Fun with Topology, Down in the Mystic Forest

("moon's haunted" voice):  rectangles arranged in brick pattern topologically isomorphic to hex grid.

what?

*screenshotting somerset art assets and getting onto photoshop to hack together a rough .png file* rectangles arranged in brick pattern topologically isomorphic to hex grid.

So I guess it never stopped bothering me that the roads/bridges mechanic in Somerset was a little too complicated and graphically confusing- in the playtesting group I was in in college we were always forgetting that there were certain ways that movement was limited. I always thought, maybe this would be better with squares instead of hexes? but then it wasn't complex enough, and there was too much blocked off to boot, with 1/4 of the edges untraversable bridgeless rather than 1/6.

Discovering that squares/rectangles tiled in an offset grid is topologically identical to tiled hexagons reminded me of this conundrum, and got me thinking again. If the squares were arranged in bricks, with one corner each cordoned off instead of one edge? Maybe not topologically indistinguishable from prior prototypes' regular hexagons with one side inaccessible (it's possible to have as much as 5/6 of the edgeage blocked off under this model, [edit: come to think of it it's possible to have 6/6 blocked off under the hexes]) but imho that makes it functionally better, providing hopefully the perfect balance of navigational affordances and meaningful need to circumnavigate/ bridgebuild. Maybe there's a way to do functionally the same thing with hexes, I don't know [edit: 1 full hex side, plus 1/2 a side? but that still allows 100% of a tile to be blocked off mathematically, as established in the earlier edit, whereas that's literally impossible with the square thing, so.] Certainly a lot easier to read the board this way with squares.

Also: triangles arranged in a similar offset grid, topologically identical to square regular tiling. Also topologically identical to hexagonal tiling, alongside the offset square thing discussed above? Well, a lot of things, as seen in the last link, but particular to speaking of non-edge-to-edge Euclidean tilings: hexagonal tiling is isomorphic to hexagonal-but-with-triangles-surrounding-them-this-time tiling. Wild.

Homestuck Made This World

It was Spring of 2009 (I was at the tail end of my Junior year in High School) and I read a lot of webcomics. I'm not altogether positive how I heard about it, but there was this webcomic Problem Sleuth that I learned about (probably through Ryan North's blog on qwantz.com) and binged. In it kingdoms are united and divided, the Black Tower is fought to the top of floor by floor, reality turns out to be an illusion. They truly were, MS Paint Adventures. (Only not actually done in MS Paint. But truly adventures.) It was the most epic undertaking, reading-wise, that I'd undertaken in my entire life till that point. Almost 50,000 words over 1,673 pages; I just did the math and that's, 10.75% of Rhythm of War? Which as a single volume is like 90, 95% the length of the entirety of The Lord of the Rings, including appendices. But Lord of the Rings isn't heavily illustrated, and Stormlight Archive is only illustrated a couple times every hundred pages; Problem Sleuth has at least one illustrated panel every page, many of them animated, which invites a slower pace as you reflect and, like, fondly regard creation.

So yeah like I said it was till that point the longest single work I had ever consumed in a jot- (looking up Harry Potter wordcounts, stayed up all night reading those on their releases, days at a time- 250k+ words, that's... more than 50k for sure) but like I said, only illustrated once a chapter, and in Harry Potter they don't have to stretch a power cable from one end of the universe to the other, growing and shrinking it in a complex sequence of maneuvers so that it can be the right size to plug the AC in, so there.

Anyway.

So after I read Problem Sleuth (I binged it just after it had wrapped up I think, if not a little before) a few months later it turned out that its author, Andrew Hussey, was starting up a new webcomic in a similar vein, Homestuck. I... it's, the spellcheck isn't recognizing Homestuck as a word, it corrected me on how to spell Hussey's name but it's redlining this one, strange. It's HOMESTUCK why wouldn't it recognize- oh okay it has to be allcaps I see. Nope, not doing that. See, I made it one or two days into it (HS) and lost interest. Stopped reading, as I liked to say, when John Egbert was still stuck at home.

Flash forward half a decade, and Homestuck had become huge while I wasn't looking I guess, and even people who weren't wired into that '00s webcomic circuit were reading it, and it was A Thing, maybe even A Thing And A Half, and I'd checked back in MSPA on occasion I guess and read the sidecomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, but didn't know it existed in\ relation to Homestuck like it does, so I was very surprised to find that out when I did get around to reading Homestuck.

How I got around to reading that was this. It was Spring of 2016 (I was at the tail end of my Junior year in college) and, Zootopia fever was in the air and Pokémon GO fever was a few months away and stuff was happening politically that had the opportunity to go very very differently but didn't, and, the webcomic Homestuck was ongoing and HOMESTUCK was NOW, but not now for long-- for for exactly 7 years after Homestuck launched (4/13/09 - 4/13/16), it was coming to an end. Yes buddy, an end, and it was A Thing, maybe even A Thing and Three Quarters. The adventure had been on Act 6 of 7 for half of its run, and Act 7 would take place in the form of a gargantuan like 25 minute flash animation, and maybe there would be one or two epilogue pages but that would be it, forever. I read that friends on Tumblr were rereading it to get ready, and I read that friends on Facebook were hyped about it, and heck and gosh and gee, why do I have so many GNC friends what does that say about me, and I just looked back through my posts at the time and there were totally a few Homestuck cosplayers in the background of the reportage I did of Fandomonium! I, and it was In The Water. I do hate when a secret is kept from me, and this seemed like a terrible secret.

