prokopetz - Tumblr blog

[prokopetz]

#time to search op's account for a keyword! #yup (via @alopecoiddaydream)

Given the theme of this person's blog at the time of this posting I'd be fascinated to know which comedy relief character from Homestuck they think I find "shockingly relatable".

That sinking feeling as it gradually but irresistibly becomes clear that the author regards the character you find shockingly relatable as comedy relief, and that what the text presents as the impossible confluence of grotesque circumstances which resulted in the character in question being Like That is recognisable to you as your life.

[prokopetz]

That sinking feeling as it gradually but irresistibly becomes clear that the author regards the character you find shockingly relatable as comedy relief, and that what the text presents as the impossible confluence of grotesque circumstances which resulted in the character in question being Like That is recognisable to you as your life.

[prokopetz]

Topic: best Catholic saint to photoshop Dave Strider glasses onto.

[prokopetz]

Topic: best Catholic saint to photoshop Dave Strider glasses onto.

[prokopetz]

Jesus gets Dirk Strider glasses. Obviously.

Topic: best Catholic saint to photoshop Dave Strider glasses onto.

[prokopetz]

(For clarity, none of this material is new; The Clockwork City is already included in Appendix A of draft 0.4.2. This is just an alternative presentation to help make playset elements easier to deal with at the table. If you're terribly curious what the whole playset looks like – minus the cards, of course – you can grab a copy at the usual place.)

Selected previews of the playset card bundle from the forthcoming 0.5 revision of Eat God. These will be provided as image files for use in virtual tabletops and as a print-and-play PDF (four cards to the letter-size sheet) for use in face-to-face play. These entries are taken from the playset The Clockwork City, co-written by @cryptotheism.

We're shooting for functional rather than pretty at this point – pretty can come later! – so please don't mind the occasionally wonky line balancing. If you have any suggestions for improvements based on this preview, please don't hesitate to let me know – I'm not going to be the one using these, after all!

[prokopetz]

Selected previews of the playset card bundle from the forthcoming 0.5 revision of Eat God. These will be provided as image files for use in virtual tabletops and as a print-and-play PDF (four cards to the letter-size sheet) for use in face-to-face play. These entries are taken from the playset The Clockwork City, co-written by @cryptotheism.

We're shooting for functional rather than pretty at this point – pretty can come later! – so please don't mind the occasionally wonky line balancing. If you have any suggestions for improvements based on this preview, please don't hesitate to let me know – I'm not going to be the one using these, after all!

[prokopetz]

Topic: best Catholic saint to photoshop Dave Strider glasses onto.

[prokopetz]

Everybody talks about how Silver Age Superman is a dick, but a less remarked-upon quirk of the era’s writing is that Silver Age Lois Lane is obsessed with proving that Clark Kent is Superman specifically because she’s convinced if she does, he’ll be obligated to marry her.

Initially it’s implied to be a blackmail thing, but later Silver Age writers seem to have forgotten that and taken “Clark Kent must marry Lois Lane if she discovers his secret identity” as an axiomatic rule, to the point that Kent would often voice worries that he’d be forced to marry other characters who were close to putting the pieces together – regardless of whether they’d expressed any interest in the first place!

Now, do you know which character apart from Lois Lane has the best track record for figuring out that Clark Kent is Superman across all the various reboots, elseworlds, and miscellaneous adaptations?

That’s right: Batman.

So, logically

[prokopetz]

It really depends on which part of the idea you're trying to resurrect. The initial "Lois Lane is a crazy stalker who's trying to prove that Clark Kent is Superman because she plans to use the proof to blackmail him into marrying her" premise would probably fit right into the modern idiom, though it would obviously read very differently than it did in its original, more cartoony Silver Age context. The whole "Clark Kent is for unspecified reasons obligated to marry anyone who uncovers his secret identity" thing that it eventually evolved into would be trickier.

Everybody talks about how Silver Age Superman is a dick, but a less remarked-upon quirk of the era’s writing is that Silver Age Lois Lane is obsessed with proving that Clark Kent is Superman specifically because she’s convinced if she does, he’ll be obligated to marry her.

