Key posts by Minna through the comments and on twitch

[JoB]

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.

[ponders firing larger, heavier barbed projectiles that get stuck in the membranes and hopefully throw them completely off balance before they're even close enough to make an attempt at center mass]
[also, UV-enriched AA searchlights]

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.

More precisely, "The light we receive from the moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the sun".

Q.: This character info thing has skald crossed out next to military.

"Academic", actually.

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.

Now that's a prompt to ponder raising your own kids someplace else if I've ever heard one ...

A. [...] 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.

Because mankind needs some incentive to get going with that Dyson sphere, obviously.

A. [...] 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

... Germany I buy, but France happens to be on the wrong side of the Rhine (and the Alps) for that.

[Mebediel]

Hello hello hello here's another chatlog for you all! Minna was working on the cover illustration for the new site during this chatlog; doc is here.

chatlog_011018

Characters
Main Cast

Spoiler: show

Q.: Onni is surprisingly good at fighting, where did he learn to throw hands like that?
A. (0:13:20): Oh, we haven’t actually seen him fight, I don’t think. He’s punched Reynir once, but that doesn’t actually tell much, and it didn’t knock Reynir out. I don’t think he’s actually good at fighting. You’re not gonna see him do some sort of kung fu moves on anyone.

Q.: Onni, please keep the hood on to cover your disaster hair. [regarding the drawing]
A. (0:14:29): Yeah, his hair is gonna be even more of a disaster now, since it’s gonna be a little bit more grown out. Basically like Lalli’s hair, but even more of a mess. In Finnish when you have that kind of hair you say that it looks like a ‘heinäpelto’, which means that it looks like a hayfield, like the strays of hay are sticking out in every direction after it’s been raining and stuff.

Q.: Mmm, fluffy Onni.
A. (0:29:50): Yeah, I guess he’s pretty fluffy. I purposefully gave both Onni and Lalli fur coats in the real world because I really like drawing fur, and the only time I get to do it in the comic is during the dream sequences. And I want to draw more fur! And also, obviously, fur coats look really cool. Or I guess not really coats, they’re more like capes.

Q.: I love how dynamic Onni looks and how he and Lalli mirror each other here. Do you think there will be a hot spring moment with the crew? XD
A. (0:30:55): I think we discussed this last week? [question time-stamped (1:11:23), chatlog_220918] No, there probably won’t be a hot spring moment, the typical shounen manga (or I guess shoujo manga also?), even though they could do that in Iceland, but there might be a sauna scene. But that won’t be just fanservice, it is gonna be a regular story-kinda-relevant scene. But even though it won’t be in the comic, maybe I might have to draw a hot spring, Icelandic hot spring moment, as fanservice during one of the streams.

Q.: Are any of the outfits in SSSS based on traditional designs?
A. (0:33:15): Yeah, I kind of take a lot of little basic cues from traditional Nordic clothing. Like, Lalli and Emil have the white tunic kind of thing and white pants - kind of really basic clothes with the pattern hems and stuff. Or what you usually see in traditional Finnish paintings, it’s what people in Finland used to wear in ye olden times or Kalevala times. And obviously Emil has- I’m trying to give his fancy coat, give him the Swedish Dala patterns on his cape and shirt. And Sigrun has the lusekofte patterns on her jacket. And Mikkel is also gonna have the same sort of patterns, since it’s kind of a inter-Scandinavian pattern, so they’re both going to have the same sort of pattern. And Reynir is going to have Icelandic star pattern on his shirt. So yeah, all of them have some traditional clothing influences in their designs. Some more than others. But they all have something.

Q.: Does Onni like petting cats? He gives an impression of a fella who would allow cat to sit on his face XD
A. (0:42:55): [laughs] What gives you that impression?! I’m sure he doesn’t have the aversion to cats that Lalli has, he’s definitely more cat-friendly. I don’t know if he would allow a cat to sit on his face unless he was dead asleep. Then, obviously cats can do whatever they want

Q.: But does he [Onni] have an aversion to owls?
A. (0:47:18): Oh yeah, since Lalli is basically a cat person, so he doesn’t like cats. No, Onni has an affinity to owls, he understands them. And owls don’t come and annoy him the same way cats might come over and annoy Lalli. [alternatively, check question (6:31:12) in chatlog_250818]

Q.: How do you imagine the voices of everyone sound like?
A. (1:41:45): Oh, ‘m not really good at answering that question, because I don’t really imagine the voices that much. It’s kinda the same way that people ask ‘who you imagine would be a good actor to play the characters’. I have no idea, I can’t imagine them. Or I can imagine what they would look like in real life, but I can’t really imagine the voices that well, or who would be a good actor and so forth. Which is maybe just a little bit weird since I see a lot of people who do create comics, the first thing they know is who they want to play the characters and what they would sound like if it was made into a screenplay or something. So I feel always that I’m doing something wrong with not caring about that so much. Maybe it’s just because I kind of see comics and manga as the ultimate story-telling device, and a lot of other people see comics as a stepping stone and really with that their work would be made into an anime or a movie or a TV show, so they really think about the end product, which that case would obviously have sound and actors and animation crews. And I just want to focus on the comic, because that’s the superior product in my mind.

Q.: Is anyone out of SSSS story good at growing plants?
A. (2:10:45): I feel like Reynir might be if he tried. Maybe Lalli, too, since he would be able to.. Well, do you really need to focus on growing plants? You really only need to remember to.. Well, now I’m going to offend everyone who’s a big plant-grower by saying “Oh, you only need to remember to water them once a week!” I know it’s a lot more complicated to grow any sort of plants, otherwise there wouldn’t be the word form ‘green thumb’ if it was so easy. But yeah, I guess Lalli and Reynir, that would certainly be something they would be able to bond over.

Q.: This may seem like a crazy question (it probably is), but was Tuuri's death foreshadowed by the SSSS symbol? Because I had this revelation today...
A. (2:53:52): No, the symbol actually has nothing to do with it. I know some people thought that since the symbol has six parts of the flower thing and the last one was hollow [draws the symbol], people thought that they were like the six main characters and one of them was dead. But no, the symbol is just a modification of the Scandinavian snowflake/flower pattern, and since I used the sort of version where the Nordic flags were in it, there 5 Nordic countries and then I had the hollow one as an extra. It’s just a visual, interesting little flair, because just as the flower thing it’s really generic and not that usable as a no-logo. But no, the petals don’t symbolise the characters and did not foreshadow Tuuri’s death. Another case of over-analyzing. I’m happy you guys are the over-analyzing kind of people, it means I don’t have to be too clear in my story-telling, because sometimes if you have a really young audience you have to sometimes keep explaining- well not explaining but making everything really-really clear, because you don’t want to risk some people not understanding some sort of vague symbolisms or foreshadowing. So I’m glad I’m able to count on the fact that most of you people would figure things out, even if it means that sometimes people will come up with all kinds of theories that have nothing to do with anything.

Q.: Is the duck a symbol of Emil's ability to swim?
A. (2:56:35): [laughs] I mean, ducks are kinda like Emil, they have a lot of body fat that insulates them from the cold. And Emil has a fair amount of body fat, the kind of layer that’s just under the skin, that gives that slight husky body build. We can make a lot of duck interpretations.

Q.: When the glass of the picture was cracked across Turri I knew something was going to happen to her. Since it was across her eyes I thought she might be blinded which since she wanted to see the world would have been horrible for her. Obviously not as bad as dying though, that I wasn't expecting. [page 189]
A. (2:59:14): Yeah, that I actually did purposefully. And there’s a lot of people who saw that crack run across her eyes and be like “Oh no, she’s going to die.” And you know.. Eeeh, it did happen. I guess it’s fairly common symbolism, I’m sure I’ve picked it up from a ton of different horror stories. It’s very typical, the one where either the face is blurred out or there’s something wrong with the eyes in horror stories where it’s foreshadowed that something is wrong with ether someone’s soul or they are going to die.

Secondary Characters

Spoiler: show

Q.: Are there going to be many new secondary characters?
A. (0:27:52): Maybe not secondary characters, but there’s going to be tertiary characters that are important for driving the story forward but won’t be around constantly. But yeah, we’re gonna meet a lot of interesting characters along the way. You won’t have to try learning a ton of new names or anything. I think, at least.

Worldbuilding

Spoiler: show

Q.: Does SSSS world have kotatsu, the warm tables with blankets on them?
A. (2:51:42): I have never heard about that.
Q.: Kotatsu....heated table. Big in Japan.
A. (2:51:50): Maybe in Japan? Because they are certainly not a thing in the Nordic countries, I have never seen or heard about that before. A heated table.. Hm. Interesting. That sure does sound like something that would be very comfortable during winter months. Although in Finland you don’t really need them since if you’re really cold and really want to find a solution tot that you just go use your sauna. No need for heated tables. Are they, like, electric tables? Or are they some sort of crazy construction with warm water pipes running through them or something? Or even crazier: do they have candles inside them that heat the table frame?

Rash, Magic and Ghosts

Spoiler: show

Q.: Would different musical instruments lend powers to Finnish mages? Would different mages need different instruments?
A. (2:21:26): No, I don’t think so. As far as I know, the kantele is the only one that’s really specifically used for magic in Finnish mythology. But it’s not even that needed, a lot of mages in Finnish mythology don’t use the kantele. It’s just kinda the central symbol for one of the biggest mages, that was Väinämöinen who created the first kantele.

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related

Spoiler: show

Q.: Is there any foreshadowing in the first adventure that you feel fans overlooked?
A. (0:17:19): No, not really. I feel people have been very diligent trying to look for every foreshadowings. I can’t think of any that I intended to be picked up that people wouldn’t have. I’m more worried that I may have started some sort of foreshadowings, which I sometimes do, and then forgotten about it and not properly taken it to the conclusion. And since I don’t remember what those would have been, I just have this nagging feeling that “Oh, I must have forgotten something that I meant to include but never did.” Kinda like “oh, I must have left the stove on at home.”

Q.: [referencing the previous question] You mean fans overanalyzing everything.
A. (0:18:47): Let’s not say ‘overanalyzing’. I’m happy you guy are picking up on the little things I put down.

Q.: [story about how Minna will confuse us with fake spoilers + more]
A. (0:20:57): See, I’m going to have to start just throwing in all kinds of fake spoilers, so that you can’t tell when I’m accidentally spoiling something or not. Because every stream I’m going to claim ten different things that maybe are not going to happen (Or maybe will...). It feels really weird to be back in that position at the start of the story, in a way, or a major plot arc. Because you really want to share a lot about the story coming up, because you know it’s going to take years to get through all of it, and tell the whole world all your fantastic ideas! But you have to not do it. And I had the same problem when I was starting SSSS; I wanted to do a lot of cool concept art, but I had to pace myself and not reveal all the coolest parts, because then when it actually happens in the comic everyone’s like “Hm, I saw it already. It looks much cooler when you drew it three years ago.” And then the cool part of the comic just becomes a gigantic letdown.
Q.: Keeping secrets about awesome-good stuff is difficult.
A. (0:24:53): Yup! There’s actually also this idea that people in the creative works tend to pass around that stories that you have - it’s kinda like some sort of water pressure thing where you have some sort of dam where the creative pressure builds up, and if you talk about the cool ideas that you have the pressure lets loose, and then you end up not actually doing the comic or writing or art that you actually meant to do, because you told everyone about it, and that pressure to actually produce the work just kinda fizzles out. And then it ends up being really lame because you don’t have that drive to put in all of your effort into it anymore.So not only do you have to be careful not to spoil the story, but you also have to make sure that you don’t spoil your own enthusiasm by prematurely telling everyone about your ideas. And I do believe that, because I see a lot of people do a lot of ‘fanart’ of their own future comic ideas and stuff like that, and that’s something that I’ve seen even before I had my own comic. Some artist that I was following would start saying “Oh, I’m gonna make this awesome comic” and everyone would get excited and I would be excited too, and then it would suddenly be two years later and they never even started the first page, but every week draw a bunch of art of the characters and ideas. And it was always “Oh, like next month I’m gonna start drawing the pages!” But, never happened, because they kept drawing the fanart of their own work instead. Letting all of that creative pressure out that way.
Q.: It must be tradition during comic breaks to restart reading. Restarted last night and already up to 617 less than 12 hours later.
A. (0:23:22): Nice! Maybe I should reread the comic myself from start to finish to make sure I really know everything that I’ve foreshadowed. Because I kind of only reread the parts that have made it in the books, since I had to go through them checking for errors and proofreading and everything. But after that I haven’t reread the last 400 pages, I think. So we’re almost at the point where you guys probably know the comic better that I do. I mean, I do spend 15 hours on every page so I do remember fairly well; when someone describes a page to me I will remember everything that happened to it and every facial expression and all the colour choices I’ve made. But just off the top of my head?.. Like when I reread the first and second books for the print books, I realised a lot of little story parts that I had already forgotten, and I was like “Oh! That was cool and interesting!”
Q.: You just gotta make sure to give out the last books as well already!
A. (0:27:17): Yes, of course! They are going to have to keep coming out, like, once every year. And hopefully, since every book is 300 pages and I’m able to draw 200 pages every year, I’m going to slowly catch up in a few years where we’re not two books behind constantly. That would be nice.

Q.: How do you get references for those traditional patterns? I really want to include some more of them in my art but idk where to find references.
A. (0:43:13): Hmm. Well, for Finnish art, what I like to Google if I need something is Kalevala paintings. I guess I don’t know if you find all of them in English if you Google, but I think you do. Actually, let me test if that works. [tests] Yeah, that actually works, you get a lot of work by Akseli Gallen-Kallela and some other people, and they have a lot of the traditional Finnish clothing. So that’s what you want to Google if you want to see the kind of stuff that I’m going for for the Finnish ones. So that’s Kalevala and paintings. And for the Nordic stuff, if you Google the word ‘lusekofte’.. Actually, let me type that into the chat. [types the same thing]. So those are good places to start for some nice patterns.

Q.: We go on a trip and I have emergency coffee.
A. (0:46:39): Oh my. [laughs] That sounds.. horrible. Anytime you need emergency coffee, it can’t be a good thing. It means stressful and tiring times, am I right? I don’t do emergency coffee, my caffeine fix is ‘emergency Pepsi’ [laughs]. It’s the same thing, I think caffeine-wise the content is pretty similar, from what I understood.

Q.: Guys I’m so hungry.
A. (0:50:38): I’m not, for once. Or, well, not for once, but last time I was really hungry, which was a pain, because I am such a wimp that when I start getting hungry, my brain completely switches off and all I can think about is food.

Q.: [Minna talks about her bird-feeding hobby]
A. (0:54:57): Oh yeah, and speaking of autumn, I had to put out the bird feeder already, even though we’re obviously several months from winter (or not winter, but you know, snow and stuff). But for some reason, every single bush in my garden has no berries in it, which is kind of weird, because last year I had berries in every single thing, so like, the rowan tree, and there’s some sort of blackberry bush, and three different redberry bushes, and they’re all completely empty this year, and I was like “Poor birds, they’re going to starve to death before it’s even winter!” So I put out the birdfeeder this morning and it’s already one quarter eaten; I have a big one, it fits five little balls that you give to the birds, and they’ve eaten one quarter of it already. I looked out the window during the day, and there were like five birds flying around it all the time; it’s so cute! So yeah, I’m very early with my bird feeder this year; letting them have a little bit something to thicken up on so that they don’t starve to death. I’m sure they wouldn’t, all of my neighbours have elderly women living in the house. Almost all of them, so everyone has a ton of bird feeders all the time, and I have decided to join them, before I’m even 30 years old.

Q.: No Halloween in Scandinavia, I assume?
A. (1:11:53): That’s correct. Obviously people know about Halloween since they consume so much American media, and a lot of people kinda adopt it and school and workplaces might have a one-day Halloween party where people get to dress up like people do in America. And stores might sell a little bit of Halloween decorations because of that. But the actual Halloween is the old All Hallows’ Eve, when you just supposed to go and put some candles on graves of people. It’s not a celebration. And definitely no trick-or-treating, especially not in Finland, since we have a similar tradition around Easter. And some kids want to copy the American way to get extra candy, but I think it pretty much died away after one year, because kids would try to do the trick-or-treating but no adults would give them any candy because they already do that once a year and nobody wants to do it twice. Especially since trick-or-treating is kinda rude, it doesn’t really fit the Finnish mentality where you.. Like the way.. Well, I don’t want to say that trick-or-treating is like threatening people, but in a way it is since it’s “give me candy or I’ll ruin your yard” or something, and that doesn’t really fit well with the Finnish culture. You just have old people telling you “None of that stupid American rudeness! We are Finns! You better give me something in return if I give you candy.” Which is what is done during the Eastern similar kind of thing, you are supposed to give a person who asked for candy first of all a decorated stick, like a willowstick with feathers and colourful paper pieces, and you are supposed to go over and chant this sort of good luck spell for the summer dressed up as witches and cats. So you kinda give something in return to the people who you visit and they give you candy as a ‘thank you’ for the spell that you cast for them.

Q.: Are you a fan of the older Fallout games? Fallout 1 and 2 to be specific.
A. (1:33:24): I haven’t played those. I really like the way the graphics look and I would love to play them actually more than I enjoyed the newer ones, because I’m a fan of isometric view games, I don’t care that much for first-persons shooters. But I tried one once and I had a lot of trouble with my computer. For some reason  wasn’t able to get t to work n a windowed mode, and on my screen the old graphics in full screen looked reeeally bad, I wasn’t able to get anywhere. It was too distracting, just how bad it looked. But I would love to play them if I’ able to get it to work in windowed mode sometime, because I’m sure I would really like them. The look like the kind of games I would enjoy. But no, I’ve only played the third one and New Vegas, I think, was the one that came kinda in-between. And I have not played the newest one because my computer can’t run it, my graphics card is too old. Which I guess is good, it saves my time and I don’t waste it playing games. I was a little bit salty when it first came out and I wasn’t able to play it.

Q.: You've mentioned quite a few ideas for future streams! Do you have a list for future drawings?
A. (1:35:45): Kinda? I have some folders that I name after things that I want to draw, in an ideas folder. I don’t actually have anything in those folders [laughs]. It’s a weird way to keep a list, but in case I decide to pick one of those ideas, I will collect the reference images for them. But I don’t keep a proper list. I might forget some of them and re-remember them once people start requesting something. But I do know what I want to draw for the next month.

Q.: A lot of stuff has to be cut out in movies ): So I kinda agree with Minna. [see question time-stamped (1:41:45) in Characters]
A. (1:44:28): Yeah, movies especially are kind of a really big letdown, usually if you have some sort of comic. Like, mangas that are made into animes are often really good, because they tend to follow the script of the manga to almost 100%, and the artstyle and everything, it’s just coloured, and then it only comes down to the quality of the animation and voices. But when something is made into a TV show, like a comic is made into live-action with actors and someone editing the script.. So many changes that I feel like I’m always kinda disappointed. And I only like TV shows that are made from adapted stories, in cases when I haven’t read the original material. Whenever I read a book or a comic and it’s made into some sort of adaptation, I’m always really disappointed, even to the point where I start avoiding them because sometimes it even ruins the original material, because the animated or new version tends to stick to your brain since there’s a lot more visual and sound information that your brain absorbs, and it kinda overwrites the original and ruins a lot of it. For me, that’s my personal feeling.
Q.: At first I saw my comic idea as an animated tv show, but then I read SSSS and saw that it would be generally better as just comic and that comics can be good on their own.
A. (1:47:57): Yes! Well, I don’t know, it’s a good lesson that I’ve departed, since maybe I’m completely wrong and comics are [a] doomed medium, but comics are actually pretty good, because you don’t need to have a team around you to make the thing come true. And people are able to make a living from doing comics and a lot of people are even able to become rich from doing comics and manga and those kind of Korean, scrolling comics. There’s a lot of big names who make a really good living from it. And comics are kinda.. even though print media is kinda slowly dying, comics have a great opportunity to be published on the internet really easily. And they are visual medium, so even though people are slowly becoming less able to read properly, which causes problems for novel-writing communities, fewer and fewer people want to read anything, and they have to try to get into audiobooks, comics have a lot of decades still in them since you don’t have to read that much and people will be able to easily enjoy them. 
Q.: Unfortunately the academics tend to be waaaaay under-informed about webcomics!
A. (1:55:42): That is completely true. But that is something that probably isn’t going to change until the current academics are slowly replaced by younger generations. And comic already have the problem where they aren’t taken seriously as literature. I remember a few year ago, maybe only one year ago, I think the New York Times or some really well-know publication, that has some sort of bestseller list for novels and literature, removed the ‘graphic novels’ section and the comics industry that I’m kinda aware of on Twitter - everyone went crazy, because it was like one of the few places where graphic novels were considered as literature, and the fact that they removed that section was a deathblow to the reputation of comics as something that can be taken seriously. And I guess they haven’t reinstated it, that is not on the list, and people are kinda salty over it. But it definitely shows that traditional publishing industry doesn’t consider graphic novels as proper anything. ‘They are like video games, you don’t learn anything from them’, you know, in their minds. But eventually more and more things are going to move to the internet because it’s just so much more convenient and cheaper. So the attitude is going to change too, eventually.
Q.: Honestly, I think that that sort of disregard is in good part due to the comic books code. It's really a shame because there aren't just awesome works like yours out there but also some dealing with really deep themes but people seem to be stuck up to actually notice or care.
A. (2:01:13): I would’ve understood that that’s some sort of American comics censorship, like you’re not allowed to write about things that aren’t suitable for children, I guess. But I don’t know about that since I’m not from America. I just know that in Europe, in a lot of countries, even though comics might be regarded as something okay, webcomics are definitely seen as “What the hell and why would you ever do that?” There’s a lot of attitude that if it’s free on the internet then it’s got to not worth anything and it’s only valuable if it’s actually published by real publisher and out in the stores.
Q.: Yeah I have observed the weird prejudice against the comic form ever since I worked in comic shop in 1982 and my dad thought "graphic novel" was a hilarious neologism.
A. (2:02:45): Yeah, it’s a lot of.. ‘snobbery’ I guess would a way to put it. But for me it doesn’t really matter. People feel the same way about video games and I don’t care. I guess the people who are really upset about it the most are those who wish they would be able to receive the same sort of prestige as bestselling novel authors can recieve, like get all kinds of different awards and get into the newspaper on the literature pages, because a lot of comic writers have the same writer’s complexes where they want to reach the same sort of things that the novel writers want to reach, and they’re obviously very upset that they are excluded just because they do comics instead of classical literature work.

Q.: Do you take kitty with you when you go out for a walk?
A. (1:58:00): No, no, she’s an indoor kitty. She only gets to go out in my garden. She’s kinda skittish, and I live in a small town but there’s people out on walk all the time, people have their dogs and cars. She would just get scared and run into someone else’s yard and then [] for three days. I don’t want that to happen.

Q.: Does your cat like to sit on your shoulders or lap?
A. (1:58:52): Shoulders - never, she is kinda too big to sit on anyone’s shoulders, she doesn’t quite fit there. But she does like to sit on my lap nowadays, she’s become really friendly in the last year or so, especially now that it’s getting colder. She used to only sit on my lap maybe once a week, and now she wants to sit on it every day, almost. Like, the last week which has been pretty colder, several times a day she would come and sit on my lap for a little bit for some scratches. And in the morning she will come and sleep on my chest; I will have my covers on and she will walk up to me and put her paws on my neck or my face, wherever she happens to fit them, and just be my warm little extra-blanket. Annoyingly, that also tends to trigger her grooming instinct - if her face comes too close to my face she will start licking my chin until it start hurting a lot because of the kitty-tongue. Feels like sandpaper.

Q.: Do you know other Finnish comic creators? Are there other artists there that we should be watching?
A. (2:06:45): I’m actually really out of the loop on other Finnish creators since I do my comics in English, and that has kind of isolated me from the Finnish creators scene. There are some Finnish creators who also do their comic in Finnish, some of them are also published by Hiveworks, which is I guess the publisher/collective that my webcomic is part of, but I’m not actually up to date on what they are working on, I just know that there are a few of them. But no, I don’t really know that many Finnish creators. I’m an international internet citizen! On the internet in doesn’t really matter where you are from. I guess if I wanted to get into the Finnish comic community I would have to go to Finnish comic conventions, I hear that’s where comic creators from around here gather. But I’ve never been to even one of them, so I don’t know Finnish comic creators and they probably don’t know me. So if you ask some known Finnish comic creator (if you ever met one) if they know my work they would probably say “I have no idea who that person is.”

