All The Kings Men: A Chocobros-themed Charity Zine
All The King’s Men (Etsy Shop) is a Final Fantasy XV zine showcasing the relationship between the four main characters (Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia, Prompto Argentum, and Ignis Scientia.) either as a romantic avenue or a platonic companionship. It’s a not-for-profit work, with the after-cost proceeds going to The Railroad Rainbow, a non-profit organization that helps LGBTQI individuals facing threats to their lives and safety find asylum.
The prime piece is a two-book set, broken into the King’s Men core and the Crownsguard Chronicles partner. The latter is where you’ll find my piece.
I got to work with a lot of big names in the fandom on this, I got to do some headcanonin’ and worldbuilding, and hopefully I get to be responsible for helping at least one person find safety. Every order helps us help someone else. No one deserves any cruelty for loving another consenting adult, no matter who they are or who they love.
I know the King’s Men is getting some of my money. (Joke’s on them. I’m ordering seven.)
So a while back I joined a fandom zine, and even though it’s been up and open for shopping for about a month now, we’ve only really just recently settled on a charity to donate our profits to.
First the zine:
Waves of Wonder: An Ocean-themed Prompto Charity Zine
Waves of Wonder is a Final Fantasy XV zine featuring Prompto Argentum with the theme being oceans or large bodies of water. I was lucky to be one of a handful of artists who was allowed to participate, and after careful review my piece was placed inside the zine under the correct section, for which I am absolutely thrilled.
A snippit of my piece in the Zine. Let’s just say how psyched I am this is my preview shot.
The Zine retails at $15 for the digital and $25 for the digital/hardcopy combo, bouncing up and around as needed for the various extras we’ve put together. Altogether, we hope to raise enough money to make a sizeable donation to our charity of choice, Ocean Cleanup!
WE AIM TO CLEAN UP 90% OF OCEAN PLASTIC POLLUTION
-The Goal of Ocean Cleanup
And they’re already working on it. But things like this take time. And money, unfortunately. Lots and lots of money. But a little can go a long way, and we want to help. We can’t do it alone, though, and we know it’s hard to give away money without getting something in return.
So we’re asking you to buy our zine, so we can all give something to make our oceans a better place for our aquatic friends and the mysterious merfolk to live.
My brother has a tendency to send me things. Not all of them are my style, because his humor and interests don’t always align with mine. And then sometimes…. well.
Sometimes he sends me things like this.
My brother knows I love plants that don’t fit into the “it’s just a harmless plant” mold. Give me plants that eat meat, that eat other plants, plants that bleed, plants that do more than look pretty and harmless. Even if they do look pretty and harmless, or are pretty and harmless.
Pretty and harmless is okay! But always, give me more.
And my brother gave me this. And I went off on a research binge, and shared it with so many people, and got things back!
Hura crepitans, the sandbox tree, also known as possumwood and jabillo, is an evergreen tree of the spurge family (Euphorbiaceae). It can be recognized by its smooth brown bark covered in many dark, pointed spines which have led to its being nicknamed monkey no-climb.
The sandbox tree’s explosive fruit has led to an additional nickname: the dynamite tree.
For starter’s, lets find out what this ‘explosive’ fruit looks like, yeah?
Its fruits are pumpkin-shaped capsules, 1.4–2 inches (3–5 cm) long, 2–3.2 inches (5–8 cm) diameter, with 16 carpels arranged radially. Its seeds are flattened and about 0.8 inches (2 cm) diameter.
It… doesn’t look dangerous, right? Or explosive. Does it?
The sandbox tree’s fruiting bodies are large capsules which can explode when ripe, splitting into segments and launching seeds at 70 metres per second (160 mph). One source states that ripe capsules catapult their seeds as far as 100 metres (330 ft). Another source states that seeds are thrown as far as 45 metres (148 ft) from a tree, averaging about 30 metres (98 ft).
