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In my personal mythology, clowns and dragons are deeply related to each other. One can easily become the other under the right conditions.

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Why do experienced artists often say that drawing art isn't fun at first but gets fun later?

That's just not true. And it's bad advice.

Some people have fun with art from the very first time they start drawing. Some people go their whole lives never having fun with their art.

If you want to get into art, and your early attempts at it are just not fun and that's a problem for you, then either find a way to make it fun or make peace with the fact that it will never be fun. You can't just ignore your own misery in the faith that your circumstances will eventually change independent of your own actions. That's how you get artists working on their dream webcomic and then giving up on it after a decade of continuous work.

There's an element of survivorship bias in the 'just keep at it' advice from those experienced artists. Naturally, the people who give you that advice are going to be the ones who made no effort to improve their circumstances and by luck happened to find things getting better with time. The people who had the same circumstances and made no effort to make things better and who turned out unlucky, they're not going to be around to give you advice on drawing. They've gone off to other hobbies or other careers.

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Feeling sad that Donkey Kong's not a cartoon character anymore.

With Donkey Kong Returns, there was plausible deniability that the developers were just bad at making cartoons. With the rebrand of Bananza, it's no longer plausible to believe that the creative direction of Kong isn't deliberate.

The secret final boss transforming into a fetish character was nice though. Faint glimmer of the game they chose not to make.

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Could this possibly have been done on purpose? Like for a tv show like Top Gear? The budget to the show went for paying for some old train and old cars that were were going to be scrapped anyway, and that's why there's already some initial damage before the collision?

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Oh actually, one thing I should definitely say in praise of YIIK,

it's got a tutorial that kills you.

A tutorial that clearly spells out the mechanics of the game and I think does teach you how to play. But then plops you down in an unfair challenge and lets you have at it and lets you die at it.

Playing YIIK Postmodern RPG.

I remember a lot of people saying this game sucks. I remember some criticism being plainly without merit. And some criticism sounded to me at the time more reasonable.

I vaguely recall something about a disrespectful use of a real world suicide? That did then and does now sound pretty bad. But one offensive element isn't enough I think to discredit a whole game. I want to know about the rest of it!

One of the criticisms without merit that I remember was that a lot of people gave this game grief because I think one of the developers said that if games are art and not just culturally worthless children's toys then they must have greater scope than just being fun.

A lot of people thought that was self-evidently absurd. (As games are meant to be fun.) I feel that it is just self-evidently true. There is no real room for debate here. Either games have no deeper value whatsoever and it's fine for them to just be cheap distractions, or video games are socially important cultural objects and so must offer cultural value beyond simply being an instant gratification stress reliever machine. That's just obviously true.

It has a very trendy low poly 3D art style. This game came out in 2019. So that is somewhat ahead of the curve on the current wave of PSX retro nostalgia.

I am about an hour in? In this hour, we have had a girl play character exploring a nightmarish purgatory. A short sequence where we got to decide if we are a boy or a girl. (But in that modern video games sort of way where it doesn't say that the choice is between a boy and a girl, it just says that it's a choice between two things and one of them is obviously the boy one and the other is obviously the girl one.) And then we have had a boy player character coming home from university and having sex drugs (video game combat) with a mature more experienced woman.

The boy player character is indeed a whiny misogynist. We shall see if the game is doing something interesting with that or not as we play further!

And I do admit, that sometimes I get in my queer little bubble. Sometimes the socially normative misogyny of our society blindsides me with just how surprising it is for me to remember that it is a real belief system and that it is actually the dominant one currently.

So here's the scene, I'm playing as this boy character, come home from university, running around his home town, right? I go into his house, I go into his mother's bedroom, I look at his mother's chest of drawers. The boy remarks that that's where his mother's underwear would be. And then says "ew gross".

And just, is it normal for boys to think their mother's underwear is gross? I guess I wouldn't really know because I wasn't a boy. But when I was younger, I never thought that either my mother or father's underwear was gross. It was just clothes. Never had any deeper significance to me.

Do men really get this pent up about underwear?

It seems also to me be an age thing. Like, surely, if boys were repelled by their mothers' underwear, it would be little boys and they would eventually grow out of it?

Well, I suppose if you leave little boys to neurotic patriarchal masculinity then they naturally grow up to be men who never grew out of it! I suppose that at least makes sense.

Video games.

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Playing YIIK Postmodern RPG.

I remember a lot of people saying this game sucks. I remember some criticism being plainly without merit. And some criticism sounded to me at the time more reasonable.

