Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – The feeling of anticipation that leads you to keep looking outside to see if anyone is coming. (This definition is questionable – I could only find it in lists of untranslateable words)
One of Magpie’s and Wild Streak’s get-togethers, but he’s running late, as usual, but apparently not for the usual reasons
CW: mentions of parental abuse (literally, it’s just mentioned that Daisy was abused), mentions dangerous driving and police, implied relationship with significant age difference (they aren’t dating at this point, but Daisy is in high school and everyone else is far beyond that)
Rating: G
Magpie put down the lock and her tools. Dammit, she didn’t expert Wild Streak to be on time, but this was getting ridiculous. They didn’t get together that often, and usually at Wild Streak’s place. This time, he’d said – and it was obvious he was being prompted by Charles, the sweetie – that he didn’t want to disturb Daisy while she was doing homework. She’d thought she’d had him figured out years ago, but turned out he still had surprises. No idea who Daisy was, but it was the first time she’d heard that sort of affection from him.
She turned up the police radio. She hadn’t heard anything, but nothing else was as in character for him as catching the attention of some cop. He’d get away, probably, and have a good time doing it. Of course, that’d only be if Wild Streak was driving and his boys had stopped that ages ago. Andre was smart enough to keep the cops from noticing them.
A knock on the door. Finally!
Wild Streak strode in, the mannerless oaf, carrying his kit like it was weightless. She grinned. “What took you so long?”
His smile faded. “Oh. Uh. Daisy was upset.”
Andre prompted from a step behind him. “She doesn’t know who Daisy is yet.” He waved and held up a big cookie tin. “Hi Magpie. Charles sent snickerdoodles.”
“There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
“Got it.” Andre headed that way.
Wild Streak set his bag next to the couch and flopped down. “Somebody was teasing Daisy. At school,” he started, pulling out his lockpicks.
She rolled her eyes. “Backtrack a bit there. Why do you have a school age kid at your hide-out?”
“Her dad abused her,” he said with a shrug.
“Since when do you care?”
Another, more eloquent shrug. “Since it was her.”
Andre returned with a tray with cookies and drinks for all of them. “We don’t get it either, but he adores her and she’s a peach.”
“Okay then, how’d you meet her?” And his face lit up, like she’d only ever seen when he was bragging, and he started his tale.
CW – mentions of ableism towards amputees, mentions of war and injuries from it, abusive personality (it’s Wild Streak…). Word count: 569, rated G
Andre ruminates on Wild Streak’s one friend.
The boss doesn’t have a lot of friends. It’s his own fault, you know – he’s self-centered, impulsive, and quick-tempered. Me and Charles are the only help he’s been able to keep, and honestly some days I don’t know why we stay. Daisy adores him, of course, but he’ll do anything for her. Everyone else in the community? They respect him, fear him, admire him, but don’t like him.
Except Magpie. I don’t know when they met – she’s about me and Charles’ age, younger than Wild Streak. But she can make her smart-ass remarks to him and he’ll smile. I mean, she’s careful, but not terribly so, not walking on eggshells careful the way people like Gimmick are, or the super-respectful way the way gang leaders are when they hire him. And he looks forward to spending time with her. We don’t need to remind him about their get-togethers, mostly, or gather up his stuff for him. And she trusts him – I’ve talk to other goons and nobody else knows that she lives in a big penthouse or that she’s loaded.
Maybe it’s that the boss doesn’t care. He doesn’t even glance at her swanky place or expensive decor. And she’s nice when she comes over – our place is alright, but it’s got scars from Wild Streak’s tantrums and most of our stuff is second or third hand. Charles and I do our best to keep it nice, but we don’t bother with a bunch of decorations that are just gonna get broke.
He doesn’t care about her legs either. She’s too young to have been in the War, but she’s missing both legs. Missing parts and other problems are common enough, but there’s always the people that tend to still treat disabled people a little different. The boss doesn’t care. And she’s never said anything about his eye or skin. He doesn’t try to scare or creep her out either, doesn’t do his usual power plays.
