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What creative projects are you working on?
it has not been about a month since the last thread, but it would probably be more convenient to just do these threads on the first day of each month instead of in the middle of the month and waiting for another twenty or so days to get on that track is ridiculous, so i'm going to just start this one now and then do the next one on may 1st. anyways, we're back again! here you can share/provide updates on some of the projects that you're working on. they can be of any kind--digital, physical, work related, passion project, whatever. pretty straightforward, i think.
for my part: i've been mostly too busy blowing my literary brains out on school papers to actually do anything creative, but there is of course the sleep-deprived, nonsensical clusterfuck of a story in eniko that i have posted over here if you are interested in that and haven't seen it. i want to get around to actually writing some more (and not just writing what are basically fucking fever dreams), but i still have a couple of papers coming down the pipeline, so i'll probably have to put that aspiration on the backburner for the rest of the month.
here is something of actual substance that i am working in a small update to how it is you're supposed to decline a certain type of equestrian noun. it is exactly as fun as it sounds, but it's also strange and technically not predictable:
I'm still working on my novel, among other things. When I get stuck on it I work on short stories or reviews. I've written more since I started the Patreon than I have in years and it has definitely had a net positive effect on my life, despite the fact that my day job has gotten particularly grueling recently.
I am working on an educational podcast project, where ATM to work means to think about it and make a note every now and then. In a month and a half tho I will be able to start to actually work on it. It will be language learning material for my native tongue, Turkish.
Another project I am working on in a similar manner is a rewrite of my static site generator that I use for my website. It will be an excercise on writing a program in a planned manner, something I am really bad at. In this new iteration I want to have a set of types / interfaces which can be used conveniently to extend the program. I will also do TDD from the get go, so that it'll be more workable. In itd current form the program is some spaghetti code with tests for random things put on to of it like meatballs. The next one will be like risotto: a great base to get creative on. Hopefully...
Will you be posting your generator in open-source? It would be curious to see what it takes to develop one, as it seems you're essentially starting from scratch, as far as the next version is concerned.
Oh sure, I will. It's going to appear here.
The current version is here. It is rather hackish. I don't think I'll use Ruby again, I may go with a typed language.
I'm writing some of the dialogue for a game I'd like to make - this one is a long-term goal and I'm doing a bit more practice in the language before I start in earnest. But I have fun plucking away at the worldbuilding in and a bit of the 3d and text assets in the meantime.
It's about an alien who crash-lands on a planet and discovers there are already aliens of the same species living there. I'm intending it to be a chill, lighthearted game about community and nature.
The other game I'm working on for practice is a very short text adventure game that is about defeating an evil dragon to save the king. Except it's based on the schoolyard game "Kiss Marry Kill" so those are the only commands you have available. (Although to be completely honest its working title is "FMK"...)
That's a fun one.
Please publish it here once you're done: I'm working on something that might benefit from the insight of how to develop interactions with a limited set of commands.
I was a bit stuck on how to get started with a story idea I'm working on until yesterday. Now I know it begins with snow. :D
Please do share.
Once I've got the prelude crafted I'll share it here. It'll be the first creative writing I've done in 20+ years, since high school and early college.
Getting back into writing can be difficult. I haven't written anything meaningfully for anywhere between four and six years.
Let us cheer you on as you boldly go back into the war of art, and let us greet you once you come back with a trophy.
Slowly, passively adding lines to a film script that's never going to be made. It's a story about a father and a son, two Russians, who decide to go to the US and open a business after their wife/mother dies, in a "fuck it, life just gave us a rotten lemon, so let's kick it down the road and go to where we have the opportunity to do good and get some fresh air" sort of a way.
The reason it's never going to get made is because it's a tender, personal story that has deep ties to my personal history – and nobody wants that.
The reason I'm still writing it is because I want to see more of those tender, personal stories. Films like Chef, or Appaloosa, or Coach Carter: stories about genuine emotions, and people's lives, and things that make us unique. Few people are making those, so I might as well make my own. It's also fun to have a project that has absolutely no chance of ever making it, because then there's no pressure and no anxiety about finishing it.
Other than that, I've been mostly working on making my friend's website better, in different kinds of ways. Changing markup for something more semantic, adding functionality, rewriting styles from a bloated 150kB modular library (fuck you, Bootstrap) into ~10kB of precise definitions. I like handcrafting web pages; there's something very, very fun about that – like making a wooden figurine with but your hands and a beltful of tools.
Still plugging away at Magical Girl Comic. Viz is starting an original imprint for creator owned western material, (https://www.viz.com/originals) and once it gets sorted, we're going to try and submit for it. No chance in hell, but I figure it's a nice goal for getting it done by the end of the year.
