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how many of these blobos can you name? (this is engagement bait btw. i hope it works 😉 )

Book Review: A history of webcomics by T Campbell, 2006.

This book is free to rent on the Internet Archive right now! Don’t download this out-of-print book from Anna’s Archive, that would be illegal.

A contemporary review of the book can be found on Fleen (original blog) (IA), and it makes an interesting companion piece to this blog. This review is largely negative, focuses on mistakes, and is clearly written by an reviewer as familiar with the topic as Campbell is. I think these mistakes are important, but this review won’t focus on these.

I am not Fleen. I was reading webcomics in 2006, but am not intimately familiar with the topics this book tackles. We are now almost 20 years removed from this History of Webcomics. And there’s been a couple of changes in that time. The book opens with calling 1993-2005 a Golden age. If one were telling the history of webcomics today, would this era be more a footnote? Maybe the value in this book will be to prove this is a time worth remembering. I don’t know.

Let’s get reading!

The b00k spends 2 pages explaining the history of nerdc0re, and ends it with this legendary comic page in complete earnest. Its worth remembering the times before irony poisoning. Forget irony poisoning! Forget it! And enjoy a classic! Here it is!

Does anyone here speak L337?

The book spends A LOT of time on Scott McCloud, of course. This is your invitation to re-read Choose Your Own Carl. It spends a lot of time on Dilbert, on Sluggy Freelance, on User Friendly and a drama involving hotlinking User Friendly comic strips. It keeps returning to this Nerdcore idea, which feels so dated, but I… I don’t think its an inaccurate description of this millennial zeitgeist, even if we’d use ruder words for it today.

It feels like its taken a while to get to the Gamer comics, the comics we’d most associate with this era today. PVP and Penny Arcade are most talked about, with a large section dedicate to the flame wars Kurtz of PVP would get into. Infamous webcomic CAD only gets a passing mention, in the same sentence as several other comics such as Real Life, which are both comics whose reputations have diverged significantly.

Characters from the websites Keenspot and Modern tales face off.

TWO PWNED L0Z3R5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The comic discussed platforms and businesses for several pages. Maybe interesting, but these are the same concerns all netizens are still facing. If you’re familiar with the encroach of capitalism on the web, you know the shape of this discussion.

When webcomics try to form collectives and unions, its worth pointing out there’s a turbulent history there. People will learn from experience, I suppose. The turbulence is platforms vs users, humans vs capital, and the natural interpersonal conflicts we all navigate. These don’t go away easily with time and change.

oh shit campbells on about the N3RDC0R3 again

There’s a section in here about Furry comics. I genuinely think some furries might find these pages interesting, even as they mostly litigate what are ongoing flame wars. “Is furry porn ethical” is touched upon, but it presents the phase “Furverts“. There’s some jargon for you. Never say I don’t do anything for my furry readers.

From the Furry section the book transitions into a brief discussion of adult webcomics. Furries and adult media were already heavily associated lol. Although the book doesn’t mention any adult comic by name except the paysite Slipshine. Lol there’s a short mention of Paypal dicking over adult comic makers. Paypal hasn’t changed, but you need to be pretty new around these parts not to know Paypal has always sucked.

The Ice Queen. Joe Zabel often uses 3D figures created in poser to startling effect
CHAPTER SEVEN: MONEY MATTERS AND THE MODERN WEBCOMIC There is no webcomics industry. There is no large commercial exchange of webcomics. There are [only] a handful of people making anything more than extra spending money from their webcomics. —Scott Kurtz, 2005°” I do webcomics as a hobby—I don’t do it to gain fame or popularity or earn money, and it feels like too many artists are doing webcomics for the wrong reasons. All I say is, I believe webcomics should be done for enjoyment and not for money or fame. —Space Coyote of Saturnalia, 2005°"* Rare is the artist who cares nothing for success, i.e., survival! But [that] ideal is alive in the hearts of many artists who may hope for success, but won't alter their work to obtain it. —Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics?” Four of my favorite online cartoonists are Patrick Farley, Cayetano Garza, David Gaddis and Mark Martin; and I can tell you with certainty (‘cause I know these guys) that if their sites could support them financially, they'd be posting 5 times as often! And so would |, for that matter. —Scott McCloud in J Can’t Stop Thinking?”
Above: Ctri+Alt+Del sold out of its first printing before the first customer received his first book.

Space Coyote, AKA Nina Matsumoto, has absolutely turned her art hobby into a career. I’m familiar with her work. I wonder how she feels about these statements now. It doesn’t matter what this one random person thinks, I suppose. But its interesting.

