#sorry for the lack of new stuff

[snarkspawn]

tchk.

[brodudemanbroski]

here’s a deadpool drawing from a week ago i forgot to post here!!

[cluedoenthusiast]

ive invented a new game its called “Shadow Monkey Mystery: Who’s Taking Over?” (still working on the name)

you have to guess whose brain is inside the persons body in the picture i hope that makes sense

miles as jamie

miles as alexa

alex and alexa swapping

alex as miles

jamie as miles

matt as al

miles as al

jamie as al (and possible miles as alexa)

miles as matt

no idea who these are

nicks very hard to recognise whereas you can spot miles a mile away

feel free to play along

[ninacarstairss]

there is a tremendous lack of chloe green and shara wheeler content on this app and we should be fixing that

[5t4r5and5uch01]

FANART FOR @cheezthatboiii ‘s TMNT AU!! TMNT OVERGAME ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️

LEONARDO!!! I literally love his design sm hes such a gooberr, him and his goofy braces and scarf AGHH

I also drew their Mikey earlier today, hes so gremlin coded T-T <33

No cuz i’ve been drawing them none stop yall THEY R SO AHSBSBBSBS

You guys should REALLY check them out!! Peak designs frfr‼️

[abracadav-r]

i can't be one of those ppl who are like "5e sucks, play ad&d" bc look at this new art of halaster

[alexkeller-doodles]

I love your art style, its so squishy and adorable!!!

If your still open for requests, can I request something Gazalex? Maybe them just cuddling on a couch with a ton of blankets and some hot chocolate?

Hope your having a good winter and happy holidays! :)

[day 40] thank you so much for your sweet words anon🥺💞

[icewindandboringhorror]

examining a seemingly normal image only to slowly realize the clear signs of AI generated art.... i know what you are... you cannot hide your true nature from me... go back where you came from... out of my sight with haste, wretched and vile husk

[gay-jesus-probably]

(Feel free to ignore this-! I’m just happy to hear someone’s deep takes on Zelda)

I really love your deep dives and interpretations/discussions on the Gerudo people and their history, influence and life in BOTW/TOTK (I totally agree with all you’ve said)

I just want to ask/Point out (after reading your imperialism post about TOTK) didn’t the Zora for many years like- not want to serve or be a part of the Hylian families army either? Like, even before Mipha’s death, weren’t the Zora very much against conforming to the Hylian’s rules and such? (In every game?) I’m a bit confused on how Hyrule is split up, the Zora’s having their own kingdom(s), the Rito and Goron’s having elder’s/their own leaders but still serving the royal family??

It’s always bothered me how these separate races all still have statues to the Goddess Hylia (Started in BOTW) and not their own deity’s to pray to or follow (Like the Zora praying to Nayru makes sense, or even something like Jabu Jabu to bring back- or the Rito could’ve prayed to Valoo, a great dragon or something.)

It just feels like Nintendo COULD’VE put so much care into all their races stories and histories! But oops no this game will be for Kids(TM) and we can’t put anything too deep or serious. Makes me sad :( I wanted to see them in a deeper context.

Oh yeah, it's very weird that they just put zero effort into explaining some of the worldbuilding. I mean, in BOTW it makes perfect sense to have the races be off doing their own things! It's post apocalypse, Hyrule does not exist anymore, these different communities have no real reason to interact with each other! And I really liked that BOTW outright showed that there was no particular effort for diplomacy, but people still got along as individuals - I liked that we saw different races hanging around each other. I loved that there were Gerudo in Goron Town to trade for their gems, I loved that Goron were allowed into Gerudo Town because they're a race of rock people that legitimately don't have any real need for gender and just use masculine terms by their own choice, and the Gerudo understood that. And I loved the whole Tarrey Town sidequest, because it actually felt really satisfying to build up a new town that had inhabitants from all the races, not for any particular reason, but just because they were people that wanted to live there and work together. They didn't need a big central government to make it a whole Thing; they were just getting by.

