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flickering-nightfall · 2 months

Note

If you don't mind me asking, what does CDSS stand for?

"CDSS stands for Chasing Daybreak: Sundown Survived, which is a whole mouthful and a half so I just always call it CDSS."

Via here but I didn't actually tag that post as CDSS so it wasn't findable, oops

I'm going to do more stuff for it and explain what it's actually about, but I have some other stuff I need/want to do first.

#I'm focusing on commissions and the suns + spearmaster video mainly #and my map parts #with doodles and writeup stuff on the side #and a lot of stuff not related to this blog lol #cdss #text #ask #anon

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ange-la-ange-ootd · 4 months

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Dumping some cosplay stuff in this outfit blog (sorry, not sorry), but it's been really fun getting back into this dear old hobby of mine. ;v; Hoping to cosplay a bit more in 2024 as well.

And something silly to end the year: Al Jeanne slowmo spin~ This cosplay is sooooo fun to wear.

[ID: A cosplay selfie of the character Fumi from the visual novel Jack Jeanne, playing the role of Mary Jane the dollmaker. Mary has blonde hair that covers part of her face, red eyes, and a slight smile. She poses with one hand by her face. Her outfit is layered and in an eccentric style, featuring oversized buttons, puffy sleeves, and a ruffled collar.

An additional video of the full cosplay outfit is included. The speed is slowed down to showcase the outfit construction and various layers (pleated shorts and a long side apron). The character spins, poses, and laughs before walking towards the camera.]

#jack jeanne #jackjeanne #cosplay #jack jeanne cosplay #sarafumi takashina #not an outfit #my sewing/construction writeup for this is still a draft but SOON #it's not new years yet here jfksl quickly posts my recap stuff #me retaking this video several times in the parking lot: fumi pls grant me a fraction of your grace ty

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leota-nexus · 5 months

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name: ¿? (pronounced "you think about all this way more than I do!") (pronounced "to pronounce it correctly, I'd have to cut out your tongue!") (pronounced "make a noise & see if I respond!") (no pronunciation) (super helpful pronunciation guide audio recording below!* <3)

alias: V

gender: probably not

lifepath: streetkid techie who later got into hacking

favorite ripper: Vik Vektor

favorite fixer: Muamar "El Capitán" Reyes

favorite weapons (no particular order): Bloody Maria, Hypercritical, Comrade's Hammer, Byakko, & Cottonmouth

favorite clothing style: crystaljock bombers & daemon-hunter ballcap

favorite colors: 💣💎😈🔮🧠 (& anything metallic neon synthwave/darkwave)

bonus fun facts:

fan of AssaultBots & MythSploders (2077 versions of BattleBots & MythBusters yes we just made them up but it's absolutely true anyway)

favorite MythSploders quotes include "When in doubt: C4" -Savage Adam & "Jaime wants big boom" -Jaime the CyberWalrus (yes these bonus fun facts were just an elaborate reason to include these quotes yet somehow still important characterization anyway)

*super helpful pronunciation guide audio recording:

(bonus pronunciation description explanation below the cut)

While asking questions about ¿?, I kept thinking of a joke that seemingly would only work in text:

"I'm ¿?"

"Wha- WTF was that?! How do you pronounce that again?!"

"¿?"

"You know what? Nevermind."

Because it's cyberpunk, I kept picturing it as "*opens mouth, tech glitch sound comes out*" until I finally realized I could create that sound!

So, if I may, let me take you on a journey of how my brain works:

First, I looked for a recording of V saying, "I'm V." Simple right? I came up empty. So I went through the character creator, waited for the music to calm the fuck down, & recorded both voices multiple times just in case. Then I took a sample of just "male voice" V & put it through a granular synthesizer where I was able to do this:

That's left (¿) & right (?) audio (dots omitted to minimize sonic overload) each tracing separate paths through the audio "I'm V" at the same time. I was like

"lulz let's hear this chaos!"

"..."

"oh no I love it"

So I hit record, only to realize they're slightly different length lines at slightly different speeds creating this shifting effect over multiple loops. I decided to record a full cycle loop & see if there's a "best" one. Except first, I was curious what it would sound like if I isolated each loop & layered them all on top of each other, like so:

"Oh No I LOVE It"

I panned each loop differently to really emphasize the movement of the sound so if you're listening through headphones, it really does end up sounding like something resembling "¿?"

But I don't want to make final decisions about my partner's character, ya know? Luckily it only took a single listen:

"Yeah, that's how it's officially pronounced. Good luck trying to pronounce that!"

So there you have it! "Good luck!"

(Personally, I just say "your streetkid V" outloud, WAY easier lol)

damn I am fucking OVER typing the words "pronounced" & "pronunciation" @_@

#oc: ¿?#my partner's v #streetkid v #virtual photography #cyberpunk 2077 #photomode #video game art #oc writeups #sound design #sound design notes #this was supposed to post tomorrow but oh well 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

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eggshellsareneat · 9 months

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Another difference between tumblr and reddit is definitely doomerism culture.

On Tumblr, accounts will pop up in the notes to say shit like "the world is going to end anyways", "we can't do anything", yadda yadda. There's a constant stream of apocalyptic rhetoric across the entire site, as tumblr doomers try to sap as many conversations as possible.

Meanwhile on reddit, you wouldn't get that sort of proselytism. Maybe it's because of the forum-esque system that reddit uses, maybe it's because you can actually argue in a way that matters, but reddit doomers mostly retreat to their own subreddits.

For my non-reddit followers, you've never heard of r/collapse. Don't! It's one of the worst places on the internet. It's a cultural meld of Q-Anon cultists with a for-profit suicide forum, all coated in a wet coat of "leftism" or "climate realism". It's a subreddit whose main export is SH-adjacent "I'm better than you for feeling worse" rhetoric. Facts and progress don't matter, because at the end of it all, the world ends.

It has 500,000 members. It's not a small subreddit by any metric. And they all stay there.

If you've reblogged a post on Tumblr with the caption "climate change will get us regardless", you need to understand that you are in a pipeline that leads to communities like this. The only motivation is to hit the bottom first, and your nihilism is exploitable for attention.

Progress has been made and will continue to be made. Remember, problems like CFCs and acid rain have been effectively solved--not by capitalism, but by effective targeted regulation. That ocean temperature graph you're all obsessed with right now? That's a direct result of new UN policy banning many harmful emissions from cruise ships, which has let more sunlight hit the ocean.

Tumblr doomers are wrong. I want you to fully understand that you are wrong. And if you want to keep being wrong, I want you to understand the sort of community that will accept you.

#eggshell writes #textpost #reddit culture #climate change #climate policy #doomer #climate doom #collapse #this isn't even the most notorious reddit cult incidentally #that honour goes to r/superstonk #i can do a writeup on it if dan olsen doesn't get his video out first

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sg2tiger · 1 year

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Finally, this is my 2022 gaming wrap up! Usual ramblings under the cut.

Pokemon Throwback

With my 6-year old nephew living with us, it's my job to get him on and off the school bus. Last year, when he was in preschool, he had the afternoon class, so we had all morning to do whatever before we had to get ready. It ended up becoming a regular part of the routine to play Pokemon for an hour or so before get dressed time...and the game he chose specifically was LeafGreen. What we actually ended up playing was a FRLG romhack I found with a grab bag of pick-your-own QoL changes called Pokemon Throwback. In essence, we were playing LeafGreen, but things like cut trees staying cut, ability to obtain all pokemon in one cart, phys/special split, consecutive-use repels and other things just made life a bit easier, especially when coupled with the emulator's fast forward feature (GREAT for grinding).

Ultimately, over the course of the school year, we made it through the entire main game, Elite Four, and all of the Sevii Islands (I was pretty burned out by then, and he actually wanted to move on and play Gold, but he also didn't want to stop until we got his Dragonair to evolve...and it had about 5-6 more levels to go after we beat the Elite Four...). Then we went back, caught all the legendary birds, and Mewtwo. We didn't catch 'em all, but we DID catch every single Unown of the alphabet, which took about 3 weeks (again, we only played for about an hour every weekday) and probably made me go more insane than catching 'em all would have. In the end what matters is that he had fun and was excited to learn more pokemon than just the handful of popular ones on his pajamas and stuffed toys. And he really did learn them, and retain what he learned - kids are smart! Even if his sense of nicknaming was essentially 'the animal it's based on + y' (he had a real crisis when we caught Horsea).

We played the game on my phone, with my bluetooth controller. I really liked this controller and was pretty bummed when I upgraded to a slightly bigger phone and the mobile clip just simply did not fit anymore (we still use them as Switch controllers for multiplayer, but still). I ended up getting a different type of mobile controller that attaches horizontally for my new phone, which will hopefully accommodate at least one more phone in the future before they start making them TRULY gargantuan.