Q.: Most of the European comic artists I know of are Franco-Belgian, but I know there are a lot more in other countries. I just don't know how to find them x.x
A. (2:09:16): Yeah, the Finnish comics scene is kinda different from the Franco-Belgian one. From what I’ve seen and heard, it’s a lot more artisan, like there’s very few people who make a living from making comics, especially story-based comics. The only ones who really make any money are humour strip comics that are published in newspapers. Most of the other works are introspective, the author is putting their own feelings and psychological musings into comic format. So a lot of Finnish comics aren’t really known outside of Finland, and not even inside Finland, most of the stuff people here read are Donald Duck and other international comics, the same Franco-Belgian comics that are popular in other countries. There’s a very small market for Finnish comics even in Finland.

Q.: Bunch of Finnish webcomic artists know Minna.
A. (2:14:04): Oh. That’s nice to know! Well, I guess webcomic artists would make more sense. I do know other Finnish webcomic artists, too, and follow a lot of them on Twitter, even the ones whose comics I don’t read because I don’t have time to read comics anymore. I was thinking more like ‘established comic scene’. Like, if I went to a Finnish comics convention, I kinda feel like if I mention my comics… I mean, I could be completely wrong, maybe everyone would be like “Oooh! You that person! Yes, I know your comic!” but for some reason I feel like nobody would know who I am.. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. For some reason. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just self-deprecating and wallowing in pity like “Ooooh, nobody knows me!” Or maybe it’s wishful thinking, since I don’t really want to be famous ever. Especially not in.. Like, on internet it doesn’t matter, but in a small country like Finland you can get accidentally famous for no reason, if the stars align, and then people would recognise you as “Oh, that person who made some sort of comics” and they would have no idea who you actually are, they don’t know what your comic is, they just know that you’re famous for something because it’s such a small country. I’ve seen people get famous for dumbest things, and everyone in the country knows who they are for a year.

Q.: Except for the thousands of fans all over the world?
A. (2:16:18): Eeeh, I mean.. The internet feels like a different world than the real world, Obviously, I know people on the internet are real people, but it just feel so different. Like, when I go out in the world, I don’t think about my comics at all, I just walk around. Well, I guess I think about it in the way that I’m thinking about the plot and stuff, but I’m not thinking about myself as a comic artist. And I like knowing that nobody I meet has any idea who I am. I’m just a regular person.

Q.: Minna, you put expectations low, so you can be surprised that ppl really know you!
A. (2:17:36): It is good to put your expectations low. Always better than the opposite, thinking that you are a big hotshot and showing off somewhere and finding out that nobody cares and then getting really bitter and angry about it [laughs]. I could see myself doing that, so I definitely always try to not get to much of an ego, because yeah, I don’t want to get angry about finding out that I’m a nobody.

Q.: Have more people from different countries (besides what you said in your latest description) asked you if they could translate your comic?
A. (2:18:28): Yeah, some people have. Not like publishers, but just regular people who would like to translate it for free have asked if they could. But the problem with that is that Hiveworks, my online publisher and book publisher in a way now, they kinda have digital exclusivity for my comic, and they don’t want unauthorized translations to be made, they want to keep those options open for themselves, if they want to get into translating the comic officially. Or to get publisher that can translate it to some language and get a deal that way. Since sometimes if there’s a fan translation floating around I’ve understood that it can sometimes kinda undermine a future deal, because the person who would be interested in doing official translation at that point would feel like the audience has already been tapped out by unofficial translation and get skittish about it, since traditional publishers can be really nervous about things online and feel like if it’s online for free it’s not gonna sell. Which obviously isn’t true, I wouldn’t be able to make a living otherwise.

Q.: Appreciating the videogame soundtracks today
A. (2:22:17): Well that’s good! This is my relaxation and anti-stress soundtrack playlist. It has Final Fantasy IX and some Pokemon remixes, which is my go-to feel-good music. It puts my brain in a good place, since it has so many positive connotations for me. It’s the kind of music that I listen to if I’m feeling at all sad or stressed out, it always puts me in a good mood.  Or if I feel demotivated.

Q.: When you say this is the adventure 2 cover art... How will it be used? Cover of what?
A. (2:48:16): It’s going the main image on the website, it’s gonna replace the one where they are standing on the bridge on the current one. So it’s going to be the cover of the website for the next few years. And I’m probably gonna post it as page 1 or page 0 of the next adventure so that it doesn’t start with the chapter cover and starts with this one instead. I think I want to do some sort of cover for the first adventure, because while the books have their covers, the comic kinda awkwardly starts with the cover page for the prologue, which I’ve seen a lot of people use in articles when someone post like a little blogpost or article on some sort of comic website. They tend to use that one as the cover image since it’s the first page and it’s kinda cover-like. But I want to make something that’s more indicative of the artstyle. So that’s kinda what’s it gonna be used for. For the second adventure, and I’m gonna need to do something for the first adventure too and insert this as page 0 or -1 or something, so that I can put it before the first one currently without messing up the numbering.

Q.: Did you decide on what name your Twitch-watchers should use?
A. (3:27:38): Yeah, I was actually thinking you could all be Hummingfluffs, since a hummingfluff is a cat mixed with a bird, like a little fluffy gryphon. So everyone who joins obviously gets the badge, and that means they are now a hummingfluff. That means I can design different types of hummingfluff, different types of cats mixed with different types of cats mixed with different types of birds, and that could be kinda funny. And everyone could pick what kind of mix they want to be. And then the crew would be like the Fluffness or the Fluffball, you know, where all the hummingfluffs live.
Q.: We can draw our own hummingfluffsona.
A. (3:28:31): Ye, exactly! Because there’s a lot you can do with that concept. So that’s what I kinda gravitated towards and what I think I’m gonna stick with.
Q.: Are you gonna art the crew as hummingfluffs?
A. (3:29:05): Oooh, that’s a good idea! Because then not only do I get to pick what kind of cat they are, colour schemes and that, but I get to pick some bird for all of them. Aaaah, that’s a good idea. Definitely going on the list of things that are gonna have to be done.
Q.: What kind of a hummingfloooof are youuu?
A. (3:30:22): I am the original hummingfluff, it’s a cat that has hummingbird wings, but it doesn’t have the long hummingbird beak, it has a short beak. And it is pale blue. That is in the icons, that’s me, the pale blue hummingfluff with little delicate hummingbird wings. And the colour is because the original hummingfluff name was what I use to call my Mega-Altaria when I used to play competitive Pokemon, and that’s the same colour as this Pokemon has. So that’s why my hummingfluff is that one and is the one that I’m using if I do like a logo or something (and the emotes).

Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, Process

Spoiler: show

Q.: You're having a fur nostalgia from all animals you drew in ARTD? Your fur is very nice to look at.
A. (0:35:25): Well thank you! Actually, I used to draw a lot of really detailed fur before I started A Redtail’s Dream, because I guess I wanted to be like an illustrator, and I did a lot of mythological creatures like gryphons and dragons, so I drew a lot of scales and fur really detailed. And feathers. And I also did anthropomorphic animals like tribal wolves with axes, and rabbits with hunting gear, foxes, stuff like that. So I did a lot of really detailed fur work. And I’ve gotten a little bit rusty because I haven’t done anything detailed like that that I used to. This is nothing compared to how much detail I put into that kind of fur back then.

Q.: [referencing the previous question] All of @Hummingfluff ‘s art is nice to look at.
A. (0:36:40): Aww, thank you! That’s really nice. Since I have gone through a lot of different styles in my life, and I will kind of flip through them now and then. And sometimes I miss one style, but some other style is the one I keep gravitating towards, so it’s nice to know that all of it is enjoyable.

Q.: I’m participating this Inktober and I hope I can keep it up ; u ;
A. (0:52:50): Yeah, I know I would not be able to. There’s the thing when if you are on a good streak, you get really pumped up because you’ve been a good girl, and you’ve been able to stick to something every day, but then if you miss one day? Oh, then everything falls apart, because that makes you depressed. [laughs] And then when you miss the next day, and then you start eating candy to make yourself feel good, and then you feel even worse; [high-pitched voice] ahhh! So, I’m just going to say, I’m not going to join Inktober because it would ruin my life. Maybe exaggerating a tiny bit.

Q.: I love how you work with ink and black n white balance in the picture How do you feel when there's enough of dark patches in the picture?
A. (0:57:22): How do I know when there’s enough black in the picture? That’s actually one of those questions where I just have to go “Oh, you know, when I feel like it!” or “Oh, when it looks good!” [laughs] That’s kinda it. Mostly I’ve learnt to see what’s the good amount of black by studying other people’s work, so I have a big library of really nice inked black and white pictures in my mind and know what they look like, and I also know the kind of images that I don’t like, that look too messy for me. So I’m trying to imagine those pictures in my mind and do similar sort of levels of black and white, and dark and light, and detailed areas vs low-detail areas. So that’s really it. I’ve built a big library of references in my mind and I try to go with those. A lot of it isn’t conscious, I’m not thinking about it much, but I do know that I have those images in my mind. It’s not some sort of innate thing that I just know from nowhere, I’ve definitely done some studying by trying to look at other people’s work.

Q.: You're so patient with every part of the illustration, that's so amazing
A. (2:34:35): Well, thank you. Yeah, it’s what basically you have to learn if you want to do any sort of illustrations that take more than a few hours. You have to learn a lot of patience and kinda get to a place where you’re able to sit just with your thoughts, or lack of thoughts, and not get incredibly bored and want to stop in the middle of a painting. I’m kind of blessed in the way that I don’t mind just sitting with my thoughts, I always have something to think about, I don’t really get bored that way. Sometimes I get frustrated with an image if I’m working on it for hours and hours and I feel like it’s not getting any better. But if I feel like I’m making progress, I don’t mind the fact that it’s going to take me tens of hours in the case of larger illustrations.
Q.: I'm gonna learn that patience.
A. (2:36:54): Yes! It’s a good thing to strive towards. And you know, it’s gonna take time, I obviously didn’t start out just being able to sit and work on the same thing for days on end. Like when I first started to want to do arts kinda seriously, it was amazing as I was able to work on one thing for more than five hours, and it was very rare that I would continue something that I started one day and continue it the next one. By the time I went to bed, no matter where I had gotten to with this piece, it was finished. I was not gonna continue on anything. But slowly-slowly you get that two-hour piece to four hours and to six hours, then you get to ten hours, then you eventually make something that takes twenty hours. I think I got at my most illustration-driven point I was doing fifty-hour paintings. I think one time even maybe eighty hours. And even that isn’t crazy, I hear a lot of illustrators who do proper, really serious illustrations that are meant to be used for big video game releases and stuff like that as advertisement, spend over a hundred hours just on one piece, because it has to be perfect.
Q.: 80 hours?
A. (2:39:44): Yes. That is not even exceptional in the world of illustration. If someone works 40 hours a week,which isn’t even that much for people who are working as artists, people tend to work at least 60 hours a week, that’s something that’s gonna take.. Those are the kind of people who release two grand pieces every month. But they usually get paid by the hour, and those pieces will get thousands of dollars for one, because they are used for important marketing purposes, and those art pieces are usually a really big part of what sells especially video games, those really big promotional artworks. They kinda brand the whole game.
Q.: I can do a few hours but I think the most I ever spend on anything was about 25?
A. (2:41:01): Well, 25 is really good. What’s the most I’ve done in several years is probably also around 20-30 hours. I haven’t done the big 50+ hour pieces in many years. And this one is probably also not gonna take that long, I think it’s gonna take maybe 30-40 hours at most, since there’s a lot of characters and several backgrounds that are gonna need to be rendered. But yeah, even 20-30 hours is really good.

Q.: Do you find the limited palettes helpful when working on a piece? I've been trying to work more digitally and I feel like I get overwhelmed with colors.
A. (3:23:34): Yes, personally I have trouble when there are too many different colours in a piece, because it’s really difficult to balance them. Well, even here I have just 5-ish different colours, but they are kinda in specific ranges: I don’t have greens, I don’t really have yellows, I don’t have certain blues. It definitely helps, it’s a lot easier. If anyone’s getting into painting, I’ve heard that it really helps just to start with black and white and then start adding colours slowly. First do black and white and then black and white with red highlights and details here and there and then instead of black and white you do blue and white and red highlights, and you add colours one by one as you get more used to them. And just using three colours you can get so many different combinations like yellow and purple and grey and orange and turquoise and blue. And then you add white and black into the mix and you get so many different cool combinations. It’s so much easier than trying to work with all the colours in the world. Even if you look at photos that people take - the ones that I gravitate most to, that I think look the coolest, are the ones where the photographer has chosen a scene that has some sort of limited colour palette. It’s very rare that I like a photo that has all the colours. That kinda looks childish to me, since children's toys tend to have red, blue, yellow, green, purple on maximum intensity. It just doesn’t look as pleasing to me as limited colour palettes, on top of it being easier to manage.
 
Q.: Limited palette is one of the things I really love about your work!
A. (3:26:14): Thank you, thank you! I’m really glad. Some people don’t like it, some people say that it’s cheating, because you are fooling people into thinking that you have a lot of colours going on, but then they look closer and “Aaah! It’s only three colours, that’s cheating!” It’s the same kind of people who think it’s cheating to draw digitally, that it’s not real art unless you do it by hand. You get weird purists like that, but definitely don’t listen to that, actual professionals know (who are really good at everything) also say that you should start with limited palettes if you are trying to learn. And then, once you have learnt to use limited palettes, then you can try to use all the colours, and then you can decide what is your style and what do you actually like the most.

Writing: Character-creation, Pacing

Spoiler: show

Q.: How did SSSS start? Did you come up with the characters and then the story? I have some characters I have ideas about but I can't quite figure out storytelling.
A. (1:46:22): My first ideas were the concept, not the story or the characters. I was thinking about what if some sort of catastrophe happened, a disease outbreak, a pandemic would happen, where would people in the Nordic countries be able to survive? I wasn’t even thinking about making a story, I was just imagining it in my mind, like where would people be able to survive, and I would look at Google Maps if I was bored and try to see what are good places for people to live. And after that I started thinking about stories around that concept. And then with that came the characters, and then I eventually decided that I wanted to actually make it into a proper story. And then the characters and the plot kinda co-evolved: one thing would change in the plot and the characters would change with it and vice-versa. So yeah, it was really the concept of a post-apocalyptic scenario in the Nordic countries.

[JoB]

A. (0:30:55): [...] there might be a sauna scene. But that won’t be just fanservice, it is gonna be a regular story-kinda-relevant scene.

... now if only I could figure out which member of the cast could possibly star in the comic's next sauna delivery ...

A. (1:11:53): [...] Well, I don’t want to say that trick-or-treating is like threatening people, but in a way it is since it’s “give me candy or I’ll ruin your yard” or something, and that doesn’t really fit well with the Finnish culture.

Now that sounds like the Finns have unruinable rock gardens everywhere.
(I guess that you have to grow the stuff to build your sauna furnace somewhere, though ...)

Q.: Did you decide on what name your Twitch-watchers should use?
A. (3:27:38): Yeah, I was actually thinking you could all be Hummingfluffs, since a hummingfluff is a cat mixed with a bird, like a little fluffy gryphon. So everyone who joins obviously gets the badge, and that means they are now a hummingfluff. That means I can design different types of hummingfluff, different types of cats mixed with different types of cats mixed with different types of birds, and that could be kinda funny. And everyone could pick what kind of mix they want to be.

It certainly is, but I have to say that that idea's been around ...
(Including hummingbird based ones.)

[Windfighter]

It certainly is, but I have to say that that idea's been around ...
(Including hummingbird based ones.)

Good argument, but Minna's hummingfluff predates the ones you linked with like 1½ year!
(Even more if I remember correctly about that being what she went with since forever on the internet...)

Either way the concept of fluffy birdies have probably been around since forever. I'm sure you can find medieval art of catbirds if you went searching, they drew a lot of weird stuff back then

[Róisín]

They surely did draw some weird stuff, Windy. Especially those knotwork animals used around the edges of illuminated manuscripts or as capital letters. Not to mention the strangely elongated and distorted ones used as supporters in heraldic blazons.

[Kis]

Chatlog! Stream from last Friday where Minna was inking a page. Doc here.
Note: if you know Finnish, consider helping us with one of Minna's answers in misc information about alibi pronunciation.

chatlog_051018

Characters

Spoiler: show

Main Cast

Q.: Emil is being a pretty boy as always, like "Woman will you ever shut up and let us do our stuff in peace, proper rest is needed to be pretty"
A. (0:13:44): Yeah, he’s being very fancy over here. But he’s gonna be lucky in that Mikkel and Sigrun are kind of separated from him with a hallway; he’s gonna have plenty of piece and quiet on his side. I don’t know if he’d actually appreciate it that much. I’m sure he apparently doesn’t have to necessarily talk with Sigrun or Mikkel all the time, but I’m sure he would also like someone to listen to him talk, and Lalli isn’t the greatest at that all the time.

Q.: Of the crew, which would see the idea of eating a grasshopper the least strange?
A. (0:15:55): Hmm. I guess Lalli might, in the sense that he would understand the pragmatic parts of it, being a scout and having to eat whatever is around. And I guess Mikkel maybe too.

Q.: So much fluffiness. [about Kisu]
A. (0:33:27): Yes. Kitty is always going to remain very fluffy. Even though she’s going to be an adult in this story, since she would be getting closer to being 1 -year old, I guess. Or at least over half a year old. I guess cats are kinda adults or adult-looking by that point.

Q.: My friend thinks Emil looks like Ted Gärdestad, do you agree?): If you know who he is.
A. (0:45:45): I don’t know, I’m gonna google it right now. [Googles] Oh yeah, I guess, kinda. He’s like a singer or something. Year, there’s definitely a couple pictures here that make him look like Emil. I wouldn’t object. Emil would have a more refined nose, though, more sculpted. Aristocratic nose. And obviously Emil has the He-Man haircut [laughs]. Every time I see a picture of He-Man I can’t help but think of Emil. Which is ridiculous, because the hair is the only thing they have in common.

Q.: Kitty gets scritchies
A. (1:54:20): Yes, she does! She gets grumpy when she doesn’t get them for a long enough time. I think this person’s [who scritches Kitty] job is literally just to make sure Kitty has everything she wants. He is the cat servant on the ship or at least quarantine part of the ship.
Q.: Quarantine cat manager.
A. (1:56:31): Yes. I mean, it’s a pretty good job - you don’t have to clean dirty dishes or dirty other things, that’s some sort of quarantine manager otherwise would have to.. I guess he would have to clean the cat litter, but that’s easy-peasy.

Q.: At the time this page takes place, how far into quarantine is the crew?
A. (1:54:54): A week, I think? Yes. I had to think about what the dialogue is gonna be, because I knew t from the dialogue. It won’t be too long, but definitely longer enough that boredom is going to start creeping in over the relief of not being out in the wilderness anymore. And Kitty is definitely not too approving of her suddenly very tight quarters. But she does have her running apparatus, so she’s not dying from not moving around.

Q.: If the crew had managed to confirm Tuuri's infection back in chapter 15, would they have done something else aside from keep her in isolation?
A. (2:06:08): Mmm, I have to think a little bit. There really wouldn’t have been anything that could’ve been done. Maybe they would have tried to facilitate some sort of.. easy way of dying? Because that’s really what would’ve been done for people who would do get infected - they would be sent somewhere, like a hospital-type setting, to be allowed to die the same way people with terminal cancer are allowed to die faster but as painlessly as possible. Yeah, I’m not really sure what they would have done, it would be a lot of drama-fighting.

Q.: Would the books be as long at quarantine as the crew?
A. (2:21:33): No, they wouldn’t need to be, because the pathogen dies fairly quickly if it’s outside a living body or a host, so they wouldn’t be as crucially confined. But they would be going through some sort of UV light treatment and drying off and everything. I think they would probably be in treatment for a few days.

Q.: What is Emil looking at in that last panel?
A. (2:37:04): Well, you will have to see on the next page! I’m obviously strategically ending this page on the kind of panel where the reader will have to say “What IS Emil looking at in the last panel? I guess I’m gonna turn the page and continue reading.” Very strategic. I’m not even joking, I do think about that. This panel could have easily been the first panel of the next page, and this panel [indicates to second-to-last panel] could’ve just been the last one ending right here, but I made sure it ends on this panel rather than this one, which doesn’t open any questions of what is the next page about. Which is a good thing to at least keep partly in mind when you script your pages. If there is an easy spot where you notice that you have used a few panels that you can squash in a little bit earlier to create some sort of page-turning prompt - it’s usually worth it to be getting into the habit of ending pages with some sort of I guess mystery. Even if it is the mundane kind, not every page needs to end with someone looking like “Aaaah!ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ”
Q.: Well what is he reading?
A. (2:39:13): I don’t know, I haven’t decided, really. I guess he’s reading a proper book, you know, Sigrun’s reading a picture book. Emil is educated enough that he actually can read if he is bored enough. He’s not the bookish person, but he will definitely be able to semi-appreciate a good book.
Q.: He's reading Allt om spadar!
A. (2:39:48): [laughs] Re-reading it, I guess.
Q.: If he's reading about ducks, does that mean he's trying to figure out what the duck in his dream meant?
A. (2:41:59): I mean, Emil didn’t even notice the duck, so he would be completely unknowing about it.
Q.: Is he reading Donald Duck?
A. (2:43:47): No, he’s reading an actual book, not a comic.

Q.: Mikkel talks a combo of Copenhagian and Bornholmska though.
A. (3:27:54):Yeah, I haven’t been too good at defining exactly what kind of Danish he actually speaks. I’ve just been able to say “I guess it would be some sort of mix? Aaaah?” since a lot of non-Bornholmian people would have been able to flee there and mix in their dirty regional dialects with the local one, muddying up everything.

Q.: Would any of our mage characters rather not be mages? Also would any of our non mage characters rather be mages?
A. (3:31:36): Nah, I think they’re all pretty happy being what they are. Sigrun certainly would want to be a mage, because the Norse kind of mage are typically in non-combative roles and she thinks they are lame and are kinda like office ladies. And Emil.. I mean, maybe he wouldn’t mind so much, but he doesn’t have a big craving for becoming a mage. And Reynir’s obviously very excited about having some cool abilities.  And Mikkel.. Maybe he would appreciate being a mage, but nah, I think he would get bored of it like he gets bored of most other things.

Q.: This is so out of topic but I wonder if we will ever see the characters cry?? I feel like we haven't seen that at all.
A. (3:33:00): I guess I have done the thing where it’s implied that they’ve been crying, or some of them on the side, kinda in the shadows. I don’t know, I’m not- I mean, it’s possible, but I guess I’m not too into the showing someone directly crying. I feel like it’s just as impactful as to just imply it. You don’t need to actually draw the tears and snot and everything and them grimacing their wrists together or anything. That’s just my personal preference. I know in a lot of comics and manga the crying parts are really amped up because they are big emotional scenes, which is water flowing everywhere, gigantic eyes, faces distorted to keep maximum emotional impact. And you know, I just don’t really feel it that much, I feel it more when you understand that crying is happening but it’s necessarily not shown. The most impactful one is someone’s face in the shadows and you can kinda see a single tear hanging off their chin or kinda dropping off there. The ones where it’s like just complete waterworks or several panels and people screaming - it kinda loses its effect.

Q.: Would Tuuri have liked to be a mage, since she was the only one of the younger Hotakainens without powers?
A. (3:35:35): Yeah, I think she would have really liked being one. But on the other hand, since she wasn’t immune, she wouldn’t have gotten too much out of it, she would have still been kinda trapped inside the walls in a way. So she would have much more preferred to be immune rather than being a mage.

Q.: Has any of the crew improved on their foreign languages in the week they've been in quarantine?
A. (4:13:43): Probably not, no. One week wouldn’t be enough that any of them would be jumping into the joy of learning new languages. At that point they are still kinda winding down from the excitement of finally being in a safe place.
Q.: Sigrun looks like she's done winding down already
A. (4:15:22): Definitely, she would have been the first one to. Two days, maybe, and she’s kinda recovered from her arm injury fever, and now she is ready to get out and back into business. But she’s certainly not going to be learning any more languages.

Worldbuilding

Spoiler: show

Q.: What other new jobs occured after the Rash besides cleansing and kitty petting?
A. (2:28:23): Hmm, I don’t really know about new jobs, a lot of the old jobs that are mostly done by machines these days would have been become more needed - more hunters, farmers, horse caretakers and riding instructors and stuff like that. Probably a lot of carpenters, people who would supply the things that won’t be made in factories anymore. Glassblowers, carpet makers, pottery persons.

