Problem Machine
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Posts posted by Problem Machine
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A book I found very useful starting out as an artist was Anatomy: A Complete Guide for Artists by Joseph Sheppard. It goes into detail with how the tendon and muscles are laid onto the skeleton and how they change position when each body part moves, which was incredibly useful. I also reinforced some of this information with watching a video dissection of a cadaver but that experience is a bit more difficult to broadly recommend.
A super important lesson when it comes to drawing, I think, is that a lot of the time you're doing two jobs in one: You're designing an idea of a picture in your mind and you're making careful marks on paper to represent that idea. This is important to remember because you don't always have to do both of these at once, and it can be much easier and more pleasurable to focus on one or the other sometimes. I found, myself, that having a hard time coming up with an Idea and being frustrated when the Idea I did come up with didn't pan out was initially a huge impediment to improvement and productivity for me -- focusing on just making marks on paper and eventually shaping those towards some expressive goal can be much more approachable. Conversely, sometimes it's fine to just study technique and anatomy without worrying about immediately applying it, and just let it sink down into the mind for later use.
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Ah, beloved cartoon character Shratio
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Surely if this hoax was successful enough to permanently change the film's online presence it is significant enough to still be mentioned in its wikipedia article. Surely this is the most actually noteworthy thing about the film.
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Haven't gotten to the end of the pod yet, but Chris mentioned a burglar who thought he would be invisible to cameras because he was covered in lemon juice. I recently stumbled across this story myself when I was researching the Dunning-Kruger effect -- apparently it features prominently in the study for which the effect is named. What Chris didn't mention is that, as best as I can understand from the brief mention of the case in the Dunning-Kruger effect Wikipedia article, he believed that lemon juice would make him invisible because of some absurd misunderstanding of its actual application as invisible ink. Now, this sentence doesn't have any citation that verifies that, so I may just be passing along my own hoisting, but I'd prefer it to be true anyway.
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I know I've directly or indirectly gotten a few people on Slack to pick up Slay The Spire, but I thought it might be a good idea to also post about it here. Slay the Spire is a deck-building Roguelite currently in Early Access. There's a lot of room there for them to add new stuff, but it's already pretty solid and fun to play and I don't see it getting anything besides more awesome as it continues to be developed. Unlike most card games where synergy is a matter of getting a few key cards in your hand, Slay the Spire gives you a small deck, a full new hand every turn, and when you run out you just reshuffle your deck and start over, so odds are you're going to end up having the opportunity to play every single card in your deck several times in each combat, so every choice you get over what to add or not to add can be incredibly important. Unlike most card games, I very rarely feel like the optimal play is obvious, and choosing the wrong order of moves can have severe consequences.
Each run takes maybe 90-120 minutes once you get the hang of things. Right now I have one win with the ironclad (warrior class) and one with the Silent (rogue class). Right now those are the only two classes, but they're planning on adding another one which I can only imagine will probably be some sort of shitty wizard.
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Is the Getting Over It stream vod gonna get migrated to IdleVideos sometime? I'd like to see it kept around for posterity. Or at very least turned into a Twitch highlight so it doesn't get deleted after 2 weeks
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The use of music during that segment was truly incredible. Thank you Nick for coming up with the idea and presumably Chris for doing all of the real work.
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Do we have a canonical character design for Lord Hoistmas yet? Because
There's a problem with the toilet
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Now that the door is open for long-distance casts, any thoughts of having some of the other hosts who've moved away back on sometime? Assuming the new setup works out.
You also mentioned before that you wanted to get away from the rotating host cast thing because you thought it drove people away from the cast. Does IT no longer being the primary cast change the calculus on that at all?
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What I'm doing: Mostly music, but if you'd like me to do something else I can probably figure something out. I'm good at 2d art and writing as well -- also programming, but primarily in Haxe/AS3 which aren't I think going to be used much in this Jam, though I'm sure I could pick up C# if I need to. I figure I have enough time to contribute moderately to two projects or substantially to one, but I'm probably going to be pretty busy for about a week during Christmas, from like the 19th through the 26th.
Contact Info: PM me here or on Slack
Time Zone: Pacific (-8)
Portfolio: I'm just gonna link music here, let me know if you wanna see anything re: the other stuff.My contribution (music) for Wizard Jam 5
My contribution (game) for Wizard Jam 4
Soundtracks for both of these and others available here:
More music on my bandcamp:
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Yeah I don't think Griffin's character really found much of a hook, but maybe that could emerge naturally over a longer campaign. Magnus didn't start out as an interesting character, but he definitely turned into one. I thought Nadiya was pretty good though, it's fun to have a deadpan character in the mix.
