#largely because i’d have to scrap and redo so much of it
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apollos-boyfriend · 2 years ago
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Please please please talk about your ocs (if you want to ofc). I have such a similiar thing going on with mine and I really wanna see your take on it
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WAIT NO i did not mean to get that across i love talking about these guys so much i am open and welcome to questions at any time they r my livelihood
so i don’t have a lot of modern drawings of them bc mcyt kind of took over my life BUT i do have these references for the main characters!!
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so these r axl and halley!! they’re kind of the main tie ins to the whole creation and destruction thing, as they were both created to be vessels, of sorts. more like messengers. since the entities couldn’t physically manifest on earth, these two were created to relay information instead! creation speaks to during the day, and destruction at night through their dreams. the issue was, when they were designed, the two were meant to be one being, but got split into two due to an accident. they’re literally two halves of a whole, and have an odd bond because of it, able to communicate without so much as saying a word.
because of that, they’re VERY close. codependently so. they’ve never known a life without the other by their side, and low-key shut down when left alone. axl’s the quieter, more calm and collected one of the two, while halley is the more wild card spitfire that will talk anyone’s ears off if they give her the time of day. together, they kind of make a functional person, if you really squint, and i love them both so very much
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comicaurora · 4 years ago
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Hey! I am also starting a webcomic, so just, any general advice tips? Anything helps
Whoof. Here goes.
Set an upload pace you can sustain. There's nothing wrong with having to take a break - almost every webcomic I follow has had at least one hiatus - but don't set a pace you can't keep up and burn yourself out. The urge to get your story out as fast as possible is very strong, but a webcomic is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to keep yourself healthy and sane enough to keep up the pace.
I recommend drawing at least the first scene in advance before going live. It'll give you a feel for how the process will actually work and you'll start with a page buffer.
Speaking of, I find maintaining a buffer is vital. Not every webcomic does this; I follow a couple that'll occasionally be like "page is going up in a few hours cuz it's not done yet" and that wigs me out like whoa. Of course, this depends on the style of webcomic you're doing - large story-arc comics benefit from buffers, but short four-panel gag-a-day comics need them a lot less. My personal rule is I try to have at least twenty pages in the buffer, and I work much farther ahead when storyboarding - we're currently near the end of chapter 11, and I'm about to start storyboarding chapter 17. This is farther ahead than I usually work, but we're coming up on the end of the first arc, so I want to have everything laid out.
Pacing is the hardest part of comicing. I had no idea going into it - and it shows. The earlier chapters are a lot less tightly-paced, with plot developments sacrificed in favor of massive splash panels. The rule I currently work on is that every page should contain at least one new thing - a plot development, a character reveal, it can be anything as long as it's SOMETHING.
There are lots of options for sites that can host your webcomic. I ended up making a site on my own so I'd have more control, but that option is probably the most complicated (and expensive), so it might be easier to just look up things like hiveworks, webtoons or tapatastic to see what they offer. Some people host it straight onto tumblr, which is probably the simplest option available.
Keep an eye on how you're feeling about the project! This kind of endeavor can be very taxing and potentially soul-crushing. It can also be incredibly rewarding, but don't be afraid to step back and take it easy if things are feeling wrong. Something like a webcomic very easily falls for the sunk cost fallacy, where you worked on it for so long you can't possibly change anything about it, but sometimes stories go in unsustainable directions and then it's important to be able to step back and realize you need to burn a few things to the ground before moving forward. There was a stretch of something like 12 pages in Falst's intro that I had to completely scrap and redo from the storyboards because they just weren't working right. This is part of why the buffer is helpful - that way nobody has to see the parts you realize later aren't working.
Have fun! It's going to be a lot of work, but you're doing it for a reason, and that reason is (presumably) you want this story out in the world.
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gerbiloftriumph · 5 years ago
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So you wanna be a king (pt6)
Or, at the least, you want very much to cosplay one, and you have put too much time and energy into this to stop now. Let’s finish this costume.
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Part 6: The Adventuring Cap (and also hair and some makeup)
The rest of the tutorials are here: cloak, tunic, pants/boots, bracers/pouch, accessories, and as always, I’m a novice cosplayer making all this up as I go along, so feel free to ignore me or steal my ideas and run.
There’s one last piece to this costume. Something important. Something that unifies Graham across the years from 1983 to 2015: his adventuring cap.
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Even when he has his crown on, that old hat isn’t far away. So let’s get into it. 
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But before we can actually start sewing a hat, we need to talk...hair. Because that will probably alter the hat size.
Hair (and also make-up):
Should you be blessed with the slightly curly black hair Graham has, then that’s fantastic! 
I do not have such hair.
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You remember how hot this costume is? At least three shirts, one and a half pants, a cloak, a cowl, bracers, and knee high boots? Let’s make it worse by adding a wig.
I buy all my wigs from Arda Wigs--I love that quality and those nice prices. I’m the sort of person who pulls the wig out of the bag, fluffs it up with hairspray (got2b glued is a miracle in a can), and runs, but should you want to try heat sculpting, they’re great wigs for that too.
Since I’m revealing all my secrets, this particular wig is a Benny in Deep Brown (when I bought it it was called Natural Black, but I think it’s the same color). It’s warmer than their pure black, which I wanted for this sunshine boy. https://arda-wigs.com/products/benny-classic?variant=27836199174
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Incidentally, while we’re here, some quick make-up things:
If you can’t grow your own beard, spray some hairspray on your chin and sideburn patches, take an old tube of mascara (the older and weaker the more control you have--gosh that sounds mean), and build up your own with downward brush strokes. A little goes a shockingly long way--I tend to overdo it myself. Use an eyebrow wand brush to shape the beard and make it look more natural. Seal with more hairspray, maybe a touch of setting powder. 
For the freckles, I smear a thin layer of eyeshadow primer across nose and cheekbones, and then go ham with a marker eyeliner in dark brown. Seal it with a touch of setting powder. I promise, it will go absolutely nowhere, even in the hot RenFest July sun, unless you yourself rub it. (I carry both beard and freckles makeup tubes in my pouch, just in case.)
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Okay, fine, we’re done stalling. You want the hat, so let’s do it.
Hat time!
First, vocab lesson! Repeat after me: bycocket. That’s the name of your hat. It’s a medieval cap popular among men, women, nobility, and business classes. And also, yes, with Robin Hood too. 
http://honorbeforevictory.com/14th-c-embriodered-bycocket-cap-of-maintenance-with-a-split-loop-seam-tutorial/ - I found my template from this page and scaled it up. Other Robin Hood hat tutorials will also likely suit, but this is my semi-tutorial, so this is what I used.
I bought what looks like less than a yard of some light blue denim and some dark blue denim. I wanted the stiffness of the fabric to help hold the triangular shape, thus, the denim. I also happened to have a large quantity of semi-stiff orange felt for some reason, which I used as a core strengthener, but this core is almost certainly unnecessary. The hat keeps its shape really well once it’s on your head--no wonder it was so popular. Feel free to skip the core if you want.
Grab your measuring tape, plonk your wig on your head, and measure where the hat will sit. I got 24″ around. Feel free to make tests with that boundless scrap from the rest of this cosplay to get the size you want. My shape is 14.5″ long, and 11�� from its highest tip to its brim. Don’t forget to add half an inch of hemming space to your pattern (which in my case is made of scraps of paper taped together because I Am Cheap). 
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Test your samples, adjust the pattern as necessary to make sure you’re happy with the brim length and how it sits. 
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At this point, I made another one of those choices. For some reason, I intentionally transposed the colors, putting the darker color for the main body and the lighter color for the brim. I don’t know why. 
The following tutorial will get confusing if you look only at the colors. I didn’t have a lot of images of the process, and I felt like redoing the hat with the correct color order this week. Because I could. So, ignore the colors as some pictures are old and some are new, and look at the text instead. For reference, all things will be referred to via this image terminology: 
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Your top color will be cut exactly to the pattern size you like (with that .5″ hem margin, as usual). Your brim color, however, gets an additional half inch on the bottom, where you wear it. For a visual, like this:
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This way, you can fold the brim over the rest of your hat sandwich (...I’ll explain that, hang on), to sew a video-game-clean line. 
