chriscr0ss54

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Falling Star

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Decided to steal an outfit for Sign. The chase sequences in Siames' The Wolf really reminded me of what she spends her time doing haha https://www.instagram.com/p/BuCBb9xnu1p/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1axbgim5bvx8

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Context: Life for the Good Samaritans has been chaotic...since the formation of their merry band. Meaning that Sacrifice jr. hasn’t had a ton of time to assess just what the hell happened during what is widely known as The Crater’s incident. Where she poltergeisted in fits and starts across parts of Seattle. Aether’s...kept up with the GS crew’s reputation so she asks him to show her just how bad the damage was. And it was bad. @j-popsicles

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My bear of a mage, Ursa taking a superheated tomahawk to an astral projection of envy and malice.  One might mistake him for an Obrimos, but nah, he just smooth talked a spirit of fire into a tomahawk made of ephemera. Works really well against monsters in twilight-  @theonyxpath

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You can never go hunting 

With just a flintlock and a hound 

You won’t go home with a bunting 

If you blow a hundred rounds 

– 

It takes much more than wild courage 

Or you’ll hit just the tattered clouds 

You must have just the right bullets 

And the first one’s always free 

 –

You must be careful in the forest 

Broken glass and rusty nails 

If you’re to bring back something for us 

I have bullets for sale 

–

Anne, she’s a supernatural monster hunter ala the Winchesters, her thing being that she knows enough rituals and junk by heart that she can consecrate monster killing weapons on the fly.

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Just a few doodles of Aether and his fam being goofs.

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More MtAw art featuring my silly Acanthus, Sign. Trying to see how well I can illustrate the varied spellcasting of my different npc’s

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Small Tips For ClipStudio

I have some hours before work so I’ll use them to actually detail why I’ve found CSPaint to be so efficient for bastard-aligned painters who like to take shortcuts.

This will seem familiar to most of you guys, but this functions a little bit different from Photoshop. It turns everything you draw on the layer into editable curves, but retains the aliased smoothness of an ordinary raster layer. Practically a cheat to access the whole suite of amazing tools CS offers for lineart. Such as:

The vector eraser is The Best™. You can be as messy as possible and this tool erases the excess. One pen-flick and it’s done. Much faster than cleaning it up by hand. You can also tweak the settings of this brush to encapsulate more/less lines as you erase but that’s getting a little more involved. Anyway, last thing:

Maybe the only thing better than the vector eraser. There are multiple settings, but these three are the most handy. You can smooth wiggly edges, connect broken strokes, and tweak the width/weight to exactly how you want it. This also has a ton of settings you can play around with. It’s great!

There’s a lot more tools you can use, but you get the point! It’s a really good drawing program. I recommend it!

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Do yourself a favor. Learn to code. Here's how.

I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.

Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.

(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)

But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:

Novice

Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:

Dash - by General Assembly

CodeAcademy

w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)

Intermediate

Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:

Khan Academy

CodeAcademy - Ruby, Python, PHP

Difficult

If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.

Programming problems

Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems

Talentbuddy

TopCoder

Web Applications

If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.

Django Tutorial

I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.

Rails Guide

If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:

Cake PHP Book

Symfony 2 - Get Started

Yii PHP - The Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion

If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.

If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.

Best of luck!

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Just some quick sketches of a few old characters of mine. I was playing with some symbolism about their personalities. #sketchbook #anime #originalcharacter https://www.instagram.com/p/BqivkDsHpi6/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ni8kkl970cc1

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Alright, these are the Christening pieces in whats now gonna be my art-post account. Enjoy, there will be m u c h more to come. @rvamag #tabletopgames #digitalart #anime https://www.instagram.com/p/BqisEBkHlEd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=xjxqrgb6m5gn

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One might also argue that one who contends with and makes deals with powerful beings, notorious for screwing people and comes out with magic powers...is quite the smooth talker. Its all too easy to end up a mad slave with nothing but a slow end to await them, concerning some creatures. Warlocks can be very forceful in their search for power...which also represents the charisma stat. Charisma saves are usually against things that would compel you will magical force, like zone of truth, or banishment. That suggests a certain...force of will that’s required to overcome those spells. That same force of will could be pictured as...a warlock, payed with arcane power, straining their Will to control powers not their own.  I mean...it cant be easy even getting the attention of these overly-powerful entities. They have many cultists praying to them to no avail. Its even harder to get them to do anything but destroy you...let alone bless you with otherworldly gifts. After an ordeal like that...charming the pants off of a noble, or smooth talking a guard would seem like child’s play. Warlocks are a diverse bunch by nature...so for every creepy recluse, there’s a sly, confident cajoler of dark forces. 

Who else thinks charisma is a weird spellcasting stat for warlocks?

It just seems like a person that would:

1. Enter a deal with an archfey.

2. Sell their soul to a fiend.

3. Make contact with a lovecraftian horror.

Wouldn’t be a very charismatic individual, and would most likely seem ‘off’ in an uncanny valley sort of way. Something that I thought up for a homebrew game are some alternate spellcasting choices for warlocks.

Archfey warlocks can use charisma as their spellcasting stat to reflect their interactions with the formal and ever so proper courts of the fey, but can choose to use wisdom instead. Their wisdom reflecting the time they’ve spent in the presence of various Lords and Ladies, and them learning to perceive and detect things only on instinct on a totally different level than other mortals.

Fiend warlocks can use intelligence as anyone willing to negotiate a contract with a fiend should have their wits about them, at least I would hope. The other stat would be wisdom as well, considering that also goes into decision making and reading people, but in a different flavor.

Finally, Great Old One warlocks should definitely use intelligence, as it’s usually a mixture of genius and madness that follows those who delve into the incomprehensible nature of the old gods. And to make the lovecraftian inspired warlock even more of a weirdo, have their spellcasting ability be literally anything other than charisma, because the cthulu fthagn dude isn’t gonna be charming considering his head is filled with the tentacles.

This also could open up the already super customizable warlock class even more. Perhaps your character was smart enough to be a wizard but wanted to get magic the easy way, or was cocky enough to make a deal with a fiend. Maybe your character isn’t a people person, but is wise from time spent alone communing and pondering with the feywilds and the magic therein. Your character is dumb as a bag of rocks and isn’t charismatic, but somehow caught a flicker of attention from a great old one and can steal a bit of their forces by other means.

Just. Warlocks are supposed to be the black sheep of the casting classes, hell they’re supposed to be weirdos, madmen, rejects, and borderline enslaved to powers greater than themselves. You think that guy is gonna talk his way out of anything? Seduce the monster of the week? Charm people into spilling their secrets?

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I felt like showing my War Cleric, Hector some love this week! So...what better way than drawing a badass moment in a fight with a Hydra.

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Meet Aeiron, my snarky, mischievous school teacher! I’ve been playing a new world of darkness game called ‘Sanctuary’ and basically the players are various residents of a utopian society that were kicked out for various reasons.  Despite being so sheltered, he doesn’t know what a ‘bird’ is...Aeiron continues to search for more answers about the world he never knew he lived in. Sanctuary is run by my good friend @brennars

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Commission piece for a friend and fellow player @confuseduzu!!! In @j-popsicles‘s campaign, The Golden Land My Cleric and her Rogue have the best time picking on each other and drinking into the night...its well worth commemorating.

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‘nother Bump