#technically .. art... included. a little bit. just a small doodle but whatever

[ciagent8]

blocktales demo 4 spoilers... whatever go my silly blocktales ranting

CAPTAIN TROTTERRRRRRRRRRRRR AAUHHHGHHHGHGHHHGHGHGH

this is probably going to mainly be about captain trotter 🔥i'll leave the ancients ranting up to scrybe because they love ancient egypt. but CALYPSOOO. CAPTAINNNN

dude there is literally nobody left to live the captain's legacy except calypso probably. think about it. his entire crew died in the temple and considering how he acts + the fact his entire crew is poor, he probably didn't plunder that many people?? even if he did they wouldnt know him personally right

so the only person left to keep his legacy alive. to remember him

is the person he thought betrayed him in the end

AND. THE FACT THAT HIS DREAM FOR YEARS WAS TO GET THE TEMPLE TREASURE. AND HE HAD TO WATCH HIS CREW DIE. AND HE HAD TO DIE. WHAT THE UFCK

something something maybe theres more to the fact that he called the player "sharkbait" . evil metaphors or whatever

ALSO. WHY WAS THE PLAYER KIND OF AN ASSHOLE THIS CHAPTER??? directly going for the sword after being told not to. i know we had to but for the love of god you couldve atleast waited for captain trotter to leave the area first

also they barely batted an eye when calypso was talking after the ancients battle. literally just walked up and grabbed the firebrand card 💔

ALSO . THE FACT THAT CALYPSO STAYED TO HELP CAPTAIN TROTTER ACHIEVE HIS DREAM. THE DREAM THAT GOT HIM AND HIS CREW KILLED. IMAGINE HOW THAT FEELS ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING SHE WAS THE ONE WHO PUSHED HIM INTO THE LAVA

also this demo has been the first time we've seen a sword wielder 1. be influenced by a sword DURING the chapter, not before (captain trotter) 2. SURVIVE being influenced by a sword (griefer) also cruel king isnt important but. FUcking. "I hope the King is alright" im gonna jump bro HES DEAD

ANYWAY the ancients bossfight ost was fire. first song with lyrics for blocktales and it was amazing. CAPTAIN TROTTER'S THEME WAS ALSO PEAK . BOTH OF THEM ARE PEAK 🔥🔥🔥

just saw this im going to throw a brick at someone Oh my god why would you do that

MOVING AWAY FROM CAPTAIN TROTTER. GRIEFER CURED YAYAYAYAYYAYAYA i LOVE his new design

also he was so silly. me when he offered the player bloxys. he offered to play games with player. i really like griefer wahhhh

his attacks for his call card are sick btw. its a shame that like half the time he uses them its on an enemy with defense that he can't attack 😭

also also . uhmm waiter waiter more kyoko content please. pretty please? next chapter at least? 🙏kyoko wahhh

by the way

love this guy. hes stupid /pos i love how he goes between saying "thou" and "thy" and then saying that the housing market is awful. also yes this is an actual image that just shows up in the chapter

uhmm i still need to play pre-prologue but yeah. i love blocktale 🥺🥺

[kyoupann]

Please do more of the writing head canons. It’s really interesting to see other people’s ideas on the topic, so if you can be bothered, I would highly appreciate more, thanks bye <3

Y’all don’t know how happy I am to talk about these headcanons, they are my babies and I love them so much :’) thanks for asking g <3

Handwriting Headcanons

Same dynamic as before, try to guess whose handwriting it is before reading and tell me how many you got right! <3

You can find the first post here (no need to check it tho)

Quick disclaimer: halfway through making my initial notes, I remembered I had one (1) single lesson of graphology in my applied linguistics class, but that was a year ago and some information might be off. I just thought it was neat to include.

