Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time [realizes I wasn't addressed by a name] Wuh oh!!
she/her. illustrator, sculptor, game developer, former tattoo artist, future dragon
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Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time [realizes I wasn't addressed by a name] Wuh oh!!
The latter
Signed up for the special afterlife where I become one of those enemies from Klonoa. Just walking back and forth with a placid, guileless smile, no capacity for worry. A prelapsarian innocent
Didn't know Baby Steps was a game so this just seemed like practical advice
And it's played for a mixture of comedic farce and sobering horror, when the camera pulls back and you see the sheer waste. These people are morons and it's a multiplier on the damage they can do. They wouldn't be doing this sort of shit if they knew how anything worked, and they're too old to teach
Victory in particular; its antagonist faction contains dudes who independently contend that "The Cause" is -to restore the earth's destroyed environment by wresting it from the hegemon -to wash the blood off mankind's hands in the healing waters of the Uterus -to make the world's biggest motorcycle
One of my favorite things about Tomino Gundam (that's missing from non-Tomino Gundam) is how every "faction" is this fractious mess of opportunistic climbers, true believers, nutcases and/or morons, all fighting over the wheel or trying to get one over on each other, all operating on incomplete info
Ruuules
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pce...
Maiasaurua mama
Now that you can describe it as "Fear and Hunger with the BG3 battle system" is the world finally ready for Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter?
Despite all the miracles and direct intercession of the divine on behalf of the faithful, The Bible is tax code
Writing a magic system? I'll show you something interesting. The two types of magic system are tax code and blackjack. LOTR? Blackjack. Nen? Tax code. Warhammer? Blackjack. Vancian magic in D20? Tax code. Magic in Vance's stories? Blackjack. Despite all the rules lawyering, Stands are blackjack
NIGHT WINDS (1978, KARL EDWARD WAGNER): Every one of these stories has some cruel little snarl, like the punchline of a Gothic ghost story, that elevates them above usual sword & sorcery fare and lodges them in your mind -- all in the span of a paragraph. Good lit for lovers of evil, lonely men
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1959): Two acts of laughing at one of those exceptionally involved New Vegas sidequests; one act of pacing around in the dark and muttering "...jesus Christ" to yourself every five minutes
Its all footsies babyyyy
One of my dream projects is to do what Atlyss did for the PSO clone/KMMO, and make an MH clone where the only weapon is old greatsword. All positioning all reads all holding 🔼 all da time
Monster hunter theory
Shit I'd always sit in there reading something I just got from BookOff too!!
Heartbroken to learn that one of my favorite restaurants from before I moved north closed during covid...
Omg...
Stuck on this encounter in Mario 3. There's a guy throwing hammers at me, and he has a fair pattern with honest reads & a respectful time signature. But there's this other guy also throwing hammers who breaks my focus! I don't know how they expect me to memorize the first guy's timing like this...
They are tremendous. Almost all other modern superhero media shrinks them to the size of action figures or trading cards, whereas those drawings + the accompanying prose imagine a world large enough to house things like Indrid Cold
I earnestly think they are the best part of the games they appear in, or at least the place where that game's quality & character is at its clearest. DeS and DkS had tremendous, game-defining swamp levels; DkS2's is a dusty fart
The Rolly Stones
Ask me for one
Last night was the facebook of sex
Wrote a post about Silksong's enemies, how they follow in the footsteps of beat 'em up enemies (probably incidentally, idk) and why that's a good thing www.patreon.com/posts/139192...
