Amateur Writer | Professional Disaster | Not. A. Lich. | Not Conforming to the Pattern of This World | Follow me for fics, weird canva creations, and general meming. https://www.deviantart.com/lamarckianenterprise
I am an emerging writer who was born and raised in that golden not too distant past where when you felt you had really good ideas but found yourself completely incapable of expressing them you just learned to draw or write or sing instead of outsourcing the work into a mass scraping and recombining algorythm and basing your entire artistic identity on being part of a new industrial revolution for art.
My childhood reading was a healthy regimen of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Douglas Adams’s detective and hiker series that one wizarding series we all know about, and Twilight.
I am someone who has happily grown into the exact sort of person they regularly made fun of a decade ago.
My dream is to someday write something popular and well known enough to regularly get snubbed in online circles as a signifier of someone’s refined taste and maturity.
I’ll try to post something related to writing every now and then but no promises.
After about 5-6 months of research, outline work, writing, rewriting, several rounds of alphas and a lot of learning about what I like about my own art, the first public demo for our Yuri Horror VN Hapiru is finally out!
With roughly 11,807 words in the longest possible route, two routes total, and two days (really chapters) worth of content, an average playthrough of the demo should take about 30-50 minutes, and we hope to add more going forward if people are interested!
Instantly reblogging because yes I did write and make most of the art for this (some of them are copyright free unedited images or renders made by Nineveh who also made the completely original music), you should also check out the character trailer below and follow the bluesky and like and subscribe and bla bla bla.
This is WILDLY incorrect, sheep are my special interest and I've been raising them for over a decade so excuse me while I get up on this soapbox: ewes do not have a standing heat. Cows reportedly do, but not sheep.
a) ewes who are in heat and feeling flirty solicit sex by walking other to someone they're attracted to, then turning their backs, peeing, wagging their tails, and making extremely flirty bedroom eyes over their shoulders at their crush. Also try to murder anyone they feel might be a rival for suitors. Also also try to murder her crush if it turns out they're not keen on her. Ewes in heat but not feeling flirty (yes this happens) walk around all business as usual and you only know they're in heat bc of the crowd of hopeful suitors following her around and fighting each other. Either way it's not subtle.
b) ewes DO mount each other, with great frequency and enthusiasm. If this is mentioned at all, it gets written into the literature not as a sexual act but as something ewes do to visually signal to rams that they are in heat. (If a ram is within a mile and not dead I promise he doesn't need any such signal) A 'lesbian' ewe will follow a ewe in heat and try to run all the other suitors off to keep breeding rights to herself just like a ram would, whether she herself is in heat or not.
c) it's really really easy to tell what a ewe is attracted to by who she mounts/lets mount her and who she head-butts away from her with murderous intent. Most ewes are more or less indifferent to gender. Out of two dozen I currently have one(1) exclusively straight ewe, and two(2) exclusively lesbian ewes, everyone else is in between.
As far as I can tell the real reason there's no "concrete facts" (sarcasm) about lesbianism in sheep is first off, in a commercial flock ewes that don't get pregnant every year, preferably on the first heat of fall, get culled. No one bothers to determine if she's infertile or just doesn't like rams, so lesbian ewes determined enough to actually stop rams from breeding them don't last long, and secondly that most people researching homosexuality in livestock I've experienced are either stuck in a Victorian "two feemales can't have sex cause there's no peenus for penetration hur dur" mindset or in an equally outdated male-actively-chooses/female-passively-chosen mindset and it just doesn't occur to them that ewes might have preferences.
Could I ask for more details and sources on the lesbian sheep thing being a myth? Not saying this to question you but I really can’t find anything other the meme if you look it up on search engines and I genuinely want to just know more about it.
Dreamt about meeting an irish person in some european country and seeing the sights with them and apparently they have abandonment issues because when I left her behind for the day to try and surprise her with a steak meal I’m making with the help of some TLC women she instesd assumed I’m just leaving her behind like everyone else in her life does after we get too close/she misread something and she heads over to a graveyard to cry it out or something and I’m in a convenience store in the graveyard cooking the meal and wondering if she’d like it if I used the rest of the onion to make a blooming onion and a TLC woman told me the portion sizes are too big and asked me if she knew I was here because it kinda feels like she did it for a reason and I joked about how morbid irish people are in general after the war and said she probably was just here to check it out and tlc woman said well that’s true of about half of them but the other half realy doesn’t like to think about it and acts like it never happened.
