#it’s ready to be posted 👍 it’s a very fun chapter with some Fun little references towards the end (and some cited sources in my notes)

[mangoisms]

ok LOL some gems from chapter 10 of frmb

(reader is italics, eijun is bold, miyuki is regular)

[syn4k]

okay so since we've basically finished the draft of the first chapter of this fic we're working on and since we're going to be posting it exactly a week from now on may 30th as planned (unless something goes horribly and i mean HORRIBLY wrong), i figured that i may as well finally start posting a little bit about it here because this thing's been cooking for a few weeks now and man are we excited about it.

without further ado, everybody get ready for... salt and the sea!!! (named after the Lumineers song :3)

so about a month back our dear friend quincy @starry-storm-main watched a mianite s1 clip we sent xem in which tom did one of his signature Tom Things and tucker (whom he was living with irl at the time) muted himself in the call but could still clearly be heard screaming in agony from upstairs from tom's stream. and xey were like "hey what if you interpreted the fact that we could still hear tucker as an in-universe psychic link between him and tom" and we were like YOUR BRAIN IS HUGE AND I NEED TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT THIS NOW.

things very quickly got out of hand past that point and since then the idea has expanded into a full study of tom's loyalties being split between his friends and his god, with the mental link between him and tucker kinda accenting everything that's going on on that side of things.

so yeah this is gonna be a longfic (or at least a multichapter) and it's also almost certainly gonna get into some pretty heavy territory eventually so uh. have fun everybody and be prepared to get ur titties blown off 👍

[starskichild]

I LIIIIVE!! 💥💥

And OH BOY did I have one hell of a year.

When I tell you that 2024 was one of the craziest years of my life yet...and that's saying something after 2023 and 2022!

But as 2024 comes to a close, I'd like to reflect on all the changes that have happened in my life, and where I might be going in 2025 (somewhere good, hopefully🤞)

Let's start off with the things I did not expect on my 2024 bingo card to happen this year:

My dad getting laid off from work

Snagging his dream job...halfway across the country (we all sat down and talked about if we wanted to move or not, which we did)

Moving cross country

Moving...with four sedated animals...in one car...for two days...

Toxic family drama (okay that one was kinda expected)

Remodeling a house

Got my dream pet for the very first time, LIZARDS!!! 🦎

Going through not one, not two, but THREE different jobs (The one I had to leave unfortunately because of the move, even though I liked it, and the other two were just flat out awful. I've now finally landed on the forth one and am super happy and now job stable 🤠👍)

Death of a childhood dog

Death of friends' childhood pets (yes, you heard that right for both. We had MULTIPLE friends in my close friend group, me included, that had their childhood pet decide to run away to the happy sunshine ranch in the sky...literally a few days apart from each other...it was not a fun two weeks.

Getting to show my other childhood dog the ocean for the first time.

Going through not one, but two Hurricanes for the first time. (Milton I'm looking at you, you little twink sounding ass bastard. You had no right to be as scary as you were. I can't say much for Helene, cause she didn't come near where we are, but I pray for everyone who was affected by her.)

Death in the family

Deciding to sell a house...again (my dad had over an hour commute everyday for his job and my mom was not happy where we were, so we were slowly withering away in that house)

Finding the perfect new house...that was on contingency...

Going through SIX. DIFFERENT. BUYERS. Five of whom, with what they were asking, wanted us to just give them money for our house at that point.

Almost loosing the perfect house (it was cutting it close by just a few days to find a buyer that would take our house)

A GODDAMN GIFT FROM THE GODS ABOVE (A buyer who came in two days before our bid was going to be dropped from the contingency, who ended up buying our house)

Toxic family drama...again (Again. Expected)

Moving...again

Learning how to drive...again

Aaaannd now we're all caught up...I'm on the other side of all of this as the year finishes off. Extremely grateful that it all worked out, dazed, and most of all tired...as I consider what's in store for the new year.

First things first: I want to get back to drawing regularly and posting to Tumblr. I miss it here! And you guys are all amazing, so I wanna come back, and actually post some stories, doodles, and general content.

