Gracious Anthracite @anthracite@dragon.style

Is it #introduction time again? Sorta seems to be.

Hi, I'm Peggy, and I run dragon.style. If "paying $20/mo to keep it up, putting off updating it for a year, and occasionally opening the place up for new users" qualifies as "running" it.

I am a trans lady who spends most of her time drawing complicated sci-fi comics and sort of earning a living doing that via Patreon.

Adobe Illustrator has been my main medium since 2000, it's a pretty unusual choice but it works for me.

I used to do burlesque, then pole dance, as a hobby and a way to stay fit. I miss it and should find something similar again.

You may know me from elsewhere as Egypt Urnash.

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Spyro 1 focuses entirely on movement and navigation. The vast majority of the dialogue in the game is stuff like “Hi Spyro! Have you tried pressing X at the peak of your jump to glide?”. It has a paper-thin story, and a world populated entirely by enemies and things you can kill for hit points. It relied entirely on its amazing level design and it’s gorgeously stylized art.

2, on the other hand, is FULL of story. Every new level is a new situation, with an NPC to explain it and beg for your help. It’s also got a few game design ideas borrowed from what we now call “Metroidvanias” - you *cannot* 100% any of the first hub world’s levels until you’ve been to the second hub world and acquired a new skill that lets you access new parts of the levels.

It’s a really huge change. You go from chill places that all have the same story - Spyro is recovering gems, freeing dragons, and catching the odd egg thief - to a series of places with their own problems. Everywhere you go in 2, someone is fighting someone else and wants your help; Avalar is a magical land full of conflict.

I’m finding that I can’t play 2 for as long at a stretch as 1, simply because of this added narrative complexity. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; sometimes you want to hang out in the chillout room listening to ambient, sometimes you wanna be on the dance floor with the music that makes you wanna shake your ass, you know?

Part of this, I’m sure, is due to technical limitations. Insomniac was pretty much starting from scratch with 1, and had to figure out how to get charming animation into a PS1, how to make fun levels to dragon around in, and lots of other stuff that 2 was able to build on to make a much more complex game. 2 probably has everything they had to leave on the cutting room floor during the process of getting 1 out, plus a ton of new stuff that came up while they were making it!

It is 5:15 and the sun has gone down and my entire body just wants to curl up and sleep. I guess this is why Seattle spawned an international coffee empire.

Awrite, fuck it, I just found the 'careers' section on Blaine Kern Studios' site (they're one of the two major float-building companies in NOLA) and sent them a resume and a chatty cover letter. I'm not expecting anything to happen what with them mostly being sculptors but you never know.

Sudden thought: if I end up moving back to New Orleans next year, I should take my portfolio around the various local companies that make Mardi Gras floats and throws.

"What's your job?" "I make Mardi Gras happen."

And let me also say #ThankYouPatrons to the folks who help pay the hosting bills for dragon.style. Birbsite is a hellish wasteland in part because their profit model involves keeping you there as long as possible to show you ads; here, you can stop by, communicate, and then get on with your day. Thanks for helping to keep this place running, everyone! 💖♥️🐉🔥🔥

Hey, I wanna take a second to say #ThankYouPatrons.

I’ve gotten more money by using Patreon to ask my fans for their direct support than ads EVER made for me. It feels a lot better to do it this way, too. Thanks a ton for your support, everyone. 💖

Okay I think we're back.

Sorry about the downtime, folks. We ran out of disc space on Friday morning, and the usual methods of clearing space did nothing. I chose to err on the side of moving slowly rather than doing SOMETHING even if I wasn't sure it was right, so it took the whole weekend to get things up again.

We are now paying ten bucks more per month for some extra storage, which should help keep this from happening again any time soon. I need to make sure there is some monitoring in place on this new space, but right now I just wanna have some supper and play Spyro for a while.

We might be back?

