one of these days i swear i am going to make a character analysis for the cat across the whole series

Permission to headbutt: Granted (Patreon)

I've come to realize a trend/trope in ships I like and It all really boils down to:

Insanely popular and or powerful person/being x Just some random ass dude (gender neutral)

Just like: "Wow I have so much power and/or status!" (and maybe even many love interests that already want them) "Oh, who's that standing at the corner?- *literally just the most basic and average being on the fucking planet standing there* "OH MY GOODNESS, MOVE OVER RANDOS I'VE JUST SEEN THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!!!<3!!!" like that's so funny to me

What led to this (orufrey comic, cw an uncomfortable/creepy scene)

Thinking about the symbolic weight of smoking in the TLT universe that comes to the fore in The Unwanted Guest -- the way it moves through from person to person: Pyrrha smoked, and Augustine wanted to impress her in all her stone cold fox MILF James Bond glory (and tbf who wouldn't) so he started too. and even though as far as he knows she's been gone for a myriad and is never coming back, he keeps the habit. Ianthe sees something in the hollowed-out Faberge eggshell of Augustine that resonates with her, all that gilded eloquent emptiness and disdain through the ages, so she picked it up from him to try to emulate it. She picked it up so hard that Palamedes -- the exact spiritual antithesis of the 'smoking! on a space station! what a powermove' ennui Ianthe so admired -- spontaneously unnerded enough to even known how to, simply from a sort of contact contamination of the soul.

G1deon and Augustine sharing a jittery smoke after their near-Harrow experience during soup night, and it's the closest thing to any real sense of brotherhood that remains between them. Pyrrha going ten thousand years dying both literally and for a smoke (and then Camilla sold her fucking cigarettes (for a third of what they were worth, probably Pyrrha's own good, and also more importantly grocery money). what an entirely haunted time to be alive etc.). Augustine and Mercy trading a cigarette back and forth in the middle of their collusion over the love and murder of god.

An act of small and measured self-destruction in the name of something a little bit like connection when you're stuck somewhere in yourself where love itself dares not or cannot tread (ritualized, transmissible)..........

what i learned from cr bg3 livestream:

caduceus' guilty pleasure is kombucha

fresh cut grass could be henry crabgrass' dad

chetney is fjords dad. canon. no more questions

mollymauk is he/him but could be swayed

heyhey!! just wanted to say your works are amazing and i love them so so so SO much aagghhh!!

now onto the request— what if,, what if reader knew a ton of languages like nikolai does, and they call their s/o pet names in those languages. an example would be,, maybe if they knew french they would say 'mon chéri' or perhaps they picked up romanian at some point and would call them 'dragă'

the characters i have in mind are price, nik, alejandro, & rudy, if that's okay !! (´▽`)

sorry for the super long ask, lol :')

Hey there! Thank you, that makes me really happy to hear :D And don't worry about sending longer asks, I really don't mind ^^ Also, that request is really cute! I love reader speaking several languages and being a sweetheart in all of them :D

Price, Alejandro, Rodolfo and Nikolai with an S/O who Knows Many Languages

Price: I think he knows quite a few languages himself, being a captain in the SAS and all. Not nearly as many as Nikolai, but he probably knows a good three to four languages, so he likely wouldn’t be entirely clueless when you call him something along the lines of mon petit chou fleur. While he won’t understand every term of endearment you call him, it does warm his heart to hear you speak a language he doesn’t know. It flows off your tongue very nicely and he just loves listening to you. Depending on what kind of language it may be, even the profanities sound nice. Although whenever you want to get his attention, just to call him something in a language he doesn’t understand, he sort of expects it to be some cute pet name. Will always smile at you, even if you were to call him your albernes kleines Kaninchen. Retorts with a pet name in one of the languages he speaks. Sometimes he does feel the urge to learn a new language, just for you. Or maybe you could learn a new language together? Practice with each other and just have a good time overall? He might bring up the idea at some point.

Alejandro: Like Price, he probably knows a few languages himself. More than the average person, but not nearly as many as Nikolai. So probably three to four as well. However, because he knows Spanish there’s a good chance he can derive most words in a Romance language. Call him something along the lines of giliw and he’ll always retort with some embarrassing pet name in Spanish. Yes, he knows several languages himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t almost always revert to Spanish anyway. Pretends that you’re using your languages against him and calls you a traitor. And, as is the rule in your household when you’ve betrayed him, you will be held accountable. Lots of chasing through the house. Will “interrogate” you to get you to tell him what you said. Call him a term of endearment in Spanish and you won’t ever hear the end of it. No matter how many times he hears you call him guapo, he always gets that goofy grin on his face. Might research embarrassing terms of endearment to use on you in any other language. And yes, his goal is to find a language you don’t speak. Once he’s found one? He’s not gonna let you live it down. He’s bested you, and that’s all he wanted.