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I don't believe that was the talk I was thinking of. I don't think the game he was talking about even reached the prototype stage, much less the very robust stage it sounds like he's talking about here, but was just one of many candidate games he considered after Braid but before he settled on The Witness. Is the game he's talking about here what turned into The Witness? I'm about to go to bed so I don't have time to watch an hour-long lecture right now, but I probably will tomorrow since I find his lectures fascinating -- though since his weird bothsidesing of the google memo I've been disinclined to follow him on Twitter. I guess the issue with thinking deeply about one set of problems is it often then makes you appear startlingly naive in your ignorance of other sets of problems.
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I think I remember in one of his GDC talks Jon Blow briefly talking about an MMO as one of the ideas he had toyed with for a followup to Braid. IIRC the concept of it was an MMO that required much more intricate moment-to-moment teamwork. It doesn't really seem like quite enough to go on, so I can see why he didn't pursue it.
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They're planning on trying remote setups for now. It sounds like Janel's gig is currently only expected to be six months, so hopefully it will just result in slightly off-rhythm casts for a while and then everything will be back to normal.
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I'm surprised that no one brought up the idea that immediately jumped to my mind re: Jake's cut & paste greeting card ploy, which is the supreme hoisting scenario where there's an exceptionally hot day which weakens the glue, so when your grandpa opens the card and sees that "you are the best granddad" has been intentionally pasted over with "Happy Birthday," you have set them up for the sickest accidental burn possible.
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Fascinating, they should definitely mention that on the next cast.
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1. TF2
2. L4D
3. L4D2
4. CS:GO
5. Dark Souls
6. Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin
7: Playerunknown's Battlegrounds
8. Fallout: New Vegas
9. Dark Souls 3
10. Super Hexagon
I don't know off-hand if Steam includes software in the list. If it does, then I think Aseprite will be in there probably around #7. Let's find out!
Ahh, I forgot about Terraria and Borderlands and I've spent more time in Aseprite than I thought. Other than that, pretty close.
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I find co-op so flat compared to vs, it's confusing to me how many people prefer it. It's fine once in a while, but the tension and dynamicism of versus is in a whole other league of experience. Co-op just feels like the tutorial for vs to me.
I think Joewintergreen hit most of the reasons I like the original better in his post, but the huge one that keeps me from going back is the scoring system. They replaced the flawed and frustrating scoring system of L4D1, where a squad wipe resulted in almost no points but that deficit could be made up by a solid health bonus in subsequent rounds, with a truly awful system where it was nearly impossible to recover from losing a team member partway through the campaign. It felt like a sequel made by ambitious people who had only a loose grasp on what the strengths and weaknesses of the first game were, and even the original campaigns imported in have weird traces of that, like the boomer bile which is basically just another pipe bomb they invented to have another throwable and the melee weapons which made hordes even less of an obstacle than they were before. And, of course, even if you play a L4D1 map in L4D2, it has the L4D2 scoring system.
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On 9/24/2017 at 9:45 AM, WickedCestus said:Wouldn't it make more sense for the city that's based around a sunken ship to be called "Octlantis"? I feel like they truly goofed these names.
I think for the metaphor to hold it would have to be an octopus city that started underwater and then rose up to the surface
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yeeee which one should I have installed? The good one or L4D2?
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I took any statements about the greatness and perfection of the writer's work with a grain of salt coming, as they did, from the writer -- more or less.
I think the biblical stuff is kind of boring, and choose to kind of sideline the creator's intent in favor of what the creator perhaps unintentionally ends up saying about the act of creation: That it is often callously cruel and violent and self-aggrandizing. That he apparently didn't intend to say that and is uncomfortable with it is a bit hilarious to me.
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It's weird to me that so many people are reading it solely as religious allegory. I didn't really interpret any of it religiously -- for me it was more just like a brutal deconstruction of The Giving Tree.
Also not sure where you're getting the idea that all of the abuse is justified in the name of great art. If anything my read was that the message was about the toxic mental environment artists create for themselves, so kind of the exact opposite of that. I don't think we're meant to think that the writer is anything but a shithead by the end, but maybe that's optimistic.
Important If True 50: 4468, Y'all
in Important If True Episodes
Posted
I'm like 20 minutes in and how was there an entire conversation about the spiritual dissolution of a Mythbuster without the phrase "Bustin' made me feel bad"?
Also I want to see every version of this hint line movie you all describe. I think a Very Good throughline of the cast in general has been spinning outlandish premises into different hypothetical movies, so next time you're struggling to describe the cast maybe you can mention that.
Okay now I'm going to listen to the rest of the pod.