Klei did a huge bugfix on DST and this was the accompanying image, which is now my desktop background, which got me through hours of being frustrated near to tears on a cheap capture card issue--I kept seeing him working so hard and so happy to work and going “okay one more time”, and finally, FINALLY, my VHS tapes are gonna come home to roost! All I have to do is force Bandicam to view my capture card as a microphone to get audio accompanying my video because Windows won’t recognize it as anything but a webcam, then use OBS to record the Bandicam window because OBS won’t recognize the workaround and Bandicam won’t let me record more than ten minutes without a serial, but together I can capture the outgoing Bandicam footage through OBS and soon enough I’ll be uploading home movies and getting slapped with copyright violations on Samson and Sally again! It’s so SIMPLE!
Maxwell, presumably: Oh, hi. How are you holding up? Because I’m a potato.
A friend, a cool artist and game developer based in Toronto, is putting together a MEGA RAD semi-annual horror anthology! Check the flash:
Cover art by Trevor Henderson
Rejoice with us, beings of meat!
OUR PRE-ORDERS ARE NOW OPEN.
PARADOX GHOST PRESS PRESENTS THE FIRST ISSUE OF BLEED ERROR, a deeply unsettling collection of short stories, flash fiction, and poetry about the bleed error of the universe printing outside the margins of reality. With cover art by Trevor Henderson and housing some of the most profound love letters to the uncanny, this glossy-covered, semi-annual collection is something you should let yourself be gently cursed by. You won’t regret it, we’re fairly sure.
PREORDER NOW!
We cannot stress how important pre-orders are to us as a small company that refuses to publish via major POD websites. This is our first issue, which also means we need a projected number of copies to print. Please don’t let us fall into the fathomless abyss of failure where our bones will be gnawed to dust by foes unseen. Please, please support us by purchasing early, and you avail a special discount! It would mean the world (and other shrouded, sinister worlds) to us.
And yes, we are still soliciting flesh – er, submissions! You can read more on the guidelines HERE.
SUBMISSIONS CLOSE MARCH 1st, 2022.
Source is the pre-order and submission page. Does your work fit any of the following?
We’re looking for short stories, flash fiction, and poetry that runs the gamut of everything from absurdist horror to bizarre science-fiction to unsettling dark fantasy. We love the uncanny; what we look for is the telling drop in your stomach when you absently look up at the skies and there are far more constellations than you’d remembered, brighter and closer and in configurations you don’t quite recall. We want stories about the bleed error of the universe printing outside the margins of reality.
We are interested in stories with LGBTQ2S+ and diverse leads, especially with narratives that are not confined to tragedy tropes.
I know it does, because I know you (I’ve read your creepypasta, too)--if you’re a talent, and you don’t have a place for it to call home, why not consider getting in on the ground floor of something amazing? There’s almost a month left before submissions are closed, you can consider it a challenge!
Why is this calling in a favor? Why, I’m glad you asked!
It so happens this producer is one of my own, dare I say our own--a bona fide and quality-controlled member of the Don’t Starve fandom. Now, I know I am speaking from personal bias when I say that the DS fanbase is an overwhelmingly warm and talented community, but I as sure do not speak from personal bias when saying that as a whole, we god damn adore some quality uncanny horror. We are given to gas lights and goblins, be they in the literal, figurative, or far-flung future alternate universe form, and we want to see them thrive.
That’s why I am asking you, here, today, to open up your hearts (and if applicable, your wallets) and show a little consideration for the one of us that could be any, and rises to this honorable goal with heart in hands, breathless with anticipation and clutched viciously by the shadows of anxiety as numbers are crunched and dreams are made. I believe us to be capable of not just propping enough pre-orders to sell, but in making Bleed Error something we will be proud to have even the slightest hand in. I believe us to be the artists, the writers, the magic bean buyers who can propel something great to greatness. We can set that on its trajectory, and we can do it one reblog at a time.
And, anyway, you know...some of you guys like me too, and I’m not in it or anything, but...Zampano was good to me during what you know have been some difficult months, and that kind of character is, I think, worth rewarding.
