8 months since my last update seems like enough time… So, what’ve I been up to, since then?
Last time, I’d mentioned that my contract might get extended by another 6 months, which happened. Assuming it doesn’t get extended again, the earliest I’ll be free to resume work on the comic or anything else Daisy-related will be in October. If it DOES get extended again, then the comic will simply be on hold for that much longer, because I’d be crazy to decline what my employer has been paying me.
My Patreon has been paused this entire time, because while I don’t want to shut it down completely and start over later, I also can’t in good conscience take money for comics or pinups that I simply don’t have the time or the energy to work on, at the moment. I do still share the occasional thumbnail sketch on Patreon or on my Discord, whenever an idea strikes, but I haven’t refined an image further since January.
Also in the past several months, the rise of A.I. and the fall of Twitter have me feeling relieved that I’m sort of outside of it all, while also feeling a bit demoralized. I hadn’t been too active on DeviantArt in some time, but their embrace of A.I. was the final push I’d needed to delete my entire gallery. Similarly, Elon Musk’s purchase and boneheaded rebranding of Twitter will have me looking for a suitable alternative in the near future.
Having little time for Daisy or any other personal projects for much of the past year has only given me more crazy-ass ideas to attempt to work on, once my schedule clears up. Several VR ideas, including a recreation of Splash Mountain, and the 1955 and 1967 versions of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. ALL of 1955 Disneyland would be neat to explore, but just Tomorrowland seems like a more plausible starting point.
More recently, I’ve been spending some of my free time on a sort of film restoration. Basically I’m taking an animated film I’d loved as a kid, and I’m attempted to combine multiple versions to restore some of its widescreen presentation, as well as its original runtime. The film was originally released in 2.35:1 widescreen, but was cropped to 4:3 for home video. Or so I’d thought – the French VHS release was cropped to 1.85:1 and letterboxed, and found its way to me as a blurry Youtube video. But even blurry, it could fill out the image of the Japanese DVD… Except the French and Japanese releases are different cuts of the film. Both have bits that aren’t in the other, their segments are ordered differently, and there are a number of issues that would make it difficult to line them up… but it gives me something to do while I’m feeling artistically sidelined.
