#Defining Multimedia

[rohitdigitalsblog]

Best Multimedia Iinstitute in Rohini 

[femboypussy420]

Hey holy shit?

Press Release Rooster Teeth to Find a New Home with the Brand’s Original Creator Burnie Burns at Box Canyon Productions Nine months ago, Rooster Teeth announced that it would shut its doors after 21 years of creating content. Today, the Rooster Teeth brand and much of its remaining assets have been acquired by founder Burnie Burns, and his independent company, Box Canyon Productions. Austin, TX – February 5, 2025 – Burnie Burns, founder of the online media outlet Rooster Teeth, has officially acquired the beloved entertainment brand. This milestone marks a new chapter for Rooster Teeth as it returns to the hands of its original creator as part of his company Box Canyon Productions. Under Burns’ leadership, the historic brand plans to renew its focus on innovation, community engagement, and the spirit of creativity that first defined its success. Burns started Rooster Teeth in 2003 with the breakout success of Red vs. Blue, the longest-running web series in history. Over the years, Rooster Teeth expanded into a multimedia powerhouse, producing hit shows like RWBY and the international RTX convention series, while fostering a passionate global fanbase. With this acquisition, Burns aims to reignite the collaborative and community-driven energy that made Rooster Teeth a trailblazer in digital entertainment. “I am excited at the challenge of bringing Rooster Teeth back to its roots,” said Burns. “The heart of this brand has always been its fans, and I look forward to writing a new chapter together.” As an early pioneer of online video content, Rooster Teeth set the standard for how fan-first entertainment could thrive in the digital age. With Burns back at the helm, fans can anticipate a renewed dedication to Rooster Teeth’s original mission: to entertain, inspire, and connect. Along with the acquisition, Box Canyon announced a new development slate of productions for 2025, including renewed production of some of the platform’s classic shows, a new original audio adventure Again, and an untitled reimagining of Burns’ first film The Schedule.

Posted 2/5/2025

This audio is also on the RT main site

[orxinus]

EUCLYDIA RISES REDRAW CONTEST WINNERS 🏆

Apologies for the late announcement. There were just too many wonderful pieces that Orxa passed out after mulling over who to pick. Since Orxa is very indecisive, he has added 2 runner ups that get a prize of chibi doodles.

WINNERS UNDER CUT

RUNNER UPS

enderqueen_

@oriondrawsstuff

Prize: Chibi Doodle

EnderQueen’s hatching rendering style and defined lines are so pleasing to look at. The colors on Orion’s are so vibrant topped with the expressions really shows the whimsy joyous vibes.

3rd PLACE

@seafoamheart

Prize: Doodle/Sketch

The way it’s colored really gives a mystical feel. The attention to detail on the light source and shadows is spectacular. I adore their expressions!

2nd PLACE

BlueJayNoa

Prize: Doodle/Sketch

The composition and effort here is outstanding! The merging of two frames, the grid, the star turned into a shooting star to bring more color to the piece. Plus I adore Bill’s expression here!

1st PLACE

womanofthepipis

Prize: Colored Art

My jaw literally dropped when I saw how creative this was. I never expected a mixed media piece and as a multimedia artist, I know crafting is hard. The way everything’s put together is absolutely splendid.

For the winners, please message me for your prizes.

Congrats to all the winners and thank you to everyone who has participated! Please do know that I appreciated every single piece you guys made for this month’s event. You all did a wonderful job! :D

[theresattrpgforthat]

THEME: RPGs for Accessible Gaming

The RPGs for Accessible Gaming Bundle is currently live, and it's raising some money for a great cause: DOTS Braille Dice, which makes tabletop gaming more accessible for blind gamers. Here's a few great games that you can find in this gigantic bundle!

Arkyvr, by Alewood Games.

ARKYVR is a multimedia MOTHERSHIP 1E setting & toolkit to play documentary filmmakers in space for 1-4 players and 1 GM.

Equipped with only their camera gear, ARKYVRs will attempt to document life in space and expose corporate client atrocities while surviving the void’s unspeakable horrors. Players will make ends meet through corporate media contracts but with each assignment they will also find horrible truths hidden just under the surface of their mission. If the ARKYVR crew survives their film shoot, they must then decide how to distribute their footage. Some clients will pay a handsome price to cover up their atrocities while others will use it to lead a revolution. How will players use their recorded stories to shift the balance of power? Will they even live long enough to tell the story?

Created by and in collaboration with industry filmmakers! ARKYVR is a 60 page zine that brings a unique vision to deadly space adventures through the lens of a camera!

ARKYVR only works if you have a copy of MOTHERSHIP to play with it with, but since the core rules of MOTHERSHIP are free to access, this shouldn't stop you from being able to pick up the game and enjoy it's film-making twist. Each character concept comes with duties: elements of the role's job that help you define your character and give them some bones to build a personality off of. The core rules of the game are re-contextualized around missions that involve capturing footage, rather than investigating jobs gone wrong.

I feel like ARKYVR has the potential to combine the horror of space with the lovely irony present in horror movies that involve artists getting in way over their head for the pursuit of the art that they love. How much will they sacrifice for the perfect shot? What kind of art does their team want to make? What kind of art can their team afford to make? What dark secrets will they uncover in the process?

Fang, by Joel Happyhil.

You’re a Fang, an ageless super-powered being living among humans, you live in city that doesn’t matter surrounded by people who won’t live to see a fraction of your life, yet you can’t help but be intrigued. You are driven by your desire, an ever-growing thirst that has the power to reduce you to something less than human, but who knows how long that could take.

Here's a game for the vampires and their human companions. FANG has a lot of common hallmarks when it comes to what you think about ttrpgs: stats with ratings attached (in this case in the form of dots), playbooks that define your character type, and a method of advancement, to show how your PC grows over time. Similar to Blades in the Dark, there's dice pools and staggered resolution levels. There's also a thirst track that increases and decreases as your vamp experiences the visceral parts of life, like physical harm, strong emotions, or the thrill of victory.

What I love in games like this is when you see what happens when you hit your character's limit. In FANG, this limit is Starvation - when your Thirst track hits 12. Your character has an outburst, or breaks down, pushing you closer and closer to getting taken out of the scene. On the other side of the coin, Human characters have a Passion track, which is less powerful than Thirst, but also exempts them from the consequences of Starvation.

If you want a game about a desperate character having a terrible time, you'll likely find some really satisfying moments in FANG.

Be Seeing You, by Tanya Floaker.

This roleplaying game contains dangerous levels of dystopian science fiction, social allegory, and psychological drama.

Influenced by fiction in the vein of The Prisoner, Stalker, and Utopia, and real struggles against mass surveillance, the Hostile Environment, and the alienating effects of capitalism.

Be Seeing You is a game about surveillance and dystopia, but it's also a collaborative world-building exercise, building a story through a series of short vignettes. No character is controlled by one single person; each player will pick up the role of the Prisoner throughout the story, focusing on how this central character is treated by the village and its residents.

The game itself is diceless; things change in the story based on the kinds of choices you make when it comes to answering the prompts and following the parts of the story that are interesting to you. This is a game that thrives with a group that feels comfortable in the dystopian genre and loves hitting thematically resonant story beats.

Pretty Beastly, by Em Hubbard.

Calling all disaffected furniture, oppressed appliances, and humble housewares ready to rise up against monstrous monarchists! You were once simple servants in the household of an overbearing oligarch. Years ago, you were victims of an unfair curse and now you really are objects - dishes, chairs, mirrors, and ornaments. The time has now come to rise up against your Prince, defeat the vile sorcerer, and fight back against an oppressive social system!

Pretty Beastly is a collaborative roleplaying game for 2-5 players. Players work together to create a story of cursed household servants struggling against their oppressive social system. A deck of cards will help determine your challenges, successes, and failures.

Taking inspiration from animated musicals and dramatic historical epics, a fantastical (problematic) fairy tale collides with the French Revolution. Quirky and political, this game will take you on a wild anti-establishment musical adventure.

Welcome to the story of Beauty and the Beast, from the furniture's point of view. Set firmly in the setting of 18th century, this is a game of rage and revenge; working as a group to escape, defeat, or break the chains you find yourselves under as the servants of cursed and cruel monarch. The game is played over a series of scenes, using playing cards to provide inspiration for challenges as well as the means by which you can overcome those challenges. There's also a hilarious addition of musical numbers, where your characters break into song if you draw a low-enough card.

Corporate Fae, by ryland.s.

You’re a really weird fae, as far as everyone knows, you’re the only one who’s got an obsession with human corporate work life. Fortunately for you, you can stand in as someone’s secretary, manager, or the barista across the building. Unfortunately for humans, they don’t remember you before and after you temporarily take up someone’s position.

A close human friend asks you to attend some company galas and parties to do some corporate espionage and learn some gossip your friend can monopolize.

All you need is a deck of standard playing cards without the jokers, a way to record, and some time to play.

Hello solo gamers, I haven't forgotten about you! Corporate Fae is a prompt-based solo game that uses a deck of cards to generate details that allow you to imagine a story about a fae trying to commit corporate espionage.

The game is rather simple; you draw to determine the role you've taken and the kind of party you attend, and then continue to draw various juicy pieces of gossip that your fae will overhear. I think it might be interesting to try and piece the bits of gossip together, to paint a portrait of a slowly unraveling secret being pieced together from the various bits of information you gather while socializing at the party.

The only criticism I have for this game is that there isn't a great way to wrap up the game in a neat little bow at the end - I think I would have loved some kind of tension underneath getting found out, or perhaps a timer that gives you a hard limit on how much time you have to gather information before you need to leave the party - maybe like a clock-strikes-midnight situation or something like that.

Darkest Hour, by Emmeryn.

Here, a night like any other.

Rays of sunlight slowly recede over the wilds, the cabin, the steeple, the mausoleum. A gathering of friends, allies, comrades, hunters, united in their cause. They may not yet realize the danger they are in, but a cruel eye turns upon them. Something cursed awakens, stirring to life with the fall of dusk. A hunger claws free from the pitch black.

In the darkest hours of night, hearts tighten as untold horrors bear down. Fangs, claws, the glint of rusted steel and the scrape of bone. Howls and screams resound in the darkness, creeping ever closer.

Will you live to see the light of day?

Darkest Hour is a horror tabletop game designed for one-shot horror sessions. It can be played as a GMless game or with a GM, and can accommodate 2 to 5 players (with or without a GM) for one to two play sessions totaling 2 to 5 hours. It can be played with as little as the book and three six-sided dice.

