Do have any advice for a young animator who wants to make their own indie animation one day? It's called Paranautical.
Spend some time working on collaborative animation projects - get to know what it's like being part of a crew. Get familiar with what an animation pipeline is like, what tools you'll need, what roles need to be filled. Be a good teammate and make connections with other artists you can reach out to when it's time to start hiring your own crew.
If you're going to launch with a crowdfund, or if you're going to drop your premiere or pilot episode on YouTube , do some audience building first. Share your development work, talk to people about what you're doing, livestream. Project development and audience building take time. It's not something you do in a month. Or even within a year, typically. If you're serious about making a series, or an animated film, settle in for a long term commitment. Remember you don't have to rush it, and it'll be better if you don't rush it.
Don't forget the administrative side of things - production management, tracking tasks and deadlines, accounting, payroll, software licenses, file storage. Budget. Keep your scope reined in. Work out fair pay rates for cast and crew. Plan for extraneous, unpredictable expenses. If you don't know what you're doing in these areas, either keep your project small enough that you don't have to do a lot of it, or hire people who have experience with this stuff.
If you haven't produced any completed animation of your own with a full team before, start out small. See what it's like making just a minute or so of completed animation with a crew of you alone, or you plus a couple of others. Use this to learn some lessons, find your voice and style, and smooth out your pipeline. Or just focus on producing an animatic with a strong script first. You can figure out how to bring it to completion later. Work your way up to big things - don't try to start there without experience. Even if you raise a sizable budget with crowdfunding, it can disappear very, very quickly if you aren't careful and realistic about your production plan.
All that that, I wish you success! I hope you get you make your indie project!
Discription: Ellipsus is a principled alternative to Google Docs—built for writers, by writers.
For: Beginner and intermediate
It has easy interface to navigate and offers variety of convenient tools for writers.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: Website.
02. Scrivener
Description: Scrivener is a word-processing program and outliner designed for writers. Scrivener provides a management system for documents, notes and metadata. This allows the user to organize notes, concepts, research, and whole documents for easy access and reference.
For: Intermediate and expert
It is designed primarily for intermediate to expert users who are working on long-form, complex writing projects such as novels, screenplays, or academic theses. While beginners can learn to use it, the software has a notoriously steep learning curve due to its extensive, high-powered feature set.
Cost: Paid with a free trial.
Type: App.
03. Campfire Writing
Description: Campfire is a reading and writing platform for genre fiction. Discover books & bonus content, write novels, and self-publish with royalties.
For: Beginner and intermediate
It is accessible to beginners but is specifically tailored for intermediate, who require heavy worldbuilding, organization, and planning tools etc.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: Website and app.
04. Reedsy Studio
Description: Reedsy Studio is a free online app for authors to plan, draft, edit, and format their book, creating professional ePub and print-ready files easily.
For: Beginner and intermediate
It is primarily designed for beginners and intermediate authors, particularly those self-publishing for the first time who need a free, all-in-one, and user-friendly platform.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: Website.
05. Atticus
Description: Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software.
For: Beginner and intermediate
It is designed to be accessible to a variety of users, but it is primarily tailored for intermediate to advanced (professional) indie authors, though beginners can use it due to its intuitive interface.
Cost: Paid.
Type: Website and app.
06. Novlr
Description: Novlr is writer-owned creative writing platform. Join a community with writers and their goals at the heart of everything we do.
For: Beginner and intermediate
It is designed for beginners to intermediate writer. It is often recommended as a more user-friendly alternative to complex software like Scrivener, making it ideal for those who are intimidated by steep learning curves.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: Website.
07. JotterPad
Description: JotterPad is a text editor app for Android, developed by Two App Studio. It is proprietary software that uses the freemium pricing strategy.
For: Anyone
It is designed for beginners, intermediate, and expert writers alike, making it a versatile tool for anyone focused on creative writing, screenwriting, or plain-text drafting. Its primary appeal lies in its minimalistic, distraction-free interface, which is useful for beginners.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: Website and app.
08. FocusWriter
Description: It's a simple distraction-free word processor. It provides customizable themes, font, colors, and background image to add ambiance. It also features on-the-fly updating statistics, daily goals, multiple open documents, spell-checking, and much more.
For: Beginner.
Suitable for writers who like simple and distraction-free word processor.
Cost: Free.
Type: App.
09. yWriter
Description: yWriter is a word processor which breaks your novel into chapters and scenes, helping you keep track of your work while leaving your mind free to create.
