Latest Posts by m-p-lebrush - Page 7

The thing is that I would absolutely play a video game about a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbour’s cat in a small village in the mountains if — and this is extremely important — it was a Discworld point and click adventure game and the cat was Greebo and the process of searching for him unearthed a secret invasion of some kind of malevolent supernatural force in the Ramtops.

Hey. Your brain needs to de-frag. Literally it needs you to sit there and space out.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

Give your brain a Daily Dose Of De-Frag.

I dont post things about me much, but I’m a bit proud of this. I got really into Horizon: Zero Dawn by accident, and realized after playing it a bunch that I was super close to 100% achievements. So I pushed and got there.

So then along comes the sequel, Forbidden West. I delayed a couple years, but finished the story a while ago. I kept itching for more because I just love this world and story and characters.

Today I finished everything.

I’m just really pleased about this.

So now 100% on Horizon games is a thing for me. I don’t think I’m going to 100% the Lego one, but I’m so ready to invest in Horizon 3 whenever it happens.

Just like the Samwise quote, this is one of the stories that sticks with me because the heroes keep fighting no matter how dark it looks, because there’s good worth fighting for. It’s a reminder I’m holding close the way the world is right now. Those same feelings are built into the song too, so of course I’ve had that on loop as well:

I am raindrops in the flood

I am emptiness, I am hope

I am lonely in a crowd

But when you hear me, you'll be near me

Stay here with me

in the flood

something's wrong with my copy of Slay the Princess

We've all been here, or will be soon enough. You'll get your answers if you haven't yet, some earlier than others. Some maybe not at all.

Who the fuck is that narrator???

Soooo after playing a bit more i think i'm starting to get a grasp who the princess is - she is a reflection of me. She will always react according to my actions (and grow some more personality in the meantime) But who is the narrator - he sometimes has power over us (especially in the first chapter) and sometimes not. He clearly can't be trusted. Is he one or many?? He loses power the more power the princess gets...and he seems to be disgusted almost jealous whenever our realationship to the princess gets better. SOOO who is he? Is he our self preservation? Our pride? Why isn't he able to see the mirror (something i believe he isn't lying about)

At one time he let slip that we were MADE to slay the princess - so what are we? Are we a clone? What is this world which is completly under his control? Will I ever get answers. I fucked around a little bit but havent found any satisfying answers yet... So my question is - what can i do to really piss him of so he makes a mistake and reveals to much. I will ponder this.

Amazing analysis.

I think the voice of the cold intrests me as a character so much because he's such a real and visceral response to their circumstances. Which is true for all the voices and each is intriguing to dig into in a different way, but this post is about cold the others will get their turn (probably)

Imagine with me, for a second, you've only just learned what it means to exist and you've already been discarded.

You've done everything you were told without question. This is your purposes and you were promised Good at the end of it and you do it and you do it well. Your guide, and authority figure you should be able to trust who is seemingly so much more experienced in this world than you even seems happy with you. You must be doing it right

Then you're abandoned. The only Good for you is an eternity of nothing. The only way you can be Good is to hurt others and to not exist at all.

Wouldn't that leave you empty? Hurt, clawing for something, anything to fill that void. You had Purpose and it turned out to mean nothing, you had a vague promise of Good and it turned out to be nothing.

You can't be Good, can't fulfil that Purpose when all of it means nothing, when you've been lied to and led to be locked in a box for the rest of time. And rather than feel that hurt, you claw it out of yourself with your own two hands, and the same implement you'd used to fulfil your Purpose.

All he wants is that Good he was promised, and to him that's the opposite of that box. It's the opposite of Nothing. It doesn't matter if it hurts him, if it hurts somebody else, if it feels good or feels bad, he just craves something that will make him feel. That will make everything worth it in the end, that will free him from the monotony and inherent stagnation of the situation he's in. What use does he have for morality in pursuit of this? What use is morality in this situation anyway? Where everything is being presented with such grand consequences, where everything is both right and wrong, where these consequences never seem to quite stick for him regardless? So he simply encourages action, in whatever form that may take.

