#basically what uve been seeing on here is years of posts and works in like a few weeks which is interesting in its own way

[satuwn]

Bro how tf do you make such good designs like they're all so good aaa :DDDD

THANK U SM! i have a lot of ideas in my little head honestly only abt 1% sees the light of day 😭 but all u gotta do id be thinking abt designs 24/7 and how to turn inanimate objects into little creatures and ull be great 😎 JDHFJF BUT FR for me sure sometimes the ideas come randomly, but usually i start with a base! thats why i love pokemon designs sm bc you get a template, and then u can just do all sorta wacky stuff to it! i also love looking at images, of toys, items, clothes, houses etc, ANYTHING! and going, how would that function as a creature? what could its eyes be? what species does this remind me of? etc and just trying to bring a base concept to life basically! or just simply fusions lol, theres so much u can do with if u just put two simple things(like an animal and an object) together! idk i think abt this a lot but its often hard to explain eek i try my best x w x

[jaderimehardt]

Re-Organizing Things 📦 & Resin Mask

My new Sterilite storage containers finally arrived in the mail today. A little late but that's okay- it's been rain storming again where I live. We even have predicted snow? Cali expected to get snow? 🌨️❄️ Hah. Yeah right. I'll believe it when I see it.

(No, that's not me being negative, that's me being grounded. I've lived here my entire life.)

But anyways! I bought these two containers to stack upon each other for basically two levels of flat surfaces, vs. the one flimsy (but cute) fabric cube I had before. These also have a seal that according to the website:

💠 "Gasket Boxes offer a gasketed seal to safeguard items from both air and moisture, keeping those special belongings safe from the elements, dust and pests."

Most my storage containers in the garage are like this because of this seal. Last thing I want is for moisture to get in and penetrate things. I see what happens to my soda boxes out there in the winter lol, they become soggy and warped and just yuck.

If you want the Walmart link to these exact ones, it's here: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sterilite-Plastic-Storage-Container-12-Qt-Gasket-Box-1942-Clear-W-Blue-2-Pack/855654663. You can also find more just searching Sterilite. But they can get pricey- you're buying that fancy 'seal' after all.

Let me show some pictures.

Another reason I like these so much, and I believe I mentioned this, is because the bottom of them is flat. I don't mean a rounded-flat, I mean square-flat.

With most other containers, the edges will curve up so much you cant push items or boxes all the way to the edge and you lose so much room in the box. It's actually a huge let down- but not with these. You can clearly see I pushed a box all the way to the side and I'm losing none of my inner space. I love these containers.

Think I have more pictures of these in past blog posts where I'm storing bubble mailers and such in them.

Time to put them to the test with fitting my resin molds in them. I only have room for two in my shelving otherwise I'd totally buy more.

On the left is the "flimsy fabric cube" I was referring to above, lol.

But yes, these do fit all the things! And everything is flat for the most part. I'll have to do some digging to pull stuff out when I need it- which may become a bit obnoxious time to time... I wish I had room for more of these 🤔💭 even just one or two more. Especially with the way I keep buying molds 😅

I'll figure out something, and I might end up buying more of these.

(It's important to keep resin molds flat because you want your resin to cure flat. If your molds have curls or deformities, they're going to cure that way too. Ofc there are some exceptions- like some silicones are heavy/loose and bounce back, some molds are small, etc.)

I'm not trying to turn this into a total insert-product post or anything but it's kinda looking that way isn't it? 🙃🫠😅

Up until now I've only worked with UV Resin, but I'm going to change that this year and work with epoxy, and with that means I need to have proper protection equipment. If you're reading my stuff, I hope you're taking note of this and considering this yourself.

At first I just went to Amazon and searched for "resin mask" and "resin mask for women" or something simple and got a plethora of options, it was a bit overwhelming.

After reading through several items and many reviews, I almost settled upon one. Almost.

I then saw this comment.

And decided to look up some things. (Time to use some braincells~)

So, the mask I was looking at (that, that comment came from) was the mask + the filters + goggles. The price of it came to:

That one can be found here btw: https://a.co/d/hfoAiO5, and it looks like this:

BUT! Let's take a look at 3M like she's suggesting.

(Link: https://a.co/d/1XrdvGU) Kay...

(Link: https://a.co/d/atr8H4I) Okay...

Now we're just missing goggles. But there's many pairs of goggles out there, this is just the baseline for the mask + filter.

21$ for a cheapy wanna-be knockoff (and people are wishy-washy on its validity to keep you safe) vs. 40$ for the real deal.

Putting two and two together I was kind of like wait... this isn't adding up for me. The 20$ one kinda feels like a scammaz, y'know? Or maybe you can see it as a really good deal 🤷🏻‍♀️

If you're still not sure which is the best option at this point, let's find a pair of goggles.

(Link: https://a.co/d/frylBF6) My Bro uses this brand all the time at his construction job and look at the amount of reviews on this. In addition, the comments and vid reviews are great on them too.

Also in the reviews on these goggles, are a bunch of photos of people wearing these with the 3M mask and other types of masks. So they definitely work with masks- that is something I was looking for specifically.

Another thing I was being mindful of, is if they cut off your peripheral view cause that's a thing that drives me nuts. According to one of the video reviews- they do not, because of how they sit on your face/head 👍🏻

That puts us around the 52$ mark if I'm just averaging the price, not really doing actual math.

Yeah you could go the cheaper route and get a "knock-off" for 20$, but is it worth the risk? That's something you gotta assess for yourself, I guess. Personally I bought all of the separate things, I'd rather be safe than sorry. I did however link all these things here to provide information and options.

If you're going off the grid of information I've provided, just make sure to read reviews and watch video reviews. Make sure you can return the product. People are usually vocal if they have complaints about a product, but sometimes you have to judge that for yourself as well cause flukes do happen.

Or, in some cases people don't know how to install/operate things, they'll have user-errors and blame the company or product for their faults. Even if an item arrives damaged, they'll blame the company for the item's condition when it was more likely the fault of the Shipping Courier. In that case, is their customer support good? Is that mentioned in their reviews anywhere? Be mindful. Do research.

There might be better brands or options that I don't know of. I'll be the first to admit I don't know everything 🤷🏻‍♀️. I didn't even bother to consult my Bro on this (cause I'm not the type to just randomly dial up/text someone and be like heyyyy~ question~)

Can always consult Google and Youtube too with keywords like "Best Resin Mask" or "Best Resin Goggles". I didn't consider to do that this time around; Those are usually hit or miss for me. Most times they take you to websites of "Top 10 ___" and then they're super expensive out of budget items and 🫠 meh.

Edit: The mask stuff just got here!

The filter was very easy to install onto the mask and I don't smell anything weird coming from it.

It does fit me and it's adjustable- if anything it tricks me into feeling like it doesn't because I'm used to using a headset at the PC that sits more forward on the top of my head, and this sits far back on my head. That's going to take some getting used to. But it is secure, it's not going to fall off. It's like a loose helmet- It's a mask.

Exactly how Amazon reviews described this. When trying these on, I could see out my peripherals- which I love.

These sit up high on the cheeks and the nose, so they leave room for that 3M mask (or other masks). They're very clear, almost like you're not wearing anything at all. I'm surprised myself at how much I love these 💟 (stamp of approval)

[fbwzoo]

Hi there! This is a formal request for advice from Reptiblr, as Facebook groups have proven thoroughly unhelpful.

This is Pirogue (like the boat) -- an approximately year old Crested Gecko I got back in June, weighing in at 8 grams. Originally purchased from Josh's Frogs.

Here, he's pictured in a sauna while I did a body check and cleaned his enclosure. I do this about once every two weeks, because he hasn't been growing so I try to pay extra care to his nutrition and hydration.

He's currently eating Pangea Growth & Breeding, and before that, he was on Repashy Complete Mango. I swapped him because he refuses to eat insects and hasn't really grown the whole time I've had him.

His full time enclosure is a 20g vertical corner tank, with two food ledges, two thermometer/hygrometer units, a water bowl (in case he feels the need to soak for any reason), 6 different hides, and several other random furnishings (plants, wood, ledges, etc).

He's got a ReptiSun UVB 10.0 -- that I bought the UV detection cards and tested to make sure it was working -- and a ceramic heat emitter on a thermostat marketed for greenhouses. His substrate is, from the bottom up: clay pebbles (Josh's Frogs False Bottom), Eco Earth mixed with aspen shavings, equal parts moss and leaf litter in different sections.

It stays good and humid in the cool end near the bottom, while the rest of it periodically gets a bit dry. I do mist from time to time, but I find that if I do so too much, it leaves the humidity too high for too long.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few details but this is the broad strokes, at least. I spent about $400 setting up an enclosure for this little guy who's barely longer than my index finger, and I'm trying really hard to be good to him.

So, here are my questions:

Is 8 grams an okay weight for a yearling?

His weight hasn't changed the whole time I've had him; is that a bad thing? It seems like a bad thing.

He hates being handled which makes it difficult to get good pictures, but what do you think of his body condition? Is he too thin?

He refuses to eat insects; I've tried several kinds, several sizes, both live and pre-killing them for him. He just won't eat it. He literally runs away from live ones. Is he still getting enough nutrition without them, being on the MRP diets that contain insects? Or do I need to keep trying? (Do you have any suggestions for getting him to eat them?)

I have powdered calcium and a powdered multivitamin supplement for him; how often should I be giving them?

How do I know if he's missing something nutritionally?

Thanks for your time! ❤

-------------------------------------------------------

Oh dear, I'm afraid I'm really no help with this! I only know basics for cresties and I'm a bit terrified of getting one bc of how small and fragile they seem! 😅

Posting to see if anyone else can offer advice & answers for your questions though! It sounds like you're doing your best for this lil guy, he's a lucky geck! I hope someone is able to help, and that Pirogue starts to put some weight on for you!

[noddytheornithopod]

So yeah, seen the premiere and had a bit of time to think things over and see what others are saying. My feelings... I’m not sure how I’d summarise them. I guess I’d say something like enjoying it but in a very distant and sceptical way? I’ll write more about the actual episode soon but to start, I should mention the source of my scepticism and hesitation: whitewashing (cut for a spoiler character).

Even back last year when the Bad Batch arc aired, I saw the mutant clones from Clone Force 99 and all of them but Wrecker looked... way lighter than they should? And the implication is that their genetic alterations is why they look, well, whiter? When these deviant clones are allowed to serve because their mutations turn out to be “beneficial” and “positive” instead of disabling?

Yeah... look, I don’t think Filoni and the folks at Lucasfilm are being intentionally racist, but nobody ever thinks they’re racist even when they’re spreading that very racism (well, except a few unashamed bigots like Nazis, but they’re a very clear minority and not really relevant here). Taking clones of a brown man and having them turn out to be whiter and the correlation of that being with genetic traits that enhance existing features instead of making them unfit to serve... yeah, really not a good look. There’s a reason some people have been using #UnwhitewashTBB. Oh yeah, did I mention that Wrecker, the only one with a normal, darker skin tone is the big dumb muscle of the group? And that Tech, the whitest one, is the brains? Crosshair and Tech both look like white dudes, and Hunter even if his tone is darker still looks paler than he should (same with Omega for that matter). And of course, Echo basically has bleached skin because even being frozen shouldn’t deprive him of that much colour, so what the heck? They can’t even justify that one with genetic alterations to the template, which is already a bullshit excuse because... why does having a brain that process information super efficiently or super enhanced eyesight make your skin lighter? There’s no narrative reason for them to be lighter skinned, it’s such a flimsy excuse with weird correlations that send some kinda unfortunate messages. It’s a shame, because the idea behind the Bad Batch is that differences are what make us who we are and that we should value that... and yes, they ARE different from regular clones (which I guess is why they designed them like this???), but they don’t need to be turned into freaking white people to illustrate this. Like, if you really want to show them be different, convey that in features associate with their traits (aka something that Wrecker’s design does, shame being the darkest skin ruins that >:V).

Oh yeah, speaking of whitewashing... the hell is up with Caleb? Oh yeah, Kanan Jarrus from Rebels is here, back when he was still padawan Caleb Dume. When I was watching the episode I was like “wait, is his skin tone right? or is it kinda light for him? also his hair too???” I then saw other reactions and yeah, this is definitely a whitewashed design. Just... why? The fact that they’re retconning a comic whose version of events I honestly prefer doesn’t help at all. How are they gonna excuse this one? That years of being on the run blasted his pasty white skin with too much UV? That he’s stuck inside the temple too much?

It’s apparently an issue that some fans have discussed for years, and I’m glad it finally became clear to me. The most I got concerned about clone whitewashing was when people tried to claim Rex was that dude on Endor, and... no? Just because they both have fucking Santa beards doesn’t mean they’re the same person. But I mean, suddenly hearing these voices all come together with the hashtag finally brought things into perspective. It seems like it’s been an issue for a while, little thing that had me going “huh that’s weird” like 99 looking awfully white even as he’s deformed (oh yeah I also think he’s written in an ableist, even inspiration porny way, but that’s ANOTHER story), the clones in general seeming to have lighter skin tones in places (in TCW it never bothered me tho I have seen criticism of it there, it’s mainly in Expanded Media and Rebels I was asking questions). There’s also Boba Fett in the episode Deception looking weirdly pale?

People have even brought up that Dee Bradley Baker, a white man, voicing these Maori men brings issues, especially with how his accent... isn’t very accurate. Like, I do think he’s a great voice actor, even with the clones and how he’s able to individualise all of them even with the same voice, but... his accent honestly sounds more like a bad Australian one than a New Zealand one, lol. Again, this is something I always noticed and found weird, but only with the recent movement has it really been giving me perspective. Even this took me a while to process, because in voice acting there seems to be more flexibility with who can play who (even if many recent conversations like the one about Apu from The Simpsons have gotten people to ask if when this happens we lean into caricature, which is what people are concerned with here).

Okay this post was actually meant to be a general reaction to the episode, but my whitewashing rant really got out of hand. I do feel like I could’ve been more vocal in the past about some of these things, especially as a white person myself. It’s easy to be complacent out of fear of conflict, and it’s something I do feel I need to work on. I also do want to specifically hear opinions of Polynesian and of course especially Maori Star Wars fans and what they have to say about this, if anyone has anywhere to direct me in that specific regard.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Lucasfilm has a whitewashing issue. I don’t believe there’s deliberate malice, but that makes it even more important to fight - things like this can be normalised to a degree we don’t question it. It’s much harder to unpack unconscious biases and things that are normalised in society than it is to confront the open bigots.

