#db2023
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[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.
each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]
🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.
notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)
i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.
i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)
i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.
actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.
handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.
WIP : full text card assignments
bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.
[image description: they are truly garbage notes, i tell you. half of it is written at angles to the other half, many numbers in the math problems are not labeled, mistakes are scribbled over. it gets me there but it doesn't look pretty. end description.]
#desert bus 2023#desert bus for hope#disco elysium#book arts#letterpress#letterpress printing#handset type#printmaking#db2023#finished works#long post
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Desert Bus is nearly over, but they still have many hours and in the morning (for me) an auction for the big version of my poster! Join them in the last leg of their $1,000,000 raising event!
http://www.desertbus.org
http://www.twitch.tv/desertbus
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Andrew kicking off DB 2023 in the Goncharov shirt, of course. Excellent taste in movies on this charity run.
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This year's Desert Bus for Hope craft-along prize is complete! She's got a nice fancy frame because she deserves it.
My guess was a bit off — this didn't quite take 300 hours but it's not that much less! Relieved to (hopefully) be able to get it to its destination by the deadline.
Keep an eye out in a month or so to find out how you can possibly get your hands on this! More details will be put up on the Desert Bus site as we get closer to the event, which is in mid-November.
#The Sandman#Death (Sandman)#Neil Gaiman#DB2023#cross stitch#embroidery#Desert Bus for Hope#Desert Bus#Kirby Howell-Baptiste#my crafts#it's done wheeee
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WE'RE SO BACK
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My submission for the desertbus shift fursonas! And also the first art I felt I could post in how long? Sorry y’all.
Desertbus is a charity stream supporting child’s play, a charity that makes like slightly less terrible for children in hospitals, while playing a terrible bus game.
They’ll be streaming for a good while so you should let them keep you company and maybe try for some giveaway!
#desert bus#original art#original work#furry#my art#cardinal#bobcat#wolf#dragon#loadingreadyrun#desertbus#childs play#db2023
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Hello!
This year's Desert Bus For Hope charity marathon stream event is merely a short time from starting, so here's a post to let you know and also highlight things!
Come join the bus for a week of positivity and to raise money for child play charity.
If you don't know what desert bus is, see this wonderful video:
youtube
If you want to actually look at the website, it's:
And finally, all the good team at the Video Strike Team (VST) has their stuff at
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DESERT BUS FOR HOPE
The chairs additions from Dawn Guard today in a handy picture form! - original chair from the Pinny Arcade pin at store.desertbus.org designed by Moz Lunsford!!
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Video
youtube
DB2023 - QWERPline: Continually Unprepared
Always love to get new QWERPlive!
Really excited for Season 3.
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[video description: recording of making a case/box to hold a card deck from davey board and book cloth. the box has gaps in its two longer walls so that the card deck can be pulled out easily. Grey book cloth is glued to the box base and walls, and extra tabs of cloth wrap from the walls under the base and glue the pieces together. To apply pressure to the entire base at once, a filler the size of the card deck drops into the box and weights are placed across the top. end description.]
what is better than making perfect box for specific item. NOTHING. it is The Box for This Object and nothing else. platonic ideal of Categorizing: exactly one thing goes in this bucket because the bucket was made in the shape of it.
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DB2023
The poster has begun!
Get ready to watch the event at http://www.desertbus.org or http://www.twitch.tv/desertbus
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Desert Bus '23 Game Jam Game: The Coffee Question
Okay here’s a weird, non-standard thing.
See, I made my game jam game. I put it on this site. I hated it and brewed about it for a bit. But i believe in tracking my mistakes as well as my successes, so I figured it was better being done and moving on. But then a few days later, before the jam ended, I got a different idea and wanted to act on that, and so I did. What that means is this article has two distinct parts.
Part 1, here, before the fold, is me just showing you a game and linking to its itch page. After the fold is Part 2, the original version of the article, which is written by a more bummed out version of me.
The game I made is called The Coffee Question, and it’s based on the idea of trying to remember a complicated order for the whole staff when you run down to get people coffee. It’s a small game, only 27 cards, and it’s fully cooperative. You play it in two rounds, and have to try, collectively, to memorise an order of the food you’re there to get. Consider it a lesson about writing things down. It’s also built around a lot of different references to what I think of when I think of Desert Bus and food, though some concessions have been made to make the things hard to remember.
I think it’s fun! I recommend it! I like cooperative games for Desert Bus, feels more charitable. You can go get it over on itch.io. You can also get it here:
The Coffee Question – DB2023 Jam GameDownload
The rest of this article is preserved for archival purposes, and the other game is there for consideration, but really, don’t worry about it. The game is fine I guess, but I was really upset by the whole process. This one also had the same kind of upset but after writing about how you should route around those problems, not doing that in my followup shows how silly I can be.
Desert Bus 2023 happened! I made a game for it! Here’s my game jam game for it! I am not happy about it! I have thoughts about it and my approach that are bad! I’m going to talk some smack about it but also there’s a free to play print-and-play game pdf in this post! It’s just after the picture but before the fold!
