17 questions with: Almighty Watashi

I met Almighty Watashi online, when he invited me to a LARP close to the Slo-Cro border. I've yet to go, money, car and general LARP knowledge being limiting factors. But since then we've become fast (online) friends and share art, critique and love of DIY (where he's far less anal about it than I am).

Stop by his page

http://lagcity.net/

and his YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/user/AlmightyWatashi

1) How did you first get into arts and crafts?

Arts have always been here for me. Since I was a kid, I filled all papers around me with drawings, comics and even animations inside textbooks. Crafts came recently when I started making larp gear, but I just make those for myself

2) Do you have any projects planned for the future?

Curently, I'm animating a music video for our local band, Drvored with illustrations by Sven Nemet. It should be finished in about a month or two. After that, we'll probably switch to making video games. We already have a programmer programming things.

I'm also fighting in the latest martial arts movie with a few friends.

Other then that, I always have at least 20 unfinished projects crying somewhere in my dungeons.

3) How do you coordinate your making time with the rest of your life?

Currently I have a part-time job so I have enough time and not enough money.

4) Any hints and tips you’d be willing to share?

Stick to one or two projects until they are finished. Don't be like me. Unused idea is potential. Half-used idea is a waste of time.

5) Or inspiring words for those just starting out?

Not much I can say. If someone has the urge to make art, nothing should be able to stop them. Just try to find the best way to make yourself work on arts in your free time instead of doing it to avoid really important work like school or a real-world job. Starting is the hardest. You know, turning off facebook and taking a pencil.

6) What do your family and friends think of the things you make?

They vary from obsessive curiosity to dismissive acceptance.

7) Do you like/do commissions and why?

I love doing commissions, but not enough opportunities arise for that. I do some graphics/web design, but that's not nearly as fun

8) Have you ever done any collaborations and if so, how was it?

I'm doing some right now. It's a great experience because you have someone else to share the pain and glory of creating art. It also helps you work more because people rarely have their depressions synchronized, so you can encourage each other to start working

9) What scale do you prefer: making small or large things? Or somewhere in the middle?

Small things are much easier to finish. Large things are much more awesome, but take a lot of time and tend to get stuck along the way.

10) Do you have a theme that goes through all your work and if so, what is it?

Bright colors and child-like simplicity.

11) How important is the Internet in your work?

Extremely important. Without internet, it would be much harder to show your work to people or learn your craft on the go.

12) What is your favourite cartoon? Why?

Samurai Jack. It's a very elaborate series done in incredibly minimalist way. Anyone afraid that good animation is too much work should watch some Samurai Jack and see how even extremely complex scenes can be done by working smarter, not harder. Also, it's like Sergio Leone making a cartoon about post-apocalyptic cyberpunk Japan. You can't not love Samurai Jack.

13) Favourite artists: dA and otherwise

Matt Groening, Genndy Tartakovsky and Pendleton Ward. I'm still not sure that those three aren't actually one uber-person with teleportation powers

14) Favourite ice cream flavour

Kinder or Nutella, depending on the ice cream shop

15) Worst craft related injury

Nothing worth mentioning, but I'm currently in the lead with Croatian larp-related injuries

16) What is the best super power to have and why?

Telekinesis. Because it caters the lazy and is abusable as hell since it could technically also mimic flight, energy shields and million other specific superpowers

17) Song that always makes you feel better

Grandad's Flannelette Nightshirt

That's all folks! The artist feature will (hopefully) happen every last Thursday of the month. If you've enjoyed it leave a comment, share, reblog. If you would like to be featured, contact me.

Until next time

LaDIY Tasha

[Gpost] Knock-knock and the reality fragments

This is your brain on Knock-knock

If you were to say to a seasoned gamer: "Oh, it's an Ice Pick Lodge game.", that would be all the description they needed. For those of us with far less XP, I will translate what I believe this means: This game will mess with your head in subtle and creepy ways. 

Knock-knock is supposed to be a horror game. I say "supposed to be" because it isn't outright scary. It's subtle, it is what "Zodiac" is to horror movies. You won't scream and jump out of your seat as you might with "Amnesia". You may not even realize it's creeped into your head and set up residence in that part of your brain that would still check for monsters under your bed.

 

You play the Lodger, a wild-eyed self-proclaimed scientist (world-ologist, by his words), observer of nature. His slippers, night shirt and shawl make him look clumsy. His voice is a murmur of a claymation character. You never quite know if he is an insomniac, insane or just unlucky. He mutters to himself (and you) about what happens in the house. He draws you in with his peculiar ritual of checking all the lights in the house: his real house and the dream house.Your mission is to survive until morning. Sounds easy enough. It isn't.

But don't take my word for it. I asked my S.O. to write down his experience with the game, being an experienced gamer and all. So, for the first time, I'm having a guest post! Yay!

Knock-knock is a game I know by reputation. It's by Ice-Pick Lodge, a highly reputable band of lunatics. And that reputation was enough to make me reluctant to play it, because I don't deal well with the dark, or the things your imagination might put into that dark.

Knock-knock is a game about a lunatic. He reveals it immediately, as he rambles to himself about having to check the doors, walking strangely through a deserted house where the furniture fades in gradually as you stay in a room. Sometimes pop-up messages appear with his diary notes. Sometimes you go out of the house and wander through a dark forest where a little girl shows you fragments of reality.
It's eerie. Unsettling. Freaky. At the start, I was nervous what would happen. But nothing happened, so I kept playing. The house became comfortable, the weird shifting of rooms and appearance of furniture becoming routine. There was nothing to fear. 

Due to some weird glitch, my Guests have no heads...

And then the guests arrive.

