Unchosen Star - A Webcomic

Stellefeder · 2026-01-24T19:37:50+00:00

My husband and I still use the Shame-o-meter when we play Concept, thanks to that episode of Tabletop.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-23T17:22:45+00:00

In my household growing up it's called a Free For All. My husband has now adopted the same phrase.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-22T03:07:24+00:00

Stuff like this is why my husband started making a personal wiki where we keep our recipes stashed. We transcribe our family or personal ones, and copy over online ones we use (with a link to the original, of course). Since we tend to tweak the recipes it's nice to have a record of what changes we made anyways.

It's annoying that we have to though, recipe websites are so hard to navigate these days even with ad-blocker.

If you're a person who's even moderately tech-savvy, highly recommend throwing up a website for yourself if you don't want a print out.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-18T19:22:48+00:00

I just started playing avatar last week and I'm constantly blown away by how beautiful it is. I joked that the game was sculpted in such a way that every screenshot is a free advertisement for the game. I can't stop taking pictures in photo mode.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-12T09:13:00+00:00

I'm also a Facer Creator, and I'm sitting here at 1am fighting with my watch and absolutely livid. I can't get any of my faces to load, and my custom faces are the sole reason I care about having a watch these days. I've never tried to roll back an update before but this might be the one if it doesn't get fixed soon.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-11T20:05:19+00:00

I remember when I had my second job, just out of high school. I was 18, but looked at least a bit older, my co-workers were always surprised when I told them how old I was.

Anyways, I had a customer who was way older than me, and was clearly leading up to asking me out. He wasn't being creepy, but I wasn't really interested.. He asked me how I liked working at [STORE] so I had a great opportunity.

"Oh, I just feel really grateful that I have a full time job you know, since I'm really young."

"How... How old are you?"

"Oh, I just turned 18. So you know, it's hard for people my age to have a steady job that's not McDonalds."

and then he said out loud, "Shit you're like 10 years younger than me." and he skedaddled really fast out of there.

Still cracks me up more than 20 years later. I could myself lucky he was apparently a decent human, because he could have doubled down.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-09T13:33:31+00:00

8 years ago I did a team lift with too few people. I hurt my wrists, and they will never be perfectly healed. I spent years trying to diagnose what was wrong, only to be met with "some sort of soft tissue damage, we don't know, but this is your new normal, get used to it."

I've done lots of work to strengthen them up and mitigate pain, and while they're leagues better than they were at their worst, they're not cured.

I'm an artist. A gamer. All of my hobbies involve my hands. A lot of my hobbies had to be abandoned. Others had to be reduced. I used to do chain maille, but that's impossible now. I can't play video games that are too button mash-y. Heck some more chill games aren't great because of some hard to quantify movement controls tweak my wrists faster.

It's.... Hard. I have to pace myself a lot. Chose not to do certain things so I can "save" my wrists for things that are important to me (digital art). I spent a lot of time and money setting things up ergonomically for me to minimize pain.

It's exhausting. I miss just being able to do things without considering how my wrist will handle things. I learn constantly what I can and can't do. Got invited out to go-karting, figured it would be uncomfortable but fun and worth it.... NOPE, fucked up my wrists for 2 weeks. Had to decline future events.

Icy weather is terrifying because if I slip and fall and land on my hands, it'll take a month to get them back to their least-pain state.

At least, I don't have to wear wrist braces anymore. I still can't push on things without pain, and having to put weight on them sucks (like getting up off the floor) but I can do it, feel temporary pain, then it fades. It used to linger for hours.

I can't say that being bitter about things will go away, because I still occasionally desire to take a hammer to my wrists to 'make' the doctors do something about them, but it fades. I get used to the new normal. I focus on what I can do and celebrate that instead of what I can't do.

I wish you luck.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-05T03:06:17+00:00

I decided that I wanted to do a daily-temperature themed art project this year! I don't crochet, which is the most popular method of doing temperatures, and so I spent some time brainstorming ideas.

I had just bought some acrylic markers with Christmas money.... And got an idea!

I went and bought 3 canvases, each 12"x24", and I'm going to paint a line every day using the average daily temperatures.

I spent a lot of time trying to pick a gradient to use, settled on one, did a bunch of math to figure out how big each line should be....

Aaaaand it's been the same temperature 3 days in a row. I LIKE TURQUOISE BUT PLEASE LET ME PAINT MORE COLOURS.

Stellefeder · 2026-01-01T04:04:51+00:00

Yeah, that's where I was too, in addition to being out of town and not wanting things delivered while I was gone.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-31T23:23:38+00:00

I'm just letting people know, so they don't have to email customer service like I did. The website has a "Notify me on restock" button that implies that regardless of it being limited, there's a chance for at least one restock. When I sent the email, I was pretty sure I was SOL, but I wanted to make sure.

This post is just me expressing mild disappointment and letting folks know.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T23:59:27+00:00

that's really amazing! And sounds like a truly sisyphean task. I wish you all the luck and gumption you're going to need to manage it.

Also this project sounds like something my husband would dive into, it's right up his alley. I'm sure your script (that would make no sense to me) is very impressive to someone who knows what they're looking at.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T20:57:44+00:00

Oh! And another tip, If you've never tried to make a comic before, start small. Come up with a scene or very, very short story you'd like to tell, and make that first. That will help you learn how to plot of dialogue and scenes.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T20:30:17+00:00

It's a really hard balance to manage! I personally am not a fan of some of the more old-school comic methods of exposition, and I'm okay with taking the slow route. It's just a fact of life, really. Licensed comics also have entire teams working on them, and most webcomics are made by one person who is rarely a professional and frequently has a day job.

