#Desert bus for hope

[micro-toad]

Here's another quilt I made for Desert Bus for Hope, this would've been 2021's contribution.

I love Labyrinth so much, so why not make a quilt of the movie poster?

Here are some stats for the Labyrinth Quilt:

Measured roughly 37 x 54.5 inches, about 1600 individual pieces, I believe the smallest one was slightly smaller than a cm. I ended up hand sewing a lot of the crystal ball portion. Also no black was used in the quilt, the dark values were a deep espresso brown.

In retrospect I wish I quilted it better, but meh, what's a girl to do? I still love this one to bits. I should post so of the making of pics too hehe.

[endangereduglythings]

For this year's Desert Bus for Hope, I have made a needle felted model of The Discworld. Enjoy! I'll be sure to reblog in November when the event starts.

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.

each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]

🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.

notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)

i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.

i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)

i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.

actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.

handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.

WIP : full text card assignments

bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.

[image description: they are truly garbage notes, i tell you. half of it is written at angles to the other half, many numbers in the math problems are not labeled, mistakes are scribbled over. it gets me there but it doesn't look pretty. end description.]

[strikefourth]

THE GARAGES SIGN OFF @ DESERT BUS FOR HOPE 2024

Wednesday, November 13th, 1/4/9pm PST/EST/GMT

pre-orders available now. see you at the show!

[cryinginblaseball]

Incredible. Thank you for everything, The Garages.

[library-whale]

i’m listening to and as the quiet takes us, dream of gentler stars on loop rn

just

holy shit

[trialbystory]

1.24 million dollars and counting!

168 hours and possibly more!

The first ever Desert Week for Hope!

The Bus will continue until morale improves.

[somewhere-south-of-neutral]

You guys like commemorating bad copper, right? Bid now! Money goes to Child's Play Charity!

This auction ends 9:00 PM Eastern Time

[etraytin]

Desert Bus For Hope Is Coming!

So I know everything sucks and is crappy right now, but I have good news! We are only two days out from the most wonderful time of the year: Desert Bus time!

Once a year in November, the fine Canadian gamer comedians at Loading Ready Run shut down everything for a week and turn the whole studio into a vehicle designed solely for the purpose of raising money for Child's Play. Starting on Friday, November 8, they will begin playing Desert Bus, the world's most boring and tedious video game, round the clock until people stop paying them to do so. Every hour costs seven percent more than the one before it, and the marathon continues until the next hour cannot be reached. To make this epic struggle more palatable, they also spend the week entertaining the audience with games, skits, comedic bits, and pretty much anything anybody can come up with. In the seventeen (17!) years they have run this marathon, they have raised over 10.6 million dollars!

All right, you say, sounds great, but what is Child's Play and why do they need all this money? Child's Play is a charity that was founded by gamers in response to a half-baked thoughtpiece saying that video games were making kids violent and ruining their minds. They fought back not with words but with actions, raising money from their community to put toys and video games into children's hospitals, for the kids who most needed joy in their lives. Over the past two decades their mission has evolved from not just directly providing toys, but also sponsoring the creation of guidebooks to help therapists select the best toys and games for therapeutic purposes and providing grants for Child Life Specialists in hospitals to make sure that the kids are getting to be kids as much as possible.

So basically what I'm saying is, if you're hurting right now and you need distraction and fun and some hope that people are doing good in the world, this is it. They're streaming on Twitch starting at 6pm Eastern on Friday and going til they run out of money (usually about six and a half days in recent years.) It's (mostly) PG and a safe, inclusive space to hang out and maybe start feeling better. Plus it's for a good cause!

[dimestoretajic]

when the aristocrats player sacs their commander

[beamiesbuddies]

🔥💀Prince & Princess of the Underworld 🔥💀

I had the privilege of crafting Zagreus and his new lil sis Melinoe from Hades (and Hades 2) as one of the prizes at this years Desert Bus for Hope, an online telathon supporting Child's Play Charity for children in hospitals and domestic violence shelters! Tune in from Nov 11 to approx Nov 18 for a chance at them!

Both of them are 12" high, posable, and come with their signature weapons, a couple glasses of ambrosia, and a DB-themed Pact of Punishment. Had so much fun making them and hope a lucky bidder enjoys them as much as I do!

I'll be posting detail shots of each sibling in the coming days!

[meyari]

Desert Bus for Hope is always the best week of my year. It fills my heart so much. They raised over $1.25 million for Child’s Play charity this year. Fun, games, wholesomeness, love for peoples of all shapes, sizes, and identities. They’re apparently going to do some sort of Mini Bus in May? Very excited :)

[endangereduglythings]

This year's Desert Bus for Hope offerings. It's some MTG Planeswalkers on their way through Bloomburrow.

