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#this was loads of fun to do particularly drawing the beast and thinking about what a friendhsip between them would be like!
brittle-doughie · 5 days
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Playing hide with the beasts would either be the most terrifying and fun thing in the world, change.my.mind
(Also thank you for liking my stuff AAAAA-😩😭✨💖😤)
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Hiding Y/N, Seeking Beasts (The Five Beasts)
Yeah, man. I thought it was some pretty neat stuff :]
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Shadow Milk Cookie will try to lure you out with whatever he can come up with. He won’t sweat it too much as he looks around the area, but it’s for the best that you don’t poke fun at him for not finding you. He can and will put more effort into trying to find you by placing various dolls and such that will alert him if they spot you. Don’t always believe that he doesn’t know where you are. He might just know more then you think…
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Eternal Sugar Cookie is more straightforward, gunning for whatever source of noise that’s emitted, taking any chance on the possibility of finding you there. She’ll offer you loads of cuddles and kisses if you make yourself known, she was going to do so anyway, but the sooner the better! She might even hide away for a little bit among the clouds, making you believe that she’s gone only to swoop down toward you once you’re out in the open. Keep moving, Eternal Sugar will always be hunting you.
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Burning Spice Cookie isn’t about patience, he’ll try to increase the heat of the air in a certain area in a bid to draw you out. It has a particularly significant range radius, so when the air starts to get warm, that’s your cue to go to a different hiding spot, he has poor reaction time as he’s too distracted letting everything burn, so it should be fairly easy to move between spots. He’ll always be slowly moving about, so change spots often! What’s the matter, is he too hot for you?
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Mystic Flour Cookie is a bit more..extreme with her methods. If she can’t locate you and if the game is out in open land, she will start to destroy aspects of the environment to limit the number of hiding spots you’ll have left. This will go on and she’ll get more aggressive with this tactic until she finds the spot you’re holding up in. Your best option is to lure her away to a different spot before rushing out of yours and relocating. She isn’t a fool, so use these distractions sparingly.
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Silent Salt Cookie is another pretty straightforward seeker. It’s in their name, Silent Salt is…well silent, the only indicator that they’re in the area is the sound of their footsteps. This can work against you as you’d need to be as quiet as possible when moving, if you make a noise, they’re almost guaranteed to go and investigate it. Take a page from Mystic Flour and try to make noise elsewhere from your spot, then quietly move to another location while Silent Salt is investigating. They wise up fast, so pick a very good spot to start off with.
Winning keeps you safe from them for now…
Losing has you as their cookie for eternity! (They have a schedule, each Beast having you for a certain time in the week. They get angry if someone doesn’t hand you over on time! )
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trulycertain · 4 years
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I’ve just finished Hearts of Stone for the first time (I got the expansion packs last birthday, thanks Ma), and cor, I’m... still a bit dazed. That was one of the best experiences I’ve had with a game for a long time. Heck, in some games that would’ve been the main campaign. It truly feels like a work of passion.
The negative, to get it over with
I had some issues with the portrayal of the Ofieri. The people we see are monsters, mages, mystics and enemy guards. The first Ofieri person you meet is... a toad monster you kill. And then the next ones are your jailers. 
And you might say that Temeria and Redania are full of yokel stereotypes - I mean, the “How often should I beat my wife?” NPC line is a clear nod to that kinda thing - and plays on Slavic mythology, folk tales, and fairy tales, and Ofier is the nod to the Arabian Nights... but we don’t get many Ofieri characters, nor clear examinations of those tales. Instead we’re quietly directed back to Robin Hood and Beauty and the Beast homages (which I adore, but). And one of the first introductions you get to their pseudo-Arabic language (which doesn’t feel as researched as Sapkowksi’s cod-Welsh Elven, but I don’t know about Nilfgaard’s language) is a Redanian guy calling it “gargling.” *wince* After the interesting, often nuanced takes on pseudo-Slavic culture and the fantasy non-human racism, I found that a bit frustrating. 
And yet... In some ways, it feels like CDPR were aware of this. Because you don’t actually have to kill the rest of the Ofieri guards, and then the next people you meet from Ofier are scholars and thoroughly nice dudes. (And... merchants, which is another stereotype on its own, but maybe I’m reading too much into that and reading British biases into it.) And gosh, I find it interesting what little we see of Ofieri scholarship and spirituality, and runeworking/smithing as prayer. It’s like a mix of Islamic Golden Age mathematics - but with languages instead - and humanism, maybe with some Pagan influences. It’s really, really beautiful, and it’s clearly had some thought put into it. Also interesting is the interlinked duchies/city-states sort of system that the merchant nods at, which I’d love to know more about.
OK, so... maybe this is easy for me to say as an English lass who looks like a flour explosion in a snowstorm, but it feels wonky (to say the least), but... not ill-intentioned. If anything, the portrayal of the Ofieri is rather less biting than portrayals of other countries, though those portrayals also feel less.. loaded. I’m not sure what to think, to be honest. I had some issues with how strongly the pack tries to force you into romance with Shani and makes it a bit all-or-nothing. I wish I’d been able to buy her a drink or give her a nice rowan garland (actually, seriously, I need to draw her in that flower crown, it’s lovely and she was adorable) even as a friend, as a way to say goodbye, rather than just... buggering off and leaving her there sad, and failing a side quest to boot. Framing the romance that way made it very clear that “oi, you’ve made the wrong choice,” even if you had your reasons. And when you talk to her later, it’ll still treat things like you romanced her.
The Order of the Flaming Rose didn’t do much. Yay, fancy bandits. But... thanks for the armour, guys? Made a fair bit of cash off that, nice of you.
The positive (my favourite bit)
Shani! I haven’t played the first game or the second (I’ll... get there), so I hadn’t met her before. She’s wonderful. And much as I love Yen - and stayed faithful to her, though I was sitting there thinking, “Would books Geralt do this? I’m really not sure” - I liked how in contrast, Shani often gets into the thick of it with you. I also love a) doctor characters b) characters who put their calling above all else and have such strong purpose. She’s kind and wry and I was seriously tempted to romance her. I also like her admitting that it was a “make the most of the time we have” thing, and that it probably wouldn’t work long-term. I appreciate that honesty and again, that sense of purpose. Much like Triss, she’s not dropping everything for Geralt, who has his own crazy timetable and travels to deal with. That straightforwardness is lovely. 
And also... god, I really like her friendship with Geralt. Even if you don’t romance her, they’re so comfortable with each other, and it’s so clear how happy he is to see her. They relax around each other and she knows how to gently poke fun. Seriously, I can see why people liked her and wanted her back.
“And now I have nowt.” Bloody hell, is Olgierd von Everec actually written with Northern dialect as well as voiced with the accent? Is the dashing rogue... Yorkshire-accented? God, they must be Polish, Northerners almost never get to be upper-class or smooth in British media. (Even Sean Bean had to go posher for GoldenEye.) Nice to hear the language spoken properly.  I always admire the localisation when I’m playing Wild Hunt; it’s beautifully thought-out and detailed. And yes, Von Everec was an absolute jerk in a lot of ways even before the wish, but... a well-written, nuanced one. Also, considering some of the lasses we see in Skellige: sometime, I’d really like to have seen a female character along similar lines somewhere (one Geralt couldn’t bonk), though I know that won’t happen. (No more Geralt games. ;_; )
“A man must have some moments of madness from time to time. Tells him he’s alive.”
Iris! Goodness, I hesitated for nearly ten minutes over That Decision, and I still feel sad for her typing this post up on my couch, having finished the expansion an hour ago. I think it adds even more that I’d purchased “Starry Night Over the Pontar River” by Van Rogh (I can’t believe they even did that). I played Geralt as genuinely loving her paintings. (And seriously, speaking of assets, that Iris/Olgierd marriage portrait is lovely.) She was as complicated as her husband, though she got less screentime - and some part of me would have gladly trapped Olgierd in a painting and brought her back into the world, but I also know that necromancy in The Witcher doesn’t work like that. A very romantic-fairy-tale take on the tortured artist trope.
I even found Vlodimir interesting. I was glad that Shani called him on what was basically fancy sexual harassment and told him to keep his hands to himself, and he was clearly a real shite in life, but... yeah, even I felt rather sad for him after the dressing-down he got from O’Dimm. And to be honest, he does have some bloody hilarious lines. This series excels in “likeable bastard” characters.
I get shades! And I’ve been going round with the Mastercrafted Wolven Armour and those, doing the look I fondly call Douchebag Geralt, ever since. CDPR’s nerdery. It wasn’t particularly immersion-breaking, and it made me cackle. “Merchant With A Pearl Earring”? “Witness me”? “Geralt: The Professional”? “The Professor’s Glasses”?
All the optional NPC dialogue. You can doom yourself by not researching enough. You can never find the runewright. You can miss half the wedding party dialogue. You can miss things like the Van Rogh painting and the sad, rather interesting story of Vesemir and his lover (and the Viper Armour!). The game always rewards you for being interested in the story, and thorough (you are playing a detective, after all), but because it was smaller, they’ve also made HoS so dense and all that’s here in abundance.
“Delight in the world and all its glorious creations.”
The furious pace. It’s a rollicking, rip-roaring adventure. A frog prince! An old friend/lover! A political plot! A storm! A deal with... something not-good that may or may not be The Devil! A shirtless tied-up action-movie fight with five dudes! Dueling a reluctant immortal! Characters from distant shores! A horse race through the streets of a village! A Guy Ritchie-esque heist movie nod to Robin Hood! Getting possessed by a ghost and sitcom/rom-com hijinks while fishing for boots, herding swine, and retrieving fire-eaters! Haunted mansions and tortured artists and interesting grief and depression metaphors! A Seventh Seal-esque game of wits with something very old and very unkind! O’Dimm promised a big adventure... he wasn’t wrong. And it probably sounds like they’re throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks... and yet, it all makes sense and ties in beautifully. It’s really well-written and thought-out, and balances a touching story with CDPR clearly wanting to give you your money’s worth and take you on the best journey they can.
Gaunter O’Dimm. The one thing I did think was that they’d be more vague about who/what he actually was. I was surprised at the more overt things like the crossroads deal, and the Oxenfurt scholar. But I immensely enjoyed his character, and that trippy finale was fantastic, even if I spent everything after the first second or so muttering, “It’s a REFLECTION, oh my god Gaunter you have commitment to your theme, please let there be a mirror in the house.” (And it’s also kind of perfect that one of the main spectres who attacks you in his realm is a Hym. Punishment for misdeeds, the guilty conscience... I’m seeing a theme here.)
Treasure hunts and new armour.
“Like your new gear, Roach?” We got to see a bit more of Geralt's fondness for this Roach (not sure what number she is, to be honest) and that he treats her well.
Lots of quiet but intense, lovely Geralt moments. The kindness with which he treats Shani, and his quiet, wry joking around with her in comparison to Vlodimir’s crudeness; the fondness and understated grief with which he speaks of Vesemir, and finally getting to hear a bit more of what he thinks about his mentor; the guilt he feels over being pulled here, there and everywhere on adventures and how many people he’s left behind; more stuff on “Witchers are heartless bastards because mutations” and how untrue that actually is; his steadfastness about trying to avoid bloodshed in the heist; how he doesn’t like to see Vlodimir tortured, even if he is... Vlodimir. Course, I play Geralt as a (pragmatic, blunt) goody-two-shoes, so it might be different if you play him bloodthirstier, but there were some lovely not-blank-slate-protag moments. CDPR get that the characters are why people come to the games; I adore playing a game where “go to a wedding reception” and “have a snowball fight with your daughter to cheer her up” are missions.
I’d be interested to see anyone’s takes on this pack, because I was so busy trying to avoid spoilers when it came out (and I think I might have been knee-deep in Fallout 4? Not sure) that I missed most of the stuff on it. But it was full of fascinating characters, wonderful performances, some really sad, achey complex themes, and pulpy adventure. I spent... too many moments trying not to cackle in joy. And much as I tried to be a completionist and do base-game sidequests remaining after the main story and drag it out over several days, I spent enough time on this expansion that Geralt’s beard grew back and my backside went numb. So. Even with its imperfections, probably one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time. So.
...God, and there’s another, slightly bigger expansion to go. I’m not sure I’ll survive.
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fountainpenguin · 5 years
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What do you think of TUFF Puppy? I see a lot of people give it flack for one reason or another, but do YOU think that’s warranted? Would you recommend the show at all? Hopefully that’s not a loaded questions. Thanks!
I was able to watch the show with my free 1-month trial on Hulu (as opposed to buying the episodes on Amazon or something), so that’s always nice, and it was a good way to keep entertained during my study breaks this semester.
I previously wrote out my general thoughts about “T.U.F.F.” in THIS post just after I finished my binge-watchif you’d like to read that too. I can expand on some thoughts in more detail more below the cut.
“T.U.F.F. Puppy” isn’t the first show that pops into my head as a recommendation for its genre (“WordGirl” is the superior crime-fighting cartoon in my mind). When it comes to secret agents, I do enjoy a good “Bruno the Kid” for its wit, slow burn character development, and the fact that some of its villains legitimately die. And when it comes to cartoons that really explore animal behavior and what it would be like to live in an anthro animal world, I’d point first to “My Gym Partner’s a Monkey.”
