#Eventually I'll redo this and the graphic

[kuurosakiis]

❝....I'll do what I can to help.❞

Kurosaki Ichigo from Tite Kubo's Bleach

Penned by Mori

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[pinkyjulien]

🟨 Just call me [V]

[deadn30n]

instead of decorating i've been cooking. get ready.

[princemick-archive]

the prince

[erabundus]

anonymous &&. said... hi sorry, this isn't an interaction, but is it alright to ask where your blog theme is from <;3?

oh, i don't mind!

i  actually  made  my  theme  myself  —  both  the  graphics  and  the  code.  (  except  the  little  floating  blobs;  you  can  find  that  here!  )

[braveburned]

redid my pinned graphics because I literally hated it okay thanks <3

[keystonepublishing]

Dirges in The Dark by WixWrites

Before I start, let me just say: Ranchers! Scarian! Hermits and Life Series and Empires characters! Sheriff Jimmy! Sheriff Scar! Criminal Tango! the Wild West! Treebark and Ethubs!

RANCHERS. THE WILD WEST. CREEPING ELDRITCH HORROR.

Whoo, that was a rush.

I'll be honest; I think this book would have come out much sooner if not for my decision to add-in a whole lot of stuff into the text and pages. It got to the point that the original cover would have been a wanted poster at the front and a sheriff's report at the back!

I had to restrain myself, lest this book would never get finished at all. It's already been 59 days since my last post, and doing the original cover would have stretched the days even further. So I had to follow the mantra: Finished, not perfect. Besides, nothing says I can't make another version in the future...

From the moment I finished this fic, I knew it would become a book. But at 143,412 words, Dirges in The Dark by @twodiamondhoes would stretch my ficbinding skills to the limit and would be the second-ever bind that would reach past 250 pages (the first was an MCYT Sleepy Bois fic that predates this blog that I want to redo).

Eventually, the full typeset took up 520 pages! And as such, I finally decided to use extra support for the entire textblock. From an old pair of pajamas, I backed strips of fabric with glue and paper before cutting it into tapes, forming a crucial support for the various weaves along the spine. I then covered the entire spine in brown wrapping paper for even more strength.

For the title and headings, I scoured for and found several typefaces, dingbats, and vector graphics which really evoked the fic's Western and Gothic vibes. I also took some inspiration from fellow ficbinders in the Renegade Publishing group for the style of layout and formatting throughout the book, such as using faded images in the background of these pre-story pages.

I wanted the reader to be immersed in the Wild West from the get-go, so having such images from the start — before the story even begins — felt very appropriate. I tried to make them thematic to the information presented, like a singing cowboy for the music playlist pages, but I think I made the image too faint to be seen!

As for the chapter openers, I experimented with some layouts before finalizing on what you see: photos taking up one entire page on the left with the chapter titles and opening paragraphs on the right.

Just like my last bind, I want to make the reader feel immersed in the story and also bring out the mood of that particular chapter. This, however, led me to entire days of scouting and scouring stock photo sites just to find the right pictures for 11 different chapters. 4/10 would not recommend for sanity.

Given that the story uses a number of foreign words, old slang, and specific Wild West-era terms, I added a plethora of footnotes at the bottom of some pages for extra context and meaning.

I also wanted to be playful and make certain story parts, such as characters receiving letters and notes, really look like they're a part of the story. So I cropped old paper textures and fished out old fonts from the past to make them look as if they're actually there, pasted against the paragraphs!

More importantly, there were some specific parts of the fic that felt super important and I wanted to highlight these passages, especially the Deals made by the characters throughout their arcs. Given DiTD has a certain affinity with eldritch darkness, I decided to highlight such paragraphs by backlighting them against a band of pure black. Besides being thematic as hell, I made the bands have curved edges and decorative lines to add a certain western-gothic touch!

It was from this that I begin to think "what if I can color entire pages to convey the mood and setting?"