Minecraft: Arid Adventures

One night...at a time where I actually hadn't played Minecraft for several months...I had a weird dream. It started out with a friend gifting me some kind of VR survival horror game about exploring desert tombs and recovering artifacts while being pursued by the angry undead guardians. At some point, the dream called for sand physics, and my brain reached into the video game sand physics databanks and pulled 'minecraft sand blocks falling all at once'. The dream then shifted from a more realistic style to that familiar blocky aesthetic (though the non-aesthetic elements were still very survival horror and NOT minecraft). When I awoke and recounted the dream, the minecraft image ended up being what stuck with me, and I wanted to see if anyone had made any kind of desert-themed modpacks. I found...one, which I didn't really like, so I took it upon myself to spend a month and a half working on my own.

The result is a sort of desert-flavored kitchen sink pack, filled with tons of places to explore, loot to discover, challenging enemies, and some light survival with thirst/temperature mechanics (offset by lots of food items to hydrate and keep you cool because I didn't want hardcore survival to be the focus of the pack). I spent a lot of time creating a huge arid ecosystem of modded desert, badlands and savanna biomes filled with tons of desert ruins, bandit camps and other structures across the landscape. But despite how much time I spent fine-tuning and playtesting it, when we actually got it on our friend server we ran into more than a few problems...like the massive overspawning of deadly, deadly scorpions. Still, regardless of some oversights, I'd like to think the pack was a success, and we had some fun playing it together between April/May (I spent half of February and all of March putting it together).

Arid Adventures was ultimately my less-polished-than-I'd-hoped first foray into learning how to make Minecraft modpacks, and I've applied a lot of what I learned about things like NBT structures and datapacks to other packs I've made since. Still, I've got a soft spot for this one, and I'd like to recreate it on 1.18 or 1.19 if possible...and I think it should be, I'm just waiting on one mod in particular to update (Team Abnormals' Atmospheric, for its additional desert biomes as well as resources like aloe and yucca which my bespoke desert food mod incorporated as ingredients for lots of recipes). Maybe when the time comes that I'm able to remake and polish it up a bit I'll even post it publicly on CurseForge. I'm pretty shy and have a massive lack of confidence in my work, though, so I tend to just keep my packs private for our friend group server 😔

(we’re actually currently playing a winter-themed modpack called “Arctic Adventures” which is “Arid Adventures but Cold”. Except not really, because I just took a light vanilla+ modpack I’d made and threw a couple winter-themed mods on top of it. But I thought the name was funny, so maybe there will be more [x] Adventures packs in the future)

Vigil: The Longest Night

You can really tell that 2021-2022 was me trying to work up the nerve to play the actual Dark Souls by warming up with various Soulslikes first. I don't even remember how I discovered Vigil, but probably I figured that if I liked Hollow Knight and Salt and Sanctuary I'd have fun with Vigil too. And I did, actually. Unlike the aforementioned, I even finished Vigil with 100% completion, grabbing all achievements over the course of two playthroughs.

Combat and healing felt a lot more forgiving than the others Soulslikes I'd played, at least if you picked the right perks. I ended up running axes, focusing entirely on that tree and the general survival one, and generally it always felt like there were very few enemies and even bosses that gave me a truly difficult time by the latter half of the game (several of the early bosses did kill me many times). At least, as far as the 'main' content goes - once I hit the bonus bosses like Bluemagpie and Redsparrow I really felt like I had to memorize every possible move the boss could take and counter appropriately. Frankly, if not for the fact that I misunderstood one achievement as having to collect EVERY weapon/armor set in the game, I probably would have given up on fighting Redsparrow after my first 10+ deaths...but I persevered and killed every optional boss in the game too.

I think what I spent the most time on in Vigil was just my obsessive determination to discover every nook and cranny on the map, because games like this where your map is fogged until you traverse it always compel me to reveal it all (I'll never forget the hell Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey put me through because of this urge of mine). The game is absolutely chock full of little secret rooms that you can just barely see a hint of on the map...usually there will be a small passage you have to slide through or something, sometimes hidden behind breakable objects or just otherwise in places you wouldn't think to look. I'd call it the 2D equivalent of Dark Souls' love of invisible walls. Between hunting down places that I sensed held secret passages and trying to platform my way through the trees in the forest areas, I got really into unfogging the map. But hey, in doing so, I was also working my way through all the various loot required for achievements, so one gameplay loop always fed into another in a satisfying way.

I feel like Vigil is the kind of game that's easy to overlook in the sea of 2D soulslike metroidvanias out there, but I had a good time with it. By the end I even really wanted to know more about the story and the lore, unfortunately somewhat marred by a translation of questionable quality. And with the way some of the endings played out, I'm really hoping that there might someday be a sequel, because it definitely feels like the devs left an open door for there to be. I'd say if you're into this kind of game, though, Vigil's worth checking out.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

I was pretty torn between rating this "Pretty Good" vs. "Decent", because I feel like my expectations for this game were unfairly high, but I also feel like every time I play I find something that I feel like the game COULD have done better, but for some bizarre reason chose not to. Kakarot was a game I was looking forward to a lot when it first got announced, because conceptually it seemed like something pretty different that had a lot of potential to be interesting. And while I think Mistake #1 was choosing NOT to start the story off with kid Goku in the original Dragonball (which would have suited the survival and exploration mechanics so so SO much better if we started off with him before meeting Bulma) I understand that we must bow to the whims of the marketing gods at the end of the day, and 90% of the target audience doesn't care about the original DB at all. Still, despite the name being 'Kakarot', it was obvious that a lot of the game would be spent playing as characters who are NOT Goku...and in particular, Gohan, and the idea of playing through his training with Piccolo with these game mechanics sounded like a lot of fun.

That comes to my first issue with the game...speed/pacing. And I get it, because the game spans the entirety of DBZ from Raditz to Buu, but even so it always feels like we're skipping way too fast through the parts of the story that would service the gameplay the most. I thought what would make this DIFFERENT than the usual DBZ fighter is that we would NOT be skipping over the 'less interesting' parts quite as much, because the gameplay involves more than JUST fighting this time around, but more often than not I still found that it skips massively through major story beats when it should slow down and try to be more immersive. I've been playing intermittedly over the course of a few months so I don't have a lot of specifics off the top of my head, but the most recent part I finished was the whole entire Ginyu Force segment...in the space of about 45 minutes.

I remember being irritated that the game barely conveyed what an actual THREAT the Ginyus were to Gohan/Kuririn/Vegeta before Goku shows up, because of the way you still 'win' even the losing battles of this game. And while I know we're kind of in an era of de-bloodening the Dragonball franchise as a whole, the lack of violence also really lessened the impact of the absolute beat down Rikum gives everyone, and thus also diminishes just HOW powerful Goku - who shows up and stomps him in 10 seconds - has become. Then the whole Ginyu body change bit is just kind of raced through with little ceremony at all despite being one of the more iconic aspects of the whole Namek arc IMO...I don't know. I felt like Goku went from space ship to healing tank in even less time than usual, and in a game that's literally named after the guy it's EXTRA noticeable just how little time is spent focusing on him (admittedly if you go over all of Z in your head you'll realize Goku is actually out of the spotlight for a whole lot more than you'd think, but the game's fast pace doesn't help matters either).

Again, I'm sure a lot of this is just my own expectations being unreasonably high for a Dragonball game, but it bums me out when the general presentation - the extremely faithful cutscenes, the soundtrack, etc - is really immersive, but then they'll just go and race through a whole story segment to get to the next fight. Oh, I remember another one that annoyed me. Imagine if the game wasn't afraid to actually let you control BULMA for the brief interlude where Popo takes her to Kami's spaceship! Imagine actually having to explore around as Bulma (you could even give her Popo's magic carpet so she could still use the game's flight mechanics) and scavenge for mechanical parts (which is already a thing you CAN DO in the game mind you!!) to try and do some repairs to the ship. Or just having to search around the area, maybe in the middle of a blizzard (it was a snowy place iirc), to find the ship at all. Instead the game just kind of went from 'Vegeta got away' to 'but they found a spaceship to go to Namek' almost IMMEDIATELY. Being that I'm playing the game alongside my nephew, who started to get curious about Dragonball (I think he saw some kind of Goku vtuber playing Minecraft on youtube or something, and got excited when he found out that I knew all about Goku), there's lots of bits like this where I end up having to summarize some of the stuff the game glosses over, because watching the story unfold via this game IS his first exposure to Dragonball (which I guess in a way makes it a good thing that the violence is generally pretty toned down compared to the original).

Anyway, yeah, idk. I feel like even when the game does let you explore it's all very barebones and watered down. The fact that only the story cutscenes are voiced and all the original sidequests are just grunts and noises also irritates me because it feels so lazy (Xenoverse does the same thing but idk, it didn't bother me there, I guess because all the battle dialogue was still voiced and it was just overworld stuff that wasn't). I also don't feel like I ever really have to use mechanics like fishing or cooking or any of that stuff because the battles are pretty easy? At least on normal difficulty, because the combat system is so simplified compared to a proper DBZ fighter. It's more about like, Touhou-style attack dodging than anything, which is fine, but I find that it's rarely challenging enough that I feel like "damn I should have spent more time scavenging ingredients to cook food before the battle!". It just feels like they tried to make a game with these survival RPG mechanics but didn't know HOW to, so they're very tacked on...and they just made a bog standard 'let's rehash the same DBZ story once again' Dragonball game when it COULD have been something better. Especially if they dared to start with Kid Goku's life. Sadly I know that a AAA game focusing on OG DB is basically a pipe dream.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights

After I finished Vigil I was feeling hungry for more 2D metroidvania soulslikes, and Ender Lilies just happened to go on sale like, a few days later. It had really good reviews so I picked it up and spent the next few days playing it obsessively. In fact, based on the dates of my achievements from start to end, I finished the game in less than a week (31 hours total), 100% completion with all achievements. And after I did I just kept feeling like...it wasn't enough and I wanted more. I really got sucked into the world and its atmosphere, particularly through the amazing soundtrack. And once you start digging and trying to understand the lore, it's extremely compelling as well.

While I'd really like to see the devs make another game like this, maybe even set in the same overall world, I'm not really sure if I want a sequel per se. In a way, Lily's story has just begun, but I also don't feel like I want to PLAY whatever lies in her future. Probably because if I did it would mean what awaits her is more monsters and more sadness. But I really would like to explore more of the Ender Lilies world, perhaps beyond the boundaries of the kingdom, or maybe even delving into the past of the Ancients before the events that lead to the game's story.

I can't really talk about the game too much without spoiling too many things that I think are just better discovered for yourself. The game is tough, but not unforgivingly so (especially if you're not going for all the achievements), and it's pretty short if you can hit 100% in just 31 hours. I'd absolutely recommend checking this one out, especially if other similar 2D soulslike metroidvanias seem too challenging. Or at least watch someone else play it (ideally without commentary). Ender Lilies is a whole experience, between the art and the music and the story and the lore and the way the gameplay itself just clicks, and it's one of those things that I'm sad I'll never be able to play for the first time again.

PS - I want more games to take a hint from its map system, particularly in highlighting a room when I've collected everything in it to let me know I really didn't miss anything, because that shit is SO fucking clutch when you're achievement hunting, or just if you're the kind of person who hates the idea of overlooking anything.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

As I mentioned in the addendum of my 2021 post about Three Houses, it took me so long to finish that game that I actually saw the release date of Three Hopes (mid to end of June iirc) as my deadline. And that wasn't because I had any intention of GETTING Three Hopes (especially on release day, because I just don't buy games like that), but because I knew my Three Houses-loving friends WOULD, and I'd be right back in No Spoiler territory with them after just finally breaking into the inner circle of 3H spoilers. Thankfully I did manage to finish my final route (Crimson Flower) just a week or so before Three Hopes came out, and I even played the Three Hopes demo afterwards to see what it'd even be like (I've never played a Warriors game before). When I saw that the story was actually pretty engaging I was like, oh, this is less brainless than I thought, maybe I'll buy it (eventually)...and ended up getting a gift copy from a friend instead. Nice!

Except...while my Three Houses friends all expected to get obsessively sucked into it (after also enjoying the demo), and I was excited to actually be there with them this time, they unexpectedly became engulfed by a DIFFERENT fandom...progress sort of halted on the Three Hopes front...and then I became the one who was afraid to spoil THEM by pulling too far ahead, so I slowed down...and eventually that just sort of killed my momentum entirely and...yeah. I've stopped playing for now.

Being that I had done the two Eagles routes back to back as my last two routes in Three Houses, AND that being the favorite house of said friends (and the one they were also gonna pick first), that's where I'm at. I have no idea how far into it I am because the game seems surprisingly on par with a normal FE game in terms of story pacing...maybe halfway, or not quite halfway through? I wanna say I got to chapter 8 or 9 before I burned out. I do want to go back to it at some point, ideally when (if?) my friends become re-interested, but either way after how long it took me to push through Three Houses I suppose it was a good time for a Fire Emblem break regardless. I've still got a bunch of other Switch games (notably Shin Megami Tensei V) waiting on my shelf, and I had intended to jump on that when I finally finished Three Houses before Three Hopes came along and threw me that curveball. I've just kind of had the cartridge in my Switch ever since, deluding myself into thinking I'm 'still playing it' because I know the minute I take it out that won't be true anymore.

I suppose I should actually give a review, huh? Well, despite how not far at all I actually am in the game (considering the other routes), I feel like I've played enough that I've seen pretty much every type of gameplay mechanic. I gotta say, despite it not being a turn-based strategy, it feels a lot more Fire Emblem than I thought it would. Just about every downtime activity from Three Houses reappears here in some form, and there's a lot more to do at your base and on side missions than I expected. Trying to get all S ranks can also be really addictive and I spent a lot of my playtime retrying the same missions over and over because I felt like just one small change could improve my time and get me that S (and so far, with maybe one or two exceptions, I've managed to S rank every mission by retrying it a few times). The missions are also still very much what I would call strategic, just in a different way, and the main missions especially give you lots of options for how to tackle your objectives so long as you've been thorough about clearing the map and picking up resources and intel along the way.

I find the gameplay pretty overwhelming with the realtime combat when so much is going on, so the way I adapted to that personally is that I spend a loooot of time pausing and opening the map screen to issue orders to the other characters. Then I usually pick one and try to carry out my own goal while they autonomously work through theirs, periodically swapping to someone else to see how they're doing and just for the variety of playing as someone else here and there. But I'm basically ALWAYS checking my map every 30 seconds to get a feel for where my units are and what they're doing, and what needs to be done...which I found helped me keep track of things a bit better amid the stream of endless enemies, special attacks flying around, and being constantly bombarded with dialogue while I'm trying to fight. It took a bit of getting used to but I think it's pretty fun once you get the hang of it.

What surprised me the most when I played the demo (and made me consider getting the full game at all) was that the story does play a big part in the game. I guess I just sort of expected an excuse plot that sent a bunch of familiar faces out to use anime moves against an army of bad guys. I have no idea how the plot kicks off for the other houses, but what really drew me in with the Eagles was how the decision to reveal and act on one thing at a much earlier point in the plot lead to a completely different outcome, spinning the usual Three Houses story off into an AU that still felt internally consistent with the original characters and events. When it came up, I was like, "no way, that's going to basically change EVERYTHING!" and got really sucked into the plot even before the demo wrapped up - so kudos also to the demo for providing enough content to actually suck the player in. That said, this game is very much only for people who finished Three Houses...at least, I sure can't imagine being able to keep track of the story, or even being interested in it, if not for knowing what ORIGINALLY happened and how differently a few factors of Three Hopes influenced them to change course. So while I'm sure there ARE Warriors fans out there whose interest in the game is mostly that aspect, I think for most people you're not gonna want to just pick this up without having played the original first...IMO, anyway, this game is NOT Standalone, despite being an alternate universe version of Three Houses' plot.

But yeah, I do wanna go back to this someday, because I was enjoying myself. I think just the combination of my friends falling off (not having anyone to talk about it with anymore after liveblogging ALL of Three Houses to them felt weird) and just generally needing a break from these characters after 8 straight months of them warranted a break. It's time for me to accept that, pop out that cartridge, and move on...I'll come back eventually. Probably...

DARK SOULS: Prepare to Die Edition

So, after all those soulslikes paving the way, we finally arrive at this point. All of it, training me for the mindset to go into a game known for its frustrating level of difficulty. I'd actually had Dark Souls in my Steam library for YEARS (that's why it's the old Prepare to Die Edition and not the Remaster), but only now did I finally feel like I was ready to take it on. And so, after applying the DSFix patch/mod (and one other mod that makes crates/barrels occasionally drop things like arrows and throwing knives because I was gonna smash them all anyway (currently really missing this in DS3)), I began my journey in June 2022...and only just wrapped it up in November.

I talked about this a bit in my Undertale review back in 2020, but what you know/expect/feel about a game before going into it can very much affect the experience you have when you finally play it. In the case of Dark Souls, I was strongly influenced by fear of how difficult it would be, due to its reputation. That fear lead me to watch lots of videos before playing, as a way to kind of prepare myself for what was to come (because going in blind was too scary). Most of these were challenge runs, so the focus was on the boss fights, but it all gave me enough of a taste of the general progression and various hurdles I'd be facing along the way. As such, I often knew exactly how to prepare, and how cautious to be making my way through areas, which trivialized a LOT of that expected difficulty.

