Uncanny Apostle

Game developer and retro/lowpoly 3d modeler, with a focus on surreal horror.

[uncannyapostle]

Mouse World

[luckyzlink]

gnosia D.Q.O. cafe LOOP2 is sending me

I'm sorry BUGer this pun is like- I'm wheezing HELP

yuri they made the most traumatic experience of your existence into a burger /j

[titleknown]

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Historically Fucked Over Artists On An Institutional Level:

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

????????

[carolxdanvers]

Times that Copyright Expansion Resulted In Something Kinda Funny:

When Metallica did a twitch concert and got a copyright strike on their own music as a direct result of their lobbying for copyright expansion

[morallygay]

Rewatching some parts of the earlier seasons of dr stone makes me notice there really were so many emotional and contemplative meaningful moments that basically were the soul and charm of the story and have sadly been less and less present —and when present, hit less bc they’re not really allowed as much time and space within the story— imo.

Dr stone has never been a character-focused story which is tragic to me BUT not really the point here; I won’t look for burritos in a pizza store or whatever the metaphor was. And despite not being much character-focused, it has always been a very soulful, emotional and philosophical story. Humanity-focused you could say. With many moments like described above (like idk, nikki and her music, minami (the journalist) and her camera, everything about byakuya, the christmas tree, and many contemplative moments tied to an invention getting completed).

I once described (s1 (even 2) of) dr stone as feeling like it is overflowing with love for the world and humanity and taking any opportunity to express this so sincerely, but I wouldn’t be able to say that about the show as it is now. It still has it!! And has moments like that!! (like xeno’s joining the KOS in his heart before getting petrified, suika’s 7 years ofc…., or everyone voting in favor of the round trip) but definitely misses and underuses opportunities. But still I feel like if the writing of s1 dr stone were applied to s4 it could have sneaked in more, for the better. With idk, chelsea, joel, brody, even the 2 luna goons. And literally anything, it doesn’t have to be tied to a specific character, like the ‘everyone voting in favor of the round trip’ example.

Near the final stretch of the story everything is so simply plot-driven, and i didn’t really understand why I was so much less invested in the show, why it subconsciously felt like smth was missing, and I found myself questioning what I saw in it that was so meaningful in the first place, until we had that ryusui character focus/development about stanley last episode (and even then I’m scared it’s going to be speedrun to quickly get back to the plot too), and even more clearly still when I revisited those earlier moments. I get that obviously part of it is that for ex naturally less characters are introduced near the end etc, but, man still I really miss those bits. I hope at least the very end is going to be soulful like that again. Like at the end of s1.

[helicalsymmetry]

i actually don't give a shit what 'human nature' is. i don't care what we're 'meant' to live like, and i'm not interested in projecting a vision of whatever validates my political/ideological beliefs onto the past. it's natural for humans to die of diseases and injuries. it's natural for humans to hit each other to death with objects. i don't care if my body is 'meant' to be a persistence predator in an (unrealistically) idyllic hunter-gatherer society because actually my body is 'meant' to lay down and die of nerve dysfunction. defy and overcome your fucking nature and do what you want without hallucinating the support of a thousand dead apes.

[targetedknowledge]

[uncannyapostle]

My new favorite addition - binoculars! Great for animal watching.

[uncannyapostle]

I spend way too much time just driving the tractor around…

[kooldewd123]

i will never stop loving how dr stone gives us a stoic supergenius protagonist who's always idolizing science and logic and stuff and then instead of going the easy route and using that framework of cold logic to make him some aloof holier-than-thou figure who's above such petty things as "emotions" and "friendship" the show goes no! senku is actually a deeply compassionate person because that is in fact the logical conclusion to come to. there is no such thing as a lone genius. science is a collaborative effort, built upon the shoulders of those who came before. all of senku's vast mountains of knowledge would amount to absolutely nothing if it wasn't backed up by taiju's strength, yuzuriha and kaseki's crafting skills, chrome's ingenuity, the practical experience of people like ukyo and ryusui, the many individual skills of each and every person in the kingdom of science, the tens of thousands of years of human progress it took to build up those stores of knowledge in the first place, and the eternal faith and support of his father byakuya. every action senku takes is not simply borne out of devotion to science, but out of devotion to this specific understanding of science - the understanding that scientific progress is inextricably linked to society itself and that one cannot exist without the other. senku may be the smartest man alive (not to mention the de facto leader of humanity's remains), but he still recognizes that he is only a single man, no more or less important to humanity's survival than anyone around him.

[uncannyapostle]

Wasn't happy with the old footstep sound, so I changed it. Also animals make footstep sounds now.

