elitetrick

Solipsus - Page 7 - High Res

Gaze upon those epic shrubberies! I promise I'm working on my backgrounds, it's an on-going process. >.<

Solipsus - Page 7

Ignorance is only stupidity if it is chosen or favored.

Weekly Update - 271 - 5/19/25

It Monday again? Where do these weeks go fr? Okay, my goal this week is to finish two more Solipsus pages and finish the Riley Bonus art, then I want to get started on the next God Slayers page.

I asked my husband to make space on the site somewhere for me to add Solipsus, but the website's code base has been out of date by a few years, and making any major changes to it runs the risk of breaking everything. Fwiu bringing it up to date at this point is as intensive as migrating it to an entirely new code base, which he wanted to do anyway because there's one he likes better. So he did! Spent most of the weekend on it. It'll come with some usability improvements and some visual changes, most of them people probably won't notice. We'll push those changes live soon(ish). AFAIK the Solipsus page will need to be added first, as well as some archive thumbnails and other changes, but those shouldn't take long once he sits down to do it.

Comics this week?

God Slayers: No

Solipsus: Yes!

NOW It Ramble Time!

And what I want to ramble about today is AI/LLMs. And it's a doozy, holy shit.

But all this time I've been trying to figure out what -I- think about AI, and I think I've made up my mind about it at last.

Drumroll please!
Dudududududududududududududududududuh...!

MY OPINION IS: Well, it's complicated.

AI is a divisive topic, especially in art communities, for obvious reasons. I've largely kept quiet about it because I'm honestly worried that even trying to take an objective stance in regards to AI might be seen as somehow speaking up in its defense. So I want to be clear from the jump that I DO NOT LIKE a LOT of what is going on with AI right now, but there's a "but." My husband and I talk quite a bit about this tech and what it could mean for the future and we have similar thoughts on it but for different reasons I think.

Ever since this LLM technology first appeared I've been curious about it and I try to keep an open mind about most things, but humans be humans and humans are kiiiinda shitty sometimes, and like with any new technology a lot of humans are using it for shitty things. I want to consider both the pros and cons, and maybe figure out what purpose... if any... such a technology might have. After all, in my own lifetime I've seen the rise of a lot of weird technologies that were strange at first and have ultimately become an essential part of our lives, and I think it's pretty clear by this point that AI isn't going away any time soon, as much as some people might like it to.

After these past couple of years I still have mixed feelings about LLMs. AI first and foremost feels like one of those things that was simply made because we CAN, and even its original creators seem like they are still trying to figure out what to do with it. I think part of me kinda hopes that we'll find a place for the technology that's more helpful to humanity than harmful, but I don't think it's there yet. And I'm still on the fence about what it could maybe be, some day. However, I've started to make up my mind about it in certain ways, as well as finding a few ways to maybe make use of it that don't feel... icky.

First though, the ickiest of all:

AI Art (majorly icky)

I've made up my mind about AI art. Part of what's inspired this ramble is that I've seen a lot of braindead takes about AI art recently, people saying how artists should just quit because "AI has won." Now, I'm not a smart person. Canonically, my fursona's only braincell was eaten by a moss piglet, and yet my empty head cannot FATHOM the sheer magnitude of stupidity one must have to unironically believe that LLMs are capable of somehow "winning" art. For one thing, art isn't actually a competitive sport! Artists do not "compete" with each other. Art is something that brings people joy and gets us to think and feel emotions and inspire one another. I've never once felt like another artist is somehow a competitor. We coexist in harmony. What a crazy take that is. Thinking it's possible to "win" at art conjures up images of the dumbest possible high school jock who thinks that literally everything in life is football. AMERICAN football.