...Which led to the madness in these pages. I can't reveal too much because of spoilers, but there are certain times when the characters end up in situations where the very light turns to dark. Or they end up in hellish situations. Or the eldritch creatures began to speak.

It took some creative brainstorming to figure out how to show the mood of such scenes in printed pages, but I eventually figured out that I need find the right fonts, change their colors from black to white, and then change their backgrounds from white to dark to highlight them all! The power of formatting!

There's a lot more pages where I went wild with such shades and fonts, but I ain't revealing in public because spoilers!

But undoubtedly, this is the biggest experiment I have made with this bind. There is a certain part where Grian and Pearl spoke in eldritch R'lyehian / Cthuvian, and I want to convey the sheer strangeness of the speech and it's meaning. Something outside the box.

Luckily, I have an inspiration in fellow fanbinder @mythrilthread, who made an amazing fanbind that used vellum overlays to showcase the speaking of alien languages and what they mean in English. AND IT LOOKS SICK AS FUCK. When I finished reading Dirges, I knew I had to emulate this form of language translation, so I printed the eldritch speech, cut it, and pasted it onto the spine to give a similar effect of strangeness, and IT LOOKS SO COOL!!!

And lastly, I just had to include some of the amazing fanart made by readers into the book! All of these are placed by their corresponding text and chapters, and they all look so cool!

So I want to give a special thanks to @azzayofchaos, @leafdoodles, @hybbart, and @foxyola for granting their permission for me to include their incredible works into this bind! The dark shades and page formatting is one thing, but these works truly make this book feel so much more alive!

All in all, this bind was an odyssey in the making. I experimented with page formatting, layout wizardry, and bookmaking methods that I haven't tried before. While I know I could do better, I am beyond happy to see this work finished!

And once again, a thousand thanks to @twodiamondhoes / WixWrites for crafting an amazing story!

[justamethyst3]

Soda Candy one year!!!

Y'all I started writing SC a year ago I'm gonna cry

BUT!!!

To celebrate, I drew a new cover (for Wattpad) :D

(I didn't end up sharing the original here but I'll share both side by side so you can see my improvement in almost a year (with the dates I started drawing them) hehe)

Ahhhh Tsukasa looks so much better now 😩

And Rui's with him!!! :D

Tsukasa's the reason I wanted to draw a new cover. I don't like how I drew him and the old cover wasn't good enough for me anymore XD

I did have to redo the stars behind them (cause I lost that part of the original graphic), but I left everything else the same cause I still liked it lol

And soon-ish I'm planning on redrawing Little Kitty's cover (maybe for its one year, if I don't have anything that takes priority and my health is doing alright 👀), so anyone who reads that, look forward to that... uh... eventually. I don't want to set a for sure date cause idk when I'll get to it yet ehe

[nokingsonlyfooles]

A Good Rule of Thumb: Too Clever is Dumb

Sooo, I am going through the site, post by post, to make sure everything is legible. Got about 100 left to go. But, here's the deal, my custom reusable blocks, which WordPress is so proud to offer... Aren't.

It's the updates. It's a year's worth of updates since I designed most of them, to WP and to the third party blocks that hafta keep up with it. Milo's cards don't really work anymore, nor do my existing accordions - although the the template still works on the latter if I stamp out a whole new block, the accordions weren't as complicated.

There wouldn't be as much of a problem if I could make a post and never, ever open it in the editor again, ha-ha, but that's not how I roll. So, while I am fixing colours and minor formatting errors, I am experiencing an occasional crashed block. I haven't killed any of Milo's cards yet, but the template doesn't work to make new ones, so it's inevitable.

First, I am correcting for legibility. But, eventually, I will have to go back around and redo the cards, and probably the Liner Notes, and other random stuff. I'll have to pick a new card format before I post the next instalment, because there's a card in it. I might end up going way more simple with no font or graphics at all - I'm having trouble with the theme fonts overriding the card fonts. Or else I'll hafta go back to images, which is less accessible and won't work with the dark mode. I know probably nobody's willing to put up with my work via a screen reader, but I'm trying not to be an asshole, just in case, ya know?

