Please Do Enjoy The Difficulty

Back to drawing my favorite characters

but then a young lady did a fan design of her for kicks on her blog and da account full of fanart, and valve loved it so much that they bought the character design from her, and they eventually hired her to draw official tf2 comics for them, and now the administrator’s this big developed character through multiple oneoffs and arcs and stories in the canon and the fan is now an inhouse comic artist working ft for valve

And here’s her first official appearance in the comic, made only one year later:

Makani has not only worked on Team Fortress 2 comics, but also Dota 2.

She came up with, and drew a bunch of joke concepts for a Dota hero who had won the latest community vote: “which hero gets the next Arcana item?” (arcanas are expensive, 30 bucks items who radically change the appearance of a hero)

This was one of them. And when I saw it, I decided to turn it into a courier for the game (couriers being creatures that bring items to the players).

Much like the concept itself, I did it as a joke, with Yuri, my workshop partner-in-crime, but it, uh… kind of spiraled out of control, and, long story short, it ended up being actually added into the game for the huge yearly tournament, where it contributed a significant amount of money to its prize pool. 

It even got cosplayed!

But that’s not where the story ends;a plush maker from Oregon noticed the courier, thought it was very cute, and she made a plushie out of it. But she was no mere craftswoman; she was also working as the CFO and accountant of a video game company called Nightdive Studios, and they happened to be looking for an animator.

I have now been working there for a year, on a very badass project (the System Shock 1 remake!), and it’s thanks to Makani’s joke.

it builds itself up like OKAY WE FOUND THESE DEVASTATING RESULTS

and then you go in to look and you find it had a sample size of 40 

and then you’re like okay, what was the fantastic difference between these 40 people when sleeping with and without a dog

and the article is like

THE FINAL CONTESTANT APPROACHES. WE CANNOT LET REIGEN WIN. VOTE SANS TO BREAK THE STREAK.

There this post that goes like “Sees the word I: I did nothing. Fuck off”. But, like if your friend was telling you a story and they went “I saw a dog on the street today.” You’re response wouldn’t be “I did nothing fuck off.” Instead there wouldn’t be a reaction like that, because you understand that you’re friend is telling you a story. When they say “I” they mean themselves and not you. 

That’s the same way it is in fanfic. It’s the narrator telling you a story about what happened to them. Not someone telling you a story about something that happened to you. 

When I first started writing fanfic, back in the mid 1990s (yes! the late twentieth century!) one of the discouraging things about it was that people treated fanfic as if it was disposable. It seemed like what most readers wanted was a constant stream of new content, whereas I tend to produce one big work every 6-12 months. It made me sad that people seemed to think there was no point to re-reading or saving old fic. There is no sell-by date on fiction! It does not get out of order! It can still work even years or decades later!