To give perhaps the best example, I was very aware of Blighttown's reputation because it's practically a meme. People hate this Blighttown place. It's full of aggressive enemies and a deadly poison swamp that's become a staple of all future FromSoft games. It's the worst area of the game. Etc. Granted I later found out a good deal of the hate was due to the terrible framerate the game had on consoles (wasn't an issue for me on PC, at least with DSFix), but I imagine a lot of the hate also comes from people recklessly rushing their way through the upper level and getting caught by the constant ambushes, especially from the toxic dart guys. But because I KNEW ABOUT THIS REPUTATION, I went through Blighttown very slowly and cautiously. I had my bow ready at all times and a solid supply of arrows, which I used to tag enemies from a distance so they'd come attack me one at a time instead of ambushing me in large groups. I came prepared with blooming purple moss from Darkroot Garden to counteract the toxic from the blowdart guys, and since I knew they wouldn't respawn when killed I wasn't really afraid of them in the first place - after all, once they shot me, I'd pretty much know their position and be able to kill them, heal the toxic, and be on my way.

Aside from one or two deaths by fall damage (one particularly funny one was when I saw an item on a ledge that I could practically sense was schmuck bait...but I jumped down to get it anyway, and sure enough the floor collapsed under me and I fell to my death) I didn't have any trouble from Blighttown AT ALL, and definitely not one bit of frustration. It was TENSE, because of how dark the place is and because I was in constant fear of being ambushed, but it just didn't really happen because I could always spot the ambush from afar and tag the enemies individually with my bow. In a few areas with particularly dangerous drops of walkways I just decided that I didn't need the items that badly and ignored them. I got to the middle level bonfire without issue, and then made my way to the bottom of the swamp from there rather easily. And despite the poison swamp at the bottom itself being an obstacle, I had already gone back to the asylum to pick up the Rusted Iron Ring (though originally that was so I could get through the pool in Darkroot Garden), and the enemies at the bottom are much weaker than the ones in the top half of Blighttown so you're really only using your estus to heal off the poison anyway. I spent a lot of time farming the slugs down there for titanite shards and it felt like the poison, while it lasts for a million years, REALLY doesn't even do all that much damage, so as long as you don't panic and keep an eye on your health bar it was really easy to just periodically heal through.

The point is...one of the most hated areas of the game was a piece of cake to me because of the way I approached it. And I approached it that way to begin with because I went into the game knowing about its difficulty, preparing myself accordingly, and taking it slow and steady instead of rushing through and getting caught in a dozen ambushes. Of course this experience is built on the back of the millions of players who played this game when it WASN'T a decade old, and I'm not trying to trivialize the experiences of people who DID struggle with Blighttown by saying 'just like go slower lol'. But I do think it's fascinating how much easier this game is when you approach it the right way. I think, if I didn't know about all this stuff in advance, I too might end up trying to play it like Skyrim or something, just recklessly running into ambushes and traps and swinging my weapon wildly with no regard for enemy attack patterns. But by 2022 I think almost everyone knows that you can't play Dark Souls that way, and they probably wouldn't even try. And if you're not trying to play it that way...it's really NOT that hard of a game at all. It's a challenging game, and it will punish you for playing carelessly, but it's a far cry from the reputation the game has for being hard for the sake of hard. In fact, having recently played Megaman 1-3 with a friend via Switch Online, I feel like THAT is much more of a hard-just-for-the-sake-of-laughing-at-your-failure kind of game, where it just feels insurmountably difficult for no reason half the time, in a very un-fun kind of way. And the whole time we were playing it (and making heavy use of Switch Online save states along the way) I kept thinking about Dark Souls, and how much more forgiving it is than fucking NES Megaman (or NES Mario, or lots of NES games tbh).

Anyway. While this preparedness probably is the entire reason I was able to push through the game and finish it with 100% completion (even if it took me 6 months of playing cautiously), I did also end up feeling like it trivialized my experience in a sad way too, because I didn't really get to learn what the game wanted to teach me by punishing me, since I always knew what was around each corner. That's why I'm currently playing Dark Souls 3 blind (though I'll go back over a walkthrough once I finish an area to pick up items I missed, I'm NOT looking into things ahead of time). I think I probably would have been too scared to play Dark Souls blind, which is why I used those videos as a crutch in the first place, but I'm stronger now and I want to have that experience.

So, would I recommend Dark Souls? Yes, unless you absolutely hate third-person action RPGs in general. I think even if you're afraid of Dark Souls for its difficulty, you should give it a chance. Don't feel ashamed for looking up a walkthrough to prepare you ahead of time - you're still the one who has to beat the area by yourself, after all. While it did make me a little sad after the fact that I didn't get to experience the game blind, honestly, if I hadn't played like this I might never have had the courage to experience it AT ALL, so I'm glad that I did. I still felt pride when I conquered a tough area or boss on my own, even if I knew what to expect before going in. I guess it's like, if you were going to climb a mountain or explore the woods, wouldn't you feel a bit more peace of mind if you had a map of the area? But the map isn't going to climb the mountain for you...at the end of the day that's still something you've gotta do with your own power, and you can still be as proud of that as the guy who didn't buy a map. Or something like that, anyway. And also, don't believe everything you hear about on the internet, because I feel like the game's difficulty has been memed and exaggerated far beyond the actual truth anyway. Just take it slow and steady, prepare as much as you feel comfortable beforehand, and whatever you do, don't you dare go hollow.

Skyrim Together

Oh boy. So as we know, every year I find some way to play Skyrim again (except last year where I played Oblivion instead), and this year that took the form of trying to get Skyrim Together Reborn - the multiplayer Skyrim mod - set up and working with some friends. Except the idea of playing vanilla Skyrim (even with friends) sounded too boring to me. No, instead, I waited until someone else released a stable Skyrim Together modlist and then tried THAT out...and then proceeded to cannibalize it, removing mods I didn't like and adding new ones in that we wanted instead. You know. Just normal Skyrim PC player behavior.

Anyway, after about two weeks of working basically nonstop on my list, patching it and everything, making it as stable as absolutely possible on singleplayer...we took it online. And I learned that just because I've got Intermediate+ Skyrim modding knowledge, I don't know SHIT about what's going on under the hood in Skyrim Together's arcane black magic system. Long story short, we had uh. Problems. Lots of them. Most of them actually very funny, like, being attacked by a wolf (on my screen) and being told I'm actually crazy because it's a fucking skeever (on their screens).

Or looting the dead wolf/skeever and finding 148 bones, 296 dog meat, 539 skeever tails and 148 wolf pelts on it.

Or having...whatever this is, happen whenever your friends move around, except on THEIR screen YOU’RE the one doing it

Or getting launched into the sky for having the audacity to shield bash...

OR the respawn system sending you to the back half of a dungeon you just started, potentially behind locked doors that only open from the front side, leaving you essentially trapped.

You know. Normal Skyrim behavior.

Suffice to say, after many days of saying "okay let's try it again but do [x] this time", we just couldn't get past a lot of these issues. And funny as they were, they were kind of impeding our ability to play Skyrim...together. Eventually we all just kind of got so tired of trying that we quietly abandoned the project. Even me, with the fierce determination I had to make the modlist work for that two week period, just couldn't understand why things were so hilariously broken once we got online, and lost all my zeal for trying (the only thing I could possibly think to do was to ask for help on a support Discord, and given the choice between troubleshooting with a stranger and just giving up, I chose giving up).

Honestly, even if things WERE working as intended, the whole process quickly became tiring. Every time I made changes to the list I'd have to reupload it for my friends to then redownload and overwrite their files with. And we had to get VPNs to connect to a private server session with (the need for extra tools like this is why I listed this as "PC" and not just "Steam"), and depending on which one of us was hosting we'd often experience slightly different flavors of bugs. And it didn't even matter how hot we made our orcs, because certain RaceMenu features just don't sync properly to the server, so all the time we spent perfecting our Himbo body morphs was for naught. It just kind of kept chipping away at our patience a little at a time until the cons started outweighing the pros of playing Skyrim together, and we all just lost the desire to keep trying.

But hey, this was all happening in September, just a month or so after Skyrim Together Reborn's official launch. And it was only DAYS after I saw someone else post a modlist that I then used as the basis for mine. It was probably too early to be as ambitious as we were. My hope is that development on Skyrim Together, and its Nemesis fork, make enough progress that by the time ky desire to play Skyrim again rolls around I might be willing to take another crack at it, and maybe things will work better by then. The day may yet come that our hot orcs will finally be unleashed on Skyrim...together.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

I've mentioned a few times how me and a friend of mine like to co-op play ostensibly singplayer games with Switch Online, but they do have some multiplayer-friendly games on there too, and sometimes we do also play those. One time we got very into playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on Genesis. And then shortly after that my friend discovered an alarmingly similar game on the SNES called Kirby's Avalanche. We started to suspect this might be a case of some Japan-only game that they didn't expect to take off in the west without more familiar marketing, so we looked into it and it turned out to be the case - for a series of puzzle games called Puyo Puyo. After finding out there was a modern Puyo Puyo x Tetris crossover for Switch (that might be easier to play together than doing it via Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine) we both grabbed a copy...and I even grabbed a second copy on Steam when there happened to be a Sega sale about a week later and I spotted it there too.

