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morningfears · 4 years

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Just Right

Rating: PG | Fluffy af!

Summary: “I found a ring today.” and “I’m not moving, your lap is too comfortable.” With tattoo artist!Ash request by Anon.

Word Count: 1.6k (kind of a drabble?)

The tattoo shop was finally closed, the door locked and the main room quiet, after a long day of clients. The shop’s staff had long disappeared, all eager to leave work behind for the night, leaving Ashton sat in his office alone. The hum of the overhead lights and the scratch of his pencil against paper filled the silence that had fallen over the shop and for the first time since unlocking the door at ten that morning, he felt like he could focus on the design he’d been working on.

It was a simple concept and should have been an even simpler design but he’d been stuck for days, unable to get it to turn out the way he’d imagined. It was as if his hands had a mind of their own and he’d grown frustrated. The trashcan beside his desk was filled with crumpled pieces of paper, each a discarded attempt at the design, and the cup full of pencils he kept on the corner of the desk was rapidly emptying but no matter how hard he worked, nothing seemed right.

It had to be perfect, he would accept no less for this particular piece, and he just couldn’t get there.

Ashton had planned on giving himself enough time to work for an hour after closing before leaving to meet you for dinner. It was written in bright green ink on his desk calendar and programmed into his phone, just so the shop assistant wouldn’t accidentally schedule a client for him, and he’d been looking forward to it all day. You’d both been exceptionally busy, new clients and projects piling up, so it was a relief that you’d finally be getting some time to yourselves. However, as the hour dwindled he lost himself in his work and seemed to be making greater progress than he had since starting nearly a week ago.

His eyes ached and his head pounded, the strain of the day settling in, but he didn’t dare slow down as he didn’t want to interrupt his progress. Instead, he focused on finally finishing. He was so wrapped up in his work that he didn’t hear the sound of his cellphone vibrating against his desk, nor did he hear the sound of the back door opening or your shoes hitting the tile floor.

You stood in the doorway of his office for a long moment, arms folded over your chest and a fond smile on your lips, to watch him work. His eyebrows furrowed and his tongue darted out to wet his lips as he shaded in the drawing. His hands were covered in graphite, stained from the work he’d done, and you smiled at the sight. Seeing him at work, watching as he drew or tattooed, was one of your favorite sights and you always considered yourself lucky to be able to witness it so regularly.

You remained unnoticed for far longer than you thought you would but the scent of Thai food finally overwhelmed Ashton enough that he lifted his head and blinked in surprise to see you standing in the doorway. He looked confused, but happy to see you, until realization hit him.

“Fuck, I missed dinner, didn’t I?” He frowned, dropping his pencil and reaching to rub his eyes before he caught sight of the mess on his hands and grimaced.

“Technically, no. I’ve got dinner right here.” You held up a plastic bag filled with your usual orders before you stepped into his office and crossed the room to place it onto his desk.

“I’m sorry, doll. I’ve been stuck on this drawing for so long and I finally got it to start looking the way I wanted.” He reached out for you and, despite the stains on his hands, you took his hand and let him pull you to stand between his legs. “Hi.”

“Hi,” you laughed, giggling as his hands found your hips. “Don’t worry about it. The restaurant was crowded, anyway. People were waiting for tables so I figured it’d be nicer to eat here where we don’t have to rush. Can I see what you’re working on?”

Ashton reached around you, quickly piling a few pieces of paper on top of the sheet he’d been drawing on, before he grinned at you. “Nope. Not yet. Don’t want you to see this one until it’s finished.” He did that, every now and then, and though you hated not being able to see the progress he made, you respected his desire to keep his work private until he was ready. So, with a pout, you nodded and reached behind you to grab the bag of food.

“Oh, alright. Well, if I can’t see your work, you can at least take a few minutes to have dinner with me.”

Ashton laughed as he released you from his grasp and watched as you wandered around his office, grabbing the utensils you’d left stashed in a cabinet for nights like this. You often ended up here, having dinner with him at his desk after work, and though you appreciated the nights that saw you both dressed up and hitting the town, you treasured any moment you got him to yourself.

As you moved about the office, gathering utensils and two drinks from the mini fridge in the corner, Ashton watched you with a fond smile of his own. You were so good to him, even when he did something stupid like forget the dinner date you’d been planning all week, and he loved you more than he ever thought himself capable of.

Without thinking about it, he announced, “I found a ring today.”

It was no secret that Ashton was going to propose. You’d talked about marriage at length, confirmed that marriage was in the cards for you both, and knew that you were both ready. He’d been searching for a ring, one that was exactly what you wanted, and it seemed that he’d finally found one.

“I thought you spent the day at the shop,” you hummed as you returned to the desk and allowed Ashton to pull you down onto his lap.

“I left to get lunch for everyone. Found a shop I hadn’t tried before.” He took the box of noodles from you and pressed a kiss to your temple as a ‘thank you’ when he opened it to find his favorite dish inside.

“So, I should stay away from your sock drawer, then?”

“I’ll show it to you, if you want. That way I can make sure you like it before I propose,” he joked before he took a bite of noodles.

“Mm, I think I’d prefer to be surprised. I’m sure it’s going to be perfect, you picked it out.”

“Hey, I’m the cheesy one.” He laughed, nudging your side with his elbow, before he nodded. “Thank you for the vote of confidence. I appreciate it. The boys approve.”

“I’m glad. You figure out who’s going to be the best man yet or are you just going to toss their names into a hat and leave it to chance?” You grinned at him, your question ending in a laugh as his own face fell and he released a groan.

“Can I just have three best men?”

“Your three best men are, like, most of our wedding guests, babe. Gotta make some decisions.” You reached out to pat his shoulder and he laughed as he nodded in agreement.

The pair of you had already started planning your wedding, including the guest list, and had settled on a small affair with close friends and family. You knew that he would end up choosing one of the boys sooner or later and you were in no hurry, you weren’t even officially engaged yet, so you let him remain undecided for the time being.

You moved on to a different topic, opting to catch up on what you’d missed in one another’s lives, as you finished eating. You sat comfortably on his lap, content to remain there until it was time to head home, and Ashton noticed as you both placed your empty containers onto the desk.

“I wanted to finish this up before we head home. Do you want to go ahead or wait here?”

“I’m not moving,” you mumbled, turning to place your head in the crook of his neck, “your lap is too comfortable. Can you draw with me here?”

It was, by no means, a comfortable position to draw in but it was possible. And you hadn’t had much time to just be together in recent days so Ashton nodded. “Sure, doll. Just promise you won’t look?”

He rarely made you promise not to look at his work so you nodded, content to keep your head buried against his neck where you could smell the cologne on his skin. “Promise. I’m just gonna close my eyes. If I fall asleep, just wake me up whenever you’re ready to go.”

He knew that you would be asleep in minutes, you hadn’t slept much lately, but that was alright. It’d keep you from looking and ruining the surprise. He was waiting for the right moment to propose, that much you knew, but what you didn’t know was that he was that he was working on a print for you. You were opposed to the idea of a tattoo for a significant other, you firmly believed it was bad luck, but you loved his art so he wanted to give you something special. It wouldn’t be inked onto your skin but it would be permanent enough, framed and hopefully displayed in your future home, and that was enough.

Everything finally felt just right and Ashton was proud to finally know what love really was.

____________________________________________________

Author’s Note: I love the idea that there’s complete communication about something as big as a proposal. Like, a surprise is nice, but knowing that it’s coming and being open about it is important, I think. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m. still working on drabbles, promise. I haven’t written Ash in so long, I missed my boy.

Tag List (like this post or message me if you want to be added!) : @toolazymyguy , @irwinkitten , @jamieebabiee , @glittersluke , @spicycal , @lusbaby , @everyscarisahealingplace, @brokenvirtualheartcollector , @if-it-rains-it-pours, @blisshemmings , @calumscalm , @lovemenowseemenever , @ijustreallylovezebras , @rhiannonmichelle, @p0laroidpictures , @tomscuddles , @loverofmineluke , @harrytreatspeoplewithkindnesss , @blueviiolence , @loveroflrh , @empathycth , @luckyduckydoo , @tobefalling , @bandsandbooksaremykink , @watch-how-she-burns , @megz1985, @wokeupinaustralia , @lucidlrh , @canterburyfiction , @cal-is-not-on-branding , @t-i-n-y-d-i-n-o , @jaacknaano , @findingliam-o , @mindkaleidoscope , @idk-who-i-am-anymore1 , @sammyrenae68 , @flowerthug , @calumsphile , @caitdaniels, @drummerboy794 , @writingfortoomanyfandoms , @x-lover-of-mine-x , @miliefayy , @sunaaii , @canterburyfiction , @sebrox40 , @nati-nn , @opheliaaurora23 , @bitterbethany , @sunnysidesblog , @333-xx , @thesubtweeter, @zhangyixingxing1

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antihero-writings · 4 years

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IM SO EXCITED TO BE ABLE TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU GUYS

It’s a project that’s been a while in the making....

I MADE PHYSICAL BOOKS OF MY FICS

AHHHHHHHH

Including art from @almaadst (tumblr), Junki Sakuraba (instagram and Deviantart), Stlyrica (instagram), and niuan_ (instagram)!

(I took a video of me flipping through it, but apparently tumblr doesnt let you post videos, so I’ll probably post that on a different platform and put a link to it in a reblog! For now I just included most of the pages with art on them).

I’m so excited!!! The printing service was so nice, and I think they turned out really amazing!!! :D It was a lot of hard work, but I think it was really worth it!!

I feel this requires some explanation!!

I have many grandparents, and they’re super supportive—happy to read my writing, even if it’s FanFiction. A few years ago I compiled a 3-ring binder of all my writings at the time for them for Christmas. They absolutely adored it, so I wanted to do that in the following years too, but for some reason never got around to it.

So this/last year we decided to go all out and not just make a binder, but use an actual printing service to print physical copies of my work! (We also made one of these for my original works, and another 3-ring binder for anything that couldn’t fit in the books).

(I have included the table of contents in the pictures so you know which stories are in the book. (Not all of them would fit)).

They seemed to appreciate them, haha!! And I thought you might too!!!

In addition to that, very quickly after doing this I realized, as long as I got permission from the artists, I could sell something like this to you guys!! Kinda like a zine, but, you know, of my own works!!

So, yeah! If I made a physical version of my fics to sell, would you guys be interested in buying?

I’ve gotten permission from the artists to sell all but two of the pieces in the books, (and I’m not sure about the border art on the cover and back, they were from the internet) so I should be able to make similar books like these in the future!!

I made a survey to see what you guys would be interested in buying! (I put that here ^^, as well as in a separate post, so please please go check it out!!)

Even though I do have 3 copies of these left, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to sell these particular books. So I’m considering remaking a version that’s a bit more sell-able! I was thinking of splitting future books up by fandoms. I think generally people just follow me for one or two fandoms, so it might be nice to sell a booklet of all my Castlevania fics together, a separate one of all my Pandora Hearts fics, and so forth. Would that be good? Then the one-offs could be all be in their own book, maybe? Either that or splitting them based on genre. (ie all the anime fics are in one book, all the cartoon fics are in one book, all the video game fics are in one book, and then all the more mainstream stuff is in one book). Any thoughts?

I really hope you guys like it/think it’s cool too!! It’s so much fun to have actual physical proof of the things I’ve worked on over the past few years!!!

Even if you’re not interested in buying, a reblog of this, and/or the survey post, to spread the word would be super duper helpful!!

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moonyandsaturn · 3 years

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Paper Rings

little dorlene fic that you can also read here

The moon was high, hanging in the night sky with smoking smells flowing to it. Out the window into the midnight streets.

“I’m not sure this is exactly how I want to meet your friends.”

“What do you mean this is perfect!” Lily smiled.

Dorcas looked around at the abnormally large flat. The walls were covered in nicely printed wallpaper and slightly dusty frames hung paintings Dorcas couldn't remember from any of their art history classes.

“Geez, this place is giant,” Dorcas whistled as Lily continued dragging her up the stairs. The sound of laughter from a higher room (with even higher people in it) was made clearer.

“Yeah, Sirius is a rich asshole,” Lily replied, earning a laugh from her. “Even painted all those paintings himself because he wanted to be original,” she mocked.

“Ha! So who's all here?”

“Oh so there's Remus who you’ve met. Then this is Sirius’ place so obviously he’d here. And then we have James of course.” James was Lily’s fiance. They got engaged about 2 months ago and the wedding would come along soon enough.

“Is that it?”

“No, there's Marlene too. You’ve probably seen her around. She's on the volleyball team.” Dorcas shook their head not remembering any of that. “Well, that's fine anyway they're over here.”

Lily opened the door to a large room. It was sort of a lounge room, it had a TV and all that. Normally they wouldn't be upstairs though.

The two of them entering earned a few “Heyyys!!” and “It was about time you guys got here!” James got up to give Lily a kiss before leading both of them over to the couch they were all on, Remus was already rolling a joint for them.

“Dorcas right?” they looked up at the person asking. She must be Marlene . The girl talking had dirty blonde hair pinned up in a messy low bun. She was wearing a much too large brown leather jacket with a band tee and jeans as well.

“Um, yeah. They/she,” Dorcas had grown accustomed to just telling people their pronouns as a greeting. It just made things much easier.

Marlene smiled back. It had a sort of crookedness to it, in between a smirk and a grin. “She/her.” Dorcas nodded back as she received the fag from Remus.

The talking went long into the night, or morning that is. It was an interesting group of people. Marlene and Sirius were probably the more extroverted and outspoken out of them, though Sirius was kind of whipped and would shut up if Remus said so. Marlene seemed to just constantly flirt with her. Dorcas understood it may just be how her personality seems to her but sometimes it got annoying. Of course she already met Lily and James long ago and didn't learn anything new about them.

Marlene seemed especially interested in her dating life.

“Yeah, and then we broke up. They were pretty nice but it just didn't make sense for us to be together.”

“they?” Marlene looked up from her phone. looks like she was listening

“yeah, me and my partner.”

“Ever dated a girl before?”

“Maybe” Dorcas winked and turned back to finish her story.

By maybe that meant never, and Dorcas was simply playing the pronoun game. Dorcas did have a preference for girls right but they had only dated guys up till now. 3 actually. First was her high school boyfriend that lasted 5 months, Charlie Robeson. Charlie came out as trans several years later so maybe Dorcas should have said her high school girlfriend . 2nd was Gideon Prewitt. They dated for 2 years. Two years of her life wasted really. Dorcas shook the thought from their head. Gideon was a douchebag who could go fuck himself. Her last boyfriend wasn't really a boyfriend at all, they fake dated to get someone else jealous. Ah, yes fake-dating Remus Lupin was probably the best out of her romantic encounters, excluding the part when him and Sirius forgot to lock the bathroom door and Dorcas happened to walk in at the wrong time.

