#after effects 3d text

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3D Text Animation Tutorial in After Effects [NO PLUGINS]

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Add 3D Text to Video Footage | Adobe After Effects | Motion Graphics | C...

[dognonsense]

Question...how do you make your patches? They seem so fuckin cool. I'm working on a vest and a jacket atm, and I'd like for them to be done by the time a pride fest rolls around next month.

Main technique I use for making patches nowadays is linocut. Its best suited for mass production of patches.

Make sure to remember your carving the mirror image so you have to flip all the text. Using tracing paper to flip the design is a good trick, as well as leaving graphite marks on side, then pressing that to the lino to leave the marks in the same spot. Another trick with pencil is to view what ur carving in negative space quickly, put a paper over your design and shade over it with pencil, darker marks will be where you haven't carved yet.

I use speedball fabric ink, it takes 1 week to set then will be fine to be washed. I have magenta, violet, turqouise, and white. They have a limited range of fabric colors at the store. I have seen gold and silver fabric paint for sale and I will investigate it one day.

I use a speedball roller, i find the smaller one to be better than the big one as I can be more precise and waste less ink.

I got a fancy handle for $40 but the screws fallen out so its broken now so just get some heavy books. I used to use a mug. Whats important is pushing your whole body weight into it.

I got a speedball carving tool with different heads I can swap out so I can cut into the lino at different deepness and widths. The heads are stored inside the tool since its hollow and has a screwable removable bottom. I use linocut or dollar store erasers for my carvings. Make sure to wash the ink off your linocuts after your done using them.

A thing to increase the lifespan of you're linocuts is to use wood glue, some cork or wood pieces, and glued the lino stamps onto them. I dont do that yet so my stamps fall appart from overuse sometime and because I cut way too deep into the lino since I hate chatter.

Chatter is the term for in linocutting when theres little messy lines and stuff. It makes the art more recognisably to be linocut. My work is very clean with no chatter which is why people don't notice its linocut usually. This is a stylistic choice, with diy styles having a lot of chatter can look really cool so experiment with leaving bits of extra uncarvered lino sticking out in ur stamp. I need to experiment and buy some more lino.

You can also use multiple linocut stamps together to make a patch. Some patches ive made have like 8 different stamps. Ive made a dog nonsense patch where each letter was their own eraser stamp. You can also use different colors between the different lino stamps on the same patch to add more color. An effect I like to do is first stamp it in color, then the next day I stamp it in white over the same spot but shifted to the right and down slightly. It makes the text have a cool border 3D effect I love doing.

If making a more detailed picture with colors, i reccomend hand painting patches. I use white fabric paint mixed with acrylics for color to get all the shades i need. Acrylic paint mixed with fabric softener works too.

If doing words and you dont want a unique font reccomend using letter stamps. If you want a unique font for that i recommend hand paint for individual or linocut for mass produce.

The positive of letter stamps is the font is neat and can be done quickly. I know from lending them to my roommate that they are very helpful if you have dyslexia and have trouble getting letters right.

A visual effect of the letter stamps is that have a nice boxy edge effect, its an imperfection that adds a personally touch to it. I have both lower and upper case stamps that I got from michaels. You can use a hair band or elastic to hold a bunch of letter stamps together to make a word stamp.

You can use other stamps than letters that you find at craft stores for example my racoon print is a craftstore stamp.

You can also find big plastic letter stencils at the dollar store that you can use to do lettering by filling in gaps with a sponge or or paintbrush. They make special paintbrushes just for using stencils.

You can also get plastic stencils in the shapes of things, i got some for children and use a horse stencil for my horse smoking weed patch. Easier than drawing a horse myself.

Another technique I use for more unique clean patches is gel plating. I haven't tried printing laserprint images with it as ive seen online a lot but I will try one day. What i personally do is use it to make imprints with chains and physical objects.

Another thing i use with gelplates are any stamps or linocuts that dont have words, or words ones that i fucked up with and forgot to mirror when carving. It flips mirror image twice with the gel plate so it goes back to being right again on the patch.

Another patch making technique is using foamboard cut into shapes glued onto cardboard. This is good for a quick test of a design and is very cheap to make. It will not hold under water so is more difficult to clean.

[batteredbanana]

IT IS DONE (for now)

I finished the disco jacket I've been working on for ages. I might still change or add some more details but I'm really really happy how it turned out and I'm looking forward to actually wearing it

I tried to recreate the halogen watermark effect by using two different types of reflectors, using one as the background, cutting out the design from the other one, and sewing that onto the first one. That leads to a kind of cool effect when taking photos with flash:

For the phasmid, I cut out pieces from the first reflector material and painted on them with acrylics, then sewed them all together and onto the jacket. That the phasmid is an actual extra layer leads to a nice 3D-ish effect

I probably will add some more stuff, especially in the front side of the jacket -- but that might take me another 8 months, so I'm calling it done for now

I'm also going to take some photos of the jacket actually being worn soon

Some more progress pics under the cut:

This was my very first plan for the jacket -- I didn't really think about how exactly I wanted to make everything and hadn't even bought the actual jacket at this point so a lot of it turned out to be too much effort to make (for now) -- like the reeds at the bottom and the whole front part. Also I changed the text because A I couldn't find a good way to place the letters of sunrise parabellum and B "something beautiful is going to happen" just sums up the spirit of disco elysium so beautifully to me

Soooo when I finally got the jacket I started by making the reflector patches and then made a new plan for the rest of the jacket:

Then it was just a lot of work painting everything and sewing everything together. The reflector material is very sturdy so I hurt my fingers a lot making it, and after sewing on the first version of the phasmid I had to paint over the whole thing again to hide the damage sewing did to the paint as well as possible

I also put some work into trying to make it more durable by heat setting the paint and using some acrylic spray over the whole thing but I'm under no illusion that it would survive a washing machine, so hand wash it is

[upsidedownsmore]

ENTRIES CLOSED, reblogs turned off, thank you everyone for entering and sharing your wonderful works!!

A compilation of every entry piece can be found here!

The winner is @mugbearerscorner and the information has been confirmed in DMs!!

Roll proof:

A link to the full spreadsheet of entries can be found here!

I'm so so grateful to all the people who participated in this event!! I'm so happy with how well it turned out and I'm so so thankful to be able to host it!!! Love you all!! :) :) :)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GAUSS PRIME ACCESS GIVEAWAY!

* Provided by Digital Extremes! Info about the prime access here.

To enter, simply reblog with your art of ANY warframe giving a thumbs up!

Giveaway entries will close on FEBRUARY 10TH at 10:00pm CST

The post for the above drawing (with reference screenshot and wips) can be found here.

MORE INFO UNDER THE READ LINE, PLEASE READ IT IF YOU WANT TO ENTER

Notes:

This is not a contest! The winner will be decided entirely randomly, image quality will have no effect on chances of winning! Make whatever you can in any medium you want! (This can also include 3D mediums! The only thing I'm not including is unedited game screenshots/captura, though edited might be okay). Everyone can draw regardless of how good you think your own skills are!

Please submit your own drawing(s)!! Only one is necessary but you can make more if you want of course! Do not use any AI generation tools for your entry.

When reblogging it might be a good idea to enter some text either in the post or in the tags! It turns out reblogs with just an image and nothing else might not show up under the original post, which means I might miss your submission!

Only one entry per person, you will not get more entries for additional reblogs and/or drawings.

The goal of this is for the community to have a fun little gallery of warframe thumb ups in the reblogs, but again don't stress over how "good" your drawing is! As long as you have fun and submit something vaguely in line with the prompt you're good! (such as a wave instead of a thumbs up or an operator instead of a warframe, etc. Up to you how closely you want to follow the prompt!)

You DO NOT need to engage with me in any other way (likes, follows, etc.) to enter, just a reblog with a drawing loosely following the prompt!

This giveaway will only run here on Tumblr due to issues with bots and impersonation on Twitter. The issue of course is that the only way to submit images under a single post on Tumblr is through reblogs, but please know that I do not intend this to be a means of promotion. If people could submit images in the replies I would gladly take that option! If this post gets taken down I will look into other giveaway options.

As this is my first giveaway as a Warframe creator please let me know if I've made any mistakes!

Here are some example drawings that would all work, but of course whatever you want to make shouldn't be limited to this!

Inspired by @ritens, I will be assigning one unique number per individual and then throwing them into the random number generator on random.org. After the entries close and I roll the winner, I will update this post with the winner's name and a message saying that the giveaway is closed. Reblogs will also be turned off once the giveaway is closed, as I am only using reblogs as means of congregating drawing submissions under one post during the giveaway period.

Whoever's number get's chosen will be contacted via DMs here on Tumblr, so please make sure your DMs are open! I will be asking for your Warframe IGN and platform so DE can give send over your prize! If you have cross-save linked or merged then please tell me, though I will also be asking in DMs as well. If the winner doesn't respond within 48 hours or no longer wants the prime access pack, then I will roll a new winner with the same method but with the previous winner(s) number(s) taken out of the pool.

Topmost drawing without giveaway text:

Anyways good luck and most importantly have fun!!

[linnaealyn]

Old mod page, abandoned 3/2/24; New mod page @ Godsibb

Finally, after 2 years of work, it is complete. -But still being updated.

There's a Japanese version of the mod now!

今は日本語版のMODがある！

This is a mod for Xenogears using Retroarch's Beetle PSX HW core real-time texture replacement feature. (It requires the Vulkan driver, so make sure your graphics card supports that.) (Duckstation doesn't have a similar option, unfortunately.)

It replaces every single character dialogue portrait, menu portrait, & (almost every) battle portrait (looking at you, Yggdra officer Gear pilots) with high quality, cleaned up artwork, as well as recreated high quality UI while keeping it as close to the original game as possible.

