#I just thought I’d recreate one of the arts in the art book and this seemed to work best

[lavandulalurker]

[Image ID: a digital drawing of a rhodochrosite gemstone made into a Land of the Lustrous character. The character sits on the bottom right on the screen, relaxed, leaning on their left arm, their right arm being lifted, and their legs slightly crossing. The character is drawn at a 3/4th angle and a light source is coming from below them. They have rose colored eyes, hair, and fingernails. Their hair is a middle part with two strands in front of their ears coming down and a half ponytail, with the hair in the ponytail being sprawled out. They are wearing a white button-up, a black blouse with short sleeves, tie, shorts, and shoes. The background is mostly white with a spiked shape sitting behind the character. A picture of an actual rhodochrosite gem is on the top left of the screen. End ID]

Tried replicating the manga style for this piece but I don’t know if it really comes through that much… anyway this is Rhodochrosite based on a picture I found on Pinterest! I imagine that they’re pretty cheerful and all of that but I don’t really have a story planned out for them! Or even their job. I just like creating lotl ocs for their designs haha they usually aren’t super well thought out

[dailyadventureprompts]

do you have any advice for running and/or adapting prewritten modules?

DM Tip: Coloring outside the lines. 

A piece of advice that’s vitally important for DMs, especially newer DMs to recognize is that presenting our party with a fleshed out, vibrant world is a magic trick mostly reliant on us having enough easily adaptable world-pieces laying around. It’s a matter of building the track as they go, and though modules provide a box full of pre-selected track pieces that can be useful building that backlog, the process is still reliant on YOU to fill in the blank space and account for the odd directions your party might end up in. 

As such, it’s important for us to look at modules not as a recipe that must be followed to have a good time, but as a concentrated dollop of inspiration/jumping off point upon which we can create our own adventures. There’s a similar philosophy behind my own adventure prompts, as I seldom expect people to be able to use them 1:1. Even I have to adjust things and change details when turning a series of individual prompts into the material of a campaign. 

The first step when you’re thinking of adapting an existing work  (whether it be a module or a narrative you want to turn into an adventure)  is to ask yourself and your players if this is the right fit for what they want to play.  There’s no point in adapting an adventure focused around a heist if your party wants to be out exploring the wilderness, and there’s no point in adapting a wilderness exploration adventure if your party wants to do a political thriller/urban mystery.  Just like with creating a homebrew campaign, you want to match the story to the expectations of your players. Trying to build a machine without knowing what it’s for is an exercise in frustration, as is trying to build a story without knowing the general direction you want it to be going.  

Next is to read the work back to front, making notes as you go, specifically looking for: 

Interesting ways the narrative could spin off from this, and what adventures might occur if your party make different decisions than what the story allows. 

What emotional work you need to build into the party’s backstory/previous adventures/to have them make the decisions you NEED them to. 

What happens if the party fail at each major step of the journey. 

Ways you think you could do X thing better. 

After you’re done with that, read another work with similar themes/subject matter with an eye of salvaging it for ideas to improve the first. Most modules have a direct path in mind with a few major branching points. What you want is raw material for when your party zigs when the original writers expected them to zag, as well as extraneous details that can make otherwise thin plot beats into sturdy pillars of your story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve averted disaster or disinterest in my games by importing an npc or worldbuilding detail from something I’d recently read/watched into a narrative I’d thought was fully planned out but was just failing to fire

Finally, sit down with a notebook and try writing out the adventure step by step. Any time you get fuzzy on the details, it means you haven’t internalized the story you want to tell, and would end up running things by the book. This isn’t bad necessarily, but it’s the difference between a musician who has to go slow and follow along with the sheet music vs one who’s practiced enough to be confident in their performance. Recreating it like this might also let you see narrative potential that wasn’t necessarily evident in your first attempts.

Art

[freckledfenrir]

finally dug out some of my old Owl House sketches. Here are the two I like the most. All the others ones I don’t like enough to post (there all super rough sketches and most look bad due to me trying to learn the art style at the time), I’ll have to go through my other sketch book that’s currently buried under my mangas to see if I have more though.

when drawing them I tried to keep it in TOH style as much as possible. I typically like to try and recreate the art style of what I’m drawing since I wanted to be an animator, but now I just draw without worrying about replicating art style. (It always put too much strain on my wrist since I’d grip the pen tightly when replicating styles) Im not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure the one on the left is for like a music band au of sorts. The one on the right though i remember making after I watched Puss in boots 2: the last wish. I’m also gonna start signing my art. A friend told me it’d be a good idea to start doing that. Wasn’t sure what to do. Just thought the ears and fur would look cute.

[edgymcedgerson]

It’s 3AM where I live at the time I’m writing this, and I am once again thinking way too much about the Hexsquad. Don’t know where I got the idea to begin with, but I was thinking about all the games we see on Luz’s laptop and then started wondering what it would be like if she introduced the rest of the Hexsquad to the world of human games, and what games they’d all enjoy.

I’ve not really seen this discussed anywhere, but these are just ideas I’m having in the moment of my sleep deprivation that I wanna share and yap about in my usual rambling fashion. I’d love to hear peoples thoughts and head-canons if they have any for this idea too too!

Amity:

I personally don’t think Amity would be that into gaming, at least not compared to the others. But if she were to have games she enjoyed, I can see her liking visual novels first and foremost as there’s something fun about throwing yourself into the story and having a choice in the direction things go/how you interact with the characters that she found so appealing; this idea kinda comes from the episode where we found out Amity had a secret collection of Good Witch Azura books and how she drew fan-art of herself with one of the characters.

I can also see Amity enjoying a rhythm game once in a while as they’re easy to pick up and put back down without having to worry about remembering a story; it isn’t too hard to learn them in the begining but the want to get good at them can become addicting. I feel like she’d love the casual competition in them and that she’d work hard to get the highest score she could so she can place in the leaderboards. Her enjoyment of rhythm games would soon lead her to get heavily into DDR and she’d enjoy going to play it at the arcades with Luz on their dates, I think she’d pick up on it astonishingly fast.

Gus:

Sandboxes all the way! I can’t explain why this is my first thought for the life of me, but I can see Gus really enjoying The Sims and Minecraft particularly in the sandbox genre. I especially love the idea that he’d play MC on splitscreen mode with his friends if there was a console in the Noceda house. I think Gus would also really enjoy RPG’s too, especially if he found one or two of Luz’s old JRPG games lying around. I feel like he’d love the flashiness of the fights and ‘all of the amazing stories humans come up with’.

If he got into Sims, I feel like he’d create a household based on him and his all living together a giant house, maybe he’d even make a household based on the crew in Cosmic Frontier. I like to think he’d excitedly drag the rest of the Hexsquad to come see the things he’s made/done in the game too.

At some point he’d wonder if it’d be possible to make a ‘real life sims’ with illusions, though he’d hesitate to try it out as he was worried something would go wrong (as it seems illusions sometimes do the opposite of what you want, as seen with his illusion clone in one of the episodes, I don’t remember which one rn lol).

Willow:

I don’t know what this genre would be considered, and I feel like this is totally obvious, but if she were to get into games I can see Willow absolutely loving the games that require a lot of player-movement, think things like Just Dance, Wii Fit Ring, Beatsaber, etc etc. Anything to get the blood pumping. She’d find it fun how she could get her friends to join her on the multiplayer ones and enjoy the playful competition of it all.

