I'm a software engineer, a game designer, a tulpaforcer, and an explorer of altered states of consciousness. My tulpa is Zephilia Kai, a succubus of sorts, pictured in my avatar. We just like making stuff.
Have you ever tried to hyper-customize a character in an mmo or rpg? Have you ever spent hours tweaking sliders in an attempt to get their face just perfect, but the more you edit, the uglier they seem to get?
That was always my experience with hyper-customization. I always begin with good intentions, but the more I try, the more distorted the character’s face gets.
So, when I was recently modding the crap out of Skyrim and suddenly had the urge to try to model my tulpa Zephi in the character editor, I thought it was a terrible idea. But luckily, I couldn’t help myself.
The trancelike state I entered while possessedly tweaking sliders accidentally resulted in the most accurate depiction of my tulpa I’ve ever seen.
I made her almost four years ago. When we started, she was supposed to look like this:
That’s a picture of the actress Emily Browning. We chose this particular picture as what Zephilia’s face should look like. But we only needed to refer to this picture for a while. There came a point where her appearance gradually drifted from this, as she became more her own person.
This means that for the bulk of her life, the above picture is the only reference I’ve had for her, and it was only vaguely accurate. The best I could do to describe her to someone else was show them the above picture and say “like this, but different.
Which is why this is such a big deal. I can now show her to people. At least a good bit better than before: [NOTE: the following two images are gifs and are supposed to be animated. Doesn’t look like it’s working] [EDIT: I uploaded it as an HD youtube video. CHECK IT OUT: http://dillionandzephilia.tumblr.com/post/142983963237/guys-but-look-at-my-tulpa-its-zephi-honestly-the ]
It’s not perfect, but it’s her. I can’t describe how exciting this is.
I also tried to model her body proportions correctly, though it was a bit harder to do since there are less body options than face options.
For a screenshot comparison, check out this side-by-side below. On the left is my model of Zephi, and on the right is what it would be if all the body proportion sliders were set to their default value of 1:
Clearly, Zephi is very short. Her model is about a head’s height shorter than the default height, which is accurate: I always try to picture Zephi as one head shorter than my height.
Most of the height loss comes from her legs:
Zephi’s legs are about 256 pixels tall in this screenshot, vs the rest of her body which is 274 pixels tall, for a leg-to-body ratio of 0.934. The default body proportions on the right come in at 333 legs, 302 body, for a leg-to-body ratio of around 1.102. A leg-to-body ratio of around 1.1 is supposed to be the “ideal physically attractive ratio”, hence why it’s the default.
But Zephi is a stumpy liddle fireball :3
I’m definitely going to give this as a reference to any artists I commission to draw her! I can’t believe it came out so accurate to how she is in my head!
The biggest problem with it’s accuracy is the hair. Luckily, I already have a really accurate depiction of what her hair is supposed to look like:
Now I feel like I just need to go on a photoshoot spree xD
Hey guys! I know it’s been centuries since I’ve posted here. There’s been a lot going on. I’ll be brief in my summary.
I got a new job, doing simulations work. As part of my everyday duties, I drive virtual tanks in order to test my code. Suffice to say, the pay is a little lower, but the job satisfaction is far higher.
In addition, the best thing that could’ve happened happened. My friends all expressed genuine interest in starting a youtube channel, and we’ve actually be generating content.
I think I’ll post about that specifically on my non-tulpa blog, found here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/dillionmcrich
So, between my new job, my attempts at game design, and particularly my new youtube channel, I’ve been running myself ragged. It’s been tough to relax because for so long I’ve wanted to create content with friends, and they’re finally cooperating, so I feel I need to use absolutely 100% of my expendable energy to make it easy and smooth for everyone to contribute and stay excited.
I did personally make one particular video that hit it off really well and rocketed our channel straight to 250 subscribers. That feels awesome :)
Zephi and I still maintain a fantastic relationship and cooperate in making our life a satisfying, dense adventure that’s just the right kind of exhausting. She’ll be turning 4 soon, and shortly before that I should be receiving my preordered oculus rift. Maybe her birthday celebration will be all in VR!