Q.: Would there be people at universities studying memes?
A. (2:44:40): No, there would be no universities with all the modern classes of underwater basket weaving or whatever it was. There wouldn’t be time or resources to be able to put into.. Let’s just say it, useless things that are offered at universities these days, it would be more like hard sciences and trade-oriented universities, it wouldn’t really be...fun classes, time-wasting classes. There would just be very straight-forward universities, the few universities that exist (there wouldn’t be many), most people would probably be training to become just something like a smith or a teacher or a baker or a carpenter or a sheep raiser or a horse trainer or a farmer. Or a fisher, or a hunter.
Q.: Don't you love underwater woven baskets?
A. (2:46:22): Yes, I collect those. I buy them all the time on the eBay and I like to smell what kind of different waters they’ve been woven under. I can smell the sea water or the lake water or the swimming pool water.

Rash, Magic and Ghosts

Q.:  What exactly is the progression between someone contracting the Rash and losing their sanity and turning into a cannibalistic troll?
A. (2:10:36): Very slow is the answer. Like, when the world ended, society would have already collapsed from just people dying regularly from the disease, and everything collapsing, and starvation happening and everything, before people who were still alive starting to mutate would have become.. that dangerous. The first few weeks and months would have been mostly troll-free. And they would have slowly emerged from houses where everyone else had died and they have been just lying somehow alive, transforming in their beds and hospitals and basements, wherever people had started hiding. And those who had maybe family members who got sick and didn’t die, they would have protected them while they were mutating, hoping that they were still in there, and they would have been for a while, but eventually they would have become unresponsive, unable to communicate properly. And sooner or later become something that had been killed or would kill the caretaker.

Q.:  If one gets bitten on a removable limb like a hand, will cutting it off save the person?
A. (2:12:38): Yeah, if it’s done fast enough that the blood in it doesn’t spread to the rest of your body. And if you get bitten in a very active vein with high blood pressure, there’s not a lot of time to cut it off before it’s already in the rest of your body. But if you just get flesh wound, then it’s gonna take a little bit of time for pathogen to get absorbed into your body and get around. And of course the less of it in your body the less likely you are to get it, like with most diseases: if you only get a few viruses of something then you might not get it because the viruses might just die from something and there won’t be enough of them to overpower the immune system. So yeah, if you do get bitten in like a finger, cutting it off immediately would definitely improve your chances to not get it immensely. But if it’s a big wound, then the chances that cutting it off would save you are so small that the chances of you dying from sepsis from getting amputation.. you’re more likely to die from the amputation and aftermath of that than be saved from doing it. So it’s not necessarily the best way to about it unless you’re bitten on the hand or a toe

Q.: Is the immunity gene recessive or dominant?
A. (2:15:00): Recessive I guess, I feel like. I haven’t actually decided or made a scientific chart about how it is inherited, there’s a lot of mystery about it. And it can emerge spontaneously, I guess within family lines who haven’t had it before. All I know is that it’s definitely highly heritable, but it isn’t guaranteed.

Q.: Finns go to Tuonela when they die. Does that mean Sigrun would go to Valhalla?
A. (2:19:21): Yes.

Q.: Are new ways of doing magic getting discovered/made? Like new spells etc. Are following generations of mages stronger than the previous?
A. (2:40:02): Yes, I would say so. New spells are developed and discovered. And new ways of doing things. Which would make sense in a “scientific” way, because a lot of folklore and information about ancient spells are very partial, there’s a lot that was never written down properly, and has since become lost. So it would make sense that if magic was real and [] that people would have to rediscover a lot of the lost information and continue the development that stopped ages ago, since there would be now more people doing it and more people working on something. Simultaneously trying to find new ways of doing increases the speed at which new things are discovered in proportion to how many people are doing it and with how much vigor.. And at times like these it would be very important and rewarding to come up with the more effective spells, since they can mean literally life or death.

Q.: Can a non-Finnish person convert to Finnish belief system and if so, would they be treated like a Finn (having a Luonto, entry to Tuonela after death, and the like)?
A. (3:01:03): Hmmm. I think that would be trickier, because the Finnish gods aren’t really that involved in human interaction, or they don’t really interact with humans or pay much attention to them unless they are directly addressed or asked for favours. There’s no one who would be able to grant a converting Swede or something their luonto. That’s something that comes with birth. So I don’t think it would really work out. But I think the other way around could work, like someone could start worshipping the Norse gods, and one of them could be like “Yeah, I like this person, I’m gonna make sure they get into Valhalla and I will give them my favours.” But maybe some of them would be able to.. If Icelandic mage would want to become a Finnish mage, they would probably be able to, if they learn Finnish fluently, probably ask a favour of the Finnish gods and that way kinda become part of the Finnish world. But they wouldn’t be able to get a luonto, I don’t think. And getting into Tuonela - that would be tricky, I guess? Maybe you would be able to get into Tuonela if you were good enough or you had maybe another Finnish mage to kinda guide you, I guess you would need the guidance to get there. So if someone would be able to ask the Swan to bring you over instead of you going to Valhalla.. See, I didn’t really thought about that beforehand, so I’m speculating the rules of my own comic universe.
Q.: Oh my, I asked a hard question.
A. (3:05:24): Yes, it was! I think that would be one of those situations where maybe I wouldn’t want to give too specific answers, because.. Maybe it’s something that hasn’t really been tried a lot in the world yet, it wouldn’t have been that many years. A couple decades, maybe, since the Finns and other Norse people would have gotten into contact with each other. So there wouldn’t have been a lot of overlap in mages trying to adopt the other pantheon instead of their own. Like, why would you? Unless you’ve fallen in love with someone from one of the other countries. So there would be a lot of variables. Something would maybe be possible with enough trying and effort and power. And other things maybe would never be possible, because they will be things that are granted by birth. Or to birth. Or at birth?

Q.: Did Denmark, Norway or Sweden ever have their own mages?
A. (3:37:22): Yeah, they kinda do. Those who are discovered to have mage powers are usually trained in Iceland, since they are of the same stock, they don’t have different kinds of powers that the Icelandic ones, and Iceland has the best facilities for training.

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related

Spoiler: show

Q.: What’s a hummingsona?
A. (0:02:04): Well, last time we were talking; since a hummingfluff is a mix of a cat and some sort of bird, like any cat breed and any bird species, like you can have a parakeet mixed with some sort of Persian cat, and people were thinking they wanted to design their own little hummingfluffs.

Q.: Why did Hannu and Ville have to "kill" Puppy-Fox in the end before they could leave?
A. (0:20:22): I don’t quite remember (it’s been 5 years!) but I think it was like… If I remember correctly, he had a Grandmother-fox or something who wanted to punish Puppy-fox, and he had to experience death for the pain of it. So they were kinda given that task as the last thing to do by the Grandmother-fox.
Q.: They just needed to want to go home, but what Hannu really wanted was to kill Puppy-fox and that's why they had to do it. Puppy's grandmother was all like "yeah okay, have fun with it!"
A. (0:22:43): Okay, thank you. See? My readers know better than me what my plot was.
Q.: I mean, Puppy-Fox is a jerk, but I felt bad for him when he got killed. x)
A. (0:23:07): Yeah, but obviously everyone knew he wasn’t actually getting killed, it was just ‘hunting the jerk’ kind of moment, and everyone knew he was going to be okay afterwards. It was more like on the level of seriousness or severity as grabbing someone and throwing them in a lake, like a frozen lake. They would be just really cold and angry for a while, but nothing really bad would happen to them.

Q.: Is there any theme to the second adventure that the first one didn't have?
A. (0:27:42): Kinda. It has a lot of different themes. I won’t tell any of them (I don’t think) yet. But it’s not gonna be the same sort of ‘salvaging books’ kind of adventure. There will be completely different reasons for going out.

Q.: How much did you learn how to program until you were ready to start working on your game?
A. (0:51:17): For a few weeks I only did basic exercises with some sort of online instructor, you know, watching a video and they show how you make some super-super basic program. And after that I started doing exercises online from tutorials, but I kind of started working on the game through those exercises, like I would modify them so they would fit into some part that I wanted for the game. So I guess I started on the game fairly quickly, because that made me not get really bored with it. But honestly, it took a few months of exercising until I was able to do anything on my own, without a tutorial to show me exactly how to do it. Like, the walking script or moving around - that’s all from a tutorial, step-by-step how to code in Unity, and it was one of the earliest ones I did. And I had no idea how to do any of that on my own or even think through the problem. If I mistyped anything I would have to go through everything to find what I had mistyped, because I couldn’t understand what could be causing the problems. But I still use that code because it works and it was from some tutorial. But it’s still in the game and I have no reason to switch it out for something better because it’s good! But yeah, I started working on the game really fast, I just used tutorials that helped me make the game to learn. And now I’m at the point where I don’t really need tutorials, if I run into a problem I Google around trying to see how other people have solved that problem.

Q.: [Windy gave the link to her hummingfluffsona and Minna said she couldn’t look at it]
A. (0:55:47): Everyone else will be able to just click on the new link right now; I can’t really because I still have the really slow laptop, and it freaks out if I try to open anything more than the one Twitch-tab that I have open. But I have been eyeing some new laptops, kind of looked what kind of price range some sort of decent work-oriented laptop goes for. They are fairly fairly expensive; obviously, laptops are very expensive to get the sensor power that you have in your regular computers into such a small space, but I guess it’s worth it? I’m such a cheapskate, even though I know I’m going to have a lot of use of it, I always have a big hard time committing to buying something expensive for my workspace. Like, I haven’t updated or bought a new computer in, like, five years [laughs]. Even though I could use a new one, and I do have the money to buy it, but I’m just really cheap, and I probably won’t buy a new one until this one literally breaks on me.
Q.: Saaaame, I need to get a new laptop… But I bought watercolours instead of saving xD
A. (0:57:55): [laughs] Yeah, I mean watercolours can be surprisingly expensive. Like when I used to still use watercolours, and obviously paper, just the paper and watercolours and new, black markers for inking- that was a lot of money. Like people say that they can’t afford Wacom tablets, like the basic ones for a couple hundred, and that’s why they stick with traditional for years and years. But when you think of it, those tablets will last you for- I haven’t upgraded mine in seven years, I think, (six or seven years) and it’s still working and all the money that I haven’t spent on traditional materials is definitely more than what I spent on this tablet. Traditional art is expensive, unless you’re going for copy paper that you got for free from, like, that you stole from work or something, and regular pencils, that you can get 100 for ten bucks. Yeah, it’s not a cheap hobby. And there’s obviously the thing that digital art is going to get more and more cheap constantly; soon you will able to use any regular tablet, will be powerful enough that you can do art on it. Like iPads are already powerful enough that professional artists, some of them completely skip the Wacom tablet + desktop, and just do all of their work on iPad, on one of the programs from there. And other tablets are going to be just as good in a few years, I think, and then people won’t even need to buy an additional drawing tablet if they want to do digital art. But traditional art, it might get a little cheaper I guess, but there’s really a limit how cheap you can get when there is physical stuff to pay for, like paper; you’re always going to have to pay for the wood that has gone into creating that paper.
Q.: I can’t stand Windows 10.
A. (1:01:14): Mmm. I think I have Windows 8 on my computer still, since it’s almost a decade old by now. And definitely all the bad things I hear about Windows 10 are making me a little bit hesitant to buy a new computer right now. I think I had Windows 10 on some tablet that I used briefly, and I do seem to remember that I didn’t like it, so that’s also adding to the ‘Hmm’ feeling of investing a couple thousand in a new working computer that’s going to be my main workstation for the next five years. I’m kind of hesitant buying one with Windows 10 if it’s so negatively reviewed, I guess. From what I remember, it seemed really heavily designed for tablet use, and that’s obviously not great when you are a desktop user.
Q.: I've got Clip Studio for iPad. It's a very good port. Though drawing in public makes me nervous.
A. (1:03:00): [laughs] Well, you don’t need to draw in public, you can just draw at home, on your sofa. And in public you just watch movies. [laughs] I never draw in public anymore. If I’m out and about going somewhere, waiting in the dentist’s office or at the bus stop or anything, I’m not even going to bother drawing, I don’t take any sort of drawing materials with me. Drawing is for home, where work is. Which, I guess, is easy to say since I’m at home 99% of the time.

Q.: How has your week been?
A. (1:18:03): My week has been.. I’m trying to remember. What day is it today? Ah, it’s Friday. What have I done this week?.. Have I drawn anything? Hmm. My week has been very mysterious, in that I can’t remember what I’ve done. So yeah, that’s my week! I guess I’ve been mostly resting. No wait, I actually had to prepare stuff for the book launch. That I have done. But other than that, my week have been relaxing and mostly fairly uneventful, which is good.
Q.: If you can't remember, you did nothing bad, right?
A. (1:19:46): Riiight, or you did something so bad that you have to hide it somewhere deep in your brain. I definitely haven’t driven over any old ladies because I don’t own a car. So I can always say that is not on my ‘bad things I’ve done’ list. But usually if there’s been a really crazy thing happening in town, some horrible murder, and then you come along and say “I have no recollection of anything I’ve done this week!” - it’s usually not a great sign, you might become the main suspect at that point.
Q.: You bike them down haha.
A. (1:21:12): I did kind of bike a kid down once. I blame the kid though. I was biking home from school - and, in my defence, I was a teenager so that’s okay, a teenager can bike down a kid - and the stupid kids were running back and forth across the street and I tried to slowly bike past them, but of course one of them ran right in front of me. Thankfully, I have already slowed down to a tiny, tiny crawl, because the chances were pretty high that one of them was gonna run in front of me, so that happened and it was very annoying.
Q.: What if you /stole/ a car and drove over an old lady?!
A. (1:22:04): I mean, I don’t know how to drive, so that would definitely be a miracle. [laughs]

Q.: How's Kitty?
A. (01:22:33): She is sleeping in the sauna as usual. I think she’s gonna be probably sleeping for a few hours. She had a really active period for...like only an hour ago, she’s been kind of awake most of the day. Which I guess is kinda good. She’s sleeping mostly when I’m sleeping, and very adorably has started sleeping in my bed, usually around my feet. So when I wake up and go “oh no, where’s Kitty?” I can usually kind of look over like “Oh there she is, sleeping next to my feet.” On the negative side, it always kind of makes me worried that...you know, if I wake up and accidentally kick her. I don’t want to do that.

Q.: Well we can always give you the purrfect alibi Minna! [about poor old ladies who were supposedly hit by car]
A. (1:23:52): “Well we can always give you the purrfect..” [tries different pronunciations of ‘alibi’] Hm. Have I ever heard that word pronounced? I’m sure I have, I watch enough crime shows that it must’ve come up. Thank you, yes, I can always claim that I have been totally streaming all week long. I was definitely not out and about when that old lady got ran over. [laughs lightly] The hypothetical lady that was ran over.
Q.: Ah- lee -by.
A. (1:24:40): [tries to pronounce the syllable breakdown] I don’t know if that was correct, because when people do the English pronunciation thingies like that, I don’t always know how to properly pronounce the little snippets. [tries to pronounce it “ahh lee bye”] [laughs] See, it’s getting worse. I doubt either one of them was correct.
Q.: [Minna tries many variations suggested by chat while laughing, like: uh lee bye, ah leh baj, ella bye, ale bi, a-la-by, al-ih-bi, and alley bye].
A. (1:25:17): [Minna tries the pronunciation variations]
Q.: Can someone Finnishize it?
A. (1:26:04): Yes, that would be very helpful. Well in Finnish, I think you would just say ‘alibi’ [pronounced: ahh-lee-bee] [Minna speaks Finnish here and I cannot transcribe it, someone who can please do so?]
Q.: YES [to the Finnish alibi’s similarity to the English pronunciation]
A. (1:26:37): Oh, the Finnish one is the same as English, ‘alibi’. Good good.
Q.: The Finnish one is like the German one sounds.
A. (1:27:05): Nice. Well, it would make sense, since obviously it’s a loanword, so it’s probably come through Swedish, and that would probably be really similar to the German one, and English one.
Q.: English is totally wacked. (but at least you don’t have to remember the gender of everything *glares an France*).
A. (1:28:54): Yeah, that’s the same problem with Icelandic, when I’m trying to learn that. And not only does it have two genders, it has the third one, the neutral gender, so I have to remember three different ones. And I’m just like *arghh* [laughs], why. But I guess you can’t really complain as a Finnish speaker, since their language has all of its own completely ridiculous rules, that make people want to kill themselves when they try to learn it.
Q.: I have no idea about genders in the Swedish language.
A. (1:30:44): Swedish doesn’t use the genders anymore, I think. Well, it kind of does the ‘en’ or ‘ett’, those are the ones that are in Icelandic too, but the third one is, for some reason, not in Swedish anymore. It would be an ‘en’ with two n’s, like ‘enn’? I don’t remember which one is the masculine and which one was the neutral. All I remember is that ‘duck’ is a feminine word, because when I’d read Donald Duck, ‘duck’ obviously comes up in a lot of words. And even male ducks, if they have ‘duck’ in their title, like, not in the name, but there’s the superhero form of  Donald Duck, he’s like ‘Stálöndin’ or something like that, it’s like ‘Steel Duck’, and he’s always referred to as she, even though it’s a male character. But in it he is referred to as ‘The Duck’, and duck is female! It always trips me over, so that’s why I remember that one specifically.
Q.: I thought Swedish merged male and female and kept neuter?
A. (1:33:31): That’s completely possible, too, because I don’t remember which ones were which ones. In Icelandic I only remember that the words that tend to end with -ur are the masculine ones. Like fiskur, köttur, hundur, I think. Yeah, and then the ones that don’t end with -ur are feminine ones. Like önd - duck is a feminine word.
Q.: What exactly is the contextual difference between using en and ett? [Swedish articles]
A. (1:40:28): There is none. That is the gender difference. One of them is masculine and one of them is.. or however it works in Swedish. But that is the only reason, which is why they are difficult to remember, they are things that you have to- at least for me it’s things that I only know because I’ve heard them spoken. And I’m pretty sure they correlate to something similar in German, so if you know the genders in German you probably know them in Swedish. They are the same in Icelandic as they are in Swedish.
Q.: So like French where some words are masculine and others are feminine?
A. (1:41:41): Yes, it is the same exact reason. I guess it’s a commonality among Indo-European languages. English is an exception, I believe, in that sense that it’s one of the very few languages with relation to those languages that don’t have the gender system anymore. And one of the signifying or identifying aspects of Finno-Ugric languages is that none of them have any gendered words, not even for pronouns, they are completely -- I don’t even know what the word would be -- non-gendered.
Q.: I would just go stick to japanese, because it has no gender, but I'm still functionally illiterate because I can't read a lot of kanji.
A. (1:43:04): Yeah, probably most languages in the world have non-gendered language structure. It is probably an Indo-European part of how the languages have evolved.

Q.: So what do you think about your comic driving a lot of people to try to learn other languages?
A. (01:43:44): It’s good. It’s always good to know other languages. Obviously it’s going to become probably less important as different translation software becomes more common, and obviously the big languages are going to become more standard, like everyone’s gonna know either English or Chinese, you know, Mandarin or whatever, or I guess Arabic, or, what’s a fourth language, Spanish maybe, in the Southern Americas. Or I guess Russian maybe would be a fifth contender for languages to learn. But the amount of languages you need to learn in the world is decreasing. Nowadays the only reason to learn any language other than those is usually some sort of cultural interest, you usually don't need them for business. Like you don’t need to learn Swedish if you want to do business in Sweden, internationally everyone will know English, same with Finnish. And obviously translation applications will be more sophisticated, learning languages will become more and more like an interesting thing to learn, like learning to play music. Something to expand your way of thinking and just have something to spend some time on to relax. That’s really why I kinda have learned a little bit of different languages, like Estonian and Icelandic. I just wanted to learn something when I was really stressed out in school, I started to learn just to take my mind off things. I didn’t really want to learn “useful” languages because then it becomes stressful because you have some sort of reason why you’re learning them. But yeah, I think learning languages can be really therapeutic. And you always gain respect from people if you can say, yeah, I speak more than one language. If you speak more than three I guess you become a polyglot, or some other weird word for people who know a lot of languages.

Q.: [Minna talks about rain]
A. (2:17:57): Hm, I think it suddenly started raining a whole lot outside. I thought I had weird static for some reason coming up inside my head, like in my ears, which usually precedes a dizzy, fainting-kind-of-spell, and I was like “Oh-oh, I’m gonna be feeling not so great right now,” but turned out it was just a crazy amount of rain coming my way. Which is good, I like the rain. Like most people do, it’s very soothing. Then you don’t have to go outside. But even going outside in the rain I really don’t mind unless I’m going somewhere where I want to be dry. If I’m going just for a walk, I don’t care that my clothes get wet because I know I’m gonna be able to go right back inside in an hour when my walk is over and switch into something dry and warm. Water is not able to hurt me.
Q.: RAIN IS GODLY.
A. (2:19:37): Yes, it is. It is the bringer of life! Any place that has a lot of rain is a place where plants can grow and animals can live. Which I guess is why humans would have a reason to, biologically speaking, have some sort of affinity towards rain - you want to live somewhere where there is rain. So if you get some sort of stress attack and freak out everytime it’s raining you probably would try to find a place to live where there’s no rain, and then your whole tribe would starve to death because there wouldn’t be anything to eat around.
Q.: Rain smells nice.
A. (2:20:51): Yeah, it does. In the summer. Now it’s autumn and there’s a lot of dead leaves around, and the rain kinda makes them smell, everything smells like wet mushrooms, the grass is starting to rot and die. I don’t enjoy that too much. But in spring and summer rain definitely smells really good.
Q.: I once lived in a place where it didn't rain for most of the year. It was awful. The weather report had nothing to say except "how hot" and "UV index".
A. (2:22:39): Yeah, humans are not supposed to live in those places where it doesn’t rain, and so are most other animals. And I guess you can say the same about cold places, which explains why most people in the world don’t live in the driest parts of the world nor the coldest parts of the world. Most people live where the water is, in places where monsoon seasons and stuff happen.

Q.: Sooner or later Minna will make "duck" trigger the censoring machine.
A. (2:42:42): It would make sense, because people also use the word ‘duck’ as a way to get around other often censored words, or, you know, a very specific one. Actually, there is two words - ‘duck’ and ‘dick’ - that can be replaced with the word ‘duck’. So I’m sure ‘duck’ is censored in some places. Someone gets really annoyed with people using the word ‘duck’ as a replacement for other words and then censors the word ‘duck’. It would make people use the word ‘dunk’ or ‘dink’.

Q.: Do you eat duck? If so, do you like it?
A. (2:48:16): I don’t think I’ve even eaten duck. It’s kind of a bird that’s not really eaten in Finland, people just eat turkey and chicken. Duck I might have eaten in Chinese food buffet, I feel like I’ve eaten it, maybe. If so, I don’t actually remember how it would have tasted. I’m sure I would like it, I’ve never tasted a bird that I haven’t liked. And those birds would be turkey and chicken. And maybe duck. Actually, my maybe closest taste of duck would be duck-flavoured noodles? Yeah, noodles with that flavour pack, that would have been duck-flavoured. And I seem to remember that was okay, I don’t remember anything specific about it, but yeah, that’s my wide experience with “duck”.

Q.: HI MINNA DID YOU SURVIVE?!
A. (2:54:31): My break? Yes, that sure would be interesting. No, I didn’t survive my break, I did a lot of stretching and fell over and couldn’t get back up! You would just hear me screaming in the background like “Some please call the ambulance! My address is this and this! I have broken my legs! I have stepped on my cat and broke everything!”

Q.: I want a Finnish spitz but according to the hunting people I'm not allowed to get one so.
A. (3:20:41): Why not? Did they give a reason? I know they aren’t the kind of dog you’re supposed to have in residential areas, because they are famous and bred for barking at pray, so you can’t own them unless you live somewhere where you don’t have direct neighbours. Which means there are a few around here, I see people walking their Finnish spitzes. And they live in places where they have big yards, where the dog can be out in a big outdoor area and bark at walker-bys a.k.a. me, which is very annoying.
Q.: Well they're hunting dogs so I guess they have to do that to like, feel good.
A. (3:22:16): Oh, that could make sense. People around here definitely have a lot of hunting dogs, so I guess it would make sense that they are actually going hunting with them. And I guess breeders who breed specific breeds have, you know, good ones, have stipulations of what you actually have to with the dogs if you get them. So it would make sense that the breeders would say that they won’t sell the dogs to someone who won’t take them hunting. Or at least take them out into the woods to run around and chase birds.
Q.: Yeah apparently they have to pass a hunting test to actually be bred too, so that the hunting gene is strong, and the breeder won’t sell to someone who won’t hunt.
A. (3:23:55): Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, when my dad wanted to get his collie dog he had a very colour pattern that he wanted, which is the same colour that my cat has. I think he’s got a blue merle or something like that. It has grey and light orange instead of brown and black as its pattern. And he wanted one of those and he had a really big trouble getting one, because nobody there wanted to sell them to a person who wouldn’t take them for god shows, because those patterns are I guess kinda rare and the breeder want them to be taken to shows, so that their precious special pattern dogs will be seen all over the world. So he was eventually able to get one that had like a flaw, so that it wouldn’t be able to be taken to shows anyway. But yeah, apparently breeders have a lot of demands, especially for specialty breeds. Obviously anyone can get golden retrievers and stuff like that, but rare dogs and dogs that are bred for something very specific I guess understandably would be..