Another quick disclaimer: I don’t know much about Hylian, but I like to think it has a similar stroke system to Japanese, so the pressure and accuracy of your strokes play a major role in your handwriting (among other things, ofc.) so there are some parts where I focus more on that

(First Row, from left to right)

Sky

Our first boy is mother hen! Believe it or not, he has the prettiest handwriting out of all of them! Sky: probably has nice, even elegant handwriting because Sun forced him to practice when they were little. In the end, that paid off because his handwriting is the prettiest one. There’s no pressure, but he is confident in what he writes that his lines aren’t thin. Mistakes? what is that? this boy has impeccable grammar and spelling. No mechanic errors to be found in his letters! I’d like to think that many of Hyrule’s classic/staple poems were originally written by the firt king aka sky child. Like, imagine, after a retiring from being a Person of Power (as the first ruler), Sky finds comfort in the arts: revisits his old woodcarvings and starts writing poetry about the world he still doesn’t fully understand. wowie. tldr: sky writes poetry and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.

This is what one of his letters would look like: 

Next one is the one and only, our Hero of Time

2. Time

I’ll die on the “Time didn’t know how to read and write” hill. His handwriting is simple, not pretty but not messy. It has some grammar and spelling mistakes here and there. Can become unreadable if writing in a hurry, he sorts of forgets spaces between words are a thing/letters have different sizes and lowercase letters end up the same size as capital letters. I’m not saying he sometimes forgets to write articles: he just doesn’t want to. Honestly, he just has this dad-neat handwriting. He is a gentle dad and writes like a dad, if he puts too much pressure onto the paper, his handwriting become too sharp/angle-ish and ends up looking ugly. And as much as he would like to not care about it, in the end he does (:

Malon taught him how to write and it was quite the experience. At first he didn’t want to because he was ‘too old’ to learn and it was torture at first, but now look at him devouring his cowboy novels. 

A chunk of his handwriting: 

*sniff* such a dad quote.

3. my mansss, your  4x1 deal at Target: Four

Look, my boy is patient! He could do some nice and fancy lettering if he wanted to. He was taught that handwriting and spelling said a whole lot about him as a person, you know, like a first impression kinda thing; so he always proof reads more than twice before sending ­a letter. Super rare grammar mistakes.

The faster he writes, the more slant his writing becomes. Under stress/ when not sure how to write things down, run-on sentences are everywhere and his handwriting is inconsistent in general (I don’t headcanon each part of him having completely different handwriting because handwriting becomes muscle memory over time. It’s just slightly different variations of the same, like idk  Vio’s handwriting is neater than Green’s and Red writes hearts instead of any dot/circle and no, I do not take constructive criticism on that, jk i do.) Adding on to each of the colours’ handwriting, I’d think Red and Green write with words slanted to the right( inclined), Vio is a mix of the opposite, so reclined and straight, and my mans blue a true neutral writes straight (kinda like Time’s).

The logic behind this is that inclined writing supposedly means honesty and need for giving (and getting) affection; reclined means, as you can probably imagine,  defensiveness and repression of true feelings, but also shows great concentration; straight handwriting means self-control, observation and reflection as well as distrust and indifference. But as complete being (tm), Four just writes as in the image example which is not too straight and not too inclined, and I believe that’s a good middle for him

HOWEVER, if I’m feeling in the mood for crack, I totally accept this boy to have the ugliest, chicken scratches-looking handwriting! :’D It’s just funny to think that someone like him, who has to be precise and careful in his work, can't write neatly to save his life. 

One of his letters would look like this: 

Also I just LOVE how his hero titles look in this font ksksks

and that’s

(Middle row, from left to right)

4.- Mister Bunny Boy - Legend

His uncle taught him how to write. I’d call his handwriting pretty and neat at a first glance, but he presses too hard on the paper, most of the time staining the back or the following page. Sometimes will retrace some words if he doesn’t like how it looks (which only makes it messier). According to my notes, a thick or strong handwriting represents determination/commitment.

As I also headcanon him to know many languages, mechanical errors are more present than grammar ones; that is, weird capitalisation of words. Punctuation is somewhere in between; uses too many commas when he should just cut the sentence. he mixes punctuation from two languages or more in writing when too distracted (or too focused, because, well, pressure.); when he writes for himself, he has almost no problem following said language’s punctuation rules. Also, this is just polyglot culture, and I’m projecting a bit, but when he forgets a word in the language he’s writing, he just replaces it with its equivalent in another language because we don’t care about fluency, but rather functionality. in this household (more on that in my language hc, ksksks).