And we also saw the less good side of these things, like that one guy in Hateno that greeted you at the gate, and decided Link was trustworthy specifically because he was Hylian, making it clear that xenophobia still existed. I like that Kass was kind of thrown by Link asking if he was a giant bird, and the implication that Link was being kinda insensitive there and Kass was choosing not to be offended. I liked that there was a Hylian couple on their honeymoon in Rito village because the guy genuinely loved the town and its culture, while his new wife looked down on the Rito and hated being around them. And I liked that the older Zora still held a grudge against Hyrule for many things, up to and including the fact that Mipha died defending it, and the older generation would rather risk everyone's wellbeing than accept help from a Hylian that had been involved. And I like that you can run into other Hylian's near Zora's domain that outright tell you Zora have been trying to recruit them to do something important, but they all refused to get involved because they don't think that those weird fish people could have anything serious going on and it all seemed really sketchy.

My point is, BOTW really did feel like it'd been a hundred years since the end of the world, and everyone was just trying to get by and live their lives. You saw people being open minded and accepting other races for no other reason than the fact that they were all people, and you saw people being petty and bigoted just because they didn't trust people that looked and acted differently from them, but for the most part people were all just getting by and doing their own thing. BOTW gave the impression that Hyrule had been an equal alliance between the Hylian's, Zora, Goron, Rito and Gerudo (and with the Sheikah having a considerably less equal role, specifically built on the Sheikah having been forced to submit to cultural genocide to save their own lives, and the Yiga clan being the survivors that fought back instead), with Hyrule acting as sort of the core of the alliance, if only due to literally being in the geographic middle.

I mean fuck, the existence of the Divine Beasts suggests that things are equal! Yeah, Hyrule has a royal family with holy powers due to literally being the descendants of a Goddess, and they're the ones that always get the reincarnation of the Hero that's the only one who can wield the bullshit OP magic sword... but they don't get a Divine Beast (Link's dinky little DLC motorcycle doesn't count). The Divine Beasts were specifically made to be weapons of mass destruction, and they were specifically made for the non-Hylian races. That really does suggest an active effort being taken to balance the scales, that the ancient people saw that only Hylian's were granted divine favour, and so if the gods wouldn't give that power to other races, they'd fucking make it themselves. The existence of the Divine Beasts feels like a promise to keep everyone on equal footing, and say what you will about pre-Calamity Hyrule, but they didn't even question keeping that promise.

...And then in TOTK, all of that's just gone. The Sheikah aren't their own people with a complicated relationship to the throne, now they're just Hylian's with a different aesthetic. The 'alliance' between the races turns out to be built on Hyrule's first King and Queen pointing their stockpile of magical nukes at everyone and asking them politely to become their subjects, and pretending not to notice the implied threat that they'd magically nuke anyone who refused. In BOTW the Sheikah race being sworn servants of the Hylian royal family was acknowledged as a fucked up situation, and that power imbalance being horribly abused in the past was what created the Yiga clan. In TOTK, we're outright told that Rito, Goron, Zora and Gerudo all exist for the sole purpose of serving the Hylian royal family, and that is framed as a good thing and the proper way of the world; the first sign of Ganondorf being evil is that he refuses to submit.

And even putting all that super gross ancient past stuff aside, the present day is equally fucked. Hyrule has been gone for a century. In BOTW, few people even remembered that Zelda had ever existed, and of those people not many of them cared. Nobody was really interested in having a central government, they were all getting by just fine on their own. And again, it was made pretty clear that the pre-calamity situation had been an actively maintained collective alliance between independent nations. There was a reason that people were predicting that Hyrule's monarchy would be abolished in TOTK, and that's because we all saw that there was literally no reason for anyone other than the Sheikah to respect Zelda's authority as a ruler - the Zora were the only other people to still remember her, and they were completely done with the Hylian royal family anyways. If Zelda rolled up declaring herself the Queen of Hyrule anywhere else, she'd be laughed out of town, because that's the standard response to a random teenager showing up and informing you she was actually the highest authority in the land. Zelda had no inherent authority left at the end of BOTW, if she wanted to be in charge, she'd need to earn it. That's the state of the world that we were shown.