And so I began the undertaking...

It's the present day. I'm flipping through my At-A-Glance for 2016 right now, its pages rich with pressed movie tickets from my multiple viewings of Zootopia and Hail Caesar and 10 Cloverfield Lane, and there's only one official reference to reading MSPA in the section I daily keep of the things I watch and make and read and play. April 13th, fittingly; a day upon which I also apparently played Tzolk'in and Halo Reach and explored the last-updated-in-July-of-1999-and-kept-in-pristine-condition-since-then babyname website alfabette zoope. That's the only official reference, but you can catch glimpses of references here and there elsewhere if you keep your eyes peeled and know what you're looking for. A Morse code decryptor written down the margins of April 1. April 16, a couple references to a "JADE FLUTE." Nothing that would mean much at all if you weren't in the know, but telling enough in context.

There's a reference just under the sole instance of the words "MSPA" to "North of Reality," a microfiction blog that was one of the things advertised in the MSPA adbar at the time. It was the first Patreon I ever signed up for, on my tight college budget. A new exclusive print-only limited run short fiction sent in the mail every month. I do hate when a secret is kept from me.

Flashback to a few months ago. Not even a flashback, let me just, tell you about it. Dropped my phone, shattered its screen, got a new one but finally with an old one I could take to work with me and use as an MP3 player, I could do that and listen to audiobooks and podcasts and maybe a little music, like I'd always figured would be a good idea but never had the wherewithal for, though I'd tried it before with an even older phone. Thursday June 2nd 2022, the daily in/out/cycle section reads like this: 

a bunch of WRITING EXCUSES; TRENCH; THE BAD GUYS; I inadvisably start (so, 1st 45 min of) THE DARK KNIGHT because it's a good movie, even though I should really just go to bed

I'm soon listening to one or two other podcasts and make my way through an entire audiobook I'd downloaded to my drive back in 2018, and exhausting listening options rapidly which is great, but I learn about a podcast GAMES STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES which I'd somehow overlooked in my search for games studies podcasts till now (because my focus primarily lies in analysis of analogue games?) and make my way through that. Halo Reach is namedropped as "solving the Hamlet issue." It's great.

I make my way through the back catalogue of that with the alacrity of, like, I'm picturing the opening logos of BONANZA and the way the fire burns through that map, but fortunately for me GSSB isn't the only podcast on the Ranged Touch network. Michael and Cameron also host a podcast where they do serious literary analysis of Steven King novels (they're currently on Misery) and another podcast where they do the same thing to, Homestuck... It's called Homestuck Made This World, but that's not why I'm titling this post that.

So like, all this time I just assumed that everyone else, like me, got done reading Homestuck in April of 2016, and nobody ever thought of it again, but that's not true? There's still an active fanbase, not just of the weird and multitudinous ongoing spinoffs but of the original comic. It never even occurred to me that that might be the case.

So Homestuck Made This World. I rapidly made my way through the backlog of that. Michael was keeping up with the entire thing as it was coming out, Cameron is reading it for the first time for the podcast and getting a fresh take on it, and I...

I'm actually halfway between the two hosts. I told you half the story, but that was only half the story. I said I began the undertaking, up above, but if you assumed I finished it I... what's that thing Doc Scratch says, well anyway. I made it to the end of Act 5, halfway through the whole thing, and a little bit into Act 6 but not very far at all-- the same instinct reared up that I'd had when I first stopped reading, when it was coming out for the very first time; Act 6 just seemed like a remake of Act 1 which just seemed like a remake of Problem Sleuth. May have been the reason, or at least part of it? Because, like, if Homestuck were half shorter, I would probably have been able to get all the way through it by the drop of Act 7, but it wasn't, it was twice longer. I told you that in High School Problem Sleuth was the biggest thing I'd ever read? Acts 1-4 of Homestuck, put together, were already hundreds of pages longer than Problem Sleuth (a webcomic in which, I must remind you, the entirety of the universe is traversed several times over) and with a word count that is literally hundreds of thousands of words greater. Act 5 was longer still than those four acts put together. And...

Alright so at the time, it seemed to me (apparently misreading the events of the 13-minute long flash animation climax of Act 5) that the entire universe had been destroyed and all our beloved characters dead, the events of Act 6 taking place in a new universe with an entirely new cast that nobody ever talks about so must not care about very much. I don't know where I got that apprehension of things, but that was indeed my apprehension of things, yet scores of pages into Act 6, that it took place in a new reality created by the kids' Sburb session the same way that our universe was created by Sgrub of the Trolls'. 

And anyway, by the time I'd got to it, it was too late. Act 7 had already dropped. I'd failed in my quest.

I don't regret giving up there when I did. If I do have a regret about it, it's that I didn't get to Act 6 by the time Viz media bought the website making it corporate, and the URL changed breaking many links and obliterating the forums entirely, and Flash was discontinued so a lot of the interactive elements in the comic had to be dropped or altered in form. The experience reading Homestuck now is entirely different from reading it in 2016. As was always going to be the case.

So anyway, I'm caught up to the events of Homestuck that they discuss in Episode 7 part 1 of the podcast, and suppose I'm going to keep going. I mentioned North of Reality being my first Patreon, in my way old baby days of being a patron, and well now Ranged Touch is my latest. Mmhmm.