Cut two identical shapes from each color, not forgetting that extra half inch on the brim bottom pieces. Sew them along the half inch hemline, so that you have two (three if you’re making a core) separate triangles, open at the bottom since that’s, y’know, where your head goes. They’re kinda like little tents.
Take your scissors and cut out tiny triangles close to, but not into, the hem stitch at the top curve, so that you can poke a smooth arc into the top (see visual below). Iron all hems flat. Take your top piece and turn it inside out, with the hem sitting inside. The core (if you’re making one) and your brim will remain inside-out looking, because that’s how you’ll build your hat sandwich.
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It’ll look like this. I stuffed the core piece inside the top piece, then shoved the brim piece into the core piece. All three pieces are tightly, cleanly, stacked together. It’s a hat sandwich! Stitch the hats together in key places so they don’t shift--like at the top of the arc, and in a few places along the hemlines.
Starting at the hemline in the back, fold the extra half inch from the brim piece up, curl it over itself just a smidge so your line stays nice and clean, pin, and hand stitch the top and brim together.
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It’s a bit tricky to get a photo of what it looks like, but once it’s all done and you fold up the brim, the stitches will be hidden, giving you that nice clean edge.
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Should you be so inclined, at this point you could get fancy with embroidery (that split loop stitch from the bycocket tutorial is one I eventually want to add), or determine a nice way to add the trim to the brim. Which I haven’t yet so...you’re on your own.
(Incidentally, if you’re in a hurry and you have one fabric choice like a sturdy felt, or maybe you’re doing Ch1Graham and don’t want to deal with this double-color nonsense, you can always go with a single sheet method. Cut the usual two triangles of your single sheet, sew them together like normal, but stop sewing when you get to the fold of the brim. That’s about 4.5″ along the back for me. Turn the whole hat inside out, so the nice hem is along the top, pin and sew the back flap that you had left unstitched, and when you fold up the brim, the ugly hem is hidden inside. A visual example is here:
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For the feather, I chose an ostrich feather because A: It’s huge and flouncy and bouncy and I like that, and B: ....it’s what the craft store had at the time. Because I figured I’d need to eventually replace it over time and wear, I did loose ugly stitchwork just under the brim, so I can unpick it and replace it as needed. 
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And with that, my friend, you are A Whole Entire King. 
Go memorize some addenda, go act with bravery and compassion and wisdom, go make friends with some squirrels, and please watch out for fairy tale obsessed goblins. 
Always seek adventure~!
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(And that’s all for the cosplay how to semi-tutorial series! I hope it was helpful! If you have questions, feel free to DM me. I’m happy to help you look your best! At this point, that’s my last post on this topic unless someone asks for how I made the crown. 👑 Let me know if you want that too~)
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game-meak · 6 years ago
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A Proper Postmortem
Maybe?!  Heck if I know how to actually format a good post but let’s try.  As game development went on for almost four years, this is probably gonna be long... and also give away basically the whole game oops!  Read on with caution.
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Sometime around July 2014, a month after the initial release of my first game, my room was being remodeled and I was stuck with nothing for free time but a garbage laptop I could do anything on, an old flip phone, my sketchbook, and my 3DS.  So beyond playing an obscene amount of Animal Crossing and Tomodachi Life, I at some point went “hey, what if I made a second game starring the kids.”  So I started trying to plan it out!  And it went
absolutely nowhere that I intended it to go!!!
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For instance, this is the very first page of sketches.  This squirrel was supposed to be really important.  It’s not.  I don’t even KNOW what’s up with that duck.
A thing I like to think about before I set off making any of the story, assets, or scripts for my games tend to be themes and motifs.  And I kept circling back to a very important, very personal “theme.”  Without using the internet at large as my therapy couch, I was emotionally abused and taken advantage of multiple times in my life and it greatly impacts how I interact with people to this very day, as you’d expect events of such a degree would.  Particularly, I kept thinking that the RPG Maker fan crowd tends to skew young and be in the teenage range and at ages 14-16, I could’ve used something to help.
Of course, my entire thought process isn’t necessarily one of charity and selflessness.  It was also a way of me expressing what I’d dealt with in ways I’ve only ever communicated with my friends who were also victims of the same circumstances, the closest I would let myself come to personal stories and retellings with a cover of plastic children and wild adventures.  It was also in some ways a way of me verifying to myself that something ongoing was, in fact, bananas and should not have been happening, but that might be another story for another time.
As you can probably guess, Haze and Seal came into the picture since I needed to make two characters who would have this struggle.  A lot of decisions came about because of my personal experience.  They’re 15/16 because I was at the time of the incidents that primarily inspired me to make this game.  They’re both nonbinary because I am.  They love anime because I did (and do...?!)  One of their friends is even directly modeled off how one of my friends looked in high school.  To that degree, I guess someone, somewhere can call them self inserts.  But they’re also not, since I didn’t want to just do a personal retelling with fictional characters.  I’d just write a memoir or something at that point.
Haze’s design came first, and then Seal’s was sort of made as a foil to them.  Haze’s “colors” are pink, black, grey, and red.  Seal’s are teal and light purple... and also black.  Haze had a rabbit motif (which got toned down as I went on), Seal had an owl motif (which is now just a single mention in their list of likes...), etc.
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Though in the beginning, the story was entirely different.  Initially, everything took place in the neon-ish areas with black sky and reflective, celestial water (that I, very eloquently, call “spacewater”).  The idea was that Haze and Seal were beings from another dimension and that their “fighting” was causing a rip in the universe that the kids stumbled into and therefore got wrapped up in this mess.  I had an entire script written and started making assets and when I went to sum up the game’s plot in a neat paragraph, I realized... I hated it!!!
So I chucked all I had done by that point writing-wise and started again.
In fact, I rewrote a lot.  After the first it was mostly small tweaks and adjustments, but the biggest ones (and the ones that still present a challenge to me!) usually involved trying to make Seal feel like a believable character.  I had shown an early draft to someone who said that Seal felt too much like trying to get back at someone, so I scrapped a ton of their lines and tried again.  I still worry whether or not they come across too Strawman-y, but I’ve done the best I can and whatever criticism people have can apply to my next writing attempts.  It’s very hard to separate yourself from subject matter you feel really personally attached to.  I don’t want to write them in a way that you immediately hate them, or hate me for writing such a blatant “villain” character, but in a way that you can formulate your own thoughts.  That said, though, I am violently allergic to people who call Seal a “tsundere,” even in jest.  So I guess I want people to have their own thoughts as long as it’s not that specific one...! (;;;;)
You may be thinking “heck, this is a lot of paragraphs in and you haven’t even brought up gameplay thoughts” and yes... that’s very true.  Shamefully, for a game where I thought “I should definitely, absolutely focus more on making it a Fun Game than a walking visual novel” I might’ve actually dropped the ball in that area.  I’d like to think I was more adventurous than I had been with my first game.  Some parts do kind of fall into the “walk to the next cutscene, find a key to unlock the next cutscene” pit, but I did put effort into figuring out what I could do with RMXP.  My obligatory “please don’t use this engine here, people thinking of using RPG Maker” statements here.  In the final product, though they’re very simple, I’m most proud of the chalkboard puzzle and the paint sorting puzzle.
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Even if, y’know... I somehow neglected to include the letter “k”
Speaking of, I’m not sure if this is a general RPG Maker thing, a “man I hate RMXP” thing, or a “meaka cannot gamemake” thing, but I had several event/puzzles just up and quit on me a few times.  Like they would work fine for months and months, but one day I’d go to them and just nope, suddenly they’re not working, sorry.  Copy+pasting the event to a new map wouldn’t work, so I’d have to manually redo the event.  One of them was the chalkboard puzzle.  The other was the sliding puzzle when Tony is by herself.  Which I’m also aware slows the game down a ton, but I have legitimately no idea how to fix that... I tried and I could never get to to not lag like crazy.
Like I said, I started in July 2014.  I’d shipped the game off to my beta testers in March 2018.  A vast majority of that time was spent creating the visual assets since everything you see in the game is custom.  All the sprites, all the tilesets, every little pixel of it.  All me!  Needless to say... it was very exhausting and very time consuming. I grossly underestimated how much time I thought it’d take.  I never accounted for the very real possibility of burnout, which is incredibly silly considering I was making something entirely by myself that was also an occasionally difficult subject matter...!  There were quite a few weeks where I touched nothing because I couldn’t bring myself to and even a few times where I just considered deleting everything and cancelling the project.  I knew I’d be mad at myself if I quit, especially as I got later into production, so I just tried my best to make sure I didn’t turn it into a huge chore.  Obviously, there were parts that were more tedious than others, but this game really is a very large labor of love that I put a lot of my heart into.
