#testing out a different workflow

[glorfindel-of-imladris]

Erestor of Doriath 🍃

[nouverx]

Day 1 and Day 2 of RadioStatic Week

First Meeting and Sharing a meal! I like the idea that Alastor is the one who approached Vox first because of how unique he looks eheh

[theorphicangel]

sugar sweet ! Satoru Gojo x fem!reader

description: what's better than having an amazing, gorgeous and adorable husband you may ask? how about one who also doubles as your own personal chef and baker?

tags: established relationship, afab!reader, satoru house husband core, SMUT, MINORS DNI, satoru is your personal chef, this is not sanitary..., food play, whipped cream frosting on ya nipples, oral (fem! recieving), unprotected sex, creampie,

wc: 1.9k

author's note: wow i missed writing long fics, hope you guys enjoy!!!

taglist: @emochosoluvr @celear @thoreeo @moxieisanalien @amberbalcom14 @13-09-01 @k-kkiana @tyyqqaaa @ehcilhc

fill out the form to join the taglist!

comments and reblogs are much appreciated !!!!

You should count yourself lucky. You not only have a gorgeous and adorable husband. But a husband who also doubles as your own personal chef and baker. 

As soon as you walk through the front door your senses are hit with an array of food. Slipping off your shoes, your feet meet the cold tiles of the marble entrance before transitioning to the soft plush carpet of the Gojo estate. 

Your body aches and you’ve been on your feet all day with rarely enough time to eat. This is what makes coming home so special. Knowing that your precious husband has a meal already waiting for you. 

You focus on the scent which fills the house, making your guesses of what it could be as you make your way to the dining room. Satoru often puts you to the test, never telling you what the meal is until you take the very first bite. 

The dining hall is already lit with candles, keeping the ambiance low and calm. Exactly what you needed after a stressful day like today. Your meals were always ready and piping hot at the table, with your husband awaiting by it. His own dish awaits next to yours, smoke rising and the savoury aroma tempting him to take a bite. But he never does. He stays loyal to the idea of watching you taking the first bite and even on the days when you arrive late or work overtime he keeps your plate warm until you arrive home, dedicated to making the perfect meal for you every day. 

Each dinner was entirely different and varied. Some days he did a simple curry recipe, other days he made your favourite macaroni cheese dish, yet on the days when you least expected it your husband made dishes that could only be found in the top restaurants in the world, michelin star and above. He even goes out of his way to provide the best beverage for each meal. The estate has its very own cellar, collecting wines from all over the world and maintaining the rarest wines that nobody could find. 

Often, you express the idea that Satoru should open his own restaurant, evident that it would make waves in the food industry and no doubt would be the best in the world. But everytime you bring it up he rejects the idea, stating that he is only content in making food if you were his sole customer. He’s dedicated to making food to fit the standards of your taste and he’s not willing to expand that for anybody else in the world. No matter the price they could offer. 

In addition to being your own chef, your husband also has interests in baking. He doesn’t do it often, rather focused on his culinary skills of dishes than baking cakes but with his extreme sweet tooth it would only be a matter of time before he dived into the baking world. 

Stepping out from your busy workday routine, Sundays usually find you and your husband sleeping in till late. Of course, you’re more tired out than him so Satoru ends up slipping from your grasp to head over to the kitchen. You’ve barely opened your eyes before the soft hum of a mixer is heard. 

The kitchen has always been Satoru’s haven, a place where he can work with no interruptions from anyone (apart from you of course). He’s joked that even if he went blind he could still make the best meals possible, knowing all the ins and the outs of his environment. 

Satoru’s workflow doesn’t get disturbed when he hears your footsteps patter on the kitchen tiles, he’s currently icing one of his favorite cakes: strawberry cake with whipped cream frosting. There’s a pile of chopped strawberries next to him for the final decoration once the frosting has settled. 

The entire room smells like sweet sugar and strawberries along with a little heat from the use of the oven. Silently, you join your husband’s side and watch silently as he pumps out the icing in a methodical manner, waiting until he’s finished. There’s a crease between his brow as he concentrates and his tongue pokes out from the corner of his mouth. 

“You’re very good with your hands.” you note. There’s a slight flirty intonation in your voice directed at your husband. He smirks a little as he replies. 

“You think?” 

“Mhmmm.” You hum, dipping a finger into the leftover bowl of cream before putting it in your mouth. The sweet sugar explodes on your taste buds and you can’t seem to sigh in relief. 

“Good?” Satoru verifies and you nod. 

“I have too much cream left over.” Satoru mutters to himself. “I could make another batch of cake.”

“Sounds good.” You note before hopping on the counter by his side. Almost immediately, Satoru walks over  to stand between your thighs. Your hands run up his undercut before reaching to fiddle with his locks. The scent of strawberries and sugar lingers on his body, the apron on his body marked with a few stains from his creation.

“You smell sweet.” you note taking in his personal aroma. 

Naturally, the two of you lean into a kiss and of course his lips taste like strawberries too.  “You taste sweet too.”

His plump lips deepen the kiss, becoming hungry for you rather than his appetising creation that sits on the sidelines. Satoru begins to get a little handsy, gripping at the fat of your thighs. His hands slowly creep up towards your pajama shorts paired with an old oversized shirt of his.  

A low groan leaves Satoru’s throat, his desperation becoming difficult to hide. It’s not hard to feel a certain bulge poke at your thigh through his apron, a simple kiss from you and he’s already got himself worked up. Just at the sounds of his sexual frustration you can already feel a heat building in your lower body. 

Satoru’s lips refuse to leave your own lips for a good minute or two, leaving you breathless and warm when he finally does pull away. His hands latch around your shirt and he moves to pull it up and over your head before chucking it on the floor. 

Your nipples harden immediately despite the warmth of the kitchen causing a small gasp to leave your mouth at the sensation.

“What are you doing?” You question, watching Satoru grab the icing tube next to you. Your husband doesn’t reply, merely placing the tube directly over your nipples before squeezing out the frosting. Your lips part slightly watching the cream land on your breasts. 

