Darkrider

CHARLES RAFFERTY The Problem with Early Warnings People don't like to leave a party unless the house is actually on fire. Even then, if the flames are far enough away to be pretty, they'll finish their drink, take one more pass at the hors d'oeuvres. How things happen has always been unclear. Hurricanes begin in a place where no one lives. Agents of the government start to wear masks. Fascism is a word my neighbors won't use yet. They are following the law, they say, and the sirens are coming for someone else.

This hit so fucking hard today.

Rendering local videos is definitely a resource-intensive process that, optimally, is usually a job for a dedicated desktop PC. A gaming laptop is alright for playing games but most streamers uploading VODs to YouTube are using a rig with a powerful CPU and graphics card.

Doesn’t Twitch automatically save the VOD after you finish streaming, or are you generating a local copy to upload to other platforms?

Rough sketch of Sans from Deltarune/Underatale. The art program color wheel can be seen in the top right corner.

🎺💀

Xern sketch!! Whoa!!

a meme a rooftop covered in a massive amount of snow labelled "the OC lore contained within me at any given time" and someone on the bottom right corner of the rooftop starting to shovel a small clearing that's labelled "the OC lore I've publicly shared"

lore runs deep and snow just keeps falling

“He came from the east, seeking a cure from the curse. But there was no salvation; only lordship, or the dark.

So he left the Throne of Want, forsaking all his crowns, and disappeared into the deep. Some think he despaired, yet others say that he followed another, the phantom of an old companion.”

And to think all it took was the DS3 servers going offline to finally lock in and kill Vendrick!

DS2 will always have my respect for expanding the world and the setting in new and exciting directions; it had a vision that made enduring all the gameplay jank worth it.

Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Aeos, it’s that the mask gets itchy. You’ve worn thousands like a second skin. But the real one needs to breathe eventually, and they will slip off. And I’m worried about what you’ll see when it does. Will you like it or hate it? Will you even recognize yourself?”

This is not just the exceptional, brazen acts of one senile madman (though all of this is true). These are the acts of a dying empire doing whatever possible to stay on life support, in support of a global economic system designed to funnel wealth to a shrinking minority. This system must be ended.

Local affairs being what they are, we’ve already seen the US being willing to interfere within Latin American electoral processes to gain influence, bribe their politicians for resource extraction, and fuel the capitalist machine for the economy and our billionaires. Everyone else loses.

In times like these, a materialist analysis of the situation offers clarity, strength of conviction, and unequivocal conclusions of who is in the wrong here. America is the largest and most dominant force that everyone south of our border is downstream from this power dialectic.

I don’t think anybody is looking to see how consistent your moral calculus is before passing judgment on your assessment of the situation. It is precisely this kind of hand-wringing that brought about the justifications for Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless others. Now they’ve dropped all pretense.

I’d go so far as to say that this is an unfortunate and very liberal (and thus ineffective) thing to do. It dilutes the main point of contention, that America has performed an unequivocally evil act purely for its own interest. Nothing else should be a factor in our calculation.

One thing that is unnecessary in all this is all the prefacing people feel like they have to make before criticizing Trump kidnapping a foreign president. We didn’t put up with that bullshit for Gaza, we don’t need it here. Nobody who demands that kind of “nuance” is arguing in good faith.

“There is a radio in the distance. A radio of the world. Playing sounds: Good morning, Elysium. Soon you will return to the world.”

4 games that defined my 2025!

The software I used & the art I made!

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is free on Internet Archive for the foreseeable future.

Hard to put to words how much I’m blown away by this piece! Truly stunning depiction of the big tiger, captures his aura and disposition perfectly! Thank you for always making the holidays something truly special ❤️

An illustration off big muscular anthro tiger sitting on a throne and looking at the viewer.

Christmas gift to my dearest @darkrider213.bsky.social of his amazing and always inspiring character Huxian! 🧡🧡🧡

Whatever survives Xander’s flare nuke gets a polearm piercing them at meteoric speeds. A powerful duo indeed!

Thanks again for this awesome piece, the way you nailed their look in the FF Tactics visual style is so so cool!

As a Christmas present for @darkrider213.bsky.social since we’ve both been playing Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles recently, I drew our two fursonas, Xander and Huxian, dressed as our favourite jobs in the game: Arithmetician and Dragoon respectively.

Happy holidays, man. ✨

One of these days I'll go back to DS3 to do a faith run with that weapon and a lightning infusion. Hilarity shall ensue

Can't believe it took me this long to make the connection to DS3, but I forgot how broken soulslike weapons like the Fire Knight's Greatsword can be when they have natural elemental damage built-in and can be infused to gain the right stat scaling.

Close enough. Welcome back Lothric Knight UGS

“You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”

There are no lights. There are no ornaments. There is no sign of the holidays in these halls. But it is still there, in sentiment, in the unspoken, beyond silence and pain. And therein lies the gift, the goodwill. There is still a Christmas of a sort here; perhaps all the more faithful to its origin

Some thoughts: When using GenAi as a mood board you don't get sources. This means you deprive yourself from knowledge. You generated a location? You deprived yourself of knowing more about the interesting parts of the world and why things came to be. Generate an armor or costume? You deprived yourself on real world techniques, function, form and history. You generated art inspirations? You deprive yourself of learning about artists from history or lock out living ones from potentially being hired. Ethical issues of using GenAi models aside, one ends up making visuals mood boards devoid of reality and history. With it one deprives themselves from learning about our world and who is living in it, inadvertently making your work weaker, because of how detached it is from our shared human reality and history.

Been thinking on the use of GenAi for mood boards. Ethics and legal risks aside, I truly believe using GenAi as references deprives one of many pivotal things.

Here’s a blurb on what I mean:

Patches from Fromsoft games. Bald man in armor and no eyebrows.

"I asked ChatGPT"

"I asked Grok"

Well I asked Patches and he said "There, that hole. Take a closer look."