My niece wanted to go ride bikes with her friend (I guess she's allowed to hang out with people her own age sometimes), so my sister and I decided to keep playing with my sister's cat in tow.

It wasn't quite the same.

 

I'm very pleased to announce that the audiobook edition of Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand is now available on Audible! David Ault worked so hard on this audiobook and I think it turned out spectacularly. If audiobooks are your thing, please give it a listen!

 Sometimes it's like she doesn't even want Link to save Hyrule. (I guarantee you that if someone were to say something like 'my headcanon is that she's secretly evil', my niece will absolutely take that and run with it.)

This really happened, and this is why you can't leave her with the controller unattended.

retrograde

 On occasion I write poetry!

I'm fascinated by the fact that just because our Solar System looks a certain way right now, doesn't mean things were the same all throughout its history. It's also amazing how in the past few decades of space science, researchers have noticed peculiar little incongruities about our planetary neighborhood, and from them have begun to tease out pieces of an incredible story--tales of wild planetary migrations, moon systems built from the rubble of an earlier satellite catastrophe, and episodes of intense bolide bombardment. It makes our present-day Solar System seem completely tame in comparison. I'm excited to see what other stories we can uncover as we learn more about our little spot of space.

Neptune's moon Triton is a definite oddball in its system. It's the largest Neptunian moon by far, looks completely unlike the others, and has a really unusual retrograde orbit. From this and other bits of evidence, most scientists have reached the consensus that Triton is probably a Kuiper Belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune when that planet moved outward during aforementioned planetary migration episode. However, in order for this to work, Triton would have had to have originally been part of a binary system, and the capturing interaction would have to involve its companion being flung away to who-knows-where. 

It's a rather poignant story when you think about it--somewhere out there is a missing twin, wandering the void alone after an unfortunate encounter with a big blue bully. Is there any way to figure out if a given object is Triton's missing companion? Makes you wonder if we'll ever happen upon it someday.

If we do, we should tell Triton.

 I wasn't feeling all that great today and decided to phone it in as far as art stuff.

I'm not really good at phoning it in.

This maybe isn't something you want constantly in your ear while trying to navigate a puzzle full of live currents and killer robots. But she persisted nevertheless.

 The last of the traditional media pieces (that I feel are worth sharing, anyway). I sort of randomly made up this character design for the Star Wars universe, but never did anything with her.

All this old art has given me a hankering for doing stuff with marker again. I'd love to get some Copics and go camp out at my local museum and just doodle colorful dinos all day. Sounds like a dream.

 Random creature design; the idea was that these blind beings float on the wind and absorb airborne nutrients through the gill-tendrils on the underside of their heads. I like its little rodent paws. Purple and red brush pen with colored pencil.

 She's at it again! Link's sassy little companion has been pretty busy with school (and playing through Echoes of Wisdom), but we finally managed to get some play time in. We might go challenge Ganon soon... but rest assured she'll be back to join Link on his Tears of the Kingdom adventures at some point.

This actually happened. It was great.

 More watercolor! I really love working with watercolor, but it does require a certain amount of work space that I just don't have right now. Maybe someday I'll get a dedicated art desk and then I can do more with traditional media. For now, though, I'm really uneasy with the idea of trying to fit open water on the same desk as all my electronics.

This character design was inspired by the cat-people in Escaflowne, a fantasy anime that I remember aired for a brief period on Fox Kids once upon a time (this really dates me). Later I learned that it was really a heavily-edited version of the series Vision of Escaflowne, which was decidedly not a kids' show. Lesson to dubbing company producers: if you're bringing an anime over to the English market with the intention to present it to kids, it would help if the title in question was aimed at children to begin with.

I also based this design after one of my previous cats, a lovely tortoiseshell. She was a sweet girl.

(Looking at this piece now, it's nice and all, but I seem to have had no concept of the idea of line weight. Those thin lines are really getting lost beneath the bold watercolor. I'd love to do something with brush pen and watercolor one of these days.)

 Sometimes I dabble in watercolor!

This was a design I concocted in college for a tabletop roleplaying campaign where my character was an eccentric mechanist in a world with Renaissance-level technology--kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, but female and questionably sane. It's always a great day when your character's skillset allows them to build their own combat vehicles with a few good dice rolls. (She ultimately ended up building her own airship, so that was fun.)

As an aside, I like the idea of tabletop roleplaying, but I haven't participated in any of it for a while because I had some bad experiences with groups who were unpleasant and unfriendly. I think if I were to do any more roleplaying, it would have to be with family and/or close, trusted friends.*

*I actually wrote a Neopets fanfic about this issue that I never bothered submitting to the Neopian Times. I'll get around to posting it on this blog eventually and ranting more about the importance of being a decent human being during highly social games that have to do a great deal with both group synergy and treating every player with respect and kindness.

Video game ramblings: cancellations, consoles, and how to make a bad mobile RPG

 Is this blog turning into less of an original artistic content blog and more of a ranty gaming blog? Perhaps the question I should really be asking myself is, does anybody actually care either way?

With some recent occurrences in video gamery, and just overall thinking about things in my spare time, I've come up with another batch of items to discuss and no better place to put them. Read on if you're bored enough.