I’ll be taking the site down again in a bit; I moved all the images to a new drive and wanna make sure they’ll actually go to the right place and persist across a reboot before I say we’re back.

I am really glad Toys For Bob replaced the bone in the hair of the gorillas and monkeys on Tree Tops with an arrow. They went from looking cringeley Ethnic to just plain goofy.

Not so hot on the one hard-to-get-to dragon in that level who has, uh, really big red lips, though.

Also getting 100% on Tree Tops is exactly as much of a pain in the ass as it was in the original, and I have resorted to visiting good ol' GameFAQs to learn what to do there. And for the 99 lives code because I ran out oflives repeatedly missing the supercharge jumps in Fucking Tree Tops.

Mass-downloading all my Furaffinity favorites and setting my main desktop to endlessly cycle through all this weird-ass furry porn when I'm at home continues to be one of the best life choices I've made in years.

There is an article relating to Mastodon on the front page of HN this morning. Five hours in and it’s still hasn’t had anyone going on about how terrible Masto is because it SUPPRESSES MY MARGINALIZED RIGHT WING DISCOURSE WAAAH yet. I feel like it will be an important milestone when we see one of these fall off thee front page without getting any of that kind of comment.

it's that time of night when i contemplate just drawing some weird porn because I didn't make myself spend as much time drawing comics as I wanted to today and I want to keep rebuilding the habit of "spending a certain amount of every day drawing"

except nothing's inspiring me in that direction, maybe i should just go to bed

Passing thought: Maybe it's just that I have retweets off but I sure did not see much of an outpouring of emotion from Comics Twitter over the death of Stan Lee. Like, I think I saw more emotion over Ditko dying, and Ditko was a crabby bastard who sat alone in his lair drawing creepy Objectivist tracts for the past forty years.

This thought brought to you by visiting DA and seeing a picture of Mary Jane crying in front of Lee's grave.

Actually now that I think about it I kinda want to do one of those "Dead colleagues greet you at the gates of Heaven" drawings oh him except it's Kirby and Ditko and all the other Marvel artists who got stiffed on co-creator credit and money for years holding him down and beating the shit out of him.

Finished "The Return Of The Obra Dinn". More guessing than I am entirely comfortable with was involved. But at least now I know when the monkey died.

A very satisfying logic puzzle, for the most part. Identifying the otherwise-anonymous crew members by their slightly distinctive shoe choices was more than I was willing to do, though, so I just guessed those.

Worth the money, I think.

Getting back to drawing some Parallax. There are backgrounds I need to design for this set of VX10 pages and I am just totally punting on that in favor of having some fun knocking out character drawings.

It's late at night and I should have done a lot more drawing today but I had no energy so I end up just drawing an alternate color scheme version of my fursona with a thick, short girlcock.

@mira

It probably would, especially if you can get the knack of using it without resting your arm's weight on it. Or at least that's my guess based on what's minimized wrist issues in my career as an artist, especially after switching to using my Wacom stylus for everything.

DM me a Paypal/Square/etc address?

I just got a message from a couple theatre students in England who want to use my Tarot deck as the structure for some randomized performances.

I really need to get that reprint moving and all I wanna do is draw Parallaaaaxxxxxxx *whine*.

Assorted thoughts:

It's a little thing but I really miss watching the treasure cascade out of one chest and into another between zones. It celebrated MY HOARD, and made me smile at all the shiny things cascading by, which distracted me from the load times. Otherwise I have no complaints so far; it's Spyro, with modern camera controls and at least three orders of magnitude more polygons on everything.

It sure is weird to rescue a crystal-caught dragon and see this lovingly-modelled character, who will never appear ever again in the entire three games, pop up and say "Hey Spyro! Press the JUMP button at the peak of your jump to glide!". Or something else similarly, and blatantly, tutorialesque. That's really gone out of style in the twenty years between the original game and now, and spending a few thousand dollars worth of person-hours on sculpting, painting, and animating each of them highlights that a LOT.