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stemmmm · 4 months

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Close to a year and four rewrites later, I present to you...

Stem's Thoughts on the Game Design of Harvest Moon on SNES

I’m not going to lie, if you don’t like farming sims, you won’t like this one. At their core, every farming sim (at least in the rpg genre) is nearly identical, and that’s because of this game. In a way, I might dare to say that Harvest Moon for the SNES is the perfect farming sim because it has every one of the usual elements in their most simplified form and it just works straight from the get-go. It works so well in fact, that after this game came out in 1996, four more entries to the series were released before the year 2000.

If you are someone who does like farming sims, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s simple and to the point, with a fast pace and enough random events and points of intrigue that the game kept me relatively engaged for my whole playthrough.

Also, by nature of this being the first game and therefore hard to cover concisely and by nature of taking so long to write this... it's long as hell! Enjoy! :) <3

I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there.

(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)

You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!

I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.

The Utility of Fences

At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off.

On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.

With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix.

The Reality of Fences

After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.

I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability.

I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.

How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies

Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.

It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.

Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good.

Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.

The Charm of the Game

Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.

Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.

There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things.

The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.

The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.

It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.

Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES

You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it.

As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.

I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.

I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.

There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!

#harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon snes #hm snes #game review #m.txt #hm posting #i think i hit the image cap also? it wouldn't let me put in more even though i dont think there are that many. maybe it was a different cap #im happy to answer questions about things i didnt cover here too lol and i have notes from my playthrough if anyone is interested in those #those notes are the only reason i was able to keep all of this straight given how long it took me to write #anyways finally hitting post after like 3 days because i keep forgetting until weird hours

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arcanegifs · 21 days

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#BRUHHHHHH I NEED ANOTHER TEASER I BEG YOU RIOT #ITS BEEN THREE YEARS I CANT WAIT TO USE NEW CONTENT FOR GIFS LMAO #personal tag #dont look at me im just here to complain about content drought lmao its really not good in fostering a healthy fandom ngl #because ppl will just hyperfixate and consume media for like a month and then the fandom goes poof right after lol #i miss all the people scrutinizing media every week i miss all the essays pumping out when content arrives #these days its just.... nothing lmao i only really still have arcane in my mind because of fanfiction and a lot of fics have been inactive #ik we're getting new stuff in a few months #and ik we're not in canceled shows hell but like #i really hope that if theres season 3 we're gonna get it a bit more regularly #i really miss it when content was like weekly or every 2 weeks because ppl and the fandom are wayyyy more active during those times #binge culture and netflix sort of changed it lol #i miss it when fandoms were huge!!! i miss it when it was so CHAOTIC lmaooooooooo #I MISS WAITING FOR LONG ASS HOURS WAITING FOR CONTENT TO RELEASE EVERY WEEK!!!! I MISS IT!!!! that was like what 12 years ago LOL #I KNOW arcane is special with their 3 year drought because it takes time to make arcane #but like..... idk man i miss content lmao #iirc they took too long to make s2 bc they have no idea if s1 would be even renewed #so i hope s3 will be a bit more regular now #anyways im gonna go bye bye

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skitskatdacat63 · 3 months

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"Non paeniteo potitus."

+ details & process

And, process !!

The jump btwn the second to last and last always surprise me whenever I make one of these because I always forget to take snapshots after I start painting. It's always like: oh yeah heres the lineart with some colors- BOOM fully finished✨️

What he's holding are the Austrian imperial scepter and orb, seen below:

I was going to draw the crown too but decided I don't hate myself that much(maybe some other day), and gave him a golden laurel crown, bcs I'm obsessed with that as a motif, and also its very remincient of the boy king statue that started this whole thing!

There's some symbolism of this, both intentionally but also just historically. I love that the orb represents that the monarch is holding the world in their hand, basically every old monarchy has one of those, and I think it's very cool for symbolism. But also bcs of that, I was forced to basically draw catholic fanart so, you win some you lose some. The star halo above him head is both to reference those religious statues with star crowns(I saw them a lot in Europe and they imprinted onto my brain), as well as: his four championships of course!

