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more panels from my twine because what else am i doing these days

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this started out as propaganda for my warhammer ripoff hahaha… It’s a reminder to the Manufactory that canaries (people with no biomechanical augmentations) work among them for a reason, and are the first to show signs of suffering when things are about to go sideways. this is one of the few spaces where someone’s vulnerability is an asset, but like most things in the Empire, it is only tolerated because it can be exploited.

then I started thinking about other institutions where someone’s suffering forecasts mass suffering. something something… a society is judged by how it treats its pariahs, scapegoats, and deviants. I don’t want to be a canary for you people, I didn’t ask for this, but it IS funny in a sad, morbid way that my suffering is tied up with the suffering of the masses. your own people will giddily burn you for fuel, not sparing a thought for the sparks at their own feet.

the song is inward and outward. we’re all in our own cages. sometimes it’s easy to recognize that someone shares a cage with you, sometimes it’s very hard. I don’t have a hopeful denouement for this like I normally do but I think the tiger poem will do

these are available as shirts and prints if you like. [women’s t-shirt] [men’s t-shirt]; [variant women’s t-shirt] [variant men’s t-shirt]; [print] [variant print]

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(POINTS)

READ KINGSGATE

finally adding Faceplate into kingsgate after buying him from @1ore a while back and now you all have to look at him B)

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I see your destinies above you like angels who don’t love you 

I drew this in 2023 after reading the IPCC report and hearing “Steal Smoked Fish” for the first time. I meant to finish it up, but never did. It resurfaces now, I guess, much like the vaquita at the brink of the Sea of Cortez.

My life is full of addicts and ex-addicts, infinitely precious people who have teetered on a similar brink. There is something in there that is the same— the vaquitas in the sea of cortez and the vaquitas in my life, and feeling so sad and angry and helpless about the state of things that I want to bring the whole world to heel. 8 vaquitas. 8 vaquitas and how are we not rioting in the streets? 8 vaquitas and how do i go to work tomorrow? 8 vaquitas. 8 vaquitas. it’s about the vaquitas but it’s not just about the vaquitas. it’s never just the vaquitas. Our struggles are so tightly bound up with one another’s. Please give flowers to the living.

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ok we're live again 👍

m0r1bund.com is in hell for a little bit while i mess around with the guts o7 thank you for your patience

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m0r1bund.com is in hell for a little bit while i mess around with the guts o7 thank you for your patience

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The Warg, Goregon, or Wargonopsid is an endematic creature fabricated by the Endling Cult. Much like their creators, these animals serve a variety of purposes, functioning variously as beasts of burden, hunting hounds, and companion animals.

I describe these animals chiefly to advance Warg husbandry beyond the shores of Earth. This is a common source of misunderstanding between Endling envoys and Imperial diplomats, whose superstitions about the Endeme place them at odds with one another. I also seek to demystify the creature in the eyes of the Archive, which lacks the capacity to study them directly. In so doing, this dossier endeavors to ease certain tensions under the current ceasefire.

Read 'On Wargonopsids' ▶

... goggy (gorgonopsid doggy)

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teemill doesn't do a lot of promotional sales outside of the UK, but they're throwing us a bone this week. from november 22nd to the 29th you can get 10% off your order with the code "TAKE10" at checkout.

you know. at my print-on-demand store. liveblogging my print-on-demand store,

Happy 1 AM. I have merch

Pleased to announce that my shop has more than just prints now. Shirts... A mug... Another print... Mostly just shirts and mugs and prints. I haven't ordered anything else yet, how mysterious

check it out...

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went through the art on your site and I absolutely love motu's mask . I fully was under the impression he was a guy with a animal head at first, out of curiosity what was your inspiration for its design ?

THANK YOU!! I love that he gives the impression of having a real critter head. He would be so indignant about this, which is great, because we have to keep him humble.

so Motu came about after I replayed Morrowind for the first time as an adult, and I wanted to port my player character, Roan, into Moribund. I had put a lot of time into her story, and I guess by that point it had drifted from the source material enough that it was time to wiggle out onto dry land.

