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the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you

#amusing

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Finally! Bad boy Garrus is home ❤️

Took me long enough to finish him!!!

#Mass Effect #fan art #garrus vakarian #turians

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Definitely agreed re: dehumidifers - the one I bought in early 2022 was extraordinarily useful. Trying to dry clothes in this flat otherwise would be near-impossible. (Technically there is a line outside, but it sags badly so half your stuff drags in the grass, and sometimes the line itself has algae on it - three guesses who found this out the hard way...)

Day 2 in new flat. I am going to attempt to use... The contraption

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"this too shall pass" well can it fucking get on with it

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small town buzz

instagram | shop | commission info

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Let's irresponsibly breed a dog together!

Share as much as possible that dog gotta be atrocious by the end of the week

#I'm amused that we have a plurality winner here #oh tumblr #never change

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The Fallout TV show

So, you may remember the days before my social energy-level suddenly collapsed, back in early 2022, and never really recovered? The days when I used to post regularly with idle speculation on media, video games, books and other things? Apparently tonight we're taking one for memory lane on all that.

I just saw the first two episodes of the Fallout TV show, and I have some thoughts…

First, a small surprise: it's actually good. It's a thing. In 2024. Which is enjoyable. Yes, I know, I know, I know. It shows the crisis in popular entertainment that I'm surprised by this. (It's the same feeling, actually, as when Baldur's Gate 3 came out and my socks were blown off by the unexpected experience of properly falling in love with a thing again.)

(By the way? From now on I'm going to call the show FoTV, on the same principle as Fo3 or Fo4 or FNV, just because I can't be bothered to type "Fallout TV show" over and over again.)

Also, somewhat-related to the above, FoTV is the best game adaptation I think I have ever seen. The world of the games is there, from props and set-pieces to the wasteland environment itself, even little nods to actual in-game mechanics. There are also lots of call-backs to the games themselves. For instance, FoTV's opening sequence was, to me, very reminiscent of the opening sections of Fo4, where the perfect suburbia is first set up, and then implodes in front of your horrified eyes, then is incinerated by a literal atomic bomb. The opening sequences of FoTV also do a good job of nailing the fact that while it's a future, it's not our future. It isn't spelled out directly, but we're shown it very smoothly through the mise-en-scène, whether it's news coming via an analogue radio, oldschool chemical-film cameras, or fashions that we just don't wear in our 2024, and so on.

And then Los Angeles gets nuked.

(I do have a small nitpick here. While I understand why the writers structured this scene the way they do, and it works narratively, nonetheless several characters are looking DIRECTLY at the first explosion when it happens. At the absolute minimum, they would have been blinded. More realistically, the radiant heat from the explosion - even at this distance! - would have given them extreme burns on exposed skin. And for that matter the UV component of the flashover would have given them an extreme case of sunburn. Also, the shockwave should actually have been a one-two-three punch - effectively-instantaneous light-flashover first, then the ground shaking as the speed of sound in rock is about three times faster than in the air, then the window getting smashed in by the airburst. Also, uh, they all cope unrealistically well with a storm of knife-sharp broken glass fragments being hurled into their faces.)

(You'll also note that I haven't said a single word about what the hard gamma rays might be doing to the cellular machinery inside their bodies. Actually, this I'm a bit less sure about - gamma rays do attenuate in air, at least somewhat, and also high-energy photons have a tendency just to go straight through people without actually stopping - our soft tissues, at least, semi-transparent to X-rays! -, so I suspect that at the distance the birthday party was from Ground Zero, you could possibly argue this one either way.)

Anyway. Moving on from all of that, before I feel a need to go and look up cumulative radiation-exposure tables or something, because this is supposed to be a Tumblr post, not a peer-reviewed academic paper.

Regarding Lucy's characterisation, I found it interesting how she flips from "sheltered and naive" to "unexpectedly competent". While she's lacking in knowledge of the world outside her vault, she's also clearly very adaptable and good at thinking on her feet. She figures out that the visitors from the other vault are actually Raiders without any direct help, and actually manages to get out of THAT room alive - all the more surprising when you realise she was up against someone who a) had the benefit of surprise, b) had prior experience with violence and killing and c) was also the person with weapons (at least at first). Lucy may be a bit of a cloud-cuckoolander in some ways, but she's not a pushover either. She's also clearly capable of taking initiative and acting on her own when she needs to, and she's also seemingly not averse to taking a third option if she thinks other people are in the wrong. (In particular, her decision to let herself out of the vault stands out here.) On the other hand, she also alternates these merits with getting easily-flustered and off-balance around other people, along with a tendency to telegraph her actions in a very overt manner. (There's a mildly-hilarious moment early on where you basically get to watch her flub her first speech-check.)

