m0r1bund

[m0r1bund]

You are a crazy person, you know that? 9 months of silence to drop insanely cool shit like it’s nothing.

Continuing to reaffirm why you’re a fantastic artist and hitting high ranks on the inspiring individual leaderboard.

I hope one day there’s a little wiki for Threadbare for all the fun worldbuilding because I will die of death if I do not get to know more….

Hello from the floor, which I'm on now. Thank you for taking the time to say this, it means a lot to me!

and LOL If I'm good for one thing, it's writing essays about things that aren't real. I've been thinking it would be nice to organize my gallery pages better so that it's easier to find those essays... Or maybe just biting the bullet and giving it the morb wiki treatment. frightening.

[m0r1bund]

I know most artists are probably annoyed to hell and back with art advice questions…

No idea on your stance so I’ll ask

How do you do format your backgrounds?? Like the perspective, the empty space versus detail, what shape to make the canvas, all that stuff, idk.

I can imagine detailed stuff in my head but in practice I flounder to even begin to put it to paper so is there some sort of method to the madness?

Lastly, do you think it’s a good idea to start by drawing over real life images as a way to learn?

That’s all, thank you

Hi, sorry this took a while. No worries about asking, I’ve been there and I think we sometimes underestimate how much people like to feel helpful and to talk about their process. I have an awful memory, so it’s hard for me to retrace my steps sometimes, but I’ll try!

I remember being in a similar place where my mind’s eye was far ahead of my technical skill. This still happens, I don’t think it ever really goes away, I just remember it feeling especially pronounced and frustrating when I was younger.

context: I used to be really frustrated with my inability to finish or even start large, meticulously detailed pieces, especially landscapes and environmental pieces. This changed as my technical skill started to catch up with my mind’s eye, and I could execute things faster and faster, before my brain would arbitrarily decide a piece was “done.” I’ve had this lifelong tension between trying to become a faster artist so that I can strike while the iron is hot, while also accepting that my brain is wired a certain way, I don’t have to make myself suffer by working against my own brain, and it’s OK to make slow art. for all the grief it gives me, the ADHD hyperfocus / state of flow is part of the process and I do genuinely love it.

So with that in mind, here’s some pointers that I’ve personally found useful.

done > perfect, started > not started, always and forever. Lower the bar as much as you need to. I think this can be rough for those who are less motivated by the process and more by communicating something as it exists in their head. Unfortunately I am learning this lesson over and over, that a piece simply will not happen unless I make it feasible for myself. Can it be done faster and shittier? Can you settle for getting one or two things “right” and letting the rest turn out how it may?  

Taking up photography, studying photographers, and yes, tracing / photobashing / painting over photos (with appropriate permission.) Sometimes it’s more intuitive to find the composition than it is to make it from scratch. I’m lucky to live in the place that I draw, so it takes less guess-work to translate it to my art, but I also just think it’s fun to cultivate an eye for composition using the world around you.   I think creating your own references also teaches you things that studying curated art will not. You interacted with the space in-person, so you have valuable insight into how the space feels and the relationship between objects that you can’t glean just from a picture. It’s also got the beauty of the amateur’s eye. Contrast won’t be perfectly balanced, you’ll get to work with weird color combos under weirder lighting, things won’t be massed very intentionally, etc. What’s interesting to you about the subject is ultimately unique to you, and you get to bring that out.   Video game photography is another fun way of studying someone else’s work. Virtual landscapes are intentionally composed, down to the massing/lighting/visual clutter, so in a competently-designed environment it’s easier to find picturesque vistas or neat places to stage your subject. More fun, maybe less frustrating than exploring an environment that isn’t similar to one you want to depict.   I like sandbox games for DIY scene-setting too. Staging stuff in blender, making rough clay models, whatever you need to do to feel out the space.  

Ditto the above for studying other mediums that you enjoy. I feel like it’s glaringly obvious when I want something to be a 10-part animated series or, like, a tapestry, because that’s just where I go to when I’m pulling from my mental library.   Maybe part of why I gravitated to film and animation is because you can see changes in composition, focus, perspective, etc. happening in real time, so it’s easier to notice them, and to reflect on how they change the meaning of the scene.  

