An Actual-play Podcast Where We’re Playing DEAD IN THE WEST, A Game Of My Own Creation! Please Give

Mario Odyssey does a lot of cool, strange things, but none as cool or strange as letting you dress the most iconic character in all of videogames as a topless cowboy. 

In this video I talk about character design and theory, as well as why Mario has stuck around as long as he has. Any likes, comments, shares or subscriptions will go a long way!

Tried my hand at a Gaster battle. I haven’t seen much art embracing his whole shtick of being a lost/deleted/corrupted file. I think something like this is more in line with what Toby would give us in terms of an actual encounter with him.

Hello friends! I’d like to direct all of you to the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1367347179/dead-in-the-west-a-tabletop-rpg-set-in-the-mythic?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=dead%20in%20the%20west The past year and a half or so, I’ve been working hard on creating my very own pen-and-paper tabletop RPG (think Dungeons and Dragons if you’ve never played one before). The game is set in what I like to call a “Mythic Old West” setting - think old cowboy movies and pulpy novels - the kind of place made up of tall-tales and larger-than-life characters. Setting out on an adventure in Dead in the West should feel like your party is a group of modern-day scribes, stitching out the tapestry that is the first Great American Folklore! The Kickstarter is not asking for very much, and will go towards creating both a digital and physical edition of a beautiful rulebook, filled with gorgeous artwork by tumblr users like yourselves, all paid a fair commission.

Please do consider contributing to the Kickstarter! Dead in the West is an incredibly fun game, and I’d love to share it with as many people as I possible can.

Also you get the bonus of seeing my ugly mug in the dieo up there.

Thanks everybody <3

The Cradle

We assumed we were in the box.

It was only natural, after all. It’s what anyone would have thought. We had been away for almost six years. A little silver glint in space; not even enough to catch the eye. The CAS system kept us asleep most of it, of course. If we’re talking waking hours, we had been away from Earth maybe eight months.

Space is full of radiation. There’s a reason so many old astronauts have cancer - it comes from everywhere. Our ship had a ridiculously simple monitor, a light really, that was meant to alert us when radiation levels were about to get too high. The trouble was, when we were under, something went wrong. No way of knowing what, but this little green light was on the fritz. We looked at it and no one could figure the thing out - our chief engineer, after some tinkering, told us that the thing was garbage. That there was a 50/50 chance it was accurately indicating high levels of radiation. When you’re in a little metal tube, surrounded on all sides by death, those odds really don’t sound so bad.

Still, it was enough to get to you. It turns out an even chance was the worst thing we could have heard. I would gladly have taken 90/10, or even 99/1 odds. The certainty of death would have been infinitely more comforting.

After a few days, someone brought up we were exactly like the cat in the box. I’m sure everyone is aware, but if you’re not, I can give my two cents. Schrödinger’s cat is a kind of tawdry metaphor that was never really meant to be taken seriously, but the basic premise is as follows; a cat is placed in a box with a Geiger counter containing a trace amount of some radioactive substance. In the space of an hour, it’s equally possible that the substance  remains unchanged as it is the substance decays. If the substance decays, a flask of poisonous shatters and kills the cat. In the hour before the box is opened, the contents of the box are a superposition, wherein the cat is both alive and dead. Upon observing the contents of the box, the superposition “chooses” an outcome. It was a metaphor that, to my foggy recollection, was meant to mock the idea of a contradictory harmonious state. However, it caught the public imagination and became accepted into the vast sea of pop-science.

What is interesting, however, is the notion that an action in the present, ie opening the box, can in fact change an event in the past, in this case whether the cat has been alive or dead the last hour.

We were currently the cat in the box; there was a 50/50 chance that we had been poisoned. The monitors on Earth would know for certain whether we were or not, but we were not due to communicate with them for another six months. It was funny, in a way. We joked about being zombies. That we were just waiting for the boys back open to crack open the lid.

After a month, it stopped being funny. I became unsure whether I was feeling the effects of radiation poisoning. Maybe it was a placebo, maybe it was all in my head, but I swear I could feel it. I could feel this looming dread, this decay deep in my bones. Examining the path the ship had taken, one of my peers figured out exactly where the radiation source must have been, if it indeed existed at all. After two months of uncertainty, we decided to open the box ourselves. 

