#i wont be able to do any drawing or video editing on it unfortunately. just plain old operations.

[crabs-but-better]

my dad gave me a laptop with an optical drive aaaaaaaa

[ask-shakespearehigh]

Q&A post with the Mods!!!!

This is going to be a long one oh boy

How strict is the delineation of creative control vis-a-vis characters/plays between the mods? (@pedanticlecturer)

We generally have the plays split up along lines of “what we know”— we have a list at the very beginning of the blog. Sometimes we’ll draw the others’ characters (mostly me drawing some of Star’s…) but even then the final say on characterization is up to the “main” mod for that play — mod aster

what aster said -- mod star

What is your favorite play? What is your favorite character in terms of how they were written in the source material? (@pedanticlecturer)

I think my favorite play overall is Macbeth, just because I like the vibes (and the fact that I too could kill Macbeth), the fact that you don’t say it’s name in theatres, and the fact that it’s a play I did a full read through and analysis of in class. Favorite character? Puck from Midsummer. — mod aster

uhhhh,, hmm. ive always had a soft spot for midsummer since i saw it with aster esp bc of how fun the costumes were. of the comedies it has the largest potential to be the most visually pleasing bc of the concept of fairies,,,and im gay and dramatic so i love that. id die if i got to costume design for midsummer,,,or be in it,,,yeah. fav character. hmm. probably mercutio?? i recently saw a version of romeo and juliet where mercutio was played by a woman and oh my god it was amazing!!! not to mention mercutio’s portrayal in baz luhrmann's INCREDIBLE version of r n j!!! (I based my mercutio design on him) he just spends the entire time making dick jokes. love that. -- mod star

How do you answer asks so fast? I mean it's great but I'm impressed 😂 (Anon)

Personally, it’s a mix of: notifications on, quick drawing speed, and using the blog to avoid my class work — mod aster

aster is fast and (as you can see from all of my answers) im lazey -- mod star

Are there any elements/characters of the plays you're covering that you would have liked to work into this blog's plot, but couldn't due to the constraints of the setting or the synthetic nature of the blog? (@pedanticlecturer)

I wanted to make everyone gay but unfortunately due to plot constraints we have to have some hets but that wont stop me from making it lgbt as possible. -- mod star

I did want to make The Tempest more of a central play, but it just didn’t translate well. Similarly, other supernatural elements like the witches in Macbeth. This isn’t so much a constraint mentioned, but my own time/energy means that I want to show the Macbeth backstory, in a specific format, but I can’t right now— mod aster

Is there a hierarchy of import when it comes to each play's individualized impact on shakespeare high's general arc? If so, what plays are crucial to the foundation of the story? Which ones did you do mostly for shits and giggles? (@pedanticlecturer)

This is phrased like an ACT question and i might not answer it right so sorry in advance but: mod aster and i only selected a few plays for each of us to do given we dont know all of shakespeare’s works, but we tend to put more emphasis on the the more well known. But it also comes down to 1. How much we have plotted out for each play and 2. What the followers ask about most. Our two most popular are hamlet and macbeth bc people are familiar w those but around march caesar always becomes relevant again. I didnt even have designs for some of the characters until someone asked about them. -- mod star

I would say the same as star— it generally comes down to what people ask about. I will say that the overall plot is sort of separated into “has happened” and “is happening”. Like, the human potion of Midsummer, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth are all in the “aftermath” portion, while Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, among others, are happening. We’re trying to incorporate as much as we can, and I don’t think any of them were really put in without some thought.— mod aster

What personal significance does shakespeare hold in ur guys' lives? (@pedanticlecturer)

I go to a theater school rn and so ive dealt w shakespeare (although not all of them) it also helps that i was in loves labours lost last year as moth and that i read hamlet and r n j. Theres also a theater in my state that always does One Big Shakespeare per season and they always do them super well!!! My love for shakespeare probably started w seeing midsummer at that theater w mod aster!!! So. Theater kid rights!! -- mod star

To be honest, I got back into Shakespeare Because of the blog. I’ve been friends with some people that got really Pretentious about Shakespeare, and it kinda put me off of it. I did have a book of abridged plays (the plays’ plots written out in prose, basically) that I read as a kid, which is what got me into not only the plots of a lot of the plays, but also the idea of having them illustrated. And, same as star, the theater in state does the One Big Shakespeare— and they tend to do some really cool things with the costumes, setting them in diff time periods. I haven’t been able to see any lately since I’ve moved, but they still slap. — mod aster

