iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 14h

Fair. Uh, Wipeout Pulse then? StarFox? Shadow of the Colossus (boss fights only)?

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 14h

You messed with the R4 soundtrack yet?

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Drawing on the train was pretty short-lived because it was very difficult to draw with any accuracy while the train swayed violently as it traveled along. I turned to Autodesk SketchBook for traditional drawings and DotPict for pixelart to draw with my phone at the time, the Google Pixel XL.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Fast forward several years into the 2010s. My career had started freeing up some creative energy, and I've switched from a driving commute to taking the bus or train. The train ride was LONG, so if I wasn't playing videogames, I'd break out the ol' sketch book and start sketching.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I still haven't let her go as a personal best. Not to be a downer, but there are times when I think she might be holding me back from improving. 😓 A reminder to you, and everyone else: Don't forget to read the Alt tag for every image. 😉

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Technically, I never stopped drawing completely. I did sketches every now and then, and if I did finished works, I would keep them small. I dabbled in pixel art throughout my life (starting in 1989!!) and after joining the game community, 1up.com, my pixelart skills resurfaced.

This is a scan of a picture I drew during a quarterly meeting on a free memo pad with a free pen the company gave out at the venue. The funny thing about my inspiration was that I would seem to have my more creative ideas during times when I shouldn't be drawing. I love this drawing. According to the file time stamp, it was scanned in 2005, but I remember taking a few months, maybe a year, to scan it. Although I upgraded my scanner to a much-faster USB model by that time, I still didn't like going through the process of scanning images. 😅

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

By around 2003, I finally landed my first full-time job that aligned with my comp-sci degree, but as time wore on, I lost my momentum in drawing and it almost completely ground to a halt. It's hard to imagine now just how slow PC tech was back then. The pre-USB era was TOUGH for peripherals! 😖💦

A cleaned up and digitally-colored work of my OC, Red Six. In 2003, my method for putting together pieces were extremely tedious, where I would keep the final composition in my head, and I would draw each element separately, finish it, and finally arrange each piece on a single canvas. When you combine that with extremely slow PC tech (waiting for image scanners to scan drawings on paper was excruciating and drawing with tablets were frustrating because of how slow data translated pen motion into graphics) and how my white collar job started eating up so much of my spare time and creative energy, you can start to see why I was starting to give up on drawing. When I think about it, I'm mostly to blame for getting in my own way with such a backwards composition method.

This picture of Terry Bogard from SNK's Garou Densetsu/Fatal Fury series is yet another example of struggling with my own composition methods. I remember getting so excited about how this pose turned out that I had to finish cleaning it up, coloring, and rendering the shadows, but completely forgot about the rest of the composition. The time stamp of the original PSD file says this was from late 2004.

I feel this was the last completed work I did before I stopped trying to make finished pieces. I titled this piece "Yonaka no futari (夜中の二人)" because Ryu and Gouki are doing mysterious poses in the moonlight. Oof. Ryu and Gouki were sketched on paper, cleaned up, colored, and rendered separately, then were arranged on a single canvas. The moon was a photo (tsk tsk, no credit given to the original photographer...how naive) that was color-adjusted for the piece and the funky mountain drawn in with a mouse. Done in Photoshop in September 2004.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Much like how other kids in the 80s started drawing, I draw with a pencil on paper, but as PC tech got more accessible, I started using computer apps to color my works, starting with Mouse Paint on the Apple //e in the 80s, to Photoshop in college in the 90s.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Howdy, all. This is the start of a retrospective series (of sorts) of the digital chapter of being a dude that draws. Illustration has been a hobby of mine since I started doodling waaay back when I was 3-ish (I'm now 48), but I'll just try to focus on my journey into digital art.

A flimsy illustration of a typical cube (the common cube drawing one would be taught when starting out as an illustrator), with the caption "Dramatization of the my first drawing." The cube was drawn with my finger over a close-up picture of a white wall I took on my phone. My sister actually showed me how to draw a cube like that when she was teaching me how to draw. If I remember correctly, I was only three years old when she taught me how to draw a cube like this.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

😰 W-wait. Does the mattress change color because it gets soaked in monster juice?? Or does it just gain its natural color back after it reverts back to its true living form....? If it's juice, do the stains come out easily with Dreft laundry detergent?

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You know what? I'll start gathering up some of my pieces I've done in the past (back from around 2017, back when I started posting work on IG) and post them here. I don't think I've shared everything from there. Probably group them by year and give some back story. Stay tuned. 📺

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What a tense run. I got all four of my Bingos in the last ten minutes of the show!

