Past The Town Of Strange

An archive of Ursulav arts, quotes, fan flailings, and other things she may leave lying about. Warning: Contains Wombats

[tkingfisher]

P.S. The voice actor is doing the audiobook

Pre-order

[tkingfisher]

Popping in to say that What Stalks the Deep, the third Sworn Soldier book, comes out on September 30th! And there’s a snazzy super limited edition box set from Juniper books, if you like that sort of thing!

[tkingfisher]

I have been doodling a lot on my iPad mini these days, after a couple of years of just not feelin’ anything artwise. But I have shamefully neglected to post them to Tumblr! So have an art dump!

It started with a sheep. I was messing around with new watercolor tools and crosshatching tools, thought “that looks kinda like a sheep” and then took out the bits that didn’t look like a sheep.

The noble Aukhound, originally bred to herd migratory seabirds. These majestic, slightly damp creatures are now used extensively in ecological restoration work.

I do this whenever I see a frog.

Then I was just in the mood for weird shadowy cloaked figures.

You know that’s a clove cigarette.

Portrait Of A Creature With A Chicken On Its Head

Just two weird little creatures having tea together.

[tkingfisher]

Was doodling in Procreate and then there was Owl.

[brianadrawsbooks]

I've always been a big Poe fan and a big T. Kingfisher fan, so I was thrilled to find out she's written her own take on The Fall of the House of Usher.

This spooky little book has all the gothic Victorian vibes of the original along with some new sci-fi concepts and a non-binary protagonist. While I loved seeing things from Alex's viewpoint, Maddy was the character who I really wanted to paint. She's a little bit crazy, a little bit dead, and absolutely fantastic.

[dduane]

whats a paladin

(a) One of the twelve greatest knights in the court of Charlemagne.

(b) Any knightly or heroic champion; any determined advocate or defender of a noble cause.

(c) The hero of @tkingfisher's Paladin's Grace.

ETA: see also Ursula Vernon's Paladin Rant.

[tkingfisher]

I have had a WEEK.

First Hound got into some chocolate. Ok, this happens to dogs all the time, it’s not baking chocolate, and I know perfectly well that it is not INSTADEATH. Online calculators by weight are like “Yeah, that’s nothin’.” This dog has eaten rotten toads, hardback books, cigarettes…she is a canine garbage disposal. She has also never been sick a day in her life.

Then she starts eating grass. Except Hound does not know what grass is, so she is just in the garden tearing off Random Leaves. I end up chasing her around going “That’s an elm! That’s sticky germander! That’s a rare Himalayan salvia! What are you DOING?!”

Obviously this happens at one AM. Because of course it does.

Then finally she makes a noise like a murloc having an orgasm and all the plants come back up.

Fine, I think. That’s that. Nature takes its course.

Which just proves that I am, in fact, staggeringly naive. The next morning, Hound is breathing shallowly and lethargic. We drive her to the vet school ER an hour away. We explain about the plants and the chocolate and the murloc noises to a nice young vet with a manbun who looks about fifteen years old. They take Hound back, and discover Hound is having severe arrhythmia. Which is a chocolate toxicity symptom. Except we all agree that the quantity she got hold of absolute should not have done that, but hey, maybe she has developed an unexpected sensitivity. They keep her overnight. I leave a large deposit on my credit card. We drive an hour home.

The next day I come pick her up. A nice vet who actually looks old enough to drink gives me a list of symptoms to watch out for, including extreme lethargy. They give me back some of the deposit. Hound comes home.

The next morning, she is extremely lethargic and furthermore, Not Eating.

In a hound, loss of appetite generally happens several hours after all clinical signs of life are extinguished. I drive her an hour to the ER. A nice vet who appears twelve says her heart is working perfectly fine, and suggests pancreatitis. Let’s do an ultrasound. Err…in a few hours, they’re kind of slammed. I go to a coffee shop and attempt to work.

The ultrasound fails because they can’t see around Hound’s stomach, which is enormously swollen. They do an X-ray. There is something weird in there. Foreign body, it looks like. Not blocking anything, just sitting there. “Foamy mass” is the term being used. It has air bubbles. Chocolate wrapper? Weird mass of leaves? (Oh god, was she eating frog eggs out of the pond again?) The vet decides to induce vomiting to get the prize out of this particular canine Kinder Egg. I sit in the waiting room and attempt to work.

