So my hobbies

Yeah I still read Manga and I do still enjoy gaming though I've little to no interest in most player vs player games beyond maybe fighting games and even then I'd say Smash only. Anime I kinda dropped around my few years in University due to time limitations but it's not like I avoid it actively or anything like that. One of my new hobbies since I last brought this up is writing. Yeah I mentioned a massive erotic pokemon themed thing I was working on as a means of release but that thing is basically unreadable and unfollowable even for me due to the nature of how it was created. I'm not here to talk about that thing, I'm instead going to talk about something completely different.

Back in mid 2017 Takahata101 began uploading archives of a D&D campaign he was doing live on twitch. I'm so far out of the loop with everything going on behind the scenes there since I stopped using twitter entirely but I've always kind of wanted to know what exactly D&D was beyond the video games and book series and I dove in on that. I wasn't expecting to get invested to the point I'd lose sleep over the ups and downs of their campaign, and then naturally as TFS began their own D&D and Lani started his own I jumped aboard those as well. All of these campaigns literally had me in a place where anytime I was at work or doing menial tasks I'd find myself literally daydreaming about possible outcomes of their ongoing campaigns in anticipation of the next upload. One night during a power outage I decided to just open a notepad file and write until the power came back on. I ended up writing a short little interaction between an ancient crimson dragon and a confident yet naive sorcerer in the half hour or so before the power came back.

This thing sat on my computer for a few months untouched but I kept bits of it in my mind and eventually I went back to it and continued the interaction to a logical conclusion which left me with a glimpse of a possible world for this story to take place in. I then spent a couple hours just creating a quick map doodle in paint and marked out a few cities and towns. The next day I began trying to flesh out some details on these locations in the hopes of building a loose world for myself to write more stories in or even continue the one I had already started. Just after Christmas I managed to contract strep throat somehow and spent a solid day bedridden, during which time I legitimately spent 12 hours straight adding a second and third chapter to that interaction with the ambition of literally creating a novel in a notepad file. After recovering and on my trip back to this file I realized that I'd bitten off way more than I could chew and that my writing was far too wild and unrestrained with far too much expositional dialogue rather than simply letting scenes flow naturally. I stalled updating this silly untitled fanfiction of sorts in favor of writing side stories in-universe that are canonical but aren't in any particular chronological order. This way I could better focus my writing on the scenes I want to happen rather than trying to explain backstory scenes in the midst of another scene.

As of right now I've sorted all my loosely D&D themed writing into its own folders and subfolders to keep the chaos organized. I've only done the very tip of the iceberg in terms of planning out the actual world structure and city lore and I still have over half the settlement stuff to even plan out. I have absolutely no clue about anything D&D related as I've never actually played or DM'd a campaign so I have nothing set up in terms of pantheon or planes which is going to be a significant problem down the road if I don't sort that shit out sooner rather than later. Something I did decide I want to do with this is leave it open ended so that I can always jump in with new characters and unrelated stories in the same area but in different eras at my own leisure. Not to mention if I ever do get in with people who'd invite me to a D&D campaign and if they ever ask me to cover for them as DM and do a one-off for fun I'd at least have some kind of barebones world to work with.

One final thing on this silly little creative outlet, I started playing with digital art in paint 3D when I got my new Laptop in late 2017. I'm absolute garbage at digital art, part of that being mouse and keyboard with high sensitivity and part of that being paint 3D, but really my biggest hurdle creatively in terms of visual art is that I never learned how to draw people or characters without a reference. I can landscape without reference but doing something as intricate and detailed as a person or animal or even trying to bring your own OC's to life is just something I'm not good at. Not to mention I have 0 confidence in my linework and the only actual experience I have with color is watercolor and oil paint landscapes so the more common cartoony or 'anime' style that people tend to use for OC's is an absolute nightmare for me to try and replicate without any reference. I can fairly accurately replicate something with a reference digitally in a couple hours but only replicate. I can't look at a reference and paint that character in a different pose or even really do expressions. I never learned how to draw emotion at all and that's another huge hurdle for me. I can do neutral and frowning/angry expressions easily but more complex emotions like empathy, nervousness, shyness/embarassment or even trying to draw happy eyes is just something I don't know how to do and I'm incredibly upset and discouraged by my own ineptitude in that department alone. It's why I stopped trying to draw without a reference. There's nothing I want more than to be able to bring the characters from my writing to a visual medium so I can show them off but I can't seem to bring them out the way I envision them because I lack the skill to do so. I refuse to degrade them with rough paint sketches, I want them to look like they were at least competently done by an artist and I sure as hell don't have cash to throw at someone to commission OC's so I guess I'll just have to suffer until I get them out of my head.