Karma Chameleon

click to fullview, as usual

it transitioned from autobio into just drawing megaman bosses about 2/3s of the way through the day because my life isn't that interesting










the rest of the day i spent playing minecraft and chipping away at some commissioned work in between drawing robots, which is a pretty good day tbh

sorry 'bout the weird size/whitespace, twitter pisses jpeg artifacts of displeasure all over pixel gifs that aren't tall enough to ride

as far as i know zero never lets his hair down in a game and that's a criminal crime that needed rectifying; the original sprite is from MMX3
(there's a SINGLE wrong pixel and it drives me up the wall but i don't have the energy to fix it. maybe it's like knitting and it can be the deliberate flaw that traps evil spirits in my pixel work, whatever)

my sis invited me to her housewarming party and i didn't know any of the other people there so i basically expected to show up, give present, mooch food, and head out again, but then she challenged me to a smash ultimate match and five hours passed in a fugue state full of viddy games

there was a dude who played a couple rounds & kicked all our asses very handily singly or together every time and then someone else wandered in the room to exclaim "[name]! aren't you going to an actual smash tournament after this!" so i don't feel bad, i'm content to be filthy casul

the startup announcements claimed there's some megaman themed event going on with the spirits thing and zero came out of an assist trophy to support me in the final match of the night so megaman haunts me everywhere at all times

when smash wound down i was glancing at my watch and thinking about leaving and then sis was like 'let's do catastronauts' and that was also very good

everyone was comparing it to overcooked but i havent played that so for me the more helpful simile is, i know what the little pixel crew of FTL feels like now. frantic as shit and everything is on fire always. how on earth do you play with less than 4 players? NPCs that you can't personally yell at to coordinate strategy seem like they wouldn't be helpful so maybe they just wind the difficulty down..?

w/e a good day but i sure got nothing done so i guess i'll pay the price tomorrow

i get that, to be the underdog kindhearted hero type, and for the Drama tee em, the various incarnations of megaman have to hold these pacifistic ideals and be real torn up over having to destroy their fellow robot, and also that the classic megaman gameplay demands you Must destroy eight robots of comparable intelligence/ability to yourself, and a final boss, or two, and several hundred generic mookbots. but the conflict between that story and that gameplay gets downright sadistic

and because im avoiding problems by thinking way too much about mega man. . . now im imagining a game that takes proper advantage of MMX's absolutely BANANAS societal conceits instead of restricting it to manuals, prebattle monologues, and badly dubbed animated cutscenes. .. ...

what im imagining is a player character whos a robot therapist, as in, a robot who does therapy for other robots, and theres a widespread computer virus that causes robots to lose control and attack humans (substitute “reploid" and "the Maverick Virus" if you want to keep ties to MMX) 

and the actual gameplay is like, debugging minigames, but cartoonishly exaggerated, obvi, i'm thinking basically the weirder Trauma Center levels but on a background of circuitry instead of organs. protecting vital data from "worms" and repairing busted connections and stuff. 

but you start getting patients who don't have anything obviously wrong with their programming, and if you talk it out, they have pretty good reasons for breaking the First Law; intolerable working conditions or abusive owners or whatever. and the easy path forward is to adjust their systems anyway, turn up the levels of robo-dopamine and turn down their empathy/ambition/whatever and send em back; or you can help smuggle them out of their workplace, or get them the resources to unionize and organize, and such

pitfalls i would want to avoid: resist ever devolving back into pew pew laser shooty action, be nuanced about psychiatry & medicine (probably sometimes the "right" path forward genuinely is administering robo-antidepressants, etc, in the tutorial levels, and you follow up with those patients a lot) 

so i guess the pithy reductive summary is "papers please plus trauma center divided by robots“

 gravity falls dream. the pines family was.. driven out of town? i don't know, everyone had turned against them. dipper and mabel had been turned into duplicates of toby determined and mcgucket, respectively, again idk why or how. they needed to split up and avoid the number three at all costs: saying the word, thinking about it, being in groups of three people..  (ford was nowhere to be seen, it was just stan & the kids.
dipper was the one i actually followed the perspective of as he cowered in a little shed on a full moon night while an absolutely enormous manifestation of Bill blotted out the light. the shadows he cast were like thick, viscous liquid. something was swimming through it.

