#aaaaaaah it's done! on to the next big project now!

[hey-hey-j]

The final chapter of Whether You're a Brother is up! It's been a fun ride ♥️

(★my Ko-fi)

[ahedderick]

I get so much done

   It’s a random, rainy Tuesday in January, time to get some work done!

   I sometimes get ‘volunteered’ by my family to help people with art-adjacent tasks. This happened over a month ago when my daughter told her boyfriend’s Grandma that I would help her update/repaint her mailbox. She lugged the offending mailbox home and I sighed a bit internally. One, I technically know how to do lettering, but I haven’t practiced in decades and my brushes are all for art, not calligraphy/lettering. Boy, is there a difference. Also Grannie wanted Elvis’s guitar painted over her ex-husband’s name on one side of the box.        which I get, but I         ok agreed to do it. Why not. Then the holidays happened and I put off the mailbox project.

   Until today, when I pulled up my big girl attitude and painted the damned guitar and lettering. It is not what you might call my finest work, but it is sufficient to grace a rural mailbox at the ass-end of Flintstone.

   I then moved ahead with the landscape commission, painstakingly tracing a line of buildings into the center of the scene. I painted the snow and trees around them, and that small area the size of a business envelope took about as long as the entire session before where I covered 3/4 of the canvas. It was picky and finicky, but helped me recover from the lettering.

   Along the way Hero got hay, cats and dogs got their morning food, and Meadow got some worm medicine that she truly hated. The worst part is that the pills are dosed so one pill will medicate the average-size cat, but Meadow is a Big Girl and needed an extra half pill. With cheese. Because I am not utterly heartless.

   Baxter, at some point, found a skein of yarn my daughter had gotten out for crochet purposes. She found the yarn strung across the house and used forceful language as she untangled it. I was keeping my face very neutral, because snickers wouldn’t have been appreciated.

   “Can we bake a cheesecake flan?” Well, my next task is trying to call the folks at the 529 savings plan to see why they haven’t sent me a check - so FLAN IT IS.

   I began the slow process of caramelizing the sugar while she started in mixing cream cheese, evaporated milk, and etc. I ran into the living room to put Mos Eisley Cantina music on (I needed it) and heard her erupt. AaaAAaH!

 “Get it out! Quick!” my son yelled.

AAAAAAAH! *****!

   I returned sedately to the kitchen to find that a stink bug had flung himself into the cream cheese and milk mixture. In his panic, he Released the Stink. Son was laughing helplessly, daughter was iRAtE (and also laughing). The Mos Eisley Cantina band was tootling fervently in the next room.

   There was nothing for it but to throw the mess away. Thank heavens she only got the first two ingredients in. She went out back to fling it dramatically, which worked until the hens came running. They ended up. cheesed. We have cheesed hens.

   Meanwhile the sugar did caramelize. I poured it into the baking dish without incident. A second try with the cheese and milk yielded a lovely batter that we poured into the dish on top of the caramel. I gently placed it into a baking dish of water, and into the oven it went. Fingers crossed!

   Now I have to locate paperwork and call the College Trust. Unless . . . Meadow needs some pets? For her nerves?

[littlemissnellie]

the original character playlist tag

rules: choose 5-10 songs that you feel would be your OC’s favourite and tag your friends specifying a character you’re curious about

aaaaaaah i know i’m like a million and a half months late to this, but back when the wonderful @smallcowplant tagged me to do this i was just starting to post my townie makeovers. and whilst i loved by townie makeovers, i didn’t love them nearly enough to waste this fun tag on. so i was patient and held back until i was ready to start working on my next project: a story, where i actually had original characters to use this for. 

once i start posting the story properly you’ll understand why there aren’t exactly loads of original characters i could have chosen from to use for this, plus if i’d have used one of the more main characters it would sort of expose my plans prematurely. so instead you’ve ended up with this lovely lady. she has big dreams, an unrequited crush and a dead-end job at ‘once upon a cone’...

she also has a playlist of songs though, which i took ages to settle on because i wanted something that i felt she would actually listened to but also tied into her character arc which is easier said than done when you have a garbage music taste consisting of musical theater albums and glee covers like i do. but i’m pretty happy with the results, so here it is!