They got into the elevator up to her flat. It was eerily silent at this hour of the morn, creepy almost. She played with her keys for a moment, trying to find the right one before pushing the door open to her modest flat.

Dorcas tossed themself onto her bed kicking the duvet over her body, snoring lightly to sleep and the sun started making colorful patterns in the sky.

☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾

“Oh, come on Meadowes! Surely you must like me a little after 2 months!”

“Marlene, you’ve been asking me out as a joke for 2 months. sorry I’m not looking to get humiliated!”

Dorcas could hear Marlene catching up to her, a stupid fucking smirk playing on her lips. “What if it's not a joke?”

“Then we wouldn't really be here, huh?” Dorcas said, pulling her bag tighter to her.

“Just a small dinner! You don't even need to come home with me.”

“What a generous offer,” Dorcas rolled their eyes.

“Oh, you know I'm joking,” Marlene smiled, walking backwards to try to keep up with her. “Come on, what's your favorite food? We can go get that when you're free.”

Dorcas sighed and stopped to face Marlene, she was only a couple inches taller than her. Maybe 5’10 or 11. “What about when you’re free?”

Marlene beamed. “Anytime is good.”

“Not now it is, get your ass over here McKinnon! Actually go get the ball then come back!” A booming coach's voice came from the volleyball court.

Marlene bent down to pick up the ball and gave Dorcas a little two fingered salute before running back to the court. “See you later, Meadowes! For dinner!!”

“Hey! That wasn't a yes!” Dorcas called back to her, not receiving a response and shaking her head as she walked away.

Neither of them had each other's phone number so it's fine. To be quite honest, Dorcas wouldn't mind a date. Marlene was attractive and funny, just very very persistent. She could be compared to James in high school, poor Lily.

Dorcas took her thoughts away from their almost date and walked over to the bus stop to meet up with some people for her group project. They convinced everyone to meet up at their favorite coffee shop. Dorcas was unreasonably excited to get some coffee in her system, specifically mocha with some foam and chocolate drizzle on top.

Curse you Remus, now I'm addicted to shit Dorcas thought as she drank almost the entire thing under 5 minutes. She got her things out to wait for the others.

she got home at a decent time, just as the moon rose and the sun set. Dorcas made themself some popcorn to watch a movie with.

Ding! Dorcas checked the microwave but the popcorn wasn't done. Ding! She realized it was her phone and picked it off the counter to see the messages from an unknown number.

Marlene: Hey I thought we were gonna have dinner :(

Marlene: also don't hate me Lily was the one who gave me your number after she saw me stalking you

Marlene: also this is Marlene probably should have said that first so you don't think I'm a creep

Dorcas: You are a creep

Marlene: ouch

Marlene: I thought you liked me Meadowes

Dorcas: I never said that

Marene: Maybe you’re in denial ;))

Dorcas: hmmm let me think

Dorcas: no

Marlene: :((((

Marlene: well now that I can text you when are you free?

Dorcas: you really are annoying aren't you?

Marlene: nah just know what i want

Marlene: soooo????

Dorcas: I'm watching a movie right now

Marlene: ok?

Dorcas: ok so you can come over you persistent arse

Dorcas: you can get my address from lily too creepy

Marlene: is that my new nickname??

Marlene: I deal with the name calling just for you, see you in a minute :))

Dorcas sighed and looked over at the microwaved that was now smoking and smelled of burnt popcorn. She cleaned it up and opened up the windows before enjoying watching some stupid reels on instagram.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Marlene grinned at Dorcas opened the door.

“Har, har,” she deadpanned and let her inside.

“What's that?”

Marlene set a bag on top of Dorcas’ dining table. She didn't answer and instead pulled out one of those bags of sweet people normally bought at halloween.

Dorcas laughed at the size of it. “I don't think we’ll be able to eat all that.”

“That's what you think. I could survive solely off of starbursts,” Marlene replied.

“The orange ones are the best.”

Marlene turned to face them with her mouth open with disgust. “Those are the worst ones!”

“No, the worst ones are pink.”

“I think we need your senses checked, love. There's definitely something wrong with your taste.” Marlene moved closer and Dorcas’ cheeks warmed up at the pet name.

“C’mon I just got Disney plus so we can watch something on there.”

Marlene followed Dorcas to her couch giddily, “Oooo, I vote for Princess and the Frog.” She plopped down on the other side of the couch and Dorcas tossed her a blanket.

“Yeah, okay. Princess and the frog and Mulan are probably my favorites.” She got the remote to turn the TV on.

“Well, maybe your taste isn't all that damaged,” Marlene smiled before turning to watch the movie.

Movie rolled for the full 1 hour and 38 minutes and for part of the credits. The two didn't talk much only making comments here and there, laughing at things they thought funny and pointing when something interesting happened.

“I would die to have something like Ray and Evangeline.”

Dorcas looked over at Marlene who was still watching the credits rolling in tune with the background music.

“The firefly and the star?”

Marlene faced her once again.“Mhm, yeah. I’d wait my whole life for that.”

“Yeah, it's sweet isn't it? How much he cared.”

“Mhm,” Dorcas’ breath hitched. they didn't know whether they were moving closer or if it was Marlene. Oh, it was Marlene and how welcome the closeness was.

Dorcas closed the small gap between their faces. Place a light kiss on the girls lips. When she pulled away only a second later Marlene still had her eyes closed, a soft smile set on her face. She opened up her eyes to see Dorcas who probably looked like a nervous wreck. Marlene's smile broadened.

“Can I kiss you?”

Dorcas fought back her own smile before sitting up and pushing their lips together again, this time less unsure.

They were like that for a long time, hands running in each other's hair (which Dorcas was surprised her curls didn't get tangled in). Pulling each other closer by the neck, running thumbs over soft cheeks.

They eventually pulled apart to breathe. “I wasn't expecting that till maybe the third date.”

“Not’s not a date,” Dorcas held in a laugh and looked away from Marlene who was eyeing her.

“Of course not. Not after you insult pink starbursts,” Marlene said before turning her back to Dorcas, claiming a spot on her lap, sort of using Dorcas as a back rest. they didn't mind. It was the perfect height. Dorcas lifted their chin onto her head and wrapped their arms around her shoulders. She quickly places a kiss into her hair before letting the night's sleep take over them.

☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾

1 year later:

Dorcas blinked herself awake.

“Morning.”

They looked up at Marlene who had her arm around her head. “Morning. Did I oversleep?”

She looked away from the book she was reading. Ever since Dorcas moved in They’d been reading all the books on her bedside table and now Marlene had to catch up. “No, think you got a bit of a cold, sorry.”

“It's okay,” Dorcas closed her eyes again, feeling comfortable in their girlfriends embrace.

The night before the whole gang took a trip to the beach. At night. Cause they were all utterly stupid. Marlene went into the ocean first urging everyone else to also. James jumped in after free to wallow in his youth and was happy to get a break from babysitting. Harry was an amazing kid but his godfather was also Sirius so Harry too was a bit chaotic. Dorcas eventually joined everyone in the freezing water, Dorcas could have sworn they turned blue.

Marlene turned abruptly, causing Dorcas’ head to fall back on the pillow which wasn't nearly as comfortable as her. “Would you ever want to live together?”

Well, thats an odd conversation starter. Dorcas laughed. “We already are.”

“No, I know that. I mean when we're out of uni, working and all that.”

“Oh, I never thought of that.”

“I’m just saying we don't have to decide I just thought maybe-”

“I never said I didn't want to,” Dorcas cut her off before Marlene started rambling. “I think it would be nice.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Yeah, so stop worrying, creepy,” she laughed.

Marlene gave them a deadpan expression. “When are you gonna stop calling me that!”

“Never,” Dorcas grinned. “Sooo, would you just wanna live together or?”

Marlene laid back down, looking at the ceiling and Dorcas leaned over her. “I don't know. We could drive away and live in the country maybe. We can work from home so our dreary Mondays aren't so dreary.”

Darcas laid down next to her. “We’re bound to have fights and stuff, though.”

“That's fine,” Marlene faced her, but didn't move her body. “We wouldn't be able to be happy if we’re not angry sometimes.”

Dorcas sat up again, pulling Marlene up with her. “Would you ever want to get married?”

Marlene rolled her tongue on the inside of her cheek. “Yeah. Don't have that much money though. Can't get you anything shiny and nice like you deserve.”

Dorcas took Marlene’s hands in theirs.“I hate accidents but you know? I didn't really mind it when we went from friends to this. You’re the one I want, Marlene McKinnon. And I’d marry you with paper rings.”

#taylor swift inspired #dorlene #dorcas meadowes #marlene mckinnon #lesbian marlene #marauders #marauders era #lily evans #modern au #harry potter

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mysticsparklewings · 3 years

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I keep promising to attempt to return to regular posting and then not really doing it, don't I? XP Well, hopefully this time I mean it. I do want to. And whether you guys can tell or not, I have made some behind-the-scenes strides towards being able to. One of the things pushing me this time though is I'm mad at myself that I neglected to post really anything substantial in March, which is going to mess up how I end up filling out this year's Art Summary in December/January time. That probably sounds like a silly thing to be worried about, but...I don't know. I like having at least one thing to show per month that shows what I did during the year. It's like a super-extended checklist of, "Yeah, I did something that month!" Anyway. I thought maybe posting something like this--A bit more than my usual WIP Wednesday of empty promises--would help hold me more accountable...and now you can also see I'm not kidding when I say I have a backlog of stuff I haven't posted yet. XD Some of my be familiar, some of it I've mentioned once or twice before, some of it is totally new to you guys...and some of it was technically "backlog" even before my unintentional off-again on-again hiatus. But I've blurred the names since some of the titles aren't finalized and a few I'd like to keep as a tiny bit of a surprise. ;) As for the WIP Side, technically most of what you see is also backlog now, but it hasn't been scanned in yet, so I'm withholding "backlog" status until then. Still, you can see I have finally finished the Art Snacks piece I've shown actually WIPs for twice now, a funny little cat drawing I've said nothing about, the PRINTED PROOF FOR THE NAPOWRIMO BOOK! :D, and underneath all that is the planner I set up to...help me keep track while playing catch in Animal Crossing. Yes, part of my absence initially included not playing AC:NH since mid-November, and then more recently was because of me trying to catch up in-game between when I stopped playing and the present day. Now, the NaPo Book is probably the most exciting thing for obvious reasons. And while I don't want to drag out the details too much here (I fully intend on doing a separate post about that), I will say that I now understand A. Why there's usually a whole team of people behind making a book and not just one person; and B. Why we order proof copies before putting the thing up for sale. Because somehow a handful of mistakes made it past me and at least three other people I had look at the book before ordering the proof. XP Something also kind of exciting is I do have a small assortment of supplies that I'm almost done swatching (which yes I have totally been procrastinating on) and will then need testing, which means viable excuses to make yet more art to add to the pile! Of course, then the problem becomes getting myself to sit down and write out all the descriptions for said art. I know technically I don't have to, but I like having that written record of what I did most of the time--because I do revisit my old descriptions sometimes to replicate the process for a new piece--and I personally don't like how some artists make these big elaborate pieces and then have nothing to say about how they made it other than how long it took. To me, there's something humanizing about explaining the process, so to just skip it altogether would just feel wrong to me. Although considering how not wanting to physically put in the effort to do that has held me back, I may experiment with not going into quite as much detail or otherwise trying to streamline my process a bit. (And admittedly some pieces have been in my backlog so long I don't fully remember all the details...which is exactly why I try very hard to get the descriptions done sooner rather than later.) And you know, in some ways it may look or feel like I'm constantly playing catch-up in one way or another, but I've realized that when I really get in the mood to sit down and dedicate time to something, sometimes I actually like having a looming pile staring at me. Part of the reason I hadn't played AC in so long was I was a bit burnout and kinda bored with it, but having so much to do to catch up really reignited that fire in me. The game felt like it had purpose again. While we're on realizations, I probably don't have to tell a lot of you that I'm still in the camp that a lot of my life and my mental health is just better and more enjoyable when social media is not in it. Extra so for Twitter, in particular. Do you know how much nicer it is to only have to check my very small list of "favorites" to see what they're up to, which takes about 5, maybe 10 minutes at a time, and not feel like I owe it to any of them to interact with their tweets? [Because most of them are too big to even notice me anyway, but I digress] That is SO much better than the endless home feed scrolling of hundreds of people, lots of whom I don't even follow they just show up because people I follow, follow them (which I want to turn all the way off so badly but I can't because that's not how Twitter works) and half of which is content I. Could Not. Possibly. Care less about. I like Twitter for news on content creators that can't easily post a small status update to Youtube or whatever. I DO NOT like Twitter for Social Media. AT ALL. Seriously. I opened myself up to posting pictures of my cats over there, and it's STILL not enough to keep me posting and engaging regularly. That's how bad it is. Ahem. My little rant aside, I have thus decided since the Twitter Game™ does more harm than good to me, in general I'm just not going to play it anymore. I'll post my art over there and other stuff when I feel like it, but otherwise, I'm just captial-D Done With It until further notice. It's just better that way. Speaking of games, you may all be surprised to know I've been chipping away at a little video project [about a game] while all this has been going on, too. The NaPo Book comes first, but I'm hoping to have some serious headway on the video done, if not have it finished, by mid-June/July. I've mostly been bouncing around various software trying to find one that can do everything I need on a budget of exactly $0, and the good news is I think I've finally landed on one...which I'll spare you the details of for now. Once the video is closer to being a reality, then we'll delve more into that. So...yeah, that's what's been cooking in the metaphorical Mystic Kitchen. And I tell you guys all of this to 1. Hopefully be the first of that "regular posting" I want to do (still looking at once a week, which I've said probably 500 times before now), and 2. Putting it out there, as I alluded to before, will hopefully be like me signing a contract with myself. "You said you were going to do the thing, so do it." And with that, I suppose I should end this here since this description is surely long enough already, and get back to work on some of that stuff so I'll be more likely to follow through with it, yeah? ;) See you soon, I hope

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hitodama89 · 4 years

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It’s one heck of a tea time, guys!

First of all everything that I’m going to write here is technically public knowledge, but even so I’d prefer if you didn’t go spreading my words/post around because I don’t want to get any sort of angry mob after me. I just need to write this down somewhere to get it off of my chest; I myself am only marginally involved in all of this, but it’s still clogging my brain. Clear? Good, let’s get the tea party started!

