stone tiles ✿ by konpeitounogumi on twt

I made a horizontal rainbow boardwalk! Originally made this for my kidcore island, but I ended up scrapping the idea.

You can find the corners in my creator code!

Gayle, I think if you look down now even, you'll be pleasantly surprised!

i really want to share my acnh island, i've been working on it in the early morning hours... i have a small area in front of the able sisters, the secret beach, decorating a medium-sized largely inaccessible empty upper area next to my house, cleaning up the middle beach area, finishing the "convenience store" room/house, cleaning another medium-sized empty space next to the side of the outdoor cafe, then finding a double rainbow... most of the time will probably be spent searching for interesting items to put here or there... oh, and i need to put a little path for the visitors to actually get to the entrance from the community center.

Little bit of a vent, not that serious but slightly heavier than you'd expect from the subject.

TL;DR designing an ACNH island is suffering and I took that personally

So my island has been in a WIP state since its creation. Got fairly far with implementing my plans, and I've worked on pieces of it here and there, but recently, I was inspired to redesign the whole thing (again). No longer liked all the ideas I had liked before, and overall felt it was lacking. With some struggle, I started coming up with new ideas that I felt good about.

But the thing that has slowed me down the most? That has me already doubting or even hating my brand new ideas?

Paths. It always comes down to the paths.

Custom paths? Default paths? Both have pros and cons to consider. Fellow ACNH players are likely familiar with these issues: loss of footstep sounds, limited design slots to work with (is it worth using 12+ slots for a single path border?), having to make every design from scratch (no Online for me), lines of grass left between paths/inclines/buildings...

And I can't decide. I can't find an answer. Whatever I try, whatever I imagine, I don't like the result. I've hit a wall, and that wall is my own perfectionism. Clearly there is no perfect solution, and I have to compromise to progress—"finished, not perfect" and all that—but I don't want to compromise the vision I have for my island, even though I know that vision is unattainable.

I just want to have an island I'm happy with. And it feels like no matter what I do with it, I'll never be satisfied. I've seen such beautiful pictures and videos of other people's islands, and while they inspire me and fuel my creativity, they also raise my standards for my own island because I know it could be so much better.

I want to be able to settle for "good enough." But it feels like trying to paint a rainbow with one or two colors missing or not quite the right shade. Maybe I can make something pretty, but it's not what I envisioned or want.

So I think, let's just come up with something different. There are plenty of designs I would like just as much or more, right? I'm already struggling because I like multiple exclusive aesthetics/layouts/etc. and I can't fit them all on one island. But...paths are kinda omnipresent, and that means I have to accept them being substandard. Unless? I've considered using minimal to no paths, but I can't imagine that working for me. I'm not going for full-on natural forestcore or whatever (and even that wouldn't look its best without dirt paths, right?).

I guess I might've made this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. At this point, I feel tired and stuck and hopeless, and part of me wants to let it go. It's just a game. But I don't want to give up and leave my island a mess again. For a short while, I was excited to create, thinking I could shape my little land into something great, something I could walk through with a smile and maybe feel proud of. And now I wonder if that's really possible. There must be something I can do, something I'd like, but I don't know how to find it. I'm honestly having trouble focusing on it right now.

Seeking inspiration is a double-edged sword. As nice as other people's islands look, I know a lot of pictures are shared with filters, and even those that aren't...well, seeing images and videos is different than walking through your own island day after day.

I could go into the game's flaws and limitations, but this is what we've got. And it's not all bad. There's potential. The problem is my own inner critic, and I don't know how to get past it.

The best part is that I've been trying to fight this perfectionism with the game from the beginning, when I last restarted my island and named it Wabisabia after the term wabi-sabi, the Japanese ideal/aesthetic centered on transience and imperfection. You can see how well that's going for me ha ha ha! Even if I want to embrace it in theory, it's not so easy to break through the perfectionism cemented inside me.

Anyway, yeah. Back to agonizing over my island I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #213

Brought to you by a marine biologist giving no diversity points to ACNH, the sneaky bastards...

