tried to draw rakan in the 2XKO style

(click for higher resolution)

spins him around trying to understand the pink mop he calls hair

listen i get where people are coming from when they say that nobody should have expected a radical overhaul of the shinobi system considering the series very squarely set up its main theme as not abandoning friends. that certainly was the setup. but i also think it would be inaccurate to say that the story as it evolved affirmed that refusing to abandon one's friends was the be-all and end-all fix for everything. i cannot emphasize this enough: it's not as though the prior generations we saw lacked devotion to their teammates. the problem was that the larger sociopolitical circumstances obstructed their ability to connect in one way or another. even naruto acknowledges at the land of iron that his and sasuke's positions made it impossible for them to reconcile. so for the series to do a 180 and assert that actually friendship was the solution all along (even though there have been no meaningful systemic changes, even though the source of these intergenerational conflicts has not been addressed) rings hollow. it's especially glaring that being violently beaten in a fight makes sasuke desert his quest for justice without any reservation -- therefore no ideological or political separation was bridged, sasuke was just made to forget what motivated him for the entire series' run. naruto and team 7 succeeding where their predecessors failed was not a function of anything they did differently, but mere narrative convenience.

In the end, politics was an accretion of personal decisions, and that means that the personality of the protagonists cannot be left out of the discussion. It determined not only how they reacted to the situations in which they found themselves, but how others reacted to them. The growing support for Edward IV in 1461 must have owed something to the realisation that he would make an effective king - whereas his father never seems to have been regarded in that light.

--Rosemary Horrox, "Personalities and Politics", The Wars of the Roses (Problems in Focus), edited by A.J Pollard

...When the worst had happened, and civil war was a reality, the overwhelming imperative was to find some way of restoring order. At the level of high politics, what this entailed in practice was a rallying around the de facto king. The Wars of the Roses, far from weakening the monarchy, actually strengthened it, since the king was the only man able to surmount faction. In spite of (Henry VI’s) manifest failings, Richard, duke of York's criticism of the regime commanded little high-level support - and would have commanded even less but for the crown's alienation of the junior branch of the Nevilles, headed by York's brother-in-law the earl of Salisbury. York in fact never did attain the political viability to break the vicious circle of temporary ascendancy and political exclusion. It was his son, Edward, earl of March, who finally mustered enough support to take the throne. He was able to do so in part because the situation had been transformed by the country's descent into open war, which reduced the compulsion to uphold the king as the embodiment of stability. Once it was no longer a matter of averting war, but of stopping it, political opinion began to divide more evenly between Henry VI and his rival. However, the crucial change may well have been York's own death at the Battle of Wakefield late in 1460. In the ensuing months Edward of York was able to present himself as the man who could mend the shattered political community. That self-identification with unity proved immensely potent, and it was not a role which could plausibly have been filled by his father. In the eyes of contemporaries, York had been the begetter of faction: a man tainted by his willingness to go to extremes.

DOMINIK MYSTERIO, JD MCDONAGH, and DIY on WWE RAW | 1-15-24

Tis my digisona, no clue if I've uploaded it online before

A virus type counterpart to the terriermon and lopmon lines

The colorful version (in my typical color scheme) a mode change I've taken to calling "Play Mode"

It's the form he takes to make himself seem less scary around children

The odd things about both recent live action Barry Allens is neither really seems like they want to be Barry Allen. TV Barry often comes across like Wally West's personality grafted onto Barry's Geoff Johns' mandated backstory, something comic writers have also been guilty of since his resurrection (just no escaping the fact that Wally is now the default version of the Flash for many). Movie Barry, however, appears to be just Miller trying way too hard to audition for a really neurotic Spider-Man movie. It honestly feels like DC and WB's has no clue what they actually want from a Flash adaptation except for it to resemble their IP.

Remember when i said i was gonna be more insane abt pandora hearts?

Yeah, this is the result. Enjoy <3

Summary:

Jack Vessalius was like a perfectly still body of water. Unchanging, serene, picturesque. Like the calm before a storm. No one knew what lay under that calm, unruffled exterior that gave away nothing. He was but an apparition. A shell of a human being, like they say. A shell that was given a name by a little girl one snowy day.

the older i get the more i appreciate my mum cooking the things she did when i was younger. considering she doesn't even like cooking all that much and was still working full time back when i was a kid, i'm so impressed when i look up some of the recipes she made and seeing how much effort it actually was.