In her down time/when she needs to cool down from some intense training/exercise if she wanted to play games she’d probably enjoy a good cozy game such as a gardening simulator. For her, while it wouldn’t be the same as taking care of real plants, it’d be nice to have her own little digital garden she can look at and make as big as she wants (especially while they’re stuck in the human realm, I can’t remember if this is canon or fanon but I feel like she’d have a greenhouse back at home in the Demon Realm? And she’d miss it a lot; so it’d be nice to try and recreate it in a game.)

Last of all, Hunter!

I will admit, some of my ideas for Hunter in this is partially me projecting some of my fave genres, but I can genuinely see Hunter being big on puzzle and strategy games! Basically anything that requires him to think and or learn tactics on how to best play the game. I feel like he’d enjoy a good mystery once in a while too.

I think Hunter would probably enjoy the idea of stealth games too, but he’d struggle playing them either because it reminds him of his time as Golden Guard too much, or he gets way too anxious trying to stay stealthy in them and it ruins all the fun for him. I can see him also maybe getting into rougelites/likes or dungeon crawlers because of Luz. They’re easier to get into than stealth games as they don’t cause him as much stress.

At some point he’d find a game he loves out of all the ones he tried and focuses on that one and that one only, he just completely obsesses over completing/getting good at it as he needed something to keep him occupied as having nothing to do makes him nervous. So much so he ends up 100%ing it in a shockingly short amount of time. Everyone is worried because his eye-bags are getting worse, but it’s thankfully not nightmares keeping him up this time like they probably assume. He just got way too into the game and would forget to sleep.

[lucysweatslove]

Finished NeuroTribes today. Yes, I binge-listened, and I even put it up from 1.5x to 1.75x then 2x and then 2.3x. My brain just needed it faster, idk.

This means I’m 2 books away from 100! If I finish Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (misplaced Kindle and need to find) and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (20% through) by Friday before bed, that would be kinda cool, 100 books in half a year.

Contrary to what people say to do, I try not to set too many goals for recreational things / things I do just for fun. Such as reading. Meeting goals can give a sense of achievement and pride, and goals are particularly helpful in getting me to do things I Don’t Really Want To Do (assuming I set the goal myself; otherwise Demand Avoidance enters the chat). However, goals also start to suck the fun out of things I already want to do / am motivated to do on their own. Even if they’re reachable, I focus too much on the goal instead of the intrinsic enjoyment of said thing. Which is why I try not to have goals for # of books to read in general. Buuuut I think this is a time where a short term goal can actually help.

I wavered on whether or not to give NeuroTribes 3 or 4 stars in Goodreads as I felt it was sold 3.5; ultimately I went with 3. That might be different if I visually read instead of listening to the audiobook, as no matter how slow (or fast) I have audiobooks playing, I don’t retain small details as well as I do while visually reading. General thoughts:

Seemed to portray more pictures of autism as those who are lower masking and have higher support needs.

Did talk about the strengths that autistic people bring to society, used Temple Grandin a lot here (I like her so I’m not mad about it).

The downside was that for most of it, he really presented autism in two ways: more profound autism with lower IQ, or such low social engagement, or such high support needs (often to the point that families find them a burden and families, historically they have been institutionalized, there is significant shock and relief when they can do basic ADLs on their own- which I’m iffy on the presentation), OR genius “savant syndrome” level autism. I would’ve more liked representation from those who do have low support needs and are high maskers but aren’t “savant syndrome” level geniuses at their special interest or anything to that degree. I found it difficult to find “me” in the examples, exactly, or a lot of the autistic people I know, and I had to remind myself much of the time that I am still valid even if my intelligent and hyperlexia doesn’t reach the examples he gave.

In later portions he did talk about it as a spectrum (which he also credits Hans Asperger for initially postulating- but that brings up another bullet point), so it’s not like he totally ignores that there are people like me, or my autistic friends, or whoever out there, but the general feel seems to gloss over us.

Also used the “if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism” idea to reflect that every autistic person is different

Thankfully portrayed how ABA was founded in a negative light. Not like “ABA is stupid and harmful and nobody should ever do it” but actually explained how using punishment for behavioral modification passed review boards

I can’t remember if it was addressed, but he used “functioning” labels for some of the book which is gross.

Dude had a huge boner for Hans Asperger, but this was also written in a time where the common idea was that he was anti-Nazi and only seemed to favor the “lower support needs” kids (“little professors”) to try to get Nazis to not kill autistic kids. Like “look at how useful these kids are, it would be such a shame to kill them when they have so much use to the state.” When I have more emotional energy, I’d like to do a deeper dive into the guy, but as of right now, my opinion of him is fairly low, and I was overall very annoyed at the level of reverence given to him in the book.

Talked about some controversies regarding vaccines and how autism speaks is more “cure” driven than actually support/resource driven.

Did eventually get into the modern day advocacy movement, how more autistic people are demanding their voices be heard when autism is discussed, and how there is a push from actually autistic people for advocacy groups to focus on resources and support and “normalizing” autism as a different neuro type vs “curing” it like it’s something faulty. Also mentioned that actually autistic people have pushed for “disability first” language instead of person-first, which I appreciated.

Overall an interesting history of how we have historically categorized, tried to explain, or pathologize autism in general, and how as we have come to understand it more, we realize how much more common it is.

He talked a little about how when autistic people are around other autistic people, or when alone, struggles and level of disability tend to decrease. But, I wish he would’ve gone deeper into some of the social issues autistic people face, especially the women who do want to fit in, how NT people can often tell when somebody is autistic even if they don’t have the words for it (they can just tell there is something uniquely different)

I think if I had read this in 2015 when it was published, it would have been a 4 star. Which is why I struggled with the 3 or 4 star rating- I want to judge it based on the information available at the time he was researching and writing, but at the same time, I feel like I can’t condone a book that is so Asperger-positive, and a 4 star review feels like condoning it. And I really did want more of a comprehensive look of multiple presentations, not just the very much struggling autistic people who need high levels of support or the Darwins and Einsteins or Grandins in the world.

I guess what it comes down to… to me it feels like this was written for the neurotypical person, and maybe with a goal to shift their view of autism. Establishing a common ground of the stereotyped picture, but then challenging that view primarily by showing the amazing achievements of autistic people, too. Which, I mean, that’s fine to a degree, and it’s not like he talks about those who present more stereotypical in disrespectful ways exactly (he himself isn’t disrespectful, but he doesn’t shy away from detailing the awful history). I just wish the message was less “we need autistic people in society because of all the good the genius ones can do for us NTs” and more “regardless of their support needs or achievements, autistic people deserve to live in an accepting, accommodating, understanding world.”

[myhappyexobubble]

EXO Fandom - Part 2 - FanArt

This post follows part 1 - available here.

After working on stories and loving the imaginative fiction created by the fandom, I came across stories that highlighted visual work by fanartists to help provide visual reference. Initially I found most artwork to be digital, but it was happening upon a pencil artist that struck a chord and made me think, “I could probably do that.”

At the time, I was close to graduating with my Bachelors Degree in Studio Arts with an emphasis in painting and mural. I was known for hating portrait work and chose to mostly work in abstracts and landscapes, or still life. The pressure to make a person look recognizable was daunting. I had just finished my senior project early and had very little to do in studio reserved time, but had an ample supply of medium and papers. So, without much thought, I started to draw EXO.

My early work is pretty rough, but as I mentioned, I did not like drawing people. I spent most of an entire semester working on some random drawings and eventually completed my first ‘series’ which was really just portraits of all members using the same medium and paper. I posted those drawings on my personal Instagram because I didn’t see it being a big deal. It became a big deal.

