Mike Driver
cherry valley forever
AnasAbdin
Today's Document
Cosimo Galluzzi
todays bird
PR's Tumblrdome
Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
styofa doing anything
sheepfilms
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
★
No title available
RMH
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Discoholic 🪩
dirt enthusiast
shark vs the universe
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Portugal
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
@vynettec
Where to Support Me
Hi! My name is Vynette, I'm a trans artist that focuses on character design, although I'm learning a lot of other skills in my game dev journey. If you like my work and would like to support me, you can do so in the following places!~
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vynettec
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/vynettec
I also take character art commissions, the details for which can be found at the top of my blog site. Thank you very much, and have a wonderful day!
i kno most people say rosalinas height is 7,3 but im addin 5 mor inches to dat!!!
Melty Blood: Type Lumina - Stars Go Around… (Magician’s Night EX)
Troublemakers 🐈🐼
this too shall pass but the fuck was that for
Reblog to give yourself bigger tits.
I want to speak out against the whole push towards DEI. I feel that ever since you made the push to make identity the forefront of a character it has hurt the stories you tell. Captain Sisay's race was never the focus of her character and she was a complete badass! And I fear if you did it over again Gerrard would be trans, black and disabled just because. It also cheapens the stories of world devastation when characters worry more about their gender than Bolas destroying everything.
The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.
Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.
I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.
You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.
Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.
You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.
And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.
And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.
Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.
That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.
Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.
But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.
If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.
When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.
Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?
How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?
Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.
There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.
I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?
Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.
Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.
And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.
To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?
Thanks for reading.
listen the fact is that a lot of poor people ARE bad with money. i have terrible impulse control around spending 5 dollars here and 10 dollars there and i know so many people around me who have this problem too. but its not "this persons bad with money, so theyre poor"; its "this persons poor, so theyre bad with money". i dont know when i'll be able to get a little treat or eat out or buy myself something that will make me happy again so i have to do it now. idon't know when i'll afford food again so i have to buy it now. i don't feel confident in the fact i'll ever have the cushioning to genuinely enjoy expendable income, so instead of saving and hoping (only to have my savings routinely wiped out for moving, or medical costs, or a car accident), i spend it now so i can enjoy life now.
i think if you see poor people ebegging constantly but two days ago saw them posting about a fancy coffee and a pastry, you need to stop viewing "spending a few dollars you maybe shouldnt" as something that requires the Punishment of "can't pay the fucking bills". some of us, just like, need to feel like we have some kind of normalcy in our lives because being poor fucking sucks
Adobe is going to spy on your projects. This is insane.
For general graphics: use GIMP For vector graphics: use Inkscape For drawing and illustration: use Krita For print and web publishing and design: use Penpot For PDF authoring: use LibreOffice For PDF reading and form filling: use Okular
All are free, open source and cross-platform. None use AI.
Princess Luana - Reference Sheet
Empress City - Train Station
Cloud receiving her daily kisses commission for @indeedjaffa
commission info
so over the past couple months ive been solidly finding more and more evidence that kirito is in fact a trans girl, but yesterday i learned i was limiting myself in my search for evidence
because so far ive been looking at the light novels, the anime, and the mainline pc games
but not *the fucking mobile games*
which um... *what the fuck?!*
stuff like this:
Magical Girl Kiriko debut in SAOUB! You can see the video of Kiriko's Incarnation here: https://twitter.com/SAO_Yeri/status/151931597229301
or the fact these are all just official art for a real game from 2016
like *what*
^pet the girlthing
like im sorry there's a limit to how blatant you can go before it's just canon
🌿 Help Us Find Peace Amid the Chaos 🌿
Hello, friends.
My name is Mohammed, and I'm reaching out from a place of unimaginable hardship. My family, like so many others in Gaza, is struggling to survive each day. The conflict has taken a heavy toll on our lives, leaving us to face a grim reality, our home has been destroyed, and we are left with nowhere safe to go. 😔
I am the father of three beautiful children, and as a parent, nothing is more painful than watching your kids grow up, surrounded by fear and destruction. Mirn, Bark, and Mariar are the light of my life, but they've never known the joy of running through a park without fear, or playing freely like children should. ❤️
We've reached a point where staying here is no longer an option. The walls that once sheltered us now stand in ruins, and hope for a safe future is fading fast. We dream of rebuilding, not just our home, but our lives, somewhere free from the daily fear of war, where my children can sleep peacefully and smile again. 🕊️
But we need your help to make this dream a reality. Your support means more than just money, it's a lifeline. It's a chance for us to begin again.