For: Intermediate and expert
It is designed for intermediate to advanced writers, particularly those who are plotting-heavy, structure-focused novelists or screenwriters. While it is free and has a straightforward interface, its focus on organizing scenes, tracking character data, and data-heavy analytics makes it most useful for writers tackling complex, long-form projects.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: App.
10. Grammarly
Description: Grammarly is an American English-language writing assistant software tool. It started as a tool to review the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing.
For: Anyone
It is designed for a broad range of users, offering utility for beginners, intermediate, and expert writers, though it serves different purposes for each level. It is primarily targeted at anyone who writes using a computer for work or pleasure, including students, professionals, bloggers, and non-native English speakers.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: Website and app.
11. Obsidian
Description: Obsidian is a proprietary personal knowledge base and note-taking application that operates on markdown files.
For: Intermediate.
It best for intermediate to expert users—especially those who want a powerful system for organizing and connecting ideas, but beginners can use it too if they’re willing to learn.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
Type: App.
12. AutoCrit
Description: AutoCrit is an online manuscript editing tool that gives fiction and non-fiction writers the power to quickly and effectively self-edit their work anytime.
For: Intermediate and expert
It is best for intermediate and expert writers during the editing phase. It’s an analysis tool, not a beginner writing one.
Cost: Free but includes premium plan for some features.
PluralLog is now available on Google Play. It's the first version, and it's a real shot — member profiles, front tracking, journaling, polls, mood trends, and the full federation stack for those who want to share.
We built this because plural systems deserve software that takes their experience seriously. Not a clinical tracker, but still something that can act as a personal tool for managing their disorder. Not an app that pathologizes switching frequency, or is heavily opinionated on what a user needs to see. A quiet, well-made tool that fits around however your system works.
This project grew out of real conversations and research with plural folks about what they actually needed — what was missing from existing tools, what language felt right, what privacy meant to them.
What's next
iOS is in the pipeline. The relay server code will be published soon as an open initial release — we want communities to be able to run their own relays without depending on us. We'll post here when it's ready.
If something doesn't work for your system, or something feels off, reach out. This app will grow with your input. While we can't, and won't, commit to implementing all features, we're hoping to watch how the space around the app develops and lead some discussions about where we can take this going forward.
A few people said I should make a post about how I collage, and I love talking about stuff I make, so here we go! l have quite a few progress photos and also timestamps for my most recent big collage (link) so I'll talk about that :) This is about 10% tutorial and 90% me talking about how long things took me, and it is a very long post, FYI.
1. Template
For anything complicated, I make a template using a photo. I have a touch screen laptop with a pen and some mediocre discontinued sketchbook drawing program. It has layers which is what I need. I used to use the same notetaking program I use for school, which does not have layers. I have no idea how I made that work for my Vladdy and Kevin collages.
I used this photo (Kirk celebrating during the last game of the 2025 regular season, in which he hit 2 home runs, posted by the jays on twitter. Sadly I'm not sure who took it) and then in a few different sections, drew on top of it. I have thought about this and decided that tracing like this is fine for a very transformative art thing. (Also i'm not selling these)
Things I consider are obviously the hard outlines of body parts/clothing, and then I figure out the insides. I try to keep a vaguely similar level of detail throughout (at a certain point the face will have smaller pieces than the arms, but I don't want one side of the jersey to be super detailed and the other side to be made up of 4 pieces), and I figure out where I can simplify things. I love doing jerseys, because fabric folds are often pretty defined shapes and also pretty forgiving. I definitely don't put every single one in my design, and it looks very fine (look at the right arm for example (our right, his left)). Hair and especially facial hair are the worst, because how am I supposed to do skin showing through a beard with paper like this? Not sure. Sometimes it just works? In general, I just draw shapes until it looks vaguely reasonable.
(At this stage I always get too optimistic. On my screen, I can zoom in to draw. I can't zoom in on my papers as I'm tracing and cutting them. You will see that in the real version I simplified the jersey lettering, because I tried and just could not manage to do the split font.)
Doing this took me about 1h15m. Maybe a little more, I'm not sure. I mostly kept track of time for this project, but I forgot to pay attention to that while doing the template so this was my guess.