Anyway, I may have briefly fallen into a week-long period of Puyo Puyo Fever where I couldn't stop playing, and all my dreams were haunted by falling puyos and tetris blocks. I got over it, but I still think it's a really fun and addictive game, and the multiplayer aspect of dumping garbage on your opponent's field to screw them over is a really fun way of turning what I tend to think of as a singleplayer genre into something competitive. And there's tons of different modes and ways to play, too, whether you wanna play Just Tetris or Just Puyo Puyo or a combination of both, time attack, all kinds of weird variations...and there's a weird over-the-top anime singleplayer story mode as well, where you can launch special attacks at your opponent as well. I actually got stuck on one of the bosses in this mode because I suck at utilizing the special attacks and you REALLY have to in order to beat her, but I'll get her...one day...

My nephew also got addicted to it and even got his own copy of the game for his birthday, so we can play together too (or by himself instead of him borrowing my switch all the time). He particularly likes that you can reskin your puyos to look like Sonic characters. But yeah, honestly it's a pretty fun game, especially if you just want something to pick up and play on the bus, or while you're in a hospital waiting room because you've had an ear infection for 3 weeks, or something. It's pretty pricey on Switch at least, though, so I'd either grab it on Steam (where it's $10 cheaper even when it's not on sale) or wait for some kind of Sega sale to get it cheaper. I think it's a lot of fun, just like, not $40 fun. There's also a Puyo Puyo Tetris 1 that's cheaper, which I imagine can't be all THAT different unless you care about the online scene or something.

Super Mario 3D World

My Switch co-op friend got me this because he thought we would have a fun and friendly time doing co-op together. Oh how wrong he was.

First of all. It’s a fun enough little game, though I prefer the gameplay style of Mario Odyssey myself. I feel like this game’s levels are definitely designed more for quick play sessions, with the star and stamp hunts kind of working like bite-sized versions of tracking down moons in Odyssey. I played through the first world or two by myself before we headed online together for jolly cooperation. Or more like (I’m Mario)...

You see, the game feels nice and friendly and colorful and there’s even a lot of cases where co-op is encouraged. But you can’t show me a results screen at the end of the level where one player can do better than the other, even to the point of being awarded a crown to wear into the next level, without awakening the blood fury inside me. Every time he performed better than me (due to my overwhelming tendency to hurl myself off cliffs) it would ever so slightly raise the rage meter inside my heart. I would become obsessed with doing better in the next level. And at first this was sensible...get more coins than him. Collect the stars before he can. Get the checkpoint and exit flags to show my M instead of his dumb L. All things that would give ME more points. But sometimes you’re just not as good at Mario games as the other person and it’s easier said than done to just BE better than the competition.

But what if there was no competition in the first place? The solution was in front of me all along. Eliminate him. Pick him up and throw him off a cliff, or into an enemy, then use the resulting precious seconds to race ahead and get all the goodies before he can catch up. Of course, this became less and less successful as time went by and he caught onto the fact that I’d try to throw him at virtually any opportunity. Sometimes he’d flip the script and throw ME off before I could get a chance, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth warfare. But more often than not it goes like this

Turns out I’m REALLY good at playing myself. In fact, while looking for a video clip for that first gif of me throwing him off the cliff, I found about 6 like this where I try to pick him up but end up being the one who dies instead.

Honestly though, my favorite was this time, where I spent a while playing nice and not doing anything overtly evil, until we got to a toad house...

The toad house gets marked as cleared as soon as you exit, and he didn’t have any powerups on hand while I was running around with my raccoon suit, so he was pretty pissed about this one. Perhaps my finest moment of video game dickery of all time, and it’s not like it was premeditated (I’m not that smart). I just thought it up on the spot and thought it would be funny. And it was (to me). And that’s what it’s like playing Super Mario 3D World with me.

#sg2 plays video games #sg2's game reviews #this post was already long enough but I also had a little writeup about my experience with the bosses of dark souls #since I've already got it typed up in a txt somewhere I'll probably throw it into a second post and just link back to it here

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kaijutegu · 4 months

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Alligator Body Language and You, or: How To Know When An Alligator On Social Media is Being Stressed for Views

Alligators are wild animals. Despite the idiotic claims of animal abusers like Jay Brewer, they cannot be domesticated, which means they are always going to react on the same natural instincts they've had for millions of years. Habituated, yes. Tamed, yes. Trained, definitely. Crocodilians can form bonds with people- they're social and quite intelligent. They can solve problems, use tools, and they're actually quite playful. Alligators are also really good at communicating how they're feeling, but to somebody who doesn't spend much time around them, their body language can be a bit mystifying. And it doesn't help when social media influencers are saying shit like this:

That is not what a happy gator looks like.

That's a terrified, furious gator who isn't attacking because the ogre handling her has her in a chokehold. She's doing everything she can to express her displeasure, and he's lying about it because he knows his audience doesn't even know how to think critically about what he's doing. He knows that because his audience doesn't know anything about these animals, he can get away with it. This I think is why I hate him so much- he deliberately miseducates his audience. He knows what he's doing is factually inaccurate, he just doesn't care because attention means more to him than anything else in the world.

Let's change that! Here are two really important lessons for understanding alligator body language on social media.

Lesson 1: Alligators Don't Smile (in fact, most animals don't)

So what's going on in this video? Jay Brewer is aggressively choking his white alligator Coconut while scrubbing algae off of her with a toothbrush. And make no mistake, he is digging into the creature's throat while she is visibly distressed. He claims she's happy- but she's not. He is willfully misrepresenting what this animal is feeling. That's a problem, because people... well, we actually kind of suck at reading other species' body language. The reason for this is that we tend to overlay our own responses on their physical cues, and that's a problem. For example, let's look at an animal with a really similar face to ours, the chimpanzee. Check out Ama's toothy grin!

Wait, no. That's not a happy smile. That's a threat display. When a chimpanzee "smiles," it's either terrified and doing a fear grimace, or it's showing you its teeth because it intends on using them in your face.

How about a dog? Look at my smiling, happy puppy!

Oh wait no, this is a picture of Ryder when he was super overwhelmed by noise and people during a holiday party. He'd hopped up in my sister's lap to get away from stuff that was happening on the floor and was panting quite heavily. See the tension in the corners of his mouth and his eyes? A lot of the time when a dog "smiles," the smile isn't happy. It's stress! Why Animals Do The Thing has a nice writeup about that, but the point is, our body language is not the same as other species. And for reptiles, body language is wildly different.

For instance, look at these two alligators. Pretty cute, right? Look at 'em, they're posing for a Christmas card or something! How do you think they're feeling?

Well, I'll tell you how the normal one is feeling. He's annoyed! Why is he annoyed? Because the albino just rolled up, pushed another gator off the platform, and is trying to push this guy, too. I know this because I actually saw it happen. It was pretty funny, not gonna lie. He's not gaping all the way, but he was hissing- you can actually see him getting annoyed in the sequence I took right before this shot. Look at him in this first shot here- he's just relaxing, and you can see he isn't gaping even a little bit.

By the end, he's expressing displeasure, but not enough to actually do anything about it. He's annoyed, but he's comfy and that's where one of the best basking areas is, so he'll put up with it.

Reptiles open their mouths wide for a lot of reasons, but never because they are actively enjoying a sensation. Unless they're eating. No reptile smiles- they can't. They don't even have moveable lips. If a reptile is gaping, it's doing so because:

It is doing a threat display.

It is making certain vocalizations, all of which are threats. Alligators are one of the rare reptiles that do regularly vocalize, but most of their calls aren't made with a wide open mouth.

It is about to bite something delicious or somebody stupid. Check out this video- virtually all of the gaping here is anticipatory because these trained gators know darn well that the bowl is full of delicious snacks. (I have some issues with Florida's Wildest, but the man knows how to train a gator AND he is honest about explaining what they're doing and why, and all of his animals are healthy and well-cared for, and he doesn't put the public or his staff at risk- just himself.)

youtube

It's too hot and it has opened its mouth to vent some of that heat and thermoregulate. This is the main reason why alligators will often have their mouths part of the way open, but sometimes they'll open all the way for thermoregulation. This is what a thermoregulatory gape looks like- usually it's not all the way open, kinda more like < rather than V, but you can't say that 100% of the time. Additionally, a thermoregulatory gape... typically happens when it's hot out. If they're inside, maybe they've been under their basking light for too long. Heat's the dominant factor, is what I'm getting at.

There is another reason that a captive crocodilian might be gaping, and that's because it's doing so on command. Some places have their gators trained to gape on cue, like St. Augustine Alligator Farm and other good zoos. They have the animals do this in presentations that are genuinely educational. They ask the animals to open their mouths so that they can show off their teeth and demonstrate how their tongues seal off the back of their mouth. They'll also do it as part of routine healthcare, because looking at their teeth is important.

In this case, the animals aren't gaping because they're stressed, they're gaping because they know they're gonna get a piece of chicken or fish if they do it. And what's more, they're doing it on cue. They have a specific command or signal that tells them to open wide. It's not an instinctive response to a situation. It's trained. If the animal provides the behavior after a cue, the situation is much less likely to be negatively impactful.