Uh, wow? Wow. This is a tree that can shoot you. But only if it’s sowing its oats, so to speak. Still, imagine going to the ER and having to explain that your “bullet wound” is actually a tree trying to impregnate you because you were “somewhere in it’s range.” Granted, that sentence probably happens mostly in a fantasy world, but the gist of it still remains.
Cue, somewhere, a tree-spirit of some fashion knocking other sentient beings up this way. I mean. Be reasonable. If ripe fruit explodes and impales you, it’s theoretically a valid means of cross-species pregnancy. Painful, sure, in all the ways. But a tree-spirit isn’t human, and this definitely wasn’t painful to THEM, and even if you managed to convince one to be careful of human pain, this would probably be a topic that wouldn’t necessarily come up.
I mean. Considering the rest of the dangerous things the sandbox trees are known for besides “exploding fruit.”
The Caribs were said to make arrow poison from the sap.
Fishermen have been said to use the sap to poison fish.
Unripened seeds were cut in half to make pounce pots.
The wood makes furniture.
It’s an invasive species in Tanzania and can easily become so anywhere.
The fruit is poisonous.
Seeds, pods and tree spikes are used to make jewelry.
It has distinctly different male and female flowers.
It delights people who like things that explode and/or shoot people.
It’s amazing. I love it. I have Ideas, as a writer. As a plant lover I also love it, because it’s such a unique type of plant. Sure, there are other trees that are also dangerous, and I love them too. But this?
Glee!
Do you have a plant that’s unique from others you know? Or maybe just a plant you’d like to share with me? Let me know; I want to see it!
As some of you may have noticed (or maybe not, maybe this is news to you!), I.. uh. Fell off the posting wagon. Yep, that was me. I was doing really good, too! And then Corona hit, and the world freaked out, and with the world, so too did my occupation. Apparently every one of my occupations is #essential, four of them I can do from home, one of them who immediately freaked out and went “Hey, we need everybody to work an extra fifteen hours,” and so there it went.
The paychecks were good. The mental stress, somewhat less good. (I had two mental breakdowns in as many weeks, at least one of them borne thanks to my manager pushing buttons.) I took a two week Corona leave, which is all the longer that my job will hold my position for, and while I could have spent it writing posts here, I spent it murdering things in videogames and doing yardwork instead.
In that vein, the lawnmower might be broken?
I did manage to finish my zine piece for the Ocean Prompto zine, which as far as I know doesn’t have an official title yet, but my piece is done. I am relieved. More than that, I’m actually really excited about it. It’s got a title and EVERYTHING.
But while that’s peripherally relevant to the blog, it’s not as important as remembering to blog.
I remember watching this movie as a girl, curled up on the couch, living through the next dragon movie with my father. It’s a good memory; say what you will about family, but one thing my father and I could always agree on was dragons were the coolest. Just the best. And this was one of the movies that made it happen.
Although I have this in a multipack on DVD with some of it’s successors, those are still at this time packed away. When I bother to get them all out and watch them properly, I’ll post about any differences I might find (in as much as my own review standards permit) but in the meantime, Dragonheart and it’s sequels are all on Netflix, and I… well. I got a smidge bored. So I figured I’d peek in and see what could be seen. And I am so, so glad I did.
I don’t remember crying over this movie, as a child. But as a jaded adult? Yeah, I admit it. I cried. I wept. It was great.
I missed this movie, through the years. It was nice to watch it again. A Knight betrayed by those he loved, Oaths turned dark by hearts that didn’t believe in them, a good, solid vengeance story?
Some people say this movie didn’t survive the test of time. I suppose, to them, it probably didn’t. But watching it and applying what I know of science and mathematics, it’s still a really strong movie, especially considering what tools and understandings they had at their disposal back during filming. Every hint of what it takes to sustain a dragon, plus the touch of mysticism and lore, it’s huge. It’s great.
Any dragon-lover who enjoys that touch of realism, I think, is going to enjoy Dragonheart.
I often talk about scribbling things down, gathering ideas from Everywhere, and seeing what can be done with them. But I don’t often share those. Let’s try that for a moment, hmm?