2. Materials
I use plain normal 8.5"x11" printer cardstock as my backing paper. Something sturdier might be better, but this is in my house already and it works well enough. Tools I use are scissors, a craft knife (and replacement blades. Recent and excellent development there for me), a cutting mat, a glue stick (just a cheap one from dollarama. I've decided that I'm opening a new one for each big project even though I don't use up the old ones, because if they dry out even a little they get super globby and hard to work with), and a fine tip sharpie pen. Also my laptop with the photo+template layered so I can check colours as I go.
For my interesting papers, I have a huge amount of magazines (I got so many free when people in my neighborhood were giving them away) and catalogues and such. I especially use a lot of flower/seed/gardening catalogues, and a lot of the free LCBO Food and Drink magazines.
I also have my template printed out a few times. 1 to cut and trace with, 1 to check pieces off when I'm done them, and a few extra in case I rip a template piece and want another copy. I fought my printer software violently for 15 minutes to get it to print at the right size. I am counting that as artistic process time because I say so. (total so far: 1h30m)
3. Collaging
I work 1 piece at a time. I cut out the piece from my printed template with my craft knife and make a mark on the top side (some small pieces are hard to tell back from front, but it does matter, so that helps me), then put it top side to the back of whatever paper I want to use and trace. This means I don't get any pen on the good side, but does sometimes make it hard to line up properly if I want a specific part of a pattern or something or it's a small area of the right colour. Depending in the size and shape, I'll use either the knife or scissors to cut out the traced bit.
If it's an extremely small piece so that I really can't hold the template down well enough to trace it, sometimes I'll glue the template to the paper and cut around it that way, and then peel it off. It isn't ideal, but I had to do that a few times.
I started with the chin, because every part of this cutting template pieces -> tracing -> cutting paper process isn't perfect, so sometimes things don't line up quite as they should. In the past, I've started at the bottom of the page with jersey bits, and then when I got to the face, things were misaligned quite badly for the most detailed section. Starting here mostly avoided that issue.
Ok, here we go.
This is 5 pieces and getting here took ages because I had to go through so many papers to find a selection of the right colours for hair/skin. Running total 2h30m. (As in, finding papers and doing 5 pieces here took an hour. It sped up a little later on.)
_________
Now up to 29 pieces, running total 5h15m. This is my embarassing disaster of a workspace. You can see where I'm cutting out my template pieces and also checking them off on a second copy of the template. Also, as is very very very obvious, colours and patterns!! I am not going for realism in colours. I could, I guess, but my vision from the start of my whole collaging situation was mixing up patterns, and I still like how it looks. Jerseys especially are, again, very forgiving. If it's jersey shaped and says Blue Jays on it it will look like a jersey no matter how much random stuff is in it.
_________
Now about (I counted a few times throughout and my numbers did not always match up lol) 68 pieces, running total 8h45m. Long and skinny pieces (like the very left piece of the red sleeve) are very annoying to hold down and trace, and really small pieces like the lines on the white end of the jersey sleeve are truly awful. I could not cut out that template piece without it falling apart, so i just freehand cut a thin strip of blue paper and cut it to the right length and decided it was fine. Overall, the red sleeve was really fun because I had gathered a lot of different red things (blood orange from a cake, some flowers, different photos of fabrics...) and I think it looks cool together.
_________
This is when I made his teeth too white (got lazy, didn't want to trace the very small and finicky teeth so I just glued the white template paper on) and it looked like he had very bad veneers.
I took that off and did trace and cut out properly, and then this is where i got to that day. Running total 11h30m, 91 pieces. It looks very silly with the gap for the ear, but that was a very finicky part because (with my zoom-enabled confidence) decided I needed some complicated ear design. I put it off.
_________
And now for the first hand. You can kind of see the order I'm putting pieces in to be sure they fit together. If I had done the thumb before the rest of the hand, it would have been way easier to get the angle wrong and have nothing fit together. After the pic on the right, that's 13h30m and 111 pieces.
(The most terrible thing is if I design myself something where there isn't a clear reference to "anchor" it to. If a piece fits into a curve well, or has a corner meet up with another one, or is the same length as a piece it's next to, that's fine. I don't have a picture for an example, but anything "free-floating" next to other pieces is bad. This may or may not make any sense)
_________
This is where it got very exciting for me! Because his face was (almost) there! And it looks like him! Before that it was jersey and sleeve and hand (generic) and here it's Kirky (specific)! This is at 16h, 135 pieces. The face was hard to do because of all the small bits (and the shapes and alignments aren't all the best. There are a few gaps that are larger than I'd like, such as to the right of the mustache, but it doesn't stand out much at all, so it's fine
_________
Face done, jersey base done, now at 18h15m and 166 pieces (that number doesn't match with previous numbers but whatever). At this point it beat the George collage for most time-consuming art project of my life. (Which is surely very short for many artists out there! I was not at all an artsy person for pretty much my entire life until mid 2024, so I have never spent all that much time on art until recently.)
