On this little page, I want to shout out some of the amazing people that have gotten me to where I am now. I know “Thank Yous” and “Credits” are usually reserved for the end of a project, but given the vast scope of my ambitions, there’s a good chance we’ll never see the end of AAiS. (interpret that sentence however you want) Therefore, I deemed a dedicated webpage to be the best option to pay homage to these exceptional individuals, especially since I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve managed to get to this point in my life without ample outside help. No one can make it all by himself, that’s a lesson I learned the long, hard, and painful way.
My pseudo-philosophical ramblings aside, here’s a list of some of the greatest personalities I’ve had the fortune to share this planet with:
Aaron Blaise and the team from Creatureartteacher.com,
Stan Prokopenko and the team from Proko.com,
& Matt Kohr from Ctrlpaint.com
Obviously, I had to start this list off with some artists. As I’ve learned during my years in school and Uni, teaching people the foundations of visual art is difficult in person, and somehow even harder online. Teaching the foundations of art in digestible, short but also precise and informative videos, however, is another step above that entirely. Not only does the creation of such videos require an impressive array of knowledge about the many subjects at hand, but also considerable skills in script-writing and acting. Beyond that, you also have to consider the equipment costs for recording, cutting, animating and hosting these videos online. Putting in all the required time, effort and money to make such content, but then also taking the extra step of freely providing large parts of said content simply for the good of mankind, now that doesn’t deserve anything but the highest appreciation from my part. The people mentioned above have all made invaluable contributions to the world by providing fledgling artists with a seemingly endless library of free videos that’ll get them started on their journey. I highly encourage anyone reading this to check out the websites linked above and to show your support for these guys in whichever way you feel appropriate. I wouldn’t be here without them.
The team behind Krita.org
While we’re on the topic of doing something free of charge for the benefit of humanity, I want to express my sincerest gratitude to the guys working on Krita. While Krita certainly isn’t the only free digital art application contributing to the global effort shaking Adobe’s ivory tower of digital creative software market dominance, it still has a special place in my heart. For me, it started with Krita and ended with Krita (that is, if you consider ‘today’ to be the ‘end of my preceding history’. This project and I are both still alive, don’t worry.). Their software has also consistently improved over the last few years, always providing awesome new features for a fraction of the performance loss and none of the cost that Photoshop updates have incurred over the years. Of course, Krita isn’t quite the all-purpose software that Photoshop is, and Adobe still has the leg up on specialized “Neural” features, but if you were to ask me which painting software I’d recommend to a beginner, this is it – no question. While I certainly would have found certain means to do digital art even if Photoshop was the only art software out there, the Butterfly-Effect dictates that neither you nor me would be here today if Krita wasn’t around. So, if you’re happy with how life’s going, why not visit their website and give them some support?
Andeh Pinkard from comicfontsby.tehandeh.com
Do you like type fonts? Because I don’t. You know, I used to like them, but then I learned about all the licensing stuff involved with using certain fonts in your projects, and that changed my entire perspective. Finding a font for my comic that both looked good and didn’t require me to sell my soul to some ancient evil demigod called “Xahvhijh” seemed like a hopeless endeavor, but then I came across Press Gang Studios. While Andeh isn’t the only guy offering fonts for non-profit and self-published comics, the sheer amount of high-quality typesets on offer made me want to give a special shout out to his website. If you’re in need of letters that look good, but are unwilling to suffer an eternal afterlife of being forced to listen to Xahvhijh’s cryptocurrency TEDx talks, then you should check out Andeh’s website.
