#warpcorps

So after Funko started churning out product like there was no tomorrow, a huge part of how it wrecked the scene was how it was sold. Nowadays, you can go to Target and get you a Pop, but that wasn’t always true- they were originally sold in niche markets, like game stores, indie toy stores, and other places that didn’t really have a mass market. And because they had these licenses- if you look at a lot of the early ones, they were comic book characters, and comic nerds went ape for them- they sold, and sold pretty well, and eventually they just kind of replaced the market for art toys. 

Another of Funko’s biggest advantages was that they’re cheap. No, really, they are. Even though some people will pay a lot for them, the basic funko is cheap and readily available. You can see what you’re getting with the Pops- there’s less of a blind bag/blind box element, and they’re pitched very much as a pop culture thing, not an independent thing. 

Which isn’t necessarily bad. Other companies jumped on the vinyl toy bandwagon, most of them lots bigger than Funko. They just didn’t cut the same design corners, and at least from the perspective of somebody who’s into the indie stuff, that makes a ton of difference. For example, Disney has a line- Vinylmations. Here’s three versions of the same character (my favorite Disney character, incidentally).

Look at the eyes. This is the same character all three times with the same basic eye style- bright yellow with purple eyebrows. But hey, they’re different! Top hat Figment has a focused look and he’s excited (because he’s supposed to be announcing something). Astronaut Figment looks right ahead and is smiling- he’s supposed to look how his Audio-Animatronic looked on the ride. The third Figment, from the Nerds Rock line (I took off his glasses to show off his eyes a bit more) has a more stylized look, less reminiscent of his AA figure/official design- and his eyes are bright and cheerful, because he’s supposed to be, y’know, cute and appealing. You can make licensed characters cute, and you can even do licensed characters in such a way that they’re all recognizably part of the same line- here’s some of the rest of that Nerds Rock line.

Oh dear, I can see why you’d be a little freaked. Are they offering to pay you for it? Or are they just trying to get extra free labor out of you? 

I have in the past had clients do something similar where they’ve approached me for more work, usually because they like the way I work, even if they didn’t like the house I was associated with at the time and wanted to keep me. Or because I told them I’d be leaving a project soon and they expressed a wish to keep working with me outside of our usual contract. But we were never supposed to be anon to each other, and to me this is...kind of creepy that they went so far out of their way to find you. Surely they could have just conveyed to the person they usually talk to that this thing needs done, unless they are trying to get out of paying for it, or it’s something your boss hasn’t agreed to.

34. Cartography

The skies are vast and empty, almost as though specifically crafted to defy exploration.

Humanity sends out probes at increasingly large fractions of the speed of light, hops and skips short distances not even reaching ten lightyears in clumsy, generational crafts, all the while recording where they’ve been, the characteristics of the many suns and planets they’ve visited, their trajectories and positions. Humans evolve into unrecognizability, split and divide into fleets upon fleets, a thousand-thousand different species, scattered into the cosmos like seeds to the wind.

Why they left a long-forgotten Earth becomes unimportant, generations upon generations of astrological recordings convince ever more alien descendants that only the endless pursuit of the universe’s many moving parts, recording the rational mechanics of a material world, lends them purpose. They hop and skip ever farther, their probes scout ever faster, and their map of the cosmos grows.

After many millions of years, two such generational craft intersect, the first such occurrence in all recorded history. An almost religious fervor strikes these two peoples, so unused to coincidence, and the celebrations last an improbable amount of time, measured by a unit so separated from the realities of planetary dwelling as to be unfathomable by their ancestors. But most importantly, the spatial data accumulated by the two vessels is assimilated, compared.

It does not match, in any regard.

They again spend unfathomable stretches of time trying to reconcile these differences, to salvage the purpose of their very existence. Space and time has distorted as they traveled ever faster and farther, has distorted by processesnatural but unknown, planetary orbits have decayed, suns have fallen into singularities. The sciences and methods and language used to record and convey the information has deviated in the millennia since separation such that the objective reality they measure could be identical and neither party would or could ever know. Together, both ships had explored one hundredth of a millionth of the observable universe.

Unlike their ancestors, these post-humans had truly known purpose, had lived a directed and orderly existence that left no room for existentialism. They were Cartographers, their purpose and their being one and the same. Without that, both populations fell to despair and expended all their resources to pour out probes in all directions that would warn other vessels of the cruel truth, exhausting even what was needed to sustain life. They succumbed to a suicide of sorts, a uniquely human act.

Hardison’s favorite days are the ones right after they finish a job, when they’re all riding high but there’s nothing in the way to distract them.

Today, Eliot is down in the kitchen of the brewpub, and he’ll probably stay there all through dinner service, changing up the menu and trying to terrify the servers (except Amy’s in charge of the servers on tonight’s shift and she knows just enough not to be scared of him). Parker’s on the roof of some building somewhere, but she’ll be back for dinner, because Eliot always makes her favorites on the day after a job and she likes eating downstairs.

On the day after a job ends, Hardison always knows where they are, and he always knows that they’re going to be right beside him at the end of a day.

yeah i had two separate writing classes where i had assignments like "subtly follow someone around and listen to their phone conversation then write about what you think they're like outside of that when you get home" or "sit on a bench and write about what you know about someone from their outfit and what they're doing" it was very uncomfortable for most people involved