The Green Knight's Quest

( Depth year, 20x24 project, 8 of Pentacles )

I haven't finished the font project because I needed to think about what the final form of my font collection should look like, but I have processed all fonts I acquired prior to mid-June 2025.

( Taming the Fonts, once and for all )

The lessons from this are twofold. One, working out a process that works for you will make life indefinitely easier. I haven't yet worked out processes for everything in my life, but I am working out more processes, and even when they're incomplete or insufficient, they're steps in the right direction.

I am also encouraged to look FOR processes instead of feeling overwhelmed.

But the other lesson is that while some of this probably *is* a character trait – something that will come easier to some people than others – it totally can be learnt.

Even in your fifties.

(Ugh, that sounds old.)

( Lessons Learnt )

It's a bit of a revelation for me that earlier charity bundles created a lot of cognitive load (all those games and I have no idea what they are, and I'll have to at least make an effort to sort them, and they take up so much space, and I spent all this money and never play them [ok, with charity bundles that guilt is very much reduced], but they were a moderately high cognitive load and I mostly dealt with them by ignoring them. (I downloaded the solo bundle, I haven't downloaded several others).

Compared to the last bundle: I checked it out, found a few things I was interested in, it's for a good cause. I have downloaded everything and presorted it (video games, multiplayer games, solo games (though there may be some movement when I find out I was wrong from a brief glance), 3rd party games, supplements. I will back up everything, and delete the things that I'm not interested in right away.

And something miraculous happened. I'm looking forward to eventually playing these games, even if I will probably dump half of them unplayed (for there are many many lots, and many games I *want* to play), but they're not taking up that uncomfortable mental space of 'this is too much I can't cope, argh'. Instead, I can look at this bundle, go 'I feel in control', back it up, and remove them from my hard drive for now; I'm currently working my way through the Solo Bundle, and when I have a bit more brain and hard drive space, I shall download and process another bundle.

Step by step, I'm reducing technical debt, and it feels GOOD.

Lots of stuff happening, mostly annoying, leaving me pretty much wiped out. I could not resist sharing this one…

Anyone can be shouty, edgy, and black.

There seems to be more than one band with a pink logo, but this song surely features the most metal instrument of all times:

the recorder.



(For Germans: This is Torfrock. Brings back memories. I got there via Platt folk songs: Dat Du meen Leevsten büst -> Nakich bün ick gor nich mehr so schmuck (from recommendations - c'mon, I had to listen to that [*]) -> other Torfrock songs -> WTF???)


[*] There's an English language folk song, 'I just don't look good naked anymore' of which this is riffing off. And in typical Torfrock manner, it's a lot more direct. ('schmuck' is an adjective used for attractive people, so... yeah. I still understand a fair bit of it. Not all, though, which is annoying.).



(click on the link if it appears to be not available; the video is fine.)

So yesterday I gave my bank login to a scammer. I should have known better. I know better. This is a post where I analyse why things went wrong anyway and what I can do so this will never happen again.

( Long list is long )

I got away lightly, but not without cost. Right now, I'm a bit scared to sign up for online banking again, however necessary it may be.

I am very embarassed about the amount of muppetry that could have cost me a considerable sum of money, but I am trying to forgive myself. Every now and again, humans make mistakes. Sometimes costly ones. Closing my laptop around the power cord and needing a new display was costly. A small misjudgement while parking my car was costly. And, and, and. Sometimes it only takes a small slip, and afterwards you kick yourself, but that is life. We wish it wasn't, but it is.

Warning: contains quickly flashing images.

In this video, JP Coovert gives a cheat sheet for character design. It has some head shapes and some eyes and some noses etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3JH-Y-ZmOk

My life has been changed forever. For the first time, coming up with a character was easy. I have been trying for years, and while I _technically_ was able to do this, it’s never been effortless. Or fun.

Instead of trying to remember how to draw eyes or noses, and trying to come up with appropriate ones, and spending an awful lot of mental energy on trying to remember how to draw a nose, how else I could draw a nose, and which nose might be appropriate, I was just able to look at a depository of noses and pick one.

I had always hoped this would get better with practice, and it did, sorta, but on a scale of 1-50 it moved from 5 to 10 for me.

Twenty minutes with this and I have my second character and my _character creation skills_ have moved closer to a felt 30: I did actively think what shape and features would go with a particular character, and then I evaluated the possibilities, and picked some, and hey presto, a unique little devil that didn’t exist in the world this morning.

