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The Y2K virus (Millennium bug) was a large potential computer virus that would have occurred at midnight on January 1st 2000. In the years leading up to the turn of the century in the year 2000, people got more concerned about how the dates formatted on computers would read as 01/01/00, the computer systems at  the time would not read the 00 as 2000 due to how everything was formatted with double digits, instead, it would read as 1900. This mishap in code could lead to some serious errors with computer systems all around the world, ranging from the collapse of major world infrastructures like banking and air travel, some people even thinking the error could result in nuclear weapons exploding in their silos or launching all around the world, resulting in a computer based apocalypse.

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Tomorrow’s Pioneers ( رواد الغد Ruwād al-Ghad / The Pioneers of Tomorrow) was a Palestinian children’s TV show that ran from 2007 to 2009, starring a young child host and a co-host, who was usually a man in a costumed animal suit, pictured here is Farfour, the first co-host of the show, who wears a Mickey Mouse costume. The show was very similar in format to the likes of Sesame Street or Barney, talking about life in Palestine, but alternatively the show was full of antisemitism, Islamism, anti-Americanism, and a lot of themes against the neighbouring nation of Israel, who Palestine have had major issues and wars with. The show has achieved major worldwide attention for how it brainwashes and spreads anti-Israel propaganda to the youth, and how it wants to bring up all these children as fighters against Israel and to die as martyrs. 

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Anarchism is a political movement that is skeptical of most, if not all justifications of authority that seek to abolish any sort of institution that they claim maintain unnecessary hierarchy, including governments, capitalism, and nation states. Considered the most left-wing historical movement, it is usually described alongside communalism and libertarian Marxism as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement. The movement had it’s origins in the 19th century, but made a major resurgence in the 20th and 21st centuries, growing in popularity and influences with anti-capitalism and anti-war. Their symbol is a large A in a circle, which frequently appears on flags and spray-painted onto walls.

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Propaganda is a form of communication that is used to persuade, influence, or in some extreme cases, brainwash people into a specific agenda, that can be found in all sorts of media all over the world to push many different subjects, with the main examples being the subjects of war, political campaigns, the media and big corporations. Propaganda only really became a massive thing in the 20th century, with their main usage being that of getting people to apply for the army and join World War 1 or World War 2, such as the example provided of the American figure Uncle Sam wanting you to join the US Army, similar to the one we used of Lord Kitchener wanting Britons to recruit for the war. To this day, some countries like China or North Korea still regularly use propaganda on their citizens.

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Pan European Game Information (PEGI) is the content rating system for video games in Europe, Turkey, and Israel, formed in 2003 to help consumers make decisions about purchasing video games with the use of age restrictions. The usual ages range from 3, 7, 12, 16 and 18, along with a special exclamation point (!) that is used for video games available to all ages with parental guidance heavily recommended. These are usually accommodated with content descriptors, small images that suggest what the game contains that warrants the specific age restriction. Descriptors like fear, violence and in-game purchases might be included on games for younger audiences, it just depends how much, but ones like sex, drugs, and gambling might only be included on games rated 18. The American equivalent to PEGI is ESRB, which serves as basically the same thing, but the ages icons are letters instead of numbers.

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Zootopia (known as Zootropolis in the UK and other regions and Zoomania in Germany) is a computer animated buddy-cop movie produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, released theatrically in 2016. The film tells of an unlikely partnership between a police officer bunny and a con-artist fox in a world of anthropomorphic as they investigate a criminal conspiracy involving the disappearance of predators. The film has a heavy theme of racism and civil rights throughout, in a world of animals that are considered prey and predators, after a supposed epidemic of savageness in the film leads to many predatory animals being feared and discriminated against, for example, a predator animal sitting down on a train and minding his own business, which leads a prey mother and her child to move further down the seat.

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Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the Fuhrer and Chancellor of Germany during World War 2, both up until his death in 1945, and the leader of the Nazi Party. During his reign, he was responsible for starting WW2 by invading Poland in 1939, he would be very involved with all of the military processes throughout the war for Germany and the Nazi Party, and was responsible for initiating the Holocaust, which ended up in the killing of six million Jewish people. During his reign as the chancellor of Germany and as the leader of the Nazi Party, he promoted an ideology of white supremacy, saying that the Aryan race of people is the one true race / master race of the world, with all over races being considered racially inferior.