Bruno Frasca from bru-cast.com
You didn’t really think I’d write up this entire page without contributing to our mutual appreciation society, did you, Bruno? Jokes aside, Bruno is probably the single person to have been most immediately responsible for AAiS, and this website, existing in their current form. You see, for a long list of reasons, I’ve always had extreme anxiety about putting myself online, and that was actually one of the biggest factors keeping this whole project in an endless procrastination loop for all these years. All of those apprehensions were suddenly put to the test after I had drunkenly agreed to come on to the BruCast one evening. After a few preceding hours of utter panic, Bruno and heavily-inebriated me ended up recording an episode for his podcast together, and what followed was one of the most awful, sleepless nights I’ve ever had in my life. That much was predictable, of course, but what came after THAT was entirely unexpected: I woke up and was still alive. But not just that, there was also no internet hate-mob standing in front of my door threatening to burn my house down after I had dared to put such an awful performance on the net. Even more: There were no articles written by the NYT about my horrendous showing, nor were any of my accounts hacked, nor were there any hate-filled comments about the podcast. There was nothing, except for a few likes on the video…
I had screamed into the abyss, and the abyss didn’t care. I was nobody, a screaming madman between a billion screaming madmen. The sum of all my life’s fears was met by society’s collective ambivalence. It was beautiful, the most beautiful reaction I could have hoped for.
A long time ago, I heard someone say that self-consciousness and narcissism are heavily related, if not the same thing. If you suffer from low self-esteem and are incredibly self-conscious, like I am to this day, you might initially want to reject that description and argue that being self-conscious is, instead, the complete opposite of narcissism and that your life would be so much better if people could just take their eyes off of you for one god-damn second. This one single podcast, in my eyes, proved whoever said those words entirely correct. Turns out, people weren’t looking at me at all. I didn’t matter to them, and despite my fears, they didn’t spend their entire day making fun of me. For years, I put off doing what I really wanted to do as a way of pleasing people that were barely even aware of my existence, but Bruno’s podcast changed all that.
After our episode together, I sat down and worked tirelessly for two months in order to create this website, write the first RB entry and finally release the first two pages of AAiS, which brings us to today. Had Bruno not shoved me into the limelight and indirectly given me that realization, there’s a good chance none of this would have ever happened. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again from the bottom of my heart: Thank you, Bruno.
(Despite me mentioning it a few times, I wouldn’t recommend you actually watch our podcast episode. It’s bad. Go watch any of the other ones.)
Vincenzo “Vinny” Pizzapasta aka “Vsauce”
Ok, I’m running into a minefield of people calling me out for having para social relationships here, but I still want to give old Tugboat a quick shoutout. Booti was actually one of the first English-speaking YouTubers I ended up following, and all that started with the release of his first Skate 3 video back in 2012. At the time, I barely had a principal grasp of the English language, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of watching the funny skate man get stuck on a car while some Italian-American jabroni laughs his ass off in the background. After this first hit, I ended up watching more and more of his videos, and as I slowly expanded my repertory of English-speaking YouTubers that I watched, I soon found myself having an almost natural sense for their language. Let me tell you, the English side of the internet is infinitely bigger and infinitely more fun than the small German corner I was stuck in before having randomly stumbled upon one of Dinty’s videos. Anyway, ever since that one day back in 2012, I’ve been an avid fan of Barnyard’s work, even if I’ve never commented on one of his videos, never posted a word in his chat and only ever caught two streams of his live. Without Binyot, I probably would have never gained any interest in retro tech, sci-fi stuff, web comics or good music, and neither me nor you would be where we are today. Thanks for making this possible, Italian Joel.
(For those not in on the joke, his name is Vinny and his channel is called Vinesauce. Highly recommend you check him and the rest of the Vinesauce community out, they’re all legends.)
RyuujinZERO, Fevix and whoever at Valve caused the 2019 Summer Sale fuckup
Ok, now this one’s a bit of a story, so sit back and relax. Once upon a time, in the magical year of 2019, back when no one had any idea what a “Wuhan” was, there ruled a king over the realm of videogames. His name was GabeN, and by his graces descended great deals from the heavens above, tremendous opportunities to save tons of money on games you like. In the summer of that year, GabeN had, once again, decided to grace us peasants with his magical gift of price-slashing, and slashed they were! This time, though, the sale was accompanied by something new: A grand prix during which steam users could compete in earning steam wallet cash by doing certain tasks within certain videogames. It was a great gesture of kindness by the lord of videogames himself, but unbeknownst to GabeN, he had made a mistake. You see, a certain task within a game called “Starbound” was infinitely repeatable thanks to the help of mods, allowing the user to earn great amounts of cash for no effort at all! This grave mistake by lord GabeN destroyed any sense of competition, and soon users were scrambling to buy Starbound in order to make mad stacks of steam cash. One of these users was me.