Say hello to a one-shot horror game that can provide multiple sessions of fun, thanks to the various settings and horrors you can combine for a different theme each time. Your characters are hunters, pursuing a monstrous and terrible haunt that has trapped them somewhere. You use six-sided dice to try and overcome the challenges this story throws at you, each obstacle becoming harder and harder to overcome the longer the story goes.

The author refers to the work of Avery Alder, but I feel that in some ways, there's also a little bit of Ten Candles hidden in the roots of this game, especially with the rising doom the further into the story you go. That being said, the Haunt does have a weakness, and defeating them is much more likely to happen than in a Ten Candles game. If you want a game that's dripping in monster vibes, you probably want Darkest Hour.

Other Games I've Recommended in the Past…

Teenagers With Attitude and Post Apo Calypse, by CardboardHyperfix.

A Witch, A Gallows Bird, by Jellyfishlines.

Protect the Child and Copper Shores by me!

Wrath of the Undersea, by EfanGamez.

If you like what I do, you can always leave a tip at my Ko-Fi!

[legacy-expo]

With the passing of iconic artist Greg Hildebrandt, we thought we'd take a chance this week to shine a highlight on Shadows of the Empire, starting with the amazing work Greg and his brother Tim put into the ambitious multimedia project, that helped to launch the classic EU as we know it. The Hildebrandt brothers' art defined for many this gigantic leap into expanding the universe, when their artwork was used to capture and tie together scenes from all aspects of the project (book, comic, and game), in a series of Topps trading cards. The process of their endeavor is captured in the artbook "Star Wars: The Art of the Brothers Hildebrandt."

[probablyasocialecologist]

The image of the hippie is now so thoroughly entrenched in the public mind that some of the very strangest aspects of the counterculture can easily be forgotten. Those in the rural commune movement were frequently not in any sense running away from technological society. Indeed, the commune builders were often some of the staunchest believers in the transformative power of new technology, making experimental multimedia artworks and installations, pioneering many passive and renewable architectural technologies and construction methods. While some communes attempted to recreate pre-Columbian patterns of life, building pueblos and tepees for their new society, others became in thrall to Buckminster Fuller, creating delirious versions of his ecological technocracy and reinforcing the strange links between the military and the hippies, the government and the counterculture, that so defined those times. And eventually, some of those who fled the city as part of the ‘back to the land’ movement ended up as powerful members of new elites as the Cold War drew to a close.

Douglas Murphy, Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture

[fanlore-wiki]

Meta Monday: The Wave Theory of Slash

Fans often have their own theories about fandom, and one big early theory was the Wave Theory of Slash, which is this week’s Meta Monday feature. Originating from a 1993 essay by Lezlie Shell, the theory posits that any given fandom (or fan) progresses through clusters of tropes and styles of slash shipping, similar to feminism’s progression in “waves”.

The essay classifies slash fic into four waves:

Character-based stories with slash

Character-based slash

Slashing the characters

Multimedia slash

Each wave is further defined by four characteristics: the explicitness of a sex scene, the relationship of the story to canon, sexuality focus within a sex scene, and the writer's perceived relationship to the fandom.

Learn more about what defines each wave and discussion about the theory on Fanlore!

-----

We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

[empvrealities]

@ ! DR𖤓NA’S LOGBOOK ;

drana , 23 , she / they . asks ok !

( last updated : jan 31, ’25. )

hi, hello, hi !! i’m adriana, but please feel free to call me 𝓭.rana — that is the ( nick ) name i go by online and the one i’m most comfortable with. i am a linguistic & intercultural mediation graduate aspiring to get into audiovisual / multimedia translation & dialogue adaptation ... or ( forensic ) linguistic mediation; fluent in italian ( mothertongue ) and english especially, i know my way around a spanish dictionary but completely fail wherever french is involved. funny, but i promise this has nothing to do with the french. love and hate you guys.

interests of mine include procedural dramas ( for the love of all that is holy guys watch fringe, nobody knows or talks about it and idc it is a crime in my book ), broadway / musicals, behavioural analysis, criminology, horror ﹢ thriller genre, text–based roleplay ( guilty pleasure ), hozier, arctic monkeys, chase atlantic, dog training & equestrianism. the autumn–ish, winter–ish vibe ? love it. absorbed it into my very being. i am it & it is me. i am that one brownish, reddish leaf that refuses to let go of the branch & holds on for dear life. the cup of warm, sweet chocolate that warms your hands on the coldest of afternoons, but especially the too hot to handle cup of coffee that you throw on your enemies out of pure spite, because why the hell not. i am also ( very obviously ) all over the place. i’m trying to be funny. or interesting. some of you guys may say i’m very much not funny. nor interesting. ( rude. but maybe fair ? )

⁎* 𓆃 *⁎

though i haven’t been involved with the shifting community prior to like, 2023, i have been lurking around shifttok since early 2020, mid–quarantine. yes, i somehow managed to survive early shifttok & shook off all of the misinfo that stubbornly clung to me like second skin for the better part of three years ( yikes. ) tiktok–wise, i’ve fallen back to old lurking habits. i don’t know if i’ll ever pick that account back up. but i heard good things about the tumblr side of the community ( better than both shifttok & shifttwt at least ); & i missed having a safe space to chat everything shifting–related in. my inbox & asks for this blog are open & are to remain so. please feel free to drop whatever in there. ♡

dni : basic dni criteria ( racists, lgbtphobes, misoginists, zionists... you know who you are. don’t be weird ), anti–shifters & non–shifters. if you don’t like who i’m shifting for ( nobody problematic, dw ) just don’t interact. for your own safety & mine, i will not be following or interacting with any minors.

✡ ❛ supernatural @ the third winchester, 25. ( wo ) man of letters, ¾ of team free will. the middle child ( kinda ) & sam’s twin sister — older by like five minutes. rest assured i play the “older sibling” card every chance i get. insufferable ? he deserves it. ⁎ i’m what the angels define a blessed child, imbued with angelic grace @ the crib and endowed with ( mostly passive / defensive ) angel–like abilities. castiel’s charge and lover. whoops, i guess ?

main tag: #✳ᬊ：the family business﹒

↪ post masterlist.

✡ ❛ criminal minds @ the bau’s specialist in cult & ritualistic crimes ﹢ victim advocacy, formerly an officer for the los angeles police department ( lapd )’s k–9 unit. 29, italian–american. raised by rossi & his ( late ) first wife in my sick, constantly in–and–out of the hospital mother’s stead. my biological father is out of the picture ( read as: stuck behind prison bars. ) ⁎ dynamics with the team are all fine & dandy. then again, reid may just be the one honest to god bane of my existence. hate him, love him, love to hate him & hate to love him. or however it goes.

fun fact — when not busy with bau–related work, i’m in charge of overseeing the fbi’s k–9 dogs’ training. because... hell yeah ?

main tag: #✳ᬊ：wheels up in 30﹒

↪ post masterlist.

✡ ❛ supernatural x criminal minds @ john’s bastard daughter & half–sister to the winchesters. from a mol family before the mol "disbanded". fbi agent & unit chief of the prd ( preternatural research & defense ) unit, successors to the american men of letters. specialist in undercover ops, linguistics ( enochian ), demonology ﹢ werewolf lore, tracking, hunting. called to deal with violent cases where the supernatural ﹢ hunters are suspected to be involved & tasked to "protect" its existence while eradicating the problem at its source. without alerting the general population, nor local law enforcement.

crossover drs are fun. they are. huh-uh. really.

main tag: #✳ᬊ：confidential﹒

↪ post masterlist.

✡ ❛ yellowstone @ a cozier experience than what’s seen in the show, for all of my western & cattle–driving & horse–taming dreams. fifth dutton child & youngest daughter, one of three barrel racers competing for the ranch ( my main mount is a palomino ahq mare ) & kennel manager of the dutton border collies, also situated on the ranch’s land, where we raise and train our working stockdogs. a blood feud between my s/o’s family & mine makes for a nice romeo & juliet trope — minus the deaths.

main tag: tba.

↪ post masterlist.

[ridiasfangirlings]

What are your thoughts on K as some kind of multimedia series thing? I've been seeing other series that do that with them having anime, games, books, etc. that are all supposed to be this one big project that you'd need to know entirely to see the whole story. Unlike K though which got popular when the anime released, I barely hear anything much about other series that sorta did the same as it did.

I think K’s a bit different from a lot of other multimedia project style anime, in that it seems like nowadays ‘multimedia project’ is just code for ‘there’s a gacha game’ XD Seriously though I do feel like a lot of series do that now, an anime comes out but it’s just secondary to the mobile game and the real focus of the project is please please spend your money to buy pngs of our large cast who will each be allowed to have one (1) defining personality trait each. Sometimes the show might get some drama CDs or there will be an idol element so they can sell CDs and concerts but it definitely feels like you don’t see light novels as much (unless it’s for an already popular series to capitalize on something pre-existing) or even really manga that are specifically intended to fit into the series timeline and aren’t just random ‘day in the life’ or ‘retelling of the gacha game’s story’ ones. 

I think K is also interesting as a multimedia project in that the anime seems to be the ‘primary,’ more or less, or at least the thing that it’s expected people can generally watch with minimal knowledge of the other materials and still enjoy. Like I think it’s expected that viewers will at the very least watch season one of K first and that will get them interested enough to seek out the side materials, the side materials supplement the anime storyline but never supersede it. Compare that to something like, for example, Hypnosis Mic, where the main storyline is more in the songs and drama CDs and the anime was intended to promote those, but the HypMic anime itself can easily be skipped (season one at least, I never watched further than that) without affecting the main storyline of the actual series. Or something like the recent Delico’s Nursery anime, which gives a taste of the story but doesn’t really stand alone well without any knowledge of the stage plays it’s part of. By contrast while you could theoretically skip the K anime and just read the side materials you would be missing the main thrust of the storyline, the side materials build up the world around the anime but ultimately they remain in service to the anime rather than the other way around. 

I actually personally prefer this way too, while I do wish the side materials would get referenced more in the series proper I’ve found K far easier to follow than pretty much any other multimedia project I’ve tried to get into because the anime had actual stakes and important story happening and I didn’t feel like I would be totally lost if I missed, say, posts from the one person posting translations of a drama CD on Twitter or something like that. I also like that while K did have a mobile game at least it was brief and had fun moments with the existing cast, rather than falling into the trap of needing to constantly add more characters and everyone’s personalities getting flatter the more the cast ballooned. I think it both helps and hurts a little that K was created by light novel writers, on the one hand I think the anime is a bit uneven because Gora as a whole aren’t used to working within the confines of an anime but on the other the novels and short stories really give these characters a chance to shine that I don’t think they would have gotten if the anime was just there to promote a mobile game or a concert.