And I’m having FUN. I’ve previously liked some of the results in the rare moments things came together, but now I’m looking forward to taking this progress through its paces and to just, y’know, doodle faces, the stranger the better, and to create my own examples of eyes and ears and noses and horns.

I’m well aware that this is only a first step along a long path. I need to be practice more so I can reproduce the same characters consistently, I need to be able to change the angle from which I draw them and give them different expressions; I need to be able to draw bodies as well as faces, and I need to clothe those bodies and provide them with equipment.

( more musings )

I feel that I could have had this sooner if I'd spent a little more time analysing what, exactly, causes me so much problems. Which is not to say that I would have come up with this method on my own, but, dammit, I could have come across this YEARS ago. (June 2020, to be precise)

I have a long journey ahead of me, but for the first time, I'm feeling confident I'll get there.

Bonus Art: I wanted to use this as an icon, and for that, just line art on white was too boring. I looked a little through my available resources, worked out what would work. Pride reared its head, and so I spent a couple more minutes to throw some paint at a canvas in Rebelle.

Recently, following a video about Neil Gaiman (gods, what a completely fucked up guy. I like Good Omens and bounced off his other stuff because there was a streak of cruelty in them I did not want to keep in my life, and also, I read Douglas Adams take on the old gods in the modern world before American Gods, and Gaiman could never reach that mark for me). But anyway, following up on that I watched a short video on Harry Potter which discussed whether we still need new takes on HP, given that the question of whether Harry Potter was any good had been settled a long time ago, and the author briefly mentioned the angle of Harry Potter and Disability, so I took a look.

Nearly two hours later, my answer is ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I needed this because it brought up a number of angles that I hadn’t considered.


( Harry Potter and me )

So yes. I didn't reread the last three books, didn't see the films, and thus most of the examples in this video were things I'd encountered once, fleetingly, or things that become more obvious when supported by visuals, like the interior of St Mungo's, but other things were things I just didn't pick up because I wasn't looking at the books through this particular lens. Almost every point that was made was one that seems self-evident, which always sets my spidey-senses to tingle: am I being drawn in by great rhethoric and do I ACTUALLY agree when I go away and think about it?

In this case, I do. I don't agree with every point (I don't, thankfully, know enough about children with trauma to know whether Harry's character is believable), but a lot of the stuff going over the books I've read articulates things that have left me feeling uneasy, and some of the stuff I've skimread, when looked at in more detail, is indeed every bit as problematic as it sounds on the surface.

So while I'm aware that two hours is a good chunk of time, this video is in chapters and can easily be watched in smaller increments. I found it a worthwhile use of my time because it made me think of things I should catch as a reader and pitfalls to avoid as a writer, because not all of them are obvious, though many actually are. (The abysmal lack of mental health support in the wizarding world, for instance. Then again, which of the Hogwarts teachers would you trust?)

I’ve tried an earlier incarnation of Aeon timeline which didn’t quite land. Version 3 is much more promising: it’s versatile, it has multiple views, it relies on filtering (which I think is the way forward for taming large amounts of data).

It also has the subway view of ‘here timelines cross’ which I want to play with as a concept.

( Use cases for a timeline app )

Gaining technical skill in Aeon Timeline is my first priority. Not all solutions are intuitive, and I need to write them out so I can repeat them.

( Where features reign, bugs are not far behind )

I am glad I took a couple of days to think about how I want to use the software instead of delving in and generating a lot of data because chances are, it would have been the wrong kind of data.

( Why strict Chronology might not work )

So while I'd like to build that strict chronology – an entry for every relevant event (and one of my main characters moves around A LOT), I'm not sure this is the best use of my time right now,

This at least led me to brainstorming what would be useful.

What I need to know is how the meetings between characters match up. Like the situation that I've fixed where one character takes three days to come to a meeting and another character has to squeeze in a weeek's worth of events, and that's riding _fast)_,.

So what I want to try is to map out various plotlines and focus on the places where they meet. There are some fixed events that I can count forwards and backwards from (the Learned Society meets once a month; solstices happen regularly) so that shouldn't be too impossible.

( More musings about plotlines )

So overall, I can see myself using this software to gain new insights into my books. Fixing the 'timeline problem' is only one application, and while it needs to be done (and I still want to write the software that lets me place events on a map because locations are just SO important). It's very early days yet (though I may have found the in-depth video series I was looking for, it's in German, and while it's a bit long-winded and I am *completely* at sea with at least half the writing terms he uses, this is very promising, because he keeps going back to '… and this is how I use it for my novel'. (There are eight parts that seem relevant, plus iOS (I have downloaded this, but while I can access unsaved documents, once I save them, they don't sync, so I shall probably watch that one, too) and synching with Scrivener and Ulysses, neither of which I use.

