Just Doppin’ By To Say I Am Loving 270 Miles And More So Much! Such A Bright Spot!!! Stay Safe!

Smokestone, aka a name I picked by looking at it and combining two elements, right before I needed to submit this. 

Cardstock, scissors, acrylic paint, colored pencil, a random mess of behind-the-scenes glue and tape. This was fun and I’d like to try more of this kind of thing.

So this is, oddly enough, an insight into the weird shenanigans I get up to at work. It started when Edmond imed me to ask if I had any Hostess Ho Hos at my desk. Explanation of convoluted work shenanigans under the cut.

I said no, and that since I had no car it would probably take me a while to walk to a store to get some Ho Hos. He asked me if I thought we could trick Ellen into getting some and I said, possibly. He suggested I fake a coma, and then they'd find a note in my jacket saying they needed to feed me Ho Hos to revive me. I said I wasn't confident in my ability to convincingly fake a coma. Edmond said he'd do it, but he'd already done it twice so it would be suspicious. I suggested he fake the coma and I pretend to be a doctor to legitimize his medical need for Ho Hos. So we did that. 

This whole Ho Hos thing inspired a pretty long email thread too, but I won't really get into that. At one point though, Ellen joked that we'd eat Ho Hos at our bi-weekly instructional designer jam session this week while Edmond would be out of office. Edmond told us adamantly not to eat Ho Hos without him.

We probably wouldn't have eaten Ho Hos without him, except that the next day, Ellen discovered a pack's worth of peeps hidden around her cubicle, including drowned in her water bottle. (The peeps are a whole nother Thing I won't even explain.)

A little revenge was, thus, in order. In addition to relocating the peeps to hiding spots around Edmond's cubicle (including the rescued drowned peep, now placed in a bowl and perturbingly still soggy a day later), we decided to eat Ho Hos at the jam session while Edmond was gone. 

And of course, if you're trying to make someone envious of your Ho Hos, they've gotta be damn magnificent. So we decided to try for some fancy plating. Ellen provided the Ho Hos (we've actually got an extra pack to give Edmond - after he sees the photos of these ones) and the little plate. I brought in the Torani sauce, glitter, and carved the strawberry roses.

tldr; my co-workers and I get kind of ridiculous and now I have gained the useful life skill of knowing how to carve strawberry roses.

At last night's Glitch Immersion workshop, we each rolled a D20 to generate a game pitch for us to sketch quick concepts for. I rolled: fast + dark + Street Fighter. Went for literal dark w/cave stages that darken over time during a round. Attacks landing briefly light up the cave. If the round times out and there's no victor, the stage goes black and the weird beast lurking in the background emerges to chomp ya.

One more batch! This about rounds up the characters you can expect to be interacting with on the island (except for one of Teen Alchemist's rambunctious younger siblings whose sprite I haven't gotten the chance to finish yet.) Other character batches here and o'er here.

These three you aren't necessarily going to need to interact with like the route characters or the Innkeeper or Shopkeeper. It might be in your best interest to take a shot at befriending them though. Might be more to them than there seems and hey, maybe they've got some help to offer you? You might as well chat them up, what else you got to preoccupy you while trapped on this tiny rock, you silly grump?

Still to come, probably some alternate sprite expressions, screen mockups, stuff like that? I'll try to post a bit more in general too, although it won't all be game-related work. I'd like to post sketches and fanart and other personal art too :]

Back in May my partner and I went to a Julia Nunes living room concert here in Minneapolis and it was dopest most intimate and emotional show I’ve been to. I started following Julia’s music years ago and her album Some Feelings means a lot to me. K and I have jammed along to every song on that album countless times.

So! I decided to make this tiny zine to give Julia at the show. Did a lil page for each track of Some Feelings. Made of blank index cards, some pens and markers, and a little blue thread.

