#which is a big plus! definitely my goal of this drawing adventure

[silentgrim]

your art has been so cute and it's so sweet of you to do too! i keep looking forward to seeing whoever you end up drawing next :)

aaa thank you!!! 😭 i’ve been really insecure about it,,, tho i’m glad you like it! you just gave me a confidence boost so thank u! 🤍

[loreholdlesbian]

Wilds of Eldraine Draft Booster Challenge

Every set I like to make a draft booster pack featuring the themes of the set. (This particular booster has been done for like a month and I just never got around to posting it lol.) The goal of this project is to make cards that you would be unsurprised to open alongside the rest of the set, while innovating on its mechanics. This is a hard balance to strike, especially at common which takes up the majority of the booster. It's based on one of the challenges from GDS3 that i can no longer link because of wotc's shitty ass update to their website that broke access to like half their articles.

Now that the intro and griping are out of the way, let's get into it!

Art links:

Gadwick

Bitter Winds of Winter

Gold-Spinner Faerie

Syr Ginger's Vow (Screenshot from trailer)

Magic Pumpkin

Sword of Noble Destiny

Never Woke Up // Lay Down

Hungering Lich-Knight

Evil Relative

Induce Vengeance

Reign of Vermin

Basket of Baked Goods

Feasting Hedonists

Hunting Prowess

Rare

Gadwick, Wizard of the Wilds 2U Legendary Creature- Human Wizard > Lost Research 1U > Instant- Adventure > Draw a card. (Then exile this spell. You may cast the other half later from exile.) Prowess You may cast creature cards as though they had Lost Research as an Adventure. 2/2

I always like to do something novel in these boosters since, riffing off the GDS3, they’re supposed to be something I’d show to wizards of the coast to impress. Sometimes it’s quite hard to do anything too new at common and uncommon, which means I want to go hogwild at rare. This definitely has the novelty factor. I have no idea if it can be made to work within the rules or if this wording is correct, but I wanted it in here all the same.

Uncommons

Bitter Winds of Winter U Snow Enchantment If you would put one or more stun counters on a permanent an opponent controls, instead put that many plus one stun counters on it. 5U: Tap target creature and put a stun counter on it. (If a creature with a stun counter on it would become untapped, remove a stun counter from it instead.)

I’m a big proponent of the idea that the snow-queen themed cards should have had the snow subtype. I might make a post defending that at some point, but for now just go with it. I went back and forth on whether to make my own card for this theme snow, since it would match less with what the set did, but ultimately I went with this because I decided if I ever do anything with my cards like a custom cube, I’m gonna prefer it to be snow. And I make the rules here. This set has an unusually high number of stun counters and while it isn’t directly tap-matters like most of the cards in this archetype (though it does enable it, if not all that well), it just feels like a cool card to exist and this feels like a good place to do it.

Gold-Spinner Faerie 3B Creature- Faerie Bargain, bargain, bargain (You may sacrifice up to three artifacts, enchantments, and/or tokens as you cast this spell.) Flying When Gold-Spinner Faerie enters the battlefield, create a Treasure token for each time it was bargained. When Gold-Spinner Faerie enters the battlefield, create a Treasure token for each time it was bargained. 3/3

You’ve heard of multikicker, now get ready for multibargain! This feels like design space for the mechanic that wasn’t really explored, so it felt good to touch on in this booster.

Syr Ginger’s Vow 2B Enchantment- Saga (As this Saga enters and after your draw step, add a lore counter. Sacrifice after III.) I | Create two Food tokens II | Sacrifice a Food. If you do, draw a card. III | Destroy up to one target creature or planeswalker. 

For a while I had a Saga in the rare slot, but I decided to swap it out for something with a bit more novelty, so I ended up subbing in this card which I think I like better anyway. I love the Syr Ginger stuff, it’s just so silly, and I like doing Sagas that show a plane’s history. I think this captures the steps of her story very well which is nice for anyone who didn’t see the trailer.

Commons

Magic Pumpkin W Artifact- Food Vehicle Celebration — As long as two or more nonland permanents entered the battlefield under your control this turn, Magic Pumpkin is an artifact creature. 2, T, Sacrifice Magic Pumpkin: You gain 3 life. 3/2

I love weird type combinations, and I wanted to make a Food Vehicle or Food Equipment, and that felt like something that needed to be a top down design- luckily, cinderella provided the perfect opportunity. I wanted it in the cinderella story colors therefor, which means it needed to be white. White isn’t *much* of a food color in this particular set but I feel like that’s fine.

Sword of Noble Destiny 2W Artifact- Equipment When Sword of Noble Destiny enters the battlefield, attach it to target creature you control. You may create a Royal Role token and attach it to that creature. (If you control another Role on it, put that one into the graveyard. Enchanted creature gets +1/+1 and has ward 1.) Equipped creature gets +1/+1 and has ward 1. Equip 1

I know this set is mainly focusing on fairy tales and not camelot, I’m really shocked we didn’t get a sword in the stone reference using royal role tokens. It seems like such a hard thing to resist. So I didn’t. I pared it down to its simplest form to get it to work at common; I’m quite happy with the sword bestowing the same bonus as a royal role token, and that you can stack them on the same creature and be happy with that since the bonuses stack. Works out neatly.

Never Woke Up 1U Enchantment- Aura > Lay Down U > Instant- Adventure > Tap target creature. Enchant creature Enchanted creature doesn’t untap during its controller’s untap step.

This set debuted adventures on enchantments but only on a single rare cycle. I wanted to expand on that with a cycle of Auras, and here’s the representative of that cycle.

Hungering Lich-Knight 2B Creature- Zombie Knight Bargain (You may sacrifice an artifact, enchantment, or token as you cast this spell.) Hungering Lich-Knight has lifelink and haste as long as you’ve sacrificed a permanent this turn. 3/1 The Wilds are haunted by the Courts’ past misdeeds.

Here’s a twist I always like to play with alternate cost mechanics; one where the bonus doesn’t specifically require the alternate cost, but if you pay the cost it’s guaranteed. I did something similar with exploit back in VOW. I think it’s just a very fun way to do something a little different with a mechanic.

Evil Relative 1R Creature- Human When Evil Relative enters the battlefield, for each creature you control named Evil Relative, create a Wicked Role token and attach that token to that creature. (If you control another Role on it, put that one into the graveyard. Enchanted creature gets +1/+1. When this Aura is put into a graveyard, each opponent loses 1 life.)    1/1

I wanted a card that really plays with the “You can only have one role on a creature” and Wicked felt like the best way to do that since it has a payoff for that. Since there was no wicked role card connected to the wicked step family, I decided to connect it to that which helped pull the design together in a “have multiple of this card” direction.

Induce Vengeance 2R Instant Target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to any target. Create a Cursed Role token and attach it to that creature. (If you control another Role on it, put that one into the graveyard. Enchanted creature is 1/1.) The coven would not let their sister’s murder go unavenged.

I wanted to try using a cursed role as a sacrifice-lite effect and decided fling was a nice and simple execution of that. I think it’s fun cause with bargain and with other roles, since it’s easier to get your creature back at full power. It was very far from the usual fling flavor though, so I decided to go with someone kills a witch and is then cursed by her sisters in return. 

Reign of Vermin 1R Enchantment When Reign of Vermin enters the battlefield, create two 1/1 black Rat creature tokens with “This creature can’t block.” 4R, Sacrifice Reign of Vermin: Attacking Rats you control get +2/+0 until end of turn.

You know I couldn’t resist putting a rat typal card in here. Typal cards at common tend to be be more of the threshold-one variety (that is, only asking that you control one creature of that type, or one other creature) because limited plays better if commons are less demanding on your deck, so they’re more usable in multiple archetypes. But I think this card works fine on its own even if it’s of course better with more Rats to go around so I don’t think that’s too much of a problem. I also like how this design came out as very good bargain fodder, which helps it tie into the set more. 

Basket of Baked Goods G Artifact- Food Whenever Basket of Baked Goods enters the battlefield or is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, put a +1/+1 counter on up to one target creature. 2, T, Sacrifice Basket of Baked Goods: You gain 3 life. The werefox couldn’t help but comment on the smell of such a delicious morsel.

Here’s another nontoken food and another fun piece of bargain fodder. I know it’s redundant with some of the cards I have already but I’m really happy with the design and I definitely wanted it in here.

Feasting Hedonists 1G Creature- Elf Ward 2 Whenever an Aura becomes attached to Feasting Hedonists, create a Food token. (It’s an artifact with 2, T, Sacrifice this artifact: You gain 3 life.”) 2/2 A night of song and dance in the woods, a decade of time lost.

And here’s the obligatory enchantment payoff of the set, simplified for common. It has a simple payoff (though one that ties well into set themes and helps you pay bargain costs you probably want in your enchantment deck without having to sacrifice those enchantments you want), and I made it only proc off of aura that become attached to itself so follow the rule of thumb that commons shouldn’t do much when you’re not already looking at them. The ward is so you don’t get punished too hard for putting auras on this thing.

Bonus Sheet Slot

Hunting Prowess 3G Enchantment- Aura [rare] Storm (When you cast this spell, copy it for each spell cast before it this turn. You may choose new targets for the copies. Copies become tokens.) Enchant creature Enchanted creature gets +1/+1 and has “Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, draw a card.”

Bonus sheet slots are always weird since they’re explicitly reprints and the point of this project is to make new cards but the solution I’ve settled on is to make a card that wouldn’t feel out of place on the bonus sheet (ties into the overall theme, doesn’t demand things of limited that aren’t present, works flavorfully) but also wouldn’t be a good fit for the main set. The easiest way to meet that second constraint is to use a keyword that wasn’t present. This is a card that would have most likely been in MH2 to be reprinted here, but I think an Aura with storm is just a lot of fun. Combat damage trigger felt like the best way to make it being an Aura, rather than a sorcery distributing counters, worth it in a way that can be spread out or stacked on one creature.

[peoplelikegames]

Steam Games Festival: I played so many demos. My thoughts...

I spent a few days playing as many of these demos as I could and wrote down some rough impressions.

Black Book (Morteshka): Heavily atmospheric and steeped in Slavic mythology. You play as a Slavic woman named Vasilisa, attempting to bring back her husband, who has committed suicide, back from hell in an effort to save him from the eternal damnation that their religion believes befell those who commit suicide. She becomes a witch after venturing through the gates of hell and back. The gameplay takes several different forms, depending on what you’re doing. It’s got some point-and-click adventure game elements during the more exploration focused scenes. Sometimes you’ll find herbs that can be used as items later during combat. The combat plays out like Slay the Spire and other deck builder games of the ilk, with the key exception of the spell slots. Instead of the standard 3 energy system restricting card usage each turn, here you have 3 slots that can be filled with spells that correspond with the slot type. You have 2 Order slots (big spells) and 1 Key slot (little spells) you can fill each turn. It’s a small twist to the formula that opens up a lot of interesting possibilities and combinations. In between fights and the point-and-click scenes you’ll get to interact with people you meet along the path to your destination and make choices that effect the story and your character. Vasalisa’s journey looks bleak and full of death, and I’m interested to see where it goes.

AK-Xolotl (Daniel Piqueras Constantin): Fast paced, adorable and aggressive top down shooter. Very simple gameplay of shooting down waves of enemies picking up weapons and items that drop when they die. Feels great to play. Good movement, good dash, not much else to ask for. Really quick and snappy shooting and simple gameplay loop me keeps playing again and again just to get a higher score and see what new stuff it has to throw at me. It’s got really cute pixelated graphics and lots of forest critters with guns. The game also features an absolutely filthy death metal track that’s a perfect representation of how aggressive the game really is. Just a really quick and dirty time that definitely makes me want to see the finished product. Also, I love the lil axolotl guy.

Despot’s Game (Konfa Games): Rogue-like dungeon crawler where you control a mob of humans. It’s a pretty cool and complicated battle system my only problem is I can’t help but feel like I don’t have enough control on the outcome of the fights. It’s almost a little like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator in that way. Basically, your run begins with you purchasing a bunch of little humans and different weapons to give to those little humans which will give them a class. Give a little guy a medkit and now he’s a healer, give someone a gun and they’re a shooter now. Humans with classes have special abilities they can activate when there are enough classes of that type on the field. Like an Auto Chess (Auto Battler?) game, if you have, say, 2 or 3 Fencers on the board, your fencers will now have access to their special ability, a dodge roll. Position your people in what you hope is a tactical formation and start heading for the dungeon exit. Most rooms consist of a fight, which plays out automatically. When you press go on a fight, your troops and the enemies will all start fighting until only one side remains. This is where the game loses me a little bit as it’s unclear how much of a difference positioning makes or what more I should be doing to change the outcome. Did I win this time because that unit was farther up than last time, or did the AI just play it out slightly differently that skewed in my favor? I can’t tell if the changes I’m making are actually making a tactical difference, or if the AI routines are just clashing with slightly varying results each time. You’re gonna lose units a lot but they are pretty disposable, with frequent shops for buying reinforcements or new gear. And every unit contributes to your mob’s total hunger meter, which deplete with every new room you enter. You have to buy food to feed your troops to keep them from losing effectiveness. Bigger team=greater food consumption. Gotta find a balance with your money and spending it on new units, new weapons, and food. I really wanted to like this game more because I really dig the hook of building up a mob of little guys with cools powers and I like the unit synergy system as well, but the perceived lack of control over how the fights play out and the game’s edgy humor ultimately pushed me away.

Dead Estate (Milkbar Lads): Fairly generic zombie shooter rogue-like (there’s gonna be a lot of rogue-likes). Your standard twin-stick kind of shooting you’d find in the Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, except here you can jump, adding some verticality. Explore each room, kill the zombies, find the key and then find the elevator to the next floor. Sometimes you find a new gun or shop along the way. The movement feels pretty slow and the rooms feel small. Too many times would I walk into a room, fight three of the same zombie then walk int next room just to see two more of that same zombie. Too many times did I have to walk back across a whole level at a snail’s pace. Needs more enemy variety and to move a little quicker. The shooting is a little better, I like how the game makes its weapons feel distinct by how much it kick it has. More powerful weapons will push you back with each shot. Unloading the mini gun felt chaotic and rumbly that make you slide back and wiggle in a fun way. You can usually kill most enemies before they’re even able to do anything makes them unique, rendering most enemies the same “zombie that walk towards you for second before you finish them off.” Didn’t really draw me in or entice me to see what I might encounter on higher floors.

Foregone (big blue studio): This one feels a little like a watered down Dead Cells at first, AT FIRST. It’s a little slower and less snappy but it’s still very fun. Plus it’s more of a linear 2d action platformer with lots of loot. I like the loot aspect here quite a bit; watching a bunch of currency fly out of enemies is satisfying in a “headshot kill in Destiny kinda way.” Just a bunch of fun particles and a frequent gear drop that has you constantly popping open your inventory to equip your new gear and make those numbers go up. If that’s your kind of fun, you can definitely find it here. Lots of weapon variety on show here and most, if not all, of them feel unique. Just wish the combat was little tighter, which since this is a demo, I assume will come in due time. The game could also do a better job of informing the player that they’re taking damage, which made it difficult to hone the timing on the dash to avoid taking damage. And I’m hoping the environments of the full game become a little more diverse and sprawling, right now it feels like it’s mostly individual rooms/levels of engagement at a time. Excited to see how the full release pans out.

Tunche (LEAP Game Studios): Immediately drawn in here by the beautiful hand drawn art style. It’s a brawler roguelike and if you know what those two words mean in the context of video games, that’s all you really need to know. The brawler combat is what it is, very combo and juggle heavy, enemies that take dozens of hits to kill, fairly bland and just flat land environments. Walk forward until you’re stopped, fight a bunch of waves of enemies, rinse and repeat. Except this time you occasionally get upgrades after finishing rooms like “chance for attacks to cause burn” and “chance to regain health on hit,” your standard rougelike fare. With the territory comes the roguelike difficulty, and this game is plenty tough with the amount of enemies it throws at you and how limited your health pool can be. All of the art and the animations are what really shine here, and if you’re into that brawler style combat, this seems like a pretty good one of those.

Power of Ten (Pew Times Three): Next up we have a top-down space shooter roguelike. I like the minimalistic pixel art style in this one. It helps with atmosphere and you making you feel like a small ship in a large system. Your goal is to power planetary shields on inhabited planets throughout the system by gathering resources from asteroids. While you’re hunting asteroids, pirate ships will randomly attack a planet, pulling you away from resource gathering into a space dogfight against the pirates. That push and pull of gathering resources to fuel a planets shields while simultaneously protecting the planets whose shields are not yet charged is the core loop here that I really like. Conveying solid, core gameplay loop that’s engaging is exactly what you want to get across in a demo, and they definitely deliver that here.

Jelly is Sticky (Lunarch Studios): A lovely, casual sokoban puzzle game. Sliding around and rearranging cubes of jelly into oblong structures to match highlighted areas within a given space. You’ll encounter jellies of different qualities along the way, all with their own quirks around how they like to stick. I really like the non-linear structure in the over world, letting you navigate around between levels from all of the jelly-archetypes at any time. Solving sets of levels will unlock jelly in the over world you can stick to and rearrange to give you access to further levels gated behind walls and other triggers. It’s an appreciated extra layer of depth you don’t expect from a puzzle game that could have very well presented it’s levels in an ordered, level-select screen.

Potion Craft (niceplay games): In this game you play as a budding alchemist trying to make your mark on the world in your newly acquired (stolen possibly?) alchemy shop. Its an alchemist simulator. It’s presented in an “alchemy text book diagram-style” that’s immediately endearing. Every day, you collect ingredients like herbs and fungi from your garden and then it’s time to open shop. Customers come and share their plight, asking for potions of different types. They’ll offer different prices for potions of different potency which you haggle up further (or lower, if you mess up) through a simple timing mini game. The actually potion making is puzzling and unique, if not occasionally limiting. Ingredients you add to the cauldron determine a path that the potion icon in the center will follow across a fog covered map. Add more ingredients to add length and direction to the path, trying to build the path in a specific way that will lead to a “?” destination marked on the map. Name the potion, choose a bottle and label, and brew it. You’ll learn what it does, and can save the recipe for easy use again later. The only downside is how limited the ingredients are makes it very punishing when experimentation results in failure, all those ingredients are just lost. It seems like the game really wants you to just fill the orders at hand instead of blindly exploring into the fog to see what weird stuff comes up, which is my favorite thing to do so far. This is still easily one of my favorite demos of the bunch and has to be seen for oneself.