It's also important to remember that there's a difference between a partially open mouth and a gape! As discussed above, alligators will often have their mouths a little bit open just to maintain temperature homeostasis. It helps them stay comfy, temperature-wise. These guys are all doing thermoregulatory open-mouthed behavior- that slight open and relaxed body posture is a dead giveaway. (That and it's the hottest spot in the enclosure.)

Lesson 2: A Happy Gator Is A Chill Gator

So if alligators don't smile or have facial expressions other than the :V that typically signifies distress, how else can you tell how they're feeling? One way is stillness. See, alligators subscribe to the philosophy of if it sucks... hit da bricks.

Basically, if they hate it, they'll leave. Unless, y'know, somebody has their meaty claws digging into their throat or is otherwise restraining them. (Restraint isn't always bad, btw. Sometimes the animal is going through a medical thing or needs to be restrained for their safety- which a responsible educator will explain.)

Let's look at a very similar scenario, in which a captive alligator is getting his back scrubbed.

As you can see, it's quite different. First, he's not being restrained at all. Second, look at how relaxed he is! He's just chilling there vibing! He could simply get up and leave if he wanted to, because he's not being held. Towards the end of the video, as he lifts his head, you can see that his respiratory rate is very even as his throat flutters a bit. I'm not sure what this facility is, so I can't comment on care/general ethics, but like. In this specific case, this is an alligator enjoying being scrubbed! And you can tell because he's not doing anything. A happy gator is content to be doing what they're doing.

Why Should I Listen To You?

Now, you should ask yourself, why should you listen to me? Why should you trust me, who does not own an alligator, versus Jay Brewer, who owns several?

Well, first off, there's no profit for me in telling you that what you're seeing on social media is in fact not what you're being told you're seeing. I'm not getting paid to do this. That's the thing with people who make social media content. The big names aren't doing it just for fun. They're doing it for money. Whether that's profit through partnerships or sponsorships, or getting more people to visit their facilities, or ad revenue, you can't ignore the factor of money. And this is NOT a bad thing, because it allows educators to do what they're passionate about! People deserve to be paid for the work that they do!

But the problem starts when you chase the algorithm instead of actually educating. A "smiling" alligator gets the views, and if people don't know enough to know better, it keeps getting the views. People love unconventional animal stories and they want those animals to be happy- but the inability to even know where to start with critically evaluating these posts really hinders the ability to spread real information. Like, this post will probably get a couple hundred notes, but that video of Coconut being scrubbed had almost 400,000 likes when I took that screenshot. Think about how many eyeballs that's reached by now. What I'm saying here is that it's just... really important to think critically about who you're getting your information from. What do dissenters say in the comments? What do other professionals say? You won't find a single herpetologist that has anything good to say about Prehistoric Pets, I can tell you that right now.

Another reason you can trust me is that my sources are not "just trust me bro," or "years of experience pretending my pet shop where animals come to die is a real zoo." Instead, here are my primary sources for my information on alligator behavior:

Dragon Songs: Love and Adventure among Crocodiles, Alligators, and Other Dinosaur Relations- Vladimir Dinets

The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles- J. Sean Doody, Vladimir Dinets, Gordon M. Burghardt

Social Behavior Deficiencies in Captive American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis)- Z Walsh, H Olson, M Clendening, A Rycyk

Social Displays of the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis)- Kent Vliet

Social Signals and Behaviors of Adult Alligators and Crocodiles- Leslie Garrick, Jeffery Lang

Never smile at a crocodile: Gaping behaviour in the Nile crocodile at Ndumo Game Reserve, South Africa- Cormac Price, Mohamed Ezat, Céline Hanzen, Colleen Downs (this one's Nile crocs, not American alligators, but it's really useful for modeling an understanding of gape behaviors and proximity)

Thermoregulatory Behavior of Captive American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis)- Cheryl S. Asa, Gary D. London, Ronald R. Goellner, Norman Haskell, Glenn Roberts, Crispen Wilson

Unprovoked Mouth Gaping Behavior in Extant Crocodylia- Noah J. Carl, Heather A. Stewart, Jenny S. Paul

Thank you for reading! Here's a very happy wild alligator from Sanibel for your trouble.

#reptiblr #alligator #crocodile #Youtube

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ordenza · 1 year

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good morning today we have a lot of things to do

#stop motion video draft prepare for presentation on wednesday documentation sketches and writeup

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alfheimr · 7 days

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My Favorite Cheap Art Trick: Gradient Maps and Blending Modes

i get questions on occasion regarding my coloring process, so i thought i would do a bit of a write up on my "secret technique." i don't think it really is that much of a secret, but i hope it can be helpful to someone. to that end:

this is one of my favorite tags ive ever gotten on my art. i think of it often. the pieces in question are all monochrome - sort of.

the left version is the final version, the right version is technically the original. in the final version, to me, the blues are pretty stark, while the greens and magentas are less so. there is some color theory thing going on here that i dont have a good cerebral understanding of and i wont pretend otherwise. i think i watched a youtube video on it once but it went in one ear and out the other. i just pick whatever colors look nicest based on whatever vibe im going for.

this one is more subtle, i think. can you tell the difference? there's nothing wrong with 100% greyscale art, but i like the depth that adding just a hint of color can bring.

i'll note that the examples i'll be using in this post all began as purely greyscale, but this is a process i use for just about every piece of art i make, including the full color ones. i'll use the recent mithrun art i made to demonstrate. additionally, i use clip studio paint, but the general concept should be transferable to other art programs.

for fun let's just start with Making The Picture. i've been thinking of making this writeup for a while and had it in mind while drawing this piece. beyond that, i didn't really have much of a plan for this outside of "mithrun looks down and hair goes woosh." i also really like all of the vertical lines in the canary uniform so i wanted to include those too but like. gone a little hog wild. that is the extent of my "concept." i do not remember why i had the thought of integrating a shattered mirror type of theme. i think i wanted to distract a bit from the awkward pose and cover it up some LOL but anyway. this lack of planning or thought will come into play later.

note 1: the textured marker brush i specifically use is the "bordered light marker" from daub. it is one of my favorite brushes in the history of forever and the daub mega brush pack is one of the best purchases ive ever made. highly recommend!!!

note 2: "what do you mean by exclusion and difference?" they are layer blending modes and not important to the overall lesson of this post but for transparency i wanted to say how i got these "effects." anyway!

with the background figured out, this is the point at which i generally merge all of my layers, duplicate said merged layer, and Then i begin experimenting with gradient maps. what are gradient maps?

the basic gist is that gradient maps replace the colors of an image based on their value.

so, with this particular gradient map, black will be replaced with that orangey red tone, white will be replaced with the seafoamy green tone, etc. this particular gradient map i'm using as an example is very bright and saturated, but the colors can be literally anything.

these two sets are the ones i use most. they can be downloaded for free here and here if you have csp. there are many gradient map sets out there. and you can make your own!

you can apply a gradient map directly onto a specific layer in csp by going to edit>tonal correction>gradient map. to apply one indirectly, you can use a correction layer through layer>new correction layer>gradient map. honestly, correction layers are probably the better way to go, because you can adjust your gradient map whenever you want after creating the layer, whereas if you directly apply a gradient map to a layer thats like. it. it's done. if you want to make changes to the applied gradient map, you have to undo it and then reapply it. i don't use correction layers because i am old and stuck in my ways, but it's good to know what your options are.

this is what a correction layer looks like. it sits on top and applies the gradient map to the layers underneath it, so you can also change the layers beneath however and whenever you want. you can adjust the gradient map by double clicking the layer. there are also correction layers for tone curves, brightness/contrast, etc. many such useful things in this program.

let's see how mithrun looks when we apply that first gradient map we looked at.

gadzooks. apologies for eyestrain. we have turned mithrun into a neon hellscape, which might work for some pieces, but not this one. we can fix that by changing the layer blending mode, aka this laundry list of words:

some of them are self explanatory, like darken and lighten, while some of them i genuinely don't understand how they are meant to work and couldn't explain them to you, even if i do use them. i'm sure someone out there has written out an explanation for each and every one of them, but i've learned primarily by clicking on them to see what they do.

for the topic of this post, the blending mode of interest is soft light. so let's take hotline miamithrun and change the layer blending mode to soft light.

here it is at 100% opacity. this is the point at which i'd like to explain why i like using textured brushes so much - it makes it very easy to get subtle color variation when i use this Secret Technique. look at the striation in the upper right background! so tasty. however, to me, these colors are still a bit "much." so let's lower the opacity.

i think thats a lot nicer to look at, personally, but i dont really like these colors together. how about we try some other ones?

i like both of these a lot more. the palettes give the piece different vibes, at which point i have to ask myself: What Are The Vibes, Actually? well, to be honest i didn't really have a great answer because again, i didn't plan this out very much at all. however. i knew in my heart that there was too much color contrast going on and it was detracting from the two other contrasts in here: the light and dark values and the sharp and soft shapes. i wanted mithrun's head to be the main focal point. for a different illustration, colors like this might work great, but this is not that hypothetical illustration, so let's bring the opacity down again.

