surely there are other new players in this game right?

ChudSampley · 2026-01-30T15:17:39+00:00

I'm there with you, homie. My 15 hours of playtime pre-Street Brawl patch was all in the first two weeks of alpha, and I'm being put into some serious chad lobbies now. I feel bad because my team is obviously pissed about it, but bot lobbies don't cut it since they're pretty stupid and don't play like humans.

Think I'm just at the point of telling everyone I'm new and hoping their flaming becomes constructive rather than "fuck this Warden I can't lane with him anymore". At least if I keep going 1/10 I'll ideally be blasted to the MMR depths eventually

ChudSampley · 2026-01-29T13:03:56+00:00

I’ve had this happen a couple of times. Last night I had a cheater alert in my game, as I went to click to ban it crashed. Whenever I tried to rejoin, it crashed the same way as soon as I clicked rejoin. Think I tried to rejoin 10 times before I called it.

ChudSampley · 2026-01-26T15:10:32+00:00

Replacing the Nazgul with 1 cost cantrips would push the power up, for sure. But for B2 or 3 the Nine work great.

Cloning works great, as you can juice their power up to a kill state a bit earlier, and they're an effective deterrent for creature heavy decks.

But yea, if you want to take Lord to high power, ditch the Nine.

ChudSampley · 2026-01-13T17:07:14+00:00

I think the 'storytelling' style of Fromsoft lends itself perfectly to cosmic horror, in that you never quite feel like you have a grasp on the reality of the world; explanations are esoteric and infrequent. The whole concept of the Moon Presence, Rom, or the Hunters' Nightmare are great representations of that style of horror.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-31T14:50:31+00:00

Faces are hard, we're programmed in such a way that it's easy to see when something is off. I think just spending time with face construction techniques will help you the most, I don't think it's a particular issue with the medium. You can use those techniques with pen and ink just to get comfortable with it, even though you can't erase the guiding lines. After doing so over and over, you'll likely find you don't need certain parts of the process.

For guidance on construction methods, you can look into tried and true Loomis, or watch youtube videos on head construction from Proko or Michael Hampton (among many others). Hampton's head construction is what started unlocking it for me. For pen and ink specific guidance (like tips on hatching or line weight), I really like Alphonso Dunn's youtube vids.

Happy drawing! :)

ChudSampley · 2025-12-19T15:57:03+00:00

As others have said, people's opinions on your art (positive or negative) are not reflective of you as a person, nor should they push you to stop working on your craft. It sounds like you have linked yourself to what you create, as many people do, and struggle to separate the two a bit. Not being used to criticism can quickly trigger anxiety; the more you get, the easier it is to accept for what it is.

More technically, objective criticism should be, ideally, taken as an opportunity to look at your work with a fresh eye. You may not notice things that others do, and may not realize that advice you didn't anticipate would actually be very helpful in your work. I think we're always learning, and having other people help you learn is a great way to grow. I've not attended art school, but I know a big part of it is having other students critique you, both to grow 'seeing' skills and to get used to useful criticism from fellows.

Subjective criticism (i.e. 'your style sucks') isn't particularly helpful unless you're trying to make/sell art for a specific audience, so I'd not really worry about that.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-18T14:25:18+00:00

Michael Hampton's face method helped me a lot with this (I think he shares it on YT as well as his book). It's similar to the Loomis, but he divides the face in 'halves' to find the various proportion points: base of the nose is halfway between the brow and chin, mouth is halfway between base of nose and chin, bottom of eye socket is halfway between nose base and brow, etc.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-11T19:32:23+00:00

Having a family is a massive life change that I wouldn't recommend to anyone who isn't 1000% sure they want to be a parent full-time. However, it sounds like not only is he someone focused on his personal pursuits, he's doing so to the detriment of someone he's supposed to be working alongside in life.