The talk of monetization is also extremely obsolete. There’s talk of marketable plushies and print editions: yes. But there’s a lot of wondering if “donation drives” will ever work out. Can a comic be crowdfunded? is a question the book seems in doubt about, when we know the answer in current year is a resounding Yes.

It briefly mentions the feeling of being nickel-and-dimed, which is something I do feel. With so many patreons around, all with ever increasing price floors, supporting your fave artist feels more expensive then ever. I get that we’re in a cost of living crisis. We all are. The readers, too. Not that I don’t have a list of ppl im supporting – but this individualist pricing structure has its limitations. Support government funding for the arts, now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There’s also a lot of words on advertising, a venture in which the price floor has lowered considerably over the years. A modest page can’t get a nice chunk of pocket change with advertising alone any more – and the adverting nowadays raises massive privacy issues. Download ublock origin, now!!!!!!!!!

Not that webcomics remained breeders-only. Manga traditions had loosened up American preconceptions here, too; manga had genres specifically for gays and lesbians, and even its mainstream showed widespread acceptance. More than one well-known manga (Ranma , Futaba-Kun Change, Sailor Moon) featured a boy who spontaneously changes genders. ‘“Transgendering” found its way into webcomics like E/ Goonish Shive, where the gender-switching was similarly arbitrary, and Venus Envy, which dealt with real transsexuality.’’”> Merely gay characters were relatively populous. Gay authors were usually positive or matter-of-fact about being gay, so Justine Shaw’s brutal honesty startled the field—but soon attracted it. Naturally, gays, like women, found certain genres friendlier than others. True gay-bashing was extremely rare, but most nerdcore and gamer strips either featured jokes about heterosexual men doubting themselves or avoided the subject altogether. They were under no obligation, of course, so long as other genres were there to pick up the slack. In certain matters of faith, though, almost no one seemed willing to step up. EI Goonish Shive, above, explores identity with magical, temporary gender-swaps, while Venus Envy, right, tells a more down-to-earth story of a transsexual.

Nothing to add here, I just thought some readers might want to read about ‘transgendering’…

There’s more to read, about race in webcomics and class in webcomics. Remember to not download this book from Anna’s Archive if you want to read all about it.

Although the book mentions bigotries in webcomics, I think remembering that webcomics always tackled progressive issues is something worth remembering and celebrating.

Exhibit of webcomics alternate futures past. including world domination, micropayments, and artificial intelligence.

hm

The future.

Did this book from 2006 predict the future?

Shifting hierarchy: This book predicts new comics will replace old mainstays. A very safe prediction, and one that is absolutely and obviously true.

Decentralization and DIY: I think the book unfortunately got this one wrong. But the future it predicts seems more rosy that the reality we got. Webcomics are almost exclusively on platforms now, as are most netizens. That’s not to say decentralization and DIY have completely fallen by the wayside, and are usually where the most interesting webcomics, if not the most successful, exist right now.

Short-form as a vanguard, long-form in development: Short comics continue to be shared and spread most on social media, as short form content is just more shareable. One-offs are just as likely to do numbers as shortform strips from a bigger comic.

Techno-art: Stagnation tbh, as art becomes #content for #platforms. Nothing wrong with PNGs, ain’t broke. Although I think new web technologies are increasing potential out there.

Generation One. Cartoonists who had grown up with the Web joined the field and began to change its aesthetic from the inside out: Yes, true.

Organic ties to readers: ok…

Demographic expansion: Other web media took some of webcomics attention. The audience for webcomics is no doubt larger, but that same audience has more web multimedia taking their attention. This is a good thing

The elite reader. For good and for ill, webcomics’ own creators and their biggest
fans exerted a disproportionate share of influence on their surrounding culture. Criticism
was difficult and fan-service was easy. I’m not sure what the prediction here is, but uhhh,,,, true?????????

An industry in embryo: There’s more money in webcomics today compared to 2005. True I guess.

The book also proposes six broad scenarios for comics future. The sixth one is the web vanishing completely. Could still happen. Of all of them, “the expanding long tail” scenario is the most pressing and accurate. It predicts a move to platforms, who aggregate the efforts of artists into large platforms for themselves. It also proposes a scenario where webcomics remain populist and serve the lowest common denominator: an anxiety still expressed.

WHATS THE REVIEW, POINDEXTER???????????

pic goes hard, who drew it.

This pic that goes hard was on page 108 of the PDF. I’m lost in the credits.

from the bookcore

this is da nerdcore

its got L337

like a elite

comics

bcomics

the internet

moar liek teh splinternet

anyway heres this classic by beanytuesday

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I love government funding for the arts!

Its ok when an artist who receives government funding creates something ugly, niche, or bad. I’m just glad when money is spent on bad art, instead of the military.