I also have some announcements and plans I have in the works. Me and a few friends of mine are working on some projects that I'm going to try and make sure get finished by 2025. So stay tuned for that. I can't wait to show you!

Unfortunately, writing Behemoth Father and other works got pushed to the sidelines during everything that happened this year, which I'm super bummed about. So, I plan on trying to get the next chapter out in 2025. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about it, and I've been writing in the background during all of this. It was just...alot to juggle at the same time, but I'm ready to jump back into it. 😈

Anyways, I just wanted to give an update on everything, and to show I'm still alive. I've missed interacting with all you guys, and I'm excited to see where the next year takes me! Like I said before, hopefully somewhere good, but anything can happen. I'M BACK BABAE! Peace! ✌️

-MӨƬΉ

[dashawfrostart]

These Few Weeks In "Time & Again" #31: There Are Reasons Why It's Taking So Long 😅 (Aside From Me Writing These HUGE Posts)

Phew. I'll get straight to the point right away, and it's a bit sad: the development of the chapter has slowed down a little bit immensely came virtually to a grinding halt within the last two weeks or so, due to some life matters (and lack of necessary focus). I'm still at the supermarket scene, and it's still not done. That makes me quite unhappy. Dammit, I hate when that happens!.. (and no, in the context of this post, that was NOT said about the abandoned shopping carts that are blocking the way from the parking lot) 🤣😅 As I said before, life takes away so much time from art!.. But I'm already picking up the pace and trying to refresh the vision after being near zero productive directly on the chapter. For example, I've made a promo art - one of a few I was thinking about for a nice representation of the essence of the latest chapters, with a cryptic and surreal twist. And boy it looks goooooood 😁 In my head though, I'm still constantly working on "Time & Again" and related stuff. But I need a spark (just like Lothar?.. ... ...?). It feels too grey to me right now (and that is BEFORE I applied the desaturation filter! Unholy snapmap!). It has always been a struggle to me - to spring back to the fired up state of readiness for whatever creative matters I attend to. Never ever in my artistic life have I answered the question of how to regain my creative spark that's been somewhat lost along the way, to lift my work to a higher level of productivity and awesomeness - even up to this day. I think listening to very good (read: hearty, conceptual, wholesome, wicked crazy, etc.) music albums used to help back in the day, but I'm not certain if that helps anymore. Or maybe I have become extra picky in my selection of inspirational art, because consuming and dissolving a lot of wonderful art into oneself is quite possibly bound to make oneself more demanding in regard of quality over time. I blame Lothar's thought pattern for my misfortune. That guy is no fun at all. Get your Sch***e together, Lothar, and be happy already so that I could be happy together with you.

To complicate the matters even further, while working on another piece the other day I happened to lose my progress due to Krita crash during an autosave, which broke my file to the point of complete rubbishness. I'm sure you're all familiar with that; I always hated losing any amount of my work, and I hate throwing away hours of effort like that just because of some random crap happening, especially since spare time is often a luxury to me. I ended up cursing a lot that day - most likely as much as Lothar does on the regular basis for no reason - or even more profusely. That was sure Sch***e, no exaggeration. ... Well, good thing I back up my files regularly 😁👍 But the sad thing is still sad: I resumed work on that piece later on, as if I haven't touched it after sketching at all. And saving incremental versions is now a must, although I never used to do that before. In the moments like that, I always think AI would've been so much help, because, well, why should I redo everything again if I already spent that much time but it all went down the drain for a reason that has nothing to do with me?.. Some people don't have nearly as much time to input into their art as I do. So help from aside to compensate would've been marvellous, for pesky little situations like that that make you want to play the new Doom and cherish moments of glory kills more (... says the person who hates glory kill mechanic as a whole). AI is nowhere near as terrible as the folks who have read too many horror sci-fi stories enjoy demonizing it; people just refuse to think how it might be helpful in resolving certain issues and boosting their own creativity, or using their limited time more efficiently. (I already wrote not just once about certain AI features I would like to utilize to boost my creativity).

