#also yes I did that in microsoft paint

[lulu2992]

Happy 10th Anniversary, Far Cry 4 (2/3)

One day, I wondered how many ways to finish Far Cry 4 there were depending on who you choose to follow and how you deal with the antagonists.

I did the math and found that the answer was… 1,729! Don’t take my word for it because I don’t even remember my calculations now, but I made diagrams to illustrate all the paths.

What did your adventure(s) look like? :)

If you’re curious, I included my three playthroughs (and the reasoning behind my choices) under the cut:

First playthrough:

I chose Amita the first time because there was no one else to retrieve the intel she wanted while Sabal already had a group of fighters defending the camp. When I came back, I didn’t like his reaction and thought it was unfair to blame Ajay.

I did take his side in the next two missions, though, because I wanted to get rid of the drugs.

At the end, I still chose Amita because Sabal just kept getting more and more obnoxious, I didn’t want Bhadra to be forced to become Tarun Matara (and potentially marry him) and, since I had burned the fields and destroyed the factory, I thought nobody would be able to grow or sell opium anymore. Amita would melt the artifacts, sell the gold, and that’s how she would make money.

I was very happy with my choice until I read there was a post-credits scene involving the new leader of the Golden Path and went to Tirtha to watch it. Seeing what Amita had become really hurt, and it looked like me destroying everything opium-related didn’t matter after all, which was very disappointing...

As much as I hate Sabal’s behavior, in my opinion, he’s a better-written character compared to her because you can see him become more and more despotic as the story progresses, and it happens in a believable way, but while she’s a flawed person as well, it really feels like Amita just turns evil after the credits.

Honestly, I felt betrayed.

Second “playthrough”:

I just wanted to see the secret ending. I believe I waited a little over 13 minutes for Pagan to come back.

Third playthrough:

Basically, I sided with Amita when I had previously followed Sabal, and vice versa, so I could play all the missions. I also decided to kill Noore this time because shooting her in the back without telling her anything seemed like a less painful way for her to die since she doesn’t survive anyway... However, I let everyone else live because, when given the option, I always choose not to kill.

[thequeenofmyownscreen]

This Sunday, me and my sister took advantage of the weather (not very creepy, very sunny, but the light was beautiful) and the fact that we live in the area to go and take some photos at the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (fun-scary !).

This is my first cosplay ever - I've done events in historical costumes before, but those were rented and it's not quite the same vibe. Also it's not quite finished, I'm still missing the hammer hair piece, I'm not satisfied with the white strand, and the hands feel too "clean". Also my sister took the pictures and then I modified some of them, but I'm not a professional by any means, so it mostly meant me opening Paint and the Microsoft software ^^

Also, and this is the major problem, I did NOT realize when I was doing the make-up and the hair, that I put the lock of hair and the mouche on the wrong side. On the official portrait, you (as a viewer) see them on the left, but it's the character's RIGHT… and I put them on MY left, when I should have put them on my RIGHT. "But wait", you say, "on these photos everything's the right way round !", and yes, you're right, it's because I edited the photos and managed to flip them like a mirror image, to hide the fact that I'm a dumbass. (My sister laughed, and said it's wasn't a big deal and that my cosplay could be different in that way ; but I have control problems).

... Still I'm happy with the results of this day.

Fulls credits under the cut

Laudna from Critical Role, Campaign 3. Character created by Marisha Ray. Hair and make-up and cosplay by me (based on the official design by Hannah Friederichs) : with my own embroidery work on the blouse, Pâté plushie from the Critical Role store, ear jewellery & leather belt & leather bag bought from different Etsy stores. Photos by my sister G.C., edited by me. Location : Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris).