There's something about Homestuck that invites this kind of reflection on it, the circumstances under which you read it for the first or the whateverth time. Sorry if I rambled, forgive me for writing ALMOST TEN PERCENT OF THE SINGLE WORDIEST PAGE OF HOMESTUCK here. Act 6 intermission 3, 2 intermissions past where I'm at so far. There was a break of 32 days in between the panel that preceded it and that one, and I cracked this thing out in like, .2 percent of that time, so like, if this were 10 times longer it would only have taken me a day to write. Sick.

Alright well I've got work in the morning, so, y'know. Goodnight. 

Film Tier List: My Favorite Movies by my Favorite Directors

So today we're making tier lists of our favorite films, but I love films too much and needed to limit my tier list some, so decided to make my list of favorite directors instead, choose my favorite films of each of those, and ranked those in a tier list. So there are a lot of great flicks that aren't on this list because their directors are already represented elsewhere on this list (I really vacillated on my favorite Tarkovsky let-me-tell-you)! And there are a lot of great flicks that aren't on this list because like I either haven't seen enough of their directors' movies to really consider them favorite directors of mine though maybe I would if I've seen more of their stuff (Carl Th Dreyer, Martin Scorsese,) or they're great movies by directors whose outputs I generally consider overrated (apologies to Edgar Wright et al.) And it's tough. Like, some of my all time love-with-all-my-heart faves couldn't make it but whatchugonnado. 

In real life all of these movies would be S or A tier (perhaps breaking down along S-A being S's and B-C being A's) but this is like the, GOATs butting heads the way goats do. Rather not get this granular about rankings at all but hey it's fun and, at least in this instance, harmless.

Tried not to go down too deep a rabbit hole with animation directors! But there are like a lot of anime directors that I'm sweating bullets now realizing I forgot. Why'd I include Satoshi Kon, of whose movies I've only seen a couple, but not Masaaki Yuasa or Mamoru Hosoda, when I've seen just as much Yuasa as Kon and almost every Hosoda to boot? It's weird and arbitrary and also has to do a lot with what didn't make this list, like, have you seen the Magnetic Rose segment of Memories? All these directors are incredible but you'll go mad double-guessing your own tastes.

Pirate Game Reasons to be Excited for August

 Leder Games, the makers of Root and Oath, are coming out with a new game whose preorder opens on August 1st. It's called Ahoy and it looks great, and hopefully cheaper than either Root or Oath? But with all the fun artwork and spirited design and asymmetrical gameplay that Leder are known for. I've read the design diaries on their website and it's clear that they put their usual care and craft into every stage of the process, and like, that's swell. Still you'd better be cheap than Root or Oath, I friggin mean it.

AEG, the makers of Mystic Vale, came out with a pirate game last year called Dead Reckoning (nothing to do with the Mission Impossible movie coming out next year, it's a nautical term for a method of determining your position based on direction and speed.*) I saw it on Kickstarter but ultimately decided not to back it, hoping to instead pick it up in stores or something when it came out. Only it never came out in stores, and might've been a Kickstarter exclusive thing or something?, but it's coming back onto Kickstarter again on the 9th. This one's also got a lot of neat ideas in it, plus a solid-looking integration of AEG's same patented Card Crafting system that we saw in Mystic Vale.

Also like, I never got around to buying Stonemaier's revamp of Libertalia when it came out earlier this year? I thought I was tighter on money than I really was, and, oh well. I actually saw a copy of the original 2012 edition of the game in a Local Game Shop in Montana when we went there a few months back, and would totally have bought that in a heartbeat had I not known that Stonemaier was coming out with their own revisit. Now of course I'm thinking I wouldn't mind having both..., but oh well. If I'm looking into both others next month, I may as well make August the time to (swash)buckle down and get myself a copy of Libertalia: The Winds of Galecrest. Yo ho.

A couple of days (may 6th) after my last post (may 4th) a few things happened but I didn't post about them because I wanted my mom to see it (last post) and maybe know what the heck I'm talking about, like oh yeah I remember that movie it starred Bob Odenkirk or whatever. But when she saw me after reading the post she just brought up tips for not having stressful dreams?? So like hey anything you can remember at all would be appreciated. 

And the things that happened, anyway, were followups to previous things that happened. Really, the only reason they bear repeating is because of that. My hand cramped, and a bird flew somewhat close to my head?? That stuff is nothing, right. Outside of context.

But there are two posts, both coincidentally from Decembers past (one 2020 one 2019) that provide context.

my hand cramping- I made this post when my hand had cramped and it was in such a specific way that it felt like, oh, that must be electricity, I must be generating electricity with my hand.

https://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2019/12/shocky-powers-pt-i.html

I promised I'd have more, and that was, a quarter of a decade ago, two and a half years. Because it wasn't the last time my hand had cramped like that, even at time of writing that post. I promised I'd get to a part two. 

Eh, maybe later.

A bird flew by my head! Actually, this post, not context, though frequently I think, it should have had.

https://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2020/12/readshorts-blogpost-with-three-prologues.html

You see, this post with three prologues, the first prologue was the dream I had that morning, which actually doesn't have to do with anything, and even the day of posting it, I realized- no, that's not what the first prologue should have been. The other two provide context, and tie into something that happened. Dream, introduces you to Oscar I guess? Dunno.

