m0r1bund

[m0r1bund]

(POINTS)!!!!!!!!!

ok last art fights i guess

@m0r1bund’s Sinuk & Brun, @crowbobot’s Swallow, and T1xbY’s Pushifrise (with my other oc Pako, bcuz they’re both pufferfishes :D)

yeah im not gonna attack again today, burnout and sleep deprivation’s fucking me over a bit SO i guess this is where it all ends for now. aughhh i had so many other characters i wanted to draw…… perhaps next time! I’m gonna try to keep improving the following months so i can attack even MORE next year!!! hopefully!!!! ahaha

[m0r1bund]

A bitty little something of Daithí Aquilegia for baby's first GW2 art party :) Really liked this fella's face and fit. Thank-you to @leafofkudzu and Verdant Shield for hosting, and @snoodls for inviting me along!

[m0r1bund]

Was under the impression petrei had replaced his lower half with a giant centipede mech and did not have normal legs under All That. But now it's almost like a tail in my minds eye which is equally awesome

I thought Petrei was some manner of centipede-lamia too, and then I think after I arrived at the combat scene, I realized how much his body plan resembles the Col's. Petrei was an indistinct smudge of red in most panels so I mentally walked it back (only sort of kind of) with biomechanical tailcape, and now here we are hee hee.

He is pretty vulturine too with his collar and hunch and big ole schnoz. Part of that comes from the Doctor, who I also think of as thematically vulturine, and someone who moves around in that kind of shuffling turkey vulture way. I had thought about hamming it up more with Petrei's venetian weevil-vulture-plague-doctor-thang, but I had mixed feelings about taping two cool animals and a pop culture icon to kind of a shithead. now he is... those same things but with a little less chutzpah than he could have had. c'est la vie.

anyway, thank you! He turned out to be a lot of fun and I'm glad other people are having fun rotating him like a 3d rat.

[m0r1bund]

on the hunt for an e1dol/but i am bad at riddles. assuming the ones that are "guarding: ???" are the unclaimed little guys!

Yep! Those are the unclaimed ones. I usually go in order by number, but not always... just like I try to have an e1dol floating around at least some of the time 😅 the past two months have been pretty wild. happy hunting!

[m0r1bund]

Oh to add on to my last comment, I forgot to tell you how much I admire the choice to never (As far as I remember, and my memory is bad so I hoping I’m right) show the full extent of the archivist’s body, which really portrays how menacingly large and unfathomable they are. The choice to only show the hands of extremely important figures is insanely cool for creating this inhuman distance from them, displaying how you’re simply unworthy of seeing their visage. It’s only when one is brought to death’s door is their face even ever shown, it’s very smart! I hope you take pride in the fact that decisions that may feel inconsequential for you help you stand out and give an untouchably unique style to the visual language of your stories. Or, in simpler terms, the art is awesome and aids the plot, very very impressed :D

Thank you so so much. This is one of those things that just kind of lives in my brain, and I don't want to say anything about it because I want people to have an experience uncolored by my Director's Commentary (TM), so it's incredibly gratifying to hear someone recognize and name it. I'm fighting the impulse to say more because there's still more I want to do with this motif, but just know I'm rotating this message in my brain very rapidly.

[m0r1bund]

What inspired the sort of abomination-like Swiss Army knife centipede look of the Archivist? And can I get a picture of them being all tall and with bad back posture :D

Absolutely.

excellent excuse to do horrible weevil man origami. Also hi I have a tablet again, yay :)

I didn't expect to have as much to say about him as I did, but design rambling below.

so I should preface this with the fact that I didn't work out Petrei's design in advance. I definitely had an image of him in my head, but the panels in Threadbare are the first times I drew him. so the biggest reason he looks like that is because it's what I could draw quickly and shittily.

second biggest reason is uhhhhhhh

The Archive is an offshoot of the Endlings which are an offshoot of me wanting to make some WH40k Mechanicus-type guys that I could play dolls with. they're kind of walking backwards into this, the Archive being visually closer to the source material, but deviating more than the Endlings from being machine animists, what with their disdain for the secutors they rely on.

