We are three quarters in to what I've deemed the "Year of the Fool's Leap" in a previous blog post, and I'd like to give you all an update as to my doings and things as it pertains to this new productivity paradigm I've devised for myself, as well as some thoughts about the future of this website and the purpose it serves.
Let's get in to it.
So, How's it Going So Far?
Wait... What do you mean "Year of the Fool's Leap"? Are you doing something stupid or what?
I explain what I mean by that in great detail, which you can read here, but if you don't want to slog through paragraphs and paragraphs of words, I'll explain it succinctly here in only one:
I've dubbed 2023 the Year of the Fool's Leap because I've taken a "leap of faith", so to speak, into a new productivity paradigm in hopes of increasing the rate at which I crank out creative content. This new paradigm involves freeing myself as much as possible from any needlessly restrictive protocols (which tend to be counterproductive as my creative juices dry up when I turn my art-making into a stringent job) by instead allowing my creative mind to freely create as much as possible, only guiding it as my rational mind sees fit to do so, much akin to tending a garden as opposed to building a machine.
So, What Have You Gotten Done In That Time?
I'm sure it looks like I've done virtually nothing during that time, just sort of tweaked the website a bit and teased the production of a comic, but I can assure you things are happening behind the scenes.
The Comic
Firstly, yes, the comic Kiki Banana: Treasure Huntress is still in the works, even if it doesn't seem like it has had any work done on it in quite a while, as the Currently Working On page hasn't seen an update for a while now. That's because things have changed a bit.
My Vision for this (for lack of a better term) intellectual property of mine has expanded, and some of the details have been clarified.
I may have mentioned before, but since I don't remember where and to what extend, I'll mention it again - I have ambitions of building a body of creative properties over the course of my career as a Cartoon Artist that can each become a self-perpetuating, content-generating apparatus of sorts that can eventually be headed up by other people so I can go off and start more.
A lot of creatives do this kind of thing. One in particular that comes to mind is Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. He's responsible for starting the likes of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Pikmin, etc, yet each of these properties others have taken over while he retains little, if any, involvement. He established the foundational work for others to eventually build up and expand from.
I've decided to make Kiki Banana the first of these creative properties I start, and as such will require a tremendous amount of effort and, especially, focus in order to get established. But, once it is established, it'll only require the occasional bit of effort and attention to keep it going. It's like rolling a boulder over a hill - getting the boulder to the top of the hill is the hardest part, rolling it uphill. Once it's up there, though, gravity can take over to roll it downhill.
It's also like the story that famous motivational speaker Zig Ziglar tells about the water pumps. Those old water pumps that pull up well water from deep underground take a tremendous amount of pumping at first, and you never see any evidence that it's working. That's because the water is indeed slowly making its way upwards with each pump, but it takes many, many pumps to get it flowing out the faucet, and if you stop, all that effort was wasted as the water falls back down again, and you have to start all the way over. However, once you do get the water going, it just flows and flows, requiring only the occasional pump to continue flowing.
So, with this creative property of mine being the one I've chosen to manifest first, I needed some time to develop and clarify a Vision for the whole kit n' caboodle, as opposed to only the one print comic series. That required some time and thought, but now I've got a working plan.
Each of these properties I'll develop in phases, each with a specific purpose and plan of action with a quantifiable endpoint.
Kiki Banana, Phase 1:
For Kiki Banana, first I'd like to establish a hardy supply of "free sample" material; stuff that folks can engage with without having to give anything other than a smidgen of their time and attention to see if this is something they'd like more of. This "free sample" material will begin as both a series of Web Comics and a series of Animated Shorts. The Web Comics will be 1-3 page short bursts of silliness, emphasizing jokes and gags, whereas the Animated Shorts will be mostly farcical cartoon adventure stories with emphasis on visual humor and stunning set pieces.
Secondly, of course, I'd like to establish the beginnings of paid content (seeing as it would be nice to see a little money earned from the immense amount of time, effort, attention, and energy it takes to make this stuff), which will come in the form of the aforementioned Print Comic Kiki Banana: Treasure Huntress, which tells longer-form stories about Kiki's becoming a seafaring treasure hunter, which people more invested in the characters and setting would better appreciate than those going in blind, and would thus be more willing to pay.
