#I am still blocked lol

[ellenchain]

🍩🌴Vacation time 🌴🍩

[joshuamj]

Hero.

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

over the last 3 months i have seen myself called (and sometimes blocked for being assumed to be):

a racist/a bigot

homophobic/queerphobic/transphobic

ace/demi-phobic

a fascist

for expressing opinions such as "I found the characters and background stories in Veilguard weaker and less interesting than previous Dragon Age games" and "i miss the amount of tension and conflict that we used to get to explore with the player character depending on their in-game background and life history" and "i did not feel Lucanis' character and romance arc was fully satisfying while I was playing through it".

and since this all started we now have:

seen the entire DA staff laid off from Bioware

heard many now-former bioware devs talking about how toxic the workplace was during the development of DA4

seen allusions to Bioware/EA executives overriding plot/plans that the Dragon Age writers/devs would have preferred

extracted large amounts of cut content from the games that show things like increased emotional response range for Rook, or alternate endings for companion arcs (NOT concept art content, but actual written and even voice-recorded dialogue in the game files), or increased impact from decisions you could make in the game

IN ADDITION to what we ALREADY knew about how many times the game changed direction/leadership changed/the mid-process layoffs, etc.

so can we maybe not keep putting "people who come into the Dragon Age universe from a place of love and were ultimately disappointed with the latest installment" in the same trash bucket as "dudes on twitter who were mad there were trans/nonbinary characters in their AAA game". can we FUCKING as a community acknowledge that there are many reasons someone might not jive with a change in direction other than jumping to "they disagree with me so they must obviously be horrible people, whose opinions shouldn't be counted anyway" (<-if this is your first impulse maybe examine that also).

i am so tired and i am never gonna get an apology for any of it but NOW that a lot of the people who were posting/reblogging these sentiments are hearing/seeing all these other things add up. it's like suddenly now it's "acceptable" to have problems with aspect of Veilguard or want more from it, because the writers/devs have shown they probably did too during it's creation. whereas when I said these things right off the bat (because the only thing we had was the game we got. not the game we can pretend they wanted to make instead) it WASN'T because apparently expressing opinions on my personal tumblr counts as "being mean to/harassing devs who worked hard on the game" or, again, assumed I am a racist/bigot/facist/queerphobic.

you're allowed to still like Veilguard. it's fine i promise. you can love the game if you love it and my not loving it has nothing to do with your own relationship to this piece of media. i am happy there are people who truly can enjoy it without massive Caveats. but i am still seeing like 3-5 posts Per Week express those opinions and it is really destroying my love for the community i once enjoyed.

[hanzajesthanza]

witcher netflix: [drops]

henry cavill fans: honestly, i don’t really care about the story, i’m just here because hcav is hot asf

me: wtf? how shallow is this… only there because the titular witcher is hot? talk about missing the point…

witcher 4 trailer: [drops]

✨ciri✨: 😡

me: … i understanded.

[melljam]

hello??? i love everything about this???

[devilsskettle]

The X trilogy + "psycho-biddy" influences

[svtskneecaps]

i find it so cool to notice that like non-native speakers making mistakes in their second language tells you about the grammar and vocab of their native language like that's so cool to me.

like i can only pull up confident examples from french bc i learned that one but like etoiles saying "watch the chests" instead of "look at/in the chests" is because in french i imagine he'd use the verb "regarder" which does translate to "to watch" but also can be used when we in english would say "to look"!!!!!! that's cool!!!!! and sometimes i'll hear the french saying along the lines of "wait me" bc that's the grammar for it in french!!! "attends-moi" is "wait for me" they just don't say "for" it's cool!!!!!! wow!!!!! i fucking love that i think that's so fucking neat bc i know that I MADE that mistake in the other direction, bc on an assignment i wrote "attendez pour moi" bc we say for in english!!!!!!!! and it was wrong!!!! and it's cool!!!!!! it's cool that i can pick up things about other languages even when they're not speaking the other languages!!!!!! wow!!!!!!!!! like when spanish speakers start english sentences with "is" bc that's how it works in spanish!!!!!! that's so cool!!!!!! they don't need "it" in spanish and hearing y'all say that is like wow!!!! i'm learning things about how spanish sentences work even though it's not even in spanish!!!!! holy shit!!!!!!!

i know i've noticed more things from the other languages too but i can't remember any of them now bc my spanish is "69 days on duolingo" and my brazilian portuguese is "meu deus" but if anyone else has noticed please!!!!! tell me!!!!! it's so cool!!!!!!

(as an aside this is not to knock or mock anyone for being bad at a second language i just think it is FUCKING FASCINATING i am giggling i am kicking my feet i think it is so cool it is so fucking dope language and language learning is so cool)

[elodee]

HERMIT A DAY MAY - DAY 10

Stressmonster x Cucumber Quest

For Stressmonster I chose the wonderful webcomic Cucumber Quest!

I chose this design for her because I thought her colors and aesthetic would work wonderfully with the art style. I also think she would probably appreciate how cute the comic is if she were familiar with it.

This one was very difficult for me and I'm still not entirely satisfied with how it turned out. The rendering for this comic uses a very different style than what I'm used to, and I had some trouble reverse-engineering how the visuals are created, so it didn't turn out as on model as I would have liked. But, that being said, I think she looks adorable anyway. I also totally made up how the kitty would look, since as far as I can remember there aren't any kitties in Cucumber Quest, so I came up with her design from scratch.