With the Imperial Archive, I think it's important for them to take themselves very seriously but look goofy while doing it. I struggle to find a good balance between making them feel goofy, but not too endearing; brutal and inhumane, but not too competent. it should be easy to make fun of them, but it should also feel a little dangerous, because they are fragile people with big egos and bigger guns. probably that's why I keep taping knives to every available limb. I'm taking another page out of warhammer's book. it's an inherently goofy setting, and the more bad actors try to co-opt it into being "cool", the more goofy it becomes. tape a knife to a gun. tape a knife to his legs! and he has bonesaws for wings because fuck you i guess

Designing around this tension between goofy and banally cruel is difficult sometimes, because there are a lot of ways we can unconsciously punch down when we design villains... making them "ugly," old, gender-nonconforming, giving them disfigurements, equating extensive robotics and prosthetics with inhumanness, etc. In retrospect, Petrei sorta resembles this statement and is a weird primer for what an Archivist looks like. I think of the archetypal Archivist as a conventionally beautiful person who is just, like, vacuously brittle and empty inside. but Petrei isn't in the business of worrying about his appearance. He has other insecurities to deal with. He's also head of the Archive's bioengineering division, and I felt like it would be a missed opportunity for him not to be a giant mechanical weevil man.

(Aside: The Doctor studied under Petrei before working with Markus, so that's another source of design symmetry. I thought it would be fun that they resemble each other.)

Anyway, I found myself thinking a lot about about body image, disability, and transhumanism with Petrei, because of the aforementioned considerations, and also because this has emerged as a running theme with Chief + the R.A. and Threadbare and I'm stumbling to keep up. I think the Archive rides the fringes of what is socially acceptable / desirable among the imperial elite. but they also are maybe the most sensitive to others' perceptions of them because they're in the business of manipulating hearts and minds. so, the mundane self-image problems that everyone has get magnified to the extreme in them. they're too mired in the loneliness and misery of cruelty to be able to see themselves clearly... not to say they are unhappy people necessarily. probably they are doing the same mental gymnastics that we do just to get by, and it has become too normal to be anything but background noise in their lives of comfort. but they are certainly yoked to maintaining power/control/security and I think they are forever missing something because of that.

Perhaps Petrei feels insecure about his dainty frame or his masculinity, and feels the need to appear bigger than he actually is. maybe he doesn't want to be perceived as, ahem, "flamboyant" like certain other Archivists. Being the Archive's head bioengineer also means he's very Visibly a guy who is artificially extending his lifespan like a living mummy. He interacts more intimately with death than the other Archivists, and maybe his own mortality hangs over him because of that. I mean, all Archivists tend to be obsessed with their own mortality, because they had to kill to get into office, but perhaps Petrei is insulated from that, because he hoards knowledge on his trade and creates secutors, something every Archivist needs. this leaves him time to self-experiment and guard himself against the more inevitable specter of age hanging over him. does he hide behind layers and layers of robes and wires and biomechanical augments because he feels fragile? maybe it's fitting that his proximity to death makes him a little "weirder," less brittle, and more vulnerable/accessible than other Archivists. maybe his self-image could benefit from the fact that there are people who will see being a 15 foot tall centipede weevil man as a feature and not a bug (hah) but I don't think his ego needs inflating. he chose lobotomizing people over love, and he gets to deal with that.

Speaking of weevils, we'll get his personal monologue for modeling himself after them later. mine is that I think they're cute (goofy) and it's easier for me to design machines after insects than anything else because I'm better with creatures than I am machines. The centipede origami came later when I had the idea that it would be fun if he was actually tiny under there.

He did end up resembling the Col more than I wanted him to, but I can live with tweaking their designs later. we can't both show up to the party with centipede legs. how embarrassing!