Except nope, nevermind, Zelda's the almighty God Princess of the world and literally everyone mindlessly accepts her ultimate authority. She can order people to strip naked and walk into a monster den to die for her amusement, and they would immediately do it without asking any questions (yes I know the underwear thing was a misunderstanding, but the fact that everyone jumped to follow the misheard order without a single question is horrifying). And the imposter Zelda arc just hammers home the point that Zelda is in a completely unearned, lifelong position as dictator of the world, and literally nobody cares if she abuses that power. Zelda brainwashed Yunobo and forced him to ruin his own business and nearly destroy his own people? He's just worried she'll be angry that the mask keeping him brainwashed was destroyed. Zelda summons a giant monster to attack Yunobo and Link then walks away? Oh my god, the giant monster Zelda just summoned to kill us might hurt her, we have to save Zelda from it! Zelda literally openly attacks King Dorephan and tries to murder him? He'd rather go missing in the middle of a crisis and suffer alone in hiding than let anyone know that Zelda just tried to kill him. I don't understand why they bothered with the fake Zelda arc, because literally nothing the fake Zelda does is allowed to have consequences.

It just doesn't make any goddamn sense. Nobody feels real anymore, there's no politics between the races, there's no reason for anything being the way it is now. The entire world of Hyrule has been reduced to just Zelda's Fanclub, and nobody would ever consider doubting her for a second. I don't understand why the fake Zelda arc is in the game, because it's never actually allowed to be part of the story. Nobody actually cares about 'Zelda' tormenting people, and so we're told that there is literally nothing that can possibly happen to make Zelda lose her authority. There's no stakes. We're not supposed to care about anyone who isn't Zelda, we're not given any real reason to care about Zelda herself, and so why the fuck are we still here?

...I've distracted myself a lot here lmaoo, I'm not really sure where I was going with all of this beyond just rambling about shitty writing and bad continuity. The point is, BOTW had some really good writing and worldbuilding. That Hyrule felt like a real place inhabited by actual people, and the different races were their own, independent people. When they worked together, it was a sign of them putting time and effort into reaching out to each other and meet on the same level. Meanwhile TOTK feels like it's made of fucking cardboard most of the time.

(Also for the record I agree that the Goddess statues being Literally Everywhere was kinda fucked, BUT I'm willing to let it slide as a matter of just game design; that's where you go to trade spirit orbs for upgrades, so you want a spot to do that in every major town for player convenience. And using different deities in different areas wouldn't work, because the players are introduced to the mechanic with a goddess statue; they're not gonna naturally assume that the statue of a giant fish can do that too, so most of them would assume the statue is scenery and just ignore it. I thought it was at least a nice touch that the goddess statues had different decorations in some towns, and that some towns put the statues away from the main areas; it gave the impression that while everyone while worshipping Hylia was widespread, everyone was doing it differently, and in some places it wasn't very popular - just look at the Kakariko statue being in the middle of town with a well maintained pond surrounding it and torches to draw more attention to it, then compare that to the Gerudo Town statue being down a side street on the edge of town, away from the main gate, with nothing of any real importance nearby, and nothing to get people's attention. It really works with the Sheikah's culture being built on their devotion to the Goddess, while the Gerudo's history with Hylia and her followers is a lot more complicated, and so their statue's location implies that worship of Hylia is pretty unpopular among the Gerudo.)

[employee052]

me in the day thinking abt tsp: hehe funny british man get mad n pissy, buckets and average man

me at 2am: narry do you ever wonder if my worries of designing you in an original way are, in a sense, dramatic irony when considering the fact that its very much related to the topics of ultra deluxe, where both of us got stuck in the cycle of feeling anxious over changing ourselves for the sake of pleasing others and of fear of driving them away, only to realise that in giving external reviews of our art power and desperately trying to appeal to all of them do we end up losing the original joy of the art? do you think its fucked up how through this experience, ive ended up with a skip button ending of my own where ive been forcing myself to make the content i think others would love instead of the ones i love personally. would a redesign even feel fitting? should i forgo the whole originality aspect and just let you be yourself, like how i should let myself make the art i want to make, and let you speak and be heard rather than skipped over?

the narrator, tired: For fucks sake, go tO BED-

[warden-melli]

Look at how pretty these are 🥹🥹🥹

I need to decide which cards to put in them

[cuubism]

If you don't mind me asking - what do you think Dream's attitude/reaction towards Tolkien's works (including the legendarium!) would be? (I'm asking a lot of Sandman bloggers this, because I'm extremely curious regarding your takes on this.)

oh! hang on i gotta brush up on my tolkien because i haven't actually read any of the books since like. 2011.

i guess my main thought would be about how dream missed like, 95% of his work when he was stuck in his Jar. my understanding (read: google search) is that tolkien was building up the mythology for his stories before 1916 (when dream was captured), but most of it was not finished/published until a while after.

