#Creative Sources

[iseeitiseetheisland]

*NEW* Adam Driver & Joanne Tucker at Spike Lee’s Creative Sources opening party, 3/10/23

Via adamdrivercentl on Twitter

[dustedmagazine]

Guilherme Rodrigues, Ben Bennett & Ernesto Rodrigues — This Full Mouth (Creative Sources)

The father-son duo of Ernesto and Guilherme Rodrigues may be some of the most prolific improvisers out there, which is saying something. Their seemingly never-ending output provides a real-time document of a living, breathing, ever-changing improvisational practice. With This Full Mouth, the duo is joined by percussionist Ben Bennett, known for his work with luminaries such as Michael Foster and Jack Wright. Bennett’s playing represents extended technique for percussion taken to perhaps its most logical extreme. His drum set is completely deconstructed, with drum heads placed on the floor and a variety of objects utilized to create wild and unexpected sonorities.

On This Full Mouth, one can hear the fruits of the Rodrigues’ decades of experience improvising together. Bennett’s percussion alchemy is an important x-factor in pushing their playing into unknown territory. On “Break/Even,” Bennett plays as if he is shooting sparks out of his drumkit, and the Rodrigues’ strings interplay at a delirious pace until the music slows to a creeping, wavering drone. Bennett’s extended technique takes center stage on “Changed Blood,” and is perhaps as close to Evan Parker’s saxophone playing as percussion can get. The trio chirps away frenetically, conjuring a woodchipper of sound. Bennett’s wobbly percussion technique turns to a death rattle, and Ernesto’s droning cello provides the perfect backdrop for Guilherme’s scratchy viola. Though the energy slows somewhat towards the end, as a whole This Full Mouth represents improvised music at its most animated.

Levi Dayan

[fmp2rubix1786]

Design Inspirations 2.

Iconic Fantasy Aesthetic

AI Prompt: What are the key features of an iconic Fantasy Aesthetic.

Rich, Dreamlike Color Palettes: Fantasy aesthetics often use deep, vibrant, and ethereal colors. Rich purples, blues, greens, golds, and silvers are common, sometimes accentuated with pastel or metallic tones for an otherworldly feel.

Baldur's Gate Series

AI prompt: What are the key features of the Baldur's Gate Series.

Rich Narrative and Character Development: Players create and customize their own characters, embarking on epic quests that intertwine personal stories with the broader world events. The series is known for its complex characters and morally ambiguous choices that significantly impact the storyline.

Classic Stereotypical Fantasy RPG Swords In Games

AI Prompt: What are the key fetaures of Classic Stereotypical Fantasy RPG Swords In Games

Classic fantasy RPGs often feature swords that are more than mere weapons; they are imbued with rich lore, magical properties, and significant roles within the game's narrative. Key characteristics of these iconic swords include:

Magical Attributes: Many swords possess inherent magical abilities, such as elemental attacks, healing properties, or the power to banish evil. For example, the Master Sword in "The Legend of Zelda" series is renowned for its ability to repel evil and protect its wielder from certain magical attacks.

[lightheal]

messing around with my fantasy headworld species, i want them to look animalistic with slight fantasy features rather than just being furries, but don't want to overstep into my other species's features, and i'm pretty happy with this middle ground!

[grumpoww]

Send me requests!! :)) I'm bored

[inbabylontheywept]

Babylon's 6 D&D Tips

I DM’d D&D for ten years. I started in middle school, and I kept it up until my sophomore year of college. This is my mini-guide for what the game is, what it isn’t, and how to play it well. So. From the top.

Tip 1: Don't make your main storyline time dependent. 

D&D is an amazing open-world experience. You can pick at any detail. Nothing is a non-interactable part of the scenery. If there’s a sewer manhole, you can lift it up and climb down. If there’s a house, you can look inside and rob it. If there’s an NPC that you meet at the market, you can follow them home and see their whole life. Their parents, or their partner, their trade - all of it. It will be made up on the fly by some sort of reasonably skilled improv speaker, but it will also exist after that. That’s how the world is built. That’s the secret sauce that makes D&D beautiful.

