#you better come with good animations so i can convert them | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sirfrogsworth · 10 months

Text

A few people took exception to calling my car's CD player useless.

I actually think it is great there are a few holdouts still using CDs.

CDs are truly one of the most perfect media ever created.

And I can prove that mathematically.

Some will say vinyl is superior. And as much as I love records, the audio quality is preferred, not better. People have a *preference* for how vinyl sounds, but it still leaves out audio information and has noise and artifacts caused by the mechanics of the turntable and an imperfect manufacturing process.

In fact, the lesser audio quality is exactly what people enjoy. It has a warmth and comfortably compressed dynamic range that is not fatiguing over long listening sessions. It's like choosing a nice fire over a 100% efficient space heater.

But if you want perfect audio quality that does not exceed the limits of human hearing, compact discs are where it's at.

It all has to do with Dr. Harry Nyquist and his Nyquist-Shannon Theorem. (Sometimes Shannon gets left out and it is just called the Nyquist Theorem.)

The simple version is he figured out how much something needs to be sampled in order to not lose any information. As long as you sample something at a frequency greater than or equal to twice per cycle, you will have a lossless... whatever.

In this case, a lossless audio recording.

So the range of human hearing is about 20 Hz to 20 kHz. That's the lowest and highest frequencies we can perceive. The scientists creating CD audio figured they'd do 22 kHz for some overhead and then you double that to get 44 kHz. (Technically it was 44.1 kHz.)

You can imagine the smooth curvy line as an analog recording. No gaps. No information loss.

The black squares are digital samples recorded over a period of time. You can see there are gaps between those black squares. A tiny bit of time passes between the squares where nothing is sampled. INFORMATION LOSS! NOOOOO!

Clearly the vinyl nerds are correct and digital is inferior, right? You are going to get the dreaded... STAIR STEPS!

Not so fast, bucko!

By getting enough samples over a period of time, you can use math to infer that smooth sloping line connecting those individual samples. So the digital recording also has no information lost once it is converted back to analog and played through your speakers.

This connecting of dots is called "interpolation."

You could take the curvy analog, convert it to digital, get the same black squares, and then interpolate the black squares back into analog and get the same curvy line. It goes back and forth perfectly. And this is all verifiable with an oscilloscope.

NEAT!

Then of course you need a good dynamic range--the spectrum of quiet to loud. Anything above 85 decibels will damage your hearing, so they went with a 16-bit depth which covers roughly 100 dB. Again, giving them a little overhead for death metal and overzealous trumpet players.

And the final component is data bandwidth or "bitrate" usually measured in kilobits per second. This is how much data is read every second. The 1s and 0s of it all. The bitrate of a CD is calculated by multiplying 44,100 samples per second per channel by 16 bits per sample and then multiplying by 2 channels. After all that mathing is math'd, you get a perfectly uncompressed 1,411 kbps.

So you've got all the frequencies you could ever hear combined with as much volume as your ears can stand with a bit rate that will give you no loss of data.

The *perfect* audio quality all encoded into little microscopic pits.

Now you may be asking, "Why do I see "24/96" or "24/192" advertised on fancy audio equipment and high quality streaming platforms like Tidal? Aren't 24 bits better? Isn't 96 kHz MORE than 44.1 kHz?"

Dr. Nyquist might say... this is some bullshit.

This confusion comes from the fact that recording quality and playback quality are two different animals. This misunderstanding happens with video and photo quality as well. Recording in 6K will give you a sharper picture even if your final playback quality is 4K. You can get bad pixels and noise and stray photons that do not contribute to the detail in the video. By giving yourself overhead you can ensure you hit the desired quality target.

And recording at 24 bits and 96 or 192 kHz, you get a higher resolution to edit and master with, but it is only advantageous to the computer software... not the human ear.

From a photographer's perspective, I relate to it like this...

If I have more megapixels and more colors and more dynamic range I have more leeway when editing my photos. If you try to push a low quality photo in the edit, it has this tendency to fall apart. You can get ugly color banding and harsh contrast and sharpening artifacts. By capturing more quality than you need in the finished product, you can process the photo much more dramatically before it deteriorates and loses integrity.

Audio and video are the same way.

So let's say you have a metal singer that screams at the microphone as loud as possible from 2 inches away.

At 16 bits they may surpass that 100 decibel dynamic range and distort the recording. But if you record in 24 bits, you get 144 dB to play with. Or you can even do 32 bits and get 1500 dB--a volume that no human voice could ever surpass. It guarantees a clean, distortion free recording, but 32 bits would be pointless for human listening.

The same is true with the sample rate. Having a higher resolution allows you to zoom into waveforms and adjust things to an extremely granular level. You can do precise timings, tiny pitch adjustments, apply loads of digital effects, and just have more room for audio activities without degrading the sound quality.

But outputting 192,000 of those black squares is going to interpolate the exact same smooth curvy line as 44,100 when it is played through speakers.

The oscilloscope knows what I'm talking about.

Now I am about to reveal a secret that no audiophile who has invested in a $115,000 high resolution 32 bit/3,072 kHz DAC wants to acknowledge...

The master recording is always more important than the playback quality.

If you have a high quality source it will sound great even in a highly compressed MP3. Just like the 6K video is sharper on the 4K TV. And the high megapixel photo looks better in an Instagram post.

If the source is good, the media will be good.

And since high resolution audio services often seek out the best masters available before encoding their playback files, it gives many people the illusion they are getting better sound quality due to the boosted specs.

When in reality, it was just a better copy of the original recording.

According to Nyquist, your human ears are not computers and all you need is double the frequency to hear perfect sound with no loss of information. So anything above 16 bit/44.1 kHz/1411 kbps and you are just wasting bandwidth on a server.

And I don't want to hear anything about "stair stepping."

IT'S MATH.

Your ears aren't better than math, okay?

If you don't believe in math, then you and Jack White can sit in the naughty math corner with his bespoke overpriced vinyl pressings.

I will say, there is a gap between your standard music streaming service like Spotify and your bullshit audiophile service like Tidal.

Free Spotify uses heavily compressed files. Which means the bitrate is quite low and there can be information loss. Or "lossy" compression. Modern compression is actually pretty amazing, but I'm afraid anything below 320 kbps may cause some songs to not sound as intended.

Depending on the content, some songs are more suited to compression than others. And even with premium Spotify, they cap songs at 320 kbps which still may not be enough for busier, harder-to-compress songs.

Also, I don't know if Spotify cares about getting the best quality master for a given song. Which, again, is the most important aspect of sound quality.

But services like Tidal waste bandwidth with their super specs and that isn't great for the environment. What I'd love to see is a company that makes their best effort to seek out high quality masters, and encodes their files at 16 bit/44 kHz with a lossless variable bit rate compression. Variable bit rate or "VBR" will do more compression during simpler parts of the audio and less compression during more complex parts. It's smart compression, basically. And as long as you use a high enough bitrate to achieve lossless compression, the sound quality will be the same as if there is no compression at all. So you still get smaller file sizes that use less bandwidth and have a smaller environmental impact.

That would be a streaming service I would consider paying for. Especially if they put great effort into getting high quality original recordings for their content.

In conclusion... if you are still using CDs you don't need to worry about audio quality. You're all set. There is a sort of beauty in what the audio scientists who created compact discs did. They figured out the limits of human audio perception and created a format that just slightly exceeded that. No "bigger number is better" marketing. No audiophile bullshit.

They said, "Here is what you need and nothing more."

They made a perfect thing and they should be proud of that.

#long post

434 notes · View notes

agent-oo-z · 20 days

Text

Ok it’s been too long since I’ve spoken about BG3 headcanons. Instead of talking about my Tavs though I’m gonna talk about the companions!

POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW!

No Minthara because I have yet to recruit her in one of my games, sorry!!! I love her I just haven’t had the ability to play with her and all that.

Halsin

Halsin does not have sculpted abs. He’s got a stomach. I mean come on he’s literally a bear.

He loves talking about the ecology of the various environments you visit. He knows so much about so many plants and animals and fungi.

If you ask him to, Halsin will braid your hair for you. Social grooming is very important to him.

He loves to play with scratch and the owl bear cub in wild shape. He takes the shape of a wolf most often so he’s not too big.

Halsin keeps a nature journal! It’s like his own private version of inaturalist. He tracks the species he sees and where he sees them.

Gale

Gale is skinny and a bit toned during the start of the game, but as he is encouraged to take better care of himself he puts on some weight.

He is constantly asking Halsin about various creatures and Druidic magic. The man’s a nerd, he’s got so many questions and Halsin is kind and patient enough to actually enjoy answering them. They’re great academic buddies. When Gale becomes a professor he invites Halsin to give lectures on ecology and Druidic magic.

Gale has created spells that allow him to make a magic kitchen while on the road. This way he can use more than a campfire to cook.

He loves to stargaze and will point out his favorite constellations if you ask to join him.

Astarion

While he’s good at mending and sewing, Astarion enjoys making perfume far more. He eventually develops perfumes based on each of the traveling companions.

Astarion teaches the entire camp how to wash blood out of clothing and gear because someone has to. Also he refuses to do everyone’s laundry for them.

He often goes with Halsin to forage for herbs and flowers. It’s a chance to stock up on supplies for his perfumes and also to manipulate bond with the Druid.

Him and Shadowheart often discuss poisons together. They have a secret game early in the adventure where they say how they would poison each member of the group, what poison they would use, and why. When both of them start to feel accepted and cared for they switch to talking about what poisons best represent the group members instead.

Shadowheart

She spends a lot of time at camp by herself, even after rejecting Shar. She values alone time. It also allows her a chance to process what has happened to her and what she has lost.

Scratch sleeps with her most nights after he joins the camp. At first she’s annoyed by it(a ‘pet’ distracts from her mission) but it’s not very long before she’s cuddling with him.

Shadowheart collects trinkets after converting. She wants to surround herself with things she enjoys.

Lae’zel

Since she travels with a grindstone, Lae’zel helps everyone maintain their weapons. Not out of kindness at first, but because her allies being weak and having subpar gear makes her weak. Eventually tho she teaches everyone how to do it themselves to help them be stronger(and because helping people care for their weapons is a friendly gesture).

She develops a special bond with Gale and Shadowheart, as all three were manipulated/used/abandoned by their deities. She doesn’t exactly know how to support the others as the process things, but she is Faerun’s greatest hype man and constantly reminds them that the gods were cruel and foolish for what they did.

Lae’zel and Halsin help each other maintain their braids. Hers are more intricate and decorated but Halsin is more than able to put them in properly.

Wyll

Wyll spends a lot of time with Karlach after he refuses to kill her. At first because he wants to apologize for hunting her and prove he can be trusted, then after the transformation for advice on how to live life with horns, and finally because he just loves to spend time with her.

While he wasn’t exactly “shy” before his transformation, Wyll starts bathing last because his own body has become unfamiliar and he no longer feels comfortable being seen without at least a shirt and some pants on.

When the others realize that he’s struggling with his body more than he lets on they do their best to help in their own ways. Karlach teaches him how to care for his horns properly, Halsin helps him learn how to braid his hair around them, Astarion finds clothing that is not only comfortable and modest but also makes him look really good, Lae’zel helps him adjust to the change in his center of gravity by sparring with him, and Gale tracks down books about teifling/fiend anatomy for him to read.

