#first time since 2021 i feel really good about this. 2022 was decent but a stepdown and 23 sucked ass.

[ashenberry]

[ID: Apollo Justice and Trucy Wright from the ace attorney series at a concert. trucy is leaning over with excitement in her eyes and apollo has is arms crossed and leaning towards trucy. end ID]

semi frequent apollo justice redraw! now featuring trucy. previous apolli here speedpaint under the cut

[Video Description: A speedpaint of the above mentioned image. end Description]

[sleepanonymous]

Hi, I was wondering if you knew when Vessel started 'dancing' on stage? I'm pretty sure he started doing in in the late Sundowning-ish era/ TPWBYT era but I thought you'd probably be the best person to ask about finding videos from when he started dancing.

Oooh this is an interesting rabbit hole, thanks for asking Anon 🖤

So... I guess it depends on what you mean by dancing, because Vessel has always sort of moved on stage, you know? But what he did back then and what he's doing now is completely different. Like... maybe a better word for what he used to do is "writhing." The earliest video of a ritual I've seen of Sleep Token's was their third ritual in (what I'm assuming is) late 2017, and "writhing" is probably the best word for what Vessel was doing on stage (and I say that affectionately/respectfully).

TLDR; Conclusively I would say Vessel started dancing, as we see him dance on stage today, in the summer of 2022. He's always moved on stage, and even acted unhinged during Sleep Token's earlier rituals. Below the cut, I go through rituals on YouTube from 2018-2023 to try and pinpoint exactly when Vessel started dancing like we see currently in 2023. (I went through quite a few videos, most not even mentioned in this monster of a post, so I made a YouTube playlist here).

A great example of Vessel's early "writhing" dancing is this YouTube video of Nazareth from the 2018 Leeds Festival (he's also an absolute menace here!! He steps on III, he didn't paint his waist or his back, and he strangles and spits on the original OG IV. Like... the man had demons and I am here for them). The dancing that's most similar to current times starts around 2:37 and 3:40.

2019 is impossible to find good videos for lol, since they did most of their rituals for the Beautiful Oblivion tour as an opener and, apparently, nobody films openers. But there are some with decent audio quality from ArcTanGent (my favorite being The Offering). Interestingly, he's less animated, still writhing, but not a menace to the rest of the band while doing so. If anyone is even slightly photosensitive please don't watch these ArcTanGent videos, the lighting effects really didn't agree with the camera's shutter speed.

This is a video of Higher from December 2019. The sound is not as crisp, and the videographer is quite a bit further from the stage, but Vessel is still moving, especially towards the end. The breakdown starts around 2:15, and while III and OG IV are definitely more animated than Vessel, he's still dancing with them. He even jumps down to scream the end of the song at the barrier (and has a mini-wardrobe malfunction) at 2:39. That crowd was really feeling it and so was Vessel.

Because of the plague in 2020, all of Sleep Token's shows were in January. Vessel's behaviour was very similar to the video posted above (just with less crowd interaction). The first show they played in 2021 was the Download Pilot. This is the best audio quality of that show, and Vessel also moves/dances the most in this video, though it's toward the end around 2:31, where the videographer forgot they were filming and just started vibing, so it's really hard to see, lol. I don't blame them, but it's also shakycam to the max. (Also, a quick fun fact, this is the first show the band played with our current IV as far as I can tell.)

This is another video from 2021, but from Sleep Token's TPWBYT rituals tour. It's Hypnosis, and in the very beginning, we see some Floor Vessel, which is neat and reminiscent of the most recent NA rituals, before he does some of his usual writing, though quite a bit more animated. Around 4:06 you can see the writing again, but after 4:19 it morphs into what we've seen from more recent rituals. (Also, if anyone wants a full 70-minute video of this show, filmed from the center of the balcony looking down on the stage, you can watch it here. Some parts have major flashing, so just be careful).

Here's another video of Hypnosis, this time from September 2022. Here, finally, we see Vessel's current version of dancing, hops and arm flails included. It starts right when the song kicks in at 0:13, and he does it again at the end, around 4:29. Technically they did a UK tour with the Architects in May (see this video of The Offering at 3:50) and an Australian tour in June 2022 with Northlane (again, see this video of The Offering at 0:20, 1:37), with similar behaviour from Vessel, but that BRRF Hypnosis video is the first video I ever watched of Sleep Token live so it's very dear to me and it's also better sound quality than anything I could find from earlier in the year.

I went way overboard with answering this question, Anon, but it was super fun, so thank you again for asking 🖤🙏 Again, I made a playlist of all the videos + several others. If anyone has any recommendations for me to add to the playlist, send the links my way (especially if they aren't The Offering or Hypnosis lol) and I'll add them in chronological order.

[7nsomnia]

can i ask, what’s wrong with dcc? i always hear that they kinda suck as a company, but from the vlogs i’ve seen, they’re one of the better companies. i’m not really as into dreamcatcher as some of the blogs on here even though i consider myself a stan, so i might not have the right information

okay. I feel like this is like opening my personal pandora box so this might be long. I'm pretty tired today so apologies in advance if this isn't very coherent asdkjh

dcc are a pretty decent company on a surface level, they treat the members well (which should be like the bare minimum for any company but I know that in this industry that's something to genuinely praise) and they actually change according/respond to negative feedback from the fandom etc when they or the members mess up (or they used to anyway).

for me it started in 2020 and how they handled handong's return. like the way they handled her absence was fine (good even, I would say), but the lack of hype for her actual return made things feel so underwhelming even though it was supposed to feel like a relief that she was finally back. I can't remember all the details anymore, but I do remember that the first time I felt like things were actually alright with dc was when they did the online concert crossroads in march of 2021. on that note I think most ppl were expecting ttol and dlm to be repackaged with ot7 versions and yet it's 2024 and they still haven't released them.

the handong stuff atp is water under the bridge tho, the group is fine, the members are fine, etc, I'm only mentioning it because that's when things started to feel really off for me.

so now we get into the actual things that happened that have left the fandom feeling burned out/frustrated/disconnected etc etc, whereas this happened to me at the end of 2022, I'm seeing more people now going through what I did back then:

I think the most pressing thing was that dcc didn't capitalize at all on dc's first win. they got their first win in april 2022 and didn't even do anything special in korea to commemorate it. it was a HUGE moment and they did nothing with it. usually after a group gets a first win you'll see them getting more promotions in korea, magazine photoshoots, mc deals, etc but dc just went on ahead to do festivals in europe and have a usa tour, these things are not bad but it was the lack of promotion in korea that in turn just made it all feel useless. that year dc also weren't invited to any end of year awards if I'm not mistaken so it all felt really disappointing and like all of the work we had as a fandom had been for nothing. I have to reiterate, dc/insomnias had been getting screwed over on music shows since 2019 with deja vu to get that first win, like I don't want to talk about the injustices the group and this fandom suffered through the years but it was a true story of resilience, so getting that first win in 2022 was a huge relief. to see it all going to waste was just... heartbreaking honestly.

when it comes to tours...... god I don't wanna get too much into it, but 4 tours in the usa in the span of 2 years is not normal. specially when they're prioritizing that over having a proper asia tour and the likes (AND promoting in korea??). latam tour is practically sold out rn and they're getting no merch or m&g benefits like the usa tour. I don't think doing exclusive things for a specific tour is bad per say, but you have to treat all your fans semi equally at least, specially for a group whose fanbase is majorly international (this will be important later), or it will happen what is happening rn which is ppl will leave the fandom. This is the first latam tour since 2019 (2017 for brazil!)... they've waited a really long time so personally (even tho this doesn't affect me bc I'm european) I feel like it's really disrespectful but wtv, onto other things.

now, speaking of the fanbase being majorly international, if this is the case, you'd think the company would make an effort to stream important events to their fans, like hmm the 7th anniversary concert perhaps? but nop, that didn't get streamed. a repetition of the dumbassery they did in 2022 where they split the concert and the members' solos in 2 days and only streamed one and so intl fans couldn't watch half the solo stages? and don't get me wrong, I think it's important that they have events that are korea only like they have the fansigns etc, but something as major as their 7th anniversary? when they've gotten here thanks to their international fans? that stings a little.

and lastly (maybe), we have dcc's usual lack of promotion during comebacks. fans always paying for ads, intl fans always doing the most for digitals even when it's Not their place (because this is smth that the korean fandom and dcc should be responsible for), fans having to reach out for vendors etc... Justice cb truly has been the culmination of the very worst promotions dcc has done tho and there have been some really bad promotions before... no radio shows, minimum interviews, barely any variety... were there even any ads? usually it's always fans paying out of pocket for ads. it just feels like throwing the members' and the company's work out the window for no good reason? Virtuous is one of their best albums and yet it feels like they just dumped it to go on tour again. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing btw, having short promotions in korea is fine but like... promote for real? give your fandom content that they can watch and rewatch for however long it takes your group to have another cb? specially now that it seems that they're shifting to one album per year (not sure this is their wisest decision tho all things considered), you have to make sure that you promote that album properly? which kinda also goes with like, giving your fandom enough time to save for what you release and put out, specially if you're not trying to grow the fandom anymore. if they're dropping an album then don't announce a tour on top of that, and if they're announcing a tour then don't announce a photobook on top of that, and if they've just released an album then wait longer than a month to announce a photobook, and if they've just dropped a photobook then wait a bit longer until announcing the re print of albums the fans have been begging you for 6 years to re print LOL bc all this does is frustrate fans who can't make that much money in such a short time and it's stupid. like. in 2018 I dropped like 200 euros for like their very first photobook BECAUSE I had time to save that amount from their you and I cb (may) to whenever it was announced (I think it was august), and that was the highest tier (so you could get it for much cheaper) and bc back then it was like. well they barely release anything other than albums, so it's fine (also shipping was sooooooo much cheaper I miss it everyday, ofc this is not their fault tho but anyways).

lastly actually, oh my god. that stupid ass app where fans pay a subscription to message the members privately? has been the fucking worst thing to happen to this fandom and the members imo. if fans weren't respecting their boundaries before, it's even worse now. but it's also like. yeah the members should be reinforcing those boundaries, and I get wanting to at least make a buck of those problematic type of fans but I just don't think it has been good for the members at all. I won't elaborate too much on this because it will genuinely piss me the hell off but bottom line: that app has been hell for everyone genuinely there is no bright side to it other than dcc makes money out of it. and there's better ways to make money :))))))))

anyway this is over 1k words atp and somehow I feel like this all just the tip of the iceberg and I probably have forgotten many things bc tbh in the past year I've just. been trying to make peace with it all and just accept things for what they are because dc have been really special to me for such a long time and I just don't want dcc's decisions to make me throw all of that away (like I almost did). I love their music, I love the members, and so I will continue to celebrate wtv right decisions dcc makes but I'm not going to pretend that they're a good company when it comes to business decisions bc they're really not

[tolbachik-art]

How does one become good at drawing planets

Hey, thank you so much for the kind words & the question!