[tolle-folien]

Hyperpigmentation Treatments - Which Ones Really Work?

Hyperpigmentation is a condition where excess pigment is created in the skin, resulting in a blotchy look. The condition ranges from easy freckling, to the much more stubborn type called Melasma. The type of hyperpigmentation you have relies on what caused it. In this article we will certainly examine the various sorts of hyperpigmentation, and afterwards the most sophisticated therapy choices offered today for remedying it. Initially, let's begin with an evaluation of hyperpigmentation. Even if you are not a certified skin treatment therapist, it is essential to understand this problem to make sure that you can better recognize just how it requires to be treated. In basic terms, hyperpigmentation is an undesirable, over-production of melanin in the skin. Melanin production is a typical procedure that the body utilizes to protect skin from damage. You see this procedure at work when you establish a tan. Nonetheless with hyperpigmentation, the melanin production is erratic and uneven, which can be aging to your appearance as well as just simple unsightly. In the skin care sector, different terms are utilized for hyperpigmentation that results from specific causes. The following is a checklist of the generally known kinds, along with a description of each: Freckles: Yes, even blemishes are a kind of hyperpigmentation. They arise from a pattern of melanin manufacturing that is genetic or inherited. Melasma: This is hyperpigmentation from hormone reasons. The hormonal agents can originate from oral or infused birth control, pregnancy, or menopause. It appears in a regular pattern across the temple and top cheek bones. It additionally often tends to be darker and also harder to deal with, typically since the client is still being exposed to the resource of hormonal agents. Age-Spots: This form is normally from environmental damage by UV rays. The reference to it's being age-related is due to the reality that it appears after several years of exposure to the sunlight. Post-Inflammatory Hyperpigmentation (PIH): This is the outcome of trauma to the skin. It can be from a cut or abrasion, acne, or specialist skin care therapies that are done poorly. Other types of hyperpigmentation consist of actinic keratoses as well as numerous sorts of sores, which are pre-cancerous conditions that need to be checked by a dermatologist. We will not be talking about these problems in this short article. What you should understand is that no matter what type of hyperpigmentation you are detected with, the therapy for it will be the same. This is because all melanin manufacturing in the skin is a response to swelling. To be much more certain, melanin is produced in cells within the epidermis, called melanocytes. When that cell is subjected to anything that generates swelling (UV rays, estrogen, drugs) it generates melanin. If the melanocyte is revealed to a source of swelling over and over again, it may come to be completely harmed and also remain in a protective setting. This implies the cell will certainly constantly create melanin as well as continue to be dark, also when the inflammation quits. What this additionally suggests is that therapy for such problems will certainly be continuous ... lasting indefinitely. This is particularly true of ecological damages that generates age-spots. So whether that inflammation comes from UV rays (sun), hormones or various other medications, acne, or expert therapies like laser resurfacing or deep chemical peels, similar methods will be used to treat them all. Right here is an evaluation of the most popular choices in the skin treatment industry for treating hyperpigmentation: Topical skin lightening items: These are skin care items that contain active ingredients called tyrosinase preventions. Tyrosinase is an enzyme in the body that is necessary for production of melanin in the cell. These ingredients can be artificial or chemically created, or they can be taken from natural sources. This is one of the most typical kind of therapy utilized by skin treatment experts, since it is the only one that specifically services tyrosinase and also just how melanin is produced. It additionally happens to be the most affordable. Performance depends completely on the quality of the product, such as kind of tyrosinase inhibitors, toughness of active ingredients, as well as price of penetration. Lotions need to have the ability to pass through to the basal layer of the epidermis where melanocytes live. Remember, considering that therapy will be ongoing to prevent hyperpigmentation from repeating, pick products that are safe for long-lasting usage. Only all-natural tyrosinase preventions are risk-free as well as without side-effects. The artificial tyrosinase prevention referred to as hydroquinone is not recommended for use exceeding 3 months. If you have been using it, attempt to wean yourself off of it and onto natural tyrosinase inhibitors. Chemical peeling: This treatment is carried out by skin care professionals and also should only be done in their facility. There are differing depths of this treatment, and mindful evaluation of each individual ought to be done prior to a depth of therapy is picked. Due to a feasible complication of stimulating a lot more melanin manufacturing, mindful analysis needs to be done to identify depth of therapy and also proper skin-prepping steps to take. This therapy works for hyperpigmentation, but should be an add-on to treatment with topical skin lightening items. On its own, peels will certainly not prevent hyperpigmentation from repeating. Prices usually range from $150 to $1000, depending on deepness of treatment and whether you see an aesthetician or doctor. Laser treatments: There are different sorts of laser therapies for hyperpigmentation. Similar to deeper chemical peels, not everybody will certainly be a great prospect for this much deeper treatment. It is one of the most costly kind of therapy, costing an average of $2,500. With any kind of pigmentary hyperpigmentation, the reappearance price is roughly 50%. Topical treatments should come with laser therapies to avoid reoccurrence. Based on level of effectiveness, security, and expense, topical skin lightening items confirm to offer the most effective benefits for every person. The best method to remedy hyperpigmentation and maintain outcomes is by influencing tyrosinase task in the cell. Nevertheless, not all products are created equal. Efficient items must be from an expert product, or something that would only be available with an accredited skin care expert. However not every professional skin treatment line will certainly be totally effective. Specialist Products vs. Medicine Store Brands To correct hyperpigmentation, you MUST make use of a specialist skin care line. These are skin treatment lines that are just offered via physicians and also other accredited skin treatment professionals. You can not go to a medicine shop or department store to get this sort of item. Too expensive you say? Well take another look at rates, since chain store brands are usually much more expensive than specialist skin care lines, as well as medication shop brands have now reached a comparable cost. And also remember, nothing is a deal if it doesn't function. So what's the real distinction between a professional skin care line and medication shop or chain store brand names? Lots, however top is most likely scientific research behind the formula. As a whole, specialist skin treatment products are sophisticated solutions. Nevertheless, not all lines that professionals carry will be effective for hyperpigmentation. Amongst professional lines, you will certainly locate high quality basic skin treatment lines, as well as likewise scientific or restorative lines. In order to create true, dramatic adjustments in the skin, make sure you use a corrective product. Many skin treatment specialists will bring both kinds; nonetheless try to find products that claim the following: Use of a big selection of components. Simply read the tag. If the components in an item number less than 15, search for a various product. Some producers of professional lines will utilize upwards of 50 energetic ingredients in a solitary product. Use high portion of active components. You need to be able to discover percents of numerous active ingredients exactly on the label. Medical lines use greater strengths of vital components; or else they would be chain store brands. Use a big amount of natural ingredients. This will certainly be harder to locate in a scientific line, but it does exist. Natural components are extra suitable with the skin's cells and have actually improved capability to penetration the skin layers as well as into the cell. That's where it needs to get! Nevertheless, don't seek product lines that assert to be all natural. These kinds of products simply are not progressed enough to generate outcomes. You may as well be spreading out vegetables and fruit on your skin, which will not do anything for hyperpigmentation. Natural active ingredients that are utilized in corrective skin care lines are stemmed from all-natural resources, however only under laboratory conditions where certain components are isolated and also focused to produce a sophisticated active ingredient. For hyperpigmentation, look for products containing: Kojic Acid Dipalmitate, L-Arbutin, Rumex, L-Ergothioneine, Vitamin C, Glycyrrhiza Glabra (licorice). These amino acids and plant by-products are a few of one of the most efficient natural tyrosinase preventions. Use of advanced, clinical active ingredients. In order to be taken into consideration professional effectively, all-natural ingredients should be integrated with a certain percentage of innovative ones that are processed under laboratory conditions. A number of these types of clinical active ingredients are synthetic due to the fact that they are simply not offered in nature, and also there are a large number of safe ones being utilized in skin treatment. No use man-made fragrances and also colors. No reputable professional skin treatment line includes these components in their items. They are high up on the listing of allergens, as well as are just not needed for outcomes. In summary, the best choices for treating all kinds of hyperpigmentation are topical skin treatment products that make use of all-natural tyrosinase preventions. These items target the specific manner in which melanin is produced, are most safe, position no difficulties or rebound impacts, as well as are one of the most budget-friendly. Simply make certain the product is from a clinical skin treatment line. If you discover a truly phenomenal product, it will additionally create additional benefits in the skin. Search for abundant use antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, as well as various other nutrients.

[peak-dumbass]

Thoughts on Sons of Garmadon cuz redesigns :]

Also instead of watching all of the season and then adding my thoughts later I instead took notes while watch the season so that’s why this post is incredibly long, sorry about that :/

Anyway enjoy :>

Sorry for the accidental posting and I don’t want to rewrite everything so here’s from the original post

Lloyd reading the title of the episode also caught me off guard the first time I watched this

Basically Lloyd caught me off guard entirely the first time I watched this

Also his eyebrows are now THICC

“Still thirsty?”

...

I can see why people like Nya a lot (._.’)

Nya’s badass and f—king love her

Also the water bubbles she makes look really nice

Jay mimicking Cole is adorable

The first time we see them after a year and the first thing we see them do is argue and disturb a group of people that took a vow of silence 

I love them

“Did I call you at a bad time?” They’re in the middle of a fight with the mechanic, what do think?

Also Pixal calling Lloyd “Master Lloyd” :’/

“Whoever said fight fire with fire clearly didn’t know what they were talking about.” “Hey, you’re stealing my lines!” I love you Kai

“Who likes ice cream? I do! How was that line Kai?” I love you Zane

Them teasing Lloyd for his deeper voice and them just genuinely having family fun bonding time just fills me with such happiness that I can’t describe with words :’’’’’’’’>

Misako abandons Lloyd yet again, and she was just starting to act like a good mother in Hands of Time >:/

Jay is not understanding a single thing being said to him, but at least he’s trying 👌

Their excuse for not mentioning the royal family throughout the series is “they like their privacy”? Really? Like really? Are they expecting us to believe this bullish-t? 

Lloyd seeing Harumi for the first time: Can You Feel The Love Tonight🎶

Now Cole’s the only one who hasn’t had a crush in the series he is so gay and the writers can’t convince me otherwise

Can I just say the lighting for the inside of the place is beautiful? Cuz it is.

Also I just realized Cole’s the only ninja that isn’t wearing sleeves on his ninja suit, that’s cool👌

Since Harumi’s natural hair color is white, does that mean she’s albino?

“The maskes must never be reunited” Says the person who reunited the mask >:/ I know she’s acting good here but still

“No thank you, I actually gave up sweets. My body is a temple.” The moment I heard that for the first time I was like “WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO MY BOI?! WHO HAS HURT HIM?!”

Lloyd, stop stalking the princess, that’s illegal >:|

“Don’t worry, we’re ninja, we’re experts at this kind of thing” They proceed to loose the mask, let their main villain onto their ship, and Lloyd gets a crush on her :/

Grade A ninja-ing right there 👌👌👌

I’m on episode 2 and seeing Harumi acting nice and sweet and connecting with Lloyd and knowing that she’s faking all of it, I just feel so so so so bad for Lloyd :’<

Cole, don’t try to give Lloyd advice about girls when you aren’t even attracted to them

Ok so I procrastinated a bunch on doing this for some reason so Yee, let’s continue

I’ve only seen Mystake for 1 scene and if anything ever happens to her I’ll kill everyone in this room and myself

Oof I’m now sad and realize why everyone likes her

Ok so we all agree the tea Mystake gave Jay and Lloyd to see the drawings move is weed right? Or had weed in it?

Why is Cole hiding in a garbage bin when Zane is using a perfectly good newspaper? Also oh boy can’t wait to see Rocky DangerBuff and Snake Jaguar in action :3

The way Snake walked into the bar Jesus

and I’m trying to watch this without skipping it cuz to me the whole thing is very awkward and I can’t stand awkward stuff like this but I also heard there was glacier so I’m gonna try to watch this without yeeting my phone and burying my face in my pillow

Chloe: Snake is gorgeous and we stan

Me: I know he’s beautiful look at him, he’s amazing

He’s bad boi and baby boi at the same time and I love him

Just added Cole into a scene with the ninja when he’s actually still kidnapped by UV so noice job Ninjago HQ 👏👏👏

Zane looks so weird in the flash of Wu finding him dear god

Stop bothering him Cole, let Zane Rp as Snake for a little bit longer

DAD COLE DAD COLE DAD COLE DAD COLE DAD COLE DAD COLE

Cad is what Cole would have named the baby if it didn’t turn out to be Wu cuz Cole + Dad

Ali: "Why cad?" "Its cooler than Chad cause you take out the h for hoe"

Ali/clumsy you’re a genius

”you didn’t think it would that easy, did you?”

Guys is weird to think that UV is 100 times hotter after saying that line?

Mommy UV vs Dad Cole, Mommy UV is fighting Dad Cole for the baby

Oof I remember what’s gonna happen to Zane y’all and I’m not happy plz Mr.E stahp plz

Mr.E to the SOG after he kicks Zane’s ass: Guess who just got murdered!

“Not all men-“

Me: You’re right, Zane Ninjago would never do this

Mr.E: I’m on my way, I’m on my way, I’m on my way to kick Zane’s ass :D!

Cole is Pearl from SU confirmed, he was staring at baby Wu sleeping

Harumi: Maybe we can use this blanket at a Parachute?

Lloyd: What do this is a cartoon?!

Lloyd proceeds to do the exact thing he said wouldn’t work

Also Harumi is the best actor I’ve ever seen like seriously 10/10 👌 actor, playing with Lloyd’s heart strings like she’s been doing it for years

“How to be a heartbreaker” is Harumi’s jam and theme song

SO I WAS ADDING MY THOUGHTS ON HERE AND TUMBLR JUST DECIDED TO BE A LITTLE B-TCH AND CLOSE ON ME BEFORE I SAVED MY THOUGHTS AND NOW MY THOUGHTS ON HALF EPISODE 5 AND 6 ARE GONE OOF SO I’M JUST GONNA SAY THAT PIXAL IS HAVING SELF ESTEEM ISSUES OR SOMETHING SIMILAR AND SHE’S AMAZING AND IT’S MAKING ME SAD THAT ALL SHE SEES HERSELF AS ASSISTANCE AND NOTHING MORE

Also Lloyd falls onto a few branches and gets a hurt arm that requires a blanket while Nya was at the front of the ship with 0 protecction and was basically yeeted to the main deck while it crashed into the jungle and she doesn’t even get a break?!

