Mr. Son vs Youtube

My comment:
Look I'd LIKE to finish my projects but the ADHD is still kicking my butt.
I'm finally making some solid progress on a comic with my new meds, though.

My comment:
I bought some Doritos on my last grocery trip because they were deeply discounted in some store sale... but they haven't been a regular part of my groceries for years, even though I do enjoy them.

They probably will never be a regular part of my groceries ever again, even if the price goes down permanently.
Just another occasional treat I buy when I'm craving them

My diet has been changing a lot since I got on ADHD medication and it's been much easier to summon up the energy and focus to cook, which gets more vitamins into me, which gives me even more energy and focus.
I don't NEED those quick no-prep calories the way I used to.
And if I'm gonna have cheese and MSG now, I can have them with my broccoli pasta and also get a lot of nutrition into me.

My comment:
This guy has absolutely no concept of art as play or community building.
Do I think artists should grow and get more skillful over time? Yes.
But FFS, getting on the level of the old masters isn't everyone's fricking GOAL.
"Oh they just want praise with no cricitism" -- showing art that's clearly meant to build social bonds between queer people or fan communities.
"They refuse to develop their skill" -- showing art clearly just meant to have some fun playing with color or someone's pet OC.

"Why WHY do they keep sharing art that I think is bad? It must be because they're so delusional they don't know or can't admit it's bad."
(taking him by the shoulders)
Or. Maybe. Some people. Have DIFFERENT GOALS THAN YOU.

My comment:
See, I reject the assertion at the ending, that these things are "pretentious". To me pretentiousness requires a layer of artifice. You're pretending to something. If you genuinely care about these artsy tricks and analysis, it might be a bit of wankery, but it's not pretentious.

My comment:
Pausing in the first few minutes to say:
YES. Frickin' finally, a take down of the Hero's Journey that I might be able to share with people to explain why it bothers me.
I'd been stuck with my own experiences and feelings about which, which are not fully coherant.
I always knew it couldn't explain EVERY story, but I kind of accepted at first that well, maybe it just explains MOST stories and the outliers are outliers?
But the more I saw people using it as an actual analysis tool for the stories I liked, the more it fell apart.

I was watching some video, years back, where someone was going something like, "this is a perfect example of how you can remove pieces of the Hero's Journey to make a stronger core narrative while still retaining the core vitality of the Hero's Journey."
And I found myself thinking... at what point in hacking away at the supposed Hero's Journey do you admit that it's not a Hero's Journey story any more? That it's something else? How far before you let go of the framework you're trying to jam the story into? When will you admit it doesn't fit right?

And more recently I've been finding myself watching writing advice videos in case there's something interesting or useful to me for my current project... only to run into the problem that a lot of things people treat as universal just... don't apply to the sort of stories I want to tell?
Advice on handling your villain? There's no villain character in my story. The closest to a villain we have exists off screen and we only know them by their effects on one of the main characters. And they get taken down off-screen through no action of our main characters either. They're a side note to the real story.
Advice on giving the character strong wants to help the reader "emphasize" with them? Neither character has strong wants at the start of the story. One because he's a bland everyman who's been putting off his desires because he keeps thinking he isn't prepared enough for them yet, and the other because they've been horrifically traumatized into not expressing their personality. The arc of the story is actually centered on character two learning to feel safe enough TO want things?

Anyway.
I'll actually watch the video now. XD

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...oh no manosphere stuff.

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Oh right the refusal of the call. Another point my current project immediately "fails" on. Because my main guy #1, Ren, at no point tries to refuse "the call" (his new responsibility) in this story. Something shocking and unexpected gets dumped into his lap, and while he gets mad and scolds the person who did it, he never turns it down. That's one of his core defining character traits, that he accepts this burden immediately and without hesitation.

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"Being stuck in a state of arrested development and having to make the active choice to move on, improve, and bring something back to your society."
Oh damn it Ren's arc DOES fit that, ahaha. XD

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I really need to find that website once that explained a Japanese four-beat storytelling structure.
It went something like
A. The first premise
B. The second, seemingly unrelated premise.
C. The information that ties them together.
D. The twist/perspective shift.