I'm still definitely a beginner, and have a long way to go, but it really warms my heart to hear you say that. For starters, getting over any perfectionism you may have is a big must!

I know a lot of people always say this, but practice, time, patience, doing studies, and having fun are the most important ways to get better!

I'll walk you through my progress, and what I've done to get where I am today with things! I will warn you, it did turn out to be a long winded post. If you want the jist of it, you can scroll to the bottom!

So, I've been doing digital art since say, mid 2015 or so. I didn't have much of a grasp on art, and while I grew up loving space and space exploration, I didn't quite understand how things worked.

On August 2nd, 2015 (when I was just 15), I posted my first piece on DeviantArt.

This was my first foray into space art. It may not be the best, but I remember being very excited about it, and actually making a piece like that.

This first piece is a big sign of what issues I would face with space art until very recently; a lack of detailing, leading to a soft appearance.

This would plague me for quite some time; I would put very little effort into detailing, and wouldn't even zoom in on the canvas for quite some time. I would do things from afar, not wanting to zoom in for some weird reason. This can be seen in the following paintings, as well.

This one, also of Neptune, was posted two years after the first one. The framework is kind of there, but only barely. The perspective is off, and once again, the detailing is too minimal and too soft. On top of that, the shading isn't nearly as harsh enough. Compositionally though, I was starting to get a grasp of some basics.

There would be a brief artless period in my life from 2017 to 2020; every once in awhile, I wouldn't do art for a few years. Then, suddenly, I would get back into it and put out several pieces, all before growing quiet once more.

2020, once Covid-19 started happening, would see the return of me to the world of art now that I was suddenly without a job.

Once again, Neptune will be a demonstrator of how my skills changed.

I was starting to get there; in terms of composition, much better than my older works. Coloring is a bit off, but overall, I was starting to actually understand how art works, and why things like detailing were important. One big thing here though; I was still painting with color. That would be one of the last big things for me to get over, although I didn't even know it then.

From the period of 2020-2021, I made a lot of paintings and mission patches for my one friend's KSP youtube series (seen here).

Doing what were essentially mini paintings, I learned a *lot* about composition and detailing. I think the one I spent the longest on was Heywood, in which I did my best to follow imagery from Voyager. Looking back now, however, it isn't quite accurate; that's the south pole! I still had a lot to learn in regards to doing accurate portrayals of celestial bodies, down to inclinations and the like.

Anyways, doing all that really burnt me out, on top of doing free art for people I didn't even know. That's another big lesson; only do gift art if you feel up to it, and for a friend. Do not do it for strangers.

It wasn't until late 2022, in September, that I actually finished a piece again. My illness had been pretty bad, leaving me bedbound for quite some time. However, during that time, I hadn't lost my skills thankfully.

This would be one of my first somewhat decent portrayals of Jupiter and one of his moons, using SpaceEngine for getting reference images and making sure all the parts were in the right place. This would set the groundwork for later paintings, as I always use SpaceEngine now to make sure I have the orientations and sizes of things in the sky right! It's been an invaluable tool, I quite literally don't know where I'd be without it.

Anyways; after that, it was very sparse once more, up until quite literally this year. Sickness sprung up again, and I had a rough winter due to the loss of my grandfather to Covid-19, among other things.

2024 saw, in my personal opinion, the biggest and best change to my art yet.

PAINTING IN VALUES!!!!!!!!!

I cannot stress this enough; understanding what values are, and how to see them in every day life literally changed my entire perspective on things. On life! I cannot go outside anymore without comparing and contrasting values of objects and natural phenomena.

This was before values. Not bad, but still not great. Detailing was getting there. This is from March 27th, 2024, and was part of an art trade with @dan-asd of their worldbuilding project.

And this, this is 3 months later, from July 16th, 2024. Commission for @corvidist, my very first. This was a massive leap in the way I understood and processed the world around me, and in turn, what my art looked like.

Everything is in values. Your phone, with the seemingly pure black LCD touchscreen to the blue and purple phone case. The clouds, with their bright white tops and dark bottoms. The river, with the murky green waters contrasting with the bright orange stones. All values, just differing shades of gray with color added! Everything is light! Everything is the absence of light! Light is the entirety of your piece; you just have to understand where light falls, and where it doesn't.

Apart from that, everything is just rudimentary shapes and lines. The universe is made up of different kinds of lines and shapes. Entire worlds can be reduced to light and lines, people can be too. You just need to know what to look for, and how to process that into artwork.

I cannot stress how much understanding that, and doing tiny little paintings really helped me get a much better grasp on things.

Take some time, get a small canvas out, and paint your favorite celestial body. Take as much or as little time as you need, and just have fun with it. Play with color, play with values, whatever your heart desires!

Once you're done, take a step back, and compare it to the picture. Analyze what areas you didn't enjoy, and what areas you did. Look for what doesn't line up with the picture, and think of how you could better approach it. Think of how you can change the lighting to make it seem more real, what effects are needed to bring it to life.

Art is the process of taking what you love, and putting it to paper (digital or not!). Focus on what you enjoy doing; it will all come naturally with time. You'll start to pick up on things, big and small, that will bring your pieces closer and closer to what you want it to be.

And please, for the love of everything that is holy, have fun with it and don't overthink it! You will be so disappointed in yourself if you hype yourself up for a piece, only for it to come out not the way you expected. That's ok! That's part of learning! It can be disheartening, but if you take the time to look at how and why you don't like the piece, it'll come out so much better next time around!

Talk to people, too! Talking with my dear email-pal Eduardo was my first step into understanding astronomical art, and thinking on how to improve my work. He really helped me step into the right direction when I was just starting out, which I am still eternally grateful for to this day. I think of him and his work often; he really was a massive help.

In more recent times, talking to @whirligig-girl helped me to get a better grip on realism, and how better to portray celestial bodies. She was a huge help in giving me pointers for fixing up my View From Amalthea piece, as well as the ones that followed after. Talking to artists more experienced than you and getting critiques is always a huge help; it can really show you things in a new light!

Speaking of, don't be afraid to let a piece rest and marinate for a bit. A day, a week, or even a year. It doesn't matter. You will come back to it, and you will see new things you never saw before, and think of new ways to improve upon it. I have a piece that's been in limbo for YEARS, and I still have yet to actually get to paint it (the top one, the alien one (i will never finish that Uranus piece though lol)). I have it perfectly envisioned now, so waiting really did pay off in the end.

Essentially, it all boils down to this:

Everything is light, or lack thereof.

Don't overthink it, and have fun.

Do not do free art for strangers.

Everything is shapes and lines.

Step back and look at your pieces, deconstructing them in your mind or on paper.

Examine your everyday life, and see how everything interacts in terms of values and color.

Do studies, please god, do studies they're so fun and eyeopening

Warmup! Warm! Up! WARMUP!!!!! They are critical to getting your mind in the art headspace! You will feel less interested and less focused otherwise!

Don't worry about your medium, just do what you enjoy and works best for you! There is no such thing as a perfect brush!

Talk to other artists in fields you enjoy!

I love talking about art, I really could go on for hours, but I will stop myself here.

You decide what you get out of art; it's your skill, your time, so do what you desire! These are only anecdotes about my experiences with art; they aren't universal, but I do hope they've helped. If you have any questions, any questions at all, don't hesitate to reach out!

Lastly, here are two resources for you for any future artworks you may do:

I got this book many years ago, but the lessons it gave me were invaluable. I mean it; they helped me to understand the importance of doing studies, and for detailing!

Paid membership, but an organization dedicated to doing astronomical art. I have yet to join, but I've heard lovely things about it! Hoping to join later this year, funds allowing.

I will finally end this here. Thank you so much for the ask, and I hope you have a lovely rest of your day!

[batsplat]

i really want to hear your opinion on this. I feel like some people underestimate pecco a lot. most of the people I’ve seen on here are talking like it’s certain that marc will do better than pecco next year, but I’ll be surprised if it’ll be actually like this. pecco has way more experience on the ducati and nobody understands the ducati like pecco does. see race weekends like assen or mugello, he’s literally unstoppable and I feel like he’s even holding back. plus pecco is 26yo and he’s in his prime and probably will be for at least two more years before the decline inevitably begins, and he’s injury free! but the real advantage he has over marc, in my opinion, is that he literally lives under pressure and he already knows that marc will try to hit him on the track and above all mentally. he knows what he is getting into. when he talks about wanting to maintain harmony in ducati it’s because he’s already aware that marc will ruin it. like yeah ppl r saying a lot that marc is going to destroy pecco and all that, but right now the facts state that pecco is a 2 times wdc back to back (probably 3 by the end of this year) and right now on the ducati he’s the best rider of the grid. marc won his last wdc in 2019, it’s been years since he won, and he got his arm fucked up in the process. so yeah marc will try everything to destroy pecco but he needs to be careful to not destroy himself in the process. (this is not marc hate, I’m just tired of seeing people understanding pecco)

first of all, I'm broadly with you on a lot of this, anon, though I wouldn't quite as far as to say I'm predicting pecco to beat marc. second of all, I do think I have a bit of a problem where I have my rational sports brain - but I also have the other less rational bits of my brain. and some of those irrational bits are currently stuck in this mode where I have two different fundamentally contradictory mindsets that are kinda... mental blocks in terms of me predicting what will actually happen next year

mental block #1 is 'you've been following sports all your life and you know how this goes'. like, I've kinda been conditioned to think if you aren't a wunderkind, one of the talents of the century, already a megastar when you were in your nappies bla bla, you're basically fucked? certainly fucked when you are going up against one of those prodigies. you may get close and trick everyone into thinking it's actually possible, but... idk. this is a mindset that broadly stood me in good stead when I started watching motogp, like you just don't bet against fuck you talent. something like 2017, I never really thought marc was going to lose that title. so when I look at marc and pecco, however much I rate pecco there's a bit of my brain that automatically goes 'yeah but marc will win anyway'. it's that kind of... sometimes things that look slim differences in sports, margins that should be small aren't actually small at all, and in a way the end outcome feels like it was always kinda inevitable. I get that same sense when I'm watching 2005 last lap duels between sete and valentino - these are situations where you both parties should have a decent shot, but somehow you know that if you ran the simulation one hundred times, it'd basically always go one way. it's the illusion of competitiveness. one guy's always got something a little bit extra in the back pocket

