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Happy Birthday Red! You’re easily my favorite antediluvian artist!

Hi Red! I've seen in a few places that apparently today's your birthday so I wanted to say happy birthday :D I want you to know that your work is amazing both in the comic and in the channel, it has really impacted my life in more ways that I realise and I wanna thank you for it all. Have a great day and year!

thanks! I hope to spend it continuing to do and make the things I love doing and making!

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Ok I’ve been watching Phineas and Ferb Season 5 and I have to ask: WTF DID THEY FEED THESE WRITERS? Out of context in no particular order spoilers becuz wtf?!:

-Doofenshmirtz fires an inator that makes the Fireside Girls have a Lord of the Flies moment

-Linda Flynn Fletcher is literally vaporized

-Doofenshmirtz and Candace acquire the same therapist who figures out their traumas are connected and proceeds to egregiously invade the privacy of Doofenshmirtz and Candace in order to prove his theory right

-Buford is obsessed with making a bread bowl jacuzzi

-A Ferris Wheel and a Giant Zoetrope REPRODUCE???!!!

-Candace gets her driving license

-Irving returns in full incel mode but it’s actually really sad.

-Monty and Vanessa have a fling on a cruise

-Baljeet murders a plant monster with Doofenshmirtz’s face for an uncomfortably long time

-Buford’s collections of life sized molds returns with a vengeance so palpable that we get details such as “I’m trying to get one of every person in Danville” “Why are there so many of me?” “You think you should be flattered? You should see how many he has of me?”

-Stacy gets a theme song

-OWCA has a private Haberdasher?

-The “if I had a nickel” gag returns and most likely mathematically incorrect

-Buford has a schedule of everything Baljeet does

-The Lumberzax returns

-THE CHRONICLES OF MEAP: MEAP ME IN ST. LOUIS

-Meap has gone rogue?

-Suzie has a birthday party?

-Did Phineas and Ferb give Buford a Bread Bowl Jacuzzi to distract him from seeing Suzie’s birthday party nearby, considering Suzie is his greatest fear. Which means based on what I’ve learned now makes Suzie even more terrifying than previously

-Is Jerry the Platypus a performer or an actual giant platypus?

-Buford slays

-Perry is jacked?!

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Bigtop Burger Season 3 Episode 1 is out now and can I just congratulate everyone on Happy Pride. Also incidentally, I’ve been knowing this ever since they showed up on screen for 2 seconds in passing during the Season 2 finale, but LDG is hot in the same way I find Reagan Ridley and Miss Pauling. I guess I might have a type.

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Having just seen Final Destination Bloodlines, my main takeaway is a question: if killing a soul with a long life expectancy would give you their years, would you have to stomp healthy tortoises every hundred years and be immortal?

Like we know from the fourth movie (I know the terrible one) that Death is one sick bastard and won’t let you die until the death he reserved for you occurs? So if you periodically care for a special breed of tortoises (maybe genetically modified to live for a long time depending on your access to resources) that are incredibly healthy and extremely long lifespans and then stomp on them as soon as they’re born, do you just live forever?

I personally like tortoises so it could be one of those immortal jellyfish or lobsters or whatever, but could you just kill somewhat immortal animals and get their life expectancy or would it have to be people?

My second takeaway: damn that’s the world’s evilest penny!

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You know I’m not a Trekkie, but a thought occurred that came unbidden. Today, I present to you the inherent comedy of:

Expat Klingon researcher who obsessively studies the entire discography of Madilyn Mei

And his brother

Expat Klingon researcher who obsessively studies Discworld

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Her agent really saw the comic and decided, “you need an agent? I am now your agent.”

For your book, who's making it again? Did they approach you or did you approach them?

Andrews McMeel! My agent sent out a proposal with a PDF of the first few chapters and some bonus content to several possible publishers, and they responded that they were interested!

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Hi!!

So you know how the Magnus Archives fandom has the Do Not Archive tag? It's just something that Jonny Sims has blocked so if people don't want specific posts of any sort to be seen by him, they can use that tag

Does Aurora have anything like that? I know you don't exactly go looking through the fandom tag but it's also hard to stop other people from tagging you in things with no warning. Not your fault at all, but it can be startling and I feel like it'd be easier to implement a solution by going to you about it rather than spamming the fandom tags begging people to ask first

The tag could be something like "adamant prison"? I dunno I'm not clever

Thanks!!

That's an interesting idea! We can codify that, sure. I'll block the tag "adamant prison" and everyone can have a field day in there

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TFW you’re so sleep deprived that when you finally get some sleep and you wake up early in the morning the day you feel like you’re up late but it’s actually just normal sense of time.

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Have you decided what kind if any of extra content will be in the published comic?

we're currently grappling with how to include it all without ballooning the pagecount to the point of the print becoming Very Spensive

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Having just watched What If? Season 3 Episode 3 my questions are in order:

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-

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how did Bucky get recaptured?

