I've been going through my friend/follow list and cleaning it out a bit, because my notifications were getting insanely cluttered. If I've removed you, no hard feelings. If we were friends enough that you noticed I removed you, let me know -- I'd probably forgotten that username was yours.

I shifted people into groups as well, so if you got a notif that I'd friended you when we were already friends, that'll be the reason.

MEANWHILE I REDISCOVERED SO MANY RAD ARTISTS. (This is what happens when you follow too many people. You forget who you've got on there.) So I'm going to feature some of the most absolutely rad, for your enjoyment. In no particular order:

Scebiqu draws the coolest fantasy art and pin-ups. You should especially look at their pin-up goddesses, and this siren, which is one of my favourites:



Artema has brilliant cosplays and adorable paperdolls:

:thumb114830211:

hibbary is freaking amazing at dragons and animals:



jkatkina just draws. the best landscapes. I cannot even:



lebzpel makes me mad jealous with her character drawing skills. Also, dose blocky shadows:



Novawuff brings all the griffins and dragons to the yard. And they're like, it's better than anything else ever:



ani-r does intricate, often creepy, always beautiful landscapes, and also the Echo series, which is like Silent Hill in monochrome:

:thumb188707211: :thumb97810521: :thumb94678906:

Pirateswoop has DOSE COSPLAYS, and also the best fanart. The best.



Polar-Parasite aka SOYBEANZUH aka creator of some of the coolest, trippiest art I've ever seen.

:thumb216542249: :thumb202107729: :thumb180800054:

SoupAndButter does realistic Pokemon, and these are twice as realistic and a hundred times more wonderfully creepy than any you've seen before:



tracyjb makes the webcomic Lackadaisy Cats, and if you haven't seen her art then your life is empty and meaningless. Even her sketchdumps are beautiful.



nireth has successfully made me fall in love with her. ……I mean her photomanips.

Mature Content

speedy mock-up teaser image thing: i.imgur.com/zBykW.png

Inspired by Bang! and MS Paint Adventures, Pyth and I are planning and pondering something along the same lines. A webcomic that is also kind of an rpg that is also kind of a point-and-click adventure.

And it will be called... the EXTREME RENT-PAYING ESCAPADE.

The way it'll work is this: One of us posts a panel of the comic. You guys in the comments tell the characters what to do next: what to examine, where to go, who to befriend and who to kick in the back of the knees. We'll try to use all the suggestions, but if we can't we'll pick based on who was first, whether there's a consensus or what seems the most fun. There'll be a vague plot and fun stuff to discover, but the plot will be built around your choices, so you won't be railroaded.

We have a place to host it already, though I don't think I'll link it until it looks as good as it can. In the meantime: who'd want in on this? Anyone up for bending some fictional characters to your horrible will?

I have been an active participant in the deviantArt community over these past couple of months!

No, wait, that other thing.

Perpetually absent. Yes, that's the one.

Third and final year of uni has started up, which is intimidating and awesome in roughly equal parts but which mostly is time-devouring. Which is in its own way awesome, because I've slacked off way too much over the summer writing-wise, and it feels good to start hammering at the keyboard on a regular basis again.

But here and there I'll make time for dA again. SUP GUISE DID I MISS ANYTHING FUN? ♥

Unless you've been living under a rock these past few days, you must already know that the third Bioshock game has been announced, that it's called Bioshock: Infinite and that it seems to have torn the fanbase in half. All the comments I've seen seem to find it either utterly amazing-looking, or utterly horrible for not being set in Rapture. I'm in one of those camps, but I won't say anything more until I've tossed out a few shiny links.

The Guardian's Games Blog has the trailer, as well as the original press release about the game.

Ken Levine talks up the new game over at Irrational's site (thanks to Bioshockfanatics for that link).

And IGN has run a deliciously long article that summarises the trailer as well as the short demo that was released to journalists.

Those are the ones I know about - if anyone else knows of more, I would love you for sharing, because I'll go on record right now and say that I'm impossibly excited for this game.

The Guardian was the first place I heard about it: my friend sent me the link, with no explanation, so when I clicked it and saw the article I just about died. I'd not been expecting an announcement about the game for ages.

'Course, the first time I saw this sentence:

"Bioshock Infinite will take players from the sea to the clouds and is set on a city in the sky."

My excitement turned into trepidation, because I love Rapture a hell of a lot and leaving it seemed a shame, besides which a flying city seemed a bit too fanciful by comparison. Don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna start arguing that a city on the bottom of the sea wouldn't get crushed by the water pressure, but it seems less the stuff of fairy-tales than does a city which floats among the clouds.

So yeah, I was worried. But then I watched the trailer, and to say that it won me over would be an understatement. I won't summarise it here when you can watch it yourself (and probably have done so already) - but my god, the world it shows and the questions it raises. Who are you, the snappily-dressed protagonist? Why are you getting beaten up by a snappily-dressed cyborg which seems a lot like the steampunky cousin of a Big Daddy? And, if you subscribe to the theory that Andrew Ryan'll be in this game, who is that snappily-dressed fellow dancing to a gramophone on the balcony?

(I first heard that theory posited as something along the lines of "Andrew Ryan is alive and somehow fifty years in the past thanks to plasmids!", which just made me laugh. But might he be the right age to appear as a young man? Not sure, but it'd be a nice nod to the Rapture games to mention him, á la Fontaine's audio diaries in Bioshock 2.)

The articles answer some questions and raise others, but questions aren't the only thing that hooked me: simply put, the game looks beautiful. Columbia is so gorgeously designed that I don't even know where to begin, with its balconies and blimps and adverts, oh my goodness, its propaganda and adverts. "Burden not Columbia with your chaff" is so... it's just so darkly, delightfully Bioshock that I already feel at home.

And I think that kind of thing is a key reason why a game can be Bioshock without being set in Rapture. Columbia is fantastical, yes; but the trailer has me trusting the developers to make me believe I'm walking around on a flying city, just like they made me believe I was trapped in a crumbling fishbowl under the Atlantic. And Columbia has a lot in common with that fishbowl, not in its location but in its themes.

The first thing you see of the city is a row of proud American flags: that kind of overt political symbol makes me feel that the developers know what they're doing, along with the propaganda that I already mentioned. IGN's article talks about death, collapsing sections of the city and a man making political speeches from behind barrels lined with guns. Columbia embodies a political ideal gone to seed, run - occasionally literally - into the ground. Distil, mix with superpowers and compelling-looking characters, and make the whole thing as brokenly beautiful as possible. What's more Bioshock than that?

I'll miss Rapture, and I'd like to see more of it, but I'm not going to cling to its bones and miss out on a chance to explore somewhere so new, so similar and yet so different, so fascinating. Heck, even the floating city part doesn't worry me any more. Where else would it go? The land? No, this has to start with a city flung somewhere fantastic. The kind of stories Bioshock tells would be impossible anywhere else.

I need to get better at uh checking messages and commenting and... dA in its entirety. :/ SO HERE'S A THING!

EGO STROKING MEME

1) I like when you draw ____.
2) I wish you drew more ____.
3) I wish you did more fanart of these series/characters:
4) I wish you did more original art of these characters:
5) I love how you draw ____.
6) If you were to draw a comic about ___ I would be so happy!
7) If I could get you to draw anything, it would be ____.
8) My favorite part of your work is ____.

OTHER:
1) When I think of your art I think of ____.
2) If I had to describe your work I'd say ___.

PAY PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THE ONES ABOUT WHAT I SHOULD DRAW NEXT. Because I want my list of ideas to be as long as the moon, or something. Why haven't I finished that spliced!Fontaine drawing yet?!