Brain Farts and Finger Twitches

This is an art/writing blog. Expect artwork ranging from the serious to the silly, and writing ranging from drabbles to longfics. See the Writings link for writings. Artwork will be tagged by subject matter. Anything NSFW or potentially triggering will be tagged as such.

[cortex-reaver]

Any idea where and when we’ll be able to read your System Shock fanfic?

At this point, here is the only place I have it. I haven't been writing additions to it for a very long time. Perhaps after the remake releases, I'll revisit it and try to finish it off. :)

[cortex-reaver]

Do you have any other places we can find your work? Specifically your nsfw system shock stuff?

Sorry, no. I keep NSFW on a pretty tight lockdown. And right now it’s just not my thing. Thanks for asking, though.

[cortex-reaver]

i asked back in uhh 2019 and kinda wanna ask again: any update on the shodan/reader stuff getting uploaded to ao3 or something?

Probably not anytime soon. I’m not full of spoons these days, and I’m exploring other interests right now. Someday.

[cortex-reaver]

did the shodan nsfw blog get poofed by tumblr's thing back in december? i tried finding it a while back (i liked reading the stories) and couldnt

I poofed it myself in advance, cause I wasn’t interested in dealing with 90% of it getting flagged and blocked from view. [glares at Tumblr and mouths ‘inseeeeects’ in staff’s general direction]

There’s a possibility down the road of getting those stories up on AO3. But I wanna get my System Shock fic ready to post there - it’s a 3/4 finished longfic, and it only makes sense to drop one there that’s most of the way done. I’ve been refining the earlier chapters to better fit the later ones and plug some plotholes that look a lot more glaring 60 chapters later, soooo.

And then I’ll probably go for the NSFW stuff, cause they have a tag system for that.

or I might set up a Pillowfort for that instead. Dunno just yet.

Just right now I’m puttering along doing my own thing.

[cortex-reaver]

Hadn’t arted in ages, and felt the itch.

A mellow, primeval world orbiting young binary stars. This world resembles Mars before it lost most of its atmosphere and water in the distant past; scientists from Earth study this system extensively for clues to what happened.

The planet’s rotation is still pretty fast, so the day-night cycle is rather quick. People can take in an entire sunrise in minutes rather than half an hour or longer on other planets. Life-forms are fairly sparse and limited to the oceans’ biospheres at this time, save for a couple of mosses and fungi growing at the shores.

As such, this planet has rough edges that a lot of people find charming. Settlements are growing quickly despite scientists’ concerns that humans adding their load to the ecosystem may upset the fragile brink this world’s new life is teetering on before exploding across its surface.

Fortunately, most of the colonists are a responsible lot who are already keeping their footprint on this world low. 

[cortex-reaver]

SHODAN. Doing the Cher thing. With Elite Cyborg backup dancers, Edward Diego on drums, a Cyborg Assassin on a sweet keytar, a Cyborg Drone on guitar, and a hopper doing pyrotechnic displays.

She may or may not be singing Metallica’s Spit Out the Bone.

[cortex-reaver]

This one has sat on my computer being poked at off-and-on for a while. Finally, I’m calling it done, and washing my hands of anything else with it.

Following the premise that hot high-energy blue stars’ habitable zones would be much further away than Sun-type stars, I wanted to do a planet with such suns that were basically really bright pinpoints in its sky. As a result, the sky would have a really bright area, and the rest of it would be much darker - like the way skies in Arizona can be when they’re super-clear.

So!

This is a tropical water-world sharing a common gravitational center with a large rocky planetoid that behaves like Earth’s Moon. The tides here are strong and since this planet has larger oceans than Earth, they affect the planet more so. Volcanism is more frequent, creating islands out of the ocean that dot the planet like freckles.

It’s a popular place for vacationers looking for something completely different from the usual tropical jungle world, and settlers genetically modified for watery environments. This planet has a thriving network of underwater cities, and many gorgeous islands full of unique wildlife for those adventuring above-ground.

Everyone is advised to layer on the sunblock - even though the planet has a healthy ozone layer, those high-intensity blue rays can cause intense sunburns in a very short time!

[cortex-reaver]

Added more wreckage and blood to enhance the mood.

[cortex-reaver]

SHODAN and the Hacker in a glare-off. Punctuated by blood, smoke, cracked glass, and two middle fingers.

[cortex-reaver]

I like to think the Hacker’s smiley shirt was more of an electronic emoji display worn as a shirt....and that SHODAN could hack it to annoy the ever-living crap out of him.

[cortex-reaver]

Round 2. Because Round 1 didn’t cover all of her various moods.

There will probably be more in the future.

[cortex-reaver]

A mellow desert world orbiting binary dwarf stars. Since the stars are fairly cool for stellar objects, their habitable zone is very close. As a result this planet’s view of its suns is spectacular, and makes them look like huge stars!

Postcards from this world are quite popular for these sunsets. All the system’s planets orbit in a circumbinary path around the two suns, and due to gravitational forces when they formed, they have very slow rotational periods.

Thus, days are three times as long as on Earth! Sunrises and sunsets take several hours. For photographers who like to take pictures of sunspots and flares, it’s paradise.

[cortex-reaver]

This was originally going to be some rocky-yet-habitable planet with distant blue suns, but somehow in the middle of doing all the mountains it turned into an ice planet.

I was getting nagged by the idea that a habitable planet around a hot bright star (like a blue-white one) would have to be far enough away that the star becomes just a really bright dot in its sky. Wheras planets around red dwarfs can come up pretty close and said stars look like red giants in their skies. So I wanted to experiment with a blue-sun planet using this exact effect.

Especially happy with the clouds and all the handpainting over the rock texture brushes I used. Ughh, I didn’t think it’d come out as well as it did after not having really arted like this in...a month and a half?

So!

A barely habitable ice world orbiting two blue-white stars on a circumbinary path. It sits just barely on the outer edge of the habitable zone, and is constantly ripped with worldwide coriolis-fueled ice storms caused by its surprisingly short rotational cycle. The cloudscapes and snowscapes are always spectacular here, and thrill-seekers get more than their fair share of adventures to tell their friends when they get back to their homeworlds.

[cortex-reaver]

What it says on the tin.

I saw an emoji expressions challenge, and couldn’t get the idea of SHODAN making some of those faces out of my head. So here we are.

[cortex-reaver]

Pop Team Epic in my style.

[cortex-reaver]

Inspired by that shitpost the other night about an immortal dog. I thought of SHODAN when I read it, and then had to draw it. :D

[cortex-reaver]

Okay, so.

I was aiming for the atmospheric blending of gold/orange light from the cooler, closer star, and the yellower/white light of the brighter and more distant star. I have this purple glass ball at home, and sometimes I look through it and the world feels tinted like there were two suns - one reddish-orange and tinting everything orangey, and one yellow-white whose scattered bluer light tinted everything purple on top of that.

So I wanted to try drawing that kind of sky. This is basically me trying to blend the light of both suns in a way that was convincing but also artistic. Probably the orange star needed to be surrounded by oranger or whiter sky. Probably. But! I like how this turned out.

So, the story-blurb:

This is a mellow Earthlike world orbiting a cooler dimmer star, probably like TRAPPIST-1 or Proxima Centauri, which orbits a Sun-like star at probably Jupiter’s distance. The combined light and heat of both stars is such that the planet is still comfortable and habitable for humans. It’s a bit warmer overall than Earth, but has a thick enough atmosphere that any accumulated heat is evenly distributed around the planet, keeping it from getting too cold at night.