And best thing about it is, if there's anything you don't like about it, like certain aspects of the UI, you can locate and delete that file from the folder. Everything is optional. (if you have any questions as to what's what, drop them into my dms)

Current version: 1.4

現在の日本語版: 1.4

(More screenshots below download info and UI changes.)

Being a real-time texture replacer, it should work with any English version of XG, both base-game and modded/patched. Any fan-translated patch using the US version as a base should display correctly.

There's a separate version for the Japanese version of the game. May need some editing still with other characters' UI ("Ether"/"Spells"/"Arcane"/etc) but for the most part its good to go in terms of battle UI. Let me know if you find any errors.

(I've been using it with the Perfect Works Build mod. Highly recommended!)

(Note!!: If you use PWB mod, don't use its "readjusted portraits" patch when patching your rom, as that patch interferes with this mod's portraits texture replacing.)

(It works on Steam Deck... but don't ask me for details in setting that up in particular, I don't own one 😅)

~~~

Download/ダウンロード

I recommend reading the instructions txt files I included in the DL.

This includes information such as how to set up .cue and .m3u files, swapping discs, renaming the texture folder, Retroarch settings and Beetle PSX HW Core settings to get the mod working, settings suggestions for making a cleaner looking and faster playing XG (YMMV), and settings to fix certain emulation issues Ive come across (freezing on fast-forward, crackling audio during 3D/effects-heavy cutscenes/gameplay, blank screen during Rico flashback, etc).

~~~~~~~~~~

-Changes made to the UI include:

Menu UI:

selection triangle, Walk/Gear icons

menu portraits

▲ ■ ● ✖ button DeathBlow menu icons

ABXY button DeathBlow menu icon- alternate textures

Battle UI and on-foot specific battle UI:

Circular battle palette and tags behind text

Battle palette text, "Combo", "Return", "Enter", "Miss", "EP", & HP/DMG/heal/AP numbers

HP/AP bars

"Time", "fuel", "total damage", AP numbers, "1/2/3 point(s)", "cancel end"

battle portraits

▲ ■ ● ✖ button DeathBlow icons

ABXY button Deathblow icons- alternate textures

Bottom screen mid-DeathBlow ▲ ■ ✖ icons (unfortunately, there's no way to change the other mid-DB quadruple-button icons)

Combo 1-7 and Accept icons

In-Gear specific battle UI:

"fuel" and fuel numbers

"Fuel" (when using boost)

fuel bars (top and left)

All Gear status menus' green text/numbers

Attack level numbers and ∞

Gear menu backgrounds

Gear "power shut down", "camera damaged", "out of fuel", etc, statuses

background UI elements, runes, triple red triangles, Gear lock-on UI (unfortunately, there's no way to change the circular part of this UI)

Misc UI changes:

Red/grey spheres (in the menu and loading screen)

All instances of selection diamonds, both horizontal and vertical

Load/save screen "CARD 1"/"2" text, memory card icon, load/save bar/text

Disc 1 and 2 maps (with alternate color versions; makes the enterable area indicators harder to see though)