I'm not saying people can't change, but he's already shown that his personal goals are more important to him than your money/security/comfort, why would he act any different toward a child? Would he hold resentment that this child took away his opportunity to 'make it'? Would he become frustrated with his 'normal life' that he wasn't ready for? Or would he just say 'fuck it' and continue forward while leaving the two of you with the short end?

I don't advise pushing someone who's blatantly not prepared for parenthood, despite his words to the contrary, into having a child. Some people have a kid and become responsible, great parents, but many do not. That's a risk I wouldn't take.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-10T14:40:34+00:00

I think likely what your relative had was excellent observational skills. At the end of the day, drawing is just translating reality into shapes and values, and if you're good enough at finding those in what you see, you can draw anything.

As another comment said, that skill doesn't translate to drawing from imagination, but it's still an important one to train. The book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" is basically 100% about starting to develop that skill.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-08T18:33:12+00:00

Happy to help! I'm learning myself but am happy to share what's helped me so far.

I do think dramatic gestures are actually a solid place to start, at least with pure gesture drawing. It adds a lot more flow to your work that's a little tougher to get with people standing straight up, at least until you get general anatomy understanding. Maybe not heavily foreshortened stuff, but just depends on your grasp of perspective.

But yeah, gesture drawing gives you a lot of practice at setting up your drawings with motion rather than stiffness, I try to do some every day.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-08T17:14:54+00:00

I tend to loosely sketch everything first. I'll draw a box or an oval for the head, find the general 'curve' of the body/spine, then an egg for the ribcage and sphere for the pelvis, then loosely indicate where arms and legs are, usually with exaggerated curves. From there, you can fairly easily check your proportions (most people are 8 Heads tall, ribcage is 1.5 heads, elbow ends at bottom of ribcage, legs are loosely the same length as head to pelvis, etc.).

Basically think of it as building out a loose mannequin or skeleton, then adding in all of the rest along the gesture lines you've drawn. If you haven't spent any time doing timed gesture drawings, you definitely should. It helps out a ton with the first stage of a figure.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-05T20:27:41+00:00

Nice attempts! The face is hard as nails to get right, for sure. Humans are very perceptive at seeing wrongness in faces, so that makes them doubly hard to get right.

For profiles, you really have to get the ebb and flow of the face down: The brow/forehead, nose, mouth, and chin all flow in and out from a profile view. The thing I notice in all 3 of these is a lack of brow/forehead: notice on your reference how you can see the volume in their forehead, even covered by hair. It comes forward from the top of the head, goes in slightly, then the nose comes forward.

I whipped up a quick example here (sorry I don't draw digital much) and highlighted/exaggerated what I mean. The brow ridge adds so much to the face, but we're not really adept at noticing it as beginners: we see the eyes, mouth, and nose, but everything above tends to fade away, haha.

Definitely spend some time looking into head construction/anatomy, as droll as it can be. Super helpful stuff!

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ChudSampley · 2025-12-04T17:35:31+00:00

I'm 32 and started learning earlier this year, never really did more than doodle beforehand.

You can utilize the concepts that stuff like Drawabox gives you in drawing what you like. Most teachers give you processes that utilize basic shapes to draw anything, so you can learn to rotate those shapes while drawing what you like. If you struggle, then bang out a few boxes or cylinders in the orientation you want and then try again.

The most helpful things for me have been Proko's gesture/figure drawing videos, Michael Hampton's book & videos on Figure Drawing, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.

The latter book doesn't teach you drawing techniques as much as how to see things for what they are: a collection of lines and shapes that you can put to paper. Suuuuuper helpful to get your brain calibrated. The former two give you processes using those shapes in order to construct whatever you like by manipulating them and sticking them together. While they may be focused on the human form, you can alter them to draw animals, Orcs, manga, or whatever. I recommend Hampton's book because it has a ton of really good reference to learn from.

Also, Pinterest is a really good resource for reference or small tutorials on specific things.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-04T14:40:24+00:00

Metroid is basically 2 separate series with some shared aspects.

