#square weasel studio

[the-remainder]

Square Weasel Studio Games

We are Ze and Nim, a couple who journeys through the waking and dreaming world together. We strive to write stories awash in warmth and sadness. Our characters are flawed but worth saving. Their journeys will make you think, and may break your heart, just to put it together again in a way that is a bit more hopeful, a bit more wholesome than before.

Discord | Patreon | Kofi | Twitter

Chronicles of Tal’Dun: The Remainder

This is a story of two magi, Vyn and Ilar, who find themselves trapped in a collapsing tower with their only hope for salvation being a difficult ritual. Or at least that is what Ilar tells you. The thing is - you don’t remember anything, and Ilar’s story makes less and less sense the closer you are to the ritual. Are they hiding things to protect you from the bitter truth, or are they deceiving you for some more nefarious reason?

Guide Vyn’s actions to death and beyond and uncover Ilar’s truth. Are they your colleague, lover or something completely different? Read between the lines of what they are telling you, explore your surroundings for clues and use hands-on deduction to break the vicious circle and set them free.

form: VN/IF hybrid | status: finished | price: $19.99 | play at: Steam | Itchio

Chronicles of Tal’Dun: The Longing

Most people spend their whole lives never touching magick, and some are gripped by it before they ever open their eyes. Is there a place in this world for a child cursed with the hunger of the moons? For a child with a song that wants to be sung? Will they devour one another or find salvation in each other’s embrace?

The world of Tal'Dun is shaped by mysterious forces of the Sea, a power that gives and takes life. Touching its waters brings death to most people, but in rare cases some survive it and become magi. Evin and Near come from very different circumstances, one grew up in a tiny village and stumbled upon magick by accident, and the other was born with it and spent their life locked away in a temple. Despite this, as if pulled together by the currents of the Sea, their paths cross, and now a storm is brewing.

form: illustrated novel | status: ongoing | price: currently free, $ when finished | read at: Itchio | wishlist: Steam | more chapters at: Kofi | Patreon

Our Winding Road

Disillusioned with civilian life, former heroes Rowan and Jori retrace the steps of the journey on which they fell in love, with the hopes of rekindling their strained relationship.

Assume the role of the-great-“Ogre Slayer”-turned-desk-jockey Rowan, brave the various dangers lurking on your way, yourself being chief among them. Will you and your love find your way back together again, or will this journey mark the end for you two?

form: VN | status: finished | price: free | Play at: itchio

[velvet-cupcake-games]

Made Marion Development Update, January 2023

Happy New Year!  We have an exciting development update for you this month, so let's get to it!

Welcome, Meissa and Gui

I absolutely adore the updates to Meissa's outfit. Check out their sleeves - you can tell that the cloth is silky and diaphanous. This is one of Meissa's neutral expressions, and emphasizes their anxious and troubled nature. You only get hints of it in the common route, but it's a major theme in their story. Rest assured that other expressions will show their kind and flirty sides as well!

Gui's new sprite boasts a more direct stance and a gorgeous rapier hilt. His neutral expression is the one that most people see - an elegant but slightly forbidding look that keeps folk from getting too close. He's taken a special interest in Marion, so she sees his more personable side as well.

First Look at Combat Animations

Our combat animator Ze of Square Weasel Studios has finished up our first two combat animations, and here's a quick preview of how combat will look!  This is a less dynamic scene (I need our sword spark animation for the more complex ones - plus those are more spoilery), where Marion is simply showing John her forms and he is defending with his quarterstaff, but it gives you an idea of the basic layout of our combat.

I recommend watching it on Youtube in HD if possible. The animations are a bit smoother in-game, as there's some lag in the video capture.  I'm excited to get to add some motion and splash to our combat scenes!

We've done our best to make them migraine-friendly (we have a migraine-sufferer on our team), but if they bug you, you can turn off combat animations only in our Options menu!

The Writing Department

I'm not exactly an Ocean's Eleven type of writer so don't expect anything incredibly complex, but I think it's going to be fun. Along the way, you'll encounter three Nottingham guards who have their largest role to play in John's route but show up in many other routes when I need a guard (or three). I've named them Ser Laurence, Ser Charles, and Ser Morris. These lesser noblemen have a Geoffrey-approved uniform (who would have guessed?) and a bad reputation. It seems they've been assigned to guard this month's tax shipment as it's been loaded into transport wagons and is ready to ship out to Londonne the next morning...

That's our January update, hope you enjoyed it!

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 11/9/21

ALMOST birthday problems

listening short ride in a fast machine, john adams. i listen to a lot of instrumental stuff throughout my workday and there are only so many video game soundtracks i actually like.

this version is nearly a full two minutes shorter than the version on spotify i liked best. this piece looks fucking exhausting to both play and conduct, and the comments are full of conductors complaining about it lmao

read the wiki page like “okay what is this About is it an experimental piece about spaceships bc that’s what i want this fluttering-adrenaline-pulse piece to be about” no! it’s about eighties sports cars. it does not sound like it should be about eighties sports cars. 

i know just enough about classical music to be dangerous. i know what i like, which is when people incorporate folk music into their style (copland, dvorak), music featured in the barbie ballet movies (tchaikovsky), and a very small number of bach chamber works (one specific doctors’ waiting room music). this doesn’t really fit into any of those and sounds more like a movie score to my (bad, deaf) ear but it’s a pretty cool four-minutes-and-change.

reading Has Witch City Lost Its Way? by Kathryn Miles for Boston Magazine

the author asks this question and then kind of shrugs at it. this was a weird one! i’ve been to salem quite a few times. it’s a very charming little town on the sea with good nightlife, you can take the train into boston, the rhythm and flow and concerns of a tourist town are very familiar to me, it’s almost the perfect place for me to live, and i could never ever live there bc 1) money and 2) i find it absolutely fucking insufferable in large doses. i think the intersection between queer people and astrology/witchcraft/woo is fascinating, and it probably is a great way for some people to reclaim the concept of religion, but please god get all that as far away from me as possible. i like nondenominational spookiness and vampires and that’s about it.

it’s very difficult for me personally to think of witchcraft without thinking of both queer people and terfs. it’s odd that the author did not address this, nor did she mention that many of the “witches” killed were people of color. the author does point out that hey! it is super weird to disneyify a place where atrocities were committed! but she also flinched away from any real criticism about the modern white witchy movement trying to make itself as palatable as possible though commercialization. except in a very oblique way, bc all her interviews were with people who have a vested commercial interest in “Witches Are Nice And Friendly Actually”

this is quite long for a puff piece, with several interviews conducted for background info, and i get the feeling there was a very heavy editorial hand here. massachusetts people are fucking terrified about losing out on tourism, since historical events are really the only thing the state has going for it (unlike jersey, where yeah tourists drop a lot of cash, but there’s a sort of indifference about how the state is viewed? they’re assholes and proud of it and massachusetts ppl are assholes and really defensive about it).

watching not quite a fallow week, but bouncing off a bunch of anime while trying to find something just okay enough to handsew. bouncing off things for very petty reasons, let it be clear. saving The Harder They Fall as little a treat for myself tonight, bc i have YET ANOTHER work call w/japan.

playing one cycle/playthough of The Remainder (act 1/free prologue) free on steam by Square Weasel Studios.

i like to keep an eye on the LGBTQ+ tag and this one is in fact gay, people have hair and pronouns. there's a sea-based magical and religious system! please pay attention to the psychological horror content warning up top!

art style is delicious- there's been a rash of "magical otome protag with amnesia" lately (the arcana is i think the most famous), and i do like how they're like "what do you look like? hah just kidding, this is u :)"

romance/otome/dating games have consistently been some of the most fucked up games ive ever played, for reasons of Genre that could be several theses on its own. i appreciate the content warnings at the top, but even though this is not a game specifically tailored for a fanbase (i think it would work better without the name customization, actually) it does have a beautiful tragic sadperson whomst i expect to see some cosplay/fanart/fanworks for. there isn’t a good gender-neutral term for sadboy. bear with me.

inside baseball industry musings, my company does not rep them, all thoughts my own &tc: i cannot immediately find a ton of info about this studio, other than they're canadian. this is odd, bc finding info about games and studios is literally my job, esp bc they are also doing all the Indie Marketing things right EXCEPT for social media- releasing a free teaser like this, doing episodic drops with completely different SKUs so they keep getting fresh eyeballs, and a very high-effort and polished art style. they also have a very well thought out steam page that properly sets expectations and gives a good teaser of the game. their thumbnail is fucking killer and drew me in in the first place, and the whole thing (aside from one! one singular typo in the actual game itself! very forgivable!) is very polished. this team knows what they’re about. i'm sad nobody's really talking about this, but we are experiencing an absolute glut of games right now.

it doesn’t really look like anything i’ve seen before, which is always very exciting. it’s got flashes of dry humor that i like very much and i probably will pick up the full game when it’s out in feb (ep 2 is out but i like consuming completed things bc i Never remember to come back to them)

making hey remember this bad boy? finally washed it on cold/delicate/with woolite and on the extreme-low-heat dryer setting, then absolutely crisped it again on high for a bit bc i am quite paranoid about moths and carpet beetles. i would like to hang this on the wall adjacent to my work desk bc there’s been a bad echo on all my calls lately, but this blanket is very hard to look at. so it is folded up small and thrown artfully over our maroon futon and they kind of cancel each other out.

the fringe is in okay shape, i started combing it out before realizing that’s an insane thing to do and i only have a limited number of hours on this here earth. the thing i DID do was reattach the fringe in the seven or eight places it was peeling off. i think it was originally machine stitched on, which makes sense. although if you hand-embroidered and hand-quilted a blanket of this size, a little bit of straight stitch is going to be Nothing to you.

teaser of next week’s tuesday again no problem, bc god willing i will have cleaned/deodorized/built a proper frame for this thing and hung it up

[gottawriteanegoortwo]

Darkstache - Seeing the Truth

A follow-on from the prompt where Wilford discovered Dark was colourblind. He’s determined to help Dark experience the beauty that is colour.

