Reblogged
Another one. Have you come to regale my splendor?
Weshan.
AS FAR AS THE UES KNOWS, YOU'RE A HUMAN TO THEM.
Hello there. . . . Ah. You're asleep. You wouldn't mind if I took a few things, right?
Reblogged dragonroilz
Reblogged dragonroilz
so happy and free
this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.
which meant i went and read about snail brains.
here's the bad news, at least by human standards:
snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.
pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.
snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."
so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.
and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.
snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."
if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.
pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.
i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.
snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?
so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."
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And finally, as one more little treat for the One Year Anniversary of Gravity Circuit, we've got a small prequel comic for you folks! This comic contains some spoilers for the events of the game, so if you haven't read it yet, maybe put it off until you have played it. This comic was illustrated by @baconpal, who drew the character portraits and cutscene visuals you see in the game. The comic is also available as an imgur gallery here. Rest of the pages after the break!
aboudspeaksagain
Behind us: death, destruction, and hunger in Gaza.
Ahead of us: illness, displacement, survival by the hour.
aboudspeaksagain
Our home is gone.
My niece died because of famine.
My parents are wounded.
I am hospitalized, suffering from severe anemia caused by malnutrition.
This is not a future. This is my life in Gaza.
aboudspeaksagain
I am struggling to breathe. I need an oxygen tank to survive. Please don’t look away. Your donation could be the breath that keeps me alive.
please share
Why do we feel left behind? Because Gaza no longer matters to the world. Pain is news. Death is numbers.
Gaza now: Rain, violent winds, freezing cold. Tents flooded. People without shelter. Winter and siege are finishing what war started. 💳 Donate here ➡️ PayPal ✅ Verified fundraiser
Winter isn’t just cold it’s killing us. No shelter. Just tents torn by wind and drowned in rain.
My family and I have been sick for weeks. We need medicine, food, water just to survive.
In 9 hours, this was reblogged 300+ times. I received one donation.
If people gave 5 AUD (≈ $3 USD), this wouldn’t feel impossible.
I ask people to help me be heard, and I get blocked instead.
I don’t know what else to do. I’m not asking for attention. I’m asking not to disappear.
If you can’t donate, don’t silence me. Share.
Reblogged elizabeths-dumbassery
grimm fans stay winning (everyone who kept insisting he was evil, pay up)
She's minding her own business and sleeping. Ideal, A+, we love to see it
it's not really a cult if we can see people demonstratably be able to leave and 'wake up' from it without any further consequences
#Sorry if I'm wrong since it's been a while since I've played HK but isn't Brumm unable to leave without the help of the knight?#I do agree that Grimm isn't bad especially in comparison to other higher beings#still sketchy as hell though...#Just because we personally had a good experience with him and the troupe#doesn't mean that he's off the hook for possibly carrying out atrocities basically#Idk after the whole deal with lifeblood I'm a lot more skeptical of what the pale king doesn't like lmfao
Sure, that's one interpretation, if you assume that he's the only one speaking truthfully and everyone else is lying to you in the entire DLC, which is. Demonstratably not the case.
If Brumm is correct about everything, including 'ohh this ritual is profaning the kingdom' (which is something that the White Lady also gets aggressive about...and WL is also not a reliable narrator; she's protective of hallownest even when it's a fucked up zombie kingdom)...why does Divine exist. Why does she do the things she does? She can literally stay behind after the Ritual for purely her own reasons and is not punished for it, she only leaves if they're banished.
If Brumm's Not Allowed To Leave Without The Knight, why, then, does Brumm and Grimm's dialogue mirror each other, talking about a consequence that does not seem to be about Brumm at all actually:
It is done... and yet... It is not merely by fortune that we meet here, in the darkest, furthest reaches of the world, where my Master's scarlet eyes can not see us. Mrmm. A song that never ends… is no song at all. [...] If you wish to silence the endless song… Mrmm, meet me where it began… But if you return to the Master and complete the Ritual… Mrmm. As long as you do it without regret, I will bear you no hatred.
And so our great Ritual nears its end. Will you continue to harvest the flame, even though now you surely see the path it illuminates for us?Our scarlet eyes will watch you keenly… friend.
if you dream nail Brumm at the lantern site:
Master… are even you a slave? If so, let our chains be broken together!