Before you could even question him again, Satoru already has your breast in his mouth whilst using his free hand to knead your other. 

A breathy moan leaves your throat as you tilt your head back and your hand creeps up Satoru’s undercut. He’s quick in lapping up the whipping cream and immediately switches with constant groans and hums leaving his mouth in complete pleasure. You’re sure that by now your panties must be stained as you squirm in your seat. 

Noticing this, Satoru's quick to trail his tongue down from your breasts to your thighs. With assistance he pulls down your shorts and panties leaving nothing but your sweet dripping cunt on the counter. You spread your legs enough for him to see and he practically melts to his knees, becoming level to you. 

“So fucking precious god–” he mutters, completely fixated. 

It doesn’t take long for him to dive in and for his tongue to lap at your juices, his fingertips grip onto the fat of your inner thigh keeping you in place. As always your hands know where to go: one keeps you steady behind you and the other is already lost in your husband’s white locks of hair. 

He’s already pussy drunk. Evident by the vibrations of groans and moans you feel from him between your thighs. His tongue laps at your clit drawing lazy circles to make you twitch before licking at the entrance of your cunt once more. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck–” 

The curses roll from your tongue so easily as you feel the build up of your climax. Satoru can tell whenever his pretty wife is close because of how hard you’re trying not to suffocate him with your thighs as well as  the tight grip you have on his hair and the endless moans that pour from your mouth. 

But he can’t have you finish like this. 

Satoru pulls away a string of saliva following his lips as he does. He licks his bottom lip and lets out another groan of relief. 

“I think you got it wrong earlier sweetheart, you’re definitely the sweeter one here.” With the taste of whipped cream from earlier mixed with your juices, Satoru was sure that you were the sweetest thing he had ever tasted, better than any recipe that he had ever tried previously. 

He places multiple kisses on your lips as he pulls out his cock from his boxers, already hard and leaking with precum from eating you out. You whine watching Satoru stoke himself before teasing his tip to your entrance. His cerulean eyes meet yours, filled with nothing but love and desperation for you. His eyes are heavy lidded and you can tell he’s holding his breath before pushing into you. Feeling his cock stretch you out, your mouth widens to let out a silent gasp.

Feeling this full never fails to surprise you. Your nails dig into his back as if you’re attempting to seek out some sort of relief from him. Your husband groans out your name in a low tone in your ear, so low that it causes you to shiver in his arms. 

He starts slow, barely moving within your tight walls. Satoru’s observant to your every moan and whimper, basing his pace on your own reactions. Just like how he instinctively knows when a dish is perfectly cooked, he knows when your body is ready for more before you even get the chance to tell him. 

As your walls tighten around him, his cock pumps a little faster and with a lot more force behind it. Before you know it the entire kitchen is filled with the sounds of skin slapping and filthy moans. It feels like you were made just for him, the way your cunt manages to swallow him whole, stretching yourself out for him so he can hit that sweet spot and those pretty little moans. 

 Your eyes never leave the gaze of his own. “Toru–” you warn, your voice high-pitched. He leans to place a kiss to your collarbone, he knows exactly what you need before you even say it. He can read your body better than any cooking book available.

“Satoru,” you whine again, only a little louder this time. “I’m-I’m gonna cum toru, fuck–”

Your husband curses under his breath and his movements stutter at the same time, the stutter in your voice causing him to lose his focus. 

“You wanna cum for me?” He asks, his cheeks are flushed and his eyes are getting heavy, evident of his own release approaching. You can say nothing but nod at him as he continues to pound into you. It doesn’t take long before the two of you climax at the same time. 

The room is filled with nothing but your heavy moans mixed with his grunts as he delivers one last pump into you, your thighs shake and shiver as Satoru spills his hot seed in your walls. 

“Maybe I should make a pie next.”  He murmurs watching his cum leak out of you and drip onto the floor. 

[techav]

On Celebrating Errors

Isn't it beautiful? The lovely formatted tables of register and stack contents, the trace of function addresses and parameters, the error message ... it's the most beautiful kernel panic I have ever seen.

Why on earth would I be so excited to see a computer crash? What could possibly be beautiful about a kernel panic?

This kernel panic is well-earned. I fought hard to get it.

This kernel panic came from a current NetBSD kernel, freshly compiled and running on Wrap030, my 68030 homebrew computer. It is the result of hours upon hours of work reading through existing code, scattered documentation and notes, writing and rewriting, and endless compiling.

And it's just the start.

As I've said before, a goal of this project has always been to build something capable of running some kind of Unix-like operating system. Now that I finally have all the necessary pieces of hardware, plus a good bootloader in ROM, it's time to give it a shot. I'm not that great with this type of programming, but I have been getting better. I might just be able to brute force my way through hacking together something functional.

It is hard.

There is some documentation available. The man(9) pages are useful, and NetBSD has a great guide to setting up the build environment for cross-compiling the kernel. There are some published papers on what some people went through to port NetBSD to this system or that. But there's nothing that really explains what all these source code files are, and which parts really need to be modified to run on a different system.

I had a few false starts, but ultimately found an existing 68k architecture, cesfic, which was a bare minimum configuration that could serve well as a foundation for my purposes. I copied the cesfic source directory, changed all instances of the name to wrap030, made sure it still compiled, then set about removing everything that I didn't need. It still compiled, so now it's was time to add in what I did need.

... how ... do I ... ?

This is where things get overwhelming very quickly. There is documentation on the core functions required for a new driver, there's documentation on the autoconf system that attaches drivers to devices in the tree, and there's plenty of drivers already to reference. But where to start?

I started by trying to add the com driver for the 16550 UARTs I'm using. It doesn't compile because I'm missing dependencies. The missing functions are missing because of a breaking change to bus.h at some point; the com driver expects the new format but the cesfic port still uses the old. So I needed to pull in the missing functions from another m68k arch. Which then required more missing functions and headers to be pulled in. Eventually it compiled without error again, but that doesn't mean it will actually run. I still needed to add support for my new programmable timer, customize the startup process, update hardware addresses, make sure it was targeting 68030 instead of 68040 ...

