#if having a consistent style was a game then I am losing

[spicyicymeloncat]

The magical girl ninja au (part 3) has returned with a reboot! It is literally their rebooted designs!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 (here)

Tried very hard to give them techno-esque outfits, and in this au, they get their magical transformation via the techno blades (Lloyd gets his when he gives up his power to the ninja, it’s like a trade off).

Also that’s not Zane’s permanent design for the the season, his design changes after he gives up half his power source. Due to only being at half his power, his magical girl form is weaker and instead Pixal gets some powers instead. They end up splitting the cloak between them lol (omg they can have a magical girl transformation sequence together!!). Here’s a rough doodle

[kremlin]

i figure most human behaviour that, not only doesn’t occur in other animals but has zero connection to animal behavior is basically distantly rooted in the known fear of inevitable death. let me be clear. cats and shit don’t know they’re gonna die. we do. we have thoughts. we know it’s coming. we think we’re gonna be rich, bullshit like that, most humans believe in magic and most humans doubt that math is a universal or consistent thing. total nonsense right. but everyone knows their ass is gonna die. before you write me off as some dumbass reciting basic 101 level university lectures just Trust Me I’m An Engineer. anyways. being human and dying are somewhat one in the same.

“if i do nonhuman things i can cheat the reaper.” short and sweet. if i can beat zelda faster than anyone i can outrun the reaper. and you know what, fuck it, i’m scared shitless of dying. it’s gonna hurt really bad no doubt. what if the brain destroyal process makes time slow down in my perception and it’s not just like five seconds of bleeding out or fire ant bites or however you go. Scary. so i’ll play along:

i am an average american man and i enjoy bad game runescape. it’s a computer game. MMO. kill monster get loot. sell what i don’t want to other players for gold. spamming chat with “SELLING BOWSTRINGS 200gp” for an hour “sucks” so the devs add a grand exchange where you can post buy/sell orders for a given item+price to maximize gameplay efficiency and minimize social interaction.

like any other MMO you can pay some sketchy website real money for ingame gold farmer by chinese gold farmers. totally against the rules. remember this

so the first thing that comes to any male aged 23-27 mind is “buy low sell high” basic bitch shit. no good. there’s a 5% tax that’ll wipe out your profit margin intended to eliminate this behavior (you’re supposed to friggen kill monsters). but everyone thinks they’re a genius and can beat the system and that there is a secret george soros style illuminati group that is holding the secrets, blah blah blah, whatever, and this comes as a coping mechanism after losing your shirt after trying to beat the market (success rate of 0%).

here is where people mostly quit thinking: if you do the math, which takes about ten minutes and can be done on one side of a sheet of paper with the most basic calculator, it’s easy to figure out that the amount of gold you’d need to play dirty (buy out all the available Feathers or Fire Runes or whatever) in order to corner the market would be so high that there is no possible way for a character to hold that much without having spent IRL money for gold. you’d get autobanned.

SO..finally, go on the ol’ www.reddit.com, and make a really really professional-to-professional sounding post advertising a “service”. Saturate the fuck out of it with dense but very real financial jargon. the “service” (which needs to be obscured enough with plausible and relevant language) is a hedging service aimed at make-believe market players who are buying and selling such huge amounts of items and gold (usually in anticipation of a game update that will speculatively introduce a sudden, dramatic, and capitalizable price change for some item). you need it to be as alien-sounding and foreign as possible but with enough believability and clarity that a handful of reddit jackasses will figure out what the fuck your post is about. whenever pressed further, act totally puzzled and make it very clear that this is not a service relevant to “individual entertainment-motivated” players or some shit. no matter what amount of gold anyone quotes at you, just act puzzled and if that amount is 1/1000th the amount one of your “normal” clients deal with. you need to do all of this extremely artfully. and by “you”, i’ve been meaning to write “me”. really lay it on thick that whatever you’re “doing” is totally unavailable to them and that you want zero to do with them.

so now theyre still mostly totally confused but enough is made clear that their interest is piqued. got my hook in em. some guy will copy/paste wikipedia shit in an obnoxiously long and pseudointellectual, contemptible but characteristically reddit guy style what you’re “selling” actually is in the most exhausting, hand-holdingest way to his fellow reddit gamers. with complete tone of authority.

inevitably one of them will put on their sherlock holmes hat and go deep undercover, emailing me posing as an interested party. bingo. now i get to really lay on the WTF and go off the rails asking about vouchers from One Of The Big Seven, but oh no, you can’t get one of them to vouch for you, that’s fine, it makes sense, we’re the only firm that deals with unvouched, that’s our market, well, one of them at least. Just give me a rough rundown of your entry criteria, dwell time, risk tolerance, fuckin “Gamma Ratio”, you know, all the basic stuff, and i’ll have the team generate a .xlsx for you to plug your data into to get a rough feel for what the final contract might be like.

(lololol) But REMEMBER, that excel sheet is seeded, output is fuzzed and salted and if you share it or try and sell it to our competitors, it will be fuzzy enough to be worthless to them but obvious to us who leaked what. this is the only way we’re able to integrate unvouched clients without untenable premiums and while managing our risk levels

blah blah blah blah, i go on and on and on and the guy on the other end is developing a scab from constant head-scratching. and that’s about the maximum real-world harm i’m willing to inflict. i know this sounds like an elaborate as fuck confidence scam but it isn’t. that shit makes me sick. i’d literally slam my arms in a car door before taking a cent from all this. hell, i’ll go out of my way to guarantee i don’t even piss anyone off or offend them or anything.

your guess is as good as mine but i do stuff like this constantly for anything i know well enough and the example i gave above is just a pretty low quality one i made up on the spot. this is a public blog after all.

anyways, cheers, hoping this saves me from dying or whatever the hell i was talking about before that could have probably been cut out. Namaste. Mahala.

[sarcasticscribbles]

I made a curious cat and people been asking about my designs so I thought I would share it here too If you have any question too you can send it here or over on curious cat!

Under cut is a very long monologue about some design choices regarding my s1 gang, Gerry and some avatars!

S1: Jon, Martin, Sasha and Tim

Right off the bat I'll admit I had seen TMA fanart before, but I assumed it was a game from how consistent designs are (Jon and Martin); however when I started I avoided fanart (but I am not immune to TMA fanon designs). I'll explain S1 gang, they are my favourites. I find fcs helpful to keep them consistence.

Jon: I have a basic Jon design: short, brown man with long hair and glasses. Jon has a put together façade but, he wasn't qualified for the archivist position, and he doesn't know what he's doing. Therefore, I like him with longer hair he can't care for, therefore messy. It gets longer with the seasons and adding on all the marks he gains from the entities. I gave him half-moon, golden glasses with chains holding two eyes. I like to think it's a Beholding artefact, so Gertrude wore them before him. I used to have Dev Patel as a reference for him, but I've switched over to Riz Ahmed!

Martin: Very basic: fat man with fluffy hair and glasses. When I heard his voice, I thought of Harvey Guillén, who stayed a reference for Martin's body. I pictured him in a dorky attire; round glasses, ginger, comfy yet business appropriate clothing. I added eyes in the pattern of his jumper and added freckles. I've recently play around adding a beard, because I think he wants to look older than he is (re: CV; "I'm only 29!") but haven't found a style I like. I keep him fat throughout the series, instead of him losing weight s4.

Sasha: She has some canon traits: tall, long hair and glasses. I draw her hair up to stay out of her face. Contra Jon, I think she was more qualified for the archivist position, so Gertrude started preparing her for the role. She wears an eye necklace I draw Gertrude wearing that's in the same style as Jon's glasses. She has a matching bracelet with Tim and overall is one of my favourites. (notSasha): I took what was established and flipped it; short, short hair, no glasses. I imagine notthem could pass as cousins (since they still need traits to the victim's family?); no immediate resemblance but with a few traits of the original.