Leveraging your limits. Limited palette, limited time, limited scope, whatever. Easier to play with values when you’re working in black and white than when you add color to the mix. And hey, what can you uniquely do when you’re working under certain limits that you can’t do if you had free reign of a blank canvas? Pixel art, polychrome pottery, noir… The limits of a form make it memorable, or however that saying goes.  

Massing detail and polish around the focal point of the piece. I don’t think I’m very intentional about this with my finished work, I usually play with contrast or negative space to bring attention to things. but I often do this with my quick-and-dirty art like Basedt and Threadbare. I polish the bare minimum to communicate what I need to, and then leave the rest to imagination.   like anything else it’s just another tool in your toolbox, not as useful to those with very detailed work that choose to guide the eye in other ways.  

Thinking of the environment as its own character(s). Some of us get into art because we’re having fun drawing our favorite characters or our OCs, so backgrounds are just that--- backgrounds, scene-setting, all secondary to the main event, not as interesting or exciting to draw. I am personally trying to get rid of the mental boundary between subject and environment, because that’s more in line with how I feel about worldbuilding and life in general. They’re inseparable, they feed into one another, and it does me better to think about them holistically.   Corollary to that: Environments can be fun! A lot of people think of them as drudgery, but I don’t think you have to self-flagellate doing a hundred still-life master studies if that’s not the most efficient way for you to learn. We can and should do difficult things, but I don’t know, I think you can trick yourself into getting excited about drawing cars or buildings or rocks. For me, it’s exciting to explore my headworlds through the eyes of the fake people who live in my head. I guess having that touchstone of something that’s familiar alongside something that’s unfamiliar makes it more fun. When the switch finally flipped, it was really rewarding to realize I was scribbling landscapes as the “main event,” and the inclusion of a character was a last-minute thing if it happened at all. It can be fun! It doesn’t have to suck! But it takes time.  

OK, I think that’s all I got right now. As usual, glean what’s useful to you and forget the rest. There are others who can speak more competently about technical stuff than I can, and I’m sure I’m overlooking something obvious. this is just what sticks with me, personally.

[m0r1bund]

despite everything

basedt update

24 whole pages... waow... here is a link to the first page in the bunch... go to them

I have posted (most of) my page buffer and hit pause on Basedt updates for the near future. I don't have a drawing tablet or most of my art tools anymore because of the housefire, and I don't really know when I'm going to be back in action, so I can't estimate when Basedt will return. I'm scratching at the walls to get back to it, though. I just want to draw

[m0r1bund]

this escaped my drafts prematurely but it's done now. here ya go o7

Things have been quiet lately on account of my house burning down. Nobody was hurt, and I haven't lost my physical / digital art pieces, but I have no way of working on them right now... which means I'm going a little stir crazy! haha! ha !!!

I had the foresight to draft a post with some of my favorite panels from my twine game, Threadbare. I was originally just gonna use them to promote the game, but this is all I can to work on right now, so you're getting the director's commentary reel I guess. but first

Play Threadbare!

Or don't, I can't control you.

I started making Threadbare so that I could weasel my way out of drawing comics. it was supposed to be a low-effort way of telling Frey and Kairos' story, which is, in the grand scheme of things, ancillary to everything happening on wasteland Earth.

(honks clown nose)

the art is also made to be low-effort, even if it doesn't stay that way. unremitting red/white/blue/black takes the guesswork out of painting in color, and also feels like propaganda art. mapping characters to certain colors makes simplifying them easier. Frey can be reduced to an angry blue smudge and Kairos can be a stupid red hat on a triangle.

I had already written out most of the Frey-Kairos scenes back in 2023. The holding cell scene is actually one of the first things I drew LOL. Everything else sprang up from the twine game format. I knew I wanted some buffer between Frey breaking out of the Abattoir and Frey confronting the Oracle, so that we could learn more about the two of them, and also the Archive, without rushing into prophecide. This ended up changing the structure of the story more than I thought it would... and created a lot of self-inflicted scope creep... which is for me to unpack at a later date (when I'm done) (girl help im not even done)

but probably the biggest addition is

her

and ES I guess.