So many parts and pieces that need to be updated. Each one requiring searching for the original function or variable declaration to confirm expected types or implementation, then searching for existing usages to figure out what it needs ... which then requires searching for more functions and variable types.

But I got something that at least appeared to have all the right parts and compiled without error. It was time to throw it on a disk, load it up, and see what happened.

Nothing happened, of course. It crashed immediately.

I have no debugging workflow I can rely on here, and at this stage there isn't even a kernel console yet. All I could do was add little print macros to the locore startup code and see where it failed. Guess, test, and revise.

I spent a week debugging the MMU initialization. If the MMU isn't properly configured, everything comes to an abrupt halt. Ultimately, I replaced the cesfic machine-specific initialization code and pmap bootstrapping code with functions from yet another m68k arch. And spent another day debugging before realizing I had missed a section that had comments suggesting it wasn't for the 68030 CPU, but turned out to be critical for operation of kernel memory allocation.

Until this point, I was able to rely on the low-level exception handling built into my bootloader if my code caused a CPU exception. But with the MMU working, that code was no longer mapped.

So then came another few hours learning how to create a minimal early console driver. An early console is used by the kernel prior to the real console getting initialized. In this case, I'm using the MC6850 on my mainboard for the early console, since that's what my bootloader uses. And finally the kernel was able to speak for itself.

It printed its own panic.

The first thing the kernel does is initialize the console. Which requires that com driver and all the machine-specific code I had to write. The kernel is failing at its step #1.

But at least it can tell me that now. And given all the work necessary to get to this point, that kernel panic data printing to the terminal is absolutely beautiful.

[catalyswitch]

Was talking with wife recently about AI and the ways it's incredibly stupid and I am reminded of the time a few years ago the Execs at the place I worked previously wanted to incorporate AI into our workflow in order to help materials development. They wanted to make sure that the company was "utilizing the latest technology to make us more productive" so they partnered with a company that uses AI/ML to predict chemical structures in order to enhance performance based on our desired properties. My boss and I kinda thought this was stupid when it was first announced, but we were still unprepared for how bad it was really going to be.

The problem of course here is that what a computer thinks is good and will perform well does not often make sense according to the laws of physics. So more often than not the computer would spit out extremely specific and nonsensical structures that it believed would increase performance. These structures could range from completely impractical to sometimes downright impossible to actually make, so for every set of predictions we got back we had to first filter all the nonsense and then select a set from the ones that could be made and tested in a reasonable amount of time. In addition, they emphasized that the more data that they have the better the predictions would be, so the pressure was on to synthesize and validate as many molecules as possible as quickly as possible. This was a huge drain on time and energy because again some of these structures were nontrivial to make. Not that the computer people would be able to tell the difference. But still the executives were excited about it so we gave it a try anyway. The idea was that we would start by making a bunch of different materials and test the results and then feed those results back into the machine to predict better structures based on the ever growing data pool.

The funny part of the story, of course, is that with every iteration, the performance got worse. This was not surprising to me. The mechanisms that dictate performance in this field are not fully understood even now, and there are still many papers coming out every year adding more knowledge to the field. Additionally, the predictions weren't being made using some fundamental understanding of the mechanisms at play, but by training an algorithm using a pool of existing literature. You're just not going to get good results by "midjourneying" chemistry. We did around 3-4 iteration cycles with them over that year contract and every time the performance of the structures that it had predicted were worse than the last set, sometimes dramatically so. And they would tell us "no no, the data set isn't really big enough to give good results yet" and "once the model has tested enough structures it'll get better" but it didn't in that period. And it's possible that on a long enough timescale it might be possible? But, the reality was that we had a whole year of time and resources essentially wasted because our CEO thought that some tech guys in SV could use AI to do chemistry and didn't believe us when we said it was stupid.

And you know what? We figured out something that worked really well less than six months after dumping them and getting to do it our way again.

[ostrichmonkey-games]

Ostrichmonkey Hack: Layout Behind the Scenes

Been procrastinating on this enough! So here is a look at some of the process and decisions that went into doing the layout for the Ostrichmonkey Hack.

Let's start with the goals I had in mind:

Keep it simple.

Keep it easy to make.

With those goals set, next step is gathering materials and resources (not all of this was done as cleanly as I'm making it out to be, but this is the gist).

Materials used:

Classic Explorer Template

Affinity Publisher and Photo

Fonts

Art

The text itself

The Classic Explorer Template was critical in getting this layout done efficiently, since it does a lot of the work for you. It's not a replacement for having a rough idea on how to do layout, but it can serve as a nice tutorial/explainer on different elements of layout and typesetting, and honestly, is worth its (digital) weight in gold. There's a free version available if you want to check out what it offers.

I use the Affinity Suite for my layout work. It's a nice set of programs with a manageable learning curve, but there are plenty of other alternatives so go with whatever works for you (one of my favorite elements of using multiple Affinity programs is that within Publisher, you can access both Designer (vector illustration) and Photo (photo editing, illustration etc) functions, which is just a nice workflow).

Here's what my setup looks like, with all the guidelines/base grid stuff turned on;

Normally I start with some style tests and “sketches” to get a feel for what I want the layout to look like, but the Classic Explorer’s does a lot of that heavy lifting for me already so I get to skip this step for this project. Speed and efficiency is one of the main reasons I wanted to use the template - this was envisioned as a “I just need to get something done” kind of project.

So next up on getting it done, fonts!

There are lots of great places to get fonts from, just make sure you're getting them from legitimate sources. Do your homework and make sure that "free" font is actually free to use in commercial projects.

I pulled three fonts from the depths of my collection.

