#compare drafting tools

[resdraft]

Transforming Concepts with AutoCAD, Revit, and Chief Architect Drafting Tools

Choosing one of the right drafting tools depends on the specific needs of the designer or architect, the complexity of the projects, and the level of collaboration required. CAD, Revit, and Chief Architect each have their strengths and weaknesses, catering to different aspects of the design spectrum.

[citrusinicake]

stone sword mentality final vs wip

as can be seen in the wip it was originally gonna be drasticduo instead of starfox but the posing was way too reverent compared to how i perceived their dynamic to be so i decided to change it to starfox because... well *gestures at whatever tf they had going on in s4*

[dcmkanswers]

What are your thoughts on Nakamori Aoko? And about her role in MK?

-

I'm torn, because her role as a character could be good, but it's insultingly underutilized.

Her personality is fine. Strong side being that she's known Kaito long enough to not get chased off by his real less than stellar personality, and she fiercely supports the police because her father is on the force, giving her an overall 'talk shit get hit' attitude towards criminals. Pretty loyal, too. Vulnerable side stemming from the fact that her father works too much and it seeming that none of the people close to her overtly support her -(which I say in a wordy way because Kaito does support her, but he'd die of embarrassment if he did it in an obvious way)- leaving her alone with some self esteem issues. ...Which may also have something to do with why she's friendly around new people, for better or worse. Altogether, she initially comes across as strong willed, but actually gets hurt easily. She could be a complex character to work with...

If she ever got any focus outside of being a convenient tool for Kaito in his heisting.

The Sun Halo chapters gave a lot of potentially good ideas, and then essentially tossed them into the trash because the writing had to stick to a three chapter format. KID and Aoko kidnapped together by another criminal, KID injured, Akako and Hakuba getting in contact to find them with magic and detective work, etc. But the biggest tease was the idea of Aoko realizing that Kaito might be KID. An idea that's been in MK fans minds for as long as the series has existed, build up by Ginzo suspecting Kaito while Aoko defended her friend, the knowledge that Aoko has a personal dislike of the thief and shows that anger every single time she sees KID, probably the most complex subject regarding Aoko that people like to mull over.

And it's just. Given half a chapter, a few frames of her questioning things in her thoughts, and then dropped. Given a handwave and implied to be ignored.

I could go into other details, but the best way to sum it all up at once is to say that Aoko is someone trying very hard to do and be good, and the narrative works even harder to just constantly cut her down behind her back. She 10000% deserves better than what she's being given in MK, moreso than pretty much any other character, because at the moment she's just a slow burn tragedy with her protag friend lying to her and using her as much as he can get away with, and that he will continue to get away with because of main character privilege.

[sinfullyrosey]

Shrimpmer!Reader

Floyd Leech X GN!Shrimpmer!Reader X Jade Leech

Warnings: Mild Violence, Brief Mentions of Accurate Shrimp Cleaning Methods (kind of gross)

I literally had written up a mini fic showcasing the tweels first meeting Shrimper!Reader… and lost it. Have no idea where it is. Searched through my drafts and got pissed, so just started over from scratch.

Can be read as platonic but with a lot of sus behavior ngl

The Basics (aka an Introduction to Shrimpmer!Reader)

Shrimpmer!Reader is a cleaner shrimp, a type of shrimp known for cleaning off parasites, algae, insects, and other bad stuff from fish. They’ve even been known to eat the mucus and infectious material around a fish’s wound to reduce infection and aid in healing. There are different species of cleaner shrimp, ‘scarlet skunk’ or ‘white-striped’ cleaner shrimps being known for cleaning the mouths of moral eels specifically.

Shrimpmer!Reader specifically comes from a family of cleaner shrimps that have a long-standing business partnership with the Leeches. Their family provides their cleaning and patch-up services to better the mereels’ health and heal any injuries, and in turn, the Leeches provide protection. It’s a mutualistic relationship where both benefit. And congrats, they were assigned to the tweels when they were but a mere fry and twins were still little elvers.

But what is it that Shrimpmer!Reader does exactly? Well, they have a cleaning station set up (i.e. a flat rock for the tweels to lay on while they work) and they go over the twins’ body, ridding it of any parasites and other debris. Picking at their scales and skin like a fine-tooth comb. They’ll even clean their sharp teeth using specialized brushes and tools to make sure nothing is stuck and strengthen the dentin (real shrimp physically go inside eel’s mouths, but shrimpmers are too big for that). Whenever the twins come to them with an injury after one of their scuffles, Shrimpmer!Reader will clean and disinfect the wound, being sure to remove any parasites, then wrap up the wound to heal faster.

In terms of anatomy and size difference, Shrimpmer!Reader is much smaller compared to the twins, but not on the same scale difference as real shrimps and moray eels. They’re not tiny enough to fit in their mouths but are small enough to be carried with ease. The best comparison I can give is like with the dwarves and Neige, but the tweels’ eel forms are much bigger compared to regular humans, so Shrimpmer!Reader would be shorter compared to a human as well. Floyd would joke about them being “child-sized.” Just like the Octatrio, their bottom half is that of a white-striped cleaner shrimp while the rest of their body has the matching miscolored skin, fin ears, and a pair of long, white antenna on the top of their head. No, their hands aren’t claws/pincers, but they do have sharp nails that aid in cleaning.