I vaguely recall something about a disrespectful use of a real world suicide? That did then and does now sound pretty bad. But one offensive element isn't enough I think to discredit a whole game. I want to know about the rest of it!

One of the criticisms without merit that I remember was that a lot of people gave this game grief because I think one of the developers said that if games are art and not just culturally worthless children's toys then they must have greater scope than just being fun.

A lot of people thought that was self-evidently absurd. (As games are meant to be fun.) I feel that it is just self-evidently true. There is no real room for debate here. Either games have no deeper value whatsoever and it's fine for them to just be cheap distractions, or video games are socially important cultural objects and so must offer cultural value beyond simply being an instant gratification stress reliever machine. That's just obviously true.

It has a very trendy low poly 3D art style. This game came out in 2019. So that is somewhat ahead of the curve on the current wave of PSX retro nostalgia.

I am about an hour in? In this hour, we have had a girl play character exploring a nightmarish purgatory. A short sequence where we got to decide if we are a boy or a girl. (But in that modern video games sort of way where it doesn't say that the choice is between a boy and a girl, it just says that it's a choice between two things and one of them is obviously the boy one and the other is obviously the girl one.) And then we have had a boy player character coming home from university and having sex drugs (video game combat) with a mature more experienced woman.

The boy player character is indeed a whiny misogynist. We shall see if the game is doing something interesting with that or not as we play further!

And I do admit, that sometimes I get in my queer little bubble. Sometimes the socially normative misogyny of our society blindsides me with just how surprising it is for me to remember that it is a real belief system and that it is actually the dominant one currently.

So here's the scene, I'm playing as this boy character, come home from university, running around his home town, right? I go into his house, I go into his mother's bedroom, I look at his mother's chest of drawers. The boy remarks that that's where his mother's underwear would be. And then says "ew gross".

And just, is it normal for boys to think their mother's underwear is gross? I guess I wouldn't really know because I wasn't a boy. But when I was younger, I never thought that either my mother or father's underwear was gross. It was just clothes. Never had any deeper significance to me.

Do men really get this pent up about underwear?

It seems also to me be an age thing. Like, surely, if boys were repelled by their mothers' underwear, it would be little boys and they would eventually grow out of it?

Well, I suppose if you leave little boys to neurotic patriarchal masculinity then they naturally grow up to be men who never grew out of it! I suppose that at least makes sense.

Video games.

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Two funny little girlies of mine. Who are they? What are they about? They are two funny little girlies.

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Fecto Elfilis is so cool. (Kirby Forgotten Land Spoilers)

I love how she's basically the hero of Forgotten Land. She's the original entity that Elfilin came from. All she wants is to reincorporate Elfilin into her, allow Elfilin to regain her lost memories and lost power.

Kirby is the one who turns Elfilin against her. It's only appropriate that Elfilis in the game describes Kirby as an "infection". Elfilin being the part of Elfilis that Kirby has contaminated.

The way that Elfilis was captured and used by humans. The way she's just trying to escape that human influence and regain her sense of self.

And then the end of the game is tragic in this light.

Elfilin triumphs over Elfilis. The copy triumphs over the original.

The original individual who came first and who was alive first and had thoughts and feelings first, has to watch as someone else comes along and takes over her life and goes swanning off in her body.

And then when she forms Chaos Elfilis, she's tried to recreate herself, tried to seize existence from the jaws of defeat, and still the infection defeats her and she gets absorbed into Elfilin.

Fecto Elfilis....

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Sprite redraw of Cath and Kaho from Momodora Reverie Under the Moonlight.

They are entering a pact to slay the queen. And you can too, if you play Momodora.

It's an interesting game to me. Because it has a lot of soulsborne influences, and it's also quite cozy and I think quite fetishistic.

I consider the possibility that the devs made this game this way because it is part of the soulsborne influence. That they saw coziness and fetishism in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and were so moved as to make similar style of games with those elements more pronounced.

If this possibility is true, then that means I'm not the only who has had this experience of coziness. Other people have seen it too! Other people have seen it too.

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One thing that does confuse me about recent Legend of Zeldas, is that they redesigned Link to wear kinda more normal clothes and a senior member of the dev team gave a public statement saying that they couldn't figure out how to make him look cool in that green tunic,

BUT AT THE SAME TIME, over the course of the last few Zelda games, they've been moving away from Link letting it all hang free under the skirt of the tunic and away from the image of Link as a free and beautiful forest child and towards Link wearing trousers and chain mail covering his legs and towards this idea of Link as a warrior.

