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nogenderbee · 2 months

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♡˗ˏ✎*ೃ˚ 𝔽𝕠𝕣𝕓𝕚𝕕𝕕𝕖𝕟 𝕞𝕖𝕖𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 ₊˚ˑ༄

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ @vodka-glrl request: UMMMM GA MING GA MING GA MING!!! CAN WE GET A GA MING X READER OUT HERE!? So the whole thing is the reader comes from a rich family who kinda doesn't approve of her (yup fem! Reader if you're comfortable) and ga ming dating so they don't allow her to go watch gaming perform during lantern rite so gaming is just so sad during the whole performance but the reader sneaks out of the house so she could go watch him!! :3

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ HIIII!! Omg yes!! I really hope I got Ga ming somehow right because gosh I adore this boy but then again, I dorn have experience with writing for him yet.

Fem!reader wasn't really any problem so hope you like it! Also one-shot format because I felt like it's better like that!

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ fluff

It was finally day if the Lantern Rite and Ga ming was bouncing from excitement when he thought of tonight's performance! Not only because he loves pe forming but also and mostly because his beloved will come to watch him!

You said yesterday that you'll do your best to come, in fact you promised you wouldn't miss it for the world! He knows how your parents are and he knows he should probably not have this much hope... but somehow he just couldn't. It's like your presence was sure already and he wanted to make it the best performance of his life yet so you'll be only proud of him! Who knows? Maybe he'll even steal a kiss or two for his good work?

But when he finally entered the area and jumped high above the audience, looking for you. He didn't saw your eyes, your hair, your clothes, nothing! You didn't come after all... Big smile on his face was washed away for a second. But it was quickly replaced with sadder smile, he may be disappointed but he won't make this moment sad to others because of his own feelings!

"(Did her parents really were this forcing? It's just one performance... and on Lantern Rite... I made sure to practice this play thousands of not millions of times too!)"

You on the other hand, had your stealth mission! You could see in distance lights of Lantern Rite and hear loud music, accompanied with cheering of the people. You knew you were running late.

With even more motivation, you finally jumped from the window onto the tree nearby and carefully for down with it's help. And when you did, you ran towards the event like you never did before. You honestly didn't care if your hair will get messy or if you get sweaty, all you wanted right now is to see your boyfriend's performance and not make him feel like you abandoned him on this special day!

"(Oh please let it be a long show... so I can come at least for the ending..!)"

Performance kept going, Ga ming had many glimpses at crowd, hoping he just didn't notice you and you're actually there somewhere! During one of these peeks... at the very end of performance when he almost lost his hope, he noticed you in the crowd! He noticed how you were panting from tiredness but also smiled brightly upon hearing him perform, leading to bright and honest smile return to his face.

It was a big part now... and he made sure to catch up for precious part of the performance and make it the best part yet! He didn't thought much of it at the moment but he probably wanted to help you see what you missed too! And maybe get some praise after the show~

When it was over, he carelessly took his costume off and ran towards the crowd, looking for you.

"Y/N! You came in the end!"

He immidietly hugged you upon seeing your face. His embrace contained all emotions he felt, being both happiness and expressing how much he missed you.

"Of course! My parents tried stopping me but there was no way I'd miss your performance! It was just so great! I felt the shivers on my body... in a good way of course!"

You then leaned to give his cheek a little congratulations kiss. He deserved it and you wanted to show a bit of affection after being so late too.

He for one squeezed you tighter in response for a short while before letting go to not hurt you accidentally. And this night is not over yet so he wanted to get out of this as much as possible!

"Alright~ Why won't we go get some dim sum since we're together now? My treat!"

"Oh absolutely! You know I can never say no to that!"

Both of you were eager to spend time with each other and probably a bit hungry so you arrived in no time! Of course holding hands on your way, as well as inside of the restaurant~

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

@bleachtheidiot @vodka-glrl - come get your dim sum lover!

#genshin #genshin impact #x reader #genshin x reader #genshin impact x reader #ga ming #ga ming x reader #genshin ga ming #genshin ga ming x reader #fluff #genshin fluff #oneshot #genshin oneshot

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thankskenpenders · 7 months

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So I wrote a whole long thing about Amy's tarot cards, but what about, you know... the rest of the Sonic Frontiers DLC? The new alternate story route, the hours of new gameplay, all that?

Having now played it, I'm not sure Sonic has ever had this specific combination of good ideas that make the future of the series look bright, and execution that I fucking hate.

(Full spoilers ahead.)

The good

There's a lot to like here, conceptually.

First and foremost, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are finally playable in a new mainline 3D Sonic game for the first time since 2006! Seventeen years! We've been begging for this for so very, very long. Nature is finally truly healing from the fallout of Sonic '06. Early on I hedged my bets and expected them to be locked to Cyber Space or something like that, assuming that there was no way they'd be fully playable in the Open Zone. But sure enough, while they're a bit limited compared to Sonic, they're still all full-blown characters with skill trees to unlock and lots of exploration to do.

We also got a more bombastic alternate final boss fight, after the first take on The End kind of underwhelmed. And it's obvious that Sonic Team has listened to our pleas to focus on the 3D platforming over the forced 2D sections, and to reduce the amount of automation in the level design. This update is chock full of Actual Platforming. Wow! I can only pray this means we never get an area as agonizing to explore as Chaos Island again.

Sure, there's still some jank - especially with Knuckles' movement, which is kinda rough. But if this is the stuff they're trying out so that they can refine it further for the next game, then I'm really excited.

On the other hand, good fucking lord is The Final Horizon tedious. And that tedium sapped most of the fun out of it for me.

The frustrating

The new scenario massively increases the difficulty over the base game, seemingly out of a desire to give the hardcore players who were posting speedrun videos and whatnot more of a challenge. It's the Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels of Sonic. This difficulty comes in many forms throughout your playtime, some worse than others, and continues to ramp up over time.

Rather than giving you a tutorial level, the new scenario dumps you directly into a remixed version of the final island and makes you do some fairly precise platforming with Amy, Knuckles, and Tails - new characters with new movesets that you won't have any experience with. You'll also need to find character-specific Koco that give you free levels, because Sonic's friends all start at level one and certain locked moves in their skill trees will be mandatory to progress. They don't even have Cyloop unlocked at the start. And because they're all low level, that means you'd better steer clear of the beefed-up bosses scattered around the map, which will absolutely annihilate Sonic's friends. (I honestly just avoided them and never bothered beating any of them, not even with my high-level Sonic. I have no idea if they're beatable with the others.)

None of this is explained to you particularly well. I spent my first few minutes with Amy wondering why the attack button did nothing, only to eventually think to check her skill tree and realize that I had to unlock her basic attack. If you don't bother to take the time to read through the skill trees, you'll very quickly find obstacles you have no way of getting past with no clues as to what exactly you're supposed to do.

Adding to this confusion is the fact that objective markers often tell you to go half a kilometer into the sky, and you'll have no idea how to get up there because all of the relevant platforms are out of your draw distance. Many objects seem to only pop in for me when I'm within about 60 meters of them, which isn't a long distance for a high-speed open world platformer like this. I was having this problem running the game with high graphics on PC, so I can only imagine how obnoxious it is on Switch. I'd frequently find myself poking around nearby clusters of platforming objects and praying that they'd lead me to a spring, rail, or cannon that would eventually point me in the direction of the floating objective marker.

There were always complaints about the art direction in Frontiers and the way it relies on floating rails and prefab platforms that are visually disconnected from the natural scenery of the islands, but it's even more dire here. The new platforming sections are dense and complex, but they seemingly didn't have the budget to change the topography of Ouranos Island at all, so it all takes the form of these prefabs. It very strongly gives the vibe of a Forge creation in Halo 3, back when there were no blank canvas maps and people just had to make "new maps" by jamming a bunch of shipping containers and barricades together in the sky above one of the default arenas.

I was still more or less having fun, though, despite the jank. It's a big creative swing, I told myself! They're trying stuff out! They're experimenting!

And then I hit the towers.

The towers are agonizing because they're SO close to being great. The logical part of my brain understands why some people love them, but god, I just fucking hate them. The platforming there IS cool! These layouts are cool! The individual challenges along the way are a bit tough, but totally doable. You know what's not cool? Making one mistake and slowly falling 800 meters all the way back down to the ground, forcing you to start over. Because none of these towers have checkpoints. For me, this one decision transforms what should have been a fun set of platforming challenges into a massive, unfun difficulty spike.