Q.: I wanna tell you it's been amazing to see the journey through Denmark (mainly because I'm Danish) and I can't wait for the next adventure. But I'm gonna leave now to keep my mind spoiler free! Love the comic! Praise the cats! Cya!
A. (3:25:58): Yes, I’m also excited for the next adventure and it was fun going through the Danish part of the story. Kinda getting myself familiarized with the countryside and places in Denmark. Obviously, I visited Denmark beforehand to see a lot of the scenery for myself. But then - Google Street View is very handy to get to see what things actually look like somewhere.

Q.: Is the 2nd adventure the final adventure, or will there be a 3rd?
A. (3:26:49): It’s kinda the same situation as I had with the second adventure. It will depend on how I feel like a year before the second adventure ends. If I feel like continuing, there will be a third adventure, and I know the plot of it and the character developments that I want to save for the third adventure. So yeah, there will be if I’m not burnt out on the story in a few years.

Q.: Did you guys play Habbo?
A. (3:46:30): No, I did not. A lot of people my age did, however. I think back when that was anything I didn’t have consistent access to a computer, I feel like we only had one computer in the house and everyone got like half an hour on it, so I really wasn’t able to play anything that was online-based. Or really play any video games on the computer at all until I got my own one.
Q.: My childhood was "500 games on one disc" games.
A. (3:47:31): Oh, those are horrible! I didn’t have one of those disks, but me and my brother had a knockoff Game Boy type of thing that was ‘500 in one thing’, and they were all- the best one was Tetris, and  that was the only one that was playable, everything else was garbage. Especially slight modifications of the same simple games.
Q.: My brother had a cheap 100-in-1 NES ripoff. It was shaped like a penguin, and you had to push the beak in to power it on. And its eyes lit up. x)
A. (3:50:03): Wooow! I feel like those types of insane gimmick devices aren’t really made anymore, that’s something that will really belong to that part of history. Nowadays the gimmicks with gaming platforms or devices is that they come in dozens of different skins, like the Nintendos DS and I guess the Switch now too - they all come in, you know, the Zelda version, the Pokemon version, the Mario version, the Peach version, the Golden Peach version, so people waste their money on that instead of the penguin-shaped thing with eyes that light up. Which is a good business for Nintendo, I assume it doesn’t actually take a lot of resources and investment to print a different skin on the same device. It’s like printing money. And I can’t really say anything about people who do pay premium for those skins, because when I did buy my 3DS I did pay extra for the one with the Pokemon skin. And I can’t say I regretted it, it was really nice to look at. And if I did want to buy one of the new ones, I would do the same.
Q.: I was very tempted to get the Zelda version of the 3DS <_<;;
A. (3:52:10): Yeah, they are nice. A lot of the designs that they make look classy, some graphic designer actually thought about it. They’re not just some cheap screenshot plastered all over it, they tend to be properly designed to look a little bit timeless. Which makes sense, because most of the premium skins, the people who are paying for them aren’t usually kids who just want device, their parents are just gonna mostly buy the cheaper version. The people who do pay for the premium skins are gonna be adults who have the money to spend, geeks and nerds, and they want something that looks classy.

Q.: This might be a bit random, but which camera did you use for those Iceland trip pictures you posted? I usually shoot on film, but I really liked the look of those photos you posted.
A. (4:11:43): It’s Olympus, I think. I can see the camera right now, it’s in front of my face, 3 meters away on a shelf, so I don’t actually know what the specs are, but the brand is Olympus. It has one of those lenses that are I guess all-purpose lenses. I read in reviews that it’s very useful for lifestyle bloggers - it’s decent for close-up photos of people but also decent for landscape photos. It’s definitely not a high-end, I think it cost 200 euros, the camera and the lense that it comes with. It’s a few years old by now, though, I’ve had it for probably 5-6 years, so I’m sure there are newer, better ones in the same price range.

Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, Process

Q.: ...hearing Hummingfluff say "perspective is difficult" honestly feels very good?
A. (3:15:01): Well, good. I definitely don’t think that everything’s easy for me either. Thing become easier the more you do them. And when you do run into a tricky spot that you haven’t practiced that much, then all the difficulties are right back there. Or when you notice that you’ve actually done a mistake, then it’s always difficult to try to work around that mistake. I feel like I have some sort of perspective issue going on with this [indicates on the screen] and I’m not really sure what it is. Trying to add hallway perspectives to it just made it look weirder, because there is some sort of error. And in those situations it can be better just to leave out some parts of the perspective and pretend like everything’s okay.

Q.: When you pick the color scheme for each chapter, do you choose it based on the mood of the scenes?
A. (4:05:22): Yes. Mostly based on the mood. And I have thick folders of colour ideas, colour inspirations, I tend to kinda go through them if I have no idea what I want to do for the next chapter, and feel out the colours based on what the mood is gonna be and pick one that fits. But usually I have some idea long beforehand, and everytime I see some photo or picture that has that kind of colour scheme that I’m thinking of, I will save it in a folder named after the chapter so that when it’s time to start drawing I have my colours laid out for me beforehand.

[Mebediel]

We cut it pretty close with this one, but here is the chatlog from two weeks ago when Minna was working on this. Transcript Googledoc is here (we might need to consider cleaning it up because it's now 300+ pages long). Apologies for the Epic of Gilgamesh-esque holes in some of this log...a few answers got muted in the saved video.

chatlog_061018

Trolls

Spoiler: show

Q.: Can the Rash bears be scared off by shouting "PERKELE!"?
A. (00:18:50): No, I don’t think they scare that easily. They’re fairly agitated. Kind of like bears that are in pain or have freshly woken up from their winter slumber. They’ll just get angrier if you start screaming at them.
Q.: So animals that normally hibernate will still do so even when infected by the Rash?
A. (00:21:00): Some of them might, yeah. Since animals don’t change quite as much as humans when they are mutated, so many of them would retain their need and physical ability to hibernate.

Q.: Can trolls only speak if they had absorbed humans? So a troll that is purely from an animal does not?
A. (2:22:48): Yeah, they wouldn’t be able to speak from their mouths. An animal might be able to communicate through their telepathy kind of way, at least some sort of emotions, but yeah, speaking audibly, they would need some sort of human intellect but also vocal chords.

Characters
Main Cast

Spoiler: show

Q.: Are we going to see the crew+Onni deal with what happened to Tuuri?
A. (00:17:45): Sure, yes.

Q.: In regards to losing teammates throughout her career, where do you think Sigrun would rank Tuuri?
A. (00:27:02): You mean like in how sad it made her? I guess medium sad. She’s definitely known friends that she’s known for years that have died. And when she would have been younger, she would have been fairly upset the first time someone she knew would have died on her team. But the fact that Tuuri was in her charge, that was traumatizing in a different way because it was kind of her fault in the sense that she was responsible for the team.

Q.: As a farm boi, is Mikkel good with short range weapon like axe? Would he be able to strike a troll if he thought it was a piece of wood?
A. (0:50:02): No, because even though Mikkel has grown up on the farm, he’s not very good at maneuvering farm equipment. His twin brother is far better at that stuff, which might be one of the reasons why Mikkel isn’t at home on the farm.
Q.: He has a twin brother?
A. (0:51:00): Yeah, I’ve only entered it in a bonus picture I drew years ago. I think I gave some sort of hint in the comic because some people did guess it beforehand, since so many of you people always like to speculate about things, and I remember that point of view where people correctly speculate “hmm, does he have a twin brother?” It was either that or “does he have an older brother?” One day you might get to meet Mikkel’s parents and brother in the comic. Don’t know.
Q.: *whispering* page 629 has his twin!
A. (0:52:10): Oh, yeah! I did draw the crew in the family tree. That was after I had confirmed it with the picture I think. But yeah, it has kind of already been made canon in the comic, but in a very low-key way. You could have easily missed it if you didn’t go through the family tree with a magnifying glass. And I don’t remember if the family tree actually showed ages, so I don’t know if you’re able to tell that it’s definitely his twin brother rather than just some brother that shares his facial features.

Q.: How would everyone in the crew react to going through a haunted house/haunted attraction?
A. (0:54:18): Haunted house, eh? Well Mikkel obviously would react like this [indicates picture. He would be calm and unimpressed]. Sigrun probably wouldn’t be scared, or she would be like “Haha, I’m totally not scared!” and something really stupid, like one of those jump scares would scare her. Lalli would be annoyed and stressed out by it. Emil would be very annoyed by it. And Reynir would enjoy it.

Q.: Does Sigrun like hugs?
A. (1:01:27): Yes, she does. She’s not too stuck up for hugs. She’s not too proper for hugs, to rephrase that.

Q.:Who would engage in internet beef vs who would watch from the shadows???
A. (1:53:44): Sigrun would definitely be constantly drawn into every single argument. She’s not able to control herself too well, her emotions. She would be one of those women who sits by the computer and jumps into every single argument, from one thread to another, on Twitter and in every YouTube comment section she would be arguing with all the crazy comments [laughs]. Until Mikkel would have to come around and drag her away from that comment section. And Mikkel would be trolling people. He would be the kind of person who would cause Sigrun to answer. Lalli wouldn’t care, Onni wouldn’t care. Emil wouldn’t get involved, that might be difficult unless someone said something about his appearance, then he would forget that he’s too cool to get involved.

Q.: Is there something Sigrun won't do?
A. (muted): Hmmmm...I mean, she won’t read a book, like a proper one.

Q.: In the crew, who would be the most likely to make ligma jokes and who would be the most likely to fall for them?
A. (muted): Emil would definitely fall for a ligma joke the first time and become really huffy about it. Like, “Hm, stupid joke.” He would be annoyed on the inside, he would pretend that they didn’t affect them at all. Sigrun would make them all the time, once she figured out how the joke is structured. Mikkel would use it once [] Lalli would not bother, and Reynir would also not bother, so it would be Sigrun and Mikkel. Sigrun would run it into the ground really fast.
Q.: Mikkel would definitely make a ligma joke to Emil with the most stone-faced look imo.
A. (): Yes, he would. But he would only do it once. He does not want to repeat jokes in the same company.

Q.: Would Sigrun be the meme queen?
A. (muted): No because she wouldn’t have the patience [] she would reuse really simple memes [] She would be the one who keeps sending memes to people, and they would be like “Please remove me from your email list [] She would be the one who discovers the meme two years later. []
Q.: Rip everyone who is on Sigrun's email list.
A. (muted): Yeah, that definitely [] It would completely be cat pictures that she finds on the internet, and old memes and [] and pictures of cool outfits or something. The most annoying content that [].

Q.: Who in the crew would like memes?
A. (muted): Sigrun again, and Mikkel. Reynir would probably also appreciate them. Emil would just think that they’re stupid, peasant humor. He would be the first one to become annoyed by repeated memes.
Q.: Reynir’s the one who sends whatever wholesome memes he finds to people, Sigrun spams memes in chat.
A. (2:01:20): Oh, that’s a pretty good assessment. Yeah, and Sigrun would definitely eventually get banned from the chat and be like “What did I do? I didn’t do anything!” and believe it, because she wouldn’t understand that her spamming memes was annoying people.

Q.: You've said that Emil is a very Pretty Boy, is he aware of it? Is the rest of the crew?
A. (2:16:44): Yeah, he’s aware of it. He knows he’s a very handsome person with very good genes. He knows it, and that’s one of the reasons why he’s very arrogant. But he used to be overweight, so it kind of overshadows some of his good bone structure.

Q.: Will Onni and Reynir be using a mask in the story?
A. (2:18:14): Yes, but they won’t have them on in this kind of promo picture, because it looks cooler to have them [without?]. At least I think I like being able to see the faces of people in this kind of promotional art.

Q.: What would Lalli post to the group chat?
A. (2:29:17): What is a group chat? Is it like a Discord? Because I know a lot of people use Discord, and I don’t. I’m really bad at all this modern stuff, even though I’m supposed to that age where you are really in on all of it. Let me know what group chat is?
Q.: I think by group chat they mean a theoretical chat with everyone in the crew in it.
A. (2:30:52): Ah. So what would Lalli post in that. I feel like he wouldn’t post anything. I think he would be kind of annoyed that he would have to be posting anything and he would copy one of those ascii art templates and post something really gross so that he would get kicked out. Like some genitalia art or something like that. I’ve seen people get very artistic with their spams.
Q.: Lalli would leave the group chat and start a private chat with Emil about blueberries and snakes, right?
A. (2:33:00): Yup. Emil would start the group chat with Lalli because Lalli would definitely kind of semi-reluctantly stay. He wouldn’t be that active, but he surely wouldn’t mind it as much as the initial group chat.

Q.: So Finland and Onni in this arc?
A. (muted): Yes. We’re gonna find out more about Lalli’s, Onni’s and Tuuri’s past and the place where they lived before. []

Q.: Since it's that time of year, how would everybody carve their pumpkins?
A. (4:09:38): That would be interesting. I cannot think that pumpkin carving thing would be part of any Nordic culture. Pumpkins in general, the kinds that Americans have, the big orange ones, I never really see them. They’re not grown properly. There are smaller kinds of pumpkins that grow, summer pumpkins. If they were carving pumpkins, Reynir would carve some sort of happy dog face. Sigrun would try to carve the scariest thing she could carve, but it would be some sort of generic angry face. Lalli would...he wouldn’t carve a cat because he doesn’t really like cats... he would carve a rat face, just to be contrary. Actually, maybe he would just stab a hole in the pumpkin and leave it at that. I wonder what Mikkel would do.
Q.: How would the crew carve their turnips?
A. (4:11:41): Is turnip carving a thing in the real world? That would be kind of funny. Turnips are kind of good for carving, like potatoes are. You can carve a pattern in a potato and use it as a stamp. We did that in school. You could use a turnip for the same purpose.

Q.: Would anyone of the crew like broccoli or mushrooms or pumpkins? XD
A. (4:24:34): I guess Mikkel would, he wouldn’t say no to them. Reynir would also like them.Or not maybe like them, I’m not thinking any of them would like broccoli. Those two wouldn’t be too opposed to broccoli, but mushrooms, they are obviously a big thing in the Nordic countries. I guess I’m not the most difficult person around in that I hate mushrooms. My brother also hates mushrooms, but most normal people enjoy mushrooms. I don’t think my brother even hates mushrooms anymore. He might have grown out of that as an adult. But I never did, I hate mushrooms. Going out to pick mushrooms and frying them on the frying pan or above an open flame is a very popular thing that I really can’t partake in. The mushrooms look kinda good, especially the plain brown ones and the kantarell.. whatever they’re called in English, the golden yellow ones, they look so good. Mushrooms soups, especially when drawn in cartoon form, like in the Moomins they would usually eat mushroom soup, and it looked so goood! But I know I don’t like mushrooms! I just hate the consistency of them. My brain doesn’t understand what it is that I’m eating. I’ve only actually eaten mushrooms once, my dad tried to trick me into eating it when I was a kid, he made some sort of meat stew and put some mushrooms in there and tried to claim that they were reindeer meet, and that’s why it felt different than regular. Me eating it was like “This is not reindeer meat! I know what reindeer meat tastes like! This isn’t meat, it’s mushrooms! Aaaaah!” Because he thought that me and my brother were just being like ‘ew, mushrooms’ and if he could just get us to think it was meat and eat it we would actually like it. He didn’t believe us that it was the consistency of it that was gross.

Q.: What would Lalli do if Reynir accidentally grabbed his butt?
A. (4:52:26): Roundhouse kick. No. If it was an accident, he wouldn’t even bother acknowledging it. If it was a repeated accident, he would give him a death glare and then bite him? Or stab him. No, not stab him, Lalli isn’t reckless with his knife, he’s well-trained. He knows not to stab people.
Q.: What if it was one big slap on the booty?
A. (4:53:39): From Reynir? He would react the same way as someone punching him on the shoulder. He would be very annoyed. He wouldn’t be too aware of the more joke-y implications of that. If it was a repeated occurrence he would definitely cause some pain at some point. Either by punching or by poking someone’s eyes. Maybe not to the point of causing blindness, but to the point of causing great pain.

Q.: What kinds of things is Emil good at?
A. (5:14:41): He’s good at talking, I guess? I mean, he’s a loyal person. He’s a good friend, he won’t backstab people. And as that he’s a good, dependable soldier; in a bad spot he won’t run away. He might run away from something gross when it’s not life-or-death situation, but when it come to actually doing his duty and protecting the people he’s supposed to protect or stand his ground when it’s real time - then he is dependable. Other than that, he’s not exactly skilled at anything. He would be very tempered, very mediocre-skilled person otherwise; isn’t that passionate about anything or has any particular skills.

Q.: I'd like to know what kind of dance would every team-mate dance. Like... Ball dance for Emil and so on.
A. (5:42:36): And [viewer] said “Sigrun flamenco.” Yes, this was a topic that came up quite a while ago, a couple months ago. Flamenco was the one that I determined for Sigrun. Mikkel I don’t remember, but I would say some sort of barn square dancing. Something like that? I don’t know. I think that’s something that would be appropriate on a Danish farm. Maybe square dancing is an American thing? And Emil... Yeah, I guess ballroom dancing would fit him. Lalli - obviously nothing. Onni - also nothing. Or if he had to it would be tango or something, that’s very popular in Finland.
Q.: Who twerks?
A. (5:44:11): Nobody. Urgh, can you even call that dancing? I’m sorry, but I’m going to show my old woman grumpiness here. I must say that I shake my head at people these days. I recently saw a video of someone twerking at their wedding and it was definitely... There were children, and it does a very explicit wife on husband performance. And it definitely made me go “Mmmh. Those children are going to not forget that.”

Q.: Is Reynir going to get trained to be a proper mage?
A. (5:49:08): He is going to get some training, yes.

Q.: Do you think Emil would be popular on Instagram?
A. (6:22:15): In our world, certainly. I guess his problem would be that he’s fairly short. But on Instagram he wouldn’t have to show that, he would just have to photograph his face. He would certainly have a lot of young ladies swooning over him.

Q.: How tall is Emil?
A. (6:23:24): I haven’t properly determined everyone’s height yet. That’s one of the things that I promised that I would include in the characters section when I redesign the website. Because I know everyone’s height in relation to each other, but I haven’t decided the actual height of anyone, like in centimeters, so I’m not able to deduct anyone properly yet. And I’m going to line them up and make sure everyone’s heights actually sound normal-ish when I decide on them. I don’t want anyone to end up be 1 meter and 40 centimeters accidentally.

Secondary Characters

Spoiler: show

Q.:When will the Madsen family run out of names that start with M?
A. (1:07:22): I don’t actually know. I don’t know all of the Danish names. I have picked the ones that they have used from various ‘top names’ on Danish government websites and stuff. You know, that chart ‘what are the most common names in Denmark.’ There’s quite a few that start with “M,” but once they run out of them, not every family’s going to have 20 children, they are going to reuse the same names for the next generation, like people tend to do. Give the same name as the parent, like father to their son, and it’s just “Jr.” or something until their father dies, and then the next generation becomes “Jr.” So there’s no too much urgency coming up with new names. And people do come up with new names. Modify traditional names just a little bit. One letter here and there and suddenly it’s a new modern name. One letter here and there and suddenly it’s a new modern name that’s still culturally relevant, because it’s just a modification of an already established name.

Worldbuilding

Spoiler: show

Q.: If the religious folks go to their respective afterlives, where do the Swedes and Danes go?
A. (0:35:36): They would be claimed by the Norse gods.

Q.: Does SSSS world have hair dye?
A. (0:40:23): Maybe. Some hair dyes are fairly easy to make. I know people can slightly bleach their hair by putting lemon juice and sitting in the sun, and it slowly bleaches their hair, a little bit faster than it would by just being in the sun. But I don’t know how difficult it is to make dyes that would make it blue or red. If it’s really difficult, then  I doubt they would have it because there won’t be a lot of time and resources that can be put into frivolous things like that when the societies are still trying to rebuild, those are luxury items and products that can be made when societies are already at the point of our modern societies, when we have everything in excess really. People are able to spend money on things like hair dyes rather than food and food for farm animals.

Q.: So even if the Finnish characters go to a separate afterlife place, would they still be able to find other non-Finnish people like in Valhalla or something?? Could they communicate or see each other at all?
A. (0:42:00): After death, you mean? Well, the Finnish afterlife is not the same kind as heaven or Valhalla where you would be conscious. The Finnish afterlife is that you sleep forever frozen in ice. So yeah, that’s it, it’s the eternal sleeping state. The only way you would be awake is if someone goes to Tuonela from the living world, like a shaman or something, and wants to speak to you. But other than that, you wouldn’t be walking around visiting people. You would be sleeping. Resting forever.

Q.: Are gonna see manalanrakki in the next arc?
A. (muted): Possible. I’m definitely gonna try to include more Finnish mythology beasts. []

Rash, Magic, and Ghosts

Spoiler: show

Q.: In SSSS-verse, were there people who would have counted as mages in modern times before the Rash came?
A. (00:12:27): Not really. The emergence of magic is kind of tied to the illness sweeping through the world in one way or another, so there wouldn’t have been mages if modern times had just continued on.
Q.: So Pastor A. only got her powers when she trollified and not before?
A. (00:17:55): Yeah, but her powers are kind of different from the mage powers of Reynir and Lalli, since the powers depend on what kind of religion or faith or mythology one belongs to, and her god was the Christian one, so her power was from her God, rather than from her.

Q.: If a mage shaved their hair off, would their Luonto also lose theirs?
A. (2:52:12): No, no. That would be silliness.

About the Cover

Spoiler: show

Q.: [Minna talks about the progress she has done on the illustration so far, and also talks about cars in the forest]
A. (00:05:06): Since last time, I had worked on the corners so that you can actually see what’s going on. As you can see, you’re going to have some sort of bears here. And we’re gonna have our calmer forest with the car pileup. I’m going to have to make the cars a little worse for the wear. I think in 90 years in a forest there’s gonna be more moss and stuff growing on them. I’m not going to make them completely disappear from rusting; I know cars that have been in the forest for like 50 years are half gone already, at least the ones that I have seen around here. And yes I have seen a lot of abandoned cars in the forest. For some reason at some point in Finland, decades ago, people who didn’t have that much money would leave their old cars in the woods instead of taking them somewhere to be recycled, because I guess you have to pay a garbage fee or something. So anyone who owned a little bit of forest would just drag their car into the woods and leave it there. So you occasionally find patches where there’s like 10 cars just rotting away, and there’s one such patch in the forest nearby here. Maybe I should take a research trip down there, take some photos and properly observe what has happened to them, because I really just looked around quickly, I didn’t study. And here we’re going to have a little bit of an interesting creature.
Q.: Modern cars rust much less than 50 year old cars =)
A. (0:07:20): Yeah, I heard that. There’s some sort of improvements in the steel, I guess. Or maybe the coating. So I’m gonna say that’s the reason, scientifically.

Q.: Is that thing in the bottom a person, a ghost, or a beast/troll? [about the drawing]
A. (0:10:32): “What’s that at the bottom?” Something scary!

Q.: Were those beasts once brown or black bears?
A. (00:12:57): Brown  bears, I think. Because those are the kinds of bears that are prevalent in this area. I don’t know if black bears are a thing that exists? In the wild at least. It’s not something I’ve ever seen depicted.

Q.: Is the left bear headless? [about the drawing]
A. (1:43:20): It is indeed.

Q.: Does the bear in the center have Onni's spear stick in its throat?
A. (2:06:19): It’s going to be an older spear, it’s not going to be Onni’s spear. It’s a more ancient wound, like a scar, except the spear is stuck in there. Really brings me back to my early teenage years when I was first getting to know the webcomic world on the Finnish side of things and everyone was doing dog adventure kind of webcomics because they were inspired by the ninja dog manga, Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin, and one thing that keeps coming up was that all the dogs would have really cool scars and that kind of things teenagers would come up with. A very popular thing was dogs that had that kind of scars where they had some sort of an arrow or something stuck to their throat or face, a warrior dog, so this is really reminding me of that. Especially since that manga and anime had the bears that were the big things, like Akakabuto and his three sons. Someone also said that this reminded me of that, and it definitely does, except instead of the dogs that are drawn by teenagers having the spears [stuck?] to their face, I have not done it. The mutated bears instead. Going back to my roots. Not really my roots, I didn’t really do that kind of comics because I hadn’t read the manga or seen the anime, so I wasn’t really capable. I did really bad other types of comics.
Q.: That's a large splinter.
A. (2:08:38): Yes, a carefully sharpened splinter.