Initially it’s implied to be a blackmail thing, but later Silver Age writers seem to have forgotten that and taken “Clark Kent must marry Lois Lane if she discovers his secret identity” as an axiomatic rule, to the point that Kent would often voice worries that he’d be forced to marry other characters who were close to putting the pieces together – regardless of whether they’d expressed any interest in the first place!

Now, do you know which character apart from Lois Lane has the best track record for figuring out that Clark Kent is Superman across all the various reboots, elseworlds, and miscellaneous adaptations?

That’s right: Batman.

So, logically

[prokopetz]

There's a very particular target audience where all they need to know about a piece of media to go all in on it is that there's a girl who has this exact specific smile:

[prokopetz]

There's a very particular target audience where all they need to know about a piece of media to go all in on it is that there's a girl who has this exact specific smile:

[prokopetz]

(85% now, and also they've apparently added a stretch goal at 250% to include an optional playbook specifically for all the Tumblr weirdos who are horny for "pilot and handler" microfiction. It's ambitious, but if it did 85% in ten days, 250% in a month is likely doable!)

Imagine a tabletop RPG that started life as a Heaven Will Be Mine fangame and then got weird, then don't imagine it, because that's actually, literally the story behind Violet Core. I could describe it at length, but if you're reading this post on this blog, I'm not sure there's any way I could sell it better than that. At the time of this posting it's two-thirds funded with three weeks to go.

[prokopetz]

I think the part that best illustrates this point is the confrontation with the Owl. Our heroine goes to see a creature from whose lair no-one returns, a creature which is for all intents and purposes a god of death, and the moment she drops her dead husband's name, the Owl is like "oh shit, really?" and agrees to hear her out – but when she asks the Owl what the story is there, the Owl just says "that's not important", and the film literally never brings her late husband's history with the Owl up again, because the story ain't about him.

You know, even apart from the intricate worldbuilding about the talking rodents and what their deal is, the part of The Secret of NIMH that's like "working single mom trying to obtain medical treatment for her sick child discovers that her late husband was basically a high-level Dungeons & Dragons character and never told her about any of it, and she keeps tripping over elements of his unreasonably complicated backstory whose context and significance are never fully explained to the audience because the particulars aren't relevant to her journey" is a really fun premise all on its own.

[prokopetz]

"Designed with CRT fuzz in mind" is perfectly accurate for some games for non-portable consoles in the pre-HD era. The graphics for such games were typically developed using CRT desktop PC monitors, which – as noted in the original post – had much sharper pixels than contemporary CRT televisions throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Designing for the display conditions of a typical home television was something you consciously needed to do.

Indeed, there were quite a few games of the era which conspicuously failed to do this; if you're old enough to remember playing certain console JRPGs in the late 1990s and wondering whether there was something wrong with your TV because the menu text was fucking indecipherable, you've bumped into a game whose graphics were designed to look good on the artist's PC monitor and nowhere else!

My retro video game pet peeves:

No, sprite flicker on consoles like the NES didn't look like that. The NES ran at 60fps (and how it managed this on contemporary televisions which technically didn't support progressive scan is a fascinating piece of technical bugfuckery, if you have an afternoon to kill to read up on it), but YouTube downsamples all videos that are below a certain resolution to 30fps, which makes sprites that are flickering at 60fps look weird. The way that sprites sometimes seem to disappear entirely for long periods in NES gameplay footage on YouTube is also usually an artefact of this process – YouTube just happened to exclusively pick frames where the sprite in question is not visible when converting from 60fps to 30fps.

No, not all old-school pixel art was explicitly designed with "CRT fuzz" in mind. While this was often the case for games originally released for non-portable consoles, portable consoles have always had LCD screens (yes, even the original Game Boy!), so CRT fuzz simply wasn't a thing for them. Conversely, while desktop PCs of the era did use CRT monitors, from the mid 1980s onward, PC monitors typically used a variant CRT technology that had a much higher scan rate than contemporary CRT televisions in order to improve legibility of small text; such monitors had pixel sharpness comparable to that of modern LCD monitors, so CRT fuzz wasn't a thing for most PC games, either.