[4okra]

my term paper written in 2018 (how ND games were made and why they will never be made that way again)

hello friends, I am going to be sharing portions of a paper i wrote way back in 2018 for a college class. in it, i was researching exactly how the ND games were made, and why they would not be made that way anymore.

if you have any interest in the behind the scenes of how her interactive made their games and my theories as to why our evil overlord penny milliken made such drastic changes to the process, read on!

warning that i am splicing portions of this paper together, so you don't have to read my ramblings about the history of nancy and basic gameplay mechanics:

Use of C++, DirectX, and Bink Video

Upon completion of each game, the player can view the game’s credits. HeR states that each game was developed using C++ and DirectX, as well as Bink Video later on.

C++

          C++ is a general-purpose programming language. This means that many things can be done with it, gaming programming included. It is a compiled language, which Jack Copeland explains as the “process of converting a table of instructions into a standard description or a description number” (Copeland 12). This means that written code is broken down into a set of numbers that the computer can then understand. C++ first appeared in 1985 and was first standardized in 1998. This allowed programmers to use the language more widely. It is no coincidence that 1998 is also the year that the first Nancy Drew game was released.

C++ Libraries

          When there is a monetary investment to make a computer game, there are more people using and working on whatever programming language they are using. Because there was such an interest in making games in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, there was essentially a “boom” in how much C++ and other languages were being used. With that many people using the language, they collectively added on to the language to make it simpler to use. This process ends up creating what is called “libraries.” For example:

          If a programmer wants to make a function to add one, they must write out the code that does that (let’s say approximately three lines of code). To make this process faster, the programmer can define a symbol, such as + to mean add. Now, when the programmer types “+”, the language knows that equals the three lines of code previously mentioned, as opposed to typing out those three lines of code each time the programmer wants to add. This can be done for all sorts of symbols and phrases, and when they are all put together, they are called a “package” or “library.”

          Libraries can be shared with other programmers, which allows everyone to do much more with the language much faster. The more libraries there are, the more that can be done with the language.

          Because of the interest in the gaming industry in the early 2000’s, more people were being paid to use programming languages. This caused a fast increase in the ability of programming. This helps to explain how HeR was able to go from jerky, bobble-headed graphics in 1999 to much more fluid and realistic movements in 2003.

Microsoft DirectX

          DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for tasks related to multimedia, especially video game programming, on Microsoft platforms. Among many others, these APIs include Direct3D (allows the user to draw 3D graphics and render 3D animation), DirectDraw (accelerates the rendering of graphics), and DirectMusic (allows interactive control over music and sound effects). This software is crucial for the development of many games, as it includes many services that would otherwise require multiple programs to put together (which would not only take more time but also more money, which is important to consider in a small company like HeR).

Bink Video

          According to the credits which I have painstakingly looked through for each game, HeR started using Bink Video in game 7, Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake (2002). Bink is a file format (.bik) developed by RAD Game Tools. This file format has to do with how much data is sent in a package to the Graphical User Interface (GUI). (The GUI essentially means that the computer user interacts with representational graphics rather than plain text. For example, we understand that a plain drawing of a person’s head and shoulders means “user.”) Bink Video structures the data sent in a package so that when it reaches the Central Processing Unit (CPU), it is processed more efficiently. This allows for more data to be transferred per second, making graphics and video look more seamless and natural. Bink Video also allows for more video sequences to be possible in a game.

Use of TransGaming Inc.

          Sea of Darkness is the only title that credits a company called TransGaming Inc, though I’m pretty sure they’ve been using it for every Mac release, starting in 2010. TransGaming created a technology called Cider that allowed video game developers to run games designed for Windows on Mac OS X (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findev). As one can imagine, this was an incredibly helpful piece of software that allowed for HeR to start releasing games on Mac platforms. This was a smart way for them to increase their market. 

          In 2015, a portion of TransGaming was acquired by NVIDIA, and in 2016, TransGaming changed its business focus from technology to real estate financing. Though it is somewhat difficult to determine which of its formal products are still available, it can be assumed that they will not be developing anything else technology-based from 2016 on.

          Though it is entirely possible that there is other software available for converting Microsoft based games to Mac platforms, the loss of TransGaming still has large consequences. For a relatively small company like Her Interactive, hiring an entire team to convert the game for Mac systems was a big deal (I know they did this because it is in the credits of SEA which you can see at the end of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0gAzD7Q09Y). Without this service, HeR loses a large portion of their customers.

Switch to Unity

          Unity is a game engine that is designed to work across 27 platforms, including Windows, Mac, iOS, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, and multiple Virtual Reality systems. The engine itself is written in C++, though the user of the software writes code in C#, JavaScript (also called UnityScript), or less commonly Boo. Its initial release took place in 2005, with a stable release in 2017 and another in March of 2018. Some of the most popular games released using Unity include Pokemon Go for iOS in 2016 and Cuphead in 2017.

          HeR’s decision to switch to Unity makes sense on one hand but is incredibly frustrating on the other. Let’s start with how it makes sense. The software HeR was using from TransGaming Inc. will (from what I can tell) never be updated again, meaning it will become virtually useless soon, if it hasn’t already. That means that HeR needed to find another software that would allow them to convert their games onto a Mac platform so that they would not lose a large portion of their customers. This was probably seen as an opportunity to switch to something completely new that would allow them to reach even more platforms. One of the points HeR keeps harping on and on about in their updates to fans is the tablet market, as well as increasing popularity in VR. If HeR wants to survive in the modern game market, they need to branch outside of PC gaming. Unity will allow them to do that. The switch makes sense.

          However, one also has to consider all of the progress made in their previous game engine. Everything discussed up to this point has taken 17 years to achieve. And, because their engine was designed by their developers specifically for their games, it is likely that after the switch, their engine will never be used again. Additionally, none of the progress HeR made previously applies to Unity, and can only be used as a reference. Plus, it’s not just the improvements made in the game engine that are being erased. It is also the staff at HeR who worked there for so long, who were so integral in building their own engine and getting the game quality to where it is in Sea of Darkness, that are being pushed aside for a new gaming engine. New engine, new staff that knows how to use it.

          The only thing HeR won’t lose is Bink Video, if that means anything to anyone. Bink2 works with Unity. According to the Bink Video website, Bink supplies “pre-written plugins for both Unreal 4 and Unity” (Rad Game Tools). However, I can’t actually be sure that HeR will still use Bink in their next game since I don’t work there. It would make sense if they continued to use it, but who knows.

Conclusions and frustrations

          To me, Her Interactive is the little company that could. When they set out to make the first Nancy Drew game, there was no engine to support it. Instead of changing their tactics, they said to heck with it and built their own engine. As years went on, they refined their engine using C++ and DirectX and implemented Bink Video. In 2010 they began using software from TransGaming Inc. that allowed them to convert their games to Mac format, allowing them to increase their market. However, with TransGaming Inc.’s falling apart starting in 2015, HeR was forced to rethink its strategy. Ultimately they chose to switch their engine out for Unity, essentially throwing out 17 years worth of work and laying off many of their employees. Now three years in the making, HeR is still largely secretive about the status of their newest game. The combination of these factors has added up to a fanbase that has become distrustful, frustrated, and altogether largely disappointed in what was once that little company that could.

Suggested Further Reading:

Midnight in Salem, OR Her Interactive’s Marketing Nightmare (Part 2): https://saving-face.net/2017/07/07/midnight-in-salem-or-her-interactives-marketing-nightmare-part-2/

Compilation of MID Facts: http://community.herinteractive.com/showthread.php?1320771-Compilation-of-MID-Facts

Game Building - Homebrew or Third Party Engines?: https://thementalattic.com/2016/07/29/game-building-homebrew-or-third-party-engines/

/end of essay. it is crazy to go back and read this again in 2025. mid had not come out yet when i wrote this and i genuinely did not think it would ever come out. i also had to create a whole power point to go along with this and present it to my entire class of people who barely even knew what nancy drew was, let alone that there was a whole series of pc games based on it lol

[deepdreamnights]

Terms and Conditions Do Not Overrule the USTPO

Originally from reddit. I am not a lawyer, but this hardly needs one.

I use Suno, but it being a useful tool doesn't mean they're off the hook for trying to be sneaky. Also, this isn't just about them. Pretty much every Generative AI tool has some similar such claim or clause in place.

Any so-called controlling rights on public domain works are entirely unenforceable.

This is a long post, so enjoy this public domain song which you can use for whatever purpose you like.

Terms and conditions do not override the determinations of the USTPO, which is that without significant human modification, generative AI generations do not qualify for copyright protections and thus are in the public domain.

So for Suno, you own your lyrics if you wrote them. You own any modifications you make to the song in post. You might own the tune if it was prompted directly using Suno's weird symbols/tabulature stuff, but at this point there's been no judgement on whether a significantly complex prompt makes a resulting generation have "significant human expression".

Not to say Suno can't pull DMCA BS or issue takedowns, but it wouldn't be hard to prove they lack the standing. You'd probably have to go to court to do it, so if you're not willing to roll the dice on having to do that sending an email is easier, and that's what the company is counting on.

The important part, is to remember that human authorship is required for copyright. If you want those rights, you gotta make sure you're putting in the authorship (lyrics, editing, remixing, etc.)

Or, you can be cool with the commons and be open about the copyleft nature of AI generations.

I tend to approach my own work in a "making parts" sense because I've been doing multimedia collage for far longer than there's been generative AI. The final work is the faux trailer, fake commercial, music video or the comic or the mini-episode or whatnot.

But everyone's process is going to be different.

Part of countering misinformation around generative AI is breaking the hype side of things as much as the doom.

The corporate dream of an endless IP machine is a paper tiger, because all they've made is an infinite public domain machine. A century of trying to control and hoard the "rights" to our culture have drained the commons dry and this new tech just pumps solely into it's parched reservoir.

On the other end, the idea that one is going to get rich just because they've got some generative tools is just mist and vapor awaiting a light breeze. It's a great force multiplier, but anyone can get access to the same tools. The things the robot can't bring to the table are the things that matter, and they're going to matter even more now.

I like to compare most AI to toys (an object's use defines its function) and a way of making parts of a whole, so Lego is a good metaphor here. The creations that get attention are the ones that aren't out-of-the-box and made from the instructions.

I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to use the tech to fulfill their expressive vision, but to emphasize that it's not a push-button-get-end-result situation.