He’s really good with children. When Arabella and then Yenna join the camp he spends his evenings keeping them company, telling them stories, playing with them, etc. Karlach often joins him.

Karlach

She makes use of her unnatural heat to help with as many things around camp as she can. Drying clothes, cooking, heating water for bathing, being cozy when it’s especially cold, etc. because if she can do good things with the engine it feels less like a curse.

Once she can touch people safely, she spends almost an entire evening just cuddling with as many people as possible. It starts with just Scratch and the owl bear cub. Then Halsin joins. Then she goes to find the others for hugs. Astarion jokes about how the two of them could probably reach normal temperatures if they just hugged for long enough.

She and Lae’zel bond quickly through their sparring. The two joke back and forth in their own ways and it confuses the other companions at first, because basically no one else has had a chance to learn Lae’zel’s sense of humor.

Karlach collects the various teddy bears and plush toys they encounter on the journey. Having nice, soft, cuddly things to curl up with makes her feel safe.

Jaheira

She knows how to get you fucked up beyond your wildest dreams. Smoking with her is an ORDEAL.

Jaheria speaks to the younger party members like they’re her kids. This doesn’t become clear until they visit her home, however, at which point said companions have various reactions(Karlach loves it, Lae’zel does not).

Minsc

Minsc quickly joins the sparring sessions. He also starts wrestling matches.

He can often be found having seemingly one sided conversations in camp, apparently talking to boo. The topics of these chats are vast and varied. Gale once heard him discussing the various meanings of different flowers in bouquets according to flower language.

103 notes · View notes

myfanfic-urfantrash · 2 months

Note

I have the sudden epiphany for moar Friendship thoughts and like, the Boys™ (yes, March 7th is now part of the Boys™) having that spontaneous friend who just likes to burst in at least once a day while yelling (because they're very very excited) to show their bestie something or because they got their bestie something that reminded Friendo of them and they just had to get it for 'em.

A normal day for the Boys™ must always have at least one moment of Friendo just making one (1) loud entry (they got used to Friendo's weirdness and loudness) or else they just sense something is off about their day.

(Bonus food that the thing Friendo brought was friendship bracelets that they made for them. Because truly, I cannot imagine a world where friendship exists without friendship bracelets.)

You shall be named The Boys™ Anon :D

Since this wasn't hinted at as A/B/O I'm writing this without that in mind. I also left out Sampo cause I couldn't figure out what to write for him.

-------

Blade

Has pointed his sword at his friends loud entrances before because he was on edge so anything set him off. His friend never gets harmed though once he realizes who it is and they've gotten good at dodging any strike that comes their way so it's all good. He gets used to their nonsense so at this point he just does it to mess with them.

Kafka and Silver Wolf tease him regularly about how his friend is loud and friendly while he's quiet and brooding. He ignores them but he does worry sometimes because he knows he's not good company. But with their next loud entrance and having them hang off of him with some new trinket they thought reminded them of him his worries are put to rest, they aren't the type to lie to him anyways. If at any point his friend doesn't pop into his life like they usually do he's already on his way to find them no hesitation.

When they present him with a friendship bracelet he's actually touched and wants to make one himself for them but his hand gives him trouble halfway through the process. Once his friend figures out his desires they convert whatever he was able to make into a neat charm to carry with them where ever they go.

Jing Yuan

His friend is always bursting through the doors of his workplace just to tell him the latest news of their day. Before they used to be dragged or kicked out when he was just a cloud knight but now they can come and go as they please much to the annoyance of Fu Xuan. Yanqing thinks they're rather loud but kind so he doesn't fuss too much as they know when and where it's appropriate to be their bubbly self.

Jing Yuan honestly welcomes their loudness in his life it's comforting to hear them alive and well...loud. They at least know not to disturb him while he naps so he gets plenty of good sleep if they're around especially if they guard the door to let him nap. If his friend doesn't show up he won't immediately freak out but he will feel like something is missing so he texts them to check if they're alright before going to search for them himself.

If his friend gave him a friendship bracelet he'll do his best to make one in return. What better way to celebrate ones bond than with match accessories right?

Welt

He doesn't mind that his friend is weird or loud, though he does ask them to tone down the loudness before he develops a headache. He's also grateful he can ramble about animation and robots with them, he feels so young whenever he's with them. Is always intrigued by what new item they'll bring that reminded them of him and loses it when it's some rare mecha figurine for him to put together.

Does get worried if his friend doesn't come bug him like usual and will text or call them to ask if they're alright. If they don't respond he'll ask the other Astral Express crew members if they know where they are since it's likely they're a Nameless too.

When he's given a friendship bracelet he doesn't know what to do but he's grateful for it he's just never gotten one before. If his friend is willing he'll ask them to teach him how to make one for them too.

Luocha

Teases his friend by asking if they've missed him so much or if they're stalking him if he meets them on a foreign planet. He doesn't mind his friends loudness or weirdness, he's seen plenty of odd things on his travels across the universe so he's not exactly surprised. Does get a bit startled if his friend just bursts in whatever space he's in to share something they've seen with him, he's partially convinced they are stalking him how else would they have found him?

Appreciates whatever items they bring for him that remind them of him. It's sweet to be thought of so much and he finds himself doing the same thing while he's out and about. If for any reason he doesn't see his friend at least once per day he might brush it off as them being busy or because he simply didn't tell them where he was going but eventually he settles to text them to ask if they're alright. If he doesn't receive an answer he's calling and if he doesn't receive one he's heading their way if possible.

If he's given a friendship bracelet he gifts them something in return. It could be a friendship bracelet or a brooche he found on his travels, just something to remind them that he's there for them.

Dr. Ratio

Definitely throws chalk at his friend if they're being too loud while he's doing something important. They've burst into his class room a couple of times and though they've learned not to just burst in it doesn't stop them from visiting him to show him some cool new object they've found. He does like the stimulation of observing new objects but he does wish his friend would stop interrupting his lessons, the students appreciate however as it gives them time to write notes.

If his friend doesn't visit him he's curious but ultimately grateful for the peaceful moment. He does check up on them however if they don't show up to interrupt him as usual, he's got their exact moments they'll interrupt him down to the second. Will text and call his friend but if he gets no response he's tracking them down to get an explanation and it better be good for wasting his time.

Accepts the friendship bracelet with little issue and passes them something small he's crochet in exchange. The bracelet is a little clumsy but at least it matches his aesthetic and favorite colors.

Dan Heng

He's so tired he already has to deal with March and the Traiblazers nonsense on the daily how did he attract someone who's both weird and loud? He loves his friend of course he just misses having peace a quiet. But if his friend were to never show up one day he'd freak out texting, calling until they show themselves.

He's either touched or just plain confused by whatever items they bring him that remind them of him. Did this piece of sea glass really remind them of him? How nice. At least it's not some weird looking dragon plush, which he kept by the way.

He's touched to receive a friendship bracelets. He's read all about them and sort of unconsciously wanted one so he's really happy to receive one from his friend. Does some studies on how to make them on his own in order to make one for them.

Caelus

Doesn't mind his loud and weird friend bursting through the doors to come see him at all, in fact he might burst through doors to come see them as well. He loves seeing what little items they find to show him it's tons of fun for him and helps build his massive collection of items he has.

If his friend doesn't visit him like they normally do he'll be a little worried but wouldn't jump to conclusions too quickly but if they don't respond to his texts he's going to head there way ASAP. He just wants to make sure they're ok.

For him? Truly? He wants to cry and he might do so. He's never really had a friend of his own before until he met the other Nameless but to have one that think he's they're worthy of a friendship bracelet? He asks them to teach him how to make one for them right away.

March 7th

The loud friend so she has a rival in them. Takes at least one photo a day with her friend and the weird items they find to show her. Doesn't get how half the stuff reminds them of her but she keeps whatever they give her on a special shelf in her room. Her favorites are of course the stuff animals.

If she doesn't see her friend for a bit she's already texting them. Doesn't get too worried but with how crazy her life can get her mind might wander a bit before she's calling them to make sure they're alright. Asks everyone she knows if they've seen her friend before searching for them herself.

Made her friend a friendship phone strap but adores the friendship bracelet. The two spend an afternoon making matching phone straps and bracelets for each other.

Edited: 03/30/2024

#honkai star rail x reader #jing yuan x reader #blade x reader #welt x reader #luocha x reader #dr. ratio x reader #dan heng x reader #caelus x reader #march 7th x reader #edit: not my ass forgetting to finish Luocha's

115 notes · View notes

kaibutsushidousha · 4 months

Note

To be honest, your discussion of Minase's positive and negative qualities piqued my interest. What do you think are the main recurring fgo writers' strong and weak points? Also where would you rank the lilim harlot event?

For the sake of brevity, I'll stick to one per writer. Picking apart everyone to the extent I did with Minase would take forever and would be better done after their respective Ordeal Calls.

I hesitate to call Higashide's comedy his strong point because his huge hits are about as frequent as his huge misses. I suppose I'll go with clarity for Higashide's main strong point. Even when I think he sucked at delivering his point, I can always tell what he's trying to say, which is not something I can say about Sakurai's most compressed scripts. His weak point is his lack of ambition. It's nice to have at least one person in FGO's team who will never try to escalate things, but I can't see it doesn't make his stories more forgettable in the long run.

Minase was already detailed in his own post.

Meteo’s best quality is a tone setter. Requiem, Salem, and all his events come with an atmosphere that feels very tangibly different from what FGO usually does. Often his events are bad, but never they lack a unique identity. Which segues into his weak point, being that many of his events are comedy events and the man is simply not funny. Bullying Erice is his only consistently good joke, and when he tries other things, the results are more miss than hit. See Las Vegas and Wandjina World Tour for major examples of comedy events that failed hard at the comedy side.

Nasu is a master recycler. I don't know how he does it but the man is constantly reusing the same structures, the same themes, or the same dynamics and somehow it never feels repetitive. There is always something that makes the whole recipe feel fresh and unique despite being so easy to recognize the same usual ingredients there. And what I dislike about Nasu in FGO is how he's still stuck at the concept of selling waifus from the girls with routes days. Everyone has their list of characters who get ship tease with Fujimaru but only in Nasu's case it feels like an overwhelming majority and that some of the choices create too large of a difference between the summoned character and the character in the main story. Was it really necessary to do this with, say, Morgan? Melusine? Tenochtitlan?

And Sakurai I saved for last because one major reason this post took this long is that I was struggling to sort out what is characteristically good and bad about her. Well, even now I don’t have a simple and satisfying answer. Things can’t be simple with Sakurai, unfortunately. One friend of mine described the experience of reading Sakurai scripts as “playing chess against an opponent that doesn’t tell that you are in a game of chess” and that’s honestly a fascinating way to phrase it.

