#spirograph basics

[homestuckreplay]

has anyone else noticed that homestuck is getting kinda long?

(page 1145-1148; some thoughts on pacing and accessibility)

Jade’s bass playing to grow or move the lilypads works, and was well foreshadowed – in addition to both her bass playing pages where the garden atrium grows because of the amp in there (p.822, 1026), Jade captchalogues the bass (p.823) and the narration specifically notes ‘You take the PORTABLE AMP from the WALL SOCKET too.’ It feels like Act 3 has been entirely leading up to Jade entering these ruins.

In ‘[S] Jade: Pester John’ (p.1073), Bec guards the mystic ruins on Jade’s island, and a glowing white spirograph in the ‘same’ location mapped onto Prospit. So it’s a fair guess that the white spirograph was also present on ancient Earth, and may have been the cause of the ruins’ construction. And that means it might still be within the ruins, and could act as a portal to Skaia, which would allow Jade to go there while she’s awake. If she did that, could she travel to Prospit and find her own dream self? Or is her dream self only present on Prospit when her waking self is asleep? Either way, I think these ruins will be Jade’s backdoor into Sburb.

I love all three of these Jade pages for the visuals – 1145 because it’s cool when two panels match up into one bigger one (and interesting to think about why this was chosen instead of one bigger panel – maybe because one is Jade and one is the amp, and they’re two separate focal points?) and 1146 because Jade imagining herself as a frog as she jumps over lilypads is so fun and silly. I checked Wikifur and apparently amphibians such as frogs are classified under scalies, which is different to her interest in a ‘proud snout’, ‘the hunt’ and ‘claiming the night’ (p.797) but still fits with her desire for ‘a more visceral sapience’ and escaping the confines of humanity. So I feel like Jade doesn’t have one specific fursona, and wants to keep her options open with different animals.

And 1147 is just incredible – the glowing green symbols look like something from a hacker movie, like Jade’s entering a digital space, but at the same time we know this is physical stone and ancient hieroglyphs. Those things being meshed is very cool to me, and it makes me wonder just how much of all human technology was originally from Skaia. The mesmerizing soft glow gives the page a dreamlike quality, a reminder that Jade doesn’t have a plan, she’s just following instructions from her dreams and acting on faith.

John told Dave ‘i think you should use your copy of the game to help [rose]!’ on page 294, and it has taken 854 pages and over half a year in real time for him to install the game and help, but they are finally making this transpire. I was saying yesterday how Jade challenges Rose, and today I’m saying that Dave doesn’t challenge Rose at all. They have great banter, but Rose always has a leg up on it – and I think she types and/or thinks faster too, as she gets in her ‘Go on.’ before Dave can finish his ‘where making this’ sentence, when usually he’s the one to send a bunch of messages in a row.

Here’s the thing. I am speaking directly to Rose Lalonde here. Hi Rose, I understand that your house is burning down and things suck right now and you should not have to be the person who has to micromanage all your friends and deal with this entire situation alone. However. You are being dumb as shit by not giving Dave some basic instructions on exactly what to do the second he loads the game. You know that kid is not gonna read your GameFAQs. You know he can dish out those giant long monologues but he cannot take them. Please Rose, for your own safety and possibly the future of humanity or something, give the guy like three bullet points.

...no? Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff reference instead? Okay then.

This update also comes with a newspost, which I’m going to quote in full below.

That's my cue to disappear. Time for me to vanish into the animation abyss for a while. Let's give it a week, tops. If you're one of those people who has trouble keeping up with all the updates I bury you with, maybe now's a good time to catch up. And if you're one of those people who's finding everything going on in the story to be somewhat confusing and overwhelming, then maybe now is a good time to go back and reread it all. I'm pretty sure about 95% of all MSPA readers huddle somewhere beneath this umbrella. (/news 8 January 2010)

I have been thinking about the update frequency, and thought I was projecting because I definitely put an above average amount of time into Homestuck, but maybe this is a bigger issue. People only have so much time in the day, but some people do have more time than others. Relative to other webcomics, Homestuck asks readers to put a lot more time into it, a lot more frequently – both because the updates come fast and because the story is complex. It rewards people who do put a lot of time into it, because the small details, patterns and parallels, time loops, etymologies, and opportunities to predict and even influence (via user commands) the story encourage people to stay up to date, to read closely and reread often. The more effort you put into reading Homestuck, the more you get out of it, and that’s incredible, but it’s definitely made by and for people who have a lot of leisure time. So, young middle class people, especially teenagers and college students who don’t need jobs, and people who are socially isolated for whatever reason, will be way overrepresented. (I do this project because I love it and I do it by choice, but balancing this with work and school and relationships and my other major hobby is not easy especially with what’s felt like a recent increase in update frequency!)