The Shrimp and the Eels Headcanons

Like mentioned above, Shrimpmer!Reader was assigned to Floyd and Jade back when they were all still children. Each new generation of Leech ends up being assigned a cleaner shrimp who are around the same age so that they can grow together and build a proper symbiotic bond. You just ended up unlucky ‘cause Mr. and Mrs. Leech had twins and you were the only available one in your family at the time. A two for one deal, as it were.

Rough first meet (the twins are asses even back then), but you eventually adjusted and they learned how much they actually enjoy getting all those nasties off of them. You were gentle and efficient, it was very soothing, almost therapeutic to them. But it was only after one particular cleaning where Floyd came to you, a week after he got into a fight, wound infected and riddled with parasites, that they fully realized just how much they needed you. Neither twin skipped a cleaning or wound treatment after that.

You are tiny and not built for fighting, so the twins are more than happy to do so for you!~ Some predator is stalking you, trying to get a taste? Floyd is already grabbing them by the tail, pulling them away from you and towards his own dangerously sharp jaws. Another merperson is bulling you, picking on your smaller size? Jade’s looming right behind, tail at the ready to squeeze the life out of them. Most of your patch-up work was from attending to their wounds sustained in fights defending you.

Floyd and Jade both have their tails wrapped around some poor, unfortunate soul who was pulling on your antenna. Jade is taunting the crying fry while Floyd is “playfully” biting their tail fins.

“Jade, Floyd, let them go already. You’re going to get in trouble…”

You do meet Azul later on, though never quite befriend him per say. His contracts made you uncomfortable and untrusting of his intentions. In turn, Azul was stiff and reserved around you on the account of the overly protective eels threatening to chew his tentacles off if he tried anything.

You’re not a student at NRC nor a student of RSA. Magic isn’t your forte (or your concern really), the tweels are. Which is why you do visit the schoolgrounds frequently, especially after the two (mainly Floyd) start complaining about “needing their shrimp.” They’re not even in their eel forms most of the time, but they do still get into fights and the nurse on staff isn’t good enough.

Congrats, you’re now the Leech’s designated Health Support Cleaner Shrimp, or whatever bullshit the twins pulled out of their tails when forcing requesting to Crowley that you be allowed to stay at Octavinelle! Double congrats, because you also work at Mostro Lounge as a janitor because you literally clean for a living!

In your human form, you are much shorter than most of the other students and you have two long cowlicks that resemble your antenna. You aren’t the biggest fan of this form, finding two legs to be difficult to navigate, especially since you kind of skipped the prep class. Floyd was impatient and claimed him and Jade would just teach you themselves. An unwise decision really.

I mean, you could also just request to have the potion adjusted so you can be taller too, I guess idk the twins aren’t going to tell you that.

You sometimes turn back into your merform with the tweels and swim together because you miss it. Floyd definitely missed curling his tail around his little shrimp and pinning you down with his much bigger size. He especially loves to flip you on your back and watch your little feetsies wiggle around in a panic.

Jade misses the cleanings more than anything else. Being a vice dormleader while also working at a lounge and doing schoolwork is stressful for one eel. So, being able to just relax and have you attend to him while he prattles on about mushrooms is absolute heaven. That’s not to say he doesn’t mess with you either. Jade will gladly use your height against you by putting your cleaning supplies on a higher shelf, so you’re forced to ask him for help, teasing you all the while.

No, you can’t clean anybody else, merfolk or otherwise. Only them. Azul almost lost a tentacle after suggesting such a thing when he noticed business was running slower.

You’re their cleaner shrimp, and they’re your eels. Anybody aware of the Leech’s influence know to back off lest they end up missing under mysterious circumstances.

Oh yeah, and the tweels, at some point, made it a habit to kiss you after you finished cleaning them under the guise of you “cleaning their teeth.” It’s become something so casual between you three now that when Azul caught sight of the twins and you locking lips, he nearly fell over at not realizing the three of you were (supposedly) an item.

[insipid-drivel]

Warhorses: Which horses are actually good candidates, anyway?

This post is in honor of @warrioreowynofrohan, who asked the question in the comments under my guide, "Horses: Since There Seems To Be A Knowledge Gap". Their question, "Given what you said about too much weight breaking a horse’s spine, how did that work with knights in plate armour?" is one I'm going to try to answer here, since the answer can be very nuanced depending on where and when you're talking about.

Also, while I was a stable hand for years as well as a rider, I never had the opportunity to directly learn more ancient styles of tacking, horse training, and combat, so I don't have any direct experience to draw from with regard to horses used for military purposes. I'm still gonna do my best here with what I know, and research what I don't.

As I've covered in the past, large horses (draft horses) make less-than-ideal warhorses, and so do carriage horses like the elegant and dramatic Friesians.

