When The World Was Black And White.

New tag... taking it to another level. Hopefully this will be on a wall someday :)

Altered Perspective.

Raven.

Golden Kill

Visual artists do sketches... I'll sometimes sketch scenes.  This is just a rough something I came up with today...

        A pair of cool blue dots lit up on the bracelet about her wrist, mirroring the pair of lights just above the trigger on the gun.  Just as she’d ordered it… the weapon recognized her touch.   Only her touch, as it were.  She could almost feel the life beneath her finger, coursing through the palm of her hand, urging her to squeeze the trigger.  If anyone else tried to wield the heavy-automatic rifle, the chamber feed would seize, effectively locking all function of the gun until an authorized user attempted to use it.  But for her…

        Carefully, she set it back on the table, and both pairs of lights were extinguished.  The bracelet was just a bracelet again, and the gun was now little better than a heavy club.  For a moment, she considered how effective the vastly expensive hunk of metal would be as a simple blunt force weapon.

        She looked up and across the table.  “You do impressive work… for a doctor, that is.”

        “You are pleased, then?”

        Her silence was as much confirmation as if she’d actually spoken.  If she’d been displeased, she would have been sure to let him know, and in none-too-eloquent of language.

        Yes, silence was good.

        “About payment, then…” he began.

        She held up a bullet, one that glimmered in the dim light like gold.  In fact, it was gold, solid all the way through.  “Do you know how much this is worth?” she asked.  She tossed it to him, allowing him to weigh it speculatively in his hands.

        “Maybe ten-thousand?  At the shiest mark, at least… it could be even more.”

        “Exactly,” she said.  “That’s more than half your fare.”

        “What about the…?”

        Before he had even able to finish, she had whipped a small, silenced pistol from the small of her back, and fired a second bullet straight through the man’s forehead.  “There’s the other half,” she growled.  “Plus a little extra.”  As he slumped forward over the table, blood leaking down between his eyes, she stood to leave.  “Keep the change,” she tossed over her shoulder.

        The lights on her personalized rifle were already lit as she exited the back room of the bar, the live weapon nestled in the crook of her arm.

        Maybe silence wasn't so good after all.

Beginning of a Totally Unrelated-to-Anything Scene

The place was called “Executive Hotel”—it took a conscious effort to keep from thinking what sort of low-life executive would choose to stay in such a pisspot.  It looked more like a prison compound than the “Most Comfortable Stay,” as the sign out front bragged.  Sleeping beneath an overpass might have been better.

White paint peeled from the exterior walls, streaking the dingy surface with scars of brown.  Either it was the paint peeling to reveal half-rotted wood beneath, or it was mildew caused by some awful roof runoff.  I was certain to stay far enough away so the distinction couldn’t be made.  And the cars parked in the lot were in much the same condition, nearly every one of them a beater joint fit to throw a piston and clatter to a stop at any moment.  Paint jobs all dull tans, beiges, and sickly olive greens—or at least they had been, before the rust had begun to corrode the old steel frames—did nothing to improve my already low opinion of this fine establishment.

It was enough to make a man rethink the choices he had made in his life.  And as the shoddy suspension of my loaner car—only earlier that day, I had saved it from the scrapper with a quick exchange of five, crisp one hundred dollar bills—bounced over the broken cracks of the uneven lot, rolling like a drunken mule into the space outlined by two non-existent yellow stripes, I found myself doing exactly that...

Genome Circuitry

So, I have quite an otherworldly wound on my arm.  Not only did it leave a large patch of my skin strangely hairless, it cut out a pattern that seems to belong in some science fiction representation of human DNA.  But not entirely.  It also resembles an abstract understanding of a circuit board.  Probably the strangest part of it all, however, is that what little it bled was not blood...

It bled ink.

-N7 Day 2022-

As mentioned yesterday, here’s my new minimalist Mass Effect title card!

I’m a big fan of title sequences (and main menus in games) as the choice of art and music really sets the tone for the whole experience from that initial moment. This is one of the many things Mass Effect does so successfully, and I love playing with these moments as it allows me to do fanart of a favorite series, while still hanging out in my typography/graphic design happy place.

For this year, I wanted to explore a more alien design, maybe a strange new world we could visit in a new Mass Effect. I love doing minimal, restricted color palettes with different textures providing the details and variations. This idea was born from the classic N7 red for the text, which then spread to the planetary surface in the background.

And then these mysterious obsidian orbs hovering over these impact craters. Or maybe scorch marks... One of my favorite things in ME1 was discovering those weird ruins on random worlds, often with the single chrome sphere hovering over the surface. I wanted these orbs to hearken back to those moments, but also be different.

That’s all I’ve got. Thanks as always to Bioware for creating these games, and I look forward to new adventures in the future!

For now, though, I should go.

ROOK. Favorite. Done.

Cod Market.

AKA “Couldn’t Resist”

colorofamirror.net

Color of a Mirror is my cyberpunk novel centered around a musician who wants to be a rockstar. Written, designed, and published by me, it’s not bombastic or action-heavy, but rather is driven by character and personal, human issues. It gets into ideas of the subconscious and the lies we tell ourselves. If you like the dark futures of William Gibson, I think you’ll find something to like in this book.

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I love different forms of communication, anything really that codes words behind beautiful design rather than actual letters. The above design motif is on the cover of the forthcoming deluxe hardcover novel, and is a stylized version of the American braille for “Color of a Mirror” (beginning at bottom left).

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Tomorrow is Cyber Monday. This is everything I’ve ever wanted a cerebral, cyberpunk novel to be, so what better day to check it out than tomorrow!

Available exclusively from my website, each copy will come signed by me, and will start shipping on or around Dec. 1.

(And if you want a taste of this world, check out the cinematic dark ambient soundtrack of the same name, now streaming on Spotify and other streaming platforms!)