Been working on a project that'll generate style information from CSS/SASS files. It goes through your entire project and collects information for: elements, selectors, variables, functions, mixins and more and then generates a standalone one-page HTML report.
I've been doing web design/development for like 20 years and when I inherit or am involved in frontend work it's always rough getting started because you have to dig through so many files. With this generator I'll have all style-related information from the whole project on one page. I'll know that "$some-color" is "#00FF00" or that ".foo" can have a ".bar" class. All without having to spend ages adding doc strings or comment-style attributes.
I'm at a point where I've got most of the data, now I'm just styling the report and structuring the output.
At every job I've ever worked for the past twenty years, I've doodled comics onto white boards, sticky notes, notepads, etc., and never really bothered to save them.
Everyone once in a while I'd run into someone from my old workplaces and they'd ask how I'm doing and if I'm still making them. One place actually kept them in a scrapbook (that I'm sure has long since degraded), and a few coworkers at other places saved them for themselves. I think it was seeing one of my old comics years later and completely forgetting that I'd made it that sparked me into actually saving them as I'd made them.
So now I keep making comics as I used to, take a picture of them with my phone, jack up the contrast, add its text using a font made from my handwriting, and post them to twitter/tumblr/wherever: https://dougwastaken.tumblr.com/
I don't sign them or post them on a regular basis on account I don't want to make a job out of it, I've found that's what generally saps the fun from it. So I just post them whenever and readers just come and go as they please. I've found it's very liberating just making them and letting people find them organically so I don't feel an obligation to keep a schedule.
While the rest of my life is very ho-hum, the archive of comics I've built over the last several years has really helped give me a sense of pride and has helped keep my self-esteem afloat (well, them and my wife of course).
Nowadays anytime I see someone doing as I used to do-- writing comics on temporary surfaces/sticky notes, etc.-- I encourage them to save them! Your phone is too good of a scanner and the web is too conveniently accessible for you to have any excuses not to!
Your comics are adorable.
Working my way through them slowly. ^_^
Thank you! I'm always glad to hear when people like them! It's very flattering.
I'm trying to write a poem every day in April for Napowrimo, and I'm supposed to be working on a comic for a Fediverse zine but I haven't started yet. I should probably get on that pretty soon!
Writing out the story of a man who has several kids and the story of those children with some supernatural and superhuman elements as it goes on.
I had the concept for it as a comic but everyone I approached for the art was either super busy or WAY the fuck out of my price range. So it felt to me to get it done so Im doing it as a series of novels.
Im about half to 3/4 the way through the first book with a ton of content already done for the kids and their kids. This is the first thing Ive ever written that wasnt required by school or a job and its seriously kicking my creative ass. Im GREAT with dialogue but description is hard for me. So I end up writing out the conversations and fleshing it out from there.
The scope of it is also pretty terrifying. lol As a comic I had it projected to be 10 issue seasons with 6 seasons. Novels? Holy shit Im looking at 20 to 25 chapters for the first book alone.
That said, Ive wanted to create something for a while but its never escaped my head so the fact that this is free flowing is amazing. So Im just riding the wave and letting it happen. I dont even care if it ever makes money, I just want to make something that someone else can enjoy.
I'm working on an encounter creator for D&D. The basic idea is that that you (as a DM) would input the stats of your party into the program, and then select a difficulty setting. The program then analyzes your party and tries to create a randomized encounter that matches the selected difficulty.
The randomization is all just a numbers game right now though. It would be cool to have randomized descriptions, but that would be getting waaaay too far ahead of myself for where this project is at right now. Right now it's mostly just a UI and the groundwork for the mathematics involved.
I started doing this out of a shared frustration between myself and another DM, at just how difficult it can be to create interesting homebrew encounters that actually challenge the party.
Wasn't sure if we should start a new thread, but I was wondering if we should do more on to hold ourselves more accountible to whatever goals we make for ourselves. Either forming a more specific "Creatives Club" or incorporating it into these threads.
I just got ableton live suite and a push 2, so learning the software and just getting a hang of things. I super pumped to get into basic music production. 😬
sketchy poem thing that has been sitting in my notepad for a few days. i don't really remember when i wrote this, so i'm guessing it was done right before i passed out a few nights ago or something. it's interesting, i guess.
i'm tired. here's another one of these, lol.
I've been trying to make a site that takes data from the reddit API and displays it like tildes.net does. It's extremely simple, only displaying the frontpage with links to i.reddit.com, but it's been fun learning stuff such as the fetch API.