#trying to tag appropriately

[crabcounty]

ONCE IN A LIFETIME ❤️

[umblrspectrum]

happy solvermas

[mote-of-ash]

im compelled to draw mustard as link tonight

[math-memes]

[return-of-the-vegetable]

[...] something feels missing from your life.

[loupy-mongoose]

I prepped up a whole post to share this art all censored and timid, before realizing... I don't have to be. I wish to be bold. (Prepare for a ramble about partial nudity, lol)

So, I got a very generous impromptu color theory lesson a couple days ago, and after testing out some things, I felt like doing a full painting. But I for some reason decided that not only should it be a passionate kiss, but one in which Cody is shirtless (g a s p!)

And I went to grab a recent quote from the lovely @ann-chovi (“Having the time of my life drawing these blorbos. Smooshing them together and making them kiss like Barbies”--Never have I ever felt so understood as an artist and creator ❤️ Go follow her her art is so GOOD)

Looking at the post she said that, I realized that she drew a scantily clad man AND woman, with nary a censor or warning in sight. Which is NOT a jab at her by any means, it's the opposite... I want to be able to do that myself. I want to feel brave and comfortable enough to draw and post my blorbos like that. I've always been a modest sort--overly so, I'm realizing--and have a hard time with drawing partial nudity. Barbie doll anatomy, shirtless dudes, bikinis, crop-tops, anything. It's the main reason I had a phobia of drawing people at all for many years. I felt like I was doing something immoral by just trying to know their bodies so I could fit their clothes properly on them.

And I don't want to be like that. So I'm putting my foot down. XD

Anyway, back to the art, lol. I feel like I actually took something worthwhile in for once (color theory has been an elusive subject for me lol), and was able to make my art pop in a way I've never been able to achieve before. I'm extremely happy with the result! ^-^ I guess another reason I want to be bold--I'm proud of my work, and want to share it unashamedly. ❤️

It's a decade in the making anyway, they deserve to be a little scandalous ❤️

[ahalliance]

antoine + étoiles insane moments, p.2. aka the ass saga. p1 here

transcript + context for some of the clips below

[Video Transcript:

[First clip plays.]

Rivenzi: You want to see Etoiles’ ass, of course…

Antoine: Yeah, I’m gonna stare at your ass, Etoiles…

Etoiles: Fuck, what dread, during Popcorn [a talkshow Etoiles had been invited on the previous week], when I went up to the map and you said that, and I thought ‘whoa—‘

Antoine: Sorry

[Second clip plays: the moment during Popcorn]

PA/Domingo: Antoine Daniel has posted a tweet for us: ‘I wanted to look at this map of Africa, but Etoiles’ ass in the shape of a standing bell is driving me crazy. Smiley face with eyes in the shape of hearts.’

[Third clip plays: a continuation of the first clip.]

Antoine: Sorry, bro…

Ponce: Oh but that tweet, besides

Rivenzi: A standing bell…

Antoine: What’s more is that I never tweet and when I do it’s to tweet this sort of shit

Ponce: That’s exactly what I told myself. When PA read the tweet, I thought to myself, ‘but he never tweets!’ And he tweets to talk about Etoiles’ ass

Antoine: There needs to be a good reason, you see

[Fourth clip plays: a clip from the Team du Lundi’s minecraft server.]

JDG: Someone (in chat) said, ‘I can’t tell whether the atmosphere is good tonight or—‘

Antoine: It sucks, it sucks

Florence: You don’t need to ask every time, it always sucks

Baghera: Always sucks. Especially when Etoiles talks about ass [which had been a previous topic of discussion for him that night]

Antoine: Stooop, I enjoy it

Mynthos: You enjoy it?

JDG: It’s true tonight that it’s more weird than bad

Antoine: I like it when Etoiles talks about ass….

[Fifth clip plays: a second and different clip from Popcorn.]

Etoiles: —you’re not allowed to tell me that [Xari claimed to not know much about cinema]. I know you, I studied, because you’re my rival [in pop culture]. I really enjoy what you do in life, Xari, and you’re really knowledgeable about cinema

Antoine: What do you mean he’s your rival? And I’m just shit?

Etoiles: You, you’re my lover

Antoine: Oh yeah, sorry, my bad

PA/Domingo: One of the three is gonna die soon. There’s a whole situation, there’s a whole lore

[Sixth clip plays: a clip from the QSMP.]