Tim: Canonically described as hot so I have my own bias. I started with general attractive traits: tall and fit. I think he puts a lot into his appearance. I use Keanu Reeves as a reference, and he works great for him. He’s a hair guy, gets it professionally cut and owns expensive products, skincare routine and dresses in fitted clothing. His standard is a shirt with an eye pattern. He takes pride in his appearance, so S2’s worm scars troubled him. He stops shaving to let it heal properly but they never go away. He never liked looking at them and they are a cruel reminder of the past (however, one scar splits his eyebrow to x2 bisexuality). S3 he stopped caring about putting in effort, the stubble grew into a beard and his clothes aren't fitted. He loses muscles, gains weight, and isn’t who he was in S1.

Gerard Keay

I had just assumed Eric was hispanic (for some reason) and then I connected that he's Gerry's dad, and apparently I headcanon him half hispanic lol

But it was why I wanted to draw the Mama family portrait to play with genetics. Letting his dad be rather tall, tan with dark curly hair and Mary be ginger with paler skin; Gerry's pale, ginger with curly hair as a child. He grew up looking like Mary and started altering his appearance to be more like his dad; dyed dark hair and taking some of Eric's clothing (I also gave both a beauty mark under their eye he'll highlight despite wearing make up). Alternative scenes and goths tend to straighten their hair but I let Gerry have naturally wavy to still resemble his dad more. I tried to give him trad goth make up, mainly looking at Siouxsie Sioux in the late 70s. And a fun bonus to have his hair often cover one eye because, The Eye

Gerry cared for his dad, even if he died when he was a toddler (if I remember correctly). Gerry's chosen name is the nickname Eric referred to him as, which is also where my trans headcanon comes in (afab). I haven't thought it out fully, or how that reflects on other characters since everyone else calls him Gerard but I think there's some symbolising there having a chosen name relating back to Eric

(some) Avatars

Oliver Banks: "the Egyptians believed the most significant thing you could do in your life was die,"; I take inspiration from Ancient Egypt for my Oliver design! He wears an Ankh around his neck, but I want to look into more about Egyptian death symbolism (he has a cross too, but I'll probably remove it for future designs). I've also taken some inspiration from Nordic mythology, with Hel (Hela In English? Loki's daughter (not Marvel) ) as half his face is beautiful, and the other is a corpse (skull). I don't wanna mix too many cultures just for the sake of it, but it was a really fun design decision. And he's goth. Bonus death aligned I next time I draw Georgie I'll draw inspiration from the Death's-head hawkmoth

The Distortions: Michael's 60s and Helen's 80s inspired, no reason, just vibes. I like to think of Michael as a spiral while Helen's a twist, if that makes sense, I've been meaning to draw them together to demonstrate, but I'll include a doodle of it

Jane Prentiss: I looked into a lot of paganism, and fell into a rabbit hole. She's described as a modern witch, so I wanted a subtle alternative look with a shaved side and gauges. One of her breasts are exposed because (boobs) in old pagan traditions a lot of rituals were performed nude, to be closer to nature. A lot of pagan art has a very strong feminine force, I want for Prentiss. She has one eye, but I'll probably remove the other too, I've seen a lot of people do for more holes

Nikola Orsinov: Drag king. Because we need more of those. I love drag so Nikola's has a mix of both male and female attributes since he's just trying to imitate a human. Their design is also inspired The Toy Soldier in the mechanisms (haven't listened? To it but a lot of people pointed me to that designing Nikola!) that's also her actor Jessica Law! I put all my gender into Nikola lol, and when I can sneak an IT reference in I will

Breekon and Hope: Wario and Waluigi

Annabelle Cane: She's described having web keeping her skull together, but for some reason I imagined it to be down her neck. So I pictured her head occasionally falling off and being restored by a web. So I gave her both lol. Her vintage style is old, goth Hollywood glam to me and I love looking at reference for her

Bonus Agnes: I haven't drawn her fully, but I wanna take inspiration from Scandinavian culture, think Midsommar (both the movie and the tradition) and maybe Norse paganism. I love Agnes story and how it's only told by other people, and her relationship with Gertrude is so interesting!

[enden-k]

i’m absolutely hooked on your grimms games story.. feel like an orphaned kid (youri) begging for more scraps! please sir... can i have some more 🙏🙏. i have a good load of questions though tehe... feel free to ignore any, i know its a lot

1. you mentioned that the games are all played for the entertainment of others, but i wondered what you meant by that? does this mean there’s a higher organisation that watch these games for fun... or are the games broadcasted to the people of the city for their entertainment?

2. how long do these games typically last? i assumed they happen every year.. but do the teams have a set time frame to complete the game by, or are there no time restrictions + the game simply ends when there’s only one team standing?

3. do the games only consist of fighting, or are there external forces involved in tricking and endangering the players? for example.. collapsing buildings, natural disasters, acid rain? (which makes me wonder whether the games are held in a controlled arena, distant + abandoned grounds, or within the city and among the ppl)

4. shorter question! but how do people enter the games? the fighting siblings and the surrounding team members?

5. does kaia like women.. would she perhaps be interested in kissing girls.. just asking... for a friend.. 🫣🏳‍🌈..

ALSO I’M REALLY SORRY, I KNOW THERE’S A LOT OF QUESTIONS... i’m not expecting an answer for all of them dw, only answer whatever u feel like answering 🫶 but omg i am SO hooked on this story, on ur characters.. (particularly izayah, kaia and tay) sending u all the love!!!

!!!!!!!!! thanks for the interest and asking!!!!

2) the game starts once both siblings set foot into the city and ends when the first sibling dies. the losing sibling will be eaten by the entity, finishing the ritual and once it hungers again, the games will be repeated and hosted by the winning sibling. until then, they rule (usually nothing less than 10 years), having all their wishes fulfilled

1) for this, i have to babble a bit abt the story/inspiration behind it. when i first drew this story, i was 14 and inspired by a fairytale my adoptive father used to read to us every evening when we were younger. idk if the story of hansel and gretel is known to all of you (i think it should?) but its literally the story my comic used to be heavily based on until i made changes over the years n stuff.

in my comic, i mentioned a ritual and sacrifice etc. its all for a strange, demonic entity who lured the first siblings into the woods centuries ago and the games were eventually made for. the sacrifices, the deaths are all for its entertainment, the souls to feed it. in return, it nurtures, powers and protects the cursed city

3) the entire cursed city is their battlefield and there are few safe zones where theres no fighting allowed and where they can encounter each other on a neutral basis (hospital, central part/main business district, ...). other than that, its pretty much purge-style. no rules, everything is allowed

4) the siblings are chosen by the entity itself early on, destined (cursed) to find their way into the woods and the city, lured by the entity. this goes only for the siblings, the main players.

for fairness, each team has fixed, same roles where the possible players are lit raised for it (like youri. he was taken in and raised to be the "guardian" among many other orphans). all members get picked by the siblings themselves, theyre responsible for their teams quality and quantity

5) kaia doesnt like much, shes entirely driven by hatred................but to answer that, yes she does jkjsbdjk

some answers are quite short, i came home from work and am a lil dead tbh but yea maybe ill pick these up some time again and elaborate more or so!!

[blazehedgehog]

Thoughts on Dr. Robotnik's Ring racers and the current version of SRB2 Kart?

I never dug too super deep in to SRB2 Kart because I very rarely play online games with randos and I had no real consistent group to play with otherwise. Like, I tried to play the few times Tracker hosted a server, but he lives in the UK and I'm on wifi so it just didn't really work out.

So I was kind of waiting for the singleplayer campaign mode. I could see the potential in SRB2K. "The Mugen of Kart Racers" has been an idea in the back of my head for literal decades at this point. But I did not care about time trials because there were no items.

I streamed about four hours of Ring Racers (obviously) a couple days ago:

And I've also seen a lot of SRB2 Kart diehards lose their mind over some of the changes and problems in Ring Racers.

As someone who has never really put more than, say, two hours in to SRB2 Kart, Ring Racers is... fun? Yeah. It's fun. I'd say I enjoyed myself.

But it's also got problems. Broadly speaking, the entire game is way too complicated for its own good. It's nice that they really sat down and thought very deeply about kart racer mechanics and tried to elevate things to a new level, but it feels like they overthought a lot of it. And I mean beyond the fact this game opens with a very wordy, 30-60 minute tutorial. Don't get me wrong, it needs at least some of that, because it's a very mechanically dense game, but that's also sort of the problem.

