#it was only released in early 2020 so it is VERY new

[art]

Creator Spotlight: @chaaistheanswer

Hi everyone! I am Clara, but you can also call me chaa! I am a digital artist based in Auckland, New Zealand, with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Media Production. After graduating from uni, I moved out to pursue my art career and I’ve been a freelance digital artist ever since. I love concept art, especially character design! Creating characters influenced by my love for fantasy is what I live for. Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you enjoyed my art! And thank you, Tumblr, for this opportunity!

Check out our interview with Clara below!

Did you originally have a background in art? If not, how did you start?

I specialized in art in high school and have a bachelor’s degree in Creative Media Production from Massey University with an animation pathway. For our thesis film, which I worked on with several of my classmates, I took on the role of producer, art director, and concept artist. Our short film was featured in the Wellington Film Festival Terror-Fi in 2020. After graduating, I went on to become a freelance artist, but my goal is to work for the gaming industry as a character concept artist. Ever since I first picked up a pencil, I knew I wanted to become an artist!

Have you ever had an art block? If so, how did you overcome it?

Art block is quite common among artists, and unfortunately, I too have fallen prey to the affliction. I have several ways of overcoming art block: watching movies, playing games, reading, or going out for a drive with my sister. These are just a few things I love to do to help keep my creative juices flowing!

What is one habit you find yourself doing a lot as an artist?

I tend to obsessively research about completely unrelated topics while I draw. I find learning new things helps improve my concept designs, especially in creating backgrounds for my characters.

Over the years as an artist, what were your biggest inspirations behind your creativity?

Video games and anime were my biggest inspirations! Anything with a captivating story that’ll send me to the edge of my seat, and loveable characters. I’m particularly drawn to high and dark fantasy.

How has technology changed the way you approach your work?

Technology has made a huge impact on us artists over the last few years. I used to draw a lot on paper, but since getting a tablet, I find myself searching for the undo and redo buttons and even trying to zoom constantly while I draw on paper. I used to only draw for myself as well, but after posting my art online, I now have an audience to whom I can share my art. Because of this, I am able to earn a living doing what I love by creating illustrations for clients.

What is a recent creative project that you are proud of?

I am very proud of this recent commission I’ve done for a client! Fortunately, the piece turned out exactly how I wanted it to look, and my client was very happy with the result. I am also in the process of working on a Webtoon, which is going as smoothly as I hoped it would be before its re-release!

What advice would you give to younger you about making art that's personal or truthful to your own experiences?

The best advice I would give my younger self is to never hold back! Try not to think about the negatives of creating and sharing art that you believe in. Embrace vulnerability, and don’t be afraid to dig deep into your own emotions and experiences. Always explore, and don’t limit yourself to your own bubble. And most important of all, stay true to yourself! Stay true to your values and beliefs, and never compromise your own authenticity for the sake of pleasing others. Your art is a reflection of you as a person.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

@yuumei-art has been an inspiration to me since my early Deviantart days. I admire how she uses her skills to focus on environmentalism and cyber activism. @nipuni is another inspiration of mine. I found her when I was in the process of recovering from Dragon Age Solavellan hell. I admire how she manages to capture faces well while also sticking to her style. Her paintings are so beautiful and very pleasing to my eyes!

Thanks for stopping by, Clara! If you haven't seen her Meet the Artist piece, be sure to check it out here. For more of Clara's work, follow her Tumblr, @chaaistheanswer!

#creator spotlight #artists on tumblr #chaaistheanswer

[michaeljoncarter]

how to roll back your game version & play the early access version of bg3

because all the people in my notes talking about being sad about never getting to play during ea are making me sad. you can still get in there!! easily!! and you don't even have to uninstall the current version to do it! you can have the current game & the ea version at the same time and switch between them by just moving around a few files

all you need to do is follow a slightly tweaked version of this guide on how to roll back your game to a previous version--slightly tweaked in that this is a guide for people whose games are broken and yours isn't (hopefully?) but more on that in a sec

you need two different id numbers to download, the "main" depot's (1086941) and the "bin" depot's (1419652). the very last update to the early access game before its full release was hotfix #32. if you're just interested in playing the early access version in general, i'd suggest going with this one! but i'll also be putting in the ids for the various other patches for anyone interested in earlier versions of ea

the "main" (1086941) id is 2986558115270870303 and the "bin" (1419652) is 3491586966951526173, so in step 3, your console commands would be "download_depot 1086940 1086941 2986558115270870303" and then "download_depot 1086940 1419652 3491586966951526173" (without the quotation marks)

after you've gotten that downloaded, those slight tweaks come into play. since your game is (hopefully) not broken, in step 6, when it tells you to "Go to %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\ and delete there everything except PlayerProfiles folder," make a new folder somewhere easily accessible (i just keep mine on my desktop homescreen), give it a recognizable name like "bg3 full release" or smth, and toss all those files into it for safekeeping instead of deleting them

then, make a copy of the PlayerProfiles folder to go into %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3, and continue with the rest of the guide from there

hopefully, everything should work and you'll be able to play the early access version!

if you need to make space, you can just delete the files in %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3, replace them with the original files from this folder that you moved to their own folder earlier, and go back to playing the full version of the game

OR if you have enough space and just want to go back to playing the full release version for a while with the option to go back to ea later, you can make a second folder in that same easily accessible location, name it something like "bg3 ea," and move the ea files from %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3 there for safekeeping while you switch the original files back in. and then whenever you want to go back to ea, you just switch them out again!

if you just want to play ea generally, that's all there is to it, but for anyone interested in the earlier versions, i'm also including the ids for everything back to patch 5 or 6 (more on that below) under the cut!

steamdb's "main" depot ids go back all the way to the beginning of early access in october 2020, but the "bin" ids only go back to september 2021. i have no idea why or if there's a way to get around this to allow access to the super early versions of the game (let me know if you know), but from what i recall, most of the big changes came post-patch 6 (which dropped in october 2021), so i don't think you're missing all that much here

i'm going to list 2 different versions for each patch--the version of the patch that dropped and then the very last hotfix of that patch that was released before the next patch's release. i strongly recommend using the pre-patch hotfix versions since they'll be the ones that's already fixed any major bugs found in the patch, including the ones that caused crashes (which weren't common but did very much happen from time to time), but since there were sometimes changes made in the hotfixes between patches, i'm including the raw, sometimes buggy initial patch itself, too, for anyone who wants the true ea experience

whenever a patch dropped, there was usually a patch announcement post that included a long list of everything added/changed and a community update post that highlighted & went into more detail about some of the biggest, most significant additions/changes shortly after. i'll be linking both of them for each version so you can see what was added in each patch & decide which you'd like to see!

final pre-release patch 9 hotfix - january 26, 2023 - hotfix #32

main: 2986558115270870303

bin: 3491586966951526173

initial patch 9 release - december 14, 2022 - announcement post, community update

main: 6537615510298161288

bin: 5945988095619420679

final pre-patch 9 patch 8 hotfix - hotfix #29

main: 4587530374381214828

bin: 1158786419690212446

initial patch 8 release - july 7, 2022 - announcement post, community update

main: 6228241067016987625

bin: 7406932516672251230

final pre-patch 8 patch 7 hotfix - april 7, 2022 - hotfix #23

main: 2158159273108954060

bin: 5051502138264372142

initial patch 7 release - february 15, 2022 - announcement post, community update

main: 2319709286482444091

bin: 5051502138264372142

final pre-patch 7 patch 6 release - december 2, 2021 - hotfix #19

main: 7168428077382038060

bin: 3275005870898440938

initial patch 6 release - october 14, 2021 - announcement post, community update

main: 7453809126564301688

bin: 9049843173236541567

the oldest entry of a "bin" id is from september 16, 2021. there are no community posts or hotfix announcements from that day, and i haven't tested it myself, so... possible pre-patch 6 version? but i'm not sure! if anyone tries this one, please do let me know

main: 6252948475239841962

bin: 7144137622957893936

good luck & have fun!

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #long post #lemme know if you see i messed up any of these links or numbers or anything #because i double checked everything but it's a lot of numbers and im very dyslexic lol #posting this super fast super early before i have to leave hekrvn #so i might not see any corrections or anything for a while if there are any but i will eventually ! #hopefully this makes sense and is understandable <3 im horrible at giving instructions but yk

[v5ttelfilms]

sweet dream was over ☽ mick schumacher

gossf1poutlet news of mick schumacher and y/n leclerc previously being in a relationship trends as the number one topic across social media, following an unfortunate leak from their private accounts. both the schumacher and leclerc's have expressed their opinion on this matter, via a strongly worded 'love letter' from legal counsels that represented their respective families. on a statement that was recently released, both parties have similarly urged everyone to refrain from making unnecessary assumptions and encouraged the public to rally against the spread of misinformation and baseless accounts of the pair's alleged relationship. their representatives also promises to pursue legal actions against the culprit.

username the whiplash i got from seeing this all over my tl still makes my muscles spasm😩

username extremely amazed at how they managed to keep it a secret for so long

username yes!!! no one expected little leclerc to REALLY pick one off of her dizzying number of suitors /gen

username thanks for adding the geniune tag op

username anytime🫡 we ride at dawn for little leclerc in this house

username please present your simp card at the checkout

username sure, do you accept the laminated one or does it have to be the government mandated one?

username so... timeline recaping anyone? 🤔

username they probably got together during 2019 or 2020

username seems that way, funny if you account the arthur and mick prema timeline aswell

username got together late 2019 or early 2020 and probably broke up late 2021 or early 2022, but that's only my intelligent guess 🤷‍♀️

username around the same time mick was having haas problems too? fcking brutal

username did the article say to not make unnecessary assumptions or did it not??!🙄

username this news has devastated me more than my own breakup... and that mothertrucker cheated on me with my bff. brb hurling and crying into the void.

username they were so perfect 🥺

username forever enchanted, my treasure. FOREVER enchanted MY treasure. FOREVER ENCHANTED MY TREASURE!!

username are u okay, do u need intervention?

username send all the help you could give my way tysm🥰

username rocking back and forth while hugging my knees to my chest type of thing

username pretending they never broke up for my sanity

username probably the reason she never had the guts to attend a grand prix

username she was getting educated and winning pageants, but yeah?

username these dts fans

username 💀💀

username tell me who was the champion year by year?

username where'd you get that from, netflix?

username so mick HAS game, but i never thought i'd learn it this way😞

username throwing up and shaking trembling and hurling and screaming crying

username love is NOT real

username it's literally the way mick coined the jewel/gem nickname for y/n before the rest of the world started calling her monégasque's pearl 🥺😭

username he has bragging rights forever

username he subconsciously knew it!!!

username never letting any man call me homie from now on

username girl—

2021, Switzerland

"y/n? what are you doing down here?" corinna asks you, mildly taken aback to see you down at the kitchen just around midnight.

you look up from blankly staring at the keys of your laptop, evidently surprised to see the older woman standing just a few steps away from you. you didn't hear her footsteps or anything.