Well, tl;dr, I believed WordPress about a thing and made more work for myself. If grouped in a complex structure, Gutenberg's reusable blocks aren't reusable. Depending on complexity, you got about a year, then you gotta remake them all over again.

Beyond that: Since Discuz started dropping updates of untested compatibility, the SPOILER tags don't work anymore! There are spoiler-heavy comments now. I might be able to fix it, but in the meantime, NEW READERS (if any) BEWARE THE COMMENTS.

[violetsiren90]

I just realised ive never told you how much i love the graphics of your master list. They're so pretty. I just adore them <<<<<3333

Thank you so much!! Coming from you that's a HUGE compliment. 😁💗 The main banner I may keep, but the marker for the member sections I think I'll redo eventually because I wanted to paint the flowers for them myself when I've had enough practice. The current ones don't all match up in size, because I was in a rush when I was throwing it together, but I'm so glad to know it at least looks halfway decent!

Love you!! 😘😘😘

[pnkb1tch-archive]

ehm ehm. soft launching @famegod where i'll eventually be moving arlo once the universe gives me the strength to finish redoing his graphics & doc

[betweenthings2]

queen if u just got a somewhat long ask that just stopped randomly IGNORE. i am silly and closed tumblr halfway through typing 😞 anyway i'll redo it because this fic has changed my brain chemistry. oh my GOD. it's just so amazing. i can't even put it into words. sorry in advance for how long this is by the way!!

"Even in all of that, though, nothing hides the way George looks at him like he’s grieving. Matty knows that there is something to grieve, not just from George’s perspective. Something in him died in that house, at William’s hands. Something in him was butchered, was left to bleed out on the carpet." nevermind george grieving I'M GRIEVING. this is SO beautiful. the use of butchered like he's just some helpless animal I NEED TO BE SEDATED

"Matty is quiet for a moment, thinking, then he admits, “I don’t know what to do with that, George. I don’t know how to let you love me in the way you want to.” " im gonna scream and cry he's so sad i can't deal with this. fuckass william needs a kick in the balls and i will invade this fictional universe to do so

"the sex he didn’t want but couldn’t say no to because he was too high, all the sex he tried to say no to." im about to throw a tantrum and yell and die this is the most heartbreaking thing i've ever read

"“He haunts me, George.” William is a specter in the corner of every room, in the corner of Matty’s head." a person has died and the person is me. STOP IT I CAN'T TAKE THIS

"He looks godlike and Matty feels very small in a very good way." MATTY GOING FROM FEELING SMALL TO HIDE TO FEELING SMALL LIKE THIS. i'm going to start convulsing this is so. like. my heart is about to explode in my chest

"Matty shrugs, a little helpless. “It felt like love. It felt like the love I deserved.”" i changed my mind, this is the most heartbreaking. 'it felt like the love i deserved' i am screaming into a pillow.

i genuinely cannot express how beautiful this is, like, your writing as a whole is just. MWAH. but this was so !!!!!!!! i love your writing so much 🫶❤️ also, again, i apologise for sending you a whole essay

(ps, can i pretty please be an emoji anon 😇 if so, could i use this 🕸 ? it's okay if not!!)

Welcome to the team? club? group? Spiderweb Anon!! 💚���

Thank you so much for the ask and the compliments--I love long asks so much!! There will be a suitably long answer =)

I actually thought long and hard about the verb here. Killed seemed to passive, murdered wasn't the right feeling, and things like destroyed, or ruined, or ended didn't really capture the helplessness and hopelessness. Butchered, though, feels raw and a little bit graphic and I think makes that bit what I wanted it to be--raw and uncomfortable and confrontational. I used the phrase 'like a lamb to slaughter' in Cherry Wine and I think the word choice here continues that metaphor--that fictional!Matty feels helpless, blind, desperate, unable to get off the path he's on, docile and non-confrontational to the point it harms him. (Lambs are not, for the record, docile and non-confrontational. They're awful and they will bite.)

