The Tapestry

Hi, I'm Monckat! This is the blog of The Tapestry, a webcomic set somewhere in the extended Homestuck universe. It features a couple alien kids living on a strange alien world and playing a strange SBURB-adjacent game. Link to comic (hosted on MSPFA).

[thetapestrymspfa]

hello hello! it's me again

would you mind sharing the details of how you make your tunes? your musical background? any software/hardware of note other than lmms? advice/resources for aspiring computer musicians?

Aside from occasionally borrowing specific synth sounds from other programs, basically all of my music is made in LMMS. In fact, before ~2021 I was using an old jank mac version of LMMS that only let you use presets for most of the synths, you couldn't go in and fiddle with the dials or anything. My music-making process isn't anything special I think, just thinking up melodies as I go about my life, then improvising harmonies and fiddling around with extra details for months (or years) until I think it sounds ok. Also I tend to layer different synths playing the same line on top of each other to create the impression of a single novel-sounding instrument (this was particularly important back when I was working only with instrument presets).

As for background, my music theory knowledge amounts to a single class I took in college plus a bunch of random youtube videos, but I was a classical violinist/violist for many years and I eventually brought that back into The Tapestry's music with the live violin and viola in Volume 2. People have told me some of the stuff I write vaguely sounds like Bach fugues and concertos as a result of that background, but that comparison is definitely too generous to me lol.

I don't know that I'm good enough at music composition to give general advice, but I'd say that just getting out there and trying stuff is more important than any considerations of gear or software. Personally, the experimentation you end up doing when working with janky software compels me more than any of the flashy stuff professional DAWs can do for you.

[thetapestrymspfa]

Hello again. Names anon here. Don't worry about being late. Thank you for answering! It is quite interesting to hear about the writing process.

Apologies if what I am asking now is redundant, but I want to know more about how you come up with names for your characters (if it is possible to disclose such information without revealing whatever secret meanings they may have, that is)

Certainly! For the names of the main four characters, I was largely just looking for sounds that sounded interesting, the names with deeper meanings were the exception. I honestly don't recall if Handa's first name had any particular inspiration, and for his last name "Halminth" I think I just liked the suffix "inth" (i didn't remember until way later that "helminth" is a term for parasitic worms, i dont think that had any subconscious influence on the name). The genesis of Oenia's name was playing around with the "Oe" prefix from the name Oedipus, and I can assure you that there is no deeper meaning there, Oenia's story otherwise has nothing to do with that myth lol. Her last name "Acanenda" was just an interesting arrangement of syllables as far as I recall. Same with Deime's surname "Lyranell", though his first name is very transparently based on Deimos, the Greek deity, by way of the Martian moon. Sosav probably has the most interesting name of the bunch, because her name is directly copied from that of a character in an earlier story of mine. In this earlier story the name was meant to show the character's dual identity, with the last name "Frauhoul" coming from her native culture and the first name "Sosavend" coming from the imperialist culture that conquered her homeworld. Sosav's context in The Tapestry is totally different, but I chose to reuse the name essentially just because I liked the sound. I liked the idea of giving a female character a name as sharp-sounding as "Sosav", and the name "Frauhoul" always gave me the mental image of a warrior woman giving a battle cry (with the first half of the name being the german word for "woman", and the second half of the name being pronounced like "howl"). As for the Galfany, for their names I took reader suggestions and smushed them together. For example, "Sedranovel" was a combination of the suggestions "Sedrant" and "Shovels Slippery".

[thetapestrymspfa]

Was Ainsaiwalism inspired by The Egg?

I hadn't heard of that story before I had the idea for Ainsaiwalism, but it didn't surprise me at all to learn that I wasn't the first to think of that concept. To me the idea of a single time traveling soul passing through every living being in existence was sort of the logical next step for the idea of reincarnation, and tied in neatly with the idea of a communist theocracy built on a religion that saw all people as equal in the most literal possible sense.

[thetapestrymspfa]

Yo! Do you have any tips for getting good at consistently coming up with "good" alien names/words/jargon/terminology &c? There's a lot of those in this work and I love it to bits and so I was wondering if you know of any secret techniques that exist. If they don't, I'm still curious about the process!

(so sorry, i forgot i hadn't answered this earlier) I've had a couple different approaches to coming up with names over the years, in the early days of the tapestry my aim was emulating the sort of comically long technobabble terms you see in homestuck. I'd look up synonyms or linguistic roots of more common words and jam em together until i liked them. "Psycherefectory" and "Ainsaiwalism" are examples from that era, and in retrospect i kinda wish i'd spent more time refining "Ainsaiwalism" since it's a bit of a mouthful for a concept so central to the worldbuilding, but ehhh its fine.

A bunch of place names on Siltsphere are pretty transparently just slight alterations of earth placenames, for example Maryea comes from the Maurya Empire, Hanaway is a modification of Norway, Murabia comes from Arabia, Rungland and Mangland are England crossed with the words "rung" and "mangle" respectively. These often imply some thematic connection between the Siltsphere countries and their earthly counterparts (Mangland and England are both former colonizers that have slipped from their peak of power, Maryea and Maurya were both influential ancient empires in hot climates) but it's never 1:1. Other names are simple combinations of relevant adjectives and nouns (the Shallowlands are lands that are shallow, Briskwind is a planet with brisk winds, Archesprite is the archetypal sprite).

