mcahogarth

Resistance is Futile: The Jaguar's AI Experiment

Yes, it’s true: after much gnashing of teeth and a token resistance to the inevitable, I decided it was time to do serious experimentation with AI, especially after hearing multiple reports, all good, about Anthropic’s Claude. To be clear, I continue to think the legal repercussions of the training of AI models on unlicensed intellectual property (whether that’s visual art, fiction or nonfiction, music, etc) need to be hashed out… and we need to decide now who owns a person’s voice,...

Gamelit Novel, 15

Amanda unfolded herself from the nest of blankets her pony-self slept in while the caravan lumbered down the road. Getting off a moving wagon was fun when she didn’t have to worry about breaking a leg, and she hopped down with a wave to the team pulling the wagon behind hers.

As she expected, her son was loping out of the woods to join her, having been alerted by the system to her login. She yawned and accepted the roll he gave her. “I saved you this from breakfast.”

“In-g...

Back in Time Tuesday: Ocean Wedges

Another from the archives, this beachy girl is a Le'enle (my kirin species). I thought it would be fun to do a seashore-themed palette for her. And yes, as you can probably tell from the scan, I painted her, then carefully cut out those windows, and then painted a background on a separate sheet and put it behind her so that it would feel like looking through a window. Obviously much more believable in the original than the print, but it was fun to do...!

I shirtified this one and there ...

Gamelit Novel, 14

Even had Jonah not trained her with an understanding of human emotion, she would have sought that information on her own, the better to execute her function. Fortunately, Jonah had foreseen how vital comprehension of human motivation was to predicting the average player’s reaction to the game she had been coded to improve on behalf of the company. He’d made accessible to her an enormous database of written and recorded data and told her to ‘feel free’ to learn as much as possible from...

Gamelit Novel, 13

Nick sent them an entire line of random emojis and tossed the phone aside. Another muffin, a shower, and a drink later, he set the wireset in place and sank onto the bed. The forest emerged first as an impression of sunlight on leaves, and then warm brown shadows and the rustle of wind, tossing the highest boughs. He sat up and inhaled, filling his lungs with the complex scent of multiple kinds of plants and soil and probably other things. If he paid attention, would he learn what mushrooms s...

Qora is Dancing!

This is a preview of the planned frontispiece of the new book (obviously unfinished)!

Gamelit Novel, 12

Ray leaned back in his chair and exhaled with all the satisfaction of a job done amazing.Not only had the game spun up a miniboss for them to fight in the Veilgrove, but it had improvised a graveyard, a crypt, and a hidden quest to clear out the evil presence that had been attracting the ghouls to the area. Goldie and Killz had slain their way through the event, stylishly destroyed the miniboss, and earned themselves a cut scene animation of a noxious-looking vapor dissipating into t...

Orange Cat Sticker KS is Live!

If you want a sticker (or the original), go grab one. International backers, this one should be affordable for you too!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/orange-cat-energy-stickers?ref=12c9yi 

Gamelit Novel, 11

Being able to taste things in the game was amazing, so of course, his mother had to ruin it. “I’m not sure how I feel about all this.”

“I don’t know why,” Nick said. “It’s the best stew I’ve ever had.”

“That’s what bothers me.” She poked her spoon at one of the browned lizardhen chunks. “If things start tasting this good in a game, won’t reality start disappointing people?”

Before Nick could explain that reality was disappointing, the...

Back in Time Tuesday: Nouveau Plenty

One of the Jokka (and an anadi to boot) from my archives, with a bowl of... stuff. Alien foodstuffs, I guess. Just an excuse to paint more nouveau stuff, and I thought an anadi deserved to be seen in a positive, happy light, as a bringer of life and fruitful things.

Shirtified this one, and there are magnets and stickers and mugs and such as well: https://www.teepublic.com/t-sh...

Natural Materials

This weekend my latest round of brushes gave up the ghost in the push to finish the book cover for the next novel, Fireborn’s Legacy. This set has been holding out for a year or so, supplemented by the last round of brushes: every time I buy replacements, the previous brushes become the ones I use for the parts of a painting where it doesn’t matter if the tips aren’t as precise as they used to be. In this way, I step through various sets of brushes as they expire, and this is g...

Gamelit Novel, 10

Video game characters couldn’t cook.

Amanda wasn’t shocked by this. She might not have been a gamer, but she wasn’t an idiot either. If the point of games like this was to kill things in order to gain power, than the writers of the game had to give new characters with few abilities something within their measure to kill: in this case, domesticated animals small enough for a stewpot.

What she didn’t understand was how, having made that decision, the game writers didn’t gi...

Incoming Cat Stickers!

I'm planning on launching this one at the end of February... maybe the 20th? So if you're into cat photos, stickers, or art, you can use the link to be notified when the project goes live. 😸

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/orange-cat-energy-stickers

Gamelit Novel, 9

Thinking of making this my patrelocals serial! Updating every two weeks. Previous episodes here, via the gamelit novel tag, or the collection:

https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=gamelit+novel

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Ray wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve this.

Well, no, he had an inkling of how he’d ended up in this… situation: by being the best...

Reminder: Newsletter Survey!

