#guys please hear me out please

[cactuupng]

my roman empire is Mumbo's first ever Hermitcraft video being titled "Welcome Home" and i think we should talk about it more

[blu-ish]

HOW DO THEY MAKE THE SCENE GAYER?????

[crystalline-sanders]

ssa aaron hotchner you will always be famous

This took about five hours, reblog if you are so inclined!! I do not know if there is a big fandom here but hi it's me again

[mechanicalinfection]

He gets a little quirky at night.

[myriam-draws]

everyone read impulse 1995 for The Guy

[tzarrz]

to all people who said PART 1 made them laugh - i lov u 💗 this is for u

[thou-babbling-brook]

Guys, have we considered… 🤨

[copypasteking]

Ok, I don't usually post about these kinds of things, but I think I want to briefly talk about the new Overwatch hero because I've barely seen anyone talk about it yet.

So this is Juno, the newest addition to the Overwatch 2 roster, we currently don't know much about her. Now, don't get me wrong, I think the design is appealing enough, pretty cute even - in a vacuum (hehe), it would be fine. However... if you've been following the development of Overwatch at all and seen the other heroes, especially the female characters, you may see why this design is frustrating to me.

Why yes, it's another conventionally attractive young woman in a skin tight suit, despite being some sort of astronaut. Damn, must be some amazing future tech that allows people to wear space suits that look like body paint and yet still provide protection against radiation, vacuum and extreme temperatures. One could argue that this isn't her full suit and she is just wearing this in-game because combat, but come on. I want to add that having a body like this isn't bad, of course, it's more so the fact that the women in this game are rarely allowed different proportions or facial features.

And yea, I wasn't kidding when I said skin tight.. Certainly she also has movement animations with gratuitous hip-swaying to accompany this certified Blizzard-Moment™ of a design. The animations are cool, but this combo left me stunned when I watched the trailer haha.

The sexualisation part isn't the only thing that bothered me, of course. I actually liked this concept art much more - it provided a bit of bulk and visual interest while still retaining that sleekness that they wanted to have in there.

But for some reason, they stripped her of this, leaving it almost a bit under-designed, especially for Overwatch 2 standards.

All of this is just my opinion, and I want to emphasize that I don't fully hate the design. I'm just lamenting what could have been and the fact that, for a new hero, they just made cute Overwatch girl number 12 again. In the end, they want to market to straight gamer boys so eh, it is what it is.

[seoulzie]

beomgyu's adam's apple

an apple i'd like to bite...

the gasp i let out cause this is the sole reason i opened my hard hours!! this'll be a small ramble tee hee

beomgyu tilting his head back, exposing his neck and the prominent curve of his adam's apple. your lips softly pressing kisses along his neck, working your way up to his adam's apple, feeling it move slightly as he swallows in anticipation !!! the way his breath hitches when your tongue flicks out to lick the contour of his adam's apple, tracing its shape with teasing strokes & lightly sucking on it, his hands gripping your shoulders tightly.

gently biting the skin around his adam's apple, careful not to hurt him but enough to make him gasp, the vibrations under your lips as you hum against it, feeling the resonance deep in his throat (this is actually crazy) beomgyu's soft moans growing louder as you continue your ministrations, your mouth alternating between kissing, licking, and sucking. your fingers lightly pressing against his throat, feeling the rhythm of his swallowing and the rumble of his moans

[spooksier]

fall of rome

[doccymon]

the hang cant know i fw the extremely goofy movie… guys pls hear me out guys pls

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

"An ideal Sims game would have Sims 2's gameplay mechanics, Sims 3's open world, and Sims 4's graphics!"

I absolutely despise this take, and I want to explain why. This is a very long rant and it is full of piss and vinegar directed at everything in the Sims 4. I'm gonna try to keep everything kinda professional as much as I can but I can't guarantee an unbiased opinion.

If you'll let me talk your ears off for a moment, I'd like to explain, from my own experience as an artist and a casual player, my issues with the art style and direction of The Sims 4 compared to The Sims 2. (I'm not really going to comment on 3 because I've never played it.)

I want to start off by explaining the difference between better graphics and higher resolution. The Sims 4 absolutely blows Sims 2 out of the water when it comes to textures and polygon counts on sims, no contest. But I'd argue that the graphics themselves... aren't better. They're worse, even, so much fucking worse. The biggest problems come from the stylization and the animations, in my opinion, so I'll explain what I mean.

Have you ever felt like the Sims in 4 just look... weird? Not quirky, not kinda strange, but off. Distressing. Uncanny. Whatever the fuck the kids call it nowadays. When you strip away the packs and the CC and the shaders, the sims in the base game look bad. They're very close to being human; they walk like us, talk like us, have families like us, but they don't look like us, not exactly. There's always something off about them, no matter how close you try to get. Proportions will be a bit off, or your eyelashes will be like three polygons for some fucking reason, and the jig is up. The illusion is gone.