My comment:
Once again I watch writing advice and realize the kinds of stories I write just don't fit proper storytelling formula.
But I guess I could try to summarize my current story with:
Guy wants to treat his new girlfriend right and make her happy, but what's getting in the way is that she came to him pre-traumatized. Also she's not actually a girl but that's not under "obstacle" that's closer to "changing objectives". :p

My comment:
I have a world I play around with together with a friend. Not something to publish a book for, just a "for fun" world for play.
The magic levels are so high there that in any random village there's going to be a few peasants that have a "cantrip" or two, even if it's only the magelight spell that lets you place a ball of light somewhere that feeds off ambient magic to stay lit. Though having permanent accessible light without electricity is already world-changing enough on its own.
While magic is highly accessible on a low level, the more study you put in, the more you can get out of it.
But this world is highly... scattered. There's no major empires. No industrialization or mass transit options. There's certainly no centralized schools, so you do mostly learn things through parents or guilds or paying a tutor. And when it comes to learning from more powerful mages, it's mostly going to be than last one. If you want to learn magic from somewhere else, you have to convince them it's worth their while. And the more skilled they are, the more exclusive they're likely to be about it, and the more likely they are to have other things to do with their time.

The main character I play with is a woman lucky enough to learn her magic from an eccentric scholar-type mage who liked to take in orphans and finance caring for them by charging richer people to learn magic. She was abandoned at his home by her mother, and learned magic growing up on his lands. Her teacher's methods were mostly to do his own studies and occasionally come out to give study work to his paid students plus any of the orphans who were trying to learn magic. More and harder work the more potential he thought they had.
It's a very informal and unstructured method, but it did result in quite a few mid and upper tier mages for that world. Even if some of them come out of it resenting their grumpy and unsocial teacher and the way he made them rewrite that essay comparing the mana flows of Osward's Magic Circle under full moon light vs noontime sun THREE TIMES because their testing wasn't 'rigorous' enough and they flubbed some of the math.
Also sometimes he'd host an educational lecture and boy it sure did seem like a bunch of those were just excuses to rant about how stupid his other scholar friends/penpals were for believing THAT ridiculous theory when clearly THIS is what explains things properly.

Playing around with different ideas in how education works in fantasy worlds is honestly so much fun and people who just throw a school setting together without thinking about it are missing out.

ETA:
Man I forgot to even bring up the character's sister, who's a magical healer AND a trained doctor, because healing is so much more effective when you know how the body works. CharA technically can use healing magic too, but almost never does except for very minor injuries because she doesn't have that training and doesn't want to mess herself up. Botched healing can grow bones wrong, cause cancer, along with numerous other major issues. Better to stick to the easy things and leave serious problems for the professionals. And she has personal reasons to avoid learning medical magic more seriously. Which would be more reasonable if she didn't travel alone in the wilderness and fight monsters for years of her life.

My comment:
Dang it. I guess the sports guy in the comic I'm writing is gonna have opinions on curling, now.

My comment:
Huh. Usually advice about finishing projects keeps falling back on "making it a habit". Which doesn't fricking work for me and my ADHD. The habit-forming part of my brain just doesn't work. Even feeding myself -- something I do 2-4 times a day, hasn't become habitual for me, and I have to actively remind myself and force myself to do it.
But this? I'm glad I watched this because I think I could actually implement a slightly modified version of this system for my workload.
I have a comic I'm coming up on and soon I'll be moving from the plot-writing stage to the script writing stage, and after that starting to draw more than just practice... so this advice came in time for me to really chew on it and wrap my head around exactly what I want to do before I start.
So thank you!

My comment:
I think a raccoon would be a neat pet in like, a fanciful way. I don't actually want one. I don't even want a dog. I don't have the energy or patience to handle either. I'll stick with cats. I'm used to them, I grew up with six of the blighters, I know how to read and handle them. We have a better matching energy.