Let's begin by addressing this from the perspective of creative writing. For you writers and content creators out there, an essential part to the continuity of any historically-themed work you do involving horses will be depicting breeds of horses that didn't exist before a certain time in history. I'm going to approach this question from the stance of, "Medieval-type era warhorses". Horses were used in warfare as late was World War II, but actual horses you ride into battle with knights and archers and bannermen? We actually have to drop the subject of specific modern breeds altogether aside from using them for comparisons.

When discussing warhorses, various cultures have approached them differently. Some cultures will value a specific type of horse above all others, such as the Mongolian Steppe Horse or the American Mustang. Other cultures, which may be from biomes and territories where multiple types of horses are needed for different forms of warfare and tactics, value whichever horses can get their jobs done without their riders getting killed.

Carrying vs. Pulling:

Horses have been used in warfare since as far back as 4000 BC, but their first applications were more as chariot horses. Humans have been riding and working with horses since before we even had stirrups to more easily ride them with! As archaeologists and anthropologists make more discoveries, the more we learn that we humans have been working closely with horses since before we had specialized tools to ride them with. The very first warhorses pulled chariots or carts, which is much easier for a horse's anatomy to handle compared to carrying a heavy weight like an armored rider on their backs, which puts stress directly on their spines where they have very little supporting muscle for supporting a lot of heavy downward weight.

Warhorse Size Categories:

Really, any breed of horse can apply to a niche in warfare if it's needed enough. Even very small, delicate horses have had their place in the history of human combat! Before I continue, it's important to know that there's a unique unit of measuring a horse's height. Rather than measuring a horse's height in centimeters or inches, they're measured in units called "hands". A single "hand" = ~4 inches/10.16cm, and a horse's height is measured based upon the distance between the bottom of their hoof to the tallest part of their shoulders, just at the base of the back of their necks. We don't actually include neck length/head height in a horse's measurements with traditional measuring.

Another rule of thumb: The average horse cannot safely carry anything heavier than about 30% of their total body weight. This is a serious factor to take into mind when deciding on a type of or breed of horse for a mounted warrior of any kind: You need to factor in the OC's starting body weight, and then add on the weight of armor, weapons, and any armor the horse itself may wear along with the weight of its tack.

Light-Weight Horses:

A few examples of lightweight horse breeds whose ancestors have historically been used in combat are Arabians, Barber Horses, and the magnificent Akhal-Teke. Lightweight and delicately-boned horses like those are best applied for military maneuvers that require precision, speed, and endurance, and the rider themselves should specialize in some form of combat or reconnaissance that doesn't require them to wear heavy metal or laminated armors. Archers are good candidates for riding smaller horses, or lightly-armored swordsmen like an Ottoman Janissary.

Central-Asian and North African horses also benefit from having a higher tolerance for hot climates. They can absolutely suffer from heatstroke and cardiac arrest from being forced to run and work in extreme temperatures and should always be provided with the same protective measures in a heatwave as any other horse, but they have a little bit of an edge over horses descended from freezing and temperate climates.

Medium-Weight Horses:

Medium-weight horses started showing up in the archaeological record around about the Iron Age, where chariot warfare was becoming an increasingly utilized form of mobile combat, and people needed bigger, stronger horses capable of pulling heavier loads - such as a chariot with two passengers rather than just one. As cultures began to develop heavier-duty armors made of metals and laminated materials, it also became important to breed horses that were tall and stocky (muscular and with relatively short spines compared to their height), and therefore more capable of carrying riders in increasingly heavy armor. Medium-weight horses were also essential at the dawn of the gunpowder age when the cannon came into use in siege warfare for pulling the heavy, iron cannons into position.

Medium-weight horses are really where we see the beginnings of knights and other warrior classes on horseback come into the forefront of warfare. When you have a horse that's big and strong enough to carry heavier armor and heavier weapons along with a rider wielding them, you have a much deadlier force at your disposal. Strikes from a sword or spear from the back of a galloping horse basically results in a sword capable of cutting through enemy soldiers like a hot knife through butter.

Important Note: Traditionally, cavalrymen wield blunt swords when attacking from a charging horse's back. When a horse is charging at full speed, the sharpness of a blade becomes less important than the blade's ability to stay in one piece when it impacts hard armor and bone. A blunted edge basically turns a cavalryman's sword into a thin club that's better at holding up against smashing through multiple layers of armor and bone compared to a thinner, more delicate sharpened edge that can shatter from a high-speed impact.

Heavy-Weight Horses:

The direct ancestors of modern draft horses, such as the Shire Horse, only began to appear around about the beginning of the European Medieval Era, and were far and away not even close to the enormous sizes of the draft horses we have today. Any horse counts as a "Heavy-weight" classed horse if its weight exceeds 1500lbs/680kgs.

