#they just generally have more interesting designs

[emcaco]

Completely yes! The downside of all those candles and incense and the occasional fire requires cleaning.

But it's also THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION and ...a modern lack of investment in maintenance. Our favorite modern villains.

Malcolm Miller, the tour guide of the Chartres cathedral had some comments:

The industrial revolution also did a nasty number on buildings.

Burning coal to power factories and heat houses or churches created so much air pollution. It was a problem and it made buildings noticably gray and dingy in the course of a generation. Victor Hugo wrote Hunchback of Notre Dame to showcase how beautiful the cathedral once was and shame France into maintaining its old buildings.

Also also, every new era likes to classify previous eras as filthy and ignorant. Never mind that people of today are essentially the same as people from five hundred years ago. We like clean.

And the same civilizations that built these buildings in the first place were capable of cleaning them. Michelangelo built scaffolding to paint the Sistene Chapel. Monks did so to clean their cathedrals. People expected to do regular building maintenance and churches had extremely cheap labor from all their monks.

So you might have the occasional fall but hey, lots of people were willing to join a monastic order for guaranteed food and drink and religious feelings.

Images of scaffolds are from wikipedia's articles on putlogs and scaffolding.

(BY THE WAY APPARENTLY THERE ARE POSSIBLE SCAFFOLD HOLES IN THE LASCAUX CAVES??)

Monks often took on trades like carpentry, masonry and brewing. Cleaning was a daily chore. If the cathedral - an accomplishment of engineering and construction over centuries and a literal physical tribute to their god built from stone and blood - if the cathedral got dirty, they wouldn't just accept that for the goth aesthetic.

If people could build scaffolds to replace their hay roofs, they would build them to clean the gorgeous painted walls.

I expect our dingy image of cathedrals comes more from the decline of monasteries and a steep drop in Catholic recruitment. Combine that with some deadly wars and labor safety, and labor to scrub church walls three stories up gets a lot more expensive.

Britain and France especially had also confiscated Catholic lands and buildings during Henry VIII's time and the French revolution, which would have caused some upheavals in maintenance. It would be interesting to compare cathedral maintenance in other countries.

ACTUALLY LET'S DO THAT

Hungary and the famous Cathedral in Cologne, Germany.

The article from the Independent, which I quoted above for the Chartres tour guide, also notes that it's mostly "British and American lovers of Gothic architecture" who are complaining about the Chartres restoration.

Quote:

The British designer and blogger Adam Nathaniel Furman wrote: “A restoration that eliminates the patina of history, and reinstates an illusory ideal moment in the past ... is an act of destruction dressed up in good intentions.”

And Stefan Evans, an American Gothic art specialist, commented: “Irresponsible restoration is erasing history from a Gothic masterpiece.” He then started an online petition to protest against the work.

Back to Mr Miller the Chartres tour guide, 81 years old, who has written books on Chartres:

Is Mr Miller on the side of light or on the side of darkness? “Just look here,” he said, bouncing angrily towards an uncleaned pillar. He ran his fingers through the grime. “Filth, pure filth,” he said. “Do these people like filth? Do they like cobwebs?

“They talk about the patina of the centuries. Nonsense. Rubbish. This is not the patina of the centuries. It is the rotting remains of a whitewash from the 18th century.”

In short, British and many French cathedrals haven't been maintained consistently, Americans and Brits now think cathedrals are *supposed* to be filthy. And get snippy at the people are doing the housekeeping.

Me: Did you know that medieval cathedrals weren't actually supposed to be dark and rundown places with only stained glass as color? They were bright places full of light... the reason they look like that now is because of the centuries of accumulated grime and dust, here look at this restoration of the Cathedral of Chartres in France:

It's based on actual paint from the times, and when you think about it, it makes a lot more sense, after all a church is supposed to be a bright place of hope. Yet when we think about the middle ages we think about grimy and dark cathedrals. I wonder how much of our conception of history is shaped by our current visions of historical buildings.

My Goth GF: listen, I don't think this thing between us is working,

[sam-keeper]

Hey Look At This Comic: Smut Peddler Presents Pitch Black

I can't remember how we got on the subject of the comics that my friends Iris Jay and Nero Villagallos O'Reilly did for an old Iron Circus april fools bit. maybe we were chatting about Megan Delyani's blank frame comic Spaces, which I wrote a whole review of last year, but it might just as easily have been talking about comic structure generally. cause we're huge nerds. being a huge nerd, I was all over the premise of the joke: a fake kickstarter for a Smut Peddler volume full of comics with all blacked out panels.

it's a great gag, a full webpage duping the Kickstarter layout, with a fun tongue in cheek explanation: comics don't leave enough up to the imagination, there aren't enough interpretive gaps for the reader, so to fix that Smut Peddler will publish a bunch of Pitch Black comics where YOU have to provide the visuals. Joke, maybe, but it lends credence to frame-focused models of comics reading: it's not the images that make something a comic, but the breakdown of page space into discrete units. So goes one theory, anyway. How do these pages fare without their images?

Lin Visel deploys a regular grid of long, thin columns, with a kind of horizontal capital at the top. The speech bubbles drive a lot of the action here and there's a sense of simultaneous movement across the bottom, with the bubbles breaking the panel borders at the top and the sound effects flowing into each other below. So, there's an interesting division between the upper strip, which is relatively subdued, a moment of reassurance that exists almost in its own zone before the rush of the bottom. And, as we'll see with a bunch of the others, in the absence of images the style of the text, the shape of the word balloons, and the font colors all become more crucial to conveying what's happening (sex, to be clear). That's already a lot going on with a series of black panels.

I love how Iris's comic bakes an explanation for the blacked out panels into its narrative. The apparently dominant character gloats that her streaming site won't let her actually display the brutal force-fem pegging she's giving to some shitty gamer bro. Sure enough, at the bottom of that panel there's a black and white video control interface and LIVE signal. Text alone and the design of the speech bubbles transforms the whole diegesis of that second panel, from the floating omniscient "camera" of the other panels to a webcam. Which is crazy because don't forget, there is no diegesis at all. It's all black!

There's so many great touches in this. I love the fact that the tongue in cheek panel containing the "guy's" internal monologue ("I can feel my epic skills draining away with every thrust... along with my masculinity!") is not just a second panel on the upper strip but an inset, separating out this moment of more intimate first person experience from the more remote view of implied fucking. And look at the flowers in the final orgasmic speech bubble! This is a total tangent but I feel like a lot of older attempts at structuralist comics decomposition wanted a firm line between the panel, the image, the characters, the speech bubbles, and so on. But comic elements can constantly interpenetrate, with the apparent domain of text becoming more complex graphical elements. Also, what a cute way to depict orgasming so hard you get turned into a girl. Head full of flowers. :)

It's incredible what you can achieve without breaking Tumblr's draconian terms of service at all.

Robin Tess offers a more straightfoward humorous panel, which lets me catch my breath after Iris's hot and heavy speech bubbles. Yet, this could have been a straightfoward 2 x 3 grid, couldn't it? 6 panels? Instead, this joke about over-engineered jargon names for what could just as easily have been called a "fuckmachine" (left delightfully up to the imagination) gets its core pacing from an irregular panel format. The premise is introduced in a big splashy full-strip panel at the top, the elaboration takes up the middle row, and then the bottom, in two equal panels, displays the two part punchline. I like the subtle way the middle row panels get progressively smaller. It increases the tension as we move toward the release of the punchlines, in a way that could be easily obscured by the panel contents if the page wasn't all blacked out in this way. Like Delyani's work, it makes me want to see notable comics blacked out. It could offer a whole new perspective on the medium's language.

