#Pixel musing

[strugglingclassicist]

my first ever attempt at pixel art! I made an ionic column because those are my favourites, here amongst ruins 🏛️

[mttonex]

i be drawing them doing anything nowdays what is this 😭😭😭😭

(touched up my hairdye 3 days ago and decided they needed to do that too)

[mizartz]

little star

[adxmanial]

back on the pixel grind - commission for @/synthsational on flight rising

[starshadyy]

❝𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐋 𝐅𝐎𝐎𝐋𝐒❞

[redxdesign]

[jorvik-chronicles]

🔮 ⤷ Random and Unimportant Soul Rider Headcanons [Pt.1]

These are all mostly based on my own OC-ified versions of the Soul Riders, but I thought it would be fun to share nonetheless >:)

Linda collects plushies. Her bed is absolutely full of them, all different sizes, colours, styles, etc - as well as a lot from different fandoms she's in. For those that already came with names, she reassigned them names, and probably writes them all down in a designated notebook with cool little stickers and doodles of them.

Lisa is THE plant mom. They all buy her plants for her birthday, and they are like her children. Sometimes she’ll come home from long trips and find that some of them have wilted, and it’s the most heartbreaking moment for her as she tries desperately to revive them.

Anne will often get someone's attention by calling them by their last name only. ("PETERSON! What the HELL are you doing??")

In Linda's backpack, she has pretty much anything she could ever need. 4a. One of the things she carries is a small pocket notebook, where she writes snippets of poetry from random thoughts she has throughout the day, which she will inevitably look back on hours later (having forgotten what she'd wrote) and sit there thinking “Damn, that’s really shit why did I think that was cool and aesthetic”.

Alex has her friends saved in her contacts under the silliest of names. Linda as 'Sister of the Cheese', for example, or Anne as 'Sunshine [derogatory]'.

Lisa wears odd-coloured shoe laces. The most notable are her Converse, which are also covered in colourful patches, doodles, and embroidery that the whole group has contributed to.

Anne and Alex engage in aggressively cheesy, jokey flirting with each other, despite their relationship being purely platonic. This is probably down to the fact that they have the dirtiest minds. Sometimes they’ll just greet each other like: “Hey, sweetcheeks.” “Hey, sexy.”

Anne just has really cold hands?? Like, all the time??

Wall-hangings and tapestries are a big trade-off between Linda, Lisa and Anne.

There was definitely a moment where they all found out that Alex can rap really well. Eminem better watch out fr.

Linda collects scarves ready for the Autumn and Winter. Like, imagine her just browsing lil shops in Jarlaheim and she comes across a scarf she really likes, is just like UUUUEEE >:)) She is the Pinterest girly.

Lisa can't swim, but would really like to learn how. Until then, she is the designated rubber-ring dweller.

Alex cracks her knuckles. All. The. Damn. Time.

Anne absolutely loves card and dice games, and will challenge the others to a game or two if they have the stuff available. She probably carries around a pack of cards with her.

Alex is a WhatsApp sticker FIEND. She has a bank full of meme stickers to send in response to anything.

[12leafclover]

The World's Angriest Child and The World's Most Stubborn Woman want to fight!

[lawlieisinsane]

being insane about stars, number 3, thought it'd be fun to talk about tidbits of my experience and have it recorded somewhere.

I streamed the game! If you'd like to give me some support or watch those moments I'm about to talking about for yourself, here ya go:

Half of these are also things I thought but forgor to mention on stream

Anyway!! In no particular order...

- I loved Mirabelle from the start!!! She just looks so CUTE

- I thought the change god statue was change (money) and thought the statue was gonna give me money until someone started saying about it

- I did NOT know it was a timeloop game. My friend and beloved gifted me isat so I just thought oh how cute-- what the fuck why. No I didn't read the steam page. No I got no spoilers LOL

- so I got scared shitless when I looped the first time!!! Then got scared shitless AGAIN with the Head Housemaiden, the song changed and I went WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT!!!!

- when I saw Loop I instantly fell in love. Baby! Also immediately thought haha you're weird, are you hiding something? Looks like a funny person who's mean/funny to avoid feelings, hmm

- when loop asked who or what do you think I am!!!, I grabbed the both funniest and most logical explanation I thought, "me", but then thought hm .. you're a star, you're probably my wish or a deity who thought oh damn that guys pathetic lemme go help him. I didn't expect to be RIGHT

- I kept making lists to send to my friend about where I should go cuz my memory's SHIT, and in all those I included a bullet point of "strangle loop" lmfao

- first time I saw the island things, I looked at Siffrin and thought oh are you from there? And then the dialogue about his bg, I thought oh you had trauma and can't remember, didn't you?

- Thankfully friend also told me to interact with coin to trigger The Incident. I triggered that, I THINK after a perfect loop, inside the boulangerie, staring at the croissants on the table, and it was also the first thing I did on the stream that day. When the dialogue said "You run off from the boulangerie", and later went back from fading to black and I was still there I thought HEY we're still here tho-- oh.