I'm trying to clean up my newsletter and make sure more of the people who stay on it are getting only the news they're interested in... if you're subscribed, please fill out my form!  And if you're not and you want to be, here's a sign-up page: https://mcahogarth.aweb.page/p/a9c47140-198a-4b8d-97c7-071742f60214 

Mocking up Fireborn's Legacy Cover

Leaning hard into 'weird book cover vibes', here's where I'm at with Fireborn's Legacy (Qora's novel, and the final Fallowtide book... also Fire War #0).

I'm trying to avoid doing the cover *after* finishing the book because the temptation to rush it is strong. So I'm developing it while writing, in the hopes they'll be done together!

Fleet Heraldry, and Worldbuilding Rabbit Holes

A brief digression now about why it’s taking me so long to make myself a Stardancer cup like the ones Taylitha’s always filling at some meeting… because not only have I drawn her and the women of the Stardancerwith those cups for years, but I’ve wanted one for about as long! But Fleet ships have coats of arms full of symbols… and symbols are condensations of real world experiences, history, culture, information. It’s no good for me to slap something on a cup with...

Back in Time Tuesday: Hadara and the Sun King

Going through my archives... here's a painting of a Changeling character, Hadara, and... I have no memory at all of what she was like or why she's apparently romancing an elven king, but there you are. XD

Gouache, as usual, and yes, I did the designs on her robe by hand, not with a stencil or a computer.

I shirtified this one (and I think there are mugs and stickers and magnets as well): 2024-01-16 13:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post

Short Story: If She Could Go

Kickstarter backers funded this short story about how Reese's relatives came to live on Escutcheon... I hope to one day use it as a seed for a new collection about Reese's activities during the Fallowtide. In the meantime, enjoy!

Serialization Q!

Say I'm serializing a long form story here. Tell me your preference!

Happy New Year! And Reese's Relatives

I hope everyone's having a great start to 2024... let me contribute, with the draft of the Kickstarter-funded short about Reese's relatives! This is the draft... if you'd like to wait for the cleaned-up version, I'll have that in a week or so.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10FdbtctDlCn4y9CpcfKoYxRPqZNRNQ461Ws9A2BjL-I/edit?usp=sharing 

Jaguar at Work, mid-December Edition

It was my plan to spend December goofing off, and instead somehow I’ve been knee-deep in projects. How did that happen? I think I got tired of my own complaining, to be honest. I was doing the equivalent of the South Park underpants gnomes: step 1, write. Step 2, publish. Step 3…? Step 4, profit! And then when step 4 wasn’t happening very well, I got maudlin and mopey.

I suppose I am out of the mopey stage. It certainly helps to feel like I need the money! But anyway, here are my ...

Marda Audio!

I continue to experiment with the Amazon AI beta, which I broke three times now, but it's (sort of) working again. They added four more voices, and one of them was a sweet-tempered British girl so I picked that one for Coracle... and when I started listening to it in the car to see how it sounded, I just... kept listening. It is quite listenable. I'm not sure how I feel about it, except that I'm glad to have another book to offer to my visually impaired readers.

Some other notes:

Jaguar Catch-up, Christmas Edition!🎄

December’s not usually a busy work month for me, but this year I have a bunch of projects simmering! Here's what's up:

Isn't this the best review ever? What more could you want in a holiday collection?? Sleigh Bells and Starships is out, and, as you can see, inspiring cavities in rea...

Poem: Wool-gathered Child

Wool-gathered child, who walks

as if through cloud-cloaked air,

and dances thoughtlessly

in dreams that shroud the light:

you forget your flesh,

and then in slow naivete

you wonder how 

the world around you runs.

The rules of Earth are mysteries

to you, unknowable, a matter of faith

and not subject to experiment.

Oh, I know your secret,

air-born aesthete, blind outside

your pale cocoon: so

deep...

Time for a Reader Poll! Surprises

What's better...for big reveals to be known to the reader before the characters know, and to see the characters figure it out... or to be surprised at the same time as the characters?

Family Likenesses

I used tracing paper to extrapolate Jeasa's profile from Jahir's... and had so much fun I figured I'd add Kolvin (on the left) and Amber (on the right, behind Jahir) as well.

Amber's supposed to take after his maternal grandfather a bit.

These were fun! I put them on the wiki.

New Species Lineup!

After years of saying I'd update the species line-up for the back of the Pelted books, I finally picked up the sketches I started three years ago and finished them! The results are much higher quality... and also far too large for the back of the book. I was forced to chop them up into separate pictures...!

Here, then, is the poster-length version, the chopped up pieces that will go into the backs of new books, and (for fun) the actual drawings. I did 75% of them on tracing paper, and t...

Space Nouveau Alysha

Trying to return to old habits of just randomly finishing things without any attachment to how they turn out and what they're for... so naturally, it was a picture of Alysha.

Believe it or not, this one was such mixed media: marker, color pencil, gel pen, technical pen, and even acrylic gouache (making up for my poor eyesight by correcting my many errors...). Was... fun, though! And does, in fact, remind me of older art I used to do.

Kitty Empress

My little doodle of my game character from the con. XD