#Y'all seen the concept art for the machine

[journalsouppe]

Blood and Darkness, a Zagreus zine!! Everything is so cute omg I need to actually finish the game hfdjsk. Thank you @zagreuszine for such an amazing zine :)!! There's nothing better than seeing all the love everyone has for a character

Writing typed below!

Blood and Darkness Zine theme: a zagreus fanzine July, 2023

Merch/Bundle list:

Dusa's Gift - full bundle + pencil pouch

physical zine

digital zine

sticker with cerberus (Kiraelin)

sticker sheet (frydough)

board game print (cowgirlongirl)

bookmark (kiraelin)

surf charm (frydough)

standing charm (hoshihaemon)

early bird sticker (itszygoart)

STRETCH GOALS

sleepy print (pandalanachick)

shaker charm (mirarasol)

standee (hoshihaemon)

pin (cowgirlongirl)

added pencil pouch (mirarasol)

I love this zine so much. You can see how much love each artist and writer and mod has for Zagreus. Everything is so well made and I love seeing the range of styles both in the art and writing. I love my little Zagreus collection so much it makes me want to play more Hades now. Thank you to all those involved with the project!! I can't wait to sit and thoroughly look through the whole zine I am so in love with what I've seen already. This also inspires me to make Hades art and want to be in a Hades zine! Y'all are so amazing and skilled this is such a lovely zine!! :)

Comments:

Bookmark is in the zine (pers. note)

love the little jewelry box with the pin

the charms are SO cute I esp love the design and concept of the claw machine shaker charm :')

the bookmark is so cool

all the art is so good omg :')

Zag is so cozy in the sleepy print omg the quality is so nice too

LOVE the pin omg

the standee is so fun, great posing and I love that it's like he's doing a run

Zag dressing as the diff gods is so cute omg i esp love dionysus

cute mailer sticker!!

I love the art style in both the single stickers

WOAH the embroidered art is so cute and unique omg I love seeing art other than digital in zines

the candyland-like print is SO CUTE and is so smart omg reminds me of By Jove a little bit :')

Ough!! all the art and writing is so good

the pencil pouch not only has a really cute design (reminds me of the TLOZ items art pages) but is super well made and high quality!!

I cannot pick a favorite

love the mix of canon art and writing and au art and writing -- a great mix that fits really well

#i wish the sun wasn't in the way of the overall items image T_T oh well #man zag is such a cutie i love him sm #hades game #hades #zagreus #hades supergiant #journalsouppe #bullet journal #journal #video game journal #zine #fandom zine

[sysig]

Never talk to me or my mind partner or a slightly smaller me or his slightly smaller mind partner again

#Vargas #Lol #Finally the smaller versions have a home lol #Those are the printed size of the version I uploaded before - so if you want small bookmarks leave it at that size #And how they compare to my 1.5x bookmarks which are my current main ones #Still haven't printed any other versions but I'm sure I will sometime in the near-ish future #It's a little funny 'cause they go on adventures a little like Flat Stanley lol #I was reading two books at a time a bit ago so I had to split up Edgar and Scriabin to keep my pages #I made sure to keep them thematic to each book tho! Edgar got the book about a biblical war and Scriabin got mind invasion lol #They're back together now tho ♥ #And now the little ones aren't just flying around my area free and breezy they get to live in my new book #It's a little funny seeing how I draw draw chibi Edgar all roundy with soft edges and then there he is on the page lol #It's also funny seeing their tiny hands sticking up out of the pages - it's oddly approprite #My question is how long until I start treating this like a colouring book #How far does my respect for the original tip the scale against my distaste for the gift-giver lol #I could break and impulsively ink some scars onto that face any day! Lol #Y'all seen the concept art for the machine? There's even a straight-on headshot of Edgar in pencils it's really lovely #And the pencil of that little smile Nny gives when explaining how to pronounce his name haha

[natural-hazard]

