nicolabarth

[nicolabarth]

The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.

A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.

“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”

The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”

“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”

The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.

She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.

“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”

She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”

The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.

“I have so many questions,” she said.

“I figured.”

“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”

“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”

“But the quest is just — done?”

“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”

“My parents?”

“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”

The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”

“I’m aware.”

“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”

“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”

The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”

Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”

The knight frowned. “What do you do?”

Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”

“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”

She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.

“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”

“We aren’t?”

“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”

[nicolabarth]

Asajj Ventress. Actually a remake from a piece I did in 2010 (!).

https://www.patreon.com/mistytang

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/drmistytang/

[nicolabarth]

höllvanias smoooooothest sniper [ print here ]

[nicolabarth]

[nicolabarth]

The reason everything is like this is because the internet gave corporations the ability to do to human culture what they’ve done to the environment. We are living inside of a clear-cut forest.

[nicolabarth]

Are we sure that they're gloves and not just the animators deciding his hands are 100% tattoed?

his gloves in the shadow lord trailer gotta be like, some sort of sci-fi material or hella thin leather, i think? i can see soooo much detail. :3

[nicolabarth]

JediTok

Obi-Wan: Hi, I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi and welcome back to ‘things you can say to piss off Sith’ and you’re not allowed to argue with me because I’m the only Jedi who’s killed a Sith acolyte in like a hundred years or some shit idk, Grandmaster was really weird when I tried to talk to him about it. Anyways we’re starting off hot today, ‘you seem to be experiencing a lot of emotions right now’. If this isn’t true when you say it, it will be true by the time you’re done speaking.

[nicolabarth]

Maybe zabrak are like those frogs that can freeze completely? And the reactor coolant saved his life because it basically put him in stasis

we all remember this:

imma walk through it, because it's worse than you think. :)

so he tips backward, suddenly unable to feel his legs...

obi-wan is just standing there, staring, the fury on his face fading to grief as he realizes that maul is finished, but qui-gon's still dead. maul leaves that scene behind like a meteor. (for parsing his expression, it helps to cover up his brow tattoos and just look at the rest of his face.)

down he goes... falling what looks like 17+ stories into the coolant reservoir at the bottom of the shaft.

that is a long ass drop. if i've done my math right, maul fell for at least 3.4 seconds, reaching a velocity of 72 mph (116 kph).

in the comics, it appears he was awake and together enough to use the force to slow himself before hitting the coolant at the bottom. force users bounce well, but yeesh. that might have been splat and roll credits if he wasn't still fighting.

we don't know how long he was down there for. reactors use coolants for a long time, because shutting the system down to flush them is expensive. down time is credits, eh? however long it was, minutes or days, it seems he couldn't climb out in time. the coolant was flushed, and maul went through whatever series of tubes, pipes, valves, and fluid junctions to be drained into a plastisteel containment tube.

at this point... there's no air. however long it was, he had no food, questionably drinkable liquid, and a digestive system that ended abruptly with cauterization. he's trapped, with half his saber and seemingly not enough strength to escape while still on naboo.

then his tube was loaded up onto a trash barge by some automated system that didn't notice or care that there was a person in there, and the ship took off.

naboo is five hyperlane changes and eight sectors away from lotho minor. in a fast ship or a snazzy military vessel with a 1.0 hyperdrive that's a few days journey. two or three maybe. but maul wasn't in a cabin on a pleasure cruiser, he was in a space-cold transparisteel tube, on a trash barge. that thing probably had a 3.0 or 2.5 hyperdrive, more concerned with fuel efficiency than speed. he likely spent a week or more like that, possibly frozen, with no idea where he was going.

the ship doesn't even land. the reactor fluid tubes and maul are just dropped from the sky on a fly by. the tubes don't break either. they crash down, the fluid presumably begins to thaw. he wakes (?) up to air and light on the other side of a transparisteel wall. maul didn't cut it open with his saber hilt either. no, he apparently just punched through, still pissed off and still determined to live.

there's speculation that darth maul either knows morichro, is just straight up a zombie, or is maybe a ghost possessing himself. how else could he have survived all this?

