✨🐲🏹🌌 penelope, spirit hunter
tied to his handlers only by the dance of insects on his dress, reflections of an angel-touched beetle swarm monitored by ecological listening posts in the mundane world, he wanders the spirit realm Hybrasil from contract to contract, hunting down beings of strange and sublime power until the next celestial convergence opens the doorway back again.
when i was a child i liked combat sports; i took martial arts classes (i forget which form) and i competed in fencing. i had to stop when i went to highschool because we didn't have time for it anymore. after leaving highschool i met a girl who did boxing and i planned to go and sign up at her gym to learn it with her, but i became too ill and it never happened. still, it had reignited my interest in combat sports and i would talk about it with people. i told one guy that i liked the look of Muay Thai; he expressed a common view, which was that martial arts like this sucked, because they were impractical in a real fight. he liked Krav Maga because it was real.
[long-ish post about fighting]
might stream my first playthrough of outer wilds tomorrow ladies.
damn you're all pretty excited for this one huh o_o
tentatively going to start at 7:30pm UK time, the place is twitch.tv/canmom. We will be playing Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital! (not to be confused with The Outer Worlds by Obsidian, a completely unrelated game that happened to release around the same time). I don't know how long this game is but this may become a regular stream on Thursdays (maybe also Tuesdays).
Indeed, I don't know what kind of game this is at all really! both @footsteps-on-the-dance-floor and @enarei were emphatic that I must play it... and that they could say absolutely nothing more than that. I think it's got something to do with space, maybe? Can't wait to find out what the fuss is about~
If you've played the game, please be really careful not to give me any hints, just let me figure things out for myself! I think it should be most entertaining for everyone that way. Cryptic laughter is fine. Pretend you are the Golden Witch, Beatrice, if you like.
one hour nerds!!
It's time! At last, I'm going to encounter a game sooo mysterious that not a word of it can be breathed! What is the extremely vague hype all about? Let's find out~
>> twitch.tv/canmom <<
Tonight, in about an hour (7:30pm UK time), we'll be picking up where we left off with canmom's blind playthrough of Outer Wilds!
I now know a little more about this game, so if you have played and want to know how far we've got, click through the readmore. Spoilers ahoy, please don't click this readmore if you think you might play this great game!
Live now! once again...
>> twitch.tv/canmom <<
for some reason the dashboard unfucker script doesn't seem to be running anymore, but tumblr do seem to have decided to bring back avatars on the dash at least. so that's a mercy...
hard disk usage is not galloping out of control so much as moore's law with respect to hard drive got all fuckered by the transition to SSDs. the red queen's race between game/software developers and hard drive manufacturers just saw the hard drive manufacturers take a knee for a year or so. that's really all it is
if moore's law somehow applied to hard disk drives through the last 10 years, $150 would buy you a 24tb hard drive whose RPM under load makes it mechanically indistinguishable from a frag grenade. thankfully (?) they're no longer the preferred medium for most use-cases for data storage, so you're dealing with moore's law as it applies to SSDs instead, and they started out smaller and will take some time to catch up
honestly, even if a hiatus relative to hard drives, ssds have gotten bigger at a startling rate. just a few years ago you could get a couple hundred GB absolute tops on an ssd, now we're talking multiple terabytes as standard, same as hdds. they've already pretty much caught up (the 6TB external drive where I keep all my anime is way chunkier than you can fit in a 3.5" slot so it's probably got multiple platters, but you can get SSDs of comparable capacity that fit in a M.2 slot) and seem pretty much on track to get bigger. so yeah you're right, it's a pause, not an end to the race...
on the other hand people do seem to be heralding the end of Moore's Law for transistor density/cpu speed. I know people say 'is Moore's Law' finally over' with some regularity of course, Mr. nVidia says it dead and Mr. Intel says it ain't, but it's probably not so far off that we reach effective physical limits on that side of things...
might stream my first playthrough of outer wilds tomorrow ladies.
damn you're all pretty excited for this one huh o_o
tentatively going to start at 7:30pm UK time, the place is twitch.tv/canmom. We will be playing Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital! (not to be confused with The Outer Worlds by Obsidian, a completely unrelated game that happened to release around the same time). I don't know how long this game is but this may become a regular stream on Thursdays (maybe also Tuesdays).
