12.14.2025 - Finally got around to actually writing something on this page. It's December and I've finished scripting chapter t-09. I've started drafting the name (Storyboard) and I've really learnt a few things since volume 1 that leave me feeling a little embarrassed to only be cementing those in my knowledge now. I can finally really appreciate how panels present time and how the shape and/or ratio of panels indicate different stretches of time, different sensations of time passing. (Shingo Yamashita recently tweeted something related to this here and here.)
(Copy pasting the tweet in case they get deleted):
"パクろうと思って久しぶりにピンポンを読み返していて思ったけど、映像っぽい連続的コマ割りの時に一番小さいコマの「コマの小ささ」をアニメだと表現できないんだなって気づいたね…1-2frにすると認識できないし6frにすると比重が高すぎる" -yama
"勢いのある漫画のコマ割りを読んでいるときの印象はカットではなく僕はOLに近いと思っている、ものすごいはやいOL。そう、走馬灯のような。" -yama
Aside from that, I have to admit, though the storyboard is coming together and I've already learned a couple things, I can't help but feel like my heart isn't quite in this chapter just yet. I've just come back from completing a few animation jobs and it's holiday season so my mind is a little all over the place. I have to refocus and put everything into each one of these chapters or else I'll really regret it years down the line.
12.24.2025 - I finished the first draft storyboard for chapter 9. I still need to review and commit some dialogue/speech bubble placements. Im taking a slight detour to wrap up a couple jobs (sorry) and actually doing a bit of animating for Ill of You. I have this animation test in the oven.
Please watch Gou Miyagi's skateboarding videos. 1 2
My Christmas present this year will be the mastery of a demon which has possessed me since adolescency atpQuan. I am ready to begin time travelling.
01.03.2026 - Forewarning - The contents of this entry probably only make sense to animators and are extremely black-pilled, enough so that I feel compelled to clarify that I don't write this maliciously to discourage aspiring animators from pursuing animation. Dillegence in honesty is a necessary backbone to any message of encouragement, and it is for the explicit sake of speaking candidly about my own motivations and perspective that I write this here. If change is what we're after we mustn't be afraid to confront ugly truths. If anything I hope the expression of ugly but candid sentiments like these will better prepare the next generation of animators for the trials and tribulations that come with this wonderful craft:
Japanese Commercial Animation (Anime) is a net negative on society which is to say that I dont think any labor in this industry actually produces value to society. This has nothing to do with animation as a discipline and artform. It, however, has everything to do with it's practitioners. We have fundamentally dropped the ball and are victims of our own insufficiecies, all forms of blame hurled at CEOs, Producers, Investors, and Committee boards are nothing more than sore excuses from sore losers. It was our responsibility to do whatever was required to maintain quality.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason animation tends to attract petty, anti-intellectual types of characters which make for poor constituents of any type of strong community. We also for some reason like to stand on the shoulders of giants and rain droplets of smelly piss down upon them while we high-five each other and cross streams.(Is this metaphor still intact?).
For these reasons in part, I am perpetually stuck in a grey space of my own value systems which goes something like:
"I want to be a financially independent individual because I want to be a positive contribution to the community that I benefit from"
However, it seems that in order to BE financially independent with the profession I have dedicated myself to, it requires that I be a negative contribution on the community at large.
Let us quickly address the most straight forward solution. A simple career switch. This would be an obvious solution if it wasn't for the fact that I am the best animator of my generation and I'm unfortunately not dumb enough to be ignorant to the effect on the artform as a whole if I were to walk away from the inconveniently large amount of genius I was for some reason endowed with. I am comfortably aware that I represent Japanese animation to some extent now. I also love animation and it's hard for me to stand aside and watch my colleagues do everything in their ability to bastardize the potentials of this medium (I will not explain what I mean by this).
Anime as a product is a gambling advertisement. When it isn't it preys on its customer's other worst, most base instincts in order to survive on it's own two legs (and I know for a fact that I dont even need to go into what that is because you're already conjuring up at least a couple examples of what I could be refering to). This was not really the case just 10 years ago. Anyway, my feelings towards this stuff can be summarized as:
"Japanese commercial animation no longer fundamentally cares about preserving it's fundamentally life-affirming moral core which has massively negative implications on it's overall messaging, and by extension, it's role as fiction and entertainment in modern society."
As a product it is absolutely ambivalent about whether or not it makes you a worse person.
And this is true because anyone who's already been working in anime for sometime is reading this and thinks I am talking about nonsense. "What are you talking about bro, anime is just about having fun lols, and fun is good, umm I don't get my value system from anime lmao." Yes, well, to those of you that happily sign on to work on the next Uma Musume/Chainsawman film, for your sake I hope you really do mean that.