However, its far more often that an artist makes something that rules.

I think we need more government funding for the arts. They can never spend enough on art! No arts budget is too big, its impossible to do.

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The Intertidal Zone is a short comedy edutainment comic made by Stephen Hillenburg in 1989, and is considered a precursor to the Spongebob Squarepants television show. The story focuses on larger than life show anchor Rocky the Shrimp and his cohost Bob the Sponge, as they interview the inhabitants of the eponymous intertidal zone and discover their unique traits.

This comic was considered lost media, until it was scanned and uploaded to the internet archive by MasterDonut on 24/04/2024. Cheers, mate. This is a cleanup of MasterDonut’s scans, and I am pleased to present them here today.

Dropbox download | Read online here

NEW! Grab the torrent here.

I can’t seed this torrent 24/7. If I ever stop seeding it forever i’ll remove the link from the page, but as long as the link is here, I will get back to seeding it eventually. Also: Help me seed it! I could really use a hand, thanks.

GIF – Before – After

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Hello, RSS Feed fans. This article is for people who’ve chosen to use RSS feeds, and picked an RSS feed reader. Those choices are outside the scope of this article. What this article is about is filling your empty feed reader, deciding what to put in there and how to surf the web in search of feeds.

However, I can’t just tell you what exactly to pop in there. I will give you a few direct recommendations in the end, but you need to find things you enjoy and add them in yourself. These are some guidelines to help you select things to add.

How do I know if a website has an RSS feed?

The common feed icon depicts the tip of an antennae, with two or three radio waves rippling out of it. The RSS Logo is typically orange, although it comes in other colours. If you see this icon, it should represent an RSS Feed.

Not all websites will have an obvious link to their RSS feed. but it will still exist.

If a social media platform debut’d in the 00s, there’s a good chance it supports RSS. There’s a bit of an RSS support gap in mainstream social media platforms which started in the 10s. But RSS is still common enough that if in doubt, you should always check and see.

It depends on the culture in which the website was developed, as well. Websites from the computer geek side of the web, open-source and GNU nerds (affectionate), have RSS support a lot. VC-funded web startups that want to be the new Facebook, the people who want to build a web silo, are less likely to build RSS support into their website. A fediverse site like Mastodon supports RSS feeds, a fediverse site like Bluesky or Threads doesn’t.

[see: Footnote 1]

My web browser automatically detects RSS feeds, and adds an icon to the address bar if it detects one. If yours browser doesn’t, there are browser extensions. Haven’t got a specific one to recommend, just look around.

Some RSS feed providers will automatically detect a feed if you put a URL in. You can also use a service like getrssfeed.com can detect RSS feeds on a website.

Search engines can help you find RSS feeds for platforms the manual way. Type Platform + RSS Feed into a search engine, and it’ll let you know if feeds exist.

About Large Platforms and Social Media

Although it might seem like an easy way to fill your feeds, just duplicating your existing social media feeds is unadvisable. Give yourself new things to look at, or you’re going to get burned out seeing nothing but repetitive notifications.

There’s probably a large social media platform full of very talented and interesting users, but you don’t really want to use it for whatever reason. And if the platform supports RSS feeds, well, there you go. As a personal example, I don’t go on Deviantart much any more. Even less, since I moved the few people I followed into my RSS feed. “But Deviantart doesn’t have RSS after the Eclipse update” says the person who didn’t search and see the first result for Deviantart + RSS Feed.

So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. Think if this person who’s posts you already like, and is using a platform you don’t. A Tumblr user you like also uses Mastodon. Now, you don’t use Mastodon in this hypothetical, but you want to see that poster’s sweet Mastodon posts. Mastodon is a website that supports RSS feeds. Add their feed to your reader, follow the posts, all without needing a Mastodon account.

Sometimes, its ok to just duplicate your existing social media feeds, if the feeds are algorithm-driven and unreliable. People question Youtube’s reliability, I think its superstitious but you can add Youtube channels to your feed reader so you KNOW you’re not missing anything.

About Small web, independent web, niche social media.

One of the good things about RSS is how you don’t need to limit yourself to notable platforms. There’s a large web out there, and RSS feeds can help you keep up with it all. I know its the harder work, but you’d be surprised at how easily they accumulate in your feed once you start. This is about exercising your web surfing skills. Be curious, and bias towards subscribing to a webmaster rather than not subscribing.

Web native media like blogs, webcomics, and podcasts very often have RSS feeds. There’s even a website just for webcomic feeds, called Piperka.