Like I literally just bailed out of a Discord conversation about this because I wanted to write it over here, but let's take, for example, the spindash.

The spindash mechanic has three primary functions in Ring Racers:

You charge up a spindash at the right time during the starting line lobby segment to get a boost going into the first lap

You charge a spindash to get through one of the speed barriers for secret shortcuts

This game has Sonic-style physics and there are slopes where, if you aren't already going fast, they are too steep of an incline to drive up. So you have to stop and charge a spindash to clear them.

What value does this actually bring to the table? What's useful about it?

The starting line lobby segment is annoying because even CPU racers will bump you into a FAULT state, forcing you to start in last place. Lobby segments are also different sizes, different lengths, so as a newbie like myself, that already puts me at a disadvantage. Charging a spindash for a starting line boost does not add anything you could not already do with Mario Kart's more traditional starting line mechanic. So that means everything around it is just to make the game less friendly to newbies.

Unless you are an ultra-skilled sickos player who optimizes ring consumption to the max, or you're lucky enough to have a boost item, you are never going to be setup to crash through a speed barrier. I certainly never am. I only touch them by accident and they always make everything worse for me when I do. I would never stop and deliberately use a spindash to clear one of these, and places in the map where I get owned are never near one for it to act as a shortcut to get me back in the race faster.

The only time you need to use a spindash on a slope is if you get blasted by someone else's weapon, and there's always this deep dread to that where it's like, if I have to spindash to get up a slope, the race is already lost. Getting slammed by a weapon can already be very devastating on its own, but adding the extra step of having to come to a complete stop, wait 2-3 seconds to charge a spindash, and then crawl up the incline? It's insult to injury.

So, then, in practical terms: what value does the spindash bring to this game? The shortest summary is it's a recovery mechanic that adds an extra step to systems that are tuned to be very difficult and maybe don't even need to exist. You could remove the spindash (and all the systems that depend on the spindash) and I think it would be a better game.

And there's a few systems like this in the game, like the ring tether system, the air drop, and so on. It's nice to finally see someone trying to meaningfully evolve the kart racer into something with greater depth, but I also feel like people who liked SRB2 Kart liked it because it was a very good one of those. And it had extremely friendly mod support.

I get the desire for what's happening here. People were unfairly harsh about how "SRB2 Kart is a bad name" and the developers wanted to both establish a fresher identity and push things in a new direction. But they're also kind of reinventing a lot of wheels and adding all of these extra steps, which will and is hurting the pick-up-and-play element of "it's just a good kart racer." If you roll up on a friend group with Ring Racers and say "hold up, you gotta play the 40 minute tutorial first", that's a killer, and that's still considering they've already trimmed the tutorial length once since it launched only a few days ago.

A kart racer with the depth of a fighting game is definitely an interesting idea and like I said, I was having fun in the stream, but it's just one of those things where the more I think about what the ideal form of this game is trying to be, the more I wonder.

And that's not even considering that some things that worried me about SRB2 Kart are still here, like how many very narrow and winding tracks there are. Sometimes you get what is effectively a rally racing track but there's 8 other hyper-aggressive cars on the road with you and they're all armed to the teeth with projectile weapons. Even in SRB2 Kart's time trial mode, when I was the only one on the track, it could be hard enough to stay on the road. Now that I'm being knocked around by other racers at the same time? It can borderline on feeling impossible.

Again, I don't hate this. It's just that there's a lot of weird friction in places I feel like it does not benefit from or need.

[marinsawakening]

Something I really love about Impa (Skyward Sword) is that she's so gentle. Like, she's stoic, she's no-nonsense, she perfectly capable of being harsh, but save for her introductory scene, she consistently displays patience and kindness to the people she talks to. This is most obvious with Zelda, because that's whom Impa is in the best position to have these kinds of interactions with, and then again most obvious in the last scene with young Impa where she gently consoles an upset Zelda. But you can also see it in shorter moments, like when she mentions she'd like to plant a tree for Zelda to see when she wakes up. And even as old Impa, who's mainly here to infodump and has overall less personality than young Impa imo, you can see this patience and kindness in the way she interacts with Groose. She's firm in her convictions and doesn't sugercoat anything, but repeatedly encourages him and helps him realize his own talents and the way he can help.

I also think her body language plays a large role as to why she reads as so gentle to me despite not getting many emotional interactions with people: it's very controlled and minimal, relying on subtle movements and expressions. This is in contrast to most other characters in the game, who are much more overtly expressive. Obviously this makes her read as stoic (her more formal language also helps with that), but it also makes her read as very gentle to me. It's a much 'softer' style of expressing herself than the other characters in the game, and it means that when she does something like sit up a little before tilting her head slightly down when Link sasses her with 'Am I late?', or smiles and puts her hand on Zelda's shoulder to reassure her, it reads as more meaningful.

The biggest break in this pattern of gentleness is, of course, her introductory scene where she rips into Link for failing to save Zelda. Her furious expression right before the monologue is probably the most expressive we see her in the game, and this scene is the closest we get to seeing her lose her composure, save maybe for when she's defeated in battle by Ghirahim. She's still controlled and methodical, but clearly furious at having to save Zelda from capture. Full analysis of this scene is a different post, but suffice to say that it stands out against a backdrop of overwhelmingly patient and kind behaviour. It shows just how serious she takes her role to protect Zelda.

It's a very strong introduction, but it's a shame that it seems to have overshadowed the rest of her character for some parts of the fandom (especially those biased towards Link, which is unfortunately a lot of people). It's notable for just how unusually harsh she is in it; it is not the baseline of her character. That baseline is actually quite patient and gentle, a quality I wish more people would acknowledge.

[feathered-serpents]

So. In both God of War games Atreus/Freya are coded to follow the player right? In any game with companions the companion is obviously basically glued to the player and in a lot of games (Dragon Age for example) the companions will interact with the environment as best they can, climb letters, jump over stuff, etc but if the player gets to far away they will just teleport to their location so you don’t lose a companion

In God of War this doesn’t happen. Atreus/Kratos always follow you by naturally interacting with the environment. If you climb they climb, if you jump they jump, they never teleport. That’s because God of War’s AI is so good there’s almost never a need to, they’re really good at not getting stuck or left behind

But

Sometimes. It still bugs out. and the results. Are incredibly funny

I’ve had this happen to me twice, once in the first game, once in the second game. Both only with Atreus, never lost Freya which tracks honestly

In the first game I lost Atreus in Ivaldi’s Workshop and if you don’t know what that is because you don’t play GOW but still read the posts I make about it (I love you) Ivaldi’s workshop is an ever changing labyrinth filled with saw-style booby traps consisting of death propellers or 20 foot saw blades or classic “just fucking squish’em” the ceiling falls down traps AS WELL AS thick ass fog that makes it so you can’t fucking see and also it’s POISONOUS so if you stand in it for too long you straight up die and I have lost my kid in it

And suddenly I went from playing God of War to playing a “Lost my kid in the mall” simulator except the mall is a death trap filled with toxic fumes and ever changing walls aka any suburban mall. I am walking down all these halls trying to find this dumbass and the only thing I have to go on is sometimes I can hear his voice distantly through the mist. Far away. He’ll just say something and I’ll walk in that direction and he won’t be there. It was hell. It literally sounds like Kratos’ hell. I never found him I had to reset the checkpoint

The second time I’ve already talked about but it was awhile ago and it’s still one of the funniest things that ever happened to me in a game so I’m talking about it again.

