LMAO so, recently someone tried to SCAM me, so i'll show you what happened and the telltales of it being a scam.
This one is quite obvious but i know people who are just starting their artist careers and might not have experiece.
Follow the thread:
🚩#1: They pick your most famous/Popular art as reference. They don't know what you actually sell.
🚩#2: They will pick a random popular character. They're not roleplayers or anything. They're not here for the art in any level
You ask me, what are the odds they really like Goku? Oh, well, you'll see. At this point i check their profile for anythign that might indicate it, but as you'll see you won't have to.
🚩#3: They say they saw my ToS. On it i state i only work with paypal and google forms.
🚩#4: Random issue with payment method. They might have a real problem with it, but see; they'll never ever accept any other payment method, such as Zelle, CashApp, Payoneer, Ko-fi, etc.
I already knew this drill so, let's continue.
🚩#5: I love playing dumb lmao. Anyway, this scam revolves on them either sending you "too much money" and asking it back or something like it. I won't be following through because i know it'll be annoying.
BE ADAMANT WITH YOUR METHODS. Do NOT EVER bend them for randos.
🚩#6: They're so ready with the info on how the payment works it's fucking funny.
The reason I PERSONALLY use PayPal INVOICES (no any other payment within paypal) is that they're safe for both me and my client. My rules are stated clearly.
MAKE A ToS I BEG YOU YOUNG ARTIST
🚩#7: They're not even a good scammer lmao they REFUSE to go on my PROFILE to get a link or read anything.
I use Forms because it collects the client requests and it's easier for me to read it all in one place. It ALSO makes scammers bored.
🚩#8: They're so disinterested on the art they don't care for posing, vibes, colors, nothing. Again, they're NOT here for art. That's hilarious.
🚩#8: Same as above. They don't care for posing or anything.
On my art they link me, i have a vampire almost staking himself in a state of euphoria.
IMAGINE VAMPIRE GOKU STAKING HIMSELF THAT'S SO FUCKIGN FUNNY MY BRO, THINK YOUR SCAM THROUGH MAYBE
🚩#9: They will price your own work for you. And they'll overshot what we, smaller artists, charge for it.
They'll overshot by a lot.
They want you to be impressed and showing "generosity" usually gets people who need monay into risky situations. That's just plain cruel.
🚩#9: Same as above. Over generosity and eagerness to pay.
They're not even with the sketch, this haven't been an hour, they don't have any work form me but OH GOD they're SO READY to pay you NEED TO KNOW they WANTS TO PAY YOU SO BAD
Lmao yeah it's working out ❤️
THIS ONE IS JUST HILARIOUS BRO I CAN'T EVEN.
ANYWAY let's continue
🚩#10: They don't know me. They don't follow me. They broke every rule on my ToS. They're making me go through a payment method i am unfamiliar and don't use.
They don't care for my process. They're not interested on my sketch.
BE. ADAMANT. ABOUT. YOUR. RULES. AND. PROCESS.
Now, for the beautiful closure of this:
Have a ToS. Don't bend the rules for randos.
Use Invoices. Be sure you're safe.
Use forms if you'd like. Requests through DM and Discord ARE COMMON FOR OTHER ARTISTS. I personally don't like it, i have ADHD.
Being an artist on an online space is dangerous. If you need help, poke an artist you know, see how they operate and if it fits you. Most of them would help you.
I’ve been getting a lot of questions that boil down to “I don’t like X, could you stop doing X?” or “Okay X exists, but I don’t like it, can you do less of X?”, and I don’t think I’ve been particularly empathetic, so I thought I’d share a story where I was the one wanting less of X.
My background is fiction writing. I did a lot of playwriting and short story writing growing up, and then in college got into TV writing and film writing. I care a lot about individual card flavor making sense.
When I started playing Magic, the nails on the chalkboard for me was Walls. Creatures should be creatures. They didn’t all have to be sapient, but at least sentient, or, at bare minimum, alive. I could handle Living Wall or a Plant that was a Wall, but things like Wall of Stone really threw me for a loop.
It was so contextually silly that there was even flavor text in Fallen Empires making fun of it. (“Ever see a wall drop dead of fright, kid?. It ain’t pretty.”)
I’m a Johnny, so I did build a few wall decks. I got the mechanical joy of attacking with things that couldn’t normally attack, but boy did the flavor just irk me.