Aeon Drive Prologue (2awesome studio): This is definitely one of the ones I wanted to like more than I did. A self proclaimed “speedrun action platformer” and it demands that go fast. Very short 2d platformer levels with an ever ticking clock. If the timer reaches zero before you reach the exit, you fail the level. Consumables lined throughout the level can be used to add more time to your clock. This game is very punishing, one hit from anything, from enemy to stage hazard, will cause you to fail and restart. Very quick movement and a focus on chaining together different moves to find different paths through the level. There seemed to be benefits like special collectibles for taking more inventive, alternative paths, but the ticking clock really kept me tunnel-visioned on the most clear cut route through the level, meaning I only ever small a very tiny portion of each one. I’m not the type of person to butt my head against how to pull some crazy route as opposed to the clearly laid out one in front of me. Unfortunately, that clearly laid path just isn’t very fun to take. There’s also a dagger you can throw and teleport to, which I found difficult to aim and not as fun to use as it sounds. There is definitely something here, it’s just ultimately not for me.

Medievalien (dOOb games srl): Action RPG roguelike in a medieval world that has been invaded by aliens. You play an amnesiac protagonist trying to undo the calamity through repeated attempts from within a magical (or scientific?) time loop. Commence genre mashup. Nothing particularly stands out here. Two weapon slots and two throwables slots, lots of different items to fill them. Your weapons consist of bows, crossbows, and staves, and the throwables are bombs of varying elemental effect. It’s fun to play but fairly middling. The low poly art style doesn’t do anything for me and the soundtrack was forgettable. Still, if you’re like me and enjoy ARPGs and roguelike, it does the thing well enough to scratch the itch.

Minute of Islands (Studio Fizbin): Right out of the gate this 2d narrative platformer hits you with gorgeous hand-drawn art. A poisoned, decaying world that is beautifully drawn and animated. I’m gonna day this is not the best demo. The pace is very slow and the objectives are linear and don’t even register as puzzles. This game calls itself a puzzle platformer yet there were no puzzles to be found in this demo. I’m assuming the demo is trying to preserve story details so it starts at the beginning and only gives you a small slice from there. So maybe the game introduces more puzzle elements later in the game. But what’s left in the demo is not very compelling to play. The impressively detailed environments and atmosphere are only driving forces so far. But extremely strong forces at that.

Alekon (The Alekon Company): This feels like spiritual follow up to Pokemon Snap in all of the best ways. In its most basic form, the game plays exactly like Pokémon Snap, but builds on the nearly 30 year old classic in several key ways. Creatures in this game are called “Fictions” and whenever you take a picture of a new fiction, the creature also appears back in the game’s hub world. Once back in the hub world, you can talk to the fictions who have moved in and they’ll give you small quests to do that’ll usually reward you with key game features, like a zoom function for the camera. There’s a great feature that involves capturing photos of a fiction in all of its potential poses, which will unlock the ability to “see through the eyes of the fiction.” So when you’re looking through the album of your saved pictures, you can apply a fiction filter to see the image as a particular fiction would see if through their own eyes. Also, once you’ve unlocked all of the different routes in a specific biome, you gain the ability to “wander.” Wandering is free from the rails of the standard routes and allows to explore every inch of the biome and find other fictions that were previously hidden. It’s also a great space to snag that perfect picture of a fiction you couldn’t get while riding the rails. The creatures themselves are kind of hit or miss so far in their design. Sometimes it’s literally just a seal, sometimes it’s a ridiculous alien thing, but it seems like the personalities of the fictions are what makes them unique. Even though I didn’t care for the designs, I found myself endeared toward the creatures once I found them back in the hub and helped them with their troubles. There’s some good writing in these bits that really helps sell me on these creatures. Lots to love here if you’re into games about snapping pics of critters and throwing donuts.

Eat’n Eaten (Gaëtan Benoit): A cartoony tower defense game with bug plants. Bugs that grow from plants. It has a really fun and easy to understand “food chain management” system for building up units. It almost feels like it was designed to translate easily to touchscreens for mobile devices. Your soil has 100% nutrients, plants grow and feed off nutrients, plants grow apples which you can pick who will then become your units. When an apple dies it’s corpse returns nutrients to the soil and it’ll drop a seed that will grow into a new plant. If you don’t pick the apples off the plant long enough for them to consume extra nutrients, the apples will become a caterpillar. Pick the caterpillar off the plant and now you have a more offensive unit, who needs to eat apples to survive. The game only builds on the loop from there; the way bugs will level up into new or stronger forms after eating enough fruit, or how the game will add spiders to your team who will then need to eat caterpillars to survive. Manage this whole food chain to keep a steady supply and distribution of units against waves of enemies. I don’t know if that seems confusing when put into word like that but it’s really quick and simple to pick up they way it is presented. It can definitely get a little frantic at times but that’s when the game is at it’s most fun.

Dorfromantik (Toukana Interactive): Chill, colorful, tile placement puzzle game about building a village landscape. You start with a deck of 85 hexagonal tiles, and it doesn’t end until all the tiles have been placed. You’re placing tiles with the intent to line up as many like edges between adjacent tiles, making longer and longer networks of landscapes of matching type. The way the scoring works and how the game conforms matching sides together does a good job of making the best place to put your tile one that not only scores well but also looks good in the context of the interconnected village landscape you are ultimately trying to craft. I would kill for this game on Switch.

Unsouled (Megusta Game): An isometric pixelates dark souls-style action game. Described as an “ultra-brutal” game with “fast-paced and savagely rewarding combat,” Unsouled comes exactly as advertised. The combat in this game is very difficult and I am simply not the person to conquer it. It’s really fast paced yet proper movement and combat requires consistent timing and punished button mashing. Every thing you do has to be deliberate and calculated as it’s easy to lose control of the battlefield very quickly. Even just a few enemies can be dangerous as they all can dodge and block and roll just like you. The game is unafraid to put the pressure on and throw ten enemies at you all at once engaging from different ranges. The game demands that intimately learn the combat systems if you want to keep your stamina and health high in the heat of combat. I’d bet that if you’re a fan of Dark Souls or souls-like games, this game has all that difficulty but a different pace of combat that doesn’t feel derivative.

Rogue Invader (Squishy Games): Immediately I love the look of this game. It’s got this old school 1-bit black and white look to it. It also opens up with a fully animated and voice acted cutscene. The game is actually pretty difficult. It’s a side scrolling shooter where you’re part of an army in invading an alien planet one soldier at a time. You’re also managing weapon heat and breakage, and carry weight effecting run speed. Each soldier gets body armor and a pistol but you can equip them with a rifle and helmet from your armory. Which you’ll definitely want to do considering you die in one shot if hit in the head. When you’re soldier dies, they lose the gear you equipped them with and the new soldier needs to be equipped with whatever you can craft in the forge. This is where I ran into issues with hardy ever having enough materials to craft a helmet, go into a mission and die early to a single stray bullet to the head, and subsequently not earn enough materials to make a helmet. The evasive controls like jumping, running, rolling and taking cover all felt clunky in my hands, add that to fact that bullets often just miss even if you’re aiming right on an enemy, and it made for a pretty unsatisfying game to play.

Devastator (Radiangames): How is this not just Geometry Wars? Because this shit is just geometry wars. Fortunately, Geometry Wars slaps so this game is still pretty fun. But just go play Geometry Wars. There, I mentioned a different game like five times more than the game this was supposed to be about.

ANVIL (Action Square): Co-op top down shooter roguelike with space marines. It’s like a run-based Starship Troopers game. It’s pretty great. The three characters unlocked in the demo all have different weapons and abilities resulting in very distinct play styles between classes. There’s a fairly simple loop to each floor: search the floor for the boss, along the way areas will be filled with enemies, who’ll drop money, which can be used to buy passive upgrades from chests found throughout the floor. The upgrade system allows you stack multiple of the same upgrade for increased effect. Lots of variety in the enemy type really keeps you on your toes. Unsurprisingly, it just feels good to mow down mobs of space bugs.

Orbital Bullet (SmokeStab): A 360 degree shooter platformer. It’s a really cool gimmick actually, you move in 2d but in ring around a 3D space. It’s makes for some cool looking environments and depth from having inner and outer rings you can switch between. Really fast and arcade-y feeling. Snappy movement and gunplay. There’s seems to be a lot offered here among different weapons, in-run upgrades and meta upgrades that persist between runs. Which makes this a roguelite, as opposed to roguelike, which I tend to prefer. I like having something upgrade outside of my runs to make me feel stronger or different going into the next run. The games has a sort of ancient alien aesthetic, it feels industrial and monolithic. The bursts of neon in the walls, enemies, and weapons really pop among the ruins of the stone temple. Watching your weapons’ shot glide along the curve of the world is an effective visual as well. Just because I clearly like to compare to games so much, this game feels a lot like Resogun meets Downwell, and that’s just fantastic.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale (Greg Lobanov): A colorful and cartoony adventure game about painting that takes a small but welcomed bullet hell turn. You play as a cute little pup that claims the power of The Brush after it’s wielder (and your master) disappears along with all of the color in the world. Searching for cause and hopefully the solution, you embark on a journey to repaint the world and make your mark as the new wielder. Once you pick up that brush you can start coloring in literally everything in the world. It’s fun and charming the whole way through. You can help the townsfolk bring color back into the lives and color in their houses to their satisfaction. Use the paint to navigate the world by growing and shrinking plants by erasing/coloring them. The demo is a little thin but definitely makes me interested to see what fun stuff the game has in store for these paint mechanics.

Genesis Noir (Feral Cat Den): Okay this game was a trip. I barely have any idea what I just played but I know I really liked what was happening. It’s a heavily stylized point and click adventure game where it feels like you exist within an improvisational Jazz album. Train tracks becoming notes on a cello. Getting into a cosmic jazz-off that plays like a game of Simon and ends with your opponent on the wrong end of a mob hit. I think? Honestly this game is so trippy it was difficult to keep track of what was going on. And occasionally it was a little ambiguous as to how you’re supposed to proceed, which lead some random click and dragging around the screen until something clicks. It actually seems like it could turn out to be a really good example of a story and experience that can really only be through video games. Not quite an animated film, not quite a comic book or visual novel, but instead a fantastical, interactive amalgamation of many things. Whatever this thing may be defined as, it’s something unique and special.

[kram-ulfur]

2019 - Goals and Goal Summary

“Technically we’re always LARPing, because the self is only a construct.” “I want a new character.” “Then make one.” Last day of 2019. My motto for the year was the above quote. It wasn’t so much about reinventing myself, but reminding myself I could always choose to be different if I wanted to. This year was a pretty big one for me. Tarot Draw For The Year:

Focus: Knight of Wands. Energy. Passion. Inspired Action. Adventure. Impulsiveness. I feel like I spent a lot of time focusing on energy and inspiration, not so much on adventure. I wasn’t deliberately impulsive, but my impulsiveness did shine through a few times, resulting in me quitting muay thai and BJJ and kissing Jaye for the first time. So, pretty happy with that. Avoidance: High Priestess, inverted. Silence. Withdrawal. Secrets. Distrust in yourself. Feel like I nailed this one. I’ve been honest, putting myself out there, and learning to trust myself more.

Ways I’ve Changed This Year:  Age: I turned 30, which is a big birthday, culturally. It’s...weirdly relaxing? I can’t describe it. It’s sort of this release of pressure. When I was in my 20s it felt like everyone was competing, in a way, but now I feel like everyone is such radically different stages or paths, so there’s no competition because everyone is different. It’s also been good because sometimes when I’m being bratty or struggling there’s a voice in my head that’s like “Come on, you’re thirty! You’re better than this! You can do this!�� And it’s been awesome. Martial Arts and Fear of Injury: I started this year training six days a week, gunning it to compete, and now I am ending it not even doing martial arts anymore. I totally conquered my fear of being hit and fear of injury, which was huge, and then that meant I learned that I actually didn’t like fighting much.

It was a big deal because martial arts has always been part of my life; even when I wasn’t training it was always in the background. Deciding I didn’t need to was huge because it made me realise like, I don’t have to be tough or be perceived as being tough. It softened me up, which is kind of nice. I’m less worried about looking tough, which is always hard when you’re plus size. I feel like I am a soft person and it is a nice thing to be. I thought I would miss it more than I do. I do miss it a little, but overall I’ve just felt so relaxed. A dude got a bit aggressive with me a few weeks ago and my brain kicked straight into that sparring mode, that love of the fight, and it took me hours to calm down. I wonder what being in that state four times a week was doing to my brain, you know? I think a huge part of being more relaxed is from just not being in that state all the time. I have however been having some anxiety dreams about not being able to defend myself, so I’ll probably keep training in some capacity just to stay sharp. Relationships: I also began this year with this twitter thread bouncing around in my head, about that you should picture the ultimate Disney prince/princess level relationship you daydreamed about as a seven year old, and not settle for anything less than that. I couldn’t get it out of my head, because I’ve dated some pretty gross people and it made me so miserable. I decided I would only accept someone amazing, but that meant accepting that it might not happen and that was okay. I got super comfortable being by myself and not assessing people as possible relationship material, and that made me a better friend and all around cooler person. And because of that, I met someone amazing who really liked me for who I was, because I wasn’t trying to dull myself down to avoid intimidating people. I am dating a great person who loves me for who I am and who I am constantly impressed by. Mental Health: Not a big mental health year for me, no big revelations, just constantly chipping away at the parts of myself and the stories I don’t need anymore. I read a book that talked about really distilling the stories you have in your head, the stories that you learned and kept you safe but might not serve anymore. That was pretty good and really helpful. Weight: I lost and then gained weight this year, so I’m ending the year about two kilos lighter than I started. The gaining came from a new relationship and giving up muay thai, but I am not worried or upset about it. I think worrying about my weight meant I was putting a lot of energy into it which I could have spending on training and focusing on building myself rather than reducing. Definitely going into 2020 wanting to focus on performance over weight. I would like to compete in lower weight classes for strongman but that might not happen, and focusing on weight means I don’t train as hard as I could. My 2019 Resolutions: Leave the Past In The Past: I wanted to spend this year not spending mental energy on obsessing about things that have happened in the past: people being awful, break ups, my concussion, my mistakes, etc. Every time it snuck up on me, I made a concentrated effort to let it go and not think about things I couldn’t change. It was good and definitely something I want to take into 2020. Focus on Fighting: Definitely started the year with this, but ending without it. Things change, and that’s okay. Focus on Heritage: Meant to really nail my Icelandic this year and spend more time learning about Icelandic history. I...did not do this. I forgot I had this. Movies on the First Thursday of the Month: ........okay I did go to the movies more this year, but still not every month. Ah well. I forgot about this one too. Posture and Icelandic Training Every Day: Posture has been my resolution ever year since I was 15. And every year I forget. Fasting Whenever You Can: I did do this! My plan was to do big long fasts, and made real attempts quite often and a lot of experimenting. Through this I’ve learned the best one for me 14 hours - eating an early dinner and then not eating until breakfast. It’s been good for sleep and making healthy choices. Anything longer than that, especially if it involves skipping breakfast or having a late breakfast, ends in eating too much and eating more food that doesn’t help me with my goals. Forgetting about my resolutions seems to be a theme here. Definitely need to find a way around that. I’m still thinking about my resolutions for 2020, but I’m excited. It is going to be a good year. It always is.

[piratequeenofpixies]

WIP Tag Game

Thanks for the tag, @bookenders!

1. When starting something new, how much do you know about the story before you start writing?

That would depend on your definition of “starting,” haha. If by “starting” you mean starting the actual writing, then I generally know quite a bit: I usually have a pretty good idea of the main two or three characters and sometimes a side character or two, then the beginning and very end of the plot with maybe a random plot point in there somewhere XD I usually have a vague idea of the setting, as well. But if you mean just when I decide to start a new project (before writing): at that point I usually have an aesthetic in mind, if that makes sense: a quote or two, a color that may or may not correspond to the tone of the story, a setting or plot idea (usually not both lol), and a very vague character sketch or two.

2. What draws you to your WIP(s)? Why did you choose to write that/those over anything else?

Hmm...excellent question! For Of Stones and Shadows, it started out as more of a writing-practice attempt than an effort to create an actual story, plus it sounded interesting in my head.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now I can hardly bear to tear myself away from the story--I’m too attached to my characters!

For my short story tentatively titled “Jack” (which I had recently tabled, yes--right before having an unprecedented spurt of inspiration *facepalm*), it sounded fun and entertaining both to write and to read, and I wanted a different kind of project (length is huge) from my main to give a little variety when I get stuck on my primary WIP. So I chose a short-story idea to work on, and “Jack” was born :) It’s just as fun as I’d imagined, and twice as interesting style-wise XD

3. Favorite writing spot? Why?

Right now, the dining-room table: I don’t write well in soft areas (i.e., couch, bed) so the hard wood works great and the backed chair forces me to sit up straight and pay attention  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

4. Share your favorite line of what you’ve written so far!

Oh--may I share one from each WIP, please? ;)

My favorite line from Of Stones and Shadows (I narrowed this down from five; you’re welcome XD): “Yes, she hated the pains that wracked her muscles--but so too she cherished them, for they were the marks not of a princess born and bred, but a princess becoming, and of her own accord.”