I was doing Surtr’s trials and was getting to the last six (?) trials at the very end. If you’ve done these, you know if you do all of them in one go rather than leaving and coming back you get REALLY methodical at it. Arena one, arena two, main arena. Arena one, arena two, main arena. Again and again and again

The thing is, at the start of each of these fights the arena gates slam shut. Which makes sense since it’s supposed to be an arena. Arenas have gates and they’re usually shut. Well. I managed to move from arena two to the main arena so quickly that Atreus didn’t have time to get out of the first arena and got locked in behind the gate

I didn’t even REALIZE he wasn’t there until I tried firing arrows and nothing happened. Finally I turned around and I couldn’t see him. Then I heard a tiny, distant “Watch out father!” And got cleaved in half by a draugr. I would’ve had to restart either way several enemies you NEED Atreus with you to beat and he was in JAIL

Just the image of Atreus on his toes, locked in another arena with his face pressed against the bars screaming at the top of his lungs “FATHER!! BEHIND YOU!! HE’S BEHIND YOU!!!!!” Is the funniest thing in the world

This absolutely actually happened in my mind. Atreus thinks both are funny now, Kratos does not

[oxean-et-al]

A "brief" review of Submachine: Legacy

So, Submachine: Legacy was released yesterday, and I beat it about an hour ago, after just over nine hours of playing.

Review in brief: I liked it. It was good. It feels like a fitting send-off to the Submachine series (or this first phase of it, at least), though I won't go quite so far as to call it a "definitive edition" of the games.

Of course, there's more to my thoughts than that, hence the rest of this post. This review will be spoiler-free, though given the nature of the games there's not much to spoil. I'll also be assuming you have no idea what I'm talking about, so first, a quick history lesson.

The Submachine series is a series of (initially) Flash-based puzzle games produced by the Polish game developer and artist Mateusz Skutnik, consisting of 10 games in the 'main' series, released between 2005 and 2015, as well as 3 'spin-off' games, and one 'non-game experience,' for lack of a better term; this last item was also the final Submachine-related work to be released (or, in this case, finalized), being declared finished in December of 2017.

The first game, retroactively titled Submachine 1: The Basement, was, at its core, one of many 'escape the room'-style flash games, which abounded on sites like ArmorGames, Newgrounds, and Kongregate at the time.

However, as the series went on, the barest breadcrumbs of lore in the first game grew into a great web of narrative, held together by notes from multiple different (and sometimes unreliable) authors, and the games transitioned from being mere escape rooms into a unique form of puzzle game, held aloft by Skutnik's masterful hand-drawn environments, which benefit from his training as an architect.

I mean just look at that.

With the death of Flash, the availability of the games diminished greatly, available only through purchase on Skutnik's website, or via large collections such as Flashpoint Infinity. The 'non-game experience' I mentioned earlier, Submachine Universe, remained available through itch.io as well.

But now, nearly six years later, comes Submachine: Legacy, a remaster/re-release of all prior works in the Submachine series, available on Steam.

So, with all that preamble out of the way, my thoughts.

Submachine: Legacy is, ultimately, just the original Submachine games bundled together into one program, with some graphical updates here and there. But it's not merely the same games as before; there have been some changes and additions.

On the UI side, your cursor lights up when hovering over an interactable object, which makes looking for things much easier. The cursor also indicates where you can exit a room, and (in some cases) which item to use in a given context (hammer, karma water, etc.) That's a fairly simple change which I think makes the games much better, and more fun to play.

There are short sections linking the main games, or "chapters," which are quite nice. Also very nice are the detailed landscapes now viewable through some windows and telescopes.

There are a few changes I am slightly less enthused by, though. Submachine: Legacy, to my surprise, incorporates most (possibly all) of Submachine Universe; however, presumably due to reasons of copyright, the multiple user-submitted theories that festooned the walls of every room have been replaced by architectural sketches.

Likewise, some of the puzzles have been simplified. In some cases this is perhaps warranted, such as with the rotating wheels puzzle (I'm not really sure what to call it) near the end of Submachine 2: The Lighthouse. In other cases, however, I think it makes the series lose a small amount of its charm - I am specifically thinking of how the pieces of silverware that are used in some of the earlier games as makeshift wires, bridging broken electrical connections, have been replaced by new power relay items. These are both fairly minor changes, but they did disappoint me just the smallest amount.

The only changes that I had a distinctly negative impression of were in sound design. Specifically, both the 'item picked up' sound effect and (especially) the 'electrical connection made' sound effect went on for far too long, and, in the latter case, was rather overused.

It's for these reasons that I can't quite call Submachine: Legacy a 'definitive' edition of the games, though it does come close, and I would recommend it for newcomers to the series (the price, for reference, is $25)

Submachine: Legacy also has new content for the long-time Submachine player (which, let's face it, is likely to be most of the player base), involving over a dozen monoliths scattered throughout the games, and a genuinely brilliant new puzzle. For the sake of a spoiler free-review, I'll say no more, though do note that (I think) it is possible to accidentally reset the monoliths, so be cautious.

Submachine has been a major factor in my life, and this feels like a fitting send-off to (this part of) the series, and I eagerly await the next installment in the series.

[ohmeadows]

with the experience you have now, what is something you usually do when you feel the creative block so bad that it makes you want to drop all your writing during an indeterminate period of time? (Not considering talking to someone because i don't have friends with the same interests as me)

Lately i have been writing consistently but now i am in a point between the overwhelming need to keep creating and the suffocating need to just stop. the last time this happened not a single word was written in over a year xd

oh and im so in love with your writing btw <3

thank you and i'm sorry to hear you're struggling with a creative block, i know the feeling all too well. (there's a span of years between 2013 and 2016 where i didn't write at all.)

while a little break does do good, i know the threshold to getting back to it becomes so high it feels insurmountable. but it sounds like you need to replenish the well, as i like to call it. think of your writing as a well you draw from, and it needs a steady supply of water to be able to sustain you dipping into it for the power and inspiration to keep going. feeding it involves engaging in texts in a different way. for me, that's reading, and a lot. i sometimes feel so parched i have to steamroll thru ten books before i feel like i have it balanced again.

i've made some posts beforehand on how to approach reading as a writer (wish i'd tagged them better), but it boils down to:

make lists of beautiful words and sentences that you like; could you emulate them? could you write them in your style?

how do the writers pull off the tricks you struggle with? for me this is knowing when to just move the scene along, or how to showcase that time has passed. (i did a whole study on this from my fave books and it boiled down to just writing "A day later/Weeks down the line/Three months passed before she/It didn't take more than forty-five minutes to get across town but it felt like moving backwards through time" which was fun to learn)

just reading for fun. cannot be understated. sometimes you just need to be pulled into a story and feel too dazzled to stop and think to be reminded of how delicious writing feels

and yes, this goes for mangas, comics, scripts, movies, tv shows, even game writing imo (visual novels are great fun for how they do dialogue and emotional appeal).

another thing to not lose touch with the writing as a practice but maybe take a little breather from the project is to start a journal. i like this one a lot personally, there's the concept of morning pages where you get up in the morning and write three pages without stopping or overthinking.

this leads into automatic writing, which is about setting a timer (25 mins is a good one i feel, but even 15-10-5 does wonders) and while it ticks, you have to keep writing. yes, even if all you write is the same word over and over, or your thoughts as they come to you. this is a key component exercise at all writing schools i've ever gone to. personally i like to "guide it" so to speak with a prompt, be it a word (Lust, Rose, Name, Echo) or a full sentence ("She didn't like where this was going.") or an image. what this exercise teaches you is to shorten the distance between hand putting the words down and your thoughts as they process and come to you, as well as embracing writing messy and ugly and shitty because you can always come back and fix a half-assed page, but you can't do anything with a blank one.

third and final thing: movement. go outside. look around. if you can, get moving, take in the surroundings. there's no expectation on you to write anything from this, just let the movement and your thoughts be it. whenever i hit creative rut, i go for a walk. the first half hour my brain is quiet and annoyed. then things start moving in there as well. i'll walk all the way down to the sea and look at the waves and back home and process an idea from it. (i do keep the notes app on my phone readily available for this, but a notebook or receipt or post-it notes also work fine.)

like all art, writing is a practice and the actual act of writing is maybe 20-30% of what it is. nourish the well and it will nourish you back.

+ for what it's worth, i also often try to edge in rest days where i don't write. at least two a week. be gentle and forgiving on yourself.

[frozen-snowflakesandsunflowers]

Frozen 3 thoughts: Elsa's attire

Elsa's had some really beautiful dressed and outfits over the years. From her most iconic blue "Snow Queen" attire to her white "5th Spirit" attire. All if her outfits have shown her stages of character growth, from hiding herself from everyone she loves with her coronation attire to letting herself go with her "Snow Queen" attire. But since Frozen 3 has been announced it's left the question pondering; What is her next step of her growth given she's found herself as the 5th spirit? What's the next step of her story now?