You can use RSS feeds to automate forum lurking, although even forums software from the heyday of RSS have patchy support. The best forum software RSS support I’ve found is for Discourse, which one of the newer forum softwares on the block. New as in its ten years old, but u get it. For example, PHPBB has been around twice as long and has RSS support that sucks out of the box. Webmasters can choose to extend the RSS feed support of forums with plugins, but you know, they don’t lol. Feel free to ask ur local forum webmaster to install the RSS plugin if u want. Still, if a forum is slow-moving enough, it having just the one feed might be enough to lurk it.

RSS where there isn’t usually RSS.

Kill the newsletter

Some webmasters opt for an email newsletter instead of an RSS feed. But you can subscribe to that newsletter as an RSS feed, using kill-the-newsletter.

I think experiencing newsletters as an RSS feed makes a huge psychological difference. The contents of an email newsletter feel like an Object, like A Spam, to me. Reading them as a feed just feels more natural and enjoyable. Even if you hate email newsletters, give it a go. Throw a donation to the developer if you love it too.

I do experience cosmetic formatting issues with Kill the Newsletter, but these don’t impact the readability.

Websites I follow this way are mostly normie stuff, local businesses and government institutions, and news websites.

Alternative front ends

Many major websites may have alternative front ends available. A front end is the user interface side of a website, the way a website is presented to visitors. The back end is the machine side of a website, the underlying data a website processes. An alternative front end is a way to view the back end data, in a way that’s designed by somebody who’s not the website’s owner. It’s the same contents but a different interface.[see: footnote 2] And sometimes these different interfaces support RSS feed, where the official front end does not.

So, what I want you to do, is think of a person you already follow. A Youtube user you like also uses Tiktok. Now, you don’t use Tiktok in this hypothetical, and Tiktok doesn’t support RSS feeds. But Tiktok has an alternative front end called Proxytok, that does support RSS feeds. Now, you can see all the videos just with your RSS feed.

I’ve also seen Tiktok described as unusable due to its algorithmically-generated feed being bothersome for potential users. If you do enjoy Tiktok videos and want to exclusively build your own feed, with no algorithm nonsense, you can do it with ProxyTok and RSS feeds.

My most-used alternative front end is Nitter. It’s a Twitter front end. I quit Twitter, for the normal reasons. But I can still follow all the same users on Twitter, without using Twitter. I get the back end stuff I like (microblogs from good posters), without the frontend stuff I hate. It also means Twitter can’t show me ads, or track my activity to sell to advertisers. I don’t financially contribute to Twitter’s ecosystem any more, which is great. It’s like i’m stealing Twitter, which I love doing.

There is a list of alternative front ends here. You want to click on the Main Instance or Public Instances links. The others are for advanced users, you don’t need to self-host or worry about onion links. Keep things simple unless you really, really want to make them complicated.

Not all alternative front ends support RSS feeds, though. You’ll have to research them (try using them) to find out.

Keep at it

I stopped using RSS feeds when everyone else did, when Google Reader shut down. When I first got back into RSS feeds, it wasn’t much to look at. I followed a few things. Feeds weren’t fast. This may be desirable for some people, but in the Google Reader days, I was checking my RSS feeds daily. I wanted that pace back, and was frustrated when it wasn’t. I was bored, I wanted to give up again. But now, I have the pace I want.

It must be so hard for people just starting out. It was probably hard for me starting in the Google Reader days, but I don’t remember. I went back and re-subscribed to feeds I remember having, I had a starting point. I don’t know how hard it would be for somebody with no starting point. But treat it like a project, and keep at it. You didn’t onboard to social media you like in a day, let the onboarding of RSS feeds take a while.

Here are some things I subscribe to, that a general audience might like.

  • Blenderartists.org Forums: Finished Projects. Website | Feed
    • Blender Artists is a forum for people who use the 3D software Blender. So its just a feed of indie CGI art, which is neat! A lot of artists here also have personal sites and portfolios, so it can be a good jumping off point for web surfing if this is your jam.
  • albumoftheday Website | Feed
    • It’s an album! Every day! Gonna unsub to this one, because it links to Spotify and I don’t use Spotify. u can have it instead
  • Overclocked Remix Website | Feed
    • Vidoe game music remixes.
  • The News
    • Whatever news you like here.
  • FediVideo Website | Feed
    • Curated list of variety video recommendations hosted on the fediverse platform Peertube.
  • me its me
    • blatant self promotion

These aren’t really for a general audience so much, are they. Ask me about the even more niche stuff in the comment’s if you like, ask me shit like “do you subscribe to any anime sites”. Except don’t ask that one because i’m answering it now with Jojo News Website | Feed.