Henrietta here with the first proper(ish) devlog for our yuri horror VN Hapiru, honestly we probably should have started doing this waaay back when we first started showing our designs off on bluesky but it didn't feel as real until now you know? And I'm mostly doing these here for practice anyway.
I think once we're closer to the demo being released, or right after it I should probably get into the weeds of what went into the story, all of the discarded first drafts and influences worth mentioning, but for now we have the UI to talk about! Whooo! (I'm genuinely excited).
Honestly, it took a lot less time and effort to choose our aesthetic than I thought it would, like, it's a big deal right? The textbox is one of those semi invisible things that nonetheless helps determines the vibe of the entire work, and I was coming into it after just reading about how the entire UI could be the thing that pulls all of the art and writing together or tears it all apart, so you know that the default renpy look just would not do for our demo.
But no actually, we just sat down for a night to discuss and look around at what could or couldn't be done in renpy, and the programmer just looked at all of the art we've made so far and asked if cardboard would look good.
So I thought about it, grabbed literally the first stock image of torn cardboard I could find and hopped onto the same app I use to make all of the other art I'm responsible with and I whipped up the following using stuff we already had in like, less than 10 minutes.
Fig 1. the very first mockup made for Hapiru's UI, ignore the outlines on the characters, we wanted to see what a more paper cut out look would feel like but I liked the characters blending in more.
Looks neat right? Obviously there were a lot of problems with it still, the font was still sorta just a whatever default and it obviously did not match the way the stock image curved, and y'know, there weren't any menu buttons which is a big deal!
But it showed us that it could work really well, and that was enough to iterate on it further.
Fig 2. Second mockup, this time testing the markerlike font we ended up using as the main font.
Fig 3. Final mockup after the initial attempt at implementing the pictures the programmer took into renpy bumped into readability issues. I ended up splicing together all of the ones they took into this collage and gave her the splice for final tweaking and implementation after she decided she liked the look.
And after all that, and a lot of work on the programmer's part we ended up with this beauty, which we're hopefully sticking with from now on.
Looks really nice right? I think it pulls everything together real well, she did a great job trimming the image and actually getting the text to look right.
I wish I had more to say about it really, you know when I showed it to some of my friends/volunteer A&B testers one of them pointed out that they loved the cardboard look because it really makes you think of the zombie apocalypse right?
Like it was some sort of a final warning scrawled onto whatever's left within reach, and it really made me think, 'God I wish I had thought of that myself actually, now I can't say that's why I came up with it later damnit'.
But really, I just pushed for it pretty hard after the programmer's initial fleeting suggestion because it just felt right somehow, like collage originated as a purely physical art form right? This felt like something you'd do with the rest of the cereal box once you cut out the little mascot on the front.
PS. The Programmer had this to say about the project "As someone who enjoys piecing together constructions out of disparate parts, the aesthetic of Hapiru paired with the story makes for an extremely engaging project to work with." (Yes I triggered their corpospeech instincts...)
Oh right, not sure if anyone’s paying attention to this page but I’ve been working on a little project with a few friends over the past few months that’s finally ready enough to have things to show for it.
It’s called Hapiru, a yuri visual novel set in Utah about dealing with grief, and the importance of community in times of disaster, namely, a poorly managed zombie apocalypse pandemic and the death of most people you know who would have dragged you out of the little hole you crawled into.
Expect action! Romance! Honestly depressing themes about living in a world where death is very commonplace and the human body is no longer sacred! And three very violent women to sorta get dragged into a relationship with all at the same time.
All tied together by my writing and collage art (with additional work later from other more traditional artist we’ll hopefully have the funds to pay for through patreon and kickstarter later hint hint cough cough), and additional writing help, coding, blender backgrounds, and music by people who aren’t terminally online enough to be already on here with pre prepared handles.
It’s one of my most ambitious and lengthy projects yet, and we’re still a ways off from releasing the demo, but here’s hoping we can make it happen sooner than later.
Dreamt about a weird superspy Don Quixote, everyone had curly hair with highlights, it was set in the moden day and Don Quixote was younger than in most depictions, supermarket retail guy who has a slight mental break about how dull and pointless his life seems to be and imagines himself as this amazing superspy which his friends in the mall just sorta vaguely laughs off, the bits I remember was the climax and the end that had him holding the place up at gunpoint as part of his delusions, he snaps out of it for a moment after realizing that the love he was trying to reacue wasn’t real and the police swarm in, but his friends (a slightly nerdy guy and a much older janitor woman) who realize that the police would in fact just kill him instead rush him out to a van and drive away at high speed, giving him something close to what he wanted, ramming cop cars away, that kinda stuff.
But he instead imagines himself as the driver of a Lamborghini super car with a shrink ray that magically prevents him from actually crashing into anyone until his fictional superspy handler as played by Idris Elba asks him if he really thinks this is happening and he realizes that Sancho is desperately trying to keep the van going at 120+ without crashing into anyone and he pulls the handbrake, almost killing everyone when the van rolls over as it came to a stop. In the end he takes one look at Sancho, says something I don’t quite understand (‘I’m sorry?’) and pulls out his gun to leave, and the last words in the entire movie was a simple, and earnest, 'Goodbye, I love you’ from Sancho before Don leaves the car and the movie abruptly ends.
Dreamt that I was some pagan warrior goddess/paladin deciding to rest at an abandoned but stately house in the middle of nowhere surrounded by wheat fields and I spent the day messing around with the cute cat there, gambling on the slot machine propped up outside, trying and failing to find food, and going to sleep on the one good looking bed only to be woken up in the middle of the night by an older woman and her husband who wasn’t there before who wanted to know what I was doing in their home and what right I had to mooch like that and I convinced them into letting me stay for the night by telling them that I was a noble warrior who was far from home after a long war and her husband left after a bit and I spent a few hours regaling her with stories about my conquests and battles and drunken brawls, tavern gambling successes (I kept getting kicked out due to my potential bankruptcy inducing luck) and patting her cute cat until she told me that I really should leave early in the morning because they’re planning to head out on a trip tomorrow morning and as much as she likes me she still can’t leave the house unlocked with me in it and I told her okay and went back to sleep still hungry but a little more comfortable due to her smile and I woke up, couldn’t find her or the cat, left the house and wandered into town and noticed that some stuff I saw littering the ground on my way here was covered in moss now, no one around me recognized me, there were paved roads and cars and motorcycles to be annoyed at me for flying around everywhere, and when I tried to head back to the estate I couldn’t find it for a while because the area is a lot more filled out now and the fields are dead and the house is still abandoned but older and the slot machine is gone, the cat is dead, and the woman and her husband are gone with what I perceive was signs of a struggle and there’s a note there about why she had to leave
Thinking about the alleged cases of HRT changing someone’s sexual preferences and me bumping into an alleged example of that only to find out that she just had weird psychosexual hangups and it made me wonder if the Nature vs Nurture thing is just a false dicthomy and conception of the world that we maintain because it’s politically or morally useful like ABO or Eugenics or Good and Evil.
Like, just like genetics it’s starting to seem like we as a society initially assumed it’d be more clearcut and simple than it actually is and we just haven’t moved on because the evidence against the whole concept is best used to strike minor political victories and debate jabs.
I’m not on HRT (my government is ontologically evil when it comes to LGBT rights) but like, someone I’m dating is on HRT and she swore up and down that getting on it cut off her attraction to other women completely only for me to end up backhanding her with a yuri work I made into realizing that no she just had this weird hangup about how she should approach other women as a fellow woman.
An orphan develops the habit of talking to the moon as if it were a parent—just telling it about their day, and occasionally announcing milestones in their life, like their admission to college. Unbeknownst to them, the moon has been listening all along, and it’s so very proud.
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