perishthethought

Do you have a game you play over and over, when nothing else fits your mood? That game that is infinitely re-playable, somewhat the same every time and somewhat new and interesting?

For me it's the games in the Orcs Must Die series. But mostly OMD 3. I play the mode called Scramble, where you have to beat 5 rounds of orcs, and they get harder and harder as you progress. There are random things to make it harder (nerfs) and you can choose 1 thing per round to make it easier (buffs). I've probably played that something like 300 times now since I beat the main game + DLCs a long while ago. I go into a special mental state while playing, since I know it all so well, and just zone out for about an hour each time.

Patient gamers, what's your "I will keep playing this game for the rest of my life" fallback?

Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497 – between 7 October and 29 November 1543) was a German-Swiss painter and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style, and is considered one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art, satire, and Reformation propaganda, and he made a significant contribution to the history of book design. He is called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished painter of the Late Gothic school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Holbein_the_Younger

Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900–1931) was an American artist and illustrator.

More info on this illustration:

https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/side-by-side/

Polish, 1857-1945. Roman Kochanowski was a Polish painter and illustrator who lived in Germany. He is mostly known for his landscapes, although he occasionally did portraits as well.

More: https://artvee.com/artist/roman-kazimierz-kochanowski/

Oil on board, 48.01 cm × 32 cm

Born in Strasbourg, 1868. Died in Munich, 1919

American, 1836-1910. Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.

More Homer: https://artvee.com/artist/winslow-homer/

Balloon Dog is a series of sculptures by the American artist Jeff Koons. There are different versions of this sculpture, made between 1994 and 2000, with each having a different color: blue, magenta, yellow, orange and red. All versions of the sculpture are made of stainless steel, using different coatings to produce the different colors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_Dog

The artist:

https://www.chungsooyoung.com/

Italian, ca. 1600 - 1659

Giovanni Martinelli was an Italian, Baroque era painter active mainly in Florence. Inexplicably ignored by biographers and art historians, Martinelli was long left in the shadows. As Luigi Lanzi suggested in his History of Painting in Italy in 1847, his works however deserve far more attention. On the 400th anniversary of his birth, the artist finally received the acknowledgement he merits; He was the subject, first, of a monographic volume containing various essays dedicated to aspects of his brilliant sacred and profane production, both on canvas and in frescoes, and, subsequently, of an exhibition organized by the Uffizi in his native town.

https://artvee.com/artist/giovanni-martinelli/

American, 1848-1919

Frank Duveneck was an American figure and portrait painter. Duveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, the son of German immigrant Bernhard Decker. Decker died in a cholera epidemic when Frank was only a year old and his widow remarried Joseph Duveneck. By the age of fifteen Frank had begun the study of art under the tutelage of a local painter, Johann Schmitt, and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators.

More:

https://artvee.com/artist/frank-duveneck/

Domenico Robusti, also known as Domenico Tintoretto (1560 – 17 May 1635), was an Italian painter from Venice. He grew up under the tutelage of his father, the renowned painter Jacopo Tintoretto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Tintoretto