Let me start out by saying I hate New Year’s resolutions. I hate them so much that I tend to consider my birthday in November the start of my new year. I can’t do New Year’s resolutions because I don’t follow your ridiculously antediluvian Gregorian calendar. That said, here’s the thing that I’m going to do for the year 35 LE (Lynk Era), 12,018 HE (the Holocene calendar year) or 2018 (which I’ll be referring to as two-thousand-great-teen as a quirky motivator moving forward.
I’m going to do a Thing a Week. No lofty 13-week plans or 30-day challenges that my caffeine-addled mind slips off as fast as a retiree’s Facebook posts stumble aggressively into Godwin’s Law. You might be wondering how I intend to define a Thing™ as some of us have been in the habit of doing several things a week, for instance up until just recently most of you have avoided eating Tide Pods which could be a thing, but I’m not giving you the credit you think you deserve for avoiding the mastication of dissolving packets of laundry detergent despite current trends suggesting I should. I like simplicity; anything with an excess of complicated rules doesn’t deserve nice things and whoopsie-daisy I made this political again. Don’t blame me, blame how great globalism and the new world order could be. Moving on…
So the rules of my Thing a Week project are, as I said, simple. They are:
- Do a Thing a Week.
- Publish that Thing on Friday.
- Briefly mention in passing what the next Thing will be (that’s called accountability, Carol!)
- Repeat. (Who the hell Rinses and Repeats? When do you really need to wash your hair more than once in the same shower?)
- a completed result or milestone of an act or process that you’ve been meaning to do, and really should do. Typically creative in nature.
- an indicator of progress towards a much higher, more complicated, and otherwise difficult to manage goal.
- a personal branding stunt to get people to notice how awesome I am.
That’s it. You can take that simple formula and apply it to your own life. Slip into my DMs if you want to make a gratification check out to me.
I didn’t invent the Thing a Week. In September 2005, Jonathan Coulton (the guy who did the songs from Portal) started a Thing a Week project that resulted in four albums of songs.
From September 2005 to September 2006 I recorded a new song every week and released it for free on my website as a podcast. It was an attempt to keep the creative juices flowing as freely as possible, and a way for me to push myself to take risks, work quickly and trust in the creative process.
Since I have a lot of different metals to burn, my Thing(s)™ are going to vary. They won’t always be final products or pieces, and the medium is going to jump around a lot. One week I might draw something and the next I might vlog. Who knows!
Week One, Thing One
For my first week, I’m going to produce at least one hand-drawn, animated walk cycle. Walk cycles provide a decent challenge and cover a lot of fundamentals in animation. I’m not planning on inking or coloring it, all I care about is getting some solid form going. To get me going, I’ve been reading what I call the Animation Bible:
I’m about 110 pages into this massive textbook. If you are interested in animation, this is the book to have.
So, on Friday, expect to see at least one animated walk cycle.