Everyone has access to the same bricks. Everyone can use your bricks if they find them in an out of the box state. This is a feature, not a bug.

[rohitdigitalsblog]

 Best Multimedia Iinstitute in Rohini 

[study-diaries]

Day 3 [Table In HTML]

Day 1 [Introduction To HTML]

Day 2 [Multimedia Elements In HTML]

Line by line explanation:

Defines a table,

border : This attribute adds a simple border to the table.

style : Used to add some styling to the webpage. Can be used with any tag.

Border spacing: Adds space between table cells.

Text-align : Aligns the text in the table.

Contains the header section of the table.

Represents a table row

Represents a table column

Holds the body of the table → main data (menu items).

Used for individual data cells in the table.

<table> <thead> <tr> <th> Column Head 1 </th> <th> Column Head 2 </th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td> Row 1 Data = Column 1 </td> <td> Row 1 Data = Column 2 </td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

Final Output

------------------------------

Hope it helps :)

[classicmarvelera]

Venom’s Evolution: From Spider-Man’s Foe to Marvel’s Most Iconic Anti-Hero Across Comics, Games, and Film

Venom, one of Marvel Comics' most enigmatic and multifaceted characters, has undergone a remarkable evolution since his inception. From his debut as a sinister alien symbiote to becoming a complex anti-hero, Venom's journey is a testament to the collaborative genius of writers and artists who have continually redefined his narrative. This article delves into Venom's rich history within Marvel Comics, his significant impact across various media, and the extensive array of merchandise that has solidified his status as a cultural icon

Genesis of the Symbiote: Secret Wars (1984)

Venom's origin traces back to Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 (1984), where Spider-Man acquires a sleek black costume from an alien device during a cosmic battle on Battleworld. Unbeknownst to him, this costume is a living symbiote with its own consciousness. This narrative twist introduced a new dimension to Spider-Man's character, setting the stage for future developments

Transformation into Venom: The Birth of an Icon

The symbiote's true nature unfolds in The Amazing Spider-Man #252 (1984), where it exhibits a sinister will, attempting to permanently bond with Peter Parker. Realizing the parasitic intent of the symbiote, Parker rejects it, leading to its fusion with disgraced journalist Eddie Brock. This union births Venom, a being fueled by mutual animosity towards Spider-Man, marking his full debut in The Amazing Spider-Man #300 (1988)

Architects of Venom: Key Contributors

Venom's evolution is the result of contributions from several visionary creators:

David Michelinie: Co-creator of Venom, Michelinie crafted the character's complex psychology and motivations, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship's duality

Todd McFarlane: Renowned for his dynamic artistry, McFarlane introduced Venom's menacing aesthetic, characterized by an imposing physique, elongated tongue, and razor-sharp teeth, which became defining features

Mark Bagley: Instrumental in the Venom: Lethal Protector series, Bagley's illustrations further cemented Venom's visual identity, balancing ferocity with nuanced emotion

Venom's Evolution: From Villain to Anti-Hero

Initially portrayed as a formidable adversary to Spider-Man, Venom's character arc underwent significant transformation:

Lethal Protector Era: In the 1993 miniseries Venom: Lethal Protector, Venom transitions from villain to anti-hero, relocating to San Francisco and battling greater evils, reflecting a shift towards a more nuanced character

Agent Venom: The 2011 storyline introduces Flash Thompson as the new host, portraying Venom as a government operative, adding layers of complexity and exploring themes of redemption and control

Donny Cates' Definitive Run

In 2018, writer Donny Cates, alongside artist Ryan Stegman, embarked on a seminal run that redefined Venom's mythos:

Introduction of Knull: Cates introduced Knull, the primordial god of symbiotes, expanding Venom's lore and connecting him to a cosmic narrative, enriching the character's backstory

'King in Black' Event: This crossover event sees Knull invading Earth, with Venom playing a pivotal role in the planet's defense, highlighting his evolution from antagonist to central hero within the Marvel Universe

Venom Beyond Comics: Multimedia Presence

Venom's appeal has transcended comic books, permeating various forms of media:

Video Games: Venom has been featured in numerous games, notably Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Marvel Rivals. In Marvel Rivals, Venom's popularity is evident with the introduction of a twerk emote, reflecting his cultural impact

Film Adaptations: Tom Hardy's portrayal of Eddie Brock/Venom in Sony's Spider-Man Universe has been commercially successful. The films, including Venom (2018), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), and Venom: The Last Dance (2024), have solidified Venom's status in mainstream cinema

Venom Merchandise: A Collector's Haven

Venom's iconic status is celebrated through a diverse range of merchandise:

Epic Collections: Marvel's Venom Epic Collection series compiles essential storylines, offering readers a comprehensive journey through Venom's evolution. These volumes are invaluable for both new readers and longtime fans

Action Figures and Statues: High-quality action figures and statues capture Venom's menacing presence, with intricate designs that appeal to collectors and enthusiasts

Apparel: Venom-themed clothing, including t-shirts, hoodies, and accessories, allowing fans to showcase their affinity for the character, blending style with fandom

Conclusion

Venom's trajectory from a malevolent symbiote to a multifaceted anti-hero encapsulates the dynamic storytelling that defines Marvel Comics. Through the visionary work of creators like Michelinie, McFarlane, and Cates, Venom has become a symbol of complexity and redemption. His pervasive presence across comics, films, video games, and merchandise underscores his enduring appeal and cultural significance

Get the Ultimate Venom Collection

[thewadapan]

Multimedia & the Multiverse in Magic: The Gathering

I've got a nasty habit of, instead of reading "good, fun, meaningful" stories, devoting enormous portions of my time to pure hack shit, cynical works of corporate art that have little value as texts on their own merits, but rather through the intertextuality they share.

Anyway, the other week I sort of blacked out, and when I came to there was a spreadsheet on my monitor, with 1,251 rows corresponding to 1,251 storyline sources for Magic: The Gathering—the famous fantasy trading card game from Dungeons & Dragons manufacturer Wizards of the Coast—meticulously arranged into publication order. I'm not, like, doing so hot, at the moment.

So having spent a couple of days doing that, I sat down to work out where to start, and I eventually settled on the short webcomics leading up to the publication of Agents of Artifice, a novel by Ari Marmell. Was it any good? Tap that "Keep reading" button to find out. Uh, eventually.

I. A potted timeline of Magic: The Gathering media

The history of Magic: The Gathering is riddled with bizarre, sweeping changes in the big-picture corporate strategy, where a huge shift in the product will be announced, as if to say "This is it! We've solved it now! This is how MTG is going to work for the rest of time!" And then two years later, the decision is completely overturned, replaced with some other, new initiative that promises to fix the game forever. In some ways, MTG has lasted so long precisely because of its willingness to innovate, to experiment, to throw itself wholeheartedly at an idea and then throw up its hands in a mea culpa when everyone inevitably hates it. From its earliest days, when Wizards of the Coast began publishing its own magazine, The Duelist, the corporate culture has revolved around transparency; designer Mark Rosewater has outputted god knows how many words across articles, podcasts and social media posts, fielding endless questions from a horde of mostly-intelligent fans who seem to passionately hate the thing they love. I cannot imagine having this many hours in the day. But as a result, I can think of no other game—in fact, no other piece of art, period—where the physical process of its creation is so well-documented and so well-understood.

And it's perhaps because of all this disclosure of corporate thought processes, that to me, as a fairweather fan who's been following along for a while, many of the biggest decisions have struck me as almost embarrassingly obvious in hindsight: "How are y'all only figuring this out now?"

Agents of Artifice is kind of a perfect case study. It was the first in what was intended to be a long-running series of "A Planeswalker Novel"s, books by different writers with a more character-centric approach than MTG stories had traditionally taken up to that point. See, the big defining gimmick of the MTG setting is that it's a vast multiverse of these different planes of existence. You, metatextually, are a "Planeswalker", who can travel these worlds, and your (non-diegetic) deck of cards represents the spells and creatures you have collected from them.

But bizarrely, for fully the first decade of the game's history, from 1993-2003, the actual MTG storyline seemed to have an almost pathological disinterest in this basic premise. Nearly all of the expansions were set on a single plane, Dominaria, just across different time periods, only occasionally dipping into other planes, which were usually dreamt up and forgotten by whichever writer needed them for their particular story beat. The Planeswalkers, as depicted in canon, are long-lived godlike mages, less protagonists, and more lore. Until 1997, the tie-in media was a slate of novels and comics, respectively published by external companies HarperPrism and ARMADA, written by a fuckton of freelancers who didn't seem to be coordinating with Wizards, let alone with each other. And I'll be honest: I haven't read any of it, because so far as I can tell, for all intents and purposes, there is nothing to distinguish this stuff from the rest of the yellowy fantasy volumes from the '90s with names like "The Sword of Life" stacked sideways in piles in secondhand bookstores, from the cigarette-ash-covered floppies slumping over in wicker baskets, covers pulling away from the staples. Not even in that they relate to a card game: many of these seem to be MTG stories in name only, featuring characters and settings who never so much as appeared on a card.

In 1997, all the publishing stuff was brought in-house, all this material was declared semi-canon, "pre-revisionist", and an effort was made to tell a single coherent story across the cards and the books. This was the "Weatherlight Saga", which (I think) followed the crew of a plane-hopping skyship as they battled the forces of Phyrexia, a race of... machine zombies, I guess is the best way to put it? Anyway, mixed success. I gather the cards suffered from needing to relate to the story, and that the story itself was simultaneously a bit overly-formulaic and hamstrung by changing plans at Wizards.

In 2003, the decision was finally made to have each year's expansions take place on a different plane. Y'know, like in the premise of the game. So you've got this world of metal, a world inspired by Japanese folklore, Dominaria again, a world that's an endless city, a world inspired by Celtic folklore, and they each have their own really distinct feel and character. If anything, too distinct: it's hard to get invested in these worlds, because a year later, you won't be seeing these characters again. The broad format of the story continued, a novel accompanying each expansion, I'm led to believe of similar middling quality.

So in 2007, there's this thing called the "Mending", which is basically an in-universe excuse to nerf all the Planeswalkers, to make them more #relatable and, more importantly, to allow them to be depicted in the game itself, as a special card type, without ludicrously overpowering everything else. Lorwyn introduced five new Planewalkers, one for each of the five colours of magic, to serve as the audience's POV into the MTG multiverse going forward. And although I'm biased, because I started playing in 2011, I would say this was when MTG finally got around to fulfilling the promise of its premise. The idea was that every year there would be a "block novel", concerned with the events on that year's setting, and twice a year there would be "A Planewalker Novel", which would further the long-term character arcs.

