Poor Grendel’s had an accident.

Peggy
April 4, 2018

About a thousand years ago, an anonymous scribe wrote down an Old English epic that had been kicking around for about three hundred years. This manuscript would manage to survive until the modern age, becoming one of the oldest major works of Old English. No title is given in the manuscript; we commonly call it Beowulf, after the name of the story’s hero. Beowulf kills a couple of monsters, becomes a king, and goes out to kill a dragon, who mortally wounds him.

Forty-seven years ago, an American man named John Gardner wrote a novel, which explores the history of the first monster Beowulf killed. Grendel hangs out watching a minor Danish tribe settle into domestication, explores nihilistic philosophy, talks to the dragon, and gets killed by Beowulf.

Thirty-seven years ago, an Australian man named Alexander Stitt adapted Grendel into an animated cartoon. There are songs.

Grendel, Grendel, Grendel stars none other than Peter Ustinov as the titular monster. Who is a goofy-looking, spotted, green beast with a long, long nose.

The whole film is drawn in a flat-color aesthetic similar to the one I work in a lot; lines are practically nonexistent, and everything is charming and goofy.

It’s really kind of fascinating to watch. Especially when it turns more and more serious as the end approaches: watching two of King Hrothgar’s thanes plot treachery against him, with super-moody lighting, is constantly contrasted by the fact that one of them looks like a Muppet.

There’s gorgeous lighting throughout the film – sometimes stark black shadows, sometimes deep blue ones, sometimes really crazy colors just for the sake of design.

And all of it is told in fairly contemporary English. Mostly with Australian accents. It’s a hell of a thing.

At the end, Grendel dies. And then a merry song begins and all the characters start dancing around cheerily as the names of their voice actors show up above them. This moment really sums up the contradiction at the heart of this movie: a brightly colored adaptation of a book wherein a monster wanders around exploring existentialist philosophy, and then gets killed by the hero. It’s a pretty amazing thing.

Things to watch for, if you decide to brave the ten chunks of overcompressed VHS transfer on Youtube that’s all I can find of this:

moments when they take advantage of the fact that the backgrounds are drawn as simply as the foreground, and circle the whole camera around one character – I think there may be a definite narrative point being made here about how both Grendel and Unferth’s fates are entwined.
the way Hrothgar and his court move from swearing by “the Great Bogey” (Grendel) to saying things like “Sweet Christmas!”; one of the subtle narratives running through Beowulf is of the Christianization of Northern Europe and it’s pretty neat to see this coming up in here (as well as much less subtly, given that one of the turning points of the movie is a bard telling the story of Cain and Abel while Grendel lurks outside listening). It’s worth noting that apparently the film’s director also did a series of commercials for the “Christian Television Association” over the course of the 60s, 70s, and 80s; I would be very curious to find out what his personal beliefs were. There is not much about Stitt online; that nugget comes from the site for a book that’s a retrospective of his career.

The amazing video store I live a block away from has this in their catalog. On VHS. I’m very tempted to rent it along with one of the VHS decks they have for rental; I’d really like to see a crisper copy of this than what Youtube did to it.

It’s still kicking aound the back of my head the next day. Specifically, some choices around the casting and color design.

The same person plays the voice of both the Dragon and Beowulf. On the one hand, it’s simple economy – both are important roles, but brief ones compared to Grendel or the core members of the tribe of Danes that Grendel watched. On the other hand, it’s very tidy. The Dragon sees all of Time at once; he knows how Grendel will end and dances coyly around it. And Beowulf is, of course, that ending.

Outside the scope of Grendel’s tale, they’re even more tightly linked. They are each other’s endings, as well; decades later, Beowulf’s last heroic act will be to slay him.