And AI art is shitty! I don't think that's a very controversial take to have, as an artist. While I don't begrudge the scientists working on the technology or the people who are just playing around with it for fun, I do hate the people trying to profit from it and I really hate that some models have gotten to a point where I can't always tell at a long glance if something was hand drawn or generated. I hate wasting my time even trying to IDENTIFY if art was AI generated, because if it was, it isn't worthy of a second glance, let alone the first. Most of the time though, AI art is just... it falls into this unnerving uncanniness. Not only does it steal art from human creators, which is its first major problem that should never be understated, it also just mashes pixels into this... facsimile of art. Like a twisted pantomime of technique and style. It's like some kind of doppelganger trying to mimic your neighbors so you'll let it into the building cuz it wants to eat your face. It might look pretty decent on the surface but it falls apart under deeper scrutiny. If that's what the AI twats consider "winning," then honestly I feel bad for them. It's tragic. And even more tragic are the people who are so desperate for praise that they fake a timelapse to try and "prove" their AI generated image isn't AI. That's called scamming. It also usually shows they know so little about art that they are incapable of even convincingly mimicking the basic process. And for artists who turn to AI to try and "enhance" their efforts? That's called giving up. It's throwing in the towel and taking the easiest possible path. It's sad. And it's pathetic. A stick figure drawn by a human with no prior art experience is more valuable in my eyes than an AI generated image. At least the stick figure had a spirited effort behind it.

One of the things I love to do as an artist is scrutinize other art that is drawn by amazing real people that I want to learn from. I'll try to obtain the highest res image available of their work and zoom in real close and try to identify some of the techniques they used to create the final product. I go over their linework with a fine tooth comb, looking for each of their tiny mistakes, I draw stick figures and shapes over top of their characters so I can try to identify the proportions they were using, and I try to learn to do better through mimicry and analysis.

Now, I'm not a great artist. I'm still learning and I have a long ways to go yet. When the technology was new, it didn't take long before AI was able to generate art that appeared to be much better than mine, and early on I thought that AI art might one day be a useful tool for creating custom references, and maybe I could learn some things from them, but it's not even very good at that. AI art is completely void of style and techniques. It may create the illusion of linework because it has seen two million images that did a similar thing, but it will never understand WHY those lines were placed there. You can't learn anything from it because it didn't DO anything. It just printed pixels where it thought they should go. The few times I've tried it, I can't get it to move past its preconceptions of what a post apocalypse is so it will NEVER generate an image that is representative of MY post-apocalypse. Maybe one of the paid models might do better, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for or waste my time with something like that.

As a largely unknown artist, I've been told my style is unique (I don't know if that's a compliment, now that I think about it, but for the purposes of this paragraph I'll certainly take it as one.) I've developed my style sort of piecemeal from art I've loved and dissected over the course of my life, and I'll continue to evolve it to my own preferences. It pleases me to know that, probably because I'm basically unknown, AI cannot seem to replicate it. As a test I've tried sending it one of my sketches and told it to finish the drawing for me, and it utterly ruins it, because it only does its own thing that it learned by stealing from every artist and it completely obliterates my original sketch as if it never existed. I feel sort of validated by that, if I'm being honest. I like being unique.

And that kinda... leads into a point about why I think AI will never "win" or replace art or artists (at least not until it's at a point where it's just a digital replica of a human brain, which has... a lot of other implications and very concerning ethical questions): LLMs can never replace WHY we create. I draw because I enjoy it. I draw and I write because I have images in my head and stories to tell that I think are interesting enough to share them with others. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not good enough to tell those stories properly but I want to try anyway. AI will NEVER satisfy that desire, except for perhaps those people who are so brainrotted that they are incapable of imagining their own ideas and must instead leech off of the ideas of others like parasites.

Could I make a case for a world where I see a use for AI Art? Even if I could come up with one, which I cannot, I don't think I'd want to. I don't even buy the argument that some people are simply incapable of art and could benefit from AI as a tool. Eşref Armağan never needed AI to paint. Anyone can make art because art can be anything. Art is the spirit and soul that goes into a project, it's so much more than just the end result. Humans don't need a heartless robot to make it for us. It's so fitting that all these heartless, soulless corporations just LOVE AI art.

AI in Engineering (only kinda icky I guess?)

This is a weird one, because it's... not exactly my area of expertise. (waterbear do not the think maths or the logicals ver gud) I've had long conversations with my husband about it though, since AI in software engineering seems to be a trend that is only gaining momentum, and many companies are doubling and tripling down on purchasing the tools that enable them to integrate AI in their daily workflows. My husband feels that the current LLMs are actually pretty good, as a coding assistant. They're great at doing those large, mind-numbing, repetitive tasks, or solving singular and well-known but very complicated problems, and doing them in minutes, usually without complaining about it too much. So, they're good at doing the things that most engineers dread doing anyway. However, AI isn't yet at the point where it can replace humans, because most of the code it generates doesn't often compile bug-free without someone going through and fixing it up first. It's also incapable of solving problems that humans haven't come up with a solution for yet, because LLMs cannot innovate. I heard some of the companies who thought they could replace their entire workforce of engineers are already feeling the sting of believing they could do without humans, and I giggle with glee at them.