Sakurai is an intriguing combination of inflexibly ambitious and inflexibly professional. She has grand ideas for her characters and she will include them in the script without fail. But she's also strictly adherent to script size limitations. While Nasu is making Camelot and Avalon le Fae with total disregard to every possible limit, Sakurai is cramming so much into Septem's and London's microscopic file space that it becomes utterly incomprehensible. Nasu wrote Last Encore's plot as a whole ass novel and hired Sakurai to convert that into anime scripts because Sakurai is his expert in fitting a lot of stuff into tiny spaces. Tunguska was tossed at Sakurai because probably no one else could fit into its raid event constraints. And because she doesn't compromise on what goes in, her alternative is not revealing the mysteries about her characters but laying out all the hints so the players can figure it out themselves, which is a really fun thing once you're used to it (read: aware that you're playing chess against her).

And the answer to "Where would I rank the Lilim Harlot event" is 1st place.

#higashide yuuichirou #sakurai hikaru #nasu kinoko #hoshizora meteor

55 notes · View notes

beyondmistland · 27 days

Note

I read through all your posts about Alysanne Targaryen as Maegor's daughter and am now in a rabbit hole. Thank you. I've been thinking about Maegor's wives and which one of Henry VIII's wives they represent. Ceryse is Cathrine of Aragon and Alys is Anne Boleyn. The others are hard to pin for me since there isn't a lot. What do you think? Would Maegor's reign have been more interesting if his marriages had more similarities to those of Henry VIII?

I think this is where we run into a number of problems regarding the way GRRM wrote Fire & Blood specifically and the way he setup Westeros more generally.

For one, the fairly homogenized nature of southron culture as well as the oversimplification of religious institutions and history means you can't quite get the same dynamism as from real life European history, with its dizzying array of languages, cultures, cuisines, fashions, etc., to mention nothing of the then-ongoing Protestant Reformation. I suppose GRRM could have had Maegor convert to the Old Gods a la Julian (II) the Apostate or the Drowned God (you just know the Ironborn are the one race on the surface of Planetos that would say King Maegor the Good with a completely straight face) or even R'hllor, which would be the best choice in terms of worldbuilding opportunities in my opinion.

Moving on, we run into a handful of problems with Maegor specifically, one of them being the length of his reign. Look, while I can't deny Maegor ruling for 6 years and 66 days is incredibly cheeky, it also isn't anywhere close to Henry VIII's 36 years as king. With so little room timeline-wise, there isn't a lot of flexibility when it comes to telling new stories and fleshing out preexisting ones and all that is before you factor in Maegor himself.

I won't hold back. For all GRRM's talk of moral ambiguity, the human heart in conflict with itself, good men who were bad kings and bad men who were good kings, etc., his Targaryen monarchs are, for the most part, numbingly one-note. Aegon I is a literal enigma, Aenys is weak, Maegor cruel, Viserys I a party animal, Aegon II and Rhaenyra mirror-images of each other in their disqualifying vices, etc. As I've written before with my post reimagining Maegor as more of a Ivan (IV) the Terrible figure there was room to make him a genuinely controversial figure of historiography but instead GRRM doubled down on sensationalism and apathy-inducing slasher porn for lack of a better word. The fact Maegor is also the first and last of Visenya's line just adds more salt to the wound but that's part of GRRM's more general (and for me personally, vexing) habit of keeping family trees incredibly small.

(I do recall another alternative someone once brought up to the late Steven Attewell. Namely, turning Maegor into the Westerosi version of Macbeth by way of Der Untergang.)

This brings me to my semifinal point. GRRM didn't have to write Fire & Blood as Procopius' Secret History on steroids with a dash of Suetonius' Lives of Twelve Caesars and I, Claudius (the entire Saera episode is practically lifted wholesale from the scandal that envelops Augustus' daughter, Julia) but he did, which is doubly disappointing because not only does the final product suck quality-wise as a result but also because there were so many other avenues available to him.

He could have written Fire & Blood as a proper history (with less focus on the sex lives of teenage girls for one) or as a mirror for princes or as a dialogue between two characters or even as a character study. You can even see GRRM struggling with the constraints imposed by his use of Gyldayn in certain sections like the death of Maelor and the entire Hour of the Wolf episode, where you get reams of dialogue and characterization as well as more traditional narrative trappings like build-up, mood setting, etc.

Now, to answer your actual question (lol), I don't think any of Henry VIII's other wives map well onto Maegor's. Tyanna is, more or less, his female counterpart in terms of cruelty and zero redeeming features and entirely a fantasy construct. Elinor and Jeyne are both married to Maegor for only a year (with poor Jeyne dying in childbirth because Jeyne Westerlings, like the Brackens, Peakes, and Florents, cannot catch a break in Westeros) and before said marriage takes place neither appears on the page. As for Rhaena, well, credit where its due, she was a rare (and unexpected) highlight of Fire & Blood.

Thanks for the question, anon

#maegor the cruel #house targaryen #asoiaf criticism #asoiaf meta #valyrianscrolls #asoiaf #asoiaf themes #maegor targaryen #fire and blood #volume 1

24 notes · View notes

aguinhaac · 8 months

Text

Well, the new ecological miracle episode has just been released, you know what that means~

Today we will be reviewing the shortest miraculous special until now, Miraculous season 5 episode Action.

Let’s see what they did with the episode with the concept of one of the few kwamis I still like.

We start the episode with Marinette and Adrien driving to Luka’s boat house, and we know the episode is good when the animation looks like this

They didn’t even try.

Nino calls them in because he has some important news which is that people were throwing trash in the sena river and it was going to the ocean.

Nino: if no one handle the plastic problem, who will?

the show spent 1:14 minutes without throwing the lesson in our face, that’s a record!

And really, I really don't like it when people have an eco episode and just have the main characters, I think it's much better to have the main characters help the background characters protest, clean up, plant a fucking tree, or whatever whatever they're doing, it helps the scene feel more organic, when it's just a bunch of teenagers doing something, it looks like the characters are just Mary Sues because, you know how many environmental groups? Very little, so yeah, a bunch of kids would be able to get the whole fucking town to participate.

Well, anyways let's give a look at the group's plan.

WTF-

THEY CONVERTED THE HOUSE BOAT INTO AN ECOLOGICAL WATER TREATMENT PLAN? HOW? WHERE DID THEY GET THE MONEY TO DO IT? AND WHAT ABOUT THAT THERES PEOPLE LIVING THERE? THOSE THINGS ARE NOISY, HOW IS ANYONE GOING TO SLEEP? AND WHAT IF IT IS TOO HEAVY FOR THE BOAT? IT WILL SINK AND YOUR FRIEND JULEKA WILL BE HOMELESS, actually, DID LUKA’S MOM AGREED WITH IT? IS THIS EVEN LEGAL

AND I’M NOT EVEN GONNA MENSION HOW THE FUCK DID THEY BUILD THIS.

Well, they teach the little kids that plastic doesn’t decompose easily and there I already saw the thing was for little babies that don’t know the basic and I lost all hope this episode would be at least decent.

the boat starts to shake and they go to check what is happening and we find out that a large increase of plastic coming from… fans vending machines….. so, people can cool off…. Ugh, first of all, who buys fans that aren’t for decoration? people to buy AIR CONDITIONERS OR FANS (the not Chinese one) did Astruc ever used a Chinese fan? Those things the more you shake it, the more your arm hurts, second, really? Vending machines? The problem isn’t people putting plastic on everything even if they don’t need to, and after that not discarding it properly, the biggest problem with plastic in the ocean is fans? And third aren’t fans made out of like paper? Or like this super light material? There are some fans made out of plastic but this looks like a paper fan.

How much do you bet they just put that the biggest treat is vending machines so they cannot work at all on how to resolve the conflict and make an ending that doesn’t make sense?

Well because there was too much plastic everyone evacuates and the ship explodes… yes. the ship fucking exploded.

So Juleka IS homeless now, all plastic does to a ship is making it get stuck, and showed to us What overheated was the engine, so what caused the boat to explode and what caused it to clog, SO WHO'S FAULT IS THAT? WHO’S FAULT IS IT THAT JULEKA IS NOW HOMELESS HUH? WHO’S FAULT IS THAT?

Juleka and Anarka just accept they don’t have a home now and Nino tells Adrien to talk tp his dad.

Adrien: you know how my father is, he won’t listen!

Marinette: what if we try to resolve this another way? By going to the root of the problem,

Ok that was kinda creepy, Marinette what are you doing to do? MARINETTE WHAT WILL YOU DO TO THE VENDING MACHINES? MARINETTE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

All joke’s aside, Marinette asks her dad if she and her friends can pick up the bakery supplements which he says yes so, they rush their way to there.

They get the boxes and Marinette asks if they can see the new character they made for the special only and after that will be forgotten even if he could be important, you know? As always, his name is plastic king but I’ll just call him “the boss”

The guy then shows they were the boss lives and- Marinette is gonna break into his house huh? At this point I’m not even surprised.

Nino makes everyone disguise themselves but they are immediately discovered, but Marinette uses her main protagonist powers and they’re able to pass the staff.

So, they reach the boss

Bro looks like that one villain from the Gnomeu & Julieta movie

Well, they make a little presentation about plastic which really, it's short but I really liked it they didn't demonize plastic, but instead said that plastic IS important for our society and that we shouldn't just stop producing it, instead they say that people buy thing and throw them away right after, putting the blame not in the company but in the people, which surprised me, EXPECIALY for a miraculous, I actually think that's the better portrait of taking care of our planet In a kids show I've ever seen.

The boss explains that this of people buying and throwing it away so they can buy more is design like that and nothings gonna change, RIGHT BEFORE SHOWING ALL WE HAVE IS MADE OF PLASTIC DEMONIZING IT AGAIN AND MAKE MY COMPLIMENT USELESS, CONGLATULATIONS SHOW

The group then fuck off out of the guy’s office and Marinette has the idea to go talk to the mayor, how did Marinette without Zoe’s help was able to have a face to face with the mayor I don’t know but oh well.

Andre: But Parisians love the fans my young friend, remove the vending machines installed by the hall across Paris

Marinette: Would make it possible to reduce pollution

Andre: But it would be very damaging to my image

That’s the character that in the end of season 5 we were supposed to be rutting for, and being happy he was able to stay with the nice daughter and his dream job, THIS GUY.

Adrien demonizes plastic to his dad but without success he fucks off.

Marinette then tries to ask Nadja to talk about it in her program but apparently the boss controls the tv channel, and it’s kinda of a bad choice to make a character you’re gonna throw away later such an important person.

We than have a time skip where everyone is now in…. Luka’s boat house….

For the miraculous theorist, I think we can safely conclude, Anarka is fucking rich.

Anyways the group + the people from the around the world special proceed to help max HACK NADJA TV PROGRAM.

WTF? WHY? ARE IN THAT “Just Stop Oil” ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST GROUP? Is the show really influencing that these crazy people are doing the right thing? THEY HACKED A GOD DAMMIT TV SHOW, JUST MAKE THE CHARACTERS THINK THERE’S NO HOPE LEFT, BUT THEM THEY ENTER IN A NOT CRAZY ACTIVIST GROUP AND THE MESANGE WOULD BE DELIVERDED, DON’T GIVE FUEL TO THESE PEOPLE!

We than have one of the most nonsensical scenes of this show. Don’t believe in me? Let me show you.

Firstly, Nino is pointing a camera at the group which means he is doing a live

But we have video of the boat they’re in, underwater shot (which is just the most beautiful water I've ever seen) UK (probably) shot. Japan and NY shots.

