Harrison the Fulgurite @harrisonthefulgurite - Tumblr Blog

Highly unlikely to be of use but I want a card I can carry in my wallet that says “If I Die First In A Traumatic Survival Scenario I Want You To Know I’m Okay With You Cannibalizing Me, It’s Fine, Don’t Be Weird And Guilty About it”. And then on the back there could be like. A list of recipes n shit

teaboot

To be clear, I don’t WANT to be cannibalized. It’s not my personal preference. It’s just that if I beef it out in the open somewhere and some poor starving fuck has to have a crisis of ethics over using the protein or dying in a hole, I’d want to some way to let them know my dead ass is rooting for them

teaboot

New Hot Take: I Think An Organ Donor Card Counts In A Pinch, Actually

animusbell

having read some Martha Wells interviews it does really tickle me to imagine that when Murderbot asks for a ride, ART is basically doing that thing where you decide to entertain an obvious scam artist for a bit. Like, "Well, this is most likely a corporate spy, but I guess I am spying back on corporates right now so sure LOL let's see what the humans told it to do to trick me"

And then said 'corporate spy' spends 8 straight hours curled up on a chair watching TV and ART is like, "Oh shit you're like, a real person with no agenda. Let's hang out actually"

batmanisagatewaydrug

never liked Katara and Aang ending up together because even as a youth I always felt like women who spend their entire lives in a relationships with men they met as teens are like low-key in hostage situations. like even if he's nice I want to rescue her.

batmanisagatewaydrug

there was this couple in my high school. she was a horse girl and he was a wrestler. they'd been a couple since they were in like sixth grade and I was so worried about her.

batmanisagatewaydrug

plus he's 12 :(

batmanisagatewaydrug

obviously this take is highly shaped by the fact that when the series ended I was 12 and I couldn't think of anything worse than kissing a 12 year old boy. so I super couldn't understand why the coolest and most beautiful 14 year old girl in the world would want to do that.

batmanisagatewaydrug

at the end of the day there are so many cool and great things about the show and also things that age poorly, one if which is that this is a show made by two dudes in the early 2000s so of coooourse the main boy gets to kiss the girl at the end. he's wanted to kiss her for so long and he saved the world he deserved to kiss her now.

dni-archive

abysslll

itsladykit

Motion Picture Association of America.

waywardworldhopper

Entertainment Software Rating Board

gaslit-dipshits

A former programmer spoke up during a city council meeting in a small town in Ohio, making a well-articulated argument against data centers.

cometiny

It's important to have a weird nerd friend

ianime0

【公式】PokéMinutes | Homework Skitty

a-naf

I’ve been neglecting my tumblr, but I’m so bored I’m posting here again.

southfarthing

remember when éowyn first met faramir and immediately thought "ah yes. this is a guy who could wipe the floor with any soldier of rohan." bc I think about it a lot

southfarthing

this is their first meeting im about to chew on mithril

southfarthing

faramir: she's so sad and pretty and sad 😍🥵

éowyn: he's so tender and a killing machine

homunculus-argument

oddly specific insults that could also be used as compliments?

Just describe them. The tone of your voice dictates which one it is. You could tell someone that they walk like a sled dog and that's going to delight or bother them for the rest of their life.

the-duct-tape-wizard

“I hope you have the day you deserve” can be a good one

homunculus-argument

There was an incident on reddit where someone replied to a rancind OP with "if you ever end up in a state of needing help, I hope people show you as much kindness and patience as you have for others", and got immediately banned for "threats of violence".

zuliuli

Finally motivated myself to finish this

ashweather

Actually this is getting its own post. I want to talk about enemy abstraction in video games. You know, the thing where instead of being a person with a name who lives like anyone else, a bandit is a guy named Bandit who stands around 24/7 in a forest clearing or some shit.

Abstraction of all kinds is very common in media, but especially in video games. I'm not anti-abstraction per se - it's necessary! Every element you choose to expound on or contextualize represents an enormous amount of extra work (especially in an interactive medium) and extra prominence in the text. Take modelling environments, like someone's house. Look at your own home in real life for a sec. There are probably hundreds of distinct objects that all have unique elements to them. Your fridge magnets are a pack your aunt got you for christmas one year. A book is dog-eared at a specific page because you started to read two years ago, didn't have a bookmark, and forgot about it when you put it back on the shelf. Your desk chair wobbles because every piece of shit chair you've ever owned has eventually started to wobble.

If you were going to model a home like this in a video game, including any of those elements is hours of extra work (oh yeah lemme just spend a whole workday making individual fridge magnets in blender) but it also creates emphasis. If a player sees the dog-eared page on the bookshelf, are they going to think it's a clue to a mystery or something? So you plonk down a bed, a nondescript bookshelf, a desk, and you call it a day. And someone playing the game glosses over this location without assigning it outsized importance because it is very obviously gesturing at a space, invoking the idea of it.

Enemies work the same way, of course. The guy named Bandit is gesturing at the idea of conflict. You're not supposed to question the interiority of Bandit any more than you're supposed to read the individual books on a JRPG bookshelf. And, hell, the more zoomed-out and large scale you get, the more this is just unavoidable. You sure as hell aren't going to get super granular about every spearman's home life in a Total War game, and it would be futile to try.

All of that said, what you choose to elaborate on and what gets left abstract is revealing. It tells us what your priorities are, the things you felt were most important to your text. (This in turn can tell us how well you understand your text.) Every enemy you choose to abstract represents a decision - active or otherwise - to avoid contextualizing.

In this context, I find the enemy design something like Skyrim (and much of TES in general, with a few exceptions) to be incredibly disappointing. Clearly, specificity of place and individualization is part of the core appeal. So much hay gets made about how every NPC has a schedule. Bethesda had dozens of people working on modelling thousands of bits of junk and populating people's homes with them. You've got a plot that is, on the surface, about politics and divided loyalties and distinct factions coming into conflict with each other. You've got a map filled to the brim with distinct locations, just begging to be woven into a web of relationships and motivations. And you populate 90% of those locations with 200 guys named Bandit or Draugr or Falmer who each have two lines of dialogue or two distinct grunts and say "yeah, fuck it, ship it."

Sucks!!!!