uuhhhh hhh hh

It still surprises me at how few people have seen Freak of the Week, and I love sharing it with friends because of the inevitable, “How the hell have I never seen this?” look of awe drawn out on their face.

And man, it really is gorgeous.

Directed by Juanjo Guarnido, it took the team about a year of hard work to hammer out this bloody masterpiece (which you can learn about in his video here) using a combination of 3D animation with the power of college interns  skill of a team of artists to painstakingly re-draw the 3D elements they wanted in 2D frame-by-frame, not to mention the post processing and… everything else.

 Even though it came out in 2014, it doesn’t seem to have ever garnered the attention it truly deserves.

I really wanna drive this point home, so to give you an idea, Ghost by Mystery Skulls, animated by MysteryBen27 has 18,147,263 views.   Freak of the Week has only 2,271,121 views at the time I’m writing this.  That’s fucking depressing for something so … phenomenal.  I want more of this, and hell, maybe you do too.  But we’re not going to see anymore simply because the right people haven’t seen it.  In fact, it failed to reach a respectable level of Internet Popularity®, Juanjo himself even described it in the comments section as having ruined him because of how little attention it got.  

So if you’re reading this and you’ve got some connections with a TV network or something, consider pulling some strings to get this video spoon-fed to the masses, because people ought to see this.  I’m sure Juanjo would be all too happy to oblige.  And hell, if you wanna buy the art book, you can get the link here for about $50.

Now, maybe you recognize the former Disney animator Juanjo Guarnido for his other work: Blacksad.

Which is a comic set in the late 1950′s about a hardboiled private investigator published originally by Dark Horse Comics that does… y’know, the …

… noir investigator …

… aloof ladies man…

… badass …

… detective story thing.

That I haven’t yet read but I TOTALLY NEED TO.  

Look,

I guess I’m bringing up Freak of the Week because I was reading the comment section and, man, it kinda got me down.  

Apparently not.

So, set aside all the speculation about what kind of scary aliens humans would be from the perspective of other species. Let’s talk fantasy for a second.

Everyone knows half elves, and we know the other half is human but we don’t call them half humans. Why? Because it’s assumed all half breeds are part human, since humans will fuck anything.

See it’s not just elves. In D&D, for example, there are half orcs, half angels, half demons, half elementals, half spirit-things, half snakes… humans are out there fucking whatever pops a tentacle through to the material plane.

And of course I’m not saying this is never consentual so the other races must have people that are dtf with humans but I don’t think they’re known for it. I think humans are the ones that initiate pretty much every time.

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

With the series finishing up with a total of 283 episodes, I decided to go through the seasons and make a list of all the episodes that are significant to either the story or have call backs throughout the series. If you find I’m missing an episode you think has importance, please use the google docs link down below to suggest what should be added and I’ll add it ASAP.