This quality also makes it more competitive with other webcomics – someone might have time to keep up with, say, 20 webcomics that post a once per day or three times a week strip that stands alone or is part of a relatively simple story. If that person wants to follow Homestuck, they might have to drop down to 15 or even 10 other comics, because this one takes up such a disproportionate amount of space. This idea of creators putting out constant content to stay afloat on a transient internet, such that it could be a full time job to keep up with it (and sometimes is – there’s franchises that have in-house lore experts because creators themselves struggle to keep track of stories) will become huge in the future. And when we can all only pick a couple pieces of media to stay up to date with, life gets harder for smaller, newer and part time creators, who can’t provide that yet. And yeah I’m probably part of that problem.

I might also disappear for a few days to work on end of act 3 stuff! or I might not! if I have anything to say in the meantime or any fun asks then I will post. but at the absolute latest I will post on the day EOA3 drops and if I don’t do that then send an ambulance to my house.

> John: Ascend to First Gate.

[tenaciouschronicler]

Februrary 9 2025 2010

LORE DROP! LORE DROP! LORE DROP!

But first lets finish with Slick because huh??

Using the power of sprite flipping, Slick is able to manifest his barcode once again. Such a silly little argument actually becomes poignant who knew? Also not sure how I missed it but the references to SBAHJ were actually links to previous comics. Still doesnt explain their connection but it does make them more than just throwaways.

After scanning the barcode, the doors open revealing something very curious.

Oh yeah buddy, that is definitely a spirograph and this is definitely a bunker.

This guy again?

Been a long time.

A bunker Slick is very familiar with. We dont get much more about this mysterious new figure besides that they are:

grey with orange horns

they have cruxite and captchalouge cards so have to be connected with SBURB

his window matches the panes of Slicks console

theres a sickle on the ground

his shirt has the zodiac symbol for Cancer

and what may be a crab-like Sprite is floating in their room

This guy is obviously a player but they are not from earth so not likely in the same session as John and co. The only references weve had to other worldly beings were from the trolls so could it be this is one of them? And that begs the question of how did they infiltrate the kids session?

The intermission ends with another poorly drawn MSPA panel of this final shot in his room before the curtains close and we start act 4.

FLIGHT OF THE PARADOX CLONES

An interesting title of this act and reminded me of the orchestral piece 'Flight of the Bumblebee' by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Looking more into it, the song was originally an interlude piece for one of his operas and "intended to musically evoke the seemingly chaotic and rapidly changing flying pattern of a bumblebee (Wikipedia)." Ive got a feeling things are gonna get crazy this act, more so than weve seen so far especially with whatever paradox clones are.

Act 4 starts us where we left off with John as he passes through the gate to the planet below: The Land of Wind and Shade.

Like we did way back when, this flash is interactive allowing us to explore a part of the planet. On top of that Nanna is still back at the house, unable to join John on his quest, and after interacting with certain parts adds a little more (if cryptic) context.

Lets start with a few visual basics.

(gonna be just as much of a doozy as that house update was so be prepared)

LOWAS (because I am not writing that whole thing out every time) is a very beautiful planet, and not just cause I am biased towards blue. Glowing trees and mushrooms grow everywhere with pipes and Parcel Pyxis scattered around. The previously thought dark rivers are actually full of oil, much like the imps John has been fighting. On LOWAS we find different imps with cat and tentacle features as well as princess costumes; a product of Roses entering the medium. Hanging fairly low are clouds full of 'stars' that are actually Fireflies, trapped by a spell from The Slumbering One. The yellow salamanders that we interact with are the Consorts of this land, self-depreciating little creatures John will have to protect.

Starting with the Parcel Pyxis, these cylindrical objects operate like mailboxes ‘connected to [the] network of pipes’. Pyxis is a small constellation though there doesn’t seem to be a connection beyond a space theme. These operate using Minitablets which look similar to the Captchalouge cards weve seen. These are carved and deposited into the Pyxis for someone else, unknown to the requester, to find and then deposit said item. If you find something in one of these you are ‘obliged to keep it’ as its thought to be ‘a gift from the Breeze’. Looking around at each Pyxis we do find various items as well as more of the oil spewing from one. Of note, one of the Pyxis contains amber much like the one Serenity was in and found by WV. Nanna, after the explanation of the Pyxis, states ‘The true Heir must learn [their] ways … to progress through the Gates.’ So we now have confirmation that John is the Heir of Breath which makes sense with all the talk of wind and Breezes but more on that later.