Because it's so much more intresting if it's an active choice. Something is always better than that empty cabin surrounded by nothingness all around he's subconsciously running from. Because cold is most aware of their godly nature, and so is most aware of whats always missing no matter what they do. Who tries to fill that emptiness, first with Purpose then with Action.

For a voice that claims to feel nothing at all a lot of his drive is purely emotional. He wants to be intrested, he wants to be engaged, he wants to feel something even if it hurts. He wants to feel connection to this body the same way the other voices do, and yet criticises them for feeling in that way.

At the core of it all, he wants back what he's lost. And by his very nature he cannot have it.

Amazing Bentley.

Sorry what?????? I’m so happy!

Here’s the link to the video

50 posts!

Also this thing.

*Trumpet sounds

Hey!

Indie number one!

Hey!

Indie Number one!

Now listen closely:

You're on a path in the woods,

we are... number one????

"Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that --"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, it means they're getting worried they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh. I'm sure there are worse crimes --"

"But they starts with thinking about people like things..."

- Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

Your dreams are a much more interesting vehicle of storytelling than any lucid thought of mine.

The Turtle People

My dreams are trying to therapize me again.

I was a member of the clan of turtle people. I was teaching the younger turtles how to move through sand, and they were starting to move in synchrony. They asked me, “How does it feel to carry the weight of the world on your back?”

“When I was young, it wasn’t so bad,” I replied. “The world was small then. As I grew older, the world grew large and complex. Some days I struggle to move at all under the weight of the world.”

sylens, the focus isn’t the only thing that’s projecting

I'm very much enjoying the recent pages and just how much character is pouring out especially through body language and facial expressions. My favorite being how Tess is just so nonchalant like this is a normal Tuesday and Tynan's mix of confused and pissed. So I wonder how do you draw facial expressions? I do pencil and paper art as a hobby and for me they're one of the harder things to get down right.

Ahh, facial expressions, the backbone of a character-driven story. I can't remember ever sitting down and perfecting How To Draw Faces, but while I struggled with it a lot early on, I don't remember having much trouble with it in recent years, so evidence suggests that the faces I draw were in large part refined naturally during my chibi-drawing video-making process, which makes me think that the skillset can be refined even if the faces in question are incredibly stylized. Eyes, eyebrows and mouths are apparently all you need for the basics.

Cartoon facial expressions have a benefit of modularity - you can get away with swapping out or tweaking individual parts of the expression without having to do any redrawing of the underlying head shape (a difficulty faced by more realistic or more squash-and-stretch-heavy styles, as faces can be VERY flexible and a mouth shape or eyebrow arrangement can reshape the entire profile of the head). This can help us see how extremely complex our ability to read facial emotions really is. Tiny changes can communicate entirely different vibes.

It doesn't take much repositioning or tweaking to get across a potentially very complex emotion.

Every time I try to think of a hard list of do's and don'ts for this, I fail. Facial expressions can be arbitrarily complicated. Rules like "make sure each part of the expression is communicating the same emotion" might sound good on paper, but in practice you can get a lot of mileage out of an expression where every part is saying something different - a big smile with sad eyes, a small smirk with a calm open gaze, etc. We parse facial expressions as a whole, not as a sum of parts. Like a lot of art, getting an expression to say what you want it to is mostly a matter of tweaking it until it looks right. Suppose we want to make our example elf dude look devastated.

Pretty good, but maybe a little too subdued. This gives me "you just told me something horrible that I haven't fully processed yet" vibes. Let's tweak the mouth to pull the corners out more, putting more tension in their face.

That makes them seem a little less frozen. It looks like they're breathing in, getting ready to say or yell something. But maybe instead of SAD devastated, we want FURIOUS devastated. So let's tweak the eyebrows, where anger is stored.

The other expressions give a feeling of open devastation, perhaps witnessing some incomprehensible tragedy - this new expression looks more focused. Maybe they're currently staring down the person who got them so upset, waiting for them to stop monologuing. Maybe once they're done processing, they'll look a little more like this.

That's a powerful face, but we've strayed pretty far from "devastated" by the end there. Maybe they've started their "you can never win" speech against whoever got them so upset. There's determination in that expression - whatever they were feeling before, they've sharpened it down to a knife's edge.