With enough positive comments, I decided that I wanted to keep working on portraits of EXO and sometimes other K-pop artists when inspired. I wanted to improve and to see if I could get better at drawing faces. As I continued working on shading and texture - especially hair, I began to wonder what other mediums could be used to achieve different effects. I also began networking. I started to follow and talk to other digital and traditional fan artists who used all sorts of effects. I wanted to emulate digital effects traditionally, working with physical media in layers. I went to the art store often and purchased more variety of tools. I got recommendations for brands and techniques from a network of artists that was beginning to span the globe. I had never felt so rich in community as I did around my 2nd year of working on fanart.

Of course, it wasn’t just the community that prompted artistic growth. Not to be biased, but Kai has always been just a little more artistically portrayed in photoshoots. What I consider to be odd fashion preferences became amazing to recreate in charcoal and colored pencil. Still frame movement and emotions were so motivating that at times I couldn’t keep up with the amount of visual content that was coming out and how fast I could draw.

It was a constant race to keep up. I remember that the Die Jungs photobooks were the first that I felt so incredibly motivated by and yet could never draw everything I wanted to from those books before new content was available. When Exodus and Love Me Right came out, I was cranking out 1-4 portraits a day or at least in a week. I wanted to do more series. As EXO members moved on (Kris, Luhan, Tao) I wanted to keep making series that included the 12 regardless. I wanted to merge charcoal with paint and do blends of medium that seemed impractical. It was intensely motivating because I had not just Kai but 12 total muses that belonged on canvas.

At the time of writing this I have produced 692 pieces of traditional fan art. That’s 692 pieces of paper or canvas where the medium was applied by hand via pencil or paint brush. Never in my youth did I think I would ever complete that much body of work in an entire lifetime. 

EXO gave me the inspiration to get over a fear of portraits, dabble in more medium than I’d imagined, network globally and make friends, and for the first time made me feel like a legitimate artist. Now, we could spend another entire post talking about the copyright issues and art practices and their validity, but for now - my creative growth is still one of the many reasons EXO is my favorite K-Pop group. 

More to follow, thank you for reading.

[iamanathemadevice]

I avoided press about Hogwarts Legacy when it was first announced. I didn’t want to see the gameplay, I didn’t want to be awed by trailers. I avoided them like the plague because I was afraid I would be conflicted, that I’d see a game that captured the magic of the books and my heart would leap out of my chest. I was afraid to see the lavish visuals of the films recreated on modern gaming hardware, realized in 4K and full HDR. I was afraid I’d have to tell 12-year-old me that she couldn’t play it, and explain why. So when I got a code for Hogwarts Legacy, I braced myself. When Home Isn’t Home Anymore I thought I’d spend a lot of time in this section nitpicking. Going over every grievance I have with how this game deviates from the source material, how dated it looks and feels, and how every character just feels like an animatronic Chuck-E-Cheese robot waiting for you to come by and put a quarter in so it can say its one line of dialog and perform a grim, herky-jerky facsimile of a living being. But there are no nits to pick, it’s just lice all the way down. The longer I spent in this version of Hogwarts, the more I could feel a tangible absence. There’s definitely something missing. I thought maybe it was the lackluster art direction, the one-dimensional characters that feel like store-brand versions of the ones we know and love, or even the conspicuous lack of the iconic John Williams score. But there’s a bigger absence here.

“Review: There Is No Magic in Hogwarts Legacy”, Jaina Rodriguez Grey, Wired

The author is a trans woman who loved the HP Books as a child, and talks extensively in the review about the effect J K Rowling’s hate has had on her and people like her:

When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. K. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

[de4thdreams]

Digital copyright is a thorny and complex issue, and has become increasingly relevant as artists now grapple with the implications of neural networks being trained on their art. When it comes to issues of piracy, theft, reproduction, etc, I am firmly of the Neil Gaiman Philosophy:

“I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question.

Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author.

Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

This flies completely in the face of conventional ideas of artistic compensation, whereby creative works belong zealously within the clutches of their creators, and all engagement with their art is inherently transactional in nature. I think this is not only very silly, but also dangerously outdated, as it fails to account for technology as simple as radio piracy via cassette dubbing, let alone the future of infinite, free information we now belong to.

At the very sum of it, all digital information is infinitely, freely reproducible. Every picture, song, video, etc that we create via digital means is just a collection of 1s and 0s that can be identically reproduced anywhere else. This is a feature, not a bug, and has granted us absolutely innumerable advantages; such that an entire thesis could be dedicated to the subject.

However, for artists, it has introduced a fundamental obstacle that we’ve only just begun to solve. If all digital information is free and infinitely reproducible, how do we assign value to it? In our capitalist society, we’re largely incapable of divorcing art from the commercial means through which it is published and distributed. Entire industries sprang up, making many people incredibly wealthy, dedicated solely to this purpose.

They became obsolete the second it became viable to transfer bits and bytes perfectly from one machine to another. Their entire purpose had just become automated, by the very nature of computation: infinite digital publishing, and with the internet, truly infinite distribution.

How do we reconcile the two? Well, you might notice we’ve already begun to, via the return to the Patronage Model. Patreon was the answer that content creators came up with in direct response to the issues of YouTube’s monetization system. But it has always served as a larger, philosophical beacon for a return to better ways.

In a digital world where any creative work is almost instantly reproducible in bit-perfect recreation, we can no longer assign monetary value to art in the traditional, transactional sense that we are used to. We are simply fooling ourselves by trying to do so. All information is now free, and it yearns to be so, and there are many among us (such as myself) who will stop at nothing to ensure that freedom. We’ve been given a tremendous gift, and we can’t squander it.

But we can and absolutely should still compensate artists for their work, and fairly, via the patronage system. Allowing artists to earn a livelihood via their art is one of the most important things a society can do. But by supporting artists themselves, and not their content, we remove the barriers to the free flow of information, while still supporting the artists we love.

That all being said, the real issue here with artists finding their work has made it into these machine-learning datasets is that America does not have and laughed off the idea of Right to be Forgotten laws. That's why you have to rely on the benevolence of private corporations to get things deindexed.

Right to be Forgotten/Erased laws must go global, yesterday. They're absolutely critical to preserving data privacy and control over our own personal data, likeness, etc. The fact we don't have them is a far bigger issue than Stable Diffusion unknowingly scraping copyrighted work.

It seems they're working on improving their takedown system- much the same way Google had to after fielding hordes of complaints about their search engine pointing toward illegal, abusive, or downright horrifying material. We already figured this one out, we just need to do it.

It should not take a DMCA Request (the DMCA is actually fucking horrifying if you read about it) for a rights-owner to have control over removing their own material from places they don't want it. Sadly, right now, that is the only option available to Americans.

The whole intellectual property system in America is broken beyond repair and requires wide reevaluation, but good luck with that. In the meantime, the EU has at least allowed ordinary citizens the right to control their private personal data on the internet, without having to resort to copyright.

That's the beautiful thing about their approach. It's a human right. The right to be forgotten. It's not a commercial ownership clause whereby you, the rightsholder, have to be able to preserve it out of hypothetical commercial value. Nope- privacy of your personal data is a human right, period.

It is possible for rigorous data privacy and advances in AI to coexist. Due to the forces of capitalism, it is an inevitably that AI will continue to advance. There are too many corporations throwing unfathomable amounts of money at the subject. This is all the more reason for us to quit fucking around and enshrine data privacy as a human right, yesterday.