So there's a fair bit of material still ahead of me. The New, Meticulous Me is investing time and effort into learning the ins and outs of the software, in solving problems, in thinking about what type of organisational principles will work well for me, and it's already paying off, so I think I have found a tool that I'm going to get a fair amount of use out of.

I meant to write this up and got sidetracked, and that’s ok. One of my resolutions for 2025 is to be forgiving with myeslf.
I’d love to be an energetic person who keeps on top of everything they want to do.

Right now, I am not that person.

And because I could spend hours crafting this post and don't wanna – I want to write it and move on and get back to actual stuff – it will be less organised than I'd like to be.

( The rest of my life, redux: Health, fonts, overwhelm )

Tarot deserves its own section of this post.

( Tarot redux )

So let's have a look at my other obsessions in 2024.

( Mapping in Wonderdraft; 20x24 )

What's left are the things that I want to do more and don't always have the energy for. Reading. Writing. Programming.

One item I particularly want to focus on is learning to use Aeon Timeline properly, and to map the Five Kingdoms novels so I can fix the timeline once and for all.

Its a mess. A bad mess. And while they'll never be mainstream published, and I'm not even sure I want to self-publish them (certainly not before the sequence is finished; and the story has some way to go) I want to put it on sounder footing, and develop better habits for future novels.

And on some level, it doesn't matter. Readers are extremely unlikely to realise that one character spent three days and another character spent a week between meetings; or that one character travels one week and the other for four; these things happen in separate books and are deeply embedded in stories that have impeccable internal logic.

But *I* know that things don't line up, and it vexes me.

The other thing I am putting a lot of time and energy into is D&D: I would like to play properly again this year, and I am in the process of working my way through the rules properly. I hate that the sheer complexity has defeated me so far: I usually am a person who can learn complex things with relative ease, and D&D, of all things, has defeated me so far.

And that, I think, is quite enough for one year.

Sufi Tarot

This is a deck for quiet contemplation. I know too little about Sufism to judge whether it's a good deck from that perspective, but this is definitely a deck that I want to work more with, and so far, I have enjoyed my pulls from it. It is a deck I want to keep, a deck I want to study more; definitely a deck I can see keeping in the long run.



( A thoughtful and thought-provoking deck )

Ultimate RPG Tarot

I’m behind enough with processing decks that this is already leaving my collection. It’s a fun concepts, some cards are mildly amusing, but overall, the deck falls flat. There’s not enough there there, neither as a Tarot deck nor as an RPG resource.

Given how far behind I am in posting these, I’m just not going to bother saying much about this deck. I do not have much to say.

We both have the lurgy and are at home instead of in the place we meant to be (where all of caper_est’s Christmas presents have been sent to). There has been so much sleeping, I am ever so grateful my rib has healed and my backache has abated; 18h sleep would not have been possible a couple of weeks ago. Besides sleep, I have been wrangling fonts.

On June 15, I posted about using FontBook to manage my font collection
The short form: I started with 1001 fonts. I now have 771 fonts installed, 416 of which are mine.
I haven't logged exactly how many fonts I've processed; call it around 1500 (it's a little fuzzy because there are often multiple faces, and while I definitely don't count Italics as a separate font, a 'Shadow' variant is pretty much its own thing.)

I've struggled to find a tool for processing fonts for years. Decades. The newest set I processed was January-June 2018; this problem has gone on for a verrry long time, and it's pissed me off since forever.

So once I met a tool that would work, I decided to try and put it into action, and following my discovery I processed the fonts that were installed on my system.

My biggest problem was not writing down how, and we'll come back to that. But I slogged through, got an overview, booted a lot of fonts, and felt good about it.
Fast forward to September, when guilt overtook me and I processed a (small) set of fonts.
Fast forward to December when guilt raised its head _again_ and I sat down to process the next set and went 'wait, what did I actually do last time'?

In the past, that might have been it.
Meticulousness - crossing 't's and dotting 'i's – is a relatively new habit for me. It does not sit well with me. I'm an ideas person, I like discovering new things, grand schemes… I do not like the nitty groundwork, the bits where you grind your teeth and do it anyway, the thankless, boring, repetitive parts.

Sometimes they're needed. (Hello, 8-of-Pentacles.)
I hate them. They go against my self-image, and in a perfect world, I would never do any of this (alas, I am a copyeditor, I have to do meticulous formatting as part of my job.)