I feel like I failed to capture his actual likeness but *shrugs*

"When you know no one has got your back, you learn to prepare to fight in any situation."

"Let us grieve existence, together."

Psst... Iconoclasts is on sale (70% off) on Steam until early January if you're looking to play a Metroid Fusion style metroidvania that has awesome art, music, characters, and a story that will likely break your heart and put it back together.

Why do you think JS kissed the letter that Henry sent to her, was it meant to be romantic?

It wasn't necessarily romantic, as I understand it, kissing letters was more a gesture of reverence and/or humility (although it was usually followed by...yk...reading the letter); the Duke of Norfolk, for example, kissed a letter written to him by the Emperor:

As I was also preparing to go, the duke of Norfolk came in. Having told him that I had a letter from Your Majesty to him, which I intended delivering at his house in town, he insisted so strongly upon having it at once that, although the duke of Suffolk and others [of the Privy Council] were quite close by, I gave it him as desired. The Duke received the Imperial letter with the greatest show of veneration and respect; he kissed it, read its contents with great pleasure, and after listening to a few remarks which I made upon it began to express his deep gratitude for Your Majesty's kind remembrance of him, and the great honour conferred upon his person by your writing; all the time praying that God might give Your Majesty as much power as he himself had desire to serve you.

Back in August of last year, I made a post showcasing a sprite piece unlike any other one I'd shown before on this blog— a sixteen-bit rendition of Shovel Knight, sprited in the style of Mega Man 7 on the SNES!

I've only ever attempted to sprite in MM7's style a few times before (The linked post above being the most recent example), and from having a whole year of sprite expertise under my belt between said post and now, I figured it was time for me to try spriting something else in a SNES style... but just like last time, it was a little tough to decide on a subject.

Sure, I had chosen Shovel Knight previously, and would have been more than content with spriting somebody else from the Shovel Knight franchise (King Knight, perhaps), though this time, I wanted to chose a Mega Man character, one that would look plenty cool in Mega Man 7's style...

... so why not choose one of my own?

Thus, everybody's favorite guru of glitches was quick to receive a visual upgrade, and I am very much pleased with what I was able to come up with!

(Check under the cut for the usual Star Insight, Glitch Man's spriting process and a little bonus!)

When I decided on spriting Glitch Man in Mega Man 7's spriting style, I sampled Mega Man 7's color palette, grabbed all of the colors I knew I would need, and set up MS Paint accordingly for the creation of the sprite! However, where Shovel Knight's sprite was hand-drawn from the ground-up, the process I went about in SNES-ifying Glitch Man was a slight bit different, so I'll let you in on my top-secret, highly confidential process in starting his sprite...

I just upscaled Glitch Man's original sprite to roughly match the size of Mega Man's sprite in MM7 and traced over it.

To some, I understand that this method would be something of a copout, but when you take into consideration that doing so would cut down the production time significantly and allow for more room for finer details, it's actually a fairly viable technique. Plus, it's not like other sprite artists don't use this method— Rockman 7 FC instead took the SNES sprites and downscales them to befit the look of the NES Mega Man titles, seen here!

With a good idea on how to approach the lineart, all that was left was to actually draw it and color Glitch Man. Since I went into spriting him with every color I needed, applying a base color was plenty easy, though to stay true to Mega Man 7's spriting style, I would have to shade him in a very specific way.

You might notice that, in the above spriting process, I would draw lineart of a certain area of Glitch Man (Like his head), apply a flat color, shade it and then move onto the next area. I also had to make absolutely certain that one of his legs was a single pixel shorter than the other, as you'll notice is how every character is drawn in Mega Man 7 if you look closely!

And after about an hour of work, Glitch Man was complete! I'm certain I'm finally getting a hang of spriting above my usual 8-Bit limitations, and definitely intend on choosing another member of the Synth Legion to SNES-ify for a future post! Hope you've enjoyed reading through the insight behind this sprite, and expect more Mega Man 7 styled sprites to come!

Actually i am still mad about Hilary losing and trump winning in 2016, bc… whatever problems you had or chose to believe about Hilary… I don’t think we would’ve gotten to this point in our fascist hellscape if she had been in office….

hm how about I do some drawing prompts again? send me a blorbo, send me an idea, my pencil is yours to direct for the next forty-five minutes!

Like the post I made for Valentines Day, I'd like to make a big post with Halloween HCs for each anim.