BogusRed's Sketchblog

Random musings from the PaperDemon admin.

I haven't drawn too much of anything for the past 12 months. I've been in a drawing drought of sorts. Mostly because my art classes have been making me bitter about drawing.

I did draw today though. I felt the urge to draw today and I sat down and actually drew for about an hour or so. I've been planning to start work on a new website design template for PaperDemon.com. I like the current one but I like to keep things fresh. Every 6 to 12 months I redo the template. I also feel I need to change things around because the site is increasing in complexity so I feel it is necessary to change around the main navigation and also the side navigation in the members area. Below is a sketch that I did that I think I will base the next round of sketches on.

[sketch removed]

Boy, this blog sure isn't getting the love it deserves. I'll try and change that this year.

For those interested, there's a new piano arrangement available in the Music section called Magi Homeland. Be sure to check it out. I'll have more music posted soon within the coming weeks.

So at work we do these things called Snippets every week. It's just basically a list you email out on Mondays showing what you accomplished last week and what's on your plate for this week. I've kind of taken that and made a slight improvement on it. I call them Active Snippets. It's just a web page I maintain that shows what I'm currently working on, what projects are on hold, upcoming projects, and then an archive showing what tasks/projects I've finished organized by the week they were completed. You could sort of think of it as an organized To Do list. I've found this list to be very helpful to me. I tend to forget a lot of stuff and keeping up an Active Snippets page really helps me to stay organized. It's also very rewarding when I finish a task and move it down to the Completed Tasks section.

I like doing these active snippets so much that now I maintain a personal active snippets page for keeping track of all of my personal projects such as PaperDemon.com, Zarbon's Masterpiece Theater, and Surviving Together. I'm actually getting stuff done. It makes me feel really good that I'm able to maintain progress on my projects while still working a full time job.

Oh so I guess you may not know this yet but I'm working a second internship full time at the same place I worked during the summer. And I convert to a permanent employee as soon as I have my degree, which will be sometime in May. It's pretty sweet to have a job lined up for you right after finishing college.

But back to the snippets thing, I've tried so many different types of strategies to keep track of my work. I've tried planning things out on a calendar. That didn't work because I didn't like being held to a set schedule. I'd rather work on the projects I feel like working on when I want to. With the snippets thing, I can work on whatever I want to from my To Do list. I still have the flexibility to work with my moods but still get things done. I think this strategy will be the one that sticks.

Another reason that its hard to stick with one strategy is that the novelty of it wares off after a while. But I've found that if I spend a little time making whatever planner I'm using look cool or pretty then I'm more likely to stick with it. For a while in high school I was making these weekly calendar things that had anime pictures watermarked on them and had boxes I could write in for each subject and each day of the week for keeping track of homework assignments. It stuck for a while. Maybe a couple months, which is longer than most things I try. With the active snippets, since it's a web page I can use some nifty CSS to pretty up the page a bit and add graphics if I want.

I've started working on Surviving Together again. LavenderGoddessV has just finished posting a revamped version of part one of this awesome fan-fiction trilogy. I will be working from this new version to create my animated rendition of it. This means I'm back to square one on a lot of the project but that's ok. I'm totally fine with starting over. I love the new version much better anyway. So I'm working on adapting the fanfiction to a screen play. I've already completed chapter 1, which wasn't too hard. But other chapters will be more of a challenge because there are parts where the characters are describing key events in the past tense which means I'll need to write dialog and other stuff to make all the events happen in present time.

I've finally gotten around to programming one of those images with numbers thingies that prevents spam. I'll implement it soon on my blog so that I can reopen the comments feature. Look for that in the coming weeks.

Anyway, there's your update for what's going on in the life of BogusRed.

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