The Way Things Work (1994) Disk Drive

In fighting games counting (comparing) frames on moves/animations is important, even for players. For other types of games, do developers or animators count or tweak to the frame? And when counting small amounts of time like that, how do most studios do it? Frames? Milliseconds?

Animators typically count things in terms of frames. Some designers care about frames specifically too, but engineers and designers generally use milliseconds or decimal seconds (e.g. 0.6 seconds) to describe how long something should be. Using frames as a specific time measurement is less helpful because development builds typically aren't optimized and may run at different frame rates based on what's going on. Using a more specific measurement of real time is more helpful, since the game engine can calculate real time from its (variable) frame time in order to maintain accuracy. Our debug logging keeps tabs on everything in terms of milliseconds so we can see how temporally far apart events in the log fire.

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I feel a little creepy bringing this up, but I also think it's important for people to realize it. Especially people who work out their issues through fandom a lot - cheaper than therapy, often more effective, been going on for millennia, go forth and do what you need to do.

Authors engage with their fiction at a personal level, too. Authors work on their own issues in fiction, and don't necessarily understand that they're doing it until afterward.

I have a writer friend who was in an abusive relationship. She got out of it about the same time I had a personal crisis that deeply involved my marriage. We were able to talk about these things to each other in a productive way. One of the things she said was: "When you reread what you wrote during X time later, you'll see that you were already telling yourself about this."

Most of this author's mid-career was spent writing thrillers, about being trapped, misled, and harmed; about making mistakes and taking responsibility; about choosing options that other people think are bad for you, because for you they are the safe options. Once you know some details of her experience, you can see exactly where the abusive relationship began and roughly how it played out, and how all of the stories she wrote during this time, and during the long period of her recovery, had him for a villain, until she was finally able to kill him off the way she needed to. Since then, she's written a joyful celebration of art and community; she's written a medievalist fantasy of self-discovery; she's done the work she had to do and gone on with her life at last. But it wasn't until she was safe that she could even admit to herself that she'd been writing about her abuse the whole time she was being abused.

Lots of people have engaged with her thrillers at the surface level; we will never know how many people engaged with them to do the same kind of work she was doing; or how many engaged with them to do different work on different issues; or what qualitative difference it makes to all those processes to know how her personal history shaped her work. This is the nature of the beast.

One of the ways people work on their issues with art is through creating for themselves - fanfiction, meta, formal litcrit, adaptation to other forms of media. This is normal. Usually it's healthy. But it doesn't have to be. This is not something that can be judged from outside. Sometimes people who really, really ought to have therapy cling to a fandom instead and this...is not always productive. And sometimes people get into parasocial relationships with creators in which their own real issues get all mixed up with their imaginary construct of the creator.

So that's enough vagueblogging. It's time to talk about Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Who were two very different people who were best friends forever. Who were both writers doing what writers do. Who early in their careers collaborated on a religious satire in which their work got so mixed up together that they couldn't always tell who had written what in its final form, and which featured major themes about friendship, including two best friends forever collaborating, not particularly effectually, to save the world. Who had fun identifying themselves with those two characters. Who liked the idea of a film adaptation, who actively wanted a film adaptation, but couldn't find an acceptable way to do it within the industry. Who verbally worked out the details of a sequel, but never could actually sit down to write it together, but who continued to influence each other's work in ways that anyone reading both of them could see easily if they cared to look.

(Coraline and The Wee Free Men were written and published almost at the same time. I read them one after the other. The two books are very different reads, in different genres, but at the high concept level, they are the same story. Tell me that's a coincidence and I'll shake my head and say "Bless your heart, child.")

And then one of those friends got a debilitating disease and died.

And the survivor became determined to bring about the film adaptation and to get the sequel made, explicitly for his friend's sake.

Even though his friend would never see it, and it meant new collaboration with new people.

Good Omens (TV) is the best film adaptation of a text work I have ever seen in a longish life of being disappointed by film adaptations. S1 made me happy; S2 made me happy and sad and ultimately (perhaps inevitably) dissatisfied; I hope that S3 will make me happy and satisfied. But there is a level at which that doesn't matter. Gaiman has repeatedly expressed gratification over the way people have embraced it; but he's not doing this for us. And he's not only doing it for Pratchett.

He's doing it because he needs to process what happened when his best friend got Alzheimer's and died. Maybe he doesn't know that's what he's doing - but he clearly is.

