Blues CluesClaws

vader: who tore the warning sign off of this wampa cage?? storm trooper: security footage shows it was removed by a golden protocol droid vader: LOL

Vader in RotJ: wait the Alderaan princess is my daughter?? don’t know how to feel about that.

Luke: she strangled Jabba the Hutt to death with a chain.

Vader: OH HELL YEAH

why would you hide this in the tags that’s hilarious

I am, when life permits, a GM for tabletop games; I have a homebrew setting for D&D 5e in which I have run several games. And recently, I set out to try to use Midjourney to illustrate some of the locations in that setting.

In particular, Ennisbay and Dolindë, two of the most-often visited locations in the setting. Ennisbay is a port city built as much on the water as it is beside it; I've always described it as something akin to Venice, if the architecture incorporated influences of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. It is also the headquarters of the Adventurer's Guild, and thus serves as a common starting place (or place to return to, for that matter).

So here we have Ennisbay, as rendered by Midjourney.

Honestly, that's far closer to what's always been in my head than I expected. Dolindë proved more difficult.

Dolindë is the "city of scholars", but it began as the crossroads of three trade routes: two caravan routes across the desert, and one barge route along the river that Dolindë was built next to.

However, a number of scholars soon realized that being at the nexus of multiple trade routes meant access to books and materials from all sorts of places. As the little cluster of scholars in this trade hub grew, so did the resources and references they amassed; over the course of several centuries, the library at Dolindë became the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in the known world. And now, people travel to Dolindë as much for scholarship as for mercantile goals... though it is still a huge trade hub.

Needless to say, when adventurers need to get answers to something, Dolindë may not be conveniently located, but it is often where they go nonetheless.

Dolindë's architecture tends towards rounded shapes, to (somewhat) lessen the wear-and-tear of the occasionally sand-heavy dry wind (a'la the real-world sirocco). However, it is also a city that tends towards color where possible; the desert is so monochromatic, the city itself strives to provide some relief from that.

Getting Midjourney to spit out art that resembled Dolindë took a lot longer than for Ennisbay, and in the end I only ever got a couple of images that felt right; I will likely keep trying. But still...

As an added bonus, I did manage to get a spot-on image of a particular caravansarai on the route between Dolindë and the coastal port most accessible to ships from Ennisbay.

(The tower within the caravansarai is an alchemical engine attached to an underground spring. It uses an alchemical reaction to create negative pressure, drawing the water up and into a holding tank at the top of the tower; gravity then works to bring the water down as-needed for guests and their animals.)

I think I will continue to work on getting good illustrations of the locations out of Midjourney, and then I can make an illustrated player's guide to the setting for future campaigns...

I'm a dork. (Reblogging from my computer-generated art blog.)

Final Fantasy, as conceived by an AI

So while playing with Midjourney, an interesting image of a giant crystalline-blade-like tower with a chip out of it came up, and a friend and I quipped we'd love to see what the story behind that was.

Then we got to thinking.

This led to getting a text-generating AI (GPT-3) to write a summary of a nonexistent Final Fantasy game, and then trying to get an image-generating AI (Midjourney) to create concept art for it.

So, here we go.

For eons, the world of Eobenica has been protected by the light of the Silver Sanctuary's Worldcrystal and the Essences it allows Spiritcallers to summon. The Spiritcallers have long held the Golwildom Empire and their magitek forces at bay, but when the Worldcrystal is damaged in an Imperial attack, the Spiritcallers must find a new source of power to save Eobenica. They journey to the lost city of Ivaldia, where they discover the Worldcrystal's dark twin: the Shadowcrystal. With the Shadowcrystal's power, they are able to drive the Empire back, but at what cost?

The dark power of the Shadowcrystal corrupts the Spiritcallers, turning them into monsters known as the Shadowspawn. The Empire takes advantage of this and launches a full-scale assault on Eobenica. The player must take control of a party of adventurers to stop the Empire and save the world from the Shadowspawn's corruption.

The adventuring party is made up of a diverse cast of characters, including:

A few more bits of GAN-generated artwork...

Laika's still up there. not her body, sure, but her soul is. i saw it through my telescope one night when i was looking for aliens. she was sniffing for table scraps under saturn's ring. she chases comets and bites down on satellites. i saw her napping by neptune, she was kicking her feet. passing through the oort cloud is like the stroke of a hand on her fur. eyes like marbles and four little paws like flames. she bobs through jupiter's moons like cold moscow streets. up there the stars are a great big field. and look, she's running so fast. god damn, look at her go.

Context: me and my step dad are talking about stranger things

Step-dad (about Eddie): I hope he doesn’t die

Me: yeah he’s a fun character

Step-dad: no it’s just that good dungeon masters are hard to find

Fuck this one hits home.

Really wishing I didn’t have ADHD so I could read all this

Oof.