Word Count: 1,565

-

If there was one thing every single ego working in the studio could agree on, it was that Wilford was not the smartest of the bunch. He struggled with reading, had difficulties keeping track of time, had an unreliable memory on bad days, among other things. Which was why there was surprise when it was discovered Wiford was undertaking heavy research. Sitting at the desk in his dressing-room-studio, the reporter was immersed in work on his laptop. There was a notebook beside him where he attempted to write legible notes. Several drinking glasses had been conjured and emptied so he could work without the distraction of moving. Another notebook was open and drying on the radiator after some water spilled on it.

But if anyone walked in with the intention to see what he was doing, they were blocked by an invisible bubble. To Dark’s frustration, it included him.

“You know you can’t work on anything without telling me about it. As the company’s lawyer, I need to make sure what you’re doing keeps you out of legal trouble.” Dark folded his arms with an irritated expression. In response, Wilford pulled himself onto his feet, sauntered across the room, and slipped through the bubble barrier to take Dark’s hands in his own.

“Yeah, buuut Google told me that’s only if I’m workin’ on somethin’ fer th’ studio. This is a personal project that I want perfect before I tell anyone!” A seemingly simple answer had alarm bells ringing in Dark’s mind. Wilford always put his brainstorming on display for others. Why was he being so secretive? He tried to pull his hands away, but the reporter’s grip was too tight. “Ya gotta trust me, sugarplum. I’ve been workin’ hard like a little bee in here. Just gimme a little longer an’ I’ll show ya everythin’.”

“Will this be before or after you cause whatever trouble you’re planning?”

“Who said anythin’ ‘bout causin’ trouble?” Wilford was hurt by that, though he was quick to shake it off. “When it’s ready, yer th’ first person I wanna show. Promise.” He kissed Dark on the cheek and added, “Yer still free after work, right?”

--

When the other egos and regular staff had called it a day, Dark returned to Wilford’s empty office. To his surprise, the barrier bubble was gone, but the desk space had been cleared. There was no evidence he could see that might tell him what Wilford was up to. Wilford had actually remembered to shut down the laptop for once. This was certainly an unusual setting for the reporter who was terrible with technology. There had to be a clue somewhere that he wasn’t seeing!

“Babe!” Wilford’s voice made Dark jump. He spun around to notice Wilford had changed clothes to wear a faint blue (maybe) shirt, black trousers and white suspenders (he could tell those colours easily). “Thought I’d catch ya before ya left yer office. Ya ready ta go?” Dark nodded, crossing the room to take Wilford’s free hand.

“A basket?”

“Well, yeah! Can’t have ya gettin’ cold on me, eh? We got a great evenin’ planned an’ I want ya ta be cosy!”

--

The car pulled up at their normal viewing spot outside the city. Dark tried to weasel information out of Wilford, but the reporter was unusually tight-lipped. All he could learn was that the pair were sky-gazing. As much as Dark liked spending time with Wilford, he couldn’t help but feel Wilford forgot that Dark couldn’t enjoy seeing the day sky in the same way. Surely he wouldn’t need to ruin the night by having this conversation a second time, right? Stuck with indecision on what to do, Dark didn’t notice how Wilford sat on the picnic blanket and began pulling things out of the basket at first. A little vase of flowers, a notebook, some juggling balls, a small balloon, a black case… 

“Wilford… What are you doing with all this stuff?” Before Dark could sit, Wilford quickly scrambled back onto his feet.

“No, no! Not yet. Tonight’s a special night. Gonna be one of th’ prettiest views an’ I don’t wantcha missin’ it ‘cause yer askin’ why I have so many things with me.” Wilford wagged a finger playfully at Dark. A graceful bend allowed him to scoop up the black case and hand it to Dark. “A present fer my beautiful shadow.” Dark accepted the case, clicked it open, and frowned.

“... Sunglasses. At 8pm?”

“Well, yeah! There’s gonna be some big bright flashy thing of some sort tonight. Bing was ravin’ ‘bout it. I’m surprised ya didn’t hear ‘bout it!” Wilford had whipped out a pair of sunglasses and rested them in his messy curls. “Go on! Try ‘em on. Betcha look real handsome with ‘em~”

Something wasn’t right, but Dark couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Wilford was acting peculiar, like he was trying to distract the entity from something. Google never mentioned anything about events taking place in the sky. With all the random objects scattered at his feet, it could be Wilford’s way to pull attention away from some crime he had committed while out. That’s why he changed clothes, it had to be! Even with those worries in his head, Wilford looked genuinely excited. Dark never wore sunglasses, but maybe he could humour Wilford and play along. 

The glasses were put on.

The world exploded in a way he never could have predicted.

What was originally a murky mesh of blue, yellow, and grey had now become so much more. Everything was brighter, vivid, alive! He quickly lifted the glasses to see the world as he was used to, then dropped the glasses back down to see this new world. It was the glasses. The glasses were somehow letting him see colour in a way he never could have imagined and couldn’t possibly explain. The colours seemed to shift a little the longer he wore them, possibly as his eyes adjusted to it, allowing him to see so much more. A hand covered his mouth as emotions welled up inside him. Never did he think he would ever see something like this in his entire life.

“Ya doin’ okay?” Wilford’s hand gently squeezed his shoulder. Dark nodded.

“I… I’ve never seen colour like this before. It’s beautiful… I thought you brought me here because you forgot.”

“Nah. I wrote it down when ya told me. This is what I’ve been workin’ on all week that no one knew ‘bout. I wanted ta help ya see colour. These glasses were th’ best way ta do that. Bet it must be weird fer ya.” 

“I never would have guessed how many types of green there are. It all looked the same, but the leaves on the trees and the grass all look so different…” He turned to face Wilford, only to trail off as he took in the sight of his boyfriend in full colour for the first time. He was wearing a purple shirt, not a blue one! Wilford could see the emotion in Dark’s eyes through the tinted lenses as the entity’s hand reached up to Wilford’s face. “... Is that pink? Your moustache… It’s brighter than I could have imagined.” Tears finally slipped underneath the glasses as he laughed. “It’s perfect for you. I can’t stop smiling as I look at it. Oh! I never even realised it was in your hair either! I thought your hair was all one shade!” Fingers looped strands of pink locks to examine them better. “I knew I was right to think of you when I tried to imagine what ‘pink’ looked like.”

“Ya can admire me an’ my pretty pink all ya like later…. But turn ‘round again. I think y’ll like what yer ‘bout ta see.” Wilford kissed Dark on the nose before encouraging the entity to spin back the way he was originally facing.

There, in all its majestic glory behind them, was a sunset. With the distraction of the glasses, enough time had passed for the sun to dip low enough below the horizon. Dark slipped an arm around Wilford’s waist and held on tightly as he took in every inch of the evening sky.

“I knew it was yellow, I knew it was blue, but all the colours in between… No wonder you were always so excited to look at sunsets. I could stare at this all night if I could. I’m seeing colours I never knew existed before. It’s perfect.”

“I thought y’d say that. I try ta keep a diary ta help me remember things so I thought, ‘why not do th’ same fer you’?” A spiral-bound notebook was passed to Dark, open on a page that had coloured squares labelled. “I made ya a little chart so y’d know what colours are what.” A simple gesture had the emotions bubbling over all over again as Dark hugged Wilford tight.

The pair would sit in silence and enjoy the full beauty of the sunset. Wrapped in a purple and white blanket, Dark was given all the time to process what he was seeing. Later, the pair would use the notebook to show Wilford what Dark could now see in the random assortment of items that dotted the blanket as they undertook a masterclass of colour.. But for the moment, seeing the beauty of a colourful world took priority.

---

Note: For those who might be curious, I highly recommend checking out EnChroma, who do indeed make glasses to help those who are colourblind. There are plenty of video reactions to people wearing them for the first time if ever you need to rediscover your appreciation of colour.

[mdzsartreblogs]

Tags: Alternate Universes

Includes general types of AUs (ie, fantasy, historical, etc.) and fusions/aus set in other fandoms (ie, pokemon au, animal crossing au, etc.)

For a list of creature AUs, ie, works where at least one character is a creature of some kind, see the tag post for Creature AUs.

Tags for AUs are listed and linked if they are used ten or more times, EXCEPT for tags for Creature AUs, which are listed and linked if they are used at least once, OR if they double as “warning” tags for content people often like to avoid (such as A/B/O.)