Throwing away a perfectly good fan that could be reused when the whole special is LITTEREALY ABOUT RECYCLING

This thing being a worldwide thing but Marinette and Adrien don’t know about them.

The fact that even after being haked the tv show the executives said to Nadja say good things about those idiots.

“nAtUrAlLy I WaS nOt aWaRe oF tHiS, BuT aS sOoN aS i WaS InFoRmEd I hAd EvErY MoRtAl FaN mAcHinE ReMoVeD fRoM PaRiS”

DO YOU SEE MY POINT?

Anyways we see a scene of the boss screaming to Gabriel on his alliance ring that he lied and that Gabriel knew the fans were polluted, again, Gabriel is a character we were supposed to like in the end of season 5.

Well, the boss gets mad and monarch Akumatizes him into king of plastic.

First of all, this doesn't look like plastic, it looks like he's made of candy, THOSE THINGS ON HIS SHOULDERS ARE JELLY BEANS AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME OTHERWISE, I can understand why his skin is pink, his logo is basically just pink, but why black? It doesn't feel like plastic either, and what's with his feet? He has these blisters that look like he's having an allergic reaction or something, and why is his weapon a sword? I understood that when Karami and Tomoe's weapons were a sword, they were linked to swordsmanship, but why is his weapon a sword? Let's be real, the producers just gave him a sword to make him look cool, ok for the things I liked, I liked his crown. It's shaped like a king's chess crown, the design is creative and I liked the look of its lower parts like the lower parts of a doll.

Well, I think I will give him A 5.8/10 I don't know if just making him a gigant version of his logo would be better, no I was just kidding- it's just a joke- please don't do that PLEASE NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Monarch gives him the bee powers and KOP (plastic king) rushes to paralyze the mayor and we see what his powers are about, he turns people into plastic, ok that's actually a good power, it kind of reminds me of the villains from season 2, do you remember season two? When was the show good? And did we have character development? I miss that too.

He transforms the police in plastic and decides to go to the Agreste mansion.

Marinette and Adrien while Adrien was teaching Marinette how to say hi in mandarin, like the language her mom is fluent, and that Sabrine would teach her how to say at least a “Hello”? anyways they both see the Akuma so Adrien leaves her house and they both transform.

KOP transforms the gorilla in plastic so the writers can have the heroes know his powers and that he’s dangerous just for the heroes to not care about that and attack him without thinking twice, but relax guys he just throws them, phew for a moment I thought they wouldn’t do it.

He transforms chat’s staff and well-done king. He doesn’t deserve his staff, or his powers, OR HIS STANS, THAT REFERENCE WAS HORRIBLE I SHOULD JUST SHUT UP.

Ladybug: you’re the tycoon who makes all these polluting fans! The king of plastic, aren’t you?

Chat: the king of pollution you mean.

KOP: miss information, plastic is fantastic!

Ladybug: fantastic would be you ending your reign and all the pollution you’re causing!

Ugh, another show to demonize plastic, actually I think I didn’t said what demonizing plastic is, demonize plastic is put all the fault of plastic pollution in the plastic bottle or the company that made it, and say that the companies should be ashamed of that and they should stop producing plastic, first, we NEED plastic, it became an essential part of our lives, the computer the miraculous teem made this episode is made of plastic, the tv the mlb fans watch It is made out of plastic, everyone has multiple things made out of plastic, the problem isn’t making plastic, the problem is and not recycling it, and not re-using it. and is it the company fault? Me and my family used to travel a lot, and every time we got thirsty, we would buy a water bottle just so when runned out, they threw it away and buy another one, and then I ask you, who fault? The companies or my family’s? but shows tend to just throw all the blame at the companies and forget that we are the ones using it once and throwing it away, but really, I knew since the beginning of the episode they would demonize plastic.

Well KOP go to Luka’s boat house to take revenge on the kids, but ladyboob and cat noar show up to stop him, ladybug then activates her lucky charm which is a plastic bag.

They realize that the plastic bag can’t be turned into plastic because it is already made of plastic so ladybug comes up with a plan.

Alya tells the group to turn on the boat plastic collector system, so chat noir cataclysms the engine, which makes the boat explode in trash again, how many times is Juleka gonna get homeless in one episode?

Well, KOP Drowns in the most beautiful trash I've ever seen and that the MLB producers totally didn't just download from the internet.

Ladybug breaks the sword and purify the Akuma.

The boss: what am I doing here? This is disgusting, aren’t you gonna help me?

Ladybug: this is exactually what millions of sea animals are going through around the world.

Chat noir: and they don’t always have a super hero to offer a helping hand and save them.

The boss: you just covered me in a pile of trash woman, its not my fucking fault people are throwing trash at the sea I just sell plastic, Jesus Christ could you help me I can’t fucking move.

I wish he said it, ok here’s what he actually said.

The boss: ok maybe plastic isn’t always so fantastic.

Aaaaand they rushed the conclusion so that everything would end up in a happy ending, I warned ya.

Ladybug gives him a magical charm so he can remember he got one of the most rushed character developments in history.

We have a scene showing that now everything’s ok, everyone is using the kids’ ideas and tomorrow everyone will forget about recycling and everything will go back to how it was. And that’s where the episode ends.

Ok this episode is not very good.. it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen still it isn’t good, there’s a lot of conveniences, the animation is worst than usual, even if I liked the villain, I must say his powers were used billions of times, I liked they give more screen time to the fight though.

The episode was generic and I’m almost sure they made the episode just for 1: people go “oh they are so nice!” so they can cover up the racist (intentional or not) in the show. and 2: for sell merch of Marinette’s water bottle for 65 bucks each.

The message was very over the top, and they didn’t do much to try make something original out of it, they just made a check list with every single trope they use in cartoons ecological episodes and made it, and it looks like they didn’t care to much about logic, that thing in Lukas’s boat house was totally illegal and dangerous, the group just found the boss office because a random dude that worked for him showed them without thinking twice, they can just get into places they shouldn’t be able to and it doesn’t even make sense, they resolve all their problems via hacking a channel network, which doesn’t make sense and even if they were able to do it there are billions of tv ads about recycling and they never get attention, I know it’s a kid show but couldn’t they make the characters say “this fight won’t be easy, but we are gonna fight for a better world, are you with us?” it would be better in my opinion.

The characters literally hacked a network, break into a dude’s office and there’s just no consequences, I know it was for a good cause but still. it looks like the writers knew it was a filler episode and didn’t care about researching any of it, if they did, they would know that MOST BAKERIES USE PAPER BAGS, OR THAT FANS AREN’T MADE OF PLASTIC, OR THAT YOU CAN’T DO A LIVE SHOWING ANOTHER CONTRY IN REAL TIME.

Over all if you enter in this side this episode because a mess, but if you just watch the episode, it isn’t too bad.

And a fun fact this episode was made without Astruc, “but AC, if you think the episode was shitty why does it matter to you?” well my dear summer child, let me tell you, first of, I always thought if the miraculous team could do an episode without Astruc telling them what to do it would be just the best episode of mlb, and after the awakening movie that theory just confirmed itself from me, but no, it wasn’t, not even close.

And because I loved that they didn’t use Chloe in the episode, I bet all my life savings that if Astruc worked on the production Chloe would appear and say something like “ WhO EvEn cArEs AbOuT nAtUrE?” or make Andre seem a nice guy who just wants the best for his city and that totally wasn’t corrupt, so at least that a good thing about this episode.

Anyways I’ll give this episode a 6/10. Thank you for reading until the end, hope I’ll see you in the next post.

#miraculous ladybug #mlb #miraculous #ml #miraculous salt #mlb salt #mlb sucks #miraculous ladybug salt #ml salt #miraculous season 5 #mlb s5 spoilers #mlb season 5 spoilers #mlb season 5 #miraculous spoilers #action special #action spoilers

22 notes · View notes

deusexlachina · 5 months

Text

Exocolonist skills tierlist

Made a ranking of all the skills in Exocolonist.

Intended for second+ runs - some minor spoilers.

S tier - Trivialize the game

Engineering - The Brain Trainer grants +15 to each of the twelve skills, the equivalent of years of training, for all purposes except Perks. The Vintage Focus Device trivializes card challenges. The only reason I don't get this immediately is because you need kudos to buy these, and your early-game income is quite slow. The other two perks, an extra card and an extra gear, are quite solid too, giving you value along the way.

Organizing: The Org100 Perk is the single best tool for deck optimization, which is critical to passing hard card challenges (allowing you to win where a coin flip would lose). Allows you to pick only cards that improve your deck, saving you dozens of bad ones, which are much more common. Incredible for any kind of build, but also synergizes extremely well with the VFD by purging nonblue cards. The other two perks are the same as with Engineering, though in the opposite order, which is more useful - you want more gear slots as soon as you can.

A tier - Very helpful in any run

Perception - A lot of people would put this one in S-tier - I don't, largely to stress how incredibly, universally good, Organizing and Engineering are. The final perk makes exploring vastly easier, letting you skip bad events and farm all the collectibles. Getting the full value out of this, however, requires a bit of save scumming - most events can spawn in different locations, and the only way to tell what's what is by checking them. Only some events let you just nope out without penalty, and you won't know which those are. The main cost to doing all events is stress, which can be dealt with in other ways, such as Bravery, below. Perception100 is the best way to farm gifts, which synergizes with Cre100, since that chews through your inventory quickly.

Creativity - The final perk is immensely helpful for grinding friendship. Partly because it gives more opportunities to gift, but, almost as importantly, you don't have to worry about whether you need to wait to gift so you can give someone something better/on their birthday. But you need enough items to get the full value out of this, and it's quite possible to befriend everyone without Cre100 - the only really difficult one is Vace. The store upgrade is one way to get the very good Emojiproji - the other way is stealing it while working at the Depot, which requires doing a few jobs there. It's also a way to get the jacket, but Marzipan will give it to you for half price very early on, and if you can't afford that, it's free.

Empathy - Plenty of useful skill checks. The most important part is unlocking the Spa, which lets you convert kudos to thinning your deck - the best use for kudos after the special store items.

B tier - Broadly useful

Bravery - You need at least 5 points to sneak out during Glow, which gets you some interesting scenes and some useful opportunities. All three perks are nice. Strangely, the best one is at 66, which reduces the stress from exploring by 5 per event. That's really good! It greatly reduces the need for Per100, and if you have both, it's quite possible to get negative stress from exploring, which is cracked.

Animals - A bit of this is necessary to get pets, which are some of the best items in the game. The Vriki in particular stands out: it gives you +1 to a primary skill when you succeed on any skill check - even ones that don't normally give skill points! Upgrading pets is nice, if you have them, though by far the most value comes from upgrading the Hopeye, which reduces stress by 1 point per level. What's nice about this is it's a free bonus to resting, which you have to do anyway. Note that the Park will let you start levelling your pets even before you get Ani33 - it takes a few visits for them to level up. The best part of this skill, though, is the extra gear slot. The idea is that this is for a pet, but you can use it for anything.

Persuasion - You need this if you want to be governor yourself. If not, you can pass almost every skill check, and all the important ones, with 50, which you can get with all four Persuasion items (Brain Trainer, jacket, emojiproji, and doll). The perks are pretty bad. A bonus to social skill increases would be nice...but levelling persuasion comes at the cost of levelling the other two skills in the first place. (If you got that one first, it'd be good!)

