_RaNdOm_DrAgOn_

[occudo]

I tried drawing random animals from memory in 2 minutes (based on a spilled ink video) but at the elephant I realised I'm really not good at it :'D So I ended up redrawing them with references just to see the difference, and ended up spending way too much time on it.

[occudo]

Part 2!

Went back and finished the video. There were more animals I never saw before (and one where I accidentally drawn a different one :"D ) but it's all done!

[geezmarty]

might get to play a divination wizard soon she's gonna permadie session one hit by a rock that does 1d4 damage

[geezmarty]

she now has a name and it's so important you know she's also going to have a slavic accent

[geezmarty]

down so bad you draw the whole party in the high school anime au (I'll color this when we have official palettes for everyone lol)

[doubleca5t]

Supermassive Black Hole lends itself to soundtracking one thing and one thing alone and that is a strip club. Supermassive Black Hole is the most perfect strip club rock song I've ever heard. I've heard rock songs *about* strip clubs that feel less suited to a strip club than Supermassive Black Hole. I have heard songs where sex is explicitly described in the lyrics that feel less sexy than Supermassive Black Hole. Supermassive Black Hole is a song so disgustingly, flagrantly, enticingly slutty that I sometimes feel legitimately shocked that it was made by a band that most people make fun of for sounding like if Radiohead sold out after their first album. It is a crowning achievement in stripper music that may never be topped in our lifetime. It is best known for soundtracking the scene in the first Twilight movie where they play baseball.

[sunderwight]

The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.

[adizzyninja]

A humble snubnose eelpout on its way to the whale fall buffet when some nearby humans give it a quick, unintrusive study:

[julianova44]

I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!

[mephistopheles]

"bottom" please consider 🫵 whether the word you are looking for is in fact "submissive" ! because if we decide that taking dick means your personality & character r inherently subservient 😃 we might as well just throw in the towel on the most basic premise of feminism & 🔫 kill ourselves 🎉

[cosmogyros]

[scribeherself]

There is no drug on earth that can replicate the absolute euphoria of hitting a writing flow state at 2:00 AM. You aren’t even typing anymore. You are a vessel. You are a channel for the gods. The characters are speaking directly into your brain and you’re just the stenographer trying to keep up. You feel like you could fight a bear. You feel like you invented the alphabet

[tsunflowers]

I’m reading this book about the changing arctic and the author stayed with the Nunamiut people of inland alaska for a while and talked to this high school kid who was like “ugh I hate going to school in the spring I wish I was hunting caribou” and I thought that was charming. you often hear about people who are devoted to preserving their traditional culture and knowledge but it’s rare to hear about someone who’s invested in the old ways out of pure teenage selfishness. school is lame and hunting caribou is awesome

[magicandwizards29anniversary]

"Black Magician"

(Battle City Colorscheme)

Part 2 of 3

This is the second part in a 3-part series. If you're reading this and you haven't seen the first part, I recommend you check out Part 1 here!

Now we get to what will, for many of you, be a more familiar colorscheme for this card. Among fans, this is the one that's most commonly called 'the manga's colorscheme' for "Black Magician".

This is one of the longest-lasting of all of the colorsets the Magician has had. It's also relatively younger than both of the other colorschemes you'll see on this card, and historically it's had the second most sub-variants of them all, as well.

I call this card the "Battle City Colorscheme" because it debuted in the original color title page for chapter 148, which was the third chapter in the overall Battle City arc. Seems straightforward, right?

Well, not really. You might recall that, in my post on Exodia, I mentioned that all of Dark Yugi's big cards, including "Black Magician", have a link to the Egyptian god Osiris; and that the link in question for this card was that "Black Magician" is "...sometimes shown to have green skin, just as Osiris is shown to have after his resurrection".

There's a reason I put 'sometimes' in that sentence. "Black Magician" is shown to have a light blue-ish skin color just as often as it has a green-ish skin tone. In fact, due to various circumstances it can be difficult to tell whether his skin is green-tinged or blue-tinged; the same image can look different depending on what publication it's sourced from!

I'll go over the historical record of "Black Magician"'s appearance in Battle City-era color pages, tankobon covers, and other promotional images of the era under the cut.

But first, a few words on "Black Magician" and developments regarding it in the Battle City arc.

Whereas the Duelist Kingdom arc showed the process of "Black Magician" becoming what we'd call Dark Yugi's ace card, in the Battle City arc that position is solidly established. Everyone in-universe, friend and enemy alike, now associates the card with Yugi immediately.

That means that the Kaibacorp database files given to card shop retailers (see chapter 151) has "Black Magician" shown in a prominent spot on Yugi Mutou's profile; that it's known that "Black Magician" is Yugi's rare card ante in Kaiba's specific tournament rules; and that the Rare Hunters attempt to take him down by using his own ace card against him.