Two came out in 2009. A third, The Curse of the Chain Veil, was written and solicited, then cancelled. Brady Dommermuth, former creative director on MTG, said a couple of years later:

Unlike publishing companies who usually buy a book and publish it only if it's already good enough, we commissioned books on spec and had to publish what we got (after a few precious weeks of revision), regardless of how the final draft turned out. Only one book differed so sharply from our expectation that we elected not to publish it. You can probably figure out which.

The fourth, Test of Metal, did make it to publication but has apparently be decanonised with prejudice, so far as I can tell. After that, Wizards was done with print novels for MTG. There were a couple of ebooks, these written by the in-house writing staff rather than freelancers, accompanied by throwaway online short stories, which in 2014 became the main outlet for the storyline. In 2015 there was another big effort to refocus on a core cast of Planeswalkers, who became the "Gatewatch"—look, they were just doing Avengers, The Avengers had happened three years ago and people liked it back then. In 2019, they tried to switch back to novels (I'm guessing the Amazon fantasy slop publishing boom made that more viable again? Sidenote, Brandon Sanderson wrote a novella for them for free), there were a couple of books by Greg Weisman, people fucking hated them, they cancelled the next one they had in the can, and by 2020 they were back to webfiction, where they've languished comfortably ever since.

And this is just what was going on with the prose stuff. Boy, they were doing such things to that card game. They were really having a go of it with comics, too, though in the end those wound up being their own continuity. There was a Netflix animated show in production in 2019, with the fucking Russo brothers (see?) exec producing, later replaced by Jeff Kline (of Transformers: Prime, Wizards of the Coast having been acquired by Hasbro back in '99, and eventually becoming one of their biggest moneymakers thanks to everyone and their mum owning a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player's Guide). I'm pretty sure it's been fully written, almost certainly voiced, and hell, probably animated too, like the Micronauts cartoon, and I'm 90% sure it's never coming out, and even if it did, it would be dreck anyway, right? Django Wexler apparently wrote a prequel novel for it, which exists as a file on a computer somewhere. Also in 2020 they were doing a live-action show too. They wanted Angelina Jolie to play Liliana Vess. Having just read Agents of Artifice, I am laughing my ass off.

See, what I'm getting at with all of this is that over the last ten years, Magic: The Gathering has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light. The Magic 2014 Core Set was released with one of the five Lorwyn Planeswalkers, pyromancer Chandra Nalaar, as its poster girl. The branding across the products and tie-in video game all looked more or less like this:

I remember that even as a teen I was embarrassed by this, possessed of some notion that we'd kind of moved on from boob plate, culturally. And sure enough, companies like Wizards of the Coast are realising that you can make way more money if you don't limit your consumer base to straight white guys aged 16-35. By the time of the Gatewatch stuff, I gather that Chandra was being explicitly written as- well, not gay, as I expect that would've been difficult to square with her earlier portrayals, but certainly bi. So by 2019, when that Weisman novel came out, for some godforaken reason there's multiple bits in there about how Chandra is totally straight, and she and Nissa are totally besties, and everyone kicked off, from the sounds of it rightly so.

II. State of play

Look, I don't want to make generalisations about the current state of MTG fiction. There seems to be a stable of writers, and for each new expansion, one of them will take the reins for the accompanying storyline, with other contributors chiming in for side-stories. It's a lot of different voices, with their own strengths and weaknesses. I started playing again with Phyrexia: All Will Be One, mostly on the back of "holy shit, Phyrexia, I remember those guys!", which I gather was the intended effect. I followed along with the webfiction for five expansions total.

Of the stuff I read, most of it's not great!

If you're someone who cares about prose, well, you're not going to find much to like there. These are professional writers, who have editors, so there's a baseline competency you're lucky to see in amateur webfic. But for the most part it's workmanlike stuff. Here's a sample that really jumped out at me when I was reading the Murders at Karlov Manor storyline:

"No, no! Not you! I can't tell you! I can tell Ezrim. Only Ezrim. Can you get me to him without being seen? Is that within your power, oh great detective?" The way he spoke the words, they weren't praise. He turned them into a cutting insult, and Etrata glanced to Proft to see how the man would react.

That entire second paragraph exists to explain that the phrase "oh great detective" is being spoken sarcastically. My, such subtlety, so cleverly challenging the reader's expectations, and what beautiful command of language too! See, the way I just wrote that sentence, that wasn't praise, that was a cutting insult. I can do it too.

What about the fantasy storytelling, then, is it entertaining and memorable? Well, occasionally. In the March of the Machine storyline, there's some fun clash-of-aesthetics stuff, with the Giger-esque Phyrexians butting up against the Gothic horror of Innistrad, or the fairytale creatures of Eldraine, or the New Capenna gangsters. And this aesthetic mishmash is where Wizards seems to want to take the property; their latest big status-quo shake-up, at the end of the story, sees most of the Planeswalkers lose the Sparks that let them planeswalk, with "Omenpaths" instead connecting the worlds to allow all kinds of beings to pass between them at random. This defines the story of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, dubbed a "Showcase set", which brings a bunch of characters and objects from across the multiverse onto a single setting with a specific theme, in this case, cowboys; it also defines Aetherdrift, a "Travelogue set", which instead creates the aesthetic juxtaposition by spanning across a whole bunch of planes, in this instance through a death race.

Much as the Mending served to allow the introduction of Planeswalker cards, the "Desparkening" (which, come to think of it, really smacks of the Avengers Thanos snap, doesn't it?) serves the needs of the game designers: the meteoric rise of the Commander format to be the predominant way people play MTG meant that Planeswalker cards were less desirable, as they couldn't be played as Commanders, meaning it's actually more commercially beneficial if more of the popular characters can use the Commander-friendly Legendary Creature cardtype instead.

In MTG development jargon, there are two types of expansion: "bottom-up", the traditional style, which start by concepting the gameplay mechanics and then nail down a setting to suit them; and "top-down", which start with a high-concept setting idea and then develop gameplay mechanics to fit that. In terms of the game itself top-down design has won out, decisively, but I would argue that modern Magic: The Gathering storytelling is actually stuck awkwardly in the middle. The Omenpaths are clearly a "bottom-up" storytelling choice, informed by the material needs of the game. But you can also see the stories struggling against the "top-down" pitch for each expansion: Murders at Karlov Manor is an entire set themed around murder-mystery, but the writer for the stories is, put bluntly, not a mystery writer, so structurally and narratively the webfiction really struggles to execute on the basic formula for the genre, and can't deliver the feeling of "cleverness" that makes murder mysteries work. March of the Machine is meant to be an apocalyptic multiversal war story with an unstoppable enemy, with a sprawling scope and stakes that have never been higher... but because the entire thing needs to be wrapped up within a single expansion, it ends up being an almost farcical parade of the Phyrexians visiting these other planes and just completely jobbing, totally beefing it, in the end the heroes show up and just cut the big bad's head off and the day is saved.

It's honestly kind of a fascinating mode of storytelling, when you step back and really look at it. Corporate needs a story to resemble a certain genre, to hit certain beats that they can commission certain art pieces for to put on certain cards. In Wilds of Eldraine, there's this whole thing about these three evil witches, and the witch associated with one of the set's chase cards just gets shoved into her cauldron maybe a third of the way into the webfiction. Eldraine as a whole has a problem where it needs to pull from a specific canon of well-known fairytales, making it feel more like a jumble of references than a fantasy world in its own right.

Again, Mark Rosewater is actually very open about this creative choice: players react well to things they recognise. His "keep it simple, stupid" philosophy can be traced as far back as the Weatherlight Saga—which he had a big hand in—as I'm told the whole thing is very heroes-journey, very Star Wars. I haven't read that stuff; why would I, if I've seen Star Wars? The point is that Rosewater believes that iconic symbols, characters, stories, are iconic for good reason, because they resonate with audiences. All the numbers back him up. Money talks. Consistently, the most profitable Magic: The Gathering sets are not those with original worldbuilding... but rather, the "Universes Beyond" products, which consist of cards depicting established properties, like The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40,000, Doctor Who, and Fallout. There's a Spider-Man set coming out. We exist in the age of the perpetual crossover, a rich multiverse where every property gets to collab with every other. And to make space for more of these products, the number of original expansions has been reduced.

There are some signifiers, though, which aren't trademarked: things like cyberpunk (Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty), the '80s (Duskmourn: House of Horror), outer space (Edge of Eternities). Or, in particular, real-world international culture and history. The tension between fantasy as a genre and real-world culture has always existed, and Dungeons & Dragons in particular has grappled with the racial stereotyping and cultural appropriation that informs much of its basic lore. In Magic: The Gathering, there are an increasing number of planes based on mythology from around the world—see this map, which hilariously suggests that North America has "not enough history to adapt into fantasy". It's hard to point the finger at the expansion that started this practise: was it Arabian Nights, the very first expansion, where Richard Garfield literally just lifted the entire flavour of the set from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights? Maybe 1996's Mirage, which the wiki helpfully tells me had a "tropical African-themed setting"? Maybe 1999's Portal Three Kingdoms, intended for Asian markets and set in a period of Chinese history, or 2004's Champions of Kamigawa, with its premise Dommermuth described as "Shinto gone wrong"? Actually, yeah, I feel like it's probably Kamigawa.

Really, though, it's 2013's Ancient Greek mythology-inspired Theros that ushered in the modern era of fantasy tourism. Since then, there's been steady releases along similar lines, where it's like a find+replace has been done on all the Proper Nouns for made-up trademarks with similar mouthfeel. Like Disney with its animated features, it feels like Wizards of the Coast is sort of running out of parts of the world to mine for content. Speaking of mining, did you know that Lost Caverns of Ixalan, which returned to MTG's native Mesoamerica-inspired plane, was conceived as an underground set based on the popularity of Minecraft? There's a postcolonialist thread in that set about Quintorious, an elephant Planeswalker who's visiting the plane for research, where as I recall he has something of a crisis of conscience over whether he's just mining this other culture for his own academic success. Quintorious comes from a Harry Potter-inspired set.

And listen, I'm not going to sit here and pretend these sets haven't been meaningful for a lot of people. Increasingly, the team at Wizards has been making sure to bring on cultural consultants, or artists and writers who can draw on their own heritage in crafting the flavour of these sets. Fans seem to be responding well. The graphs are all going up. Last year, Wizards decided to change the name of the 2016 real-world-India-inspired plane Kaladesh (cludged together from Hindi words) to Avishkar, as it turned out one of the words forming the original name had unfortunate connotations. They're making an effort. Again, it's expensive when you get it wrong; you might have to shelve a novel or two.

