Bravely Default & Chainmail Bikinis

Agnès Oblige

edea lee

While I've never fully appreciated Final Fantasy as a game, I have enjoyed it as a cultural phenomenon and a piece of art. I find the hand drawn whispy stuff very evocative. Also the costumes can be pretty cool. Pitty I don't have a 3DS to try Bravely Default on. Although I suspect that the fighting would be far to slow for me. I played games like pokemon on an emulator on my PC. I constantly had the speed button held down so I could play at a pace that would grip my ADD attention.
What sort of name is Bravely Default anyway? It's like calling it "Stoic Beige" or "Valiant Sigh". I guess something was lost in translation.

I've just been thinking about chainmail bikinis. That last sentence should definitely not be extrapolated upon, let alone uttered in the first place. I think some people are unaware of the history of it. Many assume it was made up by horny fantasy artists for the covers of 70s paperbacks, usually portraying a muscled bowl cut aryan being clutched by the aforementioned chainmail bikini wearer.
Its first appearance was during the Gothic War (535-554AD) between the eastern Romans and the crude Ostrogoths. The babarian hordes, near the end of the first phase of the war, were running out of supplies and men. Their hardy women stepped up to the plate, and alongside their menfolk, got slaughtered. Although by the end of the war Italy had been devastated and would eventually crumble to the Lombards, another germanic tribe which went on to rule Italy for 200 years. The last fighters were said to be wearing nothing but torn chainmail, resembling thongs and bikinis.
Bikinis as a concept wasn't going to be popularised until the 1940s but there are early mosaics and art from the Greco-Roman world portraying women in bikini like undergarments, predating the Gothic War by 200 years.
In certain accounts during the wars Roman generals would command their men not to harm the lady warriors because "it boosted morale for pretty much everyone." and gave rise to the mythos that chainmail bikinis were in fact, pretty good at protecting their wearer, because generally the chicks were the last ones to get shot or chopped in half.
It should be noted, that while the chainmail bikinis are a mainstay in oldschool D&D artwork, running around in your undies in 4th edition earns you absolutely no AC.

Dragons Crown Lineup - 8bit (lo-fi)

I picked the Dragon's Crown girls because they rocketed to infamy in 2013, before the game even came out. I'm not gonna flatter the shitty gaming site that started it by linking to the article. But suffice to say, they called the artist a "14 year old boy" for drawing girls in such a provocative manner, and said everyone should cut it out.
This whole thing make me furious. The last time I was this angry about artists being told what they could and couldn't draw was 2006 in which a spasticated 15 year old me tried to articulate how much religious bloodlust over free speech sucks. I didn't do a very good job. I didn't exactly read over what I wrote after I finished. Some things never change.
Also the last time artists were told what to do during a surge of fervent social engineering it didn't end well for anyone... Kotaku is a cunt.

Aveline de Grandpré - Assassins Creed Liberation

I saw her game go up on special or something on Steam, so I figured I'd hold fire on the other pixel sets I'm doing and get her out of the way.
I feel like I'm being a cheap ass and a liar when I say this stuff is 8bit. I feel like it falls under a different period of time to the stuff we're currently doing in Photoshop CS7 via a fiber optic connection beamed into your eyeballs. Although I might have to think about it a bit more. I think it's the idea that's conjured when someone says 8bit that makes me feel guilty. I didn't make this on a commodore or anything. I used a wacom tablet and Windows 7. Even so, the easiest way to label and identify this stuff is still to say 8bit. I'm digging the idea of Lo-Fi though. Just thinking out loud.

Lien Neville, Botan And headphones

Botan

Lien Neville

I was at a loss as to which characters I'd do next, so I decided to chip away at some more of the King Of Fighters girls.
In other news I've been spending far to much money on headphones! I'm definitely no expert in these matters, but I've dealt with enough headphones in my day to know bad ones when I hear them. The earbuds I mention in that post were actually super cool In-Ear ones that were super delicious. I was gutted to see them go.
These reviews are gonna be a bit garbled, most people when reviewing headphones have one set purpose in mind for them. I on the other hand wanted a nice comfortable pair for work, and a nice comfortable headset with a mic for gaming at home with.

