#it is like 5am here

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 4: Deranged Bedfellows

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.5)

[starkspi]

"why, I had no part in that. you've always been this way!"

just a little something from @morningstarwrites fanfiction "of saints and sinners" which i'm obsessed with

[journey-to-the-attic]

happy fnaf movie (uk) release day!

[nordidia]

having a very rough night so raph doodles needed to be made

when in need, mash two interests together

[aimseytv]

people who are weird about artists sharing their own OCs make no sense to me. if you support an artist and you don’t bother getting into their own original art with their own world building and characters you’re missing out! it’s so fun to see artists i follow going down paths with their own OCs and creating a world with their own lore, side OCs and everything i find it fascinating

[moodlemcdoodle]

After a year of doing art in secret (and forgetting to post anything… I’m sorry I will have my backlog queued up soon!) I have finally accumulated enough power… to revive my ancient human superhero Sonic AU and make it actually good! Here’s a bunch of my sketches, mainly of Sonic and Tails but also of a bit of lore… More to come later!

[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.

[akascow]

niko sasaki “i know what you are” (🏳️‍🌈)

monty no last name “??!?” (🐦‍⬛)

alternative:

niko sasaki “i know what you are” (🏳️‍🌈)

edwin payne “??!?” (🏳️‍🌈)

[kijeu]

you ready, stay? [6 / ?? random 2024 stayweek gifs] ─★

[tobias-hankel]

I love how Spencer gets defensive of mentally ill unsubs. Just imagine how many comments he probably got about his mom growing up. That was the 80s and 90s - people were less aware of mental illness, made fun of it more, and people loved to talk.

I wonder if he always stuck up for her or if he couldn't. If he knew he shouldn't snap back at the neighborhood boys that were twice his size or the teacher that talked about things she didn't know about. I wonder if people made comments like that about Diana. Saying oh it's too bad what happened to poor Diana. She is too ill to work and her husband left her... She was so sweet too. And Spencer knows she is still sweet - that she can be sweet when she is lucid enough to remember who he is, when she reads to him and calls him Crash - even though she might never know that she is the reason he is bruised.

I like to think that Spencer stood up for her but he might also be too smart for that. He would have to shoulder those comments about his mom. He would go home and cry into his pillow because the world was hating on the only person he had left for something she can't control. But then Spencer gets himself into the FBI, gets a badge and a gun and a score of degrees, and he never has to listen to another negative comment about his mom - or anyone with mental illness.

Spencer might not have always been able to protect his mom, but he sure as shit isn't going to let anyone bad mouth her now.

[3-aem]

i really need stsg taking care of each other like so bad.

i do think suguru would be 10X better at it than gojo. He’d make gojo broth or smth when he’s sick and keep him hydrated, vs gojo would probably bring him like a 12 pack of sunny d equivalent and say he needs his vitamins.

[lavenoon]

@naffeclipse realized it's criminal I haven't drawn him with claws so far, since I love inflicting retractable claws on any version of the dca I touch

*self insert is not a girl (he/she)

og detective au by sunnys-aesthetic!

[booplesnotts-art]

hi! could you maybe draw micheal and/or dagon?

Hello hello! Of course🖤

So I’ve literally never drawn Dagon before in my life and this was a STRUGGLE so I am sorry if it doesn’t really look like them I tried😭😭

I planned on answering this request with a drawing of them actually interacting but this is what I have for now

I plan on drawing them kissing though I mean what

Bonus cause I thought I was funny with this one

[flowersinmidgar]

3 hours of fishing and he doesnt even know if he can eat the damn thing

[daeyumi]

Sandsea ☀️🏜️💧

[Linktober 2022 Day 8: Boat]

[mettywiththenotes]

Thinking about how Ochako acts in 425

These two moments in the past come to mind

Just after Kamino:

And in the war arc:

Ochako's character encompasses at least two things; the whole "who protects the heroes who need protecting" and wanting the people around her to be happy. The latter has the side effect of moments like the above where during or after a disastrous event, she thinks about how she doesn't like how much has changed and wishes for things to "go back to how they were"

So I think some of that leads back to 425

It almost feels like an attempt to bring back the usual shenanigans and teasing of the class in their own ways

To me, this isn't just Ochako making a comment about Izuku's hair. This is her saying "hey things have changed, I hope they go back to normal". It falls in line with what Ochako is like and what we've been shown about her before

This said within the context of Izuku's behaviour in the chapter too, the way he's both unusually quiet and also kind of seems to be trying to reach out to Ochako and Shouto is sad. It's almost like Ochako's words could be viewed as "you've changed, I hope you go back to your normal self". It's sad because Izuku isn't behaving like he usually would, he's strangely quiet and it's understandable because of everything he's been through and everything he's continuing to go through

Again, more shenanigans, and Ochako is smiling and laughing and Izuku just. stares

Things seem to have gone back to how they used to be, except they haven't, not really

Imo, while the characters are acting as if things will go back to normal, the story makes it clear in 424 and 425 that things are still different and have changed. Over and over, it's people saying/implying "can't wait for things to go back to the way they were!" and immediately being hit with "will they ever though?"