#TL: 'I don't apologize for winning' 🤭🤭🤭#^ was gonna find some old latin quote to put but was like. oh yeah of course !!!#noy sure if its entirely correct. kinda wanted to email my hs latin teacher to ask but i finished this too late at night #anyways please dont let this flop SKDKLGLVLV #im really proud of it okah 😭😭😭 it was actually so much fun and enjoyable and nice etc dtc #i questioned to myself earlier abt why my chibi art always gets more notes than my detailed art #and i realized. like unless youve been following the lore of my blog. this isnt even recognizable as f1 fanart SJFKLVLV #but thats okay because its my niche brainrot au and i will do what i want >:)#the hair and the relics are def my proudest part of this #i mentioned before but i have trouble yknow translating irl stuff or complicated stuff into drawing #but all of this came really smoothly to me in a very unexpected way #god his hair is just sooooo its ssoooooooo!!!!!!!!! i wanna pet him 🥹#but i think it def helped that i kept posting the process on my close friends #and my two irl friends(as well as some friends on here! ty!!) encouraged me a lot abt it so :D #but anyways yep pls take my brainrot art 🙏🙏 it took me 13+ hours in the span of like 3 days basically #f1 #formula 1 #sebastian vettel #catie.art.#boy king au

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simmyfrobby · 2 months

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What are your top 3 nhl teams with the best vibes?

ooh ok. yea. fun. love this. im going to declare all my biases upfront: im a pens, bruins & wild fan so obviously my nr 1 is:

minny

they have flower. they have kaprizov. they go on homoerotic little holidays together. they have two deweys and one foligno. their captain is pretty and everyone is short. every game is somehow embarrassing. even if they win. especially if they win. 11/10 cant lose.

nr 2: philly

i dont follow them or root for them but i will have nightmares about the dog mask every day for the rest of my life. also they made drysdale come hang out w them during the all star break and that was cute. also the conga line. hardass coach but we stay silly. 9/10 solid vibes.

nr 3: yotes

jason zucker lives there.

#bruins have the goalies ofc #but the ghost of christmas past still kinda hangs over that team and also they like to play soúper frustrating games #that go on for 4 hours and where I feel like I might die the entire time #captain rat gets + for vibes but then 2023 sadbrad hug kills it. if krejc and bergy were still on this team they'd make the top 3 #pens ofc dont make the list despite sunshine boy poj and the fact that erik brings the silly every day #theyre too much of a Serious Old Man Team #bonus points for the silliest own goal in the history of the franchise. points withdrawn for cookie injury i miss him so bad #anne carson asks why does tragedy exist #answer: because old men #because love. because brittle bones and traumatic head injuries.#last year i probably would've answered Seattle #Detroit at the beginning of this season but they um. made some poor hiring choices. rotten rancid vibes now im very sorry for your loss #Edmonton would've gotten a high score from me at the beginning of the season not because the vibes were good but because they were #without a doubt #the most miserable team in the league and i found that to be soooo interesting and fun #How Will The Oilers Lose Next #but theyre good again now so that's less exciting for me #montreal honourable mention for the short slutty guy #love him

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froglord24 · 18 days

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picked up one piece again

#zoro #one piece #one piece fanart #did this drawing in like one and a half hours but drawing nami took me like 3 days #no i dont have a favorite (lie)

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mooodyblue · 6 months

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Hi lily I'm having a rough night so i was wondering if it was okay that I request something that will make me feel better.

What about cg!e with a little that HATES change (me) And maybe the big change is E has been home for longer than normal and all of a sudden he has to go back on tour and reader HATES THAT so she has a big meltdown when El tells her he has to go back and he reminds her they have a routine on tour too and that it'll be the same as last time (so not a lot is changing) ?

I hope this makes sense

miss you xo - kiwi

hope u feel better :( <3 ty for the request!! hopefully i can cheer u up a bit with this ~~

pairing: 70s!cg!elvis x gn!little!reader

wc: 942

➸masterlist

elvis knew you never did well with change, so of course when he sat through another tedious meeting with the colonel, you wouldn’t be happy with the news he was just given.

he’d been on a break from touring for a little longer than usual, surprisingly due to doctors orders. he spent a bit of time with you in hawaii then flew back to memphis, getting plenty of alone time with you now that he had a bit of time to take care of little you.

you had a strict everyday routine with him. breakfast together, lunch together, snack time together, and so forth. the two of you always watched cartoons together and he adored watching you play happily in front of him every day. unfortunately, that routine was about to change.

his health wasn’t great, however, it was good enough for the colonel to make him go back on another long US tour. he wished that if he had to suffer through another long, agonizing tour that he’d at least go overseas, but that was just a dream that would never come true. now it left him with the plan of telling you.

he stepped back into his home, immediately being jumped on by you with an excited squeal. he hated that he was about to crush your spirits. “hey, baby. what’re you doin’, huh?” he chuckled, picking you up and kissing your rosy cheeks.

“can we play now, daddy? please?” you begged, giving him sweet, puppy dog eyes.

