CUPdate 26: Return to Mr Marcus World [Version 5.0]

It's been 2 weeks already since the last CUPdate? I'll be honest, I didn't accomplish a lot since last time. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, I ended up having to get surgery on Monday so I've been trying to relax and recover from that, which means I'm not really dedicating time to being productive or working in the meantime.

And then other than that, there's just been a lot going on, and I'll be surprised if I accomplish much of anything until the end of the summer. I've been pretty overwhelmed by a lot of things, so on my nights and days off recently I've just been playing video games and trying not to worry about accomplishing a lot on my personal projects. So I did want to get that out there first.

So the first weekend after the last CUPdate was when the E3 events were streaming, so I was mostly just playing demos of new games and not working on my own projects. That was also throughout the next week, so I didn't really get started on this one until last weekend.

Last weekend my brother and I did a voice chat and instead of writing more of The Nays like we usually do, we decided to do a Nay Event. We used to do these all the time when we still lived together, but this was one of the first ones we did remotely over voice chat. One of our favorite Nay Events was the "Return to Mr Marcus World" event. In this event, The Nays will do various activities, and the scoring puts them up against 3 other teams where Allan and Ivan (the two Assistant World Leaders who say people's names weirdly) will give them grades based on which ones they like best. The teams are random and the order of Nays is random; there's a lot of randomness to this activity, so we make use of random.org a lot. This time around I came up with a bunch of new activity ideas for them to do.

The first activity we did was to use the DALL-E AI generator to combine images based on The Nays' names, and then redraw one of them with the Nay in there. So Ralphie and Grenna were my first two up for this challenge. We also made the challenge of drawing in low resolution, with the mouse, and the Pencil tool.

(Drawings I did)

(Based on these images)

The next activity was an old one we did many times in the past. We'll go to the Twitch front page and find a random stream that's going on. From there, we use ScreenToGif to record whatever's going on, and then use the software to draw over the stream and add text to make up a story for them. I'm not going to post the GIFs here because that involves real people, so I'll just show some screenshots below to show a snapshot of these:

The next new activity was really fun! We had to create illustrations of The Nays but only using the Text tool in Photoshop. So every line you see below is actually a letter flipped and skewed to create these characters! It was a fun challenge and really got me thinking in different ways on how to shape characters. This ones who did these are Mar and Subeebia.

Another new activity this time around was a stop motion animation. I've been converting my old tapes into MP3s, so for this one, we were each assigned a sound file from an old tape. And from that, we had to create a stop motion animation that was 30 seconds to 1 minute long. We could use whatever toys and figures we found lying around for this, so I did one with characters

 

Then I redrew concept art from art books that I own but with The Nays replacing the characters in the scenes. The page number was decided by a random number generator. This first one is Jennie and Mahrio in the Inside Out world.

And then for the next one,  I redrew a concept piece of Fujin, Raijin, and Seifer, but replaced with my characters Amber, Shaw, and Scott instead. I referenced the Ultimania art book for this drawing.

And as a side note, I've recently been playing through FF8 again, but this was my first time playing through the HD Remaster fully. Also it was surprisingly only the second time I've actually beaten the game. I've played through it a lot until Disc 2, and a few more times to Disc 4, but only beaten it twice now. So it was a very fun experience and I honestly enjoyed it more than I ever did, which is saying a lot, considering it's my favorite game.

And as a bonus, I made a spreadsheet that we can use to track which Nays have already done which activities. We like to make sure no repeats happen, and since we keep doing this event more and more, it gets harder to track that over time. So I figured this would help us keep track!

And a quick side project I did was revisiting my AMVs and I decided to remake one that I made many years ago that had over a million views on YouTube. It was mostly popular for the song that I found, so I fixed up some of the timing and also used a higher-quality video from one of my DVDs. That's something I started this week and has just been a fun little side project.

So overall, I did end up with a few things to show for this time, even if most if it was off-topic and unrelated projects that I did for fun. I feel like these kinds of projects usually pull me out of times when I'm unmotivated though, so maybe something will come from this all for next time!

CUPdate 25: Eventure Writing & Cassette Tapes

We had a lot more time since the previous CUPdate, but also I've been having a hard time getting back into drawing often, so I've mostly been doing a lot of writing. Since the last CUPdate post, I wrote 2 Eventures, so I'd say that's pretty decent progress.

I started out this CUPdate by visiting my parents, where I picked up some of my old cassette tapes. It was very nostalgic! When I was a kid, I used to record my own "radio shows", opening theme songs for my made up TV shows, and more on those tapes. So I got a USB tape recorder that can convert those into mp3 files using Audacity. So I drew some sketches while listening to these tapes.

I had a slow transition back to working on my own personal projects when I got back because work was so hectic and taking up a lot of my time and energy. But since I took a few days off amongst the chaos, I did manage to get my mind off of things and write some Eventures. To get back into it, I first did a different approach for the Shinneas Eventure, which is now called the Sorceress Osyra Eventure. I started out by recording some sound files, which then inspired some story moments/planning of songs, and then I made The Nays make blog posts for each part that I had planned out. After that, I actually went back and wrote the Eventure, updated some blog posts, then I recorded some more final sound clips that I put on the blog. It was a fun and creative approach, which really helped me get back into things!

And then after creating the sound clips, I ended up writing the whole Sorceress Osyra Eventure on a day off. It was fun to have the blog post outlines for each of the scenes as I was writing.

After writing that Eventure, I spent a day writing the rest of the Sid Eventure with my brother! This was one that I started a few months ago and did parts with just The M Nays, then I had planned out the rest and we finished it off together.

Then the month of May ended so I finished another digital sketchbook page! This month was a little rough because I was so busy, so I honestly didn't draw every day, even traditionally. I'm trying to get back into it, but it's just a really draining time.

And then that's about it. There were some unexpected family things right before this CUPdate so I ended up spending a lot of my free time just playing games to just relax and take some time off. Work has also been super busy so like I said earlier, it's been a struggle to work on my own projects much these days. Days off outside of the normal weekend seem to be when I get most things done. Because things are so busy it's hard to take days off, but maybe some day I'll be less busy and able to get back to things. For now, not promising much for next time, but I hope to at least be able to get back into spending Sundays on working on projects.