#8-String

[guitarbomb]

Schecter Deal on huge range of models - Up to 45% off!

This Schecter Deal save between 33% to 45% off a range of guitars and basses could save you a lot of money.   Schecter Massive Deal 33%to 45% Off You can save big with this limited Schecter Deal 33%to 45% off Deal. The guitars and basses included in the deal are all being sold off by Thomann, as they are clearing the warehouse, so you can save big on all these models. However, stock is very…

[xofemeraldstars]

#invisible red string of fate

[cookiekitten91]

I wanted to draw rock band au Donna again 🤔 she’s the bassist in the terrible band that she and the other lords play in with MM as the manager.

Some folks also suggested that her ‘dollmaker’ shirt is merch from her other gig as an independent artist where that’s the stage name she goes by. I thought she would wear some kind of veil to make it less obvious who she is when doing the independent stuff. Also her bass is named Angie 🙂

[doodl3b3ans]

Donna knits. I feel like she can knit or do anything with string. Clearly. With all the dolls and hanging limbs in her basement….anyways

She 100% knits her own blankets or scarf. And stuff for Angie, of course.

Art by our lovely La TeTe

I love how confused Alcina is.

[kaddyssammlung]

He played air guitar during The Summoning solo XD That's sweet :)

[samusaran221]

MAPPA stop being evil challenge (impossible)

[thanatika]

yeah i agree with your point about survival mechanics and i feel the same way about the lack of combat mechanics. "why would an educated city doctor need a weapon" because shit is hitting the fan in every way impossible and pretty much everyone is walking around armed... also why am i supposed to believe the the fact that he's a man of intellect will somehow provide him with food? i don't think anyone is going to be too eager to share food during an outbreak intellectual or not...

+ follow up for the previous ask but actually my favorite quest from the original pathologic is the day 11 bachelor quest that involves shooting down soldiers. i think it really drives the point home about how this random fuckass guy who is supposed to be battling a plague doesn't even have the time to do that anymore because the people in charge are asking completely irrelevant things of him now and he's at a position where he cannot refuse what is being asked of him. like i think it was good storytelling that even as the guy who lowkey wants to deal with the plague and solve its mystery you still have other, more pressing, less interesting and or pleasant tasks to complete

i agree! honestly, i feel this way about the combat mechanics even more than i do about the physical survival (food, health, illness, sleep) mechanics. because sure, i can see how it makes sense for daniil's position of authority to mean that his basic needs are somewhat provided for -- although i don't think it makes more sense than what we got in the original game. i've never seen anyone bring up "isn't it kind of unrealistic that the bachelor isn't given lots of food during a massive food shortage?" as a plothole that needed to be resolved. the townspeople generally don't like him much, and most of the people with power don't either, except for the kains. sure, maybe it's kind of weird that you can go see the kains while broke and on the verge of keeling over from hunger, and they won't do anything to help you, but... the kains are pretty self-centered, and they're so goddamn weird that maybe they forget that you need to eat food to live anyway. and it's half-implied that the powers that be are ultimately giving daniil this role as a convenient way to kill him, so it makes sense that they would put no pressure on the town authorities to keep him alive.

(and honestly, artemy is taken under the olgimsky's auspices as much as the kains take daniil's under theirs! which is to say, selfishly, with ulterior motives that are more important to them than the well-being of their healer, but... the olgimskys are set up as the wealthiest of the 3 families financially, as well as the ones with the most access to food, given their control over the meat industry. so if anything it's "weirder" that artemy isn't more materially provided for, though to be clear i don't think there's an actual plothole there either way.)

but anyway, you could handwave it and say that daniil's position of privilege and authority gives him more perks than he got in the original game, but the amount of fighting you have to do to get through town is... kind of an unavoidable physical reality? like you're given so many sidequests that you often wind up walking around town after dark, and that's when the bandits come out. is the idea that the bandits would be too scared to attack him because he's so important? because that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and even pathologic 2 establishes that he's seen as a valuable target by the bandits:

and then there's the quests where combat plays a more direct role in the story itself, like getting involved in saving andrey from the firing squad, or killing guards to break artemy out of prison, or the quest where you have to kill var in attempt to stop the arsonists (which i include on the same tier as the other ones because i really like the quest journal entry he has if you complete it where he blames himself for willow's death. it's a good character moment.)

