#i haven't been able to recreate this corruption later

[queencoldart]

A Dog's Mother is officially canceled

Maybe you saw this coming, or maybe this comes as a surprise. I feel terrible because I repeatedly promised to continue updating this story. Now that I have a full time job, I realize I bit off so much more than I could chew.

I initially took a break from updating the story because I was basically pouring all of my free time into it. Every new upload consisted of many different drawings, not including the editing. I was fatigued.

Then I lost the entire script and was never able to recreate it to my liking. After that I began to rewrite parts that weren't great to begin with. This is when I realized that the way I've set the story up in previous uploads, I created some problems down the line. I tried to painstakingly fix them before continuing to upload. Twice after I attempted to continue drawing, I lost a whole bunch of my progress due to files getting corrupted. Then I lost access to the medication that helps me focus, which I still haven't regained. The more I tried to return to the drawing board, the more I couldn't force myself to do it, especially when I became incredibly busy with school and finally work.

It's been so many years now and I sense that people have had their fill of generational trauma stories. I like to keep my promises, so this hurts to do and I am sorry to all of those who have been anticipating the rest, but I think it's time for me to retire the project and move on instead of worrying about releasing it and feeling guilty any time I draw anything else.

Since I am not finishing this project, what I'm about to say isn't going to spoil anything.

Garble softens his approach to Cinder after being confronted by Smolder and seeing the final confrontation between Torch and Sconce. He was never fully convinced that he was doing right by Cinder by being extra hard on her. We learn that Garble is actually very worried about his sisters, because the world they live in is changing so quickly and the only reliable way he knows how to protect anything is by being tough.

The earthquakes, as shown and alluded to in part 2, were precursors to a massive volcanic eruption that creates very hazardous conditions for Ember, and for Torch when he saves her. Sconce returns and prevents Torch from being injured during his rescue mission. By doing this, Sconce demonstrates enough love for her son that Ember wants to give her a chance. It makes no difference to Torch, however. He doesn't believe in rewarding his mother with a rekindled mother-son relationship for doing something right. This insults Sconce and both she and Torch double down instead of making up, subverting the (Millennial) Parental Apology Fantasy trope.

Sconce's double standards prevent her from validating anything her son tells her and Torch insists his mother stays far away from him. Ember gets in between them again but this time she acknowledges her father's feelings and takes responsibility for ignoring his boundaries. She thanks Sconce for saving her father and promises to stay in touch, but implores her to leave. Sconce's emotions have exhausted her so much she has no fight left in her and she goes home.

In the epilogue, a very conflicted Sconce shows clear signs of cognitive dissonance. Her husband's snide remarks about their son make her uncharacteristically upset. While she doesn't have a change of heart immediately, it is implied she may have one later.

Several things happen after the epilogue. This isn't a part of the story, but I may draw related pieces at some point.

Ember stays in contact with Sconce, as she promised. Sconce is fond of her granddaughter and tries to ask about Torch, but never gets any details besides that he's "doing fine". Sconce writes to Ember that Torch accuses her of wrongdoing, yet never told her exactly what she did wrong. Torch is incredibly dismayed when Ember tells him this and says he isn't interested in hearing what she and Sconce have to say to each other, although it is abundantly clear he wants to know whether or not his mother is badmouthing him.

Basalt passes away. Torch has no reaction to this news, which upsets Sconce when she hears it. At the same time, she feels like she should be more saddened herself. Sconce doesn't feel like she can stay in the south anymore and begins wandering. She meets different dragons along the way, who teach her how her son's leadership affected dragons. She becomes gradually more pleasant, in no small part due to a lack of Basalt's influence, and even begins to learn bits and pieces of the truth about her late husband — information she is initially very resistant to. She encounters Torch by coincidence. This time she doesn't confront him and leaves immediately. This surprises her son, but he doesn't pursue her. He asks Ember how his mother is some time later. This piques Ember's curiosity, to which Torch simply states that he wants his mother to be well, nothing more.

The process of Sconce's reformation and eventual redemption is a long one. She and Torch eventually mend their relationship to the point they are friendly with each other, but Torch never forgives her, not even after she's willing to make amends and accepts she isn't owed forgiveness. She watches Grandma Griddle enjoy the joys of motherhood that could have been her own if she hadn't been so stubborn and counts her blessings.

I didn't intend for there to be a moral of the story, but if there is one, the main takeaway shouldn't be that those who redeem themselves will eventually get rewarded for it. It should be that it took Sconce more than two thousand years to repair her relationship with her son. Most people don't have that long, so... don't be awful to your kids, I suppose!

