Key posts by Minna through the comments and on twitch

[Mebediel]

Humdrummers?

The transcriptions aren't finished yet sorry, but the name she decided on was "Fluffball." Humdrummer is a good one tho

[wavewright62]

The transcriptions aren't finished yet sorry, but the name she decided on was "Fluffball." Humdrummer is a good one tho

I prefer Humdrummer to Fluffball just sayin

[LooNEY_DAC]

I prefer Humdrummer to Fluffball just sayin

...But then we'd have to sing "Blueberry Hill" every time we got together! /HappyDaysReference
...You're not seeing the downside there, huh?

[JoB]

...But then we'd have to sing "Blueberry Hill" every time we got together! /HappyDaysReference
...You're not seeing the downside there, huh?

Doesn't ring a bell for me, but if you need something to shoo an earworm away, I can happily provide you with a strummin' drummin' substitute!

[Mebediel]

Alright friend-o's, last Saturday's chatlog is now ready. Here is the art Minna was arting, and here is the doc for ongoing transcriptions. This is part 1 of 2.

chatlog_220918

Trolls

Spoiler: show

Q.: If spoiled for choice between an armed, perfectly healthy human and a crippled troll, would a starving troll always go for the human every time or opt for the easier meal?
A. (00:10:00): It would probably go for the human because it smells better, it would be more nourishing, and most of them aren’t intelligent enough to assess the risk-reward ratio between going after something that is crippled vs. something that just tastes better.

Q.: Do trolls... copulate?
A. (2:14:47): No, ew, that would be too gross. They have no such capability or needs. They just want to eat and eat and kill to eat.

Q.: Can trolls distinguish between immune and non-immune people?
A. (2:17:29): No, they wouldn’t be able to. It’s not a big distinction, it’s just some genes. It’s not something they would be able to smell or see in your spirit or anything.

Q.: How is it determined what type of troll someone will become?
A. (2:18:14): A lot of different things. It first depends on your own genes, how they would react with the virus, and then it would depend on what kind of environment the person is mutating in. Someone who’s mutating in a dark, enclosed space will become very different than something that’s mutating out in the woods, like an animal or some person who’s trying to hide in the woods somewhere, or someone who lives in a warm climate vs someone in a dry and cold climate. And the third thing would be different strains of the virus. There might be just a tiny-tiny bit and you get widely different results from a slight change. So yeah, all those things. Environmental, genetic, and the genetics of the pathogen all influence. There’s no clear, set rules since I decide what kind of monster I want depending on what I need for the story. I’m not going to write myself into a bag by defining to strict rules about what kind of trolls will emerge from what kind of situation. That would be boring!

Characters
Main Cast

Spoiler: show

Q.: Who in the crew would be the most likely to dab?
A. (00:05:50): Oh, it’s that ridiculous, weird move. I was going to say dance move, but I don’t think you can count it as a dance move. Hm, who would make that. Maybe Reynir. I was going to say Emil, but he’s too dignified to do that. No, Sigrun would do it! And maybe Reynir, but nobody else.

Q.: Would Emil dab if Sigrun ordered him to? Or if Reynir would ask him nicely?
A. (00:07:18): I feel like he wouldn’t even if Sigrun ordered him to, but if she started screaming at him and being all boss-like, he might do one really lame, forced mini-dab and be really, really grumpy about it for the rest of the day.
Q.: Would Mikkel?
A.: I feel like he might just suddenly, with his eyes closed, make a perfect dabbing move, but it would be a really rare occurrence that happens once, and then he never does it again and pretends that he didn’t do it and makes you think that you’re crazy and were seeing things.

Q.: I know that the rest of the world doesn't celebrate Halloween like America does, but if the crew found out about American Halloween traditions, what would they think?
A. (00:18:28): They would probably think it’s pretty cool. People in the Nordic countries [in the] modern day know about Halloween, so it would probably be preserved in the history books pretty well what American Halloween would be and the decorations and stuff like that. 
Q.: Continuing off the Halloween question, what do you think the crew would have liked to dress up as?
A.: I guess Lalli would want to dress up as a ghost because he could just be under a sheet and not have to care that much about it. The others are a little bit trickier. Emil would want to be something good-looking. He would dress up as some sort of king or prince even though he’s supposed to be scary-looking. Sigrun, what would she want to dress up as? Maybe a zombie. What would Reynir want to dress up as? Maybe some sort of a sheep monster. Mikkel would dress up as something really boring. He would just dress up as himself but have one of those fake axes glued to his head so that it looks like someone has hit him in the face with an axe.
Q.: Reynir as a wolf? Eating a sheep.
A.: Oh, that would be pretty cool. He could dress up as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. No, the other way around! A wolf in sheep’s clothing. He would be dressed up as a wolf but also have a sheep hide on top of his wolf clothing.
Q.: How about Onni and Tuuri’s costumes?
A.: Tuuri would probably dress up as some sort of cute witch, and Onni would do the same thing as Mikkel did. He would just have a knife taped to his forehead, a fake knife, paint some blood around it. It would be really low effort; even worse than Mikkel’s. Mikkel would actually put some effort in it, he would look really good—the axe glued to his forehead. Onni would just show up with the tape showing.

Q.: Who would be the most likely to have the flight discussion on the crew? [Note: this is in reference to the discussion in Misc, time stamped 0:45:23)
A. (1:07:57): Maybe Sigrun because it’s a really... stupid discussion [laughs]. The kind of stoner discussion, like [kind of a stoned voice] “Hey man, have you ever thought about flying? Do we even know what it is? Woow.” I think Sigrun would have that discussion with Mikkel, and he would do his best to confuse her even further.

Q.: More important question: the crew and weed, who if yes?
A. (1:09:20): I don’t think any of them. They all prefer to be in control of their thoughts. None of them is longing for that oblivion and escape from reality. The only way they would smoke anything would be some sort of hilarious accident. Like they start burning some old firewood or books or whatever and there happens to be some 100 year old marijuana stuck in there, oh no. That would be Emil, I guess. He’s always the one who does something weird like that, by accident. 
Q.: "Hilarious accident".
A.: I mean, isn’t it a typical sitcom scenario? Someone eats or smokes something without knowing it. I feel like that’s been done dozens of times.

Q.: Who in the crew would win a game of tennis?
A. (3:51:19): What skills do you need to win in tennis? I guess you need to be fast, active reflexes, and be able to hit the ball… I think Lalli would be pretty good at it, and Emil would be bad at it, so Emil is out immediately. How about Reynir? Well, Reynir’s fast. I feel like he would generally be pretty good at sports, and he has long arms, so he can reach the ball with the racket from far away. So Reynir would win over Lalli, because Lalli is short and small and wouldn’t be able to outcompete Reynir in that regard. Mikkel is too big of a guy, he can’t keep up the pace. Sigrun — she’s athletic, but I don’t know if she would have the tactical skills to play tennis. She would keep hitting the ball as hard as she can, and it would fly wherever. She wouldn’t be able to plan out where to strike it so that the opponent wouldn’t get it. So she would be really angry and smash her racket and stomp on it and be that kind of player. She definitely wouldn’t win. Who’s left... Reynir and Onni? I think Reynir would win. And Tuuri obviously would not win. She would be the first one out. So Reynir would win in tennis. His closest opponents would be Lalli and Sigrun.
Q.: Would they be able to get Lalli to play though?
A.: No, there wouldn’t be any match, because he would be dragging the racket on the ground and not even trying. And when it would be his turn to serve the ball he wouldn’t even hit it with the racket, he would just throw it over the net to the opponent.

Q.: Do you think Lalli daydreams? What would he daydream about?
A. (muted): Let me think about that a little bit. [pauses] Alright I have decided. He would daydream. He has to work a [] and doesn’t really want to do anything after work, so his only hobby he would want to do would be daydreaming. I don’t know about what, though. Usually when you’re daydreaming, you’re thinking about what you would want to do or be or see. Maybe he doesn’t daydream. Maybe he just goes to sleep.

Q.: Is it possible to bribe Lalli into doing stuff?
A. (muted): Yes, with food. Either bribe or threaten. Those are the two ways of getting him to do stuff he doesn’t want to do.

Q.: How does Mikkel feel about getting fired so much? Does it get him down?
A. (muted): No, not really. He usually gets fired by the time he gets tired of the job and stops caring if he gets fired or not. He doesn’t really get accidentally fired unless it’s a job where he’s required to aim a gun, then he can’t keep the job even if he wants to.

Q.: Why hasn't Mikkel gotten glasses?
A. (muted): He doesn’t actually have a problem with his vision. He has a problem with his brain.

Q.: If Emil regained the wealth that his family lost, what would be the first thing he would do?
A. (4:09:03): Buy a really nice house, buy a lot of really nice food, hire some sort of cook, cleaner, someone to take care of the house for him, and then he would buy a horse and would have to hire someone to take care of the horse and so forth. He would just want a nice big house and people to do all the work for him. I don’t know if he has gotten a slight taste of comradery and adventure with friends, he might have other ideas of what he would like to do. Being alone in the marsh and then... Not going where his friends are going. Maybe it wouldn’t be his biggest priority.

Q.: You keep mentioning that Mikkel is a bit of a mystery to you too... why is he being so mysterious anyway, just reluctant to share things, or is he hiding something?
A. (4:10:31): He’s just reluctant to share things, he’s not hiding anything. And to me his mystery is just his personality. I’m not always sure why he does what he does, I’m trying to figure it out a little bit better. I have some of it, motivations, grudges and whatever he has annoying him or motivating him, figured out. Other than that, he just has a quirky personality that I’m still trying to understand. He’s not a secret agent sent from the future or the past.

Worldbuilding

Spoiler: show

Q.: Is the duck a representation of the messenger god Hermes since they can both fly and have wings? Are we going to see a joining in of the old Roman gods?
A. (00:03:37): Oof. I do love the duck now. I loved it when I created it, but clearly it has become a staple in the story.

Q.: Imagine how dead everyone would be if insects could catch the rash sickness.  //  If insects had the rash, maybe people could move underwater.
A. (0:48:36): Yeah, there wouldn’t be any humans left at that point. The only place where you could survive then would be...oh man… I mean, Iceland again, since they have places where there are no insects, and it would be really hard for insects to fly over to Iceland from other countries. The only places that could survive would be places where insects can’t live. Super cool places or super dry places. And even dry places have scorpions and stuff, ugh. Yeah, it doesn’t work. It has to be really, really cold.  // Aren’t there bugs that can go underwater? Like they make little air bubbles for themselves? So it wouldn’t really help. Bugs get everywhere. Aren’t crabs and lobsters somehow related to spiders? I feel like there’s some sort of connection there. The same way scorpions are related to spiders, because they all have those eight legs. There’s some sort of evolutionary branch that has evolved those eight-legged creatures that are all somehow related. So we have the spiders of the sea, a.k.a. lobsters and crabs.

Q.: Speaking of scary stuff, do you have some special inspiration for your monsters?
A. (1:54:47): Not really any special. I’m really inspired to design mostly from The Thing and Dead Space, those monsters were my initial design inspiration. Now I’m kind of building on that, kind of going my own way, combining different animals and situations and means for my monsters.

Q.: Do you know in your head what happened to all of the other countries of the world between Year 0 and Year 90?
A. (2:20:09): No, I don’t know what most countries. I have thought up loose scenarios from what kind of human societies would be able to live and what kind of terrifying special monsters would be living on the different continents or some continents. I have some sort of idea for most of them, but I haven’t really been thinking specifically about all countries or all the years. I have loose ideas for what would be going on right now and what it would have been like early in the survival period, how the surviving colonies would have emerged from the chaos.

Q.: In the SSSS universe, were there mages in the times of the vikings?  //  Does that mean the Rash existed back then too?
A. (2:38:31): They would have been, I think. The stories you hear about viking mages and Finnish mages - in the SSSS universe they would have been true. If you had a time machine and went back to check if they were true, the answer would have been yes, most of them. Some rumors maybe a little bit exaggerated, but they would have been mages in historical times.  //  No, that’s a new thing. The rash isn’t connected to the existence of mages. They’re not created by it being a thing.

Q.: Will we ever learn how the rash came into being?
A. (2:41:30): No, I’m going to keep that as an unknown, because it’s more… the mystery adds a little bit to the fear of it. When you specify something really clearly, that’s usually the point in movies where the anticipation and fear of something goes away. What’s unknown is always the most scary because everyone can picture in their head something really terrifying. Like, for some people the thought that something is maybe like an outer space virus - that’s more terrifying than the idea that it’s man-made. Or the thought that it came from the jungle like ebola is the most scary thing. For some people, the idea that it’s some kind of underground, ancient virus, that came from the dinosaurs or something, the more dangerous. And if I define it in some way, it’s gonna make it less scary.

Q.: I noticed on the maps of the Known World at the beginning of the story that most of the world's population are peasants. Does that mean they're all farmers? Is it more in a feudal sense?
A. (4:22:33): Yeah, they are not all farmers, they’re just regular people doing low-level jobs. Not military, not safety officials, not scientists, or I don’t remember if I put scientists in the same [category]. But they are people who are in need of protection and who would keep society running by their work, but they’re people who can’t be entrusted with everyone. Or they can be, but they can’t be entrusted with ensuring their own safety from the outside world. [viewer says, “Commoners.”] Yeah, ‘commoner’ is a good word for it. Maybe I should have named them ‘commoners’ in the first place. It has that connotation of [angrily] “Oh, you pleasants!” No, not pleasants, peasants! Oh, you peasants are the pleasants who live here. They are also pleasant.

Q.: If a Swede or a Dane acknowledged the gods at a young enough age, would there be a chance of them becoming a mage?
A. (4:27:02): I think so, yeah. It would probably not be a really large chance, it would help if they were around other people that were also accepting of the gods and therefore the gods would be more willing to be in their presence. So if they were a Dane or Swede who grew up in Norway or Iceland, they would definitely have a chance to forge a connection with the gods.

Drawing: Inspirations, Technique, Process

Spoiler: show

Q.: Have you seen the artwork of Theodor Kittelsen? He was my favorite artist growing up, and he draws a lot of Norwegian mythic creatures.
A. (00:33:09): I don’t know. I probably have. I’m going to Google that right now because I don’t want to say yes or no. [Minna looks him up] Yes, I’ve definitely seen this art. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a lot of his art. It looks very familiar. This one I’ve definitely seen. I’m going to copy it and show you guys. [shows on the screen] A lot of the troll designs look really familiar. Very Nordic-looking designs of something. Yes I have seen. I don’t know if I’ve owned any books with his illustrations as a child. I feel like I might have come across his artwork more as an adult. It also looks like artwork that might have inspired other artists because I feel like there are Swedish artists who also drew a lot of mythological stuff, like trolls in the woods and stuff, that have really similar styles that I have seen also.

Q.: Do you do anything to protect your wrist, like a brace or exercises?
A. (1:51:33): Yeah, I do a lot. The stretching that I do every hour helps a lot first of all, which is why I do stretching breaks, because you need to make sure your blood starts flowing every now and then, and you need to make sure your tendons aren’t constantly clenched up in fists like you do when you’re drawing. You need to stretch them out every now and then, or they will start shortening and start breaking every time you stretch out your hands after 10 hours of drawing and not stretching. And I go for a one-hour walk every day; you need to have good overall health for your body to be able to repair your tendons. You need your blood to flow properly, so that’s important. And you need to eat enough nutrients, you need all the vitamins and fats for the reparations to happen. Sometimes I use an ice pack or really cold water if I feel like I have swelling in my wrist or knuckles, which is where I most often have problems, you know, get the swelling down so that they don’t get inflamed. And if I wake up and my hands are stiff rather than swollen, I will use a warm pack for maybe 20 minutes and then do stretches - you don’t want to do stretches when you are feeling stiff or have cold hands, because that can cause more damage. I also own a brace that I sometimes use so that I don’t accidentally start using my right hand to click buttons, or when I’m browsing the internet I make sure that I’m not using the hand that I want to protect, so I have a brace so I make sure I don’t accidentally switch hands and put pressure on it. I do a lot of stuff. I’m really careful, because I have a little bit of tendinitis, I’ve had it for several years, so I make sure it’s not getting worse. I can handle the amount of pain I have right now, it’s just a little bit of a sting and it reminds me that I’m not immortal, I can’t do 15 hours every day, I have to have some moderation.

Q.: Magic light! IMHO you draw light like no other! [Minna darkened her drawing]
A. (3:47:06): Well thank you. Magic light is easy to make with digital art — you just pick one of the cool light filter modes and you draw and wooow, that’s so amazing! I can’t take all the credit for being able to throw in some cool light effects. It would be a lot more difficult with traditional medium. I really admire people who are able to do fantastic lighting scenarios with acrylics and watercolors. But thank you anyway! I really appreciate the compliments.

Writing: Character-creation, Pacing

Spoiler: show

Q.: Do you ever get art block or writer's block, and if yes, how you solve it?
A. (3:06:34): Yes, I kinda get artist and writer block in the sense that I don’t come up with really new ideas and can’t come up with cool stuff to draw, and for a period, maybe a few months, I feel like I don’t have any cool ideas, I’m tired, I don’t have the enthusiasm to do art or anything. And the way I solve it in the comic is that I know the story in advance, I have material for the next three years, I’m not trying to come up with something new, I’m just gonna have to sit down and polish it, even though I hate doing it. Once I know the point of the story going forward, I can just do a clean-up of the script even when I’m not inspired to do it. So that’s how I fix it, because a few months in the span of three years really is nothing, by the time I need to write new material to advance the plot that art block will have gone and resolved itself. A new one will have come and that will have gone away and so forth many times over by the time I would run into trouble. Just have a lot of material written in advance. Obviously, this doesn’t work for people who just write novels, because you’re constantly writing the stuff that you’re writing, you don’t have to sit down for three years and draw the pages that you wrote. So I guess it’s both a positive and a negative part of doing comics. Art is kind of the same way where I just need to come up with the idea, that’s the hard part. Then, if I have an artist block in that I don’t feel like drawing — if I have some idea, like a sketch that I’ve written down, just the idea for it, or have inspiration pictures in a folder, I can force myself to do an okay job of that idea, even though I may be depressed and have no inspiration. I think of it as.. It’s my job at that point. I just approach it as a businesswoman and my boss and say “You will draw this picture.” And it might only be 70 or 60 percent of the quality that it would be if you were inspired, but I have to produce something. Basically how I resolve both of them is collect my ideas, because I come up with ideas faster than than I’m able to draw them when I’m inspired, and then when I’m not inspired, I would just use those ideas that I had accumulated. And at that point you have to have a work ethic where you have to force yourself to work even if you want to cry while working. It’s I have done. It’s very hard to draw while crying because it’s difficult to see the screen. But yeah, that’s how I do it. I had a lot more problems when I was younger, before I was doing the comic, with art block, because I didn’t really plan ahead ideas for illustrations, so I had periods where I wouldn’t draw anything for weeks and months, just because I wasn’t feeling it and couldn’t come up with cool ideas. And I didn’t have to sit and force myself to do it either since it wasn’t my job at that point. Since it’s become my job, I know that it’s either do work or go work at a grocery store.

[Mebediel]

Part 2 of 2:

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related

Spoiler: show

Q.: What's your favourite Finnish mythological monster/creature?
A. (0:19:19): That’s a tough question. There aren’t really that many specific monsters and creatures in Finnish mythology, and the ones that exist, all of them don’t have that great descriptions of what they look like. You just kind of know where they live and can deduct something from that. Like, there’s a monster Iku-Turso, which is like some sort of sea monster, but there’s really not a great description from what I know; I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of artwork of it. Sometimes it’s drawn like a giant frog, and sometimes it’s drawn like something that has moose horns, and sometimes it has a walrus type of face. The only thing you really know — it lives in the water, and it’s big, and it’s the son of one of the Finnish gods, I don’t remember who, like, the son of Ahti or Tapio or something. It’s not like Norse mythology where you have drawings of all different creatures and descriptions. Some of them have, like the Moose of Hiisi is described, how it’s made from pieces of rotten wood and old sheep parts and stuff like that, and I think there are pretty decent descriptions of the eagles, the Kokkos, like one was made of iron and one was made of something else and so forth. Even those were really really short descriptions, like, two verses to describe it, maybe what the talons were made of and stuff like that. So I don’t really have a favorite that much.