A group of salamanders can be found who explain more about what happened to this planet. Fireflies as we learned are important and The Slumbering One cast a spell before falling asleep to trap them. At the same time, ‘some really terrible guys’ asked him to create a whole bunch of Underlings which most likely means the imps. Then he clogged the land and pipes with oil sludge so ‘[the planet] can barely breath’. This may be a metaphor for choking out the planet but it could also imply that the planet is alive in someway. Those ‘terrible guys’ turn out to be the Agents, likely guys like Jack, who only became more active ‘when the Heir showed up’. For the Consorts this was only very recently which falls in line with Johns arrival to the Medium and LOWAS. The spell can only be broken when ��...The Slumbering One is awoken and slain. Then the Breeze will again flow through the pipes…’ freeing the fireflies. So now we have an objective for John to work towards.

Lastly, before we get to the big point, Nanna says ‘Amphibious and reptilian life forms play a special roll in you quest’. This comes after John speaks to a Consort about a broken Cherished Idol which is a statue of a frog. In one of the Pyxis you can actually find a frog labeled ILLEGAL CONTRABAND so the frogs weve seen on Jades island are probably more than just a weird choice. Theres something bigger going on besides ‘really hat[ing] frogs’.

Now the big point. One of the Consorts says ‘Often, wind skims the voids of the Pipes, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered Parcel Pyxis.’ Where have we heard that before? ‘Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox.’ (page 82) There is a Very deep connection here that only gets more interesting. The Consort says ‘It is a lovely sound and brings back fond memories of my childhood.’ while on page 82 it follows with ‘A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.’ Im unclear the exact nature of the connection but just speculating I no longer think that the Wind is Desolation. Instead, keeping in mind desolation is “a state of complete emptiness or destruction”, the note played by the wind used by Desolation is nostalgia. While those memories can be looked at fondly, there is sometimes a sense of loss associated with those memories for simpler times. Desolation is not what we should focus on, though we cant forget it completely, rather we should approach this with focus on the Wind and Breeze and how it will affect and change John especially as the Heir. On another note, the imagery conveyed by talking of Pipes and Breezes reminds me a lot of a pipe organ. Pipe organs work by “driving pressurized air (called wind (!!!)) through the organ pipes” (Wikipedia). Is this Desolations Instrument? And what will this mean for John?

As a final note, there is a spot where you can use the telescope to view Johns home from the planet. This confuses John because isnt he meant to climb the gates? Nanna says ‘to ascend, each time you must first descend’. And something clicked. Each kid at some point descends. John and Rose from their rooms to the ground floor. Dave after hes pushed down the stairs. Jade to the island proper. And each time after they ascend again. John to each platform and eventually the gate. Dave back to the roof to strife with Bro. Rose to the rooftop to enter the Medium. Jade to the entrance of the frog statue.

To Ascend, each time you Must First Descend.

[armoreddragon]

how did you first get into making this stuff? do you enjoy it?

There's a lot of possible answers here.

For a couple years after college, I worked at a laser engraving and cutting shop. Leather was a material we knew we could cut, but nobody ever asked for it, so I looked up some basic info and put together some masks as demo pieces. Then I got fired for unrelated reasons, but decided to keep going with the masks on my own. A decade later, I’m still going.

I've always enjoyed making things. The focused calm of working a craft, the challenge of finding the problems that need solving, followed by the satisfaction of holding in your hands something that hadn't exited before. It’s hard to beat that feeling. If you haven’t done it for a while, I highly recommend making a habit of it.

Sometime in college I realized that if I kept making things just for myself, I would eventually run out of both space in my closet and money in my bank account. So I took the best photos I could of what I had, and started posting it up on Etsy.

In high school ceramics class, I had an idea to try and make a flexible dragon skin out of little bits of clay, all glazed differently. I had no idea how to do this. A friend of mine was like "Yo it sounds like you want to look up how to make chainmail for that." She was right.

I work in architecture by day, and the decision to do that was unrelated but definitely related to my crafting obsession. Designing a kitchen, a café, a house, takes months or years of work, most of which is tedious details like picking tile patterns or looking up exactly what order to layer different sealant tapes to make sure the walls are watertight. Designing a crafting project gives me a creative outlet that is immediate. I can sit down for an afternoon and take an idea from a sketch on trace paper, to a final mask formed up out of leather. There's an excitement to that. A reminder that, yes, I can make cool stuff quickly, without needing to sink two years into a project.

For a while I worked to teach myself to draw. I managed to get pretty decent at sketching from life, with a moderate understanding of anatomy and perspective. I liked art, so I thought I wanted to make art. But I struggled with it. If I was drawing something from my imagination, no matter how well I managed to put the lines down on the paper, I would ultimately look at it and just be sad that it didn't exist in the real world. So eventually I gave up on the drawing part, and focused on the part I seemed to actually care about.