Of course, that also means that Takahashi debuts an all-new set of "Magician" support cards in this arc for Yugi to use with him (though a few go to the Rare Hunter attempting to cop Yugi's style, Pandora). More excitingly, in this arc we see a new complimentary addition to Yugi's merry cast of monsters- "Black Magician Girl", "Black Magician"'s counterpart who is quickly established as an essential part of the in-universe "Magician" mythos.

With her, and their support cards in mind, Yugi's deck isn't as scattershot as it was in Duelist Kingdom. Though he still has a lot of general-purpose cards for strategic plays, the deck's focal point is unquestionably the two "Magician"s.

(Fun fact: "Black Magician Girl"'s costume colors are specifically meant to mirror this specific version of "Black Magician"! Takahashi was really playing it cute with this detail.)

The funniest thing about it all, though, is that despite what I wrote above, the "Black Magician" card actually has far less appearances in the Battle City arc than it has in Duelist Kingdom. It only shows up in three duels, and for comparatively less time in each to boot! The only reason "Black Magician" seems to have a lot of chapter appearances in Battle City is because duels in Battle City last longer than they do in Duelist Kingdom- especially the tournament finals, which each take up many more chapters than, say, the final Pegasus duel at the end of Duelist Kingdom.

But that makes sense. Takahashi spends a lot of time in the arc establishing "Black Magician Girl" instead. Which is very necessary; if he is to sell the connection between the two "Magician"s, and in turn their connection to Dark Yugi, Takahashi needs to spend a lot of that time on the newly-introduced "Black Magician Girl", or else the whole thing would fall flat. For what it's worth: given how beloved she is nowadays, I'd say that definitely paid off for him.

One last note: as I said in Part 1, the "Black Magician" card face originally never sported this particular colorscheme. This concept of applying the Battle City colorscheme to the card itself is an invention of the 2016 color bunkobon release (and only briefly at that). In the manga's original weekly run, we're pretty much left to believe that in Battle City, the card has one colorscheme and the hologram depictions of it have another, slightly different colorscheme.

Okay! Onto the examination. Let's check out just what "Black Magician"'s on-page appearances were like in the post-Duelist Kingdom era!

Let's start with the very first time this colorscheme appeared.

Image from the back cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist", volume 20. Originally appeared as the title color page for chapter 148, "The Card as Fierce as a God", in Weekly Shonen Jump, #47, released 18 October 1999.

Here we see "Black Magician" debut its new colorscheme. So far, so good. Note that its skin here is distinctly a light shade of blue. I've taken a detail photo from a different, high-quality source to verify this.

Detail from page 115 of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Official Card Game: Official Card Catalog: The Valuable Book 4", originally released in Japan on 25 January 2002.

This isn't manga art, but I'm putting it here as a reference for the next few images:

A card illustration for "Black Magician". First released in EX Starter Box on 16 December 1999. Image sourced from Yugipedia; click here to see original context.

Notice that, unlike the manga, the robes/armor are definitely purple; the skin is green-ish; and the staff is also green, as it is in Konami's original art. Only the red trim is retained from the manga.

Unfortunately, I don't have a personal scan of this full two-page spread, so I'll borrow Yugipedia's version first:

Color title page, as a two-page spread, for chapter 170, "Closer to God!!", originally seen in Weekly Shonen Jump, #19, released 10 April 2000. Image sourced from Yugipedia; click here to see original context.

Since I have this issue, here's a detail shot from my copy.

Excerpt from my copy of Weekly Shonen Jump, #19, released 10 April 2000.

You'll notice that the colors here are really weird. "Black Magician"'s robes/armor look very purple, though from color picking I can determine that they're just about this side of actually being blue.

More to the point: the skin color here looks extremely green, as in Konami's art! Doing some color picking, it looks more like the tone is a sort of aqua or light turquoise, with a few parts being closer to cyan.

Was this the intended color for this art? I'm not so sure. Unfortunately, I haven't found another high-quality source for this art in its original colors. The color art page immediately before this is seen again, though, so let's compare that.

Here's that art as it appears in Weekly Shonen Jump #19:

You'll notice the sky here is very green.

Now here's that same panel as it appears in "The Valuable Book 4":

The sky is much bluer now!

Based on this, I can only surmise that Takahashi's original source art was given a sort of yellow-ish/green-ish tinge while it was processed to appear in the magazine, and that this tinge was corrected when that image appeared in "The Valuable Book 4".

That's the only thing that makes sense to me, at least. Consider this art here, originally published on 20 April 2000:

Illustration from page 67 of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Official Card Game: Official Card Catalog: The Valuable Book 4", originally released in Japan on 25 January 2002. Originally, this was the cover illustration for "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Official Card Game: Official Card Catalog: The Valuable Book 2", originally released in Japan on 20 April 2000.

These colors match the original 18 October 1999 color page better, don't they?

This book also featured another illustration that depicted "Black Magician"'s new colorscheme:

Illustration from page 55 of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Official Card Game: Official Card Catalog: The Valuable Book 4", originally released in Japan on 25 January 2002. Originally, this was an illustration inside "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Official Card Game: Official Card Catalog: The Valuable Book 2", originally released in Japan on 20 April 2000.

