April 2025 Newsletter

what's going on in the world of amelia?

I quit my job and I'm moving halfway down the country to live with my partner.

Anyway,

AMELIA GOES 3D

I've now finished modelling my 3D avatar in Blender and have been cracking on with the texturing.

With this avatar, I'm going for something a little edgy, a little punk, and kinda hot in a dirtbag way. It's heavily inspired by the brilliant 3D work of Lilith 'b0tster' Walther, but it's a little higher poly and I prefer to keep it 3D for mouth shapes. Not that that last bit is relevant here, since I've covered 3D Amelia's mouth with a gas mask breather thing.

I used to unwrap (arrange the 3D faces into a 2D layout you can slap a texture onto) my models completely before I even opened my image editing app of choice (MediBang). But with this model I've tried focusing on making nice textures first and THEN unwrapping the faces onto them. It's working MUCH better for me. It's meant I can lock in on giving my textures some...well, texture.

It also means you can do little tricks like this. That's 24 faces all sharing the same texture patch. You get a whole skirt from just one 16x64 segment. Looks seamless.

THE FREYA PROJECT: SECOND DRAFT

Four months into this project, I finally have a finished draft of the script. And it doesn't make me wanna throw up everywhere!

It's a lot tighter, a lot more action packed, and has a lot more heart. It's definitely a MASSIVE step up from what it was before.

...granted, it's still not AMAZING. So the next two months are about redrafting and polishing this new draft until it's finally ready to be produced into a full-fledged audio drama. I've already noticed that I have a tendency to overwrite the dialogue- the audience doesn't need as much information as you think they do!

The trap I always fall into at this stage is wanting to rip up the entire script and start again from page 1. When I was doing my degree, my final project was a 120-page feature screenplay. Being my first go, I made a ton of mistakes (trying to tackle a lofty topic way above my weight class, for a start) but one of the things I prided myself on was my making every new draft a complete, from-scratch rewrite instead of just editing the previous one.

I still think the rationale is solid. I hate the awkwardness of making huge structural changes to an already finished script- for me it often feels like trying to rip out and reorder the pages of your favourite book. It's messy. Plus, I feel some kind of obligation to the material that's already there. So by rewriting it from scratch, I have a clean slate where I can make the big sweeping changes I need.

However, I want to have my scripts ready before I die. Plus, this approach is focused way too intensely on plot mechanics and neglects other, smaller parts of a script that also need improvement. So now I just do one full rewrite to re-jig the story, and spend the rest of my time tweaking and fixing stuff.

While the script still isn't finished, I can't keep talking about it without telling you what it's actually about. So, I've finally gotten off my ass and slapped together a logline:

20 year old Leo is detached from the world, and his personal life is imploding around him. Just as he's hitting rock bottom, he finds himself the victim of both a failed kidnapping and a mass signal hijacking that outs him as a trans woman- both in the same night. This sets in motion a sequence of events that force him to run for his life and confront everything he's been avoiding...

Hope that's interesting enough for you. Work on The Freya Project is kind of on hold until after I've moved, but it'll pick right back up in June.

AMELIA'S ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2025: APRIL

This month I didn't listen to quite as much as March- 28 albums, 20 from this year. I don't think I listened to anything I've liked on the same level as my favourite albums of last month, but there's still three I kept going back to:

MADI SERKET COMMITS S*****E - Madi Serket

Between UNKILLABLE ANGEL, Perverts, and now this, the cheat code to my heart seems to be edgy transgirl vocalist/producers. I don't really have much to say about this one other than that it has some KILLER beats good god.

FAV TRACKS: SQUISHY SOPHIE, CLAP!, GET A LIFE

From The Private Collection of Saba & No ID - Saba & No ID

My other cheat code this year is rap albums with black and white covers.

FAV TRACKS: Woes of the World, Westside Bound Pt. 4, How to Impress God

A City Drowned In God's Black Tears - Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals

Rap album. Black and white cover. A rage-filled album that doesn't hesitate to start flinging shit at zionists, which is always a plus.

FAV TRACKS: The Iron Wall, Everyone I Love is Depressed

[VIDEOFUNGUS NEWSLETTER SPONSOERED SEGEMENT]

Ok now instead of banging out a limp 'see you next time', I'm gonna end this newsletter by plugging some other ones.

THE CASS REPORT

My friend Cass has a banging seasonal newsletter that's like. A hundred times better than this one. If you wanna hear about skeletons, stargazing, and what it's like to work in a cinema, hop on over and give it a read.

DYNAMO HEROES

My partner pocketandrew started his fantasy superhero webcomic Dynamo Heroes last September, and since then has been putting out three new pages EVERY week! He's up to page 120 as of writing this- check it out!