Footnotes

Footnote 1. This image was taken from “RSS Autodiscovery” by Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin of the RSS Advisory Board
– https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20081106104156/http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Cheers!

Footnote 2. The explanation of alternative front-ends is stolen from:
“You Probably Want to Know About “Alternative Front-ends” by Justin Hanagan.
– https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
– (alt) https://web.archive.org/web/20230522232310/https://www.staygrounded.online/p/you-probably-want-to-know-about-alternative
I just paraphrased this info to suit my post. Visit the original articles for more details and a more complete explanation, it’s a good article.

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Blorbo Watch

the captains

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image of the captains from pikmin 4 colour cycling rainbow gif

they’re honestly just generic archetypes tbh, i mean tehyre fun enough and have the nintendo charm TM or whatever but theyre just not rlly worth writing home about. average , in a 4 out of 5 stars way.

Glow Pikmin

Glow Pikmin

Feels the most like a gimmick Pikmin, a situational Pikmin. I don’t hate them, the night missions they facilitate are OK I suppose. I wonder where the design space for a Pikmin with 1 gimmick will go.

Ice Pikmin

Ice Pikmin

I would die for her

Meet my custom captain, Gary. They’re more like a snail than an ant.

Oatchi Fan Shrine

Oatchi Cover Art
Oatchi 4Koma
Oatchi Render
Oatchi Creepypasta

Tumblr Embed Zone

Youtube Embed Zone

No Flarlic Challenge Run

Title: No Flarlic Run
A gif of a flarlic being crossed out.

Flarlic is an item which increases the Pikmin cap on the overworld. Collecting no flarlic, you are capped at taking 20 Pikmin out of the onions. The challenge is to beat the game with this restriction.

Glow Pikmin icon
Flarlic icon

Da rulez

  1. Don’t collect Flarlic.
  2. No Glow Pikmin in caves.

My goal was curing Oatchi, which means beating the Cave for a King.

You can collect wild Pikmin in caves, which temporarily increases your cap until the end of the cave. I think this temporary increase makes Pikmin management more interesting, while Glow Pikmin trivialises it. So I allowed wild Pikmin, but avoided Glow Pikmin in caves.

This is not a low Pikmin run. You can have as many in reserve as you like.

I used Dingo to complete the dandori challenges and night missions. I’ve put my time into these, I have all platinum medals on my main file. I just didn’t find completing them to be interesting in the context of this challenge.

Dingo

The Easy

In the pantheon of Pikmin challenge runs, this one is fairly easy and doesn’t require a lot of in-game knowledge. It is an increase in difficulty which makes you change your approach in interesting ways, its a good time. It also doesn’t need an encyclopaedia of game knowledge and planning, just hop in! Its a good casual challenge for a casual fan! I didn’t use Glow Pikmin, but you can choose to use them if you’re stuck! You could also make the run easier by collecting the minimal amount of flarlic you can handle. A 30 or 50 pikmin cap would be a fine time, if 20 is too low. You could also end the run after rescuing Olimar, as that part of the run is the most non-linear and most interesting.

The Hard

There are many rules you could add to this, to make it harder. Collecting no onions at all could be an interesting one, making your only stock of Pikmin those you find in caves. Restricting the use of Oatchi is a challenge run all of its own, but some Oatchi restrictions could be added to compliment this challenge. You could restrict rewinds, but I don’t feel like that would be compelling (save scumming is a natural part of challenge runs to me, and rewinds are just a more convenient version of that).

The experience

like 95% of the game

Captain Piss

For this playthrough, my OC will be the incorrigible rookie, captain Pisš.

Ice Pikmin

The Sun-Speckled Terrace was very easy. Its difficulty is built around a low Pikmin cap. The Ice Pikmin are very useful to cheese enemies. Sprays and nectar are more valuable than growing Pikmin from monster corpses.

The Blossoming Arcadia keeps on being easy. Off topic: The Downy Snagrets are my favorite new “minor” enemy, they’re so cute.

I got the Blue onion from Serene Shores. I feel a lot of people get the Blue Onion from the Sun-Speckled Terrace, including me in my casual playthrough.

Anyway, nearby the blue onion in the Serene Shores is The Below-Grade Discoteque. This cave is worth a visit in this challenge run, just to fight its boss. The Groovy Long Legs is difficult, but that’s good. It gives its musical gimmick time to take off, whereas it died all too quickly in my normal playthough. I also got the Purple Pikmin here, which are very useful. Yes, Oatchi can carry heavy items, but Oatchi is just one pup. Purple Pikmin seriously increase the amount of hands that can be dandoring at once.