[wumblr]

robot from my dream (microsoft paint rendition)... i can't draw and it's hard to suggest three eyes in that configuration without looking like haniwa but it was very obvious they were nearly-hemispherical glassy black cameras. like an iphone

i was sitting out on the back porch of a ranch house in a rural area where my family lived (not a place i've ever been). and a couple of quadcopter drones flew by, surveilling the area and i said "that's not good." and then two chunky rectangular flying drones, like the size of a whole server rack but cased in white plastic, went by and i was like "that's worse." and then these guys showed up and started setting fire to the back fence

so naturally i had to wake up my whole family (most of whom are dead, in real life, not in the dream) like "hey, fire, fire, there's a robot with three eyes and a bowl-shaped hat setting blue fire to the backyard we've got to go like now" calmly and with an amount of patience that was not really appropriate given the circumstances. and they believed me, which was surprising, given how bonkers the thing i had to say was, but presumably the backyard was visibly on fire. i don't know

and everybody was moving fairly slowly so i was like "what are we doing here, do i have time to pack a bag" and my mom was like "yes, but remember the conventional advice" and i was like "what" and she was like "it has... to follow... a theme..." (i never got an answer for what this meant and i did not pack a bag)

eventually we made it downstairs to the garage (i have never lived in a house with these characteristics) and my aunt's car, like an 80s corvette or something, was just. constantly running. and i understood that was obviously not the car we were taking because it was always parked there, in a sort of alcove, always running, with a tube connected to the exhaust so it didn't fill the garage with carbon monoxide. and the stairs weren't exactly finished so there was just a steep step down at the end and i told my mom to be careful and she was like "get a load of this guy, thinks i can't step down" and stepped down just fine. she must not have been as old as she was when she died but i was also not younger than i am now

and then, reel missing, we were in a main street drugstore with a bunch of other people who were also trying to escape the blue fire robots and i was scouting out the shelves to see if there was anything worth stealing, which would have represented the first escalation to looting of the day so i was hesitant but obviously it was the thing to do, even if people argued with me about it, but it was all, like, picture frames and magazines and greeting cards

some guy was like "get away from the windows" (most people were gathered near the glass-door storefront) and everybody fell silent and found somewhere to hide and i laid down on the floor. i remember not looking out the window because it was more of a risk of being seen, but i also remember knowing that the villain of the story, whoever was controlling the robots, was standing outside peering in. with a spherical robot with three eyes. she was dressed like it was 1890, you know, like with the frizzy loose hair pulled up under a big hat. then i woke up

[goron-king-darunia]

Eggtober 23rd 2023

"Spill my Guts" Omurice

(Clip Studio Paint, Gouache Brush. 15 colors, 30 minutes.) Confession time. The reason my sleep schedule is messed up and the reason my egg is late isn't a mystery. I got Minecraft recently. I am very new to it but it's consuming my free time. I am obsessed with playing, essentially, "Lego" with rules. Yes, there is not much "game" to the cube game. Yes, I love it anyway. I like keeping stupid idiot Squidward-lookalikes employed and alive and making silly little barns and goofy little dirt shacks and then spending way too long making a castle only to go "No, actually, it needs a bigger tower here and oh shit oh fuck, too big oh CRAP." and then dying 101 times mining diorite and then trying to rescue my gear because I am bad at the cube game made for kids.

Confession 2. I prefer Bedrock to Java purely because the render distance makes sense to me and the fog of war thing to prevent the game from trying to render everything in Java makes it very hard for me to grasp where I am. I can navigate my little splattering of world I've explored much better in Bedrock than any world in Java, even with the settings turned all the way up. I am a landmark navigator, maps are only so much help. Confession 3. My need to play Bedrock is the reason my bae's computer got fucky wucky because they tried to join me on PC rather than bedrock for Switch so they could type to talk instead of always having to be in VC and possibly disturb the household and Microsoft is being a little bitch saying "you don't own this game" or "you do own this game but we're not letting you install for some reason" and in an effort to get it to install, they did a software update and got bluescreen bootlocked.

So to sum up: Minecraft has ruined my time management, my sleep schedule, my egg schedule, and my partner's SSD. Minecraft is cursed and yet as soon as I am done posting, I am going to load up Bedrock and work on my silly little ginormous castle.