An hour and a half later, the vet comes out and says, in awestruck tones, that they have given Hound two doses of their strongest emetic and she will not vomit. “This dog has an iron stomach!” she says. I explain about the toad and the cigarettes. She asks if they were at the same time. (They were not.) Hound stays overnight. I leave a second, larger deposit on my credit card. I drive an hour home.

The next day, the vet calls me, says “So I wanted to give you an update—oh crap! STAT TRIAGE! I’ll call you back!” and hangs up. Some hours later, she calls me back. No, the foamy thing is still there. Stomach is less swollen, though. They’re still hoping she passes it. By the way, did I know Hound has erhlichiosis? I did not, but at this point, nothing surprises me. Hound stays overnight again.

The next day, Hound is transferred to Internal Medicine. Her protein levels are weird, but she is not retaining fluid. (Yay?) If the weird foamy mass is not gone, they will have to perform surgery tomorrow. I leave a third, even larger deposit over the phone. Hound stays overnight again.

The next day, a new vet, of indeterminate age, but with a strong desire to make sure that I understand every single aspect of every single test begins explaining to me about blood protein levels and that they need to do a targeted ultrasound to make sure she doesn’t have a GI bleed. I am so deep in the hole at this point that I’m just like “Yeah, whatever, do it.” Hound stays overnight again.

He calls the next day to say that she has no bleed and no pancreatitis. What about the foamy mass?

What foamy mass?

The…the one that was…I saw the X-rays…?

Well, there’s nothing there now. Maybe she passed whatever it was. No blockages anywhere. They went over her innards with a fine toothed comb. She’s eating like a horse, incidentally. Would I like to take her home tomorrow?

I drive an hour. I get Hound. The vet’s working theory is an erhlichiosis flare-up brought on by chocolate shock. She gets antibiotics, anti-nausea meds, and special bland food in case her appetite decreases. I receive a tiny amount back on my deposit. We drive an hour home.

Hound, cognizant of her delicate digestive state, immediately attempts to break into the litterbox and eat cat poop. I deliver a lengthy lecture on the evils of dumpster diving. Hound gazes at me with great earnestness, then belches gently in my face. Learning happens to other people, not Hound.

The face of a canine garbage disposal who cost me more than my first car

[jetrocks]

Non-Britons! Instead of being distracted by the pomp and fanfare of the coronation, here’s a reminder that:

The coronation was funded by tax-payer money. This same tax could have gone towards the cost of living crisis. People are starving and freezing to death as this is going on.

Protests (peaceful or otherwise) are illegal now. A lot of anti-monarchists are being arrested for simply holding signs.

Our government is currently trying to push through a revision to the Equality Act that will exclude trans and non-binary individuals.

Oil companies have made a record profit in the past couple of years. Oil and gas prices aren’t rising because of an inflation issue.

Our NHS is crumbling because funding is going to stupid projects like this coronation.

[villainessbian]

Food banks are getting cuts to fund this coronation. Like, literally, non-theoretical money that regularly goes to food banks and stuff like that and is planned for by everyone is being withheld so it can pay for a guy who wants you to voice an oath to your TV

[jeremywhitley]

Jeremy Whitley presents THE DOG KNIGHT, with Ursula Vernon

Tuesday, May 16, 2023 - Signing Line at 5:30 pm, Talk begins at 6:00 pm

Are you in North Carolina? Do you like good books and people talking to each other about good books? Do you enjoy air conditioning or the sound of a sharpie scratching across paper? Are you looking for a place to sit down and talk about good dogs?

All of these are good reasons to join me and Ursula Vernon for the launch event for The Dog Knight on 5/16 at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill! It’s literally five minutes down the road from UNC where I went to college and met my wife! 

Come join us! You can bring other books for me to sign, but I’d really love for you to get this one too! And I’m sure Flyleaf would like that too.

[entryn17]

forever kill the idea in your head that scientists approach their fields coldly and don't see the joy in it because when my teacher who's a microbiologist showed me an image of a staphylococcus she told me "isn't it so beautiful?" and i can't stop thinking about it everytime i look at bacteria

[the-knights-who-say-book]

reading a T. Kingfisher book is just a scavenger hunt for where she’s gonna put the clockwork bees this time

[tkingfisher]

After all these years, the app I really really want to exist is still Pokémon for Naturalists.

Seek from iNaturalist is good, if limited, but dammit, I want REAL gamification. I want people to get a serious hit of dopamine from their citizen science. Especially plants.

