Early route bird line of the Alker region! Based on peacock sexual dimorphism and royalty. They have a pompous and haughty personality.
Name: Pavolet (pavo, genus name for peacock)
Type: flying
Species: chick pokemon
Ability: Inner focus
Hidden ability: Immunity
Stats:
HP- 40
Attack- 30
Defense- 30
Special Attack- 50
Special Defense- 40
Speed- 60
Base total- 250
Evolves into Pompreen at level 17
Name: Pompreen (pompous + preen)
Type: flying
Species: royal bird pokemon
Ability: Inner focus
Hidden ability: immunity
Stats:
HP- 70
Attack- 45
Defense- 30
Special Attack-75
Special Defense- 60
Speed- 80
Base total- 360
Evolves into Peacrown at level 34
Name: Peacrown (peacock + crown)
Type: flying/fairy
Species: regal peacock pokemon
Ability: Dazzling/Subdue-Opponent's defense and special defense are lowered when this pokemon is sent out
Hidden ability: Immunity
Stats:
HP- 70
Attack- 60
Defense- 55
Special Attack- 100
Special Defense- 85
Speed- 110
Base total- 480
Here are the old designs! Quite pleased with how the silhouettes were refined. I wish I would have been able to keep the male Peacrown’s tail feathers splayed, but I remember not quite being able to figure out a look that I liked. It was also kind of hard to make them look different from the Pidove line from generation 5 but I think the deep blues and teals do a good job. Pompreen’s facial plumage also evokes a masquerade mask, as if it were attending a costume party.
I'm at my friend Patrik's place in Vingåker (I usually go there every summer and stay for a week). The second day I woke up at six in the morning with migraine and threw up twice, but now I'm feeling fine again. It's nice to just relax and go for walks in the woods around here.
6 for TFATWS and 8 for Thunderbolts! Definitely also turning around and bothering the person behind me a lot both times... and a little sad to be missing out on Sharon...
It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.
Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.
I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!
I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.
Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)
And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:
Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...
It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.
It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.
And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.
Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:
Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.
Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.
Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:
Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.
Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!
We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.
__
(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)
I was replaying Soul Reaver Remastered again and man I love how well Melchiah's design and ability compliments each other so well.
Soul Reaver 1 and 2 spoilers ahead if you care.
You see a glimpse of Melchiah in the opening cutscene, and again later on his visage carved into stone of what he looks like. You can see the scars of his skin being patched and stitched together to maintain his form. It's clear how much he's barely keeping it all together in his 3d renders
The state you see him in at this point is further contrasted in Soul Reaver 2 between being a human vs a vampire.
He was similar in build to his Sarafan Brethren. This is probably a byproduct of reusing base models and animations to economize the game scope and pipeline, but regardless we also see how he looks in his mural. Compared to his vampire form, his neck and body shows signs of bloating from the internal decomposition as well.
Raziel's voice over further reinforces this:
"My brother, Melchiah, was made last, and therefore received the poorest portion of Kain’s gift. Although immortal, his soul could not sustain the flesh, which retained much of its previous human frailty.
This weakness, it seemed, was passed on to his offspring. Their fragile skins barely contained the underlying decay."
Due to his soul barely being tethered to his body, it was never enough for him to have the same regeneration as his other brethren. This unfortunately lead to the devolved state we see him in, centuries after Raziel awoke from the abyss
Over time he grew to a hulking mass horror, developing bony spikes and spines, but that didnt prevent his body from further deterioration. Still having to compensate for his rotting flesh, he had to resort to grafting whole parts and bodies to maintain his larger physique. And yet it wasn't enough to outpace his deterioration. His lower body is lost leaving a spine like slug of a tail, bones and muscles exposed, his metal mask (what I like to think) replacing pieces of his skull broken off from vampire hunters trying to kill him. Heck, it looks like his brain is exposed underneath his mask.
You can also tell how he is unable to reinforce parts of his body that is difficult for him to reach. Striking him at the front leaves him laughing at your attempts, while attacking him from behind leaves him screaming in pain similar to being skewered by the gates. Small things like that suggests that maybe even his nervous system has become more and more exposed due to the difficulty in reaching those areas.
Because Melchiah was in a constant state of decay, walking a fine line of unlife and death, I like to interpret this as him inadvertantly breaching the spectral realm on a regular basis. This lead to him adapting to his environment and thus developing his ability to phase through gated barriers.
You can even see him doing this in game during his fight. If you shift or get knocked into the spectral realm, he follows you there and pursues you. When he gets close enough he becomes more corporeal (as much as you can be in the spectral realm) to take a swing at you, before phasing out again.
One more before he sends me back to the squid.
Out of curiousity, I wanted to double check and see if you can get a similar cutscene to Dumah's when entering Melchiah's chamber in the spectral realm, but alas there is none. Probably due to logistics in the mechanic of time slowing down to a standstill and they want to lock you in with Melchiah.
But that just further suggests that even though he can enter the spectral realm, doesnt mean he is actively aware of what happens in there. Similar to how Raziel interacts with the spectral and material realm.
Anyways thanks for making it to the end of my ramblings. I love how cohesive and well implemented the lore of the series is incorporated and enhanced by the gameplay, (regardless of how cheesy and shoehorned some game mechanics are scripted in)
I was thinking about how Stronginthearm is a common dwarf surname in Discworld, and then I thought "it's as common as 'Smith' in the real world" and then I realised...