As a time-saver though? Well, AI is what allowed my husband to turn what was probably going to be a many week long website migration he was dreading into a 3-evening project he did over the weekend. Which is great! AI engineering may even allow small teams and solo creators to do coding like what has never been possible before. I can only imagine all the tools and games that might now be possible in the hands of those who previously had no ability to create such things.

Unfortunately, what the LLMs are best at are the tasks that would normally be given to interns and junior engineers. And it's most likely going to cost a lot of people in those roles their jobs, as a result. That's largely because of a global epidemic of short-sightedness and bottom line hyperfixation. Nobody making such decisions ever seems to consider... if companies replace all their interns and junior engineers with AI, what will they do when all of their senior engineers retire?

AI as a Writing Aid (semi-icky)

Now I hate this one, because while I think there's something to it I also feel like it's kind of a trap. I've done quite a bit of exploring this topic though, and I believe there is some merit in using AI as a writing aid. It's annoying, however, because of its irritating over-eagerness to want to write my damn scene for me if I ever slip up and accidentally give it too much context. Despite me telling it in no uncertain terms that I NEVER want it to write a SINGLE WORD of dialogue or description on my behalf, it'll sometimes just do that anyway, because that's what it's been trained to do, and it doesn't understand why that's wrong because it's not alive, and it doesn't care, and any time it writes that shit I know I can never use any of those words in anything I write myself, just because that would feel EXTRA SUPER ICKY. But I have to also acknowledge that I can't help but be influenced by what I've read, having merely SEEN the words in the order it provided so then when I'm doing edits or rewrites, I may accidentally circle back around to shit that it wrote for me just because it might have been a short, memorable, halfway decent line and I simply forgot that I originally saw it when talking to the AI. There's just no escape. So that's why I hate it. And that's what I mean when I say it's a trap. It can be really helpful right up until it's detrimental with no warning.

When it's actually being an AID though, I find that AI is pretty good at helping to overcome writer's block. If my head is stuck on some idea that I am having trouble understanding or putting into words, I just straight up ask it whatever question I'm hung up on, and it'll then proceed to generate a boatload of explanatory garbage but because it'll all be semi-relevant garbage I've found it can actually kind of kickstart the right parts of my brain in the right direction, moving me past the writer's block and saving me time that I'd normally have to spend pacing in circles around the house for hours until I could break myself out of whatever thought-loop I'm stuck in. It can actually be a big help that gets me to start writing. Beyond that, because it's a Large Language Model that does nothing better than Modelling Large Languages, I find that it is also great as an all-in-one Dictionary, contextual Thesaurus, Spelling/Grammar Guide, and Fantasy Name Generator (sometimes, getting usable names out of it can be a challenge sometimes and usually I end up taking pieces of all its suggestions and mushing them together myself anyway.) I just make sure only to ask it questions and not send it the actual text I wrote.

AI as a Research Tool (sorta un-icky?)

It's funny to think that I've been doing this long enough to see so many massive shifts in just... internet. I like to research when I write, so that I might have at minimum a basic-level understanding of a topic before I try to explore it in fiction. When I was first trying to build an understanding of Riley's mental illness, I used Google a lot to look up psychological profiles of people with hallucinations and schizophrenic symptoms and I watched a bunch of videos and I tried to build an understanding of what living with such a thing might be like for her. To this day, I still don't think I can say I fully understand it. It's a complex topic, different for each person, and without having ever experienced it myself I doubt I will ever understand. But as a result of all that research, I think I built an understanding of Riley. Which is all I really needed for the purpose of telling her story.