"fuckass william needs a kick in the balls" is possibly one of the funniest things I've ever gotten in an ask, particularly in regard to The Big Light fics. This fic was almost called This Is What Love Looks Like because fictional!Matty spends most of it trying to understand how fictional!George loves him and how to accept that. He's trying so hard, they're both trying so hard. Things will get better for them, eventually.

I love the concept of a haunting, or the idea that there is something you can't or won't let go of or that won't let go of you. Fictional!Matty can't let go of everything that's happened, in part because it's still there for him, physically, but it also won't let go of him because he blames himself for so much of it. The haunting in this fic, and is this whole series, is, I think, synonymous with guilt and shame and fear for fictional!Matty.

I didn't even realize the continuity in fictional!Matty feeling small until you pointed it out here, but now that I see it, I'm feeling quite proud of myself, so thanks for that =) In all of this, fictional!Matty sees fictional!George as his safe place, fictional!George encourages it, of course, and sometimes fictional!Matty quite likes that he can be small and have it be safe. It's the difference between being cozy in bed with a bunch of blankets and being alone when it's storming or something for him.

Poor fictional!Matty didn't/doesn't really like himself all that much, especially when he was using, so the conditional affection or kindness that comes hand-in-hand with violence is what he'd do to himself. People don't, as far as I understand, take themselves out of bad situations that they think they deserve, and fictional!Matty is no different. Plus, as he said to fictional!Adam, he got drugs out of the deal and that's what he really wanted at that point.

Thank you so much for the ask and kind words!! Here's an essay in response--I've never shut up a day in my life so this is what we get.

[scorchiesdragons]

I got all the pair cards done, gods that took forever. Lucky for me, I still had the pair template for my last hatchery lying around, and it's (probably) faster to make then the fancy ones.

Mine's pretty modular, it's mostly BBcode with an image for colors and an image with 2-4 hatchling possibilities, all the gene odds are in regular text so I can change them on a whim and only have to redo the hatchling possibilities.

I also did a mini lair purge, and also realized that I don't really want either of my Aether pairs in a hatchery (the babies aren't. that great, even if I like the dragons themselves). One of them has been designated as a fodder pair, and the other is in limbo (I'll get a new mate for at least one dragon from the second pair eventually). I still have 41 proper pairs (and 3 stock the pond adjacent pairs).

Now I gotta figure out if I want to make graphics or not. and how to make the graphics if I do (there is no theme. how do you make nice graphics with NO THEME or THROUGHLINE)

I also have to set up the thread and figure out the new pinglist system (which is probably really great for regular size hatcheries, but a little overwhelming for me)

[icharchivist]

i feel you on being sad about ff7r, i actually loved it at first because i personally really liked a lot of things about how they expanded the midgar section of the game and i wasn't thinking too hard about how some of the plot changes might remove a bit of nuance, or the sephiroth stuff, because i was just having so much fun while i was playing. but then the ending happened and the stuff with zack on top of it and i progressively got more annoyed because i just wanted it to essentially still be the original story??

i won't go on too much about it because i don't wanna leave an essay in your inbox but i just feel like, the original game is from 1997. it certainly has its own flaws and things that might make people not wanna play it, and it deserved to be recreated in beautiful 3d graphics and brought to the attention of a newer generation of gaming fans who may not have given ff7 a second look before. i wanted people who would get into this amazing story for the first time because of the remake to get the original story, more or less, and could've overlooked some flaws with how they expanded/changed it if it was still basically the same plot! i'm still gonna play every part of the remake but the whole stealth sequel thing they're doing is such a bummer to me lol, i've already talked to a lot of my friends and family about it and strongly recommended that they play the original game even if it might be a bit dated.

🥺🥺🤝🤝

i'm glad to hear about your experience with it and relieved it was a bit of the same.

oops a bit more under the cut (no spoilers this time though! just salt.)

