Let's Go!

my advice is 

draw a lot.

draw what you see, not what you remember.

seriously i can’t stress that enough. Reference is out there, please use it.

don’t be afraid to try new stuff/ don’t be afraid to step out of your confort zone. It’ll probably look bad on the first few tries but once you’ve practiced enough, you’ll get the hang of it eventually.

Practice A LOT. If you want to get good in one thing, you’ll have to practice that thing.

DON’T COMPARE YOURSELF TO OTHER ARTISTS. Your growth rate is your own, and so is theirs. If they are good, surely they must’ve spent a long time to get there, and you’ll get there too.

Hey all, a little Social Media PSA if you have the Facebook App on your phone. 

With the last update, Facebook began tracking something called ‘off-Facebook Activity’ which keeps up with all apps and browsing you do off of Facebook and collects that information with the purpose of targeting ads… which means they’re selling it to ad agencies. This includes access to any banking apps on your phone and your spending habits. 

 Not only is this a major breech of privacy that Facebook didn’t have to tell us about when they updated the app, it’s, of course, automatically turned on. 

From Facebook, go to the Menu by clicking on the three horizontal lines on the top right of the screen.

Scroll down to the bottom and select the Settings & Privacy drop-down menu.

Then select Settings (the first option under the drop-down).

This will take you to a screen showing multiple headers with lists of links under them

Scroll down to Your Facebook Information and select Off-Facebook Activity.

The next page has a short explanation of Off-Facebook Activity. Click Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity after the What You Can Do header.

This will take you to a screen with an option to Clear History (which I recommend). To actually turn off this feature, you will have to click the three dots at the top right of the screen and select the Manage Future Activity option that pops up.

This will take you to a page explaining in more detail what they’re doing. Select the Manage Future Activity at the bottom of the page.

THEN you can finally select the toggle to turn off Future Off-Facebook Activity. 

I never did share the full version of this comic here (arguably, that was for the better).  Based on a true story.

This was a commission for Nicole Ott ([email protected])

⚠️However they never paid in full so this is more of a beware of this person.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Nicole Ott ([email protected]) does not pay for commissions. ⚠️⚠️⚠️

This is also the reason why I will no longer be offering half payment before and after the commission is done, like I used to.

I will only accept complete payment upfront before staring any commissions from now on.

I know it sounds unfair to those that did complete their payment this way, but I'm just trying to protect myself.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Design Book

Pikopuri Magazine (ぴこぷり) is a video game magazine aimed at young girl gamers. In 2013 they held a design contest and asked readers to submit drawings of their original clothing designs.

From over 7,000 submissions, they chose 70 and converted those designs from drawings to in-game pro-designs complete with QR codes as well as matching shoes and accessories. Additionally, they included QR codes for original patterns such as windows, food, and Face Cut-Out Standees.

I’d like to see that drawing, but I can’t find a way to buy that specific magazine issue that had the contest in it, Pikopuri February 2012 or whatever. Does anyone have that particular one, or has a picture of the contest’s drawing that gets drawn over for submissions?

#WEAPONIZEDCANCER

Okay yeah, I’ll tackle this exceedingly dangerous question.

AUs and “what-if”s I don’t mind because I think those are interesting explorations of what would change in a story if specific aspects of a character (in this case sexuality/gender) were different. I think that’s neat, and it poses interesting questions without ignoring the original text of the work.

A headcanon, to me, is somebody saying “Yeah, I’m just going to go ahead and  cherry-pick only the bits of canon that I want to be true while ignoring the work as a whole.” That creates a bad reading. I hate it when people do this regardless of whether it’s my work or not

That’s not to say that headcanons are never a good call, but when it comes to character sexuality and gender, I always think it’s weird to mentally assign someone a sexuality or gender that they canonically aren’t. It feels weird and regressive to me. You don’t get to decide what you want a character’s gender or sexuality. The character does. I’ve gotten flak for this stance before, but  I think “headcanoning” any character as any sexuality they aren’t is equally weird, no matter which way you do it. It’s weird to think of a straight character as bi, a bi character as gay, a gay character as ace, an ace character as straight, etc. All bad.

On the subject of Epithet though:

Something like Zora x Percy I don’t mind too much. It’s mostly harmless.

Zora is canonically bisexual and I write Percy as ace (maybe aro too? I’d have to talk to her original player about that).

Because Percy is ace nothing sexual would ever happen between her and Zora. 

Because of their position in the story and who they are as people Percy would never be interested pursuing a friendship with Zora, let alone a romantic relationship with her.

I know what kind of girls Zora is into and it ain’t Percy.

But! I can see—in an AU— some of those comics of Zora flirting with Percy at a bar actually happening, and I think they’re pretty cute.

Molly being non-binary is one I see a lot. That one’s also harmless. There’s nothing in the text to counter it, so okay that’s fair game.

Giovanni being trans though.

Uh.

Kinda hate that one, if I’m being honest!

Not because I don’t want trans representation, but specifically because of the reason I saw people making Trans Giovanni their “headcanon”, which was: “Giovanni likes feminine things! He crafts and cooks and has motherly traits! I bet he was assigned-female at birth!”

SUPER weird, regressive, and sexist take there, guys!

Giovanni is a cis male. The whole point of Giovanni is that he’s a teenage boy who is comfortable and open with his own femininity, which is something I wish I saw more in media. He’s emotionally intelligent. He wants people to talk about their feelings. He paints his nails. He’s the team mom. He’s a guy, and he’s cool with all of that. He’s not “secretly trans because he has traditionally feminine traits”. What? What even?