didn't actually wake me up; woke up later in the dream while looking up morse code to send smoke signals, because apparently that was the most secure communication method vs. dream god. 

and i'm not really even branching out either because a lot of my effort has gone into building up thaumcraft, the mod i already basically knew. it's version 4 and i'd previously been using the less-complete & mostly-reworked version 6, so it's.. sort of new?and theres a bunch of other mods expanding it... i like wands better than the newer power glove thing just for aesthetic, and even though it's slower & more complicated i like that nodes are tangible and manipulable in a way that the formless blanket of magic in the new versions isnt, but there are SO MANY aspects. one of the mods adds MORE, why on earth did that seem like a good idea
anyway this is an illustration of the time i threw an ender pearl against the wall instead of placing it on a pedestal, which is a fairly typical level of competence

another mod i played with for awhile is just called Necromancy and it's bad, objectively. the documentation is awful (i STILL can't figure out how to make pigman parts) it doesn't integrate right with WAILA, rideable minions (the whole reason i got interested in the first place) don't work, a lot of the models & textures are mild-to-moderately broken, it's just generally messy and the dev has abandoned it. also, it adds its crafting components to, as far as i can tell, the loot table of EVERY MONSTER, and there's nothing else you can do with extraneous hearts and brains and lungs except eat them like they're rotten flesh that spreads out over three valuable inventory slots.
but modular custom monsters was a very ambitious project and i salute them for that, from the head of my reanimated army of horrors.

from left to right that's Shorty, Skelly Longlegs, Clyde, Squidiuqs, Heavy Metal Album Cover, Henderman, and Diogenes.
Clyde is a creeper with Enderman torso & arms but it came out looking like a creeper in an oversized black sweater, which is unexpectedly adorable. Squidiuqs is the result of me realizing the "squid torso" and "squid head" items look exactly the same and you can apply both of them to the same monster. This isn't how the mod works but in-fiction I imagine Shorty and Enderhen are the result of me basically just swapping the heads of an Enderman and a chicken; the Enderman head is stuck in the screaming 'aggressive' position which makes me think Shorty is deeply resentful of all this nonsense. Henderman silently followed me several hundred blocks away from the house one time. She's completely inscrutable. Diogenes wandered into a Nether portal and returned, and now he hangs out next to the soulless husk of a human body I keep in a big jar outside, contemplating the nature of life and death.

Not pictured are THE BIG MAN (an enderman with iron golem chest and arms), Patches (a mishmash of mostly skeleton and zombie parts with one oversized enderman arm), Dwayne (in fiction I consider him Squidiuqs' half-sibling; squid head, iron golem torso, I think creeper legs but I don't remember), Butch (a sheep with a wolf head, and you wouldn't think this fairly simple conceit would break so badly but... the spatial relationships of her component parts are Casual At Best), Andersen the Wolf Squider, etc, etc, etc.

the minions tend to teleport around when nobody's looking at them, i don't know if their stored locations are just approximate or their AI hiccups and they start following me again when i hadn't asked them to or what. i shouldn't have given some of them creeper heads bc my reaction to that pattern is Visceral and Immediate right up until i realize it's one of my loyal beloved abominations.