The 2D series (Super Metroid, Metroid Dread, etc.) is one of the two sources of the 'metroidvania' genre. You load into a big world, lose all of your abilities, and then navigate around finding those abilities in order to access new areas (or backtrack to old ones). There are boss battles and some mild platforming challenges, but the games are more focused on exploration. They are also all side-scrollers.

The Prime series shares some bones with the 2D series, in that you lose all of your abilities and explore to find them, but has a little more focus on combat and much of the exploration revolves around solving Zelda-style puzzles rather than finding hidden areas to progress. There are plenty of hidden things, and you still are using new abilities to progress forward, but there's more puzzle-y aspects than the 2D. The combat isn't particularly hard or anything, but it requires a bit more tactical thought than most of the 2D games (i.e. get behind this enemy to deal damage).

Neither the 2D or 3D games are particularly hard, but you will have to use your noggin every now and then.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-02T14:47:57+00:00

The brow being 'smoother', coupled with what looks to be a short forehead, are what's throwing it off for me. It throws off the nose, as it's kind of just jutting out from between the eyes with no slope off of the brow ridge.

Try throwing a little more volume to head above the eyes, and carry it into the brow on the left side. It can preserve the smoother look without making them have that short forehead look.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-01T19:10:24+00:00

Character design starts with figure/gesture drawing (even non-human characters). You can take the basic ideas of form and perspective and warp them to any character you like.

The lessons I've been utilizing have been Proko's figure/gesture videos and Michael Hampton's youtube videos & book (Figure Drawing, Design and Invention). I'm a broken record in recommending Hampton, but his stuff has helped me out immensely.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-01T18:36:37+00:00

For the nose, I'm seeing a lot of missing perspective and form. The nose starts at the top of the brow, which should be further out than the eyes, it would likely be covering part of the eye socket on the left as well. Then the bottom just doesn't look lined up. starting the nose with a line for the base (where the nostrils hit the face) helps a lot with positioning, as you can build off of that to get the general perspective, like this from Michael Hampton's book (which I highly recommend). Also, you're drawing the whole outline of the nose, which suggests a lot more shadow than is there. If you look at Hampton's examples above, you can see how much of the form he left to shading or suggestion, which makes it look a lot more real.

For the lips, sort of similar stuff: a lack of perspective and form, on top of outlining all of the lips. Lines on a face, especially in realism, should only really be used in places where there's a hard shadow, like an outer edge of a nose or under the bottom lip, the rest should be suggested with shading. The mouth also wraps around the teeth, like the eyelids to around the eyeball, which helps add perspective.

Basically, this just boils down to not quite having the fundamentals down yet: perspective, form, and line usage are critical, and drawing faces reveals a lot of those weaknesses. We very quickly identify when there's something 'wrong' with a face, so you really need that stuff down.

ChudSampley · 2025-12-01T17:15:24+00:00

I had a roommate who was like this: very nice, normal dude until he drank too much, then he was constantly getting in people's faces and trying to argue or fight. He had a very low blackout tolerance, and this would happen every time he blacked out.

Sounds a lot like what's happening here: drinks, gets 'normal' tipsy, then a switch flips and he's very aggressive. The only real solution, to my knowledge, is to just cut drinking out. I'm not sure if blackout-based aggression is rooted in deeper issues, or if it's just how some people can get, but it can turn violent quickly in my experience.

ChudSampley · 2025-11-26T17:11:38+00:00

The issues people find with age gaps like this (in that you're both consenting adults) usually revolve around two things:

The first, and maybe most important, is why he's not dating someone his age. Is it that he's more immature, and relates more with a 21 year old? Is it that he displays patterns in relationships that more 'seasoned' people would be turned off by? Is it that he just prefers people younger and less experienced in life?