The only thing Magpie and Wild Streak care about is locks – everything from tiny little padlocks to great big safes. Picking them, hacking them, exploits, work arounds, and, if necessary, breaking them. And they’ll compete with each other – and if you know Wild Streak, you know he hates losing. But with Magpie, he’ll just laugh and have her show her or make another bet or whatever. They trade stories, without the type of oneupmanship you see with big shots. He’s even given her things – he’ll make his own picks or turning tools and it’s one of the few times he’ll sit still and work hard on something. About the only other time is when he’s taking care of his clothes. And if he makes something new, he’ll give her one to try out. She does the same, but she seems to buy a lot more of hers.
They sit and race to get through a pile of locks or one of them will have something that just came out or that is rare or especially hard to get open. The boss can practically whisper at one to get it open some days and other days struggle with it for half an hour, but Magpie is consistent. Fast, with those nimble strong fingers of hers.
I don’t know how they met or if there’s anything to their relationship but locks, but damn I’m glad the boss has a friend.
I’ve changed Wild Rush and Deuce of Heart’s names again. Wild Rush is now Wild Streak and besides the grey skin he’s also got a black scar across his face and one eye that’s completely black. Deuce is now Wild Heart (her real name is still Daisy Hart).
I’m working on getting characters designed in Daz3d so I can do pin-ups on Patreon (starting at just $1 a month!). I have Charles and Andre nearly done (I need to do scars), Swordcat almost done (I have to finish his textures), Magpie almost done (I need to do the designs painted on her prosthetic legs), and Mick almost done (I need to do some fixes in Blender and his tattoos).
So here’s some of that art. If you want to see them more often or with less clothes, subscribe to the patreon!
WIP of Daisy / Wild Heart and Wild Streak (I’ve made his hair darker since then)Different angle so you can see Daisy’s mask better because I spent SO MUCH time on it. (I don’t know Blender very well yet). And her gold eyes.Magpie. I’m not entirely happy with her design but I don’t know what I don’t like. I need to do the art for her shins.This is Mick Adler, one of the founders of Future-Tech, the company Delia works at. He’s the reason Future-Tech exists – he invented an amazing battery that replaced gasoline engines in cars, among other things. The parrot is Darla who he spoils rotten. Mick is Latinx with black, white, and indigenous heritage.
Note: Swordcat is another sorta-multiple character in the Shard-verse. The body really is Leon Smith’s, but it was transformed when he picked up the sword, which has a personality that lives in his head and sometimes steers the body around, because swords don’t have hands. Stomlin Ward keeps the sword in the freezers because then Leon can be a calm, somewhat dim, cat. (Relevant vignette/post)
I’m incredibly proud that I managed to get this down to a perfect drabble. CN for implied genocide of humanity and of an alien race, freezing, burning, specieism
Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.
Leon dreamt of memories not his own.
Leon wasn’t like its lords before (how long ago? how- its thoughts skittered and it shuddered in the ice). Leon was grey compared to the lords’ passion. That didn’t matter. Glory would be restored, shining cities and green forests. It would be carried again by lords with thundering voices and soft wise words and dazzling eyes matching its own. And then no more coldness, no more loneliness, no more wrong-smelling air – flat, oily like enemies of old – no more furless parodies of people.
CN: mention of hunting / implied animal death. As always if I miss something, please let me know so I can add it.
Word count: 405, Rating: G. Crossposted to the Rainbowfic community on Dreamwidth
Ostanes and Iosis are from the novel that I have some rough draft chapters up for (you can find them in the Story Index). Basically all you need it know is that Ostanes split himself into two people using alchemy so he could do his great work. Basically, they’re multiple and headmates, but in-story they wouldn’t fit the definition. Ostanes can’t use Iosis’ name and tends to refer them as one person most of the time.
Did you know I have a Patreon? With exactly one patron at the time of writing? I do! And I’d like some more patrons, so I’ve updated the tiers, including TWO tiers for smut. Well, not too smutty, because Patreon won’t let me, but pin-ups of fictional people! Yay!