With Pyre, ~six years later, I have another character with a dangerous mental illness, except in a very different context. I was really hesitant to make her a true psychopath at first because I felt as though that was a mental illness I did not understand, and I doubted I could ever understand it. It's one thing to try and imagine a character with mostly positive hallucinations ("positive" in that they add something to her perception, not "positive" in the sense that they're good for her, of course), it's quite another to imagine a character that is lacking some of the fundamental emotions that make most of us feel like a people. And Pyre, in particular, has a fair few quirks that are quite unique to her, and I was struggling to piece everything together in a way that I could wrap my brain around it.

As Google has continued to increasingly turn to shit, flooding me with its often wrong or useless Gemini responses followed by a full page of sponsored ads before delivering even a single useful link, the methods I used to try and understand Riley have kind of fallen apart. So I found myself turning to ChatGPT more and more for exploring and trying to gain some kind of understanding of such things. You know me, I like to ramble, and ramble at the AI I shall do until it gives me responses I'm satisfied with. And granted, its answers still can't be fully trusted, so if it's something important I still try and find a real answer from a different source (like Youtube or Reddit or Wikipedia, as if they're any more reliable) to confirm that whatever the AI has told me is at least plausible enough for fiction.

And as a silly aside, AI is also just fun for asking stupid questions when the truth behind the answer doesn't matter in the slightest because it's only a fleeting curiosity that'll be forgotten in two flicks of the tail.

AI as a GM (actually kinda fun)

Honestly this is my favorite way to use it, as a toy. I just describe a scenario and then I play a solo TTRPG with the AI as the GM. With the more modern models, it's actually quite fun, it's smart about remembering important notes and it is way better at crafting an interesting adventure for me than the models of a few years ago. I feel like this is probably the best and most harmless way to use it. EXCEPT:

AI as an Environmental Catastrophe (idk)

I hear this one a lot in regards to AI and I agree, overall the tech is probably just kind of a huge waste of energy(?). But then someone will go on to say that's a reason we shouldn't use it at all, and as with most things, the five or six questions you or I might ask it over the course of a day are probably 0% of the load when compared to the thousands and thousands of enormous art and text prompts sent by any single megacorp that's trying to replace their entire workforce with it.

Now, they claim they're working on making AI more efficient, less power-hungry, but who knows, and it's also making the megacorps eager to build more power plants of the nuclear variety, which... honestly, may not be a bad thing(?) if done right(?). So I don't really know how to feel about it. It's the kind of thing where we may not know the long term impact until decades from now. Maybe it'll all work out, or maybe it'll be too late.

In Conclusion

In summary, this LLM stuff probably isn't going away. I don't know if or how AI is being taught to people, in schools or workplaces or otherwise, or if we've largely been left to just figure it out for ourselves, but much like with Laptops, the Internet, Smart Phones, and the Printing Press, we may just have to learn how to live with it and since we have to do that, we might as well figure out some way to gain something from it. Only time will ultimately determine if this technology is of net benefit to humanity or not, and if it is not, then hey, it'll probably fade away in another few years or so, perhaps be replaced by something much better (or worse!). I'm still pretty wishy washy on the AIs of today, and the potential uses they may have beyond just being a novelty or a toy, but I remain firm in my conviction that I never want AI to create for me. THAT is the hugest waste of this technology.

Oh, and no AI was used in the writing of this ramble, btw. It took me... ~7 hours (including breaks, but not many) to type this up and edit it.

God Slayers - Page 226

Turns out that being on Skye's good side is just as dangerous...

God Slayers - Page 226 - High Res

Not sure what Kiera was expecting to happen but I'm pretty sure it wasn't this.

Solipsus - Page 6

How indeed!

Solipsus - Page 6 - High Res

Blep.

Weekly Update - 270 - 5/12/25

I think I already shared this image awhile back but it's one of my favorites and it's a great preview for the next page. We'll find out later in Solipsus that people who know Cerellia will casually call her Cera (with a soft C). If you know anyone with a four-syllable first name my guess is they probably generally prefer to use a nickname, and Cera probably doesn't want everyone calling her by her full name all the time either.

So I'll admit I didn't get as much done last week as I was hoping to do. I drew some Solipsus, I did a bunch of worldbuilding for Solipsus, some much needed refinement on some rapidly upcoming world concepts, and I ultimately played way too much Ratopia, but I didn't get much else done. Rather than moping about or letting myself feel guilty about it, I'd rather instead commit to doing better this week.