I can't envision a version of myself that doesn't make things. I think on some fundamental level, I measure my worth as a person based on what I put forth into the world. I don't know what else to do.

When you decide to turn a hobby into a business, it of course takes some of the delight away. It's no longer something you do when you want to relax and have some fun. It becomes an obligation, to make and ship orders on time, to pack up your stuff and bring it to craft fairs, to track your expenses and file your taxes, to stay on top of the constantly changing social media landscape. But it also lights a fire under your ass. You can't just keep making the same thing you made three years ago–you have to keep making new stuff, keep improving your techniques, keep reaching for new ideas that have never been made before. You lose some of the joy, but you gain a lot of satisfaction.

All through my childhood I filled my closet with little handicrafts kits, that I got as gifts or that caught my eye when following my dad to the art store. Calligraphy, wood carving, weaving looms, boondoggles, spirographs, knitting, crochet, fancy nautical knots, sculpey, and more that I can't remember. After all those different things, I’m so glad that I found a couple specific crafts that really grabbed me, that take enough work to develop expertise, that have expansive enough applications and possibilities, that I could devote a decade or more of my time to focusing on them.

I’d been interested in the furry fandom ever since little fantasy reading teenager me tried looking for stories where the dragons were the main characters, and I found people online who were doing just that. There’s a powerful do-it-yourself attitude that’s baked into the core of the fandom: The world isn’t giving us the art that we want, so we’re going to make it ourselves. I keep having ideas for things that I want, that don’t exist yet. If I want them to exist, I have to be the one to make them.

My dad was a photographer, and I spent many childhood afternoons with him in his darkroom in the basement, delightedly washing negatives, turning them gently over in their canisters of chemicals, sitting still in the dark as Dad unspooled the sensitive film, squinting in the red light as the projected images magically re-emerged on the clean white paper. What could be more amazing, more normal, more right, than having your own little space to work such magic for yourself.

In about 2008 or 9 I ordered my first batch of metal scales, with the idea of trying to make a dragon tail in time for Halloween. It took probably a couple weeks to figure out how to make it, and within a week I had thought of how to do it better and disassembled the entire thing. By the 3rd or 4th time I'd rebuilt it, I thought that it was probably good enough that I wouldn't feel embarrassed to post it online and see if someone might want to buy it.

Of course I love working on these things I make. But I don't think that's exactly why I make them.

[starcrossed-sky]

Hi hey yall in case you didn't know -

I do digital spirograph art! Pics for eyecatching reasons yknow how it is.

and today I'm here to be a bit of a shill because the program I use (Rebelle, the niche art program that mimics real life pigments in a digital workspace) is getting a HUGE UPGRADE this month. Rebelle 7 features such incredibly hype new features as:

-> Actually including a gradient tool (lmao yeah I know right? but no more manual watercolor gradient smearing for me) -> METALLIC COLORS????? WITH SHINE AND EVERYTHING??? -> Vector support! (another Fuckin' Finally I'm hype about) -> Lots of improvements to the way they do paper textures and brushes that are frankly over my head if we're being honest

on top of the existing ABSOLUTE STACK of features it had. And: It's not and never has been subscription based! It's a one time purchase per version, though it's normally at the moderately pricey end of ~$90USD for the basics and ~$150 for the pro version.

BUT NOT RIGHT NOW, because while version 7 is on preorder you can get the Pro version for

✨THIRTY UNITED STATES DEERHIDES ✨

(Until December 1, then the price bumps up to $50 until the Dec 14th release date)

So if that sounds up your alley you can preorder here. Note that they've been coming out with new versions pretty regularly but having an existing version usually files off about half the upgrade cost - I could have gotten 6 for $79 instead of $150 as an upgrade from 5, I just never got around to it before they announced 7.

Disclaimer this is a rewarded promotion but I am also legitimately hype as hell for this. METALLICS YOU GUYS.

Anyway spread the word and smack that reblog button I guess.

[apocalyptic-byler]

I haven't been around here for some time due to personal matters anyways what I wanted to ask was how spirograph art is yk related to byler/mike? 🥲

HI HI HELLO

so basically i was just pointing out that the spirograph is a tool used in art and art is mainly connected to will!!! it’s just a cool little detail that i found and it could be a small little hint as to what mike is looking at (which is possibly the painting. spirograph = art, art = will, and the main art piece of the last season was the painting) orrrrrr it could show that mike and will are sharing a room since art supplies are in mike’s room and mike doesnt draw or do artsy stuff like will 👍🏾