It was not our decision to make.

We put ourselves to sleep and turned the ship around. We had a six month timer; that would put us in range of Earth.

In that sleep, you are meant to dream. I had nothing. When I think back to my time under, I recall nothing. Only the darkness and a strange anxiety.

We awoke, looked out the window, and realised we were wrong. We were wrong all along. 

We were never in the box.

A neutron star is the result of a collapsed star. While relatively tiny in size, their density is incredible. A neutron star with a radius of only 7 miles can have a mass of over twice our sun. They also give out enormous amounts of radiation. A tiny, blinding usher. A calamitous angel. The scroll, rolling up the night sky.

Swallowing whole the world entire.

Uncertainty was the curse. There was an even chance that there was no radiation source. There was an even chance the monitor was faulty. There was an even chance we were all fine.

But we had to know, and in our knowing, we became fate. We were the observers. We forced the choice. We changed the past and smashed the vial.

It wasn’t us in the box, it was the world. But we needed to look. We needed to.

So the auction scene in Jurassic World 2 is p good, but how would it flow with some big band jazz and snappier editing? (pls forgive me my memes)

ok so i generally don't find guys attractive but you cute 👌🏼👀

As a long-decaying malevolent skeleton I don’t hear that much, so thanks

Hey everybody. Here’s a video I made about animation, what it means to me and the psychological idea of “Flow” - or when a task becomes meditative. 

If you enjoy this video, please feel free to let me know if there’s another topic you’d like me to talk about. Similarly, any advice/general comments are much obliged. 

Oh! And I went and did a twitter now because people on my videos kept asking. Feel free to follow me @The_Infranaut

Thanks everybody!

There are times in my life I have wondered where the pain goes when it is absent. In my age I've realised that the answer to that question is simply; 'deeper'.

Owen from “Lilytooth”, a work in progress

What if the Camera Really Do Take Your Soul? Arcade Fire, Anthropology and Western Myth.

“Flashbulb Eyes” is not a particularly long song (especially compared to the others on the album), and lyrically speaking it... Well, it's eight different lines.

However, it is in this track where (I feel) the albums two strongest themes, fear or sociopathy and hatred of fame come together in the most succinct and straightforward way.

Though recently, this song has inspired me to think about something else; the idea that certain people once believe that “the camera can steal your soul”. It mostly seems to be colonial bullshit. 

What you're looking at here is a photograph from keen scientific writer and pioneer of Japanese photography, Ueno Hikoma. During Hikoma's life, he captured many iconic scenes of the Japanese countryside, as well as its inhabitants. His work was widely influential, and he maintained close relationships with and even taught many of the other great Japanese  photographers of the time (Uchida Kuichi, Noguchi Jōichi and Kameya Tokujirō to name just a few). At times, however, superstitions crept into his craft, and he had trouble taking the pictures of a number of his Japanese countrymen. You see; it was a belief in some areas that having your picture taken would also take your soul away.

Except, no, that's not really true at all, it's just how Western society seemed to interpret it. It's true, Hikoma had difficulty taking the pictures of some Japanese citizens, however it wasn't really for fear of a soul being stolen. It was in fact far closer to some of the Japanese believing that they could become sick from having their picture taken, possibly due to the bright flash – and even this belief does not necessarily come down to superstition as much as misunderstanding. The camera was still a relatively new contraption – especially if you were a farmer and had never seen anything remotely similar before – so general unease around it does not seem too absurd.

This example, by the way, happens to be one of the very few (documented, at least) examples of a people actually fearing the camera in this way.

Other instances of of civilisations fearing the camera seem to stem more from cultural misunderstandings. For instance, the Australian Aboriginal culture (much like the Iroquois) is an intrinsically oral one, containing no written language. History and stories pre-1788 were maintained through song and repeatedly told stories rather than through physical documentation (The Iroquois, conversely, would appoint “Sachem”, individuals tasked with remembering and teaching Historic events). As a result, the Aboriginal tradition has become a profoundly esoteric one. Due to this traditional, recording an Aboriginal ceremony, song or practise is a matter of extreme contention, and it is highly recommended (and really, just a mark of respect) you consult the host before taking pictures. The avoidance of the camera, for these people, is not a matter of fear, but of cultural preservation. 