Hopefully @lady-quen's breadbugs like ketchup! Smacking @quezify with a ping for this egg and also an open invite that if he ever decides to get into games that aren't Peggle, he has an open invitation to hit me up on Minecraft Bedrock. (Invite applies to anyone who knows me on Discord by the way.)

Love the garbage baby cube game. 10/10, would waste my life on that.

[somerunner]

Cradle MS Paint art

Each of these took almost an hour in MS Paint. Lest ye think I'm capable of just whipping out art of this...esteemed quality.

Hey, did you know I have an ask game going on while I work on my thesis and end-of-semester work? It's a way to at least interrupt my scrolling so that I can get something done, and then go from that to my actual work. It's not pinned, but it is tagged. I'll reblog it right after this post.

Image descriptions in alt texts and under the cut. Also, brief quotes from the books.

[Image ID: A really low-detail Microsoft Paint sketch of Yerin, Mercy, and Ziel floating in the air over a coastline. They each are holding their equipment at the end of Waybound; Yerin is holding Netherclaw and wearing black robes, Mercy is holding the Silent King Bow and is wearing full-body amethyst armor, and Ziel is holding his hammer and shield while wearing his Dawnwing cloak.

The Crimson Phoenix is in the other corner of the image, looking a dull red.

/End ID]

Mentally, Lindon split the enemies in half. "Which Dreadgod would you like?" he asked.

Yerin snorted. "Give you two guesses, and the first doesn't count."

Lindon spoke again, and Dross relayed his words to the others on the battlefield. "Everyone, I would be grateful if you could contain the Bleeding Phoenix and keep the enemy Monarchs away from me. I will face the Wandering Titan."

Waybound (Cradle book 12), Will Wight

----------

[Image ID: A pixel-y and low-detail portrait of Ziel, post-Waybound. He has his green madra horns and jade scars, and is wearing both his black Reaper armor and his green Dawnwing cloak over his shoulders. His hair is short and a solid dark gray. Ziel has a bored expression.

/End ID]

He looked over her shoulder to Ziel, whose expression was impassive. Ziel lifted a hand. "Hey. Welcome back."

Waybound (Cradle book 12), Will Wight

[crossf1recreat1ons]

Yoooo happy birthday @petrock42clone I made a thing for ya! :D This thing actually took a little while to finish (with the frames being manually being drawn on Ibis Paint and Microsoft Clipchamp being a bitch), but considering what I'm able to do as an amateur animator, I like how it turned out ^^ Characters used (in order of appearance) Sketchy (Axel's ARMSona) Crossfire (my ARMSona) Tracey Doodles (on the left) (ARMS OC by Axel) Scarfer (on the right) (ARMS OC by Axel) Jeon-Neo (Punch Out OC by Axel) Kapster Shot (far left)(ARMS OC by Axel) (I actually did the design based on a description of what he looked like by Axel a while back, so if I missed anything, I'm sorry TwT) Dustin Fleetwood (middle left) (Punch Out OC by Axel) Beep Bow (middle right) (Punch Out OC by Axel) Siren Sparky (far right) (Punch Out OC by Axel)

Here's the inspiration for the video (I also got the audio from there and yes the audio is edited there too)

Okay I'm gonna post (most of) the individual animations below, since I really like how they turned out

[overlord-of-fantasy]

I drew my new Oc Nimdel the Orc in Microsoft Paint. It looks terribe XD, but if you wondered how he lookes like: here you go.

I also drew him in his elven form, bevore Sauron tortured him with "My little Pony" lore.

Also, no, I do not know where his eyebrows went... Oh, and yes, they did

(CW: Violence)

cut his cute little ears of.

