A long way down

"Pushing Your Luck"

painted with acrylic gouache and every shade of green paint marker i got lying around :^) painted on the mat frame too and it came out better than i thought!

queer, particularly trans representation hasn't come all that far in 20 years. maybe there's less blatant transphobia, but there sure as hell isn't any widespread positive representation. we have multiple generations of trans women and men who were only able to explore their identities during adolescence in online spaces. and kids today are being stripped of that.

Some context of the session: The party was trying to reach the estate of Count Los Feratu (Not actually a vampire despite what the name suggests, he's literally D&D Live action Gomez Addams) but first they have to cross The Lawn. To borrow from the late great comedian John Pinette when describing the castle lawn of Windsor Castle in England:

So the entire session was the party going through various non-lethal traps, skill challenges, and encounters. There were open grave pit-traps, grabby skeleton hands out of the ground, a troll construction worker yelling at them that the bridge is out of order, and a Hedge maze complete with a Minotaur Gardener they passed on the way out.

Now I had been intending to use these sphinxes for a while and was happy I could work them into this adventure. They would be the final obstacle before the party reached the house and the session would end. However at the last second I realized I hadn't picked names for them! So I borrowed the names of a mother/daughter duo from a She-Ra fanfiction I'm currently obsessed with. So the Mama is now Kitt and the Baby is Isha.

I will quote parts of the Discord chat directly.

There seems to only be one more gate between you and the main house. You just need to go past that large catlike statute and you'll be at the front door. ...Wait a second. Statues don't usually breathe do they. Kobold Wizard: "NNNOPE!"

From there I basically added the panels into the chat one at a time. At the reveal of shy baby sphinx Isha, the players were delighted and the characters immediately decided that 1. She was adorable, and 2. they were going to encourage the little darling to ask her riddle and hype her up as much as possible.

Paladin: "Good riddle, little one." Leonine Barbarian: “A dastardly clever one. We were lucky.” Isha perks up. "I did it Mama!" Kitt smiles at her daughter. "Yes you did. Now let's let the nice people pass."

i was made fun of enough times by adults, by peers, for liking something and wanting to share it that i just. didn’t. anymore. 

dont fucking tease kids for liking things. even if you think its cringe. ESPECIALLY. if you think its cringe. because the way you speak and act towards them when they are sharing themselves with you STICKS and they will think of it years down the line.

“What’s that you’re drawing?”

*panicking* “It’s nothing, I’m sorry, I’ll put it away.”

“No it’s okay, I was just curious about it.”

“It’s nothing. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“You’re not in trouble, I just thought it looked like a character from a video game I like.”

Her face *lit up* the second I gave her the smallest bit of approval. She started asking me if I’d heard of various AUs for Undertale, and I tried to follow along as she explained her favorites. I obviously had to keep an eye on the rest of the class, answering questions and helping with algebra, but each time I passed her desk she had more things to tell me.

When they're white queer male characters, it's their queerness - and fandom embraces that. Any OTHER marginalization, however, becomes an OBSTACLE to ever engaging with them in the first place.

Great dialogue can come from radical emotional honesty. But in most real conversations, people

dodge questions

answer indirectly

lie (badly)

change the subject

crack jokes to avoid serious answers

lie (convincingly)

say half of what they mean

tell the truth but get so anxious/angry/defensive others now think they're lying

If your dialogue feels unnatural, it might be because everyone is saying exactly what they think, or articulating their thoughts too well. Try letting characters hide things instead.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

> realize every screen displays color slightly differently

> realize every camera captures color a little differently

> realize every format and image editor translates color

> realize every printer deposits ink differently

> realize every kind of paper accepts ink differently

> realize colors look completely different under different lighting conditions

> ok I'm going to do everything greyscale now

> black density changes as ink cartridge depletes and depending on viscosity after multiple prints

> "what color white are you using"

From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea: