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TransmorpherDDS

Age 38, Male

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Joined on 11/20/18

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TransmorpherDDS's News

Posted by TransmorpherDDS - 3 days ago


The Crits for Breakfast crew is going to be streaming more D&D tonight! Come join us at 9pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/afterdisbooty or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTFRYGP68sWs6WRw-Y6ODQQ


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Posted by TransmorpherDDS - 2 weeks ago


I'll be really surprised if this is where you learn this, but Akira Toriyama has passed away.


When I first started drawing comics, they were simple, childhood drawings on lined paper telling very basic stories, and every character was named after someone I knew in real life, even if they didn't look or act anything like the person they were named after. If anything, they looked and acted more like the characters from Chrono Trigger.


it wasn't just the in-game sprites, but obviously that was a big inspiration, but those amazing watercolor illustrations in the instruction manual and on the front of the SNES cartridge. I remember staring at them for hours, looking at all the little details hidden in every aspect. The creativity in the designs that were simultaneously so complex, yet also simple and iconic. The main character of my comic wore a headband over spiky hair and wielded a katana. One of the other characters was a giant frog for absolutely no reason.


At the time I was already aware of Dragonball, since some of the original series had aired briefly on my local Fox station, but I didn't really make the connection between the two until Dragonball Z started airing on Sundays on UPN. It almost felt like a secret club... this amazing show full of backstory on a channel that practically nobody was watching on the morning when most people were sleeping in. I remember getting a Dragonball Z shirt at an import store and getting teased at school for wearing a shirt that said "BallZ" on it.... it made it feel all the more special when I met others who recognized it and knew exactly where it came from. A secret club of weirdoes and nerds where the password was "Kamehameha".


The thing about Dragonball was that the world it inhabited felt so fresh and creative. I loved American comics at the time as well, but the ones I was aware of were basically all set in New York City, or some ficitional equivalent. They endeavored to appear as though they're taking place in the Real World, with only the superhero shenanigans differentiating the two. But here you had Dragonball... mixed among crowds of people there are just dog people, because why not? Cars and buildings were these stout, rounded little things that felt real enough to accept, but had personality all on their own. Anything could happen in that world and all looked Just. So. Cool!


American comics made me intimidated. I didn't know anything about New York City, or crime, or how Radiation works (although, in retrospect, apparently neither did anyone working at Marvel). But Dragonball felt freeing. The world can be whatever works for the story. A character can have powers just because they figured out how to do it... they didn't need to bitten by a radioactive animal, or fall in a vat of chemicals, or get exposed to gamma radiation (again... nobody knew how radiation worked). And there's always a convenient giant empty field where the hero can battle the villain and have cool, earth shattering energy blasts go off without constantly thinking, "Hey, shouldn't that have killed like... a whole bunch of innocent people?"


I think one thing that I've seen a lot of other creatives bring up following this tragedy is appreciation for how there was just something about Toriyama's work that wasn't just entertaining... it was inspiring. He created works that made others want to create as well. You'd have a lot more trouble finding an artist on sites like this that weren't inspired by Toriyama than those who are, even if it was only a little bit. The world has changed because of him in ways we're only beginning to understand... I know so many people today who I met because of a shared love of something Toriyama created. He brought people together. He created a legacy that will outlive all of us. He changed the perception of Anime in the West... of cartoons, of comics, everything. But, in the end, there's one thing he did that stayed with me beyond anything else he ever accomplished...


He made me feel like I could be an artist too.


1

Posted by TransmorpherDDS - February 18th, 2024


We're going to be playing tonight at 8:30 PM EST on Twitch and Youtube! Last week's session ended on an explosive cliffhanger, so stop by as our heroes face their darkest night yet


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Posted by TransmorpherDDS - February 4th, 2024


The hiatus is over! for Crits for Breakfast, the D&D Actual Play group I play with. Work schedules are still a bit up in the air, so we can't guarantee a dedicated schedule, but the goal is still to play on Sundays as much as possible. Speaking of which, we'll be playing again tonight! Come join us on Twitch or Youtube at 8:30 PM EST as our heroes make their way back into town after their explosive conflict with the Slavers of the Black Market.


Posted by TransmorpherDDS - January 8th, 2024


We're playing again tonight! It's actually my birthday tomorrow, so come hang out and wish me a happy birthday! We'll be playing tonight at 9pm EST on Twitch or Youtube. The adventurers have gotten themselves into a dangerous situation in the sewer beneath the city of Pennington, and they're only getting into more danger as they continue their quest to find the man who wants them dead.


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Posted by TransmorpherDDS - January 1st, 2024


The CFB crew is back! We took some time off last week for the Holidays, and also needed to reschedule this week's session because of New Year's. We finally took advantage of the fact that this is an adults-only and our heroes visited a brothel in our last session! What kind of shenanigans will we get into this week? Come join us tonight at 9:30 PM EST at Twitch or Youtube and follow the adventure!


Posted by TransmorpherDDS - December 27th, 2023


I don't really actively engage with Pokemon games... I kind of treat them more like idle clicker games. They're incredibly easy, the story usually doesn't particularly matter, and so I end up mostly half-paying attention to them while doing something else. Like watching TV or listening to a Podcast.


So the new Pokemon DLC is a sort of "big finale", where the random trainer battles you find around the map use actual tactics and build smart teams, which I could kind of get into except that, on top of that, all the battles in this DLC are Double Battles. Double Battles require a completely different technique than single battles, and allows for some clever comboes with Pokemon. But also this is the end of the game, and I've built my team entirely around single battles. So now if I want to play and not deal with annoying nonsense in every fight, I need to take the time to completely rebuild my team with a focus on attacks that synergize with each other. And I just don't care enough. The plot is boring, the interesting characters from the main game aren't here, and all of the new characters are really, really annoying. There's this truly awful brother/sister duo that the entire DLC revolves around, and they're both insufferable losers who I don't want to spend any time around.