An example of his writing:

so powerful

4.-  Mr. Wolfman, howl me a song - Twilight

I don’t have much for him because 1) I don’t think he writes a lot and 2) he is a hands-on/visual learner, I’ll die by that. He only learnt how to write because Ulli insisted it was important and he was not about to disrespect his momma; he IS That Guy, but doesn’t really write enough to have neat handwriting.

Many people seem to overlook the fact that his house is filled with books and write him as completely illiterate (which if not explored properly, ends up feeling a bit disrespectful and full of prejudice, but go off I guess; and that’s on my core Headcanons for Twi); however, he sticks to simple sentences. Knowing how to read and understanding a text is different from knowing how to write them. Like, when we would see a semicolon and understand its position in the text, but didn’t understand the nature of it. Is this clear? idk i’m sorry. So yeah, boy reads a lot, writes very little.

As for his Actual Handwriting, as opposed to Legend, his handwriting is thiccc but not because he presses into the paper; he is just that messy, he has no sense of ink-flow-control, he does what he can with what he has. To the untrained eye, his handwriting illegible letters like v, n, u are very similar; when he makes notes for himself he does it in the form of doodles or small ‘icons’. But! He reads a lot, so he rarely makes spelling mistakes (: he is your go-to guy when you don’t know how to write a word.

An example of his writing:

He keeps a journal, sue me.

3. My first born- Warrior

Okay, first off... I accept this is completely biased. I saw the idea and said “That’s True”. If you haven’t, please read Effective Communication; or The Lack of Thereof by htruona, a fic where the boys reflect on the language barriers between them. It’s incredibly funny and probably what made me start making these silly notes. So, if you’ve read that fic, you know where I’m going.

My man, Warrior, can’t fucking write. I mean, he physically can, but it’s very bad. Here’s the reason for it, tho, and it’s not his fault: Technically, he knew how to write alright but he joined the military and whatever note he had to write had to be concise or in the worst case coded. He mixes capital and lowercase letters. If we consider that he joined the military at around 15, his handwriting and grammar had yet to continue developing. Just think about how after summer break, your handwriting was always slightly worse than before because you didn’t write for an entire month. Now think what 2 years can do to that. Hmm, not cool, dude. He makes quick notes, when writing he’s all gotta go fast. he is the lighting mcqueen of writing; good for emergency messages, not ideal for love letters. His punctuation also suffered a lot, he only know full stops and commas and hardly uses them. A sentence for him is either one word or fifty without a single comma, no inbetween.

His hero title and an example of his writing.

(Bottom row, or what I like to call “fuck cursive” row)

7.- Magic man - Hyrule

I’m basic and I do agree with the popular headcanon of he not knowing how to write because well, y’all know his Hyrule. He only knows how to write his name because that’s important, same with numbers. I don’t see why would he write/read except checking the roadsigns. (he can even use this as an excuse for getting lost frequently; he thought it said something different.) But I do think that because his habitual reading consists of roadsigns, his ‘punctuation’ is weird af and places full stops/points/periods at the same level of his words and his commas/question/exclamation marks below them. Yk, creative license. Sadly, I don’t have much about my magic hands man so here’s what his writing would look like if he actually wrote a paragraph:

Man, I love Hyrule.

8.- Man, I don’t understand this boy -  Wild

Cursive? ain’t nobody have the time for that. He woke up and had to save the world in his underwear while not knowing how to read nor write.  He learnt during his journey and was taught by multiple people from different regions, that explains his inconsistent spelling of things and names for them. So Wild knows language variations for many items and uses them interchangeably (even if they aren’t exactly the same). Another headcanon related to writing/language skills that I’ve been thinking about is that if the shrine was able to cause amnesia, I’m sure there were other areas in the brain affected which leads us to language disorders such as agraphia and aphasia. But that’s a story for another day ksksksk

An example of his writing (after relearning)

9.- The best of sons - Wind

I don’t have much for him and that makes me sad. Look, he’s a kid, doing kid things like stabbing dudes on the head. This boy was taught cursive by his grandma, but could never do it and no one needs it anyway. His handwriting is good enough for his pirate life, Tetra is the one to handle Official stuff, he just gotta sign. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound. He is still relatively young and can correct his handwriting if he desires. But same as Wild, with how many times he’s been thrown out and hit his head, I’m starting to consider some language disorder for him as well.