Honestly i'm a bit on the same ground there because i did really enjoy playing the remake, it's fun, it's dynamic, there's new quests i think are really fun and great, and i was so hyped with seeing everyone else that i was willing to give even Sephiroth a shot. tbh originally i thought it might be just straight up hallucinations that aren't motivated by Sephiroth himself, just playing on Cloud's trauma, and while we lost the subtility, i am a sucker for exploring more of Cloud's trauma and complete collapsing "This Is Fine" mental health.

I was always a bit iffy about the Specters but i did go through the game mostly happy with what i got. But yeah ultimately it's really both the conclusion of the Specters storyline and the Zack scene that left me "huh." for a while.

And honestly my reactions when the game was over was just "okay i'm not. sure what to do with it but i'll guess we'll have to wait and see."

but it's sitting on it for a few years now that really make me go, actually, i really dislike it 😭

Originally i think i wanted to go easy on the game because i was buying onto the "well maybe it's too much to expect them to do a plot that is exactly the same as the OG, they keep talking about how they don't want to redo the game 101 and i guess that's fair", but now in retrospect i'm just "... but it was advertised to be a remake. And Yuffie's DLC can show very well how they can do new things adding to the game without making it a straight up sequel. and why is ff7 having a metacommentary plotline anyway" and that's when i started to get beef about it. Like, it's shitty to punish the fans for them being mad they got sold something under false adverticizing.

The Grief theme from the OG is something i care a lot about so this was one of the first thing i started to think in depth about, and since it also meant trying to make sense of "why do i want /this/ death to happen again" it eventually made me think of the others themes i cared about the remake would not be able to follow through properly and *there* you get how i am today, fully jaded about it.

Truly the "Sephiroth locked himself in the Nibelheim Mansion" character arc. Going in with curiosity and coming out with, actually, the more i read the more i think it's too bad.

As for the second paragraph: 100%!!! Like, i've been here for 15 years and i know for a fact that recommending the OG is always met with "oh but it looks so bad" (it's stylized not bad!!! oh well), or "i can't focus without voice acting" or "but the gameplay sounds boring", which is added to how all the others entries in the series have polished graphisms to start with (even if some are early polished 3D and have clunky animation as a result, it still holds up that the more "modern" player can get into it yaknow)

and idk when you compare it to like RE2 Remake that balances remaking the old game with new graphisms and everything and then changing a couple of things either to upgrade the story or to make it more coherent with later update in the franchise.... It's kinda like the type of things we expected i guess???

And i've seen people decide to get into ff7 for the first time by the remake itself. Some people are waiting to see where the plot is going to go via the remake. And while the remake can work as a sequel if you squint, idk how i think about it being the first contact someone has with the saga. (tho i don't know how much i can criticize on that level since i started with Crisis Core, then watched Advent Children, and then i read the wiki for the OG and only played the OG years later. So i have no lesson to give on the "but you're not experiencing the ff7 saga in the right order :(" front)

I have a friend who's a game dev who also only got into ff7 via the remake, and we discussed it last time we met because he knows i'm a huge fan and he wanted my opinion as a Veteran™. Turns out, while he liked a few things from the game, there was a lot out of it that he didn't like and couldn't figure out why (except a few things he called "idk what's going on but it sounds like Nomura's fuckery", you can feel the KH veteran out of him). And the more we discussed it the more he realized that a lot of the things he really didn't vibe with were truly Remake Only Decisions. Like he didn't understand on what level Sephiroth is meant to be a legendary Antagonist while all he does is just being a generic villain who shows up early just to go "heheh i'll do evil", or complained about super long and eventless dungeons that were really just, remake only stuff. and he hated the Specters bc he kept seeing it as breaking from the immersion of the story itself and their appearance seemed to be completely separated from the main story, as if it was another story running in parallelism to the one we're going through.

