reyofsunlight666

[reyofsunlight666]

Hello, April is my birthday month, and I have another comic to share with you. This one is called Fossils, and it's about digging things up.

Physical copies of Fossils are read by unfolding a single sheet of paper, as can be seen in the video below. Fossils was risograph printed in four colorways, the one shown is federal blue and aqua on brown paper. You can buy a copies in my online store.

My other paleoart minicomics:

Broomistega & Thrinaxodon (read - buy)

DEEP TIME (read - buy)

[reyofsunlight666]

[reyofsunlight666]

oh and that gap in my resume is when i was digging my own grave

[reyofsunlight666]

How Bethesda fixed Vampires without realizing it

So there's a LOT of takes on vampires across media, and most of them are radically different from each other. The Elder Scrolls series has an interesting version that I haven't seen anywhere else, that incidentally fixes a bunch of lore issues with vampires, and yet Bethesda hasn't ever really leaned into any of that.

So, the issue with vampires in large RPGs like Elder Scrolls games, D&D, etc, is that a world where various elements of character building are supposed to be balanced, vampires are heavy on the upside and light on meaningful drawbacks. So in Oblivion, Bethesda completely reworked their vampires, coming at it with a blank slate:

Vampirism is a 4-stage affliction, with each stage increasing the numerous benefits of being a vampire as well as the middling drawbacks. Stage 4 brings with it all humanoid NPCs recognizing you as a ravenous monster and attacking you, basically wrecking the game. And, this is the unique part, you reduce stages by drinking blood. Being a vampire is LESSENED by doing the most vampiric thing out there, it actively makes you weaker.

And this is great. From a gameplay perspective, you vanish below ground to kill zombies/robots/whatever, and you grow stronger as the dungeon goes on. But if you don't rush through it, or if it's large, you surface having ignored your hunger for several days and have to do a whole second quest to sneak into town at night and drink blood, where the only reward is to engage with the game again. It's a drawback in the gameplay sense rather than the stats sense. And it lets game designers throw the player against weak vampires in town early on, and face dungeons full of max-bloodlust monsters later once the player knows how things work.

Meanwhile, from a lore perspective this is also great. Suddenly, it's not that vampires have to be evil, it's that they have a choice. A good person who flees their family to hide in a cave is going to starve, turning into a ravenous, uncontrolled, extremely strong monster. Someone who's comfortable sneaking around town drinking blood, meanwhile? They never lose control. They walk in the sun. They're perfectly human. Or as human as anyone can be while the blood of their neighbors flows in their veins.

And Bethesda doesn't DO ANYTHING with this. People you talk to in-game just treat it as "all vampires are evil, why would you expect anything else", when they've created a world where vampire morality is so much more interesting. The few vampires who exist in civilization that you're not supposed to kill don't really discuss their condition at all. And there's plenty of evil vampires choosing to live in caves running societies of vampires, when that makes no sense compared to basically any other way of life they could set up.

Bethesda games are a masterful disaster, in this as in everything else.

[reyofsunlight666]

Eugene Chadbourne, I Hate The Man Who Runs This Bar!

[reyofsunlight666]

Don't worry, no one in our family is [REDACTED]

[reyofsunlight666]

10th century church door with Norse ironwork at St. Helen’s Church in Stillingfleet, England

[reyofsunlight666]

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

Check out my stuff!

✧Read Namesake✧ ✧Read Crow Time✧ ✧Store✧ ✧Patreon✧

[reyofsunlight666]

power metal is the greatest genre ever made bc you can be listening to an awesome song and the lyrics are some shit like “double! wizard!” like i think i may have found the point of it all and it’s about headbanging to songs about evil wizard clones actually

[reyofsunlight666]

