# making

[talenlee]

Dragon Regulation

Dragons are cool

I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion. I think that, broadly speaking, if I put a thing in a fantasy universe and put it within certain benchmarks for what constitutes dragon-y-ness, it’ll be accepted as a dragon. And maybe you’re much more loose and casual about it, but I think about how there are rules for dragons. Or if there aren’t any, shouldn’t there be?

Rules For Being A dragon

Dragons are like pornography. I can’t define it for you but I sure know it when I see it and also terabytes of them have passed through my screens each year. But more the first part.

You can call anything you want a dragon. In the real world, we call a type of fruit a dragon, and a bug, and a very cute lizard, a bigger less cute but still cooll lizard, and a seahorse and a slug and a millipede that makes zyklon-B.

Yeah, really.

Messed up, huh?

Anyway, the point is, dragon isn’t a special title. You don’t actually have to fulfill any obligations to be considered a dragon. It isn’t about being a lizard or about being able to fly or being able to breathe fire or even something like number of legs. This extends into your world and what you mean when you say a dragon dragon.

Here’s a list of just… stuff that I’ve seen about dragons in different sources.

They’re ancient reptilian flame-breathing hexapodal creatures with two wings and four legs but no hands, like Smaug from The Hobbit Part 3.

They’re long ferret-like creatures that fly without wings, and a serpentine body, fluffy hair and antlers, like in Raya and the Last Dragon.

They’re round, with tiny flappy wings and big yellow eyes, like How to Train Your Dragon‘s Gronckle.

They’re a sinuous dinosaur-bird with a huge jagged beak and crest, like Ridley from Metroid.

These are just a handful of things, but while all of these things can be called dragons, none of them seem to ‘break’ the term, right? But what about:

Chrono Cross has a dragon that’s a human-shaped clown.

Seath the Scaleless from Dark Souls has no scales, which isn’t actually that big a deal compared to how he has no legs.

Like A Dragon is a game about Yakuza dudes.

temtem has a feathered serpent with no limbs as a dragon.

Pokemon has Exeggutor, which is a walking palm tree with four heads.

Bubble Bobble has two dragon protagonists who have no wings and barely necks.

Mario has Bowser? Who may? be a dragon? But he’s also a turtle, and lacks wings?

There are even more examples of things that are ‘dragons,’ and that seem to sit outside a single, obvious specific intersection of ‘dragon-ness.’ In your worldbuilding then, the thing to consider is what you need ‘dragon’ to do or mean. In Like A Dragon, the term Dragon is used as a reference to literature: nobody in that game is actually producing a real dragon because in that story, dragons aren’t real, except as a thing people can be, and – you know, so on.

To that end: Work out what Dragon is supposed to mean. It isn’t necessary to have rules, but it helps if you know whether or not you need them. For myself, I like the idea of dragons as very magical but materially real creatures. I like the idea that they fly with their wings, that they are very muscular, that they have a lot of weight, and that while there are a lot of virtues to being what they are, biologically speaking, they are creatures that exist, and follow rules. They’re long-lived, they eat, they drink, and they sleep.

Rules for Treating A Dragon

Okay so you have some rules, or some guidelines at least, in your mind for what a dragon is, what makes a thing a dragon. In my case, I started with ‘it’s big, magical, and it’s a meaty, material entity, not a god, or somehow fundamentally supernatural.’ The way I tend to think of a dragon is as a single character that represents a government you have to negotiate with or deal with.

How does the world treat dragons?

In your world, are dragons mysterious? Are they history or are they nonsense? Do people have the idea of dragons but no experience with what they really are? Are dragons common, such as things like kobolds (are they dragons, to you?) or Dragonborn? What about half-dragons? Kinda hard to claim that dragons are fake if you’ve got a queen who’s been famously a half-dragon for generations, at least, if that’s a claim that’s somehow believable.

Dragons are pretty materially significant: are there laws about dragons?

Consider, if a dragon is a dangerous thing that can endanger a city, it might be illegal to contact dragons. It might be seen as just fundamentally a dangerous thing for a random citizen to do because talking to a dragon could get the dragon’s attention on the city. In the real world, there are laws against doing things that can cause landslides, there are laws against encouraging wild animals to approach the city, and there are laws about contacting dangerous political entities.

