Today I had a major frustration with Blogger's tag editor that ended in me removing most of the tags from all my posts in disgust and rebuilding my tag tree from scratch.

I think I like the end result a lot better though.

Stablehand: Hexarts and Perissodactyls

The world of Stablehand isn't just a single, homogeneous glob of city and forest. Why would it be?

Accordingly, there are many different populations of hexarts with different shared characteristics. The Common Hexart, Hexartus multipotens, is usually scaled and compact, while the Hinotorian Long Hexart, Hexartus hinotoriae, generally has a long, slender body and tends to be covered in filamentous, hair-like plumage. It also displays sexual dimorphism, with the male tending to have larger, narrower horns with more tine-like projections, whiskers, and a fluffy mane toward the back of the head. The female tends to have shorter horns, no whiskers, and a fluffy bulge mostly toward the chest and back. Hexartus regalis, a tropical species, has bright colours and fin-like structures designed to release more heat.

And then there's Hexartus multipotens familiaris, the hexarts people often try to keep as pets (with mixed results). I was trying to draw one possible breed but was too lazy to finish it.

And these...

This is basically what happens when I make phylogenetic trees out of typos. "Triceraderm" came from a misheard radio ad and "zenra" came from a typo I made while looking for reference pictures that I just couldn't get over.

The monoceros was something I'd been intending to include in Stablehand for a long time, but until I'd built this phylogeny, I didn't have any idea how to draw it. It's like a unicorn, but instead of being some kind of modern, sparkly swan-horse, it's a real, bona fide unicorn from the good old days—you know, the kind with an eight-foot-long horn that couldn't be captured alive because it was just that fierce. At the moment, I see it as being the single most dangerous animal in the entire Stablehand world. (At least as far as common, naturally-occurring animals go. There might be a couple weird anomalies that are worse.)

The zenra is pretty much the opposite, and is just about the most peaceful, serene animal in the Stablehand world. It's gentle, obedient, and hard-working.

There.

It's done. All the Destiny Attribute symbols are done.

In the event you can't figure out everything you ever wanted to know about Destiny Attributes from this diagram, you're probably hopeless a full explanation of each attribute will be arriving within maybe a week.

Today, June 15 2013, shall be known as the day when all my Stablehand supplemental stuff passed into the CC-BY-SA 3.0 and the CC-BY-NC-SA quietly faded away.

(I say "quietly faded away" because the CC-BY-NC-SA is an unslaughterable hydra which cannot be revoked retroactively—though I can cancel it going forward, I can't stop you if you somehow made a derivative work under that licence before that date. I don't think anybody actually has, but I feel like I have to put this here just in case anybody wakes up at 3:00 AM, happens to stumble over onto my site from one of my other pages, and thinks they've wandered into an alternate universe when they see the "wrong" licencing tag.

Hey, It could happen.)

Stablehand: Jinfèng's Theme

Jinfèng's theme!

Finally! I finally arranged Jinfèng’s theme.

At first I was just going to do it as a straight strings song, but then I got the random idea to put techno sounds in it and it became about twice as good.

I did an unusual amount of chord arrangement in this song to the point I probably actually learned a little bit about playing the piano instead of just using it to find notes.

The style I did it in was vaguely inspired by music from various Pacific Moon artists.

Lyrics will arrive shortly.

Access drives preservation. So, if you think of, "well, why don't we just go and encrypt it and put it in a vault, and we'll be able to look at it in 70 years, or something like that...", I think that kind of a "dark archive" is the worst possible idea.

I think it's keeping things in use, active, that keeps a part of the mind-share, keeps people knowing about it, liking it, caring for it. So I think that the best way to preserve things is to make things accessible. It may sound a little... "un-obvious", but especially in this digital age, where it's so easy to forget... If you take things away for a generation, it's as if it doesn't exist. So everything we do is open-source, and all the things we do we try to give away.

Brewster Kahle's words on preserving knowledge at the Internet Archive. I think they also briefly explain exactly what is wrong with overly-extended copyright terms, overzealous enforcement, and legal protections on DRM.

TDNMB: the highlights, 4/16~5/2

Okay, now I've finally gotten all my blogs in order and decided what I'll do.

TDNMB and my Stablehand/Tyrian tags on tumblr will be for all my WIPs I feel like posting, and separate posts on this blog will be for the finished stuff. However, since I seem to be producing a lot more WIPs than finished stuff lately, I'm also going to post compilation posts here of the rougher stuff from my tumblr periodically. This is the first of those posts, mostly covering 4/16~5/2.

Here I was trying to draw a symbol for one of the main characters to wear.

I can only imagine that PSAs in the Stablehand universe are some of the most entertaining things ever. At least when they deal with hexarts, anyway. XD

(If you don't get the joke here, as I said, people often regard hexarts as if they're some sort of devil spawn or something, so the thought of a bunch of them in the same place having a big party like this would be appalling to a lot of people.)

Another of the main characters hails from Hinotoria, land of the firebirds; it's a little bit like China. Here I was trying to design a style for a writing system to be used there.

Here I was attempting to design a logo for Stablehand incorporating the Destiny Attribute symbols and some calligraphy, as well as a general typeface based on it called Retrolark.

This was not actually posted in TDNMB, just on my dA, but I couldn't find my post if I'd posted it here, so here it is.

It's some more of the hexarts from the colour chart.

And finally, this is the WIP I was working on yesterday. It's Shadow, again from the hexart chart. He's going to be a semi-main character, but he'll be somewhat interesting to make a story about in first-person (read: a headache) because he doesn't talk or think in words.

His anatomy kind of shifted by the time I got him into Blender.

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