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Come Hell or Hot Water (Inverted Castle Ep 39: Gestalt: Steam & Cinder)

The hosts let off some steam in Gestalt: Steam & Cinder (Metamorphosis Games, 2024, PC)

If you prefer to listen on the go this episode is also available at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/inverted-castle/episodes/Come-Hell-or-High-Water-Inverted-Castle-Ep-39-Gestalt-Steam--Cinder-e2qka7k or your podcatcher of choice.

Also, if you'd like to see our opinions to tell us how wrong they are, we are now publishing the google doc with our personal stack ranks at https://tinyurl.com/inverted-stack

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Hi Mark. With a lot of talk recently in the online space about the unreasonable outrage and horrendous death threats towards the Commander Rules Committee and Commander Advisory Group, I want to thank you for being the proverbial "shield" for some of the most heinous and grotesque backlash towards WOTC as the unofficial public representative for MTG. I know it can be absolutely draining for your mental health to receive harassment in this position, so I just want to say I am grateful and empathize that you are in this position. With that being said, as one of the most prominent faces of Magic, is it possible if you could say a word or two about the aforementioned harassment towards the RC and CAG to deter these harassers and possibly share your own experiences regarding unconstructive hate to help the victims of such depravity (if you're comfortable sharing)?

There are advantages and disadvantages of being one of the faces for Magic. When people like something we're doing, even when I had nothing to do with it, I get lots of praise. Most players only know a handful of Wizards employees, so they tend to assume that the people they know are responsible for the things that are happening.

There is, of course, a downside to that. When things happen people dislike, I'm also the light rod for complaint. Whether or not I had anything to do with the issue in question, I get the blame. I am Head Designer. Many times, I did have a hand or a say in what happened. And when I'm responsible, or partly responsible, for something, I try to own up to it.

Players are not a unified front though. When we do thing X, some of you will like it while others will not. I often will get complimented for the same thing I'm being yelled at for.

From time to time, we do something a majority are unhappy with. At times, we do things a majority are *very* unhappy with. That's when things can get a bit ugly. There are a lot of civilities built into daily life. There are just things you don't do or say to another human being. Most of that goes out the window online.

For some reason, the anonymity combined with just how social media has evolved has emboldened people to do and say things they never would in person (and I should also acknowledge society has changed in ways that even what's acceptable in person has changed).

What this means is I get a lot of negativity, some of it very personal. I'm not just talking about people criticizing the in-game choices I've made (or often didn't even make), but comments on me as a person, about who I am and what they think of me. People tell me that want bad things to happen to me. Not just getting fired (although that's a popular one), people vocalize, sometimes quite graphically, about things they want to happen to me.

The first few times this happened, I took it pretty hard. Having lots of people attack you online, saying horrible things about you, is tough. Humans look to other humans for approval. It's just built into our DNA to want others to like us. Having people attack you hurts. You have trouble sleeping, eating, it just weighs on you emotionally.

I was bullied as a kid. This really isn't much different except its much higher in volume and very public.

With time, I learned to adapt to it. It's not that I enjoy people saying nasty things about me. It still sucks, but I've found ways to process it. I came to realize that someone being nasty is more a commentary on them than me. And I adopted a philosophy of looking past the words to the message behind it. Most people complaining didn't like a choice we made about the game. I could focus on the feedback and less on the delivery method. But that took years, and it has a lot to do with who I am as a person. I enjoy the things I get to do with a public profile, so I accept what comes with it.

I've made the conscious choice to build a thick skin and weather social media, so I can continue doing what I love. It saddens me that I have to.

I say all this because I don't know if people really process the harm they're doing when they get negative online, especially towards another person. Most people do not have the years of processing angry messages like I do.

Words have an impact and that doesn't matter whether you're speaking them directly to someone's face or typing them in the privacy of your home.

Bullying is not okay. Cruelty is not okay. Making a conscious choice to belittle another human being, especially because they made a choice you disagree with about a game, is not okay.

When you use ugly words, you are doing harm to another human being (sometimes many human beings). Imagine if someone attacked you like that, or a loved one, or a friend. Don't do something to another human being that would cause pain if it was done to you.

That doesn't mean you can't communicate unhappiness. It doesn't mean you can't vocalize that you disagree with a decision made. I would stress two things. One, make it about the decision and not the person who made the decision. Explain why and how the decision impacts you, not what you think of the person because they made the decision.