_________
And now the other arm done. Hands are always hard, but at this point my new blades had arrived and I was using a new sharp one so that helped a little. I definitely used the gluing the template trick here a fair bit. Now up to 20h25m and 193 pieces. At this point this is the main collage done! Just jersey details left!
_________
I wanted to do the split font on the jersey. I tried and could not make it happen. That was disappointing, but also sped up the last bit immensely! I think it looks pretty good even with the simpler lettering. Also, added the buttons and velcro patch and such.
Final: 21h15m, 206 pieces (and I am pretty confident in that count)
And the final good scan is here
4. General thoughts:
I could have sped this up if I had more organized papers for sure, or if I was not usually collaging between 11pm and 3am (not at my speediest)
New glue every project and frequently changing knife blades is really the move
I should really put this in a frame because right now it is safely in a box to not get dusty or damaged, which is very safe but not very good for me looking at it
I really like talking about myself and my crafts apparently! This is long!
Everybody should make a collage at some point. Not necessarily this complicated or this style (and if for some reason you do, my workflow is certainly not the best way to do this!!!), but some collage. It's very cheap (papers are often free - old flyers, junk mail, newspapers, ask if people nearby are getting rid of old magazines..., scissors and a glue stick are cheap, and depending on what you want to do you might not need a cutting mat or craft knife) and it can be very quick or if you decide to you can make yourself a many hours long agonizing but somehow delightful situation.
If you made it this far thank you for reading :) This was fun to make and then fun to think through again!
Just had an AI-centric software development job pitched to me as:
it's not about how many hours the human works in the seat. it's about how many hours are spent working on each project. if you had spent two hours tending to a batch job, that's two billable hours. If you spent two hours tending to two simultaneous batch jobs, that's still two billable hours of work per batch job, which means you did four hours of work in two hours. Your goal is 40 hours of work in a week, not 40 hours of butt-in-chair.
Suddenly, the parable of the AI Bro who's talking to Claude while in the coffeeshop makes sense to me now. That AI Bro is being a productive worker while also having a bit of a life at the same time as his work.
If you're working simultaneously on 2 tickets for the whole week, then you might only spend 20 hours "at work" while still doing 40 hours' worth of work. If you do 3 tickets simultaneously, that's 13h20m "at work" with 40 hours' productivity. In some environments, this might be called time-and-attendance fraud. But instead, for this job, it's using AI to further decouple productivity from work-hours — this time, in a way that benefits the developer.
There have been proposals to cut the de facto 40h work-week to 30h or 20h, which have been pushed back on because of lost productivity. Instead, this job would index productivity to a 2026 baseline, and then as long as you're that productive, you've done the work and earned the salary. Imagine how this would apply to a factory: if a car factory produces a 2026 number of cars, but in 2027 does so in half the clock time thanks to automation, then the workers get the same amount of pay for the same amount of production and can go home early.
Which is, to be frank, a fascinating idea, but it's distributed unequally. Jobs of the mind can get 40h done in 20h with prompting, but can a roofer prompt their tools to replace a roof? The physical trades wouldn't benefit from this paradigm — unless there were humanoid robots ready to step in to do the trade work, while the tradies were paid the same rate. Everyone becomes a manager, not a doer, and in the freed-up time they can do whatever.
🚀 AI-powered software development is evolving fast—and Claude Code and Claude Cowork are changing how developers build, debug, and collaborate.
From autonomous coding to intelligent pair programming, these tools are helping engineering teams deliver software faster while maintaining quality and reducing repetitive work.
If you're exploring the next generation of AI development assistants, this guide is a must-read.
Inside this guide:
✅ What is Claude Code?
✅ What is Claude Cowork?
✅ Key features and capabilities
✅ AI-assisted coding and debugging
✅ Code reviews and refactoring
✅ Multi-file project understanding
✅ Best practices for developer productivity
✅ Real-world use cases for engineering teams
Whether you're a Software Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, SRE, AI Engineer, or Engineering Manager, understanding Claude's developer ecosystem can help you unlock a new level of productivity.
