Just following art 'n' stuff @n6six6 - Tumblr Blog

I had been to the Chornobyl museum once, on a school trip. I wanted to go again as an adult, especially after visiting actual Prypyat and Chornobyl and seeing the Chornobyl nuclear power plant myself.

Earlier this year the museum underwent some big repairs and updates and expansions in its display, and I was already making plans to go there within weeks.

And then russia destroyed it. The entire historical building it was in. Part of the building turned into ruins.

First they destroy things. And then they destroy even the memory if the things they destroyed earlier.

And you all aestheticize and praise them for it. And often help them do it.

rowscara

Still posting stuff from last month here, whoops

⛔Please, if it's not your commission, do not repost anything I tag or say is a commission! Reposts of my commissioned/serious works are not ok⛔

twiststreet

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

sirenscallgamedevhell

Steam Rejected My Upcoming Visual Novel for Having “Adult Content” That Doesn’t Even Exist

Banning random eroge from the platform wasn’t enough, apparently.

Hey, ya’ll. My name is Jacob Cumiskey and I make Higurashi inspired visual novels about how much living in Florida sucks. The answer, of course, is very much, but that’s not why we’re here today. Those in the community that know about Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity already know. What matters for today is that I make visual novels and, hey, maybe you do too. In which case, I love you. And because I love you, I don’t want you to get crushed by the giant boulder that’s rolling towards us. I don’t want you to get hurt.

Cause this shit hurts bad. Really bad.

Even though I’m furious at Steam right now, please remember what I’m about to say here comes from a place of love. Not love for Steam and how they seem to ban games from their platform for seemingly no reason (CHAOS;HEAD NOAH two months before it was set to come out...cough...cough…), but love for you as a developer or you as a fan of the medium itself. Thank you for believing in visual novels and letting them change your life for the better in the same way they’ve changed mine. Now, please, learn from these mistakes of mine as my life’s work gets crushed by Steam into complete vaporware. A few weeks ago, I completed the beta for my second full length game, Siren’s Call: Second Wind. I was thrilled; play-testing had been going well and the general verdict was that it improved upon the mistakes of my first game, Escape Velocity, considerably. Other than writing the script, it was significantly easier to make Second Wind than game #1, as I had really learned the engine I was using inside and out. As such, it only took two years to make and 11,000$ (thank you assets from the first game) as opposed to Escape Velocity’s five years and around 25,000$. I don’t like talking about those gross game development numbers typically, but I feel like it’s important to mention them so that the weight of this boulder rolling towards us can be felt properly. Perhaps your game cost less to make financially. Perhaps more. The money doesn’t really matter that much, other than me no longer being able to justify to my in-laws this “career path” of mine. Cash is just a means to an end, that end being making more visual novels. I need to make more visual novels. It’s a compulsion. To quote someone I love very much, “I gonna keep writing until I die!” Or, at least, I want to. What matters more than the money, to me at least, is the time spent making the game itself. That time spend making a game is the crystallization of your soul. Your love. But does any of this matter to an AI Steam Chat Bot?

Of course not. Siren’s Call: Second Wind got flagged for having adult content that doesn’t exist. Even though Steam spent a median time of 36 minutes playing a 10 hour game.

Please note that in Siren's Call: Second Wind, there is not a loose nipple to be had. No sex scenes. Nothing of that ilk. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m “against” eroge or anything stupid like that. Aoi Tori in particular might be one of my favorite visual novels of all time (Judith looking main heroine + religious overtones sold me immediately), I am just famously bad at writing sex scenes and have more fun making games without them.

Maybe it was the mature looking, all adult-aged cast that did it though? Or the fact that it’s a story about marriage and all that entails? Yeah, maybe it’s just a little too “adult” even though there is no nudity or sex to be had? The main character does use the word “masturbate” at one point! Maybe it’s that. So I’ll just get this totally-human Steam person to tell me what the issue is and then maybe I can…

...oh. Right, 36 minutes median playtime.

