So When is Anything Happening Anyway? January 10 2023
Hi guys! Some people actually read the blog posts on this site. When I first decided I was going to close, I set in motion a series of events to end things. My initial plan was to get done by the end of the year.
BUT! Has an ADHD person ever correctly estimated the amount of time they will take to finish a complex undertaking? Maybe, but it was likely an accident.
Here's the current adjusted timeline.
GETTING DECEMBER 2022 ORDERS MAILED OUT - Done! I sent those out a few days ago.
INTO THE UNKNOWN RESTOCK - so if you've followed my comments on Instagram and Reddit, you'll know that I've vaguely said that there will be a restock of the OTGW inspired collection. This decision was based on the unexpectedly high demand for the collection, and was not initially planned - otherwise, I simply would have made bigger batches. Because I can only work when Baby Yeti is either asleep or being watched by Dad Yeti, I have such limited time. I'm going to figure out which ingredients I still have and reorder the others as soon as I can, but because shipping times for ingredients can be weird I'm going to put this as LATE JANUARY to MID FEBRUARY.
NEW COLLECTION I'VE VAGUELY TEASED - A while back, there was a post on /r/indiemakeupandmore where someone had made an AI come up with indie perfume descriptions. I commented being like, I want to make it! And then two years passed. I've actually been working on this for a while, but I want to do the final tweaks to some of the scents to make them exactly what I want them to be. I'm only going to do this after the Into The Unknown restock. PROBABLY MARCH?
AND THE REST - After both of these restocks, I will have more ingredients than I want to hoard in my small apartment. The Yeti Room is slated to become the Baby Yeti Room after this - he's almost a year old and now has entirely too many books and toys and various babythings. So I will make random other things - I was planning on restocking the hair oil because it's got a bit of a following, as well as releasing the exact recipe used, etc etc. Eventually I'll sell some of my making supplies to interested buyers - things like lake dyes that I thought I'd have a reason to use but then didn't ever actually use because I never dove that deep into cosmetics manufacturing etc etc. If interested in any of this nonsense, wait until MARCH to ask questions.
I want to get most of the stuff sold by MAY for a few reasons.
1. Get it out of my dang apartment
2. I want to use my free time to play Tears of the Kingdom when it comes out
3. Also Disco Elysium
4. Seriously, I have had no video game time since this dang baby (Apart from a few runs of Vampire Survivors after my husband unlocked most of the things that made it easy...)
BUT WAIT, WHAT ABOUT THE POSTCARDS FOR THE INTO THE UNKNOWN COLLECTION?
So some people asked about getting postcards made from the Into the Unknown art. When I originally decided to make AI generated art to use as the labels for my last couple of releases, there wasn't as much discussion about the ethics of AI generated art - certainly not like there is now. I've canceled my subscription to Midjourney, FYI. But I do have a bunch of art generated within that time that I'm planning to still use- mostly since the entire reason that I initially decided to do it was because I was making a whole computer generated indie collection. So this was the thought process.
1. AI generated scents and names. What about...
2. AI generated label art! Looks like I'll subscribe to one of those things and then I can make a bunch of art, including art for...
3. Into the Unknown! What a good idea that I'll never have mixed feelings about!
(TIME PASSES)
4. Uh...do I want to try to profit off of art that was made from an AI? Art that may have been stylistically influenced by other artists?
For what it's worth, I never asked for art in the style of other artists. The keywords I used to obtain the style for the ITU collection were "Vintage illustration." For the AI generated collection, I pretty much just fed in the names of the perfumes with zero stylistic guidance because I wanted the outputs to be purely based on the names and not influenced by what I wanted them to look like (that said, I ran some of the inputs several times to get ones that looked interesting.) But any label art generated in 2023 will be by my own miserable scrawl (or public domain images or photos that I take or something.)
So right now, I'm thinking of doing the following.
1. OFFERING THE ART AS DOWNLOADS WITH OPTION TO TIP? I'LL HAVE TO SEE IF I NEED A SHOPIFY PLUGIN TO DO THAT.
2. MAYBE STILL MAKING POSTCARDS IN THE SUMMERTIME BUT ONLY IF ENOUGH PEOPLE STILL CLAMOR FOR THEM AFTER READING THIS HORRIBLY LONG BLOG POST.
I know that postcards are way cheaper to print in bulk, so there is value in having someone do that instead of just being given some crisp and shiny jpgs. SOOOOO I guess this is the end of the blog post? If you have any additional questions, ask me and I'll respond in y e t a n o t h e r p o s t.
If this was incoherent at all, I wrote it at 2:00 AM and can edit it later when I am well rested.
Last thing: Baby Yeti is doing so well! He was a helmet baby for a while because of a very flat head but now his head is so round and he is always screaming in joy. He is learning how to walk and wants to grab the cat at all moments. He has an obsession with the carbon monoxide detector that I try to discourage.