#variety games

[beaubirds]

I'm not late you're late! Or are you a little to the left? https://www.twitch.tv/beaubirds

[traitorvalkyrie]

3 years ago, I started streaming just for the hell of it. Today, I'm celebrating doing 3 years of just absolute chaos by doing more chaos. Come hang out and chill.

[felassan]

SAG AFTRA news update:

"SAG-AFTRA Members Who Work on Video Games Go on Strike July 25th A.I. Protections Remain the Sticking Point SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, acting under the authority delegated by the SAG-AFTRA National Board, and with the unanimous advice and counsel of the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee, called a strike of the Interactive Media Agreement, effective July 26 at 12:01 a.m. Today’s vote to strike comes after more than a year and a half of negotiations without a deal. The convenience bargaining group with whom SAG-AFTRA is negotiating includes Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc. Any game looking to employ SAG-AFTRA talent to perform covered work must sign on to the new Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement, the Interim Interactive Media Agreement or the Interim Interactive Localization Agreement. These agreements offer critical A.I. protections for members. Negotiations began in October 2022 and on Sept. 24, 2023, SAG-AFTRA members approved a video game strike authorization with a 98.32% yes vote. Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language. “We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members. Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” stated SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher.   “The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually. The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games. That includes the SAG-AFTRA members who bring memorable and beloved game characters to life, and they deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as performers in film, television, streaming, and music: fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies. Frankly, it’s stunning that these video game studios haven’t learned anything from the lessons of last year - that our members can and will stand up and demand fair and equitable treatment with respect to A.I., and the public supports us in that,” said Crabtree-Ireland. “Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable A.I. protections, but rather flagrant exploitation. We refuse this paradigm – we will not leave any of our members behind, nor will we wait for sufficient protection any longer. We look forward to collaborating with teams on our Interim and Independent contracts, which provide A.I. transparency, consent and compensation to all performers, and to continuing to negotiate in good faith with this bargaining group when they are ready to join us in the world we all deserve." said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh.  For more information and to search whether a video game is struck, please visit sagaftra.org/videogamestrike."

[source]

[tshortik]

Played The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood and had such a good time with it!! You play as a witch making a pact with a behemoth and end up creating your own tarot deck :>

[samreich]

A huge thank you to Clayton Davis / Variety for visiting our studios, as well as our various cast members for participating!

[butchvamp]

i do think that for me personally. there is no version of taash's storyline that i can get down with except one where they reconnect with their qunari side. my main problem with their arc is that it perpetuates this idea that someone has to "choose" one culture, that they have to turn their back on parts of their identity in order to be the right kind of trans (the white western kind) and all of it just makes me so viscerally uncomfortable. and to be clear this is not me like... trying to make anyone feel bad, there are parts of taash's story that i personally connect with as well, like there is nothing wrong with the way taash does gender in general and there's nothing wrong with it resonating with people. it's when we put it all together in context within the game that it becomes a problem for me.

we know the qun does not have the same ideas around gender as the rest of thedas, we know that their identity, including gender, is connected to their duty. and so it doesn't make sense that taash's mother cares about them wearing dresses. why would she care about that. i'd ask if we've ever even seen any qunari in dresses but i'm pretty sure we've only seen three qunari women total and two of them are in veilguard and are scholars wearing what i personally consider a robe. the third is in trespasser and is ben-hassrath, and is definitely not wearing a dress. if anything, their mother should be concerned about the fact that they fight, since the whole point of leaving for rivain was to avoid taash being designated as a soldier. and to be fair, we get this a Little bit with the fire-breathing. but everything else about shathann's disapproval doesn't make sense in-universe.

and we also already know about the aqun athlok, which shathann even tries to bring up but the game shouts her down because....? i get that shathann is meant to be overbearing and kinda shitty, but this is not the way to do it. all this does is imply that aqun athlok is "wrong" and not as progressive as this other identity that rook has to teach taash about (and that also isnt even specific to rivain, or related to them connecting to their rivaini culture. it's the shadow dragons that teach them all of this along with rook. in general transness and the nonbinary identity are not integrated into the world in any meaningful way which makes it feel even worse). there are various cultures that have their own specific gender identities that do not adhere to the gender binary, and taash should have been given the chance to connect to their own culture in this way. and even if they really wanted to make it so taash just didn’t feel right with aqun athlok, that identity still should have been properly discussed as an option and handled with respect, rather than so carelessly thrown aside as “wrong” (though again not a depiction i would personally like but it would still be better than what we got).

