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Here’s a quick thing I noticed that I haven’t seen anyone comment on yet:

[Image transcript: Kris and Noelle looking at a graffiti drawing of a tree. The text box on screen says “(The room between… There is a room between.)” End image transcript]

[Image transcript: Kris and Susie standing across from Bratty in a Hometown alley. On the brick wall is graffiti of Ice-E’s head and graffiti of Everyman, labeled with his name. End image transcript]

Deltarune now has two instances of cryptic graffiti in the game. Obviously the graffiti itself has been noticed by most players, but what I haven’t seen anyone point out yet is that two of these drawings use the exact same color:

Here they are isolated from their backgrounds and placed side-by-side to better illustrate:

To me this implies that these two graffiti pieces were made by the same person. However, one is in the Cyber dark world and the other is in Hometown. Since we have yet to see a confirmed case of a darkner existing in Hometown without reverting into an object, it’s safe to assume that there’s another lightner who’s going into dark worlds besides the Fun Gang.

This raises a lot of questions, like who this person might be or what purpose this graffiti serves.

So far we’ve only been able to read the tree graffiti, which mentions the “room between.” 

[Image transcript: Kris and Noelle looking at a graffiti drawing of a tree. The text box on screen says “(The room between… There is a room between.)” End image transcript]

If this text is meant to mimic the artist’s speech then it can be inferred that the artist does not speak with any sort of readily-identifiable quirk like all-caps or a special font. 

In Undertale, hand-written messages generally mimic the author’s style of speech:

[Image transcript: Frisk reading a note left by Papyrus. The note, written in all-caps in a papyrus font, reads: “HUMAN!! PLEASE ENJOY THIS SPAGHETTI.” End image transcript]

However, this is not always the case. For example, not all of Sans’ written messages in Undertale follow his speech quirks.

[Image transcript: Frisk reading a note from Sans. The note reads, in all-lowercase sans serif font: “didn’t you just say not to bring it back to my room?” End image transcript]

His note on his sock does mimic his font, writing style, and speech sounds.

[Image transcript: Frisk reading a note, presumably written by Sans, in all lowercase standard font that reads: “the truth is that you got owned, nerd……” End image transcript]

But the note on his treadmill (presumably written by Sans) only mimics his all-lowercase writing style but does not use a sans serif font or his speech sounds when read. 

Given that the identity of Deltarune’s artist is likely an intentional mystery, it’s not surprising that the text on the tree drawing doesn’t reveal much beyond standard font and capitalization, which 95% of the characters use. 

The main thing we can infer from the tree graffiti is that it refers to the tree in Chapter 2 where you find the egg.

[Image transcript: Kris standing behind a tree. The narration says “Well, there is a man here.” End image transcript]

Was this graffiti a warning from the artist? Were they looking for this room themselves? Or could it have been an open invitation from the person inside? After all, the man behind the tree seems like he might be happy to see you.

[Image transcript: Continued from the image above, Kris is still standing behind the tree and the narration says “He might be happy to see you.” End image transcript]

We have seen evidence that the tree man might exist in Hometown as well. If you interacted with the man in Chapter 1 then “a man” will appear in one of the cars outside of the Librarby. 

[Image transcript: Kris is looking inside of a car outside of the library. The narration says “(There is even a man inside this one.)” End image transcript]

This could make the tree man a strong candidate for being the artist, although there are other possibilities.

Besides the tree man, we know that there is the Knight and the “strange someone” giving out Shadow Crystals who’ve interacted with dark worlds. We don’t know if either of these people have directly set foot in a dark world yet or if they merely meddle from the outside. We also don’t know if these are three distinct individuals or if two or more of these roles are being filled by the same character.

Another possibility for the Artist’s identity, potentially overlapping with the above candidates, is Alphys. Not only do we see her standing in this alley in Chapter 1 but the files also refer to this area as “bg_alphysalley”, even in Chapter 2 when Bratty is standing there instead of Alphys:

[Image transcript: A screenshot of UTModTool with the sprite for the Hometown alley background opened. The filename for the background is “bg_alphysalley” End image transcript]

One could also argue that the writing next to each drawing lines up with Alphys having historically bad handwriting, although as far as I know she has no proven history of artistic aptitude.

