Who was the most recent person to win NFL MVP as a defensive player?

What island was part of the Ryūkyū Kingdom before annexation by Japan in 1879 and a WWII battle in 1945?

What state gave its name to the Great Compromise of 1787 assigning proportional representation to only one house of the U.S. legislature?

A multiple choice question is never a good choice for the final game-changing question, but this one was particularly bad:  Abscission is the name for A) plants losing their leaves, B) deer dropping their antlers, C) snakes shedding their skin, or D) crabs molting their exoskeletons?

I'm putting together a thing for folks to enjoy. It's a zine of sorts (PDF) with a collection of 'blorbs' (oddly shaped blobs) in very light grey. Print out the zine, and you have an instant collection of games for kids on a road trip, or with a collection of friends at the pub, or... whatever.

Now, I'm just trying to come up with different 'games' you can play. I've done plenty of 'draw faces with the blorbs as their silhouette' myself. Then, you can really insert whatever noun you want in place of 'faces'. Draw trees with the blorbs as silhouette. You get the idea.

But then, I thought - what if you made the page of blorbs into a fantasy map with each of the blorbs as a separate country?

Or, make each blorb into a full character defending their territory against the other blorbs.

Or... I dunno - what have you got? 

(Thanks to Jill "xtingu" Knapp for the term 'blorb'.)

So I decided that I would like a reference place for myself of all the kickstarters that I was involved with for 2025. With the idea that it might be of interest to some of you, I thought I would share that info here.

January

In January, and after our successful Kickstarter Gone Fishin', we decided to do monthly thematic one-shots for D&D.

So the first up was January's Gone Snowballin'. In short: a snowball battle for your D&D group.

February

For February, the obvious theme was romance, given Valentine's Day, so we built out a 'speed dating' one shot (Gone Speed Datin'), and I had a bit of fun with one of the NPCs who might wind up across the table from your character (above) while the cover art was a bit more... tame.

March

Gone Pub Crawlin' was inspired by Saint Patty's Day. We used some art I did a while back for the teaser. I really kinda love that little dwarf. Goes way back to an early post in my Patreon.

Here again, the final cover art was pretty solidly different, but I like these characters, and it feels like they're crawlin from pub to pub, so...

April

April was antiquing themed. I've no idea how / why April is associated with antiquing. 

Fun Fact: The character in the cover art for this one was originally something I started sketching up as another NPC for Gone Speed Datin'. I thought his open shirt, machismo laden body language, and cock eyed smirk made him perfect for lining up across from in a speed dating scenario. But when the guys saw it, they said we had to keep hold of him for Antiquin'. I still don't fully understand why, but was just happy he would find a home.

May

May was Gone Bee Keepin'. I went... a little different with this one. I really worked hard at using shapes to construct the image rather than lines. That's pretty solidly against my normal process and I found it challenging. While I'm not in love with the resulting image, I did learn a lot, and feel certain I could do something much better next time. I also did a bit of homework to figure out what sort of protective equipment medieval beekeepers wore and that's reflected in the final art. 

June

June was the first Wayward Pages bundle. Brad and I have been doing the Location Lexicon for some time now, and we decided to try bundling together  some of them and presenting them to the Kickstarter audience. They seemed to like it, though, in hindsight, we didn't do nearly enough promotional work to make it a real success. More learning as we go. Still, it was nice to see characters and art that I'd been working on for so long actually see the light of day.

It also worked out perfectly because the crew I normally work with on Kickstarter projects was taking the month off for personal reasons.

July

July was Gone Surfin'. I went a little nutty with the cover character's pose, but it was fun, and it seemed to play well with folks. As with most of these, I could tweak this endlessly.

September

September was a busy month Gone Foragin', with the regular crew, and then Matt (the writer / designer of these) did his own separate KS for Beyond the Mycelium.

For Gone Foragin', I again stuck to using shapes far more than lines, and I definitely like the results more than I did for Beekeepin'. Rapid artistic growth for the win!

For Mycelium, I did a whole painted cover, and really enjoyed the process - especially creating characters in a scene that are supposed to be mushrooms.

October

Obviously, October was Gone Scarin'.

Another fun one for me to create, and honestly, I was finally starting to feel like I had the process down for this one. It's a little... open? to me now, but it once again felt like a solid step in the right direction for me as an illustrator.

The large, blank banner eventually held the title of the book.

November

November was Gone Huntin' - with characters in competition to bring in the biggest / best game. Of course, there's a bit of a twist...

I had to hurry through the cover art for this one for 'life reasons', but overall I'm pretty happy with it, and once again I learned a bit that I will be able to use going forward.

