THE BIG THREE-OOOOOOOOO 🎉

Still so much to do today. ^^;;; Making lots of food, and then some games and prizes for the guests. One of the games is Persona or Not, in which I throw down 20 characters and the guests multiple-choice guess what their name is, say if they‘re a persona character of mine or not, and describing who they are. Or give me a random HC of who they are if they don’t know. XD Points for correct answers; bonus points if you draw them (quality irrelevant) because what better birthday gift for a writer/artist than FAN ART XP

Now time to frantically prepare, since I still have several hours before things get bumpin. If only my body wasn’t trying its best to make me feel as 30 as possible aaaaaaaaaaugh ^^;;;;;;

Got myself sorted into Team Vampire~ 🦇

Here is my profile:  https://artfight.net/~TheLadyAnatola

And here is my tag here on Toyhouse for all my characters on ArtFight: https://toyhou.se/TheLadyAnatola/characters/tagged:AF

I’ve been in a severe art block all this year and have only drawn pencil sketches so far and no finished, inked and colored art yet. TT_TT I’m way behind on attempting to fill out a yearly art summary with all 12 picture slots, so hopefully this event will break me out of that. We’ll seeeeeee come attack me so I’m motivated to revenge yooooooo

Another annual reminder that even I am affected by the passage of time. XP 

No going out for pasta dinner dressed up fancy this time. This year it’s a dinner party at the house where I pretend to be more Filipino than I normally am. Got my mom’s chicken recipe that I hope I don’t burn while deep frying this time, lumpia that I’ve never made before, sticky rice, and some ube cookies are incredibly thicc and a deep purple color. They look like alien cookies, or like they’re from a cartoon or something. XD

Still got so much to prep and clean before the guests arrive. Why did I give myself so much work for my birthday? ^^;

Further cementing my "Eternally drowning in OCs" tagline by adding more water to drown in. XD Not like most people can actually see all of them since the unfinished ones aren't public, so this is mostly a hole of my own to dig and remain trapped in. Now I have even more to work on, and I'll probably focus on both filling out profile information and trying to draw character references so that more of these dorks darlings can be made public. ^^; On the bright side, I'm more than halfway through my list of characters to make profiles for, with only about 300 more to go. Then I'll finally be caught up and will only have truly new characters from then onward, which has never seemed like a possibility before. 

HERE'S A HISTORY LESSON ON MY CHARACTER PROFILING JOURNEY THAT NO ONE ASKED FOR :D

I've been accumulating these losers lovelies since 2001 and started documenting them by hand in 2005 or 2006. By the end of high school in 2012, I had my profiles in 5 or 6 notebooks that I carried with me to school EVERY DAY because I was, and still am, a fool like that. In 2013 or 2014 or so, I started putting them up on Charahub and actually had all of them uploaded at one point, even if most of them were placeholder profiles for me to fill out later. In 2015, my sister introduced me to Toyhouse, so I started the slow process of moving everyone over here since the customization here is a lot nicer than what Charahub had to offer. And then the shutdown of Charahub three years ago forced me to migrate anyone who had a slightly filled in profile over here within a month. At the time of the shutdown, I had 801 profiles on my multiple Charahub accounts, and it took me nearly 20 hours total over the course of 5 sittings to move everything. ^^; Since then, I've bumped up the count on my Secret Character Masterlist to just over 1000. I have a problem. XP

Well, back to toiling for me. And to think in my very first bulletin nearly 7 years ago, I celebrated having 100 characters uploaded. Guess I'm averaging 100 characters a year. ^^; If only I had this kind of energy to actually write them in their stories, but that's a different beast to tackle. 

Another project I've wanted to do for years but have never known how to approach it is actually creating some kind of guide to my main story universe, detailing the history of the various worlds, the magic/rifting system, all the various deities and races/species of beings, and all that other jazz. It makes sense to me just because I've been in my own head for so many years, but explaining it to other people is kind of a challenge. XD I guess that can be my next big seemingly-unachievable goal for me to work on if I ever finish this one. We'll see how that goes.