I rushed through Hero’s Hideaway in the beginning, because Moss is a pain in the ass here. I collected two cards and guessed the third number. I did do some sparklium collecting after Olimar was rescued. I collected the Ice Pikmin Onion here, because Ice Pikmin have been so useful. I could have probably skipped the onion, in retrospect.

The Giant’s Hearth was just going through the narritive requirements. The Cradle of the Beast was the cave I completed to find Not Charlie, because its entrance was the most accessable to me. I didn’t collect the rock onion, didn’t feel like it. This was my favourite area in my casual playthrough, because I liked the public barbeque setpiece.

The Primordial Thicket was just going through the narrative requirements. I don’t have much to say about it, but I do have a lot to say about a certain cave in it.

Cavern for a King

Louie

The only part I grinded for was the Cavern for a King. The boss rush of that cave was a lot harder with so few Pikmin.

A few bosses were just a pain in the ass. Toxstool, the Bloomcap Bloysters, and the Gildemander were bosses which had to be taken slow and were easy to mess up.

Its very hard to freeze bosses with only 20 pikle men. Except for the Baldy Long Legs,the only boss you can completely cheese with ice Pikmin. You gotta take it up on that offer. Freeze the puddle of water its in. You only need ten ice Pikmin. Once its dead, leave the cave again to get twenty Purple Pikmin for the upcoming water wraiths.

That bastard Empress Bulblax was the pain in the ass she always was. Only the normal advice, take things slow and don’t get greedy.

The Anchient Sirehound took so many rounds to kill. I even left to restock Pikmin halfway through the battle. It took so many rounds to drain the HP meter, and it’s where I spammed spray the most. Bring at least two Purple Pikmin, it makes bringing down the tail so much easier.

The Pikmin 4 4koma

Title: 4Koma
Title: 4Koma x4

I’ve been using images from this throughout this article.

Illustrated by Kino Takahashi, the Pikmin 4Koma is a piece of original promotional material Nintendo is posting to the Pikmin official website several times a month. It’s very cute and quirky, but ಠ_ಠ it doesn’t have an RSS Feed ಠ_ಠ. Anyway. here are some of my favourite strips.

4koma?

Everyone, including Nintendo, is calling it a Comic or a Manga. Which is a fair description, a 4koma is a subgenre of comics and manga. Like, the fact that I automatically refer to it as a 4koma is a sign that being a weeaboo is terminal and forever.

Seeds of Wisdom. Pikmin carrying small black seeds.

Seeds of Wisdom

I love watching the Pikmin be little freaks.

An Acquired Taste. Oatchi and Rookie running towards a Switch cartridge.

An Acquired Taste

Licking nintendo cartridges joke in current year. I wish this would have happened in game. I wish Oatchi could have eated one.

Pikmin and Books. Rookie learning about flower pressing.

Pikmin and Books 1

I love the 4komas in which you see the minor characters be little freaks. Its like their natural habitat.

But wait! There’s more! Tumblr use fullmoonfireball has been doing some fan translations of comics before the official translation gets around to it. You can view all their fan translations here, but i’ll also flag up some personal faves.

Training. Rookie climbing a wall.

Training

The misdirection punchline is one of my favourite joke genres.

Swallow

Swallow

Swallow

Hair Care Scare. Rookie looking at Oatchi's tail.

Hair Care Scare

mop oatchi (mochi)

Previously

Talked about the Pikmin fanon wiki in the post “hey check this out (1)”: clicky

Embed Hell

Stuff i couldn’t think of an excuse to embed anywhere else. Please support the original release.

open here to visit embed hell……..

Credits

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This blog contains Final Fantasy Spoilers for All Of Them

There’s like only a handful of dilfs in final fantasy and theyre not all here. Anyway here’s the tier list for DILFs in Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line

Excellent DILFs

Auron – He’s not the step-dad, he’s the dad who stepped up.

T.G. Cid – ha ha Trans Gender Cid.

Barret Wallace – It sucks that the date scene with him and cloud is a joke. i want barret to date cloud for real.

Laguna Loire – In retrospect, he was the first videogame DILF I was down bad for.

Merely Ok DILFs

Cecil Harvey – Only a father in the Expanded universe 🤮🤮🤮 (expanded universe bad). I think its funny to call him a DILF and I like him.

Jeckt – Absolute dogshit parent. Fucking Sucks. I hate his pussy. But what kind of self-respecting faggot like me would say ‘no’ to Braska’s Final aeon I mean come on. Who wouldn’t lower their standards for that huge hairy monster.

Just handsome men, but you know, not old men (whats the point).

Aerith Gainsborough – I said what I said.

