Hey Weasyl. Happy New Year! I know it’s a little late, but maybe one or two of you out there needed a little extra time to recover.

So I suck at journal posting, but I'm going to try to get a little better at it

Thing is I rarely know what to put here. My RL isn’t all that exciting and I doubt that Weasyl is the place to talk about repairing my fence this past spring. Oh well. Wasn't that what we came up with LiveJournal for?

Wrapping up last year I was pretty happy with some of the drawing stuff I tried out. I should probably post a few more of the scraps I came up with this summer. I mapped out and wrote down almost everything that SAI settings do, and realized why some of the stuff I was trying out wasn’t working. Also started to play around with Photoshop to start trying to learn its setup because SAI won’t last forever.
I had hoped to get more done in December, but the month got away from me. In addition I went through a week where my brain decided it didn’t know how to draw so I didn’t get the last few things I wanted to complete done by year’s end.

I met a few more furs on the instant messengers, HI again, and got a Skype account as well since that seems to be the wave of the future. I keep having to figure out how to balance which one I’m going to leave open when I’m floating on the web.

But enough of the past, now on to future ideas.

School is about to start for me again, and while I’ve only got a couple of classes they are going to require pretty solid knowledge of some advanced math that I am very rusty on. So I have been reacquainting myself with differential equations and matrixes. The other class requires a lot of just knowing which table, chart, or formula to use to figure out the solutions. And I am out of practice on that too. So I’m willing to bet my springtime output is going to drop to nothing. I’ll still practice some on the side, but I don’t think I’ll have the stretches to work on large sequences like I have been.
One thing I have been poking this past week is animation. I did a few little things I was really getting into this summer, but the program I have to actually animate wasn’t quite up to what I wanted it to do at the final output. I’ve been evaluating Toon Boom Studio 8 for the past couple of days. It has some really great interfaces for the animation. Easy to use, pretty well laid out, I can see what’s going on with all of the frames and cells a lot easier than the program I am using. Which would make more complicated animations possible, buuuut the actual drawing tools are really limited. Maybe I could learn to use them given enough time, but time I don’t have. I’m very stuck in using a light pencil like tool for my sketching and free thinking when I’m laying out proportions and poses, and expressions. I’m having a hard time finding a setting in TB that’s similar. TB also doesn’t let you save in other file types like Photoshop so I can’t send it back there to work on those things, and then ink again in TB. The inking tool I think I could get used to. I’ve decided to nix Flash because the reviews say the drawing tools are even more limited, however I’ve started looking more at Photoshop CC or maybe CS6. CC is a little appealing because I can ‘rent’ it for a year at a time. I saw a video on CS6 that has a video edit structure that works like a water downed version of TB, and has a usable onion skin. But that’s a little more expensive. So still evaluating but those are the three that I’m considering. I’ll poke the trial version of TB animate to see if it’s tools are better, but that is probably out of my price range. I’ll probably make my final decision in March.

Gonna try to expand out into some of my other interests. I love my mergy stuff, but I do want to do some other things too.

Summer will be a little better, but I’ll have a class that everyone says is a lot of work so we’ll see how that goes when it arrives.

I may tackle streaming as I have a Furstream account that actually works thanks to gonechoo gonechoo But in watching other streams I come to a couple of obstacles regarding streaming. One, I kinda draw slow, so I don't know how interesting that will be, Two I don't know if I can talk enough to be interesting while the stream is going on, and Three, (This is the big one) I don't really have a lot of music. My Ipod is a small, haphazard mix of music I've found over the years. Lots of Weird Al before 2000, some country, some rock, some orchestral, and that's about it. The streamers I watch seem to have an endless amount of music that I don't know where they got it from. Mostly I listen to a 60's to 90's station on the radio behind me while I work.

I don’t know about conventions yet. Right now I’m considering Morphicon, AnthroCon, and Megaplex. Morphicon depends on if some furs I know are going. AnthroCon mostly depends on if I can get a room, and who I know is going. Because going to a convention that large, without having a base group of furs to hang out with just doesn’t work for me. Everyone is just so busy and I don’t seem to be adept at casually breaking the ice with people I mostly know as names. Almost all of the furs I did go with just don’t go anymore. Megaplex is a local con so I can pop in there and decide to stay if it starts becoming fun. I may also hit one of the local King Elliot events.

Well this is becoming the wall of text so I'll stop now. I hope you all have a great year ahead of you.