Indeed, I don't know what kind of game this is at all really! both @footsteps-on-the-dance-floor and @enarei were emphatic that I must play it... and that they could say absolutely nothing more than that. I think it's got something to do with space, maybe? Can't wait to find out what the fuss is about~
If you've played the game, please be really careful not to give me any hints, just let me figure things out for myself! I think it should be most entertaining for everyone that way. Cryptic laughter is fine. Pretend you are the Golden Witch, Beatrice, if you like.
one hour nerds!!
It's time! At last, I'm going to encounter a game sooo mysterious that not a word of it can be breathed! What is the extremely vague hype all about? Let's find out~
>> twitch.tv/canmom <<
Tonight, in about an hour (7:30pm UK time), we'll be picking up where we left off with canmom's blind playthrough of Outer Wilds!
I now know a little more about this game, so if you have played and want to know how far we've got, click through the readmore. Spoilers ahoy, please don't click this readmore if you think you might play this great game!
After several months of fierce fighting, with 256 initial combatants, we have made it to the FINALS
Now, it's time to determine Tumblr's Favorite Show!
Previous rounds can be found below the break:
First part of a comic I've been working on since March, for publication by Fremantle Press. It's meant to be an omake-style riff on Samsara characters but the scope spun a little out of control because I don't know how to half ass anything and that's why it ended up taking 6 months instead of 6 weeks -____-||
Please consider subbing to my Patreon to support my work! I'll be back to working on Samsara Dreamin' later in the year :)
in the end i think the biggest surprise of the night was that Cleopatra, even with all the wild shit that Tezuka did put in it, never has the trampoline Caesar scene from the trailer
So. Storytime.
Two years ago, we had a joke. "We should totally show some hentai on Animation Night 69." we said. Having said that, we were honour-bound to totally commit to the bit. Teaming up with @mogsk, I wrote a massive post on sexuality in animation and the history of 'hentai', from the hentai seiyoku discussed in 20th-century sexology journals to the modern subcultural kaleidoscope.
It is, genuinely, one of my favourite posts I ever wrote in this project. It's definitely not perfect - the sections on BL and the lolicon boom are especially weak, but still! There's no way I'm beating that.
Mogs, meanwhile assembled a perfectly pitched playlist of animation dealing with the theme of sexuality, from classic oldschool BL like Kaze to Ki no Uta to charming little comedies like Oruchuban Ebichu, and a scattering of actual h-anime like Weather Report Girl. For my part, I led with the genuinely classic film Kanashimi no Belladonna (Belladonna of Sadness).
So somehow - somehow! - we managed to make the idea of getting together with your online friends to watch a bunch of anime about sex just... plain fun and uplifting, to the point that @footsteps-on-the-dance-floor will tell me years later how much she enjoyed it. Not to mention, we got a pretty good cross-section of the different dimensions of sexuality in animation as well!
I didn't even get banned on Twitch.
This week, the counter has drawn the sex number. So can we do it again? Well, my friends, we're gonna try~ Tonight, @mogsk and canmom present: the long-awaited sequel to sex. Sex, 2.
This time we're narrowing our focus a bit. One of the distinctive elements of eromanga, by the analysis of Kimi Rito in The History of Hentai Manga, is how particular images get encoded as signs that can be reused by other mangaka, and these signs can become the seed for particular subgenres. So, our selection tonight is in part designed to give a brief cross-section of some of these visual tropes.
So let me introduce you to our program. CWs: sex, obviously; also a couple of these films (Cleopatra, Parade Parade) cw for rape. Here's the programme, read on for brief descriptions of each item and a lil cultural context~!
[n.b. a lot of these are TV series - we will only really be getting a 1-2 episode sample of each one, for runtime's sake.]
Last time we led with certified classic, genuinely moving and good as hell film Belladonna of Sadness. This was part of a last gambit by the struggling Mushi Productions, the studio of Osamu Tezuka, credited with inventing TV anime back in the day with Astro Boy. Long before there would be such a thing as an h-anime subculture, Tezuka experimented with creating erotic animated films based on history and mythology.
Belladonna is the best remembered of the three, and with good reason. Tezuka was largely not involved by this point. The others, though... are some plain fucking weird movies, I'll tell you that much. So tonight we'll be watching Cleopatra (1970). I may have shown you the trailer before - this is the Caesar trampoline movie. That is only the beginning.
Live now at https://twitch.tv/canmom ! Come say hi in chat, we'll start the movies on the hour~
7th PALADIN. Maugis was a powerful sorcerer and necromancer said to be able to stop the sun itself. He was known for providing most of the paladins with powerful weapons like durandal and flamberge whose origins were always mysterious. For he is also known to be a great thief!