[nicolabarth]

[nicolabarth]

He's a good influence. 🧡

[nicolabarth]

So the new itch.io guidelines are out and they are both predictably bad and also quite unpredictably bad. There's so much to go over here but here are some of the highlights:

First we have the broadly worded content restrictions. So much of this is just strictly bad for several reasons (for example, you cannot have a NSFW game that doesn't even fetishize rape but has rape be an important thematic element under these new rules) but my personal favorite is that these are so broad that huge swaths of content are just banned from itch.io. You like VNs of monster girls having sex? Sorry, but your favorite spider girl VN is animal-related, we cannot prove that you don't want to fuck spiders so its gone.

(a real problem anyone thinks about??????)

Game where you can transformed by magical artifacts and sometimes fucked? Sorry, that's non-consensual content. Banned. You cannot be transformed into a maid against your will. You also cannot have your protagonist call an older woman "mommy" because likeeeee that's incestual right?

"Minor-presenting" what the fuck does this mean. Genuinely. If a grown woman wears a fetish uniform is that minor presenting??? What the fuck are you talking about.

Also by the way if they feel your content is "too bad" for their platform, which includes a list of conditions incredibly broad to contain things like "a woman who likes being gagged during sex", they will just steal your revenue. No no no not just the revenue from the work in question. All of it. This makes any NSFW work a ticking timebomb, especially since itch.io doesn't have the fucking staff to deal with all of this! There's no second chances. You are not protected against fraudulent report or our dumb as fuck employees.

itch.io right now is just not a safe platform for NSFW content, and honestly, it really should be said, a fair swath of SFW content too. Don't use it, find alternative ways to survive in the market right now.

It's not going to be easy, but it's necessary. Here's a link to an article going over some solutions. I cannot personally vouch for any of these in particular but you need to do what you gotta.

Also, harass VISA and Mastercard. Phone calls over emails. Ruin their workflow. Do it for weeks, don't give up.

[nicolabarth]

HUGE fan of the enemies forced to work together trope. not even in an enemies to lovers way just 2 ppl who absolutely despise each other being forced to tolerate the others presence and being like once we’re done with this i won’t fucking hesitate. top 10 tropes of all time

[nicolabarth]

"Don't just throw ripped jeans away, you can repair them using these 10 cute Visible Mending techniques!!" unfortunately my friend the first point of failure for every single pair of jeans i have owned in my life has been the Crotch and Ass. Knees: fine, cuffs: fine; but 3 years in, and all that stands between the world and my astronaut-patterned taint is 0.5µm of denim worn so thin that every squat threatens to tear it to shreds like wet toilet paper. If the Tiktok craft community could figure out a way to resurrect jeans afflicted in such a way that doesn't involve adding a whole ass buttpatch like some sort of inverse assless chaps situation then that'd be great

[nicolabarth]

The Princess can only be awoken from her slumber by her true love, but countless Princes have failed to do so. When a poor townsman is successful, the royals try to dispose of the man and convince the Princess that one of the Princes is her true love.

[nicolabarth]

Star Wars really is so boring and not imaginative at all when it comes to gender and sexuality.

Walk with me for a sec: women with no tits bc they lay eggs. A bunch of species where the afab ones are larger, and species where they have "male" voices due to their size. Unisex species where you just can't fucking tell like with some birds. Species that don't have sex and/or gender at all. Species and cultures that have more genders than you can comprehend. You could transition and nobody would gaf because some species do that naturally, anyway. Homosexuality is uncontroversial since a human man sleeping with a human man is hardly weird when he could just as well be sleeping with a Wookiee instead. Or a Twi'lek. Or a Trandoshan.

The "rules" we're familiar with should become near obsolete in a multi-species universe if you think about it. There is SO MUCH and we're barely scratching the surface here!!

[nicolabarth]

In a training session

[nicolabarth]