mental block #2 is that it's actually been really fucking long since I've seen marc win and there's been a lot of false dawns on this front. I thought he'd win the title in 2020. I kinda thought he'd win the title in 2021. I was at least open to the possibility he'd win it in 2022. okay, in 2023... but you could still go 'yeah but he's finally physically fit now' (or, well, you could until the first race weekend was done). and honestly? gut feeling, I was feeling pretty bullish about 2024, partly because I didn't think the gap between the bike specs would be this noticeable. so by now it's a bit? you know, I kinda need to see him win again to believe it? which he probably does too, just a touch, and that makes it a completely different proposition from all those other titles... within this sport in particular, it's really not that easy to recover from years in the wilderness. you never really know if he can get close to handling the field like he did in his prime until he does it again. and... however impressive I've found him this season, which I really, absolutely have, I still haven't seen that from him. I also feel like currently... the magic is still there but his pace is so fragile, and that used to be the really scary thing about him - the relentlessness of his pace. this year, it's one lap pace, it's weekend to weekend, it's how sometimes he's slower in races than you thought he'd be - and yes, there are all these other explanations, but... well, again, if the bike is holding him back, if it's the ducati adaptation period, then that's all well and good. but I'm not really going to feel that's true until I actually see the next step

now obviously both of those things can't be true - and the fun thing about next year is that I don't actually feel it's a done deal. because, yes, people do underestimate pecco. and also because, yes, there's still some real question marks about the version of marc we're getting. just look at this sachsenring situation... obviously 'someone could get injured' is quite a depressing way to look at future title fight permutations, but you can't really treat it as a certainty that it won't happen, no? I feel like one element of last year that doesn't quite get the attention it deserves is that pecco was winning that title a whole lot more comfortably before a bike ran over his leg. the race right after that was misano, where pecco had won the two previous years and there's zero reason to believe he couldn't have done so again rather than take two laboured p3's. that's not a title fight anyone's primarily remembering as an injury arc (cf too the le mans crash) - but it clearly did play a big role and could easily have been decisive, without actually taking out one of those two contenders of competition. marc used to win his titles with a whole lot of throwing himself down the road to find the limit of his bike, but he can't afford to do that any more (if he ever could). we still need to see what version of marc we're getting, if we're getting a version who can just be fast anywhere come sunday - or a very good version of marc who isn't quite that. who knows exactly how much worse the gp23 is than the gp24! who knows how much more there still is to come in terms of ducati potential from marc! we have rough indications, but it's far from definitive. maybe one of them doesn't click at all with next year's bike! we'll only know when we see it play out!

and yet I still expect deep down that marc wins that. it's just kinda supreme belief in his fuck you levels of talent, the belief that he'll figure it out somehow because I've seen him do it so many times. and of course, the other big problem is we don't know what version of pecco we're getting! I have talked before about how historically unusual pecco is as a champion in many ways, which for me always makes it quite tricky to figure out what he'll do in basically any situation. like, where is his ceiling? is he still going to get better? is he going to get his act together? my problem is that I feel like I enter every single season going 'yeah I reckon this year pecco will get his act together, ugh he's going to dominate the field' and then it's just a bit? is this just who you are as a rider, or is this something you can still change?

the thing is, with my fullest respect to pecco's titles, however much I enjoyed those train wrecks, obviously you cannot do this against a version of marc marquez that is remotely up to scratch. like, you just cannot. pecco cannot do a 2022 and expect to win the title. against an even slightly serious version of marc marquez. on the same bike. pecco can't really do a 2023 either. I'll give him a pass for some of those late season results, but if you're chucking it down the road that often early on then, yeah, no

that being said... low key if you ignore all the little numbers, this year is actually a serious title fight...?

like I am always aware that acknowledging this could make them both dnf five times in a row but...? there's one sunday race one of them haven't won, and cota is its own thing. everything else...? whisper it softly but this is a good title fight? 2022-23 were sort of accidentally good because everyone's errors and runs of good forms and performance trajectories just kinda coalesced so you got late season drama, but this? consistent high level of performance from both blokes, decent wheel-to-wheel action between both title rivals at several different races (definitely more than in 2015 and everyone remembers that as a classic, also on course to be more than in 2013 and most years 2007-12). idk, at what point do we just have to acknowledge these guys are pretty good at what they do? sure they're on the strongest bike, as are the vast majorities of blokes who win titles historically. but bastianini's reasonably highly rated and he's not even gotten particularly close to winning a sunday race this year on the exact same bike - one p2 on merit snagged on the last lap and another one less on merit when vinales was highsided to the moon for mechanical reasons right ahead of him. yes, the title contenders have had some howlers... pecco's portimao and catalunya sprints were... well, y'know, and martin's jerez race and mugello sprint were also... y'know. but apart from that?

idk man... we can cry over photos of casey on his gp7 all we like, but at the end of the day these twits have come out with some class performances these last two years. and at a certain point you've just gotta hand it to them. they've become more experienced at how to manage a title fight, which is how you get a version of martin this year who is still fast but is less likely to phillip island it. some of those performances late last season were great! for every martin qatar and pecco india, you also get a martin thailand and a pecco indonesia. maybe they'll stop chucking it down the road so often, or maybe they'll keep chucking it but so will marc, because these days they have ridiculously many opportunities to do so! I also think it's worth pointing out that minus some questionable early season form from pecco, those two are basically always on the pace! they're always there or thereabouts! that's how marc used to kill his title rivals, not necessarily by winning a bunch of races but by making sure he was always picking up points - because he didn't have any truly slow weekends. these guys don't either at the minute! we are seeing them actually get better in front of our eyes, it's great

the other stuff... oof, I don't know what pecco's prime will end up being - remember, actually he's low key already edging out of title-winning age. he's now 27. this century, only two riders have won titles when they were older than 26 - valentino twice and jorge once. obviously, that's partly happenstance, and you don't suddenly get struck down by 'being washed' lightning when you turn 27... plus on the flip side, I also think the fact that pecco has only reached his prime relatively recently means he could have quite a few more years to go. who knows! who knows if marc being increasingly more breakable becomes a big factor! recovering from injuries gets tougher the older you get and the more knocks you've taken! on the other point, the ducati is a bike pecco knows very very well and has a lot of time riding... but broadly speaking I do trust marc with a year's worth of experience get as much out of that bike as he ever will. just the fuck you talent again. we don't know what that performance level looks like, but I don't think it'll be a question of familiarity any more at that stage

so where does that all leave us? do I really want to be making motogp predictions this far in advance? yeah, sure. if I had to put money on it, I'd still back marc, I think? but I really do hope we get a proper fight, and I really do think we might! I'm far from convinced in writing off pecco. basically *grabs the crystal ball, aka checks the races we've literally just watched* let's say pecco absolutely dogwalks the field at a few circuits. like maybe a mugello, an assen, a cute qatar, even a catalunya now he's faced down his demons (though maybe jorge on that aprilia goes bye bye at montmelo). then give marc his races where he laps the field twice in cota and sachsenring. and we're going to get a few classic duels, for the fans. if those duels happen at the mugello's and catalunya's of this world, pecco's might be in deep shit. if they happen at the misano's and aragon's and maybe even jerez's, we can get something going. they both have at least one silly early season crash (also kinda tradition for marc outside of his peak peak seasons lbr) and everyone gets to call pecco a bottler and crank out the good ol' crashquez. and then hopefully we can massage those numbers enough that pecco isn't crashing three times to marc's one and we actually get a proper title fight. and hopefully they don't get injured too badly. I've said this before, but I could easily see a title fight where pecco wins most of the big duels but his inconsistencies let him down. if his bad days are p3's, however, or if marc himself is a bit flaky at times, then we're suddenly having a very different conversation (also don't feel that comfortable in writing off aprilia/ktm and their respective star riders, especially in year two of the factory ducati partnership)

one thing about pecco (that you do also bring up anon)... if there's one trait in his competitive makeup that most reminds me of marc, it's his resilience. he's very good at bouncing back, he's very good at dealing with adversity, a lot of the times he's at his best when he's under ridiculous amounts of pressure... if anything, he's worse when he has reason to feel confident. it comes through both in what a class defensive rider he is and how good he is at dealing with title fight pressure. if there is ever a time where he mentally gets his act together at the very start of the season, surely it's going to be when he has the famous marc marquez in his garage. if that doesn't do it, literally nothing ever will. and listen, knowing marc will try to mess with you isn't quite the same as being able to stop him from messing with you. wanting to maintain harmony doesn't mean your chances of maintaining harmony are necessarily great. but... you know, pecco got his first ever win by defending against marc lap after lap, facing essentially the most stressful situation imaginable with the 93 on his tail. marc made him a better rider that day. marc might make him a better rider next year too... you never know

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 09/05/2024

edge of a balcony

Season 8 Featured on: The Joke​-​Explainer 7000​™​'s Highest Quality Rips: Sunrise

Ripped by Emm Bee Sea

Requested by Fezaki! (Request Form)

Tentative rip name: A Balcony atop the Labyrinth of Lights

Remember back on guess what​?​?​?​?​?​?​?​?, when I talked about a "secret" recurring gag on the SiIvaGunner channel that I'd been completely oblivious to for the longest time? We're talking about another one of those today - only now, its one that I actually have noticed and been decently familiar with. On almost every April 4th since 2021, a certain Mori Calliope's birthday has been celebrated with a small bevvy of rips made in her honor. Funny enough, I've known of this joke since it started despite having no real attachment to Calliope or her music - but the rips themselves have been consistently good enough for me to always remember to check in on the channel on April 4th every year. It would seem as if my efforts paid off in spades this year: edge of a balcony, more than celebrating Calliope, doubles as a surprise celebration of SiIvaGunner itself, making it an incredibly rewarding and heartwarming listen to long-time fans like myself.

Which is oddly fitting, when you think about it: I learned in reading up for this post that Mori has been an open fan of the SiIvaGunner channel since a long time ago, and has referenced it openly from time to time. 2022's event for her was notable enough to get a page on the Wiki, and through this she eventually learned of the event's existence in 2023 and was overjoyed seeing all the rips made for it. I've made it clear before that I don't really follow the VTuber scene at all in posts like Shiny Smily TALE, but that mutual love between channels is just so fun to see from a distance - especially given that Morio's original music just so happens to work really well within rips. Given that distance from her channel, end of a life wasn't a tune I'd really heard before tuning in to edge of a balcony in particular, but it struck a chord with me that I genuinely wasn't expecting it to. I hate to say it - but it was like a repeat of the exact same feelings I had upon discovering Logan Paul's Shop - only now even moreso, given that it was from an artist I already knew had some genuine merit.

Because yeah, end of a life is a fantastic tune. It's a rather melancholy, reflective piece, where Mori reflects on how many things she's been through in life, her friendships, her opportunities, what she's grateful for, all that which led her to where she is now. That's befitting enough to be used for Balcony - a theme I've already spilled far too much love over back on Balcon Fusion Collab, but one that to summarize also hits those very same thematic beats within Cave Story itself. So that's a slam dunk of a rip concept right out the gate! But if there's anyone who I know knows her SiIvaGunner lore, it would be Emm Bee Sea, someone I've been seeing in the comment sections to just about half of the channel's uploads since way back in Season 2 - and one who's not shy to express her affection for what she loves through rips like Staff Roll (SM64) Fusion. And indeed, through that knowledge, through that love for the channel's life, Emm Bee Sea was able to turn edge of a balcony into a celebration of Balcony not just as a theme, but of its eight years worth of rips throughout SiIvaGunner's life.

