Status Report #27: 5th of April, 2026 [Important news!]
You might have seen our recent post about our rebranding plans. Well, Amalia and i have decided that we'll just shoot for it and get started. There's too many things we can't really plan for in this regard, so the only way to really do it is to...... well, just do it. See how things go and tackle the inevitable issues as they come up.
So, starting today, our little duet shall start going by a new name:
-Close Quarters Wombat-
Yeees. It's rather silly, but then, that's the idea. And "Captain Casual" wasn't exactly a very serious name, either.😉
You might be guessing at it's origin already. When we were starting out with Casualia Parks, our first animal was the Wombat, and we immediately came up with tons of puns, like "Digital Wombat Simulator", "Ace Wombat" or indeed, this new handle of ours.
We just like it a lot. And as we explained in our recent post, changing our name will prevent likely friction in future.
.... also, Wombat are just kinda cool. Like an australian Capybara.
So yeah. Take note: If you have this blog bookmarked or some such, in a couple of days the domain name is going to change, which means your bookmark will probably break. Our new address will be:
www.CloseQuartersWombat.com
That's right, no more -music suffix. That's partially because no one else seems mad enough to adopt this name, so it's simply not needed to differentiate. But also because we're generally shifting the way we look at our online presence.
You see, we started out purely as a musician, and so thus far in our minds, everything we did was always in support of our music, including this blog, which we started as a platform to write about and promote our music.
By now though, we're recognizing that we've clearly branched out a bit. And while we enjoy making music and want it to be heard by plenty of people, writing a good blog post about a video game is a valuable project in it's own right, and if things work out, then in future, sharing our art (as in, visual art) should be, too.
We're still a musical duo, and in fact we're hoping to increase our musical output again, but we've come to realize that we're a bit of a generalist, and we're embracing that.
But, to get back on track, over the next week or two (and hopefully no longer!), there'll be some major changes in our various channels. We'll have to try and see how artist name changes work on various platforms.
On some platforms, we might be able to simply change the profile name and keep on truckin', but on others, we might just have to wipe the slate clean and start anew. Might be a bit inconvenient, but the good thing is that we're doing it quite early. If we had thousands of followers, this would be next to impossible to do without major sacrifices.
Oh, and also we should only have to do it once. It's not that we disliked Captain Casual, but it was just a pre-existing online handle we adopted as an artist name when we started making music.
In case you're curious, by the way, it was a reference to James May of Top Gear/Grand Tour fame, who had the nickname "Captain Slow". They had a scene once where he was in the studio, lounging in an armchair with a pipe and, being a long-haired pipe smoker myself at the time, it sparked the idea.😉
But this new name feels like we have a real connection to it, silly as it might be. It's inspired by stuff we actually did, our wombats in Casualia parks, and so it seems a bit more personal.
That, and y'know, aside from a long-dormant YouTube channel with a similar name, absolutely no one else is using this one, so it feels properly like our own. Unlike Captain Casual, of which there are a few, some smaller creators and a rather big one.
By the way, we're perfectly aware that "Close Quarters Wombat" is a bit of a long title, so just to let you know right away, we might use "CQWombat" or just "CQW" as needed. So if you see that, it's probably us!
Well, in any case, that transition is going to be happening, starting today. We -might- also use the opportunity to sanitize our channels a bit. Say, if we have to make a new SoundCloud account, we probably wouldn't bring over all those "Drum Beets" we made a good while back. Our channels kinda have a lot of old, experimental stuff laying around, especially our YouTube channel. Stuff we tried while figuring out what we actually want to do. So while we don't wanna just "erase our past" as it were, we might tidy up a bit.
New banners and stuff shall of course follow as well, but that'll take some time. Ultimately, that sort of thing is the basis for why we wanted to start doing visual art in the first place.
Now don't panic, we won't put horrible stickman images up. We'll only upload something if what we have is truly decent.
Anyway, this -is- still a status report, and our rebranding efforts aren't the only thing going on, so let us present you with our new category system, like so!
-Blog-
Yeees. Since we're starting to consider non-musical projects as equally valuable to musical ones, and not just support work, we've decided to properly categorize in our status reports.
After all some of you might only be here to read our blog and won't be interested in our music. Or you're only here to see if there's any news about our next tune. And besides, it's much neater than just lumping everything into "projects" and "non-projects".😉
But yeah, there's good news for you blog readers out there! We've indeed been playing an old game, and the blog post about it is just about finished! Surprise!
In fact, we're already playing the -next- game we wanna write about. And we've got a week off work, so maybe Amalia will finally get around to finishing that tulpamancy-post she started ages ago!
And speaking of Amalia, in this new post, we're implementing a bit of a format change. See, we generally write our posts collaboratively, so between us, it's usually a bit awkward to know whether we should go with "i" or "we" in places.
So, we've decided that we'll simply let you know who's writing which parts, and make it extra-clear by...
... having Amalia's text slightly coloured!
Yes, like so. That way, we don't have to awkwardly word things and always write in the second person. I can speak about myself, and she can speak about herself. Though of course, considering our..... "nature", you'll still see a lot of "we" and "us" around here.😉
-Music-
Good news here, too! We finished mixing our next tune just today! Just some mastering, giving it the final touches and the audio will be finished!
However.
It -will- take a bit of time before we release it. The reason for that is simple: This tune is actually the origin of our new name. It's called "Close Quarters Wombat", and so at this point, it'll be a self-titled tune, which is sort of perfect to really establish the rebrand.
But yeah, what that means is that we'd like this to be a special release, and we want the cover for this tune to double as our new logo/avatar. And well...... we really wanna draw it ourselves. >_>
...... which is what we'll talk about in the next category:
-Art-
Well, in order to draw our own cover, we do have to practice art a little bit. Not talking about months and months here, though.
The plan is to crop together a little reference from stock images, then trace over that and create a simple, but decent home-made avatar and cover.
Obviously, over the months and years, we can reiterate on it, so the visual quality of our channels should improve as we learn. Should be neat, even if things might be a bit scruffy at the start. S'part of the journey.😉
And to be fair, we're not starting from complete zero. I mean, we've been doing our own graphic design for a couple of years, including cover art and stuff. AND a good few years back, before Amalia was even with me, i dabbled with this program. Even did a Bob Ross paint-along.
For now though, we can't really report too much in this field. What we -can- tell you is that we've installed Krita and, after doing extensive research, ordered ourselves a drawing tablet. Mouse drawing would be bad enough, but we don't even have a mouse. We have a trackball.
But yeah, look forward to us sharing our progress here! Or brace yourself. That might be more appropriate. 😜
-Life-
So, in case you're interested, after we reported being drowned in ungodly amounts of bureaucracy in the last report, we can now report that...... well, there's actually still a fair bit of that going around.
But! Progress has been good, and things are moving along, so it's feeling far less irritating. Also, we -did- pretty much take a break during the first of these past two weeks. Took things easy, didn't do any work on projects, just played video games and found a good bit of time for DCS.
.... but yeah, then the second week came around and we decided to plan an entire rebrand of our whole online presence. Hm, seems we just can't help ourselves.😛
But yeah, that'll be it from us for the time being. Obviously, with all the changes and updates happening, we'll be pretty busy in the coming days, and things will be pretty chaotic across our channels.
We'll likely also end up making a sort of debrief-post where we're going to mark down the most important changes, new channels and what have you.
Until then folks, happy easter, and have a good one!
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