A dragon is kinda like all three?

Rules For Slaying A Dragon

Who can fight dragons in your story?

Not everyone, right?

A dragon is something that in your mind is probably only going to show up if it’s important and difficult. It’s a term with a degree of prestige. You don’t just beat up a dragon in an alleyway, and you don’t go out slaying dragons like they’re rats. I mean, you might if you think of kobolds as a type of dragon, and maybe a setting where there are populations of feral dragons providing problems in city infrastructure could be interesting to go in one way or another, but by default, nah.

Dragons are dangerous.

Who kills a dragon? I’ve written about this in the past, in my talk about the way that a dragon is a surrogate government. Thing is, you gotta consider in your stories and your worlds what stops a dragon, what displaces or defeats a dragon. Can they be? Can they be reasoned with? I compare them to states, but are dragons going to have the needs of states, can they be reasoned with? Do they have the economic presence of a state?

Most of the time when you see a dragon defeated, it’s a story about someone who should defeat the dragon doing it. It’s very rarely a peasant uprising, it’s usually a knight or a prince and it very commonly is connected to a justifiable cause to go deal with the dragon. It’s really interesting to because it feels like to an extent, a dragon, at least an evil or hostile one, is a bit like a rogue state? And wouldn’t there be a clear idea that ‘hey, someone should go deal with this, or what it’s doing?’

Forgetting About Drakes

None of this is necessary, of course. Dragons are such iconic creatures that you can just have one apepar in a story in the world and people will go ‘oh, yeah, dragons, we know what those are.’ You don’t have to consider them as economic engines or state actors that result in regulation.

But isn’t it more interesting when you do?

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[lexamakes]

Cat bed continues to be a raging success!

[begemotthedog]

He's trying hard just to let us get some good tea from a cute teapot!!😭🤍

Commission for arelhyhahaha on Twitter!🍵

[getamovieon]

[copperbadge]

Last year I got into imprint and letterpress in a hobbyist kind of way, and after visiting the Hatch Show Print shop in Nashville (well worth the ticket if you're going to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where the press lives) I decided I wanted to learn more about how printing worked from a mechanical point of view.

I'd like to buy a real letterpress, but I found a "build your own" kit on eBay and -- I have to say it doesn't work well but it is a functional press and I learned a lot about press construction while building it!

[ID: Three images; top left is the kit box with the parts and manual inside, while the top right is the half-built press. Bottom image is the press fully built, with a lever at the top, the inkpad inverted over the base, and a "press" plate between inkpad and base. It prints, kinda. I may be able to improve it.]

[kirbyfigure]

૮ ｡ˊᯅˋ ა

[ethereqll]

OBJECT SHOW MAKING !!

` for i am officially [trying] to make my own object show! i dont have anything in the way of money, so im looking for animators + vas that are willing to work for *free*..

i know this is probably a lot to ask, but itd mean a lot to me!

you can ask for my discord,, ill happily send it one way or another if willing to help :~)

there are other jobs available! like artwork, background design, script writing, etc..

thanks a lot!

[very-ito]

Rika Timelapse

[postcard-from-the-past]

Butter making in the Normandy region of France

French vintage postcard

[talenlee]

The Boundaries Of Love (In Worldbuilding)

Hey, does love exist?

This is one of those frustrating kinds of philosophical questions because there’s a host of stuff in the real world that exists, fictionally, but that doesn’t mean the material of it actually exists. In the real world, countries definitely exist, but there’s nothing about the country existing that’s true outside of the people in the space enforcing that identity. Numbers and math exist, in that you and I can both execute on their systems and get the same results suggesting some kind of central uniformity, but there’s nowhere you can go to get a cup of four.

In the real world, love is not an object unless you want to get into truly ontological spaces of what an ‘object’ is. It isn’t stuff, it isn’t material, it’s a fiction, in that it is also a term that is used to reference a signifier that humans can relate to based on its meaning. And those meanings are… weird. Those meanings are manifold and complicated, and this is, I must make clear, not a thing that’s true of all cultures everywhere.