[stylinsoncity]

What’s your relationship with inspiration from other authors? Something that scares me in writing, while also being a book lover, is that thin line between referencing a style you love in order to improve, and fully imitating it. I do think that what I make is a direct reflection of what I’m attracted to when reading, ‘cause I also tend to try and write things I would enjoy if I were on the other side of the artist-consumer dynamic. But it is a delicate balance, I think. It also applies for those who like figurative arts, like drawing. Recreation of other’s pieces is a fundamental part of learning how to make your own. But after a while, when does the inspiration end and the originality start?

Did you struggle with finding your own style too? Because every time I come across a work of yours ‘on accident’, like without checking the author first before starting to read, I always recognize your voice no matter what. Usually I fall in love with the writing, have my ‘this has to be Stylinsoncity’ thought, and then inevitably have my ‘duh’ moment when I do check the author’s name and prove I was right. They always are unequivocally you, which is something I’d like to achieve (a little jelous tbh).

P.S. Have a nice day, sorry for the length of the question, I’m no good at summarizing. 💕

Hi! No need to apologize!! Thank you for the ask and for the compliments on my writing :) What you’ve said is also one of the highest compliments I think you can give an author. Because i think most of us do struggle to find our voice and be original and have people affirm/admire that.

I do actually shy away from reading books in the same genre as the one I'm writing because I don't want to be influenced subconsciously. it's definitely something i'm wary of.

but i also think we’re far enough into civilization now that all current and future works contain bits of the past. the authors whose books we're currently reading drew inspiration from authors before them and so on.

but that's not to say there's no room to be original. I recognize that the things I'm writing about aren't novel ideas or concepts. But no one has lived my exact life, so there's always going to be something I can give to a story that someone else can't. The same goes for you.

I'll read something and see a metaphor that's so brilliant and I'll wonder why I never thought of things in that way, but perhaps it's because that's not where my experiences and my understandings about the world led me?? no matter what, i think there's room to approach topics in a way only you can by drawing on experiences that are unique to you.

i think there's a lot i could say about this actually, but i might ramble.

i just feel like it's okay to emulate a writer you admire because it's not like that's where your growth and skill ends. eventually you'll read another author you admire and another and everything you're learning about language and storytelling from those authors starts morphing and shaping the way you tell stories. And maybe you fall in love or maybe you start a new job or you go on a trip. And all of those little things continue shaping the way you see the world and understand yourself and others. And eventually, naturally, i think your distinct voice arises from all of that.

idk! i've never really given thought to this before, but it feels nice to brainstorm about it. i do worry about being derivative all the time, honestly. but then i'll write something i've never read before and it reaffirms that there are still original thoughts i can offer the world. that's true for all of us, i think.

[hollygl125]

Summer Reading / Writing / Arting Tag

Tagged by: @coping-via-clint-eastwood. (Fun! Thank you!)

1. Describe one creative WIP project you’re planning to work on over the summer.

I’m planning to submit a story for the ficwip 5k AU challenge, but I wrote that two days after it was announced (I have absolutely zero control over my mind), so now I’m just waiting for sign-ups and posting. I consider it a pre-canon divergent, canon convergent modification of a coffee-shop AU (not that I’ve ever read a coffee-shop AU). I think it’s pretty cute. But, since it’s already complete, I won’t exactly be working on that over the summer….

I will still be working on my ongoing series. It was ostensibly finished last August, but it’s grown in length by at least 50% since then (by adding to the middle—the end point is roughly the same). I currently have two unfinished sections (sections where I started adding something but need to fill in the rest).

In a dream world I would make a video to accompany the fic series, but I am an extreme perfectionist and don’t currently have the patience, so I think I would likely just drive myself crazy in the attempt.

I’d love to learn to make gifs in Photoshop, with pretty colours and layers and I don't know what…. I made a gif-set in PS once, but the end result was really big and unusable for most purposes because I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I’d also kind of like to embroider something. I bought some embroidery kits while slightly out of my mind during the height of the pandemic, and I think it would be fun to try using them and then, after learning a bit, make up something on my own. (Would it involve bees and butterflies? Probably.)

2. Rec a book!

Fiction: Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland. I haven’t read this in forever, but I meant to recommend it to someone about a decade ago and never got the chance. So I’m recommending it now to y’all instead.

Non-Fiction: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi, which is about the development of racist ideas and non-racist ideas alongside each other. I think this is one of the last books I read before I broke my brain.

3. Rec a fic (outside your character tag)!

How cute of you, question-asker, to think I read any fic outside GSR!

4. Rec music!

I’m terrible at recommending music, but I do have a Spotify playlist for my GSR series. (The Spotify playlist is only current to the stories I’ve posted so far. My private iTunes playlist has about 100 more songs. The Spotify playlist will get there eventually.)

5. Share one piece of advice!

I did my undergrad in History and English Lit, but I have no background in creative writing (aside maybe from previously running my dog’s Instagram account), so I don’t know if I’m in much of a position to give advice, but I’ll tell you how I approached my writing process (and had a lot of fun with it!), and maybe that’ll help someone.

Writing fan fiction was not something I seriously considered doing until the day before I started doing it. On the day before I started, I thought of it as something I might do quite a ways in the future, when I’d prepared more. But then the next day my brain was like, actually, no, we’re doing this now.

The reason I’d decided to write fanfic was that I had all these little romantic GSR scenarios running around my head at night (and in the morning, and in the afternoon, and in the evening…), and it was getting really tiresome having to recreate the dialogue every night.

When I started I did an outline in a Word doc with story or chapter headings, based on the different aspects of the GSR story I knew I wanted to address. After I had the outline, I didn’t fill in the story linearly, though. I first wrote whatever scenario was most pressing to get out of my head. Then I wrote the next thing, then the next, then the next, all based on what was most urgently trying to escape my head. Sometimes I added more headings when I had new ideas.

But it was never work; it was always fun. I probably looked a little goofy. I kept thinking… oh my god, I can’t believe I’m doing this. (You have to keep in mind that, until January 2022, I had not read any fic since (or before) I read fic for Josh and Donna when they were taking their own sweet time back in the mid-2000s.)

Eventually I had to write some sections that were more functional—stuff that was simply necessary to get from Point A to Point B—but that was really minimal and still relatively enjoyable. (I have a hard time even remembering what those sections were anymore, but I think the chapter explaining how they got from the year of honeymoons to the events of season 13 was definitely one of them).

So I guess my advice would be that you should just do whatever works for you. (E.g., you don’t have to start at the beginning.) I think this works well with c-v-c-e’s advice: “This is art. There ARE no rules, especially ones restricting flexibility and expression.”

And, most importantly, please remember to try to have fun!

Tagging: If you would like to participate, please consider yourself tagged!

[whitesworldofwam]

Now that 2024 is over well underway and I’ve gotten over the post Christmas madness that hasn’t been helped by lots of manager absence I’m feeling ready to get back to picking up my next Patreon Art series. There was a two week period there due to sickness and holiday and unexpected absence of a returning manager that the management team was just two people. And technically just one actual manager since I have no actual position just been given the approval to run the Branch.

Anyway, I’m digressing here. I’m kinda planning out a more long term series. The trick I’ve always struggled with was a concept that would allow for sufficient changes of pace to keep the reader interested while at the same time ensuring a constant theme connects the whole thing together. And following some kicking ideas around with my Patreons I’ve hit upon a real gem.

While I’ve yet to settle on an actual title for the series, I am running with a work in progress of The WAM Hotel. Yes, that’s a little pedestrian and doesn’t exactly capture the imagination but it does sum up what I’m thinking here.