Biology - Necessary to be a doctor. The extra augment sounds incredible, but the time and training to get Bio100 outweighs the benefits you'd get from any augment except Calm Temperament. More collectibles is alright. The xenobotany lab is nice if unlocked in the early game. Some of its events can be quite useful...

C tier - Limited use

Toughness - There are only a few Toughness checks in the game, and the only important ones can be done through other means. Upgrading cards is amazing in many deckbuilders, but in this one, you can only upgrade your starting cards into slightly less shitty ones. You might as well just get rid of them in the vastly-better Spa. Immunity to being injured sounds impressive, but there are very few chances to be injured, they're only when you screw up, and it's healed as soon as you rest.

Reasoning - You need this to be a teacher. There are only some places where you need to level reasoning at all, and most of the time, you can use other, better, stats. The autoplay fairy only slightly improves your hand. And if you've gotten the best possible hand, which becomes quite doable with experience, it's utterly useless. The mental skill bonus is useless for the same reason as Persuasion100.

Meme tier - Negligible value in any run

Combat - You never need this in a run. Even if you want to go into combat, you don't need a single point in combat, except for a few checks, which are invariably bad ideas. Combat items are bad, and the bonus to red skills is, like the other two, useless. There are only two reasons you would want this: you're going for a particular career, and you're trying to befriend Vace. Even so, you won't get much use out of this.

#iwatex

18 notes · View notes

thelediz · 1 day

Text

Sonic Underground: The Chaos arc

That’s right, folks, it’s another three-parter, because this is the actual Knuckles arc, buckle up for a ride!

I’m watching Sonic Underground in search of inspiration to finish a fic I’ve been writing forever. It’s a sad state of affairs. See the recap of the first three episodes here, if you're interested!

The plot (for want of a better word): Robotnik has developed his greatest weapon yet: a giant gloating fortress powered by chaos emeralds! To defeat the undefeatable, the Sonic Underground call upon their ally Knuckles to help them save the day!

Sonic Underground 27: Flying Fortress

We kick off with the triplets on some kind of vacation day, Sonia sunbathing, Sonic playing frisbee against himself, Manic… digging for cash…? It’s all disrupted by a big flying ball with guns.

Now, this is Sonic Underground's equivalent of the Death Egg, but it isn't really a good one. It doesn’t look like the one from the games, and the equivalent of the Archie comics was much more egg-shaped. But it functions the same. It’s a big flying ball-shaped fortress powered by chaos energy.

The scary things about it are that it’s got an impenetrable outer shell (though Sonic breaks OUT of it okay), and a security laser beam thing that literally disintegrates anything it touches. Also its hallways are apparently labyrinthine, because Sonic spends a good minute running around it lost before the security system comes after him.

In this series, Sonic is not able to fall face-first from the upper stratosphere without harm. This is a problem, given the whole flying fortress thing, but Manic’s got a hoverboard so it’s fine.

But the good thing about Sonic getting chased out by the security beam is that he recognises the green energy as emerald energy. Which means they need to go see Knuckles.

Hilariously, in this series, Knuckles not only has traps, but also voice-activated anti-aircraft guns and a radio shack. It’s so very at odds with the mildly techno-phobic character we will come to know in the games, but it’s not entirely out of line for the Sonic 3 & Knuckles version, so cool.

Knuckles shoots the triplets (who are flying a converted SWATbot because why not) down, but Sonic uses their smoke to write his name in the sky and all is well. The most annoying part of this sequence is that the flying SWATbot was Manic’s idea and Sonic was against it, but when Sonic has an idea to stop Knuckles’ attack, Manic acts like it was Sonic’s. It’s… par for the course, but… mm. MM.

My headcanon to merge this series and the games kind of falls apart because of the conversation they have, where it’s very clear neither Sonic or Knuckles expect Robotnik to be able to get a hold of a chaos emerald, and Sonic can’t imagine there being more than one, but I hope you’ll forgive me my trespasses.

Knuckles, as per his original animated and comic nature, refuses to help because his duty is to protect the floating island. The Sonic Underground has to convince him with

THE SONG: No one is an island. Another Jamaican-style reggae tune, but thankfully without the accents this time. It’s not a bad sound, not bad lyrics, it’s generally okay, and more importantly, annoying enough to get Knuckles to give in.

No, literally. He is giving in because he’s been peer pressured through song.

So while Knuckles prepares a fighter plane, he is visited by his (recoloured) Great Grandfather Athair (Archie comic continuity is a go)(no Archimedes though, which I consider a damn shame) who has been given a Sean Connery voice and we just roll with it. Athair tells him that if he leaves the Floating Island, Mobius is doomed, but hey, maybe the future can be changed, so whatever man, you do you.

Meanwhile, in another REMARKABLE show of continuity, Robotnik is targeting Port Mobius because they have turned against him. Remember? Episode 9? Won’t blame you if you don’t, but wow, credit where due.

Also, Sleet and Dingo point out Port Mobius only rebelled because they rigged up a sea monster, because they’re not actually evil so much as employed/forced to be (according to this writer, at least), and Robotnik snaps that they’ve caused so many failures that he’s close to getting rid of them if they interrupt him again.

THE CONTINUITY. SOMEONE CARED ABOUT THIS SHOW. -WILD FLAILING-

Sleet is afraid of getting robotocised because they’re no longer needed, so he declares they need to do something. Yes, that’s right, folks, Sleet and Dingo are going to be sabotaging Robotnik for this arc to make sure they stay employed.

Meanwhile, the triplets and Knuckles have snuck on board and Knuckles pulls out a ‘chao-meter’ (kay-o, not ciao) which is basically an emerald tracker. It even kind of looks like an early build of Rouge's emerald tracker that we see in Adventure 2. So weird to see, in hindsight. Oh, wow, what if Adventure 2’s writers watched this series and… Nope. No, we’re not going there.

While they hunt it down, Sleet and Dingo are already stealing the emerald. Lucky for them, Robotnik knows our heroes are onboard, so only thinks Sleet and Dingo are trying to escape the falling ship.

And so episode 1 of 3 ends with the Flying Fortress in the sea, Sleet and Dingo on the run with the emerald, and nothing but danger ahead…!

Sonic Underground episode 28: No Hedgehog is an Island

First off, can we talk about how misleading that title is, and how good of a plot-relevant episode it could have been, about how Sonic needs to learn to rely on his siblings? Back in the day, it would have been a bit nonsensical in context, but in the current culture you could totally have him burning out or getting frustrated, and that leading him to screw up something, until his siblings help him de-stress and he gets his head back on straight, and…

Anyway. We have an episode to recap.

“How much would we risk to save the world from chaos?” Side-eye. Much side-eye, Aleena. On multiple levels.

Two things in immediate contrast to last episode: one, the chaos emerald is now much longer and pointier, and two, Sleet and Dingo (who originally stole the emerald to keep their jobs with Robotnik) are crowing about ‘so long, Robotnik'. So we’ve apparently given up on last episode’s proud continuity.

Knuckles is the hero of this episode, saving the siblings from drowning in the middle of the ocean and keeping everyone focussed on the emerald. It’s not yet about him worrying over the whole end of the world thing Athair warned about, but I’m sure we’re getting there.

So Sleet’s new plan is to use the chaos emerald to become ruler of Mobius. And then, for reasons that are only seeded if you don’t think Dingo actually likes Sleet, Dingo decides to use his physical strength to overpower him and take the emerald for himself.

Which. Look. I don’t tend to think too much about Sleet and Dingo – they’re the required hench-villains, they’re clocking in as evil (unless the writers demand otherwise), whatever. But as soon as you start thinking about Dingo, he’s… How does he morph? Why does Sleet have his controller? Why does he LET Sleet have his controller? As this episode proves, he’s perfectly capable of taking stuff off him. He doesn’t seem to enjoy being transformed. Why does he put up with Sleet’s insults? I kind of handwave it in that Dingo appreciates Sleet’s intelligence and ability to think beyond the current moment, but then that makes this a bit stupid, and also makes Sleet insulting him so much also stupid. Better to manipulate your muscle than build up resentment, or stuff like this will happen. And at the end of the day, he’s going to take Dingo back anyway, and nothing will change about their relationship, and…

I’m gonna stop and leave this to @shinymisty-blog to figure out.

Of course Dingo immediately drops the emerald and… it breaks. This actually makes no sense for an item of ultimate power unless Mobian rock is laced with a conflicting mineral that warps and contains the power of chaos into but we accept. The emerald kind of explodes in power, bathing Dingo in energy and recharging the van that Sonic’s trying to get started. Why not.

Cute little character moment – Manic drums in his sleep and snores in time. It’s kind of adorable, if very silly.

Aaaand we get the start of the Knuckles x Sonia romance. Knuckles is now on to blaming himself for not getting the emerald back, and Sonia comforts him. They’re then attacked by rogue chaos energy, and Knuckles has to save her from falling into a hole in the earth. And as everyone in the 90s knew, a person comforting a member of the opposite sex who’s getting down on themselves, AND then the first person getting saved by the second, can only lead to True Love. Et cetera. Sigh.

I’m not gonna lie, I strongly suspect this romance is a big part of what soured me to Sonia’s inconsistent love life when I was younger. It was so utterly unnecessary.

Also, Sonia can make herself into a spinning whirlwind. Are you honestly telling me she can’t - No. No, I’m not doing this. Just accept and move on.

So because chaos is breaking out all over, Sleet decides he needs to go crawling back to Robotnik, who is the only person who knows how to bring chaos under control. Another side-eye for the fic purposes.

Meanwhile, while the chaos energy is about to attack Port Mobius, Manic does something weird that doesn’t go particularly explained. He brings out his drums and plays them hard and loud until… the energy disperses? In the series, this is just one of the reminders that Manic’s power DOES actually equal his siblings’, it’s just entirely wrapped up in drums, but HOW it works is never mentioned or explained. He just… has that power over chaos, or something, I guess. He will not use it successfully again.

The song: Learn to overcome, which is some early Blink 182 like you can’t even guess. Like, M&Ms or Man Overboard type sound. Which is kind of funny because the music video is really trying to imply this is some hard punk rock sound and… ohh, honey, no. I love pop-punk and worship the godfathers of it like any good millennial, but it is NOT hardcore. And now I have Man Overboard in my head. It's just another, it's just another, it's just another night aloooone!

Also, just a weird side note that I wish I couldn’t notice, but whoever animated Sonia this episode really liked her boobs. Just saying. They are super noticeable for some reason.

So properly bolstered (or terrified, the expression leans more toward the latter) by the music, Knuckles suggests they go see Athair for advice. Anyone who has read the Archie comics knows this is going to be pointless without Tails.

But he gives them a cannister that can reform the emerald, and says they must make an alliance with Robotnik, which will somehow enable the cannister to work. It’s nonsensical, but it’s something that always had to happen in these cartoons, so we accept and deal.

The Sonic Underground refuses to make the alliance, but Knuckles decides to betray them and follow his grandfather’s advice…

Sonic Underground episode 29: New Echidna in Town

Aleena is on her nonsense again, talking about how sometimes it takes a whole world to learn a lesson, and that Mobius is now “learning the greatest lesson of all”. She does not tell us what this lesson is. I infer that it’s ‘chaos is dangerous’. And I mean… honestly, woman. We're about to have the Adventure games. STOP.