A tougher case; lots of this is a little closer to green, but many parts of it pick as blue as well. Bizarre, since this and the previous image debuted in the same book! (On a side note, when I first say this image, I was pretty confused: the image seems to depict a scene from Duelist Kingdom, but "Black Magician" uses his Battle City colors, and "Dark Knight Gaia" uses his Konami colors, which were never seen in the manga proper! I'm still not 100% sure whether this is indicative of possible canon Duelist Kingdom-era monster colors, given its release date and provenance.)

Check out this, from about a week later:

Detail from the cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist", volume 11. Originally seen on the cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh!" volume 18, released in Japan on 28 April 2000. Image sourced from Yugipedia; click here to see original context.

The above is also more consistent with the 18 October 1999 color page. As is the next volume cover:

(Please try your hardest to look past the Dark Yugi taking up all of the foreground.) Detail from the cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist", volume 12. Originally seen on the cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh!" volume 19, released in Japan on 4 July 2000. Image sourced from Yugipedia; click here to see original context.

One more image from the very end of 2000 to check out here.

Image from the back cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist", volume 16. Originally seen as the color title page for chapter 200, "The Courage to See", released in Weekly Shonen Jump, #1, on 4 December 2000.

So by all accounts, the April 2000 color page is a fluke. The in-manga "Black Magician" has bluish-colored skin in most appearances. At best, you might say that, from an art materials perspective, Takahashi sometimes shades it with green.

But to this day, in Konami's game a good portion of illustrations new and old depict it with distinctly green-ish tinged skin.

Ultimately, it seems that Takahashi was fine with the greener tone. He must have signed off on all of the various Konami illustrations featuring it, after all. But as far as his own depictions go, "Black Magician" has a bluish tone. And this seemed to be true for him up until possibly 2008. (But I'll get into that in the next post.)

Just to be thorough, let's also check out what Mahad, the original ancient Egyptian High Priest/spirit predecessor of the "Black Magician" card, looks like on the cover of the volume 35 tankobon:

Detail from the cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium World", volume 4. Originally seen on the cover of "Yu-Gi-Oh!" volume 35, released in Japan on 4 September 2003. Image sourced from Yugipedia; click here to see original context.

Now this one's pretty ambiguous when you take both covers into account. But as far as I can tell, they're both slightly different shades of blue.

So it's settled. In the manga, the Battle City-era "Black Magician" colorscheme had bluish skin, just like you see on my card at the top of this post, and just like you see in the 2016 color bunkobon release during the Death-T arc.

But that's not all, folks! There are other colorschemes to cover here. Come back tomorrow as I document the possible origins of the "Black Magician" card's last major colorscheme, and account for a few other odds and ends as well. It's gonna be one wild journey, going into the Toei/Bandai/Konami illustration situation, Takahashi's later depictions of Dark Yugi's iconic monster, and possibly more! Don't miss it!

[kawaishizuka]

@silverwindsblog said: Can you do gifs of Yami’s scary face from Yu-Gi-Oh! (1998 Toei Series)? It would be nice for having gifs related to Halloween. :D

[inksquiggles-blog]

I love the flame effect in his eyes in this first episode. It makes him look so out of his mind.

[princess-of-prussia]

In the Iron Lung movie, Ava says that Simon killed 60-something people, and that doesn't include the Eden people who died. In the Iron Lung game, they say that after the Quiet Rapture, there are fewer than 1,000 people left. That means that using the most generous estimates possible, Simon killed at minimum 6% of the human race. Percentage-wise, Simon is the most impactful murderer in human history.

[sals-sonic]

I love you ao3, I love you dead dove, I love you dark and fucked up ships, I love you weird and unusual kinks, I love you porn without plot, I love you unapologetic violent fiction, I love you horror, I love you splatterpunk, I love you unreliable narrators, I love you morally gray characters, I love you characters with no morals whatsoever, I love you authors that write whatever you want, I love you authors who don't stop others from writing whatever they want, I love you readers with critical thinking skills, I love you media literacy

[kaijuyuri]

i like how all cats regardless of species can either look rlly badass and cool or just incredibly silly stupid

[kaijuyuri]

my proof

[apricops]

'disembowel' is such a good word. y'know your bowels? they are GONE

[kaiokentimesten]

I love seeing certain takes about certain characters and going "congrats. You've fallen for the front they put up"

[laserwalnut]

Tie Nut & Bumbling Idiot 2

[lithominium]

Put your harpy girl in a harness, then attach a big rope to the harness, then take her to the park and fly her like a kite

[grimoiremanifest]

☝️Probrlem

[lithominium]

Whats the problem

[grimoiremanifest]

how;get down

[randomalistic]

I think making character playlists is good for you and connected to analysis skills in a very fun way and low investment way. I know its seen as quite trivial but to me it operates the same way looking at a lot of art builds ur skills passively. Yummy enrichment activity