Part of that time is also a little bit of indecision.  Did you know I went through 3 possible title screens?  I sure did!  I’ve also publicly posted about redoing both Haze and Seal’s bust sprites before.  I almost redid all of the kids’, too, but I didn’t wanna get caught in the loop of remaking everything, so I opted to just leave them as they are.  Most of them don’t bug me as much.  M...most of them!
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I’m hopping back on the Story train since obviously that was my main focus, but the decision to have Seal sort of “reveal” their true nature (or at least have a jealousy-related anger burst) to Octavio as an animated cutscene was one I’d decided pretty early.  Which is also why, unsurprisingly, I was debating getting voice actors for a hot minute.  But I wouldn’t have used it anywhere else in the game, so I opted not to.  I also wanted to keep the file size low, but that wound up not happening so much, h-haha...   For someone who uses the only engine without native support for videos, I sure do like making animated cutscenes, huh.
Anyway.  This scene originally bridged Octavio’s section of the game to Pablo’s, which would’ve been (for some reason) in an abandoned hospital.  But that didn’t pan out because it didn’t fit what I wanted the game to be and also by switching the order of the two, it builds up more tension(?) on the kind of character you expect Seal to be.  I hope their very first “fuck off, maybe” took someone out there by surprise!
This also was the point when I decided I wanted to commission an original soundtrack, since nothing quite got across what I wanted at the time.  Which is when I put out my silly ad post and somehow managed to get the amazing ProjectTrinity to compose for me...!  I’m still amazed by the sheer quality of music he made for my little RPGMaker game.
Having the teen characters curse was also something I waffled on for a bit.  Clearly, I dwell on the important things as a writer.  I wanted it to contrast the cutesy, kidlike way the siblings talk and also the sort of squeaky-clean image the witches (particularly Seal) present to the kids by contrasting how they talk to each other, most importantly how Seal talks to Haze and their other friends.  I did have the same issue with the Mother in my first game, but I opted to not have her curse at all either since she’s childish in her own way, too.  But that’s not for THIS game’s postmortem, get otta here!!!
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I also very much was set on a “battle” with words being the final event of the game.  Though I had a hard time imagining what that would be initially, but eventually arrived at a sort of fake battle system that was introduced in the mine.  The setting for this battle changed with time (everywhere from the park to the academy and in between) was considered...!  The dirty secret is that while I did like the decision to make it take place in the voids between worlds, I also sort of did not want to draw the staircase in the witch academy.  Originally, the kids would’ve also helped Haze “reach” Seal (who was putting actual obstacles in the way), but I guess in my own way, I wanted to give Haze the ability to confront Seal on their own, one-on-one.  Or something like that...!  I also didn’t want to add too much needless backtracking.
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I’m... unsure what other point I really want to make, so I guess I’ll end this here unless anyone has anything in particular that interests them they’d want me to answer!
All in all, this game means a lot to me and took a chunk of my life to make and I really hope it’s able to reach at least one person who might need it, even if it’s only a little. 
To all of you who gave it a try, thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart.
A shameless link to the game:  [itch.io] & [RMN]
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arihi · 6 years ago
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Life Update
Here’s the life update that literally no one ever asked for!
I’ve just finished taking the bar. Real talk? I didn’t apply myself like I should have. I don’t anticipate on passing. (No, not even if you really really believe that I’m smart.) I hit a funk immediately after graduating because of some panic over the future and some family stuff after that got me pretty depressed. I feel a little guilty and like I’ve let down the people that cheered me on all throughout law school. I barely studied. I barely felt like I could. Maybe I could have done better. If I could redo it again, I would have. If only because I feel like I’ve also disappointed myself by letting life get in the way. But we don’t get redos in life.
But it’s looking up! Realistically speaking? Now that the bar is over, I can better dedicate myself to things that mattered to me - things like improving myself, working on projects, writing, working towards a better place for myself. Things that were honestly progressing as they were, but were hampered by my worry of social and familial obligations to care about the bar? Things that I kind of hope to continue forward with, to develop and to hopefully succeed. Taking away the looming threat of the bar away, my life has been slowly climbing up on multiple levels, and it’s...hopeful. And I’m scared to say that, because I’m so used to not wanting to say things out loud for fear something will go wrong, or someone will use it against me and push me down, because I’m so used to that. But it’s hopeful.
What’s next for me? I don’t anticipate truly going into law as a profession. Consideration of that even has kind of been placed on the back burner and not been really thought about, in favor of my current priority: moving out.
Home life has been...troubled lately! Or maybe it’s always been and I’ve always not looked very closely. Or been taught otherwise. The important part is I’ve gotten a lot of support from friends and followers alike pushing me to want something better for myself and to pursue it. You’ve all no doubt seen my constant posts about finding apartments elsewhere. Maybe it’d be easier to move somewhere local first? But I also know I’d be a lot better off literally a thousand miles away from home. As far away as possible. And maybe I’ll make a new one for myself.
Anyway, this is largely a personal post! Not very much should impact my followers, except maybe a bit of inactivity if-- when I do move. I’ll still try to keep up to my story a week promise. (I realize the irony in posting this after having delayed a story two weeks in a row, but those are coming to ya after I recover from the bar.) And...it feels super weird asking this, and I know I’m not the best judge of my own writing but still - I’ve been encouraged to try and do some more with my writing now that I’m out of school and contemplating relocation. It’d also kind of be the best thing ever if I could like, make something out of writing, and have writing help me out of here. That being said, I’ve kind of contemplated Patreon or Ko-Fi as of late - I had plans and all a while back at the start of the year, but got intimidated/a little low on self-confidence and scrapped them. If you’ve read my stories and liked them and would like to support a bit, do consider! Totally optional of course, and I’ll still be putting stories out weekly regardless :) But it’s something I’d really like to do and am a little hesitant but mostly hopeful for.
I’ll write up a separate post on it ^ all later, and actually post links when I’ve made them. This post is more to show where I am mentally at the moment. If you have any questions or concerns or feedback or advice or cries of outrage, like you’d prefer one or the other, or you are really sad that airlines stopped giving out free stroopwafels as snacks, or whatever, do let me know! I love hearing from you all. I feel like I’ve grown a lot since first making my blog, since first stepping into the hypnosis community, since attending my first con - and even since the start of 2018. I’ve gotten to share shitposts about my sleep issues, my random daily experiences, my down moments, my excited moments. Honestly, it feels a bit odd baring myself on a blog like this. When I first started it, I was very rigidly making sure that I’d only ever publish stories or reblog hypnosis things and keep to a theme because no one would ever want to see personality? But I’m beyond glad that I do, and that I haven’t scared you all away yet. We’ll see! There’s still time to run.
Thanks for reading my post, and for being a part of my growth this year.
- Ari H.
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sepiadice · 6 years ago
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Tales of Genius Ch. 2: Follow the Light
(9/16/18)
And so, for possibly the first time ever, I got a session two in a campaign! New high score! Woo-hoo!
Also, got to redo an adventure I ran for the old High School crew. Updated it slightly, added a puzzle, changed the final encounter, added a pair of magic items.
Don’t think I have any sort of RPG Life updates. Working on various other projects off and on. Started watching a new Netflix original series that redoubles a plot point later in this campaign.
Added a fourth party member. Which I think I’m going to lock down on. The games I’ve been involved with always had a problem of having a large number of players, so I think I want to try for the classic four-person ensemble.
Hope they’re having fun. Doubt plagues me, but they’re not whining to me, so it’s probably fine? It’s still clear I need to continue practicing GMing, and I’ve noticed I’ve been stuttering and having difficulty pronouncing words. That will all need to be improved before we move on to the podcast phase.
Now, for the second part of Tales of Genius![1]
CAST
Eli Roberts: (Played by Lyons) Child of Clio. Doctor, travelling to write a medical text akin to Gray’s Anatomy. He’s an Intellect! Olivia Grayson: (Played by Maddie) Child of Thalia. Apprentice to Eli. Believes her Squirrel-raccoon companion is her boyfriend reincarnated. Fromthe: (Played by Jose) Child of Calliope. Military veteran and current mercenary. Also has some mercantile ambitions.