[spyroforlife]

Aight I’m doing it, gonna explore some of my VERY OLD writing, the first “books” I ever wrote. Gonna use the tag ‘my old writing’ for this if ya wanna block it, but anyway it is time for me to reminisce >:) I’ll probably devote a post to each book I decide to post pics of, and I’ll likely do a format where the cover page will be in the main post, and the rest under a read more. Now without further ado…

ah yes. The label on the shoe box I kept all these in. Love how I wrote this as if it would actually stop anyone from opening it

(it has my full name on there so I of course blotted that out lol)

Ahh gotta love that old school Microsoft Office clipart. Anyway it is time to open the box and select my first victim

OH I forgot I also used this much later on to store letters that were written to me in basic training (gently moves those aside)

…I’ve made a fatal error, this box doesn’t have my most ancient stories, it has ones from slightly later on in my childhood. NOO where is my Charmander and Torchic story!! Ah well I may have to delay this adventure until I rescue the early stories from my storage unit, but for now. This will do.

Once upon a time (probably before 2008 but idk when exactly) my older brother made the fatal mistake of revealing to me that people will actually go on the Internet and just post weird lil stories :O Like they’ll just write something funny. And post it. And other people can read it. Wow!

Naturally, I wanted to try it, and came up with a really ridiculous idea about giant weiner (or wiener, I kept changing the spelling) dogs that ended up morphing into a multi-story saga where it turned out the giant dogs are actually ALIENS and Earth ends up destroyed, also it features me and my older brother as self-inserts which he thought was GREAT. The best thing? None of this actually made it onto the Internet but I sure did print out the whole dang story, make a cover, and then tie it all together with nice gold thread. More under the cut

I just wanted to post the full first page so y’all can get an idea of the ridiculousness of my early writing. I was probably like. Actually I don’t think I was even 10 yet. Or maybe I was? Ehh about 10, maybe a little older but I’m relatively sure I wasn’t a teen yet. My brother helped contribute parts of this (like the strange, funky business part) but most of this was written by me.

As you can see the gross out humor is in full effect. Of course. As I was a young child who watched Nickelodeon. Moving on

A small excerpt I just happened to enjoy. “Let’s go drink the sacred toilet water!!” is quality dialogue let’s be real here. From here on out I’m just gonna share my titles from each story

This is the start of the second story in the series, and it heralds a running thing with me criticizing people if they happen to skip stories and read out of sequence

“if you had even bothered” TWEEN ME WITH THE SNARK

Yeah said picture of Kibblion is actually what was on the cover page. Made in MS Paint, to everyone’s shock I’m sure

I don’t care what anyone says, I was funny back then. My older brother said so which means it’s true

How much do you wanna bet this one wasn’t actually the last story? Don’t bet anything, it actually was, whoa :O I had a thing back then where I liked doing Animal House style epilogues so-

I promise there was context to all this. My self insert (Kari, of course) and the guy from the start, Joe, got to go to Kibblion and we inexplicably turned into alien weiner dogs ourselves. I think I handwaved this as “radiation”

My brother (Chris) got to be the villain who also survived Earth’s destruction and he had psychic powers just because.

the weiner dogs have a thing in their society about not eating animals unless they’re dangerous ones, hence them pulling bullshit like “oh this animal is tasty but not a threat? Oh- we’ll make it dangerous then :)”

Other names are just other random characters, mostly weiner dogs. but uhh yeah. There you go

the random shit I wrote back then. I promise I’ll dig out the truly old stuff but ohh my god looking back at this series was so funny. Maybe I could transcribe it all and post it to AO3. I already did that with some other old stories of mine which can be found here so. HmMM >:)

well lemme know what you think and I hope you enjoyed this ridiculous nostalgia trip

[typhin-hoofbun]

Yes, I did! I'm about to turn 42, actually. So I had my first "actual touch typing" class in 9th grade, which would've been 1996-1997.

In elementary school (I went to a private school for grades 1-6), we had a "computer lab" class with Apple computers, especially the IIc and later the IIgs. We were not taught proper typing then, just things like LOGO, a brief bit on BASIC, and various programs/games like Word/Number Muncher, Carmen Sandiego, and Oregon Trail.