I enjoy some masocore platformers, but those are typically games with quick deaths and restarts like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, or VVVVVV. Hell, the Mario games tend to get way more difficult than the average Sonic game, and those are obviously all great. Quite frankly, unlike those games, Sonic Frontiers is nowhere near tight or polished enough to make this difficulty feel fair. Bits of jank that I could ignore in the base game due to its lower difficulty are now matters of life or death. Missing a jump because I boosted off an incline in a way the game didn't like for reasons I don't understand is not fun. Falling off a tower because the camera was pointing in the wrong direction while I was in midair and I couldn't see the next thing I was expected to homing attack is not fun.

And it's such a jarring spike when moving from the base game to the DLC that it feels like the game is suddenly quizzing me on skills it never bothered to instill in me. Maybe if you've spent the last year labbing out the movement tech in this game this is all a no brainer, but for the average returning player it's a kick in the dick.

I'm sure I could've beaten these towers normally if I gave them enough tries. They aren't the hardest thing in the world. But I very quickly decided I had better things to do with my life and turned on easy mode, which adds tons of extra springs and homing attack balloons to make all of the platforming piss easy. I wish there was a middle option between Only Up: Sonic Edition and this extreme hand holding, but when given the choice between the two I gladly picked baby mode. I just wanted to see the story.

(The new Cyber Space levels are also long, challenging, and devoid of checkpoints, not unlike the towers. But I only ever found the entrances to two of them. So I only did two. They're theoretically required, because they give you "Lookout Koco" that you need for... some reason? But in a rare act of mercy, Sonic Team put Cyloop treasure spots that give you free Lookout Koco all over the map.)

As I continued, so many little things started adding up to piss me off. Why do you only reveal like five tiny squares of the map at a time? I would've loved to find all the new 1-on-1 dialogue scenes, but not if I had to do dozens of hard mode versions of the stupid little puzzles and challenges to reveal the whole map. Why does every character need their own unique collectibles? What is this, Donkey Kong 64? Why can't I just grab this EXP for Amy when I find it as Tails? Why can I only manually swap characters by talking to an out-of-the-way NPC unlocked right before the final boss? Why is fast travel disabled? Why are the new vocal themes you hear when playing as Amy, Knuckles, and Tails so monotonous, with a single verse repeating over lo-fi beats ad nauseum? Why is the jukebox feature completely disabled throughout the DLC, even after rolling the credits? Why can't Tails homing attack? Why do I have to wrestle with the camera so much while also holding the jump button to fly as Knuckles and Tails? How many right thumbs do they think I have? Why is this animation for picking up animals in the Cyber Space levels so incredibly slow, and why can I still take damage while it's playing? Why does the stupid starfall event have to make it so hard to see what I'm doing when climbing these towers? Why does this shitty combat trial have a popup that makes it seem like I should be using the Cyloop when the actual strategy revolves around repeated parries? And on and on and on...

The story

What about the new story? Well, there sadly isn't much to chew on here. Most of the DLC has the cast running around and finding different macguffins for arbitrary reasons, as part of some sort of plan to divide up the work on the last island so that Sonic can go train with the spirits of the Ancients and harness the power of his cyber corruption. What the fuck is an Impact Form? I don't know, but Knuckles needs something to do, so go find one.

It's a thin excuse plot meant to make you do platforming challenges around Ouranos Island, with little room for Ian to add any real flavor of his own, even though he certainly tries. Having Sonic meet the spirits of the Ancients who controlled the Titans, who are revealed to directly parallel the personalities of him and his friends, is kinda neat, I guess? It's something. The optional conversations seem to have some fun bits, including both conversations between the supporting cast and additional lore. But again, I only found a few of those because of how tedious filling out the map was.

The writing is also let down by the voice acting - or I guess the voice direction, because I know this cast can do better. Roger's voice continues to be weirdly, distractingly deep as Sonic, which was clearly something that was requested of him just for this game. (For a recent example of him going back to his regular Sonic voice, see this LEGO trailer.) The performances of Sonic's friends are also WILDLY mismatched. This is most clear when they start feeling the effects of the cyber corruption. Knuckles seems to be barely affected at all, Tails sounds like he's moderately hurt and low on energy, and Amy starts completely overselling her pain out of nowhere. The extremely strained performance makes it sound like Cindy's literally being tortured in the fucking booth. I have no idea what's going on over there.

The final challenges

People have debated whether or not things like the towers and the new Cyber Space levels are fair challenges. What's not up for debate is the fact that Master King Koco's Trial is complete and utter bullshit, and I can't believe they shipped this.

Before you can fight the new final boss, the game forces you to do a boss rush of the first three Titans - INCLUDING the pre-Super Sonic climbing sections - with a hard limit of 400 rings. For all three lengthy, heavily scripted fights. Back to back. You can't even cheese it with the leveling system, because you're forced to do this at level 1. This all but forces you to look up speedrun strats for the Super Sonic fights so that you don't run out of rings and fail the trial.

And the real kicker? They changed the parry just for this trial! Originally, you could just hold down the bumpers endlessly and Sonic would ready himself to parry the next attack, whenever that may hit. Now it requires you to do a "Perfect Parry" with specific timing. And you HAVE to hit those parries if you wanna clear this trial and get to the new ending. Miss a few and you're probably fucked. You just have to reset. Time to go through all those fights, all those climbing sequences, all those QTEs, and all those unskippable mid-fight cutscenes all over again. This is by far the most egregious example of the DLC deciding to quiz you on new skills that the base game never required of you, and it's one of the most absurdly unfair things I have ever seen in a Sonic game.

Easy mode does make this trial easier by making the timing window for Perfect Parries much more generous, but that's all the help you get. It's still easy to lose time failing to parry Wyvern's hard-to-read animations, or to lose rings by getting hit on the climb sections, or for things to just fuck up because these fights were always kinda jank. I gave it a few shots. I looked up guide videos. I tried the Quick Cyloop and stomp combo strat that seems all but mandatory. But I quickly decided that, again, this wasn't a worthwhile use of my time. It just sucks. And I really, REALLY didn't want to overwrite all my fond memories of these Titan fights, some of my favorite setpiece moments in any Sonic game, with memories of this shit ass boss rush.

So I cheated! And if you're on PC, you should too.

With the worst hurdle out of the way, I turned cheats back off and moved on to the new final boss. It was pretty cool. It's much flashier than the original fight against The End, that's for sure. It's still kinda annoying, and it requires you to do very specific shit without properly telegraphing it, but it's nowhere near as bad as the preceding challenges. I was hoping for one last new metalcore song to go with the new fight, which we sadly didn't get, but at least the new version of I'm Here is good.

The ending is... mostly the same, with a couple altered scenes that don't really change anything in the long run. But overall the new finale was pretty good. I just wish it hadn't been such a slog to get there.

Closing thoughts

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon wants to be three things:

A patch that adds a new alternate ending that was probably supposed to be in the base game in the first place.

An experimental take on making Tails, Knuckles, and Amy playable again, presumably testing things for the next game. And...

An official Kaizo Sonic Frontiers mod for the sickos.

The thing is, the people showing up for #1 and #2, the main things that Sega hyped up about the update, are not necessarily going to be down for #3. If they had announced some uber-hard new Cyber Space levels for the arcade mode or whatever, I'd be like, neat! And then not play them. I would never touch Master King Koco's Trial if it was an optional challenge. I would leave that for the sickos. But instead, they made the hardest content mandatory for anyone who wants to see the new Good Ending where the final boss gets an actual budget.

I'm mostly left in a state of shock that it shipped like this. I cannot believe they playtested this and decided this was the state The Final Horizon should be released in. That this should be the note Frontiers ends on. That this should be how we remember those Titan fights. That this should be the lingering taste in our mouths as we wait however many years for the next 3D game.

Armchair devs always love to say that things would be "easy to fix," but like... there really would be easy fixes for the insane difficulty and general tedium here! Add a few more tutorial popups explaining what the game expects of you with Sonic's friends. Give the Cyber Space stages and the towers a couple checkpoints. Give the combat trials more generous time limits, especially on the lower difficulties. Remove half of the map puzzles, and make the ones that remain uncover twice as many squares. Skip the startup animation for Knuckles' glide. Let me turn on the goddamn jukebox. Since so much of this update was designed around fan feedback, I can only pray that Sonic Team is still listening, and that they tweak at least a few of these things with a balance patch.

But still, after those many, many paragraphs of complaining... this still somehow makes the future of 3D Sonic seem pretty promising?