(There’s also comic effect; Dignam uses a very posh voice for both roles. Having a far-off, legendary warrior speak in a British-flavored accent is both kind of goofy (especially when contrasted against the band of brutes and cutthroats he leads), and an interesting choice for an Australian film…)

This relation is carried through to the visuals, too: the Dragon is nothing but bright reds, the colors bleeding into each other as the combination of VHS and Youtube compression reduce him to little more than a silhouette. Beowulf’s cape is a bright red rectangle fluttering behind him; together, they are the most vividly red things in the whole film, except perhaps for the fire-snakes that populate the pool that hides the entrance to Grendel’s cave.

I would have to watch the film again to check but I am petty sure those are the *only* bright red things in the entire film. I’m pretty sure Stitt and his crew were clueful enough that this is by design, if so. (Oh, hey, look, up in those screenshots. Who’s the only Dane wearing red? Unfirth. Who tries and fails to kill Grendel multiple times; who Beowulf slays – at King Hrothgar’s suggestion – as part of his plan to lure Grendel into Hrothgar’s hall – just before he kills Grendel. Yep. Very nicely done, Stitt. The red ties them all together in a complex knot around Grendel’s ending.)

Addendum 2: oh man we just checked and while DVDs don’t seem to be available in the US, they’re still in stock on the site of the Australian company that is distributing it. Total cost, including shipping to the US? AU$19, which works out to about US$15.50. Hell yes. I just bought a copy and will maybe offer to donate it to Scarecrow Video to keep next to their VHS copy when I’ve watched it, because I want to make it easier for more folks to see this treasure.

this week

Peggy
March 29, 2018

Sunday: I decide that since I’m gonna be selling stuff at Norwescon at the end of the week, I want to take it easy this coming week. Also there is D&D and our comedically bad decisions may result in giving the Big Bad exactly what she wants. Also I discover that my Tarot deck has now entered the levels of out-of-printness where the only people offering it for sale are pricing it in the low three digits, and begin getting things together for possibly Kickstarting a second printing. When I throw together a first draft of the pitch, I take out the deck to ask it which ones I should use in the pitch; the 10 and 99 of swords leap out while I’m shuffling before I even ask.

Monday: The landlord wakes me up around 7am. I have somehow managed to forget to pay rent since last July, and he has only just now noticed this. In looking into how this happens, it turns out I have managed to stop paying my rent for an entire year. I send him email informing him of this. He used to notice within a week if I missed a payment; I wonder what’s made his 2017/18 so chaotic?

Tuesday: I come home in the evening to find water on the kitchen floor. It seems to be coming from below the counter and stove. I write what is probably the most awkwardly-timed maintenance request ever to the landlord. I also fire off an email to the investment counselor at my bank, briefly describing the rent situation and my need to withdraw money from my investments to cover this ASAP. I update the landlord on this. Also my regular D&D game nearly falls apart. Also after I get back from the grocery store later in the day I note that the two rotted-out loafers which mysteriously appeared on the sidewalk outside the apartment last Friday have been meticulously placed at the corners of the yard. The inner Magician feels this is, at the very least, some very bad feng shui if not outright Bad Mojo; I put them in the neighbor’s dumpster.

Wednesday: There are moist spots in the carpet near the kitchen that do not correspond to the new wet spot on the ceiling. I drop a message in the bank’s general communication system asking them to either poke my investment counselor about this or get me someone else who can deal with this. In the afternoon he replies and wants to talk about it on the phone. I say okay sure whatever, call me.

Thursday: Nick and I rent a car and go down to the airport hotel Norwescon is at. I set up and start selling. While browsing the net to kill time (it’s slow, as expected for the first day of a four-day con), I get multiple people pointing me to an exposé on John Krickfalusi’s propensity to have sex with underage girls. Most of which happened while I was working at his studio. I now want to take out the part of my brain that learnt important things about drawing from him and wash it. Processing this is definitely not a thing that helps my performance as Con Table Peggy, but a book sells itself anyway. I come home and there is an ultra-short email from the landlord asking what’s up with the money; I tell him I’m playing phone tag with the investment counselor while also trying to honor my commitment to deal at this convention. I also drop some email to said investment counselor saying, you know what, how about we do this via email, I am stuck at a con all day and really can’t do phone stuff. I wonder why it seems to be suddenly very urgent that I get this money to my landlord by the beginning of the month when he could ignore it for a whole year.