Heavy-weight horses were really more bred for pulling enormous weights rather than carrying knights. While yeah, there is some evidence that suggests that heavy-weight horses were used by heavily-armored knights, historians argue a lot about whether it was a rule or an exception (such as with Henry VIII, who continued to ride well after he had begun to weigh more than 350lbs/158kgs, and even went to war in France in his final years on horseback). Generally speaking, medium-weight horses tend to be the right balance of agile and strong for carrying someone that's going to actively be fighting. Heavy-weight horses were bred to be a lot more tolerant to the chaos and frightening stimulation of the sounds of battle, but medium-weighted horses generally tended to be more suited to moving efficiently through dense packs of soldiers and weaving around other horses.

Ponies:

While actually being the smallest class of warhorse, ponies were essential when it came to carrying cargo and working as pack-horses. In certain forms of terrain, such as mountains, large horses pulling big carts full of supplies or soldiers could often be extremely impractical. In situations where an army needed to move on foot and form a narrow line in order to travel, ponies were able to traverse much narrower and rougher terrain while carrying smaller loads to their destination, when heavier horses would struggle more under their own weight and dexterity.

Europe-Specific Terminologies:

If you're a writer reading this and writing a piece set in the European Medieval age, there are specific terms used for the different classes I listed of warhorses above that I'm gonna list:

Destriers: The Destrier was a universal term for the iconic knight-carrying, jousting horse. They were also sometimes referred to as "Great Horses" due to their reputations in combat settings. Destriers could have just about any appearance, but were rarely taller than 15.2 hands, or 62inches/157cm. They were capable of carrying heavily-armored knights (although knights in full plate mail rarely rode into battle and stayed on the horse the entire time - they tended to specialize at grouping up and killing a lot of footsoldiers swarming them at once and preventing breaks in defenses from being overwhelmed by an oncoming army; in the case of Edward the Black Prince, we have substantial evidence in the form of his surviving brigandine that a mounted soldier or knight was more likely to wear chainmail and brigandine with a tabard on their body with their arms, feet, and heads the most heavily armored in plate when they intended to fight on horseback, making them a little lighter and more maneuverable, but I may be waaay off base there because I'm thinking of more of Italian soldiers who used full plate and how they applied it in battle more than any other example) and wearing armor themselves.

Interestingly, the sex of a destrier was often chosen strategically. Stallions (horses that haven't been neutered) are more aggressive, and could both act as combatants on their own if their knight was dismounted or killed, but could give away an army's location if they were attempting to move stealthily. Stallions whinny and shriek a lot when they're horny or arguing with each other, which is most of the time.

Mares were often chosen by Muslim armies for being much less vocal, and therefore much more capable of stealth. Geldings (neutered males) were the preferred mounts of the Teutonic Knights, a Catholic military group, since they couldn't be stolen and used to breed more horses for the enemy army.

Coursers:

Coursers were the most common Medieval European warhorse. It's important to remember that in Medieval Europe, most armies were almost entirely comprised of common men - serfs subject to the will of their landlords, not far removed from slaves in many ways - who couldn't afford the highly-prized and expensive Destriers. Coursers were usually a bit lighter than Destriers, but were still strong enough to carry someone wearing armor. Coursers were also a little more utilitarian, because they were also sometimes used in hunting as well as warfare, so they had a valuable use outside of warfare that the owner could benefit from.

Rouncey:

A rouncey was an all-purpose horse that could be used for leisure and travel-riding as well as be trained for war. They were a lot more likely to be found on the farm of a serf or independent farmer of some kind, as they could fill a lot of different roles depending on what they were needed for. Their sizes weren't really important as much as their ability to get the job done.

It's also critical to remember that, when talking about warhorses, we're usually talking about eras long past. In general, thanks to resource availability and incredible advances in medicine, modern humans are significantly taller, and therefore heavier, than people from the European Medieval era and prior. While fatness was valued in many cultures for its suggestion of wealth, most working-class and serf-class people worked intensely physically-demanding daily lives just to maintain their own homes. They were a few inches shorter on average than we are today, had greater fluctuations in body fat distribution depending on how harsh or bountiful the harvest season had been and the season in which a war was taking place (the average person's weight would swing by 30lbs or more on average every year prior to the industrial era), and cavalry were usually chosen based upon skill in the saddle as well as physical size when considering the application of medium or heavy armor being placed on the horse's back and body.

[hedgehog-moss]

About translation. I remember reading a translated version of the Illiad and the pre-note praised the translator because he had managed to balance making the translation work in Swedish while also keeping the original greek feel. It's often regarded as one of the best translations there is (in Sweden) and it makes me feel as if translating a book/poem/text is an art in itself.

Oh I love when translators do this, when it works—writing with an accent, by echoing the voice of a historical period. Marguerite Yourcenar did something similar with Memoirs of Hadrian—it's not a translation of a classic text but she wrote it in French as if it were, so it would feel authentic as the autobiography of a Roman emperor. Translation was an integral part of it: she would translate her first drafts from French to Latin or Ancient Greek (as Hadrian spoke both), which allowed her to notice phrasings that sounded wrong, too modern, and then she'd edit the French sentences accordingly.