Now, what does this story have to do with AAiS, you ask? Well, I bought Starbound during the sale and made about 40 bucks in return, so that was cool, but not cool enough to be a focal point of this story. No, the important things started happening after the sale. Once the sale was over, I actually sunk quite a bit of time into Starbound, and soon found the amount of content in the game to be somewhat… lacking. Luckily, though, there was a great repository of mods available through the game’s Workshop, and so I started adding one mod, then another, then another and another… Eventually, I also ended up installing the “Avali” creature mod and that’s where this story gets interesting. After installing so many mods, my original save for Starbound ended up getting corrupted and I had to start a new game. I chose to play as one of the avali this time and subsequently had one of the most fun times in my entire history with video games. All the mods had completely ruined the game’s balance and I proceeded to put together a character build so overpowered that nothing could survive a single shot from my granade launcher, including bosses. Seeing a cute space raptor running around with a one-shot grenade launcher of death like that made me want to draw some art of that little fellow, and with the art came the first short stories.
Soon after that, the first cornerstones for what would eventually become AAiS were laid down. That’s right, “An Altercation in Space” actually started out as “An Avali in Space” and was supposed to be about a cute space-bird bringing justice to the galaxy through the use of his giga-atomic-fusion-fission-hyper-mega-explosive-mega-death-ray grenade launcher. As you can tell by looking at the story now, we’ve somewhat diverged from that original concept. Indeed, I kept adding more places, characters, designs and other stuff onto the original story, and soon things didn’t really mesh with the avali canon. As the scale and ambition of AAiS grew, I felt more and more like I was simply impose my Lore-divergent ideas onto the creation of another, so action had to be taken. That action was the creation of the Ryka(ni). Now, a rudely honest person could say that the rykani are simply slightly taller avali with some miniscule design changes that make them visually more boring. That person would be correct, but… uh…. yeah. I suck at creature design, that’s the excuse I’m going with. Despite some visual similarities, their lore ended up being nothing alike, and in terms of history, biology, psychology, technology, sociology and all that other fun stuff, there’s very little avail remaining in the rykani. (The only lore-thing that was kind of carried over was the concept of “packs”, although shatils work very differently from avali packs.)
But despite any and all differences, I still felt it proper to give credit to Ryuujin for designing the little space-raptors and inspiring me to write my own universe filled to the brim with cute, fluffy aliens, and to Fevix for creating and upkeeping the avali mod for Starbound. Had you guys at any point in your life decided to not be as awesome as you ended up being in this timeline, I wouldn’t be here today.
My Friends and Family
I know some of my friends and family members might think this one redundant, but important things are many times not said often enough, so here goes: I truly cherish the relationships I have with every single one of you. There’s no way I would have made it to this point without the support, comfort, friendship, and love every single one of you have given me over the years. I know I’m not always the best when it comes to showing my affection, and I also know that I’m not the most talkative and direct person out there. Despite that, I sincerely hope that all of you know how important you are to me.
And you
Yes, you. If you’re reading this, you’ve already done more for me than I would have ever had the guts to ask for. Even you just visiting my website and reading this paragraph truly means a lot to me. You might think that I’m laying it on too thick by this point, but please, do consider this: At the time of writing, there are about eight billion people living on this planet, and I’m just one of them. Now, ask yourself: How many people out of those eight billion have you given as much attention as you have given me by engaging with this website? Even if you just headed straight onto this page and then skipped right to this bottom passage, you’ve already given me more attention than >99% of the other people in this world will ever receive from you. You see how this goes? No matter what you do on this website, you’ve already added me onto your top 1% of most engaged with humans, and that’s awfully kind of you. Now, you might consider this cheating and claim that I’m abusing mathematics to make either one or both of us feel better about our place in this world, in which case I’ll have to plead guilty. Turns out that, statistically, I matter to you, and if you let me know of your existence through any of the means provided at the bottom of this page, then statistically you’ll matter to me in return. And in conclusion, everyone in this world matters to someone, at least purely mathematically, and that’s nice.