It might not shock you to learn that Balcony Cruise was not the first rip of the song to be featured on the channel. Cave Story as a game is immensely popular for its music, how much it resonates with the exact kind of person who would also grow attached to SiIvaGunner - hell, Quote as a character in the King for Another Day Tournament was added specifically due to winning the MAGFest 2019 character ballot in vote popularity. And as the chorus begins in edge of a balcony, as Mori's vocals continue leading the melody of end of a life forward, keen-eared viewers will identify the melodies being played by Balcony's original lead instrument in the background - The Flintstones theme from Balcony - Cave Story, music by clipping. from balcony., Subwoofer Lullaby from Moog Island...its all remarkably understated, never taking attention away from the central focus of the rip, never turning it into another Fusion Collab. Yet I find that it plays to the theming of end of a life, and to the theming of small-scale celebration of the day as a whole, so beautifully. Not everyone who follows SiIvaGunner cares all that much about this VTuber girl - I myself am far out of my depth there - yet, for those who care to listen in, there's an unmistakable beating heart to edge of a balcony that makes listening an absolutely magical experience.

On a personal note...It's easy for me to worry sometimes, having ran this blog for so long, with so many words spilled on the most minute details, that I'm more invested in this whole thing than I should be. I still regularly meet people confused over how this channel could even HAVE "seasons", befuddled as to what there is to be taken seriously in its storytelling let alone that it has theming, and most importantly, unable to see the channel's beating heart of creativity as anything more than a tired running joke. I'm not going to act all superior over other people not "getting it", I know full well that SiIvaGunner is not a channel for everyone. But that's part of what makes getting rips like edge of a balcony feel so unbelievably reassuring - to see such unfiltered and pure expressions of love toward not just the entire SiIvaGunner channel, but toward a creator with just as loyal and undying of a fanbase, toward yet another part of the internet many simply "don't get". That the kind of love that I needlessly worry about being too open about is not just allowed to exist, but allowed to flourish, blossom, into something this beautiful. It's the kind of reminder I keep getting from the SiIvaGunner channel at a regular basis, and the kind that'll keep me coming back to this blog through thick and thin.

♫ We were singing at the top of our lungs to the numbness ♫ ♫ This city never died... ♫

[wraithsoutlaws]

Then & Now the (x: perfect drug) edition:

Inspired by the fandom to look back and celebrate the boys' journey as well as my own in terms of vp.

March 2021, ps4.

I never created Dagger with the intention to ship him with anyone, but by the time I got here on his file it felt strangely natural. He was still a very fresh oc but things began to click immediately and genuinely felt like it was meant to be. The development of him as a character began to happen side by side with this silly little ship and both ended up becoming really personal and special to me.

It's hard getting decent shots on ps4 with anyone. It's especially hard when it's a minor npc with extremely limited screen time available! You have no idea how many times I went back and played these two quests trying to get something interesting. Honestly I'm really grateful for my time on ps4 not only because it helps me appreciate what I can do now a little more, but I think a lot of my growth happened here, stretching the limited resources I had available.

July 2021, ps4

Learning how to work within the confines of totally vanilla photomode, getting creative with base game poses and skipping time to find the best natural light, etc. I'm still proud of these pictures, they capture an intimacy that I think is really special, and at the time were some of my favorites I'd ever taken, and even now I can note the growth between these and the first ones I'd taken.

April 2022, laptop

The first pictures taken on my laptop and my first time posing them with AMM/setting up a scene. I might like to retake these some day. I'm more critical of them than I am of my ps4 pics tbh but they're still an important part of my journey. Over time I noticed red lighting had become my comfort zone, or more specifically, a crutch! So I've tried really hard since then to improve on that and push myself in different directions.

February 2023

It took me almost a year to feel comfortable enough with posing to attempt some goddam kisses. I'm still not very good at these but at least I improved in other ways. Honestly, I struggle with these two at times because they aren't your typical outwardly loving, cute couple, and I'm usually very strict with myself to keep them as in character as I can. That can make it hard to think of couples poses/ideas, both cute and spicy, but. they can be lovebirds as a treat.

May 2023

Only recently have I begun to feel a strong sense of style in my own work. Playing with lighting and scenes, and trying to jam as much personality as I can into these slice of life pictures is really important to me and is one of my favorite parts of doing this. They can be sweet together but it's important you see the other side of that (the blood, the knives, drugs, etc. Also Dagger resting his ashtray on Dum Dum is one of my personal favorite quirks). I really try to put a lot of their life into pictures like this. I want to convey all the parts of who they are together, even if nobody else notices.

June/July 2023

Its pretty hard to articulate how important these two have become for me over the last couple years. I've been playing this game since release and haven't had this sort of steady inspiration or creativity for years. Even on the bad days, just thinking about them is enough to get me through as silly as it sounds. I've grown so much not only in VP but my own art (something I had all but entirely abandoned until I picked up this game). They've provided an outlet I've been searching for for a very long time, and I'm really grateful for that. It's kinda wild looking back at where it started, and seeing how far it's come. Sometimes I still struggle with my perception/the worth of my work but I can't deny the happiness its brought me either.

Including a couple other character ship pics under the cut c:

I'm always a little insecure about my ship pics specifically, I'm very bad at comparing myself with others! But I put a lot of love into these and I can see the improvement when I look at them over time. Regardless of anything, they were all made with lots of love and I hope that comes across.

[mesaprotector]

Under the cut: most overrrated and underrated anime of each year since 2017 for me (subjective!), with explanations. You can send me hate but be nice about it.

I'm only including stuff I've watched at least a cour (12 episodes) of. And also, some stuff like Dororo, even if I didn't personally enjoy it, I can see why people would, so it isn't on this list.

Starting with overrated.

2017: Dragon Maid

I guess the appeal of this is gay undertones with adult characters in an era when that was still pretty uncommon. And I do like some parts of it, including the ending. But I just cannot look past the weirdness of the Kanna/Riko ship and especially whatever is going on with Lucoa/Shouta, and the show overuses many of its worse gags. Even as someone who has developed a decent tolerance for "weird anime fanservice" this went too far for me.

2018: Violet Evergarden

This is a more mild case. It's a very pretty anime I don't dislike, but the story is kind of all over the place and the lasting acclaim it's gotten surprises me. There's just one episode that's top-tier (you know which one); besides that, the show doesn't know what direction it wants to take or what message it wants to have, and Violet herself is nowhere near entertaining enough to make it work.

2019: Shield Hero

This take is so lukewarm it's like someone forgot they put it in the microwave. But yeah—it starts off decent for exactly four episodes then does nothing whatsoever of interest for the rest of its runtime. I feel vaguely sad every time I hear about it getting a new season.

2020: Jujutsu Kaisen

It's a shounen, so I don't really expect more than well-animated fights out of it, and it has occasional good writing. The characters are not as interesting as I wish they were, something made clearer by my friend making me watch part of Naruto soon after the first season aired.

2021: Komi-san

This is not how social anxiety works. It does not just render you a mute who is somehow the most popular girl in your class regardless. I mean, sure, if you're watching this just to laugh it's kind of funny, but nobody should pretend this has any social message.

2022: Bocchi the Rock

Oh boy. I liked this, actually—it's a slightly above average CGDCT (Cute Girls Doing Cute Things) show with one-dimensional characters, a predictable plot to the extent that there is one, and only a single saving grace—highly imaginative animation for approximately 2 minutes out of every episode. I finished it, re-emerged into the world of online anime discussion, and found that people were calling this an all-time classic. I think no other show's acclaim has confused me as much as what happened with Bocchi; at one point Anilist had it at #4 all time, which is absurd even after considering the recency bias. There are similar shows that do far more interesting things with their casts— A Place Further than the Universe, The Demon Girl Next Door, K-On. I guess since I don't relate to Bocchi I just don't get it. I'll admit, at least, that she's written much more realistically than Komi is.

2023: Heavenly Delusion

This show started out extremely well, but but just like Dragon Maid above, it's a rare case where the fanservice is so jarring it seriously bothered me. The show has one episode in a completely different animation style for no real reason, just because they pulled in a guest director. The ending is miserable to watch and unlike plenty of tragic shows there doesn't seem to be a point to it, or any level of narrative coherence. I would refuse money to watch a second season of this.

2024: Apothecary Diaries

This is another mild case, similar to Violet Evergarden—it's quite good, I just don't think it's as smart as people believe it is—and Maomao's character feels a bit too pander-y even with how good Aoi Yuuki's voice acting is.

———

Now underrated.

2017: Shoukoku no Altair

I guess this entire post is "overrated: shows with great animation" vs. "underrated: shows with poor animation". But I feel a shounen with an interesting world (based on historic Turkey), actually smart writing of military tactics, and great character moments shouldn't suddenly go ignored just because it ran out of animation budget near the end.

2018: Akanesasu Shoujo

I post endlessly about this show. It's a very dumb and yet very wise show with the most emotionally beautiful final episode in the history of the medium. Cowboys. Baked fish cakes. Amazon Prime. Arranged marriage. Watch it please I'm begging you.

2019: Granbelm

As far as I can tell the only reason people dislike this 2D (!) mecha show is the cutesy designs for the mechas. It's a show that handwaves a lot of its plot elements, so it wouldn't appeal to someone who wants logical analysis of their stories, but it's emotionally smart without being cliché, and the sound design is fantastic. I scarcely notice sound design—only this and Chihayafuru do it so well to make a real difference for me.

2020: Id:Invaded

This show is reasonably well-liked and not that obscure, but it's still better than its reputation. If I had any doubts before that I Kenjirou Tsuda was actually a fantastic voice actor instead of just having a great voice, they were gone after watching this.

2021: Pretty Boy Detective Club

Slow-paced dialogue-driven shows almost always feel underappreciated by the anime community, with Monogatari the lone exception. This is by the same author as Monogatari, visually beautiful, and every bit as well-written—and yet MAL has it at a 7.08. My best guess as to why is that the primarily straight male Monogatari fandom was annoyed by the mild fanservice of the boys in this show (it's in the name, isn't it?), and nobody else bothered to watch it. It's much less ambitious than Monogatari is and much easier to get into.

2022: Requiem of the Rose King

If "an anime reimagining of Shakespeare's Richard III with dysphoria as a major theme" is a premise that appeals to you, and you can tolerate some animation budget struggles, watch this; if it doesn't, don't.

