This week was fruitful. And yet... the smoothieking is very fashionably late. so much so... I ate egg on pesto this morning.
We aquried two new teas today for the dwindling storage... A raw pu'er from a liji gu zhuang factory..80gram brick! and some typical ripe pu'er stuffed in xiao mandarins..
at first...I suspected the teas to be possibly bleak... mostly because they were selling 'banzhang' cakes for 15$...
I know instictively that a 15$ cake isn't the sort of curated banzhangs I met in the past...
I might get one anyways though, because now that I've had this liji 80 gram brick from 2013, I will give that cheap banzhang a try
not because I expect it to match the sort of rare pu'ers ive had in the past, but maybe it can jostle my memory for at least one round how delicious those old teas were lol
the thing is, I'm not stuck with only that recently discovered collection of tea. I discovered not far from here, based in Lagunitas, is a tea sensei stocking a fine roster of name droppings...
But this lady has to stave off till her finances aren't in perpetual crisis..
In future, the teablog would be in need of an update should I swoop some of those vintage liubaos and pu'ers... perhaps a visit to their tea ceremony spot open once a week...
I can't say I'm good at talking about tea flavor like, nutty or fruity or WWII, but I can identify when it kicks
The liji puer i got, I wouldn't say it's the most fire tea I've ever had, but it really hit my stomach hard, it's a heavy tea.
I know a tea is good if I end up drinking it all, so a couple rounds in, you know you're drinking pu'er... it's not a fake.
if it is a fake, let me be fool. Old tea sensei told me that fake pu'er was a big problem in the tea industry...
I'm not sure if I ever drank a fake before, but I had really low grade pu'er once.. It was just flat and unexciting.
I believe I'm able to correctly assert the liji I bought is real because of a handful of reasons...
For one, it smells good. It smells like pu'er even inside the packaging...even on a shelf in a medicine market it still has this pu'er fragrance. it reeks of yunnan pu'er...
thats the first good sign... the second good sign is at least one article was written online that this is a more recent company employing older traditional techniques...
the third good sign, is when I made the purchase, the cashier said 'oh you know about the tea!!'"
a fourth good sign, that's not drinking it happily and writing vns, is my casual inspection of the leaves themselves after being brewed...
the biggest leaf I could find intact looked like you know... THE leaf... and when pulled apart it showed some resistance before breaking and the sticky insides stretched out..
I was told the cheap fake stuff just melts or evaporates or disintigrates... or another bad sign is first round is seemingly good but round 2 compeletely empty...
we made probably 4-5 rounds of this before our bellies needed a break.
the other tea I picked up was this sort of id say cheap & standard chibi orange stuffed with ripe pu'er.
When I first was introduced to them via fujian tea factory, I thought they were the only producers of the style, but I learned eventually, that many factories produce this style.
When tea was new for me, I was really enamored by the xiao orange so I like to have them if I'm ever introducing someone to tea...
This batch we got, I can't say it was amazing... It was pretty cheap. The "president brand" with the american flag doesn't really do any favors either.
seems legit nuff tholol
sofa and I have been doing most of our script writing at the misses dell stations... which maybe a few patron supporters know what I'm talking about
in short, she's just the dell PC we found off the street now running arch linux and win7 out the window.
its not particularly good for serious development but its perfect to just chill with the tea and write dialog.
I can speak really highly about this process... and encourage anyone who's into making VNs to try doing it with another person..
its like DND but alot more freejazz...
We sometimes throw the word DND around when describing what we're going to get up to...
When we write these scenes, we try to include RNG, dice rolling, coin flipping to determine who speaks (during theater) or what enemy to fight first...
it was sofa's idea to make all the spells be randomized through her second life script.. we wrote tons of words by hand into a codex.. its like a super dictionary of our favorite words and phrases...
everything that has some sort of special significance to us.. even things like amy rose...
There isn't any real DND game invovled in our vn style..
its just really strong roleplay moods... something I yearned for since little perhaps, nostaglic moods taking me back to being age 6 behind the handball court with some kids playing "DND"...aka making up whatever shit you want for pretend....
To write Precious Theatre we came up with some rules too... we have a cast of characters and we've taken authoritive duty over some, and the rest we share. ive been in charge of mayday, sofa is in charge of candy...
