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I'm not sure if anyone brought this up, but there is a character that uses laser vision decomposition to analyse their target. Unfortunately it's the League of Legends character Vel'koz.

Thinking about a Wormverse take on eye beams by way of Scott Summers. The thought I had was this- a form of heat vision that incinerates things, but also provides comprehensive psychometric feedback about whatever or whoever you just incinerated. The effect varies in its intensity; just looking in the general direction of something raises the ambient temperature by a few degrees, but truly focusing on something begins to superheat it as though targeting it with a magnifying glass. To truly know is to destroy. To comprehend is an act of violence. Connection becomes associated with aggression, leading to self-imposed isolation and fear of intimacy.  

And for the kicker, the only material immune to the eye beams are the capes own tissue, rather than a convenient dues ex mineral a la ruby quartz; the cape wears a pair of translucent skinglasses (skin-covered sunglasses, crafted using grafts of their own skin) in order to partially block the effect when they’re trying to avoid accidently using their power on anything. Power in need of a good trigger, if anyone has ideas.

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Hans Dahl (Norwegian, 1849-1937) “Folkeliv på fjorden” (1900)

oil on canvas (66 x 48 cm)

private collection.

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It's less about what restricting iframes forces the player to do and more what it forces the dev to do. It strongly encourages boss movesets to be more varied and have less bullshit since you can't always fall back on letting the player rhythm game their way out of it.

That said, the attacks that can't be purely dodged in FromSoft games in particular usually suck (aoes you have to run away from, Consorts pre-patch x slash), though I blame this on being a disruption for the only type of combat they expect by this point.

Honestly I think we need to reckon with what giving the player easy access to iframes on demand can do to combat design. Parries and dodgerolls are the defensive technique that beats everything. Who gives a fuck about positioning or spacing when you can press the button with the right timing, right? They're fun and all, but more games should think about doing what Hollow Knight does and restricting the player's access to iframes. When you have to dodge shit by physically maneuvering out of the way, it forces the player to consider more carefully the geometry of every attack, and it allows for more axes of difficulty escalation than increasingly more offbeat attack timings you have to rote learn.

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Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1886) by John Singer Sargent

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The hyperstim photography is the Japanese guy who does the saturated cloud photos right

every time I consider using twitter for socializing and for posting art, I have to pass through the world's most banal engagement bait, a metric fuckload of japanese porn artists that I followed when I was a lass, hyperstim photography, god tier art, impossible amounts of e-whoring and shilling, topped off with absolutely no way of filtering content. it is too much for my lil brain

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the old cistern beneath the flood control system

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Perhaps we could introduce some powerful and dangerous creatures to act as guards. And you know what, once we've made such a protected area, may as well store other valuable magic objects on more accessible levels of the structure.

Ok, ok, hypothetical. You and your party have sealed the great evil demonlord in an amulet.

You are a canny adventurer, and have heard many a tale of artifacts like these that end in tragedy, either from some corruptive force emanating from them or some dickhead finding where the thing was hidden and breaking the demonlord free.

You're going to be smarter than those chumps. What do you do to safeguard the amulet and keep the evil sealed for good?

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I was always so sad as a child that we didn't have local flint. I wanted to knap so badly.

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It also gets muddied the fuck by the way that romantic chivalric fiction coexists with knights for basically their entire history. The real knights kept trying to play pretend at being the fake knights and it's hard to tell what they actually did vs what they liked to think of themselves as doing.

i need to get a better idea of what exactly the status of a knight was

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This website really does make me feel like

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Some shields had a strap called a guige that could be used to take some weight over the shoulder or wear it on the back when not in use. It shows up inconsistently in art.

where did that thing about soldiers carrying their shields on their back even come from

it's super common in like western fantasy rpgs so you always get that dumb animation where people just sort of hover their shield off their back in like world of warcraft

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It's burger if it has a bun and a primary thick slab of protein (or a replacement like a portabello). The yumbo is all thin ingredients so it doesn't count. Same as a BLT on a bun.

okay the non-american burger absolutism seems to be "on a burger bun = burger" so i have to ask the australians out there: does that mean a yumbo is a burger

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For Tomb Sweeping Day some parts of China have added paper smartphones to be burned alongside fake money and other goods for their ancestors.

Has anyone fully incorporated smartphones into customary grave goods yet? Probably not, right? Anyone could be the first, it's there for the taking! Obviously the core idea is just that you'll be bored without your phone, but I think part of the motif should be that you need tap-to-pay to pay the ferryman. (People can use real phones for this because, like humans, they have planned obsolescence, but eventually they'll need to start ritually burning out some of the fuses on the circuitboard to deter grave robbers.)

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Hurdy that gurdy

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