My favorite line from “Jack:” “Unfortunately, she did so right in front of his face so that he very nearly toppled off the beanstalk and plummeted to the earth in a wailing, thrashing muddle of boy.” I love this line--especially out of context--because it really summarizes Jack’s character as a whole and how inadequately prepared he is for their (his and Jada’s) adventure. :)

5. If you had to choose one OC to bring to life as an actual person, which one would it be and why?

Garan. 100% Garan. Not only would he make a fantastic big-brother figure, but I would have waaaaay too much fun setting him up with my friends. :P (I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have a real-life big brother--I would send him out on far too many torturous dates with my gal pals lol)

6. Are you looking to get published? If so, do you hope to make it a career?

Yes, I would love to publish :) Yes and no--while I do hope to publish and eventually make additional income off of that, it is not my main career goal. I actually will begin studying to teach high-school English this fall :)

7. What’s something you would read but would never write (or the other way around)? Any reason?

Hmm...I read sci-fi on occasion but will probably never write it. Probably.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

8. What’s something you are most proud of about your work so far?

My character development/arcs! I love my characters and used to really struggle with making them realistic and 3-D, but now I’m much better :D

9. Badly describe your WIP(s) in one (1) sentence

Of Stones and Shadows: “Girl, wash your face” and grow up already.

“Jack:” thinly-veiled story about obedience and stupidity

10. Why did you want to be a writer?

While I don’t remember a specific moment of realizing I wanted to be a writer, I do know that I want to write to inspire that feeling of being lost in another world, of stepping into another’s shoes for a brief time in readers. Those are feelings I have always loved, and I hope to inspire others to cherish those feelings as well <3

Tagging @writingonesdreams and @mvcreates! (Feel free to ignore. Also, please let me know if you’d like to be added to or removed from my tag list. Thanks!)

Thanks for reading! Have a great day :)

[jeremystrele]

A Day In The Life Of Textile Designer, Cassie Byrnes

A Day In The Life Of Textile Designer, Cassie Byrnes

A Day In The Life

by Sasha Gattermayr

Cassie starts the day with her daughter Lottie, who is just 18 months old. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Look at them in their matching Variety Hour get-ups! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

They eat breakfast together and then scoot Lottie off to daycare, while Cassie heads to work. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

The family’s cute house! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Cassie wears a dress from her textile label, Variety Hour. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

The Variety Hour shop is on Gertrude Street, where they sell apparel, home textiles and accessories. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Chatting with retail assistant Hayley before heading upstairs to the rest of the team. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

The walls of Variety Hour are just as vibrant as the textiles within it – and Cassie herself! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

The light and bright Variety Hour studio sits above the shop overlooking Gertrude Street! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Cassie manages a team of five: some full-timers and some part-timers. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

They’re currently working on three collections at once, plus workshopping a new homewares range. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

A lot of ‘fabric touching’ happens with the production team to ensure each piece has the right look and feel. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

A super colourful and busy moodboard. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Varuety Hour also has a content arm, so the team spend some time talking about what’s going to happen in this month’s vlog. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

‘I was that kid who was hustling from an early age and had my first “business” at 14,’ says Cassie Byrnes. She even had a ‘very short-lived but very lucrative’ eBay business selling vintage clothes in the early days of online marketplaces.

A fascination with vintage fashion prints spurred Cassie to make the move from Brisbane to Melbourne in 2012 to study Textile Design at RMIT – despite having never been to Victoria before! Luckily – it was the right move. She quickly fell in love with textiles, and threw herself into her studies, working like ‘a psycho’ to excel in her course. Then, in 2016, not long after graduating, Cassie launched her own brand, Variety Hour, working freelance on the side to prop up her new business.

‘The year I started my business, my parents were on the verge of bankruptcy after working incredibly hard in their small business for the past three decades,’ she says. ‘It was heartbreaking, but I also knew I was completely on my own, there was no safety net and no one to fall back on. I definitely get my resilience from them. It also taught me that just working hard does not guarantee success, and you have to remain nimble and adaptable to change.’

Today, Cassie manages a team of five people, working from their dreamy Gertrude Street studio above the Variety Hour retail store! In-between designing new ranges for Variety Hour, and managing her retail store, Cassie still regularly collaborates with with big brands, designing prints for the likes of Nike, Anthropologie and Uniqlo.

Cassie has big picture goals for the future of Variety Hour. She wants to get her team up to full-time hours, experiment with new applications like jacquard weaving and embroidery, and do more to celebrate body diversity (VH clothes now go up to size 22!). In doing all that, Cassie sees the domino effect it has on supporting local manufacturing, creativity in the textiles industry, and promoting size inclusivity among Australian women.

Imagine if every day was as colourful as this!

First Thing

I wake up around 7am to the soothing sounds of my daughter either singing or yelling from her cot – my alarm now for the past 18 months.

I pretend I am asleep long enough for my husband to get Lottie up and start breakfast, then I lie in bed contemplating my existence in the world. Eventually I accept my reality but like clockwork it’s way too late and it’s a mad rush to get out the door within 20 minutes (in case you didn’t realise I am  definitely not a morning person). Having once worked a solid decade in hospitality, I will forever be a night owl, unfortunately my daughter has still yet to receive that memo and I have to find a way to function in the mornings.

Morning

After getting into the car and breathing a sigh of relief, I turn on ABC Melbourne and listen to Virginia Trioli on my way to drop Lottie off at daycare in Fitzroy. I usually get sucked into hanging out with her adorable baby friends and chatting to the teachers before grabbing a coffee at Gabriel and making my way to the Variety Hour office, just around the corner on Gertrude Street.

The morning is a whirlwind of emails and planning out the day. I am a meticulous planner (because I am also a meticulous procrastinator) and have forced myself over the years to get more organised.

The team arrives between 9-10am and we gasbag about life, which eventually turns into chat about this week’s production dramas and what content we have on the horizon. Penny and I spend the morning creating content, today we are filming our monthly vlog. We finalise an upcoming photoshoot and go over our plans for socials for the week. Our office sits above our shop so I might head downstairs to check in with Hayley, our shop girl.

Lunchtime

I don’t really eat breakfast so by midday I am starving. I love having lunch with the team so I usually see someone start to prepare their lunch and I tag along for the adventure. Having lunch together means we can chat freely about non-work stuff and we always have interesting convos. It gives me a chance to let out all that pent up conversation that I have pushed down all morning while trying to focus on work.

Afternoon

I spend my afternoon bouncing around working with the team. I spend some time with Jess – our production manager. We currently have three collections on the go: finishing winter and getting the last production run from our manufacturer; sampling our Classics collection; and designing new cuts and finalising prints for summer. There are always a billion things to decide on, from choosing zip colours to how many centimetres we need to take off a sleeve.

I spend time with our designer sarah on our homewares collection, which is a work in progress at the moment. We feel a bunch of fabric strike-offs and look at samples. There is a lot of time spent in the office touching fabrics and discussing details people wouldn’t probably think about. Today Sarah and I had a great chat/debate about what is the perfect shade of olive.

Evening

At 5pm I clock off for the arvo and go pick up Lottie and make our way home. Between 5-8pm is baby/family time and I let myself have that and try to put work aside. My husband has become a domestic goddess since Lottie was born and normally cooks us all dinner. We have a pretty boring but delicious roster of favourites that are quick and healthy. We both play sports so sometimes one of us runs out of the house if it’s an early game.

After Lottie goes to sleep, I go up to the home office and start the night shift. I always get my creative work done in these hours because it’s quiet and uninterrupted. I still have not mastered getting print creation done while at the studio with people around, but I am sure that will come with practice.

I put on some terrible but fab TV like Real Housewives and paint in my sketchbook or work on a new print. This week I am deep into our new summer 2021 collection. I have to be asleep by midnight because anything later I am an actual mess of a human the next day and get nothing done. I wrap up work around 11pm.

Cassie at the Variety Hour office. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Cassie’s greatest moments of creativity come at night, so after dinner she heads to her home office, puts on some trashy TV in the background and gets to work with her paints and sketchbook. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

An explosion of colour! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Right now I’m listening to, watching, and reading…

Listening: Love a podcast these days. My favourites are You’re Wrong About, How I Built This and The Indicator

Watching: Peppa Pig, CoComelon and The Wiggles

Reading: ‘Who Gets to Be Smart‘ by Bri Lee 

I get my best work done when…

I have the entire day and evening in the studio. I usually do this on a Sunday while no one else is around and all is quiet in the world.

My productivity tool/tip is…

Turn your phone off and put it really far away (like, a different floor of your house). I deleted the email app from my phone a while back now because I read a great quote that called emails ‘someone else’s to do list’. I really try to keep things as separate as possible because my work and home life are so intertwined.

A philosophy I live and work by is…

Be a nice person.

Something I’ve learned the hard way is…

Creativity needs to be nurtured. When you are a creative that also happens to run a small business, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day running of things. I learnt back in 2019 that you need to work a daily/weekly practice into your routine. A time to ponder and experiment by sketching, painting or writing that you can look back on and draw from when looking for inspiration.

Variety Hour’s 2021 winter collection has just dropped! Shop online now, or pop in to their gorgeous shop at 155 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy (open Wed – Sun).

[luwucas04]

About 4000 (I am so sorry) Words Concerning Films that Helped Define My Existence

Ah, movies. So much in one package. Story, music, visuals, what’s not to love? Today I shall be elaborating on the most noteworthy films in the thrilling ever-changing saga that continues to be my life. Screenplay alongside a screenplay, if you will (please take this statement as modestly as you can).

The first ever thing in my entire life that I remember being an avid and enthusiastic fan about was the original Star Wars saga, written and directed by George Lucas, spanning May 1977 (A New Hope) – May 2005 (Revenge of the Sith).

As mentioned in the podcast and as you may be able to tell from said podcast, I can’t really pinpoint an exact point in my life where I was introduced to it as it was kinda integrated into my upbringing from the get-go—and due to this it’s a very near and dear franchise to me. And oh boy fun fact my first ever childhood crush was Luke Skywalker (I vividly recall my uncle asking why I had his page bookmarked haha). I remember it was something that I would always watch with my dad and or grandpa, and then when I couldn’t find the VCR set that we had for it, I officially commenced my illicit streaming career (not really though, I didn’t get very far. Only crappy 20-minute clips on YouTube). Star Wars for me was the first thing that I actively sought out stuff for or showed genuine interest in pursuing if that makes sense. Like, you’d watch whatever movies or shows were thrown at you and you never thought much of them. Ohoho not Star Wars, though, that one lasted years. My cousin and I would always bring our little action figures to play with whenever we visited—or we’d find long-ish sticks in the backyard and have lightsaber fights, I got the video games, posters, Lego sets of ships (X-wing and Y-wing to be exact), an entire encyclopedia that I still own to this day (I just checked and there’s a date written inside, April 9th 2010 (which is my 7th birthday)), and of course inspiration for my own art and such. I remember I made this magazine that was essentially just me redrawing pages from the guidebook I had. I still have it, too! Sitting at the bottom of a drawer right now. Also, later on for some reason I absolutely loved drawing Ashoka Tano. Over and over again man. I drew her taking up my cousin’s entire driveway in chalk once.

Not only are the Star Wars films a nostalgic and comforting series, but it held onto its marvel throughout the. Wow well over 10 whole years, I’m getting old. Additionally, because at the time we didn’t have as much access to the things we can achieve with modern technology, I was basically all on my own with it. I fueled my own fascination. And shockingly, not a lot of people in my elementary school (up until maybe grade 6-7) showed much interest in it either. So it was pretty much just me myself and I, and occasionally my cousin whenever he visited, and I think that made it all the more special to me. Also, at the time I think it was geared way more toward kids. There weren’t series like The Mandalorian or active internet communities that were obsessed with the series as far as I was aware, so there wasn’t the same quantity of content nor overall enthusiasm around it. Nonetheless, it was and still is a very personal series due to how engrained it is into basically every aspect of my childhood. I’ll try not to be too repetitive with what I said in the podcast, but ultimately the clear nature of the franchise (attractive character designs, colours, setting in general (it’s an action-packed space adventure what’s not to love)) is what really made me latch onto it, and it kickstarted my interest in the very essence of media and understanding the film medium and what it has to offer. I remember asking how they got Jar Jar to exist on screen and he told me they made him out of CGI, and I interpreted that as they somehow made a real-life computer model out of him and that they were actually interacting with like a physical, solid hologram. Anyway, revisiting the franchise and diving into more of its intricacies now (like the production diaries) is like an absolute goldmine. There are so many aspects of it that 100% contributed to and nurtured my goals, passions, and ultimately who I am as a person. Here is some of my very recent art for good measure:

Up next up we got Lord of the Rings (dir. Peter Jackson, December 2001 – December 2003) or I guess a better way to put it would be those plus The Hobbit (December 2012 – December 2014) trilogy. I think it was earlier than the Marvel phase (which follows this section) because like Star Wars I can’t really remember my first viewing of it, but I definitely watched it all. It might’ve been around grade 3 so 2011-ish? Quick anecdote, one time I had a sleepover I was really excited for, and as we all know when you’re excited for something as a kid and it’s later on in the day, time doesn’t actually pass at all, and so my genius ass decided to flip on The Fellowship of the Ring and boom it was 5 pm and time to leave. Also my grandparents from my mom’s side of the family (they’re German so we call them oma and opa) were visiting once and my opa (grandpa equivalent) wanted to watch something so I was like “omg Lord of the Rings is perfect there are so many characters he can feel empowered by (Gandalf and Saruman because they’re old)”. Phenomenal logic—now thinking back it was probably much too violent for his tastes but yknow.

I love Lord of the Rings so much because it’s the true embodiment of an ideal fantasy story; there’s such pure character dynamics and personalities and Tolkien created such an incredibly solid world in which these stories take place. Man knew his stuff, and in turn provided a charming and utterly wonderful scape for young minds to roam free within. I was going to talk about this if I did my other culminating idea regarding masculinity within the media, but I have the perfect opportunity to do so here: something so great about said world is how sincere and genuine a lot of the male characters are (yknow minus people like Denethor and Alfred). Namely the fellowship, they all openly care for and are affectionate towards one another, something we rarely see between men both in modern media and in real life. Aragorn is a perfect example of someone owning and being comfortable in his masculinity. He is kind to and uplifts others, and communicates openly with them. He isn’t afraid of being intimate and vulnerable towards them, either. We see this in Boromir’s death scene. Aragorn doesn’t patronize him for trying to take the Ring, he consoles Boromir in his last moments and they treat each other with the utmost tenderness and respect—not callously or stiffly. Right after decapitating an orc, Aragorn is still able to run to his side, hold him, and kiss him on the forehead following his passing. Aragorn also isn’t afraid to share fame or glory, in fact he never seeks it out in the first place despite his lineage. It was at the battle of Helm’s Deep that he embraced that destine to be king, not out of lust for power, but because these people needed guidance and leadership and he could provide it for them. He elevates others in an incredibly positive and empowering way, especially Frodo and Éowyn, and is content with the fact that the story is not about him. Even at his own coronation, he directs every single person’s attention to the literal earth-saving feat that the hobbits have achieved in light of his own massive accomplishment. He is such a great role model to have been able to look up and aspire to be like, and I wish there were more characters and people like him.

I was a fan of those original films at an earlier point in my life, but the thing that brought that interest back a little stronger was undoubtedly the release of the Hobbit prequels. Like the Star Wars prequels, everyone can say what they want but they are very gorgeous to me. I skipped out on seeing Frozen with my class to go see The Desolation of Smaug with my dad and that was SUCH a good decision. Although, I’m rewatching them all now and Battle of the Five Armies kinda sucks at the beginning. They kill Smaug in like the first five minutes and like it wasn’t bad but it was very anticlimactic. I also don’t like how they shoved Legolas in there, his personality is really jaded and he’s kind of a big prick in those films. But it’s fine I love Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage and the rest of the dwarves the most. They were obviously the most significant and I like them a lot, and there are three movies as opposed to the one book so there’s even more content!

WHEW sorry about that anyway The Hobbit really was the revival/rekindling of that past love for Tolkien’s world. I also had a good close friend who was also along for the ride as well—being able to be into these things alongside someone is always fun and I’m grateful she was there and shared my same energy. She had the Lego game for that one, very similar free-roam concept as my Marvel one (coming up next), so we had lots of fun with that too. To reiterate, I am rewatching these movies again now as an older person with like an actual conscience, and my takeaway from them is vastly different on more of like… a philosophical level, I suppose. I appreciate the process of things more and the backstory behind Tolkien’s lore and the timeless characters and deeper meanings that he’s conceived. But that wouldn’t be very chronological of me to go into it here so moving on.

Proceeding next, around grade four at the most (so just after it came out), I watched The Avengers (dir. Joss Whedon, 2012). Not only did this single-handedly make my art convictions explode (in a good way), it also instigated my love for soundtracks (and also the entire Marvel universe but we’ll obviously be covering that very soon).

The Avengers was like an epiphany for me. Literally ground-breaking and earth-shattering. Changed my entire 10-year-old life. It was all that I ever wanted and more, and since it was around 2012-13 that I became aware of its existence, the internet community was blossoming with possibilities and content. That same friend liked it as well! My Avengers/Marvel phase definitely rivals my Star Wars phase; I think I watched The Avengers first, and then my dad was like “yeah ok you need to watch everything else now” and so henceforth Captain America and Iron Man and Thor. Those were very good times, and I actually remember experiencing all of them for the first time ever. The Christmas of 2013 was absolutely wild. I only got Marvel related gifts which was incredible at the time. My first ever ‘art of’ book was for the Avengers film, too! I also got an arc reactor shirt that actually lit up and I thought that was the absolute coolest thing ever, and then I remember I cut my tongue on this candy I was eating and my mouth bled profusely for a while. However the most iconic gift of all was my copy of Lego Marvel Superheroes for the PS3. I finished it in about 2 days, and it’s the only Lego game that I’ve gotten 100% completed progress on. I love that game dearly and still play it sometimes. The thing that I love specifically about it was the ability to free-roam the entirety of New York City as any character you wanted, me and that friend would do that exclusively for hours on end and make up our own stories with all the characters. Here is Galactus perusing the streets

Speaking of characters, this was the first thing that really got me making up and drawing a shit ton (apologies for lack of a better phrase) of original characters. I’d make superhero characters for me and my friend (ok I guess I should give her a name huh), Mackenzie, and even for random people in my class cause we needed to fill in some blanks in the stories we’d make. I’d create comics, write little stories, make variation after variation of these people we came up with, and of course like normal children me and Mackenzie would go to the park near my old house and pretend we were said characters. Man it was so fun. Then we’d do all those personality quizzes to find out which member you were most like. Mackenzie and I would do these quizzes on none other than our state-of-the-art BlackBerry playbooks. For me it was usually either Iron Man or Thor, and Mackenzie had this weird curse where she’d only ever get Loki as a result for anything at all which was very hilarious to me. Circling back to soundtracks, The Avengers OST was one of my first full album purchases. The main theme was my favourite track out of all of them for obvious reasons, but I still paid respects to all of them and listened to it often. Since I bought it with my dad’s Apple ID, it’d show up on the communal iPad that we used for music in the kitchen and I have full recollection of my grandpa playing it on blast in the morning to wake us up one time. I was aggravated at first but then when I realized what it was I was like ah yes of course. After the Avengers soundtrack, I got the Wolverine (2013) OST and that was fun but I didn’t like all the tracks in the same way, but THEN I got the Days of Future Past soundtrack. THAT is a good soundtrack AND a phenomenal film.