Q.: The moon got infected and mutated?
A. (2:30:28): You mean that it was irregular? Yeah, I don’t think people would buy that explanation.

Q.: Are those troll bears the evil representation of the "hear no evil see no evil speak no evil" monkeys?
A. (2:34:08): Oh no, I haven’t thought about that at all. This one here [the left one] wouldn’t hear, speak, or see any evil. This one [the central one] would be able to speak evil, I guess, and maybe this one [the right one] would be blind. But yeah, this guy over here [the left one] has all of them going on for him. No, that was not my intention and won’t be the characteristics of them. And this one [the right one] is missing its paws, so it can’t feel any evil. Can’t scratch any evil. It has bone-sticks for legs, it can do some fairly good scratching or stabbing with them.

Q.: What caused those Bear Fingers to be so long?
A. (2:35:36): I was going to make a joke about Red Riding Hood, “Why is your nose so big and ears so big?” So that they can claw you better! I think I saw a picture of a bear that had been shaved or something, and they have really big, weird gross hands. I was a little bit inspired. Big paws are a characteristic of bears that you notice easily, and I wanted to do something with that because bear paws tend to, even with the claws, be kind of cute, but not when they are without fur and have long fingers - then it’s not cute anymore.
Q.: Bears are definitely in the top 10 animals that should not be shaved ever.
A. (2:37:35): Yes. Can you imagine a breed of bear that was like a naked rat? Like those mole rats that live underground? Imagine a bear like that. Now that I’ve started talking about it, I kind of want to make one of the bears kind of furless. That’s going to be something that I have to think about, and I will edit one of the bears off-stream if I do decide to do that, because it would definitely be very disturbing. I feel like I might to that with this one [the right one, which she actually did]. Since they all are going to be kind of distinctive in their behavior and their danger level, and having one of them be furless would be appropriately disturbing. At least partially furless, it doesn’t need to be completely bald, but most of the fur had fallen off because of rotting.
Q.: Hahaha do it Minna.
A. (2:39:21): Yeah, I think I’m going to. It’s too disturbing not to include, and I’m not going to have a fourth bear. This is going to be a triade of bears. Too much of an opportunity for grossness to not to. This one [the left] already has his thing going on, he’s missing head, it’s going to have really freaky legs and holes. This one [the right] is going to be better because it obviously has stuff going on with it legs, it’s going to have gross stuff going on with his face too. It’s gonna fit well to have it also lose its fur, because it’s kind of sickly shaped. It’s going to be the kind of behavior I have kind of conditioned it to have.

Q.: Are these bears actually going to appear in the comic or are they just supposed to contribute to the mood of the cover?
A. (2:42:20): They’re gonna appear in the comic, they’re going to be fairly.. essential foes? Maybe significant is the word I’m looking for. But yeah, they will be on the cover because they are actually important.

Q.: What's that tiny light in the tree? Liekkiö?
A. (muted): I will not tell because that would be spoilers.

Q.: What’s the middle picture below the crew?
A. (muted): Something very interesting. []

Q.:  It has been determined that the thing at the bottom is a scarf mummy. Is that close?
A. (5:42:01): [laughs] Visually you wouldn’t be wrong. Definitely looks like a scarf mummy.

Q.: Does “it” only have one eye?
A. (6:23:07): You mean this one? Yes. One big bad eye.

Q.: I'm chuckling at the fact that Reynir is basically bodychecking Emil in this shot.
A. (6:24:44): I am not familiar with that word. What does bodychecking mean? I hope it doesn’t mean something extremely inappropriate. [she didn’t answer back when we explained it]

Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, Process

Spoiler: show

Q.: Have you posted your brush settings anywhere or did I dream of it?
A. (1:03:52): I did post the set that I bought that has the set that has the brushes I use a lot that aren’t default brushes, but most of the brushes that I use are the ones that come with Manga Studio. I don’t think I’ve made any changes. Everything in this picture, like the lineart I did with the mechanical pencil, I have one that’s a little bit of a lighter version and one where you don’t have to press that much, and these are all the default inking pencils that come with Manga Studio. And I use the g-pen that’s meant for inking, and I use it for color. I have a few brushes that aren’t default that I actually like, that’s water detail, gurgle, and dry watercolor, those are nice. Especially these two [gurgle and water detail]. Those are all from the same set that I guess I can post a link to the chat.
[posts in chat]: cool brush set>
It’s the link to the person’s DeviantArt page and it’s like 5 bucks. There we go, that’s the link to the one that I like. I haven’t posted any of my Photoshop brushes. I have a lot of custom brushes here. I haven’t made any of them myself, but they’re from free brush sets that you can find on the internet. But since I haven’t done any Photoshop drawing on stream and you haven’t been asking for them, there’s no point in me posting them before I show how they work for me.

Q.: I found some good manga studio brushes that I like
A. (1:12:07): I’ll try to remember to check those out. I still have my old laptop where it isn’t possible to open any links without it crashing. I do wish I had more interesting brushes in Manga Studio. I feel like the brush engineering is fairly limited compared to what brushes can be made in Photoshop. I don’t actually know how to make custom brushes in Manga Studio, I kinda know how to make them in Photoshop, so I don’t know how it works, but I feel like almost all of the Manga Studio brushes that I find are very soft, even the ones that are supposed to emulate some sort of brush stroke as acrylics or something. They all feel fairly digital and soft while in Photoshop, I’ve actually found a good amount of brushes that have that gritty, almost random feeling of actual brushes, like dry media brushes, really clumpy acrylics and oil paint, stuff like that.

Q.: Have you tried Sketchbook?
A. (1:15:05): No, I haven’t tried it out. I don’t really care about free programs, they tend to be free for a reason. They might be good for beginners and might even be good for professional work, but I’ve become accustomed to a lot of the features that exist in the paid programs, and I’m willing to pay for them. I don’t mind the price when it is the thing that I’m able to produce my living with. Like if Photoshop could improve by 20%, I would be willing to pay 50% more. At this point the money matters less than the quality of the program.
Q.: Sure there are stuff missing... Layer options are abysmal, but these artificial brushes are rad.
A. (1:16:51): Well, I might have to check it out, I’m definitely interested in brushes that are able to emulate traditional art media as naturally as possible, in the way that it feels and looks kinda similar, but I haven’t found any that really do that. Which makes sense, because usually what’s needed to emulate the natural artwork needs a lot of computational power and someone who’s good at programming but also knows how traditional media works. Someone who’s an artist but also good at directing a program.

Q.: Can we bother you for official SSSS-prompts for inktober next year?
A. (1:18:21): Hmm. Oooh, that would be difficult. I feel like I have bad imagination for anything when I’m asked for it. Maybe. Right now I’m trying to come up with anything and my brain is completely empty, so it might not work out. I feel like you guys are better at giving me ideas than I would be at giving you ideas.
Q.: You have the BEST imagination!
A. (1:19:48): I feel like I’m able to come up with enough ideas that I can paint one thing every week and maybe a little bit more so that I’m accumulating ideas slowly. But an idea for every day? Even a little one feels very..
Q.: It would be fun to get them from our goddess and savior though, but if Hummingfluff says no we're not gonna bother her with it
A. (1:20:59): I mean, if you guys need it for the next year, I’m sure if you would ask me on stream a few months before October, then I would be able to better say if I can give any ideas. Maybe I would be able to come up with a few ideas per stream and collect them in time for October.
Q.: You don't need ideas, just words! Like last year we had six days that was just the crews' first names!
A. (1:22:24): Ah, I see. Hmm. So yeah, I don’t know anything about Inktober, I just know people try to draw things with ink, I don’t know what the prompts are supposed to be. I thought they had to be the actual concepts rather than just words. Sure, if it’s just words, I can come up with them. I’m not so inept that I wouldn’t be able to come up with some words.
Q.: Alright, I'll bother you with it closer to next October
A. (1:23:20): Okay, that would be a good idea. I will come up with some fun words for everyone. Maybe I’ll come up with them and write them down for myself and reveal them on stream. Obviously I don’t stream every day so I will reveal next week’s words or something like that every illustration stream. It might be fun. And maybe by that time I will have bought a proper laptop so that people would be able to post the links to anything they would be able to finish in the chat and I will actually look at them.

Q.: Your linework hatching (repeated lines...?) is so good. Is it calming to work on it?
A. (1:47:57): Yeah, it can ways. Like the stuff with the bears, I seem to remember it was kind of fun. When you have the outlines out, and you know what the shape is going to be, it’s fairly easy, and since it’s kind of messy, one line being wrong isn’t going to change anything in a bad way. Unlike line art in someone’s face, even one line off  is going to change the facial expression, that’s kind of...not stressful, but it takes a lot of brain power, while sketching is more relaxing.

Q.:  Do you have any good tips for clothing folds, and generally making clothes look natural? For someone with not a lot of experience drawing em.
A. (4:42:14): Hmm, that’s actually a tricky one, because I still struggle a lot with drawing natural-looking clothes. One thing that’s really important to keep in mind is always think about how the cloth is hanging on the thing it is hanging off of, like, where is the cloth actually touching the skin of a person or thing. Here [Reynir’s legs] it is touching the skin on the top and it’s stretching in these directions and the folds need to go in the directions in which the cloth is stretching off the skin. Here [Lalli’s legs] it is also touching over here, so there are no folds, it’s flat against the shin, but the folds are on the sides where it’s flowing off the side. And you have folds usually where it’s not touching the skin, so we have folds here on the sides where it’s kinda crumpling up in this direction. And here [Lalli’s chest] it’s crumpling up like this because Lalli is hunched over, so the cloth isn’t touching his skin, because it’s getting compressed. So that’s how I try to think about where it is. Like, here [Sigrun’s arm] it’s also touching Sigrun’s elbow, so the folds are radiating out of that point and stretching in this direction. Same here [another arm], radiating out from the stretch point. So I usually try to think about what is that direction where they are getting stretched out from or crumpled up into. That’s how I try to think of them when I draw them, because I do sometimes just draw folds kinda from memory that I have seen how folds are being drawn by other people, and I just see the image in my hand and I draw them. Which is kinda limiting in the sense that when I want to draw different kind of fabric and different folds in different directions, then I don’t actually know how to draw it, because I don’t have that image in my head, because I haven’t seen someone else draw them exactly that way. So I’ve been lately trying to understand a little bit better how the folds work. It also helps to build up a visual library, so definitely do look at the pictures that the other people have drawn and photographs of women in fantastic dresses of different materials, thin materials will fold in different ways, a leather dress will fold different than a flowing silk dress. And it’s good to build up that visual library to guide you. And drawing from reference now and then helps to cement those images in your mind, so that when you’re drawing on your own you can pull them up and compare them with the reference image in your head.
Q.: My problem is where to put the folds.
A. (4:47:13): Yeah, that is tricky. There I definitely get my information from looking at a lot of pictures of people in folding dresses and other people’s drawing of them. I’m memorising it and slowly getting to understand why something is folding in some specific places. Imagining it in real life, thinking about if I was wearing this sort of dress and then I imagine myself hunched over - where would the folds in that shirt be? I feel like I can imagine different clothes on myself and think about where they would fold.
Q.: It can be useful to wear clothes and just ogle yourself in the mirror.
A. (4:48:37): Yes yes. You don’t even need the mirror, everyone has a smartphone these days, so you can take pictures of yourself in different poses if you don’t have a full body mirror. Just put the phone somewhere with an automatic timer and take some photos of yourself.

Writing: Character-creation, Pacing

Spoiler: show

Q.: Might we expect a Chekhov's gun type of story element in SSSS? (like a small/seemingly unimportant detail that only later on becomes important in the story)
A. (1:41:08): Maybe. I do do that sometimes. I will drop some sort of detail that seems stupid or insignificant, and it becomes significant, and a lot of people catch onto that. They notice something as a “Okay, something is going to have to happen with this thing because it’s obviously a Chekov’s Gun kind of element.” But I don’t remember any specific ones that I’ve done.
Q.: IS THE DUCK A CHEKOV'S GUN!?
A. (1:43:35): No!

A Redtail’s Dream

Spoiler: show

Q.: What do you think Hannu's luonto would be?
A. (2:19:00): Well, I guess, very on the noise answer would be Finnish spitz, the same kind that Ville was, but that wouldn’t fit, because Hannu’s personality doesn’t really fit that mold. Not a fox. Some sort of grumpy, reclusive animal that would fit in the Finnish landscape. That’s a tough one! I haven’t actually thought of that one, and I can’t think of an animal that would fit off the top of my head. For some reason, I want to say the thing that...not a skunk but...not a beaver...big and white and has a black…[viewer guesses “badger”] a badger! Yes! You were able to guess badger from my drawing! Props to you. It was definitely hard mode on that pictography.
Q.: Wolverine?
A. (2:21:13):Wolverine would be really good! Yeah, I’m going to change badger to wolverine, he would able ease into that since it is an animal that’s part of the Finnish fauna, fits better than a badger. A badger I think is more common in central and western Europe.
Q.: Wolverine is cool and immortal so that means Hannu is still alive in Y90.
A. (2:22:15): I don’t understand that comment. I think I’m missing some sort of reference. Are wolverines immortal in some sort of mythology?

[Mebediel]

Pt. 2

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related, PART 1

Spoiler: show

Q.: Cat happy, timer set?
A. (00:03:37): Timer has not been set, so thank you! Thank you for reminding me. And cat is happy indeed. She is sleeping in the sauna as usual, but she was very active and very hungry just an hour ago. She ate all of her food, and then I had a soft heart and gave her part of the chicken I made: I cut off the gross part, the tendons had part that had visible veins, I usually refuse to eat those so I give them to her too, and then she was still hungry and wanted more chicken, and finally she went to bed.

Q.: What is your favourite season of the year?
A. (00:13:39): Hmm! That’s a difficult question. They all have their ups and downs. Autumn is definitely my least favorite because it becomes so dark for such a long time. Already now it’s kind of depressing, and I know it’s going to keep getting darker and darker every day for a few months soon. It smells like mushrooms, and that’s gross, and it’s wet and cold, so I don’t like it really. Winter is pretty nice. I don’t mind the cold since I’m able to return to my warm home and I have floor heating in my bathroom. That’s really important. I didn’t really enjoy winter when I lived with my parents. For some reason my parents’ home had roof heating. They had a really high roof or a ceiling and the ceiling was heated. Like, why? This way the whole house was really cold all the time. They would have cold leaking through the windows and poorly insulated corners and stuff. It just never got warm, but if you got close to the ceiling, then yeah, sure, that was warm. So back then I didn’t really like winter, also because I had to go to school every day, and the trains would always be late if there was even a little bit of snow. And that was kind of stupid, because you would think that in a country where it’s snowing all the time trains would be somehow immunized to it, but no, even a little bit of snow and trains would always be late. That was annoying. And of course we would have to help our parents to dig out the cars and stuff in the mornings. But now I like winter because it’s pretty and it’s lighter than during the autumn. Spring is really great, I think spring might be my favorite. There’s no bugs and it’s really light, you can go outside with kind of a light jacket. Summer and winter are kind of equal in my rankings. Spring is best, autumn is the least great one. Autumn also has moose flies, and I hate them so much.
Q.: Oooo, heated floors are the best.
A. (0:16:39): Yes they are! My cat likes them too. You can notice that it has started getting a little more chill outside because she always wants to chill on the bathroom floor because of the heat. And I also go there and stand there with bare feet in the morning if I’m cold and immediately get warm. I don’t think I will ever be able to move to a home that doesn’t have at least some part with heated floors. I’ve become too adjusted to this luxury.
Q.: In South Korea most places/apartments have heated floors.
A. (0:19:47): Oh, that sounds really nice. I don’t have heated floors in my whole home, I only have them in the bathroom/shower/sauna area. The rest is just regular floors, but I have really well insulated floors. So they are not cold during the harshest weathers during winter. When I moved in, we had to renovate the floors because they were old and cracking, and I specifically chose slightly more expensive flooring materials that was known to be really well insulating, and it was a good investment because they are indeed. They aren’t warm, but they also aren’t cold. I can walk without socks if I need to, even during winter. They stay pretty much the same temperature as the air in the room.

Q.: I've seen pictures of Finland where there are massive clouds of mosquitoes, is that usual?
A. (0:21:37): No, massive clouds of mosquitoes isn’t usual, but they’re definitely not insane. I think most people have probably experienced such clouds once or twice. They happen sometimes when it’s the perfect condition. In the evening, no wind, somewhere close to wetlands, when they have just emerged; there’s a thing my mom likes to call the ‘hyttysten yö’, which is ‘the night of mosquitoes’, which is when big batches of them emerge, and they you have a lot of mosquitoes for a few days before birds eat them and thin out the herd. I haven’t experienced a crazy swarm of mosquitoes, but my mom definitely has in the past because she goes hiking a lot more than I have, and met a lot of mosquito clouds and also the horse flies, the ones that bite, those clouds. One, I heard that she was hiking with her sister, they stopped the car somewhere on the way there, and some sort of horrifying humming sound started being heard from somewhere from some grassland, and a huge cloud emerged from there, and they ran inside the car, and the windows were splashed with these gigantic horseflies. I guess they saw their first meal in several weeks.
Q.: I'm glad that's not usual, I was very scared for you.
A. (0:23:37): I’m kind of impervious to mosquitoes in the way that if I get bit they don’t actually start itching unless I start scratching them, then it’s hell. But if I see like “Oh no, I have ten mosquito bites on my leg or my arm”, I can see them, but they won’t start itching until I touch them. If I let them be for a few days, they’ll go away, so I’m not as much affected by mosquitoes as other people are. I know people who won’t even go outside or go to certain place because they hate mosquitoes so much. Like, my dad had been thinking to move out to the countryside like I am, and then he visited one day and we went out to walk his dogs, and there was a lot of mosquitoes, and after that he basically said, “I think I’m going to stay in the city. I’m not that interested in the mosquitoes.” And I don’t mind mosquitoes at all. It’s really only the sound that’s annoying because your mind will instinctively get stressed out by the sound, because you’re supposed to want to get away from them, because for humans mosquitoes can be very dangerous in places where they carry diseases. So even though the mosquitoes here aren’t really dangerous, that stress reaction is instinctual anyway. So I can’t sleep if there’s a mosquito buzzing around my home.
Q.: I am a mosquito magnet. Other folks dont get bit when I'm around.
A. (00:28:45): My mom’s kind of like that too. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that well; she’s the kind of magnet that all the mosquitoes arrive, and unfortunately it means that some of them...there’s some overflow. I get my share of her tail of mosquitoes. I always make sure to walk in front of her if we’re hiking because behind her there’s always a cloud of mosquitoes, and if you walk there, you’re sure to get bitten. But I’ve found that nowadays, mosquito repellents are really good. They won’t really repel the mosquitoes, but they won’t bite you, they’ll sit on your hand, but the poisonous whatever-it-is that’s in those materials, they won’t bite you because it smells so toxic.

Q.: Would you say the duck represents a mosquito in that Lalli wasn't allowed to sleep any longer after it showed up?
A. (00:30:06): [laughs]

Q.: Was thinking of visiting Finland sometime in the near future, what areas/places would you recommend to visit? [similar question was asked in chatlog_140918, (1:18:57)]
A. (00:30:20): If you visit, my recommendations would be the kind of places I like, which are the different national park in the central and eastern parts of Finland, where most of the lakes are. The ones that I’ve visited that I like are Koli and Patvinsuo, and they are in the eastern parts of Finland. And I’ve seen a lot of pictures but haven’t visited myself and I’ve heard a lot of good things about Repovesi and Kolovesi; they’re like lake and cliff kind of national parks. Really, I think you can look up on the web, there’s probably an English speaking website for the Finnish national parks, and you can see pictures of them. I would recommend the ones that look nice and are reachable from wherever you would like to set up camp hotel-wise. I don’t mean “set up camp” like “put your tent up somewhere.” If you’re able to rent a car, you can pick a few of the national parks and just drive to them, do a few day trips.

Q.: Did you finish the last frame from yesterday already? (the tedious one)
A. (0:32:36): I didn’t finish it, but I did about half of it. I I mapped out all of the perspective and the big lines, but I haven’t drawn the people or cleaned up the details, I still have probably one hour that I need to spend on it. But other than that, all of the panels are finished.

Q.: I can't wait for the t-shirts!
A. (0:33:07): Yes! I only made one design for this time, and I’m going to make more for next year. I figured there’s so much stuff going to the store now with the book and the plush and the key-chains and a couple of new prints and one t-shirt, that I wouldn’t want to overload people. So there’s gonna be just one t-shirt design to kinda check things out and make sure everything works. And next year, in spring, in time for summer, I’m going to make a few different designs, so people who have different tastes in designs will be able to get theirs. I’m going to make something that’s cute, and something that’s scary I guess, like a moose skull design, something like that.
Q.: A "How hard can it be" Sigrun Eide T-shirt!!! pls pls pls pls please!!!!
A. (0:35:59): I have to design stuff that are kind of generally cool. I don’t want too many inside jokes. I want something that would be appealing to someone who doesn’t know about the comic, they would see the t-shirt and be like “Oh, that looks cool!” Don’t want to spam up the store with a dozen different designs, and half of them sell only three t-shirts.
Q.: DREAM DUCK T-SHIRT!
A. (0:37:02): No!
Q.: So, no duck t-shirt?
A. (0:37:10): Yeah, there will be no duck t-shirt. I’ll stay very light on the inside jokes. Those are the kinds of things you can make as an artist or comic creator when you have hundreds or thousands or millions of readers. Like big humour comics, they have immense readerships, and an inside joke that’s been in one comic, if it becomes like a meme among big readerships, they can sell hundreds of copies of that just from the sheer numbers of readers that they have. Even if 0.1% of them buy it, 0.1% of a hundred thousand people is like a hundred people, I think, so it would be worth it.
Q.: I can't find the shirt, help.
A. (0:38:46): It’s not in the store yet, it’s going to be added to the store at the same time as the book, they come at the same time. It’s going to be t-shirt, print on demand produced, so it won’t be able to run out, so no worries there, no hurry to get to the store, and the book, both books, the plush, and all the other things. Kind of semi-launch of the store. I think it’s going to double the items in there. I have to ask about the stickers, by the way, I haven’t checked if they’re in stock, but I don’t think they were last week and they were supposed to be re-ordered. I’m worried that they might have slipped through the cracks with everything else because those sold out. Which is really nice, I had no idea how many people would be interested in stickers, but I think they had ordered a few hundred sets of those, so they have sold surprisingly well and should be re-ordered.
Q.: Given what you said, the t-shirt will be available on Monday?
A. (3:16:20): Yes. Monday around evening time for Europeans and after midday or something for Americans. I don’t remember exactly which time zone it was that the people over there that are in charge of the store are going to launch it. I only remember which time I promised I would be awake to be in contact with them in case something goes wrong and post the update and everything.

Q.: [Responding to someone in the chat who had to leave because their family was congregating outside their room] Aha that used to happen to me while I was doing homework. The rest of my family would just chill in the doorway while I was trying to do homework.
A. (1:09:29): What kind of family setup do you have? Do you have like 10 younger siblings that have nothing better to do than hang out in your doorway? Or do you have a hovering mother that constantly wants to talk to you and ask [in high-pitched voice] “How’s the homework going?” That’s so weird. My family had.. The most peaceful times have been when my brother is in his room on his computer, I am in my room on my computer, dad is in the living room watching TV and mom is upstairs watching TV.  Or nowadays mom and dad are using their tablets, browsing the internet instead of TV more and more. But, same thing. And it would be complete silence in the house, everyone would have their own headsets on so that nobody else has to be disturbed by sound. So the thought of people hovering in each others’ doorways sounds so different from what I had growing up. In my family, we were definitely very respectful of each other’s need for alone time. When I think about why I’m so prone to wanting to be alone by myself, I think it might be a little bit genetic because it seems to run in the family. Enjoying being able to be alone is a nice trait to have because then you don’t get that.. A lot of people have a need to have constantly other people around or they start feeling alone or depressed or bored or whatever, so it’s nice to have that ability to enjoy your own thoughts. The internet helps a lot. You’re never going to be bored if you have the internet.
Q.: That sounds like my family.
A. (1:13:43): Oh, the being alone at opposite parts of the house? [laughs] Yeah, we definitely reached peak serenity and peace in the family when everyone had their own device. And the worst part was when the whole family had only one computer, which was in the early 2000s when it was very expensive to have the internet or computers. The internet was tied to your phone bill, it was very expensive and it almost lead to daily fighting where we all had one hour to use the computer and if someone used the computer five minutes too long, there was screaming to be happening, because the next person had something very important that needed to be done, and the previous person in the middle of finishing something very important and so forth. Once we all had our own computers (and TVs in case of mom and dad), everything became peaceful.

