Volpeon 🐉

dragons are great at giving pep talks and speeches because we have inherent ~gravitas~. Comes with the territory of being beasts of legend associated with power and ancient wisdom, even if most of us are total dorks

← the face of ancient knowledge and wisdom

It never ceases to amaze me how effective taking longer breaks is. Not just for programming, but also for drawing.

Stuck on some complex code? Do something else, get back to it a few months later and suddenly it's clear what's lacking and how to make it better.
Did some shading on a head, but it's only okay-ish and you don't know what to do? Draw other things, try shading heads again months later and suddenly it just works out.

It happens all the freaking time to me. It's magic.

this is still my greatest post
I bring it everywhere with me like a picture in my wallet

• It's based on PowerPC, meaning you have to use an arcane toolchain to output compatible assembly from your C or C++ code
• It doesn't have shaders; just a fixed function pipeline
• The game menu intro screen is hardcoded into a special partition on every game's disc
• They sold 102 million units of this infernal device

see the Tweezer Attack

The Tweezer Attack was an exploit that involved the use of a pair of tweezers to bridge areas of memory, allowing homebrew code running in Gamecube mode to have access to limited sections of Wii memory (MEM2) [...]

oh and most(all?) "portable gamcube" hardware mods are made by sawing a wii motherboard in half

the tweezer attack was fucking incredible. restricted from accessing certain areas of memory? fuck you. my hands are the mmu now. i move your cards to my side of the field and end my turn.

Slit pupils are a trait exclusively seen on ambush predators who stay low on the ground like cats, crocodiles, snakes, etc, its use is that it provides an ample vertical field of view that massively increases depth perception at the cost of a smaller field of view.

You can actually see the opposite case on goats, horses, sheep, etc, who have a horizontal pupil that maximizes field of view at the cost of depth perception, but it ain't an issue to them since all they need to know is if there's a predators trying to jump them while they're grazing.

That brings us to circular "lens-style" pupils, they're a mix of both, pretty much. Good field of view and depth perception, which is the go-to for basically most animals on earth, including some unexpected predators! For instance: Tigers, jaguars, lions and every other large cat has round pupils, since they're not low to the ground like small cats and some lizards. Same goes for every bird, especially birds of prey like owls and hawks, since they'll always be watching their prey from above and slit pupils are completely useless for that end.

All that is to say: Pretty much every dragon and mythical lizard: flying western ones, eastern ones, drakes, wyverns, sea serpents, leviathans, wyrms, lizard people, hell, even most dinosaurs... all would have round pupils. The only exception possibly being particularly small flightless dragons, and maybe kobolds. Slit pupils have a powerful association with lizards, I know, prolly why I see it so often in art, but slit pupils are a niche exception, not the rule!

Ultimately, draw however you want, I just wanted to give my two cents for folks that might care about that sort of thing :D

This post covers what I was saying about dragon eyes yesterday, while quoting the same person no less. 🥴 But yeah, absolutely this. Glad to see others care about such things. ❤️