would you be so kind - dodie everybody talks - neon trees hung up - madonna don’t stop - fleetwood mac dog days are over - florence + the machine

it might be a while before we meet her in the story, but hopefully this gave you a little taste of what she’s about!

now for the tagging. @simgerale - since you’re just starting to tell amoria’s story, if you fancied doing this tag then i think this would be really fun to do with her. @nooodlenoot - i know you have a lot of projects you’re playing around with atm so if you want to do this then i’d love to see what you could do for any of your characters. and @foreveralwaysanauthor - i know you don’t really have any sim stories going on at the moment, but if you felt like putting a playlist together like this for any of your original characters then i’d love to see it! <3

[vorthosjay]

Let’s Talk About Wool Over the Eyes AND Dominaria News!

AAAAAAAH SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT TODAY. The story is here, while big news for Dominaria was rolled out here, here, and in my own article here. NO TIME FOR INTRO LETS GO.

Sphinx’s Decree by Daarken

None of her tamales had made it through the journey (they had crumbled to an inedible dust somewhere in the metaphysical space between Ixalan and here), so she traded a piece of amber from home for a bag full of odd-looking coins.

This is an important detail for a couple reasons. First, she was bringing tamales to barter! Second, they crumbled to dust in the Blind Eternities.

"No, but I'd love to make one!" Saheeli grinned and pulled Huatli up off the bench. "We are going back to my workshop right now so you can describe them to me. I've been needing a new artificing project!"

I realling like that Saheeli and Huatli are besties now.

Also, and I can’t overstate this...

ARTIFACT DINOSAURS

Grimlock, Ferocious King by Tyler Jacobson

The road was dusty and broad, peppered here and there with stores that had been in business longer than he had been alive. It was a sleepy sort of place, and Angrath was happy very little had changed.

A little plume of smoke was rising from his foundry. A hand-painted window on the outside read "OPEN" in blocky lettering. The building was little more than a shack on the far end of town, but it had been his shack on the far end of town. Piles of iron and metal were stacked outside, and a number of items and weapons were hung on a rack, each tagged to mark which order was which.

Sounds an awful lot like an old west plane, as most of us have speculated for Angrath from the start.

Two minotaurs glanced up from their anvils. They were tall like their mother had been. They wore bulky leather aprons, and their horns were adorned with the jewelry worn by unmarried women of their age.

Their eyes went wide. The one on the right snorted in shock. The other's ears stood up in surprise.

The one on the right sniffed the air and trembled with emotion. "Father?"

Steam softly hissed where Angrath's tears met his skin. He smiled.

"Rumi. Jamira. I'm home."

She remembered journeying upriver alone . . .

bravely diving into the river that ran through the city . . .

watching as a sphinx rampaged through Orazca . . .

and standing atop the Immortal Sun to turn said sphinx—along with dozens of other enemies—into gold.

Vraska remembered it all as clear as day, and gladly laid bare her mind for Nicol Bolas to inspect.

Like the image up top, I really like the idea that the moments that didn’t happen because Vraska’s backstory for Orazca.

"HE IS ALONE AND IMPRISONED HERE," it read in the same wandering flourish as Nicol Bolas's earlier messages. "CONGRATULATIONS, GUILDLEADER VRASKA." The location listed below the message was in a sparsely populated corner of the city. A perfect place to deal with filth in an appropriately sinister manner.

Whelp, RIP Jarad... again.

The tan was real. The scrapes, the newly callused hands, the muscles (the muscles!) were all his. Jace felt proud of his body for the first time in his life. He must not lose track of it now. Gideon would help with that—he'd been trying to foist a workout regimen on Jace for a year now.

Love to see that the emotional growth for Jace is sticking. He’s no longer intimidated by Gideon and avoiding his help because of that.

Also, you were trying to use me to lure Bolas to Ixalan to be imprisoned, weren't you? What stopped you on Tarkir? Has everything you've ever done actually just been about defeating Nicol Bolas? If so, we're going to need you to step up.

YEAH WHATS UP, UGIN?

Jace's first instinct was to reach his friends on Dominaria by focusing on Liliana, but the thought of her gave him pause. What he felt for her now wasn't anything resembling affection. It felt more sickly than that. An anemic, old, anxious tether between them that felt more like dread than tenderness. The entire notion of her was unsettling him, so he focused on the others instead.

Good.