December

December was Gone Sleighin' - a snowy race in sleighs pulled by various creatures.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this one was both fun and educational. It felt like my composition and layout game was on point, and I like our elf friend in the front. I made the forest of trees a bit 'generic' in order to make sure they didn't detract from the rest, but looking back, I wish I'd made them a little more unique.

...and that wraps up the Kickstarter work that I did in 2025. That wasn't all of the art that I did in 2025, but this seemed like it warranted it's own separate post / archive.

What's your favorite? What would you like me to have done that I didn't?

I put cheese on everything. (Well, not anything sweet cuz that's disgusting. And sacrilege). 

Mostly cuz any food that's not sweet (except cheese) is gross so adding cheese makes it less gross.

I found a piece of colby jack in my cardigan pocket today. It was partially dried out.

I thought perhaps I had a problem. Though in fairness, this is the first time this has occurred.

And I didn't eat it, so clearly I'm good. 

What is the name of the fictional language in the novel 1984 by George Orwell?

What Belgian artist painted The Son of Man in 1964?  [Not pictured:  nerdsholmferret with his face obscured by an Apple]

What is the name of the chemical reaction between amino acids and sugars that gives seared steaks and toasted marshmallows a distinct flavor?

What Norwegian explorer led the first expedition to reach the South Pole in 1911?

I hadn't realized it, but aside from the sketch I did the other night of the blacksmith, I haven't done much character art for some time. Since I made some headway with Caravan! last night, I gave myself the 'treat' of doing just that.

The game is pretty focused on some 'coming of age' themes, so characters will likely be young by default. This image will go in the 'heritage' section of character generation, which gives a sense of what equipment they start with. So our heroine here is using hand me downs which could maybe fit a bit better.

She'll get cropped a bit in the rulebook, but you lucky dogs get to see the whole image (which I did because I didn't like the idea of cropping her to start).

The gameplay is still perplexing to me, but card creation feels very natural.

George Maciunas, "One Year" 1973–74

Today was another good day for games. I started the day working on replacing the image that Brad had been using for Maze. I'd forgotten, but he pulled the image from somewhere on the web as a 'placeholder', but he doesn't own the rights to use it. So I went to work figuring out something to put in its place.

Then, I headed down to King of Prussia, and an event at (of all things) the Wegman's cafe. I'm not sure if there was name for it, but it was a game designer meetup. Met some new folks, and one or two (of the half dozen I met) really seemed like great connections in the community. Both knowledgeable and had a clear desire to help.

In addition, there was one young guy who was clearly new to game design, and was asking a long list of questions. I was thrilled to be able to help answer a ton of art related questions.

The whole thing had a great 'people helping each other do what they love' vibe.

After discussing the thumbnails above with Brad, we settled on a base concept and I got to work iterating some possible options.

The original placeholder, the base design I'm working on, and the 'hero / move' token as a sample of the other icons so my medusa will have enough of the 'look and feel' of the others as to not stick out in a bad way.

So resolutions: is that still a thing? It's Ephiphany already so guess I should get mine out there.

I don't really have resolutions, I more do goal setting. 

Goal 2026.1 - See the milky way with my naked eyes. This means finding a place with minimal light polution on a moonless night. There are darksky maps to aid with this. I have not planned a trip for this, I'm simply stating this as a 2026 goal.

Goal 2026.2 - Read the following books

1. Yi Sang - The Wings + Crow's Eye View << this on in particular is proving hard to source. I might have to settle for something else by him
2. Johann Wolfgang Goethe - Faust, a tragedy in two parts
3. Miguel de Cervantes - The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha
4. Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Hell Screen
5. Albert Camus - The Stranger
6. Cao Xueqin - Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as Story of the Stone)
7. Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
8. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
10. Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
11. Hermann Hesse - Demian, the Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
12. Homer - The Odyssey

Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis is also on the list, or lets say crossed off this list as I read it last month. 

Why these particular titles you might ask? Well, my kid got me into this video game and the main characters of the game are the characters from each of these books. (Except Yi Sang, who is the writer. Maybe he writes about himself? I guess I will find out.) 

I mentioned to my bookish fam this list about 2 months ago. And the books started showing up. This is about half of them - the rest are scattered about the house. An item of note not shown in the photo: CM Adams gifted my kid the almost complete works of Hesse and they are now ensconced in her bedroom. That "The Age of Goethe" book I found in my garage and though the commentary is in English, the Faust (errr, UrFaust actually) is in German. So that doesn't help me much. 

I anticipate a number of future posts will be about progress on this goal.