#therealflurrin

[verycharismaticdragon]

Visas w2....

when you just trying to chill but brianna is on your case for being a sith and kreia is on your case for being not sith enough

ty for the prompt!

[midzelink]

a series of events:

in April of 2019, I create this blog, after a resurgence of feelings for Midlink (and Twilight Princess in general) hits me incredibly hard

I get asks over the following weeks inquiring about what else I ship in the game, resulting in my thinking about the characters and their relationships in ways I never have before

enter: Ilia/Shad…before I realize that Ilia/Ashei is an infinitely better ship, and Shad is a Huge Mega Gay™

suddenly, Shad needs a boyfriend 

Shadlink is good, but in a perfect world where Midlink exists, it cannot

only other young men in the entire game are Fado, and…the STAR game guy

forget about Shad and his bachelor status due to poor options; months pass

fast forward to a couple months ago, where @therealflurrin and I discuss Zant’s fate after the events of Twilight Princess

I write up this post; Zant could be alive, and if so, could even be deserving of redemption

Zant_is_a_good_guy_now.jpeg

out of nowhere, remember that Shad still very much needs a boyfriend

hahahaha, the crackship to end all crackships, right?  but I couldn’t possibly, actually…

.

.

oh no,

[snailcomicz]

Atton X Bao-Dur X Exile

I’m just very soft for “Survivor and perpetrator of horrendous crimes, who now holds so much regret over what he did, being so overwhelmed with love he can’t process it all at once” and “Traumatized man who created something horrible in order to inflict pain back on those ready to make the universe burn being pursued romantically in a way that validates him exactly as he is” and "Someone who's had so much love and no way to give it due to trauma over the way they create relationships gaining confirmation that they can love freely".

This post was made by me and @therealflurrin

[snorlaxlovesme]

therealflurrin replied to your post: L’s dub VA is like. sometimes British but...

With everything else he has going on, would you be surprised if he’s a teaboo too. Look at him. He ships johnlock

uidhfkkhwefdk flurr STOP

[sandflakedraws]

I hope you have an excellent birthday today

Thank you ^///^ I shall do my best~

[lugiaabsol]

therealflurrin replied to your post: Does anyone have any anime recs??

Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. Badass female bodyguard protecting a young boy touched by spirits. Very underrated, but I put it on a level with FMA.

O: oh shit never heard of this but seems right up my alley thank you!

[captmickey]

STOP COMPARING THE THREEPWOOD CLAN!!

Guybrush Marley-Threepwood is WITTY

Elaine Marley-Threepwood is POWERFUL

Reginald Van Winslow is LOYAL

Wally B. Feed is SWEET

Carla is FIERCE

Bugeye

Haggis is STRONG

Edward Van Helgen is SMART

Cutthroat Bill is HARDWORKING

Anemone is CONFIDENT

Lady is SNARKY 

[gloomy-prince]

therealflurrin replied to your post: hey that's really....... not okay to plug in...

im pretty sure the aunts were meant to be lesbians before the writer’s strike anyway? like…unless i missed something huge in both my watch throughs, you can read it that way right up until the series suddenly goes “oh no wait straight people only here’s a flashback to prove they’re sisters” so it’s not that big of a deal? the nature of their relationship is not hugely central, just that a dynamic exists?

is that really true?? cause i only watched the show once when it was originally airing and i was like....10-12, i think, and then i started rewatching it years after the fact, not remembering most of it, and i honestly thought they were lesbians for a hot minute until it said they were sisters and i was like “oh gross”

[theskyexists]

therealflurrin replied to your post “would somebody, SOMEBODY, please, make a video about the Doctor to...”

You've done video editing before, do you want help getting the footage?

that was 40 seconds that i managed to finish!!! hahaha

but yes footage is the first step huh... o-o

[ruinsofxerxes]

weird town name anon: you COULD translate it as Rump..........

CURSED SUGGESTION

[morceauoleander]

therealflurrin replied to your post “ill be honest its uh its kinda offensive to make headcanons about...”