But for what it’s worth, “T.U.F.F. Puppy” was enjoyable. It didn’t feel like a repetitive Monster of the Week show and it had its share of fun and engaging plots. There were some worldbuilding elements I really enjoyed (such as laws protecting endangered species - including villains - and the aquarium doubling as prison for aquatic criminals). There were some fun animal behaviors that I enjoyed seeing anthropormorphized, such as Kitty bringing people dead mice to express affection and the Chief (who is a flea) sneaking drinks of Keswick’s blood when he gets hungry. Many of the jokes were creative and worked for me- for example, a background character ended up committing crimes solo for a day because his usual partners in crime were on jury duty.
It is a show aimed at 7-year-olds, so it has its share of simplistic characterizations, crude humor, and a preference for action over long-term character development. And blood. There will be blood.There are a few continuity issues as well, but they’re pretty minor details. If you’ve enjoyed the other Hartman shows and are itching for something to watch this summer, it’s a fun choice if you can find it for free. I will say that now that I’ve watched it, it’s fair game for headcanons and ‘fic allusions.
I’ve been re-watching the series with my little brother (skipping around to see my favorites instead of going chronologically this time) and it’s been enjoyable. He’s gotten really into it and we like quoting random lines at each other (There’s an entire song about how to defuse a nuclear bomb that we’re particularly fond of).
The way I see it, if you go into it with an open mind, you’ll enjoy it, and if you go into it looking for reasons to dislike it, you’ll find them. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now and I think that “T.U.F.F.” might actually be my second favorite of the Hartman shows. I’m more biology-minded than tech-minded and worldbuilding-oriented than action-oriented. I could never get interested in much about “Danny Phantom” except Youngblood psychology, and as much as I adore Mikey being a manipulative narcissist, the rest of “Bunsen Is a Beast” is a little hit or miss for me. 
I enjoyed how “T.U.F.F.” really drew me into the world. If you watch the show starting from Episode 1, you learn everyone’s names extremely quickly. That means every major character at T.U.F.F., every single villain, and every henchman every villain has. I believe the exteriors (and some interior rooms) of every major character’s home were seen within the first half of Season 1, except Keswick’s which was seen in Season 2. We even learned the streets of several major locations. Details like that helped strengthen my belief in the world and follow along without getting lost. Villains were often defeated through clever plots rather than just punching them into submission, which was nice too, and they were a nice blend of being goofy and legitimately threatening.
Feel free to skip anything containing the Caped Cod, though, because he’s a piece of work and you’re not missing much.
Character-wise, I would have liked to see more female characters, and more villains too. One of the awesome things about “WordGirl” is that is has a truly massive pool of villains to draw from, and they’re all fleshed out in lovely shades of moral gray. In “T.U.F.F.” you will get the same few villains over and over again, so you’d better learn to like them. Some of the villains didn’t appeal to me, while others are fascinating from a psychology / writing perspective.
I wasn’t very interested in Snaptrap (the show’s main antagonist) during my first watch. He’s your typical evil megalomaniac, but he’s also dumber than bricks and doesn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities to choose from. During my second watch, however, he’s grown on me. I’ve realized that I like him more when I listen to what he says instead of overthinking what he does. He’s probably the funniest character in the entire show, and has a whole slew of quirky lines like “If I’m so dumb, why have I been getting away with slowly poisoning you?” and “I love our new crib! It was an impulse buy. (Gasp!) We should steal a baby to put in it!” One of his quirks is that ambiguity trips him up, so he’s easily confused and has a lot of quasi-insightful thoughts about mundane things… it’s hilarious.
Snaptrap’s not that bright, but he’s incredibly impulsive with a knack for building destructive weapons and promptly losing them. He also has a streak of affection for kids and is a surprisingly good parent when put in that position (He’s absolutely the type who would encourage his kids to follow their dreams and would support them every step of the way, which is an interesting quality for a villain). Literally the first thing he did when he realized he’d accidentally cloned himself was send his clone into the world to live the happy life he didn’t get to have. He grows on me more and more each day. He’s fun.
I like the Chameleon (the second main antagonist of the show) a lot. I favor neutral characters, and the Chameleon tends to base his loyalties on the kindness others show him. Sadly for him, both the good guys and the bad guys find him clingy and annoying, so he ends up ping-ponging back and forth between whichever side he believes will cause him the least amount of pain (When he knows he’s upset powerful enemies, he’ll try to hide in either jail or witness protection to avoid facing consequences).
His motives for most crimes are hilariously petty. He’ll target vacation spots where he had a bad experience or attempt to burn the whole city because he thinks the heating company takes advantage of him for being cold-blooded. He’s the type of villain who commits international crimes purely to earn the “international criminal” bragging rights, but he’s also the type of villain who will drive random strangers to the airport mid-crime attempt despite it being out of his way. He’s described himself as someone who “doesn’t always make the best choices, but you just can’t help rooting for anyway.”
The Chameleon is arguably the smartest of the main villain trio, but his weakness is that he’ll let his “friends” walk all over him in a desperate attempt to maintain one-sided friendships. In Season 2 he got himself tangled in a terribly abusive relationship with his girlfriend and is completely in denial that she’s only interested in him for his money. He’s exactly the type of quirky villain I’m interested in. I’d love to tap inside his head for a ‘fic or two.
The third main villain, Bird Brain, isn’t one of my favorites. I did enjoy a lot of the minor villains, such as the members of F.L.O.P.P. (the Fiendish League of Potential Perpetrators) who think they’re way more evil than they really are. Meerkat is particularly interesting. He’s obviously in the criminal business for fame rather than fortune, but planning isn’t his strong suit. He can organize a get-together, put together an evil lair, scout for useful weapons, he’s great at pep talks, he has connections- he can do EVERYTHING on the spectrum to put a criminal organization in motion, except actually think up ambitious plans. He works so hard, but he’s his own worst enemy.
He’s like an evil secretary.He really needs a boss to design plans for him and keep him on track and pat him on the head and tell him he’s doing a good job. If Snaptrap ever took him into D.O.O.M. (and listened to him), he’d have organization and Meerkat would have muscle. Seeing ‘kat run with the big kids for a day would be interesting, I think.
Anyway, there’s a nice handful of engaging characters in the show and some fun episode plots as well. The worldbuilding is decent, though there’s still room for headcanons to expound upon. I’d recommend it to anyone who thinks they might like it, because if you have a good attitude, you’ll see it as a good show. It has its ups and downs, but it’s cute and clever overall. There are three seasons worth of episodes (Seasons 1 and 2 have 50 individual episodes each) so if you watch it, you’re sure to find something in there you enjoy!
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theguineapig3 · 5 years
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Fanfiction Memes
Thanks for the tag, @accioharo! Let’s see...
1. Post the last sentence(/paragraph) from a wip:
“Theft- particularly of a living organism.” Presea put the photographs down on the low table to free up her hands. As she continued, she motioned to explain the patterns and actions of carving. “Burls are especially prized for their intricately-patterned wood grain. Objects carved from burl wood sell for very high prices, and because they are rare, people search all over to find them. Poachers sometimes cut down a whole tree, but often they saw off just the burl itself. This leaves the tree susceptible to diseases and pests that result in a slow and painful death.”
Real, uh, uplifting there, Presea. As always. 
2. Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Pick out the title that most intrigues you, or interests you and post a little snippet of it or say something about it!
“Equilibrium 2″ (because the original Equilibrium document got so long that it took too much time to load and I had to start another one)
“FGBSEC”
“Stare Decisis”
“Jeffrey’s Apprenticeship” (probably doomed to never be finished)
“Lithos” (definitely doomed to never be finished)
“FGBSC” is probably the most intriguing title because it’s just a string of letters, but if you’re familiar with my in-progress fics, you might recognize “Fugitive Guardian Beast Seeks Experienced Cardcaptor.” Since Lithos probably will never see the light of day, I’ll post a snippet of that one for your enjoyment-
Lina tilted her head thoughtfully. "Well, it depends on the perspective. You and your dad are the same in that you're both extremely competitive people."
"Runs in the family." Zelgadis murmured, eliciting a glare from Lina. Alex didn't see it, however, and had her own rebuttal.
"I'm not competitive. I'm the number one leastest competitive person I know!"
"Case in point." Lina replied. "Your dad was always trying to be better than Enrico in everything. He tried to make everything a competition. He's his own person with his own special talents and abilities, but for some reason he felt like he could never beat Enrico."
"Was Uncle Enrico competitive?"
"Actually, no. Enrico was the opposite of your dad in every way. He was energetic, happy-go-lucky, and loved life no matter what happened. He didn't care if he won or lost, so long as he had a good time while doing it. I think your dad was trying to imitate that because he wanted to learn how to be as happy as his brother was. In the end, happiness was something that he had to find on his own- and he did, with your mom and your siblings and you. But he never reconciled with Enrico, and he probably regrets that he missed that chance because of his feelings of inferiority. He sees that you're so much like him, and he doesn't want that to happen to you."
3. List the first lines of your last ten published stories. note if there are any patterns yourself and see if anyone else notices any!
The siege of Nor’este lasted 7 months and two weeks. (Equilibrium)
Time is a thing no one can truly gain or lose; it can only be borrowed and returned. (Fugitive Guardian Beast Seeks Experienced Cardcaptor)
The arrival of a world-renowned celebrity in a tiny seaside village was enough to draw people from all over the region. (Stare Decisis)
“Hello? You wanted to see me?” (Perigee)
“Your fever is up again. Did something happen?” (The Rescuers)
A cold wind blew through the courtyard. (Guilty Until Proven Innocent)
Filia’s teeth clenched together in annoyance and she gripped the steering wheel, trying to keep a careful balance between watching the road in front of her and glaring back at her daughter, who was sitting in the backseat of the van with her arms crossed and her lips turned up into a pout. (Filia’s Best Christmas Pageant Ever)
The blood-strewn battlefield was silent in the moonlight. (Mythos)
It was a dark night, and it was not the kind of night that a person would want to be in a dark alley in the slums of a big city. (The Trouble With Diplomacy)
Lina pressed herself closer to the tree she was hiding behind. (Pulling the Strings)
It seems like, with the exception of a few- Rescuers and Perigee both start with dialogue, and Fugitive Guardian starts with an ominous quote- I always take the first few sentences to establish the setting and/or what the characters are doing. I know dialogue is supposed to be a good “hook,” but I tend to want to know exactly what’s going on, haha. In my mind, it puts the reader “into” the story immediately, so that once the dialogue starts, they know what’s going on and aren’t missing anything by struggling to figure out where the story is and what’s going on. Personal preference, I suppose.
TAGS! @yami268, @eastofthemoon, @fabletelle, @ghostypeaches, @cutepiku, @glittercanblog (You can use RPs or original projects if you want, or if you don’t write a lot, you can just include drawings or comics, or just ignore this too, haha. The goal is to have fun!)
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destroy--troy-blog · 5 years
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There are ladies and afterward there are ladies with dazzling wedding dresses that wouldn't look out of order in a scene of Game of Thrones. Legend Bridal Designs have practical experience in the last mentioned, making astounding marriage clothing that goes the additional mile to make something paramount and one of a kind for your enormous day. On the off chance that that implies adding mythical beast style scales to the dress tail, at that point so be it.
Sonia's been one of the UK's best wedding bloggers for a couple of years now, yet she generally figures out how to improve year-on-year making her an ever-present amount in our main 50. The narrative of her own mysterious proposition is certainly worth perusing however it's her genuine weddings that will keep you returning for progressively, stuffed with life, love and those little minutes that remind you what you're truly getting married for (it's not only an extremely costly gathering!).
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Cornwall is unquestionably wonderful and the main thing increasingly stunning are the weddings occurring there. Fortunately for us, Pasties and Petticoats report all the marriage goings-on down in the Wild West, regardless of whether it's natural days in the Cornish farmland or staggering festivals by the ocean. It's everything here, it's everything free and it's everything along these lines, so addictive.
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Honeysuckle and Castle's blog is stuffed with the genuine ladies and grooms sufficiently fortunate to get hitched at one of their three delightful wedding settings in the east midlands. Their photograph displays are stacked with motivation for everything from beautification, floristry, bridalwear and those littler additional contacts that you maybe wouldn't generally consider. It's everything here, and it's everything dazzling.
honeysuckle and château
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A standout amongst Essex's most dazzling wedding settings, the Fennes blog merits following just to remain refreshed with all the perfect unique days occurring there. Be that as it may, not content with simply making your heart feel like it's going to implode with charm, there's an abundance of supportive tips, thoughts and lady of the hour directs on their blog to help you along the way to your own ideal day.
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Spoiler alert for those new to Marianne Taylor's inventive reportage photography; it's shocking. You can test her beautiful weddings and get some incredible thoughts for your scrapbooks by following her genuine weddings just as the genuine stories in detail behind the exceptional 'I do's' she gets the opportunity to record.
Picking your wedding blossoms can be one of the hardest pieces of the entire arranging process. In any case, Laurel Weddings' driving woman Laura has curated an impressive blog intended to make the activity a ton simpler. One of the UK's driving wedding flower specialists herself, she realizes all the most recent styles, patterns and designs yet additionally what thoughts from yesteryear are making a rebound. It's sprouting sublime.