Bonus art is... bonus, so I'm just gonna focus on just getting two comics out this week and call that a win if I succeed.

Comic(s) this week?

God Slayers: Yes

Solipsus: Yes

Drawing: Solipsus pages 9-10, God Slayers page 226, Bonus Riley art, Solipsus character studies and stuff.

Playing: Ratopia

Ramble (mini):

Can't lie, I've been struggling lately. It's like I just want to sleep for the next ten years, or until every day stops feeling like yet another step towards even more chaos and uncertainty, which seems like it could take even longer than ten years at this rate. But then, I have you guys. I get out of bed every day largely because you all seem to like reading the comics I make. And it's kind of crazy how much that helps. So thank you. Even though I may not be the greatest at... well, anything really, you guys give me a great excuse to keep trying. And I appreciate it. A lot.

Solipsus - Page 5

Do not.

Solipsus - Page 5 - High Res

I drew the original sketch for that expression in the lower left a year ago and I still love it.

Weekly Update - 269 - 5/5/25

So many previews today!

My backgrounds could be better! You know it. I know it. Errybody know it! It no secret.

And it's been on my mind lately that I can do more in my efforts to improve them. That I must improve them. There's obviously other things I can work on, many places I can still improve, legs, hips, faces, ears, noses, eyes... but I feel like my characters are kinda decent and my backgrounds continue to be my biggest weakness and I can win big by simply learning a bit more about filling in the spaces around my characters with something that's a tiny iota more visually stimulating.

So here's just a preview of something I was dabbling with this weekend after watching a tutorial vid that managed to get me thinking very differently about doing landscape heavy art. In the past I've been trying to draw them the same way I do characters, which is very... organic shape/structure and line-oriented. But I think the more important thing for a landscape is to focus on the big forms and the blobby shapes and just... the general big picture things. And what I have up there doesn't seem too terrible, I don't think! For once I'm actually not embarrassed to show it off.

Comic(s) this week?
God Slayers: No (I want to clear out some other things in that queue down there first >.<)
Solipsus: Yes

Drawing: Riley and Snake bonus art (darn you), Max Body Pillow (CRIES), Solipsus Pages 08-13, God Slayers Page 226

Playing: Baldur's Gate 3, mebe some Ratopia cuz it's 1.0 now! (Also it's cute and fun and I recommend trying it out if you haven't!)


OOOOOH, I should NOT have gotten drunk before I finished editing this post. OH WELL. KILLING BRIANCELLS IS THE ONLY THING KEEPING ME SANE THISE DEAYS THINAKS FOR READING.

God Slayers - Page 225

Rosettes ARE fancy.

God Slayers - Page 225 - High Res

Alternate timeline relationship building in action!

Solipsus - Page 4 - High Res

Ferrick embodies one of my favorite character archetypes: the ancient who is so tired of everyone's bullshit all they can suffer to do is crack wise at the expense of others.

Solipsus - Page 4

Just because I know better than to dump a ton of exposition on the first few pages of a story does NOT mean I don't feel the nagging impulse to do so.

Weekly Update - 268 - 4/28/25

Hopefully you're all enjoying Solipsus so far! What little of it I've posted anyway. There's so much I want to say, to kinda like... hint at a bunch of upcoming stuff. But I should keep my mouth shut and let the story do what I hope it'll do.

God Slayers Comic this week? Yes!

Solipsus Comic this week? Also, Yes!

Ramble:
Um... no ramble today, I need a nap. And not just any nap. I need a damned nap.

Post Micro-Nap Edit:

Oh yeah, Max body pillow hasn't made much progress but it doesn't seem to matter because someone's braindead trade war is making merchandise impossible for small businesses.

Also the votey thingy is still up. I'll close it out in another day or two.
Who Should I Draw Next? - Round XIV (It Riley time!) | Patreon
I'm honestly kinda regretting putting Snake on there, lol. Given Snake and Riley have very specific canon interactions in the comic's future, I'll have to come up with some spoiler-free non-canon scenario, or maybe some Alt Universe stuff. So... I WILL do that... if he wins, but I really wasn't expecting him to win.

Solipsus - Page 3

Anyway, still nervous about sharing this story, but hopefully you guys will enjoy it!