I know Nya is stronger than Lloyd but GOSH DIDDLY DARN I didn’t know she was that STRONK!

Baby Wu: “Ninja never quit hehehehehe”

The ninja:

Lloyd: Confused Green Bean Noises

Harumi: kisses him on the cheek

Lloyd: •////• completely forgets what he was confused about

Harumi saved by lovestruck Lloyd and boners

Cole to Baby Wu: You took care of us, it’s only fair that we take care of you.

Me:

GOD I LOVE COLE HE’S AMAZING

Harumi and Lloyd during that one waterfall scene in Episode 6:

Also Harumi’s backstory for why she likes Garmadon and hates the ninja including Lloyd, it completely makes sense cuz she was a child that over heard that the ninja didn’t do sh-t and Garmadon saved the city so it makes sense why she hates the ninja and believes Garmadon should be Ninjago’s leader, and since it happened when she was young she didn’t think things through, she didn’t think about it from the ninja perspective and especially didn’t think about it from Lloyd’s perspective cuz she was a child, kids don’t tend to think about the other person’s perspective on things, so I think it makes sense and it’s really good 👌 also this is Ninjago’s first main female villain, all the other ones were either second in command or were in a crew that worked for a bigger villain so yeah that’s cool

“Don’t you guys have any idea what she’s doing? She’s resurrecting Garmadon! Lord Garmadon!” Yeah no sh-t Kai, the name of their gang is “Sons of Garmadon”, of course they know and of course they’re ok with it why do think they’re helping her?

“Then it’s a good thing the Quiet One isn’t a bad guy but a bad girl” It doesn’t matter that Pythor, Chen, Morro, and Garmadon had dicc, what matters is that the greater evil didn’t listen to them dipsh-t.

Harumi screams a lot, like Princess Peach/Damsel-in-distress amount of high pitch screaming and I’m surprised Lloyd or the other ninja haven’t told her to shut up at one point.

a slightly dark room suddenly turns a little bit darker

Harumi:

Lloyd: Jesus even when I was a kid I had tougher skin then you, I know this is a little hypocritical for my to say, but grow the f—k up god

Ok woah woah woah, how did Lloyd go from “I didn’t tell you about the fact that I’m part Oni, Mystake only told me and Jay” to “You’re the Quiet One” like he isn’t wrong but how did he put it together in such little amount of time?

Ok this is how the Lloyd vs Harumi fight should have gone down:

Lloyd: Give me a good reason not do destroy it right now.

Harumi: I’ll give you 2. You want to see your father again and you love me.

Lloyd: HAH! While you busy being a heterosexual b-tch I studied the blade!

Lloyd kicks Harumi’s ass and the day is saved

Am I wrong? Lloyd only met Harumi a couple of days ago, it’s like Anna from Frozen but LEGOs

“Love is an open door” is Llorumi shippers theme song

“I WANT YOU TO FEEL THE EMPTINESS THAT I FEEL”

B-TCH HAVE YOU NOT SEEN HIS F—KING CHILDHOOD HE HAS MORE TRAUMA THEN YOU WILL EVER GET YOUR F—KING LIFE TIME!!!

I KNOW SHE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER AND THAT SHE HASN’T SEEN HIS LIFE LIKE WE HAVE BUT DAMN IF IT ISN’T ACTIVATING MY PROTECC-LLOYD-AT-ALL-COSTS-AND-THAT-THIS-IS-TOTAL-BULLSH-T INSTINCTS

“Or we’ll have to get all ninja on you!” “What does that even mean?” “I don’t know I was improvising” Tbh that’s a mood Kai, at least to me

Lloyd: Guys, Rumi is the Quiet One!

The ninja who are currently surrounded by the SOG including Harumi: Oh really, ya don’t say?

Lloyd just got yeeted out of a waterfall so it sorta makes sense why he didn’t notice

Lloyd said I won’t let you get away with this and Harumi said YEET

They have Lloyd they have the masks and we have trouble

Baby Wu: Puppy!

that ain’t a puppy Sensei it’s a giant underwater scorpion monster

I forgot they tamed the giant underwater scorpion monster and named it Crabby, and Jay hugged one of Crabby’s claws, Jay’s favorite pet the ninja have ever had is Crabby confirmed

“So this is your true face without the mask, no wonder you covered it” Damn Lloyd is salty, LET LLOYD SAY F—K 2020

Chloe: Lloyd said "bitch u ugly" poetically

Me: Yeah, he got the saltiness from Kai and the poetic speech from Zane

“There was never anything between us”

One episode earlier

“You want your father back, and you love me”

One episode earlier

Harumi kisses Lloyd on cheek and proteccs him from the corrupted Samurai X suit

Me:

Harumi gets close to Lloyd

Me: KICK HER IN THE NONEXISTENT BALLS

Yay the most useful and totally not child abandoning character, Misako, is here and giving Lloyd information that he already knew and is being incredibly useful buy not only abandoning Lloyd for a second time in his life but also finding Baby Wu for the SOG Hooray

“Stop Rumi, this isn’t you!” B-tch you’ve only known her for a couple of days, and she has played with your heart, in dangered your friends, and tried to kill you and your friends on multiple occasions, and she nearly succeeded on killing Zane (though tbh Zane gets nearly killed every season so that isn’t a surprise)

“You were right, this isn’t me” YOU SERIOUSLY BELIEVED HE’LL FALL FOR THAT BULLSH-T AGAIN? AFTER YOU TRIED TO DROWN HIM AND HIS MOM WHILE SUMMONING HIS EVIL DAD FROM THE DEAD? HAH, B-TCH YOU THOUGHT!

“Stop. Save it for someone who cares” Yesssssss I love youuuuuuu by baby boiiiiii

Sees the arm coming out of the anvil-thing

Me: Terminator Garmadon? Also this is what happens when we complain too much, we also gotta be more specific people! We can’t ask for just Garmadon, we need to ask for Good/Sensei Garmadon or else we’ll get bullsh-t like this!

THE SCENE OF THE NINJA SINGING WEEKEND WHIP JUST PLAYED AND THE HAPPY WHOLESOME VIBES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Also there’s no way harumi gets the resurrection spell right on the first try, like no way, impossible, like she even gets interrupted by Lloyd and the ninja at the end and then Garmadon appears after that? Like I’m not a witch/wizard myself but I’m pretty sure that’s not how spells work? You don’t just start a spell, stop before the spell is finished, and the spell still works :/

Also how the hecc did Garmadon know where to find Harumi? It was never explained, he just like punched his way into the police station and was like “Yo b-tch what’s up?”

“I can turn him once, I can turn him again” ends up getting his ass handed to him and nearly dieing for the millionth time in his life

“That sounds like a really bad idea” “And Kai knows bad ideas, he’s full of them” Oof Kai just got roasted

“Lloyd, what are you doing?” “I’m sorry, Nya. I have to confront him” OOF HE REALLY DID JUST PULL A KAI DIDN’T HE

I’m not gonna quote everything Lloyd says here cuz there’s too much but DAMN HE’S REALLY PISSED OFF AND IS REALLY DOING A KAI JESUS

I know we all wanted Sensei Garmadon back but I’m ngl this Garmadon looks really cool and gives really good evil speeches to unmotivate his opponent

OOF Y’ALL REALLY HAD TO ADD LLOYD HOLDING OUT THE PHOTO OF HIM AND GARMADON WITH LLOYD STRUGGLING SAYING “FATHER” AND THE PHOTO GOING INTO THE WIND DIDN’T Y’ALL MY HEART CAN’T TAKE THAT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AND I STILL HAVE TO MAKE IT THROUGH EPISODE 10 WHERE I KNOW LLOYD’S HEART IS GONNA BE RIPED OUT OF HIS CHEST AND STOMPED ON WITH A SPIKED SHOE

F—K HARUMI F—K NINJAGO HQ F—K EMPEROR GARMADON F—K THE SOG JUST LEAVE MY POOR BABY ALONE

Y’all I don’t think I can make it through the next episode f—k man

Holy f—k I forgot Emperor Garmadon reads the title card in episode 10 oof

“Not so fast!” “‘No so fast”?! You used that ages ago!” True, it sucked then and it sucks now

“My brother is coming” “How do you know?” “I know” Dang even baby Wu doesn’t tell people sh-t

“You sure you’re up for this?” “I was married to him once, I’m up for anything” Ok so you’re saying that as if you were the one that was treated badly in that relationship and not the other way around like it should be but whatever floats your boat pal

“Careful!” “Are you actually doubting my ability to closely approximate the true value of our surroundings? I’m a nindroid.” Damn Zane is pissed

COLE LITERALLY JUMPED OFF THE BOUNTY TO CATCH BABY WU NOT KNOWING JAY WAS GONNA CATCH HIM AKA HE WOULD HAVE DIED FOR BABY WU I’M SCREAMING GOD I LOVE COLE

Ok so Lloyd you are excellent at fabulous/eat-a-dicc-b-tch exits like wow 👏👏👏👏👏

Also the scene with the 4 OG ninja and Baby Wu traveling to the first realm looks really really nice ngl

All in all I really really like this season, it’s great 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

[urmomification]

SWAG ANOTHER DREAM SMP AU FIC IDEA THAT ILL NEVER WRITE POG

this is a very long post please im so sorry my brain it just

(tw for like slight possession n shit)

(sorry its all jumbled i write all of these in discord to my friend and copy paste them here please if u have questions ask me im always willing to talk abt this shit please it haunts me)

(context: i saw a tiktok abt the hc that both dream and techno are gods of some sort bc theyre mentioned in the tales of the smp by karl a time traveller and my brain just ran w it)

going back to the techno and dream are gods thing right so dream is a vessel for the god dream xd (??? work in progress youll know what im talking about at some point its really funny tho uve def seen clips of it) and he was possessed?? by the god after the server started (when he started going from super friendly with everyone to control/power hungry) when he started sacrificing everything for power so no one could have power over him? that was the god making him do it bc the god was terrified of not being in control since theyd lost it all to techno in their past. thats why we never see dream and techno fight and why we see dream extend help and support to him at times as well as respecting his boundaries and such bc theyre scared of techno (again w the best of 10 duel reference, techno killed the god in a past life which is why the god has been forced to use a human vessel to get anything done on the mortal plane) but when something that powerful spends pretty much any amount of time in something mortal and mundane like a person, the host body starts to change (hence the mask) i like to think that the god would be akin to that of a biblically correct angel?? like the ones w multiple eyes n shit yk so after time things start to happen to normal dreams body he gets extra sets of eyes and he gets taller and overall his body seems just Too Small for whatevers inside of him and thats why he (hc) started wearing the mask in the first place he knew something was wrong w him but he didnt want anyone to know even tho they would most likely help him he was ashamed that he was different in the first place so he started wearing the mask once the other eyes showed up. and i think that the god would talk to dream similarly to how technos voices work yk? except its just the one voice instead of many many small ones. and again with the mask thing when he lost to tommy and they took him in, part of his mask broke to the point where u could see just a bit of the right side of his face but enough to see that it Wasnt Right there were two eyes where there shouldve been one and spots on his cheeks bright enough to resemble stars and where the color of his pupil should have been is just a sickeningly neon green with nothing else behind it. so they let him keep the mask even tho they already know something is wrong but it clearly makes him Very Distressed when asked to remove the mask or told to give it up. blah blah blah god harassing its host bc it got them caught and thrown in a prison and dream goes ever so slightly insane having to share a mind and body with a literal ancient god w a vendetta against everything hes built whos forced him to sacrifice everything he loved and cared for out of fear yk the usual prison shit and then techno comes a long and breaks him out or whatever but on their way back to his house he drops a really cryptic line abt how 'its nice to see an old friend again' and 'i thought i got rid of u for good last time' and dream is just ???? what are u talking about?? weve never been friends and youve never gotten rid of me? what. until techno spins around and just 'im not talking to you im talking to the thing inside u' or whatever and dreams eyes flash some brilliant gold or sumn and boom this is ur fellow god speaking how may i help you and dream xd (that feels so wrong to say but) and techno bond or well ig just talk abt how the past centuries have gone and ig while xd is fronting (??? i think itd kinda be like DID in a sense w multiple people being able to front yk?) dream is in a sort of semi conscious state but still hears everything going on around his own body until hes thrown back into the drivers seat (i think that xd would only be able to front for short periods of time due to the vessel n shit that makes sense right) and hes so confused someone please help him hes just a dude who happened to get possessed by a god someone help him so when they finally get back to technos house he sits dream down and explains the best he can without literally melting dreams brain. which would also play into the 'technoblade never dies' bc hes. literally a god. mortals cant kill him unless they have idk some sort of super weapon idk and blah blah blah xd gets what they want and finally has the ability to leave finally leaving dream literally the shell of a man with no home friends materials or anything with techno to basically take care of him until he reaches some semblance of stability again (which would take ages, realistically (wdym realistically) going from normal, to a god sharing a body with you and speaking in you brain living as a single being together and hearing their thoughts, to back to normal but with all the memories of what you did and what they made you do and also no more god speaking in ur head it would take a hot sec to recover from) so he lives with techno (whos, not to mention, another god) for a while until he can fend for himself again and after a good year or so passes and no one hears from dream they start to look for him and see what happened bc he went from the biggest threat on the server to just. gone. no one knows where he went after whatever he did and they want closure. is he dead?? who knows. so george and sap set out looking for him and decide to ask techno for help since hes good w directions n shit also he was the last person to see dream alive so he might have an idea of where he is and they walk up to his house and knock on his door and techno opens it and just stares at them he knows who they are, dreams talked about them before but hes never met them really so he talks to them, getting through the polite hellos how are yous before sap finally asks 'do you know what happened to dream? no one knows where he went and we just want closure' techno huffs and tells them to wait there he (this is the basement door im using his arctic tundra house in my head) goes down the ladder to the second basement, they can hear him talking to multiple people (ranboo phil dream) but cant tell who everyone is before coming back up the ladder, back to the door. he tells them to wait outside he needs to get something first (its dream hes getting dream) theyre standing out by carls stable when the door creaks open and dream steps out looking around for who the fuck could possibly be looking for them he betrayed everyone and most people thought he was dead who could possibly be here asking for himself and not ranboo or philza and when he steps out, his green hoodie (memento made by ranboo to help him cope w the loss of the voice in his head) catching the morning light off the snow and he was happy and then he saw them standing by the house hed grown to call home at least for now he breaks. he missed them so so much it hurt. he never expected to see them ever again much less them come looking to see him but hes scared he realizes he doesnt know what to say there is nothing to say he fucked them all over he ruined everything and then hes being hugged. they missed him too. they dont forgive him jsut yet but they missed him and thats enough for him right now. the three of them stand there just being in each others presences and techno creaks the door open to make sure they arent trying to kill each other and sighs and leans against the frame smiling. hes happy again and thats the best he can do for him. he invites them all in and offers to explain everything to them to try and ease the blame off of dream bc in all honesty it was his fault but xd made it far far worse that it should have been (a bit late but foot note abt xd i think that they would be an idle god until someone w intense feelings of powerlessness and insecurity like awoke them from their techno induced slumber and inhabited dream to help him fulfill his desires for power and control) and by the time he and dream are finished its late at night and sap and george are ??? so u were possessed by a god who techno killed centuries ago in a duel and it amplified ur feelings of insecurity and ur thirst for control to the point of isolating urself from us and destroying everything everyone cared abt?? also technos an ancient god who lusts for bloodshed but also makes turtle farms in his free time?? are we getting this right????? and techno and dream are just yea thats abt it glad this all made sense then they all go to bed (its a small house dream has a lil shack like ranboos and sap and george somehow slept over there for the night) and in the morning sap and george leave again but promise to come back, they still arent ready to forgive and forget bc even tho it wasnt all his fault his emotions getting away from him is what caused this all in the first place so they do need time to process now that they know he isnt dead and dream continues to live near techno in almost full independence and eventually moves back with his friends even tho many still hate him. hes happy and for now thats enough. another foot note; even after xd leaves his being, he still has the extra eyes, glowy freckles n is xtra tall n shit that cant just be reversed but now that hes himself again these things take their tolls on human bodies so i think hed have something at least similar to arthritis bc of how his bones were literally manipulated bc of how strong ethereal magic or whatever is. so he would still wear the broken mask but he takes it off now and is ok with it being off hes working on getting better now that hes himself again and everyone living w/by techno is helping him with that. also i think that he would get blinks of xd's memories like from when techno was killing them and have sumn like ptsd panic attacks from it and techno feels super guilty abt it but theres literally nothing he can do except apologize and after the first few times dream stopped him from apologizing bc it is his fault but he didnt do it to him so it doesnt matter to dream at least and they live in pretty much harmony until dream finally moves back in w george and sap the end. he also started wearing the mask in the first place bc of the extra eyes but he played it off as being uncomfortable around new people and not wanting them to know what he looked like until he trusted them (bc that literally makes sense irl how funky is that) so sap and george never pushed him and when they caught him without it on on the rare occasion they wouldnt pressure him to leave it off or anything even tho they already knew what he looked like (when they respect ur boundaries </3) they just assumed that it was insecurity (it was but also mans had like 3 eyes so) and just left him alone