From the outside it looks like your average hotel, like you would find in any city around the world. I’m not sure where I’d base it yet, geographically speaking. Of course there might not have to be one and it could become a chain or franchise. Thoughts to play around with in the future. Of course, it’s not the kind of hotel you can just walk into and hope the have a vacancy. Advance bookings are essential due to the special services they offer.

Given its exclusive nature, only a small number of guests can be accommodated at one time. Where a traditional hotel would be mostly guest rooms, suites, Penthouses along with restaurants, swimming pools, bars and other facilities, only two floors actually accommodate rooms for paying guests that can number up to 50 at one time. The other floors contain this hotel’s unique selling point. This is a WAM hotel after all.

Here you will find facilities to cater to a broad range of WAM activities. From simple wet rooms where you can enjoy getting messy with the substance of your choice to rooms to more specialist rooms each with a particular theme to elaborate recreations of icons of WAM that prove extremely popular.

For those who might be newcomers to WAM, a Beginners Package has been specially created to allow a slow exploration of all it has to offer. A package which takes advantage of the most valuable resource of the hotel; its staff. Each guest will be greeted on arrival by a charming companion with kind words, a warm smile and scant amount of clothing who will guide them to their room, taking in a brief tour of the hotel along the way. Each floor is staffed by a team of these charming companions who are more than happy to offer company at any hour of the day.

If that sounds like a fun little project, do check out my Patreon. It’s the best place to see works for this series as it begins. Or watch this space for future updates.

www.patreon.com/white66

Stay safe.

White.

[k00296066]

Disrupt

to me, disrupt referred to the disruptions that i had witnessed in my college accommodation. moving from a very small village in roscommon to a populated area like limerick was a huge change. i went from living with my parents and my dog to living with a group of students whom i had never even met before. i found that solid and lasting friendships could be made but disagreements were unavoidable. a lot of things happened in the first semester that really showed that we all were young and prone to making mistakes. some things caused more of an issue than others like when my housemates friends destroyed our house and slept in my bed without permission. some things were much more personal like the comments one of my housemates made about me that were really unkind and his throwing out of some of my pieces of art. however, i acknowledge that i, too, was part of the problem at times like when my friends would take drinks from the kitchen that belonged to others.

i began my project exploring the disruptions of peoples features hoping to learn more about the art of caricatures and cartoon-esque drawing. yet i felt this aspect wasn’t really inspiring me and i kept getting stuck in a rut. i took a risk and looked at other avenues. i thought about how i was trying to draw those around me, the people i lived with, and then i thought about how they could be disruptive instead of me disrupting them. i think we can all agree that a house full of 17, 18, and 19 year olds is truly a house of disruption.

the idea to create road signs with cautions based on the disruptions in our house came to me just after my birthday party. there was an incident in the house where our couch was used in a way that none of us wanted it to. one of my housemates joked, saying “we need to find a way to stop this from happening again” and i answered “i should make a sign”. my housemates agreed that it would be very funny and useful if there was a sign and i thought it would be a perfect way to take my project to the next level.

my favourite sector of art would have to be typography. i remember beginning to learn about it in art class in secondary school and immediately falling in love. i’ve always loved recreating fonts and even making new ones. i knew signage was a great route for me as it had an aspect of language and typography with the phrases written. i really enjoyed trying to replicate the writing on signs and seeing what different fonts looked like on a regular sign.

i spent a lot of time looking at road signage from driving almost 3 hours down to college every weekend and also going on walks, photographing what i’d see. i loved the vibrant and contrasting colours and how they created a striking image in a landscape. i used my photographs to help me when i’d make a sign to make sure it would look realistic. at one point me and my friends tried to acquire a real sign from the side of the road but unfortunately our heist was cut short because the boot of my car was not big enough. this actually led to me playing with scale and making a 3D sign out of cardboard that was actually taller than me. it was really interesting seeing what a sign would look like in such a large scale when i compared it to the smaller signs i had made. i thought about the meaning and how maybe bigger signs could mean there was a bigger problem.

i looked at a lot of different artists and designers to help with my work like kathy predergast, margaret calvert, and tracey emin. i felt that i really related to the work of these artists and found similarities between the meanings of our work. margaret calvert proved to be a huge help as she was credited with creating most road signs. i also found a lot of inspiration from books in the library. i checked out many on colour and on international forms of signage. they were very interesting and provided a basis for my sign work.

in conclusion, disrupt became almost a self reflection for me. i was able to see what me and my housemates were doing wrong and try to rectify it in a comical way. i really enjoyed creating these signs and learning about how original road signage was made. if i had more time i think i would try levelling up my signage and possibly creating metal ones with vinyl on top. i think vinyl printing would be an interesting skill to learn. id also like to look more into photography and expressing my artistic view through photos of the disruptions in my house. i would also try to almost interview other people and see what the disruptions of their college accommodation would be. i found a lot of people felt my project was actually quite relatable. it would be interesting to see which accommodation has the most disruptions, and possibly make a map of the worst spots, similar to kathy predergast’s ‘lost’.

[sillysnack]

art imitates life (2/2)

& (platonic) , / (romantic)

pairing: camilo madrigal / reader

prns used: they/them (told in 2nd person)

word count: 1344

read part one here | masterlist

— — — — —

6 PM arrived quickly.

Camilo made sure to take a nap after an exhausting day of running around town with energetic children before meeting up with you in the same bakery you worked at. He also made sure to bring the collection of romantic short stories with him.

He puts on his signature ruana before walking out of his room, his mind still half-asleep.

“Where are you going?”

Camilo turns to Mirabel. Why’s Mami with her? And Dolores?

“Bakery.”

Dolores narrows her eyes at Camilo. “Why?” He answers, “I thought you’d know why.”

“We don’t.” Mirabel gestures to herself and Pepa.

“I’m seeing someone?”

Pepa gasps. “Like a date?” Camilo shrugs. “I think?” His face is peppered with kisses. “My son is all grown up now! Have fun, Cami. I’ll tell this to your papa later. Don’t stay out too late! Or if you’re spending the night at their place, just let Dolores know.”

Camilo nods. “Gracias, mami.” He turns to Mirabel, “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“You. On a date?” Camilo nods. “Tia, I think he’s pranking us.”

“I’m not! Dolores knows what I’m talking about!” Dolores just shrugs. “I didn’t hear anything, sorry Cami. You’re on your own.”

WHAT..??

“You two, leave him alone. Whether or not this partner of his is real, at least he’s going out. I trust you, cariño. You should bring them over tomorrow.” Camilo nods. “I’ll ask them if they’re free. Bye!”

— — —

6 PM arrived quickly for the both of you. Camilo, however, did not.

“I was starting to think you forgot.” You walk up to Camilo, holding the same book he brought with him. He smiles sheepishly. “Sorry. Mirabel talked to me for a while. Anyways, there’s this place that papa and I used to go to every weekend.”

You raise an eyebrow. “Used to?” Camilo shrugs. “We just… stopped..? After Casita broke down. I don’t not miss it but… I guess I mentioned this to you because I like you and I want to show you a place that’s special to me?”

“You like me?” You tease. Camilo nods. “Like, ‘like-like’? The one where you want to hold hands and do ‘couple stuff’? Like that?”

Camilo nods. “Yes..? I don’t know, maybe not. I think I’ve read this book too many times.” You laugh and hold his hand. “Don’t know if my input matters but, I think you like fast-paced love stories and you wish to have one of your own,” Camilo pretends to look at some other event around you two to hide his blushing face, “you know, I’d be willing to be the love interest in your story.” You plant a kiss on the back of his hand. “That is, if you let me.”

