My good giddy goulash, has it been two weeks already? No. No it hasn't, it's been 13 days because I'm inconsistent. But I personally pride myself on how regularly inconsistent I am. Except when I'm not.
Speaking of inconsistency, do you remember this comic from five months ago? Well it got a sequel!
Much like its predecessor, it even has an epilogue!
The creation of this didn't come without its issues, besides making people cry that is. Having temporarily torn free from the shackles of boyf-besottedness, I desired to dig deep and drive down into my to-do doodles til done and dusted. Alas, in the process of making this single comic I rather grew enamoured with this brief period in Calendar history and wrote and doodled, oh I don't know, 6 or 7 further vignettes. And as I understand it - and this is a hot industry tip if ever you've heard one - that isn't how you clear a backlog.
Nonethefewer my productivity is in rather fine fettle thanks to a new, if slightly dystopian, system I have erected around myself! Rediscovering an eclectic mix of rather old, chunky coins in a slightly less old, chunky tin recovered from my Granddad's even older, chunkier house I elected to invent ✨ Leisure Scrip! ✨
Put simply, and slightly unflatteringly, upon commencing work I set a timer ticking for 30 minutes, after which I get to grab the girthiest coin I gander from the tin, flip it for pure personal satisfaction, and clank it into a small jar on my desk whilst restarting the timer. This alone, it seems, is enough to encourage my magpie-monkey hybrid noggin to keep motivated.
But wait, we haven't gotten to the ethically dubious side yet! Indeed I have imbued these coins with value: Leisure value! Each coin can be spent to gain 15 minutes of passive leisure (watching videos, TV, playing games, staring at a wall, etc) or 30 minutes of productive leisure (making music, crocheting, making games, building a wall etc). These numbers probably need tweaking, but you get the idea.
This both incentivises me to get cracking with work as well as encouraging me to make better choices for my leisure time, limited as it is in a very physically understandable sense. Even passive leisure's higher cost incentivises me to choose it with more deliberation. Too much time watching the same Youtube videos over and over again, not enough time watching new-to-me 1970's Doctor Who episodes! The jank makes me smile. c:
Beyond this I'm also encouraged to do anything counted as neither work nor leisure in order to bypass the whole system. Shopping, hygiene, exercise, cleaning etc, all now free activities! And who doesn't like free things? I certainly do!
Now, I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing: "Crispy... What's wrong with you?" To which I confidently reply "I don't know." But more importantly whatever it is is being mitigated by whatever this is like a charm, without me feeling like a torn sack of half-mulched tubers. I'll take it while it lasts.
An incomplete list of other
miscellany achieved in this productive
period includes:
- Fulfilling
emote commissions
- A second, more
successful attempt at designing a
crochet Flynn
- Adding all newsletter
comics and the Year 1 comics
to my website
- Busting bugs in my site's comic
page
- Setting up a dedicated
newsletter archive page
- Dividing the
October & Co comic page in to Old / New
/ Origins sections
- Drawing
pixel-Snips in Final Fantasy V job outfits
for the stream
- Messing about with
6502 assembly and debugging the original
Final Fantasy to make silly cheat codes like white
mage-only, doubled walk speed, max-damage attacks,
everyone's name is Kupo, etc.
- Starting work on
doodles for next month's newsletter
-
Restarting work on part 2 of the
Dead Island highlights
- Figuring out
that disabling hardware acceleration in
LibreOffice changes the software from being
a massively buggy, unresponsive mess into something actually
useable, about which I'm so pleased I included it here
If you thought being productive meant I'd be focused then you thought wr-oh hey, a moth!
Speaking of eclectic mixes that in all certainty aren't wise professional decisions, streaming trundles on as per yoozh. Having #stelthed our way through XIII, with its wonderfully easy-to-follow plot and simple-to-kill mongoose, I grabbed everybody by the collar and dragged us down into the depths of Final Fantasy V! A 'Your Job Fiesta' sees us playing an abridged version of the game wherein I can only play as the four jobs that you choose! And boy you chose... something.
Friend games find us globe-trotting and globe-popping (its a pun on head-shots) in World War Z, before Sunday chill doodle times soothe our week-weary souls in a warm tub of OC and hyperfixation juice. Eugh.
As an aside (can you have an aside in an update made entirely of tangents?) when making VOD thumbnails last week I realised that I'd accidentally flattened all -- oop, scrip timer went off *flicks coin* -- layers in the 'Crispy & Friends' thumbnail file. Thus I resolved to remake it from scratch. Fortunately in the last few years I've learned to be less afraid of colour and shape, thus hopefully the result looks rather more pleasing. It's unlikely anybody will have noticed but I just felt like I was allowed to moan about it here.
And that's as much of the unfocused waffle that I've scrawled which I'm willing to put here. I've got to keep some surprises, haven't I? For the forthcoming fortnight I'll be newslettering, video editing, commissioning, comic-wrangling, coin-flipping and generally getting distracted by my weird interests. But now I pay for them, so I'm allowed to.
Thank you as ever for your exceedingly generous support, it really does make a heap of difference to the strength of this very peculiar thread of life I've found myself pulling. Here's hoping you consider the resulting rope good value.
Look after yourselves,
Crispy 💜