ES and Rhodes were originally funnie little nature spirits, but I long suspected that Rhodes would make a kickass ex-secutor, and I needed some NPCs to explore the Archive with, so. here ya go. I promise I'm going somewhere with them. Rhodes is filling the shoes for another old character concept I had (which was partly cannibalized by the Oracle of Caeres, funny enough.)

<more spoilery stuff under the cut. play my twine game.>

The other characters like Petrei and the Undertaker were designed on the spot, which is to say I just opened a canvas and started painting and hoped for the best. because this was supposed to be low-effort. haha.

I want to go back and figure out Petrei's anatomy because the idea of doing horrible manweevil origami is fun.

The other big surprise in all of this was having sound and music figure so strongly into things. My last twine game, Killswitch, had maybe three little songs to set the mood, and no SFX. I guess something broke in me and I decided I wanted to make an ace attorney game this time. You're all getting bespoke vox files now. my gift to you. and part of why this took like 9 months

I feel lucky that I found the musician ROZKOL, whose work is featured prominently in the twine, just as I was dipping my toes into audio editing and really scripting the meat of things. I was not expecting to find a musician in the Creative Commons scene who had totally figured out what a ceaselessly grinding imperial death machine sounds like. I have a hard time thinking in music, even though it motivates so much of my work... sometimes I feel like I have aphantasia but for compositions LOL. So I really enjoyed this kind of post-hoc surprise collaboration, it was cool to watch the scenes start to mold themselves around ROZKOL's music.

The slideshow-quicktime-event-fight-scene is especially molded to ROZKOL's song "Good Soldier." A fun return to the fine tradition of warrior cats AMVs that I was raised on. bringing in player participation is something that I would like to explore in a more elegant way in the future, I really like the idea of a music video being an active, participatory experience and not a passive one. and honestly I just want other people to feel the same unhinged rush that I feel when I put a song on repeat 70 times while painting.

There's I think four different routes in the first part of that encounter, leading to some variant panels like these.

depending on your choices, Frey gets roughed up a little more or a little less, ES may or may not stick their neck out for you, and the Oracle has choice words for you if you're a good soldier dancing partner.

(fun fact: if you don't choose to act during this scene, Frey picks a route and acts at random.)

I'm still learning what does and doesn't make a meaningful player choice. is there a branch because the possibility of choosing to / choosing not to see it is compelling, or is there a branch just to be a branch? I don't really think that you need to fundamentally alter the narrative to have fun with it. little things like ES and Rhodes remembering your name still feel meaningful to me, even if they don't change the outcome of anything. but I'm also bending to certain limitations that I cannot fully discuss until I finish this damn thing.

Speaking of finishing, I made the denouement in a deranged fever haze. I got sick twice in the span of, like, a month. It was pretty miserable. but hey, at least I had time to finish my twine.

^^^ how it feels to finish your twine (she doesn't know her house is about to burn down)

further in the vein of things burning down, I'm glad I found the song "In Your Mind" and didn't get cold feet about keeping it in the tracklist. I was struggling to nail down the tone of the ending scene, until I gave it a few listens and things clicked. but at the last minute, I nearly swapped it for "Burn it All Down." It's a really good song, too, but it's probably for the best I briefly possessed Kairos' gift of prophecy and didn't pick the one about uhhhhh. burning.

I think that's all I got for now. thanks for playing and/or flirting with the idea of playing by reading this post. kill petrei for me. and try not to be on fire.

[m0r1bund]

Things have been quiet lately on account of my house burning down. Nobody was hurt, and I haven't lost my physical / digital art pieces, but I have no way of working on them right now... which means I'm going a little stir crazy! haha! ha !!!

I had the foresight to draft a post with some of my favorite panels from my twine game, Threadbare. I was originally just gonna use them to promote the game, but this is all I can to work on right now, so you're getting the director's commentary reel I guess. but first

Play Threadbare!

Or don't, I can't control you.

I started making Threadbare so that I could weasel my way out of drawing comics. it was supposed to be a low-effort way of telling Frey and Kairos' story, which is, in the grand scheme of things, ancillary to everything happening on wasteland Earth.