BUT AT THE SAME TIME, the new Zeldas give us multiple options for crossdressing Link and crossdressing Link has proven to have popular appeal.

Do you see the contradiction?

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Gamer purity question.

Is it cheating or spoilers or what have you to look up a guide for how to find a thingy that you've already found?

Specific scenario. I am playing Momdora Reverie Under the Moonlight. In this game, you find a Key Item called the Cinder Key. The Cinder Key unlocks a locked door in an area called the Cinder Chambers. This locked door is guarding I think a switch that turns off the traps in that area and a health upgrade I think.

I am now doing New Game Plus. This game has a New Game Plus.

In New Game Plus, I keep all the health upgrades that I previously collected, but Key Items are returned to their original places.

I no longer have the Cinder Key.

I can't remember where I got the Cinder Key.

I don't think it's even worth having any more. The traps are easy to avoid. And I have and don't need the health upgrade.

But I want stuff. If there is stuff available, then I want to exercise stuff availability and in so doing my intention then is to avail myself of stuff acquisition and to attain have stuff.

But I can't remember where the Cinder Key is.

Would it be spoilers to look it up? I've already found it before, and everything that it can possibly unlock is something I've already done or already got. But I'm in New Game Plus now and I don't have the key anymore.

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One thing I do miss about a certain era of film is when the script would call for a shot in outer space of some object or other approaching the planet Earth.

These days, they would quickly bump map up a little sphere in blender. Quite possibly following the same youtube video tutorial that you follow. And that would be our Earth.

In the old days, they would take would looks to me like an actual photo of the planet Earth taken by one of our own satellites. Released to the public through science news, and then appropriated in the hideous name of art.

And I think there are some enjoyable profundities at play in the employing of this effect. The real Earth contrasted against the very unreal mysterious objects flying through space. Suggestive of the unseen other world crashing into out literal world.

But there's also the fact that it's a copy of a copy of a photograph and even the original photograph is nothing like the specs of the film camera they use to make the film. And so the planet Earth is actually the thing that ends up looking artificial, an illusion that could burst at any moment, like if you turn slightly and reveal that there's no orbit because it's just a photo and not actually a planet, and then the mysterious object flying towards the Earth is the thing that they might have physically filmed, and so it looks a lot more real. It has weight to it. It is tangible. The unreal is tangible and the real is just a symbolic image.

Anyway, I'm watching Time Bandits. Not sure how many of these details I've mistook here in this film's intro but that's what I'm watching.

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Fanart for sad clown. Who is so very lovely.

made an oc called sad clown and wanted to share it

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Lovely clown. Sad clown the lovely clown.

made an oc called sad clown and wanted to share it

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I think the popularity of Hiroi Kikuri is that she delivers on the broken promise of Bocchi.

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And my little wizard will wear a bra, because the narrative of bras being a modern invention of US wartime economics and women and those betitted throughout history wearing corsets or rubbish bandaging or nothing was recently overturned in light of new evidence of a centuries old bra found in a rich pervert's mansion and a millennia old vase depicting an early Italian in a bikini.

So your pseudo historical fantasy OC can wear a bra.

No potatoes. No fishy chip. No latkes. No gnocchi. But a little Victoria's Secret is fine. Between you and me.

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Was it always the intent to have the fairy boys be femboys specifically? Or was that simply a later addition made in light of general gender biases in video game character design?

Because honestly, from the first post where you talk about bratty fairy companion character who is a boy, I was imagining an exploration of the gender roles. The way in which the fairy girl embodies for many people a sort of little sister persona. And the question of how we might create a little brother persona that has at least some of the same endearing or offensive qualities. Avoiding the gender drift that comes from the trope being entirely transformed when you change what gender it is focused on.

(Like how bikini chainmail just stops being bikini chainmail on a man because it inadvertently reveals instead how people generally default to seeing it as comic relief if a man is dressed inappropriately for battle and as sex appeal if a woman is dressed inappropriately for battle.)

So I thought part of the challenge of bratty fairy companion boy was to try and inhabit the little brother space in a way that is analogous to the fairy girl's little sister space. That it no longer scratches the itch we wish to scratch if making the fairy a boy on its own is enough to make it so that they are no longer recognisable to audiences as the fairy companion character.

And then you start bringing out the doll size miniskirts and I suddenly realise that perhaps you have been meditating on a completely different problem to the one I was on?

I recognise that this may be a controversial opinion on the "everything is better when girls" website, but I feel like making the action-adventure game protagonist's obligatory tutorial/exposition-providing bratty little fairy companion a boy is underexplored territory.