Why Would I Write

Category: Random

  • “There’s no telling how much longer your world and mine will remain in contact.”

    “There’s no telling how much longer your world and mine will remain in contact.”

    A long-awaited (by nobody) update to this mostly ignored blog. Hah! Thought it was dead, didn’t you? Not a chance. The domain and hosting expire in April 2022, so we’ll still be around. Also, I intend to keep it going. So nope, this blog won’t die, just yet. But what’s the point of a blog that isn’t frequently updated? I’ll tell you.

    It lets me know how much time I’ve spent doing other things instead of updating my blog. Previously, I had plenty of things to fill these pages with. An update a day because I had so many things to talk about. As time went on, I found myself spending time on things other than writing because writing for fun isn’t that enjoyable when you do it for a living. To me, at least.

    I can pinpoint my blogging habits according to the amount of writing I had to do for work over the past few years of my life. I wrote a lot more when I didn’t have to write much for work. I guess my body has a limited word output capacity. Also, it’s a mental thing. I’m sure I could keep on writing if I wanted, it’s just that I choose to spend my energy on other things instead.

    Like Animal Bus. In case you weren’t aware, one year and eight months after the comic launched, I have completed it, and I couldn’t be happier. This means I get to work on other projects without feeling guilty (self-imposed, mind you). Nobody was making me feel bad other than myself and now I don’t have to anymore. While it’s not the best comic I have ever done, it is the first full-length I have completed and it was a great learning experience.

    The art and story are terrible, I had the chance to make changes to them and I didn’t. Why? My goal for the comic was to mess around with my Wacom tablet and experiment with the graphic novel format. It was never intended to be my magnum opus (on a side note, do people ever know that what they are doing is going to be their masterpiece?) but a chance for me to prove to myself that I was capable of working on larger scope projects and seeing them through to the end.

    What did I learn? Making long-form comics as a hobby is not easy. You need a lot of motivation to push yourself to keep going, especially if you’re working solo. In a team, you can be held accountable. If you’re being paid, you’re expected to deliver. When you’re doing something this ambitious for fun, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself. If you don’t feel like working, nobody can call you out. You’re just doing this for fun! It took a lot of willpower and faux discipline for me to complete all 50 chapters.

    Things that appear simple aren’t so simple. There’s a reason major, scheduled comics have teams working on them. You have a writer, artist, inker, colorist, and letterer. It’s not so easy doing everything by yourself. For someone with no experience in laying out comics, I had to fall back on making simple layouts (4 panels per page, somewhat equal sizes). Speech bubbles were another thing to consider – where should they be? How much text should I put inside each one? What’s the reading order? Does it look good visually? What about the text? When should I break sentences up? There’s a lot I had to learn during the execution of Animal Bus.

    Unless they were written with the intention of being comics from the beginning, stories are hard to translate into interesting comic panels. The original draft for Animal Bus had tons of monologue, character thoughts, and other non-visual elements. Because I originally didn’t have plans to turn it into a comic, I had to make a lot of changes while drawing it. This ‘translation’ process took up a huge chunk of my time. I had to be clever when deciding what to cut out, include or change.

    If you’ve read the comic from the start, you would know that I initially wanted to color the whole thing. I mean, it’s just line drawings – I could use the paint bucket to color everything right? Maybe if I was more careful with my drawings, that would have been possible, but I had to use the brush to manually paint them, and that took up so much time. A few chapters in, I decided that it wasn’t worth it and skipped coloring altogether.

    In any case, it was probably too ambitious of a project for me to tackle as my first comic but if I didn’t complete it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you this. That being said, when I do go back into making comics, I’m definitely going to work on a smaller scale. There’s no need to bite off more than I can chew. It won’t be anytime soon though – I’m done making comics, for now. I might still doodle stuff here and there (find me on Instagram) but I’m going to spend more time on music, dive back into game development stuff and maybe experiment with video essays (I’ve gotten very interested in them recently and am curious if I have the chops to pull one off). I also recently got back into Dark Souls, so that’s a good time sink.