So. Storytime.
Two years ago, we had a joke. "We should totally show some hentai on Animation Night 69." we said. Having said that, we were honour-bound to totally commit to the bit. Teaming up with @mogsk, I wrote a massive post on sexuality in animation and the history of 'hentai', from the hentai seiyoku discussed in 20th-century sexology journals to the modern subcultural kaleidoscope.
It is, genuinely, one of my favourite posts I ever wrote in this project. It's definitely not perfect - the sections on BL and the lolicon boom are especially weak, but still! There's no way I'm beating that.
Mogs, meanwhile assembled a perfectly pitched playlist of animation dealing with the theme of sexuality, from classic oldschool BL like Kaze to Ki no Uta to charming little comedies like Oruchuban Ebichu, and a scattering of actual h-anime like Weather Report Girl. For my part, I led with the genuinely classic film Kanashimi no Belladonna (Belladonna of Sadness).
So somehow - somehow! - we managed to make the idea of getting together with your online friends to watch a bunch of anime about sex just... plain fun and uplifting, to the point that @footsteps-on-the-dance-floor will tell me years later how much she enjoyed it. Not to mention, we got a pretty good cross-section of the different dimensions of sexuality in animation as well!
I didn't even get banned on Twitch.
This week, the counter has drawn the sex number. So can we do it again? Well, my friends, we're gonna try~ Tonight, @mogsk and canmom present: the long-awaited sequel to sex. Sex, 2.
This time we're narrowing our focus a bit. One of the distinctive elements of eromanga, by the analysis of Kimi Rito in The History of Hentai Manga, is how particular images get encoded as signs that can be reused by other mangaka, and these signs can become the seed for particular subgenres. So, our selection tonight is in part designed to give a brief cross-section of some of these visual tropes.
So let me introduce you to our program. CWs: sex, obviously; also a couple of these films (Cleopatra, Parade Parade) cw for rape. Here's the programme, read on for brief descriptions of each item and a lil cultural context~!
[n.b. a lot of these are TV series - we will only really be getting a 1-2 episode sample of each one, for runtime's sake.]
Last time we led with certified classic, genuinely moving and good as hell film Belladonna of Sadness. This was part of a last gambit by the struggling Mushi Productions, the studio of Osamu Tezuka, credited with inventing TV anime back in the day with Astro Boy. Long before there would be such a thing as an h-anime subculture, Tezuka experimented with creating erotic animated films based on history and mythology.
Belladonna is the best remembered of the three, and with good reason. Tezuka was largely not involved by this point. The others, though... are some plain fucking weird movies, I'll tell you that much. So tonight we'll be watching Cleopatra (1970). I may have shown you the trailer before - this is the Caesar trampoline movie. That is only the beginning.
tomorrow [Tuesday], 7pm UK time! we're doing this thing!
one
hour!
Mathematics people interested in either learning about the Peano axioms of natural numbers (how do you prove a+b = b+a) or interested in learning a proving assistant (Lean) should DEFINITELY check out the natural number game. This is a game which teaches you both of these things step by step, and has you construct the natural numbers and their most important properties from the very basic axioms. Even if you just like logical puzzles and are interested in a bit of mathematics you should check it out!
well i got locked in and stayed up stupidly late but
victory!!
So. Storytime.
Two years ago, we had a joke. "We should totally show some hentai on Animation Night 69." we said. Having said that, we were honour-bound to totally commit to the bit. Teaming up with @mogsk, I wrote a massive post on sexuality in animation and the history of 'hentai', from the hentai seiyoku discussed in 20th-century sexology journals to the modern subcultural kaleidoscope.
It is, genuinely, one of my favourite posts I ever wrote in this project. It's definitely not perfect - the sections on BL and the lolicon boom are especially weak, but still! There's no way I'm beating that.
Mogs, meanwhile assembled a perfectly pitched playlist of animation dealing with the theme of sexuality, from classic oldschool BL like Kaze to Ki no Uta to charming little comedies like Oruchuban Ebichu, and a scattering of actual h-anime like Weather Report Girl. For my part, I led with the genuinely classic film Kanashimi no Belladonna (Belladonna of Sadness).
So somehow - somehow! - we managed to make the idea of getting together with your online friends to watch a bunch of anime about sex just... plain fun and uplifting, to the point that @footsteps-on-the-dance-floor will tell me years later how much she enjoyed it. Not to mention, we got a pretty good cross-section of the different dimensions of sexuality in animation as well!
