Needles & Nilbogs

 I haven’t decided if I’m ever going to actually post the city spies soulmate au that’s been rattling around in my brain since (*checks draft creation date*) February of last year (technically: 2/16/22, 9:19 AM, hah), but I want the book 1 outline out of my drafts before book 4 comes out (THREE DAYS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), so this is a proposed outline for a city spies fic that has about 1/2 of book 1 written, all of book 1 planned out, and a loose outline for books 2 and 3.  This was the original idea: It's the one where whatever you write on your body appears on theirs in the same spot, starting at age 10, and it's just the person who completes you whether it's romantic or platonic; also, fate guarantees that it's someone you will have contact with even if that comes from finding out you're soulmates, you're always going to meet in person at least a bit. Often have mannerisms in common. Rio and Brooklyn get closer platonically through their notes while fighting in...

 Like I said the other day , I want to talk about my writing more because there’s a lot that I want to say that I don’t want to put in authors notes (usually cause I think of stuff in the shower and then don’t remember to edit it in when I’m at my computer later), but there’s also no better place to put it. Also this is an official threat (not in a violent way) that if you ask me a question about something I wrote I will answer, and answer in depth.  So this is about my latest fic, once and for all , which is a city spies and murderbot crossover, and it’s basically an excuse to do a roleswap but across universes and also to drag in multiverse shenanigans in general (one of my favorite things). Go read it, right now it’s pretty short, and while this isn’t spoilery for the fic, it doesn’t really make sense without that context. And I had this idea in the shower last night and absolutely have to talk about it somewhere at some point   This… *drumroll*… is backstory.  ...

 If you’ve been paying any attention to me lately, you might have realized I got really into writing fanfic over the summer, and now I have an AO3 account under the name BWizard . It’s really fun and somewhat easy for me, and I’ve posted a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about some of it in detail, and I’d like to.  I feel kind of nervous about that, honestly; I write a lot that’s intended for myself, and so while it’s fun and I’m happy with all of it (or at least everything that makes it to AO3), a lot of it has an intended audience of one person, me. (The murderbot stories about the mirror universe and high school au have an intended audience of maybe three people each, one of which is me. Just like this blog, with its four or five regular readers, including me, my dad, and a Russian spambot. [Hi spambot! Hope you enjoy leaving comments I delete instantly.]) So I do a lot of writing what I want to read and all, but that also means that I don’t get to talk abou...

Ironically for a blog that’s on my college applications, writing college applications has mostly kept me from blogging lately. Totally coincidentally, I only have a couple of photos but they’re of something really cool!  For Halloween, I wanted to make something I could use for cosplay, and I chose the PreservationAux survey group from the Murderbot Diaries books.  The jacket is a gray long-sleeved tshirt that I cut open and sewed a zipper into, then embroidered, and the rest of the outfit is just stuff I had, except for the “feed interface” which I bought at the local ren faire.  Me in the costume Progress shots Gratuitous project and pumpkin picture. You can probably guess which pumpkin I did, and it’s not the dog.  Mirror selfie of the jacket right after I finished it. 

Ugh, club day. Too much being a smiley person for me, thanks. It was not helped by the fact that I was running on like no sleep. (I stayed up to make triboards for two clubs, which might have been a bit overly ambitious.) Anyways, that’s why I didn’t post yesterday. So tonight I used family movie night as an excuse to project all my complex emotions about club day onto some characters from a story I’m writing. I don’t know whether I’ve ever talked about this on the internet before, but I guess this snippet I’m really happy with is a good start.  The bare minimum context is that it’s about a bunch of high school theater kids, about half of whom are magical in some way; this includes the main character, eleventh grader and threadmage María Soledad “Solí” Armijo Riveras, and her banshee girlfriend Elia Graydaughter. Everyone involved is queer and magical and just trying to get through high school, and they have shenanigans and friendship and stuff.  (CW: mentions of transphobia, ...

 I will have a photodump from the trip we went on next week, once I’ve had a bit to process, and I’ll talk about some fun yarn stuff and game stuff soon (it’s been a while, I know, I’ve had a weird summer), but this week is all about poetry, specifically a whole bunch of poem snippets I wrote over the last few days. (Thursday’s note: This was supposed to go out yesterday, to make up for absolutely nothing last week and in celebration of my birthday, but the beach happened so I didn’t write.) This is mostly a loose celebration, in an odd way, that it’s my birthday and as such I can do whatever I want here (still true even when it isn’t my birthday. Let me have my moment of oddity though), so I’m posting poetry.  Something There is something very poetic about all this — late afternoon sun in my eyes hair and skirt flowing, swirling in the wind  strings streaming from my hands while I weave  Weaving I am  Weaving a poem As I am knotting this bracelet Because There ...