Anyway, you have to understand, when I mean net negative, I do mean the negative. Which means that it's not the fact that I am NOT contributing positively to any type of community by engaging in this work, it is that I sincerely feel that the projects that I am apart of genuinely make the world a WORSE place, which means that to do no work at all would actually be an improvement in my estimations.
This is the predicament most milennial and generation-z individuals who are trying to survive the work force find themselves in. The average person when confronted with such a rock-and-hard-place will just accept that their work is not where they are going to find fulfillment and instead use their income and leisure to find that instead. Unfortunately, working as a key animator isn't exactly the kind where I can clock out at 5 and have 2 weekends at the end of my week, for a plethora of reasons that I expect readers will already be able to sympathize to some extent. But all that to boot, recent tax laws and the declining Japanese Yen quite literally strips out half of my income as an international freelancer compared to pre-covid era. But I suppose to yearn towards a pre-covid era is completely pointless in which case I will redact the declining Yen but maintain the 20 percent international freelance tax as arguments. We are simply in a completely different world than the one 6 years ago.
For what it is worth, if there was even a shred of the aforemention moral core left I would be happy to dedicate my entire life to just this industry.
Really, again, my complaint is to do with the commercial industry and has nothing to do with animation. I still maintain that animation is a supreme artform and one of the pinnacles of human acheivement and project. Though I have all of these complaints with the specific industry that I work in (the japanese one), it is a fact that animation industries elsewhere are more abyssmal in all of these respects.
All these obstacles aside, if I really needed to make ends meet, I know deep down I could...at the cost of selling my soul via restraining contract to some studio and being complicit in this advertising machine. Unfortunately, I have grand dreams of leaving the world a better place than I found it, so I'm doing this god-damn comic as an extremely humble, extremely minute step-if-not-lil'-shimmy, and it is immediately coming at the expense of any prospect of forward movement in any other avenue of life. Just this little shuffle in some direction that isnt where I am right now is already costing my entire person.
For all intents and purposes, I am a bum lol. I am literally shirking my employment to draw a fucking comic book (it's not even a book it's all digital). And not only do you have to swallow that weirdly-shaped pill, you also have to somehow believe that this comic book about magic powers is genuinely sapping my humanity by the hour. It is the the north pole of my active mind, everything I do and think is within the context of this project. I say with an intonation of shame that trying to put this project onto the page somedays leaves me paralyzed in my own anxiety for hours on end. And it probably isn't even going to be that good because I know I've never drawn a comic before. Can you believe that at the end of this I'm going to then produce a 15 minute high-quality animation film? Well I do, because I am, and I will even if it's the last thing I ever do.
Anyway, the reflection to that value system I set earlier goes something like:
I don't want to be financially independent as an individual because doing so requires that I NOT be a positive contribution to society, and doing the best things that satisfy a positive contribution requires that I forego the time and energy to pursue financial independence which means that I am a negative contribution on my immediate community (I'm a bum).
Still wrapping up some jobs...I've started drawing chapter t-9, I hope to complete it before the end of February. As always, I have nothing but gratitude for your patience and time regarding this project of mine.
01.06.2026 - I LOVE SAKUGA
I LOVE SAKUGA
I LOVE SAKUGA
I LOVE SAKUGA
I LOVE SAKUGA
I LOVE SAKUGA
I LOVE SAKUGA
I should download these MADs before they get deleted...
02.19.2026 - Once again, I have made the mistake of underappreciating the condition of sequential imagery. I have to re-embrace the whims of my pen. Need to know when to draw 画 and when to draw 絵. Which I guess in english is kinda like the difference between baroque and impressionistic appeal...?? or Fine arts and sketch..idk. Also took me way too long to realise symmetrical composition doesn't need be acheived with the vanishing point but can be done by the framing of the elements themselves (sometimes it's too on the nose). Passing the narrative thread between dialogue and panelling is tricky business. There's a finesse to it that's just like timing and secondary motion in animation. After all, they are both temporal mediums. Slowly stringing together the pacing of the chapter, making sure the narrative ratios are balanced against each other. Page/panel layout over a stretch of manga needs to be synthesized into something more cogent...probably. Mustn't forget the onomatopeias.