Also there are still many moistnesses around the kitchen floor.

Friday: I guess I get up and go deal stuff at the con and maybe I sell a bunch of books and am happy? Maybe I exchange email with the investment counselor and can give the landlord an ETA for when the money’s in my account so he’ll relax?

Saturday, Sunday: see Friday

I really hope next week is TOTALLY FUCKING BORING.

I may have a post soon about the John K thing as well, I made some lengthy toots as part of initially processing it. It’s like everyone who worked there had this secret they were kinda carrying around, that we could never actually say out loud (though we would certainly all obliquely hint at it when he came up in conversation), and now we can finally say it…

Silicon Dawn 2nd Ed Kickstarter? Maybe…

Peggy
March 25, 2018

Today I found out that the only copies of the Silicon Dawn left online all seem to be in the hands of people who are pricing them starting around $300. Which I guess means it’s time to drive the price back down by kickstarting a new edition or something, as this fact came from someone on Facebook who wanted to buy a copy but quite understandably didn’t want to spend that kind of cash.

(Incidentally, it seems the best way to get Facebook to show your Pages to people is to tell it you want to delete them. Which is a thing I did while thinking about deleting my entire Facebook account.)

I have a list of changes I’d make to the deck that I put together about a year ago. It’s not a very long list, despite me drawing the deck a decade ago; I’d be fixing a couple of minor errors in the first edition, tweaking the art on one or two cards, fiddling with the book some, and maybe printing it at a larger size. I should be able to outsource fulfillment and future sales. Maybe even talk with Lo Scarabeo about helping out on the European fulfillment, shipping worldwide is murderous otherwise.

The more simply I can do this, the better. Kickstarters are Serious Work and I’d really rather be focusing on drawing Parallax and figuring out how to move to Los Angeles so I don’t lose another winter to the lack of sunlight here in Seattle. But keeping Dawn available feels both important and useful.

Right now, I should stop thinking about this. My D&D game starts soon.

No-lah, or, A History Of The Golden City Of Monsters.

Peggy
March 22, 2018

So there is a thread going around Twitter right now, in which an RPG designer looks at maps of New Orleans and lists all the things that he would find fault with if this were a map handed in by a freelance cartographer for a worldbook he was editing. All of these things, of course, have sensible explanations, which mostly boil down to “it’s the least terrible place to put a port near the mouth of a river that drains 1/3 of an entire continent, and the land has changed a lot due to us no longer letting the river wander back and forth across its delta”.

My opinion of this hot take on my home city? Don’t say that the place is too weird, too dense with complicated history to fit into your idea of a fantasyland formed by third-hand imitations of the maps in the endpapers of The Lord Of The Rings. Embrace the weirdness. Look at the reasons the city is and land is like it is; transform them into something magical, and use this as the basis of a far weirder city than you would have otherwise.

And then I decided to have a go at this myself.

Ages ago, the gods all died. This much we know. They fought amongst each other and laid much of the world to waste in their wake. We have only the faintest rumors of who they were and why they fought, spun from the shredded memories of generations busy scraping out a living in the lands that escaped the worst of their wrath.

Six centuries ago, the Elvish explorer Lemoy-ville followed the many rivers of the fertile North to the place where they join into one mighty torrent and drain into the Gulf of Monsters. Legend says the Gulf was formed by the three overlapping imprints of the Foot of the Thunderer, as she crushed the Worm of the Stars before surrendering to its venom; all we really can say for sure is that the Gulf of Monsters is full to bursting with strange bones and stranger objects, many of which have found surprising uses in modern hands.(1)

Lemoy-ville planted a golden flag at the closest to the Gulf she dared set up a semi-permanent camp. But by the time prospectors followed in her wake, drawn by her tales of the ink-black beauty of the Gulf, the rich bounty of strange beasts, and the handful of iridescent crystals oozing more puissance machicx than any found in the North, the miasma that drifted in off the Gulf every winter had tarnished it to a sort of greenish-purplish iridescence. And thus was the seed that grew into the city of No-lah(2).

