A Couple Snippets From A Presentation I Gave At School This Past Week On Storyboarding!!

Alright.

Instead of whispered, consider:

murmured

mumbled

muttered

breathed

sighed

hissed

mouthed

uttered

intoned

susurrated

purred

said in an undertone

gasped

hinted

said low

said into someone’s ear

said softly

said under one’s breath

said in hushed tones

insinuated

So I wait.

Places you should add to your little town/city in your fantasy world!!

Post offices. Wild, I know. But give me the unhinged kind. Pingeons and little postal dragons all over the place. You enter. The most disgusting smell fucking assaults your nostrils. You know what it is. Letter in hand, you go up to the counter. The postal worker is just a slightly bigger pigeon. You shed a tear.

PLAYGROUNDS!! Create the most dangerous kinds of playgrounds, the ones suburban moms would TRIP if they ever saw one. Monkey bars that are way too tall, swings that go full circle... The metal slide stays the same, it's already painful enough.

PARKS!! MAKE IT ALIVE!! Show people going on walks, reading beneath trees. C'mon most of them are already hundred years old (And are going to die after that CR 15 creature wrecks the town) anyways!! Show couples and picnics, show a family enjoying the sunday, give me someone picking flowers for their loved ones.

A bakery! Do you know how much these places are underrated? And do you know how much plot potential they have? Every good story starts with food poisoning or granny's recipe! Give me a place your players/readers are going to treat like home and, for once, it's not a tavern or a guild.

Government buildings! Give me a town hall that has a kilometric line in front of it. Give me a registry that is as old as this town. Give me police stations! Give me courtrooms! Make one of your players get arrested and now all of the party has to go through burocracy like a bunch of normal people!

(Who am I kidding? You don't need to make them get arrested. They are going to do that for you.)

Touristic attractions! Give me a full-on statue of the country's leader! Give me museums! Give me streets, ruins and whatnot that attract thousands of tourists everyday! Give me an annoying city guide that tries to get the party's attention everytime!

Magazine stands! Magazines don't exist? Newspaper stands! From the Queen's Journal to the most questionable new piece of Fox's Tailtracker, you have it all! Make your players doubt what's actually happening, sprinkle a little fake news... Or is it fake at all?

...Toy stores. OK HEAR ME OUT. Make magic toys; miniature skyships that actually fly, metal toy dragons that expel fire, little wands that make little light spells, wooden creatures that can move and make noises... Make children happy! And your players too because they will waste their money on these stuff.

Instrument store!! Make your bards happy with special instruments or just weird ones! Give me a battle in one of those that is just filled with funny noises and the worst battle soundtrack ever!!

Not exactly a place but... Cleaning carts!!! Show me people cleaning the streets, picking up the trash, cutting trees!! Make the town look clean!! Give me an old man that is really proud of his work!!!

(or ways to make your players feel even worse when the villain destroys the town later on :) )

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

I needed this drag. Let’s change guys and not look back

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

Hey it's time for Oathbreaker now

Hey everybody it's me Natalie and it's been NaNoWriMo for a hot minute. It kinda snuck up on me this year so I don't think I've talked about what I'm doing this year. Well, you can come see for yourself over at https://www.patreon.com/posts/oathbreaker-ch-1-74022737 where I've posted Chapter One of Oathbreaker, A Crusader's Tale: Of the life and doings of Sir Reynold d'Morwen, Marquis of Eldur.

Oathbreaker is a return to my Nameless Queen universe (for y'all who've been reading along, it deals with events immediately before Brood and then immediately after The Carnival of Carnal Delights) during what can best be described as a highly fictionalized take on the Baltic Crusades. It follows the rather harrowing misadventures of Reynold d'Morwen, a boy from Morwen Vale who took holy orders to escape justice for a terrible crime and now finds himself part of a military order, the Knights of St. Vitus, where he's dragooned into a war of conquest and faith with the vicious and fearless barbarians to the north of his homeland. Thrown into a life wherein every moment of existence is an act of faith and war, Reynold is forced to grow up hard and fast and make some hard decisions about who he is, what he stands for, and what it means to do the right thing.

I'm me, so obviously there's going to be a lot of thud-and-blunder action violence wherein no swash remains unbuckled coupled with lots of queer pining and anticlericalism. Come see all the exciting attractions, such as: How Freydis' battle plan from Carnival worked out. Fantasy Cathars and Fantasy Bogomils. The omnicidal omnisexual cannibals (aka the good guys). Guys making bad decisions that end very badly for everyone involved. Guys who are just being bros with their bros who are definitely guys until it turns out they're girls. Giant spiders. Awkward teenagers in love bumbling into each other. And lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of religious trauma!

You can head on over to https://www.patreon.com/posts/oathbreaker-ch-1-74022737 to read Chapter 1: Four Hares and a Priest along with like . . . a shitload of other stuff for the low low price of $2 American. New chapters every other Wednesday.

Really says something about the dire state of offerings for men interested in sewing their own clothes that even searching things like "interesting men's clothing patterns" brings up articles with links to four or five whole websites that primarily offer admittedly nice but practically identical patterns for making button-ups and work pants and maybe a varsity/bomber jacket if you're lucky.

(Branching out into historical costuming for everyday wear is like your one shot at variation, and even then, the ratio of men's to women's patterns on every website is frustrating to say the least.)

Patternmakers as a trans man I am begging you. Give me a little more to work with here.

INDEX: Sewing, mending, and crafts

General information:

Fabric types

Basic hand sewing stitches

Hand sewing needles

Knitting 101

Embroidery 101

Visible mending

Crafting on the cheap

How to fix sewing machine issues

Yarn types

Clothing fasteners

Circular knitting

So you want to buy a sewing machine? (by Runeberry)

Sewing vocabulary

Introduction to bead embroidery

Embroidery stitches database (by Chanceyknits)

Yarn bowl alternatives

Tutorials:

How to sew buttons

Disability aid tutorials

How to DIY custom patches

Make some pocket extenders for your pants (by Quixiify)

How to darn holes in woven fabrics (by Delicatefury)

How to mend holes in the thigh area of jeans

How to make buttonholes (machine+hand)

How to make pockets

How to use a seam ripper

Three knitting bind-offs

How to sew a zipper

Bias tape 101

How to thread a needle

Interchangeable circular knitting needles

Patching a hole (by Bronzeagecrafts)

Knitted picot edging on button band

Making paper (by Ofmushroomsandmoss)

How to use dye plants (by Toadstoolgardens)

Game sprites and pixel-based crafts

Hand-sewing: how to start and how to finish

Tailoring masculine clothes with Stylish D

Weaving in ends to finish a knitting project

How to mend torn belt loops

How to knit buttonholes

How to bind a neckline with bias tape

How to hem your jeans

How to sew a rolled hem

Two ways to make your shirt bigger

Tailoring terms explained

How to upsize a sweatshirt with front and back panels

How to make bottlecap pins (by Coveredinredpaint)

18th century buttonholes (by Vinceaddams)

(If a link has a Tumblr username in brackets behind it, the link leads to a post I reblogged from someone else instead of a post I wrote myself.)

I've had this little idea in my head for a while now, so I decided to sit down and plot it out.

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be some sort of One-Worksheet-Fits-All situation. This is meant to be a visual representation of some type of story planning you could be doing in order to develop a plot!

Lay down groundwork! (Backstory integral to the beginning of your story.) Build hinges. (Events that hinge on other events and fall down like dominoes) Suspend structures. (Withhold just enough information to make the reader curious, and keep them guessing.)

And hey, is this helps... maybe sit down and write a story! :)