NESW compass letters (unfortunately, there's no way to change the circular compass texture)

~~~~~

-Screenshots (before & after and alts):

And Japanese version's (日本語版) UI:

⬇!!Spoilers in images further down!!⬇

--

I won't be showing all portraits here; only the ones worth mentioning.

Portraits created for the mod that have no artwork equivalent:

Portraits to match their sprites vs official unedited artwork:

(default on left, alt on right)

Roni/Medena/Erich edited sprite equivalent vs their official PW art

Citan edited unsmiling (dialogue-only) sprite equivalent vs official smiling art)

Krelian(s) edited sprite equivalent vs official art

Portrait alts created for fun:

Both sides of scar-eyed Bart

Two-eyed Bart

Kim lab coat with glasses

Fei-colored Id

Fei-colored Id with Id's yellow eyes

Fei-colored young & older Emeralda

(might add to this list later. have any suggestions? fun ideas? lmk. It doesn't have to be canon-compliant.)

Screenshots of alt portraits in-use:

I'll continue to update this and subsequently reblog it as new versions are released.

With any new updates, just DL and replace/overwrite the old folder.

In-progress tumblr post of the past as a bit of a time capsule for myself 😄

[mylifewasamazinguntiliwasborn]

So why do I think Dual Destinies is a dogshit game @elzux?

It all boils down to one very simple thing - almost nothing about the game feels like Ace Attorney.

I think the first important thing to note here is that by the time Dual Destinies came out, Ace Attorney had been my special interest for over 5 years. I was extremely familiar with the original trilogy, as well as Apollo Justice and both Investigations games. At that point I didn't dislike any of the games I had played, Apollo Justice was my least favourite but I still loved the game a lot.

Now to the meat. Why doesn't Dual Destinies feel like Ace Attorney? Let's break it down.

The dialogue - lacks the usual humour and snark. The game can't keep me focused on the dialogue. In a game where reading the dialogue is required to play the game. The dialogue is so, so boring and often nonsensical that I found myself skipping huge blocks of text, just because I either couldn't or didn't want to read what was going on. It's a massive drop in quality in a series that is known for its top tier dialogue, which usually effectively furthers both the plot and the characters. Here we instead have dialogue that feels like someone who only knew Phoenix Wright through early 2010s Youtube memes had written it. My favourite example is from DD-1 where Phoenix's inner dialogue reads (Noooo, come back my beautiful contradiction!). First glance, it's okay. Maybe even funny. Second glance, hold up. Phoenix would never think that. He might have used this as a punchline after 4-6 text boxes of lamenting, not just as a single one sentence reaction to one Objection by Payne, of all people.

The characters - closely tied to the dialogue. The returning characters don't act like themselves. The new characters are paper thin and without agency. The side characters are so boring I still barely remember anyone's names. Phoenix is stupid. Why is he stupid? Phoenix is goofy, yeah. He's a silly little guy. Sometimes he's slow, although his literal character arc of the first 3 games is becoming The Best Attorney Ever. He can't be stupid 10+ years into his career. Especially remembering that he JUST tried to reinvent the entire court system in his country (more on this later). That's simply not something an idiot or an incapable lawyer fucking does. Apollo isn't Apollo. He's given three new backstories here and in result, Apollo Justice ceased to exist. He was kind even if a little sarcastic, he was unsure about himself, and he was so willing to learn. And here? Here he's just a mean prick and a know-it-all. Yeah okay he's traumatised yadda yadda then why is he like that in DD-2 as well? You know, BEFORE his bEsT fRiEnD died? Also what fucking best friend? How about you talk about his mother instead? Why turn his cute speech patterns into some traumatic goddamn mess? Literally no one asked for that. Athena is an awful character for the first half of the game, then gets some meat, and is then devolved back to 0 by giving all her agency to Simon Blackquill. Amazing. THIS is the game series praised for its strong female characters? Give me a break. I don't know anything about Athena except that she's a polyglot and has PTSD. That's not a character, that's a plot device. Simon Blackquill is kinda okay but he's also the first major overstepping a line Ace Attorney does. His character is too ridiculous. Why is a death row convict a prosecutor. Even within the AA universe it just doesn't make sense. He's just too much. Bobby Fulbright/Phantom is the 3rd worst character of the entire series. Where is Klavier Gavin. And let's talk about character designs while we're here! They're awful! Not only are the 3D models ass, but Pearl Fey's aged up design is fucking horrendous! Also this is the first game that really feels like it was made for cosplayers. The characters don't feel like characters anymore. This is an anime convention in a courtroom, now.

The plot - again closely tied to the dialogue as dialogue is the main device used to move the plot along in Ace Attorney. It fucking sucks. The cases don't make sense. It's a trend started by AJ, but DD takes it a step or a hundred further. Every case is so deeply uninteresting that even after having now freshly played the first 2 cases, I couldn't really summarise their plots for you. Where's the motivation, or the motive for that matter? Who cares? Who are these people? The only interesting case is the last one, and it's only interesting because of the last half of it. That's where the game peaks, I'll admit it's even good for a moment there. Then it's of course brought down by the whole Phantom thing (refer to section "The characters"). It's so one-dimensional, something Ace Attorney has barely ever been before. It's like Berry Big Circus: The Game. I'm miserable writing this thinking about how I still have four more cases of this to go. But most importantly: WHY give Apollo all these fucking backstories? And WHY erase everything Phoenix did in AJ? Where's the jury? Why was it buried? What happened? What? Where's Klavier Gavin?

The game mechanics - this is huge. First off, let me go back to the beginning where I said by the time DD came out, I had already made Ace Attorney my entire personality. I knew those games through and through. There's this very specific Ace Attorney logic that one either has/learns along the way or doesn't. Like when you're cross examining and you can Just Tell what to press, or what to present, even if you're not entirely sure why. The games are intuitive, so to speak. Well, not DD! DD remains the only game in the series beside PLvsAA where I have to look up stuff in a guide or save scam to save my ass. DD diverts from the AA logic so much that playing it doesn't feel like Ace Attorney. I can excuse PLvsAA, it was a PL game to begin with so I can understand why sometimes the writing would be lacking, but the 5th installment of the main series!? No way. Also, the mood matrix is easy and stupid and comparable to how Pokémon for the past 10 years has tried to one up itself with each generation when there was no need. Mega evolution was great, why would we need all that other shit. Magatama was great, we don't need Perceive or Moods or Seances. Fuck you. Sorry I'm getting really riled up now. And finally, of course, the elephant in the room. Why. Why can you not examine each location? What? What the fuck? That's where the best dialogue happens. That's where you build the characters you fucking morons. In the background. That's why we have the entire stepladder thing. You can't just take that out. The moment I realised they had done this I lost all hope for the game and haven't seen it since. But Unski, there must be something you like about Dual Destinies, right? It can't all be that bad, right? Right?

Correct. Here's an exhaustive list of all the things I liked about Dual Destinies. -The OST was only the 3rd worst in the series. This isn't entirely on the composer though, it's also that while I like the orchestral arrangements well enough, they just don't quite hit the intensity I fell Ace Attorney deserves. Yes this includes DGS. -Speaking of OST, probably the best Truth theme of the series, and also some of the best Reminiscences are here. -Aura Blackquill is a solid good character with an interesting backstory and her own agenda. She is easily my favourite character in this game, and A tier in the over all series as well. -Phenomenal, haunting artwork. If you've played the game, you probably know which one I'm talking about. -Sometimes the cutscenes weren't entirely awful. -They brought back the black Psyche-Locks. If only they could have done that on someone more meaningful.

[petra-creat0r]

Deltarune: Fool's Fate Ch. 2 Secret Boss

Numero dos of my Fool's Fate secret bosses! I've talked about Poly a bit now thanks to the secret boss reactions but never actually posted what he looks like since I've struggled pinning down his design until now. I knew he was gonna have triangles, just didn't quite know how to execute the design until I was in call with some friends.

Poly's name comes from his inspiration, the urban myth arcade game Polybius, as well as low-poly or polygonal. I imagine that in his original game, the "User" was replaced with whatever username/highscore name the person playing the cabinet had put in. So if Chicago was playing the game it'd be Poly B. CHI. (Guess his name should technically be Poly B. USR then, huh?)

Poly's text quirk is replacing letters with numbers and basically talking in text speak. You can see it a bit in the actual picture, but basically it's like

"W3LC0M3 N3W US3R!" "R34DY PL4Y3R 1! PR3SS ST4RT 2 B3G1N." "U W4NT 2 PL4Y 1T. U W1LL PL4Y 1T. U W1LL PL4Y 1T!" or something like that.

The soul mode he uses is the blue soul since he's a platformer game.

Pretty much immediately after I determined that Fool's Fate Chapter 2 was gonna be set in an arcade, I knew I had to base the secret boss off of Polybius. I find it funny that @grimmdeltarune and I had the same idea for a secret boss concept independently.

Backstory under the cut

Poly used to be the most beloved and played game in all of the Arcade World. A simple 3D platformer, yet Lightners would come from far and wide to play his game. Everyone loved Poly, everyone wanted to be him, his game play was near addicting. Even if other cabinets in the arcade would come and eventually get replaced by newer one's, Poly's stood tall, never being dethroned since the day it was brought in.

That was until one day, a new player, or rather players, entered the game.

Electric Rhythm Empire, a new rhythm game with three primary characters. The Empress, the Emperor, and their daughter Ritsu. They quickly dethroned Poly in popularity both among Darkners and Lightners, and eventually Poly was completely forgotten about in favor of the more popular game.

That was until Poly met a man. A strange someone who revealed secrets to Poly that no Darkner should know, and promised to help Poly regain his popularity and crown. All Poly had to do was let the man modify some of his code and soon he would be irresistible to Lightner and Darkner alike. Poly agreed.

Just as the man promised, Poly's cabinet started to get played again. Anyone who came near became too addicted to stop, quite literally hypnotized into playing Poly's game. Thanks to the strange someone's help, Poly was popular again.

As soon as the man left though, those in power figured out about the harmful effects of Poly's game. In the Light World, Lightner kids would fight violently over who would play next and it was making people ill. In the Dark World, Poly was hypnotizing Darkners into liking him. Not to mention the corruption of his code.

And so, Poly's game was shut down and he was shunned from the rest of the Arcade world. Forced to live in the deepest, darkest corner of the world and be forgotten once again. Poly though, refused to stand for this. He was determined to make his game even better, and so then no one could stop playing again. He'd force any Darkner that came near to play what was essentially a death trap, and when they'd fail, he'd just make it "better". Trying to make it perfect so maybe one day another Lightner would look his way.

Eventually, a group of Lightner kids did stumble upon him after falling into the Arcade World.

--------

Ah I love Poly's backstory. It might be semi similar to Spamton's, but I pulled more from King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph now that I've put it to text.

He's just a silly little guy driven to insanity by the need to be perfect! If you don't play his game, he will hypnotize you into playing!

[saturniandragon]

Adra's Project Wingman In-Depth Review: Per Mission Experience and Commentary

(Caution: extremely long read. Please have snacks ready)