"In the ‘60s one either believed that America was being greened or that America was being morally defoliated. You either believed that this was the dawning of the age of Aquarius or you believed that we were on the eve of destruction. I sometimes think that the most malignant aspect of the period was the extent to which everyone dealt exclusively in symbols. Certain artifacts were understood to denote something other than themselves, something supposedly abstract; some positive or negative moral value. And whether the artifact was positively or negatively charged depended not on any objective reality at all but on where you stood, where the polarization had thrown you. Marijuana was a symbol. Long hair was of course a symbol, and so was short hair. Natural foods were a symbol – rice, seaweed, raw milk, the whole litany. I found myself in situations during the late ‘60s where my refusal to give my baby unpasteurized milk was construed as evidence that I must be “on the other side.” Probably an undercover. In fact, it meant nothing except that I had grown up around farms and I had known children who got tuberculosis and brucellosis from drinking raw milk. But this was a period in which everything was understood to have some moral freight, some meaning beyond itself. And in fact, nothing did; that was the peculiarity of the decade. In a way it was very touching, this whole society so starved for meaning that it made totems out of meaningless artifacts. The whole country was like a cargo cult. But it was also very destructive. Because nothing meant what it was supposed to mean."

Joan Didion's 1975 Commencement Address at UC Riverside

[reyofsunlight666]

Thinking about the difference between "coziness" in cozy fantasy vs. cozy mysteries, and realized that the difference is basically the difference between a line and a veil in a TTRPG.

If you don't play indie TTRPGs- veils and lines are a way of curating your players' experience. At the start of a game that might contain difficult or triggering content, you lay out what you can and can't handle playing through "onscreen". If there's something you don't want to play through- bigotry, triggering situations, or just something that squicks you- you can choose to put it behind a veil or a line.

When you put something behind a veil, you're willing to acknowledge that it exists in the world, but you're not willing to engage with it extensively. There might be, say, transphobia going on in this world, it might even factor into another character's backstory, but you're never going to have to run your character interacting with a transphobe.

Conversely, if you put something behind a line, you're removing it from your game entirely. If transphobia is behind a line, it doesn't exist in your game world at all, no one is a transphobe, no one has transphobia in their backstory, etc.

I feel like... cozy mysteries tend to use veils to create their coziness, and cozy fantasy tends to use lines. And this leads to a mismatch in reader expectations that can really screw over writers who are writing (fantasy) (cozy mysteries) as opposed to (cozy fantasy) (mysteries).

[reyofsunlight666]

>looking for a new House

>ask the narrator if their House is creepy or wet

>they don’t understand |pull out diagram explaining what is creepy and what is wet

>they laugh and say “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite”

>move in

>its wet

[reyofsunlight666]

U don’t understand people growing up so you read lots of novels so you can still feel connections to fictional people and to the people who write the novels and maybe you hope you will learn more about how people work from reading all those novels but unfortunately novelists are not usually great at knowing how normal and well-adjusted people work or else they probably wouldn’t be novelists

[reyofsunlight666]

Late Roman stone mosaic from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, Caria (modern Bodrum, Turkey), dated 4th century AD, now in the British Museum. A coloured laurel wreath encloses a Greek inscription with the following words:

ΥΓΙΑ "Health" ΖΟΗ "Life" ΧΑΡΑ "Joy" ΕΙΡΗΝΗ "Peace" ΕΥΘΥΜΙΑ "Happiness" ΕΛΠΙϹ "Hope"

🏛️: © The Trustees of the British Museum

[reyofsunlight666]

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

[reyofsunlight666]

Wistman's Wood, Dartmoor by Dr Stanislav Edward

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Games like elden ring can be very "dangerous" for English as a second language speakers.

I have to consciously remind myself, especially if I am interacting with an English speaking client or business partner at work, that this is not how normal people talk.

Thou must have some business in mind, to come all this way.

A pleasure to meet thee, I'd heard tell of a new client.

Heed my words. The meeting tomorrow will be rescheduled.

What is thy business with these files?

I was entrusted this, for thee, a summary of the last meeting.

Thou art of passing skill, this excel list is perfect!

I doubt we shall again meet. I am only helping out on this project.