🥰😘💙🥰🥰💜💟🥰I 😍💗💚😍😍LOVE🖤🖤 YALL ♥️♥️🧡💛💚💝❣️💕💘💖💗💓💞💝❤️💛💜 okay now i have a question i swear— how long have the two of you been doing art??? and what were your first shakespeare plays??? (@hellaghosts)

Uhh i started drawing when i was like idk 12 and i have the giant boxes of sketchbooks to prove it!!! I moved to digital art at abt 14-15 but mostly stayed traditional until this yr when i got a Neat New Tablet so some of my sketchbooks are sitting abandoned rip. My first shakespeare was either romeo and juliet or midsummer nights dream and i love both of them v much!!! I have a very old piece of art that i did for r n j for my freshman class assignment on it and it hasnt aged well alsdjfjafd circa 2016 i think??? -- mod star

Oh man. I started drawing when I was about 10, but it was Bad. I don’t think I got much into drawing again until I was about 14? Sometime around the end of middle school/beginning of high school. I would say I started getting into drawing as more than doodling/coloring edits sometime around 2015-16? I would draw on my iPad with my finger, then I got a tablet for my computer, and now I pretty much stick to my iPad with an Apple Pencil. My first Shakespeare play was….. uh…… probably Midsummer???? I have No idea. We would go to plays when I was little, so I honestly don’t remember if I saw others before. It may have been Romeo and Juliet— I had that book where it was the original and the “modernized” with the little dog that explained things— which, if you know it makes sense, but if you don’t is probably a bonkers answer. — mod aster

Do you think this blog has like? An overarching thesis (be it b/c intentionally or simply b/c ur own take on the world has bled thru to the point where u believe it’s central to the piece at this point)? (@pedanticlecturer)

Not gonna lie, I had to read that like three times AND dm you to figure out what you were asking from us and all I have is “be gay, respect women, write your own happy endings”. — mod aster

This blog started with an ides of march shitpost and you think we have enough brain energy to write a whole thesis? I projected feelings of found family onto my half of the blog but idk if that counts. Be gay do crime 420 69 -- mod star

What’s the nature/rough dynamic of ur relationship? How do y’all know each other? (@pedanticlecturer)

Met mod aster when i was like 4 and even tho we didnt live close we became like, best friends although the Best part didnt start until we were like 13-ish and eventually we talked like non stop (about anime and homestuck. Yknow. 13 year old kid things) and we didnt see each other a lot bc of Distance and now its even worse bc aster is in colleg.,e but we consider each other siblings regardless of family bc we’re adopted into our own respective families so that bled over into our friendship and it would feel weird calling him anything other than my brother now. We’ve seen each other at our best and worst and if you really want a good insight on what we’re like as siblings watch griffin and justin mcelroy’s overview video of catlateral damage wherein i am griffin and he is the long suffering justin. -- mod star

Star is basically my long distance sibling and functionally the only cousin I recognize bc like their parents are basically an aunt and uncle and like our dads look enough alike that we’ve both accidentally gotten the wrong dad for a hug or similar so like. Anyways yeah Star is the Griffin to my Justin, complete with our absent middle brother who we love dearly— mod aster

Dubiously relevant q but what kind of music do y’all listen to when u do art (if that is indeed a habit either of u partake in) (@pedanticlecturer)

It can depend on the piece? I was working on some (unrelated) oc prints that were song-focused, and for those I just listened to said song on loop. Sometimes I have playlists. Sometimes I’ll just be in a Mood and throw a song on loop. But a lot of time for the blog, I’ll listen to The Adventure Zone for the billionth time, because I have Too Much Attention. I’ve also, on request from Star, linked the most recent “loop song”.— mod aster

I tend to obsess over the same like 3 songs every few weeks so those get listened to on repeat but it also depends on the tone of what im drawing or who im drawing i might genre switch bc of that. If im drawing ophelia i stick to lana del rey and if im drawing hamlet its the neighborhood, horatio is sufjan stevens etc. i have categorized,. Most of the characters i draw into different songs/genres/energies of music but not like i ever follow that. Sometimes i just pull up a really long nonsense video and forget to draw. Essentially: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- mod star

How’d y’all come up with ur pseudonyms? (@pedanticlecturer)