An example of his writing:

aaand that’s it.

Thanks, y’all for showing interest in this silly thing uwu it was fun to finally talk about this. If you ever want to discuss ideas/headcanons(especially if they are related to language and culture), I’m your person (: I’m always happy to hear new headcanons. Feel free to add anything to this post either in a reply or in a reblog, I’d love to hear from y’all <3<3

[ravenwolfie97]

2020 Art Summary

Yep, it’s 2021 already. 2020 is finally over. It felt like it lasted forever, and it felt like the end would never come, but here we are. Crazy how the time flew by.

I felt like I didn’t get much art done this year because of Current World Event, but I made a lot more than I thought I did. Even some of my new favorite pieces came out of this year, so I think that’s worth celebrating and looking back upon!

I was insanely productive during the first month of 2020, and looking back I was surprised at all the stuff I did, but then I remembered that that winter season was actually one of the best times of my life! I started being more socially involved, and I think my newfound drive at the time translated into all the art I pumped out this month. This is just a small fraction of what I made in January, but I only have so much space. Quite a few complex pieces in both style exploration and polishing my own style.

Apparently February was a rather intimate month. Things began to slow down in terms of my own art here, with me spending more time in social settings and school work ramping up, I didn’t have as much time to coop up in my room to draw. I did wanna do something for a friend’s Valentine’s Day OC art challenge, so I drew my lovey-dovey couple from Dance of 1000 Words havin’ a dance. Nothing actually came of that challenge, but it was fun to do regardless.

One of the things I was most proud of in the winter season was making more friends, and one of the closest friends I made was completely coincidental. I met a person named Kiri on the bus one night I decided to volunteer somewhere by myself, and we ended up chatting and getting along. They quickly told me their tumblr username, and I shot them a message immediately after they left. A couple days later, we met up for brunch, and we started becoming really close friends and creative partners!

Not much else happened in March cuz that’s when Current World Event started becoming an issue, but Kiri and I still kept in close touch and we randomly started developing a concept for a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Galar Edition. These are a handful of characters we thought up, with Skipper the Scorbunny and Dross the Dreepy as the main characters, Morgrem as the main antagonist, and some shopkeepers such as those of the Greedent Bank and the Indeedee General Store. This was also my first time drawing all of these Galar Pokemon (except Scorbunny, but I also made Skipper a bit more unique than a regular Scorbunny).

Lots of events happened this month. First of all, Steven Universe Future ended, one of my favorite and most influential shows was no longer continuing. I had to do something as tribute, both as a send-off to one of the greatest cartoons in the world and as a cathartic release for my feelings towards it.

A while later, I got the opportunity to start playing an MMO in beta called Fer.al, by the same people who made Animal Jam, which coincidentally I had also beta tested for back in the day. I ended up getting really attached to my first character, a Senri I named Sasha, and though I’ve made more characters than them since, they’re still my absolute favorite. Though I haven’t touched the game in a few months, I was really engrossed for a long time and enjoyed playing through the beta and early access phases.

At the end of the month, some friends of mine invited to a roleplay group with some mutuals, and we all played characters in a crime syndicate. Just a bunch of ragtag thieves and criminals who ended up together in order to protect an artifact called the Crown of Thieves, which was essentially a flag to be taken by other groups to prove that they are the best thieves in the land. My character was based heavily on my sona (if it wasn’t obvious) and was also influenced by Cloud Strife, since the FFVII Remake had just come out and I was super into watching the cutscenes at the time. My character’s (code)name is Valkyrie, and they are a mercenary, going between multiple different employers to carry out whatever duties they need to do. They have a more complicated backstory, but presently they were recently hired by recommendation of their friend Shark (played by @shmoots-universe​ who is also My friend now ily maya) who works with a group called the Court Cards who are currently in possession of the Crown of Thieves. Valk never really had a place to call home, but staying with this group of people had to be the closest they could get to that feeling. They still sleep with a knife under their pillow because of trust issue but that’s okay.

Okay, so technically these examples started in April, but I continued making content with them in May, and the month was just pretty void of art in general, so here I am addressing them.