Inspired on this post by @superbonusround  , here are my Spyro 2 talismans gifs [Part. 1]

I’ve always bristled at the idea that Castlevania and Mega Man are the same genre, because that usually means the blanket term of simply referring to them as “action games” when, like, 75% of the games on the market today contain “action.”

(Then there are the psychopaths who put Mega Man in the genre of “platformer,” and that’s when blood starts coming out of my eyes)

But I digress.

The thing that you’re forgetting in all of this is the drum I’ve been beating this entire time, and that’s the idea of STANDARDS. You’ve heard the term where something “raises the bar,” right? Innovation is not celebrating somebody throwing darts randomly at a bullseye and clapping even when they don’t hit the target.

Everything has to have a logic behind it, and either that logic is good, or it’s bad. And sometimes the logic is so good that it takes the current standard and elevates it to the next level, usually by improving on a core fundamental of the game design so much that all games to follow in its wake adopt the changes as part of the expected set of features that game has.

So you have Castlevania and Mega Man, as you say, right? They’re both “action games” but in the most granular terms possible, they are almost their own genres. Castlevania is a hyper-difficult gothic horror melee attack game, and Mega Man is a futuristic cartoon shooter with permanent upgrades.

As such, neither really has a baring on the other. What Castlevania does largely does not effect Mega Man, because Mega Man is not a hyper-difficult gothic horror melee attack game, and vice-versa, Castlevania is not a futuristic cartoon shooter with permanent upgrades. Both games have different vibes, both games have different goals, both games have different structures. They aren’t the same thing and therefore do not influence each other.

They are their own standards, essentially. So you have Mega Man 2, and some people say that’s the best Mega Man, so it’s the standard that all other Mega Man games are judged against. There is a wider action game standard, too, but it’s broader and more complex to define, so it’s easier to focus on something as simple as games in the “futuristic cartoon shooter with permanent upgrades“ sub-sub genre.

The thing to keep in mind about Sonic Robo-Blast 2, is that:

It’s a fangame that’s part of a long-established franchise where the core genre is sort of a platformer/racing game hybrid.

SRB2 has been in development for over twenty years, and if you’ve been following it for the project’s entire lifespan (as I have) you’ve seen exactly what it’s going for (which is to say: it’s the sequel to Sonic Robo-Blast 1, a pure platformer)

We also know what features were available in prior versions of the game (proper analog controls that did not require mouse aiming, and even a homing attack like the Sonic Adventure games had).

These three things influence how we judge the logic behind what version 2.2 has done. We can also use this information to compare it directly to games that are its peers – namely, other cartoony 3D platformers, and other Sonic games.

SRB2 version 2.2 implements its mouse-aim-focused controls because it is built on top of the Doom Engine, particularly the Doom Legacy fork. SRB2 has long fought to build a proper 3D platformer out of the Doom Engine. Every major version of the game moves it closer to this goal, with a third person camera, layered vertically-oriented level design, and moving platforms.

But for more than half of its development, a very popular feature for SRB2 has been its “Match” (Deathmatch) mode, which throws all the platformer stuff out the window and brings SRB2 back to the its roots in the Doom engine, with “guns” (weaponized rings) that can be shot at opponents in tight, looping arenas.

And because it’s basically Doom, it helps to play it like a shooter: WASD for strafing, mouse for aiming. The most hardcore SRB2 players even play in first-person, just like Doom. For them, it’s almost not even a Sonic game anymore, it’s just Doom with different weapons and more colorful maps. This, even though deathmatch didn’t get added until three years after SRB2 entered development.

As the game wore on, the old developers slowly left to go live normal lives and new developers were brought in to fill the gaps, some (or even most) of which were the types to play lots and lots of SRB2 deathmatch. They played so much deathmatch that they decided that playing SRB2 like a standard platformer was worse than playing SRB2 like it was a shooter, so they opted to make SRB2 play more like Doom, because that’s what they like.

Except it doesn’t need to. SRB2 is still structured and designed like a platformer. Nothing in the single player campaign explicitly requires you to circle strafe, even though the tutorial makes you practice doing so. The game’s own design is fighting itself, and the people who just want “Doom with different weapons and colorful maps” are winning. It’s making for a worse product to the people who have never touched SRB2′s deathmatch, or plan to touch deathmatch.

It’s their game. They can do whatever they want with it. They can take what SRB2 was and change that, if it strikes their fancy. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, and it doesn’t mean I’ve given up the right to complain about it. I cared enough about SRB2 that pieces of my artistic DNA are still in that game to this very day. I’m allowed to have an opinion on it.

And that opinion is: it doesn’t want to play like a 3D platformer anymore. It ignores 20 years of analog control standardization and tells you to play a platformer like a third person shooter. It offers a kludgy justification for it by breaking established rules of how 3D platformers work – rules that, might I add, were not broken by previous versions of SRB2.

When Mario does a long jump in Super Mario 64, he jumps in the direction that he’s facing. When Banjo and Kazooie do a Beak Barge, they shoot forward in the direction they’re facing. When Jak & Daxter do an uppercut, they do it in the direction they’re facing. When Spyro does a headbutt, he does it in the direction he’s facing. When Sonic spindashes in Sonic Adventure, he shoots off in the direction he’s facing. When Sonic boosts in Sonic Generations, he boosts in the direction he’s facing. Nobody EVER shoots off EXCLUSIVELY IN THE DIRECTION OF THE CAMERA unless they are holding and shooting a gun, like Ratchet in Ratchet & Clank. But even then, the moment you stop aiming? All of Ratchet’s moves go in the same direction that he’s facing.