If your plotline is too urgent, it kills those opportunities. The worst example of this that I have isn’t even from D&D, but FO4. The game is clearly built around exploration and adventure. The plot is built around rescuing your kidnapped baby. There’s a lot of tension between those goals. The plot does not work with the game mechanics, and it's really, really, jarring.

Be wary of doing that. It's surprisingly easy.

Tip 2: Don't set up giant, epic, fantasy battles between multiple armies. 

D&D is not a very good epic-battle simulator. There are games that have streamlined combat mechanics to allow for whole armies to fight, but D&D is very detail oriented, and trying to control too many people at once makes combat slow to a crawl. That very creative DM who can tell you every detail of an NPC’s life is also just not very good at multitasking. 

If you really, really want to - fine. But you should be ignoring standard mechanics when you do so. Move to a “cinematic mode” and just go by vibes. And generally, take a moment to “get” the game before modifying it. If the kind of plot you really want is urgent, and involves epic scale armies, maybe look into different RPG systems. D&D specializes in exploration and small, focused parties. Using it for things outside of that is kind of like hitting nails with a wrench. 

Tip 3: Don't prepare your plot like it's a book. Kill your lore codex. 

D&D is a collaborative storytelling adventure. That's the secret sauce. Writing out codexes and trying to crystallize the world before you start playing ruins the collaborative element. It’s genuinely better if you build as you go. It lets your players give input. And it saves you a lot of time. Why bother trying to write up who the Mayor of Snoresville is if there’s a good chance your party never even talks to him?  

(I would also apply this to writing in general. If you want to write all of your world's lore before starting your book, you'll never start your book. And you'll go crazy. Fear the lore codex.)

Tip 4: Prepare your combats and your NPCS rigorously, but generically. 

This ties in to Tip 3. If you spend a lot of time preparing the lore of the Bandit Leader of Redgrove, things like his family history, or his trauma, or his deep-down character motivations, and then the party never goes to Redgrove, it all goes to waste. D&D evolves rapidly and chaotically, so building things in a modular, reusable way really pays off. 

So. I tend to have two big pools for my NPC work. One is a character sheet pool. I keep it small and focused. I can generalize most melee classes ahead of time, so I can have an Archer, a Brawler, a Tank, and some Generalist Infantry. That’s like, 80% of your martial enemies, done. Spellcasters are a bigger pain in the ass, but a few pre-mades thrown into a campaign pays off if you know your themes. If you’re dealing with a death cult, make some death clerics. A dragon will probably have sorcerer acolytes. 

My second pool is a pool of character mannerisms. Some should absolutely be practiced ahead of time. Figure out what mannerisms make your villain really pop. And if the party skips that villain, just move those mannerisms to some new guy down the line and you’ll still be fine. Nothing wasted. A lot of the mannerisms are going to be picked with no heads up when the party does something weird, like following a random merchant around for a few days just to see how they live. You can get through almost all of those extremely well with just variations on the 4 humors, the 3 socioeconomic classes, and regional dialects.

Tip 5: Give your players permission to inject themselves into the world. 

It is common for people to over-formalize the rules and responsibilities of “being a player” vs. “being a DM.” I think the most common way to phrase it is something like “The Players are in charge of their characters and their backstories, the DM is responsible for the worlds and its NPCs, and both need to stay in their lanes.”

It’s isn't just better to mix it, it's necessary.

Failing to share these roles forces the world to exist in a crystallized state before the campaign even starts - at least if you want to integrate backstories into the plot. Groups that fail to do this can often feel like the characters were born the day the campaign began, and did nothing interesting beforehand. 