Jean De Ferrero: (Played by Anthony) Child of Terpsichore. Travelling con artist.
Quick exposition:
So, that whole “Child of…” thing is part of my world’s lore. About nineteen hundred years ago, nine sisters travelled the world and founded nine schools of philosophy and nine separate cultures that populate the world. The only solid marker for the tribes is eye color. White/Light grey for Clio. Yellow for Thalia. Orange for Calliope. Green for Terpsichore. Others for the other tribes as they’re introduced.
The sisters are named after the Greek Muses.
And, so, onto our tale.
DATE: Late Winter 1911
PLACE: THE TINES (Mountain border of Astree and Hervar)
We open back up on North Fort. Food supplies are running even lower, especially since a good chunk of it has been poisoned. The mayor has decided to send those clever adventurers to try and find an alternate path out of town,[2] plus this nice Jean fellow who speaks highly of his own conquests.[3]
After some brainstorming while I was busy making curry,[4] the mayor mentioned the town crypts, which are a small network of caves some distance from town. There’s an iron door there which no one has explored past, because there’s a bunch of warning symbols on it, so better just stick the dead in there until claimed. But, well, it’s something?
The party heads to the crypt, as I couldn’t be bothered to force any scene work in the town. Would’ve been nice to establish the mixed critters of the setting, but I’m bad at following even my own notes, and I didn’t really have any cause to delay them.
In the crypts, they discovered a small band of Saber-toothed foxes.
Olivia tried to befriend the foxes using the cheese from the rations North Fort gave her, but the foxes weren’t satisfied, and unhappy with the intrusion. So combat despite Olivia’s protests!
I still am far from getting a handle of combat narrative, but after a few rounds, they’ve killed two foxes and scared off three.[5]
Then Olivia used a magic spell to cave in the entrance. Which… I should probably take a moment to taunt the party over.
And now I have. What nerds.
The party moved towards the iron door. It’s magic proof,[6] locked, and barred. So the group needs to figure out how to get in.
Unbarring it was easy enough, but it’s still locked.
But, hey, the party has a new Scoundrel Character! Maybe he can pick the lock!
The dice say no. This is dire, as the back up plan I had is sitting in North Fort,[7] and that’s not an available path anymore.
Okay, okay. Let’s reason this out. Is the door there to keep people out, or something in? Both, but which is important?
Which is to say: this door opens out, so the door hinges are on our players’ side! Which the fair doctor thinks up, then teases the con artist for not coming up with.
Said scoundrel (Jean) uses skullduggery to get the pins out. (Because it’s heavy iron, hasn’t been moved in a while, and would require finesse. Probably some heat to remove frost). I then have them do another check to get the door open since the lock is still engaged and needs to be worked out of the wall. Which they do.
Momentary inside baseball thing that might ruin the magic: I didn’t have a firm solution. I just placed the door down and waited until I heard a solution I liked. I recommend fellow GMs do this, but also try and prepare an alternate solution if the party can’t get past it for some reason. (See footnote 7 for my release valve).
On to the next room! A massive cavern, with many tunnels shooting off, and crystalline protrusions here and there. Then there’s a wooden lean-to slash shack near the door.
In side is a desk with a chess game mid-progress, and notebook tracking the game next to it, a glass jar of mythril dust, and a mummified corpse sitting in a chair[8] holding a bullseye lantern.
Eli Roberts examines the board, makes a move, notates it in the notebook(!), pockets the mythril dust, then investigates the mummy.
(A spent story point later also says he took the notebook.)
Eli fails to find anything notable on the corpse, so he turns to figure out what path to take.
Olivia, who we are learning this session has no regard for her fellow humans, uses her magic to puppeteer the mummy.
This jostles a rolled up scrap of paper out of its beard.
Time for the puzzle! Also pop quiz for my world building lore, because screw you, at least learn the muses you picked for your character’s heritage![9]
I wrote a poem (not a great poem, because I lack rhythm) that referenced the Muses in a certain order.
Now, this puzzle needs workshopping, because once the party figured out to use the mummy’s lantern[10] to shoot a beam of light into a large crystal to refract it into colored beams, and that they needed to follow the beam that corresponded with each Muse’s assigned eye colors in the order listed on the poem, there wasn’t much else to do until the final twist.
I probably could’ve done something with the crystals. Finding them, getting them in position,[11] just some complexity for the successive rooms.
Needs workshopping. But we also had a time limit, so maybe simple wasn’t bad for this rendition.
Now, this refracted light thing was an expansion on a moment that wowed the last time I did my North Fort session, which I mimicked halfway down the mine: the first obvious crystal sent the light bouncing all over the chamber, hitting other crystals, and illuminating the entire chamber, revealing a mural![12]
The mural told the mine’s story: they were mining it normally, then thought ‘hey, let’s try magic!’. Magic resonated with the mythril they were mining, heating the cave and waking up a giant snake that started gobbling people up. They got some adventurers in to deal with the snake and stopped using magic.
What I wish I added was the snake’s giant skull in this room. Instead, I had it in another room, looming over the exit tunnels. Oops.[13]
So that’s neat.
The party continued the prescribed solution and moved on, seeing the ribs of the snake were repurposed into support beams.
Another element I failed to convey is that the mining shafts were actually expanded from the snake’s tunnels throughout the mountain.
Anyways, the final room was the cool twist. Because the final mentioned Muse is Urania. Who I assigned black/dark grey eyes.
Black light’s not a thing. What could be the…
They killed their light. Eventually, mythril dust started to glow, a thick vein going down the final correct tunnel. (The poem also mentioned Urania using the stars in her line. This fit with the mythril dust but also her role as the Muse of Astronomy.)[14]
And they exit into another large chamber like the one at the top. Including wood office shack and an iron door. Inside the shack is another mummy, chessboard, and a notebook with matching move notations to the one earlier.
Including the move Eli noted and wrote down.[15] Huh.
Eli’s player spent a Genesys Story Point to say he nabbed the first notebook earlier so he wouldn’t have to hike back up.[16]
For those curious, there’s another poem on this end for going the other way. The colors don’t even have to be the same since they’d be approaching the crystals from a different angle, so the first step doesn’t have to be Urania![17]
Anyways, the spent story point ruined how I’d hoped to bring in the boss fight, so instead a Masked Snake slithers in.
Smaller than the one slain long ago, but still pretty big. Also way too young to listen to reason.
Again, three party members work to kill it as Olivia uses nonlethal magic. The snake iced the floor, making footing difficult.
I allowed the fight to drag on a while because, despite putting in my session plans to come back to make stats and having more than a month to, I never did.
Really should sit down and just make a series of notecards for easy, normal, and hard enemies. Get too distracted with narrative.
Anyways, combat rages, half the party gets upset with Olivia’s efforts not to kill the snake, when a mysterious figure in fancy robes and snake skull mask arrives and pulls a gun.
Olivia promptly magically murders this man without a word. Then steals his mask. And returns to nonlethal spells against the snake.
After realizing the snake can’t fit through the door, Eli and Jean attempt to flee, but Olivia refuses to leave, instead standing on the human corpse she created to avoid the disadvantage of the ice floors.
Eli goes in and finishes off the snake.
Grumpy after the encounter, they exit the caves, which leads out to a point on the path below the avalanche. There’s a way to connect North Fort and Soldier’s Rest.
They go to Soldier’s Rest (named such because it’s where the military men went to rest when not on duty at the mountain fort). Turn in a letter of introduction to Soldier’s Rest’s mayor, and step outside.
Where they encounter a Jackalope. They’re giant creatures ridden by the mail carriers of His Majesty’s Courier service![19]  The courier has a letter for Eli Roberts: The Queen and Heir Apparent are ill with a mysterious disease, and Dr. Roberts comes highly recommended by his peers to help.
Whether this is because his peers genuinely believe he can do it, or because not healing the royal family could have dire consequences and they’d rather gamble Eli’s career over their own is a question I intend to play with.
End session two.
Admittedly, it was a railroading session that hinged on two combats that I didn’t prepare properly and a puzzle that need a few more facets, but I set some Campaign Plot up and actually got players to the table, so I say sufficient success! Always a learning experience! And Anthony seemed to prefer the system vastly over GURPS, so I think it’s good.