(honks clown nose)

the art is also made to be low-effort, even if it doesn't stay that way. unremitting red/white/blue/black takes the guesswork out of painting in color, and also feels like propaganda art. mapping characters to certain colors makes simplifying them easier. Frey can be reduced to an angry blue smudge and Kairos can be a stupid red hat on a triangle.

I had already written out most of the Frey-Kairos scenes back in 2023. The holding cell scene is actually one of the first things I drew LOL. Everything else sprang up from the twine game format. I knew I wanted some buffer between Frey breaking out of the Abattoir and Frey confronting the Oracle, so that we could learn more about the two of them, and also the Archive, without rushing into prophecide. This ended up changing the structure of the story more than I thought it would... and created a lot of self-inflicted scope creep... which is for me to unpack at a later date (when I'm done) (girl help im not even done)

but probably the biggest addition is

her

and ES I guess.

ES and Rhodes were originally funnie little nature spirits, but I long suspected that Rhodes would make a kickass ex-secutor, and I needed some NPCs to explore the Archive with, so. here ya go. I promise I'm going somewhere with them. Rhodes is filling the shoes for another old character concept I had (which was partly cannibalized by the Oracle of Caeres, funny enough.)

<more spoilery stuff under the cut. play my twine game.>

The other characters like Petrei and the Undertaker were designed on the spot, which is to say I just opened a canvas and started painting and hoped for the best. because this was supposed to be low-effort. haha.

I want to go back and figure out Petrei's anatomy because the idea of doing horrible manweevil origami is fun.

The other big surprise in all of this was having sound and music figure so strongly into things. My last twine game, Killswitch, had maybe three little songs to set the mood, and no SFX. I guess something broke in me and I decided I wanted to make an ace attorney game this time. You're all getting bespoke vox files now. my gift to you. and part of why this took like 9 months

I feel lucky that I found the musician ROZKOL, whose work is featured prominently in the twine, just as I was dipping my toes into audio editing and really scripting the meat of things. I was not expecting to find a musician in the Creative Commons scene who had totally figured out what a ceaselessly grinding imperial death machine sounds like. I have a hard time thinking in music, even though it motivates so much of my work... sometimes I feel like I have aphantasia but for compositions LOL. So I really enjoyed this kind of post-hoc surprise collaboration, it was cool to watch the scenes start to mold themselves around ROZKOL's music.

The slideshow-quicktime-event-fight-scene is especially molded to ROZKOL's song "Good Soldier." A fun return to the fine tradition of warrior cats AMVs that I was raised on. bringing in player participation is something that I would like to explore in a more elegant way in the future, I really like the idea of a music video being an active, participatory experience and not a passive one. and honestly I just want other people to feel the same unhinged rush that I feel when I put a song on repeat 70 times while painting.

There's I think four different routes in the first part of that encounter, leading to some variant panels like these.

depending on your choices, Frey gets roughed up a little more or a little less, ES may or may not stick their neck out for you, and the Oracle has choice words for you if you're a good soldier dancing partner.

(fun fact: if you don't choose to act during this scene, Frey picks a route and acts at random.)

I'm still learning what does and doesn't make a meaningful player choice. is there a branch because the possibility of choosing to / choosing not to see it is compelling, or is there a branch just to be a branch? I don't really think that you need to fundamentally alter the narrative to have fun with it. little things like ES and Rhodes remembering your name still feel meaningful to me, even if they don't change the outcome of anything. but I'm also bending to certain limitations that I cannot fully discuss until I finish this damn thing.

Speaking of finishing, I made the denouement in a deranged fever haze. I got sick twice in the span of, like, a month. It was pretty miserable. but hey, at least I had time to finish my twine.

^^^ how it feels to finish your twine (she doesn't know her house is about to burn down)

further in the vein of things burning down, I'm glad I found the song "In Your Mind" and didn't get cold feet about keeping it in the tracklist. I was struggling to nail down the tone of the ending scene, until I gave it a few listens and things clicked. but at the last minute, I nearly swapped it for "Burn it All Down." It's a really good song, too, but it's probably for the best I briefly possessed Kairos' gift of prophecy and didn't pick the one about uhhhhh. burning.