And thus, I ground my teeth and set to work writing down every single darn step. Which, it turns out, is really useful when you're trying to do something when you have no brain. It not only meant I could process fonts, but that I made far fewer mistakes (and no irredeemable or time-intensive mistakes).

Instad of talking in the abstract, I'll list my process here. I don't know how this will translate to any other project, but I will write it out because until I actually did this, I had no idea what such a workflow would look like.
And when you write it down, it looks… somewhat awkward. Convoluted. Redundant in places. It involves several pieces of software and awkward going back and forth between them.
At the same time, once I had worked out the process it proved surprisingly efficient. Once I sat down with a will, processing fonts became relatively easy.

1) Setting the scene.
If you want to process your own font collection, think about how you're using fonts. The categories I've derived are the ones that make sense to me, and, spoiler: the categories are somewhat fluent and I have frequently changed my mind about which category a font should be in.
The rankings are also arbitrary, and when a font has ended up in two categories, it has also more than once ended up with very different ratings. Plus I've changed my mind up and down just looking at fonts later, never mind bringing in new fonts and disregarding old ones.

( My Categories )

2) A rating system.
Mine is very straightforward. Being more granular would have increased the amount of time spent on ratings, and the amount of wibbling over whether I have the right rating, so here's my listing:

(  I *heart* emoji )
The 'I'm in love' and 'I hate' were mostly relatively straightforward; the 'maybe' and 'I likes' fonts were somewhat harder, and I changed my mind many times, both with looking at fonts and with adding more fonts to my collection.

So here goes, the long and convoluted process:

( 15 Steps to Happiness )

Some of these steps are simpler than others. A lot of them are checking and double-checking, for instance I will scroll to a 'boot' font in Step 13, remove it, watch it turn into a generic Helvetica in Pages, and THEN remove its entry. Sometimes I fumble and remove a font from a collection instead of the system, which leads to orphans; if I do it in this order, that won't happen.

( The process in review, and some sobering thoughts )

It is, if I'm honest, just a little bit frightening to ask myself what else I could achieve applying this level of mindless grinding to other tasks, respectively, *how* to apply this new-found skill of creating a procedure and sticking to other parts of my life. (It's not that I've never tried before, I've just never been as successful.)

In the meantime, that was 2.23GB of Fonts and related files.
Yesterday, I hunted for the rest of my font collection. I now have another 8.54GB to process.

If I keep up the pace, I should be done by May. That sounds almost doable.

https://www.youtube.com/@blumineck

I have just discovered this channel, and it’s lovely to see someone with skill and panache.



Not only do I love competence porn – it’s unlikely but not entirely impossible that a character will be able to do all of these things, but they may do some, or at least attempt them – but it shows me what is possible, so that when I pick an ‘impossible’ feat, I can now pick one that’s realistically achieveable.

For D&D nerds, here’s the same guy nerding out about archers.



Much of it goes over my head because I’m not that familiar with the classes/origins/spells, respectively what you can actually DO with certain spells and cantrips, but I’m leaving this here as an item of interest.

Overall, I’m on the mend. Still can only sleep on my back and am getting an average of 4h sleep a night, which is Not Great, but I can get around the supermarket under my own steam again.

Catchy little tune. Superb dancing.

Wait, Quick Sort?



And now we know why sometimes our computers slow down when performing algorithms: one of the numbers decides to drag out their solo a bit.

(It’s a whole channel. Enjoy.)

I spent most of my time setting up a template for Coding projects, and I am not yet done. On the positive side, it will cut down not only the amount of time needed to set up future projects, but make it much, much easier to do so and thus reduce my cognitive load tremendously.

I am also still battling the backache from hell that lets me sleep around 3-4h at a time, so at lot of my days are spent being a zombie and playing Slay the Spire (still haven’t slain) and doing another nap.
This is not helped by the grand redoing of sidewalks that involves tearing up the sidewalk and kerb stones, with a lot of jackhammering, rattling, general destruction, and, this morning, a sole construction guy trampling down the ground, all by himself. Which was blessedly silent.

I still have a few more lessons from Hemingway. (Using this article as a guideline for the content and providing my own thoughts on them:
( Process/Technique advice )

The main problem I have with all of this advice, apart from the last point which I haven't figured out yet, is that it comes too late for me. I am, in one form or another, already doing these thimgs. Digging deeper was a skill I had to learn (it's diametrically opposite to 'chasing wordcounts' where you're trying to put down as many words as you can; the iceberg principle encourages you to pay more attention and go over every detail twice, and question whether this is the best way of showing something or whether something else would work better, it is, in part, about self-editing as you go. Observing what's actually there/being said, finding telling detail: all great advice, wherever and whenever you pick it up.

