Both my day job and my night job have tapped out for the season, giving me an absurd amount of free time to get things squared away. This is both a good thing and bad: good because it now seems much more possible to do Feast Master and Bloodspring as well as make all the preparations for our move, but bad because we'll be working on a much tighter budget than planned.

But things will work out. Life has a way of pointing me in the right direction, even if it's a rugged and uncomfortable walk along the way.

Status report!

All the voice work for Feast Master is done and I'm a decent way into the animation. I'm procrastinating the drawing of the unicorn by writing this journal. I fail at drawing realistic animals, especially equines. And birds. And dogs, cats, and cows. And -- well, pretty much anything that's modeled after something that actually exists. Sometimes I can do a snake fairly well. Oddly enough, for all their complexity, I have an easier time with arthropods.

As for Bloodspring, it seems as if there are only two matches where there's much of any question about who won. The others were all default or near-default wins, or horribly imbalanced skill levels. The only ones that I perceive to be somewhat difficult judgments were between / and /myself. My opponent did a fairly good job of doing what she does and she handled Ensis/Dolt surprisingly well (Dolt didn't seem quite dunce-y enough, but that's a minor nitpick). I think my plot and overall whatchamacallit were a bit stronger than hers, but even so I feel as though I performed sub-optimally and that she still stands a decent chance. As for the Khaiya-Aileen match, I really cannot say, but Aileen's made more sense to me so I'm going with that one.

Since I was able to make picks for Round 3 with a modicum of confidence, I took a moment to figure out what I would do against certain opponents. In the end I decided that, for story purposes, I would really like to be matched against (in ascending order) ~Novalyyn's Nyx Chaser, *Ransak-the-Reject's Thunder, =zombieme's Throes, or *Skyserpent's Rose. I can devise some really interesting plots for these; but Aileen's character's innate dorkiness, ~PrideAlchemist7's character parade, and *SeveruSeprentine's character's aloofness would be much harder to work with.

Hopefully I don't get another match like this one. I mean no offense to Usagi and her characters -- they're great in their own right, and I mean that sincerely -- but they just don't fit all that well into Ensis's setup. Without her rival Rose (not the same as Skyserpent's Rose) in the picture I couldn't even think of a decent reason he would get involved with her in any way, physical conflict or otherwise. He would have perceived her as utterly inconsequential, and only a contrived plot like a golem stomping in at a (in?)convenient time would have given them good reason to interact at all. (OH GOD no offense to all of you who used a golem-stomping plot device -- but you have to admit it's pretty predictable.)

I can make it work, as I have with similar encounters in the RP version of Ensis, but I always find myself dissatisfied with the results. Yet I do have a 4/7 chance of getting an opponent that I can actually story with without forcing it or interfering with my Big Overarching Plot^TM. That's better than fair odds.

But with my luck....

And hey -- what's with so many people breaking the rules with the golems? They're not supposed to be helpful. Ever. It says it right there in the reference: hostile, aloof or watchful, but never helpful. They don't communicate, they don't give joyrides to kids, they don't cheer people on. Hundreds or thousands of years' worth of observed behavior doesn't have such a widespread change so suddenly, unless the shady dealings going on in the caverns are much more benevolent than everyone's trying to imply. The Bloodspring is a happy place full of rainbow-flavored lollipops where your dream faeries pop out of your head to scratch that hard-to-reach itch on your back! That's the big secret, of course!

Time to quit babbling and draw the stupid blanking unicorn.

Dammit.