In Janet Hoskins study of the myth, she theorises that the fear of the camera stealing blood is actually far more likely than the notion of a camera stealing a soul (Noting that the cameras “click” sounding similar to a sucking sound). This sounds a little odd, but makes sense – after all, the notion of a “soul” is not necessarily common to every culture, and even if a culture does posses a “soul equivalent”, who is to say their version is capable of being stolen? Is it not also possible that fear of the camera could also have begun out of fear of the power it represents – taking ones image forever, without their consent? Anthropologist Rodney Needham labelled the belief that the camera can steal the soul a “literary stereotype”.

In fact, the idea of a soul being stolen through a representative image is a distinctly European one.  During the Victorian era, it was common practise for all mirrors to be covered with sheets or rags at a funeral. This was due to the incredibly strong belief the Victorians had in “the soul” - notably that immortality was achieved through the resurrection of the soul. Mirrors were covered so that no reflection of the dead would be present at their funeral – the common superstition was that if any reflection were present, then the deceased soul could be trapped forever. It makes sense now, that many Westerners would have associated other culture's avoidance of the camera with the soul. This idea of the “reflection” representing the soul likely carried over to the introduction of the camera, where in stead of a “reflection” mirroring the soul, it was a photograph.

Ah yes, reflections. Reflektions.

Whatever Happens

In what we would consider a long dead universe, the last quark hangs in existence. Really, it cannot be said to hang or float, or be described with verbs at all.

There is nothing outside the quark. There is nothing beyond it. When we imagine this, we may imagine an expanse. A white void that stretches into infinity. This is incorrect. Outside the quark, there is nothing. There is no void, no expanse. The lack of existence is not something the quark inhabits; it is a force pressing down on it from all sides. The quark, in this sense, is all existence. The Quark is now everything.

This is what he would imagine, if he could. Never shutting his eyes, he watches Seychelles disappear beneath the bow as the ocean gently lifts and releases the ship. “It’s a small thing”, he thinks without knowing exactly what the thought refers to. To Seychelles, his ship was indeed small. To his home country of Somalia, however, Seychelles was perhaps even smaller. He continued on like this in his head as he watched the crown of the archipelago blink in and out of existence over the waves. To France, Somalia must seem small. He wasn’t sure, he assumed it must be so.

When someone does wrong, scale can be very comforting. He avoids eye contact with his fellows, and instead finally turns his gaze to the other ship. So much larger, so many more people. He takes comfort knowing that, to the sea, they are both small. I his mind, he moves up. Up to where the two boats are dwarfed by the ribbon of islands, up still to nothing but the ocean, up still until he can no longer picture the map. If he could have imagined that quark, he would have felt very comforted. To what hadron was it once attached, he might wonder. What he does consider is that there will eventually be something that will be the last thing to exist.

It could only take him so far, though. There is a hungry pain and a looming fear that disturbs the serenity of scale.

It is a mistake to think Nihilism comes easy. It would have been a great comfort for him to picture that quark at this moment, and felt the embrace of insignificance. To imagine his own cells, on the microscopic level, and travel back a quarter of a million years with them. To imagine the light from the very same moon hitting Mitochondrial Eve‘s eyes for the first same. To picture the Old Mother when she herself was new, before her genes branched off into a million directions, one artery of which lead him here, to this ship, on this night, holding this gun. How would any of this unease matter to him then?

You can be hungry, but you can’t steal. You can steal, but you can’t hurt anyone. You can hurt people, but you can’t kill them. How far back from that print do you have to stand before you can’t read it anymore? What could be done that Eve or the Quark would ever know?

He knows what it is that he has to do whilst feeling what he is told he has to feel. “It would be a blessing”, he might think, “to be small and to know it.”

Instead, he imagines the ship, sliding across a granite sea. He moves back until it disappears into the glint of the moon on the waves, and then further back until the light itself is gone. He could do anything.