One of the greatest names in the wedding blogosphere, Bridal Musings have developed and become throughout the years and their monstrous asset of tips, thoughts and aides truly is flooding with helpful marriage learning. You can even join to have their best motivation conveyed directly to your inbox, making the way toward social affair all your most loved dresses, setting stylistic layout, blossom styles and all the more much less demanding.
wedding thoughts
No, you don't need a 'customary' wedding day. No, you don't need your Uncle Jeff DJing. No, you would prefer not to get hitched in the equivalent stuffy church your Grandma got married in 50 YEARS AGO. What you do need is Whimsical Wonderland Weddings, a blog that will urge and move you to design your day, your way. Furthermore, if that implies tossing all that you think about weddings out the window to make something particularly you, at that point WWW are there to help.
Imaginative Brides
Imaginative Brides is a blog for the individuals who aren't hesitant to DIY it with regards to one of the most joyful days of their life. Prepare to be blown away. It is 2018 and not we all have a large number of pounds to go through on only one day. In any case, Creative Brides can demonstrate that you can even now have the wedding you've constantly needed with a dash of resourcefulness and inventive reasoning. An absolute necessity for your marriage plans.
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Southerners could truly take in some things from the 'I do's' from further up the nation if Brides Up North is anything to pass by. These are excellent festivals of adoration, splendidly recorded in BUN's
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themyskira · 6 years
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Wonder Woman #48
Previously in What If Wonder Woman But Men???: Earth is being invaded by +~teh D4rK g0dz~+!! They’re an iteration of the Olympian gods from the Dark Multiverse. This means they’re suuuuuper dark and gritty and edgy (i.e. they’re into murdering and subjugation) and have suuuuuper dark and gritty and edgy backstories (i.e. with excessive fridging, slut-shaming and violence).
The reason they’re attacking now is that Diana accidentally summoned them by making a very big and very vague wish while in contact with a magical wishing device, and then forgot all about it.
Last issue, Diana was lured away from Earth by a nakedly obvious distraction so that the Dark Gods could launch their invasion behind her back. This time, we see how Jason managed while she was gone. (In essence: he fails to have any effect on the invaders, but he does discover that his armour gives him a handy infodump power. This entire issue is a waste of space.)
Meanwhile Wonder Woman, our alleged title character, appears in a grand total of one page. Two, if we’re generous and count an unnecessary recap panel.
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The panel in question, included here because WHERE THE FUCK IS HER RIBCAGE.
Diana disappears, leaving Jason to fight them monologue at us all on his own.
He calls on the magic of his armour — which, remember, enables him to access ALL THE POWERS OF ALL THE GREEK GODS, but only one at a time because let’s not be greedy.
I want to talk about the armour for a bit, because it comes into play, the more we learn about it, the more utterly half-baked it’s looking.
As of issue #47, we know that the armour was created by Zeus as a weapon against the coming Dark Gods, to be wielded by ‘Earth’s greatest hero’. In a plot snag that only remotely works if every single one of the Greek gods is not only sexist but a complete dunce, the Olympians thought the ‘greatest hero’ in question was Jason and gave the armour to him.
The idea behind the armour seems to be that it allows the wearer to hit the Dark Gods with the combined power of all the Olympians, dealing a greater blow than any one could strike individually. That would make sense. Except that the only stated limitation of the armour explicitly prevents the wearer from doing this: they can only use a single power at a time.
Which means that the benefit afforded by the armour isn’t actually all that great. The Olympians would do better to fight the Dark Gods as a group. Or perhaps appoint a champion who already carries a divinely powerful item and the blessings of many gods. Say, the strength of the earth from Demeter, wisdom from Athena, a hunter’s eye and unity with beasts from Artemis, sisterhood with fire from Hestia, speed and flight from Hermes OH WAIT.
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What’s more, the actual powers bestowed by the armour are absurdly ill-defined. In theory, the wearer can draw upon any of the abilities of any of the gods. In practice, that has meant that Jason leans almost exclusively on the Speed of Hermes and the Wisdom of Athena (and oh, friends, we’ll get to that one), with the occasional Strength, I Guess?? and Managed To Hit Something One Time And Claimed He’d Used A Marksmanship Power.
What are the actual powers and limitations of this thing? Can he use the power of Poseidon to cause earthquakes? The power of Dionysus to induce a drunken frenzy in people? The power of Aphrodite to make people fall in love? The power of Hephaestus to forge cool stuff? The power of Demeter to govern the changing of the seasons? The power of Hera to be a petty jealous ass?
Part of the problem with the concept of the armour is that it assumes that the Greek gods have discrete and clearly differentiated powers. It treats them like a team of superheroes as opposed to, you know, gods, with many and varied domains and associations.
Another problem becomes apparent here as Jason summons what he calls “the Wisdom of Athena”, but could more accurately be described as “the Infodump of the Lazy Writer”. This power doesn’t gift Jason with superior insight, understanding, judgement or strategic thinking — it just enables him to instantly know key pieces of plot-relevant information so that Robinson doesn’t have to go to the effort of folding them organically into the story.
This is how Jason learns the identities and domains of the Dark Gods and, hooboy, if you thought ol’ Khrysanthemum the Grimdark Love Deity was embarrassing, get a load of these guys.
ROLL CALL!
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“Mob God, goddess of Chaos. And order, too— the “order” of mob rule. The order of a riot.”
MOBGOB! Horns, feathers, plate mail metal bustier and hoodie make for a confused sense of fashion, but the ripped fingerless gloves let you know she’s edgy™.
Literally just a shit version of the Greek goddess Eris.
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“The God With No Name. God of doubt. God of nothing.”
THE HORSE WITH NO NAME! Too lazy to get a proper Halloween costume; thinks nobody can tell he just threw a couple of dirty sheets over his regular clothes. We can tell, Horse. We can tell.
Would crap his dacks in the face of the primordial void of Khaos or the gaping jaws of Tartarus.
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“Savage Fire, goddess of war. Not war for some ideal or common good. War for power. War for profit. War for blood.”
SEXY SATAN LADY! Crotch is literally on fire. May want to get tested for UTI because that looks painful. Unclear how flaming-dominatrix-in-a-Halloween-mask getup is thematically connected to war domain.
Bro, you do realise that bloodlust, violence, destruction and slaughter in war is literally Ares’ entire deal?
The fourth Dark God — King Best, whose name sounds like a Melania Trump initiative — remains inside his floating statue, apparently biding his time while the other three take it in turns to attack.
Bear in mind, Jason is completely isolated and overwhelmed at this moment, and there’s no better opportunity for the Dark Gods to crush him into a pulp and feed him to King Be Best (he absorbs people’s power or something, it’s a thing, we’ll get to it). But no, they have to softball it by each waiting in turn to attack Jason while delivering some stilted line or other, aka the exact thing Robinson was poking fun at Jack Kirby for six-odd issues ago.
Sexy Satan Lady sets a bunch of flaming bats on Jason. I get the feeling she’s really not all that on board with the war portfolio. Like, she auditioned for the part of Lucifer, got cast as a war goddess instead, and now she just keeps trying to shoehorn hellfire and brimstone into everything.
Mobgob harnesses the power of the mob and uses it to… make a bunch of people jump off a skyscraper. This provides the Dark Gods with their second opportunity to incinerate Jason, as he scrambles to catch everybody before they hit the ground, but instead the Horse With No Name waits politely until all civilians have been delivered to safety before making his move.
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Jason: To me, Polly! Jason [VO]: Named my spear after Mom — discovered another of its powers, too — it can appear and disappear out of nowhere if I will it to.
Oh, get fuuuuuuucked.
Jason has spent pretty much his entire life resenting Hippolyta, and now he loves her and named his magic spear after her because James Robinson told us so (yet again, abusing narration boxes for an infodump). And, by the way, how many super-special magical gifts does Jason friggin need?
But mostly what pisses me off here is that Jason’s weapon — a divine polearm with a feminine name that comes to the wielder when summoned with the words “to me” — is basically just Artemis’ ‘Mistress’.
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Also, if you take another look at that panel of Jason, you’ll notice that as he summons his spear he is also diving out of the way of the Horse’s murderblast, allowing three innocent civilians to be horrifically killed in his stead. Cool hero.
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(No idea how noxious green murderblasts fit in with Mister Ed’s doubt-and-nothing domain, either, but it’s clear that none of the Dark Gods are particularly married to their areas of patronage.)
Jason throws the spear at the Horse, who disappears, and Sexy Satan Lady tags in, attacking him in the form of a pterodactyl made of fire.
Supergirl shows up and decks her. This makes Kara dizzy, because something something magic, and so rather than pay attention to what Sexy Satan Lady is doing or who she might be endangering, Jason swoops right in to help the swooning Supergirl.
Wait, why isn’t Supergirl still in the Dark Gods’ thrall? I thought their very approach was intoxicating and frenzy-inducing to people? Particularly those, like Kara, who have ambivalent relationships with their own divinities? Have we dropped that plot thread?
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Jason: Where did you come from—? Glad you did, but— Kara: Those insane gods possessed me, using their energy like I said—
That… does not explain anything.
After a couple of panels, Jason realises he’s forgetting something important. “Wait, what are we doing talking—? Should be looking— those ‘insane gods’ are still here.” But they’re not any more, because all of them except King Be Best’s flying stone statue have fucked off. Great heroing, guys!
Welp, out of sight, out of mind: Jason goes right on back to pointless talk.
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“This armour is a gift from my father, Zeus. It allows me the powers of the gods — only one power at a time, but still — Athena’s wisdom allows me to know some things… but my inexperience and stupidity don’t always tell me the best way to act upon it.”
This is where it becomes clear that Robinson is confusing ‘wisdom’ for ‘knowledge’. Athena isn’t the goddess of Knowing Shit, she’s a goddess of strategy, innovation, crafty thought and good counsel. In other words, blessed with the wisdom of Athena, you might not have all the answers, but you can assess what you do know with clear and discerning eyes and judge the best course of action, a.k.a. the complete opposite of what Jason is saying.
Jason and Kara only remember that they’re supposed to be stopping supervillains from taking over the world when Steve radios in to tell them that the Dark Gods are taking over the world.
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“They appeared in different parts of the world, sowing madness. Their very presence creates worshippers who then fight or become insane in some way.”
If that’s the case, how did Supergirl break free?
Once again, this is the kind of threat that could potentially be very effective, both in terms of building up the villains as a truly terrifying force and in terms of presenting Diana (remember her?) with a serious challenge in which the civilians she’s trying to save are trying just as hard to kill both her and each other.
And once again, Robinson delivers it in off-panel exposition, rendering it all kind of toothless.
The Justice League shows up and Jason fills them in. Somehow he now magically knows that Diana and the Star Sapphires are fighting another Dark God, I guess because his armour told him so. He also knows that the reason King Best & Less has yet to stir is that he’s waiting for something — though it’s not clear what that something is.
Because the Justice League are pros, they immediately decide that the best thing to do is to all fly right up to the super-dangerous floating murderstatue and stare at it curiously.
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Supergirl: The way he’s firing those rays reminds me of the dead New Gods on the Source Wall.
oh good. Please, do talk to me more about some crossover event that I’m never going to read.
Jason: Gods? Funny, I never dreamed I’d hear that term as much as I have.
YOU ARE A DEMI-GOD, YOU FUCKING DUNCE. YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY IS GODS. HALF THE PEOPLE YOU KNOW ARE GODS.
Aquaman: Yes, old, New, Dark. Lots of gods.
I’m so glad we climbed halfway up the Big Bad’s nostrils to have this chat.
It’s at this exact moment that Bestie stops firing his eye lasers and eats the Justice League, which is no more than anybody in this book deserves. Or at least, he absorbs them or eats their energy or something. According to Jason’s useless power of infodump, he needed their power to animate his giant stone form.
Which really raises the question of why he needs a giant stone form. I’m sure it must be fun getting to trample the city and swat drones out of the sky like you’re Godzilla, but when it’s been established that you could be using your powers to induce frenzied levels of devotion and bend everybody to your will… stomping about in a giant rock suit that takes seven of the world’s greatest superheroes just to fuel seems kind of inefficient?
King B swats Jason out of the air, and then we get four pages of Best stomping on buildings while Steve tells us that the world is ending.
“The world’s gone mad. The Dark Gods are defeating everyone — armed forces, superheroes — those whom they haven’t possessed.”
Again, you’re not selling this. You expect me to believe that these dudes are an Apocalypse-level threat, but aside from Be Best eating the Justice League (we already know they’ll be fine), all I’ve seen of them is three rejects in unconvincing costumes making a half-hearted attempt to kill Jason before buggering off. Ten minutes later, I’m supposed to buy that they’ve crushed the world’s armed forces, beaten every hero and brought the entire world to its knees, all offscreen?
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Best Buy tries to incinerate Jason; unfortunately Diana arrives in the nick of time to save him, and thus ends another entirely unnecessary issue.
(Oh yeah, and it turns out the big guy in the last issue wasn’t a floaty-stone-statue-Megazord, it was just Be Best. Pity; at least a Megazord might have been slightly more fun.)
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concerningwolves · 6 years
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Hello! I had a question about Vampires. I am currently in the works of making my own vampires, with their own set of rules and lore, but it’s heavily based on the origins. So my question is: what are your thoughts on the different kinds of vampires throughout media? Should people reinvent them, or try to stick to a more traditional sense? Thank you!
Hey Nonny! Mate, I have so much I can say on the matter of vampires. I promise to try my best not to turn this into another werewolf answer, but, well, vampires. Like werewolves, the vampire mythos is so fascinating.