And Grimm notably, does not try to stop you if you go to the lantern site, a place where he presumably can see you. He could stop you if he wanted. He won't, because it's your choice, as the independent participant of the ritual. It's Brumm's choice. It's what Brumm wants.
And doing this is how you get Nymm, who...doesn't remember the Troupe at all, and is simply allowed to live like a normal-ass person.
To be honest, I'm not even sure where I came upon it, but staring at its design, my memory stirs, something, and someone, forgotten, lost far away. The specifics elude me, but a strange sense remains, fear, but also... longing? Like a strange nostalgia for something that never happened.
And yet he still remembers the Troupe (and Grimm, lol) a little bit, but only as a dream, something he has no real connection to.
What do we draw from all this? Well, uh, Brumm is probably a bit fucked up about how reincarnation means you're losing a person you care about, for one. A lot of how he talks about the ritual betrays a very personal investment in how the ritual is going to turn out and the toll it takes, with the punchline being that he doesn't really care so much about the ritual's effects as he does about Grimm's fate. And yet, disrupting the ritual, the life's work of the troupe, gets him....release from regret and the things that have haunted him, doesn't seem like much of a punishment.
Also the Troupe is like the opposite of sketchy, Grimm literally tells you everything that's going to happen before it happens. He's giving you a choice like literally all the time. You can do as little or as much of the ritual as you want. You don't even have to talk to him ever?
#hollow knight#its so funny to me that the god of nightmares who looks like a vampire is the most ethical one#i def think theres ideas to play with about gods Needing some kind of following bc they do all seem to do/have/want that#but i can see grimm's troupe as kind of. grimm looks at that and is like ''ok how can i do this without being an asshole''
oh yeah absolutely. I think there's a desire or a need that seems to drive higher beings to Collect Mortals/Be Worshipped given how other higher beings act (including grimm's own sister), but grimm (and the nightmare king with him) seem to be the least intensely possessive-to-the-point-of-obsession about it.
It probably helps that the nightmare king seems to be basically hiding inside his vessels and thus isn't walking around getting Madness Enthrallment Aura on everything he touches, but it's fascinating in implication since Grimm seems to have tried to mitigate that urge as much as possible while still 'sating it' in a sense, where it's become a desire for companionship almost rather than a I NEED TO KEEP MY WORSHIPPERS IN A GLASS JAR AHHHHH
Instead of putting his worshippers in a jar he put himself in one
Reblogged
Also, do you have any tips on poses and anatomy? Someone else mentioned it already, but your poses are so fluid and expressive!
posted this a good while back on twitter but heres a sketchy little diagram of what I focus on with poses
most of these are important in making appealing posing in animation. you can absolutley convey a characters personality, background, what theyre thinking through posing, something I try to strive for everytime I start a pose! I think keeping that in the back of your mind as you make a pose can make the world a difference in how expressive it comes out.
Im quite practiced in the fundamentals of art so this can occupy more of my brain as I draw, which brings me to the second point part:
from an anatomy standpoint your best bet is learning muscle and bone structure and applying that to gestured life drawing. I personally believe thats the most effective way to learn. yes even with cartoon characters with rubber hose limbs, knowing the rules to know how to break them is very important.
I personally love anatomy, but I understand this can get so boring, try not to burn yourself out with it, you should always have some play with your studying. if anything at least do gesture drawings, it may seem like a lot of work but its very helpful in the long run.
bonus foreshortening with cylindric tube method:
Winter in Gaza has become a nightmare… We're not living; we're just trying to survive every day under a tattered tent unfit even for animals, let alone humans and children!!
*Every night we drown*… because water seeps into our tent from every side. Our mattresses are completely soaked, and our blankets never dry. We sleep on the muddy ground, and the cold bites at our skin… The sound of the wind terrifies us. We're afraid we'll wake up to find the tent has been blown away and we're out in the open, exposed to the rain and bitter cold.
Israeli channels are predicting that all the tents will be destroyed within days due to the approaching storm… Unfortunately, our tent will be the first to collapse, as it's already too fragile to stand.
Ahmed is just a kid. Can you imagine letting any child you care about sleep in a torn tent in a huge storm? Ahmed's family has had the option of staying safe and warm in their home taken away from them. But we care, too, and by donating and sharing, we can help Ahmed and his family stay as warm and safe as possible. Please donate!