Language games and "why do you care?"

epistemic status: wailing and gnashing of teeth The sexual tension between the terms "pragmatic" and "meaningful". We've leaned towards using pragmatic more, I believe because Spendo and Crispith love them some William James. The thing that underlies both of them is this sense of hooking in to what matters to you. I could do without the word "pragmatic"s association with a particular narrow view of what can matter ("his head was in the clouds, he had all these big ideas but no pragmatic inclinations"). I bemoan "meaningful" and "meaning"s rumored (big if true!) association with, well.... "meaningless shit that doesn't connect to real humans, and is something that people play act at". Pragmatic evokes imagery of my "no-nonsense" grandpa who worked at a glass manufacturing plant his whole life and always focused on providing for his family. Meaningful evokes my artsy-fartsy sister who's desperately trying to escape the capitalist machine by trying to become a shaman in Ecuador. Take David Chapman's post (but give it back when you're done, the internet runs out after a while) Meaningful Perception. From our point of view it could just as easily be called "Pragmatic Perception". The structure of how you perceive is shaped by the structure of how you care. When we talk about pragmatic classification systems, though I defs expect lumber-jacks to be more like my grandpa than my sister, we're tapping into the sense in which classification systems are made by people who care about stuff, and are using the classification systems to get more hooks into interacting with what they care about. As it has been, and as it shall be, talking about care can spawn plenty of strife. Because I'm not referencing the things that your self-concept or your Narrative Self (explanation needed, not forthcoming, life's cruel ain't it?) say that you care about. I don't care about what other people think of me... except, of course for all the ways that I do. Having a self-image defined via negative traits (I'm not this, I'm not that) involves paying just as much attention to how others asses you as for positive ones.

"How can you not care?!"

Sometimes it's shouted in a tone of self-righteous indignation. Sometimes it's blurted out in a confused state of reality-shock. Sometimes it comes out as barely more than a whisper, a quiet spell soaked in sadness trying to magik reality into being other than it is. Hypothetical: you and your friends have a little group where y'all get together and talk about movies. Old and new, low brow and high brow, anything that's been on a screen. You gain a reputation in your broader social network as The Movie Folk, ones who are wise in the ways of film, those of nuanced takes and discerning gaze. One day, you find out your friend Ihsmael (it's always an Ihsmael isn't it?), who by the way is one of the more respected and venerated critics in your group, has never watched any of the films you all talk about. He watched a few movies growing up, but decided he doesn't actually enjoy watching films that much and hasn't seen any since he was 8. I can image one who has righteous indignation. WTF Ishmael? The rest of us have been putting in the work for years, and you've just been reading the plot on wikipedia and mashing up takes you found on the obscure and weirdly high quality forum that no one else happened to know? You've cheated! You're a sham! You don't deserve all the adoration you get for your hot takes, I demand you immediately refund everyone who ever gave you social capital! I can imagine one who's brain momentarily glitches as they try to understand how the fuck this is even possible. Why... have you been hanging out in our explicitly movie centric friend crew for multiple years when you don't watch films? The reality-shock alternates between "this makes so little sense I most be missing something" and the existential horror of realizing another human can look at the art you prize most and only care about a minuscule superficial aspect of it (critiquing with friends). Maybe you don't see them as committing status fraud, but you can't help but think that they live in a small sad world, content with only shadows of the real. ---------------------------- Variation in what people care about is fine. Not everyone needs to love A Serious Man as much as me. What's tragic is when I see systematic forces attempting to destroy ways of caring. In one of my favorite blog posts on the internet, Ben Hoffman talks about such an experience when trying to share with a friend a new technique he learned called Goal Factoring (pick some goal you have, see if it's actually you trying to get a few different things which are actually separable as in you could satisfy each of them better by trying to achieve them in different ways)