[whatifsandspheres]

Okay, so maybe this won’t help me as much as I think it will, but now that my mind is back to it: There’s been several reasons that I don’t have a set and final design, more like multiple potential final designs for that property. There’s even one where I build most of it over with a hacienda-type structure and rent out a room or two, but that one was thought of in the desperation of being locked up in that leaky toilet of a building with government subsidy.

[fundielicious-simblr]

wips!

Hey y’all, author here (still feels weird calling myself that ngl) I was inspired by @meetthefundies​ post about pose making from a while back and decided I’d take the dive and finally get into cc making for the sims 4. It’s always something that I’d thought about, and with corona basically shutting everything down I’ve had ample time to try and learn how to do things. The whole of last month was basically a bunch of trial and error, YouTube watching, and Tumblr scrolling (coupled with my parents asking why I have pictures of random white people saved onto my google drive almost every other night 😂💀)

In the middle of august my dad caught corona, and so the government isolated my whole family and I in the house (he’s all better now thankfully) for 2 weeks, meaning I had 14 uninterrupted days of just coming up with different designs and trying to make things work. So this post is to basically just put out there what I’ve been working on, a few have made it into my game to be play tested, but so far only one has actually left CAS 😂 I know these are definitely major works in progress, but my anxiety means that I’d keep redoing things over and over again in an attempt at perfection while the rational side of me tells me that everyone has a starting point - this one is just mine. Anyway, I’m rambling (as usual), so let me just post the damn picture so I can go back to actually working on these pieces 😂😂

I’ll start with the casual clothes,

This is what I’m working on right now, ironically it’s the easiest thing I’ve done so far. This is essentially one of those ‘Snoga’ sports skirt things that fundies wear, this is the second round because the first had annoying clipping that meant I had to go in and change the design. If this one turns out fine enough then I will make different skirt/legging length combinations, but for now I just need this to be usable enough in game to warrant making different styles. 

Sleeveless frumper dress thing (I’ll sit down and come up with names for these later 😂) 

This was inspired by Anna Marie Maxwell and her #fabulous frumpers as well as the frumpers the Maxwells used to wear in the 2000s, I stalked the Maxwell blog right back to the beginning and just started saving pictures 💀 This is so far the only thing that’s made it into an actual game save, and you’ll be seeing a sim or two wearing this in different swatches in around a month since my queue is now below one month long. This dress is probably between the 8th and 10th attempt at making a basic frumper as this is what I started trying to make as I was trying to learn everything I could about making cc.

Basic short sleeved cheap looking dress (like I said, official names will come later 😂)

This your basic average amazon dress that fundies love ( a la bates sisters boutique style) I’m at that point where my instagram explore page thinks I’m a 14 year old Apostolic girl or a baptist mother of 8 looking to change my style, so I have a wealth of inspiration to choose from 😂 This is something I made and forgot about because I got excited about the exercise skirt almost working in game, meaning that this hasn't even made it into blender yet. 

Now we can move onto the formal stuff:

Ruffle mother of the bride/groom dress

This is my attempt on that blue ruffle dress that Kelly Jo Bates wore to Erin and Zach’s weddings. I initially tried to make it exactly like the dress she wore, but then I realised I was falling into the tendency of making things hard on myself unnecessarily 😂 This has made its way into CAS but there was some awkward clipping around the arms which I need to fix in blender, and will fix the textures before I can try and test it again.

Fishscale type dress 

Yup, you guessed it, this is my take on that dress. This made it into blender, but seeing the uv_0 layout made me go “eek” and distract myself with something else 💀 I’m probably going to go in and change the design, take some creative license and change the ‘fishscales’ around because there's only so much space in the uv map. 

Wedding Dress 1 aka the ‘Anna Marie’

I’ve highkey been calling this one the ‘Anna Marie’ in my folders because this wedding dress is directly inspired by hers (fyi: this link does take you directly to the Maxwell family blog, that web archive website is banned where I live and I’m not sure how to upload an archived link with my vpn on cause sometimes my laptop starts moving mad) This dress is one step away from being tested in game, and was so far the easiest dress to ‘design’ because there's literally nothing on it. I have been watching some more advanced texturing tutorials and want to try and make this look a bit better than it came out in my initial texturing attempts before I bring it I game to test.

Wedding Dress 2 aka the ‘Elissa’

This dress was inspired by Elissa Maxwell’s wedding dress, there's not many close up details of her dress so at some point I just got creative and probably the only thing I can really lend to her dress is the gathering on the side. The bolero came in as an idea after I had attempted doing these cute sleeves but was defeated after a while, so I changed things up so as not to frustrate myself 😂 This dress also has a bit more texturing needed before I can attempt to see how it looks in CAS, but I think I'll just see what happens with this one.

Wedding Dress 3 aka the EBP

In my head this dress was meant to resemble what Erin Bates Paine wore to her wedding, as in, a dress that is fine and would be considered modest (albeit a bit dated) but is chopped and skewed to make it EVEN MORE modest. The kind of changes that are obvious so the whole world knows you’re extra special and extra modest. This dress was an experiment as I played around and attempted to construct a corset back for this dress and the ruched tacked on sleeves, which turned out alright but it needs a bit of tweaking here and there, as well as an overhaul of the initial texture I'd tried out for this dress. In the notes app on my phone the initial look I was going for with this dress was “EBP overly frilly disaster” because that’s what I thought her wedding dress was like, but when I found pictures I decided I’d save the overly frilly disaster for when I was slightly better at the whole cc making thing.

Anyway, this is what I’ve got for now, I’ve got a swim dress thing next on my list which might be slightly easier to bring from start to finish? Not sure, at this point its hit and miss with how the weights transfer which affects the end result. I do have to say, seeing all these unfinished things laid out has sort of reinvigorated me to try and finish what I’ve already started before making something else, especially since a lot of them just require me to play around with the texture.

[outerloop]

Porting Falcon Age to the Oculus Quest

There have already been several blog posts and articles on how to port an existing VR game to the Quest. So we figured what better way to celebrate Falcon Age coming to the Oculus Quest than to write another one!

So what we did was reduced the draw calls, reduced the poly counts, and removed some visual effects to lower the CPU and GPU usage allowing us to keep a constant 72 hz. Just like everyone else!

Thank you for coming to our Tech talk. See you next year!

...

Okay, you probably want more than that.

Falcon Age

So let's talk a bit about the original PlayStation VR and PC versions of the game and a couple of the things we thought were important about that experience we wanted to keep beyond the basics of the game play.

Loading Screens Once you’re past the main menu and into the game, Falcon Age has no loading screens. We felt this was important to make the world feel like a real place the player could explore. But this comes at some cost in needing to be mindful of the number of objects active at one time. And in some ways even more importantly the number of objects that are enabled or disabled at one time. In Unity there can be a not insignificant cost to enabling an object. So much so that this was a consideration we had to be mindful of on the PlayStation 4 as loading a new area could cause a massive spike in frame time causing the frame rate to drop. Going to the Quest this would be only more of an issue.

Lighting & Environmental Changes While the game doesn’t have a dynamic time of day, different areas have different environmental setups. We dynamically fade between different types of lighting, skies, fog, and post processing to give areas a unique feel. There are also events and actions the player does in the game that can cause these to happen. This meant all of our lighting and shadows were real time, along with having custom systems for handling transitioning between skies and our custom gradient fog.

Our skies are all hand painted clouds and horizons cube maps on top of Procedural Sky from the asset store that handles the sky color and sun circle with some minor tweaks to allow fading between different cube maps. Having the sun in the sky box be dynamic allowed the direction to change without requiring totally new sky boxes to be painted.

Our gradient fog works by having a color gradient ramp stored in a 1 by 64 pixel texture that is sampled using spherical distance exp2 fog opacity as the UVs. We can fade between different fog types just by blending between different textures and sampling the blended result. This is functionally similar to the fog technique popularized by Campo Santo’s Firewatch, though it is not applied as a post process as it was for that game. Instead all shaders used in the game were hand modified to use this custom fog instead of Unity’s built in fog.

Post processing was mostly handled by Unity’s own Post Processing Stack V2, which includes the ability to fade between volumes which the custom systems extended. While we knew not all of this would be able to translate to the Quest, we needed to retain as much of this as possible.

The Bird At its core, Falcon Age is about your interactions with your bird. Petting, feeding, playing, hunting, exploring, and cooperating with her. One of the subtle but important aspects of how she “felt” to the player was her feathers, and the ability for the player to pet her and have her and her feathers react. She also has special animations for perching on the player’s hand or even individual fingers, and head stabilization. If at all possible we wanted to retain as much of this aspect of the game, even if it came at the cost of other parts.

You can read more about the work we did on the bird interactions and AI in a previous dev blog posts here: https://outerloop.tumblr.com/post/177984549261/anatomy-of-a-falcon

Taking on the Quest

Now, there had to be some compromises, but how bad was it really? The first thing we did was we took the PC version of the game (which natively supports the Oculus Rift) and got that running on the Quest. We left things mostly unchanged, just with the graphics settings set to very low, similar to the base PlayStation 4 PSVR version of the game.

It ran at less than 5 fps. Then it crashed.

Ooph.

But there’s some obvious things we could do to fix a lot of that. Post processing had to go, just about any post processing is just too expensive on the Quest, so it was disabled entirely. We forced all the textures in the game to be at 1/8th resolution, that mostly stopped the game from crashing as we were running out of memory. Next up were real time shadows, they got disabled entirely. Then we turned off grass, and pulled in some of the LOD distances. These weren’t necessarily changes we would keep, just ones to see what it would take to get the performance better. And after that we were doing much better.

A real, solid … 50 fps.

Yeah, nope.

That is still a big divide between where we were and the 72 fps we needed to be at. It became clear that the game would not run on the Quest without more significant changes and removal of assets. Not to mention the game did not look especially nice at this point. So we made the choice of instead of trying to take the game as it was on the PlayStation VR and PC and try to make it look like a version of that with the quality sliders set to potato, we would need to go for a slightly different look. Something that would feel a little more deliberate while retaining the overall feel.

Something like this.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize (and when that fails delete)

Vertex & Batch Count

One of the first and really obvious things we needed to do was to bring down the mesh complexity. On the PlayStation 4 we were pushing somewhere between 250,000 ~ 500,000 vertices each frame. The long time rule of thumb for mobile VR has been to be somewhere closer to 100,000 vertices, maybe 200,000 max for the Quest.

This was in some ways actually easier than it sounds for us. We turned off shadows. That cut the vertex count down significantly in many areas, as many of the total scene’s vertex count comes from rendering the shadow maps. But the worse case areas were still a problem.

We also needed to reduce the total number of objects and number of materials being used at one time to help with batching. If you’ve read any other “porting to Quest” posts by other developers this is all going to be familiar.

This means combining textures from multiple object into atlases and modifying the UVs of the meshes to match the new position in the atlas. In our case it meant completely re-texturing all of the rocks with a generic atlas rather than having every rock use a custom texture set.

Now you might think we would want also reduce the mesh complexity by a ton. And that’s true to an extent. Counter intuitively some of the environment meshes on the Quest are more complex than the original version. Why? Because as I said we were looking to change the look. To that end some meshes ended up being optimized to far low vertex counts, and others ended up needing a little more mesh detail to make up for the loss in shading detail and unique texturing. But we went from almost every mesh in the game having a unique texture to the majority of environment objects sharing a small handful of atlases. This improved batching significantly, which was a much bigger win than reducing the vertex count for most areas of the game.