Holy shit it's this video
You owe it to yrself to watch this one! It's like watching those two knucklehead their way through a D&D campaign and make the DM really mad
If we're being less prescriptive about genre, Boorman's EXCALIBUR (1981) is far and away the best shit you're gonna watch where people are swinging swords and casting spells. But since it's Arthurian legend, a lot of people don't consider it S&S
No joke I think this is the best time I had watching a "Sword & Sorcery" movie that wasn't Conan 1982
This series of posts has a delightful clarity
Almost to the end of Act 2. Game bangs but I think there's too much of it! Doesn't even feel padded, I just got a job and finite hand tendons now and I can't see myself replaying this before 2035. Hard to hold that against it my ass just old
#mondaymorningstar
TITUS (1999): Hoooly shiiit, every so often you watch a movie with it's entire cock and balls swinging, knocking shit off the table, and you realize that every industry and audience is full of cowards. If you asked me to direct Book of the New Sun for the stage or screen it would just look like this
The eroticism of Eva is wondering how long you've been alone, then watching Thunderbirds and seeing the takeoff sequence for a miniature scifi vehicle and getting an erection you're not sure what to do with
Heres my thoughts about Epic Explosion Blast & and how that creates friction and ludonarrative discipline
They should try making a video game with Swag
I've been there in a few dreams. Library of Babel but for dusty niche garage kits & artbooks they only got on Mandarake. Someday I hope to bring something back with me
Rainbow Dash 2010 has all the funniest 30 Rock quotes on tap
I tend to think of lines as a necessary evil that should be done away with whenever another illustrative tool could say what they're saying to the viewer, up to and including empty space
Oh I absolutely agree with this, which is why I specified binary lineart (and why I usually work low-opacity/shaded lineart, and try to erase/paint over every line I can). Binary linework has no margin of error. Hatchmark too thick? uh-oh that's not a form shadow anymore, that's a wrinkle/blemish
Most of the shit I do nowadays with blending/sculpting low-opacity lines was trying to find a workflow to render "big soft thing" in a way that my brain found convincing. Annoying thing about autism is how it asserts that there ARE right & wrong ways to draw if you wanna get randy from picture
It's my deeply held conviction (read: synaesthetic hangup) that if you wanna make a sexy drawing with binary linework you need your lines to be thin as fuck, like 1px oekaki lines, every pixel you let your lines encroach on the form does lasting damage to the illusion of volume & dimensionality
Drawing or finding sexy art is hard because I got fuckin autistic texture aversions but for rendering styles. Lines are too thick, I don't parse it as a body in space. Went too hard with the hatching, flesh doesn't look soft anymore. Those specular highlights make them look like plastic. etc etc
Amblin Entertainment cartoons taught me that you can be an otaku for a lot of things: like vaudeville, or golden age hollywood cinema I feel like OK KO carried on that proud tradition, in that it was made by otaku for Amblin Entertainment cartoons and golden age Simpsons
Got another one: Anything Terutsugu Hirayama was involved in (Teru's Symphonia, Castle of Noi). Sits right at the intersection of prog rock, symphonic metal and 80s mecha OPs. Every album sounds like the score to the coolest shmup never made youtu.be/W1olC671ZvQ?...
If u got a middle eastern market near you you gotta try lavakash, top tier sour candy. Not super sweet, shitload of citric acid. It's like fruit leather if there was also an imp casting green demon fire spells on your tongue while you ate it
Replying to this post costs $3 ko-fi.com/zodacoo
If you spend money on a 10+ year old Nintendo game you're falling for the eyespots dude
Happy birtday!!
A Small Momozagon
Happy birthday!!
NESS is doing some of the best shit in sword & sorcery right now, check out that crowdfunding & some of their back issues!
⚔️📚NEW EDGE SWORD & SORCERY NOVELLAS is live!📚⚔️ This crowdfund is the best possible time to get four exciting new books by @draq.bsky.social, @brynhammond.bsky.social, @breadsonja.bsky.social, and @stevewestenra.bsky.social, featuring killer art inside and out! 👉 www.backerkit.com/c/projects/b...
I think people should consider bringing lives back in games like these (or we're about to see them reinvented from first principles?) Something like Mega Man, where you have a finite number of attempts checkpointed at the boss gate, but exhausting them sends you back to a more distant checkpoint
Life Could Be A Dream
Still gotta check that out! I did play the accompanying Quake mod and thought it ruled though
Oh never mind there are like three more zones in Act 1. Big ass game. I was talking about the boss of the bells zone, for reference
Shortly after posting this I fought the boss that Act 1, which was so fun and exhilarating that I wish I could do it again -- and a big part of that was its presentation and score. This crow is delicious
Happy birthday to my favorite mouse.
Writing and tone are usually Souls lorem ipsum but with a light dusting of levity. Patches does a little Alien Hominid dance, everybody laugh, roll snare drum, curtains. Also they paid a live orchestra to play 30 variations on "Gwyn, Lord of Cinder (Nature Documentary Remix)"
Ok time to be a little mean: much like HK this game's aesthetic is "polished but vacuous." Nicest thing I can say about it is that it reminds me of an over-ambitious webcomic of the 10s, one of the ones that was drawn by an animation student instead of a bored sysadmin. Reach never exceeds its grasp
Maybe have this convo in DMs or someone else's replies, sorry
Sometimes you just gotta dodge and sneak pokes in, sometimes you gotta focus a dude down Now before he becomes a problem, sometimes you gotta bait somebody troublesome to the far side of the room so you have space to kill his bro. This is that real shit! This is Rondo of Blood Purple Spear Guys!!
