you know, there was a time where it used to be pretty all right - like yeah, I and my friends got some shit for shipping niloy, even got stalked and harassed by one particularly unhinged individual, but it was nothing like it is now.

And they claimed to have used the site for 10 years and had NEVER heard of GASP. In 10 years they had never interacted with UMAs outside of fest stuff. In their minds it was just a thing people do on the side. It's not an economic insengive to thousands of players and probably the devs themselves. If they fuck up GASP there will be actual financial reprocussions for FR.

The game won't dissolve into a puff of smoke or anything but where do you think the gems are coming from that pay for the developers beyond the originals who do it for the love huh? Who's paying the code monkeys? People buying gems on UMAs and G1s. Just drove me absolutely insane. I almost blocked them I was so mad.

Your arguments with that person is part of why I typed up my post! I wasn't about to argue with them on site, and I get a lot more mileage out of posting to my own blog than in an on-site journal. It is truly deeply infuriating to see people say 'what about x amount of users who drive the economy of the site' and have the response from casual players be 'well actually you guys are a minority and therefore have zero impact on the site at all'.

I can count on one hand the number of skinmakers on site with my level of success, it's true, and it's also true that skinmakers in general make up maybe 0.1% of the player population. But it's just false that if all skin artists disappeared overnight the site wouldn't change at all.

Maybe most of the players on Flight Rising are casual, don't do much in terms of events, only participate in dragon sales, list everything on the Auction House, and get most of their currency from gathering/occasional fairgrounds. I can believe that someone can play for 10 years and never heard of GASP or UMAs - that's very feasible to me. But even if that's 99% of the players active ever, that is not 99% of where the actual activity and economy of the site lies. And it's just not something that a casual player can see, let alone comprehend the impact of if they only stick to their own corners of the game. Yes, it's dumb to say the economy will disappear if GASP disappears, but I haven't seen anybody actually say that. I've only seen people poking fun at how 'self important' the idea is that any of this could affect the community at all.

He is the bean boy! I am happy that he can give you life in such a way! Here, have 5 more years!

Yeah I’m kinda stuck here between recognizing that I’m reading a lot into stuff and its a story that accompanies a 13+ browser pet site and gravitating toward every little possible plot loop and detail I see. 

Cause probably no one is putting this much thought into any of this they’re just doin what seems fun / works for their vision and I’m losing my mind over a statue in the corner. 

y’know

Don't be sad. They meet again!

Also if you REALLY wanna cry @researching-anomalies mentioned, while I was working on the comic, that it'd be really cool if Guardians were passed down like guardian angels, until the last of kin no longer has anyone to pass them on to :)

I keep getting this question and I don’t know if I need to answer each one of these individually or in bulk or... I mean, you’d have to dig thru my mass effect/predator AU tags to find all the posts, so I shouldn’t fault people for asking because it’s a big load of stuff to dig through, but it’s honestly all there.

Him being named Cousin is kind of explained in previous posts and comics, down to the first one I ever really drew.

He was named that by Garrus. Because Turians and Yautja have been purported to be “cousin” races, having split off from a common root no-one-knows how far back. Garrus was the only person that the Yautja would speak with (or could more easily speak with anyway--while Cousin could understand what everyone was saying more or less, the only language he could speak without physical difficulty or using his mimicry was Turian, in part because the build of his jaw/voicebox is more suited for Turian noises than any other language on the Normandy, in part because Turian and Yautja languages have common roots and Garrus can suss out his meanings here and there when he reverts to Yautja).

What this meant was that Garrus was the one talking to him/explaining what he was saying to people. Cousin’s Yautja name is difficult to pronounce, so for ease of communication, he nicknamed him “My Cousin” or “Cousin,” and that’s how everyone started referring to him as on the ship. It was easier shorthand than trying to remember Kh’dak-tnde and it avoided mangling his name. 

No one was capable of communicating w/ Cousin easily for a good long while after he first joined their party. He was actually hunting Shepard previously, but after realizing what they were ‘hunting,’ decided to throw his hat in with them. But that didn’t make him friendly towards them. The Yautja language was nearly indecipherable, as they are not part of the Citadel and they’re so isolationist and protective of their culture (they actually were still considered to be ‘cryptids’ by most people of all races), his accent when speaking Turian was thick and that speech littered with Yautja words so the translators could barely perceive what he was saying, and Cousin refused to ‘teach’ anyone how to speak Yautja. 

It isn’t until well into his time with the Team, when he finally trusts Shepard, that he grants her a language pack, under the promise that she gives it to no one else. The longer he works with people on the team, the more people he grants access to his language. 

So yeah