[Image transcript: Frisk is reading a note from Alphys. The narration says “(It’s hard to read because of the handwriting, but you try your best…)” End image transcript]

(notably, Alphys’ letter in the image above is another example of a written message not using a character’s usual speech sounds when read)

On the other hand, the scribbly graffiti text could simply be a limitation of the pixel art or a way to prevent us from knowing what it says until we read it.

Conveniently, both Alphys and Bratty block our path from being able to walk up and examine the Hometown graffiti text directly. Given that the tree image had a message to read, it’s likely that the Hometown graffiti will also have a message when we get the chance to examine it.

Based on the subjects depicted in each drawing, it could be inferred that Ice-E, Everyman, and the tree man might share some connection or at least be viewed as equally-noteworthy entities/cryptids by the artist.

I could throw out other possibilities of who the artist is, like a runaway Dess, but I would be dipping into pure speculation at that point. We don’t have a lot to go off of here other than that the Artist exists and has almost certainly been to the light and dark worlds before.

ngl this is the funniest procedural thing ive made in a while i saw https://genders.wtf/gauntlet/ and realized that the only way it could be better is if it went forever

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

so you may be wondering: how the hell does a 737 (capacity of roughly 100-120 people) run out of fuel midair? the METRIC SYSTEM, that's how!

up until the early eighties, airplanes would have three people in the cockpit: the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. generally speaking, the pilot's job is to fly the airplane; the first officer's job is to provide support, monitor instruments, and assist (the pilot and FO will swap roles periodically), and the flight engineer's job was to watch over all the fuel gauges, electrical systems, hydraulics, etc., to make sure they were all working properly, as well as taking charge of things like "setting engine power."

however, in the early 1980s -- when this story takes place -- the flight engineer role began to be made obsolete as computers and more advanced systems became capable of doing most of that work. the boeing 737 of this story was one such plane: actually, air canada 143 was quite a new airplane at the time of the accident, and had no flight engineer.

also in the early 1980s? canada was making the switch from the imperial system to metric.

neither of these things is bad in and of themselves. but put together? one of the flight engineer's jobs was to monitor fuel; it hadn't yet been made clear whose job it was now. canada, at the time, was doing refuelling in a convoluted "the fuel is weighed in pounds but put into the plane as liters" system that required Math and Conversion.

let's talk about AIRPLANE FUEL. unlike a car, you don't take your airplane to the station and fill 'er up: fuel has weight, and airplanes care a LOT about weight. way more than you'd imagine. it's the pilot's job to therefore calculate a) how much fuel they need to get from A to B b) how much extra/emergency fuel they need for safety and c) if and when they need to refuel and by how much. is there bad weather in the area? where's the nearest backup airport? if i need Ten Fuels to get to alberta and there's storms in alberta, i need another Two Fuels to circle around and kill time before landing safely, plus another Five Fuels to get to calgary in case alberta is impossible. my airplane is fully loaded, which means it's heavier than usual, so needs another One Fuel for takeoff power. so altogether i need Eighteen Fuels. except i'm in canada in the 1980s so now i need to figure out what that is in liters, and this used to be the flight engineer's job, and idk man. maybe it's 5 liters? that sounds right?

...you see the issue. it isn't that anyone was slacking off, but no one was quite sure what the conversion was, and so instead of giving the soon-to-be Gimli Glider 18 Fuels, they took off in that fucker with nowhere near enough fuel. to make things worse, the plane had a broken fuel gauge, which was a whole other thing and series of comical misunderstandings, but basically it meant that not only was there No Fuel, but the fuel gauges looked something like this:

the very-soon-to-be crashed airplane's day started off normally. they did a little hour long flight from one city to another with no issues. because they knew the fuel gauges were being silly, while on the ground they did a "stick test", which i'm imagining involved a tree branch, basically checking that yep, there was fuel in the tanks, we're good! (in actuality, what it was doing was measuring the weight of the fuel. except, again, they had their maths all backwards, so due to this convoluted conversion process they went "our fuel weighs 5 kilograms, which equals 20 pounds, which equals 18 fuels, which equals 900 liters." just. silly math. i don't want to make these guys out to be idiots: they would obviously have never flown the plane if they had realized their mistake. but the other problem was of course that the process was already convoluted and required multiple conversions; imagine how much worse it would be if, like these pilots, it was a new system you weren't used to!)