Naturally, I wanted to share this with others. When I got back home to DC, I tried to teach goal factoring to the Less Wrong meetup there. One participant told me that they'd had a hard time engaging, because their experience with any exercise around explicitly describing goals pattern-matched to things they'd been forced to do in school. For instance, they described an exercise they'd been forced to do at the beginning of the school year. The first step was to list a goal for the year (usually for that particular class), and the next steps were about figuring out how they'd accomplish that goal. They didn't really have specific goals in mind, so they had to make something up. Usually something that they imagined the teacher might approve of. They had effectively been trained to think of reasoning explicitly about goals as something where you have to follow someone else's rules, and has little to do with getting what you actually want. It should be easy to see how this might poison the whole thing. If someone's had enough experiences like that, where something that sort of looks like explicitly reasoning about goals is forced on them in nonsense ways, they might be ruined for goal factoring – and for many other things.

This breaks my heart. The particular connection to the particular technique that is goal factoring isn't important. But the fact that a person's interaction with the school system has effectively poisoned their ability to apply the entirety of their mind the timeless question "what do I see as the good life, and how shall I pursue it?" Many moons ago, in highschool, I suggested to a group that we get gyros, which I pronounced "j-eye-rows". Some nasally voiced twerp "ummmmm AKTUALLY it's pronounced 'year-ohs'". "Great", I thought to myself, "I will now never in my life ever pronounce it the way this fucko just suggested." Many. Such. ✨Cases✨. Schools at their worst (and also at their medium) act as 12 year programs who's end result is smashing one's ability to genuinely care about huge swathes of reality. ----------------------------- Which takes us back to language games (what, you don't remember us ever being at language games? Pal, we've always been at language games). I need to go to work now, so you figure out the connection. It's something like: language games fight each other. Language games have macro-structure (The Situation you are in and it's logic) and micro-structure (how do words actually combine to mean anything?). When people care about vastly different things, it changes the relationship between macro and micro structure of a language game. Two apsie nerds discussing trains is a language game that has a macro-structure, but it's less salient than the specific details they're conveying to each other via highly systematic micro-structure. Two dudes hurling insults at each other in a bar, The Situation screens off other details. The macro screens off the micro. The point of an insult is that it peforms the Insult Move in A Situation. It doesn't matter to much if I call your dad an ass-hat or your mom a cuck. The meaning of the micro is used to understand the move in the macro, and is then unimportant (except via contributing to a certain aesthetic quality and intensity to the macro move). Some macro-structures want to destroy micro-structures that I care a lot about. I aim to do something about this.

[supercasey]

So I watched Batman Ninja with my buddy Jason the other night...

Under a readmore because I'm screaming and y'all normal people don't need to see this shitshow.

So, like, to begin with; the animation is gorgeous- I will in no way try to deny that- and does a lot of cool things with the art style. You can tell a lot of work went into this movie, and while I personally find it so bad that it's funny, I'm not gonna shit on anyone who likes this film more seriously. (Also, I'm gonna shit on the outfits a lot, so sorry if that comes off as unintentionally racist. I am white and stupid.)

However, other than that... What the shit??? Was that??? I'm still reeling 48 hours later.

The basic plot of this wild ass movie (that I could figure out): Gorilla Grodd has built a time machine so he can go back in time and rule over Feudal Japan and change history (it never really specifies why he chose Japan of all places but go off, DC). He brings Deathstroke (my fav obviously), The Penguin, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and The Joker + Harley Quinn (because if you want your plans to work you should absolutely bring in the disaster piece of shit that is The Joker).

Also Catwoman is here but from what I can tell it was accidental on her part/I think she's the one who fucked up the time machine??? Unclear.

So everyone goes to the past, including Batman, Alfred, and all the Robins (Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, and Damian Wayne as Robin) (none of the girls but let's be honest, I think they dodged a fucking bullet).

Batman ends up behind everyone else during the time traveling??? Not really explained, but now everyone has been in Japan for two years and Catwoman has depression.