I think for a better game I might be excited at finally getting some real technical challenges or take on a new area that operates in a refreshing way. But I just don't care. I didn't even mention that the DLC introduces these dumbass "missions" that you have to complete in order to build up points that you need to spend just to complete the adventure. Mostly they're annoying but doable... stuff that you'd probably be doing anyway. But there's also stupid stuff like requiring that you catch wild pokemon with a surprise attack (which is something the player character has always been able to do, but was never mechanically useful enough to justify bothering with). Or requiring that you take pictures of wild pokemon, which is something I completely forgot you could even do in the game, since there's no mechanical reason to do it, plus the controls really suck. Worst of all are the ones that require you to be in specific places... like requiring you take a picture of any random pokemon in a specific area, or one swimming (which is a huge pain if there's no bodies of water nearby), or requiring that you build a TM, which can only be done at pokemon centers. So if you're not in that area, you either just can't finish your mission, or you have to spend the points you get from these missions to get a fresh mission assigned, and just hope that it's one that's not sending you halfway across the map to complete.


What really got me to realize I didn't care enough to bother finishing this DLC was when I got an assignment telling me I had to make a specific kind of sandwich. A fairly common thing in Pokemon games for a while has been some form of food making... usually it involves a minigame, and it's never useful enough of a feature to bother with if you're not just a completionist trying to finish all the minigames the games offer, or if the usually pretty minor benefits that food provides would be useful for some specific thing you're doing at the moment. I probably could have just rolled my eyes and went along with that, but sandwich making sucks ass. It's easily the worst food-making minigame in Pokemon yet. The "minigame" is just selecting each individual ingredient, and dragging and dropping them one at a time onto the sandwich. And I do mean each individual ingredient... if you're putting tomatoes on your sandwich, you have to drag and drop 3 separate tomato slices onto your sandwich. And the ingredients have weird, stiff physics, and the drag and drop mechanic isn't entirely clear where the ingredients will drop when you let them go, since the perspective is a little unclear. So you have to pile a bunch of weirdly stiff, awkwardly shaped ingredients in a slow, boring minigame in order to achieve extremely minor and niche benefits. I think what somehow makes this even worse is the fact that you don't really find a lot of sandwich ingredients through regular gameplay. You have to go out of your way to visit ingredient shops in the world to purchase ingredients... and I never bothered, because why would I?


So, yeah... I just feel kind of like a schmuck because I paid real money for the DLC mostly because I just wanted to have more casual idle gameplay to distract myself with occasionally. And it's weird to say that I lost interest because what I got was "too hard", but I think the real problem is that none of it is interesting enough to justify the extra attention I would have to pay to it in order to get what I want out of the game. I should reiterate that it's not really "hard", it's still a kid's game, after all, but rather it's just all more difficult in a way that's frustrating and uninteresting, and I just don't care enough to engage with it the way the game seems to want me to.


Posted by TransmorpherDDS - November 12th, 2023


We're playing tonight! Come join us on Twitch or Youtube at 9pm EST


Posted by TransmorpherDDS - November 5th, 2023


Just a heads up... my D&D Actual Play group will be streaming live tonight on Twitch and Youtube! We're in the big city as part of our ongoing Western Steampunk campaign, and it seems there's some kind of shootout in the police station, and we're about to get caught in the crossfire! The stream will start at 9pm EST


Posted by TransmorpherDDS - November 3rd, 2023


So this has been running through my head for a while, and I don't really have a better place to discuss this, so I figured I'd just turn it into a rant on my journal here.

Kang Sucks. That is, "Kang the Conqueror", a Marvel comics character that has appeared in a bunch of MCU stuff and is being highlighted as the next big villain of the MCU. The whole idea is that he's a super-genius with time travel powers, and even if you kill him, a different version of him from a different timeline will just show up later and might even have knowledge of how you killed the last one to use against you.

There's other stuff about the character, but that's the main point... if you beat him, a different version of him just shows up a week later. For the characters in that world, that's terrifying. For the audience, though... he's just this huge loser who keeps dying over and over again.

So far, within the MCU, we've had 3 different Kangs already, and the only one who gave any hint of being actually dangerous was soundly defeated by Ant-Man, of all people. Ant-Man! I like Ant-Man, and I still know that's an embarrassing way to go down. We're supposed to be scared of this joker when he shows up again in a week knowing that he got his shit pushed in by Ant-Man?

On top of that, his nifty gimmick... using time travel to have a duplicate of him who can fight the heroes after a different version of him was already killed... Thanos already did that! That's what the finale of Endgame was about! Anything that makes Kang scary... you could just bring Thanos back! Not that I think that's a good idea, but the time travel duplicate thing has already been done multiple times within the MCU.

And that's all without even getting into the issues with Johnathan Majors, the actor playing him. I don't know if he's actually guilty of the things he's accused of, but it's still going to loom over the franchise, whether he's found innocent or guilty. What I find really weird is that the MCU has already established that the "variants" of a character could look and act entirely differently from the one we know... you could easily recast the role of Kang at any point and there's plenty of in-world justification for it. If anything, it's actually weirder that they're all just Johnathan Majors. But even with that fix... I hope they find a new villain for the MCU going forward. Because if your villain's most memorable feature is, "They can lose over and over again, forever!", the audience is going to lose interest sooner rather than later.