#style files 2011

[world-of-wales]

CATHERINE'S STYLE FILES - 2011

3 JULY 2011 || The Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William at the Charlottetown Airport in the Prince Edward Island on the fourth day in Canada while on tour of North-America.

[thankskenpenders]

The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

[probablyasocialecologist]

According to documents obtained by Grist and Type Investigations through a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI’s Minneapolis office opened a counterterrorism assessment in February 2012, focusing on actions in South Dakota, that continued for at least a year and may have led to the opening of additional investigations. These documents reveal that the FBI was monitoring activists involved in the Keystone XL campaign about a year earlier than previously known.  Their contents suggest that, long before the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines became national flashpoints, the federal government was already developing a sweeping law enforcement strategy to counter any acts of civil disobedience aimed at preventing fossil fuel extraction. And young, Native activists were among its first targets. “The threat emerging … is evolving into one based on opposition to energy exploration related to any extractions from the earth, rather than merely targeting one project and/or one company,” the FBI noted in its description of the Wanblee blockade. The 15-page file, which is heavily redacted, also describes Native American groups as a potentially dangerous threat and likens them to “environmental extremists” whose actions, according to the FBI, could lead to violence. The FBI acknowledged that Native American groups were engaging in constitutionally protected activity, including attending public hearings, but emphasized that this sort of civic participation might spawn criminal activity.  To back up its claims, the FBI cited a 2011 State Department hearing on the pipeline in Pierre, South Dakota, attended by a small group of Native activists. The FBI said the individuals were dressed in camouflage and had covered their faces with red bandanas, “train robber style.” According to the report, they were also carrying walking sticks and shaking sage, claiming to be “Wounded Knee Security of/for Mother Earth.” “The Bureau is uncertain how the NA group(s) will act initially or subsequently if the project is approved,” the agency wrote.  The FBI also singled out the “Native Youth Movement,” which it described as a mix between a “radical militia and a survivalist group.” In doing so, it appeared to conflate a specific activist group originally founded in Canada in the 1990s with the broader array of young Native activists who opposed the pipeline decades later. Young activists would play an important role in the Keystone XL campaign and later on during protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, but the movement had little in common with militias or survivalists, terms typically used to describe far-right groups or those seeking to disengage from society.  The FBI declined to respond to questions for this story. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Minneapolis field office said the agency does not typically comment on FOIA releases and “lets the information contained in the files speak for itself.”

[...]

Environmental activists and attorneys who reviewed the new documents told Grist and Type Investigations that law enforcement’s approach to the Keystone XL campaign looked like a template for the increasingly militarized response to subsequent environmental and social justice campaigns — from efforts to block the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock to the ongoing protests against the police training center dubbed “Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia, which would require razing at least 85 acres of urban forest.  The FBI’s working thesis, outlined in the new documents, that “most environmental extremist groups” have historically moved from peaceful protest to violence has served as the basis for subsequent investigations. “It’s astonishing to me how such a broad concept basically paints every activist and protester as a future terrorist,” said Mike German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

[svt-luna]

╰ ᥫ᭡. ⋆· ˚ ༘ * SEVENTEEN LUNA FILES

Bae Jiyeon ❨ 배지���; born January 30, 1997 ❩ known mononymously as Luna, is a Korean-English singer. Born and raised in Kensington, London, United Kingdom. Luna lived in the United Kingdom for fourteen years before returning to South Korea in 2011. She is a member of the South Korean co-ed band SEVENTEEN and its fixed sub-group the Vocal Team.

╰ ౨ৎ BASICS

Birth Name: Bae Ji-Yeon ❨ 배지연 ❩

English Name: Luna Bae

Stage Name: Luna

Birthdate: January 30, 1997

Birthplace: Kensington, London, United Kingdom

Nationality: Korean-English

Ethnicity: Korean

Spoken Languages: Korean ❨ fluent ❩, English ❨ fluent + English accent ❩, Japanese ❨ intermediate ❩, Chinese ❨ intermediate ❩

╰ ౨ৎ ARCHETYPES

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius

Chinese Zodiac Sign: Ox

MBTI: INTJ

Hogwarts House: Slytherin

Godly Parent: Hades

╰ ౨ৎ PHYSICAL

Height: 170cm ❨ 5’7" ❩

Weight: 43kg ❨ 94lbs ❩

Blood Type: O+

Hair Color: Black

Eye Color: Brown

Body Modifications:

Piercings: Lobe ❨ 3 on each ear ❩, Conch ❨ right ear ❩, Helix ❨ 2 on each ear ❩, Flat ❨ left ear ❩, Tragus ❨ both ears ❩, Rook ❨ both ear ❩, Daith ❨ right ear ❩, Forward Helix ❨ right ear ❩, and Belly button piercing

Tattoos: The number 17 ❨ side of right wrist — dedicated to the band ❩, Crescent moon ❨ side of left wrist — dedicated to her name ‘Luna’ ❩, The letter J in cursive ❨ inside her left ring finger — her initial from her name ‘Jiyeon’ but some fans theorize it’s for ‘Jeonghan’ ❩, A ribbon/bow ❨ on the back of her right hand — her trademark love for ribbons and bows ❩, ‘Lady of the Moon’ calligraphy ❨ by her right rib cage — a nod to her name once more ❩, ‘eventually’ calligraphy ❨ inside her right middle finger — just like she said, “Eventually everything that is for me will come.” ❩, and ‘lovebug’ calligraphy ❨ on the back of her neck — the nickname her grandparents had given her ❩

Unique Features: Dimple on right cheek, piercing siren eyes ❨ cat-eye/ foxy shaped ❩, beauty mark on right cheekbone and left cheek, smirk smile

Medical Conditions: Anemic and has a former collarbone fracture caused after falling during a ballet routine when she was 10 years old

╰ ౨ৎ LUNA CLAIMS

Face Claim: Jang Wonyoung ❨ IVE ❩

Singing Voice: IU

Speaking Voice: Jang Wonyoung ❨ has a naturally deep voice when she speaks, however gets higher when she whines and unironically and unknowingly does aegyo ❩

Dance Style: Momo ❨ TWICE ❩ — SEVENTEEN performances, Kazuha ❨ LE SSERAFIM ❩ — Ballet performances

╰ ౨ৎ PERSONALITY

MBTI: INTJ ❨ The Architect ❩

Personality Traits: As an INTJ, often referred to as ‘The Architect’, Luna embodies a unique blend of intelligence, strategic thinking, and an independent spirit. Her personality reflects a deep understanding of the world around her, often viewing situations through a logical and analytical lens. This makes her an exceptional problem-solver, able to assess challenges and devise effective solutions with ease.

Growing up in Kensington, London, Luna was immersed in a world of creativity and intellect. As an only child of a retired ballerina and an anthropologist, she was exposed to the arts and sciences from a young age. Her mother encouraged her to pursue ballet, starting lessons at the age of three. This early training not only honed her physical abilities but also instilled in her a sense of discipline and dedication. However, Luna often felt the pressure to excel, which led to her developing a strong work ethic and perfectionist tendencies.

Despite her outward confidence, Luna struggled with feelings of isolation. Her intimidating features and talent sometimes made it hard for her to connect with her peers, leading her to seek solace in books, art, and music. These experiences nurtured her introspective side, allowing her to develop a rich inner world filled with creativity and imagination.

During her training period, Luna’s INTJ traits truly shone. Her analytical mind enabled her to quickly grasp complex choreography and vocal techniques, allowing her to excel in evaluations. She was often dubbed the ‘Ace’ among her fellow trainees for her versatility and ability to adapt to various tasks effortlessly. However, this did not come without challenges; she faced moments of great pressure to live up to the title and of self-doubt, particularly in a competitive environment where she felt the weight of expectations.