"just..." you trail off, grappling for an appropriate response as to why you were sitting in the dark, barely awake, in the middle of the night. "files," you lie, unconvincingly.

corinna hums, and you knew she was barely convinced by your pathetic excuse, but she had too much tact to call you out on your lie. she wasn't blind, or oblivious as the kids these days would say; though she was considerably older, she still understood the worries and anxieties of the young heart.

"it's very late, schatz." she chides gently, touching your shoulder. "you shouldn't be working this late, it's bad for you." her tone was heavily laden with a motherly lilt.

"stunts my growth," you utter softly, smiling at her. corinna chuckles, pressing a chaste kiss to your cheeks. "and you can't be miss universe if you're short."

"you trust me too much." you remark teasingly.

"you ought to take over the world, darling." corinna laughs softly. "now, are you up for some warm milk and some- what do you children call it? tea sharing?"

"close, you're well versed with today's lingo. should i tell uncle michael that he should be worried?"

"he should always be worried." she says seriously, which made you tip your head back to laugh. she smiles at you, fondness clear as a day. "that's how you keep them on their toes. never make them feel comfortable."

spending the break with mick and his family in their summer home in switzerland has been a tradition of sorts. and alongside your fairy tale like romance with the youngest of the schumacher's, you had also become incredibly close with the rest of his family.

corinna grabs two glasses and neatly places them on the counter, she opens the fridge to get the carton of milk and pours a generous amount to each glass. she swiftly pops it in the microwave, before turning and giving her sole attention to you.

"i'm happy to see you laugh again, schatz. suits you better."

"that's very accusatory. i have been laughing, and smiling all week." you insist, light heartedly.

"maybe so, but not as pretty and geniune as now." she replies, "is there anything wrong? is it mick?" her tone was heavy with concern, looking both distressed and dreading your confirmation. it could have been her son that was the cause of the shift in your demeanor.

you look down at your lap, feeling the tears prick at your eyes upon her overwhelming bout of concern she plainly wears on her face. it reminds you so much of your own mother, and of which, corinna has easily become a substitute for when maman wasn't around.

"it's nothing." you clear your throat, "he's wonderful. he always is." you tried to smile in fake cheer.

"that's good." she smiles softly, "i was just about to say, that he loves you. he tells me everyday, he tells his father; he tells everyone willing to listen how much he could not fathom how you ever came to be in his life," she narrates earnestly, emotion heavy on her voice, "and he'll spend every waking moment of it to do right by you. to make you proud."

you closed your eyes, trying to will the tears at bay. "he tells me everyday too," your voice shook with emotion, throat welling up with tears. "and i know he means it. i do. but he— he never stops feeling like he constantly has to prove something, or be someone, or win everything." you weren't able to stop the tears, even as your eyes were closed. you finally open your eyes to see corinna's teary ones aswell, "and i— if i am the cause of it, i don't... i no longer feel worthy of his love."

you physically, felt all weight of pretense leave your body; finally being able to put to words the emotions, and complex thoughts you've bottled up, in fear of speaking it into existence. your shoulders sank, your defenses crumbling, as you broke down into inconsolable tears, weeping at your hands.

you felt arms wrap around you, weading through the shame and guilt you felt at your admission. you'd expected corinna's blame, but you never counted on her consolation. she held you. sympathetic and kind, and gracious; and understanding.

"it will be okay, schatzi." she says in the strands of your hair, "it will be. i promise you."

#f1 x reader #f1 x y/n #f1 x you #f1 x female reader #f1 smau #f1 social media au #formula 1 x reader #formula 1 x you #formula 1 x y/n #formula 1 x female reader #mick schumacher x reader #mick schumacher x you #mick schumacher x y/n #mick schumacher x female reader #mick schumacher fic #f1 angst #f1

[zot3-flopped]

Two months prior to its release, would-be doyens of Swift’s Tortured Poets Department have taken its barbed track listing very literally, leading to intense, often nefarious speculation regarding Swift’s six-year relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn, which seemingly ended in early 2023.

The album’s title, revealed onstage at the Grammy awards, was quickly linked to a December, 2022 interview with Alwyn and Paul Mescal in which they revealed that Andrew Scott started their group chat, the Tortured Man Club. (“It hasn’t had much use recently,” Alwyn said: you wonder if it’s undergone a recent revival.) Swift revealed the leading track list a day later: My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys, So Long, London, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, to name a few, sending fans wild with speculation.

Swift, obviously, has every right to sing about her relationships however she wants to (no apologies to Eamonn Holmes). But in the absence of any music, some fans have spread baseless, dangerous and even libellous allegations about Alwyn’s conduct (which, for obvious reasons, I can’t repeat).

Last month, a brief fan-shot video of them dining in a New Orleans restaurant in December, 2022 was recirculated online with AI-doctored audio that made it sound as though Alwyn is saying “you don’t get to tell me about sad,” a line printed on the back of one of the new album’s four physical editions.

When Swift recently told a crowd that she was “lonely” when writing her 2020 album Folklore – some of which was co-written with Alwyn during the pandemic, a lonely time for most – fans took that as further confirmation of their theories. A live medley of three songs that all appear to reference cheating threw petrol on the fire.

Swift could make this stop. She is no stranger to airing her displeasure with the likes of Ticketmaster, Scooter Braun, Spotify and Apple Music, and, occasionally, politicians. Before she released Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) last year, she gave a veiled speech at one Eras tour date effectively asking fans not to go after John Mayer, whom she dated when she was 19 and he was 32 and is understood to be the subject of that album’s Dear John.

“I am not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I wrote a song about 14m years ago when I was 19,” she said in Minneapolis.

But for whatever reason – and obviously, no member of the public has any idea what transpired between her and Alwyn so far – this time she has opted to stay quiet.

Establishing a baseline for conduct is neither commercially risky nor unprecedented: just last week, Ariana Grande said, after the release of her post-divorce album Eternal Sunshine: “Anyone that is sending hateful messages to the people in my life based on your interpretation of this album is not supporting me and is absolutely doing the polar opposite of what I would ever encourage”.

It feels like the endgame of a cat-and-mouse act that’s gone too far. Swift’s gestures towards meaning have led every single thing she does to be considered a kind of marketing, a clue to be solved. It leaves a superstar who’s usually hot on her messaging open to misinterpretation: hints about her personal life are turned by some fans into witch-hunts for anyone perceived to have wronged her; her current silence on politics allows politicians to invoke her name, from the New South Wales police commissioner quoting Swift’s anti-haters lines while defending police to Joe Biden joking that the matter of her apparently much sought-after endorsement is “classified” on Late Night With Seth Meyers.

When Swift made a blandly neutral handwritten post encouraging US citizens to register to vote on Super Tuesday, some fans speculated that her unusual left-leaning handwriting was the real indication of her loyalties – suggesting they’re so starved of substance that they’re reading into empty messages because of this dynamic she has established. (The more likely explanation is the insane way she holds a pen.)

For Swift to only direct fans as to her wishes when it suits her, it weakens her status as a truth-teller. If the comparisons with Dickinson mean anything, she might remember that nothing in the world has as much power as a word feels like the endgame of a cat-and-mouse act that’s gone too far.

#taylor swift #anti taylor swift #joe alwyn #travis kelce #the tortured poets department #the critics are not going to be kind to this album #she's too rich & successful to be so bitchy & vindictive #laura snapes

[ribbonstrawberrysurprise]

Possible Mia Ikumi Doujin Penname

First off, thanks to @berrychanx who found the initial doujin listing and @kuro93 who I know also looked into this and bought some of her works! Second off, warning for some suggestive doujin covers and other art, although there's nothing truly explicit.

First things first, I want to say that I sat on this information for a little bit considering if it was appropriate to speculate since Ikumi never chose to make this connection publicly. Ultimately I've decided to go through with it since imo the artstyle is instantly recognizable, so it'd come out eventually. I also found some still-up online accounts associated with this penname, and I know that's a thing the fandom has wanted to see for a long time. I'd ask that you please be respectful with this info and keep in mind it is NOT confirmed and that Mia Ikumi has passed away.

I'd also like to make clear that I'm totally uninterested in trying to figure out her birth name or track down any other personal info on her life that she didn't choose to share in doujin, her website, manga notes, interviews, etc. That feels very out of line. Finding other pennames can help us fans catalogue more of her work, but finding her real identity does nothing but violate her privacy.

So that's kind of where I'm at right now. If you feel differently about whether it's right to speculate on Ikumi's doujin works, or if you don't want to see anything even a little suggestive, please turn back now.

We know for sure that Mia Ikumi was a penname, since that was confirmed in ads for Re-Turn when she changed one of the characters.

征海美亜 ＊征海未亜よりペンネーム変更されました Ikumi Mia *Ikumi Mia yori penneemu henkou saremashita Mia Ikumi (征海美亜) *[Her] penname was changed/altered/revised from Mia Ikumi (征海未亜)

Prior to her return to Nakayoshi with some TMM anniversary art and then the 2020 Re-Turn short, the last work she published under that name was Koi Cupid, way back in 2005-08.

There's always been speculation as to whether she continued drawing manga under a different penname, but there was never any official word from her once her website went down, since she was not active under that name under any social media or on Pixiv. We also had no idea how her art might have evolved in the years since her last official release, so there was no guarantee we'd recognize any work of hers if we saw it. The first anyone saw of her art post-website was back in 2015 when she drew some art of Ichigo and then Ichigo, Mint, and Lettuce for the 60th anniversary of Nakayoshi.

https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/132481043559/more-nakayoshi-60th-anniversary-mew-mew-art-from https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/118704238761/ichigo-momomiya-in-her-cafe-mew-mew-uniform-drawn https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/130755109662/new-picture-of-ichigo-minto-retasu-drawn-by

As you can see, this art featured a pretty different art style than she'd had 2 decades back.