2023: Revenger

Maybe people rated this poorly because they saw "Gen Urobuchi" in the title and expected it to be as good as Psycho-Pass and Madoka (it isn't). It's still a really good series about assassins and crime syndicates in a medium-sized Japanese town, with uh—broken-down churches? Hot guys? Trade negotiations? The animation isn't even at fault here so I have no idea why it didn't take off more.

2024: Sakuna of Rice and Ruin

There are a lot of shows this year I feel were underappreciated, but this is one of the easiest to recommend—it's simple and pretty, with good character development and a really good setting, and plenty of rice farming. It is a touch kid-oriented, maybe, which shows in the lack of complexity of its character conflicts, but I don't fault that.

[im-1hater]

Me after being gone for months: hey…how y’all doing….

Anyways I’m finally out of school so now I have the time and energy to feel like posting :3

And Ig the best way is threw 3 years difference in my art !

This is the original photo (very crappy Ik)

My first attempt…. It’s something. I think this was one of the few I didn’t trace ( when I was first starting out and didn’t post anything ofc) so I think this might’ve been my first time free handing it with just the reference photo. I do remember being proud of how I did the water effect after watching a TikTok teaching me how to do it with on of the brushes 😭. This was on my first tablet so I don’t remember the exact time but it was about 3-4 hours on a random day in May in 2021 4/10 I remember showing this to my mom being very proud.

Oh boy…I can’t tell if this one or the one before is better. Well for one her head is HUGE like bigger than her ass big 😭🙏🏽. Speaking of her ass, I do not know why it looks like her buttcheek is dislocated? Like I think I tried make it look like her swim suit was tight on her body but it looks like her bottoms are 3 sizes too small. her hand and water got way worse too.. But I will say I definitely have a lot more shading and added more detail to the hair. The shading is decent albeit a bit boring but good enough. I also added color to the line art which is a nice touch. Could use some lighting besides the one coming from the sky. Also on my first tablet so I think this one was about 6 hours on a random the in May in 2022. 3/10 showed this to both my mom AND older brother 💀

Erm- I think I skipped a year or two? Either I got the years wrong or smth so I’ll need to get my hands on my old tablet lol. First, the water. I actually drew it instead of using the brushes in procreate which was definitely a better choice and payed off in the long run. And the sky is actually not just one solid bright blue that burns ur eye holes! And the clouds actually look like clouds and just not like cotton balls the same size. And it looks like I also figured out the different modes and effects I can use on the sky and water. I’m actually really proud of the background cause I literally never do a background. Also Momo brought the right size swimsuit this time! I drew the whole body instead of drawing the body as well as the clothes at the same time. I stylized my shading a lot more with the textured brushes I used. Also those knots she uses to keep her swimsuit look 100 percent better. And i used some line weight to make it way less boring than before. I put her head in a way more interesting angle. I also like how I went to one eyelash to many eyelashes to 0 of them💀. Also that hand! So much better and much more detail. Hands have become one of my favorite things to draw tehee. I fell like this is all over the place but I added some reflective lights from the water which was definitely a good choice and something missing in my previous works. I also gave her a more happy/ playful expression rather than that confused one I kept giving her. Like she doesn’t know how she freaking got there. Now one think I improved the most was….THAT HAIR! I decided “hmm, how about i actually try and put effort to the hair” and then it turned out pretty good at least I think. I added some lighting but not too much cause there is already so much. This took about 11 hours which is pretty impressive since I did this in two separate sittings. I showed this to my sister and she asked why she was a mustache cause of that line I drew coming from her nose and I can’t unsee it now 😭 11/10

[johannesviii]

Top 10 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 2022

Another pretty decent year for pop music ; a very slow one, with a lot of trash, but the good stuff was so good making a top 10 took me ages, unlike 2021 where it was way easier. Outside of the top 100, some incredible stuff dropped this year too, so yeah - even if the charts don't always reflect it, music as a whole is currently very interesting to follow.

Disclaimers / Rules:

I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these lists. There’s songs that charted in my country way higher than they did in the US, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

No song that I already put on a previous list is elligible.

No old hit song that is re-charting due to a holiday or a trend is elligible either.

Of course there will probably be stuff in French somewhere on this post. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible.

I have sound-to-color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones.

So. Uh. Again, again. How was your 2022??

Still didn't catch covid but I did catch a very nasty cold a month ago. Still drawing and writing a lot, and also spending more and more time customising my clothes with dumb patches and embroidered messages and stuff.

I went to a LOT of concerts this year, and they were all fantastic for completely different reasons! I'm so glad I finally have the budget to do this without feeling guilty or cutting down some more vital stuff. So yeah. I went to see My Chemical Romance, The Soft Moon, Sigur Ros, Placebo and Enter Shikari. Before that the last concert I had attended was VNV Nation all the way back in 2019!

Speaking of which, let’s start with the good or interesting albums that came out in 2022 or in late 2021, and this is going to be pretty long.

Albums

I have to mention that I tried to get into Ghost this year. It's definitely not for me apart from a couple of songs, but also, Impera was pretty bad. Probably wasn't a good idea to start listening to these guys in their current era.

I also have to mention that I've been thoroughly disappointed by Mainstream Sellout, because I'm one of those weirdos who actually liked Tickets to my Downfall by Machine Gun Kelly. But yeah, the guy became self-aware, and that's the worst thing that could possibly happen. Awful. Emo Girl is unintentionally funny, though.

Not sure this counts as an "album" since it's an EP, and a five minutes-long one at that, but Snake Eyes by 100 Gecs made me even more excited for their new album in 2023.

Electric Callboy's Tekkno is dumb and funny in all the right ways and I'm glad they got so much positive attention out of it. That's trolling with actual effort and passion put into it and it's kind of a lost art form at this point. The music videos are amazing too.

Rakshak by Bloodywood is exactly the kind of thing Nu Metal needed to move forward and I love the fact that energy came from India, of all places. A lot of fresh ideas, generally interesting topics and politics ; I'm sold. This is great. More, please.

Muna by uh Muna didn't leave much of an impression on me at first but I kept thinking about it and I eventually came back to it to relisten to it several times later in the year. I'm not sure what it means. Probably something good, though. Maybe it will be one of my faves of the year in retrospect..? Also it's very gay, which never hurts.

I'm somewhat conflicted about Being Funny in a Foreign Language by The 1975. Objectively, it's probably their best album ; it's straightforward, it's very well produced, it has a couple of bangers. Subjectively, I'm not even sure I'd place it above Notes on a Conditional Form, which if you recall was a GIGANTIC MESS, just because the highs of this mess were stratospheric compared to the ones the new album has. Still really good, but I miss the chaos.

Death's Dynamic Shroud's Dark Life has SO MANY different ideas going in so many different directions it's kind of a miracle that the album stays so coherent. The colors and the textures are sometimes so complex and layered that just listening to them to try to pick them apart becomes a stim to me. Beautiful.

I only found this album last month but Dimensional Bleed by Holy Fawn is one of the best post rock things I've ever heard since Sigur Ros stopped releasing new music

Exister by The Soft Moon comes so close to being my album of the year. SO close. Among all the musicians trying to become the new Trent Reznor, this guy's the only credible candidate for me, just because he's not afraid to try really weird shit. When I saw him live in October, the last thing he played had a castanets solo over huge electronic beats. And it went hard as hell! I sincerely hope his future stuff will be even better. I'm sold.

But uh. Guys. I'm sorry.

I'm so predictable. Never Let Me Go, Placebo's comeback album, is my favorite album of the year. Of course, when one of my favorite bands ever decided to release new music after nearly ten years of nothing, I was thrilled, but also worried it would disappoint me. The first singles were amazing, but what if? What if the rest of the album wasn't as good? And yet, by the time it was over, I was trying to determine if it was my third or fourth fave album in their discography. Even now, I'd only put Meds and Sleeping With Ghosts above this one. It's distinctly them, but full of new and interesting ideas. I'm beyond happy things turned out so well.

Unelligible Songs

There's a TON of them! Because that year was very good! This is kind of a non-hits rec list of sorts, but you know the drill.

Should I start with some Gecs? I feel like I should start with some Gecs. So here's Doritos and Fritos, Hey Big Man and Torture Me. You're welcome.

While we're at it, if you've never watched any of the recent Electric Callboy music videos, your day is about to get slightly better. I suggest Pump It and Spaceman. Also both are actually good songs on top of being funny.

I might have trashtalked Ghost's new album earlier but Spillways is like Poison 2.0. That's a compliment by the way

I've not always enjoyed what these guys made post-Hot Fuss, but Boy by the Killers should definitely have been a hit.

What I Want by Muna also has this "should have been a huge hit" aura. I'm feeling every line of this chorus in my bones. Best song about delayed adolescence for queer people

Are we making a list of songs that should have been hits? Let me add Metric with What feels like eternity, then

However, American Teenager by Ethel Cain might still have a slight chance of becoming a hit song in the future. I want to believe

Hey do you want some cringe. Cause here's Slaughterhouse by Motionless In White oops

JEZEBEEEEEEEEEEL IF YOU'RE THE HUNTER THEN I'M THE PREYYYYYY

At this point I'm pretty sure I've listened to Precious Hearts by The Birthday Massacre for about six hours over the course of 2022 but since I'm an old idiot who only listens to music through .mp3 files and doesn't use spotify I have no way to check

My very first contact with Bloodywood was Dana Dan, and what a first impression that was. Turn the subtitles on, by the way.

Go_A dropped an absolute banger called Kalyna at the very start of the Ukraine war and it might just be their best track so far.

I am legally obligated to mention The Foundations of Decay by My Chemical Romance. Is it their best song? Hell no. Is it mixed like shit? Yes. Is it way to long? Absolutely. Do I enjoy it? Immensely. Also it had no music video and no promotion. What a power move

Nurture by Porter Robinson, which I mentioned last year as one of my favorite albums in a year full of incredible ones, was still one of my most listened-to albums of 2022, so it feels right to mention a song he released outside of any album this year (Everything Goes On).

Avantasia is back, with a..... an album I didn't like very much, oops, but damn, The Moonflower Society is one of their best songs ever. Long live ridiculous over-the-top power metal with super-serious poetry as lyrics.

Born Yesterday by Quadeca sounds like Sigur Ros trying to make a radio-friendly song, and it sounds absolutely immaculate. Also it's about someone who killed himself just before his birthday and his ghosts deeply regrets that decision

This is not the end by Gareth Emery might be standard EDM, but it's also genuinely comforting to hear these lyrics

I need to put a break here otherwise Tumblr won't let me post this thing. Are you still there? Ok good.