Download the Print-And-Play File hereDownload
Okay, there’s a Desert Bus themed game jam that goes with the Desert Bus Event. Last year I did it, and I liked it and I liked the game I got out of it. The game I made out of it was a game about THE ANTI BUS and what I made was a drafting game full of references to the day to day events and memes of that desert bus event. I finished it and moved on to this year’s, armed with the knowledge that no, of course nobody looked at my game, because why would they? Very few game jam games get any attention.
But this year the prompt was COFFEE QUEST.
And I am still mad about this prompt.
I’m mad about this prompt because I let myself be pushed completely in the wrong direction for this game jam and the result was feeling like the game I made could never work. The game I made, if you look at it, has a terrible name and a dumb theme. It’s about people doing the shifts of Desert Bus and doing things to keep the energy up of each scene so they don’t fall asleep. The person who plays the most energetic card each turn wins, but there are cards that change that relationship. It’s a very simple game where you pick one of your two cards, and they do something. Coffee is the one trump card in the deck that beats everything but the three anti-coffee cards. That’s it! The whole thing is built out of what assets I could use for the $2.50 I already spent on art assets.
I did not want to make the same kind of game I made last year. I wanted to make something different, with a different prompt. But the only feedback I got about what I was doing was that it ‘should be about Desert Bus.’ Which… isn’t the rules of the Jam. It’s really not.
Look, my thinking now, after I’ve done is that if I made a Kingdom Hearts fangame with coffee minigames in it, that counts. If I made a game about gundams fighting, that counts. If I made a Roborosewater Cube, that counts. If I made a game about surveying teenaged girls, that counts. The idea that you need to fit ‘Desert Bus, The Event’ in your game is stupid. It’s huge and it creates the demand that the whole game be abstracted until it’s literally just a collection of references. The idea that you need to fit ‘Desert Bus, the game,’ in your game is even more stupid. The whole point of the jam is to be open and the whole point of Desert Bus, the game is that it sucks.
But when I found myself, responding to feedback, thinking I needed to make my game ‘fit’ inside the confines of Desert Bus rather than responding to Desert Bus, I wound up feeling like I had to try and make a quest game, you know, a game about going somewhere and achieving something, that related to coffee, the most boring kind of g-rated personality alongside ‘weed guy who won’t say weed’, and somehow find the room for everything else in the whole event to be referenced.
This is stupid! I should have just said ‘no, I hate your feedback,’ and ignored it. But I didn’t, I instead tried to imagine a way to approach this impossible space of making a game in a week that was also a seven day marathon and a quest game and the most boring game in the world and do it in a way that made it interesting. What I should have done, day one, is discarded all of the feedback, and day two should have been spent coming up with a thing to focus on that I liked – something I liked in the whole idea space that I could play with. A coffee game, a game about how coffee tastes like dirt, a game that had a quest for going and getting coffee – a game about a barista on a quest, a game about building lego instructions where you can use coffee to burn through more –
Even then I hate these ideas because I think that coffee sucks and I think ‘using coffee’ in the game needs to be something that actively engages with coffee and doesn’t treat it as just a generic powerup or feedback button. Like, it wasn’t that I got bad advice about coffee games. I just got bad advice for trying to accommodate that initial feedback that it ‘should’ be about Desert Bus more and these things are directly at odds with one another.
So here are my lessons:
Don’t try and force a relationship to a theme you hate. You can drop jams. Nobody cares. Nobody cares if you succeed, if they care that you give up, then they really are fucking with you.
Don’t try and encapsulate bad games with your game designs. Make good games that interest you. Your interest is vitally important to the whole experience.
Have a ripcord. If you have to, if you’ve committed for some reason, have a good reason in your mind to get out of it and something you can throw into the hole and bury forever.
I hated this experience and that’s a sign I should have quit. I should have quit and wrote about quitting and how good quitting made me feel. Instead I made something that sucks and now I’m writing about how much I hated pushing through this experience that sucks.
Don’t do that! That sucks! Game jams are meant to be fun!
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
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All right, it's technically finished but I'm not quite finished with it. I have a little time left today so I'm going to go in and change a couple small spots that I'm not totally happy with. Then it gets washed and ironed and goes to the framer after work tomorrow. Nearly there!
I haven't tallied everything up but I think I'm around 300 hours or so now.
Soon I get to play all the video games that keep coming out that I haven't had time for. I love this project but I'm looking forward to that free time.
#DB2023#cross stitch#The Sandman#Death (Sandman)#embroidery#my crafts#sooooon#not letting myself nitpick everything or I will never be done#but there are a couple bits that stand out to me#so we're gonna make them better
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Y'all im losing it over here
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Desert Bus For Hope Raises Over $180k In 31 Hours For Child's Play Charity
Desert Bus For Hope Raises Over $180k In 31 Hours For Child's Play Charity
#VideoGames #DB2023 #desertbusforhope
It’s that time of the year again. It’s the 16th Annual Desert Bus For Hope, the world’s longest-running internet-based fundraiser that combines video games and tedium to benefit charity. It has been almost thirty hours and the group has raised over $180k for the Child’s Play Charity.
That’s right, the group has raised $186,340 so far and viewers have a chance to join in on the fun by following…
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#Charity#Child&039;s Play Charity#Desert Bus#Desert Bus For Hope#Penn and Teller: Smoke and Mirrors#Video Games
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