Edit: Think I forgot to bump this when I made it public, sry!

Solipsus - Page 3 - High Res

Oh, THAT'S what that noise was.

Solipsus - Page 2 - High Res

Now with plumper melispods.

Solipsus - Page 1 - High Res

Okay here, just don't zoom in too closely. Cuz again, the point is to speed things up and cut some corners, so the usual attention to detail is forfeit. :P

Solipsus - Page 2

Wanted to start this series off with a few establishing shots, because it's definitely NOT Kuserra.

Solipsus - Page 1

Welp, it's 4-25-25, and today seems like a good day to start this thing. I am quite nervous about this but here goes!

This is the debut of a brand new comic I've decided I'm calling Solipsus. It'll be taking place on a different planet, however still in the same universe as Kiva's story. The things happening in God Slayers are happening at roughly the same time as things will be happening in Solipsus, give or take a few years. The different planets have some shared history, and certain mysteries might be slightly easier to unravel on a slightly less obliterated world.

This comic is intended to be a little rougher in style, as it is meant to be something I can hash out a bit faster, and hopefully a little more reliably. I intend to use it to experiment with a couple of different art techniques, and try to find my best balance between speed and quality. The purpose of this second comic is to hopefully fill the gaps between God Slayers pages, and ultimately my plan is to release more total comics, more often, (minimum once a week), rather than having dead weeks here and there where I have nothing to post.

I'll be releasing Solipsus in Early Access, so all Patrons will immediately have access to the first five pages before any of them will be made public. (Independently of God Slayers, so double the Early Access pages for all tiers) I think I will also deliver the first 3 pages of this story pretty quickly, as they are already done. I don't think I'll be releasing this series in high-res, because IMO the pages look pretty awful close up, unless you guys want me to do that so you can see for yourselves. I dunno, lemme know!

Everything I do is a WIP, and my processes are flexible and ever-evolving, so your feedback matters a lot!

Weekly Update - 267 - 4/21/25

Is it Monday again already? Sheesh. It's starting to feel like every other day is Monday. Or maybe it's just that every single day feels like yet another giant step backwards for this part of the globe.

Don't forget to vote in the votey thingy (Max is currently in the lead!):
Who Should I Draw Next? - Round XIV (It Riley time!) | Patreon

TLDR: Derping around with Comic #2 (3?) this week cuz I want to and it's my berthduh. Otherwise feelin' fine.

-=-=-=-

Today alone, I've started and nearly finished three entirely new comic pages. How? Great question! I'll explain. Before I do, however, no, they're not for Kiva's story. They're for that second comic I was hinting at awhile back. I haven't forgotten about it. Some of you might remember me mentioning it about a year ago. And some of you are new and this could be the first time you're ever hearing about it. But yeah! A second comic exists and it is a work in progress that is currently working in progress.

Anyway! Kiaun planted an idea in my brain a while ago when he mentioned just how quickly he can finish a drawing. He offered me some tips that might help speed things up and I've been kind of marinating on them ever since. Normally it takes me roughly 20 hours to take a single drawing (usually one to three characters) from a blank page to a finished state. And it can take me even longer if the drawing is more complex, or if I keep getting interrupted by anything. My most productive days involve getting up in the morning, making coffee, then putting my headphones on and drawing until bedtime, with maybe a short break for lunch or dinner. That'll be good enough usually for me to finish one full bonus art, give or take a few extra hours on a follow-up day.

But why? Why does it take me that long to complete one single drawing? And is there a way I can do it faster, put out more comics quicker, without sacrificing quality?

Well no. Not really. Quality and quantity are mutually exclusive when I'm literally the only person drawing. To improve quantity without hurting quality I'd need to increase the scale of production somehow, which in this case would mean hiring a team of artists. That ain't happening -- it would defeat the whole point of this for me. However, it may be possible to sacrifice quality in places where most people won't notice in order to crank out still quite passable art but at a much faster pace. As with many things, I'm really of two minds about it. On the one hand, most people probably don't notice when I take extra time to make some super clean linework around the elbows and to clean up any minor artifacting and to make sure my colors don't bleed out from every fine tuft of fur. On the other hand, SOME people probably notice that stuff, and there's also a school of thought I recall being taught once where attention to detail, even when most people probably won't notice, contributes to an OVERALL quality of any given art piece. A piece of art with neat lines and neat colors and fewer mistakes may be, to many, simply more pleasing to look at when compared to one where the artist favored haste over detail. In theory anyway. Barring a specific case where there's some sort of competition with an array of judges, does it even matter? Does story matter over style? I think so, to a point.

