Status Report #31: 31st of May, 2026

Good morning, fellow Wombatants! Michael here, and welcome to another Status report!

(Report #31 on the 31st! What a coincidence, especially since it can never happen again, what with months having 31 days at most.😉)

So, as you might have noticed, we've been super-idiotically busy these past couple of weeks. So, let's break it down as we usually do:

-Art-

Well, you might have our new project, "Sketchbook Saturdays" popping up, yesterday.

Basically, Amalia and i realized that we're looking at Art too much like we look at music. In music, if you wanna share something, you kinda have to make a whole song, because sharing individual bits of the creation process is kinda difficult. Think "Hey guys! Check out these 20 seconds of drums we recorded, today!" So with music, it's a case of getting inspired, and then really dedicating yourself to a project until it's finished and ready for release.

Now, we've been looking at art the same way, but actually, that's a totally wrong approach and made us way less productive. Y'don't have to do a full, finished, coloured and shaded painting each time. It's perfectly fine to do some practice sketches and share those. And if we like a sketch enough, -then- we can develop it further, do line art, colour it, shade it and whatnot.

That way, you don't think "Oh, we wanna draw something, but we can't dedicate that much time, right now."

Basically, we wanna encourage ourselves to do more drawing, but keep it simple for the most part. And a (hopefully) weekly blog featurette sounds like a good way of doing this.😉

-Music-

Yeah uh, we've released a song, did you notice?

You can find it on Spotify, Bandcamp, Youtube, Soundcloud, and many other places!

It did as badly as usual on SubmitHub and we expect very few listeners, but eh, such is life when you're doing music as a hobby. 

Gonna be honest, with this blog getting a decent amount of readers, and even our art and photography getting a few likes here and there, putting music on the internet feels very unrewarding. It takes the most effort by far, and you get -very- little out of it. Guess it's a pretty hard field to gain any traction in, especially when you're not catering to trends.

It's become quite clear to us over the last few months that yeah, music is quite clearly a hobby project that we're doing purely because we enjoy it, when the inspiration strikes.

I mean, the same could be said for most of the things we make, but it feels especially true for music.

Oh well, we quite like the tune, anyway. Maybe you do, too!

If you do, there's also our Production Report to read!😉

-Blog-

So, this is the area we've been -most- busy in!

Aside from our little Sketchbook Saturday project, you've probably seen it: The Hitman WOA gigapost.

Yeah, that took us quite a while to write up. Like -quite- a while!

..... which is why it's so surprising that -tomorrow- you're getting a new post on another gem from my childhood!😜

Yeah, so we took a break from Hitman before getting started on another group of destinations for our next post. Played a childhood game of mine in the meantime, but then we found that said childhood game is actually way shorter than i remembered. So we uh, just started -and- finished it last weekend and got to writing.

As a result, the break from Hitman was much shorter than anticipated. Thankfully, we quite like the game, so we didn't mind hopping back in again so soon. We're already done with Bangkok, the first destination of our next post. Gonna be moving on to Colorado shortly!

That said, we might ease up a bit in this area. Got plenty of stuff we wanna write (and -are- writing) about, but we've been going kinda hard, recently. More on that further down.😉

-DCS-

So, somehow, with all that going on, we did find some time for DCS, last weekend!

We (Well, actually, it was all Amalia) finally took some time to practice carrier ops in the F/A-18C, which is turning into more and more of a favourite of ours.

Heh, shooter thought they were with the village people.😛

We also switched controllers, from our Thrustmaster Warthog throttle to the (also Thrustmaster) F-16 throttle. Can't split the throttles with that one, but it's just an overall more practical controller for the Hornet, we find.

Oh, and speaking of splitting the throttles, we've gotta spout some blasphemy here: We recently watched Top Gun Maverick for the first time and.....

That movie is quite a lot better than the original.

There, we said it.😜

Don't gemme wrong, we like the original Top Gun, obviously. But the sequel just has so much more detail in it's flying scenes, more stuff to appreciate for airplane nerds like us and an actual, defined mission for the characters to fly, rather than some vague "Oh, there's some enemy fighers flying around, maybe we should go and do something about that."

(Even though said mission is clearly a terrestrial version of the Star Wars trench run)

Did the new movie get -everything- right? Nah, of course not. But it got -a lot- of things right, especially in the little details that non-nerds won't even notice. And we appreciate that.😉

-Life-

Right, so remember earlier, when we said we'd probably ease up a bit on the pace? Yeah, we're doing that. We've been going a bit too hard recently, and we've gotta take some time to relax, now and then. Not saying we're taking a week off or something. Just easing back a little on the throttle.

Soooo we started playing a game that we're not planning to write about! We might still do it eventually, but for the time being, we're just playing it for fun and relaxation. The game is Distant Worlds 2, a space 4x game. Think Stellaris, but with an Eve Online-style infrastructure, where resources actually have to get moved around by freighters and such. Quite cool.

But yeah, after our couple of hyperproductive weeks here, we realized that while we certainly enjoy creating stuff, we can quickly turn into a bit of a workaholic, so having a game that we play purely for the enjoyment is quite helpful. And don't you worry, we're also playing more Hitman. And we have a long to-do list, not just for gaming posts, but also for art, music and stuff in general.😉

So, here's hoping that you look forward to the next time we share something! Actually, come to think of it, that's tomorrow. The post about a childhood gem that i mentioned. Look forward to that one.😜

Until then, stay safe, don't overwork yourself and have a good one!