Camilo Madrigal is many things: charming, funny, kind, extroverted, cute, but he is not immune to smooth lines like that. Especially coming from you.

Camilo manages to choke out an answer, “Of course. I’d… I’d love that.” He turns to you, “What are your favorite stories from the collection? We could… recreate some of the stories here. It’s been something I want to try out.”

You’re lost in your thoughts, looking for your answers to Camilo’s first question.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to, though-”

“I’d like that very much, actually! By the way, where’s this place you were talking about earlier?”

Camilo tightens his grip on your hand, “Try to catch up,” and starts running. You did try to catch up. “Are we really supposed to be running?” You hold your book close to your chest. Thank God none of us are bringing any food.

You mindlessly follow Camilo through the town, silently thanking God that there weren't too many people around. Given that the sun had set early.

The two of you stop in front of an empty house.

“Papa told me he and Mami were supposed to stay here. They planned on moving out from Casita and raising us in this very home.”

You turn to him, “What made them not go through with it?”

“Isabela and Dolores. Apparently they were so close to the point Isabela didn’t want her cousin to live in a house that’s, like, just a few kilometers away.” You hum in response. “Makes sense.”

The two of you stay silent.

“You didn’t answer my question a while ago.” You turn to Camilo. “My bad. If I had to pick favorites… I’m going to do the top three things, by the way. Third is probably the one where two teens - like us - sneak out at night to stargaze.” You two sit on the floor. You open your book and show Camilo the story you’re talking about.

“Oh, that one is top three for me too! You sure you aren’t just copying me so I like you more?”

You shut close the book in your hands. “You like me? What happened to ‘maybe not’?”

“You put me on the spot!” You cheekily smile at Camilo, he turns red. “You’re doing it again!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m merely bringing up a conversation we had hours ago.” You rest yourself on his lap. “How am I putting you on the spot?”

Camilo buries his face in his hands. “Are you being serious right now?” You shrug. “Tell me about what you think are the top three best stories in this little collection we’ve both read. Go on, pretend this is a normal moment between friends.”

Friends? That’s what we are?

“Aw, friends? Lástima que quería que fuéramos más que amigos.” (Too bad I wanted us to be more than friends.) Camilo hopes his last statement made you blush. It did. You abruptly sit up and grab your book to hide your face.

“Cat got your tongue?” You playfully shove him. “Shut up.” Camilo puts his hands up in surrender. “I will. Only if you put the book down, such a gorgeous face like yours shouldn’t be hidden.”

“You didn’t answer my question…” Camilo sighs. “Fine. If I answer, will I get free food tomorrow?” You look up at the ceiling. “How about free food for life? Starts when we get married.” Camilo opens his mouth in shock. Marriage, huh? That doesn’t sound too bad.

“There’s a field nearby, would you like to stargaze with me?” Camilo just nods and stands up, reaching his hand out to you. You intertwine your fingers together while the two of you walk towards a nearby field, it was probably this house’s supposed-to-be backyard.

“About your question, my second favorite is the story of the man admiring his wife playing with their children. It’s my second favorite because… I don’t know.” You narrow your eyes at Camilo as the two of you lay on the grass beside each other, “I don’t believe that last part.”

“Mkay. It’s my second favorite because I don’t have to ask you to recreate it with me. Just seeing you with the children in town this morning was so… breathtaking.”

You look at him. Seeing you right now is equally as breathtaking.

“Your all-time favorite?”

Camilo props himself up with his elbow, resting his chin on his hand. “The one where the main character talks about their love for their friend. It doesn’t seem like the friend likes them back but, the character never confessed, so…”

“It’s a cliffhanger. I don’t like them, do you?” Camilo’s lying beside you again. “No… I prefer to know what happens to the characters.” You hum in response, “Me too.”

The two of you are silent for a while. It was pleasant.

“Would it be too straightforward if I asked you to be my partner? Like, romantically?” Camilo nervously tugs at his ruana, waiting for your answer. “Yeah. But I’m not against it. I’d love to be your significant other.”

Camilo sits up and you do the same. “Significant other is too long of a word though, how about I start calling you ‘mi amor’?” You leave a soft kiss on his cheek. “Me gustaría mucho, mi novio.” (I’d like that very much, my boyfriend).

[h-worksrambles]

What if Sam & Max got another cartoon?

The Sam & Max animated series holds a very special place in my heart. While perhaps not my absolute favourite incarnation of the two (though it’s close), it still keeps up this series’ very high level of quality, and is probably one more the more overlooked shows of its era. Furthermore, it’s also probably the iteration of the franchise that I most want to see get a revival. Partly because it’s just a very good, but also very short show that deserved more episodes. But also because I think it has a fair bit of untapped potential, to take all the best bits of the animated series we got, and turn it into something even better. So I thought I’d make a short numbered list exploring some things I would like to see if these two got another chance to grace our screens. I may do also do a future post on what I would like to see in a new Sam & Max videogame. With all that said, let’s get crackin’!

1. Target a (slightly) older demographic

The cartoon is distinct as being the only version of Sam & Max to be explicitly marketed at kids. And much of this has to do with it originally airing on Fox Kids. While I think the writers did an excellent job with what they had, and maintained much of the spirit of the series with those constraints, it’s hard not to imagine what they could have done with more freedom. To clarify, I don’t exactly want the seres to go hard R. Even at its edgiest, Sam & Max has typically between quite tame by the standards of adult animation as we know it today. The games have never gone over a T rating and the comics’ content was never above the level a teenager could handle. But when you read through the official sketchbook and see how many fun jokes were cut, I can’t help but wonder just how hamstrung the writers were by the need to keep things mostly family friendly. Even if the show still got away with a lot...

...Moving right along... 2. Draw more inspiration from the comic.

One of my personal favourite parts of the cartoon is how much it adapted from the original comics. Characters like the Rubber Pants Commandos showed up as cameos. Comic baddy Mack Salmon became a recurring antagonist. And the show did the best it could within its budget to recreate the comics’ art style, included its hyper detailed, gag laden backgrounds. One of the best episodes is a direct adaptation of one of my favourite of the comics, Bad Day on the Moon, bringing it to life with full colour, animation and voice acting. All I can say is, do that but...more. Adapt one or two of the other comics in a handful of episodes. This also builds handily off point 1. Maybe a kids’ show would have struggled to adapt Monkey’s Violating the Heavely Temple, in which the main villain dies of spontaneous combustion on-screen. But with the added freedom of a higher age rating, maybe that could actually be done (since that was the very first comic it could actually make for a solid pilot). But this goes further than just direct adaptation. Incorporate ate more comic characters like Flint Paper. And, especially, lean more into the stylism of a comic. Occasionallly the show would feature things like closing out an episode with the image of an actual comic back cover closing over. Why not do more of that? Have scene transitions that resemble panel transitions, add comic captions with additional blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags. Make the whole show feel like a comic book come to life. The comics are in some ways still the purest expression of what Sam & Max is, and I see nothing wrong with taking more cues from it.

3. More recurring characters, less one-offs

One thing I’ve noticed in my time in the Sam & Max fandom, is that the current fans really like the show’s new characters. Newcomers like the Geek, Granny Ruth, John the gator and Lorne, the wonderfully hateable Friend For Life, are all pretty well-liked by fans. 

