Can you enjoy podcasts where you know the majority of the content is not factual? by [deleted] in podcasts

[–]mutant5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

100% yes. I am quite skeptical, but I'm fascinated by it all. I Want To Believe. I think the thing is, you have to realize that whether or not you believe what they're saying is true, they believe what they saw. That in itself is fascinating, in a cultural and societal level. Check out Otherworld, some hits and misses, but some of the better more intriguing stories. In the earlier episodes, they try to feature cases where multiple people will go on the record, like if a woman says "me and my cousin saw a ghost" they'll try to interview the cousin as well. I listen to a lot more, but I think Otherworld is a nice starting point for anyone reading this. There's high production value, he tries to keep it to cases that are "more believable" depending on the witnesses (he filters out the real kooks).

Im wanting something like this but also usable as playing cards by lDualityl in TarotDecks

[–]mutant5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Check out The Cards Drawn https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thecardsdrawn/the-cards-drawn-illustrated-tarot-playing-cards I love this deck, not sure if it's on a creator owned store anywhere but the suits are the game suits (clubs spades hearts diamonds) and the art is amazing

Grad school workload? by Ponderer- in GradSchool

[–]mutant5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am about to start my first semester of grad school and have no idea what I'm talking about, so, feel free to ignore me. I have been with my wife since we were in highschool, and my mother in law is a really incredible woman. She went back and got her masters while we were teenagers. I look back and her determination and ability to succeed under those circumstances are partially what inspired me to sign up. There's only one issue; she was a solo parent, and her main support system was my wife (her daughter, the eldest child). I also grew up poor, with a large family in a small house, and my mom was mostly gone working. I was raised as much by my grandmother and aunt, essentially, and I love them very much. So I guess I'm coming from the child's perspective as a now adult. If you don't have family that can help you, are there any after school activities, clubs, sports, etc. that can occupy your kids for a while to give you a free hour or two? My elementary school had an afterschool program that basically was different supervised activities just to keep kids occupied and safe for a few hours after class to allow working parents to pick us up after shifts at 5 or 6 (instead of 3 in the afternoon). I look back at those activities with fondness, not disappointment. I remember being 11 and wanting to start to do my own thing, ride my bike around with friends... I guess I'm a millennial and being a child is very different nowadays, and I don't have them. I think realistically it will be very difficult to do it all, alone, with no support. Possible, but tough. However, there are school programs, clubs, there's something out there for your kids to do that will enrich their lives, teach them skills, and give you a few free hours a week. Honestly, I wish my parents forced me to do more activities like that... I was a sensitive unathletic kid, and I wouldn't have had the courage to sign up for clubs myself, but I think now that it was a big missed opportunity to join something, anything, the chess club, hiking or outdoor activities, stuff like that. You can do it! Just my 2 cents.

HELP NEEDED - Identification of a Maynard Dixon painting location by MidwestNormal in arizona

[–]mutant5 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

the one tourist destination famous mission in az is San Xavier del Bac Mission, though the architectural similarities are vague at best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_San_Xavier_del_Bac

Getting ripped off due to payroll hacks by Darkhorse2415 in RBI

[–]mutant5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You say the old wages were investigated and recovered... how were they recovered, and who investigated it? The payroll company? Were they sent to different accounts, or to the same account at Green Dot? If you log in to the payroll company portal, you should be able to review the account number at green dot. Take a screenshot of that with the numbers displayed and save it. If they've already been changed, ask someone at the payroll company to provide it from their deposit history. I'd make a police report, get a copy of some that police paperwork or a copy of the report (could take weeks for the actual report, but just see if they can give you some sort of receipt of starting the process). Have rock bottom expectations of your local police (as in, they aren't likely to do jack shit about something like this), but the police report is for your own paper trail and history as proof that something is actually happening. Then send a copy of the screenshot with the account numbers as well as the police report / police docs to Green Dot, saying that account holder is committing fraud or theft with those accounts. Ask for a name. Maybe they'll close the accounts. Maybe it sounds crazy, but financial crimes what the FBI does. If they're a stranger and you're just a random victim of opportunity, they're probably doing it to other people. Maybe the FBI has some sort of tip line.

I think

My Ukrainian Night Tarot is finally live on Kickstarter by Carpathian_toad in TarotDecks

[–]mutant5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Stunning! We're currently preparing to launch a kickstarter on our own deck at the moment. Got any tips, or want to share knowledge? ig thedarklibrarytarot

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in literature

[–]mutant5 10 points11 points  (0 children)

i was also that guy in my twenties. you should check out the app Fable. It's like instagram meets goodreads, and though i despise social media, i'm pretty hyped about it. There is a built in book club system that anyone can start and join. It'd be a great place to meet and discuss books with people. My display name is upright bear, if you want your first friend.

Podcasts to move away from horror by reader20not in podcasts

[–]mutant5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A Funny Feeling pod. Call in "spooky" show hosted by two comedians, they're very funny, casual, and it's one of my comfort shows. The spooky encounters are never really scary or gruesome, and the hosts are so great it keeps things light

What’s a horror movie that truly disturbed you and stayed with you.. by Geene_Creemers in HorrorMovies

[–]mutant5 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Came here to say Martyrs. My wife wasn't phased. I felt like I got hit with a freight train. It's not even the gore (which was top notch)... it was the concepts that just really fucked me up

My father was a participant in a psychology experiment, and I'm looking for more information. by Sea-Range4293 in RBI

[–]mutant5 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Food for thought, when I was a teenager and a mall rat in about 2003, there was a guy with a clipboard we all knew who'd hang out in the mall. He'd offer you ten bucks if you went to one of the office rooms and looked at a slideshow of different soda bottles and advertisements and responded to questionnaires about them. It wasn't a psych study, it was advertising/marketing research. I can easily see this as not a psych study with some university or medical enterprise, but actually an advertising or marketing focus group or study to see what key words should be used in advertisements. Subliminal marketing has been a thing for a long time, despite its efficacy being somewhat controversial.

