#and so on and suchlike

[fictionadventurer]

I'm not a fan of intrusive fantasy/urban fantasy when the magic is a Big Secret that must be kept from the public at all costs. Because truth shouldn't be limited to a select group. The truth should be open to everybody, so it's hard to root for people who want to keep everyone ignorant.

I much prefer

The main characters want people to know about magic, but they refuse to believe in it.

Magic is a completely ordinary part of everyday life and people can casually discuss it.

There is a bit of leeway for superhero stories, because the secret identity is an important part of the genre. It is usually more fun when people are in on the secret, because then the superheroics can become part of their daily life, like in the second option above. But even when the secret is kept, it doesn't quite feel like the same thing because

The superhero isn't hiding the existence of the entire world of superheroes/aliens/monsters/etc., just their own part in it

Which is much closer to humility than to the urban fantasy pride in being one of the few in the inner circle who know the truth.

[calamitys-child]

The service dog battle vest was kinda just cause I thought it was funny and cheeky and vaguely suggestive and I genuinely wasn't expecting people to actually clock it and start approaching me for like. Support going up the stairs or help picking something up or directions to their bus stop or whatever but it seems to be happening noticeably more frequently when I wear this than when I wear my other weird jackets. Genuinely very funny and charming to me. The people have spoken and they want a service butch

[swan2swan]

Sammy going from "I love my family and I would do anything for them and you don't get to speak on them" to "My family is actually The Worst and I'm proud of who I am" would honestly be a super-sick and subversive arc. Especially for a children's show.

[robinsceramics]

im curious as to about how long each of your pieces takes?? it took me two class periods to be satisfied with the pinch pot we just made in ceramics class (though that’s probably also because im very much a perfectionist) so i can’t imagine how long a whole critter would take

it really depends!! some of them (unpainted, simple shapes) take as little as five minutes; some of them (large, complex shapes with very detailed painting) take as much as 10 hours.

I have gotten way faster over the years, though, so don't think I'm just some natural genius! the skills of sculpting build on each other. Just last year it took me three hours to make a simple fox, and now I can bust out a really nice fox (with toe beans!) in two hours. it just takes time and repetition to get there <3

and hey congrats on being in a ceramics class!! I hope you have fun with it!! If you like critters, I recommend stealing some of the clay and making some kind of toadish blob out of it and firing it in the kiln, as long as your studio masters won't get mad about it. the joy of making a lumpy little guy is unmatched.

examples of sculpture + time counts below the cut!

Little guys like this tiny cicada, which is a design I've done so many times that I can make them on autopilot, are in the 5-15 minutes range to sculpt. bunnies, chickens, wizards, and mini-cats are like that for me too!

but if I add the time it takes to paint them, even simple sculptures can end up taking much more time���for instance, this starry chicken took only five minutes to make but about an hour to paint.

then when you get into the more complex shapes, those can take a lot of time—this anthro coyote took me 3 hours to sculpt because it was a complex shape AND I was unfamiliar with making anthros so I was learning as I went:

and when you add complex designs to complex sculptures, you end up with projects like this peach-tree bear, which took three hours to make and five hours to paint, so that's eight hours in one sculpture:

and eight hours is about my limit for sculptures I'm going to sell. BUT. when I'm making things for myself, I'm willing to spend even MORE time on them to make them perfect for my own tastes. I tend to spend the most time on fanart sculptures—it takes a lot more time to make a sculpture perfectly on-model to a pre-existing character than it does to make up a whole new thing. So the sculpture that has taken me the most time so far in this batch is this JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fanart sculpture, Star Platinum:

three hours to make the body, seven hours to paint him—Star has taken me ten hours total so far!!

[see-arcane]

Eggers' seems to like his vampires as very visibly walking corpses. That of course wouldn't really fit with the Carmilla story for a whole number of reasons.

Other than that she does actually have a lot of the "folk vampire" aspects he likes.

She does! But she's also a very distinct kind of monster compared to Dracula/Orlok in how she operates. Almost on the same level of Lord Ruthven of "The Vampyre," ala the MO of befriending and/or seducing innocents specifically to kill them. With Laura she seems to show signs of 'serial killer got too attached to the victim,' cue Millie getting into fixated vampire lover territory. But other than that, she has less of Eggers' preferred visceral threat and jagged edges than he seems to prefer with his villains.