That's one reason I'm not a fan of the Bobby/Loboto theory in general. It's more likely to me that Bobby has perfectly average, neurotypical parents who don't pay enough attention to him dhhxcj and better to assume that than oh he's mean because his mentally ill parents are mean to him. Rubs me the wrong way

yeah ive never been a fan of the theory simply because i cannot believe how Loboto would ever even chose too father a child EVER. no matter what his parents are, its just rude as hell to come up with that “headcanon”, its so disrespectful!

i just more recently saw people bring up Loboto being abusive and like...dont??? like seriously...dont. Would you call any of the other Thorny Towers patients abusive parents if they were to have kids?? no of course not, i totally feel Loboto this treatment simply bc of this theory of him being a dad to bobby and simply bc he fits the cliche ‘violent insane person’ trope that ppl wanna tie to his possible parenting skills

i am neutral on ppl liking this theory simply bc of some similarities but lets NOT tag Loboto as an abusive parent when he literally isnt one and youre gross for going off and creating those ideas simply due to Loboto being mentally ill

[verycharismaticdragon]

 @therealflurrin replied to your photoset “kotor era x prequel era crossover i didn’t know i needed but. listen....”

Who's the Zabrak, are they from the TV series?

yep, he's from The Clone Wars! His name is Savage Opress and he's Darth Maul's brother, which ik sounds completely made up but that's legit his story.

His arc is utterly tragic and horrible, and I understand TCW in general is supposed to be tragic and horrible but I really hate the way writers handled it - I just rewatched his episodes recently and seeing them back to back instead of spaced out over a few seasons really drove it home.

Like, they give us this kind-hearted character who lived his whole life a slave, show him going through horrific abuse that takes away the last shred of agency he had, and throw him into the Sith (to reiterate, at no point does he get a choice about being a Sith, he's literally brainwashed then used as a pawn in the Classic Sith Master-Apprentice Squabbling). After he survives that, they don't give him any chance to heal from the harm done to him, then show he's still capable of kindness and love despite it - by reuniting him with his brother, Maul (and he is literally, he is so soft with Maul despite everything, it's killing me,, he just wants to keep his family safe im...), and then they kill him off (via what i can only call Palpatine Ex Machina). And the worst part? The way his death is framed you'd think they were going to use it as a catalyst for Maul's redemption arc at least (which tbh I still wouldn't like because denying a survivor the opportunity to heal will never be a writing choice I'll root for), but nope! Apparently it meant nothing and changed nothing, as Maul's still villain-ing in Rebels which is set over 15 years later :\

(...ik i went far off topic and im sorry, it's just a very fresh salt)

[midzelink]

Twilight Princess w/o Text Boxes: A Dream Made Possible w/ Emulation

Okay.  So.

Over the past couple months of running this blog, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about emulating Twilight Princesss in Dolphin, and the other day I finally bit the bullet and booted up the game for the first time.  I had fun finally playing around with the emulator’s free look feature, and I decided now was as good a time as any to finally learn how to make GIFs the proper way--with Photoshop--so I messed around with the program a bit and ended up making this GIF, which I posted yesterday.  It’s not great, but I’ve seen worse, so eh, whatever, right?  At least I’m learning.

Anyway, @therealflurrin sees this GIF and it kicks of a conversation between us about emulation: how it works, what free look is, and what the potential for these kinds of tools are: GIF-making, edits, stills...general hilarity, y’know, basic stuff.

They ask me if I have any idea how to disable the UI of the game.  No, I say; I do a quick cursory Google, and something like that would require texture dumping, editing, and reloading, and that sounds like a heckuva lot of work, doesn’t it?  I’ll just stick to what I know how to do.

And then they say something else:

my DREAM is to capture all the TP cutscenes without the text overlays for AMV purposes......someday

And I'm like, ah.

Ah, shit.

I dunno about the rest of you, but back in the day, when I would stay up until 3 AM watching Midlink AMVs during a sleepover on my friends’ computers (because Hylia knows I didn’t have one, and what the f**k is a smart phone, it’s only 2007), I used to daydream about this exact thing.  I watched a whole ton of (mostly shitty) AMVs, and most of them either completely disregarded any scenes with dialogue, zoomed to somewhat hide their presence, or used the cutscenes with text anyway, and their quality suffered for it regardless--but that was over 10 years ago, long before emulation was so readily accessible (and long before I would discover it), and as time passed, I quickly forgot about this little dream...

...until @therealflurrin reminded me of it.

How hard could it possibly be?