El Alma Que Te Trajo (Safety Trance ft. Arca). Send tweet

It's kind of funny that emo came back a couple of years ago through 8-o-8's and sad rappers with face tattoos. It's even funnier that I genuinely enjoyed some of their stuff. It's even-even funnier that some of them are straight-up doing pop punk stuff now. All of this to say that I love Girl Next Door by Lil Lotus

If you've followed anything in the metal scene this year you already know that Lorna Shore absolutely killed it in 2022. Hell yeah let's put some melodies in deathcore, I'm all for it. Anyway Sun//Eater is great

I should probably recommend some cool music that cool people like before I humiliate myself further by recommending more edgy shit, so this is the perfect time to say that Judgment Bolt, Neon Memories and Messe de E-102 are now permanently etched somewhere in my brain. Seriously please listen to Darklife by Death's Dynamic Shroud if you have the slightest, smallest interest in electronic music I beg you

Ok back to the cringe. Speaking of neons, here's Neon Grave by Dayseeker. I've never liked a song by these guys before so this was a bit of a surprise for me

Also I've listened to it again and again but I still want to cry every time I hear This is what you wanted by Placebo. Not sure why it's my absolute favorite track on an album full of fantastic tracks. Not sure what it says about me. Not sure I want to know

I think I mentioned an Enter Shikari concert. Not sure I can call myself a fan yet, but I spent an ungodly amount of hours listening to their old and new stuff in 2022. Turns out one of my favorite songs they ever made is one of the newest ones, The Void Stares Back. This is exactly the kind of surreal and borderline apocalyptic lyrics I need in my life. I even bought a t-shirt saying "I'm the child with the telescope eyes" at that concert oops

Oh Caroline is one of the best songs The 1975 ever made and, like all my fave songs from that band, it's deeply awkward and embarrassing. It's a guy begging his ex to come back and it gets humiliating. Perfection. Thank you

Just when you thought this list couldn't get worse I'm about to confess I love The Boy in the Black Dress by Yungblud. Can't get the image of a teenager trying to remove his nail polish with his teeth after a teacher told him he looked girly out of my head now. God I love narrative songs so much

We've reached the terminal velocity of musical cringe so here's sTraNgeRs by Bring Me The Horizon because OF FUCKING COURSE I love sTraNgeRs by Bring Me The Horizon. You must be new here. WE'RE DYING TO LIVE AND WE'RE LIVING TO DIIIIIIIIIIE

Also I'm not going to recommend too many the Soft Moon songs but Become the Lies is now a classic for me only six months after it came out, and I've been obsessed with Him (ft Fish Narc, who kills it as the evil twin of the narrator) to the point of making fanart of the mental amv I have for it. Might even upload it after finishing this post, I'm not sure.

Honorable Mentions

Tití me preguntó (Bad Bunny) - I swear I had this song playing in my brain for days and I'm not even sure I like it.

Jour meilleur (Orelsan) - I'm usually not the biggest fan of the guy, but this one is really nice.

As it was (Harry Styles) - Perfectly serviceable little pop tune.

Where are you now (Lost Frequencies) - A great earworm.

Enemy (Imagine Dragons) - Listen. It's bad. But I can't get over the fact that an overly-hated band made a song where the chorus literally screams "EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY ENEMYYYY", it's so much fun to sing along with it

Shivers (Ed Sheeran) - Do I really like Ed Sheeran now. Is this my life. Is this what growing old feels like

Belly Dancer (Imanbek & BYOR) - I'm going to the gym now and this is on their playlist. It's completely brainless but it had a serious chance to end on my actual top ten at some point. I physically can't listen to it without at the very least tapping my foot on the floor.

One Right Now (Post Malone & The Weeknd) - This WAS on my list at some point but I ended up cutting it. Nobody seems to like this song, and I love it for all the wrong reasons. Namely, the fact that a duet between two male singers talking about someone cheating on them sounds like they cheated on each other. And I think that's unintentional comedy gold.

Bad habit (Steve Lacy) - The very last cut I had to make. It's a wonderful song, and I simply adore its vibe, but I tend to lose some interest after 2:20 for some reason. No idea why.

Pretty sure there's nobody still reading this post. Which might be good because there's one deeply humiliating pick on this top ten. Let's do this

THE ACTUAL TOP TEN LIST

10 - Santé (Stromae)

US: Not on the list / FR: #90

I still can't believe this idiot climbed his way out of depression and burnout just to tell every emergency worker to join a union. What a king. Legends only

Also I seriously considered putting it at the top of this list in very early 2022 if the year turned out to be mediocre. I never expected it to be placed so low in the end. That's a good thing, by the way

9 - Break my soul (Beyoncé)

US: #38 / FR: Not on the list

So uh. As far as I know there's still no music video for this one, which is kind of a power move in this day and age, not gonna lie. But yeah. You know me. Can't resist a eurodance diva. And Beyoncé as a eurodance diva is all I ever wanted and more. What the hell happened this year, music-wise, seriously

8 - J'la connais, pt. 1 (Emkal)

US: Not on the list / FR: #89

Okay, the autotune is a bit grating. Doesn't matter.

Look, I usually dislike this kind of songs and singers always talking about girls cheating on them and stuff. But no, this dude right there is singing about people telling him his girlfriend is going to cheat on him, and he basically tells them he trusts her more than them ("Cette fille, j'la connais, eh, mais toi, tu es qui ? On se connaît ?" ("I know that girl, eh - but you? who are you again?"). Very refreshing. Well played, sir.

7 - Thunder (Gabry Ponte)

US: Not on the list / FR: #59

BEHOLD. THERE IS NOW A GOOD SONG CALLED "THUNDER" ON THE CHARTS. AND IT'S COMPLETELY BRAINLESS.

So uh, this one also plays at the gym. It's just some very basic and very commercial EDM. For some reason, it kinda sounds like a pirate song to me, the kind of thing you'd drink to on an adventure or something like that. There's not a lot that can be said about it. The colors are especially trippy, though.

Does it look like I'm stalling for time? Uh, maybe I am.

Oh god, here comes the really embarrassing part.

6 - Bad habits (Ed Sheeran ft Bring Me The Horizon)

US: #13 / FR: #53

So uh. This was in my honorable mentions last year:

And it was slowly exiting the charts when this new version dropped all of a sudden in mid-February, with way more guitars and bombast, and of course Oli Sykes screaming his head out at the end. And it climbed up the charts all over again.

And since I'm a major sucker with no taste, of course I loved it.

Doesn't make up for the fact the lyrics are still very vague and Ed Sheeran is still Ed Sheeran, but clearly that wasn't enough to keep this version of the song off my list. It's enough to make me question my choices, though. Steve Lacy should probably be there instead.

Eh. Too late now.

5 - Numb Little Bug (Em Behold)

US: #32 / FR: Not on the list

I initially put this one higher ; I'm not tired of it or anything, it's just that I don't listen to it as often as some things above it. And it got popular through TikTok, too - I'd ask if the kids are okay, but we all know the answer to that question, I think. I can't get over how brutal these lyrics are for what's essentially a cute pop song. And yeah, that's a huge mood. Do you ever get a little bit tired of life? Yes! Quite often actually! Glad we're all on the same page, at least. It's somewhat comforting.

Imagine how bleak and scary that song would be if it was more serious and less upbeat, though.

Oh. Oh shit.

4 - L'Enfer (Stromae)

US: Not on the list / FR: #46

Guess we don't have to imagine. Guess it already exists. Guess it's on the French year-end chart. And it's absolutely terrifying.

Look, I'm glad Stromae is back. I'm glad he feels better. But uh- yeah. This track is genuinely hard to listen to. I'm pretty sure it's objectively better than the three songs I placed above it, but yeah.

J'ai parfois eu des pensées suicidaires, et j'en suis peu fier (I've had suicidal thoughts at times and I'm not proud of it) On croit parfois que c'est la seule manière de les faire taire (Sometimes you think that's the only way to shut them up) Ces pensées qui me font vivre un enfer (These thoughts that make my life hell)

Yeah.

3 - About Damn Time (Lizzo)

US: #12 / FR: Not on the list

I had a hard time deciding where to rank this song between #3 and #2. Maybe I should say it's a tie. It changes day to day with my mood, really.

But yeah, thank you Lizzo for being a combo breaker in this short series of songs about addiction and depression and death! This one is impossible to resist. You hear it and you just have to move or tap your feet and smile. And-

I'm way too fine to be this stressed, yeah Oh, I'm not the girl I was or used to be, uh Bitch, I might be better

Favorite lyrics of the year? I don't know. Maybe. Amazing, in any case. Thank you for this gift, madam.

2 - That's What I Want (Lil Nas X)

US: #14 / FR: Not on the list

Aaaaaaaaand back to the sadness. Well, not really. The song itself is pretty upbeat. In any case, you've probably seen that one coming from a mile away because of my 2021 Unelligible Songs list:

And yeah! It's elligible at last! I'm so, so happy. And I want Lil Nas X to find love and be happy too. Montero was gay as hell, Industry Baby was a victory lap, but this one? This one is the guy bearing his soul and you can feel it even through the impeccable production and pop sensibilities. Cry your heart out to this upbeat tune, my friend, it's gonna be okay. And we love you.

1 - Meet Me At Our Spot (The Anxiety)

US: #74 / FR: Not on the list

I think I've listened to this one more than any other song this year and yet I'm still not entirely sure why I love it so much, especially considering it took literal months to grow on me. I can't even describe its vibe. Is it melancholy? No, it's too happy. Is it happy then? No, it's too tired. But it has energy, too. Is it romantic? Not really. What is it?

One thing's for sure, whichever vibe it is, I got lost in it for hours, to the point of creating entire scenes set to it in my mind. Which led to drawings. Which led to me inventing characters completely disconnected from the song and writing a story where the initial scene I visualised is only a small one in the grand scheme of things.

There's magic in this song's vibe, and I've been on a quest to transcribe it, and I will probably fail. In the meantime, thank you for meeting me at this spot. It's been a wild ride. See you next year!