LASER AO-HEAD: This was the first pair I got after I realised I wanted a mic for Battlefield. They're a super cheap non brand on ear set. The mic works just fine. If that's all you wanted it for then it's a decent waste of fifteen bucks. Unfortunatly you do get what you pay for. It doesn't grasp your head like a vice, which is a blessing. In fact the way it's built with the slide adjustments on the side it actually has trouble holding itself in the position you set. It just keeps on sliding down, as gravity intended it to. So you have this odd feeling that your ears are doing most of the work, but are also in a losing battle in holding the headphones up. The on ear nature of it also grinds your little earlobes up after watching a movie.
In the end I would just push it down around my neck while gaming, opting to play the sounds out of my speakers, and leaving only the mic plugged in, bent up near my mouth. This is actually a rather comfortable setup, although it totally defeats the point in having headphones. The upsides of it are having a decent long cable, with that cloth exterior. I wasn't worried about the wire getting ripped out of the set any time soon. Anyway, better not get it.

Logitech G430: I got these from JB HI-FI after I got a gift card. I'd like to say I did my homework before going out and buying this pair, but I didn't. But I'm pretty stoked with the result. It makes a cool inexpensive option for gaming. It's a full over-ear pair of cans with a mic and 7.1 surround sound. The mic on it flips up and down and can be bent around a bit. It doesn't slip off your head and is pretty comfortable. The cable is nice and long and comes with a USB adapter I wore it all day at work today and the only complaint I have about it is that it can jam into the very top of your head a bit. But that's only over a large extent of time, and I've never really noticed any irritation while shooting dudes. Once again the cable is nice and long and only goes into one side, so you're not gonna get tangled in it when you get up.
It doesn't go crazy with the bass or anything, but I'm sure if you wanted it to you can muck with the Logitech control panel shit you have to install to get the surround properly going.
I was playing Tomb Raider with them on and I started noticing sounds I hadn't heard while playing with just my PC speakers. Wood chimes clonking against each other momentarily made me stop and go "oooh."
If you want a nice cheap gaming pair of headphones I definitely recommend these.
You can't really wear them around your neck as easily as the smaller more agile pairs, it cuts into your throat a bit. So it was ridiculous to wear at work. I looked like a hardcore tech support phone operator.

Philips SBC HLI45: I’ve been using these for a year, and one of the ears has finally died. I tripped over it a bunch of times while getting up from my desk at work because I forgot they were there. They’re a 10 buck pair of on ear headphones and do a pretty good job. Obviously they lack certain subtlety to the sound and bass and everything, but for something to wear at work that you can whip off in an instant to hear someone, they’re pretty good. If I ever needed heaphones again in a jiffy and I was broke I’d get these again.

Sennheiser PX 100-II: I opted to get these over the PX 200's because they had a flatter on-ear piece, which I thought would be as good as the Philips set I had previously. The PX 200's have mini over ear pads. What I didn't reckon for was the iron grip with which these grab you with, so at the end of the day my ears have been a bit squished. I'm hoping this will ease out in time. I've tried bending them out slightly so it wouldn't be so tight, but it's pretty resilient. The phones are on swivels, so it conforms to the curvature of your weird head. I'm a bit worried about how strong the little swivels are. I wish they were steely looking and not plastic looking.
The sounds are great, and you can feel the bass piss out of it just right. It leaks 0% sound as far as I can tell so far, so I won't be bothering anyone.

It has a steel band and cushioning, which looks sexy as. I wish the cable felt as heavy duty though, it pops out one ear, which is cool, cause it doesn't get in the way. Unfortunatly the spot where the wire goes in doesn't seem particularly resilient. I'm sure when I forget I'm wearing them and get up and strange myself for the first time I'll see how they hold up.

Princess Peach & Disqus

Princess Peach, in all her glory. I never did save her. She isn't even in the original mario game I played. We had the simple (Not super) Mario Bro's that was more like a mini game than the full blown platforming experience that everyone relates to Mario now. We had it on our Atari ST (can't remember the exact model number, 520 maybe?) and was completely green, unless you plugged it into a TV screen, in which case everything popped out in glorious colour. These days I find the slideyness of Mario (New Super Mario on the NDS) just to annoying to get used to. It's like he's on a Crocodile Slide or has  I'd much rather play Duke Nukem.
I've been trialling the new embeddable G+ comment system for a wee while now, not long after it came out actually. I'm a big proponent for G+ and all its related services. I sacrificed the open nature of disqus for the new comment system even. Unfortunately I wasn't recieving notifications or emails or anything when people (seldomly) commented on my shit, so it's back to disqus, a comment system that has proven itself through thick and thin, and generally looks better than all the alternatives, including G+. Don't get me started on facebooks system, now that's the ugliest thing I've ever seen, even the Blogger default is better than that.