“ah—darlin’,” he sighed, putting you down and crouching down to make you appear smaller. he took his glasses off and hung them up on his shirt, taking your hands and looking you straight in the eyes. “baby, this is real hard for me to say. i need you to be big ‘n strong for me, alright?”

the look of worry on your face broke his heart. “the colonel says he’s sendin’ me out on another tour. daddy’s goin’ away for a little ‘while.”

you felt like your whole world was about to collapse. an ache in your chest as you realized your life was about to change up again. you loved the routine that the two of you shared. you didn’t do well when things had to change. “no.” you shook your head, “no, daddy. no.” you said sternly.

he wished it was that easy to just say no to the colonel, but he couldn’t. he squeezed your hands again, giving you a sympathetic look. “baby–”

“no!” you pulled away from him, “change is bad, daddy! it’s bad!” you hugged yourself, shaking your head again. “y-you hafta stay! you-you’re my daddy, you can’t….no!” you dropped yourself to the floor, the waterworks already flowing down your cheeks as you began to kick your feet angrily like a helpless toddler—but that’s exactly what you were in your state of mind. he knew it too.

elvis was at a loss for words, unsure of whether he should attempt to calm you down or to let you ride out this meltdown of yours. he got down on the floor with a soft grunt, “hey, hey. c’mon, honey–look at me, look at daddy for a sec.” he cooed softly, trying to take your hands again. your eyes met with his, full of tears and sadness. almost fear, afraid that once the routine changed, everything would just go bad.

“you remember the last time daddy went on tour?” he asked, getting a nod from you in response. “daddy didn’t leave you alone at home, did he?”

“w-well….no…” you muttered.

“that’s right, honey. he didn’t.” the corner of his lip perked up, bringing you close to him as you leaned against his chest. he rocked you on a soothing motion, trying to calm you down to the best of his ability. “you think daddy’s gonna let ya sit at home by yourself this time around?” he shook his head, “ain’t no way, baby.”

he pet your hair gently, pressing a soft kiss to your scalp. “we always have the same routine when we go on tour, don’t we? you just gotta let daddy do what he’s gotta do durin’ the day before we can get to playin’ and snoozin’ all day.”

“b-but i won’t see you as much…” you pouted, looking off into the distance.

“i know, angel. i know. that’s the sucky part, but we get through it every time, don’t we? hm?” he kissed your scalp again, smiling softly. he turned you to face him, using his thumb to wipe the tears off your cheeks. “it took us some time to get into the routine you and i got goin’ on right now. we just gotta get back into the old one. then once tour ends, we come right back to this ol’ routine. think you can handle that?”

you sniffled, wiping your snotty nose with your sleeve as you nodded slowly. “it’s hard.”

“it is, baby. i hate it too. but we gotta do things we don’t like.” he frowned, pressing a kiss to your forehead. “can daddy get a big kiss?”

there was hesitation in your eyes, clearly grumpy and unhappy with the situation. he sighed dramatically, forcing a pout on his face. “c’mon, honey. you that mad at daddy, huh? that mean you don’t love your old man, no more?”

you gasped, “daddy!” you pecked his cheek, cupping his plush cheeks with your small hands. “i still love you, daddy! i promise! i promise!”

he chuckled softly, returning the kiss and ruffling your hair. “that’s my baby.” he grinned, “now, lets get up off this dirty floor and have a lil’ snack.”

#divider by saradika #elvis x reader #nothing more devastating than spending an hour typing out a fic just for it to not even reach 1k words bleh #i have never responded to a request this fast but im trying to do better whenever someone sends one in saying they had a bad day D:#i dont want to see my friends have a bad day and then just post their request that was supposed to make them feel better a month later!!!!#anyway hope you enjoy friend <3

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sapnere · 7 months

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BUT THIS IS THE END OF MY STORY

gift; @nenestansunsthings

#m. edits #jshk #tbhk #jibaku shounen hanako kun #toilet bound hanako kun #animangaladies #animangaedit #yashiro nene #nene yashiro #icons #SUN I AM SO SO SORRY ABOUT 1. HOW LATE THIS IS 2. ALSO ABOUT HOW LATE THIS IS AND 3.#THE FACT THAT I AM ONLY MAKING ICONS AND STUFF I GENUINELY DONT HAVE THE ENERGY TO MAKE GIFSETS IM SORRY <////3 #also. this isnt being posted on the edit blog because.#the queue is um…#welp ive set it in a specific way and ive worked for hours (lie) to get certain sets posted on certain days #im gonna rb these there anyway so its wtv tho #ANYWAYS. hope you like these <3 #and the rest of the gifts >:3