Did you know, it’s not really tator tots unless you’re eating the Ore-Ida brand? They’ve got it trademarked, and the process for making them at home can take up to twelve hours. They’re also the main ingredient of the meal Hotdish, which honestly just looks really delicious.
Daisy Duke’s daisy dukes were considered too short to be seen on TV, so the show compromised by having her wear a pair of ultra-sheer pantyhose to prevent any real clothing malfunctions. The famous Hood Slide you see them pull off in the show started as an accident, and the General Lee’s antenna Did Not Approve the first time anybody tried to do it. Speaking of the General Lee, despite absolutely destroying a number of Chargers for the first six seasons, the General Lee was the single most popular ‘actor’ on the series, receiving more than 35,000 of the 60,000 letters addressed to the series.
In some less niche facts, there have been elements removed from the periodic table. Di, or didymium, which eventually turned out to be a combined element of samarium and the twins, praseodidymium and neodidymium.
The oldest working library in the world is part of the University of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, and was founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri. By contrast, the largest library in the world is the USA’s Library of Congress, founded in 1800.
The first African-American woman to serve in the US army was Cathay Williams in 1866, under the name William Cathay, as women were barred from military service at the time.
In Columbia, the typical movie snack is dried ants, not popcorn.
The town of Baarle is actually two towns, since it straddles the Dutch-Belgian border. This was so important during some wars as escaped POWs, enemy troops, and refugees could cross to the other side of the border, often by hiding upstairs in some homes or businesses, and their pursuers could not follow them because they did not have permission to trespass in the other country.
The oldest surviving piano dates back to 1720, was built by an Italian man named Bartolomeo Cristofori, and is currently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
There are others, of course, but I think I’ll leave this here for now. Until next time!
I’m not the right person to ask, about relationships, love, romanticism, families or anything else of the sort.
I’ve never had a relationship that survived, I’m not built for romance, my concept of love wildly different from what the rest of the world thinks is OK and my family life is my family life, not for anybody else to use as a bridgemark.
And yet, people ask me for advice. Apparently I give good advice to everybody not myself. But: I have mixed feelings about this day.
February 14th, the day Valentines Day is celebrated in America, is a societal nightmare. Society has convinced people that if they aren’t ragingly hormonally in lust with someone, they’re not in love. That on this day of all days, you have to show them that you care by spending money on things they probably don’t need and likely wouldn’t even want if it weren’t for societal culture telling them they should. But they do, because society says to want it.
Human beings are a social species. We want to be wanted, to be liked, to be cared for and care for others. The culture we’ve built tells us it has to be shown through material means.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t love to have a dozen roses and a box of chocolate for Valentines day. I’d prefer it if you bought me a plant and made a mess of chocolates yourself, as opposed to buying them, myself, because I value the time you spent on it more than the money you spent on it. Understandably you probably don’t really have the time for that, because society has also taught us that time is money and if you want money you need to work, all the time.
I worked at Mordor. Now I work at Mordor’s slightly less bad cousin, like Bludhaven is to Gotham. We started getting Valentines things in before New Years. We had our first feature floating in the back room roughly the day after Christmas. It was baffling. I didn’t and still don’t understand it. The holiday is designed for couples. It’s not something a single person is supposed to enjoy.
And yet, February 15th is Valentines Supplies Half Off day. It’s an excellent holiday on its own. I love it, even when I’m broke.
But the holiday I really love starts the day before, on February 13th.
Lupercalia. The three day writing holiday about psychic wolves, honoring the wolf-mother of the fathers of Rome. (Arguably the holiday used to be people being chased through the village with various people beating them with goat parts, but it IS a fertility holiday, traditionally, and fertility holidays are weird.)
I mean. It’s not just a writing holiday. It’s a posting extravaganza. I write for it all year, and I’m certain a lot of other people do, too. But for three days, the group explodes in size. It’s magical.