Luna’s leadership qualities emerged during her training, as she often took the initiative to help fellow trainees improve. Her strategic mindset allowed her to navigate the often chaotic training schedule, and she quickly learned to manipulate situations to her advantage, especially during group activities or evaluations. While she maintained a somewhat aloof demeanor, her ability to connect with her peers through shared interests— such as crafts with Joshua or dance challenges with Hoshi— showed her capacity for forming meaningful relationships.

Now as a world known idol, Luna’s INTJ personality manifests in her strong presence and charisma on stage. She is known for her meticulous approach to performances, carefully analyzing each aspect of her shows to ensure they are executed flawlessly. Her strategic thinking allows her to anticipate audience reactions, making her a master at captivating crowds.

Luna’s intelligence also extends to her interactions with fans and the media. She navigates interviews and public appearances with ease, often using her wit and charm to leave a lasting impression. However, she remains somewhat guarded, finding it challenging to open up fully about her feelings, particularly in the context of her somewhat complicated relationship with Jeonghan.

While she is often seen as intimidating due to her ‘resting bitch face’, those who take the time to know her discover her warmth and loyalty. She is protective of her fellow members, particularly the youngest ones, and values the deep connections she has formed within the group. Luna’s ability to balance her independent spirit with her caring nature makes her a unique and multi-faceted character in the K-Pop industry.

Positive Traits: Independent, disciplined, versatile, charismatic, protective, strategic, analytical, ambitious, intelligent, loyal

Negative Traits: Perfectionist, aloof, stubborn, overly critical, reserved

╰ ౨ৎ HISTORY

1997-2011: Luna was born in Kensington, London, into a well-off family that nurtured her artistic inclinations. Her mother, a retired ballerina, introduced her to the world of dance, leading Luna to begin ballet training at the tender age of three. This early exposure fostered her love for performing arts and instilled a strong work ethic in her. Academically gifted, she attended Southbank International School Kensington, where she excelled in her studies and developed a deep passion for music. Despite her wonderful childhood, Luna often felt isolated due to her personality, seeking solace in her artistic pursuits and immersing herself in the creativity that surrounded her.

2011-2012: At the age of fourteen, Luna made the pivotal decision to move back to Seoul, South Korea, to pursue her dream of becoming an idol. This transition marked a significant change in her life, as she entered the competitive world of K-Pop. She initially trained at YG Entertainment for a year, where she faced the rigors of idol training and learned to adapt to the intense environment. Throughout this time, she was constantly approached by PLEDIS Entertainment, a smaller company that offered her a chance to further her dreams. After much consideration, Luna trusted her instincts and made the bold decision to switch companies, believing it would ultimately lead her closer to her goals. She has mentioned in an interview that her leaving a huge and well known company for a smaller one was one of the riskiest thing she has ever done and yet she does not regret it.

2013-2015: Luna trained for another two years at PLEDIS Entertainment, honing her skills as a lead vocalist in preparation for her debut. During this time, she faced various challenges, including rigorous practice schedules and the pressure to excel among her peers. However, her determination and talent shone through, allowing her to form strong bonds with the other trainees. She was supposed to either debut in a girl group or as a solo artist, however, in 2015, Luna finally achieved her dream of debuting as a member of the co-ed band SEVENTEEN, alongside thirteen talented male members. This milestone marked the beginning of her journey in the spotlight, showcasing her versatility and dedication as an artist.

2015-Present: Since her debut, Luna's life as an idol has been a rollercoaster ride filled with both challenges and triumphs. She has navigated the ups and downs of the entertainment industry, facing public scrutiny and the pressures of fame. Despite these obstacles, the joy of being with her fellow members, whom she considers family, has been a constant source of strength. Together, they have achieved remarkable success, creating unforgettable memories and sharing their passion for music with fans worldwide. Luna's perseverance and commitment to her craft continue to drive her as she embraces the journey of an idol, always striving to achieve her goals and dreams.

╰ ౨ৎ LUNA-VERSE MASTERLIST

ೃ⁀➷ comment or message me to be added to the tag list :)

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ SUBMIT A REQUEST AND ASK ME ANYTHING!

: ̗̀➛ requests are always open ♡ - lunaఌ

Taglist: @yeoberryx @minminghao @angie-x3

[kwisatzworld]

List of Valentino Rossi books and documentaries:

inspired by @pgaslys list of marc’s docs

📚 Books

What If I Had Never Tried It [English/Italian/Spanish/German/Japanese/Chinese, etc.]: Vale’s only autobiography to date, translated into a lot of languages (so many that it’s hard to keep count). The English edition is notoriously rough - think spelling mistakes and some lost-in-translation moments. Despite this, yellow fans absolutely shouldn’t miss out on this gem. Published in 2006, during Vale’s zenith with five consecutive championships under his belt, the book radiates his happiness and confidence. The narrative is casual, with chapters loosely connected, but you will still find pleasure in reading this book.

MotoGenius: the Valentino Rossi biography by Mat Oxley: Oxley remains my all-time favorite Rossi author! Initially published years ago, the latest edition is available on Kindle. It’s a treasure trove of Vale anecdotes and Oxley’s unique insights, offering a glimpse into how Vale captivated his generation.

The Valentino Rossi Files: Everything I’ve ever written about VR by Mat Oxley: Available on Kindle, this collection (in two parts) encapsulates all the articles Oxley wrote about Vale for magazines and newspapers before joining Motor Sport Magazine.

Valentino Rossi: The Definitive Biography by Stuart Barker: A comprehensive biography of Vale, chronologically organized.

Valentino Rossi: Il Dio del Motociclismo by Fabio Fagnani [Italian]: Not recommended as the author’s fan-like admiration making it read more like a love letter than a biography. The only saving grace is the interview with Aldo Drudi.

Valentino Rossi: All His Races by Mat Oxley [English/German/Japanese/Serbian]: Chronicles every race of Vale’s career, enriched with exclusive interviews.

🎥 Documentaries

When asked about a movie about himself, Vale said, “If it’s a bad movie, I’d rather it didn’t exist.” He holds a similarly cautious stance towards documentaries, and has never personally produced a documentary about himself, though perhaps that might change at some point in the future.

Faster (2003) : Premiered at the Festival de Cannes during MotoGP’s golden era, this documentary intriguingly portrays the rivalry between Vale and Max Biaggi.

The Doctor, the Tornado, and the Kentucky Kid (2006) : Focuses on the 2005 season, especially the US Grand Prix, you can see the beautiful yellow livery of Yamaha’s 50th anniversary.

Fastest (2011) : A sequel to Faster.

Hitting the Apex (2015) : Arguably the best MotoGP documentary out there. Vale and Marco riding into the sunset to ‘Wish you were here’ is a poignant moment.

Valentino Rossi: The Doctor (2016) : Produced by Monster Energy, primarily illustrating how Vale expanded his empire step by step.

Racing Together (2017): MotoGP history isn’t complete without its greatest icon, Vale features for about 15 minutes.

Valentino’s Secret Room: Inside the Doctor’s Hidden Archive (2020) : Produced by Dainese, revealing Vale’s personal collection.

Ruta 46 – Ruta 93: El camino de dos mitos (2021) : Produced by DAZN España, unfortunately I haven’t seen it yet – if you have, let me know how it tells the tale.

Tales of Valentino (2021) : A nine-episode documentary series produced by Dorna, showcasing different aspects of Vale’s career through nine significant races.

RiVale | Valentino Rossi as Told by His Rivals (2021) : Produced by DAZN Italia featuring Vale’s main rivals (except Marc), sharing their stories with him.