Q.: Other than Finnish and Scandinavian mythologies, do you have other favourite mythologies?
A. (00:26:09):  I don’t really have favorite mythologies. I tend to like all mythologies when I get to know them. There’s not that many that I have a lot of knowledge about. But Egyptian mythology’s really cool, it has a lot of really great visual imagery. Images that you associate with Egyptian hieroglyphs and paintings and dog-headed people. Those are really cool. Most of what I know about Egyptian mythology is from that video game, Age of Mythology, since Egypt is one of the cultures you can play as. And in that same vein, I also like Greek mythology. Another of the playable civilizations in that game. So those two are my other two favorites because I happen to know stuff about them. Chinese mythology also looks really cool. Again, I don’t know almost anything. I just see drawings and paintings from it, and it looks really cool, and that’s how I evaluate. The lore and stuff from mythologies tend to be the same kind of stuff told in different ways. They’re not that different or special, really. Some are more refined than others, some are crazier and weird, but in the end, it’s the same kind of fears and natural phenomenon that people have tried to explain with mythology. So I don’t have favorite mythologies based on what they actually contain, I rank them based on how cool the images are. And I think all of them are really cool, like Celtic mythology has all those people with antlers and bear legs and Celtic knots and stuff. And then you have Aztec mythology with all the weird dragons and cool buildings and human sacrifice. I’m not saying that human sacrifice is cool, but everything that’s part of that looks cool. So what I’m saying is that I like all the mythology I’ve seen. I have yet to see some country’s culture or mythology where I’ve been like, “Wow, that looks like garbage.” Nordic mythologies are my favorite because I happen to live here, and people tend to like stuff that they have some kind of childhood connection to. That or either it’s so different that it’s exotic to them. I guess I gravitated toward the stuff that I am familiar with because I have good memories and stories tied to it in my mind.   
Q.:  Try Indian Mythology. Mahābhārata, Ramayana etc
A.: Oh yeah, Indian mythologies are also really cool, with a lot of rich visual tradition. See, all places have super cool mythologies! Humans are really creative and draw really cool stuff all around the world, through the ages.
Q.: Recommendations for more good mythologies: Babylonian-Phoenician, Western African, Polynesian.
A.: Ooh, those would be mythologies where I actually don’t even know what the — I want to say graphic design! — what the visuals actually look like for those mythologies, so I have to look them up a little bit. Like when you say Japanese mythology, you immediately know something in your head what it looks like. Like traditional paintings and drawings and creatures, but those that you said, I have nothing in my head, so I will have to research a little bit. Widen my visual library.

Q.: [directed at another viewer] Is that a Hummingfluff emoji?
A. (0:35:00): Yes, the little blue thingy is my emoticon! It’s the one you get if you’re subscribed by Amazon Prime or regularly by paying. It’s the only one. If and when I get partner status, we’re gonna get three emotes, actually, I’m gonna design more custom emotes and everyone who is subscribed is gonna get access to those. But as long as I’m not partner, we only have one, but it’s super cute! Because the way it works is you get more emotes the more people are subscribed, once you are a partner. If you’re an affiliate you only get one no matter what. I think there’s 15 people who are subscribed already, and I looked at the chart which means when I get partner (if, don’t get ahead of myself!) we’re gonna have three emotes unlocked, and it’s gonna be great! I have to decide on which ones are the most useful to make first.

Q.: Do you have a nickname for this former deer beast? Like 'Stabby Skull' or something?
A. (0:39:44): No, I do not. I’m not an expert at making creature nicknames. It tends to be you guys who decide all of the nicknames. When I name my sketches when I try to come up with some creature design, I just tend to name them like ‘Long Leg Moose’, ‘Long Neck Guy’, ‘Long Feet Guy’. I just describe whatever the main design element of them is. You might think that I have a really good imagination for everything, but when it comes to names, not so much. I’m very literal. I feel like that’s one of the reasons I’m not good at puns. Coming up with silly names seems like the same area of creativity, and I’m not good at that. Like, this one I call ‘Piranha-Face Moose Skull’ or ‘Crazy Feet!’ or ‘Need to See the Dentist Moose Skull!’

Q.: Are you gonna sell Book 2 at the online store soon?
A. (0:41:22): Yes, I am! We have set kind of a launch date, since all the Kickstarter awards have been sent out or are being sent out. I’m not sure if all of them are in the mail just yet. I didn’t have promised that for someone to be like “I haven’t received my notice yet!” I’ll have to ask if they’ve actually sent out everything. But yes, we have set a date and it’s early to mid next month, I’m going to reveal the date during next week, I don’t want to reveal it just yet, in case something comes up and we have to nudge it forward a day or two. But it’s in a few weeks.

Q.: Obligatory stream question: how is kitty doing?
A. (0:42:52): She is sleeping in the sauna right now, as she’s usually doing at this time. I’m sure she’ll be up in about an hour and come over and start drooling on my tablet again asking for food. But she’s doing fine! She’s still going outside once a day, even though it’s getting colder as autumn is rolling in.

Q.: My cats and I are constantly arguing about whether the balcony door should be open or closed… But then it gets cold inside and flying spiders can come inside if the door is open.
A. (0:45:23): Flying spiders? Is that a real thing? Because now I’m terrified. I don’t want to live in the world where flying spiders are a thing that actually exists. There are ‘flying spiders’ around here and they’re gonna start coming around in the next month. They are the moose flies, they are shaped like spiders, they fly, they have hook-hands, so you can’t brush them off you when they land on you. You can’t kill them by just trying to crash them by slapping them or anything, you have to grab them and decapitate them with your nails, because they have really thick rubbery bodies, and they crawl into your hair, and they dig into your skull and start sucking your blood. They are horrifying creatures. They’re technically not spiders, since they have six legs, but they look exactly like spiders.
Q.: Flying spiders are also known as harkrankar, they're not real spiders xD
A. (0:46:48): Okay. Well, as long as they look like spiders, just as bad. I kept the door open yesterday, during the comic stream, and those of you who follow me on Twitter know that a frog came in. I noticed it hours after I started seeing weird motions out of the corner of my eye. I would look over and be like “Oh, what was that movement?” and obviously it would sit still when I looked over. Then I look down and again I would see a movement, and it kept going for like half an hour. Then I finally saw it when it jumped on the white carpet, I saw, “Ah, frog!” And the poor thing has probably been jumping around under the sofa, stuff like that, so it had a ton of cat hair stuck to it. It was barely able to jump at that point, and I had to grab it and rinse it under the water faucet and it tried to constantly jump over it. It was the size of my hand. So it kept leaping around and jumping out of my hand and back on the floor and stuff. And I was like “Ohh, Kitty, please don’t wake up and come it this frog”, because if she sees something inside, like when the bird flew inside, she would just run over and kill it immediately. There’s no way I can protect it at that point. But I was able to let it outside after I had washed off all the horrible stuff that had got stuck to it.
Actually, I think that frog might have been inside my home earlier this summer once, already. And my cat came over and looked at it that time. She kinda poked it with her paw, and it would try over, and she would run over and poke it again. But she didn’t try to eat it. Maybe frogs don’t smell that good. And eventually the frog realised that it’s not supposed to be jumping around and the cat is gonna come and poke at it a bunch. The frog put its hands over its own head, like humans do, and stopped moving. It just sat there and my cat was just poking at it without claws. It didn’t move and she got really bored and walked away, and I was able to save the frog that time, too. So I feel that the same frog decided to come back. Hadn’t learnt.
Q.: Yes, they fly by using their threads to ride on electric currents on the air! Most spiders fly, I think.
A.: Well, I don’t count that as flying. Spiderman doesn’t fly, he swings with his fingers. If you have to use some sort of aid, you’re not really flying. Humans don’t fly, because they have to use aids and motors and stuff. You need to have wings for me to count that you fly. So, if flying spiders can fly without using their web as some sort of help.. Aaah, it’s not that bad. Then they are allowed to fly.
Q.: But even birds and such need wings to fly, wouldn't that count as flying with help as well?
A.: No, no! Wings are part of their body! If they were flying with the help of their...poop...or pee...or spit, things that they produce, that aren’t part of their body, then I wouldn’t count it as flying. If you have wings, then it counts as flying.
Q.: Birds do have to poop constantly in order to stay light enough to fly though, does that count?
A.: It wouldn’t count if the pooping was the thing that propelled them into the air, and every second they weren’t pooping they would be falling to the ground. That I wouldn’t count as flying. So, if there was a human who could fly by the power of farting a lot, like a farting jet, I wouldn’t count that as being able to fly. Just personal opinion there. If there was a superhero, Fartman, I would object to saying that he is able to fly. We would have to use some other term, technical terms, for what he is actually doing. Some sort of propulsion.
Q.: But birds and bats only fly because they are flapping their wings?
A.: Yes, but nothing is coming out of their bodies. They’re using their God-given appendages. See, I’m not going to back down. This is the thesis that I’m basing my worldview on. If the only way you can fly is by expelling something out of your body, that isn’t part of your body, then you’re not flying. *pauses* Now that I think of it a little bit more, I guess I can’t say that airplanes are flying, because they also don’t flap their wings, they are practically farting to stay afloat. I’m not willing to defend this position, it might have a few holes in the logic. I might have to give up and just admit that spiders that fly by using their nets, whatever that was, pooping out nets and using electrical currents to fly with it and Fartman are all flying. Ugh, it hurts my soul. Am I believing anything anymore?
Q.: Do rockets fly?
A.: See? Those are the questions where I’m starting to doubt myself. Do they fly? I mean, do rocks that you throw with your arm, do they fly? Because I feel that this situation is the same as what the rocket is doing. It has something that’s pushing it forward, some sort of momentum. It’s a really difficult question. The big philosophical battles of our time.
Q.: And birds need to expel and inhale air to fly.
A.: No-no, let’s not completely make things up. They could hold their breath and fly, the only problem is that they will die, but that has nothing to do with their flying. That’s not a valid argument.
Q.: Yes, rockets fly, but they're not living creatures.
A.: Hmm, so the rule is that only living creatures can fly? I’m only making this more difficult for myself.
Q.: But dead birds don't fly.
A.: Mm, yeah... I mean...
Q.: You must be able to control where you go. Or else it's either floating or gliding.
A.: Hmm, that’s a good point.
Q.: But with gliding you can control where you go.
A.: Hmm, that’s also... See, there’s no... [laughs] There’s no way to define flying! Do we even know what flying is? Have we all been living a lie all this time?

Q.: Can we have a stoner bonus comic?
A. (1:11:23): If I start going down the manga style filler art rabbit hole, the whole comic is gonna be 50% just all the stereotypical fanservice scenarios. Stoner Accident, Beach arc, Swimsuit arc, all the things. Tournament arc… I’m trying to think what all the popular shonen manga filler arcs are. I guess the tournament arc isn’t really filler. I know a lot of stories are basically tournament arcs.
Q.: Cooking Competition arc.
A.: Yes, going shopping arc, visiting each other’s homes arc…
Q.: Hot Springs arc. 
A.: Yeah, that would be a very Japanse arc, but it would fit, since they would be in Iceland. Hot Springs arc. I might just have to work it in now! Or I’m just going to do the sauna arc. A whole chapter about [it]! It sounds like I’m making fun of filler arcs, but I’m actually the one who really likes them. They’re supposed to be fanservicey, and some fans like them, some are really annoyed by them, since they make the plot stop, but I always like them, because they always give insight into the characters of whatever the story is. Sometimes I like the filler arcs more than the plot, especially if it’s a really heavy plot — dark and serious — those light filler arcs can be the greatest moments in the story.
Q.: YES WE WANT SAUNA ARC.
A.: I might not make it a complete arc, but I do have definitely planned to make them use a sauna at least once in the comic. Not just randomly, it actually fits into the pacing and plot of the story.

Q.: What this piece called?
A. (1:18:00): Well, it’s not really called anything, I’ve named it ‘Diseased Skull’, because I’m so great at coming up with names that I literally named it after whats the central piece of it. It’s the skull of one of the mutated mooses.. meese? Moose. [laughs] That’s what it’s named! Yeah, I have a real trouble coming up with artistic, great names. When I do finish the piece and upload it to the DeviantArt and stuff, I try to at least come up with a little bit of a better name for some of them if I had a really boring name while working on it. Sometimes the boring name is good enough, like the ‘Beach Day’ piece — it was named like that because it was a drawing of a beach day and that’s what the final name was. Some more creative namer would name it like ‘Serenity at Summer’ or something like that. I was like “No, ‘Beach Day’!”

Q.: Moose is plural as well as singular!
A. (1:19:21): That’s right, now I remember. Several moose. It’s the geese that that is… Ugh, that’s so annoying, it’s one goose and several geese! So I would think that it’s one moose, several meese. But no, that’s incorrect. Oh, cruel English with all its weird exceptions and irregularities. That’s one of the good parts of Finnish. It’s a difficult language to learn, obviously (unless you speak Estonian), but one of the easy parts is there are very few exceptions to rules and very few irregularities. Since it’s been such an isolated language, it hasn’t had an outside influence on the grammatics of it that would have caused those irregularities. The difficult part is that there are so many rules and it’s so complicated that it can seem like there are no rules and it’s all just a bunch of different things that you have to learn. I know, I speak it as my mother tongue and don’t have to think about the rules, but I did go to the Swedish-speaking school, so I had to take Finnish as a second language classes, I actually had to learn some of the rules, and they were completely baffling to me, I wasn’t able to learn any of them. I’m just able to get good grades because I know how to speak the language, so I didn’t need to learn the rules. Except for when there were tests where you had to name cases and suffixes and everything in-between, and I was like “Nope.”
Q.: Yeah it's because "moose" is from an Algonquian language while "goose" is from Old English.
A.: Oh, yeah, those kinds of things. Sorry, English, you’ve eaten too many languages! [laughs] No, you’ve eaten at the table of too many other languages and learned their ways and created a Frankenstein’s monster. Or have you created a very cultured and varied language with a lot of different cool influences? Depends on if you’re in a positive mood or in a bad mood, or if you have to take an English test or don’t have to take one. Your view on the matter will vary.
Q.: I've been planning to learn finnish and I knew it was gonna be challenging but now I'm even more worried.
A.: No no, don’t be that worried. Finnish is difficult for most people in the world, but it’s actually not the most difficult of the languages. I saw some sort of a military guide to how difficult it is for English speakers to learn different languages, and Finnish isn’t actually in the most difficult one to learn. The was, like, category 1, 2 3 and 4 and 1 was languages like Norwegian and German, related languages, and Finnish was something-point-five. It was one of those between the categories. One below Japanese and Korean. So it’s easier to learn than Japanese and Korean and obviously a lot of English-speaking people are able to learn Japanese and Korean. And the reason why it’s a half a stage below those languages is that it’s using the Roman alphabet, so English speakers have an easy time there, but there’s also a really big easiness about learning the Finnish language, which is that there are really few sounds. You don’t have to learn a lot of different sounds and accents or weird rules about what kind of sounds comes after this kind of sounds and stuff like that; it’s very limited. Most of the letters, or not most, but maybe like a quarter of the letters of the Roman alphabet, even though they exist in the Finnish alphabet, they don’t actually exist as sounds in the Finnish language, they’re just there so that we can spell Swedish words or other languages words. So sound-wise Finnish is really easy, the rules are very- not straight-forward, but once you learn them, you don’t have to learn exceptions. And I’ve also heard it’s one of the easiest languages in the world to learn to read. Partly because of the fact that there’s so few sounds, but it’s also spelled pretty much exactly how it’s spoken, unlike a lot of languages. It can be difficult to learn, but it’s not the most difficult language in the world to learn.

Q.: Listen, I'm continually thrilled that Estonian made it (ever so slightly) out of the apocalypse!
A. (1:25:53): Why, do you speak Estonian? Yeah, it did, I figured it would be so sad if Finnish was the only Finnic language that existed, and there are so many Estonian people living in Finland (and also there would be Estonian people on the islands like Saaremaa and Hiiumaa) that could survive, it would kind of make sense.
Q.: Yes, I grew up speaking both Estonian at home!
A.: Oh, that’s so cool! Wait, do you live in Estonia? Or do you have Estonian parents? Because I love Estonia! It’s one of the countries that I would move to if I for some reason didn’t want to live in Finland anymore. Estonia and Iceland are my plan B. Like, if I get super pissed with taxes or something. I’ve been learning enough Estonian that I can read a newspaper and listen to radio shows in anticipation if I get super annoyed. And sometimes if I’m just eating I browse Estonian real-estate websites and see what kind of apartments and houses are for sale and what they cost. I kinda think “Hmm, maybe I could buy something like that if I had this and this much money.”
Q.: Wavewright had to leave the chat but I think she's from the USA, currently living in New Zealand, and has parents from Estonia? [Note: this is slightly inaccurate, sorry Wave!]
A.: Oh, that’s really cool! Well, I’m going to have to ask her next time she’s in the chat. Well, maybe not just go and ask her, I don’t want to be a weirdo, like “Hey you! What was the thing with Estonian stuff?! Tell me!” But yeah, the other place I would like to go to is Iceland, with all that wonderful nature I would like to go hiking in forever. And it has the kind of climate I really like. Cold! Well, I guess I don’t really like the cold, I prefer summer. I really love summer in the Nordic countries, as it’s so light and warm enough that you don’t need a jacket, and normally — not like this summer — not hot enough that you can’t sleep.

Q.: [the viewer has subscribed]
A. (1:26:20): Oooh, [..] has just subscribed! Yaaay! Enjoy your one emote! And welcome to the.. Oh, I didn’t think of some names that we were supposed to call our group. Oooh, I kinda want to call it the ‘Fluffball’, like, ‘hummingfluffs’ is just the creatures that we are, the little cats with bird wings and beaks, and then the nest is called the Fluffball. So I’m gonna say “Welcome to the Fluffball” [laughs]. And you are now a hummingfluff, which you can see from the fact that you have your little hummingfluff badge next to your name. So that’s what I’ve decided. I might change it if I come up with something better, but that’s cute and doesn’t mean something weird like the other names we were talking about yesterday.
Q.: Hummingbirds!
A.: No, we can’t say hummingbirds because they’re not hummingbirds! They are humingfluffs specifically, they have cat bodies and tails and ears, they just have birds wings and beaks. So they’re like griffons, except they don’t have the body of a lion and the wings and the head of an eagle, they have a body of a cat and the wings and beak of some other smaller bird like an owl or a hummingbird or a sparrow or a parrot... There’s all sorts of different hummingfluffs. I’m gonna have to draw some of them one day. Cat and some bird combinations.

Q.: Is there a way to contact Hummingfluff via E-Mail? Can't find anything on the homepage.
A. (1:36:36): Yeah, I kinda have a problem with email in that I kinda don’t really check it. I only use it for really important stuff with like a publisher and business stuff. I had my email open for a while, and the messages just started piling up. I have thousands of emails piled up right now, so that’s why I don’t have my email public. Because I know I’m not gonna check it for weeks unless I know I have something important coming in, and every time I open it, it’s just full of everything, so I don’t really check it. It stresses me out. The best way to contact me is through Twitter, if it’s something important, let me know that it’s something important and you would like to contact me with something, and I will give my email through that and then know that you have sent me something. Otherwise I just go “I don’t want to open my email.” It stresses me out so much!
Q.: -Why would you want to? -For commissions.
A.: Yeah, I don’t do commissions anymore. I just work on my comic. It’s my full-time job. I know I’m really bad at being contacted by stuff. So if anyone sends me something important via email or something, always let me know on Twitter or something that you’ll send me something, and then I’ll look it up. I’m sure I missed a lot of great opportunities just by not being an active person email-wise. The current French publishing deal that I have — I could have easily not had that, because I don’t have clear ways to contact me privately. They had actually been really trying to get into contact with me for a while. I heard that they had tried to ask Finnish people in the Finnish publishing business, if they knew about me or how to get in contact with me, but I’m guessing they didn’t even know who I was, since I’m not really known in Finland as a comic artist. It had taken a while to finally find out that they could contact me through Hiveworks (which I guess is my primary publisher) and that way they got into contact with me. Which is kinda embarrassingly bad on my part in that I don’t have clear contact instructions other than social media, which is — businesses want to contact you privately through email, and that just makes me so stressed out that I gave up on that quite a few years ago. I guess it’s kind of bad to be that kind of person who doesn’t have a public email, but on the other hand I’m so much happier. It’s like some people ruin their life by being obsessed about Twitter or social media, and they feel like they can’t stop being on social media, because it is important for the job, but then they become really unhappy and they stop being able to work properly and stuff like that, and the only way to get better is to cut off social media, so I guess I did the same with email. Social media is much easier to me. For some reason email was the problem. That made me nervous. I think I’m going to rationalize it with, you know, “Email is gonna be in the past, the future is on social media! It’s where the young people are!” Maybe not the greatest way to rationalize it. But at least I’m available somewhere. Some people aren’t available anywhere except for in real life, and you have to contact an agent to get in touch with them. At least I’m not that reclusive. [viewer] says ‘Minnamalist approach’. Yes.
Q.: And Minnamalist needs to be a thing.
A.: Yeah, really irresponsibly ignore important things in your life [laughs] and then pretend they don’t exist, and just learn to live with it and accept the missed opportunities or whatever comes from it. I mean, it’s not a bad way to live. It’s one of the ways that I’ve been able to manage stress. Just accept that I’m not the kind of person who’s able to be involved in everything. Really successful people are people who can be everywhere all the time: they go to all the conventions, they speak to all the right people, they are always doing interviews. Every place that you look at something that is even slightly related to their field — they’re always involved in some way, and people notice them, and I’m not that kind of person. I know I would start self-destructing if I start trying to push myself to be that. Because some people do, like, you hear stories about people who were kinda introverted who got successful... Not even introverted, but just regular people who maybe couldn’t handle that kind of stuff, and then they got like a manager who pushes them to do everything, and then they can’t handle it, so they turn to drugs and stuff, and they vanish because they can’t do their work anymore. So I guess in the worst case scenario you don’t really get one to get into that. It’s better to miss some opportunities and be happy than chase everything all the time and be unhappy.
Q.: It's just a way to shield yourself from distractions.
A.: Yeah, you have to evaluate what’s more important — making connections or actually producing the thing that you want to produce. Like yeah, I could try to get good connections everywhere, but if I was only able to make a hundred pages a year, I don’t think that would actually be more beneficial. I would have a hard time getting readers. I might be able to know all of the greatest editors in different companies, but I would have a new book every three years or something to produce, and that would be really hard to live off as an artist. Spending a lot of time at conventions feels like it would be kind of counterproductive to what I want to do, actually.
Q.: That’s a nice philosophy for happiness imo I understand it.
A.: Yeah, it’s really about prioritizing. You have to decide what you actually want in life. It’s always good to have a clear goal and think “Does this thing actually get me closer to the goal that I want to beat?” I mean, if the goal is a calm, nice life,  you might be able to cut some things out. If your goal is to be the most successful person in the world and that’s what makes you happy and makes you want to wake up every morning excited, then you do different things. My goal is to be able to work, create things for as long as possible. I want to be one of those people who can draw or create comics or whatever I do in the future if comics aren’t the thing fifty years from now, maybe it’s gonna be virtual reality or whatever. I want to be doing that thing until I’m hopefully 90 years old and I’m still able to work and maybe die of a heart attack at my drawing table like some finest artists have done. That’s what I want. I want to stay healthy, happy, not be stressed out or bitter about anything that I could have had or regret my decisions that much. *pauses* I guess the counter-example, like “Don’t be like this!” for me, would be those mangakas who make big popular mangas. I’m sure that if you’re in any way involved in art, you’ve probably seen the memes with mangaka schedules, about how much they work. And it’s like 7 day a week, 12 hours a day drawing, or even more, like 16 hours a day drawing, sleep for 3 hours a day, every day, never any rest or anything. No wonder so many of them burn out by the time they’re forty or die when they’re fifty, because they never exercise or sleep properly, and even eating is like half an hour a day in their schedule, and it’s just crazy. Obviously everyone loves them and they produce like 20 pages a week or something, bigger mangas that are published in Jump. It’s something really insane. They have their assistants who do the drawing and stuff, but still, 20 pages a week, they have to outline and draw the sketches, at least, but they have to do that to stay on the top. So they often burn out or get massive wrist injuries.
Q.: Don't the more successful mangaka have assistants though?
A.: Yeah, yeah, they all have several assistants. They would have, like, six assistants: one person draws the backgrounds, a few people ink the pages, but they themselves have to sketch every page and that takes a lot of time. 20 pages a week, just sketching. I don’t think I could do that to the point that some other person can ink from your sketches. That takes a lot of work. I make really rough sketches that I’m able to ink and I’m able to do four pages a week. And their sketching... I could do that, you know, 20 pages of sketches in a week, yeah, but not with the quality that would be needed for some other person to ink them. And that’s just people who only do the sketches, but there are those who also ink the main characters and stuff, and their assistants do speed lines and effects and backgrounds, that’s still 120 hours a week.

