Wednesdays. That’s the plan now. I’m going to try to do these on Wednesdays, and that way, my current ideas can be presented, instead of trying to fit the last 20 days into one post.
I have a “good” reason for the delay. I was really excited about something I was planning on talking about, but it would mean a tad more if I waited until the end of the month. Then, as the month ended, I got SOOOO busy with other things. And then this kept getting bigger and bigger, and I’m sure some ideas have spilled out my ears into the aether. Which is not the idea, this blog series is supposed to catch such things.
Delay justifications complete, let’s look at what I’ve been thinking about! First, a calendar!
The month of August is the highlighted squares there. Each blue check is a day I went to the gym or did some other sort of exercise. I’m super excited about this. Normally, I don’t really feel motivated by programs or lists or things. But I do like my accumulation of blue checks. It’s actually gotten me out of bed and to the gym some mornings.
Now, am I seeing benefit from the gym? Not quite yet. My current gym philosophy is one of persistence and repeatability. I go a lot and do things, but it’s not the sort of work out that wipes me out. I’ve also not done anything to really change my diet. So, I still have a few places I could make some easy cuts and probably get some good gains. I have no distinct plans to push right now. I’m just going to collect check marks and see what happens.
I also have a few other calendars with goals set for checks, but nothing that is as motivating in terms of results.
Podcast into Patreon
No, this isn’t about an episode of a podcast I recorded with Gem. I still haven’t edited that. This is about the podcast that I’ve bingeing, Comic Lab. It’s been fascinating as they seem to answer the questions I’ve been thinking about asking. So it’s been shaping my thoughts a lot.
There’s a lot.
One of the big ideas but I’m not sure if I mentioned last time but has really stuck with me is that there are three distinct types of Patreon supporter. And by distinct, I mean that these are the multiple goals attached to it, and people can absolutely have a mix of all three. A Patreon can be a fair exchange, a support of a service, and a support for the creator.
I had always thought of it as the support for the creator. That if you put a dollar or two into my hat, it was in thanks and in support of me. Sort of like a charity or a tip jar. A nice thing to do, but at the end of the day, you’re mostly doing it out of the goodness of your heart.
The second method is the support of a service. If you appreciate the content that a particular Creator makes, and you want them to be able to continue providing that content for free to people, this is what your support is. So like on the “Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men” podcast, where their show is entirely listener supported, or on “Sci-Show” or “Crash Course”, you might think that those are valuable to society and feel that helping them pay the bills is a worthy cause so you chip in a few bucks to help that along.
The third that I’ve learned about is to treat Patreon like a subscription service. You pay X bucks a month, you get certain goods and services in exchange. It seems pretty simple, actually. The trick is creating content that people perceive as valuable, and apparently Patreon has done all sorts of market research on what people think is valuable.
In terms of my own creation, my Patreon, heck, all my content, has been lying fallow for too long. But I now have a better feel for what I would want the Patreon to be.
So, I’m going to be ramping up content, trying to get where I feel that I’m creating enough stuff that people should be looking at me. This includes blog posts like this, which is more of an advertisement of everything I’ve been doing, more than something of value. But at the moment, that’s what I got for today.
I don’t want to make a big Patreon push until I feel confident that I can reliably produce content. But I can tell you that as I re-jigger things, one of the things I will be providing is my completed comic chapters in PDF form. And on-going backers are going to be able to get access to those, and they will also be up for sale somewhere. Maybe on Patreon, maybe some other site. Not sure yet. But the idea is to have those in a much easier to read format available for people kind enough to give me money. And a lot of those should be findable online for free? But you might have to figure out where it’s at, and who knows if that website is still up even.
Once I feel confident, my plan involves having an ongoing comic that is a loss leader, drawing eyes in. Rachael in Gameland is the current big project. And then on the side, I’m wanting to have small exclusive comics. Something like 10 pages long, short stories that actually have endings of whatever interests me or that I’ve been thinking about wanting to do. And while those might become available in the future, Patreon people are going to have them exclusive for a while. I still need to research what sort of terms exclusivity means for people.
Projects
Which brings us to my big comic project. RiGP: Pewter City is my current title for it. Maybe I could call it chapter 5? Maybe it is just Arc 3? Not sure what nomenclature I want to do. Full pages is probably my plan? I’m less sure about how to write those, so I need to do some practice and some more revision and storyboarding. According to some rough estimates I made, we are looking at 54 pages in full comic style? Maybe even 60. If I was doing it in strips, my gut tells me it would be something like 230 strips? So quite a lot of story.
I’m committing that on [Day redacted since this blog is already 2 days late. Soon!], I will put up a post on my Patreon open to the public, as I’m not gatekeeping yet, soliciting people who are interested in looking at my outline for the Pewter City arc. This will give you an idea of what’s coming, and you may also make some suggestions if you feel that there are things that could be made better. I might not use them, but I’m willing to talk about it. So patreon.com/c/mattwandcow if this offer seems interesting. Your name will be included in the credits.