I think that's all I got for now. thanks for playing and/or flirting with the idea of playing by reading this post. kill petrei for me. and try not to be on fire.

[m0r1bund]

Play Threadbare ▶

Threadbare is a “visual” “”novel”” about a martyr exacting revenge on the prophet who foretold her death. Make him pay! Fail upward! Change nothing! Fulfill your awful, awful destiny!

Threadbare features:

The indomitable power of spite, through which all things can be accomplished!  

One-sided(?) tension(??) with the guy you’re doomed to kill!  

The machinations of a deeply stupid meritocracy, which asks “what if we put wealthy art patrons in charge of a communications & intelligence agency?”  

Running errands against your will!  

High effort low art! Low effort high art? Low effort low art. It still took me nine months. And it’s not even done!  

What I can only describe as a slideshow with quicktime events scored by industrial noise metal!  

This guy, I guess !!

This is like… a pre-alpha demo. It covers maybe a third of the story, and it’s missing basic things like alt text and alternate game modes, which will be part of the full thing. Mostly this is an excuse to get other people to break it so I know what to fix. Enjoy!

[m0r1bund]

SOMETHING’S COMING TO THE SURFACE

Gratitude goes to half/moon and their album Traces – Dead of Winter for enabling thursday afternoon’s zone-out-and-paint session. Please have a listen. The cycle of burying and unburying the past continues infinitely there as it does in high Asthaom. Caldera and VEI5 make me want to walk out on my porch after dark and scream. It’s good! Also unburying Rebelle again, my favorite art program that I just can’t quite find a way to fit into my usual workflow, haha…

I remembered to record a timelapse, also. process + materials info is in the video description.

Song is ‘Caldera’ by the inimitable half/moon :)

[m0r1bund]

R3ND found a home! lucky timing that the puzzle was solved just as I checked my email this morning. thank you for playing y'all! solution + thought process below...

if you've never found an E1DOL, theyre little guys that are occasionally hidden around my website that you can adopt. theyre functionally an image with an anchor link that reveals a submission / claim form when opened. the anchor link is usually something goofy like #great-job. since it just needs to serve as a trigger for the claim form to appear, I type whatever feels right in there.

i thought it might be fun to make a puzzle out of finding the anchor link, so the claim form will only appear if you attach the right #anchor to the page URL. so, I posted a picture of R3ND and their "trailhead" on one of my gallery landing pages, with one half of a riddle pointing to where the anchor link would be found.

C4NT0 C4NT0 S1NG MY S0NG F4R 4F13LD 0F R1GHT 0R WR0NG W41L 4ND W41L 4ND TH3R3 UNV31L TH3 GH0ST UP0N TH3 C4M3R4 TR41L

The "camera trail" in this case is a faux trailcam painting I made of dia back in 2018. I added the second half of the riddle to the piece's description.

R3TURN MY N4M3 TO TR41LH34D’S T4L3 W1TH #4NCH0R-L1NK 4S C0FF1N N41L D4SH B3TW1XT TH3 SP4C3 B3TW33N T1TL3 C4S3 TH3 GR0UNDS UNS33N

this was tweaked from the original version of the riddle. I edited the wording of the first line and added a link back to R3ND's landing page with a hint attached (#4NSW3R-M3-H3R3) to better clarify what they were asking of y'all.

the "name" in this case was the title of the piece, Trail Cam. This was also the anchor link that gave access to the claim form. The rest of the riddle is just instructions on how the link should be formatted.

so, the claim link would be:

https://m0r1bund.com/others/#Trail-Cam

and that would activate the claim form. yippee! it doesn't anymore because R3ND found a home / was summoned for further mischief / is terrorizing someone else now. but that's how it works!

you could, of course, brute force this by inspecting the site's code, but afaik nobody did that, since this guy's been floating around for like four months LOL. thank you for playing honorably! I learned a lot about puzzle design from this and the feedback has helped me think about what I might try in the future.