So, Phase 1 begins with a slew of web comics and an animated short or two, and ends with the publishing of the first volume of print comics comprising of the first three episodes. After that, I'll just step back a bit, monitor audience response, and gather data through feedback to determine how I move into Phase 2 (or whether I continue at all or move on to something else).
So that's my focus at the moment, and why work on the print comic appears to have halted - it really hasn't, there's just been more preliminary work to be done before I go full steam ahead with it's production.
Also, expect a massive overhaul of the website KikiBanana.com. I plan to make the site itself as much a fun experience as the contents therein, so look out for that in the near future.
About the Future of this Website... and beyond
Alrighty then, let's shift gears a bit and discuss the potential future of The Bradshacalypse, its two-fold purpose, and what I want to do about it.
I may put out a later blog post further detailing this train of thought, but I'll just throw it out here for now - I'm thinking about splitting this website in two, one for each purpose.
Let me explain.
In a couple of blog posts (here and here, the ones with the word "teleological" in their titles), I've described in great detail about the dual-natured purpose of this website, namely as both a gallery for my creative works and a resource for other creatives who yearn for more than the postmodernist drivel that can be found damn-near everywhere else.
For the longest time, actual years at this point, I've struggled to come up with a way to seamlessly integrate both of these disparate purposes together into a single website, but the more I try, the more I realize...
They really need to be two entirely separate enterprises. Here's why:
Personal Dreams vs. Impersonal Purpose
This whole time, I've been conflating Dreams (long-term life goals, a clearly defined vision for a desired future outcome) with Purpose (the striving for an optimal future end result), which, while having very similar definitions, aren't exactly the same thing.
A Dream is personal, it's the Vision of the optimal end result for that particular person. Purpose is basically the same thing, only in a much broader, impersonal sense. Often times, one's Dream is one's Purpose, the very reason why they get up in the morning and not just curl up and die. Sometimes, however, a Dream can serve a higher Purpose, a much broader, eternal Purpose than itself. This is where I find myself.
My Dream, for example, (without getting into the details such that any counter-intention could foil it) is to establish a Creative Studio with which I can crank out fun cartoon art and tell stories that mean something to people and, perhaps, change their lives for the better in some way, even if it just makes them laugh or smile. That's my Dream that's unique specifically to me.
My Purpose, however, is (again, sans details) is to play my role, whatever that role entails, in the establishment of a New Cultural Paradigm, a new modality of thinking, that has its foundation in objective, eternal Truth (actuality, that which simply is) that works with the Laws of Nature and Nature's God instead of against them, allowing Humanity to not only save itself from the brink of destruction it finds itself on currently, but to thrive well into the future.
I go into great detail about this Purpose and why I'm so invested in it here in the Esoteric About page and this blog post.
This Dream, that's all about my own personal life goals, could be the role or part of the role I play in this broader Purpose that isn't all about me but rather the entirety of the human species. Therefore, you could say that my Dream serves this bigger Purpose.
Now, what the hell does that have to do with the website?
Well, just the fact that my Dream and my Purpose are not the same means that they can't occupy the same medium, namely this one website.
The Bradshacalypse is an expression of my Dream, my own personal purpose I've given myself (or really the purpose I've always known I've had since I first started drawing) - it is effectively my Studio... or what might eventually become my Studio, perhaps. My Dream is my own property, if you will; a solo performance. My Purpose, conversely, is merely a bit part I play in a much, much larger story that encompasses a whole troupe's worth of other players.
That's why this Purpose needs its own Medium, its own Platform.
All this platform has to be is just a place where like-minded Creatives can congregate under this one Purpose. Those of us that are sick of seeing our culture rot into oblivion can all join forces under one Mastermind Alliance to work towards reversing this course by establishing a 21st Century Renaissance with Art that resonates with Natural Law, to create actual Beauty grounded in Truth to inspire Good.
...
This is still a very new idea, so I haven't spent just heaps of time on it right yet, but believe you me, I am inspired.
Wait, hold up. What about DeOcculted.Info? Wasn't that supposed to be this "other website"?
Kind of. Let me explain.
You may have noticed (or not) that my other website, DeOcculted.Info, has been rather neglected for a while now, and recently decommissioned, relegating it to a "free site" with no special features since I can't afford three whole websites that all cost a lot of time and money to keep up.
One might wonder if I no longer believe any of the otherwise strange things I espoused on that website if I'm just giving it up. One would be dead wrong.
