living aircraft

• OK so I fucked up and should have posted 3 months ago when the New year was actually still the “New year”. But I figured I’d do it when I finished Divinity Original sin 2 for a review. To be honest I hate sitting down and writing huge paragraphs. But I always seem to let the updates pile up until I have no choice but to make a wall of text. Here is your wall of text: (Special thanks to Hydro who drew Ingo and I holiday cards even though they never made it to our place *grumble *grumble*)

• This year has been a year of firsts really. First time living with a boyfriend, First time with Hookah, Discovering Kratum, and first time going to a couple of hard core EDM shows.  We went n saw 1)infected mushroom, 2)Diesel boy, 3)Carl Cox at the Midway in San Fransisco. I can confidently tell you that Ive been slammed in a mosh pit, nearly puked in a bar trash bin, took my gold hat and cut a rug dead center of the blast area of the sub woofers. Little people in suits and ties playing with finger lights, old 70 year old men in military dress blues rocking a whiskey to the hardest shit you’ve ever heard. Face painters, and random dudes fishing for MDMA. People coming to dance wearing only bra and panties, and some people dressed as dinosaurs chilling out to the high powered sound system. Shit didn’t stop till 3Am either. What I will say about Infected mushroom was that it was really cool to see the team, especially the guy who played the guitar on stage. I love some of their singles and could hear them sampling songs from their library. As far as the set went, It was good- yet I prefer their singles more. That crowd was more about the Psychedelic theme in nature: Weirdos and hippies. We left near the end of their set exhausted but excited for more. Ingo introduced me to Diesel Boy, a world renowned Drum & base DJ who tore up the floor at the DNA lounge while people outside roamed the street looking for the GDC after parties. We saw The Carl Cox last Friday and sweated it out for 6 hours to the most electrifying house music this side of the pond. This crowd was more horny and a lot more druggy then the other shows, but everyone was enjoying themselves. Everyone. It didn’t matter that you had to fight your way to the bar to get a drink, you did it- and you got the fuck back in there. I recommend you go to a EDM show at least once.  Just don’t get caught bringing in outside liquor.

***This month I’m taking off for the 12 continuing education credits I need to earn to keep my day job. Its going to take about 2 weeks to do. So I only have room to make the minor changes to the finished Atoll comic. I’ll be back in May to continue Prince Tomcat/Calamity comic while I work with Ingo to learn the 2018 version of Blender.

***Atoll Lab short story Is officially done for now. This weekend I intend to edit a couple of pages towards the beginning/middle for quality and contrast. If you liked the 2 porn pages currently showing in the Atoll Tab, You have 1 week to save the original versions. No dialogue will be edited, so it is safe to read from front to back.

I hope you guys have enjoyed this project. I started this comic in April of 2015 during the beginning of my 2nd year of medical school. It has taken a ridiculously long time, one page a weekend in between requests and other things I owed. I started a patreon to showcase these comic arts and It got me through a particularly stressful 3 trimesters. Originally meant to be a mechaphillia porn comic, I advanced the story, and realized pretty quick that I had grown beyond this basic idea. I fell in love with the world I had made up. And so I resolved to just finish my thoughts here, independent of whether or not anyone would take interest. Some of you did, and I am very happy.

Special thanks to Cerebralerror, Gunnerrott, for turning the shitty dry ass k-rations I call dialogue into something manageable. Good editors/proofreaders are valuable and should be squirreled away when you find them. Shout out to the love of my life Aeroingo, who took time out of his music career to talk me down, and prop me up when I felt like shit some days. And shout out to GhettoDan who is helping me with Russian translations.

• In February, I took Ingo and May to see what was to be my first Broadway show. I couldn’t have started with a better show either, That’s right: I saw The book of Mormon. It was fan-fucking-tastic. A collaboration between Robert Lopez, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone, the guys painted a hilarious story of a young Mormon missionary who dreams of being sent to Orlando Florida so he could visit Disneyland while doing his missionary work. Instead He is teamed up with a sidekick whilst being sent to Uganda where 80% of the poor black African villagers had AIDS. The people walk around starving under the tyranny of a local drug warlord (who shoots people in the face). The two young Mormon elders must reconcile their differences and deliver the small Ugandan town from Evil. Great songs, Great laughs, and interludes where Jesus spoke to the audience with the voice of Cartman from south park. Go see this show if you possibly can, Its incredibly worth it. But beware of scalpers who May end up buying out the theaters only to turn around and sell them through a re-seller at twice the price. I learned the hard way that the only way to get cheap tickets to hot shows is to camp the shows websites waiting to strike the moment they drop.