Rossi | BT Sport Documentary on the Career of MotoGP Icon, Valentino Rossi (2022) : Produced by BT Sport following Vale’s retirement, highlighted by Suzi Perry’s captivating hosting style.

MotoGP Unlimited (2022) : No need for a lengthy introduction – it’s probably already been watched by everyone by now.

[lilycat23]

Deltarune, Undertale and Penumbra Fantasm

Penumbra fantasm is an unreleased track that Toby fox worked on for homestuck. Motifs from it were used in other homestuck tracks like 'Doctor' and "Patient"

The original track by Toby is mostly inaccessible but there are multiple restorations of it uploaded to SoundCloud and youtube here is an example of one of these restorations.

A recording of the original MIDI file (AwakeningCrap2.mid) by Toby fox has been posted here

Toby fox did a livestream of the song in 2012. A recording of that is below

But what does this have to do with Deltarune?

Well A motif from this song has already been used in "THE HOLY" in Deltarune

It has also fairly recently been isolated in the background of 'Hopes and dreams' in undertale and seems to be in 'another medium' too.

Futhermore,

Deltarune fans including me think it may show up more in Deltarune and some think it may even be in an important boss battle or have something to do with gaster

Now just because toby has used this once in Deltarune doesn't mean it'll show up again? What makes people think it will show up again or have greater significance?

Well Years ago before Undertale and Deltarune came out in 2011, Toby was asked on social media about penumbra phantasm to which he replied "AT SHADOWS EDGE SHATTER THE TWILIGHT REVERIE" That certainly sounds like it has to do with dark worlds and we know that Toby had ideas in mind about deltarune before he made Undertale at least regarding deltarune ending which he says came to him in a dream.

W D Gaster who's fingerprints all over Deltarune is known for speaking in all caps much like the penumbra phantasm quote and thought to have (in universe/fiction) made the tweets on Toby's account shortly before chapter 1 was released.

Plus Toby fox's first ever tweet was "The edge of the shadow, where reality and dreams meet." Which not only is similar to the "twilight reverie" quote but sounds like it alludes to dark worlds even more with them being compared to dreams many times in game.

Both of these social media posts by Toby were made in 2011! The same year that Toby had the fever dream which inspired him to make Deltarune, giving us even more evidence that this track was written with Deltarune in mind.

Credit to eldomtom2 for the above image they posted on reddit

Here is one of many great fan remixes of penumbra phantasm making it into a Deltarune style track. (This is by Chris Roomba)

Credit to Chris roomba on his YouTube channel Stars in_sight for both information and inspiration for making this post

[luthwhore]

I want to preface this by saying that I haven't read every comic in which Lex has ever appeared, and most of what I've read has been from the last two decades or from the Bronze Age; I am still working my way through most of his post-crisis/pre-flashpoint content.

These are also recommended based on how much I personally enjoyed them, so there is a bit of subjectivity here. However, if I think a comic is particularly important to Lex’s canon and/or objectively well-written, I will try to make note of it, even if it doesn’t suit my own tastes.

Stuff listed as “further reading” is content I have more mixed feelings about or that features Lex less prominently, but still think is worth a read if you want to dig a little deeper.

There are a few things I recommend avoiding unless you really, really want to read it for historical reasons (often because the comics include triggering content), and I've tried to make note of these as well.

⭐️ = most important for current continuity 💜 = personal favorites

Superman: Birthright by Mark Waid ⭐️

Generally considered the definitive retelling of the Superman origin story, and the comic that reintroduced the idea of Clark Kent and Lex Luthor growing up together in Smallville to the mainline canon after it was written out during Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Further Reading

↳ Superman: Secret Origin (alternate telling from Birthright) ↳ Action Comics Special #1 - "The Last Will & Testament of Lex Luthor" ↳ Superman: American Alien (Superman origin story that actively contradicts Superman: Birthright, but has some fun Lex moments)

Lex Luthor: A Celebration of 75 Years 💜

Not a single comic, but rather a historical account of Lex through the ages. Rather than featuring entire arcs, it tends to feature a single issue that showcases the Lex of each era, so it's a good read to figure out what versions of Lex you personally enjoy. Some of the stories in this collection are included elsewhere on this list.

JLA: Rock of Ages by Grant Morrison (JLA 1998 #10-#15)

Lex and the Injustice Gang take on the Justice League! I really like Lex's characterization here because it really shows how Lex thinks, and it does a great job showing that despite being a villain, Lex does have standards and tries to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

Salvation Run by Bill Willingham & Lilah Sturges 💜

A villain vs villain story, featuring most of the DCU's villains being stranded off-world together and comparing Lex's style of leadership with the Joker's. Probably one of the best examples I've ever read of exactly how competent Lex is, and seeing him go head-to-head with the Joker is a delight.

Superman: The Black Ring by Paul Cornell (Action Comics #890-#900)

Might be a little hard to follow if you're not familiar with Green Lantern lore, but the arc does a great job with balancing Lex being villainous with still feeling fun and flawed and human. Not a lot of interaction with Superman until the very end, but there is a lot of Lois in this one. (Sort of. You'll see.)

Further Reading

↳ President Luthor: Secret Files and Origins ↳ Superman's Nemesis Lex Luthor ↳ Lex Luthor: Man of Steel ↳ Superman: Last Son ↳ Superman: Unchained

Forever Evil by Geoff Johns ⭐️

The start of Lex's "hero" arc, which spans from the end of n52 until 2018. Functions as a bit of a reset for his character and sets the tone for everything from here on in Lex’s continuity. It gives some insight into Lex’s relationship with Lena post-reboot, and has a very sweet take on his relationship with Bizarro.

Justice League (2011) by Geoff Johns ⭐️ (Lex appears in #30-52, though you can start at #24 if you’re interested in the setup for Forever Evil)

Follows up on the events in Forever Evil and kickstarts Lex’s several years’ long time as a formal part of the Justice League. I really enjoy his dynamics with each of the Trinity here, particularly with Diana. I would recommend the Darkseid War arc in particular (especially if you’re a Clex shipper), but the whole thing is enjoyable. Lena also appears here! Read Justice League: The Darkseid War - Lex Luthor between #45 and #46.

Action Comics: Path of Doom & Men of Steel, by Dan Jurgens ⭐️ (#957-962, #967-970)

Continues on with the “Super-Lex” arc teased at the end of the previous Justice League arc. This is also where Jon Kent (Clark & Lois’s son) is introduced. There’s a lot more Clark & Lex interaction here than most of the other comics in Lex’s hero era, and you do get the sense that he is genuinely trying to do the right thing, even if his motivations for doing so are a bit…self-centered.

Superman: Imperius Lex, by Patrick Gleason & Peter Tomasi ⭐️ (#33-36)

The end of the Super-Lex arc, though not technically the end of Lex’s time as a hero. Make sure to read the n52 Justice League: Darkseid War arc first, since it references the events heavily. Great Clark & Lex content, including a scene of them being stranded on a red sun planet together.

Justice League: No Justice, by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, & Joshua Williamson

The official end to Lex being a hero and a member of the Justice League, as well as the setup for the Legion of Doom & Year of the Villain arcs. Imo, his reason for becoming a villain again is pretty contrived and frustrating, but it does set up what will end up becoming a very important dynamic between Lex and the Martian Manhunter in the next arc.