Speaking of which, Nero uses a series of tall regular panels that suddenly POP into one that seems to squirt across the page, the other panels moved to allow for the white negative space to show off the irregular splash of the panel edge. This could be the silhouette of literal fluid, but I also like the idea of a frame that just has this kind of irregular energy. The comic structure itself becoming unruly and fluid to highlight a climax is a staple of many comic genres, but I'd say that I see it deployed most consistently by adult creators, who seem more willing to throw page literalism to the wind in order to achieve heightened expressivity. And once again we've got this escalation to a climactic panel. Typing this up I actually realized I don't have a specific idea of what I think the visual for these panels is or should be. Part of the excitement comes from filling in the blanks, to be sure, but that's true of any comic, which requires us to engage in closure to make sense of the transition from panel to panel. No, it's the drama of the reveal of the vibe plug one character apparently has been hiding, the invitation to intimacy, and finally the release, all achieved through dialogue physically arranged on the page. I don't think this would really make sense at all without the visuals that ARE there--the buzzing sound effect that moves across panel borders and is simultaneous to rather than sequentially arranged between lines of dialogue, and the incredibly suggestive final panel shape. Even without apparent visuals, this is visual storytelling.

Abby Howard wraps things up with the most abstract of the pieces, one that doesn't use frames at all but implies panel contents simply through the convention of word balloon tails. The result is a disorienting dark mass. It's hard to know what exactly is happening here and actually I'm having a hard time imagining what the last visual is "supposed" to be. It sort of is what it is: groping claw marks raking a black void. It's part of the april fool's joke, but it's a creepy one, and it feeds into the final joke of the page: that all this overthinking, all this trying to make sense of black panels, has worn you out, made you vulnerable to the Dark. Well, looking at everything I typed up here, I can't deny the inevitability of this end. Time to get in the maw!

Actually I think this end uncovers the close relationship that comics and hypertext narratives or more experimentally formatted texts have to one another: the space on the page becomes, itself, a signifying element and a way to direct the flow of the story. It's a shame that this is, I think, still considered a bit gimmicky in the realm of professional publishing and criticism. We have all these tools we've barely employed for storytelling, made far more accessible than in the days of having to manually set type!

Well, maybe it'll all have its day in the sun, or I suppose night in its new moon, soon enough. With an increasingly puritanical treatment of sexuality in society and on the internet, maybe we'll ALL have to black the action out of our comics and leave the frames to imply what we socially no longer want to see.

Pitch Black: Comics Code Authority approved!

you can read more reviews in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon at least until they get my ass for being an adult writing about comics for other adults.

[rafaron1223]

I'M BACK FOR MORE SXF CONTENT!

To preface, a month ago, I learned about an interview with Tatsuya Endo on Spy x Family on a magazine that came out in 2020. Well, today I finally got it!

There were a lot of cool illustrations and drafts from the early days of Spy x Family that I don't think have reached a lot of the fans in the West due to this being a JP magazine.

The article is a whopping 8 pages! 6/8 of them is the actual interview, but there's so much text in here that it'll take me a while to translate the whole thing.

And before I forget, I present this Anya doodle by Endo for the interview.

I'll be gradually sharing my first impressions about the contents of this interview, but I'd like to dedicate this post to this particular section featuring the initial cover designs!

We'll start backwards with the one that stands out the most: Franky on Volume 4. This is just a speculation, but it seems like he was still planned to be the uncle at the time of this drawing. You can also see him sitting on an LC7 Swivel Chair, which is designed by the same person who designed the Grand Confort LC2 Petit Modèle armchair that we see Loid sitting on in Volume 1. And if Endo taught us anything about characters sitting on different chairs made by the same designer, they're pretty good friends.

In our current day, I think it's really funny that it took Franky four more volumes to finally get his own cover. God bless him.

Next is Yor on Volume 3, who, interestingly enough, is sitting on the sitting on a Heart Cone Chair, which is currently used by Fiona on the Volume 6 cover. Compared to the current version, Yor appears to have a more serene look, and the poses are quite similar. You can also see the aspect of blood stains on the floor remaining in the current version of Volume 3.

As for Anya on Volume 2, compared to the final version, she's dressed in her regular clothes rather than her Eden Academy uniform, and Mr. Chimera is seated at her right instead of her left. The pose is also different too, with Anya sitting with spread legs with her hands in front of her.

Also, it was stated by Endo before in the Eyes Only fanbook that the colors on the Marshmallow Sofa in Volume 2 are an original addition, so it's interesting to see the actual black and white colors used in this draft.

And last but not least, we have Loid. I saved him for last since his cover had a lot of versions that I think are worth looking at.

A lot of things are pretty similar here, with Loid sitting on a Grand Confort LC2 Petit Modèle armchair with a gun in his right hand (the pic quality doesn't show it, but trust me, he is) while staring forward. As for differences, Loid starts off in a pose with open legs while holding a mask in his left hand. Also, something that should be mentioned is that the detail of the characters hiding items under their chair seems to be absent.

Below is the process of how Endo-sensei got to Volume 1's final design. The first draft had Loid crossing his legs while holding his face with his hand. In the second, he's spreading his legs and holding a hat this time. You can also see the bullet casings at his feet. Maybe a prelude to the "under the chair" aspects of the volume covers? According to the captions, Endo drew these drafts on Clip Studio Paint. These drafts got rejected and we end up getting Loid in his iconic pose, which was developed into what we see now.

can't believe we lost manspreading Loid but oh well

As for the bottom half, these are other considered designs during the draft. The first and third covers look pretty plain and generic, but the second one is pretty reminiscent of the Forger's family portrait while the fourth reminds me of this extra page from Volume 4. But I can see why these designs were scrapped by Endo. Though I can see the second cover getting a cover near the end of the manga in the future, or something like that.

Overall, these images were really interesting to look at! I love looking at the drafts of Spy x Family and seeing where things could have gone. Though I'm pretty bugged that this magazine came out 5 years ago and I'm only learning about it now.

The next post will be about Endo's initial plot for Spy x Family! Look forward to it!

[chow0w]

Redesigning a winglet - 6/7

Happy Wednesday! I can't believe I'm almost done with all of the redesigns!!! I might add some new pantalan characters once I finish the last of these redesigns, but for now, here is our victim of the day!

Yikes.

I really don't know what's going on with Zephyr, but she seems to be the second (or third) super angry character in this winglet. Safe to say, I'll be scrapping most of her design and personality - save for the general face shape and big ears, because they stand out to me.

Here's my headshot! I wanted to give Zephyr a more unique silhouette, with curved horns and bigger spikes as well as a pointed nose. As for her personality and story, I decided to follow a slightly similar route to Arrow-Arum. Zephyr is quite a mellow dragon: tired, unbothered and apathetic to the world around her. She intended to go to jade mountain with her lifelong best friend (Who I haven't named,) however he died just before the academic year's start and left Zephyr to attend alone - hollow and lost.

I also wanted to make some changes to her character in order to let her stand out, and decided on giving her a prosthetic wing membrane.

The membrane itself was probably torn out at some point during her childhood, and has since been replaced with a stretchy leather material pulled across her wing and sewn (or attached) on. I haven't really thought about the exact logistics of how it would work, but thought it would be super cute if the prosthetic was a gift from her late friend, an inventor and engineer.

I don't think she would like most of the other winglet members very much, with the exception of Arrow-Arum. I can imagine the two of them often look around to their crazy wingmates and wonder where they went wrong.

Here's my full sketchpage! Thanks so much to everyone who tuned in and made it this far - these ocs have kind of grown on me a lot, and I'm thinking about making them some full-fledged characters and adding them to my artfight!

Side note, as usual: My art contest is still running until the end of june! If you're interested, you can access any information and submit your entry here in my discord server!

Later ヾ( ￣O￣)ツ

[duckyhowls]

House of the Dragon Fanfiction Clichè's to definitely avoid.

If you're interested to know 🤗

Okay, let's begin with the basics. Here are the top clichè things in a typical House of the Dragon fanfiction. Most of these pop up in around 98% of stories out there. And since you all always make the character female, that's how I will be addressing them in these clichès. Be mad 🤡

(1) Being the child of Rhaenyra, Alicent, or Daemon.