Anyway. That's my rambling thought process, but I also am just throwing spaghetti at the wall recreationally and seeing what sticks. Thank you for inquiring! I will also be answering your other ask soon because it is making my brain tick in a good way... stay tuned

[m0r1bund]

You are a crazy person, you know that? 9 months of silence to drop insanely cool shit like it’s nothing.

Continuing to reaffirm why you’re a fantastic artist and hitting high ranks on the inspiring individual leaderboard.

I hope one day there’s a little wiki for Threadbare for all the fun worldbuilding because I will die of death if I do not get to know more….

Hello from the floor, which I'm on now. Thank you for taking the time to say this, it means a lot to me!

and LOL If I'm good for one thing, it's writing essays about things that aren't real. I've been thinking it would be nice to organize my gallery pages better so that it's easier to find those essays... Or maybe just biting the bullet and giving it the morb wiki treatment. frightening.

[m0r1bund]

I know most artists are probably annoyed to hell and back with art advice questions…

No idea on your stance so I’ll ask

How do you do format your backgrounds?? Like the perspective, the empty space versus detail, what shape to make the canvas, all that stuff, idk.

I can imagine detailed stuff in my head but in practice I flounder to even begin to put it to paper so is there some sort of method to the madness?

Lastly, do you think it’s a good idea to start by drawing over real life images as a way to learn?

That’s all, thank you

Hi, sorry this took a while. No worries about asking, I’ve been there and I think we sometimes underestimate how much people like to feel helpful and to talk about their process. I have an awful memory, so it’s hard for me to retrace my steps sometimes, but I’ll try!

I remember being in a similar place where my mind’s eye was far ahead of my technical skill. This still happens, I don’t think it ever really goes away, I just remember it feeling especially pronounced and frustrating when I was younger.

context: I used to be really frustrated with my inability to finish or even start large, meticulously detailed pieces, especially landscapes and environmental pieces. This changed as my technical skill started to catch up with my mind’s eye, and I could execute things faster and faster, before my brain would arbitrarily decide a piece was “done.” I’ve had this lifelong tension between trying to become a faster artist so that I can strike while the iron is hot, while also accepting that my brain is wired a certain way, I don’t have to make myself suffer by working against my own brain, and it’s OK to make slow art. for all the grief it gives me, the ADHD hyperfocus / state of flow is part of the process and I do genuinely love it.

So with that in mind, here’s some pointers that I’ve personally found useful.

done > perfect, started > not started, always and forever. Lower the bar as much as you need to. I think this can be rough for those who are less motivated by the process and more by communicating something as it exists in their head. Unfortunately I am learning this lesson over and over, that a piece simply will not happen unless I make it feasible for myself. Can it be done faster and shittier? Can you settle for getting one or two things “right” and letting the rest turn out how it may?  

Taking up photography, studying photographers, and yes, tracing / photobashing / painting over photos (with appropriate permission.) Sometimes it’s more intuitive to find the composition than it is to make it from scratch. I’m lucky to live in the place that I draw, so it takes less guess-work to translate it to my art, but I also just think it’s fun to cultivate an eye for composition using the world around you.   I think creating your own references also teaches you things that studying curated art will not. You interacted with the space in-person, so you have valuable insight into how the space feels and the relationship between objects that you can’t glean just from a picture. It’s also got the beauty of the amateur’s eye. Contrast won’t be perfectly balanced, you’ll get to work with weird color combos under weirder lighting, things won’t be massed very intentionally, etc. What’s interesting to you about the subject is ultimately unique to you, and you get to bring that out.   Video game photography is another fun way of studying someone else’s work. Virtual landscapes are intentionally composed, down to the massing/lighting/visual clutter, so in a competently-designed environment it’s easier to find picturesque vistas or neat places to stage your subject. More fun, maybe less frustrating than exploring an environment that isn’t similar to one you want to depict.   I like sandbox games for DIY scene-setting too. Staging stuff in blender, making rough clay models, whatever you need to do to feel out the space.  