Alright, prologue for real though. In elementary school, E.C. Best which would have been sixth grade then I think, at recess I'd ducked under a thing at the playground, and the moment I emerged happened to be the same moment a flock of birds had decided to swoop down close to the ground, and there's this rush of birds whooshing past me and cawing around me. Other times, as well, were birds flying in flocks near enough to me to reach out and touch. And so there's a sort of personal symbolism which has build up around such moments in my head, it's like those are checkpoints, in a video game or however you'd like to think of it, where progress has been saved and there's no going back. There was a flock of birds that flew around me as I went home for the day, Christmas Eve of 2020. Like being caught up in a narrative.

And yeah so a single bird flew kinda nearish to me, friday the first week of last month, two months ago now (this being the end of june.) Felt worth mentioning, in context of the other stuff.

Daddy's Little Girl???

Since we're doing this lately (For Ant of a Nail was another one I'd been trying to track down for a while) I figure I might as well repost this here from the TVTropes You Know That Show? forum, first posted a little more than a year after this post where I tried to track down a few things. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=68009&type=ykts

Family film, live action, circa I don’t even know, late 1990s? It’s about, or at least features, a girl, 12ish, whose father is a comic book artist. There’s a scene at a birthday(?) party, at a pool, and there’s a live 60s-esque band who’ve been hired to perform, singing lyrics along the following lines: “ooh, she’s daddy’s little girl” (trying to search these lyrics only turns up an unrelated song.) The other kids there are making fun of the girl because of something in the latest issue of her father’s comic book. It’s a vaguely TMNT-esque publication, with anthropomorphic animals as the characters, and the Master Splinter-type character has his adopted-daughter-type figure start wearing a training bra now that she’s growing up; all the girl’s friends recognize this as being a thinly veiled stand-in for the girl’s own blossoming into womanhood and tease her for this.

The more I think about it the surer I am that the song in question is You're a Big Girl Now by The Stylistics, but going off of IMDb's credit list isn't revealing anything, probably because it's only a cover and not performed by The Stylistics themselves. That track's songwriters, Robert Douglas and Marty Bryant, aren't credited there anywhere either individually or collectively, either, though?

As long as we're trying to track down things from my childhood directly responsible for turning me into a furry, here's something I haven't tried to track down at all (not knowing where or how to begin) but which I nonetheless occasionally think about, though with increasing frequency lately- these pamphlets, there was like a whole propaganda thing about how great it is to go to college or whatever and get a high-paying job, because you don't want to flip burgers for the rest of your life! And it was about this anthropomorphic cat and it might have been told in verse, or in hopelessly trying-to-hard-to-be-hip lingo, or whatever.

(And even as a kid it was pretty clear that they were teaching us to aim to be the oppressors rather than dismantling the oppressive system instead. maybe it had something to do with being too young to have a working understanding of what flipping burgers even means or what it meant to be a fast food worker, allowing one to see piercingly to the core injustice of a system where it would need to be a personal lifelong-goal decision not to be so exploited: how is there escape for the individual if there cannot be escape for the collective? I am always dreaming about descending into dark tunnels, or drowning in quicksand. Last night I dreamt of navigating the mazelike officespace, embedding myself within their organization while working for the resistance front secretly headquartered between the walls. The night before last I dreamt of following sisters into a tube spiraling downward, the entrance secreted in a public place. Down we go, me catching every door before they close behind the women as they push onward, remaining just out of sight behind the twist of the spiral, but gradually advancing until the slightest glimpse backward would reveal me. At nearly the last moment, I am discovered, but manage to make it through the last door. Cornered by the two sisters, I explain that I'm looking for my grandfather, who had wandered off; I may or may not have genuinely thought him to be with the two. Though I should be in trouble, whatever covert protocols they have allow them to proceed with their operation: they leap into the pit at the bottom of the spiral, a long tube like a slide straight vertical. There is a protocol for accessing what's next, time travel or dimension shifting or access to their secret base. AI-AI-AI-OH! shouts one of the sisters, and I echo the syllables. ZEIGFRIED JONES! pronounces the other, though I do not know who that could be. "Oh," I say aloud, "I didn't know that the access code could be any old sounds." "It's not," they explain mischievously, and I realize my mistake, realize why they had allowed me, a forbidden interloper, to come with them. And I drop into empty space, some place between dimensions, and I keep falling, and falling, and falling, though we had already been so far down into the earth. And I know that I'm immortal here, and I wonder if they really would go so far as to let me fall forever as the punishment for infringing upon the sacred descent. And as I realize I might be in this space, falling in darkness for eternity, I wake up, and wonder if that's going to be some part of me now, a part of me in the dreamworld, plummeting into pitch darkness forever, everywhere I go, even in waking. And both dreams end the same way: when I go back to sleep, I manage to continue the dream, and I'm not going to be falling forever, and they allow me to continue on to where they've gone. It's, the dinosaur times, perhaps. Maybe a jungle, maybe a minecart. Probably a minecart in a jungle. The part that matters is this: I realize I'm experiencing two different simultaneous realities, one in which I'm a man sitting in this minecart, one in which I'm a woman. I grin and laugh and realize that this experience, now that I know the objective subjective experience of being more than one gender, can act as a Rosetta Stone to finally gauge the validity of trans identities, and at last we can answer the objective truth of whether trans men are men and trans women are women, and heal centuries of religious and cultural divides. The other dream, the dream from last night, when I fall back to sleep Jeff Goldblum is there announcing to me the sad shocking discovery of the scandal of the founder of our resistance group, VINCENT "JOHN PRAFFERAD" POWELL JR. He had been on both sides of the conflict, founding our resistance while still being part of the office space. Vincent "John Prafferad" Powell, Jr. I commit that name to memory, and wake up.)