[uncannyapostle]

Half Life Debug Room

I had another Jerma dream. Jerma had uploaded a 30 minute vlog where he talked about an amazing opportunity he had, where Valve had invited him to tour something called the "Half Life Debug Room". The first 10 minutes of the video involved Jerma talking about it while naked and crawling around on the ground in an area that looked like a Half Life 1 map with office desks, computers, servers and wooden crates. He spent a good portion of the video talking about the difficulties they had "uploading (him) into Valve's servers."

[uncannyapostle]

I spent a good while porting my game to 4.6. Made a lot of changes to various systems. I also learned how to use splatmaps to paint dirt paths onto the terrain. I think it looks nicer than just modeling the paths.

[gauntletqueen]

A dream I had

We open up on an establishing shot of a desert road. A jeep drives down it. A closer shot shows us Jessie Pinkman is in the driver's seat. He looks frazzled and panicked. In the backseat sits Walter White. He wears a severe expression but is composed. He wields a revolver.

"What do we do, Mr White??" Asks Jessie.

"You just focus on driving, Jessie" Walter replies, while blindly letting loose some shots into the road behind them.

We then see a second, identical jeep. And in it, duplicates of Jessie and Walter, but these are wearing hats and sunglasses, appearing as dark reflections of the characters we love. They chase the original pair to a roadside restaurant.

Jessie parks the car haphazardly, and the two jump out, rushing into the restaurant. He looks back to see the evil doppelgangers nearing the restaurant as well.

"You wait here," Walter tells Jessie as they hide in a storage room, deep in employee only territory. "I'm going to get help." He hands Jessie the gun and stalks away.

Jessie does as he's told, huddled between shelves like a scared animal. When next someone comes into the room, Jessie immediately catches the glint of his sunglasses underneath the brim of his hat. He screams, drowned out by the sound of gunshots. The evil Mr White falls dead on the ground. Jessie is frozen for a moment, staring at the body. Then, he runs.

On the way out of the restaurant, he encounters Mike Ermintrout or whatever the fuck, who catches him by the shoulders "Kid! Kid what happened?"

"The evil doppelgangers! They're here! I shot the Mr White one, but mine must still be here somewhere!" Jessie's speech is hurried as his eyes dart all around him.

Mike's expression betrays a deeper understanding of the situation as he sighs, and says "Don't worry kid, we already got your doppleganger, that guy is going to jail for a long time. You're safe now. It's all over, you can go back to your life."

The scene goes silent as melancholic music plays, and Jessie is brought to Mike's car. Behind the wheel, Mike tries and fails to suppress the tears. Slowly, through a series of slow-moving shots, the camera moves back to that storage room, where we see the body of Walter White. No hat, no sunglasses.

[devs-games-2]

Moving closer to polish I've implemented a feature I've wanted for a while: ambient slimelings!

They mostly just kinda hangout on the periphery but I think just having them does a lot to make the world feel a bit less lifeless :]

[kek-evo]

In spec evo, there's a concept known as the "seed world" (or seed planet), a thought experiment where a planet capable of hosting life (usually from earth biology) is "seeded" with a few select organisms (and other starting conditions), and potential evolutionary-timescale outcomes of this are then speculated upon. For instance, what if there was a planet that was basically Earth as we know it except there's no vertebrates, and then someone adds a bunch of ducks? What niches would the ducks diversify into? Would any of them evolve into cool megafauna? What would it take for ducks to evolve into avian moles? Interesting stuff. But not what I'm doing here today.

Many of you will say that I was so preoccupied with the starting assumption that McDonaldland characters are species rather than individuals that I didn't stop to think if I should, and I agree. Anyway this is my seed world - "McDonaldland" - about 50 million years after a terraformed earthlike world was seeded with classic McDonaldland characters for an advertising stunt, part of a promotional tie-in with a movie about alien planets or something (records from this era are spotty at best). This stunt directly led to increased sales of McDonald's products for many Earth-years, but once the promotion was over the planet was filed away and forgotten about for around 50 million years.

We've got a towering therizinobirdie having a snack, a bunch of western lowland gorilmaces hanging out on a nice warm rock, and some apex predator descendents of fry kids fighting over a burgersnake, which we can tell is unhappy to be considered a meal. A trio of hamburlugos glide among the treetops, eyeing up the other burgersnakes as they slither away. Sadly, none of the lineages descending from clowns made it this far.

McScientists documenting this ecosystem after its rediscovery by McDonald's archivists are intrigued to note the example of convergent evolution on display with the "sentient hamburger" seed-species evolving into snakes. Anacondas and buns, together at last.

[uncannyapostle]

Another bug; when loaded in, sleeping animals were spawned in the same spawn point on top of one another. Fixed now.

[glugslove]

she found something new :)