Cover Letter With The Vampire

The Outsider: a complete archive. Bound in real leather.

What a project! I started this typeset last year and after two practice binds here is, finally, the real deal. This little book includes every line of dialogue spoken by the Outsider in the Dishonored games, all ripped and typeset by yours truly.

I learned a ton since this was my first foray into bookbinding. It was frustrating, it was fun, I'm proud of the result despite the myriad of flaws. Two of these binds are for mutuals, one is for me.

There was a ton of thought that I put into this typeset so I included some info about it under the cut.

I typeset this project in A6 instead of the standard A5 so it wouldn't feel like I was wasting a ton of material if this project had gone wrong - but also to stretch out a comparatively small amount of text into an amount of pages more appropriate of a book. All in all there's under 9000 words in this book but thanks to the small format it's just over 100 pages long. And it meant I could use normal office paper without ending up with the wrong grain direction!

I decided against hyphenation for 99% of the typeset because it felt like adding hyphens made the small amount of text even smaller. Almost every line was edited typographically in some way to make the text feel good to me, adding line breaks and so on, idk I don't know graphic design but I did what felt right to me, so it really did take a long, long time just to typeset it all.

I wanted it to include everything including cut lines, so I included those in red and italics in the appropriate spots hovering over and through the normal text. I was trying to elicit the feeling of a ghostly afterimage or a later correction or amendment of the text. This did mean cutting the cut lines down to just the important parts, e.g. I only included the "to be a dancer" part of the cut version of the "When Billie Lurk was eight" line.

The little stars demarcate scene divisions. Empty stars mark scenes that are exclusive of each other - only one version of each scene is played in a run. The start of each scene subsection is marked with a quest marker from the DH2 journal. The lines that start at these markers connect exclusive possibilities - as with the scenes separated by empty stars above, only one subsection per level of line is played in one run. The stars are admittedly used very inconsistently because I just found they broke up some sections way too much, but the quest markers and lines should be consistently used throughout the work at least haha

The cover has been stamped with 3d-printed stamps and the impressions then painted with gold leather paint in order to give an (easier, cheaper) approximation of gold foil tooled leather. I kept it very minimalistic because the sort of story I originally wanted to tell with it is that since this is obviously a heretical book it would be very subtle in its exterior so as to not draw unwanted attention, only revealing its forbidden nature if you pulled it off the shelf and opened it. After deciding I did want to include the title on the spine that story doesn't quite work anymore, but the somewhat reduced minimalistic design still suits the Outsider, I think.

My kirtland's warbler logo is a public domain illustration by L.A. Messick via the USDA Forest Service.

the amazing world of kimball

bitches hate me for my earnest whimsy and my pathological degree of avoidant behavior

Ed Dodd

question: should I watch We're All Going To The World's Fair first or skip right to I Saw The TV Glow

One under-appreciated breed of fic writer are the ones who hyperfocus on logistics to the exclusion of all canon shortcuts, and thus usually strike upon an awesome way to flesh out the worldbuilding or characters.

Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”

Anyway I’m always DELIGHTED to find a fic or writer who asks these questions because the fics themselves are universally bangers.

Church of Whale Fall

logging back into cohost for the first time in months like troypizzafire.gif