#the maple jam

[theresattrpgforthat]

The Maple Jam

The Maple Jam is a game jam celebrating Canadian art & culture! Starting May 1st and ending July 1st, participants can design and submit works inspired by Canadian game designers, or centring Canadian art & culture. You can create work inspired by a Canadian game designer, a supplement for a Canadian-made game, or create a game or game-thing centring a piece of Canadian art or history. Check it out below!

[fullcravings]

Quick & Creamy High Protein Overnight Oats

[tiger-balm]

"what birth year do you consider old?"

[morethansalad]

Vegan & Gluten-Free Mango Tart

[uwmspeccoll]

🎶🎉 Summerfest 2025 🎉🎶

The first week of Summerfest 2025 is underway, and we’re turning up the volume in Special Collections! 🎶

To celebrate the world's largest music festival right here in Milwaukee, we're highlighting a book that documents the rich cultural history of this iconic event. Summerfest: Cooler by the Lake: 40 Years of Music and Memories by Dave Tianen, a music critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Edited by Tina Maples and filled with stunning photographs from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee World Festival Inc., this work captures four decades of unforgettable performances, hometown pride, and lakeside legends. Published in 2007, to commemorate the festival's 40th anniversary, this volume offers a detailed chronicle of Summerfest's evolution from its founding in 1968 to its emergence as one of the largest and most diverse music festivals in the world.

From Pearl Jam to A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, local bands to international headliners, Summerfest has been bringing the soundtrack of summer to life since 1968! 📸🎸🌊

-Melissa, (will be in attendance week 2 and 3! 🎉) Distinctive Collections Library Assistant

[iamthejam]

oh 1634.... ARUGHH !!!!!

[dungeonofthedragon]

Maple Jam has just started! I'm not Canadian myself, but I'm working on a playset for organiser Mint's wonderful Forged in the Dark game, Protect the Child.

Dungeoneers (working title) sees a bunch of dungeon monsters forced to look after teen sorcerer Lyria after her party abandon her during her first adventure.

Bruiser-Brute: Dorzan (he/him), a powerful red dragon.

Business-Beast: Valdemar (he/him), a savvy and knowledgeable lich.

Hearth-Heart: Spider Queen (they/them), a giant spider who never got to command the skittering hoards they always dreamed of.

Meddle-Mentor: The Hag (she/they), an ancient and powerful witch.

Outlaw-Outcast: Bleakwater (it/its), a slimy relic from another world.

Rogue-Renegade: Tisiphónē (she/her), the fury herself.

Trick-Taker: Mettle (she/her), a nimble and tricksy goblin.

[everythingwithwasabi]

High Protein Breakfast Crumble

[arkadarp]

Lo, after being in a hole for the greater portion of the month, I'm back to slam through as much artfight I can in this last third, starting with:

Late Night Bakery, featuring:

Jamie Dodger (@pink-pone) mixing the dough DD (@regulardd) rolling it out and cutting rounds Maple Glaze (me!) manning the oven Apricot Jam (@the---robbie72) spreading the jam

All y'all's horses are so cute! It was a blast to draw them :)

[sarksarkos]

Wonder Woman '58: Player Three Has Entered The Game

This is Wonder Woman #98, the first appearance of Wonder Woman on Earth-One. For some reason, it's all about capitalism. Welcome to the Gutters.

Comic book fans talk about DC stories taking place on Earth-1 or Earth-2, but that's very anachronistic thinking. I wrote that Superman #76 was the first meeting of Earth-1 Batman and Superman, but the creators weren't thinking of them existing in a separate universe as the ones from the 40s. They just wanted to write a story about Batman meeting Superman and didn't feel a need to be bound to continuity.

With this issue of Wonder Woman, we have what appears to be clear creative intent to break away from the old stories and start fresh. Harry G. Peter, the original Wonder Woman artist, passed away on January 2, 1958. (Original writer William Moulton Marston had passed away in 1947.) Art duties fell to the team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, who had been working with the current Wonder Woman writer Robert Kanigher on DC's war comics. All three would have very long careers in comics that we don't really have time to go into in this tumbloo post.

