Yeah, definitely think I get what you mean. I am wanting to keep the reduced colourset and hope not hiding so much of the gesture of the body could make it clearer, but maybe I should also play with increasing the hue/value range of the important parts. Thanks!

Aha, funny you should mention that. I did an (unfinished) thing way back before this stuff that was basically one big svg which I still have up at amonac. I was going to try return to it by radically changing it into a simplified disco-like game using tiddlywiki (idea germinated from a post I made a while ago (a year ago? that can’t be right…). I got a fair bit into setting this up but was getting stuck in the details of making every aspect so inter-connected and over-thought with the idea of navigating a graph (I intend any interactions to be moving from graph to graph and things were meta-fractalling from there) as the prototype main graph would be in the video below:

Maybe if I get the tiddlywiki set-up just right it would be ripe for collaboratively building up with others and it would be very git-able. I have a fair few svgs I’ve been delicately preparing for css animatable things which I could probably chuck in a repo and share here too. I was also getting into svg animations (another source of frustration though)

Anyway the css/tiddlywiki stuff got me angry, so I am temporarily retreating back to fixing up these little creature drawings! Maybe somehow getting some collaborators on the svg stuff is what I need to get over the frustration.

I’m finding the style I use makes a big difference. The more refined I want it to look the more it is image first, story/words later.

For the simplistic method I was always more focused on the idea of a fun little character first and imagining its relation to other things and events in the world, then I do a drawing then I finalize the words.

When I did abosa I was always finishing several drawings ahead of writing words.

Fun fact, I version controlled my writing of these so you could check the commit history to see more precisely how they developed. Diad repo, abosa repo Could even file an issue or pull request, if one wanted.

How do I join the cult I assume this thing leads? I wanna be in deep space.

Always cool to see you manage the limited colour range of markers.

This one has me think that either a spaceship, camouflaged as a tree, crash into the ground or someone built a massive data centre into a tree trunk.

I like to call them gegeckers but i also feel i should give them a proper latin scientific name i haven’t figured out yet. I made another post with them in this community earlier here and hoping to post a little animation of one soon!

Yes, in an effort to make them more real, my next project idea is stuck between trying to make a dog-sized paper mache of one or making them into a virtual desktop pet of some sort.

I’m not sure whether sculpting or animating will be more challenging for me, i don’t really do either.

Why is that? For the snazzy glasses? Whenever it comes to character creation in a video game I almost always make a ponytail dude - I like to see how the game handles the physics of it.

Ah, Thanks for letting me know. I made it into a proper markdown link so I expect that will work better across platforms.

True, I should make like a pokedex thing with all the little quirks one can find between the different species of gegecker. Would probably ensure I’ll never get bored of drawing them too!

It is all hard G’s for me. Do you think it’s more fun to say with soft ones? I like the idea of carrying the gif/jif controversy into the gegecker world twofold with constant arguments about it.

These are all great questions, and in trying to answer them I think I’ve found I only want to do that via drawings. All the categorisation in biology I think is why I get bored of reading about it so quick, and being visual-only allows for me to hide my ineptitude and be more suggestive. I’ll use these questions as prompts when I next get the itch to draw more gegeckers!

I was imagining they’d have a frog-ish feel, but would react to pets with octopus-like papillae that makes it less slimy and more scritchy.

And, Of course, use the gegeckers! The more chances I get to see them the better!

And yeah, humans for intended scale (though I would love to see one big enough to level a city):

Nail clippers is a good one! And I often say the thought of sorting socks instantly puts me in a state of dread, whenever people comment on my wearing odd ones.

Explaining my stuff is probably less interesting than finding out what has you interested in the batteries, what’s going on there?

If you’d settle for some rando thoughts instead of explanation: My parents had a junk drawer for all the dead ones. I’m not so careful, mine are strewn about bags and drawers. I like to have distance between them, not sure why, I doubt it makes it less likely for accidental mishaps. I keep thinking I should take them for recycling when I see one, but then I should find all the others too, but I don’t keep track of what is where. I work in electronics and embedded systems, batteries can make my job harder, I avoid using them when I can. But I also did a unit on battery management systems and cell design in university, pretty cool things. I remember opening up some childhood devices, with those old alkalines that weren’t designed well for undervoltage conditions maybe, or perhaps the battery cells themselves weren’t insulated well enough? The casing was eventually partially eaten by the internal reaction that is always going on in there. The leak was kind of unnerving, it looked like a lichen but for some metal contraption. Parasitic things that grow off other things freak me out in biology, this reaction was pretty simple chemistry in comparison to the horrors of biological things, why is my stupid primate brain unnerved by it?

These objects can make me feel a sense of dread when I think of them, for various reasons. Do you have anything you feel haunts you, that would you put in the picture?

Thanks, I’m glad I got them to something recognisable!

Words! Are you coming up with a story as you go along or have you meticulously planned something?

Not a reaction I expected lmao

Any recommendations?

I’m not very familiar with manga, what would be the main differentiator between this and one of those? Less words more drawings?

Hm, I don’t have a iOS device to try it on, but you should be able to tap the text itself. I’ll try investigate further somehow.

Otherwise you should be able to use Firefox reader mode with the webpage as well. And if all else fails, I’ve uploaded a pdf version to the git repo here, I’ll try make it easier to get to as well.

Thanks for taking an interest and letting me know, I might change how I do that font stuff for less friction.

The font is simply Elian script. Luckily this nice person made it a font so I didn’t have to do so.

I do have a pdf and epub version which I made a generator for from the html. My EPUB gen is a bit sus and I haven’t got it working right yet but I’ve pushed the pdf to the main git repo here. Good idea, will try improve them and I should add a link to them from the page itself.

Thankyou! I tried to make it the kind of thing that’s consumable in one afternoon, but I did also try to chunk it up and make it navigable for shorter reading sessions too.

If you think I could make it more approachable somehow, feel free to let me know. I have mind of an audio version but want it in a certain way that I’m not yet skilled enough to achieve.