Google Docs Link

Season 1

1.01 Slumber Party Panic

1.02 Trouble in Lumpy Space

1.03 Prisoners of Love

1.04 Tree Trunks

1.05 The Enchiridion!

1.07 Ricardio the Heart Guy

1.09 My Two Favorite People

1.10 Memories of Boom Boom Mountain

1.12 Evicted!

1.15 What Is Life?

1.16 Ocean of Fear

1.18 Dungeon

1.20 Freak City

1.22 Henchman

1.25 His Hero

Season 2

2.01 It Came from the Nightosphere

2.08 Crystals Have Power

2.10 To Cut a Woman’s Hair

2.12 Her Parents

2.17 Death in Bloom

2.18 Susan Strong

2.24 Mortal Folly

2.25 Mortal Recoil

Season 3

3.03 Memory of a Memory

3.05 Too Young

3.09 Fionna and Cake

3.10 What Was Missing

3.13 From Bad to Worse

3.14 Beautopia

3.15 No One Can Hear You

3.19/3.20 Holly Jolly Secrets

3.25 Dad’s Dungeon

3.26 Incendium

Season 4

4.01 Hot to the Touch

4.02 Five Short Graybles

4.04 Dream of Love

4.05 Return to the Nightosphere

4.06 Daddy’s Little Monster

4.10 Goliad

4.15 Sons of Mars

4.16 Burning Low

4.19 Lady & Peebles

4.20 You Made Me

4.22 Ignition Point

4.25 I Remember You

4.26 The Lich

Season 5

5.01 Finn the Human

5.02 Jake the Dog

5.05 All the Little People

5.06 Jake the Dad

5.09 All Your Fault

5.11 Bad Little Boy

5.12 Vault of Bones

5.14 Simon & Marcy

5.15 A Glitch Is a Glitch

5.23 One Last Job

5.28 Be More

5.29 Sky Witch

5.31 Too Old

5.32 Earth & Water

5.34 The Vault

5.38 Red Starved

5.44 Apple Wedding

5.45 Blade of Grass

5.47 The Red Throne

5.48 Betty

5.50/5.51 Lemonhope

5.52 Billy’s Bucket List

Season 6

6.01 Wake Up

6.02 Escape from the Citadel

6.04 The Tower

6.06 Breezy

6.12 Ocarina

6.15 Nemesis

6.16 Joshua & Margaret Investigation

6.19 Is That You?

6.22 The Cooler

6.24 Evergreen

6.25 Astral Plane

6.26 Gold Stars

6.27 The Visitor

6.29 Dark Purple

6.33 Jermaine

6.35 Graybles 1000+

6.38 You Forgot Your Floaties

6.41 On the Lam

6.42 Hot Diggity Doom

6.43 The Comet

Season 7

7.01 Bonnie & Neddy

7.02 Varmints

7.06-7.13 Stakes Mini-Series

7.23 Crossover

7.25 Flute Spell

Season 8

8.01 Broke His Crown

8.05 I Am a Sword

8.06 Bun Bun

8.07 Normal Man

8.08 Elemental

8.09 Five Short Tables

8.10 The Music Hole

8.12 Preboot

8.13 Reboot

8.14 Two Swords

8.15 Do No Harm

8.20-8.27 Islands Mini-Series

Season 9

9.01 Orb

9.02-9.09 Elements Mini-Series

9.10 Abstract

9.11 Ketchup

9.14 Three Buckets

Season 10

10.01 The Wild Hunt

10.04 Bonnibel Bubblegum

10.05 Seventeen

10.07 Marcy & Hunson

10.08 The First Investigation

10.10 Jake the Starchild

10.11 Temple of Mars

10.12 Gumbaldia

Day 8: Element

October Gold   -    Franklin Carmichael, 1922.

Canadian, 1890-1945

Like I run a D&D blog. I understand that D&D is the most well-known and popular RPG in the world. But a lot of the time I see people going like “Hey I want to run a D&D campaign and throw out all the D&Disms and here’s all the notes I have for running a campaign about courtly romance and chivalry in a historical setting” and I’m just like STOP YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN THIS USING D&D

There’s a sort of a mistaken assumption that because D&D is the biggest game on the market and that it’s fantasy that it should be the go-to fantasy game but look it’s not D&D isn’t a generic fantasy game it’s a very specific kind of fantasy all of its own, one that steals liberally from swords & sorcery and high fantasy and adds fucking extradimensional cube robots for good measure

So next time you’re thinking about a fantasy campaign in a decidedly non-D&Dish setting consider instead of jamming the square peg that is D&D into a round hole trying to find a system that actually supports what you’re trying to do

All right then. I’ve been meaning to dust off my own D&D sideblog for a while, so here we go with providing some examples. I’m limiting this specifically to other types of fantasy outside of the standard high fantasy and sword & sorcery millieu.

Courtly Romance and Chivalry

There are a number of options for this, and they range from standard secondary world fantasy to more historical and mythological settings. My list here shouldn’t be treated as fully extensive.

Blue Rose - based on the romantic fantasy subgenre, specifically as seen in the works of Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. A lot of courtly drama and intrigue and swashbuckling, based in a fictional world.

Pendragon - naturally based off of Arthurian mythology, and having a lot of stuff given over to the court of Camelot and the chivalric adventures of the various knights. The same company also has a kickstarter for a spin-off called Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne that might be worth checking out.

Historical Fantasy

This one’s a bit more prominent as historical settings serve as an inspiration for a variety of fantasy worlds and games, and this of course invariably extends to settings that actually use historical settings with a degree of fantasy elements thrown in. Note that I’m going to emphasise Europe here simply due to greater familiarity with games in that millieu, and as a European myself I’m ill-equipped to judge how accurate or respectful games using other settings actually are.

Because of this, feel free to add other examples in reblogs

Chivalry & Sorcery - one of the early tabletop games inspired by D&D, taking a more pseudo-historical approach. It’s based on 12th century France and strives for a degree of historical accuracy and medieval politics.

World of Darkness, Dark Ages (including Vampire and Mage) - while the World of Darkness has earned some negative attention lately (and for good reason), the dark ages RPGs are still an old favourite of mine. Also worth checking out is Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, set during the Renaissance. The Mage stuff has a really cool open-ended magic system worth checking out.

Day 3: Sun/Moon

Day 1: Plant || Day 2: Weather