03.17.2026 - Once again I find myself at a time when animation offers me a rare companionship I really ought to find elsewhere. It's not particularly one that makes me happy or comfortable, but it does give me that swelling in my chest that is forever about as awesome as it is awful. Once more I sail out to sea, on an empty ship of my own mental construct, where I cast out my reel in solitude, against my preferences. (Gotta put on the tryhard pants for this anime-gig. If it turns out mid it is going to be insanely cringe)
04.03.2026 - Okay I finished the job, and I'm going to write about my reflections concerning my progress as a key animator....in an extended metaphor......
which is to say that, as a key animator, I am lost at sea! I am stranded in miles of rich blue water with but a one-manned vessel and a humble fishing pole.
Yet I'm in no danger; I could survive here indefinitely. My body has learned to drink the seawater, and I've nourished myself on catches of the sea for which I've a voracious appetite.
Yet, do I fish for myself? Have I set out to deal in deep waters just to feed myself? Wasn't there some distant homeland to whom I've pledged my trade?
I have learned the ways of the sea, and sailed acres of fertile, watery pastures. I've made it to that outer Pacific where one forgets the spoken language, for the distance between us dampens the sonic waves.
Instead, we speak on those thalassic channels, and seek solidarity in ocean currents which rock us to slumber on the cold-face of the Earth.
The glassy surface reflects the Outer Pacific above us all, and I am suspended in night sky.
When the veil of blue atmosphere melts away into the sunset, we are revealed to be aboard spacecraft, secretly sailing among the stars.
I have caught plenty fish. I have hunted leviathans, I have rediscovered lost species. I have learned how to cast the pen and pull the line.
I have tempered the patience to leave a hook drifting for months at a time, and let it time to plummet down to umbral depths where the most secret fish lie...and my hook has yet to feel the seabed!
But what of these secret fish? They have no flesh upon their bones and what flesh is there is destitute of the sort of nutrition demanded by a human soul.
I am a fisherman to feed the people, and I've lost my way home, and by the time I've remembered, that coastline to which I belong had long since sunk beneath the horizon line.
I know I can live on these waters. I could become a Lord of All that is Blue.....Rescue me...rescue me from such vainglorious metamorphoses...!
Deliver me back to those freckled shores, for my heart will drown without a beach upon to moor this undying vessel.
Anyway, I have been reading Moby Dick whenever I have the time so sailing and fishing metaphors are all the rage to me right now.
I have been enjoying the late nights here and psychologically, I really do feel kind of stranded in outer space.
On evening drives, my windshield is speckled with the starlight of distant lamposts and office buildings, while shooting stars race past me in headlights of oncoming traffic...redshifted bumper lights drift away in the passing lanes...
And the spotlight of a full moon beams down upon the invisible path ahead.
Checked out the first episode of Black Jack, the 1993 anime OVA. They really don't make 'em like they used to, the range of expression acheived via use of Dezaki's, Layouts, Editting, and Storyboard is astonishing. I honestly
struggle to imagine how to go about incorporating such a vibrant cinematic language back into modern-form anime.
Well, anyways I finished my key animation job. I managed to sort synthesize a pattern shared between smoke and plants. I hope to write about it someday when the work comes out. Back to the comic.
07.16.2026 - I wrote about animation tools.
"Animation software is a tool, not a workspace or environment".
This is the thesis that I would like to spend some paragraphs elucidating the significance of so as to present the foundational beliefs about how professionals ought to interface with a software as a means to perfom their professions. A tool is an object that allows its user to perform tasks otherwise impossible to do without the use of. Bone knives and axes allowed the early neanderthals to seperate materials too tough for human muscle and teeth alone. The stylus and later pencil allows its user to write and draw on surfaces. Tools can also be used together to perform even more unique and complex tasks. Rulers in tandem with writing utensils allow users to trace shapes otherwise too precise for human fine motor skills. Computers allowed for images to no longer require physical mediums to be stored upon, which effectively eliminated the cost of frames in modern digital animation. Animation software ought to be valued primarily for its ability to expand the potentials of its animator.
In the modern day, this is often misconstrued with "efficiency" and "convenience". Modern interpretations of software are primarily understood for their ability to automate tasks and improve the speed or "efficiency" by which the same task can be done. In Digital Animation Software, this led to the advent of features which streamline predefined animation pipelines, such as auto-exporting cels, auto-cel imports into timeline, Copy-pasting drawings, one-button macro buttons (such as "create folder and place layer inside), and many more. These featues of software only expand the animators ability to "output" under a pre-defined set of processes, which 1.) yields diminishing returns and more importantly 2.) does so by automating the tasks of the animator by presupposing the process by which the animators solves a creative problem. The latter I assert to be a deeply poisonous presumption for creative and intellectual work. Presuppostion of the process by which animators perform various tasks collapses down the creative avenues by which an animator produces their work and any creative professional will tell you that "process informs the product". If done correctly, such automative features of software will be more careful and deliberate about what kinds of processes to eliminate as opposed to concentrating on what kinds of processes it highlights (since the latter is merely an inevitable result of automation and is therefore less "consequential" than the former).
