Artistic Frustration

Hello again everyone. My main reason for doing this post is to just kind of let everyone know how I'm doing. I'm also doing this because there's not a whole lot on T.V. at the moment besides Mysteries at the Museum. Though that is an interesting show. Anyway, it's been a fairly peaceful Friday. My dad befriended that cat who snagged that bird off our bird feeder the other evening. He's now calling the cat Ralph. For those of you wondering why Ralph, it's a small reference to an episode of M*A*S*H.

So as the title of this post suggests, I've been suffering from some frustration with my artistic endeavors. In this instance, I'm not talking about my fan fiction projects. Those are going pretty well at the moment. Well, my series of GX fanfics is going well. Some of my other projects, not so much. But I'm not going to go into all that right now. My frustration at the moment lies with creating wallpapers. I'm sure many of you reading have noticed that I haven't produced any new wallpapers for a while. The problem isn't really that I haven't been able to come up with any new ideas. It's that I've been unable to find any scans or renders to make those ideas work.

For instance, I have this one idea for an SAO wallpaper that I'd really like to do, but in all the times I've scouted Minitokyo I haven't found a single scan that would work. And it's kind of gotten to the point where I now log in there at least once or twice a day on the slim chance that I might find something, and every time I've been met with disappointment. I've even thought about asking an artist here on TheO to do a drawing that I could use for the wallpaper, but I don't know who I could ask. Plus my standards for such a drawing would be very high, and I'm not really even sure exactly what I want for it.

So it seems like I've kind of hit a dead end, wallpaper-wise. And a big reason for that seems to be that I've run out of base materials. I'm actually half convinced that one of the big reasons wallpaper submissions have gone down so much here on TheO is because there are no longer really any good scans or renders that can be used out there. Minitokyo's more or less the only reliable source for such images, and lately it just seems like the quality of scans they get in has kind of slipped. It's like eighty-five percent of the scans they get are of sexy anime ladies in skimpy outfits.

In other news (for those who are even interested in Yu-Gi-Oh!), I had kind of a letdown the other day when I checked the Yu-Gi-Oh! Wiki. I checked to see if the Clash of Rebellions booster set had been released in Korea so I could see what the five exclusive cards added to that release were, hoping that there would be another monster among those cards based on a Cthulhu Mythos deity. The five Korean exclusive cards in Clash of Rebellions had been revealed, but not a single one of them was a new Lovecraftian card. Instead it was an entire small archetype of Trap Monsters based on prehistoric sea creatures and a related Xyz Monster that acts as sort of the boss monster for the archetype. So right now, it's kind of looking like that series of Cthulhu Mythos cards has come to an end, and I was really hoping that there'd be a card based on Cthulhu himself. What really adds insult to injury is that this really screws up a future ZEXAL fanfic I was going to do that had such a card based on Cthulhu at the center of the plot. I mean I suppose I could make up such a card, but for all I know a real Cthulhu card will come out in a future booster set and I'll end up feeling kind of stupid for making one up. I know, I'm kind of weird.

Other than all that though, I've been doing pretty well. I am going to be starting another online class next week, and it's going to be a big one. So I am a bit nervous about that. Besides that and much of the stuff I just went through in this post, I've been doing okay. Until next time.

End