So, any of you remember the Artists for the Amazon project I participated in at the beginning of the year? Likely not, so let’s recap. It was a charity project with the goal of producing an art book that would be sold in order to collect money for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest. When I entered the picture the vast majority of the art made for the book had already been finished and the only thing left to do was to hold a contest where people were meant to draw some smaller sketches and other doodles, and the winning pieces of the contest were going to be used to decorate the text pages of the book and fill up some other empty spaces in it. I didn’t end up winning because a) there were a ton of participants, many of them extremely skilled and b) as I later realized most of them didn’t draw just some low effort doodles after all, but full-sized illustrations! Buuuuut because there were so many participants it was decided that all of the contest entries would be collected into a separate magazine that was sold both together and separately from the book. I ended up buying the magazine because the book itself was out of my price range and because I just wanted to see all of those entries! Which is why I know how the project continued from there.

The project’s IndieGoGo campaign launched in March and for the duration of it everything seemed to be going great: the project reached its goal and everything was so peachy that the organizer decided that they would order the total of 500 books in order to lower the production cost of an individual book. Because of that as much as 80 % of the selling price of the books was going to be sent to charity! They’d need to use some of their own money in order to get some of those extra books, but they were willing to do so and later sell them in events and such so they’d get back the money they had invested. It seemed reasonable and the books were anyway practically ready when the campaign ended: they said they’d need to do just some proofreading and minor adjustments and the books would be ready in a week!

Well... They were not. But sometimes delays happen, that’s just life! The donation percentage also dropped to 50 %, but they quaranteed that it was not going to get any lower than that. A month passed and they were still getting new proof versions of the book from their printer, and apparently the magazine hadn’t entered production yet at all. At this point it started to look like things were not quite as they had been promised to be.

It was radio silence until July. The magazine still wasn’t ready, but at least the books actually were! Although there was a sliiiiight issue with the printing costs... Turns out literally all of the money collected had been used to print the books, because the person hadn’t been able to take a loan they had been planning to take in order to pay their share of the books. I can’t even imagine how the book’s primary artists, who had donated ridiculous amounts of time and effort to it, must’ve felt after hearing that! On top of that the person couldn’t send any of the books abroad because of Covid restrictions, so they were pretty much stuck with their 500 books now.

After that the updates were just pretty much confirming that the situation hadn’t changed and after August it was time for another radio silence. I had already counted my losses and was sure that I’d never see the magazine at all, until today it just god damn arrived out of the blue! I was so surprised as we hadn’t heard anything about it in ages. It is gorgeous and makes me completely understand how I didn’t win a place in the book... Especially because my pieces are, uh, displayed quite interestingly. I drew three small pieces that were meant to be tiny page decorations, but I also included a compilation that included them all together. (It looked like this.) Despite this they were all put on separate pages, one piece per page... And it looks stupid as all heck. =‘D I don’t understand why they didn’t use the compilation file or combine them with some other small images? There is at least one page that displays two horizontal pieces from two separate artists, so it’s not like it would’ve been something completely unseen in the magazine.

But whatever. I would be a bit ashamed if I had any fucks to give, but fortunately at this point I do not. I’m just happy to wash my hands from this all and leave it behind me.

#hitto damn

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weaselle · 5 years

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I got asked in my DMs to elaborate on my master project, so, just know if you click the read more, it’s gonna be like, a LONG ass read

(in b4: when I say things like “the poor” rest assured I am also “the poor” and not trying to feed into classist designations - I just need to be able to talk about different economic demographics. Also, I’ve pulled together several pieces of writing that cover this very involved endeavor for this ask, so there may occasionally be a slight overlap of information, tho I have tried to clean it up)

@victorylilygreen (lol, you asked) @ekinsellaauthor (idk I thought you might be interested)

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I have a plan to provide solutions to the socio-economic crisis facing this country. As I put this together over a couple of decades, it was important for me to not be telling people how they have to live, but rather provide them the tools they need to decide for themselves how to live. This plan then, is more like a mutable format, the first iteration of which provides the example and proof of concept. Then, when people see a successful solution available, they will be sure to copy it -- because this piece of social engineering is meant to be self replicating this way, I often refer to it as a socio-economic worm First, a breakdown of how I arrived at my plan:

The fundamental questions at the base of my attempts at large scale socio-economic fixes are:

1- Since every current system in our society is dysfunctional or corrupt, how can a single simple solution address the entire tangled web of institutions that effect every part of our human lives -- from agriculture, to rent, to wages, to government, to education, to the textile and clothing industry -- it's all problematic and needs to change.

2 - Since we can assume the wealthy will never help change the status quo, how can we get the middle class to pay the poor to create alternatives to current corrupt systems? in other words, how can we free time and money in the economy such that doctors and lawyers and computer techs can pay cashiers and gardeners and cooks to create banks and homes and grocery stores so we can bankrupt Wells Fargo and Century Real Estate and Whole Foods?

And the first answer is, we can create a simple solution that addresses all of it by bringing all that under one roof, for one small group of people, and addressing that microcosm in a way that is replicable by other small groups, as well as able to be scaled up such that it is applicable to the larger society.

To answer the second question, we have to create a situation where the poor are making more money than they currently do. And they need to do this by providing more of what the middle class need (for less money than the middle class currently spends on it) This will provide some immediate relief for the poor while freeing up money in the middle class to fund the larger solutions.

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Since we can't create money from nothing, one way to accomplish that is: instead of the poor making more money, the base concept of socio-economic organization of individuals has to change such that it lowers the cost of living for the poor. Lowering the cost of living accomplishes many of the same things as increasing wages. And we have to do that while engaging in providing more of what the middle class needs for less money that they currently pay.

Therefore, we need to identify what the middle class needs. A fundamental problem facing the middle class is that raising a family and running a household and earning enough money to pay for it all is a full time job for three to five adults, and they are trying to do it with two. Which is a major problem for the poor also. What the middle class is trying to do about it is what the poor cannot: buy themselves more time, literally. They pay someone to clean their house, they pay someone to watch their kids, they pay someone to maintain their garden, they pay for food that requires less and less time to prepare or they order to go food. They pay a dry cleaner or laundry service to wash their clothes. If they can afford enough of these things, they wind up with as much left to do as 2 people have time for.

The important thing to realize here is that these chores are the genesis of the necessary institutions that have become corrupt or dysfunctional. Everything a household or family needs is a microcosm of the larger industries and institutions. For example, paying someone to take care of your children is the seed of a school. Paying someone to prepare your meal is the seed of food industry - if you pay them enough to prepare you enough food, it becomes more cost effective to start producing the ingredients or getting them directly from the source. Paying an accountant to do your taxes or getting help with budgeting etc, grows into a bank. Paying someone to wash your clothes is the seed of the clothing industry - soon they can offer repairs, replacing buttons, fixing burst seams, from there alterations and tailoring follow... This is how the poor will be paid to grow new institutions to replace current problematic systems.

SO. Low-income workers need to organize into cooperative communities that leverage group dynamics to lower costs. If four families live together, they don't need to buy four toolbox sets, they can buy one and share. 10 families worth of food bought in bulk costs much less than 10 individual families buying food at the grocery store. Heating a single large building and splitting the bill is much more cost-effective than paying to heat individual housing units. And when one such group is shown to provide solutions and success, other groups will inevitably come together and copy it on their own, unprompted.

AND once they are organized this way, they should offer those services the middle class are trying to use as stop gaps - the chores the middle class are buying themselves out of. The best way to do this is buy creating the solutions to the chore/time crunch for their own community, and then selling those solutions to the middle class. In other words, someone needs to do the house cleaning, the laundry, the cooking, the gardening etc for the building they all live in, and then they can go on to sell that service to middle class households.

They need to do this for less money than the sum of those things currently costs, which can be accomplished via two techniques. The first is simply by bringing all those services under one roof. When the gardener and the housecleaner are arriving in the same company vehicle, the consumer is getting passed less in gas and vehicle maintenance costs, and so on.

The second way is to identify the one or two most needed, most expensive services, and find a way to lower costs for just those services significantly. Maybe something like babysitters that function as small, suburban neighborhood daycares during peak daycare hours, and the babysitters would fill the rest of their work week elsewhere in the company.

Now! We have the poor with a lower cost of living, providing relief services to the middle class in a way designed to grow into the new food production, the new clothing industry, new banks, new schools, new hospitals... and when you have all these things, you can make whole cities that are largely autonomous. Again the concept is to bring under one roof smaller versions of all the needed things in life that have become the large problematic systems that currently exist, giving citizens the real power to either force those institutions to change, or replace them. When you have new cities, they can demand or create much larger change in government, in power production, in raw material sourcing for things like lumber and fuel. And hey can be built on purpose, instead of the chaotic haphazard growth typical of current cities. If citizens want to live sustainable, socially progressive lifestyles, it behooves them to live in municipalities explicitly designed to facilitate that.

This is my solution.

It starts with a single building. A single community. I have planed the building and community, budgeted it, designed it to be able to grow into these larger solutions. I have started the procedure to create it, taken the first small steps.

step One A: Creative Suite (already working with a small team on this)

My plan is to run several big fundraisers over the next year and partner with an SF Bay Area municipality (probably Oakland) to open a public arts production center by converting a warehouse.

The purpose would be to have a creative recreation suite with communal equipment and spaces, such that, if you wanted, for example, to make a music demo, or do a pod cast, or make cooking videos for youtube, you could easily accomplish that using the space and equipment available in the arts production center. To include:

dance floor / props and body work space

music center / DJ booth and instruments

recording studio - both audio and visual, with lighting, green screen, mics, cameras sound proofing

singing booths - individual sized sound proof recording studios, wired with a mic and output

industrial kitchen - large fridge space, rangetop and large oven, utensils / tools, big counter top

painting studio - surfaces (not always canvas) paints, brushes, frames

Crafting studio - buy bulk discount from creative center for reuse in berkeley?

wood and metal shop - partner with a tool library? is it possible to get a recyclable high-density ceramic 3-D printer to print tools with?

electronic repair (and robotics?) center

stage / small theater space / workshop with attached makeup studio

sewing and costuming – sewing machines and cloth bolts etc

gaming center - table top rpgs, card games, board games etc outdoor component, pool table, anything we can get a good deal on

computer bank - about 5 computers for general use / e games

leave one/take one library, scattered 1-2 person writers nooks

garden center

Amazingly my estimates from initial research indicates I can put a cheap, functional version of this together for about twenty thousand dollars. In terms of installing this stuff in like, an otherwise un-refurbished warehouse. Even if I spend $35k, that’s like, a new car. Plus I want the first month or so of funding to run the place up front. That’s gonna be water, garbage (it’s a lot for the dumpster a place like this needs) a shitload of electricity, and 3 people’s worth of monthly salaries to start.

Then there’s the rent or lease, which runs about $2 per square foot in the SF Bay, and I’ll need at least 5 grand a month’s worth of space. Plus monthly supplies, for whatever deals on paint and stuff we can scrounge. That means the monthly operating costs are like $25k a month. Hence large fundraisers for the initial build out and first month’s operating. Plus you draw your initial arts center membership from the fundraiser attendees.

Which, I’ve thrown warehouse parties before, so I think I can hit a target of a couple hundred people at each party spending $35 apiece. There’s a trick to it – you keep the cover charge low or non-existent, and then provide a lot of opportunities to spend money inside, like games and food and stuff. Low or no charge to attend drives attendance up, and then you have more people spending money.

One key element is, you fill out the paperwork to be a catering company. Not only do you use this to sell food at the event, but ALSO it allows you to file for a single-use liquor license so you can have a bar. Usually there are a finite number of liquor licenses in a municipality, and they can go for millions of dollars. But with a catering company’s single event liquor license you can legally sell alcohol at the party. NOW we’re talking money.

anyway, I’m HOPING I can find state, federal, or municipal grants and assistance programs for the arts (and also, maybe some kind of, entrepreneurial support programs, but for like, small personal internet ventures?) Maybe even get some city to cut the rent in half by forgiving the property taxes on the warehouse or something. If I can’t, I may have to adjust the fundraising vs start date timing. Membership will be a monthly fee like a gym. I’d love for it to be free, and will certainly stay open to anything that allows that, but by the numbers it’ll have to be about $50 a month. Still, that’s like a 24 our fitness membership. One refill of gasoline. About one person’s share of an electricity bill. A phone payment. It’s a doable monthly bill for a lot of people. Monthly budget to be supplemented using the space, for example dance classes, ticketed theater performances, live band music shows, etc. So it’s possible we could drive membership prices way down. and maybe certain days or times could be free to the public or something. I want it to be accessible. Of the 3 monthly salaries mentioned above (each at $20 an hour) one is for me and that’s all I need, enough money to live on and access to this facility. There’s no way I can figure out how to afford this kind of creative suite for just me, but I might be able to figure out how to make one a whole bunch of us can afford This is just the first step of a very involved something I’ve been putting together since forever. But even if I only ever accomplish this first nesting-doll of a scheme, I’ll be very pleased.

The Creative Suite is like, an egg. And it should hatch into a little baby iteration of a socio-economic worm I’ve conceived.

If I can grow it to the full beast, it should become a self replicating, bottom-up revolutionary process that could improve the lives of many millions of people and put more power over our personal day to day lives back into the hands of the common public.

I have thousands of words in hundreds of research drafts and notes and exploratory essays, etc, but… Roughly speaking that looks like

flip the Creative Suite into MN Building One, a scheme designed to allow minimum wage workers to access more free time, lower their cost of living, and build equity by acquiring and owning their own property. Mortgage is paid off in ten years. Meanwhile

Building One starts up a business called Full Service Living that leverages group economics to allow for ethically sourcing goods while addressing the issue that middle class nuclear families with two adults face 4 full time adults’ worth of labor to maintain the household and raise the children.

Full Service Living becomes FSL Pro, in which the first group offers the next group of minimum wage workers their old building (cutting out the banks from the process) while acquiring a second building, gives the new people in Building One entry level jobs in FSL that pay better than minimum wage, while adding second tier careers to the mix living in Building Two – lawyers, accountants, mechanics, teachers, etc. These two groups continue to propagate more communities in their paired type one and type two buildings. Each of these community pairs contains the seeds for various institutions designed into them, and are meant to cooperatively grow into:

Community Support Centers. These offer a variety of support services to surrounding communities. Such as: day care and after school programs, tax and bill/budgeting assistance, legal advice/support. The sum of the total efforts by all parties is designed to blossom into:

A school A construction and landscaping company A public owned Credit Union/Bank A public service law office An ethical clothing line An alternative low footprint locally sourced supermarket I call Alt-mart (Alt-mart works hand in hand with a food production construct I have in mind. It’s a little involved for this breakdown)

All that with room for other endeavors people see a need for. The initial concept brings most issues of modern life under a single multi-family roof such that communities are afforded the opportunity and resources to create alternatives to the flawed or corrupt institutions with which we are currently participating.

