raguna-blade

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According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.

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Sorry this took so long. Had a lot of things get in the way of completing it.

I always enjoyed the illustrations at the beginning of the NES manual as a kid, and it saddened me to find out these weren’t actually part of a real animated promotion for the game. So I decided to take those illustrations and re-create them as if they were! Enjoy this long-lost VHS promotion for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

Voice narration by Dylan Luke

Animated in Procreate and Procreate Dreams

You can watch it on YouTube at the link here.

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i. everyone keeps saying it's the hottest summer on record. you have your back pressed flat against the floor and a sweat drip in the crook of your elbow.

ii. generalized anxiety is seen as a disorder during the "ordinary" way of things. if someone were to ask you what specifically is bothering you, the answer is formless and senseless. you have a constant, physical sense of doom. it feels like a hand gripping your ribs. it feels like drowning, always, just-a-little bit. when you complain about it, your mother says - oh, you've been this way since you were a kid.

iii. but nothing is normal right now. what particular thing should you even focus on? your mind is in a terrible aperture, zooming in and out of the small and the large things. in some moments you can't breathe because of your rent bill and a breakup and your dog getting lyme disease. and then an hour later - you are overwhelmed by the shakiness of the whole world, by every person suffering, by the enormity of what is happening.

iv. you googled it. today's high was 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34.4C). it is ten degrees above average. a man on television laughs: but what if i want all of california to be under the sea?

v. how do you do therapy at the end of the world? your video-meet therapist is lovely and sweet and blonde and trying. sometimes you just say, "so... it's kind of just the everything that's happening." and then the two of you sit and stare at each other. more than once she's sighed and said, yeah. it's terrifying.

vi. things move so quickly now. you think about how your local school took six years to approve a new playground. now each day there is a development that makes your heart drop. sure, you can't afford rent this month, but - with everything happening, are you really doing enough?

vii. sometimes it feels like you cannot calculate priority - your body just reacts to each piece of information as an equivalent firecracker. money is tight, you need to get on food stamps, your car needs an inspection. and today another person got abducted. and there aren't any pollinators. and the bill passed the senate. when you try to shove it all into yourself - none of it fucking fits.

viii. you have seen almost no butterflies or bees or dragonflies this year. you go home and try not to overuse your AC. you are watching a debate about AI and water usage. the thousands of gallons wasted just so people can be fed misinformation. the man on television snorts. cry about it.

ix. you are constantly restless, sleepless, pacing. every one problem spirals into another, until they press into your temple and feed from your collarbones. you are trying so fucking hard to balance everything. and still! despite your efforts! it all just happens.

x. you aren't even in the "hot" part of summer yet, and it is ten degrees above average.

@nosebleedclub prompt: sweltering heat

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The Wikipedia article for "wink" has four different images illustrating winking and they're all slightly oddball choices, they're all a bit wacky. Go check it out if that sounds like something you'd enjoy seeing. If I see anything else interesting I'll let you know.

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Overwhelmed? Scared to make a website? Feel the pressure to do it NOW but also do it RIGHT? Don't panic!

I've made a super simple guide on domains, hosting, and even how to make a simple website landing page.

https://marquisdeclaude.com/buildasite/

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outing myself as the worlds first shuttah fan

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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.

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BANANZA!!!!!

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I had a stupid idea and I really wanted to draw it for some reason

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In the club

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Struggling to figure out what the gacha aspect would enable that you couldn't do without the monetization strategy.

Like, sure there's the aspect of your story and available characters changing based on your draws, so there's that aspect that you could do if you were trying to do it seriously. High Rarity characters or whatever are plot critical so you can't move forward until you get them (or maybe the reverse? Depends on what you're going for...)

but the monetization is firmly unneeded, and you could achieve it without it so like...???????????

I'm trying to imagine the whole "gacha game are Good Actually because the gacha business model enables narrative structures that wouldn't work in conventional games" thing applied to literally any other similarly predatory monetisation scheme. I want to see the story that can only be told through the medium of battle royale lootboxes.

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Beat The Second Secret Boss of Chapter 3 and I am enjoying that feeling one, but two I cannot believe the strategy for that fight really did boil down to

Just Don't Get Hit 5-Head.