Ditto the above for studying other mediums that you enjoy. I feel like it’s glaringly obvious when I want something to be a 10-part animated series or, like, a tapestry, because that’s just where I go to when I’m pulling from my mental library.   Maybe part of why I gravitated to film and animation is because you can see changes in composition, focus, perspective, etc. happening in real time, so it’s easier to notice them, and to reflect on how they change the meaning of the scene.  

Leveraging your limits. Limited palette, limited time, limited scope, whatever. Easier to play with values when you’re working in black and white than when you add color to the mix. And hey, what can you uniquely do when you’re working under certain limits that you can’t do if you had free reign of a blank canvas? Pixel art, polychrome pottery, noir… The limits of a form make it memorable, or however that saying goes.  

Massing detail and polish around the focal point of the piece. I don’t think I’m very intentional about this with my finished work, I usually play with contrast or negative space to bring attention to things. but I often do this with my quick-and-dirty art like Basedt and Threadbare. I polish the bare minimum to communicate what I need to, and then leave the rest to imagination.   like anything else it’s just another tool in your toolbox, not as useful to those with very detailed work that choose to guide the eye in other ways.  

Thinking of the environment as its own character(s). Some of us get into art because we’re having fun drawing our favorite characters or our OCs, so backgrounds are just that--- backgrounds, scene-setting, all secondary to the main event, not as interesting or exciting to draw. I am personally trying to get rid of the mental boundary between subject and environment, because that’s more in line with how I feel about worldbuilding and life in general. They’re inseparable, they feed into one another, and it does me better to think about them holistically.   Corollary to that: Environments can be fun! A lot of people think of them as drudgery, but I don’t think you have to self-flagellate doing a hundred still-life master studies if that’s not the most efficient way for you to learn. We can and should do difficult things, but I don’t know, I think you can trick yourself into getting excited about drawing cars or buildings or rocks. For me, it’s exciting to explore my headworlds through the eyes of the fake people who live in my head. I guess having that touchstone of something that’s familiar alongside something that’s unfamiliar makes it more fun. When the switch finally flipped, it was really rewarding to realize I was scribbling landscapes as the “main event,” and the inclusion of a character was a last-minute thing if it happened at all. It can be fun! It doesn’t have to suck! But it takes time.  

OK, I think that’s all I got right now. As usual, glean what’s useful to you and forget the rest. There are others who can speak more competently about technical stuff than I can, and I’m sure I’m overlooking something obvious. this is just what sticks with me, personally.

[m0r1bund]

despite everything

basedt update

24 whole pages... waow... here is a link to the first page in the bunch... go to them

I have posted (most of) my page buffer and hit pause on Basedt updates for the near future. I don't have a drawing tablet or most of my art tools anymore because of the housefire, and I don't really know when I'm going to be back in action, so I can't estimate when Basedt will return. I'm scratching at the walls to get back to it, though. I just want to draw

[m0r1bund]

this escaped my drafts prematurely but it's done now. here ya go o7

Things have been quiet lately on account of my house burning down. Nobody was hurt, and I haven't lost my physical / digital art pieces, but I have no way of working on them right now... which means I'm going a little stir crazy! haha! ha !!!

I had the foresight to draft a post with some of my favorite panels from my twine game, Threadbare. I was originally just gonna use them to promote the game, but this is all I can to work on right now, so you're getting the director's commentary reel I guess. but first

Play Threadbare!

Or don't, I can't control you.

I started making Threadbare so that I could weasel my way out of drawing comics. it was supposed to be a low-effort way of telling Frey and Kairos' story, which is, in the grand scheme of things, ancillary to everything happening on wasteland Earth.

(honks clown nose)

the art is also made to be low-effort, even if it doesn't stay that way. unremitting red/white/blue/black takes the guesswork out of painting in color, and also feels like propaganda art. mapping characters to certain colors makes simplifying them easier. Frey can be reduced to an angry blue smudge and Kairos can be a stupid red hat on a triangle.

