#Fixed-screen

[highretrogamelord]

Space Mining for the ZX81

[lylahammar]

Kabru 💎

[zombolouge]

The thing is, it's not about the Therapy Speak. It's not that everyone who disliked DAV hates healthy communication as a dynamic in fiction. It's not even about only being allowed to be a good guy, really, because most of us did do that anyways (though the option not being there is a loss I grieve even if I never chose it myself, but that's another rant for another day).

It's that DAV does all that stuff at the expense of being believable. At the expense of characters being permitted to have personalities. At the expense of emotions behaving the way emotions actually work for people. At the expense of letting the plot build tension through the stakes we're forced to grapple with.

Half the fics out there take the conflicts between the characters in the previous games and resolve them. I do it myself ALL THE TIME because I like to find a path to resolution through just about any conflict, that's what fascinates me about telling these stories. But the higher the stakes, the harder a conflict is to resolve. You CAN resolve any conflict, you CAN communicate healthily through any emotion, but you can't skip the time it takes to process it all to even be able to communicate it. As someone whose got CPTSD and recovered from many Traumas, I can tell you that the TIME it takes to work through it is not something you can fast track, and the ups and downs of your emotions on that journey can't be skipped. It doesn't matter if you know exactly how to do it, exactly how it's going to feel, or exactly what the end state will be, you CAN'T speedrun it.

DAV has stakes that are astronomical, but nobody treats them that way. Nobody experiences denial - a common psychological reaction to being presented with information that shatters your worldview. Nobody expresses any distrust in the establishments handing out this information - something common among cultures that have at times been at war, even if those wars are "resolved" in the present. Nobody really ever breaks down - something that any person is capable of under extreme circumstances, especially when facing multiple crises of faith that challenge everything they thought they knew about themselves. Nobody blows their lid because they've been repressing the hell out of everything. Nobody grieves for southern Thedas, the entire thing dying off screen and giving you, the player, NO way to engage with it in any way.

Not to mention there are barely any inter-party conflicts, when there should be a lot more. Why is everyone (except Spite) fine with it if Emmrich sacrifices Manfred to become a lich? Why is everyone fine with Illario potentially being set free if he was working with the venatori and Elgar'nan, two sources that have actively attacked everyone in the party? Why doesn't Neve resent Lucanis if Treviso is picked? Why doesn't Harding get pissed off at Nevarra for having a secret society of liches that never helped during the Inquisition's war against the breach and corypheus? Why doesn't Harding feel ANYTHING about Ferelden and the rest of the south? Shouldn't Harding resent the fact that she's stuck in the north while her home dies?

All of these conflicts ARE resolvable, but not easily. And it's not believable that they're never brought up. It's not believable that these characters skip through everything that happens with like, barely a frowny face most of the time. In DAO, Alistair leaves if you don't treat his conflicts with respect. In DA2, your party members try to kill each other if you don't pay attention to their conflicts/emotional needs. In DAI, people can leave or betray you, Cassandra throws a chair at Varric and tries to body him out a window. ALL of these can be resolved but it takes effort, and the characters get to SHOW that they're bothered by them and struggling the way a person would when faced with those emotions.

The problem isn't the therapy speak, or that everyone is loyal and won't leave, or that they aren't mean to each other enough. It's that it's toxic positivity. It's toxic as fuck to imply that anger or grief should be smiled over or else you're giving up, and it's damaging to people to avoid engaging with their own negative emotional responses to extremely negative stimuli. It's pasting optimism over very real, very weighty issues, sweeping it all under the rug, and you keep waiting for the lid to blow off the pressure cooker that creates, but it never does. It never becomes anything that emulates real emotions, which is why the whole damn thing feels hollow. Everything's dying and nobody cares, not even about themselves, and that's NOT healthy communication.

It's bullshit, half-assed storytelling that didn't tell us the actual story, just the vague idea of what it could have been.

