box of beanies

any pronouns! this blog is a safe place :D i like it here. you all are so nice and creative!

[uselessbeanies]

How to take care of baby with Last Legacy characters: dumb meme edit! :D

I completely understand if y'all hate these... I do too.

--cheers--

[uselessbeanies]

more unwanted meme edits...

[sweet-milky-tea705]

Mural finished ! Zoom for details

[rpgchoices]

Remembering The Arcana

I suddenly remembered how much I enjoyed The Arcana (that phone app), so I reinstalled it and found out it was sold to another company.

It is so disappointing. I remember it was created by a small company called Nix Hydra. They also have/had an itch io account, and they started a very successful kickstarter campaign to create a visual novel dating sim videogame.

(link)

The game was successfully funded, and some of the rewards for the pledges were:

An artbook

A PC VERSION OF THE ACTUAL GAME

For a while the company was ignoring the pledgers regarding the artbook:

They later replied that they were working on sending the artbook, so I think that was finally shipped but not everyone seemingly received it.

And of course, the pc version...

The pledgers got a discount code for certain routes only.

The game was supposed to be a steam/gog/pc game, a full on visual novel. But unfortunately greed won:

You can see here a bit more about how much more they ended up earning with predatory mobile app practices.

Basically, they knew they had a hit, and locked all the romance content behind pay for play. When you play the game on mobile (mind you: this is a romance game, a dating sim), you will be able to play a non romance scene for free, and a romance scene only by using a coins/keys that you can win (with high difficulty) or purchase with real money.

Nix Hydra was mainly owned by:

Nikolai Ladizinsky, Dana Rune... the rest of the employees at Nix Hydra seem pretty hard to find.

It looks like a lot of people (EDIT: three of the people) went to work at Red Spring Studio just to open a new kickstarter for a new videogame.

The kickstarter is from 2023, with an "estimated delivery" set to 2023 (EDIT: apparently the release date for the game is 2025, but none of the backers saw chapter 1 till now... 2026...). The owner and workers at the company all use first names (EDIT: shortened names/names that are hard to search, but this is not important because I missed that the people who worked for mix hydra had written in the bio, so it's only three people, none of them used to be in decisional roles for nix hydra if I understand correctly) so it is hard to know who they are, but they do credit "The Arcana" among their successes, in their website.

Funnily enough one of the rewards is an artbook and the comments are...uhm... very familiar.

Luckily, this time there is a steam entry for the game but the game is still "to be announced" three years later, which is not promising. And after three years what is currently available is still Chapter 1, which can only be played on Patreon. Updates of the game are also locked behind paywall (for patreon and backers).

EDIT: The Co-director of the game is also from Nix Hydra but not The Arcana. They are the first person listed in credits and worked for the Nix Hydra mobile game Last Legacy. Two of the writers also worked for Nix Hydra (Last Legacy and The Arcana).

And what happened to The Arcana, in the meantime?

In 2022, as soon as it stopped making money (I suppose) it was sold to some predatory mobile app called Dorian, which follows the same rules of having a dating sim/romance story where the romance scenes can only be unlocked through payment of difficult to earn coins. Dorian allows fans to create their games, using AI art etc.

So yeah, pretty sad story and a very disappointing ending. Especially because The Arcana had a solid plot and quite interesting diverging romance interests. It could have gone down as one of the most popular dating sim (with queer romance) of the past years, and instead it will probably one day disappear into a blip as soon as this mess of a company called Dorian sink into the sea.

[t0ast-ghost]

Can’t explain it but they’re really cunty in this photo

[vulcussy]

Art grad student answer: it's the contrapposto.

This is a counterbalanced pose where the weight is rested on one leg and the hips and shoulders are tilted in opposite directions. It emphasizes the curves of the body.

[lord-valery-mimes]

Cuntrapposto.

[katelyn-danger]

Cuntrapusso

[homunculus-argument]

Every time I suck ass at doing crafts, I tell myself: do not think about David Shrigley's piano dog. And every time, my brain tells me, whatever you say, dog.

[nora-yoko]

[jtmportland]

…  and I’ve grown tired of travelling alone

[maaarine]

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

[xcziel]

very good tags from @downwarddnaspiral

[van-del]

literally saw this tweet this morning

[paleo-violet]

I saw a dude say with his whole chest that biology isn't really STEM

Take a wild fucking guess as to which major has the most female students

[sixth-light]

Scientific disciplines with more women have lower funding success rates and researcher quality scores , are considered ‘soft sciences’, and see average pay drop as women enter. This is BECAUSE women do them, not a function of women mysteriously choosing lower-prestige, poorly-paid fields.

[justbreakonme]

You know what I fucking eat up every time? The thing where one character is an optimist and the other is a pessimist, and something happens that just, snuffs the hope right out of the optimist, and the pessimist has to desperately try to do what the other has always done for them, cheer them up. I live for that shit omg.

[berlinphil]

Reisen bildet Teil 1- für eine Geographiestunde im Flug bitte die Bildunterschriften beachten.

Travel broadens the mind Part 1 - look at the captions for a free geography lesson.

Photos: Markus Weidmann

[internetdruid]

Corn in all its colors! (X)

[butterclaw]

Bokty Mountain, Kazakhstan

[catsbeaversandducks]

"no"

By yuki_illust19

[marinella-ela]

[leafstem]

lets lay down with baby

lets lay down with mama

lets lay down with mama

lets lay down with mama

[dalals]

Byzantine mosaics found on the ceiling of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy.

[vee-thebee]

more rows today! even more fins have emerged >:)

up next on the chart is the tail! plus a really nifty design that goes between the fish and then it’s onto the body and sleeves!

fucking FISH

[uselessbeanies]

Hilfe please. Mein(e?) deutsche Grammatik ist immer und obviously correct nicht!!! If you aren't a native speaker and somehow mastered German grammar, please let me know how you did it.