I had already written out most of the Frey-Kairos scenes back in 2023. The holding cell scene is actually one of the first things I drew LOL. Everything else sprang up from the twine game format. I knew I wanted some buffer between Frey breaking out of the Abattoir and Frey confronting the Oracle, so that we could learn more about the two of them, and also the Archive, without rushing into prophecide. This ended up changing the structure of the story more than I thought it would... and created a lot of self-inflicted scope creep... which is for me to unpack at a later date (when I'm done) (girl help im not even done)

but probably the biggest addition is

her

and ES I guess.

ES and Rhodes were originally funnie little nature spirits, but I long suspected that Rhodes would make a kickass ex-secutor, and I needed some NPCs to explore the Archive with, so. here ya go. I promise I'm going somewhere with them. Rhodes is filling the shoes for another old character concept I had (which was partly cannibalized by the Oracle of Caeres, funny enough.)

<more spoilery stuff under the cut. play my twine game.>

The other characters like Petrei and the Undertaker were designed on the spot, which is to say I just opened a canvas and started painting and hoped for the best. because this was supposed to be low-effort. haha.

I want to go back and figure out Petrei's anatomy because the idea of doing horrible manweevil origami is fun.

The other big surprise in all of this was having sound and music figure so strongly into things. My last twine game, Killswitch, had maybe three little songs to set the mood, and no SFX. I guess something broke in me and I decided I wanted to make an ace attorney game this time. You're all getting bespoke vox files now. my gift to you. and part of why this took like 9 months

I feel lucky that I found the musician ROZKOL, whose work is featured prominently in the twine, just as I was dipping my toes into audio editing and really scripting the meat of things. I was not expecting to find a musician in the Creative Commons scene who had totally figured out what a ceaselessly grinding imperial death machine sounds like. I have a hard time thinking in music, even though it motivates so much of my work... sometimes I feel like I have aphantasia but for compositions LOL. So I really enjoyed this kind of post-hoc surprise collaboration, it was cool to watch the scenes start to mold themselves around ROZKOL's music.

The slideshow-quicktime-event-fight-scene is especially molded to ROZKOL's song "Good Soldier." A fun return to the fine tradition of warrior cats AMVs that I was raised on. bringing in player participation is something that I would like to explore in a more elegant way in the future, I really like the idea of a music video being an active, participatory experience and not a passive one. and honestly I just want other people to feel the same unhinged rush that I feel when I put a song on repeat 70 times while painting.

There's I think four different routes in the first part of that encounter, leading to some variant panels like these.

depending on your choices, Frey gets roughed up a little more or a little less, ES may or may not stick their neck out for you, and the Oracle has choice words for you if you're a good soldier dancing partner.

(fun fact: if you don't choose to act during this scene, Frey picks a route and acts at random.)

I'm still learning what does and doesn't make a meaningful player choice. is there a branch because the possibility of choosing to / choosing not to see it is compelling, or is there a branch just to be a branch? I don't really think that you need to fundamentally alter the narrative to have fun with it. little things like ES and Rhodes remembering your name still feel meaningful to me, even if they don't change the outcome of anything. but I'm also bending to certain limitations that I cannot fully discuss until I finish this damn thing.

Speaking of finishing, I made the denouement in a deranged fever haze. I got sick twice in the span of, like, a month. It was pretty miserable. but hey, at least I had time to finish my twine.

^^^ how it feels to finish your twine (she doesn't know her house is about to burn down)

further in the vein of things burning down, I'm glad I found the song "In Your Mind" and didn't get cold feet about keeping it in the tracklist. I was struggling to nail down the tone of the ending scene, until I gave it a few listens and things clicked. but at the last minute, I nearly swapped it for "Burn it All Down." It's a really good song, too, but it's probably for the best I briefly possessed Kairos' gift of prophecy and didn't pick the one about uhhhhh. burning.