I wish I could give better advice than "just draw about a million little chibi faces and eventually you'll work it out through sheer numbers" but I really can't think of a better way to get good at pulling together specific emotions to match what's happening in the character's head.

sidenote this ask reminded me how much otherwise solid superhero comic art absolutely blows at facial expressions and how much that annoys me, it cannot be that hard to draw nightwing pretty

I see beauty.

my number one sleep aid this week is turning out to be Drawing More Space Bullshit

Do you have any advice on drawing hair? How do you make it so weightless and floofy?

Shapes!!

thinking non-stop about the Terry Pratchett Method of Deconstruction (TM) and how it works

[...] the wages of sin is death, but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays. (Witches Abroad)

Take a common concept, metaphor, idiom, trope etc. "The wages of sin is death."

Invert, reverse or subvert it to highlight the inconsistency or issue. "But so is the salary of virtue." (Well, actually, everybody dies, right?)

While everybody's contemplating the philosophy revealed, overextend the metaphor and whack them in the back of the head with the joke like a comedic quintain while they aren't expecting it. "At least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

He does it quite often and I love it every time.

He also gave his kids a goblin themed (the North Polar Bear comes up with it based on goblin cave art) writing system to decipher, it's legitimately good.

If you can get a copy of the book, I seriously recommend you do. It's such a good read.

I know everyone talks about how Tolkien infused his war ptsd into LOTR but did you know he wrote letters to his kids from 'santa' and they include a full on war with goblins to save Christmas?? And polar bears and elves (the shelf kind) getting injured and starving like this man could never be chill he had to have a battle and I love that for him

cybermiku update!

shes got all her limbs and wires on just some arm details and neck structure and she'll be fit for painting

gundam for scale i will get to the pigtails when i get there

Mine was The Colour of Magic because it was one we had and was the first published, and I thought I should start at the start.

Sometimes I wonder if these books are, as a collective series, some kind of eldritch abomination with a mind of their own.

Silly idea, really, because it's so obviously true. Books are magical, even if they don't look it. You can tell because looking at them makes people do and feel and see all sorts, conjuring mental images through the refractive lens of the mind's eye or giving them the desire to make things or even convince people they can make things they can't yet but given a page or two more and suddenly the whole universe is opened up and, despite having only looked at some arbitrary symbols on a thin wavy tree sliver, suddenly they can.

This is 1:50 in the morning. No idea if I'm lucid or mad. Probably a mix of both and some fatigue for seasoning. Good morrow.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, you do not decide which discworld book you're going to read first, the universe does. It's whichever one accidentally makes its way into your immediate vicinity, whichever one is the only one on the shelf at the library when you were actually looking for something else. It will find you when it's Time, it has something to do with wossname... quantum

Can confirm, I get reconstructed by a book that sucks me in for a few hours until life has to happen for a bit.

Beware: there are no chapters and you may well develop an addiction to the footnotes.

Reading a Terry Pratchett book is literally just: Here's a funny little joke Here's something that you can tell is a joke but don't get and will only figure out five years later Here's a surprisingly cool fantasy concept Here's a unique and well written simile Here's a lil guy Here's something that has aged depressingly well into the modern day Here's something that has aged remarkably queer into the modern day Here's a character that you can barely understand what he's saying Here is the most terrifying and deeply disturbing concept you have ever heard, casually mentioned Here is the dumbest fucking pun you've ever heard but in the best way Here is a quote so profound that it makes you view morality and the world in a different way Here is a plot twist that you can't tell if it's genius or stupid Congratulations! You've finished the book! It has fundamentally changed you as a person and you will never be the same!

Dude this page is a lifesaver Google is really bad for working out the order to read them in

Going to reblog because it's around Hogswatch.

Just gonna casually share this Youtube link to the full miniseries adaptation of The Hogfather bc everyone should watch it

Thank you @umbrynnoctis and everyone who got me to 50 reblogs!

Also thanks to the Aroura webcomic fan community for liking my sh***y meme and shooting me up here after it did well on Discord. Have some pics from Horizon Forbidden West. Also the real, full moon.

He is on the council of many arms, but still not a master.