The truth is that Magic: The Gathering has always been about escapism—or perhaps to use another word, empowerment. The very game itself is about collecting these cards to make a powerful deck that enables you to win. It's quite literally about being able to step out of one world, and into another. It's about evoking the kind of feelings that are rare or absent from our own humdrum lives. In the '90s, it was empowering to a certain kind of dork who got bullied a lot. Now it tries to be empowering for everyone. Check out Daretti's sick wheelchair.

People play Magic: The Gathering all over the world. Of course they want to see themselves represented in the game. If Kamigawa was borne from a place of Orientalism, exoticisation, then newer planes feel like they're at least coming from a place of inclusivity.

III. Agents of Artifice

This post started out because I wanted to review Agents of Artifice, and if it's taken me so long to get to the point, then it's only because I felt it was important to have all this in mind.

See, when I googled "Agents of Artifice EPUB", I didn't find an EPUB, but I did find a tweet observing how Agents of Artifice fans will always have an EPUB to share on the off chance they finally convince someone to read it. Except the way the tweet wrote the words, they weren't praise, it turned them into a cutting insult.

So this was great news for me! Already, I'd found out that there are two types of people, Agents of Artifice fans, and other people, and I was incredibly excited to learn which of these categories I fell into. I had a sneaking suspicion that Agents of Artifice might be a shibboleth for the tension inherent to the MTG playerbase, between the enfranchised players who came up with the game in the '90s—the kind of people who might unironically enjoy a yellowy fantasy paperback, assuming they can read—and, well, everyone else.

It took me a while to get through the book, mostly because I wasn't enjoying it very much for most of it.

From pretty much the word go, the prose is a cut above what I come to expect from MTG fiction:

The ground rolled, and it was not ground. Shifting grays and black—not a color so much as a lack of color—formed a surface scarcely less treacherous than quicksand. Through it, deep beneath it, high above it in what could hardly be called a sky, snaked rivers of fire, of lightning, of liquid earth and jagged water, of raw mana. Colors unseen by human eyes flew overhead, refusing to congeal, soaring on wings of forgotten truths, borne aloft by stray gusts. Mountains of once and future worlds wept tears of sorrow for realities that never were, unchosen futures that no other would ever mourn.

Like, it's not anything to write home about, except by this comparison. "Wept tears of sorrow", c'mon, just say "wept"! Clumsy repetition of the word "future" in that last sentence, too. This extract, from the very start of the book, is definitely a little bit annoying, a little bit affected, a little bit trying too hard. But, like, it's not bad. It's got ideas. It's trying to do something with the English language.

Unfortunately, I don't know, the start of this novel is just a slog. The prologue, quoted above, is told between two deliberately-unspecified figures, making some kind of vague pact; it's like every dogshit prologue you've ever read. After that, we're dropped into our POV character of Kallist, a guy invented just for this novel, so you know he's going to be boring as fuck. And he is! He's completely infatuated with Liliana Vess, the aforementioned Angelina Jolie black-aligned necromancer Planeswalker, and he resents that she seems to be leading him on, which she sort of is. There's a suffocating tinge of male heterosexuality that unfortunately taints the book in many places, not just on an object/plot level, but in the prose itself. Anyway, they've been hiding in a backwater part of Ravnica, the infinite-city plane, but their luck runs out and a mercenary captures them, hoping to track down Jace Beleren, the blue-aligned telepath Planeswalker who's the book's actual protagonist. They escape, and travel across the city to warn Jace.

Then there's a twist!

I wouldn't say that it's a particularly good twist. The rest of this review will necessarily go into spoilers, but just to keep things spoiler-free for now, I'll stop playing hard-to-get and say what I actually think of this book: if you like Magic: The Gathering and like reading, you could do a lot worse than this one. It definitely has its moments.

In fact, what Agents of Artifice has over the rest of it is precisely the fact that it's a novel written to promote nothing in particular, but Magic: The Gathering itself, in the abstract. Beyond the executive mandate that it feature so-and-so characters, it's clear that Ari Marmell is just getting to write whatever the fuck he wants. So there are bits in there that feel like they're not about communicating the mechanical beat-by-beat of someone else's synopsis, but rather are trying to communicate some kind of feeling, drawn from life.

Take Ravnica, for existence. In the game, Ravnica's identity is defined by the ten "guilds", factions based on the possible pairings of the five colors; in expansions set on Ravnica, nearly all the cards fall into one of these guilds or another, and the storylines are defined by inter-guild politics. When Ravnica last showed up in the lore prior to Agents of Artifice, I gather that the plot ended with the guilds collapsing? But a few years later, when the game returned to Ravnica in Return to Ravnica, the guilds were back, because that was what players expected. Agents of Artifice was written with a different status-quo in mind, where the guilds really were gone. The truth is that Ravnica's guilds don't really resemble reality; a city's population just isn't divided into a dozen color-coded factions of equal power and prominence. So here, Ravnica instead has the texture of a real city. Its world-spanning sprawl becomes overwhelming, isolating, alienating; outside of your few friends, there are all of these people who you cannot relate to or connect with in any form, and some of them might want to hurt you, and you feel like you're falling between the cracks in the paving stones, slipping into the gutter. At one point, Jace and Liliana commiserate that, although they could flee to any other part of the multiverse if they so chose, there is a baseline commodity to the city that simply does not exist anywhere. And isn't that how it is, with city life?

Jace and Liliana are these phenomenally unique and powerful individuals, but they can't use their talents, because they're in hiding. The sections of the story concerned with this are defined by a sense of suffocating frustration and impotency, of a feeling that you are destined for great things, to go to great places, but are instead trapped by circumstance. It's about this feeling that you could literally step outside if you wanted, but you can't, you can't, you can't.

And look, I think I just read this novel at the right point in my life, for that to mean something to me. Maybe it would mean something to you too.

Alright, you've had your fair warning. Like I say, this book has a twist, a couple of twists in fact, and while they're not great, the story does hinge on them.

The big spoiler is that Kallist, the POV we're following for the first chunk of the book, is actually Jace, who in a telepathic semi-accident has swapped minds with Kallist, who's been living under the delusion that he's Jace, in turn. When they meet again, the real Kallist (who thinks he's Jace) gets killed, and the effect reverses, so Jace (who, until now, we think is Kallist) remembers who he is and what he's done. At this point, the book makes this big jump back in time to show events from Jace's perspective, as he's recruited by another Planeswalker, the obviously-evil artificer Tezzeret, into a multiversal "Consortium" that seeks to accrue power from across the different planes. That's where he befriends Kallist, a non-Planeswalker assassin. The Consortium pays Jace very well, and his skills as a mage improve under Tezzeret's tutelage, but Tezzeret is an abusive boss who demands increasingly immoral actions from him, and before long, Jace realises that he can't get out. Eventually, there's a line that he refuses to cross, and he decides to go into hiding instead, forced to take Kallist with him as the man is implicated by their friendship. They meet Vess and have a love triangle, but eventually the Consortium tracks them down. Desperate to escape, Jace hatches a plan to carry Kallist with him to another plane, by stealing the man's mind and implanting it into a body on another world, but his abilities fail him, causing their minds to swap instead.

The second big twist, which actually gets revealed to the reader in the form of dramatic irony, is that Liliana actually betrays Jace to Tezzeret at several points in the book; she's the one who leads the Consortium to them, she's one of the unnamed figures in the prologue, who's making a deal to hide her own scheme from Jace's telepathy. I feel pretty confident that if you actually untangled the nonchronological storytelling and put it under a microscope, you'd find that her actions make no fucking sense whatsoever, just in terms of the basic logic. Still, it more or less passes the squint test. The gist is that Liliana wants to take over the Consortium—not to have it for herself, but as payment for Nicol Bolas, the evil dragon Planeswalker who used to run the Consortium, the other figure from the prologue, the only being in existence powerful enough to free her from a demon's curse. She's not powerful enough to beat Tezzeret by herself, so instead she wins his confidence and tries to manipulate Jace into challenging him. After the mind-swap accident happens, she pushes the situation to force Jace and Kallist back together hoping that if Kallist dies, the effect will reverse; she's right. The sections where Jace and Liliana are working together to plot Tezzeret's downfall are the best in the book, easily.

I'm struggling to really boil down the plot here, but I promise that relative to the book's length, surprisingly little actually happens in it. The early sections, first concerning Kallist, then concerning Jace's time in the Consortium, feel almost obligatory, very episodic, like Marmell is going through the motions to get to the bit he's actually interested in. There's a visit to Kamigawa, and to a few throwaway planes invented for this book, which of course in classic MTG media tradition aren't given names.

The thing is that a lot of these terribly mid plot-by-numbers scenes actual pay off within the narrative in surprisingly compelling ways. In a vacuum, the prologue reads as pure dreck, but revisited with the knowledge that the two figures are Liliana and Nicol Bolas... yeah, you know what, Marmell was kind of cooking there! There's an eyeroll-inducing training scene where Tezzeret gets Jace to summon increasingly powerful creatures to fight a horrible jellyfish robot of his, and then at the end of the book, when Tezzeret and Jace fight in earnest, there's another big scene where Jace has to beat an even bigger construct of his, and it's actually entertaining. The excursion to Kamigawa serves to characterise the minor book-only Planeswalker pyromancer Baltrice; you think the payoff is that at the midpoint of the book, Baltrice allows Jace to get away because she owes him for saving her life on Kamigawa. But no, it turns out that the real payoff is at the very end of the book, when Jace reaches his limit and still just can't fucking beat Tezzeret, he ends up luring the weakened artificer to Kamigawa, to let the locals get their revenge for what Tezzeret did to their village.

The truth is that, once it gets going, there's some cool stuff in here. Jace and Tezzeret escape from a heat-seeking monster by deliberately almost freezing themselves to death. Liliana trails Baltrice to Tezzeret's lair by sneaking a phantom into the package she's carrying, then summoning the phantom back from across the Blind Infinities after Baltrice planeswalks away with it. After Jace gets poisoned by Tezzeret, he has Liliana summon a vampire to suck out his blood. Again, at its best, there's this beautiful clash-of-aesthetics, such as when Jace and Liliana fight and scheme their way through Tezzeret's fantasy-factory sanctum.