and just. i really disagree with the idea that gender identity under the qun is More Rigid than elsewhere. it’s different, as we know from comments from iron bull and sten-- and we could argue in circles about inconsistencies with the things they say, obviously there have been retcons previously in an attempt to better develop the qunari beyond what we see in origins and da2, but i think this kind of development is a good thing, and is exactly why the regression with taash irritates me so much-- but when we look back at characters like warden tabris, dorian and his father and tevinter's obsession with bloodlines, the entire experience of playing f!hawke in da2 (and also da2 literally has a whole subplot about women being murdered for like 3 years and no one cares. these games just have a misogyny problem lol) and even tarquin in veilguard commenting about how his father forced him into being a soldier because he's a man(!!)-- there is a lot of rigidity, expectations, and violence around gender throughout thedas. but for some reason these rigid gender ideals and a lot of this gendered violence is held up as the status quo and not challenged at all by the writers in the way the qun repeatedly is. the exception being dorian (though you're still incentivized to forgive his father), but a lot of the characters in tevinter-- magisters, templars, the literal black divine-- are still allowed complexities and to be the good guys working with the shadow dragons, a grace not given to any qunari character besides iron bull (who ultimately still has to leave the qun or die later). i’m not trying argue that the qun is perfect and can never be criticized-- i like the flawed characters and societies within dragon age. but the qunari also deserve to be given the same depth, complexities, and engagement as everyone else, too. and it’s worth pointing out that it’s always the qun that’s depicted as backwards for the same harmful “rigidity” every other culture in the game reinforces.

and ultimately with the way the game inserts this very modern, anachronistic, and condescending language in a poor attempt to be as "correct" as possible to "teach" the player, while simultaneously writing such a careless, racist arc about their culture kinda just , makes me feel like they were actually trying to imply that one identity is more correct and progressive than the other. or, if nothing else, it's a bias that got amplified due to their unwillingness or inability to engage with taash's character beyond using them as a mouthpiece for corporate "representation."

there absolutely are people out there that are like taash, who don't necessarily have or want a connection with certain parts of their culture, and maybe they do identify closer with one aspect of it over another. this is all fine! this happens in real life, everyone has different relationships with their identity and heritage, there is no universal experience, and people are allowed to write about their own. but the thing is. this is dragon age. and taash was written by weekes. and both dragon age as a whole and weekes specifically has a repeated pattern of racist writing when it comes to depicting the qunari. and taash's quest along with the way the antaam are portrayed-- faceless, voiceless, basically naked bodies for you to kill-- makes this a series of poor choices that i don't feel generous enough to excuse.

and it sucks. so bad. that this happened. i want to like taash so bad. but.... man.

anyways if you read this far you should read this article, which is far more eloquent than anything i could write and really dives into the whole "civilized versus savage" binary that we see in a lot of fantasy RPGs and is really epitomized in taash's quest-- in dragon age, it's always the qunari and dalish elves versus a (usually white and/or human) andrastian:

[xxcrystalinerose]

In light of Hades 2 adding new designs and MORE Nyxblings, here's a little face study I did of Chaos, Nyx, and their family. Someone once mentioned that Nyx's children who's got features she doesn't have actually have Chaos' features instead, and I wanted to compare and see which child resembles who more.

Additionally, shoutout to @blood-starved-beast for their post about the age order of Nyx's children because it has helped immensely with the brainrot.

Detailed analysis under the cut.

Firstly, the parents:

For parent and daughter, Chaos and Nyx don't really look the same. However, the cheekbones and jawline that could cut glass is hereditary lol. I wonder if there are other children of Chaos who look more similar to them?

I also like how Chaos' Hades 2 appearance could be a nod to them reconnecting with Nyx and probably wanting to look more "normal" (or as normal as they could get) for the family reunions. The exact same makeup style is cute.

Next up, we have the older children (excluding the Fates, whom we haven't seen yet):

Charon is a tough nut to crack because his portrait is so heavily shadowed and he also wears a bigass hat, so I don't really know his facial structure, but from what I could see, it's more like Chaos'.

Moros' eye shape is weirdly different from the rest of the siblings, but they appear to be downturned and large, which is closer to Nyx's eye shape. While his facial structure is more like Chaos', his eyes in particular make him look softer.

Nemesis actually has a different face structure from Nyx. Her coloring is the exact same (sans skin tone), but not the face. However, her hairstyle is similar, including the updo.

Lastly, the younger children:

It's probably because Hypnos' expression was drawn more comically, but as soon as I take a good look at his new portrait it's made greatly apparent that he and Thanatos are actually identical in terms of facial features. What makes them appear even more different is the hairstyle; Than's go straight down, Hypnos' is fluffy and piled high on his head. They also have similar face shape as Nyx, but with a squarer jawline.