I do still think the world is mostly controlled by an "elite" group of satanic pedophile psychopaths who want to keep us unbegun hylics in the dark as to their true motives such that they can harvest our efforts like we're a bunch of dumb farm animals.
I do still think that we as a species were potentially tampered with genetically by an extraterrestrial race of some sort that didn't give a shit about the ramifications of their actions, which would explain why we seem so disconnected from nature and ill-fit for this planet compared to the other indigenous species.
I do think the physical universe is a virtual reality construct designed by Higher Powers to put us on the fast track to spiritual growth such that we can evolve in Consciousness and further the Will of Creation's desire for continued syntropy aggregation amongst its constituent individuated units of Consciousness.
However... I now realize how delusional it is to try to fight the Darkness, when all you have to do to defeat it is to replace it with Light.
I'll admit, for a while there I felt a bit pressured to start some kind of "truther" thing by how bleak all the researchers I listened to framed the situation. I felt like if I wasn't participating in spreading this information in exactly the same kind of way they were, I was doing a disservice not only to those not in the know, but to myself karmically - how dare I just sit on all this information and do nothing with it, right?
That's pretty much the only reason DeOcculted.Info exists at all - guilt and pressure.
Later, as I worked on the website and gave it a good attempt, I came to realize that this method of information dispersion just isn't for me, it's not my strong suit. Later still, I came to kind of despise the dower, hopeless, angry, pessimistic attitude of many of these researchers into the dark occult and conspiracy "theory". Like, if you really think it's that unbelievably bad, why bother even trying, right? Like, what's the solution, then? What do we do about all this!?
I soon realized what I found so distasteful about them - they're trying to fight the Darkness instead of simply replace it with Light.
Yes, it's important to know the Truth, regardless of how "bad" it seems, that I agree with 100%... but that doesn't mean you have to sit there and masturbate to it like some masochistic cuckold. It means you know what you don't want, so now you're blessed with the opportunity to clearly define what it is you do want, and start moving in that direction.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. - R. Buckminster Fuller
This is one of my absolute favorite quotes, and it's what inspired me to take a different approach to "de-occulting" information. Instead of parroting the likes of Alex Jones, David Icke, Mark Passio, Michael Tsarion, Lloyd Pie, Jim Marrs, Jordan Maxwell, etc., (all whose work I respect greatly and believe is vitally important), I can take this information and incorporate it into my own creative works, using the Consciousness technologies of Art and Storytelling to embed these concepts deep into the subconscious mind, where they're permanently stuck. That's how the propagandists have turned whole nations into raving lunatics with their lies. If it works with lies, why wouldn't it work even better with the Truth...? Clearly, intellectual discourse alone hasn't done the trick yet, may as well deploy some other tactics, right?
Similarly, I can also use my Art and Storytelling to embed solutions to these "problems", rather than just knowledge of the "problems" themselves. That would be one way to build a new model, a new modality of thinking (understanding of Natural Laws, objective morality, true optimism, etc.) , that renders the current one (postmodernism, nihilism, pessimism, solipsism, satanic "me above all else" mentality, etc.) obsolete.
The role of DeOcculted will likely be rolled into the New Paradigm Website
Ultimately, the function of DeOcculted will be absorbed by the New Paradigm Website (that's what I'll call it until it becomes an actual thing). After all, if this New Cultural Paradigm is to be grounded in Truth, it would benefit those wanting to establish such to know what Truth is, right? That would be where the purpose of DeOcculted would come in, to propose a radical new (actually ancient) definition of Truth... as that which actually exists, and all the myriad implications therein.
So DeOcculted isn't dead or on hiatus or anything, it's just in the process of transmuting into something a little different.
So, anyway, that's about all I have this time around. Later, I'll very likely write up another post detailing plans for the New Paradigm Website, as there are still many kinks I have to iron out before I even begin to put this into motion, but I'm still very excited about the prospect! Finally, I can relinquish The Bradshacalypse of this burdensome need to be something it clearly isn't so that it can fully be what it always was supposed to be - a Studio Gallery of the works of a weird cartoon artist with a lot of strange ideas. That way, the other purpose can be freed of the confines of this website to be something a whole slew of like-minded Creatives can plug into and benefit from. How exciting!
Anyway, that's all for now. Peace be and take Care!