It was translated in English by Marguerite Yourcenar's gal pal life companion Grace Frick, but I've not read the English version. It would be interesting to see how she made the archaisms work, considering English and French haven't preserved the same words from Latin and Greek. (To say nothing of Swedish or other translations!) For example the word "janiteur" appears in the French text to refer to a servant or guard; it comes from Latin ianitor and is meant to sound archaic or odd in French as we don't have this word; but American English does have janitor from Latin so the "classic" feel is lost and you'll have to use a different word and compensate for it elsewhere...

(Yourcenar couldn't predict this but since French has a lot more English loanwords nowadays than when she started writing her book in the 1920s, janiteur now sounds like an anglicism rather than a latinism. I wonder if she'd feel upset or intrigued if she knew that a modern-sounding word has sneaked into her carefully-chiselled text simply because another modern language we often borrow from has kept it alive)

Literary translation is definitely an art and I love that it can be used as a tool to cultivate a unique writing style too :) In her postface describing her writing process, Yourcenar said that translating her French sentences into Latin or Greek made the modern vocabulary, phrasings or even ways of thinking, as visible as plaster on a marble statue. She also compared the process to archaeological excavation, letting the voice of a Roman emperor emerge from under the layers of time and new words and syntax that were keeping it buried.

[boreal-sea]

So something I realized watching a few videos and reading a few articles is that most of us aren’t angry at the idea of AI in general. Many of us are excited to learn about AI systems that can identify cancer better than doctors, for instance.

What we’re angry about is generative AI being used to destroy the jobs of artists (and I mean all creatives here), who have already been dealing with their work being devalued by modern society.

And I’m not sure how to deal with it. I do remember learning that when photography became a thing, many painters were horrified and terrified of would erase the art of painting. It didn’t obviously, and in fact photography because a whole new art form.

I grew up during the birth of digital art. I distinctly remember the phase digital art went through where many people declared it to not be “real art” and that it was “cheating” etc. I’m sure other millennial artists also remember this transition. But graphic designers pretty quickly adopted digital tools, and websites like DeviantArt popped up, and I don’t think there are too many people nowadays who would say a digital painting isn’t “art”. Still, I do imagine there is a gulf between how some people would view the “artistic merit” of a 3 ft tall oil painting hanging next to a 3 ft tall print of a digital painting, even if the subject and styles were similar. So the worries that digital art would erase physical painting was also proven false. And for the record, I think digital art is 100% art. The merit of digital art is equal to that of physical art.

On the other hand, I can’t say these changes didn’t affect older forms of art. Like, photography did affect the world of painting. I don’t have statistics, but it seems like it probably affected the world of portraiture the most. And I wonder if many of the 20th century art movements were influenced by photography. None of my art history classes touched on that and it’s kinda weird to me. There is definitely something about a Dada or cubism or surrealist painting that transcends beyond what a traditional photo of a landscape or a portrait can do. There is no location in the real world with actual melting clocks or people whose faces show multiple angles at once.

And then there was the digital photograph that changed everything again! Film has become a niche art form.

There were specific kinds of jobs lost due to the digital transition, too. I’m thinking of things like murals being replaced by printed banners, or book covers often being done in photoshop. Oh, and that’s another tool that was faced with fear: Photoshop! There was a fear it would destroy the need for professional photographers because everyone could just fix their own photos. Turns out nope, and in fact people skilled in photography and photo editing are still in demand. And of course there’s the loss of 2D animation in favor of 3D animation, the loss of practical effects for digital, etc.

And you might argue that in some of those cases people can tell corners are being cut and that they won’t stand for it, but Marvel movies still make billions of dollars so…

So I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI art. I am NOT saying “all current artists are stupid and wrong, in the future history students will laugh at how stubborn they were to resist this idea”. AI art is not comparable to photography or digital painting.

With a photograph, you still need to compose the image in the frame, you need to position yourself in the real world, you need to know your equipment, whether you’re using film or digital. You also need to know how to process that photo either in the dark room or in Photoshop. These are skills the average person does not have. You cannot tell an AI “that shot was good but can you increase the contrast?” It’ll just produce a completely new image.

I read an article about an art director who was encountering difficulties as the department tried to incorporate AI. They got back first drafts of art ideas from the people employed to work with the AI, gave critique, and the second round was just completely new images that didn’t include the suggestions… because they couldn’t. AI does not understand color theory. It does not have the ability to take critique. It can’t slightly alter the layout of a design.

And all of that applies to painting too. AI (currently) can’t do what a trained art student can do. It doesn’t know that to create a sense of atmosphere you should make distant objects bluer. It doesn’t know how to use human physiology and psychology to draw a viewer’s eyes across a large painting to reveal a story.

AI also can’t replicate INTENTION - and intentionality is a HUGE part of art. WHY an artist chose those colors, that medium, that composition, those tools, why they chose to display it a certain way, why the composition is like this instead of that - all of that adds meaning to the painting that you can’t get with AI.

(Yes, there is an absolutely valid field of art critique that evaluates a piece of art on its standalone value and the message it conveys without the context of the artist’s intent, but that should be compared to the analysis that DOES include the artist’s intent! That comparison can bring about so much understanding!)