Over the decades, No-lah grew. From a tiny camp of thrillseekers and fortunehunters, to a small town of inns and shops for those, to a place sprawling past the borders of the benevolent influence of the clear waters of the mighty River ‘Tchafallayall(4), to a bustling city of the descendants of fortune-seekers both failed and successful, refugees from the wars of the North, and outcasts. Its architecture came to incorporate strange hints of the buildings of the vanished gods, drawn from treasures found further and further out in the muck of the Gulf of Monsters, built in part with the puissance machicx cracked from the bones of the Serpent Gods who perished in the god wars.

Despite the regular intrusions of strange gibbering beasts that crawled out of the Gulf, No-Lah became a successful, lazy city.

And then, three hundred years after Lemoy-ville stuck a flag into a benighted hump of land near the Gulf of Monsters, the man who would be known as the Weather Witch-Lord came into possession of the Heart of the Star-Worm. Pulled from the middle of the Gulf, somewhere along a four hundred mile long coiling underwater rise, it drew the dark syrupy liquid of the Gulf up the ‘Tchafallayall with it. Rendered into powder and sprinkled along the banks of the ‘Tchafallayall, it stopped the river’s wandering far better than any previous efforts. And most notably, after much effort and pain, after cracking it open and learning the secrets of its center, it… it summoned something, a nameless, seemingly-mindless shape that rose up from the river and mirrored its Gulf-tainted curves, its head high in the sky above No-lah, its tail fading out somewhere over the Gulf it came from.

We called it Katrice. Or, more precisely, Nashro’ber, the Weather Witch-Lord of No-lah called it Katrice, and everyone who wished to remain on his good side did the same. Other city-states making tentative footholds around other parts of the Gulf of Monsters called it other things: the Devistaciour(5), the Skrt’t’xa(6), and, well, within a decade pretty much everyone within three week’s ride around the Gulf was calling it Katrice, and regularly paying tribute to the Imperial City of No-lah, because that was better than what happened when Nashro’ber decided you were insufficiently respectful. Mine towers sprung up in the Gulf, digging for more of the Heart of the Star-Worm, and whatever other miracles they could find along the way. The banks of the ‘Tchafallayall between No-lah and the Gulf became armored walls, sprinkled every year with freshly-powdered Wormheart mixed with the blood of some of that tribute. Every year, Katrice grew thicker and darker in the sky; every year, the city celebrated with a party that grew along with the ghost of a god that moved to the city’s bidding.

After two hundred and eighty-seven years of this, Nashro’ber, the Weather Witch-Lord of the Fourth Golden Empire(7), died. The official record of his last words is lost; the rumor around the city is that they were, simply, “Run”.

Four and a half weeks after that, Katrice had laid waste to fully two-thirds of No-lah. Half of the Weather Witch Corps perished before one desperate Witch tore the Heart of the Star-Worm from its resting place in the half-embalmed skull of Nashro’ber, stole a skiff, and vanished into the Gulf. Katrice scattered into a thousand thousand wisps of heartbreak-colored cloud, and has not been seen since. Nor has that heroic, unnamed Witch.

Surprisingly, none of the former client states of the Fourth Golden Empire came in to finish what Katrice started. They didn’t lift a finger to help rebuild, either. Not without demanding a heavy price first, at least. Not without laying claim to whatever prizes they desired from amongst the city’s richer refugees.

It is twelve years later. The city’s population is, at best, half of what it was. Some of it is changing, made strange by the backlash of the power beneath the Gulf. Some of it is still in ruins.

But Lemoy-ville’s flag still glistens purple, green, and gold in the center of the Elvish Quarter(8). And we still throw one hell of a party every year, even though the riverwalls are mere rubble along the course the ‘Tchafallayall took before Katrice changed everything.