Style and format are also factors in the equation though. Webcomics (and perhaps periodicals in general) tend to be a little more forgiving, I think, so long as the content continues to trudge ahead. Some artists have a style that lends itself far better to a sketchier look. And if I were, for example, to begin using a faster, rougher style for Kiva's story, that change in style would almost certainly be noticed, and it would probably be jarring -- perhaps even look awful in comparison to previous pages, even from a macro scale. If I were to do something like that, I would probably have needed to do it from the start. So I'm not gonna do that.

For the SECOND comic though, I may lean more heavily into a rougher, quicker style, and just really explore that and see what I can do with it. There's a lot I can do to speed things up I think. I can make my pages simpler -- pack in LESS stuff on them. Then I can go a little bit sketchier with the lines, and a little rougher with the color fill. And I can make more use of tools like scatter brushes. I thought about maybe going monochrome with it, and I'm sure that'd save a ton of time, but I like color way too much, and this comic proves it has the potential to be particularly vibrant, so I nixed that idea right away.

Anyway, it's my birfdoo this week, and because it's my barthmew I think I just wanna work on the second comic this week. So... will there be a comic this week? Yeah. But it'll be something new. Something I can maybe keep up with at a much faster pace than once every couple of weeks. Something I might keep a few extra pages of in reserve for when I'm lagging behind on everything else. And I'm curious what y'all might think.

I think I hope to do 5-8 pages for that second comic this week, just really try and crank them out as fast as I'm capable, as a test to see if I even can do this. Then I'll seed them out slowly as I work on Kiva's story, so I can start getting better about posting SOMETHING each week even when I haven't finished the next God Slayers page.

Ramble (as if I haven't rambled enough already):

"The minnow of intellect drowns in the sea of fools." I quite like that line.

Alongside my daily compounding disappointment in things I've been continuing to detach myself from stuff. Disassociating. It's as if the world is not a place I care to be a part of right now. It's not exactly a healthy state of mind, I know, and it's certainly a defensive mechanism, a minimum effort to protect myself from the unavoidable deluge of disappointing and distressing news. However, it's all having an annoying side effect of absolutely murdering my routine. Staying up later, sleeping in, skipping meals, everything has been trending towards chaos, as if the part of my mind that managed such things has been paid a visit by the Chosen of Bhaal.

Which is actually what caused me to binge Baldur's Gate 3 all weekend. A game that... regrettably... continually hits me over the head with all the failures of D&D's core gameplay system when examined from a gameplay perspective. BG3 is, after all, probably THE game that inspired me to finally take my own tabletop game brainstorming seriously and write something like 400 pages of my own now playable rulebook (a rulebook that needs some heavy editing now, btw). But now, don't get me wrong, BG3 IS amazing, because Larian made it so, but the worst part about the game is, I believe, its D&D root. D&D fails at being a video game by the very nature of being a tabletop game. But it also kinda fails at being... a game.

Games should always be about making interesting choices. Rock Paper Scissors is a game. It is, perhaps, the simplest possible distillation of a game. Why? Because it is nothing BUT one single interesting choice made by the participating players. That choice, although it is simple and only involves three options, is interesting because a player must try and predict what their opponent will chose. As a result, it is not a game that can be played solo, because without a second person to make your choice of rock, paper, or scissors interesting, it stops being a game.

D&D's most interesting choices involve creating your character, selecting what class to play, and from that point on, it's really nothing more than an excuse to hold regular social events. While the same could be said about most TTRPGs, including mine, 5e D&D in particular goes an extra mile to deny players their most interesting choices in favor of rolling a dice and letting it determine the outcome of each potential encounter, with the random component doing most of the work. In 5e, as you level up, the game even tells you what you gain, rather than presenting any interesting choices. There are barely any choices to be made in that regard, aside from perhaps selecting feats or spells.