I leave with an example of great writing (cited in this post
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

If I say ‘all I did was paint one chestnut tree’ I’m selling today’s work short.

Yes, I painted only one tree, but I _designed_ how to paint chestnuts. This strategy eventually collapses when the tree icons get small enough, but the goal is to create sets of trees that are similar enough to each other to be parsed as ‘the same tree’ (all elms, all birches, all chestnuts) while bringing some variety.

I’m borrowing from mapping principles where you try to design symbols that are distinctive along several axes - pattern and shape and colour and size are the ones that come to mind; I think there’s six or seven in total. So my elms not only have that wonky tall elm shape, I show the trunk and main branches in black. My birch trees have a teardrop shape, with trunks and branches in white (and a distinctive light colour). My chestnut trees are rounder and have marks for the candles; and I had to experiment so I have a _suggestion_ of candles instead of an accurate representation, because it has to remain readable at relatively small sizes.
I haven’t decided on shapes and styles for beeches and sycamores yet,

(The Sycamore tree is sprouting again. YAY.)

Not everybody makes a distinction between fine art and illustration, but I find it a useful lens. Creating icons for mapping, even though I use a painterly style (and you can make fine art with vectors) is about considerations that have nothing to do with the emotions of the viewer or telling a story; this is about clarity, ease of recognition, standing in for the thing they represent.


So, back to Hemingway. Last time around I looked at the legend: the Kansas City Star rules about 'short words, short sentences, short paragraphs' (but also 'positive language: 'his sentences were simple', rather than 'his sentences avoided complexity'.
( Musings on simple language )

In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The article calls this 'the ultimate example of how clear, concise and simplistic language can be extremely powerful.'

Does it work? Yes. Does it work because or _despite_ the simplistic language? Or is 'simplicity' a red herring, the first thing we notice because it's so strong here, and we should pay attention to other aspects of the text?
( This is long and convoluted and gave me a new appreciation of Hemingwaty and goes against all ‘rules’ )

There’s not much to report on the mapping front. I’ll be pressing on with creating trees. Yesterday while catching Pokemon I noticed that some of the trees on the green would work as assets. While, in an ideal world, I’d create my assets entirely from photos taken on fieldwork, this is not practical. Most of Penrhos is densely wooded, which makes it impossible to get a good picture of ‘a tree’ - you’re usually very close, can’t get the entire tree into the frame, and the tree is halfway obscured by other trees. Which is the opposite to what you need in assets, where you want a clear, iconic shape that is easily recognisable as a member of the species. So while my bluebells and daffodils and wild garlic were photographed in Penrhos, my trees, other than the Elder Stateselm, were not. (I’m also cheating with the spotted laurel. At the time, I didn’t have photos from location, and honestly, only I will know.)

So let’s turn our attention to next month, November, which has been ‘National Novel Writing Month’ for nearly 25 years, until the organisation took zero steps to prevent pedophiles from grooming children and has been scrambling and making bad decisions and blaming its members ever since.

It says something that I have a 'NaNo Meltdown 2024' on my hard drive which I have had since March.

( A little more griping )

Anyway. This November, I don't think I shall chace wordcount, I certainly won't begin a new project, but I want to pick up one of my existing ones and push forward. I also want to hone my skills, and have found inspiration in an unlikely place: Writing like Hemingway.

Or rather, learning to write from Hemingway.

So let's look at the man, his writing, and his writing advice a bit more.

( Hemingway - the Legend, now with added AI )

Looking at this post, I think it's long enough. This is Hemingway through a looking glass briefly, the short, almost abrupt, sparse, cut-it-to-the-bone Hemingway of legend. ]

Maybe this section should be called 'edit like Hemingway' because so far, the items I've picked are all about word choices and how to string them buggers together.

I thought I could pick a short piece (200 words) of my writing and simplify it according to Hemingway rules ^H guidelines, and I am satisfied to find that this is really hard, which means that I did not use my words in vain.

_If he chooses to bring the guild into disrepute_ – what is one supposed to do with that? 'Give the guild a bad name' doesn't quite have the same flavour. 'Ruins the good name of our guild' comes closer. 'Drag the good name of our guild into the mud'?

( 146 words, simplified )

( 168 words of rough draft )

And while this has been a rough draft – I have not yet edited this book, though I will occasionally read through it and fix things that jump out to me – a lot of the choices I made are stylistic choices. You can argue whether they work or not, and I will be going over them again later, but now that I am forcing myself to undo them in favour of an arbitrary set of rules, their absence rubs me the wrong way.

