Rynling R&D

Books read: 120
Manga read: 92
Graphic novels read: 47
Video games finished: 26
Zines reviewed on Etsy: 88
Artworks commissioned: 21
Art and comics posted: 50
Posts on Gingko Books: 44
Posts on Digital Fantasy Diary: 53

This year I gave myself permission not to finish books I don’t like and to drop games that lose my attention. Still, I did okay.

I didn’t work as hard to maintain a steady posting schedule this year, and nothing bad happened. Nothing good happened either. Social media is changing, and engagement is down across the board. Still, I did okay.

In 2026, I’d like to keep track of AO3 comments I leave, with the point being to encourage myself to leave more of them. Even if it’s just a generic “I really enjoyed this story,” it’s still worth sending the author a nice note. I appreciate short comments when I get them myself, and I think seeing short comments on a work on AO3 encourages other readers to leave short comments too. Not everything needs to be an essay. The things you do for fun don’t have to be difficult to be meaningful.

Now that 2025 has forced everyone to learn about Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, what I want to see in 2026 is for everyone to learn about bait.

This applies to myself as well. If I see someone being unhinged, the strategy is to immediately block and ignore. If they are unhinged in real life, I will block and ignore them in my heart.

We only have so many days on this earth. 🍵

The Grand Coven Library -- Solo RPG Zine
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skoticus/the-grand-coven-library-solo-rpg-zine/description

I've been thinking of perhaps using Kickstarter to fund the initial print run of my Ruins zine. I've been hesitant to do anything like this for various reasons, but I found a successful project that might serve as a good template. I don't think I'm going to get 220 backers donating $4000, but I could probably put together a page like this.

Ordering 50 full-color zines from the printer I currently use is about $300, and that seems like a reasonable goal. I actually have a copy of the zine listed above, and it's just a small, 16-page, black-and-white stapled zine made with a home printer. If a physical copy of something like this can go for $10 before shipping, I can probably get away with asking for something similar, at which point I'd only need 10-20 backers for a successful project. That's doable, right?

Silksong
https://hannahlockillustration.tumblr.com/post/794407609977421825/silksong-just-beat-phantom-in-the-game-u-where

I love Hannah Lock's art in general, and I especially love this illustration in particular.

I'm linking to the piece here as a reference to myself. What I hear is that the way to develop your style as an artist is to allow yourself to be as horny as you need to be about one specific thing, and this is exactly the sort of thing I can't get enough of: A little guy in a lushly green environment. This is, for example, why I still love the Zelda games despite also kind of genuinely hating the Zelda games.

While studying my social media metrics over the past two years (which is a totally normal thing to do), I realized that reception is totally random. In addition, nothing I draw is ever going to do numbers in the current social media ecosystem. So why not give up and do whatever I want instead? Specifically, given that I love color and composition but suck at linework, why not loosen up a bit and just fill the page with rough lines and color blocks? And if I draw dozens of pieces just like the illustration I linked to above, so much the better! In the art world I believe they call this a "theme."

I have a handful of pieces I need to wrap up; but after that, it's little guys in green environments time. 🌿

Flower Fairies
https://flowerfairies.com/meet-the-fairies/

Since their first publication in 1923, Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies have enchanted both adults and children alike around the world. The botanically accurate drawings in the 170 original illustrations, coupled with the enchanting fairy images based on real children from Cicely’s sister’s nursery school, appeal to our innate sense of magic and wonder.

I used to covet these books when I was a kid, when I would sit at the shittiest library you can imagine and try to redraw the illustrations onto printer paper. For years I had a vague memory of the books existing, but I could never find them again. Thankfully, Penguin (bless its corporate heart) has scanned everything and collected the pages online in a lovely website. One of my projects for this summer is going to be to download all the paintings and create my own personal archive, I think.

I’m proud of what I accomplished this year:

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People like to say that “you create your own luck,” and I’m doing my best. Still, I hope some actual luck comes my way in 2025. Good luck to all of us in the new year. I hope we all make it.

I want to create three illustrations for next December:

- The winter solstice will be on December 21, and I want to post a blatantly homoerotic spooky illustration of the horned god framed by mistletoe.

- I have decided to embrace my longstanding cringefail love of Gawain and the Green Knight and celebrate Bisexual Beheading Games on December 25. I want to draw an epic botanical horror kiss.

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- 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse. Will I learn to draw horses? Absolutely not. I will trace over a stock photo borrowed from Pexels dot com. But I will do something really cool with it (that may or may not involve mounted archery). And I will do this far enough in advance to print postcards to send to friends at the beginning of December.

I need there to be an 18+ Final Fantasy server on Discord for writers and artists.

Not so anyone can do anything lewd. Rather, it would be nice to have a chill place to drop in and hang out and talk about video games where people can say "fuck" and discuss the plot of games that came out more than ten years ago without having to worry about spoilers.

There are two really good servers for Zelda artists (Zelda Creators and Linktober), but they're both purposely designed to be accommodating to children (under the age of thirteen). This is cool, but it's also not the type of space where I feel super comfortable.

Unfortunately I am terminally offline. I only check Discord once every three or four days, and then only for maybe five to ten minutes at a time. I can't create or maintain a server on Discord myself. The only way to be a part of a Final Fantasy community like this is to apply to zines and hope I get accepted.

So I guess my resolution for 2024 is to build a Final Fantasy portfolio and apply to Final Fantasy zines. My dream is for there to be a Final Fantasy VI zine one day, so that's what I'm going to focus on creating the perfect portfolio for. By this I mean that I am giving myself permission to write all the bizarre niche FFVI fic I always wanted to. I never wrote these stories because there is no audience, but that's okay; the audience is me.

In 2022...

I read 101 books.
I read 63 graphic novels.
I read 42 manga in English.
I read 33 manga in Japanese.
I read 115 zines and dōjinshi.
I watched 10 movies.
I finished 27 video games.

My resolution this year was to consume less media while being more aggressive about dropping things once I stopped enjoying them, and it was wonderful. Next year I would like to read fewer books, and I would like to read them more slowly.

I also posted 61 comics and illustrations to social media.

My resolution this year was to draw more backgrounds, which was quite fun. Still, even while taking shortcuts, backgrounds are time-consuming, which means I was only able to post about one illustration or comic per week. Next year I want to try to work on more time-saving strategies for backgrounds while leaning harder into designing environments.

It’s only the middle of November, but I’m going to call it: 2022 sucked. Content warning for serious life talk.

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This is all very negative, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that this is where my life is right now. Hopefully next year will be better. I mean, it has to be. Something has to change, and I need to figure out how to make that happen.

ETA: This post comes off as way more depressed than I actually feel, so let me add something good to balance it out: It's quite nice to live in a world where laptop hard drives just keep getting bigger every year, which means that I will never have to delete any of the Final Fantasy VI fan art I downloaded from DeviantArt in 2006. Personal relationships may come and go, but those jpegs are forever.