Just three characters, but the probability of at least one of them being your characters parent is around 87%. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't bother me all that much, but come on guys, give us readers SOME originality!

(2) Being a secret love child, typically of one of these men: Daemon, Cole, or Harwin.

Guys, this was cool back when season 1 first premiered. Now it just makes fanfiction repetitive. Like, the plot twists are just not hitting the spot anymore.

(3) Being one of Rhaenyra's "strong bastards"

This is so typical. If you are Jace's twin you earn extra cliche points. ESPECIALLY when it turns into a plot twist of not actually being Harwin's child and you're either Daemon's or you are Laenor's only true born. Like, come up with new ideas or just scrap it, on god.

(4) Becoming the dragon rider to either: Vermithor, The Cannibal, Grey Ghost or Seasmoke.

I know this is a big one. Personally, I've seen way more Vermithor than Cannibal ones, but I'd say it's an easy 50/50. Other times it's Grey Ghost, which is just utterly boring in my opinion (mostly because yall forget you have dragons half the time until it's important), or it's Seasmoke after Laenor "dies". Like, why can't you do something creative and maybe just claim an already existing dragon after a characters untimely demise? Every time someone makes their character claim Vermithor, I roll my eyes. Like, we get it, you want a big ass dragon.

(5) Laenor is a good, attentive father.

But only to the character for some reason, and dotes on her, but not the boys? Wake up, he's a cool guy but a pretty lowsy family man. He loved the boys, but he loved freedom more. He just wasn't built for that kind of life.

(6) Viserys just exists to be chronically dying background character.

Where is the interaction with anyone other than copying down already existing scenes? If you write a fic for example and claim he "adores" his grandchild via Rhaenyra (let's assume you are), then why is he just there and having zero interaction? Where is the bonding that backs up the fact he adores said character? Also, this guy was a very significant character in the entire show/book, and you guys just let him die in the background, like...

(7) Having your character have a Daenerys based complex.

For example, you give her more than one dragon. You USE Daenerys as a face claim (I can't stress enough how unoriginal this all is), and some fics even copy her quotes and the fact she can speak Dothraki. Then you give a BS excuse as to how she knows the language. So uncreative it's basically copywrite. It's even worse when you use Drogon as your dragon. You know, there is one fic I found through tiktok where the OC's name was DAENERYS, and her dragon was named DROGON. Like, grow up. Its obsessed fans like you make her character unlikeable. Stop it. It's cringe. Stop trying to be her.

(8) STOP USING CIRI FACE CLAIM ON FUCKING GOD.

Omg, we get it, she has white hair 🧍🏼‍♀️😭 But ya'll she looks like an alien that took crystal meth. The actress is pretty but the costume design in the Witcher for her was lame as hell. Too many authors use her. You know how many goddamn tiktok slide shows I've seen of people promoting their crappy books with Ciri as their faceclaim? I immediately scroll. Its almost as bad as Daenerys.

(9) Owning Dark Sister without actually having your character EARN the blade.

It just is either gifted to her for absolutely zero reason or she just has it in general. Like, how many times do I have to read about the sword being gifted to her by Daemon?! If you want the sword so bad, make your character go through obstacles throughout the story and EARN it. Its just lazy writing.

(10) Having absolutely zero interaction or connection with people outside of nobility/royalty.

Examples being the common folk (blacksmith, bakers, whores, etc), merchants, foreigners, soldiers, maids/servants, slaves, witches, humanoid creatures, the free folk, sailors, travellers, bards, theatre people, etc. I never see friendships or any sort of actual interaction outside of royal characters, and barely interaction with other lesser important Houses such as Redwyne, Manderly, etc. Its always just made up characters from House Stark or House Martell or something like typical like that. You guys barely write any outsider interaction - and brothel visits barely count! Where are the relationships outside of the castle walls?!

(11) Forgetting that the character has a dragon (if she has one, which is most likely a yes, don't lie)

You guys always forget you have a dragon and a close bond with said dragon. This is in EVERY SINGLE FANFIC. Make sure to write scenes here and there of your character spending time with the dragon. Its also good details if maybe your character talks about their dragon often like the way you losers would dote and yap about your cats and lizards or something emo like that. STOP FORGETTING YOUR DRAGON!

(12) Coming up with the crappiest and most non thought through Valyrian sounding names for characters AND dragons.

Examples of crappy names I've seen are: Daellya, Caellayna, Jaenarya, and Daenyares (again, stop trying to be Daenerys). Stop. They're shit. They're poorly thought through. Come up with something that sounds pronounceable and not an absolute tongue twister. It's not clever or cool. It's stupid and lazy. Dragon names that are stupid include: Haelyx, Onyxys, and sometimes even Valyrian names that are FOR PEOPLE. These names just sound so lazy and emo. Think of something that readers would remember, look back on, and not visibly cringe. I've seen someone name their dragons things like Daeron and Maegor before and I knew then I had to quit reading for the day.

(13) Forcing all the characters to like the reader.

Bro, come on, its so unrealistic. I saw a tiktok slideshow once of someone's fanfic. The caption said "everyone in love with my character" then proceeded to show every important person in the entire show. Mainly the hot ones. Newsflash! They're all hot. Like, stfu and let your character have enemies that aren't just Cole. Smh.

(14) Making the character a party girl in a medieval fantasy AU

Guys, this is a world where the only "rave" youre going to this weekend is a brothel orgy or a play in the streets that acts out political propaganda. Like, you ain't attending a Diddy party unless it's Larys' and we all know he doesn't have the funds or the legal right to throw a party at the Red Keep.

(15) Being Helaena's best friend, or being nice to her.

I love Helaena, but yall need to stop doting over her through your writing sometimes. Give it a break. She has her flaws too and I bet if ya'll knew her irl you'd be so awkward around her. I'm tired of pretending she isn't a complicated character.

(16) Helaena being written as an airhead or dumb vibes.

She's not an airhead she's just antisocial, amongst other things (towards family anyhow). Write her as unnattached, not a day dreamer. And also, even worse if you give her crappy riddles that sound like they're written by a 2 year old. Helaena has shown to be very aware and very smart.

(17) Normalising Cole, Otto, Daemon and Alicent hate.

We get it, their flaws outshine the good parts. But again, realism. Enough said.

(18) A stable boy romance phase.

Like bruh. Nobody asked for this. We get it, you like the Borgias, but nobody came to watch you smack lips with a dirty stable boy you just met and probably would forget about within 2 chapters. I wish I could say more, but its ALWAYS a stable boy.

(19) Aemond's "hmms".

Guys, he hummed probably 3 times throughout the show and you suddenly think it's a habit. Aemond is silent most of the time. He's a silent, calculative snake. I love him, but whenever I see you guys write "hm" I die a little inside. It's not a habit. Everyone makes that noise.

(20) Dragonstone and The Red Keep.

Why is it always a constant setting? Unless you're on dragonback or confronting Aemond at Storm's End, you're either at the castle in Kingslanding, or the one on Dragonstone! Like, you guys got so many other settings to take advantage of: the city, the beach, the Kingswood, small villages, other nobles castles, Essos, the mountain ranges, etc. Like its a fantasy world, come up with something even like secret hidden places or ruins and stuff.

Anyway, I am done yapping and being mad. If you guys have any other cliche things to add, I'd love to hear them in the comments. This also helps me avoid writing this stuff as a HOTD author.

[lookingfts]

Enjoy media again

This is a bit of a long one, but if you want to change your relationship to technology in a manageable but effective way, you might find this interesting.

Over the past year or so, I’ve realized how exhausting technology has become. I’m a Millennial, so I grew up with CDs and VHS/DVDs. I was attached to the hip with my iPod and I have fond memories of browsing video stores to pick something for family movie night.