I think that's all I got for now. thanks for playing and/or flirting with the idea of playing by reading this post. kill petrei for me. and try not to be on fire.

[m0r1bund]

Things have been quiet lately on account of my house burning down. Nobody was hurt, and I haven't lost my physical / digital art pieces, but I have no way of working on them right now... which means I'm going a little stir crazy! haha! ha !!!

I had the foresight to draft a post with some of my favorite panels from my twine game, Threadbare. I was originally just gonna use them to promote the game, but this is all I can to work on right now, so you're getting the director's commentary reel I guess. but first

Play Threadbare!

Or don't, I can't control you.

I started making Threadbare so that I could weasel my way out of drawing comics. it was supposed to be a low-effort way of telling Frey and Kairos' story, which is, in the grand scheme of things, ancillary to everything happening on wasteland Earth.

(honks clown nose)

the art is also made to be low-effort, even if it doesn't stay that way. unremitting red/white/blue/black takes the guesswork out of painting in color, and also feels like propaganda art. mapping characters to certain colors makes simplifying them easier. Frey can be reduced to an angry blue smudge and Kairos can be a stupid red hat on a triangle.

I had already written out most of the Frey-Kairos scenes back in 2023. The holding cell scene is actually one of the first things I drew LOL. Everything else sprang up from the twine game format. I knew I wanted some buffer between Frey breaking out of the Abattoir and Frey confronting the Oracle, so that we could learn more about the two of them, and also the Archive, without rushing into prophecide. This ended up changing the structure of the story more than I thought it would... and created a lot of self-inflicted scope creep... which is for me to unpack at a later date (when I'm done) (girl help im not even done)

but probably the biggest addition is

her

and ES I guess.

ES and Rhodes were originally funnie little nature spirits, but I long suspected that Rhodes would make a kickass ex-secutor, and I needed some NPCs to explore the Archive with, so. here ya go. I promise I'm going somewhere with them. Rhodes is filling the shoes for another old character concept I had (which was partly cannibalized by the Oracle of Caeres, funny enough.)

<more spoilery stuff under the cut. play my twine game.>

The other characters like Petrei and the Undertaker were designed on the spot, which is to say I just opened a canvas and started painting and hoped for the best. because this was supposed to be low-effort. haha.

I want to go back and figure out Petrei's anatomy because the idea of doing horrible manweevil origami is fun.

The other big surprise in all of this was having sound and music figure so strongly into things. My last twine game, Killswitch, had maybe three little songs to set the mood, and no SFX. I guess something broke in me and I decided I wanted to make an ace attorney game this time. You're all getting bespoke vox files now. my gift to you. and part of why this took like 9 months

I feel lucky that I found the musician ROZKOL, whose work is featured prominently in the twine, just as I was dipping my toes into audio editing and really scripting the meat of things. I was not expecting to find a musician in the Creative Commons scene who had totally figured out what a ceaselessly grinding imperial death machine sounds like. I have a hard time thinking in music, even though it motivates so much of my work... sometimes I feel like I have aphantasia but for compositions LOL. So I really enjoyed this kind of post-hoc surprise collaboration, it was cool to watch the scenes start to mold themselves around ROZKOL's music.

The slideshow-quicktime-event-fight-scene is especially molded to ROZKOL's song "Good Soldier." A fun return to the fine tradition of warrior cats AMVs that I was raised on. bringing in player participation is something that I would like to explore in a more elegant way in the future, I really like the idea of a music video being an active, participatory experience and not a passive one. and honestly I just want other people to feel the same unhinged rush that I feel when I put a song on repeat 70 times while painting.

There's I think four different routes in the first part of that encounter, leading to some variant panels like these.

depending on your choices, Frey gets roughed up a little more or a little less, ES may or may not stick their neck out for you, and the Oracle has choice words for you if you're a good soldier dancing partner.

(fun fact: if you don't choose to act during this scene, Frey picks a route and acts at random.)