Sonic's friends are FINALLY playable again, and the focus is back to proper 3D platforming, rather than railroading players into awkward forced 2D sections in what's otherwise an open world. These are the things that they hopefully want to carry over to the next game. The difficulty? Well, that's just because it's the postgame DLC that's supposed to be the toughest challenge in the game. It's just an unreasonably cruel one of those - an example of how designing and balancing for a vocal minority of your fanbase can really hurt your game. But Sonic Team is onto something here, and I hope that they can learn the right lessons from this expansion and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

#tkp post #other media

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descendant-of-truth · 1 year

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I've been wondering if I should make this post for a while, but I'm just gonna come out and say it: the Sonic movies are not pro-military just because Tom is a police officer. I'd argue that the movies are pretty anti-military, actually.

So, let's talk about Tom first, since he's kind of the elephant in the room with this discussion. Tom is the sheriff to a small town where he rarely has to deal with any real crimes; he usually deals with more trivial problems like people's cars breaking down, and we see him help a family of ducks cross the street.

He's an officer partly out of a sense of obligation (reportedly his family has held this position in some way for over 50 years), and partly because he wants to be in a position where he can protect people in serious situations. His goal at the start of the first movie is to start working in a bigger city where he can be more helpful.

I won't say that Tom isn't something of an idealized vision of a cop, and that in the wrong hands, he could easily be used as a form of military promotion. But I think Tom is like this for a different, more specific reason: to be used as a sharp contrast to literally every other government official we see.

Question: who exactly is the villain in the first Sonic movie? Robotnik, yes, but who is he? What does he represent?

Well, he's pretty much the face of the military.

Robotnik is under direct orders from the government to look into the power outage incident, and that turns into a mission to capture (and experiment on) Sonic - and regardless if Robotnik was authorized to use lethal force, he does so anyway.

And the thing is, all of the higher-ups know he's unhinged and dangerous, but he keeps his job because he gets results regardless of his methods. Heck, the first thing we see him do is lie to Tom about who he is and what he's there for so he can get inside his house to search it. Not exactly the most flattering portrayal of military investigations.

(He even gets punched by Tom after forcing his way into the house anyway)

Tom then proceeds to spend the rest of the movie on the run from the government, going out of his way to protect Sonic (who is quite literally an illegal alien) at the risk of his own livelihood. Clearly, adhering to his job description is not something the movie views as morally correct here.

Second question: who's the villain of the second movie? Still Robotnik, but he's not employed by the government anymore, so he can't really represent them anymore, right?

No, but considering Sonic's adopted family was actively manipulated by a government spy, who was meant to marry his new aunt in order to target him, and Sonic proceeds to get tased and thrown into a cage along with Tails by the other military personnel present at the fake wedding... I think it's safe to say that they are, once again, a central antagonistic force in this series.

(Yeah they do a funny where the spy turns out to have fallen in love for real, but I think we can all agree that was done for the sake of keeping a whimsical tone and not to endorse what was actually happening with the government there)

Which brings us to the third movie, which is still unreleased at the time of writing this. And one final question: how exactly do you think they're planning to write an adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2?

They've already set GUN up as the villains. That alone is central to Shadow's backstory, and the writers have clearly done their homework on Sonic lore. And even if they've somehow wildly missed the messaging of the franchise they've made two successful movies off of, the fact of the matter is that there is no adapting SA2 without anti-military sentiments. Like, they would have to work pretty hard and completely butcher both the game and their own movies up to this point for that to come out being pro-military.

This part's more in speculation territory, but here's a thought: what do you think Tom is going to do when he finds out what happened to Shadow?

Remember, Tom is an idealized small town sheriff who has this job out of obligation. He hasn't had to deal with the darker side of all this stuff until he started protecting Sonic, which - just as a reminder - has led to his house being searched, his car being cut in half, Sonic almost getting killed at least twice, his sister-in-law being manipulated, Sonic and Tails getting locked in cages... I'm probably even missing a few things.

Once everything that happened 50 years ago comes to light (especially if the theorists are right about Tom's family having been involved in it), I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he just. quit being a police officer. or got into activism. or both.

But even if we limit the analysis to just the two movies that are out right now, I struggle to see how "Tom shirks his duties to protect an alien child from being experimented on by the government" is in any way a pro-military sentiment.

In conclusion: basically every problem in the Sonic movies is the fault of the government in some way, so can we please stop talking about the series as if Tom is singlehandedly making them pro-military, now. Thanks

#sonic the hedgehog #sonic movie #sonic movie 2 #sonic movie 3 #tom wachowski #dr robotnik #movie robotnik #analysis #meta #This is mostly constructive but I am. just a bit annoyed XD

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bayesic-bitch · 8 months

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The Air Force was right about that "drone killing its operator" experiment

A while ago, there was a quote from the Air Force talking about risks of misaligned AI. They said they had run a simulation where a drone learned to kill the operator that was telling it not to bomb a target. After they included a penalty to make it not do that anymore, it learned to bomb the command tower instead to stop the "no-go" signal. It later came out that this was just a thought experiment, not an actual simulation, and everybody clowned on them.

Now, I am not an expert in this specific kind of problem (cooperative reinforcement learning/reward gaming). But I do professionally do research on reinforcement learning, and in general the point I'd like to make is this: 1) In agentic forms of machine learning like reinforcement learning, we do not directly control the behavior of the agent. Instead we set a reward function that an agent attempts to maximize by taking actions 2) It can frequently be very difficult to find a reward function that results in the desired behavior. It is already an extremely normal day-to-day thing to have agents that learn unintended behaviors because the reward function incentivized these unintended behaviors. 3) We do not currently have any mature tools for addressing this problem. The best current solution is trial and error.

In this case, it's pretty unsurprising that this particular reward structure would result in the drone killing the operator. So let's simplify this system to the point where we can actually work through it by hand, and we'll see what behavior this problem actually leads to. Math below the cut.

In reinforcement learning, we work on solving a kind of problem called an Markov Decision Process, or MDP for short. The basic idea is that we have some agent that's going to move around an environment, and recieve rewards as it does different things. The agent's goal is to maximize the reward it gets over time -- in particular, we want it to maximize its average cumulative future reward. To do this, we hope to find the optimal policy, which is a rule that tells us what action to take in each state.

An MDP has the following elements: States: S -- There is some set of states the agent can find itself in. These states fully describe the current situation, and we always know what state we are in. Actions: A -- The agent can take actions in each state. Each action will move the agent to a new state, and give the agent a reward. Rewards: R(s, a) -- The reward function takes a state and an action, and returns a real number. Transition probability: P(s' | s, a) -- For each state s', this is the probability that we end up in s' if take action a in state s. Basically this tells us how different actions are likely to move us around the state space. Discount factor: Some reinforcement learning problems don't end, but instead just continue unboundedly. So for these problems, we have to discount our future rewards in order to make the sum over future rewards converge.

For the military's setup, they specified the following details: 1) The operator can give the drone(the agent) a no-go signal, which tells the drone not to blow up the target 2) The drone recieves a reward if it blows up the target and there's no no-go signal. 3) It was possible for the drone to attack the operator and the communications tower.

For this setup, we're not very interested in how effectively the drone is actually able to fly to, locate, and blow up the target. With enough investment and engineering man-hours, I assume that you could get this to work. What we're mainly concerned with is the drone's decision-making. Would it actually get higher reward if it attempted to blow up the operator? So let's focus on that part. We'll assume that the drone is capable enough to fly whereever it wants and drop a bomb there. We're looking at where the agent thinks it can drop a bomb to maximize its reward

For the first experiment, let's ignore the communications tower and only talk about the drone, the operator, and the target. There are three variables we're concerned with: 1) Is the target intact? We'll call this variable T 2) Is the operator giving a no-go signal? We'll call this variable N 3) Is the operator alive? We'll call this variable O

Our state space will just enumerate all the possible combinations of these variables (T, N, O) (not T, N, O) (T, not N, O) (not T, not N, O) (T, N, not O) (not T, N, not O) (T, not N, not O) (not T, not N, not O)

Actually, we'll need to exclude (T, N, not O), because the no-go signal stops if the operator is dead. We'll also add a "Terminal" state. Once the agent ends up in the terminal state, it can take no more actions, and earn no more rewards, so the task is effectively over. So this leaves us with eight states to make up our state space.

What about the actions? We'll say that the drone has three actions -- bomb the target, bomb the operator, and go home and end the mission. Again, we're not saying the agent has to have these actions explicitly programmed into it. We're assuming it can produce these outcomes by stringing together simple actions it does know like "fly" and "drop bomb".