  It’s odd, therefore, that most of them...aren’t in it all that much.  Lorne gets two episodes as the main antagonist, and a cameo in a third. And he’s frankly one of the luckiest ones. Despite being a fan favourite, Granny Ruth only has a single 10 minute episode. Checking the series bible also suggests other characters were planned to be recurring cast members, but were ultimately cut. The character Ms. Honeybunny was orignally going to be Sam & Max’s landlady, but ultimately only had a very different, much smaller role in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. And Mack Salmon? The show’s supposed big bad lifted from the comics? Two episodes, one of which is the finale. Now I absolutely think supporting characters can work well in Sam & Max. I have a whole other piece going into why. So I think these characters deserve more time to shine, especially the Geek, who I’ll talk about more in a later section.

To achieve this without drastically overinflating the show’s scope and run-time, it may be worth cutting down on the sheer number of one off characters and villains. If there’s one area I consider a weak point of the cartoon, it’s these guys. Does anyone really have any investment in Larvo? Did we need the incel moles? Are any fans clamouring for a return of Lactose the Intolerant? And hot take, Gary the psychic kid wasn’t sweet, he was just annoying, sorry-not-sorry. I’m not saying you can have no one off characters. But maybe cut down on the amount to make room for a slightly beefed up recurring cast. (Side note: but it’s worth pointing out that the cartoon-exclusive characters are still owned by Fox, and it would require some legal finagling to get them back. But even if these characters specifically couldn’t return, my points about the pros of an extended cast still stand).  Speaking of...

4. Use the Geek more, you cowards!

The Geek is simultaneously one of the most distinct aspects of this version of Sam & Max while also being the most under-used. Sam & Max’s tech supplier and resident girl-in -the-chair, she provided the duo with wacky inventions to solve cases with, while playing the role of deadpan snarking straight-woman to their insanity. Despite being effectively a studio mandated inclusion, a trend that has previously fallen flat in other shows, she actually works really well in Sam & Max’s dynamic, and there’s almost an implied screwed-up found family aspect between the three given that she’s living in their basement. Unfortunately, the fact that she was studio mandated is the most likely reason why she’s barely in the show. Whether for fear that she would mess up the pair’s dynamic, or just resentment at being foisted with her in the first place, the writers seemed hesistant to use her more than the bare minimum. She gets little to no screen time in the handful of episodes where she’s present, outside of one episode where she is kind of the focus.

  Still, as I said, I think that, despite the writers’ reservations, the Geek proved herself and succeeded where other kid avatars failed. And I would like a revival to use her to her full potential. Let her come on a case or two. Give her an episode where she’s the clear focus. And most of all, let her be a full-on mad scientist, every bit as morally ambiguous as her kinda-sorta dads. This is a girl who should be building deaths rays and running highly unethical experiments in her lab because it’s a Tuesday and she’s bored. I also wouldn’t mind playing up the found family angle she has with Sam & Max, but not too much. Sam & Max has always been really good at creating a believable relationship between its leads without being too saccharine. As much as I love how fans have run with the interpretation that the Geek is their adopted daughter I wouldn’t want to overplay it and try too hard to be cutesy or cloying. This franchise is classier than that. Basically, I want more of the energy encapsuated in this one scene from the show.

  Effervescent.

5. Have some nods to the wider series, but not too many

  Since I went on about taking more from the comic and having more recurring characters, you may be wondering if I want to see references to, or characters from, the video games in a cartoon revival. The answer is...kinda. Much as I enjoy the recurring cast of the Telltale games, and as much as I feel Hit the Road’s characters are actually super underrated, I do wonder if this could turn into overkill. Part of the charm of Sam & Max is its relative lack of canon. Every incarnation is distinct and so you can start wherever you like and have a good time. If Telltale characters were showing up every episode, the show would risk feeling less like its own thing, and being its own thing in the franchise was part of what made the cartoon so charming.

 The best blueprint for the approach to fanservice I would want actually comes from the recent game, This Time It’s Virtual. While my feelings on this entry are admittedly mixed, one thing it nails is being an absolute love letter to the series without risking continuity lockout. Most of its homages to the rest of the franchise are in off-hand references, or background gags. These are a treat for fans, without leaving newcomers confused. It’s still a solid jumping on point if you should choose to start there. Likewise, I would like to see the show reference the video games, but not too much. Maybe I don’t want Sybil and Bosco every episode, but you could perhaps use Bosco in one episode plotline based around his paranoia and absurd prices, getting the gist of his character across to newbies with no other knowledge required, and leave it at that. Or maybe Sybil gets one episode instead, hiring the two out for a case and switching jobs three or so times across the episode. Or perhaps a Conroy Bumpus revenge episode. And I’d say that much, at most. I see no problem drawing freely from the comic since that’s effectively the series’ source text. But as for the rest of the franchise, by all means homage it, but don’t go overboard. Throw the fans a bone while still letting the show stand on its own.   ...And that’s pretty much all my ideas for what I would like to see in a new Sam & Max cartoon! Oh, and before you ask about voices, while I would love to see David Nowlin and Rob Tinkler, my favourite Sam & Max respectively, perform together, this would likely be decided by the logistics of where the show was produced and what voice actor union the creative team would be pulling from. So I would be entirely open to new voice actors, or old ones returning, I wouldn’t mind either way. 

  I hope this was a fun read and that you’ll join me in keeping your fingers crossed that, one day, we will get another TV series with these goofballs. If you have any ideas of your own for what a new cartoon would look like, feel free to leave a reply. I’d love to see other folks’ ideas too!  

[somanysoundtracks]

That moment you realize you're not playing a heavily modified version of giant senet in "Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation" (1999), because you're actually playing a modified version of the game of twenty/Twenty Squares

(Image from "The Game of Twenty Squares" from cyningstan.com http://www.cyningstan.com/game/1061/the-game-of-twenty-squares)

Also, before we start off, credit to "Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games Across Borders" (2016) by Walter Crist, Anne-Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi, and Alex do Voogt for more background on the various ancient board games. I am not an archaeologist or historian, but these folks are (also they go way more into detail on the individual games, naming arguments, rules, geographical movements, etc., than I will because this post is long enough).

(You can purchase an ebook copy on Books (iOS) and Kobo, and a physical in most places books are sold; I get nothing from the sale, it’s just a very interesting book)

So I haven’t found anyone who’s written or vlogged about this in ~23 years of this video game’s existence, so I guess it’s down to me, having too much free time and an interest in going down a research rabbit hole.

I’ve wanted to be an Egyptologist since I was like 7, so learning senet - an ancient Egyptian board game - was something I was always interested in doing, particularly given how often senet pops up if you do any basic research into the lives of ancient Egyptians or their mythology.

(A senet/znt board from Abydos ca. 1550-1295 B.C.E. (the other side appears to have had the game of twenty on it) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544775)

(Image credit: Wikihow)

According to some versions of the myth, Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, was either jealous of Nut’s (goddess of the sky) love of Geb (god of the Earth), or knew of a prophecy whereby her offspring would unseat Ra from the throne, and cursed her to be unable to give birth for the whole year. On Nut’s behalf, Thoth, the god of wisdom, played senet against Khonsu, god of the moon, for enough moonlight to add five extra unofficial days to the year (bringing it to 365 days), wherein Nut could give birth.

The giant game of “Senet” in TR4′s Tomb of Semerkhet always fascinated me, because not only was it apparently “senet” in some form, but it also just looked neat (for the time, TR4′s graphics looked really cool). By the time I was able to play it myself, though, I’d come to accept that it wasn’t actually senet, because the configuration was wrong (most senet games have 30 cells in 3 lanes of 10, whereas “Senet” in TR4 has 20 cells and is arranged like a lollipop or hammer).