Further Reading

↳ Action Comics #23.1 - Bizarro ↳ Action Comics #23.3 - Lex Luthor ↳ Superwoman (2016) #1 - #8

⚠️ Note: Superwoman (2016) issues #1-8 feature both Lex and Lena and follow up on what was set up in Forever Evil and Justice League (2012), but the writing around Lena’s disability is extremely ableist. It does feature a lot of Lena and expands more on the backstory set up in Forever Evil, and there are a few good character moments for Lex, but Lena's treatment is pretty bad, so read with caution. ⚠️

Justice League (2018) by Scott Snyder & James Tynion IV (#1-39)

Lex’s return to classic villainy, along with the Legion of Doom. The arc is a little weird in places and I’m not crazy about some of the choices made, but his dynamic with the other villains is fun, and I enjoy his relationship with the Martian Manhunter. I personally like both Snyder and Tynion as writers enough to power through the general weirdness of this arc, but your mileage may vary. It’s pretty dense and hard to follow at times and I felt like it didn’t really hit its stride until about issue #8, so you might need to power through a bit at the beginning.

Year of the Villain: Hell Arisen by James Tynion IV

Follows up the “Year of the Villain” plot set up in Justice League. It’s weird as hell but it does have some good character moments for him, and more importantly, features the conclusion of the arc.

Further Reading

↳ Justice League Annual #1 ↳ DC’s Year of the Villain Special #1 ↳ Year of the Villain: Lex Luthor 💜 (Features an alternate universe where Lex is married to that universe's Kal-el. No, really.) ↳ Dark Nights: Death Metal ↳ Action Comics #1000 (special anthology issue)

Superman: Son of Kal-El (Annual #1) by Tom Taylor

I don’t have strong enough feelings about Lex in Son of Kal-El for me to recommend the whole series for him alone, but his interactions with both Clark and Jon in the annual are very enjoyable. (If you like the annual and you enjoy Jon, Lex is a recurring character in SoKE, and the series is a pretty quick read.)

Batman: The Abyss, by Joshua Williamson 💜 (Batman (2016) #118-121)

Technically a Batman story, but a very short one. Superman is currently off-world, so naturally Lex needs to find another hero to menace. Williamson is the current writer on the mainline Superman book and imo he is THE best Lex writer at DC. He really captures the way Lex earnestly views himself as a hero while doing the most unhinged bullshit you have ever seen. Worth a read if only to watch Lex take Bruce on the worst date of his life.

Action Comics #1050, by Joshua Williamson, Philip Kennedy Johnson, & Tom Taylor ⭐️

Provides context for the current Superman run. You could technically skip it, but with Williamson as a co-writer, I have no idea why you would want to. Lex is truly a mess in the most enjoyable way here.

Superman (2023), by Joshua Williamson ⭐️

The holy grail, the crown jewel, THE comic to read if you’re a Lex fan. The comic is only a few issues in as of writing this list, but Williamson really hits the perfect balance of making Lex funny and charming while still kind of being an asshole. (Updates monthly, though July-August won’t have new issues while the Knight Terrors arc is coming out.)

Further Reading

↳ Superman: Son of Kal-El ↳ Superman: Kal-El Returns ↳ Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen (2019) ↳ Lazarus Planet: Assault on Krypton ↳ Action Comics: The Rise of Metallo

The Last Days of Lex Luthor, by Mark Waid 💜

Written by the same author as Superman: Birthright. This comic is a Black Label comic, which means it’s not part of the mainline continuity and is more “adult oriented” than the mainstream books, so the writer has significantly more freedom and it shouldn’t take a lot of prior knowledge. In this comic, Lex is dying, and Superman is trying to find a way to save him. (The comic will be 3 issues long, released every other month.) I would strongly recommend reading Superman: Birthright first, though it's not mandatory.

Smallville: Season 11, by Bryan Q Miller 💜

The S11 comic is a little bloated with random cameos from other DC characters and the art is pretty inconsistent at times, but there are some really nice moments in it if you want more Smallville Lex. You can skip the Titans & Lantern arcs if you’re not interested in the extended Smallville universe, but the rest of the comic features Lex pretty heavily. Prepare yourself to cry over Otis. If you read nothing else, read Smallville: Alien, particularly if you're a Clex shipper.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth, by Scott Snyder 💜

A post-apocalyptic/dystopian future story, following Batman as he attempts to make his way back to Gotham. Lex only appears in issue #2, but Scott Snyder really loves his villains unhinged and psychosexually obsessed with their heroes. Lex’s fate in this might make you tear up. ⚠️ Character death warning. ⚠️

Clark & Lex: A Young Superman Graphic Novel, by Brendan Reichs

Young Clark Kent enters a competition to win an internship at Luthorcorp, where he meets and befriends a young Lex Luthor. Heavy Smallville influence is present here! This novel is marketed as the first in a series, so we'll hopefully see more in the future.

Further Reading

↳ All-Star Superman (widely considered one of the best Superman stories ever written, but I would not recommend if you’re new to Superman) ↳ DC Bombshells ↳ Injustice: Gods Among Us / Injustice 2 / Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent (would not recommend these if you’re new to DC)

Prior to the changes made to Lex's lore in the wake of "Crisis on Infinite Earths", Lex had been a mad scientist first and foremost, and had generally been portrayed as fairly human and flawed. This version of Lex grew up in Smallville alongside Clark Kent, though in the 80s and beyond this would be written in and out of his continuity several times.

These can be a little campy and goofy at times, since the comics were still being marketed toward children and were largely episodic, but there are some truly excellent bits of characterization for Lex within the pre-crisis canon, and it really is a treasure trove of Clex content if you're into that.

How Luthor Met Superboy, by Jerry Siegel (Adventure Comics #271)

The original story of Lex and Superboy (Clark) meeting for the first time. Eventually retooled slightly for Elliot Maggin's "The Luthor Nobody Knows" and then massively overhauled for Superman: Birthright, but this is the original, and while a bit corny and dated, some parts of it still hold up!

The Showdown Between Luthor and Superman, by Edmund Hamilton (Superman #164)

Lex and Superman face off on a red sun planet in an attempt to prove once and for all which of the two of them is stronger. The start of the short "Lexor" arc wherein becomes a hero on another planet.

Luthor Unleashed!, by Cary Bates 💜 (Action Comics #544)

The conclusion of the Lexor arc (mentioned above). Lex has a wife and child on Lexor, and considers that he might even be able to let himself be truly happy there. Unfortunately for him, his obsession with Superman wins out.

The Luthor Nobody Knows, by Elliot S! Maggin 💜 (Superman #292)

This story is somewhat of a retelling of "How Luthor Met Superboy", but told via flashback from the perspective of Superman. It's a bit more introspective than the original Silver Age story, with Clark reminiscing on his relationship with Lex.

The Einstein Connection, by Elliot S! Maggin 💜 (Superman #416)

Long before Smallville decided to make Lex an Alexander the Great fanboy, pre-crisis Lex uphold Albert Einstein as one of his heroes. A great character study on pre-crisis Lex, and in general a great example of the more "frenemy"-esque dynamic that Maggin wrote Clark and Lex with.

The Ghost of Superman Future, by Elliot S! Maggin (Superman #416)

A story set in the far future, with an elderly Superman recounting his life, including his friendship with Lex Luthor and all of its many ups and downs and complications. Contains the first-ever reference to the idea of Lexcorp, though it would not be fully incorporated into the mainline canon until post-crisis when Byrne revamped the character. ** If you like this story, I would strongly recommend reading Elliot S! Maggin's short story "Luthor's Gift", as it delves further into the dynamic between Clark, Lex, and Lois and presents a very bittersweet story of the end of Lex and Lois's lives. **

Further Reading

↳ Luthor -- Super-Hero! (Superman #168) ↳ Lex Luthor -- Super Scalp-hunter! (Superman #282) ↳ The Parasite's Power Play (Superman #286) ↳ Seven-foot-two... and Still Growing! (Superman #302) ↳ Welcome to Luthorcon III! (DC Comics Presents: Annual #4)

There are some I would personally recommend only reading for historical purposes, as they do not have a lot of connection to Lex's current characterization and have largely been retconned. These contain some pretty triggering content and I will try to warn for it where appropriate.