Two, watch your language. As I said above, words have power. They can be used to build or to destroy. Is the language you're using designed to hurt? If so, don't use it. Use other language. If you need to take time to calm down, do so.

Community is what we as individuals choose for it to be. One of the things I love about the Magic community is how kind it can be, how accepting it can be, how uplifting it can be. But that's because we each individually choose to do that. The Magic community can get ugly, but only if we allow it to become so.

So please, the next time you're making a message designed to do something destructive rather than constructive, take a moment to reflect. Why are you doing this? What is your goal? Is it your intent to hurt someone? Because that's what negative language does.

I ask the Magic community to be better. I know we have the potential. I've seen it.

Be part of the solution, not the problem.

Thanks.

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Hey, sorry if you’ve been asked this before, but I have ADHD and I’ve been following your comic for years and just now have started to write my own comic (partially because you really inspired me). But I’m really struggling with staying on the project even when it’s boring and getting myself to work on it in the first place. Do you have any tips on how to keep your brain invested or just to make yourself do the work at all?

I have excellent news, I literally just figured out something really important about this.

So when you're an ADHD kiddo or otherwise have difficulty staying on task in a structured environment where Task is the Priority, the main way people try to MAKE you stay on task is by removing your access to anything that is not The Task. No phone, no TV, no doodling, no going outside, etc. In practice, this just makes us miserable because it takes the boredom that's always simmering around a 2 or 3 and cranks it all the way up to 11. In the same way that you would have difficulty staying on task if you were in physical pain, this crushing existential monotony makes it very difficult to work. The work might get done simply because you have no other options, but it will not be done quickly or well, and it will take a while to recover from how much it hurt.

What I realized earlier this week is I caught myself doing this to myself. I had 42 pages of background colors to do, and I thought to myself "this sounds really tedious, but I suppose I have nothing better I can do." And I realized what I'd just thought, and got very alarmed.

Because back when I was an ADHD kiddo imprisoned by school scheduling and a million little factors that keep children immobile and restrained, I couldn't stop thinking about how big and exciting the world was, and how much I wanted to be anywhere but here. When I was feeling really crushed in I'd pick a random spot on the maps on my wall and just imagine being there instead of my bedroom. This was the impetus behind almost all of my creative energy. I've said it before - anything is a prison if you can't leave, and being in a prison makes it easy to imagine how amazing things could be outside of it. Aurora's initial worldbuilding was forged in the crucible of fifth grade misery. My enthusiasm for art and my creative drive are inextricable from my sense of wonder and yearning for excitement in the real world. Not escapism, but appreciation. Wonders unimaginable are out there, and I gain just as much joy seeking them out as I do conjuring them up in my head and sharing them with all of you.

So now that I'm a grown-up with actual freedom in every way I've been able to get, the idea that I was staying on task by making myself believe the world was small and not worth seeing was extremely alarming. It could keep me on task for an afternoon, but at the cost of slowly extinguishing the thing that made me want to make art in the first place - the hunger to experience and draw inspiration from all the myriad complexities in the world.

So what I've been doing is I've been purposefully and intentionally taking excursions whenever I catch myself thinking "I could take a break but it wouldn't be worth it, it's the same outdoors as always, I'll be uncomfy and unproductive and tired." Because that is never true. Every time I've put down the stylus and gone out, I've been renewed in one way or another, and when I come back to comfort fully recharged I get a lot of shit done. Because it is easier to work on anything if you remember why you wanted to make it in the first place, and it is self-defeating misery to just lock yourself in with it and tell yourself you're a bad person if you can't get it done.

I honestly don't know how widely applicable this is. I have worse wanderlust than anyone I know, so for me this has always been modeled as imprisonment vs freedom. I've also been extremely lucky to find myself in a profession that lets me set my own pace on literally everything I do. But I genuinely believe that when it comes to making art with ADHD, you need to give yourself freedom to move laterally, not just in the direction of obvious forward progress. We don't think linearly in any other part of our lives - art is no different.

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Spinning our Wheels (Inverted Castle Episode 35: Timespinner)

The hosts tug at the threads of destiny in Timespinner (Lunar Ray Games, 2018, PC / PS4 / PS Vita / Switch / Xbox One)

If you prefer to listen on the go this episode is also available at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/inverted-castle/episodes/Spinning-our-Wheels-Timespinner-e2lnb3n or your podcatcher of choice.

