iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 21h

Whenever I open a jpg in Photoshop and it has some sort of image corruption, and then I open it in a legacy version of MS Paint and it displays perfectly and resaves it in a jpg format Photoshop can handle… I just feel very proud of MS Paint like its my good boy. Happens more often than you expect.

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Natalie @nataliehall.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

An old piece about migraines 💢

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Breaking News: Tragically, Detective Baby Rosalina is no longer playable in any officially-released Nintendo game.

Fake box art for “Detective Baby Rosalina and the Mama-M.I.A Mystery”

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I don't know who's in charge of noclip.website, but I am SO greatful they added this control.

Outset Island from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, as viewed on Noclip.website, now featuring a "time of day" slider.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In a 1992 issue of Nintendo Power, several years before Ocarina, there is a Zelda comic where Link is depicted with a fairy companion who is drawn as a glowing orb with wings, but when they zoom in on her she has a full humanoid body. I think it's safe to say this was a known artistic shorthand.

Zelda comic in Nintendo Power showing a glowing orb fairy accompanying Link through some sort of aquaduct.

A closeup of the fairy shows a humanoid in a short dress, with a pixie cut and insect antenna.

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thirsty-pocket.bsky.social @thirsty-pocket.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I recently saw some discourse over weather Zelda fairies are literally glowing orbs, or if they're tiny humanoids enveloped in light. I'm team humanoid. And I like the beta design for Navi is still essentially how she looks if you peer into that ball of light.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I just realized you could use the angle of the moon phases in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, along with the wind direction compass to determine the latitude of Wind Waker's map, and I should not have been surprised to discover they just based it on what the moon looks like at Japan's latitude.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If any Minecraft resource pack makers have experience using the NUIT mod for skyboxes. I would like to reach out for some questions. I got this working before my hard drive fried itself a year ago, but now that I’m retracing my steps I’m starting to think I just got lucky.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

As the Hyrule Warriors roster proves, the friendly supporting cast of the Zelda franchise is cast like The Bachelor. Just a buffet of potential ships for your strapping elf bachelor. The only correct ship is Rosa though because they’ve canonically dated. And she brings a lot to the table like a key

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Me knowingly and wrongly changing an “it’s” to an “its” to meet the character limit.

Shutterstock image of young child crying into his hand while holding a handgun in the other

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I’m glad people seems to be okay with DK’s redesign in Bananza. I still don’t like the redesign they gave Diddy Kong in the N64 era. His eyes shouldn’t be that blue and his brim shouldn’t be that pointy.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Was Link’s design ALWAYS inspired by Peter Pan, or did we just assume that after they leaned HARD on Peter Pan for Ocarina of Time? I just never really noticed how many of the parallels trace back to Ocarina specifically.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Homestarrunner somehow managed to make its characters ages SO ambiguous that Strong Bad could fantasize making out with his ugly teenager OC and it just reads as mild cringe humour. Like no this makes sense because this guy is 50% Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. A needle astoundingly thread.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Saw a Tiktok talking about things in your home that only work if you know the quirky way you need to use them (lifting up on the counter to close the drawer, hitting the light switch just right). Anyway I think it’s a good way to describe old video games.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Why did America name THAT bird the “bald eagle” when y’all have this thing?

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I just replayed the Uncharted games (1-4) and my mental tier list of them changed quite a bit. 2 is not as good as I remembered and 4 is high above the rest.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is an hours long visual novel, I liked this game but I would not want to strap a stuffy headset to my face for the duration of it.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I was at the dollar store and saw this strange print of a pop-art style paint-over of what I know to be a still from an animation test for a cancelled Popeye film. I realize this is just the result of someone grabbing a pic from Google without knowing its origin, but it’s weird that this exists.

A still from Genndy Tartakovsky’s cancelled CGI Popeye film, painted over in a colourful pop art style.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

They should do a Monkey Island game that canonizes his cameos in Uncharted 4. Guybrush Threepwood: In Over His Head With A Timeshare

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Fat Bear Week has begun and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen so many pixel art sins in one place. -mixels ✅ -rotated pixels ✅ -inconsistent shading and outline styles ✅ -vector-autotraced pixels ✅ -the fish’s dorsal fin clipping through the bear’s snout? Not really a pixel art sin but ✅

A sloppy autotraced vectorized or maybe just AI generated pixelart bear holding a higher quality but rotated pixel art fish in front of a much lower resolution pixel art background.

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Pepe Reyes @suscipepe.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Paintings for my first show!! #art #painting #illustration

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I saw a decal on a car reading “CAUTION THIS CAR IS A TRANSFORMER” Way to dox a transformer. Not cool.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The internet is like the 6 blind men touching the elephant except they’re all in different rooms touching different animals and they think they’re in the same room but it’s actually a group call and the elephant is dying.