Anyway, after that I was a Marvel connoisseur for a little while. Like Star Wars I got an entire character encyclopedia, a bunch of comics, posters, you name it. My parents and sister also enjoyed dabbling in stuff too; we’d watch the animated series together on Netflix and eventually ended up seeing all the new movies together when they came out in theatres (except not my mom though cause she gets motion sickness from action films). Marvel was a staple in the adolescence stage of my life before I was introduced to anime (then it was all downhill from there (I am kidding anime was a part of my life that I look back at with great fondness)). It was reason for so much of what I explored with my art and my own imagination, and was one of my first experiences in what it was like to be a part of a fandom-esque community. There were also memes ripe for the picking when it came to Marvel; as one can assume I had no access to memes in kindergarten to grade 1 in the late 2000s. It was such a lovely and warm point in my life, something that established what kind of passion I really poured into something when I really liked it. And akin to Star Wars, there’s just so much to like about it. There’s so much to offer, an array of colourful characters and storylines—and of course, creative liberty when it came to superpowers and that whole narrative. The sky was literally the limit. Here is some of my ancient 2014 portraiture that I dug up for the sake of this assignment

Ok heads up we are now veering AWAY from childhood content and touching on a film that played a more personal part, namely during a very pivotal point, in my life. I picked up The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky, 1999) at a bookstore and read it at the speed of light; I was crying in my room on my bed by the time I finished it. I love how we see Charlie’s character change over the course of the novel, not only through what he describes or how he perceives things but his style of writing in general. Anyway, I wanted to read the novel first before I watched the movie (dir. Stephen Chbosky 2012), and I was pleasantly surprised by how accurate the movie is to the book (well duh the author directed it). I read/watched this right before I started high school, so I was kind of (but not really considering the built-up childhood trauma he has yikes) in the same position as the protagonist, Charlie, as he was starting out (minus a lot of the major aspects of his character and what he went/goes through (like drugs)). A lot of the things that he learns were really important takeaways for me before heading into that new chapter of life like he did.

Contrary to the title of the (I know it started out as a novel but I’m just gonna say film) film, you need to put yourself out there and advocate for yourself in life. It’s great to be a trustworthy individual whom everyone is vaguely aware of and likes, but you need to approach things with reason and make yourself known somehow. At the time, both before and during grade 9, and even still sometimes in the present (though I do it more deliberately now), I found myself just standing on the sidelines as life happened before me and I let it sweep me away without having any feet planted on the ground. It was like I wasn’t in control of it, and in turn I might’ve struggled in some areas more than I should have. I didn’t own anything, like I wasn’t totally present. Similar to Charlie, I was a person who’d always be there for others, someone people could talk to and confide in, and ultimately someone people truly enjoyed having around—which is pretty great. But I didn’t fully know my position or what I ultimately wanted in any of those situations. Don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly grateful for my entire freshman experience and I absolutely wouldn’t have wanted it any other way considering all personal circumstances, but with that foreknowledge of the importance of making a name for yourself, especially in high school, I think I was able to branch out with ease a bit more than I would have without it. I at least was aware of what was going on in that sense. That movie is really special to me because it ended up being a pseudo-mirror of my own experiences. Charlie’s English teacher, Bill, embraced his writing abilities and urged him to participate more, share his own thoughts, and express more of his personality by giving him books for extra reading. My first ever semester of Laurier did the exact same for me as Bill did for Charlie. It fostered my interests and intellectual abilities, and you guys constantly urged me and everyone else to go above and beyond what we were used to because you knew we could do it (even though I feel like I could’ve done a lot better on some things as my marks in grade 9 are a bit lower than I’d like them to be, but hey it was a time of adjustment and I did my best and that’s what matters). As a direct result of Laurier, I’m really lucky to have been surrounded by an amazing group of passionate students, a handful of which became my closest friends throughout high school, and that my very first teachers of the day were people who uplifted me and genuinely cared not only about furthering my academic work, but about my growth as a person.

Whew let’s wade out of the sap and get into some more energetic stuff!!! To tie off this recollection of my life through film the most recent and notable movie that impacted my life was, the one and only, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (dir. Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman, 2018). Similar to The Desolation of Smaug and Frozen, I went with my dad to the cinema but parted ways with him to watch this movie by my lonesome (he went to the Aquaman theatre instead smh). Again, phenomenal choice. I talked about this in my grade 11 blog, but Spider-Verse is an absolute masterpiece in every way shape and form.

At the point I watched it, I knew what I wanted to generally do with my life (be part of the art industry) and the visuals of this movie alone were enough to make me want to elope with it and never see or talk to anyone ever again. It is such a gorgeous film. The way they strayed from the yucky 3D conventions norm—and there is literally no way they could’ve done the majority of what they did in that movie effectively if they did it live action. Or, they could definitely try and make an attempt, but it’d look like garbage. For example, a lot of the action scenes in general and also when they become abstracted like with the particle collider. 40-60 fps would not do that sense of movement justice at all. Too smooth. Not enough grit and personality.

Anyway, they also pioneered new animation techniques in mixing 2D and 3D, and explored a newer superhero trope where the main character’s own mundane life struggles are equally as important as him trying to sort things out with these new powers. It’s more of a battle between what Miles wants with his own personal life—new school, the friends he won’t be able to see because of said new school, owning his own abilities and adjusting to change. Then on top of that he’s met with all these alternate-dimension people that he has to work and be on par with. Aside from the art, I thought the overall message was every special: Miles learns through trial and tribulations, unsureness—and most importantly, failure. Confidence and optimism, in regard to what he thinks he can and can’t do, is vital. Amidst everything he is faced with, he starts out as just another kid who wants to be just another kid. But we all have something special inside us that we must choose to embrace if we want to truly flourish. We see him come to terms with the fact that he really is capable of greatness if he sets his mind to it—and that’s the main message: anyone can wear the mask. And can we talk about that soundtrack??? Not only the instrumentals, but the actual songs were great too! “Sunflower” and “What’s Up Danger”? Lovely and fitting. And back to the OST, the Prowler’s theme??? Shivers.

There is such a unique and beautiful vibe to this movie, and it’s inspired me in more ways than one. Aside from that nice motivational stuff, it also has recently played a tremendous part in developing my own art. All of the artists who worked on the film are people I immediately tried to find on social media so I could see more of their work. I purchased the art book, and even bought a 2D sequence illustration course provided by one of the art directors, Patrick O’Keefe. That course also came with the (digital) brushes he uses, and I’ve used them in pretty much every single one of my pieces since downloading them. This movie really showed me the possibilities of what could be achieved in the art industry, and it made me want to be a part of it so much more than I was before. I want to be involved in revolutionary visual achievements, and I want to develop characters and stories and worlds that are as interesting and loveable as the ones in Spider-Verse. (my stuff featured below)

So there you have it folks, 5 (five) of the most significant movies in my life relayed in a whopping just over 4000 words. I hope this has been enlightening for all you readers out there, perhaps you now have a better understanding of how I came to be personality/interest-wise, and I hope you can catch a glimpse of that same importance these pieces of media have in regard to me and my values.

[jeremyknox]

i was tagged in 3 tag games in the last day or so and instead of making 3 separate posts in which i tag much of the same people, i decided to consolidate. i love you all who tagged me.

uh....idk if i have anyone to tag? you guys kind of covered everyone i WOULD tag. i guess @flowerparrish, @colormekorrasami, @jordanetalaredead, @megayest, @twin-ace, @lakesandquarries, @peachy-shrimp, and @hotdamnlookatthispan.... if any of these look interesting, you should totally do them!

okay everything under the cuuuuut

tag game number one: tagged by the sweetest human, @carrie-frances

what’s your favourite song(s) to sing/hum? this is a tough one? currently i’ve been singing You by Keaton Henson a lot and also Ophelia by The Lumineers. Let Her Go by Passenger is another goodie for singing lately. Oh and Lost Boy!!!! by Ruth B.

what’s your favourite flower/tree/plant? I love nature wow. My favorite tree is definitely a Weeping Cherry Tree or Willow. My favorite flowers are sunflowers and roses! Plants in general, I just really love cacti? It’s a product of having family I adore in Arizona haha

what do you always doodle? hm... cats, mostly

how do you take your tea/coffee? With plenty of splenda and some milk

favourite candle scent? Vanilla, mostly. just sweet things

what perfume do you wear? body sprays from bath and bodyworks, usually vanilla or peach

what’s your go-to dance move when you’re alone? i have zero clue haha

favourite quote? i don’t know off of the top of my head! perhaps the one i have tattooed, from star wars. “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”

favourite self care routine? putting on good smelling lotions. reading a book. snuggling oliver. calling someone i love.

fuzzy socks or house slippers? both! but mostly fuzzy socks

what colour are your eyes? just plain ole brown

what’s your favourite eye colour on others? idk? i think blue or green but i adore brown eyes on everyone

favourite season? why? autumn, i like the colors and the clothes and the smells

cheek, neck or nose kisses? cheek! but the real MVP are forehead ones

what does your happy place look like? the beach but without all the people. or a quiet forest with light filtering in

favourite breed of dog? i’ve always loved boxers the most, and cavaliers

do you ever want to be married? if so, what colours would you pick for your wedding theme? yes, i think i do? i don’t know what colors, it’s always changing. i think it depends on the person i’m with because their input would matter. i’d want the colors to be whatever colors they think of when they see me and vice versa

cursive or print? it’s a solid mix but mostly print

favourite weather? raining and warm, but not thundering

tag game number two: tagged by the amazing @dancyon

— What was your last…

1. Drink: iced tea

2. Phone call: my aunt calling with some hard news

3. Text message: my aunt with an update

4. Song you listened to: love me by the 1975

5. Time you cried: yesterday and i’m gonna cry later today @ love, simon

6. Dated someone twice: yeah

7. Kissed someone and regretted it: for sure

8. Been cheated on: by two different people, apparently im easy to cheat on

9. Lost someone special: sadly, i’ve lost a few

10. Been depressed: lmao got that good good depression goblin

11. Gotten drunk and thrown up: god yeah whoops sorry friends

— Fave colours

12. purple (any shade really)

13. blue (any shade really)

14. soft yellow

— in the last year have you…

15. Made new friends: ahhhh!!!! yes i have ♥

16. Fallen out of love: hhhhhhhhhh

17. Laughed until you cried: probably

18. Found out someone was talking about you: oh yeah

19. Met someone who changed you: yeah, in more ways than one

20. Found out who your friends are: idk???? kinda yeah

21. Kissed someone on your facebook friends list: uh i think i have my ex still

— General

22. How many of your facebook friends do you know irl: majority

23. Do you have any pets: my boy @ollycat and then my dogs and cats @ my parents house

24. Do you want to change your name: i actually did but now i’m back to my birthname bc being NB is one big ???? of what do i want 

25. What did you do for your last birthday: oh shit well w my friends i got drunk on rum, dressed up like a pirate, and played d&d. and then fam was the usual cheesecake factory adventure

26. What time did you wake up today: uh around 8 something officially?

27. What were you doing at midnight last night: i think i fell asleep before midnight? if not i was watching Critical Role

28. What is something you can’t wait for: my next tattoo!!

30. What are you listening to right now: just the sounds of my grandparents house

31. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom: I have an ex named Tom and a Grandpa named Tom

32. Something that’s getting on your nerves: just like....everything about this breakup and stuff i guess

33. Most visited website: god uh...tumblr and twitter????

34. Hair colour: naturally a dark brown with some reddish in it. it’s currently died as close as possible to that

35. Long or short hair: medium?

36. Do you have a crush on someone: no currently i’m avoiding all romance like the fucking PLAGUE

37. What do you like about yourself: i’m pretty tenacious

38. Want any piercings: nah, i’m more the tattoo type

39. Blood type: ..............why

40. Nicknames: bird, birb, kbird, kbirb, broseidon

41. Relationship status: single

42. Sign: aries

43. Pronouns: they/them

44. Fave tv show: on air right now it’s b99 and the good place. in general, buffy and gilmore girls

45. Tattoos: i currently have 6 and i want sooooo many more

46. Right or left handed: left!!!!

47: Ever had surgery: tonsils and stomach yeah

48. Piercings: none

49. Sport: none currently but football (soccer) will always have my heart

50. Vacation: currently in arizona!! i’ve been all over though, i miss mexico a lot

51. Trainers:  what does this....mean....like.....shoes???????

— More general

52. Eating: currently nothing? 

53. Drinking: iced tea currently

54. I’m about to watch: LOVE, SIMON AGAIN BITCH!!!!!!!

55. Waiting for: life to feel right

56. Want: a nap, like always

57. Get married: okay your answer of “if i get past my commitment issues and find someone that loves me, sure” was fucking perfect

58. Career: teacher!

— Which is better

59. Hugs or kisses: hugs

60. Lips or eyes: eyes

61. Shorter or taller: taller

62. Older or younger: older

63. Nice arms or stomach: arms

64. Hookup or relationships: relationship

65. Troublemaker or hesitant: hesitant

— Have you ever

66. Kissed a stranger: nope

67. Drank hard liquor: hell yeah

68.Turned someone down: in high school yeah. and like once in college

69. Sex on first date: ........im an ace baby

70: Broken someone’s heart: supposedly

71. Had your heart broken: mhmmmm

72. Been arrested: nah, just brought home by cops

73. Cried when someone died: yeah, i cry at everything but especially death

74. Fallen for a friend: ..........only friends tbh

— Do you believe in

75. Yourself: trying to? cullen says my heart’s vibranium

76. Miracles: some days i do

77. Love at first sight: probably not, i used to though

78. Santa Claus: not anymore

79. Angels: i’d like to

— Misc

80. Eye colour: brown!

81. Best friends name: i mean..... jenny, ellie, michelle, and cullen? plus like max and jor, of course

82. Favourite movie: i guess the princess bride is the Most Favorite of All

83. Favourite actor: my MAIN MAN, hugh jackman

84. Favourite cartoon: danny phantom right now

85. Favourite teacher’s name: in HS it was mrs haley and in college it was dr trainor....grad school so far it’s been jen lynady

final tag game: tagged by the cutest, @blurredmxnds

bold the statements that are true

APPEARANCE:

I am 5'7" or taller

I wear glasses

I have at least one tattoo

I have at least one piercing

I have blonde hair

I have brown eyes

I have short hair

My abs are at least somewhat defined

I have or have had braces

PERSONALITY:

I love meeting new people

People tell me that I’m funny

Helping others with their problems is a big priority for me

I enjoy physical challenges

I enjoy mental challenges

I’m playfully rude with people I know well

I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it

There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY:

I can sing well

I can play an instrument

I can do over 30 pushups without stopping

I’m a fast runner

I can draw well

I have a good memory (lmao about some things???)

I’m good at doing math in my head

I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute

I have beaten at least 2 people in arm wrestling

I know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch

I know how to throw a proper punch

HOBBIES:

I enjoy playing sports

I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else

I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else 

I have learned a new song in the past week

I work out at least once a week

I’ve gone for runs at least once a week in the warmer months

I have drawn something in the past month

I enjoy writing

I do or have done martial arts

EXPERIENCES:

I have had my first kiss

I have had alcohol

I have scored the winning goal in a sports game

I have watched an entire season of a TV show in one sitting

I have been at an overnight event

I have been in a taxi

I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year

I have beaten a video game in one day

I have visited another country

I have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts

RELATIONSHIPS:

I have a crush on a celebrity

I have a crush on someone I know

I have been in at least 3 relationships

I have never been in a relationship

I have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them

I get crushes easily

I have had a crush on someone for over a year

I have been in a relationship for at least a year (on and off)

I have had feelings for a friend

MY LIFE:

I have at least one person I consider a “best friend”

I live close to my school

My parents are still together

I have at least one sibling

I live in the United States

There is snow right now where I live

I have hung out with a friend in the past month

I have at least 15 CDs (somewhere in my things)

I share my room with someone

RANDOM SHIT:

I have breakdanced

I know a person named Jamie

I have had a teacher with a last name that’s hard to pronounce

I have dyed my hair

I’m listening to one song on repeat right now (i JUST ended my thing w this)

I have punched someone in the past week

I know someone who has gone to jail

I have broken a bone (just a toe)

I have eaten a waffle today

I know what I want to do with my life

I speak at least 2 languages

I have made a new friend in the past year

[gethealthy18-blog]

How to Keep Kids Active With Adventure Points

New Post has been published on http://healingawerness.com/news/how-to-keep-kids-active-with-adventure-points/

How to Keep Kids Active With Adventure Points

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Imagine a world where kids happily keep themselves busy and learning while doing activities that they love and learning math at the same time. A place where kids compete in a friendly way by doing athletic activities, creative games, and reading books.

Sounds too good to be true, right?

I’ve always heard that necessity is the mother of invention and this is certainly true of this Adventure Points idea. Ever had one of those motherhood moments where every child needed something at the same time, one had just spilled a smoothie everywhere and the baby needed a diaper change?

