Excalibur-T005

It's been... wow. It's been four years since I've submitted anything to deviantArt, and more than that since I've submitted anything I drew, rather than a couple of things for a mash-up contest. A lot has happened in that time. I've finished high school, started - and am on the verge of finishing - college, I've made new friends and said goodbye to a few. And through all that time, I've been drawing. Things have been going pretty well for me this year, so I figured I'd give a shot at putting my work out there again. For a while, it will just be pencil sketches, but if things line up right, I might branch out a bit. Or who knows, maybe I w

Why are characters ostensibly meant to be going into combat designed wearing clothing that no one in their right mind would actually wear to a fight? This is most notable with fighting games, where the obvious out-of-story reason is to appeal to the very basest impulses of male gamers, but I haven't seen any justifications in-story for these ridiculous choices, barring the brain-dead handwave of "it's enchanted" that is so very popular with the creators of MMORPGs. When you create a character and give them a backstory - and, with games like the Soul Calibur series, it's often a surprisingly good backstory - you need to keep in mind that, in-

As many of you are now aware - as most of you have hopefully been aware for years - the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is a rebel group active in central Africa, headed by one Joseph Kony. The LRA has been active for more than twenty-five years, and is responsible for many senseless deaths in that region of the world, in addition to a laundry list of crimes against humanity. However, the LRA is not the only problem in central Africa. There appears to be a misconception that removing Kony from the equation will make everything all better. The fact is, the lack of strong, stable, trustworthy governments in the region is a far greater problem tha