On Re-Inventing A Popular Mythos
For starters, there is no one traditional vampire, although the oldest record of a vampire-like creature goes back to first Greek and then Slavic roots. As with the idea of a man having a beast inside, the idea of a human-like creature living in the darkness and feeding off fellow people was very popular.
Both vampires and werewolves are based on fears around darkness, animals and the human condition. Personally, I think that so long as you stick with those core ideals, you can re-invent the mythos however you like within reason.
Twilight pushes the boundaries of reason, and not necessarily because of the vampire-romance-age-creepy factor. My main issue is the Meyer Vampire itself, as I have no problem with vampire romances so long as they are done well and without the huge age gaps or the idea of one human’s blood being particularly alluring. That being said, I respect Meyer’s attempt to re-invent the vampires, I just feel as if she didn’t do enough research beyond the Western take and abandoned the core ideals. Here are some of the mistakes I feel she made:
Sparkle sparkle
This one is probably a shared peeve by many who read Twilight, for a whole lot of different reasons. For me, it’s because I can’t see any reason for the sparkle part beyond making Edward more attractive to Bella. In the mythos, a vampire’s relation to sunlight ranged anywhere from irritation to instant dustification on contact. This isn’t to say that I don’t think you can play with the sunlight reaction, but I found sparkles too far-fetched and without any mythological or cultural beliefs to back it up.
Italian Connection
The vampire Meyer went with for the base was the more modern, middle-ages take. That in itself isn’t really a problem, but why do that if you’re going to remove the religious components? I have a very strong view that if you’re going to re-invent a mythos, do your best to draw on one cultural source. This is because cultural history ought to be respected and given fair representation. To do that, I think that Meyer ought to have either said “these vampires are harmed by religious affects and so the volturi live in Italy” or “these vampires aren’t harmed by religious affects so I should draw on the Hellenestic or Slavic roots and base them in Greece/Eastern Europe”.
It’s worth mentioning here that the sparkle-skin thing could have been spun if, say, Meyer went with the Hellenistic vampire as a base. The story goes that Apollo cursed this poor guy to be hyper-sensitive to/irritated by sunlight; therefore, one option could have been to use the idea of that curse and say “the sheen on their skin in sunlight is so that they can’t hide and everyone must know them for what they are”.
Blood Delecacies
I’ve already mentioned disliking the whole “your blood is particularly alluring so I’m going to become obsessed with you” trope - not least because that’s a terribly unhealthy central component in a romance, but also because blood is blood. This one is more of a personal pet peeve though, and not really a bad representation or anything of the like, so feel free to overlook it. (But seriously, if you include the trope, keep it away from romance)
Vampires Unboxed
There are a lot of parallels between vampires and werewolves, and that’s mainly because the Slavic take of the vampire was originally a werewolf. That alone leaves you with a lot to use and mould, but another parallel is the “vampire tree”.
I talked about shapeshifters and man-beasts being a tree, of which the werewolf was an offshoot, and to continue that metaphor, vampirism is like a vine or some sort of climbing plant wrapped around the Shapeshifting Tree. You’ve got your standard vampire-vampire, which is what most vampire takes are based off of, but you’ve also got the vampirelike creatures: parasitic, evil spirits; creatures that feast off human energy; lamia... some research into vampiric beings and creatures will provide you with a goldmine of useable lore. Why stick with the traditional vampiric humanoid when there’s so much more you can run with?
 Nothing makes me happier than perusing a fresh take on the vampire. As the human condition and our perspective on it grows, there is no reason why you can’t be creative with the mythos, so long as you’re respectful and steer clear of harmful tropes.  One of my own back-burner works has a race of Greek-inspires vampires that I’m building, and it’s great fun.
I’m rooting for you, Nonny: break the box apart and rebuild it from the slats and nails!Good luck and enjoy making your vampires x
Media Favourites
Bad vampire re-inventions aside, there are plenty that I adore and make me super happy, from classics to contemporary. This last bit is going under the cut because it’s really just a list of examples with some commentary.
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu pre-dates Dracula and follows a female vampire, Eastern European and Middle-Ages influences. Yet to read all the way through, but what I know already has it pegged on my immediate TBR list.
Dracula by Bram Stoker; considered to be the birth of the classical-modern vampire, I first read this when I was ten and then again last year, seeing it performed as a play in between. Safe to say, the Stoker Vampire is one of my favourites. Slavic-Christian influences.
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King; I’m yet to read this, but I’ve been a little put-off because Father Callaghan appears in the Dark Tower series, and in short: King spoiled his own vampire novel for me. Spoiled as in the “spoilers” sense, that is. The themes of faith, good, evil and human nature are combined brilliantly to make his vampires, and I’ll read it one day without a doubt.
What We Do in the Shadows; This film exists only in screenshots and clips for me, but damn it’s such a good take, particularly if you look at the relationship between vampires and the human condition through a more modern lense.
Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough; I read this novel no less than four times, and just thinking about it has made me get anxious and look around the kitchen. Although not classified as vampire fiction by popular modern standards, this young adult horror draws on loads of the original Slavic beliefs around vampiric spirits and the diseased undead. I would highly reccomend this one as inspiration for a unique take on vampires.
The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith; I think I got like, four books in?Stefan had just been turned human by some flowers... I don’t know, it was years ago. But anyway, romance and love triangles aside, the vampires in this series stuck with me, even though I got bored with the rest of it. The shape-shifting and predatory ways were all consistent with the Slavic lore and I really enjoyed that one aspect.
Young Dracula; British children’s comedy series following the son of Dracula, who doesn’t really want to be a vampire and has a human friend. There was all sorts in there that I loved, but my two favourites aspects were: bottling blood and acting like it was wine, with a pallet and distinct aromas, and the bat shapeshifting. Dracula was also a massive drama queen and his son was Constantly Embarassed. A lot of tropes such as the Tortured Recluse and the Vampire Victim were dissolved too, which made it all the more attractive to me. I remember the show getting progressively darker and intense, and then either I lost track of it or it went off-air. Either way, it’s still on my mind a few times a month nine years later.
My Babysitter’s a Vampire; and here it is, my guilty favourite from my late pre-teens. I was a fan of both the film and the successive TV series, because at the time I liked the fresh take on the sun theme, and enjoyed the use of flying ability. I wasn’t such a fan of the idea that being a vampire could beautify someone, but the rest of it secured my love.
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britesparc · 3 years
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Weekend Top Ten #480
Top Ten Videogame Logos
I like games. I’ve been playing them for a long time; since the 1980s, which was over seven years ago. In that time I’ve seen many ages of gaming come and go – remember full motion video? – but one thing I have noticed is that game packaging has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. From large sturdy cardboard boxes the size of two hardback books back in the early nineties, to slim ‘n sexy DVD cases around the turn of the millennium, to – well – absolutely nothing these days as we oxidise games from the air. And one of the things that used to – and, I guess, still can do – make a game’s box art really pop was a sexy, elaborate, or otherwise just really frickin’ cool logo.
Now, by “logo” I’m basically talking about the design and typeface of the title itself. I don’t really mean the lambda sign from Half-Life, or – to step outside specific games for a second – the famous Ghostbusters symbol. Some games do actually end up with iconography incorporated into their title design, and you might see a little bit of it here; but for the sake of argument, I’m using “logo” to mean “title”, and how pretty that title is.
And I gotta say, some games had very, very pretty titles.
Now, I know, from research, that 8-bit games released in the eighties often had wild and wacky logos. However, there’s precious little of that on my list, because I didn’t really notice it at the time. I can appreciate it now, looking back, but it meant nothing to me forty years ago because, well, I wasn’t born or was simply far too young to notice. I didn’t really pay attention to box art until I had my Amiga, and that was about 1990. So there’s precious little here that’s genuinely old. That being said, I do seriously think that the golden age of logo design was that late eighties/early nineties period, as we transitioned from 8-bit to 16-bit home computers, with a legacy that continued into the PC dominance years of the mid-to-late-nineties. I think at this point the industry benefited from beginning to have certain established patterns and artists, but was still loose enough to allow a huge deal of experimentation and a feel of general lawlessness. It was in this era that Roger Dean reigned supreme, a vastly talented artist whose airbrush style defined the Amiga 500 for me. His work can be seen on this list, and – surprise – it’s at number one. Dean was so good that not only did his artwork grace dozens of boxes, but he also designed the greatest logo for a game developer of all time.
(Just as an aside: I had a lot of Psygnosis games for the Amiga. I remember vividly my cousin and I would desperately try to parse the wording of that logo – “Is it a P-S-V? P-S-V-C?” – during the brief time it appeared on screen whilst the game loaded. Ah, those exotic early years, full of wonder and possibility… but I digress)
Anyway, there were loads of bright, bold, colourful logos in those days. I think they mostly wanted box art that leaped out from a crowded computer shop shelf, and generally there was probably an assumption that the audience would be either young or nerdy, so there was no outward desire to be elegant or minimalist. Huge, chunky logos were popular; large text, airbrushed artwork, characters incorporated into the logo itself; plenty of shading and embossing effects were used to make a logo stand out proud on the box.
As time wore on, and the target audience aged and maybe wanted to appear a bit cooler, logos seemed to grow smaller. 3D extruded block text was replaced with simple white font work and elegant design. As such, into this new millennium, there are very few really exciting logos nowadays. Even my beloved Half-Life has a really minimalist design, which works, yeah, but it’s not exactly an all-timer. We do still get some very good logos now and again; I’ll go to bat for Halo any day of the week, but even that is twenty years old now. BioShock’s was pretty cool, too, with its rusted brass façade, but even that’s, what, 14 at this point? Blimey.
I think the evolution of the game logo can best be illustrated by comparing the original Doom logo to the one used in the 2016 remake. Vibrant colour versus flat white. I know which I prefer.
So there we are; my ten favourite game logos. And as these are game logos, I’ve banned anything that’s adapted from external media, whether it’s a Star War or Spider-Man or even Cyberpunk 2077 (which does have a cracking logo but is more or less a version of the one used in the original role-playing game). Anyway. Let’s have at it.
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Shadow of the Beast (1989): not the first Roger Dean box art, but arguably the most famous, and certainly the one that caught my attention. Well, actually, it was Beast II in 1990 that I saw, but I’m picking this original logo as it’s a bit cleaner without the “II”. Anyway, what’s not to like? Dean’s fantasy-metal style is evident, with a logo that’s kind of threatening to look at, the pointed curls descending from the letters connoting teeth or claws, but the brushed, metallic detailing giving it a technological bent. Supremely cool, freakish, and a style carried very strongly into the game (and moreso the sequel).
Elite (1984): a rare example of a relatively minimalist piece of box art for the eighties, but all the same this logo is something else. Huge and bold, carved out of solid gold, its eagle wings suggesting the power of flight whilst the strangely-crowned head suggests something almost majestic or godlike. It’s the perfect logo for a game about space exploration, yet it also has echoes of Nazi symbolism or even Judge Dredd, giving the game a subtle sense of menace.
Lemmings (1991): unlike the other two, this was a fun, bouncy game, whose childish, cartoony stylings hid a dark and fierce puzzling heart (and also supremely distressing scenes of Lemmings getting mutilated). But this logo is beautiful, its jolly, chunky green typeface reflecting both pastoral beauty and the hair of the little critters; the misaligned letters reminiscent of the undulating hills the levels hint at (but don’t actually contain, particularly). And we get the heads of the Lemming poking out, squarely cementing them as an important part of the experience, their character the defining characteristic of the game itself and all its associated art.
Doom (1993): a seminal moment in gaming, and a seminal logo too. Surprisingly colourful for a game about the ravages of hell, this is a bold and bright bit of typography, the extruded letters suggestive of the 3D nature of the game itself; the almost terracotta tiles meshing with the complex mechanical geometry on the letters reminiscent of the game’s merging of the supernatural with the highly technological. And there’s the pointed extremities of the word, directed down like fangs, hinting at the horrors and dangers to come. Quite simply brilliant.
Minecraft (2009): the most recent game on the list, but its logo is almost a throwback. Thick, square, blocky letters reflect the cuboid nature of the gameworld; the angle away from the camera suggests height and importance, subtly hinting at the scale of the game itself. This is an iconic piece of iconography, instantly recognisable by children – to the extent that trying to draw a logo like Minecraft, or recreate the Minecraft logo itself, is fairly common in our house. I also like that one of the letters appears to be a Creeper.
Pac-Man (1980): and here we have the oldest logo! But so iconic. The chunky font, with letters comprised of thick shapes, devoid of some of their detailing, is cool enough; despite being released at the beginning of the eighties it has an almost sixties vibe. The “C”, of course, looks like Pac-Man himself. But what really makes it art is the offset colours, giving it the air of a misprint or of looking at 3D without glasses. It’s a deeply cool effect and helps make the logo feel timeless.
Dizzy (1987): another oldie, making its first appearance in ‘87’s Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, although the logo design was very slightly tweaked and refined by the follow year’s Treasure Island Dizzy. Simplistic 3D block letters, but what makes it sing is that they’re dizzy; linework suggests them spinning, but it’s how the perspective differs from letter to letter, giving them a confused and discordant feel, that gives it just that little bit extra.