I love space so much and my main blog is starryeydsailor space gay rights!! Im also tiny and full of energy and bright so basically i;m star -- mod star

Uhhhh i was like “hey i want to do uhhhhhh flower?” And then I google searched flower names until I found one I liked —- mod aster

How did you end up deciding the rough timeline of events in canon? (@pedanticlecturer)

It’s mostly determined by like. How we choose per story? If that makes sense. Like, we just take story by story, and decide “is it happening, has it happened, and when?” And then we fit them together in relation to each other just by dint of. All existing at once. Like, I knew I wanted Macbeth to be in aftermath, because like, even though there’s no murder, the way I’ve translated it to the AU is still kinda heavy, and it’s something that I don’t know that I could do properly if it were happening right now. Also, it’s more interesting IMO to have them at different times. Tl;dr we wing it per story and slot them together— mod aster (mod star agrees I just can word better, in theory)

If you could tell the story of shakespeare high in a different format than an ask blog, would you? Obviously y'all are making very good use of the format, but would you want to write this as a animated series or like? a comic book? or is the form inseparable from the story? (@pedanticlecturer)

I kinda wanted to do a webcomic or maybe to plot develop through like, animatics but the element of surprise comes from the asks we get and really makes us think so the blog is a good start. We didnt think we’d get this far -- mod star

Pretty much what Star said— there are certain elements where it’d be neat to do as a comic or as an animatic. Like, the fantasy dream is like, an anthology webcomic of each story, where you can like, see other characters in the background and stuff. But to be honest, we develop a lot by what we’re asked— there was a post about developing worldbuilding by being asked questions and then pretending you’ve thought about the answer, and it’s not far off. Personally, it’s hard to just lay out a story, because I have a whole WORLD and what’s relevant? What are people interested in? It’s by getting questions that I can then focus in on an area to develop. And yeah, we Super didn’t think we’d get this far lmao — mod aster

Any headcanons about your characters that you don't think will ever come up on the blog through asks or plot posts? (@pedanticlecturer)

I could make a whole separate post for this!!!!! Mostly its voice headcanons (and by mostly i mean like 1 or 2) or relationship hcs!!!! -- mod star

Honestly same. I don’t think I have voice headcanons for mine, though I bet I could find some. I’ve got a bunch of miscellaneous headcanons that just kinda float around, but like they’re scattered, too numerous for this post, and also not always things I’m sure are canon yet.— mod aster

[skyscribbles]

Plans for 2018

I say ‘plans’ cause lord knows what’s gonna happen but!! Better to plan and try than give up just because I’m not sure. Anyway it may be long so I’m gonna ramble it below the cut

First major plan:

Work on a set schedule

I feel like I can get a little bit lost because I don’t have STRUCTURE anymore. Working in a classroom or general work environment did me so many wonders, cause my brain could snap into a work-mode. Unfortunately I don’t really have access to that kind of thing anymore, so I have to set it myself. 

The basic plan is:

Monday: Sketches Wednesday: Linework Friday: Color/Finish

This can apply to commissions or personal works! If I have multiple commissions, I can send off multiple sketch stages on Monday, try to get lineart done on Wednesday, finish ‘em by Friday, etc! Tuesdays and Thursdays would be sort of free-drawing days where I can doodle or have fun.

That’d be one drawing a week at the least which is!! Ideal!

Saturdays and Sundays might be study dedicated? So I can kind of keep myself on the ball, while still getting work done. Of course I’ll have to factor in IRL stuff and anything that gets in the way, but if I can get at least something done each of these days, it’ll be good enough. 

100 Theme Challenge

I opened a folder on DeviantART for a 100 theme challenge! I’m gonna try to make complete pieces for it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish all 100, but I’m gonna try! If I can manage one piece every week, I can get it done in less than 2 years... /dies

Which should be a good show of my progress. Of course I’ve taken on many challenges before and have fallen short, but ATTEMPTING challenges is better than not, cause even if I do fall out of it, I still have work done that I wouldnt have done before! So there isn’t much to lose, and some to gain!

Get Some Kind of Project Going

Patreon sadly is probably not going to happen in the near future until i can get some personal stuff settled, but I did consider maybe trying to open a Redbubble store! I have to research proper printing colors/formats and the like so my products wont be cheaply put together, but that’s a possibility!  I may also do something with my Ko-Fi! Probably simple commissions if people donate or something! I’ll worry about that later.