Then came smartphones, and streaming. And I was happy with both for years, until I realized:

I hate my phone. And I hate streaming. And I hate, more generally, what modern technology has evolved into.

Everything is designed to die quickly, to hoard your attention, to screw creators and suck your energy and joy dry.

I’m not alone in this, of course. At the end of this post, I’ll link to some great videos that helped motivate me in making changes.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide, but I wanted to share a bit of the journey I’ve been on and the changes I’ve made to fix my screwed-up relationship with technology.

First up: my phone is a black hole.

If you asked me, I would say I’m not addicted to my phone. I rarely use any social media except for Tumblr. I don’t need to use my phone much for work. And yet, somehow, my screen time was consistently seven hours or more.

How? Where was that time even going?

So I started taking suggestions from other people and applying them to my smartphone. Here are the big ones, and how well they worked for me.

1. Deleting games

This is pretty self-explanatory. If there’s a game on my phone, I’ll blink and suddenly be on level 400. It’s what I do while I watch TV. And I never feel like I have anything to show for it. Games are not inherently the problem; but without any kind of tangibility, it just all washes over me with no impact.

So I don’t keep games on my phone. If I’m really itching to play something, the Google browser has some free games without ads, like Solitaire. But even that I have to tread carefully with – it’s too easy to keep shuffling. I have a hunch that if I broke out a card deck and played Solitaire the old-fashioned way, I’d get a lot more out of the experience.

2. Hiding apps from the home screen

Some apps just stare at you. If you hold down until the app wiggles, and press Remove App, you have the option to remove it from the home screen but keep it in your app menu. I find this extremely helpful for apps that often distract me. For me, that’s email and Tumblr. Those are my “slot machine” apps – the ones that I refresh to get the hit of dopamine from something new. The point is for me to have to work slightly harder to get to them. To create friction between me and my time wasters.

The first day after you move something, you will compulsively click on that slot 100 times. And then you'll realize how much you were reaching for it.

3. Setting time limits for apps

The first night that I set a 45-minute time limit for email, Tumblr, and Instagram (which I rarely used to use, but had recently found myself checking mindlessly, even though I can barely see the actual posts from my friends anymore) – I was already over the limit for the day. That felt like a wake-up call. Why was I on my email for 45 minutes? There’s nothing critically important in my email. Ever.

I find myself with a different mindset when I open these apps now. The ticking clock in my head makes me view each moment I spend on there as precious. The goal is to see everything I want to see before I’m blocked. This artificial scarcity makes it more interesting and less compulsive.

4. Changing my phone to black and white

This. THIS. This is the single thing that brought my screen time from 7 hours a day to about 1 hour a day.

Putting my phone into black and white did something to my brain. Almost immediately, I could feel that my eyes were less strained and my mind was quieter. I did not expect that.

It’s an accessibility setting, and it’s not easy to get to, for obvious reasons (Apple doesn't want you to). For iPhone, you can go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters. I used the Grayscale and there’s an option to control the intensity of the filter. I have mine at about 85%, since the full 100% grayscale is a little hard for me to see.

I’m not kidding. This is game-changing. It takes away 90% of the temptation of your phone. I can still do everything I need to do – and for the things I want to do, like looking at pictures in color or watching videos, I use my iPad or my laptop or my TV. Those devices have never had the same issue of overuse for me; I think phones tend to be the easiest to abuse. But whatever device causes you problems, you can probably use some variation of these tips to help.

Second: streaming sucks now.

Not just the cost, or the ads, or the fact that you need 7 different services to watch everything you want.

For me, it was the decision paralysis. Every time I booted up Netflix, I felt overwhelmed by choice. How do you wade through all the low-quality filler to find something interesting? Nope, nothing here. Move to Amazon Prime. Move to YouTube movies. Move to Disney+.

I not only found it exhausting…I felt as though the endless choice was making media meaningless. Movies, TV shows, and music were all blurring together in my brain. Once in a blue moon did I actually get excited about something I saw on a streaming platform.

There are other issues: streaming movies and shows can be altered. They can be deleted without warning; even for things you bought. Algorithms control what you see, and you lose the feeling of choosing for yourself.

Now, I kept Netflix, mostly for its original shows. I’m on the lowest ad-supported plan, which is about $9 a month. I may cancel it and only keep it for a few months out of the year, to catch up on everything at once. It’s not hard, with seasons being like 8 episodes.

But I canceled everything else. I canceled Sirius, I canceled YouTube Premium, I let it all go.

Here’s what I did instead:

1. I got a library card.

I’m privileged to have a lovely library very close to me, and I was embarrassed that after 13 years of living in this town, I didn’t have a card. I recently started getting back into reading physical books as well. So I got my library card and checked out some books.

I had no idea how much libraries offer now. With my library card came completely free access to Freegal Music, Hoopla, and Libby. Those will probably vary depending on your library.

Freegal Music is basically like any streaming music services, only you’re limited to five downloads a week. But you can stream almost anything, and I find that the curated playlists take me out of the "sameness" that I felt with my YouTube Music playlists.

Libby and Hoopla have e-books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music, and binge passes that you can check out to binge content on other streaming services.

I’ve barely scratched the service of what’s available. Of course, the selection is slightly more limited, and you have to “borrow” things electronically before you can use them. But that only works in favor of my quest to feel more connected to the media I experience. There’s a time limit on it, and that creates some kind of urgency.

If you’re lucky enough to have access to a library, please use it. I wish I hadn’t waited so long. Even if you go literally one time, just to get a card, you can enjoy so many of their digital offerings. (Though my library does also offer fun in-person events, like reading clubs and craft classes. And you can check out 50 things at a time. 50!!!! For a month!!!!)

2. I bought DVDs.

Recently, I went down a rabbit hole about physical media. Like everyone else, I tossed all my DVDs and CDs years ago. Waste of space. It’s old tech.

But it’s true: you can’t own digital media. It’s not yours – you’re only renting it, even when you buy it.

I’m a pretty avid thrifter, and I had always seen the tons of DVDs and CDs and vinyls at thrift stores, but I never bothered to look.

So that was my first stop. I went to my favorite thrift store and found a Blu-ray player for about $9 and a DVD player for $7 (in case one of them didn’t work). Let me tell you – I had a BLAST picking out DVDs. It was so much more fun than clicking through a streaming menu. Right now I have a little over 30 DVDs (at a couple of bucks each – each one was literally cheaper than me renting a digital copy), including tons of my all-time favorite movies. I was shocked that I found so many of my A-list faves on my very first trip – Sunshine, Pride & Prejudice, the whole LOTR trilogy.

Feel free to judge my taste...I don't mind.

(You can also rent DVDs at the library.)

I made sure to buy players that came with the cords so I didn’t have to buy any (I’m only moderately tech literate) and it works great.

Beyond the fact that DVDs and Blu-rays aren’t compressed like streaming and so might actually look and sound better – I was just excited about media, for the first time in a long time. These are my favorites. I own them. I get to look through this collection and decide what I’m in the mood for. I get to keep hunting and find even more of my favorites.

I also got a handful of CDs. I love the way they look. I love interacting with media again. Fortunately, I have the space to display them, but you can also remove them from the cases and put them into a CD sleeve.

A huge used physical media store opened down the street. I’m so excited to see what they have. It might become my new favorite place.

I can still stream on Netflix. I can still buy a movie on Vudu or whatever if it’s something I’m really in the mood to watch. That option isn’t going anywhere. And if you like streaming certain things, go for it. I am not against streaming as a concept. I just felt like streaming had become this draining, chaotic maze that I was lost in, instead of something that made my life better and more convenient.

Maybe we need a little inconvenience. Maybe having everything in the palm of our hand only devalues those experiences and lessens the impact.

Maybe some of these things that I did aren’t available to you – but hopefully some are. I hope this is helpful to anyone who feels like I do. This is just part of my journey, and I want to continue finding a way to live more actively and intentionally in this world that is trying so hard to make us isolated, tired, and passive.