I want to record sightings of ten different shrubs and BAM you get a Shrubasaur, but he’s not gonna evolve into Oakdaimon until you log fifty species of tree. I want obscure-ass Naturemon that only show up if you’ve successfully logged thirty species of nearly identical lichens. I want to walk into a swamp and find a gamer in hip waders grinding water bug IDs so that he can finally get Belostoman, the Toe-Cutter.

Then ideally I want to be able to battle other naturalists. I want to yell “Sedgizard, I choose you!” and have my opponent stare in mingled awe and horror, because bitch, it took me years to document three hundred native sedges, and NOW IT WILL EAT YOUR FACE.

…I am pretty sure I am not the only person who would be down for this.

[tkingfisher]

ADDENDUM: Since people are asking about ID apps, let me say that there are a couple neat ones out there—iNaturalist is the biggest and best and really cool, but the only game aspect is the one you’re playing in your head. Still, you can take a photo of a plant and upload it and odds are good you’ll soon know what you saw!

Seek (by iNaturalist) has a neat feature that lets you scan something with your camera, but can’t do IDs as well as iNaturalist. (You’ll probably wind up stuck at genus level on a lot of stuff, which doesn’t get recorded as a sighting.) You do get little badges, but I feel like they could push that aspect a lot more. (I think a lot of *fun* science apps are made by scientists rather than game designers.)

Merlin ID has an amazing feature that tells you what bird is singing, and that can then be uploaded to eBird, for those of us who collect bird sightings obsessively. It’s fairly reliable, with a few caveats—it overpings on Yellow-Breasted Chat and it sometimes thinks the cat is an actual Catbird. (I am vaguely curious as to whether we will see an anomalous spike in supposed Chat numbers as a result of this app getting used.) That aside, though, it really is very impressive. I just wish it had, like, little badges or unlockable cute bird icons.

There’s some others out there. I’ve tried PlantSnap but when last I used it, it was pretty unreliable. I’d be yelling “No, this is NOT a violet, this is Kidney-leaf Crowfoot, I planted it myself, you are full of CRAP!” and deleted it in annoyance.

[tkingfisher]

So this is a painting made with the…help? Use? Assistance? of an AI, or more accurately, a visual learning algorithm thingy. I started out by feeding prompts about birdhouses into the Midjourney AI.

Lots and lots of prompts. I easily racked up a good hundred-odd birdhouses over a couple days. (Most of which, of course, ranged from horribly deformed to simply boring.) Whenever I made one—largely by accident—with an interesting composition, I ran variations on it. This one began life as “scene of a birdhouse like a beehive, in the style of a tarot card.” It looks nothing like either a beehive or a tarot card, but I thought the composition was neat.

Of course, at that point all I had was a fairly small jpg, in a sort of oil paint style that got squishy if you looked too close, and no birds. (Probably there is an AI that does birds that do not look like mutants, but I have yet to see it.) So off I went to Procreate. (I hope this video works!)

This is not a composition I would necessarily have come up with by myself. On the other hand, it’s not an image the computer could have come up with by itself either. Most of the AIs I’ve played with are good for running through thumbnails and concepts, but bad at refined images. Having to scale way up and fix all weird mushy bits took a fair amount of work, but I kinda like the end result.

Anyway, it’s interesting. Also American goldfinches generally don’t use birdhouses, meaning this would be an entirely unnecessary birdhouse, but I somehow find that kind of appropriate too.

[fuckyeahursulavernon]

The smallrus is tiniest of the seal family, not much larger (and rather similiar in shape) to the garden slug. They prefer damp areas with large amounts of water, like well-watered gardens with fish ponds, and can often be seen sporting in puddles and bird baths, making their typical call (a sort of squeaky bellow.*) Any gardener is generally delighted to see the smallrus appear, as the occasional nibble of a leaf is more than made up for by their ability to keep down the number of mosquito larvae and other small aquatic nuisances. - Ursula Vernon

*Inhale a good lungful of helium and yell "GRONK!" and you've about got it.

[madstuart]

I’m re-reading Digger! And doodling Digger. 

[madstuart]

Having one of those days where I just miss getting new episodes of The Hidden Almanac three times a week. For… well, for Reasons.

[tkingfisher]

I wrote a book! You can pre-order! Or buy it starting Tuesday the 21st!

If you don’t like Amazon, it’s available from all the usual suspects as well.

It has a young wizard baker with a sourdough starter familiar. And other stuff, but c’mon, the sourdough starter is the real selling point.