The Brotherhood of Steel are, unsurprisingly, back. So far there hasn't been any explanation for how they apparently recovered from the events of Fallout 2 or (possibly, depending on whatever the "canonical" ending is) the events of Fallout: New Vegas. They're also back in the arrogant/dickish mode of behaviour that they fall into very easily. They're also implied to be amoral in their own way - one interpretation of Maximus's trial scene is that he gets assigned to be Knight Titus's squire precisely because they do think he's the guilty party for the "boot-razor" incident, and the higher-ups actually like this bit of backstabbiness. (Perhaps they interpret it as ruthless determination, or a willingness to do "whatever is necessary for the mission". Or maybe they just think it's funny to kick him a little bit upstairs, just so they can see what happens next.)

(As far as I could tell, the narrative and the evidence-in-the-text are coy about whether he's actually guilty concerning Initiate Dane. Personally, I suspect Max isn't the guilty party - given that he had the bunk next to the victim, it would be the dumbest crime imaginable if he was. It's also clear that he has enemies amongst the other aspirants who might be willing to frame him. But who knows? And less favourable interpretations of the events definitely exist.)

While it's subtle, some of the Brotherhood's flaws are also on display here. Remember the overconfident Knights who got themselves blown up by the Boomers in FNV? Knight Titus shows a lot of that sort of behaviour too. Going AWOL in the middle of the mission to do some big game hunting, because he was "bored"? Yeah, arrogance and overconfidence there! Also he displays some real stupidity with his treatment of Maximus, being extremely rude to him and blaming Max for his own failures while he's also too injured to stand up, and there are no independent witnesses present. You'd think anyone who's a wasteland native would know to be extra careful when there's no backup or support! And to add extra sauce to the stupidity, this after he had Max remove his helmet!

The narrative doesn't make it quite clear whether Max either gave Titus a quick headshot, or just stood there until the internal bleeding or whatever ran its course, but it seems clear enough what happened there. And honestly, it's hard to hold it against Max given that Titus was both an incompetent and a dickhead. (Though, one subtlety - as I recall, we don't ever see Titus's body, so I wouldn't be totally surprised if he reappears at some point.)

Somewhat related to the Brotherhood stuff, I was also interested to see how the writers handled what we might call the power armour question. Basically, it's depicted as being, well, powerful, but it's also clear that Max doesn't really know what he's doing, so his T-60 doesn't turn into any kind of Disk One Nuke. (As the Ghoul puts it, "you should've read the manual" after Max gets his leg stuck after landing on a surface that couldn't take his weight.)

As for the Ghoul and what his agenda is, at two episodes in, it's hard to say, and there's not enough evidence to even begin to speculate. However, one detail I did notice was that Lucy's father seems distinctly unsurprised (if horrified) by the break-in to the Vault. Also, while I couldn't entirely sure, he seemed to recognise Moldaver and doesn't seem particularly-surprised to see her there. Moldaver's comment to Lucy - "you look just like your mother" - also seems to confirm that she has some prior history with Lucy's family.

Then there's the vault attack itself. For the Wasteland, the survival-rate among the residents its actually rather high. The Raiders could very easily have exterminated them … and they don't. "Restraint" and "mercy" are not qualities we associate with Raiders, so this is an interesting turn of events. (The "hostages and bomb" scene in particular had a bit of a dog-and-pony-show sense to it - notably, the delay on the bomb is long enough for the hostage vault-dwellers to make an escape, almost as if it was never really intended to kill them in the first place.) There also seemed to be a suggestion that Moldaver wanted them to stay inside the vault, which is interesting for its implications.

Anyway, I look forward to the chance to see future episodes. This has proved to be the most interesting TV experience in some time.

#Fallout #the tv show #LHS reacts #idle speculation #also #hi #I'm not dead!

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#Mass Effect #fan art

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Still mostly on hiatus but:

One of the reasons I spend a bunch of time going "mmm, except when No" at a lot of writing advice posts that go past (even when I actually, personally, agree with them and write like that) is that when I was a wee young writer, all that kind of advice basically paralyzed and stifled me.

It was more than a little like the well-meant advice about How To Practice Piano that I got from a lot of the musical adults in my life, full of many imprecations about how I had to do it That Way or I would have bad habits and etc.

The problem is when you're a little girl (or boy or neither, but I was a little girl) with a totally undiagnosed anxiety disorder and no idea what "anxiety" feels like, whose ways of expressing anxiety and stress were to shut down into expressionlessness and an inability to communicate, all that shit does is mean that no matter what happens, or how much you live the thing, part of you starts wanting nothing to do with it and will actively sabotage your attempts to do it.

And nothing but nothing but nothing matters as much to learning a skill as just doing it a lot, so that the literal process of doing it and all the embodied bits of doing it become familiar and natural. You will literally have better luck learning to draw by fucking around with a pencil or other instrument in your hand for hours and hours and hours and reinventing the wheel than you will by listening to advice that then makes you too anxious to do the thing.