One for the title and main headers (Wallau Deutsch)

One for the second header (Rakkas)

One for the body text (PT Serif)

Technically a secret fourth font for some "bullet points" (1651 Alchemy)

I picked these fonts out because they work together well and are readable. The title/main header fonts are comparatively less readable, but you can get away with that since headers are Big and used less frequently. The second header (Rakkas) is a nice middle ground between a full on blackletter font like the main header, and the classic-y serif of the body text. It creates a transition between the two fonts.

I used PT Serif since it was already in the template, but it also had the bold/italics versions I knew I would need, is readable at a variety of sizes, and had all the special glyphs I would need (it actually did not, but whoops, we'll get to that later).

Normally when I start layout, I do a quick "sketch page" where I try out different fonts and style tests that can look something like this;

But that wasn't necessary for this project (another advantage of the using the template).

Now, let's get to some choices in formatting the text itself.

Each time a key term came up, it was highlighted by bolding and italicizing it. Any time after that, it was just normal text. I went back and forth on highlighting it every single time, but the current format just looked cleaner so it won out.

Additionally, in several places in the text, rather than introducing a third header (which just broke up the page too much, disrupting the flow and clean look), I instead put what would have been the new third header (HP or WOUNDS in the above example) in all caps and behind a colon. This ended up not disrupting the text too much, and was only necessary a handful of times. But when it was necessary, I made sure to stay consistent. Consistent and organized formatting is one of the key ways to make your layout look nice and clean.

Aside from changing some font choices, one of the other ways I tweaked the template was with some spacing (between "sections", like in the above text, introducing an extra line break between the Attributes and Staying Alive sections) and the "bullet points".

The large bullet points that accompany the second headers are actually a glyph pulled from a different font. I picked that one out specifically because its just a little irregular and handwritten looking (1651 Alchemy is a handwritten styled font), and it also helped pull you to the start of new sections, further enhancing the second header. It helps make each section discrete and more "modular".

Back to extra spacing for a second now. So each "chapter" of the text uses the main header to designate it as a full "chapter".

"Characters" up top there is one of those chapter headers. It's nice and big and special, and also takes up a good chunk of space. One a full spread, this also means that the second page of text begins higher up than the text on the first page (compare where Attributes starts vs where Dying starts).

I played around with the format of spreads that did not have a main chapter header on them, starting the first page text up toward the top to have it line up with the second page. Which, probably would have been totally fine, but I preferred the look when each spread had the same kind of spacing. But repeating the main header on each spread was too clunky. So the solution;

Bam! A line!

Blank empty space looked too empty, but slapping a quick line there took up just enough visual space for it to work. Then, I carried that line-design-language to other places (to separate footnotes from the body text, within the tables, and sort of on the cover). This then made the line choice feel even more cohesive and purposeful.

And speaking of footnotes, that was another extra tweak/flourish I added not present in the template (the sidebars are part of the template, but sidebars rule so they would have happened regardless). The footnotes served as a way to share specific references as an informal "works cited". A lot of NSR/OSR design is super iterative, so I thought it would be cool to shout out some of the more direct inspirations and references I used when making my game.

But the footnotes were also kind of not really my downfall. Turns out PT Serif didn't seem to have all the necessary footnote glyphs, nor did it want to make proper superscripts of integers past 3. So, rather than trying to find a new body font (or deal with the headache of using a font solely for superscript notation), I just fudged the formatting some and stuck to asterisks, and restarting "numbering" on each spread. Oh well.

Let's now briefly touch on laying out tables.

It sucks.

My advice is find an example of a really nice looking table and then try and figure out what makes it look nice, and then doing that forever. Luckily, the template saves me again by including multiple examples of tables, ripe for tweaking. Which ended up looking like this;

Nice and clean! Hooray!

Okay, there's a lot of small decisions that goes into making text properly formatted and look nice, but I skipped some of those decisions and didn't go ham on typesetting, but whatever. That all about covers the important parts regarding the text. Now let's talk about art.

Public domain art is your best friend.

I went and trawled through a bunch of art I've saved from the Met's Open Access collection (there's plenty of great open access collections out there, just happened to have some from the Met handy), and settled on this piece;

Which I then dropped into Affinity Photo and played around until I ended up with this;

Nothing too wild, but it Felt Right, so it's done.

I then immediately dropped that onto the cover page, slapped the title on, added a quick border (and also spent some time trying to fix some weird issues that ended up being solved by just rasterizing it, whoops) and bam;

And that's the only art piece used throughout the zine! But I made the most out of it. Between each chapter, I had a single splash page and dropped in different zoomed/cropped versions of the art. Like so (and even on the back cover!);

The original image was high resolution, so zooming in worked, plus the effects/distortions I created hid any imperfections.

So that's the art sorted and the zine finished!

Now, this is getting pretty long, so if there's anything anyone reading this is interested that I didn't touch on, shout in the notes!

[urlknight]

Hi there, Love your work! I'm also doing stuff in Unreal and it feels like it's rarer to find other indie devs using it. I love how clean all your UI feels, and UI is something I seem to really struggle with.

Do you have any recommendations for workflows / tips / sources etc for getting better at UI?

Also I'd love to know more about the material / shader workflow for your latest post if you have more information anywhere.

Thanks :)

Hello there! Thank you!! I hope you don't mind me answering publicly as I feel like some people might be interested in the answer!

I really appreciate your UI (User Interface for those not knowing the acronym) compliment as it's something I've spent a long time working on and specializing in, in my career as a software engineer. UI/UX often goes completely unacknowledged or taken for granted even though it takes a lot of time and hard work to create and develop. In the engineering world I frequently had to advocate for and explain user experiences to those who didn't have as deep of an appreciation for UI or a very sophisticated understanding of why a good, visually appealing user experience makes, or on the flip side, can break everything. I think it's a very challenging, overwhelming topic to grasp and communicate, but just by being interested in it you're already way ahead!