I'm still learning what does and doesn't make a meaningful player choice. is there a branch because the possibility of choosing to / choosing not to see it is compelling, or is there a branch just to be a branch? I don't really think that you need to fundamentally alter the narrative to have fun with it. little things like ES and Rhodes remembering your name still feel meaningful to me, even if they don't change the outcome of anything. but I'm also bending to certain limitations that I cannot fully discuss until I finish this damn thing.

Speaking of finishing, I made the denouement in a deranged fever haze. I got sick twice in the span of, like, a month. It was pretty miserable. but hey, at least I had time to finish my twine.

^^^ how it feels to finish your twine (she doesn't know her house is about to burn down)

further in the vein of things burning down, I'm glad I found the song "In Your Mind" and didn't get cold feet about keeping it in the tracklist. I was struggling to nail down the tone of the ending scene, until I gave it a few listens and things clicked. but at the last minute, I nearly swapped it for "Burn it All Down." It's a really good song, too, but it's probably for the best I briefly possessed Kairos' gift of prophecy and didn't pick the one about uhhhhh. burning.

I think that's all I got for now. thanks for playing and/or flirting with the idea of playing by reading this post. kill petrei for me. and try not to be on fire.

[m0r1bund]

Play Threadbare ▶

Threadbare is a “visual” “”novel”” about a martyr exacting revenge on the prophet who foretold her death. Make him pay! Fail upward! Change nothing! Fulfill your awful, awful destiny!

Threadbare features:

The indomitable power of spite, through which all things can be accomplished!  

One-sided(?) tension(??) with the guy you’re doomed to kill!  

The machinations of a deeply stupid meritocracy, which asks “what if we put wealthy art patrons in charge of a communications & intelligence agency?”  

Running errands against your will!  

High effort low art! Low effort high art? Low effort low art. It still took me nine months. And it’s not even done!  

What I can only describe as a slideshow with quicktime events scored by industrial noise metal!  

This guy, I guess !!

This is like… a pre-alpha demo. It covers maybe a third of the story, and it’s missing basic things like alt text and alternate game modes, which will be part of the full thing. Mostly this is an excuse to get other people to break it so I know what to fix. Enjoy!

[m0r1bund]

SOMETHING’S COMING TO THE SURFACE

Gratitude goes to half/moon and their album Traces – Dead of Winter for enabling thursday afternoon’s zone-out-and-paint session. Please have a listen. The cycle of burying and unburying the past continues infinitely there as it does in high Asthaom. Caldera and VEI5 make me want to walk out on my porch after dark and scream. It’s good! Also unburying Rebelle again, my favorite art program that I just can’t quite find a way to fit into my usual workflow, haha…

I remembered to record a timelapse, also. process + materials info is in the video description.

Song is ‘Caldera’ by the inimitable half/moon :)

[m0r1bund]

R3ND found a home! lucky timing that the puzzle was solved just as I checked my email this morning. thank you for playing y'all! solution + thought process below...

if you've never found an E1DOL, theyre little guys that are occasionally hidden around my website that you can adopt. theyre functionally an image with an anchor link that reveals a submission / claim form when opened. the anchor link is usually something goofy like #great-job. since it just needs to serve as a trigger for the claim form to appear, I type whatever feels right in there.

i thought it might be fun to make a puzzle out of finding the anchor link, so the claim form will only appear if you attach the right #anchor to the page URL. so, I posted a picture of R3ND and their "trailhead" on one of my gallery landing pages, with one half of a riddle pointing to where the anchor link would be found.

C4NT0 C4NT0 S1NG MY S0NG F4R 4F13LD 0F R1GHT 0R WR0NG W41L 4ND W41L 4ND TH3R3 UNV31L TH3 GH0ST UP0N TH3 C4M3R4 TR41L

The "camera trail" in this case is a faux trailcam painting I made of dia back in 2018. I added the second half of the riddle to the piece's description.