I got better at playing piano when I literally started saying "fuck it fuck you I will do this however works". It took me until I was 27. It turned out that all the people who insisted that it was super important to learn it perfectly the first time, because otherwise I would have to unlearn bad habits which was way harder were fucking wrong.

It was way, way easier to unlearn bad habits that were minor compared to the sheer ability I started to have to make my fingers do the notes after six months of fucking around and playing imperfectly and haltingly and with weird stops in the middle, etc, than it was to try to do it perfect when doing it perfect made me so anxious I didn't want to sit down at the piano.

So much easier.

Additionally, especially when it comes to anything more than the most basic techniques (things like "how to make sentences and paragraphs that carry meaning in the language you want to use", or "how to do the very basic applications of watercolour to a paper" or "what the damper peddle does"), the subjective - the matter of taste, of what people like and don't like that is totally qualitative - gets into things really fast.

The op of that recent post? Yeah they're a contemporary romance author. And absolutely: contemporary romance audiences are brutal in their expectations of efficient pacing. This is a genre that already has specific bars to meet pegged out and flagged in simply writing in the genre itself. You bet every single one of your scenes better be multitasking more than a stereotypical single working mother who Has It All if you want to excel in that genre and get acclaim!

That colours their advice; that contextualizes it, and also tells you who it might not apply to. Because I literally don't like that genre, personally. I find it - you'll laugh - rushed, cramped, and prone to skipping all of the parts I like even in contemporary stuff. But that's also because I am only passingly interested in the story that for that genre is front and centre of the point of the book, and that comes down to a matter of taste, equivalent to whether or not you like white chocolate.

It doesn't mean that OP is Wrong or Bad. It just means that OP is telling you how to write books that they like, or think are correct and successful. If you agree, then it's great advice! If you don't, ignore it, don't worry, you'll be fine.

And I point these things out for every other creative out there who is like I was, who is starting, or just struggling, or otherwise quite insecure in what they're doing, and hits advice that seems to say you're doing it Wrong or what you want to do is incompatible with good writing or . . . whatever.

I hate the advice "don't waste your reader's time", for example. It is inimical to me being able to write anything. How the fuck am I supposed to know what a ~*hypothetical reader*~ considers a waste of time? Y'all can't agree on shit. How about I just do what I want to do and the readers - none of whom are being brought here by law, mandate, or a gun to their head - can decide for themselves how to spend their time? They don't like what I've got on offer they can go somewhere else and please themselves: they have agency here.

ON THE FLIPSIDE if that thread on how to do pacing illuminated something for you, made it make sense, made it seem like what you want to do with your art was more in grasp, then great!! Fantastic! Take it and run with it - it's great when structural, technical advice makes something click.

What I'm here for is to just chime in and add that any time an author says "this is how to write", you should mentally add on a "if you want to write like me/write like how I think is valuable" before you even move on to assessing whether the advice will actually do that. Because literally nobody actually knows exactly how to please all audiences because audiences want absolutely contradictory and mutually incompatible things depending on the audience, and even the day, and the mood, and sometimes the phase of the moon.

The most important way to build your skills as a writer is to write, and then write some more, and then write some more. Anything that makes you too anxious to write, or feel like writing isn't worth it, or that you can't just write until you've gotten a thing perfect, is bad advice, because nothing matters as much as the sheer practice.

Advice that makes you want to write more (or draw more, or sing more, or . . . whatever) = good advice. Advice that makes you apprehensive to start = bad advice, at least for now.

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#For once #an April Fools that actually amused me #so on this occasion #reblog it is then

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Ardat-Yakshi Monastery

#Mass Effect

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"Camaraderie... adventure... and steel on steel. The stuff of legends! Right, Boo?"

Thanks to @the-upper-shelf for bringing this little silly headcannon into the page! <3

#Mass Effect #fan art #space hamster

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All of my BG3 landscapes on one post :) prints ✦ patreon (full speedpaints are available there + wallpapers)

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#ouch #also #LOL

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You are Gaius Julius Caesar, and it's a lovely day in March.

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Today is the only day you can Reblog this

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2024 March 9

Comet Pons-Brooks in Northern Spring Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horálek / Institute of Physics in Opava

Explanation: As spring approaches for northern skygazers Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is growing brighter. Currently visible with small telescopes and binoculars the Halley-type comet could reach naked eye visibility in the coming weeks. Seen despite a foggy atmosphere, the comet’s green coma and long tail hover near the horizon, in this well-composed deep night skyscape from Revuca, Slovakia recorded on March 5. In the sky above the Halley-type comet, the Andromeda (right) and Triangulum galaxies flank bright star Mirach, beta star of the constellation Andromeda. The two spiral galaxies are members of our local galaxy group and over 2.5 million light-years distant. Comet Pons-Brooks is a periodic visitor to the inner Solar System and less than 14 light-minutes away. Reaching its perihelion on April 21, this comet should be visible in the sky during the April 8 total solar eclipse.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240309.html

#astronomy