- I don't remember if my friend said to talk to Loop after this (think yes but I forgor), but since I love them, I was anyway I just had a break down, Loop look at my cool coin-- then things happened and I went I JUST GOT HERE WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN TO ME

- Change god interaction traumatized me! I'm never speaking with them again

- I kept saying Loop could be my therapist instead

- why's the king waist so grababble. Fr. Weird guy

- at the start I NEEDED to give flower to king, thinking if he gets some love and a snack everything will be fine! I didn't know you actually could, friend told me later

- i follow the dev on bluesky so I saw a post of them holding a Bonnie figurine and though oh haha cute!! grabbing them like a hamster!! i didn`t kNOW

- the king hides snacks in the pillars and also hes probably crying because the party stepped on his hair in the door for the third floor. Or because he's hungry. or because he's pathetic. Or all of the above.

- kept calling the starry door the "loop door", it's theirs I don't make the rules

- Messing around with my friend, apparently I kept saying sus things like "you can be both Loop and Siffrin!", or "if it's the wish that caused this why don't I just wish to stop it. Like get me out of here thanks", or "is king my dad or something. who made me."

- siffrin and the other siffrins Mal du pays should start a band and start dancing

- I love odile. She's my third fav, first being loop then Siffrin

- "this is the house of leaves" i said, then said "nah actually this is the house of can't leaves get me out of here". I'd make siffrin read house of leaves, honestly

- kept insisting to do most playthrugs without skipping so I saw a lot of cool internal thoughts and stuff!

- my funniest joke was probably "hey odile check out how hard I can dissociate" on her quest and skipped the entire dialogue

- there are 19 birds in Dormont. :)

- did not get a bunch of special dialogues because i cannot be mean to my pixel family

- I did not actually defeat loop. I let them get me instead, they were always my fav I couldn't do it lmao

- when loop was teaching the secret hand shape and said "put your finger next to your mouth" or something i actually bit my finger and then the realization hit and i OH YOU LITTLE BITCH!!!!!!!!!! i love and hate you.

- later on I convinced myself that Loop was “a star”, and “my wish”, and I still didn’t KNOW

- once Siffrin stopped saying peeou, peeou! I started doing it for them because I gotchu buddy I’ll get your whimsy back

- on the tutorial I gave the wrong answers purposefully to see the answers and then the game gave me a helpful little chart and I thought “holy fuck I’m being berated, how dare you”, but little did I know that ended up being very very helpful to me because I forger easily

- I actually did destroy the king with one good crit from Siffrin one time. It was funny.

- I also counted the rocks. I forgor how many there are, but almost twice as many as there are birbs

- jingle jangle bell pendant is my favorite souvenir ever. Ding ding!!!

some more fun things i remembered

-finished with around 50 hours, 79 loops. Siffrin actually forgor SO many of them, i swear the god i was around 40-50 and then suddenly oh woopsie loop 66, loop 69, loop 77. Id probably taken more time if it weren't for friends guiding me (i love u friends) or my worry to see through everything again and make it boring for the audience

-pretty sure i said or thought "the nostalgia sadnesses are loop shaped!! which are also Siffrin shaped!! all triangles!"

-cannot remember shit from the house even tho i did it in its entirerity many times. i still dont know places. rip.

-"oh you trapped yourself in the loops, didn't you?"

-i forgor what wish siffrin made at the start but went "I bet you wished yourself into the timeloops", then friends were asking "whats your wish siffrin", SORRY I FORGOR

-every memory i got with "you'll always remember this" message I kept saying "will I? Suspicious...~

thats all I can think for now. bye

[ctutj]

[stardestroyer81]

I recently got my paws on the Jada Mega Man and Fire Man figurines, and I would go as far as to say that the former is the best Mega Man figure yet! And seeing as it's been quite some time since I've sprited a robot master in my own style, I chose to draw a Fire Man sprite in a style similar to that of Mega Man Ultimate's own... and this is what I came up with! 💙✨🏳️‍⚧️

[shinypetrichor]

endless gifs of dom howard [18/∞] Isolated System at Glastonbury 2016

[pixelgrotto]

Marrying Maru

Not too long ago, I married Maru, the nerdy Stardew Valley girl who makes robots. I then proceeded to get her final 14 heart relationship event, after which I lost interest in Stardew Valley.

This has happened to me before. 20 years ago, when I was into Harvest Moon 64, I chased Karen incessantly, giving her all the random gifts that I could forage in the forests and spending my evening hours in the bar with her at the expense of my farm. Upon winning her heart, I stopped playing the game.

Back then, I liked to joke that this represented some sort of cad-like behavior in myself - that the chase was all that mattered to me. But as an actual married fella these days, I know this isn't the case. Rather, I've realized that I enjoy Stardew Valley (and by extension the Harvest Moon games that inspired it) not so much as the cute farming game it mostly is, but as a relationship game. And when I say relationships, I don't just mean the ones that occur with Maru and the other dating options. I mean the whole idea of moving into a small country town, making friends with the villagers, and becoming a fixture of the community. All of that stuff vibes with me way more than the act of growing turnips, milking cows, or building silos so I can grow turnips more efficiently and milk even more cows.