I can’t currently find the forum post I found that instructed another user on how to remove the UI of another (non-Zelda) game in Dolphin, but I can more than summarize the process myself after the day I had yesterday.  Essentially, each aspect of the game’s UI is a texture in the game’s files; you can’t delete textures, but you can replace them using Dolphin’s built-in texture loading feature.  In order to do what I had set out to, I had to:

Navigate to the graphics setting in Dolphin and turn on the “dump textures” feature, which could create viewable .png files of every single texture loaded into the game upon boot and direct them into a single folder.

Boot the game, ensuring that the elements of the UI I wanted to eliminate were clearly visible.

Find the textures responsible for these elements in the dump folder, making note of their file names.

Create and duplicate a 1x1 transparent .png file, renaming each duplication to match each of the various textures I want to replace from the previous step.

Place each of these “textures” into a folder that matches the name of the folder created by the dumping process, moving that folder into Dolphin’s custom textures directory, and again navigating to the graphics settings and checking “load custom textures.”

Doesn’t sound too difficult, right?

...Right.

Some textures were easy, of course.  Getting rid of the text itself was as simple as finding the very few textures that had the letters of the alphabet on them and replacing them, but more than a couple of them were vague stills of nonsense, and combing through hundreds of these textures to find the right ones when I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for...

Well, it was quite the headache, and at some point I ended up saying “f**k it!” and just started replacing anything and everything that looked vaguely suspicious.

For instance, after eliminating the actual text from the boxes, there still remained the matter of the “glow effect” behind the text--upon inspection without the obstruction of this text, just a glowing circle.  I just skimmed through the dump folder that resulted from me booting up the game for just a few seconds and I counted more than thirteen textures that fit that exact bill (plus several others that looked like they maybe could have also been the culprit, somehow), and I just kept on rebooting and replacing, rebooting and replacing until those stupid circles were gone.  (Not the best method in the world, I know, but we learn from our mistakes.)  I spent ages looking for the surely-it-must-be-a-long-black-rectangle-texture responsible for the backdrop, was unable to find it, and replaced a metric shit-ton of unimportant-looking textures until it, too, was somehow gone--and after a lot of trial and error, I finally got the result I was hoping for.

In doing so, however, I had eliminated a heckuva lot of textures that didn’t need replacing, and the entire thing left a bit of a...foul taste in my mouth.

So, like the perfectionist I am, I moved all of the work I had already completed to another location...and began again.

This time, I replaced textures one by one, rebooting the game each time to ensure that it was the correct one.  That “long black rectangle” I was looking for ended up being a tall, transparent image merely 8 pixels wide.  Those glowing circles ended up being the dang circle that I suspected least, go figure.  Regardless, slowly but surely, I was able to replicate my previous success.

Now, my custom texture folder looks a little something like this:

And the in-game result has transformed this:

Into this:

(As you can see, I’ve replaced many other elements of the UI outside of text boxes, and I put them into their own sub-folders for organization’s sake.)

It was a lot of work, but as far as ten-year-old me would be concerned, I have created a means in which to achieve my once impossible dream:

Twilight Princess cutscenes without text boxes.

What does any of this mean?

Effectively, I’ve created a “texture pack” of a sorts that removes most of the game’s UI elements, including the text boxes that have obstructed so many of the game’s better moments.  It’s still far from completely finished, but as of now, it serves its primary function flawlessly, and all that’s left of my childhood dream is one eensy, teensy thing:

Recording, baby!

That is to say, video recording of all the game’s cutscenes with this texture pack in effect, so that kind of footage is available and out there--otherwise, all of this work I’ve done will have been for naught, yeah?  Fortunately, I’m not just an idiot with an emulator and Photoshop; I’m an idiot with an emulator, Photoshop, and OBS Studio, ready and capable to do all of the hard work of capturing these moments for me.

And now, all that I have to do...is play the game.

So, what happens next?

I’m not going to put an estimate on how long this kind of thing is going to take; I have a life outside of this blog and outside of replaying a game I’ve played more than a few times, but over the next few weeks I’m going to be playing through Twilight Princess on Dolphin with the intention to:

Find and capture each of the game’s cutscenes without UI interference, and upload them (probably onto Google Drive) for use by the general public.

Create save states throughout my playthrough and upload them as well, so any person with a good PC, Dolphin, and a North American Twilight Princess .iso can jump into the game at any point they’d like.