The story in this issue is a new version of Wonder Woman's origin, and that of the Amazons in general. The Golden Age Wonder Woman origin sets up their mythological origins as relates to dominance and submission, as well as Wonder Woman herself being born out of a clay statue imbued with life and powers by the gods. This version excises some of that, and seemingly depicts Wonder Woman as no different in nature from any other Amazon.

Well, except that everyone else wears pseudo-greek clothes and Diana wears the Wonder Woman costume around. She knows she's the protag, she's just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Also different is that the original Wonder Woman was explicitly tied to WWII, where this version of the character is contemporary. Instead of being forced into action by the war, Wonder Woman is now summoned to be a hero by the goddess Athena. DC likes to put twists on their origin stories whenever they make a new one, which is just not confusing at all.

Diana enters herself in the contest to become the Amazons' champion. To prevent her mother from playing favorites, all of the other Amazons disguise themselves as her. This is a pretty clever narrative trick, as through the next few pages of trials we don't actually know if the person we're watching is going to win or not. However, it's Diana's book so she proves herself the best. Her first mission - to earn a million dollars for charity in a single day with only a penny.

Before she can even think about leaving the island, the comic goes "but now THIS is happening!" A fighter pilot flying over the island randomly explodes, and Wonder Woman has to leap into action to save the pilot. This, of course, turns out to be Steve Trevor, her classic love interest. He's kind of an irrelevant character without the war on, but he mostly sticks to the background.

The sequence where she rescues Steve is wonderful, I love the expression on her face when she realizes this might not work. This is also a good illustration of how she's different from, say, Superman. They're both powerful, but Superman is overly powerful, to the point where most tasks are almost effortless. Wonder Woman is somewhat more limited in her powers, and she has to make up for it by using her abilities creatively.

There's the common thought about Superman being too powerful to be interesting, and I think that's kind of reductive. I think that being too powerful is what makes Superman interesting. He has more power than he knows what to do with. Wonder Woman is more in line with the classical Greek heroes, where she never has Too Much power, but she always has Enough. Consider Hercules. If Hercules needs to, he has Enough power to hold up the sky, but he never has Too Much power that wrestling a lion or wrestling a boar is trivial.

Wonder Woman flies Steve Trevor back to the "Twin Cities," which I guess means she took him all the way back to Minnesota? I can't see why anyone would go there, but okay. Conveniently, she finds a contest to throw a coin across the river and win $1,000. She immediately loses the coin to a small child, and has to show off with a jump rope to get it back. I like the gag with the gumball machine, and I love when superheroes are good with kids. Even Batman's good with kids!

Wonder Woman throws the penny over the river, but the coin goes too high and an eagle catches it out of the air. She ropes the bird with her lasso to get it back, and this bird is somehow able to lift her into the air and fly her over the river. The bird drops the penny and Wonder Woman falls into the water, and... well, look.

So, the unspecified enemy sent a submarine all the way up the Mississippi river on a mission to nuke Minneapolis. I don't. I don't know what to say to that. I get the feeling that this story was intended to be set during the war and this was a Nazi sub, but at some point it was changed to take place in the present day of 1958, when the politics were incredibly different.

I can only assume that some KGB warlock in Soviet Russia consulted the oracular head of Rasputin, who told him that there would be a massive revolution in 1999. The only way to avoid this disaster would be to strike down the leader known only as "Prince" and prevent his purple reign. Something something raspberry beret.

So, the cold war just got hot, but Wonder Woman is able to prevent it from going nuclear. She drags the... torpedo? missile? The writer of this story normally does war comics so I would expect him to know the difference. Whatever unholy ordnance hybrid it is, Wonder Woman brings it to a halt on the beach, and spins fast enough that she fuses it completely with the sand. But she has to go back.

For the penny.

