Nepenthe

I was just thinking the same thing. More than the usual amount of love went into that one, and most people probably wouldn’t even stop to notice. The subtle fade-out at the top. That is some pleasing vomit.

Ok. Mini-rant because I can’t contain myself atm. Do you wanna know a badly-kept secret? I’ve been making art on and off for 29 years. My ass wishes I could draw too. A ton of artists wish they could draw.

Talent will only give you a leg up, and mainly just at the beginning. The rest, all of us have to struggle for and I’m quite sure very few of us appreciate having to do so. And no matter how good they get, there is always something they have no idea how to do yet or they have some idol whose style they envy more than their own. Or they’re the type that only hates what they make because they’re the one who made it.

Van Gogh had a painter friend named Gauguin, and they were both jealous of each other. There is no magical point that one hits where you feel like you’re Good Enough. The best you can aim for is the kind of steady improvement you don’t even notice happening except on a scale of years, and the confidence to acknowledge those improvements instead of hyper-focusing on every way it isn’t what you saw in your head (it never is).

Go get a pencil or your ipad or whatever. Youtube is by far your biggest friend. Go look up videos about how to actually see what’s in front of you instead of what your brain insists must logically be there. USE REFERENCE. Trace a photo over and over, then immediately try the same thing freehand – this one is super useful, because a lot of drawing is also muscle memory. Break things down into simple shapes and then build on those. Use the open space between objects if you need to, to trick yourself into drawing something complex without getting lost in intimidating structural details.

When you’ve got those down, move onto perspective and composition. Cry a little if you have to, then get back to it. Because now you’re able to do whole backgrounds. People? Do tons of deliberately imprecise gesture drawings. Give your OC a terrifying robot head, a pillow for a torso, and springs for limbs. But go get. Your pencil. And be ok with drawing at first like everyone thinks they draw.

Barring that, my second choice is singing.

In that case, I also choose NZ 802 years ago.

It can be a little stressful even for me. And yes, the inventory management is atrocious btw, it’s a common complaint.

Like someone else mentioned, you can always pay a little to respec if you find out a character doesn’t have the stats to do what you’re wanting/what they’re built to do. That does require gold, and it is something that needs to be read up on and ultimately taken for a test ride to see if it’s even fun for you. That many options can feel really daunting.

But I think with enough cleverness, the game can be won with almost anything. Just last night, I watched a playthrough of a guy who had challenged himself to beat the game without killing anyone or manipulating anyone else to kill them for him, and he did it.

Whole game. The only NPC he had no way around personally harming could still be knocked out and left alive. He tricked the end boss into murdering itself through careful use of explosive barrels and he himself never fired a shot — a super cheesy fighting tactic common enough that the term “barrelmancy” is a thing.

I’m not gonna say there won’t be reloads, but there are a multitude of ways to handle most if not all altercations. Some things can be talked out of, or allies sought to help.

If not, it could be a huge, horrible fight taken head-on for the awful fun of it, or you could sneak up and thunderwave them into a hole and be done with it. Covertly poison the lot. Command them to drop their own weapon and then take it, and giggle while they flail their fists at you. Cast light on the guy with a sun sensitivity and laugh harder at their own personal hell.

You could sneak around back and take the high ground, triggering the battle by firing the first shot from a vantage point the enemy will take 4 rounds to reach through strategically placed magical spikes.

I passed one particularly worrying trial by just turning the most powerful opponent into a sheep until every other enemy was dead and I could gang up on them. Cleared another fight sitting entirely in the rafters where they had trouble hitting me, and shoved them to their death when one found a way up.

Going straight into a battle is the most expected way to do it, but there are usually shenanigans that can be played, is what I’m saying. Accept with grace the attempts that don’t work. If the rules of engagement seem unfair, change the rules.

If it helps any, the game does also reward xp fairly generously. Just reaching new/hidden areas grants a little bit, to say nothing of side quests.

That guy I was talking about, the one that finished with zero kills, ended the game at level 10. The level cap is 12. That was all just wandering around, doing stuff that didn’t require fighting.

Know which stat each class mainly uses and focus on that. Do not make the mages wear armor, it is not a happy fun experience. Beyond that, be clever and moderately lucky with your cleverness. You’ll be fine.

It’s a lot to get used to and does take time to be familiar with all your options, but I started out not very far above where you sound like you are. You do get used to it if you take your time, and I’m certain most people would be overjoyed to help.

I’m not so sure. I’ve not played the first two to be able to measure between them, but I do recall thinking that if I hadn’t been so into watching videos of other peoples’ dnd campaigns, I would be so helplessly far out of my depth.

As it was, I was already struggling a little bit with which class was best for my likely playstyle. Who can use what armor, why, and what happens when they don’t. What skills go with what stats. The general info they don’t have a need to go over when you’re not the one at the table.

Those aren’t things OP would know enough about to even know they don’t know, so I’m glad they have someone helping them. I don’t consider myself anything remotely resembling intelligent and they’re starting out with less. For being easily one of the best things I’ve played in years, it would feel impossibly daunting for a noob

The post can, yeah. The predictability with which all posts or comments containing the word “Google” will have several responses underneath evangelizing Firefox almost certainly will not, after it exceeds a point it very clearly routinely exceeds.

Not because you guys are wrong, (you’re not), but because you’re annoying, which is almost as bad. There is something in psychology called reactance theory, and it’s the reason why, when you’re just about to do the dishes and then someone else tells you to do them, it’s suddenly the last thing on earth you want to do.

