|██████████|BODY
|██████████|MIND
|██████████|SOUL
Status: What is sleep anymore?
|██████████|Will To Art

█ Gasp, added a status bar! My mood seems to have very little with my motivation to art, so... there it is. Course I'm sure many people have a perpetual "don't want to art" state nearly 100% of the time (artist or otherwise)

█ The past few days have been rather... weird for my sleep cycle. I have what I suppose some would consider an 'addictive' personality when it comes to playing video games that I become interested in. With that mind I would be considered a 'functional addict'. I used to play a lot of WoW back when I was going to college and when I had a normal job. As soon as I got home I'd play non-stop till it was time to sleep, but my performance never suffered for it. I pulled off 4.0 GPA, and I was given praise for some of my initiative at work (though didn't save me from being 'downsized')

Recently I got into the Hearthstone beta (It's an online card game) and I decided to basically crossed the fence from being 'functional' to full blown addict. It was an interesting experience to say the least as I end up staying 40 hours straight and I still had to tell myself to sleep. My previous record was something like 32ish hours or something like that and I was passing in an out of consciousness every time I blinked my eyes. This time around it was much different, I was wide awake; perhaps more awake than I've ever been for a long time. Normally when I get tired my eyes get watery, my neck and back start to get stiff, and my body starts to feel numb and aching on a whole; and I did start to feel like that for a little bit, but it disappeared and I felt wide awake. I'm not sure how long I could have stayed awake but I doubt it would have been good for my health, cause I do know about those stories of gamers who go for days straight with no rest who just fall over dead. After being in that state myself I can understand how they were doing it without feeling tired, the brain just gets so into doing whatever is happening that tiredness just doesn't set in.

Needless to say that kind of threw my sleeping cycle off whatever kind of axis it was spinning around. I've had a day where I was up for like 24 hours, and a night where I was sleeping for 12. My memory of when I was awake and when I was asleep is pretty hazy. I'm still trying to figure out when I want to be in bed and when I want to wake up. When I do I can get back to doing the art thing. (I don't really want to take on new commissions while I'm in a zombiish mode, I can't exactly guarantee good quality as such)

█ So yeah Hearthstone, it's a fun game. I imagine I'll grow tired of it relatively quickly as the meta game seems to be highly dependent on paying for cards, as well as the game stagnating as there's only a few decks that seem to function on the higher levels. The draft mode they have for it is interesting as well, but the problem is you have to pay to get into it (or do a lot of grinding to earn enough gold to do so)

I never played M:TG all that seriously, and I feel they are significantly different games.

█ I suppose I might as well mention (I think again) that I do have an account on weasyl. I probably would have had been active on it during FA's downtime if not for that financial crisis that happened to me in the middle of it (A thanks again to the people who commissioned me during that time, it helped a great deal).

Certainly that FA downtime had people up in arms and the like. I can imagine the myriad of thoughts that ran through some people's heads during it (most of it unkind I'm sure). Sure FA could be better, what thing exists doesn't suffer from "could be better"? People stick around I think for the community that exists here. Certainly the people I've gotten to know is because of that community that is based around FA.

A different side of the equation are artists who get a lot of their business via FA (like I do for example), but for myself I had enough of a social network to keep myself busy for the days FA was down, so I was plenty busy (I still have dozens of images to upload, but I'm lazy), though other artists aren't in the same situation and the site being down probably hurt them a fair bit. Suppose it would give them a fair bit of motivation to have alternative methods of contact. I suppose that's the other strength of FA is that because of the larger community artists are more drawn to it because it's easier to get customers on it.

I often think why there doesn't seem to be a site that has information for artists/commissioners. Yes sites allow artists to inform their watchers or passersby that they are open for commissions and their prices and usually a forum on whatever site for artists to advertise, but on the customer end it's a horrible system as they have no real way of finding artists to do work. It's more like they have to stumble across them. I think this is certainly the case because there's plenty of decent or great artists doing commissions but virtually no customers because they're virtually unknown (in a literal sense when I think about it)

How would I construct a system/site for artists/commissioners? I think it would be pretty easy overall to structure. An artist could list their price range (or trade/freebies), payment methods/options/deposits, type of art they do, how often they take commissions, how many commissions they've done, and average time it takes them to complete the commission. Customers would have the option of rating and reviewing that artist plus linking to the art that was done for them (or worst case not done for them). I think all of this would allow it to be easier for artists get customers (if they need it) as well as customers to find an artist that suits their needs.

Heck, even just a simple page that listed all the artists that have flagged themselves as open for commissions would be all that's needed as the artist themselves can supply the rest of their information on their front pages.