Maybe the cat didn't have pants on? That always made me uncomfortable as a kid..

Pledge Items Inbound Next Year

 The Kickstarter thing is a minor thing in my life right now, though it would seem otherwise as it's the only thing I've been posting about. Just keeping you abreast is all! Not everyone is fortunate enough to have the dispensable income to do the swag boxes, heck it's only a precise alignment of stars that allowed me to have the dispensable income to do the swag boxes being as I am trying-to-save-money! So I figure it's imperative of me to share these tidbits with everybody, because this may be a bigger part of your life right now than it is of mine! 

So yeah here's a list of pledge items that BackerKit says is coming my way. They asked me a survey, and asked me if I wanted any add-ons, and showed me at the end all the pledge items incoming inconnection (?) to swag boxes. There was an option to have all collectable pins on the side for $100, but I'm already getting 3/4ths of the set and, being-as-I-am-trying-to-save-money, am not planning on spending $25 per pin to track down 4 pins (which would come with the physical copies of books for the people who'd ordered those. and. I have no interest otherwise in joining that number.) 

Really though like I've said I'm only interested in those swaggy boxbois because of the Stormlight ones. And Cytoverse as well, now that I've finished Cytonic. Eh? I believe I've promised other certain swagboxes to others, don't know if there'll be wearables in those specifically but I put myself as a medium so y'rall being mediums as well. (Looking at it, it's the Hoid and general Cosmere boxes that are having the shirts in 'em. So far.)

Witnessings

Finished work early and rushed home today to witness the end of the Surprise! Four Secret Novels Kickstarter at 5:00 MDT, 4:00 here. Stayed up halfway latish tonight, this evening right now, to witness the release of the 1950 US Census to the National Archives at midnight also MDT for some reason. It's (past) 11:00 here and I'm staying up a bit longer to chronicle these things. Witnessing myself post this I guess.

*Mouse Bursts Through Door*

I meant to go to bed an hour and a half ago. Maybe two hours? But then I had to grab my fully charged phone, which reminded me to do my March Madness bracket (out of each showdown, I'm picking to win whichever team whose mascot reminds me most of Batman) then I checked Brandon Sanderson's website for updates on stuff, read the updates on stuff and made a meme about them instead. So I guess I'm unfortunately still awake right now. nevertheless!

Did I think making this was a good idea I don't know I'm tired leave me alone.

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/some-faqs-you-might-enjoy/

So he published a pretty indepth thingy answering FAQs about the inception of the Kickstarter, where he goes deep into the weeds of logistics and everything and just has this whole long thing about how awful and harmful Amazon's business model is among a heckuva buncha other things and it's great. "Enjoy" indeed.

re: Tony Hawk

Alright so a few standard time units ago I discovered that Tony Hawk has just like publicly tweeted out his cell phone number for anybody to text if they want. Dude just, lets his fans text him. I think there's an automated thingy in place or whatever, from what I've seen, but still there it is. So like...

I mean I would probably want to do a second or even third draft of it, but...

D'you think that Tony Hawk would like last year's Halloween short story? Like, if I were to do that, and then maybe, text the link to him or something... I was, well analytics indicates it's one of the most popular things I've posted in a while, is what reminded me... and yeah, it's okay. I don't know, it's just a thought.

y'know what I'm just gonna leave this right here 

For Ant of a Nail

Going through old posts to remove people's deadnames

Well most of it was accomplished May of this year, just updating people's pronouns and stuff and replacing their names and all that seamlessness, (seamlessness for the most part, that is,*) but only finished a few minutes ago? It was the switching of Cailin's and my correspondence to Facebook messenger, that made it difficult; where we had our Facebook-public names in the body instead of our wikispaces screennames, that introduced the difficulties I wasn't sure what to do with, from Correspondence 2/26/12 21:52 - 22:19** to Correspondence 3/25/12 22:45 - 22:56†

It was like, [deadname] Anderson Taylor, when Anderson wasn't even Cailin's real middle name... So like, what to do with that?; and I decided on keeping it for the Matrix reference, trans allegory and everything, (thinking of making Resurrections my first movie of 2022) but didn't get around to making the change till GALDANG SEVEN MONTHS LATER because of executive functioning stuff.

Anyway, reading through these and looking at myself from ten years on, it's something. Like here, Correspondence 3/25/12 22:12 - 22:28 when she was thinking of naming her blog Phylum Arthropoda, or maybe Phylum Anthropoda, which doesn't make as much since so she was pivoting away from it, or maybe make it on purpose and not on accident...

Eric Perazzo

You could go back to the man foot thing, and pretend you're...

And I leave it dangling. The answer is A FURRY. pretend you're A FURRY. I couldn't even bring up being a furry to her, lest baleful looks of judgement or whatever, and she was a woman all this time and dropped so many hints about it if not outright coming out and I couldn't even, frigging, well anyway. I've examined that feeling many-a-time. I've got more to say about the receipts of that, I'll, unpack it to you later, if you want me to. We come out on our own time.

The Midnight Cat of Rustling Leaves

My hands are starting to age.

You can always tell a person's true age by their hands. There's an old World War II movie from the '50s, To Hell and Back, where the war-hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy plays himself, recreating the same real-life feats he himself had performed more-than-a-decade previous when he was more-than-a-decade younger; it was released when he was 30, and he's playing a teenager, but Audie Murphy, he's handsomely baby-faced, and actually really convincing as a minor-who-had-to-lie-about-being-18-to-get-into-the-army. He's actually really convincing, except for one scene. It's near the beginning, before his mother dies, and he goes to hug her, the actress playing her, and he wraps his arms around her back and the back of her head, and you can see his hands. And they're broad and veiny and starting to go boney. A man's hands. A mortal's hands.