The City Spies series by James Ponti is getting a new book sometime in February! It will be called City of the Dead, and it’ll be the fourth book. I shared these thoughts and predictions for it on my personal instagram on Monday, but this is a slightly more edited essay-format. ( Instagram announcement  for the curious; it has the cover and the name.) Fair warning: spoilers for City Spies, Golden Gate, and Forbidden City ahead. I will try to mark anything really terrible, but just read the books please. I want to talk about them with people, aaaahhh!  My initial hopes on reading the announcement were for a book about Rio or Kat, given the cover. Personally, I’m hoping for Rio because of the fanfic I’m working on that’s currently about him, Brooklyn, and their friendship, but I would also enjoy a book about Kat because she has a really interesting point of view, and I’d love to see more. The way each book has been focused on one kid so far means that there’s probably going to b...

I had all these ideas, but somehow I just have no motivation to write this week. I have a thing, a gaming thing. It is almost done, but I don’t know how to get to the point where it’s done. I am so close. It just doesn’t want to be finished. So today, I’m going to whine about discuss the DMC numbering system for floss colors, and complain about all the better options explore ways that it could be easier to remember.  First, the DMC numbering system is a means of organizing their vast array of colors. They have at least a thousand color codes, all of which define a very specific color and shade. These codes don’t have any relation to the colors they represent, and there’s no rhyme or reason to the codes. Some related colors are near each other, like 971 Pumpkin and 970 Pumpkin Light, or 796 and 797, both dark blues. But 815 is a dark red and 818 is light pink, and some shades (mostly ecru) don’t have a number even. It’s frustrating, hard to remember, and usually easy to mix up the...

 Continuing on from the past two posts, this is the final part of a 3 part series dealing with textiles and traditions in fantasy worlds.  Today, I’m going to give a few examples of textiles in RPG worlds that I’ve built, but first I want to briefly talk about working these into a game. Working worldbuilding into an rpg plot is a complex subject and requires a lot more effort than I can give right now to cover comprehensively, but specifically for textiles, one thing I do is to describe what clothes people are wearing. This is especially useful if clothes denote something special in society, but even if they don’t, “light brown linen robes” and “neon yellow polyester raincoat” come from two very different cultures and textile traditions, and imply two very different levels of technology. Beyond clothing, consider dropping in household items — a “woven rug with geometric patterns” can give a good setting to a scene and reinforce bits of culture, or a tablecloth could be made ...

This is a continuation of the series I started one two weeks ago: textile traditions in fantasy worlds  and how you build them. Part 1 was about general ideas for how cultures interact with textiles, and this part (part 2) is about specific traditions for your culture. I assume anyone reading this, fair warning, has already read part 1 and has sort of a general idea of their culture’s textile traditions and history. Or at the very least, a couple of ideas about materials and workers and tools.  This week, we’re focusing on specific textile traditions in a culture. This means things that have been handed down for at least a few generations (traditions are passed down from person to person) relating to fabric and its role in people’s lived (textiles are mostly not-everyday-clothing-things but more like rugs and blankets and special clothing) that are reasonably compact to define and easy to drop into an rpg world (specific means not going into 300 years of detailed history all ...

Shut up, it’s still Thursday. I really like historical textiles, and I like fantasy worlds, and I like world building. So let’s talk fantasy textile traditions, for your default fantasy d&d-ish world. I have a bunch of ideas, and so I’m going to present a guide to developing a complete textile tradition for a fantasy culture, using examples, and also a list of things I’ve done that anyone can steal and drop into a game, because I have a lot of those. That’ll be the end of this three part series. This first bit is mostly about researching and coming up with general ideas, next week will be about making specific traditions, and the last week will be a list of ideas that you can use to build on.  I want to note that this is going into a lot of detail, and most people aren’t going to use this level of detail. I actually often start with specific traditions rather than a general thing, but I have a lot of preexisting knowledge that I can use to develop the general ideas more quickly...

 I know it’s late, but bear with me. I’ve had a bad day today and couldn’t really write much. I’ve been tatting more lately, and I thought I’d share a thing I tried for my attempts! I’m actually not using a traditional shuttle. They click too much and make it hard for me to work silently like I prefer. Instead, I’m using the plastic clips that hold bread bags from my local grocery store closed. They hold a decent amount of thread, and they’re really surprisingly easy to use.  That’s all. I had a migraine and that’s everything you’re getting. Sorry. 