yippee!! that's getting closer to what my heart wants. for fun, let's see what this looks like if we change the blending mode to color.

i do like how these look but in the end they do not align with my heart. oh well. fun to experiment with though! good to keep in mind for a different piece, maybe! i often change blending modes just to see what happens, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. i very much cannot stress enough that much of my artistic process is clicking buttons i only sort of understand. for fun.

i ended up choosing the gradient map on the right because i liked that it was close to the actual canary uniform colors (sorta). it's at an even lower opacity though because there was Still too much color for my dear heart.

the actual process for this looks like me setting my merged layer to soft light at around 20% opacity and then clicking every single gradient map in my collection and seeing which one Works. sometimes i will do this multiple times and have multiple soft light and/or color layers combined.

typically at this point i merge everything again and do minor contrast adjustments using tone curves, which is another tool i find very fun to play around with. then for this piece in particular i did some finishing touches and decided that the white border was distracting so i cropped it. and then it's done!!! yay!!!!!

this process is a very simple and "fast" way to add more depth and visual interest to a piece without being overbearing. well, it's fast if you aren't indecisive like me, or if you are better at planning.

let's do another comparison. personally i feel that the hint of color on the left version makes mithrun look just a bit more unwell (this is a positive thing) and it makes the contrast on his arm a lot more pleasing to look at. someone who understands color theory better than i do might have more to say on the specifics, but that's honestly all i got.

just dont look at my layers too hard. ok?

#process #art tutorial #unsure what else to tag this as. if this does not post properly i will cry.

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despazito · 1 month

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could u elaborate on "parrots make bad pets"? not disagreeing (far from it) just interested to see your take! looking to learn more about this

(i've gotten this ask before so please don't mind i'm just gonna paste a writeup i did a while ago)

There’s a blog run by an animal behaviourist who specializes in parrots that i really enjoy reading, she has a very good writeup on the state of companion parrots as an industry: The Inconvenient Truth About Cockatoos

so basically the average person usually cannot meet the needs of a parrot, especially medium and ESPECIALLY large species. they are long lived, extremely social and intelligent animals who are very demanding if you are their only companion. in my mind the most 'ethical' pet parrot setup is having some pairs of budgies in a dedicated bird room filled with foraging enrichment and doing some basic command training as a bird-human bonding activity instead of cuddles.

most pet parrots are hand reared or even hatched in incubators by breeders and are never given a chance to be raised by their parents, and virtually none stay with their parents until a natural weaning age before getting sold. which is wild considering it is fucking ILLEGAL to do that to puppies or kittens.

A parrot isn't really born wired for human companionship in the same way that a dog or cat is. they imprint on their parents which sets the blueprint of their kin, and they generally want to only form extremely close bonds with others of their kin. To get a very people-oriented parrot, it has to think it’s people.

This is different from the socializing practiced in raising cats and dogs or acclimating ferals to people. socializing means exposure to things so that the animal doesn't grow up to see the target as a threat, and ultimately that the target is something that can be very rewarding to spend time around. A dog raised with its mother and socialized to people still understands that it's a dog, it can get along with other dogs, but can also form strong bonds to people. They actually read both dog and human body language and legitimately have an awareness that we are different species.

The companion parrot is raised to think it’s people, and as a result many lose the ability to form bonds with their own kind. in fact the reason many breeders remove eggs or chicks from the nest is arguing that the parent birds don’t really know how to raise their chicks- because they themselves were hand reared and never learned how to parent from their parents! it seems that, like us, parenting isn't perfectly hardwired in parrots and they need to learn the skill from their families, oftentimes even staying to help their parents raise younger siblings!

That's why it's not at all uncommon for pair bonded breeding birds to be sold as a completely separate product from companion birds in many aviary operations. there's so many ads for people selling breeding parrots that fucking hate humans or are semi tame specifically listed for sale as breeders not as pets:

then their babies are bred for the pet market so they are taken either before or right after hatching to get hand reared and imprinted onto humans, because a parrot-bonded parrot just won't be as interested in forming those close human companionships you see in viral videos. this isn't the case for all aviaries, i want to acknowledge there are smaller scale breeders who have tamer breeding birds, but big producers can have borderline feral pairs and the point i'm trying to make is when you socialize a parrot to either the human world or parrot world, it's often at the expense of the other.

most trouble starts once the parrot begins reaching the age of sexual maturity. they stop being openly cuddly to most people, and will try to pair bond with their primary caretaker. It's not uncommon for this to lead to aggression towards other family members because parrots don't share partners, they can even do this to babies they are jealous of!

But a human can't become a suitable mate substitute for a parrot, and some of their mating behaviours such as regurgitating on you can seem straight up gross so the human then shuns the parrot and shuts down their advances. this can make your bird become very sexually frustrated that can lead to more unwanted behaviours and even health emergencies such as prolapse. we lead them on by stroking their chest and backs (only something bonded pairs do, you are essentially jerking off your parrot when you do this..) then reject them with no other outlet for their natural urges, and spaying/neutering isn't an option either! so they're stuck in a psychological purgatory of being unable to fulfill their instincts. and if they're in an understimulating environment and left alone for most of the day in addition to all that, frankly i think that's just an awful life to give to an animal we allegedly love!

we essentially alienate them, and when they don’t have people around to meet their extremely high social needs because you work a 9-5, even if there are other birds around, the lonely or frustrated human-bonded parrot can become depressed and self mutilate.

parrots that were left with their parents, are raised as parrots, and weaned at their own natural pace overwhelmingly do not exhibit these destructive behaviours.

a productive relationship with a pet parrot is one that fosters independence, not dependence, on the human companion. the most responsible parrot owners should strive to act more as a zookeeper to their parrot instead of cuddling it and creating a ‘velcro’ bird glued to the hip, and socialize with them via training sessions instead of letting their birds indulge in pair bonding behaviours like petting and preening which leads to sexual frustration and aggression or self mutilation.

Ultimately I believe any parrot hand reared and imprinted onto humans is some degree of psychologically damaged and suffers from the parrot equivalent of a developmental trauma, they have been robbed of a normal parrot life and it cannot be undone.

SO many parrot rescues are completely flooded with unwanted pets, many with tough behavioural challenges (for example it's not uncommon for parrots to be reactive to an entire gender, so that cuts the adopter pool immediately in half). and these patterns can be difficult to break especially without the aid of a behaviourist. and the thing still has another 40 years of life left in it but nobody wants to adopt because it's another "crazy bitey bird that hates everyone", has reached sexual maturity so it's no longer as friendly, and it's much easier to start from scratch so folks choose to just buy another baby and keep the cycle going.

And none of that even touches on the rampant poaching that keeps supplying the trade in many parts of the world. and that's why everyone should have domestic chickens or pigeons.

#i added a bit oop #its a child that cannot move out and may live up to 70

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olderthannetfic · 1 year

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I deeply do not understand fandom creators who try to get people to stop reposting their creations on platforms where the OP doesn’t have an account. Asking people to credit them - absolutely! It’s reasonable to want credit for your work. But to insist that the work only be appreciated by people who have accounts on the exact platform the OP has? And to ask followers to harass any re-posters en-masse until the re-poster and all rebloggers delete the content? I’m baffled by this.

How is fans sharing your work and linking fellow fans back to your account a *bad* thing?!

Are you new?

Most creators don't want their work reposted. They may appreciate shares from Youtube and the like. They certainly do not appreciate someone making a separate video upload or whatever.

Fandom creators are even warier, particularly about their work escaping its intended context and finding hostile outsiders. Of fucking course they do not want their work on some other platform. That's the way to get waves of harassment sent back towards that fandom creator. It also often involves lots of asspats for the reposter and nothing for the creator.

I have no sympathy for reposters crying that they got harassed over art theft. Stop stealing if you can't take the heat, asshole!

Maximum audience is what shitty influencers want. It is not the ethos of fandom. Some people seek fandom fame more than others, but there has always been a strong sense of finding your corner, not of trying to get your shit out to the entire world.

WHY THE FUCK would I care about people needing the "convenience" of my fic on their own platform of choice? I use AO3 because I support AO3. I loathe Wattpad and will certainly not want to increase its popularity with my free labor and my content.

Yes, it does annoy me when people screenshot this blog and put it on twitter. I am intentionally not on twitter because twitter is garbage. I have no desire for my own writing to increase twitter's relevance. Fandom should stop treating twitter like The Place To Be. If people feel like they're missing out by being there and not here, good!

And obviously, I roll my eyes when some attention-seeker posts my shit to reddit and gets eighty billion upvotes. If you love me so much, go give my reddit account that karma. (If you're doing your own hobbydrama writeup or something, that's different though. I'm talking about c&p posts with little of your own content.)

There are different ways of sharing, and some of them are more annoying than others. Some platforms are irrelevant to a creator, while others they actively oppose being popular. Nobody is going to know or care if you post some fan art to a private discord with your friends.