Gideon's position on Dominaria was moving—not just at normal walking speed or mounted speed, but faster than he had any reason to be going.

How is he moving like that?!

I know how.

"Wow! I've never planeswalked onto a moving object before—what exactly are we riding in? How is it powered? How fast are we going?"

Skyship Weatherlight by Mark Tedin

It’s the Weatherlight, which in it’s earlier incarnation could achieve speeds of up to 110 mph, but got faster as the story went on.

It’s powered by powerstones, perhaps the bones of Ramos still?

He realized he had landed in something slightly gooey, and looked up to see who was nearby.

@sarpadianempiresvol-viii suggested that Jace landed in Squee and now I don’t want it to be anything else.

He heard quick footsteps on metal and saw Gideon skid out from a nearby door, eyes wide and body frozen with shock. His expression was overcome with emotion. This was someone who was happy to the point of tears to see that he was alive. This was a friend.

Compared to his rampant insecurity around Gideon earlier, this is awesome.

He saw Gideon lurching forward to hug him, but one of the other people in the room abruptly stepped in his way. She appeared to be in her seventies. She wore thick red robes, and her silver hair was tied in a loose, somewhat frizzy braid at her side. She looked Jace up and down with a distant, amused smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. The woman looked over her shoulder at Gideon and raised an eyebrow.

"Who's the bookworm?"

WHO IS THIS LADY I WONDER?

Art by Yongjae Choi

"Orazca is ours once more," he said. "The three aspects of the sun shine bright, and thus begins a new age of conquest for the Sun Empire. Ixalan is ours . . . and Torrezon is next."

That was... a relatively minor ending. I think the vampires and pirates might have been more interesting.

Magic Story will resume in April 2018 in Dominaria.

Magic: The Gathering Narrative Team:

Writers – Alison Luhrs and Kelly Digges Editor – Gregg Luben

Ixalan Story Development:

James Wyatt (Creative Lead) Chris L'etoile Doug Beyer

Special thanks to:

Jenna Helland Ken Troop

I want everyone to take a close look at this list, and realize that Chris L’etoile hasn’t been at Wizards of the Coast in year. This list shows exactly why the new plan to bring on an outside author is so fantastic. Alison and Kelly were writing all of the stories for Ixalan, AND were responsible for the world guides for future sets and the thousand art descriptions necessary every year.

Let’s move to the Io9 Article!

Dominaria’s story starts right after the events of Hour of Devastation. Gideon and Liliana have arrived on Dominaria following the Gatewatch’s defeat at the hands of Nicol Bolas. Together, they begin a mission to kill Belzenlok, the final demon holding Liliana’s contract. They get to see a lot of Dominaria in the process, which gives fans a look at how the plane has changed, and make some allies who may be familiar to longtime players.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. First of all, confirmation that Liliana’s fourth demon is on Dominaria.

Second, and more interesting, the rest of the Gatewatch are still working together?

Also, if Liliana’s fourth demon is there, YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

What’s changed in Dominaria since fans last went there in Time Spiral?

Wells: Dominaria has started to recover from the Phyrexian invasion, though it’s left its mark on a lot of places and cultures. At the time the story starts, Dominaria is facing a new threat from the rise of the Cabal, which has been taken over by Belzenlok, and is now spreading across the world.

So, has the Weatherlight been restored to take on the Cabal? That seems like the task here, the big bad. Which honestly has me super excited because we’re inching one step after another closer to my grandest theory coming true.

I feel like I don’t have to do much speculation as to where the story is going, because I’ve already figured it out. I’m super pumped.

And then my article!

I think I liked Jamuraa best -- Zhalfir really captured my imagination -- but every setting had so much potential for more stories.

Zhalfir (might) be back! The wording on this was awkward so it’s not clear if she was talking about the history of Jamuraa or modern Jamuraa.

In the podcast, you mention a number of intriguing story details that I'd like to talk about. The biggest of which is the return of Skyship Weatherlight. Is this the original Weatherlight, recovered and rebuilt, or a new ship with the same name?

It's the original Weatherlight, which is rebuilt during the story.

It’s the original Weatherlight!

Notes from the Podcast!

Tiana is the guardian angel for the Weatherlight!

Arvad is a vampire and they become friends!

Teferi has a family!

Lots of cool stuff! I’m super pumped, and I’m sure more specifics will form in my head as we go.