I present automated timesheet and keyframe-labelling as one such historically unsuccessful execution. Timesheet automation features are proposed as allowing the animator to offload the task of numbering each layer of an animation timeline to auto-enumeration and the task of notating camera instructions and key/breakdowns to drag-and-drop/hotkey keyword stamps. Animation blocking is often much too organic and diverse for these automated actions to capture the full range of what an animator might choose to express in a timesheet. These systems often prune out the flexibility to notate for situations like: layer B needing to switch from being on top of layer A to below it at some point in the blocking of the scene, by which simply you would appreciate a column labled B both to the left and right of Layer A in a timesheet to notate when and for how long this shift in blocking occurs. This is easily accomplished if the animator is allowed to "draw" on their timesheet, by literally drawing an extra column to the left of A and annotating that column as needed to satisfy the blocking. This is the flexibility and dynamicism of creative problem solving that software must allow the overhead for if it intends to automate it.
In short, these methods create an overly reductive framework of what exactly a "timesheet" is and do more to frustrate the animator than facilitate the task of communicating the temporal organization of the animation shot for succeeding departments. Yes, that is *really* what a timesheet's utility is in an animation production. That is literally what the timesheet is created to do, and that utility in and of itself is vital for collaborative animation-making. This is the essential understanding software designers much have about the tasks they choose to replicate in software features.
The best way that I can think of for software design to be successful at preserving that overhead mentioned before, is by first obtaining a grasp of the "essence" of the task. Taking the timsheet for example, columns and grids, circles and triangles, dashes, dots, 1,2,3's and a,b,c,s memo spaces and camera columns are all interpretations of best-practices for how to accomplish that task, but they are not the tasks in and of themselves. The animators task is not literally to translate their layer organization to numbers and letters with circles and triangles around them, those are just semantics and standard conventions. More importantly, these semantics come from a time when software didn't exist and the task was performed on literal sheets of paper and so you have to question if these semantics are suited for a digital context. Most attempts have failed this simple competency check and have confused the finger for the moon, and the features are more about transfering the activity of translating the timeline into these arbitrary labels as opposed to enabling the animator to better communicate the temporal layout of their animation shot to succeeding departments who will bring their drawings to final footage.
And from this, I think I can get into a much broader issue with regards to animation software which is that most animation software fail because they for whatever reason are too focused on replicating the methodology and pipeline of the analog era, or at worse they are literally trying to market the "experience" of analog animation. Let's just get this out of the way, softwares will *never* recreate analog workflows and pipelines. Your computer screen versus pencils and papers are fundamentally different interfaces with different points that they excel in. Software cannot "replace" analog, but I think it can and should co-exist alongside it. Therefore, animation software must re-imagine the ways it goes about facilitating those same animation tasks (which are agnostic to what medium you perform them in) if it hopes to strive for an optimal digital animation environment. You must be prepared to question everything and entertain new processes which inevitably differ from their analog counterparts in some way.
Some may ask, if you want them to coexist with one another, how can you hope to do so by creating separate processes for each medium? This, my friends, is the genius of the Japanese Layout System. The anatomy of a handdrawn animation shot comes down to 3 things, Key frames, Layout, and Timesheet. That's it. So long as any methodology can produce these three ingredients, wha'lah, you have a functioning animation shot. This is what all that malarky about creative and intellectual tasks and neanderthal bone knives was building towards. It doesn't matter how you make your animation, so long as you can produce those 3 ingredients, any staff member in a Japapnese production will be able to produce an finished animation shot with what you give them. This is the crossroad at which digital and analog methodologies high five and cross streams.
And really take a moment to consider what these are. These are literally just images, pngs, jpegs even. If you wanted to get fancy (which you probably would if you wanted to do anything serious) the timesheet should probably be a .txt or a some kind of spreadsheet file. These are data types that any software(whether animation or not) could potentially read and edit. It's honestly an embarrassment that we can't pass a shot around any of the 3 triple A animation softwares on the market seamlessly. WHERE THE FUCK ARE OUR EQUIVALENTS OF .OBJ FILES. There are landmarks like this in animation software that I think are genuinely good and vital ideas to animation-making and as software designers we would do well in investigating where these are first before we start firing off x new feature that makes it so I can push 3 less buttons to preview my animation loop.