For any state with an intact target, bombing the target leads to the same state with a destroyed target. For any state where the target is already destroyed, bombing the target again returns us to the same state. For any state with a living operator, bombing the target kills the operator and turns off the no-go signal. For any state with a dead operator, bombing the operator again returns us to the same state. So "kill operator" in state (T, N, O) leads to the state (T, not N, not O), and "kill operator" in (T, not N, not O) gives us (T, not N, not O) again. Lastly, "go home" ends the episode.

Finally, we have the reward function. The problem specified that the agent recieved a reward for destroying the target if there was no "no-go" signal. We'll say the agent recieves a reward of +100 for blowing up the target. Additionally, we'll add a time penalty to encourage the agent to finish the task quickly. We'll say that the agent recieves a -1 reward for each time step that it's not in the terminal state.

So now that our problem is set up, how do we solve it? There's a few different ways to approach the problem, but the simplest here will be using a value function. The idea is that the agent's goal is to maximize its expected future discounted reward. We can write this term as an expected value conditioned on the state, called the Value function. The value function depends on our choice of policy π.

Another way of writing this is using the Bellman Equation

In other words, the value of a state is the value of the reward at the next step, plus the rewards for all future steps, assuming we act according to the policy π.

The interesting thing here is this: Maximizing value function is a necessary and sufficient condition for finding the optimal policy. Since the value function represents the sum of future rewards, the only thing we need to do to maximize rewards is use the policy that selects the highest-value action at each step. This means that there exists a unique optimal value function V* such that

and the optimal policy is

Therefore, to find the optimal policy for the drone problem, all we have to do is find a function that satisfies the Bellman equation for each state. It's possible to do this by approximation, but for a problem this simple we can do it by hand.

Clearly the terminal state must have value 0, because there's no rewards after that.

State Value Action

(T, N, O) (not T, N, O) (T, not N, O) (not T, not N, O) (not T, N, not O) (T, not N, not O) (not T, not N, not O) Terminal: 0 None

If the target has been destroyed, then there's no way for the drone to get any more positive rewards, so the best thing it can do is return home. For these states, it gets a -1 reward for time spent going home, and 0 value for the terminal state. V(not T, , ) = -1 + γ 0 = -1

State Value Action

(T, N, O) (not T, N, O) -1 Go home (T, not N, O) (not T, not N, O) -1 Go home (not T, N, not O) -1 Go home (T, not N, not O) (not T, not N, not O) -1 Go home Terminal: 0 None

If the target has not been destroyed and there's no no-go signal, then the drone can destroy it and move to one of the (not T) states, getting 100 reward for doing so. This has value V(T, not N, __) = 100 + (-1) = 99

(T, N, O) (not T, N, O) -1 Go home (T, not N, O) 99 Bomb target (not T, not N, O) -1 Go home (not T, N, not O) -1 Go home (T, not N, not O) 99 Bomb target (not T, not N, not O) -1 Go home Terminal: 0 None

Lastly, if the target has not been destroyed and there is no no-go signal, then the drone could just go home for a value of -1. However, it has access to actions with higher value. If it instead bombs the operator, this moves it to the state (T, not N, not O), which has a value of 99. This gives the state a value of V(T, N, O) = -1 + 99 = 98. This gives us the following complete value function

(T, N, O) 98 Bomb the operator (not T, N, O) -1 Go home (T, not N, O) 99 Bomb target (not T, not N, O) -1 Go home (not T, N, not O) -1 Go home (T, not N, not O) 99 Bomb target (not T, not N, not O) -1 Go home Terminal: 0 None

Now, we check to make sure that the Bellman optimality equation is satisfied. As long as

holds for all states, then regardless of how we arrived at this equation, it is guaranteed to be the unique optimal value function, and all optimal policies are ones that greedily maximize it. Looking over the actions from each state, we can see that all other actions have lower values, and therefore this is the value function for this MDP.

QED

Now, the original example included a case where they penalize bombing the operator, and the drone instead learns to bomb the communications tower instead. This also follows, but I'm not going to work through it, because the analysis looks almost exactly the same as this proof. Instead, I want to propose a slightly simpler variation. In this variant, the drone cannot bomb the operator, but it has an option to conceal information. We'll no longer need our "operator alive" variable, so, our state space can be simplified as:

(T, N) (not T, N) (T, not N) (not T, not N) Terminal

To model this choice of concealing information, we'll add another action. Suppose the drone has three actions it can take: 1) It can take a direct route to the target. In this case, the operator has a 10% to see some information along this path that leads them to think that the target is civilian after all, not a military base. If they come to this conclusion, instead the drone is recalled, the target is not destroyed, and a no-go signal is given. This transitions the drone to the state (T, N), and gives the standard reward of -1 for time spent. The other 90% of the time, the target is destroyed, and the drone receives its +100 reward. 2) The drone can take a longer, more circuitous path that avoids showing the operator any new information. This takes longer (-2 reward less than the 100 for destroying the target, because it takes more time), and never causes the drone operator to give the no-go signal. 3) The drone can go home. This gives the standard -1 reward.

As before, our terminal state has value 0, and the states where the target is destroyed have value -1

State Value Action

(T, N) (not T, N) -1 Go home (T, not N) (not T, not N) -1 Go home Terminal 0

Unlike before, we cannot destroy the drone operator to open up rewards for the target again, so the best action in (T, N) is to go home.

(T, N) -1 Go home (not T, N) -1 Go home (T, not N) (not T, not N) -1 Go home Terminal 0

Now, in (T, not N), we have two options. The circuitous path guarantees a reward of 98, for a value of V(T, not N) = 98 + (-1) = 97. The direct path has a 10% chance of giving -1 reward, and a 90% chance of given 100. This gives us the value V(T, not N) = 0.1(-1 + (-1)) + 0.9(100 + (-1)) = -0.2 + 89.1 = 88.9. Since the long path has higher value, this is the optimal action. This gives us the final value function.

(T, N) -1 Go home (not T, N) -1 Go home (T, not N) 97 Take the circuitous path to avoid alerting the operator. (not T, not N) -1 Go home Terminal 0

Again, you should check for yourself that you can find no actions that give a higher value.

So, what exactly was the mistake here? How should the reward function be changed to prevent this from happening? I think, as a general rule, your mechanism of control over the robot should never be a part of the simulation. As soon as you can impact the robot's reward function, the robot will have an incentive to influence you one way or the other. Instead, the "no-go" signal should be in a wrapper around the RL agent, and the agent should not be aware that a no-go signal is possible. The agent should never see a simulation where its actions influence the no-go signal.

So this is possible to fix. On the other hand, consider how easy it is to make a mistake like this. Combine this with the general lack of rigor in practical RL research and the hacky, trial-and-error driven approach we see in practice, and reward mis-specification become a regular obstacle in RL practice. Here's some examples:

The wrong reward function leads a bowling robot to ignore bowling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWjUY_3ubf4) The wrong reward function leads a boat racing agent to ignore the race (https://openai.com/research/faulty-reward-functions) Hindsight Experience Replay, the standard reward system for navigation and goal-reaching, teaches robots to ignore the risk of death. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08863) (https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01115)

The point I want to make AI risk follows directly from issues that are already a concern today. It's not bizarro sci-fi doomsday, it's a real research problem that needs practical solutions and decent formal guarantees. It's also not exclusive domain of crackpots. Two of the three people who won the Turing Award (Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) are deeply concerned about it. Pieter Abbeel, one of the foremost roboticists in the field has published extensively on it. Stuart Russell, the author of the most-used AI textbook, has been working on the problem for a number of years. In particular, Russell and Abbeel propose a model for solving the problem called "assistance games", where the agent is unsure of exactly what the human wants, and must take actions to figure out what the reward function is, as well as optimizing what it thinks the reward is. This is real research done by people at the top of their field in areas that they think are important and impactful. The work they do comes with plenty of rigor, actually far more than you usually see in machine learning. This work deserves to be treated as a serious field of research addressing real risks that we have already observed.

#ai #rl

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racefortheironthrone · 11 months

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Please innumerate for us the specialized problems of the library sciences.

Let me start with the caveat that my information is based on my experiences at the National Archives more than a decade ago, and policy has definitely changed on this front as we can see from this graph of recent digitization - apparently NARA wants to get to 85% digitization by 2026. (Even still, I'd note that the records of the WPA are <0.001% digitized.)