(read more)

Types of Alternate Universes

alpha/beta/omega dynamics

animal transformation au

canon divergent au

immortality au

pre canon

post canon

creature au, by type of creature

android

alien

angel

bird person

bug person

bunny person

cat person

centaur/horse person

chinchilla person

cow person

daemon au

deer person

demon

dog person

dragon

elf

fairy character

fenghuang

fierce corpse

fish person

fox person

frog person

goat person

ghost

god

hyena person

kappa

lion person

lizard person

merperson

mimir

mouse person

panda person

octoperson

ogre

ox person

phoenix

pig person

plant person

raccoon person

sheep person

snake person/naga

spider person

squirrel person

tiger person

unicorn

vampire

weasel person

werewolf

winged character

xie zhi

zombies

creature au, by character who is a creature

creature a qing

creature a yuan

creature apple

creature cangse sanren

creature the dafan mountain goddess statue

creature jiang cheng

creature jiang fengmian

creature jiang yanli

creature jin guangshan

creature jin guangyao

creature jin ling

creature jin zixuan

creature lan jingyi

creature lan qiren

creature lan wangji

creature lan xichen

creature luo qingyang

creature madam lan

creature meng shi

creature mo xuanyu

creature nie huaisang

creature nie mingjue

creature nie zonghui

creature ouyang zizhen

creature qingheng jun

creature song lan

creature su she

creature wang lingjiao

creature wei changze

creature wei wuxian

creature wen chao

creature wen ning

creature wen qing

creature wen ruohan

creature wen xu

creature wen zhuliu

creature xiao xingchen

creature xue yang

creature yu ziyuan

fairy is not a dog

deaging

fantasy au

chinese mythology au

fairy tale au

greek mythology au

soulmate au

transmigration au

witch familiar au

gender swap

historical au

transmigration au

royalty au

modern au

celebrity au

college au

dance au

elementary school au

figure skating au

high school au

musician au

organized crime au

reality tv au

restaurant au

royalty au

selfie

social media au

soulmate au

sports au

superhero au

technological anachronism

transmigration au

mxtx single verse

reincarnation au 

role reversal au

science fiction au

cyberpunk au

mecha au

soul mate au

time travel au

Crossovers and Fusions

coraline au

disney au

dungeons and dragons au

genshin impact au

harry potter au

hollow knight au

legend of zelda au

lord of the rings au

my little pony au

pokemon au

silent hill au

sponge bob square pants au

star wars au

studio ghibli au

the witches au

word of honor au

[blessuswithblogs]

Video Games are a God Damned Mess: Bad Business Practices, Unsustainability, and the Fidelity Plateau

(shoutouts to the anon rando in my inbox for telling me about the read more button you were kind of rude about it but i don’t use this website so i legit didn’t know)

The video game industry has always been a bit wild and wooly compared to its older contemporaries. The emergence of a new medium is always rife with upheaval as paradigms shift and people discover that the old rules don't necessarily apply all of the time. That said, the past three months have been filled with what I can really only describe as catastrophes for many disparate publishers and development studios.

 You may recall I talked a bit about this during my game of the year list and Fallout 76 analysis, but to recap: with Telltale shutting its doors and shafting its workers, the writing was on the wall for the same thing to happen again as the intrinsically unsustainable boom and bust cycle began the less glamorous stage. It turns out I was correct in my predictions but congratulating myself for seeing this coming is not unlike congratulating myself for accurately predicting that tomorrow will be Tuesday. Or. Whatever day it will be when I post this. fuck i dated the lp thread ruined LOOK the point is that this was really obviously going to happen and that nobody felt the need to prepare for it or try to stop it before 10% of Activision-Blizzard's workforce got canned is a major failure of the industry at large.

So let's talk a bit about what's happened since then. There's been a lot, so forgive me if I miss your favorite corporate implosion. First, at Blizzcon, Diablo Immortal was revealed to what actually might have been the most actively hostile reception of a game in history. This has less to do with the more financial aspects of the ongoing Videocon Crisis and more just kind of served as an ill omen and an example of Blizzard's worrying descent into... wherever it is they're going. If gross incompetence was a place, they would be descending into it. On paper, a Diablo mobile game is a money-printing proposition. When all is said and done Immortal will still probably make them gobs of cash. In practice, however, they fucked the landing so hard they probably lost potential sales. The kind of folks who go to Blizzcon and get omegahype for a new diablo game are not the kind of folks who play mobile games. Mobile games have a Stigma among the hardcore crowd, and also the Ethical Business Practices in Video Games crowd (which as of this writing appears to be me, Jim Sterling, and the Warframe devteam). For a lot of braindead gamerbros, mobile games are synonymous with things like Candy Crush and Peggle, which are perfectly fine games honestly but they're For Girls or some shit so mobile games are bad and for casuals. More pertinently, mobile games are also a ferocious jungle of microtransactions, pay2win mechanics, and generally shoddy design. Command and Conquer and Dungeon Keeper, beloved franchises that have been ripe for revisiting for years now, both found mobile games and they were both utterly terrible. These games make a great deal of their money by exploiting "whales", or in actual human being language, vulnerable people with disposable income and difficulties with impulse control or addictive personalities. Or kids who know their mom's creditcard number. Kids play video games. Now that we are no longer kids (theoretically, anyway) it can be easy to forget that. I'm not the pearl-clutching type, but I think that stigmatizing a genre of games that proudly touts an exploitative-of-children business model is probably okay.

So there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of Diablo Immortal right out of the gate, and quite frankly whoever thought that just pushing that out there with literally no other Diablo related news items (like any whispers of the long coveted hd remaster of diablo the second) was either transferred in from another company the day before or had some kind of unspeakable grudge against the scheduled presenters, to whom my heart goes out to. There is also some undeniable precedent that Blizzard-Activision will, in all likelihood, monetize the everloving daylights out of it. Both Hearthstone and Overwatch have more or less become nicely polished vehicles with which to deliver lootboxes to players for a nominal fee. If this hadn't been followed by a seemingly unceasing calvacade of disasters, the whole debacle would have been really funny to point and laugh at. It's still pretty funny to point and laugh at, but it also has some less amusing implications. Blizzard in particular has been up to a lot of no good lately. Let's talk a little bit about their recent one-two punch.

First up, we have the complete and sudden abandonment of competitive support for Heroes of the Storm. Heroes of the Storm was essentially Blizzard's seething regret and resentment for letting Valve snatch up the whole Defense of the Ancients thing put into code and unleashed upon an unwitting populace. It had actually been gaining some renewed interest over the past year or so due to the developers putting in some elbow grease and making the game both more accessible and just. More better. HotS has also had a modest but respectable eSports scene since the game's launch, with a variety of professional players, shoutcasters, tournament organizers and emergency bugfixers employed. Many of them were anxious about their jobs for months in advance with no word from the higher ups about who would still be employed by 2019. Sometimes, companies have to make difficult decisions and let people go to keep operating. Even my communist ass reluctantly accepts this as a reality of the system we live in. However, there is a protocol about this kind of thing. Giving notice. Giving, you know, severance pay. Stuff like that. And of course this presupposes that this sort of cut to the workforce is actually necessary in the first place. Given that AB subsequently reported record profits for the year of 2018, I have some doubts. Completely dropping support for a game out of the blue is a scummy thing to do to your playerbase. When it is also directly impacting the livelihood of hundreds of people in your employ, it goes beyond scummy and turns right into Unacceptable.

But "unacceptable" is Bobby Kotick's favorite word in the English language so while shoving hundred dollar bills from his latest corporate bonus up his butt he and his friends in the boardroom decided that the HotS esports people might get lonely, so they had better go and fire another 10% of the workforce too. Just because. Like literally just because. His company is doing fine - better than fine! They are at record levels of better than fine. But the shareholders demand more and more exponential growth, so to cut costs that really didn't need cutting, away goes 10%. Will game quality suffer because of this? Undoubtedly. More work being piled on fewer people who are also living in mortal fear of losing their jobs Just Because is not a recipe for success. People are mad about this, much like people were/are mad about Fallout 76 - players of games, industry wonks, and iconic voice actresses alike are no longer tolerating this kind of thing in Two Thousand and Nineteen, Common Era. Nor should they!

Elsewhere in the Game-o-sphere, similar developments are brewing. ArenaNet, the folks wot do Guildwars, went through another round of mass layoffs. EA's stocks have plummeted and Battlefield V "failed to meet expectations" because it only sold A Ton and not A Fuckin Shit Ton, and Anthem is not really lighting the world on fire. After Mass Effect Andromeda's... curious debut, Bioware has probably been feeling the heat and a lot of people are concerned that it too will suffer the ultimate fate of all studios acquired by Electronic Arts: joining Visceral Games in a broken heap at the bottom of the garbage chute. Bring back Dead Space you motherfuckers. Bethesda continues to, improbably, suffer through PR disaster after PR disaster with Fallout 76, a game that seemingly cannot stop fucking up. Ubisoft has received some positive attention for vowing to NOT lay off hundreds of employees for no discernible reason, which leads me to believe that our standards for praiseworthy behavior have dropped alarmingly low. Even 2K Games in all of its monolithic glory seems to be feeling a bit of a Stock Price Squeeze. Honestly by the time I get this done and posted it's entirely possible that somebody else will fuck something up. I'm still kind of waiting on the fallout from Randy Pitchford's porn thumbdrive, but I'm also a little bit pleased that Actual Money Crimes are getting more traction in the news cycle.