There's a lot going on with UI. From visuals to knowing common design elements to successfully conveying a story to the user to implementation to testing to designing for accessibility to animation and I probably didn't cover everything with that run-on sentence. There's frontend engineers out there whose role is solely to maintain and improve UI component libraries for companies. And that's without throwing games, whose UIs are all uniquely visually tailored to their experiences, into the mix... I could keep going on about this honestly, but I'll get to what I think you can do personally! 1. Learn about common design patterns. What's a toast? What's pagination? What's a card? Little things like that. These apply to all software UI/UX, including video games- and knowing these off the top of your head will make it so much easier for you to invent your own UI designs and patterns.

2. Study the UI in the everyday applications you interact with. Step through menus and think about how you got from point A to point B. Take a moment to think about the why someone put a button where they did. Study the UI in your favorite video games, too! Take a lot of notes on what you think works really well and what you think doesn't. And also there's online resources that are great for inspiration. I personally spend a lot of time on the Game UI Database. - https://dribbble.com/ - https://www.gameuidatabase.com/ 3. Don't be afraid to start with basic sketches or even just simply representing everything with grey boxes. All my UI starts out as really crappy sketches on paper, or tablet sketches on top of screenshots. Visualize your ideas and then keep iterating on them until you've got something. For example, I went from this:

To this. (And come to think of it I might actually still want to make those cooler looking buttons in my sketch) 4. Break everything out into pieces and individual components. A good UI is made up of building blocks that you can reuse all over the place. That's how it stays consistent and also saves you a lot of stress when you need to go in and update components. Instead of a million different looking UI pieces, you just have to update the one! These individual components will make up your very own UI Component Library, which will be the standardized design system and source of reusable components for your project. This also applies to your visual elements that don't do anything (like I personally have a whole mini library of diamond and star shapes that I reuse everywhere).

For reference, here's a breakdown I made of my Inventory UI. On the right, I've labeled most of the individual components, and you might be able to see how I'm reusing them over and over again in multiple places.

5. Spend some time listening to designers talk, maybe befriend some designers! Many of them have an unique, interesting view of the world and how we interact with it even beyond just software. Their perspectives will inform yours.

6. Test your UI on users whenever you can. Get feedback from others. This is the best way for you to see what works and what doesn't. As game devs we spend so much time with our games it's easy for us to lose sight of the full picture.

7. Be patient and don't give up. Continue to be open to expanding your knowledge. These UI skills take time to develop. I personally am still learning even after like 10 years of doing it. Coming up with the visual elements is very challenging for me and I spend a lot of time rearranging things in photoshop before I actually start coding anything at all in Unreal.

Whew, that was a lot, but I hope that gives you some thoughts and a place to start!

I don't have any posts out there about Blender/Unreal shader workflows right now, but I'll consider making another post sometime soonish. I appreciate you asking and you're welcome! :)

[odysseyeurobeat]

A New Approach To Performances - Feb 2, 2025

(AKA, "What do you MEAN I can't use one MIDI controller for two programs at once???")

Many of you may know that I perform live! At conventions, at clubs and bars, and wherever else the world needs a dose of eurobeat, I've been performing my work on stage for many, many years now! Fewer of you may know that I've tried different approaches to my shows over the years— for a little while, I'd just play the songs end to end; then I learned how to DJ, and now most of my sets revolve around DJing.

Lately, I've been revisiting that, and trying to figure out new and more compelling ways to perform. For the last year on and off, I've been attending choreography classes. These have not resulted in me properly learning routines, but they HAVE boosted my confidence tremendously. As well, in the last few months I've dreamed up possible performance methods and workflows that are less DJ-centric so I can focus on singing, crowd interactions, the occasional novelty (maybe some keytar sections or playing a drum pad?), and some fun video effects.

Today I began putting that into action by trying out my various MIDI controllers, trying new configurations in Ableton Live and Bitwig Studio, and... failing. A lot.

It turns out, some of my ambitions of mapping multiple functions in two applications to one MIDI knob were a bit more ambitious than I thought they would be. Getting programs on the same computer to talk to each other is surprisingly more difficult than I thought it'd be. Getting Resolume Avenue and Bitwig to communicate worked, Avenue and Ableton surprisingly less so. And even then, getting one or the other to handle MIDI clock information in basic integer values has proven frustrating.

Instead of still trying to mix between two "decks" like DJs do, I may do it one of a few ways: * Pre-mix the set in Bitwig or Ableton, find "pause points" for water/audience interaction. I'd basically be performing to an automated experience, which would be easier to predict and work around, but with little to no flexibility. * Load in songs as clips instead of full-length audio, which would buy me back my cue points from the DJ years; but I'd still have to mix between songs, which increases potential failure points. * Find more innovative ways to use Traktor (my current DJ software of choice) and video/lighting programming, or pre-mix a few songs together and THEN load those into Traktor. Current performance method wouldn't change dramatically, but the overall visual appeal would improve. * Make shorter versions of my songs I play through from start to end, like a traditional concert. (Doesn't seem right, given the nature of eurobeat; but it's not far from what a few eurobeat stars do already!) * Keep pushing towards building a whole one-laptop visual audio extravaganza, restraints be darned.

...I want to see what I can do with some MIDI automation and video for now, with maybe one play-in "novelty" and automated vocal effects with some optional ones I can dial in any time. It'll be a bit weird to surrender some of my control over which songs play when, but I want to start building a more compelling, less DJ-specific live set where I'm a bit more of a performer. I think I'm onto something with this, though time and figuring out the tech will tell.

I'll be chipping away at it in the month(s) ahead. Who knows? If I get it ready in time, it may not be long before it gets a test drive at a real show! 😉

[whatifyoulivelikethat]

If you were in a long-term relationship with Jungkook, how do think the sex would evolve? How different would the 50th time you fuck be from the first time?

the 50th time would be within two weeks tops, wydm

Actually, the answer is the same, by the 50th time we would know a bit more about each other. In that sense, the first time would be the "worst". But this is Jungkook we're talking about, so his "worst" is probably better than most. He does know good rhythm, heh.