In middle school, there was very little in the way of "computer lab" courses available. I remember one which had an art program, and one of the kids found one of the demo images and claimed he did it himself because he figured nobody would know, I guess? (It was a minor animation based on that famous painting of a diner that Google tells me is named "Nighthawks" and was done in 1942 by Edward Hopper.)

In high school, I was told I could "pick an elective" by someone who was claiming it was to prepare me for the "college experience", but when I asked for the "most advanced computer class I could get" (because I had always been a total computer dork my entire life), I was put into the incomprehensible "KBD DOC PROC" or similar. Only to find out that stood for "Keyboarding and Document Processing", a fancy way of saying "typing". The first day, a flyer was passed out titled "Don't be afraid of the Mouse - It's not a real mouse, it can't bite you." I was internally screaming even before the teacher introduced the computer and uttered the line, "This TV-looking thing isn't a TV, it's called a mon-i-tor." So much for "most advanced".

In addition to typing tests, we also did basic "word processing" programs, but between it still being 1996 and it being public school, we were still using DOS-based programs. I forget which one exactly, I believe Microsoft Works was chosen though Lotus 1-2-3 was present. The next year, "Business Computer Applications" would switch to Windows 95 and use Word and the other programs in Office. And the remaining two years were basically the exact same class.

I hadn't been using touch typing, going into the class, but since I was already familiar with using computers, it was a thing I "knew" but didn't see the point of using (until I was actually forced to). The teacher, however, was someone who detested computers as a general rule. During the final exam, we were told to just type a passage from the book and "get as far as we can" in the allotted time. When I asked what to do if we finished, she met the question with a "This will never happen" scoff and went "Just start over, I guess." I was on my third pass when time ran out.

My senior year, I was up to roughly 80 WPM. I only continued to improve, especially when in early college. I was playing a website-based game (Pre-Flash, I think) that included a chat room where you could enter using your character's name. Since the game had a limited number of turns per day, they encouraged you to simply play multiple characters (as long as you didn't use them to funnel resources to one another to give yourself an unfair advantage). So I ended up in that chat room with anywhere from 3-5 characters at once in different windows. I'd keep up with multiple conversations, and that practice was probably the biggest leap in speed.

I haven't tested myself in a long time, though. So I don't know where I am anymore. ^_^;;

This is a subject that really interests me because I (28 years old) had computer classes in grade school where learning how to efficiently type was a big focus. As a result I have a very high WPM (words per minute) count and am an excellent touch typer.

However, I've heard that they started phasing out computer classes in a lot of schools because it's assumed that kids/teenagers already know how to use a computer in this day and age. But smartphones are more popular than computers now, and as result a lot of Gen Z/Gen Alpha kids are able to text very quickly but their typing skills aren't as good.

[joshuawithers]

40 years of the Mac and why I can’t use anything else now

By the time I was buying my first Apple Macintosh computer the launch of the Mac in 1984 was already a myth, a story shared from one nerd to another, like an Aboriginal Australian cave painting.

In grade five there was an Apple IIe at the back of the classroom no-one knew how to use but when I realised that the computer magazines at the library full of computer programs and games written in Basic contained not just ideas and lines of code - yes, actual real code just printed in paper magazines - but code I could type into an Apple computer, execute, and then enjoy, I was hooked.

I kept on reading those computer magazines like APCMag, PC User, PCMag, Macuser, Mac Format, and countless others whose names escape me but the school library stocked so generously.

At one stage I designed on paper my dream computer which would triple-boot Microsoft Windows, OS/2 Warp, and Mac OS System 8. I think a “Mac on a PCI card” product had been released, or the opposite for inserting in a Mac, so I designed my Frankenstein’s monster of a computer and presented it to class imagining that they would a) care, and b) be in awe of my product design and computer engineering. Alas neither Steve Jobs or Bill Gates wrote and congratulated me.

I’m not sure how I wrangled it, but somehow our family acquired a Packard Bell IBM-compatible personal computer with a 486 SX 25/33 processor, 4MB of RAM, no sound card, but it did come with Windows 3.11.

