Hi, I am Carissa and I am an artist, designer, photographer, and writer. Words are an avenue for my self-exploration and self-expression. When all else fails, and I can’t paint the picture with photography or drawing, words will always be there. During my time at Simplex I hope to share my inner world and how connected I feel with other creatives who inspire me. I’m a firm believer that everything is bridged together in a matrix of shared energy. Creative energy is transferable and influences are more important than you think. We are the people, places, and things that inspire us.
I hope to get to know you, I’d love for anyone who resonates with my words or the things I share to feel free to reach out to me. Figuring it out is more exciting when we do it together. I hope that the things I write help me understand how I operate and see myself in the creative sector. Maybe it could help you too. No two processes are identical, but they can sure as hell inform the other.
So hello to new discoveries and I hope to see you on the other side of the screen.
Written on: April 24th, 2021
First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to at least be interested in this journey of ours. We’re kind of just putting all of this out there with no expectations. As of writing this, we have no active followers or supporters. So if you’ve taken the time to go out of your way to read this, I appreciate you and I hope we’ve brought some value to you in some way.
Let me first introduce myself. My name is Troy Tintiangco and this is my baby. I am currently 26 and not employed. I have worked in a lot of different mediums, mainly in the digital space. I’ve been filming since I was 12, started experimenting with motion design and graphic design at 16, and have been just making different things since then. I like making things.
I’ve spent this past quarantine year working on my mental health and trying to figure out where I want to be career wise. I’ve been working with the idea of “Simplex” since I was at least 18 and this past August I began to finally flesh it out and understand it better. A month or so ago, I reached out to a few friends to get involved with the project and here we are.
This post officially marks the actual (public) beginning of Season 1 for Simplex Minds. The last post was just an introduction. I still can’t believe we’re finally going after it. After all of the sleepless nights laying in bed thinking, brainstorming about what this project could be, we have a team and we’re working towards our first season. I’m super proud to be able to even get this far with this project and to do it with the support of creatives I’ve had the honor to meet and know these past years is a blessing.
So you said this is the beginning of season 1, what does that even mean? What’s a season?
The idea behind seasons is to give the 4 of us, as a group, a set beginning and end date for the content we are going to produce. We are all doing this on a volunteer basis right now and I want to make sure I am not asking too much out of my friends. The last thing I want this to be is a chore.
I don’t want us to get into a “post everyday, for everyday, forever” kind of cycle. Personally, I think that can get unhealthy. I don’t believe you should have to work everyday of your life consistently to be successful. Breaks are healthy. I also believe breaks are necessary for creatives to prevent burn out and be able to be creative again. It’s fuckin hard and stressful to be creative every single day of your life.
I also believe quality will drop if we’re writing and making content because we need to post something on ___ day. I want everyone to be making content because they want to. I want everyone to be working on something they feel is valuable to themselves and to others. Once we put the “we have to post everyday” expectations on this, we lose that purpose.
If we tell y’all we’re doing this in seasons, y’all won’t have those “post everyday forever” expectations. We’ll have time to breathe. TV shows do it, why can’t that translate with this?
Breaking this up into seasons will also allow us to develop each season separately and allows us to experiment with each season. We may do something one season and not do it the next. I want to keep it fresh for y’all. I want y’all to not feel like you’re getting the same recycled content every season, where’s the fun in that?
I will say we do not have a budget right now, so we can’t do too much as of now. We probably won’t be able to do too much more next season, but we’ll get there. I’m talking big picture here. That’s just the vision. The season structure gives us a lot more creative freedom. We’ll see how it all develops, but I really like the creative freedom that comes with seasons.
The time between seasons is undecided, but we at least plan on making sure each season has a clear beginning and a clear ending. We’ll let y’all know when season 2 is planned to start. Let’s just not get too far ahead of ourselves. We still need to work on season 1 lmaooo.
For the first season, we’re going to keep it simple and not get too big. We decided as a group to each write 5 blog posts on the different creatives we look up to. This in turn makes Season 1, 20 weeks long with 1 post per week. Every week we’ll be diving into a different creative and break down why we think they are making the complex look simple. From the meetings we’ve had so far, the different artists each person is planning to write about right now are really diverse. I’m really excited to see what everyone writes about.
The main purpose of this first season is to establish. To establish our voices and to establish the first section of the Simplex Minds process. “Understanding the complex.” This season we will just be trying to learn and understand from the artists/creatives we look up to. We won’t be learning directly from them, but we will be learning from their pieces, their journey, their aesthetic, etc. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to connect with them directly, who knows?