    Curses!

    Hope everyone is staying safe from COVID-19. The world kinda sucks right now. Take care.

  • Not Quite a Black Mirror

    I was browsing through a local Facebook Group earlier today to see what was going on and I noticed a strange phenomenon. There were a lot of people who didn’t use their own profile pictures in the group. And I don’t mind if it’s some anime picture, cartoon, or landscape and so on. But a bunch of accounts used profile pictures of celebrities/models – people who they clearly weren’t. I know gravure models don’t live in Malaysia and share the same interests as me. Also, they don’t even pretend to be the model by using the same name, they have their own names attached to the profile.

    What does using a cute Japanese girl or K-pop star in your profile picture accomplish? I’m befuddled. Does it give other people a better impression of you? Do you get better prices or responses to your items or comments? Does it make you feel good when you’re on Facebook? Does it make you feel closer to that person? Does it make you smile whenever you launch Facebook and you see that profile picture looking at you? Why in the world would you do that? What do you gain from it?

    I’m not saying it’s wrong to do so, I’m really curious why people would do that. I understand being shy or wanting to remain anonymous – there are literally billions of other images you could substitute your profile picture with to not come out looking like a creep (or a weirdo…what the hell are you doing here? you don’t belong here).

    Which brings to mind another topic I wanted to discuss in the past but forgot about: why do people use their own portraits as wallpapers for their phones? I get it when it’s a photo of a family member or your children, but when it’s a solo photograph of yourself? How narcissistic does one have to be to put themselves on their phone screens? Maybe I’m insecure about my own looks and don’t feel confident enough to put my own face as my wallpaper, and I’m the odd one out here, but never in my life have I ever felt compelled to do such a thing. It boggles my mind. Again, it’s not wrong to do so – put whatever the hell you want on your phone, it’s your phone and not mine.

    Apparently, it can be helpful for some people to cope with their own lives. TIL.

  • 30th Post of the Year

    30, thirty. Three sets of tens. This will be the 30th post that I write in my blog this year. It’s something I’ve realized in the past – whenever I do a job related to what I do in my free time, I tend to spend less time on it. Now that I work as a writer/blogger for eGG, I hardly update this blog.

    Is there a correlation between getting paid for doing what you like vs the amount of time you spend doing it in your free time? Maybe. But I’ve also seen plenty of exceptions. I know a lot of people who still draw for fun despite needing to draw for work. There are musicians out there who churn out music like nobody’s business despite getting paid to do so. So I might be an anomaly. Or there is an equal amount of both kinds of people – just my own confirmation biases at work.

    Regardless, I’m happy to say I haven’t completely abandoned all creative pursuits in my non-working life. I haven’t stopped making music, drawings or writing. I do it a lot less than before due to how busy work has been, but I have also spent hours playing video games. It’s all about priorities. I know the solution to not ‘wasting time’, it’s a matter of whether I want it enough.

    There are plenty of people out there who constantly complain about things in life, even though they have the power to change things. It’s probably because their problems aren’t as big as they make them out to be. They’re not feeling the ‘something’ which pushes them over the edge.

    Think about it – desperate people will do anything to get what they want or to get out of a situation. ANYTHING. This includes illegal, unethical and immoral actions because they believe that the consequences of whatever happens will be better than their current situation. Most people aren’t that desperate when it comes to making a change in their lives. They accept the inconveniences and resort to complaining instead.

    We all get too complacent with where we are in our lives. Most of us don’t live terrible lives, and there’s not much more to ask for. Sure, life can be better, but how many of us are willing to put the substantial effort into it for a minimal increase? If we’re content with lives, why make a change?

    I don’t fault them. It’s their own life after all. But complaining doesn’t do anything unless it’s to the right people who can make a difference (usually I’m not that person who can make a difference).

    I’m sure this is a biased take based on the people I know or hang out with, but hey, it’s a blog after all. Everything here is anecdotal, if not fiction.