More often, though, the big, memorable moments are actually times when Jace's power completely fucking fails him. During that first training scene with Tezzeret, where all of his summons just job horribly against the construct, one after the other. When he tries to shield Tezzeret's thoughts from Nicol Bolas, and the dragon just runs circles around him. When he's fleeing the Consortium goons in a crowded marketplace, and winds up accidentally killing a bunch of bystanders by calling a drake to save his own neck, and he feels their dying thoughts all at once. When he botches the mind-swap. Whenever he tries to use an illusion or telepathy on a zombie, or a golem, or some other mindless creature. When he tries to planeswalk away during his fight with Tezzeret, and he finds that he can't. When he still, after everything, just can't quite win.

It's obvious that Marmell is a writer who's cut his teeth working on RPG sourcebooks, because there's a sensibility to his writing that isn't quite at the level of "rational fiction", but which is nevertheless trying to be clever in a gamelike way. There are mechanisms in the world that can be used to contrive and resolve conflicts using oblique means, and even if it doesn't quite make sense, it at least feels like a system of cause and effect.

My favourite bit of descriptive work comes during Jace and Liliana's visit to Nicol Bolas on Grixis, a necromantic plane made out of dead tissue. The prose absolutely luxuriates in the description of a landscape composed of flesh, bone, boils, scabs, and abscesses, crawling with corpses that want nothing more than to kill, and Liliana is right at home there, possessed of more power than she knows what to do with. Goths are fucking crazy, yo. There's this raw-as-hell bit where Nicol Bolas gets one of his clairvoyants to spy on Jace and Liliana as they arrive, and the way she does this is by peeling the cornea from this guy she's been horribly torturing, and placing it in her own eye... and it's not the squick of this moment that got to me, it was the way her partner's like "gee, I'm glad this guy's still got his other cornea for next time, it's such a pain in the ass when we have to stake a new screaming torture shmuck to the ground".

The thing about the the multiverse, what draws me to Magic: The Gathering as a setting, is the idea of a place that exemplifies a kind of emotional reality. What if the rules of a genre were actually baked into the fabric of a world itself? What if you could take a thin slice of experience, and sort of extrapolate out a whole world from that one feeling? Grixis, then, reads as a reflection of Nicol Bolas, villainy taking place on a scale that just cannot be comprehended in a human lifespan, you can look from one horizon to the other and still not see all the corpses. The icy plane where Tezzeret and Jace meet (and flee from) Bolas reflects Tezzeret's cold treatment of Jace, and in turn the moral coldness that Jace has adopted by this point.

This is all just flavour, though. What the book is doing that's interesting, to me, is in those emotional stakes, the character work. Kallist says of Jace at the midway point: "He uses people he should trust, trusts people he should avoid, and avoids people he could use." The clairvoyant says of him: "He walks the intentions of others as easily as he walks between worlds, but knows not his own." Jace is cowardly and indecisive, often an honestly pathetic figure, cringing away from opportunities to change his own situation, making constant moral compromises and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. His solution to conflict is usually to reduce the other person to a vegetative state (that reminds me, in addition to the occasional sexism, you get some light ableism, and some blatant fatphobia with one particular character, just for spice I suppose).

He has this fierce loyalty to Kallist, but Kallist is really just some fucking guy, an assassin who just happens to be nice to Jace, and Jace's self-centred actions directly ruin Kallist's life. Funnily enough, the book at one point goes out of its way to remark that they're not gay, despite their close history, but y'know what, there's such a rich dynamic of mutual debt and jealousy there that it's hard not to be compelled by their platonic interactions regardless. Like I say, Kallist is boring, but as a foil to Jace, he works: he has less power, fewer moral compunctions, and he's happier for it... except of course, to Liliana, Kallist hardly registers. There's an asymmetry to his friendship with Jace, and again, I've had asymmetrical friendships.

As for Liliana, considering the kind of book this is, she gets a surprising amount of interiority, a desperation that drives her, a frustration with Jace, the faintest trace of guilt over her deception. The title, Agents of Artifice, refers most literally to Tezzeret, but Jace and Liliana are also both defined by lies, illusion, and self-delusion. The romantic ambiguity experienced by Kallist (actually Jace) at the start of the book turns out to have multiple explanations, as Liliana knows that he's not entirely Kallist nor Jace, and she's planning to betray Jace anyway, she just has mixed feelings about it. And it's like, yeah, I've liked people and not known if they liked me back.

Tezzeret is a fantastic villain, if a bit too obviously evil from the start, precisely because Jace has a sinking feeling that Tezzeret might really be that bad, but nevertheless hopes (wrongly) that he can be reasoned with. Tezzeret is fallible, occasionally afraid even, struggling to keep his own anger in check, domineering and cruel in a way that few people are. But, y'know, I've had a boss who sucks.

IV. Disempowerment

A while ago, I realised that I was playing Dungeons & Dragons wrong.

I've played with a few different groups of friends, and unfortunately, many of my friends have treated it less like a roleplaying game, and more like a wargame. It's a form of escapism that seeks to populate little labyrinths with subhuman, subsentient creatures who can be slaughtered en masse, their homes looted of everything that isn't nailed down. It's about finding clever ways of killing things, or if you can't come up with something clever, then just rolling the dice, over and over. It's about learning new spells and having the numbers go up, so you can fight and kill in more powerful and complicated ways.

And when I've played Magic: The Gathering, with different friends, they play the card game in much the same way, as an exercise in constructing elaborate combos, turns that take forever, a game of reading cards that say "all creatures", of swinging for lethal.

When I was a teen, my mum would drive me home from D&D, and my dad would always ask, "did you win?" And I would be like, no, Dad, you don't get it, you don't win in D&D, it's not that sort of game. It never sunk in. But I think part of what rankled me about that question was the fact that, on some deeper, truer level, he was right. My friends played D&D to win. Our characters were just representations of ourselves, not as we were, but as we wanted to be.

And I guess I just wanted something different, I was always pushing the games to be different. When the Dungeon Master instructed me to level up between sessions, I would "forget", leave my numbers a little smaller. My hit points remained comically small, even as the monsters grew comically powerful, such that a single hit would always knock me out. My character was a coward, a slimy little creature that would hug the corners, throwing spells and lying out his ass, at once scared shitless and bored out of his mind.

Look, I'm sure you can tell me lots of stories about the Dungeons & Dragons game you played that was nothing like this, where you were actually doing the whole "collaborative storytelling" shebang, building up these character arcs and overcoming your flaws and having things go wrong and, well, roleplaying. I'm sure you had lots of fun. I don't want to fucking hear it. Have you ever listened to someone describe something that happened in a tabletop game? It's like having someone recount a dream at you. It's either fuck boring, narrative white noise, or it's an embarrassingly real glimpse of the person's id.

You could put me in the fuckin' lotus-eater machine if you like, and I would lose my mind, I'd pluck out my own eyes and turn mean, hole up in a cupboard somewhere and kill anything that got close. I don't like myself, and I don't like the things I want, all I've got in me that's any good is a spiteful, righteous energy, half a conscience, I guess, and the jealously-kept dregs of the cleverness that defined me growing up. These days, I mostly just feel stupid, blind to the feelings of others, wasting away.

I think what I'm saying is that, in the end, I liked Agents of Artifice because I saw myself represented in it.

Appendix: The Spreadsheet

I'm not quite ready to share that spreadsheet, because, like, I haven't test-driven it, and honestly am not sure I ever will.

As I alluded to earlier, all these old MTG novels are out of print. I was able to track down Kindle listings for 35 publications, which by my count leaves approximately 50 books which you just can't read, period. Or, like, you can buy someone's dog-eared paperback on eBay, but it'll cost you far more than any of these stories are worth. There's no particular logic to the missing books, apart from the fact that all 12 HarperPrism books are missing (maybe they're tied up with rights issues).

Now, sales figures are a corporate secret, but I'd be interested to know exactly how much money Wizards of the Coasts makes off these ebooks. I wasn't even able to find half of them on the Amazon store without doing some roundabout google-fu. I'm also curious to know what sort of contracts they were written under, if Wizards owns these texts outright (I assume so, that's how it normally works) or if they have to pay a few pennies in royalties to the authors every time someone buys a copy. Especially taking into account that it's easier to, uh, download ebooks free online, they can't be making much, right?

It seems to me that the actual value of paywalling this stuff is that it doesn't meet the editorial standards of today, and "you have to pay a fiver to read this" is a great way to get around the Streisand effect: it's not that there are lost, forbidden MTG novels, they're right there, it's just that no-one is reading them, certainly no-one is paying to read them. Even dating back to the time of their publication, the reviews on the expansion tie-in books are generally merciless. The most common criticism seems to be that jack shit happens in them.

And indeed, that's a product of multimedia storytelling for a game like this, because you have to release ~three products over the course of a year, and a set of randomized trading cards is good at representing a single time and place, not a story with a sequential narrative. This was what MTG was struggling with during the Weatherlight Saga; if the story is on the cards, and the cards all get shuffled, how the fuck is a player supposed to know what order anything's happening in? So instead, narratives in the MTG universe basically got distilled down to this: here's a high-concept fantasy world. There's a big change and the world is put in turmoil. Finally, the world is in a new state. Ravnica has guilds which suffer Dissension until finally the Guildpact breaks. The disparate Shards of Alara undergo a Conflux which results in Alara Reborn as a unified plane. It's less an exercise in plot, and more an exercise in worldbuilding, flavour, because that's all it needs to be. The contract writers get handed off this big-picture outline, and about all they can do is populate the world, ground it in a POV, who futzes around sightseeing until the world-shaking event happens.

So yeah, this place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. I can totally see an argument that there's no reason to make this stuff accessible, because the only result of that would be that the human race wastes more of its precious time on it.

Except it's nothing so intentional, is it? As I say, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to which books are available for purchase, and which don't.

In a similar vein: by my count, there were probably just over a hundred Uncharted Realms short stories published on the Magic: The Gathering website prior to the switch to serialised webfiction. Of those, fifteen have vanished. The website has undergone multiple overhauls and migrations, and pretty much the entire article archive got wiped out, barring a few pieces (such as the serials) which someone made the effort to preserve. As the site was well-trafficked, pretty much everything can be found on the Wayback Machine, though retrieving it is a little tricky as a change to the site's URL schema means you have to know the old schema, the links on the wiki (which got migrated to the new schema) aren't reliably archived.

At a glance, I actually like the new "Magic Story" page. It's organized by year and expansion, beginning with the first serialised arc, Khans of Tarkir. The current expansion is right at the top for easy access. They've even released ebook compilations from time to time.

But, like, I do have some notes.