That’s not to say vertex count wasn’t an issue still. A few select areas were completely pulled out and rebuilt as new custom merged meshes in cases where other optimizations weren’t enough. Most of the game’s areas are built using kit bashing, reusing sets of common parts to build out areas. Parts like those rocks above, or many bits of technical & mechanical detritus used to build out the refineries in the game. Making bespoke meshes let us remove more hidden geometry, further reduce object counts, and lower vertex counts in those problem areas.

We also saw a significant portion of the vertex count coming from the terrain. We are using Unity’s built in terrain system. And thankfully we didn’t have to start from total scratch here as simply increasing the terrain component's Pixel Error automatically reduces the complexity of the rendered terrain. That dropped the vertex count even more getting us closer to the target budget without significantly changing the appearance of the geometry.

After that many smaller details were removed entirely. I mentioned before we turned off grass entirely. We also removed several smaller meshes from the environment in various places where we didn’t think their absence would be noticed. As well as removed or more aggressively disabled out of view NPCs in some problem areas.

Shader Complexity

Another big cost was most of the game was using either a lightly modified version of Unity’s Standard shader, or the excellent Toony Colors Pro 2 PBR shader. The terrain also used the excellent and highly optimized MicroSplat. But these were just too expensive to use as they were. So I wrote custom simplified shaders for nearly everything.

The environment objects use a simplified diffuse shading only shader. It had support for an albedo, normal, and (rarely used) occlusion texture. Compared to how we were using the built in Standard shader this cut down the number of textures a single material could use by more than half in some cases. This still had support for the customized gradient fog we used throughout the game, as well as a few other unique options. Support for height fog was built into the shader to cover a few spots in the game where we’d previously used post processing style methods to achieve. I also added support for layering with the terrain’s texture to hide a few places where there were transitions from terrain to mesh.

Toony Colors Pro 2 is a great tool, and is deservedly popular. But the PBR shader we were using for characters is more expensive than even the Standard shader! This is because the way it’s implemented is it’s mostly the original Standard Shader with some code on top to modify the output. Toony Colors Pro 2 has a large number of options for modifying and optimizing what settings to use. But in the end I wrote a new shader from scratch that mimicked some of the aspects we liked about it. Like the environment shader it was limited to diffuse shading, but added a Fresnel shine.

The PSVR and PC terrain used MicroSplat with 12 different terrain layers. MicroSplat makes these very fast and much cheaper to render than the built in terrain rendering. But after some testing we found we couldn’t support more than 4 terrain layers at a time without really significant drops in performance. So we had to go through and completely repaint the entire terrain, limiting ourselves to only 4 texture layers.

Also, like the other shaders mentioned above, the terrain was limited to diffuse only shading. MicroSplat’s built in shader options made this easy, and apart from the same custom fog support added for the original version, it didn’t require any modifications.

Post Processing, Lighting, and Fog

The PSVR and PC versions of Falcon Age makes use of color grading, ambient occlusion, bloom, and depth of field. The Quest is extremely fill rate limited, meaning full screen passes of anything are extremely expensive, regardless of how simple the shader is. So instead of trying to get this working we opted to disable all post processing. However this resulted in the game being significantly less saturated. And in extreme cases completely different. To make up for this the color of the lighting and the gradient fog was tweaked to make up for this. This is probably the single biggest factor in the overall appearance of the original versions of the game and the Quest version not looking quite the same.

Also as mentioned before we disabled real time shadows. We discussed doing what many other games have done which is move to baked lighting, or at least pre-baked shadows. We decided against this for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was our game is mostly outdoors so shadows weren’t as important as it might have been for many other games. We’ve also found that simple real time lighting can often be faster than baked lighting, and that certainly proved to be true for this game.

However the lack of shadows and screen space ambient occlusion meant that there was a bit of a disconnect between characters in the world and the ground. So we added simple old school blob shadows. These are simple sprites that float just above the terrain or collision geometry, using a raycast from a character’s center of mass, and sometimes from individual feet. There’s a small selection of basic blob shapes and a few unique shapes for certain feet shapes to add a little extra bit of ground connection. These are faded out quickly in the distance to reduce the number of raycasts needed.

Falcon

Apart from the aforementioned changes to the shading, which was also applied to the falcon’s custom shaders, we did almost nothing to the bird. All the original animations, reaction systems, and feather interactions remained. The only thing we did to the bird was simplify a few of the bird equipment and toy models. The bird models themselves remained intact.

I did say we thought this was important at the start. And we early on basically put a line in the sand and said we were going to keep everything enabled on the bird unless absolutely forced to disable it.

There was one single sacrifice to the optimization gods we couldn’t avoid though. That’s the trails on the bird’s wings. We were making use of Ara Trails, which produce very high quality and configurable trails with a lot more control than Unity’s built in systems. These weren’t really a problem for rendering on the GPU, but CPU usage was enough that it made sense to pull them.

Selection Highlights

This is perhaps an odd thing to call out, but the original game used a multi pass post process based effect to draw the highlight outlines on objects for both interaction feedback and damage indication. These proved to be far too expensive to use on the Quest. So I had to come up with a different approach. Something like your basic inverted shell outline, like so many toon stylized games use, would seem like the perfect approach. However we never built the meshes to work with that kind of technique, and even though we were rebuilding large numbers of the meshes in the game anyway, some objects we wanted to highlight proved difficult for this style of outline. 

With some more work it would have been possible to make this an option. But instead I found an easier to implement approach that, on the face, should have been super slow. But it turns out the Quest is very efficient at handling stencil masking. This is a technique that lets you mark certain pixels of the screen so that subsequent meshes being rendered can ask to not be rendered in. So I render the highlighted object 6 times! With 4 of those times slightly offset in screen space in the 4 diagonal directions. The result is a fairly decent looking outline that works on arbitrary objects, and was cheap enough to be left enabled on everything that it had been on before, including objects that might cover the entire screen when being highlighted.

Particles and General VFX

For the PSVR version of the game, we already had two levels of VFX in the game to support the base Playstation 4 and Playstation 4 Pro with different kinds of particle systems. The Quest version started out with these lower end particle systems to begin with, but it wasn’t enough. Across the board the number and size of particles had to be reduced. With some effects removed or replaced entirely. This was both for CPU performance as the sheer number of particles was a problem and GPU performance as the screen area the particles covered became a problem for the Quest’s reduced fill rate limitations.

For example the baton had an effect that included a few very simple circular glows on top of electrical arcs and trailing embers. The glows covered enough of the screen to cause a noticeable drop in framerate even just holding it by your side. Holding it up in front of your face proved too expensive to keep framerate in even the simplest of scenes. 

Similar the number of embers had to be reduced to improve the CPU impact. The above comparison image only shows the removal of the glow and already has the reduced particle count applied.

Another more substantive change was the large smoke plumes. You may have already noticed the difference in some of the previous comparisons above. In the original game these used regular sprites. But even reducing the particle count in half the rendering cost was too much. So these were replaced with mesh cylinders using a shader that makes them ripple and fade out. Before changing how they were done the areas where the smoke plumes are were unable to keep the frame rate above 72 fps any time they were in view. Sometimes dipping as low as 48 hz. Afterwards they ceased to be a performance concern.

Those smoke plumes originally made use of a stylized smoke / explosion effect. That same style of effect is reused frequently in the game for any kind of smoke puff or explosion. So while they were removed for the smoke stacks, they still appeared frequently. Every time you take out a sentry or drone your entire screen was filled with these smoke effects, and the frame rate would dip below the target. With some experimentation we found that counter to a lot of information out there, using alpha tested (or more specifically alpha to coverage) particles proved to be far more efficient to render than the original alpha blended particles with a very similar overall appearance. So that plus some other optimizations to those shaders and the particle counts of those effects mean multiple full screen explosions did not cause a loss in frame rate.

The two effects are virtually identical in appearance, ignoring the difference in lighting and post processing. The main difference here is the Quest explosion smoke is using dithered alpha to coverage transparency. You can see if you look close enough, even with the gif color dithering.

Success!

So after all that we finally got to the goal of a 72hz frame rate! Coming soon to an Oculus Quest near you!

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2327302830679091/

[sifstuff]

Weight Painting

Note: Please don’t reblog this, I only posted it here because someone requested it and the private link wasn’t working - it’s a WIP and I have like zero time to actually fix it. Thank you. <3

I’ve noticed a lot of people struggle with weight painting, which I empathize with – not understanding weights kept me from making the kind of CC I wanted to make for years! Most CC tutorials don’t really explain much beyond «do a weight transfer», which isn’t always sufficient, so I decided to write up what I do when I weight paint. I’m sure there are ways of doing this that work just as well (and better!), but through copious trial and error, this is what I’ve found works for me.

I’m mostly going to focus on long dresses and gowns (aka 90% of my CC), but a lot of this should be useful for other types of CC as well.

This isn’t going to be a full, detailed guide to weight painting because, honestly, I don’t actually understand Blender that well. I’m also not going to cover meshing, UV maps, basic weight transfers and stuff like that – if you need advice on those things, check out the Sims4Studio forums. :)

I use Blender 2.76 – things might work/look different in other versions!

1. Vertex groups and mesh explosions

Okay, so this was without a doubt my biggest hurdle back in the day. My meshes kept getting all spiky and deformed in game and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.

Turns out vertex groups are, like, really important. This is probably obvious to a lot of people, but it took me about two years to figure out, so I’m gonna talk about it.

Your mesh needs to have the same vertex groups as the base mesh you’re cloning, and not all EA meshes use the same ones. If you’re doing a weight transfer from the mesh you originally cloned, this shouldn’t be a problem. Most tutorials will tell you to clone an EA package that’s as similar to yours as possible, and this is a huge part of the reason for that.

However, I don’t do that! This is because I don’t want to use too many mesh cuts (for a guide to mesh cuts, look at this Sims4Studio guide) because they confuse me. In fact, I clone 99% of my dresses from the base game chemise so that they’ll be both base game compatible and only use one mesh cut.

Now, the chemise looks nothing like a gown, so if I was going to do a weight transfer from that for a long dress, it... wouldn’t work. That means I have to use something else, and that means paying attention to vertex groups. Let me explain why.

If you export the chemise and open it in Blender, you can see the list of vertex groups on the right. If you try to import a mesh that has additional vertex groups into your package, you’ll get distortions and weird spikes in-game. Most notably when it comes to making long dresses, the chemise does not have Skirt, Foot or Toe bones, but most of EA’s long dresses use one or more of these. So, for instance, if you do a weight transfer from this Holiday Celebration gown:

And import the mesh into a package cloned from the chemise...

Your result will be something like this:

This is because these vertex groups don’t exist in the original cloned mesh:

The easiest way to avoid this is, as I already mentioned, cloning and doing you weight transfer from the same mesh. A lot of the time, that’s going to work just fine. As I also said, though, I don’t do that. So what do I do instead?

2. How to manually fix weights

This is the dress I want to weight paint. My .package file is cloned from EA’s chemise. As you can see, they look nothing alike.

Now, I’ve been doing this for a while, so I already have an old piece of CC that I can do a weight transfer from that’s not going to have any vertex group issues (full disclosure: all my skirt weights these days are transferred from my Hannah dress and then adjusted slightly). For the purposes of this guide, however, that’s not how I’m doing it.

The first thing I’ll do is separate the dress from the body so I don’t mess up any weights unnecessarily. Then I’m going to split the mesh one more time so that I can do individual weight transfers for the top and the skirt.

I do this because it’s usually really hard to find a mesh to do a transfer from that’s similar enough to both parts to give a good result, and since I’m aware of what vertex groups I can use, this isn’t going to be a problem. Sidenote: I also recommend splitting meshes like this for UV1 transfers.

Next, I need to find base meshes to do weight transfers from. For the top, I almost always use this base game sweater because, in my experience, it works for almost anything:

Finding a long dress or skirt is harder, though. I don’t want to use the Skirt, Foot or Toe bones, but just about all EA meshes use them. So what I’m going to do is find a mesh that uses them anyway and then manually remove them.

Note: If you’re completely new to weight painting, you’re going to be much better off finding meshes that use the same bones/vertex groups! I’m doing it this way to demonstrate manual weight painting and editing in general, not the most efficient way of weight painting this particular dress.

I’m going to use the long gown from the Holiday Celebration pack because the skirt has a similar-ish shape.

Let’s take a look at the vertex groups in Blender. This has a lot of bones that I don’t want, but okay!

The next step is to do weight transfers as usual, which I’m assuming I don’t need to cover. Merge the mesh back together (if you split it), and let’s talk about the most important, magical, amazing button in all of weight painting. That’s this one:

See, The Sims 4 only allows vertices to be attached to 4 bones and automatically limits them if there are too many. This can result in weird deformations and spikyness in-game. However, Blender’s «Limit Total» button will, well, limit the number of bones per vertex for you. You can do this manually as well, of course, but I very, very rarely feel the need to. Generally, using this tool regularly during weight painting will fix SO MANY problems. Click it immediately, and keep clicking it every so often.

Next, I’ll pose the rig so I can see what the mesh is going to look like when it moves. This looks pretty good right now, but of course, it’s not going to look like this in-game because it has too many bones. It also looks pretty jagged and doesn’t move very smoothly.

Let’s start with the vertex groups. What I’m going to do next is straight up delete the groups I don’t want. In this case, that would be the Skirt, Foot and Toe bones – compare it to the vertex groups in your cloned mesh if you’re not sure.

Then hit «Normalize All». We just removed a bunch of weights without replacing them with anything, which will result in a whole bunch of weirdness and deformations. Normalizing the weights will automatically make sure all the vertices have the right values to work properly.

Once I’ve got that sorted out, it’s time to do the actual painting. In this case, what I want to do is smooth out some of the jaggedness and fix some spikes that have appeared.

In this case, there appears to be a problem with the left calf. The bone related to this is named, appropriately, enough, b_L_Calf. By clicking this vertex group in Weight Paint mode, we get an view of how the weights are painted on the bone.

Note: All the vertex groups are quite reasonably named. If there’s a problem with the shoulders, for instance, the b_L/R_ShoulderTwist bones are most likely the ones that needs fixing.

Dark blue means the vertexes aren’t weighted to the bone, red means they’re heavily weighted to it. In the image above, it looks like the weird spike should be moving with the rest of the calf, but it’s hasn’t been painted to do so.