Balthier – Transmasc swag (has a deadname)

Faris Scherwiz – Transmasc swag (has a deadname, transed his gender and became a pirate)

ok so all the trans stuff is just headcanons this series actually kinda sucks when it comes to queer characters

comment with youre fave. or with the ones i missed, i didnt post them all

Anyway, thanks to the fandom Final Fantasy Wiki for the pix.

Original Fandom link:

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Wiki

Via Breezewiki:

https://breezewiki.com/finalfantasy/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Wiki

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Q: How is stylus gaming different than finger touchscreen gaming?
A: Stylus.

The difference between stylus gaming and touchscreen gaming is the difference between painting with a brush, and painting with your fingers. Fingerpainting is super rad, but hoo-boy, using a brush is a whole different kind of awesome!

A stylus can demand more precision of the player, require less hand movement, and use smaller UI elements. Human fingers are large, imprecise, prone to obfuscating game elements, and its very taxing to wave your entire hand for demanding gameplay.

Trauma Centre is a game with terrible politics where you need to zap cartoon viruses inside the human body with lasers. It rules, and it could never work with finger touchscreens. It’s too fast and precise.

Professor Layton contains beautiful backgrounds, where you can tap hotspots to find flavour text and hint tokens. In a finger touchscreen scenario, the game is playable, but your fingers would obfuscate the UI elements you’re attempting to interact with. It would suit a point-and-click style with a mouse better than fingers.

The Nintendo DS is the home of several adventure game classics. A point-and-click genre moving to a stylus based input is just such a natural fit. And you don’t really need to do anything differently than a mouse point-and-click. There’s a lot of great adventure games for finger touchscreens too, but they usually need to design their hotspot UI around that input method and make compromises to it.

Drawn to Life is a generic platform game with a gimmick – You yourself can draw the appearance of many in-game elements, including your protagonist.

Illustration mechanics and gimmicks are a natural fit for stylus games, and appear in many DS games. Drawn to Life is just the most obvious example. WarioWare DIY would be another great example. Animal Crossing: Wild World lets players illustrate their own custom outfits for the player character. Kirby: Canvas Curse is a more subtle usage, where you illustrate lines for Kirby to move across. There’s similar minigames in Super Mario 64 DS where you interact with Mario by illustration. Or the DS Zelda games, where drawing on the game’s maps, and drawing paths for AI controlled characters (Zelda) to follow, is a neat mechanic that adds a nice twist to the Zelda formula.

on the other hand.

I get why people like finger touchscreens. You don’t have to own a stylus – and a stylus is a tiny piece of plastic which loves to go missing. Whereas your fingers are Just Right There.

I am aware there are stylus’ available for finger touchscreens. And I do own and use some! and they go missing A Lot!! But these stylus mimic human fingers, by having large wide grippy tips. And the games I’m playing them with are clearly built around fingers anyway, so it’s just not the same.

but yeah in the end i

i do miss stylus gaming. *sigh* Touchscreening with fingers isn’t the same.

anyway please leave some comments. let me know your fave stylus game, or if you also miss this input method. or just say anything I live for comment’s

Thanks to LParchive, which I stole screenshots off of because of course I did. Specifically, thanks to World‘s Trauma Centre LP, Lyrax‘s Kirby: Canvas Curse LP, and Dragonatrix/Lotus Aura‘s Professor Layton LP. Good stuff, you three rock. <3

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pokemon

This article was originally published 16/05/22. I edited it on 17/12/23 to make it better. Enjoy.

The story is simple and for children, and pretty much The Plot of every merch-driven narrative. The evil new Team Rocket has stolen all the Pokemon Cards and kidnapped the strongest card players, can you rescue the cards and the strongest card players?

English Patch Overview

You don’t need to play the first game to get into this. The English Patch is extremely highly recommended, as NPCs share hints and several fights require speciality decks.

The fan translation is extremely organic sounding and high quality, although it’s translator admits they don’t know Japanese that well. It is what’s called nowadays a Machina Translation Post-Editing effort, with the machine translation used being over a decade old. It could even be considered a rewrite rather than an extremely accurate translation. But MTPE or rewrite, the translation is extremely good, reads naturally, and contains all the gameplay clues and information a player would need. It’s good work, its excellent for what it is.

The only sign its a fan translation is the fact it lets you use hiragana and katakana in names. This is an option the original game had, which an official localization probably would have removed. Leaving it in just adds more opinions for naming, and a fine thing to leave in, I love options. You can use the character which looks like a face, ツ (tsu). It’s epic.

The fan translation was done by Artemis251 (the main translator guy) and Jazz (credited as supplying the base; adding the ability to write English text, and doing a menu/card translation).

Get the fan translation: Romhacking.net page or Arty’s Generic Site.