I'll be answering those exact questions in a theory regarding Elsa losing her powers and Hans returning but in this post I'll answer it by guessing and exploring the possibility for her attire in Frozen 3.

Elsa's main style is a long floor length dress with a slit be it on the right or in the middle, with a longer flowing cape and snowflake like shapes patterned all over the attire. She also likes transparency in elements of her costumes. Let's not forget she loves shoes made out of ice. So we can expect at least some of those elements in her Frozen 3 attire. Oh wait - some of you might we wondering will Elsa even get a new attire because she found herself and is the fifth spirit now. The answer to that is of course she will! There is more to her and even Anna's story to tell because if not there wouldn't be a Frozen 3 in the works. And with every new journey of finding themselves, they make, come new outfits. Here are some of Elsa's iconic looks:

She also goes for a cooler colour palette with shades of blues, whites, pinks, purples, turquoise, teal etc. There would be only a few occasions where she'd go warm which is on Anna's birthday, to match the floral theme by wearing pink and green (my personal favourite looks of Elsa). As fifth spirit, her attire includes the specific colours of each element: turquoise (water), blue (air), pale blue (earth), and purple (fire). And because she's got ice powers, and white is part of the ice and snow colour palette, it makes it the fifth spirit colour and balances out the other four spirit colours. So she'll most likely be wearing white. But as a theory goes around that she should lose her powers temporarily, her attire will reflect her powerless side. Maybe she'll wear black as opposite to her fifth spirit dress to show the title that came with the powers disappearing.

But let's look at her styles in the Broadway version of the movie. During her second solo, "Monster", she wears a different attire for it (which I absolutely am obsessed with!). She wears a pant suit. Here's a few stills of it:

It's so classy, so elegant, so Elsa! Her top half of the outfit has basically the same kind of structure as her original dress. The only difference is that this has a V-neck and that had an off the shoulder neckline and the other difference is the neckline if the bodice has a thin lining of wool. The pants are same have embroidered white pattern to it and she has below-the-knee heeled boots with a thick fur lining on the rim of it. She keeps her cape with this look which puts the cherry on the top of the cake.

I definitely would want Elsa to have this kind of look because if her fifth spirit role consists of running around the forest especially if there's danger than honestly speaking she should be wearing pants - like she did in Frozen 2 as her main look underneath her overcoat. I think I might re design the look above to make it suit for the role she was born into (Fifth Spirit).

Then we have her Disney Lorcana (Disney's trading card game) looks.

The one on the left is inspired by her attire she wears underneath her coat in Frozen 2, but it has elements of her fifth spirit attire in it. So if we see Elsa embracing new looks with her new style it could look similar to this. Her cape is along her sleeves too which is also a nod to her fifth spirit cape being 2 separate capes going down from her shoulders.

The one on the right is more a witchy look which I love. She looks like she would be called "The Northern Witch". It's inspired by one of her one of her concept arts of Frozen 2 (can be found in the Art of Frozen 2 book). Again it's got her fifth spirit emblem on it. As for her cape, it's more of a cloak here. If Elsa vanished to the North mountain again she would nail this look and if there was a magical book involved too, this would be go well.

To conclude, I would really love to see Elsa in pants again because her role as fifth spirit is less formal than her role as Queen, as it is more about protecting the forest from any kind of threats that may arise (as we are due to see hear in the upcoming podcast). Don't get me wrong, I love Elsa in dresses and skirts, it's her main iconic looks. But I think from time to time, if she wears pants it would show her change from the formal Queenly role to her free spirited role. Oh and yeah I know Elsa does have pants underneath the gown but I mean, showing it more obviously like the one in the Broadway way version. Her long capes and dress would get in the way when dealing with threats as she will in the podcast so maybe learning form that she changes.that up a bit. I mean we are going ot have new looks for both Elsa and Anna for promotion purposes too so might as well. But either way, dress or pants, I'm definitely going it be excited to see both Elsa and Anna's new looks in Frozen 3 symbolising their character or further growth in the movie.

Also I think since November will mark 10 years of Frozen, we should add the tag "A decade of Frozen". Just for celebration purposes and for fun! It feels like only yesterday we got the first movie - im not crying 🤧❄️

[wyrd-syster]

FANFIC ROUNDUP: 2023

LIST OF FANWORKS

POSTED

lend me some sugar (I am your neighbor) | Haladriel neighbors AU | E | 2/2

tell me something true (or tell me nothing at all) | Haladriel "This is How You Lose the Time War" AU | E | one-shot

it's a dangerous game | Haladriel Venetian-style "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" AU | E | one-shot | dead dove

dig up the bones (but leave the soul alone) | Haladriel canon divergence | E | 9/? (wip)

living la dolce vita (I’ve been saving all my summers for you) | Haladriel "Stepford Wives" cult AU | E | one-shot

take a chance and roll the dice (say it once, say it twice) | Haladriel Halloween-themed drabble collection | M | 8/8

there is a light (and it never goes out) | Haladriel Hanukkah-themed canon divergence | T | 1/2 (wip)

sugar and spice (and everything...) | Haladriel neighbors AU | E | sequel to lend me some sugar | one-shot

Total words: 127,458, almost triple my output from last year. I am flabbergasted.

UNPOSTED WIPS

oh boy. Not including wips noted above:

we were angels, once (don't you remember?) | Haladriel immortal soulmates au | M (probably?) | one-shot

break the lock if it don't fit (love sticks, sweat drips) | Haladriel "Ocean's Eleven" AU | E | one-shot (title subject to change)

and on the creature scratches (it doesn't know how to get out) | Haladriel mob AU | E| multi-chapter sequel to oh, can’t you hear that scratching? (there’s something at the door) 

Untitled third installment of the Haladriel like a good neighbor series

Untitled Haladriel Rumpelstiltskin AU

TOTAL # OF COMPLETED WORKS/FANDOMS WRITTEN IN

Six completed works written for the Sauron (Halbrand)/Galadriel (Haladriel) fandom, The Rings of Power

OVERALL THOUGHTS

it's like I can't consume media anymore without being like "*leonardo dicaprio meme* this could be a Haladriel AU!"

PERSONAL FAVORITE?

I'm going to say living la dolce vita (I’ve been saving all my summers for you), mostly because of the amount of work I put into it. Honestly, I never thought I'd finish it! I restarted this story six or seven times — I just could not find the voice. But I am so pleased with the outcome. I think of everything I've written this year, this story really underscored to me that, beyond "flashes of inspiration," writing is a lot of hard work that needs consistent attention and practice!

MOST UNDERAPPRECIATED?

I definitely think this one is it's a dangerous game, my Dr. Jekyll and Hyde AU. I initially started writing this for a Gothic-themed challenge, abandoned for a bit, then finished in a flurry for Haladriel Week. This fic is also a close second for my favorite of the year. I love a Gothic aesthetic and I made sure this story was chock full of it. I was also so purposeful with my writing voice for this story and, to me, it doesn't sound like anything else I've written.

MOST POPULAR?

Oh without a doubt, lend me some sugar (I am your neighbor)! 

STORY WITH THE SEXIEST MOMENT?

I mean, this is so subjective, but I think the somnophilia scene from it's a dangerous game takes the cake for me! I wrote it in one sitting during my lunch break and my god was it hard to go back to work after this...

An excerpt from the end of the scene: Instead, he adjusts her skirts and melts into the darkness, leaving her as he found her; boneless and wet, flushed with heat and ripe for the taking. 

MOST FUN STORY TO WRITE?

Fun is a strong word, but I was the story I felt was most fulfilling to write was tell me something true (or tell me nothing at all). I already had some of the template letter concepts in my notes from a twitter conversation much earlier in the year, and expanding on them, while building the scenes around them, was a really fun exercise.

HARDEST?

I'm not going to lie, most of them! I used to be the type of writer who would have one flash of inspiration, write it up at a mad sprint, then quit writing until I was struck with another mad idea. I wrote for so many prompt and themed challenges this year that I was required to be more intentional about story building and more consistent with my writing — even when it was hard, even when I hated everything I wrote down. Felt a lot like muscle training at the gym!