I understand the romanticization of "the first time", because society trains humanity to crave new over old. "Old" carries the negative connotations of stagnant, repetitive, dull, whereas "new" evokes excitement, refreshment, shiny. But fixating on "first time" implies that a person is one-dimensional and can be fully explored within a single experience. Of course, some people are shallow and remain shallow, but most people are complex creatures whose charm comes from their continued learnings making him more interesting. Sex between two people also includes the third perspective of experiencing something together, which is different from facing it alone.

So, yeah, the first time would be fun but perhaps a little clumsy. That's the beauty of introductions; sex for the first time is introduction of body to body, similar to how the first conversation is an introduction of person to person. I know what I like and he knows what he likes (assuming he's not a virgin), but we have much to teach each other about ourselves. The 50th time we would have a better understanding of each other, so then the focus pivots to refinement and discovery as a unit. Learning to be better at what we know, teaching each other about what we've learned, adding / subtracting kinks, innovation and creativity, moving through phases of how we like to do it...

I don't see a point in having sex with someone else if you're only in it for yourself. That's why we have hands. (Or toys. And so on.) Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a better result is the definition of insanity. Besides, the chase is what I crave. Maybe even more than the orgasm itself. I want to find new, creative ways to make someone cum. I want to be the best at their favorite sex act and then become even better than that. I want to test my limits. I want to understand even more than I want to know. What is about that that you like? (That that I like that~) How can I apply it to something else? If you like this, then by association you might also like this. Or want to try that. And so on.

I'm someone that desires and constantly searches for improvement, from my daily life and workflow to topics I'm obsessed interested in. Such as sex. Sex is such a vast, complex topic that is always expanding. I think becoming old is when you begin to accept that you can no longer learn. And I always want to learn. Especially when it comes to Jungkook.

... 's.

Dick.

What?

Anyway.

He's playful. He's adaptable. He seeks new, enjoys challenges, likes aesthetics, take suggestions and constructive criticism as a chance to improve. He's not the type to think he's the best (even if he is) and he wants to be the best. In that sense, I think we would be on the same page when it comes to how we approach sex. So, whether it's the 50th or 7777777th time, the words we both want to hear from each other afterward are, "that was the best sex I've ever had". So we'll probably be constantly working towards that.

Side note, he's gonna make me work out, isn't he? Maybe it's time to pick up yoga. Or pilates. Increased flexibility always helps in the bedroom. ;)

[weirdghostcat]

All my drawings can be found under [All Artworks] [Asks] history: [weirdghostcat asks] [Asks about Timeline-Tale] history: [timeline-tale asks]

Creator of Timeline-Tale (short: T-Tale)

Everything about Timeline-Tale is under: [Timeline-Tale] Meet the characters: Pit | Plug | Chara | Frisk | Dyne | Alph | Grillby | Asriel | Mettaton | Asgore | Toriel

Comics: A Spark For The Future (Coming Soon)

The other lore stuff: - Error finds Pit - Pit and Plug as kids - Timelines + Casino!Pit

🌟 My name is Shaya, but Cat/Ghost/WeirdGhostCat, whatever you prefer, works too. I'm from Germany, so if my grammar sucks, I probably wrote it while being half asleep.

🌟 This is my main blog. I will post and reblog a bunch of random stuff in here, but most of them will be fandom related.

🌟 Main fandom is Undertale.

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💚 Drawing is my main hobby and I will take breaks from time to time. So don’t be surprised if I don’t post any drawings for a month or a week.

❤️ Artstyle will be a little inconsistent, which is partly a result of my non-existent workflow. I have my main lineart-brush but I still test a bunch of different stuff out.

💜 Commissions are not open. But if you have any suggestions, what I could draw next or want to ask me something, my inbox/ask-page is always open.

!!! I'm fine with people using my art as long as you credit me. Also, don't remove my signature/hashtag/watermark, and don't use it for commercial purposes. !!!

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✨ I have a BlueSky account but I'm currently inactive on it because my main focus is Tumblr right now. If you are still interested, feel free to check it out: BlueSky

(Updated: 26/06/2025)

[glorfindel-of-imladris]

(WIP) Testing out a different workflow with the Rivendell husbands

[libraford]

The good news is that he found a different job and next week is his last week and I only have to work with him 2 more times and only one of those times will I be alone.

Tech talk and rant below.

But in my opinion, we should have fired him earlier on because two weeks into the season he was unclear of what any of the equipment apart from the camera actually did.

The camera takes the picture.

The lights light the subject.

The computer matches the subject to the picture.

The transmitter connects the camera to the lights wirelessly, so that when you take the picture the lights flash automatically.

The sync cord connects the camera to the computer so that the image is displayed on the screen.

The skyport connects the lights to the computer so that they automatically adjust.

Its just all the electronics going through a circular systems check to make sure they are firing properly and matching it up against our white balance test. I know it sounds complicated, but its literally just a circle.

I understand that this can be complicated for someone who is used to 'click button, get picture.' But having the same problems over and over again because he doesn't understand the proper procedure and doesn't look at the checklist that he swears he never received even though I gave him my laminated copy and having to fix all of the problems that are literally because he didn't respect me enough to listen when I explained it to him cuts into the time that could be spent getting ready.

Now we are a month and a half in and on Tuesday he asked me what the skyport does.

If your skyport fails, you have to adjust your lights manually.

Therefore... skyport makes the computer talk to your lights.

And every time something fails, he says 'this would be so much easier without computers' and I'm like. Fine. Okay? Try to match 900 student names to photos without a computerized indexing system. Try getting the light to be consistent without a startup exposure test.

No sense of troubleshooting, which isn't very difficult. If something isn't right, restart the computer and try again. If you get a repeat of the problem, call Freddie from IT. But usually, a reboot fixes most problems.

But then he started breaking the rules, and in a very intentional way. Like at first it was 'oh I didn't know I wasn't supposed to show them the photo' even though we went over this in training. Then it was 'well, I'm not supposed to show you the photo but if you come back here while I'm adjusting my lights I can't stop you.'