IT COULD BE THE NEXT CEMETERY DANCE COME ON Y’ALL
This is an unsolicited advertisement, or unvertisement. It is done without solitication (or knowledge) of the creator. I just wanna see this cool as hell project get off the ground. Thank you!
just fuckin' vibing on these lines of action and realizing that Wilson's face is so rounded forward in utter guile and curiosity and Maxwell has lit. opposite face shape, his features draw in at the points where Wilson's bow out
also you can draw a pretty strong line between the tip of Wilson's chin and the tip of his forelock in a lot of these stills if you're more of a scientific genius than I am and don't do it on a gosh hekking phone screen with one fingy
"How many times have you seen this animation now exactly pal"
"I think it didn't hit triple digits until it was baked in as the Switch demo but I think that dubiously"
Anyway I finally did what I should have done years ago and broke Canon Slapfight down into individual frames
As much as it’s an infinite loop, it was storyboarded as a linear interaction! And it’s exactly the one you’d expect!
WARNING FOR BRIGHT FLASHING GIF
ALSO WARNING FOR YARDS OF NERD RAMBLING, AT LEAST SIX SUBURBAN ONES AND A COUPLE BACK ACRES BESIDES
OG:
Ad infinitum. But who started it?
Who ALWAYS starts it? We have exactly one frame that says everything it needs to about why this is happening: Maxwell is directly misdirecting Wilson, because that’s what he does. There is a 3% chance that Maxwell’s pretending to wave to mislead him, but given all reason, I’m going with the 97% probability that the caption to this is Wilson’s response to “say pal wanna see a magic trick”, because Maxwell is bored and Wilson is gullible. It’s the foundation of their relationship, canonically, all slash mischief aside. “Nothing up my sleeve...”
...and because of that canon, the trick is faking him out to torment him, because, again, Maxwell is bored. Don’t let Maxwells get bored. They can’t help themselves.
It’s just teasing him, but since Wilson is (justifiably) on edge about maybe getting murdered after being betrayed once and dying.......more than once
he loses his chill, and even as Maxwell pulls back and looks genuinely concerned and/or at least “c’mon it’s just a joke”
he escalates the situation
"ahahahhhh...ha?”
aaand no longer bored, Maxwell goes full into the slapfight, overjoyed and triumphant (ha ha oh I made myself sad)
which Wilson leaps into with vigor, because we all, myself included, forget that he is also a smug bastard, they are both absolute manchildren, they are playground flirting fighting
There are, of course, more actual animatic frames, a lot of tweens, I think it explodes into 500+, but that’s the story here. And it’s beautiful because it is the story here. “Maxwell gets bored, Wilson reacts, Maxwell leaps on attention like Ophelia into an open grave, Wilson has to punch his smug stupid face” until the last star burns out.
That’s it. That’s my Nerds. It takes six seconds to view the full animation. It says EVERYTHING.
And behind the curtains, it says everything else.
I’m gonna take the two seconds and pat myself on the back for this being the only time I ever found Klei ARG tracks by myself, because nothing they do is without purpose, even if these two ancient thinbos are doing it. This dropped shortly after they found each other in the DST chronology, when Klei was just beginning to hint at the plot for that quantum leg of this trip, just a gif on a blank black page. If you think to check the source code...
...which seems like another gag until you go “why clank?” and then realize you should be reading between the lines.
I know people don’t quite get why I’m so into characters from a game where “you just run around and survive, right?”, and I give them that entirely. The magic/science of Don’t Starve is that it’s intensely story-first in drive, it just hides it all to be stumbled on by people who are running around surviving.
Anything that is arbitrary can be made into a connection. It’s a fantastic takeaway for anyone building a world. It’s important that the connections aren’t made all the time, that you pick your lode-bearing coincidences well or you’re risking pretention, but once you internalize it, you can weave remarkable things into a story.
You can come out and tell your readers, your players, your viewers, what have you, just about anything if you leave out just the right frame of perspective for viewing the context until you want them to have it.
I mean, provided you’re into the kind of misery that is thinking fifteen moves ahead at any given moment, putting the long hours into making that context matter, the writing, the problem-solving, the worldbuilding, following the arcs to their possible trajectories, having a plan of action for impact regardless of what the players in the great dramedy might do.
Where I come from, there’s a name for that kind of person.
We call them GMs.
I’m so glad ours are so clever 🦊🍵📆
ok break it up you two, remember he’s only got 80 HP, Wilson, probably bruises like a ripe peach even with your little whiff-mittens