Robotnik informs Knuckles he’ll only make a deal with him if Knuckles brings him the Sonic Underground. Knuckles of course says no, but Robotnik is more than happy to call his bluff. “If I can’t defeat Sonic, I’d rather Mobius was destroyed.” Which I mean If Mobius isn’t the entire planet, that’s less insane and more evil than I think the writers intended. In series, Robotnik’s just insane as hell, which is appropriate because, y’know, back in the day all villains were all irrationally evil. Or Robotnik has gone crazy from chaos and anarchy beryl poisoning and

Anyway. Knuckles agrees, for the good of Mobius. Besides, Robotnik ‘promises’ not to robotocise the triplets. He’ll just keep them locked up. Honest. This is definitely not a lie that Knuckles will be horrified to discover later.

Meanwhile, the triplets are talking about what to do (Sonia wants to save Knuckles, Sonic wants to save the world, Manic points out they need Knuckles to save the world) and I do not know what Jaleel White was thinking, but Manic’s sing-song tone in this scene is so incredibly grating…

Knuckles comes back. And we have another moment of Sonia x Knuckles, and I mean… just… just look at this.

Sonia is magically attracted to men that are going to screw her over, I think is what we’re supposed to be getting from this. OR she’s just attracted to wet cats. One of the two.

And Manic plays wingman for his sister. We stan a supportive brother, even if we hate the relationship he’s batting for.

Anyway, so, Knuckles leads them into Robotnik’s trap and the triplets get captured in sticky stuff, and Robotnik immediately orders robotocisation. Five minutes, kids. FIVE. MINUTES.

So of course Knuckles turns on Robotnik and rescues the siblings. So the betrayal lasted all of two minutes. Conflict and resolved! -dusts hands-

Sleet and Dingo reunite, and Sleet transforms Dingo into a box to contain the broken emerald pieces. Naturally, this causes Dingo to mutate into a kaiju blob monster. I mean, obviously.

While Dingo goes on his rampage, Robotnik remains obsessed with capturing hedgehogs, until Sonic smooth-talks him into working with them to get back at Dingo. Like I said a few episodes ago, manipulation was once a thing Sonic was REALLY good at.

The song: The Mobius Song. Rocking tunes, brah. Like, totally tubular jams. For sure. That’s all I can get from this, and I don’t know why, because it’s actually kind of mod-rock, so I don’t know why my brain went there.

It distracts Dingo enough for Robotnik to catch him with sticky stuff, which is enough for Dingo to fall over and cough up the emeralds, which Knuckles catches, and… yeah, okay, let’s go with it. Enemies aligned, harmony was achieved, the day is saved. Hurrah.

So uh. Yeah. First, the counters, because it’s been a while:

Sonic implying less than 100% American heterosexuality: 5

Sonia in love with Bartleby: 4/37

Sonia in love with someone who is not Bartleby: 3/37

Sonia’s got super strength: 4

Manic’s thieving Is A Problem: 4

Then I have to process what kind of… narratively frustrates me, as world-builder, because we just have to accept the characters for what they are. But the… I think this is a problem Sega actually had, and still probably has, in that it doesn’t actually know what Chaos Energy does. It doesn’t know why Sonic (and Shadow and Silver) can use it to become a demi-god, or why it makes Angel Island float. It was only in the Adventure era that Sega solidified Chaos as emotions become form, and that’s part of why it quietly hasn’t ever acknowledged the Super Emeralds since, because they’re like… what? Super Emotions? Whatever. And what do emotions have to do with making stuff float, I mean... anyway. Anyway.

But that lack of clarity was really obvious in things like this, where Sonic doesn’t have power over chaos, so they take the safer route of chaos = bad, rather than the games’ line that you need to find control in chaos so that you can move forward with strength and resilience (GOD I LOVE THIS FRANCHISE).

And I actually think that could have been a really cool thing for Sonic Underground to explore, with its themes of resistance and harmony and not giving into the order of post-industrialisation and Taylorism and… and instead it just… chaos is bad, order is good, except when it’s not, don’t think about it too much, just look at the funky blue hedgehog and dance to the cheesy music woo.

But anyway. I am a problem and we know this. Dance to the music, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

#sonic underground #lediz fics #sonic the hedgehog #manic hedgehog #sonia hedgehog #but seriously #the sonic franchise has so many great messages #it has amazing themes #and I have not yet seen a single series do it justice #not that I don't love most of them for what they are #but the storyline of chaos control and harmony has never been adapted well #I am such a problem

5 notes · View notes

demonslayedher · 1 year

Text

Things that went through my mind while watching this episode:

--I think this was the episode that converted a lot of people who were on the fence about Uzui, that scene with Hinatsuru is just so tender that people cannot help but feel for him. The way they animate his fingers moving as Hinatsuru talks because their resting on her chin is such a nice detail. And then we get him pumped back up by the good news that he's found one of his wives alive, and we get that skid and change in direction the roof. So good!! So cool!!

--On that note, I'm just going to jump to the end of the episode because this episode was a very flashy Uzui sandwich. I think that given that we see Makio & Suma more often interacting with each other and Hinatsuru steals the spotlight for drama gives people the impression that she's the favorite or something like that, which makes me a bit sad because I read him as loving and cherishing all of them in different but egalitarian ways. All three are his most important treasures, and unfortunately we see Makio & Suma's immature sides come out most around him, and he seems to baby them in a way different from how he treats Hinatsuru like more of an equal (even though we see in this opening scene that she still speaks like someone subservient to him--that ninja training runs deep). Makio, though, I like that we get her flashback, as it brings out a very different, contemplative, sometimes anxious side of her character which keeps her from just being the hot-blooded one or something like tat. It's not a side she can show to just anyone, but someone as mature as Hinatsuru can draw it out. Suma, though? Let her be a simple bimbo. I love her. She's my favorite. She's adorable and I never get tired of seeing her crying as she tears a kunai through the obi.

--Right! That end of the episode! Uzui's grand entrance and twirling the swords around just to show off (he and Shinobu may relate to each other more than they think), and the perfect placement of a catchphrase. Fine!! Yes!!! I like the catchphrase now!!! I hated it more than anything at the Pillar Meeting, but yes, YES, GIVE ME UZUI TENGEN-SAMA!!!!

--Back to Tanjiro!! I forgot how long this one-on-one fight with Daki took and accidentally queued up my Nezuko reblogs too early. Nezuko is still just hanging out in her box as Tanjiro turns off the Water Breath and turns on the Hinokami Kagura and flashbacks enough to the last four months to show us that he's been working at using it better--and that he's realized his limits to Water Breath. In general, I find these flashbacks to totally unbeforeseen content in the mist of battle distracted and generally not good writing advice for how it cuts into the flow of a scene, but I have also totally come to accept this as a signature piece of KnY's storytelling style. And we aren't even done yet with Tanjiro's flashbacks for this solo battle against Daki! With all these reflections, though, it's really nice to get that foreshadowing for more Haganezuka content, especially Daki's accusation that Haganezuka isn't much of a swordsmith (and he faces criticism too), and Tanjiro's insistence that it's him abusing the sword. He has always fully believed that everything that happened to his swords is his own fault for using them roughly. (And gosh, that context and comparison against someone who uses Water Breath damn near perfectly makes it all the more startleing how Akaza will later very easily break Giyuu's sword in two.) Speaking of swords, BOYS WITH SWORDS!!! BOYS PLAYING WITH SWORDS!!! Zenitsu handling his sword in a context other than the brief moments he's using Thunderclap and Flash, placing it on the ground the way you're supposed to, so unlike Inosuke who doesn't care for proper sword use whatsoever. Thank you, Ufotable!! Thank you for this filler!!

--Speaking of foreshadowing, if Tanjiro's already been maintaining fever over days at a time this whole time, this gives us lots of juicy stuff to analyze about his mark. Perhaps can interpret the damage done to the human body (and the reason all those Sengoku demon hunters died by the age of 25) as being due to the sudden increase in temperature and heart rate, but with Hinokami Kagura techniques, Tanjiro's been able to find a more sustainable way of doing it so his body is more prepared to draw on that power. I wonder, then, did he subconsciously start to do this during the Final Selection, and that's why the scar changed? Also, I believe that Tanjuro's general weakness is do to long-term sustained damage of performing Hinokami Kagura imperfectly, in a way that put stress on his body before he mastered the proper Breathing technique. Which is all to say, it makes me ponder that Tanjiro may have more years than he's assumed to, but he probably will decline in a similar way as his father.

--BUT HEY ALSO, there's imperfect knowledge and hearsay passed down from the Sengoku era about how, like, "swordsmen with black swords can't advance (because they got kicked out)" so maybe that "dead by 25" thing was a matter of looking at patterns and also counting all the guys who happened to get killed in battle? And sure, maybe enough of them dropped dead to lead to conclusions??? I'm looking for whatever hope we can for Giyuu and Sanemi, let me dig with a tiny spoon as I like.

--Anyway! We also get this beautiful, "moyase… moyase… kokoro o moyase!!!" line from Tanjiro. Yes, please.

--And all this reflection from Tanjiro about how he won't allow anyone else to go through the pain that he and other members of the Demon Slayer Corps have with losing people to the violence of demons. That's great, Tanjiro, but you're about to witness a huge failure to do so.

--Ok… so… Inosuke's scene going Homer Simpson through that tunnel is… not one of my favorites. I appreciate that he and the obi found each other mutually gross. Go ahead, keep calling her the Worm Woman, Inosuke. You're the worm, though.

--THAT MOMENT INOSUKE KICKS HIS SWORDS TO HAVE THEM BOOMERANG BACK INTO HIS HANDS, IT'S SO FLASHY, I CANNOT

--This scene down in the food cellar reminds me of the Chinese idiom, "The Eight Immortals Cross The Sea," meaning everyone shows up their individual talents and strengths. Here we've got Inosuke doing it, Makio & Suma doing it, Zenitsu doing it, and then The God of Festivities himself. So much flamboyant fun! That Zenitsu's upside-down twirl, my gosh, he's totally writing that into the Legend of Zenitsu.

--I love it when Inosuke realizes he's in over his head in battle, though. Recognizing he's in a tight spot because he can't fight the obi while also protecting the humans, and that if this isn't the actual body, then there will be no end to fighting there. It makes it so gratifying when Makio & Suma step in to help.

--Okay, but also to sandwich this post… Uzui is totally back in his proper flamboyant mode after being so happy to see Makio & Suma are alive and kicking--especially kicking butt. Relief seems to be a big part of it, but his wives truly are a source of strength and joy for him. Having reunited with all three of them, everything is once again right in his world and it's time to do the butt-kicking in his own flashy way!!

#kny rewatch #my art #uzui tengen #uzui hinatsuru #uzui makio #uzui suma

71 notes · View notes

lethedwarddavidsonworld-blog · 3 months

Text

Signalis Doom - 4

Another mixed bag of a day, largely spent on textures. Did you know video games tend to have alot of them? So today's issue came from me grappling with the fact that what's good for Signalis texturing is not good for Doom texturing. At first, i didn't see the issues though. Signalis's Textures are all actually at or around doom's texture resolutions, and it's sprite sheets can easily be chopped up into good looking walls and pillars and such.

