if you ever need a creative pickmeup remember that the administrator in tf2 was just this random disembodied old woman voice who announced match info in the game
but then a young lady did a fan design of her for kicks on her blog and da account full of fanart, and valve loved it so much that they bought the character design from her, and they eventually hired her to draw official tf2 comics for them, and now the administrator’s this big developed character through multiple oneoffs and arcs and stories in the canon and the fan is now an inhouse comic artist working ft for valve
you never know where your artistic and fandom passions will take you, if you love it and exercise your creativity in fun interesting ways, you never know what could come out of it
Out of curiosity, I went out to find Makani’s original fanart. Here it is:
And here’s her first official appearance in the comic, made only one year later:
I’d like to chime in with my own personal story.
Makani has not only worked on Team Fortress 2 comics, but also Dota 2.
She came up with, and drew a bunch of joke concepts for a Dota hero who had won the latest community vote: “which hero gets the next Arcana item?” (arcanas are expensive, 30 bucks items who radically change the appearance of a hero)
This was one of them. And when I saw it, I decided to turn it into a courier for the game (couriers being creatures that bring items to the players).
Much like the concept itself, I did it as a joke, with Yuri, my workshop partner-in-crime, but it, uh… kind of spiraled out of control, and, long story short, it ended up being actually added into the game for the huge yearly tournament, where it contributed a significant amount of money to its prize pool.
But that’s not where the story ends;a plush maker from Oregon noticed the courier, thought it was very cute, and she made a plushie out of it. But she was no mere craftswoman; she was also working as the CFO and accountant of a video game company called Nightdive Studios, and they happened to be looking for an animator.
I have now been working there for a year, on a very badass project (the System Shock 1 remake!), and it’s thanks to Makani’s joke.
The butterfly effect is real. Thank you @makanidotdot ♥
it builds itself up like OKAY WE FOUND THESE DEVASTATING RESULTS
and then you go in to look and you find it had a sample size of 40
and then you’re like okay, what was the fantastic difference between these 40 people when sleeping with and without a dog
and the article is like
…so you get through it and you’re like you’re trying to tell me you think this is substantial in any capacity, this 40 sample size 3% difference ass bullshit??????????? you fucking shitforbrick bad at math fake ass science losers?
these scientists hate dogs
Your sample sizes are small your standard deviations are high your conclusion means nothing and YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD
So there’s been a couple posts here admonishing first person POV in fics, but the more I think about it the more it pisses me off.
There this post that goes like “Sees the word I: I did nothing. Fuck off”. But, like if your friend was telling you a story and they went “I saw a dog on the street today.” You’re response wouldn’t be “I did nothing fuck off.” Instead there wouldn’t be a reaction like that, because you understand that you’re friend is telling you a story. When they say “I” they mean themselves and not you.
That’s the same way it is in fanfic. It’s the narrator telling you a story about what happened to them. Not someone telling you a story about something that happened to you.
I haven’t seen any sort of post like this about regular creative fiction yet, but if I ever do I will go apeshit.
One advantage of not really having a strong sense of gender identity is that you’re very [shrug emoji] about how people gender you. Sometimes people call me by she/her pronouns and sometimes they go with he/him pronouns and on the internet people often default to they/them, and neither option is entirely right but also, fuck if I know what would be right, and I don’t particularly care. Therefore I’m perfectly happy to outsource my gender identity to the people around me who actually need to figure out which box to put me in. I don’t need to talk about myself in third person, so really my pronouns sound like a you problem.
My pronouns are I/me and the rest is for someone else to deal with because I have better things to do.
Very fond of macrolabels, like “queer”, that provide zero extra information. Is it genderqueer? Is it romantic/sexual orientation queer? Is it queer as in “none of your fucking business what’s in my pants and what I do with it and with whom”?
Why do people stop commenting on fics if they’re more than a week or two old? Please comment on old fics. Tell me you like my one shot from 2014.Tell me you like my old multi-chap I finished in 2016 that I spent a year writing. I will be fucking thrilled.
Fics are not social media posts. There’s no “stalking” someone’s “old posts”. They’re meant to be found and enjoyed years down the line. No need to be nervous.
I reblog this message every time it comes across my dash because it’s true. And also:
When I first started writing fanfic, back in the mid 1990s (yes! the late twentieth century!) one of the discouraging things about it was that people treated fanfic as if it was disposable. It seemed like what most readers wanted was a constant stream of new content, whereas I tend to produce one big work every 6-12 months. It made me sad that people seemed to think there was no point to re-reading or saving old fic. There is no sell-by date on fiction! It does not get out of order! It can still work even years or decades later!
So yeah, I have stories up at ao3 that are literally a quarter-century old, and every time someone leaves a comment on them I am very pleased to get it. We get attached to our stories and it cheers us up to see that they are still finding readers. It means that they are still ‘alive,’ in some way.
AO3 is not social media, it’s (essentially) a library.
You’re meant to engage with any and all of it, regardless of age.