There's a few ordering issues, first of all. Magic Origins and Battle for Zendikar are swapped, a few of the individual stories are muddled up. Honestly, though, the real problem is just that the page doesn't know what to do with the side-stories. In earlier years, the MTG webfiction consisted of nothing but side-stories, written to complement the traditionally-published books. There was a transitional period where you're getting the serials, but still occasional one-offs furthering the long-term arcs, or even just interrupting the story to promote a supplementary product. For newer arcs, there's an explicit distinction drawn between the main story (divided into numbered "episodes") and the concurrently-published side stories, which are siloed off into a separate list, with no explanation for how they relate to the episodic plotline. I get that from an audience perspective, most MTG fans might just want to follow along with the main arc. And from an authorial perspective, for the most part, one person handles the main arc, and the side-stories are written by other people. But, c'mon! Are we doing multimedia storytelling, or not? Tell me how it all fits together.

The easiest thing for me, then, is to view the webfiction in the article archive from oldest-to-newest, read it that way. But a-ha, not so fast! During the big migration, a lot of the articles appear to have had their dates changed by accident. Currently, you get two random republished Weatherlight Saga stories from The Duelist in 1997, dated to 2007 for whatever reason; there's no indication what they are, both just launch straight into the prose. Then, there's "The Shadows of Prahv, Part 2". And look, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure there should be a "Part 1" somewhere before that.

Ah, but it's not just that the stories are out of order: it's that half of them are in the "Magic Story" category, and a bunch of them are in the "Feature" category. So it's physically impossible to view them all in a single list. And fifteen of them are missing altogether.

Remember how I mentioned that Brandon Sanderson novella? It came out in 2018, and less than two years later, it was taken down. It's been gone for half a decade. It turns out that the reason for this was that Sanderson had requested Wizards release a print edition for charity, and Wizards was like "Sure!", took down the download to push the charity edition, and then never got around to actually releasing the charity edition until now. I mean, hey, these things happen.

To the Wizards webmaster reading this: put me in, coach. Let me at your backend. I promise I'll be good. I'll restore those missing stories, fix the dating and category issues, correctly tag everything by plane and character. I'll curate the one-off side stories at the appropriate places alongside the main arcs. I'll make that shit more readable than it ever was. I'm in it for the love of the game, babey.

Oh, and to the Vorthos reading this, if you want to see the spreadsheet, hit up my DMs. Be nice for someone who's actually read this stuff to check my work, if I end up persevering with it. I've successfully retrieved archive links for the entire run of Savor the Flavor articles from the Wayback machine, a resource that I'm pretty sure doesn't currently exist on the web, I just don't have time to port it to the wiki right now.

And to everyone else, maybe you're wondering if I liked any of the stuff I read. Yes! One short story did stick with me. It's "A Hollow Body", by Aysha U. Farah, from the Phyrexia: All Will Be One arc. Certain followers of mine might recognise that name, and that's because Farah was one of the post-canon Homestuck writers. Indeed, there's clear influence from Homestuck in the short story, most directly in the interesting use of second-person narration. That one's good.

Addendum: please help me budget this. my multimedia product is dying

My friend Sam had this to say about this article:

I'm baffled by the idea of doing a fantasy novel twice a year to coincide with releases for your card game / a thing that sounds really hard to do at any level of quality and also totally ineffective as a marketing tool

It's an interesting point, isn't it? I think it generalises to a lot of these multimedia properties. It's the idea that the story is written almost begrudgingly—something the company is merely obligated to do, because without some kind of story, the product cannot exist. People cannot be made to care about it.

But of course, nobody likes to read, these days. So the question becomes, how do you communicate this story to the audience? The MTG website has experimented with various abridged summaries and recaps and stuff in the past, they've tried adding little flavour cards to the booster packs, or having "Story Spotlights" on cards themselves.

If you read any of the webfiction, it's obvious that what you're reading is no more definitive a window into the MTG universe than the cards themselves. It's as if these are merely facets of some underlying, true, canonical version of events, which exists less in the mind of any writer or game designer, but more in the creative director, the marketer.

Here's another part from that Brady Dommermuth post I quoted earlier:

Please know that across the 66 published Magic novels, we have tried every combination of more/less creative control, more/less time, and more/less money. No combination of those elements guarantees a great novel. (And I'll reiterate that the novels you think are great are generally in the bottom half sales-wise, and the novels you loathe are generally in the top half. There are exceptions.) Great novels are rare, and many of them take YEARS to write.

When it comes to Agents of Artifice, Dommermuth is spot on. It was only Ari Marmell's second novel. He had a lot of creative freedom on it. It didn't do crazy, "sales-wise". In that case, you can see that they just sort of rolled the dice, and got the result they got. As a novel, it's pretty good but not great.

What I think Brady sort of misses, here, is that good writers are good.

Like, again in discussing this piece, the one piece of MTG fiction that any of my pals could bring up was that Sanderson novella. Sanderson is a huge name in fantasy. I've only read extracts of his work, but I understand what he does and why people enjoy it. Of course if you get Sanderson to write a Magic: The Gathering story, people will like it! There's something so laughably backward about the fact that it was Sanderson who came to Wizards of the Coast with that novella. Like, it makes sense, he's at a level of success where you can't really pay him to do that, he was only ever going to do it for free. But Sanderson isn't the only good fantasy writer.

To me, there is something trivially self-evident to the idea that, if you're going to make an expansion themed around a fantasy murder-mystery... then you find an established fantasy murder-mystery writer whose work is well-liked, and you pay them to write a mystery for you.

Well, you can argue, they tried that, when they got Greg Weisman to do the War of the Spark novels, and it backfired spectacularly. Sure. I'd argue, firstly, that Weisman is predominantly a TV writer, not a prose writer, so of course his prose is going to kind of suck. And secondly, if you're bringing on people who aren't already intimately familiar with your property, then editorial really has to be heavily involved to stop stuff like the Chandra thing happening. That's the responsibility of the editor, not the writer.

Magic: The Gathering is a game which relies on building long-term audience investment, people who get hooked with a certain expansion and then will come back for more. You need those people to buy-in not just to the rules and mechanics of the game, but to the creative identity of the game, as well. And so if the expansions are mostly standalone from one to the next, if you're going to be rotating which writer handles the story every single time, to me it seems like a perfect opportunity to invest in the story, and hire authors who've shown they're able to hook readers, have them moonlight for a single storyline that will leave an impression on people. I'm not even talking about traditionally-published writers; the fantasy genre in particular means it's possible to take advantage of the talent in webfiction or Kindle self-publishing. That shit does numbers.

Then again, I guess you don't need to have your own creative identity. If you do enough crossovers, your consumers will always be able to find something they care about in your product. You can just cash in on that existing audience goodwill.

And I guess, if I'm being cynical, maybe that well never runs dry. Even after everyone who saw Star Wars in theaters is dead and gone, maybe the nostalgia machine can chug along still, convince the kids they care about it too, ensure that they too can recognise the icons. There's something timeless about Star Wars, isn't there?

But I don't know, maybe one day the bottom will fall out, and audiences will just stop caring. For me, it feels like in mass media, it's the writing that's consistently undervalued. With movies and TV shows, you have hundreds and thousands of people and millions of dollars involved in getting the look and sound and feel of the thing exactly right... in service of a script that just sucks. Dommermuth is right, that it seems like there's very little correlation between the quality of a story and its popularity; it feels entirely arbitrary. So I guess the numbers don't lie, and it doesn't matter if you invest in good writing or not.

It would just be really convenient for me, personally, if it did matter.

[beardedmrbean]

In July 2024, then Interior Minister Nancy Faeser banned Compact magazine. She justified the move, saying: "It's a central mouthpiece for the right-wing extremist scene. This magazine incites against Jews, people with ethnic migrant backgrounds and against our parliamentary democracy in the most abhorrent way."

Compact sees itself as part of 'resistance movement'

A 2023 report from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency, features an entire page dedicated to Compact — a magazine and multimedia company headquartered in Falkensee, on the outskirts of Berlin.

According to the BfV, the magazine's publisher says it sells 40,000 print copies a month. The number of subscribers to the Compact YouTube channel is significantly higher, at 513,000 as of June 10, 2025.

"Compact sees itself as part of what it calls the resistance movement, and it is seen by other actors among the so-called new right as part of the scene," the BfV wrote. "The main feature of many of its published articles is agitation against the federal government and against the current political system."

Ties to extremist Identitarian movement

Examples cited by the BfV include abstruse conspiracy theories used to agitate against state institutions and pluralist society. "Historic revisionist content and antisemitic narratives round out the agenda," it added.

Moreover, the report said, the outfit maintains ties with right-wing extremist groups like the German Identitarian movement (IBD) and the eastern German regional party the "Freie Sachsen," or Free Saxons.

Faeser said the message was clear — we will not allow anyone to define who does and does not belong in Germany by their ethnicity. "Our constitutional state protects all those who have been attacked because of their religion, their origins, their skin color or their desire to live in a democracy," she said last July.

Faeser wanted to send a signal

Faeser leaned heavily on the constitution, Germany's Basic Law, in calling for the right-wing extremist publication to be banned. Article 9 of the Basic Law, which regulates freedom of assembly, reads: "Associations whose aims or activities contravene the criminal laws or that are directed against the constitutional order or the concept of international understanding shall be prohibited."

Compact's editor-in-chief, Jürgen Elsässer, is a suspected right-wing extremist who belonged to the far left as a young man. Now in his 60s, Elsässer was once a member of the Communist Youth Wing and wrote for the newspaper, Arbeiterkampf (The Workers' Fight). He later worked as a reporter for other left-wing media, including Neue Deutschland (New Germany), which was a key news organ for the socialist East German government when the country was still partitioned. 

Compact can publish until final verdict

Elsässer and other plaintiffs fought the ban on his media operations before the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. He was partially successful in August 2024 when it was determined that he could continue publishing Compact until a final verdict had been handed down. In granting its stay, the court said the outcome of the case remained unclear as it had yet to be determined whether Compact had acted against the constitutional order.

The court did, however, immediately find evidence of violations of human dignity in which citizens with migrant backgrounds were demeaned. Notwithstanding, it also voiced doubt as to whether that was enough to justify a ban. For that would represent the most serious intervention possible regarding speech and press freedoms guaranteed in Article 5 of the Basic Law.

Where does press freedom begin and end?

Still, Article 5 does put some limits on speech, saying, "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honor."

The trial to define where press freedoms in Germany begin and end will start on June 10. It's unclear when a decision will be handed down.