I had one of those moments and realized that for the sake of my sanity and the kids’ activity levels I needed to have a plan for summer that didn’t involve them watching TV every day.

We reinstitute the system every summer or over breaks. It puts my kids’ natural creative and competitive sides to work for the good of all!

What Are Adventure Points?

We already have the “Mom I’m Bored Jar” which works really well but is more of a help when they are already bored. I wanted to find a way to encourage them to find activities without getting bored in the first place.

In short, this is a simple system of points for doing creative or athletic activities that encourages movement and creative play over TV watching. It also has surprisingly reduced the bickering and fighting in our house.

The idea for the name “Adventure Points” came from my kids’ hiking boots, which they call “Adventure Boots” since they wear them for hiking, fort building, and other outdoor adventures.

How Adventure Points Work

I sat down with a piece of paper and thought of activities I wanted my kids to do this summer and assigned a point value to each. The kids helped me brainstorm and we came up with a big list of activities that they enjoy (that don’t involve a screen or a snack). Things like:

Riding bikes (30 mins) = 10 points

Pull-ups = 2 points each

Push-ups = 1 point each

Swimming = (30 mins) = 10 points

Drawing (30 mins) = 5 points

Preparing a meal for the family = 20 points

Reading a book = 5 points

Reading a chapter book = 20 points

Fort-building = 20 points per hour

Folding origami (30 mins) = 10 points (Great tutorials in this book)

Make paper airplanes (30 mins) = 10 points (They love this book for ideas)

Draw with sidewalk chalk (30 mins) = 10 points

Read to a sibling (30 mins) = 25 points each

Climb a tree = 5 points per tree

Do a chore (not on regular chore list) = 10 points

Play Monopoly = 15 points

Play Scrabble = 15 points

Play Battleship = 10 points

Play Chess = 10 points

Play Uno = 5 points

Play War (card game) = 10 points

Play Apples to Apples = 10 points

Play hopscotch = 2 points

Jump rope = 3 points

Weed garden (30 mins) = 10 points

Play a game of wiffle ball = 15 points

Water the plants = 5 points

Run around the yard 5 times = 10 points

Jump on the trampoline for 10 minutes = 3 points

Do a puzzle = 20 points

Do 25 cartwheels = 10 points

Write and mail a letter to friends or family = 10 points

Create a scavenger hunt for siblings = 10 points

Play Legos (30 mins) = 10 points

Get caught doing something unexpected and kind = 50 points bonus

Rollerblade outside (30 mins) = 10 points

Listen to a history podcast = 10 points

Watch a TED talk (from this list) = 10 points

Watch/do a lesson from Udemy or Great Courses = 15 points

I thought of about 50 activities that were worth points and assigned values to each. Then, I made a list of fun family activities that would be good goals for milestone points. 100 points would earn a healthy dessert after dinner one night while 1000 points would earn a larger reward like a special activity, new art supplies, or a contribution toward something they’ve been wanting. (Tip: Use things you plan on doing anyway! This is just a fun way for the kids to earn them).

I’ve also found that the kids are excited to be helpful around the house when I offer “bonus points” for doing thing above and beyond their normal responsibilities.

After a few days of using the system, I decided to create two separate lists for older kids (5+) and younger ones (4 and under) to match their skill levels since the younger kids were being left behind by older kids (who could do many more pull-ups!).

How to Implement Adventure Points

If you’d like to try this system (and I’d highly recommend it!), here are a few tips for getting started:

1. Decide on Activities That Work in Your Home/Yard

Make a list of activities you’d like your kids to do and break it down by age group if needed. Figure out how much each activity is worth in the point system you’d like to use and assign a point value to each. Feel free to use my list as a start!

2. Decide on Rewards

Chances are that while points are a great motivator, your kids won’t be thrilled with just earning points that don’t mean anything. Decide on what the points will allow the kids to do or earn and create a list of this for the kids. We try to focus on activities and experiences rather than stuff so our rewards were activities, but physical rewards can be great too especially if they will help kids be active or build a life skill.

Some ideas of material rewards that encourage learning:

3. Track the Points

I realized that the system wouldn’t encourage the independent creative time I was hoping for if the kids had to check in with me every time they did an activity to get the points. I decided to use the honor system (which has worked really well so far) and get each kid a small spiral notebook to track points. This way, the kids track their points each day and I just tally once a day to keep the running totals.

I also created a chart to help track the points for each activity. You can download a copy for yourself here.

4. Enjoy Watching Your Kids Learn and Play!

I was really hoping that creating “Adventure Points” would free up some of my time by stopping the refrains of  “I’m bored” and “Can we watch a movie.” It certainly has and I’m definitely grateful for that.

I’ve found that even more than the free time, I’ve enjoyed watching my kids creativity soar and the older kids play with the younger ones more easily since they have more structure and ideas for activities (and because there is a goal in mind). Also, keeping track of points has been a fun and unexpected math boost for the little kids as I keep hearing questions like “Does 243 plus 15 equal 258?!” 🙂

Your turn! What are some fun ways you encourage creativity and activity during free time at home?

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/120815/adventure-points/

[getanattitude]

15 Weird Hobbies That'll Make You Better at best keyboard for learning piano

“THE more you dig into a bit of Ives, the greater pleasure you will get from it,” the pianist Jeremy Denk reported just lately, sitting at a piano within a rehearsal space for the Juilliard School. “It’s like fixing a puzzle.”

Then he enthusiastically deconstructed Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, untangling and describing the themes and motifs embedded in the complicated textures of this fascinating rating.

Mr. Denk is about to release a disc, “Jeremy Denk Plays Ives” (Assume Denk Media), featuring two piano sonatas, an esoteric selection of repertory for any debut solo album. But then, there's nothing generic concerning this adventurous musician. His vivacious intellect is manifest both equally in his actively playing and on his site, Consider Denk, an outlet for astute musical observations and witty musings, irrespective of whether a lament about inedible meatballs or even a spoof interview with Sarah Palin.

Mr. Denk will show his far more mainstream credentials when he performs Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. one with Charles Dutoit plus the Philadelphia Orchestra commencing on Thursday for the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and on Oct. twelve at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Denk argues that the Ives sonatas, composed early in the twentieth century, are mistakenly categorized as avant-garde performs as an alternative to “epic Passionate sonatas with Lisztian thematic transformations.” To your informal listener, the music that Mr. Denk describes inside the CD booklet as “good, inventive, tender, edgy, wild, primary, witty, haunting” can undoubtedly audio avant-garde. Ives, who built his living in the insurance plan organization, incorporated jazz, riffs on Beethoven and American hymns, marches and folk songs into his daringly experimental piano sonatas, rich in polytonality, thematic layering and rhythmic complexity.

“It’s so beautifully in-your-experience,” Mr. Denk reported, demonstrating a particularly maniacal passage in the “Concord” Sonata. “It’s also fairly incredibly unsightly. There is something maddening about his humorousness. Ives is constantly thumbing his nose at you in a means.”

But Mr. Denk suggests that Ives’s tenderness, which he illuminates beautifully in this recording, is underappreciated. “Ives is often about points recalled,” he reported, “or Recollections or visions fetched from some complicated spot.”

He performed the harmonically misty passages in the second movement from the “Concord,” wherever Ives directs that a piece of wood be pressed over the upper keys to generate a cluster chord. “It doesn’t experience gimmicky in the least to me,” Mr. Denk stated. “It’s all blues in the bottom. Ives realized the best way to use People little clichéd bits of Americana in a method that all of a sudden receives your gut. It is possible to’t consider how touching it really is.”

Mr. Denk, forty, continues to be keen about Ives due to the fact his undergraduate days at Oberlin in Ohio, wherever he carried a double important in piano overall performance and chemistry. “My total double diploma knowledge was to some degree of the constant freakout of one style of An additional,” he explained.

He had been a “genuinely nerdy high school university student” with a constrained social existence, he stated. “Ever considering that I used to be A child I desired to check out Oberlin and desired the liberal arts. Definitely I really get intense satisfaction out of drawing connections involving pieces and poems and literature and ideas.”

Mr. Denk explained himself for a “practice maniac,” but his horizons have extended much outside of the exercise place because Oberlin. Although nibbling an unlimited piece of chocolate cream pie at an Upper West Facet diner near the condominium he has rented given that around 1999, Mr. Denk referred to his website, calling it “an surprisingly superior outlet to launch tensions of 1 sort or An additional.” He stated it had drawn new listeners to his concert events. An avid reader of liberal political weblogs, Mr. Denk goals of writing a classical audio Variation of Wonkette, he said, but that would be difficult to do without the need of offending men and women. And he attempts to stay clear of offending individuals, he added, however he did not too long ago post a rant about method notes.

Mr. Denk, who calls himself “a true Francophile,” is tender-spoken but rigorous, his dialogue peppered with references to numerous “obsessions”: espresso, Ives, Bach, Proust, Baudelaire and Emerson.

He went off on “a Balzac mania” a few years back, he stated.

“That was a perilous time, and almost everything in life appeared drawn from a Balzac novel,” he additional. “I shed about three decades of my life to Proust. I’m confident it changed almost everything, which includes my enjoying.

“In the future my manager was like, ‘Dude, You need to center on your career and acquiring your stuff collectively.’ ” At that time, Mr. Denk said, “I had been bringing Proust to meetings.” He added: “I’m not sure I actually experienced a profession route. I had been just doing my weird thing, which most likely appeared like a disastrous nonroute to a lot of the folks who ended up watching more than me. I don't forget some exasperated conferences with my administration, However they had been extremely patient and devoted, which I’m insanely grateful for.”

Mr. Denk grew up in Las Cruces, N.M., considered one of two brothers, a son of songs-loving nonmusician mothers and fathers. His father, who may have a doctorate in chemistry, is (at different instances) a Roman Catholic monk plus a director of Personal computer science at New Mexico State College.

Mr. Denk remains addicted to the chili peppers of Las Cruces, he stated, seemingly only fifty percent joking: “The red along with the eco-friendly and The full spirituality of chili peppers. It’s even now a big A part of my everyday living. Once i go house I visit this serious dive and obsess more than their green meat burrito.”

When not on tour, Mr. Denk spends time together with his boyfriend, Patrick Posey, a saxophonist as well as director of orchestral functions and scheduling at Juilliard, where Mr. Denk received his doctorate, studying with Herbert Stessin. Mr. Stessin remembers having been amazed by “the maturity and depth” of Mr. Denk’s actively playing and remembers him as “a unprecedented scholar who absorbed items pretty rapidly.”

Mr. Denk said he “was in school eternally” until eventually “in some unspecified time in the future I made a decision to rely on my very own instincts.” Now he teaches double-diploma undergraduates with the Bard School Conservatory of New music. The pianist Allegra Chapman, who examined with him, said he was “concerned with a great deal greater than the notes to the webpage, always bringing up literary and historical references.”

“Now I attempt to method tunes in a additional holistic point of view,” she included. “He is very passionate. He accustomed to leap throughout the room and bounce about and wave his arms. It was genuinely pleasurable. He attempted to get me to think about the new music with a sense of humor.”

This combination of passion, humor and intellect, so vivid in both equally Mr. Denk’s taking part in and his composing, is exactly what distinguishes him, based on the violinist Joshua Bell. The 2 are actually regular duo associates considering the fact that 2004, when they performed at the Spoleto Festival United states.

“You get the intellectual musicians or people that don their heart on their own sleeve with no wide range of musical assumed,” Mr. Bell explained, “but Jeremy manages to accomplish both equally, and that’s best. Now we have an abundance of arguments in rehearsal, that's the pleasurable portion in addition. The fact we don’t usually see eye to eye retains factors refreshing and would make me issue anything I do.”

Mr. Bell, whose choices of repertory tend to be far more regular than Individuals of his much more adventurous colleague, reported he wasn’t normally an Ives supporter: “That has a good deal of recent audio I’m somewhat cautious. Despite Ives, right until I read Jeremy. He just provides it alive. He has these kinds of an awesome imagination, and nothing at all is done randomly.”

Ives’s piano sonatas, Mr. Denk explained, “are in a way like animals that don’t want to be tamed.”

“Just about every functionality should be so various,” he additional, a single explanation he was originally hesitant to report them. Like Bach, he reported, Ives leaves quite a bit towards the performer’s creativity.

A wonderful interpretation of your “Goldberg” Variations at Symphony House in 2008 uncovered Mr. Denk’s profound affinity with Bach. Mr. Denk will complete the perform and Guides one and a pair of of Ligeti’s Études at Zankel Corridor on Feb. sixteen.

To maintain the “Goldberg” Variants fresh new, Mr. Denk is incorporating new fingerings, he reported, “to reactivate the relationship in between my brain and my fingers when I’m playing it.”

“I think it’s an actual magical area When you've got the muscle memory,” he additional, “though the Mind is in advance in the fingers.”

Altering the fingerings is one method to stay clear of routine, he reported. “I get real enjoyment outside of crafting in an extremely excellent fingering. It's like relearning the piece, and it makes you not just take any Observe without any consideration.”

The musical philosophy Mr. Denk relates to Bach, Ives together with other repertory is probably most effective summed up in that site put up on application notes: “I’ve never ever been an enormous admirer on the ‘Think about how revolutionary this piece was when it was prepared’ faculty of inspiration. For my dollars, it ought to be groundbreaking now. (And it is actually.) Whichever else the composer may have intended, he / she didn’t want you to Feel, ‘Boy, that should are already interesting again then.’ The most basic compositional intent, absolutely the ur-intent, is you Enjoy it now, you help it become happen now.”

[samanthasroberts]

230-plus obstacles in one race sets world record for fun

(CNN)The rat race, metaphorically speaking, is nothing to aspire to. It represents a craven desire for money and power through one’s career. Even if you win the rat race, as a favorite teacher of mine liked to say, you’re still a rat.

Fit Nation: Around the World in 8 Races will air three times on Saturday, July 21, between 1 and 6 p.m. ET and one time between 5 and 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 22.

The Rat Race Dirty Weekend — which attracts thousands of competitors every year to the expansive grounds of a noble estate two hours north of London — shares a few qualities with the career metaphor. Ambition, pushing oneself and overcoming obstacles that stand in the way of your goal are common to both.

But the objectives between the rat race and the Rat Race are much different. The physical race is less about getting ahead than it is about fun, fitness and the satisfaction of overcoming fear and physical limitation in order to accomplish the course.

With more than 230 obstacles spread over a single 20-mile loop, the Rat Race Dirty Weekend purports to be the largest obstacle course race (or OCR) in the world. Maybe it is — it’s impossible to prove and easy to outdo, depending how loose your definition of “obstacle” — but that’s not the point. The point, it seems, is to be the most fun OCR in the world. And from the smiles, good humor and bonhomie among the more than 5,000 rats who turned up this year, I’m going to declare mission accomplished.

For the event’s founder, Jim Mee, the balance is allowing adults to act like kids, while also making the course very challenging.

Build a better rat trap

Rat Race, a company that organizes Dirty Weekend and a host of other adventure courses throughout the world, is Mee’s brainchild. He isn’t just the founder and director, but he designs all of the races, as well.

Mee had participated in various OCR courses, including the Tough Guy, a public, non-professional course in Wolverhampton, England, created by a former British soldier in 1987 and considered to be the first of its breed. Mee saw an opportunity to do these races bigger, safer, better organized and more enjoyable. More well-known OCRs — Mee describes them as “suffer-fests” — tend to be more testosterone-fueled than family-friendly.

The Rat Race series began in 2004, but the first Dirty Weekend event at Burghley House was in 2013. The family that owns Burghley House — reminiscent of “Downton Abbey” with its Elizabethan architecture and expansive grounds — wanted to partner with Rat Race and use the grounds for more than just horse events. Some of the obstacles are so elaborate and large that they live at Burghley House year-round.

This year, more than 3,500 competitors and their families camped on the grounds of Burghley House. There’s a concert after the race, a beer and food hall, and hot tubs you can soak in after the race for a modest fee. The whole experience draws teams of friends and families from all over the UK, Europe and beyond; runners came from 47 countries this year.

Not content to just be the world’s longest OCR, the Dirty Weekend also featured a potential Guinness World Record-breaking length of monkey bars this year. Richard Heady and Thomas Wolfe await official recognition for each monkeying 56.6 meters of bars.

There were some growing pains on race day. Some route confusion met runners approaching one wooded area. A bouncy obstacle couldn’t be inflated in time. But with 230 others, what’s one or two fewer? Every year organizers make changes, adding different and more challenges.

Most participants say their favorite obstacle is the last one: a 60-foot-high water slide. Competitors barrel down the chute to a splashy end, just feet away from the rentable hot tubs and beer tent.

Technically, the winners this year were Jason Burgess, who completed the course in just over three hours, and Nicola Johnson at just over 3½ hours, and they each won a modest prize amount of 500 pounds. But the real winners were everyone who turned out for the most fun that a stately English estate can provide in a single day.

Everyone — kids and adults — was in a great mood afterward, enthusiastically recounting harrowing moments. A concert that night was headlined by Dave Pearce and the Ministry of Sound. Festivities ended at midnight, but the happy memories and sense of accomplishment last much longer.

Use the Force

Training for OCRs is multidiscipline. Athletes need to master long-distance running, weight training and then specific skills related to obstacles, such as rope climbing, swimming, balancing and swinging from rings.

“You can’t really train for it; that’s kinda why I like it,” said Dominique Searle, a UK police officer who came in third among women last year, her first time, despite a goal just to finish.

In addition to putting in the training miles for what is nearly a marathon of running alone, a variety of strength and conditioning workouts are important for building up more than just running fitness. One runner attributed his amateur boxing training with giving him upper body strength that served him during the Rat Race. OCR athletes who have space and the budget might build mini obstacle courses in their backyards.

OCRs are all-body workouts: arms, legs, core, heart and lungs. “You use parts of your body you don’t normally use,” Mee said. “That’s part of the beauty of it.”