BIGGEST SURPRISE?

My output really surprised me!! I complain to my therapist all the time that I'm shit at finishing things, but it's hard to deny the truth when it's staring me in the face: six complete stories, two wips that I will complete! And not just the quantity of my output, but the quality too. I am proud of, and really like, everything I published!

I mean, don't ask me how my social life is going lol, but at least my writing life is going well!

DID YOU TAKE ANY RISKS IN WRITING THIS YEAR?

Dipping my toe into Dark Fics for sure, which is new for me. But beyond that, just engaging with the fandom as a whole! I firmly believe that writing/story-telling is a communal activity and I am beyond grateful to have found that community. It's the first real fan-space I've been a real part of, and it's definitely improved my writing.

MOST UNINTENTIONALLY TELLING STORY?

My life is too boring to translate to fic lol. But I did not have to dig very deep to write the depression beats in living la dolce vita (I’ve been saving all my summers for you). A lot of what Galadriel goes through — the listlessness, the anger, the selfishness — is stuff I also struggle with during depressive episodes.

FAVORITE LINES/SCENES?

I like them all lol but these are a few that I know others, including my fiancé, have really liked:

dig up the bones (but leave the soul alone): “My lady, if I had a dragon’s tooth for every time you told me not to worry while you went careening off into peril, I’d have a smiling crown for my troubles.”

lend me some sugar (I am your neighbor): And she shatters, then, like glass; a thousand glittering pieces sailing off into the light. Irreparably damaged, ground to dust — edges sharpening as they fall into a mosaic of destruction. There is no end and no beginning. A lifetime of little deaths folding in on themselves, one on top of the other.

tell me something true (or tell me nothing at all): I am drowning in this ocean of blood. And you — you are not here to pull me to the surface as you once did. How could you, when you are wave and anchor both?

there is a light (and it never goes out): She can offer him no words of comfort, no platitudes to ease his sorrows. But she can offer this. The soft touch of her lips to his, the gentle stroke of her fingers across his cheek. She cannot mend a broken heart, but she can hold it for a while, cup it in her palms and keep it safe. She can pour her light into his darkened soul, weave together a dream where they are bound and they are whole. If only just this once.

MY FAVE PART OF FANDOM IN 2023

Literally just having this fandom. Having this community of wonderful, kind, incredibly talented people I can talk to, get advice from, brainstorm with!! I have made so many wonderful friends and I will be forever grateful.

2024 WRITING AMBITIONS

I want to continue developing a consistent writing habit, preferably once a day. Ideally, I'll become to type of girlie who wakes up at 5am and writes for two hours before work, but let's be real, I'm way to sleepy for that!

I also want to focus on two specific things: writing faster and writing less. First, I am, in my eyes, a slow writer — without that "flash of inspiration," it can take me a few days to write a single scene. Mostly because I do not follow my own advice and have to get everything perfect in the first draft. Second — as you can see from this post!!! — I have always been the type of writer who goes "why use one word when you can use ten?" I want to be able to write shorter stories without feeling like I'm compromising on my vision.

2024 FICS ON THE IMMEDIATE HORIZON

chapter two of there is a light (and it never goes out) 

the immortal soulmates AU

dig up the bones (but leave the soul alone)*  (which I think will be on hiatus until I can get a few chapters ahead before posting).

Thanks to @liminal-zone for the format, @conundrumoftime and @thecoziestbean inspiration!

[lamarckianenterprises]

On Alledgely Intelligent Machines

All of this reminds me of like, two to three years ago when AI Dungeon 2 was this hot young thing and 'respectable' gaming news sites were posting opinion pieces about the wild unrestricted adventures they were having on it and how it would change the way they roleplayed forever, even though it was this bumbling, lawless thing that could barely find the plot to lose most of the time.

And then fast forward a year or so and we find out that the algorithm isn't magic, and that prompting it with 'the end' specifically outputs a 'thanks for reading, please donate to my patreon' message lifted from all of the thousands upon thousands of poor schumcks who had the misfortune of deciding to share their work online for other people to freely read.

All of this 'AI is progressing too rapidly and will one day very soon develop into real AGI that will change the world' malarkey is just jingling keys. I think it's called Longtermism, they want us to fret and fuss about how this will affect the lives of our great great great grandchildren commutting to Mars 200 years from now, and not about how this is affecting real people today.

"Think about how neat it would be to have an AI that can answer all of the questions left in the universe for us" Sam says, as his company hurriedly cuts ties with the underpaid Kenyan workers manually sorting and tagging the database his LLMs are based on.

"Look at how well it rhymes now, this will definitely distrupt the Poetry Industry which definitely is a thing that exists in real life I am a real scientist I know these things," his employees say, in a research paper hyping up their own product while they improve its ability to deepfake images that gradually erodes any trust we still have in our society.

All the while touting the most mediocre, average examples of just about any creative field as proof of its rapid, inevitable and perpetually explosive growth as if it was the figurative Antichrist heralding the coming of the Son of God and the Kingdom of Heaven.

I miss when we just let these things run rampant without a single care for consistent style and realism because we enjoyed witnessing what utter insanity it came up with, I miss when it was just a 'neat tool' that could maybe provide a freaky background or add trippy dogfaces to your clouds, I miss when we were wondering about what all of this weirdness said about what understanding language and having pattern recognition means when it's divorced entirely from reality instead of wondering how quickly we can refine and normalize its output well enough to mechanize all forms of artistry.

And above all else I miss not hearing about it, because honestly it still isn't that good. The slightly uncanny photos, mass art style plagiarism module and extremely resource intensive shorts are neat and all but, when it comes to prose, and DMing?

Well let's just say that AI Dungeon 2 crawled so that ChatGPT can sorta aimlessly waddle around in those babywalker things that seem neat and helpful, but are actually deathtraps that can cause long term health and developmental issues by actively preventing your child from spending the time they need to crawl around and develop the motoric skills and musculature needed to stand and fail repeatedly at walking. (Which is why they have been banned in Canada since 2004.)

_____

Maria D.R./Lamarck is an Indonesian writer whose boomer mother has talked about how great AI is to me and everyone in her social circle every damned day since ChatGPT was released.

[boyfridged]

Do you agree that Jason, as written by Winnick in UTRH and Lost Days, acts out of character post-resurrection if we take into account his post-crisis robin days? If yes, how would you have him act/react to stuff after he comes back from the dead?

tldr: i definitely agree. moreover, classism plays a huge role in it, and i don’t think that at this point the storyline could lose these implications, which makes trying to conceive what an “in character” (for robin jay) version of these events would be quite difficult. 

let’s just start from saying that i don't think it's a secret that i don't really like winick in general. despite his work being mad interesting on a conceptual level (and style-wise, genuinely well written!), he has no love for the characters he writes about. 

imo utrh shouldn't even ever make it into the mainstream batman timeline. i am aware that this is a radical opinion, but my take is that it would do best as an elseworld story (and in this version too it would need some tweaks here and there), because it made damage both to the mythos of batman and jason's legacy that can never be undone. the very premise of the story is so deeply disconnected from jay's original place in the narrative, and so classist at its roots, that there's not much room to truly fix it. 