So, returning to the main point: the industry is in a bad situation of its own making. It's a scene that's almost always been defined by trend-chasing. For a while, that meant that we would just have to suffer through an endless glut of EXTREME SPORTS GAMES SPONSORED BY A DUDE or a barrage of samey console shooters desperately trying to be Halo every once in a while. Unfortunately, the trend-chasing now extends not only to the games themselves, but to the methods by which they are monetized. Ever since DLC became a mainstream thing, the brightest minds of the boardrooms have been working tirelessly to deduce which method of fleecing players will scientifically speaking get them the most money. Inevitably, when some enterprising little weasel develops a new and improved monetization scheme, the rest of the little weasels will immediately latch on to that scheme and that's how you end up with Battlefront 2's ridiculous lootbox grind and Shadow of War's ludicrous inclusion of randomized lootboxes in a singleplayer action-adventure game. While I'm certain that the platonic ideal of the lootbox has existed in some form or another for decades now, I think that we can squarely lay the blame for the Great Lootbox Plague of the Twenty-Tens at the feet of Valve.

Valve has been known for questionable business practices for a while now (albeit in a more lowkey way than We Fired 800 People So Bobby Kotick Could Buy a New Yacht), largely getting away with it because Steam has been more or less unchallenged as the premier digital distribution service for video games. This might be changing soon, as Epic Games is going straight for the jugular with a number of aggressive moves with its own fledgling platform, but historically, Valve has faced very few consequences for just kind of being petulantly antagonistic towards its userbase because said userbase is easily mollified by steam sales and Gaben memes. When people think lootboxes in 2019, they probably think of games like Overwatch or Battlefront 2 or basically any contemporary multiplayer game. I certainly do, but a bit of fact finding allowed me to remember that Valve has been doing this shit since Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2's byzantine cosmetics market can't be overlooked either. All three of these games are or were at one point genre leaders and made Valve so much money they basically decided that they didn't really need to make games anymore. A reasonable conclusion to draw, given the fact all three of these games are inextricably linked to their history as very popular mods. Valve just outsources a great deal of its labor to dedicated, naive fans and gives them a pittance of the huge mounds of dollars they make from their hard work. It's a good racket, but it has set an alarmingly poor example to the rest of the gaming world.

Games as a service, in concept, is fine for games that lend themselves well to the idea. MMOs have been using a variation of the model for decades now and that genre is actually like, Perplexingly Healthy. Free to play games like League of Legends and Warframe have also had success with a service model. The problem comes from the AAA Game industry's pathological insistence on shoving square pegs into things that don't even have holes to begin with. Shadow of War, or Assassin's Creed, or any other major singleplayer offering, has no business whatsoever being a Live Service. They are finite experiences by design and that's completely fucking fine and normal. Appending microtransactions and lootboxes to them is a transparent attempt to just suck up a little bit more money from players in the most unsustainable way possible. Here is a small hint if some WB Games bigwig stumbles upon this: first of all, I'm building a guillotine, so you better watch your ass. Second, how dare you fucking make Shelob a sexy lady. Third, (this is the one that is probably most relevant): People are willing to pay as they go for cosmetics and timesavers for games that they like and want to support. I've dumped a lot of money into League over the years because there was a period of time where I was playing it nonstop and having a wonderful time for quite literally no cost to myself, so I felt like buying the cute Panda Annie Skin was a good compromise. Regrettably I would later learn that there are aspects of Riot Games I'm not super okay with giving money to but at the time they seemed agreeable and my friends who work there gotta get payed somehow. This whole dynamic of wanting to support a video game goes out the damn window when you are already charging a $60 entry fee, plus whatever highway robbery pricing you put on the inevitable DLC. In this case, the onus is squarely upon the publisher to provide an experience and content one would reasonably expect of the pricetag. Putting in microtransactions for cosmetics is galling. Putting in microtransactions for actual game progression, like in Battlefront 2 or Shadow of War, is outright insulting.

Many will leap to the defense of these publishers and developers, saying that these measures are necessary to make these ludicrously expensive and lavish AAA games that all look suspiciously like one another. For the time being, let's accept this as a true statement. If this is, in fact, the state of affairs in the industry, then the industry needs to change to a more sustainable business model. When playing Destiny 2, during a big space cutscene, the cute pilot lady ferrying me to The Large Molerat Man's Murderboat had beautifully rendered skin where you could see the pores and the little wispy cheek hairs that swayed to the momentum of the space plane's movements. It was very nice but then the next year or so I heard nothing but people pointing out "hey this game has no content you dipshits" or "the devteam is actually scamming people with the experience system to wring more playtime out of them". The cheek hairs affair succeeded in making me want the pilot to buy me dinner and regail me with stories of her space adventures as I batted my lashes at her in romantic admiration, but also: stop it. You do not need to do this. This is strictly unnecessary. The graphics arms race of yesteryear is over. Nobody cares anymore. Fidelity is plateauing harder and harder, to the point where games running properly on console without having to settle for 30FPS is becoming very difficult. There is an Earth B somewhere out there where Bloodborne was not a sony exclusive and got a PC release with 60FPS support and loading times for humans and on Earth B I am still playing that game for the forseeable future because it is the best game ever. We are far past the paradigm where we are making Tremendous Graphical Leaps with each successive generation. Right now, as of this writing, games look jawdroppingly good. Just ludicrously pretty and grandiose. Continuing to push the graphical envelope for Every Damn Annual Release is a waste of resources: monetary resources, labor resources, system resources. As of March, 2019, what people really want is stability and functionality. Something that runs nice and smooth at 60FPS and doesn't turn its characters randomly into nightmare inverse-Rayman beasts. I think the huge success of the Nintendo Switch, a console with relatively modest hardware but superb functionality, portability, and a surprisingly full featured library of both massive first party titles, like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey (which honestly look better than a lot of games on more robust hardware because of wonderful art direction) and smaller indie games, is testament to this line of thinking.

Maybe that's too bold of a statement. Maybe there's this huge swath of the gaming public that is just clamoring for more cheek hairs. If there are I think they're fucking out of their minds but who am I to judge. As long as games like that werewolf game The Order exist, where the universal reaction is "this is so pretty!!! ...wait there's nothing in here." I think that there is a serious responsibility to push back against that because evidently it's bankrupting the game industry and forcing them to violate international gambling laws to stay afloat. Except it's fucking not, actually. Many publishers are claiming record profits, upward trends, and are in a spot to have the raw nerve to say "well this game that sold 7 million copies didn't sell 8 million copies so it failed to meet expectations". They are doing ludicrously well for themselves in terms of generating revenue from sales. Where these highly successful corporations are running into problems is satisfying the almighty Shareholders. Shareholders are sort of like. Imagine if you got a job where you had to keep a large committee of actual babies happy, except the babies don't know shit about fuck about anything and demand that you routinely break all reasonable laws of sustainability and keep bringing in exponentially higher profits or they will take their ball and go home. There is still, evidently, money enough to give newly hired executives million dollar signing bonuses, but when it comes to just making a game that doesn't fall back on exploiting people with gambling addictions, we're suddenly dealing with an outfit of noble, longsuffering churchmice just trying to make ends meet. People are rapidly getting fed up with this blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty. Sales from Hearthstone card packs alone could fund a robust HotS esports scene for eternity if properly apportioned. This money is not properly apportioned. It is thrown into a gigantic incinerator so Kotick can get high on the fumes.

You might be wondering what this girls' deal is with Blizzard. Surely there are more egregious offenders? Firstly, Blizzard is very relevant at the moment because they are one of the highest profile publishers to recently Do A Business Oopsie. Secondly, I live in Irvine, California. Blizzard HQ is a ten minute drive from where I live. It's a local company to me, and it's legitimately kind of hard to see it continue to go down this path because I've had friends and neighbors who have worked there and enthusiastically described the experience right up until the very moment they get canned for no reason. My alma mater, UC Irvine, is one of the leading schools in the nation on adopting eSports into their collegiate athlete program. I understand, to a lot of people, Electronic Sports (please support them) are a big joke silly thing, but to me and my family who work in the UC system, they're actually like a huge and pertinent part of professional life. I'm literally being consulted by my mom's co-workers for advice and insight on how to minimize the abusive and toxic behavior that has become synonymous with streaming and professional gaming because campus now has a huge eSports center with rows on rows of gaming computers for students to use. Games Are Big. They are a powerful cultural and economic force in the lives of millions of people and denying that because of "haha nerds" is the same shortsighted, utterly-lacking-in-self-awareness wanking that resulted in the stupendously destructive "its just the internet, it doesnt matter lol" attitude that has caused the world so much grief. That said Bart Simpson becoming an esports legend sponsored by Riot Games is still pretty lame don't @ me.