This time, Wonder Woman takes no prisoners. When it fires on her again, she dodges and feints until the submarine blows itself up with its own torpedo. Wonder Woman killed dozens of people and the only thing she's worried about is her lost penny. That's cold. And I remind you, this was in 1958. Batman and Superman still had iron-clad no-kill policies, and Wonder Woman just blew up a submarine because they took her penny.

Wonder Woman feels that all is lost, until one of the children she saved finds the penny in his fishing net. She tries for the rest of the day to make a million dollars out of it, probably through a series of improbable trades, but nobody bites. Just when the time is up, she overhears that the city department of transportation only has a million dollars in its budget to build a new suspension bridge.

This may seem like a small amount of money in today's money, and it was not that much bigger in 1958 money either. The cost of the Golden Gate Bridge was somewhere around $17 million, and that was in 1939 dollars. They may as well use that penny.

And that's exactly what she did. Using her amazonian super-strength she somehow turns the copper in a single coin into enough metal to build a whole-ass bridge across the Mississippi.

I did say before that she wasn't overly powerful, like Superman. I stand by that. Because there is the matter of tone. Superman is an alien, he's fundamentally a character based on science. Whenever his powers have a negative side effect, it's usually described in scientific terms. It can make the fantastic easy to accept, but you have to have a certain kind of logic to it for the readers to accept it.

Wonder Woman isn't just a character based on magic, she's a character based on myths. Mythology always has an element of characters doing feats that utterly defy explanation. Hercules holding up the sky, Thor drinking the ocean, Paul Bunyan shoveling out the great lakes. Wonder Woman is built on that mythological framework. If she wants to utterly demolish physics so her story can have a happy ending, she can do that because that's the kind of story this is.

So yeah, I think this comic was excellent. DC never treated Wonder Woman as the cash cow that Batman and Superman are, and on some level that's disrespectful, but it lets her have more of a personality to her stories. I feel like we see more about who Wonder Woman is as a person in this one issue than we do in several months worth of Batman or Superman comics.

We're going to see how long that lasts! Because Wonder Woman doesn't have the absolute glut of comics that Super-Bat and Man-Man have, we're going to take a closer look at her stories. Until next time!

[theresattrpgforthat]

The Maple Jam: More Submissions!

The Maple Jam has just a few weeks left before time is up, and submissions are rolling in! Let's look at some of the latest!

Forged in the Sun, by Cal Pal, is a Forged-in-the-Dark game about surviving or thriving in a volatile galaxy. It carries a beautiful old-school science-fiction feel, similar to Dune or Star Wars.

My Weekend is All Booked, by souplover13, is a game about being trapped inside the New Halifax Central Library. It includes references to some very Canadian NPCs, as well as some Canadian book recommendations!

The Witch's Curse, by Cheyenne N.K. Stone, is a Monster-of-the-Week mystery about a legend based in St. Thomas, Ontario. It's about Maria Baldwin's grave, and centres around her black gravestone and a black cat seen protecting the grave site.

Dungeoneers, by Sam Robson, is a hack of Protect the Child, a game by me! It's inspired by media like Dungeon Meshi, and centres a bunch of dungeon monsters taking care of a young sorcerer when she's abandoned by her party.

And of course, there's Campaign.Frame, by me! This is a campaign structure designed to accommodate a large number of players, and a large number of games! Inspired by ReBoot, it's full of 90's computer graphics and inspiration to help you slot various ttrpgs into a video-game console.

[fattributes]

Kiwi Macarons with Fresh Kiwi Jam and Vanilla Buttercream

[maple-leifarts]

god im so tired and out of it rn ITS NOT EVEN THAT LATEEE

[morethansalad]

Easy Vegan Homemade Strawberry Pop Tarts

[bevanne46]

8 Free Quilt Patterns including Jam Pantry and the Canadian Maple Leaf Block, from Monica Curry Quilt Designs.

[iamthejam]

in honor of the gang being reunited and four nations being finally freaking over <3