(i want to say, preemptively, that i am aware that there are people who read utrh as a story of a revolutionary and a victim – and they have the right to do so, but ngl, my view has always been that it was never written as that. utrh reinforces so many stereotypes that it overshadows the revenge tragedy spirit of it all.) 

another disclaimer is that, to be honest, jay doesn't have a very consistent characterization even in his 80s run, and it also has some classist implications that ideally should be either erased or addressed in the text (that winick instead exaggerated and put at the very front of his storytelling.) starlin's writing is, at the end of the day and very much ironically, more sympathetic and gentler in evaluating jay (simply because at the time he would not get away with changes too blatant) but details such as jay saying that "all life is game" and his random nonchalant behaviour that has its origin in the very beginning of starlin’s run are already signs of it. some readers will trace jason's arrogance prevalent in his red hood era to these issues and say that his actions post-res are therefore a logical extension of his robin days, but i don't buy it. even if you want to lean into starlin-esque characterisation, if you consider the core problem of the garzonas plotline – which is power, jay shouldn’t look into the solution of anything in climbing to the top. and if he did, it would have to be written as a “becoming what you feared/hated most” kind of story, which i can see a certain appeal in (and which would at least acknowledge that it was not his initial personality), but which would go back to its classist assumption of cycles of violence and doomed fates.

so – how to make his post-res era more accurate to his post-crisis robin days (and least classist in the process)?

if we were to follow my fav iterations of his characterisation (barr’s detective comics and the ntt appearances) tbh I don’t think a lot would happen, because his personality is quite mild, and just so hopeful there that i wouldn’t expect any extreme actions from him – but then again, the circumstances that he finds himself in post-res, the trauma, and his sensitivity do warrant grief that should become a driving force in his life from now on. the question is, what to do with this grief as a plot device?

i know that plenty of jason fans hate this take but I actually think the concept of jason trying to be detached and cruel but being bad at it might be one of the least offensive to his 80s characterisation. it’s def not accurate to pre-52 canon (apart from countdown perhaps) but imo for jay to be authentic and nuanced he should be conflicted about his own actions. his overconfident behaviour should be a pose – just as his frantic acts in his origin story as robin were. (again, something that many readers don't take notice of – but reading the rest of collins' writing wherein jay quickly settles into being easy-going and even a bit shy is proof of it.)

these two points lead to the “no good deed” narrative that I often talk about - the reading that jason saw his intuitive and self-sacrificial kind tendencies as something that brought him pain and that never was quite efficient, and that post-res he intentionally tried training himself out of. there are some flashes of it here and there throughout the years of the red hood publishing history, but it never got a true spotlight. and if i were to write lost days, jason flinching at his own violence would be a focal point of the story. 

moving on to utrh; i have spoken about it at length before but I think if he were written 1. with more political sensitivity 2. to have retained the same maturity re: the social order 3. to have the same idea of morality, he should have followed more of actual revolutionary tracks and the whole “drug lord” authoritarian figure schtick along with the idiotic idea of “controlling crime” would have to be thrown out of the window. 

and, later on, forgiveness should play a big role in his story. he's so quick to forgive and justify everyone in his robin run – this is also why i reckon his team up with harvey in tfz was a wasted opportunity.

so, in conclusion – perhaps not that much would have to change re: his actions but definitely a lot should change regarding his emotional journey and his position. i would def throw out a lot of mindless violence and power posturing out of it though. and perhaps make him a bit more polite just for the sake of more consistency (this is not me taking a moral stance btw nor tone policing a fictional character. i just think it would be more faithful to his 80s writing unless you want to make him explicitly scared. and it would be funnier tbh.)

[thevindicativevordan]

Comics this week ? (like WW #12)

Superman #17 - The good Absolute Power tie-in of the week. Glad to see Clark is pissed about Jon and not handling it well. He’s much more aggressive and short tempered here, with Zatanna playing the cool head. An underrated aspect of Superman is that when he loses his powers he also tends to lose his patience and his restraint. Something to unpack there about how much of the cool-headed friendly personality we normally associate with Superman is an act. But of course I am not unbiased when it comes to Superman and Wrath…

World’s Finest #30 - Waid managed to write a story that even the Wondy fans enjoyed, truly a Herculean feat given the grudge they bear towards him for his self-admitted tendency to misrepresent Diana. Themyscaria came off well, they had advanced tech, kangas, and not all of the Amazons were hostile to the World’s Finest trio.

Wonder Woman #12 - Bleh. Good to let Sampere get ahead so that the actual story has consistent art, but these AP tie-ins from King are not hitting.

Green Lantern: War Journal #12 - Loved the ending. Finally have a stand-alone story for Stewart that I can recommend. I'm not sure about keeping Ellie around as her own entity. I interpreted the bit about John's Mama being preserved in the ring as John rewiring his ring to be based on his mom's personality rather than literally preserving her soul or what not, and that interpretation strikes me as very touching. Montos for Stewart is what Reis was for Hal, what a shame we can’t get a 50 issue run on Stewart from this team.

Jenny Sparks #1 - Judging by the complaints, it’s seems like this was a lot of people’s first exposure to the Ellis style of sneering bastards making fun of “capes”. King captured that tone perfectly I’d say, even if some of Spoke’s imagery was heavy handed. Old bearded white guy feeding the birds for no reason other than he wants to (God as a benevolent provider) contrasted with Atom saying he wants to kill and eat the birds because he can (God as a terrifying force of destruction) was not subtle at all. Will King bring up the High is my biggest question. After all it was the High who in a way caused Jenny to form the Authority in the first place, since she seems to have a negative opinion of Superman here I want to know what her history is with High/Superman. Especially in a post-S&tA world (even if it is an Elseworld) you could wrong some interesting stuff out of Superman and Sparks talking about the Authority.

Ultimate Spider-Man #8 - If my clothes started smiling at me I would simply never wear them again. I would also set them on fire. If it wasn’t obvious, the picosuit is 6160 Venom. I loved how ominous this entire issue read, even without any major action you can feel the swords dangling over the cast. AI Peter is already referring to himself as his own entity, he’s focused on the kids just like regular Peter, he’s teasing that he can do stuff Peter doesn’t know about, how long until he starts trying to “take the wheel”? Maybe we’ll get a version of Earth X Venom where the suit tries to bond with either Richard or May in an effort to protect them.

Harry meanwhile gets a small humiliation in that Maker didn’t even consider him worthy of notice, which is only going to fuel his need to prove himself. Been going back and forth on if Richard or Jonah would be the ones to die, and after this issue I bet it’s Jonah. Killing Jonah would affect both Richard (with whom Jonah bonds in one of the best Jonah moments ever) and Ben (who is clearly lonely after his wife’s death and Jonah dying could push Robbie to join Ben or Peter to jump ship too). Kingpin gathers his Sinister Six, and I loved how Mysterio is shown to be playing mind games with his fellow villains.

[sugaredcosmos]

I got into One Piece at the start of this year

and overall I really like it. At the moment I'm in the 800's range of chapters so I'm on Whole Cake Island and I wanted to share my thoughts on it since so much is happening now with the franchise between the manga seemingly headed towards an endgame right now, and the live action's success and confirmation of a season 2. The first thing I'd like to say is that I think I can overall recommend reading/watching it. However, I do have a few problems with the series that I think people should be aware of when getting into it. For one thing it does have many of the issues that plague the shonen genre.

In particular, it has a few issues in its portrayal of female characters at times. However, I will also say that those female characters, while often drawn in very limited body types and facial structures, have easily as quality and engaging stories as the boys in the show. All of them have their own unique, interesting, and emotional backstories that are consistently on par with the men's. However, at the same time, they are also undeniably more prone to sexualization and are often on the sidelines in a lot of the fights, the ladder of which is especially apparent after the timeskip as of where I am now. So, overall I think the depiction of women can be hit or miss but I will also say that it's still a lot better than some of the other big works in the shonen genre, namely Naruto and MHA.

Another quirk I've noticed about the series is that most if not all of its characters definitely suffer from flanderization as time goes on and lose a lot of nuance that they had in earlier chapters. I think there are standouts among the cast of this but it's pretty universal. To give an example, I'll use the relationship between Luffy and Chopper. In chopper's introduction story there's a bit where luffy thinks that reindeer meat would be pretty yummy. Somewhat on brand for Luffy but it still feels a bit out of character. Later on in that same arc Luffy is shown fighting for chopper and defends him for his ideals (see episode 88 of the anime for referene). Later on, however, there are numerous "emergency food" jokes made by luffy that genuinely bother me with how much it feels out of character for him. Like I know that "having all of the food" is on of the reasons that Luffy is a pirate but I would also think that his friends are a lot more important to him than that. Especially with the influence that Shanks had on him when he was younger (spill a drink on my and I can forgive that but mess with my friends and you're fucked etc etc).