Q.:  I just started working at a high school library and we are going to work on updating our comics section. I was telling the head librarian about your comic and he seemed receptive to getting one for our collection! I'd love to get Redtail's Dream too but if I recall correctly there is no more physical copies yeah?
A. (1:27:17): That is correct. It sold out the same year it was printed. I only printed 2000 copies, since that was my first book and... yup. And I dream to reprint it since it was such a huge book and I didn’t have the space to store it. But it would be reprinted, it’s something that’s probably going to probably happen next year. With the help of Hiveworks I won’t have to store the books at home which really was the largest problem, they would take up my whole bedroom/cat’s bathroom/guestroom. So none left right now, but next year it will be available, so if it’s still something that you guys are working on then it might be able to be added there. But that’s really cool, thank you that you have been vouching for my work.
I wonder if my books are anywhere in any libraries. I know people are able to donate book to libraries, but I don’t think that other than that any of my comics would find their way to any collections, since most books that go to libraries have to be sorted through proper distribution channels and libraries order books from them at a lower price (or a discount is the word I’m looking for).

Q.: Aw but politics is nice to talk about .. xD [about political talk in SSSS Discord channel]
A. (1:30:01): Aah, is someone talking about politics? I also enjoy politics a lot. I don’t allow it in the comment section, but I enjoy listening to political talk shows now and then. Politics is really one of those things where they are fun to listen to and talk about when you feel like it, but when you get tired of it it can get really mood-dampening. It’s good to leave politics to the places that are meant for politics, which is TV shows and discussion forums and YouTube channels and stuff that are set up for that and feel like comic comment sections and social areas. And for comics that aren’t political - obviously some comics are specifically political and deal with current events and stuff - it just dampens the mood. Most people read comics for escapism, which I do too, I get really annoyed when I read some comic that has nothing to do with politics and under the comic the author has decided to do a “PSA: don’t do drugs, kids!” version of some sort of political plea or something. It really takes you out of the art and the story. When I go to watch a political show, I don’t want them to start singing or something; when I go watch someone singing, I don’t want to listen to them tell me about politics. So I’m kind of doing the ‘do what you want others to do to you.’ I decided I’m trying to keep “my comic and art area free of politics” (quote from myself), which is sometimes difficult to speak to, since a lot of people do use their platform to share their views and I guess it’s very tempting sometimes, but I have promised myself that I would not do the thing that annoys me when other people do it. If you guys were wondering why I don’t tend to allow political discussions. Which is kinda something I learnt when I was starting out with the comics, because kind of have to make a decision do you talk about politics and current events or not. And I was listening to a podcast about people who made webcomics, it was Brad Guigar and Scott Kurtz] and a couple other guys, and one of them talked about how his comic was running when 9/11 happened and every website had to talk about it, every comic author had to say how horrible it is and everything. He was the only one that decided that he wasn’t going to mention it. In his author comment he just wrote about punny joke in his comic, and obviously he felt disrespectful, because you’re supposed to say something. Something horrible has happened, everyone’s saying “Oh no, how sad it is!” and in the end he got a lot of thank you emails from people who said that they were so stressed out by the fact that every place that normally would bring them joy and humour was filled with sorrow and mourning. And they were really thankful that this guy has just provided one place on the internet where it was not discussed. I kinda learnt from that and decided that I will take that approach. So no matter what happens my comic will be one place where I will not bring the sorrow of the world upon you guys, because it won’t help. If something bad happens, everyone on the internet is going to talk about it, me adding to the pile is not going to make anything better or worse or anything. I can provide a little bit of reading.
Q.: I don't like political content in art that wasn't meant for it either, but I do like political cartoons.
A. (1:35:20): Yes, exactly! When it’s meant to be there, and you read it because you like it, you enjoy it, there’s a lot of political books where the story is all about some allegory about some political system, like Animal Farm. When you start reading Animal Farm, you know it’s about communism and an allegory about that. You don’t go, “Oh my god, why is there political stuff in my book?” But if you start reading Harry Potter or something and suddenly it becomes about communism, then you can go, “What! I thought it was about wizards!” That’s my approach. I’ve got my feelings about it. But it’s the same about everything else. If I watch a movie that’s supposed to be a thriller, but it turns into a musical, I will be really, really annoyed. Because if I want to watch a musical, I’m going to watch a musical because I’m in the mood for it. I will not tolerate a musical in my Walking Dead episode or something.
Q.: J k rowling tweeted 2 years ago that harry potter would support the state of israel like that was supposed to make sense...
A (1:36:54): Yeah, JK Rowling has done kind of the opposite of what I want to do. She has gone full political with her twitter, I have heard. She’s kind of a funny...or at least I find it amusing because she keeps getting in political arguments, but then she also does hypocritical things, so she doesn’t have a lot of friends on either side of the political sphere. I see people on one side of the political sphere will be like, she obviously has all the opposite opinions, but then the other side is always ragging on her because she does things they don’t like. She puts her foot in her mouth a lot. And I know I would also do that if I started doing political commentary. I don’t read her tweets because of that because I know that she says a lot about Harry Potter in retrospect; changes things and says what the things are supposed to symbolize. It kind of ruins things because everyone decides what they think different things symbolize, and when the author afterwards starts changing things or saying, “No, no, you’re all wrong who think this and this, actually this and this is supposed to be the correct interpretation. Then it kind of becomes like “Eh, it was better when I thought my interpretation was correct,” so I stay away from her twitter because I really like Harry Potter. At least the first four books. After that I didn’t really care about it that much. The tone kind of changed. Sometimes authors can kind of ruin their own work.
I know JK Rowling has some sort of beef with PewDiePie at some point. The only reason I even know about this is because I was watching PewDiePie at some point. He has some sort of meme review on his channel, and I watch it to understand what’s going on with the memes nowadays, and I guess at some point he got into some sort of argument with JK Rowling, and she was very not a fan of PewDiePie. That’s really the only reason I even know about it. I didn’t even know she had a twitter before that because I tend to not even follow writers of things I enjoy. Like most people just enjoy books and video games, and they don’t even know the name of the person who wrote it. and I kind of assume that’s the same with my comic. A lot of people might enjoy it, read it every day, but if someone asks what’s the name of the person who makes it, they would be like, “Uhh, some Scandinavian lady I guess?”
Q.: That JK rowling - piewdipie showdown was such a cringe
A. (1:41:53): I enjoy those kinds of things. I enjoy internet drama because it’s just funny. It doesn’t really hurt anyone, especially when it’s rich people duking it out. Because you know they have it well, well maybe not all mentally, rich people can be depressed and sad, but they have the means to take care of themselves. And JK Rowling, was she like the richest woman of planet earth or something? And PewDiePie’s a millionaire too, so it’s not like either of them...it’s just funny. I like internet drama. It’s one of the best things on the internet really. I always say that “I don’t watch soap operas. I’m totally above that.” But my soap opera is the soap opera of the current year, aka social media and YouTube and live streams, and everything that’s going to come with it. The whole word is just a big soap opera sometimes, and it’s a lot of fun.
Q.: Have youuuuu ever had internet dramaaa?
A. (1:43:42): Not really. I guess I might have been kinda close to it sometimes. But I’m one of those people who likes to sit with the popcorn on the side and watch internet drama. I don’t actually want to be involved in anything, that seems very tiring. A lot of people seek out drama because drama does mean fame and sometimes, occasionally also success. You become successful if you get some sort of drama and then keep the eyes on you. But for me, it doesn’t seem worth it. I don’t think it’s that useful for artists to get their fame through drama. Usually if you want to get fame through drama, you need to be the kind of personality who is creating content that is facilitating that sort of people. Like YouTube personalities. You need to continue getting involved in drama if that’s how you got your fame. Or to keep it. I stay away from drama. I don’t get into fights. I stay away from everything. If I see drama popping up even in the streets around me where I could jump in because I’m kind of in the know-how about something, I will not. I will stay away from it with my bowl of popcorn by my side.
Q.: So cool you watch the *clap* meme *clap* review series! What would be one of your favourite current memes?
A. (1:45:35): See, I don’t even know what the current memes are, that’s why I’m watching it. Like the one that a lot of people in the comic scene seem to be using is some sort of anime screenshot with the guy with the book and he’s holding his hand out to like a butterfly. And the butterfly is changed out for different objects, and the guy says, “Is this something?” I don’t understand it at all. I don’t understand any of the jokes. People do weird things with it and they get hundreds of retweets, and I don’t understand what the point of it! I don’t know if PewDiePie has done that yet, but I will definitely need to get my education on that meme. I’m bad at memes. It’s kind of the same thing, in the same field as puns. I feel like when I get them, I appreciate them and enjoy them, but I can’t make them myself, and it takes a long time for me to understand them. It’s like literally a brain fart problem that I have that I’m not able to produce them myself.
Q.:  I would never have thought that you thirst for internet drama. xD
A. (1:47:08): I mean, I’m a silent kind of person. I stay in the shadows and just watch it. It’s not just internet drama. I did the same way with real life drama, in school. I never got involved in anything, but if people were talking about their drama in recess before class starts, I would enjoy listening to it while I was drawing, and the other girls would be gossiping about whatever, and it was fun to listen to. The internet is the same way.
Q.: Nowadays the point of memes is to try to make something as absurd and incomprehensible as possible yet still be understood.
A. (1:49:03): Yeah, I guess. That one meme that was just posting the letter “e,” that’s definitely the height of absurdity if I’ve ever seen it. I do enjoy the absurd memes, especially when they catch on. The more absurd it gets, the bigger it gets, the funnier it becomes. And the bigger it gets and the more absurd it is, the faster it tends to burn out, but it’s still funny. Something else will come along and replace it, so there’s never a lack of funny-ness.
Q.: We often take our cue from Tuuri when we're excited about something in the comments, and we let loose with an E (or twelve).
A. (1:51:09): Yes, I got the meme for once! Like one of those latest memes, the ligma one, I didn’t get it. I saw the meme review on it, that was the first time I heard about it. I didn’t actually understand it even after it was done explaining. I was like, “Oh, that sounds like a funny name for a fake disease. I totally get it. That’s so funny.” It took like three weeks for me to understand what the pun in there was. It got to the point where people had started using ligma and segma for me to understand what it actually was. A light just clicked on and I was like, “Oh, I get it! It’s funny!”

Q.: How many pages do you want to have done before you start uploading the new adventure?
A. (2:02:14): The first pages that I’m going to post is going to be a very short prologue, and it’s going to be three pages. So I’m going to need to finish those before the break ends. And after that I’m going to want to have four buffer pages. So I’m going to need to draw seven pages. Plus the first chapter cover, one that we did on stream last week, I think? So the last two weeks of my break, so to speak, is going to be me drawing those seven pages. I’ve done most of my resting already. Half of the last week I was resting. Next week is going to be fix the website, the layout and fix all the little things that I have left lingering for the last few years.

Q.: My gf (who's Norwegian), also never knows how to pronounce Aunt haha, guess it’s a Nordic thing (that, and how to say W) [Minna couldn’t pronounce ‘aunt’]
A. (2:03:30): Yeah, it is mostly. It’s a strange word. For some reason I feel like I can think it in my head, but when I actually say it.. Like, ont? ant? ount? [laughs].

Q.: Will there be a two week break between the prologue and chapter one?
A. (2:04:10): No, I’m going to be posting on Mondays from now on. This Monday is going to be the update about new stuff in the store. The next two Mondays I’m going to post the cover, I guess it’s going to be this one, I’m going to have some sort of logo at the bottom, and after this one I’m going to post the prologue. And then it’s going to be one week left, and then the chapter starts. There won’t be a two-week break anymore, it’s going to be one update every week on Mondays for the next three weeks I guess. It’s been one week.
Q.: I like that the quarantine time is roughly around the same time as the break between the two adventures, it feels immersive somehow.
A. (2:25:46): Good! I totally planned that! No, I did not.

Q.: Can we hear an evil laugh?
A. (2:32:04): Nope, not this time. I might indulge you guys when it comes to Halloween, I could try to be in the spirit and do something, that something being an evil laugh…Since I promised that I will do a drawing of the crew in Halloween costumes. Was it yesterday or was it last week? Maybe when I do that, I’ll also include an evil laugh. Try a witch laugh.
Q.: That means you have plenty of time to practice!
A. (2:33:41): Eh, I’m not going to practice. The laugh will be what it is. And a witch laugh is not that difficult.

Q.: Korpiklaani, good music choice.
A. (muted): []

Q.:
A. (muted): [something about bald hedgehogs]

Q.: What volume your in My Hero Academia?
A. (2:53:34): I have bought volumes up to 11 and the rest I read online, because the volumes started taking too much space. But I’ve read pretty much all of it. I’ve skipped one of the big battles that happened (or a couple of big battles that happened) in the latter volumes, because they were reeeeally long, and that’s one thing that I don’t really care for in the shonen manga are that really drawn out, like, ten-chapter long battles. I feel like the power crit is very common and gets tiring. I’ve pretty much caught up, you won’t be able to spoil much for me.
Q.: Do you like Naruto then?
A. (2:55:05): No, I haven’t read Naruto. I guess I should. I don’t feel like reading it. For some reason I feel like it’s really long, like it’s something that went on for decades or something. And I hear that it lost a plot at some point and became drawn out. I do tend to like stories that feel like they are working towards some sort of ending, usually. Sometimes I like stories that go on forever ever. But Naruto feel like too much work to get into. But I should, really, just to educate myself. It’s one of those things that so many people have read that I should kinda read at least a little bit.
Q.: Naruto is So long.
A. (2:56:26): I guess. The other one that I’ve heard has gone on forever is One Piece. That one I’m not going to read because I don’t like the artstyle or the character designs, but I’ve heard that one has also gone on like a thousand chapters or something, or a thousand..yeah, a thousand chapters.
Q.: You read One Punch Man?
A. (2:56:52): No, but I’ve seen.. Or I’ve read parts of it, people posting around. That one seems definitely a lot of fun, it’s a humour comic in a way. But I haven’t read that one either. I haven’t read almost any mangas in the last 8 years, maybe. I stopped reading anything when I got into university. It was part of my ‘stop wasting time on anything that isn’t drawing’ when I decided that I really need to become able to support myself doing art. And reading mangas went out the window together with playing video games. But now I feel like I’ve gotten to the point that if I am able to stick to reading  something for a few hours every week, I get more inspiration and insight in the story structure and stuff like that that ‘outwaste’ time that I waste, I guess. Especially since I can read things on my phone on the toilet.
Q.: Have you read Berserk?
A. (2:58:19): No, I have also not read that one. Another one where I don’t really care for the artstyle. Like, people say the art is phenomenal, and I can understand why they say it, but it’s too intense and messy for me. I like kind of cleaner ones that have attractive-looking character designs. I like the artstyle in Naruto, the manga that I’ve seen. So I would read that one just for that case. But I feel like it also might be a little bit too late in my age to read it and enjoy it to the fullest, and from what I’ve understood it’s more geared to a little bit older than the Pokemon series, and I know that if I tried to get Pokemon at my age and hadn’t gotten my early childhood exposure to it, I woudn’t appreciate it that much.
Q.: I would suggest first trying out a bit online since Naruto isn't everyone's cup of tea.
A. (2:59:36): Yeah, that’s definitely how I would do it and how I tend to do it. I read something online and then I buy volumes at least to the point that I want to support the creator. Like, I might buy the volumes but then read it online, but if I do enjoy it I don’t want to just do it.
Q.: I don’t really anime or manga. Manga is expensive and anime is meh.
A. (3:00:12): Manga isn’t really that expensive! Compared to regular comics page-wise. I’ve actually heard that the reason why so many people read manga in the west nowadays while comics are - especially in America - are kind of struggling is because mange is so cheap compared to regular comics. Like, for 4 bucks you might get 20 pages of an American super-regular comic, but for 7 bucks you get 300 pages of black and white manga. They have smaller format and cheap paper. But yeah, definitely they are expensive if you have to buy 20 volumes. Then even 5 bucks a volume would end up costing a hundred bucks.
Q.: You might like Mushishi, I don't think it's terribly long and its beautifully drawn.
A. (3:01:41): I haven’t actually but I will have to check it out.
Q.: It isn’t a manga (its a video game), but Okami is so beautiful and the art direction is So gorgeous.
A. (3:02:08): Yes! I actually played it! It’s an old game. I don’t remember what platform it was on. I feel like I played it years and years ago, but because I got it for Christmas I have such great memories. I got it for Christmas and my mom had brought home a video projector from her school and we were able to project TV on our...the whole wall in my brother’s bedroom and I would play Okami for days, just on the wall. The whole wall was the video game and I played it in a few days from start to end, and my brother watched and we ate candy and chips and whatever since it was Christmas. That was amazing game, it was so beautiful.
Q.: Regular comics are also very expensive here
A. (3:03:03): Yeah, comics are expensive.
Q.: I never really liked the American comics besides Sandman, so manga was really fascinating.
A. (3:03:15): I’ve never gotten into American comics. I’ve read European comics and manga. I guess Donald Duck would be the closest thing to American comics, since it was originated by Americans.

Q.: Will you take some time off and do something fun during the "break"?
A. (3:09:26): Not really. I’m going to take a few days. In total I’m going to try to have one week’s worth of day when I’m not drawing anything and just try to do something where I don’t use my hands, you know, read, exercise.. That’s it, I guess. I’ll probably take a few days just to play video games, but that’s also something that uses my hands. So I’m mostly going to try to ...it’s difficult. I like being productive. I’ve already had like three days where I didn’t draw anything at all, and my hands already feel better than they did at the end of last chapter. So it always helps. But I’m not going anywhere.
Q.: What are you going to play?
A. (3:11:10): It is going to be a toss-up between Don’t Starve and They Are Billions. I’m not going to buy a new game. So I’m going to allow myself a couple days to play something. And I don’t even know if there is anything new out that scratches that same survival/base-building itch. The only thing I’m really looking forward to right now is the next expansion of Don’t Starve. It’s the game that I’m going to allow myself to play next properly.
Q.: Will you play for us?
A. (3:11:59): You mean on stream? I mean, hmmh. If some of you just want to hang out, I guess I could for a few hours, since I might be playing. I could do two hours of playing for those who want to join and then continue on with an artstream afterwards, if I do a bonus stream on Monday, like I did last time. I could, if some of you want to see me dying in Don’t Starve.
Q.: I think a game stream would be rad as heck.
A. (3:13:15): I guess I’m going to do it. I’ll do it on one of the days I’m planning on doing a regular stream, since the regular streams start in the evenings for me, I’m going to have time to just play some video games at first.
Q.: Don't Starve is nice to watch yuss.
A. (3:13:38): I guess I’m going to play Don’t Starve, then. I know I’ve really enjoyed watching other people play Don’t Starve in the past. That’s why I bought it. That’s usually how I buy games: I watch someone play it and get really hooked on it by watching. Especially building games. Obviously, story-based games are more tricky to replay. Building games and survival games give that “Oh, I could have done that so much better! And I would’ve built this differently and everyone could do it themselves.”
Q.: A game stream would be awesome. :O
A. (3:14:48): Hm, I might just do it next week then. A few hours of Don’t Starve before the regular art. Allow people to settle in before the drawing starts. I was thinking the next week I’m going to start the Halloween picture, so I might just do it together with that one. It’s not going to be Monday, though, since Monday is going to be the store launch, and I’m needed just in case something explodes and Hiveworks need me to  fix something. I obviously don’t want to be streaming at that moment. I’m going to do a stream on Tuesday. I’m going to start the Halloween picture and I guess I’m going to decide how early I would want to start me playing part of that stream. Like 2-3 hours beforehand, and those who are interested can join early, and the rest can trickle in when it’s regular drawing time as usual.

Q.: [chat is talking about dragons]
A. (3:17:19): People are talking about dragons now. Hmm, that’s another idea for a future picture. The crew as dragons! Because I haven’t drawn any dragons in many years and I used to draw dragons as my main thing back when I first started improving. Dragons was one of the main things that I was drawing and learning through and gaining some sort of following for my work. There’s a big audience for the typical fantasy dragon images.
Q.: You're stealing my jo!
A. (3:18:24): What do you mean? Oh, you were drawing dragons and I’m going to steal that idea. Whoopsie! See, you should never tell your ideas on the internet; someone’s going to come and steal them! Actually the thing is the opposite, you shouldn’t be afraid of people stealing your ideas on the internet, but it will happen. Everyone on the internet draws the same thing. Something even becomes the thing to draw and thousands of artists will just draw that same thing, like that Bowser lady thing the last few weeks. Art online has to be the more the merrier kind of thing rather than people trying to have original ideas, which isn’t a bad thing. If something’s popular, then it’s good, and naturally there would be a lot of artists giving their taking on something. Gives the people what they want.
Q.: I was just going to mention the Bowser lady
A. (3:20:00): Yeah, that one spread like wildfire. I noticed it first when I posted something on DeviantArt, one of the images I had finished on stream. And I still have a fairly large follower base on DeviantArt even though I didn’t post every year, and I guess my pictures have a pretty good chance of ending up on the front page. So I checked out the front page and saw my picture there and noticed that every third image on the front page was some rendering of Bowsette by various popular artists. Everyone trying to cash in as fast as possible, be among the first ones before people get tired of something. So you can’t jump in two weeks later, you need to be as fast as possible. Especially people who do specialise in fanart and have the fan base around that - there’s really no time to waste when something gets big.
Q.: Are you gonna do Bowsette xD?
A. (3:21:13): No no, I’m not a Mario fan. I’ve never played the Mario games, I only played once because one of my friends when I was nine or something, they own a Nintendo 64, I think, and they had Mario and I played it when I was visiting, so that’s my only Mario universe exposure. I don’t care about any of the characters at all. So I’d be very bored drawing any of the.. I guess I played Mario Kart, maybe. Actually I haven’t. I played the version on Playstation, a.k.a. the Crash Bandicoot racing game, which is the exact same thing as Mario Kart, just with Crash Bandicoot universe characters.
Q.: Crash BANDICOOT.
A. (3:23:38): I was a Playstation child not a Nintendo child. The only Nintendo that I had was Game Boy, and the only game I had was Pokemon [laughs]. All my other games from that era were from Playstation One. I did have a GameCube, though, but that was later. I think I was a teenager at that point. Even then I had no Mario games.
Q.: The crew as Skylanders!
A. (3:25:22): What’s Skylanders? I don’t even know what that is. I thought Skylanders was some sort of a thing that Spyro the Dragon morphed into after it was sold off to some company. And it kind of failed as a standalone game.

Q.: The gang as a punk-band with Tuuri as a drummer!!!!
A. (3:22:42): Hmm, that’s another theme that I.. For some reason I don’t care about at all. I know people really like bands, garage bands and stuff like that. I don’t care about bands at all. I don’t think drummers are cool, I don’t think bass players are cool, I don’t think the singers are cool. So I would be very bored drawing that and I don’t want to draw something that makes me bored. I would have to want to draw something for it to become good. It’s a possible idea if I hit a spot where I just can’t think of anything that I want to draw, and I guess it would count as fanservice if there was nothing else to do.
Q.: Nobody thinks bass players are cool Minna
A. (3:24:21): Okay! See, I had no idea who are desired people in bands. Are guitar players cool then? What even are there? Guitar, bass, the drums and violin? I think a lot of bands have violins, right?? The kantele player? The Irish bagpipe player? That one’s the staple of every band.
Q.: Bass players are cool *shakes fist*
A. (3:25:59): I mean, I didn’t say bass players aren’t cool, someone else said and I just nodded and went along with it!

Q.: Hey, do you see the northern lights a lot up there?
A. (3:28:29): No, I have actually never seen them. You are supposed to be able to see them sometimes even in southern parts of Finland, but down there you need to go outside of cities during winter, because there’s too much light pollution; I’ve never bothered, I haven’t cared enough. The weather report would be like “Tonight you would be able to see the northern lights, and if you want to see them, you have to go outside and this and this and that” and nah, it’s always cold, and they tend to appear at the coldest times of the year when it’s getting close to -20. Who wants to go outside in the middle of the night and drive somewhere and look at the sky when it’s that cold. And the couple years that I’ve lived here - I don’t know if you would be able to see them, I haven’t, again, bothered. Maybe I should actually pay better attention to the weather reports this winter because it’s dark enough around here that I should be able to see them. But I hear they’re actually not that spectacular. The ones in pictures tend to be very exaggerated, the colours are turned up a lot to actually show them, but in real life, they look more grey-ish and aren’t that bright.

