"Viktor Antonov, The Artist Behind Half-Life 2 And Dishonored Among Many Other Games Has Sadly Passed

Fandom: he's gonna manwhore His way Out of it

Odysseus: nah, I'm gonna stab him until He beg me to stop

Me: even better!

?

@maroonsoldier

Boop 🌟

just a little sketch because drawing these two saves me from depression 🙂‍↕️

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

okay trope idea

Spider-Man ranks higher than johnny in an online who's the hottest/most alurring superhero.

People think that mask is part of the allure or don't care about his face when his body looks like that.

Johnny gets mad starts letting things slip about spidey that he thinks are embarrassing

peter just laughs and teases Johnny like

"well as the 4th hottest super hero in new york-".

the trend of shrinking hans capon into a submissive, feminized “twink” is so regressive and creatively lazy. 

the idea that hans’ theatrics or needing rescue in-game automatically code him as a “bottom” is a stereotype literally rooted in misogyny. since when do drama, sass, or vulnerability—traits routinely gendered as “feminine”—equate to sexual submission? 

this is a really reductive take. it weaponizes patriarchal baggage to pigeonhole queer dynamics: softness = weakness, flair = passivity. it’s the same toxic logic that paints flamboyant men as punchlines or prey in mainstream media. 

capon’s theatrics aren’t a surrender of power. they’re tools of a cunning nobleman. queer history shows us that femmes and flamboyant individuals have always been leaders, provocateurs, and survivors—not passive accessories. reducing capon to a “bottom” because he’s extra not only severely misreads his character, but regurgitates the old and tired lens that equates femininity with inferiority. 

fans can argue it’s “fiction” and “preference” and “harmless fun”, but when these stereotypes dominate, they reduce gay men to hollow fantasies for straight and heteronormative audiences instead of fully realized people. personal preferences in fiction aren’t inherently harmful, but when entire communities default to flattening queer characters into hetero-adjacent roles… it reinforces the idea that same-sex relationships must mimic heteronormativity to be legible.

let characters be messy, loud, and authoritative without straitjacketing them into roles that confuse personality with sexual position.

trying to remember how to draw

I'm just warming up, but I have a huge desire to draw a spider-boy