Superman (1986) and The Man of Steel (1986) by John Byrne

John Byrne was tasked with rebooting the Superman franchise after Crisis on Infinite Earths and made a lot of sweeping changes to the Superman lore at the time. One of the changes made was to switch Lex from a mad scientist who grew up in Smallville and was friends with Clark Kent as a child to a corrupt billionaire who grew up in Metropolis. A lot of the emotional complexity and depth of the pre-crisis version of Lex was stripped away into making him more unambiguously villainous. The Lex of the Byrne era is... to put it delicately, very predatory and abusive to the women in his life. John Byrne is also a far-right conservative and his politics in general bleed through a lot into his work, so I don't recommend it on... pretty much any level.

Lex Luthor: An Unauthorized Biography by James D. Hudnall

This comic contains Lex's Metropolis-based origin story, which would be his accepted origin from Crisis on Infinite Earths through the publication of Superman: Birthright. On top of lacking most of the aspects of Lex that most people who like him actually appreciate, this comic continues the Byrne-era trend of Lex being sexually predatory and physically abusive to the women in his life. You've been warned.

[cityof2morrow]

Billonheir Shelves: 12 LACKesque Woods

Published: Simmons 9-24-2023 | Updated: 9-28-2023 SUMMARY “Billionheir Shelves by Selfless Salesman - cheap, modular shelves for shop owners with billionaire-like pride but broke down budgets. Combine two or more items to create unique commercial displays.” 12 LACKesque recolors for the Billionheir Shelves (Simmons, 2023) set. Remember - you’ll need to turn “move objects” ON if you want to place wall shelves away from walls. When placing Billionheir Pedestal Shelf 002 and 004, they need to be shifted upwards at least once.

DETAILS Requires All EPs/SPs. You need the Billionheir Shelves (Simmons, 2023) set. It contains the Billionheir Pedestal Shelf 001 (wall/pedestal/shelf colors) REQUIRED for these recolors to display correctly in-game. Recolors files are combined so if you delete the “yellow” recolor, for example, you delete it for all subsets/objects it applies to. Additional recolors will be available on this site under #ts2recolors and #co2recolors. DOWNLOAD (choose one) LACKesque from SFS | from MEGA CREDITS Thanks: Kit Kat Crew. Sources: Any Color You like (CuriousB, 2010), Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik), Kitchen Basic (Hafiseazale, 2016; BuggyBooz 2008), Kitchen Basic Extras (Hafiseazale, 2016; BuggyBooz, 2010), IKEA LACK Color Actions (EA/Maxis via Michelle, 2016), Mini Shelf (Gwenke33, 2011), Modular Shelves (Billionlioe, 2019 via Creative Commons Attribution), Quake 4 (Evillaire, 2005; Philip Klevestav, 2013; 2010), Sci-fi/Industrial style textures from Quake 3 (Evillaire, 2003).

[stepswordsen]

【KagePro】 KuroEne Chibi Commission by Hika 🖤💙🐍🐇

Kuroha (Saeru) and Ene Chibi Icon Commission by Hika (@/onigiwi2namayo)

Hika's Twitter: (X)

Hika's VGen: (X)

In accordance with Hika's Terms of Service (TOS), editing, using, or reposting these arts, in any way, is prohibited without explicit permission from Hika, and me, the commissioner.

Intro

Thank you to Hika for the lovely commission of my beloved KuroEne 🖤💙🐍🐇

I also commissioned Hika before to draw my KHR Yume (Canon/OC) ship of Xanxus and Selena ❤️💜 That will be posted soon, too 🥰

I don't mind giving permission if my mutuals want to use them. I'll most likely grant it, but you also need to receive Hika's permission if you do.

I commissioned Hika to draw Kuroha and Ene for my chibi icon commission! Hika initially drew the unhinged expression for Kuroha >:D And then changed to the version with the smug smile :]

I asked Hika to keep both expressions for the finalized versions since I loooove both 💞💘

Hika sent me the high-res files for the KuroEne commission 🖤💛💙 THEY'RE SO CUTE AHHH I'M SO HAPPY!!! MY CHILDHOOD OTP OF 10+ YEARS!!!

I LOVE THE COLOURS AND THEIR EXPRESSIONS... MY KAGEPRO OTP FOREVER!!! THE BELOVEDS

KUROENE WORLD DOMINATION 💥💥💥

Hika's chibi style is SO cute. I love how Hika draws eyes and expressions sm… Kuroha's new expression is SO cute OMGGG. I also LOVE the insane one very much <3 I love both! And Ene my wife is just the CUTEST AAAAA 😭💙💘💞

The thick round lines and simple blush and highlights works so well. God they look SO precious!!! And Hika's colour choices are fantastic.

I love the blue~ish tones Hika used for Kuroha's hair and how Hika used yellow and blue for the backgrounds to make the colours pop.

The dark blue BG works well against Ene's more muted blue hair. And I love the ice blue colour Hika chose for Ene's eyes ahhh…

Also ty to Hika for including both expressions~ The cute Kuroha and the insane expression are so nice ahhh. AND MY WIFE ENE'S ADORABLE EXPRESSION AHDSHDSHDSHDS

I put the Saeru twice for the sake of formatting

My Message

This was the message I left for Hika!

I love how the commission turned out... You drew their eyes and expressions so well~ 😭🥺

Your chibi style is very adorable! You draw such expressive chibis! They look so precious~ I also love the colours you chose and how well they pair with the BG colours. The thick round lines, simple blush and highlights are so nice in your style!

The colour choices are amazing ✨ I love the blue~ish tones used for Kuroha's hair, and how the yellow and blue background colours makes their colours stand out!

The dark blue BG works well against Ene's blue hair~ And I love the ice blue colour chosen for Ene's eyes! 💙

I'm so glad you were so accomodating with minor changes and revisions like colour changes and small details! I really appreciate it 🥰💘💞

Misc Rambles

WHEN HIKA SENT ME THE KUROENE CHIBI COMM OH MY GODDDD THEY'RE SO CUTEEEEEEEEEEEEEE 😭🖤💙

MY HEART RATE SPIKED WHEN I SAW THESE...

THEIR EXPRESSIONS PLEASEEEEEEEEE

ENE MY WIFE IS SO CUTE I COULD CRY

12 YEAR OLD ME WOULD BE SO PROUD OF ME RIGHT NOW… BE THE CHANGE YOU WANNA SEE IN THE WORLD 🤸

I KNEW HIKA WOULD DO THEM JUSTICE CRYING SCREAMING SHAKING ADKLSKLSDKLDSKLKLSDKLSDKL

Commission Rambles

KuroEne have some official art refs (official art, merch arts) that can be inconsistent in colours (ex. their headphones) so I also gave some notes and quick edits of official arts.

I sent these arts of Kuroha and Ene as my main refs 🖤💙

I sent more too, but I felt that since I'm commissioning chibis of them, that these arts simplify their designs nicely.

Kuroha and Ene Rubber Strap Charms by 1st PLACE

Kuroha and Ene from Cospa's Tsumamare Series (Pinched Series)

Concept Arts by Sidu from .dsd –Sidu illustration Works 2011-2015–

Scans by @/ayara-resara

Edit by me

Ene, Konoha, and Kuroha from Mekakucity V's

I did a little edit of their concept arts for fun. I mainly did it to get a clearer full body ref of Saeru to make it easier for the artists I'm commissioning

Takane/Ene and her bfs. All 3 of them /lh 🖤💛💙

My main focus is on 9/6 and XX/6, basically all related ships (KuroEne, HaruTaka, KonoEne)

Depending on the arts (including merch arts), Kuroha's clothes either get coloured with the same black colour, or with the inner clothes as a darker black.