(Sidenote: it seems she also did some art for the 55th anniversary, back in 2010, but this is much closer to the dates when she was working under the Mia Ikumi name and has roughly the same art style as OG TMM: https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/151430694480/doodles-of-ichigo-and-berry-drawn-by-mia-ikumi )

Obviously, starting in 2019, she then went on to release the two-shot manga TMM 2020 Re-Turn, some miscellaneous promo art (Blu-ray bonus comic, Alice in Wonderland merch, Smewthie fanart, etc.), and finally new covers and bonus comics for most of the rereleased manga volumes before her passing. Between the works she published in the 90s-early 2000s and all of this new art, we have a pretty good sample size of her artstyle over time. So it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled on something familiar looking…

Berrychanx found a listing (https://jp.mercari.com/item/m11046282201 ) for an Idolmaster doujin called Room Fight! created as a collab between 2 doujin circles/artists: Nameless Color (ねーむれすからー) and Komomo+ (こももぷらす), published by Poco Poco in 2014. The seller specifically noted that the style looks very similar to Mia Ikumi's, and it's very hard to argue! The hands especially look the way that Ikumi has always drawn them, and the eyes, facial expressions, and hair shading is pretty much one to one for Re-Turn.

Nameless Color has some other works, but they aren't in this same artstyle at all. Therefore, the one whose style matches Mia Ikumi's is Komomo+.

https://doujinrepublic.com/product/tag_page.html?tags=85361&ref=product_page&type=rel_tag_circle

As far as I can tell, the doujin circle is named Poco Poco, and the artist's penname is Komomo Kozakura (小桜小桃) or later Komomo (小桃) or Komomo+ (written as こももぷらす). There's a lot of variation in which spelling is used across doujin sites, and sometimes Komomo is listed as the circle name rather than Poco Poco, but I'm unsure as to whether this is a change in how presumed-Ikumi branded herself or just a lack of organization in the websites. Also, the Room Fight! doujin is categorized under komomo+ (https://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/ZHORE153927) and under Komomo Kozakura (https://ecs.toranoana.jp/tora/ec/item/040030276511/ ), so I’m sure they’re the same person and not just 2 people in the same circle.

Here are the titles I could find under all of these names across various websites in approximate publishing order:

https://www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=&search_word=&ck=true&inStock=On&person_id=1051050 https://www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=&search_word=&ck=true&inStock=On&person_id=2874482 https://www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=&search_word=&person_id=2864627 https://ecs.toranoana.jp/tora/ec/cot/circle/LUPA2D6P8476d16Qd687/all/

The main fandoms are Idolmaster, Kantai Collection, and Strike Witches. It's immediately obvious how much they look like Ikumi's style, from small details like the faces to larger things like how she tends to pose characters on her covers. They range from 2008-2016, and you can see that earlier works look a little more like her TMM-era art while later stuff is way more Re-Turn.

So is that all the new info? Do we need to track down and buy these doujin to get any more new info on Mia Ikumi? Well, that’s definitely a thing you can do! But there’s one other avenue.

You see, the title page of Girls Fight! does lead to a now defunct webpage: pocopoco.sblo.jp

https://web.archive.org/web/20081201000000*/pocopoco.sblo.jp

The Wayback Machine has 5 captures for this website: 12/31/08, 2/25/11, 6/3/13, 4/25/16, and 3/14/23. The latest one just shows the same error page not found message as if you try and go to the site now, but the others all have blog entries ranging from 2008 to the end of 2015 (i.e., starting RIGHT after the end of Koi Cupid/Mia Ikumi's professionally published/official manga career).

https://web.archive.org/web/20090103031628/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/article/20797588.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160425011557/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/article/170290508.html

Mostly these posts are either drawings or advertisements for a new book she's selling at a con or online by mail order, so there’s a whole bunch of new art. (Warning: there's nothing outright nsfw, but some of these images are probably the most suggestive ones I link in this post, moreso than even most of the doujin covers. Use your own judgment!) The rest of the posts are personal diary entries.

(Sidenote: I am NOT going to translate this whole blog because there’s a whole bunch of text! I looked through the available pages, and the auto-translated version is fine for getting a basic understanding. If you have questions about a specific post, feel free to ask, though! Right off the bat, the text on the big image at the top of the earlier captures, the one with the green-haired catgirl in a red outfit, is just a paraphrasing of the post where she explains her categories/tags to help you navigate the site https://web.archive.org/web/20090103030651/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/article/21376253.html )

This website, crucially, also links to Komomo's pixiv account (Username: 小桃/Komomo), which is still up!

https://www.pixiv.net/users/3966440

(I was logged in when I accessed the page, so it's possible you may need an account to view it. Please do keep in mind this is not an account publicly associated with Ikumi/TMM and that the owner is likely deceased. We don't need to leave random comments and messages.)

The oldest picture is from 2012, when she created it (she posts about this), and the most recent picture is from 2018, so you can really see the artstyle shift here as well. There is no reference to TMM or Mia Ikumi anywhere.

The blog also links to her NicoNico page (Username: 小桃/Komomo), where she posted a few Vocaloid covers from 5/16/10 to 6/4/11.

https://www.nicovideo.jp/user/16890918/

She talks about uploading these covers on her blog under her utattemita/”I tried singing” tag: https://web.archive.org/web/20160425011607/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/907578-1.html

So, the art definitely matches with what we know of Mia Ikumi’s art, both from published works and stuff posted online to her official website, ikumimia.chu.jp (Hika posted some of the website art here and here if you aren’t familiar)

(As a tangent, that website seems to have been created at or before 5/7/07 and gone offline sometime between 7/1/10 and 7/27/11, so there was definitely a period where she was working under both identities at once…)

But is there any other info linking Komomo and Mia Ikumi?

The site doesn't give much personal detail about Komomo irl, but it does say she was born in spring, and Mia Ikumi's birthday was March 27th.

プロフィール 名前小桜小桃です。 一言:春生まれです。 Profile My name is Komomo Kozakura. In a word, I was born in spring.

There's also a diary entry about her getting a Scottish fold kitten for her mom in 2008 after the family cat passed away 2 years back. We know from the bonus comics in the TMM manga that Mia Ikumi had a Scottish fold.

スコティッシュフォールドという種類のキャリコなお嬢さん。 A calico lady called a Scottish fold.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081231223544/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/627816-1.html

Komomo also says she’s interested in gothic lolita clothing and that she dresses up at events. We know Mia Ikumi also dressed up for events, since that’s in her bio, and she drew her outfits in manga bonus page.

＊ゴスロリの部屋＊ 小桜小桃の趣味のページです。主に持っている服やアイテム、欲しいモノの紹介、ゴスロリに関する事とかも書いていこうと思います。 *Gothic Lolita Room* A page about Komomo Kozakura’s hobby. Mainly I’ll write about clothing items I own, stuff I want, and things related to gothic lolita fashion.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160425154652/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/627812-1.html

今回のコミケはカゼのため、コスとかせずに防寒重視でいったのですが Because I had a cold at this Comiket, I went without any kind of costume to focus on keeping warm

https://web.archive.org/web/20160425154658/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/627816-1.html

Between the art, the timeline of when things were posed vs Ikumi's public career, and the small bits of overlapping info on the artists' lives, I'm very confident that Mia Ikumi and Komomo Kozakura are two pennames for the same artist.

As for why, we can only speculate. I will say it's pretty common for artists to use a different penname for doujin work vs professional work, although some keep it more secret than others. It's especially common if the doujin work is more risque than the professional, which is the case here. I'll also say that almost all of Ikumi's post-TMM works were fairly short. Only One Wish may have been imagined as a one-volume anthology from the start, but it seems like TMM a La Mode and Repure may have been canceled early based on rushed endings with a lack of follow-up on plot points. Comi Digi +, the magazine in which Koi Cupid was published, got discontinued in 2008, presumably ending that series early as well. Ikumi also seems pretty annoyed with her editor in the a La Mode bonus comics, so possibly she was frustrated with baggage of the Mia Ikumi identity and wanted a fresh start.

Possibly she stopped putting out work around 2018 or possibly she started working under another penname. Maybe that was when Nakayoshi got in contact with her to begin planning for ReTurn, Ole/Au Lait, New, the TMM Blu-ray, the manga re-release, etc.

In conclusion, it seems like there are many more works by the artist known as Mia Ikumi than we'd thought previously, plus slightly more of a web presence, although this seems to have ended years before the TMM 20th anniversary renaissance. It's possible there are more accounts under the Komomo/小桃 name or under another penname that might be found in the future.

#Tokyo Mew Mew #Mia Ikumi #Meta

[critter-catcher]

Let's talk about gay penguins for the next day of pride month!

I think most people know at this point that penguins are known to be gay, and even lesbian! But what most people don't know is that they've been seen to engage in homosexual behavior since at least as early as 1911!

See a scientist, George Murray Levick, documented the behaviour in Adélie penguins at Cape Adare, but described it as "depraved". He decided it was too shocking for public release so he hid it. The only copies that were made available privately to researchers had the English text partly written in Greek letters, to prevent this knowledge becoming more widely known. The report was unearthed a century later, in June 2012 and was finally published.

(X)

Unfortunately that's not the last time gay penguins would cause an uproar.

There have been a lot of homosexual behavior seen in penguins in captivity, including Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins in New York City's Central Park Zoo. They were noted by staff at the zoo in 1998 to be performing mating rituals, and one of them in 1999 attempted to hatch a rock as if it were an egg. Zoo keepers decided to give them an egg from a pair of penguins, which could not hatch it. Roy and Silo spent two and a half months raising the healthy young chick, a female named Tango. When she reached breeding age, Tango paired with another female penguin named Tanuzi!

(X)

Now for the "controversy".

And Tango Makes Three is a children's book published in 2005, telling the story of Roy and Silo. There was a lot of support, but there was even more backlash. Despite having ten awards and two nominations, it appeared on the American Library Association’s top ten banned books, banned in 2023, 2020, 2017, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and firstly in 2006, just a year after it was published.

(X)

Alright, enough sad stuff, lets talk happy.

Here's the thing, penguins often lay more than one egg, though usually only one chick will survive. In captivity same sex penguins will adopt (or steal) extra eggs to incubate and raise the chicks! It's likely this happens in the wild, though it’s harder to say. Visibly, male and female penguins tend to only differ in size, and not by much. On top of that, they act very similar, particularly in terms of reproduction. Both males and females invest pretty equally in raising their chicks. That means it’s difficult to tell male and female penguins apart and even more difficult to identify any wild mating pairs as homosexual.

