liminal artifical network entity

Snagged from delphi

🎶 Last song I listened to: East of Eden - Zella Day

📺 Currently reading/playing/watching:

• trying to get myself to read Translation State which has been sitting next to my bed for months (I preordered it...), in the middle of How to ADHD also, and kind of Harrow the Ninth
• playing FFXIV, GW2, and occasionally random things like trying to finish up BG3 or Pillars of Eternity 2 and a second DAI playthrough
• also still playing in two D&D campaigns
• watching Evil because seven suggested it a while back, and I'm just getting around to it. actually watched a few things recently that aren't just youtube, which is a bit unusual for me (trigun stampede: very pretty & I think I still prefer the original, dungeon meshi: this one is fun, may pick up the manga to catch up there too)

🌶️ Sweet/Savory/Spicy?: I love a decent spicy food, but my spice tolerance is medium and my body does not really enjoy dealing with it, so probably savory.

❤️ Relationship status: signed up on a dating app and had no energy to try to date.

🤩 Current obsession: currently in-between obsessions I suppose.

( bly manor (spoilers) )

( lovecraft country (spoilers) )

Besides that I started watching Kipo, but I'm only through like, episode 4, so it'll be a while hah.

Because when I'm stressed I end up kind of wanting to do projects with concrete endings that make me feel accomplished, and I had been interested in ortholinear keyboard layouts for a while, I got a kit and put one together. I'm still kind of getting into setting up QMK so I can try programming different layouts on it (especially want to mess around with trying out tap dancing key setups... not sure if it'll work for me but I'm curious), but it was already kind of nifty to put it together even if ... largely it was like screwing in 6 screws, popping on a stabilizer, and carefully inserting key switches and keycaps. Someday I also kind of want to try learning soldering, but didn't want to get that far into the weeds yet.

Definitely stretches my hands in a different way to use the ortholinear layout, though most regular typing is pretty intuitive once I figured out where b and v were in relation to f compared to a staggered layout (you really do not realize that the b key is very far away from f until the letters are in actual columns and you keep typing n trying to hit b). The symbols get a little wonky since I have to use modifiers for them though, and I have to take a bit to readjust every time I switch back and forth from it. Does already feel like I have to move my hands less though which is kinda nice.

It's apparently been almost two months since I updated... I was sort of keeping up reading for a while, but then most of October actually got taken up by... game planning? I both started my Numenera adventure (it's definitely ending up to be more than a one-shot, but less than a full-on campaign thing), and one of my D&D games-- the one being DMed by the former party member of my offline group-- the DM is a teacher and also in grad school and school started and has been really stressed with all that. Something brought up the topic of a premade campaign, and since she expressed interest in playing a premade, I offered to DM a premade on off weeks, so I've been setting that up too. While I'm really enjoying the Numenera game, thankfully it'll be short, because I cannot handle running two games (and playing in two other games) for the longer term... even though at this point it might actually take us a couple months to get through the adventure.

( more musing on dming )

Anyway, as might be expected I have not been drawing much because of this. I did do this orc after doing some studies on tusked animals:

Also because I did finally finish my old sketchbook that I technically started in 1997, this was in a new sketchbook. I don't know if it's really worth doing a sketchbook tour of the old one or anything, but it is sort of interesting since it kinda spans me from around ages 10-34 ahah. Like mostly it goes 10, a brief span of when I was ~13, and then jumps to age 33, but still. Most of my sketchbooks are kinda like this, though usually not quite as dramatic of an age jump. I just have a tendency to use one for a while, start a new one, and then go back and finish the old one... eventually because I don't want to feel like I'm wasting paper.

( and about stuff I'm watching )

Oh I did also read marthawells's Network Effect finally, and it was good. Also finally started Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, but haven't gotten all that far yet.

Besides that, as a state we're still on fire, and it's been getting pretty bad, but we did just get about 6-8 inches of snow where I'm at and hopefully that helps, but it's going back to being dry so I'm not sure. It's not near me at the moment, but it's still concerning in a general sense.

Hm, I've been reading and trying to interact with others a bit more but never got around to finishing a post. And now it seems... very long.

Media

• Fringe is really only getting worse, but we're nearly done. I keep being so bored while watching it, which is the most egregious thing, the only character I still care about is Astrid, and it's really just nonstop WOW THIS IS RACIST when it comes to Astrid.
• Carnival Row is actually getting more interesting past the first three episodes of romantic angst I don't really care about.
• Kinda dropped ACNH for now, and I'd started Hollow Knight but barely got anywhere I am... terrible at reading on-screen cues for games and reacting appropriately. Still fun to run around it a bit. Was also trying to finish up the Blood and Wine Witcher DLC, but GW2 has a festival and a content drop upcoming so kinda doing that for now instead.
• I guess Dappervolk exists again? I only found out yesterday, but I remade my character and ... we'll see? I'm not actually sure if I want to take commissions again at the moment. It does seem like they polished it more and added more stuff to do which is nice, though some of it is still very repetitive and convoluted to navigate.

Tabletop

This gets its own section because 90% of my life outside of work right now is tabletop I guess?