Q.: How is the 4S video game progressing?
A. (1:49:07): Steadily. I work on it every week for one day. I think I was supposed to post an update this week. I don’t remember. If I was supposed to, I’ll post it next week. I have now finished the NPCs, the code for them, and I think I finished a big part of the NPC dialogue code, so I have something to show again next week. [note: yeah, outdated information, she posted her progress on 27.09]

Q.: Where did you learn to code for the game? Are you self taught?
A. (1:54:09): Yes! I started to learn exactly for the game. I was just going to make a visual novel at first, start learning a bit of a basic coding for that. Then it turned out to be really easy and fun, so I decided to make it a proper game instead. So yeah, I’m self-taught. I’m just learning on the internet. There’s a lot of really good tutorials for coding, naturally. It’s the internet, it’s full of people willing to share their knowledge.
Q.: Very admirable to teach yourself coding for your game.
A.: Well thank you! It was really just for fun, I’m not doing anything really grand with it. It’s just a good way to get my brain off the art now and then, since it can be a little bit exhausting if all you do is think about colors and figures and composition. Coding is so different that it kinda relaxes me. Just one day a week or one day every other week, since a lot of the game is also doing art with just a little bit of distraction now and then; it’s really helpful for my overall enjoyment.

Q.: What code language are you using? Python?
A. (1:56:03): No, I’m learning C#, or that’s what I’m using and obviously learning, since I’m using Unity to build the game and that’s the main language, I think. Also there’s just so many tutorials for C#, that’s why I picked it. I tried some other languages at first, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do, and the languages I picked didn’t have really good tutorials, so my learning experience ended there and I had to start over with something else.

Q.: Somehow, it always comes down to cannibalism with the fandom. [related to the discussion mentioning cannibalism in the chat]
A. (2:07:16): Yeah, I guess that in the end that’s some sort of reflection on me because I attracted you people here. So there’s something wrong with me that attracts all the cannibals. Do I need to start doing some sort of introspective self-analysis?
Q.: It started when Reynir arrived as the emergency food!
A.: Ah! So that scene attracted all the cannibals! It was probably spread around on some cannibal website in the ‘favourite webcomic’ section and it got really popular and obviously people came from over there. I see. It all makes sense now.

Q.: Speaking of that would eating trolls count as cannibalism? Inquiring minds needs to know. [see question (2:07:16) in Misc. category]
A. (2:10:11): Hmm. It might not, because I feel like the virus changes your DNA, so technically they aren’t human cells that you’re eating. Like, if someone’s born as a human, but they are put through a lab experiment where they’re given some sort of serum that changes all of their cells into pig cells and they look like a pig, and they are a pig, and all of the cells are pig cells, and if you eat that pig that was born a human - is that cannibalism, or are you just eating a pig?
Q.: Aaaand we're back to eating trolls.
A.: Yeah, that’s the big question of the comic. Can you eat them? [laughs] And even though I said no, the question always comes. But technically, if you do eat a troll, is that cannibalism? And do you turn into a wendigo? If you eat a troll in America? Oh,  if there was American version, American survivors, if you eat a troll, a specific kind of troll with an American strain of the disease, you turn actually into a wendigo troll yourself even if you’re immune.
Q.: That'd be highly unethical, how can you suggest such a thing?
A.: What, turning people into pigs in laboratories and then eating them? It was just an example! I wasn’t saying you should start turning people into pigs genetically. Yes, I agree, that would be highly unethical.
Q.: Is the pig still sentient?
A.: I mean, still sentient as a pig, but it will have a pig brain, so it won’t know that it’s a human. It might have some human memories, I guess, but it wouldn’t understand that it’s a human, because it has a pig brain and it has the intelligence of a pig. But maybe it would recognise people that it met as a human and come up to them and be like “oink oink”, and it wouldn’t act as a human with human emotions, but it’s a pig that had met humans before.

Q.: We're just peacefully eating people here and you come up with such scenarios!
A. (2:14:12): I’m not one who’s going to de-escalate a discussion about eating people, I’m the one that’s going to come up with horrifying science-fiction, crumbling society kind of scenarios. I will be the top degenerate in this discussion.

Q.: How’s the weather? I had heard it is too warm for the end of September.
A. (2:36:16): Yeah, it’s pretty warm. The nights are fairly chilly already. Nowhere near being frost weather, not below zero. But if you go on a walk after 9 or 10, you already start needing mittens for your fingers, or you might need to start putting them in your pockets, but during the day you can maybe even leave your jacket at home, it’s that warm, like over 15 degrees some days. Which is definitely too warm, it’s supposed to be autumn already. Which it is, the leaves are all turning red and brown. It doesn’t look like summer, but it is a little bit too warm. It is raining, though, which is very often… it’s not insanely warm for autumn, it’s just a few degrees warmer than it should be. I was at the gas station buying something a couple days ago and overheard two men talking about how it’s “Oooh, it’s getting so cold already, I went fishing and the wind started up and my fingers felt like they were gonna fall off”, because it was 5 degrees or something. So it’s not super warm or anything. If the fishermen are already complaining that it’s getting too cold to fish without something on your hands, it’s getting closer to winter.

Q.: Is the water still wonky there?
A. (2:58:04): No! It’s actually good now. Someone did ask yesterday [21.09.18], but this week is the first week that the water is now drinkable. There’s a couple of areas somewhere in the woods where not a lot of people live where the water is still questionable, because they had a problem where there’s really long pipes, for kilometers and kilometers, and ten people who actually live year round there using the water. So the bad water is still in the pipes and not getting run out, but where I live it’s okay now. It’s still full of chlorine, so it tastes really bad it’s really gross to drink. It’s not refreshing at all, so I have to force myself to drink water, (you have to keep hydrated), but it’s perfectly fine. We just have to wait for the chlorine water to run out. *pauses* I had gotten so used to fetching the water from one of the tankers every evening, that one day this week, when I went there and the tanker wasn’t there, my first thought was “Yay, the water must be good enough now that the tanker is gone” but the second thought was, “Aw, the tanker is gone. I don’t have my nightly water-fetching routine anymore.” I felt a little melancholy for no good reason at all.

Q.: Without spoilers, what are you looking forward to the most in the second adventure?
A. (3:10:57): A lot of character interactions, a lot of new places or semi-new places that I will get to draw. I’ll get to draw characters in a new season — it’s not gonna be winter anymore, so I’m gonna get to try out a lot of different colour schemes, foggy mornings, fall mornings, sunny days that aren’t just grey and rainy and cold and snowy, and a lot of cool monsters that I have thought of. I’m excited for a lot of things.

Q.: How do you know which songs are safe from Twitch's copyright rules?
A. (3:26:00): I don’t. The ones that are copyrighted get muted automatically. If you watch the recording, some parts of the video have red bars in the play bar (or whatever it’s called, like the timeline bar) and those red bars mark the music as being muted so they don’t break the rules. Like the one stream when I was drawing the Beach Day scene I created a lot of contemporary Nordic music, like summery tunes from all the different Nordic countries, and probably half of the video for that was red bars, muted because it was modern, popular music that had copyright stuff in the system.

Q.: What do you daydream?
A. (muted): Usually I daydream about side [] I daydream about eating food that I want to eat, thinking about “next week maybe I’ll eat this or this or this.” [] I daydream about what kind of home I would like to have if I had all the money [] what kind of garden, what kind of walls, what’s the layout, where are the walls, I would need a lakeview and a forest nearby. [] That kind of daydream is my favorite subject. My dream home. I never get tired of it.

Q.: Part of me always giggles when I see the word "mage".
A. (4:48:25): Well, now you’re gonna make me start giggling all the time. It doesn’t mean anything bad, it means ‘tummy’. That’s just a cute word. But it sounds really silly when you read the sentence “What if someone found out that they are a tummy?” or “Could they become a tummy?” A powerful tummy with great tummy powers.

Q.: Maybe build a cat trapdoor? [Minna often has to open the door for Kisu]
A. (4:45:26): A trapdoor? What? A trapdoor where my cat will fall into? Why would I do that? Just a cat door? I don’t think those are ‘cat trapdoors’.
Q.: No a little door in your door for the cat.
A.: Okay, then that’s just a cat door. A trapdoor is a kind of like a rich evil people have: you go into their mansion and ask them for a favour, and they press a button and the trapdoor under you opens and you fall into the pit of alligators. No, I can’t really have a cat door, because it gets so cold up here that if you build something into your door, that introduces possible heat leaks, and that’s a really bad thing. It would have to be a really expensive custom Nordic-designed cat door, and even then custraction people... you never know, they might leave a seam somewhere that leaks. And then the whole home is compromised and it’s gonna be always cold inside during the winter. Plus, I have double doors even for going into the backyard for the same reason you have to add double insulation for everything — you can’t just have one thin door, you need double doors to keep the cold out. So I would need to have two cat doors installed, and then it would cause all kinds of problems. So no, unfortunately cat doors aren’t really a thing in Finland, and pet doors overall, because of the cold reason. The only place where you can have animal doors is a summer cottage that isn’t supposed to be insulated for the winter, that is only used during summer. But in regular homes pet doors just aren’t a thing. Except in rare occasions where someone has the money to pay for a special Nordic animal door with special insulation and double airlock and everything that would be needed.

Q.: What's the coldest it gets up there?
A. (4:51:55): I don’t know what the record would be, but I know that I have to expect below -20 for a couple weeks a year at least. Well, not at least. Sometimes it’s a little bit warmer and you only get like one week where it drops below -20. When it gets really cold it gets close to -30, and that’s when people start going like “Ahh. Sucks living in this country.” And obviously cars start having trouble running and everything when it starts getting to that point. The comfort level is between -25 and +25, like people might start complaining when it gets close to those, but when it gets past that point, in either direction, people start going “Oh my god! I can’t live, I can’t work, I can’t do anything! This is hell!”

[JoB]

A: [...] But in regular homes pet doors just aren’t a thing. Except in rare occasions where someone has the money to pay for a special Nordic animal door with special insulation and double airlock and everything that would be needed.

... hmmmmmmm ...

(On a somewhat more serious note, isn't there a quite traditional solution for that problem?)

[Sc0ut]

Just a suggestion for the transcript team: when Minna has a conversation on a certain topic with commenters, if there are more than a couple of lines exchanged, it gets confusing and impossible to follow if you dump all the comments in one place and then all of Minna's answers after it. I think stringing them after each other, like they go in a normal conversation, would be better. As it is now, I skip over those parts because it's too annoying to constantly skip back and forth to remember what she is replying to. (At least that's my experience with this! Other people might not mind, but then I think they wouldn't mind if it was presented in the normal dialogue style either.)

[Mebediel]

Just a suggestion for the transcript team: when Minna has a conversation on a certain topic with commenters, if there are more than a couple of lines exchanged, it gets confusing and impossible to follow if you dump all the comments in one place and then all of Minna's answers after it. I think stringing them after each other, like they go in a normal conversation, would be better. As it is now, I skip over those parts because it's too annoying to constantly skip back and forth to remember what she is replying to. (At least that's my experience with this! Other people might not mind, but then I think they wouldn't mind if it was presented in the normal dialogue style either.)

Noted! Yeah, this last chatlog was particularly bad about this. I’ll go back and fix it tonight when I get home.

[Sc0ut]

Noted! Yeah, this last chatlog was particularly bad about this. I’ll go back and fix it tonight when I get home.

No rush! Thank you for considering this, and for the excellent work you do every week

[Mebediel]

No rush! Thank you for considering this, and for the excellent work you do every week

Not at all! Should be fixed now. Let us know if the new format works better.

... hmmmmmmm ...

LORDY

[Mebediel]

Double posting to bring you all the Friday stream where Minna was inking one of the pages for the next adventure! I don't think she posted any previews anywhere (correct me if I'm wrong), so those who did not watch the stream will just have to wait with eager anticipation.

chatlog_280918

Trolls

Spoiler: show

Q.: Can immune people become part of a giant somehow?
A. (00:55:36): Mmm...I don’t know, maybe they could be, like, a giant that just fuses flesh and your body could just melt into it? But immune people I think would just die from that; obviously you get, like, sepsis, and you die if you start fusing with some sort of gigantic flesh blob. So I guess the body would technically be stuck in the giant, but they would be dead, they wouldn’t be part of the giant in that sense. It would be just like a tree branch could be stuck in the flesh of the giant. So not really, no.

Characters
Main Cast

Spoiler: show

Q.: ...is Sigrun reading a kid’s book?
A. (00:07:56): [laughs] Yes [continues laughing], and she’s very bored with it. I named it something, “God Natt Katt” is what the book is called. [laughs] It means, you know, “Good Night Cat”, obviously.

Q.: Above the book, is it Kitty or something that looks like her?
A. (00:09:33): Yes, Kitty is going to have her own quarantine space. She’s going to have a sleeping space, an eating space, probably some sort of toys over here, and she’s going to have one of those running things where she can exercise. I guess her sleeping place would have a mesh so she can hide in there.

Q.: Is Sigrun a slob when she is on R&R? [+ Chat explaining to her what R&R means, ‘rest and relaxation’]
A. (00:13:16): I have no idea what “R&R” means. [laughs] It’s not bed and breakfast, that’s “B&B”. [Chat tells her the definition of the term] Ah, is that a real shortening for that? Seems like a very rarely used thing, I’ve never heard that acronym before, R&R... Um, I guess she is, you know, she’s not the kind of person who would always be tied to work. If she’s on proper vacation or somewhere where she can’t be killing things in the field I guess she would be probably a slob. But she would also become bored very easily, which I think we were all able to figure out [laughs]...Ah, [viewer] said military slang, that’s good.

Q.: Will we get to see snippets of their travel back to the known world?
A. (00:18:08): Yes, we are going to see--actually, the whole first chapter is gonna be quarantine, so we’re gonna see their journey back. Well, actually I don’t know if it’s gonna be just that, the first chapter. I don’t know where I’m gonna divide the chapters; the first chapter might end up being pretty long and that involves stuff like, you know, meeting Reynir’s parents and stuff like that. But yeah, we’re going to see them traveling back. We are not going to have a gigantic timeskip where it’s like, “Oh, five years later they reunite!”. No, no we’re gonna continue where we left off pretty much. It’s gonna be a few days, maybe a week skip.

Q.: Reynir looks ded.
A. (00:23:07): Good! He’s supposed to look bored to death.

Q.: Where’s Lalli, is he okay? Just out of sight?
A. (00:26:42): Lalli is very small, he’s gonna be over there [points on the canvas]. They’re all gonna be in a row in the little cubicles and Lalli’s gonna be the smallest one this time.

Q.: Is Lalli aware he’s been named after an axe-murderer?
A. (00:32:17): Yeah, he probably would be. I mean, he was deliberately named after him since, you know, it would give him some sort of kinda “protective strength” to be named after some sort of very Finnish….I don’t know what the word in English would be, but tuittupäinen warrior.... I guess “short-fused” would be the word in English?

Q.: Are their own clothes being burned or just cleaned really really well?
A. (00:42:09): I think they’re being cleaned really really well; at least their equipment is being preserved and cleaned, like Lalli is going to have his rifle back. They’re not just going to discard all their stuff. But we’re not going to see the old uniforms anymore so they might as well be burned; they’ll probably go right in the trash. They’ve been worn out, really gross. But there’s no rule that all their clothes and equipment would have to be burned, if that was the case then they would obviously not be able to bring back the books either, they would have to be burned, too. They’re all being decontaminated with, like, UV lights, and probably heat and cold — put in some kind of super freezer, minus fifty degrees or something.

Q.: So are they wearing like...hospital/quarantine clothes?
A. (00:46:06): Yes they are. They’re gonna be wearing, like, you know, white, loose gown-type clothing, the kind that you would wear in hospitals — but not the kind that I see on American TV where, like, the butt and backside is showing [laughs]. They will have, you know, proper clothes.

Q.: Are we gonna see what will happen to the books?
A. (00:46:48): I think so, yes. There won’t be anything dramatic happening to the books. The books will be safe; they will be sold, probably at auction to, you know, any archives or rich people that want to have them in their collection of old stuff.

Q.: [Referring to the current illustration] Sigrun’s reading???
A. (01:10:11): [laughs] I mean, clearly not. I mean maybe she was trying….it’s not working out too well. And it is a children’s book, she might just be looking at the pictures.

Q.: Does the crew need to give field report after they get out?
A. (1:45:47):  Yeah, yeah they’re going to give some sort of field report. But we’re not going to see them doing that. I think they’re gonna just be doing that in quarantine, that’s something that the quarantine facility would have materials for, that would be a normal thing for people to do once they return from somewhere and are put in quarantine. And they have nothing else to do to write a bit of a report Or they might not write it down but have someone to come in and transcribe it. Have a short interview.

Q.: What would Reynir tell his forefather who wanted to live away, safely from all the death? After everything he’s seen now in the aftermath? Disappointed/understanding?
A. (1:17:04): Well, he would probably be understanding, the forefather. He knew that other people would be more suited for working closer to danger. It just wasn’t for him. So he wouldn’t be like “How dare you! My legacy was to be far away from danger and you have crushed all of my dreams by being different from me.” He wouldn’t mind, he would be like “Oh no, I could never!” Mostly he would be weirded out by the fact that he’s able to talk to his descendant through time and space somehow. But what Reynir would say would be, “Yeah, you were right to go somewhere safe. It’s definitely kind of crazy out there.”

Q.: I think Sigrun would read the Walking Dead comic.
A. (1:22:47): Well, Sigrun would definitely appreciate comics. Fewer words, pretty pictures.

Q.: Does Sigrun have crayons for when she gets really bored?
A. (1:25:26): They actually have a lot of stuff in their little cubicles. They have books and they have games, like board games and stuff that they can play together through the glass, and I’m sure they have crayons.

Q.: Is Reynir sitting on a LazyBoy?
A. (1:25:27): No, he’s sitting on a hospital bed, but he’s propped up on a billion pillows and crumpled up bed covers. They don’t have beanie bags or anything. The cubicles are kind of private hospital rooms. A hospital bed, a bathroom, and some things that can entertain them.

Q.: How did Mikkel get to be so well-read? At least he seems to be.
A. (01:27:09): Well he would have just read a lot. He grew up in Bornholm. It’s a well-off part of the world in the comic. He would have had a pretty decent primary education. His family owns a farm, they would have had access to books and stuff, been able to afford it. So he would have read there. And, once you get a taste to reading, then when you’re bored, you try to get access to books and read them. It’s really just that. He hasn’t had a crazy education or anything. He’s just been to a lot of places, read a lot of books, listened to a lot of stories by other people who have been to other places.

