mystery cycles

Have you ever heard the saying "it takes a village to raise a child?" Well, where I live, most people do not know the name of their next door neighbor. This isolation can cause loneliness, but it is more than that.

Having a community is helping people do jobs they can't, it is lending tools, it is teaching someone to do a job their parents never taught them, and more.

Luckily, there is a solution that is becoming common in co-housing and eco-villages around the world.

So what do they do different? They utilize common areas or community centers, as well as outdoor spaces(such as courtyards or rooftop gardens). While you still have your private home with your own kitchen, you also have these spaces which are open to everyone.

Here are some ideas you might see in these common spaces:

Indoor play area. In some, the retired senior citizens who like to keep busy volunteer to watch children in these areas while parents are at work.

Dining room big enough to fit every person who lives there and guests.

Community Kitchen. People take turns cooking, or they have occasional dinners together.

Private office spaces (for work-from-home workers who still want to be around people).

Tiny libraries.

Outdoor play area.

Outdoor sitting spaces.

Community gardens and/or a greenhouse.

For your solarpunk stories, this actually could come in handy. Having these common areas give you more of a excuse for your characters to interact.

The ONLY WAY to combat the lack of funding in arts education is for professionals to take a few hours a week to share their skills for FREE, to empower and encourage the next generation of artists. THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR. Here’s 200 tutorials:

Now that I’ve seen two separate posts about Motor Crush here and here in the space of a day, I’m taking that as a sign to get off my rump and post about ISOLA, an upcoming comic by the same writer, @brendenfletcher​, and Gotham Academy artist @karlkerschl​.

Using inspiration from Princess Mononoke, the story is about a queen turned into a tiger and the journey she and her Captain of the Guard (and perhaps more) take to return her form. As you can see from the teaser images, the release has moved from Spring 2017 to Summer 2017 and is now slated for Late 2017 so we just gotta wait and make sure there’s demand when it does come out.

Here are some panels from the prologue, which was published at the end of each of the first Motor Crush issues:

Teaser from the comic itself:

Now that the new expansion pack is announced and shit, please make sure if you are going to do fan art of any of the black NPCs and characters that you get their skintone right.

I should not see any whitewashed anything. Please take the time to learn how to color darker skintones if you don’t know how.

And please, if someone shows concern that your art looks whitewashed, don’t get in your feelings. Change it. Become a better artist. Trust me, realizing that you made a mistake and changing it will show people that you can be trusted and that your art will be loved. Getting defensive and being outright racist will me no one is gonna look at your shit. This also goes for current characters as well.

LONG COMIC BOOK RANT INCOMING:

Okay some things need to be said:

1. If you’re going to write a smug thunk-piece about the “failure” of “diversity” in comics, maybe don’t use the cover image of a book that’s had 4 collections on the NYT graphic books bestseller list, won a Hugo and cleaned up at Angouleme. Just because you HOPE it’s on the chopping block, oh Riders of the Brohirrim, doesn’t mean it is.

2. I will tell you exactly why Ms Marvel works: it didn’t set out to be Ms Marvel. We were originally going to pitch it as a 10 issue limited series. I had a 3 issue exit strategy because I assumed we were going to get canned. There was no “diversity initiative” anywhere–getting that thing made at all was a struggle. It was a given that any character without AT LEAST a 20-year history would tank. Everybody, myself included, assumed this series was going to work out the same way.

3. That freed us–by “us” I mean the whole creative team–to tell exactly the story we wanted to tell. We had nothing to lose, nothing to overcome but low expectations. That gave us room to break a lot of rules.

STUFF THAT IS DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN:

1. Unexpected audiences. We are at a point in history when the role of religion is at a tremendous inflection point. What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this. Nobody could have predicted or planned for that. That’s being in the right place at the right time with the right story burning a hole in your pocket. Plenty of other stuff I’ve written and liked has fallen with a huge thud. That’s the norm. Exceptions are great when they happen, but hard to plan.

2. The paradox of low expectations. The bar was set pretty low for Ms Marvel, but because of Ms Marvel’s success, that bar got set much higher for similar books that came later.

STUFF THAT IS ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE:

1. This is a personal opinion, but IMO launching a legacy character by killing off or humiliating the original character sets the legacy character up for failure. Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?

2. Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*

3. Never try to be the next whoever. Be the first and only you. People smell BS a mile away.

4. The direct market and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly.

5. Not for nothing, but there is a direct correlation between the quote unquote “diverse” Big 2 properties that have done well (Luke Cage, Black Panther, Ms Marvel, Batgirl) and properties that have A STRONG SENSE OF PLACE. It’s not “diversity” that draws those elusive untapped audiences, it’s *particularity.* This is a vital distinction nobody seems to make. This goes back to authenticity and realism.

AND FINALLY

Dungeon Master Apps

Dragon + is great for updates to current content, it is a endless well of information that should spark anyone’s creativity. It’s all around a great publication.

RPG Sounds: Fantasy is awesome for atmosphere and an alternative to the YouTube which plays adds, or constantly has you searching for a new song to play.

Trello connects to both your phone and computer and is a great alternative to physical note cards. My favorite for session prep.

Story Cubes always pull me out of writers block. Some of my favorite game moments came from a random roll of these die.

Time Tree my least favorite side of D&D is organizing the best time for everyone to play. This app allows all the players to upload their schedules and makes life so much easier.