And I think I think too much. If you’re in my age range, the rest of the Stone Temple Pilots lyrics are probably filling themselves in now. I don’t even know if that’s correct, and frankly I don’t care – I wish The X would get over its aggregate federally-mandated Bush and Smashing Pumpkins boner and play the half a dozen mind-90s radio tracks I actually liked.

When I was exploring CCR and The Animals and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, my dad bristled. He “hates that shit,” he said, for good reason – he couldn’t get away from it then, and now? Now it’s all the classic rock stations play. A purgatory of a few dozen top forty rock tracks on endless shuffle.

Which has nothing to do with the ultimate subject of this post, that being DCR status as it relates to ATC production.

Here’s a simple fact: DCR.2 (“The Operative”) is heavily outlined, mostly scripted, and needs two or three major CG assets to proceed. It’ll need these assets for the rest of the story. DCR.2 already has four pages (16 strips) complete. These will be acceptable with a little bit of work on the writing to correct grammatical errors and such.

TV.2 (“Water”) has a firm outline but no actual script, and a CG to-do list that is, in a word, insane. There’s a TON of work to do to get the chapter ready, and almost all of it is one-off work. One-off for Transitional Voices, anyway. It’s stuff I could use later, and it’s stuff I can use for portfolio development (a high priority after immediate production goals are met, along with securing income, employment, etc), but between the shape of the script and the shape of the assets, well… DCR.2 would be ready for production even if I worked on DCR and TV assets in parallel.

DCR needs Whitehouse’s apartment (in some detail), Jesse’s apartment (skeletal), the outside of Gheny (for closeup balcony shots, and the parking lot for top-down shots at the end of this chapter), and the skeleton of an Aeon corridor. And a DCR.1 rewrite (THIRD EDITION!), but after a very quick skim that can be done in a day.

TV needs a finished Banshee (aerospace fighter), tweaks to Sabrosa textures, a section of sickbay, and part – or all – of the Daedalus bathroom. And that’s just for the first scene. From there it’s all new exterior stuff, but it’s complicated new exterior stuff.

Ultimately, after the current round of re-covering is done, after the website is done, it looks like I’ll be targeting DCR for production. The fact that the chapter has an almost-complete script and already has pages weighs favorably, given the amount of work required to get TV.2 into a similar state.

That leads to the puzzle of DCR formatting and layout, with a special emphasis on the DCR website. For the last several years it’s been a blog with an occasionally updated strip-format comic. These strips have been the “draft” form of DCR pages and in some cases bear little resemblance to the whitehouse that appears on the ATC website. The story can either continue in strip form (as, after a fashion, my “commentary” on other college newspaper comic strips), drafted in DCR.org and showing up here as full pages, or it can mutate into straight-up Full Pages, in which case, the ATC site is a more natural vehicle. What with being completely geared towards comic presentation and whatnot.

I plan to have the thinking on this done by the time the chapters and site rework are complete. At the moment it looks like production is going to be DCR assets, DCR.2 while TV.2 assets are generated, then TV.2. Then either DCR.3 or TV.3. However things develop, DCR.2 actually has pages – which puts it firmly in the “unfinished business” category. Unfinished Business is what the past eighteen months have been about – it would be foolish to keep the project on the back-burner at this point.

The Operative will be short – shorter than Whitehouse – and with four pages already done-for-art, it’s that much shorter. In terms of work left to do, anyway. 18-20 pages as strips, possibly 22-24 if I “expand” to pages or expand the strip format from 4x to 3x or even 2x.

Any way I cut it, regardless of the amount of time I spend on it, we’re not going to see anything in the way of new pages on any front until February or March at the earliest. Maybe January if I’m phenomenally lucky and accomplish everything that needs to be done to close out The Dualist, update the site, etc.

Another round of Thinking Out Loud, brought to you by Philosmatika, Garfield Artworks, and a clock radio that can’t let go of the 90s.