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Darren M. A. Calvert @dmacalvert.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

From this day in 2021: My nephews were curious about Final Fantasy after seeing a Moogle I drew and I described Chocobos as looking "kind of like Big Bird" so then I had to draw it.

A drawing of a Muppet-y Cloud Strife riding on a Big-Bird-like chocobo.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: art is not an objective category that includes some things and excluded others. It’s a category you can put anything you like into, and putting something in the category changes how you look at it and evaluate its worth.

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jojomama38.bsky.social @jojomama38.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

playing around with color hair

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Mondo Mascots @mondomascots.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Mingous (the elephant) and Mic (the duck) are from the popular character universe Angry Babyz. Apparently they are not actually angry, but engrossed in play.

A blue elephant and a yellow duck, both small and scowling, stand on a green carpet in a convention centre.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I don’t carry a lot of regrets in life, but I do regret trying to mythbust the “cheese puff as a floatation device” from Pixar’s Onward. What a disgusting experience that was.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I spent many many hours in Super Mario Sunshine, but it has the worst graphic design of any Mario box art. Look at this Impact Font nonsense. Whose idea was this?

Rotated closeup of Mario Sunshine box art. The ring around him reads “Has More Moves Than Ever” in Impact Font

Rotated closeup of Mario Sunshine box art. The ring around him reads “rinkle Water In The Sunshi” in Impact font

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

“Yes we can certainly use this AI image if you like. My only concern is that if the point of this is to look slick and professional the “AI weirdness” might undermine that goal. Its entirely up to you but its my responsibility as a designer to point out these potential concerns before we hit print”

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Nintendo Life @nintendolife.com · 16/09/2026

What I Learned After Working On Over 1,000 Switch 2 Joy-Con (Repost)

nintendolife.com

Feature: What I Learned After Working On Over 1,000 Switch 2 Joy-Con

The joys and cons

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

They tell you the spiders in your house are good because they eat bugs, but they’re actually just there to be food for the bigger spiders.

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Dorihey @dorihey.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Carl has some experience with badges

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I was walking past some clover with my wife yesterday and recounting this story again even though she was there when it happened. I was acting it out and accidentally picked ANOTHER four leaf clover. So what do I even know about probability.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Totally normal Facebook Marketplace interaction: Them: I’m free alllll day! Me: Great! I’ll be home at 3pm! Them: Can’t you just leave the item outside and I’ll leave the money somewhere? Me: I cannot leave a pile of knives outdoors.

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Kasey Gifford @kaseygifford.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

What happened to the crazy inventor making stuff in his garage trope? When I was a kid in the 90's it was so common It seemed like a legit career path, now you hardly see it anymore and I feel like theres a darker reason for that shift. In modern media science is done in a lab owned by a corporation

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Coyote Vs Acme was great. They managed to remain faithful to the character’s personalities in spite of a much longer runtime than a silent short. I do feel like the animation could’ve played more to camera though, so it would look less like cutscenes from a 3D Looney Tunes platformer.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I’m struggling to decide whether to replay Ocarina before the remake comes out. On one hand, I’ll be better able to notice and appreciate all the subtle changes, 1/2

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Here’s my conspiracy theory: Is AI actually threatening to end human civilization, or are they just claiming that because it’s finally proving to be a dead end and they want to look like heroes when they inevitably pull the plug to save their wallets, rather than failures.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

QRT with the games you’ve finished for #Zelda I’ve progressed partway through 4-Swords Adventures and Triforce Heroes. Not really keen on Zelda 2. Awakening was the 2019 remake.

Everything checked off except Zelda 2, Four Swors Adventurs, and Triforce Heroes.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Nothing that appeals to me very specifically, but honestly that’s kind of a relief considering the backlog I still need to work through.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Went camping with family over the weekend and within 10 (literal) seconds of introducing the concept of a four-leaf clover to my nephew he managed to find one. Now he’s going to grow up with a very skewed sense of clover rarity.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Mii Maker has music again. Repeat. Mii Maker has music again.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Zelda Fans Baffled. Link, Ganondorf Look “Wet” in Rainy Scenes.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The only thing I’m not sold on is the colour palette of the Kokiri Forest. There’s something sort of uncanny about that space in the original game with its dark greens and yellow haze.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Ocaremake looks great. The art style is 100% a product of the era. The Switch 2 is 4K so they’ve chosen an intentionally detail-dense art style to leverage that hardware. I’d be reluctant to buy a generic HD remake, but this has enough new embellishment to be interesting to explore again.

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Stephen Brandt-Plant @stephenjplant.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Is there a Bluesky feed for video games that isn’t 90% fan art? Nothing against fan art, but it’s hard to find news coverage, discussion and opinions in the gaming feed I currently have.

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