What it comes down to is this: the games industry has grown into a hugely influential and powerful institution that affects the lives of more and more people every day. However, the appropriate growth in regulation, oversight, and worker protection has not occurred and has honestly shrunk. People love to talk up Satoru Iwata because when the Wii U was floundering he took a massive pay cut and refused to lay off any staff, reasoning that "it will be very difficult for our teams to create software that will impress the world when they are constantly worrying about losing their jobs." It's a little incredible that The Baseline Reasonable Thing To Do has elicited such effusive praise, but that's the world we live in and Iwata-san was pretty alright so I'm okay with it. Both his conduct and reasoning are both solidly above reproach in this case: it is really hard to be creative when the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head! That’s 500% true! This goes for game developers, community managers, eSports staff, support staff, literally every part of the process that matters, even the totally unrelated clerks and communications people who are still completely necessary for creating games. The only people who don't suffer are the dipshits on top who don't actually contribute to the creation of games in any way. They're still fine. Better than fine, really. That's why people are mad. That's why people SHOULD be mad. Don't stand for this anymore.

[elcorreodetorreon]

Legendary journalist John Pilger on Assange's arrest

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.



Moreno: A Latin American Judas.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.” The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars

When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.” The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”

These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.

If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls truthful “things,” what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?



Even the propagandist Harding could be at risk.

What is to stop the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, andDer Spiegel in Germany and The Sydney MorningHerald in Australia. The list is long.

David McCraw, lead lawyer of The New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”

Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.

In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.

Journalism: a Major Threat

Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defense in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.

“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”

And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.

[irislabslive]

So Much (For) Stardust

It's 2am and I am listening to the new Fall Out Boy album for the second time. Last week I had the luxury of attending one of their album-listening parties.

Fall Out Boy has always been one of those bands for me, one of my bands. I've made so many friends through my adventures for them. The first time I saw them live 12 hours prior I was on a flight home from Mexico and begged my dad as soon as I got home to let me go to the show. It was a radio station show 30 minutes from my house. He ended up bringing me - I weaseled my 14-year-old self to the GA barricade and screamed my heart out that night.

Soon after that Monumentour was announced and I got to see two of my bands together that summer. By the end of 2014, I had made so many friends through this band and even started seeing them outside the internet.

In December 2014, I went to NYC for the first time by myself to see Patrick Stump give a GarageBand masterclass at the Apple Store in Soho with my friends.

January came around and so did the release of American Beauty/American Psycho and on release day, they played The Today Show. Ironically enough, my first-ever concert was Hilary Duff on The Today Show. But this January day was different, my friends and I got on a midnight train to the city and were ready to see my favorite band the day their new album came out. We waited hours in just hoodies in Rockefeller Center. It's one of my favorite stories. When it was time for the performance there was a small crowd of us and we got let into the studio to watch. After the set, they all came up to us and talked with us a little bit, and thanked us for coming.

The next month they played the NBA All-Star show and I remember my friends getting my ticket for me while sitting in English class. This show was so special. Hell, Shaq was there handing out cake. That was my first time in Hammerstein Ballroom and also the closest I ever got to be in one of their pits. I remember screaming my heart out and Pete Wentz loving my energy.

I was 16, so concerts were at my parent's discretion. I didn't get to see them again after that until 2016, my 17th birthday gift was seeing Fall Out Boy at Madison Square Garden. 17-year-old me never would've thought I'd end up working there years later. That show was truly an experience, Wintour had one of my favorite productions I have ever seen. Plus, one of my dear friends from those days went with me and we had the time of our lives seeing our band.

When the next album cycle came around, I was away at college so a big tour wasn't really on the agenda. But here we are again. I'll be seeing Fall Out Boy again in August. I'm lucky this time though, I'll be going to two dates. I'm returning to the same venue I saw them at on Monumentour with great seats, and finally getting a real Fall Out Boy pit experience because I'm so lucky they are playing my job. It's so crazy to say Fall Out Boy is playing my job. (Like I didn't just reveal I worked at one of the biggest venues in the world.)

It took me the whole album to write this little love note to Fall Out Boy. I can't wait to scream these new songs with friends old and new. Over 10 years later and this band still has the same chokehold on me as they did on that little kid that wore their Fall Out Boy hoodie every single day of school. This was the album I needed for this point in my life, and I am so grateful for this band always having me when I needed it.

So Much (For) Stardust. AOTY.

[the-remainder]

Our Winding Road

domestic-fantasy-breakup(?)-adventure

Disillusioned with civilian life, former heroes Rowan and Jori retrace the steps of the journey on which they fell in love, with the hopes of rekindling their strained relationship.

Assume the role of the-great-“Ogre Slayer”-turned-desk-jockey Rowan, brave the various dangers lurking on your way, yourself being chief among them. Will you and your love find your way back together again, or will this journey mark the end for you two?

Play it here!

32k words - Multiple endings

Animated sprites and backgrounds

Immersive soundscape

Puns galore

Mature Warning - Explicit descriptions of sex.

Good ending guide

A collaborative effort by Square Weasel Studio and friends, made for Amare Jam 2023. (see game page for full credits)

[farvn]

“Do you remember now, my dear Vyn? It hurts doesn’t it?” Square Weasel Studio’s “Chronicles of Tal’Dun: The Remainder” receives an overall score of: 9/10 OUTSTANDING + SILVER MEDAL OF UNIQUENESS Read my Steam Review here: https://steamcommunity.com/id/Far2close/recommended/1616280/

[codynaomiswire]

“The Return of Quaid”: Initial Thoughts

Last week I went ahead and posted some initial thoughts I had for “Beyond the Corona Walls”, and thought that perhaps it would be fun to go ahead and continue doing so for the other episodes in season 02!  So here are some of my initial thoughts for “The Return of Quaid”.

- This episode was quite enjoyable to watch!  While it didn’t do a whole lot to further the underlying plot of the series, it was really nice to get to see more of Vardaros, to get to know the city’s people a bit more, to see some character development for Vex, and to see a situation where the “heroes” in the story find that not everyone is eager to jump for joy at their presence and get on the band wagon of taking a stand against foes that can do some legit damage.  It made the world of the series feel more complex and real I think, and also helped to illustrate how sometimes we may feel a strong urge to help people, but the help we think to offer / can offer may actually come across as intrusive and arrogant as opposed to what really needs to be done.  Was good for the writers to show a situation where our heroes realized a more long-term and local solution needed to be found for the plight of Vardaros, and that it wasn’t gonna come from them just putting a few bad guys in their place while passing through.  I just really appreciated that message being portrayed here, as it feels very relevant to our modern context in a lot of ways when it comes to complex issues surrounding law and order, disaster relief, charitable actions, etc.  The solution isn’t always cut and dry, and I really liked how this episode showed that.

- I did find it a little bit confusing how “Beyond the Corona Walls” ends with the team riding off into the sunset away from Vardaros, and then all of a sudden this next episode begins with them back in the city’s town square buying supplies.  Though in one post I read here in Tumblr someone had theorized that perhaps as they were riding away they suddenly realized that in all the chaos of the previous episode, they never got the food supplies they set out to get in the first place, so that’s why they headed back for them.  I think this is a pretty legit explanation (and also pretty funny!), though it perhaps would’ve been nice if we got to actually see that, or else had a bit more dialogue at the beginning to fill in that gap in the flow of the plot.  But it really isn’t too distracting though, so that’s ok.

- Quaid was a really nice addition to the character roster!  I love how unique his character design was, and how the artists of the show didn’t go with the stereotypical ultra-buff crime fighter type for him.  I also liked how they made him a little quirky, and I LOVE how they made him a beekeeper of all things!  It was so random, but also felt so genuine and endearing.  His VA was also really good, and the mentor-protégé relationship he forms with Vex is super sweet~!  I hope we get to see more of him later on in the series.

- Vex’s character development was really nice!  I think it’s great that the writers gave her a mentor in the character of Quaid, and that her role as Vardaros’s new deputy was a creative choice.  It allows her to be in a heroic role, while also giving her space to retain her sassy and no-nonsense persona.  A good choice!

- The fact that Quaid and Vex’s mentor-protégé relationship was so central to the plot of this episode was such a delight for me!!  Again, I love how this show explores all kinds of different relationships (not just the romantic ones), and that a mentor-protégé / teacher-student relationship was portrayed so well and so positively was great to see!  It was also an intergenerational relationship, which I think is good to portray more of, too.

- Was nice to get a bit more of Eugene and Lance’s backstory, and to hear how Vardaros was actually a city they spent a significant amount of time in when they were younger.  Was also interesting to see how they didn’t see Quaid as their enemy even though he had arrested them multiple times in the past, and that they were all able to move on from that and form new friendships with each other by the end of the episode.

- I loved Lance in this episode!  Of course I love him in every episode he’s in because he’s just that great, but he really did shine in this one!  It gave me the impression that the writers were really trying to connect him with the stage performance / Broadway background of his VA, which was nice to see!  While the joke of the episode was that Lance’s acting wasn’t really that great, it was fun to see the passion he has for acting and dance nonetheless.  (And while Lance may not be the best at stage performance per se, I would give him a 100 in terms of his speech skill that we’ve seen in previous episodes.  xD)

- Again the design and animation of food in this series is just scrumptious!  Makes me about as hungry as when I see food animated by Studio Ghibli (which is a huge compliment by the way).