"You have so much potential" is a phrase that I still wince to hear, and even now -- after a diagnosis in adulthood of ADHD, and with full awareness that it is in fact ADHD that causes me to get stuck in executive dysfunction paralysis staring at a task I know I *can* do but somehow *can't start*, and even knowing ways to force myself out of that rut -- I still hear that echo in my head at times when I'm struggling, and my brain follows up with "you're just a fucking flake, Pax; you need to try harder".

“I went to school for game design! I am highly qualified to talk about any game out there!”

I bet you don’t even know how big an 8 year old’s hands are.

You cannot meaningfully understand a great deal of Nintendo’s game development decisions without understanding how a child holds and uses a modern game controller. People love to critique game companies like Nintendo, especially core gamers and educated developers, as if they are some authority on game design but in twenty years I have never seen this type of individual talk about how Nintendo’s game design is constrained by the size of a child’s hands.

So…how big are they?

Big enough to use a dpad on the playstation controller but not large enough to use the analog stick comfortably. The opposite is true on the xbox controller. The shape of the joycon is designed for easy access for small hands for both.

Still, the kid’s thumb will have difficulty reaching both so rapid switches are not possible. On the left hand of the switch the stick is above and the dpad below, and the opposite is true on the right. This is a direct consequence of how a kid might use the controller. In most games the left hand controls movement - meaning an analog stick - and the right hand controls discreet inputs - meaning the dpad/button diamond.

Children’s also struggle to reach shoulder buttons and have lower grip width, so the natural gamer grip in which two fingers are resting on the shoulder buttons does not work at all for children. They usually have to use all four fingers to hold up a heavy device. The shoulder buttons go from being the most easily accessed buttons on the controller to the most difficult.

A child’s grip strength is lower, and thus so is their ability to hold a heavy controller comfortably, especially one not designed for their hand size. A single joycon in sideways mode, often used in child’s party games on the switch, is a far better controller size for a child while it is uncomfortably cramped for an adult.

It is not a coincidence that the Switch, which is marketed as a family console, comes prepacked with the controllers that are kid friendly and adult friendly controllers are a secondary purchase.

There are more things you can point out, but in a practical sense you can see these design principles applied by comparing something like Kirby vs Metroid Dread.

Kirby is almost entirely controlled through the face buttons, with only the rarely used defense button mapped to the shoulder buttons, and you can really get by with never using it. The triggers are not used at all. You rarely have to combination press anything. If my memory is correct, the shoulder buttons are never used for any temporary transformation abilities. The difficulty of using new abilities should not be compounded by hard to reach buttons.

Dread on the other hand uses combination presses a lot and ties three critical abilities (free aim, missile use, and sliding) to the shoulder buttons. The omega cannon, a rarely used but critical and time sensitive ability, is tied to the shoulder buttons for the easiest and most intuitive possible use. The stress of defeating an emmi should not be compounded by fumbling with controls.

Smash Bros in particular is pretty cool in how its control scheme is set up. The most basic functions that a child might use are very simply mapped to the single stick and face buttons. As you learn to play better and try more advanced techniques (like an adult might) like timed grabs, dodging, and shield use you move away from the face buttons, incorporating more and more use of the shoulder buttons. It splits the difference for the best of both worlds. You can trace the principles of this design all the way back to the N64 and I would not be surprised to learn that the in game mechanics were built specifically to compliment this novice to expert transitional design, which is what makes smash bros so friendly to novice and expert gamers alike.

#i have smallish hands for an adult#and arthritis#so this is relevant to me too#something to consider

This is an excellent point as well, something I wasn’t going to get into but so much of game design just ignores accessibility issues like this all together. So many of the basic assumptions of game design from input device to button mapping to in game accessibility features are built around the assumption of fully abled adult between late teenager and middle age.

In light of Square-Enix's recent reiteration of (and stronger enforcement of) their ban on third-party tools that modify the game, there's actually been a chunk of discussion on the Final Fantasy XIV forums about accessibility and the assumption that "fully abled adult" is the default gamer.

The pushback I've seen in that thread from folks who hold the opinion that accessibility considerations require making the game "easier" on an objective level by making it hand-hold you is one I've seen from developers, too -- including when I was in the game industry for my day job. And honestly, I fell into that camp ("I don't want to make the game easier!") when I was still doing games for my day job.

But I no longer think that's necessarily the case.

What I find particularly interesting is that a surprising number of people who pushback against the idea of accessibility features are ones who already will talk at length in other threads about how they've customized control schemes for their own comfort.

(Which I do understand; I have small hands and the early stages of hereditary arthritis myself. I also game quite actively, and raid in FFXIV. As such, I have about half of my controls on the keyboard near WASD and the other half bound to the side-buttons on my MMO mouse.)

But I think people would strongly push back on the implication that it made the game objectively easier to allow them to change control bindings, and that therefore they were somehow playing it on an "easier" mode.

