enRAPTURED || More Info on the Project

💛 The Home for Wayward OCs: Norah 💛

Norah is from the comic Agents of the Realm by Mildred Louis! She’s a college student who picks up a cool shiny trinket on the ground, and winds up inducted into a multidimensional squad of magic warriors - along with her loud roommate and three of her awkward classmates.

And Green with apologizing Blue.

(Featured Art Link)

Demons’ Souls’ Final Question: What About The Future?

I’ve been pondering how to end my first playthrough of Demon’s Souls. My quest had been so clear at the start: as a temple knight, it was my duty to serve God in banishing the demons and their soul arts by sealing the Old One.

However, I began to question my purpose upon discovering the Talisman of Beasts on Scirvir the Wanderer’s (Black Phantom) body. It revealed the church’s God and the Old one to be one and the same. Magic and Miracles but two applications of the same power, both with the potential to harm and help others.

Later, I had made the decision to kill Yuria the witch, simply for being a witch. This seemed a good idea to me at the time, but upon rescuing Yurt the assassin, enabling him to kill two people in the Nexus, I had to reflect (after killing him, of course). Why would I kill an enemy of the church whom I knew nothing about, yet tolerate the presence of a murderer who claims “Human lives are not so precious as you might think” for so long?

Last night I fought Maiden Astraea, a former saint who became a demon in order to use her power to cure the sick. Astraea cursing God for dooming people to suffer resonated with me deeply, and her suicide once she realized my victory was inevitable pained me greatly.

Returning to the Nexus, the Old One can be heard crying out, the path between our worlds re-opened. Saint Urbain seemed to show his ignorance of the Old One’s true nature in claiming it sounded like the cry of a hungry child, but Sage Freke, the magician and enemy of the church, came with a plan ready: take the old one’s power for our own, and presumably, use it to do good. (This is of course, how i frame the decision given my character. Sage Freke seems pretty solely dedicated to the pursuit of science, not necessarily concerning himself with its application.)

For a moment, my choice seemed clear: become an all powerful version of Maiden Astraea. An Archdemon that performs miracles. A force of nature which serves to mend the world. The game however, provides King Allant (the main villain, a king who awakened the old one in the first place) as an example of what happens when one tries to take on such responsibility. Though Allant’s influence on the world is unquestionably an evil one (you basically spend the whole game trying to undo his influence) his son, Ostrava, speaks nothing but praise, faith, and love for his father as a human. At first I thought he may be biased or delusional, but this can be disregarded, given his later acknowledgment of the necessity of his father’s demise (going so far as to kill himself to keep from stopping you). How, then, does a good king turn evil, if not for some inherently evil soul magic? The answer is the Fat Official. The demonic bureaucrat. He embodies all 7 deadly sins, and is the last person you’d want in a position of power. He is not an inevitable part of society, but he is inevitably hidden within governments as large as the United States, and likely even Japan. Hell, most businesses employ these guys as managers, ever been to Stonefang Mines? The point is, no one man can exert the level of influence as King Allant without a massive hierarchy of power between himself and the people, it’s just unmanageable otherwise. The dream of doing the work of Maiden Astrea on the scale of something like a God or even a King is not possible without some of these goons getting involved somewhere, and as the game tells us (I think in the fat official’s hat description) the appearance of these middle-managers is what seemed to herald the age of demons.

What, then, am I to do? The Shrine of Storms and Storm Ruler provide evidence that hundreds of years ago, a whole other nation rose and fell with the use of Soul Arts. If I simply seal the Old One, am I dooming mankind to repeat the cycle once again? Am I forsaking future generations of people that could use the power of Demon’s Souls to advance science to some sort of utopian future? Leaving our world stuck forever in the dark ages? Lost, I return to the words of Saint Urbain: the Old One’s cries sound like a hungry child. I believe Sage Freke says when you rescue him, that the Old One is like a gaping maw, perpetually consuming additional souls. Hunger, scarcity, or perhaps, the hope of a future with less of these struggles for our children, the Old One embodies them all. It is need itself. So how do we choose to see that need? As something to be overcome, or something to gently lull back into peace? I choose the latter. It strikes me as somehow less cynical to choose to soothe people’s suffering in the present, and be the best person I can be, in the hope that the next time the Old One rages, another hero will have the strength of heart and peace of mind to do the same. We can never conquer this reality, but we can slay the demons where we see them cropping up. We can work toward a society which produces less illness, less brutality, less hopelessness, and less abuse, by working to limit the ability of any one False King or Fat Official or Fool’s Idol or Adjudicator to exert dominance.

Break the cycle of violence, and trust that this will make the future one of increased peace. Never perfect, constantly struggling, and embracing every minute of it. If a game this hard can be fun, so can a life of slow, dedicated work for a better future.

Comic-Con@Home 2020- Coloring Comics

Gender, Race, and Comic Book Coloring

Did you know that comic book colors used to be hand-separated by an army of women in Connecticut? That “benday dots” are named after a real person? Or that there’s a technical reason African-American skin tones look wrong in old comics? Geek out on the hidden corners of comics history, from the Golden Age up to today’s digital era, and learn about the craft of coloring with color artist Marissa Louise (Amethyst), comics creator Mildred Louis (Astrea's Nexus Studio), researcher and essayist Zoë D. Smith (University of Chicago), and master letterer/former DC production artist Todd Klein (Sandman). Moderated by author Anina Bennett (Boilerplate).