Project Wingman! Or so I've heard it more described as "a love letter to the Ace Combat franchise." Another arcade flight action shooter game similar to Ace Combat, and if I remember rightly, designed and developed by Ace Combat fans. Again I've spent years and years avoiding spoilers, although inevitably I began hearing a few things about it; it's like Ace Combat, it's set in alternate history, you can carry up to 4(!) different types of ordnance, and it's orange. So I guess like NFS Most Wanted (2005). Like Ace Combat 7 of course, I'm playing with my Xbox controller.

Which brings me to the first... quirk of the game. The menu interface. You control a cursor on the screen with your left thumbstick, and you have to carefully position it to the menu buttons that you want to access. The left thumbstick doesn't cycle through the menu buttons, you have to control a cursor with your joystick. Which I find to be a little on the negative side and I decided to just use my mouse to navigate the menu. Makes me wonder if this is a side effect of Project Wingman being developed as a PC game first and console second.

The last time I was met with this kind of UI controls was in the 2019 game "Observation."

However I am very impressed that the menu background isn't just a static image or a repeated video. It looks like a real time 3D rendered scene with planes flying above the treeline. Also what looks like a massive airship or a mothership trailing slowly across the sky. My hype level is up by 3 notches. I can't wait to start playing.

No fancy animation or a CGI video as the intro. Just a text that briefly tells the story about the game's world. Very much like David Szymanski's "Iron Lung" game. Seeing Sector D2 is not a massive game studio and just an indie developer, it's perfectly fine. And what I learned is that Project Wingman's universe is alternate history Earth that experienced some kind of massive natural disaster or calamity that changed the world forever, and new nations start to rise from the ashes. The game takes place 400 years after the event.

First briefing screen. Wow this orange tint really reminds me of Ace Combat Zero briefing screen. And I can also see the map of the Project Wingman world in the background. The continent of America has changed, not dramatically, you can see the general shape of the continent, but the west shoreline has practically split off from the rest of the continent. And a glimpse of what used to be Japan, China, Philippines and Indonesia, now reduced to just a few main islands, presumably the remains of the cataclysm mentioned earlier.

Apparently our protag is a mercenary pilot who goes by the name Monarch (as in monarch butterfly, I assume), who is a part of Hitman team, under the mercenary organization known as Sicario. And our client is the Federation? Is that a country, or a union like the one in COD Ghosts? Either way it brings me back to Cipher and Pixy, who were also merc pilots. In PW, apparently we're fighting a group of pirate pilots.

First mission, destroy some kind of research material that was deemed unsafe and fell into a group of merc pirates. A few ground targets, ships, and a few air targets. Alright, no big deal. My Ace Combat experience is more than enough for this.

I'm actually impressed with the voice acting. I've heard how difficult it is to voice act in a game or a movie that doesn't sound too cringey or too monotone. The guy doing the briefing actually does sound like he's done it probably a thousand times. I wonder if they hired a professional VA or just someone from the internal dev team.

Plane hangar. They give you 2 starter planes to choose. A T-21 (apparently a trainer plane that resembles MiG-21), and T/F-4 (a trainer plane that resembles F-4). I was going to use the Fishbed but the Phantom has slightly better stats, even though I'm bored with Phantoms, so I chose it. UGBL as secondary weapon, pretty standard.

First flight. Operation Red Current. AWACS Galaxy on station and OH MY GOD I HAVE A WIZZO. AND SHE HAS DIALOGUE LINES. The last time I had a wizzo was Ace Combat 2, but he just had generic repeating dialogues like missile lock/alert and stall warning. Your plane does form vapor clouds at Mach 1, something missing from AC7, so I loved that. Once again, for a small dev team, the voice acting is well done.

First set of ground TGTs clear. Ronin moving in. "Cordium" cargo? Never heard that before. They say it's too unstable, Federation orders to just clear it BOOM. MASSIVE EXPLOSION like an FAEB just went off. Mission complete, question mark? Another flight called Master Goose comes in the AO, flashing as friendlies. I don't really trust this but hey, I'm just a merc, not paid to ask questions.

If they turn out to be a fake squadron like the 8492nd, I'm gonna be... Well I don't know what I'm gonna be.

And there's a civil war in the Americas. Country of Cascadia being invaded by the Fed for natural resources. Our client is Cascadian Air Force now I guess. Is this like Belka trying to annex Ustio in AC0?

You know what, I'm too excited to have a wizzo. I'm gonna get another Phantom that isn't a Phantom (F/E-4). Big surprise, all of the SP weapons are available for use right away, no need to buy them separately. I like this game already.

Can I just say the explosions in PW from STDMs are so dramatic. Way more dramatic than AC7, it's like they hired Michael Bay. Not a bad thing though, it's giving PW identity. So it's not just a "Ace Combat we have at home"

Mission 2, all going well, fighting Fed border patrols until a massive airship came practically out of nowhere. At least this one doesn't have drones, just SK.27s and F/C-15s. A couple MLAAs later and it's down, but then no explanation as to what we just shot down. Oh well, at least we're with Cascadian AF now.

Mission 3. Rowsdower AFB. Once belonged to Cascadia now seized by the Fed on their conquest to expand their military (ala Belka), we're on a mission to take it back. Ooh, new aircraft for purchase. SV-37. I genuinely thought I unlocked a Flanker early in the game but it's just the Swedish dorito (Viggen). And it has MLAGs, if MLAA is Multi Lock Air to Air then I guess MLAG is this game's version of 4AGM. Only single seat though, I still want to hear more of Prez's dialogues. Maybe later.

Crosstalk squadron appeared, 5 Super Hornets. Grun Squadron flashbacks from Zero, anyone? Oooooh there's a health bar on the bottom of the screen for each enemy craft. I loved it. Wasn't much hassle fighting them, and we landed in Rowsdower.

Honestly I'm kind of impressed that as a band of pilot mercs, we have our own AWACS. Anyway next mission, aid Cascadian national guards from being overwhelmed by the Feds.

Two new aircrafts. CR.105 and SK.25U. I thought CR.105 is a Foxbat at first but it's delta wing design with no canards or tail surfaces. But its speed rating is off the rails, so I guess partly inspired by the Foxbat.

I'm buying SK.25U for Mission 4. Two seats and a boat load of A2G hardpoints. I sure hope there isn't any mission update where we suddenly have to fight an entire air force! (Thank fuck there isn't)

Really this game has the Frogfoot when Ace Combat 7 doesn't? Come on PA.

Next mission, Cascadian capital of Presidia. The Feds have taken over the city. Cover retreat of Cascadian armed forces. Multirole mission with tendency towards A2A. MG-31 and F/C-16 now available for purchase. Not sure if I trust a flying brick with wings for this mission, so Viper time. Guess I have to leave out Prez for this one.

Mission 5, over Presidia. WOW THIS CITY IS SO COOL with all the low hanging clouds. Though what's with all the needle towers/structures all over the city?

Thought we were done but the Feds sent out not just one or two other massive airships but FIVE of them to try and keep Presidia in their hands. I thought I shot all of them down but Mission Over text?? Did I fail??

Debriefing says Status: Success but Stardust said Presidia fell anyway. I guess it's supposed to be that way.

So far into this game, I'm developing the sense that Project Wingman is largely inspired by the classic PS2 AC titles (aka The Holy Trinity), I guess more towards Zero. The orange tint, no checkpoint system, the absence of aircraft tree, aircraft parts, merc pilot protagonist, but they also incorporate some modern QoL features like flares.

I think I would appreciate something present in AC but not present in PW; lock range indicator. You know the HUD in AC, just to right side of the pitch ladder, is a slider with a chevron that indicates the distance required for your ordnance to lock.

Mission 6, attack the Feds from the other front by crippling their energy production sites at Apodock Fracture, apparently in Yellowstone. Also they've been hunting for some material called cordium? Is that what caused the massive explosion in the first mission?

Two new aircrafts, Super Tomcat and Fulcrum! Two of my favorite aircrafts. But I had to choose the Tomcat because I miss Prez (cmon man I've been all alone in Ace Combat for years). Fucking hell it's expensive though. Better be worth it.

Yep they're hunting for cordium. We're ordered to destroy their containers. Fucking hell the SAMs in this mission are fierce, I got hit 3 times and was down to 23 health. And two more of those fucking Fed airships?? Just how many of these things are there??

Alright, mission completed. Almost. New blips on the radar, VX-23s and SK.37s. Federation Peacekeepers. Engagement Not Advised written in large text on my screen. I hammered the throttle and fly just meters away above the ground to avoid missiles and head to the return line. Reminiscent of the first time you face Yellow Squadron in AC04.

Crimson Squadron. Fed's top ace in Cascadia.

(I learned late that you have infinite flares in this game)

Mission 7. Cascadian Coast Guard seized a Fed battleship/cruiser off the coast of Cascadia. Just me and Hitman 3 this time. We're to provide air support although I kinda don't want to fly the SK.25U just to have its LASM. New aircraft for purchase called the... Accipiter. Whatever the hell that means. Apparently based on the Harrier. Not enough cash to purchase. Back to the Tomcat.

Think I forgot to read the weather report for this mission because it's stormy as fuck and the clouds are violent. I'm not sure who has the bigger balls to fly through such extreme turbulence, me or Monarch. It's actually very scary from cockpit view, everything shaking up around you and you hear the creeking and clanking from the plane's aluminum panels like they're going to break off at any moment. Oh well it's just an anti ship mission with a couple of air targets THE FED SHIPS HAVE RAILGUNS ON THEM WHY AM I FIGHTING MINI STONEHENGE AT SEA

Ok that's over now. New mission that's purely air to air mission. Take down Fed logistic planes while also avoiding shooting down civilian airliners. Weather cloudy. Two new aircrafts, Super Hornet-C and Flanker-B. But I'm still having way too much fun in my F/D-14.

Also I just learned that the seemingly random clicking noises when I'm flying is just a noise indicator of my missiles fully reloaded.

Mission 8, Briggs Mountain Range. Wait why is that civilian airliner the same as the Fed airship that I've downed multiple times before?

Doesn't matter. STDMs, HVSMs and MLAAs. One by one shooting down Fed Globemasters. Conservative with MLAA use because I totally didn't restart this mission because I accidentally shot down a civilian airliner. Then the true airship arrives. Airship Gladeus with two F/S-15s. The fucking AAM pods on the Gladeus are a nightmare to hit tbh, but mission done. More importantly no civilian casualties.

But I begin wondering, is there like multiple paths in this game like Ace Combat Zero? Like Knight, Soldier and Merc paths that are determined by whether you shoot N.TGTs or not. That's my goal for my second playthrough.

Mission 9. Raver mountains. Covert mission to take out SAM sites so we can push without losing planes. F/C-15 is now available for purchase.

But you know what, let's take the Accipiter for a spin. What was the last Ace Combat game that lets you fly a Harrier? None. Well, Assault Horizon, but that's not a true AC game. Woah, what is this, CGP? A shotgun gun pod?? Flechette rounds?? I don't fucking know how it works but I wanna try that shit out.

Alright, near CIWS units. Time to try CGPs, and... it's disappointing. Although I think my expectations were a bit too high. Well at least they didn't lie about it being a short range weapon.

And of course I did the tunnel runs in this place to destroy the containers. I'm an Ace Combat vet after all, tunnel runs are my bread and butter.

Mission 10, now the real deal. Solana Comms Array and the adjacent airbase... without Cascadian air force to help us. It's alright I guess, Monarch is already a one man army as he is. Or one man air force.

But I'm this far into the game and I still haven't found Project Wingman's equivalent of QAAMs. Maybe there will be a "HASM" (High Agility Standard Missile) or something. I guess it's time to try the Eagle for a spin.