There have been many records of captive same sex penguins, and, there's even what could be considered a non-binary, or genderless, penguin.

In 2019, mothers Rocky and Marama hatched a chick together at sea Life Aquarium in London. This chick caused further controversy after the aquarium announced that it would not be assigning the chick a gender. The chick is identified with a gender-neutral purple tag rather than the usual gendered name and color coded tag. Beyond that, the penguin’s life will be the same as any other penguin at the Aquarium. They say that Gender means nothing to penguins, so why have we continuously assigned it to them? The General Manager of the aquarium comments that the decision to raise a genderless penguin is following an increase in conversations around human gender neutrality.

(X)

#this one got long sorry yall😅 #found out a lot more than id already known #animals #nature #critters #wild life #wildlife #animal facts #facts #birds #penguins #gay #homosexual #pride #pride month #lesbian #non-binary #lgbt

[digitalgate02]

The UPDATED (OG) Adventure universe’s Partnership double year math count

Updated Digimon Adventure OG Timeline’s Partnership Math Count List 

Not particularly spoilers from the movie, just stuff stated by the official timeline from the pre-release stream for the movie in Japan (Oct 26)

Early 80s - Oikawa Yukio & Hida Hiroki make the first contact with the Digital World, befriend Pipimon (no partnerships)

1995 - Hikari and Taichi find a Koromon egg* (no partnerships)

1996 - 2 (Rui; someone else gets a digimon later in that year*)

1997 - 4 (Menoa)

1998 - 8 (Possibly the previous 5 mentioned from Adv’99 anime/novels)

1999 - 16 (Adv Eight, Meiko*)

2000 - 32 (Ken*)

2001 - 64 (Michael)

2002 - 128 (Daisuke, Miyako, Iori)

2003 - 256

2004 - 512

2005 - 1,024

2006 - 2,048

2007 - 4,096

2008 - 8,192

2009 - 16,384

2010 - 32,768

2011 - 65,536

2012 - 131,072

2013 - 262,144

2014 - 524,288

2015 - 1.048,576

2016 - 2.097,152

2017 - 4.194,304

2018 - 8.388,608

2019 - 16.777,216

2020 - 33.554,432

2021 - 67.108,864

2022 - 134.217,728

2023 - 268.435,456

2024 - 536.870,912

2025 - 1.073.741,824

2026 - 2.147.483,648

2027 -  4.294.967,296

2028 (02 Epilogue) - 8.589.934,592

↓ Original notes + "Why there's still no retcon of the lore" below ↓

First, the OG notes from the outdated post:

→ This count is not about “which was the very first digimon-human contact”, and yes about people with a digivice. Because if we were going to count who was the first human to have contact with a digimon, it’s actually two and they’re Oikawa Yukio and Iori’s dad, Hida Hiroki.

→ I’m ignoring all the inconsistencies with other material (WS & ▽) because they seem to not match well with the original count. So, in this case, Ken’s statement in the anime (Aug 2000) is the one to be accounted for here. I don’t know if Ryo counts as Chosen (possibly yes, judging by 02 flashbacks) but I’m not sure where to place him here.

→ I’m only adding Michael to the count, even if he’s not a main character and yes a side character, because 02 ep 14 had this statement regarding him. And I like Michael too so, let me have him there :V

→ Menoa states in the movie she met Morphomon when she was nine, and according to the Dash X novel version, she’s the same age as Taichi. Which means she became a Chosen in 1997.

→ I couldn’t think of how to include Maki & Daigo’s group in this because ▽ contradicts with the original lore’s math – The fact the Pt4 book released with the movie on Japanese theaters state them being in Elementary School the time they went to their adventure in the DW, and later the confession scene means they’re in University/College makes them possibly been Chosen Children way before 1995, and I’d take it granted that they were chosen by someone else IF weren’t for the Homeostasis being involved in the scene and the digivice being way too modern for that time (it was basically Taichi group’s model. If you look at Rui’s digivice in the leaked footage from DigiFes2022, his model seems to be different and an older version)

→ That said, Meiko is the only character in ▽ that does not fall into contradiction with the math count. Because in 1999 there was not only Taichi’s group, but also other 8 non-featured Chosen according to Kakudou’s notes. So we can consider Meiko one of those other 8 children.

→ When it comes to Wallace, I prefer to think he is game in the original math – Taichi and Hikari met that Koromon in 95, but they had no digivice until 1999. Which means it can be possible that Wallace had encountered Gummy-Choco’s egg before 1995 and only became an official Chosen Child later.

Now, the new notes:

→ To avoid spoiling any detail about the movie itself, I’ll make sure to tell you they might have changed how the math works only. It’s not like, “everyone gets a digimon at the same time” but rather… “A X number of people get partnered with a digimon in different periods of a year” – Which means yes, you can still count Rui and Ukkomon as the origins of the Digimon partnership, but that later in the same year someone else (or, say, Wallace in the main timeline) got a partner months later.

→ That said, I’m opting to update this list and work within the idea that various sources of partnership (Homeostasis, Holy Beasts, etc) can be counted in the math. Remember – Homeostasis (not referred to as this in the OG series but yes in the novels) had selected Taichi & co., but the Holy Beasts chose Dai-Miya-Iori. And some other entity probably chose Ken in August 2000. This could explain why there’s a higher number of partnerships happening at the same time in Adv’99 and 02.

→ As I mentioned before, and indirectly supported by the staff (check the official timeline at the top of the list), ▽ has violated the lore to the point it goes in direct conflict with the new 02 movie and the entire timeline. So I guess it’s better to consider ▽ as its own timeline/Alternate universe than forcing it into the main timeline.

→ That said, and since Meiko does exist in Kizuna/main timeline, I suppose Maki and Daigo also do exist, and maybe they got their “ages” retconned and down to something suitable to the universe’s math count. They can still be part of the previous five kids mentioned in Adv’99 anime/novels, but they are probably around their teen years, or even early 20s instead, not fully adults working for the government I suppose. Or alternatively, just not Chosen yet. Pick your favorite route, Maki/Daigo fans!!

→ Yes, the Koromon from the very first movie IS NOT THE SAME PARTNERED WITH TAICHI. This never was confirmed, and was just fandom's theory. Considering how ▽ also made this mistake and possibly was one of the lore's violation, I prefer to believe this means it's not the same Koromon/Agumon partnered with Taichi in Adv'99.

#digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digifood for thought #kizuna spoilers #02tb spoilers #ni's digitheories

[aquatark]

My previous post made me realize that not a lot of people here are aware of Endless Ocean's bowmouth guitarfish glitch fiasco, which I think is a shame because 1) it's an interesting look into this game's history, and 2) I find it really funny... long-winded explanation incoming!

So! you see this guy?

You can place him in the game's aquarium, right? I bet if you've played the game, you've done it without even thinking twice!

...Well, in the initial Japanese release of Endless Ocean (known over there as Forever Blue), you couldn't. In fact, attempting to place this little scrimbly in the aquarium crashes your game.

Now this isn't too bad, since you can just press the reset button and continue your game normally, right? well... if you happen to leave the aquarium and save the game after having opened the creature placing menu, selecting a bowmouth guitarfish, and then closing the menu without placing anything... then congrats! you can never use the aquarium again, because it autoplaces whatever you left in that menu on your next visit! :D

In case you're wondering what this looks like in action, this video taken around the game's launch showcases it well, while also using the game's MP3 playback feature to put some anime music in the background, which I think adds to the experience:

So... how does this happen? How could something like this make it into the final game?

Turns out, this is due to how Endless Ocean categorizes creatures internally. Each creature in the game falls into a category, depending on the movements and behaviors the developers wanted to give them. For example, "migrate" type creatures follow a set of coordinate points creating a route around a stage, whereas "swim" type creatures simply swim around the area in which they are placed within a certain radius. Think of a whale shark's movements versus that of a butterflyfish - they have very different AI telling them how to behave.

Now, trying to load a creature of one type as a creature of another... does not make the game happy, to put it lightly. It doesn't know how to handle the request, and so crashes to prevent further weirdness from ensuing. There is only one byte (literally the second smallest unit of digital information storage you could use) per creature responsible for telling the game what type to load the creature as, and this includes when placing creatures in the aquarium. A slip of the keyboard caused a dev to type the wrong number in this byte, making it attempt to spawn bowmouth guitarfish placed in the aquarium as "swim" type rather than their correct "migrate" type. Literally one wrong number caused the game to crash, and for ears to bleed across Japan.

Since the aquarium is unlocked so early in the game, people discovered this on day one, in their first play session... and since Endless Ocean was a launch game for the Wii in Japan, that's even worse. It's not exactly a great look for your brand new console to have a game break so bad you can't use a mechanic anymore. And Wii game crashes are not pretty. So, Nintendo put out a statement on the day of release, notifying people of the problem, how to avoid it, and saying that a recall would be put in place. A week later, they released another statement, which stated people could apply to have their games replaced with an updated version, which would be mailed to them free of charge, by either phoning in or filling out an application online. This service continued up until 2020, over ten years after release! They really didn't want any copies of the broken version around... good thing we have archives of it!

The updated version even has different box art, with an added blue bar at the bottom, showcased in this incredibly crunchy image:

I love picturing Nintendo executives freaking out after a humble diving game causes such a mess they have to print the game again, losing them a lot of money and causing the game to get a lot of negative press...

I've seen old forum threads talking about the game as if it's garbage before it even came out internationally, because this situation was pretty much the only major news coming out about it. Can't have helped sales, at least...

Anyway, the game was patched to fix this glitch, along with a few other minor tweaks, and it was this version of the game that got translated worldwide. Japanese fans love joking about the whole ordeal, and I can see why! For example, on the bowmouth guitarfish's Niconico Pedia page (for which the closest equivalent in English would be something like Know Your Meme), this is recounted comedically as "...probably the most notable moment for the bowmouth guitarfish in the history of the internet", which is probably true! There's even image macros about it!

So yeah. The bowmouth guitarfish's reputation was forever tainted, and some Nintendo execs to this day probably wince when they see one.

tl;dr - A developer for Endless Ocean typed one number wrong in the code, making the game explode if you place a bowmouth guitarfish in the aquarium. Nintendo had to recall the game, and that specific fish has lived on in infamy among Japanese fans ever since.

Next time you use the aquarium, try putting a bowmouth guitarfish in there, and be grateful you can at all!

