this is not me trying to defend nintendo’s business practices or say that either of these games don’t have flaws, but I think a lot of the comparisons people are making between breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom are a little unfair and don’t really take into account that they are different games with different purposes.
“breath of the wild feels so empty compared to tears of the kingdom” … yeah? with breath of the wild, one of the game’s main themes was isolation. you wake up in the future far after the apocalypse you were trying to prevent has already settled. you have no memories, very little strength. just like hyrule, just like zelda, all you have is your will to continue. breath of the wild is the quiet moments, the secret spaces, the weight of the world that has continued to turn without you still resting on your shoulders.
tears of the kingdom is not like that. hyrule is no longer the wild. it is no longer quiet and lonely. there’s community. every sidequest is intertwined. your friends fight alongside you. this isn’t “fixing” breath of the wild, this is it’s natural continuation. as time goes on the world continues to heal and rebuild. if breath of the wild was clawing hope, tears of the kingdom is direct action.
like yeah there are things tears is doing better and (imo) things breath of the wild did better. but i don’t think either one is a replacement for the other.
I don’t think I’ll ever be over Defunctland’s last name being Perjurer. Mind-bogglingly intense and thorough research, and this fucker’s name is Person Who Makes Shit Up.
“‘Yeah? You want to shoot something? Bastards!’ They all stared, Carcer too. Reg had stood up, was waving the flag back and forth, was clambering over the barricade… He held the flag like a banner of defiance. ‘You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom!’ he screamed. Carcer’s men looked at one another, puzzled by what sounded like the most badly thought-out war cry in the history of the universe. Vimes could see their lips moving as they tried to work it out. Carcer raised his crossbow, gestured to his men, and said: ‘Wrong!’ Reg was hit by five heavy bolts, so that he did a little dance before falling to his knees. It happened within seconds. Vimes opened his mouth to give the order to charge, and shut it when he saw Reg raise his head. In silence, using the flagpole as an aid, Reg got back to his feet. Three more arrows hit him. He looked down at his skinny chest bristling with feathers and took a step forward. And another. One of the crossbowmen drew his sword and ran at the stricken man, and was knocked into the air by a blow from Reg that must have felt like it had come from a sledgehammer.”
— Terry Pratchett, “Night Watch” (I’m posting this whole thing not ONLY because it’s a great scene in itself, but also to draw a contrast with another scene. Remember in Reaper Man when Windle Poons woke from death and had to lie on his slab for a while wondering what happened and how to move his body and get his organs working right? Reg Shoe didn’t have to do that. Granted, at the end of the fighting Reg considers what’s happened to him and falls over because his brain thinks he should be dead, but Vimes indicates it won’t be too long before he’s up again. But here in the moment, Reg didn’t stop to think about it, and he gathered perfect control of his body to help beat the crap out of the bad guys. Reg Shoe, who started his literary life as a comedic side-character, a parody of overzealous community organizers–a good-natured, kind parody since Reg’s activism never hurts anyone and is never described in a negative light–gets a stunning backstory, in which it’s firmly established that the reason he’s undead and not dead-dead is that he’s too full of fire and passion about the rights of his fellow citizens to leave the land of the living behind. ‘You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom’? A strange battle cry, but one that turned out to be true for Reg, at least. (via noirandchocolate)
The other thing I absolutely love about Reg is that he actually, canonically, is too angry about injustice to die.
And I juxtapose that with pterry’s telling Neil Gaiman that his anger is what’s made him a bestselling author.
And yeah, you know what? These books are angry. Vimes is angry and Susan is angry and Granny Weatherwax is angry, and the entire Monsterous Regiment is angry, and sometimes Adora Dearheart is angrier than all of them. Moreover, Tiffany can’t become a witch until she’s willing to be angry.
You have to do the right things with your anger. You have to drag goblin-killers to justice, not get drunk and fight the gutter. You have to tell the football gangs to shove it, not tell your best friend to walk away from fame and fortune. But anger is what changes the world.
And Pratchett’s anger resonates with us, and makes us recognize our opportunities to change the world. We read these books and we catch the anger like a disease, and discworld shapes it like a mold, and so his anger goes on living, goes on revolutionizing, even after he dies.
GNU Terry Pratchett
“It’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”
ancient humans were also just some guy, if you got a baby from 60,000 BC and raised him in the 21st century he’d just be another teen boy named logan who tech decks off your arm
this boy from tom björklund’s art WOULD own a minecraft creeper plushy
YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ok ok ok I’m so sorry but I HAVE to talk about this
there’s something so loving about what tom björklund does and just- fuck I’m foaming at the mouth here
facial reconstruction isn’t a new concept (see the Kennewick Man/Patrick Stewart incident) but it’s difficult to find people that are truly good at it! genuinely there is a big gap in this field because there just aren’t a lot of people who do it professionally!
facial reconstruction, especially from bone or bone fragments, is such a fascinating intersection of art and science, and a tremendous amount of care is put into determining what these people might have looked like.
with that said, it’s VERY easy to screw it up
configuring muscle attachments and fat distribution is genuinely *very* difficult to do, and when you do it badly, you get this (pictured above). by adding too much muscle, they gave this 600 year old man a VERY interesting jawline (notice that the bottom of the chin doesn’t match up with the bone at all!) and they *really* made him look older than he was. would you believe me if I said that he was estimated to only be 46 years old?
basically I’m just REALLY excited about Tom Björklund’s art because it’s amazing work, just from an anthropology perspective
just look at this!!!
facial reconstructions aren’t just an artsy thing that you can just say “oh, that’s cool!” to
by giving these people faces, even if they aren’t always accurate, we open the doors for the average person to connect with the past at a very human level. sure, looking at bones is cool, but looking at art of someone that lived thousands of years ago is *incredible*
looking at a picture of a boy that lived thousands of years ago and thinking “yeah, he would’ve loved Minecraft” is EXACTLY the reaction that these pieces are meant to elicit
I’m sorry but i’m so sick of shit like this. I don’t know you Patricia and with that attitude i don’t care to get to know you.