Unlike most of you, I got into a position where I could do something about it. I was one of the people who pushed to make the defender keyword. Then, with the help of Brady Dommermuth, I got rid of Walls. For several years, we stopped making creatures with the Wall creature type.
But as time rolled on, I kept getting requests from players for more Walls. The very thing I disliked about them, the incongruity, was something that made them charming to a host of players.
When R&D first starting talking about Walls returning, I initially fought against it. Magic felt better to be without them in it.
What turned me around was Demons, of all things. In early Magic, we took away Demons because there was this fear that it would turn away too many players. It became clear though that the majority of the players liked Demons, and that we were letting a small minority remove something from the game that a majority enjoyed.
So, we brought them back. If we did that with Demons, why not Walls? The only difference was I personally didn’t like Walls. Didn’t the philosophy for including one apply to the other?
These issues, Demons and Walls and several others, helped us form a philosophy of inclusion over exclusion. Assuming it didn’t cause direct harm to certain players (things like harmful stereotypes), we should let players have access to the things that made Magic enjoyable to them.
With time I came to realize that making other people happy was a net benefit to me. I love Magic. I want others to love it too. The more happy players, the bigger the community, and the bigger the audience. That means it’s easier to find people to play with and the game could expand out and do even more things.
I came to see Walls as a good thing, not because it made me happier in a vacuum, but it made the Magic audience net happier.
That’s where my answers are coming from. Magic is too broad to not occasionally do something that any one player might prefer not to do. That’s where the customizability comes in, and even more importantly, that’s where the empathy comes in.
If something is net negative to you, take a step back, and see if it’s net positive for the audience as a whole. Does its inclusion make others happy? Does it allow someone else to fall in love with Magic? Is it doing good even if the good gained isn’t specifically for you?
I went through that exact process with Walls, and my shift in perspective made Magic even more enjoyable for me because I could see how it improved Magic for others.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do with my answers. Not neglect acknowledging that whatever you’re upset about isn’t impacting you negatively. It is. I get that. It makes Magic something less for you personally.
I’m just asking you to think about the thing you love most in the game. Some one dislikes that thing. Magic would be better for them if we removed it. But Magic is better for you and them if we include both things rather than take them both away.
Inclusion over exclusion.
Let the game have all the things people enjoy, and each person individually leans into what they enjoy and learns to deal with what they don’t. That’s the recipe for making the most players the happiest, and making Magic the best game it can be.
I had always wanted to build a custom draft environment. To play with friends, to maybe play at game stores, cons, and maybe, if I was lucky, with some of the designers who make the game that gave me so much.
But whatever world concepts I had, Wizards executed their own version. Arranging playtests was hard enough. It would be impossible for a set with the same theme as one Wizards had already made and that my friends had already played. What I needed was something Wizards wouldn’t do, something that I could grind away without fear of duplication.
So I decided to make a multiplayer set.
Along came Conspiracy.
Mechanical hooks wouldn’t work. If I'm to make a set, it can’t be something Wizards wouldn’t do, or haven’t done, but rather, something they can’t do. Something they aren’t allowed to do.
Other intellectual properties.
Not wanting to waste a lot time in printing cards and roping in friends to play, my primary tool for playtesting was solitaire using existing cards, mentally replacing keywords with my new mechanics. For example, if I had an evasion mechanic to test, I’d just tell myself “all the flying creatures have my evasion mechanic instead of flying”. I’d find an analogue, counters for counters, tokens for tokens, I’d grab cards from other games with icons and say, “this icon represents this mechanic”. Whatever I could do to make it easy to remember while piloting two decks against each other by myself.
In 2019, I went to a Magic event in the London Excel and met Mark Rosewater and Aaron Forsythe. I went just to say “hi” and “thank you” but the queue to meet them was for spellslinging: you were supposed to play Magic with them. I didn’t bring a deck. I didn’t bring anything. I just wanted a moment. But Mark kindly sat me down to play pack wars with him. I got back in the queue and waited for Aaron Forsythe to be free. Again, I just wanted to say thank you and not take up his time. But a man behind me said, “I have my silver-bordered cube” and he gave us a random pile of cards each, and I played a 1v1 against Aaron. This experience is my most cherished M:tG memory.
Leaving with a beaming smile, it brought back all the work I’d done on my custom sets with the dream I’d had of sharing my sets with them. I considered the logistics: my idea of skinning other properties into M:tG meant I’d have easy access to a consistent resource for card images but the real issue was still printing prototypes.