Princess Zelda 8bit

You can now buy this as a print!

I opted to go with the "Twilight Princess" version of Zelda, as it sort of just felt the most familiar, even though I had never played that one.
Back when we were kids me and my mate Jonathan would scrounge through the rubbish people left out on the side of the road during the Inorganics Collection. We got so much sweet loot. I managed to build my first computer scrounged from bits and pieces down the road. Once we found a giant CRT monitor, which to this day is still the biggest one I have ever seen. It took two of us to carry it, and even then we had to take breaks. I even found a box of ancient Dragon magazines from its early black and white days. Unfortunatly mum thought they were the devil, so she threw them all out, except for one I had on me at the time she snuck into my room and got them. I never really forgave her for that one. Oh well, to bad, I downloaded all the latest ones when I got my D&D Subscription. Like to see her throw away my iPad.
Oh yeah, before I get back on topic we were once shouted at by the neighbours for being wombles, which I thought was hilarious even at the time. Also I was going through some rubbish once and these older kids were walking back to their house. They saw me rifling through their rubbish and this girl went "Hey he's going through our stuff!" I looked up, decided that hissing would be the most diplomatic way to handle the girls suprise that someone would want shit that they had relinquished and then ran away down the road.

There was one other treasure we got during our adventures. A couple saw that I found some old nintendo cartridges, including the original golden Zelda cartridge, they seem stoked that someone was interested in their old console. so they brought us out their entire system, in its box and everything. Now this was a point of contention. Ethan had a playstation, Jonathan already had a sega, I had (at best) a family PC which everyone shared. HOWEVER, they handed the box to Jonathan, and there's no way a 10 year old is going to give that sort of thing up, even though I had a bunch of the cartridges and Ethan agreed I should have it. He stubbornly took his Nintendo into his house and it never left there again, even after he assured me I could borrow it sometimes. That was bullshit, I didn't need his handouts. I once suggested I should take it a couple years later, to which his dad overheard and got shitty at me because I had no right to it. He didn't understand kid diplomatic relations! He had no idea in the sort of Cold War he was nuking! There was nothing I could do after that. I'm surprised at how sad I feel writing this.
My first console was a PS3 I got last year.

Alyx Vance & Racist DJ's

Alyx was one of the first characters I remember hugging the main character, or interacting with the camera. Before that the most interaction you got was people staring at you while waggling their mouth up and down, and getting shot at. I got Half Life 2 in Thailand at their version of The Humble Bundle, a street vender who had just spent a good long while burning the games onto CDs and handily including a crack or reg key. Episode 2 glitched out and didn't work though, so I went ahead and got it during this years Steam Summer Sale. Hopefully I'll find some time to play it after I angrily finish "Tomb (Optional) Raider (mandatory)".

Apparently rather address an issue Dame Susan Devoy would prefer to just call someone a racist and be done with it. I mean, I guess that's the main weapon she rolls out, with a title like Race Relations it's easier to just call the people you represent bigoted idiots and the people you're working with creating relations with a noble blameless people.

Maybe if she went out clubbing once in a while she would have taken DJ Neill Andrew's comments a little more seriously. He owns a club, he obviously sees what's going on more than she does. Obviously he could have been more eloquent with his grievances but there is definitely a scummy set of standards that is running through the indian clubbing scene.

I haven't heard of any prolific raping going on, but I definitely hadn't heard the term "Vag pinching" till my girlfriend related her horror stories of the scene. Watching Indian dudes honing in on her and her drunk friends that didn't know what was going on sounds pretty horrific. Most of her stories revolve around Indian guys with super hard deep V necks sticking their hands up skirts and generally not responding to "No meaning no".

