Vorlonagent

I love Foglio's pictogram-speak.

I was thinking of the early days of Larry Nivin's Known Space universe and and one of the first Earth-launched starships known as the Angel's Pencil.  A Kzinti warship approached the Angel's Pencil under a gravitic drive using accelerations of hundreds of G-forces while the Earth ship was just plowing along at 1G using a crude photonic drive.  Kzinti telepaths reported that the ship was unarmed.  The Kzinti moved in for the easy kill.
...And got carved up with the photon drive.

Codswallop. This thread and to a degree the entire Off Topic forum is meant as a venting post where you can let out frustrations in relative peace and safety. Anyone who doesn't feel like sharing doesn't have to read this thread. Those of us who do read it are generally adults who know what we are letting ourselves in for. So no apologies needed.
And yeah, I know a bit about things getting scary. None of us blame you, and we all root for you getting better.

Hey, folks. It's been a while. I'm going to start re-posting my old slays a few at a time, if that's alright:




 

Aliens would have to already be interested in something approximating our planet's chemistry and temperature or they'd just move on and leave us alone.
Whatever humans may have done to the Earth, it ought to be trivial for aliens who want to make Earth their home.  A little CO2 here, some landfills there...Nothing compared to terraforming Venus or Mars.

They send a few teenagers to make crop circles, tip cattle, and go joyriding with whatever poor schlubs with no witnesses they can find.  While the conspiracy theorists are busy with all that, they go to the conspiracy theorists' mothers' homes and convince them they should throw out any boxes that haven't been opened in over a year.  Then they just pick up the boxes that contain the conspiracy theorists' comic book collections.

There is little more frustrating when playing a game than to come up with a plan, only to the game itself keep you  from even trying it.  For example, there was this one old game that claimed to let you develop real estate, but all you really did was endlessly circle Atlantic City.
I really think leaving Ventor Avenue undeveloped and building six houses on Marvin Gardens would be a much better option than a hotel on each.  But will the zoning board even listen to my request?

As hkmaly suggests, the trick is basically to preserve Dan's shading as far as possible whist still attaining the desired colouration and brightness.
Mainly, this amounts to significantly limiting operations on the value channel to those which don't affect the shading (applying levels/curves/gamma/contrast/etc to specific regions (usually not the entire image) is generally fine, provided this is done in such a way that it doesn't noticeably mess up the region border).
The hue and sat channels are a different matter, and can even be region-floodfilled, although I didn't have to resort to that here (I do when I'm e.g. colourising from greyscale though).
My first version basically made the hair and attire lighter in colour.  The second shifted the focus to contrast and saturation, thus increasing brightness rather than simply lightness.  The final effect on the second version was to take something closer to the first version, use the levels tool to extract only the highlights, blur the result significantly and then use it as an additive layer, with a certain tuned alpha, above what I had so far for the second image.  This gives the image an additional subtle glow.
Use of waifu2x beforehand is also very helpful, mainly because it makes selecting regions a lot less fiddly.

Pharoes had their own form of rock.  Lots of it...

Pharoes had their own form of rock.  Lots of it...

Good job and thanks.  I'm a little disappointed with the results, however, which is no reflection on you, HarJIT..  The result is a little...blander...that I might have wished just thinking about it.

No capes!
 
 

I think we need to assist Elliot with his "reasonable doubt" defence.

Cat-n't. Too much Dogma to get around.

For calming people down, it's hard to beat calming pies.

That's not normal behavior for a major appliance...

Here's one for you.

Ditto above

I may have written all that music for ROTT, Duke Nukem 3D, Stargunner, and Shadow Warrior, but I'll let up a secret right here: I couldn't play for [censored]. I had to have the God Mode code to see everything in the game. Otherwise, I would never have been able to get a feel for the levels in order to come up with music for them.

I'm Spartacus!

I was hoping someone would...

IT'S NOT A TWO-FER!

Copy errors.
A new monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He notices, however, that they are copying copies, and not the original books.
So, the new monk goes to the Abbot to ask him about this. He points out that if there was an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies. The Abbot says, "We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son."
So, he goes down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours later, nobody has seen him. So, one of the monks goes downstairs to look for him. He hears sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old monk leaning over one of the original books crying. He asks what's wrong.
"The word is celebrate," the Abbot said with tears in his eyes.  "CELEBRATE!"

I hope this works for you...

Dewitchery Diamond! Elliot turns into Mall Girl, touches the diamond and gets a duplicate that we'll now name Rose, and then Elliot turns into Cheerleadra and touches the diamond again, then Elliot reverts back to himself and goes to school while Cheerleadra and Rose goes out to dispel Voltaire's statement that Cheerleadra is Elliot. The reason Cheerleadra and Rose are looking at each other like that is a side effect of Elliot realizing he loves those forms now.
Also, the Dunkel's will need to renovate the basement to have a bedroom because there's no way they're going to be able to fit 2 more beds in Elliot and Ellen's room.

I accept this as canon.