hell, even in pathologic 2 itself, one of the biggest Bachelor Moments is on day 11, when you have that big dramatic convo with him after he killed a soldier for the papers he was delivering. plus one of bad grief's idle dialogues in patho 2 is commentary on the bachelor being "quick on the draw" and that he "already shot someone". like he just straight up is not living a combat-free existence. and overall, combat isn't just a good tool from a mechanical perspective, heightening the stakes and placing pressure on the player (though it is), it's also pretty important for him on a thematic level imo, almost as important as artemy and his "rivers of blood". in patho classic, daniil has this early interaction with the inquisitor:

which, thinking about it from a doylist perspective, was probably the writers' attempt to make it sound more plausible that this random medical researcher from the big city was competent with multiple types of guns. and i appreciate them coming up with that hint of backstory to cover their bases a bit, but with those bases covered, i think the fact that daniil ultimately spends more time shooting people than he does prescribing medicines for them actually does a lot for him thematically? i mean, if his whole thing is that he's this "tempted destroyer", someone who frames his career as a combative battle with death rather than a quest to save people's lives, whose "default" solution is to raze the town with artillery because he's too limited by his rationalist worldview and military upbringing (and bitterness over being manipulated and sabotaged) to come up with a solution that saves the any remaining infected survivors on his own. plus the way that clara frames artemy and daniil as two sides of the same coin in being violent destroyers and killers, who without player intervention will immediately devolve to running around chasing each other down in what's either an insanely dedicated tom and jerry LARP or some really elaborate foreplay. imo, that whole dichotomy (which is pretty core to the game, as the idea of dichotomies are core to it in general) works so much better with the way they're both presented in classic, stalking around with gun/scalpel in hand. hell, not to mention the effect that spending 12 in-game days trying not to starve and getting killed by bandits or guards or worms or soldiers every day would have on the player, and the way it would make them feel about the town and their natural projection of those feelings onto dankovsky, who is a perfectly fitting vessel for them as the avatar actually undergoing those virtual experiences.

ultimately i think they are mainly going this direction out of a desire to do something more creative and original, which is fine... it just seems a bit silly to me that they keep saying "well obviously that doesn't really work for the bachelor's scenario", when, well... even as recently as patho 2 in 2019, they seemed to think it fit his narrative pretty well! i'm also guessing that a lack of combat won't be that bandits are just no longer roaming the streets at night. it sounds more like pathologic 3 is set to be more of a nonlinear experience, where you'll probably fast travel from place to place instead of having to walk across town so much? so you'll be avoiding bandits just in the sense that the gameplay will be avoiding them. i guess i'm hoping that at the very least, there's still the implication of the crunch of not getting enough sleep or food and the threat of being stabbed to death while trying to get through town occurring to dankovsky in the background, even if those mechanics are deemphasized in favor of more macro-level town resource management, time control, and sherlock holmes fruit ninja or whatever the hell they were on about back in 2022 lmao.

[cads-the-cat]

An Offering

(get it? Because I'm offering you the Offering... pls don't judge me I'm sleep deprived after this)

For all of you who want to play a Sleep Token song but don't have the money or skill for an 8 string guitar. I found parts of it online, but edited out some mistakes, edited the breakdown and added the iconic intro that is originally played on the piano

I definitely spent way too much time on trying to get this to work in certain apps to only give up in the end because it wasn't, but oh well. Not like I have anything better to do

Also, Vessel, if you're seeing this, could you please write some songs with 6 string guitars in the upcoming projects because i almost lost my sanity over this🥲😘

[spotaus]

... So i SWEAR this isn't intentional...

Im back... Again. And on brand... Again.

Um so that flesh eating shapeshifter kingdom...

Is there any known kingdom it would neighbor? Does it neighbor Orchard since Dust apparently has been there? Do you have any ideas for what they would look like? Does DUST have an idea for what they look like? Do they just out of habit shift into things familiar to those in proximity since its hoe they hunt? DO the hunt by shifting a luring humans into a sense of security? When Dust used to make deals with them would they find it more polite to shift to something similar to a skeleton but just... Wrong and uncanny valley? Since they hunt humans and not monsters or animals so they have had no need to mimic those perfectly tu lure them in unlike with the humans. How many eyes would they have. Do the dishes look great and appealing? Would some look more raw and grotesque like how some people eat raw beef? Would they gift things from their country that would be made of for example human teeth in jewelry or human skin in like bags or such like we did and still do for the teeth and bone of animals and leather/pelts? Would they keep humans like we do cattle?