Dwarves in Discworld are very literal. A smith would be strong in the arm. Stronginthearm is literally the dwarf equivalent to having the surname Smith.
I like to think there's an Ankh-Morpork show (perhaps a live stage show) that's a combination of Great British Bakeoff and Forged in Fire where they bake dwarf bread and then attack a ballistic dummy with it.
Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.
another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this
The apartment we were in was full of mold and cigarette smoke residue, and now we're in an actual house!!! I can finally have my libraryyyy and a clothes line and a bbq. Also I can now go outside my back door without having cigarette butts and water dropped on me from upper balconiesss
The cats are getting used to it but they seem to like the light and space!
My family and a friend helped out so so much, especially after I ate shit stepping on a roller I had myself placed on the floor. No permanent damage but damn i am sore today.
We have almost 2 more weeks with both places so we're gonna take our time cleaning and getting the stragglers out.
heyyyyy it’s october again which means it’s time for
✨Yeto’s Superb Soup✨
I had posted a recipe in the comments last year, but I decided to make a better version
Ingredients:
one 2lb kabocha (you can use an equal-sized pie pumpkin, but in my opinion kabocha has a much butterier texture and nuttier flavor. Also the yeti uses kabocha in the game so it gets points for accuracy)
1-3 carrots (last year the store had the fattest carrot I had ever seen. This year I needed 3 carrots to match that volume. Listen to your heart)
2-3 celery stalks (equal to the amount of carrot)
1/2 white onion
6 garlic cloves
(optional) 2 habanero peppers
mirin/cooking wine
1 box of fish stock (if you want it vegetarian, use kelp dashi stock)
1 box of vegetable stock
4oz goat cheese. I’ve tried making this with cream cheese and feta, but the flavor really doesn’t land right without the goat cheese.
1 cup? (<- it was eyeballed) heavy cream
.7lb filet of salmon
??tbsp olive oil
6 tbsp butter
a few pinches of flour
thyme, paprika, nutmeg, red pepper flakes salt & pepper
(optional) gronions to garnish
Step 1) Preheat oven to 400°F/204°C. Slice and deseed kabocha
Step 2) coat the pumpkin in a thin layer of olive oil. Season with thyme (I like dried thyme but fresh is better!), ground nutmeg, paprika, red pepper flakes, salt & pepper.
Bake for 30-50 minutes until it’s soft enough to scoop off the rind with a spoon. Thinner kabocha might only take 30 minutes, and thicker kabocha (like below) or a cake pumpkin may take 40+ minutes.
note: if your kabocha/pumpkin is especially thick, your soup may end up tasting sweeter. If you want it more umami, use less of your chosen gourd or maybe add a splash of soy sauce to the broth? Haven’t tried that but it’d probably work
Step 3) Prep all your other veggies while you’re waiting for the pumpkin to bake. Dice the onion and set it aside. Chop the celery & carrots into Chunks and mince the garlique
Step 4) Wait until the timer for the pumpkin has 20 minutes or less left. Heat up your pot/dutch oven on high/med-high heat, melt 2 tbsp of butter, and add the onions. After about 6 minutes, add the garlic. After another few minutes, sprinkle flour and stir, and keep frying until it browns.
Step 5) Add the rest of the butter, the rest of the veggies, and stir. Deglaze the pan with a splash of mirin/cooking wine.
If you timed it right, the pumpkin should be about done. Using a spoon, scoop the rind off the pumpkin. While you do that, periodically check on the veggies, adding another sprinkle of flour and a some of the fish stock as it gets dry. It’ll create a sort of paste and the onions will be pretty browned at this point.
Step 6) Chop the pumpkin & add it to the pot. Add the rest of the stock. If you’re using habanero, slice it and add it now. Add any other seasonings (it may need more salt) to taste. Once the soup boils, turn the heat to low and cover.
Personally, I prefer soups with Chunks in them + I think it’s more authentic to what the yeti made, but if you REALLY feel compelled to blend your soup, do it now.
Step 7) While the soup is heating up, get out a frying pan and add a tablespoon or two of some olive oil/butter on med-high heat. Add the salmon filet to the pan (scale side down) and just let it sit there. Don’t touch it. When it turns opaque halfway up, flip it until it’s fully cooked.
Once it’s cooked, remove it from the pan, remove the skin, and shred it into bite size pieces. If your salmon was really thick like mine was, and some parts of it are still pink, then toss the pink parts back in the pan to let them cook a little longer.
Add the salmon to the soup.
Step 8) Once the soup has been simmering for a few minutes and you’re too impatient to keep waiting, remove it from heat, add the goat cheese & heavy cream, garnish with gronions or whatever herb of choice, and enjoy!
In the game, this soup restores eight hearts, and it truly does feel that replenishing. This soup could cure any disease.
DIXIE CARTER, DELTA BURKE, and JEAN SMART as
JULIA SUGARBAKER, SUZANNE SUGARBAKER, and CHARLENE FRAZIER
DESIGNING WOMEN (1986–1993)
S01E22 · “Bachelor Suite”
I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!
Forget-me-nots @marilythscales - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