Filled a lil 144 pg sketchbook in one week. I wanted to try pumping out a bigger volume of drawings than I usually do in a short amount of time, without worrying about quality or what I was drawing. It ended up being all OCs, hands, shoes, and fashion sketches I guess? I hadn't done something like this before so it was interesting. Trying to embrace the whole sucking and struggling and powering on part of trying to really, earnestly get better for the first time now. Gonna try something else next week.

Aisle 6 Remix 

Fic summary:

I feel like….someone’s watching me. Eve looks up from the two flimsy boxes in her hands (microwave stroganoff and frozen gluten-free shepherd’s pie) to see that someone was indeed looking intensely her way. A woman stands a few feet away, cart halted, staring right at her. Young, sickly pale, hair in disarray, clung sweaty to her forehead.

Eve figures she should probably address this situation.

|| One overthinking gay's remix of the best queer spy vs spy romance on film, if bits of Season 1 were smushed with bits of Season 2 and it all started with a meetcute in a grocery aisle.

Chapter 01: Knife me, rob me, creep up in my sleep

|| In this universe, here's where it begins. It's a good thing Eve's a terrible cook.

Click here or on the header above to give it a read! 

Hello from me, the writer:

Hey! It’s 2k19 and fuck it I’m finally writing fanfic. It’s bananas I haven’t before but I feel good that a show as completely slick, smart, sexy, and super fucking gay as Killing Eve was the one to pull me in finally. 

Here’s Fic #1, Ch 1 for me. I had this thought after 2.02 dropped, kept thinking about it, thought it had potential and eventually decided to think it into existence.

And yeah, I’m a very extra gay who enjoys making little graphics so I did decide on a whim to make chapter graphics. I hope someone enjoys this but if not who am I kidding I did it for me. The plan’s to hopefully do it every chapter.

The feedback I’ve received so far has been so positive and kind, I’m super happy about it?? Thank you to everyone who gives it a read! Please feel free to hit me up here or in the comments if you’ve got anything you’d like to say or ask.

Plenty chapters ahead, the next to come Monday <3 

I draw @azaraih's characters 500% more than my own, so sometimes K reminds me it'd probably be cool to think about and draw em again. Gettin a feel for them back. If you saw some of my sketchbooks in college or high school you might recognize some of these guys, though they've probably changed.

Another selkie game preview, mockup screenshot of a conversation this time. Sorry for the roughness! I kind of just have a separate psd where I occasionally drop updated versions of background/character/interface art so I can have an ongoing idea of how different elements are gonna come together eventually. So here's a sloppy wip of the Inn interior bg + not quite finished Selkie + idk what that expression the Storyteller has is, semi-amused pondering? + dialogue box I roughed out.

azaraih worked out the base perspective for the overall room and I've since taken over and I am WAY slower at fleshing this out haha. Oh well, I'm learning I guess? azaraih's also got some misc progress shots from selk gam, I think the initial sketch for this background and some interface/ui and coding stuff? So check that out if you're interested in seeing other selk gam  work! (Also I've been referring to this as selk gam just cause...that's what I call it in my head, it really isn't titled that haha woops)

We're very serious game makers. Look at our potato buttons. Look at our idk shell. 

Well, this is what my in progress games usually look like… It takes a while to make all the imagebuttons for the actual game, so I usually have placeholders that are textbuttons or… potatoes. The potatoes are actually the save/load/options/quit buttons, so it’s kind of hard to tell which is which right now haha.

Anyway, this is kind of what it’ll look like when you’re exploring the island. There’ll be actual arrow buttons to click on to go to different areas instead of the textbuttons in the top left, and the day/time info will probably be in the right corner I think? And the background will be different depending on the weather instead of just having text that tells you the weather.

But yeah, since this is the beach, I made a thing where you can pick up shells! Each time it’s a new day or night, it generates a few random shells for you to pick up.  You can take them to a shop in town and sell them. There’ll be about 10 different kinds and some are more rare than others.

I want to work on this game more! I’m trying to go through the parts of it I made in November and fix/improve some things.  I should get back into writing the fisherman route too…