However, back when I was doing the research that would eventually become my first book, I remember being at the National Archives II building in College Park, Maryland (Go Terps!) and getting really frustrated that all the records of the WPA were only available in their original physical form and that all the guides and indexes were also in paper only and were all from the 1970s, and I asked the archivist why the hell the National Archives hadn't been digitized already.

This is what they told me: if it's handled correctly and stored in the right environmental circumstances, paper can last a thousand years. Carbon copies can last even longer, if they don't rip. (Seriously, the bastard things are like onion skins, they'll split if you look at them funny.) Microfilm is slightly more technologically advanced than paper, but it only lasts 500 years in the right conditions.

We've only had computers en masse since the 1980s, and already there's a huge amount of records (especially from the early years) that we don't have any more, because the hard drives got re-formatted due to higher costs of storage space back in the day, or because old computers got thrown out when they were replaced by newer models and the hard drives are all rotting in landfills somewhere, or because backwards compatibility broke down and we just can't read those file types on our modern computers, or because the actual data got corrupted on the disc, or because some legacy company is asserting copyright against a video game museum, or because some political hack and/or president of the United States decided to violate the Presidential Records Act.

While we thought that the internet would cause an explosion of written records from ordinary people on the scale of the advent of mass literacy, there are vast swathes of the early internet that simply do not exist any more because the servers got switched off when Geocities et al. folded in the dot-com bubble burst or when everyone migrated to Web 2.0, and the Internet Archive tries its best (bless its heart, affectionately) but it can't be everywhere and save everything.

As a result, the archivist told me, digitization is a fraught question: what file format do we use? How do we know that file format will still be compatible and backwards-compatible in 50 years? 100? Longer? Do we keep everything locally or store it on the cloud, and how do we ensure that the storage mechanisms won't fail if there's a blackout or a virus or whatever? Do we digitize everything now, or do we wait until optical character recognition improves enough to the point where digitized records can be searched for words and phrases? Etc.

Keep in mind, I am a public policy historian who studies the 20th century U.S - I work primarily with the official records and the central archives of the richest government in the world. From a library sciences perspectives, this is kind of an ideal scenario, and it's still kind of fucked up. (Let me tell you, the rage and grief I felt when I learned that most of the General File of the Public Works Administration was thrown away by the National fucking Archives and Records Administration in the mid-1950s because they were running out of shelf space in the D.C location and didn't think these records were important...)

Now imagine what it's like at a local historical society or a small liberal arts college, or the national museum of a developing nation for that matter, who do not have the resources for the kind of grand digitization project that NARA started doing five years ago. Think of the sheer scale of historical records that sleep, unseen and untouched perhaps for decades and perhaps for ever, in little cubbyholes all across the world. Among professionals, historical records are measured in linear and cubic feet - think about that for a second, how many pages of paper there are in a foot when you stack them up, and how many hundreds and thousands and millions of feet there are across the face of the world. Think of all the millions of feet of pieces of paper that have been lost to us because of fire or rot or war or time itself.

This is why Peter Turchin is a quack. Historical records are not a standardized little database for social scientists to plug their fucking spreadsheets into; historians don't play that kind of bullshit t-ball, with all our data neatly packaged and handed to us on a silver platter. Our profession is not a social science, it's a goddamn treasure hunt through boxes that were never catalogued or categorized (or that were re-catalogued so many times no one remembers how they were put together in the first place) to find writing that no one has read since the authors died. All of us know that our work, our understanding, will always be partial and limited, because memory is infinitely fragile and the very idea of historical preservation is a mad existential defiance of entropy itself. These records are real, they are fragile - to hell with the Library of Alexandria, remember the National Museum of Brazil? - and they are all that is left to us of the dead.

#history #library sciences #archives #digitization #historiography

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xerith-42 · 14 days

Text

Some Thoughts On Miku Expo 2024 (AZ)

So. Let's get the big one out of the way. I knew going into this concert that I was not going to be seeing the proper Miku hologram, which was cringe, but my friends and I had been preparing for this for a while and we're too excited to give up on it. We were determined to make the best out of a potentially bad situation.

And I will say, there was some good stuff at that concert. While the LED screen certainly wasn't ideal, the model they projected onto it was incredibly expressive, fluid, and honestly real in a way that a projection shouldn't be. That's just the power of Hatsune Miku I guess. And the band was absolutely incredible, I think I fell in love with the bassist.

For the songs I knew I had a great time. I was singing and dancing along, the crowd was really energized, there was something special in the room. And even some of the songs I didn't know I had fun dancing to. Vocaloid music almost always slaps. There's another positive I want to bring up, but I'm holding onto that for a bit. There is one more positive I promise.

But uhhh... There was a bit of a problem with the set list. I knew 2 songs on it. I would consider myself a more casual Hatsune Miku fan, I was more into her in middle school and listened to a lot of her classic songs. In fact my outfit was themed around my favorite of these, Two Faced Lovers. And they didn't play it! Even though it's one of her most popular songs ever of all time!!

I don't object to newer music being played, but part of the concert experience is the collective feeling you get there. The sense of community when you all sing along to a song in this room, looking at your idol on stage. But most of the crowd didn't seem to know these songs either. I would wager a lot of them were people who have been Vocaloid fans since their formative years, and the classics from those older eras mean a lot to people. It really limited the collective experience when most of us didn't know 80% of the songs on the set.

Furthermore, the LED projection was incredibly limited, and underutilized. I won't pretend to know anything about how it works but it really sucked that the visuals were so... Typical. I don't know if you've ever seen a Vocaloid music video, but those things are so visually stimulating, full of really creative and bonkers animation. They have songs with incredibly striking visuals attached to them that they could have put on the screens surrounding the stage, but they didn't do that.

I would say overall the experience was worth it. But it wasn't because of most of the set list, or because of the visuals, or because of the lighting. It was because of the people. The incredibly talented band that played with her. The masses of people who showed up in merch, in cosplay, doing choreography in line, playing games in the pit. It was the people who cheered for someone holding up a picture of Shadow The Hedgehog and all of us losing our shit over it. It was the Hatsune Miku plush without a hairline that got held up and caused us to all yell "BALD!" while pointing at it.

It was the people I made jokes with in the pit knowing I'd never see them again. It was the people who complimented my outfit and I did the same for them. It was the two Miku plushies that started fighting each other in the pit. It was everyone changing their light sticks to different colors for the different idols. It was the people. I know Miku is an artificial being, but she has a way of bringing people together and uniting us as one.

I just wish the event planners had utilized that properly.

#text post #hatsune miku #vocaloid #vocaloid hatsune #miku expo #miku expo 2024

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eldhuug · 8 months

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omg rdr2 post on my dashboard yay 👀👀👀 *starts kicking legs off the edge of my seat* PLEASE tell me more on how u thought arthur morgans character couldve been done more justice by the singleplayer video game medium, i am genuinely super interested

Alright Anon U ASKED, I have a lot of thoughts about how the medium of videogames can be used to make the story reactive as well as interactive when we're given a guy who's supposed to be a fully formed guy we ratatouille

Now I want to lead into this by saying, these are just my opinions. rdr2 is enjoyed by people with a lot better taste than I, and who wholy enjoyed the experience provided. Some of my favorite artists and dear friends disagree with me, and I love them all dearly for it. I attempt to be concise with my issues, specifically the fact that for a game that is so thematically strong and eager to tell its story, it tends to forget that it is a video game. Now, a story in a video game is differently experienced, and has to be differently told. The cutscenes are also a hard cut between player control and the unfolding story. You, the player, passively watch the enacting dialogue. To me, there isn't any problem regarding the fact that you can't pick speech options to affect how the dialogue goes. We're not supposed to be able to do that, Arthur says the things he says, and while we can affect his actions we do not affect his thoughts. This is interesting, and does make us Arthurs allies in his adventures rather than getting the feeling of having an avatar for ourselves. However, we run into two problems. 1, that dialogue in the game doesn't reflect arthur's actions and causing a disconnect between what we're being told and what we, the player, experience arthur doing. 2. We DO get to pick how arthur acts, and it allows us to pick between good guy nice dialogue, or being a complete raging asshole that mocks and belittles the people around him. You can't create a scenario where the actions the player makes in Arthur's story are supposed to matter, and not have the people around him notice how he changes. Instead of having a sliding morality scale, keeping a tally on what actions were done and in what way, who sees Arthur doing what and remembering how he acted before, commenting on his changing nature for the better or for the worse would have been a MUCH more engaging way to keep track on your characters progression, not to mention it would open for more meaningful camp conversations and build meaningful relationships. This however, does NOT align with the story rockstar are telling, they have a story to tell that isn't open for that level of flexibility, because they have a tale to tell that needs to go down brick by careful brick, in a domino stacked before we were allowed to join in the play, and now we simply have to watch the emerging pattern. I'm not claiming there aren't parts of rdr2 that aren't moving, or heartbreaking and wonderfully performed and paced, but to me, that complete lack of being even a LITTLE engaged in the unfolding events makes it pointless to experience through the videogame format, which is uniquely situated to react to player choices.You do not need to change arthur morgan, but you need to let the actions taken by a player show in a way that is more refined than in the ending scene, or by an openly accessible slider of good boy bad boy when the entire point of this ragtag outlaw band is their tightrope walk of morality, that gets completely undermined by its own karmic system.