And my thoughts? So worth buying the Eagle. Missed out on Prez, but when you attach second and third slots with MLAAs, you get 6AAMs in game. Awesome stuff. Fed is crumbling.

Mission 11, Bering Strait. Another purely A2A mission. The most expansive A2A battle ever committed, he says? We'll see to that WHOAA THIS IS LIKE THE MAYHEM MISSION FROM ACE COMBAT ZERO ON STEROIDS

And of course Crimson squadron shows up with a fuck ton of reinforcements. Totally reminding me of Schwarze squadron battle. But I'm not going down without a fight.

55 fighters, 3 SK.37s and 2 VX-23s downed by one humble F/D-14. I tried getting a close look at a VX-23 but couldn't make out what it resembles. My best guess is that it's probably something like Chengdu J-20 but couldn't see the fine details. Is there like a PSM mechanic in this game because those guys were pulling 90 Gs every now and then

Feds have issued retreat. Crimson 1 insists on staying, Crystal Kingdom order stands. Eventually Crimson obeys, and retreats the whole squadron.

If anything Ace Combat or movies have taught me, I predict Crimson is going to go berserk within the Feds. He's gonna think the Fed is too weak and just holding him back, he's gonna take Federation's most outrageous aircraft and weapon and use them to set a personal score with Monarch. I'm calling it.

I love Prez's reaction after Crimson retreated. Like yeah bitch, you better fucking run! I love her.

Alright, mission 12. Feds is absolutely crumbling after their airforce got decimated by Hitman. Multirole mission with heavy tendency towards A2A. Something about oil rigs facilities at sea.

It's railguns again, the same one that Fed ships were firing at me on previous mission with the Eminent Domain. Hitman 3 said something, why is this rig more heavily guarded than the comms array?

Mission update came up. Unknown target marked on my HUD, but I'm not firing yet. I fly close to the unknown to try get a visual but it's too damn dark to see anything, even with gibbous moon. Then something happened.

"Project Wingman is away."

What the fuck is that?? Project Wingman?? Something rapid just took off from one of the oil rigs. It's way too dark on my screen to see whatever it is, but it's roughly triangular AND IT'S SHOOTING RAILGUNS BACKWARDS AT ME WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THIS THING

Apparently piloted by another merc named Frost? Monarch shot it down with HISMs and STDMs. Frost ejected but said something about releasing data pod. I suspect this is a Federation superweapon undergoing research. That will explain the amount of AA defenses all around it although of course the game's debriefing doesn't tell me anything.

Mission 13. There's a new Fed superweapon, an airship fleet by the name of Task Force 1. It's resting in a port, we're to destroy it before it's unleashing hell, I suspect. Although something about Kingdom of Sawaiiki, one of Fed's states, will probably get in the way.

Maybe I should expect neutral/N.TGTs.

Two new aircrafts. F/S-15 and... what the hell is this? "Chimera"? At the front it resembles Su-57 nose, but the way the wing blends into the body is a bit like F-16XL's cranked delta wing, and it also has a V tail like YF-23 (maybe that's why it's called Chimera). And it's 285k to purchase, I don't even have 100k credits. Why is this available to purchase right now?

Whichever the case I can't buy either of them. I'm going with the F/C-15, I'm gonna need its MLAG.

I think this mission is where the game can do with some optimization, because my frame rate was down from 80+ to 40 near the docks where there are a fuck ton of targets. But I don't want to compare this to Ace Combat 7 because this is a game from an indie developer. I'm sure they did what they could for optimization, and I'm not gonna blame them.

Mission itself was pretty standard. Nothing super interesting although the part where Hitman 2 had to radio out a long announcement to Kingdom of Sawaiiki that we have no beef with them, and telling Galaxy afterwards that it costs "2 bucks per word" is pretty funny. I love these conversations.

Mission 14. Grimwood coast, provide CAS for ground troops and prevent Feds from regrouping. But expect bad visibility he says from the forest fire nearby. I'm gonna gamble and take the SK.25U.

Oh shit, I guess we're working with firefighters as well now. I hope I don't have to protect them at some point because I'm essentially flying a tank. That has 40mm/65mm HE ammo for its main gun.

I forgot to say but the MLAGs in this game are phenomenal. The multilock ability of a 4AGM and the range of an LAGM? Slow reload speed but I'm sold. Who needs an A-10 anyway right

Feds in Grimwood have surrendered. They burned the forests for nothing. Also I keep hearing allies calling Monarch "The Crown" now, and in earlier sorties I also hear something along the lines of "how dare you take the name of a king as your own", "not all kings are just."

I'm developing the feeling that this game is fantasy medieval action adventure but with jets and airships instead of swords and magic. No hard feelings on that, I'm a huge fan of The Elder Scrolls series. So I'm looking forward to see how much this game plays into the mythological/medieval theme. Maybe like Ace Combat Zero, with how Cipher and Pixy did the aerial equivalent of jousting? We'll see.

Also there's this level of detail and touch of realism, that I think has never been done in Ace Combat before. When an enemy jet whizzes past you above Mach 1, you can actually hear the sonic boom from their wake. That's awesome.

Mission 15, Cascadian city of Prospero, the largest trade center apparently. Get rid of its air superiority elements and secure the airport. SK.37 is now available for purchase, yet I'm still under the required price for it.

I do have to comment on the way planes are painted in PW, or at least the default skins that you use. It's like plastidipped or cerakoted or something, like how guns are these days. Nothing really spells practical camouflage/camo pattern. But hey, maybe that's just how Monarch wants to look in the skies.

Liberate Prospero they say but they didn't say the Feds would be so desperate that they would LAUNCH 50 NUCLEAR CRUISE MISSILES JUST TO PREVENT CASCADIA FROM GETTING TO PROSPERO. THEY JUST BELKAN'D THE SHIT OUT OF THIS CITY. DID THEY JUST OPEN UP A VOLCANO FROM THE GROUND?

Hitman 3 just said Calamity. Is this what happened 400 years ago before the events of this game?

Fucking hell.

Mission 16, instant continuation from previous flight. Only me, Prez, Diplomat, Comic and Galaxy now. No idea if anyone else is alive. Flew over Rowsdower, no response.

Fuck, new blips on radar. It's the merc Frost from earlier. AND MASTER GOOSE FROM MISSION 1. I FUCKING KNEW THEY SHOWED UP TOO CONVENIENTLY

"You fired up? Come shoot me down." Yeah bitch I'll shoot you down in that fancy bitchass superplane you're flying. And don't you dare copy my boy Pixy's line from Ace Combat Zero.

(Just kidding, I love the devs for having her voice actor say that)

Fucking hell, I thought a swarm of MQ-101 drones was bad, but I never thought I'd be on the receiving end of an ADMM where each individual missile is a QAAM.

Stardust again. Contract to fulfill you say? Fuck you man, there's nothing else out there now. Everyone's got our number, even Diplomat and Comic's real name. Sicario is only 4 man band now, 5 if you count Prez.

Kaiser seems convinced after Stardust offered something to us. Whatever that is. Meanwhile I guess we're regrouping on an abandoned highway as a makeshift base.

2 months later.

Mission 17. Brite Fortress. One of the safe havens outside the whatever the fuck is happening out there.

I sold my Harrier to get some cash back. I'm done with the Super Tomcat. It's time for SK.37. It's only got AA hardpoints but I need to fly something else. Oh and an MGP. I've never used MGP in Ace Combat before but I'm gonna try this one.

Woah, what is this? AOA limiter? Replaces flares? Doesn't say what it is.

Alright, Brite Fortress. Railguns and airships as usual. At this point I've been desensitized to them, because I learn that the Feds is just Belka/Erusea hybrid. As in, a superweapon maniac.

Aw shit, they have a massive tank/train/land cruiser. This thing doesn't have any A2G weapons, but it has MGP. 4 of them. And AOA limiter, more like AOA unlimiter. Let's you pull off PSM-esque move while holding down L3 and turning sharp. I like it though, it replaces your flares but it doesn't restrict you to low speeds and a complicated QTE like Ace Combat 7, and you can perform it anytime as long as the indicator is ready.

Mission 18. Aw shit, we're back to Prospero now? I really don't want to.

Yeah, figured. Crimson showed up again. VX-23s and SK.37s again. But now I can at least match their crazy AOA maneuvers.

My first try I nailed AOA limiter module pretty quickly. If used right it's essentially a "teleport to enemy's 6" button. Well I didn't use it right. Got shot down.

My second try. If Crimson is calling it personal then so will I. I will spam this AOA limiter if I have to. Even Diplomat is absolutely fed up with Crimson's shit, telling him to shut the fuck up and turning off his radio. Learned that, other than spamming AOA, you have to firewall the throttle, make sure your speed never goes below Mach 1 even when turning. Got hit by a missile once, but this time I downed them. All 8 of them.

Crimson laughing maniacally on the radio as his plane falls. What a waste of pilot, Comic, I agree. But I'm feeling that won't be the last.

Mission 19, back to Presidia. Take out Federation's naval force.

VX-23 is now available for purchase. It is like Chengdu J-20/Lockheed F-22 hybrid. Well, more like F-22 with the wings swapped positions. Can't buy this one either even if I sell my SK.37. And I love this thing already because of its AOA limiter.

Naval force destroyed. Presidia is next.

Mission 20. Now I could really sell my SK.37 now to get the VX-23, I wonder if I should do that...

Fuck it. Yolo.

Presidia is liberated. Feds are surrendering. War is over. And then...

"KINGS"

....

No.

No, Sector D2. Please, don't.

Don't make Crimson 1 pull a Pixy on me for the ultimate mission.

I called it earlier. He's gone off the rails. He took the Fed's superplane and nuked everyone in Presidia with it except Monarch. Probably intentionally, to set a personal score with me.

But I'm not scared. Well, until he fired railguns on all directions, launched Project Wingman's equivalent of ADMM, and released force fields ala Arsenal Bird/Alicorn. When I thought this game would be like Ace Combat, I didn't think it would be "Ace Combat, but 150% more fucked up."

I employed the similar strat from before. Lock the third person camera at his plane, firewall the throttle up to Mach 2 and spam the AOA limiter. He's got 3 health bars in that superplane that's probably powered by cordium. If previous missions didn't emphasize on how orange this game is, well, this final showdown does.

Everything is orange. The skies, the ground, the sun, the missiles, the railgun trails, my HUD, half the time I couldn't tell if my missiles hit him or not because my interface was loaded with directional missile proximity indicators. Thank fuck the health bar is still perfectly readable.

"You signed this deal a long time ago." WELL I DIDN'T SIGN UP TO FIGHT YOU SPECIFICALLY NOW DID I. But you've decided that it's personal so bitch, COME THE FUCK AT ME.

"I'm Cascadian. You think I take joy in killing my own countrymen?" SO WHY THE FUCK DID YOU DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. YOU LET YOUR OWN PRIDE CONSUME YOU AND THOUGHT THEY'RE ACCEPTABLE LOSSES IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL BEEF WITH ME. FUCK YOU.

I danced with him in the skies for probably a good 15 to 20 minutes just trying to land one or two hits on him. A deadly aerial dance that involves jet fuel, multi lock missiles and nuclear railguns.

Three health bars depleted. My camera is still locked onto his PW.MK1.

"No, not yet..."

Then all my HUD element disappears.

He's not dead yet. Two health bars now on the bottom of the screen, one for Hitman 1 and one for Crimson 1. Fuck, I have to fight him again. I grazed my VX-23 on the railgun trail and took some damage. But I still have my wings. I can still fly.

Another 10 minutes of fighting. I'm gonna fucking joust him now like Pixy. Dozens of STDMs, hundreds of railgun projectiles and thousands of 20mm Vulcan rounds.

His last health bar is depleted.

...

But my camera is still locked onto his plane. The corpse of his PW.MK1 flailing through the clouds and trailing flames.

Why am I not seeing a chute?!

"Monarch..."

God damn it, Crimson, eject! Eject now!

"When you hear the thunder..."

There's no time for speeches, damn it! Eject!

"When the storm comes for you..."

Dying will not solve anything! Fucking punch out, god damn it!

"Remember me."

...

But he was a fighter pilot to the end.

Remember him, Monarch.

Because it's just you left.

No one else. No Prez, Galaxy, Diplomat, Comic,

It's just you.