And how exquisite is the yaoi between Alexei and Bucky gonna be?

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There’s books, comics, and other games so you don’t have to do that to yourself.

hey guys !! long time no see. guess who started playing league

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Reblog for bigger sample size!

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Reblog for bigger sample size!

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Recently with Arcane ending and the backlash/critics the second season received I've come to feel like it's even harder to start writing and creating art (as in, "if even people on that level aren't perfect, what chance do I have of making something truly good?"). How do you deal with this feeling, to start creating, knowing all the mistakes you're gonna have to make?

Well that's an interesting question. I think Arcane is actually a really good example for this. Because as far as I can tell, everything Arcane did with its story was, from the creators' perspective, a success.

I didn't see any glaring mistakes in Arcane season 2. I just saw a lot of decisions that served the themes they wanted to explore - love being unbreakable even when the participants have hurt each other unfathomably, sisters and sister cities falling naturally back into care and alliance when faced with an outside threat, the blinding allure of vengeance and rage and how it's a trap that must be actively escaped.

I think it's always important to meet a story where it's at. "I wanted the story to be a different story" is never a useful criticism. A storyteller needs to tell the story they think should be told. I think Arcane is throwing some people because season 1 in isolation looked like it could have been setting up some different threads - I was expecting them to more thoroughly explore the class divide in Piltover and Zaun and how they could navigate mending their relationship after so many atrocities and injustices inflicted on Zaun, but instead they used the sister cities as a mirror for Vi and Powder, and Vi and Powder are two people who love each other and have hurt each other and despite that will never stop being sisters, so that gets reflected back into Piltover and Zaun. I don't think that's a perfect analogy, but I do think it's the analogy they were going for.

A story cannot be every story. They picked the story they wanted to tell and executed it in the time they had, and I think they did good. That's a lesson we can all internalize as artists; my art, once created, cannot contain every possibility it held before it existed. And even if I fulfil my vision as closely as possible, some people are going to wish I'd done something else. And if those people have such a strong vision of the story they wish I'd told instead, it sounds like they should probably tell that story, since it's already taken shape in their mind. "I wish this story had scrapped its plans and themes and explored this OTHER idea" isn't useful as a criticism, but it is a very powerful artistic motivator.

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So uhh. If you feel like talking about it. As someone who lives in the US, how are you being kind to yourself on this upsetting morning <3

Checked in with my loved ones first and foremost.

It's interesting. The vibe I've been getting from my circle is very different from 2016. Much less… dread and horror at a realignment of the understanding of what can and can't happen here, now, in this place and day and age. More "fuck, guys. again? whatever. enjoy your consequences, maybe you'll manage to learn something this time."

Frustration and anger is not the most positive feeling, or even the most fair one to express, but it is a protective one. It hurts a lot less than most alternatives.

And it's quite a shift. It was earthshattering back then. How could this have been allowed to happen? Why couldn't it be stopped? Why couldn't we stop it? Why couldn't I stop it? Why couldn't everyone see what this meant? Why couldn't I make them understand? Did they really not care? What did that mean about humanity as a whole? Were we so thoughtless? How could anyone be trusted?

It seems… much less earthshattering to see it happen twice. Disappointing, sure. Frustrating. But nowhere near as devastating as the first time I saw it unfold. We already knew it could happen. I've already had time to digest the implications. Now I'm just freshly disappointed.

It also feels less indicative of Crushing Truths Of Reality this time. We've seen shit get bad. We've also seen shit get better from here! We know both outcomes are possible, even inevitable. We know hoping for a better future is always worthwhile. This isn't the apocalypse. It's an unremarkably bad turn of events brought on by unremarkably self-centered well-documented human impulses. It's utterly mundane in its unpleasantness. It doesn't need to be dignified with despair.

A democratic election, no matter the outcome or the side we're on, makes us all acutely aware of how outnumbered we are by people whose worldviews and priorities are demonstrably incomprehensible to us. And the first time you get outnumbered, it's a shock. Defeat is haunting. It didn't matter how badly you wanted it; by the very function of democracy, you do not have the power to override greater numbers. (insert electoral college caveat here)

The second time through, I find myself focusing on a different facet that has dramatically reduced the amount of spiralling I'm doing. I don't expect this to work for everyone, but for me specifically, it helped to crystallize a few thoughts:

You don't have the power to control anyone else. You don't. You can't share your worldview and your revelations with them. You can't make them think or understand anything. You can lay it all out for them, but you can't make them listen, and you can't make it click. A mentor can't make their student learn a lesson; that's why teaching is so complicated and hard. An active choice must be made by the person to enable themselves to understand, and they must put the pieces together in their own mind before it makes sense to them, and the pieces must have been presented in a way that makes sense to them in the first place. Lead a horse to water, can't make them drink.