Why has Marvel suddenly become the poster child for everything wrong in this world? For the 100th time no, Marvel movies are not all the same and they’re not “souless”. Anyone saying this, obviously hasn’t even tried to watch a Marvel movie. Ever thought that maybe these characters/stories resonate with people? Cause let me tell you, i’ve felt more emotions from a Marvel movie than i have from some “high art” bullshit.
And the AI shit, really? Lesser people have tried and failed to copy the MCU bc they lacked the heart and soul it took for the MCU to be built in the first place, and u think that an AI could write a Marvel movie and have it be good????? Be serious, even the worst Marvel movie would be better than the best an AI can “come up with”. Also, implying that the work put into Marvel projects is as shit as the “work” of an AI, is insulting to the countless of talented artists who have been working their asses off in every single project. Instead of doing shit like this, ever thought that you should use your platform for sth good? Like idk, talking about the REAL issues AI is causing to art? Don’t you, as an artist, understand that AI is a threat to everyone? To art itself?
But i guess you’ve all learned the trick by now. Want attention = start talking shit about the MCU. At least be more creative, this technique has gotten old
I’m bored, Patricia 🥱🥱
The issue is less the MCU and more Marvel Studios and the studio is representative of the modern studio system.
Here’s how things used to work (adjusting the terms and dollar amounts to modern equivalents):
A studio would produce a wide variety of films. Some of these would be big-budget tentpole franchise releases as sequels to popular films or based on bestselling books. They’d cost around $150-250 million and, with proper marketing investment, would earn their money back easily (even if they were crap). Some would be mid-budget more experimental films costing $25-50 million that were based on lesser-known novels, comics, video games, etc. or were original screenplays. Some would be low-budget movies costing $2-10 million or so with nobody with name recognition based on an obscure or older book or an original screenplay. These movies wouldn’t often have the large marketing push behind them and some would be hits, some would be modest successes, some would flop, and some would flop initially but make money later.
The problem is our economic system overall shifted. Long-term investments are now frowned on because it means you’re not making more money this quarter than you made last quarter. Line Go Up and if Line No Go Up, Company Bad.
Investment in riskier mid- and low-budget movies is no longer viable because those films typically have a long tail. They don’t make their money on opening weekend, they make their money slowly over time with home video sales, licensing for television and streaming, and maybe a bit of licensing for ones that get a cult following.
So studios want to make their shareholders happy, so they’ve gone all-in on the safer big-budget franchise movies.
And the MCU is the poster child for safe big-budget franchise movies because they’ve never had a real flop, just movies that “underperformed”.
Most of the complaints from directors aren’t about the quality of the MCU films but about the change in the studio system that has eliminated the ability to get smaller and more original films made. But the trade magazines these interviews are for can’t print “Famous Director Says Studios Killing Innovative Cinema” because these magazines make most of their money advertising movies for big studios. So they follow up by asking the director’s personal thoughts on superhero movies so, when the director says something mild like “they’re not for me, I don’t watch them”, the trade a nice clickbaity headline “Famous Director SLAMS Superhero Movies, Says They’re Killing Cinema!!1”
So the impression we get are stuffy old directors shouting at clouds and riling up all the pretentious self-proclaimed cinephiles who will pile on attacking superhero movies as “not real cinema” and then The Discourse™ happens and yadda yadda and we’ve once again lost the real problem:
It’s not that studios are making superhero films, it’s that studios are only making superhero films.
This is also bad for the studios as all their eggs are now in one basket. They no longer have the cushion of modest-budget modest-performance films to ensure they’ll make money even if a big-budget movie flops, it’s ONLY big budget movies which means each movie HAS to be profitable by a huge amount.
Now there’s a lot of other bullshit going on here (executives are non-creatives so overly rely on formulas to judge “good” screenplays which is why movies feel same-y, Hollywood Accounting, studios spending money attempting to launch their own streaming services rather than continuing to license to existing services, many executives still functioning under the idea things still work like they did in the 80s/90s, etc.), but this is the crux of the issue with why it seems everyone’s attacking the MCU specifically and frankly, I’ve rambled on enough here.
PS. I like the MCU. I like that they’re branching out, particularly with the TV shows, into other styles of story. Not all of them are for me, but not all art should be for me personally because that would be boring. There have been very few “bad” MCU films, a feat that pretty much no other long-running franchise can claim. The problem isn’t with the MCU or with superhero movies, it’s with capitalism.
maybe wander around the house/stretch a little if you’ve been sat at the computer a while (artists especially: sTRETCH THOSE WRISTS)
reply to that text/message from earlier you’d forgotten about
maybe send a nice lil message to someone having a bad day?
I just would like to thank everyone who ever reblogs this so that it somehow ends up back on my dash because I usually need the reminder (especially the drinking water one)
Of all posts to see with a million notes, I’m glad it’s this one.
Ezekiel Norton is a Cartoonist / Tinkerer / Super Genius. He is currently working on a webcomic, Epee, which has not launched yet, as well as a few other projects which aren't as high priority. This blog will be used for posting his personal drawings sketches and, one expects, the usual Tumblr silliness as well.
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