Every reflection we see through the glass of the window next to our desk is imperfect. It is blurry, slightly transparent, duplicated (although this might be attributed to the double paned glass). The window itself, unclean. We could stand to give it a wipe down.

The shower curtain rod we hung up above our desk to hold spools of colourful filament bends concerningly. It has done so ever since we put it up to hold the spools in place. It's not failed us yet.

One of the spools is feeding the printer on the shelf behind the desk. Like the line of a blood transfusion, its solid colour feeds into a machine too complex for us to understand. There, it gets made into something new - a modernist vase we don't intend to fill with plants, but pens, tools, ephemera, possessions.

The display on the printer reads Five Hours and Nineteen Minutes. It is, because it always is, completely wrong. Its repeated attempts at proper estimation fail. It does not seem to notice. We do not seem to care.

A roll of one sheets mocks us. We've had it for literal years, and we've always told ourselves we'd hang up the original posters for Hitchcock's Vertigo and Kubrick's 2001. We've not watched them. We don't intend to. They mean little to us.

Maybe that's why they're not on the walls yet.

DESIGN AND THE ARTS

A few days ago, prompted by a post on collaborative science fantasy writing project and general headache generator r/VXJunkies, I had the displeasure of pulling out an old project of mine. Christ on a stick. I'm not sharing that project, not ever, and every artist will know the feeling - but I suppose being able to cringe at your old work means you've matured. Learned. Become a better artist (or at least a more judgmental one).

You may, dear reader, noticed a new project. The International Space Agency. It's one of my pro bono pieces, for a fellow world builder on the GWB Discord, but I was just really proud of it. The hexagon as a symbol for "space" and being able to iterate on that concept for the divisions of the ISA is an idea that may not be original, but I still really like how this came out.

And, of course, let's not forget this newsletter! Intended to be released every month with a new issue, RMV MONTHLY is a little view into whatever I'm thinking about, working on in terms of design and writing, and whatever else I'm thinking of. A bit of a scream into the ether, if you will. You of course will. You're reading this far. I've already won, dear reader.

THE WRITTEN WORD

Lately I've made not much progress on the novel. My editor assures me that that's okay. I'm inclined to believe that. Still, I can't help but feel I should be more excited about where I am in the story - the second to last act is just seconds away from starting, but I just don't find the motivation to write.

I've even tried something new. Based on a property I've loved for decades, Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine, I've started writing a screenplay for a TV show. It's not very good, at least I don't think so, and in the first episode I've already written myself into more corners than a standard writer's room has. Still, I like the exercise. Not my first screenplay, but I'd like to have it be my first good one.

That being said, dear reader, one area I've put a lot of work into is world building. In fact, the vault is more active than ever, and I've actually found a cool new plugin in Obsidian that can pipe all your content into an OpenAI embeddings model so you can ask questions about the world and its details. It doesn't work that well, but the fact that it works at all is already really impressive to me. At least it has the gall to admit when it doesn't know something, instead of hallucinating like its LLM cousins do.

Specifically I've been working on religion along with Henry from GWB. More specifically, I've been working on the Sundom of Eris (the Tallisite religion), the Milkwalkers and the prophecy of the Parallel Descendants. As always, hit "Worldbuilding" in the sidebar to visit the digital garden in which you can read all about the world I'm building.

Special shout out to Hytheter, been reading their Novella Onion of Time and really loved the idea of the hyperspheric geometry of spacetime they toyed with in that work. The idea of "rotation" being something that could very well apply to higher dimensions is a really cool concept, plus the thing was a great read in general.

A LOOK AHEAD

Definitely want to get back into writing the way I did when I started the novel. Plus, the screenplay needs work. A lot of work. So look out for that!

Ever yours, dear reader,

RMV