Anyway I’m going to end this post now because it has gotten WAY too long. I focused mostly on painting and photography in this post because those are my particular fields of speciality, but this applies to ALL ART. It applies to music and writing and scripting and acting and composing music and just. Everything. All art.

I don’t think there are any forms of art AI doesn’t threaten. Now granted, AI can’t currently pick up a paint brush. It can’t use a crochet needle. It can’t hold a camera. And maybe there will be some sort of return to physical media in response to AI produced digital art. Or maybe there will be a response in digital art to stylistically distinguish it from AI in a way AI can’t reproduce. I’m not sure what will happen. Maybe some proof the image was digitally painted by a real person, somehow. Or that it’s a real photo, or a real article. I saw someone mention there may end up being labels like “100% human made” like we do for organic food lol. Maybe work in progress videos or photo metadata will become more commonplace as evidence of authenticity.

Anyway, NOW I’m ending this post. Whew.

[gallusrostromegalus]

So...uhh, you mentioned that tousen is the one captain who zaraki "if you don't fight with both joy and intention to kill you are a bitch" kenpachi actually respects because he punches WAYYYYY above his weight class, and you also mentioned that even if he is very skilled with it, suzumushi still isn't his sword. My questions are: In the event tousen gets his sword, what happens to suzumushi? he now has two zanpakuto? he can use both? can he actually do bankai with both? At the same time? My my second question is: If he gets his own zanpakuto, he will be able to punch SO MUCH HIGHER above his weight class, and with who it would actually be a fair fight with him at that point? because my man has both skills and absurd power now, so most captains can't top that. If you cannot respond to either of those questions because spoiler spoiler, just give me a "yes.", please and thank you

Short, minimal-spoilers responses:

Suzumushi dies. This is apparent from the second Kaname picks her up- she should have died with Kakyo and is living on stolen time.

The reason Kaname is so weak compared to the other captains is that, since Suzumushi is not *his* Sword, she takes A SHITLOAD of energy for him to keep alive, let alone use. The Curse he has in the fic does not help this situation! Suzumushi also changed her attacks to make working with Kaname easier, so even with all the added energy, her output is bad. Their partnership is generally wildly inefficient, but still a miracle- what he's doing should be, at most, only theoretically possible.

Suzumushi dies *in the middle* of Kaname's fight with Aizen, and my favorite scene in the drafts folder is him manifesting his own Zanpaktou in the middle of the fight to continue.

Which is another Only Theoretically Possible thing, and it evaporates when Kaname collapses

Eventually, he is sent to visit Oetsu to Actually Properly Forge his Zanpaktou (and uh. Update the royal guard on the everything that's been happening), but he does not get a second sword.

Because Koumori is not a Sword :)

Without going into too much detail, Kaname can now use his Zanpaktou properly and yes, it's very Rock-Lee-Dropping-the-Training-Weights. He has now properly entered his weight class, AND all that time working with Suzumushi is paying dividends.

Kenpachi is at first, DELIGHTED that Kaname can kick his ass even harder.

Then SPECTACULARLY DISAPPOINTED, Because Koumori is not a weapon for fighting, but a tool for stopping fights in their tracks, and particularly Noxious to Kenpachi, whose first life was as a sword.

Sure, he probably could beat Kaname and Koumori, and it'd be a hell of a struggle, but it would not be FUN. It would be the opposite of fun. He'd rather go get a root canal than fight that Fucking Thing.

[soullessjack]

okay but like. cogs turning .. last holiday truthing cwt maxxing… the sheer difference in dialogue between the script and the episode is killing me. the deliberate choices made to change said dialogue and even the ending…

like am I alone in thinking that this whole exchange in the dungeon was very oddly disjointed? very “nobody fucking talks like that” core. they just say shit but it doesn’t land with the other’s response.

and especially when you compare it to the draft:

for some reason or another, the writers deliberately cut out jack’s lamentation that he is still dangerous, that mrs butters is right to be doing what she’s doing, and that nothing has been the same between him and the Winchesters since he’s come back. they deliberately cut out dean saying “you’re one of us, and you have a chance to make it right.”

there’s also the glaring difference between how sam and dean defend jack in the episode vs the draft. in the draft, they say this:

D: “You said you didn’t want to destroy this family, but Jack is our family.”

S: “You hurt him, you hurt us.”

Mrs B: “No, he’s infected you. I have to keep you safe.”

D: “By trying to kill the people we care about?”

Mrs B: “No, he’s a monster!”

D: “Aren’t we all?”

•••

not only do sam and dean say that jack is their family and someone they care about, but they also explicitly hold themselves on the same monster totem mrs butters holds jack to (much like what dean said in tombstone, “we’ve all done things, so if you’re a monster then we are too,”

…which all then gets cut and turned into “He can save the world.” no, don’t kill jack, he’s our family and we care about him and he is good despite his mistakes -> no, don’t kill jack, he can save the world.

the explicit choice to center jack’s worth on his usefulness rather than his inherent value as the winchesters’ family and even just as a person, rlly speaks so much to the way he’s essentially narratively doomed to be dehumanized as a tool/weapon/device.

and the fact that this is all eventually preceded by Cas saying “you never needed absolution from sam or dean or me. we don’t care about you because you’re useful or because you fit into some grand design. we care about you because you’re you,” (which in turn is preceded by jack fitting into a grand design and fucking off to the raindrops forever), makes it seem either a painful inconsistency or some weird twisted inside joke between the writers (cough season 16 cough cough puke).

