~AoRK~

This is my Tumblr. What else did you expect here, an autobiography?

[kuzukinz]

Very good.

[sedelerystick]

Inspired by true events (me @ my cat)

[nonaferatu]

This would have had me crucified on tumblr 10 years ago but maybe we are ready for this conversation now:

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

This is a PSA to about 3/4s of the Portland Youth populace

[markrosewater]

What was the most surprising thing you learned during playtesting this week?

That [censored] is best represented by [censored]. It was a huge insight.

[squeakyart]

Vexra the chaos witch

[wishfulsketching]

how do you think Silco reacts to Powder and Ekko dating in the au? honest if I was Ekko I’d be TERRIFIED everyday of my life knowing who my gf’s parents are. I also think we need more fanfiction about this

I think Ekko is one of the few people who are safe from the "scary dads" thanks to being Benzo's kid. Also, Ekko knows how soft they really are.

[kuzukinz]

Bathin, Agares, Foras, and Crocell

[yoursinsandpunishment]

This is definitely my kink

[hungwy]

hey do you think ronald mcdonald is a dom or sub. i sent this before but im not sure if you got it or not

yeah i got it last time

[zrrion]

Sledge hammer is good, no notes.

War hammer is a little outdated cause we mostly use guns now.

Framing hammer is fine and honorable.

Claw hammer sounds scary but its basically the most normal sort of hammer there is.

Ball Peen hammer is the kind that people ignorant of hammering will question you on. "It's for peening" you say but they won't believe you.

And that's it. Everything else is a mallet or some such. There should be more hammers. I want a garlic hammer. A book hammer. Idk just want more options.

[victusinveritas]

[writing-prompt-s]

!!!

[unknought]

In 2007 the US Department of Housing and Urban Development started reporting homelessness rates:

As you can see in this chart (from Statista) there was a fairly steady decrease in the number of homeless people from then until 2016. It flattened out for a couple years in 2017 and 2018, and then rose in 2019 and 2020. No data was collected in 2021 (due to COVID) and the increase from 2020 to 2022 was negligible, so one might hope based on the data from this chart that the upward trend was flipping around, and that by now by now it might be on its way back down, but this does not appear to be the case.

For 2023 the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported a homelessness count of 653,104. This is a dramatic increase which blows previous annual changes out of the water. It's a 12.1% increase relative to 2022, an 18.7% increase relative to the low in 2016, and the highest absolute number of homeless people since data started being collected in 2007.

So this is one way, at least, in which standard economic metrics being up has not translated to people doing well.

An objection one can make here is that even this new high is only about 0.2% of the national population, and while things may have gotten worse for the people in the very worst of economic straits, this doesn't say much about what things are like for the rest of us.

I agree with this up to a point. (Probably not the implied argument about what we should care about but let's not get into that for now.) It's probably true that homelessness rates don't shed a lot of light on how the median American is doing. But I think they are relevant to the well-being of a lot more than 0.2% of the population.

Even though only a small proportion of Americans are homeless at any given time, there a lot more for whom the threat of homelessness looms very large in their financial considerations, not irrationally. More people who are homeless probably means more people who can just barely make rent as long as they skip a few meals, more people who stay with an abuser because they wouldn't have anywhere else to stay, more people who can't quit their job to find a better one because they couldn't afford to miss a month's rent, more people who can't move out of a mold-infested apartment, more people who are just struggling with anxiety about whether they're going to be able to make rent every month. It also almost certainly means more people couch-surfing and more people who were homeless for part of the year that happened not to include late January, neither of which would be counted in the official statistics.

How much of an impact does this end up meaning, on how many people? I'm pretty unsure, but here's a suggestive statistic from the Federal Reserve:

> Challenges paying rent increased in 2023. The median monthly rent payment was $1,100 in 2023, up 10 percent from 2022. In addition, 19 percent of renters reported being behind on their rent at some point in the past year, up 2 percentage points from 2022.

It seems at least very plausible to me that claims about how great the US economy is doing merit a substantial asterisk.

[j5daigada]

punk maid

commission for H3llycats

[raginrayguns]

it seems backwards but in fantasy fiction, large stakes of the story shrink the world.

like in Pact, it's like, oh no, if this demon gets loose, it could destroy the whole town! Which is a suburb of Toronto. So the story seems small. But what that means is that the world seems big. Stuff like this is going on everywhere.

if instead the heroes are trying to save the world, then they're presumably the only heroes trying to save the world. This story, with this small and easy to remember list of characters, is all that's going on.

One unique thing about Pact is that every fantasy story seems to be happening simultaneously, somewhere off-screen. The limited stakes of the story is one of the choices that made this possible.

[triviallytrue]

[foone]

as someone who has hacked a ton of games: yes this is how they are.

Games that have shipped are full of terrible hacks. often they're marked as such! if you've got comments, you'll often see shit like "// fix this before we ship" and the game shipped 20 years ago, and the hack is still there.

It's gotten slightly better since the 90s? We used to have to hack around basic missing pieces of the game engine. Like, Duke Nukem 3D has a lie in the first screen you see:

You see the little shadow around that roof bit in the middle?

This engine doesn't support world shadows. There's engine support for shadows under enemies, yes, but not on the world. Duke3D came out in January 1996, and Quake was high anticipated and only a few months away, and guess what? it supported world shadows! It had a whole lighting engine!

See? World shadows! The torch on the way leaves a shadow under it, and that column casts a shadow, and Duke Nukem 3D's BUILD engine supports zero of that. So... why is there a shadow there?

If you open the level in the editor, you'll find that the shadow is defined as a sector. You see, the engine DOES allow you to manually set the brightness level for floors/ceilings.

So they just made the level designers manually put shadows in. For every bit of the world that should have a shadow, manually draw a sector the shape of the shadow, then darken it a few shades. There you go, shadows. Did this take a massive amount of work? Probably! but it meant they looked like they had a feature they didn't.

Railroad Tycoon saves games by taking a screenshot of the map. Commander Keen scrolls the screen by redrawing the edges of items and then actually redrawing it every 8 pixels. Wolfenstein 3D figures out when two columns of the screen next to each other have the same colors and draws them at the same time, because it was faster on these ancient video cards. 3D Movie Maker has "full 3D backgrounds" that are actually just a flat picture, but they appear 3D because they also do some trickery with a depth-buffer. Half-Life has a tram with a door that can open, something the Gold-Src engine can't do, by having two copies of the tram level (one with a door and one with a tram) and having a loading point after the tram stops moving.

Games are always hacks at some level. They always have been! They probably always will be.

We only know about these hacks because they're in games that shipped. The beautiful hack-free games that are architecturally pure in their design? They probably never got finished.

So yeah. Don't be afraid to fake what you can't do in your creative endeavors. Chances are, no one will ever notice, and the few weirdos who do (like me) will think you're a genius for doing it.

[evilsoup]

It's different if you intend to be an academic of some kind, or if you're studying medicine or something where the point is to learn specific skills, but for most people the purpose of going to university is to get a bit of paper which unlocks jobs outside the bottom 30% or so of the economy. For those people there's no moral objection to cheating. IMO. Just be careful not to get caught.

[arctic-blade]

クローナ on X: "陸八魔アル カジュアルスタイル (Tapで全身見えます) #ブルアカ #BlueArchive https://t.co/0Q0masFTSd" / X

[arctic-blade]

クローナ on X: "角楯カリン カジュアルスタイル (Tapで全身見えます) #ブルアカ #BlueArchive https://t.co/E4Fmw2t2i1" / X