Progress Report - January 16, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Look at that, I actually remembered to make a weekly report!

I wish I had better news to report. As you probably noticed, the January 14 ideal date for the Claire/Jill video has come and gone.

The short and simple answer for that is that I've been in a bit of a slump the past few weeks. I made a tweet thread about it the other day. I feel like I'm slowly working my way out of it, but right now I feel like the biggest thing I need is a kickstart - something really exciting, to get me in the mood to deal with the rigmarole that is the Claire/Jill project.

I think that kickstart is Primordium, which I also think is at least partly responsible for the slump. I can't overstate just how excited I am for the series as a whole, and for episode 1 in specific. I mean, we put together the entire video in two days. You don't do that for a project you don't care about.

And so I think it's the fact that I've been having to sit on my hands for the past two weeks that's really cramping my style. We were ready to get the voices installed, get the video into post-production, two weeks ago. But the turn of the new year saw half the team involved get sick - Innie had a nasty chest cold immediately followed by a sinus infection she's only now getting over; Milly had her own upper respiratory infection (URI) and is now dealing with COVID ripping through her household; and even my subtitler, DancesWithWolves, was down with the sickness (woh ah ah ah ah) and only recently got over it.

Which is why I shifted gears over to working on the Primordium title sequence, where we got 14 animations done in a single session. Again, you don't do something like that unless you're really impassioned. That's why I think, once Primordium gets its wheels out of the mud, it'll drag my mojo out of the muck with it.

After thinking on a bit earlier, I decided to redirect that impatient energy into the storyboards for future episodes. Some time ago I wrote Episode 2, though I don't remember if I shared that storyboard. Regardless, I am sharing it now - it is attached at the bottom of this post.

Earlier today, I finished the storyboard for Episode 3 - which is where today's post image comes from. It runs longer than I'd like - I am targeting 8 minutes for episodes, and Episode 3 clocks in at a hair over 10.5 minutes in the storyboard. And that's after 3 revisions to cut as much fat as I could without compromising my goals for it. But, at the end of the day, I don't think people will complain about an additional 2.5 minutes of Triss getting her face fucked. 🤪

I've already had the general thesis for Episode 4 planned out. And with Episode 3 completed, I now know exactly how I want to start it - much like how the completion of Episode 2 elucidated the perfect starting point for Episode 3.

I have also been working on other things, while I bide my time and hunt down the drive to finish Claire/Jill. Most notably, I've been working on Raven and Starfire, for a project I've had in mind for probably ten years or so now. I also put together Nataly, the third Parawhore and the camerawoman documenting Miya's and tammy's antics. I've been working on a pipeline for automating model releases too, where I am currently building my own binary viewer to help me with writing code to parse model files and fetch all of their required assets. 

Perhaps most interestingly to you all, I've also been working on the Super Secret Project that I have alluded to in the past, the spiritual successor to the Hiveship / Phazon sexology. Indeed, I think I'm comfortable enough to share a bit more about it. I'm going to be skimp on the details still, as we're still early days.

Some time back, I teased you all with Artemis, who is the successor of a specific blue-suit-clad bounty hunter of projects yore, whom I can no longer use due to particular legal complications. I've been holding my cards close to the chest, however, until I was ready to tease her companion. And I think I am ready to do just that.

Everyone, please give a warm welcome to Medusa:

The technocrat to Artemis' bounty-hunting antics, she is the brains to her partner's beauty, the stealth to her other's strength, the watcher to her counter's whore. The relationship that Artemis and Medusa share is beyond simple labels, with Artemis being extremely protective of Medusa while being as promiscuous as you all know her sassy previous incarnation to be.

But that's all the better, as far as Medusa - whom Artemis playfully refers to as "her little cuck-cake" - is concerned.

It's hard to overstate just how much Medusa enjoys watching her significant other get all her holes reamed by thick alien dick. She may even prefer it to having Artemis all to herself - though it's a tough call to make, given the trip she gets as she has the strong and infallible bounty hunter melt into a submissive puddle beneath her novelty-shop riding birch. She knows that Artemis plays up her amateurish attempts at domineering - it's just not Medusa's personality - but damn if the commitment and the effort doesn't get her nerdy heart pumping.

That's just a brief glimpse into Medusa's character (and a briefer one into Artemis'). The story itself that these two are central to is titled simply Corsair, in reference to their legally-ambiguous career of riding along the periphery of human space, taking all sorts of odd jobs - mostly bounties, but at the end of the day bills need to be paid - from and against the myriad alien species who, by and large, have an ambivalent-at-best attitude toward the authoritarian Terran Hegemony.

The code-names of Artemis and Medusa come from their origins - they are the only surviving members of a short-lived and aborted private military experiment, Project Ascendant. Genetically engineered before birth, members of the project were each named after a different Greek deity, and engineered for a specific task. The Artemis were hunters, uniquely tailored for extraordinary stamina and endurance for tracking down foes and engaging in brutal guerilla ops in the field. The Medusa are living computers, with exceptional quick-wittedness and a strong affinity for pattern recognition and intellectually adapting to new environments.

The project was canceled due to a convergence of factors, the most dominant being that the Ascendants had personality quirks that were extremely dominant and deemed inconsolable in wartime conditions. Relevant to this discussion, the Artemis were extremely hypersexual, using their stamina and endurance to constantly steal away and have intense, passionate sex in the middle of operations. The Medusa were extremely prone to sensory overload and had immense social anxiety, making interfacing them with agents and operators a near-impossible task with an immense resource load.

The second biggest nail in the coffin of Project Ascendant was that, by the time the first batch of Ascendants were of age and training for feasibility analysis, the superior technology of Shells had not only become viable, but had entered the mainstream. The projects' investors didn't see the point in investing millions of dollars and 18 years of waiting into a single specially-engineered human with severe personality complications making them unruly to utilize for their intended purposes in war. It was much simpler to take a Shell off the shelf, swap out its chassis with armor plating, put a rifle in its hands, and have a skilled soldier remotely pilot that Shell through the dangerous fields of war from the safety of the forward operating base - and as soon as a soldier's Shell dropped, simply swap them over to another Shell and push in yet another of the never-ending waves of robotic bodies that the technology allowed.

But Shells are a discussion for a later time - a time when I discuss Conscious Code, the greater three-story universe that Corsair belongs to, more holistically.

For now, you'll have to be satisfied with just this little foray into this one story. 😉

And for now, you'll have to be satisfied with this Progress Report. Until next week, everyone!