A big shoutout to all these creators who inspired me. Here are a few videos that really helped me:

Only Consuming Media from the Library

The Importance of Inconvenience

Using This iPod for 30 Days Changed My Life (a series)

Replace all of your subscriptions with a library card

[nhaneh]

Growing ever more frustrated with the use of the term "AI" and how the latest marketing trend has ensured its already rather vague and highly contextual meaning has now evaporated into complete nonsense. Much like how the only real commonality between animals colloquially referred to as "Fish" is "probably lives in the water", the only real commonality between things currently colloquially referred to as "AI" is "probably happens on a computer"

For example, the "AI" you see in most games wot controls enemies and other non-player actors typically consist primarily of timers, conditionals, and RNG - and are typically designed with the goal of trying to make the game fun and/or interesting rather than to be anything ressembling actually intelligent. By contrast, the thing that the tech sector is currently trying to sell to us as "AI" relates to a completely different field called Machine Learning - specifically the sub-fields of Deep Learning and Neural Networks, specifically specifically the sub-sub-field of Large Language Models, which are an attempt at modelling human languages through large statistical models built on artificial neural networks by way of deep machine learning.

the word "statistical" is load bearing.

Say you want to teach a computer to recognize images of cats. This is actually a pretty difficult thing to do because computers typically operate on fixed patterns whereas visually identifying something as a cat is much more about the loose relationship between various visual identifiers - many of which can be entirely optional: a cat has a tail except when it doesn't either because the tail isn't visible or because it just doesn't have one, a cat has four legs, two eyes and two ears except for when it doesn't, it has five digits per paw except for when it doesn't, it has whiskers except for when it doesn't, all of these can look very different depending on the camera angle and the individual and the situation - and all of these are also true of dogs, despite dogs being a very different thing from a cat.

So, what do you do? Well, this where machine learning comes into the picture - see, machine learning is all about using an initial "training" data set to build a statistical model that can then be used to analyse and identify new data and/or extrapolate from incomplete or missing data. So in this case, we take a machine learning system and feeds it a whole bunch of images - some of which are of cats and thus we mark as "CAT" and some of which are not of cats and we mark as "NOT CAT", and what we get out of that is a statistical model that, upon given a picture, will assign a percentage for how well it matches its internal statistical correlations for the categories of CAT and NOT CAT.

This is, in extremely simplified terms, how pretty much all machine learning works, including whatever latest and greatest GPT model being paraded about - sure, the training methods are much more complicated, the statistical number crunching even more complicated still, and the sheer amount of training data being fed to them is incomprehensively large, but at the end of the day they're still models of statistical probability, and the way they generate their output is pretty much a matter of what appears to be the most statistically likely outcome given prior input data.

This is also why they "hallucinate" - the question of what number you get if you add 512 to 256 or what author wrote the famous novel Lord of the Rings, or how many academy awards has been won by famous movie Goncharov all have specific answers, but LLMs like ChatGPT and other machine learning systems are probabilistic systems and thus can only give probabilistic answers - they neither know nor generally attempt to calculate what the result of 512 + 256 is, nor go find an actual copy of Lord of the Rings and look what author it says on the cover, they just generalise the most statistically likely response given their massive internal models. It is also why machine learning systems tend to be highly biased - their output is entirely based on their training data, they are inevitably biased not only by their training data but also the selection of it - if the majority of english literature considered worthwhile has been written primarily by old white guys then the resulting model is very likely to also primarily align with the opinion of a bunch of old white guys unless specific care and effort is put into trying to prevent it.

It is this probabilistic nature that makes them very good at things like playing chess or potentially noticing early signs of cancer in x-rays or MRI scans or, indeed, mimicking human language - but it also means the answers are always purely probabilistic. Meanwhile as the size and scope of their training data and thus also their data models grow, so does the need for computational power - relatively simple models such as our hypothetical cat identifier should be fine with fairly modest hardware, while the huge LLM chatbots like ChatGPT and its ilk demand warehouse-sized halls full of specialized hardware able to run specific types of matrix multiplications at rapid speed and in massive parallel billions of times per second and requiring obscene amounts of electrical power to do so in order to maintain low response times under load.

[thydungeongal]

hello question for u ms. dungeongal

i have been having an Thought re: ttrpgs that i have been unable to resolve. i find myself getting interested in OSR games but, at the same time, having a problem with 5e because of its lack of design and me having to do the work of the designer a lot of the time (as the DM). do you think OSR-type games resolve this sort of issue, and how so?

Broadly speaking, yes. The older editions of D&D that the OSR movement/school of design is generally informed by (being the original edition, the various iterations of the Basic set, and AD&D) are usually much more focused in their mechanics, so while they usually aim for a much narrower play experience (a combination of dungeon-crawling and wilderness exploration punctuated by conflict) they usually have mechanics that are directly in service of that play experience instead of just giving a general framework that can theoretically be applied to multiple modes of play but which gets very little actual tangible support.

So yes, if you want to run an old-school dungeon crawler type of game OSR games and the editions of D&D that inspired the OSR have much more in terms of DM support for that type of gameplay. At the same time a huge part of the fun in OSR type design is the fact that the various older editions of D&D being more or less compatible with each other also empowers DMs who really like to tinker with systems. But none of that is necessary and most OSR games, taken as is, already provide a lot of procedures and guidance to make the game pretty much run itself.

Errant is one of my favorite examples of this: while something of a departure from its D&D roots it is still more or less about the same type of gameplay as old-school D&D and it's full of toys for the GM to play with and it rules. The game is also free although the for money version of the game comes with art.

[vitriol-and-alcohol]

Hey, I ran across this post again!

I reread both original novels and I have some ✨thoughts.✨

I'm assuming the match is between the novel versions of Drs. Frankenstein and Jekyll and the comic/gameplay version of Dr. Ludwig.

Basically, there's no version of this fight where Ludwig doesn't win. Getting a bit pedantic, he benefits from a century or two of advances in agriculture and medicine out of the gate.

Ignoring that, let's look at our fighters:

Victor Frankenstein is a wealthy young man from an influential family in Geneva. He was an intelligent child, though he didn't have a lot of guidance in what he studied early on. He consumed a lot of debunked and pseudoscience, for which he was teased by his professors later in life. He finds the natural sciences interesting as well, and to study further he enrolls in the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. Before he leaves, his mother dies.

While in Germany, he claims to have discovered the secret to animating the inanimate. He's not very clear about his methods, but it seems to involve quite a bit of chemistry and, if I remember correctly, electricity. He spends long nights in his workshop afterwards assembling a giant man. Because it is relevant to his fighting statistics, I want to note that, from what I understood, he does not go grave robbing for this endeavor. He says he visited charnel houses for his materials. He designed his creature, his Adam, to be beautiful. Something goes wrong the moment he completes the process, however. He's revolted by the very sight of what he's done and goes to sleep in a churchyard over it.

That becomes a bit of a theme for him. He's disgusted by his Adam, and for a long while whenever he sees him, Victor sleeps outside about it. He's so messed up after the first time, he's incapacitated for nearly nine months. He then returns home to find that his younger brother has died and their family maid, a childhood companion named Justine, has been accused of his murder. He's sure that somehow, Adam is the true culprit. He reassures his beloved cousin/fiance Elizabeth (a much more important and awesome character in the story than I've given her credit for here) of their friend's innocence and guess to find the scene of the crime. He sees his creation in the distance and sleeps outside over it.

At the trial his brother's murder, Elizabeth speaks eloquently as a character witness for Justine. Victor, who saw an 8 foot tall man at the crime scene decides to keep his mouth shut. I know it's not CSI Geneva, but the murderer left a handprint on William, and I assume Adam's hands are much larger than Justine's. The only reason they suspect her is because she had a cameo in her pocket that William was wearing. Elizabeth points out that she wouldn't have had to kill him over it if she wanted it, she could have just asked. The court has literally no other evidence and Victor never says a single thing. So she's executed after being coerced into a confession in order to receive Last Rites.