Zool (1992): perhaps a lesser-known and less iconic logo, unless you were a huge Amiga game in the early nineties. The airbrushing to give it a metallic, embossed effect is very of the moment, but what I love is the eyes. The double-O is rendered as Zool’s cross-looking eyes in his ninja bandana. On one hand, making the Os eyes is rather first-base, but partly it’s how they’re executed that I like; it’s also just because the big angry eyes are rather funny.
Pokémon (1996): first appearing on the cover of Pokémon Red and Green in ’96, the general Pokémon logo is a beaut. Again, it gives the appearance of simplicity, but the execution is complex. Chunky, friendly lettering, yellow like kid favourite Pikachu; kids’ll love that. The blue outline and drop shadow help it pop and give it a subtle, almost 3D effect. And the letters are discordant; rather than a regimented logo, it’s all over the shop, different sizes and weights of letter, all jostling for position on the page. It perfectly encapsulates the tone of the game.
Deus Ex (2000): I’ve more-or-less steered clear of the sci-fi design of “metallic logo that’s otherwise just the title”. I like logos with a bit of something extra; hence no Perfect Dark or Halo, despite those being great in and of themselves. Deus Ex takes the spot, though, partly because the letters seem built out of something, cobbled together in a dystopic, cyberpunk-y way. As you play a cyborg, this feels apt. And then there’s the logo itself, a towering corporate-looking edifice, a brilliant juxtaposition of two shapes that together suggest a D and an X. It’s slick and shiny, and is present in the game itself as a gently rotating loading screen, reflective of the advanced 3D graphics the game possessed.
Honourable mentions go to Theme Park, with a logo that’s suitably corporate and also reflective of a roller coaster, and Quake, just for that really cool nail-through-the-Q effect.
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geejaysmith · 6 years
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A (Late) Birthday Message from your TLC Artist
It's been one year since [S] Play the Rain. Or, more accurately, it’s been a year and a week because I forgot to post this on the 25th/26th, lmao. 
While I'm not 100% happy with everything about this flash - what artist ever is? - the praise and the kind words that have come our way for it mean more than I can meaningfully articulate. I can never grow tired of the expressions of amazement over the rain our wonderful programmer Lt. Parsons brought to life. The day it went online, the notifications for your wonderful feedback scrolled across my phone almost non-stop. I screenshotted them all and I still have the caps from that day.
You see, like a lot of creators, I have pretty high standards for myself. You only have to look at Caliborn: Be Calliope (and know that, until that point, I had never attempted to animate anything on that level) to know I'm kind of an ambitious sonnuvabitch. This is a double-edged sword: I can slog through animating and cleaning up a 90-second fight scene. On the other hand, when my vision doesn't turn out perfect, exactly as I envisioned it - and how often does that happen? - it's an incredible source of stress.
This was the case with Play the Rain. One year ago Kat and I were juggling deadlines and midterms and trying to get that beast finished when we had maybe 3/4ths an idea what we were doing, Flash was lagging like frozen molasses, and we were tired and frustrated and our 10/25-ish deadline was looming. I was having my low-key perfectionist freakout. And then the Credits went live, unexpectedly, and it was all anyone in the Homestuck fandom could talk about. It seemed like Play the Rain, which I had been putting together for months, drawing assets around weekly updates and a hellish full-time summer job, would get drowned out by this unexpected addition from Hussie.
Oh, and fun fact, that October 25th was my 21st birthday.
I flipped. I finally got my anxieties out in a frenzied rant to patient, long-suffering Kat. Moods like this pass pretty quickly for me, but they come on strong. I remember the gist of it, mostly. The general sentiment was "what if I'm never good enough". But one thing I said that I remember clearly was "I'll never be as good as Andrew Hussie."
And I'm not Hussie. I know that. I'll never be him and I can't be him because we're two different people with very different lives. But it still felt like he'd just come from behind and robbed us of our thunder with no fanfare and little apparent effort, with a song I fucking had plans to use in TLCstuck no less. It felt like anything I could do, he could do better, faster, neater, and get an exponentially greater response. That comparison isn't particularly fair to anyone involved: the Credits went up on MSPA and we're a comparatively small fanventure. Hussie is a professional with a team of professionals who have made Homestuck as a full-time job for the better part of a decade. Meanwhile, I'm a full-time student and this is my first serious attempt at comics, yet alone animation, since middle school. But at the time, I was a wreck. It felt like I'd failed to measure up.
Then we finished it and put up Play the Rain and the response was greater than I could've hoped. Your messages and comments and likes and reblogs brought me to the brink of tears, truly.
Now it's one year later and I'm again juggling classwork and stress in the semester from hell and trying to give attention to personal things while I have the passion to do them, in addition to finding time to multitask on upcoming flashes. HINT: it's fucking hard, especially for me (I hyperfocus and often have a one track mind; I do not switch subjects easily). I had similar breakdowns earlier this month which resulted in me taking a week off regular TLC updates - which promptly went towards working on aforementioned flash work. We haven't ever really stopped working on TLCstuck since February of 2015 when we first started the project. Part of said flashwork involved going through old panels and it make me think to myself, "you know what? I've done good. I've managed to do all this on top of swinging a full class load for two degree programs and a part time job. I'm kind of fucking awesome."
So one year out from Play the Rain, three and a half months after Caliborn: Be Calliope, a few weeks after Mental Health Day and on this, (a week after) my 22nd birthday, I just wanted to write this up to say to my readers "thank you" from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for reminding me that it's ok if my work isn't perfect. Thank you for every uplifting message you've sent our way. Thank you for every ounce of support you've given us over these two years of TLCstuck. Thank you. Thank you so, so much.
And for the artists out there who recognize themselves in this post, please remember that while it's ok to push yourself, know when you're hitting your limit and know it's ok to ease up. Please remember that others don't see the platonic ideal of your work you have in your mind and they will not be disappointed if it doesn't live up to that. Please take a moment every so often to look back on what you've done and how far you've come. It often doesn't look like you've climbed a mountain until you look down on where you started.
Thanks for reading. Remember to be proud of yourself, and above all be kind to yourself. Have a nice day.
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pharaohsparklefists · 7 years
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Episode 96, part 2: does Bakura actually WANT to lose?
(part 1 is here)
Time for the thrilling battle of
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Malik (no the other one) VS Bakura (the pointier one)
To be followed by the championship match The Writers Of YGO VS The Idea Of Having As Many Names As There Are Characters Rather Than Only A Handful Of Names Shared Between An Alarming Number Of Characters
Bakura comma Dark and Malik comma Dark are both talking big talk:
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Tragically they talk the murder talk but do not walk the murder walk. Can you imagine how cool an actual knife fight on top of this blimp would be? Rod-knife vs the steak knife you know Yami Bakura keeps in his back pocket? 
But no, it’s time for c-c-c-c-card-games. With possible optional vague death to follow. Given that one of these characters has yet to duel the Main Character and the other has been half-heartedly set up as the ostensible but intermittent overarching villain for the entire series, tension that either might actually die in this duel is ... low.
Also Bakura seems particularly uninterested tonight in dueling, y’know, to win. Less than TEN SECONDS into this duel and he says OUT LOUD:
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REALLY HONEY? What’s even the point of laying cards face down if you TELL YOUR OPPONENT WHAT YOU’RE DOING??
Yami Malik’s smug confidence is therefore increased even more
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picture: dangerously high levels of smug confidence
So Yami Malik attacks, in his turn, TURN TWO, okay, like Yami Malik’s FIRST TURN, less than a minute after Yami Bakura said OUT LOUD that he was setting a Trap, okay? everyone following? and obviously
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so Yami Malik obviously chuckles and sighs and mocks him for expecting him to be surprised th--
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nope. no. apparently not. Yami Malik is ??S??H??O??C??K??E??D??
#NANI
#BAKANA
#HOW-DID-THIS-HAPPEN
a trAP???????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
honestly. idk. i don’t even know how to make fun of this. t h i s s h o w.
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... I mean it is a pretty surprising-looking trap. I guess. I guess.
Anyway the Impossible To Predict trap is a permanent trap that doesn’t prevent Bakura’s Monster from being destroyed but does deal Yami Malik damage for every destroyed Monster, so they’ll both lose LP and Bakura doesn’t even care that his Monster died because...
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y’know, he’s into that kind of thing... 
BUT! Yami Malik, after Bakura said he was laying a Trap but before almost-immediately forgetting (??) that Bakura laid a trap, laid his OWN face-down card, Remove Trap, which needs no expl--
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oh shut the fuck up.
(I know, I know, this doesn’t really read like Yami Malik was actually surprised by the Trap, because he had Remove Trap on the field but I swear, he goes through the full pupils-dilate camera-zooms-in voice-rises Surprise ritual. If they meant for him to be play-acting, they fucked up. You can’t play-act your pupils to dilate.)
(Okay technically he doesn’t HAVE pupils rn so his IRISES dilated, but I feel like that counts. Bc real people’s irises can’t change size and they always have pupils.)
Anyway, so, after all that, Yami Malik doesn’t lose any LP but Bakura still loses his Monster and his LP
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... and part of his arm. #awkward
except the arm must on some level still Be there bc otherwise his hand - and MORE IMPORTANTLY his Duel Disk(tm)!! - would fall off? but apparently invisible-limb is a common symptom of having part of your soul bitten off? bc Bakura immediately figures out:
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This is a lot more subtle than Bakura usually likes his vociferous soul-consuming beasts of darkness, so that’s probably why he looks so cranky.
Also he’s cranky because he has a backseat duelist tagging along:
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“EXCUSE ME!! AS IF I, BAKURA, BLASPHEMER EXTRAORDINAIRE, MASTER OF ALL FORMS OF SACRILEGE, TOP-TIER TOMB DESECRATOR, WOULD EVER BE AFRAID OF GOD?? I WAS SPITTING IN THE EYE OF DEITIES BEFORE YOUR ENTIRE BLOODLINE WAS EVEN HEARD OF, KID.”
mid-bicker, they’re interrupted
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“strategy planning time”, eh? #winkwink you two “planning strategy” over there? #nudgenudge is that what the kids are calling it?
Yami Malik decides it’s time to get serious about drawing Ra and activates Everyone Draws Up To Six Cards, which, like, idk, really rattles Bakura:
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why are you so shocked??
actually the shocking thing about this is that Yami Malik activates it when he has four cards (so only gets to draw two) but Bakura has two (so gets to draw four)
Quickly getting over his shock and determined to completely outdo Yami Malik for “surprising tactics that help your opponent more than they help yourself”, Bakura plays a card called, hilariously, Dying Altogether!
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and then draw a new hand. 
But the person playing it loses LP based on the number of cards they have in their hand so this is an even worse time for Bakura to play this than it was for Yami Malik to play his!!
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“Alright then how about YOU draw a load of cards to help you find Ra sooner and I’LL lose a bunch of life points! Who’s laughing NOW??”
“... hey, quick question, do you know how to play this game?”
And after all that:
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“... okay another question, do you get off on losing this game? like how aroused are you right now, ballpark?”
“You think that’s a lot of LP to sacrifice for questionable gain? Watch THIS!”
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Yami Malik: please stop.
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Yami Malik: I’m ... not sure I want it anymore.
But then he figures out Bakura’s aggressive masochistic strategy:
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And indeed, almost immediately:
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“Well, shit.”
167 notes · View notes
shinygoku · 7 years
Text
CutCat’s Favourite Disney Animated Canon
I’m pretty sure everyone and their grandma has already written something along the lines of “Disney was a big part of my childhood” before divulging into some bigass essay. This won’t be much different lmao
But still, I’m not making an objective list, it’s coloured by my own experiences watching the films. Some old Classics won’t even make the Top Ten because I personally didn’t get particularly into them. My favourite may or may not be the best across the board.
Also yeah, I’m not touching on all Fiftysomething films, I’m actually just gonna start with the Top Ten and whittle them down to the last one standing. I haven’t seen all of them so ones I may really dig, like Moana, hafta wait until I can judge for myself. I’ll try to cover all the things I’ve listed, even if it’s as they’ve been eliminated.
This may even be fun for other people to do, maybe!
We’ll return to our scheduled programming after the Cut! 😺✂
Ok I lied, I’ll list the Top 10 and then mention things that didn’t get quite that far, but it won’t take long.
TOP 10
(In order of release, not preference)
Pinocchio
Alice in Wonderland
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Mulan
Frozen
Zootopia
Honourable Mentions: Spider-Man: Homecoming (isn’t Disney Animated Canon even though it’s Marvel and therefore Disney lol), Epic Mickey as the story and gameplay and atmosphere is really great, but it’s a game instead of an animated film, and Sleeping Beauty. SB misses out because while the Animation is gorgeous and the Fairies and Maleficent are fantastic characters, the human leads drag it down.
Anyway, time to half that list! Same ordering rules as before:
TOP 5
Pinocchio
Alice in Wonderland
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
Yeah, that’s right! The Lion King is already out! I know, I’m a fraud!!