I prefer when his inner clothes and boots, etc., are a darker black cuz it has more visual contrast against his design. It also differentiates the clothes more to have the outer shirt be a lighter gray black vs. the darker blacks in his hair and inner clothes.

His entire design is in dark colours (black, gray), and the gold in his eyes and facial markings cuts away from that. Yellow is a bright vivid colour.

Though it makes sense in MVs like Outer Science and some official arts/merch why his outer and inner shirts are the same colour to not distract from the mood/atmosphere, and also in pieces/merch that use a limited colour palette

For the FIRST time, I finally get to see that Kuroha art in full and not in crusty quality for once. It's a happy day for me

She is TINY compared to them... Haruka/Konoha/Kuroha is 182 cm (6'0") and Ene is 157 cm (5'2") or 640 px tall... Portable gf. They could put her in their pocket

Interesting that Ene's thigh highs were originally asymmetrical in the concept arts. The finalized design definitely fits her more.

Simplifying Ene's headphones is completely fine with me cuz of the rectangular part on it...

The rest of my rambles are under the cut as usual! ✨

Commissions

Whenever I commission artists, I send a detailed description of the characters' relevant design details, poses and expressions, etc., in the form itself.

Then I attach all necessary art refs in a Google Drive Folder and then send the link to the artist.

Because I know that sending a lot of art refs and a detailed description, just makes things easier for the artists you're commissioning.

My commission request forms tend to look like this

Commission Request

Characters

Series/OC (if applicable)

Design Details (for each character)

Poses and Expressions (Artists can ask for these to help guide their art process, but otherwise I just leave it up to the artist)

Other Notes (Simplifying details, especially for chibis, is perfectly fine with me)

VGen Rambles

VGen's site layout and format are honestly better than Ko-fi's imo

VGen has a REALLY nice UI for commissioning artists... I prefer it over Ko-fi when it comes to commissioning artists.

It shows all your commission requests in an organized format, and it has a really good commission request form, where the artist can send invoices.

VGen lets you upload more files and links as art refs. It's better than Ko-fi's in that it allows you to upload more files and add links. Iirc, I think Ko-fi's has a limit of 5

The artists can DM with their clients on VGen directly, and also leave files in high quality directly on the commission form after completion

There's also a review section, typically the artist leaves a review for the client and the client can give one. I always leave a message for the artist after the commission is done to show my gratitude 🥰

[transformers-mosaic]

Transformers: Mosaic #612 - "Truth"

Originally posted on July 25th, 2011

Story, Art - Dušan M.

deviantART | Seibertron | TFW2005

wada sez: Here’s another retro-style strip by Dušan M. It directly references his previous strip, “From The Secret Files Of Teletraan II: Multiforce-14”. Here, Bombshell (using his Diaclone color scheme separately characterised as Salvo) sneaks past a guard using his cerebro-shell. The guard’s design isn’t an exact match for Exhaust, with the green on the deco more closely resembling Wheeljack, but it’s definitely using that general body-type. Protoforms, seen in the first and last panels here, were only added to Transformers lore in Beast Wars.

[world-of-wales]

CATHERINE'S STYLE FILES - 2011

6 JULY 2011 || The Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William spent time at Skoki Lodge in Banff National Park on their seventh day in Canada while of their Royal Tour of North America.

[hollywoods-angel]

joan <3

joan baez is an american singer songwriter and activist. many of her folk songs spread awareness about social justice, and are protest songs. she was part of the folk revival of the 1960s alongside bob dylan, who she had a very public relationship with, and she is arguably one of the most important folk singers. in 2017 she was inducted into the rock n roll hall of fame.

joan chandos baez grew up in nyc and as a child her family converted to Quakerism. during her childhood she was often discrimanated and called racial slurs because of her Mexican heritage, which sparked her intrest in activism. she attended boston university and lter dropped out to perform in local cafes and venus, and refused to play in segregated areas.

joan's first professional performance was at 18, and afterwards she made her first album sold moderately well. she went on tour and had a sold out performance. in 1961 she relased another album, then another in 1962 which both went gold. the same year she was on the cover of time magazine- something that was rare for musicians. during the mid 60s she continued to rise in popularity, and introduced her audience to the then unknown bob dylan.

the two were in a relationship throughout the early to mid 60s, and wrote numerous songs about each other. joan's musical style was unique and she continued to experiment with different styles. bob described her as having a 'siren' like voice and having a unique guitar style. her first single to chart was in 1965, and out of her 14 vanguard albums, 13 were on the billboard 100 mainstream pop chart. 11 made top 40, 8 made top 20 and 4 made top 10. her music has inspired the likes of bob dylan, joni mitchell, judas priest, led zeppelin and many more.

a crucial part of joan's life has been her activism. she was one of the early artists to use her platform to spread awareness, both through her music and through her actions. she supported the civil right's movement (leading to an fbi file on her), protested the war in vietnam (and got arrested), is against the death penalty, advocated for the lgbtq+ community, supported peaceful protests in iran, performed in rallies against the war in iraq, was in a tree 'sit-in' for urban farmers, endorsed obama during the 2008 election and performed for the protesters at occupy wall street in 2011.

in 2007 joan was given the lifetime achievement award at the grammy's for her impact on music, and in 2011 the amnesty international, a human rights group honored joan and had a tribute event. she also received an award in 2015 by the amnesty international. the american academy of the arts and sciences elected her to the fellowship in 2020 for her contributions to music and activism, and she was listed at 189 on rolling stone's 200 best singers list.

[chibivesicle]

Gokinjo Monogatari got an English release. I am just - feeling like I got my wish from 1998.

That's right, I'm alive but not very active on the meta for the time being. 2023 sped up for the second half; work got crazy busy for Q4. I worked up to Dec 18th through several weekends so yeah, needed some recharge time.

I don't know how I missed this, but thanks to watching Coleen's Manga Recs, I discovered that the one shoujo manga title that I had been wanting an English release for has finally arrived. Gokinjo Monogatari by Ai Yazawa!

I discovered Gokinjo Monogatari in '98. One of the local comic stores had the first three tankobons and I bought them based on the cover artwork alone.

It wasn't until undergrad I was able to meet a few more people and figure out more than just the name and artist. I tried to find the translation of the manga online, but was unsuccessful. I have to remind people that before scanlations, you had to buy a tankobon and hope you found the text based translation which would have the text according to page number and what panel location. I read a fair bit of Kenshin that way, but sadly, this series was not that popular with readers in the States. I've been moving my entire adult life hauling my three precious volumes of the manga hoping that someday I would first, collect volume 4-7 to complete the picture and that I'd have my matching English version. Granted, I haven't done a good job of looking for volumes 4-7 when I've been in Japan . . . or using the internet either.

As if to spite me, the follow up manga, Paradise Kiss, did get a translation in 2002 from Tokyo Pop which exists in the same universe as Gokinjo Monogatari. Note that a previous manga's characters show up at the Flea Market in Monogatari as well and Yazawa likes to keep a lot of her series tied together. Eventually, the scanlation of the series appeared and I read it around 2011. I'd only found an episode or two of the anime during the golden age of file sharing, but didn't follow through on it. I wanted to read the manga before watching the anime. In 2017, I visited the Manga Museum in Kyoto, got to see a cool display about Ribon magazine and of course they had Gokinjo Monogatari merch! I bought the file folder set and stickers! I bought the Gokinjo Monogatari UT shirt from Uniqlo featuring Ribon series. Yet each time I found more stuff, the universe got the last laugh. Japan released the collectors set with four volumes, there was a French translation, German etc and never one for English. So, you have to realize how I absolutely lost my mind when the thing I'd figured would never happen, happened! Not only was it a thing, I'd even missed the December 2023 release date -at least I didn't have to wait for a pre-order to get volume 1.