You'd think their hairstyles are radically different. However, this official art of long-haired Than shows that his hair curls at the ends. His hair is straight now, but I'd like to think he straightens it out, because otherwise it would look a bit wavy still.

As for Eris, people keep saying that Nem looks like Nyx the most, but Eris looks astonishingly similar to Nyx. Oh, the irony of looking like the parent you detest.

Summary (and some thoughts):

Face structure-wise, the older children look more like Chaos, while the younger children look more like Nyx.

Of all Nyxblings we've known, only Nemesis has black hair.

Except for Charon, the children's eye art style is reversed between Chaos' and Nyx's (the ones with purple eyes have visible pupils and highlights, while the gold-eyed ones have no visible pupil or highlight).

Where did the curly hair genes come from? The twins are explicitly stated to be fatherless, too. Maybe some other children of Chaos have curly hair? Maybe Gaia, as she was mentioned in Hades 2?

I have a theory that the older children look more eldritch (more similar to Chaos), and only started to look "normal" during Nyx's separation from Chaos, and the cutoff point is Moros, unless Momus is older than him. Would be cool if the Fates are an amalgam of three bodies, because they're triplets and older than Charon.

Thanatos cutting his hair was actually a smart decision because his new hairstyle flatters his face shape more. I'm sorry darling but you don't have game in styling long hair. Too bad he and Moros don't know each other, big brother could've given him tips.

The entire family is hot. Nuff said.

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Toy Box

[owlyjules]

Hi! Sorry if you've been asked this before (or just don't want to say, because that's cool too), but I was wondering if you had any book or author recommendations you could give? :> Your art is always accompanied by such lyrical captions, and I was wondering what inspired them. Thank you for your time and all the gorgeous art you share! <3

Thank you so much!!

I just love creating little stories with each picture when i paint them! (Btw big thanks to my wife for helping me spellchecking and beta reading those since english is not my first language!)

For recs, a lot of the inspiration from fairytale books I read as a kid and some more recent influences but its really a little bit everywhere so its hard to pinpoint!

But heres a few of my favourites for this october mood!

The last Unicorn

Anything by emily caroll!

Tove Jansson

T kingfisher

The angels game by Carlos Ruiz Záfon

Hope you find one you like!:D

[unikhroma]

i love the vocal sonic tracks. i have too many of them memorized. i wanna know which one is your favorite. i obviously couldn't fit every one in the choices but i tried to get the most popular ones in + include older ones

[yiga-hellhole]

"the zelda timeline is bullshitted and fake and-" wind waker and phantom hourglass and spirit tracks are all direct sequels of each other. the games themselves say this. adventure of link is a direct sequel to LOZ. the games and guidebooks that came with it say this. link to the past was made as a prequel to explain how the triforce came to be in the state it was in in LOZ. the games and guidebook say this. ocarina of time was then made as a prequel to this game. also links awakening, as per in-game story and guidebooks, is the same link as the one from alttp. but then majoras mask was made as a sequel to ocarina of time, even if it conflicted with the events of link to the past, which suggests the whole time travel thing had some consequences. twilight princess, with the execution of ganondorf and the literal hero of time teaching you the way of the sword, is then pretty safely assumed to follow some time after ocarina of time. the oracle games feature twinrova attempting to resurrect their son, but summon ganon instead, telling us that it AT LEAST has to take place after ocarina of time and before LOZ. skyward sword pretty solidly establishes itself as the very beginning of hyrule, so has to happen before everything else.

its literally only the handheld games and the actual timespans where the timeline wobbles. the vast majority of it makes perfect sense. timeline haters simply have only actually played 2 games at best (one of which being botw) and then read some salty tumblr posts.

[straykids-17]

SCOUPS SVT x 'The Game Caterers' EP. 2

[porrigens]

The Witch’s children🗡️

[justplaggin]

WHO'S CHOPPING ONIONS

[0l-unreliable]

sketchbook pages full of gay people

[catofoldstones]

okay but siblinghood in asoiaf also extends to the previous generation of starks because look at how brandon abandoned everything to go rescue his little sister, threatening the crown prince in the process - the second most powerful man in westeros. It’s about ned desperately trying to find lyanna all over the continent only to find her locked away and dying. It’s lyanna screaming for Ned and the fear only leaving her when he promises that he’ll keep her newborn safe. It’s Ned raising her son as his own, knowing fully well what that would do to his new lady wife and their family. It’s benjen still going to the wall to fulfill his duty despite not being the third son anymore george I am in your walls