I haven’t posted about it a lot but I truly think there’s some vast trapped-in-the-narrative horror working around jack constantly being dehumanized both within the show as a living weapon and by the writers themselves as a plot device.

shits wack I guess

[jackdaw-kraai]

The thing I think isn't talked about enough in all these conversations about "AI art" is how, even if you work out all the kinks, even if you get it to the point that it works perfectly according to the most lofty goals set, even if all that came true... AI will still disappoint when set next to even just a moderately skilled human artist. Not because of any technical flaws with the product, but because of its fundamental limitations as a tool.

AI, as we understand it right now, without all the grandstanding and doomsday predictions and near-mythological qualities we ascribe to it, works on binary. Down to its core, stripped to its studs, it works on binary code, and you see that reflected in the design. Every choice it makes, every result it produces, is a result of a million, billion "yes or no" questions asked of it that chain together into a coherent response. Endless amounts of "TRUE or FALSE" results spat out when data is fed into it, that string together to form a conversation, or an essay, or a painting, or a comic. At least, when trained on enough data to weigh the odds in favor of what the creators want it to do.

If you ask ChatGPT to tell you something about romance, it filters its endless data banks for what that training data it was given matches your request and what results in those tests were rewarded by its programmers and which were discouraged and based on all that, it begins making TRUE or FALSE choices with the odds weighed by that data. That's how all AI we currently have fundamentally work, and that, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It's a tool, and tools are hard pressed to be evil. What it is, however, is vastly inferior to the process of a human writer for one simple fact: when asked a question, we have more options than to answer it TRUE or FALSE.

If you ask a human writer to tell you about romance, they too will draw upon all the memories they have stored away of what they know about romance and base an answer off of that. But they will also draw up all the knowledge they have on astronomy, to compare the feeling it creates inside to that of hydrogen fusing, and that of medicine, because it burns so bright inside that it feels like your rib cage feels like it should be alight from the inside until it looks like an inverted x-ray image. A human writer will visualize the way love feels and draw connections an AI couldn't fathom, because it was never trained to do so. And more than that, if a human writer tells you about romance, they won't tell you just about romance.

They will tell you about how romance happens.

They will tell you about what romance between a young Polish woman and a young Polish man living in what would one day be the powiat of Bieszczadzki on the border with Ukraine, but for now are just the Bieszczadzki mountains, in the spring of 1914 would have looked like. And they will tell you about how it looked like all the months afterwards as the young man is drafted into the army and their home is ravaged by WWI as the Bieszczadzki mountains become one of the most bitterly contested regions in the Eastern Front during the war. They will tell you about how romance, how the love blooming from it, cannot fix the damage wrought by senseless battles fought by powers so much greater than the two of them, but how it carries them through the war nonetheless.

And what's more, they will know enough about the history of Poland to parallel the growing love between these two young people with the growing, not-yet-formed modern state of Poland that will once again rise from the ashes of the war after having previously been partitioned by greater powers into non-existence.

A human writer will not only have the knowledge to do that, they will have the skills and manner of thinking necessary to form the thoughts that will lead to such a story and make it into something incredible. An AI, no matter how well you train it, no matter how good you make it at emulating a writer's style, will not be able to form the same thought process. Not because it is flawed, but because it simply isn't built for that.

An AI cannot experience nationalism or patriotism for a country, an AI cannot reason out how people might have lived in the absence of credible historic evidence when it runs up against a gap in its data, an AI will not understand the link between fragile, young love blooming in adversity and a country struggling to be reborn in spite of the greater nations around it that wish it would remain dead. It cannot do this, because it isn't based in "TRUE or FALSE" questions. It's based in the painfully human experience of complicated emotions, difficult thoughts, and yes, even deeply flawed ways of looking at the world that nonetheless are beautiful exactly for having those flaws.

An AI, at its core, with where the technology is right now, is a machine of averages. Even if we polish it to peak performance, that will not change. At peak performance, it will still give you an average of all the possible answers it could give, it will be technically flawless, and it will never be anything even close to a fraction of the lightning in a bottle that a writer with categorically shit technique can capture if their heart and mind are put into it.

And let's be honest here and step a foot outside of the bubble of speculation, just for a bit: AI will never, ever, give you an answer or story that pushes boundaries or makes you think like even the most technically incompetent but passionate authors are able to.

Because in order to push boundaries, in order to deliver a message, you have to be willing to make people uncomfortable. You have to be willing to be messy and raw to the point that your story bleeds. And even if we polished AI to perfection, even if, by some miracle of a completely new and fresh coding base, it could do all those things... the humans pulling the strings of the machine would never allow it to do so. Because if their machine produces stories that push boundaries, that have things to say, that make people uncomfortable, it's not going to be profitable. It's not going to be advertiser-friendly. It's not going to please the stock market. And let's be honest here, in the end, that's what matters to those people.