In the meantime, someone else has inadvertently taught Adam French, so he's able to eventually have a conversation with Victor. He asks for a female companion. Victor agrees, then changes his mind, then a lot of other people die. Adam figures out guns at one point. They chase each other as far North as they can go. He's kind of a dick to the one guy who's nice to him, the captain of the boat who rescued him from freezing to death, then Victor dies too. Adam finds his creator lifeless on that boat and goes to live in solitude.

IN CONCLUSION:

Victor does have a bit of raw strength and endurance. He wasn't building muscle by digging in graveyards, but moving around human bodies isn't easy. He's generally healthy when he's not worked himself into hysterics over the uncanny valley existential question mark he created. He's intelligent, but incredibly cowardly. The disaster he finds is largely of his own doing and obsessions.

We know much less about Henry Jekyll. Like Victor Frankenstein, however, the act of creation he's best known for is also largely chemical, though it seems to lean a bit more into alchemy and medicine.

We know he's a well respected doctor in Soho and from his large house and serving staff, likely well off. He spends a lot of his time trying to live up to that image of the philanthropic doctor and makes a potion to try and help him repress those urges. He later writes that if he'd been trying to enhance his benevolent side, the resulting split person might have been more like an angel than the evil person that did emerge.

And... That's kind of it. He tries to stay himself eventually, but he loses control of himself in his sleep and eventually can no longer make the potion. He dies as Edwin Hyde.

IN CONCLUSION:

I'm not including Hyde in this equation. We know Hyde is incredibly strong, but we only ever see Jekyll sickly. They have very different physical forms, with Hyde the younger and stronger one. Henry's smart, but again, he brings his disaster on himself with his obsession. He keeps Hyde's memories, but it's not like Edwin's a skilled fighter.

Finally

A lot of Herbert Ludwig's early life is also a mystery. A retcon of his origin gives him the hometown of the "vaguely European" city of Rottenburg, Germany. The blurb also, interestingly, hints that he comes from a long line of mad doctors who swap townsfolk's organs until they get carried away and are run out of town by a torch and pitchfork wielding mob.

He ends up, eventually, in America in the employ of Team Fortress Industries where he's hired as the team Medic. Between fleeing home and the end of Comic 7, he 1) steals a box truck containing wedding doves from some Prime Minister's wedding, 2) absconds with one of his patients skeleton mid-surgery (they survive), 3) invents a fluid that can heal nearly any wound on the battlefield, 4) brings back a teammate hours after his death, 5) sells his soul to what looks like the devil, then later performs soul transfer for the inevitable reckoning with that devil where he negotiates himself into five more decades of life and a soul left to bargain with before he has to start worrying, 6) invents or at least uses several weapons where he is able to shoot health into a teammate from afar.

As far as in-game stats go, he's tied for second fastest base speed (average gay walking speed) with pretty average health. Like most TF2 classes, he has a melee attack, but not an unarmed one. He does, however, tend to keep his weapon of choice, a surgical saw, nearby.

I think that gives us enough information to set up this fight.

There's one stat I didn't bring up until now, one Drs. Jekyll and Frankenstein have that Dr. Ludwig does not, and that's shame. If you set this fight in Geneva, the man who could not even speak up to save Justine's life is going to be too busy holding the weight of his family reputation to swing at two other mad scientists. Similarly, set in Soho or not, Dr. Jekyll had to invent soul alchemy to wriggle out of the societal expectations that are placed on a doctor of his status. Neither is going to do well in a fist fight in public. So, let's say you put it in Dustbowl.

I can see why Henry Jekyll came in second, but the question did not bring Edwin Hyde into the equation. He loses on general health over the appearance of his novel and, given that he has like half a dozen degrees, probably age. He does have those dark desires that he worked so hard to quell, but it's not exactly clear what those are. Is he violent in his Jekyll persona, or just horny? I think he's going down first.

Victor is close behind him though. Even alone, he does not seem to show much more courage. Given the time, both novel scientists might be able to come up with some interesting chemical traps, but they do not show the inclination to do so in their stories.

The real advantage Dr. Herbert Ludwig has, besides the lack of crippling societal expectations, is that he starts where we typically picture the other two. Medic is a B movie horror antagonist that escaped containment. Not only that, but he has a whole found family's worth of equally unhinged support network. He's not hiding his experimentations, he's sharing them with the other mercenaries and getting feedback to improve them. That's important, because like Henry Jekyll, he uses his experiments on himself.

Final analysis; it's not a fair fight. Switch out the scientists for their creations or their own B movie selves, and you might have an actual scuffle.

Bonus: I was trying to come up with a more balanced trio by using more modern iterations of the characters. I got as far as Dr. Frank-N-Furter and the Glass Scientists version of Henry Jekyll.

I don't know if they'd fight exactly, but I'd read the hell out of that crossover.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hi! You definitely don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but I looked at your tier list and saw that Jack and Epel were in the "sliiiiiiiightly dislike" and "solid dislike" categories respectively. Jack is easily in my top 5 and I find Epel to be a fun character despite feeling more neutral towards him, so I was just curious as to why you personally don't like them that much.

Thank you!

[My personal Twst tier list is here!]

Jack actually used to be in the same "solid dislike" tier as Epel. (I briefly explain his ascension to another tier here.) I've loosened up on my opinion of him since his dream in book 7, but I still don't consider him to be a character that I particularly enjoy.

A lot of things about who Jack fundamentally is just do not appeal to me. For example, his design has many elements that I find unattractive (big muscles, silver hair in a spikey mullet, wolf ears and tail, the whole "tough guy" look, etc.). I don't dislike tsunderes (my own Twst OC is one), but I'm extremely picky with them. I prefer tsundere characters to have a reason or part of their backstory that explains why they find it hard to express themselves truthfully. To my knowledge, Jack doesn't really have that, so I instead find him "tsundere for the sake of checking it off on the cast" instead of cute. He gives me very strong... dog energy (especially with the way he idolizes Leona and trails Ruggie around offering to do stuff to help him out), and that's a HUGE demerit for Jack, since I am very much a Dog Disliker. Any traits you would normally assign to a dog and find appealing about them become drawbacks for Jack in my eyes. The one big thing I do happen to like about Jack is that him being the stubborn moral compass of the group makes for interesting clashes with other characters (particularly those within his own dorm).

Epel falls into other tropes I dislike: the "babyfaced one who wants to be manly" and the "country bumpkin that's a fish out of water in the big city/a new community". I feel like there's very few ways to do these without inevitably falling into the same story beats, and I do not find this engaging. I think that Epel's character arc in book 5 happened much too fast and needed more time to cook. (He spent 16ish years with conservative gender views and it takes a SINGLE social media post from Vil to get him to change his mind?? Okay??????) Admittedly, a large part of why I dislike Epel is that his Harveston dialect is EXTREMELY difficult to translate over into English and I'm never quite satisfied with how I've chosen to write it. The dialect always comes off as "too exaggerated" one way or another. His general behavior is also much too immature and rowdy for my liking (he's too overeager to fight, he speaks out of turn to seniors and figures of authority, etc.); if you haven't noticed by now 😂 I tend to prefer mature, collected, and brains over brawn types, which Epel does not really align with.