This is one of the instances where a higher resolution and more detailed models and meshes work against you. You aren't making believe. You are beyond the point of pretending that the pixelated shapes are real clothes and bodies and faces, because at this point, they're close enough that you don't need to. There's no gap to bridge. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're lifelike, at least, not enough to be completely human. In some ways, they're still tethered to being cartoony and plasticky and fake. Just enough to frighten you. Enough to put you off. They're not using it to their advantage anymore, and instead, it's holding them back.

When the Sims 2 came out in 2004, the developers knew that they weren't going to make a perfectly accurate life simulator. They physically couldn't render every wrinkle in the face or fold in the clothing. In some animations, things clip strangely or the facial expressions are sort of janky or there's just some form of roughness around the edges. But that's okay; your brain doesn't need a perfectly accurate representation this time. That's not what you're here for, anyway.

The Sims 4 is basically Icarus-ing itself into disaster. The entire game sacrifices style for complete realism, a goal that was unachievable ten years ago, and is unachievable now.

The Sims 2 never thought of itself as a completely realistic life sim, though. It has cartoony, low poly meshes and exaggerated proportions and wild, raunchy storylines that would never occur in real life. BECAUSE IT ISN'T REAL LIFE. And it isn't like real life, not because it's failing to be, but because it doesn't want to be!

The Sims 4 is not ever going to completely replicate human looks or interactions or dynamics. And if it's trying to, it's doing a shit job of it. That shouldn't be the goal in the first place. If I wanted to watch a lonely college student talk to himself in the mirror to try and get better at interacting with people, I'd close the computer and go look at myself. It somehow highlights the most mundane parts of life without any of the whimsy and goofiness that the earlier installments had. It takes itself too fucking seriously for its own good, and it's killing both the gameplay and the art style.

The other point I'd like to bring up is the animation. The Sims 4 allows for much more customization of both sim and environments, but at the cost of dynamic animations. How many times is that grab animation reused? How many times is the same set of animations used for sims with wildly different personalities? Your sims barely feel alive with how little they express themselves.

Now, look, I'm a digital artist. I've dabbled in animation, but only briefly, and only in 2D. I've got no clue how 3D animation works, much less how it worked 20 years ago, but I can see the passion in every single animation in the Sims 2. The more niche interactions allowed for more expressive animations than in 4. They could afford to have a distinct animation for mean sims throwing the football extra hard to be assholes, rather than every sim using the same generic football-throwing animation to save time and money. I get where they're coming from. I get the idea. But in one move, you've both made the art style stiffer and less expressive, and you've made the personalities of the sims seem meaningless. Everyone acts the same, regardless of what their moodlets or their traits say. It's hollow. It's stifled. It's a waste of potential.

But for what Sims 2 lacks in polygons, it makes up for in smaller animated details. Quality over quantity. The sims have hair physics, they open the door before they get in the car, they take utensils out of the counters when they cook, they jump on the couch and the cushions smush under their weight. When they dance, the weight is realistic, and when they smile, it tugs at every one of the few dozen shapes that make up their faces. The sims are lively. They dance and sing and love and hate just like humans, and rather than being some strange attempt at mimicry, it's almost a tribute. They were made with love. You can tell that they were drawn up and rigged and animated by a bunch of people working together, studying each other and making faces in the mirror for reference and watching their kids and neighbors and dogs and hands for reference. The sims are not human, and not trying to be, but they're taking the most human parts of us and making them their own.

You could never have a game with the Sims 4's graphics and the Sims 2's gameplay. The gameplay and graphics are inexorably connected, and the Sims 2 just has so much glorious detail baked into it, that you could never really make it work underneath the limitations of the later games. The developers of 2 knew what their limits were, and they worked tirelessly to make the game as full and complex as they could within those limits. The developers for the Sims 4 just did not have those guidelines, and thus, the drive to bend the rules was no longer there. They didn't go wild in rebellion because they were never told they couldn't in the first place. They spent the entire time chasing a goal they couldn't meet, and lost sight of what made the series fun to begin with.

It wasn't the realism you came for; you had realism already surrounding you. It was the caricature of it that made it interesting.

[fireladybuckley]

I can’t believe a boyfriend made a silly sex joke to lighten the mood after both partners had a moment of vulnerability. The audacity. The horror. The normalcy! Unbelievable. How dare a conversation about feelings turn to levity. How dare a couple have a light chat about trauma-related things over dinner that doesn’t turn into an incredibly deep heart to heart instead of a joke and moving on. Unbelievable. I’m never watching this show again! 👎🏻

[blue-razzslushie2]

"Richie Lipschitz is a Demiboy" I say into the mic. The crowd boos. I begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.

"T-They're right." they say. I look for the owner of the voice. There, in the 3rd row stands: Richie Lipschitz themself.

[lesbiamano]

i've given up on this facade of normalcy i had before. i am NOT normal and will now spread whatever propaganda this is.

[skyiiskyii]

me and the rarepair nobody cares for