so they boarded their passengers and set off from montreal with the intention of flying to edmonton. and that's when things all went terribly wrong.

pictured: the intended and my interpretation of the actual flight.

all this set up leads to the actual flight, which is almost boring in summary: while high up in the sky, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. this is bad. we do not want this to happen. the pilots had no idea what was happening at first, but i mean: it was pretty obvious. there's no fuel. no engines. no power. you're 30,000 feet in the air in a 64 ton machine and gravity is going hey girllll heyyyy.

but the thing is, airplanes are really cool. like, this is what got me so interested in these plane crashes and accidents: airplanes are awesome. because first of all: just because you weigh as much as a building and are thousands and thousands of meters in the air? doesn't mean the airplane just falls. hell no! without power, an airplane will still stay in the air, losing altitude, sure, but gliding fairly safely and manageably. this doesn't mean you're safe, but: when air canada 143 lost all power, it still had time and options. it also had... the RAT.

the Ram Air Turbine, or the RAT, is an amazing fucking guy. if an airplane loses power? a hatch pops open, and a little propeller drops down automatically. he's wind powered, and he will provide just enough backup power to keep the most critical systems online, even without fuel or engines or god. we LOVE the rat. and the rat leapt into action here, providing the pilots with enough basic systems to keep going.

this doesn't mean that air canada is out of the woods. landing without power is not easy! the trick to landing an airplane is doing it at a nice shallow angle and low speed, which involves things like "doing nice steady turns to line up with a runway" (no time, we're falling steadily), "using engines to get our speed right" (what engines), "getting to the correct altitude and speed to touch down gently" (we have NO POWER we can't go "oopsie too low" and pull up and adjust). if a plane loses too much speed, it WILL fall out of the sky (a stall) because the aerodynamics stop working. if it's going too fast, you're not landing, you're diving cockpit first into the ground. without power, you can turn, but turns will reduce speed. you can't level off or go back up. you are Going In A Downward Direction. the trick is figuring out how fast and how far and aiming at a runway.

this is also where ATC comes in! we love air traffic controllers!! air canada called a mayday, and ATC leapt into action. their job becomes to Get Them What They Need. air canada wants to go anywhere in canada? atc will move everyone out of the way and get them any runway in the northern hemisphere. when this happened, air canada 143 was near winnipeg, which was their initial goal: this IS going to be a crash landing, and the nearer they can be to emergency services, the better. however, the first officer was doing Good Math, calculating their rate of decent vs distance flown, and soon realized that even though they could literally see winnipeg from the windows, they just weren't going to make it. they were falling too fast.

enter: GIMLI. the first officer had actually trained there during his air force days; it's a former base with two runways. it wasn't ideal, because ATC had no information on it and it lacked instruments and equipment (normally, for example, airports will have locator beams and so on to help an aircraft lock on to the runway at the Correct Safe Angle), but... better than a field or lake. one of the dangers of this type of no engine landing is actually being non-committal: waiting too long to make a decision, trying to maximize time in the air rather than land. this makes sense! it's probably pretty human instinct! prolong that crash as long as possible! but it's much, much better to simply Commit and Prepare and Go For It. and that's exactly what air canada now did.

they told ATC they're going to gimli and made the turn. the cabin crew was meanwhile preparing the passengers for a crash landing.

the crazy thing about plane crashes is, actually, that they are very survivable. don't get me wrong: they're bad. people die. but the number of worst case scenarios where dozens of people still, somehow, survive? shockingly high. of course, you don't want ANYONE to die. i would be terrified if it was me. but cabin crew had to know it would probably be... well, not okay. but that if they got everyone prepared and braced, people were going to make it out. people were going to survive this. possibly most of them. possibly all of them.

as the plane approached gimli, problem #87 came up: they were still too fucking fast. they're gliding down! they can't stop! normally, a plane would simply slow down with flaps, or maybe do a couple of big circles before reorienting themselves towards the runway to lose some speed and altitude, but they don't have time -- or altitude. and that's where the theme song KICKS IN

here are reasons you DO NOT DRIFT airplanes, by the way. it can fuck up your engines: engines work in part by taking IN air, so flying at a Drifting Angle means that's all wrong. the aerodynamics are wrong. you're losing speed VERY fast. you can get OUT of the drift, but now your engines are fucked. on the other hand, this plane effectively HAS no engines, but... there's a reason people don't drift planes, okay.