As a final send off, I leveled out my VX-23 to the horizon, pointing towards the sun, and fly off into the distance.

Contract completed.

---

Project Wingman, completed. Wow. What a game.

The story, the gameplay, the graphics, the sounds, voices, visuals, everything.

I can tell it's all been made with passion and love. And it really is... a love letter to the Ace Combat franchise.

It may as well be an Ace Combat game on its own.

I never mentioned it, but the OST is also phenomenal. Especially on Mission 11. On par with Ace Combat. Maybe even better, for an indie game. Especially the credit song, the leitmotif that's been playing throughout the game since Presidia. I'm calling it Monarch's theme.

Wow, just wow. I nearly shed a tear.

You know I once read a quote, I don't remember if it was from this game or something else, but

War doesn't decide who is right.

Only who is left.

10/10. Phenomenal game. Sector D2, you are legends. Absolute fucking legends, you hear?

There are so many people backing this game on Kickstarter, on the order of hundreds. Maybe thousands. All their names are in the credits.

And it was all so worth the money you all have invested in the development of Project Wingman.

And for me, it was worth the money I spent on buying this game.

Enjoy your victory while it lasts, Monarch.

You may not have a throne, or anything left in your world.

But you are the king.

As for me, I'm gonna play the game again and try to understand the lore better. It seems that I have a tendency to hyperfocus on the task/quest/gameplay at hand. Probably gonna turn down the bgm and sfx a little bit so I can hear dialogues better.

[mitleiden]

A guide from a reddit's user

Found an interesting guide that would help:

" Alright, so I have been on shiftumblr a lot… if you find the right sources it’s great! Definitely better than tiktok, sometimes better than Reddit.

Anyways, I have been dabbling a lot into the Void State topic because it seems like a fool-proof way to shift and manifest anything instantly and I found this post today which tells you exactly what the void state is, what it isn’t, how to get in and more.

I’ll copy the text here for people who don’t have Tumblr and then link the post here

Couple of notes from me I didn’t see mentioned in the post. I have come to believe we always end up in the void when we are sleeping, we’re just not aware of it, so becoming aware could be one of the easiest ways to enter it. I have also come to believe that any manifestation and any shift happens through the void, wether people become aware of it or not. Because the void is literally everything and nothing. It’s where it all exists basically. "

table of content

i. intro

ii. the void

what it is

what is not

why the void state

what it “looks like”

iii. how to enter it

the “before state”

awake

asleep

other ways

affirmations

iv. q & a

v. outro

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

I. INTRO

in this post i talk about everything in context of the void state. i explain in deep detail what it actually is, clear up more misinformation, how to enter it in a lot of different ways, why the void is really nice and useful and in the end even have a q&a for everyone that got questions! you will notice how insane many misinformation are here. not just a few but full "guides" and "explanations" with it. please do not blame the creators for spreading them more! if you thought the same, you also could've been one of the people making posts about it.

II. THE VOID

let's start with the actual topic. to explain what the void is we have to know what exactly we are at first. so, what are we, what are you? you are an awareness. that means you are a tiny swabble-bubble thingy that experience the multiverse. right now you are on the physical plane so you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. you can do a lot more things but the only important one is that you exist. you have no original appearance or identity (that's another topic) at this moment you are just you. you experience the 3d as y/n y/l/n. there are a few more things of course like your subcons and all that but it is not important for us now.

What is it?

we know that we are an awareness currently on the physical plane. we don't have an original identity we belong to as much as a reality. so what happens if we leave the 3d? is that even possible? yes, yes it is. that is the void state. the void means that you leave the physical plane. that is all. it is nothing special or unusual. the void state is the state of awareness. you, the tiny swabble-bubble thingy, exist there in your purest, most natural form. you could say the void is your home. when you aren't in a reality, you are in the void state. it's where you always return to and there is nothing more natural for you. you are just power, happiness, and peace there. nothing from the 3d can effect you anymore, your mind get's a whole reset. what does that mean? you have to know that you, the awareness, are not meant to doubt, have limited beliefs, worries, fears, trauma. it isn't natural or normal for you. you have them here on the 3d because they are physical circumstances. once you leave the physical plane, it of course means that they don't exist anymore. you enter it and BOOM they get completely erased. you won't even understand how you could believe such stuff after that. as you can see, the void is the state where you exist in your most "original" form, even if you don't have any identity or something like that.

What is not

this is gonna be a long, long list. i'll actually make bullet points with everything i've ever heard here so you don't have to ask in the comments "someone said it is xy, is that true?". you can be very very sure that everything here in this list got 100% nothing at all to do with the void state. in the end i'll talk about the most drastic thing's but i also explained a lot already in my post about misconceptions.

body asleep, mind awake

meditation

dreaming

SATS

a sleep state

the God State (mindset*)

Theta State

the “before state”

meditation

relaxation

the thing after you wake up

being “in your brain”

any other physical state at all

as you can see, you guys came up with a lot of things! you may already understood, the void means leaving the physical plane, so its being a physical state is absolutely impossible. you do not notice it on the 3d. at all. it is just not possible. many, many ask me "why didn't i shift from the void" but tell me a few sentence later "and i only felt my body a little bit" and i sit there like "okay, i'll start from the very beginning".

so please guys, in the void you leave the physical plane. you have no body. you can't feel anything physical at all. when you "felt your body only a little bit" you weren't even near the void. once you entered it, the physical plane doesn't exist for you anymore. with these very important information we can just ignore 10 things from the list now because we know that they aren't true at all. last but not least "it is the god state". but what is the god state? there are two main definitions here 1. just another term for the void so it's totally okay to say it, but what many here mean is 2. the "god state" mindset*. that's a bit tricky, the second meaning is just a mindset. it represents your natural state of mind where you are limitless and powerful. you have it immediately in the void BUT if you have it here on the 3d you are not automatically in the void. you are still on the physical plane. tiny but important difference.

Why the Void State

you may already thought "damn, that sounds cool" but do you know how cool it actually is? besides that you finally align with your natural state of mind, that the void is pure happiness, peace, and joy, that you can chill there as much as you want, you can also do everything you want!! whatever it is, there are no limits. so here a few things you may don't know you can do:

change the past

skip time

change your whole appearance

shift everywhere

manifest to wake up in the void every night

manifest the future

erase things (f.e. racism etc)

manifest to always shift instantly

change everything about your life

manifest to lucid dream every night

as you can see, a lot more than many people think of. and the coolest?? it is instantly, in the very moment you want it, 100% reality. in the void the 3d/4d time gap can not exist because you are ABOVE the 3d. in the void you and your subcons work completely together that means that you literally give the commands. what do you have to do for it? want it. you don't even need affirmations or anything. you just want it and it is reality, no other possible outcome. in the void you can not fail, never and with nothing. if you ever thought you were in the void but "didn't shift" this is your clear sign that you were definitely not in the void. you are pure power there, it is impossible for you to fail at anything.

What it looks like

a question many, many have! what do you see in the void? actually you see nothing. you have nothing to see, you have no eyes. that's something most people are afraid of, deep, endless black and nothingness. but that's not the whole answer. you can customize your void! you have something called a "mental image". it is a picture you have in your mind and that is what you see. you can change it to your liking, very common here are galaxies. you could compare it to very, very vivid visualization but you don't have to focus on it and it's completely natural. you see whatever you want to see in the void. if you don't want black nothingness, you won't have it. very simple. so please don't be scared!

III. HOW TO ENTER IT

there are a lot of ways to enter the void! you can basically leave the 3d through everything you want but of course a few things are easier for the mainstream than others. just try what you like and don't think you have to enter it immediately. i always compare it to speaking a language after a long ass break. it's weird and maybe seems hard, but every day you get more confident and notice how easy it is. that's the exact same with the void. everything is progress because every single thing is one step closer to being comfortable.

The “before state”

a term you guys hear extremely often from me. i came up with it because this was also a misinformation. but wait, what is it?? the so called "before state." it describes the time where you, the awareness, get ready to leave the physical plane. it always happens and especially beginner can feel A LOT there. it is the state where you feel like spinning, floating, falling all at once with tingles, dizziness, and confrusion. some time ago people said that this is the void. it is not. that's, as you already know by now, something that happens before you enter the void. many feel it, some do not and that is completely okay. for most people that actually feel it this intense it get's less and less every time they try. like you get more and more used to the idea of the void state, you know? you mostly witness it when you try to enter it awake or through a physical state. if you think you can not stand it, that's okay, you got enough other ways!

Awake

before doing anything, ask yourself what you wanna do there? do you wanna chill a bit, manifest something, shift? with the intention or affirmations? if you can answer that you're good to go

maybe put your phone away really quick to just calm down a bit so you're not full of energy while trying. you could draw something instead?

lay down in a position where you know that it won't distract you. nothing that hurts or is uncomfortable

now it helps many (especially when it's your fist attemps) to have a vague "plan". do you wanna visualize? affirm? counting?

if you wanna relax more you can take a few breaths at the beginning

after that try to just don't care about your body. don't care about your breath (and DON'T focus on it!!), you can count or start visualizing/affirming till you reach a deep deep relaxed state

now you'll probably start feeling A LOT. physically and mentally (i don't talk about the itchy-pain feeling, that's just you body). your body will feel like floating, spinning and falling at the same time, you'll be dizzy and "confused". that's okay and totally normal. just stand it, do not fight it*

if you have trouble affirming while that happen just think about it, it doesn't have to be very specific

after that you'll feel nothing, absolutely nothing

then you'll leave the physical plane, you'll just know it because you feel inner peace and happiness and calm

*this is the before state and will most probably get less intense every time you try sleep

Asleep

you can also enter it with a sleep method! a thing not many people know but that's why we are here, right? just go to bed, now you can do several things:

listen to subliminals

visualise

affirm

have mental conversations about the void

just set an intention

