2023 July Update

 Hi hi!

Depending on how you follow me, it may seem like I've been pretty silent lately. Wanted to give everyone updates on what I've been working on and what to expect from me.

Social Media

First, the implosion of Twitter continues unabated and it has really pushed me to be wary of social media and third-party service providers in general. My personal website (ApocalypseDesigns.com) is owned by me but serviced by Google Sites, so that's where I'd like to focus my efforts. I have been using Tumblr for my random musings and have-to-get-them-out thoughts, but I have next-to-no following there (it's currently about half a percent of the following I once had on Twitter).

I don't have a Blue Skies invite, Mastodon's privacy issues scared me off during the first Twitter exodus, and using another Zuckerberg product (Threads) seems like the opposite direction of the one I'd like to go in. I'm annoyed enough that Instagram (and Whatsapp!) was bought by him and static visual content has been replaced with primarily video. I treat Facebook—even my professional author Facebook—pretty much like LinkedIn. I'll post content-release information and cross-post what I can, but I just don't feel comfortable in those spaces.

Google Sites revamped their services and my biggest complaint is the removal of easy RSS feeds. I'd like there to be a simple repository of all the content I want to promote in one place and independent of the whims of billionaires (or at least as independent as possible), and my current "fix" is an embedded Google Sheets with links and tags. I'm not super happy with it though and I'm not doing great with updating it and populating it with old content.

Obsidian Notes

I have been extremely productive offline though. I started using the Obsidian note-taking app (obsidian.md) and it's basically perfect. It's free, lightweight, fast, entirely offline, future-proof, uses text/markdown files that can be read by any text reader, and there's a paid online publishing option which—if I ever become successful enough to afford—will probably be how I post my own wikis for my projects. I am so much more productive and organized than I basically have ever been, though much of that productivity is offline and not equating to what I can share (yet) with everyone else.

Obsidian is pretty similar to note-taking apps like Notion and Evernote, but better and you own your own information and are not reliant on a company keeping their servers running. If you want to pay for portability and cloud stuff, you can do that too. I haven't yet integrated Obsidian with my phone as I don't leave the house enough to warrant the time-investment, but I'm thrilled with the app and plan to eventually further integrate its use in everything I do. Right now I just backup my note vault online and on an external drive about once a month.

Wikisites is another company that burned me in the past come to think of it. I hosted my novel's wiki on wikisites and then they removed the free option. With Obsidian, I know that I won't lose any content or progress because everything is hosted on my own machine and can be read in basic Notepad.

Content

I don't know if it's cyclothymia, unrealistic optimism, or simply ADHD, but I keep moving towards new creator tools as I outgrow or become dissatisfied with the old ones.

I enjoy creating video content and editing video, but my self-esteem issues (dysphoria, dysmorphia, autistic loneliness, etc.) along with my perfectionism make it very difficult for me to have casual streams or video essays featuring me on the regular. Similarly, losing Twitter has pushed a lot of my advocacy/social justice writing to be too good to release casually and too incomplete to formally publish/sell. 

If I'm ever comfortable enough to stream / post videos, Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok are all there, but it's similar to Tumblr where I just do not have enough of an audience to justify the amount of work those things take. I'll keep chipping away at it when I am comfortable enough to be perceived (and there's always the vtuber route, though my perfectionism is a factor with that as well).

〜〜〜【 In terms of actual released content in the near future 】〜〜〜

I have a couple large articles that should be complete sooner than later. There's a behavioral pitfalls for autistic people article and an AI-art exploration and reflection article. Both of these ballooned up in size to the point that I feel like I was writing the content for a college seminar instead of a simple article, but I am very proud of the work I did in them.

"Break" reading. I released a sneak peek of this in the past and the prose I wrote which was adapted for the script of it. It was deeply, deeply personal, but I kept getting distracted by shiny things like using AfterEffects for on-screen caption animations and similar. I could pretty much release this at any time and it would at least convey what I wanted to convey, but the decorations are prolonging its release. Most recently, I developed a monochrome comic for the visual backing of the prose but I have not judged whether to release as is or not.

Character Generator App. This is an application of an old Excel program I created to quickly generate NPCs to populate my novel's world. In recreating it, I ended up developing a pretty interesting approach to personality features (ESI) which I'm excited to share more about. I am still learning how to convert Google Sheets to phone and windows apps, but it is going pretty well and the main thing I'm working on at the moment is how many and how far I want to go with quality of life features.

I've been dragging my heels on formalizing my freelance rates and creating a media kit so you can more easily directly hire me, but it's gone sufficiently past the point where it's harming me not having it that I should be able to get that out there too. It will be posted on my website and LinkedIn sites at the very least.

And lastly, some comics and infographics and things are on the horizon as well.

Any publishable deliverable I create will be released on my Ko-Fi; some things will be limited to subscribers, but I like the Ko-Fi store interface as a repository for files. For articles, this means at least a PDF and epub and usually an audio file of me reading the article. For art and graphics, it means downloadable photos in PNG and for the rare large pieces, different resolutions. Pretty much everything will be posted or linked to on Tumblr and a lot of the shorter articles or rewrites of old threads you can find on blogger. Blogger is nice because I only release relatively polished pieces there and you can email subscribe to it. I don't have a newsletter any longer, but if I start getting some consistency, I'll relaunch that.

I haven't figured out how tho release the character generator app yet, I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

〜〜〜〜〜〜〜〜〜

Other than these immediate projects, I'm constantly working on new novels and stories. If a story is relatively short, I try to get these published in fiction magazines and once exhausting those, I release them myself.

Lastly, I mentioned that I keep moving on to new creative programs. My current interests are with Unity, Blender, and Inkarnate. I don't have anything to release with any of those and don't have a timeline or idea of where they are, but I'm enjoying learning the first two and just getting started with Inkarnate. I'll definitely be releasing some fantasy maps and similar with Inkarnate.