another plot twist: gimli air force base was no more. the runways were still there... but it had been turned into a drag strip, ironically enough. and it was family day! picture this. you're a nice canadian racing fan in 1983, at the strip with your family, cooking hotdogs and poutine on a grill. and a fucking 737 APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in front of you. because that is exactly what happened. there were KIDS. on BIKES. with a PLANE HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS THEM. in the mayday episode, the kids tried to outrace the plane in a panic: in the pilot's telling, the kids simply froze in fear.

by the time the pilots realized the runway was occupied, it was way too late to turn back. they landed. in a twist of bad luck that turned into good: without power, they had to manually release their landing gear.... and the nose gear didn't lock. this turned out to be a weirdly good thing: without nose gear, the plane's nose hit the runway and acted as one hell of a brake in ITSELF, grinding on the asphalt as the plane barreled down at high speed. the pilot also intentionally steered the plane into the rail in the middle of the runway, trying to slow the plane even more. and... it worked! the plane came to a stop. everyone was fine. even the kids on bikes.

all this friction caused a small fire in the nose, and so the pilots called for an immediate evacuation to be safe. this caused a bit of an issue: because the nose was on the ground, the butt of the plane was higher than usual, and the back slides were basically just vertical drops. a couple people got mildly hurt using them, as you'd expect.

meanwhile, the drag strip folks were rushing over with fire extinguishers and the like, and the small fire was easily contained (note: do not fuck with burning airplanes. this one had no fuel so COULD be contained). by the time ATC got emergency services to gimli, everyone was safe, ankles were being iced, and presumably everyone was eating hot dogs.

the airplane itself had some minor damage (from when the nose acted as a brake), but was largely intact: it was patched up, refuelled, and took off from gimli a while later, where it flew for another 20 years before retiring of old age.

and that is the story of the Gimli Glider: that time a pilot drifted his plane so hard that he saved the lives of everyone on his plane.

all 69 of them 😎

This is "The Most Tumblr Punchline" in action, only I didn't realize there was something to look up.

Now that I do?

Follow for recipes

take this test (https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/), then come back here:

it doesnt have to be a good score, you dont have to take it multiple times, you dont have to get on a good screen, etcetera. just gimme your score please this is my final project grade :)

Disclaimer: this time last week I did not know a goddamn thing about Vampire: the Masquerade, and I would be thrilled for someone with more grounding in the system to weigh in! However, as a firm believer in the fundamental eroticism of game mechanics, I have been speedrunning all the character building info I can find, and I think the amount of information I'm able to share is more than none! 

Second Disclaimer: we all know these motherfuckers are not above outright lying on their public-facing character cards -- Van Chapman's secret warlock level says what -- and I am very nearly expecting someone to turn out to have, say, a dark secret that hasn't been disclosed yet.

Sources: Paradox Wikis, White Wolf Wiki, GhoulApp -- I have particularly been having a LOT of fun with GhoulApp and I really recommend it for getting a ground-up sense of how character creation works! -- and several friends who played in college.

The first thing to note is that all these characters, with the notable exception of LaVonte, are absolutely stacked with merits and discipline powers; this was explained in the second Adventuring Party when Lou mentioned that Brennan had given them a fairly high amount of XP to spend in character creation. (V:tM doesn't level in quite the same way as DND or DND-alikes; the XP you earn are basically a currency you can spend on buying upgrades for your character, which are priced according to their desirability. I actually really love this system!) 

We also learned from that Adventuring Party that they're earning 2 XP per session and Lou noted that he didn't spend any of his in character creation and now has 19, so they had 15 to begin with. I'm absolutely not going to go through and confirm step by step that everyone's XP expenditure adds up, because we're not seeing the entire character sheet and I don't know what Brennan homebrewed or allowed bending of the rules for, but 15 XP is a reasonably high budget. Which makes sense, because these characters are really on their own in Purpee -- if they run into something they're not equipped for, they have basically no chance of getting useful help with it -- and Brennan doesn't like to keep players trapped at punitively low levels for longer than it takes to make a point.

ALL THAT BEING SAID! Breakdowns below the cut. This one got LONG.

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

And then the school gets attacked and he turns into Phantom and back again.