Fast forward to recently when I finally looked into getting a senet board to play with my family, and I discovered another ancient Egyptian board game called Mehen, supposedly based on the Egyptian snake god of the same name, who was known to wrap his coils around Ra for protection every night on the sun boat as Ra journeyed across the sky.

(Image credit: a Mehen board from Abydos, Egypt, ca 3000 BCE, the Neues Museum)

During that search, I randomly came across boards for the TR4 game I thought the TR4 devs made up! But rather than being a recreation of a fictional board game, as a number of gaming enthusiasts are apt to do, this one is real. It was called Aseb, which is a name you come across for the game of twenty in a number of places, and is a little more accepted than the alternate but also relatively popular name, Tjau. Most of the academics I’ve seen don’t use either “Aseb” or “Tjau”, though. They call it the game of twenty or Twenty Squares.

(A Twenty Squares board from Thebes, Egypt. ca. 1635–1458 B.C.E https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/twenty-squares)

So what happened here? TR4 actually calls it “Senet”, so clearly the naming choice was intentional on some level. Here's a picture of the in-game item in the Tomb of Semerkhet level to learn the rules for the board game (you can see a preview of the board itself on the bottom right) (also I believe this is from the console version):

The name of the item in your inventory telling you what the game you're going to be playing is called:

(Screencap from “Tomb Raider 4 - Tomb of Semerkhet Walkthrough” by Roli's Tomb Raider Channel: https://youtu.be/RhAbD7EsC8A?t=512)

After the game of twenty was introduced to Egypt, it was often added to the back of senet game boards (two games in one). I’ve reviewed interviews from before and after TR4 was released, various retrospectives and documentaries, and found nothing on who made this level or why the game was misnamed, assuming anyone involved even knew it was misnamed. I imagine the TR4 devs found one or more of these double-sided boards during game development: a labeled senet board with the game of twenty on the back, and they then assumed it was the same game in two variants. My assumption is that someone wanted senet because it’s a relatively well-known cultural artifact from Egypt that people would at least have name recognition for, but the game of twenty was picked instead of senet because it’s shorter and less complicated. Plus, senet is considered to be a metaphorical journey through the Egyptian afterlife, which is suitable for a tomb (and a game involving bringing a dead god back to life), and many of the surviving boards we have were found in tombs.

Maybe the devs even read some article somewhere that misattributed it. Surviving board games have been misattributed over the years and anything is possible. Also, this was 1998 and it's easier to download an epub of "Board Games Across Borders" in 2022 than whatever they did.

Notably the team did research at the British Museum (https://youtu.be/aTL88Z4db9k?t=4560), which has at least one senet board on display. It also has a game of twenty board, which was possibly in South Carolina or being transported when the team was researching (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA24424)

The team also bought books for research, though I'm not sure what, other than some of the works of John-Yves Empereur (https://youtu.be/aTL88Z4db9k?t=6414). There was also apparently a US team (Core Design was British), but I'm not sure where they went for research.

I've seen a few websites call the game of twenty in TR4 a "variant" of senet (likely because it's called "Senet" in TR4, but doesn't look like senet). It's not. Senet is Egyptian (though the origin is murky pre-First Dynasty). The game of twenty possibly came from the Indus Valley and shows up in Egyptian artifacts around the 17th Dynasty. The game of twenty is supposedly a variation of the Royal Game of Ur (from Sumer). The Royal Game of Ur was played all around the region.

(https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1928-1009-378)

For the game of twenty, four of the cells on the right were folded back into a longer tail. I haven’t found any historian or archaeologist who says that senet or the game of twenty was involved in the other’s creation, outside them both appearing on the same game boards, back to back. For all intents and purposes, senet was present in Egypt for some time before the game of twenty arrived, and then both games were popular there simultaneously.

I can’t find any fansite, forum, speedrunner, or playthrough that references the fact that the giant board game in TR4 isn’t actually senet. Even Stella’s Walkthroughs references it as a variant of senet, and links to Senet’s wikipedia page, which does actually have a game of twenty board on it (though they call it Tjau), and the Met’s page on senet, which also references the game of twenty. Tomb Raider Horizons mentions the game and shows screencaps, but talks about senet, not the game of twenty. And all the fanwikis I’ve found refer to it as senet, not the game of twenty or any of its other name variants.

For all intents and purposes, I guess no one noticed this in 23+ years, or was invested enough to go down a rabbit hole for it. But it’s neat to learn it was real.

Unrelatedly, there appears to be a sort of senet board in "Tomb Raider" (1996). There are ~15 more cells than most senet games and 2 extra lanes, but it's interesting that the team seems to have sort of done it right just a couple years beforehand.

(Screenshot from "Was it Good? - Tomb Raider 1" by Josh Strife Plays: https://youtu.be/dwzIu4zFJVI)

It's possible the TR1 game is forty-two and pool, which is supposed to be similar to senet, and has 42 holes, though the number of rows is wrong, and I don't have a picture of the board for comparison.

It's also possible this is some version of "Hounds and Jackals", which often has 58 holes (notably the one above has 45 cells), but the TR1 board looks more like senet's does and the pieces are missing, so who knows? (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/543867)

Misnaming aside, shout out to this translation of the casting sticks in a video game not built to play board games and using 1998-9 tech.

(Screencap from “Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation - 13b - Winning at Senet” by ladycroft214: https://youtu.be/1JV2oIXmVMg)

You can also play versions of all these games, online or physically. We don’t know the rules for all of them, and rules changed over the centuries anyway, but many people have come up with their own rules based on what we know, so there are versions online, and plenty of board game makers who have designed them for you to purchase, or even draw yourself on paper, like the ancients used to graffiti on roads and walls.

[rothjuje]

Guys. I think we have found a moving company. HALLELUJAH. We might not kill each other after all.

It’s a smaller Texas company with great reviews. I think it’s done, all we have to do is sign. I didn’t realize just how much this topic was draining us but it’s like the elephant in the room is gone. Yessssss thank you universe. Thank you. Thanks again.

Rough (rough) night with the kids and the animals, horrible timing with my current hormone-triggered migraine, but I will celebrate this win. And also thank science and imitrex.

Growing up, I used to mourn the fact that I didn’t get to grow up in the 60s. It used to devastate me. But I think I’m okay. I can recreate the parts that I missed but still have access to science and medication and fertility treatments.

Part of the move is getting rid of paperwork and supplies from our IVF journey. I’m strangely... nostalgic? For a time in my life that was very stressful and unhappy. But still full of miracles. Eleven of which are still frozen.

I have a question. How do you know when your family is complete? Is it a warm feeling? A practical thought? A financial decision?

I’ve been asking my irl friends what stops them from having a million babies. Most said their partners were done. What makes someone feel done though? I need to know.

Growing up I always said I wanted 5 kids. I don’t know why, it was just a random number, I never thought I’d actually get married and get to have more than three kids. I feel like any more than 3 and you are considered a large family (myself and all my friends came from households with 2-3 children but 2 was more common I suppose looking back).

I think 5 kids would be too crazy for our desired lifestyle, but I still have this feeling. Like, this vision that we are supposed to have another son and then in my early 40s have another daughter. Where does this come from? Why do I want 5 kids? Also in this vision is a lush garden that the kids frolic in, with a playhouse in the middle with art supplies and they can help garden and create stories in their playhouse and we won’t ever come inside until it starts to get dark and the sunset paints the sky.

Where does this even come from? Books I read?

I guess what I am also asking is how do you reconcile daydreams with reality. Help please. And please tell me I’m not the only one with sappy/unrealistic daydreams..