Artstuffs: Guess who just figured out how to vector stuff?

THIS GUY! Through a bit of bouncing back and forth between GIMP’s path tools and playing around with Inkscape’s Pattern Along Path tools and other node-tweaking whatnot, I now know how to make vectors that look relatively close to the show? But it’s still not spot on. It’s most noticeable if you look at the inner-body tapers. Still. I’m glad to have finally figured out a way to make lineart that doesn’t look super janky and to have an idea of how to make very MLPFiM-esque art. On the other hoof, I do not like how many hours it takes to do. It’s not hard. Just. Time consuming. Someone if I’d make the extra step on to animating this stuff. The answer was: Possibly but it’s really unlikely. Given that this takes me about four times longer than my usual slapping color on a rough sketch on a single image, going from this to animation would be kinda nuts. And I didn’t build these to be flash-animation puppets.  I could probably tweak and force them to be such with a lot more node-tweaking but they’re not designed for animation as is. (And trying too hard to MAKE it be a flash animation build is exactly why I kept struggling with vector art for so long.)

Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Reread Progress

40 – Recovery : Scotch is in a bad way… but P-21 gets a bit more fleshing-out, and it’s fun.  Mainly, Blackjack finally realizing he’s been addicted due to lifelong exposure to Med-X, and Glory having understandable frustration with even his presence.

[Oops!]  I fell asleep for a few chapters. Technically the chapter I mentioned above, I listened to yesterday. But I wasn’t in much of a rambling mood yesterday. And I’m not sure I care enough about this particular arc to go back to review these chapters right NOW.

43 – Lucidity :  It’s the Happyhorn Gardens chapter! Both one of my favorite chapters in that it does the most exploration of the potential benefits of future tech in the  Fallout Equestria Expanded Universe and one of my favorites in that it really lays down heavy what with the mindscrewery weirdness.  I woke up about half-way into this one. Though, as much as I like it, it has a lot of very gruesome and uncomfortable content like rape and child murder. Ultimately though, the good makes the bad worth getting through.

44 – Mares and Stallions : This is another one of those chapters in which we get a glimpse into an alternate universe that could have been in the form of Blackjack’s Littlehorn Massacre Nightmare with her party as young ponies on their way to their new school…

This chapter is also the chapter Stygyus first shows up. And… really this chapter is a great deal about sex and sexuality. It  doesn’t linger on it for the purpose of eroticism or ribaldry, but it’s a major theme in this chapter.

45 – Hightower : “Champion in Bed”.  Also, Mister Shears first appears. B-Team regroups at Meatlocker and then they go into Hightower.

This is also the chapter where it’s revealed that Psalm murdered the now-grown-up Pokey Pierce and Pinkie Pie… a matter of moments before the bombs fell. So I guess either way they were set to die? But it still only cements my dislike of Psalm. I question why didn’t make me dislike [Spoiler].  By matter of course, it also gives a brief glimpse into both the organization of the Ministry of Morale and of the Ministry of Arcane Sciences right in the final minutes of their relevancy. I’d still like to see a fic that explores what those structures were all like before the war started peaking, but I guess it really might just be on me to write such a thing. After chatting with Kkat in the IRC though, seems like the MoM in particularly had a very very loose structure built around a fairly simple and straightforward mission statement. And that as things became more and more about weeding out insurrection and whatnot instead of making more fun, things became worse and more frantic and harmful.

46 – Casper: Man, Blackjack abuses ghoul mental deterioration a lot. And I feel kinda guilty when she does. But it works! Also

“Well, he’s probably not personally running it, and definitely not the whole M.o.M., but he totally has his hooves all over the law enforcement branch.  I don’t think he cares about party reservations, balloon research, or theme parks, after all.  But we totally know who assigns our Hearth’s Warming Eve bonuses, and you just don’t go behind Quartz’s back.”

I would be ALL OVER that balloon research. Also this conveniently gives me an excuse to blame someone other than Pinkie herself for things going sour with her her ministry. Yay. Heck, I could split the blame between Twist for passing on drugs and GB for changing at least one branch’s direction… On the other hoof if Twist didn’t do what she had, then the MoM would have been doomed by bomb attack right at the start…  So… bittersweet? Eh. I blame GB.

–

Breaking down Project Horizons by Volume, Volume 1 seems to be the most about Security as an entity and our initial A-Team. I like that volume. Volume 2 has the whole Blood and Stars / Hoofington Rises thing going on. Seems to be less about individual level things and more about establishing and hinting at grand-scale plots. The dreams get more interesting and mysteries are getting setup, and it’s kinda cool but daunting. This is also were we start getting a bit more ‘gap-filling’ universe expansion with Blackjack getting involved with Watcher. Volume 3 seems to primary revolve around conspiracies and redefining Fallout: Equestria as a universe by making great use of knowledge of when and where the original story by Kkat- Fallout: Equestria- had left time gaps or explanation gaps and un-shown perspectives. Typically when people talk about PH playing too much with canon or why it’s so vital to FoE as a setting, it’s because of exactly this chunk section. The most obvious example: LittlePip’s memory gap is used right at the first chapter of this volume to give Blackjack and her A-Team an adventure with LittlePip and her team. And it fits. There’s nothing in the original story that would imply these events didn’t happen.

I haven’t recently reread Volumes 4 and volume 5 just started, but 4 seems to be mostly about escalation of power and scale, and Blackjack’s painful journey that shapes her into the so-called Maiden of the Stars. Some of the coolest action parts happen in this volume! Heck, even some parts of just plain genuine fun here and there. But by this point, it’s getting really REALLY hard to keep track of all the characters. And then Volume 5 starts off with an immediate and huge shift from everything we’ve seen before implying a breech of a point of no return. What this volume is meant to be is hard to guess from just the one chapter. But this will probably be the end volume.

Rambling and Other Stuffs:

I played lotsa videogames. Probably about 3 hours of Awesomenauts between today and yesterday. And I keep fitting in a few minutes of the MLP Gameloft game here and there, so I’ve probably played at least an hour of that total. The MLP game is kind of a dirty cash grab, but it’s not as brutal about it as some Piano apps I’ve seen or even compared to the same core team’s LPS game. It’s super cute and has a reasonable atmosphere though, so I keep coming back.

I was gonna ramble more about that, but then I ran out of steam. All you need to know is that Apple Bloom, Cheerilee, and Twilight Sparkle are all working on a carrot farm and Big McIntosh is cranking out lemons every three minutes.