Although to be honest I haven't gone clubbing because the whole idea of it is pretty lame. I mean, there's no computers to hide behind and there isn't even the possibility of a decent conversation due to how loud the music is. So really all I have to go on is the complaints and corroborated evidence from chick mates of inappropriate touching and general harassment.

At this point the conversation around clubbing culture shouldn't be stifled by uptight politically correct attitudes and vilification of the messengers who've brought this to light. Anyone who's going to call DJ Neill a racist and walk away without really taking anything on board may be opening themselves up to being nothing more than a rape enabler.

Oh and another thing, New Zealand, can we stopping raping our old people? It's all kinds of wrong.

Rogue Legacy Girl

Me 'n my girlfriend are big fans of Rogue Legacy. I showed her a story the other day about this guy complaining that he had taught his girlfriend a game, and she got into it. but it got to the point that if he played any other game he was excluding her and not playing their personal "thing". Becky said that's how she felt when we don't play Rogue Legacy.
We've gotten to a point where we play pretty casually. She's not at the point yet where she can take on a boss. So we grind for gold to get our stats up. And if she doesn't get a minimum of 1500 gold then someone goes home upset.
She recently got a Divine title, which we had to screen shoot. It's happened more than once now, so that proves it wasn't just luck.

Also here's some screenshots of Rogue Legacy looking like Tron. I think it was one of the new things in the latest patch? Not sure.

Mass Effect - All The girls 8Bit

Tap for full size

You can now get this as a print!

I got Mass Effect 2 on the Holiday Steam Sale. I played through the first one yonks ago. I lent the CD to my friend and he promptly went to Australia with it.

I was a bit gutted with the game because I didn't realise I wouldn't be able to do all the side missions after doing the main story. With the Elder Scrolls games I always powered through the main storyline before carrying on with all the crazy side stuff.

Anyway, it autosaved past the point where I could just troll around the universe doing fun stuff so I never went back to it.

I always played the game as Femshep, I've heard that the male Shepard has a retarded voice actor, so that seems like justification enough to not have to play him.

Anyway, I did all the squadmates from all three games. If I've missed some just drop a comment.

Morinth was the hardest to do, apparently absolutely no one on the internet has any interest in her.

Anyway, I guess I'll play through 2 and then get the third one when it's 2 bucks on Steam.

Ashley Williams

Aria

Femshep

EDI

Jack

Kasumi Goto

Liara

Miranda

Morinth

Samara

Tali

Sarah Kerrigan - Starcraft 2

For me, Kerrigan, Queen of Blades was the face of bad ass RTS games of my childhood. Although my brothers managed to get Warcraft 2 running on our DOS machine Starcraft never really made it into our house. I'm not sure why. My brother used to go to Dick Smiths (an electronics store) and play an hour or two of it when he'd come home from school. He wasn't bothered by anyone because he had friends that worked there or something.

When I finally had a chance to get around to playing it it must have been about 2008 or so. And by that time there was no way I was going back to 640x480 resolution games.

Elizabeth - Bioshock Infinite

Elizabeth made quite a splash when Infinite came out. Even so much so that her creator told people to cut out the whole Rule 34 stuff out. Which, as a DM, I can tell you that tell you that telling the internet to stop doing something is like using your charisma and diplomacy check to pacify a Gelatinous Cube. It's not gonna work and now the cube has noticed your smell.
Yay, it's 2014. I'm glad you all made it alive. We lost a few of us along the way, but you know. They'l be ok. It looks like I did exactly the same amount of posts in 2013 as I did in 2010. 7 or so posts a month. That's not bad. There was a lot of stuff I should have posted last year. Initial experiences of work life, messing with colleagues shit, more Melbourne stuff, weird stuff that happens to me in town and the ever present street art photos I'm always taking.
February last year was my highest hitting month, and was at the height of posting the Snow comics. Work has been pretty brutal and I haven't been able to commit to ambitious projects as much as I'd like. The pixel art stuff is keeping me sated for now, and is accomplished in a reasonable period of time.
My highest hitting post last year was the Phantom Prospect guide I did not that long ago. The only other post to do any good last year was my Skadi art I did for a competition. Of my top ten hitting posts most of them are Dwarf Fortress related (from 2012). It shows how dedicated and insatiable the community is for anything Dwarfy related.