I didn't even get banned on Twitch.
This week, the counter has drawn the sex number. So can we do it again? Well, my friends, we're gonna try~ Tonight, @mogsk and canmom present: the long-awaited sequel to sex. Sex, 2.
This time we're narrowing our focus a bit. One of the distinctive elements of eromanga, by the analysis of Kimi Rito in The History of Hentai Manga, is how particular images get encoded as signs that can be reused by other mangaka, and these signs can become the seed for particular subgenres. So, our selection tonight is in part designed to give a brief cross-section of some of these visual tropes.
So let me introduce you to our program. CWs: sex, obviously; also a couple of these films (Cleopatra, Parade Parade) cw for rape. Here's the programme, read on for brief descriptions of each item and a lil cultural context~!
[n.b. a lot of these are TV series - we will only really be getting a 1-2 episode sample of each one, for runtime's sake.]
Last time we led with certified classic, genuinely moving and good as hell film Belladonna of Sadness. This was part of a last gambit by the struggling Mushi Productions, the studio of Osamu Tezuka, credited with inventing TV anime back in the day with Astro Boy. Long before there would be such a thing as an h-anime subculture, Tezuka experimented with creating erotic animated films based on history and mythology.
Belladonna is the best remembered of the three, and with good reason. Tezuka was largely not involved by this point. The others, though... are some plain fucking weird movies, I'll tell you that much. So tonight we'll be watching Cleopatra (1970). I may have shown you the trailer before - this is the Caesar trampoline movie. That is only the beginning.
tomorrow [Tuesday], 7pm UK time! we're doing this thing!
watched 5 of the current 6 episodes of Zom100 (I'm watching Zoombie's releases, which have Crunchyroll's translation with better typesetting).
tricky to know what I think...
visually there's nothing to fault - it's got energy and style all over and every episode brings a new crazy impressive sequence, with great choreography to music and inventive staging. that's why I'm watching it, and it consistently delivers! kVin has already written about the strength of the team behind it in great detail. the consistent bright colours of the zombie blood, the use of yellow, the seamless transition between real and abstract - all kick ass.
narratively... it's certainly direct with its themes, but not at all in a bad way, and it's a meaty subject matter for which the whole irreverent take on zombie movies is a fitting metaphor. it won't say it in so many words, but it's clearly about philosophy, finding the 'good life'.
As You Know, the zombies in Romero's movies stood for Consumerism(TM). if the modern world has a deadening, dissociative affect to it, we pull that further, and we get literal walking dead. alongside that is a huge element of wish fulfilment in zombie/post apoc stories: the idea of a reduction to a simpler world, where all the complications of society are stripped back. sure, everyone may die, it's tragic, but the protagonists are given a stage to come into their own as a badass hero type full of Machiavellian virtù.
zom100 doesn't bother with the smokescreen of tragedy, and indeed it uses the contrast between the feelings of of the protag who's getting to live his best life against the backdrop of collapse as a source of comedy. but then it's about poking and prodding at that wish fulfilment, trying to define it more sharply.
our protagonist wasted years at a hyper-exploitative 'black company' but now he's freed, he has to face existential aimlessness; his friend found material and social success but no personal fulfilment and had to conquer his fear to pursue his real dream; the blatant tsundere love-interest girl is too narrowly focused on survival to enjoy her life - each one seems set up to explore some facet of the human condition. the ED shows a fourth member of the MC group, who will presumably explore some other angle of 'how do you live'. if you know how much I like NieR Automata, you can probably imagine that's a theme that's up my street.
so what's the "but"? well it's just so much hetero guy pov lmao. I just... do not connect to the MC, and the show is very heavily structured around providing a stage for him to work out his shit.
for example, it's maybe a little too obvious in introducing characters to demonstrate the theme of the episode, then feeding them to zombies as soon as their purpose is served. the fate of the flight attendants in episode 4 especially bugged me: for our main two boys, the flight attendants are an opportunity to prove their masculinity and sexual prowess (the MC's ability to 'score' is questioned, while it comes effortlessly to his friend). so these girls show up and they hang out; one of the girls has sex with the friend and then promptly dies. the other refuses sex to our protagonist but she talks about her ambitions providing some insight to him and then gets chomped - don't you see, she was reminded of her childhood memories, she had one good day, ah, mono no aware! meanwhile the cynical and slightly arrogant leader of the flight attendant group is the most fun of them all, but she's just zombiebait. the protagonist grieves for all of one minute but then cheers himself up.
and of course you expect characters to die frequently in a zombie story; and the whole point of the show is that the MC's cheerful affect is completely inappropriate for a zombie apocalypse. but the effect of storylines like this is to that it's so manifestly a world of effectively invincible protagonists, where everyone else is basically an NPC. our protagonist will embarrass himself and suffer pratfalls for a joke, but ultimately this is a world that exists to serve him, and he acts like on some level he knows it!
all the same, I'm curious where it will go once it finishes establishing the main cast group.
on a more niche note, it's interesting observing that 'hypercompetent hacker girl in a big coat' is becoming fixated as a love interest pattern. the big coats are cool, so fair enough.