I'm happy to see that this version included some of the original color pages!

It has a few more at the end with a photo wall of Mikako's outfits. Everything about the style of this manga, I absolutely love. The fashion goes so hard even now. I get nostalgic with all of the mid-90s Japanese street fashion which has a mix of 60s mod and 70s flare. I think the series also does a good job of capturing that awkward time in your teenage life when you are trying to figure out how to act with people you are interested in. But failing to sort things out. Unlike a lot of other high school manga series, this one stands out with the much more "normal" appearance of the students. I remember picking it up and thinking that the characters looked like they could be my peers; though there is no way Mikako's outfits would pass my high school's own liberal dress code where dyed hair and piercings were permitted. Her bare midriff would get her in trouble . . . Funny how now when I look at it, this is a very unusual high school set up for a Japanese reader likely coming from a more regimented school environment with a uniform and strict dress code. I never thought about it at the time. More that I was plotting my own hair dying plans for when I moved out of the house for undergrad just like the characters had - while still in high school. I did read Parakiss back when it came out from 2002-2005; however, it never really resonated with me the same way a series that I couldn't even find a decent translation for. I started to watch Nana but couldn't get into it at all. Maybe it was my mindset or the fact that I wasn't the mood for young twenty-somethings figuring their shit out.

Yet, here I am in the winter of 2024, and I have volume 1 of the collectors edition format of Gokinjo Monogatari and I'm still loving every little bit of the story as I read it. Perhaps, Parakiss and Nana were more edgier/grittier than something like this which is why they never quite clicked with me. I wanted my fashionable shoujo drama but not over the top. I'm not sure what I'll write about it. It isn't a well known series both due to the fact it is from the 90s and that it is shoujo but perhaps I can reflect on what I was drawn to it all those years ago and what I think about it now.

[silicacid]

US police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF, leaked files show

Hacked police files show US law enforcement agencies for decades received analysis of incidents in the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli thinktanks, training on domestic “Muslim extremists” from pro-Israel non-profits, and surveilled social media accounts of pro-Palestine activists in the US.

The Guardian’s analysis of documents from the BlueLeaks trove of internal law enforcement documents found no indication that this was balanced by information from other Middle Eastern sources or US Muslim community groups. Nor is there any indication that pro-Israel activists were subject to any specific scrutiny.

At a time of polarized reactions to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the analysis raises questions about the scope of police intelligence-gathering in the US and the influence of Israel and its supporters on those efforts, and how this has shaped the treatment of activists and social movements, especially those who are pro-Palestinian.

Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, former FBI undercover agent and author of Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy, said the use of such documents and receipt of such training was damaging the practice of good law enforcement.

“It’s frustrating that we’ve developed this national law enforcement intelligence-sharing network that basically takes disinformation straight from the rightwing social media fever swamps and puts it out under the imprimatur of law enforcement intelligence, so it becomes an amplifier of disinformation rather than a corrective to that disinformation,” German said.

The BlueLeaks trove was obtained and released by self-described hacktivists in June 2020. It contains material from more than 200 law enforcement agencies, including intelligence material disseminated by federally sponsored umbrella bodies such as fusion centers and high-intensity drug-trafficking area (Hidta) programs.

One body whose internal archives were exposed in the hack, LA Clear, is tasked with providing “analytical and case support” in narcotics investigations in southern California, according to its website. It was established as a joint project between the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association, the California department of justice, and the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department in 1992.

Despite its ostensible mission to combat drug trafficking, the LA Clear archive of training materials (labeled “lacleartraining”) included in the BlueLeaks trove has several analyses of previous episodes of widespread conflict in Gaza and the West Bank that are sourced directly from the IDF and closely aligned Israeli thinktanks.

One of the documents is a reproduction of a PowerPoint-style presentation dated 11 April 2011, badged with the insignia and name of the Strategic Division of the IDF, and entitled “Escalation in the Gaza Strip”.

The presentation is marked “for official use only”, a US government designation for documents which are not for public release.

The document asserts that “there has recently been a sharp increase in terrorist attacks emanating from the Gaza Strip intentionally directed at Israeli civilians in southern Israel”. The presentation offers evidence including Israeli counts of rocket attacks from Hamas, the Sha’ar HaNegev school bus attack and the killing of a family in “the Jewish community of Itamar” on 11 March 2011. (Later in 2011, two cousins from the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta were convicted of the murders and sentenced to multiple consecutive life sentences.)

The document does not present the long history of conflict between residents of Itamar, which the international community considers an illegal West Bank settlement, and neighboring villages. In 2010, a Human Rights Watch report singled out Itamar’s settlers with allegations of land theft, raids on Palestinian villages and extrajudicial killings.

Elsewhere in LA Clear’s training materials is another PowerPoint-style presentation authored by the Dado Center, a military studies department of the IDF. The presentation offers a retrospective analysis of “Operation Cast Lead”, the IDF’s name for the 22-day military assault on the Gaza Strip that commenced on 27 December 2008.

That document is labeled “FOUO”, an abbreviation of “for official use only” and appears to be a cursory visual aid for a spoken presentation. It points to “unique geo-strategic conditions (Gaza encircled by Egypt and Israel)”; “unique operational conditions (air supremacy, intelligence superiority)”; and “unique adversary (multiple identities, limited capabilities)”.

The presentation, which only includes the IDF’s perspective, also highlights challenges including “legitimacy (external & internal, strategic narrative)” and “media coverage (a controlled information environment)”.

Amnesty International alleged in a 2009 report that during Operation Cast Lead, the IDF targeted civilians, carried out “indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilian objects”, and used munitions containing white phosphorus, the use of which against civilians is a violation of international law, according to the World Health Organization.

Another document in the trove is a longer 2011 report assessing “terrorism from the Gaza Strip since Operation Cast Lead” produced by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC). The ITIC is an Israeli research group whose founding director and current director were previously IDF intelligence officers. The thinktank reportedly maintains an office at the Israeli defense ministry.

None of these documents mention narcotics trafficking or criminal activity in the US. LA Clear’s archive and the BlueLeaks trove do not appear to contain any alternative accounts of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Guardian contacted LA Clear for comment through the body’s website but received no response.

Elsewhere in the BlueLeaks trove, there is ample evidence of a close relationship between law enforcement agencies and US-based pro-Israel organizations.

The archive shows how close the relationship is between a range of law enforcement agencies and the pro-Israel civil rights non-profit the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Emails preserved in BlueLeaks show various agencies promoting ADL training sessions for law enforcement officers, including a January 2013 session on “screening of persons by observational techniques” and a seminar at the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center on the “evolving nature of Islamic extremists”.

ADL staff are shown as registered attendees at events run by fusion centers, offering bios that advise the organization that “we facilitate workshops for law enforcement on extremism, hate crime and (in Washington DC and Israel) counter-terrorism”.

The ADL, whose website banner heading at the time of reporting read “We stand with Israel”, is one of very few community organizations who train or are consulted by law enforcement officers. They are frequently cited throughout BlueLeaks as an authority on extremism and terrorism.

The Guardian contacted the ADL for comment but received no response.