Love is very ambiguous in English, because it’s a word that’s meant to cover a host of topics from the social to the theological to the preference to the experiential, and in no situation in English is love the wrong word or overstating anything but contrasting those uses with one another creates some strange discrepancies. In a vow, love is the term we use to describe a lifelong commitment’s motivation and then in the dinner after that wedding it’s a term used to describe how we feel about the nice fingerling potatoes.

I bring up English because it’s very important to remember this is localised to English. Not that other cultures are clearer in how they communicate about love, but about how that other cultures just aren’t doing the exact same thing because it’s always valuable to remember the boundaries and parameters of what your constraints are. You can use this as an angle to address, by thinking about these big, broad concepts and then trying to consider ways the concepts might be approached in different ways.

The United States and England, two major media producing cultures that share a language and use ‘love’ in similar ways still express that idea in a lot of different ways. As an example – god help us all – Love, Actually is a movie that is ostensibly about depicting love in a host of ways, and those ways include some incredibly British things that then, non-British people are able to interpret and map onto their own experiences. A Christmas novelty Single isn’t really a thing in most countries, but it didn’t stop Love Actually from selling perfectly well in America. This is because Love in this case is not a universal, uniform thing, but is a collection of floating, related signifiers. You don’t find love as a thing that exists and testing a goopy liquid in a tube, but instead, love is a thing you find by people talking about it.

This is where you can wind up with some interesting tripping points in your world. Because it’s not uncommon in worldbuilding, fantasy especially, to try and turn ‘love’ into something like a material force, or a fundamental underpinning of a magic system or something that drives psychics, and that creates a new problem. Because love is powerful. I mean, love doesn’t even ‘exist’ in our society and we still treat it as if it’s fantastically powerful, because people will do things in the name of love. Love is one of many motivators for people but it’s a really, really strong one, it’s so strong it overrides our common sense and can even lead to displays of strength or resolve that transcend all forms of survival instinct. We are really good at loving and loving is really good at being a motivator, and if that’s the case…

Like…

We already have in our real world, systems that try to weaponise love. Patriotism, for example, tries to engender a love of your country, one of those other fictions, and we do a lot to try and instill patriotism like a kind of psychic virus. That’s the real world where you can’t turn love into fluid goop and transport it, for example. When you start involving psychic powers or magical energies that can recognise and respond to the Power of Love, when there are government-impacting artifacts that care about Love, you run the risk of making it so that these are things that governments start to render programs to react to.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

After all, imagine if there was a magical power of love sword in your country. Imagine if there was something that, like, cared about a wielder who was pure of heart and knew true love, and this was capable of turning the tide of armies in battles. In that environment, a government program to ensure that people could be pure of heart and could know true love would be worth doing. This is assuming there’s no ‘line of descent’ malarkey there though because then the government program to promote the use of this weapon is uh, eugenics, but if it’s just anyone pure of heart and smoochy of lips could use this weapon? Then you might wind up in a country where there’s a whole bunch of infrastructure that seems kinda weird and fanciful to people at first, where there’s a deliberate attempt to make sure people can communicate openly and honestly about love and relationships, and maybe even a more refined language for doing so, to make damn sure that people who have ‘true love’ know really well what that means and how they can use it, for when the government needs to access it.

When you look at a world, as a world builder, there’s always a chance you give away that whether or not the world is meant to have one language, it was definitely thought about in one language only.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[lexamakes]

I made the cat bed in to a macaron, it continues to be a fav spot.

[lurking-latinist]

Hey, tell me something you like about your own writing/art/whatever you make! Something you're good at, something you enjoy doing, or even just "I'm proud that I work on it"!

I'll start: I'm good at sticking the landing. I have a lot of punchy ending lines that feel satisfying to reread.

(That's why I write so many oneshots: I get to write more endings that way...)

[vampirefreakzx]

💙✨️Miku claws!!✨️💙

A turquoisey blue / green

These are made to sew into handpaws or gloves! For cosplay and fursuiting ect!

Get them here!!

https://oddsockzxart.etsy.com/uk/listing/1865118676/3d-printed-tealturquoise-fursuit-claws

[getamovieon]

Models and set pieces from Asteroid City

Photos by Gregorios Kythreotis of Sable