But it’s also a workout for your psyche. “I know my legs can do it,” said John Burrows, the gardener at Burghley House, who competed in Dirty Weekend for the third time this year. “It’s just my head that needs to be told, as well.”

One of the largest of the Rat Race obstacles, the “Ewok Village” rope structure, greets racers with a giant banner written in Star Wars font: “May the Force be with you.” And it does seem that in addition to physical fitness, there is another force at play.

For some, the psychological obstacle isn’t endurance or managing pain but rather fear, particularly the common phobias associated with height, water and confined spaces. One obstacle combines two of those as you plunge two stories down into a pool of water from which you swim out.

Searle said the Rat Race Dirty Weekend helped her combat the PTSD she felt after being hit on her bike by an off-road vehicle. “These races have totally brought me back out of myself and having fun with [my] kids again, rather than being scared and not wanting to go out,” she said.

“We see a lot of our participants doing this for mental health,” Mee said. “You have to face your fears.”

Newcomers should ease into the sport with shorter or less competitive races. The Dirty Weekend Rat Race, for example, offers a 13-mile option. There are many OCRs available, but given that the sport has little regulation and some degree of risk, it may be prudent to stick with more established providers.

There is not a lot of gear required for OCR. “A pair of trainers, my mates, grit, determination, and that’s all I need,” Mee said. Reebok and New Balance are among the manufacturers jumping on the trend to make “OCR shoes,” distinguished by added tread (good for climbing) and good drainage (for water obstacles). Some OCR competitors wear gloves to help with grip, especially when they are soaking wet.

Many runners use small running backpacks that hold water containers and protein snacks; staying hydrated between water stations and replenishing burned calories is vital. But for some obstacles, having a backpack was a liability. Many throw their vests to the other side of an obstacle before tackling it.

One of the toughest aspects that Dirty Weekend runners cited was the cold. The race has various parts in which you must get partially or fully wet. Having quick-drying running clothes is key to letting your body reheat. Avoid wool socks or clothes, because they chafe when they get wet. As with many outdoor sports, OCR requires managing clothing to avoid getting too cold or too hot. Whether it’s sweat or muddy pond water, wetness cools your body even when you don’t want it to.

There aren’t any public data on injuries from OCR events, but trails, jumps, inclines and the obstacles themselves create opportunities for twisted ankles, shoulder strain and pulled muscles.

See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter.

Twisted ankles from uneven terrain and obstacle climbing are the most common injury at Dirty Weekend, Mee estimates, along with reinjury of pre-existing shoulder issues, such as a dislocated one. There is a doctor on-site during the race, and they’ve posted a safety video on YouTube.

Bad form or poor training can cause repetitive stress, given the length of the race. That said, unlike in most purely running races, there is less emphasis on speed, and many OCR participants prudently take their time getting over, under and through them.

In general, OCR athletes should compete defensively, staying alert to potential hazards. That’s what a smart rat would do. That’s how they get the big cheese.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/230-plus-obstacles-in-one-race-sets-world-record-for-fun/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/230-plus-obstacles-in-one-race-sets-world-record-for-fun/

[ferix-writes]

for the writing meme: 3, 4, 22, 23, 40, 47

3. Name three favorite writers.

I’m actually going to name four, but two tend to work together for their FFXV content so w/e haha. 

One is @tenshinokorin, because her fics are just inspiring in how hilariously in character they are. I love how she takes whatever idea she’s focused on and just goes for it full force. Her writing is like life goals level to me lol. To have the drive and the skill to take even the oddest situation and make it relevant to canon is just so cool. 

The pair is @schalakitty and @inevitablesurrender​. Their mastery of the boys’ relationship and all the wonderful smut they have given the fandom is staggering! Seriously, I get so excited when they publish something new. 

The last is @demnocts​. I think Gil was the fic that got me into his work, but he has so many good ones! My favorite thing about his fics is that the storytelling is so captivating. Whenever I read his stuff I can’t tear my eyes away!

4. Name three authors that were influential to your work and why. 

The first is J.K. Rowling for, obviously, the Harry Potter series. I’ve kind of come to resent this because her writing is definitely not the best out there, and I’m a little tired of the HP fandom in general because I think it’s kind of toxic in the way that fandoms get when they’re too big, but I can’t deny that I really fell in love with reading, and in turn writing, because the Harry Potter series was being released as I grew up. So, it is what it is, and if I hadn’t started reading so much so young, I don’t think I’d be as love with fiction as I am today. 

Another is David Clement-Davies, as I read his books Fire Bringer and The Sight when I was younger and really loved both of them. They’re both stories about a group of animals that go through all these ups and downs of their lives with an added touch of fantasy, kind of similar to Watership Down, in a way? I feel like his stories really motivated me to want to write fiction, too, because they were just so captivating and adventurous, while also being about stuff that a teenager would like (ie, wolves and magic, haha). 

I can’t say I’ve read any of his other works, but I really enjoyed Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s been so many years since I’ve read it so I can’t really give specifics, but I guess I was just amazed by how much worldbuilding and such that he’d done, it just really stuck with me. 

I have to be honest, I don’t read many published books anymore. It’s probably a habit I should break, but I just take up all my own time with either school, work or writing. 

22. Favorite story you’ve ever written. 

Man it is so hard to pick a favorite out of all my FFXV fics. I’ve been staring at my list of works for the past 5 minutes so I guess I’ll just make a decision and say Sericues. Honestly I’m just really proud of myself for writing that? I can’t believe I came up with that whole thing just based on one drawing, and on top of that it was fun overall, like looking through the websites of designer lingerie brands like Agent Provocateur and Bordelle for inspiration. I also hadn’t written a sex scene in like….years. But somehow I jumped right back in with a foursome and it all worked out.   

23. Least favorite story you’ve ever written. 

I can’t say I have a least favorite among my FFXV fics, so I’m going to reach into the mixed bag of other fandoms I’ve written for in the past. This isn’t really a least favorite as in ‘I didnt like writing it’, its more, ‘How has this become so popular??!!’ 

I wrote a less than 200 word fic that probably took me like 15 minutes, based on some random prompt an anon posted on 4chan’s /vp/ in 2011. I posted it on deviantart (and Ao3, but it’s not as viewed over there) and since then it’s gotten twenty-six thousand views. That’s five times as more as any of my fics on Ao3. Ao3 does probably have a much smaller userbase, but still. It’s 6 years later and people are still bookmarking it. I’m just blown away. 

40. Which one of your stories would you most like to see as a movie/series.

Well if someone made an actual movie/animation about any kind of FFXV Dance AU, much less my own, I’d flip my shit, so there’s that haha. 

But since we’re talking mostly about a video game I’ll change this to ‘What if one of your fics could be added to the game’s canon’. And in that case it would be either Of Hair Colors and Gossip or Heart’s Desire, because I just really want Noctis to marry Prompto, okay. ;-;

47. How many unfinished ideas/stories are you working on at the same time?

I’d like it to be just one, but of course that’s never true. Right now I have four…ish, but I’ll probably come up with something new in like the next hour, goodness knows. 

They are-

Into You, the dance AU that’s WIP

A fill for this prompt (yes I was the commenter)

Plus 2 other ideas that are pretty much fully fleshed out, but I havent actually written anything yet. 

Plus a few other ideas that would only be drabbles.

And a lot of bookmarked prompts that i’d love to fill someday. 

Whew! Thank you so much for the ask! And bless you if you read this whole thing lol

[breegullbeakreviews]

NOTICE: I’m a 64-bit backer of this game. That means I put over $500 (approximately $535) into this game on Kick-starter. That being said I’m not going to cut this game any slack.

Summary: When Capital B steals all the worlds’ books, Yooka and Laylee set out on a quest to stop the corporate creep and get their book back in a collect-a-thon adventure straight out of the 90s.

Overall: For better and for worse Yooka-Laylee is a game out of the 90s. I’m a fan of a lot of what this game is inspired by, but when this game fails it does so to such a degree that it makes me angrier than I’ve been in a very long time. If it’s on sale or available on Games with Gold or Play Station Plus I’d say it’s worth a shot, but as the reviews paint, this game is the definition of a mixed bag.

Gameplay: Yooka-Laylee is essential a Banjo Tooie sequel. You know the one people complained Nuts & Bolts wasn’t. Yooka the Chameleon and Laylee the Bat are an animal duo that can fly, shoot projectiles, and do a few other unique new maneuvers I won’t spoil here. You collect Pagies to open new worlds and expand them and Quils to pay Trowzer to teach you new moves. There are 20 Pagies in the hub and 25 in each world while there are a mere 10 Quils in the hub and 200 in each world. A Mollycoolin each level will allow you to transform with the help of formerly evil scientist Dr. Puzz. There are 5 Ghost Writers in each world and collecting all of them nets you a Pagie. There are Quiz shows.

Everything I’ve listed off is a classic Banjo game staple, but most of them are either done mediocrely, or just badly. The first one you’ll likely see messed up is the transformations. In Kazooie and Tooie these tied into one or two of a levels ten Jiggies. Here they tend to tie into just one of twenty-five. The last two levels are the biggest exceptions to this rule, but compared to the source material, these transformations feel like they’re here out of tradition as opposed to necessity.

Ghost Writers are next on the list of classic elements muddied up. Each of the 5 little guys has a different method of catching them. One stands still, one runs around a set area, one fights you, one needs to be fed with a projectile, and one is invisible. 3 of these aren’t terrible. Guess which two are terrible? The little red fucker who attacks you is always placed on a small platform that’s about the size of his lunge attack that you need to dodge before he is vulnerable to a hit. I never once found the invisible blue ghost on my own. I looked up every single one of them.

The Quiz shows are also pretty badly botched. Instead of one final quiz before the boss fight at the games end, you get three super small quiz shows. You need to cross ten spaces with three lives by answering questions. No challenge spaces, thank god for that in this game, but also no musical questions. The one interesting mechanic here is that if you answer the question in the first two seconds you get to move two spaces instead of one. The part where things go south though is in the questions themselves, and it’s caused by the fact that the first quiz comes in so quickly after the game starts: some questions are based on player stats and choices. How long have you been playing? What was the first ghost writer you collected? How many Quils do you have? These end up being the questions you get most of the time as there just isn’t a wide enough variety of characters and settings to draw creative quiz questions from.

This last blunder I guess is more of a preference thing, but I never liked buying moves in Tooie, and that’s what you do here. Trowzer gives you moves free in the hub, but inside the five worlds he charges you. It doesn’t even force Yooka and Laylee to find Trowzer in a certain area for a certain move. He sells all the worlds moves from one easily accessed spot towards the start of the world. Heck I think the most effort you need to put in to find the guy is in the first world.

This last issue is kind of a big one, and part of it again depends on preference, but it’s a new mechanic to an extent as well: Expanding worlds is a terrible idea. Banjo Tooie was cool for a play through when it was big, but even with warps it feels tedious and empty years later, at least to me. Nuts & Bolts was a result of an attempt to fix the issue by making getting around the massive world as fun as what you do once you get there, and that worked, but I’m getting off topic. Yooka Laylee’s expandable worlds are always either too empty to start with, or get to big when expanded. I’ll hit on each level more specifically when I get to each, but let’s just say this game struggles to find that happy medium.

Also again opinion, but this game has back-tracking to previously visited worlds. Something my 3D platforming preference Banjo Kazooie almost entirely lacked. Some people like it, others don’t. For me it’s certainly not a good mark on this game, but probably an necessity due to the games size.

Mini-games: They all suck. All of them. If Yooka-Laylee had no mini-games this game would be so much better than it is. I guess here it’s also important to note that while I grew up in the 90s with Rare game, I only grew up with their 3D platformers on the N64, so Banjo-Kazooie, Tooie, and DK64.

I never owned a Super Nintendo and I’ve never played a Donkey Kong Country game long enough to get behind the wheels of a mine cart. That being said Kartos is a relic I have no nostalgia for. Kartos generates out of thin air a series of mine cart tracks floating in the games environment filled with holes and obstacles you need to avoid while collecting enough gems by the end of the course. I don’t find these fun. Not one bit. This is compounded in the fourth world, but I’ll cover that when I get there. What annoys me about the inclusion of this character is it is stretching beyond Banjo to an era I don’t care about, but more importantly its inclusion was a stretch goal. I have very mixed feelings about stretch goals, particularly how you usually need to go through a bunch of lesser goals, like this one, before hitting to really good ones, like the day one release on consoles.

Kartos isn’t the worst thing about this game though. Another side character holds that title, and his name is Rextro. Rextro’s inclusion was sadly always a planned part of the game, and he is by far the worst part of that plan. I haven’t heard one person speak positively about them, and that’s for good reason, because there is no positive side to them. They’re relentlessly hard, are home to a host of frame drops and other glitches, and not only do you need to beat them all to get a Pagie, but you then need to beat the high-score for another.

My end game time was just shy of 32 hours, and probably a good 5 or 6 of those hours was spent basing my head against these horrible mini-games. While the mine cart at least becomes somewhat of a mechanic that you learn to use over the course of the game, Rextro’s Arcade never builds on its games, and each arcade game is just as bad if not worse than the one that came before it. If I ever replay this game I’m going out of my way to avoid both of these.

Hivory Towers: Hivory Towers is the games HUB, and it’s got some problems. Most notably is that outside a small number of short cuts you can open up, getting from one end of the map to the other is a chore that can require multiple loading screens. The Pagies scattered about are pretty clever considering you never know if you’ve got the right move for the job.

That being said the place feels over designed. Since most of Banjo’s moves weren’t required to transverse Grunty’s Lair, outside theming changes around level entrances, the lair stayed pretty consistent in design. It was a cave with barren walls and the only thing blocking your way to the next area was a note door. Here progress is blocked by the next move which means to get from one end of the map to the next you need to pull out every move in the book, literally. Not only is this inconvenient to play through, but it leads to ugly areas like around the entrance to Moody March which is covered in grapple points because that’s the next move you need to progress.

Tribal Tropics: The game’s first level, and the one I’m going to have the most bad memories of. Not that it’s this levels fault. It just happens to be the first level and therefore the one you see all the games problems in first. The annoying ghost writers, the dead ends fixed by world expansion, the under used transformations. They’re all here and they hit hard. Same goes for Kartos and Rextro, but Kartos is actually pretty easy in his first outing.

There are two problems this world has that are all its own though. One is that it is home to the most back tracking in the game. You are unable to complete this level 100% until you’ve gone through over half the game. It’s other problem is part of a joke that culminates in the final world that broke me inside. A Pagie is in a container for no other reason than this joke. You need to talk to it and it’ll open the lid saying it can’t just slide out. I assumed I needed to hit a switch or something so what should have took two minutes took twenty.

There is some good here. Racing against the cloud is fun and the boss fight is interesting. Another cloud can also be used to fill, freeze, or drain the world’s river. Yeah it’s a short list, but it’s not like the first level of Banjo Kazooie or Tooie has a massive highlight reel.

Glitterglaze Glacier: This is the generic snow level, but it’s also the least interesting level in the game due to its attempt to be unique. When you unlock the world you’ve pretty much seen it all as it doesn’t have any dead ends that could be opened up. Instead its expansion opens up the ice palace in the center of the map where the game becomes an isometric platformer.

Let’s tackle the exterior first though. By default this world feels a lot bigger than the previous despite being smaller, but that is a result of a lot of dead space and various levels. Outside the palace there are several other interiors to explore, but all of them turn the game into a linear series of platforms. The transformation for this worlds is only used for one challenge which is the lowest of any of the transformations tied with the next world. There are also several tedious challenges outside involving slippery slopes that are solved with one of the games more interesting new abilities. While these are done better latter, these are handled well for teaching you the basics of these move.

Inside the castle the game turns into an isometric platformer. The labyrinth like design just doesn’t work well here. Finding our way back to a room is annoying, and sadly you’ll be back tracking to rooms quite a bit. The puzzles are all isolated to single rooms, but what you’re supposed to do in each room isn’t always clear or doesn’t always work as intended. For the first time since Ocarina of Time I hit a situation where I was doing the right thing but the game wasn’t detecting it for some reason.

I don’t have negative memories of this world, but it’s certainly in the lower half of the games worlds if I was going to organize them from best to worst.

Moody Marsh: This might be my favorite world in the game. Now negatives wise the world starts out way to small, and once expanded it’s still easy to get lost. The only other issue I had was that some of the challenges don’t set you right back up to try them again, but the general lack of a “retry challenge” button is a more overarching problem for the whole game.

Now for the positives. This world has the best Boss fight in the game. It might be in my top boss fights of all time. It’s not crazy epic, but it’s a mechanically sound fight that never feels cheap. The banter during the fight is fun and it doesn’t out stay its welcome. It’s also designed in such a way that the boss feels massive despite mostly off screen. It’s a boss I’m really sad isn’t repayable without starting a new game because it’s just a really fun boss.

The world also feels the most like a world out of a 90s collect-a-thon. Trees that stretch into the sky and just stop. An endless stretch of water out into a sky box. Even crummy draw distance disguised by darkness. It feels like a modern take on Bubble Gloop Swamp from Banjo Kazooie. Instead of a central hub leading out into clusters of challenges it’s a series of clusters connected by various platforming obstacles that aren’t part of the puzzles.

The world also has the least terrible Rextro Arcade game. It’s not good, but I didn’t loathe its very existence. The mine cart challenge also mixes things up with multiple paths that loop back around which creates a series of back tracking loops you’ll need to hit in order to collect enough gems. The transformation is underused, but it’s still a really cool idea that is sadly limited in use.

Capital Cashino: This world is considered by many to be the worst in the game, but I’m not sure I agree. It is home to my worst memories though. Unlike all of the other worlds, you don’t collect Pagies directly outside of Rextro’s Arcade, Kartos’s challenge, The Boss Fight, the Ghost Writers, and finding all the Quills. Instead you collect Casino chips and exchange them for Pagies. This concept is super interesting despite its sloppy execution. I’d love to see this explored in a sequel with a different theme.