Just need to cement running combat and the Advantage and Disadvantage system. It’s a new thing that takes getting used to. Plus the question of what to do when you get a nothing roll.
Also need to get firmer control over what magic can and cannot do. And also that GM trumps rulebook everytime.
I have an outline for the next session. Just need to add some meat and work in elements the players enjoy. Maybe try and have it be less of an Eli Roberts focused story.[20]
Until next time, may the dice make things interesting!
[1] Pompous sounding name? Perhaps! But it’s a grab from the Tales JRPG series, and a TED Talk I saw once. [2] Had the party asked, the Mayor was avoiding asking South Fort for help because that crosses a border and could cause a lot of diplomatic tensions. The party didn’t ask, so I’m noting it here for my own gratification. [3] Because we needed to fit a new party member in some how. [4] Which I forgot to put potatoes and apples in. I’m disappointed in myself. [5] Unless it was the other way around. There was confusion! [6] Iron is magic proof in the setting! Because I’m taking inspiration from my vague knowledge of fair folk mythology. [7] Her name is Debra. I didn’t have the exact details (improv!), but if needed, she’d have the key for the door for… reasons? [8] I keep trying a Douglas Addams thing where I save the most glaringly obvious and distressing fact for last. It’s never worked because I keep getting interrupted or the players overlook I mentioned a monster. Might be a sign to stop, but why would I? [9] I casually left a prose-y cheat sheet on the table before we started. So it’s open notes. [10] Always provide the required tools if you can’t be sure the party has the needed supplies. [11] My much coveted block puzzle! I’ll figure it out someday! [12] In the pathfinder version, it instead revealed a sleeping dragon. I should’ve worked in a similar element on top of what I put in the chamber. [13] Maybe if I ask nicely, my players will pretend this is what I did. [14] Why do the muses include two with dominion over Astronomy and History? Who knows! They just do! [15] I was hoping someone would mess with one of the notebooks for this exact reveal. They played right into my hands. [16] I’ll leave it to the players to retcon why they stole the first notebook. [17] Maybe Urania should’ve been the mural room. You light the crystal for the story, then have to darken it to move on.[18] [18] Take three on this dungeon’s going to be epic! [19] A pay off when, long, long ago, when I was very young looking through a borrowed copy of GURPS 3rd Edition, I saw a picture of cowboys riding giant rabbits with saddlebags reading ‘Bunny Express’. Finally did it. [20] He took the reigns on the session one mystery, and the letter plot hook only works with him. I’ll try to do hooks working off the other three before returning to him, if at all.
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dlamp-dictator · 7 years ago
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Allen’s Rambling: The Four Dreaded Questions of World Building
Y’know, I was going to write this Rambling on my RP blog about why trying to mix world-building and RPing can make things confusing and difficult for your RP partners, but as of editing this I’m going to make this a bit more general.
For a lot us that want to make an epic fantasy or sci-fi world I’m sure we all took a few days or weeks to sit down and draft a bunch of notes on how we want to things to go down in that world. How people live, how they dress, how they talk, what kind of environments they have, and so on. Just... create a living, breathing world to get yourself and your readers lost in. I know the feeling, I’ve wanted to do that myself for awhile now. The issue is... how to exactly do that. Making a bunch of notes about a faction here or a faucet there can have building that world take forever. I’ve done a lot of thinking on this topic of the past few months, ultimately decided to not bother with it anymore due to my own... weaknesses as a writer. While I’ve personally decided to change how I write my original stories so I don’t have to worry about world building, I think I’d try and do a little good and try to share the system I made for world building before deciding to scrap it.
In short, world building can basically be boiled down to answering three to four questions:
Where/How does this group of people get their food?
What do these people do after they get their food?
Is there magic?
If yes, how does that magic effect how these people get their food?
You think I’m kidding, but that’s really it. Answering those 4 questions will lead to so many, many others. “But why the focus on food?” I hear some of you ask. A simple answer.
If there is no food, there is no world. 
If there is no grass for cows to graze, there are no cows. If there are no cows, there is no beef. If there is no beef, there is no meat for humans and predators to eat. You see my point? A few years ago I took a college course on ancient history as an elective, and that class went into great detail about how many great civilizations got started by the blessing of merely being formed by a river of large source of fresh water to grow crops. That history of Japan video that was floating around awhile back was a great example of my point, research ancient history in general is a great way to learn world building, but moving on.
Just to show I’m not all talk I’ll use one of my own worlds/societies that I’ve been trying to make. Awhile ago in one of my RP Ramblings I said that I had a group of female forest ninja that I was writing a story for. I’ve since then deleted that story due to... issues I was having, but I’ll answer those questions about that group here.
Where/How does this group of people get their food?
The forest ninja get their food by hunting and gathering in the forest they live in, eating while plants and forest animals like deer and bears. Most are vegetarians and only eat plants, but hunting and the consumption of meat isn’t forbidden.
What do these people do after they get their food?
Before actually eating, most will prayer in thanks of the meal. In terms of general activities most go through religious rituals. Prayer, dance, training in either martial arts or religious studies.
Is there magic?
No. At least not in this society.
See? Pretty easy right? 
WRONG. 
Now here comes the hard part. Answer those questions leads to so many others. Why do the forest ninja only hunt and gather? Do they grow their own food? Why don’t they if not? What kind of plants do they eat? If most are vegetarians why isn’t hunting and eating meat outlawed in their religion? Why do their leisure activities focused on religion? What is their religion? What are the tenets? What kind of god do they follow? Is it just one god or many? Are all members of these forest ninja religious? Why is there no magic? The list goes on, and on, and on. And even answering all of those questions will lead to others, and you just keep going, and going, and going until you run out of questions and every faucet of that civilizations daily life and existence is answered.
Sounds fun, right?
“No Allen, that sounds like a lot of work.”
Oh, you poor child, we aren’t even if at the fun part yet. There’s a fifth question in this I didn’t mention:
5. Do other groups/civilizations interact with your main character’s society? If so, how?
And this is the question that leads you asking the previous four at least 1 more time.
You see what I mean? You understand why this is a pain to do properly? And don’t even get me started on magic and superpowers. I’ll spare you all 5 paragraphs and just link these two great videos on Hard and Soft Magic and how they relate to world-building made by a Hello Future Me. The long and short of it that magic changes everything about your world. 
If your characters can spawn fire out of their hands to cook food it means harvesting firewood isn’t a thing that people need to do as frequent, which changes how much wood is gathered in your society, which changes how wood is viewed in your society as a resource. If your characters can shoot out lightning it means industrial-level uses of electricity works very differently, which my lead to certain jobs not existing and your economy running in a completely different way than our own. If you characters can spawn and control water it means that water distribution and droughts are probably not a thing, which mean there is likely a huge population boom due to the abundance or clean drinking water, which means a high disparity between rich and poor and large city areas in general, which mea- 
You see my point, right? World Building is complicated.
Thankfully, there’s a nice way to get around, which is to explain literally nothing about it. This was covered in that soft magic video, but a tumblr post I reblog a while back explains it much quicker than that video does, and I’ll just quote it here for those that don’t don’t want to be view several tabs.
Either explain it or don’t.
When authors include things that don’t fit within the real world–magic, time travel, anachronisms–there is an impulse to explain how it works. Which can be fantastic for worldbuilding, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can make more problems than it solves.
Stephenie Meyer tried to explain some bizarre thing about chromosomes, and it made the biology of vampires and werewolves make no sense. Suspending disbelief worked better in that case before she tried to ground it in the real world.
Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, just has random anachronisms that are never explained, but because there’s nothing even close to resembling an attempt at an explanation, we can just shrug and go, okay, that’s how it works. The magic in Harry Potter seems to basically not be grounded in anything, but we can believe it within the context of the story because she doesn’t try to ground it in anything.
In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, on the other hand, he goes into a lot of magic theory, and it gives us a strong feeling of worldbuilding. There’s enough logically coherent explanation for it to feel grounded within itself.
It is possible to go too far (see: Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind) where the plot ends up so tied in the reader understanding intricately detailed scientific and pseudo-scientific minutiae that the story is incomprehensible without it.
Generally, though, if you’re going to make something up, either say it exists and leave it at that, or entirely figure out how it works. Halfway is always less believable than nothing at all.