Numenera

( I'm trying to setup a Numenera one-shot... )

D&D

Occupation

Forgot to post this here so here's the crew from this campaign: Left to right: Glyph (mine, changeling artificer often in gnome-form), Fido (shifter cleric of the music domain), Redna (halfling paladin), Sprig (seven's, tabaxi druid of land), Jessabell (halfling druid of the moon), Vivienne (our DM's NPC, half-orc we report to)

Tears of the Void

And then I finally did this design for my other campaign of my circle of spores warforged druid, Eclipse: We started at a festival and in one of the festival games we won a Dress with Pockets (of Holding) and the other character didn't really want to wear it so Eclipse put it on. So that's why a dress and dressless version.

I wanted to make him kind of look like a tree with leaves so I gave him a leaf-mantle and made him more top-heavy with spindly legs. To be honest I was originally going to push him further into creepy territory but uh, this DM has an extremely low tolerance for creepy and can't really separate her feelings from the NPCs reactions, and I didn't really want to deal with having every NPC we talked to flee in horror from me*, so I kinda tried to keep the design just a little unsettling.

*This ... was kinda literally how it was going with just saying he only has aspen-bark eyes and no other facial features, she was so horrified at the idea of talking to something without a mouth.

I'm not loving the half-manual crossposting, it's just still finicky and Instagram's image quality is sketchy sometimes anyway (sure did some compression to the fanarts below). Also I'm lazy and if it's going to be a manual process that I'm also already using DW's image uploading for regardless ... maybe I'll just manually do periodic sketchdumps here instead. Which also means I can make the thumbnails not giant ahah. I was worried how quickly I'd use up the storage allotment but I'm only getting close to 1% so ... it should do me for a while at least.



Someone started a May art challenge called Mayshroom, and while I am not prepared to do a full monthly challenge, I was looking at the prompt list and kinda felt inspired to at least do one, so I did the first day's prompt of 'fly agaric' mushrooms. Aka the iconic red with white spots mushroom. I just liked the idea of a little mushroom cape.



This meme was going around on Twitter, and I did a sketch version, not sure if I'd have the energy to color them, but since I made them just the meme-size I did work up to at least some simple coloring. I didn't actually get most of these as suggestions and they aren't my favorites necessarily, just kind of characters I felt like would be fun to draw. LTR: Trahearne from GW2, Anthy Himemiya from Utena, Bobo del Rey from Wynonna Earp, Nakajima Youko (wanderer mode) from Juuni Kokki/12 Kingdoms, [redacted for potential spoilers] from SOMA, and my headcanon version of what Alice Quinn looked like from the book series of The Magicians.

forgot about this, kind of started as a doodle during a work meeting, but turned into portraits of my and my friends Raksonas: Token (purple), Charm (green, seven's), and Mellow (yellow, sideways's). if you haven't heard of Martha Wells' Books of the Raksura, well, now you have? there's queer dragony shifter people, other cool new races, and it's a fun romp of a fantasy book series, go check it out!

Original post at synthearts, might contain additional images.

honestly, I wish it was easier to post pictures on dreamwidth. my wordpress crossposting seems to have broken, and it was still a little clunky and weird anyway... might look at if I can write up a generator script that makes it a little less tedious but I think it probably still comes down to the copypasting which is what I keep... unsuccessfully trying to avoid.

anyway, so here's some more D&D characters both from games I'm playing and also just messing around with and just other miscellaneous sketches I never posted from last year.


This is based on numbathyal's photo, I'd just gotten these handmade watercolors off etsy so I just did a quick sketch.

( sketchdump cut )

anyway this is the last spam from me tonight ahah. just wanted to do it before I put it off again.

at some point maybe I should do some catchup posts but mostly I keep thinking I should maybe actually share these? with 8tracks closing, I got really amped up saving some playlists and decided to actually finish up a few I'd started so. if you're into the magicians here's one, ( forty (and a half) times )

and then I started compiling this one because I'd been into a couple songs with this particular ethereal/haunted music box sound, so I made a (short) playlist out of it and adding a few as I come across them: ( captured melodies )

I just realized I’ve posted like… nothing on Dreamwidth since 2018 ended, art-wise so uh. Here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve done since January I guess.

redraw of an old (2008) sketch of Corey, to see how much improvement I’d had and also to try to come up with a simplified art style

ETA: Click the picture to the wordpress post to see the rest... maybe someday I'll figure out how to better include galleries or something.

Not specific to this episode and there's like no one else who's going to get this reference because you'd need to both be into the Magicians TV show and also into the Books of the Raksura, but seven and I were talking and realized the kids have a similar setup to a Raksuran court with Margo as the ruling queen, Eliot and Quentin as consorts, Alice is a... very dysfunctional sister queen, Julia's a visiting queen from another court (who challenged Marina, the former queen) with Kady as her warrior. Penny's also a warrior but I guess whose court he's in might depend on which Penny. Dean Fogg is a line grandfather. Poor Fen is the lone Arbora with all these unstable Aeriat. And Josh is really more of a groundling Margo adopted into the court.

And I just wanted to record that somewhere. If I actually wrote anything I suppose that's a good candidate for a crossover fic? But instead it's just going to stew.

( Spoilers, kind of just summarizing my liveblog thoughts. )