Where the world falls apart is everything else. The challenges are all really weak. The transformation makes no sense here and for some reason it is how you get a massive number of chips. Sadly how you get those chips isn’t explained at all and I discovered how to tackle it by accident. Most of the platforming chips are obtained through a series of random obstacle courses and the rest by playing slot machines that require timing to work out.

What would make this the worst level in the game is Rextro and Kartos. Let’s start with Kartos. I really didn’t like this mine cart course. It’s just not fun at all. It lacks any sense of creativity and is just really difficult. This is also where the world’s boss hides. You fight this world’s boss in a mine cart and it’s the worst boss in the game. It took me over an hour to beat this thig. You jump projectiles and mines and wait for an opening to shot over the course of 3 phases that have nothing in common. It’s just a terrible boss fight all around.

Now for Rextro. This is the worst of his games. It’s the first one I struggled to finish let alone get the high score on. I again spent over an hour on this thing. It’s really bad. This mini-game has frame rate dips like crazy, pointless decorations that block your view of the course, and by its very design you need to play almost perfectly to beat the game at all.

Galleon Galaxy: Much like Moody Marsh, Galleon Galaxy takes after another Banjo Kazooie level, Treasure Trove Cove. Unlike Moody Marsh, its scattered design doesn’t work to its advantage. First off this world starts off insanely small. It starts off consisting of two small islands and a cove. Once expanded the level quadruples in size adding several more islands and a large number of floating space orbs.

The concept of the level is a cross between a pirate theme and space and it’s really cool aesthetically. The level truly feels unique in the genre. The world has the most used transformation in a good way. Not only does it get use across the entire map, but it’s how you’ll face the world’s boss. The game even cleverly gives you a tutorial for the transformation before it lets you out to explore.

That being said the challenges are pretty hit or miss. They are also mostly isolated to their own separate space orbs and usually come down to just platforming. That being said there are some really good challenges here like the robot puzzle. If it weren’t for the isolated aspect of things this might have been the game’s best world.

Final Boss: I want to like this more than I do. It’s a multiphase fight, but it doesn’t feel like it’s fairly designed. Particularly the final phase. Due to the games power bar being vital to most of the moves you’ll need for the final battle, the final phase makes it impossible to have enough time to recharge that bar without taking a hit since you can’t move fast enough to avoid the attacks. The first phase also is designed in such a way that you can get hit by the boss moving to his next location so you need to move into the corner. There are also unskippable mid boss cut scenes.

[geeky-elf]

Major Graphic Novel Update on REFD

So I have been more motivated than usual this week and with a little more free time, I managed to write two more storyline snippets plus three character designs (third one submitting tomorrow). I'm still figuring out the best title for the whole thing. Right now the one that sticks to me is Rajin: Edge of Darkness, but I feel I can get more creative with it and pick something else, but I'll see. Honestly I need to stay focused with grad school for the time being, but I'm really hoping after graduating and I can start illustrating pages, or at least focus on my art in general just for the sake of improving. Just somethings that I can touch on now: Characters: Skyfyre: Main and first character in the story who becomes possessed with a dragon's soul and gains elemental magic throughout. Eldoron: A sky pirate with a bad history who decides to make his life around building an airship to travel the universe, exploring new worlds, meeting new faces, and ultimately with a goal of vengeance of the eminent dark powers that lie beyond. He is very tech savvy and has a strategic mind. Often combining technology with magic, which is what created Rajin in the first place. Jessie: A Wiccan whose expertise is in alchemy. She can concoct anything from a healing potion to a powerful bomb. Ian: A accident in his youth left him for dead if it wasn't for the help and sacrifice from others to aid in keeping him alive and converting him to a cyborg with super human capabilities. His main purpose is ensuring everything runs the way it's supposed to and inventing new and useful items. He has a geeky and outgoing persionality for the most part, but is plenty happy with himself and his inventions. Pixel: An insectoid like fairy who befriended Eldoron at an early age. She's become a useful companion and guide. Her sense of adventure and need to help others has ensured her to be a useful part of the team. She mainly helps Eldoron, but often aids in other tasks where her small stature is to her advantage Orion: A full blooded elf with a mysterious and rough exterior. Not too much is known about him or his past. He rarely talks and at times can be rather blunt. However the only other crew member that seems to break his barriers is Jessie. He is the knowledge base of the crew and reads during most of his time. He knows everything about every mystical or non mystical race and their history. Orion possesses telekinetic and limited time bending powers. Trish: A nature loving goblin who is almost ninja like with her amazing senses and quickness on her feet. She is sort of the rogue of the crew, and good on stealth related and missions requiring a quick in and out. She loves fantastical creatures of all sizes and often collects them and trains them as her own. She is knowledgeable in Phoenix falconry, gryphon riding, serpent taming, and even dire wolf domestication. The only creature that still remains out of her reach are dragons. They are just too smart and clever she says. She hopes to try to train a wyvern though, being more primitive, she might have more luck. Blaze: Skyfyre's dragon companion who possessed her from within his egg form. He is one of the more powerful fire dragons, but with his link to Sky's elemental magic, he can shift and change to accommodate those needs. (An eastern storm dragon, a fire drake, a furry tundra dragon, a sea serpent, and an earth wyvern). Acheron: One of the main antagonists of the story, but far from the ultimate one. He is elven in magic, but vampiric in it's very nature. He acts as a medium to the dark powers and becomes molded and shaped in their will turning him into a monster who possesses a sense of masochism. He likes making his victims suffer greatly and yearns for the destruction of worlds to spread his evil powers further. Plot synopsis: A mysterious force in the universe, whether its the ether that holds space together or it's more has made outlying planets in worry. As darkness spreads, many are forced to leave or become victims to its power leaving others to fend for themselves. As planets get consumed, parts break off and ricochet through its infinite vacuum. One the broken parts lands on Earth near a small village where an orphaned girl's curiousity takes the best of her. Upon further investigation, she becomes possessed by the mysterious being within it's shells. Turns out that being was a dragon, though starting out as a baby, has great potential for power. As she grows stronger and discovers magic powers of her own that would change her life forever and create many enemies along the way. It's not until a mysterious sky pirate comes to rescue her is when her journey and discovery of her destiny really begin. It's aboard the grand airship, Rajin, where Skyfyre learned about what her role is among many uniquely gifted crew members. The gang will travel to the far reaches of space discovering new planets and making new friends along the way whether they are elven or dwarfish. In the end the fate of the galaxy rests in the hands of these handful of mystical humanoids and beasts alike. Style: The style found in my character designs will be similar to what I hope to accomplish in the comic. Characters that aren't too realistic in nature, but I need to master anatomy still and improve on it overall so I can pull it off that much better especially since I'll be drawing different characters of different ages a lot. The style of the graphic novel itself, will be semi Ike a hero comic book, but it will read more like those such as How to Train you Dragon comics as well as the Last Airbender set. Not pop arting as I want to focus on the illustration side of it all. I want to make the backgrounds detailed while the foreground characters are simple (Miyazaki film like). Setting: About Rajin: Most of everything will take place on Rajin, which is almost a small city in itself. Rajin has everything one would need on long periods of inner space travel. The airship itself is self sustaining powered by magic and technology alike allowing it to fly and keep everyone comfortable. Food is grown on board along with places to train and work on combat and energy based abilities. Plenty of room for Blaze to stretch his wings on and roomy living quarters that can put a luxury apartment complex to shame. Everything is customized to one's own and plenty of rooms and living space on each and every one of the floors that will fit to everyone's needs. There are armor and weapon making and repair places along with those for recreation based use. The airship itself has many amenities that are found on Earth, but also many that are inspired from all over making way for a diverse community to live in harmony and make a home for themselves. Ian has even created robots and tech that make life easier especially to avoid having to walk all the way from one side to the other. About other Homeworlds: While a good chunk will occur on Earth as Sky and Blaze learn to get used to one another and try to find their place in the world without bringing unwanted attention to themselves, the graphic novel will go through many planets and homes to not only distant human related relatives like Eldoron's, but also many mythical beings from animal halflings, to orcs, dwarves, mermaids, centaurs,....you name it they will all appear one way or another. The worlds themselves, will be as unique as them holding an artistic beauty that I really hope to master backgrounds in general by this point because I want to capture the complexity of the natural and artificial side of it all. You will have worlds that aren't anything more than caves, deserts, oceans,...etc. and even those that are completely suburban. Sort of a Futurama/Star Wars feel as many of these outlying worlds are connected and many travel between them and beyond especially in the more advanced regions of tech and discovery you will see more of these connections, while others isolate themselves more. Artist Goals: I've been thinking so much on this project since I was a freshmen in college (almost 8 years ago). Often ideas came to me as I daydreamed in class or on the way to class, but now I've changed a lot of the aspects, but began fitting all the pieces together more and more. My main goal(s) as an artist is to try and master or at least be the best I can at all the mediums available to me whether its painting, colored pencils, sculpting clay or 3D models, animating, plush making,...I want to try them all in my lifetime. I also feel it would be cool even if it's a one time thing for me to publish a graphic novel and maybe a purely written book that goes with it. I'm not sure how long the novel will be, I want to extend it as far as a I can without milking anything to death. Might publish one or two or several depending on where it goes. My main focus now is grad school so I need another year to focus on that and get my degree, but I feel with whatever free time I have I can work towards improving and putting more pieces together. I want to perfect whatever style I can come up with before the illustration process begins. Things that I should focus on: Backgrounds, backgrounds, backgrounds, I need to practice backgrounds so much in terms of accuracy in detail and lighting as well as in perspective especially for big city scenes and such. This will definitely be the hardest goal because I need to improve a lot in terms of drawing and coloring and getting everything right with that. Airship tweaking. I feel the exterior design could use continued work to make it as interesting as I want it to be. I also need to do a floor by floor layout to show all the rooms and areas and even some concept art on how some said areas will look. Character Designs: Lots of thought still needed here, I need to improve on my human based style in terms of making sure anatomy is as accurate as possible while keeping it in almost a Disney-esque sort of way since realism won't be my focus with characters to keep them simple as I focus my time on backgrounds and such. Also figure out how many add on characters will occur as the story progresses and how that will ensure their uniqueness in terms of additional roles on board Rajin. Storyline: It's getting to the point where writting while it helps, I feel I need to start just doing and thinking of further story arcs as a go. Right now I feel I have a nice story idea that should extend for a good chunk of it, but antagonist development and how that leads to end game, is what will be tricky and i have to figure that out too. Right now, it's organized like this: Skyfyre's daily life as a homeless orphan prior to the meteor strike followed by possession of soul and continues forth as Sky trying to get used to her new situation (denial first step of course and avoidance). Blaze grows a little bit with her as they spend several months trying to make a home elsewhere before eventually getting captured by government agencies. Skyfyre is than experimented on and starved to the brink of death in the hands of corrupted people who wish to extract her power. During this time flashbacks to the meteor's origins should occur "The Rescue" (snippet in gallery) will occur as Sky is brought onboard the ship She has trouble adjusting at first "Slow Dance of a Sky Pirate". As she learns to adapt to the new changes and potential destiny gets to know the other crew members better, she begins training with them. Of course in time a relationship slowly builds between her and Eldoron. During the time on the airship spanning a few months, flashbacks to Eldoron's past "Attack of Vimera" will come into play. Several flashbacks for each character will come into play (not necessarily in chronological order where they will be the most significant, I want the reader to piece the parts together and the connections that were formed from beginning to present day). These will take place throughout at different parts, some towards the beginning and some other when Acheron is introduced. Something begins to happen to the airship where some outside force disrupts the magic within the elemental crystals that keep the ship running. It becomes an emergency and they must travel to each of the major elemental based planets to restore their powers one by one starting including a visit to the marine planet. "That Night". Where the relationship between the two grows a little more. It's at these different locations they meet and take on some of the inhabitants that will prove useful as they continue to learn about the growing threat of the darkness spreading Acheron will get introduced at one point followed by many failed fighting attempts including a major climax one "Sky's last Fight" So far this is what I have laid out mainly still a lot of things I hope to extend it upon and fill it with all leading up to a life versus death situation with the final battle. Well that's what I have laid out for now. Changes are bound to occur and will update accordingly. Thanks for reading. Hope you all like the ideas so far. Created at simplydevio.us

[counterscheming-intensifies]

Salvaged infodump

Once upon a time, THG was hosted on late MSPAF. On top of various shenanigans, the thread was also a good source of hints, most of which weren’t posted elsewhere. Unfortunately, i realised a few months too late to start preserving it, so in the end out of 69 pages there are about eleven missing. Tidbits are organised in chronological order, with links pinpointing the exact timeframe when applicable.

117-125

Character interaction is a big part of this adventure- treat the people you meet one way, and you'll get one result, and treat them another way, and you'll get a different one- it could even lead to a death of a character if you aren't careful. So yes, decisions about how you behave towards fellow kidnappees will be pretty important! Choose your friends wisely...

Also, yes, symbols on the doors correspond to symbols on the keycards. Only the keycard with that symbol can open a door with that symbol. The doors can't be opened in any other way except for the administrative override.

126-131

Haha, let's just say our antagonist has a thing for details. I wanted to include a line where the guy noted that all the information was known beforehand, the whole procedure was just to verify it, but it sounded awkward with the rest of the monologue, so I left it out.

And yes, it is very important! Think of The Walking Dead Video Game- in case you don't know, the decisions you make in that game towards the people around you can determines things like whether they'll betray you or not, help you or not, etc. The "social links" that Kate and her fellow kidnappees will have will be very vital towards future events (and its all in the audience's hands, seriously, I'm not going to decide who the characters gets close to). I might even make a small "summary of relationships" at the end of each part of the story, just to see where its strong and where it's lacking among our protagonists.

143-149

Though I have a note about this guy you might want to take into consideration! Half of his lineage is European, and half of his lineage is East Asian. This is a pretty big influence on his life (you'll see much later just exactly how), but yeah, just something to keep in mind, perhaps!

175 As reported by LuvianBlue:

AUTHOR HERE to impart a few maybe-helpful hints to understanding what those symbols mean!

They DO mean something. What they mean, however, won't really be elucidated until well into the adventure. Also, there IS a pattern to them and the way they are arranged (the picture Lawsome provided shows the correct "order" of them), and maybe later, as further details are revealed, you'll smack your forehead and realize that it was kind of clear what they were meant to be all along. Maybe.

The same goes for the characters. Each character is tied to his or her symbol more than just by wearing the same color. Things like personality, backstory, motifs and themes surrounding them...they match the meaning of their symbol in more ways than one.

I'll say right now that there isn't really a correlation between where people were put and the symbols outside their doors. I needed to create an opportunity for the character bearing the purple symbol to be able to open Kate's door, and therefore put her in a room that could only be opened by that character. I then put the rest in rooms that didn't match the symbols on their keycards...except Seth. If you looked closely at the map that Connor discovered before, Seth's keycard matches the symbol outside his door.

Is that intentional? Maybe. Maybe not. (Bear in mind that we actually never saw what Seth's room looked like, due to it being in darkness...)

207-212

The pendant has a purpose, but isn't in any way related to leashes or mind control! In fact, Seth was just being metaphorical about the leashes thing. What he was basically saying is that scientists have a tendency to depend completely upon other people in order to be able to do their work, and the same goes for the Achronists. He, on the other hand, would be the last person to rely on someone completely like they do- he'd rather be the one that holds the power and is being relied on, the one "holding" the leash.

As for mind control, no, the Achronists didn't do mind control. They were just really, really persuasive. Plus, having a lot of money to give to people also helped with getting people along with their cause. Hope that helps!

246-253

(Somewhere between 236 and 246, a discussion started concerning the meaning behind symbols and a bunch of proposals were debunked.)

This update contains a WHOLE lot of hints to backstories and whatnot. Really do read the dialogue, it contains an enormous amount of clues.

Go back and look at the dialogues and stuff again! Often, throwaway lines or things that seem like forgettable statements do contain foreshadowing. There's even a throwaway line pertaining to the symbols that is a really big hint as to what it supposed to be. (It's not in this update, though.)

The meaning of the symbols are a bit...simpler than you might be thinking they are. But they still do play a big role in how I designed the characters, their personalities, and how they interact with one another, as well as their role in the story.

???

ALSO HINTS FOR THE NEXT [264-274] UPDATE: 1. No one is going to die. However, Cancel's gift will not be something anyone wants to have if they want to survive... 2. An example will be made of Kate for sure. 3. There is more than one of everything. (Don't take this TOO literally, but keep it in mind.) 4. Happy birthday, Ms. Greenwood.

If you are concerned about where this adventure will be heading/want a better understanding of what and will not be present in this adventure/want to read some of the author’s rambling (without spoilers) about the basis and goal for the story in and of itself: [the resulting explanation is LONG]

312-322

(concerning Daniel's introduction)

But I never confirmed him or anyone as the one who wrote on the walls so I'm not sure where you got that from????? Besides, none of the cast has any access to any paint-like substances at the current moment, and I CAN confirm that those drawings are rather old (I would say older than Connor, and he's the second-oldest of the cast at age 40.) You won't find out until much later about where those came from. Also, I can definitely confirm the last guy is not a schizophrenic either! He's high-strung, prone to panic, and may be a little more mentally vulnerable than some of our cast, but he's not hallucinating or anything of the like. I promise that if I will show a character involved with or dealing with such a controversial topic as mental illness, I will do my research first before undertaking such a thing. I understand and realize that such things are very serious, and that not representing it with truth and honesty would be offensive and rude to those who are dealing with or have been exposed to such things. Having a few traits of what would seem like behavior of someone crazy does not necessarily crazy make. (...)

He Who Has Yet To Be Named is NOT schizophrenic + I have NOT confirmed who has gone and painted those things on the wall. I CAN confirm that those black scrawls are over 40 years old.

323-330

In order to add some fuel to the speculation, have a few hints/vague tidbits about characters and such that might help (or further confuse) your theories and such for this adventure while it's on break! 1. ACHRONICITY. MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE. 2. There is a reason why Seth is tall. 3. She had something taken away, but then got something in return. 4. Dark, moist places are more prevalent than you think. 5. Goodnight, sweet prince. Flights of angels would sing you to your sleep, but they don't particularly want to at the moment. Actually, they'll never sing for you. Not in a million years would they sing for you, you little nothing. 6. You'll never expect to see what you'll see out the window in this place. 7. He's like a glass house, and it'll only take one stone to knock him down. 8. It could happen in two ways. From the inside out, and from the outside in. One is quicker than the other, but either one will happen whether you like it or not.

