January 16: RWBY, Shadow Seer, Time Princess, and Apothecaria

The days have been blurring together. I've been trying to create an artificial urgency around the idea of "soon another week will have passed" so that I'll still get stuff done. It mostly gives me a sense of artificial sorrow that I'm not getting anything done.

I am doing things, though.

We haven't gone out much in the last several days; snow and the cold have kept us indoors.

*checks notes*

Yup, last time I drove the car was also the last day I posted an entry, and I mentioned it in that one (went to pick up meds for Lut).

I don't know if I can reconstruct what I've been doing on a day-by-day basis. Lut and I have played two games of Kill Team and watched some more of The Bad Batch. We've also begun our second attempt to see all of RWBY.

We first watched RWBY several years ago, when there were, I don't know, three or four seasons. Then we forgot about it or lost track because of cancer or something. Years passed and there were a bunch more seasons and Lut and I only half-remembered the series. So a few years ago, we started a re-watch from the beginning. We got through one or two seasons and no farther, for reasons lost to time.

Then Lut told me about the Justice League x RWBY crossover (how did this become a thing? amazing) so we watched those and decided it was time to try, again, to see the rest of RWBY.

And of course we still didn't remember most of what we'd already seen.

Rather than start of with season 1 again, we read the Wikipedia episode summaries for the first season and started with season 2. We watched all of season 2 yesterday. The Rooster Teeth website for RWBY grouped season 2 into one "movie", 2.5 hours long. It's weird watching it as a single film, because there's not a single narrative that unites it throughout. It all flows as a continuous whole -- it's not episodic in the way old TV shows used to reset at the start of each episode. But it still feels like a series rather than a single long story.

Season 3 was broken into part 1 and part 2, so we watched part 1 today and will probably watch part 2 tomorrow. I think here's where it starts getting bleak and then for all I know continues to be bleak for the next 6.5 seasons? Guess we'll see.

It's interesting that Lut likes RWBY, because he's usually annoyed by shows about kids/teens or with prominent kid characters. The Bad Batch focuses a lot on the sole child character and Lut's not thrilled with that. But RWBY doesn't bother him. My guess is that it's because it's kid/high school drama stuff that he doesn't care for. So if the plot is focused around evading curfew or parent/child relationships or 'how do I become popular', Lut tunes out. RWBY's center is 'defending your values/friends/humanity against violent enemies', and while it has a lot of subplots, they tend to be handled with maturity rather than having the story become 'this wouldn't be a problem except that all the characters are so childish.'

I've spent a chunk of time on Time Princess, too. A society event started on Monday so I've been poking at the game regularly to refresh quests for folks. I also started 100%'ing some stories. Time Princess is interactive fiction, and my approach to the stories has pretty much always been to (a) see all the endings I am interested in and (b) to craft all the clothing. Time Princess gives a bonus if you (c) 100% a story, which it defines as "read every variant on every route, good or bad, minor or major, and craft all the clothing." Sometimes doing (a) and (b) would get me close enough to (c) that I'd do it, but with so many stories I crafted all the clothes but never bothered unlocking and going through each variant on every route. The game recently added a "spend stamina" quest that I often didn't bother doing because I'm hoarding stamina and it didn't seem worth it. But I decided to use that quest as a reason to spend stamina working on seeing the last bits of all these mostly-completed stories.

I use a walkthrough while doing this because I do not have the patience for working out on my own which choices I need to change in order to unlock some scene. (How difficult this is to do varies wildly -- in some stories, almost everything is very obvious and you don't really need a walkthrough. But on others, it's a tangled ball of obscure changes and replaying stages to make the changes stick.) There's a handful of stories where I'm not sure a good walkthrough exists, so I may never get around to getting those to 100%. :D But I've finished two since starting this project, and am working on a third.

Ooh! And I finished painting a miniature! This is the Shadow Seer I started painting back in October. Despite taking almost three months to finish it, I think actual hours spent was more like 8-12. Which is still so much time to spend painting a single figure. I should take some pictures of it. It does not look like 8-12 hours of work but it came out all right. I started painting another of the Void Dancer kill team today -- a Death Jester. I think the Death Jester will go faster. The sample color scheme for that model doesn't bother me so I can use it more as a guide and not have to make as many creative choices. Also, I don't like the model itself as much so I don't care as much how well it comes out. And there's way less harlequin print for the suggested color scheme. Painting tiny diamonds on a miniature is so time-consuming, and I painted so many on the Shadow Seer model.

In between all of that, I've been playing/writing/illustrating Apothecaria, in roughly equal measure. My illustrated Apothecaria buffer is at 6 as of this writing. Unillustrated: zero. It's sort of fun to illustrate them as I write them, but I want to get back to having a big buffer of written-but-not-yet-illustrated entries. Mostly because once I illustrate an entry, I am done with it. No more changes, no matter how minor. It's not so much "because a picture exists for it" as "because I already decided exactly where the text goes and how much room the picture takes up and I'm not rearranging the text and picture NOW. Imagine if it messes with the layout on subsequent pages. HORRIFYING." This is an editing-hostile style. Which is fine, because I'm doing this For Fun and it doesn't need to be The Very Best It Could Possibly Be.

But it is nice to have a bunch of writing done well before I'm gonna illustrate it so that I have some time to think about it and squeeze in any changes I want to make while it's still easy to change things.

I have continued to Not Work on my nominal creative priorities for the month (editing and outlining). I decided that since Apothecaria is on the list of things I both want to do and want to have done, I might as well lean in to that and just work on it. At least until I have a large buffer again instead of just a small one. Or until there's more creative resistance to working on Apothecaria and something else feels easier. I might actually get to editing. I've been postponing it in case the new outline prompted me to change some things in the first book. But I doubt I'll want to make such substantial revisions to A Dragonling's Family that editing without knowing what those changes are will be wasted effort. And making some progress on one of the creative things I was supposed to do this month will make me feel better about the way time is slipping past me.