When that all coalesces into networks of these communities and institutions, we’ll have all the necessary pieces to the puzzle and I hope a city will be built. I’ve designed many elements of it. Engineering as well as socio-political and economic design. But who knows if I’ll ever get there.

More detailed breakdown of the plan follows:

Project Overview and Concept Exploration:

Begins with providing affordable housing, property ownership, and upward mobility to minimum wage workers. Becomes a network of live/work facilities with a focus on sustainable entrepreneurialism, accessible autonomy, and community outreach.

These facilities function as socio-economic labs - they are on paper corporations, to access any advantages, protections, and loop-holes available to the corrupt institutions currently running the economy. They target the large corporations, ultimately seeking to end them. They produce businesses such as restaurants that grow all their own food, and doctors that are paid for by the apartment complex to provide medical care to residents.

Additionally, theses facilities provide a new way of life, in a format that allows for autonomy, but also allows for successful participation in the current economy... where all the money is.They also attempt to alleviate the time crunch problem for the middle class, wherein managing a household and raising a family is actually three or four full time jobs.

As such, the facilities are designed to grow into these large businesses/institutions:

SCHOOL

A preschool through junior college school on 3 cooperative campuses, wherein the school functions as a microcosm of the economy as a whole for the purpose of study: school gardens provide cafeteria food; school wood shops produce school furniture; economy classes figure out how the school budget can afford the water, fertilizer, metal, and wood.

3rd graders have classes in the garden learning the biome and doing the weeding; 8th graders are each growing 3ftX3ft gardens and helping in the large garden; 11th graders are cross-pollenating and designing green housing and aquaponic systems; bachelor students are splicing plant genes in the lab.

But by then some of the students have stopped being involved in the garden, and are making replacement hinges for all the school doors as metal shop homework or squeezing enough money out of the school budget for a big homecoming event.

By the third campus, students are living on site, so there is housing to manage. Student store and cafeteria provide economic interactions; the whole of our socio-economic society done small for study and practice, under a single administration instead of our current system of a scholastic career being broken up into mismatched administrations, which is a disservice to our students.

ALT-MART

A facility meant to compete with Target and Walmart and Whole Foods etc. It grows from the live/work facility kitchen and meal-plan set up. Alt-mart features a permanent farmer’s market, supplemented with an onsite garden/nursery. There is an onsite industrial kitchen and restaurant that uses overstock from the farmer’s market and ingredients from the garden, possibly purchasing all unsold produce from the farmer’s market at a discount.

The restaurant offers prepared foods for sale to the public, kitchen processes overstock into consumer goods like ketchup, frozen microwaveable breakfast burritos, and canned corn. Bakery also, of course. Facility also features a tool-library with a 3-d printer that can print any tools not on the shelves.

Additionally features local tailoring and a second hand clothing store. The local tailors get access to all the second-hand pieces for use in making their own clothes to sell onsite, as well as some facility-bought cloth and onsite machinery (sewing machines to textile machines like tuffters, gins, and looms).

Toy aisle is franken-toy land, where in-house creative DIYers take second hand toys and make whole new toys out of them. Electronics section is mostly repair, and offers lessons in repair. Book-nook and greeting card section features local/community writers. And so on. The goal is to offer an alternative to the big one-stop-shop stores, with a focus on local/community sourcing.

CONSTRUCTION COMPANY

This business grows out of building maintenance and groundskeeping into a landscaping company, then into a construction company. It should be the company used by the network of facilities for any renovations and repairs, so it should grow quite large.

COMMUNITY-OWNED CREDIT UNION (and LAW OFFICE)

Basically a non-profit bank, that offers community outreach for people who need help with budgeting, would like to learn about mortgages and homeownership, etc. Grows out of a Community Support Center that also offers community office space and legal advice.

FIRST STOP HOSPITAL

Not a full hospital, at least not at first, this should just be a few medical professionals that can answer common questions, provide emergency medical response, and assess medical conditions. Not for treatment so much as to find out what kind of treatment you need and who to get it from. Where first-time parents bring their babies when they’re not sure if they need o bring their baby to an emergency room. Honestly, medical care is the hardest part of this whole thing and I'm not sure if it's going to be possible or what to do about it.

CATERING AND EVENTS COMPANY

This is what get’s the ball rolling, the catering folds into the care-taking positions within the facilities, and the events company later become basically the arts entertainment and media/information division. There's a traveling circus element. It's fun.

These projects can possibly culminate in a whole large, sustainable city built from the ground up, that I have outlined. It involves building a large hill and two small lakes. I am happy to talk a lot more about that, but it clearly necessitates all the above pieces and more.

OKAY, so much for the overview. Let’s start at the beginning. The loan is for 2 million dollars, for a property of 1 million and another million in remodel costs.

Note: I ran the following numbers for California. Obviously property values and minimum wages are different other places, but the concept should still be applicable. Additionally, these are preliminary estimates only. Additional research and budgeting is required.

____________________________________________________________________

First I have to tell you about a type of loan called “Micro debt”

Basically, if you loan 10 people a total of 100k, they are each responsible for 10k of debt. If one of them defaults, the other nine split their debt, so now each of them has about 11k of debt, which is payable as it is not a significant increase in debt per person. However, this also encourages them to all help make sure nobody defaults on the debt -- for example, if one person is in danger of defaulting because their car was totaled and they can’t get to work, there are nine other people with a vested interest in making sure that person gets access to a vehicle or ride share. If a person starts to default on payments because they are drinking all the time, there are nine other people who are going to drag the to AA meetings.

A couple of banks in Bangladesh and Germany have had success with this, citing a 98% repay rate which is a few percent better than the average home loan repay rate here in the United States. Additionally, there are at least a couple million people who have this structure of loan here in the states, so it's not unheard of nor untested, even specifically in our own economy.

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SO. 28 people get what is essentially a home loan for 2 million dollars. We'll call them group A. They each have about a $71,000 mortgage, their share of the loan. (note, an average mortgage in California is like, nearly half a million, so, less than a hundred thousand is a GOOD mortgage)

Group A buys property (ideally unused/abandoned industrial sites or dilapidated property in low income areas) for about a million, maybe a little under, and builds a facility on it for about a million, maybe a little over. (I looked at apartment building costs per square foot and reviewed properties currently for sale in California to get these numbers).

Some of the money is earmarked for partnering with the city on local infrastructure - so, say the streets in that neighborhood need repaving, we might buy all the materials for the city to do that, saving them money, incentivizing the city to work with us on rezoning and permits, while at the same time those kinds of improvements are an investment in the value of the property. This is because many of those buildings are not zoned as live-work the way this project requires, and rezoning without incentivizing the city to cooperate is a nightmare.

The facility is 60 bedrooms, with an industrial kitchen, plenty of diverse common space, and shared facilities (like at a gym: banks of private shower stalls, even a hot tub and a sauna, because if you’re going to ask people to give up single use showers in their own apartments, you want to add value).

Group A moves in and rents remaining rooms to an additional 28 people, we'll call them Group B.

Now, out of 60 rooms we have 56 people living in the facility. 10 of them are caretakers. Instead of paying money, they pay their way in labor, and they additionally receive a monthly stipend of 500 dollars a month to start. The caretakers do all the building maintenance and groundskeeping, they do the housekeeping and laundry, they make sure the bills are all paid, and they provide (cook) a meal plan. Utilities are all included in rent.

This means that anyone renting there has a single, affordable monthly bill for their cost of living, never has to cook, never has to do laundry or wash a dish. I call this Full Service Living. And the budget is for 60 but only 56 are planned in, with 4 slots available for social outreach, so this community can offer semi-temporary room and board for free to women fleeing abusive relationships, disabled veterans, homeless people with children, rehabilitated felons, whoever they want to help.

All this for a single payment of $1,000 per month, per paying resident.

Rent, food, utilities, housekeeping, everything. In an area where rent alone is more than that. This guarantees that a person making local minimum wage can afford to live, and pretty decently, with more free time and less headache.

When the building is paid off, if they want, Group A will each have a room to live in, plus a room to receive rent from, as income.

Let's break down the budget for this so far

(60 people, minus 10 caretakers and 4 outreach residents, equals 46 paying residents)

Per Month Costs to Paying Residents:

Meal plan for 60 people = $5,000.00

60 person phone plan = $1,800.00

Internet sufficient for a business: $400.00

Water bill for 60 people = $1,800.00

Electricity for 60 people = $3,600.00

Garbage bill for 60 people = $2,000.00

Caretaker stipend = $5,000.00

(subtotal: $19,600.00)

Building/Community fund = $1,853.002

million dollar mortgage = $21,213.00

Property tax = $3,334.00

Total: $46,000.00= $1,000 per paying resident per month, roughly $600 “room” and $400 “board” with as many costs of living as possible paid as one low bill.

Sharing a room adds a "board" payment to the room, so if you move a romantic partner in with you and split it evenly, you each pay $700. I also have discount rate breakdowns for people with children in various scenarios, but it starts to get complicated for what is supposed to be a simple overview. Basically it comes down to an inherent flexibility in the meal plan; the fact that a food budget for 60 people easily accommodates an extra mouth to feed could allow a group to offer a single parent a separate room for their child with no board payment, so they could live in two rooms for $1,500; stuff like that.

At those payments, the building is paid off in ten years. TEN. Our low income earners don't have to wait 30 years to be actual property owners, and they only have to give the bank an added $500k instead of the 1.4 million a 30 year mortgage would net.

Here is one place people replicating the format and participating in their own group can do whatever they want. The 28 building shareholders have the option of leaving everything the same but owning the place outright, which means they are no longer paying the ~$500 mortgage portion of their bills, instead each receiving about $500 in rent from the other residents, which is a net gain of $1k per month each in disposable income. Or they could all just sell the building and split the money 28 ways. Or they could all move out and use the entire building to generate residual income. Anything is good, we've made almost 30 people property owners and built them equity for only minimum wage while they provided relief services to the surrounding community, so anything they think is best, we've already done it good.

Ideally they move into a second building and sell the first building to group B, which is what the very first group will have to do to complete the seeding of the entire project.

SO. The two buildings I mention represent two stages of the greater project. Full Service Living, and Full Service Living Professional (hereafter FSL, and FSL Pro)

In the first stage, you have 10 caretakers providing full service living to 46 paying individuals, most of whom make minimum wage, and 4 social outreach recipients. FSL is basically getting as much of your life as possible handled with a single low bill, something similar to living in a good hotel.

To expand, The caretakers additionally seek to offer this service to middle class households - these homes already hire a house cleaner, a gardener, use a dry-cleaner, order delivery food, so they are prime clients. As middle class households become clients, the caretakers need more people to handle the work load, and the other people living in the facility quit their minimum wage jobs and work for the FSL company. This will earn the group profits as a whole while paying the individuals close to $25 an hour. THIS allows the second building to be much nicer.

With a second, much nicer building, the 28 people move in, and they find 28 new renters from higher up the economic food chain. These folks need to earn at least 35k a year and include people from a specific list of professions. This new group of 28 shall be referred to hereafter as the tenants.

The rent agreement is unique: The 28 tenants pay about 2k per month each for the same package, the FSL company from the first building provides all the housekeeping, meal plan, etc. The tenants also agree to pay one third of any increase in their wages, up to a cap, with the money going toward renovations, improvements, and additional services and amenities. This means as your income increases, you pay more actual dollars, but a smaller percentage of your over all income

So if you are making 35k you earn 3k a month, which means you pay 2/3 of your income to the facility (many people spend this much on rent plus food). If you double your income, you now earn 6k per month. Your rent package would go up by 1/3 of your additional income, or one thousand dollars, and you would still have an extra two thousand dollars per month of personal discretionary income. You would have started out paying 2/3 of your income, but now you’d be paying only 1/2 your income. Your building improves, your life improves, but you’ll always be able to afford it, and every raise you get does give you more spending money. Additionally, the staff is motivated to really give you all the support they can, as a well supported individual is more likely to have monetary success.

And one more important thing. Tenants either pay an additional 500 bucks a month in money, OR they offer $500 of their professional services to residents of the facility. Unclaimed time must be made available to the surrounding public for free.

So, say a paralegal values her time at $50 dollars an hour for qualified legal advice (such as, do I need a lawyer for this? what kind of lawyer do I need? What is this legal process going to look like?). The 50 residents only use an hour this month, so something like 9 appointments should be made available to the surrounding community for free - the facility staff will handle outreach (letting the community know of the offer via flyers etc). They will handle making the appointments according to her availability, and will provide the facility’s communal office space to hold them in.

These programs allow businesses to grow in a very low risk environment. Let’s look at a day care worker. She’s a classroom assistant at a day care, going to school part time to finish her teaching degree. She offers residents hours of baby sitting as her $500 service. As she earns more money, the facility also earns more money, and can renovate a space that sometimes functions as a play room for kids. No longer going to school, she is earning more money, the facility hires a permanent babysitter or two, and she manages them. Free to residents, they accept neighborhood kids for a reasonable fee. Low cost good quality day care becomes available to the neighborhood. She’s a class lead at a good school now, making more money, so the facility can afford to hire classroom assistants and the baby-sitting / daycare starts offering after-school programs to older children, well on its way to being a small private school, with our tenant running it.

Similarly, restaurants and construction companies grow out of offering facility residents goods and services.

To recap the ideal situation here: 28 people live in a nice 60 bedroom facility. They own a business in a neighboring facility, which houses workers who are paid fairly, but who also pay the first group monthly on a ten year lease (instead of paying a bank) -- after which that second group owns the building they live in and no longer has to pay. Everyone’s cooking, cleaning, laundry, are all done for them. By now their meals are largely made from the facility’s garden and aquaponics greenhouse, which includes a fish-farming pool, a few goats, a cow or two, and some chickens and ducks. Living with them in the facility is their lawyer, their nurse, their electronics expert, etc. They’re all part owners in their own non-profit bank/credit union, and there is an onsite day care, gym, and communal workshop. The group offers outreach programs to the surrounding community: low cost high quality day care, legal advice. They provide semi-temporary room and board to those in need, such as women fleeing abusive relationships, disabled veterans, and the homeless (especially those with children). They are an active part of an ongoing socio-economic program designed to give low-income housing, property ownership, retirement options, and upward mobility to minimum wage workers, as well as alternatives to broken institutions to all.