Finding a JP Rom is up to you. The legal thing to do would be to buy a cartridge and dump it yourself, and I am obviously a law-abiding guy. I don’t advocate crimes, but WowRoms of a 20 year old abandonware game wouldn’t be unethical to acquire. Original devs and Nintendo aren’t getting paid either way, so who cares. Hypothetically + In Minecraft.

Review

The game is easy, but has a difficulty curve. The endgame trainers are a fair challenge, but its still a game that children can beat. The earlygame is fairly open-ended, but the game gets more linier as things go on. This isn’t a bad thing, it lets the developers control the difficulty curve more.

There is no penalty for losing a card game, except in rival fights, which reward you with rare cards for winning on the first try. But you can complete the game fine without those rewards. Like in irl card games, sometimes you will lose fights to getting a bad draw at the start. But this can also happen to your opponents. There is also no forfeit option, meaning if you’re in a no-win situation it can take a while to lose and try again. There’s autosaves in battle and systems to discourage save-scumming, so you can’t restart in a no-win scenario.

Progression is very horizontal. Each fight wins you a new booster pack of pokemon cards, and more flexibility within the in-game metagame. This adds complexity organically.

Everything is very close to the real card game, with pixel art translations of actual art. All of them look fine, although several look better than others. A lot of them are attempting to translate a variety of art styles into pixel art, to mixed results. Everything being pixel art does flatten the range of art styles its imitating, but it still conveys the original art at the same time.

Yes, you can get the famous Charizard card. In the game. I don’t think Charizard is actually a very good card. It’s a glass cannon and resource hog, which leaves you in a nigh-unrecoverable state if it shatters. Charmelon is definitely one of the best second-stage Pokemon, however.

There are various NPCs who will give you suggestions for strategies in decks. Perhaps these strategies would also have been interesting if performed in the irl card game of the day, although I assume the metagame has advanced somewhat in the past 20 years.

I don’t know how people who were into the modern card game would react to this game. Its a blast from the past, and would either be interesting for that reason, or too different from the modern game for those people to enjoy.

How fun you find this game does depend on how you feel about the Pokemon trading card game IRL. I was a casual fan as a kid, so I found the game very fun. If you can’t fucking stand the Pokemon trading card game, this game won’t save it for you. Oh well.

The field pixel art is gorgeous. It looks very much like Pokemon Crystal, but with a lot of tile animation which makes the environments come alive. Its very cute.

The Team Rocket grunt characters are wearing red uniforms. Very cute.

Team Rocket


Characters face sprites have three emotions, netural, happy, and sad. The characters faces react when they draw a new card, and based on how they feel about the match. NPCs have absolutely no poker face. This makes gameplay more interesting, as it adds an element of attempting to read and predict your digital opponent. Its very simple, but its compelling.

I like this game. Good times. If you’re a pokemon fan and it sounds interesting to you, give it a whirl.

Blorbos from my game

Was Ronald the first friendly-rival in a Pokemon videogame? I’m sure somebody knows for sure, sperg out in the comments #engagement

Old men from pkmn ????

Palette limitations on the GBC meant they had to give this girl green tears. I love it. I like when small children crey, welcome 2 my twisted mind nah

thank god they gave Courtney an anime laugh in this game. Very good game design.

The way they’ve drawn this guy’s glasses is great. They’re like fucked up eyes

always love a Anime Scientist

Introverted Pikachu-loving NEET.

Team Aqua

nuclear family

glub glubbo

Rancid old man

Rancid old lady

Facemasked chef.

Extroverted Pikachu-loving NEET.

Firey chef men (return of the fucked up glasses)

These motherfuckers. kinda gay ngl

More mother fuckers.

The guy in the hat wants you to build a deck with all the legendary birds and dragonite in it? And they’re such bad cards and its a three type deck why. I ended up building a deck based around the birds, the eeveelutions, and the dratini line. It ended up working pretty well, and it was an interesting challenge building a three-type deck. but it also fucking sucked

anyway the girl just looks cool

christ the final boss is so good. look at him. he has evil red eyes its so good

imakumi? red version

President and CEO of The Pokemon Company, and the producer of Pokemon, Tsunekazu Ishihara

One of eight powerful post-game bonus bosses, a ghost locked away in a sealed shrine for being too good at pokemon cards, cat faced man

see, this is one of the things which keeps me coming back to media for children occasionally. It’s just so fun and corny and brazen to play this shit completely straight. yes, somebody could be so good at pokemon cards they need to be sealed away. its not even noteworthy, this is just a common trope. its mundane. a ton of kids shit does this and it owns. other ghosts include a clown and a plague doctor