No, the textures on N64 and PS1 games weren't that bad. While these consoles were technically capable of resolutions up to 480p, this was very demanding for them, and rarely used outside of menus and cutscenes; actual gameplay output for games on these consoles typically ranged from 192p to 240p. The textures were of an appropriate size for the gameplay resolution. The whole "razor-sharp polygons with drab, muddy textures" look that pops up in a lot of retro media inspired by games of this era isn't imitating how such games look on their native hardware – it's imitating how they look when played on desktop PC emulators that have to stretch the textures all to hell in order to render them.

Like, I'm not saying these aren't valid aesthetic choices for modern retro games – particularly those that are trying to capture the experience of playing pirated console games on a janky PC emulator – but it's the spurious assertions of greater authenticity that often go with them that get my goat. If you want to slap a CRT filter on a Game Boy Advance title because you like the look of it, be my guest, but insisting that this is "how it was meant to be played" is simply false.

[prokopetz]

A proposed occupant for the as-yet-unfilled 36th Form slot in Eat God. Name pending!

Image transcript under the cut:

[TODO: Silly Alliterative Name]: You have a special bond with creatures that are looked down upon in polite society – that is, with vermin. You can speak with them and make requests of them as though you share a language, though they're not compelled to obey unreasonable demands, and their answers to your questions will typically be limited to “yes” or “no”. Roll or choose the class of vermin you have a bond with (d6) – 1–2: Insects; 3–4: Reptiles; 5–6: Rodents. With effort: call creatures of an appropriate species to your presence; this doesn't create them out of thin air, but such creatures are inherently likely to be in your general vicinity.

[prokopetz]

Vectrex had apparently planned to release a handheld console with a CRT vector display in the late 1980s, but cancelled the project because they determined that it would have been impossible to make it cost-competitive with the Nintendo Game Boy. I'm not aware that any CRT-based portable console actually made it all the way to commercial production, though.

My retro video game pet peeves:

No, sprite flicker on consoles like the NES didn't look like that. The NES ran at 60fps (and how it managed this on contemporary televisions which technically didn't support progressive scan is a fascinating piece of technical bugfuckery, if you have an afternoon to kill to read up on it), but YouTube downsamples all videos that are below a certain resolution to 30fps, which makes sprites that are flickering at 60fps look weird. The way that sprites sometimes seem to disappear entirely for long periods in NES gameplay footage on YouTube is also usually an artefact of this process – YouTube just happened to exclusively pick frames where the sprite in question is not visible when converting from 60fps to 30fps.

No, not all old-school pixel art was explicitly designed with "CRT fuzz" in mind. While this was often the case for games originally released for non-portable consoles, portable consoles have always had LCD screens (yes, even the original Game Boy!), so CRT fuzz simply wasn't a thing for them. Conversely, while desktop PCs of the era did use CRT monitors, from the mid 1980s onward, PC monitors typically used a variant CRT technology that had a much higher scan rate than contemporary CRT televisions in order to improve legibility of small text; such monitors had pixel sharpness comparable to that of modern LCD monitors, so CRT fuzz wasn't a thing for most PC games, either.

No, the textures on N64 and PS1 games weren't that bad. While these consoles were technically capable of resolutions up to 480p, this was very demanding for them, and rarely used outside of menus and cutscenes; actual gameplay output for games on these consoles typically ranged from 192p to 240p. The textures were of an appropriate size for the gameplay resolution. The whole "razor-sharp polygons with drab, muddy textures" look that pops up in a lot of retro media inspired by games of this era isn't imitating how such games look on their native hardware – it's imitating how they look when played on desktop PC emulators that have to stretch the textures all to hell in order to render them.

Like, I'm not saying these aren't valid aesthetic choices for modern retro games – particularly those that are trying to capture the experience of playing pirated console games on a janky PC emulator – but it's the spurious assertions of greater authenticity that often go with them that get my goat. If you want to slap a CRT filter on a Game Boy Advance title because you like the look of it, be my guest, but insisting that this is "how it was meant to be played" is simply false.