At first it was 'hey, Jay, remember what Freddie said about the no-touch policy during training? I know you want to make the kids like you, but its very unprofessional to ask them for a high five, especially since these schools are very strict about their own no-touch policies and also did we not just go through a wholeass pandemic?'

And now students are complaining about him physically adjusting their posture with his hands.

Like... I don't mind bending the rules a little. But before you can bend the rules, you have to understand why the rules are there, so that when they are bent there is a good reason. The rule about showing photos is there to make workflow consistent. The no touch rule is for the safety of ourselves and the students.

But breaking the rules constantly just out of disrespect means that I can't bend them myself. I have to be a hardass. I hate being a hardass. But if I'm not a hardass and someone tells me that he's violating our no-touch policy, the company gets in deep trouble.

Not that he'll ever... ever follow my advice on the subject because as previously mentioned- he respects no one here. He has 15 years experience as a photographer and is too good for this place. Why would he listen to someone under 40 with three years experience dealing with schools?

His pictures aren't even very good. They're average.

Just two more jobs with him and then he's off to do something else and gods I hope he's better at that than he is a school photographer.

[kaidanworkshop]

Workshop Progress: November Update

Happy Holidays guys, gals, and non-binary pals! Firstly, apologies for the delayed update! Flu and COVID season is in full force this year, and it seemed to have it out for not only the Workshop staff and families, but for our VA Paul Warren! We're happy to report that everyone is on the mend and returning to our regular workflow. Learn from our follies; make sure you're taking care of your own health as well! Last update we focused on our alpha and beta testing progress with the Creation Kit and Assets Team -- progress on that front continues as we add in more recorded lines and refine the new systems we've implemented; this update will be a deep dive focusing on our Writing Team and their workflow process in organizing, evaluating, and proposing changes to the base script via our peer review system. Besides this, we have our fourth recording session with Mr. Warren in the coming weeks; after this session, our business lead is projecting one more session will be enough to complete the rest of the original script, and we can begin to finalize what options the community has towards allocating the remaining funds. We've been compiling a few synopses of what those bonus content options will be, so stayed tuned on that front! Finally, we're very excited to show off some of what we've managed to implement, so one of our Community Team members will be streaming some of our current 1.3 beta for our Discord community this upcoming Wednesday, November 15th, 2023 at 3pm CST, and Thursday, November 16th, 2023 at 10am CST! With that out of the way, here's our Writing Team Workflow Deep Dive! Warning: The below contains spoilers!

The temperatures might be cooling down outside but we're staying nice and warm working on the Kaidan romance lines commission. As we move towards the more emotionally charged dialogues the player can have with Kaidan (i.e. his friendship and romance quests), we realized that our previous script notes for our VA needed to be a bit more robust in order to really convey the tone we're looking for. As much as we all love this silly little 10+ year old game, the reality is that Skyrim's engine has its limitations with regards to NPC emotivity and expression, so the onus falls on the voice acting to carry the extra emotional weight. While Kaidan is, on the surface, a rather reserved person, a major part of the growth he experiences with the player character is allowing himself to more vulnerable and forthcoming with his emotions. For prior commissions, our script to Mr. Warren was aggregated into spreadsheets broken up by quest name and dialogue path, with brief notes on delivery/different quest paths as needed.

For each commission, we have two members of our staff sit in with Mr. Warren and offer direction as he works his way through the script. We tend to get around 3 to 8 different takes of each line, with around 250 - 300 lines per commission. Once complete, Mr. Warren sends us the full audio, and the next leg of processing begins. Our absolute savior of an audio tech gets to work splitting all the hundreds of different takes up into individual cuts, as well as processing the audio for any latent sounds or fuzziness in the background. Once separated, they're placed in an associated thread for staff members to listen to and vote on.

Sometimes we are very lucky, and there's a clear winner for the individual take. Sometimes.

Other times, ties must be split. Or not.

It is also during this process that we'll identify lines that might've been misread or otherwise need a retake. We aggregate a list and discuss our feelings on it, then shoot them back to Mr. Warren with further clarification on what we're looking for in his delivery. The process of receiving, splitting, and voting on the retake lines then begins again.

This method of breaking down these emotion-fueled dialogues really helps us as a staff keep a firm grasp on the original presented characterization of Kaidan, and not get wrapped up in trying to unnecessarily change or otherwise alter his dialogue. There's a reason this follower remains one of the most popular within the Skyrim community, and the last thing we want to do is damage LivTempleton's magic with arbitrary wordsmithing. Still, sometimes changes are needed. We try to keep them as minimal as possible, but some lines stuck out due to strange wording or odd delivery. For example, Kaidan's response to this line was originally "You do, eh? Well keep digging there, you might make it to Akavir." We felt that it didn't flow very well, and depending on how far the player has progressed in his personal quest, it might not make any sense for him to be mentioning Akavir at all yet. The below change smooths out the transition in this conversation.

Another example of a change we're adding in is creating a path for players to exit the romance path completely -- as it is now, if you wear an Amulet of Mara and initiate the romance path, there is no way to change your mind. However, we always felt that the below line pathing was very harsh; after all, Kaidan exits the conversation completely and shuts down. Working in a way to 'break up' with him via this dialogue path (sorry Kai!) felt like an easy way to work in a new mod function without having to create entirely new dialogue -- it saves money for extra content in the future, something very near and dear to our business lead's heart.

Finally, one of our favorite changes is rewording the "How do you feel about me?" dialogue tree. Given that not all players will be following the 'hot' or 'warm' romance paths, this line of questioning from the player felt like the LDB was fishing for compliments -- not a good look in our opinion. We changed this to instead be a more equitable exchange of compliments between the two ("I think we make a good team" & "Can I tell you something? I'm glad we met"). Also, we use this format to track which lines will have multiple nickname/pronoun takes.