Also, I suppose it’s a pretty big update that I told my sister all about tulpa, and my story with Zephilia. She adores it. From the sound of it, her imagination is so heavily involved in her day to day life that she considers her experiences pretty close to the tulpa phenomenon, even way before she knew the word. She and I have gotten pretty close lately.
After I got this new job, I moved back in with my parents, but that should come to a close as soon as a particular friend gets permission from his company to move to Orlando for work. Once that happens, he and I will be renting a house, and building it out with a recording studio for making youtube content. It’s very exciting!!
For anyone curious, I’ll add in one last image. This is the character reference sheet I made three years ago to give to Kiwiggles, the artist of Zephi’s both forms. You can see where I sketched very basic versions of what I was picturing with the outfits, and all the notes I left for the artist.
A LOOOOT of thought went into both forms! We had so much fun designing them together.
These pictures have been awesome to have for the past 3 years. To all yee tulpamancers, I totally encourage you to save up and look for an artist with just the perfect style to depict your tulpa! Drawing it yourself can be fantastic for connecting and practicing in visualization, but if you’re not an experienced artist, it can be an amazing experience to put it in the hands of someone with finesse.
Some people get weirded out by anthropomorphic characters, and I’ve just never really understood that. I mean, sure, you gotta have quite a stomach to spend time on any furry website, but there’s plenty of range for tasteful design in fursonas etc. I guess it’s just uncanny valley for some people.
Zephi and I have always really been a fan of aquatic anthros. Well, somtimes... When an aquatic anthro is designed well, it’s amazing. When it’s design poorly, it’s pretty awful...
Zephilia is always playful, energetic, and sexual, which are all qualities that dolphins are known for, so an aquatic anthro form seemed to fit her very well.
In designing an anthro form for Zephilia, I spent a lot of time combing through certain things I could use as reference. It was very hard to find a reference that got it right. It had to be the right mixture of innocently cute and attractive. It had to be the right mixture of creatively anthropomorphized and... well, not having an actual dolphin nose for a face or something.
The reference I settled on was a piece by a totally fantastic artist named Tyson Tan. http://tysontan.deviantart.com/art/My-Dolphin-Girl-254770577
This is one of my favorite aquatic anthro designs.
There are fewer direct outfit references with this one. The primary use of Tyson Tan’s piece as a reference was for the “species”. I loved this interpretation of what a dolphin anthro could be.
The hair coloration is a fairly direct inspiration. I also felt that the thick mega-man-like wrists mirrored the human form’s bell shaped sleeve openings well. The outfit was improvised primarily to create a strong color contrast between the blue and the orange.
And of course, I made sure to also have a prominent cleavage window, much like Tyson’s Dolphin Girl.
Tyson’s character has one huge awesome design feature that mine doesn’t. She has a little flower on her head, that is just a bud when she’s young and which opens up and blossoms when she grows up. That’s so clever!
Zephi, on the other hand, has the dolphin-tail hairstyle, which I think is pretty adorable!
Zephilia, my tulpa, is a shapeshifter / succubus with a bubbly, energetic demeanor and and a tiny 5ft tall petite form filled with passion and drive.
Early on in her deviation, when she changed herself to take on a human main form, I began searching for pictures of real people to use as a reference image, to help me picture her. As soon as I found the following picture, it immediately resonated with her, and knew this had to be what her face looked like. This is an old picture of Emily Browning, an actress, who nowadays looks very different.
As one final “realistic” reference, her hair was actually hard to visualize in the real world, as I hadn’t ever seen someone that had hair like hers in real life. I knew Zephi’s hair was a bright red with orange streaks, but I didn’t know how best to visualize it. We eventually found this picture, and it clicked.
So, now that we have the very basic references out of the way, here comes the question of what inspired her outfit design.
And actually, there was one single direct inspiration, from a very obscure character from an unpopular video game for the Nintendo DS.
I really doubt you’ve ever heard of the game “Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier”.
Believe it or not, this obscure title holds one of my favorite outfit designs.