Rodolfo: You’d actually have to call him by his name if you want his reaction since he usually just tends to block out people speaking a language he doesn’t know. Why bother trying to understand someone like that? It’s not like he’ll learn the language overnight anyway. Rodolfo knows about three languages, so not as many as Alejandro. But he knows English and Spanish, which means he can communicate in most places anyway. He thinks he knows enough languages since learning one takes roughly an eternity and he doesn’t have the time for that anyway. Call him Cục vàng and he’ll just look at you as though you’ve grown a second head. You’d have to tell him what it means and then he’ll smile. While he will always appreciate a good Hartlam, he might look at you confused until you tell him you love him. Might not always retort with a pet name of his own, but will mix it up among the languages he does know since he doesn’t wanna seem too stupid next to you. Will also sometimes look up new terms of endearment in languages he doesn’t know so he can surprise you, but might get a bit shy since he might botch the pronunciation a bit. But he tries, and that’s all that matters.

Nikolai: He canonically knows eight languages, so there’s a good chance he knows what you’re saying. Even when you’re saying something in a language he might not entirely know, he might be able to derive the word from a language he does know. Although he may love any pet name you give him, he especially loves any Russian ones since he’s very attached to his country and his native tongue. Goes absolutely wild whenever you call him radnoy. There’s just something so sweet about you calling him something nice in Russian, doesn’t even matter if you botch the pronunciation. Will always give you a hug and a kiss to your forehead since he will always be reminded of how much he loves you. But even a simple min søde skat will get him to smile, even if he has no idea what it means this time. Because of you he might be inspired to pick up some new languages along the way, maybe even ones you don’t know so you can get the same treatment he does with you. Whenever you speak a language he doesn’t know he gets heart eyes for you. You’re just so gorgeous, you’re just so very smart. However, at some point he will just start speaking Russian to you, even if you don’t know the language. He won’t say anything mean, he’ll just tell you how precious you are and how much he loves you.

21 / 15

closeups under cut

some closeups

The Most Unreliable Narrator I Have Ever Seen

soooooo I had a Cyberpunk-obsessed phase pass recently, and this time Johhny Silverhand's character caught my eye. His story, more specifically, and how... inconsistent he seems, depending on each source.

In the game, Johhny acts like a bastard for most of the game. He panic-rages on his first meeting with V, throws many threats around, but is later beaten into the background with the blocker pills Misty gave to V. Even Johnny's friends' are well, they react Loudly to his return. Y'know, make it known his presence alone provokes a lot of anger from them.

Even during his first appearance, when V gets thrown into Silverhand's memories of his SAMURAI concert, the only real thing V recalls is the all-consuming rage that he felt, which he tried to shout out through the microphone, but it never felt like enough.

And doesn't this sound weird then, that the only thing Johnny does throughout the game after that first meeting is help V out? He learns about the Smasher guy hideout at the docks (he does that through dubious means but that's Johnny for you), he helps V out when the seizures become worse, he calmly agrees to Any decision V makes, despite V clearly Not being in any real state to oppose him in the finale of the game, he plans the whole thing with "Alt" so V can get his body back at Johnny's own expense, from the beginning, and he doubles down on that claim at the end of the game.

Do you see the dissonance? The egoist rockerboy that admitted to using his friends to getting what he wants, and the downright self-sacrificing hero and a friend that is Johnny at the end of the game? People change, sure, but this divide is very massive and too sudden, so I wanted to dig into that. And what I've stumbled upon, with the help of canon Cyberpunk materials like the Red sourcebook (or, more specifically, LayedBackGamers' reading of the canon books and his lore videos on different topics), is that

Johhny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077 is the Most Unreliable Narrator I've Ever Seen.

Count with me here:

Johhny's personality in general. No matter what your interpretation of him his, it's impossible to ignore that Johhny is very much a people person and he exploits that knowledge and charisma to suit his own goals. If you choose to trust him, then you might have already been played.

2) Johhny has been alone, only his lovely self for 50+ years inside the Arasaka chip. Don't ask me how he is still even remotely sane, I haven't got a clue (hopefully the time as a construct without outside stimulation flies differently and he hasn't felt those 50 years in real time). The thing to mention here, however, is that, being alone with your thoughts and emotions for a long time, having nothing else for entertainment, is a great opportunity to rewrite your own memory of events or emotions you've felt.

3) Lack of a body. The aforementioned constant rage, that was the dominant emotion is Johnny's life (before Alt, at least, if Never Fade Away is anything to go by, and I mean, that's literally a love ballad), is a symptom of his PTSD from his too-young years serving in the corpo war, same as his signature silver hand. I'm not a specialist here, but I do know PTSD, especially for war veterans, is a physiological illness just as much as it is a mental one. Johnny's body literally had trouble living normally after that experience, and knowing this bastard - he never managed to treat that. Existing as a personality construct frees him from the many bonuses of being corporeal, but it also free him from the physiological side of PTSD. His day-to-day existence is fundamentally different from that of the Johnny Silverhand that the world knew 50 years ago, so yes, as a 'time traveler' or a source of information and comparison about the 70's and 20's of cyberpunk world Johhny is not a good source.