The pandemic began. In the tumult, I discovered Tabletop Simulator. I could make my own cards, port them into simulator, and play online because everyone was in lockdown. For the first time, it felt like I could actually do this.
Gathering my many notes, I began blocking out the logistics of a Magic set, considering the as-fan, collation, sheets, and so on, I mapped out a half dozen sets (each with their own three-letter codename). One of which was The Lord of the Rings. I found friends to playtest with and I can only thank Triske, Coop, Jonathan, Lawrence, Pat, and Zefferal for their time.
I quickly understood why Mark Rosewater loves his job: every set posed a unique challenge and creative puzzle. I loved it.
And then... Adventures in the Forgotten Realms came out.
“This is fine” said I, sipping tea amidst the flames. “Wizards owns that IP, it’s not them licensing another IP. Which would be preposterous. Impossible. No, no. This is fine.”
Announcing… Universes Beyond. The Lord of the Rings.
I looked at my work, defeated. If I am generous with myself, perhaps my sets had made the progress in several years what a team at Wizards makes in several weeks. Were I ever to get my set into a stable, draftable form, the novelty would be long gone.
So I gave up.
But as the articles for their many Universes Beyond and Dungeons & Dragons set came out, I noticed that their design process was what I had been doing in my sets for years. Sad to say, but a bitter sense of rejection lingered. A feeling I wasn’t justified in having, but it's there. That pit in the stomach of how I wasted my time, and my friends’ times, on a sunk cost fallacy. I stopped reading articles. Magic design felt like a party I was unwelcome at. I still haven’t even read or watched any Lord of the Rings release videos or looked through the set. I've seen friends talk about some individual cards on twitter, but that’s all.
What I saw of Wizards' wasn’t like what I made. Though I freely accept that my work remains too raw and untested to be seriously considered as a 'set', I'd gone down a fun design avenue that Wizards didn’t. My work here is personal to me, but I'll share it all the same.
Here’s the framework for my custom set of The Lord of Rings.
When is "Action: The Art of Excitement" scheduled for release?
No idea. Most likely it will release in some form next year. I’m not involved with the publication process. It’s a rather a sore spot for me. I believe my name will still be on the book.
Sorry for the late reply, I have no idea when this was asked, as for some reason Tumblr never notified me of anything in my inbox.
Shouldn't Dak Fayden (greatestthiefinthemultiverse) be the Star Lord stand in?
He is! :PThe last panel is (from left to right): Dack Fayden (Star-Lord), Ajani (Groot), Tamiyo (Gamorra), Narset (Mantis), Daretti (Rocket) and Angrath (Drax).
I guess my drawing skills didn’t make that clear, but if you check it out, it’s the same shoulder pad. :)
Hi, what is the difference between setpiece and supense scene? What is the difference between Action and Actionthriller? Is an Actionthriller a subgenre of Action, of Thriller, or both, something in between? Thanks
Oh hello! I had no idea someone asked me a question. Sorry otherwise I would’ve responded sooner.
The difference between suspense and set-pieces is: suspense is when we know as much as the characters, as opposed to mystery (we know less) or dramatic irony (we know more). A set-piece is when you take kinetic activity and raise it to spectacle and choreography. A set piece can be done with suspense, mystery or dramatic irony.
The Action Thriller is a subgenre of Action where everyone is running out of time. It’s not anything to do with the Thriller genre. We use the same name because “thriller” is a term often used to refer to Thrillers and certain kinds of Action and I think it’s better to use names people already know than to try to make up new ones.
I did a ten-page silly comic trailer thing. Enjoy.
Basically, when I realised that Elspeth is Cap, and that the Story Circle is the Guardians of the Galaxy, I committed to this enormous time sink and I regret nothing.
SHE SURE IS because she is literally finishing up a shed there, look, you can see the last of it clinging to her tail
but she’s already dressed again, after peeling off the skin that would previously have been under that armor
the only logical conclusion here is that she wanted a picture of herself at her SHINIEST and PRETTIEST and hurried to get dressed once enough of her fresh and shiny new skin was uncovered
I bet her bestie took the picture and has been eagerly waiting with the magical fantasy camera for like, hours
“oh my GOD T’sissra your scales are SO VIBRANT this picture is going to be AMAZING”