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umblrspectrum · 8 months

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thanks iz

#you'll never fucking guess what new hyperfixation ive gained #had the game for 3 days and i already have over 24 hours on it #its so punishing and so fun #anyways friend bought it for me cause i showed minor interest and well here we are #burrowing heaven is so cool though #i might get another favorite eventually cause i'm only some 30% through all the Beasties #who knows #art #lobotomy corporation #lobotomy corp #lobotomy corp burrowing heaven #burrowing heaven #i didn't feel like coloring today #dont worry md followers. im cooking #i didnt actually check what tags existed for lobotomy corp so this will have to do

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lovedazai · 5 days

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this week was so stupid

#its over :) thank GOD #next week will be better !! (saying it until i convince myself)#i see my asks. i love u #i promise i’ll reply when i have a little more energy <33 #look inside my head its literally this 🌫️🌫️#i think i’ll sleep for twelve hours now #i dont want to think ab it anymore so i’ll tell u something good that happened !!#i got my hair done !! im so obsessed w it ive been feeling myself ever since #i met the cutest boy ive ever seen….i didnt talk to him v much </3 but maybe he heard me telepathically #lastly ! i got my fav serum on sale !!!!#itll all be ok :< ending my day w my dog sleeping on me and shes v warm #tmw is lazy mai day im not doing ANYTHING !! except maybe baking some goodies #i hope ur week was kind to u <33 and ur weekend is even kinder

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carnivalcarriondiscarded · 5 months

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pacing back and forth in front of my laptop like a caged tiger debating on making an amazon account

#on one hand: god no fuck no ive held out this long #on the other hand: i need very specific things that stores usually only sell online #and the nearest stores that Might have them are over an hour away and that takes so much fucking gas which is Expensive #not anywhere near worth it for a maybe #like. im. im stuck in a corner #absolutely unprompted #i dont want to contribute to amazon but there are things i cant get otherwise ive Checked the other online stores that would have them #and it can have lower prices and Sales...#fuck. well im contributing to late stage capitalism merely by living in the usa so might as well #i will use it as little as possible. i swear this to myself #i will only use it when im sure that there are no other options #THE DAY'S WHIMSY IS FADING RAPIDLY!!!!#i am no longer sipping at this tasty beer like someone Indulging #i am taking Swigs like someone trying to forget #it really is delicious tho. very bready and not too bitter <3

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dreadnotau · 3 months

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Happy three years everybody! As always, there’s a lot to say on the occasion, so pop in at the end of the post for the tl;dr if you don’t have time for my detailed diatribes, haha

Boy, time flies, huh? Feels like the second anniversary was just yesterday, but maybe that’s just the several long hiatuses getting to me. I’ve been scarce on uploading anything anywhere for a while now, even though I promised I’d actually pick up the slack this time around. What gives? Well…

For one, college hell, and for two, a lot of unfounded anxiety about putting my art out there. Allow me some theatrics for a moment and I’ll actually get back to the comic at hand… I’ve never had an exceptionally supportive environment for making art. It wasn’t suppressive, not in the slightest, but it also wasn’t… encouraging. It was always treated as a hobby or a distraction rather than something I was allowed to be fully proud of, especially because a lot of my art focused on more cartoon-y and fantasy ideas, rather than still life studies and painting (which people generally outside of the art sphere tend to value more, arbitrarily). Couple that with a childhood full of being bullied over minute shit you hadn’t even considered could be an issue before, and you get a teenager hellbent on never sharing his interests or ideas with anyone, mostly due to the fear of rejection.

I’ve grown, thankfully, but that paranoia and fear doesn’t go away overnight. As I’m sure you all know, Meowchela was the one who originally encouraged me to post this comic, and the only reason she succeeded was because she was the first person in a long time who listened and engaged with my interests and my art in a meaningful way. It’s kind of obvious her friendship had a profound impact on me, and I’d cite her as one of the reasons I was even hopeful enough to apply to an art college in the first place! This comic, and that bond with another person, proved that maybe these things I’m so passionate about weren’t duds, and weren’t something I had to keep to myself.

So, fast forward a few years. About three years, in fact.

During one of my classes, right before this hellish two weeks of exams started, one of the class assistants talked me into showing my comic pages to one of my professors. He’s generally a pretty open guy when it comes to new mediums, but I’m always… apprehensive about showing my less “traditional art”-y things to professors, but, he ended up being genuinely proud of it. Specifically, I showed him pages 85-87 (because they’re my favourites) and, he didn’t read the text, just the visuals were enough for him to say “good job, keep it up” (which is HIGH praise from that guy). When I mentioned I’ve been meaning to simplify the visuals because I didn’t have time to work on the comic very often because of college and classes, he dismissed it on principle. I was honestly caught off guard. Heavily paraphrasing, he suggested that worsening the visuals for an arbitrary deadline was counterproductive to making something that’s Good™.