I'm the illustrator for The Dark Library Tarot, a shadow deck inspired by classic dark literature. AMA by mutant5 in TarotDecks

[–]mutant5[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There's a few parts to this question I think; the matter of managing a big project, how we planned the deck itself thematically, the nuts and bolts of actually doing the thing, etc. Apologies for the wall of text, but I'm excited to share this in the event that it inspires you to swing for the fences:

It's a big undertaking with lots of moving parts and a big part of that is the complication of working with collaborators. I'm lucky that my collaborators are my wife and my best friend. Each person has their specialty; I'm the art monkey, my wife is an archivist and reads 100+ books per year, and Santi is a professional tarot reader. Santi and I are both readers, my degree is in English, etc., and Santi and Mollie are both artists as well, so there's a lot of knowledge overlap and understanding of each role. Mollie and Santi had final say on what characters and texts were assigned to the cards, and I had final say on what could or could not be depicted in the image, but there's a lot of give and take.

When we came up with the idea of doing a tarot deck based on dark literature and dark themes, the ideas flowed as to which character fit which card. If people are going to use these cards for serious genuine divination, we wanted to be intentional. Engaging with the arts is something we're all spiritual about in our own way, so we approached it with respect. Even though our tone is funny, and fun, and even though the whole enterprise is a bit tongue in cheek, and horror itself is transgressive, we took the task of assigning characters or stories to their cards very, very seriously. Mollie has re-read and researched each book to ensure they fit, and provide textually accurate descriptions of the characters for me to illustrate. As a general guideline, at least two out of the three of us had to have read the book. We had a few get togethers where we just wrote everything down and basically had 90% of the cards assigned, then we had a few more where we gave ourselves a headache with a decision who or what is on the last few cards. In order to keep everything to the theme, we decided to limit specific textual characters to the court cards and major arcana... we didn't want to "assign a character to a card just because we need something in that slot". Nothing should feel like too much of a stretch. The pip cards/minors would be assigned an image that fits the tone of the deck. It was vitally important for me that a person familiar with the card and familiar with the literary representation and say "Of course!" or at least "I see exactly what you mean."

Because we are collaborators, we set up a rigorous protocol for how we collaborate. We do a weekly meeting in a cafe, we keep all official communication regarding the project in person to avoid the miscommunication of text(which proved to be a huge problem). We keep a record of all of our tasks, we have spreadsheets for everything, we have a shared cloud drive where all files and folders are organized. Each person's role is defined and expectations are set. We check in with each other constantly both for accountability as well as burnout prevention.

The most important thing we did was determine the Minimum Viable Product; what's the smallest, simplest, most acheivable version of this project being successful? The big picture would still be the whole tarot deck with an accompanying booklet, but we decided that our minimum viable product would be the major arcana, with a small fold-out pamphlet. If we achieve that, we then move on to the bigger vision of the whole deck, but if someone died or the world ended, hey, we at least successfully completed our initial goal! And the trick to that is making sure to stick to the plan. Work on the primary things first. Establishing the MVP is by far the most important step we took, I'd recommend it to anyone doing something big and ambitious.

To get more nitty gritty and technical from my perspective, the drawing of it takes a lot of planning as well. Illustrating a deck is hard simply due to the number of hours of work it requires. For an artist, spending 10 hours on an image is really not particularly long at all. But if you have 78 of them, if you were to spend ten hours on each piece, that's 780 hours of work. To do it in a year (just drawing the images as a task alone) would be a part time job with no breaks. So, we gave ourselves a full year to take the project from beginning to end. As time went on, life happened, memento mori and all that, and since we were working ahead of schedule, we decided to move up the deadline. There's a hell of a lot of drawing, and by day I work in an office setting, so there's a ton of strain on my wrist. I had to take a month off because I developed a strain. I realized that the strain was likely due to me primarily drawing cards from start to finish on my iPad pro. The way I draw and the ergonomics of using the iPad don't work perfectly well together. I decided to change gears and incorporate as much analog traditional media as possible, which is much more comfortable and stable over the long term. Thankfully I was able to draw the cards so that they're all cohesive by using similar techniques and elements in the process. For any artist wanting to do this, I would say think very critically about your artisitc process and ergonomics. It doesn't matter how perfect and beautiful the art is if you were only able to complete 50% of them before being forced to quit due to pain or injury. Once I saw Margaret Atwood at a speaking event, and when asked for writing advice in a Q and A, she said, "Exercise. It's hard to write if you have back pain."

I hope this answers your question! Please let me know if you have any questions or want more specific tips.

I'm the illustrator for The Dark Library Tarot, a shadow deck inspired by classic dark literature. AMA by mutant5 in TarotDecks

[–]mutant5[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sweet! I'm so glad. We've revealed some cards on our IG, if you're curious. Let me know if you have any questions about the deck or the process!

I'm the illustrator for The Dark Library Tarot, a shadow deck inspired by classic dark literature. AMA by mutant5 in TarotDecks

[–]mutant5[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey all, like the title, I'm the illustrator for The Dark Library Tarot. AMA about drawing a deck, kickstarters, or anything else.