Every Act of Kindness Brings Us Closer to Safety. Your compassion can help us escape this nightmare. We are asking for your support, no matter how small, to help us start fresh, away from the violence, away from the rubble, and toward a place where my family can heal and grow. Every dollar you contribute is a step toward hope. 🙏
Thank you for standing with us in these difficult times. Your kindness can help us rebuild our lives and find peace again. ❤️🩹
With sincere gratitude,
Mohammed and Family
My name is Mohammad Salem Abu Swierh, a husband and father of… Mohammed Abu Swierh needs your support for Help Mohammed's Family From Gaza R
I’ve always felt the core role of this blog has been one of information. We make a lot of choices in design, and I try to use my various communications, including Blogatog, to walk the players through what we were thinking when we made key decisions.
The challenge with this approach is that it’s very logic-focused. It uses intellectual justifications to explain actions. But the problems I’m often responding to are emotional in origin. I have a good friend who’s a psychologist. He refers to this (using the words of author Robyn Gobbel) as an owl brain solution to a watchdog brain problem.
When someone is hurting, hearing about why the thing that is causing them pain is the result of intellectual decisions falls flat. That’s what has been causing some tension lately here on Blogatog.
It’s clear that for some Question Marks changes over the last few years represent the loss of something key to what makes Magic special to them. To them, the game is losing its heart.
While I can’t necessarily do anything about that, I want to better understand what you’re going through. So I’m using this post to ask players who are concerned with the recent changes to help me understand their feelings. Let me hear your stories about how your lives have been affected by these changes.
The way I explained it to some friends:
It felt like waking up to find out my favorite park had been paved over.
I'm a game designer (admittedly a flesgeling one). Magic was the tool I used to cut my teeth to do that. Some of the earliest posts on this blog were attempts to understand Magic: the Gathering by recreating it. I've been doing thay for over a decade, now. My friends have been arouns for years, watching me (and later participati g themselves) take the stories and experiences we found as we went and bring them back to Magic.
That always felt safe to me. While I couldn't join the ranks of people making the game professionally, I could build something adjacent that would never be definitively proven "wrong", because Magic was its own thing, and I was adapting other things. I had all of the room I needed to stretch out and practice and grow, like running through a sprawling park.
For years that practice and pursuit was guided by the literal hundreds of hours worth of packaged and shared experience, thought, and philosophy presented by you, between Blogatog, Drive to Work, and the volumes of articles posted over the last decade. Paired with the dozens of sets and thousands of cards to pick through released over that timeframe, I had a great workshop full of good tools and strong materials on which I could practice. Vainly, I hoped that one day I could join the ranks of designers who were making what I was sure was one of the greatest games ever made.
When the first UB products were announced, I was trepedatious. They weren't why I was here. They felt a little blasphemous. Magic was phenomenal. Why did it need outside material? I thought about that, though, and tempered my reaction. Magic borrowed plenty from others, and made plenty that wasn't aimed at me. I didn't like it, but I supposed I didn't have to. I saw new people take a look at magic for the first time and thought, "Well. I guess that can't be so bad, right?".
Over time, more of these products were announced, surfaced, and yielded similar results. I wasn't keen on most of them, but there was always something worth finding in them. Something to reward me sifting through. I could still see the heart of Magic in it, even if I didn't care for the expression. Still, something tugged at the back of my mind. Something that felt familiar. A similar story about a slow, creeping corruption that could be managed, resisted, until the fatal moment it couldn't. I ignored it.
"Half of all releases going forward will be Universes Beyond."