There is no evidence in BlueLeaks that Muslim community groups such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (Cair) are consulted on issues involving Muslims; Cair is barely mentioned outside a series of four newsletters from the Omaha Terrorism Early Warning Group describing it as “unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land terror funding trial”.

In 2007, Cair was named alongside other organizations as an unindicted co-conspirator in an FBI indictment concerning a land trust it alleged was funding Hamas. In 2010, a federal judge found that the agency had violated the organization’s rights, though there was evidence connecting the groups to the trust. A 2013 Office of the Inspector General report found “significant issues with the way the FBI implemented and managed its Cair policy and guidance” in connection with the case.

There are indications that this emphasis shaped investigations: in at least two instances, the National Criminal Intelligence Resource Center archived social media feeds of Palestinian American pro-Palestine activists. The feeds indicated no apparent wrongdoing.

The Guardian previously reported revelations from the trove including that Google was passing user data directly to law enforcement authorities; that law enforcement officials baselessly linked “antifa” activists to arson attacks; that officials were characterizing the Proud Boys as an extremist group in private long before the events of 6 January 2021; and the private firms profiting from police militarization.

On the scope of the latest revelations, German said: “At a time where there’s much more public sensitivity to foreign influence in domestic affairs, having a foreign country’s security services aligned with the beat cop on the streets of American neighborhoods is concerning.”

[astralsi]

hello, elli! how are you doing? i'm always very impressed by your builds, you seem to craft them very carefully and you definitely have an amazing eye for detail. there's lots of small touches that make them feel alive/realistic and they have a warm atmosphere that really appeals to me. because of that, i'd like to ask you if you have any tips when it comes to building and finding inspiration. oh, i almost forgot, i'd love to have your last builds and its residents when you reach the milestone!

Hiya!! this is such a sweet ask and the ideas are brewing in my head so you get a dissertation under the cut :D (ps ily you made my day HEHE)

ALRIGHT! so first of all a little context, i've been building since i got the sims 3 alll the way back in 2011. i think. i was 7, couldn't speak or even understand english yet and my game was stuck in it so for a very long time i was just doing whatever and most of the time it.... sucked! I got the sims 4 back in 2014 with the mac release, and back in the day the build mode was revolutionary so i spent a lot of my time in there. For me building is fun, i know a lot of people who see it as frustrating and timeconsuming and while it can be- it can also be very enjoyable in the right setting.

first of all, style changes a lot and my builds look different every year! the style i've been building in now only really started in 2021/2022 with this build:

now for some tips:

there's a lot of ways to get inspiration, but my favourite and most useful is pinterest! i have a board full of exterior and interior designs, some i use for vibes and others i follow very closely, i find using references (just like you might for sims) helps a ton when trying to build something realistic. Also think magazines like architectural digest, design blogs on tumblr, youtube home viewings, other video games, tv shows etc. When i'm building for DFM i like to keep Stranger Things, Gone Home and Bones And All in mind as inspiration, and when i build the house in this post for @literalite's Dgwicf i referenced the house from Bosch.

Along with that comes inspo from other builders on Simblr. Go and look at your fav builds, what makes them stand out to you? how can you incorporate that into your own builds? what do you need to be able to do that? One thing i did a lot while learning was watching speed builds; and i mean the REAL kind not the stop motion ones despite them being weirdly satisfying lmao. Ones with a good voiceover help too. Seeing someone actually build makes it a lot easier to figure out more complicated building styles.

One thing i like to do is to build through storytelling. I personally mostly build for sets, so then i like to consider what the viewer needs to see to be able to understand a character without having to know them, where you are/live says a lot about you! But for gameplay it works similarly. Ask yourself questions; who lives here, what is this lot used for, how much money do they have, where is this set, does this match the rest of the neighbourhood/town. If building many lots for something like a story or save file, i like to make a pinterest board for the town vibes too.

Technically, i think there's two main tips for making a build look nice in this specific style. Landscaping and Clutter! i actually think landscaping is the most important part of building as it ties the entire thing together; even if its just three trees in a planter pot. Don't forget about terrain painting either! this one's hard to learn if you never do it but i'd say start out with the softest but largest brush option and kind of airbrush some dirt/gravel around the lot and add a little extra dirt underneath houses and roads. Last tip; if you struggle with roofing there's lots of tutorials on youtube, or you could just choose builds that have less roofs.

i have no idea how to explain how to clutter but you could walk around your house to look for stuff you'd normally clean up if someone would come over. add that into your build :) think trash, laundry, study materials, craft projects, little random nicknacks, cooking supplies, etc. sometimes i go through my clutter folders and just put everything i want to use in one room and distribute it later once the furniture is in!

so uhmmm,,, i hope this was helpful lemme know!! have fun building and don't forget to take snack breaks... sugar helps hehe

[geminid]

The other ask about college reminded me, I just brought a physical copy of superbright to my college professor, I took digital painting with him and now he's letting me sit in on his life drawing class. He did a quick flip through and he liked it! He also immediately said "yeah if you like this art get into the history, who did they learn from?" I've only been following you for 2ish years? And it's just been what's landed on my dash. But I looove your pieces, the coloring on the backgrounds versus how Leo and Takumi are drawn, and then the pieces like the mainly pink diner.

So yeah mainly wanted to say you're super cool! Things that you learned from would be neat to see but no pressure.

hi i was honestly very shocked to read that you would show this to your professor who is probably a really great artist but im glad he liked it? ???

i answered the rest of this under the cut

as far as my art history goes, i have no academic background in art so i'm just making stuff up. i think like a lot of kids I got my roots in wanting to draw like shoujo manga, particularly the big eyed round faces of the early 2000s. I would just try to copy the eyes or something. To this day I honestly don't really look at tutorials or watch speedpaints i kind of just look at finished art and try to emulate the things I like about them. It's very simplistic I think and perhaps means I don't make art that's as clean or efficient as people who actually go out and try to learn how pro artists actually draw.

i went on pixiv a lot as a teen and followed like 1000+ artists and looked at a lot of art all the time. I was really enamored by people who could draw characters and backgrounds, like fuzichoco. (this is a super weird fun fact but one of my favorite artists in like 2011-2012 who specialized in like drawing beautiful girls with beautiful backgrounds ended up getting into leokumi under a different name/account and i was their mutual! and i didnt realize this until rather recently. im too shy to share the name tho. my teen self is throttling me btw). I Really wanted to learn how to draw backgrounds so i had to go through the struggle of teaching myself perspective and later on downloading 3d software so i could see boxes on the same plane at angles lol.

When I see art I like I try to capture the essence of what it is I liked about it in a piece (maybe one time its desaturated colors, and the next its dramatically long legs, or adding blur to the foreground), and i decide if it worked out and I want to keep doing it. Some stuff i definitely continue to use is i draw upper eyelashes the way i do because of Sata (touken ranbu, feh artist) and i started drawing leo with weird non-blond hair colors because of Araki (the jjba mangaka, who often colors his characters in alternate palettes than their "canon"). Even though i think there are stuff im a bit rigid about, like i always kinda stay in the realm of anime style, I'm still trying to keep trying out stuff I see in other artists, not just even anime artists but everyone's favorite Leyendecker or Mucha, or I'll take photos of random stuff to file away as an idea. Like I have a photo of leaves my coworker collected that have a nice green to pink gradient that I took for inspiration.

As far as the diner picture goes I think to pull off that piece I needed to practice making art with less colors and also less contrast. Similar shades of pink take up most of the picture with teals being a secondary color and avoiding adding other colors in large amounts. I think the linework is doing a lot of work in that piece. I had to google a photo of a person sitting at a diner table for the perspective.

idk if this answers anything but it was fun to think about?