There are a couple of ways to fix this, the easiest of which is probably using the «Add» Weight Painting Tool. The exact settings aren’t super important and fairly intuitive, so go ahead and play around with them. Make sure Auto-Normalize is active, though. Then use the tool on the offending vertex, and the weird spike disappears.

The Blur tool is by far the one I use most, though, and it works great for things like this as well. It gives you less precise control than the Add/Subtract tools, though, so it’s mostly a matter of preference.

My next step is going to be smoothing out some jagged edges with the Blur tool, starting with the upper thigh area, which has some spikyness going on.

Note: The mesh I weight transferred from doesn’t use the Thigh bones at all, so with the Skirt bone gone, the skirt is purely weighted to the ThighTwist and Calf bones. This is how I weight paint long, flowy dresses as well. These types of meshes don’t really require a precise distinction between the Thigh and ThighTwist bones, and it’s easier to weight paint two vertex groups than three. Tighter and shorter dresses generally require using all three, though.

To make sure you don’t accidentally start weight painting the arms or unrelated parts of the mesh, you can select the part of the mesh you want to focus on in Edit mode and activate Face selection masking for painting by clicking the tiny red/white cube at the bottom of the screen in Weight Paint mode.

So, back to the actual weight painting – once you understand the basics, it’s really not that hard. Here, I’ve selected the different bones on the leg (b_R_ThighTwist, b_R_Calf b_Pelvis near the top) and gone over them with the Blur tool, and it looks much smoother already.

The next step is to do this, well, everywhere! This involves moving the rig into different positions to see how the mesh moves and rigorous use of the «Limit Total» button to make sure what I see in Blender is what I’m going to see in-game.

I’m not going to give a step-by-step guide here because it’s basically just the same steps over and over until I get a result I’m happy with – using the Add, Subtract and Blur tools on the appropriate vertex groups where I want to fix something, and hitting Limit Total a. lot.

Once I’m happy with how it looks in Blender, I’m going to import my mesh into Sims4Studio and test it in-game...

Aaaand we have a working dress. :)

[keelymewett]

Zombie Movie: I Am Legend (2007)

“Here’s Karen at the health desk.”

Karen from the health desk. (Picture: A female news anchor, Karen from the health desk.)

Language warning (sorry kids, but this is an MA15+ movie). 

I shit you not, that’s one of the opening quotes of the movies. So, friends and enemies, welcome to the longest review I’ve done of a zombie movie yet. It’s 1:35am here in Australia and I’ve just finished rewatching I Am Legend, everything’s fresh in my mind and I’m hyped up on chocolate. 

This movie has incredible tension, a fresh take on the zombie apocalypse, and it’s based on the 1954 novel by Richard Matherson, which inspired the modern day vampire and zombie movies. Why you may ask? Because it popularised the concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to a disease... now I’m beginning to realise that watching zombie movies during a global pandemic maybe wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had. Any who. 

YouTube rewind made me forget how bloody good of an actor Will Smith is, and boy does he deliver in this movie. Robert’s (that his character, btw, though I will probably end up just referring to the character as Will Smith) interactions with Sam the goodest girl in the world (she’s a dog) and the mannequins is incredible.

The goodest girl in the world. (Picture: A dog (I’m sorry - I don’t know dog breeds! I’m 99% sure she’s a German Shepard) being given a bath and head scratches by Will Smith.)

Now: three things to look forward to in this “review” (assuming you read the spoilery section below). One: how realistic is this apocalypse? Two: there’s a dog. Three: zombie vampires. Vampire zombies? 

Backgrounds details! (Picture: Will Smith opened the fridge. On the fridge door are photos of his wife and daughter, a calendar dated for December, a drawing with “Marley” written in kids handwriting, post-it notes, a pamphlet with the heading “Quarantine”, and a Time Magazine cover of Robert Neville (Will Smith). The title reads (heading) “Saviour?” (sub-heading) “Soldier, Scientist” (body of text) “In a Battle that Could Save Thousands of Lives, Lt. Col. Robert Neville Takes on the XV Virus.”

Also, there’s banging in my house at the moment and when I say I’m peaking. I’m going to need to listen to some music while I write this.

Read on for a fun time! Spoilers ahoy!

Realism (the really relevant part. Yikes)

Okay, so what’s this fresh take on the apocalypse? Basically, this doctor cures cancer and it all goes to shit from there. I’m not 100% on the logistical jump from “destroying cancer cells” to “humans (and animals) becoming bloodthirsty mutants that burn in the sun” - for instance, this is just my sci-fi high-school biology and physics brain working here, cancer is basically a rogue cell that mutates other cells and destroys them in the process, yeah? So if the doctor, like she said, uses these cancer cells to work for the body and in the process “cures” cancer, wouldn’t the humans just... infect each other and the virus would kill the host if it went south? Given, that did happen in like 90% of cases as Will Smith explains, but where does the sunlight allergy come in? Is cancer afraid of UV? Confused, but I digress. 

... Is that my queen, Missy, from Umbrella Academy? (Picture: A woman with blood leaking from her eyes, holding a child and shouting for help.)

The scene where they’re listening to the radio and the guy is like we’re “issuing a military quarantine of New York City” I’m like bitch you wish. Unrealistic. The USA currently (9/10/2020) has the highest cases of COVID-19 in the world (for future historians and poor school children, it’s at 7.68 MILLION cases, no statistic for recovered cases for some weird ass reason, and sadly, 212,000 deaths. For reference, here in Australia we’ve had as of today 27,206 cases, 24,807 recovered and 897 deaths. New Zealand, who went into hard lockdown, had as of today, 1,864 cases, 1,800 recovered, and 25 deaths, with a period where there were 0 new cases for several days.)

Though, with that in mind, everyone going outside and gathering in large crowds? Realistic. 

The actual movie part

Praises time! Will Smith has a stockpile of food. Also, him getting Sam (the dog) to eat her vegetables like she’s a little kid? Cutest thing ever. 

Stockpilesss. (Picture: Will Smith wearing an apron and preparing a meal in a kitchen chock full of food items, including things like Pringles and spaghetti sauce.)

Setting alarms on his watch for sunset? Brilliant, smart idea, fantastic. Re-enforced windows and door, AND booby-trapped house? Incredible, genius. Setting traps to catch the zomvamps? (like the dumb name I just came up with? Don’t worry, I’ll reveal the stupid arbitrary name they ACTUALLY came up with later) Talent, intelligence. 

Dude, why wouldn’t you restrain the head/chest? You know, the part that can bite you? (Picture: Will Smith in a lab coat standing over a female zombie-vampire who’s been secured to a metal bench by the wrists and ankles. Medical monitors are connected to her.)

Now, Will Smith is out here looking for a cure. And by looking, I mean actively creating. In a lab. He washes his hands before going in - *chef’s kiss* follow his example - and unlike other zombie movies where it’s super dramatic in the hunt for a cure, this is a lot more chill considering it’s a) been 3 years and b) is more like how science actually works. Trials, tests, animal test-subjects (there is a debate about the ethics of this which I won’t go into here) (I mean a debate in real life not in the zombie movie haha) and human test-subjects. 

“Did you kidnap my girlfriend, bro?” (Picture: bald, pale muscular dude-bro-looking zombie-vampire roaring in rage.)

The mother-fracking zombies

I have to say it: these are the most dumbass looking vampire-zombies. I say vampire-zombies (zomvamps) because they avoid sunlight but also eat people? 

Now, unlike most zombie movies, these are really bloody intelligent zomvamps. At one point, after setting a booby trap and catching a zomvamp after stumbling into a nest of them, Robert says “They’re not showing any human social behaviour.” Hahahaha. Okay bitch first of all dude bro screamed when you kidnapped his mate, secondly dude bro has pet dogs, thirdly dude bro fucking caught you in a trap. He took revenge on you there, love. He followed you home!

The zomvamps are apex predators, can climb, run, hunt in packs, communicate with each other, set booby traps, make coordinated attacks, follow you home, learn where you live and remember it, and holy fuck humans had no chance. 

Thank you for clarifying, because I actually found this quite funny. Like, look at him! (Picture: dude-bro zombie-vampire from earlier growling in front of a flaming car. The zombie-vampires are very CGI, pale, fish-person looking things with pale skin and completely bald of hair. This guy is wearing ripped clothes. The caption reads “Growls menacingly”.)

Random things I have in my notes but haven’t mentioned yet (yes I took notes) 

What’s with the apocalypse and mannequins? Looking at you, Five (Umbrella Academy). 

(Picture: Will Smith looking at a “female” mannequin, who is dressed in a coat and black bob wig. They’re in a movie store. Funnily enough, behind the mannequin is the “Adult” section of the films.)

I agree with the fuck-that-shit sentiment when you see a mannequin suddenly appear in a different part of the city - like how in the hell?? 

(Picture: Will Smith aiming a rifle at a mannequin in an orange jumper. Mannequin is usually located outside of the movie store, yet here it is randomly in the middle of the street at the end of a T-section. There are tall glass windows behind the mannequin, and the window to the right has a giant, gaping pitch black hole in it. It’s presumed that there is a nest of zombie-vampires in there.)

... so is this a booby trap for humans or for zomvamps? Because the former makes sense if that dude bro zomvamp analysed Will Smith’s trap from earlier and remade it (hence dropped the car off a bridge to string him up), and the latter doesn’t really make sense because a) you’ll only catch (and probably kill) one zomvamp and why would you want only one unless you’re Robert and two why tf aren’t you meeting up with Robert he’s been broadcasting and racing around town hunting deer (elk?) in a sports car. 

I’d like to know how hard it actually is to do like a weird sit-up and get yourself free of one of these kinds of traps. Am I dumb for thinking it’s not that hard? (Picture: Will Smith is suspended in the air by a rope tied around his ankle, the result of a booby-trap. He’s struggling to free himself.)

Come on, you’re literally a doctor and a soldier. Don’t tell me you’re actually considering pulling that out? (Picture: Will Smith has been impaled in the leg by something. It looks like he’s about to attempt to pull it out. He’s in the middle of the street as the sun sets, and Sam is right next to him.)

Sam is a queen. Here are some photos of her.

(Picture: Robert Neville’s wife carrying a baby Sam - Sam is a puppy, by the way, and very adorable. Neville’s young daughter is walking out of the gate to their house behind her mother.)

(Picture: Will Smith in a flashback saying goodbye to his wife and daughter and crying. Sam is licking away his tears.)

Sometimes I hate foreshadowing. (Picture: Will Smith searching a house. He opens a cupboard and there’s a newspaper article with a picture of a zombie-vampire dog. The article reads “Infected dogs can come out at dusk. Stay in the light.” There’s a number to call for questions.)

Worst birthday ever. Now I’m sad and there’s still half the movie left. 

(Picture: Will Smith sitting on the floor of his lab, hugging Sam, who’s just been bitten by infected dogs.) 

Get Shrek’d.

(Picture: The ‘Shrek’ movie playing on the TV in Neville’s house.)

Ma’am, do you not know how to ration? That is such a waste of food. (Picture: the woman and kid who rescued Will Smith have cooked breakfast. She’s cooked way too many scrambled eggs for two adults and a kid, and all the of the bacon for literally no reason.)

Oh yeah, wanna know what they call the zombies in this movie? 

Dark Seekers. They dropped that one on us well into the final half of the movie. Dark Seekers? Really? I won’t get into how dumb that sounds when you had two options to choose from - vampires and zombies. Hell, go with my suggestion of zomvamps, even vampzoms. Dark Seekers? Sorry, I get hung up on dumb zombie-alternative names. Sure, I get the atmosphere might be ruined by calling them vampires or zombies, but not even lying I didn’t realise she said “Dark Seekers” until I turned the CC on to grab a quote. I thought she said “Dog Keepers” hahahaha. “The dog keepers got them.” My defence is that the dude bro did keep dogs. 

Finally, wrapping this up at 2:15 before I add in pictures, you’re telling me approximately 100 zomvamps made a coordinated attack on Will Smith’s house to eat... 3 people? That’s like me and a hundred mates descending on the pentagon for a fucking snickers bar. We’d get like an atom each. 

Oh, what’s that? They’re here to rescue one person? Really? Really? How in the fuck are they even zombies if their primary purpose isn’t to eat humans. I’m disappointed. But points for a fresh take, at least. 

Now one of the things I remember about this movie is that is has an alternate ending. The actual ending (huge spoilers but then again, you’re in the spoiler section) has Will Smith sacrifice himself (read: blow himself and the zomvamps up with a grenade) to defend the cure and save his new friends. The alternate ending, which was scrapped due to negative audience reaction, has Will Smith communicate with the zomvamps who like actually calm down and listen to him. He gives the dude bro back his friend, and... no one dies. 

I’m sorry, how is an ending where, sure, a cure isn’t found YET, but, the “villains” of the movie are humanised and a new side of them is seen that shows, hey, maybe there’s another way through this apocalypse, better than an ending where Will Smith dies? Make it make sense test audience. Because, remember, there’s still a whole bunch of immune people living out here, and three of them are currently in the same room. Robert’s only been working on the cure for 3 years. How many years do you reckon it takes to cure cancer? Hint: it’s ongoing in real life. Just because the cure isn’t found in the movie doesn’t mean it won’t be found. Ughhhh. I digress again. 

I have more random photos but I am very tired. If anyone’s interested in hearing me roast butterflies, the world not actually ending in 2012, and a missed pun about Until Dawn (even though it was made like ten years after this), and a quick analysis on Robert Neville and God, let me know :) 

Have a great day everyone, wash your hands, social distance if possible, and quarantine. Just because the COVID-19 virus isn’t turning us into zombies doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting us. 

Worldwide statistics, 9/10/2020: 36.2M total cases, 25.3M recovered, 1.06M deaths. 

(Picture: Will Smith saying “I like ‘Shrek’ after just quoting an entire scene of it to win a kid’s trust.)

[tepiddreamer]

do you know anything about why amaya is raked up right now? have the trainers offered any explanations? it would be nice to hear from them as there is a lot of speculation but no definitive answers

So I have heard nothing outside the normal trainer lines such as ‘raking is a natural form of discipline among killer whales’. Which is half true.

It is true that wild Orcas rake just like they do in captivity. But in captivity it is much more prevalent and even signs of abnormal behaviors amongst captive individuals.