I’d do a comic but honestly I am not any sort of comic artist. I haven’t shown much interest and passion for it, and I know it’s something you absolutely NEEEEEED to be passionate about to even hope to finish. It doesn’t mean I wont ever try a short comic or two that’ll be like, 2-3 pages! But a long running series is not in my future.

Stream....Eventually

This one’s part tech issues and part anxiety issues. 

I kind of hate being WATCHED when I draw cause it makes me stiffen up really bad and then I can’t quite draw as easily, and then THAT makes me worry all my stuff is turning out bad in front of everyone and that I’m a sham of an artist, blablabla etc, and I know it’s something I’ll HAVE to get past eventually. But I’m gonna take baby steps on this one. Maybe I’ll try to upload Youtube videos or something of me drawing once I can learn some basic video editing!

And Finally, Try To Get Over Myself

I KNOW THIS SOUNDS MEAN LMAO but hear me out:

I have, a lot of issues with anxiety still. Even sharing works can make me nervous and tense cause I get hard on myself if I worked SUPER hard on something and just comes out...subpar. I have to work on getting over these fears, and learning to not get so personal with every drawing. It’s mostly on me and a mental thing I have to work out, but I want to become courageous and post more, even if it ends up garbage! At least people can see that I’m not always at the top of my game, and it’s fine to have drawings that just aren’t as good.

No artist is always at 100%. I don’t expect that from others and I shouldn’t expect that from myself. Not to say I wanna be LAZY but, just learn to forgive myself if I screw up a drawing... 8′D;

ANYWAY THATS THE RAMBLE, here’s hoping I can stick to at least most of this!! And see y’all in 2018!!

[bbs-backlog-challenge]

Two Years of BBLC!

Wanted to reflect on the blog a bit, and talk about where it’s going from here. Going to be mostly stream-of-consciousness stuff that doesn’t pertain a whole lot to the actual point of the BBLC itself, so I’ll do your dashboards a favour and put it under the cut.

So then! Let’s talk about success.

In terms of its primary function (that being ‘get BB playing through that got-dang steam library’), it has been an undeniable success. I started at 80 games, have played 120, and now have just 30 left. Questionable mathematics aside, I know for sure a good 80% of those games I played would have forever been pushed to the backburner if the dice weren’t in control.

As an aside- I’m a lot more frugal lately, too, and have bought far fewer bundles just because they seem like a good deal. A change in attitude towards spending is a secondary, unexpected but definitely worthwhile benefit of the blog. I’m now happier to spend $60 on a game I will play than to spend $15 on ten games I probably wont, despite the latter seeming like a great bargain.

When I conceptualised the BBLC, I’d envisioned it as something of a community effort. In its original form it was a forum game, with some moderate success until people started ignoring the core concepts and instead using it as a tool of self-flagellation; complaining and even boasting about the size of their backog and doing nothing to combat it, even though that was the entire point of the thread. (Breathe.) When I revived it I posted it on that same forum, but its traffic had died down massively and my thread saw no traction at all, unfortunately.

I moved it over to a blog format (this one!) and managed to get a couple of friends to jump in on the fun, but it never really took off in the way I would have liked. I think the audience that would appreciate this blog isn’t really on Tumblr (though I do appreciate the 15 followers I’ve amassed in that time)- not to mention Tumblr’s pretty awful when it comes to interactivity with readers and potential players.

I’ve been thinking over that a lot recently, along with thoughts of how I could potentially monetise the idea. I’ve come up with a few ideas, each with pros and cons...

First, I thought a podcast form of the challenge could be pretty neat. The specifics would need to be worked out before going ahead with it, but releasing an episode every month or every two weeks where we talk about the games that have come up in the meantime, our inpressions of that first hour of play, answer and discuss questions from the other ‘casters, and end each section with a Fin Or Bin as is customary. Alternatively, as Pasq suggested, we roll our libraries together, pick a game most of us haven’t played, and each of us spends that hour playing it and we come back to discuss what we thought, sort of like a book club. Perhaps even a combination of the two ideas.

The major con with this idea is that it would require getting at least one other person to commit to doing a regular spot with me, as well as commit to playing however many games our format required. Arranging a time we can talk, setting up the audio, editing and publishing would be a significant time sink even if I elected to do most of that work myself. If the other person/people flaked, that’d grind my progress to a halt. It would be a lot of fun to talk about the lesser-known games, though, and I think it’d be a mostly casual experience. Podcasts are fun!