[hellostarrynightblr]

highlights of April & May

1. Favourite movies: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Mildred Pierce (1945) 2. Decent movies I liked / appreciated but not loved: Pat and Mike (1952), Emma. (2020), Suzume no Tojimari (2022), Bullets or Ballots (1936) 3. wtf movie/ending: Rebecca (2020). The movie is so lifeless that even gorgeous locations don't save it. It looks more like a tourist advertising. As far as the ending is concerned, leaving it vague makes the movie feel even more pointless and empty than it already was. 4. Best scenes: the ending / the police station argument in Pat and Mike (1952); 'If I loved you less...; from Emma. (2020); Katharine getting her comeuppance in Working Girl (1988); stealing a corpse from the hospital in Nine to Five (1980); the opening from Mildred Pierce (1945); the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). 5. Favourite genres: drama, fantasy, comedy, romance. 6. Favourite directors: George Cukor (Pat and Mike, 1952); Makoto Shinkai  (Suzume no Tojimari, 2022); Michael Curtiz (Mildred Pierce, 1945); Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). 7. Favourite actors: Deanna Durbin, Herbert Marshall (Mad About Music, 1938); Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn (Pat and Mike, 1952); Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn (Emma., 2020);  Melanie Griffith Harrison Ford Sigourney Weaver Joan Cusack (Working Girl, 1988);  Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton (Nine to Five, 1980);  Keanu Reeves Ian McShane (John Wick: Chapter 4, 2023); Roger Livesey (I Know Where I'm Going!, 1945); Joan Crawford Ann Blyth (Mildred Pierce, 1945); Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell (Bullets or Ballots, 1936); Gregory Peck Brock Peters Mary Badham (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962); Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955); Bette Davis (A Stolen Life, 1946). 8. Least favourite performances: Armie Hammer in Rebecca (2020). Not only is it a terrible performance when compared to a master class that was Laurence Olivier, but even in its own right this performance is truly horrendous. It lacks all possible nuance that Maxim's character needs and is overall more a caricature than one of my favourite characters in movie history. 9. The most wasted cast: Lily and Kristin Scott Thomas in Rebecca (2020). I do believe they are capable of giving great performances, but not in this film. It's like a void sucking the talent of otherwise good actors. Also, I don't understant why make Cruella (2021) at all. The actors are fine and all but the entire film is just... wrong. This character is not Cruella, this is not her backstory, it's someone's fanfic. Nothing in the plot makes a lick of sense. Emma Stone, Emma, Joel Fry, Mark Strong. 10. The best wasted premise: Rebecca (2020). A gothic mystery romance. Sign me up... most of the time. You have to try to stuff it up. They managed. 11. Best premise: Suzume no Tojimari (2022). Crazy and brilliant. 12. Favourite cast: Pat and Mike (1952), I guess. I just really love seeing Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy together on screen again. They light up every scene they are in. 13. Favourite on-screen duos: Herbert Marshall x Deanna Durbin in Mad About Music (1938); Katharine Hepburn x Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike (1952); Anya Taylor-Joy x Johnny Flynn in Emma. (2020); Melanie Griffith x Harrison Ford in Working Girl (1988); Jane Fonda x Lily Tomlin x Dolly Parton in Nine to Five (1980); Keanu Reeves x Donnie Yen in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023); Sadie Sink x Dylan O'Brien in All Too Well: The Short Film (2021); Joan Crawford x Ann Blyth in Mildred Pierce (1945); Edward G. Robinson x Joan Blondell and Edward G. Robinson x Humphrey Bogart in Bullets or Ballots (1936); Gregory Peck x Mary Badham and Phillip Alford in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); Frank Sinatra x Kim Novak in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). 14. Favourite on-screen relationships: Pat Pemberton + Mike Conovan (Pat and Mike, 1952); Emma Woodhouse + George Knightley (Emma., 2020). 15. Favourite characters: for the first time since I've started writing these I know exactly who the best character is. Possibly the best character of the entire year. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). I adore this man for his reserve, conviction, strength, love, patience, compassion. He is the most inspirational character I can think of. Gloria Harkinson, Richard Todd / "Mr. Harkinson" (Mad About Music, 1938); Pat Pemberton, Mike Conovan (Pat and Mike, 1952);  Emma Woodhouse, George Knightley (Emma., 2020); Suzume Iwato (Suzume no Tojimari, 2022); Bruce Wayne / Batman (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, 1993); Doralee Rhodes (Nine to Five, 1980); Caine (John Wick: Chapter 4, 2023); Roger Livesey (I Know Where I'm Going!, 1945); Mildred Pierce, Veda Pierce Forrester (Mildred Pierce, 1945); Detective Johnny Blake (Bullets or Ballots, 1936); Atticus Finch, Scout, Jem (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962). 15. Favourite quote: You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962). 16. Favourite fact discovered in 2023: I have a couple. Gregory Peck and Mary Badham formed a life-long friendship on the set of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Harper Lee and Truman Capote's real-life friendship was also depicted in the film. 17. The most overrated film: like half of them? Rebecca (2020) is terrible; Working Girl (1988) is a bit cringe; Nine to Five (1980) is ALL cringe; John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) is okay but not a masterpiece; I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) has the most annoying protagonist; Highlander (1986) is a bit meh. I'll go with Cruella (2021) because it has no right to even exist. 18. The most disappointing film: Rebecca (2020). 19. The biggest surprise: Gregory Peck and the entire To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). An introspective character study. Truly deep and meeningful, masterfully written, diracted and acted. What do they say? They don't make them like they used to? Indeed they don't. 20. Best cinematography: The absolute best one is Ernest Haller for Mildred Pierce (1945). Cinematography in that film is breathtaking. It's one of the best-looking noirs I've ever seen and that is saying something as I've seen about a hundred of them. Honourable mentions go to Erwin Hillier (I Know Where I'm Going!, 1945); Russell Harlan (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962). 21. Best set design: George James Hopkins (Mildred Pierce, 1945). 22. Best costume design: Mildred Pierce and Working Girl (1988). 23. Best music: Nine to Five (1980) just because the song is an absolute smash hit! I have had it on repeat for years. 24. Best prooduction choice: cinematography, costumes and casting in Mildred Pierce (1945). Joan Crawford is a knockout! Also, everything about To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). 25. Worst production choice: making Rebecca (2020). Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to remake a Hitchcock classic? Was 1998's Psycho not enough? But also, they made it in the brightest possible colours. It's supposed to be a dark mystery almost horror and it looks like a Taylor Swift music video. Moreover, the costumes are truly baffling. They don't look 1930s at all and paired with rainbow colours all the style of the story or the 1940's adaptation is gone. Just by looking at it, you'd confuse it for a modern melodrama. I can't leave it at one. The whole existance of Cruella (2021) annoys me. Such a pretentious and irritating film! The obnoxious costume design is one of those notoriously bad production choices. 26. Film of the month: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). There isn't a single doubt in my mind.Mildred Pierce (1945) is a close second, also quite a gem of a film.

[catgriller]

Fandom creators self rec game! Choose five favourites from your own creations (and tell me why, if you like!), then pass on to at least five other people. I'd love to hear what you're proudest of. (No pressure btw!!)

Omg omg , so I’m gonna go from oldest to newest (late2021-recent2023)

The quality may be bad becuz im screenshooting most works from Instagram, this is also not in particular order.

—

1. Timebomb(Ekko x Jinx) - League of Legends fanart

I’ve liked this work since I finished it (9 December 2021) and I don’t think so stop loving it! Idk why tbh! Mostly becuz of the small details of .. everything but also becuz I feel as though THIS is where I first found my art style! I don’t think I’ll ever top this work (in my opinion)

2. Technoblade Philza and that guy - …dsmp ☠️

Now I don’t like Dsmp at all anymore. (And tbh I don’t care if people still like it LOL) This is a 17 September 2022 redraw of a… 2020(?) art work (it was bad)….. Though I don’t like the fandom/content anymore I can still like the art! I really like the designs! REALLY BADLY TOO. IDK THEYRE JUST SO GOOD… might just steal them later and make them into my ocs

3. Obikin (Anakin x Obi-Wan)- Star Wars

I rlly like the colours, it looks so warm and cozy………. This was the first time I drew Obi-Wan decently good too. (27 January 2023)

4. Rexsoka (Ahsoka x Rex) - Star Wars

I really really love the colours, the anatomy is so delicious, and I just love those two immensely. I should rewatch clone wars now that I think about it………. I miss my Star Wars fixation so bad it was my PEAK!!! I just all together love this fanart so so much. Good memories too, fandom wise. (16 February 2023)

5. Draco Malfoy - Harry Potter

This was when I was experimenting with shapes and different colouring styles.. and tbh Draco is just so me and so my favourite.. actually I lied Harry is my fave… Idk! I just rlly like this recent-ish one! He’s such a baby! He’s my child!! (21 June 2023)

[noisynaia]

TAG GAME - YOUR FIRST FIC

In honour of my pocket friend who posted her first fic today (she shall go unnamed because she’s still reeling from the anxiety) I thought I’d share my experience posting my first fic and tag some writers who I’d love to hear from on the subject!

I’m curious - why did you decide to post your first fic? How did you feel about it? Any tips/advice you want to share with people who are thinking about posting their fic?

Thank you for the tag @davnittbraes! <3 what a fun and meaningful tag game!

My First Fic Story:

I think I have always had a tendency to  get very engulfed in the media I consume. 

I have had a very strong fondness for literature, since I was very young, my parents read a lot for me and because of that I was exposed to many stories from an early age, that I properly was too young to read myself. (My parents also had a rule that you had to have read or heard the book before watching the movie haha)

Then when I was a little older I found fanfiction and that was such a fun and intriguing way to continue and build on the stories and characters of the books and movies I liked.

I wrote my first fic when I was a teenager, It was a hunger games one and I posted it on ao3, I was not huge or anything, but it got a decent number of hits, I had not expected that and I actually enden up deleting it because I got too insecure about it and I stopped writing for a long time after even though I kept on reading  and enjoying fanfiction and kept making up stories in my head. A lot of my insecurities came from the fact that I write in English, which isn’t my native language, and it is honestly something I’m still pretty insecure about. The whole ‘I’m not good enough’ thing is so real and so brutal.   

But around christmas of 2021 I sat down in front of my laptop and wrote again for the first time in years. It wasn’t until August 2022 that I got the guts to actually post something, which enden up being Distant Suns, here on tumblr and ao3. It was super uncomfortable, but I am so happy I did it! 

I think what really helped me finally doing so was that I came to the conclusion that my writing didn’t had to be perfect or even necessary ‘good’, if I enjoye doing it it reading enough and if other people happen to enjoy it too then that is just an amazing bonus and most importantly that it is okay to make mistakes. My writing is never going to be perfect no matter what language I write in, but so what, nothing is. I stopped telling myself that I shouldn’t write because my writing was flawed and started to tell myself that it was cool that I wrote despite of it.   