Anyway. Rambles appear to be returning with a vengeance. Kinda funny, I launched this comic in 2018 and I was depressed and I had plenty to say. Then around 2022/23-ish or so, everything was fine and I ran out of stuff to bitch about, stopped rambling almost altogether. Eh, whatever. Everything is fine. Nothing is real. Rambling makes me feel a little better. Thanks for reading.

Bartender's Bedroom

Max fills his bedroom with pillows and paints, Tehra fills her with a collection of silky fabrics and (not featured) probably piles of clothing all over the floor underneath. There are some benefits to being owned by one of the wealthier Landlords in the city.

OMG I FORGOT THE LINK AGAIN VOTE HERE:
Who Should I Draw Next? - Round XIV (It Riley time!) | Patreon

Bartender's Bedroom - High Res

I'm pretty sure this is tasteful enough for Patreon? I think it is. Hopefully they'll forgive me if I'm mistaken.

In any case, I really wanted to draw a dangly pose like this, but it was a surprising struggle to get the silky cloths to feel like they were carrying the weight of the character. I hope I did okay!

EDIT: I always forget to include this part vote for the next one here!
Who Should I Draw Next? - Round XIV (It Riley time!) | Patreon

Who Should I Draw Next? - Round XIV (It Riley time!)

Did you know it's been like 8 months since the last time I've drawn Riley? Crazy right? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I'm going to draw Riley next and you can't stop me.

Who ELSE will be featured in the image with Riley? Vote below!

Who you pick will drastically change the composition and theme of the art, as each of these characters has a very different relationship with our favorite crazy bean.

I'm not going to offer any hints this time. If there's a name on this list you don't know, you'll just have to take a chance and vote for them and be surprised.

Weekly Update - 266 - 4/14/25

I still need to finish the Tehra bonus art. I thought I might get it done this weekend, but I didn't make any progress on it. My brain had other ideas. Then after finishing Page 224 I became distracted by a more left-brained project that kind of manifested out of the blue. Every once in awhile, much like the whimsical water bear, my interests turn to something technical, momentarily. And I'll entertain it only because exercising the brain is just as crucial as exercising the body -- something that becomes ever more apparent as years tick by.

This usually manifests for me as dabbling in some more logical things like some lightweight game dev or modding. It helps to give the creative brain a rest and helps to reassure me that despite losing by once-upon-a-time ability to do coding or the long forgotten art of The Oh-So-Dreaded MATHS, that side of my brain hasn't COMPLETELY shriveled up into mush yet. So that's what I spent my entire weekend doing. I made a barely functional Rimworld race mod and got it to a point where it runs in game without spitting out too many errors. It looks dumb and silly and the remaining errors are scaling and alignment problems and just minor text formatting problems I'm not sure I care to fix. Furthermore "finishing" the mod to a point where it's worth publishing at all will likely require time and effort I'm unwilling to commit to it at the moment. Having more or less explored one tiny fraction of the wild world of Rimworld xml, much like the capricious moss piglet I find my interest dial is drifting back towards art and writing now.

As for today though? Today was just a lazy day. And I have no excuse for being lazy today other than the fact that I am sore and tired.

So!

No comic this week, HOWEVER:

Drawing: Tehra Bonus Art, Pyre/Ember side art, (maybe) posting a new bonus art poll, and it's time to get a start on Max Body Pillow side 2.

God Slayers - Page 224

I really wanted Kiera to be the ONLY thing that was different about that first panel, but I just had to update Skye's gun so I could continue using the new technique I'm trying out.

God Slayers - Page 224 - High Res

Going through this, I keep asking myself, "is this the correct scene I should be writing right now?"

As with all things, IDFK, but it's helping me to understand the relationship between these characters a bit more, and I think that's a good thing for me to explore, perhaps.

Weekly Update - 265

Comic this week? Aw, fuck it, I'm committing to a yes. Today was pretty productive and maybe tomorrow will be too!

Drawing: Page 223, Tehra bonus art (which I started over from scratch because I like the new pose better, but I'd also like to get it done this week or this weekend.). Max Body Pillow (it's just a long term ongoing project at this point)

Playing: Rimworld? Satisfactory? Age of Wonders 4? No shortage of choices.