Really like this game's "sapient" (varied moveset, responds to your actions, drops beads) bestiary. The enemy gauntlet rooms feel more engaging than a lot of the bosses in HK; 3 guys with 2-3 moves and 8HP apiece gives you exponentially more novel scenarios to solve than 1 guy with 5 moves and 50HP
I like SOTN as much as the next girl but that's a other game with very serviceable, 0-inertia movement (where the real draw is its wacky kitchen-sink bestiary/weapons/gimmick items). It feels like a lot of modern search action games take after their dad Alucard a lot more than their mom Samus
Yeah! Part of the reason why I'm so harsh on HK was that 70 hours of "default settings on a character controller asset" movement was a big ask for a metroidvania, a genre where my favorite entries tend to be short (SM) & have really idiosyncratic movement (La Mulana, SM again). Glad to be surprised
I wanna shout out Savage Beastfly as a fight with a fairly simple pattern, made brutal by the addition of randomized adds that join with increased frequency as the fight progresses. Tense, tightly-wound, impossible to trivialize through rote, forces you to stay on top of positioning & crowd control
HK controls like a menu cursor; all of Hornet's movement abilities give her inertia that you can't immediately reverse. Hornet only being able to heal herself when her magic bar is full (and exhausting the entire thing) gives fights a much more dramatic "it's so over"/"we're so back" sine wave
The only thing that could convince me to give this game the benefit of the doubt was a critical mass of Hollow Knight fans who dislike it. Hater spirit stay strong
Might have just bought Silksong because I saw enough people complaining about shit that sounded cool. Prepared to eat a lot of crow if they got rid of HK's easy iframe dash and made play more punishing
Reminds me of folks who complain about ranked matchmaking that tries to keep your W:L ratio at 1:1, because they want to stomp people who are new to the game as a reward for getting good
We're just gonna be doing the back half of Twin Peaks S2 but shot on digital, forever
The fact that that's considered a twisted contrarian thing to say, instead of perfectly reasonable and supported by evidence, is an indictment of the gamer
Once again this is why Demons was the best one, we could have had a franchise of "real-time survival horror Wizardry" instead of "Dante has a stamina meter now," I'm Retvrn but for this bullshit
Games only have tension when there is a consequence for failure, and when we've obviated things like "score" & "lives" all that you can threaten players with is time! I'd rather it be spent on interesting/varied decisions (playing a level) vs monotony (loading screen->runback->dodgeroll timing test)
Extremely difficult boss with a soporifically easy/short runback: eh "Runback" that is an engagingly difficult gauntlet instead of a vestigial formality, with the boss as an appropriate capstone: now we're getting somewhere Level+boss balanced around a finite number of lives/attempts: Yes! Yes!!
You will never encounter a work of published fiction that features the word "Bufanoid" more prominently. Great read for fans of evil frogmen. You will also never encounter a copy of this in the wild that isn't $500 so uhh, ask your friend Anna for help
BLOODSTONE (KARL EDWARD WAGNER, 1975): What if Conan the Barbarian got up to that shit Lex Luthor or Eggman always did: unleashing some ancient evil to conquer the world, only to have it turn on him at the last minute and ask the heroes for help? Lots of fun, more of these should star arrogant jerks
Wish the show didn't drop Togashi's habit of drawing dudes like Genthru or Youpi as warped Bill Sienkiewicz demons
Dreamt I was a cop
I'M LOSING MY MIND, THE BEST AND MOST EXCITING YHING JUST HAPPENED, BABY SNAPPING TURTLES HATCHED IN MY YARD, HOLY FUCKING SHIT WOW HOLY FUCK
They'd be cooking with Drifter if they could decide whether that shit on his face was a greying beard or some kind of Homer Simpson muzzle
Haven't played Deadlock, yet but whoever added the Frankenstein's Monster who looks like Peter Steele has a better handle on hunk-craft than anybody else designing hero shooter characters these days
Full agree with this, with the caveat that it cannot be overstated how much you need to train your taste to be open to this sort of play. I know first hand how easy it is to lose the patience for this sort of play of you immerse yourself in the constant reward/progression cycle that’s everywhere now
The musical/movie rules. One of the few musicals I have patience for, alongside like. Cabaret, Little Shop. Richard Gere rules in it
Listened to a representative sample of Chicago songs and they are all like this. Mathematically perfect instrumentation + lyrics written by a golden retriever
This is a song that would improve immeasurably if it was in a language I could not speak. Cantonese cover would go insane
Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4 is a wild song. Bassline + saxophone riff so sublime u could use it to get nominated for a Nobel prize. Then the lyrics sound like u handed a concussion victim a karaoke mic and asked him to improvise while the ambulance was on its way
Concerned about the Fomorians. They're probably still down there
Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog's documentary about an Antarctic research base
Gonna Sliders over to the timeline where they let Akio Jissoji direct every episode, instead of like 10 absolute heaters spread out over 40 years
My problem is that I just don't think Ultraman himself is cool. Big silver cop. I just want to watch the science team contend with big floppy monsters every week. This is why Ultra Q and Shin Gojira were my favorites
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lnL...
FOUND IT: Ooze Chewz. Not only discontinued, but had their name given to a completely unrelated product in the line, destroying the SEO. Now sold in Aus/NZ, as "TNT Super Sour Liquid Filled Chews." Don't know if I could eat them because they'd wrench my fillings out like pliers, but mystery solved
Mid-00s, there was this Warheads candy that was like, a waxy chewable lozenge the size of a Valentine's chocolate. Full of viscous sour slime, consistency of cold caramel. Has not only been cancelled, but nobody else can verify its existence. I know what I ate at Wild Rivers in 2004 though... help..