The silent auction starts on November 9th, and benefits kids in hospitals.

[thepehbat]

[strikefourth]

Here's a roundup of every live show the garages have played so far.

Just cause.

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HECKDANG

DESERT BUS FOR HOPE (2020)

BLASEBALLIDAYS

TAKEOVER

CAN'T PLAY LIVE

RIV

THE GARAGES VS DESERT BUS (2021)

UNDERGROUND

COYOTE WALL X THE GARAGES @ DESERT BUS (2022)

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: photos of a Breath of the Wild-themed hanafuda card deck, art rendered with hand-drawn inks and colors printed letterpress from linoleum blocks. hanafuda are a Japanese style of playing cards where the faces only use imagery, with no pips, ranks, or point values printed. there are 12 suits of 4 cards each, 48 total. in the classic deck design, suits are unified by particular flowers or plants; in this version the unifying elements for each suit are plants, creatures, or items from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. suits of horses, Guardians, koroks, dragons, ex. there are also photos of the small linocuts used to print each color, one cut for every color on each card. cards are about 1 3/8 inch by 2 1/8 inch. end description.]

🎊🎊 tadaaaaa 🎊🎊 here tis, my craftalong project for Desert Bus for Hope 2024! the event starts Nov. 8th this year, and this card deck is up for silent auction starting 6pm PST on Saturday the 9th.

hanafuda!! very very fun to get familiar with this card deck and its games. i think about doing other formats of card deck all the time and always just have to wait for a subject matter that compels me to intersect with a structure that interests me. nintendo started out producing card decks, and maybe they have made LoZ hanafuda in the past—i didn't find one but i'm truly bad at web research—anyway there isn't one available now, only a 52-card deck with alternate Zelda art.

i limited the scope to BotW for lots of reasons, big one being keeping the suits tightly defined to specific things and places, & utilizing one singular map type/environment interface. even adding TotK seemed like a nightmare for keeping suit assignments tidy. each place is a specific location in-game (with some adjustments for better composition, like, Akkala tower is there behind Foothill Stable, but i made the angles of the view cleaner), and wherever applicable, items rendered with surrounding context are done as a specific location where that item appears in-game (the sword in the rock is a real place, where you can pick up a rusty sword and see the Great Plateau Tower beyond). i'll admit to some extra heavy lifting on Satori Mountain but i only actually cheated once: Silent Princess flowers don't grow at the Springs around the statues of Hylia. but that's it!! everything else is real.

the Brights are the Master Sword, Hyrule Castle, the Blood Moon, Hylia, and the Dragons; tanzaku are shrines and towers; instead of Boar-Deer-Butterfly it's Rudania-Naboris-Medoh; instead of sakura-viewing and moon-viewing parties there are…………oh no and oh NO parties?? (guardian stalker + hyrule castle, stalker + blood moon.) in these photos, the suits are laid out in order, January to December. I made a little guide to go in the box based on the one for Nintendo's Mario Hanafuda, which also includes instructions for playing Koi-Koi.

8 colors, 88 blocks, +1 very simple reduction cut for the Sheikah eye on the back side. the classic deck is completely blank on the back, but if i hadn't done the eye i think the deck would've been missing some kind of unifying umbrella. and if you're asking yourself, hey, even with overage it’s only 5 copies of each card, why not hand color the cards? i also asked this. i tried some things and unfortunately did not like the texture at all. Only 88 little lino cuts would do for my brain worms. each card is two layers of 120# cover cross-laminated together. the drawings went down first on each copy; the back sides were printed on separate sheets before lamination. laminated, pressed, colors printed post-lamination, then each card die cut out of the 3x3 inch sheet. i very much like the color palate that came out of it; since the pen drawings went down before colors i printed the grey first to find the bottom end of the value range, bookended it with the yellow, and filled in the middle. my favorite color of the bunch turns out to be the soft brown, or maybe the "gold" with no metallic in it.

i would say this card deck was about as much work as last year's tarot deck but it wasn't all the same kind of work—i didn't have to trawl through a novel of text for excerpts and battle feelings of intellectual inadequacy to have confidence in my reading comprehension, for instance. i had to learn how to draw, like, 20 things i hadn't drawn before, and carve 88 little lino cuts, but it's just not the same kind of effort. long hours, but largely calmer. the tiny but thicc little cards are so nice to hold. i am quite happy with the style of the illustrations i found, trying to make them recognizable objects, so small, and two-color. all in all very satisfying!! (confession: i logged quite a bit of footage from my own BotW playthrough to get reference material but i still haven't actually finished Medoh myself. or fought Ganon. i keep putting it off to mess around and get armor upgrades instead. gotta get to that finally.)

wip

under the cut: the body of the little game guide that went in the box, with instructions for Koi-Koi and explainers on the yaku.