Is e1dol r3nd still able to be adopted? I found their puzzle by accident yesterday and got stuck on the second riddle, I think I've found the "name", but I've been lost on what to do with it or where, especially with what the "anchor link" talks about but it's really scratched my puzzle/scavenger hunt/arg adjacent thing itch haha, I hope you do more of these in the future!

As of now, yes they are still available! I recently tweaked their riddle because they had been sitting around unclaimed for a few months. i think the original was too cryptic haha... anyway I'm glad to see people are finding it. happy to hear it's scratching that itch for you too, I want to have a nice variety of ways to get them and I thought it would be fun to try making those kinds of puzzles.

tweaking the riddle may have clarified some points from the last time i gave a hint, but here's another hint as a token of thanks vvv

they're committed to leading people around in circles, but i promise bringing the name back is more straightforward than it seems. in fact, they've done some of the work for you already by bringing you back to where you started. that's what anchor links are good for o7

[m0r1bund]

im so late to the party its no longer even faceplapril but AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LIVE TEETH REACTION

as a ?joke? ?bizarre creative activity? the Kingsgate discord made a prompt list for daily drawings involving Faceplate the NPC who has appeared in 2.5 panels of the comic and apparently the team is actually earnestly drawing the prompts and anyway here's the slapdash graphics I made for it

thanks to @1ore for his OG design, @rosemarygin for the FacePlapril concept, @c00kiesandcream for the actual prompts and list design (idk if I should share it or what??), and @mossiagocheese for being strangely passionate about this specific boy!!!

[m0r1bund]

Is e1dol r3nd still able to be adopted? I found their puzzle by accident yesterday and got stuck on the second riddle, I think I've found the "name", but I've been lost on what to do with it or where, especially with what the "anchor link" talks about but it's really scratched my puzzle/scavenger hunt/arg adjacent thing itch haha, I hope you do more of these in the future!

As of now, yes they are still available! I recently tweaked their riddle because they had been sitting around unclaimed for a few months. i think the original was too cryptic haha... anyway I'm glad to see people are finding it. happy to hear it's scratching that itch for you too, I want to have a nice variety of ways to get them and I thought it would be fun to try making those kinds of puzzles.

tweaking the riddle may have clarified some points from the last time i gave a hint, but here's another hint as a token of thanks vvv

they're committed to leading people around in circles, but i promise bringing the name back is more straightforward than it seems. in fact, they've done some of the work for you already by bringing you back to where you started. that's what anchor links are good for o7

[m0r1bund]

shop update... shopdate ▶︎

I got sick a while ago and made some new stuff for my shop in kind of a fever fugue. shirts, prints, stickers, the works. you have to imagine my shock and horror weeks later when I remember that buying samples instead of new clothes for myself means that I have to be the one to model them. me and my shitty little phone camera against the world...

[m0r1bund]

You mentioned in your updated website that you found a lot of your footing as an artist in an arpg called TWWM. I was wondering if you know how someone could find a similar group of artists in the modern day? Or a similar project, not hosted on deviantart? I’ve been looking for these tighter knit groups of artists to be friends with but they are so astronomically hard to find for me :(

Funny enough I’m having the same challenge, as I’ve kinda fallen out of orbit from most of my haunts. I haven’t had time to rekindle old connections or build new ones, so I’m just spinning my wheels out here hahaha…

I feel like these things live by word-of-mouth, so here’s a list of some small art communities that I’m aware of. I was only ever active in a few of them, so Your Mileage May Vary, but maybe it will help you on your way.

ARPGs – art roleplaying games, usually (but not always) centered around a “species” that players make characters out of and then draw/write about them to progress in the game. a lot of them are still orbiting deviantart, but some have made the jump off-site. Here’s a list of some that use the lorekeeper framework to self-host.   I’m also aware of PaperDemon, which is a setting-agnostic ARPG for developing original characters and growing as an artist in general.   I don’t have a lot of experience with ARPGs outside of TWWM but I do know enough to say The One can be hard to find, haha… good luck soldier o7  

Sekkai Fractures – dragon RP forum. never poked around here, but I’ve seen a lot of art for it and it’s been going for more than 10 years, which is preddy neat.  