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Darn it, I meant "There's protein in *coffee, then, right?" I've ruined the joke. 😓

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Good morning, Western Hemisphere. I need protein. Beans have protein, right? Coffee is called a "bean," right? There's protein in beans, then, right? ☕

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Those poor thatched-roof cottages...

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I must confess that I've never read or watched Urusei Yatsura.... 😓

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I have a lot to say about “Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven.” Good things, of course. I think Tenchu 3 was a product made from the dev team being able to do EXACTLY what they wanted from the start, thanks to the PS2’s capabilities. What a complete package!

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

*kinda feel like apologizing for being almost in my 50s and can't game on a TV because I don't have the money/space to buy a TV, let alone a couch, or to upgrade my 5yr old PC to reach minimum specs for today's games* 😓 Gaming is expensive. I primarily game on my phone now.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Sometimes my best drawings are finished only with pen. No color. I'm in love with cross-hatching styles!

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is the happiest I've seen Mikan-chan.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I love technical drawings!! 💖💖💖

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Not a follower but... ...She's definitely "top rope" material.

An altered screenshot from a WWE game, where instead of Macho Man Randy Savage coming from the top rope to deliver an elbow drop to The Ultimate Warrior, it's Professor X from the X-Men, wheelchair and all, coming down with an elbow drop from the top rope. "I've never seen anything like it!" (This photoshopped screenshot was made by the original poster, @marcness1313.bsky.social, using Adobe Photoshop around April of 2018, before generative-AI models were available to the public)

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Watching this while waiting for my pasta water to boil is torture. Terrible timing on my part. 😓

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I was inspired by @anchet7.bsky.social to put this together, but in all honesty, I was disappointed that I couldn't add any hentai to the grid. 🤷🏽 I'm not lying about my picks, though.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

If it was on company time, I hope Honda-kun was not given security clearance! 📸🙅🏽

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Wait, Sci-fi Channel? Son, I pre-date the Sci-fi Channel. 😅 I come from a time when the distributors that bought the rights to anime series absolutely slaughtered them, only to restructure them into Human-Centipede-like monstrosities that vaguely resemble their source material(s).

static.klipy.com

Coming To America: Eddie Murphy's Dog Line

ALT: Coming To America: Eddie Murphy's Dog Line

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Well, I'm no spring chicken either (Astro Boy '80 was airing on Canadian TV when I was in first grade), but I resonate with anime from the late 80s/early 90s because that was the anime being distributed when I learned what "anime" was. Before that, cartoons were cartoons to me.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Woah, these go back a bit. I have noobie tastes compared to you.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm currently playing R4 on 3 different devices, each with separate save files. Yes, it's worth it. P.S. Playing R4 (and Rage Racer) with PXGP on, Downsampling on, and True Color looks SIIIIICK. (16:9 hack not required)

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Bah, perspective. 🫠 Ever thought about doing a second pass of the background without guide lines and compare?

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

You know, I've been saying for years now, how companies are changing their wordmark fonts to block, sans-serif typefaces so that robots can read it. These days, The Algorithm™ eats first!

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I don't think I said this yet, but I'm agreeing with you that adult games should be for adults, in the sense that adults can "take it." I'm just trying to make some sense of why things are so sugar-coated. Your meme is spot on in that regard.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

That's the way all media is going, unfortunately. At least that's how I feel. 😞 "Shock and awe" isn't a new concept, but EVERYTHING uses it, and it's used ALL THE TIME. Even the National Weather Service sensationalize the weather forecast.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I wouldn't say adults are removed from the equation as much as a wider adult audience can be reached with comedy. But the result is the same: a mediocre game no one will remember. But make it too raunchy, and it will also not sell because it's too taboo.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The way I see it, the way comedy is used in late night shows as a means to make serious topics more approachable and inclusive, making adult themes in games more goofy might be a means to make such taboo topics more acceptable for a wider audience (and less creepy if you're caught playing one).

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Another factor is the studio's target audience/budget tier. It seems that the higher the visibility, the more conservative the adult themes become. For instance, high-budget games like Mass Effect or The Witcher don't get too graphic, but for garbage-tier cash grabs, the raunch is launched.

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I feel that this is a complex topic, in the sense that there are multiple factors that determine how deep (pause) the "adultness" penetrates (pause) into the game's core. For example, what's the game's "purpose?" Is it parody? Is it homage? Is it a cash grab app? Is it an artist showcase?

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Oh my. I hope she's not doing that on company time!

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Staring at p--sies for science! 🥸

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The Marcness @marcness1313.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This piece strongly reminds me of the librarian from the music video for "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears.

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