I'm... Gonna stop for now, yeah. I am very enthusiastic about shapeshifters... Especially those that could be classified as skinwalkers and/or flesheaters. They're funky.

Blinks my big ol eyes at you 🥺. Glad to have you back Flesh Anon! And please know I'm gonna go a lil crazy about this ask because!! I love worldbuilding! And it also incorporates magic-laws from another of my projects so!! Double-win!!

So, first, I DO think it neighbors Orchid! Though, only through a treacherous little stretch of land, because *technically* about a mile radius of no-man's land exists between it and other kingdoms! It's a longstanding kingdom that no one dares to really bother because, well, the monsters there are NOT welcoming of humans for obvious reasons. I think it'd be to the northeast of Orchard, entirely landlocked and almost a sort of buffer that deterred the warring factions from even glancing at Orchard (between the freaky shapeshifters and the God-Kings? Yeah, no) but the two never made an alliance. The citizens of Orchard, while treated poorly, welcomed all species, including Humans, and so this shifting kingdom (thinking of calling it 'Whistling' because it sounds cool lol-) didn't take that kindly and decided to keep to themselves.

And, Dust's operation as crime-lord extended pretty far- (and suddenly I'm realizing that him visiting would throw a wrench in the whole Storm thing so: slight retcon: he invited visitors over on multiple occasions, and they would bring him/cook him meals, still as a part of sharing culture-) and they had good meat for the selling, so Dust did what he had to! He has several folks he knows from the crime days, but he can usually get a sense for a shifter if he's around one, anyone sneaking in or playing refugee.

Appearance Question!!! Okay. Once, a long, long time ago, these monsters were driven out of their homes. They used to be spread all across the continent, solo-hunters or living in small groups. They'd hunt humans just as humans hunted a deer. For food. No one knows why their magic needs human flesh to function, but they tried to stay modest and only take what they must. Live amongst the people. These monsters are born into the world in the shape of a mist, and take any solid shape they like, so long as it does not resemble a human. These are the easiest forms to maintain, but if a monster wants to looks like a human, they must eat the flesh. Most monsters back in the day would appear as just that, monsters, but when they were found out and driven from their homes to the Whistling Wastes? They banded together to start their own land. They disguised as humans, luring them in, keeping them captive generation after generation, eating them as they saw fit. Now? Now that the wastes are filled with life and their food supply is secured? They tend to just look like normal monsters, indistinguishable unless someone spots them changing shape. Ofc, some who work with the humans try to mimic them, put them at ease, and the disguises are just ever so wrong. These are the uncanny Valley moments.

^Along those same lines, monsters who disguise as human without eating flesh often lose their form much more quickly, and tend to wear human disguises while hunting when they're away from home + easy prey. Dust has seen a Whistler lure someone down an alley and lash out before they could even scream.

<- Long story short? These are still monsters fundamentally, they are made of magic, so it's the solid humans which are hard to mimic and less monsters (though if they don't have a perfect idea in mind anatomy can get... iffy and almost body-horror for either way-). And most skilled monsters will have a set of 'persona' they put on to lure in their prey, but a starving or young one will totally take a person or voice from the preys normal environment and horribly twist it! (Oh!! And they would totally shift to look like skeletons when around Dust, and *he* would find it uncanny, if only because he can tell that under their clothes they didn't form the bones quite right so they shift a bit awkwardly!)

Meal-wise? I think it really depends on who's visiting or cooking! Some monsters prefer to eat the flesh Raw and juicy and still warm, while others take pleasure in cooking! And the funniest bit? Seasoning and additional flavors? Super super faint to a Whistling monster, because their magic refuses to recognize it as food/input that's important unless it's cranked up super high. So? Those who put flavor into their dishes? They are INTENSE. Which makes the meals very yummy sometimes, or too much, depending on any normal species eating it. Meanwhile others focus on presentation! I think those who meet with Dust focus more on the presentation and less on taste, because They think the aesthetic is important haha!

The gifts idea is super sick and I didn't even think about it! I think they're very sparse to waist resources, but I do like the concept of bones and leather! I think the most common gift of peace is a string of carved human teeth/bones. If it's placed on a door or worn on a person, it's a sign that this place/peeson is safe for their kind and an ally. Meanwhile they keep things like the leather to themselves for their weapons, armor, bags, etc. Though! Hair is strangely a big export for them too, because they tend to let humans tend to their own hair and it comes in different textures + colors that can be used in weaving and other fiber-arts. Human vertrebre are a big deal too, old traditions in which, giving a loved-one a vertebre is equivalent to throwing an apple in ancient Greece (it was a method of confession). Vertebre are displayed in many ways but are always safe and treasured!