Crimson Daggers – I found this little forum while trying to track down where all the old conceptart.org people went. The conceptart.org site culture was too intimidating for me when I was a teenager, but it’s been years, and I think we’ve all kinda chilled out. could be interesting if you’re wanting to hone your skills and challenge yourself technically.  

Petsite forums – nice places to hang out and also great ways to find more niche art communities. I used to play/work for Aywas, briefly poked around Subeta and Flight Rising, and more recently my friend introduced me to Wermz, which lives on the Chicken Smoothie forums, and is what I can only describe as a post-apocalyptic adoptable trading card game. Most (all?) of these have custom user-generated assets, so they attract a lot of creative types. the sites also tend to be Old As Hell and have strange and esoteric mechanics that take time to learn, but this is true of many small communities, i think.  

Dead MMOs and other lost media – there’s something about the necessity of creating your own space because the original space blew up that creates these pockets of old-internet art circles. anyway I’m lurking in a handful of WildStar RP servers that have tidy little writing/art scenes. The Spore modding scene is also pretty small but lively. At some point I discovered the collaborative fiction arm of the Spore wiki. pretty cool that it’s enabling worldbuilders still today.   the nature of the beast is that these do not have broad appeal, but I mention them because if you have ever loved and lost something, there’s probably an obscure fan forum out there waiting for you.  

ArtFight - not small, but a good trailhead. some of my friends have found neat little RP forums, art communities, indie games, all kinds of things just by crawling through the pages of other ArtFight players with similar interests.

There’s probably more that I’m forgetting. I’ll add them if I remember. Please share any that you might know about for the benefit of boo boo the fool (me) who is frozen in the year 2010 and doesn't know where people are hanging out these days ):

[m0r1bund]

N.M.: This was pretty early in her tenure as a coyote. sol: yes, she helped her cross in either 1907 or 1908. they fight over the date (they fight over everything.) the Chinese Exclusion Act was 25 or 26 years old by then, but this was still before the Immigration Act started targeting immigrants from east asia writ large. her foster family (japanese+mestizo) had the foresight to seek citizenship before they became the monster of the week. i think that was after Arizona was admitted to the union in 1912… but in the end she didn’t have to worry about citizenship much. N.M.: On account of becoming a fox spirit. sol: i was thinking of the remoteness of their homestead but yes the fox thing as well.

◆◆◆

The depicted bonnet is based on this Chinese-American baby bonnet from 1919. with bits of photography by Cecelia Alexander and Andrew Cattoir. rest is yours truly.

[m0r1bund]

dispatches from two women and their weird dog, migraine demons, house ghosts, etc. in the U.S.-Mexico border. read 'em here if you want.

I'm in a funny phase where things are going great and I'm being an active participant in my own life, but I'm scratching at the walls for time to make art. so i've been lowering the bar to make what i can make with the limited time that I do have. as this is happening, i'm visited with inspiration for my old esk characters after wintering on them for a while. i spruced up the twwm section of my site in the spirit of that. this is not really a promise for more funnie dog ghost art as much as it is me giving myself permission to diverge and fuck around.

[m0r1bund]

I'm trying to figure out the E1dol R3ND's puzzle and I can only get to step two. I'm not poetic enough to figure out the right url for the second riddle though, but one day I will maybe get one of your funny beasts *shakes fist*

Thank you for playing! It means a lot to me, especially as I learn how to construct these kinds of puzzles. This one has been floating around for a while and I’ve been fortunate to have others share their thoughts about what it is and how to solve it, so you’re not alone. I put a hint under the cut as a token of thanks.

If you’ve found both riddles, then you’ve found everything there is to find and you have access to all the information you need to bring it home, with a little puzzling haha. If riddle #2 is a set of instructions for what to do with the “name,” then I guess there’s 3 points we have to settle: what the name is, what we have to do with it, and at what location. maybe it’s fitting that the name led you there in the first place?

[m0r1bund]

The Snake and the Osprey whose warring/dancing/lovemaking gives motion to the world; The Snake contends with First Man / First Woman.

little thangs for my Moribund wiki.

[m0r1bund]

Basedt has been updating and updating and updating.... and updating...

11 new pages. Go To Them

that links to the first page in the bunch... enjoy