There were two main things I worked on this month: a Steven Universe AU of my own and the whole #sixfanarts thing that kicked off around then. Let’s start with the fanart bits. I did two and a half of them (six in April and nine in May), and it was so much fun to be able to draw stuff I don’t normally do! My personal favorites are shown here: Blake Belladonna from RWBY, Roll from Megaman, Yuki Konno from Sword Art Online, and Link from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The other thing I’d been planning for a while was a Steven Universe AU, probably to cope with the show being over but also because I was inspired by a lot of those SU AU artists I started following at the time. I won’t share the details here because it’s gonna have its own blog at some point, but the example I’ve shown here is of a comic I made loosely in order to introduce a divergence in the plot of the story as well as introduce a character unique to my AU. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to draw the characters and get a feel for the style.

As the year progressed, my amount of art I made per month began to dwindle, this time mostly because school was kicking my ass especially hard with finals. However, I took what time I had to get some backburner pieces finished, like the Tigerlily picture which I sketched out a couple months back, and the Gunvolt picture which I started working on SIX YEARS AGO. I don’t quite know why I got the urge to work on it again after so long, but it was nice to finally realize. The other drawing for DOTS was done in the dead of night but I was really happy with how it came out.

Despite only having two summer classes left of school, this month was really rough because they demanded a lot of my time and attention. I did not have the gumption to do anything digital, so I stuck to my sketchbook to get out what I felt like getting out.

My friends and I did a stream of the game Helltaker, and I really enjoyed the concept, so in following my friends I made my own Helltaker demon OC named Raksha the Ravenous Demon (it’s a pun but also got mythical insp). I also got super into Hazbin Hotel at this point, mostly because the Addict music video dropped and I couldn’t get enough of it, so I doodled Angel Dust cuz I felt like it. The other drawing I did was actually a free commission I gave a friend of mine as a prize for a trivia game show I ran back in June. He along with a couple other friends got some free drawings from me for getting the top three scores, and this one in particular was fun because of how interesting it was. He wanted me to draw a video game reviewer called the Irate Gamer from a specific moment, and I decided to go ham and just make it as dramatic as possible.

University classes finally wrapped up and right after that I was in the process of moving out of my apartment and getting adjusted to living with my parents again. I did a couple of agg.io drawing sessions with my friends from the Court Cards group as well as a new Dungeons and Dragons homebrew group I had joined. I drew some more of Valkyrie and came up with a design for my DND character Qakuqtuq (or Kai for short). He is monkey grandpa and I love him.

My main focus was on finishing a polished piece for my friend Cake, whose birthday was in the upcoming month. I wanted it to be as amazing as possible, so I put a lot of time into getting more detailed and making them look good. In addition to that, I did a few TOME doodles just for fun. The creature on the bottom was for this month’s art challenge on my Discord server where we made original TOMERPG monsters, and I created Hundylow, a Crystal-element monster based on the Grindylow from English folklore.

This month was a lot more productive than the past few had been. I tried to do a 31-day art challenge called Creatober but failed to get past the third prompt because I was still swamped with other work. I’m still happy with what little I did, including the piece with my characters Kyle and Guarudan from DSWD.

I don’t remember how, but I also suddenly rediscovered an old Flipnote Hatena series called Tales of LostClan, a Warriors fan series that I would say was the most obscure thing I’ve ever been super invested in. It was what got me into the actual Warriors books, and I liked it so much I redrew the animations into a comic... twice. Didn’t get nearly as far the second time but clearly my love for this little fanfiction had not waned after nearly a decade. I felt like drawing a book cover/movie poster for the series, just to get it out there and see how much I’ve improved over all that time.

Also I felt like making a vampiresona just before Halloween because I never dress up for Halloween in art (or real life anymore, for that matter), and I wanted to do something like that for once. It was short-lived but I really liked the design!

The focus of this month was definitely on Pokemon stuff. As per usual I contributed to the current Gotta Draw ‘Em All collab, and I was tasked to draw Regieleki. It was really fun to figure out how to make it stand out and look like it was made of electricity.