I think it's perfectly possible to design for accessibility considerations without lowering the objective difficulty of the game; I tend to think that good accessibility is about making sure the game doesn't make things subjectively more difficult than the baseline for people, rather than making it objectively easier by giving people tools to 'play for them'.

The examples you give here of Nintendo's philosophy with regards to controller design (and in-game control schemes) are excellent illustrations of this; they don't make the game somehow inherently easier, they are instead intended to ensure they game doesn't unintentionally make itself more difficult for people.

For instance, I've come to be of the strong opinion that anything I want the player to react to -- a telegraph of an upcoming mechanic, for instance -- should have both a distinct visual cue and a distinct audio one. They don't have to be dramatically distinct, but if I'm telegraphing a monster's attack by something subtle in the animations, I should have a sound associated with it too; a player who is visually impaired and cannot see fine details in the animation can thus learn to rely on the subtle differences in the sound associated with the telegraph.

Similarly, for deaf or hearing-impaired players, I should never rely only on audio cues. If it's a sound, there should be a visual element as well. If my fight design is reliant on dialogue to know what mechanic is about to happen, then I need to have subtitles or something similar (even in combat, not just cutscenes) for those voiced lines. Things like that.

For keyboard bindings, I tend to think that instead of requiring a 1:1 mapping of input-to-control, it should be possible to use a many-to-one scheme -- binding multiple inputs to the same action.

I had a friend who had severe nerve damage in his hands and had a lot of trouble playing keyboard-and-mouse games as a result because it was a strain for him to hit the correct keys. If he could've bound a given control to four different buttons, he could've functionally had keybindings that were areas of the keyboard instead of just a single key; while it would've required him to use more of the keyboard for bindings, it would've also made it possible for him to hit a given control more reliably since he'd only need to hit a cluster of four keys, rather than one specific one.

(It's perhaps a little unfortunate that I've only become such a firm believer in this after I decided I'd had enough of crunch and the other less-fun parts of game development and went into consumer product development instead…)

by  Longque Chen

I figure out I had ADHD last year, but I didn’t seek an official diagnosis and medication until this year. I’m 30 years old, my school days are long behind me. I slipped through the cracks because I have predominately inattentive type and I was a quiet little girl. Having ADHD does not mean you have to be hyperactive and loud, it means you have a processing problem in your brain that doesn’t allow you to regulate your focus or emotions. 

Mental health even now is still taboo to talk about. People are more open now than ever about it however and that gives me hope. 

This is a profoundly personal comic and it only reflects my own experience with ADHD. It is on a spectrum with a wide range of personalities. But if my story connects with someone else and helps them, that would mean the world to me.

THIS

THIS THIS THIS

The first day I took ADHD medication 5 years ago, i was astonished. I told people, “It’s like i’ve been wading through hip-deep mud my whole life, and I never knew other people weren’t. I couldn’t figure out why i could never keep up, I just tried and tried and tried harder, but it turns out they never had to wade through the mud at all.”

I didn’t even test positive for ADD because all the questions were about hyperactivity and not inattention (”How many times during a meeting do you need to get up and pace around the room?” What? None. But I can’t keep my brain from wandering off for more than three minutes). I’m so glad the psych i saw believed me enough to try it. I never would have been able to go back to school without it, i wouldn’t have survived.

It’s not perfect, I still have to wade through the mud sometimes, and sometimes it’s still rough without the mud anyway - but goddamn, the difference is amazing.

Just over 2 years ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD.I was feeling overwhelmed and depressed—which was not super surprising, because work was crazy and my mother was going back into chemotherapy again—and went to see a psychiatrist. And while he spoke to me about depression and stuff, he mentioned he thought I might be ADHD; being ADHD himself, he was more sensitive to those things. 

I was pretty skeptical; ADHD was that whole 'can't stop moving, rowdy and uncontrollable, etc.' thing, which wasn't me. I was the daydreamer who had trouble keeping my thoughts on track and things organized, except for those times when I'd seize on something and stay up for three days straight working on a project. 

But he said that was a form of ADHD too, so... hey, he's the psychiatrist.He had me take a test, which I have described before as "the most infuriating video game ever": a screen would show you a colored shape for a moment or two, then it would vanish, then another would appear. If the next one that appeared was the same, you were supposed to push a button. It also had a sensor tracking your head movement, to see if you could pay attention to the screen or if you found yourself looking elsewhere. And this would go on for like... 20 or 30 minutes, but it felt like 10 hours. 

At the end, he remarked that I tested as borderline ADHD, but probably didn't require medication. Life went on.