My hands.

And I wonder, as I survey the reddening sprawl of suburbia before me from the top of this hill, orange trees and brown rooftops under a salmon-colored sky, I wonder if Audie Murphy felt the same way looking at his hands then the way I do looking at mine now? Even when his best films were still ahead of him and everyone knew it, would he have occasion to feel old? I set the skateboard down on the ground and mount it gingerly.

I think about Tony Hawk a lot as well. I hadn't done it in probably over a decade, but I've been skateboarding recently, going down the concrete-plated cul-de-sac hills and wiping out and skinning myself all over, and, realizing, I don't have it anymore, not like when I was a kid; though I can keep lying to myself alright, or keep on trying to push back against it, push against it like I push against the ground now, sneakered back foot scooping against the concrete sidewalk sneakered front foot feeling the grit of the sandpapered deck as it vibrates with the irregularities of the sidewalk rolling under me as I begin my descent. And Tony Hawk is getting older too and he wipes out plenty of times and he doesn't let it get to him, but I'm letting it get to me, and that's, fine. Tony Hawk is better still now than I ever was, and it makes me feel old to think he's getting old, and having looked up to him since I was a kid and being the age I am now the feeling would probably be mutual were we ever to meet. And we would just do a loop-de-loop of feeling old against each other, I guess. 

And there's a third person I think about a lot as well, Nick Northrop from when I was in second grade, whom I'd seen at the grocery store just the other day, I'd say two months ago buying baby stuff where I was buying condensed bean-with-bacon soup. And he looked so, well, not old, but those adult features for him looked old, impossibly so. Maybe to an outside observer he'd just appear a normal man, but all I could notice as I looked at him that day two months ago was his eyes starting to sink back in their sockets and his hair starting to fade. And we're the same age, and am I starting to look like that? And I pray that it's just because he always seemed so much older and wiser than he really was, that's probably it. Thin Nicky Northrop, who would tell us all the secrets of the grown-ups, about guns and politicians and sex stuff and the end of the world, and all the scary stuff like the axe-faced waterbabies who'd been drowned at the lake and came back to pull you under if you got too close, and Mother Whispers who appeared to you in mirrors if you called her in the darkness, and the Midnight Cat of the Rustling Leaves who would speak to you and tell you secrets and steal your skin.

There's a gust of wind and a swirl of dead leaves out of the corner of my eye, which whip against my legs like a cat trying to rub against you, and the sidewalk falls out from under me and everything's a blur, but a crystalized one like an out-of-focus snapshot. I'm momentarily weightlessly airborne, and I'm coming down again, and I'm on the ground and I'm rolling bodily downhill for a thump-thump-thump on my side as I catch myself and twist to minimize damage. Tony Hawk doesn't let it get to him but I let it get to me, because I wipe out, eat dirt, biff it, and when I pick myself up, as I push myself up from the ground like I do now, I catch a glimpse of my hands and they're broad and veiny and starting-to-go boney. And the skin is getting loose and it doesn't heal as well as it did and the scars don't fade like they used to, but that part's fine, more distinguished or something, makes my fingers easier to bend. The practice seems to have worked, not a scrape on me, a little more dirt and gravel on my jacket but bodily none the worse for wear.

I look up from myself, and around, and there's a cat across the street who seems to have seen my mishap, though its eyes are inscrutable. Um so yeah who am I kidding, it's easy for you to make that connection, this baby is gonna be the MIDNIGHT CAT OF THE RUSTLING LEAVES, let's get to that skin-stealing babey! I mean, it wouldn't really be fooling anybody if I made it seem like, oh, actually no, this is a different cat. Because I mean, let's take a look at her:

She's a black cat, her fur is all midnight-y. Seems to suck in light, be a little be too dark for the time of day, still light outside. As she advances toward me, maybe in her silver eyes is the moonlight on a clear night. And though it doesn't seem strange at the time, because hey-that's-what-wind-does, the leaves from earlier are nowhere to be seen. Maybe I would have made the connection a lot earlier had that not been...

But, no, I'm not sure at all how accurate any of Nick Northrop's stories were anyway. Did the leaves have anything to do with the cat? Was that part just a coincidence, and a minor one to boot? Dead and dry and rustling, that's what all the leaves look like right now. So, whatever. Nick Northrop, he was probably wrong about some things, he was wildly off about how sex works after all (and, hey, you don't want to know, you just don't.)

You just do not. You may think you do, but you-...

And, anyway, well, he was right about the leaves, yes, and more right about the skin thing than I could probably have hoped.

I'm on my haunches now, hands outstretched nonthreateningly, beckoning the cat over. She hesitates, but draws closer, closer, she's nearby now. She brings her face up to my hand. Tentative movements- slow to advance, quick to retreat, but steadily, with minute jerks, advancing, till I can feel the autumnal warmth of her breath on my palm. I look up and away, making no eye contact lest it be perceived as a challenge. I hear sniffs and sniffs, and finally she tentatively licks my hand. But my oh my, that's good skin, says a soft voice warmly, from the cat's direction. I think I'm going to take it. 