Find and tweak any remaining elements of the game’s UI that I can find to make the experience as clean as possible...and perhaps upload this “texture pack” for general use if I am able to do so.

...But mostly the first thing, yeah?  I may keep everyone updated on my progress, if anyone particularly cares, but I also may just keep quiet about it and then dump all of these files at once.  Who knows!  We’ll just have to wait and see.

TL;DR

There’s a whole lot of potential with this kind of thing, and even if it’s a decade too late and no one is really making Twilight Princess AMVs anymore, this is something I’m so stupidly passionate about that I intend to see it through regardless.  I mean, Twilight Princess just happened to be the game that I chose!  If it’s possible with this game, then it must surely be possible with others, and maybe this can inspire other similar "HUD-less” projects from others.  But, even if it doesn’t, I’ll be okay with that.

In the end, if I can make even just one person happy with this little project of mine, that will be more than enough.

[snailcomicz]

30 with Peter B. Parker and Miles?

“Just because I did it doesn’t mean you should too.”

@therealflurrin I WAS HOPING SOMEONE WOULD SEND THIS SPECIFIC COMBO

“You’ve got to take care of yourself after you fight a bad guy, Miles.”

“Seriously? My mom’s a nurse, Peter, I know how to take care of these things until the super healing kicks in. Besides, I’m Spiderman! I always get back up.”

“Alright, if you’re mom’s a nurse, why didn’t you treat the first set of injuries before you did anything else?”

“Ganke needed me, I didn’t know this lady and her dog were going to rob a bank!”

“Lady and her spirit animal.”

“Is that like a goobe- No, wait, was that a joke?”

“I’m just saying, you’re lucky Peni hasn’t yet figured out how to fully separate our universes after what Kingpin did to the multiverse, if I hadn’t fallen through that portal, again…”

“I might have gotten even more banged up, so what? Peter always fought through the pain and got the bad guy-”

“Just because I did it doesn’t mean you should too.”

It takes them a fraction of a second to realize they’re not talking about the same Peter.

“Uh, yeah man! You’re who I-”

“Miles.” Peter B. grabs his uninjured shoulders and shakes him, but it’s the look in his eye that shuts Miles up. Joke time just ended. “Your Peter didn’t get up. You have to take care of yourself. You give yourself a one-over before you do anything else after a fight from now on, you hear me?”

“Okay. I-I hear you.” There’s a pause, and Miles sheepishly adds, “Sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, you know any better.” Peter’s voice shifts back into lecture mode as he returns to bandaging the places Miles can’t easily reach. “You should check in with Aunt May anytime you encounter a villan too, gives her better info-”

“I did! Both times!”

“Well- Then, keep doing that! We should also keep one of May’s communication devices on us, to keep track of the portals and. You know, let you get help if a portal is in the area. If you need it.”

“Alright, it’s a deal.” Miles held out his hand, but pulled it back before Peter could shake on it. “If you agree to call for help if you need it too.”

“What? No! I don’t need- No, stop it. Stop looking so smug. I’m an adult, you’re still brand new at this, just because you need it doesn’t mean-” Peter folded his arms and glowered at Miles, who’s still had his hand in the air and smugly raised an eyebrow. “No. I won- That’s not what- MHM!”

Miles lowers his hand and wiggles both of his eyebrows. Peter’s entire tough guy persona crumbles as he flops his head back and groans.

“Fine.”

They shake on it.

---

Dear Spiderverse writers, phenomenal movie I can’t get enough of, please make the moral of the next movie ‘It’s alright to need help’ to counterbalance the ‘I always get back up’ moral of the first alsoIloveyoubye

[snorlaxlovesme]

therealflurrin replied to your post: therealflurrin replied to your video “please tell...

I went through a period of unironically listening to this song. I don’t think I beat a single level of the actual game so I just looked up the song on YouTube

i used to have to sit next to my sister while she played Robot Unicorn bc i could only make it like 30 seconds into the game and i wanted to hear what the rest of the song was ;A;

[lugiaabsol]

therealflurrin replied to your post “therealflurrin replied to your post: ...”

Sorry to hear you're going through that, that's awful. I hope it gets better unexpectedly for you.

Thank you--I really appreciate the concern and well wishes. I hope so too, just taking it a day at a time ahaha