Tl;dr I have a lot of characters wheeee

Actually picked my team this year instead of letting it be random. It’s Team Wither for me~ 🍄

Here is my profile:  https://artfight.net/~TheLadyAnatola

And here is my tag here on Toyhouse for all my characters on ArtFight: https://toyhou.se/TheLadyAnatola/characters/tagged:AF

Let’s goooooooooo

Wooooo time to be OLDDDDDDDDD XP

I’m honestly baffled this may be the best weather I’ve ever had for a birthday since I’ve lived here. My birthdays are basically always bitterly cold and snowy, and today was LOVELY ☀ I don’t remember the last time I had a birthday where I only needed a light jacket. XD

A beautiful day for pasta~ 🍝

Well, I did it. My new folder system is now in place. It's all organized by what galaxy/realm the stories take place in, so it's a little more representative of how my large story universe is laid out as a whole rather than putting things into arbitrary "Primary/Side/Stand-Alone story" categories. The majority of the stories are located in The Eternity, but I'm sure the other ones will fill out over time as well once I slowly chug my way over to those stories folders/characters that I haven't uploaded yet.

I feel like this will make more sense in the long run and will probably be the permanent folder system I use, as far as I know now. There's still a lot of non-public folders floating around, so maybe it won't seem too different to most viewers, but I suppose a few things have been shuffled around. 

Some day I would like to make thumbnail images for all the folders to make it a little easier to see what the theme/aesthetic of the story might be to general viewers, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Mostly because I don't know how to make those kind of graphics, nor do I have much interest in doing so, and it'll probably be an expensive endeavor to commission thumbnails for so many folders. ^^; I guess we'll see what happens down the road. If anyone actually does commissions for things like titles or little logos like that, you're free to let me know and I may consider it in the future.

But for now, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay organizationnnnnnnn

Picked my team at random, as usual, and I’m on team Steampunk! So guess I’ll be creeping around on you Cyberpunk folks and accosting you with drawings. :P

Here is my profile:  https://artfight.net/~TheLadyAnatola

And here is my tag here on Toyhouse for all my characters on ArtFight, since it’s already laggy over there: https://toyhou.se/TheLadyAnatola/characters/tagged:AF

Game ooooooooooon~

Another year means another day of fancy clothes, cold weather, and pasta. Last year was normal and just before things got all nonsensical, but this year is the first of not getting to go out with friendos to dinner. I did still get to go out with my dad at least (and it was totally empty at the restaurant because of the weather and the Super Bowl, yessssss), and I had a lovely video chat party with friendos instead~ 

And that’s about it for my annual update of age, I guess. XD As you were.

Another year, another opportunity to make a big To-Do list that I never actually finish. At least I’m consistent though. XP

I think my main goals this year in terms of creative projects will be: a) work on references/avatars, b) fill out more incomplete profiles, and c) add new profiles for characters I haven’t added yet. Writing profiles has always been easier than drawing up new art, but I’m gonna try my best to do a little better at drawing regularly this year, if only so my art summary doesn’t end up as scrounged-up as 2020’s did. ^^;

ALSO, some of you may or may not have noticed that a large handful of my characters have disappeared. They are on authorized only at the moment until I can draw them some new art to use as avatars. Long story short, I started feeling down about my art since I noticed a trend of people only looking at characters of mine that have digital art (meaning not drawn by me) as their avatars. Even characters with dollmaker/picrew avatars got looked at more often than characters with my art as an avatar. Which of course got me pondering if my art isn’t good enough for people to bother looking at my characters... BUT instead of continuing to feel bad about it, I just hid all of my characters that don’t have avatars drawn by me. SO NOW YOU HAVE TO LOOK THROUGH MY DUMPY ART, THERE’S NO DIGITAL ART TO SAVE YOU NOW AHAHAHAHAHA ahem, so yeah. In case any of you were wondering where a character of mine has gone, that’s what happened.

So that’s what I’ll be trying to accomplish this year, and I’ll try to prioritize my hidden characters over drawing ones who have never been public to start with. And as always, here is my unreasonably long To-Draw list that I will never actually complete. If you see a character on here that you would like to be public again sooner than later, let me know, and I can aim to work on them first.