zarkonnen - Tumblr blog

[zarkonnen]

Oh, what a lovely beasty!

There had been a trend going around where artists re-do old pieces of theirs. I am late to the game, as usual, but thought I would participate.

The original, top left corner, was done back in 2013. For the most part I still like the anatomy and structure of the original.

[zarkonnen]

Santa is on strike due to global warming.  All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger.  Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.

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Smooth map zooming I’m working on for Airships: Conquer the Skies.

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A rather silly halloween quiz for Airships: Conquer the Skies.

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Want!

Octopus Kitty

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As a game developer, I agree: it’s gambling and should be treated, taxed, and regulated as such.

unpopular opinion maybe? but the microtransaction stuff in video games with like lootboxes/crates/etc (where it’s random and you don’t know what you’re gonna get) is absolutely gambling and should be subjected to the rules and regulations that come with that label

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My one-off Airships: Conquer the Skies tankard arrived! Here's me drinking grog from it.

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Zurich Haze

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Space Exploration: Serpens Sector

Download on itch.io

Space Exploration: Serpens Sector is an old game project inspired by games like Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Star Control. Future work on the project, if any, will start from scratch, but what's here is quite pretty and playable.

Explore and map the stars of the newly re-discovered Serpens Sector.

Acquire and manage crew with various talents and opinions.

Encounter alien species like the warlike Gloptians, desperate Thellurm, powerful Nemans, and mysterious Pan-Opta.

Attempt to uncover the cause of the great calamity that nearly wiped out mankind a generation ago.

Fight enemy ships in a turn-based combat system: hide behind planets, navigate through asteroid fields, hack enemy ships, and use your crew's special abilities.

[zarkonnen]

A few years ago I completed a project called The Pirate Bay Bundle. It was a bundled torrent of one hundred freeware videogames put on The Pirate Bay. It was a curational distribution experiment and notably my most “successful” project.

My current project, which I have now dubbed One Thousand Voices, a twitter thread with each tweet containing one different videogame creator accompanied by a gif of a videogame that they created (or helped create), was started as a springboard that was going to lead up to its successor, however I have come to look at it as its spiritual successor.

Over the course of its completion, it has garnered coverage on numerous websites and over one thousand retweets. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.

While the project achieved these skin deep achievements, it also has intended subtexts (some pictured below). I’ll leave it up to you to decide what it did or didn’t manage to accomplish.

Whatever the case, regardless of its successes and failures, I am proud of it.

In truth, I fucked it up. I had a whole other half planned where I was going to send out a detailed questionnaire to the videogame creators in the thread about their upbringings and how it has affected their work within the medium but I worked so hard on the thread itself that I ran out of time and energy.

I feel after having worked on this for over a year that I should be able to impart something profound or poetic or be able to share a deeper truth about videogames. The deeper truth is that I have no deeper truths to share. Videogames can be beautiful and chaotic and yet the medium remains largely unexplored. Popular big name AAA releases are discussed endlessly, while just about everything else gets tossed to the side.

Everything I do is an attempt to explore a little nook of videogames that would otherwise remain unexplored and unhighlighted.

I encourage everyone that engages with this project in good faith to make their own discoveries and celebrate the diverse videogame creators within.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, you can signal boost the thread and its many creators, reshare this post on tumblr or follow me on twitter.

[zarkonnen]

I want one. OK, I have nowhere to put it, I admit.

forbidden knowledge

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It looks like a tiny farm!

Sometimes I miss lab (part I)

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Pretty kitty

Happy Pride everyone! 

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Drone plus image stabilisation software, probably.

to the grocery store to make homemade ramen 🚲

[zarkonnen]

This is very cool. Has anyone made some D&D stat blocks for them?

Mineral Dragons: Restored Series

This is the complete set of finished mineral dragons, some of which have been touched up or altered to fix something I disliked about the originals.

Click the images to see the name of each mineral!

You can find the series as I originally posted them right here.

Please DO NOT repost this without credit. Either reblog it from this post, or if it’s outside of tumblr, add a link to either this blog or my portfolio blog. This has been a major problem with these dragons in the past, and I’d prefer it didn’t keep happening!

[Patreon] [Twitter]

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Hebrew Speaking Trans Communities Exist: Here’s How We Communicate

There’s a misconception (often held in the west) that Semitic languages and their speakers don’t have an equivalent of ‘they’ in English for non-binary subjects, or that we don’t possess our own workarounds to gendered language. Hebrew is quite difficult as not only is the subject gendered even in generalized cases like ‘you’ but all nouns are gendered either male or female, along with all adjectives and verbs associated with the subject. To some this may seem like an insurmountable challenge, but to others it provides us a multitude of possibilities to fuck with the rigid binary form of the language. There’s no equivalent of ‘they’ that many equate to genderlessness in English, but many trans and non-binary speakers  switch between the two gendered options as indiscriminately as possible, rendering the use of gendered terms meaningless. This way of queering language is manifested and received in quite different ways than the English ‘they’. It’s impossible to slip past people without realizing, rendering the radicalization of the language impossible to ignore, but also outs trans people immediately, so many keep this way of speaking relegated to closed social groups and communities to avoid harassment. For an example of how this looks, here’s a sentence in English that makes use of the pronoun ‘they’ with 3 options for gendering in Hebrew: ‘Veve is so cute and they’re coming to the party tonight!’ To translate this sentence into Hebrew you would need to select a gender for the adjective ‘cute’, the pronoun ‘they’ and the verb ‘coming’ based on the gender of the subject, which in this example, is yours truly (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I would then choose them entirely at random, and for personal preference be as varied as possible. Here’s what that would look like in Hebrew: ‘ויו כל כך חמודה והוא מגיעה למסיבה הלילה!’ In this example I used the feminine form of ‘cute’, ‘he’ as a pronoun and switched back again to the feminine verb to ‘come’. There are other forms of queering Hebrew that are used in more mainstream feminist circles to improve gender inclusivity and also place more emphasis on female subjects since like many gendered languages groups of people often default to plural male. If you know some basic Hebrew you may be familiar with gendered suffixes – ים - for plural male and – ות – for plural female in many cases. What is also important to note for those less familiar with the language is ‘ ם’ is exclusively an “ending letter”. Queering gendered suffixes in Hebrew then adds an additional axis through which to subvert rigid rules; like the discourse that supposed grammar experts in English take up against use of ‘singular’ they people similarly abhor the use of the ם before the end of a word. If someone wanted to address a group of friends they may say "חברים” the plural male for friends. What some people do instead is this: “חברותים” This includes both suffixes in one word, but puts the female plural first, specifically emphasizing non-men in the post. And for those who want to give hell to grammar and binary gender in one go: “חבריםות” These are minor examples, but the important part is that people know there are queer and trans communities literally EVERYWHERE all over the world, and like most trans people in most languages, when figuring out how to gender someone in Hebrew, the best thing to do is simply ask what they’d like and how to gender things in a way that makes us feel most comfortable. Like all major changes to language this one takes some getting used to, but it’s a real thing and I’m glad more people have been asking about it lately. <3

[zarkonnen]

Laptops.

Well, yes.

Look to your left. The first thing you see is what you would hoard as a dragon.

Today it’s Gargoyles fanart^^