Speaking of other projects, I’m considering taking my little sci-fi universe, which people may know as euphoria blue, and sort of stealing some interesting Star Wars bits for it. Adding in a magic system I came up with ages ago. I’m still pondering that, but I might make a Star Wars comic to help practice the pacing and the concepts. Plus, Star Wars is cool sometimes. If so many other people believe in it, maybe it’s not as dead as I thought
What’s also cool sometimes is my hyper comic, which also got a good chunk of thought cycles thrown towards it recently. I have a basic plot for what I want to do, the sort of thing that is going to be best in hyper comic form. And I’m still coming up with plot threads for it, so I’m a while away from actually sitting down and writing it. However, quick and dirty pencil math tells me it would be something like 140,000 panels of content, and something like 240 hours of audio if I went and did it as a video game concept. Now, a decent chunk of those would be footage/images of characters sleeping, but not all of it. The idea of doing it as a video game has gotten a bit more plausible now that Minecraft has their mannequin concept in the base game. I could probably use those for animating characters pretty easy. Well, easier than doing it some other ways. So maybe I’ll make a test project to see how viable that system is.
Another project that I need to add to my list of things I definitely want to have done someday is a lit RPG/isekai subversion that I’m calling touchgrass. The basic concept is that instead of physically entering into the fantasy world, or instead of getting some fancy VR equipment that make you feel like you’re in a fantasy world, there’s a drug that people call touchgrass. And it makes you hallucinate that the thing you are focusing on becomes hyper real. So, you can play whatever MMO on your crappy PC, pop the pill, and now you’re living that.
Of course, I’m going to be walking this fine line. All of the tropes tell me the resolution to a story about drugs should end in tragedy or end with a person giving them up. But that doesn’t sound fun to do every single time. I want my basic story a majority of the time be “oh, man, wouldn’t that be cool?” Figuring out how to make that work is going to be tricky.
Events
Okay, let’s take a break from the future and talk about the past. I’ve had a lot of cool stuff happen in the last couple weeks.
First, I went to two concerts. The Bug Hunter/Narcissist Cookbook / Jam Mechanics concert was in Denver on a Saturday night. It was good. I like bug a lot, I’m learning to appreciate the narcissist cookbook. He’s not quite my jam but I’m getting there. I like a lot of his introspection and… let’s say… beliefs. I think he goes hard into the idea of not being beholden to the person you were before and building yourself better and better. I like that a lot. I don’t like how crass he is, and his blatant speaking of his politics and on religion don’t sit well for me. It feels confrontational and I don’t know. Not the vibe I want when listening to music.
The Jam Mechanics portion was kinda cool, as my dad and I are big fans of that podcast. We were excited that they were probably going to do a song each, and then one of their theme songs together for a total of three songs, 15 minutes and done. But instead, they played four songs each, and three songs together, and it ended up being something like an extra 45-minute set. And I can totally see being excited about that. But I had been standing on my feet for something like 5 hours when the Jam Mechanics set began. Our late lunch had been a while ago and wasn’t very good, and I had had a single can of water to drink since then and the venue was twice as packed as last year, the music was loud to compensate, and I was just ready to not be in public for a while. So, it was cool to hear the songs, but I could have gone for knowing that it was coming. I don’t know what I could have done to prepare. Maybe just mentally steeled myself for it. (I was also not a fan of the lead-ins they had done to every song. I don’t know if having the context for the song really added anything. I love the podcast because when you listen, you have no idea what song is going to come from their banter. But as a fan, I knew all the songs, and it didn’t feel like they were reliving the banter. I don’t know, that might just be the grumpiness talking.)
And unfortunately I have to compare that concert to the one I had less than a week later: Weird Al Yankovic came to Colorado Springs, performing maybe 3 miles from my house. For Christmas last year, my brother bought several of us tickets. And it was an amazing show. I could talk for hours about the Weird Al show, about its presentation, about its costuming, about its opening act, there was a lot going on. But the things that I really think in contrast are the creature comforts. We were able to sit down. There was a place nearby that we could refill our water bottles that we had brought in. We had a decent amount of space around us it wasn’t luxurious, but I felt I had plenty of personal space. It is absolutely not fair to compare those experiences, but I sort of have to. It’s human nature. I would 100% go to another local Weird Al concert. I would have to think a lot about whether or not I would go to Bug Hunter next year
The other big activity I had was my RPG day. It had a horrible turnout, enough that it’s going to be a big topic of conversation at the next work meeting. Probably. It’s not urgent really, but I don’t know how much more could really have been done to try and get players to it.
Speaking of games, my family has been playing two Lord of the Rings based games as part of our Sundays. First, the pandemic-based fate of the fellowship, which is a strategy game that has proven to be pretty hard. I’m not sure if it’s actually hard though, or if we’re still on the learning curve. My family has played a lot of Pandemic, to the point where we can get a feel for what the board is likely to throw at us, which allows us to make informed moves. With Fellowship, we are still flailing randomly at times. As we learn the game, our actions are going to be more effective, and we’ll be able to emerge victories. At least, until we crank up the difficulty or try other reasons. There are some pretty cool modifications to the base pandemic game that I think are pretty neat.
The other game is the fellowship of the Ring trick-taking game. Which I think might be the most literal title of any game ever. I’m not sure of what I think about it yet. It’s enjoyable, and we’ll play the campaign to the end, but I’m not sure how replayable it will be. One of the favorite games of ours is the crew, which is very very similar to this trick taking game. But I can’t see us soaking hours in a flow state playing playing LotRTTG with its complicated characters. idk. We’ll see, I guess.
Done
Okay, I think that’s it. Or at least, enough for me to go to print. If you don’t see a blog by Wednesday, give me a poke!
Ciao!
Mattwandcow