The Radio Rentals rented computer and I quickly became close friends but somehow with its 25MHz CPU and 4MB of RAM the computer ran slower than a slug chasing down an ice cream truck.

Enter, my Uncle Grant.

Uncle Grant was my super uncle from Townsville who sold and serviced Apple computers. We’d not been on friendly talking terms about computers since I used his Apple Macintosh and neglected to save a document he had open, but he was quick to diagnose the problem with my computer’s speed: I had an image as my desktop wallpaper. Also, he was quick to quip that “a Mac wouldn’t have that problem.”

What he neglected to acknowledge is that a Withers didn’t have a spare buck either so we went without a Mac for about a decade more.

As I’m sure is the story for most modern Mac users, having your own personal Macintosh Desktop Experience was a dream for too long.

Years later Apple announced the Intel transition from Power PC chipsets and all of a sudden, thanks to an Intel Inside and Bootcamp, these new Macs can run Windows and Mac OS X which is the perfect justification for a nerd to make for a new Apple MacBook purchase.

All white and plastic, it was beautiful, and that new Apple MacBook never needed to be tainted by Bootcamp and Windows. It turned out that Mac OS is actually quite capable on its own.

Not quite as beautiful as that G3 iMac I acquired years after it was ever useful, but always be beautiful.

And that’s why I can’t use any other OS today. I’ve tried Windows and Linux of late, I’m always open to a change so I know I’m using the best tools for the job, but my taste gravitates to the Mac. It is beautiful, useful, and just plain nice. I’ve even tried the iPad as a main computer, or the phone. But it’ll always be the Mac for me. Happy birthday, and hello, old friend.

[miraculous-ash]

Assuming the whole class will get a miraculous

I can't help but think that one day a villain will arise and each kid is going to ask to leave over time with different excuses. Maybe we'd even see glimpses of the fight out the window showing those who have left struggling before some more leave to help out.  Then eventually Ms. Bustier is going to turn around to address the class like ??? with everyone gone

[lilietsblog]

Alright, first of all, about images.

You know, there's been a categorical disruptive technology in image creation before. It's called "photography".

And it did not kill traditional art, even if it displaced it from a number of niches. But if you submitted a photograph to an oil painting competition, it'd be a scam.

Like, they're two different art forms. They're judged by different criteria. You aren't going to praise an oil painting for technical difficulty of staging (think those photographs where people are jumping together) and you aren't going to praise a photograph for realism in minute details. They're not interchangeable.

AI art is pretty much the same, except it's a lot less visually distinguishable from its predecessors than photographs are from paintings. Hence, labeling. And not mixing them up in the same category, much like how there shouldn't be oil paintings in a landscape photo contest.

Second, text.

Do not philosophical zombie me about it. AI output is fully distinguishable from human output, either immediately (see: school essay generation, INSTANTLY bullshit) or suddenly surprisingly later (see: the blackmail-prone chatbot, that one suicide hotline chatbot that got disabled for being an asshole, etc).

Yes, humans can lie over the internet. They also get called out for those lies and labeled unreliable sources on a particular topic. AI meanwhile is an unreliable source on EVERY topic - a human can be misinformed or have an incentive to lie, but an AI never has an incentive one way or another, it always makes things up, and whether they happen to match reality or not is pretty much random. Humans will generally tell the truth in absence of specific pressures otherwise, which can be socially navigated; the same cannot be assumed of AI. It's an unreliable source, always, and it should be labeled as such.

Like, - sure, we're meat computers and ChatGPT is computer computer, we're the same general category of thing. In the same sense that Google and Microsoft Word are the same category of thing, as they're both software. Go open a Microsoft Word document, type a query into it and wait for it to return search results to you.

In the meantime, AI output IS undistinguishable from reliable source output... for people who aren't experts, and/or aren't paying attention, and/or have difficulty with reading comprehension. It ends up a sort of literacy tax, and I for one don't think scams should be legal as long as they only affect stupid* people. A scam is a scam is a scam, and it should not be there.

