After disappearing off the face of this Earth for the past two weeks or so, I return from the mythical land known as “Northern Europe” to find a package left at my door step. Beware, for mere mortals cannot possibly withstand the power of geek that lies in this post.

As regular readers of my blog (an endangered specimen of magical creatures only slightly more numerous in numbers than unicorns) know, I recently got back into crack Magic: The Gathering after many years of sobriety.

As with anything I do by my own volition, the addiction comes in a sudden burst of intensity and slowly tapers off into a less freaky hobby. But anyway, during that initial rush, I stumbled across the altered art thread on MTG Salvation and was introduced to the insanely wonder world of customized Magic cards modified with acrylic paint. Most of these altered cards are known as “frameless”, which involves extending the original art by painting over the official card borders, but many also involve replacing the official art with fan art (usually involving some meme or pop culture reference).

I bought some materials and tried doing alterations myself, but needless to say my inability to mix paint dooms my abominable creations. So I gave up and instead commissioned two cards from Sandreline, a respected member of the community. Check out her awesome gallery.

So long story short, these are the results along with the original cards:

Death’s Shadow

Fable of Wolf and Owl

This is a textbook example of when two distant branches of geekdom collide, much like the classic GTA Lucky Star.

Anyway, this is really just a short post to let people know that I am still alive having survived the 13-hour flight back from Copenhagen, though at one point the plane made a sudden plunge in the midst of some serious turbulence and I was sure that my time had come.

I just landed in Singapore 4 hours ago. Will post more soon* after I adjust from the jet lag and sort through 3 GB of mostly terrible photos.

* The term “soon”, wherever it is used on this blog, is defined as any point of time between the time of publication and the end of the universe.