I startle downwards. "Um." The cat looks back up at me. Your skin, I'm going to take it, I think. The creature talks, physically opens its mouth and speaks, voice crackling around the edges like old leather. I feel my own mouth twitch at the corners. I'm not as surprised as maybe I should be, perhaps a sign that I'm not as old as I fear, and not so set in my ways, or perhaps the opposite of that somehow, that as I age I grow weary and accept things as they are.

My twitching mouth pulls into a line. "That's not how this works," I find myself saying. "You don't take my skin until you tell me a secret," and as I say the words the idea starts to feel more familiar. Is it right, though? Was there anything in the stories about a deal?

Very well, then. Would you like to know a secret? The cat spoke in a soft kind voice, just like a perfect gentleman. There is no bargain here, I would like to take your skin either way, but it does seem a fair trade. 

"I..." I find myself wishing to go back to something like earlier, flying through the air, a moment frozen in time. There's no rush here, is there? There's no way out of this, right? The way the cat speaks, like my skin would be a courtesy rather than a necessity, gives me hope. "At least let me wash off first," I shove syllable-by-syllable through numb lips, gesturing down at myself, still covered in the dust of the wipeout.

The cat eyes me with those full-moon eyes, narrows them up at me. As the sky dims, they begin to glow the suggestion of stars. Strange request, but very well. There's another gust of wind, and the creature is gone in a scatter of fallen leaves.

I'm back on the ground again, where I had been, as though none of it had happened, not that I had moved from my spot at all in the first place. I feel at my pulse, slightly saggy skin on my wrist tugging a little more loosely than I'm comfortable with. Heartrate checked, I lift my gaze to the sunset. The encounter... It already feels like it hadn't been real. It hadn't felt real in the first place.

My fingers slide up to my palm to feel the patch of skin where the cat had, possibly, licked me. Dry, of course, but that wasn't what I had been feeling for. I suppose I should go home now. Go home and get washed up, even. If I don't wash again, ever, will the cat decide never to come back? No, she'd probably take it regardless. Maybe she'd get bored and take someone else's skin instead? Or maybe she'd do that regardless. Why did cats have to be so fickle. Why does my skin have to be so smooth. Why couldn't it be a midnight dog of rustling leaves, then at least I'd better know what to expect.

So I'm back at home now, in the bathroom, washing my hands. I live alone, no-one forcing me to clean myself up like this, but by this point I've managed to convince myself that I'd hit my head in the tumble. Nick Northrup, Nick Northrup is the one who'd sent me into this minor crisis. Stupid Nick Northrup and his stupid old-looking face. I went skateboarding, and I hit my head, and his stupid horror stories inspired me to dream, or hallucinate, or something, one of the stories he'd told.

I do not look into the mirror above the sink, even out of the corner of my eye, though; do not choke out Mother Whispers' name. Made sure that the window was closed before I washed up, that no cat could get in. What was the third one, waterbabies, well that was a lakeside thing, I'm sure a bath would be fine. I force myself to look into the mirror. This was safe. This was safe.

And so I strip down and take a bath and feel better, allow myself to crack open the window to let out the moisture, and as I get dressed again fallen autumn leaves tap on the window behind me, blowing in a windless night, fluttering in through the crack and landing on the sill in a tiny pile which I turn around in time to witness constituting themselves into a cat of midnight black.

I fall to the ground with my pants only halfway on. Another moment in time, panic setting in a lot more rapidly now. Undoing so much goodwill of that bath, waste of lavender.

Thank you for washing up, she says in a suave, cheerful tone. May I have that skin of yours now please? 

"No..." I rasp. There's no way out of this, is there, think, think...

Please, I would like your skin. She grows more agitated now. If you do not surrender your skin I may have to steal it. 

My mind is reeling, entire sentences passing in between heartbeats. I'm-kidding-nobody lubdub what-do-I-have-to-live-for lubdub I'm-a-total-failure-anyway lubdub nobody-will-ever-love-me lubdub by-this-point-all-I-have-to-look-forward-to-is-dying lubdub might-as-well-do-that-in-an-interesting-way lubdub. 

And I give in.

"Sounds good," I say, my voice surprisingly even. "Go ahead and come get it."

She stops writhing, seeming just as amazed as I feel. Thank you. And she hops down from the windowsill, pads towards me- and pokes into the bathroom wastebasket. 

Uh. What?

I can feel the blood in my veins beat through my skull as she rifles around through the tissues and cardboard tubes. She stills as she finds what she's looking for, and she plucks her head in and out, like a heron snatching a fish. Pulling her head up past the rim of the basket, and between her teeth is...

An old scab of mine, which I had peeled off a few weeks back after skinning my knee two months ago in the first recent skateboarding accident. Thisth'll do justh nithely, thang you, nods the cat, hopping back up onto the windowsill and pushing the window more fully open with its forehead.

"Um," I say. "You're welcome."

She looks back at me as though she thinks me expecting something. Ah, bugt of coursth, the cat grumbles, hopping back down and sauntering over to me. I stretch out my hand, which now seems so smooth, so small, and slide my fingers down the fur on the back of the cat's head in a long stroke as she pulls her head up to mine. She lisps a secret into my ear, hops back up on the windowsill, and disappears out the window, in a burst of browning leaves.