Pratchett's illness and death are all over the adaptation. We saw it even in S1, we talked about it, the difference between Crowley and the Bookshop Fire in the book and in the show, and people openly recognized that the difference was between a young artist working with his best friend and an older artist whose best friend had died. That was simple; we all got it. Some of us didn't like it, but we got it.

But it's all over S2, too, and here it's not simple, it's a big complicated mess. The villain of S1, who wasn't in the book at all, shows up sporting the most noticeable symptoms of the disease that killed the member of the creative team identified with the character the villain goes to for refuge. The original creative team's avatars are suddenly working at cross-purposes when they seem to be allying where before they were allying when they appeared to be working at cross purposes. Mirrors function in the plot again but they're confusing. Memory is a huge theme but it doesn't resolve. And the character who is the avatar of the creator who died goes off to a Heaven it knows is a horrible place and leaves the avatar of the creator who survived angry and miserable on Earth. All in the service of setting up that long-deferred sequel.

And the thousands of people who are in a parasocial relationship with the survivor and are livid, or feel betrayed, or otherwise take this personally - really need to accept and remember that.

Watching this live video of a show from the last leg of the Skinny Puppy tour and analyzing it like I’m MatPat and it’s a fucking FNAF cutscene.

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Michael Hobbes @ RottenInDenmark on 16 Nov 2022: The events surrounding Elon Musk the last two weeks are a great reminder that, despite all the hand-wringing about "cancel culture," the real threats to workers and free speech in America almost exclusively come from the powerful.

Asher Elbein @ asher_elbein on 16 Nov 2022: To build on Michael’s point here: the hand-wringing about “cancel culture” (and “wokeness!”) is a direct attack on free speech by the powerful

Powerful people believe that they should have the power to punish or quash anybody who tells them to eat shit. There’s really not much more to it than that!

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the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

every time i draw them being cute together i have to also draw them being deeply irritating to maintain perspective and universal balance

Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you're in pain, but you don't get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone's life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn't look like they need care.

This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.

How funny that she never considered that.

I love how on Tumblr, "media literacy" has become "Um, just because someone writes about this doesn't mean they're endorsing this. I hate all these media puritans ruining everything."

I'm sad to inform you that knowing when and whether an author is endorsing something, implying something, saying something, is also part of media literacy. Knowing when they are doing this and when they're not is part of media literacy. Assuming that no author has ever endorsed a bad thing is how you fall for proper gander. It's not media literacy to always assume that nobody ever has agreed with the morally reprehensible ideas in their work.

Sometimes, authors are endorsing something, and you need to be aware when that happens, and you also need to be aware when you're doing it as an author. All media isn't horny dubcon fanfic where you and the author know it's problematic IRL but you get off to it in the privacy of your brain. Sometimes very smart people can convince you of something that'll hurt others in the real world. Sometimes very dumb people will romanticize something without realizing they're doing it and you'll be caught up in it without realizing that you are.

Being aware of this is also media literacy. Being aware of the narrative tools used to affect your thinking is media literacy. Deciding on your own whether you agree with an author or not is media literacy. Enjoying characters doing bad things and allowing authors to create flawed or cruel characters for the sake of a story is perfectly fine, but it is not the same as being media literate. Being smug about how you never think an author has bad intentions tells me you're edgy, not that you're media literate. You can't use one rule to apply to all media. That's not how media literacy works. Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Aheem heem. Anyway.

The Way Things Work (1994) Microprocessor

You say that petitions don't work, but in 2011, a group of fans started a campaign called Operation Rainfall to localize three Wii games to the West. The campaign succeeded in its goal and it helped bring Xenoblade Chronicles to a wider audience. Without Operation Rainfall, Xenoblade wouldn't have become a major Nintendo IP today. Doesn't this campaign prove that dedicated fans can create an impact?

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. On occasion, under rare circumstances, the stars align and things happen. Despite the odds, there are also lottery winners chosen regularly. That doesn't mean it's a feasible or repeatable strategy for success, or that it's a good idea for the multiple millions of lottery losers to keep playing in hopes that they, too, will eventually win.

Honestly, petitions fail the vast majority of the time because there are just too many mission-critical elements outside of the petitioning players' control. The licensor not be willing, the funding might not be there, the size of the spending audience might not be there, the technology might not be there, the dev team might already be busy with other projects, the slot in the release schedule might not be there, the executives in charge at the publisher might not be willing, the console generation might be about to turn over, and so on and so forth. There are so many separate individual pieces that must align for a specific project to get the green light. Any single one of them not being there spells doom for the project. Player enthusiasm is only a single piece of a much bigger puzzle.

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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

Reblog to bless ur mutuals feeds

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