Have some god damn sense, anon.

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ask-whitepearl-and-steven · 11 months

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Not to be a rambler on anon, but I really like the way you’ve set this AU! While it has canon elements we all know and love, the changes and additions you’ve added still leaves plenty room for theories and speculation. I know people are impatient for answers, and it’s a shame - guessing can be fun!

One divergent element I like thinking about is the whole “is Steven turning into White Diamond? Are they two actual separate consciousness in one body? Is she trying to hijack the plane?” conundrum we’re having. Listen…

In canon, Steven couldn’t turn back into Rose in any shape; having echoes of his gem’s past identities made us all think so. But no! He and his gem are one. They’re Steven no matter what. In Rose’s words in that video: she became half of him, she gave him her gem, she was willing to delete her own self for that purpose, so he could exist. “We can’t both exist”.

But…

What about White in this AU? We don’t know if she conceived Steven willingly or how aware of the process’ implications she was. My hunch feel is: nope. She likely didn’t want to have Steven… or at the very least, she wouldn’t be willing to give up her self for his sake.

And yet, Steven exists here. So this raises some questions.

Is White’s self fully gone? Is this situation here is the same as canon, and the White we’re seeing are just past memories making their own mess, fueled by Steven’s insecurities?

If “we can’t both exist” applies in this AU… how literal was Rose being? Could she have been her own separate conscious identity within Steven, but chose not to burden him? Could White have given up a part of her gem to Steven, but is now trying to wholly control it back, tempting Steven so he willingly chooses to “reset” the gem? After all, no matter how bothersome she became in dreams, she still couldn’t affect Steven without inciting him first. If there’s two identities within the gem, Steven is clearly the dominant one no matter what.

Considering how “computer programmed” Gems are… White could be fully gone, but before becoming Steven, could’ve “programmed” her gem to “guide” her future identity (Steven) into regressing back. Like installing her own Spinel resetting scythe in her mind, some backup files, hoping Steven will use it and “restore her back”.

There’s so many many COOL possibilities!! And there will be more or less as we learn about White’s motivations - Rose’s love and sacrifice determined Steven’s life, so White’s intentions will have impacts in other forms.

On the meanwhile though, I don’t mind waiting whatsoever. The story’s good and it’s worth the wait! So, thank you for giving us such a complex and entertaining story!

I love this writeup so much it is sincerely tempting to not post it at all, and instead just hold onto it. But I think you raise many fascinating points that people deserve to also see. :)

Also you're incredible for taking the time to type this all out. Reading your speculations is the fuel that fires my cylinders for the next chapter of this journey!

#chekhov answers #so many things i could say #so many things i wont

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dduane · 9 months

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Currently experiencing that very mixed state of unbearable excitement / weary resignation that comes with waiting for it to be Some Other Time. (sigh)

...Occupying myself with doing things to distract myself from noticing that the arrow of time is moving exactly as quickly as usual despite my preferences. :/

Activities involved:

watching YouTube cooking videos (in this case, vids that embody their makers' frustration with their source material: right now, Julia & Jamie)

doing research in citrus genetics for a recipe writeup for Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms

making a list of things that'll need to be handled before the inevitable-and-coming-pretty-soon-now rebuild of the main Middle Kingdoms website (because its theme's no longer supported and page editing isn't working as it should)

considering solutions to a specific piece of character business in Tot5: The Librarian that's been giving me difficulties

Trying one more time to get my brains wrapped around the most basic basics of animation in Daz Studio

proofreading one of the Young Wizards books for its upcoming international paperback edition (hint: read your text backwards, i.e. from the end of the book to the beginning—this prevents you from seeing the text as you usually do and thereby missing errors)

reading B. Dylan Hollis's new cookbook that came in today (more of this shortly)

eyeing the Ebooks Direct store to see how today's sale is doing (everybody buy ebooks pleeeeeease & thank you, they're cheap today...)

...And of course none of this is helping particularly. Nothing's going to help except it suddenly being 1 AM Irish time.

Oh well. Back to one or more of the above...

#Good Omens 2 #Good Omens #waiting #and not very patiently

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realtimefanduboutofcontext · 3 months

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I suppose we should start with why this strike is happening in the first place.

Here's a rundown of the historical background behind the Global Strike for Palestine.

(note: this is long but very oversimplified, please research the details for yourself! feel free to correct me)

By the way, the details before 1947 aren't relevant to this thread, please read the writeup by Decolonize Palestine about it!

In 1947, the UN split "Mandatory" Palestine into two states along ethnic lines - one controlled by Arab people and one controlled by Jewish people. The choice was controversial, since the border was forced upon Arabs in Palestine.

It brought in a political idea called Zionism. It's the belief that the home of Jewish people is Palestine - not IN Palestine, it IS Palestine. Problem is that Jews and Arabs were already living there together. Zionists believed that they were entitled to it, and so kicked Arab people out. In 1948, Zionists kicked 750k people out of their homes and killed thousands in an event called the "Nakba". They weren't allowed to come back to Palestine.

This process created "Israel", which slowly controlled more of Palestine over several decades, with no plans of stopping. They controlled Palestinian people's food and water, information, travel, job opportunities, etc.

This ideology of Zionism was fed into the US too. Every President since the 40s has recognized Israel, and because of geopolitical interest, has supported it as a key player in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The US gave it weapons and money, and they became besties.

Palestinians tried to resist their homes being stolen again multiple times, with protests ranging from diplomatic to very violent. They tried it all. Military and political organizations (like Hamas) formed to govern Palestine and fight (or make peace, if possible) with Israel. They failed every time, due to the weapons and intel Israel gets from the US, and the trust that it bargained from the rest of the world. All while Palestine had to make do living in an "open-air prison" inside their own country, invaded by Israel.

A lot of unhappiness with Israel and ineffective attacks culminated on October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked a temporarily defenseless border and killed 1139 Israelis and keeping over 200 Israelis and foreigners hostage. Israel was VERY quick to respond.

Two disclaimers:

Israel already knew about the attack months ahead and let it happen.

What follows is far worse.

Starting October 7, Israel launched a full invasion of Gaza (which Hamas governs) as "revenge" for the hostages and deaths. But in reality, this was just their excuse to invade what they left over of Palestine to build more colonies and finish what they started. In the following 3 months, Israel would bomb Gaza relentlessly. It would cut off power, fire at phone towers, turn off the Internet, prevent anyone from making or bringing in food, wound or kill innocent people, bomb schools and hospitals, and far far more.

Israel also pretended to care about the Israeli hostages - however, when asked at the UN if they'll stop bombing Gaza in exchange for the hostages, Israel and the US said no. (Yes, the US said that. The US is also funding this, with YOUR taxpayer money)

The Israeli Defense Forces (pejoratively "Israeli Offense Forces") originally raised a campaign to convince the world what it was doing was fair and just, in the name of revenge. Countless protests across the world have shown them that most of civilization doesn't buy it. They HAVE, however, realized that those in power don't really give a shit and will be happy to cover them in any way, and thus have been bragging about their attacks in very sick and twisted ways through viral videos and propaganda. The United States is mostly the one taking the blame, since it's Israel's bestie and biggest donor. Its biggest businesses are also Israel's biggest profits (I will talk about this another day). Meanwhile Palestinians have had to prove to the world through tragic footage and live accounts of the genocide, that doesn't get mainstream media coverage. Most of the accurate coverage is from Al Jazeera, whose reporters and their families are getting killed in action.

As I'm writing this, 25,000+ people have been killed by Israeli strikes. 64,000+ are wounded. Most of them children.

Most of the population has gotten sick from unhealthy conditions and white phosphorus gas (illegal, no one is supposed to own that).

There are no hospitals left in Gaza because Israel bombed all of them one-by-one, to ensure Palestinians in Gaza can't get medical help and die as soon as possible. All schools and universities were bombed to dust.

Israel has also expanded their war on Gaza to other places, like the other part of Palestine (West Bank), as well as Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt who had nothing to do with it aside from opposing Israel's attacks. They started fighting them too.

And that brings us to today, January 21st, 2024.

One of the most prominent figures in this tragedy, a filmmaker from Palestine named Bisan Owda, who has led us through her reporting of the genocide, called upon the world to strike. Not just for one day, but an entire week. The intent is to halt businesses from funding Israel, divert the conversation to Palestine, and grab the attention of those with the power to stop this; instill fear in them so that they see the negative consequences of funding a war.

That's why this strike matters. That is why it is happening, and why I changed the entire gimmick for it. Because while all of this is due to some geopolitical and racist bullshit, to care for Palestine here is to care for humans. So many humans who are suffering for no reason.

Now that you are armed with this knowledge (hopefully you read this far), I hope you do your best with it and understand the power. I will provide you with more resources and information in the coming days.

Thank you for your understanding.

#global strike #global strike for palestine #free palestine #free gaza #from the river to the sea #palestine will be free #israel #gaza #long post

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