#urban setting

The town square was unusually crowded that afternoon. The autumn air carried a nervous chill, and the murmurs of onlookers echoed between the stone walls of the old city hall. At the center of it all stood Elias, his head bowed in shame, hands locked in the wooden stocks that had been set up as part of a local “Restorative Justice Day.”

He never thought it would come to this.

Just two weeks ago, he’d been darting between bus stops, living by his wits. He was fast, clever, and desperate — the kind of boy who could slip a wallet from a pocket without anyone noticing. His first theft had been out of hunger. The next few were out of habit. By the time he’d been caught, Elias had convinced himself he’d never be.

Until he met Officer Maren.

She’d been riding the 47B bus, dressed like an ordinary passenger, a small paperback in hand. Elias had seen her purse hanging loose by her side — an easy mark, he’d thought. But the moment his fingers brushed the leather, her hand clamped over his wrist like iron.

Now, as punishment, he wasn’t in a jail cell — but here, before the townspeople he’d stolen from. The town had revived an old practice: public accountability, not humiliation. For one hour, he’d stand there, facing the people he’d wronged, hearing their stories. No stones, no jeers — just words.

“Do you understand why you’re here, Elias?” asked Officer Maren, her tone calm but firm.

He swallowed. “Because I stole.”

“And?”

He looked up slightly, eyes flickering over the gathered faces. “Because they trusted me not to.”

Faceless Red, 2025

@ Cabo Ruivo, Lisboa, Portugal

Slitterhead

Keiichiro Toyama will probably be known entirely as the man who created Silent Hill. Everything else will be swallowed up by that one fact, despite all the interesting projects he’s worked on and led. The Siren games took a similar horror slant but with unique gameplay ideas and a harder lean into eldritch horror, while the Gravity Rush games were a refreshing change of pace of heroic adventures that could show what the Vita was able to do. People seemed to only remember that first directorial project when his first independent project with various former Japan Studio devs came to light. Under the name Bokeh Game Studio, founded after feeling there wasn’t really a place for their ideas in Sony’s growing focus on AAA budgets, Toyama and his fellow creatives would end up releasing Slitterhead to confused responses, though starting to slant more positive. Despite all of the advertising promising something new and unique, some came into this expecting another Silent Hill. Instead of that, they got a janky, scantly budgeted ode to the directorial work of Wong Kar-wai, the manga Parasyte, and also a bit of the Siren games if you squint hard enough.

Took a little break from digimon to doodle these two gays of mine, references for two orcs in an urban modern setting that I had floating around in my head. Wanted to have some characters to draw cute stuff for once in a while and I had sketched two random orcs during practice anyways so I figured I'd turn them into actual OCs.

From the Fanatics who believed that magic was meant to change the world, to the Conformists who wanted to keep the status quo. And the Runaways who used the power for their own gain at great cost to everyone else. Those with the most power typically followed one of two groups. The Rulers and the Knights. The former believe they deserve to rule the masses. They act as the police for the magical community as a whole, keeping everything in order. They wrote the Law and they enforce it. The latter firmly believe that power begets great responsibility and so they swore to serve the masses.