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QAnon is an American radical far right political conspiracy theorist group and political movement, originating in 2017. The main basis of the group is a theory that there is a large group of cannibalistic sexual abusers of children that operate a huge sexual trafficking ring against the at the time president of the United States, Donald Trump. Although their origin date back to older conspiracy theories, the first publicly known post made by QAnon was on the anonymous messaging board 4chan. They are massive followers of Donald Trump, so much so that they tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election once Joe Biden won, and when that didn’t work, these Trump supporters, many of them members QAnon, attacked the United States Capitol building on the 6th of January 2021, an attack that Donald Trump egged on. This attack has lead to further crackdowns on the social media presence of QAnon.

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The apartheid was a system of racial segregation that existed in South Africa and what is now Namibia between the 1940s and 1990s. The whole idea was to ensure that the entire country was dominated by the minority white population, politically, socially, economically, with the white population being listed as having the highest status, followed by Indians, Coloureds, and then black Africans listed right at the bottom. Additionally, the law of the apartheid made it so no mixed couples can marry or engage in sexual relationships, and 3.5 million black Africans were forced out of their homes to live in segregated neighbourhoods against their will. In 1994, after being released from prison, Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, and adopted the current flag of South Africa, which marked the proper end of the apartheid. Despite the apartheid being abolished, some of the effects of the apartheid can still be felt to this day.

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This is an example of a box for OPIA, specifically the box for the game on the Nintendo Switch, quickly created using Photoshop. Initially, I wished to create an example of the box for every current system, including PS4 / PS5, Xbox One / Series X / S, and Steam, but in the end I only decided to do the Nintendo Switch version, due to the box format being easy to recreate and also due to the fact the Switch is the only video game console I own, and I have many examples of Switch boxes. I put the Nintendo Switch logo up in the corner and added the PEGI rating in the bottom corner, before pasting the entire art in place. It appears slightly skinnier and not everything appears on the box, but this is due to the Nintendo Switch box being skinnier in size compared to the boxes for other consoles. I’m pleased with how this turned out, it does actually look like the box art of a proper Switch game, if my art skills were more professional and I could colour better, I feel like this could actually pass as a proper box.

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This is the final version of the box art for OPIA, the piece of art that would be used on the physical box containing the game, created using Illustrator and coloured / finalised in Photoshop. With this, I created every piece of the box art separately, both versions of Jenny, the glitchy borders at the centre, and the very simple / stylised facades of city skylines in the background. I traced over the illustration of Jenny’s digital design first, which was harder than usual as I had no access to an actual computer mouse, as I lost it in the process of moving house, so I had to trace it with the mouse pad on my laptop. I then edited that and turned it into her human world design, before colouring both. After quickly making the border and the skylines, as well as choosing an image for both backgrounds, I was finished. I couldn’t be happier with how this turned out, it looks exactly like how I wanted it to turn out, the colours work really well, the overall design is simple yet effective, and I’m seriously impressed with the fact that I did this without a mouse, it was very difficult but worth it.

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The fact file for Neko-Neo, made using only Illustrator. 

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This is the finalised version of a boss character and my last character, Neko-Neo, created using Illustrator and coloured / finalised on Photoshop. On the left is the final product, and on the right is the original line work. Similarly to what I did with Rhyzel, I already had my idea for the colour scheme before even finishing the design, bright pink and white with blue highlights, which I felt like really fits with her overall ‘kawaii’ Japanese mascot character, which is appropriate considering the character is a large robot cat. The final design really works for me, perfectly capturing the kids entertainer look that I wanted, with the colours really helping, but also with a vibe that something is not quite right with that massive smile.

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The fact file for Rhyzel, made using only Illustrator.

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This is the finalised version of one of my last characters, Rhyzel, created using Illustrator and coloured / finalised on Photoshop. On the left is the final product, and on the right is the original line work. My intentions for the colour scheme of Rhyzel had been with me since the second I finished drawing her design, black and red, to demonstrate her mean, anarchistic behaviour, and also likening to some ‘edgy’ characters like Shadow the Hedgehog and Ryuko Matoi. The highlight colour I thought also worked well, another warm colour. I really like the overall finished product, the colours work very well and the whole design gives off the exact vibe I was wanting for this character.