you can do all, you can do none, just one, whatever you want. it is like the intention for shifting just with the difference that you wanna leavsle the 3d and not change your physical environment. it is the method many people use when they have problems with the before state, don't wanna lay still or have no time for it. you can do it anytime, everywhere. if you focus right now on lucid dreaming? awesome, you can still intend. in fact, the intention is exactly equally progress as when you try it awake. so it's definitely not just a "lazy version"!

Other ways

as said, you can leave the physical plane through everything but here are some of your favorites:

❈ Lucid Dreaming

you can do it already or practice it right now? awesome! maybe try to enter the void state throught it. once the dream is lucid start to say affirmations, visualize or intend. or whatever you feel called to do

❈ Physical States

you can reach SATS easily? the theta state? you meditate or are able to disconnect from your body?use it for the void state if you want. if you can enter one of these and it helps you to disconnect from the physical world, that is really great. do whatever you want to do or ate able to. the same recommended as always, visualization, affirmations, no matter what you like the most

❈ “Is it even real?”

you know the moment when life feels kinda unreal?when you look at the physical world and genuinely question how this can be reality? these are great moments to affirm you are in the void! if it feels unreal, who could proof that you aren't in the void?

❈ Subliminals

got no time or just don't wanna try? there are many good subliminals out there to enter the void state. personally i recommend solars one. just listening to subliminals can also bring you in the void. they send clear commands of what you want to your subconscious mind and it will just say "oh, wanna leave? okay got you sweetie!"

Affirmations

I am pure awareness

I am pure consciousness

I am in the void

I am in the void state

I leave the physical plane

I leave the 3D

I completely disconnect from the 3D

I cannot get influenced by anything physical

I am home

The void is my home

The original post is here

[filtergrade]

How to Create Stunning 3D TEXT ANIMATIONS in After Effects Tutorial

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

A few years ago, during one of California’s steadily worsening wildfire seasons, Nat Friedman’s family home burned down. A few months after that, Friedman was in Covid-19 lockdown in the Bay Area, both freaked out and bored. Like many a middle-aged dad, he turned for healing and guidance to ancient Rome. While some of us were watching Tiger King and playing with our kids’ Legos, he read books about the empire and helped his daughter make paper models of Roman villas. Instead of sourdough, he learned to bake Panis Quadratus, a Roman loaf pictured in some of the frescoes found in Pompeii. During sleepless pandemic nights, he spent hours trawling the internet for more Rome stuff. That’s how he arrived at the Herculaneum papyri, a fork in the road that led him toward further obsession. He recalls exclaiming: “How the hell has no one ever told me about this?”

The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical. The scrolls were buried inside an Italian countryside villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that froze Pompeii in time. To date, only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the villa that’s been excavated. But it’s thought that the villa, which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar’s prosperous father-in-law, had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of thousands more. Such a haul would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered, and the conventional wisdom among scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, plays and philosophy by manyfold. High on their wish lists are works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sappho and Sophocles, but some say it’s easy to imagine fresh revelations about the earliest years of Christianity.

“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” says Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, a charity that tries to raise awareness of the scrolls and the villa site. “This is the society from which the modern Western world is descended.”

The reason we don’t know exactly what’s in the Herculaneum papyri is, y’know, volcano. The scrolls were preserved by the voluminous amount of superhot mud and debris that surrounded them, but the knock-on effects of Mount Vesuvius charred them beyond recognition. The ones that have been excavated look like leftover logs in a doused campfire. People have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them—sometimes carefully, sometimes not. And the scrolls are brittle. Even the most meticulous attempts at unrolling have tended to end badly, with them crumbling into ashy pieces.

In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.

But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.

After studying the problem for some time and ingratiating himself with the classics community, Friedman, who’s left GitHub to become an AI-focused investor, decided to start a contest. Last year he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering $1 million in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll. “Maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried,” he recalls thinking. “My life has validated this notion again and again.”

As the months ticked by, it became clear that Friedman’s hunch was a good one. Contestants from around the world, many of them twentysomethings with computer science backgrounds, developed new techniques for taking the 3D scans and flattening them into more readable sheets. Some appeared to find letters, then words. They swapped messages about their work and progress on a Discord chat, as the often much older classicists sometimes looked on in hopeful awe and sometimes slagged off the amateur historians.

On Feb. 5, Friedman and his academic partner Brent Seales, a computer science professor and scroll expert, plan to reveal that a group of contestants has delivered transcriptions of many more than four passages from one of the scrolls. While it’s early to draw any sweeping conclusions from this bit of work, Friedman says he’s confident that the same techniques will deliver far more of the scrolls’ contents. “My goal,” he says, “is to unlock all of them.”

Before Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town of Herculaneum sat at the edge of the Gulf of Naples, the sort of getaway wealthy Romans used to relax and think. Unlike Pompeii, which took a direct hit from the Vesuvian lava flow, Herculaneum was buried gradually by waves of ash, pumice and gases. Although the process was anything but gentle, most inhabitants had time to escape, and much of the town was left intact under the hardening igneous rock. Farmers first rediscovered the town in the 18th century, when some well-diggers found marble statues in the ground. In 1750 one of them collided with the marble floor of the villa thought to belong to Caesar’s father-in-law, Senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, known to historians today as Piso.

During this time, the first excavators who dug tunnels into the villa to map it were mostly after more obviously valuable artifacts, like the statues, paintings and recognizable household objects. Initially, people who ran across the scrolls, some of which were scattered across the colorful floor mosaics, thought they were just logs and threw them on a fire. Eventually, though, somebody noticed the logs were often found in what appeared to be libraries or reading rooms, and realized they were burnt papyrus. Anyone who tried to open one, however, found it crumbling in their hands.

Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.

Today the villa remains mostly buried, unexcavated and off-limits even to the experts. Most of what’s been found there and proven legible has been attributed to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet, leading historians to hope there’s a much bigger main library buried elsewhere on-site. A wealthy, educated man like Piso would have had the classics of the day along with more modern works of history, law and philosophy, the thinking goes. “I do believe there’s a much bigger library there,” says Richard Janko, a University of Michigan classical studies professor who’s spent painstaking hours assembling scroll fragments by hand, like a jigsaw puzzle. “I see no reason to think it should not still be there and preserved in the same way.” Even an ordinary citizen from that time could have collections of tens of thousands of scrolls, Janko says. Piso is known to have corresponded often with the Roman statesman Cicero, and the apostle Paul had passed through the region a couple of decades before Vesuvius erupted. There could be writings tied to his visit that comment on Jesus and Christianity. “We have about 800 scrolls from the villa today,” Janko says. “There could be thousands or tens of thousands more.”

In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”

Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”

By 2016 he and his students had managed to read the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred ancient Hebrew text, by programming their specialized software to detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it. The software made the letters light up against a darker background. Seales’ team had high hopes to apply this technique to the Herculaneum papyri, but those were written with a different, carbon-based ink that their imaging gear couldn’t illuminate in the same way.

Over the past few years, Seales has begun experimenting with AI. He and his team have scanned the scrolls with more powerful imaging machines, examined portions of the papyrus where ink was visible and trained algorithms on what those patterns looked like. The hope was that the AI would start picking up on details that the human eye missed and could apply what it learned to more obfuscated scroll chunks. This approach proved fruitful, though it remained a battle of inches. Seales’ technology uncovered bits and pieces of the scrolls, but they were mostly unreadable. He needed another breakthrough.

Friedman set up Google alerts for Seales and the papyri in 2020, while still early in his Rome obsession. After a year passed with no news, he started watching YouTube videos of Seales discussing the underlying challenges. Among other things, he needed money. By 2022, Friedman was convinced he could help. He invited Seales out to California for an event where Silicon Valley types get together and share big ideas. Seales gave a short presentation on the scrolls to the group, but no one bit. “I felt very, very guilty about this and embarrassed because he’d come out to California, and California had failed him,” Friedman says.

On a whim, Friedman proposed the idea of a contest to Seales. He said he’d put up some of his own money to fund it, and his investing partner Daniel Gross offered to match it.

Seales says he was mindful of the trade-offs. The Herculaneum papyri had turned into his life’s work, and he wanted to be the one to decode them. More than a few of his students had also poured time and energy into the project and planned to publish papers about their efforts. Now, suddenly, a couple of rich guys from Silicon Valley were barging into their territory and suggesting that internet randos could deliver the breakthroughs that had eluded the experts.

More than glory, though, Seales really just hoped the scrolls would be read, and he agreed to hear Friedman out and help design the AI contest. They kicked off the Vesuvius Challenge last year on the Ides of March. Friedman announced the contest on the platform we fondly remember as Twitter, and many of his tech friends agreed to pledge their money toward the effort while a cohort of budding papyrologists began to dig into the task at hand. After a couple of days, Friedman had amassed enough money to offer $1 million in prizes, along with some extra money to throw at some of the more time-intensive basics.

Friedman hired people online to gather the existing scroll imagery, catalog it and create software tools that made it easier to chop the scrolls into segments and to flatten the images out into something that was readable on a computer screen. After finding a handful of people who were particularly good at this, he made them full members of his scroll contest team, paying them $40 an hour. His hobby was turning into a lifestyle.

The initial splash of attention helped open new doors. Seales had lobbied Italian and British collectors for years to scan his first scrolls. Suddenly the Italians were now offering up two new scrolls for scanning to provide more AI training data. With Friedman’s backing, a team set to work building precision-fitting, 3D-printed cases to protect the new scrolls on their private jet flight from Italy to a particle accelerator in England. There they were scanned for three days straight at a cost of about $70,000.

