“i’m Sad And Idk How To Feel Better”

*Waves in greeting from across the Internet*

(Don't know if you've gotten questions like this before but wanted to see what you'd think, considering how much you seem to like Shadow.)

Q: Concerning Shadow's title of Ultimate Life Form, do you think that it is something empowering he should wear with pride, or a curse/burden to be freed of which, among other things, shackles him to horrific and unrealistic expectations?

I feel like this question is kinda like a litmus test for why a person may like Shadow.

Personally, I think there's nuance to be found here. To me, Shadow feels both those ways about being "The Ultimate Lifeform," but how he feels about it bounces between one or the other depending on his mood. He is The Ultimate Lifeform, a being of great power that demands respect when he's trying to intimidate someone or achieving his goals -- Goals only he is capable of achieving, with what he is and all that. Obviously. He's the Ultimate Lifeform, so of course he should be the one to step in and solve the problem. He was designed to be an unstoppable force...

... So when he fails, he has to mentally come to grips with that failure in a way that, I feel, is more difficult for him than, say, if Sonic fails. Sonic is natural. His failures are natural. Shadow is unnatural. His failures. Are. Unnatural. They are not meant to happen. It's arrogance until it's not. His status is just as much a rope he holds to climb a mountain as it is a noose around his neck. A source of confidence, and Gerald Robotnik's judgemental gaze.

He's proud. He's an achiever. He's a pillar of strength. Until he slips.

So, how he (may) feel is how I feel. Depending on his mood, Shadow's Ultimate Lifeform title is both a boon to him and a great and terrible weight. He draws strength and self-loathing from it in equal amounts. That's simply how I interpret it, anyway.

full disclosure I orig wanted to make part 2 of the wolf hall brat edit (feat Thomas More as Lorde) but I scrapped it cos i didn't really have enough footage BUT the overwhelmingly lovely response from you guys to part 1 has enabled me I fear. Watch this space

ibrahim is very nearly at €40,000/€50,000 raised!

unfortunately my dear friend has gotten the news that his father has bladder cancer :(. this is unimaginably tragic on its own, but that tragedy is compounded by the fact that treatment is impossible to seek in gaza, and management is prohibitively expensive. on top of that, conditions only worsen — weather is bad, people are starving, everyone is sick and wounded, and israeli aggression does not stop or slow.

ibrahim needs our help now more than ever to raise funds to eat, to stay warm, to evacuate, and now to help his father pay for treatment when they reach safety. this is EXTREMELY URGENT — it CANNOT WAIT!!! please treat this as a personal plea for the life of my family members — ibrahim is like a little brother to me, and i cannot describe how heartbroken i am for him day after day and how terribly i want him to survive.

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Ibrahim's escape the Gaza war, organized by Safaa Alanqar

Hello I am Ibrahim, 15 years old, I seek your help and assistance to save my lif… Safaa Alanqar needs your support for Help Ibrahim's e

A friend got me thinking of 300 yrs later, Bad Future Shadow.

I think it’s incredibly fucked how capitalism discourages learning for learning’s sake. People will have interests they’ve spent years researching then say it’s “useless knowledge” bc it didn’t go towards a college degree and isn’t part of their job. Learning is never useless! Your brain is growing and developing throughout your whole life! People would never have epiphanies or sudden lightening strikes of creativity if they weren’t learning new things! That goes double for topics like science, politics, and history, which inform your understanding of the world you live in!

Hey, when I was a kid a twenty-something with the cartoon-rotted mind of a rat-brained child, I used to read lots of screenshot-style Let's Plays. (for anyone unfamiliar with the format, it's like a video let's play with commentary, only instead of a video it's a bunch of images from the game and the commentary is in the form of text. Essentially it's like a very long, comprehensive, full-spoilers written review.) I had a grand time corrupting my mind with Darkseed and Harvester without having to actually play them.

Long have I considered making a screenshot let's play of my own, but did not encounter a game that was quite compelling enough. ahem. until now. thinking of doing a screenshot let's play of gollum game, because there's stuff in the game I'd love to scream into the void about but I wouldn't want to do a video commentary - one reason being because I am running the game on the minimum visual settings and it would look as bad as it can possibly look, another being that it's such an intensely dialog-heavy game that I would either be talking over things that you really should be hearing, or pausing the footage in order to talk & blowing up the video length to like 30 hours & creating an editing nightmare for myself.

if I did this it would be posted as pages on my blog like the fanfic image gallery- I would not be posting spoilery commentary on your dash, I would be posting links to where you can read the full installment, probably accompanied by spoiler-free doodles. (I know the game's been out for nearly three weeks and people who would really care about spoilers have had time to watch playthroughs, but I still don't want to post spoilers because what if people just haven't gotten around to watching it yet or something. it's not a massive game but it's also not something so short you can just catch up on it right away on a whim on your lunch break)

a screenshot let's play would be just enough of a time investment that i was sort of hoping someone would indicate a little bit of interest before I actually do anything. not a ton of interest- honestly one (1) like on this post would probably be enough to convince me. if you do not want me to do a screenshot lets play please do not interact with this post, ty

edit: I am hearing some interest so this is now an announcement post! It will be a while before I post anything though, I am going through a second playthrough first to explore dialog options, look for little things I missed & decide on: 1) which dialog choices I will want to make in my official playthrough 2) whether there's enough story divergence to be worth tentatively planning an abbreviated second run playthrough, or if I can cover the game adequately by just giving a brief aside/summary of what happens when you choose the other options if you know the answer to this pls dont tell me! i'm still enjoying exploring the game for myself

So I will probably not start posting my let's play for a few weeks, unless I get really sick of doing productive things & binge this whole game this weekend, which isn't an impossibility.

Knights are growing on me, I think its the pageantry of it all

sparkFLAME Announced by Scrapnik Island Writer Daniel Barnes

excited to announce an all-new project from the IDW Sonic Comics Crew: sparkFLAME -- a black & white, Shonen Jump-flavored, comic book anthology featuring 11 all-new, original, 5-page stories created by the writers and artists of IDW Sonic! this project was started as a way of forcing all of us to develop and work on all of our original, non-Sonic concepts and ideas. all of us, on the book, love Sonic. but, we wanted to take this chance to really flex or comic booking muscles beyond just the blue hedgehog! more details to come, in the very near future! get hyped!

Currently known stories include:

Endless Fantasia: written by Daniel Barnes, art by Mike Luckas, screen tone by Reggie Graham

Drogune: written by Ian Flynn, art by Adam Bryce Thomas

The Nine Lives of Klaws McGee: written by Ian Flynn, art by Jonathan Griffiths (@greliz)

Ensouled: from Evan Stanley (@spiritsonic)

Virtuablu: from Aaron Hammerstrom (@aaronhamm)

Evalla: from Reggie Graham (@ziggyfin)

as well as stories from Miles Arq, Gigi Dutreix, Rik Mack (@rikdraws), Natalie Haines (@lightningstar1389), and Mauro Fonseca (@maurofonseca).

Logo Design by Tracker_TD

sparkFLAME is an independent project with no involvement from IDW

The POV is that you dream about that guy you killed twenty years ago. I had this twisted idea that Stephen has nightmares about the people he had a hand in killing, and a headless Thomas Cromwell always pops up in his nightmares - or sometimes just his head.

colored versions of this wip under the cut

FAREWELL