Mathematics people interested in either learning about the Peano axioms of natural numbers (how do you prove a+b = b+a) or interested in learning a proving assistant (Lean) should DEFINITELY check out the natural number game. This is a game which teaches you both of these things step by step, and has you construct the natural numbers and their most important properties from the very basic axioms. Even if you just like logical puzzles and are interested in a bit of mathematics you should check it out!
old art but i figure i should have it on here pending the day i draw more of the aliens in my setting.. her name is Yukash and she’s an ex-journalist turned alchemical pharmacology engineer. her species of tall, tentacle-limbed fluffy moth squids are called Minaya, and although the powers that be aren’t kind to them, they have grown to be some of the most widespread non-humans in the Liruma Mandate since first contact and colonization. her species are single-sexed (all have a pp) and are almost all girls. species ref:
in 5555 AD, the ecosystems of the human colonies have been totally transformed by cybernetics, fusing green and machine into new kinds of forest that communicate by wi-fi and chitter with artificial intelligence, wired to the grid. the mecha-forests are an invaluable boon to life in space, so governments commit millions of workers to their careful stewardship.
Ponderosa works for the forestry service along a section of the FTU's far-flung intercosmic highways; she is an experienced psychomedical technician, who dives into the cyberbrains of the forest to cure its dreams of infestation by dangerous memetic viruses.
here's the concept sketches i did to develop tazdev's space train / jumptender. i originally based this off of a sketch of what a Q-Drive ship would look like, but then i realized that these would be exclusively using much more speculative warp drive / Krasnikov tube FTL shit to get around for the most part, but the overall design still works i think. big magnets, long slender profile.
(why do the magnet loops look all fucked up and weird? is there a hard sci-fi™ reason for that? well yes sort of. i basically imagine that the magnets are a bit more complicated than a simple loop to help give better control of the field geometry. something like a stellarator i guess, which is what i was riffing off of visually. however i don't really have any "hard numbers" to back up the specifics of this, it's just an idea i feel like has some merit and more importantly i suppose, looks cool.)
if you have no idea what i'm talking about, a Q-Drive is one of a really fascinating family of speculative propulsion technologies called plasmadynamics, ranging from implementable basically tomorrow to stuff that will probably require multiple big breakthroughs. the basic idea of plasmadynamics is that if you have a magnet with a relatively small power source (on the order of a modern-tech fission nuclear reactor), you can use the magnet to attract plasma into a big cloud around your ship, making a much bigger magnet thousands of km wide (as big as a planet, basically) pushing against the ambient plasma in space (solar wind or interstellar medium). because this "plasma magnet / sail / wing" is so huge, it feels a HUGE amount of force from the ambient plasma despite it being so thin, giving you rocket-like acceleration (like, multiple gees are possible as i understand it) and letting you accelerate up to small percentages of the speed of light inside and out of the solar system for basically free. this could be done more or less with existing tech to my knowledge.
i'm still thinking about how to design this into my ships but i think i'm going to have this be the default in-system propulsion tech for Standard Candles vehicles.
Q-Drive lies a lot farther in the future, but basically the idea is that you can use plasmadynamics to make an extremely supercharged kind of rocket. if you have a really efficient particle accelerator, you can hook it up to a series of magnets to draw power from the aerodynamic drag on your plasma sails, meaning you get more power the faster you're moving (faster = more drag). it sounds kind of like troll physics but apparently there's no fundamental reason why this shouldn't work, but a particle accelerator efficient and powerful enough to make it happen is probably quite a ways off into the future. but basically, to sort of put it in videogame terms, unlike regular rockets that only ADD a certain amount of speed per unit fuel, Q-Drive MULTIPLIES your speed, which can give you a pretty crazy boost... especially when you can already sail to multiple percents of lightspeed for free.
as for the FTL stuff, that'll be for another post... keep an eye out perhaps lol