So, while I could go through all the effort of explaining how the forest ninja live their lives, I could also just say forest ninja exist and show off all the cooler more interest parts I want to show off and not worry about explaining any of it. The major flaw in doing this however is the lack of immersion and the risk of losing a reader’s suspension of disbelief by having something really nonsensical happen.
So... why write about this? 
Honestly, I just... wanted to get my thoughts out on this topic before redoing my forest ninja story. I plan on moving to writing more short stories and little vignettes with my original pieces as opposed to writing longer, chapter-based stories since trying to do something longer will always lead me to writing myself in a corner. That’s a topic for another day, but for now... I suppose that’s it. Thanks for bearing with me folks. Feel free to reblog with your own tips about world building. I’ll be playing Under Night In-Birth in the meanwhile getting my butt handed to me by Merkava and Gordeau mains.
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lnicol1990 · 7 years ago
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Plenty of work done today, although not quite as planned.
I got on with my new archery glove.
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I had to redo the fingers a couple of times as I’m using vinyl faux-leather (which was a surprisingly large piece that I found in my fabric drawers) to make the glove and all vinyl fingers are about as flexible as concrete. I used some scrap black jersey to make the gussets, as they would be flexible and had plenty of give in the material so they wouldn’t choke my fingers’ circulation supply. I would have finished the glove today, but the black, cord elastic that I have has mysteriously vanished and I’ve cleared my crafting workspace and drawers apart twice without finding it. Sod’s Law says I’ll find it when I’ve bought more and finished the glove.
So, I moved on to a quick little item that I’d considered and Alex mentioned today as well: a little faux-leather belt purse as I had no where to put my money for RuneFest.
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You may notice that there is a seemingly random line of stitching on one side of the purse. That is because I put in an insert to add a smaller compartment so I could keep my money in it without any coins jangling too much. And, as an added bonus, I then realised that by sheer accident I had made the second, larger compartment just big enough to hold my phone. I hadn’t done a single measurement to ensure my phone fit.
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Isn’t that impressive? Sheer luck, at the very least.
I then got on with making cardboard templates of:
The toecaps for Alex’s shoes.
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The buckle for his headband (the far edges are meant to be raised).
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And the general shape of my amulet: Saradomin’s Murmur, as named in-game.
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It’s against my top for a rough idea of its size, and that’s technically smaller than in-game but as big as I feel I’ll need for the details on it.
I didn’t cut anything out because it’s getting late and my eyes are feeling scratchy. The last thing I want to do is make a mistake because I’m tired.
Tomorrow, I will cut out the pieces from my EVA foam and then see about shaping, assembling and fixing them with PVA glue/water mix.
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fountainpenguin · 8 years ago
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Once Act 2 of Origin of the Pixies is over, I can finally delete the Google Docs file for it. For kicks and giggles, here are some deleted scenes that have been sitting at the end of the Acts 1 and 2 document all this time-
H.P. talking biology with Mr. Thimble:
Four and a half centuries after that, just before I was to begin my real work as an employee in the family business of Wish Fixers rather than Ambrosine’s unpaid little tagalong, I returned to Spellementary School to seek something from Mr. Thimble that I had never wanted in the months following my nymphhood: His advice.
My timing was perfect, as it tended to be. I arrived as his latest batch of students was filtering out for recess. He crouched on the floor with a dustpan full of pottery chunks and crumpled flowers (someone, it seemed, had finally put that twisted orange and brown monstrosity on the bookshelf out of its misery).
"Someone broke your vase?" I asked as he stood.
He shrugged and started for the waste bin. "One of the will o' the wisps brushed it with her wing. It doesn't matter- they were just daisies." Then he glanced over at me for the first time. “Ah. Fergus Whimsifinado. You look more like your father every day.”
_
Mr. Thimble considered this. “If you want to say you’re a pixie, then I see no reason why you can’t. The early will o’ the wisps and brownies began in a similar way. Here. You remember this old collection of tablets, perhaps. I would suggest you find some blank ones and create a copy for pixies, containing information such as wing design, particular magical abilities, sexual tendencies, and aggressive behaviors that outsiders ought to be aware of.”
I stared at the heap of tablets with my stomach curling in and out of knots. I wanted to be called something, but I didn’t want it that badly. I thanked him for the tablets and even began my work, but I lacked the attention and drive for it. The project was shelved.
This scene was originally going to appear after the lunch conversation with Ambrosine in “Love Struck Out”. In this early draft of the story, H.P. wasn’t so bogged down by feelings of “not being a real fairy” and “my mutation makes me ugly”, and he was actually going to call himself a pixie from the get-go. He approached his old school teacher, requesting to fill out the tablets to get his species placed in the school textbooks. Because of course he can do that.
I felt like this concept took a LOT out of the story, though, which is one reason why the scene was tossed and I went back to the drawing board (other reason being, it disrupted Chapter 3′s flow). I did really want to make a joke about him hating paperwork in his youth, but after ditching this scene I never really had the chance.
Also, you may notice that the mention of the vase was moved to “The Art of Starting Fires” instead. I was pretty proud of how it was written, and designed the Wish Fixers scene around it (after tweaking the scene as necessary to fit Karowel’s personality, of course). Fun Fact: In Act 4, H.P. owns a vase that looks exactly like this one even though he called it ugly in his youth.
Academy Party:
Sparkle wiggled his brows. “Are you sure you don’t want a sip? It’s orange.”
I studied the drink, then brought it to my lips. “Maybe just one.”
It runs in the family, the sugar addiction. I was at the top of my game one moment, leaning back in my comfortable seat and surveying my kingdom with fingertips pressed together. Shortly thereafter, Polly was leading Sparkle and I down the hall by our ears, both of us with our words bumping together like raindrops. I find it necessary to state, however, that soda is no longer a weakness of mine and should not be expected to work against me again. 
Although this snippet has some merit, I removed it from “School’s In - Not Much of a Musical” because I realized I didn’t want to timeskip the entire party (I played with the idea of having two parties at first). After this, I wrote the second “party” as something rather boring. H.P. was just playing snapjik with Sparkle and Polly in the basement somewhere. Brown walls and quiet people in the study area, yep. There was... no excitement whatsoever until Ambrosine showed up. It just seemed like the kind of place H.P. would hang out.
Then I remembered he’s canonically a rave-lover and grinned a wicked grin.
H.P. meets Pip
1)
I jolted upright, wings flared. “What the- Ow!”
A blue and black shape hovered above me with a horrified stare etched across her entire face. “Of all the places to spill my hot spaghetti sauce, it had to be on a fairy in diapause.”
“What?” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “I wasn’t… what?”
She bore no crown, and her bat-like wings were feathered along the edges. An anti-cherub, then. She stared at me, stiff, with a bowl of pasta in her hands.
2)
I took a few steps, but swayed heavily and began to sag. “Take it slow, big fella,” she said, tailing me. “That’s it. Keep walking forward. Forward.”
“I know you’re trying to walk me off a cliff. This is where I live. I know this valley.” I rubbed my entire face with my palm. “Was I seriously in diapause? The last season I remember was the Winter of the Scarred Caribou. What year is it now?”
“Autumn of the Flightless Bird. That would be about…” She tipped her head. “Twenty thousand years, I think?”
I blinked several times. “You remember that?”
She coughed into her fist. “Years are kind of my thing. It’s in the job description. You learn to pick them up. Anywho, no one wants to hear about my boring life.”
3)
“Hey, I’d be more grateful in your position. You would have been eaten by predators if I hadn’t waited around until some angels found you and decided to give you a proper burial.”
“They buried me alive?”
“It wasn’t their fault. You still had dust on you and you looked pretty dead.”
“And that was twenty-thousand years ago.”
“Yep.”
“You’ve been stalking me for twenty thousand years, and you’re only just now waking me up.”
“Yep.”
“Why are you like this?”
“I dunno? I come around this area every century or so to listen to that fluttery sound of your core deep underground, and I finally got curious and just decided to do it.”
4)
I checked myself over through bleary eyes, but all my clothes were still in place, well-worn by the elements and damp with ice.
“Identify yourself, or I shoot you with a seven-day blindness hex.”
“Easy, easy!” she protested, flapping her wings.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
These diapause ideas were scrapped because of the conflict with Baby, You’re a Rich Man, when H.P. tells Sanderson he met Pip about five hundred years before he was born. I used Mortikor to wake H.P. from diapause instead.