The guests are strange nightmarish creatures lurking just off the edge of your vision, off the edge of the screen. If they touch you, something happens. What is it? I don't know. Things shift, weirdness appears at the edge of the screen. Just when you've got used to the house, the guests throw you off again. You don't know what touching them does to you, but it feels wrong. So you run.

It's implied that turning on the lights keeps the guests under control. Does it actually? I don't know, but I stumbled through the rooms, turning those lights on. The protagonist mutters about hide-and-seek, so I hid behind furniture, and sometimes the guests went away. There are rules, but it's hard to figure out what they are. And then the big eye appears, staring at you as you try to turn on a light. If you keep going with the light, the eye hurts you. If you don't, you can sort of step through the eye, finding yourself in an endless hallway.

What does it all mean? I don't know. There's a lot of things I didn't know about this game, because it never tells you anything, but you guess at the rules from what happens. Eventually you just want to make it through each night, watching gleefully as a progress screen advances and whimpering as (what you assume is) the health bar goes down every time you touch a guest. You run panickingly through the rooms, trying to avoid the guests as your health bar dips, shrieking as one appears just out of nowhere. And sometimes there are other things, freakish dopplegangers and little babysitters weeping in corners. Can they hurt you? You don't know, so you try, and then you still don't know.

Eventually the game ends as you finish that progress bar. An ending appears. You have no idea what it means, and you're not sure if you won or lost, but it feels satisfying. That's Knock-knock for ya. You have no idea what it's happening, but it feels like you're making progress, and it's so very satisfying.

I loved the art style of this game. It reminded me of old Russian cartoons I watched as a kid. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Ice Pick Lodge is Russian! The game contains some beautiful surrealistic artwork, named "fragments of reality", which you can obtain by facing a small spectral girl or wandering the infinite corridors, which the breaches in the reality fabric lead to. I replayed the game, just so I could collect all of them (the fact that there is a Steam achievement for it has nothing to do with it).

Disclaimer: All artwork is property of Ice Pick Lodge.

[Inkscape] Straight corner on a rounded rectangle in 10 clicks

That was a long title...
Here's the thing. I'm an Inkscape n00b and as such any long and complex procedure description sends me into a tailspin. I've looked for tutorials on how to make a rounded rectangle have some rounded and some regular corners.... or the other way around: a rectangle having one or more rounded corners. All my searching yielded results that a seasoned pro would find simple, but which made me feel fairly incompetent.

So I came up with my own solution and here is how it goes:

Btw, all the images can be enlarged by simply clicking on them.

Click 1:

Click the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle. Doesn't have to be what you're looking for as an end result.

Click 2:

Click on one of the lines of your rectangle to select it.

Click 3:

Look up. You should see something like this bar. Click in the measurement drop-down menu and select your measurement units. My inner engineer likes millimeters, but you go with whatever you like.  W is for width, H is for height, so enter the measurements you want for your rectangle.

Click 4:

On your rectangle, there is a little circle point. This will make it a rounded rectangle. If you click and drag it up or down, it gives you a curve on all four corners. You can also adjust this on that menu up top, for the sake of precision.

Click 5:

Find the Path drop-down menu and click it.

Click 6:

The first option on it is "Object to Path". Click that.

Click 7:

Now your rectangle has a red line running through it. Pick out the corner you want to remake. There should be two little circle points on each side of it. Hold the Shift key and click on each dot.

Click 8:

Find the "Make selected segments lines" button and click that. Suddenly, instead of a curve, there is a line connecting your two selected points.

Click 9:

Click on the lower of the two point and read off its X coordinate. You can copy it or just remember it.

Click 10:

Click on your upper selected point and enter the same X coordinate. This will shift that point to to right above he other one, giving you a straight angle.

There! All done! OK, so it's technically about 14 clicks, but "10 clicks" sounds better, right? This was the simplest way to do something like this, for me. I hope it helps someone out there who's starting out in Inkscape, too.

If you've enjoyed this little tutorial of mine, leave a comment and feel free to check out my other posts. Until next Thursday!

LaDIY Tasha

Star Wars Day 2014

Ok, ok, for this to work, imagine that movie previews guy reading the following:

"It was 1997. She was 11 years old and her life was about to change.... forever!"

Dun dun duuuuun! Pretty dramatic, huh?

Yeah, it was 1997 and the re-mastered version of Star Wars was out. My dad took me to the movies. I found out years later that he isn't really that into SciFi, but he took me anyway. I didn't know what the story was about. I hadn't even seen the trailer. Dad said it was an interesting movie and that I would like it.

Ten minutes in and I'm overwhelmed with déjà vu. I've seen this before. But it was different. It was funny. It was basically the same thing as Spaceballs!!!

For many people the thing that started them out in SciFi was Star Wars. They have fond memories of seeing the movies, enjoying the adventures. For me, Star Wars was a big ol' let-down because in my 11-year-old mind, it was a spin-off, an unworthy copy of the amazing cult classic, the best movie of my life - Spaceballs!

I asked a few people what Spaceballs meant to them. Feedback brought warmth to my heart. I was not the only one in love with this movie. "They don't make comedies like that anymore!" was the comment that stuck with me the most. I think it's true. The mysterious "they" do not. Mel Brooks, though maybe not very sophisticated, had a way of making you chuckle on a very human level. It was silly, tongue-in-cheek, a little bit dirty at times, but it was always warm.

I had seen Spaceballs at the tender age of five or six. You miss a lot of the jokes and references when you're that young and relying on your budding knowledge of English. It's been 20+ years since and still I discover things I hadn't noticed before. Like this one!

So in honour of May 4th, this is a tiny mention of, what will to me, always be the unsurpassed original movie from which all your fandoms were born.