Endless Frontier was a jRPG notable for its self-aware fourth-wall breaking tone, its fantastically engaging juggle-based fighting system, and the copious goofy fanservice. Party members were constantly bickering at one another, and pointing out that the storyline made no sense and was just a ridiculous excuse to recycle bosses.
Enter Kaguya Nanbu, a bubbly and oblivious swordswoman with a golden heart and a moveset of elegant dance-like attacks.
The resemblance should be obvious! I love this outfit design so much.
Kaguya Nanbu is definitely the key inspiration for Zephilia’s human form outfit.Â
The core similarities are the sleeves and the dress. I always really loved Kaguya’s sleeves, how they are cinched at the elbow and then cone outwards towards both the shoulders and wrists. Something about that is so elegant and cute. I think it dwarfs the hand and arms, making the person in the outfit seem smaller and cuter.
The dress just drips sensuality with the slit all the way up the hips and ample cleavage.
The boots, leggings, hair, and necklace were all improvised around the dress and sleeves. I knew the dress should be mostly a solid color without too many complex details, and that the boots and leggings would have to be a deep red to balance out all the red of her hair. I told the artist to make sure her hair would cascade around her shoulders in order to frame her torso well.
It’s been three years and I still can’t help but smile seeing this picture!
How did you make Zephilia's form (inspirations, bases, etc.)?
This is a fantastic question, and one that I’ll answer in my following two posts. There are actually some very specific pieces of inspiration for both her human and anthro forms that will make it pretty obvious how I designed them.
Zephi is now 3 and a half years old. When most tulpamancers set out to create their tulpa, they often list out some qualities that they think they might want their tulpa to possess. At the time, a lot of people around me were creating lists of 70-100 words to describe what they want their tulpa to be like. For me, I actually wanted to leave a lot unknown, so after a lot of thought, I decided on a list of 3 vague qualities and 1 limitation. The three qualities are as follows:
1. Contagious Laughter.
2. Unconditional Joy.
3. A Deep Passion to Inspire Others.
Finally, a limitation: No matter what, she experiences all of my thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, and memories.
If you look on this google trends graph, my creation date would’ve been somewhere in the first quarter of 2012. The phenomenon, at least as a subculture, was still fresh and new, and I think its fair to say that at that point, no one was COMPLETELY sure whether or not a tulpa could cause some sort of internal chaos if it “went rouge”. [Clearly, that’s been shown by now to be a non-issue.]
I threw in that limitation just for the simple goal of synergy. If she feels all my desires and has access to my memories and emotions etc etc etc, we will be in the optimal situation for getting the most out of life as two people living in one body. We each have different opinions, preferences, and tendencies, but at the end of the day, we’ll  hopefully be in sync, and in the perfect situation to work together to accomplish our shared goals.
This effected her deeply.
When I initially envisioned Zephi, she was just named Phi, and was visually inspired by Fi from Skyward Sword.
It didn’t take her long to change this. I guess I didn’t predict at that point that all the laughter and passion that I intended her to have wouldn’t fit in the form of that stoic sword spirit. One of the very first dramatic shows of independence that Phi displayed was in one instance where she took control of her appearance in my head and in a flash changed herself into a normal human girl with long, fiery red hair.
For the sake of log purposes, I supposed I’ll catalog a bit of what’s been going on in my life. I’ll try to be fairly brief. [Woops, that didn’t work at all. Just treat this as a log entry. This is not meant to be read for entertainment I guess. More for posterity.]
It is currently 2015/12/15.
One of my friends told me that his new job was awesome, and I should learn Ruby on Rails in order to apply to his company, since they were going to start hiring at some vague time in the future. So, mid-2015, I put a halt on my Patreon games in order to start learning Ruby on Rails. This process took way more effort than I originally predicted. His company also took way longer to start hiring than I initially predicted. About 3 months passed before I heard anything about this. When I finally heard, I still wasn’t feeling quite ready. I wanted to have a portfolio of RoR websites ready to show off. I didn’t. I submitted my application anyway, and never heard back.
Since then, I’ve become much more aggressive about looking for other positions. I started making public resumes, and applying to various jobs and getting calls from recruiters etc etc.