Oh sure, internet will never be fully sanitized of scams until and unless it's under control in a way neither you nor I want it to ever be. But there's a difference between a sketchy spam site and legitimacy lent by large corporations openly endorsing a thing.

I think they should stop doing that, via us legally banning them from doing that.

90% of AI art discourse on this site is people arguing over the precise shape/size/color of the bottle that we should put the proverbial genie back in. horses have long since left the barn on this one champ. nobody’s belling that cat

[123abcdrawwithme]

ms paint is fun :v

redbubble!

[slightlyaggressiveblanket]

did i get lazy on the scarf? yes. yes i did. Did i also forgot to add the scar first and later on tried to fix it in photoshop? no i used microsoft paint for it but still.

[minina-7431]

Hai ^^

I wanna ask what programs do you use for pixel art ;w; 👉👈

Also happy early

Birthday

Well, the only program I use for pixel arts or drawing is Microsoft Paint. Yes I know there are applications for pixel art and stuff, but I don't use them. I have no problem handling Paint, so I don't think I need them. I feel more comfortable that way.

I used the UnderTale sprites as a reference to create more in that same style. For example, look at:

I'm going to make the sprite of a certain human, so I'm going to take Frisk's hair as a reference.

Then I give you details.

Again I use Frisk's silhouette and the red underlined part of Sans's jacket as a reference. I colored them in and enlarged the drawings (because it actually looks like this):

In addition, it is resized with this one here (You can change the size to 500, 200, 400, whatever you want):

I published them and that's it, hehe.

These tools here are the ones I used, the pencil for drawing and the bucket for coloring mainly. I hope you like them, if you want you can use those sprites, hehe. And thank you, I really appreciated all the messages of support that have reached me. I did not expect so much. qwq

[a-soft-fluffy-girl]

M'kay. Lemme form a case here.

Both will mess you up. There's no way around that. None at all. And arguably, you should probably do neither one. Both will mess you up in different ways, though, and in some cases will do it worse to you than others.

One will mess you up from a complete lack of resolution, because that's what comics just do nowadays. Full releases that try telling full, compelling arcs in sporadic ways that, in some ways infuriate, in others bore. It will completely and utterly rampage through your mind in ways that consume while simultaneously confuse. And you'll be left, at the end, wondering exactly what the hell happened.

The other is Homestuck. Click through if you dare.

The funniest part about that little jab at Archie Sonic I wrote up there? Any fellow Homestuck readers will know why I made that joke: you can argue that I just described Homestuck there, too.

But. On that note. I want to provide what will mess you up the most about both, showcasing the biggest issue of them both. Archie Sonic and Homestuck? Both extremely, and I mean extremely long. There's no two ways around it. You will HAVE to pace yourself to not burn out on either one. Homestuck alone went for a decade of the internet's big obsessions with Flash, and if you are really, truly, genuinely wanting to get into Archie Sonic and want the full scope of it all? That shit started in 1993. And didn't end until 2017. Over two decades. 24 years. You will have... a TIME getting into EITHER of these, and the thing about both?

You SHOULD start from the beginning! Archie Sonic may start off rather low stakes/take after the games considerably, but it has characters that show up hundreds of issues later! And don't even get me STARTED on the Knuckles series. But that's just it! Homestuck itself has supplemental material, too! HIVESWAP comes to mind as a... I wanna say spin-off game. And there's also the fact that it directly takes characters that appeared in Andrew Hussie's previous Microsoft Paint Adventures series, Problem Sleuth, so if you FELT like getting to know the four "card" characters better, there's another (much smaller and sillier) series to get into! And don't even get me STARTED on Homestuck 2! I'm tellin' ya, they are BOTH rabbit holes.

But there's one major problem both of them separately have that absolutely sets them both apart. And may sway your opinion. To start us off:

Archie Sonic... didn't end. It just kinda started adapting the games, then died.

