Rynling R&D

This is one of the reasons why I'm so shy about sharing the Ocarina of Time Zelda/Link story I've been writing for the past month, by the way. I'm definitely writing it with my own two hands, and I've been writing at the extremely careful and detail-oriented pace of about a paragraph a day. Still, I'm terrified that, because this is such a popular pairing in such a popular fandom, someone will accuse me of being a machine.

Like at the beginning of the current chapter, Link arrives in Gerudo Canyon, and he's thinking about Zelda in a certain type of way, and so he sees the sky above the canyon walls as a blue ribbon trailing down the sunburnt angles of a woman's back.

But I know - from having to read undergraduate paper submissions - that machine writing loves to use imagery connected to a single primary color (red, yellow, or most often blue) in the opening paragraph. So now I'm wondering if I should rephrase my own human writing, or if I should rewrite the beginning of this chapter entirely, or if maybe I should just give up and never write anything ever again. It's maddening.

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This month I participated in two fandom art challenges, and I feel like my drawing has improved significantly during a very short span of time. I guess it’s possible to achieve results if you actually sit down and put in the hours. Good to know.

Anyway, the Ocarina of Time remake comes out this Thursday! Cheers to all who celebrate.

Manuscript to Momentum
https://northnode.mysamcart.com/manuscript-to-momentum/

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From what I understand, you essentially pay $30 to download a PDF that tells you how to do selfpub marketing on social media. According to people on Reddit, both programs are very basic, but they're not scams. Idk man. This sort of thing makes me feel weird, but I also feel like I could probably use some help to get started.

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This week I did a thorough fall clean of my house and brought as many of my backyard plants inside as I can fit next to the windows. I’m actually a very minimalism sort of person, but it’s always nice to be surrounded by healthy green leaves.

In Silksong news, I think I finally managed to get a handle on the Act 3 fight against Skarrsinger Karmelita, whom people have compared to Malenia (the ultra-challenge boss) in Elden Ring. Karmelita is great, but I tend to think that the closest character to Malenia is Hornet herself. She has a giant Sephiroth sword and a fucked-up little sibling and everything. I love her.

It’s a bit early, but this month I want to recommend four books, one manga, and one graphic novel.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (here on Wikipedia)

This is the classic collection of urban legends from 1981 with the ultra-creepy illustrations by Stephen Gammell.

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Fragments of Horror (publisher page)

A collection of eight Junji Ito short stories from 2014, and the book I’d recommend as the best place to start reading the artist’s work if you’re curious.

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Strange Cases (publisher page)

A gorgeously drawn graphic novel about a law student who returns home for his mother’s funeral and ends up solving a series of supernatural mysteries.

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The Eyes of the Dragon (here on Wikipedia)

A Stephen King novel from 1984 that tells a stand-alone fantasy story about two princes defying the schemes of an evil wizard.

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The Binding (publisher page)

A low fantasy novel that resembles the manga Witch Hat Atelier on a thematic level.

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To Feed the King (Wikipedia page)

This is a literary novel published earlier this year about a woman who recreates time-period accurate table settings (with plastic food) in castles and other historic residences in England.

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Dear Author,

Thank you so much for offering to write for me!

I love atmospheric storytelling and worldbuilding, and what I want more than anything is the opportunity to spend more time in the fictional worlds that have captivated me. I’m equally delighted by slice-of-life, adventure, romance, and horror, and I also adore nonfiction meta essays and narrative concept sketches. Please feel free to dig as deep (or as lightly) into canonical lore and speculative theories as you wish.

I’m happy to read anything you’d like to write for my requested fandoms. I love most characters and ships, and I’m willing to be convinced on others. My fandom-specific prompts are just suggestions that I offer in the hope that perhaps they might be interesting to you.

I know that what you create will be wonderful, and I’m looking forward to reading your work!

I’m totally okay with:

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I’d prefer not to see:

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Here are some of my fandom-specific interests:

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The rise of end times fascism
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk

To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating. That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.

Apparently the two authors, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, just published their research as a book (here's its website) that I'm not looking forward to reading. But I will. Because this is the world we live in now, I guess.

ETA: I do want to say, though, that I find Naomi Klein's particular brand of hyperbole to be aggravating. Klein has a habit of acting like every stupid cultural trend is the end of the world, which I'm not sure is accurate or meaningful. I know the sort of writing on the book's website is just marketing copy, but still. In any case, while I don't think the silly sci-fi fantasies of oligarchs are necessarily going to result in an actual apocalypse, I also don't think Klein is wrong to argue that it's important to pay attention.

As an aside, getting really deep into a study of the climate change accelerationism and eco-fascism advocated by loathsome men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as a logical endpoint for the (pseudo-)philosophy of "effective altruism" is what caused me to abandon my Tears of the Kingdom Modern AU story The Archives of Hyrule earlier this year. It took less than a week of reading and listening to podcasts for me to go from "Ganon is 2 sexy 2 be evil" to "I think we're gonna have to kill this guy Steven." I'm joking, obviously, but what I mean is that the contradictions and conflicts represented by the character stopped being something I found enjoyable to write about. I want to say that there's a genuinely utopian potential in the techno-magical dreams of ambitious men, but I'm not feeling it at the moment.

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It was a very slow week in terms of writing. Sometimes I guess you just have to take things paragraph by paragraph, or even sentence by sentence.

Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting patiently for the Ocarina of Time remake to come out, and I’ve been distracting myself by playing Hades II. The plot of this game doesn’t make much sense, but the graphics are very shiny and the gameplay is very addictive.

Oh no. The liminal space reddit has a horrible cousin: r/TheForgottenDepths

Caves and mines are fun, but I will be happy if I never ever ever go in one.

Here she is with flat colors!

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I'm now noticing several mistakes with her pauldron armor, and I'm also wondering whether the elements of her design that I borrowed from Twilight Princess will be read as such or misunderstood as me messing up the canon design. But I have decided not to care. What's important is: (a) she looks cool, and (b) big sword.

Once again 🙏 please let the shading and rendering go well and 🙏 please grant me the courage to darken the shadows instead of falling back on my usual generic ring-light ambient lighting.