This is text from Valendon's own diary, which means that sometimes the register jumps sharply, he'll often mix present and past tenses, and there are a lot of snarky asides. Pulling out from reporting direct speech to the somewhat bored 'a runner was summoned' was also deliberate; this is more about how things are handled habitually than specific actions, and it's the last line of this particular entry, so pulling away feels right here.

There's more Hemingway, and more trees (though I took a break and drew a red squirrel), but those are stories to be told another day.

I could probably simplify the passage even further, but those edits are hard work, and I like them not.

So chazbanner posted a video of The Highwayman, a song I hadn’t been aware of, and that sent me into a rabbit hole of the four performers (I have a couple of albums by Willie Nelsono and Kris Kristofferson, a lot of albums by Johnny cash, and Waylon Jennings had somehow escaped my radar). And then one song lead to another, and I ended up watching a live version of Dolly Parton performing Jolene (always a treat, Dolly Parton) which led to this duet with Olivia Newton-John. It’s a studio performance, which means there is no male gaze involved, just the joy of music, and the two connect really well.





I would not call myself a ‘country music fan’ but when I look at my record collection, I sure listen to a lot of it. I’m *picky* (please do not complain that your wife is drunk and your dog ran away, or your dog is drunk and…) but I do like country music.

I know it’s a little late, but who’s counting. The next thing you need before making maps probably is _skills_.

Types of Maps: Spend some time with your assets and look at as many fantastic maps as you can find. Experiment.

Here’s a bunch of maps I’ve done from the same basic template, just adding more and different information, playing with different styles and density. There are always multiple ways of creating maps; this phase is about building your toolbox. How many and what kind of assets should you use? What overall density are you aiming for (a clear overview with the most relevant places, or a rich landscape you could get lost in? A map for a book that seeks to illustrate the plot differs from the world for an RPG.
Other considerations are whether you want a top-down or isometric style and what scale you want your map to have.
Play around with this, and do it before you delve into the map you want to make, because it’s much easier to do a half-hour exercise, look at it, and decide you want something drastically different than to invest sweat and tears into a map you care deeply about only to admit that it’s not working for you _as a map_.

Faking it: I’m a geographer, so my instinct is to start with plate tectonics and build worlds from the bottom up.
Only this takes time, a lot of time, a LOT of time, and while you can speed up the various phases of land and see, depositing and erosion, partial subduction that leads to metamorphic rocks, and then painstakingly working out what all of your beautiful rocks and soils mean for the settlement history of the world, I would recommend a different approach where you DO spend a little time looking at real-world maps (how do mountain ranges look? Where do rivers go, and how many should there be? What about woods and farmland and different settlement patterns in different climates?) and then arrange the map to your liking, working out the likely geomorphology by looking at your map.

This is, after all, a bonafide geographic technique, with the caveat that people cave similar cultural landscapes out of different morphologies and different cultural landscapes from the same underlying conditions; in other words, if you can make it plausible, anything goes.

Once you add magic and dragons, all bets are off anyway.
The two aspects that are important to get right are orogenesis (how mountains form; they’re not all in straight lines of the same age/height/ruggedness) and rivers (they always flow from high to low; you get watersheds, and there will be more water dumped on the ground where prevailing winds carry water from the ocean to the mountains/any steep rise in the land than in the ‘wind shadow’ of said mountains, so you get lush foressts and swamps and many rivers in the Pacific northwest, and dry plains on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

Think of the landscape that inspired your setting, however loose that inspiration: is it more Dartmoor or Kazakhstan? Find a map and redraw it: where are the settlements, how many are there, where are the mountains, hills, forests, rivers and lakes?

Take notes, generate a random map, and apply the same principles. Life’s short, and while detailed worldbuilding can be a wonderful hobby, it’s a means to an end, and the envisioned end is storytelling, so spending too much time smashing continental plates around is a distraction.

Day 1:

I’m already fudging the records a bit. Day 1 was mostly taken up by a visit to the dentist, (I get to go back next week for some work, hurray!) and catching up on the sleep I didn’t get before the dentist, so all I did was process some assets I needed which happened to be on sale.
The day before I tried to create a base map from which I can draw the map I really want to finish this month. Turns out that I ran into some limitations on both software AND map sides: You can only have one imported map at a time, it always re-imports at the original size, and I didn’t have markers that I could align visually.
Also, even using Google’s satellite and map layers, they don’t align perfectly, or at least didn’t seem to, so I had some problems there.
Plus, the area I want to map is heavily wooded, and most of the paths aren’t actually visible on the satellite picture, so I have to take them from the map.
Lesson learnt: if I want to create a reasonably accurate map from multiple sources, I need to prepare them better.

