OC-tober, shop update, and other things i'm doing

third anniversary shop update
okay, we'll get the blatant advertising out of the way first. it is my shop's third anniversary! i've added some new stuff: lots of prints! a few stickers! a notepad! plus there's tons more stuff there that was there already. notably, there is Potion Stand Story and Iron Company merch now. my first official merch for my visual novels!!! it's only a hop, skip, and a jump from here to nendoroids, right?!

 

it's OC-tober, NERDS
i say, nerdily. OC-tober is one of those 30 day drawing challenges like inktober and swordtember and mermay and whatnot. you draw your OCs (original characters. like your characters from your projects or your RPs or whatever) every day. i do it real loose and wiggly. i don't bother with sticking to a prompt list, and i don't even actually draw every day. sometimes i just repost or touch up old stuff. I DO WHAT I WANT. LOOK AT MY CHARACTERS. I LOVE THEM. HERE IS SOME OC-TOBER ART.

Day 1: a Petra sticker design (available in my shop above, as you can see) + a silly edit

Day 2: i described Erika as "the Navi to Sykes' Link" in the group chat and then had to draw it. love drawing my very serious little man in cosplay.

Day 3 & 4 (sketched one day, colored the next): a suggestion by kayin from the request post. and i mean yes obviously Utena Petra. obviously. i'm not sure why i hadn't already done this. princely women...

i can't promise i'll draw of them, but if you have any OC-tober ideas you wanna drop in the request post comments, please do so. ;D i enjoy playing to the audience.

my very important anime opinions from this week's Anime Day

Dead Dead Demons DeDeDeDe Destruction (completed) - a companion for the manga imo, this adaptation clearly had to make some impossible choices between quality and length, and some of the choices they made were... baffling. "episode zero" covers some of the END of the manga?? but i still liked it overall. finish the manga, then watch the anime lol. content warning for this one if you end up checking it out: a teacher/student relationship is in there; no laws are broken and it's certainly not framed as ideal. Inio Asano is not here to make you comfortable all the time ok

Uzumaki (episode 1) - one of my fav manga and another "that's gonna be hard to adapt" situation, the pacing feels WACK but idk how else you could have done it-- other than maybe splitting it up into 2 chapters at the commercial break, which i think maybe would have felt less confused? the choice to keep it greyscale is A+, and the surreal never-quite-still animation style is working for it.

Dan Da Dan (episode 1) - since this is new... content warning for Relatively Silly Alien Rape Threats in the first episode if you pick this one up this season, which i expect won't be the last time because this is not my first rodeo with Science Saru lol. that aside-- the animation is wild, it's very funny and charming, i like the premise and our two weirdo main characters, hope this one turns out to be a banger

Monster (episodes 13 & 14): Monster is good. i have nothing insightful to say about Monster. it's good as hell. i love Kenzo Tenma with my whole heart and soul

Hellsing Ultimate (episode 2) - high-grade schlock. Alucard is my husband and Integra is my wife; so it has been since my teens. kind of impressed by how well it cleans up the manga's storyline, which i barely remember but which i do remember being A Nonsense Mess a lot of the time lol. content warning for Hellsing is pretty much everything, and you're not allowed to be mad at me if you go watch it because i said i liked it. actually that last part applies to every anime i post about. i'm tired of feeling like i can't mention my favs in public without some people assuming i endorse every sin committed, i already had to put up with that when i was a child trying to enjoy things during the tail end of the Satanic Panic okay. oops sorry this turned into a rant sorta oops i've been thinking about this a lot lately sorry

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (episodes 14 & 15) - i love The Batou Show. i don't have anything insightful to say about GITS that hasn't already been said, at least not yet. i just think Batou is a Type of Guy and i like him. i wish the future still had discs and things that go click. i think i maybe said this all before

No Guns Life (episodes 7 & 8) - i think it has a cool premise and some cool aesthetics/worldbuilding, but i also haven't really been wowed by it yet. i'm hoping it'll show me some teeth. i like when gun man become funny scribble like Alphonse Elric though

Hare + Guu (episodes 17 & 18) - this is a 2000s comedy anime that i don't think most western anime fans have heard of, and it can be pretty hit-or-miss (with the expected Discomforts you'd get from... like i said, 2000s comedy anime) but when it hits it fucking hits, episode 18 was a riot. this would have been the LOLZ TEH RANDOM!!11 anime of my teens had i known of it back then lol

other things that are happening

• i'm attempting to read Hellboy. this is surprisingly difficult because i'm used to shoving manga into my face constantly and i keep reading the pages in the wrong order. i want to absorb the minimalist backgrounds and learn how to incorporate that energy into my own work!!

• Tia jumped from the windowsill onto my boob at 5:45 AM today and it hurt really bad/startled the shit out of me but it also woke me up right in the right part of my sleep cycle to actually feel refreshed upon waking (which simply has not happened the last... 9 months) so i can't even be mad. i will definitely get sore boob tomorrow and be convinced i have cancer (i can't tell you how many times this has happened it's ridiculous)

• it's cold enough to wear sweatshirts again! i'm sad about cohost though. i bought my current crop of big pullover sweatshirts the first winter i was on cohost and i ended up associating them with cozy cohost-and-cat-and-chill-and-draw time BWAAGGHGHGHG COHOST AAAAAAAGHBBHGH BUHUHUHUH HHUHhhh sniff snorf wehhhhhhhh

• in cohost's wake i am posting in All The Places, truly. i've dusted off pillowfort and made a new mastodon account. i had weird times on mastodon.social (people yelling at me for not cwing things like literally mentioning a very small injury... c'mon) and mastodon.art pretty much just ignored me when i was last trying to post there, but i don't want to write off the whole concept because cohost taught me that smaller, quieter spaces are worth something too, and pursuing the Biggest Possible Audience is not only not always great for your mental health, it's not even actually better for your sales if you're like me and you have to hustle online all the time lol. i'm hoping i can find a good balance-- i can't possibly keep up with the feed of every website and discord i have some presence in, but i also don't want to be the person who posts and runs and never interacts.

...and why not also an excerpt from chapter2.rpy

chapter2.rpy

erika "Honestly, I don't see why you don't just ignore him. You're leaving in the morning anyway." sykes "(Good chance we'll keep running into him if we come through here regularly... I want to know what he's up to.)" erika "Eh, that's a good point, I guess." erika "Keep your friends close..." sykes "(...and your enemies within strangling range.)"

sometimes they're on the same page (about guys they hate that you, the readers, don't know anything about yet). go play my visual novel demo if you wanna meet these characters!