The first one was definitely supposed to show Pip’s quirkiness. In that version, H.P. fell into diapause in his little cave, and she snuck in to rob him. Hot spaghetti sauce is, evidently, warm enough to wake someone from diapause. The other three all take place outside in the snow.
H.P. trying to communicate with humans
1)
“You want me to paint?” I tried to infer. I dipped my fingertips in the red powder, then stared at the wall. What to draw? I had never painted anything before, or if I had, it was when I was very young and the memories had been shuffled beneath millennia of more important work.
I looked at Tall, and then I knew exactly what to create. First, I drew two crude angels, to symbolize the concept of ‘more than one’. Then, more carefully, I drew a third figure floating over their heads, with wings spread. After setting my paints on the floor, I faced the pack again. Shiny had her head to the left, but no one really seemed to get it.
“Pack kills animal,” I said pointing to the picture that Tall had drawn. Moving my finger to the next, I pressed, “Pack gives food to the fairy and cares for them.” The third image, “Fairy lives happy life.”
They weren’t getting it. How were they not getting it?
Oh, well.
2)
I stared around the cave. Then I took up the feathers that had been plucked from the meat, and tucked them into my hair. I took up a large bone like a wand. I brushed clumps of purple dust from my left shoulder down to my hand, and clenched my fingers before they could begin to wriggle back up.
One chance. One chance.
I threw my handful of dust to the floor and silently pleaded for them to shoot up white sparks (It was only a small amount of dust, after all). With a sound like a ping, they did. I leapt into the air as I flared my wings, and held.
3)
I clung to my wand. They seemed to understand. They respected me like I was the greatest. I was a king. 
“Okay. For my first order of business, I require an escort to Great Sidhe.” I pointed out the cave and started to leave it, but after a minute of hovering outside the entrance, I came back. “Escort? Why is no one moving?”
The first and third are okay, but I’m not fond of the second. Anyway, like the scenes with Pip, these take place in “The Wanderings of the First and Alone”. I timeskipped them all instead because they weren’t necessary for the chapter, and I was having trouble making them all flow together anyway. 
Additionally, I wanted the first time H.P. is seen naming something to be when he names Sanderson (Hence why the story points out he never named his pet fish or the living cardboard boxes). I also played with the concept of H.P. sticking with this group of humans for decades, observing their mortality, but that idea was quickly discarded when I realized it would give him parental experience, and I wanted Sanderson to be the first child who truly looked after.
Social services are trash
The word- it was the wrong word. That word didn’t belong in conversation.
“Dead!” she exploded, visibly resisting the urge to sink her thumbs into my windpipe and strangle me. “The Fairy Elder’s orders! They’ll kill him to prevent the continuing spread of-”
I flashed for the door before she finished, tying the ribbons of China’s coat with all the wrong loops only to tear them apart and redo them correctly. I barreled through two streets, swerving around more than one magic carpet and knocking half a dozen Fairies to the cloudstones.
Originally, H.P. went out to lunch after dumping Sanderson on social services in “Grand Father”. However, he shouldn’t have friends at this time, so I couldn’t figure out how he ended up talking with this lady. Or how “I just illegally abandoned my son and I feel great” could come up in conversation. 
In the final version, he goes to the post office instead, and finds out from the Keepers that Sanderson was on the chopping block. The final version works well because it’s a good way to remind the audience that the Refracted exist, and it shows that despite everything, H.P. feels guilty about dropping off Sanderson with little fanfare, and so brings him the scarf.
The draft version was a little too panicked and emotional considering that technically, Origin IS supposed to be written for the pixies and H.P. wouldn’t normally let something QUITE like that slip in. I mean, for the sake of storytelling, I haven’t been writing the way I imagine he truly would, but that’s why he has an editor whom he hates.
I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring the magic carpets up again, but I think I missed my chance, so that might just end up a Frayed Knots thing.
Anti-Sanderson meets Sherri
The door opened, and a slim figure headed across the grass for the showers with a bucket in one hand and rag in the other. A damsel. A cherub damsel. Anti-Sanderson looked at me. “Watch this.”
He went bouncing and sliding down the tree, ricocheting off a tangle of branches, and at the bottom ran over to the cherub. "Can I help you carry that, twizzlerbit?" he asked, and she let him with a smile.  
The pair had nearly reached the showers when the cherub made the mistake of holding her eyelids shut, or perhaps darting her gaze away, and Anti-Sanderson lunged for her face. She screamed against his lips and slapped at him with her hands and snapping wings, but with his arms wrapped around her, even the yoo-doo doll struggled to tear him away. As the cherub scrambled off, we all dropped to our knees. We knelt there, hands behind our backs, glowering at one another, until finally Venus stormed in and grabbed the offender by the elbow.
"That's it. I have hit the roof with you. You can spend the next five hundred years in solitary confinement."
I REALLY like the phrasing of jumping down the tree, but had to toss it due to the scene change to the ballroom in “Snowflake”. Shame.
(By the way, Sanderson was mentally nine in “Bells and Whistles”, and is mentally eleven by this point in the story. Once he hits twelve, he’ll be mentally twelve for a looong time until his lines catch up with his mental age. After that, he’ll start aging with his line count. So I guess aging with lines is like a puberty thing? That makes sense to me. Let’s do that. Pair it with a wing moult and other features like an adam’s apple or something, yeah.)
H.P. meets Wanda
“Wanda Fairywinkle.”
“You’re the damsel who traveled back in time to kill the dinosaurs.”
She took the folds of an imaginary skirt and curtsied.
That’s it. That’s the scene. That’s as far as I got before I realized I would MUCH prefer to write “Rain Dance” instead, and I didn’t want to accidentally write myself into a corner.
This scene, and the next one, would take place during the war.
Chatting with Schnozmo
Robin leaned across the table. “They say some lunatic called Doubletake snuck a cú sith into the camp.”
I sipped my coffee. “That in itself was against the Fairy Elder’s orders, isn’t it? Poor sucker didn’t stand a chance, I suppose.”
“I dunno about that. Maybe.” He shrugged. “All I know is, people are sayin’ how Doubletake got himself sugar-drunk and killed Shiverwand. Just stabbed him right in the back, no warning or nothin’. His own bunkmate, while he was sleeping! Got the dust everywhere. How’s that for juicy?”
I rotated my mug between my fingers. “And the cú sith took him on the grounds of dishonorable killing?”
“Sure did! The mangy yellow thing snapped his soul up before you could steal a peach cobbler off a windowsill.” Robin slapped his knee and leaned back, both hands wrapped around the edge of the bench between his knees. “Wish I coulda seen it. Two words: Night patrol reeks. Anyway, they say Doubletake’s body’s new driver is a charming fellow. So, if you wondered.”
“Thank you.”
He flashed his jagged teeth. “Hey, that’s what the Hooded Robin’s here for.”
“And Doubletake in the cú sith’s body?”
“Got away into the trees. They’re trying to round him up. I dunno if they’ll try to get him back in his own body, though. I mean, he was a loopy fellow. A couple years in hot fur might cool him down.”
Mmhm. Originally, H.P. didn’t take Sparkle with him when he left the Academy at the end of “The Fallen Angel”. The rebellion in “A Grain of Truth” didn’t even exist. I’m still trying to decide WHAT H.P. and Schnozmo are going to talk about during this scene, or if the entire scene needs to be removed.
Additionally, the soul-swapping scene worked well for Chapter 6, because it drives home exactly what fairy dogs can do, and justifies H.P.’s reactions in “School’s In” and “Bells and Whistles” sooner rather than later.
Anyhow, those are the deleted scenes, and they’ll be deleted for real when I finish the Act 2 finale and discard this document!
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erikaalamode · 7 years ago
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Previously on The Death Dress…
Poor unsuspecting Erika thought dyeing her dress would be easy. Little did she know that dyeing would feel a whole lot like dying…
 Destruction! Mayhem! Panic! The dress… it backed up sewers, reversed street signs, and stole everyone’s left shoe!
 Finally, our worn and haggard hero conquered the dyeing process, though the dress did not escape unscathed. The dye looks uneven in areas and it’s splotchy where sap got into the fabric, but it was done… The battle was won. All was well.