[dunhoof]

ranking my fandragons by the emoji i assigned to their series

soul eater: skull

soul eater is usually represented with this little kinda jack-o-lantern kinda looking logo but it's not really significant in the series itself as far as i remember - it's a simplified representation of soul evans, arguably? it's similar to how souls are drawn in meister-vision? basically i think it's not a super great logo and there's no emoji that really resembles it anyway, so instead of that i went with what i think the logo should be - death's skull, which is seen all over the fucking place and is directly representative of the academy, ruling figure, and main setting the entire plot is based around. this skull doesnt really look like that. this is just a skull. i thought about using the deer skull bc the shape is closer to the stylized skull SE uses but i thought that'd confuse things more. 6/10

magi: gold crown

magi's actual logo is just a stylization of マギ so no go on matching that to anything. the second closest thing it has in terms of iconography is the seal of solomon. so? maybe the achievement token or rainbow star could work? the glimmer tile or sun, even? i see where i was coming from here though. the word king pops up a lot. kingdoms. king vessels. this is kind of a eurocentric way to evoke that that doesn't really fit the setting though. 3/10

fraggle rock: new friend

now this one's cute. kind of sort of looks like a fraggle. is a friend. can't think of anything more appropriate - the only big symbol i could think of in fraggle rock besides the fraggles themselves would be the rock and this is more fun than using the earth symbol. 9/10

hiveswap/homestuck: planet

my first fandragons were hiveswap and i later put my homestuck ones in with those so this actually favors hiveswap - this pink especially feels a lot more like hiveswap alternia than homestuck alternia. there's aliens in there, for sure. no emoji really resembles the sburb logo or spirograph, nor the red/green spiral. 4/10

metalocalypse: gear

metalocalypse's primary logo is a big metal-runic skull but we've already been down the route of trying to adapt a stylized skull. gears are a huge symbol and (similarly to how i complained abt the soul eater iconography) the one that feels like it's more significant in the series itself - there's a song about it and everything. become a part of the klok and all. i like that it's a rusty gray metal. 10/10

drakengard 3: rose

there's a big flower in the main character's eye. looks more like a lilly but this is the only flower emoji we have somehow (thank god we have 6 different puzzle pieces). that's fine though, the main character was also once named rose and her mark also is kinda rose-like. without spoiling too much or even understanding what the hell the plot of drakengard is, the flower is a big deal. only other big symbol is. dragon. would've been funny to just use a banescale. 8/10

the adventure zone: D20

dnd podcast. d20. taz logo has a d20 in it sometimes because of course it does. stan jenkins. 7/10

ok k.o.: ping

logo does in fact have an exclamation point. kind of comic-booky which is appropriate for a superhero cartoon, good colors. 5/10

fire emblem: sword and shield

fire emblem often used sword and/or shield. also sometimes uses dragons. couldve used the fire rune but that'd be corny. silver appropriately neutral as opposed to the blue and yellow coat-of-arms shield, style is more Serious Looking than the coli team sword/shield. sort of boring but doesn't get much better. 8/10

puyo puyo: apple

we don't exactly have a slime emoji. ringo is associated with apples and she's the mc of puyo puyo tetris 1 & 2 which is the one i played because i like playing tetris a lot more than i like playing puyo puyo. the only character i have from this series is schezo though. 3/10

carmen sandiego: red gem

no big hat, no globe, what's a mouse to do? left wing?? a valuable artifact fits in with the whole master thief thing, and red's the obvious choice. sort of weird-looking emoji. 4/10

read dead redemption: horseshoe

pretty damn western. 6/10

minecraft: shockswitch green

a square is the natural choice for minecraft - the most common logos here are the grass block and creeper face imo, both of which are green. the other shockswitch emojis have different shapes in the center, while this one is double square. 7/10

danganronpa: crescent moon 1

black and white and split down the kinda-middle like our iconic mascot monokuma - silhouette could've worked but the colors here are better. dangaronpa's big symbol is a red shape i'd describe as looking like a wing - right wing could work - but i don't think it's meant to be a wing. i actually have no clue where that shape comes from or if it means anything in particular. in the team danganronpa logo, it's more of a crescent shape to fit the logo-ization. i like this choice but it loses points for being a stretch by having the literal interpretation of a moon have 0 relevance. 6/10

the venture bros: modern

please for the love of god save me. was gonna make it the skull but see soul eater. 2/10

street fighter: firework

how the hell does a series run for 37 years and get away with having a big SF as it's only major logo. 1/10

[it-grrl]

Kids back in the physical media years you could buy a "scratch repair device" for CDs and DVDs and basically it was a spirograph you put some polishing paste in and it would evenly grind down the plastic coating above the foil stuff with all the data etched into it so your scratched discs were readable again but also left this ridiculous spiral pattern on the CD face. I was just reminded that this was a thing bc we had a DVD freeze up on us a third of the way through the movie.