On the other hand when i started to tell him how it was in the OG for instance and especially the difference in Sephiroth's writing he was nodding along like "*that* i get why it was impactful". (and he's not the type to lie about his feelings on something just to go with the opinion someone is holding, convos got heated before lmao)

So yeah like. idk. I just kinda wish they were forward about it not being a remake. and not derailling the plot of the game itself in order to make a metatextual critism on how fans demands those type of remakes and refuses to accept deviations from it.

So i'm all with you on that too 😭 i'm just so sad bc i remember in 2015 when they announced the remake being so hyped and finally feeling like the OG would be more accessible to people whom i knew at the time didn't want to bother with such an old gem game. But now i feel like it's kinda made even more inaccessible since i feel like some people would stop at the remake itself bc it's already a game that is way way bigger than the OG ever was, and it's already time consuming to start with just to have the same story told in another medium.

When Ever Crisis was announced it was supposed to be a mobile game which would actually go through the whole plot of the saga, without changing anything, but with characters's chibi, and i remember the devs using EC as a shield there like "well if you want to play the OG in good quality tune in for EC". And i didn't keep up with EC's newest news but at the time it was announced it was going to release one chapter at a time for the duration of the server, which. is such a downgrade in every front and also means you won't be able to keep the game on the long term doesn't it? and after the fiasco that was First Soldier this is even more of a dubious take.

All in all it's just, genuinely such a cynical remake and commercial approach it just makes me so sad.

so yeah i'm 100% with you on this one :(

and same i'll play the games, esp since there are still good things into them, the gameplay is enjoyable, the explorations are so fun, it's nice to see the world of the OG being given this approach! For all the stuff i would complain about there's a lot i actively like about the remake, for instance i'm so so glad we get more Aerith & Tifa scenes where they show how close friends they become (bc god the eternal shipwar pinning the girls against one another in a petty catfight was the most annoying part of the pre-remake fandom, despite the OG only ever treating them as good friends, not rivals, so the fact the remake hammers in even more "tHEY'RE!!! FRIENDS!!! STOP IT!!!" is everything to me.).

And there's stuff i think are genuinely good like, actually exploring Sector 7 and making us care about the people in it much more than the OG could prepare us for it! muah very good no note.

It just genuinely sucks that the biggest problem with ff7r is the actual core of the plotline they're going with to drive the whole story onward. Everything else goes from fine to amazing. And then this thing doesn't work for me. but since it's the most important thing of the game, it undoes everything that made me hyped to start with.

so yeah :( fully 100% with you on this one. Guess we have to push our "play the 1997 game" agenda even harder now. rip :sob:

Thank you once again for sharing <333

[ogrumm]

Here's the progress of my little raytracer!

Written in Lua, it originally started out as a project to learn computer graphics and test the limits of Minecraft computers. Using the CC: Tweaked mod, I started by drawing some spheres

Here they are in their natural habitat, the Stoneblock 3 modpack

You know what's the trouble with Minecraft computers, though? They're extremely low res and only support 16 colors (fun fact, the minecraft dye palette is a tweaked version of the EGA default color palette)

In the above picture, you can see I tried to get around it by dithering the image with a Bayer matrix! You can also see it still looks bad. I think the rectangular pixels are the main issue

This is when I gave up trying to make it look nice with default minecraft, so I brought it over into CraftOS-PC! It is an emulator of computercraft that can run on your home PC right now! Look at the incredible high resolutions supported! (The blue floor is still a sphere, just really big)

You know what's the worst part of any graphics project? Color management. Since I was using HSV to specify colors, and the ray tracing drives only the value, why not dither directly in there, right? But the hue wraps around, since 0 and 255 are both red, so you need to do the distance math in a cyllinder instead of just using euclidean distance. Then I gave up and went back to RGB conversion.

Then I switched over to error diffusion dithering, which gave some funky artifacts when the error was diffused wrong.

Everything works!

Here it is with shadows and specular lighting. I really want to add reflections, but that means completely redoing the color management again so the rays carry color, and not just value. This curbed my enthusiasm a bit. Maybe I'll finish this eventually

[vaniccio]

ffxiv graphic challenge — [ 2 / 2 ] jobs