It is a choice so small it isn’t worth arguing over, but it’s no longer your choice born out of your own free will, and now you feel cheated and resentful and you are not doing it, both out of spite and more truthfully to regain your sense of choice.

This is the same reason everyone hates vegans so much. They’re not wrong. They’re annoying. Firefox has vegan PR.

I held off listening to Hamilton for three years for no other reason than nobody else I met would shut the goddamn fuck up about Hamilton. Same with the TV version of Good Omens, whatever stupid cartoon jester thing has been in a third of the memes lately, and a hundred other things.

I am very likely to switch over to Firefox myself in the ever-nearing future. That ice is breaking. But it will not be because a bunch of strangers whined at me over my own choices for over a decade. It will be because the cons of whatever Google, Windows, etc. have done finally outweigh the pros of not having to exert effort to maintain my experience.

It bears consideration that in the meantime, Firefox users have a tendency not to even read the several duplicate comments before they start jacking off into them, not uncommonly in a way that’s loudly judgemental towards their own target audience.

The resultant spam cements a mental association between Firefox, the brand and the feeling of being annoyed and insulted. Don’t be those vegans. If I had to think, be like the art community treats Adobe. Fuck Adobe, but I’m not just gonna overload someone with aggressive pompousity who’s only using the industry default.

The thing is — not trying to sound snarky about this — do you honestly believe there is someone on the fediverse that hasn’t heard of Firefox before.

When I get deeply emotionally attached to my data analyst, I might care if they’re moonlighting on the side. Sex, work or not, is still an emotional topic for most of the human race and it’s not new knowledge to anyone.

Enough that it would not naturally occur to me that “please do not engage in prostitution while we’re together” needs to be said out loud. I will casually ask if you’re monogamous and if you say yes, that’s how monogamy works.

Even aside from that, yeah, tbh, I would consider it good form to let your partner know you’re considering a new job regardless, just so they generally know what’s going on. If you have to hide it, maybe something is wrong.

Well. “Extremist” and “nationalist” were never words I thought I would see attached to the phrase buddhist monk, but here we are, I fucking guess. That’s a thing that I know now.

I’m about to just eschew anything bipedal at this point. Two legs bad.

I know you’re trolling and indeed fuck the rest, but…buddhist monks? Pretty hard to have beef with. No pun intended.

I guess you could make the case that encouraging indifference towards suffering breeds a whole different class of sociopathy, but even then, at least they’re the least destructive they can possibly be by just never touching anything.

“It wasn’t about slavery!”

Texas’ articles of secession name slavery as a main cause twelve times. Georgia’s calls abolitionism “heresy” and Mississippi, bless them, referred to it with “a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization,” before going even further with such quotes as

[The US government] refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

Which I am only leaving here because somebody wrote that, meant it, and sent it off, and it is insane to read.

Fortunately for Mississippi, their constituents can’t.

That was one of the things I miss most about Boost. The ability to tag users was so nice both as a way to keep track of and remember nice facts about users I routinely interacted with in private subs, and to stop myself from bothering to argue with someone I’ve previously titled “depressing incel” or “autism vaccines.”

Made reading what they said easier to bear, even, with the constant reminder that it’s being typed by someone who drinks piss or whatever

Ok, explain. Link me. I’ve been turning this over in my head. I cannot fathom what “fabric artist trading card” could possibly be

This is acceptable. I love chicken and hate Ted Cruz

I personally would love to do almost all of those things. I wouldn’t want to do them as a job. There is an ocean of difference between doing something because it’s enjoyable and doing it because if I ever stop for any reason, I will starve to death in a ditch. Tends to kill the fun.

My ideal job would be chilling out as a professional student, splitting my time between large amounts of socializing and various crafting hobbies that are not stressful because my ability to live does not depend on them. Might even take up an instrument. Wouldn’t play it for anyone, I just like learning things more than I like anything else. Which is not monetizable.

Barring that, whatever allows me the most time to do so without making me miserable. Beyond the basic amount required to survive, life isn’t about money. Life is life.

Thanks for single-handedly ruining my entire character 😭

I’ve never seen one block only one community out of an entire instance, but it’s not surprising that they could. I’m assuming like an instance block, all lemmy.world accounts would be officially unable to so much as see new content from there, so no, it physically can’t repopulate.

However, the admins will have to play whack-a-mole for a good while every time another one crops up and I’m getting the sense that unlike my fool’s errand of blocking every sports community, they stand to be sued out of existence if they fail.

Maybe a bit rich coming from someone who doesn’t have to pick up and move, but it’s well-known to be an overloaded server anyway and after the initial Beehaw shock, the concept is really whatever to me as long as the fact that it’s blocked is widely known. Probably new users will always have that shock, but mostly what it accomplishes is to encourage people to spread out and keep alts if they have too much FOMO.

Sonic Spinball

Oh god, I’m so fucking sorry. Do you have like a donation page for your therapy bills or something.

It’s not a bad game, it’s just that it’s full of insta-death, has no pause or save features, and there is no Continue screen should you fail. If we stopped because we were being called to dinner, it meant having to play…the whole…game…again…all the way from the start. Proudly, we did eventually beat it, but mother of fuck

From an apparently uninformed discord user, deets? Granted, I’ve been annoyed at their insistence on monetizing via unasked-for “perks” I’ve absolutely never even thought to be interested in. But I’ve never felt like I was treated ill, and I assume there’s something I haven’t heard of

Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.

Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez’s clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.

Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.

Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company’s history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.

If it was reddit going down in flames, that’s always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you’re reading this.

And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don’t really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It’s only going to get worse, not because they don’t already have millions of users who didn’t leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.

The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.