So for anyone who is thinking about publishing their first fic or doubting themselves, I can only recommend you doing it, cause I’m sure that someone out there are going to be really happy that you do <3

And to any of my fellow writers out there writing in English despite it not being your native language, here’s a little reminder that you are really cool, in the form of a Giancarlo Esposito meme <3

no pressure tags <3

@goodwithcheeseese @wildemaven @obi-ham-kenobi

[tropiyas]

it’s the end of the year!! let’s tally up my 2022 resolutions and see how I did

first off, biggest achievement this year. The timing was a little off, since most of the weight loss happened *after* I moved to Sacramento, but i lost 15 pounds and ran a fucking marathon which is a massive win for me ���

(also i've never NOT been hydrated idk why i made that a goal when i’ve been drinking water regularly even in 2021)

hung out a lot with friends this year, and i actually initiated a few of those times! plus i’ve been reaching out and keeping in touch with people outside of hanging out. way more balanced than me being exclusively online or immersed in my solo hobbies.

even though i hate calling it a “network” it has been pretty fun/valuable to be 15% more outgoing and just HAVE people you can be friendly with

the dating ones are the only goals that i missed, but for what it's worth, they're also the only ones that rely on someone else besides me lol. i did find out that i can only go on tinder / bumble / hinge for so long without feeling weird about it, which is a new understanding of myself. end of the day - i’ll give myself a pat on the back for giving it the old college try 🫡

my roommates taught me how to openly hate one of our annoying neighbors and how to actively be pissed off at our landlord, so that’s a win there. and that carried over into me knowing my worth and rightfully complaining / being critical about the shitty aspects of my first job out of college. instead of just passively accepting it like how my parents want me to do.

other than that, i haven’t really found a lot of stuff that bothers/annoys me (besides work) so i still have unusually high patience with people and things. but it’s probably not good to actively be doomscrolling and looking for things that piss u off in the first place so i'm not too sure how to feel about this one

so that's 5.5 out of 7 bullets, pretty nice! as far as Years go this has been one of my better ones - hope y’all have had a decent year as well :)

[pixelgrotto]

Abominable Vaults

Last week I finished running a three year Pathfinder 2e game, which is the longest continuous tabletop campaign I've GMed thus far. We started in June 2021 with Menace Under Otari, the short quest included in the PF 2e Beginner's Box. Then we continued onto the adventure anthology Troubles in Otari, which lasted us about six months, and finally hopped into the three-part Adventure Path Abomination Vaults, which commenced in January 2022. Now here we are in June 2024, done and dusted!

Running this game was the very definition of a learning experience. When we began, it was my first time dealing with the PF 2e ruleset, which was pretty new at the time. (Technically, I started this campaign before my March of the Dead games that I wrote about last year, though those wrapped up first.) Only one other person in my group had played 2e, so everyone was learning. Paizo tends to make solid quickstart boxes, but I really do need to give them a handclap for designing a decent beginner's experience that helped teach mechanics bit-by-bit in an easy-to-follow dungeon crawl. I'd say that Menace Under Otari contains precisely zero surprises - it's almost the same thing as the PF 1e box, except instead of bashing goblins you fight giant rats in a cellar, then kobolds, then a dragon - but it teaches mechanics nicely without overwhelming a GM or players. Aside from the Fabula Ultima Press Start (I started playing Fabula recently and am obsessed with it), it might be one of the best Beginner's Boxes I've run.

Once Menace Under Otari was done, we moved onto Troubles in Otari, which is a hodgepodge of missions designed to help anyone who'd run through the Beginner's Box level up. They're a decent selection of tidbits that flesh out the town of Otari, turning it into something like the equivalent of Sandpoint from PF 1e, which radiated that special feel of "howdy, this is the homebase for you, newbie adventurer." Troubles in Otari was where my players' characters really started to come into their own. I tasked them with converting a fishery that they'd cleared of monsters into a Pathfinder Society outpost, they beat a bunch of dwarf doofuses called the Leadbuster Lads (who really should serve as the endbosses of the anthology), and the Fighter accidentally wooed a female troll and ogre, setting him down the path of acquiring a monster girl harem, which quickly became a running joke.

Then it was time for Abomination Vaults, which has won recognition for being a high-quality dungeon crawl module, and one of the few straight up megadungeons that Paizo has put out. It's been so popular that it's gotten a 5e conversion and will soon be the subject of a video game, and yeah, I can confirm that it's pretty good. Certainly better than the last dungeon crawl-esque adventure I found myself partaking in, 5e's Out of the Abyss, which struck me as slog city.

I will say, however, that despite its strengths, Abomination Vaults still felt reaaallly long to me, even though as a three-volume Adventure Path, it's shorter than most others in Pathfinder's catalogue. I imagine if you're running weekly sessions instead of biweekly ones you can speed through it faster than I did, but even then, you've still got ten levels of dungeon to conquer. I also probably made things more complicated by letting all of my players roll new characters at the start of Abomination Vaults, since it starts at level 1 instead of picking up at level 5, where Troubles in Otari ends. The whole reason behind this was that my players' old characters would be trapped somewhere in the titular Abomination Vaults, tortured at the hands of the undead witch Belcorra Haruvex, and their new heroes would have to rescue the OGs. I love stuff like this (basically, reasons to make my life as a GM more complicated), and it meant that my players were each able to choose between two sets of characters throughout the end of the campaign.

Aside from this flair to enable more player choice, I did try to stick close to the books, at least at first. This is tough for me, as my natural tendency while running campaigns is to homebrew twists and turns up the wazoo, but since I was still learning the intricacies of PF 2e's rules, I wanted to walk before I ran. Partially because of this conservative ethos, it took a looong time to get through everything - Volume 1 of Abomination Vaults took us about 10 months to finish; Volume 2 took 7 months (but only because my group stopped exploring every nook and cranny of the dungeon and "sequence broke" a few bits); and Volume 3 lasted about a year.

Volume 3 also coincided with some dramatic life events. Only a few months after I started running this stretch of the campaign, my wife and I decided to move from the US to the UK. This was the right decision for us, but not exactly the right decision for the game. I was now five hours ahead of my players, who are all New York City guys. Five hours is a weird time difference to surmount when it comes to running tabletop RPGs, because it basically means that weekends are the only sensible time that'll work for everyone. Alas, the fellas in my group couldn't make weekends consistently work.

Thus, I undertook the somewhat mad decision to continue running the game while living in the UK...on NYC hours. This meant that every other Tuesday I needed to run a game that started at 11:30 PM and went until 2:30 AM. If that sounds like torture, realize that sometimes the game stretched a bit late, until 3 or so. Things became even more complicated when I returned to fulltime work and needed to clock in at 9 AM on the following morning (not in an office, thankfully). Needless to say, I don't recommend that any GM out there does this - 11:30 at night is simply a terrible time to do anything as socially and mentally taxing as running a roleplaying game, and I only managed to survive about ten months of doing this by gritting my teeth and brute forcing it. Was it worth it? Well, I'm always sad when longterm campaigns peter out into nothingness, and I made it a point to say that I wasn't going to do that. Call it my own weird GM sense of responsibility, or simply me trying to prove to myself that yes, I could run an entire Adventure Path without fumbling the finale, but it was worth it in my eyes.

At the end of it all, I cut some stuff in Volume 3 to ensure that I could finish running Abomination Vaults without my mind falling apart from lack of sleep. But I also stopped sticking too close to the book in general, mostly because by this time, I was extraordinarly familiar with PF 2e's ruleset. Hence the introduction of my standard twists and turns. For instance, I fully fleshed out the nebulous fate of an important NPC whose soul gets sold to a devil over the course of the game, and my players somehow managed to take an impromptu trip to the Dreamlands to battle denizens of Leng and capture a starspawn of Cthulhu in a jar, which they then used in our very last session to trick said devil into returning that NPC's soul. Oh yeah, and the monster girl harem expanded to truly incredible size, and one of my players somehow managed to relate his character's final fate to Starfinder, thousands of years in the far-flung future.

Abomination Vaults, and the Otari saga that preceded it, was a wild ride, to say the least. Sometime over the course of running this monsterous three year behemoth, I also started writing for Pathfinder books myself, and in many ways this campaign was the one that familarized the system in my mind enough to pen stuff for books like the Tian Xia World Guide and Howl of the Wild. I'm not sure if I'll run another full-length Adventure Path anytime soon, though I do want to take my own crack at Kingmaker one day, so we'll see. I'll also most assuredly say "NEVER AGAIN" if you ask me to run another game for US folk on UK hours. Nevertheless, as I look back on the end of three long years, I truly do see a learning experience - one that expanded all aspects of this crunchy d20 game, from learning how to play and run it to eventually writing for it myself. So thank you for the memories, Otari - you were quite a lot to get through at times, but we made it in the end!

[graphics-cafe]

blinkies.cafe template releases are changing!

We are changing the way we add new blinkie templates to blinkies.cafe!!

We have opened up blinkie template submissions!! Fill out this form to submit a blank template you’ve made.

We are changing our blinkie template release schedule. Going forwards, new templates will be released in themed Blinkie Packs (~9-18 templates each). We will announce the theme of the next Blinkie Pack several weeks in advance on Tumblr and in our Discord Server, and submissions fitting the theme will be prioritized!

This means that planning and creating blinkie templates will become a community effort, with lots of opportunities to have your templates featured on blinkies.cafe. So we’ve made a blinkies.cafe Discord Server for people to chat about blinkies! Feel free to join, especially if you’re interested in submitting templates. The Discord server is the main platform where we’ll be communicating with submitters re: their templates & future Blinkie Packs.

We’ll be announcing the theme of the first Blinkie Pack soon! Looking forward to working with you :3 

(keep reading for personal rambles)

I started blinkies.cafe on October 15, 2021. There aren’t a lot of other blinkie generators on the Web, and I wanted to fill that gap by making a new one with more modern features & design. blinkies.cafe was a very small, experimental, and personal project. I made it my goal to add at least one template per week, because:

I wanted to build up a decent library of templates. Since I was the only one working on the project, weekly templates kept me progressing steadily towards that goal. I didn’t have much contact with old-web communities on Tumblr & Neocities and I wasn’t aware of anyone else that actively created blinkies.

I enjoyed the balance between the more-technical coding and less-technical gif editing. Often I found I didn’t have the energy for a coding session, but I did have energy to make a blinkie or two.

Now, more than a year later, blinkies.cafe is in a very different situation.

Lots of people are making really cool custom blinkies on Tumblr.

Many blinkie creators are interested in having me publish their blinkies as customizable templates on blinkies.cafe. Usually they are more skilled artists than I am, and they produce higher-quality blinkies at a faster rate than me.

Thanks to these creators – @transbro, @proxyrse, @pawpr1nc3 – we have 236 (!!!) customizable templates in our collection as of Dec 18 2022.

Basically, the project has matured a lot. We have a pretty hefty library of templates, and I spend more time processing submissions from other creators than making my own, so I no longer feel like I have to commit to weekly template releases to keep the project going.

Also, my personal & professional life is changing a lot – I have a career that excites me, relationships I care about, and I’m finally starting to catch up on a huge backlog of Adult Stuff I had been neglecting. This all translates to a very busy schedule, and the specific requirement to publish new blinkies each week has often conflicted with my other personal responsibilities.

I think the new release schedule with larger, less-frequent Blinkie Packs will be really good.

It’ll be fun to collaborate on larger packs of themed templates as a community!

I’ll be able to plan the releases to correspond with relevant dates.

I’ll have more freedom to plan & work on adding templates in a way that suits my personal schedule.

So I’m really looking forward to it!!! Thanks for reading this far <3

~ Amy