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WW Link was raised on a tiny little island by his grandmother, with his closest in age peer being his baby sister. Both his grandmother and the two old men on the island taught him on stories of past Heroes and knightly valor. The only other family on the island has two little toddlers who adore and follow him around as if he hung the stars. This boy was raised to be a gentleman who helps everyone without hesitation, a perfect example of ideal knightly chivalry, protecting and caring for women, children and the elderly.

And then the day he enters adolescence, filled with stories of the Hero saving his Princess and the kingdom, he meets a girl his age for the first time in his life, captured and in danger just like the damsels in distress from his stories.

And she instantly starts bullying him

Because Tetra was raised by pirates who obey her every command without hesitation. This girl is half feral, will stab unprovoked, and has probably never heard the words 'manners' or 'no' in life. For all her ignorance of her lineage, she is still a spoiled princess, just instead of proper tutors and nursemaids at her beckon call she has a rowdy crew of pseudo uncles and brothers that are trying their best to raise this little girl but are still pirates. She says "I'm bored. Let's fight a sea monster!" and they gleefully say "Yes Miss Tetra! Here's your sword!" without hesitation.

And Link falls in love, with this feral gremlin, who thinks it's funny to shoot him out of a catapult, across open ocean, face first, into a wall, of a heavily armed enemy fortress.

And once their adventure is done, his little sister decides this is her new rolemodel.

And now Link is the Hero and Tetra is the Princess, and they're tasked with re-founding the kingdom of Hyrule.

And I really want to see more of their dynamic in this lifetime than we see in their two games. I want to see Grandma's reaction to meeting the Princess that her grandson loves and granddaughter idolizes. I want to see him attempting to woo her using how he was taught to treat people, and her just being so confused by all this sappy softness. I want to see the kingdom of Hyrule that was founded by a fierce Pirate Queen and her tender gentleman Hero, before it was stabilized by any future generations. Because the dichotomy of their upbringings has such comedic potential that is not utilized enough.

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great to see you're one of the men who talk over women when they say JoCat gives them the ick 🙄 men will continue to be lonely as long as they respond to women who want them to change with "um TECHNICALLY I'm not doing anything wrong" like ok yeah he shouldn't be cancelled but women are allowed to say he makes them uncomfortable

hilarious. hi, I'm a woman, and also that's a very uncreative way to rephrase "I like leaving my Cringe Instinct unexamined and making my snap judgment of strangers everybody else's problem"

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wait, so what's goin on with JoCat? why are they the victim of the week?

This was a thing back in late 2023. JoCat received enough harassment for - and I cannot stress this enough - literally no reason that he left the internet entirely for several months with no promises to return. Some people called him weak for this, and those people are very lucky that I don't know where they live.

Everyone with a modicum of decency or empathy thought this was a huge tragedy and a failure of human goodness, and his absence was mourned across a staggering number of platforms even by people who only knew him by distant reputation. Of course, the people who think men shouldn't wear skirts or hairbows or express feelings thought this was a huge victory, and for reasons inexplicable to me, many self-declared online leftists seemed happy to side with those charming people in the triumph that they had successfully bullied and harassed a kind, sincere, GNC man so badly that he might have vanished from the internet forever. Apparently when it comes to punishing "cringe", no ally is too toxic to rally alongside.

With months to reflect and public opinion gradually catching up to the obvious conclusion that this was bullshit and should never have been allowed to happen, the handful of people who continue to act like their harassment campaign was in any way justified have mostly doubled down on "well I never said I WASN'T a huge dickhead" so they can pretty safely be ignored until they decide to start participating in the basic courtesy required for the human social contract again.

Thankfully Jo has held up pretty well with support from friends and loved ones, and has recently started being active online again. Putting himself back in the fray is an act of bravery I don't think I could match if I were in his shoes, but I'm glad he's feeling comfortable sharing the work he loves again, even if, in my opinion, the vast majority of the internet doesn't deserve that second chance.

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I made a crash course about this.

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hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

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My brain: You have so many tight deadlines. So many things on your weekly schedule. So many important jobs. You have to get important work done!!!

My hands:

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An Overwhelming Surplus of Darkness

Episode 31 released today! The hosts search blindly in Absence of Light (Koala Symphony Studios, 2024, PC)

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john green quit tumblr because of the cock monologue

No, he didn’t.