Q.: Tic-tac-toe on the glass with Mikkel? (I love that you take so well care of the team!)
A. (01:28:25): Yeah, they’re actually going to have game boards that are magnets that you can put up on the glass between the cubicles, and then they will be able to play those.

Q.: Mikkel seems to be the most wasted character in my opinion. He seems insanely smart like he's wasted potential and I don't know particularly why...
A. (01:29:19): Well, he’s kind of smart, but he’s not a genius in any way. He’s just the kind of person who knows tidbits, a little bit about that, a little bit about the other thing, but he wouldn’t actually be useful as a source of further knowledge. He just happens to know little parts about some things. He wouldn’t be able to be a scientist or an expert of anything since he doesn’t stay in one field for very long. He gets bored and insults people, gets fired for whatever reasons, so he never gains that kind of expertise in anything. He’s one of those kinds of people who floats around from place to place trying to find out what they actually want to do while pretending that they don’t even care or whatever.
Q.: He could be skald?
A. (1:30:58): He could be if he had the will to be one. But he would be bored of that really fast.

Q.: Probably irrelevant but what's Emil looking at?
A. (1:43:57): He’s just side-eyeing this corridor. He’s very bored, he does not want to read, and Lalli does not want to play boardgames with him. So he’s just having a really bad time. He’s not gonna break his dignified appearance by slouching around like Reynir. He’s gonna sit there with a straight back and look annoyed.

Q.: Are they in individual containment units or are they in one big collective apartment for quarantine?
A. (1:44:40): They’re gonna be individual. You can’t see it yet, since I haven’t done the lineart, but there are gonna be glass walls separating them. So they all have little cubicles.

Q.: What do you link would happen if the group played Dungeons and Dragons?
A. (1:50:46): Ooh, I wish I could give a good answer to that, but I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, or even watched anyone play it, so I don’t really know how it works. Like, in terms of how it’s actually played. So I really can’t give a good answer. The best I’ve seen are skits about it in sitcoms, there is like “Oh, in this episode they are playing Dungeons and Dragons!” and “I have to have a story master!” or a dungeon master I think it’s called? And other people are like “Oh, you got this and this number and it means you got hit with an arrow and you’re dead! Goodbye!” and something like that [laughs]. I don’t know how it’s played other than that.

Q.: Would the team survive "fia med knuff"?
A. (1:57:57): [laughs] what do you mean? Of course they would survive it! It’s a fun game.
Q.: "Fia med knuff" is evil and brings out the worst in everybody!
A. (2:00:08): Oooh, you meant that way. Yeah, they would start scratching each other’s eyes out. [laughs] I don’t know, I’ve never really got into rage about. I’ve played a lot with my brother when we were kids, back when if you went out of the city there would be summer cottages, and we didn’t have any electricity and stuff, we had to play games when we were bored. And we played lots and we never got into rage fights about it. So I didn’t wait that connotation about “surviving” that game.

Q.: Would the people in the ship believe if Reynir told them that he’s a mage?
A. (2:20:19): Yeah, they would probably believe him. Being a mage in Iceland wouldn’t be incredible, it’s a fairly mundane profession.

Q.: Did they have any Finnish speaking persons on the boat?
A. (2:47:27): Unfortunately no. We’re gonna find out about that soon. You know, why they don’t have one and how it’s affecting Lalli. But no, they don’t have anyone speaking Finnish.

Q.: I'm hoping they all get to know Reynir more during the 1 month quarantine!
A. (2:51:35): Well, unfortunately the person next to him in the next over cubicle is Sigrun. They’re gonna have a really hard time trying to get to know each other, since Sigrun doesn’t speak Icelandic and isn’t too interested in Reynir to begin with. So Reynir’s bored face might have something to do with the fact that he doesn’t have that much of a friend to talk to.

Q.: Do you think Lalli would cut off Reynir’s braid if he ever got his hands on scissors?
A. (2:55:30): [laughs] I don’t think he would do it, he’s not that cruel. He would think about doing it, and if Lalli got really mad at Reynit for some reason, he might do it in retaliation, but he’s not the kind of person who will just go and try to ruin someone’s life a.k.a. hair just out of meanness. He tends to leave people alone.

Q.: Why does Kitty need to be quarantined?
A. (3:08:19): Well, part of it is the fact that they have been so deep in the Silent lands that it’s just to make sure that there isn’t any unknown strain that could affect cats, and the fact that she’s been born in the wilderness, so it’s just a safety precaution. But part of it is also that she’s quarantined for other diseases. Like, in modern days if you take your animals somewhere, a pet needs to be quarantined if you move somewhere, because if it has some sort of disease that could affect the other animals in the country, then you have to get rid of that first. So that’s mostly why she’s being quarantined — she’s a wild animal that is being brought into place where regular cats could get some sort of plague from her, and we don’t want that to happen. So she’s being medicated and dewormed and everything and kept under supervision to make sure she doesn’t have something.

Q.: How can she [Kitty] NOT be happy?! she's got her own apartment!
A. (3:38:40): She’s a wild kitty! She’s never had to be in an apartment! Even in the Cattank she was allowed to go outside every day, and the Cattank was just a warm place that she could go to and sit by the fire or the stove. Here she has to be inside all the time, she won’t get to smell flowers (well, I guess she’s never gotten to smell flowers, really, since she was born into winter). But, you know, smell the sea and the wind. Now she has to be trapped like a rat.

Q.: Do you think Reynir and Lalli had any dream conversations during their stay in quarantine?
A. (4:03:55): It’s possible. They haven’t been in quarantine yet, it’s coming up. So I can’t reveal everything yet, it would be spoilers.

Secondary Characters

Spoiler: show

Q.: Do you think Ensi would know of Simo Häyhä, given her knowledge of Finnish historic/folk figures?
A. (00:20:43): Maybe. Simo Häyhä isn’t really a folk figure in the same way that Lalli was. Lalli is more of a mythological person that’s kinda tied to some sort of national awakening. Simo Häyhä is just a kinda regular historic person, and it’s not told as a tale to children, you know, like I didn’t know anything about Simo Häyhä until I heard about it on the internet because it’s kind of a meme, I guess? Like I didn’t learn about him in school, you know, during history class, but everybody knows the Lalli and Bishop Henrik (was it Henrik?)  — that story. So I don’t know if she would actually know about him.

Q.: I certainly hope Bjarni comes around often. Is he normal crew on this ship so has to be on duty, or is he here just to collect Reynir?
A. (2:54:41): He’s part of the crew of the ship. He’s actually not normally on the ship, but he’s asked to be on it to do his regular work that he would normally do on the ship. But he knew this was the one that was gonna pick up Reynir and he happened to be on a position where he could join the crew. But he’s just a regular crew here, he’s not on ‘pick-up-Reynir’ duty.

Worldbuilding

Spoiler: show

Q.: As it seems, most if not all cooks presented in comic so far have been Not Good. Are cooking books the most prized of books to be found in that case?
A. (00:54:16): [laughs] Well, there’s a lot of cooks, obviously, that are good. I just haven’t — we just have happened to see not-so-good cooks. I mean, how many have we seen, or have been presented? The one on the ship obviously is not going to be very good, Mikkel is not very good; other than that, haven’t really had anything about you know, eating, having had a meal cooked. I mean, Siv cooked some meals for the home team and her cooking was fine, so there’s not, like, an epidemic of bad cooking [laughs].

Q.: How much technology has been lost? Like at what year is the world technologically speaking? I imagine at least pre-internet.
A. (00:56:26): Yeah, it’s, I’m thinking…um, I don’t really have a good view of how much technology you had at different times, you know, in the last hundred years, but I guess like, kinda ‘50s kind of technology? Like radios and telephones exist in the cities, and they can be you know, repaired and rebuilt and maintained. But television, no; that’s like a luxury where only old televisions that have been salvaged and aren’t broken can be used, but they aren’t being rebuilt, there’s not the technology to build new televisions. So that’s, you know, kind of the line. Telephones, radio, and street lights, and obviously a lot of science technology is known and still in use, but new TVs are not being built. You know, that kind of science level. And obviously cars are used and built and maintained, but most people would have horses because cars would be really, really expensive.
Q.: I think they had computers on Öresund Base?
A. (01:01:43): Oh yeah, they did have that. So for the technology level they obviously have a lot of, like, repurposed machinery that they are still using. Every computer that is found, if they can like, salvage the motherboard or something, or even a little part of it, they are gonna use it to build some sort of computer. But they don’t have the technology or the infrastructure to make the delicate parts of a computer, so all of that has to be salvaged from the Silent World. But obviously the information isn’t lost; there’s tons of books about how to build a computer and you know, microchips and stuff and everything. So all that is archived and the information is kept safe. The problem is that they don’t have the factories and machinery and lasers and whatever you need to properly manufacture modern computers and TVs and stuff like that.
But that’s all stuff that nations would obviously be working towards, especially the bigger ones, Iceland and Sweden, and I guess Norway, within Bornholm, trying to build little factories to slowly get to a point where they can actually produce modern materials again. Because otherwise they would hit the point where all the reclaimed materials break one by one, and there won’t be any left. There would be problems, setting even further back in technology. So they are obviously slowly trying to get back to a modern technology level. And some things they have to change a little bit to fit the fact that not all materials are as abundant anymore. So the technology would be going in a little bit, you know, of a different direction, and the needs are different. So maybe like a smartphone wouldn’t be something that they are exactly trying to focus on, trying to reach. But just whatever sort of technology you need for, like, lab research, that stuff, and you know, transportation, and radar sensors and weapons would be the ones that are prioritized technology-wise.

Q.: Is refined flour a thing in year 90?
A. (01:05:12): Um, I don’t know, because I don’t know what goes into producing the fine flour. It might not be, really, because a lot of the flour that is used in the Nordic countries from my experience is actually not the kind of really white flour that, you know, hamburgers and American toasts — or I guess French toast, it’s called? — is used with. It’s really common to — well, in Finland especially, it’s rye flour, really dark bread that is what is typically eaten. And even for toast it’s mostly like whole wheat, is what it’s called, where, you know, it’s not the white flour... rather it has all the other kind of stuff in it to have more fiber. So if it’s a really complicated process I don’t think resources would be put in trying to get the refined white flour, because there wouldn’t be a need for it, people wouldn’t have, like, a craving for it that would be worth sacrificing some other — you know, it wouldn’t be worth the work that goes into setting up a factory for that stuff.

Q.: How much science knowledge was retained after the Rash?
A. (01:06:52): Mmm, most of it. And since obviously Iceland and Sweden and Bornholm all have big libraries, and even in modern times we are still at the point where almost all information is available in books that are, you know, kept in libraries and archives and universities and stuff like that. So any computer technology university or even a university that has some computer science classes or, you know, natural science classes and genetics classes and whatever, would have really big libraries of specific books about that subject. So pretty much all the information would be still available in textbooks. And of course a lot of it — if there’s like, one book of that subject in the whole country, that book would be super well-guarded and, you know, somewhere where it can’t burn down or someone can go and spill coffee on one of the pages that, like, explains how to build some sort of super-important molecule like antibiotics or something [laughs]. So yeah, a lot of the information is retained, it just is not very useful because, you know, without the factories it maybe can’t be used; so it’s just kept safe until the day when technology goes back to some sort of useable state.
So, you know, technology about space travel and black holes, it’s kept there in the archives but it’s not a priority to study stars and stuff like that. Hyperspace thrusters or whatever spaceships have [laughs].

Q.: Do they have baking powder in Year 90?
A. (01:11:50): Probably. Isn’t baking powder one of those really, like, simple products? I feel like it’s one of those things that can even be made in, you know, a chemistry class in school. If they don’t then I guess they would have yeast....But I think that baking powder would be such an easy thing to make just in a lab in like, Iceland, and it would be worth it.

Q.: Does kitten’s box have like those gloves for cuddling?
A. (01:12:47): Yes! It’s gonna have! You can’t really see them but there’s like two little balls right there [points] where the gloves are gonna fit in [laughs]. I haven’t actually drawn them yet but they’re gonna be somewhere there. I mean, obviously they’re gonna be needed, you can’t have a blessed feline in this kind of enclosement and not be able to give her cuddles when she demands them.

Q.: So biologic and physical sciences would be more of a priority? AnP, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, metallurgy, etc.?
A. (1:13:42): Yes. At this point in the comic’s technology level, the highest priority is the technology to reclaim metals from recycled materials and also getting mines and stuff back to working, and the manufacturing of small parts, so that cars and guns and machinery can be built without having to try to salvage material for them. And biology-wise, keeping up the ability to make basic medicine. That’s a high priority. Just be able to treat stuff that require antibiotics. But they would still be in a fairly basic level of trying to get things to run smoothly before they can start focusing on higher technologies, because right now a lot of the systems are running on salvaged items, which are a resource that are going to run out if they can’t reliably create their own replacement parts. So things like smaller replacement parts and basic medicines are a high priority.

Q.: How is the literacy of the population? How many percent of them can read?
A. (1:19:56): It’s very high. I would say nearly 100%. Learning to read really isn’t that difficult, and literacy is something that would be highly regarded as important as it is today in the Nordic countries. And knowledge in general has always been very valued, well, not always, but really valued. So it wouldn’t be something that just disappeared suddenly like “Oh, they’re not born out to learn how to read,” since reading would be really important even in the early survival stages. Like if you find a book about how to build some sort of trap to hunt animals, you would need to be able to read. So everyone would have to be able to read. And it only takes a few months to learn how to read. I think. At least Finnish is one of the easiest languages to learn how to read. It only takes a few months to have some sort of basic reading skill. I’m sure there would be some people who can barely read like Sigrun, since there would be thought “use it or you lose it.” A lot of people wouldn’t bother reading after they’ve gotten out of fourth grade or something, whatever the mandatory school you have to go through would be. They would be really bad at reading, they would be able to read signs or a note that says “don’t drink that water” or something. But they would be nearly literate just because they don’t bother to read. But the kind of people who just wouldn’t be able to read signs or letters or be able to spell their own name, they wouldn’t exist.

Q.: Iceland has thermal energy, but they still need oil for many things, do they use oil platforms and do they protect against sea beasts?
A. (1:23:05): I haven’t really decided what’s going on with the oil platforms. I feel like they would have tried to reclaim at least on of them, since there’s a lot of them in the Norwegian sea, so they would be on the route where they would get to them. So I guess there would be one oil platform that is operational and is guarded very heavily. Just to get a little bit of oil that is still needed, which isn’t that much. There’s not a lot of people left and even fewer people who have machinery that needs oil.

Q.: Honestly I know enough people who have trouble reading nowadays too so
A. (1:24:05): Yeah, I mean, that really depends on the country. Like Finland has I think at least 100% literacy pretty much. The only people who can’t read are the people with severe developmental challenges.  Like, my brother has really bad dyslexia, incredibly severe, and he can barely read and write at all, even after working really hard in school. But that’s the exception, and obviously he can get really well by now in modern times, because we have the technology for audiobooks and speech to text and text to speech technology. But other than that, you can’t really find people in Finland who can’t read a book, since it’s such an easy language to read and it’s a really high priority to get people to read.

Q.: What kind of board games do you think they have available by y90?
A. (1:46:05): The classics, whatever you got around in the Nordic countries. Card games, chess, things that I don’t know the English words of, fia med knuff, the battleship game and stuff like that. Simple games, not like all the super-complicated stuff that’s really popular these days, with insane fantasy worlds and graphics and a million different pieces... Oh, the Monopoly, of course and Othello. And... I’m just trying to think of any games that I played as a child. Basically, things where you only need pieces and the board, things that would be easy to manufacture.

Q.: [followup to questions about Estonians, time-stamped (2:31:48)] Absolutely, the basics are good - like I imagine it would be in Y90 for Estonian speakers. But, it could get confusing. Once my brother was travelling in Finland, and phoned home. He and my father chatted for a while, but got increasingly confused, until they realised that my brother was answering my father in Finnish, not Estonian, and couldn't make himself switch, so they both had to switch to English. In Y90, there may be an amalgamated dialect?
A. (2:42:24): Yeah, there would definitely be, any Estonian people that would have been in Finland would probably have completely been absorbed into the language really fast, because it’s a really close language. So the other people who would be kinda speaking Estonian would have to be living on the islands, Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, that are on the coast, where they wouldn’t be dealing too much with outside influences like marrying people from the mainland, visiting and trading and stuff like that. Trying to keep the language alive somehow.
But that’s a thing that’s “problem” in modern days, small languages that still exist, that still have related languages that a really similar to them. They biggest reasons why they’re going extinct are because usually the speakers of those languages also learn the bigger language that is more useful, and then the small, threatened language that’s almost going extinct is going extinct because it’s getting absorbed into the main language.
Q.: Saaremaa and Hiiumaa are accessible in winter, though, could they stay isolated enough? I hope so.
A. (2:45:00): Yeah, they would have to do the same as the Finns are doing in the Saima area, where they would have to have like icebreakers to break the ice during winters to make sure you can’t just walk over, and then have the palisades on the shores so that if something does swim over through the broken ice it can be easily killed — it’s tired, it’s cold, it’s getting up out of the water and getting closer to the palisades, it would be easy to kill. But that would prevent a horde of monsters suddenly appearing from the mainland.

Q.: Has Iceland kept computer & television technology going within the "mainland"?
A. (2:58:00): Kinda. It’s not really going in the sense that they are producing any stuff for television, there are no television shows, but some people have all televisions that still work, and computers are still used in research facilities and stuff. But, just like the mainland, they are all reclaimed or build from reclaimed parts. But yeah, they are in use on ships for radars and research labs and stuff like that.

Rash, Magic and Ghosts

Spoiler: show

Q.: [Speaking of the crew’s old clothes, see question time-stamped (00:42:09) in Characters] I would have thought burned with any chance of infection.
A. (00:43:47): No, no, they will be safe if they’re cleaned. In this case their clothes will be discarded, they won’t be used, but it’s safe to decontaminate clothes since the pathogen doesn’t survive outside of the host’s body for very long. I don’t remember what I established exactly, but it was like, less than a day I think, and it dies fairly quickly in sunlight. That’s why it doesn’t really — it doesn’t get transmitted through the air very effectively, otherwise there would be no non-immune people alive in the world if it was something that could survive in the air for longer than, you know, a couple hours maybe. Not even that, you know — I probably established that in sunlight and in the air it would probably die within ten minutes or something, because otherwise in strong winds someone’s breath with the pathogen could travel ten kilometers or something [laughs]. It would be really difficult to have any non-immune people alive in the world with that. So yeah, equipment can be easily cleaned and de-infected; it’s living bodies, people and animals, that can carry it.

Q.: So there is no chance of mutation? This is the final form of the virus/contagion?
A. (00:47:27): I guess there would be, you know, a chance of mutation. That’s why our crew is being put in a double-length quarantine for fear that it has mutated and it has — it could, you know, have a three week gestation period. But obviously I can’t really go with the “What if some sort of mutation happened?” for a story because then you have to go, like, “What if there is a mutation that, you know, sits in a person for a year before it starts showing up?”, because obviously none of the quarantines are gonna work. So I kinda have to be...story-wise, go with what will make sense. But yeah, I’m allowing for the possibility that the pathogen could still mutate, but it’s definitely not mutating fast to the point where people are worrying about insane changes of the rules all the time. Which would kinda make sense, then, in the sense that it’s not reproducing, really. It has found 99.99% of the hosts that it can and would be able to infect, and their bodies already have all of the pathogens that they can support. So any mutations that are still happening are probably pretty minor and not happening very fast. 

Q.: What would happen to people who would fail the quarantine?
A. (3:41:15): They would be sent away from the ship, they would probably be sent to.. I haven’t actually decided where. They wouldn’t be killed. They would just be sent somewhere where only immune people are, and probably some research facility. If they fail in a way that it’s not the Rash but they have some sort of other infection, like the plague, then they’ll be sent somewhere else to some sort of special facility. But if it turns out that they have the Rash illness, then they will be sent to... I’m sure there’s some place, some secret super well-guarded place where people who do get infected are sent. Like, obviously they’re gonna die or turn into monsters. And it’s a place where they will be either let die as painlessly as possible, kinda like terminal cancer patients would be. And if they will end up turning into troll, then they would be euthanized. And there would be mages, they’re making sure that their souls aren’t trapped in the world and stuff like that. But yeah, they would be put in a little transport ship and sent over here. Probably on an island somewhere. In the Baltic sea.

[Mebediel]

Triple posting (woops) bc it was too much to fit into one post:

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related

Spoiler: show

Q.: Congratulations on finishing the first adventure! *\o/*
A. (00:02:36): Thank you, thank you. Yes, it has been quite the accomplishment. It doesn’t feel that significant though, since my brain has switched over to the next adventure quite a while ago already. Basically by the time I had finished the script for the final chapter, which I guess would’ve been like three months ago or something. I started focusing all of my brain power on the next story, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot. So I already feel like I’m kind of ‘in it’ myself, but for you guys you have just seen the end, and I guess you are only now starting to get into the mood of the next one.