• Recently re-discovered one of the very early childhood books I read before I even knew how to tell time. I wasn’t sure what conversation lead to me to scour the internet for the name of this, but with assistance I was able to remember just how far back the living machine thing possibly went.  Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel named” Marry Anne” (the machine is a girl!). While I cant remember what the story was about, the face of the shovel really burned into me as this friendly amazing..thing. Almost like she was this huge dragon that loved her human enough to work her treads off. I think the story was maybe based off the industrial revolution?? But kudos to the artist. In any case, was their was a book, commercial, movie about living machines that might have sparked all of you guys as young impressionable kids? If so I’d love to hear it.

^ worlds most beautiful roar

• Lastly, My boyfriend and I started the kedo diet around the end of January. For those not acquainted with the kedogenic diet, It involves adhering to a strict carbohydrate cap of 40-50 grams of carbs a day. The idea of the diet, is to cycle out your readily available sugar reserves and starve out the gut bacteria that craves and uses the sugar before it uses fats. We started the diet, and gym late January and now I am proud to announce that as of April 4rth I have lost 55lbs. Ahead of schedule in my 100lbs loss before the end of the year. ;;thumbs up; If you are looking to get serious about weight loss, and are willing to give up carbs for a year or two, Check out this link: https://www.ruled.me/guide-keto-diet/

To be Continued…

I wanna talk a little bit about this game “Horizon: Zero Dawn” I just beat two nights ago. 2017 has seen a swath of really good AAA titles and this one is no exception. This, is easily my game of the year. However when they first started advertising this thing a year and a half ago, I had zero faith that it could even be good. the concept was so grandiose, I thought to myself that it was probably either going to be fucked to hell by the publishers into a mindless shooter (that wants to be farcry 3), or a half-baked idea with robot dinosaurs with an immature plot. I am glad I was really wrong on this..

***WARNING THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE GAME***

If you intend to play this then just skip this post. You’ve been warned.

1. Lets talk about the plot and of Ted Faro. On its surface, the plot of Horizon is relatively non complex: You are an outlasted woman of a pseudo primitive native American tribe trying to come to the terms with the fact that large foreboding replicas of robot animals (a remnant of the ancient metal devil your Goddess fought in times past) are growing ever violent. You gain the respect of your tribe just in time for outsiders to appear and murder your father prompting you to leave your sacred lands on a quest for revenge. Salt in a retelling of the origin of Skynet from the terminator series, and you get where I am going with this. As you progress the story, you start finding audio logs and other tidbits of backstory about the world you live in. This is the real genius of this game. You find out about 2 key individuals: a man named Ted Faro and a woman named Elizabet Sobek. Ted Faro in particular, was a bajillionare ceo of a robot company living high on the hog in far far future Denver Colorado. He one day decided that some of the money wasn’t enough, he wanted ALL of the money, and converted his company over to building military robots to quell the various terrorist threats around the globe. Ted instructed his software team to build a comprehensive combat suite between a trio of machines that A. couldn’t be hacked, B. could replicate themselves on the fly, and C. could convert biomass into emergency fuel if none was available. Mr. Faro in his confidence then sealed the fate of the world by instructing his team to NOT build a backdoor to the system. Various companies with deep pockets ordered these robots for various duties until a group of them encountered a software glitch causing them to ignore commands and proceed without limitation. These war machines replicated themselves into the thousands, far outpacing the losses they sustained fighting the humans who saw them as a threat. Mr. Faro knew he had fucked up big time, and reluctantly asked his former employee Mrs. Sobek for ideas on how to contain this problem. Elizabet Sobek was also a robotics genius, but choose to focus on green solutions for her robots. Their personalities and business practices collided making Sobek and Faro very much rivals. Sobek analyzed Faro’s mess and to her horror, realized that nothing could be done. It would take decades to brute force hack the system faro had created. Not enough time to stop the perfect storm of a robot plague from turning every living thing on the planet into food. Humanity had just 15 months left before all life on earth would be annihilated. You read various logs, holo playbacks, audio recordings of the events leading up to project Zero Dawn. Ted was forced to use all of his capitol in an attempt to save humanity. To build a sentient super computer with various subsystems that could work in tandem to brute force hack the robot plague (witch took decades), and terraform the destroyed planet into a world humans could live in again. Because of Faros short-sighted assholery, all the civilians were conscripted into the army, and sent to die against the robot army, all under the impression that they were buying time for a super weapon to be created to save the world. They weren’t told that world couldn’t be saved.