Back then, Moribund was distinctly lacking in war and sociopolitical beef, so I needed a real guy-of-all-time to fill the shoes of Dagoth Ur and the Sixth House... which is to say that yeah, the fact that Motu wears a mask, the burnished gold/bronze color, the engraved rays in his sideburns, those are all nods to the og

The earliest iterations of Motu's mask were modeled after baboons and macaques.

couldn't tell you why I gravitated to them. I think part of it was because I had written off primates for most of my life. I grew up a wolf girl and I thought that any animal without prominent fuzzy ears looked weird. (oh how the turn tables.)

Then he pivoted to a chimeric, set beast-type critter. I was younger and I didn't have the language for what I was observing at the time, but I was drawn to cynocephaly as a cross-cultural phenomenon. I also liked the idea of him being a visual wordplay on "dog-headed" and "god-headed"

I don't remember if I designed boondogs concurrently with him or after him, but that's the in-world justification for why he looks Like That. his mask is modeled after them.

I also had Roan and Koda's masks to reference. they were early examples of the mask-wearing practice in high Asthaom, and I knew I wanted Motu's mask to mirror theirs.

honestly, I feel like his mask is still a work-in-progress. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the planes of his cheeks and eyes. I think they can be done better.

(i swear i've drawn it more recently i just don't have access to my sketchbooks right now)

this also isn't unique to Motu, but his colors/geometry/asthaom's identity/my art in general draw heavily from settler and indigenous folk art in the Southwest, folk art in general, and also the cultural exchange happening in east asia during the time of the maritime silk road. people were making cheap crafts for mass export to satisfy the tastes of a wide variety of people who had never seen this part of the world, but this was also before the colonial powers that be, so It's a bunch of cultural and material knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs in a way that's not... like... always benign, but Different, sometimes less asymmetrical, and endearing to me as a knockoff myself LOL. it's an excuse to learn more and make clumsy efforts to reconnect with whatever tha hell it means to be japanese american.

now that I think of it, this comes full circle with Morrowind taking heavily from Indian history and Hindu cosmology. really playing a game of telephone with another guy's orientalism all the way back to the silk road. motu would hate this regardless. totally ruining his illusion of a pure and static cultural heritage.

but what can i say. i love when we pass around the Creature

[shishi] [shachihoko] [inugami]

:)

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This Is The 15th Of November. The Year Of The Dragon, Twenty Twenty-Four. These Are The Closing Days Of The Holocene... And The Final Hours Of My Life

https://www.instagram.com/m0r1bund.1ore/

Do you have an instagram?

Oh no… I don’t have one of those either… :’^o right now this fool is just dA and tumblr

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Basedt update... 8 new pages... wanted to wait so this scene would be all together...

^^^ that link takes you to the first page in the chunk... take a look

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YES! YES! YES!!!!!!!

25 of them... .

sometimes they are on my ko-fi. sometimes they are on my website. how mysteriouse

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In other news, I feel like I’ve been working exclusively on things I can’t share because I’m under an NDA with myself about them. an NDA that is simply not real and I can break at any time. like right now.

Look at these frames from my twine, boy (working on it) (no ETA) (scope-creeped myself really bad) (having the time of my life)

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hello! I was catching up on reading NAKAQUOI! and the essay from the most recent entry was such an inspiring method of storytelling. enough so to make me reach out and ask about your website in general (if you're comfortable answering!). what is it like running a lore/gallery site for your work? how and why did you get started? and lastly, what about it keeps you going?

thank you, cheers! -Winn

😭 Thank you so much for the kind words, this means a lot to me. I really enjoyed writing that little essay.