#endless ocean #endlessocean #forever blue #nintendo wii #wii #video game glitches #glitch #bowmouth guitarfish

[lakemojave]

Mojave's Top Ten Games of 2023 (3 of which actually came out this year)

I figured I should make a list like this at some point, but I didn't actually play many new games this year. Well, I played tons of games for the first time and loved so many of them, but few of them were new releases. At my current stage as a game critic, I'm playing a lot of catchup, trying to get context for current games, playing the classics and the seminal franchises of the medium. I do not have a game of the year pick. Even though I was behind the curve, I still wanna talk about the experiences that moved me this year.

Honorable mentions:

Baldur's Gate 3 (2023): One of the densest, fleshed out, satisfying narrative RPGs the gaming industry has seen in years. Immersive, well written and charming, no two people can have the same experience with this game because of how much variance and player choice is accounted for in the gameplay and script alike. It's for that reason it's not on the list though--not only have I not finished it, I'm also not doing it singleplayer, and am missing out on much of that juicy story content in favor of me and my group's meta-narrative.

Black Mesa (2020): The remake of the first half life is sharp, smooth, and immersive, combining what was visually and narratively compelling about Half Life 2 back into the original story. It has some of my favorite setpieces of the entire half life catalogue now, which is saying a lot. It's off the list in favor of the original.

Dead Space (2023): A triumphant return to the horrors of the Ishimura incident, with insidious twists to the game design and story that disrupt a fan's familiarity with the game world time again. It scared the fuck out of me so many times, but the bittersweet feeling I get thinking about the fate of the Dead Space franchise means RE4 gets its spot.

10. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals (2023)

The long awaited sequel to 2016's Oxenfree caught me by surprise after playing the first game just before it. Playing the original teen horror, I'm struck by how grating some of the dialogue can be, how sophomoric and cheap it can feel without drinking deep of the content. What makes this version of teen horror so compelling, though, is that through sympathetic participation with Alex, you catch yourself from griping at the young characters for making foolish choices, which is very effective.

What's stunning about this sequel is that in the 7 year gap between games, it's not just the team and the audience that has matured, it's the writing all around. Your character, Riley, is in her early 30s, returning to her hometown and feeling very existential as she peers into the past, the future, and the unknown in between time and space. The world of Camena and Edwards Island is expanded on those lines, the thematic focus becomes resonant and emotionally devastating, and the dynamic with young characters, familiar or not, demonstrates how strong this second chapter to the oxenfree story really is.

9. Resident Evil 4 (2023)

Look. I love a horror game. 2005's Resident Evil 4 may be among the best of them, and it may be timeless in its own right, and it may be foundational to so many other games I love today, but god damn is this remake fun. With sharper visuals and atmosphere than the original, intricate new resource systems like knife durability and parries, and some updated character work, it's safe to say this is a categorically different game than the original. Plenty of material was cut from the main game, like the IT fight or the laser hallway, which found their way into the DRASTICALLY improved Separate Ways expansions, starring Ada Wong. It's not my favorite Resident Evil, and it's far from the scariest, but it's the one with Leon's spin kick, and there's nothing more satisfying than that.

I do maintain a lot of early gripes I had with the remake. When Resident Evil 8: Village came out in 2021, it borrowed a lot of mechanical, narrative, and aesthetic tropes from RE4, updating them to a new game in the wake of the remakes of RE2 and 3. Those remakes were truly transformational masterpieces, blending all of Resident Evil's best aspects to create new, distinct experiences. RE4, the original, didn't really need much updating, it's been ported to hell and back already and is so ubiquitous that there was no real need to bring it back into the zeitgeist. Nothing can really be gained by this remake except for a victory lap for Capcom.

Cynicism aside, FUCK YEAH, TWO CAKES!

8. Mass Effect (2006)

I should say that the version of Mass Effect I'm playing is not the one that came out in 2006. The Legendary edition does a bit of graphical and mechanical tweaks to update some of the dated aspects. That's kind of a shame, because the dated aspects are what's so fascinating about Mass Effect. Between Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and now the early Fallout games, I find myself taken by classic CRPG design, which accommodates such a wide variety of player choice. Mass Effect doesn't have too much choice in it--the progression and ending are pretty much fixed from the beginning, you basically choose what flavor of the script that you want.

In that way, I like Mass Effect as a transitional piece--an attempt to bring the aspects of early CRPGS into the modern, console games market, with all the budget EA would give them. The writing and design are...satisfactory. The shooting could be more robust, the characters could have more personality, and to the series' credit those things do come about in Mass Effect 2 (which I'm sure I'll gush about when I finish it).

It's the presentation I love here. Mass Effect has maybe one of my favorite sci fi settings I've ever seen. A vast array of alien civilizations, a rich history filled with interesting lore, a competent portrayal of intergalactic politics, all delivered by characters that are deep and interesting. The voicework is also some of the best I've ever seen, and although there are many standouts, Jennifer Hale's Shepard is just tremendous. Actually playing Mass Effect may be a slog, completionist play might require some of the worst loot grinding I've ever seen, but that is all secondary to the way I was captivated by Mass Effect's version of the final frontier.

7. Half Life (1998)

I did a whole ass 5 hour video essay about Half Life, and I don't wanna belabor how much I like this game and series too much more. I loved Half life 2 and the portal games for years, but it was only for that project that I actually got around to playing this. It's a real bonafide classic, containing so many tropes of modern immersive action games WAY ahead of their time. The setting of Black Mesa is deep and engaging, the environmental storytelling is strong, and the voicework is natural and believable (for the most part.) Sometimes as a game critic I have to give some allowances to an older game for some of its jank and some of its rough edges, let myself see the thing just for what it is without all my modern hangups. I don't have to do that with Half Life like I do for other games. There's parts of it that are rough, like the Interloper and On a Rail chapters, but Half Life feels just as good to play now as it did 25 years ago.

6. Dredge (2023)

There's an old tumblr post that proposes a fishing game that's secretly a horror game. That post imagines a game that starts out normal and comfortable, but as the game goes on the player would catch stranger species of fish, soon finding monsters lurking in the deep and hidden secrets. It got a lot of peoples' imaginations going and engaged a lot of fan artists and even more comments riffing on this idea.

Dredge is that game. I was so gleefully surprised to see this game go through every single one of those steps in the first region alone. The game has a strong atmosphere and great art, leading to some real weird and nasty fish to catch and fill out the weird and spooky encyclopedia. Fishing at night gives you different and weirder fish, but it also raises your panic meter, which can cause hallucinations and open you up to monster attacks. It's a pretty ambiently scary game for the most part, and I almost chalked it up to being more horror themed than actual horror, until this one lagoon where a giant tentacle suddenly shot up at me out of a sudden drop in the ocean floor. I fuckin yelped, actually screamed in a way only two other games have gotten me to do this year.

5. Alien: Isolation (2014)

I have never, in my life, felt more powerless in a game than when I played Alien: Isolation. I'm used to games like Resident Evil, where you have a toolset for survival that is limited, but allows you to give actual pushback towards the zombies trying to get you. I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent this year too, the opposite of this dynamic, where you have NO means of resistance whatsoever, and the binary outcomes of monster encounters of that game completely broke my immersion.

Alien: Isolation actually gives you myriad crafted tools to overcome your obstacles, from human scavengers to androids to the xenomorph herself. Yet, the impossible speed and predatory senses of the monster means that one slip up means instant death, and the death animations are pretty brutal. Through cunning and cautious play, you can slip past the Alien enough times to where you get a flamethrower, which will repel her in a pinch. However, her AI is advanced to the point where she will learn your habits between deaths, look for you in lockers if you hide in them a lot, resist certain tricks like noisemaker bombs or flares. It's in keeping with how the 1979 movie presents her: a perfect killing machine. In fact, its the way so much of the Sevastopol resembles the aesthetic of that early film that not only helps the atmosphere, but makes the alien's power more believable. Immersive and terrifying, Alien: Isolation is a horror triumph.

4. Undertale (2015)

Yeah that's not actually a joke. I really did only play Undertale this year, and I was really actually completely blind going into it. Of all the games I'm happy I got to experience fresh, it was this one. Undertale seems tropey in its game design, story beats, and writing style 8 years later, but that's because so much of its design has been cannibalized by indie developers going after this aesthetic. As a bullet hell, it's...fine. As a meta commentary on retro RPGs and on the act of violence in video games in general, it's incredible. It legitimately gave me immense joy to reach the end and have my stubborn insistence on pacifism challenged even further, and then rewarded in the best possible way. I got to experience it on stream, too, with some friends who had played it previously and one who did not, and we all did the common thing and did funny voices for everybody. It's created some real cherished memories for me, memories that wouldn't have hit as hard if I did not wait to play Undertale.

3. Metal Gear Solid (1998)

Now here's a game I truly thought I'd never get around to. I'm a big fan of the Metal Gear series and when I learned that konami was releasing the master collection pack of the first 3 games, I was fuckin' stoked. If there's one other game that dictated the trajectory of storytelling and presentation of modern games like Half Life did, it's this one.

Having played the first two metal gears, the 2D ones from the late 80s, I was struck by how much of the basic design beats of Metal Gear come directly from the early titles. Seeing them translated into 3D is just incredible--all the prototypical stealth design transcribed so seamlessly into a much more legible visual language to me. The shooting may feel like ass and the bosses may have healthbars the size of Alaska, but the moment to moment sneaking in this game is so intricate and thorough that you really do feel like a tactical master as you go about it.

None of that touches on what's most memorable about Metal Gear Solid, and that's the presentational aspects. The animations and models might be worse than Half Life's, but the writing and voice acting is just world class. David Hayter as Snake, Cam Clarke as Liquid, Christopher Randolph as Otacon, and Patrick Zimmerman as Ocelot (hell even an early Jennifer Hale role) are astounding performances, even today. The cutscenes and dialogue are certainly oversaturated and long, but goddamn if I don't like watching and listening to them. I love this damn game.

2. Bloodborne (2015)

Bloodborne has been more of a myth and less of a game for me. I played some bits at a friend's house in 2017 and never owned a PS4 so I never thought playing it would be possible for me. I obsessively watched lore videos and playthroughs which got me into Dark Souls 3, then Sekiro, then Elden Ring, which has fueled much of my activity on twitch and as a game critic in general. It was only this year that that same friend lent me her PS4 and I played Bloodborne 3 whole times until I 100% the game in a matter of months. The experience was so meaningful to me that I ended up scrapping my first bloodborne video and starting from scratch, this time with Bloodborne Kart dev Lilith Walther as a guest.