Faro never stops fucking up till the bitter end though. One of the subsystems of GAIA of project zero dawn, known as Apollo, was meant to house the whole of humanities knowledge, art, history, culture as a means to re-educate the new humans once terraforming was complete. Stricken with grief, Ted Faro came to the conclusion that the decisions that lead him down the path to destruction where symptoms of a larger problem of society. “Knowledge was a poison that would harm humanity in the new world” he thought. And so, he erased the Apollo system and murdered the zero dawn team before they could rebuild it, thus returning everything back to a primitive state. What Faro couldn’t see in his short-sighted mental state, was that taking away human knowledge of the past, only doomed the humans 1000 years later to repeat the same mistakes they could not re-learn form Apollo. Humans were still killing each other day after day.

2. The robots of the new and old world. Below are a few samples of concept art of the dozens of mecha you find in the world of HZD. Everyone thought they were robot dinosaurs because they put the most dinosaurish one on the box. The Machines of the new world all served very specific purposes regarding the new terraformation. These were not designed by people, but rather by the sentient super computer GAIA . The machines were a machine’s interpretation of animals from it’s database all given background jobs like tilling the soil, clearing away dead robots, purifying the air of toxins. They only turned violent upon the advent of the HADES subsystem. Hades by desighn, was the system that took over to wipe out everything GAIA had created if it didn’t turn out right the first, 2nd, or 3rd time. However, emancipated from the command chain, Hades was free to corrupt and influence witch machines were coming out of the cauldrons(Giant underground mega factories). Where as only geo-centric machines existed, now animalesque death machines like the thunderjaw were emerging to kill people. Their is also a very important visual distinction between the machines of the old world, Ted Faros military war robots that don’t look like animals at all, versus the ones that do-Influenced by GAIA. you will notice it straight away like salt n’ pepper, How this game has a great dichotomy between the natural world and the artificial one in the cauldrons. It makes the experience of the machines so much more powerful when the world is not already so full of tech that everything blends into the overall background. You truly have time to appreciate the mecha desighns as you hunt across the landscape. One last thing,  because the machines are the most powerful things on the planet, the ancient cultures worship their strength and every aspect of their clothing style reflects the various components pulled off of dead machines. I thought this was very cool. the various head-dresses and armor with pieces of solar paneling and wire braiding thought.

3. My no. 1 pet peeve about ancient open world games, be it fallout or Skyrim or HZD: Why is it you can go and explore places humans haven’t been to for hundreds of years, and they have an item box full of shit like fresh apples, sticks, flowers, and just about anything that people of that long dead civilization would NOT have in their post-apocalyptic office cubicle? Doesn’t anyone care how immersion breaking this is?  Like skyrim where..in the bowels of the earth inside of cairns where ancient Norse viking priests were laid to rest, right next to them is a cracked urn with a hot turkey dinner inside just waiting for you. Bullshit. If your going to do this, just put in a bunch of random shit the player cant take with them because time has decayed most of what is inside of it into unusable dust. Or- your character doesn’t even recognize half of it anyway so you cant take it. Its a minor gripe, but one i’d like to see fixed.

These images are courtesy of the website of Miguel Angel Martinez :  http://www.bymonje.com/

I don’t typically buy into DLC anymore, but HZD’s got a massive one coming up in November I don’t think I’ll be able to miss. If you want a really nice experience with good sound design and cool as fuck mecha, DO please give this one a go.

In the meantime I have created a telegram sticker of vegas the f-111 for gryff (finally fixed the nose paint) let me know what you think.