Counts as one day.

We’re almost in creative season! Both Inktober and NaNoWriMo have imploded, but that should be no reason not to make art/write in autumn.

For October, I want to split my time between mapmaking (in particular, a map of Penrhos) and asset creation. I would like to have individual assets for the Great Elm at Penrhos as well as the various follies (I already have a lot of the plants) and I want to create more assets based on the map that starts here: I love the style, and there are nowhere near enough assets of this kind in the world.

Since armaina asked, and because I want to get back into long form blogging anyway, I'll be writing down my thoughts on mapping here. I'll start with Session 0: Things to set up before you create your first map.

Software: I use Wonderdraft. It's cheap, it's a proper licence (not a subscription), it's software you download (not web-based) and it has a mostly sensible asset format (.png). It comes with a reasonable set of inbuilt assets, and a ridiculous number of free assets on https://cartographyassets.com alone. (If anyone wants my spreadsheet, I can send it over; I have around 180 entries. I've been obsessing over Wonderdraft for _months_)
And yes, you can find Photoshop .abr brushes (which work in CSP and Affinity Photo and elsewhere) for free, but for mapping, you really want vector-based software so you can move things around, especially when you find that you've changed the name from 'Hold' to 'Ancient Dwarvenhold' and now the label won't fit.

Licences: I strongly recommend keeping a spreadsheet with your assets and the licences that come with them from the start. (You'll need to double-check my spreadsheet. I've tried, but make no promises I got it right.)

Mentality: Fantasy Cartography is a creative/performance art. You're sharing a story, Fantasy Cartography is about bringing worlds to life, not about accuracy. Even modern topographic mapping takes certain liberties (at the correct scale, you could not see most roads). But this is storytelling, so you'll be using weird shapes to represent mountains, not height countours.
I find that keeping in mind which story I want to tell is important.
And sometimes, the process flows in the opposite direction: I pick assets that look interesting, create topographies at whim, and then ask myself 'what kind of place is this? Who would live there? What happened to create these settlements?'
You're allowed, nay, expected to ham things up for your map, and I certainly intend to. Good maps invite readers to look around and to discover things.

(This post may or may not have been brought to you by a mountain of photos to process from this summer)

This, apparently, is a whole genre of Youtube videos, and I’ve only just discovered them.

Take, for instance, this.


It’s quite amusing.

Some of the pictures are very nice, but the thing that amused me is that he’s got his camera set up to film himself within the landscape, and every time he stood there saying ‘this is a very boring place, I can’t see anything to shoot’ I thought ‘that’s a nice path/shrubbery/sky/foreground’ - I could have taken a lot more pictures in these ‘boring’ landscapes.

( Why I take many MANY pictures )

My other advice for anyone in the position of the guy in this video (not that he needs it; he's a pro and can take stunning photographs) is to come back to the same boring ^H undramatic places.

There's always a shot you missed. When you come back another day, there's your chance again. There's always a chance to experiment and I often find that having taken the obvious pictures, now's a chance to play around and go for different takes.

Sometimes we don't have that chance. We go to interesting places, and it costs a fair bit of money to get there, and we have one day, rain or shine, to take the best pictures we can.

But often, we can practice. I don't have the money to go to the most interesting locations (and definitely can't, like pros can, decide that 'this week has great weather, so I'll go and take pictures in places x, y, x'); I have to make the most of what I'm given, and I feel I am given a LOT.

So it's almost more important to hone my skills at home so that WHEN I get to intersting places, I am capable of making the most of them.

I know I cannot keep all of the learning in my head. I need actual photos to look through at leisure so I can learn from them; when I'm on location things can be overwhelming (and there are often other things to consider, like not running into people or falling off rocks).

And now, of course, I'm curious about other videos of this type, but they'll have to wait for another day.

Feng Shui Tarot

This deck had been on my wishlist for a very long time, but it’s out of print and usually expensive. Eventually, I found a copy on Ebay and pounced. The Strength card is marvellous – I love Tai Chi, and that quiet strength is just glorious. I’m not entirely sure what I think about the rest of the deck; especially since the suits have been renamed and somewhat re-imagined.

Circumstances meant that I acquired more decks before I had time to really study this one. I like it for cards-of-the-day, but my efforts at full spreads have fallen flat, so I need to study it more and decide what to do with it.
I don’t want to get rid of it, it’s glorious, so any decision about passing it on will be a couple of years away, but so far, I haven’t connected.