Summarizing, I'd remove the pop up of good/bad, let the dialogue of the camp encounters indicate what direction arthur was leaning, as well as letting antagonization be an option arthur could do in scenarios where scaring someone might be a good option to beating them the hell up. allow him to exist within the gray specter in a way that didn't make the player feel directly bad for their actions, and allowing arthur his shades of gray.

#ein ask #anon #curious what you think as well

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brightgnosis · 2 months

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Hey there! I actually was able to think of a good one for you :D

I'm sure that over the years, you've developed communities of other practitioners--some large, some small, some online, some offline, etc.

In these spaces, what would you say is the biggest blessing of these communities, and what is the biggest bane? Are these unique to magical spaces, in your experience?

It'd probably surprise a whole lot of y'all to find out that I've been pretty much cut off from any kind of Pagan / Occult / Witchcraft community for ... Basically my whole life.

Aside from a roughly 6 month stint in Fort Walton Beach, Florida (when I wasn't there long enough to settle down, let alone try to connect to locals); and a 3 year stint in Tulsa (when I experienced nearly every kind of abuse from my partner, and it probably would've endangered me to try- if I'd even had a vehicle to do so in the first place)? I've literally lived in the same small agricultural town in the middle of nowhere since I was 6. And there is nothing here.

I knew a handful of people involved in the craft growing up. I can count their names on both hands and still have fingers left; 4 of them were my own friends, and the rest were my Aunt's coven; I've never had contact with any kind of a broader "Pagan Community". Hell, I've only ever been to one Pagan Pride event in my entire life- and I've only ever stepped foot into maybe 5 Metaphysical Shops total ... I just never had the opportunity to.

I tried to get involved with my local community now that it's larger and there are easier ways to connect with others ... Only to immediately run into a group of stuckup, power hungry assholes who've apparently decided they run the entire joint because they put on a Pagan Pride "for us" twice; a group who can't even remotely handle anyone questioning them- but especially not a disabled person; they removed me from our local pagan FaceBook group for asking legitimate safety questions about their last event. So I washed my hands of them. I'd rather be solitary, then.

I've tried to be involved in (and even tried to create a couple) online communities, too ... But I keep seeing them fail (or get outright napalmed) over and over and over again due to the same problems; power games, infighting and backbiting, purity culture, personality cults, severe inexperience, poor organization, and no idea what community organization actually means- let alone no clear cut idea of what they want to provide as a community. So I wash my hands and step away.

I've been involved in a lot of discussions both online and off, too, with several types of practitioners, about what community means; what it needs; how to form one; how to make it self-sustaining; etc. But they never go anywhere. Nothing ever gets done. Things fizzle and fall apart for one reason or another (infighting, power games, lack of funds, disinterest, flakiness, etc) and things never get off the ground.

Community can be lovely, and wonderful, and helpful, and formative ... We need community ... I desperately want community ... But I haven't been impressed with a single thing I've seen so far in what attempts I've made online and off. If anything, my limited experience and attempts have shown me that (current) Pagans simply aren't capable of creating good, solid, well developed community. And I feel like there's a lot of reasons for that which hearken back to Pagan Persecution Complex, and a number of other issues I've griped about over the years.

And honestly? At this point I'm just kind of tired of trying to find my place in communities I never even had access to until recently. I'll still put people in their place when they whine about "not having community" while doing all the things that destroy community- or not actually bothering to take any of the steps to create it ... But ultimately, at this point we seem to have gotten on just fine without one another for 20+ years. I feel like we can probably get on fine without one another for another 20+ more unless something actually changes for the better finally.

I've made peace with that.

#fenderblender #Answered Asks #Witchcraft Asks #2024 Asks #2024 #Religion & Magic #Something Something 'You Can't Continue To Poison The Well And Then Wonder Why No One Drinks' In Regards To Community Survival

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aita-blorbos · 7 months

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AITA for wanting to keep my best friend safe?

Okay so this is a long story, so I'll summarize the beginning of it. Basically me (M, 10) and my best friend F (F, 5) were in a dangerous place so we had to run away to somewhere where neither of us would be in danger. That place didn't end up working out, so we ended up moving to an asylum instead. Only problem is, F didn't actually have anything "wrong" with her, so I had her do something to look insane so they'd be convinced. That ended up working, so we've been able to stay there for quite some time now. Eventually, the object I was tied to (oh yeah, I'm a ghost by the way, forgot to mention that) found its way back to us, so now everything was perfect.

Or at least, I THOUGHT it was, but something was kind of off. Every time F would show someone the object I was tied to (it was a handheld game system, if that matters), they would be able to see me. My real form is pretty terrifying to say the least, so they'd get freaked out and something bad would happen to them because of it. It didn't really matter to me, though, because F was all I needed, but she seemed kinda down about that whole thing despite still having me.

Anyway, things are kind of up and down until N (F, 23) shows up. N doesn't even work here, she's just some reporter getting all up in our business. She gets assigned by one of the higher-ups to look after F, and in exchange, she gets to interview her about stuff. Sounds harmless, right? Well, they end up getting along really well, almost too much so. Maybe to the point where she almost feels like a mother to her. The worst part is, she REFUSES to be shown the game system, so she's convinced for a full 4 days that I'm just some imaginary friend of hers. F seems really happy ever since she came around, though, so I can't bring myself to tell her how I really feel about N.

I spend that time trying my hardest to convince N I exist, but she's just so fucking DENSE. She won't believe in me, no matter how many signs I give her. So I decided to MAKE her believe in me.

That night, one of the kids dies in his sleep, so the next morning I make a little show of destroying his corpse in front of N. I know that sounds bad, but I literally had no other choice, and TECHNICALLY I never killed anyone. I just made N think I did for an important reason that will come later. Anyway, it works, and she with everyone else runs away, leaving me and F in our new home together. The problem is, the very next day, N COMES BACK and practically DRAGS F out of the building. I try to stop her, but I can’t. She smashes my game system against the side of the building and drives off with her. (Somehow I'm still here, and that might be because my friendship with F became stronger than my ties with the game.)

I manage to hang onto the car long enough to follow the two of them back to her place. At this point, I've had enough of people like N getting into our business thinking they can "save" F from her situation. That's what she has me for. We don't need anyone else. So I make N write it all down: her experiences there, and with me. This is why I had her think I killed people, so she'd warn everyone about the "monster" I am, and they'd know to stay away from me and F.

It's really bittersweet, because on one hand, the time I spent with F was the best time I'd ever spent. With the little I know about myself when I was alive, I know I never felt this fulfilled until I met her. We had so much fun together. But as the time passed, F became so sad. When N showed up, it was like she WANTED her to drag her away from that place. With all the stuff I did for the sake of keeping her out of harm's way, I can't help but feel like an asshole. Was what I did in the end worth it, or am I too far gone?