Welcome to No-lah, o adventurer. What wonders will you find?

1: As well as the fairly unsurprising use of fighting the numerous monsters that give the Gulf its modern name.

2: Literally, “Tranquil Rest”. Lemoy-ville and her Company participated in a long explorer’s tradition of giving the least hospitable places of the world inviting names with this one; unlike their name for the Gulf(3), this one stuck.

3: Sigs-bee, lit. “Mirror-to-the-sky”.

4: corrupted from the language of the local wood-fey, our best guess is “Don’t drink that you idiot, can’t you see the god-rot not ten feet up the bank from here”; sadly, little of their oral tradition survived the Storm of the Horse and the subsequent “land reclamation” push that saw No-Lah triple in size.

5: Orkish, lit. “Rain of Filth”

6: Spinnerish, lit. “Opener of the Myriad Carapaces”

7: Much ink, blood, and ichor has been spilled on the tenuous connection, or lack thereof, of the Fourth Golden Empire to the previous three. For now, let it suffice to say that even the most ardent supporter of this claim would gleefully proclaim it to be “pretty complicated” before attempting to simplify the argument with the aid of such conceptual aids as a board with strategically-placed nails, or a godsrot-tarnished rapier.

8: Which is largely high-arched Draconate work, built after the Storm of the Melody razed the city for the first time.

two dream fragments

Peggy
March 18, 2018

I was reading some mystical philosophy kind of stuff. Supposedly it was by Beethoven. I was very definitely studying it, which is, to be quite honest, pretty foreign to my whole life. I’ve never been much for Studying in a formal fashion.
The corner of Where Am I and How Did I Get Here. I was walking along reading a book on my phone and passed my destination. I looked up and saw a street sign that read “WHERE AM I”. What an odd name for a street, I thought. My phone’s screen was all smeared up, so I couldn’t use Maps to figure out where I was. I decided not to turn around and retrace my steps; I was curious as to where this oddly-named street would lead. Soon I’d gone through some sort of portal to another, utterly mundane world, and was in a van with some other people who were now also in the wrong world because of me doing this. There was a lot of traffic; driving was slow.

dailysnek: coffee smirk

Peggy
March 14, 2018

So lately when I’ve been feeling unmotivated to work on the huge, complex backgrounds of Parallax, I’ve been trying to at least make myself open up Illustrator and do some drawings of my cobra character Kalinda. (Who is also sometimes an archaeopteryx, it’s complicated.) I have been referring to these drawings as “#dailysnek” even though they are not a thing I do every day.

Today, I went out to the Meowtropolitan (a coffee shop with a room full of very very jaded cats) with Nick. On the way I decided that it would be nice to work on a bit of design I need to do for Parallax but it was by no means necessary; if all I did was to do a color version of a Daily Snek, that would be perfectly fine. I’ve generally been sluggish and unproductive lately, and I figured actually finishing something would be a nice change from “slowly picking away at complex two-page spread backgrounds”.

Worth noting: the smoke coming off of her cup is one path, with a moderately complex Appearance stack on it.

The bottommost stroke has an asterisk next to its weight because it’s got a variable width profile applied to it.

And here are all of the #dailysnek doodles thus far. Will I keep doing these? I dunno. It’s been fun so far, and people seem to like them. Click them to embiggenate.

the is is the only one that involved looking at an actual photo of a real snake, I should do that more often to figure out how to properly pile up her coils.

And then, having done this, I used the last half-hour of my Mac’s battery life to rough out a spaceship design for Parallax. Yay!