This is the first part of a complex project I’m working on for a number of unrelated reasons (sort of a bet, sort of a dare, and then I got really intrigued…) that has to do with the real-world physics of D&D5e magic, and translating magic to physics equations. The goal is to be able to write something that looks like it could be a chapter out of a physics textbook, but for D&D magic-users. The first step, though, is to be able to come up with a way of representing magical power (in game terms, spell slots) as something that can be worked with (an equation or a constant or something).  I started with a simple method that took the number and level of spell slots for a given character level and produces a single measure of magical power. I used the table for multiclass character spell slots by level (PH 165) for all my work, because I wanted something that did not require a specific class. This method should work for providing a measure of power for any class that can cast sp...

 I woke up this morning to a bunch of texts from one of my group chats buzzing. Two people had spent about half the night swapping drabbles (in case that’s a new term for you — they’re a term for stories, usually fanfics, that are exactly a hundred words long and a complete story) about any number of things (it started as d&d character drabbles, then switched to actual fanfics). Towards the time I woke up, they had switched to shorter stories, challenging each other to get shorter and shorter but still tell a good story. The last one was only 10 words! I’m also reading some vintage crochet and knitting patterns that were written when space was at a premium. They tend toward, well, short and concise don’t even begin to describe them. More like incomplete (sometimes) and requiring interpretation (always).  So I got inspired. Here are a bunch of really short rpgs and patterns. Each paragraph is a new one, and I’ll give a word count for each, based on the word processor I use....

Happy Chanukah! Happy Advent! I had a Chanukah gaming thing that I was going to do, but I didn’t finish it in time, so I’ll either post it next week or next year. Instead, I’m going to share my writing project. I seem to get these ideas every year, so I write them down.  Meet… the Yarn-, Math-, RPG-, and Book-Related Christmas carols (not all of these may be present, this is just a few things)! Some of these people have probably seen before; heard before, more likely, actually because I was singing in the shower when I came up with several of these. And not all of these are complete or good parodies. I write them when I think of them.  O Crochet Tree (O Tannebaum) Oh crochet tree, oh crochet tree, how lovely are your stitches. You stand so soft and cuddly, you are so warm and snuggly. Oh crochet tree, oh crochet tree, how lovely are your stitches.  We wish you a merry knit-mas (we wish you a merry Christmas) We wish you a merry knit-mas, we wish you a merry knit-mas, we w...

 I have a minor obsession with the Murderbot Diaries books, in case that’s not clear to anyone. And I needed a ship for a d&d game last week. So I drew a preliminary sketch of ART/Perihelion (the ship MB is somewhat friends with, depending on your feelings about what exactly friendship is) as a kind of guide for what the players would find. Then, of course, the players went elsewhere, and I didn’t use the map after all.  However, I did add to it, and then redraw it nicer so it looks like an actual schematic that ART would have. Because I could, and I was bored, and I was forced to sit through a very boring presentation yesterday. Also, I’m sharing it because it’s nearly Christmas season, so a lot of my crochet work is presents, which I’ll share after Christmas when it’s not a spoiler.  The whole thing Logo on the top left. Transcript: Deep Space AI Division, Est. CR 2371. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.  Close up of the front part of the ship. Th...

 It’s been kind of a long week, but I’m feeling much better than I did last week. I have a bunch of ideas for a project, and I’m working on a couple of other projects, but today I wanted to talk about something near and dear to my heart: lace. More specifically, knotted lace. This is a wide category that includes tatting and macrame, so even more specifically, I want to talk about a particular kind of non-lace knot work and adapting it to lace. Today, we’re talking about two interrelated things: Cavandoli work (both diagonal and horizontal), and friendship bracelets.  Pretty much every kid knows friendship bracelets — worked in embroidery floss or thread, using a series of double half hitches to make stripes or chevrons or other similar patterns.  These are pictures of a friendship bracelet I’m making with a simple chevron pattern. It’s pretty simple to do patterns of this sort; almost everyone I knew when I was younger had made at least one or two.  Cavandoli work i...

 So I was up late last night (we went to see the musical Hamilton [!!!], which is playing around here) and don’t have anything to talk about really, and I’m just going to dump a whole list of ideas I had a while ago for role playing games (both actual game-games and story ideas or campaigns, also characters), because I’m running on not enough sleep and I just don’t have the will to write anything more. If you want to use any of these game ideas, feel free to do whatever with them; I’d appreciate credit for them but honestly nobody really reads this anyways so I doubt anyone would use them and it really doesn’t matter.