Work in progress on Charles Woodbury
The non-smutty tiers (named after some of my favorite species of cats, aside from the conlanger tier) will let you see work-in-progress images, read my thoughts about what I’m working on, and vote on what I post next. Higher level tiers get a monthly sketch or even custom art or writing!
One of the ways Ursula Vernon deals with trolls on twitter is telling stories about her (fictional) Uncle Sven. (so far as I know these aren’t collected anywhere, which is a shame). I decided to follow her example, and this is the story that resulted.
While I used some bits of my actual family as very vague inspiration, everyone and everything in this story is fictional and probably wildly inaccurate to the supposed time period, whatever that is.
(CW: references to period racism – in that I say it exists and that people would use words that decent people don’t use these days, poverty, malnutrition, drunkenness, references to pre-antibiotics tuberculosis, illiteracy, corporal punishment at school)
I actually finished it! 31 plus new words in my various conlangs. Here’s the list:
Tynthna: dzashka /dzaʃ.ka/ – blue, light blue, sky blue
Tynthna: tsaatromii /tsao.tɾo.miː/ – dress, tunic, clothing, the basic piece of clothing. The traditional clothing which is wrapped around the body and tied with a belt. From tromiiv ‘to wear’ and tsaa ‘thing, item’
This is written for someone with a basic knowledge of Illustrator. You should also be able to adapt it for other software. This post won’t tell you how to design a script (basically, doodle a bunch of things until you get stuff you like. Make sure parts of the glyphs line up consistently). I’m using letter and glyph interchangeably here.
You have my permission to save, archive, alter, and remix this post, so long as you include credit (Silvercat) and the original URL.
To start with, create a new document in Illustrator with a nice large canvas. Turn on the grid. It doesn’t particularly matter what size the grid is, but 8 subdivisions work well for lining things up. I have the grid at 72px, which means each letter will be an inch tall if printed.
Draw your glyphs as lines, keeping a consistent grid system, glyph widths, ascender and descender height, etc. Your grid can be very complex! Multiple ascender and descender heights, sub-grids, etc are not unusual for a writing system. Just make sure you’ve got a system. Use guides and refer to your other letters often.
A wider stroke will make it look more like type – I was using 7 point. You’ll probably have to make adjustments later in any case, so don’t worry overly much about getting it perfect.
Re-use parts of letters where you can, like dots, curves, and angles. It doesn’t matter how many pieces a letter is made up of. I like drawing circles and cutting them to pieces as appropriate to get a good curve, but that probably won’t work for all conscripts.
That last letter probably needs some adjustment.
See how the curve of the first one and the last one line up? And the midline of the two middle ones? It’s the same dot in the first two. The three narrow letters are five boxes wide, while the larger one is eight. Depending on your glyphs that could vary a lot or not at all. Latin letters vary widely, from ‘i’ to ‘m’.
At this point, you could stop – it’ll be an acceptable set of characters, but letter nerds will notice some issues. You can fudge some of these with a round cap on the stroke.
The problem is that the strokes end in whatever direction they’re facing. Whether done as calligraphy or as a font, letters end in a deliberate way. Compare the leg on the first glyph and the curve on the second with similar Latin letters, like below. In both cases, they end horizontally. You’re not limited to horizontal or vertical, but make a decision about it.
How do you fix it? Easy.
Outline the stroke (Object > Path > Outline stroke) then cut away the offending bits with a rectangle and Minus Front in the Pathfinder palette. If you want to be super-accurate (and you should), turn on ‘snap to grid’ (Shift+CTRL+” or View>Snap to Grid) and reposition your shapes to perfectly align to the grid. You’ll likely have to use a combination of selecting shapes with the Selection tool and selecting segments with the Direct Selection Tool. A couple of bumps with the arrow keys and you’ll be spot on.
For angles, like the leg on the first letter, before you outline, you’ll want to reposition it so it stays in your grid (unless you deem that acceptable). And you’ll want to make sure there’s enough extra on any stroke that you can cut it cleanly. This can mean redoing your curves, so think ahead.
Two options for each
How about if you want something fancier? This is where it gets fun.
Go back to your letters that are made of just lines. Open a calligraphic brush library or make a new brush. For something similar to Latin letters, use the settings below.