And then a month or so later, when I showed up for my appointment after work, he was puzzled by the fact that I had little bloody fingernail-marks in the palm of my hand and asked about it. And I mentioned, as though this explained everything, that I'd had a two-hour meeting at work that day. I was a theoretically-functioning adult, but it had somehow never occurred to me that other people did NOT need to dig their fingernails into the palm of their hand to use pain to keep their mind from wandering off in meetings. (You know, that "oh, someone said <thing>, that makes me think of <thing>, which makes me think of <other thing>" scenario where suddenly you realize that discussion of automated photography analysis via machine learning for a project started your brain down a chain of tangentially-related thoughts where eventually you ended up pondering what agricultural trends would be in various regions of the Star Wars galaxy or whatnot, and you have no idea what anyone's said for the past five minutes.)

He asked me to list a few of the coping mechanisms I had to help with focus. So I reeled them off readily, because everyone has their tricks like this. Right? But when I finished he sat there for a moment in pensive silence, and then asked "Did you use any of these coping mechanisms during the test I had you take?"

BOY HOWDY DID I. I detailed some for him -- fingernails in the palm of my hand to keep focused on the screen, repeating the color/shape under my breath so I'd recognize if the next one was the same when it appeared, etc. He was like, "So, you are not actually supposed to need to do stuff like that for that test. And even WITH all that, you still tested borderline ADHD. I think we might want to discuss medication after all."

I was utterly floored. To hear that other people weren't just quietly doing the same things (albeit seemingly more effectively than me) was literally world-changing; for some reason, I'd just taken it for granted that almost everyone had to do this, or else was supernaturally organized and with-it. But once I got on medication, it was like night and day. Suddenly, I could focus through two-hour meetings! I could keep my projects organized and on-time! It was amazing! Ral's analogy of wading through mud is spot-on; it felt like suddenly I was walking on solid ground instead of pushing through something viscous that wanted to swallow me whole.

My life since then has been an endless series of moments of realization that some thing I had always just reluctantly accepted as part of who I was is, in fact, a known ADHD trait.

(Of course, then the pandemic came along, and even the medication hasn't helped me keep stuff together entirely during The Year We Just Had. But I suspect without that medication, I would've completely given up and curled up into a ball under my desk for several months.)

...and I just realized that I was supposed to do something 15 minutes ago, but I got distracted writing this. *weak laughter*

mac and cheese

what?

mac and cheese

That’s an egg

iPad Thai

(Look, it has egg as an ingredient, go with it.)

Happy 2020 guys, this is what I spent my new year’s eve on; Scion Lightwarden sketches. Wanted to finish them up before my vacation was technically over and I’d be back to posting sketches only on my Patreon feed only. So uh… happy start to the new decade I guess.

The idea of the Warrior of Light/Darkness having potentially become a Lightwarden is frankly apocalyptic enough. The idea of the entire core lineup of Scions sharing that fate?

...well, maybe it was time for a new multiverse anyway, right? This one was getting a little ragged around the edges.

(Amazing art, though.)

Welcome to the future, where you don’t own anything and the stuff you rent stops working once your phone has no signal.

App powered car? 🤦‍♀️

I wish people remembered the age old wisdom that if something doesn’t absolutely require an Internet connection to function, it shouldn’t be connected to the internet - same goes for apps.

WHY IS A CATFOOD DISPENSER CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET

Sometimes I’m glad that I’m too poor for my “cool future stuff” monkey brain to be set loose to buy stupid shit like this.

please please please do not buy into the Internet of Things. Digital displays for appliances are one thing, but you shouldn’t need the fucking internet to do your laundry or use the fridge.

I hope this is obvious, but this is a means for corporations to abuse privacy and gather metadata. The only reason I can imagine no one discussing this is because it’s obvious.

The thing is, some IoT connectivity is useful, but it can be implemented in a sane and non-intrusive manner. (This is my actual day job; I work at a product development company.)

I designed a wireless mailbox a while back as a personal project that could let you know when the mail had arrived; it meant someone whose mailbox was down a long rural driveway and when mail delivery times were inconsistent could know when they needed to go pick up the mail.

But the thing is that if it lost connectivity, it continued to function as a standard mailbox. It didn’t, like, latch the mailbox door or shred the mail or whatever if it couldn’t get connected.

Similarly, my car has cellular data for maps/traffic and Spotify integration, as well as letting me use an app to set the climate control when it’s parked (turning on heat or A/C before I go out to the car); it’s great, I love it, and if for some reason I’m out where I don’t have signal my car continues to function as a car, even if I’m unable to stream music or get up-to-date traffic information for the GPS.

Because even if you have a good usage case for connectivity, it should degrade gracefully and continue to function unless the connectivity is absolutely key to the inherent function of the device. A public kiosk for browsing the web, for instance, is obviously not going to be useful without connectivity; a car or cat food dispenser has no excuse to stop functioning.

It’s not just egregious use of IoT to be buzzword-y, it’s also just plain bad design. I’m not sure which I consider the greater sin.