Q.: I'm guessing this is going to be the cover for the first chapter of the new series?
A. (00:05:25): Yes it is. And I have decided it’s going to be the first chapter, rather than calling it the prologue. I don’t think the second adventure is really going to need a prologue. Well it’s kind of going to have a really short one, about two pages or three, maybe? I’m not going to show those pages on stream at all. They’re going to be pretty cool, I think, and I’m going to leave those up as a surprise when the chapter starts, and I’m going to post all of them at the same time, and then we’re going to start from Chapter 1, which is going to be this cover. And obviously, it’s going to be “quarantine time”! [laughs] As many of you had hoped, you will get to see what the quarantine is like.
 
Q.: What shall you call the new adventure? SSSS.2?
A. (00:06:25): It’s going to be just still “SSSS”, but I’m going to separate them as the ‘First Adventure’ and the ‘Second Adventure’. And book-wise, they’re going to continue just chronologically, so this book is going to be ‘Book 5’ in the, you know, physical format. I’m not going to start messing around with people being like, “Oh, it’s Book 1 again, except Part 2, Book 1.”, because that gets really confusing when people Google the books. When maybe new people want to get into the series, and then then they can’t figure out which is the actual ‘Number 1’ Book. So they’re just going to continue ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, and the first adventure ends there, and then ‘5’, ‘6’, ‘7’ for the second adventure.

Q.: Have you set the kitty and fed the timer?
A. (00:23:17): I have indeed! The timer has all the food it needs and Kitty is set in the sauna. But yes, actually I have not fed Kitty, she has not woken up yet, but I have set the timer.

Q.: Speaking of gigantic timeskips, I've encountered lots of people that were really put off by the prologue's, to the point of dropping SSSS right then and there.
A. (00:23:40): Yeah, the prologue was kind of a risky move, like, I knew a lot of people wouldn’t like it, but I also knew that it was gonna be the kind of thing that would hook a lot of other people. So I’ve met, you know, different kinds of people, some that said they loved the prologue and it set up the story perfectly. And you know, obviously, it works better reading it all at once, like it takes what, fifty minutes to read all of it and then chapter 1. But yeah, especially when the comic was starting out and I was uploading the prologue and then the timeskip happened a lot of people were like, “Whaaaaat?! I’m not reading this, I got super attached to these characters and now they’re all dead!” So yeah, it was a risky move but I think it worked out, you know, most people seem to have enjoyed it, especially in the long run since the characters are related to the main cast so it creates that additional backstory that I get to kinda explore.

Q.: Is that the guy who collected the kalevala?
A. (00:25:26): You mean Lalli? No, the guy who collected the kalevala was...oh, what was his name...he had a Swedish last name...Aaaahh, well I don’t remember. No, Lalli is a character from like the year 1000 or something when Christianity was coming to Finland and he axe-murdered one of the Swedish bishops who was, you know, trying to spread Christianity in Finland. [laughs] So you know, he’s just a kinda mythological person who I guess really existed, but there wasn’t really any bookkeeping about people who lived in Finland back then so you don’t really know what’s real and false. But no, but he’s kind of a symbol of Finnish people, you know, “If you come over here and start spreading your whatever-religion or something we’re gonna axe-murder you!” [laughs]
Q.: Didn't the bishop gip Lalli over the price of bread or something? I don't know the story very well, I'm sorry.
A. (00:28:18): Okay, so the story with Lalli and the bishop was — there’s a few, obviously, different stories, but I guess the most common version is that the bishop and his fellowship of knights and stuff was passing through Finland, you know, Bishop Henrik from Sweden, and he stopped by the farmhouse where Lalli and his wife and children lived, um, and I guess they like, demanded food or something? In one version they demanded food, and in another version they paid for the food but the guy’s wife lied to Lalli and said that they demanded or stole the food, but either way Lalli was under the impression that the bishop had just demanded and taken food from his wife. And they had, you know, moved on and Lalli was somewhere in the woods hunting or whatever; and you know, it’s winter, and Lalli is taking his skis and he’s gonna follow the bishop and kill him [laughs] for taking the food. And he skis up to the fellowship, and he’s really fast — they are on the lake of Köyliön, I think, you know, it’s frozen over — and there Lalli, I guess he kills the knights that are protecting the bishop with his axe, and then he kills the bishop with his axe, and that’s the story.
There’s like an alternative ending which is I guess the “moral ending,” like, “you shouldn’t kill the bishop with an axe,” where Lalli takes the bishop’s, you know, some sort of cardinal ring or something? And he puts it on his finger and that causes the ice of the lake to break, and the ring is so heavy with his sin of killing the bishop that it pulls Lalli down to the bottom of the lake and he drowns. And the ring is still there on the bottom of the lake, and whatever….[laughs] But that’s the basic story. The bishop maybe/maybe didn’t steal food and Lalli skied after his fellowship and killed all of them with an axe.
Q.: I think it was a hat and fuses to his head or something.
A. (00:31:22): Yeah, that’s one version also. Like I said, there’s like a million different versions since it’s been a popular folk story for like a thousand years, and obviously it wasn’t written down until very late since Finnish didn’t have a written version of the language until just a few hundred years ago. So there’s a lot of different versions. The ones I’ve heard are just the basic one where he just killed the bishop and went home and lived happily ever after, and the other one was the one with the ring that dragged him to the bottom of the lake.

Q.: Is it true that it took the Catholic Church a long time to forgive Finland?
A. (00:33:06): Eh, I have no idea about that. Now, obviously, no one in Finland cares about the Catholic Church so whether or not they would have forgiven Finland for killing a bishop, obviously nobody would have cared. Since at that time it was a battle between “heathens” and the Catholic Church — not like, bloody battles, other than now and then, maybe some killings here and there — but obviously people were resisting the conversion. And that would have taken several hundred years, so whether they were unhappy with some Finnish person for killing one of the bishops really wouldn’t have mattered. And obviously once Lutheranism spread to the Nordic countries — or I guess Sweden — Catholicism vanished from Finland too and everyone became Lutherans since then.

Q.: Do you get songs stuck in your head sometimes?
A. (00:52:38): Well, obviously sometimes, yeah. Not too easily, though. I have the tendency to kinda listen to one or two songs over and over again if I go for a walk, which I do, you know, every day. And sometimes I feel like listening to some particular song or two songs and I put them on a loop and that’s all I listen to for an hour while I go for a walk. And sometimes that results in the, you know, song-stuck-in-head syndrome that can be very annoying, especially if I’m going for a walk in the evening and then I want to go to bed and all I can think about is the song when I’m trying to fall asleep. It can be very frustrating. But I don’t get the thing where people just mention a song and then it gets stuck; I have to actually listen to a song a lot for it to get stuck.

Q.: [followup to the question about Mikkel’s wasted potential, time-stamped (01:29:19)] Boredom and antisocial behaviour are typical of geniuses.
A. (1:31:59): Yeah, but they don’t make you a genius. A lot of bored and antisocial people are all just regular intelligence. Just people who aren’t that good at concentrating on things obviously get very bored very easily. And they also become antisocial when they can’t focus on the tasks that they are supposed to focus on.
Q.: I’ve been called a sociopath before, but I prefer genius.
A. (1:33:43): That’s a good strategy for life. If people say that you’re a bit weird or destructive or anything, just say you’re a genius and nobody can criticize you, because then you’re like “What if I’m the next Einstein and you would be the person who criticized Einstein and everyone will laugh at you 300 years from now.” But for real, though, it’s really bad to label yourself a genius, since a lot of people do that when they actually suck at something and people don’t react too well to whatever they have produced. Like artists who make mediocre garbage, who then don’t succeed, a lot of them always go “I’m just a misunderstood genius, it’s everyone else’s fault that I’m not super rich,” and then they don’t bother to try to get any better at what they’re doing, and then they are just really bitter, really mediocre artists for the rest of their lives. So never ever get into the mindset that you might be a genius if you want to be a productive person. The moment that you think you’re the greatest person ever at whatever you’re doing tends to be the point at which you stop improving. Happens to a lot of people. And on top of that it usually creates the kind of mentality when you can’t take criticism anymore. And then even if you get a little bit of success or even a lot of success, because a lot of people who do consider themselves geniuses are also people who are pretty good at something, but nobody’s perfect, and they think they’re geniuses and then somebody makes a four out of five review on their book, and they just flip out and send all of their fan base to the reviewer, because they didn’t review them a five out of five, and have a melt down on social media about how they were unfairly criticized even though they received an almost perfect score. But they can’t accept anything less than perfect because they are a genius. I have seen it happen.
Q.: I don’t care if I’m seen as a genius or not I’m just gonna do what I’ll do anyway.
A. (1:37:18): Yeah, being seen as a genius is really pointless. Like, if you do something that makes you happy or brings other people happiness or success, it doesn’t matter if people think you’re a complete idiot. Because a lot of people who do great stuff in the world, like comedians and other kind of creators and teachers and electricians and bridge builders — obviously most people aren’t geniuses, but still give a lot of great value to the world and can have massive success. Like in the Simpsons, you have that one tiny little mini skit where, I don’t remember what the set-up was, but you have the guy who wrote those How to Do This and That For Dummies and they’re like “Wow, how did you write all these books and you became a millionaire?” and the guy is a complete idiot. Like, he looks developed mentally challenged, and he’s like “I don’t know, I’m a dummy,” and he just takes all of his big bags of cash to the bank. That’s a stupid joke that’s simple to laugh at, but if you choose the idea that you can be an idiot but do something that other people get value from and that makes you successful - it doesn’t matter if you’re a genius, because you can be a genius and the things that you create don’t resonate with people, and then it doesn’t really matter that you’re a genius, because you can’t create something that other people find valuable. And a lot of people who I guess are geniuses and do create valuable stuff that makes them well-known and successful, it doesn’t always mean that they’re happy, because there’s the “knowledge brings unhappiness” or whatever the saying is, like if you know a lot, you get really easily stressed out, because you can’t stop thinking about possible bad things happening.
Q.: Art = "I could’ve done that" YEAH, but you didn’t >" Agree?
A. (1:40:27): Yes, I pretty much agree and lots of the artists also. It’s not only how well you drew it, a lot of it is just the idea, something that resonates with people. It can be something cute, it can be something that tells a story, just colours that happen to work really well together that invoke some sort of mood. And it might look like something that anyone could do, but the idea first of all was something that came to this one person, and even if they might not have the super-great skill to do something fantastic, they still came up with a really great idea. And then the second part is actually doing it. A lot of humour comics are drawn really poorly, like xkcd and stuff like that — it’s just stick figures and people look at it like “Oh, I could do that, and it takes ten minutes to draw it” and it’s probably true, but the actual point with it is that you have to come up with the joke first, and that’s the difficult part that actually matters. If you just draw some stick figures — you didn’t get the point and didn’t create anything interesting. And that’s the same with a lot of art in general. You can be incredibly skilled and do photorealistic artwork, but it’s just really boring pictures of, I don’t know, beans or basic trees that just look like a boat that anyone could’ve taken. Then what’s the point? No one’s gonna get care. Like, a few people might look at it like “Wow, that’s a drawing! I thought I was looking at a photo!” and then that’s a thing, but nobody’s gonna care about your next photorealistic drawing of yet another leaf that looks just like a leaf. You have to have some sort of idea. Which is why a lot of people who don’t draw that well become really successful, people love their work, because they have something, the X factor, they have some sort of idea or some stylistic choice that makes it really compelling to look at. When this kind of people become popular, a lot of jealous people go like “Wow, they can’t really draw properly and the anatomy is wrong and their faces are just blobs or super-simple anime style” and they get those kind of comments where “Anyone could this and why is this popular, I know ten other people who draw better and why aren’t they popular?”, but there’s usually some reason why they aren’t popular and this other person is.

Q.: Would you ever/have you ever wanted to play DnD?
A. (1:55:52): I haven’t really ever wanted to play it, because I found out about Dungeons and Dragons pretty late in my life, in my twenties, I think, and at that point I was already focused on my art and not interested in social anything, really. Even video games, I had stopped caring about anything that was multiplayer or online-based and only cared about single-player experiences. So no, I didn’t really care about playing it, but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had gotten into it as a teenager, because back then I was still kinda having friends and doing regular human social stuff like playing board games. I’ve played a lot of different board games; at least in Finland you always have a lot of themed board games that come out every year. Even simpler one, meant for 5 to 99 year olds, those kind of board games. But a lot of them have a lot of strategy, and cards, and themes, and adventures in the game, and get kinda complicated, and I always really enjoy those kind of games a lot. And I had a few friends that I, you know, I would get a new board game for Christmas and we would play it, and they would get some kind of board game and we would play that when I would see them and stuff like that. So I would have liked it, I’m sure, but by the time I found out about DnD I was past that part of my life and haven’t really had a hankering for playing it.
Q.: Spend hours creating a character and die 2 minutes into the game...
A. (1:58:32): Yeah, that sounds annoying. Like the kind of things that annoy me about multiplayer things. I want to be able to restart the game if I’m playing something and get a bad start. I don’t want to sit there an hour or five trying to be social and I can’t play the game.
Q.: I started when I got to uni, at 20, I would still recommend you try it!
A. (1:59:06): Yeah... but no. You need other people and I don’t want to. I don’t enjoy spending a lot of time with people. When I play games I want to play them alone to relax. If anything, if I wanted to find out how to play DnD, I would just watch people on YouTube play it and enjoy it that way. I don’t want to actually put the time into finding a group, learning to play and... ugh. Sounds like way too much effort.

Q.: *clears throat* *blush blush stammer* somebody told me that you had questions about my Estonian ancestry, after I left last week's stream?
A. (2:31:48): Yes! I was very intrigued, because you said you were happy that there were Estonian speakers alive, and I was like “Are you Estonian?” and I was very curious, because I do like Estonia. It’s a brother nation to Finland and one of the countries on my list of possible countries that I could see myself living in if for some reason I got annoyed with living in Finland. So my question was: how is your Estonian ancestry going? [laughs] like, do you still speak Estonian or do you just have some ancestry?
Q.: My grandparents were all born there, but my parents were born in the US, and they thought it was important to pass it on to their kids.
A. (2:33:20): Oh, that’s really cool. That’s kinda similar to how my parents, or I guess grandparents too, all moved to Sweden in the 70s, and my parents were born at that point already, I guess they were like 7 years old or something, and they all moved to Sweden and my parents thought it was important to keep me and my brother also knowing Finnish. In our case it was that they knew they might move back some day. And we did, so it was very useful. And I guess it was also the knowledge that if you know a European language, it’s so incredibly difficult to ever become fluent in Finnish. And the same thing with Estonian — it won’t be a language that you can be like “Oh, your ancestry is from this country!” and you can just learn it. Maybe if you’re English and have French ancestry, it can be fairly easy to pick up on French and move to France and become fairly fluent in French, since they are at least related languages. But the Finnic languages are so different that if our parents don’t pass it on you are starting from zero and probably never going to get... Well, not never, some people become completely fluent by studying really hard, but it’s just so difficult. So it would make sense if you are a parent or even a grandparent of someone and know you have some sort of language that you know is going to be really difficult to pick up in the future, that you will pass on at least some part of it to keep that sort of base.
Q.: So, I do speak it, but like an imbecile. Reading is hard, but I do it.
A. (2:35:41): [laughs] yeah, that’s the important part. If you can read it and understand it, then if you ever decided that you wanted to move to your home of your ancestry, you would have a few years of just spending time with the native population and you would become pretty much fluent.
Q.: I can speak about the concrete things that concern children — food, clothing, chores, family, minor illnesses, school — but not abstract ideas.
A. (2:37:30): Yeah, but if you have the basics where you have the ability to read the basic things — that’s the hardest thing to a new person who’s learning a language to get to that point where they can read anything. Because once you are able to read even children’s book, that’s the point where you will be able to self-learn really easily, if you choose to do it, by reading articles, books, watching children’s movies in that language and stuff like that. So if you are at that point, you have the seed to be learning the language completely.

Q.: I really like your.. Industrial design (is that the right word?)
A. (3:03:42): By that I assume you mean the design of the interior of this quarantine area. Well, thank you. A lot of it is just inspired by regular stuff that exists: I looked at a lot of pictures of hospitals, and hospital rooms, and hallways, science facilities, kind of looked up what kind of elements exist and combined those into a pleasant little quarantine area. They’re not supposed to be depressing caves, since they are designed to be places where people have to spend a couple weeks, at least. So they can’t be places where people go crazy and smashing their heads against the wall out of horrific boredom and have to be put in straitjackets. I’m basically designing the quarantine cubicles the way that I think private hospital rooms would need to be for someone who has to stay for a while and can’t leave. So there has to be comforting items. Well, most of those have to be really sterile, because they have to easy to clean and stuff like that, but there’s also comforting items, there’s gonna be tiny little bookshelves and the hospital bed and... and that’s it. Just little bookshelves already bring away that horrible sterility, because they’re gonna bring a little bit of colour. And of course Kitty is gonna have her own little quarantine box area. It’s gonna be the fanciest one, because who cares about the humans and their comfort as long as the cat has all the fancy things in her little tower.

Q.: If a reporter would like to interview you, what would be the best way to get into contact?
A. (3:16:49): Oooh, oh man... I don’t actually know, since email would be the obvious answer but I’m so bad at checking my email. Also it’s often spam. I think I need to start using my new email for business stuff and start slowly getting rid of my old email that I unfortunately have used as to signing to a billion different websites over the years, which means it is spam central. Honestly, Twitter would probably be the best way and I would just give out the email address. Yeah, Twitter probably. Just a public Twitter message asking “Hey, can I have your email?” Normally I would have my email public, but I did do that at some point, like a few years ago, and I got really stressed out about it because I got too many messages at some point. Like, there was a month where I got a lot of emails, and I got so stressed out that I stopped reading my email and my stomach would hurt and stuff when I was thinking about reading it, because I have bills and stuff that sometimes count my email like internet-related things that I need to check up and it was always a thing to open my email, because I knew there was gonna be so many semi-important things coming in that I felt I can’t read. So I eventually stopped giving out my email publicly on my website. For now, Twitter is the best way to get into contact with me for anything, really. Because for some reason Twitter doesn’t stress me out. Probably because the messages are so short. With email it was always that thing that it takes several minutes to read one, because they are long and you have to think about is this something important that I should spend next 15 minutes writing an answer to, and then that’s almost half an hour gone and you move on to the next email and it’s maybe 10 minutes and on and on. But Twitter — it’s really fast, you just scroll through, every message is like one sentence and you can pretty fast see if it’s just someone saying something nice and I can thank them and just feel happy or if it’s someone who has something important that they need to get my attention for.
I’m kinda glad that nowadays I can refer the really important things — like store-related things and the products and stuff like that — to people at Hiveworks and be like “Oh, I’m not in charge of that, just email these people and they would take care of it.” [laughs] That’s really a relief, because I’m so bad at it. Well, I’m not bad at it, but I just want to be an artist, I don’t want to take care of the business side of things unless I have to. And I had to do it for a few years and it was brutal. It’s just not in my nature. Because when you are self-published, the biggest thing in self-publishing is being the marketing person, the promoter person who gets the contacts and the interviews and writes articles to promote your work and builds a platform, and that is really exhausting if you’re not that kind of person. The kind of person who will go to conventions and make those contacts and hang out in after-parties and go to interviews and set them up. Which is why publishers, the marketers, are paid really well if they’re good, because if you have that skill and personality to be good at it, then you worth a lot, obviously. I learned that even though I was kinda able to do it since I was self-published for a long time and managed to get a lot of success from it, it was really tiring me out, which is kinda why I went like “Yes, please!” when I got some offer to not having to do it myself anymore [laughs].
Q.: Why not having a 2nd email address for the serious stuff?
A. (3:22:56): Kinda because I know I wouldn’t want to use it. I had a business email at some point, and you get a lot of emails from people asking you to do things for free when you’re an artist. Even before I was known at all I had kind of a contact email like “If you want to commission me, you know I’m an artist, you can contact me” and one in twenty emails that came to that business email that was supposed to only be for important stuff was people asking for free art, people would be like “Hey, this is a great project, we need an artist to do this and this” and then you read the email and you’re like “Oh, that’s interesting” and then at the end it would always be like “Oh, by the way, we can’t pay you and this is gonna be for a social,” and pff, you get so many just nonsense emails. And then when you start doing a comic and you have your own website, you start getting on top of the list of free art for our gigantic one-year project marketing offers like advertisement stuff like “Hey, join our network and we will provide you this and this kind of marketing” and they are scams, basically, and people who ask if they can just use your comic for free, you know, publish it on their own and for free, of course, you just get the exposure as always. So that’s really the problem, it’s that every day you have to read through the so-called ‘important’ emails and they are all just nonsense. Which is why most professional artists have managers, they don’t deal with it. Or they are part of a studio where there’s a person who reads those emails and that’s the job — they go through the email box and read through all the emails and figure out which requests and job offers are actual offers and not some person wanting free art from the artist.
Q.: Would you do an interview while twitching?
A. (3:25:45): Oooh, I don’t know. I’ve never done a voice interview, I’ve only done email interviews, written ones. I don’t think I would be ready to do a voice interview, because I want to be able to think about my answers. Like, I do email interviews, I’ve done quite a few of those. I don’t think I’m at that point that I’m able to come up with great answers that I won’t regret later. Especially if it was something that was archived and transcribed, that comes up when you google me or something. So no, I don’t think I’d want to do an interview while streaming. Email interviews, that’s what I’m able to do comfortably.
Q.: Ahh yes, I understand, it's tedious to find out which are the honest mails basically.
A. (3:27:12): Yeah. Which, as I said, is one of the reasons why artists tend to join some sort of studio, where there’s a person who’s in charge of that, because it’s so tiring. Especially since sometimes the emails — you think it’s a serious offer from the first email and then you email back and “Yes, I‘m interested in doing this project with you” and you start going into it, because it’s seemed from the email that they were gonna pay you and it was an actual proper offer, and then you get three missed emails deep and you’re already discussing the work and stuff, and then you ask how much exactly will this pay, and it turns into “Oh, hmm, uhm, well, you know... We’re not getting paid, so, you know… Revenue share of future profits! You will get that!” and it’s like “Okay, it was another one of these ‘do work for free’ ones” and now you’ve spent several hours already discussing it with this person. And a lot of them know what they’re doing. They know that the tactic to fool an artist into thinking that they will get paid and try to get them to the point where they already agreed to the job before realising that they’re not getting paid. So they know how to structure emails in a very productive wa, they know the words and phrases to use to make it seem that it’s a legit deal without outright lying so that they can’t be sued. I’m really glad I’m not in the doing commissions business anymore. I feel so sorry for artists who do that kind of stuff still. Especially on DeviantArt and places where there’s a lot of young people who don’t understand what a commission is and think it’s just free art and get really mad at you when you ask to be paid. Because I sometimes see, I follow a lot of artists on different medias and a lot of them kinda have a breakdown, and I’m freaked out about the fact that they have to spend so much time trying to filter out the nonsense offers, and I always feel so bad for them and also feel so happy that I don’t have to go through that anymore.
Q.: As an artist, I know how that feels XD why I started with "no pay, only profit revenue" when I got my friends to join my company XD since we are all doing it for free.
A. (3:30:41): Yeah, it’s really important to be honest. Sometimes I still get messages from people asking me to do something for free, and I really appreciate it when they say straight up in a message that “I can’t offer any pay, I can only offer my incredible idea that is going to make us rich” because then I don’t feel like they’re trying to trick me and can just say “Thank you, but I don’t do things for free” or “I don’t do commission at all anymore”. And obviously work for free and only do profits work really well when you are a group of people who know each other already and go into a project together. It’s only annoying when you try to dope an outside person, who’s maybe desperate, into it. Which a lot of young artists are; people wouldn’t be asking for free art or exposure if there weren’t so many artists who are so desperate that they will accept it, because they hope that maybe the next one will be paid, and if they do this one maybe it will be successful and the person contacting them is telling the truth, that they really have an amazing idea and great contacts and it’s gonna be a huge swing and then they’re gonna get a paying job. And it tends to not work. It only works out when it’s a group who goes into something together, everyone has the passion to do it and they work on it for several years, knowing that they won’t get paid unless the project really does take off.

Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, Process

Spoiler: show

Q.: Do you have rules of thumb for panel/page composition?
A. (00:11:17): Yeah, there’s a lot of kind-of-rules, the rules of three is a very common way of doing composition. You kind of have things that are in the foreground, things in the middleground, and things in the background. And you can have things that are very dark, things that are medium-dark, things that are very light. [starts to draw a loose example on-screen] You can have big things, and medium things, and small things. And then you combine them, like the big thing can be the dark thing, the middle thing can be the light thing, that can be the medium-brown thing, and you know, stuff like that. And you know, this can be the one that’s close by, and that can be farther back, and the third thing is in the middle. I might explain that a little bit closer, you know, sometime. [laughs] That’s what obviously the kind of explanation that you probably would have to know something about composition rules already. [laughs] But yeah, I do have some composition theory that I’ve read up on, and also learned from other artists explaining them. Sometimes it’s just try things out until something looks good. Sometimes I can think up a really good composition in my head, but other times I have to mess around digitally, kind of look for something that works.

Q.: Minna I remember you were going to get the links for you brushes that you use. Do you have them today?
A. (00:27:05): Yes! Oh, I saved them somewhere on a notepad...can I open it….I’ll post them in the chat, or the link to the collection that I bought that has the favorite brushes that I use. Obviously the ones that I use for inking are all default, but the ones that I use a lot which are the ‘Water Detail’ and ‘Gurgle’ and ‘Dry Watercolor’ and a few others are in this set:
Brushes

Q.: I made a fanart doodle during chapter 19. It was of Anne. I don't know what possessed me to try and draw her, but it was so much fun.
A. (1:47:59): It’s really nice! I’m happy whenever anyone wants to draw something related to the comic. It’s really great that people enjoy it enough that they want to do something related to it.
Q.: I was too self-conscious to post it anywhere tho.
A. (1:48:27): Oh, it doesn’t matter. A lot of the art that I did as a teenager when I started drawing was never posted anywhere, because I was really happy about drawing it but I felt that something looked weird — like a face was wrong or a hand was wrong, I was like “Aaaaah, I won’t post it.” But it’s never wasted, because you always learn more whenever you draw anything. Posting it doesn’t matter that much, unless you get to that point where you really want to get into the artist business, I guess. Then it’s really good to start posting basically everything online, because even sketches and rough-looking things and things that aren’t that great, they can help you start some sort of small following, and after five years even though you’re gonna hate everything you’ve drawn it actually becomes funny. I’m really happy that I haven’t deleted things off my DeviantArt from years and years ago, even things that I don’t really like, I’m glad that they’re still there because I love looking at where I was art-wise several years ago and where I got now. Sometimes you get the feeling that you’re not actually getting any better at art, and if you look only one year back, it can be sometimes really difficult to actually see any improvement, and it can be demotivating. But if you look five years back, you usually see some sort of improvement, if you keep those artworks around. If nothing else, at least save everything you do in a folder and date it. It can be really fun ten years from now to see what you used to draw. Just a tip to everyone who draws things that aren’t easy to post online about.

[Kis]

And now the stream where Minna was inking the cover illustration for the next adventure! There are several previews on her Twitter.

chatlog_290918

Trolls

Spoiler: show

Q.:  Are there any beasts that can fly? Infected bats maybe?
A. (1:19:17): Not really. Infected bats would be possible, but I was thinking the physical integrity of the wings and motor skills that bats require to fly are so delicate that even slight mutations that affect any part of those would mean that they can’t fly anymore. I don’t think there are any flying. There might be some that are able to glide and sweep and do crazy leaps and stuff like that, but I don’t think any kind of sustained flight would be possible. And if there are any in some sort of jungle where there’s gigantic bats, and if some of those are able to fly, that would be a real incredible horror scenario. It would be really difficult to secure some sort of settlement against that.
Q: Actually, bat's can lose up to 25% of their wings and still fly fine!
A. (1:20:43): Mm! That’s terrifying. But I’m still holding the notion that if the wings get mutated and grow some sort of tumors, then they would lose their ability to fly.
Q.: Flying squirrel vermin?
A. (1:21:20): Yeah, they could maybe glide around. But they wouldn’t be as dangerous. The way they would have to break into a settlement, they would need to find a tree that’s really high that’s close enough to the walls that they could glide over them. Like, a gliding squirrel isn’t more scary than a drop squirrel that just jumps from a tree on top of you. At least in my mind.

Q.: Are trolls affected by moonlight?
A. (1:22:25): Yeah, a little bit since moonlight is just reflected sunlight. Obviously moonlight isn’t very strong. Full moon is safer than cloudy weather during the night and whatever the opposite of full moon is. But it doesn’t affect them a lot. They might be a little more hesitant to go outside of shadowy areas during moonlight, but it doesn’t hurt trolls. I think moonlight is way less light-intensive than even dusk.

Q.: Does the whole thing of trolls being affected by sunlight come from mythology?
A. (1:25:29): Yeah, it does. Trolls in Nordic mythology turn to stone if they’re affected by sunlight, so if you see a really mossy stone in the forest, they’re supposedly trolls that have been stonified. And also in Finnish mythology the menninkäinen, troll/gnome creatures live underground, they die from sunlight. And in Iceland a lot of the weird stone formations that you see in pictures and on the cliff sides are stonified trolls that wanted to see sunrise and sacrificed their lives to see it and turned to stone. And there’s one that kinda looks like two big weird baulder-things touching each other, it’s like an arc kind of formation, and that have a little bit of troll-like structure to it, so you can see some some sort of body and head to the two arcs, and the story is that it’s two trolls that fell in love and they were kissing and they didn’t notice that the sun was going up, so they both turned to stone.

Q.: Would some hunters keep the troll skulls as a trophy?
A. (4:09:24): Yeah! Surely. It would have to be people who live not in the safe-zones, because you wouldn’t be allowed to bring a troll skull in anywhere, obviously. But yeah, those who maybe have some sort of hunter’s hut outside the safety areas would certainly keep some of the cooler skulls. Maybe not some of the gross ones where you can’t even tell what’s going on.

Characters

Spoiler: show

Main Cast

Q.: Is kitty certified? Looks very professional!
A. (0:04:34): Yes, she’s got a little mini collar on her back. She has some sort of certification. She’s not going to be Grade A exactly, she was a little bit too old to be trained for that and found in the wild; she’s not of the proper pedigree to be a proper Grade A cat.

Q.: Is the crew running away from something?
A. (0:18:50): No, not really. It’s just going to be typical poster-like illustration. It’s not like a particular scene or anything, things are just happening. Some of them are running in a vague direction, but Mikkel’s looking calm. He’s just loading a shotgun. They’re not actually running away from anything.

Q.: Do you think Emil would be a Thanatos or a Lucifer? [about They Are Billions]
A. (0:25:51): I think he would be a Lucifer, just because I like that unit more than the Thanatos unit. I guess the mannerism would make him kind of a Thanatos, but on the other hand, Lucifer has flame-thrower!

Q.: Did Emil retain anything from his time as a "skald"?
A. (0:36:29):  Did I say he was a skald at some point? If so, I retract that. He was in school, just learning. Maybe he was trained to be a skald? He was just learning whatever stuff, he wasn’t actually a skald. He went to the military from school, stopped his studies, because it wasn’t for him and he was really bad at them. He was never a trained anything before that.
Q.: This character info thing has skald crossed out next to military.
A. (0:37:34): Oh, I see. Well, that must have been me thinking he was doing general studies to be a skald and he stopped. But no, he wasn’t ever working as anything. I remember in the pages where he found the poster for the cleansers, he was carrying school books or something...or a backpack.
Q.: Did he retain anything from his schooling?
A. (0:40:07): Pretty much no. He didn’t bother learning anything. He hated it, and if he had to learn something for a test, he was the kind of learner who would just learn enough to pass and then forget about it.

Q.: Where in Iceland is Reynir from?
A. (0:47:35): I’m gonna have to do a little bit of topography research to completely decide where from, but from what I know about Icelandic geography, I would say he’s somewhere from...like when you drive from Reykjavik to Akureyri, there’s that eastern part of Iceland that’s fairly empty nowadays, there’s no cities or towns really over there in that part of the area. So I think I’m going to place his town somewhere over there, kinda towards Ísafjörður area, so there’s going to be some mountains around, but it won’t be on the coast, obviously, since the coast is dangerous. But I have to do a little bit of snooping around on Google Earth to find a perfect location before I put it down on the map. But it would be western Iceland. See, I had to think about whether it would be east or west! But, yeah, it would be the one that’s towards America.

Q.: Will Kitty ever get kittens?
A. (0:49:18): Oh, that’s something I haven’t thought about at all. It’s not in the plans, but it’s an idea! Everyone can have their own little kitty!

Q.: Will you do an illustration of every character (like the ones of Lalli and Reynir)?
A. (0:52:50): Do you mean the ones that I’ve done recently?.. The one I’ve done with Lalli was the last one with the skull, and do you mean the Reynir one, the one where he has his hair loose? Yeah, I guess? Obviously I’m going to do lots of illustrations over the year, I’m going to be doing probably several of every character. It’s going to depend on what I’m in the mood for that week. But yeah, I’m sure I’m gonna do illustrations where each of the characters get their spotlight.

Q.: Will the characters actually get to go home before Finland, or are they going to go right out?
A. (1:02:02): I won’t tell! We’re going to have a little bit of a breather (oh, I can’t say it! I’m always trying to say the word [says it several times], but it keeps coming out like breeding! English is difficult sometimes, there’s a lot of delicate sounds that I’m not able to produce with my mouth).

Q.: On yesterday's stream you mentioned that Mikkel gets bored with his jobs, starts insulting people, and gets fired. Are we going to see him throwing shade??
A. (1:11:01): At some point I think yes. Everyone’s gonna be getting some glimpses into their personality and their families and various flashbacks, maybe. I can’t promise you when, if it’s soon or not soon, but eventually we will see a lot more about their characters. And by character I mean their personality.

Q.: Is Mikkel Madsen a play on the name of the actor Mads Mikkelsen? Mikkel's one of my favourite characters!
A. (1:11:57): It’s actually not! I was completely oblivious to the name of that actor since I’m one of those people who don’t remember or care about the names of people who are actors, I hadn’t even heard of this actor. I now know that he’s a super famous actor who plays Hannibal on a TV show and some other roles, I guess, but no, that was an accident, which really isn’t that much of a coincidence since both “Mikkel” and “Mads” are extremely common first names, and likewise “Mikkelsen” and “Madsen” are one of the most common surnames, so the combination is like “John Smith” or something like that in English. Really common, you’re going to have lots of people with different combinations of those.

Q.: Onni looks like a ghost. [related to the drawing]
A. (1:14:16): Yeah, he kinda does with the white stuff. He’s just gonna be in the shadows. He’s not actually going to turn into a ghost. That would be craaazy!

Q.: On the last page you mentioned that if this was the end of the comic, you'd have the characters say stuff to each other. What would they say, and where would they have ended up if there was no second adventure?
A. (1:37:11): I’m not going to tell what they would say, because it’s stuff that I might want to work into their development now that the story is continuing. We would have tried to have some sort of conclusion to their character relations, and I think I would have tried to work some of that into the story even before the ending if I had decided a year ago that “Okay, this is where I want to end it, I don’t have the energy to keep going,” then not only would I have added stuff to the ending, but I also would have padded out some things in the story itself.

Q.: Is Mikkel the only chill one in this illustration?
A. (1:42:21): I guess he is! Let’s see. I mean Sigrun isn’t going to be freaking out, and neither is Reynir. I mean, everyone’s fairly relaxed, nobody’s.. Well, Emil’s not relaxed, but it’s not a panicky kind of page, and I guess Onni isn’t looking too happy. Mikkel would be the most relaxed one, as one would expect.

Q.: What's Sigrun's opinion of Reynir as of now?
A. (2:12:58): She still considers him mostly as a civilian who got lost. But she has some respect for him in that he’s a mage, so he’s not completely useless in her eyes, but she doesn’t see him as anything special or great. He’s just a person they were able to successfully deliver to the end. She hasn’t been able to talk to him at all since they don’t speak a common language.

Q.: Had Mikkel been born with his sideburns already growing? They are very floofy.
A. (2:17:48): Yeah, he was born completely bald, except he already had sideburns coming in and big eyebrows. 
Q.: You’ve now made that canon
A. (2:19:38): Yeah, I’m sure someone is going to draw baby Mikkel with his bald head and sideburns and gigantic.. No, no, I might want to draw in the future an actual Mikkel as a child and I don’t want to commit to him having a bald head.

Q.: Does Mikkel's twin live on the family farm in Bornholm?
A. (2:23:33): Yes, he’s living where he’s supposed to be living and being a very productive member of the farm.

Q.: Mikkel looks like he’s supposed to be a detective in a crime drama. 
A. (2:27:19): Good! I want him to have that kind of unfazed air to him.
Q.: I feel like he'd be the sidekick that the detective couldn’t even figure out.
A. (2:29:38): Yeah that would make sense. He would be the sidekick that keeps doing his own thing and eventually gets fired.

Q.: Is that gun Mikkel is holding a shotgun? (because the reference is probably a solid slug gun) ((not that it matters but you know that we nerds will notice))
A. (2:38:48): I don’t know much about guns. The reference that I used was like ‘double-barreled shotgun’  with the barrels on top of each other. I don’t know if it’s called something else, but that’s the name the reference I used had, and I don’t know if it’s technically a good gun to use, but I like the design so I picked it. But yeah, I know people are gonna be not to happy about it if it has something wrong with it. But I’m going with this design.

Q.: Where did the inspiration for Tuuri's middle name come from, specifically the "Vieno" bit?
A. (3:03:43): Wasn’t her middle name Kaino-Vieno? That’s actually the name of Grandma Duck in Donald Duck. I don’t remember what she’s called in English, but that’s her real name - Kaino-Vieno. I’ve always liked that name, and since I gave Onni the two-part name Ukko-Pekka they needed to have matching middle names with the same structure. And that’s the one that I chose! And that’s the only reason.

Q.: Soooo I feel like someone has already asked this, but... Are we gonna learn about the Hotakainens mysterious past anytime soon??
A. (3:13:11): Yes! That’s actually something we’re going to be unravelling in this adventure since we’re going to Finland. It’s a fitting thing to touch on. And not just touch on, we’re going to find out a lot.
Q.: YEEEESSSSS THANK YOU THANK YOU SO MUCHHHH !!!!!!!!!
A. (3:14:43): You’re welcome! I’ve been laying the hints about it and foreshadowing for a while, obviously I was going to get into that part of the story eventually. It would be very cruel of me to leave it up to complete mystery for forever.

Q.: Will they meet more members of the Hotakainen family?
A. (3:17:34): Can’t tell. Would be too spoiler-y.

Q.: In Emil and Lalli's last dream, were they having an out of body experience, or did the dream just look like the inside of the trash can they were in?
A. (3:20:03): Yeah, they were just dreaming the same way where if you’re working a lot you might dream about working in your cubicle. They just happened to have a dream about being in a trashcan. Technically it’s not a trashcan, it’s a water collection barrel, FYI, since I have seen some comments that it’s an astoundingly large trash can.

Q.: Are Emil and Lalli going to still be able to communicate without Lalli getting stuck inside Emil's head again?
A. (3:21:05): We are going to see about that also very shortly in the story, so another thing that I will not spoil.

Q.: Did Emil get the bath he deserved?
A. (3:22:22): Yeah, they had some sort of bath. The extraction place had one of those big bathing barrels that you fill with warm water and a stove where they would able to warm up the water and give everyone a proper bath.

Q.: Is the crew seeing each other as friends at this point or still as colleagues or acquaintances?
A. (3:23:11): Some of them consider each other friends, obviously. Lalli and Emil are very friendly and I guess Sigrun and Mikkel consider each other more than just colleagues at this point. But others — Lalli doesn’t really care for Reynir that much, and Emil doesn’t really care about Reynir at all. Some of them don’t consider each other colleagues anymore, some of them do. And in Reynir’s case he’s not even considered a colleague. He’s just some guy who got involved for some of them.
Q.: Rey Rey is so unpopular I’m screaming.
A. (3:25:25): I mean, the one he’s actually been able to talk with is Mikkel (and Tuuri, when mhmhm..) That was his friend I guess. I know, sadness, but he’s been able to talk with Mikkel, I guess Mikkel has some sort of understanding for him, and he’s been able to talk with Onni, we have some strange relations here. But that’s something at least. And I guess Lalli has some sort of...he doesn’t care for him, but he has some sort of respect for the fact that Reynir isn’t useless, at least.

Q.: How long passed between the boys arriving to the pick-up point and the rescue ship actually arriving?
A. (3:24:15): A couple days. Like a day or two. It wasn’t like that exact evening.

Q.: Does Emil use hair products on his hair or is it just natural?
A. (3:24:37): It’s just natural. He doesn’t put that much time into it. Obviously he can’t even since he’s not living the rich life anymore and hasn’t for a while. He certainly would use products if he was living a good life and had access to it and wasn’t having to be in the military, but he doesn’t need it.

Q.: Would Reynir let a love interest play with his hair?
A. (3:26:31): Ah? I don’t know. That’s...I mean, he doesn’t mind anyone playing with his hair. He’s not protective of it. If someone if they could unbraid his hair he’d be like “Sure! As long as you do it properly.”

Q.: Would Reynir ever need to fear the Västerström's kids cutting off his braid?
A. (3:29:00): Hmm, that could be a possible fear in the future.

Q.: What has kitty done all day that she is so tired now? [Minna said her cat looked tired]
A. (3:29:11): She has been sleeping! She was just sleepy-tired, she woke up and was looking a bit sleepy. But she’s actually been awake a few hours ago, back when I started streaming she had just gone to bed, and she’s been eating and going outside.

Q.: Did you have any inspiration for Sigrun?
A. (3:31:07): Not really. I can’t think of anything specific for her. I can’t really mention any specific inspirations for her. Huh. Well, that’s my answer!

Q.: If they had the internet, which one of the SSSS crew would be the biggest gamer?
A. (3:38:00): Oh, that’s interesting. Let me think. Lalli would have the suitable obsessive personality. Quiet but good at concentrating, he could be very good at competitive games. Sigrun would not be good at games but would be very enthusiastic about them and be the kind of player who start raging when she loses. Mikkel...he wouldn’t be playing games, nah. Reynir, not so much. Emil would probably like playing video games. I guess Lalli would be best at playing video games. He has the kind of focused, ready personality.
Q.: Sigrun would be the loudest gamer probably.
A. (3:39:07): Yes, she would. Correctly assessed. I mean, Mikkel might surprise contender to swoop in from left field and take the trophy, but I don’t think he’s that good. He would get bored before he got good enough at any single game.