Seeing the imaging process in action drives home both the magic and difficulty inherent in this quest. One of the scroll remnants placed in the scanner, for example, wasn’t much bigger than a fat finger. It was peppered by high-energy X-rays, much like a human going through a CT scan, except the resulting images were delivered in extremely high resolution. (For the real nerds: about 8 micrometers.) These images were virtually carved into a mass of tiny slices too numerous for a person to count. Along each slice, the scanner picked up infinitesimal changes in density and thickness. Software was then used to unroll and flatten out the slices, and the resulting images looked recognizably like sheets of papyrus, the writing on them hidden.

The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.

Luke Farritor was hooked from the start. Farritor—a bouncy 22-year-old Nebraskan undergraduate who often exclaims, “Oh, my goodness!”—heard Friedman describe the contest on a podcast in March. “I think there’s a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity, get the data and get nerd-sniped by it, and we’ll solve it this year,” Friedman said on the show. Farritor thought, “That could be me.”

The early months were a slog of splotchy images. Then Casey Handmer, an Australian mathematician, physicist and polymath, scored a point for humankind by beating the computers to the first major breakthrough. Handmer took a few stabs at writing scroll-reading code, but he soon concluded he might have better luck if he just stared at the images for a really long time. Eventually he began to notice what he and the other contestants have come to call “crackle,” a faint pattern of cracks and lines on the page that resembles what you might see in the mud of a dried-out lakebed. To Handmer’s eyes, the crackle seemed to have the shape of Greek letters and the blobs and strokes that accompany handwritten ink. He says he believes it to be dried-out ink that’s lifted up from the surface of the page.

The crackle discovery led Handmer to try identifying clips of letters in one scroll image. In the spirit of the contest, he posted his findings to the Vesuvius Challenge’s Discord channel in June. At the time, Farritor was a summer intern at SpaceX. He was in the break room sipping a Diet Coke when he saw the post, and his initial disbelief didn’t last long. Over the next month he began hunting for crackle in the other image files: one letter here, another couple there. Most of the letters were invisible to the human eye, but 1% or 2% had the crackle. Armed with those few letters, he trained a model to recognize hidden ink, revealing a few more letters. Then Farritor added those letters to the model’s training data and ran it again and again and again. The model starts with something only a human can see—the crackle pattern—then learns to see ink we can’t.

Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.

In early August, Farritor received an opportunity to put his software to the test. He’d returned to Nebraska to finish out the summer and found himself at a house party with friends when a new, crackle-rich image popped up in the contest’s Discord channel. As the people around him danced and drank, Farritor hopped on his phone, connected remotely to his dorm computer, threw the image into his machine-learning system, then put his phone away. “An hour later, I drive all my drunk friends home, and then I’m walking out of the parking garage, and I take my phone out not expecting to see anything,” he says. “But when I open it up, there’s three Greek letters on the screen.”

Around 2 a.m., Farritor texted his mom and then Friedman and the other contestants about what he’d found, fighting back tears of joy. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is actually going to work. We’re going to read the scrolls.’”

Soon enough, Farritor found 10 letters and won $40,000 for one of the contest’s progress prizes. The classicists reviewed his work and said he’d found the Greek word for “purple.”

Farritor continued to train his machine-learning model on crackle data and to post his progress on Discord and Twitter. The discoveries he and Handmer made also set off a new wave of enthusiasm among contestants, and some began to employ similar techniques. In the latter part of 2023, Farritor formed an alliance with two other contestants, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, in which they agreed to combine their technology and share any prize money.

In the end, the Vesuvius Challenge received 18 entries for its grand prize. Some submissions were ho-hum, but a handful showed that Friedman’s gamble had paid off. The scroll images that were once ambiguous blobs now had entire paragraphs of letters lighting up across them. The AI systems had brought the past to life. “It’s a situation that you practically never encounter as a classicist,” says Tobias Reinhardt, a professor of ancient philosophy and Latin literature at the University of Oxford. “You mostly look at texts that have been looked at by someone before. The idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone’s desk 1,900 years ago is unbelievable.”

A group of classicists reviewed all the entries and did, in fact, deem Farritor’s team the winners. They were able to stitch together more than a dozen columns of text with entire paragraphs all over their entry. Still translating, the scholars believe the text to be another work by Philodemus, one centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses. “Peering at and beginning to transcribe the first reasonably legible scans of this brand-new ancient book was an extraordinarily emotional experience,” says Janko, one of the reviewers. While these passages aren’t particularly revelatory about ancient Rome, most classics scholars have their hopes for what might be next.

There’s a chance that the villa is tapped out—that there are no more libraries of thousands of scrolls waiting to be discovered—or that the rest have nothing mind-blowing to offer. Then again, there’s the chance they contain valuable lessons for the modern world.

That world, of course, includes Ercolano, the modern town of about 50,000 built on top of ancient Herculaneum. More than a few residents own property and buildings atop the villa site. “They would have to kick people out of Ercolano and destroy everything to uncover the ancient city,” says Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II.

Barring a mass relocation, Friedman is working to refine what he’s got. There’s plenty left to do; the first contest yielded about 5% of one scroll. A new set of contestants, he says, might be able to reach 85%. He also wants to fund the creation of more automated systems that can speed the processes of scanning and digital smoothing. He’s now one of the few living souls who’s roamed the villa tunnels, and he says he’s also contemplating buying scanners that can be placed right at the villa and used in parallel to scan tons of scrolls per day. “Even if there’s just one dialogue of Aristotle or a beautiful lost Homeric poem or a dispatch from a Roman general about this Jesus Christ guy who’s roaming around,” he says, “all you need is one of those for the whole thing to be more than worth it.”

[britt-kageryuu]

Donnie is showing off some of the features that Genius Built AR glasses have, to his stream audience. With the help of their camera that can capture the AR field around them. And anything that happens in that AR field.

"The tech team had quite a bit of fun getting some VR games to translate over to AR, like that Clothes making game I made. That was probably one of the easier ones to transfer over, though for whatever reason the cloth/fabric physics kept breaking, and warping the entire outfit." Donnie while explaining this has a dressform pop into existence with a partially put together pattern 'pinned' to it.

"Though we all agree once of the greatest aesthetic features we implemented was, that from the wearers point of view there can be a videogame style HUD that is customizable. Like if you're looking for a location and bring up directions, it will show visibly like a quest marker, and optional sparkling path that you can follow." Donnie makes a purple sparkly path appear around themself that lead offscreen.

Then a pop up window appears with a message. [From Angelo: I for some reason became hyperfocused and organized the spices, drinks, and the alcohol at work. It turned out looking Oddly Satisfying. Here are the pictures! (Pictures of said organized areas, all nice and neat)]

Donnie looks at the message then realized it's visible to the stream. "Well as you can see, there is an option to have your text messages appear as a pop up. I forgot to change that setting before starting. Sigh. Reply: Those look very nice, but aren't you at work? Is it really that slow today? Send." The message they sent also shows up as a chat box, and quickly closes as Donnie opens the settings to turn off the pop up effect. Purposefully ignoring anyone in the chat asking who 'Angelo' is.

"Now, as previously stated, many personalization features are available for these GB AR Glasses. Including a portable memory bank with a solar charging battery pack, for those who want to get into the gaming." A 3D model of a bipedal purple dragon in black pants and a magenta hoodie, wearing visor style AR glasses, pops up. Apparently playing an AR pokemon style game.

"And there's a bundle in the works for vlogging or filmmaking using the AR Glasses." A 3D model of April with Mayhems ears and tail pops up wearing the AR Glasses with a drone style camera robot, recording her talking about something with pop up note floating around her. There is a 'Just a Concept' sigh next to it.

Donnie then banished them from the area before continuing. "There's still alot of things that need to be worked out before we get the first models out in stores. So please be patient. We don't want you spending a ton of money on these, only for them to not work after a short amount of time. We also want to finish up plenty of stress tests on the system and the hardware. Now please hold on minute, I need to check for any pranks that might have been rigged."

The stream audience watched as he found and still somehow triggered a prank that made a certain meme music video pop up and play. And Donnie couldn't get it to close, so the song looped 3 times before they finally found how to get it to stop.

"I will either be threatening to fire someone, or threatening fratricide, but that is for later! There are still a few more new features I want to show off in this stream!"

There are some in the chat that are still questioning about 'Angelo', but the end up getting timed out by Shelldon who only pops in to do this. And answers no questions asked.

----------------

Masterpost

[marshmallowgoop]

2023 AMV Review

[2022]

After posting my first DaVinci Resolve AMV in April 2022, video editing quickly became one of my favorite hobbies, and this new life development actively characterized my 2023. Be it working on a project to mix the HD, remastered footage of Detective Conan with the old FUNimation English dub or piecing together AMVs, much of my free time throughout the year was devoted to video editing.

A broken computer for several weeks in the summer meant that I couldn't edit as many videos as I would have wanted, but I still progressed and learned a lot. I mixed 70 episodes of HD English dub, I made a YouTube channel, I participated in video collaborations (3! Here, here, and here!), and I tried so many new things as an editor, including but not limited to:

🎬 Glitching VHS effects (seen in "Mohan Kaitou" and "Poison Tree" above, and helped by my acquisition of a VCR, which allowed me to digitize my Detective Conan VHS tapes)

🎬 Karaoke subtitle files that can be toggled on and off on YouTube, created with the help of YTSubConverter (Would anyone be interested in a process post?)

🎬 3D camera typography (the "so alone" in "Corridors of Time")

🎬Follower text (the "we'd never known" in "Corridors of Time")

🎬 Solid color transitions ("I Wish That I Could Tell You")

🎬 Circle animations ("Corridors of Time")

🎬 Masked transitions ("Mohan Kaitou," "Poison Tree")

🎬 Eye zoom transitions ("Mohan Kaitou," "Child," "Monsters," "Poison Tree")

🎬 Ink splats ("Corridors of Time," "Head Above Water")

🎬 Selective red coloring ("Poison Tree")

🎬 More thoughtful compositions, and fudging sizing and placement for compositional reasons (the handkerchief transition in "Child," the movement of the scenes behind Ran in "Monsters," the liquid flowing in "Poison Tree")

🎬Changing the color of something (the red eyes in "Poison Tree")

🎬 Static masks ("Poison Tree")

🎬 Masking out objects (any [adult swim] logos from VHS footage that didn't come from my Japanese VHS tapes in "Poison Tree")

🎬And though it's not depicted in the snippet above, a CRT and curved TV screen effect for the TV at the end of the full "Poison Tree"

While I was only able to complete 9 AMVs (and the "Messed Up" AMV sadly isn't included in the snippets above, as it remains incomplete), I'm so excited to make more in 2024 with all the new tools in my toolbox!