Still needs some work to turn it into something I can drop into Silo and use as reference to model. But there’s a good start there at the bottom, with some shapes that evoke assorted 70’s spaceships (mostly the Liberator from Blake’s 7, which always looked like it was going backwards, and maybe a little of the Vipers from Battlestar Galactica. Though I think I’ll try to downplay that as I work on them, as this is an eight-person shuttle with its own stardrive rather than a two-seat fighter that lives on a carrier.)

the dream of the very very abrupt ending

Peggy
March 12, 2018

There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. Everyone on the bus chanted this as it whirled around me, flashing between being a bus full of tourists and… other things; brief, half-second glimpses of bright lights and carnivals and who knows what. And then they were holding me, a skull coming in towards the armpit of my lifted-up arm. And then with a twist and a thump I was AWAKE, lying there in my bed. None of the slow drifting-to-awareness of my normal waking up; it was like I just fell back into my body and there I was. I lay there slightly stunned for a moment*, then got up, put on my robe, and went to the kitchen, pretty much on autopilot. After a brief encounter with Nick (it’s a sunny day today! also the Northgate mall is turning into offices! also there is a section in its wikipedia page about terrorists and serial killers!), I picked up my phone. Not because I wanted to use it – but because I wanted to see if it still worked, because I have noted that whenever I pull it out in a dream, I always get a clunky substitute cobbled together out of 1990s tech. It was, indeed, an early-21st-century device that worked as expected, so I guess I’m really awake.

The wheelchair that wasn’t? Oh, that was from before. I was in a rainy parking lot, and watched a man push a wheelchair through it, and suddenly collapse; I helped him up, and he went to his friends without a word to me. And then the wheelchair was gone and I was on the bus and that’s where we came in, isn’t it?

Previously there had been a fairly coherent narrative where I was some other guy, who had traveled a long way to seek the advice of a very Vegas sort of mystic at some kind of convention; he was looking for help with an entity that had been connected to him for long enough that he’d bothered this mystic’s father for help, as well. He was rejected once more, and watched sadly as other people looking for advice were tapped to be in some sort of forming coven; he ended up in a brightly-lit store, watching these other people troop in and acquire flashy new Magic Wands. (Me? I thought. I don’t need one of their wands. I have my own. And there it was in my hand, the plastic one full of water and glitter that I’ve had iRL for several years.) It was kinda sad.

Before that there was a bunch of the usual dream nonsense about trying to use a bathroom that was ridiculously impractical. Usually that involves me trying to pee in a toilet that’s overflowing, or has been removed, or something; this time it was a taking a shower with a showerhead attached to the wall right next to the toilet. At least the showerhead was on a hose, so it was almost usable. Until the point where that wall and toilet were in the middle of a fast fashion shop in a mall and it seemed more appropriate to deal with buying my stuff and getting out. Very much routine Dream Problems.

But damn, that ending. Never woke up like that before, feeling like I just fell into my body with a thunk and woke all the way up in an instant.

* I may have felt compelled to do a quick banishing before getting up, it was that weird

the dream of the classic comics shortcut

Peggy
March 8, 2018

This morning, I woke from a dream about tracing complicated layouts from a superhero comic, which was a little infamous for itself being lifted from another one. I suspect this was in response to me going to bed sad because progress on Parallax is slow, due to the massive amounts of complex background stuff the story needs.

Nice try, brain. I wish this solution would work. But the problem is that I’ve got to invent the remnants of a whole culture, not that the layouts are hard.

the dream of what the fuck am i doing at PAX.

Peggy
March 1, 2018

I dreamed I was hanging out with the Penny Arcade guys at some kind of giant convention. It was beyond super awkward. Way beyond. Also I kept on losing and finding polyhedral dice. Ultimately I ended up next to a tiny submarine sinking into a watery pit in the middle of some sand, which was just barely covering a whole bunch of dice. I am not sure I ever got my dice back but I sure ended up with a purse full of dice.

In reality, ECCC starts today and i am delighted to not be working it,

cryptic pattern, for sale

Peggy
February 28, 2018

I posted this a week or two ago and had a few people say they wanted it on fabric. Well, your wish has been granted – it’s for sale on Spoonflower now. If you make anything with it I’d love to see a photo of the results!