By the time they pay off the second building’s mortgage, the first building has been paid for over again, and THAT group can move into a ANOTHER FSL Pro building, offering their new building to a new round of pro tenants while offering that first building to a THIRD round of low income workers.

The first 28 people achieve all of this, building ownership, business proprietorship, community support, within the same thirty years it takes to pay off a standard home loan, starting with nothing more than entry level jobs and this master plan.

From there, growth continues. More buildings are offered to more low income earners. More facilities means more services, amenities, cooperative power, a stronger micro-economy. Political influence also increases with membership...

Eventually, you can take all these businesses and facility/communities, and go build a whole city, which looks a little like this

See the problem with cities is they grew organically. No one ever sat down and said “we know we want a hundred thousand people to live here -- what is the best design for that?” Instead is was just, some people, and then some more people, and then some more...

So.

You go out in the middle of wherever. You dig two GIANT holes. You take the dirt from the holes and you build a nice big hill. You fill the holes with water and you have two lakes. Now you have a nice place people want to live, nestled between the lakes, under the hill. It gives you enough water and topography to create a resource feedback loop and control things like wind and sun exposure.

You regulate everything for sustainability, design it from the ground up.

Current municipalities have to provide everything for the public from a budget that largely comes from property tax, which is 2% of the property value. That’s why when there’s something like a homelessness problem, there is no money to address it properly.

This city holds all the property in a trust administered by the elected city officials. Instead of rent paid to private landlords, the public leases their homes and businesses directly from the city, which keeps rents low and controlled and gives the city an incredibly large budget compared to current municipalities, which allows them to provide outstanding public services -- transportation, healthcare, parks -- as well as giving them enough budget to address any issues like homelessness. Regulation and organization for sustainability as a whole city addresses the fact that existence is always interlocked issues. For example:

Grey water. In this city, only approved cleansers are allowed for sale or use (and the city provides one. Because the city provides it, it has to be cheap and easy, which means that there is always room for improvement, or, a business selling better cleansers for more money. But no one will ever go without one available, even if they are broke). SO, no bleach down the drain. So you can take the grey water of the city, and dump it on the top of the hill into a manmade creek/river, which starts full of rocks, then pebbles, then sand (a natural filtration process) flows down the hill and ends up in the first lake, which is recreational. The second lake sits a little lower, and the water flows into it from the first lake. In the second lake there are fish farming and bi-valve farming, which additionally filters the water (especially bi-valves like fresh water muscles, which feed by straining the water through organic filters and not-for-food populations should be in the first lake as well). The city pulls its water from the second lake through its combination water purification facility / power plant. The power plant uses a steam turbine already so we simply run that steam through a charcoal filter, and re-condense it into molecularly clean water for municipal use; this uses our existing power generator, instead of requiring massive amounts of additional power.

That’s just one example. The city has it’s own sustainable agriculture program, and grows it’s own food. There are public meal plans, and a lot of organization of the city economy that I just don’t have the energy to get into here.

These designs allow a large group of people to live with very little environmental impact. It would be healthier for the citizens. And it would encourage a certain amount of political unity, while removing a lot of stress from modern life.

The city is modular in growth. So when the city population doubles, roughly half of them build a city nearby and live there.

_______________________________________________________________________

Aside from the first two facilities (and then probably the first of the cities, if that happens) I don't need or want to be involved. As it replicates into more and more facilities, the baseline should remain: "here is a format by which minimum wage workers can own property and grow wealth in a way that allows them more control over their lives and denies profits to existing corrupt industries and corporations -- copy it if you want and suit it to your own group of residents”

I don't want to tell people how to live or what to do, I want to give them tools and templates to improve their own lives, whatever that looks like to them.

Anyway, believe it or not, this is only about a tenth of the detail I’ve put into this. I can never get the whole picture of any of this out in one go, but I've spent a lot of time on all the details which, as you can tell, are innumerable. The ways in which the FSL buildings act as entrepreneurial incubators by cutting start-up overhead to nearly zero while providing an initial customer base of 60 regulars, the various permutations that could address specific scenarios, the details of how to add gardens and fish and food production supplemented by ethical food sourcing.. I could just. keep. going. forever.

It addresses the whole tangled set of problems. You have to help high population areas, but also go out to the middle of the country. You have to help low income earners and people in poverty, but also our middle class is struggling. You have to do things that effect education, infrastructure, ocean management, industrialized food production, population density/overcrowding issues, helps prevent homelessness, creates better jobs for workers of big box stores while providing affordable more sustainable alternatives to their customers...

I think this plan does all that and more.

I’m exhausted and can’t find all my work on this right now, it’s buried in email chains and computer back ups, but I think I more or less encapsulated it. Good night

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gigmusicdscvr · 6 years

Photo

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: THIS IS HOW GEN-Z RESPONSE YOUR CRITICISM CREATIVELY

Sometime ago, Instagram recommended us to a magazine called Aspirants Magazine. Their instagram account is heaven for visual enthusiasts, with alluring color grading and beautiful portraits. Let alone, their commitment to pick interesting individuals to be featured. We contacted the editorial team and that was totally surprising to know that they are juggling this promising magazine with high school and managing the task mostly through computers and internet connection.

We ended up talk to Danielle (D), Ndemazea (N), and Ry (R). So, prepare yourself to erase pessimistic ideas about millennials, specifically gen-Z, as they definitely do things and make changes too. This is #GIGCHAT, please enjoy!

Tell us brief history about Aspirants Magazine? Also how do you manage the task among you three?

D: Aspirants is an idea I had bouncing around in my head for a couple years before it was realized. One day, I was waiting in line in a grocery store and took note of the magazines and tabloids on the rack in the checkout line. I started thinking about how celebrities we’ve all seen hundreds of times before repeatedly get the spotlight. What about that person—that musician, artist, model, actor, filmmaker, photographer, athlete, what-have-you—who works just as hard but just hasn’t been given the same opportunities? Doesn’t every hardworking creative deserve a chance to be on the front cover of a magazine? I think they do. Hence, Aspirants Magazine.

N: As cliche as it sounds, my involvement in Aspirants can be pinpointed into one specific instance: a text. I had received a message from Ry and Danielle talking about an idea they had been working on for a while, and from the moment I heard about it, I knew that Aspirants was something different and special. Naturally, with that in mind, I sent my response. The rest is history.

R: Aspirants works to spotlight creatives who never really have gotten their time in the light before. By doing so we are also acknowledging differences such as class or race that lend themselves to differences in perception and experience. In terms of managing tasks, we have delegated roles among the three of us and team members that work with us on each issue. Ultimately though, everyone on the board is sort of a renaissance person in the sense that we’re all able to help each other outside of our delegated roles if needed.

Do you consider/refer Aspirants to be called as magazine or zine?

D: In terms of the publication, we prefer to call it a magazine. However, in November we are expanding our brand from just Aspirants Magazine to Aspirants Co, so you may refer to us as Aspirants Co!

N: We prefer to call the publication a magazine!

R: Publication is a magazine!

How do you choose or pick artists to be your feature story?

D: We keep a log of artists we collectively update. Usually, we’ll stumble across someone on social media or across the internet and recognize their good intentions and good work. Additionally, submissions are open for every issue!

N: It’s probably the easiest part of the job. The internet has made it easier to share our talents, and with so many talented people in the world, we don’t have to throw the stone very far to find leagues of people to feature. And of course, sometimes those people come to us.

Other than musicians/artists, do you also bring up socio-political activists in your magazine?

D: Aspirants in itself tries its best to be nonpartisan, but we aim to amplify the voices of those who are fighting for what they believe.

Among artist/musicians/figures that you feature and interview, what you could learn from them?

D: So, so much! I’m so inspired by all of them. For example, I interviewed Maunder, a musician featured in Issue Three, and what he had to say about his music really inspired me. His music emphasizes honesty. To me, also patience. He wasn’t in a rush to release music just because he could; he took his time until he felt comfortable to do so and is now making awesome jams. I think I need a reminder that sometimes it’s okay for me to take my time.

N: I’ve learned so much from each and every feature we’ve done, but as a whole, I have seen that there’s nothing conventional about being an artist. Each issue will show you multiple ways to express yourself and there’s no wrong way to do it. Our features have taught me that being genuine is key to success.

R: Each of the creators featured here are inspirational. At their core, many of our creators emphasize other people. They emphasize community. I think that we—as a publication—are incredibly privileged to be able to work with creators who so closely share our vision.

You also make a printed version of your magazine, how do you distribute it and how do you perceived the printed version ones in this digital era? Anyway, for me myself, printed magazine might be bulky and spacy, but it really feels nostalgic and real, we love it.

N: We distribute and publish our magazine with the self-publishing company Lulu. For us, the difference between looking at something online and holding something in your hands is immense, and everything feels much more real when you can touch something that you’ve created or see your face on the page.

Do you guys do this magazine as a side project and looking at the development, do you consider to make it your full time focus?

D: We’re juggling the high school grind alongside this company, so I suppose it could be considered a side project for now, but I think all three of us want to be able to make it a full-time focus of some kind.

N: Aspirants is a full-time job that, because of the aforementioned high school grind, is our “side project”. But it’s our passion and as soon as we can, Aspirants will become a full-time gig.

R: Right now, Aspirants is a side project in the sense that I’m currently in high school. However, Aspirants is honestly something I always have my mind on, and it will always be one of my top priorities.

How do you create and manage this team, as for some reasons finding and having people with the same amount of passion and sacrifice for something like magazine or blog or certain projects with almost zero profit (in the beginning) is quite hard?

D: Google Drive, ClickUp, and Discord. Without those three applications, we’d probably be significantly more scatterbrained than we already are. But to delve deeper, the passion thing is a great question. I have a lot of struggles with mental illness so finding that passion is often difficult. However, I just try to keep in mind that I have people counting on me and people that have been positively impacted because of what I do. It allows me take a deep breath and move forward, even if it’s slowly. Profit was never the ultimate goal to us. We agreed on that when we started. It’d be a great benefit and it is an aim, but it’s not endgame. I don’t rely on Aspirants for income, and I hope one day I will, but in the meantime I am okay with where things are now.

Now, what advice you would like to give to anyone/readers who wants to create change and inspirations through media or magazine specifically?

D: Find some people you trust and can bounce ideas off of and go for it. Get feedback, work hard, and take advantage of your resources. We live in an amazing transitional age of technology where each and every one of us has an opportunity to create something unprecedented through the internet. Use it.

N: Never stop creating. There will be days when you feel like it’s not worth it and there will be days when you want to quit and there will be days you will lie down on the ground, staring at the ceiling, wondering why you ever decided to start. But it’s worth it. Because there will be days where you’ll get a comment from someone giving you a compliment on your work or you’ll sell your first piece or you’ll have a larger turnout than expected at your event, and you’ll realize why you do it. And you’ll keep going.

R: As cliche as it sounds, I would tell people to just start doing. It’s different for each person depending on our access to certain things but ultimately, get started in whatever way you can, as soon as possible.

We really love your social media and website layout also art works, they're really cool and we fancy the color grading.

D: Credits to Ry, the one and only.

R: Thank you so much!

Last, share your favorite songs/musicians/music with us!

D: Dude, that’s like the hardest question for me to answer. Right now I’m digging the music of Disclosure, The Internet, MANON, and Twenty One Pilots’ new album. You can keep up with my favorite new music on this Spotify playlist.

N: “Favorite” is a hard word, but if I have to choose, it would be any song made by Noname ever. She’s a beautiful artist that has done nothing but be true to herself, and her newest album Room 25 is a work of art.

R: I honestly can’t tell you what my favorite songs are—this is an incredibly hard question to answer. At the time being though, my favorite song is Generation Why by Conan Gray.

Aspirants Magazine is online and printed magazine. Order here if you’re interested to purchase their publications.

#gigchat #interview #magazine #publicist #music magazine #artists #musicians #journalism #journalist #gen z #millennials #young people #youth #music blog

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theonyxpath · 6 years

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Yes, I’d say the creation of the 2nd Edition of Scion has taken the most thought (and Thoth) of any of our projects to date.

From the years spent iterating the Storypath System that powers Scion, to the years and years we and the Scion community dissected and recombined the first edition rules and setting, to the extensive amount of care the writers and developer Neall Raemonn Price have put into improving first edition in every way they could.

Like the Netjer (Egyptian) pantheon pictured above, all the pantheons have been researched and re-researched and run past experts in the myths and cultures they represent. You don’t in any way need a doctorate to use and enjoy them in your game, but now they more accurately reflect our current understanding of the gods and their cohorts.

Neall goes into this in his interview with Eddy and Dixie on last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast, and it is well worth your time to check it out if you’re a Scion fan. He goes into his thinking on Scion, as well as some of the often torturous steps we have had to take to get the first two game books created. If you’re not a Scion fan, he also reveals how Beckett’s Jyhad Diary was developed and written, and so basically, it’s a great overview of how RPG books are created.

You can check it out on your favorite podcast venue or directly on PodBean here: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

This Friday on the Onyx Pathcast, the Wraith Curse rears its ugly head, and the gang have to recreate an entire episode where they only mention Wraith in discussing TTRPGs and how they affect our non-game lives. Listen in to find out how the Wraith Curse manifests this time!

Dragon-Blooded art by Yiyoung Li

Now for myself, I too have thought a lot about Scion. From green-lighting the first edition and realizing that without something wahoo going on, the sales distribution system was going to under-order Scion: Hero, (“We need new games to sell!” “Here’s a new one we made.” “Wah? It’s new and has no sales history, how can we order that?”), to getting a copy of the book put into every retailer bag at that year’s GAMA trade show. Retailers who then ordered the game in such amounts that we had to do a second print pretty much before the book hit stores!

I’ve thought a lot about the dedication of the Scion community during the (very) lean years when almost nothing new came out, yet WW‘s old Scion forums were still getting more posts than entire other gaming websites. I read your posts you magnificent bastards, and incorporated that thinking into what we needed to do to elevate Scion for second edition.

I’ve ground my teeth in frustration during the time Storypath was iterating and while Scion: Origin and Scion: Hero have been incubating, and thought long and hard about the iterations and improvements that slowed things down. Were they worth it?

Well, the answer is yes, as far as I can see. Storypath is the simple base 10-sided pool system that can be expanded depending on your table’s interest in more shared storytelling that I hoped for. It is so flexible that we can add tweaks to it to emulate a post-apocalyptic scarcity game with zombies in Dystopia Rising: Evolution, and reflexive and meta humor mechanics in They Came From Beneath the Sea!.