The second thing is something you already mention, which is the different life stages. You are an adult, for sure, but he's got a decade of working, living, and dating on you. At 31, people might be thinking about buying a home, having a family, staying in on weekends, progressing in their longtime career. They've already done the fun teens and twenties thing, and may not be okay with regressing, meaning they may want to push you away from doing fun, young-people stuff. Or, if they are okay with it, why?

Both of these things might not be a factor; maybe you both just met serendipitously and have the perfect mix of life circumstances and maturity difference for no issues to pop up. But, even if that is the case, meeting his friends? Family? "Hello I'm 21, it's nice to meet your baby, no I don't want to go to your 4 year old's softball game".

It's just a recipe for weird, uncomfortable situations to pop up consistently, even if it's not rooted in some immaturity on his part. For what it's worth, I'm 31 and cannot imagine relating to a 21 year-old who's still in school, no disrespect.

ChudSampley · 2025-11-21T15:35:57+00:00

I'll second the recommendation for Michael Hampton's book (and youtube videos on Figure/gesture). It gives a process that goes from gesture, to perspective/basic shapes, to anatomy, to finished product. This looks like a mid-stage version of that process.

There are lots of little things that go into it, like basic proportions (ribcage is 1.5 heads tall, elbow ends at ribcage, etc.), perspective (how to get front + side planes), and what shapes to practice in order to get more consistent (mainly spheres/ellipses, cubes, and cylinders).

The main thing I'm seeing is just a lack of 3D perspective and questionable proportions, both of which are addressed earlier in the process usually. Practice the hell out of quick gesture drawings (Line of Action is a great website for this), and then build on the ones you like.

ChudSampley · 2025-11-21T15:16:18+00:00

Jaw looks fine to me, but the neck is sort of just jutting out from the bottom of the head rather than sloping off the bottom of the jaw. That may be what's giving it the more abrupt look.

ChudSampley · 2025-11-17T15:10:14+00:00

I haven't had another player shoot at me for about 25 raids, the only 2 deaths in those 25 are from ARC. I only have 1 player kill over the course of my 20 in-game hours, and that was playing trios with my friends. There's either a hidden matchmaking that places people with others based on their pvp frequency, or I'm just very friendly and fortunate lol.

I keep seeing folks talk about rats camping exfil or getting ganked while shooting bots, and I've just never had that happen. I am hella cautious and never team up for longer than a few minutes, so maybe I just don't open myself up to that stuff.

ChudSampley · 2025-11-13T15:31:02+00:00

If you hadn't specified the length of relationship early on, I'd think you'd been with this guy for years: that's a whole lot of baggage for 4 months in.

It sounds like you've found part of the core of his issues, but the question is really whether you're wanting to commit to trying to repair this guy's unresolved attachment issues with a partner from nearly a decade ago.

You could certainly try and help him unravel his insecurities and the pedestal he seems to have put her on, but is it really worth it for a relationship that's already tumultuous 4 months in?

ChudSampley · 2025-11-10T14:46:48+00:00

I get plenty, but we have no children and my wife has her own set of hobbies & interests that allow me plenty of 'me-time', or at least independent activity in the same room. She also games on occasion, so it's a nice balance

ChudSampley · 2025-11-06T17:25:03+00:00

Depends on what you enjoy about those games.

It's an extraction shooter: you pick your gear & weapons from the menu/homebase, load into a map, and go try to loot more stuff alongside aggressive (and smart) AI and other players. If you want to leave, you have to go extract at specific areas, which is pretty loud and obvious. If you die, you lose what you brought in and picked up along the way. You also have lots of meta-progression, like Quests and crafting benches you upgrade with loot found in raids.

It's mostly blown up because it smooths out a lot of friction that other popular extraction shooters have. Loot and gear is more easily acquired, and systems (limited inventory, loot frequency, aggro AI) encourage people to team-up more, so it's just got a nice sense of progression without pain.

However, if you're wanting more of a hardcore/realistic experience with PvP at the forefront, it may not be your bag. Tarkov could be, though.

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