The problem comes from two places. 1. these are textures made to wrap around a 3d model, not laid out along a floor or a solid wall, so i had to figure out exactly how i was going to chop it up. Do i have a few solid pieces? do i chop it up into a dozen small ones so i have the most control? the answer is it's gonna vary.

For example. here's a chunk of the Penrose and it's wall texturing. The entire room is one model, and every part of it(including the lil' spires in the corners) are all pulling from the same sheet. Each part is meant for dif stuff, which explains why some chunks are much brighter, or darker, than others. That's great for UVing, but i don't really know what i'm supposed to do with something like this. What do i do with the clearly darker chunk of wall? Sometimes, there are walls that have a lil' extra line on the bottom, or the top, and i don't know why. I think they'd texture rooms so that dif parts would look better to the camera angle. That's great for their angle, but a bit odd in first person.

I mean it guess it's not that weird, but i think it'd have to edit it to have a more natural falloff or somesuch. It doesn't look great ported as-is, and this problem comes up alot (this is a minor example tbh) 2. Doom's textures more often than not are expected to look acceptable when used on large surfaces. This means floors and walls and such need to be able to tile (or repeat forever) cleanly, but without drawing too much attention to the repetition. Like a walking loop, you don't want a specific action to pop too much because it'll call attention to the loop.

Signalis's textures, however, are often very small textured tiled very aggressively. It's something that you don't think much about in a slow game from a pulled back perspective. However, once you're low to the ground and moving at a clip, not only do you notice the repetition, but it can honestly get a bit nauseating to see the patterns whoosh by.

the floor textures look like this. Most areas are made up of the middle tile in the ring, with the ring parts often running along walls. The bits on the righjt and bottom are often used to break up the visuals. At first, i thought this would be a big problem. The 32x32 tiles just repeat too hard to look good. However, i am a dummy, and forgot that this is pretty easily solved by breaking the ground up and slotting those tiles in.

Now, it's more work than it'd be on a 3d model, cuz i'm gonna need to remember to do this manually. But, that solves the problem of using the little details. Doesn't really solve this tiled floor being a nightmare to see stretch on forever, but at least it's something. --- I spent a bit of time working on getting some 3d models and stuff into the game as a test, which didn't go great. The community models for the characters are fantastic, however, they don't deform well when converted to the .md3 format.

GZDoom doens't used fbx files, it uses OBJ for static stuff, and MD3 (an old quake 3(?) file type) for stuff with animations. It's an old old format, and only really works via a couple of blender addons or old modeling programs. Conversion from obj/fbx/ect to md3 can always be funky, i don't really know why, it just can be. Sometiems it works, or sometimes you need to model in md3 from scratch. i don't know how far i'm gonna go with that. I also played aroudn with getting sprite turnarounds of the characters. However, that's going to take it's own tech setup that i didn't give much time to today.

Overall, a pretty frustrating day, but i got alot more stuff in-engine and figured out mass naming schemes and so on. I can't say i've really solved any problem, but I'm gonna pretend noticing the problems is progress in-of-itself. So uhh, i dunno, hey do you wanna see Ariane's bathroom? god, poor girl, 20(?????) years in that tube and this is what she's got to work with.

(the blender scene is not mine, it was assembled by a very skilled person on the signalis discord. all credit goes to whoever did it, they're a godsend)

#signalis #doom #gamedev #texture #bathroom

7 notes · View notes

milfweirdal · 7 months

Text

gif making tutorial for the inimitable @snowysobsessions

disclaimer: this is exactly how i do it, but im basically just winging it tbh. there may be other methods that are quicker and/or look way better. this is just the way to which i have become accustomed. i am not a fancy ass gif maker who does colouring and sharpening or uses photoshop whatever, those folks are the real pros. i just like to get the job done :) if you wanna make really fancy gifs other tutorials may be more appropriate. ok lets get into it under the cut!

step 1:

select your source. for the purposes of this tutorial im going to stay on-brand and use this video of weird al on 30 rock (aka the original Milf Weird Al).

youtube

step 2:

either download the video (i dont have a good recommendation for a website for that unfortunately, they all seem virus-ridden these days) or screen-record the part of the video you want to turn into a gif. for me, thats the part with al in it.

my computer runs windows something - 11 maybe? and it comes with screen recording software built in that saves into a folder called "captures" in the video folder, which can be activated with the keyboard shortcut Windows Key + Alt + R. most phones also have screen recording functions, you could record it on your phone and transfer it to your computer? (for the record the website i use works on mobile too, but its very slow and annoying so i much prefer to use my laptop.)

step 3:

use video editing software of your choice to cut the clip down to just the part you want giffed. i use microsoft clipchamp because thats whats on my computer. it can also be used to crop away any black bars around any video clip, which is useful, because a properly cropped gif will probably be better quality. export the clip in as high quality as possible.

tip: try to keep the gif 3 seconds or under. this keeps the filesize down. tumblr gif size limit is 10MB, but i keep all my gifs 5MB or below because otherwise the loading time/storage burden is painful, and like i said, im not making fancy ones here, i dont mind them being a bit lower quality.

here is my clip. i saved it muted because its filesize is smaller that way.

step 4:

go to https://ezgif.com/video-to-gif which looks like this.

note that ezgif has tools for cutting, cropping and resizing videos if you dont have access to any video editing tool. its quicker if you do it in advance, though, i find.

upload your video and you will see this type of screen appear.

if youre uploading it to tumblr, the 540xAUTO size option is the one i go for by default, but it also has the following size options.

smaller size = smaller filesize, and you want the filesize as small as possible within reason. i sometimes make a gif smaller in dimensions if i'm really struggling to get the filesize below 5MB.

next is the frame rate: i set it to 25 because thats closest to the oriignal frame rate of most recorded video, but in order to make savings on filesize, it can be selected to 20FPS or 12FPS. i wouldnt recommend lower than that unless you want it to look weird and choppy, in which case, go ahead, and i wouldn't recommend higher unless you literally need the animation to be smooth as silk - for making it slowmo, for example.

i don't mess with the "method" drop down bc idk what it means.

the "Optimise for static background" tickbox is useful for if someone is doing something on a totally still background, because it reduces filesize by not animating every single bit of background in every frame. it could be helpful here as our background is not moving at all, just our heroine Alfina. i'm going to tick it.

now you can click "Convert to GIF". you should see something like this - itll be animated of course, this is just a screenshot.

our gif looks crispy fresh (and has 69 frames - NICE), but its filesize is 5.51MB which is more than id like it to be, but first we're gonna look at Effects, so I'm not going to click the "Optimise" option yet.

step 5:

clicking effects will provide the following options

if the video was sort of dark and hard to see, for example if it was live footage, it can be helpful to increase the brightness. changing the brightness and contrast makes our gif look like this, and makes it pop a little more.

you can keep playing with the settings and clicking "Apply selected" until it looks about right to you, or not add any effects at all - it's up to you. I hit the back button in my browser to go back to the gif before i added the effects, then I went to Optimise.

step 6:

the Optimise screen is like this

i tend to stick with the Lossy GIf optimization method. I put the compression level down to 30, and press Optimise GIF and see what happens.

as you can see, the filesize has been reduced by 41.95% to 3.2MB without a super noticeable drop in quality.

if you set the compression level to 200, this is what it looks like

much more pixely, and not much further reduced in size, so i stick to the lower end of the compression scale.

this is our finished gif! isnt she beautiful. i just right-clicked and hit save on it on the webpage after generating - on mobile, i guess you'd long-press on it to download it.

hope that helps!!! lmk if you need help with any other aspect like changing speed or overlays or anything but honestly it's pretty intuitive once you know how to do these bits.

17 notes · View notes

dailycharacteroption · 11 months

Text

Pop Culture Builds 12: Marcille Donato (Dungeon Meshi)

We’re back with another set of characters from pop culture to convert to Pathfinder or Starfinder, and as always have to cut the list of suggestions down to 5, which is always disappointing because you guys always send in good ones!

In any case, our first one for this week comes from a fairly recent manga (and upcoming anime!) that is something of a hit here on tumblr and other parts of the internet! I of course speak of Dungeon Meshi, or Delicious in Dungeon!

Dungeon Meshi is set in a classic fantasy setting with magic and everything, but it is most notably centered around a mysterious magical superdungeon that has attracted adventurers from near and far to plumb it’s depths. One such party is Laios and Falin Toudin, Chilchuck Tims, a few other members that leave before or join later, and our subject for today: Marcille Donato.

Marcille is a half-elf, daughter to an unnamed mother and Lord Donato, a now-deceased tallman (the settings word for what we would consider “human”, since all the human-like ancestries are just considered different types of human), where her odd aging due to her mixed heritage caused her to have difficulty related to others. However, when reunited with her childhood friend, Falin, she joined the party to investigate the dungeon and apply her mixed magical expertise to better understanding it and the monsters within.

However, disaster struck, and Falin sacrificed herself to teleport the others away from a Red Dragon which had the party on the ropes. This leads to the main premise of the series: The party has to get back down to the same level quickly so they rescue Falin’s body from the stomach of the dragon before it’s digested. However, the only way to do that is to travel light, which means sourcing meals from the surroundings. In other words, cooking and eating monsters.

Despite this being entirely out of her comfort zone, Marcille agreed, and though she was heavily frustrated with Laios’ antics and the strangeness of the meals, she seemed to learn much more about the dungeon and the monsters within when travelling in this way as opposed to just blasting them whenever she saw them.

Eventually, they did rescue Falin’s body, and Marcille was able to revive her with a bit of dark magic, but little did the party know that this was just the beginning!

Marcille is canonically half elf and half tallman, which points to her being pretty solidly a half-elf by the traditional estimation. I wasn’t able to find any alternate racial traits that really seemed like they were a match, so go nuts if you find one appealing.

It took a while for me to find a good match for her class. You see, Marcille being from a Japanese manga, comes from a world where there is no clear distinction between arcane and divine magic, and so healing magic and high damage attacks are not split up between types of casting. At first I thought white mage arcanist to mix healing magic in with traditional arcane magic, but then I realized that several spells she uses early on are straight up not on the sorcerer/wizard spell list. Then I tried going for witch, but I wasn’t sure how to emulate her mix of heavy-duty fire magic into it, until an exceedingly simple solution hit me. The bonded witch ancestral archetype that is associated with half-elves! Not only does it replace the familiar with a bonded item, but said bonded item can cast a single spell per day from a short list based on the nature of the item. While Marcille has a staff, for the purposes of this build we’ll treat it as wand to get lots of powerful offensive spells. In addition to this, we give her the elements patron so she adds even more offensive magical spells to her arsenal.

While Marcille does experiment with and utilize dark magic in desperate situations, she’s not one to deliberately curse someone. As such, her hexes are typically on the more benevolent side, things like Ameliorating or Aura of Purity. Flight, Fortune, Healing and Ward are also good choices, as is Leshy Summoning as a way to represent her spell to create “familiars” from scratch. Moving on to major hexes, Major Healing and Major Ameliorating are natural picks, as is Regenerative Sinew, and Witch’s Charge is also nice for protecting allies. As far as Grand Hexes go, Life Giver is perhaps the one that fits best with her abilities.