[thesnacken]

The way I explained it to some friends:

It felt like waking up to find out my favorite park had been paved over.

I'm a game designer (admittedly a flesgeling one). Magic was the tool I used to cut my teeth to do that. Some of the earliest posts on this blog were attempts to understand Magic: the Gathering by recreating it. I've been doing thay for over a decade, now. My friends have been arouns for years, watching me (and later participati g themselves) take the stories and experiences we found as we went and bring them back to Magic.

That always felt safe to me. While I couldn't join the ranks of people making the game professionally, I could build something adjacent that would never be definitively proven "wrong", because Magic was its own thing, and I was adapting other things. I had all of the room I needed to stretch out and practice and grow, like running through a sprawling park.

For years that practice and pursuit was guided by the literal hundreds of hours worth of packaged and shared experience, thought, and philosophy presented by you, between Blogatog, Drive to Work, and the volumes of articles posted over the last decade. Paired with the dozens of sets and thousands of cards to pick through released over that timeframe, I had a great workshop full of good tools and strong materials on which I could practice. Vainly, I hoped that one day I could join the ranks of designers who were making what I was sure was one of the greatest games ever made.

When the first UB products were announced, I was trepedatious. They weren't why I was here. They felt a little blasphemous. Magic was phenomenal. Why did it need outside material? I thought about that, though, and tempered my reaction. Magic borrowed plenty from others, and made plenty that wasn't aimed at me. I didn't like it, but I supposed I didn't have to. I saw new people take a look at magic for the first time and thought, "Well. I guess that can't be so bad, right?".

Over time, more of these products were announced, surfaced, and yielded similar results. I wasn't keen on most of them, but there was always something worth finding in them. Something to reward me sifting through. I could still see the heart of Magic in it, even if I didn't care for the expression. Still, something tugged at the back of my mind. Something that felt familiar. A similar story about a slow, creeping corruption that could be managed, resisted, until the fatal moment it couldn't. I ignored it.

"Half of all releases going forward will be Universes Beyond."

That was it. That was my playground, paved over. A new IP every three months that I wouldn't be able to adapt freely. Many of them I probably wouldn't care about, but some of them, inevitably, I will. Some of them had already. Anything above some threshold of popularity would be at risk. Anything that did, I couldn't touch. There's too much risk involved; what I make will inevitably be judged against what is published, and anything I share will be at risk of being misidentified or, worse, ridiculed for its inaccuracy.

This also doesn't come in a vacuum. Every few months, I find WotC, Hasbro, or Magic itself ensnared in a new mire. Layoffs, restructuring, another loop of accusations, admissions, and renumerationa over the use of AIGen, or some head-scratching new product that seems utterly divorced from what I thought would be coming five years ago. I haven't been able to keep up in years, and I've been increasingly uncomfortable watching it play out. I've long learned how to hold my initial reactions for questioning, but after a few years of this, my reactions are starting to feel quite vindicated. Magic is one of several things I've seen follow this road, crushing the things that made them unique in favor of things that yielded a larger market. I had just hoped for better.

In the end, I suppose I may just be among a crowd of acceptable collateral. I wasn't buying, playing, or competing. I was too mired in something I felt was higher-minded. I thought the course would correct itself. Perhaps it's too late for that, now. I see how this paved lot can be useful; it just isn't the park. Perhaps Magic isn't made for dreaming artists, writers, and designers anymore. I can't stop that, if that's the case. I'm one, flat-broke fan of something that seems to be on its way out.

It's simply a shame that we seem to be running out of parks.

I’ve always felt the core role of this blog has been one of information. We make a lot of choices in design, and I try to use my various communications, including Blogatog, to walk the players through what we were thinking when we made key decisions.

The challenge with this approach is that it’s very logic-focused. It uses intellectual justifications to explain actions. But the problems I’m often responding to are emotional in origin. I have a good friend who’s a psychologist. He refers to this (using the words of author Robyn Gobbel) as an owl brain solution to a watchdog brain problem.

When someone is hurting, hearing about why the thing that is causing them pain is the result of intellectual decisions falls flat. That’s what has been causing some tension lately here on Blogatog.

It’s clear that for some Question Marks changes over the last few years represent the loss of something key to what makes Magic special to them. To them, the game is losing its heart.

While I can’t necessarily do anything about that, I want to better understand what you’re going through. So I’m using this post to ask players who are concerned with the recent changes to help me understand their feelings. Let me hear your stories about how your lives have been affected by these changes.

[askroahmmythril]

From everything I've heard, the save corruption glitch in S/V has to do with the Vivillon event in Pokémon Go, so if you avoid messing with that, you should be fine.