Antoine: Don’t you want to get married, dude?

Etoiles: Well, I don’t have the time to fuck

Antoine: What the fuck?!

Etoiles: I don’t have time to fuck, dude. I just need to kill everyone

Antoine: No but just a marriage, you see. You’ve watched Game of Thrones— you haven’t watched Game of Thrones, you can’t know how marriages work in that series

Etoiles: I’ve watched it, but I’m married to the street, dude. I can’t give out my heart that quickly

Antoine: Yeah but you can give out your ass quickly, no?

Etoiles: No, frankly, my ass—

Antoine: What the fuck?!

Etoiles: Giving out your ass takes time, dude

Antoine: What the fuck…

Etoiles: Then again, I need to think about it. I’ll give you my answer. I need to discuss, and everything

Antoine: I’m tired of getting betrayed. You get married with someone else—

Etoiles: Never in a million years!

Antoine: —it’s like yesterday. Apparently Maximus got the mic from his ass removed while I wasn’t there. I was supposed to be the one to do it

Etoiles: Oh okay, so I’m your second choice?

[Overlapping]

Antoine: No! It was just to help him—

Etoiles: No, but, okay

Antoine: He got— listen—

Etoiles: There’s no problem!

Antoine: Fuck, nevermind

Etoiles: There’s no issue! Oh, so you’re opening my chest and stealing?

Antoine: I was just looking! Out of curiosity

Etoiles: Yeah, that’s it

Antoine: I don’t even understand what’s in it

Etoiles: Yeah, out of curiosity. Dude, your opinion on my cave?

Antoine: Well frankly it’s big

end Video Transcript.]

[butchcable]

if anyone has tips on gaining weight/muscle while on an appetite suppressant (adderall for me but any advice is appreciated) pls lmk lol. i need to not look like this GDJSGDJDGD. i cant have dairy based protein shakes/dairy in general 💔

ughh gender dysphoria

[bluevaractyl]

Woooo LU update! "Entrance"

Looks like we were right, the dungeon is the same one Twilight chased the Shadow through. Even in this earlier time, it's apparently a ruin. I have lots of questions about the nature and origin of the dungeons in LoZ. Warriors calls them "old tombs," and Legend echoes this with "Hyrule's tombs." Was that the original purpose of most of them? Or are they just referring to the way many dungeons are dark, dank, underground, and/or haunted by undead creatures? Interesting word choice.

I am very curious about what Hyrule is referring to. Is he aware that some of the items he has found belonged to the hero before him (Legend)? Which ones? The handy/power glove? Power bracelet? Red and blue rings? Is the headcanon that Legend made Hyrule's dolls going to be made canon?? (Also I love their expressions, especially Wind's.)

Love the mention of monsters unique to dungeons! I am so excited to see more. Hyrule is absolutely correct, wallmasters are gross and very annoying. The skulltula was very creepy. Good job, Jojo.

Their reactions here are interesting. Legend is unfazed, shield out but holding steady. Wild, on the other hand, is stumbling out of the way with an expression I cannot put words to, but which appears on my face when I find a spider on the ceiling at 2 am. He has not encountered giant man-eating spiders in his travels and it shows. Also, the return of Time's bow! He is a pretty good shot for missing an eye. I wonder if he had to learn to adjust his aim. Shooting down skulltulas in dungeons is probably taking him back to his own adventures. Maybe not so good memories.

Legend's little prank with the scarf is cementing my realization that he and Warriors really do like to mess with each other. It is also making me wonder if monsters are ever going to do the same. @w1lmuttart made an art pointing out how the Links' attire could be used against them. Yikes!

Twilight is very much on Time's mind. He's worried. I like the detail of Wind in that panel too, since Time has been growing closer to him as they've discovered their connection. It's also easy to see the family resemblance in Time and Twilight's expressions and features here. Warriors makes a good call, but Time knows "it's dangerous to go alone." I wonder how they will end up splitting up.