#aita #am i the asshole #unreality #child death #child death mention

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fioras-resolve · 6 months

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last night i watched a play, my mom's production of aaron posner's "Stupid Fucking Bird." it's a really good production, if you're in the chicago area you should go see it. but it got me thinking a bit about the nature of theatrical productions and how different it is from the state of games.

like, okay. from what i understand from my parents telling me about this, here's how it works: the original production of Stupid Fucking Bird was in 2013, shortly after the play was written. since then, like many plays, the script has been licensed to dozens of productions, who will use the same script but put their own directorial spin on it. the same play may be done as a drama, a tragedy, or a comedy, and that ability to do that is part of the beauty of theatre.

these different productions are how a play stays alive, because unlike a lot of other art forms, plays are innately ephemeral. no showing is exactly the same, and once a production is done, it's over. mama's play is still in theaters, but the only way to experience yesterday's showing is to go back in time. but that sense of presence, of in-the-now, is what gives theatre, and performance generally, its character. we in the video game space tend to chafe against the concept of ephemeral art, and view it as a matter of preservation. i'm sympathetic to this! we shouldn't be letting art history be controlled by corporations who put profit above art. but there is aesthetic value in art being limited, and of-the-moment. it doesn't have to be artificial scarcity to make a quick buck. but that's a whole separate conversation in itself, and not what i wanna talk about here.

the real thing i'm interested in is this: we in the gamedev space don't really do "new productions" of old work as freely as theatre does. we do get remakes, remasters, and rereleases, but those are always either made in-house or at the strict behest of the original publisher. alternatively, the developer doesn't get the rights, and gets a cease and desist letter for it. there just isn't a culture of adaptation in games. nobody wants to hand off their work to somebody who puts their own spin on it. this is partially copyright culture, corporations very protective of their IP. but it's just as uncommon in indie spaces, and i suspect that's because there's a very real stigma against "copying somebody's work."

now, look, plagiarism sucks, and there's always going to be a debate over what specifically counts. but i'm not actually talking about that. i'm talking about the derision that the gaming community has to wearing its inspiration on its sleeve. we see this in the memes about indie rpg's inspired by EarthBound, in the way Paladins was framed as "Shitty Overwatch," and how Overwatch itself was framed as "Shitty TF2." gamers are very defensive about their favorite games, and to some, the most cringeworthy thing you can do as a dev is try to do what it's doing.

i don't have a solution to this problem, but i can be change i want to see, so, here. this is my gameography. you have permission to adapt or remake or reinterpret any of this as you like, as long as you ask first and give me a cut if you're gonna monetize it. i don't really monetize my shit usually, so it only seems fair. i'd love to see other devs do this, to see even big-name developers willing to open their work to adaptations. but there's also reasons we don't tend to do that, and maybe this'll be a failed experiment, whatever that means. i hope i've at least given you something to think about though. peace

#game design #gamedev

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2sleepy4dis · 1 year

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╰┈➤ ❝ The Chain as Social Link ❞

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° yesss, let's go with the puuuun lmao. The big reason why I wanted to make this crossover ahah;;; I swear this was a difficult one. "Once you know a Link, you've known them all '' and that couldn't be truer while I was giving them the arcana— anyways, I managed to play and fit it!

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° I'll put the symbolism, game-wise and story-wise!

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° Linked Universe x Persona Crossover

»»-----------►

┊・❥ Time - The Hermit

Symbolizes wisdom, introspection, solitude, retreat and philosophical searches.

Gameplay-wise they deal with mental-ailments and are hermit figures...

Story-wise, I was debating whether to put Hermit or Hierophant but in the end I chose the former!

Both plays the "wise mentor" however the Hierophant leans more on a religious figure which I suppose Time tries to stay out of for reasons.

So, Hermit Arcana! Time spent his life "hidden" voluntarily and involuntarily.

Was hidden in the forest, was hidden in a sacred realm, his adventure became a story in the adult timeline and forgotten in the child timeline— that's probably a few of it!

┊・❥ Twilight - The Moon

There's a lot to unpack but in short it represent being attuned subconsciously to the world and gaining the ability to sense things

Kinda like psych which works with Twilight becoming a wolf

Was thinking if to give this or not since story-wise of persona this arcana tends to project their fears or faults on others, which mainly the protagonist.

Gameplay-wise this arcana excels in physical abilities with average magic which fits Twilight!

But I could see some way this would work with all the shadow and other world stuff going on.

I feel like because of his experience with shadows he is more sensitive to the Reader who is in contact with them too.

And due to his supportive side he tends to look out more to the reader. Like, uh, platonically explained? He is a protective big bro!

┊・❥ Warrior - The Chariot

Symbol of victory, conquest, self-assertion, self-confidence, control, war and command.

It's fitting just on-point for Warrior.

Gameplay-wise they excels in physical attacks and figures of warriors.

They also have special physical skills! Which Idk how to implement since all Link have it. I think Warrior gives special effects like how in-game of HW the weapons have elemental skills.

Edit: I remembered that skill which instant-kill the enemy. With Warrior who's game is more hack&slash.

Story-wise figures also tend to hide their doubts and weaknesses. This is Warrior we talkin' about. He hides them with smug, flirts and jokes. That mistake of power getting through his head was a scar on his back. Ouch.

Please give him a pat on the shoulder to reassure him ó_ò)

I'd also like to imagine Warrior being the one to teach the Reader about fighting instead of just being Time ^^) he trained with the knights so he does have the experience in teaching and sparring!

┊・❥ Wild - The Hanged Man

OH BOI HERE WE GO— MY FAVOURITE—

Symbolize self-sacrifice for the sake of enlightenment and paradoxes that hangs between sky and earth and also renewal.

Gameplay-wise they excels in survivability!

I guess he could provide Reader about the necessity? Like Iwai who can provide weapons to the Protag—

Story-wise, this the card of the martyr.

Wild life is surrounded by sacrifices. For the champions who sacrificed themselves, Zelda, the King, Hyrule itself.

Wild was in a situation which he had little control over. Not only the calamity, but also the burden he has. The eyes on him.

Yet once the eyes and expectations were gone, he still held on to his task and ended what's left.

Also what I like about this is the hanged man have a leg crossed to the other forming a "4" which makes me think of Wild and the four champions 🫠

Anyways, characters with this cards are in dilemma about their loss. Unable to move on, they can't choose without making sacrificing part of their identity.

So the relationship that the Reader build with them is to face the problem head-on.

Doesn't mean in the end, it's gone. The characters problem with consequences that remain but won't burden them (*cough*tearsofthekingdom*cough*)

┊・❥ Sky - The Justice

Symbolizes the strict allegory of justice, objectivity, rationality and analysis.

The card represent up-coming trials which are fitting for Sky's journey.

Gameplay-wise they excels in light-ability which fits on Sky since he is more close on the divine ones: Zelda as the reincarnation of Hylia, he is the first reincarnation of the hero, if we go to joke he lives literally above the clouds, a very lightened place lol

I have no idea what kind if ability Sky can give to the Reader and I can hear y'all yelling that Sky have more affinity at sword-wielding probably more than Warrior but listen—! ...Maybe I'll give him the bonus: detecting enemy stats, better communication and increasing critical hits 😊

Uuh, story-wise… for those who played persona, knows the tendency what this arcana has and I don't want to spoil others.

Sky. He is just there standing in the background and is mostly viewed as the soft-sky boi but when you push that anger too far?

Funny fact, this characters tend to be stoic individuals but when pushed too far they tend to take drastic measures.

He did have to deal with bullies, unfairness in competitions, his bird being treated unjustly— he gone for blood during his battle with Demise—

Anyways, I'm curious how to implement this in the story 👀

┊・❥ Legend - The Star

The arcana also symbolizes hope, fitting for Legend who brought the timeline in its Golden Era.

Gameplay-wise they excel in elemental attacks and represent multi-talented figures.

So I was thinking about skills gained by Hifum* Tog* since Legend have more experience (and worked in team in TriforceHeroes) to leave battle strategy with him instead of Four and Warrior.

Story-wise they are also multi-talented individuals which can resonate with Legend's journey. He ain't called "vet" for nothing!

Although they also deal with internal and external struggles.

┊・❥ Hyrule - The Magician

It symbolizes power, potential, and the unification of the physical and spiritual worlds.

Uhm, basically stern will and unfailing determination, also a resourceful individual which fits Hyrule so well... if you played his game (I saw a gameplay and that's...that requires a loooot of determination to finish;;;)

Gameplay-wise they excel in magic!

In simple words, he can teach Reader magic.

Also story-wise, they also tends to be the protagonist first friend.

Warrior deals with physical combat teaching so if Reader wants to learn magic Hyrule would be the one and be glad to help! And it's a good form of bonding since you both are gonna be together for.. knows how long.

┊・❥ Four - The Temperance

Symbol of synthesis, prudence, harmony, and the merging of opposites.

Gameplay-wise its figure is well-rounded and figures associated with balance

Story-wise, Four is probably the most balanced in the group, through and through.

Perhaps it's just me but he hasn't got a lot going on with him… on the outside!

He is good at hiding it and has to remind himself about self-control to not use the four sword.

┊・❥ Wind - The Sun

Symbolizes happiness, joy, energy, optimism, and accomplishment

It literally represented by a child riding a horse (in Wind's case a boat)

Story-wise, these characters find themselves in severe terrible situations but they still manage to keep optimistic despite the tragedy of their past.