Apparently reports are widely varied. Some say they've gotten hit with the bug despite not having purchased the DLC, as well as not messing with connecting a Go account, saying it's PURELY due to the new patch.

Now the weird part is, from what I gather, no one's been able to provide a corrupted save file so people can try to figure out what caused it. A lot of major players in the Pokemon fandom have actually been trying to purposefully recreate the bug, but have been unable to do so, so that feels weird.

Unfortunately, as tends to be the case, there's also a lot of misinformation out there from clickbait articles. Like I've seen some containing just blatant fearmongering with phrases like "a lucky few haven't been hit by the bug," when it's very much the other way around, the majority of players HAVEN'T had the bug, and an UNlucky minority have.

So it's that uncomfortable thing of "I'm pretty sure if I haven't had the bug hit by now I'm probably fine, but what if...?" Sadly there's been no official word from Nintendo / Game Freak / TPC, so we're kind of in the dark on that front. Hopefully something verifies what happened and that it's fixed sooner or later.

[miek-unofficial]

throwback to when i was corrupting skyward sword and accidentally created pinecone link

[generouslyandrogynousdragon]

Okay, so episode 8. We finally get answers, and more importantly Billy and Tommy are safe! Well, relatively speaking. They're alive at least.

Agatha continues to be the best villain of the MCU so far, and her theme song is confirmed to still be a bop. Really hope they keep her around, she could play the villain for DS2 if they do.

One of the things I have questions about is, what forbidden knowledge did she steal from her coven? It sounds as if her stealing that knowledge was what corrupted her, and if that's the case then I really want to find out what it was.

It's almost a meme at this point, but...Mephisto? One episode left, and we haven't seen him, so I guess he'll be showing up later in Phase 4. If Agatha doesn't make it past the end of next episode, then Mephisto is likely to be the DS2 villain.

Trauma abounded in this episode, and Agatha played the world's worst therapist to Wanda, but having remembered what happened and acknowledged it, I'm hopeful that Wanda will be able to move forward in a healthier way.

Also, called it, Wanda wasn't the villain, creating the Hex was an accident all along! People will no doubt say she was wrong anyway, but you try losing everything in what amounts to the blink of an eye, every hope for the future ripped away, and see how well you hold up mentally and emotionally.

There have been media forms made for decades about villains intentionally doing exactly that in order to manipulate heroes into doing what they want. Would therapy be a better choice? Of course, but with no one around to help her she was running on autopilot.

The Dream Team (Monica, Darcy, Jimmy and Vision) were almost completely absent from this episode, which is a shame, but understandable. This was definitely a Wanda episode, and the focus was where it should have been.

Hayward is a dick, as usual. But now we know he was lying to people about Wanda stealing Vision's body, so why? To paint her as the villain, sure, but again, why? Is he just angling to remove her from the equation, or get her under his control? I'm not sure why her stealing Vision's body makes her any more the villain than he could already have painted her as.

The only reason I can see is from the post-credit scene, where we discover that he has rebuilt Vision's body. Albeit a lot paler than before...

If he wanted Vision back online and Wanda couldn't do it, then I guess he felt he had to paint her as the villain to cover up his own activities. Otherwise she could have gone blabbing about his unethical experiments.

Now, finally, let's talk about the White Vision from the post-credits scene. Apparently, in the comics, that form is basically Vision without his memories/personality. I kind of want to know what that gem on his forehead is, it obviously can't be the Mind Stone this time. Some kind of focusing crystal for a beam based weapon?

My theory, and I really hope I'm right this time, is that the Vision we're used to, who we now know is a construct from Wanda's memories of him, will merge with the repaired body, restoring his personality, if not his memories, and giving Wanda back her robot husband.

On that note, in the scene where Wanda created the Hex, we see Vision being formed by her Chaos Magic. But it's a completely different colour of magic, or soul, or whatever it's meant to be, to Wanda's magic.

Agatha says that it's the magic of creation. The power to create, even from nothing, which explains Billy and Tommy. But maybe it explains Vision, too. Her subconscious mind simply recreated his soul, based on her memories of him. Souls being souls, of course, he then started growing and changing from there.

This might also explain why Wanda's magic can't control him, and why he can break her spells. This version was literally created by her magic, not only is he immune to it but he can undo it if needed. And recreate it, as we saw when he put people back under the spell.

All of this is my way of saying, please let Vision survive the end of this show. Please? Right now I give it 50:50 odds that he comes back to stay, but with body and soul/mind existing, he could be brought back. Please, Marvel, just let these two live happily. Let them have their little house in Westview, or wherever they decide to live.