 Another old piece. This was a panther martial artist character I semi-randomly made up and never did anything with. Back in junior high/high school/college, I often used to make up characters and vague storylines behind them, but not really do anything with them besides draw them a lot. I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do with characters; I guess it's just struck me looking back, how many characters I used to make up who never went anywhere, when nowadays I generally only create characters that are going in a written piece.

At any rate, I still like her design.

 More old art. I love working with markers. Brush pen and marker is seriously one of my favorite media combinations.

This creature design stemmed from a frankly bizarre story idea I concocted in high school, about a motley group of humans and aliens living on a derelict deep-space station. The main character was a preteen boy whose ancestor on the station had stumbled upon a sinister entity from another dimension who had emerged in the depths of the station, but no one believed him and his family became regarded as a joke through the generations. There was also a mysterious and brooding young man who was secretly the lost prince of a planet that had experienced a civil war some years past, and a moody teenage girl with an alien stepdad whose biomech she regularly "borrowed" for space escapades. 

(It's okay, you can laugh.)

The biomechs in the story were very odd creatures that were organically grown in laboratories and had armor plating and control systems implanted into their bodies. They were sapient and capable of communicating with their pilots.

I never really went anywhere with the story; I think I was trying to be cool and come up with some conceptually super deep sci-fi, but, well, I was 14. 

(I executed this piece much later. My art definitely did not look like that in high school.)

The other day I was feeling bored enough to do some vanity Googling, and to my surprise, Google's AI actually came up with an overview for my Neopian Times work. I'm a little shocked because nobody actually seems to care that much about it, but perhaps it has more to do with the fact that I was fairly prolific back in the day, and my username showed up frequently across many issues of the NT in a certain time frame.

(Although, this is the first I've heard of being "well-known" within the community. One of the reasons why I stopped writing for the Times was because my work was getting ignored, and I honestly haven't interacted with the player community in ages. Apparently AI thinks that prolificity = renown, so it needs a reality check.)

 As much as I eternally loathe generative AI, I concede that sometimes it is good for a laugh. I have no idea why the AI picked those four particular pieces to detail, instead of, say, one of my epically long series. The bottom two are super old and janky contributions from when I was in high school, and every time I see them I just sort of wince. 

Okay, actually that "Fifty Reasons" article is pretty decently funny by high-school-me standards. It was basically me poking fun at how, for two consecutive plots, players could choose to fight on the side of the good guys (Isca, Hannah, et al) or the bad guys (gangs of pirates and thieves, respectively), and so many people inexplicably went the "evil is cool" route instead of seeing the logic in trying to keep Neopia safe. This article was trying to point out, in a tongue-in-cheek passive-aggressive manner, that both thieves and pirates are pretty gross when you stop to think about it.

"The Ensorcellator" is a tepid little short story from when I was going through a writerly phase where I had just plain run out of ideas, and decided my inspiration process would basically be "pick random stuff and make stuff up about it". Yeah. I'm glad I grew out of that phase and moved on to "let's wait until I actually get an idea for a story".

The AI summaries are also a little off. "On Developing Your Neopet's Character" is actually an op-ed that discusses various ways one might go about giving one's Neopet a personality and biography, with examples of how I formulated my own Neopets' characters. And that's a pretty generic description of "Ylana Skyfire: Protector of Spring", which is actually more about Ylana and a clingy fanfic-writing geek (who is totally me making fun of myself) searching for a missing Illusen. (I actually do recommend this one, as it's more recent and I had great fun writing it. Maybe I'll put it on this blog at some point.)

As an opinionated aside, I'm still not a fan of the directions Neopets is heading under its current management and I have no desire to start playing the website again. I much preferred the Adam-and-Donna and Viacom days, when Neopets was more "we're marketing this franchise to kids but we know plenty of adults play too" and not "Hey Gen-Z's! Let's make your childhood on-trend!". Way to alienate everybody else, guys. Thanks.

 Another old piece; I was just playing around with character design. I'm aware the proportions are really funky; I actually went in and tried to fix them a bit in Corel but they still look off. Still, I'm fond of this illustration because I think it nicely evokes the feel of adventuring through a fantasy world.

 Another old traditional piece. This is a life reconstruction of an ammonoid (possibly Parapuzosia seppenradensis) looking very hypothetically like a modern nautilus. Usually ammonoids are reconstructed with more octopus-like soft tissue, but from what I understand, so little ammonoid soft tissue has been found, it's still really up in the air what they looked like aside from their shells. I just like the idea of a 2-meter nautilus cruising along the oceans of the Cretaceous. I imagine you could probably hitch a ride on its shell and it wouldn't even notice.

Executed in brush pen and Prismacolor marker, with some white acrylic paint for accents. I love the look and feel of Prisma markers, but their two major downsides are that a) they are expensive and b) they're noxiously smelly so you have to use them in a well-ventilated area. That's why I haven't done much with them lately. If I had the budget, I would invest in some Copic markers, which last time I checked are hands-down the best art marker in the universe (and don't smell), but they're also on the pricey side. I guess that's probably why I do more digital work these days; traditional art is fun but the materials are so costly. /artist rant

 Recently I remembered that I actually have a bunch of old traditional (i.e. non-digital) artwork lying around (i.e. neatly tucked away in a portfolio), and I thought it would be fun to post it here.

Here's a little standee of Blynn that I crafted for a Neopets contest some years ago. It didn't win (apparently most people don't share my cauliflower obsession), but I had fun regardless.