I also committed a lot of my spare time to my Fakemon Gym Leaders, as I had been working on bringing them to life in the past year or so now. As of this post, I’ve finished rendering their full body poses and gym badges, but I’m still working on completing all eight VS portraits, the first half of which are shown here.

I... didn’t draw anything this month, actually. What I’m showing here was worked on in the last few days but has actually been in progress for a couple of months, and I just finished it earlier today, in 2021. But I needed to show something off, and it’s also about time I mentioned it.

Back in October, I kept seeing people rave about this game called Genshin Impact, and I was interested but not so much as to start playing it... until my friends started playing and I was like “fuck it, let’s download it”. Since that day, I have been super immersed and in love with this game, to the point I came up with my own canon based on my gameplay experiences. This also included the creation of an original player character: Astra, the non-binary Traveller. And now, I’ve finally drawn them and brought them to life.

It has been one hell of a year. I had some of the highest highs and lowest lows in 2020, lots of changes, and I have now officially moved onto the next chapter of my life now that my time at university is finally over. I’m very excited for what 2021 has to offer, and I’m going to go forward with great ambition.

[robertkstone]

Crowning a Singular Champion: Behind the Scenes at 2018 Motor Trend Car of the Year

The 2018 Motor Trend Car of the Year program started out as so many of them have for the past seven years: with me stopping off to grab three bottles of good whiskey—to be consumed in the evenings once our cast and crew were safely ensconced at our hotel, naturally. As James Joyce wrote in Ulysses, “The bards must drink and junket.” To put it in the parlance of our times, we had 46 cars to test and evaluate in two weeks of intense Mojave Desert heat and wind. Do you know how much bickering that could entail? A good stiff drink or two is essential for inspired debate.

Before the editors arrived to judge the field subjectively, our hard-bitten advance team of testing director Kim Reynolds, road test editor Chris Walton, and associate road test editor Erick Ayapana spent a week at the Hyundai Kia Proving Grounds. These guys ran our field through endless 0–60 dashes, 60–0 halts, quarter-mile blasts, dizzying figure eights, and anything else that could place a quantifiable number to the relative performance of our field. To say this trio (along with number cruncher Alan Lau) looked spent is an understatement. Now it was the judges’ turn to take the wheel. Kim and Chris joined the panel to be sure the empirical data was fairly included in our deliberations.

After a small delay due to air travel, the 11 judges were assembled at the vast blackness of the proving grounds’ vehicle dynamics area, better known as the VDA. At this point we do our walkarounds based on comprehensive notes explaining why each particular new car is at Car of the Year, what’s new if it’s a refresh, and what it competes against. Unlike what comes later on (the fighting!), our walkarounds are lighthearted and, frankly, fun. You can usually find international bureau chief Angus MacKenzie huddled up with our legendary guest judges Tom Gale and Chris Theodore guffawing about some mangled attempt at an A-pillar, me talking over everyone else, and editor-in-chief Ed Loh screaming at us to stay on target because we’re running out of daylight.

Walkarounds are a little bit of shoptalk, a little bit of design critique, and whole lot of tire kicking. This year’s greatest moment occurred when features editor Christian Seabaugh decided to remove the hood from one of the Smart Fortwo EDs. The hood, which I think would be better referred to as a “quote hood,” is not hinged or even permanently attached to the Smart. It’s cabled to it, like a leash on a surfboard. I guess if it flies off in a crash, you won’t have to walk far to find it. I mention this because it took us about five minutes to figure out how to reattach the “hood.” The best part was that it baffled Chris Theodore, the former head of engineering for both Chrysler and Ford. There we were, standing around, trying to figure out a way to get it reconnected. Hot tip: do not remove.

With walkarounds complete and our collective brains stuffed chock-full of new knowledge, it was time to make the 35-mile schlepp to our hotel in the high-desert hamlet of Tehachapi. Christian and I volunteered to take the Tesla Model 3—even though that meant getting up 30 minutes before everyone else the next day so we could hook it up to the Supercharger in Mojave. Like all Teslas, the newest one is loaded with Easter eggs. Click down four times on the cruise control lever, and you enter Rainbow Road, which shows a moving rainbow on the instrument cluster and plays the audio from the “More Cowbell” skit from Saturday Night Live. There are a few other options to play around with, as well. There’s Mars Rover mode, which turns the nav screen into the Martian surface and the directional arrow into what I guess is Tesla’s Mars rover. Because, you know, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. There’s also an egg that changes the central screen to a doodle pad. I’m not going to tell you what NSFW things Christian and I drew on the Tesla’s screen, but we laughed for 20 minutes straight.