That was it. That was my playground, paved over. A new IP every three months that I wouldn't be able to adapt freely. Many of them I probably wouldn't care about, but some of them, inevitably, I will. Some of them had already. Anything above some threshold of popularity would be at risk. Anything that did, I couldn't touch. There's too much risk involved; what I make will inevitably be judged against what is published, and anything I share will be at risk of being misidentified or, worse, ridiculed for its inaccuracy.
This also doesn't come in a vacuum. Every few months, I find WotC, Hasbro, or Magic itself ensnared in a new mire. Layoffs, restructuring, another loop of accusations, admissions, and renumerationa over the use of AIGen, or some head-scratching new product that seems utterly divorced from what I thought would be coming five years ago. I haven't been able to keep up in years, and I've been increasingly uncomfortable watching it play out. I've long learned how to hold my initial reactions for questioning, but after a few years of this, my reactions are starting to feel quite vindicated. Magic is one of several things I've seen follow this road, crushing the things that made them unique in favor of things that yielded a larger market. I had just hoped for better.
In the end, I suppose I may just be among a crowd of acceptable collateral. I wasn't buying, playing, or competing. I was too mired in something I felt was higher-minded. I thought the course would correct itself. Perhaps it's too late for that, now. I see how this paved lot can be useful; it just isn't the park. Perhaps Magic isn't made for dreaming artists, writers, and designers anymore. I can't stop that, if that's the case. I'm one, flat-broke fan of something that seems to be on its way out.
It's simply a shame that we seem to be running out of parks.
I’ve always felt the core role of this blog has been one of information. We make a lot of choices in design, and I try to use my various communications, including Blogatog, to walk the players through what we were thinking when we made key decisions.
The challenge with this approach is that it’s very logic-focused. It uses intellectual justifications to explain actions. But the problems I’m often responding to are emotional in origin. I have a good friend who’s a psychologist. He refers to this (using the words of author Robyn Gobbel) as an owl brain solution to a watchdog brain problem.
When someone is hurting, hearing about why the thing that is causing them pain is the result of intellectual decisions falls flat. That’s what has been causing some tension lately here on Blogatog.
It’s clear that for some Question Marks changes over the last few years represent the loss of something key to what makes Magic special to them. To them, the game is losing its heart.
While I can’t necessarily do anything about that, I want to better understand what you’re going through. So I’m using this post to ask players who are concerned with the recent changes to help me understand their feelings. Let me hear your stories about how your lives have been affected by these changes.
I’m a very new player. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt was my first ever look at the game, and I immediately fell in love with the werewolves and art of the game. I spent the next few days reading the Innistrad stories, learning about the world, and going down rabbit holes discovering who Jace and Emrakul were and what they were doing there. Ever since, I’ve been a major Vorthos, caring deeply about worlds and story.
I remember when the Lord of the Rings set came out. I went to a draft my LGS did, and had a lot of fun. And I remember the first time I went to play commander with my friends and saw that one of them was playing a Doctor Who deck, and thought “huh. That feels a little weird.” But I enjoyed it and didn’t think much of it. After all, UB was few and far between.
Now, I can’t help but feel like this change is maybe tipping the edge on UB. I logically understand the reasons why Wizards wants to do it: it’s getting a lot of new players, and selling very well, among other reasons. But for me, the commitment to equal attention in-universe and UB makes me a little nervous for the future of in-universe Magic. After all; Lorwyn was pushed back in order to make room for another Universes Beyond release, how can I not be nervous? I’m a huge fan of the story and lore, and I’m sad that we won’t be getting as much, or that with the amount of product being released, it’ll just get overshadowed by the next big UB release.
Im scared that it’ll be possible for people to hop from UB set to UB set without ever knowing what the worlds I fell in love with are. It’s possible. There are so many new releases happening, faster and faster and more than ever before. People might not ever know. Or they won’t understand. They won’t see the Ixalan story that made me cry, the Bloomburrow worldbuilding, the werewolves of Innistrad. And maybe someone will ask “whoa, what movie is that from?” when seeing my werewolf deck. And that will break my heart.