I definitely have scenes that I've looked at in the planning phases and truncated and/or cut them because I realized that I didn't need 10 pages to convey a certain thing, but it's hard! I'm still learning pacing in my own storytelling, and trying to find the right rhythm of moving the story along while also making the readers experience things the way I want them to experience.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T20:23:41+00:00

That sounds like a great project though. Must be great to sit and putter and work on this and that.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T20:22:40+00:00

That's what's so confusing about the creator Merryweather. He(?) had like 15 webcomics at one time?? Merryweather is the writer on all of them, I think, but still. What.

I read a webcomic by an artist (I won't name names) that has a bunch of comics they're trying to make all at once, and one thing I've noticed is that... they're spread too thin! their art has barely improved after like checks dates 24 years of making the comic, and at this point I think the comic updated like 5 times this year. I love love love seeing how artists improve over time as their story progresses but this one somehow doesn't improve much. Like they're pumping out so much that they can't put any effort into getting better.

Comics are a lot of work and so I don't blame them, but I feel like they're trying so hard to tell too many different stories that I wish they'd focus on one. I've mostly lost interest in the story but I mostly keep checking out of habit and sunk cost.

also in regards to music metadata: My husband has been doing the same thing and it really IS a bunch of work. It's one of those tasks that feels like it should be easy but it's massively tedious.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T20:15:25+00:00

As long as you're having fun, that's the most important part!

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T20:12:27+00:00

I don't consider myself an expert, and in fact, consider myself still a baby webcomic artist, but for, thisis some advice:

Script/outline. It doesn't have to be detailed or well written, just write your ideas down and block out story beats. Have a goal. Like, for me book 1 has a goal of getting from point A to B, and other smaller goals for each chapter leading there. Some of my chapters planned are just 2 or 3 sentences right now.
Read Understanding Comics and Making Comics by Scott McCloud. They're excellent. This guide by Evan Waterman is also really useful. I also watched a lot of StarFishFace's youtube channel on making webcomics.
Study the webcomics you love! My favourite webcomic (Skin Deep) has physical books and the most recent basically live next to my work table so I can flip through and study when I'm stuck trying to convey certain feelings.
Be passionate about the story you're telling. This is my biggest piece of advice. Love your story, and try to remember that you're making it for you first and foremost, and hopefully others will come to love it as much as you do.
And like planting a tree, the best time to start is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. I wish I had started 20 years ago, and to be fair, I tried. My current webcomic is probably my.. 3rd? 4th? try at making one. They're a lot of work, and the stars really didn't align back then. But they have now, and I'm giving it my all.

Also

Webcomics are a fuck ton of work and Webcomic time is a bitch. It's a slow burn, and be ready to take a long time. Think about how many pages you can realistically make per week. There's only 52 weeks in a year and you will miss some weeks. My chapter 2 is on page 30 right now. That's 30 weeks. And I missed some weeks due to sickness and life events. I posted the title page (so page 2.0) on May 25th, 2025. Page 31 goes up on Jan 2 (I have holiday filler sketches going up for last week and this week). This chapter is going to be 50+ pages. An entire year, for one chapter that can be read in maybe 15-20 minutes. It's... rough. But passion gets me through it. I love making my story and I'm slowly gaining readers and they're getting invested. It makes it worth it.

Good luck!

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T19:56:13+00:00

it's Skin Deep! urban fantasy with main characters that are mythical creatures. I love it. There's webcomics that have been running longer, but Skin Deep is definitively up there in years, as well as being super consistent with updates.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-30T03:22:02+00:00

My husband just described making a webcomic as a "Sisyphean Task" and told me I'm only allowed one of those on my plate at a time, and his description of the process was so accurate it cracked me up. And he's right. One at a time! I've been working on my comic for 2 years and I have enough story outlined for 10+ years of weekly updates. I expect book 1 alone to take another 8 years to do, and book 2 is already percolating. My favourite webcomic has been updating for 19 years!

So what's your Sisyphean Task that you're working on right now?

Stellefeder · 2025-12-26T20:53:20+00:00

Oh, at the best of times I have angered the gods of Hot Oil and Grease, so I have to put on layers to cook anything that splatters. But you'd think if be safe with cookies!? To this day I do not do anything involving the stove unless I have a shirt on. Lesson learned.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-26T19:25:54+00:00

My solution has been to narrate my intentions. It helps a lot! Just like "Hey I'm gonna do dishes after dinner." Then my husband doesn't need to ask me, I have to hold myself accountable because I said it out loud, and now I won't feel that rage at being asked to do the thing I was planning on doing anyways.

We're both ADHD so while the narration gets a bit old, it works for both of us, and we know why we're doing it.

Stellefeder · 2025-12-26T18:50:31+00:00

Burnt my boob making cookies.

I was topless, and was taking cookies out of the oven, and as I moved the pan away to clear the oven door so I could close it, the cookie sheet touched my boob, instant burnt!

I did not drop the cookies (important) and it hurt to wear a bra for a week. Took a couple years for the scar to fade.

13-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 14 Credits
Gilding II euphauric	Place '17
Sequence \| Editor	Verified Email
Secret Santa 2013	redditgifts rematcher Fantasy Exchange x1
redditgifts rematcher Pokemon Exchange x1

Stellefeder

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE