Now Playing: III-XIII. Conspiracy

Art #1 for the Vaderkin Creative Exchange 2024! For @unlikecharlie; thank you for the prompt, I really enjoyed doing this one!

Done in watercolor on hot-pressed paper, with some white Derwent Inktense on the left where the clouds were being difficult. Inspired in part by a favorite picturebook from my childhood, and my mom's, called "The Winter Picnic."

Well, the writing muse is currently sulking in a corner and tearing out her hair, but the art muse has been feeling extremely chatty!

This is the first part of an intended 4-or-so panel series/comic strip, featuring Ahsoka and Starkiller as Rebels—and yes, they are 100% sending this pic to Vader as a postcard. Hi Master, wish you were here!

Did this one by sketching out one figure from a reference photo, then putting a pic of the sketch into Krita. Copied the outline, then used a colorize mask (ooh, fancy! literally had no idea this was even a thing a week ago, smh), added shading, extra outlining, and background.

Many thanks to the random redditor who mentioned making just one block with the rectangular select tool in Krita and then copying it multiple times to make a stone/brick wall. It makes life so much easier.

The Fulcrum + jaig eyes design in the graffiti is not entirely mine. Ages ago I saw a similar design while scrolling Pinterest, and later decided I wanted to make my own version as part of a 501 design.

If anyone has read this far and knows of any good Ahsoka & Starkiller fics, please share! I didn't find much of anything on AO3, but would love to see people's takes on how they might get along.

Now playing: III-V. In the Wake of Fate

In which our heroes (and not-so-heroic individual) deal with the fallout of the Wrea mission.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a Senator survived. A Jedi did not forsake society. Two siblings were never separated. Nor were two Commanders. And a Rogue found comrades.

The Empire has risen, but the embers of the Republic yet glow in the hearts of the just. The stage is set for rebellion, and both within the Rebel Alliance and outside of it, many fates shall interweave, for the luck of the Disaster Lineage and its associates has ever flowed in a peculiar current. And if that current is stirred, from time to time, by the enterprising Pirate… well, not for nothing has it been said that Fortune rules life.

Aka, Padmé lives. The fractured Chaos Clan begins to reunite. Tarkin suffers a raging case of Hondo-induced identity theft. Vader dials the wrong number and ends up connecting to the commlink of a Rebel agent called Revenant. Add in some youngling hijinks, and all of this is slowly building to a massive headache for one Sheev Palpatine.

Where to begin?

Fortune's Rule. It's an appropriate title in more ways than one.

Two years ago, I would have laughed myself silly at the very notion that I might ever write a Star Wars fanfic.  Or maybe just looked askance at whoever had made such an appalling suggestion.  Then I saw Clone Wars.  And now, almost seventy thousand words later, I've finally achieved a secret wish of over ten years' duration—to write a novel's worth of continuous story.  (A novel's worth, not a novel, because ye gods, this thing is far from complete!)

It's really weird.

Anyway, before I start posting about writing and anything else that strikes my fancy, I just wanted to say thank you ever so much!! to all the AO3 users who have read/kudo'd/commented on/subscribed to/bookmarked this pet project of mine, as well as to my brother and my mom/moral support/editor/typo sieve.  Fortune's Rule is by far the longest, most detailed, most in-depth story I have ever written, and there's no way in the world that it would have come this far without all of you! So, thank you!!!

✧₊⁺⋆.˚₊✩∘ Through time and into darkness ∘✩₊˚.⋆⁺₊✧

An artwork inspired by a prompt by @wendingways through an event by @vaderkin-is-a-lightning-rod yay! Hope you like it and the adjacent writer does too

Crossposted on ao3

Now playing: III-XV. Desperate Times and Desperate Measures, pt. 1

In which Padmé makes a difficult decision, and Vader spends some time with his apprentice.

Google, dear, we need to have a word about what you consider to be synonymous ideas. Because you've been bolding some stuff that has literally nothing to do with the search terms I entered. And it's annoying enough when I google something about RNA, and you bold the word DNA in every result, but I get it, they're both nucleic acids. I don't agree with you, but I get it.

However, this is getting a bit ridiculous:

Suggestions are welcome if anybody knows of a more accurate search engine than this stinker!

Present, Past, and Future

For @mina-jamsin-derulo, based on "Eyes on the future." Thank you for the lovely prompt art!

A little vignette with Anakin and Ahsoka watching the twins spar on Naboo.

The nightmare that is AO3 tagging

Okay, so maybe that's being just a touch dramatic. Seriously, though, it seems like there's a lot of tagging advice on Reddit, etc., that talks about not using a lot of tags, only tagging the really major characters, keeping the tags relevant and useful for sorting, and all that. I've kind of freaked myself by reading those conversations, and then looking at my own fic like... oh... dear... you have so many tags... do people find that obnoxious?

I dunno. Personally, I love all the fun, silly, casual, chatty, cracky, creative tags that authors use. Maybe they're not much good for sorting, but they make me smile. I don't mind reading through a huge block of tags, because apparently mine is a bit of a magpie brain, but instead of shiny things, it wants words. Plus, when there are a lot of tags, there's that much more opportunity to find a fun one!

It's also usually nice when there are a lot of characters tagged, because then I can see who all is in the story, not just the MCs. Same goes for relationships. When it comes to tagging my own fic, of course, I'm like, "Major characters? Important relationships? But they're all important! I want to tag them all!"

So, I totally don't blame people who do this as well. And if you prefer to be efficient and tidy, that works, too. Seems like, it's your story, and you know how you want to present it, so why not tag away as you see fit?

**Now that I think of it, though, there could be one very valid caveat to this perspective. Do the majority of AO3 tagwranglers find it frustrating to deal with the zany, one-off tags?

AI in Quora, and in fandom spaces?

I just have to ask. Why does Quora have an AI tool now for some questions?

Isn't the whole point of Quora... you know... asking people things? Getting people's input?

And yet, browsing around through Star Wars stuff on Quora last night, I found this:

Like... how is this helpful, O Great AI Bot Writing Helpful Answers?

It's a subjective question to begin with, so why would an AI be offering information on it? It seems like a question to debate, not a question to answer. And the Quora answers from people, of course, were

And the idea of trying to have a nerdy discussion with ChatGPT is just... weird, like there's no interest or fascination or theorizing, you know? Just this clinical-sounding summary. ChatGPT doesn't care about the characters, or the stories, or the worldbuilding, or any of that. It probably just scraped through the opinions of people who do care, and then spat out a soulless regurgitation.

[Or, heck, who knows. Maybe ChatGPT took one look at the opinionated discussions and was like, "oh hell no. i'm not touching that with a ten-foot pole. make your own moral decisions, you stupid squishy human."]

Seriously, though. AIs in fandom stuff? Weird. Fandom stuff is so oriented around people and opinions and connection, and AI... eh... until AIs reach the point of, say, Artoo & Co., it just doesn't seem like a great fit.