Heading to the Supercharger in the morning, we happened to pass a massive gas station under construction on Tehachapi’s main drag. Driving past it in the Model 3 left me with an incongruous feeling. Who’s out of touch? Tesla or the coming-soon petrol palace? Heading down Highway 58 and seeing what must be thousands and thousands of electricity-generating windmills, you get the feeling that Tesla knows something others don’t. That said, after more than an hour of charging, the Model 3’s battery still wasn’t full, and we were forced to call in the cavalry (visual assets czar and COTY whisperer Brian Vance) because we couldn’t be late to the morning briefing. It seemed to us that the baby Tesla doesn’t supercharge nearly as quickly as the Model S and X.

After some procedural words from the fine folks at Hyundai Kia and a warning from executive editor Mark Rechtin to keep the notes regarding our 46 cars short and pithy (we tend to overwrite), it was time to begin the monumental task of hacking our massive field of contenders down to a more reasonable, manageable group of finalists. Motor Trend’s Car of the Year is the hardest two weeks of work within the auto industry. I’m going to put in a plug for our process. Unlike our main competitor, which quits when it gets to the point we reach after two initial days (they hand out some sort of participation trophy/everyone’s-a-winner award), after we’ve identified the top candidates, we keep on going before declaring an actual Car of the Year. It sure ain’t easy. But the reward for our due diligence, at least on the first day, was tacos.

As is often the case, there’s a contest within a contest, a race within a race. At Car of the Year, the secret competition is who can eat the most of Wantacos’ delicious creations. First thing that needs to be said is that Ed cheats every year. See, real tacos have two soft corn tortilla shells (if you’re not from California, I’m sorry to break this news to you). But every year, Ed asks for his tacos with only one shell. Blasphemous gringo? Absolutely, but he’s also into being thin. Weirdo. Whatever his motivation, the result is just straight-up cheating. Who actually wins isn’t a matter for public record, but the industry as a whole might be shocked to learn that the photo and video crew routinely out-eats the editors. That’s because while the editors are driving in air-conditioned splendor, the visual assets crew is running around in the desert scrub, seeking out the just-right vantage point to shoot their art while hot-footing it past some of nature’s nastier creatures. Tacos ingested, we head back out for more of the same. The first day concludes with all 11 judges having driven somewhere between 20 and 25 cars. The photographers are cashed out. Useless zombies, we eat some pizza and pass out. The whiskey stays sealed.

Morning brings the highlight of the entire event: Tom’s design showcase. We could charge money for this. We should. Tom is the former head of design for Chrysler during a golden era and the person behind the first-generation Dodge Viper. What more do you need to know? Every year Tom lines up all the contenders in a specific nonrepeating order then analyzes them one by one, explaining what it is we’re actually looking at. Tom—and to a large, though secondary, degree, Chris Theodore—hits us with all the industry speak we can handle. Gesture, grain and gloss, surfacing, horizon lines—they don’t talk down to us, but those two are way over all our heads. Anyhow, Tom is very careful not to tell us what to think but rather to explain how a design works. Why we like what we like or dislike what we dislike. “Whoever designed this should be arrested,” barked Tom as we walked up to the new Honda Odyssey. In Tom’s defense, he’s right.

After a day spent sprinting to track-test the rest of the field, it’s 4 p.m. and time to start cutting down the field. All 11 judges pack into a room, guzzle enough La Croix and Gatorade to fill a hot tub, and start eliminating the cars we don’t think have a snowball’s chance in the Mojave of being Car of the Year. This isn’t a pretty process even when we’re in agreement. When the Smart ED was dismissed for having only a 58-mile range, technical director Frank Markus said, “Thank God. Could you imagine spending 300 miles in one? That should be against the Geneva Convention!” It got cruel from there. “This is as far from the ultimate driving machine as they’ve gone,” said Chris Theodore about the BMW 5 Series. After Detroit editor Alisa Priddle explained how much she enjoyed the “More Cowbell” in the Model 3, Angus weighed in with his feelings: “I hate f—ing cowbell.” When we got to the Lincoln Continental, a person who shall remain anonymous began defending the car. “There’s a lot of money to be made from this level of tastelessness.” At one point, things got so heated that Mark sardonically blurted out, “Let’s just piss off every automaker, shall we?”

