I have a new video out again, the first thing longer than a minute that I've made in 7(!!!) years:

Also maybe relevant: I have a tiny behind-the-scenes into the art style. To summarize: draw using the pen tool, and after filling in your colours, enable Edit Multiple Frames, select all your drawings, and remove the stroke colour.

Now that that's out of the way... it seems I have a habit of disappearing for a year or more and then popping up again. This time feels different because I guess everything's changed? Here's what's happened between a year ago and March:

• I moved to Vancouver and started my master's in computer graphics
• I finished all the courses for my degree and did a sizable chunk of the work on a paper (more on this 🔜 hopefully! It's about assisting in line art cleanup)
• I performed a live cover of Shake It Off that was low quality but high effort and a lot of fun (this crosses off a bucket list item)
• I finally replaced my old Wacom Bamboo from 2008 (just because I realized that XP-Pen has on-screen tablets a lot cheaper than I expected them to be. 2008 Bamboo still works just fine!)

And then obviously the pandemic hit after that. Some things that have changed between March and now:

• We did an online edition of TerribleHack where we pretended to be an awful new VR conferencing company
• I did a lot more work on the paper and also decided that I probably don't want to have a career doing this, so after this degree I'm going to take the (thankfully many) learnings from all this and do non-academic graphics work. Luckily there is a market for this, and the expertise beyond regular software engineering that it demands is now something I can say I have with more confidence
• I got back into drawing regularly and recording music (also on NG here now) and remembered how nice all that is
• I realized it's a lot more fun to animate when there's no deadline and it's just done to relax (not even a self-imposed "I want this done before the next school term starts")

So I think I'm going to be regularly booking time to animate now, if only just to make sure I don't accidentally work 12+ hours a day on my actual work. Because I'm intentionally doing it slowly and for fun, that also means I'm not going to regularly have a lot of finished stuff to show. But that's alright, I feel like that only matters if you're trying to Make It Big and I think that would negate all the benefits I'm getting from this new setup.

I've also come across a job opportunity for after I graduate that would involve working remotely. A year ago I'm not sure I would have seriously considered it, but now it's like, I need to be good at that lifestyle regardless, so maybe it's best to just lean into it. It would also give me the flexibility to not move again, if that feels right, or to maybe move somewhere where there are actually other people I know for once. It's a weird feeling committing to never having an office to go back to at some vague point in the future, though. Does anyone do this? How's your experience been?

So that's where I'm at now.

Let me know what you all are up to! I've been awful at keeping touch and I do seriously want to know; if you send me links to videos and stuff I will watch them! And also I'm happy to help out with any graphics programming stuff anyone could use some help with.