Ok so like, I’m very much a cat person and I do love the film. Top 10 is still respectable! But hoo boy, I love the first act and the Celestial Mufasa scenes, but the middle and in some ways the climax kinda let it down for me. And I’m not fond of Timon and Pumbaa. Timon most of all. tsk tsk
But anyway, before I crossed off TLK, the CGI films were shed and I’m never going to fully get over the death of traditional animation. Frozen and Zootopia are both hella rad but their success also feel like even more nails in Hand-drawn animation’s coffin. Imagine what those films would be like, drawn...! Woaaah
WtP and Mulan are also not to be sneezed at, accomplishing very different narrative but doing both so well. I just feel that Pooh’s 3-shorts format kinda disqualifies it from being my favourite Disney Story and while Mulan is so great, it just lacks something that keeps the others firmly placed. I dunno, it’s more of a gut feeling than a well reasoned argument, lol
Time for 2 more eliminations! Now we’re left with:
TOP 3
Pinocchio
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
Alice in Wonderland may not be the most faithful adaptation, but I don’t care. I’ve read both the original books and the main thing Disney does is to discard Through the Looking Glass while taking a couple of small parts of that and putting it into Wonderland. It’s very pretty, very funny and Alice is a likable protagonist, even as Wonderland’s wackiness tries to wear her down.
The Little Mermaid was always something I liked, but never quite as much as, say, Beauty and the Beast. Even with the gorgeous Underwater Aesthetics, which I’m very fond of, didn’t quite make it. Though actually I like it more now than I did before, knowing Eric is voiced by Christopher Daniel Barnes, who did the 90s Spider-Man!! :D
Ok, things are heating the heck up in the list, only two seperate cuts left to make~
The surviving films, for now, are:
TOP 2
Pinocchio
Beauty and the Beast
Yep! Bye-bye, Aladdin, Bye-Bye~
Ok this actually annoys me a bit though lmao
Aladdin would have a really damn good shot as my favourite. It’s colourful, it’s hilarious, it’s compelling! It! It... kinda traumatised me a bit as a young girl and I still feel distinctly uncomfortable about the scene in question even today. It poisons the whole damn film for me as I hafta deal with dread as I watch it. That sucks!!
Objectively, it’s amazing, but as I said, this is my Personal List, so it loses heavy points based on that.
Ok, now the hardest part. Picking between the last two.
I didn’t start this list because I already had a choice picked, I did it because I was curious which I do dig the most.
...
For a long time, if I was asked I’d usually go ‘Uhhhhh Beauty and the Beast, I think!’.
But while B and the B is brilliant and breathtaking and ...uhhh.... bombastic, part of it winning was by default (The two sweetest words in the English Language!)
Y’see, I feel, as a whole, for some curious reason, we forget about Pinocchio.
Ok that’s enough commas for now. But it’s weird! Pinocchio was hot on the heels of Snow White, the big show starter! It’s better than Snow White!! It’s actually rated the highest of all the D.A.C. on Rotten Tomatoes! Critics and normal audience alike love it!
So how come no one talks about it? I can see why it got overlooked in 1940, what with a large and notable war happening, but I literally never come across any Meta or Discussion about it or the themes or the look--
I’m gonna properly talk about it in a sec though, hahaa
So! Beauty and The Beast! An old favourite and nearly top dog in my esteem. It has it all, catchy songs, interesting characters, stunning designs, a whole load of Youtubepoops using footage from it. But it does not have Stockholm Syndrome, you foolish buffoons. Belle only starts to develop feeling for Beast after he becomes less Beastly. THAT’S THE POINT OF THE STORY. BEAST HAS! TO! CHANGE!!
And overall it does a damn good job at this~
Ok, so we already know the winner but it deserves a bit of fanfare for actually doing so well!
NUMBER 1!
TOP DISNEY ANIMATED CANON FILM
(ACCORDING TO CUTCAT) :
PINOCCHIO
I love Pinocchio so, so much!
And not just the film as a whole, the character too! Which is a very important factor here. I’m not saying the rejected films didn’t have strong characters, not at all! But this ties in with the Forgotten sort of vibe I get from the lack of buzz with this film.
Quick! Think of a scene from Pinocchio! Just one, if you can manage it.
Now, I may be way off with my presumption here, but was it the thing about his nose growing when he lies? Or was it maybe his desire to become a Real Boy™?
If you thought of any other moment, my kudos to you. It’s just, I feel that pop culture as a whole likes to harp on those points, which are either one short [but yeah, memorable] scene and the ultimate goal. And not to point fingers, but heck, why not. I blame Shrek a good deal for this, as those are the only memorable traits from their version of him. This may sound unfair, Dreamworks are doing a different take on the same character that Disney didn’t create but instead adapted from a book, but that’s mostly reflected in the vastly different designs (as in Shrek!Pinocchio looks closer to the original book version), but on the other hand Shrek started off by riffing on what Disney did and then kind of mutated into what they were mocking after the second film. Oops.
While mentioning the book, I do not give a rat’s ass that Disney’s version deviates as much as it does, they improved every point adapted. I also really can’t imagine the film doing nearly so well if it had the creepyass vibe for the main character. Marionettes are freaky, dude.
Anyway, that’s another of Pinocchio’s strengths! He looks and sincerely is Adorable! I’m gonna paste in a quote by Milt Kahl about this:
I was quite critical of ... I have a knack for alienating people by being a little bit outspoken, and they were rather obsessed with the idea of this boy being a wooden puppet. My God, they even had this midget who did the voice for "call for Phillip Morris" as the voice for a while, and it was terrible. I was rather outspoken about it. Why didn't they forget that he was a puppet and get a cute little boy, you can always draw the wooden joints and make him a wooden puppet afterwards. And Ham Luske said, "Well, why don't you do something about it, do a scene," and I did one. What I don't remember is whether they had a new voice by then or not. Probably they did have; I don't know. I did a scene of Pinocchio underwater with the jackass ears, knocking on a shell of an oyster, saying, "Pardon me, can you tell me where I can find Monstro the whale?" The shell closed up and caused a swell in the current, which affected Pinocchio. I made kind of a cute little boy out of him, and Walt loved it; this was actually my big chance. It was my move into being one of the top animators.
Pretty cool, huh? Before this, Walt has stopped production as he didn’t like what was being made. They were putting an awful lot into making the lead so loveable! I’m paraphrasing better accounts of this, but if you’re interested I do suggest looking into such!
But maybe I oughta get back on track, lord knows this rambling mess is long enough already ;v;;; I just get interested by some of the behind the scenes workings, y’know~
-
Like I touched on earlier, I think a problem is that people forget there’s more to Pinoke than his extendo nose and urge to Become Real. He’s very sweet and well meaning, but with the snag of being too trusting and gullible. He’s easy to misread as being Too Dumb To Live, but he’s very curious and does visibly learn and develop as the story goes on.
The other lead, Jiminy Cricket, is really great! He adds charm in the darkest moments and helps prevent the sweet scenes from being too sugary. He’s a great mediator and pretty good Conscience, too, he just happens to be in the wrong place a couple of times, which is the nature of the story’s structure lol
The supporting characters are really good, too! You really feel for Gepetto and damn that dude puts a lotta work into his wares! Figaro and Cleo are really cute and play off each other well.
Special shout out to Figaro for managing to get into shorts as Minnie Mouse’s pet lmao. I’m pretty sure that kitten has influenced the way I draw cats too, pff
And the villains? Holy shit, this film is teeming with bad guys, and the cut we see has none of them getting punishment onscreen.... yikes
Ok, so not to sound like Youtube Clickbait vids made by a talentless hack, but BOY! This film is dark! hahahaa
So like, my favourite Bad Guys from here, Honest John and Gideon are the tamest and most funny, but they sell Pinocchio into slavery twice. Hhhaaaaa...
The way Stromboli alternates from humorous and jovial to screaming and stomping about abruptly is frightening. Dude slams Pinoccino in a bird cage and says how he’s gonna work our boy Pinoke pretty much until our puppet pal perishes
The Coachman....... there’s a theory going around that he’s like an evil counterpart of The Blue Fairy, how he punishes bad boys by having them turn into Donkies he can then sell to mines and circuses. They never come back... AS BOYS!! [shuddering]
And Monstro is the most force-of-nature-y type of Bad Dude in the assortment but still lives up to his name! Sure, I’d be mad if someone lit a fire inside me, but are whales really known for being vengeful to the point of body slamming a cliff? Even before that, do they try to eat literally anything they see?
But yeah, it’s not just how many bad guys there are, nor how karma doesn’t strike them in a satisfying way. The stuff they’re doing and the atmosphere, it’s all legit scary
But wait! You cry!
Jeeze CutCat, why are you talking about how scary Pinocchio is when you docked points off Aladdin for frightening you?
Because, Devil’s Advocate question, the latter film is an abrupt mood whiplash moment that took me by surprise as a young, impressionable thing. I dunno how young I was when watching either film, but not only is Pinocchio consistent with plunging into the depths, but the real horror is easy enough to miss if you’re a young child. It didn’t occur to me that the boys turned into Donkies were gonna be worked to death in back breaking labour!
Anyway, Pinocchio earns the right to be spooky and has enough charm and humour in the right moments.
But ok, yeah, the Donkies. The scene where Lampwick slowly, agonisingly transforms is a damn work of creepy art. We already know the terrible secret of Pleasure Island before it starts, but actually seeing the gradual build up, the way Pinocchio can only watch in horror and then sprout ears himself and Lampwick’s screams turning into braying... it’s sure something.
The Monstro chase scene at the end is also so damn intense I subconsciously hold my breath while watching it. It’s relentless, our heroes are up against a furious gigantic whale and the merciless sea and the fucking end of that always feels like a kick in the guts. The lingering shot and musical sting hits hard.
-
But still! The movie ain’t all Nightmare Inducing!
I’ve already said I love the characters, and helping that is the impeccable voice work for everyone. The voices and little character tics make them feel so real for such a fantastical setting. I dig how the Blue Fairy is rotoscoped and realistic, which sticks her out from the rest of the cast and enhances the Other Worldliness that fairies deserve.
The animation.... boy, the animation really is something else! It was the late 30′s but they were already creating new and highly expensive techniques to make this beautiful and not only does it work, but I struggle to think of anything that can top it. Multi-plane camera establishing shots than barely last for seconds, the underwater effects with the sways and distortion, each splash and movement done by hand. Honestly this may be the most perfectly drawn movie, I’m not exaggerating. They already came so far since Snow White, it’s almost unbelievable!
Lastly, I’ll mention the music. Fucking Fantastic, is what it is! Is it any surprise that they used the tune for the Disney Vanity Plates, to this day? There’s a few songs with different memorability levels, I know Ultron is fond of the ironic I’ve Got No Strings number. I, for one, love the atmospheric use of Little Wooden Head as a recurring motif.
I really didn’t plan on my Pinocchio talk on being this long, so if you read through it all you have my gratitude. Are you surprised that it’s my favourite? I’m enchanted by it, I certainly have a weakness for sweet hearted protagonists but the film has so many good angles!
I still think it’s dang unfair that the film seems to get overlooked so much, but hopefully my daft musing might remind a couple of people that it’s certainly worth a rewatch!
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componentplanet · 4 years
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How to Boost Your Older Graphics Card’s Performance
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has upended economic activity around the globe and made it rather difficult to plan a PC upgrade. With tens of millions of people recently out of work and everyone stuck at home, boosting the performance of the hardware you’ve got on hand suddenly became a lot more interesting.
Before we kick-off, a few caveats are in order. First, the tweaks we’ll explore, even taken in aggregate, will certainly help but are unlikely to work miracles. Performance tuning can improve frame rates and turn a game that’s chugging in places into one that runs noticeably and meaningfully better, but there’s no way to turn an HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 680 into a Radeon 5700 XT or RTX 2080. Second, because every game is different, some of these tips may be more or less effective depending on the title.
Two miscellaneous tips before we start: First, always make certain you are playing games in fullscreen mode, not windowed, and not borderless (windowed mode, without a visible border). Windowed mode is slower than fullscreen, in virtually every title, because your GPU is drawing both your desktop and the game itself at the same time. Windows 10 has cut the gap dramatically, and not every game offers a fullscreen mode, but you should always test the option if it’s available.
Second, make sure you’ve dusted both your GPU and CPU. While unlikely to be a major slowdown cause, it’s far from impossible for a GPU’s performance to drop because the card is throttling under load. Dust is an excellent insulator and if you’ve got an older card, you’ve got no performance to spare in the first place.
Game-Specific Optimization
The first thing we recommend doing to squeeze a little performance out of an aging card is to experiment with game settings themselves. While most reviewers and gamers test titles according to presets (Low, Medium, High, etc), this is a practical time-saving necessity for the former and a matter of convenience for the latter.
Gamers generally know that certain features explicitly tied to AMD or NV GPUs (think GameWorks) can incur heavy performance penalties on other architectures, but the same can be true for other features as well. It’s not unusual for a game’s implementation of ambient occlusion, tessellation, or antialiasing to hit one company’s GPU harder than another, and this can even vary depending on GPU family. Yes, simply lowering game settings or resolution can improve frame rate, but toggling specific features can get you nearly the same results for a smaller reduction in performance. In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, turning on MSAA has a phenomenal performance impact, for example — much more than you’d typically expect.
The slideshow below shows the impact of different detail levels in the 2014 Shadow of Mordor, with the optional HD texture pack installed. You can see differences here, but they’re subtle. Medium detail definitely doesn’t pack as much eye candy as Ultra, but it still presents an attractive-looking and engaging game. Even turning off features like ambient occlusion or disabling tessellation doesn’t hurt the visual appeal much. Different games have different “break” points, some look dramatically different at Medium compared to High, while others “break” at Medium versus Low. Oftentimes the benefits of “Very High” or “Ultra” are quite small compared with their performance hit.