And it enables play from man on the street to god levels of power for Scion and the Trinity Continuum.

VtR2 Guide to the Night art by Sam Araya

Scion has a built-in setting now, with the World, yet it is so designed that you can pull back on that and keep the god stuff hidden, or dial it to 11 and make the presence of the gods even more impactful on our normal world. I thought about whether adding the World was the right way to go – and had probably far more discussions with Neall than he wanted to have about it – but in the end, I think the default setting combined with the very easy options to alter that if you so choose hits the right spot.

It’s there and it’s rich and deep with history, but still open enough that your characters matter. Which is a big part of Scion, as I see it.

And one more thing that I’ve thought about A LOT, and have mentioned before, is that to me Scion is just getting started. The 4 book core of Origin, Hero, Demigod, and God is really the central spine of the possible ways Scion can be played. There’s the “Children of the Gods in Modern Times” that defines that spine, and we can provide a lot more projects that help build on that. We already have the Companion, Jumpstart, Ready Made Characters, and Bestiary being worked on.

But let’s change that to “Children of ____ in Modern Times”, or “Children of the Gods in _____ Times”, and we open up a huge range of possibilities if we start filling in those blanks!

Whew! I get pretty fired up thinking about all that.

Now, on to the Notes from our Monday Meeting today! We talked about:

1- We are all over the place online right now! It’s great! On this Tuesday night at 6pm Pacific US time, Pugmire: Homeward Bound begins on the Saving Throw Show Twitch channel. Here’s the intro video (it is amazing and beautiful!): youtu.be/qMpNHXjbZK8

And the link to their Twitch channel: twitch.tv/savingthrowshow

2- I did a wee little interview that surprisingly covered all sorts of Onyx Path and classic White Wolf stories and yet did not go into my love of pudding. Why is that surprising? Because the podcast interview was for Everybody Loves Pudding, and I was lured into this because I thought I’d be able to expound on the virtues and wonders of pudding. But, even without the pudding, it’s a pretty good chat – the guys were very on target with the questions. Not sure if you can say the same about my answers, but judge for yourself: http://www.everybodylovespudding.com/podcast/season-1-episode-22/

3- Eddy Webb is flying up to my neck of the woods and we’ll be going together to Save Against Fear, the convention that benefits the Bodhana Group, whose mission is to use tabletop gaming in their therapeutic efforts. Links are below in the Convention News section of The Blurbs, but we recently added that I’ll be there on Saturday signing Magic Cards and working on some artist proof sketches. So if you are near there and want your cards signed and to help a great group – come on by and meet me and Eddy!

4- On a related topic, Monica Valentinelli is working with Extra Life on a fundraiser where she’s playing D&D5e to help sick kids. Onyx Path has donated Scarred Lands PDF rewards at various levels of contribution, so here’s your chance to help a super cause and dig into Scarred Lands! https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=326323

M20 Gods and Monsters art by Claudio Pozas

5- If you missed the Prince’s Gambit casual Vampire card game by Justin Achilli Kickstarter campaign, we have copies of the card set available to buy from Studio2 and your local retailer, see below, and the basic set and booster pack will go on sale on Wednesday from DriveThru. The retail card set is all the cards from the Kickstarter in one box, and the DriveThru cards take all the cards and divide them into a basic set, and then the added cards from the KS in a booster pack. And, because we are asked this, Prince’s Gambit is a different type of game than VTES, it is not VTES, was not intended to replace VTES, and lots of us here are VTES fans and glad that new VTES cards are being made.

6- Finally, we have a fantastic sale going on at IPR for our Deluxe and Prestige books from our Kickstarter print-run overruns! Half off until the end of October, it’s our HalfoWeen Sale! The Mummy: The Curse Prestige Editions have sold out as of this writing, which means there are no more of them available for sale anywhere in the world! (Except EBAY, I’m sure. But other than that…)

I’m not finding a clever way to lead in to out tag-line this time, no wait, I just did. Damn:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Lo the darkness that lies like a pall over Chicago. The V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter arises in October!

We’re also working on the Kickstarter for They Came From Beneath the Sea! (TCFBtS!), which has some very different additions to the Storypath mechanics we’ll be explaining during the KS. They take an excellent 50’s action and investigation genre game and turn it to 11!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

And our latest, the dice for Werewolf: The Forsaken 2e:

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)

Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)

Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)

Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)

Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)

V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

And we’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

The Prince’s Gambit basic card set and the added cards from the PG Kickstarter booster pack will both be available on DriveThru this Wednesday!

CONVENTIONS!

From Fast Eddy Webb, we have these:

Eddy will also be a featured guest (and RichT will be there at some point, too) at Save Against Fear (October 12-14) in Harrisburg, PA. He’ll be running some Pugmire games, be available for autographs, and will sometimes accept free drinks. http://www.thebodhanagroup.org/about-the-convention

Dixie Cochran will be at High Level Games Con in Atlantic City October 12-14, running a Women in Game Design panel, Eddy’s RPG Developer Bootcamp, and possibly making a surprise appearance at another event!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

Manuscript Approval:

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Editing:

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Post-Editing Development:

Trinity Continuum Core Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Trinity Continuum: Aeon Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

They Came From Beneath the Sea! Rulebook (TCFBtS!)

Dog and Cat Ready Made Characters (Monarchies of Mau) (With Eddy)

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Jumpstart (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Indexing:

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Dystopia Rising: Evolution

M20: Gods and Monsters – AD’d and Contracted.

Geist 2e

The Realm

Trinity Continuum (Aeon and Core) – Tracking down Core finals and going over Aeon Sketches.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – KS art finals in.

Pugmire Roll of Good Dogs and Cats

C20 Player’s Guide

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – Got KS artnotes out.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Trinity Core – Working on symbols this week.

Trinity Aeon – Fancying up my Opnet images.

Ex3 Dragon Blooded

Proofing

Scion Hero – Inputting Neal’s 2nd proof changes.

PTC: Night Horrors: The Tormented – KT has Steffie’s corrections in.

Scion Origin – Doing Neall’s errata changes, and swapping out the font.

VtR: Guide to the Night – Danielle is getting me her p.xx stuff on Monday and I’ll be wrapping this one up for approval by WW shortly thereafter.

Fetch Quest – Package design done

At Press

Monarchies of Mau and Screen – At Studio2. Dice and buttons getting ready to ship to Studio2.

Cavaliers of Mars – Backer copies all shipped out.

Wraith 20th – Printing the Deluxe interior, proofing cover.

Wraith 20 Screen – Printing.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Cav Talent cards – PoD proof coming.

Lost 2e Screen – Prepping files.

Scion Screen – Prepping files.

Prince’s Gambit core deck and booster PoD – On sale at DriveThru on Wednesday!

Changeling: The Lost 2e – Prepping files for printer.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: OK, celebrate this one or don’t as you see fit. I know a lot of my South Philly buddies do and will. All I know is today I didn’t get my new fancy brush recommended by Jeff Miracola today because no mail on the Monday holiday. And the last kid has off from school, so I get to hear him shouting at his friends as they multi-play a shooter. Some holiday.

#Onyx Path Publishing

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attract-mode-collective · 6 years

Video

youtube

Exactly 79 Photos & Videos Concerning The Game Boy (plus other handhelds)

So... hope you’ve all been following me on Twitter, which is more or less the unofficial new home for Attract Mode. Mostly cuz Tumblr’s days are, alas, numbers, plus I haven’t warmed up to Medium as much as I had hoped to. Though I’ve actually spent the past two months republishing every single post that contains mainline Game Culture Snapshots, so it has remained somewhat useful at least.

Now, for a while there, I had been compiling every single thing tweeted. But because I’m now so damn active on that end… plus I’m busier than ever with other projects… I’m way behind with those digest posts, and the very idea of playing catch up legit gives me anxiety. Yet I have been sharing lots of cool things, which all deserve to be in the blog proper… and because a lot of them are specific to the Game Boy, I figure, why not just focus on that?

Like the above, which is a technique for producing full color photographs via the Game Boy Camera, and yet another thing that I can’t believe hasn’t made the rounds!

Sticking with Game Boy photography, here have a pair of mods that will greatly enhance picture quality. The first involves mounting SLR lens onto a Game Boy Camera (via ekeler.com)...

And the second has one shoving a Game Boy Camera into a SLR itself (via @MaxKriegerVG)...

As someone who was into video games as a kid, and also interested in photography, the Game Boy Camera was the first camera I was able to call my own. Am pretty sure this was the case for others as well?

I also remember seeing this ad in Nickelodeon Magazine (which I would eventually writer for, not too long later) and being absolutely gob smacked (via nintendroid.org)…

Though as much I loved Nintendo brand of FUNtography, I would quickly discover… as did everyone else I also assume… that taking pictures is serious business (via @PolandNintendo)…

Not only did I have a Game Boy Color, but I also had the Game Boy Printer (I still own both, for the record). Unfortunately my snapshots from Link’s Awakening have long since faded, but as with many things, you can find copies online (via gameandgraphics.com)…

Speaking of the world of print, coming soon is a handy guide to Nintendo handy game machine (via miki800.com)…

That one magazine ad featuring Princess Peach catch your eye as well? Well here’s a much better look at it (via suppermariobroth)…

I love handheld gadgets of all kinds, yet some of the popular ones confuse me. Like Hudson’s Shooting Watch; it makes no sense to have a gadget that can detect button presses without a game attached. Guess I’m not alone (via instagram.com/kazzycom)…

A realization I made while sifting through Game Boy related content is how popular the color yellow is with many. Cuz Pokemon? Anyhow, the final post from a blog that specializes in gorgeous photographs of gorgeous hardware, which I just brought up again very recently (via hard-aware)…

How your parents used to trade Pokemans online (via melonjaywalk)…

And no, Game Boys weren't the only things that one could connect to keitais ya know. And yes, Game Boys aren’t the only portables I’ll be showcasing (via anthony10000000)…

I own quite a few VMUs and am always looking to expand my collection… but nothing yellow, sorry. Instead, I want the one covered with dolphins (via anthony10000000)…

So my new favorites artist is Eri Kitamura, and not just cuz she makes pretty looking Game Boys…

She also makes pretty looking girls playing Game Boys (well, this one is technically listening to music)…

Was originally going to post the first thing from Eri that caught my eye, which is a Game Boy with a girl on it, but instead here’s a Game Boy with a girl on it playing a Game Boy…

Time for two more videos from the same individual responsible with the process for producing color photographs at the very top. And it’s what everyone has been waiting… specifically the backlit Game Boy Color mod everyone has been waiting for.

The process is detailed in this two-part video, and here’s the first one (it’s about 50 minutes long cuz spoilers: this shit ain’t easy)…

youtube

And here’s part two, which is ONLY 40-ish minutes long…

youtube

The author of the videos actually has a store, so if the process seems a bit too daunting, you can purchase a pre-modded unit for $250. Actually, this one is $260, cuz of the dual shells. Quite the price tag, yet somehow totally worth it (via instagram.com/esotericmods)…

Now might be a good time to mention how… remember that GBA with the GameCube finish from eBay a few months back? Well, I decided to get the one that resembles a Super Famicom, something I’ve been lusting over for years.

Well, here’s what the aforementioned seller had in his listing…

And this is what I got instead…

Yeah, that green shoulder button is not the right shade. After some complaining, I got the seller to admit that the one in the picture was hand painted; he didn’t know where it get ones that it’s exact color as on a Super Fami controller.

He also had a no refund policy, yet I bitched & moaned enough to warrant an exchange, for another Cube-esque model, one sans the stick. Cuz it’s comparatively boring to look at, here’s a version with the stick…

Again, mine just has the standard d-pad. As for my replacement… the colors of the A & B buttons are not an exact match, once again. But it’s close enough (am mostly just sick of dealing with that guy, aka johnnys_merchandise, whom you should all avoid btw), plus I have started to scour AliExpress for replacements.

BTW, my failure to obtain a modded handheld that channels another form of hardware has me wondering if I should go for something completely different instead (via instagram.com/wakuwakuisland)…

Up in the mountains, flower bloom amongst Game Boys & Game Boy Colors, whereas deep in the forest, you’ll find mushrooms and Game Boy Advances (via pxchinko)…

Some say memories are fuzzy, though for others, they're leafy (via lyosphe)…

I’ve looked all over for tinycartridge's original post, but no luck, so you can all instead have my personal copy of the earthy wallpaper that was shared years ago (and which I still to this very day)...

The Game Boy Micro, DS, and DS Lite are like family, and like siblings, there can the occasional squabble (via benkyo-es)…

@frankcifaldi: When I met this guy in 2003 and he told me he was going to make an extensive fan site about the Supervision, a Taiwanese Game Boy knockoff, I was like "sure dude." 15 years later he actually launched the thing??

Meanwhile, the Game & Watch Perfect Catalogue just came out, with the full low down on all 59 models. BTW, had no idea there were 59 in total until @ionadisco mentioned it…

How Game & Watches were sold in America; I fondly recalls this ad in-between the pages of Amazing/Spectacular/Web of Spider-Man (via suppermariobroth)…

And how Game Boys were sold in Japan, one day one apparently, which would explain this salesperson’s rather perplexed demeanor (via flashbak.com)…

Silly as it sounds, and as silly as he looks, the US version of Firebrand is nonetheless a warm & welcoming face from my childhood (via nintendometro)...

Mario dropping a knowledge bomb (via suppermariobroth)…

Here’s Peach seemingly kicking Toad’s ass in Super Mario Bros Deluxe, which I’ve been meaning to tweet for a while now, but now seems like the right time & place for obvious reasons (via nintendometro)…

A cute comic about someone finally beating a game after ten years, or at least I believe that's the case (you know, language barrier and all; via @desune593)

Sailor Moon seems to enjoy handheld gaming more so than in the arcades (via uglygreenjacket)…

It saddens me that ravages of time is robbing me of my precious memories, including the names of 90s anime, hence why I had to ask on Twitter who exactly is this (answer was Tenchi Muyo; via shxtfased)...

It’s SethEverman, just playing some pokemon blue…

youtube

Speaking of music, it again saddens me that I wasn’t about to make the trip to Japan to catch chiptunes at Square Sounds, and various associated venues. At least @bit_shifter_ took this great snapshot of Glomag at Cyberpunks Osaka…

Meanwhile, here in NYC, we actually still have record stores. And you can grab Josh’s latest release, his first in 12 years(!) at Rough Trade (via bit-shifter)…

Though back to Japan; attended Square Sounds would have also afforded me the chance to check out Tokyo Game Show, where I could have gotten that VMU shaped USB drive that was being sold at the Sega booth (via miki800)…

A few weeks before TGS, there was an earthquake in Japan, in northern island Hokkaido. Many were left without power, but one person was able to keep up with the news, thanks to an old DS peripheral that basically provides bunny ears (via kotaku.com)…

On a semi-related note, here’s someone watching old ECW VHS tapes on their Game Gear (via heavyelectricity)…

Sorry, but the only other thing I have that’s related to Sega’s Master System on the go is this gif from a pizza ranch salad dressing (yikes) commercial, which was cross-promoting Sonic Chaos (via sonicthehedgeblog)...