However, one large theme emerged after the “discussion.” The Korean car industry is on the ascent. Two Kias made the final cut—the surprisingly good Rio and the impressive Stinger, making up 25 percent of the finalists—and the Hyundai Elantra GT Sport was our bubble car, meaning it almost came along for the final two days. “Good value, good warranty? No! Good cars,” Chris Walton said of the Korean entries. Angus said if he were Japan, he’d be worried. The room agreed.

Speaking of Japan, we took an unusual step with the Honda Civic Type R, electing to not only bring it along as a finalist but also to separate it out from its lesser brethren, specifically the Si. See, the Civic itself was actually new two years ago and was a finalist in our 2016 competition. We dig that car. In fact, the Civic went on to win one of our Big Tests, straight-up beating every other car in its class. We view the Civic Si as a variant of the Civic we already know and love and therefore not Car of the Year material. The Civic Type R? An entirely different animal.

I’ve rarely witnessed so many people so impressed by a performance car. Angus crowed it’s the most impressive car from Honda since the original NSX. I kept asking the question, “What if the new NSX was this good? Hell, half this good?” Using the excuse/insider knowledge that the Type R is actually designed and built by a crew in the U.K., as opposed to Ohio, we took the unusual, probably unprecedented step of bringing the Type R along as a stand-alone finalist.

Anyhow, we had our Elite Eight.

That night we finally broke into the liquor and even a couple of cigars.  If Tom’s design showcase is the part of Car of the Year evaluations we could profit from, then knocking back a couple while talking shop about the car industry is the part that would cost us. Tales and truths are told. Boardroom dramas revealed. Due to the possibility of personal defamation lawsuits, perhaps the less said here, the better.

The Finalists

The next morning began our standard finalist drive loops. Because we had gotten our high-speed thrills out of our system at the proving grounds, for the most part the loops were uneventful. (I got pulled over by a friendly Tehachapi officer for something or another but was let go with a warning.)

The talk at lunch was mostly about how good all the finalists are and how the argument the next day should be a knock-down, drag-out type of affair. I developed some sort of flu and headed back to my room as soon as the loops were done. Everyone else went off on a photo shoot and then dinner.

A pounding on my door woke me up at around 9:30 p.m. It was Ed and Frank. They wanted the whiskey. I handed over three bottles. Two of them came back the next day.

We had four loops left the following morning, then lunch, and then the main event. Of the eight finalists we brought along, seven were deemed competent enough to take home the Golden Calipers. After shining on the test track, the Lexus LC 500h had failed to impress us out in the real world. We probably should have brought along the V-8, but the thinking was that because Toyota has built its rep as the leader in hybrid tech, bringing along the gas/electric LC 500h was the smart play. Turned out we brought the right car, but only because it made our decision-making process easier. With such stiff competition you’d think that the deliberations would be testy. For the most part, though, they weren’t, with several cars being billed as “great car, just not Car of the Year.”

If there was a single car I think most judges would have stolen, it was the Porsche Panamera Turbo. Yes, sure, of course, it starts at $147,950, but have you driven it? Forget about straight-line speed (0–60 in 3.0 seconds, quarter mile in 11.4 seconds at 121.2 mph), on the winding track the 550-horsepower, 4,662-pound big-dog Turbo cornered so hard that the windshield wiper fluid sloshed out of its container and across the windshield. It happened to me! That said, the “little” 4,498-pound twin-turbo V-6 4S Panamera was pretty sweet in its own right.

Although either Porsche constitutes a legitimate finalist, the decision was made to bring the 4S—not the Turbo—along. I gotta tell you, I was against this. However, most people felt the Turbo constituted “too much.” I’m not s from PerformanceJunk WP Feed 3 http://ift.tt/2BjR3IP via IFTTT