[soapysudz]

Jason after a certain incident

@bonerot19 enjoy :)

Poll is in the weblogs (why did my spellcheck change it to that???) Ahem REBLOGS to decide what comfort to give him, so far the cat distribution system is winning

Edit: the cat distribution system won! stay tuned for whenever I finish that

[harbek]

Rogue. (Played by Jonathan Groff, in Doctor Who.)

The first full, realistic portrait I've done in years.

Spent all weekend on this. Still room for improvement, because I'm a perfectionist. And I could tweak it forever, but in 5 hours I'm getting on a train to start the first week of my master's degree in art.

Detail shots and sketch:

Bonus: Comparison with a very old drawing I did of Jonathan, back in the days of Spring Awakening. If you wanna get better at drawing, just keep drawing, you'll get there. ♥

[sunderwight]

If Tianxi were T4T they'd both have survived.

Especially if the Old Palace Master didn't know about it (and why would he? I don't think Su Xiyan would tell him and TLJ definitely wouldn't). Somehow word gets around that the demon realms are celebrating because Tianlang Jun is going to have a child. OPM, already aware that Su Xiyan has shacked up with him (and furious about it), takes this to mean that Xiyan is pregnant and does his usual thing of locking her up and forcing an abortive on her while plotting to ambush and trap TLJ.

Except of course, Su Xiyan isn't pregnant enough for the abortive to do more than make her somewhat ill, and Tianlang Jun is too busy giving birth to fall for an ambush. Su Xiyan escapes, Tianlang Jun safely delivers Binghe, and they all ride off into the sunset with Zhuzhi Lang and threats of declaring open war if the other sects ally with Huan Hua Palace to try and make any kind of move against them again.

The old palace master never does figure out why his plan didn't work.

[eliounora]

sunset in silence

[royaltea000]

trying to learn how to draw this dude

credit to @/transparentalia for the ref images :)

[bryverros]

merlin fanart i disguise as an art study pt 2.

[skywerse]

final lizzie design, too lazy to colour tho,,, but she pretty much has the same colour palette as the previous doodle

[highretrogamelord]

Spelletjes 3 for the ZX81

[heckitall]

Same As It Never Will Be

Part 1 - Part 2

-

it's been a hot minute since i drew the 2k3 boys. gotta say, it was v refreshing and nostalgic

i'm hoping to have a friday update schedule :)

[moonyslesbian]

ive got 99 problems and having ravi come back on the show wouldnt solve any of them but it would still be nice i think

[alicornze7]

ribbun animatic AHHHH

Really love how this turned out, never again😀👍

[nervousgnome]

Mallory Grave // Paranoid + Genius + Socially Awkward

[vyxated]

if anyone is wondering why loading screens seem to break and show the grey llama image instead of the plumbob, it's because they changed the instance number of one of the plumbob image assets from 6aec0ad1d1ed59c2 to 6aec09d1d1ed580a.

yeah, a simple change in the instance number is all you need to make a UI mod break, among a couple of other things 🥰 this happens if your loading screen mod only includes the ScaleFormGFX file (where you change the background) and doesn't include the plumbob image assets that has the old instance #.

how it works:

Mod includes an old GFX file and its associated image asset(s) w/ the old instance # -> UI doesn't break, game reverts to the old loading screen as a result. (Think of TMEX's Clean UI that keeps the old main menu design.)

Mod includes only the old GFX file, while the image asset w/ new instance # comes from the game files' itself -> UI breaks, there's now a disconnect between the old GFX file and the new image asset.

(more details on why/how ui mods break the way they do at some other time)

so in theory, if you are to import all of the older plumbob image assets (before 22 Oct update) into your loading screen mod and keep the old instance numbers as they were, your loading screen will "fix" itself because the GFX file in your mod can now find the image asset that it was tied to, or as stated on the 2nd point above, revert to an old version of the loading screen.

(plumbob looks janky because I didn't use the old image assets and used the new ones instead)

anyway. off I go to update my ui mods and come back in a few days 🫠