BeamBrain

Being sick enough typically meant spending the day laying in bed, alternately shivering and burning, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally puking, and that was still preferable to spending the day at school.

My org has like 8 events on the calendar for this upcoming week and I'll need to attend at least 2-3. The first one isn't until tomorrow but seeing those updates just drained me of energy and now all I want to do is lay down and tune out the world.

For the most part, the article speaks for itself, though I did want to add some elaborations of my own.

At first blush, Marta Velasquez, the game's protagonist, seems like the stereotypical Strong Female Character (tm): a misguided attempt to make an admirable female character by having her embody all the traits of toxic masculinity. What becomes apparent as one plays through the game, though, is that we're not supposed to admire these traits, and in fact the game spends a fair amount of time dissecting and criticizing toxic masculinity through her. Velasquez is a hazard to everyone around her, carelessly blasting her wingmen, sabotaging her organization so she can fly more missions, constantly threatening her coworkers with violence, and the world reacts accordingly. Her coworkers fear and despise her, her self-centered attitude gets in the way of her organization's mission, and she largely spends the game digging herself into a deeper and deeper hole. She is, at best, a terribly broken person in desperate need of therapy, only tolerated by those around her out of pity or necessity.

That's doing quite a bit with a female protagonist for 1994, and a hell of a lot more than any contemporary games I can think of (Metroid 2 and Super Metroid maybe come close).

The only naive mistake on any players' part would be playing with this guy in the first place

Pinging @[email protected] because I know you hate this stuff too

There's still a lot of sprites left to do for this guy, but the rest should be much easier now that I have a base to work off of.

Tagging @[email protected] because they liked the WIP.

• Blue lines indicate base of neck
• Yellow lines indicate neck
• Green indicates head (with snout outlined)
• Red indicates eyes

Want to make sure nothing jumps out as blatantly wrong with proportions/perspective before I proceed any further, so that I can correct those mistakes while it's still easy to do so. I am not anything resembling a trained artist, so any advice would be greatly appreciated, even if it seems obvious.

"Make it less square" isn't really an option, since the attack it's used for needs a square hitbox.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Made the default "ASP.NET Core API" project (the weather forecasting one) in Visual Studio
• Built it and copied the contents of the build folder to C:\Users\[My username]\TestService
• Ran the TestService executable. It says "Now listening on: http://localhost:5000"
• Open my browser, enter the "http://localhost:5000" URL. I get a 404 error. This is all on the same computer.
• Noticed that, under launchSettings.json, there were some other URLs listed, none of them localhost:5000. It gives 2 https URLs: https://localhost:7079 and http://localhost:5222. Both of these give "connection refused" errors.
• At this point, I don't know what else to do

Please help I don't want to lose my job

EDIT: I was able to figure out what was going on. Solution is here. Thanks to hypercracker and everyone else who advised