I think the general problem for both Jack and Epel for me is that it takes them both much, MUCH longer than the other characters to gain any sort of meaningful depth. Their content so often falls back on the same old safety nets ("I like to exercise!"/"I like apples!") instead of trying to find some creative ways to expand on them. For example, we know that Malleus likes exploring ruins and the solitude they provide, but he also wonders about the history tied to them, admires architecture, etc. When he visits new places, he comments about the differences between his home and this new location. This demonstrates his curiosity and also lets us know he knows very little about the world. Jade has his obvious interests in the mountains and mushrooms, but he has also indicated that he wants to try drawing specimens he finds and that he finds manhole covers interesting. You can see him expanding beyond his initial interests and wanting to learn more about the human world. What do Epel and Jack tend to do? "Oh, I'm reading this book because I want to build more muscle definition!"/"Apples are the best fruit ever, have some that my family sent!" Arguably, these types of behaviors could be extrapolated to determine something else about the boys (Jack is very determined/a hard worker, Epel cares deeply about his family and believes in the quality of their produce), but the issue is that this is so often ALL they are portrayed as. I feel that neither of them get the same amount of nuance and diversification that the rest of the NRC cast enjoys.

[ctcaptaincorgi]

Hey, hold up, this isn't my usual art, since I normally draw for Star Wars, but I really wanted to do stuff for Thunderbolts after watching it twice. I want to talk about the movie. Consider this your first and only spoiler warning. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. And if you have seen it? Watch it again.

Well, I don't know what happened, but my posting schedule is gonna be completely thrown off now that I've seen Thunderbolts. I didn't really have much anticipation or excitement for seeing it (though I was curious because I had jokingly guessed the Thunderbolts would fight the Void). But then my friends invited me, so I saw it, and... I loved it so much. It hit me emotionally in ways I didn't expect. And like, this movie decided it wouldn't undercut the emotions and I'm so thrilled by that. There was a lot of emotional sincerity. I really like how they handled the character development. I didn't think I would care so much about any of the characters, but then by the end I DID.

This movie really hit the regret from past wrong that still haunts the characters (or at least Yelena), and yet the characters are trying to come to a place where they can still do some good. Like... it feels highly specific, but I LOVE that kind of redemption story. The struggle with coming to terms with what you've done, having to fight to keep going, to be a little better, to help who you can even if you stand a high chance of dying in the process. There's something that just feels so real about it. It got me in the feels.

There wasn't any spectical, no showy CGI fight to make the Thunderbolts look like awesome, cool heroes. While most of them have a degree of superpowers, its nothing like the previous Avengers. The Thunderbolts are mostly just people trying their best to help Bob who they can see is struggling too. There's no way for them to defeat the Void through traditional combat. All they can do is support Bob. Honestly, around midway through the movie, after Alexei talked to Yelena to help her feel better, I got kinda choked up when everyone was saving the people from falling debris. It felt so much more meaningful and truly heroic because these people are far closer to human. In any other movie, the focus wouldn't be on heroes trying to save as many people as they could. It'd show them looking for the next bad guy to punch. I don't know, this movie felt weirdly grounded despite Bob having the power of a thousand suns and make people relive shameful moments in their lives.

You might've noticed, but I had a lot of thoughts on this movie. I loved it. It's probably my favorite from at least the past two phases, if not in general. I still love a lot of the other MCU heroes and movies, but this movie now has a special grip on my heart as evidenced by me finally deciding to draw MCU characters for the first time. Because I've genuinely never been so interested in doing so until now.

I originally meant to draw all the Thunderbolts + Bob, but then I ran out of space on my canvas. Bob is a Labrador flat coat retriever because they come both chocolate and black, as well yellow/blond on rare occasion. When choosing a breed, it was so important to me that the breed be fluffy (like Bob's hair), but also ideally come in those three colors. For the Sentry, I have his hair slicked back (for the purposes of this au, it was bleached like the movie too), and the Void's color is just barely lighter than the line art and the hair is similarly messy/fluffy likey design for Bob. For Yelena, I wanted a smaller breed well regarded for their agility, so picked the parson Russell terrier because it was the only breed the American Kennel club mentioned that gave me any Yelena vibes (because I wasn't going to make her a papillon). And for Alexei, I wanted a very large, brawly dog, ideally from Russia, so chose the Caucasian shepherd. I'm really happy with how they all turned out. I want it on the record that Bob is the first MCU character I've ever drawn as a dog because once I had the breed and concepts in my head, I had to draw it. And I have no regrets about that.

Also, I would be fine if the MCU didn't pair them together, but I see a lot of potential for Bob x Yelena. I think they'd be really cute, and at least have way better set up before Marvel could confirm if they're dating later (unlike a few other canon couples I can think of).

[assassiowl]

"Can you eat a pine tree" - Hearthian Food Exploration part 1

I'm in the middle of a deep dive investigating Hearthian food. Take the words of this post with a pinch of salt. Heh. Omg it's happening, I think this is my first expanded headcanon. I'm so excited. Theory crafting Heathians and their culture around food, sourcing ingredients and preparation techniques.

Disclaimer

So far, the presence of ghost matter wiping out non-aquatic lifeforms seems to limit the availability of hearthian diet to aquatic based life. That being said, it was long enough for Hearthian's to evolve, so let's just ignore inventing entire species for culture is outside a game dev's scope alright. I'm firing off ideas since I want to draw more food and it's raising a lot of curiosity. But that being said, having access to more creaturas opens a lot of doors. I must design one. Fish meat They eat fish. There's enough bodies of water on Timber Hearth to suggest the presence of a variety of freshwater lake and river fishy. We also have the entirety of Giant's Deep which is just an entire planet of sea. The large gravitational pull on that planet amplifies deep sea pressure. I'd like to think that anything coming out of that water would be evolved in such a way to adapt to these critical conditions. Lots of teeth, bioluminescence, blobby or flat bodies. Extra creepy looking. They're all evolved to be ambush predators to preserve energy. They grow really big. Catching one of these titans could feed the village for a week. Incidentally, I drew angler fish hotpot the other day. I imagine the Hearthian population is quite large. At some point you get a group of people risky enough to challenge the anglerfish. I think it'd be like a fairytale or generations of fish hunters who bring back this glory meat. But they can't do it in a flashy loud way, so they develop all this stealthy hunting gear designed to get them really close for the assassinate. HYAAH then they drag this big ass carcass back home through cold space that keeps it fresh.

Food preservation So at it's core food preservation is about dealing with the microorganisms in food, food preservation is finding ways to deal with them so they can't render our feed inedible. So with something like fish (meat, fruit etc.), you're looking to pull the moisture out, you'll see drying racks where they salt the stuff or leave it to hang in the open, you can bake stuff, or put it through a dehydrator. That's far too high tech. Similar techniques with salt (curing) or smoking foods, it's the same principal. Ingredients So we then have to ask, do they have access to edible salt? Primarily that's sodium chloride to us. For the sake of simplicity, Hearthians are surrounded by rocks, and they have good stomachs, so yeah, probably. Having access to salt opens up so many possibilities.