Q.: I hate soulslike gameplay cause I can't get gud, but i love the aesthetics. I can't process fast games. I need turn-based or sneak away from fights kind.
A. (3:39:21): Me too, the time when I was able to do things that needed precision and ability to do things fast are definitely in my childhood. Nowadays I need turn-based or some sort of strategy-based, like I would have the option to lay traps to kill my enemies rather than have to aim or something.

Q.: Are there any English words that you think are funny/ridiculous?
A. (3:40:05): And people say ‘aunt’, because I was really bad at pronouncing that. [laughs] Not really. At least for me, the words that are ridiculous, if you find them in your own language because you can understand the deeper meanings and little sillinesses of it. But when you learn another language everything is equally silly and therefore not silly at all. And things that are silly tend to be because I find them hard to pronounce rather than them being weird. At least, I feel like English is a fairly- like, it feels just like a normal, standard language. I know there’s a lot of things that people point out as strange sentences, like that one “buffalo buffalo buffalo something” but I’m just like “Okay. I guess it’s a bunch of buffalos!” and don’t really understand the deeper meaning of it.

Q.: [In response to Minna’s cat climbing up onto her tablet] Precious I hope science can someday invent the way to draw and pet cats in lap.
A. (3:46:36): You would need some sort of arm extension that goes around the cat.

Q.: What’s everyone’s favorite type of dragon?
A. (4:00:28): For me, I feel like a typical western type of dragon that’s completely white, I guess, like a snow dragon looks kinda cool. Like a thin and elegant one, not one of those big and bulky ones. At least that’s what I would draw if I had to draw a dragon right this moment.

Q.: Pumpkin soup is good! With a little ginger, maybe some curry...
A. (4:12:36): I don’t even know what pumpkin tastes like. I feel like I’ve never eaten it in any shape or form. Or really used anything seasoned with pumpkin. Yeah, I think it’s something that isn’t a thing in Finland, at least. I remember I was looking to find some canned pumpkin because my cat was a little constipated last year and I read online that you can give canned pumpkin to cats to increase the fiber in their food, and I was like, “Okay, that should be easy to find,” but it does not exist in Finnish grocery stores. It’s not a thing that’s eaten around here. Summer pumpkins, the small yellowish kinds, are really a seasonal thing that people eat as a vegetable.
Q.: TRY IT! Try pumpkins.
A. (4:13:55): Ehh, I would have to find one first.
Q.: Aww poor Minna...pumpkin pie or sweets are so good.
A. (4:14:25): Yeah, that definitely sounds something that’s very American. Or maybe in the central European countries.
Q.: White girls in America are all after those pumpkin spice lattes...
A. (4:14:53): Yes, I’ve heard that mean stereotype and laughed at it, but I can’t really laugh at it because I don’t even know what pumpkin tastes like. I’m just a poor foreigner who has no idea about any of that. I don’t even know...is pumpkin supposed to be something that’s kind of a treat? It’s kind of a vegetable, like eating a carrot in my mind.
Q.: I loooove pumpkin spice everything tbh and I'm only half a white girl.
A. (4:16:36): I think half a white girl means that you are a white boy. It’s what I deduct from that. I’m guessing my guess wasn’t correct [laughs].
Q.: Pumpkins aren’t that much of a treat, just more like a seasonal snack around this time of year.
A. (4:17:49): Alright, I guess I kinda understand it. For some reason, in the spring time, around here in Finland people eat sweet peas as a snack. Like, the kind that are in a pod. There are times of the year when you can go around cities and see those little pods thrown around the roads, because people will just buy a bag of sweet peas that are fresh from the fields and eat them as a fresh spring snack. So I can kinda understand people eating pumpkins in a similar way, as a seasonal snack.
Q.: I once made a casserole with pumpkins and tomato soup and broccoli and mushrooms and some cheese instead of a Lasagna, it was awesome.
A. (4:17:10): That’s sounds horrifying. All of those things are the worst things you could put into your food. Mushrooms and broccoli, why would you eat that voluntarily?! I don’t understand humans.
Q.: [Minna looks in the chat]
A. (4:18:44): People are saying broccoli is awesome, uhh. Maybe I’m remembering the wrong vegetable, but I think broccoli is one of those things that smell really bad when they are boiled.
Q.: Because those are some of my favourite things?
A. (4:19:24): I don’t understand you! Aaah, mushrooms, broccoli and cheese! I mean, cheese is good, but together with those - no! I cannot accept, I will not accept that other humans have such different tastes than I have. On the other hand, I know people eat sheep heads and stuff, so I suppose accepting that people eat broccoli voluntarily won’t be that difficult.
Q.: Broccoli is the small green tree like thing.
A. (4:20:10): Yeah, I know, I was thinking if I’m remembering the smell wrong, because I know my mom sometimes likes to come over and she brings her healthy food, and I think broccoli is one of the things that are supposed to be really healthy to eat. She boils them and the whole house smells like garbage and fart. But I might be mixing it up with one type of some sort of kale, I think. In which case I would give my apologies to broccoli, if it turns out that it doesn’t actually smell at all and tastes like a cucumber or something.
Q.: Broccoli's good if you fry the hell out of it. <_<
A. (4:21:15): Well, that would kinda kill the purpose of healthy in the first place. At that point you might as well be frying candy if you’re gonna be frying something.
Q.: I am American and I have never heard of a deep fried candy bars, but I wouldn’t question their existence m.
A. (4:23:57): I have heard about the deep fried Mars candy bars. It might be a rumor, though, but I have heard that it’s a thing that has happened.

Q.: What is your favorite dish tho?
A. (4:21:35): I don’t know if I have a favorite dish. I just have various...I like simple things. I like pizza, I like lasagna, I like fish soup, I like chicken with fries, I like chicken with curry, I like chicken with pasta and a cream sauce, and I like fish in general, just like smoked fish is so good with some sort of remoulade sauce. Those are my favorite. And sausages, and meatballs, french fries, hamburgers, I like all the foods that are simple and don’t have vegetables in them. That’s the common denominator for my food likes. I like fried pork, the kind that you get in Chinese food, that’s what I always order.
Q.: Wow, lotsa Italian things
A. (4:22:48): I really like a lot of Italian foods. In that way, spaghetti with bolognese sauce and some parmesan cheese is definitely on my list of favorite foods and something that I make fairly often. It’s really easy to get ingredients for a good tasty pasta bolognese. The only thing I can’t get from my tiny town grocery store is the parmesan cheese. I need to get that beforehand when I go into the larger town.

Q.: I too hate mushrooms, especially the smell when they're getting cooked. [Minna hates mushrooms, see question (4:24:34) in Characters]
A. (4:27:31): Yeah, the smell is not great. I don’t know if I mind the smell when they’re being cooked, but I don’t like the smell of mushrooms in the woods when it’s wet. It’s a really muddy, dirty smell, I feel like. Like something is rotting.
Q.: Kantareller look SOOO tasty, but I know I will hate it if I try.
A. (4:28:13): Exactly. They look so good. They have a perfect colour and they are the easiest ones to find when you are picking them. I’ve been mushroom-picking with friends and family before, and they are so fun to pick, but I don’t get to enjoy the eating of them afterwards.
Q.: I think mushrooms can substitute for protein though?
A. (4:29:11): Yeah, they are apparently a very good way... For vegans or vegetarians that don’t get their meat protein mushrooms are on the list of protein sources. And are a good survival food, if you do need to survive. So if I was starving to death, I would certainly succumb to eating mushrooms. I would just have to make sure I found one of those books that tell me which ones are the poisonous ones. I know some of them, like the really bad-looking one that is obviously poisonous, the one that looks shriveled brain, a black brain - that one is very poisonous unless you boil it for ten hours or something. So I don’t want to eat that one and the red one with the dots. But other than that, I’m kinda clueless. I know some of the good ones, you learn that in school, like kantarell and the brown one, something-suppen. I think I can recognise those.

Q.: Ok. Too much food talk. I have to go and hunt something out now >: U
A. (4:30:50): Oh, ‘hunt something out’, I thought you wanted to go hunting [laughs]. That you were so hungry that you had to go hunting for some bear, get that fresh blood and meat taste. I feel like I would really enjoy hunting. I wouldn’t want to kill the animal, I’d just like to hunt it down. Which I guess photographers do. So maybe I should start getting into photographing animals to satiate my hunting want. In the future, if I get to a point where I feel like I’m bored and need a new hobby. Hunting a.k.a. photographing animals would be a fun thing to do.

Q.: If I remember correctly, you really like candies? Will you get yourself a nice heap of candy in celebration of the Halloween season?
A. (4:33:46): Sure. Definitely for the season, but I”m just gonna get candy for myself anyway. Maybe I get some extra ones just because it’s Halloween, I have a good excuse. But I kinda have a sugar addiction, so I do have a candy bar every day, like few rows of a chocolate bar or a small, 70 gramm candy bag. One of those that are really overpriced just because they are so small. But yeah, I’ll definitely buy something extra nice for Halloween if there is something. There’s the problem that the Halloween isn’t really celebrated in Finland the same way as in America, so there isn’t really Halloween-themed candy. That is reserved for Easter and Christmas. But I will see if there is something that I want.

Q.: I found out about the existence of Kalakukko a while ago and I was shocked.. Is it a common food in Finland?? Would Lalli eat it?
A. (4:35:24): Yeah, kalakukko is like a rye bread that has little fishies in it. Sometimes some kalakukkos can have salmon or bigger fish inside, but usually it tends to be small fishes like the kind where you eat the head and tail of it, because they’re crunchy. They’re not food that people eat every day, but they are kind of regional delicacy that the people who have a taste for it really really like. When I went to Koli with my mom to hike, there was a small delicacies corner of one of the larger gas stations over there that sold cakes and stuff and regional baked goods and they had a lot of different  kalakukkos there. And I was like “Ugh.” And my mom was like, “ Oh that’s so good, I’m definitely going to have to buy one!” I don’t remember if she bought one, she’s not supposed to eat carbohydrates since she’s diabetic, and the bread part, even if it’s rye bread, has carbohydrates. But, yeah, people do like kalakukko and it is sold usually as a delicacy. I guess that’s one of the foods that are used as an example to show how gross Finnish traditional food is. You know, Italian traditional food - all of those delicious wonderful things, and then FInnish traditional food - rye bread with a bunch of fish in it. And people think “Ugh, why.” But yeah, that’s not just a joke, people actually do like it and people still eat it. But it’s not an everyday meal, I don’t think.

Q.: The longer I look at the thing at the bottom, the the more I think of Toph "I am the melon lord!"
A. (4:54:48): I don’t know who Toph is. Other than he’s a melon lord, I suppose.
Q.: From Avatar the Last Airbender.
A. (4:55:50): Ah, I see. I haven’t watched that one. Another one that people say is great, but I just haven’t gotten around it. I guess I should. As I say about everything.
Q.: Highly recommend it if you ever want something to watch! It's in English so you should be able to watch while also drawing.
A. (4:56:21): Yup yup. It’s definitely on the list of things to watch. There’s so much to watch, though. Nowadays there’s a complete overabundance of entertainment. Even if I watch things ten hours a day while I’m drawing, I’ll never catch up on all the things I want to watch, because there’s so much free stuff on the internet I want to watch and listen to. There’s just not enough time. Which is probably an excellent problem to have, I guess. Too much entertainment.
Q.: For point of reference, Avatar is on the same level of quality as Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, it is Top Tier.
A. (4:57:41): Yes, I’ve heard that it is a high-quality American-made animesque thing. By the way, I haven’t watched the newer edition of Fullmetal Alchemist, not the Brotherhood version, I believe. At least it’s the newer edition, I already watched the original one, which was like 50 episodes or something. Like, it actually had an ending. Which I didn’t care for. So I’m happy there’s a new one, I might have to watch it someday. I kind feel like I’ve got my closure on Fullmetal Alchemist even though I didn’t like the way it ended, I don’t even remember how it ended, I just know that I didn’t like it. But after that pain of accepting that it ended.. I accepted it, and then when it was restarted I was like “Aaaah, I’m over it already.” I think that was one of the first animes that I actually watched online, that weren’t on TV; before that the only animes that I’ve seen were Pokemon and a little bit of Digimon, that was on TV in Finland.
Q.: Digimon best anime.
A. (4:59:48): Yeah, I liked the first season. I tried the following seasons, but they didn’t have the same feel to it for some reason. I feel like they kinda changed the formula a lot, which I admire. And even the artstyle changed a little bit, I feel like. Obviously, a lot of things that are successful just do the same thing over and over to stay successful, and it’s really cool when some show does change things up every season. But the flip side of it is that if you liked the thing in the first season  and they change it.. Hmm, you don’t want to keep watching.
Q.: The Digimon dubs on Finland were legendarily ridiculously bad xD
A. (5:00:44): Yes, I remember that! That’s why I didn’t actually watch Digimon when it came out dubbed. It was so bad, the voice acting. Just ridiculous. I saw a few episodes as a kid, and it made some sort of impact on me in that I wanted to actually see what the plot was to the end, so I watched them as an adult on some website in English. And it was definitely not as cringy as the Finnish dubs. Like, even the theme song, the Finnish one, there was a woman who couldn’t hit the notes, the “woah woah woah” part she would be like “AAAAAH!” It sounds so horrible! While the Pokemon one was really good, so Digimon just seemed like a really cheap knockoff on the Finnish side of things.

[Mebediel]

If all the chatlogs start becoming this long, I think we might have to start being a little more selective in what we transcribe. But for now,

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related, PART 2

Spoiler: show

Q.: I would be a bad therapist because I would feel so horrible about all these horrible things people are experiencing and hate myself for not being able to make everyone feel great all the time ,___,
A. (5:11:24): Yes, you would not be able to be a good therapist. I’ve heard it is a very specific kind of personality you have to have to be able to do it. There is a paradox that you need to be caring and able to assess correctly what’s going on and have empathy and give it in the right amounts, but you have to be able to completely ignore everything, the problems of the other person, because therapists have maybe dozens of clients. And if they actually do genuinely care about them they would- and obviously a lot of therapists burn out and become depressed themselves, because it’s such a tough job. The kinds of people who go into being therapists - they want to help people and they feel so bad for these people that they just want to make them feel good - they tend to be the ones that burn out, I’ve heard. And the ones that are actually able to do it as a career for years and years and actually help are the ones who are able to just coldly put it out of their mind, not think about it after daily work, but methodically analyze what’s wrong with the person and know scientifically what are the right things to say and do rather than go with the heart. There’s the kind of people I’ve heard that are not able to last long. And also aren’t able to help properly, because supposedly the way to help someone isn’t always the ‘feel good’ way, you can’t enable certain behaviours and demands and stuff like that. Therapists need to be able to be really harsh and cold. Well, not cold but assertive and strong. Like, a person who is  really emotional is usually not the person who is able to help other emotional people. Other than obviously be a friend and feel a good person, but in harsh times it usually takes very balanced and methodical mind to actually find their problems and speak the harsh truth and force people to take the measures they need to take to get better.
Q.: So therapists must be like Finnish mages!
A. (5:15:59): Yes, pretty much.
Q.: Aww I wanna be able to help people >:
A. (5:16:15): Well, that’s a lot of ways to help people without having to be a therapist. Just being around and doing stuff is helping people. And honestly, if you go through life, and even if you don’t necessarily help people, if you just don’t cause harm to people - you’re doing pretty good. I mean, you didn’t make the world a worse place, and even if you helped one person once in your life, you are already at net positive. So don’t be stressed out about helping people. Help yourself first, and then if you figure out some way to help people and it makes you happy, then do that. It’s always the principle of ‘you need to be okay first before you can do anything.’ Like, it’s the airplane emergency thing where it always says “Before you assist a small child to put their mask on you must make sure that you put your own mask on and are able to breath,” because otherwise if you try to put the mask on the child first and you pass out while doing it, both you and the child are going to die. So it’s always just pointless to worry about helping others if you’re not at a state yourself yet.
Q.: It's like you're talking my thoughts (is that English?) Begin with yourself, then you can try to do good if you can.
A. (5:20:50): Yes. I always feel like this is a good idea to have in your mind. And it’s an old classic, there’s a lot of versions of it, I feel like at least I’ve heard. Like, I’m able to focus on my art and kinda do it in the sense of mood where even if I’m feeling a little bit depressed I can do it with the mind set that “Well, I’m doing it for other people and it makes other people happy.” But the reason I get into that mindset even during downtimes is because really I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I’m stable mind-wise, I feel secure in where I’m going and I have my goals and everything kinda set up. So I’m able to do things that I wouldn’t be able to do if I was really-really sad like I was as a teenager, yeah, very late teenage years. Then I wouldn’t have been able to think in the way of doing comics to make other people happy, I was really just worried about “Oooh no, what’s my life gonna be? Oooh, I don’t know what to do with my job! I’m gonna be working at a gas station or something for the rest of my life! I have no idea what to do!” Nowadays I’m in a good place and I can cheer up other people by doing a bunch of art.
Q.: I never had any luck with therapists. half the time, when they would suggest something it would take me 10 seconds to destroy the logic behind their reasoning. This was when I was a teenager.
A. (5:24:13): Yeah, I mean it would be a very difficult job to find really good therapists. I feel like people who would be excellent therapists would probably kinda set up into the really demanding parts of the job, like criminal therapists, people who work in the harshest areas like prisons and stuff where they try to rehabilitate very disturbed minds. I’ve heard those are the most difficult places to work as a therapist, but the actually very skilled ones would be in high demand of those places. Regular therapy places, cheap ones - I’m guessing you would be really lucky to get a gem of a therapist.
Teachers are kinda the same. A lot of people who actually don’t have all the qualifications personality-wise to be a great teachers, to deal with the difficult children and different problems that children have. It’s really a toss-up between what you actually get. Some teachers are absolute gems and you know them or realise immediately which ones are the really great ones. And most teachers are just there because it was the profession that they got into.
And also a lot of therapists have a problem where they might get into it with rosy thoughts about how great it would be to help people, but then it turns into a grind where they have to see dozens of different clients and they won’t be able to keep the one-on-one thought to all of them like they had envisioned themselves doing when they were training or something, and then it becomes kinda a grind for them. At least I feel like that would happen to me if I wanted to become a therapist. At some point everything that you do as a job becomes just a job.

Q.: Being stressed about getting money and being able to produce good art are somewhat incompatible for me.
A. (5:27:40): I can understand that. For me it was kind of the opposite. The fear of not getting enough money to live as an artist and having to go work at a grocery store instead was so powerful that it pushed me into working 80 hours a week even with school and sleeping like 5 hours a night for two years. That really helped me [laughs]. I can be greatly motivated by fear of failure. Buth having the carrot of succeeding and the stick of fear of failing and not making enough money was very powerful. And if I hadn’t had that fear, I wouldn’t have gotten into crowdfunding my first book, that obviously was really terrifying. But the fear of not getting money was greater than the fear of jumping into self-publishing. So that’s kind of how it works for me. I definitely do enjoy doing art when I know that I’m not scared of not getting money when I know that I am making enough money to get by. But paradoxically, the fear helped me get over that scary part. But people are different, obviously, some people get really paralyzed by fear and are only able to work in relaxed places. Fear and stress and bosses that are really overbearing are difficult for some people, and some people become completely unreliable and unable to produce anything properly when they don’t have someone putting a little bit of pressure behind them, a fire under their butts. Like the classic: you start working when it is five hours before the deadline, and as long as you don’t have a deadline you don’t do any work. That’s a big advice that I heard a lot about doing comics or any sort of big art project that you do on your own was that you have to create a deadline for yourself, because so many people will become inactive and lazy if they don’t have a deadline for something. So an advice that was always given was if you want to do a short comic, look up some sort of a comic competition for next year and decide that you want to submit your comic to it and make it your deadline and kind of psych you up because you have to meet the deadline, your life depends on it. And that way you are more likely to actually work on it than if you just say “I’m going to make this comic this year” without anyone pressuring you.
Q.: Minna, so you've used your "weakness" to make it your strength! It is nice to know you've found your place.You sound quite happy now.
A. (5:31:30): Yes, I’m definitely happy. When I became happy was when I.. Well, first of all, my greatest fears and depression kinda went away when I got into graphic design university, because I figured “Okay, that’s going to be my job.” Even though I hate working with clients, I get through it better than working in some sort of revolving door work that I hate anyway. And then when I realised that you can’t be a comic artist and make money from it online. It was like.. a big ball of fire lit up inside of my heart and.. just having that goal, even the thought that maybe it would take me ten years to get there and I would have to work on side jobs on the side, made me happy. And the fact that I managed to get there without that part - I’ve been feeling blessed ever since, so it’s been eight years, I guess, since I became happy [laughs].

Q.: At my old job my coworkers taught me how to twerk and the whole restaurant celebrated when I figured it out. [see question time-stamped (5:44:11) in Characters]
A. (5:46:33): Oh my goodness. That sounds like something from an American sitcom.
Q.: Some days u just gotta make it clap.
A. (5:47:02): Ooooh! I disapprove! No, no. That sounds so wrong! What have humans become. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re approaching being able to create an intellect that is greater than our own, yet humans are devolving into shaking their butts in intricate ways.

Q.: Actually there are quite a lot of your fans in Russia, Minna.
A. (6:02:10): I know! I’m so happy about that. The first time that I found out that I had a lot of fans in Russia was with A Redtail’s Dream, because people ordered the book through the Indiegogo campaign, and Russia is the only country where if you ship something that counts as a big oversized letter, which I was able to do with the books, you still have to include a big customs form that says everything about the contents and stuff. So I had to put all the Russian books in one file, send out all the other books to the other countries, and then I had to do all the Russian ones separately and do the form. So I kinda had a good visual about how many Russians had ordered the book, because it was a growing file that had to sit on the side while I was sending out the other ones. And the Book 1 for SSSS, that was the same situation, and I feel like it was even a bigger percentage of books going in the Russian direction. And I’ve also seen a lot of really great cosplayers from Russia cosplaying the characters. So yeah, I’m well aware of my Russian readers and I am very appreciative. But I guess it makes sense since the comics have a lot of the Nordic cultural elements, and people who live in the northern parts of the world, even though the cultures are very different, have certain parts in common just because it’s cold; like there’s the stoicness and drinking vodka I guess [laughs]. And a certain sort of strange humour - I’ve  found that I understand a lot of Russian jokes very well, they are very similar to the kind of jokes that the Finnish people tell, even though the cultures have nothing in common... developmentally? Like, they don’t have common roots. But because people who live in similar environments tend to grow similar customs. It makes a lot of sense, it’s the same reason why people who live in warm climates all share a similar joyfulness, lots of parties, colourful stuff, and people who live in dark, cold places have the stoicness and coldness and strangeness to them.

Q.: Minna, haven't ever thought like visiting St. Petersburg?
A. (6:06:26): Maybe. It would be a really easy place to visit from Finland since it’s a direct train from Helsinki every day, I think it’s two-hour express trains or something. But I think my mom visited there once with a a school teacher’s outing, and apparently it’s kinda disorganised tourist-wise, in that it was difficult to get a taxi to places and when they finally got the taxi, the taxi driver was drinking vodka very stereotypically. And I get really nervous when I travel, and I get extra-extra nervous when there’s not clear  tourist facilities, which is why I enjoy travelling in the Nordic countries, because everything works the exact same way. You know how to get a taxi and how to get help if you are lost. I know that St. Petersburg has like 10 million people or something crazy, I don’t know, maybe 5, I don’t remember but really huge, and also kinda disorganised - scares me a lot. So yeah, I might, but I would definitely go with a tourist group where there’s a guide who takes care of that. I wouldn’t go on my own. But that’s the same with most countries: if I don’t know the language or don’t know the customs, I would prefer to go with some sort of guide to help with not getting so nervous, because I obviously want to just enjoy the architecture, culture and stuff like that and not be worried about getting lost.
Q.: It would be soooo nice to see you in person.
A. (6:08:46): I understand! I’m such a nervous person. And you maybe wouldn’t even enjoy meeting me because I can be cheerful online, but when I’m stressed out and tired, which I usually am when I’m travelling, I become a stone-faced, quiet, slightly rude person in that I will try to get away from people, my answers become very short and crude, well, not crude, but cold. I have noticed this about myself. I feel like I would definitely be one of those people… the saying is don’t meet your heroes because you will be disappointed. I would be one of those very disappointing people, I feel like.
Q.: Resting b**** face?
A. (6:10:05): I think I might have that. Maybe not resting b**** face, it would be like dead fish face. Just glazed over eyes staring into the distance. I have resting b**** face often when I’m in photos for some reason. Or not even resting b**** face, I have an arrogant, tiny little smile and slightly upturned chin and nose. I don’t know why. I feel like it might be because I’m short, so I try to straighten my back and not look so tiny, and it usually ends up with me looking arrogant.