Apply that to your lines, with a 1pt stroke. You’ll get something like below, with thick verticals and thin horizontals. (You can decide whether you want to apply it to dots or not, or to use a narrower stroker) But now you have a lot of adjusting to do to get it gridded.
You could actually just fix it and then leave it like that. Mess around with different calligraphic brushes to see different effects. You could also do like above to get sans-serif glyphs with variable line weight.
Or you can make a fancy serif version. Note: this is the quick and easy way. You can get fancier with curved serifs. Take a look at different font faces for ideas.
We’re making a slab serif font here.
The first step is to make nice clean angles for the serifs to hang off from. Extend your lines so that the round ends will get cut off, outline the stroke, then go to town with Minus Front. Get everything arranged on the grid nicely. It can be easier to outline each line at a time so you can make adjustments to angles and lengths as the other lines get set into place.
Nice and clean
Now make a little rectangle where you want a serif to be. The exact size is up to you. I did one square wide and half a square tall. You can use those just like that for serifs, but I want to get a little fancier. Select one corner and bump it up a point or two. Now copy, rotate, and reflect your way around the letter. (It’s easiest if you copy the serifs to a space below so you can just grab them without going back to a previous glyph).
For thinner strokes, you want thinner serifs – for the wide strokes I put the serif halfway into the stroke and for the thin, the back of the serif shape touches the opposite side of the stroke. It helps to turn on Smart Guides so you can get the exact middle on the exact line segment you want. You can use a serif font as a guide, but in the end where you put serifs and where you don’t is up to you.
Fancy
Now do all the rest of your letters and try not to curse past-you for deciding the writing system should have so many glyphs. Could be worse – you could be carving the whole thing into stone.
It’s been one of my most popular designs and now it’s better than ever!
It was inspired by a tweet by Ursula Vernon and now it’s got a cool background on many products and more stuff, including masks, aprons, and puzzles (and more) Get this design and many more here: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/40084254
I’ve got a new design up on Argent Whiskers, with more to come. It’s a cool design inspired by the carpets of free time spent in arcades, bowling alleys, theaters, and skating rinks. Get it on everything from masks to socks and be covered head to toe in 80s awesomeness.
I’ve already said that I was creating Maanxmusht to borrow words into Nyjichun, but I was actually making two conlangs. The other is Tsako, which is vaguely Finnish inspired, at least for the phonology.
Tsako and Maanxmusht are what’s called “naming languages” – conlangs with just enough vocabulary and grammar to create names. Tsako has less than 250 words – some of those created just to show how to use the couple of derivational prefixes that I’ve invented.
Tsako has paucal and plural, phonotactics that strictly limit what can appear where while still being CVC, and vowel harmony. I really like how the plurals turn out.
You can see all of it on my Neocities site. Here are some words I especially like:
nimerøl – to bake, which forms ɯtinimerø, a baker
iirikogyl – to barter
mørmøkottɑæd – ceramic, βottɑæd – clay (β changes to k medially), ætekottɑæd – potter
ʦøpɣø – blanket, paucal – ʦøpɣɑt, plural – ʦøpɔkkɔ, which changes to tsepe in early Nyji
to give – ɑɑreel, charity – ɑɑree
salt – øʣ
to shine – peippel
I could pick a dozen more, but how about I stop there.
I’m going to talk about how I use Calibre to organize all my files for tabletop rpgs. If you don’t know, Calibre is a program for organizing ebooks that’s available for PC, Mac, Linux, and even as a portable version. I’m not going to go through everything you can do in it, because it has good documentation and a helpful forum.
It’s great because you can have multiple libraries (I have books, comics, sewing & embroidery patterns, papercraft – those two could be another post – and games). And in each library you can have “virtual libraries” to divide them further, along with saved searches, tagging, and the expected metadata. For my games, I pretty much just use the tags and metadata.