... But the good thing is that my automation-fixated self found an easy way to speed up my work a little! I have installed Windows PowerToys - solely to be able to have the thumbnails and previews of the SVG files in file explorer! And I am furiously happy!!! 🥳 Such a simple thing makes my work so much easier and more enjoyable. Ich bin so erfreut 🤗 Now I don't need to start Inkscape every single time I need to quickly look up the speech bubbles placement. Neat-o! Art aside, PowerToys has so many little neat features that might come in handy for the nerds such as myself. Another one favourite of mine is Quick Accent - something I 've been dreaming about for, like, almost 15 years. I like typing (especially my large texts) on computer - I am not a cellphone person (says I, after copy-pasting the draft for this blog post from my Keep notes😅); so adding extra German and Spanish characters to the texts has been a bit of a nuisance - until now. The only downside to Quick Accent is that it sometimes starts off when the games are running (regardless of Game Mode being on), so instead of adding every single one of my 500 Steam games (and beyond) to the blacklist, I simply turn Quick Accent on only when typing in a mixture of languages. That's a small inconvenience, but I can certainly live with that 😁 On a side note, to share and confirm the already long existing joy: I love shell integration, context menus, and explorer previews that Krita provides! I can just look into my folder, enable preview pane in file explorer - and I can easily preview all my SVG and KRA work-in-progress files, if need be! Just like that:

(as depicted on the screenshot above: the SVG file has a thumbnail now, too, thanks to PowerToys; Krita thumbnails and explorer previews come with the installer, and that's super useful. Also, this is a perfect example of the notes I leave on a separate layer RIGHT in my Krita files, to remember what else I need to do or how certain something must be done. Yup, it's always a mess. And it's a fun mess. Almost surprising how the final editions of my art always turn out so clean, eh?!..)

Working on a comic is a complex task after all, and it requires tying the storyboard, the written voice lines, and the intended way of representation of the visuals all together. Every single element in a work like that must have the reason to exist in a specific place, in a specific way, for a specific reason. Because I says so 🧐. (objections are not accepted. Shoo, shoo, heretics!)

Speaking of Krita... There's also one more thing I thankfully resolved the other day, so I'm sharing it here, in case somebody has the same issues and hasn't yet found a solution. I have noticed a weird stutter/lag with my pen a few days ago inside and outside Krita. And yes, you're right: it was doubly weird, because it was happening outside Krita as well, just on the desktop or when I used file explorer with my graphic monitor on. Since Krita obviously was not the culprit, I thought it might've been a problem with my Huion app. But it was up-to-date, and that never happened before until recently. So I did a quick search, and - just as quick, which was pleasantly unexpected and lovely - came across this post that described the exact same issue I had. So I followed the post's instructions. Logitech LampArray Service - disabled. Now drawing is a pleasure yet again 😁 I'm always very happy when the solutions to my techy problems are resolved so quickly and easily 🥳 (now, onto the more hardcore troubleshooting: trying to make the original 2 CDs retail version of American McGee's Alice run on Win11... Unholy snapmapadoodlemap, that's gonna be an adventure, and I am NOT looking forward to it 😵‍💫😩)