(this became an insane and mostly unrelated rant i am so so sorry)

i think a lot about how much of his own... area of work and power dream missed when he was trapped. the 20th century, generally speaking, was a time of rapid growth in storytelling methods and media more generally. dream missed almost all of radio, particularly radio as it became a medium for stories. radio was invented in the late 1890s but didn't see a proper rise into a storytelling medium, rather than mainly a direct communication one, until around the 30s. so dream missed the creation and growth of the first, i guess you would call it, networked storytelling, and technological storytelling, and what was... probably? the biggest return to an auditory type of storytelling since the original oral tradition, folk tales, great epics etc, for radio at its peak of cultural relevance (at least in the US and probably the ""West"" more generally, alas i can't speak as knowledgeably for other parts of the world, obviously plenty of other parts of the world had radio in the early 20th century and onward, but i don't know much about its use as a fictional storytelling medium versus for news and government broadcasts. something to look into! part of why radio became such a medium in the usa was because of our rampant capitalism and commercialism lol, so less capitalistic places might have approached it differently - here, advertisers wanted to figure out a way to monetize radio better, but obviously people aren't going to just listen to hours of ads, so they packaged them around stories, live music performances, and variety shows. that's where soap operas as a form come from -- they were originally sponsored by soap companies! also serials, though of course books have also been serialized in the past. and sponsored radio programs also birthed the sort of episodic comedies that eventually evolved into the half hour TV comedies we know today)

which also means - as a direct result of missing radio, dream also missed the rise of television as a medium - it grew directly out of radio, even the big networks we know today, CBS, NBC, and ABC were originally radio networks. television has ended up being a huge change in visual storytelling, not only in its inception, but especially in its more recent years - it's probably the only long-form audiovisual storytelling medium, which is something that didn't really exist before. huge shift in storytelling possibilities. he also missed the development of comic books, and the internet, and the resulting increased accessibility of art and storytelling to both artists and art lovers. he missed an absolutely huge, HUGE shift in the democratization of art and the ability to share it. and, once again, the development of totally new methods of storytelling in the form of internet video! not to even mention the accessibility of MUSIC, music recording and sharing was still in its infancy when dream was imprisoned and now you can get, and make, and share pretty much any music imaginable! and the new genres! and the intermediality of everything and the cross-cultural awareness!

this is not even getting into the new ease of photography, or film, which was also relatively new in 1916. imagine going into a coma when there were only silent films, and waking up to everyone and their mother making tiktoks. the last film you saw was one of chaplin's or something and then you come back and see interstellar in imax 3d. i think i'd explode. (dream would love film, too, it's very dreamlike)

dream returning to the waking world in 2022 and immediately having the entirety of tiktok beamed directly into his head:

(another thing i think about a lot but won't get into because i'm already rambling - hob witnessing the entire development of accessible writing from the printing press to fucking social media. insanity. i want to pick his brain on it

what pushed hob over the edge, do you think. what's the one thing he saw written online that briefly made him regret ever getting involved in printing at all and wish everyone was illiterate again. it was not porn, btw, mr. monsterfucker gadling can handle anything, ok. no, it was something much worse...)

anyway. rambling over. this is all to say that i am not a tolkien expert and haven't read much of his stuff anywhere recently - though i was quite obsessed with it in middle/high school - so my main thought is in relation to dream getting cut off from all of these great stories. it must have been like, to put it flippantly, your favorite tv show getting cancelled halfway through after a cliffhanger XD. he has all these stories from great storytellers - tolkien included - storytellers who are building their whole own worlds in his realm, storytellers he's nurturing and supporting in his own way - and gets ripped away from them. and when he returns, they're all gone.

here's hoping someone who knows more about tolkien can give you an answer more specifically relevant to that. that's all i got for now 😂

[idioticbat]

i don’t think i’ve ever posted this here so here it goes

[wizardsimper]

Hoping that in the next patch they stop tweaking characters personalities and start fleshing out Wyll's storyline...

[ruelpsen]

ofc the one time on this break that I finally had the house to myself and was hoping to record, I found out right before some news that totally killed the mood 😑

[ashfdhfgdsfk]

might remake to a new account entirely and change the name i go by