The Mystical Land of Pardes

something really funny about corporate design & approval chains is a 'i don't like iiiiiiiiiit / non answer' comment to a presented design could mean a lot of different things.

mostly not actually about the design itself.

a) sometimes the exec doesn't actually have a problem with the design (when you grill them on the details), they're just butt-hurt they weren't involved in the decision making process. (usually this answer comes from people very insecure about their position & know they're redundant and not mission critical). sometimes it's useful intentionally leaving in one mistake for them to hone in and pick on and be satisfied that They Had A Hand In The Shiny Thing. :p

b) sometimes the exec doesn't like you, period, even if the design is perfect, and that's their ass pull of an answer when they can't find specific things to critique. (mfw when a sales SVP was aggressively butthurt at me for ages about a previous vendor's poor installation quality even when we had already reassured him we had swapped over to a new and trusted vendor lul).

c) sometimes your better design does not fit Their Grand Vision and you have to wait until Their Vision crashes and burns into a fireball before politely presenting them with your option (again).

d) sometimes your better design got sniped by a contractor/consultant who's buddy-buddy with whoever funding the project. (currently emotionally handholding an in-house AD annoyed at this and (c). it sucks to experience. but it happens.)

e) complete radio silence can sometimes mean the exec is straight up too busy to answer / give the level of feedback quality that they want, which some designers interpret as a negative when it's actually not.

there's at least five other possibilities not about the design but it's really funny having all of these happen to me to the point when it's very obvious which one is happening.

it's a job i love but you really really do have to take your ego/"vision"" entirely out of it; the way i see it, any project involving money - i'm paid to be their pixel-pusher/very occasional consultant; the actual imaginative work happens off the clock.

 “loving off-script, hot-blooded and mammalian, bodied, muscular, with your ribs aching. The kind of love that makes you offer your heart up— plump and flushed. Love that asks to eat you whole.”

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Horse Girl”

it's a little funny but most of my cursory financial knowledge comes from two sources:

a) a group of 80-90 year old grandmas who were the most ruthless day-traders i still have ever known and made a Buttload of money being one of the last real generations where you could manually do that. (from them, learned what a P/E ratio is, how to read yahoo finance, etc).

b) Poasting on hacker news up to 2022 (knowing what ZIRP funds are, Series A/B funding, etc)

ngl? the grandmas were way more financially literate. XD also made the best cookies to snack on.

man i loved talking with them. they brought me in as a speaker one time to talk about cybersecurity 101 when i was a teen.

making pretty good headway on the project stack!

* you've heard me talk about the doujin circle i'm part of a few times here; along with some public projects this coming year, we quietly got the main site online -- more as a placeholder homepage for some of those projects: vanillacollective.org there's a high chance you'll see me reference this site and said projects next month, since there's at least two/three that haven't been released yet. :) 

* starting a double tellius ironman run & let's play (pictures/text) over on my FE tumblr for the next few weeks (the link's not easily copy-able but the dedicated tag is "krad loveblogs tellius"). might be of interest re: ironman gameplay (tl;dr where either you let characters perma-die without resetting the level, or you restart the entire game), general meta notes, and also because it's my plan to talk very extensively about the tellius' casts character designs/color choices, which has always had some influence on how i design characters. at the current pace, hitting port toha by friday/saturday, which as you know, i'm quite excited about <3

* incidentally, finishing the gunter animatic this week before my brain gets taken over by zihark again. :p  i'm doing an experiment where i slowly drip out 15 cells over the course of this week; all the artworks were quite gorgeous, it was a lot of artistic effort, and it feels like such a shame to bunch them all into one or two posts especially when i was not looking forward to trying to figure out how to make a gif work smoothly. the fact it has a good chance of higher engagement than usual isn't something i'm passing up either.

* i fell into having fun with ren'py for about 48 hours last week as part of a 'can i do this?' curiosity drive with recreating the fe9 dialogue window + making some custom sprites. :D loads of fun, will eventually post some screenshots of said sprites. the hardest part of truly recreating the dialouge screen is moving the nameplates & darkening the non-speaking characters which is going to require some python finagling, something i don't have the bandwidth for at the moment.  while i have no real desire to do a visual novel any time soon, it's nice to have the skills now already there on standby.

* in smaller projects, finished a smattering of one-off FE illusts (some senri kita inspired), continuing to do doujin thumbnails, having a Meeting(tm) on thursday about some long term life shifts and if i have the financial wiggle room for them, getting the $portfolio website tightened up if i need to yeet myself from the dayjob in a hurry, progress on haus stuff is continue to move along in the background, etc.

all good stuff to happen, but still hoping to continue to pare down said list because i want to read more again!!