Major issues with copyright began to crop up violently towards the end of its tenure, and there was eventually enough of a backlash from the disputes some Archie artists and writers (the name Ken Penders should ring a bell) had with SEGA's uses of its characters and concepts (thanks, BioWare) that things progressed to SEGA to just hit the "fuck this, reboot it" button and hike themselves over to IDW instead. Because of the serialized nature of how comics function, especially if you're taking a page out of how DC and Marvel release and tell their stories? There is no ending. Arcs complete, yes. Entire storylines have payoffs, that's a fact. But the story did not have an actual conclusion. There was no "and then Sonic lived happily ever after, and so did all the friends he made and kept along the way". Plus, the way villains crop up is almost eerily like DC and Marvel: they just do not stay dead, and it's the weirdest shit Finitevus.

Some, however, see this as a strength of the medium. No set ending allows for further stories to be told in its world. All of it's through fan-based means, but that's where the magic of it all appears. And the length and breadth of its storytelling, through so many different artists and writers in its time, give each set part of it its own distinct feel. Each differing section of the story feels distinct, unique, and has its own personalized feel. And arguably, that's just as much of a strength as it is a weakness. It's even where the current writer for Sonic, both the IDW comics and Sonic: Frontiers, Ian Flynn, started off with the blue blur! As for Homestuck?

It has the weirdest fucking pacing you will ever come across.

Homestuck is, by and large, just as serialized and ambitious as anything Marvel or DC or Archie Comics has ever bloody conceived. It started off just the same as the other MSPA site's adventures (I mentioned Problem Sleuth, right?) in that the site's audience would actively send in "commands" for the characters in the story to act out. It was a choose-your-own-adventure game that everyone could submit suggestions for on the forums! Hussie, the artist and writer, would actively write out specific suggestions, and would even do them as animated gifs. Each page had a chance to be a gag or a small animation for character's sake. And each arc in the story would have its own distinct "Act". And... in laymen's terms, there are technically six "Acts" (seven if you count the finale) that all had a specific focus. Act 1 was setting the world up, Act 2 supplied some stakes, Act 3 provided some context for new characters, the list goes on!

But the cast began to grow. And grow. And grow. And eventually, entire squadrons of characters would start cropping up without any input. It would randomly shift, for an ENTIRE ACT, to a PREQUEL story. Acts would have intermissions that would randomly shift the perspective to other characters entirely. Acts following that would rapidly and COMPLETELY change up everything that we would know, following ENTIRELY new characters altogether we had no idea to expect, only showing what's going on with the ORIGINAL main characters in Intermissions! And later Acts... HAD ACTS. The last full Act had six individual Acts. AND FIVE INTERMISSIONS IN THAT ACT'S ACT. None of it made any sense! It was a free-for-all of pacing that told the entire ending of the story, the REAL ENDING of the ACTUAL PLOT TO THE WHOLE THING, in a GAG PORTION made with PUPPETS MONTHS before the actual final posts!

And that was the MAGIC of it all for those watching it as it was being released! It would go on months-long hiatuses and then just drop mind-boggling animations with guest artists and musical maestros that included TOBY FOX of UNDERTALE FAME. Entire animations that looked and sounded fantastic, just because Hussie COULD. It was a blip on everyone's radar during that second half of its lifespan, and... like... it just... ended. Without any fanfare. Months of build-up... to simply stop. Because the ending had already been told. As a joke.

I think I made my point, though. You wanna get messed up by a "what it could've been" deal with some of the most varied writing and storytelling periods any comic had gone through, for better or for worse? You go for Archie Sonic and try to find a cohesive collection of all 290 issues, plus the 32-issue Knuckles run. You wanna get messed up by a goddamn trip you won't ever be able to replicate the feelings from that has joke callbacks years after they were made in the first place? Look up the Unofficial Homestuck Collection.

I vote Homestuck. That series still hasn't left my brain alone in years, and I think you just gave me an excuse to download that archive and give it a re-read of my own. It even has a literal mod to replace some of the older, more offensive jokes that just don't hit as well after years of social progress. Yep. A webcomic. With a mod. Funny how that works, considering it was styled to be like a game~