WELCOME TO THE FAMILY  

𝒾𝓃𝓉𝓇𝑜

I'm 𝓰 𝓪 𝔀 𝓻 𝓸 𝓷 𝓮 and I was born in 1982. Started gaming at the end of 80's. First machine was Commodore 64 and I aslo played on Amiga and switched to PC's at the beginning of 90's, and stayed that way. Tried consoles at friends but that was never my cup of tea.

At the beginnig I had no gaming prefferences. I was happy to have acces to a device, before my poor parents had to sell it, or when it was borrowed for a long time by someone with better economic situation. The acces to games was also not super easy. So I was fascinated by any games I could get, and wasn't picky. Most time I played Boulder Dash and Spy vs Spy series. I also was intrigued by first creepy SF metroidvania games but can't recall any title. I played hundreads of games on Commodore 64. So I was a hardcore gamer (in terms of time) already as a kid.

First half of 90' I was there when FPS genre was emerging and felt in love with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 2, and my all time favorite FPS game - Quake 1. This game will stay in my heart forever. My first impression of a REAL 3D first person experience is impossible to describe to people who find this as something common. And the dark lovecraftian theme of the game was coresponding with my teenage reading habbits of fantasy, SF and horror genres.

Second half of 90' was a golden era of RPG and I spent more than thousand of hours playing Diablo 1 and Fallout 1 and 2. It was the time, when I discoveried that postapocalyptic can also be a theme of games not only books and B-movies, and it became my favorite ex aequo with dark fantasy.

First half of 00's I was a poor university student and had no acces to any device and my gaming was very limited. I sometimes played HoMM III with friends (unforgetable game) but in the middle of 00's I was gifted with my first laptop and I was able to catch up with Diablo 2 and TES: Morrowind which still is one of my favorite RPG games.

When 10's came I was back again a dedicated gamer with hundreds of hours spent on Diablo 3 and Skyrim. And few years ago I discoveried Steam and here I am. Opened to any interesting genres, but there are some prefferences like open world RPG's, single player FPS, logic and puzzle, or artistic titles, and there are some that I avoid, but not going to mention them.


𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓂𝑒

I was thinking about a theme that will somehow corespond to making emoticon arts, and also to me or my interests, maybe something that is important to me. The rook had to stay becasue it's my IRL nickname (actually only elders call me by my birth name). For the rest I wanted some form of a handicraft, but the Idea about fabric patters was an accident.

Weaving fabric somehow reminds me some aspects of mosaic making. It is also methodic and time consuming in some cases. My favorite design of fabric is houndstooth. It is also one of the oldest (google gerum cloak). SInce it's name is related to an animal I got another idea of connecting the fabric pattern theme with my love of animals. I actually like animals more than people. I'm always living with an animal, if it was a dog or a cat form a shelter, or a guinea pig rescued from the lab. I also had animals from a pet store, but I'm not proud of that.

So there are four patterns with animal related names I used: herringbone, birdseye, houndstooth and sharkskin. All of them are still used in clothing design. There is also puppystooth pattern which is only a smaller variation of houndstooth, and a pattern called crowsfoot. I decided not to use it becasue the name does not clearly stick to one pattern (it is a variation of barleycorn, and it sometimes gets confused with puppystooth, herringbone, chevron), and it would stand out as much stronger related to my rook/crow, and I wanted to have equality. And there was place for four only.


𝓉𝒶𝒸𝓉𝒾𝒸

I wanted to have an animated avatar. Reduced Steam avatar to a part of the name and made my own animated avatar below. First showcase also combines with the bio above (text with graphic that imitates text, with a title of the showcase). It was difficult to make all lines equally distanced from eachother. "Cutting off" circles required lots of try and error.

Workshop showcase is a presentation of the theme - close up photographs of fabric with all four patterns. They are adequally named. The order of them is not random. Tried many different ideas to get a good looking composition. All four following showcases are ordered in the same way, but the order of making them was different.

My first idea was to make them all with emoticons. Houndstooth was first, becasue it is most difficult, but made with emoticons it had too large single elements. I wanted them all to be equal. I decided to make houndstooth with ASCII and match everything to this technique.

I needed to use game review showcase, becasue I needed four (Artwork and Workshop was already used). The game KNIGHTS had a diamond check pattern, and color was not too much different. Since houndstooth is a form of a check pattern, this choice was perfect.

Wanted to write something in all of them. In this one I made a simple note about the game, so nobody would ever report me, for using review against its purpouse.

The empty spaces around is an aesthetical choice, but it was also a technical limitation. That way a review, when opened, will not disrupt. Cutted last rows, so I also cutted first to have symmetry, and kept that consistent through all those four showcases.

Since I wanted to have at least one emoticon art, chosed only one pattern (birdseye) that will look good, when made with emoticons (and still similar to other showcases), and used it as showcase... that informs about emoticon arts.

Sharkskin was the easiest pattern to make, but it was difficult to make it look good on both win7 and win10.

Herringbone was the only pattern I could use in screenshot, because of vertical breaks of the pattern. Last one was utilised as gap between 1st and 2nd screenshot. I made a screenshot of the sharkskin pattern and manipulated it in paint. Just had to count everything, to have equal number of pixels for each column, and it actually was possible to fit it in the same width as other showcases made with ASCII.

Group avatar is Albrecht Dürer's "Wing of a European Roller" 1512, made black & white (check it out in color).

Workshop item was made in gimp using a photo of an old Singer sewing machine.

Guide picture is Albrecht Dürer's "Greyhound" 1501.


𝒻𝑜𝓁𝓀𝓈

This will be a list of people who are my friends, people who inspired or encouraged me to make emoticon arts or design my profile, people who were very helpful, or people who where suprisingly kind to me, and since that is not common nowadays - especially on internet - I find nice people very inspiring. List is open, and If I forgot about You or all that conversations that we had, please remind me. I do remember many people I would like to include, but cannot find them. Alphabetical order, because we are all equal:

Aevoa, AestriaL, 𐌀lph@da, Andrej, Assassin, BF♛ | Vault Girl, Blue64, Dipsy, Dispacho, Electra, ElitetoN, Epic, eXon^, goerming, Haru Peekaboo, ᴴ ᴱ ᴸ ᴸ ᴳ ᴬ, 彡 𝓲𝓷𝓩𝓪𝓷𝒆, LeChuck, Milk, ƝΞᑕ𐍂Iᔕ, neverdusk, N O O C X, Rosetta, RPG Gamer Man, Selecтιve Oвlιvιoɴ, snaws, ♪Ƨqυiяяєl♬, stardustsunday, Steph S, sub357, W-Cactus, 真実の恋...


𝓂𝓊𝓈𝒾𝒸

I could talk about music for days, so I'm only going to say that one of my most favorite instrumentalists and composers is Sean Malone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qztlyZAsDOs


𝑜𝓊𝓉𝓇𝑜

Quote: "Be kind to others, not becasue they deserve for being kind to them, but becasue you deserve to be a kind person" - Me, just now.