But back to "Time & Again"! Now, on to why you gotta be really patient with me right now; there's a reason. And the reasons is of a truly grand scale. Perhaps I've never mentioned that - or maybe I have only briefly - but I think that Chapter 6 is going to be the most complex chapter of all. Even more complex than the last one, Chapter 8. While Chapter 8 is primarily going to be an emotional explosion (surprise surprise *slow clapping*), Chapter 6 requires a lot of peculiar research done by me in order to represent certain things right, for the proper feel. And it's all gonna be about urban scenery. I must admit, I kinda hate drawing urban scenery: too geometric, too little nature. Everything should be perfectly straight or diagonal, depending on the view angle. That's just boring. And yet, it has to be done for my story, since it's basically a sci-fi story (the setting is definitely sci-fi). That's a personal preference, of course... But I'd always prefer to draw lush trees instead of tall concrete buildings. I bet ya that's because I am a bird nerd, and the trees often have birds on them, and the buildings often don't... Unless the birds are rock pigeons. Rock pigeons have conquered the world long ago. I bet they're planning on something mischievous right now as we speak. But I digress. However, when I appreciate other people's art, I absolutely don't mind urban landscapes and sci-fi settings; on the contrary, I actually really like them. One instance stands out especially in my memory and is still fresh even though a few years had passed since I played it: that's the supermassive office building in Infested that was incredibly difficult to navigate due to - well, as the name suggests - demon infestations. In fact, that place was the main inspiration for the layout of the mysterious abandoned building in Chapter 4 of "Time & Again". In Chapter 4, when Lothar and Jeanny travel around to see what the peck is going on, they come across something that resembles a giant greenhouse. Planning and drawing those 2 pages was so much fun for me! And although they featured geometric shapes as well, those 2 extremely green pages were a delight for me to draw through and through! I never get that feeling from drawing urban scenery. But again, a̴r̸t̵ ̷r̴e̵q̴u̴i̴r̵e̴s̶ s̴̖͚̈́a̴̹̋̈́̊̐͒c̵̱̭̋̓͂̕r̴͕̙̰̖͊̎̈̈̆i̷̘̜̼̲̎̈́͗̃̓̈́͜f̶͔̼̗͔̯̬̈́̋i̷͍̦̭̦̰̊͗̈̚͘͜͝c̶̡̝̩͔̄̆̾ͅe̴̮̖̜͚̦̓̅̏̃̀s̸̱̅̈́͜.

And, since I already mentioned Doom mods above, and how much they contribute to my artistic life, I gotta note something else. Within the last couple of days, I had a few random visions that I thought might improve the feel of Chapter 6. Quite rarely, I reconsider the parts of the storyboard and panel placements, so they ever so slightly differ from the initial sketched variation. So one of these snow-white and deer-filled winter mornings, armed with a red pen to apply corrections, I took off to look at the ending of Chapter 6, neatly and consistently outlined in my sketchbook. In my to-do list, for a long time I had a note saying, "Look at that Doom mod again for the extra inspiration for Lothar's thoughts". So the last summer, I got to play RAMP 2023, and there was that incredibly peculiar, very narrative little level called "Mirror Mirror". I played it at least twice to uncover the promised different endings, and I recorded one of the playthroughs for a future reference. And just a couple days ago, I rewatched my recording. I was stunned. I know that I might be biased. I know that I, in fact, might be VERY biased, knowing how often "Time & Again" is on my mind. But holy smokies! - the main character's thoughts in that mod bear some unbelievable resemblance to Lothar's train of thought in Chapter 6! Also has to do with depression (I think). Also has to do with mirrors and reflections. Also has to do with giving a damn or not. This fits perfectly. So I took notes as I watched the video and I'm thinking about refreshing some of Lothar's voice lines with creatively reworked lines from that level - or maybe I'll flat out keep them unchanged, for a better, incredibly subtle reference that nobody will ever get 😅. Because they are just fantastic.

I really recommend y'all to play that short level. I don't think I have ever played anything like that before. The part with the mirror puzzles was quite entertaining, too.

I think it's time to wrap it up. I usually type on computer right away, but since I don't have enough time lately, I started to type my notes for the future posts in Keep (one might say I'm finally evolving, lol). And, knowing how much I can babble sometimes - just like Edgar - my Keep note hit its symbol limit, so I had to start a new one (that didn't take me long, yup). So I have A LOT of stuff left unspoken. I believe, some of my longreads might be very cucumbersome🥒 for some people to read. But it's not that you didn't know what you were getting yourself into when you visited my blog for the first time, right? 😉 Bis dann, until next time!

P.S. I know, I know: the "peck" joke is getting really old, but I really can't get over it. A Hat In Time was a real blast to play in co-op, and it left a few really nice sweet scars on my memory that will never dissipate. I really like writing "peck", even though I know that I pecking shouldn't curse in public.🐦‍⬛ (I also love northern flickers; can't wait to go see them by the lake this summer again... but I pecking-peckity-peck-peck digress🤪)

P.P.S. In the light of the aforementioned Doominess, I also started to wonder if I could replay Unloved as well. There were references to Unloved in Chapter 3, too, after all. And I never beat it without iddqd, maybe I could try harder this time? 😅