So, for DMs: Don’t be afraid of trying to inject NPCs and details of this world into your player's past. Imagine that your party rogue goes into a town and finds a fence for selling some stolen trinkets. Maybe, have the fence recognize the rogue. “Gods of fire, it’s McClellan. I haven’t thought about you since the candy-rat incident. You took a real beating making sure I got away that day. Glad to finally have a chance to pay you back!” 

Now, the rogue still has a choice here. They can say something like “Ah, this guy is mistaking me for someone else, but I can roll with it to get a better deal.” It’s their character, and their choice. But they can also go, hey, I do know this guy. I was apparently part of something called “The candy-rat incident.” I can decide how I know this guy, and where, and for how long, and what that incident was. That’s not less control - that’s more! 

And for players: Don’t be afraid of injecting your past into the world. Maybe you’re a fighter in a wartorn setting and you run into a group of deserters robbing refugees by the roadside. The DM has clearly planned this as some vindication, some enemies you get to thrash without feeling bad. But you have different plans. You take your helmet off, and you look the deserter’s leader in the face, and you say “Jack, you saved my life back on Stone Ridge. You were a good man once. You could be one again. Ride with us.” 

Now that's powerful stuff. Do you even know what Stone Ridge is? Hell no. Are you gonna? Hell yeah. And what you just did was way better than the DMs plan of bonking bad guys to feel good. You changed the writing of the world, commandeered an NPC, and made the whole encounter far more interesting.  

Tip 6: Ignore all portrayals of D&D in the media. 

The best players that I get are people with no experience with D&D of any kind. The second best are those that are willing to drop their preconceptions at the door and just play. The worst are people that have seen D&D portrayed somewhere and are insistent on imitating the portrayal. The exact nature of the failure varies - at worst, they’ve seen some kind of tongue-in-cheek parody, like order of the stick, and then hyperfocused on all the worst parodied aspects as the whole point of the game. D&D is not about outsmarting the mechanics (which is trivially easy, and largely pointless - it just makes your own storytelling less fun), nor is about turning everything into shallow tropes about Horny Bards and Dumb Fighters and Insufferable Paladins. At best, they’ll have seen some kind of ultra-cinematic example of D&D played on a podcast, where the DM has a theatre degree and ever party member is a professional actor. Those people are nice, but they often have unrealistic expectations.

[yeoldenews]

While we’re on the subject of names, is there an explanation for how traditional nicknames came about that are seemingly unrelated to, or have little in common with, the original name?

ie- John/Jack, Richard/Dick, Henry/Harry/Hank, Charles/Chuck, Margaret/Peggy/Daisy, Sarah/Sally, Mary/Molly, Anne/Nan, etc

I am actually over a week into researching a huge follow-up post (probably more than one if I’m being honest) about the history of nickname usage, so I will be going into this in much, much more detail at a hopefully not-so-later date - if I have not lost my mind. (Two days ago I spent three hours chasing down a source lead that turned out to be a typographical error from 1727 that was then quoted in source after source for the next 150 years.)

As a preview though, here’s some info about the names you mentioned:

The origins of a good portion of common English nicknames come down to the simple fact that people really, really like rhyming things. Will 🠞Bill, Rob🠞Bob, Rick🠞Dick, Meg🠞Peg.

It may seem like a weird reason, but how many of you have known an Anna/Hannah-Banana? I exclusively refer to my Mom’s cat as Toes even though her name is Moe (Moesie-Toesies 🠞 Toesies 🠞 Toes).

Jack likely evolved from the use of the Middle English diminutive suffix “-chen” - pronounced (and often spelled) “-kyn” or “kin”. The use of -chen as a diminutive suffix still endures in modern German - as in “liebchen” = sweetheart (lieb “love” + -chen).

John (Jan) 🠞 Jankin 🠞 Jackin 🠞 Jack.

Hank was also originally a nickname for John from the same source. I and J were not distinct letters in English until the 17th Century. “Iankin” would have been nearly indistinguishable in pronunciation from “Hankin” due to H-dropping. It’s believed to have switched over to being a nickname for Henry in early Colonial America due to the English being exposed to the Dutch nickname for Henrik - “Henk”.

