arsonwizard

[arsonwizard]

rolling badly is something that can be so good for developing your character, actually 

#gritting my teeth and repeating this to myself everytime i roll bad

[arsonwizard]

[arsonwizard]

Bikes are cool

[arsonwizard]

When you're tired, stressed, burned out, depressed, or just busy, figuring out how to feed yourself multiple times a day can take more energy than you have to give. Here's a resource I've been leaning on lately so that feeding myself is easier. I've never been a meal prepper because I don't like eating leftovers over and over, and taping a written list of snack ideas to the pantry hasn't worked for me in the past. When I tried a visual method by saving a folder of photos on my phone, something clicked. I'm a visual person---of course I would benefit from seeing a personal menu of food in my own kitchen! (I haven't tried it, but I imagine a visual menu would work for kids too.) Right now, my menu has a lot of appetizer-type finger foods on it because that's what sounds good and doesn't take long to make or reheat. Maybe I'll change my menu out seasonally like a restaurant... Anyway, I hope this sparks an idea for you if deciding what food to make is a struggle. If not this method exactly, experiment and see what makes the task easier for you! I'm all for saving energy on daily, routine tasks so that I can spend it where it's really important.

[arsonwizard]

Human One

Threat Assessment and Risk Assessment react to Murderbot taking unexpected damage.

[ID: A short comic drawn digitally in shades of red. At the top is an alert banner that reads “ALERT. PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY DROP. MINOR DAMAGE SUSTAINED. !!UNPREDICTED!!” Panel 1 shows the humanoid feedsonas of Threat Assessment (TA) and Risk Assessment (RA) looking slightly upwards in surprise. TA looks confused. Right of that panel is a red panel showing an outline of a humanoid with a red dot on the left side of their torso. Panel 2 shows TA and RA from a different angle, with RA in profile and TA glancing down at it. TA says, “What was that?”. RA replies, “She shot us.” Left of that panel is another red panel, showing a woman with short dreadlocks in a ponytail and a determined expression pointing a recently-fired gun slightly to the left of the POV. Panel 3 shows TA holding a feed panel in each hand, glancing at one with one eyebrow raised. It asks, “The human?”. RA is looking to the left over a spread of four feed panels, its hands drawn up to its chest, looking worried. It replies, “I didn’t see that coming.” Panel 4 has RA looking forwards again, one hand on its arm. It says, “I didn’t account for -” Panel 5 shows TA asking “For what?” The bottom of the image depicts Murderbot standing, its back to Human One, who is pointing a smoking gun at it. They are in bright red against the black background, unbound by a panel box. A white streak slashes across the image from Human One’s gun, through Murderbot’s back. Red text underneath them reads “For us still being the monster.” /end ID]

[arsonwizard]

Me when I use the blender that makes 50% of all turtles feel immeasurable pain

#tgats me when the blender gets turned on ;-;

[arsonwizard]

this year my challenge for everyone is to unlearn the association between love and morality. love is not something that is inherently morally good, and the absence of love is not something that is inherently bad. sex without love isn't morally bankrupt, it's just an action. people without love aren't less kind or less good, they're just people. when we can get past this false (and often unnoticed) dichotomy of good love/evil lovelessness then i think we are going to be able to take leaps and bounds in sex positivity, aro advocacy, certain discussions of mental health...

[arsonwizard]

This is one of my favorite bits of incredibly clever fuckery that goes on behind the scenes of 3D modeling, and I have an intense compulsion to talk about it right now.

If you've never seen the true geometry of the merc models, you're probably wondering what the hell is going on with the one on the left. Minecraft Steve 3D-printed looking motherfucker.

Believe it or not, it's the exact same model as the one on the right. The light is just being instructed to interact differently with its polygons! The one on the left is being given flat shading, while the one on the right is being given smooth shading.

The mercs have far fewer polygons than you probably think they do. And that's not just because the game was made in 2007! Most stylized faces probably aren't going to have many more polygons than this, especially faces designed for video games. Thanks to the magic of smooth shading, they don't need more than that.

So how the hell is this possible?

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED! Class is now in session!

For our example, let's focus on this area of his ear.

On the left, with the flat shading, you can see that there's a pretty stark difference in the perceived color between those surfaces. But on the right, with the smooth shading, it's... well... smooth!

To understand how smooth shading works, first you have to understand what a 'surface normal' is. They are also just called 'normals'.

See, a single polygon can only ever be perfectly flat no matter how you arrange the vertexes. If you have three vertexes making up a triangle, and you fill in the space between those vertexes to make a face, that face is completely flat. It doesn't matter whether the vertexes are 2 millimeters or 2 miles apart from each other; the plane that intersects all 3 points can never be curved.

In simple terms, the normal of a polygon is defined as the direction in which the face is pointed. Because the face is perfectly flat, this direction can always be expressed with a single line.

On the left is a simple example of the surface normals of a cube. Each blue line represents the direction that its face is pointing.

On the right, the red arrows are pointing to the normals of these ear polygons. In these two clusters of two polygons, you can see there's a pretty big difference between the angle of the normals. This means that there's going to be a big difference in the way light bounces off of them - and that's why it looks so blocky when we just let it be flat shading.

On the left, I've illustrated how light is going to bounce off of each polygon the same way, all the way across that polygon.

If we GREATLY increased the number of polygons, we could make it look a lot smoother, but we don't want to do that. More polygons equals significantly more work for the computer, so the solution is a little concept called 'interpolation', which I've crudely illustrated on the right. See how the angle of each light bounce is ever so slightly different as we move from one normal to the other?

Instead of just calculating the light the exact same way across a whole polygon, smooth shading also looks at the normals of the polygons around it. The rendering engine then pretends that the surface is curved, based on some very complex math.

I don't fully understand it myself. But I imagine that it is probably grossly oversimplifying it to say that it's taking the average of the two normals. Hopefully that description kind of gives you an idea of what it's doing, though.

Imagine if you took a sheet of paper and lightly pressed it over the two angled polygons to try to give it a bit more of a curved surface for light to bounce off of. That's what smooth shading does, but instead of using a piece of paper, it uses whatever material is defined for those polygons.

And that's just a little bit of the magic of shaders in 3D rendering! It is shocking just how much of a render's quality depends entirely on the way light works. There is a whole bunch of stuff happening that honestly has very little to do with the quality or poly count of the model's geometry - it's the shaders and the light simulation that are doing the REALLY heavy lifting, and that's why RTX technology in particular is such a huge fucking deal!

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Class dismissed!

#this is why i always like looking at silohettes lol #cuz the smoothing illusion doesnt happen there

[arsonwizard]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[arsonwizard]

Please be normal

[arsonwizard]

(SOUND IS CRUCIAL) this video is has murdered me dead the music the editing the way information is slowly revealed about the two of them the plot twist the breaking bad images. WILLIAM WILLIAM WILLIAM. all over minecraft parkour someone help im seizing

#this is a shakespear play to me #wilheim shakespear..

[arsonwizard]

[arsonwizard]

me after facing horrifying Trials: oh god that was awful but im so glad its over Tribulations: hey

[arsonwizard]

While talking with the Hobbits, Tom Bombadil puts on the One Ring. For a moment, all of the Nazgul burst into merry song. It is never discussed among them again.

[arsonwizard]

[arsonwizard]

Vintage Shiaparelli bottles. Circa 1930’s.

[arsonwizard]