These elections highlight a disconnect in what different groups of people care about; and no matter how clearly you explain yourself or how passionately you perform, caring cannot be forced on someone. Understanding and connection cannot be forced. You cannot make anything or anyone matter to someone. They have to choose to see how it matters in order to internalize it. If they choose not to, that is not your failing. You couldn't have made them do it by just Explaining Better. They are not your responsibility. They make their own choices. You can't reach inside their head and connect the dots for them.

I'm a storyteller. I make stories and put them out into the world. I hope people get something good out of them, but I have no control over what that something is. I want people to be thoughtful and kind and compassionate and hopeful and see themselves reflected in stranges, no matter their differences. I can craft stories that I hope encourage this. But that is the extent of my ability and the extent of my responsibility. I control no-one's actions but my own, and so while I am not having the best day, I am at least content that I am doing what I can, and I am not shattering myself against impossibilities trying to control the things I can't.

Sometimes, people make decisions that I think are really bad. I can't make that not happen. All I can do is try to make decisions that will result in things I think are good. Today, that means checking in on people, and not assigning too much dramatic narrative weight to an ultimately mundane set of unremarkable bad decisions outside of my control. We'll take life as it comes and help each other out when and how we can. Everything else is out of our hands.

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For some reason the idea that strawberries became a kudzu like invasive species whose smell is highly toxic to alien life occurred to me while reading this and through the mystical process of my brain, it created a super cut video of “Top 100 times Strawberries Killed a Planet with an epic orchestral cover of “Strawberry Fields Forever” playing throughout.

If you were a sci-fi writer, how would you solve the Fermi paradox? That being the discrepancy between evidence for alien life, versus the likelihood of their existence? (basically. If alien so likely, why we not see?) The Dead Space series has an amazing cosmic horror solution, but i'm curious what you're brain could come up with!

There's a lot of possibilities, some more interesting than others.

The speed of light and the distance between inhabited stars makes it prohibitively slow to detect, make contact with, or reach any star with alien life. It doesn't matter if we're not alone, our corner of Space Reachable Within A Human Lifetime is so comparatively small that we may as well be. We're all blindly wandering through an infinite desert, calling into the void. Space exploration is a long game, and on that timescale, even whole civilizations blink out very quickly. If we manage to catch a signal and follow it, we might find nothing on the other end but ruins - or an asteroid field where a planet's orbit used to be.

The universe is too young for us to find anyone else out there. We're the first. How will we shape the galaxy to make life better for those who come after us?

The life that formed on Earth is terrifyingly invasive. The atmosphere and ocean is choked with monocellular life, and its surface is coated with a mass of multicellular organisms finding new ways to devour one another. Even extinction events don't keep down the biomass for long. If life on other planets looks anything like us, the problem isn't going to be detecting it. It'll have gotten everywhere. The problem is going to be not immediately getting colonized and eaten alive by it. And if life on other planets DOESN'T look like us, our whole planet is probably a class 1 biohazard and contamination risk. Multicellular earth organisms contain microcosmic ecosystems that proliferate explosively when they die. If anything inside them can find ANYTHING to eat, it's over.

Life evolves frequently, but always in oceans. It is extremely rare for any alien life to leave that ocean and adapt to life on land. Without this step, the jump to space exploration - even space contemplation - becomes infinitely more unlikely.

Monocellular life is seeded on planets from an outside source and allowed to self-cultivate and grow until the biomass reaches a certain volume. Then the farmers return to harvest it.

There is not a single other species on our entire planet that humans can actually reliably communicate with. It takes tremendous amounts of training to make an animal capable of recognizing even a handful of words, and very few of them can use them. Humans can't even communicate with other humans with 100% clarity, even if they're using the same language. When we find alien life, if we even recognize it as anything resembling life as we know it, we have absolutely no way of communicating.

Space colonialism has been disallowed by the space geneva conventions due to massive past tragedies, parasitic exploitation of worlds and senseless loss of life. Human expeditionary efforts are being watched warily through targeting sights.

We've known about radio communication for less than 200 years. We haven't yet figured out the medium through which all advanced civilizations communicate.

Alien life exists in abundance, but the vast majority of it is extremely tiny. We wouldn't spot an anthill on a satellite photo, and none of their ships are large enough to survive passage through our atmosphere.

Earth's oxygen atmosphere is an anomaly, and our first and most enduring extinction event. The explosive proloferation of cyanobacteria and their oxygen photosynthesis irreparably altered the planet's prebiotic atmosphere and wiped out everything that couldn't handle the sudden massive increase in a highly reactive and flammable gas. Earth is considered highly toxic and unstable, though recently detected increases in methane and CO2 might signal that nature is finally beginning to heal.

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How heavy are we going with the religion allegories with the paladins? Will little queer catholic me need a TW for religious trauma?

everything I've learned about catholicism has been against my will so I doubt I'll be hitting any deep cuts with this one