There is a lot of fertility and romance involved, granted. If I’m ever not poor, I might start participating by buying wolf-themed writing gear? Who knows.
When I was diagnosed with fibro, a lot of things didn’t make sense, but some things did. Some things made less sense than before, since I thought I’d had them figured out. And some of them made more sense, with the understanding of my disease.
One of the things that made more sense was my thoughts.
Now, I’ve never had thoughts of killing myself, and even at my worst, on medication we learned exacerbated my depression, I never have. But my brain does ask some of the strangest questions unexpectedly, like:
What would happen if my car drove off a cliff?
What would happen if this saw jumped back at snagged me?
How bad can it really hurt to break an arm?
All of these are questions I don’t actually need to know the answers to. I’m old enough to divine the answers based off past experiences, and I have no desire or need to hurt myself. But the thoughts, inexplicably, were there. They came as quick as they would go, often in moments where there was no contextual reason for them to be popping up.
Chronic pain numbs you to other types of injury, in a way. Your new normal becomes constantly hurting, and there’s no way to mend it. Having a name for fibro didn’t make it easier to deal with, but it made it easier to understand; naming your demons makes them controllable, so to speak. I began to understand that my body was reminding me that it hurts, in loud, cohesive thoughts. A worse injury couldn’t possibly hurt more, could it?
But more than that, I knew it wasn’t something to ignore. I would acknowledge the thoughts and follow them to their conclusion mentally. If my car went over a cliff, depending on how far down and what obstacles it met on the way, X could happen, or Y. Talking to my subconscious was a useful tool before, and it became so whenever my mind would be assaulted by intrusive thoughts.
Well, I say intrusive thoughts, but they actually have another name. Stray thoughts. Only we call them differently, because stray thoughts are usually not detrimental to life or limb if you act on them. They don’t cause anxiety.
I’m anxious enough without extra thoughts adding to it. But I’m also a writer. I can’t shy away from it, but I can use it.
And why not? I’ve been using anxiety my whole life for one thing or another. If you’ve ever written a paper under the stress caused by last minute panic then so have you.
So I talk to myself, whenever these thoughts press in. I puzzle out information and tease together ideas. None of them are good. But in writing, sometimes you have to break a few characters before you can write a good story.
Fibro doesn’t make sense of why invasive thoughts bombard me. It doesn’t help me understand them. But even if I’m wrong about what is causing them, that’s what I’m going to continue to believe until I find a better working theory:
I learned during my stint at Mordor that having one is important, not just for work-related things. (Protip: when working at a warehouse, keep a pen and paper handy. If the line goes down, if work gets scarce, if something happens at all, write down the time it happened, and when it stopped. Trust me: you’ll want that when the numbers start to scream at the bosses.)
Here’s the thing: writing ideas hit you most at the moments when you literally are not in a position to write them down. Falling asleep, in the shower, on the pot– at work, when you’re shoulder-deep in canned biscuits, in a fridge with half-frozen fingers and a back that is screaming at you, and your brain goes, ah, this would be a pretty excellent thing to write about. What a shame it would be to forget it before you get home.
So scribble. A lot. I try to hold onto that idea long enough for break or lunch to roll around and I can jot something quick down. Sometimes it clicks along enough for a short paragraph, and sometimes I only have a few moments to do the rough notation and any characters that might have been relevant. Sometimes I still manage to forget it before I get to the break room.
But when I have the free time, after, I can look at my paper and go, oh, I have a note here, this would make a really good story, let’s try it.
I do it with curious things, too. Sometimes there’s a new channel or a documentary on the TV, and they’ll drop an interesting tidbit somewhere that I just have to go research. Like samphire, which I learned about during a lunch break wherein a documentary about Venetian Glassblowing was on. It burns clean, or clean enough, and was a huge step forward in the advent of clear glass.
Progress!
So scribble. Anything that catches your eye, piques your interest, or even just happens to come across your mind. If you don’t have a chance to write right now, mark it down anyway and come back to it later. You’ll never know what good it can do.
Author Natasha York 