...my ingame persona has gone a bit off the deep end, yes. i'm competing with other people on the server who are, like, completing unholy rituals to become vampires and werewolves, mostly. they like bragging about how they can run ridiculously fast or their bare fists hit like a tank or they have natural damage reduction or whatever, but i don't burst into flames in direct sunlight and i have opposable thumbs all the time, so i'm good. i think i might actually be closer to on par with them now that i've enchanted a real good set of gear and infused my body with a bunch of permanent magic, but i can Never Die Again because it turned out that the infusions only last until you respawn the ordinary way and it's a hassle to keep manufacturing the aforementioned soulless husks to artificially reincarnate into. also i kind of explode into purple goo on death now.

but i have 'chameleon skin' (permanent toggleable invisibility) and a set of mutable 'chameleon tools' so that's very satisfying

thenthsnowflake commented that it would be funny to see recovery!leo's version of the expression meme with an identical image in every box which is absolutely very funny but here's the thing: i do genuinely try to convey emotion with the scribbles obscuring his face






i'm not drawing the same character the full 25x again so soon though.

here's some more even so

i cooked a food on the stovetop today like a real boy! it was garlic toast and a mishmash of hashbrown/eggs/cheese - ie only like level 2 cooking - but i got the timing correct so it was all complete at the same time and it tasted good, and i haven't done A Real Cooking in awhile, so i'm counting that a victory for the day
OTOH, the "meal" before that, using the term generously, was roasted cashews and goldfish crackers poured into the same bowl and eaten with a spoon, so, eh... adulthood... it's a work in progress. i think it about evens out.
related: part of my Get My Shit Together Initiative for the new year was getting a pad of blank list sticky notes with a magnet on and slapping that on the fridge, and listing the contents of the fridge in the format of potential meals on it. i have the deadly one-two punch of not thinking about food prep until i'm already hungry, and then not being able to think clearly about food prep 'cause i'm hungry. now instead of trying to remember what all i own and how to put it together i can just pick off the list. i.. think it's working?

been headachy all day which isn't great. i've been quiet here and everywhere because i started a new javascript project and spent 90% of yesterday & the day before just picking at code. it's for laying out the canon CMWGE quests and how they fit into arc structures n stuff. it calculates total XP, you can build from the ground up or use one of the default sets as a springboard, that sort of thing. it's not complete but it's in good enough condition to look at, if you like: https://karmachameleon.github.io/quests/
i'll make a real post for it when all the data is actually in - the functionality is all in place but only maybe 2/3 of the quests

on a whim i grabbed a french translation of a mercedes lackey book and it is, if nothing else, taking me longer to read - normally i would whip through entire novels in, like, a day, but according to the very helpful ereader app i am (checks) just shy of one-third complete, after two days chipping at it. it's an interesting experience because the amount of vocabulary i actually understand is hovering around 60-70% but i remember the original text well enough to fill in the gaps. 

i understand it better when i read it aloud so i've been wandering around the apartment haltingly yammering in french to the cat..

genuinely so curious if the translation of "Firesong" to "Flammechant" deliberately included that "méchant" (mean, spiteful). i was wondering how french would handle taleydras names and other made-up compound words but they're mostly played straight, a few things got broken up - mindspeech is something like "parler à l'esprit" and hawkbrother="frère du faucon." kerowyn's mercenary company, the skybolts, got translated as "les Éclairs" which threw me for a helluva loop until i looked it up and saw yeah, that is "lightning/thunderbolt," as well as the pastry. i'm learning! kerowyn, seriously, rename your thing. that can't possibly sound dignified even in french.

everyone else was presumably as distracted by holidays and holiday-aftermath as i was. also i personally am having a really hard time thinking about things that are not minecraft

if you're just tuning in, the goal of these posts is to post links to DW content i enjoyed over the past ~week, in lieu of being able to reblog it, every saturday.

links today:
bramblepatch - a candle-themed B&W coloring page

copperbadge - cute kibby

and an upcoming thing to look forward to: artyuletide - an exchange of gifts based on obscure personal-favorite fandoms, previously a tumblr-based event - will begin posting gifts soon!

as an apology for not having more content here is a picture of some tiny pokemon figurines i found at the mall.


if you have anything you'd like to share, especially journals/communities/RSS feeds to promote, the comments section is ready to receive!