This is what it's like in the U. S. of A., folks

In America, people eat hot snow slushies graciously given to them by the relief effort. Don't ask me how hot yet still crunchy snow is even possible. It just is, because that's what the glorious leader says. He also says it's perfectly explainable for people to be driving around in cars as though they are affluent and be desperately poor at the same time. Americans sure are a tenacious lot, aren't they?

Hexart colour chart

Yesterday I stayed up way too late (way too early, you could even say) making this silly hexart spectrum picture. But I like it. And I guess that counts for more than the number of hours I should or shouldn't have stayed up on a random day.

These eighteen extremely special hexarts each embody one of the eighteen Destiny Attributes in Stablehand. Each one has a specific colour or grey shade, resides in a specific place somehow connected to its respective attribute, and displays a form somewhat similar to that of its attribute's respective symbolic animal (though more so for the Directed-attribute hexarts than the Undirected-attribute hexarts). The Undirected hexarts also have arbitrary accent colours and/or auras that relate to their name/story/personality.

You've already seen Red, Azzuro, and Quietus. Achroma, Sphene, Savannah, Patriarch, and Tobiano are probably next up, as I've already partially designed them. Shadow and Celeste are also probably coming soon since I feel like their designs are going to be very interesting, though I don't know whether I'll be able to make them as interesting as what's in my head as soon as the former five (though the same might turn out to be true for Partriach too). Oh, and I actually tried to design/draw some of the main characters once recently, but got a bit sidetracked, possibly because of all these hexarts. :p

To make a long story short, there are a lot of awesome hexarts coming in the near future.

Bad Translator describes itself

Today as I was returning to my "nonsense dream team" for more inspiration for Stablehand, I stumbled across an odd little quote that seems to describe the process, particularly Bad Translator, perfectly.

My favorite tool, the inventor of the word spirit? It can encrypt, a kind of Story. Flowers and vegetables for human consumption. Why not use it? I think?

Four good reasons why protecting the public domain is important

Number one:

Subterranean unicorns. The Swiss scientist responsible for the piece this illustration went with suggested not only that mountain springs connected with some kind of underground river system from which they got their minerals, but also (probably not too seriously) that there might be dragons and unicorns living there. Reasonable, right? If you can't find good evidence of them living anywhere above ground, then clearly they must be hiding underground if anywhere. And of course, doesn't it nicely explain why dragons are so often found in caves even in spite of their elusiveness above ground?

The only problem is that I have no idea what a subterranean unicorn would eat, given that it would be too deep for most plants and algae with the exception of maybe some really long plant roots. Worms...? Fungi...? I'm not really sure how far down soil bacteria and microscopic protists go, though it's kind of funny to imagine an underground unicorn taking up huge mouthfuls of dirt indiscriminately to try and extract them.

Going back to dragons, just look at this other illustration:

A reasonable reaction, if to not as reasonable a threat.

Number two:

Pterobats. They were supposed to be pterosaurs, but the artist didn't know that, and thought they were some kind of weird flying batrat. It amuses me that the silhouettes in the background conform fairly well to real pterosaur skeletons but then the ones in the foreground have to have more reasonably mammal-looking faces.

Number three:

Colourful and bizarre bestiaries. Among these you'll find some beautiful renderings of familiar fantasy animals, as well as some... less familiar things like the vegetable lamb. Seriously, go read about the vegetable lamb... it's kind of surreal.

Number four:

The "19th-century engraving style". This is a bit more pedestrian than the other three, but in my opinion, it deserves a mention of its own just because it's so distinctive. Ever notice that odd half-flat, half-three-dimensional look of old engravings with immense detail but all too often just stopping short of feeling entirely real and believable? Especially combined with an uncoloured background (which was not uncommon since many of these had to be coloured manually), it can have a strangely distant and empty quality to it. Personally I think it's really interesting.

Whenever I see anything like this, it always amazes me that it possibly could have been forgotten by the general public and pop culture—really, why did I never hear of the vegetable lamb until recently? How does stuff that weird ever manage to slip away?—and at the same time makes me really thankful somebody went to the trouble of saving it. What got me thinking especially about this lately was the idea of modern (or somewhat modern) books, games, whatever that get abandoned by the creator or copyright holder and then seem to just vanish, almost like a modern equivalent. However, still shielded by copyright, they don't even necessarily have the benefit of people trying to preserve them or spread the word given the risk that depending on the method of promotion, someone might get angry! Communities still re-emerge around them sometimes, but may still be scolded by others should they take "questionable" measures just to try to keep the work alive and to circumvent difficulties such as hardware failure that were not an intended feature of the product. (Well, usually.)

I'm wondering, informally, if super-long copyright terms (possibly growing even longer) and a general fearful climate are going to result in more interesting, unusual things being "forgotten" to general culture. But I can't predict the future or change much of anything. What I can do, though, is give you more examples from the past of things I'm glad were not actually lost.

In English, that means that whenever I can find the time to do it, I'm going to be periodically posting what I think to be some of the best of the public domain. I don't know if that will actually solve anything or get anybody else to understand my strange worries, but maybe something good will come out of it.

Maybe.

Yesterday I made a few small edits to my template which I think will result in faster page loads, as well as some small aesthetic changes (including writing a short script that makes the labels list into something a little more comprehensible).

By the way, I'm testing out a little something else having to do with my blog code on this post, so if weird things happen to it, that's why.

(Edit: well, that worked okay, but I think I'll try something else.)

Stablehand: Azzuro

Another hexart! This is Azzuro, who represents the Synthesis attribute. He's a highly curious and meddlesome individual—the kind of creature that you really wouldn't want to knowingly leave a stray backpack or picnic basket around.

As the Synthesis attribute has to do with combination among other things, I tried to make his design a bit eclectic, with features of blue jays, pterosaurs, swallows, theropods (deinonychosaurs and Carnotaurus specifically), and of course hexarts, though I don't know if it shows.

(Fun fact: I accidentally typed his name in three different spellings before I finally decided I liked this one the best.)

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