For more alien names, ones less rooted in english or human languages more broadly, my choices are a bit more abstract. Names like "Galfankaal", "Vohlaga", and "Kaihnar" were more about just finding combinations of sounds that felt interesting to say, or seemed like sounds those aliens would make. A "technique" I've used is taking a mispronunciation of a real word and respelling/modifying it to the point of unrecognizability. One day years & years ago I was thinking about the name "Persephone" and imagining it being pronounced "Purr-suh-Fone", then swapped out some sounds to make it "Fore-suh-Feen" and then used that as "Phorscyphene", one of the major worlds of my pre-tapestry sci-fi universe.

[thetapestrymspfa]

Hey just checking, is the tapestry over now? I'm starting it with some friends and one of them was wondering whether it was ongoing or finished

hey there! the tapestry is ongoing, it was on hiatus for over a year but I just posted a new [S] page for it about a week ago and there's more en route

[thetapestrymspfa]

Tapestry Update 8/4/25

At long last we return, to say farewell (for now) to the world of Siltsphere.

[1007xf]

Merry Christmas

[1007xf]

Uh

[thetapestrymspfa]

will there ever be merch of this comic? just wondering

i was never sure if there'd be enough of a desire for it, but someday i'd like to make that happen

[thetapestrymspfa]

when can we expect the next update?

comic's been on hiatus for a little while due to a variety of factors (work taking priority, mental health, various ideas for the next update getting pushed to later in the comic, etc.) and i can't give an exact date or anything, but the next update will happen when i have something good ready

[thetapestrymspfa]

i love your comic so much!!! the worldbuilding and the character interactions are sooo fantastic and you art is gorgeous :)

how do you come up with such interesting worldbuilding (or what are your inspirations)?

thank you so much! always a treat to learn people enjoy my silly little world for me, worldbuilding is usually a process of thinking up a random wacky idea (for instance: what if there was an alien species that put their minds into giant spaceship shells) and then asking questions about what that idea would imply (how did their society evolve? -> they started out as hermit crab like creatures who saw their shells as manifestations of their souls) and so on and so forth (what happens when one of the hermit crab guys dies? -> their shell and therefore identity is passed down to their offspring. what do class distinctions look like? -> wealthy individuals have huge space station shells that poorer individuals stay in as guests, with rights and responsibilities for both parties. how do hermit crab guys without shells fit into society? -> they are seen as soulless non-entities that inspire existential terror akin to what humans might see in a zombie) my biggest inspirations were probably the spore: galactic adventures user-made levels i played as a kid, particularly the xenoplanets series which was a lovely little sandbox of sci-fi worldbuilding

[garden-ghoul]

bewitched by the princesa's terrible posture and normcore typing style

[thetapestrymspfa]

Tapestry Update 2/10/24

The mysterious moon lady puts her powers of decay to use. 9 pages. Link to the update.

[thetapestrymspfa]

oh my god i'm just finding out about your tumblr i LOVE the tapestry so much :) few questions, feel free to answer only one or all of them [or none, really. up to you] 1. is there a technique you use to draw ALL of that detail in the backgrounds? 2. what do you use to draw/make music? 3. how did you come up with the tapestry? you said on one of your previous asks that you make a lot of things up as you go along, but how much of it all is planned, as well as how you build up to it, do you just create plots on the spot that get to the planned out bits? 4. [feel free to ignore this one if its too spoiler-y] since this is a different kind of sburb/polln'ator session, will classpects still be a thing? or will there be something entirely different?

btw i love sosav :)

Thank you so much, glad you're liking the comic! I'd be glad to answer your questions! :) 1. For the most part my technique is just to spend the time to draw all that detail, but over the years I've gotten the process more efficient by working more improvisationally and trying to find quick and easy ways to convey specific material textures with just a few lines. 2. For drawing I pretty much exclusively use Photoshop, I make almost all my music in LMMS but for the latest album I added a few elements to some tracks using Logic Pro. Also, I use Blender for 3D modeling. 3. The concept of The Tapestry started out as a Sburbventure adaptation of a story I made in Spore: Galactic Adventures, and only a few elements from that version of the story made it into the final comic. Most of those elements are still spoilers, with the exception of the "entire galaxy being brought into the medium" plot beat that was revealed in [S] Superimpose. At this point I've got the entire backstory of the comic plotted out, as well as the rough outline of the ending. The Act 3 plan right now is comprised of a loose sequence of events that need to happen before the act finale, and as the comic goes along I'll be splicing things in or switching the order of things around as the pacing demands. There are also sections of the comic I intentionally leave open for more improvisational storytelling. 4. While there hasn't been any sign of anything equivalent to homestuck classes, several characters have been hinted (or in a few cases outright stated) to have associated aspects. I'll leave it to you to find them ;o)

[thetapestrymspfa]

Tapestry Update 1/4/24

The escape from Amnsomn continues. 7 pages.

Link to update.

[1007xf]

Hello

[corrucyst]

a bad bitch named can opener