Across 7 people (not 8 cause one of them was me play-testing on Steam). Over the course of several weeks of “reviewing.” What the fuck are we doing here Steam? Legitimately what is the excuse? Tell me what to "fix" with my game. Tell me what is so over the line that my game needs to be paired with legitimate eroge/hentai games that I can’t possibly compete with. Tell me WHY you want me to falsely advertise my game with an “adult only” label that I cannot rip off? But that’s when I remember that a boulder has no mouth to speak with. It just rolls forward and crushes everything in its path that doesn’t know any better.

So learn from my mistakes. I’m not saying you need to lie to Steam during your content review if you’re making a visual novel. Just remember that they are now flagging games with no nudity or sex scenes in them as “adult only.” Cult of Takumi for Hundred Line and Persona 5 are totally fine with their crew though. Remember that. Learn from it.

Before this point, I was spending about 25$ a day running Reddit adds to direct people to Steam and generate wishlists so that I had enough groundswell for people to, you know, be aware that my game exists when it launches. It was going well. As you can see from the above picture, we got like 3,000 wishlists since I launched the Steam page in January. Given that 10,000 is the metric for a “successful” pre-launch, a few more months of this would have put us within striking range. But yeah, not doing that anymore. Steam might be the only way I can realistically recoup my 11,000$ loss from this game and keep making visual novels, but I don’t want to put more people in front of a fucking boulder. I don’t have much social media, but I’m gonna do what I can to just link people to itch.io instead from now on. I’ve emailed JAST about potentially bringing my games to their platform, because I heard they are compassionate people that give VN developers that have had their games purged from Steam a good home. I’m hoping they write back. I respect their legacy. Really, the whole situation with Chaos;Head should have made this kind of thing obvious to me. But I was blinded by love. I wanted to keep making games. I still do. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’re a human with a heart in their chest that loves seeing how people react to the stories you need to tell.

But the human element doesn’t matter to Valve. To them, games are a product. End of story. If I release a patch for Second Wind on Steam, I won’t be able to be vocal about it on Steam itself. They remove entire accounts for things like that. So, visual novel fans will see the black bars covering content I can only guess Valve considers to be “adult only,” get (reasonably) pissed, and then tie that negative feeling to the game. It makes sense. I’d be pissed too. The whole pipeline leaves a sour-taste in one’s mouth. Maybe a good publisher can smooth over that process. I don’t know. All I know now is that the feeling of joy I felt for getting my second visual novel in 7 years completed feels like a distant memory.

Maybe if I find more money, I’ll add legitimate porn to the game. I can become the game Steam thinks I am. Crowdfund some hentai after I’ve already done two crowdfunding campaigns. My Mom would understand. My Dad would think it’s funny. But I’d think of Aoi Tori and how much worse the porn in my game would be. Purple Software is too high of a bar for me. At least on that front. No matter what happens though, please be aware that this is happening. The boulder here is only getting bigger. And we’ve gotta a find a way, as visual novel fans/developers, to either shatter that boulder to bits or, more realistically, circumvent it altogether. Please be safe. Remember you are loved.

ordheist

some of my favourite chara designs from the past few years.

I'm currently open to work, so hmu if you need character/creature design for your project. reblogs are always greatly appreciated!

soonielo

i will go feral

thecrumbez

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

erratic-dragon-fruit

out of the tags with you

boredguitarfish

Recent sketches and studies

All related to 40k. Birb, inquisitor, daemonhost, what not.

Last pic are Renauldre belongs to @/ KumratArt and Wilco belongs to @/ TheTerrornaut .

qsycomplainsalot

Mean Machine Angel typa guy

bowelfly

Brother Gregor gone fishin'

bowelfly

Meanwhile, in the reeds

mynqzo

finished my first semester oufh god finally blorbo time

vezimira

important question

imsupposedtobestudying-whoops

I finished it 💚🌿🗡

qsycomplainsalot

Sorry to highjack your post to make a point OP but this here is Bretonnia's aesthetic for Warhammer Fantasy. Whenever I point out how badly designed the new miniatures are compared to old metal stuff people always hit me with "oh well you just want them to be historically accurate anyway". Bretonnia was never historically accurate, it was Victorian fake medievalism, troubadourism or whatever you wanna call it, and it works because it's a parody of French chivalric ideas and Arthurian romance.