Q.: Is there anyone on the crew that would make a facebook page for kitty?
A. (3:39:44): Sigrun would!

Q.: Is kitty's design inspired from anything?
A. (3:41:05): She’s kinda inspired from my cat’s design, at least face-wise. My cat has that kind of wide cheeks and this kind of [draws M figure] shape above the eyes. And then she has light orange patches around, so that was the basis for the design. Obviously, the one for Kitty is really simplified, my cat has all kinds of grey and black and spots and stripes all over the place, but I wanted something simple for Kitty, so she only got that kinda iconic heart-shape instead of the M-shape that cats usually have.

Q.: Did Reynir's family's farm just raise sheep, or were there other animals too? Did Reynir ever wish that they had a specific kind of animal on the farm?
A. (3:43:26): Nah, I think they only have sheep. I don’t think he had wished for other animals. Sheep are surely enough work, and in a town like that, you would have other people who have other animals, there’s people who raise horses and chickens and stuff. Young capable men would be required to help out on different family farms on different times, like small communities get to do — families help each other out. So he would have access to take care for other kinds of animals too (or be forced to do it).

Q.: Does Sigrun have any embarrassing secrets she would never want the crew to find out about?
A. (3:53:04): I’m sure there are, but they would be ridiculous. If these secrets came out, nobody would care. Like, she wore her jacket backwards to work for a whole day and everyone laughed at her behind her back and it was really humiliating for her ego as a leader. She doesn’t want anyone to ever bring it up. She doesn’t have real embarrassing memories. Or if she does, those aren’t the ones that she cares about.
 
Q.: Is there a reason that Emil doesn't like Reynir? Cause I can't really remember him doing anything, and Emil was embarrassed after treating him like a prisoner…
A. (4:14:24): They just have non-compatible personalities. Reynir is a little bit too — is lackadaisy the word? — carefree, he smiles a bit too much about stuff that Emil doesn’t get, and I feel like they have the kind of personalities where these kinds of people would have a hard time getting along in the real world. And obviously the fact that they can’t actually talk. I’m sure they would learn to be friends if they could talk. Emil would bother to try to make friends, Reynir would want to be friends with anyone and everyone. Reynir’s a really happy farm dog and Emil is a stuck-up poodle. You can imagine how happy that poodle would be to have a happy farm dog around.

Q.: Is there going to be more language learning from the team members now that Tuuri is gone?
A. (4:16:56): Probably some, yeah.

Q.: Do any of the main cast (including Onni) have any weird sleeping habits?
A. (4:27:30): Well, Lalli has his sleeping habit of sleeping under the bed. Other than that, not really. I guess Sigrun snores. And that’s it. I think Emil might be the kind of person that would be sleeping with a teddy bear if he had an option. Like, his favorite teddy bear from his childhood, but he had to give that up when he joined the military.
Q.: Can't believe the military is so inhuman to not allow Emil to sleep with his teddy.
A. (4:29:14): I mean, he would have been allowed, but he would have his contemporary aged other recruits kind of making fun of him, and he was already a little bit fat, a little bit overweight when he joined. He’s not that stupid that he wouldn’t know that he was going to be the absolute laughing stock. Emil wasn’t exactly in an elite crew either way. He would have been a laughing stock anyway. The bottom of the bottom. The most laughed at in the whole army, even by the other laughing stocks.
Q.: Emil has since trimmed down and presumably had some experience with the cleansers, did they ever lighten up on him?
A. (4:31:25): You mean like warm up to him? Sure, but he was still in the rookie team. He wasn’t the first person there, but he was definitely not one of the people about to get a promotion any time soon. He still had a little bit of an attitude and would have been whining all of the time about having to sleep in some sort of tent on the ground.

Secondary Characters

Q.: What exactly does Bjarni do for a job?
A. (1:06:13): He’s just some sort of mechanic. Since he’s immune, he has the clearance to work on all kinds of ships even those that are going in dangerous places, sea-beasts hunting ships and stuff like that. He’s not actually a warrior himself, but he gets to go to dangerous places and see crazy stuff happening. Yeah, he’s a mechanic. Always valuable for any ship.
Q.: Quantum mechanic?
A. (1:07:14): Sureeee…He’s a quantum mechanic. That’s the new hot profession for the future, dealing with something-something-tunneling and atomic handling and whatever else.
Q.: So how did he find out "how death looks like" as a mechanic?
A. (1:08:04): Well, first you go working on a sea-beast hunting ship as a mechanic, and you look out the window, and the warriors that are supposed to fight sea-beast on little hunting vessels get completely crushed by the monster and there you are, the mechanic looking out the window, seeing all of it while you’re fixing a leaky pipe or something, and then you have nightmares for the rest of your life.
Q.: Oh, I didn’t know he had a name.
A. (1:09:28): Yeah, Reynir’s siblings’ names have only been revealed in family tree, info-page that I did. So that’s how people know what’s his name is. You’re not actually supposed to know anything about their names yet in the story. You’re gonna find out properly, pretty soon since he’s on the ship. He’s gonna get to talk to Reynir, so he’s going to be officially introduced.So don’t feel bad if you’re like “who is this character?” Some people even remember the names of various relatives that I put into the chart way better than I do, and they will reference one of the grand-cousins or something that I put in the chart, and I will be like, “Who is this character you’re talking about?” and people will be like, “Oh, it’s the relative of this character!” and, “Oh, I completely forgot!”

Worldbuilding

Spoiler: show

Q.: Have you considered how good Helsinki would sound as a book raid target? There's three libraries within 500m of the harbour and each other, including the University Central Library, the National Folklore Archive, and the National Library which has a copy of every book published in Finland. Boat in, boat out, one day, what could go wrong!
A. (0:50:48): Hm! I didn’t actually know that! I’m not too well-versed in the libraries in Helsinki, even though I went to school there for five, six years (oh, that’s a long time!) I guess that would be pretty good. I could easily come up with some reason why it wouldn’t work. Like, Helsinki has those underground tunnels, a really big system of underground network both for heating reasons and also for space saving and third is for bomb security in case a war breaks out again, so it’s kinda extra-dangerous, because those tunnels are filled with creatures who are able to survive the winters, because they are underground, deep in the granite where it never gets below minus degrees, it’s always warm enough for the big trolls to survive, so it would be very dangerous to go there.

Rash, Magic and Ghosts

Q.: Is there a reason why everyone has to be quarantined in separate rooms and can't visit each other or anything?
A. (3:13:47): Yeah, because when you’re being quarantined there’s the possibility that one person is infected and other people aren’t and you don’t want that infected person to infect the others that otherwise could survive. I’m pretty sure usually when you quarantine people you make sure they’re in seperate cells, unless you’re dealing with a catastrophic situation when you only have a few rooms and hundreds of people, then you have to put everyone who’s under suspicion in one room and you just have to live with the fact that you might be sacrificing healthy people to being infected by being placed in that room.

Q.: If it's not too much of a spoiler, can you reveal something about how Icelandic mages are trained?
A. (3:18:35): Nah, I’m gonna leave that to the story. We’re going to see a little bit of that fairly early. I’m gonna leave it just because it’s not too far away from now that we’re going to get to see it. I can say that it’s a fairly bookish process, it’s not as much field-work and as related as the Finnish way of training mages.

Q.: Are you planning to delve more into the specifics of the Rash illness? Like what its origin is, how it affects people, why it doesn't affect cats, and how to cure it? [was already answered, see question time-stamped (2:41:30) in chatlog_220918]
A. (3:57:58): No, I’m not going to, because that would kill most of the mystery and mysticism of the world, and since I’m not doing a scientific approach to the story, there is magic and Old Gods and stuff, it would kind of ruin the mood to try to explain things scientifically. I’m purposefully masked the origin of the Rash for that exact reason. Before I wanted to do magic-related stuff in the story, I actually was going to have some sort of set origin for the illness, and it was like made in a lab and it escaped — very typical stuff. But when I decided I wanted to go the more mystical route for it, then I decided to come up with some specific way to make it untraceable.
Q.: It’s nice not to have EVERYTHING explained because it leaves stuff for the reader to figure out.
A. (4:02:05): Yes, exactly. And it lets people imagine in their head their favourite explanation, because the one that I would pick to explain everything would be really boring to some people and they’d be like “Oooh, that’s the most boring way to explain it. In my head it was this and this,” and some people don’t want to think about it and don’t come up with an explanation in their head,and it leaves some breathing room in their mind to not bother thinking about it.

[Kis]

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related

Spoiler: show

Q.: I LOVE this chapter cover!
A. (0:08:36): It won’t really be a chapter cover. It’s going to be the picture on the main website, so it’s going to be a cover for the whole next arc. So it’s a big cover.

Q.: Good to know you take care of your health.
A. (0:09:05): It’s always really important! Even though I just want to draw all day long and produce as much as possible, you have to always remember that if you cash out time on your health now, you have to pay it back later, and I want to be able to draw for many, many years and not wear out my hands. I obviously do — and most artists already have — a little bit of repetitive stress syndrome on my hands, and I always make sure that I don’t make it worse. When the pain starts surfacing, I know I need to add a little bit of extra rest into my schedule.

Q.: Can you tell us a little more about Adventure 2 now that you're working on the cover? ^^,?
A. (0:10:11): Yes! Actually what you’re going to be able to see is...it’s going to be taking place in Finland this time. It will be fairly apparent from the cover, it’s gonna have a lot of the Finnish kind of nature, it’s going to have mutated bears and something scary. That’s all I can tell, I’m not going to tell more about what the main plot of the story is gonna be. You’re going to find the purpose of them having to go there in the first one or two chapters, but I don’t want to spoil it until we get there. In particular, it’s going to be looking a lot like A Redtail’s Dream again; same kind of scenery.
Q.: o.O.... mutated bears!
A. (0:11:46): Yes! They’re gonna be scary. And there’s going to be mutated moose and such. Don’t know if it’s going to make it into the cover, though.

Q.: How much time passes between the end of the first story and the start of the second?
A. (0:12:25): We’re going to only have a week, I think, before we get to see them. We’re going to start in the quarantine.

Q.: Are you going to re-print the first book sometime?
A. (0:14:20): By that do you mean a Redtail’s Dream? Because the first book of SSSS is reprinted. If you mean the Redtail’s Dream book, then yes. It’s the next one planned with Hiveworks, but it’s going to be some time next year, once we have finished everything with the second book and I’ve gotten a little bit of a mental break from that.

Q.: A few weeks ago we were talking about being bothered by crazy people, this morning my neighbor from across the street woke me up by pounding on my door and accusing me of taking a picture of his truck. When I said I hadn't, he cussed me out and talked about how he was born and raised here.
A. (0:17:37): Crazy people. Do you live in a city or something? Because I’m really glad I live in a small town, because from the fact that there’s fewer people you have fewer crazy people. There’s only really one person who’s weird, and he’s a developmentally challenged man, so he’s allowed to be weird, there’s nothing weird about it. There’s no crazy neighbors to worry about. But yeah, when you live in a city or in suburbs, you’re going to be dealing with all the crazies, and I’m glad I don’t have to do that. 
Q.: I live on the outskirts of a large city haha.
A. (0:19:57): Eh. I mean, that’s how you’re gonna get the crazies, they wonder out from the cities and find you. I mean, isn’t it like…I think I’ve read some sort of studies that living in cities and places where there’s a lot of people creates a lot of social problems in people and mental illness, because humans aren’t involved in large groups, they’re supposed to live in small tribes of 20-a few hundred people, so a lot of people become kind of maladjusted living in big cities or even nearby, so not onl do you get more crazy people, living in a place where there’s a lot of people, but you also get a larger percentage of people becoming weird, because it’s unnatural to live in such crowded places or places where there isn’t a kind of small village, small tribe kohesion.
Q.: That wouldn't surprise me, I think living somewhere where you know everyone makes you mind your manners a bit more.
A. (0:23:25): Yeah, and also humans have all sorts of primal instincts to assert their social stages and knowing what rank they have in a small group. And when you don’t have those groups, villages, tribes, people get problems with aggression and overreacting to things where normally they wouldn’t have to try, freak out at someone, because in a small group they would be secure in their position. So that’s why living in cities causes low-level anxiety for people, and that anxiety can come out as aggression or flashing out at neighbours and strangers just from tiny little annoyances. 
Q.: Tbh living in cities is pretty lonely. Or can be.
A. (0:24:53): Yeah, that too. Even though you can have tons of people around, that creates a problem that it’s harder; it’s the paradox that the more people you have around the more invisible you become. The internet is a really good invention that kinda helps with that, because people can find communities and like-minded people, smaller groups online and don’t have to be so isolated in cities.
Q.: I find that most of what people talk about as "crazy person" is people who are upfront and open to complete strangers on the street, in ways that can be seen as either a criminal or a weirdo.
A. (0:26:41): Yeah, that sometimes true, but sometimes also...you say “crazy person” when you really just mean someone who just overreacted. If you speak to someone who’s a stranger the same way you would speak to a family-member in the way that you say something rude or mutter something mean under your breath, that wouldn’t be a big deal among friends or family, that is a sign that you have a social inability to adjust to the different situations that you have. Because in order to be able to function properly in large groups of humans you need to learn to act properly. You can’t act the same way, as upfront and rude or kind to strangers as you can with family members or friends. So “crazy” is a weirdly, a little bit hyperbolic, but it’s a sign that the person hasn’t gotten the social interaction part completely, because they don’t understand the boundaries of how you act among family and friends and how you are supposed to act among complete strangers, especially in situations where things are tense, you can start insulting people because they annoy you. 
Q.: Well, that’s still quite a Finnish way to look at this , over here in the Warm warmlands people are much more open in that way.
A. (0:30:26): That could be possible. In Finland, it’s extremely rude and kinda.. You would be considered crazy if you approach people who are strangers, because you are supposed to leave people alone. People do want to be left alone generally if they are in public. Sometimes it’s okay; it’s more socially acceptable for old people to start talking with people on the bus and stuff, people go “Oh old people, they’re lonely and harmless and you can talk to them.” There’s even this joke about Finnish people, how you treat people who look you in the eye on the bus. “If you accidentally look someone in the eyes who’s a stranger on the bus, first you have to quickly look away and make sure it doesn’t happen again. If it happens a second time, you need to be really careful and ready to run away, because the other person is clearly crazy because they looked you in the eyes two times. And if it happens three times, you call the police.” Obviously a joke, but the thing is - you don’t look strangers in the eye, you don’t smile at them, you don’t try to start talking to them unless there’s a reason. Like, if something crazy happens, you’re on the bus and a car in front of you has an accident, then you’re allowed to talk to each other about it, but if you start talking to people on the bus, then the assumption is that you’re a mental patient on the run.
Q.: I found that I could quite easily ask my way in Helsinki, is it more accepted because I had a reason for asking something to strangers?
A. (0:35:02): Yeah, it’s totally socially acceptable to ask for help. And if you’re a tourist, especially if people realise that you’re a tourist, even if you start talking to them people understand that there are cultural differences and foreigners might be more upfront. But, yeah, if you need help, like directions, people are always happy to help. And if you have a car accident or have a flat tire, a lot of people will stop and help you. People will break the ‘don’t speak with strangers’ when there’s a reason to do it.

Q.: Who's that in the lower left?
A. (0:21:37): Eh, what’s left?... This is right, this is left. Emil is falling over, as would be typical. I always have to think which side is left and which one is right. Same with east and west, I always have big trouble if someone says “from the east” or “from the west,” it’s always like “oh no, what direction is that?” Like that game that I keep mentioning all the time, because it’s the last one that I’ve played a lot, They Are Billions. You get zombie raids, gigantic masses of zombies coming in from the map every few days that you have to defend against. They can come from the south, the north, east or west, and it’s always announced a day ahead: “Oh no, there’s a horde of zombies coming from... the west!” I’m always like “Oh no, which side is the west?” and then I always confuse myself, and half the time I will move all of my troops to the wrong side, to the east. And then I lose, because I couldn’t figure out which direction was west. It’s a real problem! And it’s affecting my life.

Q.: Are there any Devil-like figures in the mythology of the Scandinavian countries?
A. (0:28:43): There’s not really a devil, but there’s people, like...Finnish mythology has the lord of the underworld kinda in the same way that Greek mythology has thee guy, Hades (was it Hades?) who was Tuoni, and then there’s kind of an evil gnome-creatures in both Finnish and  Norse mythology, but there’s not really the kind of evil, devil person. If someone does know better that there is, let me know, but as far as I know, there isn’t one that would be that would be the personification of evil or Hell.
Q.: Well I mean in norse mythology there is the goddess Hel.
A. (0:32:43): Oh yeah. I don’t remember how close that goddess is to a sort of devil-like creature. I’ll have to brush up on that.

Q.: So with the piece you're working on replacing the old ones on the website, what are you going to do with the old cover page/character sheet?
A. (0:40:36): Well, the color page I think is already in the gallery section. If it isn’t, I’m gonna move it over there. So it’s not gonna be discarded forever. It’s archived! And...you mean the character page? That one I think I’m going to actually split into two sections, because there’s gonna be new people finding the comic who are going to be reading the first adventure, so I’m going to split in into two sections where you can choose the characters for the first adventure or the character for the adventure. So I’m going to keep the current character page and then also make the new one with the updated infos.
Q.: Won’t new readers know something's up when they notice Tuuri's only in the first one but not in the second one? 
A. (0:42:24): Well, when you open the characters’ page, it’s gonna default to the first adventure characters, and then there’s gonna be like a tab for the second adventure. You know that if you tab over to the characters of a future story you are going to get some sort of spoilers, so at that you choose to do that yourself. At least I understand that if I’m reading Harry Potter or something and there’s character information for the first book and then for the second book and third book — I know that if I check the character list for the third book before I’ve gotten into it, there’s gonna be spoilers for me. I’m counting on people having the ability to not spoil it for themselves if they have the option.

Q.: All of autumn is Halloween (if you want it to be). [Minna mentioned that it’s Halloween soon]
A. (1:03:05): Halloween over here isn’t the same as in America, it’s All Hallows’ Eve, it is one evening and you’re supposed to go to the graves of people and light some candles and then you go home. And everyone gets a day off of work, it’s like a national holiday.

Q.: On the second to last page we see everyone walking into the side of the ship. What I was wondering about is when you'd find out that isn't actually a question.
A. (1:03:54): [reads question a few times] Ah! You tricked me into having my brain short-cutting! [laughs]
Q.: I’m so sorry for that.
A. (1:04:28): You won’t be forgiven. My trust has been broken. I thought is was a question and it wasn’t!

Q.: Will you have the website redesign up when the new adventure starts?
A. (1:38:17): Yes! I’m actually going to need to have it up in a couple weeks because I’m going to want to upload the first couple of pages before-hand during the break and I need to have the website redesigned before that. So the website design is my priority the next two weeks, and then I want to have it finished.

Q.: If SSSS had ended there, would you have had a plan what to work on next?
A. (1:39:55): Yeah, I would have...I have a lot of ideas all the time, and I do know what I would want to work on next if I had to stop SSSS or if for some reason I couldn’t work on SSSS for some catastrophic reason. You never know, but... I have more stories in my head, and I know which one I would pick for my next big adventure. I’m keeping that one in mind, I’m going to be working for at least a few more years on SSSS, so you never know, I might completely get bored of the idea I have right now and choose to work on something else when the time comes. I make sure not to reveal any of my ideas because if anyone gets excited about them and I change my mind, people would be like “Oooh, why would you get rid of that idea you told us about and instead do this really stupid thing?”

Q.: Is the website of your own design + programming?
A. (1:41:13): Yup! I learned the basics of how to make a website on my own really early. And since then I’ve always wanted to design my own websites because I’m always picky about how it works and looks. I don’t want to use the basic comicpress, blogpress templates that the most people use, they’re kinda limited in how the websites look. For the actual reading page of the comic, they would be fine, so I kinda designed that part to look similar, because the functionality is important, but I want to have a flashy entrance page where I can keep all of the additional information.

Q.: How did you learn how to design/program your own websites? Like any particular websites or resources?
A. (1:44:08): Not really, I kinda started slowly learning when I was 13 years old or something, so I guess I was learning from some sort of Finnish ‘learn basic HTML coding’ and I started with a program that was called Microsoft some-sort of front page or something. It was a program meant for making websites. In the beginning I was just making copy-paste code that wasn’t even code, you could just pick from menus that “Oh, I want a thing here and I want a link here” and stuff like that. And I kinda slowly learned how to actually do it in markup rather than just adding things in from menus. And I really really late learned how to do actual coding, basic interactive stuff, so that everything wasn’t hard-coded in markup; like, I learned some basic PHP when I made the website for A Redtail’s Dream, so that every time I had to change something, I didn’t have to go through everything and recode it by hand.

Q.: How is working with Hiveworks?
A. (1:46:32): My publisher? Things are going good. The kickstarter rewards, all of them have been sent out now, I know people have been receiving their stuff, and we’re going to launch the store — well, not the store — Book 2 officially in the store next week, well, no, Monday the 8th, so we are busy working on that. Thankfully, they are doing the work for actually setting up the pre-order website and stuff, I just need to...I still need to do some promotional artwork for the plush and the book, and just boring things are on my plate. That’s what I need to do this week. Ugh, I don’t want to do it because it’s just annoying, boring work! But I don’t want to ask someone else to do it for me because then I won’t be happy with the promotional images, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to that.