Spooky Story 2021

 Okay so every year I post a story and every year I have to go back into the archives to see how I format it with the announcement post the day before- and sometimes I goof on that but I think I'm doing it right this year, post beforehand titled thusly saying "Spooky Story [year]" with a brief introduction, and the next day the post is titled the name of the story and the text thereof, the story. Last year I had no such introduction, but I did write up a bit of a post on November 1st with the intention of backdating it to October 30th... maybe I should actually post that up, it would provide some context for last year's (and this post of this year...)

So I had a couplefew of ideas for what the story would be this year, saving one of them for next year (it would be more appropriate for 2022 than 2021,) and one of them I guess I'll explain in the backdated post I just told you about, this being the part where the context I just talked about would be explained. Hahaha, this is so boring, you don't care. 

So I guess the story tomorrow is going to be called something like, The Cat of the Whispering Leaves. hasn'tbeenfinalizedyetthough

...I haven't posted in ages- I was going to say, on this blog, but really, on anything. Webcomic? Not cancelled, but, it's been, I mean I haven't drawn anything or written anything and even the projects I'm already halfway through I haven't really done much more than poked with a stick before running away. YouTube. Am I doing nanowrimo this year? My job eats so much of my time, but like I actually enjoy it and find it fulfilling, and am good at it even! It was just supposed to be this short temporary thing, for a few weeks or a few months, work on the farm in the meantime before doing crewmember stuff on a filmset once production of that began- but that whole thing was hit by a current events train well before the pandemic struck. 

The Midnight Cat of the Whispering Leaves, that's a little better. At first the villain was just going to be a skeleton or something, but I had a dream this morning where there was, something about, the end of the Doctor Who episode Day of the Moon where Amy's both pregnant and not pregnant, later revealed to be because, her body at the TARDIS is just her actually-pregnant consciousness projected into a not-pregnant Ganger flesh or whatever-- only instead it's of pregnant/not pregnant it's, pile of leaves/a cat. So like, yeah! 

I have not seen a single episode of Doctor Who starring the twelfth or thirteenth doctors. Think the most recent episode I've caught the entirety of is, *sucks teeth,* Nightmare in Silver? I mean I have vague recollections of The Name of the Doctor but was just, so confused, throughout, the entire thing...

Different (Better?) Prelude Page

 

Wasn't satisfied with the wording earlier and hopefully this is better?? I'm still alive, but fun fact, printer and scanner companies are evil and probably have some nefarious purposes behind why their technology is so difficult to use. You have to install a driver! A different one each per new printer/scanner! It's totally possible to just make it plug and play, but they choose the difficult option!

Cap'n Patches! April 29 2021

 

Some of this came out well! 

Not sure it's at the point where I'd be impressed enough to consider my own thing worth reading yet, heh, but it feels good to be creating, and finishing something as opposed to not finishing it. Still trying to figure out workflow (ideally I figured I'd draw the artwork out physically, scan, and color from there, but this is just coloring with the drawing also in the computer, isn't that interesting;) maybe I'll have something by next week, maybe not. But gee I hopse-oh. 

Cap'n Patches April 22 2021: Prelude time!

 This is my third attempt at this gif, the content being the same but the word that fades in having been switched up. At first it was Preface, again, which we'd already seen like three times, and so figure, we're out of that by now with this, this should be different! 

So then I changed it to Prologue, and was going with that for a while... I was debating whether the Act I prologue and the Act 0 prelude should be the same thing... but hey good news, I got a few Eldritch Horror expansions today in the mail, and I'd decided to order them really mostly because I love the Prelude cards introduced in the expansions, and hey I respect Michael Reviewcorner's opinions but he's wrong on this one,  prelude cards rock, and did somebody say Prelude hey that's enough of a sign for me!

Besides there's already a prologue coming up, different from the Preface and the Prelude, (guess I'm gonna have to figure out what's in it now but that's fine, I've got a few ideas) but it's different anyway, and you know what I think I'll do that thing I was talking about and release more than one page today.

Patches: Next Gif

 

I title this post thus, just "nex gif," because I'm not at this point sure if I really am going for the each-page-is-the-next-week's approach, but three-fourths of the gifs into it I guess I probably am. Which is actually fine! Not as impressive in the archive, when we come to hosting this on its own site, but heck it's just the archive..

Pretty pleased with how this came out! It's something I've been thinking about, that these aren't as good as they could possibly be, but about as good as I can make them with my current skillset; maybe I'll get better ever or maybe not... but these look real swanky actually, reviewing them with freshened eyes.

Cap'n Patches: April 1st and 8th

 

Instead of one gargantuan gif I'm chunking it out into four smaller ones! Transitioning from one tableau to another, which gives you time to actually stop and study them, which is also much better (the single-gif file would have had to be even more enormous had I timed it out with the lingering tableaux like I'd wanted.) I've got all four gifs already constructed, and kinda want to post them all now and get on with the story, but doing it one at a time gives me more time to work on what comes next (which is not in gif format.) I'll be forced into deeper water soon enough; this gives me comfortable lead time and makes me feel like I'm on top of the ball. Meanwhile I guess I should also be looking for a way to host these on their own dedicated site...

I think there'll be gifs again, perhaps every time April 1st happens to fall on a Thursday. As ambitious as this one? More ambitious? Maybe even a fully animated video file instead...? we'll see i guess.

the gif for real tho??

 

exported this time at LOWEST MAXIMUM QUALITY POSSIBLE like seriously IT SHOULDN'T BE MATHEMATICALLY POSSIBLE but we DID IT ANYWAY. Let's see if it's even gonna work cos it still took a heckuh long time to upload hmm.

I hope it doesn't actually, because I've got a better idea...