Okay onto me rambling:

They have this scene where every villain gets a title card/one-liner, and everyone else but Deathstroke gets a line that fits their shtick. I feel like they had no idea what to do for a pun/joke, so there's just a literal pause then "... Yeah :)" from Deathstroke. I straight up scream-laughed so fucking hard.

All the Robins look so fucking stupid except for Tim. Nightwing looks like Goku, Red Hood has the tallest bucket on his head I've ever seen, and Damian's hair... good fucking lord.

Also, Damian is completely out of character. The people making this movie, I think, have never read a comic with Damian, and just made him into "annoyingly happy child character that is annoying as all fuck and talks to animals for no reason except Baby" and let me tell you, I got such whiplash from seeing that. Also Damian and Red Hood are apparently voiced by the same guy and my buddy Jason is freaking out about it lmao.

Joker's fucking UGLY next question.

Harley sounds low-key annoying in this film but that might just be me... feels like a lot of people who try to voice her make their voices as high-pitched as possible and it's very grating after awhile.

There's an amnesia plot??? Where Harley and Joker get amnesia after a boat fire??? Red Hood beats the fuck out of them and while I feel bad for Harley, fuck Joker, he can die. They get their memories back by seeing a plant... that looks like Joker's face... as my boy Deathstroke would say: "... Yeah."

There's a clan of Batman ninjas from the past and, tbh, they look pretty fucking cool and I thought they were a really neat concept. Doesn't excuse the bat ghost thing.

OH GOD THE ENDING FIGHT

Through a series of unfortunate events, Gorilla Grodd and all the other villains start fighting each other in giant mechas in order to decide who will rule Japan because of course they do.

My favorite parts from the villain fights:

Two-Face's robot is the shit of nightmares. At one point Deathstroke and Grodd are going at it, Two-Face gets between them, then FLIPS A COIN FOR WHO HE'LL BEAT ON (very in-character I guess but I was still screeching). Btw, he chooses to attack Grodd, and Slade just stands back like "... Yeah :)"

Can you tell that I'm not over that stupid line yet?

PENGUIN HAS SEMI-SENTIENT PENGUINS WORKING ON THE INSIDE OF HIS ROBOT WTF!?!? WHERE DID HE GET THEM!?

Poison Ivy is beautiful, next question.

Okay, back to everything in general:

Grodd reveals that he has been low-key mind controlling all of the other villains this entire time, and that he's the one who made everyone build giant robots. He attempts to take full control of everyone, but Joker does instead. This is maybe the most sane part of this entire goddamn movie.

ALL OF THE ROBOTS MORE OR LESS FORM VOLTRON, LADS!!!

So now our heroes (Batman, the Batsquad, and the Batclan) need to take on this giant robot... so what's a boy to do? Well, if you're Damian Wayne in this movie, you get a magic flute from Grodd after he nearly dies for you, and with the help of your baby monkey friend, summon an army of millions of monkeys that form a giant monkey.

This is a Batman movie. Just thought I'd remind y'all of that.

At first it doesn't work, but don't worry! Another monkey (wearing a pink bow to remind us that she's a girl and the other monkey's love interest) comes and helps Damian play the flute better so the monkeys are better.

Monkeys still aren't enough, so with the power of bats and probably a lot of weed being smoked, the bats that came out of literally nowhere form a giant Batman to punch Voltron.

(Side note: they destroy the arm that Deathstroke was controlling so I don't know why he isn't dead. Never explained. He isn't even really hurt!!!)

The Robins enter Voltron to fight the villains because Joker loses control of everyone: Nightwing vs Penguin, Red Hood vs Deathstroke, and I forget the other match-ups, but nothing matters except that Red Hood walking up to Deathstroke and saying "Tell you what... I'll let you take the first shot" was badass and the best part of the movie.

Too bad we didn't get full fights scenes between everyone 🙃

Batman nearly died??? But lived??? I was so lost at this point and probably should've been paying better attention, but I was too busy trying to convince myself this wasn't a fever dream.