I have no idea why I'm so amused by this Getty Image of a Neo Geo Pocket that was confiscated at summer camp. Or perhaps no explanation is needed? (via hellomrkearns)…

Speaking of the Great Outdoors, here’s my buddy Steve enjoying some Mario Kart 8 in the middle of a forest (via instagram.com/vitaminsteve)…

And speaking of Mario Kart on the Switch, Bowser seems like a pretty cool dood to have a car trip (via suppermariobroth)…

The Switch is so beloved that people are doing fan art, not for any particular game but the simple the act of playing with it (via annazees)…

Granted, one of the best things about the Switch is all the different ways in which one can play (via kanekoshake)…

If you enjoy your Switch on the go and are looking for a way to store games… and are a diehard Breath of the Wild fan as well… plus if you have access to a 3D printer (via miki800.com)…

youtube

It’s a tribute to Star Wars… games… all of them… featuring Princess Leia focused on her DMG (via deviantart.com/robduenas)...

BTW, do you still have your Game Boy? If not, here ya go (via anthony10000000)…

When the realization hits that your Game Boy Color library is incomplete (via @Bootleg_Stuff)…

Back to my buddy Steve, who visited the Primark at the Staten Island mall and took pics of the game related apparel that, sadly, were no longer in stock by the time I was able to swing by. With the one thing I really wanted being this shirt…

This pair of Super Mario Land X Air Jordans is only $1,350.00 (via miki800.com)…

I’m sure you’ve seen him already, but for the sake of completion, here’s that grandpa from who rigged this bike with 11 phones to become a Pokemon Go master (via bbc.com)…

Yet another sign of our times, literally (via fuckdragonballz)…

This image features a PSP and a MacBook, both of which are from the mid-2000s, yet feels very late 1990s/early 2000s. Why? Those USB cables (via jcgraphix)…

And last but not least, here’s Paris Hilton with her DS in 2005 (via @ParisHilton)…

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ms-demeanor · 6 years

Text

Getting shit done with executive dysfunction/depression/adhd part 3

You Are Going To Need A Calendar, I Know, I’m Sorry, I Hate It Too But Sometimes That’s Just How It’s Gotta Be.

So I graduated college the same week I got married. I planned my own wedding and hand-wrote invitations and fitted my own dress and was my own DJ and made bridesmaid bouquets the same week that I had 5 finals, one of which was a 5000 word research paper.

It was a difficult time in my life and the only way I made it work even the tiniest, tiniest bit was because I had a pocket organizer that let me write a couple of lines for each day so that I could figure out when tests were or what assignments were due or when each vendor had to be paid or what day to pick up flowers.

Then I happily abandoned that for about five years and kept getting confused by how frequently I’d forget dates or double-book myself or get surprised by a deadline that I’d been aware of for months.

It turns out that I do not understand time. I don’t have a sense of hours passing, I have trouble telling weeks and months apart, time is an illusion and I’m so sorry for my perpetual lateness; I love my friends and I want to respect them but I just can’t time. It doesn’t happen.

So I’ve gotta have a calendar.

At the moment I have a little custom one that I printed that’s just each month as a calendar page that I can write in things like “out of town trip” or “show” or “mom’s birthday”. I can put in things that I have planned to do with people! I’m not forgetting that stuff anymore! It’s great!

But here is what is so much better:

Write your monthly goals on your calendar.

So this is a thing I figured out a long time ago actually: New Year’s resolutions are bullshit primarily in that people wait for the new year. Fuck that, time is an illusion, make a resolution every fucking month if you want it’s great.

So two of my resolutions this year were actually to do two different monthly projects - an art project and an F/X makeup project. So on my monthly calendar I’ll write the name of the overall monthly goal “D&D pin designs” and then for each week I’ll have a different goal so like “Collect reference images” “Sketches” “Inking” “Scan and Color” “Mfg Pins.”

My makeup goal for the second week of March was to buy alginate. It didn’t happen but I had it written down and when I realized it wasn’t going to happen I had enough time to change my plans from doing an F/X look that would require a lifecast to doing one that was mostly just facepaint and fake blood.

If you’re looking at your goals in the context of the timeframe you have to accomplish them it lets you reset your goals to be more realistic. I wasn’t going to be able to make a lifecast of my face, cure it, test alternate latex products, make a realistic animal/human hybrid face mask, and put together a good video about that project in one week so I had to change the plan.

So if you’re a student and you’ve got a monthly calendar the top of each month should say something like “Final project due at midmonth” or “Midterm on the 28th” and then each week should have something like “write outline” “find sources” “rough draft” “rewrite” “final draft” written on it. If you get to halfway through “rough draft” and you haven’t written your outline you know that your drafting process is going to get crushed down but you also now have a fire under your ass to write your outline and dig up some sources.

Also crossing off the days is like writing things down in its “oh got this is actually a real thing” impact. If you’re crossing off the days you’re reminding yourself that you have X number of days remaining before a project is due.

IT CAN’T SNEAK UP ON YOU IF YOU’RE ALWAYS LOOKING AT IT. DON’T LET YOUR SCHEDULE BE A VELOCIRAPTOR. IT CAN’T CLEVER GIRL YOU IF YOU HAD EYES ON IT AT ALL TIMES.

Part One - Throw a Bunch of Shit at the Wall Part Two - If it’s not Written Down it’s not Real Part Three - Time is a Social Construct but it’ll still Fuck Your Shit Up Part Four - Something is better than nothing so done is better than perfect

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killfaeh · 3 years

Photo

Péguy's progress

Hi everyone! As mentioned in the in review 2021, today I'm going to talk more about the progress of the Peguy project. We're going to talk about 3D and programming, so this is a news that will be relatively technical. Let's go!

The application Péguy

As said before, I haven't made much progress on the application itself since the last time. It has been enriched with a few more effects and new possibilities for modeling shapes. But not much more.

I did a lot of research on the different methods of automatic texturing on a sphere. Going from a 2D image to a spherical volume is not an easy task!

I added the possibility to define holes in the textures.

The revolution function: it allows to draw a 3D object from a 2D curve by simple rotation around an axis. Any 3D modeling software worthy of the name must offer it.

Extrusion from a 2D shape. This is also a must-have feature.

New primitives (basic geometric shapes). A little donut for the road?

On the other hand, I did a lot of research and also developed small independent tools that will be interesting to integrate into the application in the future.

FreeCAD and the Python language

In January 2021, my dad decided to learn 3D modeling so that he could model small mechanical parts to be manufactured by online 3D printing services. The idea was to be able to replace small broken or lost parts. The software he started using for this is called FreeCAD. It is a free and open source computer-aided design (CAD) software. It is a technical software. It is designed to model mechanical parts, architecture, but not really to make art (video game, animation, illustration... all that). For my comics, I'm interested in using 3D for architectural scenery or vehicles, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at it... Just out of curiosity... While doing my research, I discovered that the software was customizable with scripts or plugins written with the Python language, like many 3D softwares. But the most interesting thing is that FreeCAD functions can be called from an independent Python program without opening FreeCAD! I really found this very interesting, so I rushed to do some tests.

This is one of my very first tests. It was sculpted using the boolean principle. Basically, the idea is to create shapes by adding or subtracting simpler ones from each other or by taking the intersection of 2 shapes. This little diagram found on Wikipedia is more telling than long words.

Until now I had never really gotten serious about 3D modeling because the software I had studied up until then was more for art. When I wanted to model objects or structures whose geometry I knew with mathematical accuracy, I was very frustrated by the imprecision of these software. The problem was that they didn't allow you to express shapes by entering custom mathematical formulas and you had to struggle to do things freehand that could have been quick and easy with a little math. The idea of making 3D generation programs where I am not hindered by a user interface quickly became apparent. I had started to study the subject with Java. Since I discovered FreeCAD, I have developed lots and lots of programs with it.

Sets and ships for the Star Trek webtoon project.

Robots and planetoids.

Vector drawing

The other revelation of the year in 3D modeling was... 2D vector drawing! Yes! Who would have thought it? A 2D tool! In fact, I quickly realized that if I just entered mathematical formulas and numbers in my head or with 2 or 3 calculations on a corner of the table, I would quickly hit a snag. How to deal with more complex shapes, especially curves? So I quickly wondered if there was a way to import vector drawing files into a program using FreeCAD. And the answer is YES :D In 2020 I took advantage of a promotion to buy the Affinity Designer software, but I wasn't sure how to use it. Well, since I discovered the possibility of using vector drawing in 3D, I use it all the time. 8D Now my method is to draw 2D plans of my objects and convert them into 3D objects, either by extrusion or by revolution, either with FreeCAD or with Blender.

The wing pattern of the Klingon bird-of-prey is a typical example of what I couldn't do with just lines of code.

The door of the sickbay of Deep Space Nine was modeled on the same principle but with Blender instead of FreeCAD and Python.

This is the tournament arena in Dragon Ball Multiverse. I modeled its main structure by applying a revolution from a curve I drew in Affinity Designer.

Small independent applications

Well, coding everything by hand and declaring one by one all the vector files imports can sometimes be laborious, and above all, it's perfectly unusable for the general public. So, I started to code little tools that allow me to make the link between my vector drawing files and my Python programs. Eventually, the idea is to combine my FreeCAD programs with my interfaces developped with web technologies.

This little tool allows me to load a vector file and to associate to each 2D element parameters that allow to define which transformation will convert it into 3D. As it is, it generates a Python program. Then, I copy and paste this program to run it and generate a 3D object.

Nodal languages

In the Péguy project there are 2 ideas that I wanted to develop. The first, an interface accessible to the general public that can be used like a Lego set. The second, a graphical programming interface to create more complex and dynamic objects reserved for more experienced users. At first I was planning to use the event scheduling system of RPG Maker as a model.

But after some research and some exchanges with friends who also practice 3D, I discovered that there was software based on this principle: a graphical programming language in the form of nodes that can generate complex scenes in an automated way with great freedom. The most famous in the field is called Houdini and is widely used to generate special effects in movies among others.

There is a free version to learn how to use it, but as soon as you want to use it for commercial projects, the price stings! It's a product that is aimed at companies and not at small independent artists. I will surely study it out of curiosity. While wandering around itch.io I found a small open source tool based on the same principle but much simpler. This software is called Sceelix.

This example is provided directly with the software.

Well, it doesn't seem to be really maintained anymore and it's a bit broken. I only managed to run it on a Windows 10 virtual machine and another Ubuntu 20 and even then it was a bit buggy. But on Mac OS X, on other versions of Windows or Linux, it crashed. In short! It's interesting to study the concept but it seems to me hardly usable as it is. And then recently, there's good old Blender which has integrated geometry nodes which are based on the same principle.

I haven't looked into it yet, but knowing the node system for materials, the current quality of Blender's interface, and seeing the captures of work done with geometry nodes on the internet, I think it's a powerful tool. I'll be sure to take a closer look. Having said that, after a quick exploration, it still seems to lack some existing node types in the 2 previous tools, namely if blocks or for loops. When you're used to programming for a long time like me, having to do without them and tinkering with them to be able to emulate them quickly overloads the interface with the number of nodes. In summary, there are two possible approaches: either the nodal model which is currently the most commonly used in 3D software, or the RPG Maker approach which looks more like a written program and has less risk of becoming messy and unreadable. If you have an opinion on the subject, I am all ears.

Blender

In absolute terms, since its last versions released during the year 2021, Blender is now able to do most of the things I'm looking to do with the Péguy project, at least for the 3D part (not for the 2D part). Most of them... I've been training intensively in Blender for about 5 months now and there are shapes that I could do with my Python programs that I still can't do in Blender, even with plugins. 3D CAD tools still have some little tricks in terms of pure modeling that artistic 3D softwares don't have yet. So, for my own use, Blender would do the trick by combining it from time to time with Affinity Designer, FreeCAD and some Python scripts. But doing all this with general 3D software like Blender is devilishly technical and is clearly not accessible to everyone. If you're not a bit of a mathematician, mastering raster and other manga effects in general 3D software is not an option. And I know that many comic artists are alergic to math and technique. :p

Black and white and color comic book renderings. And to do this, nodes, with sub-nodes and sub-sub-nodes...

This gives me a more precise idea of how to orientate the Péguy project: to specialize it for comics, or even illustration, and make it accessible to non-technical profiles.

Roadmap

Now that I have a clearer idea of what I am going to do, here is how I plan to do it. The first step will be to make a first version only with the 2D features (including the manga effects you already know). I found that the vector drawing really helped me so I think it's important to make it a central part of the project. Moreover, if nodal languages are multiplying to do procedural 3D, I have not yet found an equivalent in vector drawing. I think it could be really interesting to explore this idea. The 3D will come in a second time. The overall philosophy will be to ensure accessibility to non-technical profiles, that it is a lego game for them, but also to offer a little more to the more comfortable users. Well, I think I've covered it all the subject. I realize that I've explored a lot of things over the past year when it comes to 3D. It's a fascinating subject. :D Okay! I'll stop bothering you. I wish you a nice week and see you soon! Suisei

P.S. If you want miss no news and if you haven't already done so, you can subscribe to the newsletter here : https://www.suiseipark.com/User/SubscribeNewsletter/language/english/

Source : https://www.suiseipark.com/News/Entry/id/318/

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laikaworld · 7 years

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The Stop-Motion Animation Studio With a Cult Following

Travis Knight, CEO of Laika, is breathing new life into an under appreciated art form

Travis Knight is sitting in the back of Laika Experience, an exhibition at Comic-Con in San Diego, next to an interior set from his film Kubo and the Two Strings, one of several film sets stationed around the room. Each setup looks effortless, but the reality of the hours and decisions that went into that tiny space is something only Knight and his team understand. In a way, you could say seeing the sets re-created is like returning to an alma mater campus. Memories. Sometimes too many. “I won’t say which one, but one shot on Kubo took two months to get the expression right,” says Knight, CEO and president of stop-motion animation studio Laika. “It’s ridiculous on some level.”