To explain this in more detail, many serious Stardew players post pictures on Reddit showing their pimped-out farms that are entirely automated with turnips that grow themselves. My farm, in contrast, is a bit of a mess - it's semi-automated, but I've got trees planted far too close together, my crop arrangements aren't aligned, and the western sector of my farm continues to remain a shitshow because I just can't be arsed to clear away those rocks and stray weeds. All this aside, my farm is good enough, and I don't feel like continously improving it because it's not the meat of the game to me.

The meat, rather, is those aforementioned connections made with villagers, all of whom are kind enough to show me their current affection level with a handy little colored dot representing a heart in the righthand corner of their text boxes. Over the process of wooing Maru, I managed to max out the hearts of her parents, her brother Sebastian, all of the villagers who live in proximity of her family's mountain home (hello Linus, you swell hobo), and almost all of the other bachelors and bachelorettes, who proceeded to hit on me shamelessly after Maru and I went steady, because that's just how this game works. (Everyone lusts for the farmer.)

And so, with most of the townsfolk that I cared about either in love with me or enamored with me as a close friend, my interest in the game dwindled. Oh, there's still stuff to do in Stardew Valley, like finishing the community center or getting a 100% score, and for a while I considered both of those challenges. But the community center is infamous for the busywork required to complete it, and it forces me to pay attention to my seasonal crop output, fishing catches, and recipes in a way that requires min/maxing or guide-consulting, which is something I feel reluctant to engage with in a game about retiring from the stress and monotony of city life for the simplicity of the countryside. Once the center is complete, as well, nobody in town actually uses it, which is perhaps the most lamented fact on the Stardew Reddit. And as for the 100% score, I'm just not built to achievement-hunt and do every little thing for the allure of getting the 'perfect' game these days.

Stardew Valley also carries over an unfortunate habit from most of the Harvest Moons. Once you marry someone, their personality slowly diminishes as their story reaches a conclusion. This is fairly typical for video games, which have never managed to represent marriage as something that's a beginning rather than an end. Yes, you can have kids with your spouse, but those kids only grow to toddler age and end up waddling around your farmhouse for all eternity, only slightly more interesting than furniture. And I don't really want to have kids with Maru anyway - I just want to manifest the outcome of her 14 heart event, which was a cute astronomy date where we reminisced about her robot MARILDA, who gained sentience and decided to fly through the cosmos. At the end of it, we watched a falling star, and I told her I'd made a wish to grow old with her, and she said she had the same wish. But this wish shall never play out.

I say all of this with some facetiousness. Obviously, Stardew Valley is a very good project made by one very hardworking guy, ConcernedApe, who put years of his heart and soul into it. Marriage was just one piece of the puzzle for him to implement into a game that needed to juggle enough elements to appeal to fans of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and heck, even Legend of the River King. But as someone who loves the relationship side of these life sims more than anything else, I simply daydream of more. I chose Maru because she's the closest Stardew character who resembles my real-life biracial wife, and as one of only two POC characters in the game, I demand to know more about her existence as a half-Black resident of a mostly white town. On that note, what are her thoughts on being neurodivergent and having astronomy and robots as her special interests? (Yes, her dad Demetrius is most certainly on the spectrum, and Maru probably is too.) What about her relationship with her half-brother Sebastian, who resents her as the child who receives more fatherly affection?

All of these character traits gleamed at me as I got to know Maru, and alas, they remain mere gleams that are not further developed. Once again, I suppose it's a bit much to ask for Stardew Valley to delve into topics like race relations, since this is after all a very white game due to what I assume are the life experiences of ConcernedApe. (Maru herself is a 'Black girls do STEM' sterotype, admittedly.) But the fact that Stardew even bothers to bring up these topics at all makes me see the lovely potential that exists beyond the stars, and I wish that potential could be cultivated.

If I were to turn all of these hopes into reality, I suppose my ideal Stardew Valley would be one that still looks the same, but doesn't place end goals on farm success. (Indeed, I think you could replace farming with a wide number of professions - I'd personally love to play as a bookstore owner or libarian in a small town.) Rather, the finale would depend on raising those little heart levels in everyone's text boxes, creating community to the fullest, finding friendships that don't always exist in real life, and loving someone with all of their warts and drama - through spats with their family, realizations of their deeper self, and wishes that may never fully develop. Until we finally grow old and die together. The closest Harvest Moon ever got to managing this was with A Wonderful Life, but to quote an old meme, I think we can go deeper.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I married Maru and stopped playing Stardew Valley. To me, my game more or less reached its natural finale when the two of us smooched under the stars and thought about a future where we grew old and crusty together. That's the future that I long for with my real-life waifu...and I guess I kinda want it with my in-game waifu as well.

[argentinosaurus]

[dekun22]

Racer Rin - Muse Dash 🎵

[redxdesign]