This is going to be a weird and vulnerable sidebar, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it. Honestly, it blows my mind that anyone reads them. I think it’s because I’m still operating on the assumption that this form of storytelling is for n=1 (yours truly) and other people are merely tolerating it, LOL. I used to be way more sensitive about sharing my characters / stories / worlds, because the forms of storytelling that came naturally to me were often received as incomprehensible, dense, and unintuitive by other people. At a certain point I decided that I just had to accept this and become my own hype man. People could enjoy the pretty pictures out of context, and they could be a vehicle for me to journal about the pretend people who live in my head. Good compromise 👍

for someone who talks big about making weird art and finding the 6 people in the audience who truly get it, I don’t think I realized that this could include my deranged essays about things that aren’t real. And yet. AND YET!!!! I think this desire to present my work in a way that’s “more” than just pretty pictures with text attached to them has been simmering for a long time, even though I dismissed it and was kind of embarrassed about it. Which is wild. Because I grew up on bestiaries and warrior cats lore compendiums and video game wikis and morrowind. There was clearly a precedent. And Yet.

Anyway, this desire started rubbing shoulders with the technical limitations of blogs and gallery websites, and also a general disillusionment with social media during the enshittification of the internet. Like, yeah it sucked that my whole body of work could vanish overnight. But mostly I had worldbuilding neuroses that made me want to scratch at the walls, and I knew just enough html + css to be dangerous. In 2018, I had also finished some longer works that made me more confident in my ability to deliver a cohesive Moribund, and these works weren’t intuitive to share on social media… So… I guess that gave me the impetus to stop flirting with the idea of getting my own website and start actually working on it.

M0R1BUND.com used to be a pure html + css + js website hosted on Neocities. It was ideal and I miss it in a lot of ways, because yeah, that IS the most unadulterated control you can have over your webspace. Had a blast with it, experimented a lot, learned a lot, hosted galleries and twines and webfiction and digital collages and ARPG stuff and interactive maps and a webcomic. And it was mine as much as it was the work of kind people sharing sample code on stackexchange, LOL.

Eventually, I felt the growing pains of managing this by hand. Updating ate hours out of my day. There are definitely more intuitive ways to build and maintain a pure html + css + js website, but I was working with what I knew. I started learning wordpress for basedt.net with the hopes of automating certain operations, like posting art to a gallery or pages to a webcomic. It felt intuitive enough that I later rebuilt M0R1BUND.com in wordpress.

It took a long time and a lot of work, like almost a year? And I still haven’t mirrored everything. Wordpress has made things easier to maintain, but I learned the hard way that it doesn't avoid the pitfalls of simpler website-builders… which is to say… whatever it does to make life easier will also make life incredibly difficult if you decide you want to do something manually. And it’s never the stuff you expect.

These days there’s also the baggage of Automattic’s nonsense. Wordpress is open source, so I don’t think it will go anywhere, but it’s still the corporate clownery that I wanted to escape by making my own website. Blech.

Really though, I love running M0R1BUND and it’s the closest thing I have to an ideal “home” for my work. Going to a dedicated website is unintuitive and out of the way for a lot of people, but (indicates generally) what have we just learned about me. This one’s for n=1 and the, like, 6 people who pop in and say hello. You are my people...

Looking forward, things cook at the rate of 2937728839 irons in the fire, and they are all getting done, but they are all getting done sooooo slowly… I’m having fun. Besides having a general compulsion to make art and tell stories and be Understood, I think that’s what carries me thru this. I want to have fun. and I want to trick people into caring about my characters and also the Sonoran Desert. And as Bjork says, I have to get the wiggles out or else the dark times will come.

It’s getting late and I don’t have a denouement for this. Thank you for your kind words! Thank you for asking! hope this answers? hope this helps (???) take the best and leave the rest.

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Happy 1 AM. I have merch

Pleased to announce that my shop has more than just prints now. Shirts... A mug... Another print... Mostly just shirts and mugs and prints. I haven't ordered anything else yet, how mysterious

check it out...