In a wild pod, you will mostly see calves, adolescents, and males with rake marks*. Out of the entire group the youngest will have the most rakes. A mother will rake a calf for attention or punishment. How severe the raking is determines on the behavior, and other members may join in on the action. I have seen wild calves being tossed by pod members, or in some cases the rakes came from siblings attempting to assist a ailing calf. In the wild alloparenting is common, in that younger animals will be raised or ‘babysat’ by other members of the pod while the mother is off hunting or resting. But this kind of behavior is resolved quickly, and not as frequently as in captivity.

In the wild the animals spend a great deal of time traveling from one place to another for food, socializing, traveling again, pod integrations, resting, and what can be considered play time. But the animals are constantly expending energy and being stimulated by other animals, sounds, objects in the water, and food.

In captivity the animals are given their food requirements, and spend less energy traveling or being mobile. While most animals do some kind of behaviors throughout the day to raise heart rate and trainer interaction (stimulation), the caloric burn is not equal to those in the wild. So they log. Or hang at a gate. Or elicit attention from a trainer. A calf will pester or bother another pod mate. And that pod mate now has free time and energy to expend on that calf.

I hate to ever use a human comparison to animals, but this is the best way to explain this. Human children between the ages of 3-7 enter what is known as the ‘push button stage’. A normal child this age is somewhat verbal**, mobile, and likes to explore. This energy can be creative or destructive. They will knock items over, tear them apart, kick/punch other individuals, ignore given commands, purposely or defiantly go against a rule or instruction, act out to garner attention, soil/disrobe themselves, enter/leave a forbidden area, and various other activities to illicit a direct response from parents/caregivers. Basically: what can I do to make you mad and give me what I want, and if I don’t get it I will act out, sometimes violently, to discipline my caregivers.

If you have never had children or worked with them, I recommend a quick view of one of those Supernanny programs. A tantrum/meltdown over not getting chocolate milk is a good example. A frustrated parent will give verbal warnings, put them in time out, and suffer as the child has a complete meltdown for not getting what they want and not being able to communicate their thoughts/feelings. Behaviors observed in baboon and great ape species so negative behaviors by juveniles and are punished by dominate family individuals, either by chasing/biting/grabbing the animals in submission.

Killer Whales have a similar process. Except they lack appendages like hands/feet. So they use a warning call, chase the individual, roll them over/hit with their tail flukes/rake with their teeth. A raking is a direct punishment, it does cause pain, although how much pain depends on how deep the rake is. A superficial rake will probably come down to a shock factor, a deeper rake is more than likely a painful reminder. A calf may not come when called, stray to far from their mother, rough play with another animal, may take a EED away, persistently want to nurse or ask for food, general aggravation of a tired mother.

In captivity is where the aberrations really start. And these aberrations differ from animal to animal and park to park. Here we see Shouka vocalizing before she purposely went after Ulises and went after his tail. A minute later Kalia and Shouka began fasting chasing each other then rolling/balling. This is a reconcile effort, in that touch can reconcile bad feelings. What set Shouka off is unknown, however in the last year I have seen her become aggressive towards the males and even Amaya. In Kalias case she would rather spend time with the trainers than with her daughter Amaya, who is very independent. Shouka will often be paired with Kalia and Amaya, and the 3 of them are a force to be reckoned with. Shouka has taught a great deal of behaviors to Amaya, and Kalia has passed her assertiveness onto her daughter as well. But this assertiveness has gotten her in trouble, she has a tendency to bully Ulises who will turn around and give it right back. Shouka seems to have a shorter tolerance for Amayas habits, and will quickly roll and rake Amaya, even with Kalia in full view. Amaya is pushing buttons, how far can she get within another whales personal space before they react. Kalia seems to become jealous of her daughter getting attention by the glass and by trainers, she has pushed Amaya away. Amaya has energy to burn and wants to be stimulated, but in a gated pool with bored adults its not happening, so she plays with the gate, or interacts with guests, baits birds, plays on the slide outs, elicits responses from Shouka, and wastes time.

Makani has lost his mother, the former matriarch of the San Diego pod. As a juvenile male, he is the bottom of the ladder, and the first to be disciplined. Luckily Makani has been taken in by Corky, but Corky is a no-nonsense whale and will quickly put Makani down. Recently Tilikum16 posted a video of Orca Encounter being interrupted by Makani after he tried to nibble Corkys tail, and Corky chased him into the show pool. Corky resolved the tension herself, but Makani stayed in the show pool. Ikaika is submissive to Makani, Keet does well, Nakai has rolled him, Ulises has raked him several times. The females don’t tolerate him well. This is not to say that this wouldn’t be happening if Kasatka was still around, he would still be on the bottom and raked up. Makani is testing his limits of what he can get away with and his own environment. He will push EEDs over a gate and vocalize until a trainer retrieves them.

photo@Makaiolover_lisag

Makaio is the youngest of the Orlando pod, and currently one of 5 whales in the pod. While he does have some raking, he is not as bad as the youngsters in San Diego.

photo@LunaBeluga

Sakari is also another juvenile whale in San Antonio, a member of 5 whales. She as well has superficial raking (notably on her saddle) but again not as prominent as the San Diego pod

So what is wrong here?

Well for one is pod size. The San Diego pod is now at 10 whales, 5 females/5 males. There is a good mix of Older female (Corky), Older Male (Ulises), Middle Age (Keet, Orkid, Shouka), Teenage (Ikaika, Nakai, Kalia), and finally juvenile (Makani, Amaya) These whales are often broken into 4 groups with Dominant/Cycling (Kalia, Shouka, Amaya), Intelligence (Orkid, Nakai, Ikaika), Balance (Corky, Keet, Ikaika, Makani), Size (Ulises, Keet). Throughout the day these smaller groupings will be intermingled or switched out from pool to pool for husbandry or shows. Some whales do not do well mixed (Corky/Ulises), are direct family (Kalia, Amaya, Makani, Nakai) or are used for high energy behaviors (Ulises, Kalia, Shouka, Orkid, Nakai). Some animals like Corky and Ulises are put into underwater viewing due to ‘tank pacing’, they swim in circles all day long and keep park guests interested. Others log all day like Keet. But by keeping them separated they cannot form a cohesive pod. Dominate behaviors from Kalia and Shouka lose traction with other whales like Orkid or Corky when they are kept in different pools for days at a time. They can hear each other, they can maybe see one another, but cannot enforce matriarchal behaviors until they are in the same pool together. Kalia and Shouka were recently kept separate for 43 days due to not being on birth control, this further adds tension to the group, then possible hormonal/sexual frustrations from being placed back on BC. This group cannot easily be put entirely together due to tensions within the pod.

They also can’t escape one another. Ulises will relentlessly be bullied by Shouka and Kalia for hours and trainers will ignore it (my last visit in July I was privy to this first hand in that Ulises had new rake marks by the end of the day, and was chased during a dine program, yet trainers made no move to switch him in to another pool). Amaya will hang at a gate while Kalia and Shouka log near trainers. While Corky does adore Makani, I sense she wants time away from him sometimes. When the whales have a ‘disagreement’ I do argue that sometimes separating them needs to be done sometimes. You mix them up daily for enrichment and stimulation but ignore the warning signs that they are not a cohesive group.

In San Antonio Takara and her 2 daughters are often together with access to another pool, the 2 youngster often entertain themselves with following trainers or splashing guests. The 2 males are often separate in another pool, except for main shows. Takara gets plenty of trainer time and alone time.

In Orlando there has been a great deal of disruption. Medical problems, separation due to cycling, storm interruptions (rain delays and show stops can frustrate a animal that is used to routine), loss of the UV area to interact with guests, and new/unconfident trainers. But it is still a smaller group that can be easily separated or put together as one if needed.

TL:DR Amaya and Makani are heavily raked due to aberrations in a captive environment. They are basically toddlers pushing their nearest tanks mates buttons and suffering the consequences. These consequences are exacerbated by confinement, irregular groupings, boredom, and frustrations.

Wild whales rake but captive animals act out.

* males with give each other rakes during sexual play with another male. Also mammal eating or stranding ecotypes may have more skin damage from the type of prey they are hunting

** In the last 15 years cases of Autism and lower brain development have increased. The number of non-verbal children by age 5 has drastically increased. Even with a limited vocabulary a child can convey basic feelings, but can become stressed or frustrated when they cannot come across clear or what they need. Scientific studies and research must be updated to account for the raising numbers of children who are non-verbal or limited vocabulary after the age of 5. I did not included children in late stage prepubesent/puberty as hormonal changes due alter behaviors.

[spacezeta]

Devlog once more

Featuring the previously poopy-looking tree after a glow up!

The previous tree had a placeholder generic bark texture and the tree itself had only been uv mapped pretty liberally (Blender’s Smart UV Project can do wonders but it can’t work miracles). Now, this new tree not only has some roots on the bottom (...which you can’t really see in this picture...) but was also properly mapped, though the big difference was the dirt and mold painted into the texture itself. Since I’m going for a PS2 era-look, all the dirt and wear of objects are all baked into their diffuse textures, which in turn are the only kind of texture map used (it ain’t PBR that’s for sure). Also the base bark texture is different! (thanks textures.com!) Also the #filter helps for the tree’s self-esteem.

Speaking of updating textures, I did a massive upgrade on the wall/floor textures and now everything is much, much better looking. Before doing that I went to study some actual models of old PS2 games for inspiration and, specifically in Silent Hill, I noticed that a lot of textures had a very grungy look to them, as if someone had slapped a grunge texture as an overlay. So I did just that! Well, sort of. But basically that. Also some other touch ups and I just really liked the result.

Here’s old version / new version:

it’s subtle but it’s there

Aside from texture shenanigans, there was again a lot of cutscene-related stuff (mostly animating and then implementing the cutscene in the engine itself), and then I had to stop everything to make a, let’s say, character, from scratch (the whole high poly then retopology then rigging and now animating). Honestly it took me longer to actually figure out what I was going to do than to actually do it, mostly because my stubborn self decided to start sculpting without a very clear idea of what I was going to do so I had to start over twice.

Lesson learned here: planning is yummy. planning will save you from future headaches. yay planning.

(I now have that written on a post it note right in front of me so that I don’t forget it ever again)

Also, good news! The reestructuring of the game is going to be much simpler than expected, and it’s going to take a lot less time than what I had initially predicted. I found this out after finishing the initial cutscenes, when I finally got to some proper gameplay and half an hour later I had already slammed right into another cutscene whooooops. Not that these scenes are one right after the other, mind you! It’s just that I got the gameplay part done so fast that suddenly I was doing another cutscene again. So, good news!

Nothing much to say aside from that, other than I took a week off to travel to São Paulo to see my favorite band live (it’s Muse and they’re the greatest, fight me) which also happily coincided with BGS, probably the biggest gaming event here in Brazil (oi pros br lendo isso) so I got to go to that for the first time. This year we only walked around, did some reconnaissance, but hopefully next year I can be there with an actual game to showcase!

[studentlulu]

Disclaimer: Everything that I have written about is completely true and happened to me within the 2017-2018 year.  I wrote all of this as not only a way of coping with what has happened to me, but to come to terms with and helping me understand the difficulties and challenges I went through in the past two years.  I did not do this because I sought attention or for any other self-serving narcissistic purposes.  If you have read through this completely and have any questions for me or want to learn more, please feel free to personally message me and I will answer your questions to the best of my ability.  In addition, after you have read this through, if you feel like commenting, please leave only positive comments.  Please refrain from leaving any negative comments.

           My journey to college graduation has been a long and difficult one, full of twists, turns, and bumps along the way.  I entered into the University of California Irvine (UCI) as a Freshman in Sept. 2014 and fully intended to finish in Jun. 2018.  That would have been the plan if things had worked out perfectly well.  However, as we all know, things never go perfectly well, especially not with life.

           Sure enough, I was diagnosed with stomach cancer in spring during my junior year in 2017.  It was devastating news beyond comprehension.  I was so scared.  I was only 20! There were so much things I wanted to do!  I want to explore the world and I even planned to study abroad in Singapore that year!  I want to eat different cuisines from around the world! I want to do so much more! Now with this news, all of this has abruptly stopped!  Everything became dire uncertainty.  What do I do?  Do I have tomorrow?  How long? How do I tell everyone?  Who do I tell?  Most of all, how do I cope?  My mind went ballistic!  My family was by my side when I found out, and we promised that we would get through this together.

           We discussed treatment options with my doctors and decided that I should go through one round of chemo, surgery, recovery, and then one final round of chemo.  Each chemo round was four appointments and would require me to come to UCSF Medical Center.  Due to the rigorous treatment plan, it was decided that I would have to postpone school till I finished treatment and recovery.  It was a very difficult decision, but it was the only way to deal with the condition.  So, I contacted the Bio Sci School of Affairs Office and told them about my predicament, and requested to postpone my education and enrollment until further notice. Thankfully, they were quite understanding and informed me that they would readmit me back to school whenever I was ready.

           Chemotherapy left me tired, nauseous, moody, and grumpy. It also left me very cold-sensitive and UV-sensitive.  Starting with my second infusion of chemotherapy, my hair fell out.  I slowly became bald and I hated my look.  I loathed the fact of losing my stomach even more!  I love food! Without my stomach, how can I eat? What can I eat?  How can I go to school or go on with life without my stomach?  Of course, not to mention the unimaginable constant need of going to toilet!  After the pre-surgery chemo was done, I then had the surgery to remove my stomach in early October 2017.  I was hospitalized for more than two weeks for that procedure.  Recovery from surgery was extremely difficult.  I was not allowed to eat what I wanted nor as much.  I had to mentally force myself to ignore my hunger feelings as my brain needed time to adjust to the fact that there is no stomach to store food.  I had to eat ¼ the portion of a normal adult meal.  This proved to be arduous because I love food and love to eat.  In fact, when I was healthy, I could eat as many portions as I wanted and sometimes, I would finish others’ leftovers.  Wasting food is a crime, I believed that.  In addition, in Chinese culture, it was considered respectful and a sign of appreciation to be able to eat as many portions as you could.  I couldn’t do that anymore with a smaller stomach size. What if others who did not know about my condition became misinformed and thought I was eating less and being disrespectful?  With this new body, I totally resented the fact that I could no longer eat as much because I equated it as I would no longer able to enjoy food!  Recovery was very painful; and I hated the “heathy” but very bland food that I had to eat.  What is there to look forward to when I could not even enjoy the most basic thing in life: eating?  Life seemed bleaker at every moment passed.  Only the constant encouragements from parents and others kept me going, but barely without passion.

