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I spent a couple days monkeying around with an AI tool suite for Krita and while it was interesting and I’ll probably keep playing with it to see if there’s a use-case for it in my workflow, I found that when I went back to color this picture (and realized I could solve so many of my headaches with the selection tool) that I was really enjoying myself. I draw because I love it, and even if there are parts of it that I just have to get through so I can do the parts that make my heart sing, I come out of that time spent feeling richer for it. I didn’t get that as much from incorporating generative tools. There are a lot of other criticisms and observations I could make, but I’ll leave it here for now.

I put some hours into Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 the other day. It was good.

I kinda like the mostly mindless killing a bajillion enemies and picking up powerups. You can definitely do some character building, but it’s not very in-depth or anything. There’s a meta-progression that’s whatever so far, but I did feel pretty dope when I got a fat haul of resources after a really good run and felt like my next one would start substantially more powerful. I think I unlocked a shortcut too? Hopefully, because one thing I’m not very positive on with this game is that the environments are quite large and there’s a lot of running. I’m also not sure if there’s any way to “extract” and take all your loot back with you. I hit a point where I was like, “I definitely want to just end the run and get out,” and it didn’t seem like there was any choice but to keep pressing forward, even though I was very several levels deep into the run.

Overall a pretty comfy game to dissociate to while you listen to the news. Also plays pretty well with controller, although some classes might work better than others.

Otherwise I haven’t been playing a lot of vidya outside of my Dominions turns. (Still a handful of spots in Lucid’s tournament! If you search lucid tactics discord you should find it.)

I have been enjoying playing Lancer with my tabletop group the last few weeks. After a long time of playing pretty narrative-heavy campaigns, it’s been very satisfying to get into some real serious tactical combats where we’re planning out across multiple turns to eke out a victory.

It makes me feel profoundly lonely to think about. It’s like having a tea party with your stuffed animals only you’re watching from the other room as a shadow does it for you.

It’s crazy how actually spending time drawing every day makes you better at it.

My line weight is still inconsistent, but I did a bit better with the hierarchy of weight here. The anatomy is exaggerated, but fairly consistent. I’m sloppy and should spend more time cleaning up. I need to take time to do hand practice, they’re one of the most expressive parts of the body and I could do much more interesting poses by taking advantage of that. I am pleased with how the bearskin looks almost animated, perhaps it is; but I should continue to push my poses (and values).

Most of my tablet and Krita operation is pretty comfortable at this point, but it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to do cleaning. Until we get specialized generative tools to do that kind of work I guess it’s making better lines, spend a long time, or let it be messy.

You’re allowed to shape your body how you like, even to conform to a system of aesthetics. Fitness is also a creative pursuit.

It’s been referred to committee, who knows it if it will make it back out. I’d say that I don’t expect it to come to a vote, but I’m not making any predictions at this point. I mean the Republican party has been trying to get rid of public school for some time.

No Pasaran?

They might call it a c(a)ester, which I think is a parallel etymology with castle both from the Latin castrum.

Castle comes from French too.

I’ve been playing a little bit of Majesty Gold HD. For being from fucking 25 years ago, honestly that game still holds up really well. It has a lot of personality for a goofy little rts/management game, what’s compelling about it though is that there are a lot of missions with different constraints and objectives and they can be pretty challenging - especially if you try to get a better time.

You have a surprisingly robust set of tools to try and get your little guys to do what you want, and the pace of the game keeps the player actively putting out fires while executing their strategy. I like that, now that I’m playing it as an adult, I can identify different builds for choosing between mutually-exclusive guilds or figuring out what build-order will work based on how aggressive the map is. There is a surprising depth to the game.

It also has some really great unit barks and sounds in general, very silly, but easily differentiated and memorable, which is great because they’re an important part of staying on top of things. e.g. Hearing a tax collector cry out as his coins spill is a clear and immediate indication that you have a hole in your security, or hearing a series of heroes yelling about how they’re running away lets you know that a significant threat has been encountered.

It’s disappointing there haven’t been many good successors to this game. The sequel is pretty widely panned with good reason. I’m aware of The Leviathan’s Fantasy, (which apparently has recently fully released? I don’t know what a release means anymore,) but at least when I was looking at it it was only partially translated and had some significant jank. I’ll probably give it a try now though. There’s also a demo out now of Crown of Greed, which looks to be a fairly faithful remake of Majesty. There’s only one demo mission now, but it felt pretty much like classic Majesty with a couple more advanced features (like flags that you can set a minimum number of heroes to rally to before they try a bounty) - not quite as much personality to it and with middling voice work though.

I think this is a pretty sick style of game and would probably work well for a lot of colony sim fans or people who like RTS campaigns. Honestly maybe the future of RTS games is less e-sport and more management hybrid. One can dream.

Still playing Dominions, but two of my games are hopefully going to wrap up soon, one I decided I’m just vibing in, and the other is still really fun. A really big tournament is coming up on Lucid’s server (369 entrants at time of writing) and I’m stoked because the first round might be really small games and have a lot of noobs to roll. Also very likely to just get rolled, but I feel pretty good about a couple of my builds at this point and I can tune at least one to be rush-focused pretty easy.

Oh yes. His work was an inspiration for the consideration actually.

His head is too big and the foreshortened hand should be larger. He has a certain Santa vibe.

I would really like to be able to use machine learning tools for content-aware fills or easily masking out a figure that has transparency. I have yet to figure out how to do that easily in Krita. Sounds like it’s not worth risking the adobe fishhook to see what they’ve got though.

I feel we are entirely too concerned with this sort of thing. Just speak plainly and directly.

Super clutch site. Also didn’t realize it was that easy to put feeds into antennapod. I’d been manually downloading on my phone.

Sad that Seeking Derangements got lost again. If anyone knows another plug for that please share.

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I think we’re pretty close to that honestly.

I had a pretty neat realization that I could magic wand select the lower part of the main figure’s body and apply a gradient just to that part, which allowed for maintaining a highlight on his sleeve. In general I would like to get more slick with that kind of thing; it can really allow for cool effects. I feel like the textural elements in this piece are pretty phoned in, because they were - I didn’t spend more than like 90 minutes on this. But I mostly just wanted to try it out and I’m pretty happy with how things went. I tried to make sure that for the most part adjacent color fields were different brightness values and I think that was largely successful. Really what this piece needs to be elevated is patience and going over the edges of things until they’re all nice and clean, plus a re-do of textural lines. I’m quite pleased with the rim-lighting on the primary figure, but quite dissatisfied with it on the secondary figures. I was intending for a sort of wood-cut evocation with the textural elements, but my application of and choice of brush didn’t quite bear that out.