- Cassandra cutting the apple into a honeybee shape, and that potentially being a subtle reference to Applebee’s!  xD  That was golden!

- Was interesting to see Anthony the Weasel as the new up-and-coming crime boss after the Baron was put out of commission.  While Anthony the Weasel isn’t himself a very imposing figure, it does show that he keeps on the lookout for power vacuums and for opportunities to advance his own agenda.  The fact that he also has the respect and loyalty of his comrades also keeps him as a viable threat, despite any apparent weaknesses he may have in other areas.

- Was very clever on Quaid’s part to fight the Collector using a swarm of bees!

- The overall tone of this episode was very encouraging and uplifting, and I liked how it showed that even the small kind gestures of everyday life can make a big difference!

- The putting up and tearing down of the canopy that Anthony the Weasel stretches over the town square seemed quite symbolic.  Very nice!

- Favorite bit of dialogue in this episode:

Vex: “I can’t believe I’m doing this.  I feel like an idiot.”

Eugene:  “Yeah, kid, becoming one of the good guys will do that.”

This just felt super honest and genuine to me.  Sometimes doing the right thing does make you feel stupid, embarrassed, or vulnerable, but you do it anyway because it’s right!  (And it also helps when you have friends to help support you in doing the right thing, too.  We need each other!)

Overalll, I felt that this was a really nice episode!  Good job TTS/RTA crew!  Can’t wait for episode 03!

[brn1029]

On this date in music history…and now after the last one…I want to go commit some "wild antics"….🤣🤣🙄

May 24th

1956 - Lys Assia

The first Eurovision Song Contest was held in Lugano, Switzerland. The event was the brainchild of Marcel Baisoncon of the European Broadcasting Union. Seven countries participated and they were each allowed two songs. Both Luxembourg and the winner Switzerland used the same singer for both. Switzerland won with 'Refrain' by Lys Assia.

1962 - Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with 'Good Luck Charm' his 11th UK No.1 single. It completed his second hat-trick of chart topping singles in the UK.

1963 - The Beatles

The Beatles recorded the first of their very own BBC radio program, "Pop Go the Beatles". The theme song for the program was a version of "Pop Goes the Weasel". The Beatles' guests for this first show were the Lorne Gibson Trio.

1963 - Elmore James

US blues guitarist and singer Elmore James died of a heart attack aged 45. James wrote 'Shake Your Money Maker', which was covered by Fleetwood Mac in 1968. Known as "The King of the Slide Guitar", James influenced Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Keith Richards.

1966 - Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart appeared at the Whisky a Go Go. West Hollywood, California. Supported by Buffalo Springfield and The Doors.

1969 - Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's album Nashville Skyline peaked at No.3 in the US chart. The singer's ninth album, it also scored Dylan his fourth UK No.1. The album featured 'Lay Lady Lay', which became one of Dylan's biggest pop hits, reaching No.7 in the US, his biggest single in three years.

1969 - Billy Preston

The Beatles with Billy Preston started a five week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Get Back', the group's 17th US No.1. Credited to "The Beatles with Billy Preston", it was the Beatles' only single that credited another artist, 'Get Back' was also the Beatles' first single release in true stereo in the US.

1970 - Peter Green

Guitarist and founding member Peter Green played his last gig with Fleetwood Mac when they appeared at the Bath Festival, Somerset, England.

1974 - David Bowie

David Bowie released his eighth studio album Diamond Dogs. The cover art features Bowie as a striking half-man, half-dog grotesque painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert. It was controversial as the full painting clearly showed the hybrid's genitalia.

1980 - Phil Collins

Genesis fans turning up at the Roxy Club box office in Los Angeles to buy tickets for a forthcoming gig were surprised to find the band members Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford selling the tickets themselves.

1991 - Gene Clark

Founder member of The Byrds Gene Clark died of a heart attack aged 49. Wrote The Byrds hits 'I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better', and 'Eight Miles High', member of McGuinn, Clark and Hillman and solo.

1999 - Queen

Queen singer Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, was honoured on a new set of millennium stamps issued by the Royal Mail. Mercury, who featured on the 19p stamp, was a keen stamp collector, and his collection was bought by the Post Office in 1993. The stamp marked his contribution to the Live Aid charity concert in 1985, and caused controversy by featuring a small portion of Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, in the background - UK stamps by tradition only carry pictures of living persons who are members of the Royal Family.

2000 - Chrissie Hynde

A New York Judge told Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde that if she wanted her March arrest for protesting the sale of leather goods in a Gap store dismissed, she'd better keep her nose clean for the next six months.

2003 - Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney made his first ever live performance in Russia when he appeared in-front of 20,000 fans in Red Square.

2009 - Billy Joel

Billy Joel was being sued by his former drummer for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties. Liberty Devitto, claimed that Joel hadn't paid him proper royalties for 10 years of his work. Devitto was Joel's drummer from 1975 until 2005, when he said he was abruptly thrown out of the band. He said: "People get fired, they get severance or insurance for a certain period of time. I didn't even get a phone call. It was cold."

2017 - Elvis Presley

Sonny West, one of the original members of Elvis Presley's Memphis Mafia, died of lung cancer at the age of 79. Joining Elvis in 1960, he was abruptly fired, along with his cousin Red and bodyguard Dave Hebler, in 1976 without explanation. The following year he co-authored the book Elvis, What Happened?.

2020 - Al Rex

American bassist Al Rex died age 91. He started playing for Bill Haley & His Comets and its predecessor Bill Haley and the Saddlemen in 1949 and became noted for 'wild antics' on stage

[chickenthingsandmore]

Best Fence For Chickens

Every chicken farmer knows that he cannot take the task of choosing good implements lightly. Therefore, our goal is to guide you through the options that you will have available so that you choose the best of all.

Let’s see a list of the 7 mesh/fence for chickens that, according to prices and buyers, will be the best you will find in the market.

1. BSTOOL Chicken Wire Net

Perfect Size for CraftWorks: we tend to Cut The 10-foot Wire Mesh into three Sheets, Each Wire internet Measures thirteen.7-inch breadth by 40-inch Length, More Easier for You to chop and Shape; These meshing Mesh square measure made of Galvanized Wire With zero.63” x 1” polygon Mesh gap, The Perfect Size for Family Craft Works. Main Purpose: This little Size meshing internet is principally Applied in Family Crafts, Such As jewelry Holder, Safe cowl of Pet Cages, Christmas Garland frames, Photo walls, etc. You Can Cut and form For the other little comes. Advantages It is large. Resists moisture. Disadvantages The package is heavy.

2. Amagabeli Garden & Home Galvanized Chicken Wire

1/2 opening cross-section, 48″x50′, 19 check Hot plunged excited, twofold zinc covering Imperviousness to rust and long assistance life For use around gardens, in studios, and for regular home or property projects, covering for window screen, chicken run, coops, hare fence, tree monitors, channel drain, soil sifters, garden raised bed, garden fence, and structure a munching outline on new green grass. To fence out rodents, moles, snakes, little creatures cottontails, gazelle squirrel raccoons, owls, a german shepherd, a line collie. Security for vegetables, tomatoes, strawberries, and spices; to keep snakes, scorpions, raccoons, possums, skunks, weasels, and so forth out and make hares, chicks, hens, birds safe. Advantage It is of a suitable height, to prevent the chickens from escaping. Includes connectors. Disadvantages We do not see you against this product.

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[churchofsatannews]

Hokum Productions and Jersey City Theater Center Present Nathan Gray of Boysetsfire 

Hokum Productions announces its debut show with the Jersey City Theater Center featuring Nathan Gray of seminal post-hardcore band Boysetsfire on Saturday, January, 20th, 2018. Tickets are now on sale for $10 and capacity will be limited to 50. The show will also feature an exclusively New Jersey-based opening line up including The Wedding Funeral (Darren Deicide and Ethel Lynn Oxide's new gothic-Americana project), Joe Billy (acoustic folk-punker), and Hoag and the Weasel (a progressive, experimental folk duo) as well as local vendors.

The show will take place at Merseles Studio in the Jersey City Theater Center, which is located at 339 Newark Ave., Jersey City, NJ. Tickets are available here. 

As a Hokum tradition, the guest deacon for the night will be comedic artist Rev. Michaelanthony Mandrake. Vendors slated to table include JC Oddities Market, Etched in Embers, Jewelry by Javiera Magaly, and the Impractical and Costume Co., with more to be announced. Hokum Productions began as a monthly Sunday showcase in the back room of McGinley Square Pub in Jersey City, NJ and is dedicated to alternative roots music and culture. Unique and formal attire is always encouraged.

Website

[timalexanderdollery]

Costume design for animated movies is ridiculously difficult. The team behind Frozen 2 explains why.

Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, and Sven in Frozen 2. | Walt Disney Animation Studios

How dresses of velvet and ice are animated. Plus, Anna gets a new hairstyle.

When Brittney Lee first signed on to do animated work for Disney’s Frozen more than six years ago, our Queen of Arendelle sported a very different look. “Elsa was blue and had black spiky short hair,” Lee says. The character went through many iterations before landing on her final beauty look of a thick white-blonde side braid, white skin, and an impressive purple smoky eye. Her wardrobe went through just as many changes. What started out as a coat made out of living weasels was eventually turned into a glistening gown that millions of little girls around the world would go on to wear.