To learn more about Cucumber Quest and see my style references, adventure below the cut! (The funds are still raising for Gamers Outreach!)

Cucumber Quest is sweet, beautiful webcomic by the artist Gigi D.G. It follows the adventures of a young rabbit boy named Cucumber and his sister, Almond, as they go on a quest to defeat the Nightmare Knight. Unfortunately Cucumber Quest will not be finished as a comic, due to changing circumstances in the authors personal life, but the story will eventually be concluded as an illustrated script and every one of the over 800 pages of the comic is more than worth reading.

I cannot say enough good things about Cucumber Quest. It has a charming, engaging story, beautiful art, and fun, memorable characters. Please give it a read if you have the chance, you will not regret it. Style references:

The comic uses a lineless style and soft color palettes. The shading changes drastically with the lighting, but I tried to mimic the style as it looks with flat lighting (such as in most panels of the above example).

Here's an example of a character rendered with more dynamic lighting (this is Peridot, she is a witch)

Cucumber Quest title banner

[katyspersonal]

If you can't handle me at my Willem x Rom you don't deserve me at my Yurie x Rom. 😔

[grubloved]

its so silly but i just keep thinking abt being in norway and seeing for the first time kinda ever that like governments can do things to make peoples life better. for no other reason but just to improve things. like im sure norway has lots of problems i didnt see on a trip but i cannot stress how insane it was that the government had done things because it would be nice. to take care of people. ?????

[cocoa-belle]

Personally, my favorite part of the finale was when they finally got a cat (delusional)

[kingsofneon]

Following the events of Beast World, Damian winds up in possession of his former collar. Former...except for the fact that he wants to wear it again.

Read "Run Tame" on ao3!

[svtskneecaps]

also in terms of the bolas playlist it's fascinating to me that the songs added by each person have a slight tendency to represent a consistent aspect of bolas

like

the songs added by slime are their chaos

the songs added by philza are their rebellion

the songs added by cellbit are their rage

the songs added by baghera are their anguish

it's so fucking FASCINATING TO ME but i don't know enough music theory to elaborate lmfao this is Vibes Only

(mouse's songs i can't boil down to an easy noun which is why they aren't mentioned lmao anyway they go hard asf)

(also i went on the longest fucking unhinged elaboration in the tags lmfao i almost didn't have enough tags left to tag "long tags" at the end

(i could have even gone on longer in terms of where their characters were at entering purgatory [philza: cage for a cage; cellbit: fed worker murders; baghera: her past as a federation experiment; slime: turning into a code because of the code pretending to be his daughter] but i ran out of space and also time it's 4AM AAAAA)

[cheriecoke]

truthfully i want to back away from jjk but i don’t know how

[weewooooweew]

[merlins-strawberriesandroses]

I’m not very articulate unfortunately but now that I’ve made this sideblog I wanted to get some thoughts out. I do see the logic when folks say that Arthur mostly experienced bad things in regards to magic, so it makes sense why he was wary of it/didn’t alter the laws since he didn’t know about Merlin’s guardian angel tendencies/etc. BUT. If we’re going with the magic is a queer metaphor (or just using it as one of many real life parallels) then I got to say. If you’re homophobic or your dad’s a queerphobic/bigoted politician who sanctions their murder and you haven’t explicitly said oh yeah I really don’t agree with that. Then queer people will probably not go out of their way to be kind to you while also letting you know they’re queer. They’re going to be wary and many will be antagonistic, and if there are queer people in your life they’ll probably keep mum because saying anything risks their life/security, and even freedom, in a way that’s distinct and sometimes worse than the restriction of freedom the closet imposes. 

In the same vein I feel like well if magic was banned in Camelot, and we know that even innocent people using it for, idk, healing a cut, got persecuted, then why would magic users be tripping over themselves to explicitly show Arthur how they’re using “good” magic. It’d put them in danger! Even if they were being helpful they’d not be telling Arthur they were being magically helpful (on account of the tyrant father’s laws still existing). Only sorcerers who are about to Revenge it Up (or power-grab it up) will likely be found out as sorcerers (on account of the occasional monologue and gold flashing eyes as they try to stab u).

Arthur just couldn’t have realistically seen an equivalently diverse number of people doing benevolent magic as long as all magic, no exceptions, was technically still illegal. (Though he does see some instances of ‘good’ magic!)

And about magical people close to Arthur not telling him for so long (Merlin, Morgs), I think they had many understandable reasons. At one point if you live long enough in a place where various parts of your identity can be legally prosecuted, or are liable to be socially persecuted, it’s physically hard to even get the words out. From personal experience the fear is just very encompassing, and it sucks to think that you very likely have to bear agression or worse if you want to let people you care about know. Plus, for Merlin I imagine a part of the situation was that telling Arthur would risk their closeness, which is pretty important to his ability to protect him. And Merlin believes that if he protects Arthur, the prophecy dictates at some point in the future magic will be legalized (which it does become, but it’s mentioned so briefly at the end. Could we not have had a happier ending??) :( I have a lot of other thoughts on this specific topic that I’ve tearfully jotted down over the years about how I understand why Merlin didn’t tell his friends (I’m less tearful about it now haha I was just Going Through It back then), but I fear I’ll still be incomprehensible and even more rambly, so I’ll avoid doing that right now. ANYWAY sorry for the ramble. I just made this sideblog and realized I can share some of the things that have been rolling around in my mind for years. Okay now I’m gonna go back to being in denial over the ending :)