Harry is thought to be a remnant of how Henry was pronounced up until the early modern era. The name was introduced to England during the Norman conquest as the French Henri (On-REE). The already muted nasal n was dropped in the English pronunciation. With a lack of standardized spelling, the two names were used interchangeably in records throughout the middle ages. So all the early English King Henrys would have written their name Henry and pronounced it Harry.

Sally and Molly likely developed simply because little kids can’t say R’s or L’s. Mary 🠞 Mawy 🠞 Molly. Sary 🠞 Sawy 🠞 Sally.

Daisy became a nickname for Margaret because in French garden daisies are called marguerites.

Nan for Anne is an example of a very cool linguistic process called rebracketing, where two words that are often said/written together transfer letters/morphemes over time. The English use of “an” instead of “a” before words beginning with vowels is a common cause of rebracketing. For example: the Middle English “an eute” became “a newt”, and “a napron” became “an apron”. In the case of nicknames the use of the archaic possessive “mine” is often the culprit. “Mine Anne” over time became “My Nan” as “mine” fell out of use. Ned and Nell have the same origin.

Oddly enough the word “nickname” is itself a result of rebracketing, from the Middle English “an eke (meaning additional) name”.

I realized earlier this week that my cat (Toe’s sister) also has a rebracketing nickname. Her name is Mina, but I call her Nom Nom - formed by me being very annoying and saying her name a bunch of time in a row - miNAMiNAMiNAM.

Chuck is a very modern (20th century) nickname which I’ll have to get back to you on as I started my research in the 16th century and am only up to the 1810s so far lol.

[daily-public-domain]

Day 277: Lonely squid, 900 meters deep

link

–This image is part of the public domain, meaning you can do anything you want with it! (you could even sell it as a shirt, poster or whatever, no need to credit it!)–

[thatbendyfan]

something i made for my poetry class final. not even sure if she’ll accept it since i didnt use my own words, but i’ve reread it enough times to tell that im proud of it

[deliriousblue]

THE HEART KILLERS (2024) + tropes prior art by @hurlumerlu

+ bonus:

[copepods]

being an artist who only does fanart is all fun and games until you lose interest in your current hyperfixation and don't immediately find a new one and so you are completely lost and unmotivated and unable to do the one activity you love most in the world for several months just hoping something new will come along and spark your interest so you can feel like a living person again

[namgination]

seven angels ♥

[splatloafbud]

THANK YOU SPLATOON 1 FOR CHANGING MY LIFE ❤️

[rosegoldthorns]

Something something, maybe live action remakes that exist for the sole reason of retelling a story without animation so people can "better connect" to it and deal with it "realistically" have people who are making it who have no idea what the original point is. Something something, maybe classic tv shows and movies are so popular because they were well written and done well and don't need changing. Something something maybe live action remakes ( instead of remakes which are VERY different) actually suck as a concept in general

Or something like that...

[seventh-district]

Figured I'd try my hand at some Redacted character post/text edits!

[ 1 / ? ]

Credit to @/sainthowlzon for all the Listener icons, and to @/elisacaleisa for their google drive with all the canon icons!

(slightly alternative version of the Solaires' GC edit below the cut bc i had a lil too much fun with what Vincent would name his contacts)

[menoetiades-the-giver]

personal pet peeve is when i see posts about VERY OBVIOUSLY song of achilles content but it is not tagged as such, only tagged with their names and im like ok wel!!! i wouldve enjoyed tsoa content but i just wish this was tagged as SONG OF ACHILLES achilles and not achilles!! the thousand year old mythical figure?? whose public image has seemingly been hijacked by this soft boy yaoi!!?!? i respect the soft boy yaoi, i enjoy the soft boy yaoi, but for the love of god tag it for what it is. and if you tag it as iliad content you will boil.