4) The chip with Johnny is literary inside the head of another person. The characters in game question, multiple times, just which decisions is V making on his own, and which of them might be Johnny's doing. Not consciously, no, but V and Johnny are clearly not your simple neighbours. They are not your 'close friends that start subconsciously copying each other' too. It is quite possible that the chip with Johhny is adapting to the 'hardware' it is running on, so it is specifically implementing parts of V's personality into Johnny, to minimize the 'friction' between the personality and the body it is supposed to inhabit. Everyone say hi to existential horror)

5) How does Soulkiller ever work? Is there data on how much the resulting engram actually resembles the person it tried to copy? How did the process of copying Johnny go? I can answer the last one - very badly.

Death of Johnny is told in excruciating detail in the Cyberpunk sourcebooks. Johnny died on the floor of Arasaka tower, torn in two by a shotgun blast from Smasher. There is no information on how much time it takes Soulkiller to create the engram from the brain, but it better have finished doing that before Johnny's brain started dying from a lack of blood and oxygen, and he clearly didn't have much time either, considering bisection is not the best for bodily fluid preservation, so it's a wonder the engram even works properly. Plus, during the initial heist to steal the chip with Johnny, the chip was damaged further before the idiots decided to stick an unknown harddrive into their heads to preserve it. Basically, it's nothing short of a miracle, that engram-Johnny is actually a whole damn person, that he can function, think and feel properly (well, as much as Johnny can do those things)

It is very sad that V can't talk to Johnny about this, as the man does blame himself over things he hasn't even done, and he had done enough emotional damage to himself and people around him without that kind of burden on top of it.

6) Johnny's memories are literally false. The attentive reader had to pick this up in my previous point - didn't Johnny die in the hands of Arasaka after they interrogated him? Nope. Nope, and I can say that confidently because,

(drumroll please)

Cyberpunk tabletop sourcebooks! Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk universe and the TTRP series of games, has worked closely with CDPR writers during the production of the 2077. He oversaw everything, and he says that 2077 is in the same cyberpunk universe too, it's not an 'alternate reality' or anything.

Johnny Silverhand died while trying to buy time for his friends to escape, from a shotgun shot from Adam Smasher. That's it, he died on that floor, there was noone to interrogate, no rooftop helicopter he ran for.

The sequence of 'memories' we see from Johnny's POV in the game is a mishmash of two different assaults on the Arasaka towers, yes towers there were two of them. There is a great video explaining all the small and Major details Johnny's version of events got wrong, because we have the sourcebooks and the text inside. You may accuse me of holding a 'holy canon' argument ... and well, yeah, this is kind of holy knowledge, as it was written for gamemasters.

Still, some of the things in Johnny's version are Major, and while the media certainly covered the whole story extensively with corpo propaganda (oh, btw, Johnny didn't bomb anything, he probably didn't even know there was a nuke involved, he is literally just a scapegoat), there are some holes that a citizen of this world might know and wish to poke. The aforementioned Two Arasaka towers, or the absence of the legendary solo Morgan Blackhand from Johnny's story. Interestingly enough, there is a radiostation of Maximum Mike in-game, who is actually just pretty much Mike Pondsmith, and he does propose a couple of questions the 'official' version of the attack doesn't cover (like, where would a rockerboy even get a nuke, he might have been popular, but that's not just something you find without military contracts, and that means corporations). Another thing is that since Arasaka owns Soulkiller and has had the engram for a couple of decades, it is quite possible they are the ones responsible for messing with Johnny's memories.

So uh, yeah, Johnny is the Most Unrealible Narrator I have ever seen. Johnny of 2077 is most certainly not the Johnny of 2020's, but this might be a good thing. Maybe the 'real' 2020's Silverhand could never have made the progress the engram did, or become such a good friend and companion for V, or maybe he could have done those things too. We'll never know. I really love this story anyway.

I was tagged by @wearileigh to make myself in these picrews: x x x

Thank you for tagging me!

I tag @onedivinemisfit, @theimpossiblescheme, @13eyond13, @faintingheroine, @eroshiyda, @blackwoodbanshee and @elegyofthemoon if they want to do it.

I was just thinking what a cool job this might be.. what if you were just the person who makes little still images of cute animal figurines doing various activities to post on social media...? like.. show up to work and just spend the whole day like "hmm... this table should be placed to the left a little.. let me set this miniature bagel down in this way... this tiny rabbit should be wearing a scarf", setting the backgrounds, the lighting, etc. ... dream job perhaps lol...

Anime good :) (Patreon)

witch scrambles

MAN your art, but especially the latest pieces of Walking Fire Friend and Sparkle Dog really have the vibes of like, sanrio?? I want stickers and half a dozen accessories with them plastered all over so bad

!!! thank u for the kind words!! im playing around with the halftone effect, i like how it makes it look like a newspaper comic ^_^