[saprosappho]

really annoying when people use closed captions to provide commentary on what they’re saying, which they do not provide captions for. yeah man i’m sure that was pretty funny

[citadelofswords]

i think i am possibly simply not smart enough to write a mystery story

[hawkesque]

best possible outcome now happening to me time to worry extra hard about fucking it up . but later for now im on mini spring break and im going to write gay fan fiction about it . yippee

[faust-terrorsofthenight]

Yayyy!!!! 🥳💖

[amrv-5]

Okay given that my 25th birthday (wow) falls directly on American election day and also that it's been a trying week already if anybody wants to be really nicey* to me next Tuesday I would be grateful forever <3

*see tags

[unnonexistence]

just started reading book 3 in this series and page 1 is taking no prisoners hgdshdslk

[see-arcane]

Have you written in any other anthologies?

A handful! Though only the more recent ones have my finally-trimmed-down moniker of C.R. Kane.*

*My full name being both bereft of the beloved magical eye pun wordplay and, ironically, reading far too much like the pen name of someone trying too hard.

99 Fleeting Fantasies - "Angel Season," featuring celestial beings nesting on Earth. It's chill, it's fine.

99 Tiny Terrors - "Atoms Break the Same All Over," in which an apocalypse has been and gone. Bring your Geiger counter.

Offbeat: Nine Spins on Song - "A Walk, A Talk, A Death, A Life," based loosely off the premise of turning a song into a short story. Mine was "How to Save a Life."

Strange Little Girls - "Marco Polo," in which a child goes swimming and meets some new friends. Nothing goes wrong. Honest.

Creature Stew - "Tripping," which shows how the undead season their cuisine. It's free on Kindle!

And, if you want to duck into the backroom behind the curtain, (apologies for the sticky carpet)...

A couple erotica helpings too.

Blood in the Rain 4 - "The Married Woman," stars an amorous vampire sniffing out a bedmate who's already taken. Consequences ensue.

Mashed - "The Stray," wherein both halves of the supernatural x human coital collision assume the other one is the prospective party to be whisked away. Also free on Kindle.

[talkorsomething]

Week 3,,, i did it,,,, :great_thumbsup:

Except, not every day was perfect 9 of everything + stretching! For one, its Wet Out, for two.... eh, well, something sad happened. I will be okay though.

Going into week four (auditions coming up so soon!) I think all i will try to add is the dance warmup because aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i hate it lol

[flemmboyant]

sometimes i realize that people have uhhhhh Different Problems than me and its very startling

[victorluvsalice]

-->And then it was time for everyone to converge on the greenhouse and help out Victor – specifically, by doing some targeted harvesting while he finished up his tending! I had Alice return to normal and rush in there to pick the coconuts, the pineapples, the soy and black beans (and evolve a couple of plants while she was at it), while Smiler picked a bunch of their herbalism stuff (with a focus on stuff like the noxious elderberries and poison fireleaf I didn’t have before). Smiler then dusted Victor’s bees with mite treatment, fertilized their noxious elderberries so they could evolve them up to nice level, and headed upstairs to have a nice bath –

-->And Alice got sent to the kitchen to make some more food for the food stand, using her new appliances! :D Because if we’re going to have a food sale, we need to have food to sell! She’d already made a garden pizza last playsession while at the store, which was already in the stand – I thus had her make a fresh batch of dough in the stand mixer, then bake up some banana split waffles, a loaf of artful focaccia, some minty mocha cupcakes (in the oven! :D), and a pineapple pizza! Yes, I was thinking a bit about food that Smiler would probably like, as they were the one who was going to be running the stand – sometimes I regret that they’re a vampire who can’t eat regular food in this save, as I know any human Smilers would be all over banana split waffles and pineapple pizza. In another save, Smiler, I promise! I’ll fudge things a bit in my potential future Valicer In The Dark save! XD

-->While Alice was getting her cooking on, Victor and Smiler were keeping busy with the last of the farm chores (while the chickens were keeping busy with a fox – I gotta get some more livestock upgrade parts). Victor FINALLY finished the tending (and deactivated poor Elmer to stop the bot from constantly trying to weed a glitched plant) and got the initial batch of super-selling done, then left Smiler to finish off selling everything while he cleared out the cow shed (and once again dropped the results on the ground next to said cow shed – I just had him put the trash in his inventory for later recycling). Smiler got Gardening skill 9 from all the super-selling (and harvesting the lemon tree in the corner that had gotten skipped in all the super-sell batching), which pleased me greatly –

And then I realized “wait a minute. Isn’t it supposed to be New Skill Day? Where’s the holiday thing?” Concerned, I checked the calendar, and confirmed that it was indeed a holiday – but that I didn’t have the overlay for it in the corner of my screen. Uh-oh. That DEFINITELY seemed like a sign the save file was on its way out. I decided not to worry TOO much about it at the moment, as New Skill Day is just a pop-up holiday, and not a particularly important one, and instead Alice box up the final pizza, slapped all the food in the foot stand, and had Smiler grab said food stand and gather everyone up to bring them to the Brindleton Bay Pawspital –

[ranvwoop]

its wallowing hours! again.