[thedurvin]

I forget the name but I think it’s basically just a couple of lasers pointed at a mirror that rotates like a Spirograph with controls on the box to adjust the various gears and axes

What is this?

[happynutsforbrainsquirrels]

It's basically online Spirograph! How fun is THAT??

[etherwhirl]

Hello there! How ever are you?

I, also, adore spirographs: I have a couple different sets.

Would you be at all willing to divulge to me what computer program or other which you are using to accomplish your awesome designs which you post on your blog?

Thank you for your time! ^~^

Sincerely,

Jess W.

Hello @owlzowlz Thank you for showing interest in our designs. We use Python programming language for designing the pattern. And then use video editing software for adding music and basic editing. If you have more questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you.

[realtorjamier]

A Guide to Hosting December Holiday Dinners!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Holiday celebrations are back in full swing and back in person. Hosting a holiday dinner party is a great way to reconnect with family and friends. December is the month to take a basic dinner party up a notch with Instagram-worthy, over-the-top décor and jolly fun!

If you need inspiration, Pinterest can be your most creative, stylish friend. Unfortunately, the deluge of digital images can also be overwhelming. Let us help you get a plan in place for your soiree, and then you (and your laptop and your favorite shopping venues) can take it from there!

Party Themes

Pick a vibe that matches your tribe. Do your friends prefer beer pong and nachos or are they drawn to a more sophisticated soiree with guests dressed in their Sunday best? Here are a few ideas for party themes that span the gamut between formal and informal. 

Holiday Movie Premiere

Focus on one particular movie, or a mixture of many. Playing movies in the background is an easy activity and offers introverted guests a comfortable socializing option. This party can be styled up or down, depending on your audience. Red carpet pizazz or pajamas and pizza. Invitations can be elegant stationery or cute admission tickets. The table centerpiece could be anything from the infamous leg lamp from A Christmas Story to fake snowballs a la Buddy the Elf. Dessert could include a gourmet popcorn bar. Let your imagination run wild with your favorite holiday movie ideas.

Gift Back

This year’s gift exchange could be a nostalgic nod with a philanthropic twist. Guests can bring new toys, games or books that remind them of their childhood (think Slinky, Lincoln Logs, Tonka trucks, Spirograph, etc.). Before adding each toy to the donation box, guests can share stories about why they have chosen to gift their item. These stories will make great conversation starters. The trick here is to make sure the toys are brand new and still appealing to kids! Fat Brain Toys offers new versions of popular toys from the 1920s through the 1990s.

Winter Solstice

If you want to be completely on point for this party, the first day of winter this year falls on Dec. 21, which is a Wednesday evening. But celebrating midweek is not absolutely necessary. What IS necessary, is that guests dress in their best winter white, and the party food and décor follows suit: white flowers, meringue-inspired delicacies, snowflake luminaries (doilies wrapped around glass jar candles), a gourmet hot (white) chocolate bar. Party favors could be gourmet marshmallows. You get the idea.

Pajama Party

This can be fun for families with children or you can do a grown up version. Either way, playing The Polar Express movie in the background — the dreamy story of a group of pajama-clad kids who end up on a train bound for the North Pole — will create the right atmosphere for this casual gathering. Don’t forget blanket forts (sized for adults with dimly-lit LED candles), junk food, karaoke, and group games.

There are countless party theme possibilities — Christmas Around the World, Ugly Christmas Sweater, Creative DIYs (wreaths, gingerbread houses, Christmas ornaments), Christmas Carol Karaoke, Holiday Trivia, Christmas in Vegas, Tropical Holiday with the Beach Boys’ Christmas Album, Holiday Talent Show. This list goes on and on.

To-do: The List

Once you have chosen your theme, it’s time to create your list. Live by your detailed to-do list.

Your master to-do list should have many subcategories including:

Guest list

Menu

Budget

Equipment rental

Music selections

Party decor

Grocery store list

Liquor store list

Party store list

Once your preliminary list is underway, it’s time to schedule tasks by creating a checklist and referring to a calendar. What should you accomplish one month before the party? Two weeks before? One week before? Two days before? This will help you eliminate much of the inevitable last-minute scramble and panic.

Simplify, streamline

Here are five tips to simplify and streamline your party:

Choose as many make-ahead recipes as possible.

If you plan to make the spirits bright all night, big-batch cocktails are so much easier than custom cocktails, unless you hire a bartender. Champagne punch in a beautiful punchbowl is not only easier but it also makes for lovely and festive décor. Make sure to include a fancy alcohol-free, and mark the difference with simple tent cards.

Rent or buy an inexpensive coat rack so that guests aren’t searching for their coats in a jumble on your bed at the end of the evening.