That’s kinda stuck with me. For a good few years now I was more focused on optimisation rather than visual improvement for the comic, and though it HAS contributed to better visuals in some ways (cutting corners sometimes makes for a less pointy and jagged end result), it’s kind of weird I’m treating an art project that way, isn’t it? I set a lot of… arbitrary deadlines and standards for myself, in the form of expectations and what I “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing at certain stages in my life. I’ve thought of Dread Not as a passion project second and a stepping stone first, if I’m being honest. As if it was too… fandom-y and derivative to be treated with more gravity than that, like it’s an immature project because I was still a child when I came up with it. As if it was something I’m making to Build Up to Something Else, something Bigger and Cooler and More Important, and… the more I think about the future of Dread Not, and even my future career options, the more I realised that’s, ironically, a really immature way to think about it.

If there’s one thing going to this art college has taught me, is that there’s no “right” way to make art, and there’s no “right” way to success as an artist. There’s no clear-cut paths, just more commonly treaded roads, but even those are heavily overgrown. Why should I try to box myself into thinking I have to make things from complete scratch to be taken seriously? What’s so bad about Dread Not as a story and as a comic that’s caused me to vaguely keep it under wraps when conversing with people in my day-to-day life? Why wouldn’t I put all these skills I’ve acquired to improve and expand this project that’s Right There, WAITING for me to finally get off my ass and get pages out there again?

I wish I could say I’ve used all this time away in a particularly clever way, but I really haven’t - at least, it feels like I haven’t. My art has undoubtedly improved over time (though admittedly the art for this post was Very rushed, fuckin exams), and while I’ve been working on projects in the background, chipping away at them in a VERY disorganised way, I haven’t been posting that progress anywhere, and I haven’t made any good progress on my biggest project, Dread Not, because of the other ones. And, honestly? Admitting that kinda stings. This comic means a lot to me, and I wish I actually gave it the time and attention it deserves instead of letting it sit out hiatus after hiatus because I keep failing at structuring my time.

So, my new plan is a little more abstract: find a way to work Dread Not into my school schedule, and slowly build a habit of working on it more often. No clue how long that’ll take, but I think it’ll be worth it to consider it as an option, and hopefully finally end these long, drawn out hiatuses with short bursts of uploads in-between. HOPEFULLY. Building habits was never my strong suit, so please bear with me while I figure this out in what will probably be the most hectic upload schedule in this comics history, which is: no schedule at all.

From now on (until the end of Act 1), I’ll upload pages when they’re ready, and depending on how the weeks go and how complex the page is, they could be weeks or days apart from one another. Hell, some might even take a month to finish if school stuff gets REALLY hectic (god knows Hellish Exam Week number 1 and number 2 won’t be giving me much time to work on the comic), but I’m determined to do this. I want to be able to put my all into this project again!!

(And hopefully finish Act 1 by the end of this semester…)

TL;DR: College is giving me life lessons I didn’t expect, and because of them I’ve decided to give myself a non-existent upload schedule for Dread Not: Pages will be posted when they’re ready, and the spacing between pages could wildly vary depending on circumstances and the actual complexity of the page itself.

As always, thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for being patient!

If all goes well, there will be new content very, very soon.

#dread not #dreadnot #dread not au #dreadnotau #not comic #kris #schedule update #again #apparently i was calling this last hiatus a pseudo hiatus?#oh silly past me. this was a full blown hiatus jesus fucking christ #but yeah no i love being at this college dont get me wrong #its just that i have like 3 exams to prepare for the next two days ALONE #so like!!!! wish me luck!!!!! for christs sake #yknow i was planning on actually Dedicating Time to the art for this post #but uhh. haha. a little thing called the consequences to my actions caught up to me #fuckin psychology exam today that i had to cram for last night #i think it went ok? who the fuck knows at this point #but for tomorrow and the day after that i have digital shit to finish some theory to cram AND an ENTIRE PAINTING #that i didnt even START YET #and its an autoportrait. as if i wasnt suffering enough i have to stare at my ugly mug for hours #AGAIN. BECAUSE I HAD A DIFF AUTOPORTRAIT TO FINISH FOR LAST WEEK #im in spain without the s yall pray for me

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