I have never been more immersed in a game world than I have been in Bloodborne's. Yharnam is not only such a dense and intricate city, it is drop dead gorgeous in such a grotesque and macabre way. Many words and many writers have already described the surreal hypergothic smokescreen shrouding the insidious cosmic beings steering the terror and bloodshed from out of sight, so I won't repeat them here. You don't forget the sights and sounds of Bloodborne--they linger in your imagination, the visual language shapes your own ability to conceive of images and ideas in horror fiction, twisting the familiar into stranger shapes and forms.

Plus it just feels so fucking good to play. I like From Software titles and their style of combat, and I like how fast combat works in Sekiro and Elden Ring, but neither of those games accommodate brutality like Bloodborne does. You're meant to attack recklessly, cravenly, no blocking, just press the attack again and again until you're drenched in the gore and blood of your foes. You feel like one among the beasts--after all, what difference is there between a predator and the man that hunts them?

1. Signalis (2022)

I have not stopped thinking about Signalis since I played it the first time. The game is like a fucking honeypot for me. It's got Resident Evil style tank controls as an option, with similar combat and inventory management, themes and presentation similar to Silent Hill, and a sci fi flourish akin to Dead Space. So what, it's every great horror game jammed into one retro style amalgamation? Sounds like a great time for me!

That's just the surface, the hook of it all. While the game certainly uses this familiarity to pull you in and make you comfortable and excited for its own terrors, there's a creeping feeling of unease as you continue to revel in the horror and gore that's taken over these halls. Your character, Elster, is a special ops android in a fictional fascist regime, who has abandoned her post to search for her human partner, whose identity eludes her as she slips into delusion. After reaching the depths of the first area, where the space mine turns into a hall of flesh and viscera, the very walls pulsing and dripping, the world suddenly resets, and you find yourself back in the very first zone, now covered in the same blood and gore. The characters cry out in pain at you, begging you to stop, to turn back, to stop prolonging their hell with your own pursuit of an ending. A chalkboard in a classroom with a pretty frivolous note early on now reads "YOU'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE."

If I go on I'm gonna spoil the whole game, but that part there is the essence of Signalis to me. Many games will challenge your own enthusiasm for playing, question the time you spend in the game rather than like, going outside or something. Few games will actively blame you for prolonging the suffering of the game's inhabitants and creating a self contained digital hell. Few games will ask you "why do you want terror?" in the way that Signalis does.

Signalis is a triumph of horror game design. The imagery is horrifically cryptic, the worldbuilding is dense, the monster design and soundscapes are creepy and effective, the gameplay feels desperate and every bullet fired feels like a scream for help. Signalis is my favorite game I played this year, hands down.

[candymay]

My crazy roman empire is Lana and Armie's work and life parallel like in that it's always sunny in philadelphia conspiracy theory meme way

2010: Lana's debut studio album as Lana Del Ray, a.k.a Lizzy Grant // Armie's breakout role in The Social Network. Fun fact: one of the songs is titled "Put Me In A Movie." Armie also tied the knot that year.

2012-2013: Marked Lana's major-label debut with "Born To Die," a divisive album that jumpstarted her career but also faced enduring criticism from media and critics. // Armie experienced his first "flop" with big studio films in "Mirror Mirror" and "The Lone Ranger," but the real ones know they're actually golden lol.

2017: marked a pivotal moment for both Lana and Armie. Lana unveiled her first SMILE on her album titled LUST FOR LIFE (the antithesis of her pessimistic Born To Die), sounds like a stupid insignificant detail yet it resonated deeply with the fans, marking a departure from her "sad girl" persona. It's her summer bop album. Very Timothee's Elio. // Obvi, Armie delivered his standout summer love performance in CMBYN, solidifying his position in Hollywood. It was a momentous occasion for Lana, particularly with the release of her song "Get Free" — you literally just had to be there it changed her history forever lol. Finally, I'm crossing the threshold From the ordinary world To the reveal of my heart I never really noticed that I had to decide To play someone's game or to live my own life But now I do I want to move Out of the black Into the blue

2020-2021: Lana faced major backlash for her infamous Instagram post "Question for the Culture" and later for wearing a mesh-looking mask during COVID. // Armie's divorce and scandal lol. Interestingly, the year before, Lana released the masterpiece "Norman Fucking Rockwell!" featuring the song "The Greatest." And I'm wasted Don't leave, I just need a wake-up call I'm facin' the greatest The greatest loss of them all The culture is lit and I had a ball I guess I'm signin' off after all

2023: Lana Del Rey released a diaristic masterpiece with "Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd," transitioning from her self-indulgent, character-driven songwriting to a more personal and introspective exploration of her family and personal life. // After a period of silence, Armie's interview was published in AirMail as a full-length article. One of the songs, "Kintsugi," reflects on the recent deaths of three of her relatives, including her grandmother. Similarly, Armie had recently experienced loss; his father, his grandmother, and Florence.

Daddy, I miss them I'm in the mountains Probably running away, I've been meaning to say That there's nothing to do except know that this is How the light gets in Like cracking, the light gets in Then you're golden Just another folk song, but anyway I try so hard, but that's okay It's how the light gets in Armie opened up about his experience of sexual abuse by his youth pastor, marking the first time he publicly discussed it. Lana addressed a similar theme for the first time in her Grammy-nominated song "A&W". If I told you that I was raped Do you really think that anybody would think I didn't ask for it? I didn't ask for it I won't testify, I already fucked up my story On top of this, so many other things you can't believe

2024: Both are now living their best sober lives, with Lana having been sober for 20 years after her early struggles with alcohol and Armie has been sober for three years. They are now thriving, embracing new habits like vaping (lol), learning more about spirituality, and hanging with their family, and it seems like it's only up, up, up from here.

#too long but please bear with me i'm just a crazy bitch #there r still so many other details but i'll stfu for now

[prokopetz]

It might still be too early for this kind of question, but what have been your favorite video games you've played in 2022? :3c

Given what the release schedule over the next three months looks like, yeah, it's probably jumping the gun, but what the hell. I'm going to arbitrarily restrict my consideration to games actually published in 2022, or else we'd be here all week, though.

(I make no apologies for the high concentration of sequels on this list. I know what I like!)

Amber City is a spiritual sequel to 2017's Flood of Light, and its gameplay is in much the same vein, being an atmospheric walking sim with light point-and-click puzzle elements. If you enjoyed the idea of The Witness but wish the puzzles didn't hate you personally, this might not be a bad one to check out.

Blossom Tales II: The Minotaur Prince isn't going to break any new ground for those who’ve played its predecessor, though it's somewhat more adventurous in its dungeon design; if you enjoy casual 2D Zelda-likes, you'll probably enjoy this. Fans of 1980s fantasy media may also get a kick out of its pop culture pastiche elements – let’s just say the narrator is definitely taking advantage of the fact that his grandkids have never seen Labyrinth!

COGEN: Sword of Rewind is a Mega Man Zero style hack-and-slash platformer that does one of the first interesting things I've seen in years with the time manipulation formula, essentially merging your "mess with time" gauge with your health bar. The damage-boost routing in the speedrun is something you need to see to believe.

Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils is a retro platformer from the makers of 2020's Zelda-like dating sim Prodigal. Comparisons to Celeste are, perhaps, unwarranted, as the mechanics are very different, but I felt something familiar in the role of momentum in its flow of play. Visually, it's incredibly pink, which is something I always appreciate in a game.

Dungeons of Dreadrock is a short logic puzzler that one could be forgiven for mistaking for an old-school roguelike at first glance. Each level is a set-piece that borrows from the conventions of the grid-based roguelike genre to create situations where only one sequence of actions leads to survival, and challenges the player to find it..

FAR: Changing Tides swaps Lone Sails' landship for, well, an actual ship. The engineering sim gameplay remains largely unchanged in spite of that. Some of its elaborations on the previous game's formula don't work as well as they might have, being challenging more due to the limitations of the physics engine than anything else, but the frustration factor wasn't high enough to ruin my fun.

A Game with a Kitty 1 & Darkside Adventures is me flagrantly breaking my own rules, since everything in this anthology actually came out in 2005–2008 – it's just the anthology itself that's a 2022 release; I'm mostly throwing it in because this list was otherwise light on free-to-play titles. It all held up remarkably well on a replay earlier this year, though.

Gunborg: Dark Matters is a run-and-gun precision platformer that seems to have flown entirely under the radar, having just 11 reviews on Steam at the time of this posting. I'm not sure why – I mean, it's got a great soundtrack, and you play as a woman with a sword the size of a surfboard. What else do you want?

Jack Move is a JRPG-style title that blends self-consciously silly 1980s cyberpunk with contemporary anime aesthetics. I have to confess that I'm cheating a bit by including this one, as it's been out for all of three days at the time of this posting, and is the only game on this list I haven't played; I have, however, followed its development for some time, and I've had a lot of fun with the various demos the dev team has put out over the years, so I'm confident in plugging it here.

Recursive Ruin takes a page from 2019's Manifold Garden and basically asks "what if it was super fucked up?" The recursion here is fractal rather than directional, with progress "inward" eventually leading right back where you started. The story is naturally pretentious as hell; whether that's a criticism is a matter of taste.

RUN: The World In-Between wears it Celeste influence on its sleeve, but really takes more from classic endless runners like Canabalt. The "procedural generation" is just the same dozen or so puzzles for each zone being strung together in various orders, and the story is thinner than the trailer makes it look, but if you're a fan of the "running from left to right set to awesome music" genre, you could do a lot worse.

Submerged: Hidden Depths picks up where 2015's Submerged left off. The gameplay is substantially similar, though with a heavier focus on exploration puzzles and fewer linear set-pieces. Even so, it's not exactly what I'd call challenging – it's better approached as a pretty walking sim with light parkour-puzzler elements.

System Purge is about as basic as it gets for a precision platformer. No fancy moves here: you run; you jump; you get your face melted off by a laser. There's actually quite a bit of blood and gore, which is something I rarely have the stomach for, but the game is short enough that the lurid bits don't overstay their welcome. Fair warning!

Taiji is... well, remember when I said Amber City is a good one to check out if you like the idea of the Witness but wish the puzzles didn't hate you? This is one to check out if you do enjoy it when the puzzles hate you. There's a lot here that will be familiar to fans of the latter, though the puzzles are somewhat more varied owing to the fact that colouring grids is a more flexible game mechanic than drawing lines.