( Read more... )

Trash Panda Tarot

This used to be a kickstarter. I’d contemplated it at the time, but I think I’d just backed something else, and it seemed a bit gimicky, so I passed on it, and regretted it ever since.
I regretted it even more when I saw how much money it went for second-hand.

It’s stinking cute, that’s why.

There are other decks I’ve oohed and aahed over and then forgot; but this one haunted me.
Eventually I found an affordable copy, but with a twist: one card is badly damaged.

I bought it anyway. £20 for a 77 card deck vs. £125 (over my budget) for a full deck? I'm glad I did. The card in question is the 2 of Swords, and while every card in the Tarot has its own meaning, there is a whole cluster of choice cards that differ only subtly. Between the Lovers, the 2 of Wands and the 2 of Pentacles, I feel that choice-based messages are pretty well covered. Yes, the extra nuance would be nice, but it’s not as if you’re losing the Death card. (I have also done plenty of readings where one card stuck in the box. I consider which card did NOT want to come out to play, and what that means for me.)

The moment I had this deck I fell in love with it. It’s hilarious. I love that the pentacles are D20s.
But mostly, I love that this is, indeed, a Trash Panda (=Racoon) perspective on life. They don’t want the same things as people do, they don’t act the same. And that means that I’m now viewing the cards in a new light, from a different angle.

I wish this deck had a better guidebook, but that doesn’t stop me from being able to read this deck; there’s enough in the guidebook to nudge me into the right interpretations.



( Read more... )

This edition should go to a good home. It arrived, I started reading with it, and I had so much fun that I decided to get a copy of the second edition as my birthday deck. It was $ouch. Twice a year I’m willing to splurge a little. More often than not that splurging is on tarot decks, and I knew that this one was a very low risk that I would not like it.
I like both the bordered and the borderless versions; I like the new font and new backs and new box a lot better, and I have no regrets. The first edition is marvellous, and if that had been all I could get, I would be very happy, but I am even happier to have the second edition.

One of the last things I needed to migrate from my previous system (Monterey) to my current system was my e-mail client.
In the past, this has been a hassle. I eventually worked out how to achieve it, but of course, I have forgotten the instructions.

I just opened Postbox.
Everything was present and correct.

I now have 700 e-mails - most of which I’ve already seen and processed - but that doesn’t matter; that’s easily done. What matters is that this was a task that has been hanging over me. (First I had to ensure that this system was viable for me. Then I had to ensure that there were no problems that I’d overlooked. Then I had WWDC to deal with, and a lot of cognitive load. Then I had the Font project that I wanted to push through, at least the first round of it. Then (ok, some of these things overlapped a bit) I had a bout of sciatica and slept in 2.5h increments. Then I started coding in earnest again. Today I had a very frustrating day hunting swimsuits at my local shopping centre (no luck at all, you can have knitted or ones with zippers, but you can’t have swimwear that’s actually suitable for SWIMMING), and tried to overcome my inneren Schweinehund (the part of me that just don’t wanna), turned off Wifi, and tried to find out how bad things were.

And things were good, so that’s THAT task done.

Tarot Arthurién

Oh my. I may have briefly talked about the Bonestone and Earthflesh Tarot, a stunning deck that had preorders before I got into Tarot, and years later finally was fulfilled without going to market proper. Immediately, some leftover decks were offered for $$$. I declined to buy one that would have come to around £120, sold as he stands - no guarantee that you’d actually get a deck in working order.

And that’t twice the price of a really expensive deck of the sort I buy once or twice a year at most, and you can get 4-5 really lovely mass market decks for that price.
I have around twice as many mass market decks than indies and I love them all.

This on *is* a mass market deck. It was slightly dearer than most Anglo decks are, but it was totally worth it. It will need a deep dive because the guidebook – which is very in depth and wonderful – is in French, and my French, much less my mythic/esotheric French, is not very good. But this deck is absolutely utterly glorious.

With one exception. Whenever I pull from it, Gawain has a tendency to turn up. Good lad, Gawain, but still.

(There are rumours the Bonestone and Earthflesh will go to mass market; if that happens, I will buy it. There are also rumours that a number of cards had to be changed because they were using real people’s likenesses.)


( Arthur in his full glory )

This deck is a keeper. Haven’t used it much yet – I am still in the ‘pull a card, use Google Translate to translate the text, and the clean it up, and ponder the card phase, which has fallen off the stack a bit.

And the artist has another Tarot which did a successful Kickstarter and will come to US Games mass market next year, so I shall pick up that, too.