I'm agog at those architectural details! Gorgeous.

A fountain and/or statue would be good, yeah. Or a carousel if you feel ambitious.   

Hey everybody. Thanks for your kind words.

The minor surgery was minor & went smoothly, & the infection has cleared up, hopefully for good.

They caught the macular degeneration very early, before I ever would have noticed it affecting my vision. (I've always been near-sighted.) With precautions, especially wearing special protective lenses, the progression rate can be slowed way down. It's a bit sword-of-Damocles, but even worst case scenario wouldn't have me totally blind for years yet.

Clarification: I've had MS for almost 15 years. The question is whether what happened was 'just' an exacerbation (typical for relapsing-remitting MS), or something else like a stroke or 'mini-stroke' / TIA. I'm having to concentrate to do stuff l used to not need to think about, like typing. This is worsening the intention tremor (YouTube has good examples) I'd already had. It's frustrating that typing takes so long & tires me out... but doing it is essential to whatever degree of recovery is possible.

Re: KS vs my health.
Like my physical therapist says, having a personal goal (or goals) is essential. Clinical goals are required by insurers, but patients focus on what we want to get back the ability to do. So I'm working towards typing 25 wpm (I used to do 40-50), sure; but my goal is to be able to play KS levels again. Right now I have to cheat just to get through easy environmentals, mostly because I can't manage the multi-key jumps. I am already improving some. And I'm motivated. 

Granted, you can eat all the baked (not fried) doughnuts made with brown rice flour, banana, kale, kelp and lima-beans that you want. This turns out to be 1/20th (5%) of a single doughnut, and eating that one bite causes no ill effects to your health whatsoever.

"♪ I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener... ♫"

(And everyone wishes I hadn't sung that, as I am grotesquely tone-deaf! Thank goodness for text-only interfaces.)

Granted! From now on, the phrase "the theatre" will only be spelled and pronounced "thCeWtohlevaitere" -- a change which will be widely blamed for the precipitous drop in the popularity of stage plays and other not-for-broadcast acting.

I wish I knew what happened to that package of burger buns we purchased last week and that somehow seems to have disappeared from our home.

Hey, Fubaka. Pretend that I'm insulting you right now. Something that you take very personally -- I dunno, saying your mom is fat, or your level sucks, or your pet hates you, or you're a child molester -- whatever. It just has to be something that would matter to you.

Now, anything that's significant to one person, is going to matter not at all to someone else. Even things that most people consider important, having access to clean water for example, there's going to be someone who lives far away from anyone who doesn't have access to clean water and who just doesn't care about anyone outside their own family or community or country or whatever.

But not everybody thinks my hypothetical insult up there is a big deal, or anything to get upset over. And if you say you were insulted, maybe even try to explain why my mother / level / pet / molester comment was so hurtful? There's going to be somebody who doesn't just think it's no big deal, but accuses you of bringing it up just to get attention or some other ridiculous reason. And maybe says something to you like "Let it go.  Go get some fresh air.  Take a nap." -- as if your feelings about your mother / level / pet / molestation history can just be gotten over like a mild case of heartburn.

That said, since you apparently think you don't have a horse in this race, but rather think you're an impartial third party? Please, take a day before you respond to this. (Maybe you spent the two weeks since the subject was dropped here carefully crafting your response, but it at least looks like you just discovered the fortnight-old conversation today.) And please do it elsewhere than in this topic, where I doubt Talps wants it further derailing discussion of his level. You might also consider that Talps does not need you to 'defend' him from me or Chrysophylax, and we were actually all getting along fine before you butted in.

If you do decide you want to continue this conversation with me (and/or Chrysophylax and/or anyone else who cares to join in), and find an appropriate place on the forum to continue? It will be... interesting... to see you try to back up your claim that anything I stated in my previous post on 29 July 2014 at 19:06:35 was factually incorrect. Serious ^{[citation needed]}, there.

Is the dragon only going to be seen in cutscenes? Because while I don't think my pixel-art skills are up to making a good dragon that would work in a tileset, I could probably do you a dragon in another style. (Possibly something you could use as a gradient and/or CO, depending on the look of the tileset(s) it would share screen-space with.) Are there any other cutscenes done for the level yet?

Feel free to PM me details if you don't want to spoil the dragon's look / traits / etc. here in the preview thread.

@ Healy: Well, it doesn't hurt to ask, and the worst they can do is say no, right? I think there are contact links for at least some of the photographers in the article... so go for it!

@ LPChip: LOLOLOLOL  IKR?

I came across this post: http://www.boredpanda.org/30-breathtaking-images-will-force-you-to-move-to-china/ * and many of the photos immediately reminded me of KS landscapes, and/or looked like RL versions of common design elements in KS levels. I've attached a few of the most KS-ish images for posterity / people who can't view BoredPanda for whatever reason.

_{* Viewing images will most likely not force anyone to take up residence in another country against their will.}

Image credits:
"Red Rock Valley at Yuntaishan" by Wiwat Navakanon
"Zhang Jia Jie" by Jumrus Leartcharoenyong
"Photographer in the Cave" by Woosra Kim
"Autumn in Wuyuan" by Raymond Peng

Honestly, some of these make me want to just re-create the whole landscape with gradients, tilesets & COs! And even the ones that wouldn't necessarily translate directly into KS very well could still serve as inspiration for getting a similar feel in a level.