Lee and her colleague Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay are part of the visual development team at Disney. This means they’re animated artists responsible for designing everything from the characters to the environment to the props. And, yes, the costumes. Both worked on designing the outfits for Anna and Elsa on Frozen 2, which Sastrawinata-Lemay notes might be the most intricate of any animated movie in history due to advancements in 3D and computer generated imagery technology. It’s an upgrade that’s made her and Lee’s jobs both more exciting — “because it helps to enhance the storytelling” — and more challenging, “because there are so many more details to consider.” For example, as Lee explains, many of the costumes in the first Frozen involved embroidery, but the technique wasn’t nearly as involved as it is now. “On this film, we could really be elaborate and add a lot of extra bead work or sequins that wouldn’t have been possible to do on the first film,” she explains. “We really tried to meet technologies’ needs in creating more art work and more design where appropriate.”

Then there comes enhancements to the fabric. Lee and her team use a C.G.I. tailoring program called Marvelous Designer that allows them to see how certain materials would drape on an animated character in the same way that it would drape on a person. “Something that is meant to be a velvet shouldn’t be moving as if it was tulle or if it was cotton,” Lee explains. “We run a whole bunch of tests until we can get it moving in a way that is believable and that is also hopefully true to the fabric that we’re trying to represent.”

Disney

Elsa’s costumes had to move realistically — even underwater.

The way a fabric behaves in motion is important in this particular film because both Elsa and Anna spend a big chunk of it on the move, traveling through forest and ocean. As Lee explains, the simulation team at Disney has a process of testing different settings on the digital fabric to predict how it will react to certain elements. For one scene that Elsa spends in the water, Lee says, “we could see the way her dress looked when she was walking in the water, we could see it soaking wet, and we could see it floating underwater before we ever signed off on the final approved design that she’s wearing.” Lee and her team also pulled a lot of underwater photography and videos for reference “so that [the animated dress] can be built and perform the way that everyone’s anticipating it to perform.” She continues: “We try to do as much leg work as we can in the design phase.”

When it comes to the costume design direction for Frozen 2, Sastrawinata-Lemay says they were told three things about the film beforehand: it takes place in the fall, Anna and Elsa will be three years older, and there’s going to be an epic journey. “Everything else is being worked out at the same time as we’re designing,” she says. Thankfully, since this is a sequel, they already had a good idea of who the sisters are style wise. “We didn’t have to ask the question of ‘oh, would she or would she not wear this,’” Lee says. “It was always more of ‘well, what’s right for this girl at this moment in time?’”

Anna’s style draws inspiration from traditional Norwegian folk wear known as the bunad, a dress typically made out of wool and adorned with embroidery, and silhouettes like the cinched waist and full, A-line skirt from Christian Dior’s “New Look.” Her looks tend to be grounded in the fabrics and materials of the place and time period (the 1840s-1850s, according to Lee), which means she wears heavier materials like wool and velvet and her color palette skews on the warmer side. The focus for this film centered around upgrading her wardrobe to something that felt more mature than the “bubbly younger effervescent sister,” Lee says. One instance is the shape line of Anna’s dress which, before, always included a rounded scalloped shape. “We really squared those shapes off, so she’s just a little bit more linear and a little less playful,” Lee says. After 122 iterations, the team ended up with a classic A-shape dress with a bell skirt and a deep purple travel cloak.

Disney

Anna (left, with snowman Olaf) wears Norwegian folk wear inspired capes and dresses.

For Elsa, the focus wasn’t to make her seem older, since “she’s always been a little more stoic and reserved,” Lee says. “She’s the older sister and so we sort of played that into her from the beginning.” But rather the challenge lay in how to design a costume that was going to endure high amounts of action. Elsa’s outfits draw inspiration from designers like Alexander McQueen and Elie Saab “just in their mystic grand silhouettes and bold statements,” Lee says. And everything the team had created for her up until the second film included long trains and floor length hemlines which would prove cumbersome. So the question then became: “How do we cut her hemline so that it’s not floor length, but still makes her feel like Elsa?”

Lee and her team managed to do this by creating a tailored coat paired with a double paneled cape, which allowed Elsa to “retain that snow queen dress quality that she had in ‘Let It Go,’” Then, for strength, they added snowflake encrusted shoulders that are meant to look like militaristic epaulettes. “We wanted to make sure we were illustrating that she’s the Queen of Arendelle,” Lee says. “There should be some sort of authority in the costume that she’s wearing for the bulk of the film.” As far as fabric and color go, tulle and cool shades are reserved for our frosty protagonist, who is creating these materials herself out of ice.

To add even more practicality to both Anna and Elsa’s wardrobes, they wear pants underneath their dresses. “We didn’t want [the pants] to be the element that you’re looking at, but we wanted them to function and help them be able to move through everything that they needed to move through,” Lee says. Elsa’s outfit is topped off with a pair of snowflake-adorned ice boots.

Disney

Sven, Kristoff, Olaf, Anna, and Elsa’s costumes look more realistic than ever in Frozen 2.

Along with the costumes, Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay also received a directive to upgrade the sister’s hairstyles. “The big thing for Anna on the first film is that she really owned pigtail braids,” Lee says. “But anytime that we tried to put her in the pigtail braids for this film, particularly in her travel costume, she just felt too young. It felt like she was still a school girl.” With the suggestion from director Jennifer Lee, they ended up pulling half of her hair down and adding a crown braid that runs across the back of her head.

This is another case when the technological advancements proved to make things tricky. The program used for grooming was intended to build things like grass; meaning, the hair looked almost too much like hair. “At Disney, we like to stylize and we like to caricature things and make them feel very appealing and very approachable,” Lee says. “So we can’t necessarily go straight to completely realistic hair because then that fights with what our characters look like.” The team then had to find a balance of being somewhat realistic and somewhat caricature like. “That might mean that the hair follicles are a little bit larger than what they would be on a normal human or smaller and it might mean that there’s just more of this magic hair spray in Elsa’s hair,” Lee says. “There’s always things that we’ve gotta consider that are different than real life.”

Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay are designing for what would be best for the characters and for the film, but they eventually have to grapple with whether or not people will want to wear their designs in real life. (They will; Disney reported that more than three million Anna and Elsa dresses were sold in North America in 2014 alone.) The duo try not to think about that when they’re in the thick of working though. “At the time, it’s more like solving a puzzle piece than designing for a consumer product,” Sastrawinata-Lemay says. Eventually they have to pass off what they refer to as “call outs” to their design team so that they can manifest their creations into physical costumes.

Disney

Elsa’s dresses in Frozen 2 are inspired by designers Alexander McQueen and Elie Saab.

The timeline of the process goes something like this: Once an outfit is approved and while Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay are finalizing how the garment is constructed, where the seams are, and what specific fabrics they’re going to use, they simultaneously put together a diagram made up of call outs for the team that’s designing the physical costumes. “It’s like a bible on how to make the dress,’ Sastrawinata-Lemay says. “It’s really detailed, down to what direction the embroidery thread would go and how big or how small it is.”

It takes many iterations to get right, a relative idea since very rarely is there a one-to-one translation from film costume to consumer product, especially when it comes to the fabrics. Sastrawinata-Lemay says that, if somebody were going to make an exact replica of their designs, down to the materials used, “it would definitely be more of an haute couture gown outfit that would cost so much money.” The pair doesn’t have control over what the alternative materials are, but they understand the need to use affordable fabrics for items being mass produced. “It is no more expensive for us to put a very luxurious velvet cape on Anna than it would be for a much cheaper material,” Lee says, noting that this isn’t the case for product designers.

For the past two years that they’ve worked on Anna and Elsa, the animators have been immersed in the Disney universe, where the real world rules and restrictions don’t apply. “You’re designing for a princess so we kind of go all out,” Sastrawinata-Lemay says. “Because, well, why not?”