Vain Ascendance is a a roguelite precision platformer whose art style and mechanics put me strongly in mind of 2018's Overclocked, though the dev teams are unrelated. When I've plugged this game in the past I've been teased that my obsession with games about red haired women who can air dash is showing, but this I must protest: her hair is purple.

As for unreleased games available in demo or early access versions that I've tried out in 2022, I'll keep it brief, since these aren't proper recs, but you might have a look at any of Dormiveglia, Garbage Girl Louise, Gigasword, Keylocker, Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, Little Witch in the Woods, Rebel Transmute, Rose & Locket, Ruin Valley, Shards of Gravity, Star Hearts: Launch Point, Undergrave, Venus Looks for Jupiter, Vermillion Descent or War Girl.

#gaming #video games #video game recommendations #violence mention #swearing

[fans4wga]

Netflix seems to release much more feoreign and mire unknown movies (atleast here for me in germany) do you think thats strike related or is it to early to assume streaming services are trying to release non american movies due to big budget american production having been brought to a halt?

It's been a long time coming that Netflix (and other streaming services such as Amazon, Disney+, Apple TV, Paramount, etc.) are making more and more in non-US markets, though the stuff coming out right now was largely written & filmed pre-strike. Still, Netflix and other studios definitely saw the strike coming and invested more in non-US content to help themselves weather the strike, so you're absolutely right on that count! (source).

It's worth noting as well that many other countries do not have strong unions like the USA's WGA and SAG-AFTRA to protect the rights of writers and actors. See the example of Netflix's South Korean breakout hit Squid Game: "In his contract, [Squid Game creator & writer Hwang Dong-hyuk] had forfeited all intellectual property rights and received no residuals — royalty payments that writers, directors and actors normally receive when their work is reused after an initial broadcast. He said in an interview that “Squid Game” had earned him “enough to put food on the table.”'

For a show that won awards and boasted millions of views, it's absurd that Hwang didn't get some kind of success-based residual payment—but Netflix essentially cheated it out of him and made all the profits without paying Hwang commensurate to his value.

On the other hand, Netflix must pay viewership-based residuals to writers in Germany and Sweden (news story from 2020) because of differing legal requirements, which is great—it proves that it's very possible for Netflix to afford this and make it happen. And the success-based residual is one thing the WGA is fighting for in its current negotiations: if a show does well, the residuals ought to reflect that success. (There's currently just a flat rate paid to writers—imagine the writers of Stranger Things getting paid the exact same as a show that got only a few thousand views. It's just nonsensical.)

At the same time as all this is true, we want to caution strongly against placing any blame on writers/actors in non-US territories for continuing to work right now. There's no contract that protects non-WGA/SAG-AFTRA creatives legally if they walk out in solidarity, or a strike fund that supports them if they stop working. We do hope to see other countries' entertainment industries following suit and unionizing soon as a direct result of the 2023 strikes (and the way the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are effectively communicating their value and demands!)

(As a brief tangent, even countries with preexisting industry unions, such as the British actors' equity union and Writers' Guild of Great Britain, simply don't have the institutional strength to combat some of the exploitative practices that are so common. We want to see these unions get stronger as a result of this hot labor summer & everything that's happening so visibly with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA—but we also don't blame their members for continuing to work right now because there's no promised guild protection if they walk out.)

Thanks for your question, and please let us know if you'd like clarification on anything here!

#writers guild strike #sag-aftra strike #sag strike #actors guild strike #wga strike #writers strike

[aufi-creative-mind]

Slightly eldritch Link and Zelda post-totk? Like what effects does draconification have on Zelda when she returns and what effects does link have from the zonai arm?

Could be physical, could be mental, maybe both?

And if you are into linked universe, what does the chain think of this?

..... C:<

Slightly eldritch, you say? WELL...

I don't have a lot for a Post-TotK Zelda... Maybe some leftover scales on parts of her body but that's as far as I can think of.

But for Link, I have PLENTY.

Especially for a Post-TotK LU Wild.

This is gonna be a very long post so please bear with me on this one.

--

Many of the Post-TotK Wild headcanons I had were made from 2019 onwards, after the BotW2 announcement trailer. And then started to evolve and become more eldritch during the 4 year long waiting and from the breadcrumbs of info the Zelda dev team dropped prior to 2023 release.

(Most of these Post-TotK Wild headcanon have now since been debunked with the official TotK game lore. But I like to come back to them and they are being repurposed in some way with the new official TotK context).

Many of these headcanons were about Wild's creepy glowing green hand. Especially as prior to the game's release, it was never revealed who was the hand's original owner. So I had a dark theory that the Glowing Green Hand was originally the Ancient Hero's and their Hero's Spirit was used as the "Seal" on Ganondorf's corpse. Thus halting the Reincarnation Cycle and why there's a massive 10K year gap between the Ancient Hero of 10K and the Hero of the Wild's incarnations. (This is no longer the case, of course but I sometimes think about it).

--

So anyway, as for what effects the Zonai Arm may had left behind on Link.

Officially, I had an idea that the Recall ability had enhanced Link's Flurry Rush ability. Particularly the "freeze" game mechanic when Recall is activated, which allowed Link to quickly observe what's in front of him in a split second in real time. And also makes it easier for him to trigger his Flurry Rush when on the ground.

So...basically his time perspective and trigger instincts for his Flurry Rush ability have improved. Especially as I have a headcanon that Link's Flurry Rush is his Champion Ability in BotW.

--

As for Pre-Totk release / "if Link kept the Zonai Arm abilities" headcanons, I have a couple of ideas that I did experimented with. Especially with the LU Boys.

At the time, I had Post-TotK Wild to not only being older but is also rather cryptic about his TotK adventure with the reasoning that its still too raw for him to tell the rest about what happened (Especially as there was so little info about what happened at the time, other than "a sequel is in development" and "Link gets a glowing arm").

Of course, this has now changed and I am still thinking about what new experiences and abilities from TotK would Wild bring to the LU Family. Though the one definite change from the original Post-TotK headcanon is that... Wild is now 7 years older than he was in BotW. So he's now 125 years old.

Before the Zonai Arm's Abilities were revealed, I had an idea that the Glowing Arm had three abilities - dubbed "Farore's Blessings" - Wrath (rage/survival power up), Breath (ability to see spirits/soul leaking) and Spirits (animal spirits and where the Farore's Spirits originated from).

Some of these ideas may be repurposed with the official TotK ideas.

I have also done a handful of stories that explores the Farore's Blessing abilities with the LU family in the past. Including Puppet Twilight AND Fierce Deity. Especially the Fierce Deity one which was originally an early live writing story that I spotenously created in the LU main server back in 2019.

Here's the sketches I made based on that.

(Original posts: Original 2019 sketch [left], 2020 Redrawing [right])

(Original post: Dialogue Exchange comic)

I have plenty more in store! Many old Pre-TotK-release headcanons and new TotK ones that are slowly brewing in the back of my mind. But this is how much I can post for now.

Enjoy! :D

#answered #but like seriously though i had to edit this one post 5 times because it kept deleting all of the pics i wanted to attached... #linkeduniverse #linked universe #tears of the kingdom #totk #botw2 #breath of the wild 2 #lu wild #lu time #totk spoilers #tears of the kingdom spoilers

[eretzyisrael]

by John Podhoretz

I have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

When I talked with Israelis on a trip in November, the phrase described a gut emotion few under the age of 50 said they had ever experienced—the sense that they were personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an extended military invasion than a terrorist blow. They had lived through years of ineffectual rocket fire that was all but magically extinguished by the Iron Dome and Arrow anti-missile systems. Those interceptions had provided a feeling of near-divine protection. No longer. Israelis feel raw now, and such vulnerability is never momentary or transitory; one might say the opposite. Once it seizes you, it might take years before you wake up one morning and notice suddenly it’s no longer there.

I experienced that blissful moment once in my life, in New York City in 1998, when I was walking alone late at night across Central Park and realized I was doing something I simply would never have done before in my 37 years as a native Manhattanite. The feeling in the gut of every New Yorker of my age—the need to protect oneself from some sudden onslaught, in part because everyone we knew had been attacked in one way or another—was just no longer there, and I had never felt it disappearing. Because of the crime drop, because of increased police visibility, because of the presence of others like me in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, this new sense of freedom was now my new reality.

I am not saying Israelis ever felt secure in quite that way before October 7. They had, of course, lived through 60 years of terrorist attacks (the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 as a violence-worshipping gang designed to attack civilians on the model of the anti-colonialists in Algeria) and several short wars over the past half century. But through the 2010s and early 2020s, the sense of immediate danger for Israelis had split in two—and might therefore have seemed, oddly enough, twice as weak.

The threat had either become too geopolitically large to affect their quotidian existences (like the existential risk posed by Iran’s nuclear program) or could have only come so suddenly and unexpectedly that it would have been absurd to disrupt your daily life taking personal countermeasures (Palestinians engaged in a bus-stabbing spree at one point; how do you defend against that?).

These kinds of perils were certainly haunting, and they played a significant political role in Israeli elections and Knesset debates, but they were more theoretical to 9 million Israelis than actual.

So, now, when an Israeli says, “I’ve never felt like this before,” what he’s describing is a loss of stability, as though the very earth under his feet is no longer truly solid but might crumble beneath him. This is why the Hamas action, though not a terrorist attack in the traditional sense, may have been the most effective strike against Israel in the history of the Jewish state. It has destabilized people internally, which is terrorism’s goal. It also helps us understand the ongoing traumatic effect of the continuing crisis involving the hostages in Gaza. They have been held in unknown conditions for months now by monsters whose vicious acts on October 7—and sadistic conduct during the captivity of those hostages who have been released—makes the thought of what they might be going through utterly paralyzing and terrifying when it crosses your mind even for a second.

Israelis have the sense that, but for the slightest accident of timing and location, any of them might have been one of those hostages. And they hear the air-raid sirens, and they run to the shelters and do not do so in the almost lackadaisical way most of them did before October 7. The larger threat to Israel’s existence, and their own existences, has moved from the theoretical to the actual. After all, Hamas actually invaded Israeli territory and roamed on Israeli soil for three days before the Gaza envelope was cleared of them. Fail to finish them off now, and it could, it would, it will, happen again.

#israel #hamas #gaza #terrorism #palestinians #israelis

[felassan]

Do you think were going to see a Dreadwolf reveal trailer at Dragon Age Day or at the Game Awards?

hello!