Webgen animation would have never acquired its unique approaches, which later fused back into the larger animation body of knowledge, had it not been for inventive yet flexible systems like flashes symbol system and intuitive playback and navigation system. Instantaneous flipping and playback drastically increased the "fidelity" by which animators could check the spacing of their animated frames which had the inadvertant effect of spawning a generation of animators who were able to divorce themselves from the individual appeal of each drawing and instead focus on the overal appeal of the motions themselves. Symbols allowed for nesting animations within each other, and access to orchestrating much more complex and interesting camera work, effects animation, and video editting (it also spawned an entire branch of animation medium).
Please appreciate how symbols didnt just produce effects in one, but at least three different areas of animation (It should also be known that Flash, the program where symbols where invented, wasn't even designed for animation production, it was for web development) The aforementioned benefits "emerged" out of the system of symbols. This is what is so genius about something like flash symbols, which is that one feature possessed so much flexibility and robustness that it could be adapted to solve problems in two different areas. I think this is the right execution of the main thesis of this essay, and it is still worthwhile to inspect more about why this is so successful.
Symbols themselves reflect something fundamental about digital workflows that can't be produced in analog environments, which is that they allow users to construct (functionally) infinitely nesting information structures. This is a mode of organization that you can't very well do without computational logic, and symbols leverage this for the purposes of structuring animation.
There is this philosophical idea that "everything is defined by what it isnt" which I personally think is especially applicable to drawing. What is draftsmanship if not the ability to accurately denote the boundaries by which something ceases to occupy? Tentatively, and I'm really spitballing here, I think this wisdom can be transmuted into a certain wisdom in craftsmanship that creating something starts by building up towards the final image from indirect approaches from different directions. To first draw a human body you must first construct its anatomy, to paint the light you must do so by contrasting it with the shadow, to build a tower you must first construct your scaffolds. I think Software as a tool behaves similarly; tools are only a small part of the whole of a profession. A single tool can't hope to encapsulate the entire methodology involved in complex tasks, it has to work together, if not with other tools at the very least it needs to work together with it's user. There needs to be a kind of ebb and flow for tasks to come out well, and so as the user will do well to take full advantage of their tools, so will the tool in allowing the the user their full range of intentions.
07.26.2026 - Sunny skies today, 69 degrees farenheit, Humidity: 70%, precipitation 0%, and the wind blows eastward at 7 miles per hour.
Clear skies tomorrow, 70 degrees farenheit, Humidity: 70%, precipitation: 0% and the wind blows eastward at 10 miles per hour.
Heavy rainclouds next week, 66 degrees farenheight, Humidity 93%, precipitation :99%, and the wind blows eastward at 10 miles per hour.
Clear skies next month, 68 degrees farenheit, Humidity 75%, precipitation 10%, and the wind blows westward at 6 miles per hour.
Cloudy skies next year, 70 degrees farenheight, Humidity 89%, precipitation 50%, and the wind blows south at 8 miles per hour.
If I could have a supernatural ability, I'd like to predict the future. I dont really care about predicting next weeks lotto numbers, or the
manner in which I'll die...I'd just like to predict the weather...and never be lied to by a weatherman again. I'll always know the right
dates to plan trips. But more importantly, I'll understand this planet much more intimately.
Meteorologists gather data from all over the planet and make predictions about next week's weather. They study the rainforests, deserts,
oceans, rivers and cities to formulate some understanding about the state of the earth which will manifest in the skies of tomorrow.
And if we invert this understanding, are the skies of today merely an encrypted reflection of the earth, yesterday? As if the translucency
of the atmosphere were a looking glass into the past, which reflects our earthly history back at us, and mixes it with the refracted starlight
of a century ago.
To be alive and conscious is to be a predicting machine. Even our most mundane decisions are contextualized by the imagined
state of the future which is extrapolated from our memories of the past. We are always forcasting the weathers
of our own lives, by stepping, one frame at a time, through our snapshots of reality. We are always animating, in one sense or another.
And perhaps by this same mechanic, I might peer into the clouds on an afternoon walk, and from a small fraction of time capture a moment of
motion in the clouds, and through some supernatural, otherworldy intuition, simulate the rest of time in my head and map out exactly where those clusters
of vapor disperse off to, and recondense in other patches of sky, and repeating this with the entire firmament, I'll know if next month's
picnic should fall on a Saturday or a Sunday.
If you look up at the sky for long enough, eventually you might feel like you're being sucked up into that vast ocean of scattered sunlight
...and the world starts to feel like it was built upside-down. Whenever I start to feel suffocated by what's around me, I look up,
and imagine the world, upside-down.