As we approach the final sets of scripts to wrap up the revoice section of the Workshop timeline, this process may undoubtedly change again when we begin discussing how we'd like to work with the community in producing Workshop original scripts -- which is exciting! In using a peer review system from start to finish, we keep ourselves open to workflow improvement suggestions that ultimately makes the process easier in the long run. While this method of group voting and review undoubtedly adds extra time to production -- especially given the logistics of scheduling multiple staff meetings to accommodate all the different time zones our staff members live in -- we feel that it results in a more polished product, and one in which all the members of each team feel empowered to discuss and offer their insights for our favorite CVF. We'll see you for the beta 1.3 livestreams on Wednesday, November 15th, 2023 at 3pm CST, and Thursday, November 16th, 2023 at 10am CST!

[krowfaced]

Small story time!

So back in 2013, I studied game art at this vocational education. One of my personal projects for the education's portfolio courses, I was making a model of Zlatomir #mandatory3Dblorbo and I went through the entire workflow a typical artist would do in the industry; Concept art, sculpt, low poly, rig and skinning. One of the educators there had recently gotten into 3D printing and he was having a lot of fun just testing a bunch of prints. Then he got the idea to have a little contest; show off a print-friendly sculpt you had made, get votes, winner gets a 3D printed sculpture. So I made my edits and submitted. I didn't win, but it was really fun to see the entries and the actual print of the winner in the end! - Years goes by, I work as a game artist for a while, realize I don't like working with it, get my existential crisis, and decide to enroll to the same vocational education but specialize myself to a technical artist. This educator with the 3D printer was still working there (and now directly as my own educator). One day he announced that he set up a table at the school's kitchen with various 3D prints he made over the years, telling people to pick anything they fancy because he would throw them out otherwise. Some were abstract geometrical shapes, some were duplicates (or misprints haha) of that winner's entry, and some where just of a various different sculpts from other students. It was neat to examine them, but I didn't end up taking any of the offerings. Then I go to my desk, and I was met with a small surprise; There was a 3D printed Zlatomir bust next to my keyboard. There was a post-it underneath it, that just said something in the lines of "Didn't you make the sculpt for this one?" It was so wholesome and unexpected. Not only is there a blorbo print on my desk I never expected to ever see, not only did my educator actually remember it belonged to me even though at the time he was not my educator, not only that he randomly decided he wanted to use my sculpt as a little guinea-pig outside of the contest, but also that he set it aside from the rest of the prints he was giving out to make sure I had dibs for my blorbo. So many levels of wholesomeness

[cosynoodle]

Whale from Dishonored

This painting was a bit of an experimental piece from early in my masters, I was trying out a different workflow for painting, and I was reading some colour theory work and wanted to test some things out!

It is a whale from the Dishonored universe, being drained of its oil after being killed - whale oil is used to power Dunwall, where the first game takes place.

I love the art and story of Dishonored so it was fun to paint something from that world.

[thewebcomicsreview]

So, I have this advice in my head about comic writing for beginners, it being that first time writers of the medium need to understand that comics are a visual media first and a textual media second and that the artist is usually the one pulling the heavyweights. (no offence)

So, is it good advice or does it need more work?

It's bad advice. I'm not going to deny that even a hardworking writer who does research and test reads and multiple drafts usually spends significantly less time per page than the artist, but that's not really "advice" so much as "a statement", and you didn't actually advise anything in your advice. Are you saying the artist should stay humble? Feel bad? Are you explaining why the writer is usually the one who does the web site stuff as well to try to even the workload slightly? Is this entire ask just attempting to subtly neg me about being a comics writer? What's your point?

But more importantly you're equating "the writing" with "textual media" as in "the text in the narration and dialogue balloons" which is super bad advice if you're a writer working for an artist, because most of the text in a good comics script isn't text that appears on the page, it's the text that tells the artist what to draw. The less good you are at writing this part of a script, the more the final page is going to deviate from what you wrote, so you want to be clear and detailed both in what's happening and why it's happening. When you're writing for prose, you want to try and cut as many useless words as possible, but when you're writing a comic script you're giving directions and you want to make it as clear as you can. This includes things like

Literally what is going on in the story. Alice and Bob are walking down the street carrying shopping bags.

Details. It's late afternoon, and there's no one else on the sidewalk that we can see. Alice is wearing a light yellow sundress. Bob is wearing a thick orange parka pulled close. One of these characters are not dressed appropriately for the season. The sky is cloudy and there's a little snow on the ground, implying it's Alice. They're walking past a store called Carl's Car Calls whose logo is a car on an old-timey telephone.

Emotions/Explainers of what's going on in the story to help the artist make decisions you forgot to think about. Alice is dressed like this because she's been trying to ask Bob out for a while, but every time she does she gets cold feet at the last minute. A writer might not think to make Alice's skin red from the cold, making it clear that she's uncomfortable and drawing attention to her choice of outfit, but an artist knowing the context might think to do that, and help make the writer look smart.

Directorial details. Alice is going to beat Bob to death with the baguette in twenty pages, so make sure it's the most prominent thing in either bag.

Dialogue. BOB: "Carl's girlfriend apparently makes enough that they can afford a new house. I wish I had a girlfriend who got me my bread."

I'm not saying we all have to be Alan Moore writing 1600 words of description for a page of Batman opening a door, and some artists want less guidance than others, but precisely because comics are a visual medium that it's important for the writer to dedicate the overwhelming amount of their time to describing what things, y'know, look like. If you skimp on that stuff you'll describe a character as wearing "an ankle-length skirt" and you'll get the page back and it's like

If you've written for artists long enough, especially as an amateur, you know the pain of getting a page back that's different from what you wrote in such a way that it's create a plot hole or the Chekov's gun you meant to establish is barely even visible or whatever. No skill as a comic's writer is worthwhile until you've developed the skill of telling the artist what they're supposed to draw (and yes the artist is also part of the creative team and different artists have different workflows etc., but that's for lesson 102). If you can't do that, what's even the point of anything else?