All images from @linkeduniverse "Entrance"

[clowningaroundmars]

my personal atsv hobie brown hc is that this boy can build a watch that enables the wearer to travel to any dimension they want to, made entirely out of cobbled up parts he "finds"

but anytime anyone brings up AI or algorithms or social media he pretends to be 100 years old

hobie: what's a bloody "snapchat"? fuckin 'ell those effects are nightmarish, mate

miles, exasperated: hobie, you BUILD TECH that astrophysicists in my dimension can't even replicate. how are filters on a phone trippin you up?

hobie: dunno, everyone's got their strengths n weaknesses, i 'spose... 🙄😒

[chthonic-cassandra]

Something tipped over a line for me and that 'gritty realism means representing people from other eras as having no real conception of cleanliness' thing, of which asoiaf is such an exemplar, is actually infuriating me rather than just irritating.

[asakurahaos]

[jaynovz]

i feel the ramble meta post about how hextech is a cursed red herring that accomplishes nothing good, similar to the function of the urca gold in black sails, building up in me

[exn0bis]

So. Completed Veilguard. I have lots of thoughts.

Regardless, I don't think I'd be saying anything that hasn't already been said.

For my part, I went in with the expectation it was going to be bad. I was pleasantly surprised by some things, certainly by the technical aspects, but it fell about where I expected in most other ways.

But first, the good.

It was extremely refreshing to see a AAA game actually release so well optimized for once. I'm running an older system at this point, with a GTX 1080 TI. Even so, out of the box, I was able to run things on the Medium preset perfectly. After some troubleshooting the latest Nvidia driver, and updating the games native upscaling to FSR 3.x, I was running things on a mix of High & Ultra with minimal to no frame drops. This was way beyond what I expected, and made the play experience more enjoyable. While I do think that, like many games in the past few years, there is some over reliance on upscaling to make it look its best, Veilguard still maintains excellent visual fidelity without it.

On that note, the game is objectively gorgeous, regardless of how one feels about the art style (which I did personally like, too); I'm also extremely impressed how they adapted a simulated strand hair system into something playable in real-time without it being overly taxing. Would love to know the technical breakdown for that specifically, but either way, I would not be surprised if we start to see more games released with something similar going forwards.

Veilguard very much proved you can make something look gorgeous and still have it be playable on more than just the latest and greatest systems, and I hope it will encourage more studios to focus on how they optimize and implement their work.

I also found the general gameplay mechanics to be, overall, enjoyable. I was hesitant going in, as I'm 1) bad at games, and 2) from a CRPG background, so the real-time style of combat is not generally something I'm good at. I was also concerned about the stripping down of party mechanics, etc, that was a big part of the previous games. And while I do wish the party tactics had been a little more varied, I ultimately found combat fun and responsive, and that they struck a reasonable balance between simplicity with party, and overly tactical. It did have way too many buttons & combos for me, but that is definitely a me being bad at games thing and not a fault in the game.

I also was extremely impressed with how smoothly the game transitioned from gameplay to cutscenes, and I really liked the more open maps/elimination of excess loading screens.

Unfortunately, that is about all the praise I have for the game.

I'm not really going to talk too much about the complete disregard for the world state built by previous titles, because I think all that needs to be said about that has been. I agree that, from a development standpoint, they needed to find a way to simplify things. However, going so totally scorched earth that character creation literally states "you don't need to customize your previous choices if you don't want to because it doesn't really affect anything" only serves to insult and infuriate the very dedicated player base.

It's very clear that the goal of Veilguard is to wipe the slate clean for the purposes of rebranding and bringing in new players for future installments/capital. Considering the mass layoffs at Bioware, and EA's generally established business practices, this sort of tactic isn't really surprising, no, and was truthfully only a matter of time. But that doesn't stop it from feeling like a slap in the face.

That being established, the total disregard for existing lore, world state, impact of previous titles, glaring plot holes within Veilguard itself, etc, is unfortunately to be expected. No point in picking it apart individually, as it's all just a symptom of the goal of a clean slate reboot.

Which isn't to say I wasn't cursing at my screen by the end of it, but I digress.

I had hoped I could at least enjoy the game as something new, turn off the part of my brain that associated it with Dragon Age and just play it as a stand alone thing. This even worked for the first chapter or so, as I was really enjoying the exploration and gameplay. And then I started recruiting more people. And the main plot started to really get going. And turning my brain off suddenly stopped helping.