Have to-go containers available so you can send guests home with goodies. Table centerpieces and other holiday décor can also make nice take-home party favors.

Be prepared to wrap it up. We’re not talking about gift wrapping, we’re talking about how to gracefully nudge night owls to go home. When the party’s over, but your guests seem to be staying over, be prepared with subtle hints that it’s time to leave. Lower the music. Blow out candles. If they still won’t leave, yawn. Then start cleaning up.

One last way to make your soiree stand out and live on a little longer — take pictures throughout the night to share with guests in a follow-up thank you note and/or social media post. Celebrating together and then capturing these meaningful memories strengthens your friendships and enriches your life.

[fdragon-art]

Day 147 - Mock-up of Demo Arena

What could go better than a spirograph in the middle?

[eventidespirits]

Laci Explains the Planes of Existence [World Building]

Okay so -- what you need to know first of all is that there are like, infinite planes of existence and they're all overlapping and stacked on top of each other. Like some weird combination of a three-dimensional spirograph, a tesseract and a cosmological layer cake. Secondly, what you need to know, is that most of the planes can't really interact with each other, not directly, anyway. Every plane of existence lives on its own personal frequency and unless you can vibe at that specific frequency, you can't see it or interact with it. Uh, not for most people, anyway.

There are some weirdos out there who can see and hear these other existential frequencies -- usually, it sounds like tuning in and out of different radio stations or looking at a double exposure on a photograph fading in and out of sight. There are even weirder weirdos who can create a bridge-frequency that lets them cross over into those other planes of existence or directly interact with them. I am not one of those weirdos though I think you can tell I'm one of the first kind. I think. It's always hard to tell what's actually dimensional bleedover and what's bipolar deciding to fuck with my head. So, you know, take everything I say with a grain of salt. Or a gallon of it. You decide your salt poundage, is what I'm saying.

Okay, with that tangent out of the way...

All of this kinda makes it sound like everywhere on our plane (The Material Plane, baby!) has the same frequency. Which it doesn't.There are minute variations in the vibrations of our plane throughout all of existence -- and that's how you get liminal spaces or like, the places where you can cross over into other planes, even without the ability to open doors. Basically, some places have a variation in the frequency that makes them really similar to another plane of existence and that allows some like, bleed over.

Depending on what kind of place you're in, that'll kind of determine what's bleeding over. Your own personal vibration matters, too. Like, the mood your in, the place your head is at, what kind of day you've had. There's an infinite number of planes and while there's totally an infinite number of existential frequencies, theres's some... overlap. Like when you get your radio set between two stations so that you can hear both? It's like that.

The plane of existence that's closest to the one most of us live in is The Land Beyond the Mists, which like, most people know as Faerie or The Hill or Under The Mountain or... Look, Faerie shit always has roughly fifty-billion names per concept, they're slippery like that. Point being, Faerie exists one station over from us -- probably because we used to be the same station. Faerie and Earth used to be kind of the same place but at some point, the fae looked at what was going on here and said "oh, hell no. Fuck this." And then they packed up their shit and left. But because it would take way more oomph than even the Seasonal Queens had to completely separate from the Material Plane, it stayed connected. There are places where it's still totally the same place, too. Deep in the woods and high up in the mountains there are places that are still totally Faerie.

Another place that exists on a really similar frequency to the Material Plane is the Astral Plane -- yeah, that place that all the hippies and new-agers say is where we go when we dream. Which isn't totally true. Most people don't go to the Astral Plane when they dream. Most people, end up in their own personal demense -- the plane of existence that lives inside of their head that no one else can really get into. As far as I can tell, the Astral Plane is kind of like, the space between all of the planes, like a cosmological crossroads where all the planes can bleed into each other and interact. I guess it's like, the blood type O- but with existential vibrations. Which honestly, should make you pretty fucking glad you don't go there when you dream because like, imagine if your mind crossed over into some kind of existential plane of eternal torment? That would blow.

Oh and that personal demense thing, yeah -- all of us have a plane of existence that's solely ours and solely tuned into our frequency. There's some stuff that can get in there from the outside -- some vampires can do it if they've got the skill with mind-reading type stuff, some Outside beings can do it, hell some humans can do it. But for the most part, your personal demense, your mindscape if you will, is your personal safe-space. This is totally yours and no one else really gets to decide what happens to it... Mostly. It's also only connected to the outside world through you. As far as I know, basically every sapient being, everything that has a soul, has a mindscape. Which is partially why there's like, an infinite number of planes.