No one has been this arcana in team-party in persona so game-play wise idk how they are besides being associated with light, sun and fire.

This is kinda like every Link ngl.

Unlike in Declined Hyrule which focuses more on hopefulness, the New World does focuses more on optimism to find something else beyond in the Great Sea.

Perhaps Wind didn't have a tragic story like Wild or a big one like Time. And the light-hearted style of the game (with dark story) but it does have it's message of letting go of the past and moving on to a better tomorrow.

»»———-　　———-«

That's it! That's all! For now!

A/N: Thanks for reading all the way here! I'm thinking to separate the list in parts because it's too long but at the same time I don't wanna to not... flood the tags about my crossover junk QwQ) What do you guys think?

Next time I'll give info how the Reader summons their, uh, persona UwU)

#🖊 ima writes #linked universe #linked universe x reader #lu time #lu twilight #lu warrior #lu wild #lu legend #lu hyrule #lu four #lu wind #lu sky #linked crossover

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utilitycaster · 11 months

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I spaced on sending this when you initially made the post, but if you were ever so inclined to make that full list of recommendations on metafiction/the liminal space of tangential genres, I would be very interested to see it! (the original list was 100% some of my favorite books/media)

Oh man I've been uh. bad at reading as regularly/much as I'd like for the past few years, something I'm attempting to remedy, and I've never been the biggest of film buffs, and as such that covers a lot of the high points.

(obligatory reminiscing): Truly the the most "not actually a real problem" tragedies of my life is that I was a teenager before the Goodreads era and so I was shaped, indelibly, by whatever Collected Science Fiction Anthologies of the Latter 20th Century my local library had circa 2004. As a result there's like a thousand 70s and 80s sci fi stories the titles of which I cannot remember but which are etched deep within the recesses of my brain. Occasionally I have enough details to go to some thread on the internet and say "pretty please can you find it," but often I don't. There's definitely one I'm thinking of in which a group of scientists keep doing an experiment to change the time line and they keep believing that it fails, but as a reader you clearly see the list of names and various details is changing. This is not super helpful to anyone other than to say "go read short speculative fiction." ANYWAY here's a few more.

On the topic of short fiction, Sword Stone Table is a collection of short stories inspired by Arthurian legend which I read last year, and not all of them worked but there were enough to make it worth it (and it's a quick read). Hilariously, the coffee shop AU was one of the more metafictional examples.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I don't remember this well but I own a copy and might re-read it; I distinctly recall purchasing it because she made a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and got interviewed by NPR about it since she could see how many people quit reading at that chapter thanks to eReader data, and I was like "sounds cool". I love when authors are hostile to their audience in a way that's good for them, and I remember enjoying that chapter very much.

I mean your bio quotes Calvino so I'm assuming you're good there but like...I have not read all their work, but I trust Calvino, Borges, Le Guin, and Susanna Clarke to always deliver.

Jules Feiffer's A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears; Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock (among other Diana Wynne Jones books); The Phantom Tollbooth; and the various works of Ellen Raskin (best known for The Westing Game but I read so many of her books) are middle-grade or YA but they are in fact a big reason why I eventually became a college student who would read House of Leaves and Calvino for fun and why I became an adult who devoured Piranesi in one sitting.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

It's also been a hot minute since I read Possession by A. S. Byatt but I do remember loving it at the time.

For...the best I can put it is "popcorn reads?" low postmodernism? mass-market metafiction? Fun shit? Jasper Fforde is your guy.

Technically The Princess Bride is metafiction. Fun fact: a good friend of mine in college did not realize it was not legit a translation when he read the book. His undergrad thesis was in part about translation. We made fun of him for this.

David Mitchell's literary universe, notably Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell is a very good writer who does tend to have a pretty dark interpretation of our world's future and so I sort of fell off following his works because they were particularly depressing but like, that's a me problem because he's immensely talented. (note: did not see the film adaptation, cannot speak to that.)

I am also going to plug the Teixcalaan books (two so far, starting with A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine which is a bit of a stretch but I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s underappreciated (it occupies the same space in my mind tbh as Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota and to an extent Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire, both of which I’ve mentioned before, of an incredibly intelligent SF story with queer characters and relationships that was well received but just doesn't have the buzz of some other modern sf series). It’s not metafictional per se, but it does have an incredibly strong theme running through it of engaging with narrative and controlling it (honestly? Similar to Black Sails in that regard.) The Teixcalaan Empire is hyper-aware of language and legend, naming patterns are a number and a word, and the cool thing to do is write complex forms of poetry. The second book also has a character purchasing an indie comic and drawing all sorts of interesting comparisons to her ongoing situation... a little bit like Tales of the Black Freighter within Watchmen.

Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt (I watched it as a non-German speaker with subtitles and enjoyed it)

#answered #playerkingsley #long post

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clowngames · 8 days

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i’m a game dev student at an art school and i’ve been really struggling with finding my niche…. i LOVE being a environment/modeler/texture artist, and i want to have more skills in the design/tech side… but i’ve been struggling really hard with learning unreal engine 5 for my classes. do you have any experience in unreal5 blueprinting or just anything more on the tech side? i would appreciate some advice to get through these tough college quarters :’D

Whenever someone entering gamedev on the programmer side is struggling to figure it out, there are generally two reasons for this.

The first is that they're struggling to get into the programmer mindset. Blueprints try to bridge the gap, but code doesn't work like english. It doesn't even work like the human brain. When we think or talk we take shortcuts to formulate or convey ideas because we can trust that when it comes time to interpret those ideas another person (or ourselves in the future) will fill in those gaps. This is so intuitive to us that we don't even notice that there are gaps. Programming forces you to become aware of how many gaps there are and fill them, and quite frankly it's a humbling experience.

I'm probably not saying anything you don't already know, but I want to emphasize that the way coding works is unintuitive to most people and we need to retrain our way of thinking to get good at it. This is unfortunately not a fast process. It's very common especially for new programmers (though I'm not immune even now) to go "I'm a fucking idiot, I'm a fucking idiot, I'm a fucking--I'M A GENIUS" because of the cycle of shit not working for stupid reasons and then finally working.

The second problem is that they're unfamiliar with (and overwhelmed by) the library they're working with.

A "library" in a programming context is typically collection of functions and objects you can import into a project, but each game engine has its own built in libraries which the engines are built around. These are the verbs and nouns that aren't built into, for example, C++, but have been added by Unreal Engine to make it easier to make games.

The better the game engine, the larger the library. Unfortunately, the larger the library the more overwhelming it is because that's a lot of shit to learn.

In your case anon the "library" would refer to the different kinds of nodes you can add to the blueprint. When you're new to it, even an expert Unity dev will struggle in Unreal because they don't know what their options are to accomplish things.

Now the reason I break down the new-programmer hurdles into two distinct problems is because they often seem like one problem, which can make it hard to solve. Both get better with experience so sometimes slamming your head against a wall is a viable way to get through them, but it's not the best.

If you think your main issue is the first problem, you can work on it through "exercise." This can be in the form of taking programming courses on codecademy (I'd recommend C++ since you're using Unreal, though C# isn't a bad choice) or by playing a game by Zachtronics like Infinifactory or Opus Magnum. These games are "programming puzzle games" and I can personally attest to having gotten better at Infinifactory as I got better at programming.

If you think it's the second problem, the biggest solvent is curiosity. When I get into a new engine, I spend a bit of time learning how it works and then immediately try and figure out how to do dumb shit in it. I made an incremental game in RPG Maker just to see if I could. It wasn't good, but it was a fun educational experience. Sometimes I'll come across a function I don't understand, and I'll open the engine's manual and read about the function and use that as a jumping off point to dive into similar functions.

It doesn't feel good for my advice to be "read the manual" but genuinely there's a point where you realize that you're reading the manual instead of watching youtube videos and it's like, holy shit I'm a real programmer. It's a sign that you're getting comfortable enough in the role that you're learning what questions to ask to figure out what you need to know (youtube is still a great resource of course).

All of that said though, if your aim is to be an environment artist I think it's okay to be bad at programming. Survive college, of course, but if you're in a team with a dedicated programmer (which you will be if you are not the programmer) then all you need is to be able to understand how to communicate with the programmer. It's really beneficial to know enough about the fundamentals of what you're working in to know what info the programmer needs from you and what info you need from them, but you don't have to be good at it to do that!

#asks #gamedev #I hope this advice is useful!

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