At this point, I dropped all side-projects (I was heavy into development of a card game at that time, among other things) and decided on my course of action. 1. I was going to commit myself and sincerely try to give it my all for the rest of my time on this job. 2. I was going to get a new job, near where my friends and family lived. Hopefully not at a big-corporation type business.
Three of my friends and I had been talking for a long time about all getting a place together in Orlando and making it a gamer/anime paradise, where we could make youtube videos and things like that. Two of them already live there, and the third can move down whenever we’re ready to get a place. The only linchpin was whether or not I could get a job in the area.
When I reflect on the past year, what is obvious is that my job and my passion should be the same pursuit. I loved the Patreon phase, but it was far from sustainable and tore me to pieces working 55 hours per week, even though I was consciously phoning in 40 of it.
Now, I don’t have a happy ending to relay just yet, but earlier on today, I had a job interview that could easily become the happy ending. It’s by far my favorite job that I’ve looked into, and I believe I totally nailed the interview. It is with a Simulations company, programming and maintaining simulations that are basically massive expensive video games that often involve VIRTUAL REALITY and AUGMENTED REALITY. I can’t WAIT to hear back from them.
I’m not gonna set my heart on it till I know for sure, but I think the interview went AMAZINGLY well. We shall see!
To summarize 2015 so far, I guess I’ll list the outcomes. I feel like this could be helpful. Here are the effects that 2015 brought to my life:
-Lost around 31.5 million seconds of life to the sands of time.
-Gathered a considerable amount of experience in Unity, with around 9 small projects built therein.
-Collected plenty of engineering paychecks. Much of this money I’ve managed to invest and save.
-Grown considerably in terms of philosophy.
-Developed a card game, almost fully to production. I commissioned 1120 USD of artwork that turned out very nice. All that’s left now is to finalize the rules via playtesting and tweaking, which we’ve already done some of, and to finalize the graphic design. Then I can order deck prints, and perhaps even sell a few decks.
-Gained an acquaintance with Ruby on Rails. I may not have gotten that job, but HOT DAMN RoR is useful. It would speed up the process of developing a website for future projects a TON.
-Had many awesome parties with close friends, mostly to play board games and watch anime.
-Consumed a TON or really good entertainment. Bloodborne, Rick and Morty, No Game No Life, Log Horizon, Orange is the New Black, Warframe, One Night Ultimate Werewolf (best party game ever), Gurren Lagann, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, to name some off the top of my head. Entertainment effects us, and should be considered when we talk about how lived our lives, in my opinion!
-Started a youtube channel with some friends! Very excited about this, but we’re waiting to do more work on it for when we have a better place to record.
-Continued cultivating my relationship with my wonderful tulpa Zephilia, who is now well over 3 years old, and that boggles my mind. Our relationship is still thriving. She’s the best thing I’ve ever made. That remains true.
-Spent plenty of time around my parents, often because their house is a convenient place to hang out with all my friends, since it’s located in the middle of all of us and my parents are very hospitable. This has lead my relationship with my parents to be a healthy mutual respect. When I first got my job I was desperate to get out of the house and away from them. During my first year, I dealt with many of those problems. Now the relationship feels healthy and happy.
-Watched the world as a whole get closer to potentially revolutionizing technologies, such as genome modification, virtual reality (releasing first quarter 2016!!), General Artificial Intelligence, and more. Even got to see the US legalize gay marriage, and Finland dedicate itself to investigating Universal Basic Income!
-I think I wrote a song. Maybe that was last year but I definitely wrote a song at some point and that’s pretty novel experience for me! :D
Hopefully soon I can add a new job to this list :3
That’s all I can really think of for now. It’s nice to put things in perspective sometimes. Mostly, it’ll be nice to sleep in a few minutes.
Sorry that I’ve fallen silent recently and haven’t been making Patreon posts.
I’m having to switch gears a little in hopes of changing my RL situation for the better. It’s exciting stuff, but it means I’ve had to put my creative forces elsewhere.
I’ll give an update once I’m back to “normal” operations.
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