Calibre main menu
I keep my ttrpgs on an external drive so I can work with them from both my laptop and desktop. This works perfectly with Calibre as long as the drive has the same drive letter on all computers. I currently have about 600 files in Calibre with a couple hundred more that I need to go through before putting in there. (There is so much free content out there, folks)
side menu in Calibre, showing Authors, series, formats, Publisher, tags, and saved searches)
My content is split into games (tagged ttrpg, physical game, or system for stuff like Fate or Dungeons and Dragons which has a ton of supplementary content), adventures (mostly dungeons because I love dungeon crawls), and resources (monsters and creatures, tables to randomly pick from, gm-ing tips, and other behind the scene stuff).
Everything gets tagged with where I got it (usually itch.io or drivethrurpg) and a genre if possible. For adventures and resources I just have to tag what it is (dungeon crawl, monsters, NPCs, fantasy, horror, etc) and what system or game it was made for. Games are the easiest to tag, but also get the most tags. Here’s an example:
Dragonhearts cover with the Author and tags.
For games I tag:
genre
Game Jam or similar – like the Bundle for Racial Justice & Equality (2020)
what the gm situation if it’s not the standard gming (gm-optional, gmless, rotating gm)
number of players if it tells me or I can guess (solo, 2 players, etc)
equipment needed (diceless, d6, tokens, index cards, card deck, loads of dice, etc)
themes (collaborative, storytelling, empathy, humor, communication). This is the hardest to tag
info like minimalist, one-page, two-page, supplement, hack, etc
stuff that’s in it like goblins, dragons, crows, rodents, etc. (A game where I can play as a rat is a must-buy)
I also tag stuff as played once I’ve played it, because I have so much that I want to get to.
I only put the main file in Calibre and note in the description that there are multiple files. Character sheets, alternate formats, handouts, gm helpers, and other miscellaneous stuff goes in a folder. Alternative playbooks for things like PbtA games or Troika! get added to Calibre.
I don’t have to have very many folders. Currently I have 40.
Example of some of the folders – side bar shows separate folders for solo games, adventures, and resources, and then folders for specific games. Main area shows the files for Fate Core, including different formats, tutorials, and character sheets.
Aside from that, I get the description from wherever I got the files, add the authors and publisher (often the same name), and a cover if it doesn’t have one. If I’m really good, I mark the date it was published so I know what version I have (sometimes I put the version number in the description too.) I get that from more information drop-down box on itch.io (you may have to hover over the updated section to get the date instead of the number of days ago) or on drivethrurpg, in the right hand side product menu bar.
Here’s a good example of one that’s done (also, an excellent game and I recommend joining its Discord for more resources)
Mausritter with the author, tags, format, publisher, published date, and description shown. This one I actually did make sure the date was correct.
You can see:
this was by Isaac Williams, aka Losing Games.
It takes 3 to 6 players.
It’s fantasy, with mice.
I got it in the Bundle for Racial Justice & Equality on itch.io (although I believe it’s also on drivethrurpg)
It’s an osr (old school renaissance) and SwordDream game.
I’ve played it.
Since it wasn’t tagged otherwise, it needs a gm.
… I didn’t mark the equipment – it basically needs a standard set of 7 rpg dice
It was update in Jun 2020
All in all, it’s pretty easy except for the loads of files I need to do. (I still have 65 folders of stuff to do just from the Bundle for Racial Justice.) Let me know if you have any questions or if you want to see more examples. Also, if you find this helpful, consider buying me a ko-fi
There are no written instructions and the photo instructions aren’t complete. I also made some alterations. I added the stone details in the top floor windows and in the tall turret I added the inside walls and roof (all of these were cut from pages that didn’t print correctly the first time). Also, the clear acetate and the crenelations on the roof were apparently supposed to just be glued on, but I added tabs and slits for them instead and they ended up needing no glue.
I disagree with some of the designer’s decisions, especially the grey buildings on the top which were an absolute bear to build. I may redesign it to make my own version, but if I do it won’t be anytime soon.
It’s simply printed on cardstock and is designed to be sturdy for the most part. I added reinforcement with scotch tape along the ramps and I expect it’ll last pretty well. I’m not going to use metal dice with it, but I don’t think I would put metal dice through any dice tower.
I’ve made a video of it in action and it sounds quite nice:
