Giglamps rambles

There's a bundle of blog posts waiting in the wings but I still have a million other things going on and trying to find the files I need to finish them up during little pockets of downtime is proving difficult; it's a sod of a situation but rest assured, there will be footage of local waterfowl doing aquatic bird stuff sometime soon. For today though, we're having a look at Pools, and a fraction of the 805 screenshots I took during my first playthrough (this is after trimming the numbers back 'n' all - it has a very appealing aesthetic!) It has a compelling atmosphere, both beautiful and eerie in equal measure, and the mazes are superbly satisfying to explore. When you get a feel for how everything connects, what passageway leads where and you find somewhere you haven't previously been, reaching a new area feels really rewarding, especially in the moments when you walk into the more grand rooms that almost feel like ancient temples in how they're laid...

It's time for more screenshots today and at the moment, I'm revisiting Hellblade on the Steam Deck, thankfully a breeze to get going after the amount of faff involved with setting up other things. Control, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a bit of a sod to set up (thank you to some kind stranger on the internet for putting up a bundle of settings that balance nice visuals with the game running properly because man alive, I was completely lost at sea with that lot.) Also, for some reason, Prey was hell bent on crashing out while it was meant to be installing. No idea what the problem was but I had to keep an eye on the machine for ages, then run the risk of restarting GOG Galaxy and just hope that it wouldn't lose the progress with the installation after an hour and a half... but yes, it's on there now, ready to go. That's the main thing. Not quite fun 'n' games in the traditional sense, but here we are. While all this was going on, I also took a run a...

It's time for another round of "Shunt everything off of Neon because it has fuck all storage space and it's having a universe-ending conniption"; I knew going into it back in 2023 that 128GB is bugger all storage, but this load of ol' pants was all I could afford at the time. While that whole drama was going on, I did a bit more housekeeping on Rose Fossil, trying to bring some discipline to years worth of files that were lazily dumped on there to sort later and among all this chaos, I found more old art... it's time for the Saturn pattern! This is one of those things I've been meaning to get a better photo of for ages but for now, here's the general gist of it. This is the final version of the pattern, from 2024, based on the striped version of the logo, with French knots and Smyrna stitches for the stars, and using some lovely variegated thread for the nebulae. Can't remember the specific DMC number but it might be called Bougainvillea. It's ...

This started out as a spontaneous doodle for a bit of fun, back around the start of July, and suffice to say it all got a bit out of hand. This watercolour version ended up sprawling over about 3 days, then I spent another night on a different version that was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off take about half an hour or so and now it exists in badge form as well (and more design ideas are waiting in the wings.) I might've gotten a bit carried away there but anyway, here's the doodle that started this little endeavour. The cutaway background is a bit chaotic because it was just not turning out right, so I swept over it with the eraser tool until it ended up looking like... something . I also went back and redrew the baton to correct the wonky angle and it still turned out a bit iffy - alas. Now onto the badge version... My main concern about getting the design on a badge is that the watercolour effects and ragged, textured lines wouldn't print well on a small scal...