ITS EZ

JUST DON'T GET HIT

IF THEY'RE SWINGING FOR YOUR NOGGIN JUST SAY NO AND DUCK

DOING SOME FINAL BOSS SHIT? NO THANKS JUST GONNA AGREE TO DISAGREE AND NOT TAKE THAT ON THE CHIN.

YOU'RE THINKING TOO HARD JUST DODGE.

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So I'm wondering at the mechanical set up of Deltarune right about now, reaching the end of chapter 3 and having a bit of trouble with the secret boss, and I'm suddenly wondering about the way the game is very very very EXTREMELY clearly intent on you playing it over and over again to figure some things out.

Like I always wondered how you're supposed to figure out the Snowgrave Route without some kind of in game hint, and it's been a while so perhaps i've missed some hinting in chapter 2, but there's some OVERT hinting in chapter 3, in addition to a bunch of other stuff like the game out and out telling you some secrets only AFTER you would have been able to put them into action (Drink from the Oasis several times)

Which taken with the way the game can shift RADICALLY between routes, and the way that some story stuff seems gated between them, also makes me wonder about there being just one ending.

Which, I don't think is a lie. I think that's objectively the case. there is only going to be one ending...However, like in the chapter 3 section with the Ice Key and everything involving the Sword Route, I'm suspecting that you're flat out going to be denied from accessing it you haven't done "everything"

Not literally everything. There are (for now) obviously a couple of a secrets that don't go anywhere and seem to be just easter eggs, minor goofs etc. But there's definitely clean clear route splits and SEVERAL characters are clearly aware of you the player as an outside entity who in some ways breaks the rules of the game.

Which, taken with Ralsei's thing about Darkners not being real, only to then launch into the characters playing a video game (complete on couch) and the way the SOUL is able to interact with that in ways they can't, strikes me as there's definitely something you, as the Soul and the PLayer character (Because you're not Kris. The game is ADAMANT about this) need to actually do to see the ending.

Now this admittedly feels a bit like a cheat. Oh there's only one ending, but it's gated behind blahblahblahblah which yeah a little bit, but I don't think it's unfair to characterize it as one ending. All Routes Lead Rome, and you have to travel a lot isn't weird.

Hell, that's a VERY standard story telling trick in video gaming. You have to see the "other endings" to reach the true end.

Which get's me back to the games structure bit, because the game is set up to let you just leap back into whatever chapter you want, at whichever ending you want, casually. It tracks at least a few secrets (the Shadow Pieces) things persist through chapters etc etc etc. And the video game set up of Chapter 3 Honestly encourages this reading for right now. You have the game, you have the true game, you have things you have to do that are pretty arbitrary to unlock the ending, etc etc.

It remains to be seen how this plays out of course, and I half expect the release schedule is in part to encourage this kind of thought in the player (A lot of the stuff involved sounds like the old days of gaming where you'd have stuff like Horde all of your rare healing items to keep certain characters from dying) as well as give them the time to scour the game to find these secrets.

If it looks like that's the case whenever i get to chapter 4 I'll be pretty excited about it.

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Things that have increasingly been making me uncomfortable in Deltarune:

How Every Single Time* You Get Control Back after a cutscene Kris stares at the fucking camera.

*I Say every Single time, but I only started really picking up on it in chapter 3, and i'm REASONABLY sure this has been going on but uh...Man. Man I do not like that.

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I know that character designs are ultimately done by the people with the pen and that's fine whatever.

But sometimes it's genuinely very very fun and funny to try and figure out why certain characters dress the way they do IN UNIVERSE, especially when it just absolutely clashes with their personality and you find that there is, in fact, a pretty solid reason if you look at it right.

In this case, the thought was spurred by Dizzy from guilty gear who was...A Lot.

But makes sense when you realize that Testament probably gave her those clothes and or that fashion style and it's just...It makes me laugh harder than it probably should, but when you see her in Strive wearing MUCH more modest clothing that fits her vibe a bit more it just makes it retroactively funnier.

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i started the holoEN series after sana graduated and finished it after the other graduations 😭 so here's a bonus sana for the complete set!!!