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[monicalozzano]

Sentimental education

MOVIES 

Disney Classics 

Alice’s Wonderland (1923), Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Make Mine Music, The Jungle book 1, Peter Pan, Dumbo, 101 Dalmatians, Alice in Wonderland, Anastasia, The Sword in the Stone,  The Ugly Duckling, The Jungle book 2, The Practical Pig, The Aristocats, Silly Simphonies, Lilo & Stitch 1 and 2, Plane Crazy, Robin Hood, Little Marmaid 1, 2 and 3, Pocahontas 1 and 2, The King Lion 1, 2 and 3, Mulan 1 and 2, Hercules, Bambi, The Rescuers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1 and 2,  The Three Caballeros, Aladdin 1, 2 and 3, Tangled, Meet the Robbinsons, Tarzan 1 and 2, The Princess and the Frog, Frozen, Moana, The Beauty and The Beast, Saludos Amigos, The Many adventures on Winnie The Pooh, Lady and The Tramp, Oliver & Company, The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Home, on the Range, Wreck-It Ralph, The Leyend of Sleepy Hollow, Animation from Disney/Pixar

Toy Story 1, 2 and 3, Monsters Inc, Monsters University, Cars, Cars 2 and 3, Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, Inside out, The good Dinosaur, Brave, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, A Bug’s Life, Up, WALLL-E, Bolt, Chicken Little, Zootopy, Gnomeo and Julieth, Big Hero Six, Coco

Disney live-action 

Mary Poppins, The cheetah girls, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Trough the looking glass, High School Musical 1, 2 and 3, Camp Rock, Camp Rock: The Final Camp, Wizards of Waverly Place, Wendy Wu: homecoming warrior, Princess Program Protection, The Beauty and The Beast, Stuck in the suburbs, Maleficent, Cinderella, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Enchanted, Princess Diaries 1 and 2, Pixel perfect, 

Dreamworks 

AnimationRaise of the Guardians, The Boss Baby, Trolls, The Croods, The Prince of Egypt, Turbo, Shark Tale, The Road to El Dorado, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Home, The Guardian Brothers, A Monster in Paris, 

Paramount Pictures

How To Train Your Dragon 1 and 2, Shrek 1,2 & 3, Shrek the Third,  Shrek Forever After, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted,  Monsters vs. Aliens

Universal Studios

Lorax, Despicable Me 1, 2 and 3, Sing, Pitch Perfect 1, 2 and 3, Mamma Mia, 50 Shades, 50 Shades Darker, Bruce Almighty, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Psicosis, Les MIsérables, The Land Before Time

Blue Sky Studios

Robbots, Ice Age 1, 2, 3 and 4, Río,  Horton

Studio Ghibli

Tonari no Totoro, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 

Sony Pictures

Hotel Transilvania 1 and 2, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Smurfs 1 and 2, Goosebumps, 

alittlebitofeverything..

A lot like love, Basquiat (1996) Fight Club, Spring Breakers, El ciempiés Humano, Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, 12 monkies, Psyco, Casablanca, 50 First Dates, Get Smart, Love Rosie, Romeo and Julieth (2013) La vita e bella, Batman Trilogy (by Nolan) Ramona and Beezus, The Neon Demon, Under the Skin, the perks of being a wallflower, The proposal, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Pollock (2000) Charlie St. Cloud, The Danish Girl, The Notebook, 10 things I hate about you, Titanic, Pretty Woman, P.S: I love you, (500) Days of Summer, A Walk to Remember, Letters to Julieth, Nothing Hill, About Time, Dear John, The Crush, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, No String attached, A Cinderella Story, Grease, The Breakfast Club, My Best Friend's Wedding, 27 Dresses, The Vow, Shakespeare in Love, The Last Song, Another Cinderella Story, One Day, Ever After, Remember Me, The Longest Ride, The Lucky One, If I Stay, Paper Towns, Tres metros Sobre el Cielo, Tengo Ganas de Ti, The First Time, Cinderella (2015) Pitch perfect 1 and 2, Mean Girls, Clueless, Wild Child, Not Another Teen Movie, Easy A, Cruel Intentions, La Vie d'Adèle, Bring it on, John Tucker must die, Monte Carlo, Just like heaven, What Happens in Vegas, Runaway Bride, Definitely maybe, Friends with Benefits, Black Swan, The sweetest thing, La la land, Moonlight, Crazy stupid love, Grease, Bad moms, Love and other drugs, The Social network,  Just go with it, Grown ups 1 and 2, Bedtime stories, Click,  We’re the Millers, Big Daddy, The devil wears Prada, The Intern, Bride wars, Coco avant Chanel, The Theory of Everything, Sabrina, The Pursuit of Happiness, Marie Antoinette, Last days, Blue valentine, Singing In The Rain, Cecil B. Demented, eXincenZ, Back to the Future, The day of the Jackal, Roman Holiday, I, Tonya, Phantom Threat, Ginger and Rosa, Lady Bird, Dunkirk, Fifty Shades of Grey (Trilogy), The Orange Workclock, 2001: Space Odyssey, Roman Holiday, Matrix, Dead Poets Society, The Edge of Seventeen, V for Vendetta, Lion, The Glass Castle, Hacksaw Ridge, Arrival, Independence Day Resurgence, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), Suicide Squat, Wonder Woman (2017), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League​, Batman: Lego Movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming​, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Avengers: Infinity War, Thor, Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok, Iron Man, The Square, Wonder, Murder On The Orient Express, Before Midnight, The DUFF, Peter Pan, Snowman, Anabelle 1 and 2, Insidious: Chapter 2, The Greatest Showman, A Dog’s Purpose, IT, Baby Driver, The Mask of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro, Me Before You, Wish Upon, Happy Family, Atomic Blonde, Water for Elephants, Agora, Ted, LOL (2008), LOL (2012), Hairspray, The Healer, A Question Of Faith,The Danish Girl, Mr & Mrs Smith, Spice World, Bed Time Stories, Pixels, Spy Kids, Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Valentines day, Intern, Little Prince, The Theory of Everything, We Are Your Friends, To Kill a Mockingbird​, Me and Earl and The Dying Girl, Heaven is For Real, Saving Mr. Banks, Life as We Know It, Dorian Gray, Twenty, Nerve, Batman: The Lego Movie, Baywatch, The Emoji Movie, Captain Fantastic, To The Bone, The Lovely Bones, Flipped, Homeless to Harvard, Ghost World, Divergent, The Hunger Games Trilogy, El Club de los Incomprendidos, Final Destination Franchise, Neon, The Longest Ride, Before I Fall, Matilda, My Babysitter's a Vampire, Endless Love, No Se Aceptan Devoluciones, Latin Lover, Now is Good, How I Live Now, Que Pena Tu Boda, Que Pena Tu Familia, Cásese Quien Pueda, Que Culpa Tiene El Niño, Nosotros Los Nobles, Cantinflas, Memorias del Subdesarrollo, Child of Rage, El Amor En Los Tiempos del Cólera, La Vendedora de Rosas, Rosario Tijeras, Soñar No Cuesta Nada, Los Colores de la Montaña, El Acorazado Potemkin, F for Fake, Agarrando Pueblo, Ojo y Vista: Peligra la Vida del Artista, El Tigre de Papel, Sex in The City, Mirror, Mirror, Stepmom, Adore, Think Like a Man, The Three Stooges, Vamps, Zambezia, The Beatles: Eight days a week, Storks, Ghost in the Shell, Bad Moms, Liar Liar, Clueless, Shape of Water, Woody Woodpecker, Everything Everything, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Fallen, Dude, The Space Between Us, The Kissing Booth, Barefoot in the Park, Mamma Mia, American Beauty, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fathers and Daughters, Mr & Mrs Smith, world War Z, When We First Met, 

            SERIES 

Friends, How I Met Your Mother, 13 Reasons Why, Sense8, The Vampire Diaries, Glee, The End Of The Fuking World, Las Chicas del Cable, Stranger Things, Riverdale, Jane The Virgin, Gossip Girl, Luis Miguel, Grace and Frankie, Abstract (the art of design), Velvet, 

SERIES ANIMADAS

The Simpsons, The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter´s laboratory, Ruglats, All Grown Up!, Courage The Cowardly Dog, Star vs the Forces of Evil, Steven Universe, Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, We Bare Bears, Caillou, Hey, Arnold!, Ed, Edd y Eddy, CatDog, SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, Johnny Bravo, Recess, The Angry Beavers, Futurama, The Wild Thornberrys, Happy Tree Friends, Super Friends, Mike, Lu & Og, Pepper Ann, Bob the Builder, Oggy and the cockroaches, The Animated Series, The Pink Panther, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, The Fairly OddParents, Codename: Kids Next Door, Lazy Town, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, The Flintstones, Regular Show, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, Las Tres Mellizas, Woody Woodpecker, Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, The Tom and Jerry Show, Tom and jerry Kids, Scooby-Doo ¿Where are You?, Scooby-Doo Creepy Cities, Pokemon, DragonBall, Pucca, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, Kim Possible, American Dragon: Jake Long, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Popeye the Sailor, The Proud Family, Phineas and Ferb, The Replacements, Dave The Barbarian, Doug, Danny Phantom, Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, The Buzz on Maggie, The Emperor's New School, Phil of the Future, Dragon Tales, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Clifford Puppy days, Care Bears, My Little Pony, Bear In The Big Blue House, Zaboomafoo, Curious George, Jay Jay The Jet Plane, Sesame Street, The Book of Pooh, Blue’s Clues, Rolie Polie Olie, Jojo’s Circus, Little Einsteins, Barney and Friends, Go Diego Go!, Pocoyo, The Backyardigans, Higglytown Heroes, Dora the Explorer, Silly Simphonies, Heidi, Animaniacs, The Jetsons, DuckTales, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Tiny Toons Adventures, Inspector Gadget, Pinky and the Brain, Top Cat, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show,  The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Yogi Bear Show, Yogi's Treasure Hunt, Captain Tsubasa, Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks, Stanley, Pinky Dinky Doo, The Koala Brothers, Cubeez, Troll Hunters Tales of Arcadia, The Boss Baby, Gravity Falls, The Little Lulu Show,

KDRAMAS

Goong, Uncontrollably Fond, My Love from Another Star, The Heirs, Love Cells 2, 

                                    still in process...