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!

We have covered this fish before, but you wouldn’t know it with just a passing glance. And that’s nice for Animal Crossing when it wants to cover the most popular or most colorful species, and they find one species can do both of those jobs. The rainbow trout is one such fish, a popular sport and food fish throughout North America, and across the Pacific to Asia.

The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) appears in every Animal Crossing game, from the very first game to Pocket Camp and New Horizons. Now, you may realize that there isn’t any fish that is specifically called “Rainbow Trout” in ACNH, and you’d be correct. However, the Golden Trout, as we covered a LONG time ago, is a subspecies of the Rainbow Trout, and they are still considered the same species in real life, so, like I said, Animal Crossing doesn’t get any points for diversity here. 

The points are withheld even more, because the Rainbow Trout is a salmonid, just like so many other fish in this game. At least it’s not as bad as cyprinids, but it’s close. Salmon are in their own Family, Salmonidae, the only living group within the Order Salmoniformes. Within this group are the chars, taimen, salmon, trout, among others. Many of them are famous for swimming up rivers to spawn once and die afterward called semelparity, as we talked about in the cherry salmon. Some of them, though, are iteroparous and can spawn more than once in their lives. Rainbows of all colors and life histories are in the latter group.

By Lisac Mark, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-photos/

The Rainbow Trout is represented by 15 subspecies: some are beautifully-colored, like the freshwater-only Golden Trout; others, commonly called Steelhead, are more pale and are ocean-faring, only returning to freshwater to spawn. Freshwater rainbow subspecies are often much smaller than the subspecies who travel out to sea, too. So, why aren’t they just considered separate species? Well, that’s complicated, as we’ve discussed before, but, to put this at a high school level, a species by definition is a group of individuals that can interbreed freely with one-another. A subspecies, then, is sort of like a different variety of the species (kind of like the “regional variants” Pokemon has been into making lately, if we really wanna flex the presence of real science in video games). These varieties can still interbreed and make viable offspring that can then breed themselves, but, typically, these subspecies are separated by some physical barrier that usually prevents that from happening. That’s why for flying and marine animals, sub-speciation is a bit less likely to happen than it is for terrestrial animals or animals that are restrained to certain rivers, like a number of the Rainbows are.

If that physical barrier is kept intact, a subspecies could absolutely become its own species sometime in the future. By being separated, the two populations have been pushed into their own, separate evolutionary paths. Scientists now hypothesize that sub-speciation is the first step towards full speciation, and will eventually lead to greater biodiversity, either in that area where the sub-species exist or worldwide, as is the case for the red fox and its 45 subspecies. However, this changes when humans modify environments - as is the case for the Golden versions of the Rainbow trout, those sub-species could disappear thanks to diversions and habitat destruction on their river systems. Likewise, habitat fragmentation can separate populations to create two sub-species just as well. Whether these things are “good” or “bad” is subjective, but, typically, any drop in biodiversity is an environmental issue, but, the creation of two sub-species who are less genetically diverse after their habitat is fragmented is also an issue that puts them both in jeopardy. Honestly wish we could just leave nature alone, but I know, and you should also know, that isn’t realistic. We just need to do our homework before we start bulldozing through places, y’know?

And there you have it! Fascinating stuff, no? 

The main paths I have on my island 🐰

Credit to the original creators listed, not mine, but thought they were worth sharing! 💜

Rainbow Path

MA 0566-8605-3773

rainbow tile ✿ by konpeitounogumi on twt

a colorful decal or stepping stones collection! with fruit, rainbows, heart, star, mushroom, juice box and more design stepping stones!

pastel rainbow path designed by tiger of laluna

[marina voice] FROO-OO-OO-OOT 🍎🍏🍒🍐🍊🍑

fruit tiles! if you use this path and take pics, i’d love to see~ feel free to tag me!!

Here's some more colorful patterns. They're seamless and transparent.

Rainbow border I made for the terra-cotta path!

EDIT: Look at the updated version here!

@utu_semi666