The anime also has its own set of issues. The early one piece anime I think got the vibe of the story phenomenally well. The animation and art style is incredibly faithful to the manga and consistently gives of so much charm and vibrance that I think is lost later on, especially with things like the first opening, the soundtrack, and the eyecatches with the wanted posters accompanied by character's musical motif/theme. Where the problem comes in is when these really sweet and charming elements start going away upon the end of Skypeia/G8 and the start of the series' run in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The artstyle has a noticeable change, and the pacing begins to suffer a bit more than it had previously. You can look up what episodes cover what chapters in the manga and early on it was usually a ratio of like 2-3 chapters per episode, sometimes more, and around enies lobby it goes down to 1-2 chapters maybe 3 sometimes, and post timeskip it's one chapter per episode and sometimes 2 or 3 which is why I switched to basically exclusively reading the manga after awhile of bouncing back and forth between reading and watching.

The final issue I really have with One Piece is that the manga's content has a few weak parts. The 3 main ones that I found were Long Ring Long Land (specifically the davy back game), Thriller Bark, and Fishman Island. Two of these actually have something in common, Long Ring Long Land and Thriller Bark both have really really good parts at the end of them. My main thing with Long Ring Long Land is that the Davy Back Game feels like it was made under editor pressure to have a tournament arc. Because it just kinda pops up and never comes back again with very little if any character development or change in the status quo. However, after the davy back game has concluded we get a loooooot of new stuff, worldbuilding, a character introduction, and foreshadowing. Similarly, Thriller Bark is another arc that I wasn't a super big fan of until the very end with the musical number and subsequent conflict involving a fair amount of spoilers which I wont go into now, but just know that my main issue with thriller bark is that I think it should've been a shorter island more in line with something like Whiskey Peak, Drum Island, or Amazon Lily as a bigger part of the Sabaody Archipelago/Impel Down/Marineford Saga. Finally there's Fishman Island. I wont say much since it's post timeskip content and very spoilery, but I think it's a very thematically rich saga that suffers from too many new and underdeveloped characters, and a loooooot of pacing problems not to mention a lot of annoying character quirks and out of character actions of both the straw hats and a lot of the villains and local characters. Luffy in this arc is just really mean to another character for very little reason and it feels VERY out of character to me, and a lot of Sanji's really annoying character traits from an otherwise likeable character come out swinging here. But other than that and a slow start in the manga (which the live actions kind of fixes if you watch that first) One Piece is GOOD. Like, really good.

It's a show that, despite being the kind of premier shonen manga for the past like 25 years breaks from a lot of the genre's tropes. A lot of action manga, including the newer ones like JJK and Demon Slayer all seem to portray the characters in a place within a kind of societal system where they find a place to belong. One thing that One Piece does that I love is that it places its characters in direct opposition to that system. As pirates, the Straw Hats are outlaws being hunted by a system that's consistently portrayed as unfair and unjust. Oftentimes what they do when they visit an island is take down some illegitimate ruler that's been forcibly put in place by forces outside of the people's control. That's not something that happens in normal shonen. In fact, it's usually the other way around. Typically a shonen series villain is someone within or outside of the current system that's trying to change it. Shigariaki in MHA, Suguru Geto in JJK, the Phantom Troupe and Chimera Ants in HxH; all of these villains are bad people in the same position as the Straw Hats in One Piece. It's incredible how much nuance goes into the series villain's place in the worldbuilding. There are heroes and villains on both sides of the story's central conflict of Pirates vs the World Government. Usually the world government is portrayed as oppressive, unjust, and serves to keep the cruelly wealthy Celestial Dragons in power. However, we also see certain agents of this system that are good apples or neutral forces just trying to do good in a bad system such as Captain Smoker, Koby, Aokiji, and Garp. On the reverse side we also have a rogues gallery of pirate antagonists who usually end up being shorter term villains but sometimes evolve into overarching threats such as Blackbeard, Buggy, and a few of the Seven Warlords and Four Emporers. Ultimately the series main conflict is one of Freedom vs Control as well as who deserves to be in power and a leader's right to rule. Overall, I recommend you take the journey through One Piece. It's funny because it really is a journey. If you tell a One Piece fan that you watch or read it the first question they'll usually ask is where you are in it and it feels like that's a mark of progress in an adventure and i think that's really special. Just like the characters in the show, you're embarking on a journey. If I were to give any advice to new readers/viewers it would be to savor the moment you're in. One Piece is a piece of fiction and art that is truly about the journey instead of the destination. Don't worry about "being caught up" take it at your own pace and enjoy the moment you find yourself in and realize just how far you've come and how far you have left to go. Btw, in case anyone asks, my favorite character is Sabo and my favorite Straw Hat is Chopper

[devinescribe]

Hello everyone! I have some kind of important news!

Over the past four or five years I have enjoyed writing for all of you. All the wonderful people I have met and all the things I have accomplished!

As many of you know, I have some unfinished stories.

However, I am struggling to update because I am not as passionate about this account as I was.

I, will not be writing anymore. I understand if many of you decide to not support the account anymore.

I will be giving this account to my friend. She is a very talented author, younger than me, however. So I have a blurb she has written about herself, and I’m sure that you will enjoy her writing.

“Hi! Im not comfortable giving my name on the internet but my usernames on most things is Devine.Scribe! I’m 17 years old, I’m starting college in two weeks majoring in history and minoring in poli sci. I’m from Puerto Rico as well, and know Spanish! Like my friend, I am more than willing to write for ethnic or plus size reader, because I am BOTH OF THOSE 🙌

It has saddened me to see my friend lose interest in their writing, and seeing them struggle with their life irl, and struggle with not being able to have a more consistent uploading schedule.

I promise I will not A, delete any of their works without expressed permission, and B, make their account into something they wouldn’t have wanted. We have similar writing styles.

I have been tasked with, when I’m able to, finish writing their stories (such as 100 Promises, and My Sunshine) but also to create my own stories that I have loved to make. I also only write xreaders, but for different fandoms!

Here are some I will be writing for, and characters:

Percy Jackson (Show and Books, I’ve loved them since the beginning!)

Luke Castellan

Percy Jackson

Leo Valdez

To start! I can always add more!

My Hero Academia

Neito Monoma

Iida Tenya

Hitoshi Shinsou

(to start, of course I can add more if asked!)

Miss Peregrine’s Home(Movie, just started the books!)

Enoch

Jake

(Any of the other children would be platonic or family type of stories)

FNAF(Games, not movie, loved it but want this lol)

Micheal Afton

William Afton

Gregory(PLATONIC PLATONIC PLATONIC OR SIBLINGS ONLY)

Sun and Moon (not sure about this one yet but I’m willing to try 🫡 )

Hunger Games(TBOSAS)

Treech(my beloved)

Coriolanus

Sejanus

(Willing to write for more!)

Defendants RoR (slayed)

Morgie Le Fay

James Hook

Hades

(Willing to try and write for others and the other movies)

IHNMAIMS

Ted

Am

(I really love this short story and I hate Harlan Ellison horrible horrible man booo I hope he hates me for writing about his characters like this)

Demon Slayer

Giyuu

Zenitsu

Inosuke

Tanjiro

Obanai

(Willing to write for others!!)

I like lots of different things so you can always ask and I’ll tell you if I write for them or not!

Some rules are that I’m 17, so I would appreciate if people younger than 16 wouldn’t interact. I know I cannot handle what people do or who interacts with my content, but just like my friend, I also can get into dark content and writing it. Please use caution when reading my works, I will put warnings if necessary.

I won’t write smut!

Almost everything else is on the table!

Some other things I WONT write about

Incest

Explicit rape scenes(can mention trauma of it and passing comments about the trauma but not explicit depictions of it)

Pedophilia

That’s it for now, but if it changes I will add it!

I totally understand if you guys who liked my friends writing want to unfollow the page! As well as I know they are older, so I understand if some pages who don’t like people below 18 interacting or following decide to unfollow this page! I hope I can write and make people happy!”

Once again, thank you for all of your support through out these past four years. It has been so wonderful to get to know everyone. I won’t disappear completely, Devine can upload things I write that I send to them! But for now, as I move into a new chapter of my own book, I’ll be signing off. Thank you so much for everything my dearest readers,

Sery-Chan-13, logging off ❤️