The last plane of existence that I know that exists right on the edge of this one is...The Creeping Dark. It's the domain of an aspect of something that came from Outside of the Ordered Cosmos -- something we call the Myriad. It has a bunch of different names but none of the ones I know are its real name... Which I wouldn't write down even if I knew it. Names have power, that's why Fae are the Spiders Georg of naming things. Anyway, this is not a place you want to be. This is not a place you want to Cross Over into -- and unfortunately, it's one of the ones that has a real bad tendency to bleed over into our world. It really likes abandoned buildings, old mineshafts, anywhere dark that humans are scared to tread. It's even bleeding into the tunnels beneath the city of Santa Marta (where I...live. If you can call it living...) which makes this city like, stupidly fucking dangerous for everything and anything. Ugh this is why everything should be served in trays with compartments. You do not want the planes touching like that.

Okay well, I think that's pretty much what you need to know about the planes of existence. Like, I could get into the Celestial Firmament and the Infernal Abyss and the Land of the Dead but like -- the thing is, those are just names humans gave to groupings of planes with similar frequencies. They're not like, one specific place they're just planes that have really fuzzy, indistinct boundaries and have started blending together. And I'm not like, an expert on those planes anyway. Especially since like, I won't be going to any of them when I die anyway...

Anyway, there's my little explanation of the planes of existence! Hopefully it made some kind of sense, lol.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

My Opinion on AI Art

I am going to put this on my main blog where everyone can see it, because I have seen a lot of different takes about AI generated imagery and I wanted to share my take. Do what you will with this information, but keep in mind it is only in relation to the state of AI generated imagery in 2022. If you come back to this in 2025 and scream at me about some controversy that has occurred after this was posted, I will hit you with a brick.

Okay. First things first, is an AI generated image art? Well, let's look at it. As of this writing, there are no sentient AIs, and all pictures made by an AI are made at the behest of a human*. The human involvement in these images is significant: humans start the projects, come up with the ideas, run as many iterations as they want, make changes to the inputs as they need to, and decide what the final product is. Humans may take the images the AI generated and edit them, modify them, paint over them, etc. The AI, much like a spirograph or a bucket of paint dangling from a rope, is just an algorithm to create images with.

In this regard, because most of the conscious decisions are being made by a human and it's being done recreationally (as opposed to being a survival tool), it is art. Full stop. What kind of art it is, the quality of it due to visual artifacts, and whether it should be in its own category away from art created with more traditional tools are all separate questions from the intent that drives it, which is that a human wanted to make something for fun. That's the only criteria needed for it to be art.

*Human here is used to mean "Living thing that thinks", and can include H. sapiens, elephants, aliens, time travelers, crows, and members of the family Hominidae that don't belong to the species H. sapiens

Now, onto the second part. The way most of the AIs we have seen so far have been trained is just wrong for a product that's being released as an art tool. For our own reference, let's look at how websites use art. When an artist joins an art website, they give that website permission to store the image, distribute the image to other computers which request access to the image, and make alterations to the image (e.g. make tiny versions of it to use as a thumbnail). That's part of the Terms of Service for every art website, and if you didn't know that you should go read the TOS again. However, the artists did not give the same permission to the groups that run these AIs, and they did not give the website permission to transfer permissions. That means when the AI makers scraped the internet for images to train the AI with, they did so without getting anyone's permission. This is the part people should be upset about.

Now, we've all downloaded images to our hard drives, shared pictures we like with our friends, and even studied other artists to figure out how they do that fiddly thing we don't know how to do yet. Individually, that's okay. We're not claiming the picture is ours. But these groups are creating AIs that will regurgitate pictures they have been trained with and then people attribute those pictures to the AI, not to the original artist. That's basically the art version of money laundering. At this time, that means the only ethical AIs to use are the ones that were trained solely on public domain works or had permission from the original creators of the works being used. And as far as I can tell, no AI image generator that meets those criteria exists yet. The people who made these tools made them without any consideration for the people who may be impacted by these tools, and that's not cool.

Now, the third part. Some artists are freaking out because they think AI art will replace them. I personally do not share this opinion. As we have seen from various other industries, such as the jewelry industry or furniture industry, people will pay a premium for the artisanal stuff even though mass produced alternatives exist, even if the mass produced stuff is equal in quality. I believe that tendency will also occur in the art world, and there will always be a place for independent and professional artists as a result. Photography did not end the career of the landscape painter, nor did CGI destroy the job of the set designer. There were periods of upheaval, yes, but at the end of the day things settled into a new normal and those jobs continued to exist.

Furthermore, we already have hobbyist artists who do great work for next to nothing, and that hasn't driven independent or professional artists out of business either. One only needs to look at the sheer disparity of prices in the Furry Fandom to see that independent artists can compete even in a market saturated with low cost artwork.

So, that's my opinion, and I look forward to giving AI generated imagery another shot when they come out with an AI that was created with informed consent and input from artists.