As of writing this, we haven’t fully developed any of the content we will be posting in the future. Everything is in the brainstorm stage of development. All we have right now written down are our goals for season 1.
If you have made this far in the post I commend you and here are my goals for season 1 lol.
What do I want to do for season 1?
For season 1 there are many different things that I want to do.
Most of it is behind the scenes work beyond the regular content that you will be ingesting, but don’t worry I’ll write about my process through those endeavors too.
Mainly in season 1, I just want to learn and progress.
Creatively, I want to become a better storyteller. I want to go more in depth with the different ways directors/writers tell their stories.
At its core, this is going to be a storytelling platform. I want to be able to effectively tell the stories of the creatives that we have the opportunity to work with and collaborate with.
I also want to be able to effectively portray my own experience. How cool would this be if this pops off and y’all could get transported to this point in my life where I have absolutely nothing figured out? Is my story any more important than anybody else’s? Absolutely not, but I personally want to come back to these in the future and read the things I posted about and get transported back to this moment in time. I suggest you do the same too. You’ll forget more things than you’ll remember. Take the time to document your story. You’ll be surprised how different you are and how much things have changed over the years.
Stories come in many different forms and the mediums we use are just tools to tell such stories. I don’t know where I’ll be getting my inspiration from when writing these future posts, but I’m not trying to limit myself to a certain medium. You can learn from anywhere. Just depends on how you look at the information you’re absorbing.
By the time the season ends, I want you, who’s reading this, to want to share your story with us. I want y’all, the community, to be as involved with this as much you can be. I want this to be a fun place for creatives to be able to interact with. I want this to be a place y’all go to to feel safe. I also have a lot of fun plans with the Instagram stories to get y’all involved.
I just want season 1 to feel like a collective journey between our creative team and you, the reader. I want y’all to be on this section of our life journey with us. I want y’all to progress with us.
I want you all to feel and be able to understand our team on a semi-personal level. I am pushing the team to be as personal as they are willing to be. “As they are willing to be.” They will share what they want and won’t share what they don’t want to. We’ll see what happens. Hopefully at the end of the season y’all can see yourselves in some of us and we can help inspire you in any way we can.
Overall, I just want to have fun with this. I want to bring forth our learning and development process and at the same time give as much creative freedom as I can to everyone involved.
Welcome to the start of something with great potential with people who have great potential. We aren’t sure how things are going to go. We have no clue how this is going to end up. But, that’s the beauty of it.
Simplex Minds Season 1, begins today.
... also I want to eventually be able to write and direct my own original series. Just putting it out in the universe. Future Troy, you got this. Wow, can’t believe you’re making it happen. That’s crazy. Keep killing the game future Troy.
I'll be first to tell you that I get overwhelmed. I get overwhelmed a lot. I focus too hard on a problem and begin to succumb to that problem without even facing it.
I look at that problem and it just feels like a behemoth of an entity staring you down with no place to escape. It's just an overwhelming energy that you know you have to take on eventually, but it just feels like you're only given a stick to fend it off.
Today I had a conversation with a good friend of mine. We have these weekly conversations in order to just keep ourselves in check. We talk about what we did the week prior, where we we're at mentally, and what we want to do moving ahead.
We were talking about a lot of different things and then I just talked about this huge pressure I have right now to find a job. For over the past year, I have moved back home and have been resetting. I felt very lost in what I wanted to do career wise and just needed to some time to take a step back, reset, and assess where I want to go forward. Luckily, my parents have worked hard enough to allow me this resetting period. But now, I'm 26 and need to figure out a source of income and job. Mainly for health insurance purposes.
This might all be super first world problems, and honestly it is. But, this is the situation I am in. I'm grateful to be able to be in this situation, but it is a situation nonetheless.
The thing about the move back is that I wanted to make sure when I get back to working it'd be working towards something I truly want to do. I really didn't have to move back. I was able to find regular work at a restaurant and was working as a photographer part time in order to pay off my rent and food. I was living paycheck to paycheck. Wasn't living comfortably by any means, but I was able to sustain myself. My savings was hardly ever able to truly build up and decided it was time to move back home. It was time to take the time to understand my wants and where I truly wanted to go professionally.