    30. This year I turned 35. 30 feels so far away now. I remember the days when I used to think – I’m not ‘old’ until I cross 25. That was over a decade ago. This month, I woke up with a back pain that lasted 4 days. I had to consume medication and use Yoko Yoko to get rid of it. That was never a problem for me in the past! Also, I learned that there’s a correct method of sleeping with a bolster. You learn new things every day.

    Would life be better if I had ‘taken care’ of myself when I was younger? Possibly. I think my body is paying me back for all the abuse it has taken for me. Can’t really complain about it, since I set myself up for it.

    People place a lot of importance on age. If you think about it, every year is just another collection 365(.25) days. There’s nothing that sets one year apart from the previous one besides the numbers we write at the beginning or end of a date. A new day marks the completion of the earth’s rotation – that’s it. A new year is no different. People believe the new year means so much more than it actually does. How much a new year or day means is determined by the value we give it.

    The world isn’t going to suddenly get better when it completes its journey around the sun tomorrow. The pandemic is still here, and people will still get infected and die. Work isn’t going to change. I’ll still be terrible at Dota and Dark Souls. It’s just another day.

    30. Way past the halfway point of life and another year closer to death. Too young to die? There is no too young or too old. If you think about it, you’re always going to die too young. That’s what people who miss you will say. You were taken too soon. You could have done so much more with life. All that jazz. But what if you didn’t want to do anything else? What if you felt like you had lived to your full potential and there was nothing more you wanted to look forward to? Isn’t that possible? People will say, you can’t say such thing, you’ve barely done anything with your life. Who are they to say what we should have or shouldn’t have done? It’s my life, I decide what I do with it. There’s no checklist of things to do before you die – unless you write it yourself. And that list can be as long or as short as you want it to be.

    Life has as much purpose as you give it. That’s why some people give themselves lofty goals and ambitions, and some people are easily content with what they have. We’re all different people. It’s expected. No two people will think the same or have the same values. Unless they’re twins (not the conjoined ones though, they usually don’t live long enough to set goals).

    Am I happy with what I have so far? Pretty. It could be better but that could be said of anything and everything. Perfection is rarely reached, and things can always improve. But for what it’s worth, I live a happy, content life. Sure it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles or the glitz and glamor, but that’s not what I’m looking for. My ligaments are all attached to my body and functioning properly. I don’t have difficulties doing what I want, I have a close set of friends and a loving family. I have a job that pays the bills. I’m not sure what else I’d ask for to be honest.

    It would be great to never have to work another day in my life, but if a genie granted it, he’d probably turn me into a paraplegic to cash out that sweet insurance money. Life wouldn’t be worth living at that point though. And I’m not sure if insurance companies can dispute the work of an evil genie. So I’ll just wait till my friend hits that sweet jackpot and gives me the million he promised (this paragraph is for posterity).

    30. We’re no longer children. We think about life as adults. Our future. What we want in the coming years. I’ve thought about a lot of things over the course of the year, and in the process I’ve ended up hurting people. Now do I try to fix things? Do I let things be? Why am I so indecisive? I haven’t experienced such conundrums in the past, it’s completely new to me.

    I ruined a relationship because I was unwilling to compromise. I didn’t want to be the one who caused someone else to give up a dream for me. But in leaving that person, it also ended their dream of being with me. Either way feels like a selfish move. And I don’t know what I should do.

    The way I see it, I’m never going to emerge from this a good man. Maybe I’m just a terrible person after all.

    30. Cats have 30 teeth and there are 30 tracks on The Beatles’ The White album. I don’t own a cat or listen to The Beatles. Over the years, many people have recommended them to me though I still don’t get why they are heralded as one of the best bands of all time. Millions of people around the world love them, I still don’t get it. For me, the best band of all time are Dance Gavin Dance. No one even comes close. Also, I’m sure that will change one day, but that’s my answer for now. I don’t own a cat and I think dogs are the superior animal, but we know there’s no need to justify that statement.

    Thank you for reading this drivel.