And you nailed it! Humans are totally kept like cattle. Maybe a bit more humane, but not particularly. Most Whistling monsters view humans as lesser lifeforms and don't truly bother to acknowledge their sentience. It helps that *most* humans in Whistling are so many generations deep with only a few new ones every year or so? Yeah, they don't know any better. (I actually think Chara (Killer's backstory) was bought from Whistling in an auction as an infant and raised in Orchard post-smuggling.) Sometimes a monster will have attachments to a certain human and keep them around, like the cow you bottleraised from a calf you keep around? But that's far and few between, and usually those humans are miserable because they see what happens to the others.

(Fun fact! The oc I'm directly inserting for this area, Pretender, showcases a fun quirk about Whistling as well! He's a monster who works as essentially a Human Vet, and will heal health complications in stock/pet humans. He does it for the love of the job, he knows human anatomy better than anything because he studied, and he's great at it. He's also the best disguised in the whole kingdom. Only thing? His reputation as a doctor is SO well known that occasionally he gets letters or desperate humans coming in looking for treatment for illnesses. And he'll do them! For free! Because he's just having fun with it. The humans in Whistling are the most healthy humans across the continent, rivaling Sanctuary, and it's because without morals they were able to study. Eventually Pretender runs into a stray human who's usually non-verbal and young and kinda imprints on him, and he humors it. Only to get really attached and accidentally stop seeing humans as lesser, which throws his world-views for a loop lmao but that's unrelated-)

ANYWAYS!! Glad You're excited about this other kingdom! They won't be mentioned much/at all in the Main story I don't think unless it's a cameo, but I love fleshing it the world and it adds so much texture to the chaos happening around Orchard haha! (Also, again, perfect excuse to weave Doppletale's story in!)

[desire-mona]

type of shit ive been on lately

[bismutharts]

worms off the strings!

no more needs to be said i think

this is part of my project to make a zine a day in april

[guitarbomb]

Kiesel Steph Carpenter Vader Signature - Shadow & Snow

In a significant collaboration earlier this year, Kiesel Guitars welcomed Stephen Carpenter, the iconic electric guitarist from Deftones, into its artist roster. This partnership marked a unique move, as Carpenter continues to endorse both Kiesel and his existing signature guitars with ESP. Kiesel Steph Carpenter Vader Recently, Kiesel revealed the fruits of this collaboration: two new signature…

[dramioneasks]

In the Library Where He Kept Her - GreenInk_RedLetters - E, 32 chapters - Draco wallows in the passing of his wife Hermione Granger. By charming her favorite books, he's able to live vicariously watching their memories while succumbing to his grief. It will be up to him, the persistence of friends, and the legacy of Hermione's love whether or not Draco chooses to continue living in the past, or shut the doors of the library for good. Told through both flashbacks and present-day scenes.

[fluxydrawings]

art is all about drawin the most self indulgent shit possible. have Crane from this one undertale oc insert fic i adore deeply that hasnt upd8ed since 2016 and haunts me and Siffrin In Stars And Time hangin out :) I think they'd be friends <3

[imaveryevilenby]

alright hold on hold on hold on we're doing 3am gender thinking again

so the initial idea of my views on gender that occurred to me at 5am last time in what was probably a manic episode is fuck gender I can't fit the boxes expected of me so I'll dismantle the whole system and do my own thing

so problem is I can't do that, I can't dismantle the whole system and go my own way because I am entirely dependent on the sex and gender systems we have in place and how other people view sex and gender

additionally the idea that gender itself is the outdated stereotypical system is flawed, gender is the way a person feels and we've made categories and boxes to describe incredibly complex feelings

the problem is the more specific a gender gets, the smaller that box gets, the more people are excluded from that box so the solution is another box that fits better or make their own like with neogenders

the solution is a line of gender boxes like hermit crabs...

the fun part about thinking of gender and stuff is that I personally believe that every single person on earth experiences gender and life differently from every other person, even if only slightly

so theoretically if every person on earth were to describe their gender outlook and gender experiences and form a gender identity from that, then there could theoretically be 8 billion god damn genders

the solution is more genders

the solution is running Doom (1993) on my fucking gender

[mechazushi]

LORDS, LADIES, ESTEEMED HIGH MEMBERS OF THE KN8 FANDOM LANDS! I BRING ONTO YOU---

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