           Another chemotherapy soon went underway after surgery. This time around, my physical reactions were worse, and my mental stage sunk even lower.  I developed dry heaving.  I could not stop scratching my skin, I was extremely tired and fatigued, sometimes unwilling to leave the bed, and there were times I did not want to take in or even eat food because the mere sight of it made me ill.  Then, on Dec. 19, 2017, during what was supposed to be my second fusion of chemotherapy during my final round of chemo regiment, something went terribly wrong.  I went into anaphylactic shock due to negative reactions to chemotherapy.  I could hear my younger brother (chemo treatment center only allowed one relative staying with patient) franticly calling me, and I could barely hear my nurse called out “Code Blue” before I lost consciousness on the treatment chair!  When I faintly regained my consciousness, I felt heavy stuff on my chest.  I believed that it must had been my unconscious will to live that kept me alive.  Or perhaps the prayers from parents and my families had kept me alive.  Or perhaps it was not my time to die yet.

           I was extremely fortunate that I was under the care of the world-class doctors, nurses, and other medical professions at UCSF Medical Center, because they revived and saved me.  I woke up in the emergency unit after 4:30 pm with my parents on my bedside.  I had been out for at least six hours.  I wound up staying in the hospital for observations and treatments for two days. IV chemo treatment was discontinued after that; and the doctors prescribe another form of chemo treatment for me.

           I went back to school after completing treatment during spring break in April 2018.  I wanted to go back to school so badly for a change of venue and for a more “hopeful” environment.  A familiar place where I thought I had better control of life.  After all, I had been in a school environment all my life.  Ironically, as I started back to school, it was ending for many others.  As everyone else was enjoying their spring breaks, I was slowly readjusting back to school.  It felt weird to be returning to school towards the end of the quarter.  School was so quite.  I got new roommates who were very friendly though.  For that, I was grateful for their kindness.  

           I found it very hard to stay off social media and see everyone else’s progress.  I was supposed to be part of the graduating class of 2018 that quarter, but I couldn’t.  Facebook was the worst place because many of my classmates and friends were posting their graduation pictures.  I would read their posts or look them over and I would feel terribly inadequate afterwards because I was not to part of that graduating class which I had set my heart and my mind to be a part of.  I felt like a big failure.  I failed! That was the only two words that occupied my mind.  I fell into darkness.

           To prevent myself from feeling worse I tried my best to stay as far away social media as I could.  I would call and text my parents, often in tears, asking whether I could have done better or been better to graduate on time like everyone else. They would often reassure me that I had (a) done my very best, (b) that everyone finishes college at their own pace, (c) there’s no rule saying that I had to finish college in four years, (d) that I went through something extraordinary that most people could not comprehend, and (e) that I could reach out to medical professions or my trusted relatives or friends to seek their opinions.  To my parents, I stood up to cancer and I won!  Such accomplishment and my life are worth every bit of celebration!  I should be very proud of what I went through and had achieved.  Sometimes their comforts worked and made me feel better; but more often they did not because I felt that my parents were not me and could never understand what I had gone through.  Talking to my therapist and sometimes my cousin D (who was also a licensed therapist) temporarily helped me to sort through my feelings, as it seemed to be a safe place to open up and freely express myself emotionally.  

           However, no matter what, I still had to live with my new physical form.  I hated this new me: missing organ, patched up body, and no amount of time would ever restore it!    

           Summer rolled in.  It was much worse for me than spring.  During the summer I was trying to find employment while living on my own. The long periods of unemployment dragged me down to spiral back into the same emotional depression I faced in spring. I started to question my self-worth and believed that because I did not finish school on time, I was stuck here as a failure, forced to finish school late, or attempted to finish school now, while my classmates graduated and moved on with their lives.  I was stuck in a negative emotional spiral; and the worst part of it was that it was self-inflicted.  At that time, I didn’t see it, and couldn’t get myself out of it. It was a negative self-hatred cycle, one that I found comforting and validating in its own twisted sort of way because it was the one thing that was being truthful to me in my life.  I felt that everyone else, including my mom, stepdad, cousins, and friends, knew nothing about what I had gone through personally.  I felt like they did not truly mean what they said about being proud of me and loving me. Even worse, I had forgotten what a champion and fighter I had felt like completing chemo and cancer treatments. What I had gone through no longer felt like an accomplishment worth celebrating, but a laborious task that anyone could have done or gone through.  It was no longer impressive.  Instead of saying to myself, You went through something terrible and came out of it a stronger person, I found myself saying instead, So what you went through chemotherapy and finished your cancer treatment? Thousands of people do that every day. You’re nothing special.  YOU’RE not special but a failure!

           The negative self-hate caused me to cut off contact with loved ones, even my immediate family.  My mother tried very hard to keep contacting me and was concerned for my well-being.  Once, when she called me to ask me why I hadn’t spoken to her in a long time, I finally managed to choke out, “I don’t want to talk to you because I’m angry and I hate myself, mommy.  I hate myself and want to end it!  I don’t want to talk to you about it or let you know.  You would never understand!”  My mother would respond, “Your feelings are always yours and no one can truly feel exactly.  However, please note that you are loved and not alone.  We are here for you, always!  Just let anyone know that you are around or reach out to anyone you trust. That’s okay.  You had been so brave to go through so much in your young life. Every bit of your life is worth in solid gold!”  Of course, I could not listen to her. I cut her off and took her out of my contacts. That’s how deep I was in my own dark world!  Without me knowing it, Mom never gave up on me and had clever ways to send encouraging words to me.  Today, in my clear conscience, I cannot imagine the amount of anguish my mother must had in hearing her own daughter said she hated herself.  

           I ceased having social interactions with others because I did not want to be around others who, I saw and viewed, as not supporting me and my thoughts.  The few times I did speak with others I sometimes got into emotional outbursts. I wound up treating my mom and others as emotional punching bags, venting out my angers or more negative emotions on them.  At times, I would even text them to tell them that I found life unbearable and not worth living, and that I wanted to end my life.  My behaviors were so reckless but I was not in the right mindset to realize them. I was in such a deep depression stage and only focusing on all the terrible things.  I learned later that my suicidal threats made my mother go into emotional breakdowns and become physically ill.  God, what hell I had put my mom through!  I regret such awful behaviors!  If only I knew what I know now.  I am sorry.

           What finally pulled me out of that negative spiral for good was my witness in person to my mom’s unconditional love.  In September 2018, I came home for my follow-up doctors’ appointments.  My parents sat me down and had a heart-to-heart talk with me.  We talked about things and addressed my negative spiraling emotions.  My mother looked me in the eye and told me that she could not believe what I had said or even considered giving up on living.  “Life is precious,” she said, “please take good care of it, and always carry a grateful heart!”   Especially since my dad went through the same thing and so much worse, yet he never gave up and fought to the end.  He was a true fighter.  In addition, my mother’s boss has a daughter, in my age, who went through the same thing, but she never gave up.  In fact, she was now in Africa doing volunteer work. As we talked, I learned of the efforts my mom and stepdad made behind the scenes to keep me well.  I could see and feel mom’s passions for life and for me as she held back her tears.  I saw for the first time in person how my actions and words had deeply hurt her.  I could see how much my life meant to her, and I will always be precious to her and a part of her.  I could see how I had misunderstood my parents.  My struggles were their struggles, plus much more.  I’m a survivor and indeed I should be proud of it!  

           I decided that it was time to change.  I changed how I saw things and decided that I would only focusing on positive thoughts instead.  I changed my perceptions of my new body.  I shifted my focus on the bad things happened to me to how I can use my story to inspire others.  I changed my mindset about future outlook of my life.  God has given me many chances to live, that’s got to mean something.  I am intended to find my purpose in life. I will keep trying my best and never give up.  

It’s been two years since the initial diagnosis and over a year since I finished treatment.  I haven’t shared my story publicly until now because of many reasons, but mostly fear of criticism from others.  However, it is my life, and it is my story.  As time passes, I have gained more confidence and strength in myself. More importantly, I am here today because I have so many giants standing behind and supporting me.  I owe it to them, all of those unsung heroes, to share my story as an upcoming UCI Class of 2019 graduate.  And no, I did not graduate late, I graduated just right on time.

Acknowledgement and Thanks: I would like to thank my mom, stepdad, brother, and both sides of my family for their love and support during the difficult times in my life.  I would also like to thank Dr. Korn, Dr. Nakakura, Ms. Renee Wang, Nurse Lana Taran, Dr. Jaime Cohen, and the rest of the medical teams and staff at UCSF Mission Bay Hospital.  You are literally my life-savers!  At UCI, I would like to thank the Bio Sci Student Affairs Office for being very understanding of my situation, allowing me to take time off to recover, and allowing me to re-enroll again after I regained my health.  Thanks to Mr. Cheng Ko at the DSC Office for registering me with important resources on campus, as well as helping me get reacquainted and readjusted with school after I returned.  Thanks to Ms. Sheena Danesh for helping me find important resources to use when I first got diagnosed, such as the DSC, and when I returned to school. Also, thank you for helping me with the multiple doctors’ appointments that I had to attend.  I would also like to thank Ms. Adelí Duron and Jane Killer at the VSC for their support and understanding, as well as answering any questions I had about financial aid.  I would also like to thank Dr. Eldridge and the UCI Counseling Center for seeing me for the past two years since my diagnosis and upon return from treatments.  Thank you for providing me with a safe and secure place for opening up emotionally and tools to deal with my stress.  Finally, to the countless unnamed friends, people, and others along the way who helped me or motivated me along the way.  I could not have gone through this alone.  

Thank you so much.

Love,

LuLu

[flowerrpetaled]

( olivia holt, demi female, she/they, fire emblem: awakening ) * &. i know it must be scary for you, olivia after surviving the takeover. to turn into someone like orion “ori” monroe, a twenty-five year old clerk at amy’s, right here in castle town. just remember that you are as artistic as you are self-conscious, and to be wary, be safe, be true to who you are : neutral through and through. ( hylia )

                yes i gave myself awakening rights again bc this is,,, best girl,,, i love olivia sm n im so excited 2 write here bt like owain - all of u be warned bc i haven’t played awakening in a long long time so i’m bound 2 be rusty with her !! / tws : death , kidnapping ( ment ) , anxiety

BEFORE THE SNAP . /  O L I V I A

so OKAY. prior to the events of the game , Olivia was a dancer that traveled around the continent of Ylisse with a theatre troupe -  unfortunately , bc of her popularity , a plot to kidnap her into her career had been set into place , and the west khan of ferox basilio prevented it. this would start off their friendship , which would eventually lead to olivia’s involvement in the plegia-ylisse war. 

her involvement was firstly to rescue chrom’s army post emmeryn’s death , to where she escorted them back to ferox via a carriage convoy. and then afterwards , before facing off against gangrel , she joined chrom’s army as a dancer to invigorate and inspire troops ( aka , if you’re not familiar with the dancer class in fe , olivia’s ur only dancer in awakening and she can basically make ppl move twice one turn )

BTTTT YEAH that’s rly about it ?? my olivia’s not married 2 anyone in particular - kinda just leaving that open ( only flat no is chrom bc chrobin rights ) bt she has her son inigo n she loves him dearly !!

but okay so like ,,,, character-wise , olivia is graceful & considered a perfomance genius. she dances divinely & her singing is gorgeous - however , she possesses extreme stage-fight & anxiety as well as incredibly low self-esteem. she’s very sweet & kind & a lovely person , but she’s also ,,,, honestly this poor girl thinks so lowly of herself n modern-day olivia would probably be behind so many self-deprecating memes

poor baby is startled v easily by surprises and/or strangers - a lot of her supports help her find ways 2 cope with this in one way or another and some of them are ,,,, incredibly sweet ?? like. one of my personal faves is her support w/ stahl where he respects her comfort zone & communicates her with notes bc he knows olivia gets incredibly anxious around confrontation. virion also volunteers to teach olivia a dance from across a room i believe for these same reasons just to respect her comfort zone n it’s INCREDIBLY sweet

one thing For Sure is that her confidence raises as she performs - but almost immediately after , the adrenaline fades n olivia goes back to her shell - n that’s okay. i honestlyyyyy really love olivia sm bc like , i deal w/ a LOT of what she deals with n it was rly cool to see a character like me bc i uh. yeah im an anxious fucker.

i also always feel the need to explain myself n am incredibly shy n need assurance even if my actions were entirely valid.

bt yeah i’m so excited 2 write her n give ini his momma !! she’s my babie,,,, il uv her,,,,

AFTER THE SNAP . /  O R I O N  M O N R O E

SO ORI. ori is an interesting story in itself bc again in some ways it’s a lot of what i dealt with bt also,, you’ll see.

so i’m 90% sure she’s like. the third character i have born to famous parents bt ori was a case where she was the fourth child of a dancer mother, an actor father, and her siblings were performers + producers + directors and ori was expected to fill the same shoes.

however, she didn’t excel like they did - she didn’t excel and was always seen as the “odd one out” and the “disappointment” even tho she was just as talented as the rest of them. she just... didn’t get lucky in her career like they did, and her parents, instead of helping her or pushing her to keep trying, kind of just... used her as their token disappointment bc ig “every family has one” and all that bullshit.

so she was the one who led a more quiet life and for that reason couldn’t take the constant weight her family put on her to succeed when they already accepted she couldn’t. so that’s when ori moved out to castle town, just bc it was quiet and nice and off the map.

and also nobody... connected the dots. nobody saw her as the odd one out that didn’t fit into a family of celebrities. ori was just ori and while ori wanted to pursue her own things, she was made to feel comfortable in her own skin again.

still as shy as ever and definitely quiet & anxious, she’s an aspiring dancer but doesn’t really want to go onstage again just yet. she survived , so yes she remembers, but she’s more comfortable right now dancing in an empty room by herself than in front of other people. bt she’s defo choreographed like a hundred dances just by herself buuut she’s still gotten the “i’m not meant for that stuff” thing stuck in her head when she watches the dancers at ct centre of theatre & dance and she’s scared to audition for those reasons.

she currently works at the makeup counter at amy’s !! bt also on bad days she sometimes works in the stockroom instead w/ permission n it makes her feel better.

so she’s still,,, babie. n she wants to find inigo more than anything even tho she’s honestly scared he won’t remember her when she does : (

ANYWAYS I LOVE HEERRR IM GONNA HOPEFULLY START THINGS ON HER SOOOOOOOOOOn