I want to take this announcement in good faith. I want to believe that Wizards will keep treating the worlds and story right, after all, there’s a Netflix show coming out! But what happens if the show gets cancelled, like so many Netflix shows? What happens when Universes Beyond becomes the right financial decision and in-universe sets aren’t profitable? I’m scared that the amount of sets of the world I love, the universe that I like more than Doctor Who or Transformers or Fallout or SpongeBob might just fade away. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, overshadowed by the next shiny big UB thing.
I’ve always felt the core role of this blog has been one of information. We make a lot of choices in design, and I try to use my various communications, including Blogatog, to walk the players through what we were thinking when we made key decisions.
The challenge with this approach is that it’s very logic-focused. It uses intellectual justifications to explain actions. But the problems I’m often responding to are emotional in origin. I have a good friend who’s a psychologist. He refers to this (using the words of author Robyn Gobbel) as an owl brain solution to a watchdog brain problem.
When someone is hurting, hearing about why the thing that is causing them pain is the result of intellectual decisions falls flat. That’s what has been causing some tension lately here on Blogatog.
It’s clear that for some Question Marks changes over the last few years represent the loss of something key to what makes Magic special to them. To them, the game is losing its heart.
While I can’t necessarily do anything about that, I want to better understand what you’re going through. So I’m using this post to ask players who are concerned with the recent changes to help me understand their feelings. Let me hear your stories about how your lives have been affected by these changes.
I don't make posts like this a lot, and I'm sure this might already end up lost in the sea of replies, but as someone who saw the announcements and felt like I had received news that a beloved pet who had been sick for a while was being put down, I want to try and say something:
Magic has been a part of my life for nearly 15 years now, more than half my lifetime, and got me through a lot of rough times. Part of it was it being a fascinating game mechanically, sure, but MOST of that was due to its stories, it's worlds, it's characters, and the gameplay that so beautifully could tell those things through wonderful ludo-narrative harmony. When I designed custom cards for my friends for fun, they've always been top-down, always concerned with finding appropriate art, a fitting epithet, appropriate color identity, mechanics that evocatively tell a story, because those are the things I value most about magic; its stories.
I have felt, for a while now, that it seems that Wizards of the Coast does not value those stories like I do; or rather, they seem to not care at all.
Sure, the designers and writers and artists that actually *make* the game give it their all to make it fun and special for us with what little room is given them now. But that doesn't stop changes from happening that have eroded away at magic's narrative and aesthetic soul. Planes get a third of the time originally afforded them to have their settings develop and their stories progress. Unique and iconic species are erased from type lines for generic earthling descriptors. An overall decrease in vanilla creatures and increase in card complexity leave much lower room for flavor text and microfiction. The list goes on.
Worst of all, we have crossovers what feels like every other month now, and every time Wizards demonstrates to us Vorthos that they don't believe the setting and stories we live so dearly to be worthy of sharing with the other property anywhere as much as that property is lovingly portrayed in our own. Do you remember, Mark, when the trailer announcing that Marvel sets were coming dropped? Did you notice at all, when the only time afforded to mention the Magic half of that crossover was to make a shitty pun about the *name* at the very last second?
Wizards loves to talk SO VERY MUCH about their gameplay framework, how great the mechanics of magic are at portraying *other people's* stories, but they never feel compelled to promote their own stories with anywhere near as much effort or care. We have to fight, tooth and nail, to get people to know magic story even *exists* now. And now they've put the final nail in the coffin. Made the call that no longer will any given part of magic be allowed to stand on its own, that Magic would be better in their eyes by being Fortnite or Weiss Schwarz, a platform for other people's favorite stories, rather than focus on its own IP. We are going to get more UB than we will original magic now, and that ratio is only going to become more dire as things continue.
I have loved magic, and it's stories, for over half my life, and now Wizards is doing everything they can to steadily push me out of the game in favor of a mysterious potential player that likes Pop Culture Soup more than I loved Magic. That makes me feel genuinely terrible.
Thank you, Mark, for giving this chance for some of us to speak emotionally and actually feel heard. I doubt it will amount to anything in the end, seeing as we are clearly in some kind of minority that aren't worth being marketed to, but it's still nice to see it acknowledged that feelings have been hurt and matter to someone there more than cold logic. I hope you have a good day, despite all the sadness being shared.