Q.: Are there going to be trolls hiding in the dark background?
A. (2:21:54): Yeah, we’re going to have several different scenes. [starts pointing] Over here, we’re going to have a dark forest and ancient cars with trees growing through them and maybe some sort of critters over here. And there we’re going to have mutated bears, three bears, against a very ominous red moon, and then we’re going to have something over here. Some sort of crazy creature. So yeah, we’re going to have dangerous things in the background. I’m going to have to make the sketches for the background better before I start working on those on stream. They’re very loose right now, I wouldn’t be able to draw them properly without putting thought into it. I just kind of indicated what I want composition-wise.

Q.: "Bears howling at moon" shirt.
A. (2:25:13): Yeah [laughs]. Oh, I might have to do that in the future. Mutated monster bears.

Q.: Just wondering, but have you heard of/seen the work of the webcomic artist Leppu? (one of her most popular webcomics is "Prague Race")
A. (2:49:36): Yeah, I have. She’s another person from Finland who’s making webcomics. That’s not actually how I found her work, I only found her a few years ago when she joined Hiveworks. That’s how I found out about it. It’s another one of webcomics that I haven’t actually read, but that I used to check in on every few weeks to see if there’s a new page, see how the artist is doing, because that’s what I’m interested in. I like to see other artists’ work and just know what they’re up to. I don’t really have time to read everyone’s comics anymore. But yes, I do know it, and every time I see her art posted anywhere I recognise it — she has a style that you recognise as hers, and she does almost all of her work in black and white and traditionally, so that gives it a very recognizable flare to begin with. I guess she recently started a new comic. Like, Prague Race hasn’t been updated in half a year or something. I haven’t checked out the new comic yet.  Q.: The new comic is Tiger Tiger, it's really funny.
A. (2:52:17): Yup, I follow her on Twitter, so I see her post update pictures, they look really pretty. I’ll probably try to read it if I have time, when there’s a hundred pages or something. A hundred pages is a really good amount of comic to read. It’s really fast and you always get somewhere in the story. Like, 20 pages in a webcomic, that’s not a lot to read. So I always wait a little bit before I even attempt to get into something.

Q.: lmao my wrist is constantly twinging yet I just ignore it.
A. (2:54:10): Oooh, don’t ignore it! If you start feeling pain, you need to change something, because it’s gonna get worse if you just ignore it. You need to start doing stretches, you need to exercise every day, just generally, you need to get your blood flowing so that your body can fix whatever is wrong. And if you can, try to find the reason that is causing you the overwork of your wrist and try to find some position where you’re not doing the exact same motion that is causing it. When I start getting pain in some part of my hand, I try to change my grip a little bit, the way I hold my pen or the way I’m sitting, so that I’m doing a different sort of arcing motion with my arm. So I have a few different positions that I use when I start having pain somewhere, that I change until I get rid of the pain for at least a little bit of the time. I have this thing where my wrist isn’t actually the one that’s usually hurting, the pain in my hand travels around, or I force it to travel around, so that I don’t have the one place that is constantly getting worn down, because then you’re eventually going to hit this spot where that part of your body becomes unusable. So I’m evening out the burden by making sure it’s different parts of my hand that get most of the work put on it. But don’t ignore it, definitely don’t ignore it! Stretching and resting and exercising are the most important things you need to do. You might not be able to heal it, but it’s important to make sure it doesn’t get worse, because if you get some sort of pain that is tolerable and it never goes away, you can live with that. The human condition is to live with pain. Everyone has some part that always keeps hurting. But you don’t want that to get to the point where the thing is always hurting so bad that you can’t concentrate and you forget about it now and then, you don’t want to let it get worse as time goes on.

Q.: Does your mom watch your livestream?
A. (2:58:08): She said that she watches sometimes, but she’s a teacher, so she can’t stay up to two in the morning. But I’ve heard that she does watch them sometimes, in retrospect at least.
Q.: Tell her to join our chat.
A. (2:58:43): Oh no. My parents are pretty good at letting me do my own thing. I know that both my mom and dad kinda keep up with my work, but they also know that I like my privacy, so they promised that they won’t call all the time and ask me how I’m doing and they won’t be constantly showing up in my work stuff and my social media, and I promised on my part that I will always be diligent in making updates in social media, because my mom says that if she’s worried about me, she will check my Twitter to make sure I’ve posted something, that I’m okay, so I promised that if I’m not uploading the comic for some while that I will make a Twitter post about anything at least once a day, so that she can make sure that I’m okay. And also I promised that I will always answer the phone when they call. I hate talking on the phone, but that’s completely reasonable. We have good, balanced relationship there. Parents really want to constantly be kinda keeping in touch and I’m so antisocial that I get really tired of that, so we have reached a good balance. 
Q.: Tweets as substitute for phone calls are perfectly fine in our modern age.
A. (3:01:01): Yes they are. Especially since my mom doesn’t actually need to make a Twitter account, she doesn’t like social media and refuses to make a Facebook page, which I understand, I also don’t like using Facebook for anything other than having comic updates for people who do want it. So I understand my mom, but she can at least utilize the free window into my life that is Twitter, and she obviously enjoys the cat pictures.

Q.: Yee lol it’s always fun to figure time zones when I talk to my international friends.
A. (3:04:50): I hate time zones, since the comic’s readership is kinda split between people who read on the European continent from Russia to the UK, and that’s a lot of time zones, and then the other half is over in the Americas — Canada, Latin America, and the United States — and then that continent is split into a several time zones, so I have a really hard time figuring out times when everyone or the majority of my readers are able to join in on anything. So I guess this time in Americas it’s middle-day, maybe afternoon in some parts, and it’s around midnight in Europe. Why can’t the whole globe be on the same time?! Why can’t the earth be flat?! Like a big old disc that just has some sort of dimming, you know, it gets night because the moon moves in front of the disc or something. But even then, we wouldn’t have the same times because the moon would be entering in front of the moon at different times. Hmm. Maybe if the night worked so that the sun would turn off at different times, and that way we would be living at the same time of the day on the whole globe. And it wouldn’t be a globe, it would be a disc that constantly faces the sun. That’s my solution to this nonsense problem.
Q.: We should live on Discworld *nods*
A. (3:07:56): Isn’t there a book named Discworld? I feel like that sounds familiar. A sci-fi book series.
Q.: Force everyone to live by the same timezone and give them flashlights!?
A. (3:09:03): Or maybe we should just force everyone to live on the same strip of land on the globe and the rest of the globe would just be used for robots to farm food for us, and all of humanity lives on this one narrow strip, one time-zone strip with gigantic skyscrapers to make us all fit. And if you go to work for some reason into the other time-zones, then you need to use the flashlight and live by the human time-zone.
Q.: Yeah Discworld is one of the longest running book series in the world I think?
A. (3:09:55): Oh, okay! I know I won’t be reading it then. I get really easily burnt out on long book series. The longest one I tried to get through was I think fourteen parts, some sort of fantasy epic. It got a little bit too much, I got to the point where I couldn’t remember any of the characters because there were so many, and all of the little plot points. Actually, I did read one really long series. I read the Redwall Series up to book 12 or something, after that I think they stopped translating them into Finnish. So I lied! I have been able to read one decently long series.
Q.: You mean The Wheel of Time?
A. (3:11:06): Yes! That’s the horribly long fantasy series. You guessed it from my description! Yeah, I think I even own the books in pocket format. I think they’re not really in English, in either Swedish or Finnish, I don’t remember. [a name of some author]? Maybe. But yeah, I had a lot of those books, and at some point I just couldn’t keep up with anything anymore. But I read at least ten of them.
Q.: I feel like Redwall was really great but each book just felt the same after awhile.
A. (3:12:02): Yeah, it definitely had that problem, but I read them when I was really young, I think about sixth grade, fifth, sixth grade, so I would have been 12 years old or something, and I didn’t mind that the books were basically the same after some time, I loved it. I just wanted the same thing over and over again with slightly different animals and setup.

Q.: Is the duck foreshadowing for Adventure 2 because ducks have two legs?
A. (3:08:39): Come on! No, it’s foreshadowing for Adventure 2 because ducks have two wings and two eyes! The legs have nothing to do with it.

Q.: If the crew is going to Finland I have high hopes for the second story.
A. (3:15:27): Yeah, it’s gonna be pretty good. I’m gonna get to revisit the same kind of scenery that I did in A Redtail’s Dream except with the addition of ruins from old times and scarier monsters.

Q.: I'm super excited about that~ Secrets and all that~
A. (3:16:37): Yeah, I like sprinkling around little secrets in the comic and then making you guys wait five years to find out about it. That’s kind of how it works even in books series: you get something interesting in book 1 and then you have to wait three years for the person who’s writing the series to get to the part in the story where it actually becomes something. And it’s always fun when you get to that point except for the times if it’s a really disappointing revelation. Then it’s not as fun.

Q.: Are you opposed to fans sending you physical mail, post cards or fanart? Or would you rather not?
A. (3:37:06): I would rather not, because I don’t have a (what’s it called) PO box? Most people who do accept stuff from people who want to send over have PO box. I don’t have one, I don’t  live in a place where you can really get one. So yeah, I don’t want to have strangers sending me things to my real mail. I don’t want to go to my mailbox and be like “Hm, did I get a nice postcard today or did someone send a jar of poop.” You never know with people on the internet.

Q.: Chickens r my fave farm animal, it's fun collecting eggs and u can pet them. [see question time-stamped (3:43:26) in Characters]
A. (3:45:02): Yeah, I’ve heard chickens can be really cute. But I’ve also heard that they can poop a lot and the poop can be dangerous, like it can get dusty in their coop, and there’s something in their poop that is dangerous when you breathe it in, so you have to keep cleaning it every day. I read some sort of guide on why you should not have chickens unless you live on some sort of farm, and it was basically that it’s a lot of work to take care of chickens and you shouldn’t just get them for the fun of it if you’re not prepared to suffer the cleaning.
Q.: Can't you make gunpowder out of chicken poop?
A. (3:46:35): Well, I would not doubt that if someone claimed that. Yeah, I think it is, because another thing that I read was that you’re not allowed to have certain kinds of heaters in the chicken coops during winter, because there’s something also in the poop or pee or something that is really flammable, so if you put a heater in a coop everything is going to burn down explosively because it’s basically gunpowder in the air. So I think you’re right on that.
Q.: Birds pee and poop in one.
A. (3:48:25): Ah! I didn’t actually know that. That does make sense. You never actually hear about birds peeing on people.
Q.: My grandparents have pigeons and haven't had any trouble with those! A hawk ate one once though and all the other birds were too scared to come out of their coop for a while.
A. (3:49:28): Aw, poor little birdies. On the other hand, the hawk got happy, so that counts for something, I guess.

Q.: Would you be ok with peeps making similar design real clothes inspired from your stuff?
A. (3:54:03): Definitely! A couple people I think have done something like that, knitting-related clothes. That’s really cool, since I’m not in the business of manufacturing clothing myself, it doesn’t harm me in any way if people make it as a fanwork. And a lot of people have done cosplay and that way also mimicked clothing of the characters. The only reason I would have something against it is if my greatest dream was to be a fashion designer and that was what I was trying to become and my dream was to one day make a clothing line that was inspired by the comic, then I would be like “No! That’s my territory! You are cutting my future profits as the greatest clothing designer!” but since I have zero interests in becoming that, I have nothing against people designing clothes inspired by my work.
It’s kinda like the same sort of situation where some well-known artists are opposed to people doing commissions based on their characters, like, they have some really popular comic, let’s say, and other people are making commissions based on those characters. Some artists are really opposed to that when they themselves also make commissions based on their own characters, because then the other people who are doing it are cutting into his profits and stealing potential customers away from the original creator. Whereas artists who don’t necessarily do commissions based on their own characters or having so many commissions that they don’t need anymore — they tend to not mind that kind of stuff, and same goes with people selling prints based on those fanarts they have made. Some artists are really protective and won’t allow that in cases when they feel like those people are stealing their customers, which is true sometimes. And then the artists who don’t think their work or their customers are being stolen will allow it. So that’s my reasoning. Clothing stuff is not really cutting into my business.

Q.: Do you cook?
A. (4:02:51): Kinda. I have basic dishes that I like to make. Usually, since I want to work a lot and be very effective, I don’t like wasting time cooking food. When I do cook, I do things that I can keep for several days and just eat it and not have to do it again. So I cook like lasagna or fish soup or meat stew or chicken pasta or chicken and rice, basic meals. Other than that, I might just buy something that I can put in the oven like fishsticks. I almost never actually eat stuff that use the microwave. At least it has to be something that requires putting it in the oven. And I try to be healthy since it has a lot to do with how productive I can be, so I do make sure that I don’t buy the instant food stuff because it might taste good since that’s the reason why people get hooked on some sort of simple microwave meal, and it tastes good and it’s easy to make but it’s low on nutrients, so when I buy things that can be heated in the oven, I make sure it’s something proper, like fish with the crispy covering, I buy stuff where it’s actually fish and not fish mixed with 90% of garbage.
Q.: Oooh, lasagna.
A. (4:05:00): Yeah, lasagna is so good. Oh and obviously lasagna’s twin sister, spaghetti and bolognese sauce are very similar in consistency and taste. But lasagna is so good, I actually try not to make it very often, because it’s kinda addictive. Like, I make a pan that’s supposed to be enough for four days and I would eat it in two and a half, because I take one weak portion and I’m full, but it tastes so good that I eat a second portion and oooh, that’s horrible. That’s like a luxury meal for me. But it’s so easy to make. It’s one of my favorite foods. By the way, the worst kind of food that I make when I don’t want to cook anything is... I literally just take canned tuna  because I keep a little bit of a pantry where I keep stuff that lasts long, and then I just open it, it all of it, get my protein, and then I eat a cup of frozen blueberries to get my vitamins and carbohydrates and that’s my meal. It’s really pathetic when those days come, when I’m just so lazy and I’ve forgotten to cook something the previous day and I’m like “Aw, no.” I mean, it’s not unhealthy! You get the basic nutrients, it’s not like I’m eating McDonald’s or something, but I definitely feel a little pathetic during those days, like “Oooh, this is not how an adult is supposed to eat.” 
Q.: Canned tuna for the apocalypse.
A. (4:07:43): I’ll be honest, I’m actually always keeping a little bit of food in my pantry just in case something happens. I live in a small town, if for some reason something bad happens and you can’t get food from the store for a month, then I have enough food that I can survive! And that’s on purpose. That also means that I have a lot of tuna that I can eat when I don’t want to eat for a regular meal.
Q.: I also have the always tuna can and beans and stuff.
A. (4:08:35): You’re supposed to have. Basically every government says that you’re supposed to have at least three days of food in case there’s a week when the food network is disrupted. But then you’re like “What if it’s three weeks?” It’s gonna be really tough if you have only three days of food. And it’s so easy to keep a couple shelves of something that you eat anyway. All the stuff that I keep, like the tuna, I keep eating it and then I buy new stuff every now and then. It doesn’t take up space and give a little bit of piece of mind.
Q.: Now I kinda want some fish.
A. (4:10:38): Yes, it’s been a very fishy day. Fish is good. Unless it’s the kind that has been fished in the Baltic Sea. Or fed stuff that has been made of fish that has been fished out of the Baltic Sea. Any part of the food chain that has touched the Baltic Sea — it’s bad for you. Don’t eat it.
Q.: Wait what's bad about the Baltic Sea?
A. (4:11:46): It is the most polluted inland sea there is. Is it inland sea? Well, whatever it is technically called. It’s the most polluted part of the sea that there is because the only part where fresh water gets into it is that tiny-tiny strait between Denmark and Sweden, where our little crew drove over. If you look at the map, it’s a really thin part where the water gets through, and it’s narrow and winding, so there isn’t a lot of edge ins between the sea and the Baltic Sea, and there’s a lot of countries where all of the polluted farm water from rivers and toxic waste from cities and everything that’s going on are all running into the sea. Poland, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, the Baltic countries, all of them, and certainly some rivers from probably France and inner European countries all flow into the Baltic Sea, so it keeps getting more and more polluted. And fish who eat plankton and stuff that lives there, the pollution is collected in them, and the bigger the fish, the more concentrated the pollution is. Or I guess the fatter the fish, the more that fish has eaten, the more concentrated it is. At least in the Nordic countries, any shops that sell fish from the Baltic Sea have to have those kind of warnings that if you’re pregnant you shouldn’t eat and you shouldn’t eat it more than three times a week at maximum because it’s too dangerous for your health otherwise.

Q.: How might the sound design for City of Hunger be (if there is to be any)?
A. (04:15:55): I don’t know yet, I’m going to have to do some proper research in what’s some basic sound design for the games that I’ve enjoyed, since that’s something that I never pay attention to when I play games. So when I want to actually think about what I want for my game, I’m like “Aaah, I don’t know! Something that isn’t distracting I guess?” But yeah, it’s gonna be something that isn’t distracting. Something pretty basic.

Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, Process

Q.: How big are your comic pages usually?
A. (1:35:56): If you mean pixel-wise, two pages or the one spread is like 8000 pixels wide and the height was like... well, I don’t even remember. It’s 3000 or something. So they’re not insanely big, but they have a lot of pixels. I know there’s people who insist on going always above 10000 pixels for any canvas they’re working on. And I’m just like... Well, I would use it, too, if  I had a really powerful computer. At some point you have to go with what your computer is able to handle, I don’t want it to take ten minutes every time I want to save the file.

Q.: I love colour scheme so much already It reminds me a little of the prologue.
A. (1:14:38): Yes, it’s kind of intentional, since its the colours that I picked to be the standard colors for the comic. It’s the tan background and then kind of a lot of purple or dark, deep violets, and then the reds. They are the colours that I use in a lot of the infopages and a lot of the prologue had, the actual comic pages had this kind of colour scheme. The very first layout that I had before the one that we currently have had the same colour scheme. It was just a group picture of the crew, they were standing and posing, but it had these colours, so I’m kinda going back to that one for the main website layout.

Q.: I've been writing a comic script for about a year, but I can't draw.
A. (2:36:30): Well, you know what the solution to that is! You just have to draw. And that’s how you learn. Nobody wants to write amazing script and waste their horrible learning years on that. So, if you want to learn how to draw and eventually get your comic script done, write another comic script that you still like but isn’t that important, and draw that one. And then it doesn’t matter if it sucks because it’s going to suck. My first few comics that I made when I was a teenager, they are all really bad, but I still made them, and they helped me become better. So yeah, although A Redtail’s Dream was my practice comic and my first real comic that I did, I actually have a like hundred comic pages that I’ve drawn as a teenager before that, you know, on different little projects that I abandoned, like, all of them. I don’t think I’ve ever — actually I’ve done one comic properly to the end, which was 20 pages. Other than that, I definitely have like a hundred pages before even getting to a Redtail’s Dream. That’s always the answer, you just have to draw something to get all the bad pages out and you will eventually become good enough to draw your own comic, that it will become good to the point that people will actually want to read it.

Q.: Do you think you will stick to the style you draw the comic in now, or is there a particular look you are aiming for that you have not reached yet?
A. (3:51:09): I kinda have a particular look that I am trying to reach, that I think I’m pretty close to. I feel like I’m gonna stay pretty similar to what I have now, because there’s a problem where the look that I’m trying to reach is... I feel like I’m pretty close to it, but I’m not quite there, so  I’m like, “Why would I swing back and forth, getting slightly closer?” and then I’m “Oooh, I’m so close to the perfect style!” and then I try to reach the perfect style and then make a misstep and fall further away from it and then I notice that I went too far away from it, and then I try to get back to whatever it was before. So my style is kind of shifting around still, but I feel like I’ve reached what I want my style to be. It’s not fluctuating as much as it was doing a couple years ago where I would have really good pages where I would still look back. I was really close to my dream style in this and this page, but it would fluctuate to something completely different on the next 20 pages and then shift back to being kind of more stable over the last year maybe.

Writing: Character-creation, Pacing

Q.: The thought of a post-apocalyptic world often evokes despair which is built in in many stories. SSSS is pretty light in tone. Do you ever struggle with that, whether or not or how much to build in a sense of despair?
A. (1:16:55): Not really, because I kinda don’t like the post Apocalyptic stories that wallow in some sort of despair all the time, especially when it comes to the way that humans are portrayed as almost everyone being evil and cruel, which might make sense, there’s a theory that if something really bad does happen the most cruel people will survive, because they won’t hesitate to take advantage of the most kind people, so that way it would make sense. But I get tired of those stories really easily. Like the Walking Dead, I liked the comic (I haven’t watched the TV show) for quite a few volumes, but at the point where the stories stopped being about zombies as the main threat and it started being some sort of crazy warlord sort of person, everything got really depressing even for a post-apocalyptic story. I lost interest, I don’t like those kinds of stories, I like stories where they have some sort of goodness in them, except in cases where it’s absolut horror stories,  then I like it to be as dark as possible. But for long-running stories, I can’t keep interest if it’s really negative. I just made the kind of story that I like so it’s not difficult for me to balance the horror and the flashbacks to dark times with the lighter elements of camaraderie and people trying to survive and generally being not-evil.