In a similar vein, a really common important ingredient for food is also sugar. The existence of Marshmallows suggests there's natural source. Just wandering around, I think most suitably would be honey, it wouldn't be too far removed to imagine bees on Timber Hearth. There'd be an abundance of flowers, actually I've talked myself into it just now. Bee keeping Hearthians is now in my head. We also know with fish you can boil bones for stocks and gelatine (the latter is also used in marshmallows, sweets and other desserts, not to mention the flexibility it affords us in cooking). And by extension I think natural flora that have fruit. With that and sugar you can make vinegar, which opens up pickling as another food preservation method - pickle fruit, veg, fish whatever. I've been imagining lots of wilds mushrooms and leafy things. The hardiness of Hearthians means they'd probably be more adventurous, even at risk of an upset tummy. There's just an abundance of potential here and I'm no mycology expert, but I do think when I come around to drawing more, focusing on incorporating more fungi is key to interesting dishes. It's so versatile, I think you could think of it like a tofu. Plus the colours and variety of shapes make for really interesting shapes to draw. What about vegetables? There's a lot of potential for naturally occurring vegetables. Which in turn leads to entire bodies of agriculture and options as a staple food. Root veg and leafy greens should be common in the wild. Though rice and grains to grow maybe? Pine trees So this is where I started this entire rabbit hole. I thought, well, they can't just survive off fish and marshmallows. Haha... Unless? Literally first question "can u eat tree bark" Turns out in some cases... yes. Kind of. The two models in game are more likely pine trees (Pinus sylvestris) and redwood pines (Sequoia sempervirens). Outside the usages of wood as we know it for buildings and spacecraft, as far as I could find, the edible bits are split into: cones needles bark sap nuts You can apparently boil the tight closed green female (???) cones to soften them and eat. But stay away from the barky stuff. It's old and wood like lol. Actually did you know pinecones make for great fire starters. Get a couple dry ones when you're camping and chuck them in. Needles, it's possible to make tea out them, random reddit comments say it tastes like juniper berries (like in gin). It's quite healthy too. Allegedly they have medicinal purposes else they're used for mulch (for fertilising plants). I always imagine Heathians to be careful for future generations like that. I found some posts talking about using the pine needles as a flavouring for smoking your fish, so potential here too. Bark. I really wanted some evidence of people just chewing on hunks of wood. You know like how a toddler monches on toy blocks. Turns out inner pine bark was used in something called bark bread. It was a starvation feed where they used the stuff to pad out the flour to make it go further. It didn't have much nutritional value so as soon as possible it was cut. Sap wine exists. Generally pine sap isn't used for food purposes. Who am I to question it. Actually far from it, I think if we start incorporating extra sugars (from root vegetables, wild flowers and fruits), the process of fermentation actually opens up so much. Alcohol, vinegar, heck if we start factoring in the potential for additional creatura, then we can have milk, therefore cheese, yogurts and stuff. You start combining all of that with plants and medicinal whatnot, we have the potential for cosmetics and medical products. Imagine that, hearthian makeup. So pine nuts are a classic. You can roast them, throw them on a salad, with fish and meats, turn them into a dessert. They're super versatile. For a treat you could turn it into flour. Super expensive, but maybe for big occasions - like a festival? I'm at the character limit. I'll be back.

[squishycat330]

Donnie! I finally did my 2012 & 2018 Donnie mix! (its been 3 weeks and 5 days. . . I’m so sorry)

he’s! Here! He’s finally Here!!!!

another run down, one last time!

In the 2018 series the boys are all different types of turtles, Leo is a Red-eard Slider, Raph is a Alligator-Snapping turtle, Mikey is a simple box turtle and Donnie is a Soft shell turtle (shudders), in the 2012 series Donnie says that he suspects their Common-Box turtles and/or Diamond-Back Terrapins.

So they’re all different turtles and Donnie is by far the most complicated, he’s a Diamond-Back Terrapin and a soft shell turtle. His shell is a mixture of both a normal shell and a softshell, it’s thinner and smoother then his brothers, but harder then a normal softshell, the outer part of the shell is soft wall the inner area is harder his scuts are oddly but consistently shaped and a bit thicker,

his plastron is similar to his shell and is softer as well, it’s more rounded and is flush with his chest/skin (if that makes any since) the plastron and shell blend together similarly

I really like the design I gave in his shell it looks nice, tho is gives off bohemian vibes which isn’t Donnie, it was also much easier to draw it digitally then traditionally, I also drew the traditional one first (because I’d dropped this for a bit). his shell is probably one of my favorites! (More on this in a moment)

Donnie also has a cover/armor for his shell!

It’s made out of recycled Kraang metal since it’s probably pretty durable and strong, he painted it purple because Donnie. It’s got holes for his belt and loops for his Bo-staff, and he’s attached something to his plastron that clips in to place with the pice on his shoulder, he made it after he got an injury to his shell early on, I actually looked up how ‘fixing’ turtle shells work when their injured to understand how it’d go for Donnie and I did end up coming up with something,

the outer bit is stitched wall the inner is sealed with zip ties and ‘command hooks’ or Resin and Fiber-Glass (or whatever that stuff is)

Donnie takes more after the soft-shell with his general shell wall his scuts are supposed to be the Diamond-back terrapin, tho the spotting on his shell I made to match a softshell turtle and how their typical drawn, he’s also a ✨lanky✨ boy and I think it could possibly come from the soft-shell turtle.

he’s so adorable! I love his cute lil face so much!!!

I just really love this drawing! He’s so freaking cute!!! His lil markings and smile! And eyes he’s just so adorable! I love it so much!!!

much like how I did Leo I thought Don having less specks in comparison to his brothers fit him,

I didn’t have to many problems with Donnie drawing wise. . . . (remembers that I had exactly 3 problems with this boy right off the bat. . .)

(yeah the three problems where his side in between his shell and plastron because at the time I hadn’t worked that out yet, the other problem was the fact that he was the only one with a neck. . . Yeah, all of the other turtles are at angles where the neck isn’t visible Donnie’s however (Mr. Soft-shell long neck boy) is and that was annoying for me. . . And I don’t actually remember what the last one was so yeah thanks Don!!!) But~ it was mostly just figuring out how to mix his shell tho, which was vary hard and I had to look up a lot about soft shell turtles, it was a lot more research then I did for the other boys, it was a nightmare looking at all of those softshell turtles. . . .their creepy and kinda disgusting but also vary interesting. . . I don’t know. . .it’s weird. . .

I actually proposed the idea for his shell to a friend who side it was actually really good and provided the idea for his plastron! So big thanks to them!

I also wanted to give him glasses and his goggle like things but I couldn’t figure that out digitally so I didn’t add them I may do that at another point tho since it’s a cute idea!

that’s the last of em! Donnie now completes the 4 turtles collection!

now moving on from that: the thing that finally motivated me to finish Donnie was actually what now goes Along with this which I’ll be working/posting on soon ;> I’d also point out Donnie took about 2h in general, so probably the least out of all of them which is funny,

id also say the first time I got distracted by drawing Donnie was to draw something by brother had suggested and it’s. . . .a disaster stupid funny disaster, then I just kinda never picked it back up and switched to traditional for a bit so yeah sorry Donnie!

Leo: Raph: Mikey:

Miscellaneous:

[fierykitten2]

Well that was a disaster (Knight probably doesn’t think it was that much of a disaster. It got to beat the shit out of Kieran’s Hydrapple as punishment for when he made Spriggie and Cherry cry. Char on the other hand was out pretty quickly after she swapped in). Passionfruit swapped out twice (the second time was an accident, I wasn’t paying attention when I selected Volt Switch. Not that I was paying that much attention the first time either), Orange, Spriggie, Char and Cherry all fainted at some point and two of Kieran’s Pokémon had to knock themselves out

On the plus side, two new Master Balls so now I have three. I guess once I beat The Indigo Disk I’m gonna go and focus on Master Balling the Swords of Justice (to be fair I wanted to do the Legendary Birds early even though I vastly prefer the Swords of Justice but who cares I’m doing the Swords of Justice first now. May need to work on some names for Terrakion and Cobalion bc I’ve only thought of one for Virizion)

[bonehilda-deactivated]

One of the best things about Disco Elysium by far is that it does not fear ugly women. The world is full of ugly men, but ugly women are so hard to come by.

[fae-morrigan]

Y'know, I see a lot of people argue that like, Jay is ugly. Why does Jon like him? And I've made it clear I disagree, because, like, cmon:

That is OBJECTIVELY a handsome man, and I'm a lesbian, lmao.

But like. If he was. ... So?

I actually think it's pretty cool that DC was like, yeah, Superman fell in love with a guy who cuts his own hair with dull scissors and dresses like oscar the grouch. He's a little weird to look at, maybe he's not the most conventionally attractive dude, but SUPERMAN found him wonderful and wanted to kiss him on the mouth.

That's... great? Like that's great. There's no universe where that reading of the text isn't awesome and empowering. Queer love should transcend looks and social status, and a huge part of queerness is finding beauty in the 'odd', anyways.