The first stop-motion film was made in 1898, but the technique was largely replaced by hand-drawn celluloid animation by the 1920s. Stop motion was deemed too time consuming: painstakingly animating clay or wooden puppets by hand, frame by frame, so that, played in succession, photographed frames mimic real action. “One of the things I wanted to do at Laika right from the start is take this medium that I’ve loved since I was a kid and bring it into a new era, dragging, kicking, screaming,” Knight says.

And guess what?! We get some new-ish info on film five!

“According to Knight, the fifth film (the name of which is still secret) is a major departure for the studio. For one, it has no characters who are children.”

Read the rest under the read-more below!

Knight, 44, grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, where he filled his time with illustration, music and the arts. He watched stop-motion animation flicks like Ray Harryhausen’s creature features and Rankin/Bass specials including the holiday staple Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In 1998, shortly after Knight graduated from Portland State University, his father, multibillionaire Nike co-founder Phil Knight, invested $5 million for a minority stake in an animation studio led by Will Vinton, who co-directed Closed Mondays, the first stop-motion short to win an Oscar for best animated short film. Vinton, who had opened the animation studio in Portland in 1975, was in financial trouble and in need of an investor. The younger Knight, coming off of a failed attempt to launch a rap career in New York and still passionate about animation, started an internship.

‘I wanted to take this medium...and bring it into a new era.’

At Will Vinton Studios, Knight rose to production assistant and then animator on the Emmy Award–winning stop-motion show The PJs, which was created by Eddie Murphy, Larry Wilmore and Steve Tompkins. He quickly became one of the studio’s standout animators. But by 2003, Vinton was still struggling, so Phil bought the company—he has said he was partly motivated to own Will Vinton Studios because if it failed, his son would likely leave for a studio in Los Angeles. He had spent most of his sons’ childhood away from home, a reality that was especially difficult when his older son, Matthew, died in 2004 at 34. In 2005, Phil and Travis launched Laika and began developing their first feature.

What links Laika’s films—Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)—is their depth and complexity. Ben Kingsley, who voiced the villain Archibald Snatcher in The Boxtrolls, explains that the movies “include a dark side many other people in [Knight’s] field might outlaw.” Coraline, adapted from the children’s gothic novel by Neil Gaiman, follows a blue-haired girl who slips away from her inattentive parents into a twisted dream world. Kubo, a story in which Knight says he channeled emotion from his own experiences, is about a boy who seeks his deceased father’s armor to protect him from his unfeeling specter grandfather and aunts. In both films, family members vie for control over the main characters’ sight and identity.

Gaiman met Travis years before he became CEO, when Gaiman and Henry Selick, director of the 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas, were already working on the screenplay for Coraline. Shortly after the film’s release in 2009, Travis was promoted to president and CEO. “It was terrific watching a relatively reclusive animator step up,” Gaiman says. Animators work mostly alone. Once a director has briefed them on a shot, they work solo with the puppets and sets. There are 24 frames in a single second of film, and each puppet is meticulously posed and made to stand, often with a rig that is later removed from the picture using CGI. An animator will finish around four seconds of film per week. If a character takes a couple of steps, it’s a good day.

After years spent tending to the micromovements of puppets, Travis grew into his role as CEO, then director, and has now branched out. This summer, he began filming his first live-action feature, Bumblebee, a Transformers prequel backed by Steven Spielberg. But his accomplishments with Laika are still his greatest achievement. Each of the studio’s four films has been produced with the same budget, about $60 million, a fraction of the cost of CGI projects from studios like Pixar and DreamWorks. If his father’s Nike empire was built on products for speed and momentum (“Just Do It”), Knight has dedicated his life to stopping motion, breathing life into pauses and stillness (just barely move it). Yet, working as a businessperson and artist, Knight often calls on his father for wisdom. “Personally, one of the most rewarding things has been how I’ve been able to understand and connect more deeply with my father,” he says.

All four of the studio’s films have been nominated for an Academy Award for animated feature film, and in 2016, the studio won a scientific and technical Oscar for its innovation in rapid prototyping, or 3-D printing, in animation. Each puppet is designed so that the facial expressions can be switched, with thousands of eyeless masks that can pop on and off the puppet’s steel armature. Although this technique, known as replacement animation, has been used for a century, Laika’s integration of modern technology has given its characters unprecedented depth. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the moon-headed Jack Skellington wore 800 hand-sculpted faces. For Coraline, the title character had 6,333 printed and painted faces. Kubo had even more (23,187).

But despite all of Laika’s accolades, none of the films’ characters have been mass-marketed—meaning none have ever appeared on bedsheets or sippy cups. The studio launched its first Instagram page only a week before the exhibition at Comic-Con in July. “At some point you step back and realize we’re doing the company a disservice by not exploring these opportunities,” Knight says. In 2016, Laika hired Brad Wald as CFO (he had commercialized Downton Abbey for NBCUniversal in London). Knight wanted to expand the studio’s brand and produce a film each year, along with apparel, dolls and life-size foam figures. For the fifth Laika feature, which will wrap filming around March 2018 and will be released by 2019, the plans for merchandise are already underway.

According to Knight, the fifth film (the name of which is still secret) is a major departure for the studio. For one, it has no characters who are children. The collective vision of the films will be on full view at a Laika retrospective, Animating Life: The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA, that will run at the Portland Art Museum beginning this month. When you see a tiny puppet with bits of human hair dipped in silicone and remember how they blew across the character’s face in a snow gust, you can’t help but marvel at the fact that each strand had to be lifted by hand to create that swirl. “The only life [a character] has on-screen is the life that the artists bring to it,” Knight says. “I just think that’s movie magic in its finest form.”

#laika #laika studios #animation #travis knight #news #laika film 5 #same here travis!#i put the whole story under a read-more #because you need to subscribe to the NYT to read it all i think?#queuebo and the two strings

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aludrakijurorin · 7 years

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I am starting a new project I hope everyone loves, cause I certainly do. Furmaids =D I know furry mermaids are already a thing, but I wanted to let my creative freedom flow and draw something that wasn't mine or other peoples' characters. This project is going to include my love for all aquatic things, mixed with my love of drawing and designing anthros. I absolutely adore mermaids, dolphins, fish, water pokemon, all to the point of not even realizing how much I've surrounded myself with aquatic knick knacks. I want this to be a learning project for me. One where I step out of my comfort zone and improve my art in an achievable way. With each piece I will try something new, or work on one of my weak points that I have pointed out to myself, and that friends have helped point out for me. Each piece will have a generic land animal, and a generic sea animal, but I plan to add more flair in the future while still keeping each animal recognizable. This time, I drew a panda mixed with an orca =D Their markings match up perfectly, yet both are easily recognizable. I worked on three weak points in this piece: perspective, shading, and backgrounds. When I usually draw arms, there's typically no perspective. This time I tried to let them flow freely from the body, stretched out on each side. While it's not perfect, it's something I need to practice on, and I'll only get better with practice. Shading has a different effect underwater than it does on the surface. It's much softer, and with a bright floor (or pool walls), light easily bounces off these surfaces and illuminates everything with a softness. It's really beautiful to me, so I tried to capture that with a more soft shading style instead of having stark lines. Backgrounds will always be a flaw of mine, but I have grown from having transparent backgrounds, to some colors with texture, to finally dabbling with actual settings. While this setting is an empty open ocean, it also compliments the character well without clutter. Overall, I am super duper happy to be working on aquatic creatures, and I really hope I can push myself to make more of these. I already have a folder saved with tons of ideas, and am open to suggestions, whether it be a land animal you'd like to see, sea animal, or both! My next project should be a fox mixed with a koi fish. If you want to see more, please let me know! I love getting comments, favorites, compliments, praise, it's what keeps me motivated and wanting to draw more. I want to note that I MIGHT be selling prints of these furmaids in the future at conventions. With the help of Kravlin I may be able to display or sell prints at the furry conventions he regularly attends, which would be an absolute honor. I really just want to display my art and gain more publicity more than anything.

#furry #anthro #Furry Art #panda #pandas #orca #killer whale #killer #whale #underwater #digital art #digital #art #aludra #aludra art #aludrakijurorin #furmaid #mermaid

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mysticsparklewings · 5 years

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SweetTarts Book

Is it candy? Nope! Better! It's a book! :D

Better/more pictures here: http://fav.me/ddpfvdp It was also a nice break from not worrying about tablet things. A small disclaimer that this isn't the only mini book I've made since making my Duck Tape Mini Sketchbook; this is just the most recent one I've made and it's going up first because it's the freshest in my mind. (The others are coming, I just have to take some time to sit down and remember the making-of processes for them and compile the photos together.) This book is also one of 2 that I made that strongly break away from my usual formula, most of which I figured out when I made the very first two Homemade Mini Sketchbooks, and you can pop over there (or to the Duck Tape book mentioned above) to read about it for comparison so (hopefully) I won't repeat myself too much going forward here. This break from formula was inspired by two videos by Sea Lemon over on Youtube; One on making a candy box into a book (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcASCs…) and one for Painted Book edges (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ertzJY…). But my book does vary slightly from hers in how I made it, aside from just being a different candy box. In Sea Lemon's video, she uses a Junior Mints box and mint paper to match the candy theme. I don't have a whole lot of colored paper (at least not enough of one kind to use for book pages) but I liked the idea of the outer edge of the pages matching/blending with the candy box. That's when I remembered seeing her tutorial for painting book edges, and figured I could do that instead to get roughly the same effect. Aside from that, I also knew I wanted to try a different construction for the spine/how the book opens and closes. Sea Lemon's tutorial, much to my surprise, is actually pretty similar to the way I normally bind my books; Perfect Bound, a.k.a. the pages are attached directly to the spine via glue (or usually what I do ends up being via tape and the other pages & covers the block of pages gets attached to). Which does work, but my brain wanted to do different things based on the horizontal nature of the candy box. I actually thought pretty quickly of these tiny John Green books made by Penguin Random House which see the paper block attached to the back cover, but the front cover and spine can move freely. (I couldn't find a good picture of those books showing that off, but hopefully you can understand what I mean by looking at my pictures here, though the binding obviously isn't as professional and the back cover attachment method is a little different.) Now, given that usually, when I try to custom-cut pages for these little books said pages end up having at least one edge that isn't properly aligned because I cannot cut with machine accuracy despite my best efforts, I typically prefer to use either a page size that requires as little cutting as possible or that I have pre-cut pages for. In this case, I decided to check and as it turns out, normally 3" x 5" index cards fit relatively comfortably inside this particular candy box (which is just the one I had most readily available; I think there are other candy boxes out there I would've preferred to play with given the choice). The pages aren't flush with the box edge like in Sea Lemon's tutorial, but I don't think it's a dealbreaker. And besides, this was just a first attempt. I can potentially try my luck with custom pages and flush edge later. Of course, in hindsight, this means my insistence on painting the page edges wasn't super necessary because you can't really see them in the end, but at least this way I was able to test both the candy box cover method and how the edge painting actually works. (Which I'll address more directly in a minute.) Anyway. Once I'd figured out the main points of what I wanted to do, I started by cutting the box down as Sea Lemon shows in her video. Naturally, I would get the one candy box that has an opening flap for the candy on what was supposed to be the spine, so I had to decide what to do about that. In the end, I opted to just cut the flap off and cut the remnants underneath so there would just be a rectangular hole there, which I ended up "patching" with a piece of cardstock backed by tape. And much later I'd end up putting my signature there, as you can see in the photos. So then I got wild and dared to paint the inside of the box with acrylic paint to match what the book edges were going to look like. It just seemed wrong to leave it white for this color scheme. And it's funny; originally I thought I'd mixed way too much paint in trying to get the right color, but because it took roughly two coats (and it still probably could've done with a third but I'm impatient) for the inside of the box, and then one coat plus light touch-ups on the book edges I actually ended up using almost all of what I'd mixed up. In between waiting for the paint to dry, naturally, I worked on gluing the spine of the index cards--and I didn't count but for reference, as a rough estimate this is probably at least one full pack of 100 cards--together. Although this time I stopped at two coats of glue (instead of my usual 3-4) since I thought it might also be interesting to try being able to tear pages off/out. Which ended up being a good thing, because after I went around the other three edges (leaving the glued spine alone) with the acrylic paint, not only did I manage to get a paint mark on the top page of the stack but also the pages were pretty stuck together and the first 2-3 pages ripped in one spot along the edge when I unstuck them, so I ended up taking off the top few pages after the fact and it worked quite well; the pages are secure enough they won't just fall out, but I was able to pull those few off with enough effort. Take a tip from me, if you're going to paint book edges, I really recommend doing one side at a time and unsticking the pages after each. I made the mistake of painting all three sides at once and when I say some of the pages were really stuck together, I mean some sets of 2 took me ten minutes to unstick. And admittedly I think despite my efforts to keep the paint coating thin, it was still a little on the thick side, which probably didn't help. Anyway. After that low-grade torture, really all that was left to do was assemble the cover/box and the page block together. Now, had I thought this process through a little more, what I probably should've done was add 1-2 pink pages/index cards to the bottom of my page stack before gluing the spine. Then I could've just stuck the back page directly to the back cover. And if I used the tear-off method and ran out of pages, I could just make a new stack using the same process and stick it right back in. Instead, to keep the backmost page as usable as possible (since the index cards are lined on one side) I ended up painting an extra index card pink and folding it in half, attaching one half to the back cover, and the other to the back of the page stack. This way, the cover still hinges properly and you can still get to the back of the index card, or alternatively if I again end up the tear-off method I can simply leave the last page alone and use it as attach base for the new stack. All that said, despite the growing pains, I think it turned out pretty nice. At the very least, it's neat just for the unexpected cover. (Though I do think next time I'll try just gluing the opening for the candy closed instead of cutting it out; getting the paper to be the right size and lining the tape up was a bit of a pain.) The only thing I'm not crazy about is that the box/front cover doesn't like to stay closed once you've opened it. Though this might be remedied with more time spent with something pushing down on it or more use. (Alternatively, it could also be taken care of with some kind of book closure/elastic, but I didn't realize that was going to be a problem, so I didn't look into options for that this time around.) I gotta say though, for some reason this project has really lit a fire in the book-making part of my brain and I know it's not going to be much longer before I cave to that "let's make a book" voice in the back of my head once again because I've been putting it off since like the day after I finished this one. I just haven't had time to let it take over; too many other projects/things to worry about at the moment. That said, I'm hoping my next few posts will be a mix of new art and posts of those other books I've made but haven't posted yet. I do have a couple of Valentine's-themed pieces planned, along with a couple of other things I don't want to spoil ahead of time. I just hope I can get everything done by the time it needs to be done. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble | Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

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