Don’t be afraid to climb into the Advanced Options and start changing various sliders. Because different GPUs take different performance hits from different options, you may need to do a little detective work, but it’s not unusual to boost frame rates by 5-10 percent just from small tweaks.
If you need a tool for checking performance in DX11 and earlier titles, FRAPS is still a good choice. (DX12 performance monitoring is more complicated and a bit beyond the scope of this article). It’s also a good idea to use presets as rough targets. If you know a game runs acceptably fast on “Low” and too slowly on “Medium,” don’t be afraid to use “Low” as a starting point for tweaking features upwards. You may find there’s more eye candy available to you than you initially thought. Treat the situation like a buffet dinner — if you don’t see much difference between “Medium” and “High” textures in a title, check to see if dropping to Medium gives you enough headroom to turn up a setting you do care about. You may find that expensive features add relatively little to the game, giving you space to enable other visual improvements you want.
Running at a lower resolution is also a useful way to spot-check performance improvements, though this is title-specific. First-person shooters tend to scale better with resolution changes than a game like Civilization VI.
Driver Tweaks
Once upon a time (the late 1990s), it wasn’t uncommon for AMD and Nvidia to drop drivers that would improve game performance by 10-20 percent, even in older titles. Those days are mostly gone, provided you aren’t installing a launch-day update for a new game. But there are still a few ways you can tweak driver panel settings to squeeze out a little more performance.
On Nvidia cards (AMD has an analogous option in its own driver settings), you can set texture filter quality to “High Performance” as opposed to the default “Quality” option, force Ambient Occlusion on or off (if applicable), and force anisotropic texture filtering off.
Tweaking image quality in-driver won’t gain you a ton of performance, but it should improve things by a few percent. It’s also useful to check, to make sure you haven’t used global settings for one title and then forgotten to change them for another.
Check for Online Tweaks and Unofficial Patches
This one, again, is highly game-dependent. Some games don’t support modding or have small user communities. But in some cases, end-users take it on themselves to create patches that fix various aspects of a title, including issues that impact performance. Games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 have often received unofficial patches that can boost performance or optimize game textures for systems with low RAM.
Overclock Your GPU (Desktop Only)
We’re only touching on the topic here, not diving into it, but overclocking your GPU is typically good for a few percentage points of performance at the very least. Again, your results are going to vary based on which card you have and how aggressively the manufacturer tuned it beforehand. Tools like MSI Afterburner can be used to overclock most GPUs.
What might you get as a result? 5-10 percent would be a reasonable expectation depending on the card.
Note: Everything written here applies to desktop GPUs. ExtremeTech does not recommend attempting to overclock a laptop GPU.
If you are planning to test a GPU overclock, we recommend small tweaks (no more than a 5 percent increase to memory or GPU clock at any one time) and slow going. Stay away from adjusting your GPU’s voltage until you’ve researched the topic and the acceptable range of your card, and don’t tell Afterburner to automatically apply settings at boot until you’ve confirmed the settings you actually want.
Expect this process to lead to a lot of reboots and/or lockups if your goal is to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your card — you’ll have to do some testing to find out where the right breakpoints actually are, and it’s entirely possible to have ten games that run rock-solid on a GPU at one clock, but an 11th title that won’t run at anything but stock speeds. Such is the nature of this metaphorical beast.
If you aren’t overclocking by pushing voltages higher, the chances of damaging the card are fairly small, though we recommend you make sure the fans are dusted before you start pushing things. Most GPUs can typically handle a 5-10 percent overclock without complaint.
Adding It All Up
None of these solutions are going to work if you’re trying to coax more life out of a 10-year-old card, but they can measurably improve your overall performance. If you can tweak game settings for a 7 percent boost, pick up a 7 percent overclock, and tweak driver settings for a further 3 percent, you’ve got a 17 percent overall performance improvement. In a game struggling to hit 30fps (let’s call it 28fps for fun), a 1.17x improvement gets you up to 33fps. That’s not a ton, no — but the corresponding impact of each additional FPS is larger the lower your frame rate is. The perceived difference between 28 and 33fps is much larger than the gap between 60 and 65fps, even though both are 5fps faster than the other.
And of course, these are conservative estimates. In certain titles and particularly if unofficial performance-enhancing patches are available, you might see significantly larger gains, especially if you’re already bumping up against the VRAM limit of your current GPU. Resolution cuts can help a lot in this case — don’t be afraid to drop to lower resolutions if you’re seeing heavy stuttering, especially if you have an older or lower-end card with a limited amount of memory. It’s sometimes possible to write unofficial config files that make a game playable by lowering detail levels below what the developer intended. I had several WoW-playing friends whose graphics I “detuned” in this fashion, allowing them to raid on laptops that otherwise couldn’t handle the job. This was years ago, so I don’t know if the same hooks are still in the game, but there can be real value in this kind of optimization.
ExtremeTech is revisiting some classic posts and guides, each of which has been updated to reflect present-day conditions.
Now Read:
How to Download the Nvidia Control Panel Without the Microsoft Store
How an Article on Game Difficulty Explained My Own Modding, 18 Years Later
Sony Scaling Back PlayStation 5 Production Over Price, Not Coronavirus
from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/262688-boost-older-gpu-performance-since-cant-buy-new-one from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-to-boost-your-older-graphics-cards.html
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barbosaasouza · 4 years
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Review: Bloodroots (Nintendo Switch)
Bloodroots is a fast-paced action game developed by Paper Cult with a wild west setting. In Bloodroots, you and the majority of the enemies only need to be hit once to be killed, not dissimilar to games like Hotline Miami and Ape Out. This style of game is becoming more and more popular — when it’s done well it can be an absolute joy to play, and luckily this is one of those occasions.
You play as Mr. Wolf, an outlaw looking for revenge after a betrayal at the hands of his former gang, the Blood Beasts. It’s a tale that’s been told plenty of times, but Bloodroots tells it particularly well. Mr. Wolf doesn’t say much, so you gain the majority of information from your former posse members. It soon becomes clear that nobody in this murderous gang of outlaws is very pleasant, and the game’s stellar writing helps you understand their motivations. Obviously the story isn’t the main draw of Bloodroots — it’s merely an excuse to justify Mr. Wolf’s violent killing sprees — but the humour it brings feels justified, helping elevate everything else around it.
Bloodroots features strong gameplay. Watching someone else play, it would be easy to assume that you’re just watching disorganised mayhem, but it’s much more than that. Upon approaching a new enemy-filled section it becomes a perfect blend of puzzle-solving and improvisation, partly because of the huge variety of weapons. Not only are the weapons varied, but pretty much everything in Bloodroots is a weapon. Obviously there are your traditional swords, knives, and six-shooters, but even the outrageous can be utilised to help kill. It becomes second nature to switch from bludgeoning a man with a chair, to shooting one with a rifle, to smothering the next with a fish. All of this can be achieved seamlessly as you dance around the stage. 
Each weapon also works differently. The axes are a simple swing-and-hit, swords and daggers allow for a lunge, and ladders can be swung around your head like some kind of rage-fuelled helicopter. This adds another level of depth to how you tackle each group of enemies, but also impacts upon the platforming sections. Some of the weapons help with traversal, for example, long sticks of wood can form an ore, a fishing rod or a beam, which Mr. Wolf can use as a pole vault to help him reach distances. Weapons will eventually perish — they can last between one and three hits, meaning you always have to think about what to pick up next. Luckily, it’s rare that Mr. Wolf is not within touching distance of something he can use to batter his foes. 
The enemies are varied, too. Early on, you face pretty standard grunts, but as Bloodroots progresses the enemy types get more complex, adding another layer of thought as you paint the town red. At this point it’s probably sounding like Bloodroots is complicated, but it never feels that way when playing. The game can be challenging, of course, but each new weapon or enemy is introduced gradually across the game, ensuring you’re never overwhelmed.
Bloodroots probably lasts around eight to ten hours depending on how often you die. In truth, the game could be a little shorter — it’s not that the game overstays its welcome, but certain sections felt longer than they needed to be. Across the three acts that make up the game, it’s fair to say there are going to be a few deaths, but thankfully instant loads mean that Mr. Wolf is never out of the action long. The initial loading of each section can take a while, but this isn’t too bad as that’s only at the beginning of each level.
The western setting of Bloodroots is perfect for the revenge tale that’s being told, although this isn’t quite The Revenant. Bloodroots doesn’t take itself too seriously, as can be seen by the jetpack-wielding villain, Mrs. Bison, yet none of the wackier elements ever feel out of place because of the game’s distinct art style. Bloodroots looks like a cartoon from the ‘00s — all of the landscapes pop with colour and depth.
The isometric angle of the camera that often zooms in on Mr. Wolf adds an extra element of detail, however, there are times when the forced camera zooms out too far and makes it difficult to figure out what you’re doing. This is all done in an attempt to make the game more cinematic, but it doesn’t always work, especially in comparison to the fantastic finisher scenes on an area’s last enemy. These leave you feeling impressed with yourself, and can even vary depending on which weapon you’re using at the time. 
Once Bloodroots’ slightly predictable story is over, there’s still plenty to come back for. Every single level of the game is ranked, and you’re given a score — high scores are all about getting combo chains and completing a level as quickly as possible. Another great feature upon replaying a section is how you can give yourself a different ability depending on which unlockable hat you’re wearing.
Bloodroots is really fun. It’s a great example of a game that’s exciting to play but difficult to master, adding an element of longevity for those who wish to get the highest rank on each level. What makes Bloodroots unique, however, is how effortlessly it teaches you the game — it intuitively demonstrates how to utilise each weapon in order to cause as much devastation as possible, without ever holding your hand. Despite a few minor bumps, Bloodroots is a very well-crafted package that’s enjoyable from start to finish.
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weightlossfitness2 · 4 years
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Confused About How To Reduce Stress? Try These Ideas Today!
Do not assume you might be remoted in your disturbing state of affairs. Everyone feels pressured at occasions. Some stress is a obligatory evil. How you cope with stress is a vital think about your life. If you want to discover ways to higher address stress, learn on.
Focus on retaining your degree of stress as little as doable. Untreated signs of stress might result in coronary heart assault, stroke, despair and ulcers. Be certain to get an ample quantity of top of the range sleep to scale back your ranges of stress and keep away from the danger of getting sick.
TIP! Try your hardest to take care of a wholesome stress degree. Stress is a serious contributor to aches and pains, despair, insomnia, ulcers, cardiac arrest, hypertension, stroke and extra.
Stop clenching your jaw and consciously calm down it. When we’re wired, the stress will focus someplace in our our bodies; mostly within the jaw. If you might be having a disturbing day, simply faucet the jaw calmly along with your index finger, clench your jaw and breathe in deeply, then breathe out slowly. This is a neat tip that can instantly enable you to really feel much less pressured.
Engage in preventative healthcare to keep away from stressing out. Now figuring out about potential medical circumstances or well being considerations can depart you feeling pressured and anxious. Over time, these issues could cause irreversible harm and even better stress. Schedule your common check-ups to be up in your screenings and preventative care so you’ll be able to maintain dwelling a wholesome, stress-free life.
TIP! Engage in preventative healthcare to keep away from stressing out. If you might be questioning your well being, you usually tend to be anxious or pressured about it, and never doing sufficient to maintain your well being within the first place could cause loads of points alongside the way in which.
Music is a really efficient software for the administration of stress. It can have a really commanding impact on folks. Many research have been carried out that show there’s a therapeutic and calming energy to music. It’s merely a case of discovering the form of music that helps to calm you, and reduce your stress.
Knowledgeable therapeutic massage is a good way to take among the stress away. People usually have tense muscle tissues of their our bodies the place stress manifests itself. This pressure shall be dissipated by therapeutic massage, and the enjoyable impact may also make your temper lighter and fewer disturbing.
TIP! Knowledgeable therapeutic massage makes a good way to handle and purge your stress. Persistent muscle pressure is actually the bodily embodiment of the stress you are carrying.
Identify what causes stress in your life, to be able to make progress towards fixing it. It’s not doable to remove all stresses, nevertheless, eradicating these that may be is essential. By doing this, you will instantly really feel higher.
Think about your stress, and the way you cope with it. There might be a greater solution to do issues. Think about logging your stress and what causes it over just a few weeks. Looking again at your notes will will let you choose your responses: had been the outcomes useful and had been they wholesome in nature? If you resolve that your not responding appropriately, it is time to develop new methods to deal with life’s stresses.
TIP! Take a take a look at the strategies you at present use to cope with stress. Monitor your responses to disturbing circumstances over a specified time frame.
Remember that alcohol is a depressant and isn’t good for stress aid. Though having fun with just a few beers with buddies is enjoyable, be certain to not depend on it each day. At the very least, it may trigger a cyclical impact that creates extra stress, and on the worst it may trigger dependancy issues.
Sometimes, simply having dialog with somebody you belief could be the easiest way to beat stress. When you’ll be able to purge the emotions of tension you might have, you’ll find nice aid. Find a cherished one that you would be able to get in contact with to speak.
TIP! Sometimes, simply speaking to a trusted pal, who can also be listener, is an efficient solution to let go of stress. You will most likely really feel higher in the event you discuss what’s bothering you or spiking your anxiousness.
