the deep moans round with many voices

One thing that happens sometimes at Not the IRS is that clients arrive for appointments with their children in tow. Company regulations forbid us to have much by way of kid entertainment in the office, but we DO have a box of crayons and a whole bunch of random line art that I've printed off the internet.

Another thing that happens sometimes is that I get very bored on slow evenings. This is the result. :)





(My scanner made both pictures look slightly more blue than they are in real life, but eh. Details.)

[link to original post, for when Tumblr inevitably breaks the embedded images]

Another podcast, another pair of coloring book pages. :D

( cut for images )


And I finally managed one that doesn't include green! Not that I have anything against green -- green is a lovely color, and obviously goes well with pretty much anything -- but I was using it at least twice as often as any other color and that was starting to get silly.

Now I am going to kill another fifteen minutes before heading off to my blood donation appointment. It was actually scheduled for 12:30pm, but the Red Cross had some logistical issues setting up (and getting a supervisor on-site), so I was told to try coming in a bit later and see what happens. So I suppose I will see.

ETA: They were still in the final stage of setting up when I arrived, but they processed people through pretty quickly so I was done by 2pm and left the snack table by 2:10. Now I am eating another small snack (plus drink) at home, and will shortly brave the ominous thunder and dark western sky on my walk to work, blargh.

Ah well, rain and wind won't kill me.

Done at last! Ever since I replaced my old desktop computer with a laptop, my scanner flips out when faced with images that are colored all the way to the edge of the page -- it basically can't read them, and just scans a random chunk from the middle. So I had to wait a day and use one of my local library's public scanners instead. I love libraries. :-)

I used only the beta kids' god tier symbols, partly because I didn't want to draw Hope or Rage, and partly because more than four symbols would have been conceptually crowded and difficult to arrange. From outside to inside, the rings are arranged in the order the kids are introduced: John, then Rose, then Dave, and finally Jade.

I drew this with Crayola marker and highlighter on printer paper, with some minor touchup in MS Paint to fix smudges and such. The Time symbol's circle and the outer circle around the Breath symbols were both traced from random kitchen equipment, but everything else is freehand.

( And here are the three WIP shots, just because )

December 21: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

More maps, yay!

So okay, Firsthome. Firsthome is another world I dreamed up around age thirteen, but in this case my initial terrible notes (which included, IIRC, a legendary pirate and a mermaid??? I dunno, it was forever ago and the notes in question were, at best, one sentence summaries of concepts that need at least a thousand words to make any sense) were extremely minimal and I didn't get around to making maps until much later.

(Except for Yanomy, but Yanomy is a weird case I will explain in a bit.)

I first 'mapped' Firsthome verbally, and since then have been engaged in an off-and-on struggle to make those verbal descriptions of geography and climate into functional images. Like, there are seven continents in this world. Three in the northern hemisphere (Arina, Yanomy, and Tirith Ansam), three in the southern hemisphere (Nivenos, Kerabada, and Chida), and one that pretty much straddles the equator (Ohiyesa). Some of these names are, um, approximations in Common (aka the language of the Estarin Empire, which is still the common speech of Estaria, a big region of Arina) for names in the language of whatever people the Estarins happened to conquer first on a given continent. So Yanomy comes from the Sirinese (or Umestai) Yan hu'Komi, Chida is short for Chidantl, and Kerabada is an expanded version of Khrabda.

I have little verbal geographic sketches of the entirety of Arina, Yanomy, and Kerabada. I have about 80% of Nivenos verbally mapped, and maybe 20% of Tirith Ansam. Ohiyesa and Chida are very vague -- though I've actually written one ficlet each set on those continents. (Seduction is set in the city-state of Vinaeo, which is on the northern coast of Ohiyesa, and Clockwork is set in Besmodu, an as-yet-unmapped region of Chida.)

At one point I started a project to map the whole world by hemispheres, but I only finished the east; west, south, and north are all sadly blank. And the map itself is pretty sketchy and subject to future revision, particularly Chida and Ohiyesa. But here it is. (The scribbly bits are mountain ranges.)

( there are a bunch of large images from this point onward )

And that's all I have to say about Firsthome today, since the topic is maps rather than history or linguistics or children's games or religion or epic poetry traditions or any of the other things I have created and written down over the past twenty years. :-)

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December Talking Meme: All Days

Something I find fascinating about Homestuck as a fandom is the weird experiments it inspires me to try. For example, this fic, which I wrote... and then decided to format entirely as a series of images. Because why not? (Don't worry! The second "chapter" is not actually a chapter; it's just a text version for anyone who is using e-readers, is reading on a small screen, has trouble parsing cursive fonts, or just doesn't want to bother with images. You may want to disable the AO3 work skin, though, since I did use pesterlog formatting.)

Anyway, this fic is a combined response to two kinkmeme prompts. The major prompt, by random_gal, was for Jane contacting either Rose or Dave to assuage her doubts that Roxy and Dirk are actually related to them. The minor prompt was for Jane meeting either Rose or Dave in person and striking up a conversation about their child that they've never met.

Contact for Proof: Dear Ms. Lalonde, my name is Jane and I met your daughter online last month... [Alpha Timeline Fluff, obviously] (3,075 words)