Q.: I tried to be a nice tourist and help people but they kinda thought I'm French and started to talk to me in French.
A. (6:11:25): When, when you were in France? And people were talking to you in French? Oof, that sounds horrible! France is actually the country where I was as a child that where I visited and felt the stress of  not being able to find my way. Obviously, I was with my parents, but even they were noticeably lost sometimes, and I could feel the stress radiating off on me very easily. And France is an enormous touristy place, or like Paris, so I know the anxiety of being somewhere that isn’t as touristy would be tenfold. I know that Finland isn’t really a tourist country, so if someone was visiting, they wouldn’t be… I feel like there wouldn’t be sufficient information and signs necessary to guide tourists. And I know it’s kind of the same in a lot of cities in eastern Europe. And Finland in that way is kinda part of eastern Europe, that hasn’t been traditionally touristy kind of country, it’s been kind of poor and off to the side.
Q.: Yea. I mean I babbled a few words at them and helped them get a ball back with a paddle but it was kinda weird. But it was a small village so it wasn't super touristy.
A. (6:13:30): Ah, I see.

Q.: I stop being able to look people in the eyes when I'm tired, but idk if people actually notice.
A. (6:13:35): Yeah, I’m having the same problem. I know when I’m in social situations and I’m getting to that point when I’m starting to become kinda rude-ish, I know I have to put a lot of effort in making sure I.. well, maybe not smile, but at least try to look at people’s faces when I talk to them.
Q.: Oh I'm actually trying to not look people directly in the eyes all the time, because I've read it's a bit rude and makes people uncomfortable.
A. (6:19:02):Yeah, I’ve heard looking people in the eyes thing is a very delicate thing, I’ve read a lot of psychology guides pertaining to that: how to be the most effective on a job interview and how to seem assertive and not weird, not to intense, not too aloof. And it comes natural to some people, but the proper way to look people in the eyes is definitely something you can get lost into, start thinking too much about it, because you shouldn’t stare at them constantly, you need to blink now and then, you shouldn't blink too often, your eyes shouldn’t be darting around too much, because then you look flighty, but if your eyes don’t move around gently a little bit now and then, then you look weird and robotic, so no. And when you start thinking about it, you start doing something weird and unnatural. So it’s really difficult!
Q.: I’m really bad with eye contact I always make weird faces.
A. (6:21:35): [laughs] I feel like when I try to make proper eye contact, I smile too much, because I’m conscious about the fact that I don’t necessarily smile at all naturally. So I get a weird, strange smile on me instead. Not great.

[Mebediel]

Hey friends! Long time no chatlogs! We're somewhat back, though, and catching up on our backlog of streams. This one is from Minna's stream of the Halloween illustration. If anyone is able to transcribe Finnish, please help us out by transcribing in the doc!

chatlog_09-10-18

Characters
Main Cast

Spoiler: show

Q.: So how would they bribe Lalli to come along? Halloween treats?
A. (0:38:34): Hmm, I don’t know, actually. Maybe a certain amount of puppy-eyes would work on him. You know, in addition to treats.
Q.: Puppy-eyes from who - the literal puppy Reynir or Emil?
A. (0:44:42): Maybe puppy-eyes from Reynir, but now that I think of it, it might actually annoy him [Lalli] more than anything, maybe it wouldn’t be that helpful. But maybe if everyone kinda seemed disappointed by him not wanting to come with them, he might feel bad inside. He wouldn’t show it but he would grudgingly put on the costume and join everyone. I feel like that’s what would happen; he has feelings, he would feel bad when everyone else felt bad because of him.

Q.: Does everyone on the team can swim?
A. (2:39:40): Yes, I would say so. I think swimming would be enough of an important skill to have that everyone would know it.

Q.: If the SSSS crew were stuck in a typical cabin in the woods horror movie, who would die first and who would die last?
A. (2:59:42): You mean they would kill each other from having cabin fever? Or are they killed by some sort of weird monsters in the cabin? Let me know, because that would probably change the outcome. If they are killing each other in some sort of madness, who would die first? Definitely not Lalli, he would be too quick and run away when people started acting weird, he would be pretty good at hiding. I feel like Emil might die first. Emil or Reynir would die first either way. Sigrun might also because she would be too prone to be loud, I think, and too brave, she might not stay out of the horror’s way. Lalli might survive long just by being good at hiding and running away from things, but on the other hand I think that he would start trying to find a way back to civilisation and start tracking through the woods and obviously then the monsters would get him when he’s all alone.
Q.: Like some sort of monster or demon or a psychopath is stalking them.
A. (3:02:41): Ah. Who would survive the longest in that kind of scenario? I feel like Lalli would since he would be the hardest to catch. But he would succumb eventually since he’s not good at teamwork and usually in those kinds of stories there’s typically two people who survive because they are the two who are able to be rational and do teamwork and get far, and either both of them survive or one of them survives because the other one sacrifices themselves. So Lalli would possibly die because he wouldn’t be able to cooperate too much, but he would survive the longest and die alone in the woods.

Misc. information, personal stuff & widely S4-related

Spoiler: show

Q.: How is kitty doing?
A. (00:09:48): I believe she is once again asleep in the sauna. And I’m sure she will wake up within an hour.

Q.: Do you believe in talent? Like that is something one is born with?
A. (0:39:33): To a certain extent. Mostly no, mostly I believe in hard work and that everyone can become really good at almost anything if they try, excluding severely handicapped people: it would be very difficult to become a great artist if you are blind. But you can become a sculptor, feel with your fingers and do that (I’ve heard that’s a thing that exists), but you wouldn’t be able to paint, I think, if you are completely blind. And on a lesser extent, you can be born with the better ability to see or understand three-dimensional space and have a head-start, like a three-year advantage on so-called ‘regular’ people, for example. And that would be one reason why someone might seem like they have born talent to draw something. But they would quickly fall behind if they didn’t practice. So in that sense I believe in some level of talent that people can be born with - a good memory, a good ability to focus, just being healthy in general - but none of that matters if you don’t practice, and someone who doesn’t have that inborn talent and was just born very average in every way is going to quickly become great and breach that gap if they do put in the work and the so-called ‘talented’ person wouldn’t. Because I’m born with a little bit of that talent, I know that if you look at my childhood drawings they look just like children’s drawings, but I did skip a few developmental steps. Like, children usually tend to leave the paper white where they draw the sky and draw it at the top of the paper, because they don’t understand what they’re looking at when they look at the sky. They think it’s something that’s above them, they don’t actually look at the sky and see that it reaches the ground. And I skipped that step, I always drew the sky all the way down to the ground. And the other step that I skipped was the one where you draw people so that they only have the head and the legs [draws a blob on two sticks] with a smile and hands. That’s an important step that children have because that’s what they focus on when they see humans: the hands, the legs and the face, those are the important parts. So when they draw them they skip the body, because there’s nothing important there as far as interacting with another human, and I skipped that, I started drawing bodies of people immediately. But I didn’t draw perfect humans, I just drew like this instead [draws a human with rectangular body and stick limbs], but this is a one-year advantage that I had, so I got praise and everything from people, so I started drawing more than other children because I liked getting praised for it, so I got even more of an advantage as time went on. But if I haven’t practiced at all and focused on something else, I wouldn’t have actually gotten any  better than other people.
Q.: Best thing to do is just practice.
A. (0:45:43): Exactly. This is the only advice one needs to become better at art. You don’t even need to necessarily practice in the mindset of practicing, you just need to draw a lot, even if it’s just something that you like. When I started developing properly in my art skills was when I started getting into Pokemon as a child, when I was 10 years old or something. I wasn’t practicing anything, but I drew a lot after that. Before that I didn’t draw that much, I just doodled cats and rabbits now and then, but as I started drawing a lot and getting interested in things looking cool rather than drawing a cat standing next to a tree or something like that, I started wanting things to look cool and have cool colours and movement and the kind of aesthetic that children’s anime has. I had no practice in mind, I wasn’t practicing anatomy of hands or colour theory, I just drew every day and slowly got better to the point where I actually started understanding art more. And then I was able to move on to other things after a couple years.
Q.: Would you ever be willing to share some of your early art?
A. (0:48:06): Definitely. I hope I will be able to find more of my early art, because I have a bunch of folders in my closet with a lot of my early art and I’m very amused by them, because as the saying goes “tragedy plus time equals comedy,” and enough time has definitely passed from my childhood and teenage drawings’ years that it’s funny, the bad ones. And some of them are kinda good and they are like “Hm, I can see why other people praised me for this one” or something. But yeah, I’m definitely willing to share. I will have to scan them, though, the ones that I have are traditionally drawn. I’ll have to ask my parents next time I visit if they happen to have my very early backups from my digital art, because them I kind of lacking, I got my first drawing tablet very very early and switched over to drawing about half of my art digitally when I was about twelve. I think I had a lot of good stuff a.k.a. hilarious stuff in that digital folder, but I’m afraid it might be lost. But I’m going to have to ask because I know that they started making backups of everything I did digitally, I’ll have to check if they still exist maybe burned to DVDs, or not DVDs, they weren’t even around back then...to CD-ROMs or even floppy disks.
Q.: It is so important that children be given the opportunity to explore their talents.
A. (0:51:14): Yes. I definitely have my parents to thank for me becoming an artist, because they raised me and my brother in the way that... we wouldn’t get just toys all the time, but any time we expressed even a little bit of interest in some sort of subject, we’d immediately be bought some sort of interactive toys related to that or tools. My brother would be like “Hmm, magnets are kinda cool,” and my mom would go out and buy a gigantic set of magnets and different boxes or whatever that had magnets. And I would be like “I kinda like to draw!” and I had every single type of pencil that I wanted and paper and chalk and everything. I didn’t even know that drawing tablets were a thing when I was twelve years old, my dad saw one of the earliest Wacom drawing tablets at a store and just bought it for me, showed up at home once with it, and I was like “I have no idea what it is,” and he was really excited and gave it to me and showed me how to use it. I was never pressured to draw. Some parents are like if you show them some talent they will pressure you into becoming that. I was not pressured to become an artist, I was just given all the tools I needed.

Q.: When did you decide you wanted to be an artist?
A. (0:53:09): Actually, when I started applying to university, because before that  didn’t really think that being an artist was a job that you can have, I was really just drawing for fun. But when I was in the Finnish equivalent of a high school, lukio, I was 16-17-18, around those years, one of my teachers said “Oh, so you’re definitely going to apply to Taik, the graphic design department, because that’s the one that also educates you to become an illustrator” and I was like “I have no idea what that is.” I have ever heard about this school or thought about becoming professionally an artist, but after that I went home and looked up the school and saw in the description what you become through going through the graphic design department (three years), and illustrator was one of the career paths that they listed that a lot of their students become. I was like “Oh, I’m gonna become an illustrator!” and that’s when I decided and put my development into overdrive. I didn’t make it in the first time, because I hadn’t become good enough yet to be on the path to being professional at arts, and was rejected and didn’t make it into any university and had to keep a gap year. And during that year I did nothing but trying to become better as an artist and then I made it in. And then, when I was in there, I realised that I hated working with customers or clients and realised that I would like to become a comic artist instead.

Q.: Have you shown your comics to other folks?
A. (0:55:38): You mean my parents and relatives? Definitely! They all know what I am doing. My mom’s like my biggest fan pretty much. When she was visiting she kind of gently asked if she would be allowed to see the next page beforehand and I of course never show it. And I know my aunt also reads the comic, she’s a great fan, too. And my grandfather, who died, we visited him in Norway, he had both A Redtail’s Dream hardcover and volume 1 of SSSS, so even though we were kind of distant since he lived so far away he kept up with what I was doing. So yeah, my family definitely knows what I’m working on.
Q.:If so, what do they think of it?
A. (0:58:08): I guess that was the continuation of do my relatives know that I work on comics. They love them. My dad is very very proud and my mom is my biggest fan. I feel like my dad is one of those people that he would be proud of me no matter what as long as I was able to get a job and take care of myself. But he’s definitely extremely proud of me being able to be an artist. And my family has a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, so I also get respect for the fact that I’ve been able to create my own job working for myself.

Q.: Is anyone else in your family artistic?
A. (0:59:20): Yes, to a degree. No one’s a professional artist, but my dad definitely likes to mention any people in my family that have any sort of artistic talent and be like “Yes, it’s definitely in the genes! It must have come from here and here.” My mom has some artistic talent in that she’s good at painting landscapes. She never does it anymore, she used to do it when I was younger; we would paint during summer usually, together, and she actually does really good stuff, she can paint from still life. She doesn’t paint much from her head, but she can paint almost photorealistic stuff, like put fruits and stuff on the table and paint that, that she’s really good at. I’ve seen some of her old paintings and they are fairly fantastic. But she doesn’t like painting people or anything, she only painted nature and still life from what I’ve seen. And she hasn’t painted anything for years. And apparently my grandfather on my mom’s side was an architect, I think. Or someone on that side, so there’s some artistic profession over there. Like, he designed some church that is in Jyväskylä that’s apparently really nice. And then I had some sort of artistic people, kinda distantly, on my father’s side. And my dad’s kind of artistic in the sense that he can draw very schematic things. He never really practises his art, but I’ve seen him draw sketches of people playing golf and stuff. And you can actually see that he has that thing where he can see three-dimensional space and understands the poses people make, but he doesn’t have any artistic proficiency because he never practises. But he has something, I can see that he has some sort of artistic eye that could be developed. And he also takes fantastic photos, so he has good compositional skills. But I don’t have any professional artists in my family.

Q.: That movie IT ruined clowns forever for me :C [chat was talking about clowns, the rest is muted]
A. (2:08:08): See, I haven’t seen that movie and I still hate clowns. I just hate them from having seen them in circus performances. They seem like... distorted, disturbing image of something. They are kind of disturbing image of a human.

Q.: Minna, do you like horror movies?
A. (2:09:00): Yes, I do. I watched a lot of them a few years ago, did some sort of a horror movie binge. I watched all of the Paranormal Activities, a bunch of  horror movies set in abandoned mental asylums and hospitals and haunted houses, you know, a family or engaged couple moves into a house and oh nooo, it’s haunted! And exorcism movies and field experiment movies and demonic children movies.
Q.: What's your favorite horror movie? :O
A. (2:11:00): It might be The Thing, I think I’ve watched it a few times. [pauses] I’m trying to think if I can even remember the names of any other ones. A lot of them just blend together, and even though some of them were really good and I liked them a lot, I don’t actually remember specifically what the name was. I’ve seen a bunch of movies dealing with possession and exorcism that I really liked, but all of them kind of melt together and I can’t actually remember which one of them was the one that I enjoyed the most. And obviously movies dealing with pandemics are also fun. But Splinter was very disturbing, it had a really weird disease thing. The movie itself was set in a gas station, and it was just a few people trying to hide in there from the splinter infection that did very interesting things to the person who got infected. But just the disease concept was so cool that it really had an impact on me. I think it was for some reason one of the scariest kinds of mutations that I’ve seen.

Q.: [muted]
A. (3:20:19): [muted]...like some study that compares how long it takes to learn foreign languages for English speakers. Norwegian is the easiest one, and since Swedish is basically the same as Norwegian—I guess marginally more difficult—it’s basically the easiest language you can learn. And if you can learn to read Norwegian, you can learn to read Swedish, and vice versa.
Q.: No more rain flash?
A. (3:20:58): I only lived there for two years, and I spoke to almost nobody! I went to the grocery store, had to speak to a couple of neighbors and the post office guy a few times, but that’s not enough to gain in fluency.
Q.: Do the same in Finnish! Or wait, have you already said something in Finnish?
A. (3:21:22): I haven’t today, so I guess I’ll have to do it. Alright, same narration! [Minna describes the picture in Finnish] And that was the same in Finnish, pretty much the same. I’ve learned that since there’s always that difficulty, when you’re supposed to say something in some language, since I always have a difficult time coming up with what to say, I find it helps to talk about what I’m drawing right now or randomly start talking about what I did, like, “I had breakfast, and then I went for a walk, and then I went to the store, and I bought this and this and this,” since obviously the people you’re talking to don’t even understand what you’re saying.
Q.: The Swedes understood your Swedish though.
A. (3:23:48): Yeah, but that doesn’t matter. Usually the nervousness about “oh no what do I say” comes for the people that you’re supposed to be demonstrating the language to, because it’s like, “Oh I’m supposed to say something proper. Should I talk about some scientific theory or something to be smart.” Obviously it doesn’t matter what you say. The whole point is just to get the sound of the language through.
Q.: This German understood a lot too!
A. (3:24:48): Yes, German is very similar to Swedish! I usually don’t understand any German. A few words here and there, but I won’t understand a sentence unless it’s a really obvious one, like “Good day!” That one is understood across all Germanic languages I think.
Q.: It really helps knowing Low German. It really helps me toss around Danish this summer on holiday too.
A. (3:27:02): Ah, so low German would be closer to the Scandinavian languages, then?

Q.: [chat discusses where people are from] I used to occupy people.
A. (3:25:50): [laughing] What? Don’t occupy people. And also don’t occupy bathrooms or houses. Just generally occupying things isn’t great. You’re allowed to occupy your own house, and I guess your own bathroom.
Q.: Occupy my front yard.
A. (3:27:10): Do you really want someone to occupying your front yard, just squatting there, using your driveway as a bathroom?
Q.: If I saw someone occupying my front yard, I would call the damn cops.
A. (3:29:40): Me too. And I would grab a knife. Scream at them. I would not allow occupation of my front yard to be occuring. I don’t have a front yard though. I just have a front door and a shared driveway with my neighbors because it’s a row house. So I would be more concerned about my backyard. Actually, my front yard would be basically in my front door, so I would be very upset about someone occupying that.

Q.: [muted]
A. (4:20:50): [muted]...last week, a couple days. But yeah, the break is mostly for working. Three of the four weeks are for work, and one is for rest, which is really enough for me since I don’t really need a mental break, I really just need a few days to rest my hands, and that’s it.

The Illustration

Spoiler: show

Q.: I thought you said Lalli would want to be a bedsheet ghost?
A. (0:10:23): Yes, but I went the fanservice way, and everyone wanted Lalli as a black cat, so that is why he’s a cat.
Q.: Fursuit.
A. (0:12:30): Well, not quite. They’re more like pyjamas. It would be the kind of fursuit that you make with five bucks. Well, the pijamas part would cost five bucks. And then you have the furry paws. The big paws were actually inspired by the Wild,Wild Pussycats in My Hero Academia, one of them was doing a costume and gigantic cat paw that’s part of it. It’s so unusable that I wanted to draw them myself.

Q.: Tuuri as an actual ghost.
A. (0:13:28): I mean I might have her in the background somewhere. Like ooooo [draws white transparent figure in the background].
Q.: Tuuri hiding among the pumpkins to scare the rest of them to even out the lopsided background?
A. (0:25:30): You mean Tuuri ghost? Because if I do include Tuuri, she would be a ghost. If that’s something you want, I can.
Q.: [general consensus in chat is enthusiastic yes]
A. (0:26:59): Alright, I guess I will have to find some place for ghost Tuuri. I feel like I’m going to want to add her hiding behind the trees peeking out. It will be more cinematic than having her like uuuh [indicating the pumpkin patch].

Q.: Kinda half-expecting Kitty to be here in like a little bumblebee costume or something.
A. (0:28:31): Oh yeah, I’ve forgotten kitty! I’m going to have to add her somewhere. She might be hiding behind the pumpkins somewhere. Eating a pumpkin or something. I’m definitely gonna have to add kitty. If it seems like I’m forgetting her getting to the end, I’m like “Mmm, I’m gonna finish soon” and I haven’t added her, definitely remind me, and I will add kitty.
Q.: NO, WAIT. KITTY AS A HUMMINGFLUFF.
A. (0:29:19): So she would have a beak tied to her face and fake wings. I could do that. Oh wait, she could have bat wings. Nice schematic right there. Yes, I will add bat wings to kitty. She’s going to have a bat hummingfluff costume.

Q.: Wait, does Mikkel’s syringe have an eyeball on the end?
A. (1:25:43): Yes, because it is not a syringe, it is a lobotomy pick. I will draw it out more properly once we get there. But yes, it is in fact an eye from not too perfectly performed lobotomy, since you’re not supposed to actually go through the eye, you’re supposed to go around it and dig around eye socket a little bit.

Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, Process   

Spoiler: show

Q.: Have you ever tried to do photorealistic art or did you stick to more things?
A. (0:56:45): I’ve really been doing more stylized things, but at some point I was doing kinda realistic stuff. During that period when I was really trying to develop as an artist, I was doing a lot of fairly realistic and very detailed art. So, photorealistic stuff - not really, because I find it a little bit boring, but I’ve definitely tried some realism when I was drawing dragons and gryphons and wolf warriors.

City of Hunger

Spoiler: show

Q.: Have you ever thought about translating the game into other languages, into Russian for example? I have a lot of friends who are really excited about the game as well but don’t have a sufficient level of English to play it.
A. (3:10:27): Kinda no, not for this one since it’s my first game, and one of the important things to keep in mind that I learned is to keep the scope as small as possible or you will never finish it. And another thing is that kind of building it in a way where everything can be translated would require a lot of extra work and complicate things enough that maybe I won’t even finish it. But I kinda will have all the story texts, NPC dialogue and the stories would be kept in separate text files rather than be embedded inside the game, since that doesn’t actually create too much work for me. In fact, it will make it easier for me to fix errors, so I’ doing that way, which would make it possible for people who want to do fan translations, they will have to just replace those files with their language translations. And maybe I’ll actually do - if I’m able to and have the energy - in the end add in some sort of a code that you don’t necessarily have to replace them, like you could make a folder next to the default one with alternative language and it would affect it and add it to the menu or something, and you could switch around so that you can decide which folder you would get the language from. And then it would be up to the fan translators to make sure that all the files are actually in the proper folder. But no, I don’t think I’m gonna go into actually including official translations into the game, because that would add too much extra work, proofreading and quality control on my part, but I will try to make sure that if people want to do fan translations, they would be able to do it. They would just have to make sure that they themselves add the files where they are supposed to be.
Q.: I just want to volunteer as the one who would handle the game translation.
A. (3:13:17): Well, if you end up having your friends, if they want to have the game translated, if there’s someone in the group who knows enough about handling files like that, which wouldn’t be too difficult, that they would want to do the translation with you, you could easily translate it with them. But I won’t do official translations and include them myself. They would have to be done separate from the game. I’m just going to focus on the [rest is muted]

[Kis]

I've been of no use lately because of studying, but I'd like to.. maybe reassure people who still read these chatlogs. All of the streams are being saved from now on. This means that even if we can't make it on time before the recordings are deleted (and at this pace we won't be able to for quite a long time), we will eventually transcribe them nevertheless. We've also been trying to make the chatlogs less lengthy by omitting some of the non-relevant answers and discussions, so I hope more people would be willing to read them. So, erm.. yeah.
Oh, and we also really need people who know Finnish! It's nothing difficult, just a few words per chatlog on average, please think about it if you are Finnish or have been learning it.
You can contact me for stream recordings if the links for them aren't in the doc.

[Antillanka]

Thanks again for doing this, you help those of us (who can't always catch the stream) a lot to stay informed about with the tasty bits of canon Minna lets out every now and then haha!

[Miriam]

Minna recently updated the character descriptions (click 'Adventure II'), in which the birthday and height of the characters are mentioned. It says that Reynir is 189 cm and Sigrun is 184 cm. I think it might be wrong that Reynir is taller than Sigrun.

Proof 1:



Minna even refers to this as a 'height chart'.

Proof 2:


Admittedly, Reynir does look like he's slouching here.

Proof 3:


Proof 4:
         

On all these pictures it looks like, or at least it's suggested that Sigrun is taller than Reynir. Maybe Reynir has grown in the meantime.

[Grade E cat]

She also marked Emil's nationality as "Finn". Well, there is a somewhat plausible scenario in which this could become correct, but I think considering it canon requires membership to a certain pair's shipper club.

And she forgot the Icelandic flag on Onni's profile.

Now, for more positive forms of fangirling:

Also, Emil had his birthday, but Mikkel didn't. So the second trip is going to happen in June-July?

And is that the word "Mage" in Reynir's profession line  ?

[P__]

Thanks again for doing this, you help those of us (who can't always catch the stream) a lot to stay informed about with the tasty bits of canon Minna lets out every now and then haha!

Ditto! I never get to watch the streams, but I always like to see the info you transcribe. Good to know that the videos get saved somewhere, too


regarding the character info, things have now been corrected... Except the height difference between Reynir and Sigrun. I'll have to assume Reynir is a sloucher (and the doctor had a hard time getting him to stand straight, godsdammit! so he could actually measure him) and/or he had a late growth spurt, as suggested, while Sigrun always stands tall! and proud! (and in heels, like Wonder Woman)