 Sort of… the dress wouldn’t have been ready for SDCC, and it, as all powerful objects forged in the heart of Mount Doom to take control over all humanity, passed into myth (otherwise known as the sewing room closet). But we had not seen the last of this dress!
*Insert dramatic theme song here*
Two years after my friend and I survived San Diego Comic Con, I got a crazy idea to make an Ursula cosplay and enter it in the D23 Expo’s Mousequerade. I am completely, utterly, hopelessly obsessed with Disney—a fact I probably should have warned my roommate about before we moved in together—and I was having a Little Mermaid moment (but when am I not having a Little Mermaid moment?), and I thought, oh what fun it’ll be to make a giant octopus dress!
Turns out, this project was actual fun. Not the ‘this will be fun, oh just kidding, I’m actually only laughing so I’m not crying’ fun of the Padmé dress, but genuine, ‘I can’t sleep because I’m having too much fun’ fun.
That whole experience really ignited a passion for sewing that I’d never really had before. I’d sewn dresses (complete with frustrated crying and some colorful words for the sewing machine) and I’d made little pillows and things in the past, but never something that made me this incredibly happy.
I’m a political science, human rights, and psychology student, so I spend a lot of time working in my own headspace, the grand results of which are usually papers. There was something so amazing—euphoric, even—in creating a crazy, impossible costume with tentacles that wiggle around me when I walk. I made a tangible object so vastly different than what I’m used to producing. And I felt like Ursula, fabulous, powerful, bold, and I loved it.
Essentially, I got addicted to sewing and particularly to making cosplays of amazing characters, and I needed my next fix. My parents came to visit me for my birthday, and they brought me my sewing machine with some projects that I could work on. One of those projects turned out to be all the Padmé supplies that we had stored away and largely forgotten about in the past two years.  I made a corset, some dresses, and spent time fiddling with my Ursula wig, but I didn’t really bother with the Padmé dress.
A couple months later, I heard back from D23 that I had been accepted as a finalist for the Mousequerade, and my mom and I decided to make a mother-daughter trip out of the expo and go for the whole event. That meant three days of cosplays. I had Ursula for one day, and an Edna Mode Halloween costume my mom had made for me in my senior year of high school, but that meant I needed one more cosplay.
Side note: I tried to convince my mom to cosplay with me, but she was too hesitant—I’m still working on it.
Anyway, D23 was the perfect opportunity to revive the Padmé dress. Two years was sufficient (barely) to recover from the emotional toll that dyeing the dress had taken, and I was ready to take another shot at her.
Here’s how that went!
First, I needed to see if the dress even fit anymore. Having spent two years gorging myself on baguettes, cheese, champagne, croissants, and chocolate macarons while living in France, I didn’t exactly have high hopes about what was about to happen when I put that dress on.
Miraculously, the dress was actually a bit large in several places.  This was great news. I don’t typically think a whole lot about my weight—my dad’s motto in life has always been, “Live to eat, don’t eat to live,” and I learned something valuable about food over form from that.
However, in the case of this dress, I just about squealed (that’s a lie, I’ve never been one for the squeal-y thing; I tried it one Christmas and it really didn’t feel like me and frankly, it just made us all pretty uncomfortable—but I was super happy about the dress).
If I had outgrown the dress, that would mean I’d have to scrap it. There was absolutely no space in any of the seams to open it up, and you can bet there was no way I was going to dye another one. The fact that it was a bit large gave me some leeway to take it in at certain points so it would fit whatever shape I am today.
I probably should have adjusted the outer dress and the under dress separately, but I was feeling both lazy and ambitious, so I sewed the lining into the shell around the top edge. When I got to the halter, I used a long strip of leftover fabric, folded in half, as a strap. I attached it to one side of the dress between the shell and the lining, and left the other side loose so I could attach some snap closures at a later time.
With the hook, but there is still gapping at the side
There was some gapping at my sides where the scoop back transitioned into the halter top. Had I stuck with the original design of the pattern I used, straps would have held this in place, but Padmé’s too cool for straps so I had to figure out how to channel my inner Tim Gunn and make it work.
I added a hook and eye closure about an inch above the base of the scoop at my lower back to close the scoop a little tighter and hold the sides in. This fixed the gapping to the degree that I was no longer worried about accidentally flashing someone if I leaned forward, because as bold as cosplay might make me feel, that’s not the quite the show we’re aiming for.
The gathers at the halte
I wanted to take it in just a bit more to be safe, so I gathered the neckline of the halter top to bring the sides in closer to my body and add a little more tension to the top edge of the dress. I danced around in the dress for a little while, aggressively serenading my roommate with Broadway show tunes, and the dress held up, so it looked like everything was secure.
One thing that did not change was my height; I’ve only been growing in one direction since middle school, and that direction is definitely not up. But this was great because it meant the dress was still the right length, and it left me about an inch to do the hem.
I rolled the hem over twice and ironed it flat to make it easier to sew. Then, I hand-stitched this using a thread that matched the purple dye so I could hide the stitches. The under dress hem was rolled and ironed and then hemmed by machine because it’s hidden and didn’t need to look as pretty.
With that done, I could move on to the outer drape-cape-dress-poncho?-flowy-thingy (the technically correct term, yes). I had done the draping years ago, so I knew what it could look like, but I was a little fuzzy on the details. However, general confusion is my default state of being, so I proceeded as usual with a trial-and-error, make-it-up-as-we-go sort of strategy.
First, I did up the back seam of the cape (let’s just call it a cape—it’s probably more of a poncho, but that word gives me serious 3rd grade flashbacks to purple crochet, and that war is best left alone for now).
Because I don’t have a serger in New York, I was worried about the chiffon fraying if I left the edges raw. In light of that, I decided to do the back in a French seam, which would hide the raw edges and also give me a reinforced section to stitch my gathers into the back of the cape.
Next, I found the center front of the cape, and hand stitched the ribbon to the halter neckline of the dress and down each side until I reached the darts at the bust. The stitches didn’t really have to be hidden because the large necklace that Padmé wears would cover the neck anyway, but I wanted it to be pretty so I went with hand stitching.
I draped everything back on me and pinned the dress and cape in place so I could mark the ribbons to put snaps for my upper arms and wrists. I found the center between where the snaps would go and marked this as well. While I had it all draped on, I put a rubber band to make the purple tail in the front as well. I took a break to play around it in, because cosplay should be fun and I like pretty things and twirly things and colorful things—I really like this dress.
When I finally got back to work, I drew a straight chalk line on the chiffon between the center point on the upper arm to the center point on the wrist. Then, I stitched across this line using a long stitch length on my machine.
I gathered this down to the length of my arm, leaving a bit of room for flexibility, then tied off the threads to hold it in place. At this point, the cape looked a lot like super colorful wings, so I amused myself with that for a while before moving on.
When the novelty of my fancy wings finally wore off, I used my machine to do a running stitch up the back of the cape, from the top of the purple to the base of the scoop back where the yellow ribbons ended. I used a long stitch length so I could gather this and tie off the threads on the under side of the chiffon.
In retrospect, I should have reinforced this with hand stitching, because while I was floating around in it at D23, my mom accidentally stepped on the hem (see, this is why I should have trimmed it shorter, but we all know how that went) and the gathers burst open. We had a little emergency sewing kit so once we got inside we could fix it easily enough, but when I got back, I redid it by machine and then stitched through the seam allowance twice to reinforce it. That said, I was on a roll (and a severe time crunch) and I really wanted to get it done.
The original
The quick fix
The reinforced redo
Now I could add the snaps! I sewed two to each upper arm and two to each wrist to hold the wide ribbon edge closed. I also sewed two to the back, at the base of the scoop to the yellow ribbon, and on either side of the hook and eye on the dress to attach the cape once I was in the dress.
You’d never believe it—I hardly could, but the dress was done! I swooped around my apartment in it for a while and yelled some Star Wars quotes at some unsuspecting friends who came by, they were confused and probably a little scared, and it was all great fun.
All I had left to do was make the accessories, which at this point felt a bit like the last half of Return of the King: unnecessary because the story is technically already done, but you still have to watch it because it isn’t actually done until you do. But that is for next time, because I’m still busy dancing in my Padmé dress.
Padmé’s Lake Dress, Part 3 Previously on The Death Dress… Poor unsuspecting Erika thought dyeing her dress would be easy. Little did she know that dyeing would feel a whole lot like…
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