I'm not sure, and I'm also hopeful/excited (so.. a regular felassan state of affairs hh..). if it's in a place where they feel ready to show it to the world more then that'd be neat, it'd be cool to see what's being worked on. and ofc anything said here is only speculation.

it's been at TGA before (2018 trailer, 2020 trailer), the last time being 3 years ago in 2020. if the 2024 internal currently-aimed release window mentioned in error on a dev profile recently is indeed still current (I'd guess that the change to "TBD" won't have been because the aim changed since the dev put that there btw, it'll have been because there isn't supposed to be any public info about the currently aimed release window yet but the games press noticed it on the profile, prompting BW/EA to ask the dev to change it. separate note: this being the case doesn't mean that there's no possibility that the window will slip more though), appearing at TGA 2023 wouldn't be a shock. maybe it depends on whether the possible 2024 release window is in early (but still after April 1st 2024 because of the fiscal quarter & FY24 slate stuff) 2024 or late 2024? as if it's later in 2024 (like say November) I could see a world where it isn't at TGA23 but is somewhere in the summer video game event/news expo period instead, because of the recent trend that's been observable in the industry generally and commented on by a former bioware dev re: an industry move towards shorter marketing periods (like more in the realm of a few months-6 months than a year). it's been said that the policy for this for a lot of AAA games has become a lot shorter, tending towards a lot shorter and louder marketing campaigns.

jeff grubb recently said on DA:D, "The Game Awards 2023 sounds right to me, they’ve done stuff at The Game Awards before. I’m expecting them to be there. If they’re not, it better be soon after, because Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, was, you know, there was a chance Dragon Age: Dreadwolf could’ve came out this year. Obviously it did keep moving internally, as I’ve reported before. It’s now, they’re looking at, you know, by the mid of next year, something like that.” and "The reality is, we very well could get Dragon Age: Dreadwolf content at The Game Awards. They’ve had teasers there before, it would make all the sense in the world for something to show up there." [link] this is interesting bc i'm pretty sure I remember a tweet from him last year about TGA22 where he straight up said "no it won't be there" or something basically when he was asked about it.

what I would say is that if it's gonna happen in a substantial way (as in not a codex entry and a blog post) in early December 2023, it'd likely be at TGA, not on DADay. this is based on how it was done previously and also on what's been said about DADay (an unofficial fan holiday event that just happens to occur very close to when TGA is held, thereby being overshadowed by it in terms of scale) vs TGA (a massive industry-wide high publicity event). DADay has seemed to have been more of a community-focused thing, a place to announce something smaller in scale like a tv show or a new book or to have something smaller highlighted like short stories or a codex. it's more of a 'today we are announcing we will be at TGA' with a new trailer-type [hypothetically] context rather than a 'here is a new trailer that isnt an ingame cinematic' type context, if that makes sense. saying that if it isnt going to be a 'big' trailer at TGA23, maybe there's something at DAday like last year where they showed an ingame sequence, which is smaller than a 'big substantial trailer' but still a video.

(idk if this post/ramble made sense but there you go). guess we'll find out in < 3 weeks. (❁´◡`❁)

#dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #mj replies #homiest88 #video games

[fallloverfic]

Nimona, the 2011-14 webcomic by ND Stevenson, turned into a graphic novel published on May 12, 2015, and adapted into a full cast audiobook on October 4, 2016, has been adapted into an animated movie!

The movie premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France on June 14, 2023. Netflix released a teaser trailer on May 18, 2023, a clip on June 8, 2023, a full trailer on June 14, 2023, another big clip on June 21, 2023, more footage on June 22, 2023, and another big clip on June 27, 2023. The movie released in select theaters starting on June 23.

The movie released on June 30, 2023 on Netflix for streaming! You can also view the movie for free, legally, on YouTube, until February 26th, 2024. Netflix also released a free-to-read digital-only multimedia 358-page artbook for the movie.

For simplified background, Disney cancelled the movie in 2021, but on April 11, 2022, it was announced that Annapurna would produce the movie, DNEG would animate it, and Netflix would distribute it for streaming sometime in 2023. I'm seeing a lot of confusion out there, so I'll make a summary of what else we know. I also keep the Nimona movie fanwiki page up to date with more info as it releases. Other good places to get news: ND Stevenson's twitter, his Tumblr, his personal site, the savenimona twitter, and the movie page on Netflix. While managing the fanwiki I found that Wikipedia's reference articles for the movie were kind of terrible and often quoted things not being said in the articles being quoted, even in their archive versions, so I would stick with first-hand accounts where possible, particularly what's coming from folks working on the movie and the companies making it. Below is a more detailed summary of info.

Nimona by ND Stevenson began life as a school project while Nate was in college. He was a tumblrite and posted the first pages on Tumblr on December 14, 2011. On June 19, 2012, he began publishing the webcomic in full on its own site. Sometime before November 2012, it was contracted for publication as a graphic novel after completion. The webcomic ended on September 30, 2014, and was released as a single graphic novel in entirety on May 12, 2015. It has currently been translated into 16 languages. Nate adapted it into a full cast audiobook that released on October 4, 2016 (you can hear a preview and purchase it via the link above). The graphic novel and audiobook are still available for purchase.

Apologies for maybe getting studio names wrong, some have changed over time. Anyway: the movie rights for Nimona were acquired by 20th Century Fox Animation in June 2015, to be produced by Blue Sky Studios. In June 2017, Fox scheduled the movie to be released on February 14, 2020. Patrick Osbourne was brought on as director, and it was planned to have the movie in the style of Paperman (Osbourne was animation supervisor of Paperman (2012), and went on to direct Feast (2015), which used the same style). After Disney acquired 20th Century Animation (as it was later called), the movie was delayed to March 5, 2021. There was reportedly pushback for queer stuff in the movie. Blue Sky is publicly stated to have shutdown due to the pandemic and money issues, which isn't relevant here, and I would be careful spreading rumors it was for other reasons. A lot of "successful" US companies shut down studios and departments en masse for other very dumb reasons, particularly in recent years, sometimes just because they aren't making as much money as their parent/shareholders wants them to and cutting salaries makes your profits look better to shareholders. The important part is: Blue Sky was being shut down, and Disney officially cancelled the movie in February 2021.

At some point around the cancellation, a video compilation of early release footage and sculpts seemingly from someone involved in the movie's production was released online. It was later taken down, but put back up by iO9 after the Annapurna, DNEG, Netflix production was announced.

After Disney shuttered Blue Sky, according to Variety, the Nimona crew, "led by former Blue Sky co-presidents Andrew Millstein and Robert Baird, shopped the animatic around town. The film caught the attention of Annapurna CEO Megan Ellison, who was familiar with the film and had been tracking the project. “I think anyone who has ever felt misunderstood or like an outsider will connect with N.D. Stevenson’s story like I did,” she said in press material for the film. “When I watched the storyboard reels I immediately fell in love with it. Nothing about it felt conventional or built off market research. It’s bold and mischievous and full of love. Nimona has such a powerful voice.”

Annapurna stepped in and signed up Millstein and Baird as executive producers. They created Shapeshifter Films so the team could finish “Nimona,” and subsequently joined the company, forming Annapurna Animation.

DNEG Animation was hired in the spring of 2021 to help with the animation, becoming collaborators on the film."

On April 11, 2022, it was announced that the film would be produced by Annapurna, animated by DNEG, and distributed by Netflix. Netflix also shared the first summary:

"A Knight is framed for a crime he didn't commit and the only person who can help him prove his innocence is Nimona, a shape-shifting teen who might also be a monster he's sworn to kill. Set in a techno-medieval world unlike anything animation has tackled before, this is a story about the labels we assign to people and the shapeshifter who refuses to be defined by anyone."

Between Netflix's posts and DNEG's Nimona page, as well as folks involved with the film talking about it, and new info released after the Annecy Film Festival announcement, we knew it would release in Summer 2023. Netflix released a primary cast article with images of what the characters look like from Netflix (be warned, both are very spoilery).

What is also interesting about the cast listings is that Ballister's last name was changed from Blackheart to Boldheart.

Sources for Business Insider said that Blue Sky's work would be incorporated into the film somehow. The second production seemingly wasn't started from scratch, and members of the Blue Sky production stayed on to work on the project. This makes sense, given the art was quite similar to what was in that footage released around the film's cancellation in 2021. DNEG crew have stated repeatedly, though, that although they did have a lot of material from the Blue Sky production, they had to make a lot of things from the ground up.

Quane released an official shot from the film on January 4, 2023:

It was announced that the movie would premiere on June 14, 2023, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France. (Post on Annecy's site, post on DNEG's site)

Two new stills were also released on April 25, 2023, with the Annecy Film Festival announcement:

On May 10, 2023, Netflix posted a new image for the movie:

The May 10 article also had a new movie summary:

"When Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a knight in a futuristic medieval world, is framed for a crime he didn’t commit, the only one who can help him prove his innocence is Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), a mischievous teen with a taste for mayhem — who also happens to be a shape-shifting creature Ballister has been trained to destroy. But with the entire kingdom out to get him, Nimona’s the best (or technically the only) sidekick Ballister can hope for. And as the lines between heroes, villains and monsters start to blur, the two of them set out to wreak serious havoc — for Ballister to clear his name once and for all, and for Nimona to… just wreak serious havoc.   

Directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, Nimona is an epic tale about finding friendship in the most surprising situations and accepting yourself and others for who they are."

Netflix released another still on May 17, 2023. On May 18, they released their teaser, the movie's first poster, and the announcement of the June 30, 2023 general streaming release date!

Netflix also added a new preview image to the Nimona page on the app, featuring Ballister and Ambrosius facing off behind Nimona.

And Netflix started selling Nimona plushies! Amazon (and possibly other vendors) are also selling shirts/jackets with official movie art!

Netflix released more footage of the movie on May 24, 2023! (it's around 6:31 in the video).

Empire magazine released another still for the movie on June 7, 2023, as well as an article in their June 8, 2023 issue.

Variety released a new still on June 11, 2023.

Netflix released a new poster on Jun 13, 2023!

More stills were released in an Entertainment Weekly article on June 14, 2023. And Netflix released even more. More teasers were put up on the Netflix app (though these are quite spoilery, so I'd advise avoiding them). The cast and crew did press tours throughout June 2023.

Again, the Nimona movie fanwiki page has more detailed info on all this.

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