I first decided that I wanted to be a screenwriter. I worked on many sets beforehand and always wanted to write and direct my own screenplays, still do, but it's not something I want to spend my developmental time doing. After, I decided that I wanted to go into content production for artists and bands, but I didn't have the skillset for that at the time. Still don't and need to work on that. Then I decided I wanted to switch to a completely different career path and work on the business end and decided to get my Product Management Certificate.
Now, I have that certificate and have been looking towards getting a job. I'm on linkedin and indeed looking for jobs and man barely any of them spark any sort of inspiration or feel like jobs that I want to do. They just feel like jobs where I'd just be doing things where I don't learn many translatable skills.
I got my Product Management Certificate because I want to be a Product Manager for a record label and work with artist branding and strategy. I want to find creative ways for artists to be able to connect and build their communities that align with their personality and aesthetic. But, luckily for most jobs you need like 2 years of music marketing to get that position. Which I don't feel like I have over 2 years to do.
The reason why I feel like this is mainly because I see myself quitting whatever job I'm doing after a year or so once this platform develops further. I see myself spending most of my future working on this platform. Every time I talk about this platform with someone. Every time I go deeper into understanding the potential this platform has, this is all I want to do. This is all I want to work on. Anything else where I have to start at the bottom and do grunt work to actually get to the things that I can translate to this platform just doesn't fit the timeline.
So why don't I do this full time? It's because I need the money. The team I'm working with right now are doing it on a volunteer basis. I want to be able to pay them for their work. I don't like asking people to do things for free. I also don't want to monetize these posts or ask for money from you if we haven't developed anything yet. Who wants to spend their money on something that hasn't delivered anything yet? Who wants to pay a subscription for something they don't even know about yet? We'd just be shooting ourselves in the foot for doing that. I want to keep this accessible and want you to want to support this later down the line. The things that will bring in money in the future needs for this platform to be developed first. In say a year or so, money will start coming in. It just isn't right now.
So that's what we discussed. Everything that I just stated, I didn't understand until I said it out loud. "Getting a job" just felt like this overbearing energy towering over me to where I just felt like I was cowering to it for some unknown reason. It wasn't like it's anything too big, but to me it felt like it.
Like I want to spend most of my energy working on this platform. I want to be working on the content. I want to be working on building community. I want to be working on our messaging. I want to work on color palettes. I want to work on potential collaborations. I want to work on future infrastructure. I just want to work on this.
The last thing I want is to be spending my time on something that won't be translatable to this platform. Or working on something else that takes up too much of my mental capacity to where I'm too exhausted to even work on this.
A lot of things that are first world problems. But, this is my life and I get to make these decisions and have to make these decisions. My parents and grandparents did what they had to in order to allow me all these privileges they never had. I want to take advantage of it and create something I'm proud of and something they can be proud of.
This has honestly just turned into a whole spiel about me not wanting a job and to work on this. But, I do need to get money. You can see how I can easily get overwhelmed lmaoo. Shit's not as complicated as I think it is. I overthink a lot. Overthinking can be good, but it can also stagnate you. It can help flesh out ideas if you're using it positively, but can also paralyze you if you allow it. And boy have I allowed it to paralyze me.
What I'm going to do is just find a side hustle in order to bring in money and have some sort of cash flow. Take on small projects that I know I can do well on. Learn through those projects and translate them to what I want to do with this. Not focus on finding a "career" or "job" yet and just get a source of income. If one comes around that feels right and aligns with what I'm trying to do, I'll apply and hope for the best, but just getting some projects to work on seems like the best route right now.
This is what me and my friend talked about this past couple of hours and felt really good to unpack it and understand where my anxiety was coming and why I was overwhelming myself. It may seem like a small problem from the outside and may be a small problem in 5 years. But that's just all a part of my growing process. That's part of my journey. It is what it is. Clown me for it. Do whatever. I don't care. I'm going to be doing great things in the future and there's a reason why you're reading this. If I get people coming back to this and reading this that's a win in itself. That just means I'm doing something right.
We all have different journeys. What's a big problem to one, may be small to another. Doesn't mean one is more meaningful or more important than another. We all deal with shit. This is what I'm going through right now. That's it.
There's value in writing down the things you go through. Whether it's for your future self or someone who finds you later down the line and wants to understand your journey that much more. Everything feels big in the moment. Whether it's actually big or not is not decided.
The future is unwritten. Nothing is known. I have no clue what can actually happen. I'm excited for the possibilities and what this could be. I'm just a 26-year-old, trying to figure life out. I know nothing. I just have a lot of hunches and think a lot.