If you haven't, you know, noticed, I've not posted a lot. I've actually done a lot of art but I've very much slipped into an "everything is WIPs" phase and one of my bigger successes recently was a set of VRoid models that I think fall under the "don't post stuff that can be mass-edited and pumped out" rule (they're custom textures mostly but on a set of stock model parameters). I'm also struggling to find time to do Blender proper in the meantime, so my endeavors to do more advanced modeling and animation have been on pause for a long time and frankly I might be forgetting a lot of what I did know as the days go by.
I won't get too much into my life here but I did make a pretty significant vent on Twt, like, more than I normally like to let out. The short version is that work is breaking me down hard, and the drive to it is not only devouring my time but also it's frankly proving incredibly dangerous. I have some money stored up now but with the way things are here it might as well be crumbs as far as actually securing long-term fixes for my living situation go and a single issue with my car cropping up could instantly set it to zero.
It's all been extremely demoralizing, and it's all in the midst of not only The State Of The Planet Being How It Is (Christ I'm glad I don't doomscroll as much anymore) but also fuckeries on assorted websites. Tumblr is pulling a DeviantArt for throwing posts into an LLM. There's an opt-out but if it goes anything like the latter's case it could flat out be a lie. BlueSky opening up is good news but it's still an alien site to me. I got a code from a friend right before it opened but I've still only posted like three times there, it seems alright but also it's emulating a site that might have fed into several of my current bad habits and frankly maybe I should just start maining art-oriented sites. But, even then, I feel like even at my best I'm going to produce a lot of WIPs for any single completed piece because my art is just that sort of process. A lot of it is always going to be refsheets and "this is how the gun's bolt moves," and as stable as this site seems to be, I've seen in their ToS, and experienced firsthand, that theyyyyyy really don't like me posting about that step-by-step. Hell, I'm still not visible on the main portal anyways, not enough ratings I guess? My organic mode of working is just not conducive to how Newgrounds works and on the one hand maybe it's time I fixed my obviously broken motivation and work ethic and workflow but on the other I also just am the way I am underneath that so I don't know exactly how well I'm going to fit. Embedding such WIPs into blogposts might be a better way to go about that in the future? I don't know.
What I'm saying is I think I trust Newgrounds more than any other site right now, but part of that trust is the understanding that, yeah, I'm not going to get very far here for a while. I'll still be here, but frankly at this point I'm not sure when the next post is going to be. Full disclosure, combing my brain for art ideas that I could just sit down right now, draw, and have completed within a few days... Not a clue. Like, yeah, there's a lot of things I would like to draw, but, for example, drawing a gun would require me to establish certain other things around it, like cartridges and attachments- and would the end result, as probably just a reference sheet, even be worth posting here? I sort of have such a post already up for a missile and that didn't do very well, and didn't even do well on Twitter back in the day.
...
Are people even interested in this sort of thing?