Livestream Q&A following the event: July 25, at 3pm PT on www.twitch.tv/ml_illo  - (I’ll link to VOD when it is avaliable it is currently on going)

Learn How to Color Comics

Do you know how comic books are colored? Learn about the creative art of comic book coloring as Hi-Fi's Brian Miller (The Flash) and Kristy Miller (Femme Magnifique) demonstrate the step-by-step transformation of a comic book page from black and white to full color. Learn professional techniques for flatting, rendering, color holds, and special effects, along with top digital coloring tips.

Demon's Souls Diary:

Well... I done beat the thing. I didn't expect to pull that off tonight, but I was on a roll and just kind of powered through the endgame. So okay, first 5-2. I know people love to bitch about the poison lake levels in these games, but frankly, this was the easiest level in the entire game for me--it's the only one where I didn't die, even once. I threw on the Poison Resistance Ring when I got there, and after that, it was just careful planning, a few Noble's Lotuses and... that's it. None of the enemies were a particular challenge (except the island of infinite slugs--that was... interesting) and... yeah. No biggie. The Dirty Colossus was super easy--just follow the golden rule and hug that backside and with a little careful dodging, he went down like butter.

So then I did 1-3, and was having an equally easy time of it until that fucking staircase right before the boss fight. You know the one I mean--the one with like 9 guys hanging out on it, including 3 of the flame-face knight guys and two archers. Much cursing, very salt. It took me more tries to get past those fucking stairs than it did to beat the boss. For The Penetrator himself, he wasn't too bad. I almost got him in one attempt, but the game crashed during the fight, so that kinda pissed me off. But I went back and, once I cottoned on to the fact that you have to dodge past his sword arm to avoid his spinny attack, he wasn't too difficult.

I play offline, usually, so I fought the NPC version of the Old Monk in 3-3 and he was super easy. Seriously, I think he hit me like once. Just a matter of baiting him around the room and choosing the right moment.

The Storm King in 4-3 was a little trickier. Not least because when I got there, my carry capacity was full, so I couldn't pick up the Storm Ruler. Had to nope out to the Nexus and go see Thomas for a minute. When I got back, I cleared out the baby mantas without any trouble. It took me a little while to figure out the range on the sword, and the big guy hit me with his attacks almost every time, but I had enough vitality to tank it, get a couple of hits on him and heal before he came back around. I guess technically this took me two tries, but only one where I was actually doing any fighting.

Maiden Astrea (5-3) I did the arrow cheese on and got the trophy for it. Would be barely worth mentioning, except AFTER I beat her, I fell into the blood river and got eaten by plague babies. That was embarrassing.

So then I went to the King's Tower (1-4). Nothing too crazy there--baited out each of the black phantoms with an arrow so I could fight them one on one. I tried killing the blue dragon, but it was taking literally FOREVER and I wasn't getting much of anywhere with it, so finally, I just gave up and booked it past him. So then I met Ostrava in his final moments, he gave me the mausoleum key, and I kicked his black phantom off the bridge for an easy win. But okay, went to the mausoleum and got Demonbrand. The thing is, I've been playing a DEX/MAG/INT build and it has STR/FTH requirements that I did not meet. But I thought, "hey, there must be a reason he said to use this," so I went back to 4-2 and killed the first reaper about 200,000 souls worth of times so I could level up sufficiently to use the sword. Which turned out to be 1) slow as fuck, and 2) weaker than my trusty Crescent Falchion. So that was a waste of a good 40 minutes or so.

False King Allant was a little tough--he took me three tries. Mostly because of that ri-goddamn-diculous AOE of his where like... if you're close enough to have a target lock on him, say bye bye to your health bar. But I kept a middle-distance, baited out his zoom attack, and my dodge game is on point, so I could leap out of the way, spin back around hit him a few times and then run out of his reach. Rinse and repeat a few dozen times and I got the bastard. And then... yeah. True King Allant is like.. nothin'. So that was that. I think there's an alternate ending where you kill the Maiden in Black, but I wasn't about to do that, so she and the Old One went to sleep and roll fucking credits.

I know I definitely didn't do everything in the game--like I didn't fuck around with world state very much, and there's some NPCs whose questlines I definitely didn't finish, but it was good enough for a first playthrough. I'll revisit it at some point and poke around in some of the more obscure corners of the game. But for now, I've had my Demon's Souls experience.

Which means now I've beaten 5 of the 6 Soulsborne games (and the DLC for the other four; to my knowledge, this one doesn't have any)--Sekiro is the only hill I have yet to climb.

For the rest of this week, I have a final paper to finish (the last 10 [of 40 or so] pages is about Dark Souls, actually--it's a paper proposing a theoretical model for video game criticism), then I have to clean my house before I fly back to Oregon on Sunday for Christmas. But after that, I'll have almost two months before Elden Ring, so I might give the ol' samurai game another shot when I get back, see if I can make it past Genichiro's lighting-ass this time. It's such a beautiful game--the swordplay in it is so goddamn precise, I wanna get good at it. But yeesh--it is ABSOLUTELY the hardest of the six, at least for me.

TIMING'S A WITCH || More Info on the Project

My wonderful group of idiots || Astrea's Nexus

SHE IS THE END || More Info on the Project