R3TURN MY N4M3 TO TR41LH34D’S T4L3 W1TH #4NCH0R-L1NK 4S C0FF1N N41L D4SH B3TW1XT TH3 SP4C3 B3TW33N T1TL3 C4S3 TH3 GR0UNDS UNS33N

this was tweaked from the original version of the riddle. I edited the wording of the first line and added a link back to R3ND's landing page with a hint attached (#4NSW3R-M3-H3R3) to better clarify what they were asking of y'all.

the "name" in this case was the title of the piece, Trail Cam. This was also the anchor link that gave access to the claim form. The rest of the riddle is just instructions on how the link should be formatted.

so, the claim link would be:

https://m0r1bund.com/others/#Trail-Cam

and that would activate the claim form. yippee! it doesn't anymore because R3ND found a home / was summoned for further mischief / is terrorizing someone else now. but that's how it works!

you could, of course, brute force this by inspecting the site's code, but afaik nobody did that, since this guy's been floating around for like four months LOL. thank you for playing honorably! I learned a lot about puzzle design from this and the feedback has helped me think about what I might try in the future.

Is e1dol r3nd still able to be adopted? I found their puzzle by accident yesterday and got stuck on the second riddle, I think I've found the "name", but I've been lost on what to do with it or where, especially with what the "anchor link" talks about but it's really scratched my puzzle/scavenger hunt/arg adjacent thing itch haha, I hope you do more of these in the future!

As of now, yes they are still available! I recently tweaked their riddle because they had been sitting around unclaimed for a few months. i think the original was too cryptic haha... anyway I'm glad to see people are finding it. happy to hear it's scratching that itch for you too, I want to have a nice variety of ways to get them and I thought it would be fun to try making those kinds of puzzles.

tweaking the riddle may have clarified some points from the last time i gave a hint, but here's another hint as a token of thanks vvv

they're committed to leading people around in circles, but i promise bringing the name back is more straightforward than it seems. in fact, they've done some of the work for you already by bringing you back to where you started. that's what anchor links are good for o7

[m0r1bund]

im so late to the party its no longer even faceplapril but AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LIVE TEETH REACTION

as a ?joke? ?bizarre creative activity? the Kingsgate discord made a prompt list for daily drawings involving Faceplate the NPC who has appeared in 2.5 panels of the comic and apparently the team is actually earnestly drawing the prompts and anyway here's the slapdash graphics I made for it

thanks to @1ore for his OG design, @rosemarygin for the FacePlapril concept, @c00kiesandcream for the actual prompts and list design (idk if I should share it or what??), and @mossiagocheese for being strangely passionate about this specific boy!!!

[m0r1bund]

Is e1dol r3nd still able to be adopted? I found their puzzle by accident yesterday and got stuck on the second riddle, I think I've found the "name", but I've been lost on what to do with it or where, especially with what the "anchor link" talks about but it's really scratched my puzzle/scavenger hunt/arg adjacent thing itch haha, I hope you do more of these in the future!

As of now, yes they are still available! I recently tweaked their riddle because they had been sitting around unclaimed for a few months. i think the original was too cryptic haha... anyway I'm glad to see people are finding it. happy to hear it's scratching that itch for you too, I want to have a nice variety of ways to get them and I thought it would be fun to try making those kinds of puzzles.

tweaking the riddle may have clarified some points from the last time i gave a hint, but here's another hint as a token of thanks vvv

they're committed to leading people around in circles, but i promise bringing the name back is more straightforward than it seems. in fact, they've done some of the work for you already by bringing you back to where you started. that's what anchor links are good for o7

[m0r1bund]

shop update... shopdate ▶︎

I got sick a while ago and made some new stuff for my shop in kind of a fever fugue. shirts, prints, stickers, the works. you have to imagine my shock and horror weeks later when I remember that buying samples instead of new clothes for myself means that I have to be the one to model them. me and my shitty little phone camera against the world...