Another problem, and one common to most of these ideas, is- I’m running out of games! If I could have started doing it 120 games ago there would be a much stronger hook than “Beebs plays 30 games and talks about them”. If I joined up with a couple of other people who each had libraries numbering three digits, it’d quickly become unbalanced.

Streaming was the other idea I thought of, or a youtube series. Go live for an hour or so to play the game as I would have done so regardless, except chat through a microphone while I do it. Them video games streams are popular, so I hear, and if I played one of the bigger-ticket games on the list, it might draw some audience.

Main problem with that angle is that playing a new game would no longer be a leisure activity, and would require set up and the right moodset to be able to put on a good vocal performance. If I was streaming, too, it’d have to be at a regular time, so I couldn’t just play games for a spare hour in the evenings. If I ditch the stream idea and just make it a youtube series, I’d have to think about whether it would just be an audio form of the blog posts (and then, why keep the blog) or if it should just be edited footage like a Lets Play series, which might boil down to 15 minutes of me floundering about with no idea what I’m doing and providing no entertainment.

I do enjoy the idea of a video series, in some form. When I think about the chaos I caused in Project Cars for instance, or that glitch I encountered in Sniper Elite, I wish I had been recording the whole time. I think Beebs-brand fun would make for some entertaining videos.

The problem then again is that there’s only 30-odd games left to go, and I can’t guarantee any of them are going to be entertaining to watch, whereas I can at least write an entertaining post about a dire game.

Either way, it seems like a Discord server is the way to go. I’ve begun setting one up, ready to launch if I ever go ahead with one of these ideas. And, of course, there would be a patreon behind it all.

I worry about my pastime becoming work.

I worry that, as with so many of my projects, I’ll forever say ‘I’ll get around to doing that video/audio/whatever later’, and then procrastinating it until it’s ancient history.

And I worry that people still just aren’t really going to care, which is tolerable at the moment because I’m getting a lot out of it for myself but may become intolerable when I’m putting more hours into it.

Thanks for reading this far, if you did! I’d welcome your thoughts on any of this. Might well be the best thing to do is just to carry on as I have been until I run out of games and call it a done deal, but quite often I’ve enjoyed writing the posts more than playing the games, and I wonder if extending that might be even more rewarding.

[insidiousflame]

My sister is back living at home. And her and dad brought a cold sickness back with them. So now, I’m dealing with that. Ugh. I just took some Nyquil though to hopefully help knock me out tonight. I really didn’t sleep well at all last night. Hopefully I can catch up on sleep and feel better for work tomorrow. I had to leave early on my closing shift the other day cause my stomach was messed up from the mac n cheese microwaves dinner...Yikes. That was awful. Auracle seems to be doing okay. We’ve been working really hard to get content out and record dances. Still need to get the official vocal cover and video editing done...No idea when that will finally happen. We will be doing filming next weekend for Kait’s mouse ear video. Unfortunately, a hurricane is going to hit this weekend...so Evie has to go home cause her dorm is shutting down and wont be able to attend practice. I’ve been stressed still, but, hopefully things can slow down a little. I’m still constantly thinking about Auracle and the idol community and what I really want out of it. Will it go anywhere other than what it is now? Do I even want it to? Will I get tired of it? I kinda feel like I will...but at the same time, i really appreciate the time we get to spend together. It feels great working hard for something. I really...really hope we get into idolfest. I at least want that. At least. I know that I want my own original music. I always wanted that. But, I just can’t seem to get myself in a mode where I can just write a full song. Sometimes it feels like i’ve got something, but i just feel such lack of inspiration. Words just don’t come to me. I always write about the same shit. I’m tired of it. I feel like I should stop giving the past so much energy, but it’s the only real source i can easily draw from. idk. And any time i think i’ve found a producer, it isn’t what I want. There’s another guy i happened to mutually follow on instagram and turns out he composes music. But, it seems to be mostly eletronic stuff. Like everyone else. And I just cant really get behind that. But, maybe i can do something? maybe? I feel like every hope turns into a dead end for me. Im just never satisfied with it. I still don’t really know what i want, do i? I mean, yeah, create my own songs. But...yet that doesnt seem to really make me happy or inspire me either. Sigh. God, help me out here. Help me grab hold of and create what ive yearned to.