If you’ll be able to, play your favourite music at work to alleviate a few of your stress. Keep music low key, in order to reinforce your inside calm. If you play up tempo music, ensure that it is glad and optimistic.
When you might be pressured, concentrate on any areas of the physique which might be clenched. In explicit it’s possible you’ll discover it in your palms, jaw and shoulders. When you determine the place your tense muscle tissues start to indicate, work to calm down these muscle tissues everytime you really feel stress approaching. This might help to scale back your pressure and enable you to to calm down.
TIP! If you might have stress points, be aware of any physique elements that you simply clench repeatedly. These could be within the again, shoulders, palms and jaw muscle tissues.
A rigorously cultivated daydream is usually a welcome reprieve from stress. See your self in a tranquil place, and free your thoughts to wander by itself. This daydreaming train is beneficial for disassociating your self from stress for a short time.
Try to cease some disturbing conditions from taking place within the first place by being ready for various events. For occasion, you may stash a spare key in a protected place, retailer an easy-to-make meal in your desk drawer, or have a back-up babysitter on name to scale back the potential stress of on a regular basis occasions. Having a plan and figuring out find out how to maintain it beforehand will enable you to to cope with any issues ought to they happen.
TIP! Instead of worrying endlessly, put together for the worst by making emergency plans. Keep a spare key in a helpful, protected spot, all the time have a ready-to-go meal ready for you at work, and make sure you all the time have a backup sitter on pace dial.
You can keep away from loads of disturbing conditions by making ready for doable mishaps forward of time. If you lock your self out of your automotive usually, then maintain a spare shut at hand. If you might be susceptible to forgetting your lunch, then maintain snacks at work. Handling potential issues earlier than they come up could make your life much less disturbing.
Arts and crafts are a good way to scale back stress. Doing any sort of inventive exercise can get your thoughts off due dates and cash for a bit.
TIP! Handcrafts are a really good solution to calm down and scale back stress. Painting, sculpting, drawing, writing, carving, or anything inventive, lets the thoughts indulge itself for some time freed from deadlines and funds.
Crafts and artwork can be utilized as stress relievers. Doing any sort of inventive exercise can get your thoughts off due dates and cash for a bit.
Deep respiratory workout routines might help to scale back stress. During occasions of excessive stress, respiratory can change into quick and shallow, and typically folks even begin to hyperventilate. Learning to manage your respiratory throughout such occasions might help to scale back stress. If you are attempting to scale back stress in your life and calm down, this sure-fire technique ought to be part of your on a regular basis routine.
TIP! Practicing deep respiratory workout routines can scale back stress. Breathing is shallow and fast after we are wired; studying to breath the right method will assist scale back your stress ranges.
Music can sooth the savage beast that’s stress. Listening to calming music is a tried and examined stress discount approach. Make certain you selected music which is calming to you, as what soothes one particular person, may really induce stress in one other. Additionally, soothing music might help your respiratory and in addition relaxes your thoughts.
A good way to minimize your stress is to placed on some music. When you might be pressured, hearken to your favourite tune, after which sit again, calm down and get in tune with the music. Engaging on this course of will give your thoughts a break from eager about the disturbing folks or issues in your life.
TIP! Music is a good stress reliever whenever you really feel your anxiousness ranges are rising. When you are feeling your anxiousness ranges rise, flip in your favourite tune, after which sit again and luxuriate in, blocking out all the things else round you.
As the above article has proven, taking management over your stress is feasible. It is not possible to keep away from all stress, however you’ll be able to reduce your load and study to cope with it extra successfully. Your life is affected by the way you react to emphasize, thus, you could study one of the best methods to cope with any stresses you face. You shall be more healthy and happier in the event you make it occur.
Take a while to meditate. Meditation might help to calm down your thoughts, physique and soul. Meditating repeatedly will quickly present an enchancment in your general stress degree. This additionally helps you combat stress in particularly tough conditions.
TIP! Consider meditation. It can calm down the muscle tissues and relaxation your thoughts.
The post Confused About How To Reduce Stress? Try These Ideas Today! appeared first on Weight Loss Fitness.
from Weight Loss Fitness https://weightlossfitnesss.info/confused-about-how-to-reduce-stress-try-these-ideas-today/
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kiddiemom-blog · 5 years
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Questionable Parenting in A PEACEFUL LOCATION
Over the weekend, Mama and Buried and I went to the movies. We were visiting my household in Connecticut and we benefited from the complimentary babysitting to see A Quiet Location.
I delighted in the motion picture but I had some issues with it. Particularly with the parenting.
Things first: if you live in a world ravaged by monsters that rely on noise to discover you, DON'T GET PREGNANT!Nonstop spoilers ahead
. DON'T CONTINUE IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE.A Quiet Location is a great film and I delighted in it.It's smart
, well put-together, wastes no time getting started, and it's scary. The genius of the flick is the method it legitimizes the most affordable horror motion picture method there is-- the jump-scare-- and bakes it into the premise of the story. This movie is almost completely made of jump-scares and you can't even get mad about it! Versus a primarily silent backdrop, every roaming sound suffices to give you a cardiac arrest.(Mommy and Buried practically survived on my lap all film. Keep in mind to singletons: BRING A DATE!) The movie ratchets up the stress and increases the stakes by under-girding the supernatural horror of the scenario-- relatively indestructible Demogorgon-looking creatures that hunt by means of a severe sense of hearing have decimated the planet-- with the familiar everyday horrors of parenting, which is currently about the most terrifying thing there is, even before actual beasts enter the formula. But once they do? Every minute ends up being a living nightmare.Of course, the parents in the movie being grade-A morons, they do not help matters much ... The family in A Peaceful Location-- headed by the movie's director,"The Office"star John Krasinski, and real-life wife/one of my Five Celeb Hall Passes, Emily Blunt-- includes two teenage kids and a young child . A minimum of, it does when the movie starts. Because it instantly becomes clear that not everyone is going to endure. No, the couple's idiot kids will make certain of that. Specifically the toddler. Because if there's one thing toddlers do, it's make sounds(other things they make: messes, you insane), and sound draws in the monsters. To be reasonable, it's hard to blame the young child, specifically after his parents inexplicably let him wander around a shop by himself and then inexplicably let him walk behind them on their method home through a forest that's presumably loaded with monsters
(not to mention inexplicably relying on any of their kids to not be dumb kids). Toddlers gon na toddler, what can you do?Anyway, the inevitable occurs-- won't be seeing that toddler no more!-- and the film leaps ahead a year . Whereupon it's quickly exposed that, in spite of seemingly having actually learned from their previous mistakes and somehow enduring for
months, they've actually discovered nothing, due to the fact that the family of five four is now awaiting a brand-new baby! These are not wise individuals. You 'd think they 'd understand that, in spite of the tragic situations, their chances of survival significantly increased without a toddler messing up the works. You 'd think they 'd comprehend that having more than two kids in today's world, let alone in a world complete
of terrifying monsters, is completely crazy! No, they decided to up the stakes by adding a child to the mix! On the planet of A Quiet Location, making sound is literally the stupidest, most unsafe thing you can do, and children are type of understood for it! To estimate the late , great R. Lee Ermey: What is your significant malfunction, numbnuts? There are all sorts of other problems with the parenting in this film, and millions
of nits to pick.(I'm sorry, but ain't nobody surviving for hundreds of days without making a sound, specifically kids. As someone talked about my FB page:"My kid actually never ever shuts up(even in his sleep ). At this very minute he's blowing a whistle.")Emily Blunt provides her own infant, by herself, screaming only when so regarding prevent drawing in the monsters. John Krasinski's "shh "finger always seems needlessly smushed against his mouth. They survive on a farm in upstate New york city but somehow have access to a lot of pristine sand. The most egregious thing? The baby hardly makes a peep the entire movie! As if.(Also, the household finds the monsters'weakness when the deaf child's hearing aid is set to a frequency that disables the monsters-- the government/scientists couldn't figure out that a possible method to attack beasts with huge "ears"is to target those ears? At least they weren't killed by water! )To be reasonable, there is some parenting to appreciate, e.g., the couple's dedication to (if not exactly roaring success at) securing their kids, the dad's heroic self-sacrifice, and his last statement of love to his guilt-stricken daughter. And there was one genuinely ingenious child care strategy: the couple crafts a wooden
box in which to keep the child, which itself is housed inside a sound-proof space (that for somebody factor they do not all live within of at all times). What I wouldn't provide to have a reason to shut my kids away in a box! For their own safety, of course!All in all, A Peaceful Location is a fun, very intense movie-going experience that produces a specifically tough watch for parents with young kids. Mama and Buried basically got whiplash going back and forth from tears to worries as she could not assist picturing a frightening world in which The Hammer and Detective Munch were required to make it through by keeping their fool mouths shut.As for me,
I 'd trade locations with this household in a second. Sure, the beasts are a downside, but all the children are silent!The post Questionable Parenting in A PEACEFUL PLACE appeared first on Daddy and Buried.
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barbosaasouza · 4 years
Text
Review: Bloodroots (Nintendo Switch)
Bloodroots is a fast-paced action game developed by Paper Cult with a wild west setting. In Bloodroots, you and the majority of the enemies only need to be hit once to be killed, not dissimilar to games like Hotline Miami and Ape Out. This style of game is becoming more and more popular — when it’s done well it can be an absolute joy to play, and luckily this is one of those occasions.
You play as Mr. Wolf, an outlaw looking for revenge after a betrayal at the hands of his former gang, the Blood Beasts. It’s a tale that’s been told plenty of times, but Bloodroots tells it particularly well. Mr. Wolf doesn’t say much, so you gain the majority of information from your former posse members. It soon becomes clear that nobody in this murderous gang of outlaws is very pleasant, and the game’s stellar writing helps you understand their motivations. Obviously the story isn’t the main draw of Bloodroots — it’s merely an excuse to justify Mr. Wolf’s violent killing sprees — but the humour it brings feels justified, helping elevate everything else around it.
Bloodroots features strong gameplay. Watching someone else play, it would be easy to assume that you’re just watching disorganised mayhem, but it’s much more than that. Upon approaching a new enemy-filled section it becomes a perfect blend of puzzle-solving and improvisation, partly because of the huge variety of weapons. Not only are the weapons varied, but pretty much everything in Bloodroots is a weapon. Obviously there are your traditional swords, knives, and six-shooters, but even the outrageous can be utilised to help kill. It becomes second nature to switch from bludgeoning a man with a chair, to shooting one with a rifle, to smothering the next with a fish. All of this can be achieved seamlessly as you dance around the stage. 
Each weapon also works differently. The axes are a simple swing-and-hit, swords and daggers allow for a lunge, and ladders can be swung around your head like some kind of rage-fuelled helicopter. This adds another level of depth to how you tackle each group of enemies, but also impacts upon the platforming sections. Some of the weapons help with traversal, for example, long sticks of wood can form an ore, a fishing rod or a beam, which Mr. Wolf can use as a pole vault to help him reach distances. Weapons will eventually perish — they can last between one and three hits, meaning you always have to think about what to pick up next. Luckily, it’s rare that Mr. Wolf is not within touching distance of something he can use to batter his foes. 
The enemies are varied, too. Early on, you face pretty standard grunts, but as Bloodroots progresses the enemy types get more complex, adding another layer of thought as you paint the town red. At this point it’s probably sounding like Bloodroots is complicated, but it never feels that way when playing. The game can be challenging, of course, but each new weapon or enemy is introduced gradually across the game, ensuring you’re never overwhelmed.
Bloodroots probably lasts around eight to ten hours depending on how often you die. In truth, the game could be a little shorter — it’s not that the game overstays its welcome, but certain sections felt longer than they needed to be. Across the three acts that make up the game, it’s fair to say there are going to be a few deaths, but thankfully instant loads mean that Mr. Wolf is never out of the action long. The initial loading of each section can take a while, but this isn’t too bad as that’s only at the beginning of each level.
The western setting of Bloodroots is perfect for the revenge tale that’s being told, although this isn’t quite The Revenant. Bloodroots doesn’t take itself too seriously, as can be seen by the jetpack-wielding villain, Mrs. Bison, yet none of the wackier elements ever feel out of place because of the game’s distinct art style. Bloodroots looks like a cartoon from the ‘00s — all of the landscapes pop with colour and depth.
The isometric angle of the camera that often zooms in on Mr. Wolf adds an extra element of detail, however, there are times when the forced camera zooms out too far and makes it difficult to figure out what you’re doing. This is all done in an attempt to make the game more cinematic, but it doesn’t always work, especially in comparison to the fantastic finisher scenes on an area’s last enemy. These leave you feeling impressed with yourself, and can even vary depending on which weapon you’re using at the time. 
Once Bloodroots’ slightly predictable story is over, there��s still plenty to come back for. Every single level of the game is ranked, and you’re given a score — high scores are all about getting combo chains and completing a level as quickly as possible. Another great feature upon replaying a section is how you can give yourself a different ability depending on which unlockable hat you’re wearing.
Bloodroots is really fun. It’s a great example of a game that’s exciting to play but difficult to master, adding an element of longevity for those who wish to get the highest rank on each level. What makes Bloodroots unique, however, is how effortlessly it teaches you the game — it intuitively demonstrates how to utilise each weapon in order to cause as much devastation as possible, without ever holding your hand. Despite a few minor bumps, Bloodroots is a very well-crafted package that’s enjoyable from start to finish.
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