Currently on my art: 2023 stats, a new year, World Collection 2023 releases

Hi everyone!

Happy new year! 2023 has finally come to an end together with the quarter. As usual, it’s time for statistics as well as other stuff.

It’s been a far more eventful half-quarter, to be honest. There’s been a lot happening – my master’s thesis, wrapping up work, COVID, my first major car accident, working on new releases as well a breakthrough with Navigator’s Glove. All of that, I’ll be discussing in addition to the statistics.

Let’s start with the releases. The 2023 World Collections are out – they actually have been for a couple of days now, but since the release was so close to this end-of-the-year post, I decided to postpone the announcement until now. I’ve also looked into the FFM 2023 and TM 2023 collections, and the former is in progress now.

As for work and my master’s thesis, I ended up concluding that since I’ve been playing tag with work, my thesis and burnout all autumn and winter and since my thesis has been the one suffering the most, it was for the best not to continue working after the end of the year. That will allow me to fully concentrate on the thesis alone and get it done during the spring semester. It’s about time I go full throttle and push that thing – and my master’s degree with it – beyond the finish line.

In addition to graduation, I have another motivator for my master’s thesis: Navigator’s Glove, which I recently finished editing and started reworking to add a huge plot bunny and, more importantly from my thesis’s point of view, background characters’ conversations. At this point, the two are complementing each other – my thesis gives more material for NG and NG both requires more data and checks it for typoes, as well as helps with processing the data on the background for the analysis phase. So, it’s a win-win even though I do find it hilarious that my most effective motivator for continuing data gathering is a fanfic.

Anyways, thanks to the reworking phase beginning and bringing considerable changes to the plot, a change of title for the project was in an order. After a good while of deliberation, clicking on random name generators and brainstorming, I settled on I’ll Draw The Stars (on your glove, on your ribbon, on my masks). Since I have planned writing that universe’s versions of the Persona 5 spin-offs, I’ve decided that the series name will be I’ll Draw The Stars, with the (on your glove, on your ribbon, on my masks) part differentiating between the series name and story name. And since the latter part is so rather long, I’ve decided to shorten the acronym for the story to IDTS (GRM). At least I think that it makes sense, since the G, R and M stand for the glove, the ribbon and the masks. Next year’s statistics will switch to reflect on the name change.

This half-quarter has not been all succcesses, though; in early November, I had my second COVID – fortunately a mild case, although the long-term effects, particularly fatigue, did try to bring me down. In early December, I ended up having my first major car accident as a driver, as my car fell into a ditch while driving in slippery conditions. Fortunately, my car and I got away without physical damage, although a tow truck was needed to pull my car out of the copious amounts of snow. The accident did leave me quite shaken, however, and I certainly lost most of my confidence as a driver. Needless to say, I dislike winter even more. I can’t wait for the snow and ice to melt so it’ll be safer to drive again.

So yeah, it sure has been quite a half-quarter (as well as a year), but I got through it nevertheless. Here’s to a better year 2024!

Now that all that’s to be told is done, let’s check out the Q4 and 2023 total stats!

Welp, it’s been mixed with my projects. TFW has gotten little progress while NG has gotten better. There isn’t really anything more to be said.

When looking at the whole picture, 2023 hasn’t been particularly good for my projects – between one discontinuation, two projects put on indefinite hiatus and TFW and NG experiencing more or less dramatic decreases in performance, it’s been a worse year than the previous one, although bringing NG into the statistics halfway through it did skew some numbers.

Now that the statistics are done, it’s time to look at the todos I put up on my previous end-of-the-year post. How does it look now that the year is over and it’s time to see how well I did? The ones struck through are done, while underlined are in progress. Bolded words are comments.

• Releasing the 2022 editions of my world collections where needed
• Studying
• Being more organized about chores This is a work in progress
• Finishing the FFM 2022 collection
• Making the Tribble Month collections
• Studying
• Actually finally starting to work out properly to get into better shape This is kind of a mixed bag; due to commuting on foot, I did get exercise, but otherwise not really… Half struck through for that.
• Bringing variety to my diet A half struck through mixed bag as well due to lunches on work days bringing more variety.
• Doing something about my pile of speedpaint footage
• Tackling my TBR pile
• Watching stuff on my TBW list
• Playing some games on my TBP list
• Finishing the game courses from last summer
• Finishing Jedova Wang’s reference
• Hoarding more data
• Finishing my Master’s degree
• Getting a job
• Learning Japanese
• Improving my backup system to use my NAS better Also a work in progress

Weeell… This could have been worse. Things did not according to plan this year and the state of my 2023 todo list reflects that. Better luck next year? Anyhow, here’s my todo list for the next year.

• Releasing the FFM 2023 collection
• Being more organized about chores
• Bringing more variety to my daily diet
• Getting Tribble Month 2020 collection done
• Finishing my master’s thesis and thus degree
• Hoarding data
• Get a job after graduating
• Properly starting to work out
• Doing something about my pile of speedpaint footage (even if it’s just scrapping some of it)
• Tackling my TBR pile
• Watching stuff on my TBW list
• Playing some games on my TBP list
• Working on Jedova Wang’s reference
• Learning Japanese
• Improving my backup system to use my NAS better (does require getting more space on it)
• Hoarding more data

These should do. Let’s hope I’ll have better luck with these over 2024! We’ll see a year from now how well I end up doing.

Now that that’s done with, let’s see how things are going with my projects, as per my project widget:

• The Fate’s Way: Chapter 83 is still in writing. I still need to redraw the regular Alyssa and also Alyssa’s friends and family and the other important people, like Matti, someday. I need to revise chapters.
• Off-DA projects: I made and released the 2023 World Collections. My master’s thesis progresses slowly; I’m almost 50% done with gathering data.
• Lyokostar: The second part of story 7 is still waiting for alphareading, but that’s a thing for once its indefinite hiatus ends. This story is in need of massive reworking, so it’s going to take a long time to finish when I do find the time and energy to resume it. References need to be done.
• A Wandering Aura: On indefinite hiatus.
• Navigator’s Glove: The fleshing out of what was known as the epilogue has been finished and divided into 12 chapters and the story’s editing has been finished. Now I’m reworking to add a considerably big plot bunny into the fic and lots of smaller plot bunnies in the form of the background characters I’ve been researching for my master’s thesis. In addition to this, I’ve renamed the story to I’ll Draw The Stars (on your glove, on your ribbon, on my masks), IDTS (GRM) for short. The new naming will take effect in my statistics in Q1 2024. I wrote 53860 words during Q4.
• Gaming: Habitica and Pokémon Masters EX keep on going. I’ve also played the remaster of Persona 5 Royal for my master’s thesis a bit and played through Mission in Snowdriftland over the December, as well as tried out Feather and Placid Plastic Duck Simulator.
• Other stuff: I have started working on the FFM 2023 collection, although it’s very much a work in progress. I have been reading fanfics mostly, although I did read through Bashō’s Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages. I still haven’t gotten started with IDW’s Transformers comics and at this point I might just postpone them to tackle some other stuff I want to read since the ones that I’m missing are no longer available digitally as far as I can see.
• Personal life: Mainly just work and master’s thesis stuff. Also COVID and a car accident, as detailed above.

That’s all for this post. Thanks for reading, take care and have a very happy new year!