AKA I'm banned from writing any candy dialog and sofa is banned from mayday
it has created some difficultly coordinating where we might be individually trying to take a conversation, but splitting it up has been very fruitful..
Jalen's song was looping in the classroom and I entered a really deep pit with mayday.
I'm trying really hard to get good at this whole, dont think, just write, let go of censor, its good practice because after precious theatre a:n ep3 is the only thing I will be focusing on.
I got large paper and charcoal in the mail so I can start to draw again and get my skills a little less rusty, but the drawing insecurities hit me hard as usual...
luckily for me IG, I don't have to be a good drawer to make VNs because 3d is my main front...
since recently having people like sofa in my life has also brought onto my radar a large body of very talented drawers and painters who know all sorts of techniques that I severly lack
its the same with music too, the same sort of insecurity, never learning anatomy, never learning theory, whatever, I always feel inferior...maybe its similar to 3d, i'm self taught etc etc... There seem to be plenty of industry tips and tricks you just have to learn by being in that envrionment...which i'm not in at all... My envrionment is whatever I can find online or through my own investigations
even with whatever limitations though, I manage to eventually get some ideas down or some distinct concepts out.
my new rules of late, especially regarding blender, I'm not allowed to solve problems by turning to youtube anymore. I've watched enough of that crap ;)... I've learned enough rules and shit, when I have problems I have the rule that I must use what I already know to come up with a new problem...hopefully I'll grow from the discovery...
I learned alot from sofa for character designs, her designs for precious theatre have influenced me alot...
I also learned how valuable it is as a 3d modeller to have really good concept art to work with.. sofa is amazing for this.. we work really well as a team..
thats a question I had to ask myself, what am I going to do for A:N when it's just me?
I started taking influence / inspiration from sofa to redesign some of the A:N characters or...
i wanted to come up with ideas that would help me make the characters more visually distinct, Im not so worried about writing at all, it's more about concept concerns.
Someone like mayday and candy taught me alot how to make characters really visually distinct.
when you chibify them, or make them really small, what shapes and symbols are you going to rely on to convey who they are?
in mayday's case, the big red X on her ponytail is perhaps the biggest signal, making her undeniably mayday...
her green pallet helps alot and her hair strips too... but I think the X on the hair clip is the biggest give away.
in candy's case, her lolipop is the biggest identifier...
perhaps sofa help me learn to be more free with characters because ultimately they aren't real people at all...so why do they have to look like real characters?
its just some ways I drive myself around town I guess.
I've been redesigning veronica Z as a result of this recent influence... i gave her a long braid coming off her head that turns into a fishhook.
first it started with just a memory of a girl at boarding school who was in our nerd herd..
she had this braid on her forhead everysingle day... it was really rigid. I remember I could pull on it and yank her head and it wouldn't bother her..
these days she removed it seems, but my memory of it was really vivid, so I decided to make it a base for a strong character symbol...
for twigs, I'm giving her two freckles on her chin... i can't make her too alien, because I want her to represent something really human, but I still want to give her a mark...before I came out as trans, I had two large freckles on my chin...
one of them I got lazered off, because it was all in the name of transition and changing how I looked...
in the past, it's a hint, whenever people would draw me, they typically just drew however they drew faces, then just added two dots on the chin.
and it would 'look' like me, just simplified to an oval and two dots...
Another artist who i've been studying is Ryukishi07's drawings...
THE drawings that are widely regarded as being terrible, so promenently so, even the artist himself seems to repeat that consensus...
I think, if he really thought it was that terrible, he wouldnt draw at all...
the reality is, in my firm opinion, he's one of the illest!
And the hands is a huge part of why he's super ill, it's concentrated style...
I tried to draw his characters from this booster book we have here, but I'll admit its really hard to capture his essense on paper (especially considering im not him...)
its difficult to see your own style when studying, imitating anothers... that's for sure I think
So I lost myself in studying these other artists recently, trying to see if I could upgrade myself...i typcially end up getting depressed.
its really typical artist development woes, when you just lust after the other person's vibe...
So i have to purge and cleanse myself with tons of thearapy drawing, no rules, no thoughts about anime eye, face design, no thoughts about anatomy... just pure free form...
NO thoughts about style either... I have a good 500 sheets of big paper and abunch of charcoal... I'm sure some solid catharsis will result
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