This all happened a long time ago, and my memory is imperfect, but here’s my memory: The cock monologue certainly hurt my feelings! But when people are trying to force someone out of a virtual space, they sometimes resort to behavior that is similar to bullying except it’s not completely identical to bullying because the person they’re making fun of has a lot of power. (As someone who got bullied a lot in school, the feeling was similar in 2014 but it wasn’t identical–because I was aware of the fact that I was okay, that what was in danger was certain aspects of my identity/self-value that I treasured but not my entire personhood itself.)

Anyway, it hurt my feelings, and still hurts my feelings when I see it shared (it feels to me like a joke about my sexuality, although I understand other people don’t see it that way; but yeah, you don’t know much about my sexuality and I don’t really want you to but it feels like a joke about that to me, which just bums me out). 

But all of that stuff is a side effect of my job and having been successful at it, and I like my job. It is a great job. All jobs have aspects that suck. My job has fewer such aspects than other jobs I’ve had.

So yeah, I did not quit tumblr because of the cock monologue. (I also did not ask tumblr to make reblogs un-editable.) .

I quit tumblr because a few people started to make extremely specific threats. One might, for instance, send me an ask that featured a google streetview screenshot of my home alongside a plan for breaking into it.

I was super scared of these people (or possible person pretending to be a few people?) because they seemed to have a lot of knowledge about me and my family. We lived in a normal middle-class neighborhood in Indianapolis and I felt very exposed and nervous all the time in my real life, and eventually the freaked-out feeling just got too big and that’s why I quit tumblr.

(Edited to add: I am aware that prominent people sometimes use death threats against them to portray themselves as victims and protect themselves against justified criticism for their bigotry or abusive behavior or whatever. I don’t want to do that; it’s important to note that I have a lot of resources and power and so was able to, for instance, move to decrease the threat, which a lot of people can’t do. But I also feel like not talking about the experience honestly has not really helped me or anyone.)

I SHOULD’VE quit tumblr much earlier–I needed to realize that people weren’t comfortable with me in their virtual spaces and that to them I came across as cringey or even creepy, but at the time, I wasn’t nearly self-aware enough to leave for any of those reasons, and plus there was a lot of pressure from movie studios etc to stay on the social Internet so I could continue to promote my books and the stuff around them. So I didn’t quit when I should’ve, and as a result had and caused quite a few negative experiences for people. I’m sorry about the role I had in causing those negative experiences. I should’ve had a better understanding of not just how I experienced myself but also how other people might experience me. That’s something i’ve worked on over the years but still come up short on sometimes.

At any rate, I might delete this later because it makes me feel a bit like all my nerves are exposed to the air but I did just want to clarify that the, like, Tumblr Legend of this whole thing is at minimum a bit over simplified. 

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Episode 29, Curious Gorge, released today!

The hosts delve too deep and too greedily in Chasm (Bit Kid, Inc., 2018, PC / PS4 / PS Vita / Xbox One / Nintendo Switch).

If you prefer to listen on the go this episode is also available at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/inverted-castle/episodes/Curious-Gorge-Chasm-e2e1cum or your podcatcher of choice.

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Some negative aspects of the colours:

White is dogmatic and uncreative. There are no exceptions to their rules. They will throw individuals under the bus for the greater good.

Blue is passive and perfectionist. They will not act quickly or without thorough information. They miss good solutions and timely solutions looking for perfect ones.

Black is paranoid and parasitic. Any coalition with black will likely devolve to infighting or graft as black jockeys for a better position in the post-problem world and expects others to do likewise.

Red is short-sighted and impulsive. They will act on their gut without attempting to disconfirm their beliefs. This makes them easy suckers and prone to misunderstandings.

Green is naive. They believe others want to form a community as much as they do, making them vulnerable to selfish acts. They may also believe an artificial equilibrium is the natural order or misunderstand something’s true nature.

I wish more people used Magic the Gathering's Color Pie instead of D&D's alignment all of the time.

Like, saying a character embodies the selfishness and impulsivenes of Red Black offers more depth than Chaotic Evil

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Ep 28 released today! The hosts keep their virtues intact in Spelunker 2: Yūsha e no Chōsen / A Hero's Challenge (Now Production, 1987, NES).

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Ep 27 released today! The hosts let the cat out of the bag in Gato Roboto (Doinksoft, 2019, PC / Xbox One / Nintendo Switch). https://youtu.be/K90U5PGS3tU