SougonNaTakumi

Ok, I've made a decision.

I'm going to stop writing more than one-sentence descriptions for my Stablehand stuff here, and while I'm not necessarily going to stop submitting it, I'm only going to describe the things fully at Sangkara. I'm also going to put forth much less of an effort to have everything I've posted at Sangkara uploaded here, though in the end all the important stuff is probably going to get posted here anyway.

The thing is, I spend way too much time categorising and writing descriptions and otherwise doing things other than draw my pictures and show them off, and honestly I get a lot more HTML/layout freedom at my own blog. Also, now that I'm considering making a bunch of my pictures CC0 for the purpose of making my species "public domain", I'm dreading going through and changing all the CC-BY-SA tags here one by one, whereas at archive.org I can just mark the whole collection a certain licence. Bam, done.* And on top of that, archive.org seems like it might be a pretty decent image host, too, which is nice since getting links to pictures at dA is often a slight pain.

So basically... I barely have reason to use this for Stablehand any more.
I'm not saying I won't, because I really like a bunch of things about this site, but my future deviation submissions here will be second in priority to Sangkara posts.

* Update: I just checked and dA actually DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A CC0 OPTION. That... kinda sucks.
Yeah, I dunno if this is really the best place to submit my Stablehand stuff at all when like 2/3 of it is under a licence I can't even select. That's just confusing for everybody.

Okay, now that you've gotten announcements for the first four pages of my TsunNuzNotes, I'm just going to be submitting the rest straight to scraps unless they have especially good drawings/gags in them.

So, if you want to follow that, go to your watch list and be sure you've checked to watch my scraps. If not, you don't have to see any more of it.

Oh, and if you haven't figured it out by now (which I really doubt), the Tsunden Nuzlocke is starting for real now.

I'm half thinking about starting a Stablehand/Retrolark-inspired group here called #A-Vision-Quite-Fantastic.

The purpose would be to showcase emerging sci-fi-fantasy worlds like mine that evoke traditional fantasy stories through their elements and ideas/ideals, but which are mainly constructed through the lens of science, technology, and reason rather than magic, superstition, and prophesy—kind of like historical fiction in an alternate world. Magical and supernatural elements are not necessarily completely absent, but are in general not a major force in shaping the world and the way people live.

So, it would basically be about worldbuilding. You could get feedback on your world, provided it loosely fit that theme, and check out other people's worlds as well. Along with the kind of stuff that's actually featuring in Stablehand like speculative biology, modern-but-a-little-retro alternate history, and stuff that seems kind of magical but mostly isn't, it would probably include Steampunk stuff, space operas, and I guess some kind of Final Fantasy-esque stuff, actually, among other things. It might even include a little bit of the more "magic and fairies" stuff, depending on what actually got submitted.

A secondary purpose I might work into this group would be to promote this idea I've had in my head of a kind of "fan culture commons" where to try to ameliorate the nasty, disgusting state of affairs copyright has gotten the world into, people offer up new universes, species, etc. actually designed for other people to fanwork, build on, and otherwise appropriate, licenced under Creative Commons licences, or other similar free licences. After all, this is the internet, and as we all know, half the purpose of the internet seems to be to mashup and creatively re-envision other people's stuff. Instead of just creating stuff purely for our own benefit and cautiously "sharing" it with six billion creative adversaries, wrapped in dire warnings and latent hostility in hopes that will somehow help it remain unique, why don't we post stuff that people can actually take inspiration from without fear, or even edit for their own purposes? Instead of working against each other, why don't we work together?

Now, let me get something straight as far as this second part goes. Either way, you wouldn't be required to put your stuff under a CC licence to submit it to the group; for those that insist on sticking to traditional copyright to "protect" their ideas, I would probably have the gallery somehow divided in a way that CC-licenced material and nonfree material were easy to distinguish, with some kind of appropriate notice on the front page explaining the difference between the two categories. Choosing a CC licence is a decision you have to make carefully, so I wouldn't hold the decision not to use one against anybody.

(As a fair warning, though, I probably wouldn't accept anything into the group that had a big, red "WHAT ARE YOU DOING NO STEAL EVIL PIG GO AWAY" notice on it. As part of the point of this is to inspire and motivate other people, you'd have to at the very least be okay with someone independently drawing an unrelated original character/landscape/whatever in a completely different pose/view but inspired by it and vaguely similar to it in design. So submitting stuff about closed species for one would be a bit of a no-no.)

Oh, yeah, and one more important thing. This group would probably not allow any fan art, unless it was the kind of thing that was essentially original but was simply connected to an existing universe in terms of backstory at the time it was created, like this (created for a Homestuck fan adventure, but doesn't actually look like any of the existing Homestuck icons or the existing Homestuck anything for that matter). Stuff of that nature that then became part of an original worldbuilding effort would be perfectly fine, as that's essentially what Stablehand itself is: a collection of the best original stuff from my fan works, plus some random other stuff, some cool symbols and paintings, and some literary devices.

Well, that was sure a long post. Anyway, tell me what you think of this!

Yesterday and today (because I started late in the day) I resubmitted a couple of my Stablehand pictures.

Why? Because deviantART's submission page was being stupid and wouldn't let me just change the files on the other ones since I wanted to swap the exported images out for my original xcfs. (My rationale was that if my story is released under the BY-SA and I want you to use and edit my images, it would be better to upload the raw layered version as well as the flattened version with a huge "watermark" that's actually just my signature on it.)

So if some of my recent submissions look familiar, that's why. If you have Gimp, you could try downloading them and opening them up if you want to look at all the layers.

As of today I'm not going to write ANYTHING more on this dA journal. Everything is going on my tumblr or on Sangkara! I feel like the former makes stuff I post more accessible to the public and more "shareable", and the latter gives much better formatting options than I'd get here. So I'm not using this any more.

I'm still going to post pictures in my gallery, of course! It's just this journal I'm not using.

Anyway, see you there!