Shikishima: 2 P 4:2? Like, 2 Peter 2:4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment? Yes, this is correct! Hehehe, glad somebody figured it out.

Magnum: Psalms 2 2:4 "He that sitteth in heaven laugheth, the Lord hath them in derision" Though, oddly enough, this one fits really well, too. Hmmm.

Tantalizing phrases, as referenced by Godbot: The one who let a weed grow where it shouldn’t have The one who devoted their life to protecting a monster The one who paints their glass house to look like stone The one who was blessed with a curse The one who wanted to watch it all burn with a smile The one who took what was never theirs in the first place. The one who didn’t feel regret. The one who is one of two. The one who came after the sky fell.

331-337

as a commentary to this picture: A couple of notes about this guy: It is NOT Cancel. Cancel and this man are two different characters in terms of...well, a lot of things. They are not the same person. Things might have been added/left out for artistic/symmetry reasons. (As in, he looks like this, but not EXACTLY like this.)

And in the end, he was all alone. What a poor, unlucky boy.

K25fF: You've got to in some way make him hate you to create a paradox. Does this mean that if Kate accidentally killed Daniel in a flashback, he would stop existing in the current time? THIS IS PRECISELY WHY THIS ADVENTURE INCLUDES NO TIME TRAVEL oh gosh my brain hurts because paradoxes

Interestingly enough, I'll say now that if you somehow were able to pick and kill a very particular person out of our cast in the past, then the entire Human Game, as well as Cancel's and the facility's existence, would never have happened. Good luck guessing which one it is.

pikajens: Is Camilla's voice supposed to represent smoke?? It's interesting that Abigail doesn't seem interested in it at all. Would expect the most boring voice for her would be the typical valley girl. I designed the voices on patterns or shapes which I thought fit the characters best (Kate's is comprised of little "explosions" suiting her impulsiveness, while Seth's is sharp and full of triangles, for example), so Camilla's is more or less a collection of straight lines, though you can very well see it as smoke! Abigail finds it a bit boring because Camilla's voice is really monotone and doesn't give much away in terms of feeling. Remember those teachers in school who would drone on and on and on about a particular subject? It's kind of like that - Abigail likes voices that she can at least use to figure out who the person is she's listening to, or voices that in general sound nice to hear. Camilla's voice does none of that.

Godbot: AWESOME KEYCARD LIST This is a really good summary of events so far in the whole keycard chain! Let me help along with it a bit with some information to help you all along.

365-372

In scenes like this, there is probably a whole lot more reaction among the cast going on than you think. Just try to imagine that instead of dead silence for characters who are not speaking, you got Seth doing a popcorn.gif 50% of the time, Camilla going "Hmm." or "Oh" at random points, and Kate cursing up a storm underneath her breath...stuff like that.. I WISH I COULD SHOW/WRITE IT ALL but alas, being an author sometimes means you have to get rid of some reactions to bring others to the front. ;;

Beastnix: just to let you know two punishments at once may be fatal It won't be. Making people suffer is definitely on Cancel's list of things to do, but killing a person directly is something that the guy specifically said was more of a blessing than anything else.

So, just a clarification and some hints on what this punishment is going to do for either Daniel or Kate. It will be very emotionally traumatizing for Daniel, because actually, it's going to be more of a trigger. You know how people are triggered by the sight of blood or loud sounds or something similar to a traumatic experience they have gone through before? That's what will happen to Daniel. It'll be something very personal for him, and like I said, he will be "out of it" for a while if he chooses to take the punishment. Kate, on the other hand, has no traumatic memories associated with this punishment (as it was never supposed to be her punishment to begin with), but in conjunction with the "gift" she already has, it'll probably be more physically painful for her. I can't go into details, but it is highly possible that one will activate the other. It is also highly possible that Cancel will modify it slightly for Kate and make it worse for her if she decides to take it.

373-379

BY THE WAY, FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WANT TO KNOW HOW THE COLLAR THING WORKS, HAVE A LOOK AT THIS DIAGRAM OF SORTS

This is...Cancel's computer. Remember the one he was talking to earlier? This is the very same one. It will be retrieving and posting documents/notes/videos/soundclips/etc. that relate to the cast over the course of the adventure, some of which will give hints to the plotline and some which will just be there to serve as character tidbits that won't be shown in the adventure. Now, an interesting part of this is that you can actually try to inquire things of the computer to retrieve. It won't answer anything like "WHO IS CANCEL REALLY" but if you ask something like "I want to see more about Kate Greenwood's school life", it can do one of three things: 1) it can deem the inquiry irrelevant and won't post anything, 2) it will store the inquiry for later use and post something later as an answer to it, or 3) it can answer the inquiry right away. Do think carefully about inquiries...some might turn up some interesting things if worded the right way!

Also, bear in mind that this "computer" will be a part of the universe of The Human Game, and therefore could be considered a character of its own - if you've ever watched Person of Interest, this computer is rather like The Machine, and will be a "character" that will react and change depending on what happens in the plot. (Like, if I have Cancel make an in-canon request of it, it will be shown on the actual blog, and I'll note that there are updates to it in the thread so you can take a look.) So, do keep an eye on it - things might happen which won't be expected...

nuclearInsanity: Who's doing the inquiries? And does the masked fucker know about it? You'll just have to figure it out as time goes on. And no, Cancel doesn't know about it.

JackRises: 1st of July was when it began for Kate Greenwood and the site is saying 11st of July is when it began for Daniel Nox? i'm assuming you uh added an extra 1 there I never stated anywhere that the 1st of July is when the events of The Human Game started for Kate Greenwood, only that it was the day she remembered it as before she woke up in the facility. So yes, the extra 1 is not a typo.

THINGS THAT HAVE CHANGED IN CHARACTER DESIGN

Also, want to know a fun fact about the symbols? Here one of the patterns to them - you could have guessed the genders of the remaining members of the cast during the adventure if you have paid attention to the order

THINGS THAT HAVE CHANGED IN THE STORY

THINGS THAT ARE HINTS/THINGS YOU MIGHT WANT TO KEEP IN MIND In which I dispel some popular mysteries and say some things I think need to be said. 1. Daniel does NOT have multiple personalities! I know a lot of things point to something like that, but trust me, I can confirm he doesn't. 2. The facility is located on Earth. 3. I know a lot of you have been asking the computer/Achronicity about certain things like how Abigail lost her eyesight, what Seth's eyes look like (and his medical records), and other really obvious mysteries like that - unfortunately I can't answer such things at this time, no matter how much I want to. I might answer some after certain events in the adventure happen, to give you further details about them, but there are some mysteries I have to keep mum on, I'm sorry. I'll try to answer as many as I possibly can, though! 4. Cancel was there for the first iteration of The Human Game. 5. What monsters dwell in the hearts of men? 6. A and A. 7. Order vs chaos, science vs the supernatural, and "good" vs. "evil" are some of the main conflicts of this adventure. 8. Everyone is lying about something. Some may know much more than they're letting on.

AND FINALLY, THE TWO POSSIBLY-NEW CHARACTERS THAT MIGHT SHOW UP AT SOME POINT (OR MIGHT HAVE ALREADY SHOWN UP):

[Also we got the details on Daniel’s shirt]

428-437

Chizita: [list of all the ways/reasons/etc lies can be flung around, potential sources included.] All of those things you listed are definite possibilities, even including lying to all of you, the readers. Lies come in many shapes and sizes...

Viridis: The author has, however, confirmed there will be no time travel involved in the adventure... And yes, yes I have.

456-464

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade . . . Masquerade! Hide your face, so the world will never find you!

(in response to a comment) What Seth wasn't trying to do in this situation was control the others. No, that was one of the last things he wanted to do. If one recalls, when given the control to be the leader of the situation, he refused and pretty much said it was a ridiculous idea. Seth never wanted to gain power through using others. He wanted to isolate himself from the very start. Why? He wanted to gain power through fear and the misunderstanding that he was someone more terrible than he actually is.

475-484

Masks cannot feel pain. Once again. Masks cannot feel pain.

Redsoff: Uh, is the Mask seeing with its own eyes, or with Seth's eyes? Because maybe we could stab through the eyelids or something. The only other thing I'm curious is how long it takes before a takeover is permanent, since it seemed only minutes had passed since Seth had his "possession".

It's seeing with Seth's eyes, which you might have caught with the fact that he didn't really recognize Camilla off the bat when she approached ("is that the green cow"). It's also using his voice. It's using everything he has, really...

And how long "takeovers" actually take will be covered later. However, I can definitely say that the speed isn't always the same, it does vary from person to person, and depends on some unmentioned factors as well.

...have the sneak peek that I promised I would post. It depicts a very important event in The Human Game's history, so feel free to speculate on what it means...

???

at some point after p492 the main thread got introduced to myopic pedant and abdicated harbringer

a few vague and intriguing snippets which you might find of interest: A name is sort of like a mask, too, isn't it? I have never been here, but...I've seen this place before. I know I have. Destructive interference. We saw angels through those doors. The Heir That Never Was.

527-533

Viridis: Word of God from TRL's Tumblr is that Joe used to write under a pseudonym. And apparently his name is not short for Joseph and he has no middle names, so he's literally "Joe Verger", period. MMMMMMH. His pseudonym was Solomon Strix! I cannot confirm anything else, though…

565-573

All I can say about Seth is that I have PLANS for him. BIG PLANS.

Categories do have a relation to one another. They are all based on a certain “theme”. You will see what that “theme” is in due time.

Moreover, early on there were a bunch of ideas thrown around about the symbols’ meaning, and all of them debunked.

Other than that, i’ve had a bunch of links conviniently labeled with quotes, that i recall coming from the author as well:

when angels go bad, they are worse than anyone else.

(On the topic of Abigail) You'll see later how this will be used for something she is very knowledgeable with that no one else in this adventure has....

Cancel/The Computer IS CANON. In a way. It's possibly one-sided.

You cannot claim what was never yours.

Masks can start to display expressions. Not as much as say, a regular face

Everyone has their part to play.

@thehappinessmachine can i have this signed & stamped?

[jobsearchtips02]

Two Airbnb Experiences Hosts Shared Their Finest Moneymaking Secrets and techniques With Us

When Jim Quinlan obtained a cellphone name from Barcelona in late July, he was just a little shocked.

The caller was a world consultant from Airbnb. She wished Quinlan, who runs a small-scale natural, solar-powered honey bee farm in Clearwater, Florida, to record his excursions on Experiences, a quickly increasing Airbnb characteristic that connects guests with distinctive native sights. And for locals, it’s a handy method to receives a commission to share what makes their city distinctive.

“They were following my Facebook and website. They wanted to get Airbnb Experiences going and thought [I] would be a good fit,” stated Quinlan, who runs Florida Bee Farm. “The world has really gotten smaller.”

How Airbnb Experiences Began Sluggish and Took Off

At its launch in 2016, Airbnb Experiences had solely 500 listings. By way of current initiatives, like reaching out on to potential hosts and increasing to main cities, the corporate now boasts greater than 300,000 Experiences worldwide

A part of that enlargement, not less than alongside Florida’s west coast, will be attributed to a little bit of unabashed pestering from Orlando Cano, the proprietor of a kayak tour enterprise referred to as Paradise Adventures Sarasota.

Cano stumbled upon Experiences lengthy earlier than it was accessible in Florida, and he inspired Airbnb to permit him to record kayak excursions within the mangroves of Lido Key, a first-rate location for manatee and dolphin sightings.

“For over a year, I emailed them once a week, ‘Do you do it now?”’ he stated. “‘Do you do it now?”

In September 2018, Airbnb relented. 

“For the first six months, we were the only Airbnb Experience in Sarasota,” he stated.

Since then, he’s garnered greater than 500 glowing critiques, a whole lot greater than his closest competitor on the platform.

The best way to Create Your Personal Airbnb Expertise

In the event you’re already an Airbnb host, you possibly can join Airbnb Experiences comparatively simply. New customers should be not less than 18 years outdated and will need to have their identities verified by the corporate earlier than internet hosting an expertise. Verification contains importing a photograph of a government-issued ID plus offering a full authorized title and tackle.

Professional Tip

You don’t need to lease out lodging on Airbnb to create and run an Experiences itemizing. The companies function individually.

As soon as verification is full, submit your Airbnb Experiences thought for approval. Experiences ought to broadly match into one in all these classes: Artwork and Tradition, Leisure, Meals and Drink, Nature, Sports activities or Wellness.

Suppose guided meditation on the seashore, craft beer pub crawl that showcases your city’s microbrews or a curated date-night that options hands-on cooking with native delicacies.

For accredited Airbnb Experiences, the corporate gives $1 million in insurance coverage safety for many accidents (driving and flying usually are not lined). For hosts, Airbnb prices 20% of the gross sales value for every reserving.

What Makes an Airbnb Expertise Itemizing Profitable?

Orlando Cano, co-owner of Paradise Adventures Sarasota, emailed Airbnb Experiences once-a-week for greater than a 12 months to get listed. It paid off; his enterprise was the primary to be listed in Sarasota. Chris Zuppa/The Penny Hoarder

Baseline apart, the way you market your Expertise is all the things. Quinlan and Cano shared what makes their listings shine.

Representing Your Locale

Cano and Quinlan say vacationers comprise the overwhelming majority of their consumer base. 

As a result of Airbnb recommends Experiences to those that e-book close by lodging by way of the app, they are saying having an providing emblematic of the realm is essential to attracting guests. 

For instance, Florida is a sizzling spot for tourism with a popularity for out of doors actions and distinctive wildlife. Each Cano and Quinlan have very “Florida” experiences, however their excursions go deeper than a primary journey information suggestion about common zoos or seashores.

Since most of their purchasers are from out of city, with the ability to converse extra broadly about Florida throughout their excursions is useful too, they stated.

Getting In Early (If You Can)

Airbnb Experiences continues to be a brand new idea to many, so establishing an inventory early can have lasting perks.

Due to Cano’s foresight, he was capable of take pleasure in months with zero competitors on Airbnb Experiences, even with conventional opponents working “six feet” from the place he launches.

“People say, ‘Hey, we found you on Airbnb. That’s awesome. We would’ve never found you otherwise,’” Cano stated. “It definitely helps to be the first game in town.”

Experience and Ardour

Jim Quinlan smokes one in all his beehives on the Florida Bee Farm in Clearwater, Fla. Olivia Morris (left) and Michael Markum watch. Chris Zuppa/The Penny Hoarder

The Airbnb Expertise web site recommends that hosts have “insider access” and “expertise” to run an inventory that actually connects with individuals. Primarily, friends need hosts to indicate them a superb time they couldn’t in any other case have on their very own.

Cano and Quinlan love nature, and through their excursions, they let it present. Cano has a Grasp Naturalist certification from the College of Florida, which provides him information properly outdoors the bounds of kayaking. He says it’s helpful when gliding by way of the mangroves to have the ability to discuss wildlife and nature. The power to learn climate patterns is essential for his line of labor, as properly.

For Quinlan, the academic element of his honey bee expertise is big. He will get a number of group excursions for birthdays, in addition to bookings for people who find themselves actually into bees — and people who usually are not. However he doesn’t wish to bore his friends. He says his ardour for his honey bee farm helps him join with individuals, and it retains the entire group engaged.

“When [I] get a hug from people… because they had so much fun – that’s my favorite part,” Quinlan stated.

Excessive-High quality Pictures and Descriptions

As with all on-line platform the place you’re promoting a superb or service, the itemizing itself is essential.

It’s a spot so that you can showcase your experience and fervour within the textual content and enliven the expertise with a number of high-quality pictures.

For Cano’s itemizing, he included seven pictures of kayakers paddling by way of the crystal blue waters of Sarasota Bay. He’s positive to incorporate one other massive draw for his excursions: the wildlife. Just a few pictures spotlight encounters from curious dolphins and manatees. In his bio, he mentions his Grasp Naturalist certification and his years of expertise kayaking.

Quinlan’s itemizing capitalizes on those self same themes. He posted a mixture of pictures: some close-ups of honey bee hives, some geared-up friends inspecting colonies, and a few of him main discussions to underscore the schooling element. 

The approval course of for an inventory will be arduous. Airbnb vets listings intently, and should ship again questions or critiques with suggestions on what to repair. 

Keep away from any reference to different companies or web sites (even your individual). Airbnb doesn’t permit full names, cellphone numbers or electronic mail addresses to be included, as they goal to channel all reserving and correspondence by way of Airbnb.

Critiques, Critiques, Critiques

Markum holds a beehive whereas at an Airbnb Expertise in Clearwater, Fla. Chris Zuppa/The Penny Hoarder

Critiques are the secret. They’re a shortcut for individuals to see in case your Expertise is price their cash.

Setting expectations within the description is a part of garnering good critiques. However most of it’s by way of connections you make along with your friends. Being versatile and responsive will guarantee a extra constructive expertise.

When [I] get a hug from individuals… as a result of that they had a lot enjoyable – that’s my favourite half.

And generally making a constructive expertise means setting limits. For Quinlan, operating a solar-powered bee farm is difficult work, and he doesn’t wish to dread main tour after tour. So he retains it to about two bookings every week. And to take care of the standard of his kayak excursions, Cano limits his group measurement to 10 kayakers per information — not probably the most worthwhile mannequin within the brief time period. Nevertheless it permits him to work together extra along with his friends. 

“Treat everybody like they’re the only customer you’re ever gonna have,” Cano stated. “Not only do you want people to go home and smile, you want people to go home and smile and take out their phone or their computer and write about you.”

Adam Hardy is a employees author at The Penny Hoarder. He makes a speciality of methods to become profitable that don’t contain stuffy company places of work. Learn his ​newest articles right here, or say hello on Twitter @hardyjournalism.

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