They got back to the present and everyone lived happily ever after, the end :)

Notes: I'm sure I missed some shit but Jesus fucking Christmas, it was a wild ride from start to finish. It was, like, not that great storytelling wise, but it was so bad it was funny??? It was the "The Room" of Animated Batman films.

Batman is a fucking HIMBO in this movie. I dunno how to exactly explain it, but he makes so many stupid ass decisions throughout the movie, it's so funny. When he's trying to blend in with the townsfolk HE LITERALLY CUTS HIS HAIR TO HAVE THE BATSYMBOL ON THE TOP OF HIS FUCKING HEAD!!! WHO APPROVED THIS MOVIE!?!?

I have decided that Deathstroke didn't die because trans rights. Is he canon trans? Well, he is in my heart.

Jason Todd's voice actor did a great job with him, tbh I wish he had been more prominent in the movie.

I literally forgot Tim and Dick were there most of the time they were so unneeded in the plot.

I hated Damian but whatever.

I honestly did enjoy the movie, but probably not for the reasons the creators wanted me to. Again, nothing against the creators, but this was such an odd movie for 90% of it's run time.

7/10 would watch again, if only because it was so funny and nonsensical.

Ratings all together:

Animation: 10/10

Voice Acting: 7/10

Story (If taken seriously): 2/10

Story (if not serious): 8/10

All together; watch this if you're a Batman fan that feels like having a hilarious time and doesn't mind seeing your favorite characters be OOC or doing weird shit. I feel like this movie is best enjoyed on call/while hanging out with friends.

#dcu #dc #batman #bruce wayne #jason todd #damian wayne #tim drake #timothy drake #deathstroke #poison ivy #the penguin #the joker #joker #harley quinn #for jason #supercasey ramblings #thinking of doing a series of me reviewing/talking about batman movies and shows #but I dunno yet

[narfoonthenet]

Short Review

Just finished playing Icey, and it was a decent experience.

Icey is a 2D side-scrolling action game where you play as, well, Icey. Follow her journey through forests, city ruins, and tons and tons of enemies to accomplish her goal, her one purpose, her raison d'être: to kill the destroyer, the defiler, Judas.

Simple and straightforward, right? Not much going on plotwise.

'Course, that's the point.

Just under that simplistic plot is a meta-narrative that centers around the concept of existence and self awareness for AI constructs - think Matrix: Revolutions's "choice" and "purpose" thing, just applied to the Matrix and the machines (and done better). It doesn't try to go really deep and philosophical (thank God), mainly due to the length of the game, but just enough to keep you interested and invested in what comes next, and it does it in a novel way (for me, anyway).

Gameplay is a simple and straightforward affair that focuses purely on combat: you have a light attack and a heavy attack, a dash, ground based and air based attack, combos, and an insta-kill when an enemy's health is just low enough that replenishes your health and shield when executed.

My biggest problem, though, was during the fighting portions. There were plenty of times when I needed Icey to face a certain direction only for her to stick to the one she's facing despite my input, and at times there seemed to be a lag between a button-press and an in-game action. Also, very annoyingly, it's easy for enemies to stun-lock Icey, to the point where I had to frantically and continuously press the jump or dash buttons to get her away from them - all while being unable to stun-lock enemies yourself, unless you toss them into the air or execute a full-screen attack that's available for a couple of seconds after an insta-kill.

(Then again, I'm a button-masher, so I'm probably missing some kind of insight or some junk)

The game's art is okay. It's not bad - pretty well-done, in fact - but when you see one giant industrial robotic behemoth with a giant sledgehammer or a cybernetic heroine with edgy luminescent lines on her arms and legs, you've seen them all.

In all, I found my experience with Icey to be enjoyable and short - it took me maybe eight to ten hours to complete. If y'all want a simple action game with an interesting narrative, check Icey out.

#short review #icey #video games