The writing is awful, full stop. It's all incredibly surface level and sanitized, and it treats the player with such ineptitude I started to feel like the game had actual disdain for me for trying to play and enjoy it. If I had a dollar for every time an NPC explicitly repeated a plot point or goal immediately after a cutscene that had already painfully spelled it out for me ended, I would have recouped the price of the game three times over. I get that reading comprehension is at an all time low, but holy shit. I paid for a sweeping fantasy narrative, not a degradation simulator that treats me like a moron.

If we manage to put that aside, we're left with a narrative that spends every spare second trying to convince you of how high the stakes are and how important your relationships will be to get through it... and then never actually manages to deliver on any of it. The game repeatedly shies away from showing you anything actually bad, or building anything actually meaningful.

Yes, we see the Blight being gross and a few choice deaths, but that's it. The mass devastation we're told is constantly happening all over Thedas? The staggering amounts of death taking place? The oh-so-vile practices and punishments of our main antagonists? Anything and everything that has to do with the extremely prevalent theme of slavery? That all happens off screen, if it happens at all. Somewhere nice and clean and safe for it to exist, sanitized of any tension or emotional impact. I cannot decide if the flagrant pacing issues in the narrative are a product of the missing tension, or their own problem.

And those important relationships we're told about follow the same pattern. Even if we ignore how everyone speaks to each other like they're reading the script of an HR Workplace Togetherness video, their personal stories are devoid of the stakes we are assured they have. I wanted so desperately to care about the things these character's cared about, but I left still unconvinced the character's themselves even gave a shit.

And with a shallow plot comes a shallow character; I felt no attachment to any of them, despite telling myself they'd grow on me as I progressed. Of course, I also didn't dislike any of them, either; I just didn't care, and I find that infinitely more damming.

I think what I find most frustrating is that the potential in the characters is there, at least. They're each interesting concepts with interesting themes, and every so often I'd get a cutscene that actually got me to feel something, to react, and I'd get excited thinking 'oh, this must be when it gets good.' But no, as soon as you're out of the cutscene, it's situation normal again. No more feelings, no more tension. That all happened off screen, again. Any emotional turmoil the character in question was in moments before is now gone in favor of Group Togetherness.

Rook is no exception to any of this, either; exactly as tepid as the rest, but coated with an even less polished illusion of substance. This is not helped by the fact that the game makes an active effort to remind you that Solas is the actual main character of this story. Rook, you as the player, are just sort of... there.

The headcanons I've seen from fans do more justice to this entire cast than the game ever does.

In summary, it's sad, I think. It's ultimately what I expected, but it's sad. Many of us have a very deep attachment to Dragon Age, the story and the community that built up around it. I literally met my wife through the Dragon Age fandom. I learned to explore some deeply personal things about myself through how I related to the story and characters because of how much depth and nuance there was to examine. To see all that reduced to what amounts to a very prettily polished turd is just... yeah. Sad.

I'm really happy that there are people who have enjoyed the game. Genuinely. I hope they'll continue to do so. Myself, I'll probably still go on a screenshot binge and enjoy how pretty it looks, too. But Veilguard is very much the end of Dragon Age, for me. And I'm sad about it.

[luunatlanny]

Here they are again.. (Tamlin and Andras’s daughter). Also, I did not draw the background, too cool for that apparently.

I was gonna write a fic about them, but I only got 700 words in b4 I went fuck that. I probably will write snippets.

But yeah, some context is that Lily was in trouble with some monster and was gonna die but he saved her and stuff. His beautiful hair got diced though (;-;)👍. And then after, they go and sit on a tree, where they hear nature and they realize spring came to life again. Even though this, they didn’t get working on fixing the spring court till Mari (another Oc I had in mind of adding to the story) smacked them into shape. (She’s a sassy wine aunt done correctly. She doesn’t have a design though, so maybe a diva wine grandma…?]

[imobsessed123]

Woah Keefe is so emotionally manipulative. Not like he got raised in a horrible household where being emotionally abused was the norm. Not like half of his ‘insulting’ things were just bad attempts to make people laugh because in his mind that’s one of the only things he’s good at. Not like he probably cries thinking about all the times he hurt people without even meaning to. Not like he says things that come across as manipulative without him meaning it to because again, saying things like that are normal to him. Not like he would do anything for his friends. Not like most of his decisions, in his mind at least, were to benefit everyone else. Not like he would probably rather die than be like his father. Of course not, that’s ridiculous!