Em Void 🏳️‍⚧️

Cut together a little reel of my animation learning progress in 2025. I aim to have a lot more and better stuff coming soon. Too much for a 2026 reel, I hope.

Finished about half the scoring for the cartoon. Which is pretty good considering I had to dig all my music equipment out from under the pile and update all my software and stuff. I can finish tomorrow and should be able to post the finished project on Thursday.

I think it's funny that my phone calculator is so inferior to my Ti-89 or even this little solar powered casio.

FINALLY getting the cartoon scored after like a week of stupid interruptions and pointless problems. I need this out by Thursday or it will have to wait until next year, since it is seasonal.

Another day, another entitled boomer who shouldn't be driving cussing at me because they almost hit me.

Nooo... I'm old enough now that there is a higher probability my new kitty will outlive me. I mean, he would have to be an exceptionally long lived cat, statistically speaking. But It's in the window now.

So is this like a thing with my generation now? People get caught in a mistake, then immediately UNO reverse it and try to gaslight you about it?

One thing that sucks about getting older is that the number of people you've lost just grows and grows. Some have died, some disappeared. Most gone for longer than you knew them.

Damn so I realize that I'm probably just not skilled, but my first shots with the new camera are ... good? I keep noodling the post processing and, except for the really dark shots, the corrections all lose something. It's like my mistakes are awesome.

Yeah I think this idea that I've been strugglng to be productive in an unproductive system really hits on the eerie feeling I have had for so long. Like I have all these mental problems from the tech rug pool. I went into physics to learn to invent a lightsaber. Was told to add GUI buttons. Fuck.

Just looking at the way things used to be done. And I'm not really saying we should make things less efficient, but damn, it feels like everybody used to try harder and care more. Everything is too easy so it makes everything so hard. What can young people aspire to do nowadays?

Never realized how much work went into printing newspapers, and comic strips specifically. Never realized how much of our tech evolved from photography and adjacent processes.

Got a fancy new camera (fancy old camera) and I'm learning photopicturing. Gonna try to be a superhero with it. I got a new lens from the 80s too. It has nostalgia feelings in the way it shapes the light.

A good deal of our problems stem from the fact that we are still acting like we can make a failed system work. Our things, they don't function any longer.

Ever think about how it's possible to build other types of computers than the ones upon which we piled society?

I still wanna make a survival horror golf, stealth golf, or golf racing game. Probably all three. There probably already are forty of them, and there can be more. But I would want somebody else to do all the work on this one.

Doing literally everything I can to procrastinate on writing the music for my cartoon. This is all because they kicked me out of that band when I was 19.

I still think one of the sweetest moments in my life was sitting on the back steps by the yard with my cat Sid. It was near the very end of high school. It was nice out, the sun was pleasant and Sid sat chewing the blades of grass. I had my whole life ahead of me. Everything was okay.

Hey what if instead of youtube i just host my toons on my site and make a zine with a QR code and blanket the city with copies? Just bypass all this corporate media bullshit entirely.

I find that I am really happy when I am animating, but quickly become depressed and hopeless when trying to share online. Not so much here on bsky but definitely other socials. I just wanna be a part of a fun weird indie animation festival in a theater or park.

I mean, if you don't have to pay property taxes, your city rots out from the inside, schools shut down, and nobody wants to live there. Your neighborhood becomes a wasteland and your property value plummets, locking you into a crumbling ruin.

I didn't know this until today but apparently most other mammals have a penis bone. Somehow that was left out of the skeletal anatomy studies. This information accompanied a lot of other mammalian reproduction information I'd almost rather not know.

My consciousness seems distinct from my will. It's as though my will operates on its own, and my consciousness is merely observing. What if consciousness is the sensation of memory of physical form through time at the moment of death? Like a scan. What if we cater too much to own consciousness?

Digital artists: What paint program do you prefer? I need to learn, and I want to optimize my time with a program. (Cartoon backgrounds and concept art mostly)

I sometimes think I am doing all this art and animation for one solitary weirdo who needs to see that creation exists outside the mainstream.

I need a place where I can create with other artists, animators, and storytellers. A physical place. Because my brain knows that websites are just screens. The energy is so low in digital spaces.

#inktober day whatever. "Contraption" "...and the humans were thus destroyed ... and their destroyers became our playthings ..." See, cuz the future cat is hunting the little ai bots and gadgets that extincted the persons.

Well. '27 is on the horizon. I need a plan to start actually making some kind of indie animation play in the next year. It seems like youtube and hope are really my only path here.

I can't tell if I spent way too much time making that short cartoon or if I did admirably. And I stared at it so much I can no longer tell whether it sucks or even if it was a funny joke at all.

There's so much more to create. But has our system exhausted every earnest innovation it is willing to pursue? Seems like you can grind forever on scams in this world.

I think my brain needs to do a different type work in the spring/summer vs fall/winter. Art is so much easier in the fall.

Oh hey! I just realized today is the third anniversary of my egg crack event. I'm 3. 🏳️‍⚧️

I should be able to finsh the last five shots in the cartoon today and move onto scoring it. I have the main chords, jingles I plan on using. Just need to record stems and pull it all into AE and premiere for post and rendering. And sign it. And color correct. And regret not fixing backgrounds.

You know when you think about it, mammals are terrifying.

I know I'm talking about my cartoon too much for such a small project. But see, I need to finish it so I can learn to trust myself. I can only build confidence by successfully finishing things.

Wow I feel terrible today. Very listless and really dispassionate about art. Still managed to clean up a few frames and take baby steps on the next cartoon.

I really want to find all the weird indie animation people in Austin. We need to start having lil' weird film screenings and animation parties. I feel too many people are too online.

Rough day. I managed to complete two more shots in this silly cartoon that I am talking about too much. I woke up in the middle of the night twice from nightmares. In one, my cats were all in Jurassic Park and I had to get them away from cartoon dinosaurs. Silly, but still terrifying.

I think it's a product of our times: despite the fact that I am super excited about continuing to learn animation and I am getting better, I can't seem to bring myself to be optimistic. It feels like cause and effect are somehow decoupled so I can't feel like the effort is meaningful.

Maybe I should start doing lil comics again?