Not a lot of Marcille’s activities point to any one specific feat, so I would pick hers based on those that will enhance her casting, such as Spell Focus (evocation), and so on. She does do a lot of dark rituals when she needs to, so also consider picking up Practiced Ritualist to help your occult rituals go off relatively safely.

Marcille’s patron and wand-staff give her a nice handful of blasting spells, and she is canonically a fire specialist, so I would recommend using their spells that she learns to mostly focus on her defensive buffs, utility, and healing, but don’t be afraid to pick up other options if they prove useful. Additionally, since Marcille sometimes uses dangerous magic, invest in picking up a few occult rituals so she can invoke powerful, but dangerous effects in necessary, such are resurrecting a friend using nearby dragon meat as a substitute for their missing flesh. Because there’s no way that would go wrong.

As a spellcaster, Marcille doesn’t carry a lot of heavy extra equipment, but she absolutely would carry any sort of useful non-weapon or armor magical gear she could find, as long as she thoroughly examines it first, of course.

If bonded witch doesn’t seem right to you, you always could go with my original plan of a white mage arcanist, or alternatively, a magaambya initiate arcanist and perhaps follow up with the magaambya arcanist prestige class, adding a handful of divine spells to their otherwise arcane arsenal, or even the unlettered arcanist if you want to play with exploits but prefer the witch spell list. Heck, you could even go havoker witch to have another way to heal, but also be a fiery blaster.

Even if you’re not trying to replicate her, this build is an interesting way to play a mage that tries their best to be able to do a little of everything, and combine healing and blasting.

#pathfinder #pop culture #pop culture builds #pop culture characters #marcille #dungeon meshi #witch #bonded witch #half-elf

20 notes · View notes

yeastinfectionvale-deactivated20 · 11 months

Text

Shaw Pack Minecraft Play Styles.

David: Dirt House connoisseur, the man built a three story dirt mansion once and use acacia wood for detailing. Doesn't mind mining but has a secret love for creating efficient wood farms and goes around planting sapling like Johnny Appleseed.

Asher: Speed Runner (dodododo) Supreme, he loves finding new ways to beat the ender dragon and boasts a 10 minute PB (He would be a lot quicker but he keeps getting distracted by baby cows and he has to spend a minute apolagising to the adult cows for making their children orphans.)

Milo: The Fighter™ he can kill anything and has defeated the warden in iron armor. The only thing he can't defeat? Building, Milo lives in a 2 x 2 hole that has a staircase going straight down to the ancient city. He only lives on steak that he gets by lighting a cow on fire and killing it. Asher has tried to get his to use less brutal methods.

Sam: The poor man is a hobo who only has a bed and two apples in his inventory at any time. He does get better supplies but accidentally leaves them in a chest 1000 blocks from spawn. Somehow he ends up in the nether and gets the first blaze rods.

Angel: Architect Supreme. Give them any block pallette and they'll make a building so good you think it was naturally spawned in. They are in love with the new Cherry Blossom biome because of the little petals that fall on the floor.

Babe: The Potionmaster, Babe has all potion recipes memorised and always has suspicious stews in their inventory that actually regenerate their hearts. They also have given Milo a suspicious stew of blindness and now he never takes food from them.

Darlin': The naked wanderer, Darlin is actually the first person on the server to get full netherite armor and weapons (hoe included) but never uses them so it is assumed that they are still using wooden tools. Angel has made a base for Darlin' and Sam but it is used more as storage for all the cool things the two find when looking for Sam's tools.

Sweetheart: The gatherer, Sweetheart is able to get anything , and I mean anything. They once got Christian and Babe elytra wings so they could recreate flappy birds. Once Sweetheart was on the look for cacti for a build Angel was doing and ended up over 10000 blocks away from spawn.

Christian: The one that always has what you need. Christian is the type of guy you can ask to see if he has a certain item and he always will have it, half the time he forgets why he has said thing in his inventory.

Amanda: Mapmaker, Amanda is a wizard when it comes to maps and buried treasure. Amanda is always dropping gifts in everyones house, or into their inventory when they are AFK.

Gabe: He's a wither skeleton, the man died before he could touch Minecraft. But he would be a hardcore player with a 6 month world.

Marie: Mama bear, Marie has only played Minecraft twice. but both times she played she is saving all the villagers and animals from harm.

Colm: He has only played minecraft oce and that was when visiting Milo and Sweetheart's new house. The game was open and he grabbed the controller while he waited for Milo to get out of the shower when Sweetheart was at work. He made a villager-zombie converter to get cheaper trades. He never played after that.

#redacted asmr #redacted audio

19 notes · View notes

its-stimsca · 2 months

Note

Hey there!! I think i want to start making stimboards, but i personally cannot make gifs for multiple reasons, unless you know a good phone app or if IBIS can make gifs !!

Do you have any suggestions and tips ?

Are there blogs that don't mind using their GIFs as long as credit is somewhere ? Or is that typically frowned upon anyway?

I wanna be respectful so i understand if this means i cannot make stimboards until I'm able to make gifs myself :3

Hi!! The way I personally make my gifs is through using ezgif, and I’m fairly sure a bunch of other stimboard makers use this website too because it’s very convenient and free. Just submit the video you want to gif (not the whole thing, just a trimmed section of what u wanna gif), and it’ll convert it to a gif for you. Make sure to credit the original video if you post a gif of it, though, as it’s really important to give credit to the source

As for reusing gifs other people have made, pretty much all of the time it’s going to be okay to use someone’s gif in a stimboard, as long as credit it’s given. In fact, most people in the stim community on tumblr make gifs with the intent of them being used in stimboards. Some really great blogs that make a lot of original gifs to be used in boards that I go to a lot are @/talos-stims, @/heartnosekid, @/helium-stims, @/aliens-stim-too. There are a lot of other good ones too, but there are a few just to get you started.

You don’t have to specifically search a blog to find gifs though. Using the main tumblr search function you can type what you’re looking for, just include the tag “stim” in your search, and a lot of stuff will come up. You can use gifs that someone else has used in a stimboard, too. Just try your best to follow their sources to the original creator, and link it directly to there instead of the stimboard you took it from. A lot of stimboard blogs get deleted, which can lead to your link to the board becoming defunct in the future and that credit being lost for people down the line trying to source a gif.

If you’re making a gif of an animation or using a piece of art someone has drawn, that’s when you want to directly ask someone for permission. Most artists don’t mind as long as credit is given, but it’s important to check. If it’s a big artist that you can’t send asks to or contact in some way, just make sure to tag them in the post of the stimboard, that way if they can see you’ve reposted their art somewhere, and they can reach out to you if they don’t want it there.

The most important thing when it comes to all this is just to source your gifs. Copy the links in the notes app on your phone, a google doc, I personally do it on a discord channel, it doesn’t matter, just make sure you have SOME kind of credit to the gifs in your stimboard linked below your post. Don’t stress too much about messing up the first couple of times though, you get better at it and you can always go back and fix stuff later.

Hopefully this helps and wasn’t too much of a ramble. I’ve been thinking about making a sort of guide on my process of making boards actually, but haven’t gotten around to it since idk if anyone would be interested. Anyways that’s all

#not stim

6 notes · View notes

not-poignant · 9 months

Note

Hi Pia,

If this is too personal feel free to ignore! I was inspired to ask this after looking over your stunning artwork.

I gather you practise (and are trained in?) animism and shamanism. I'll admit I don't know much about spirituality but I'm really interested! If you're comfortable, I'd love to hear about your journey. When did you discover these beliefs, how do they interact with your everyday life? Do you believe in other spirit realms? Have you had any particularly memorable spiritual experiences? Where in your writing can we see these influences?

Sorry for the bombardment of questions (I've really had to hold myself back lol), feel free to be selective in the ones you'd like to answer.

Hiya,

I don't really call it shamanism and haven't in a long word (it's a culturally appropriative term), I've been using functional or practical animism for a long time now. Maybe just under a decade!

I discovered these beliefs in childhood (some are familial). These days I practice Druidry through OBOD, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and I'm in the Ovate grade and have been for a looooong ass time.

When did you discover these beliefs, how do they interact with your everyday life?

This could be a long essay, but I'll just say that my writing is my Bardic work, it influences how I connect to nature, people, how I think about the world, and how I think about connections within the world. So pretty profoundly.

Do you believe in other spirit realms?

Sort of. I have a very kind of...relaxed view that goes like this: Maybe it's real, maybe it's not. Science is cool. If it's not real, it's an awesome series of visualisations and beliefs that makes my life better. If it is real, it's an awesome series of experiences that makes my life better. The moment it stops doing that, I'll walk away.

Like, I'm pretty zen about it. So many people are like 'but how do you know it's REAL' - I don't! I don't base it on whether or not it's empirically provable because the benefits are empirically demonstrable whether or not it's real and that's all that matters to me.

It benefits me, my loved ones, and my life. So...that's all the 'real' I need. I'm not interested in convincing anyone else of my beliefs and I'm very anti-proselytisation and preaching. People can believe what they want unless/until it threatens my existence re: people being transphobic / homophobic etc.

Have you had any particularly memorable spiritual experiences?

I have! But this isn't the place where I talk about them, lol. I used to very actively blog about my spiritual experiences (and actually used to run classes and educate folks) over at Dreamwidth and Livejournal.

Where in your writing can we see these influences?

I mean I wrote an entire 1 million+ word series about the fae realm that goes into great detail about how there's no such thing as pure good or pure evil (with a few exceptions one of those being Seelie lmao) and mostly everyone is shades of grey and is capable of growth and connection with nature is healing, in a story where animism is everywhere and gods are literally present in the land.

...And you know in every single section where nature is healing in every single one of my stories sdfalkfjsad

Also probably in a lot of the kinds of hero journeys I write.

My spirituality is everywhere, but it's also not an invasive spirituality where I'm trying to convert anyone. I believe in the importance of nature and our connection to it, so I write about the importance of nature and our connection to it. I believe certain experiences in nature can be healing, so I write my characters sometimes having those experiences in nature.

Most of my characters go through a 'oh nature exists and is...kind of cool actually' moment in their healing process to signify how far they've come, and I use that as a metaphor all the time.

I don't want it to feel religious. It's just like, hey, here's a thing. And since we all live in a world with some nature in it, maybe it's okay to have some nature in stories too, as a treat.

That's spiritually significant to me, it doesn't have to mean anything to anyone else.

But it does mean my spirituality and belief in animism is everywhere. It's something I live. It's mostly a very relaxed thing, and I think it's really just something you notice when I'm like 'oh look the clouds are really cool' and then I take a photo fdsalkjfsa

#asks and answers #personal #i don't *intentionally* write my spirituality into things #it's more just that i was raised with it #and it comes naturally to me #to believe that nature is sacred #and our relationship to it can always be improved #intentionally and unintentionally #my gods are in the earth and the trees and the sky and the sea #i write immanence and not transcendence #there are sacred moments in all of us #in nature #and in the most mundane acts #no one has to believe any particular thing to enjoy that #so yeah! that's basically where i am with it #pretty cruisy after all these years #administrator gwyn wants this in the queue

14 notes · View notes