AI cannot write the stories that people want it to, that they truly want it to, because in the end, the stories we want to hear are not the stories it can tell. The stories we want to hear are, in the end, painfully human, in all the best and worst ways possible. And if you want a human story, if you want to have something like that lightning in a bottle, AI can never be more than a tool in making them instead of the maker itself. A potentially useful and innovative tool, but nothing more than that.

Because if you want human stories, no one but a human will be able to write them. And no one but a human will be able to read them and understand what's being said.

[whatareboats]

Thomas wasn’t quite sure what the wooden monstrosity presented him was.

(full story below)

It was a poor attempt of whittling, in all honesty. James had been limited in tools and he had not actually whittled anything before..or properly seen anybody do it really. He just sort of stole Jacks knife and did his damn best.

Getting beaten would absolutely be worth it! (It really wasn’t, considering what he actually produced. I mean he was 11. What did he expect?)

At first, he had tried to carve it out with one of their little sharp stick things that he was forced by Jack to wield but it did not work at all.

The damn things were bloody useless and James stuck by that. He supposed they could pierce the skin of a pig well enough to be effective,or a Simon,though he reckoned that teeth or nails would be more affective. He supposed the other boys-in their smashed bottle mentality-had flairs for the dramatic even he couldn’t quite quite grasp.

Thomas Jude Smith did actually quite like them,though,James would argue that Tommy had good reason. He fancied them drawing sticks. Or well,’well-intentioned evil-plotting and who is most likely ranking lists’ sticks.

Off topic.

The whittling!

It was a toy boat! Or a hell-sent mimicry of a toy boat that could not fool a blind man.

He had decided it best to use the mucky, repulsive warpaint for some good and paint the boat to look a little more…boat like. The war paint freaked Tommy out. Too ‘dutty’. James’ was symmetrical. It was acceptable. If James had to wear it it best be symmetrical, not smudged (unless it was white, the white looked nice smudged) and god forbid a stripe be a la’al bit thicker than another.

Red smudges were an absolute no unless they were remnants of stains he couldn’t quite get out. They reminded Tommy of blood and due to recent events he had gained quite a hatred towards blood.

“We otta be tidy, red velvet cake.” He’d often say with an anxious smile and hands wracked with tremors that often overshadowed the fact that he had taken to calling James a ‘red velvet cake’ since he had started ‘caking’ on his warpaint which Thomas often compared to makeup. A mockery but James didn’t mind. It was banter not bullying.

Off topic!! Another thing Thomas insistently said was that when he got off the island his granda Felix was going to get him a lovely little toy boat for his birthday.

Thomas adored boats. He knew the names of at least 5 different boats. Since being on the island, he was starting to forget them. Particularly the different names of those navy, military ones.

He used to brag about how he definitely knew more about boats than Ralph could ever know and his daddy didn’t even need to step foot into the navy. He was doing all the proper fighting, with guns and that but he’d be home soon.

Ambrose Smith didn’t like the war. In fact, he had even tried organising protests against it with Auntie Katty before he was drafted. (It failed miserably but Tommy would never tell anyone that or any unimpressive thing about himself for that manner.)

Off topic!

Granda Felix and the toy boat!

Lately, Thomas had been rather down. You see, Tommy knew that Ralph’s downfall was inevitable though he’d always assumed it would be through the other boys rightfully appointing him as leader. Definitely not Jack going batty and running a totalitarian state, anyhow.

Being an active opposer of Jack was slightly scary. With Roger going stick crazy, Jack going more mental by the second and Ralph and Piggy being nowhere to be seen Tommy had sort of been on his last footing and Joseph was no help anymore.

I mean not to be rude to the poor bastard but he’d been going battier than Simon. Wandering around aimlessly without a care in the world-in fact in another world entirely would be a better descriptor-wasn’t helpful when trying to get out of the way of hunts.

Having a ‘hes alright’ relationship with Corny and red velvet cake would only get Tommy so far and Joseph didn’t have that at all with Cornelius.

Tommy spent half a day hoping Piggy would sneak up to him and they could formulate some sort of plan.

Cornelius often attested that Piggy was long dead and waiting around for him like some lost puppy was not at all helpful. Thomas didn’t believe that for a second.

Piggy was smart. Very smart. He was good with the maths and science and Tommy was absolutely no good with it so anyone who was were always instantly impressive to him. Tommy figured that if a boulder were to start hurtling towards Piggy, he would sense it even if he was caught up in talking and would be able to use his maths and science to get away from it.

Cornelius would often reply with “Well theres no wonder you’re getting an E then isn’t it?” Tommy often assumed Cornelius was praising him for his clear intellect. James often found use for sticks at moments like that.

Off topic. Anyways, suffice to say, Tommy needed a pick me up. James figured:whats the point in waiting an eternity to get off the island to get a toy boat when James could make him a 10x cooler one on the island?

James didn’t have the humility to admit his toy boat probably wasn’t 10x better than Granda Felix’s.

They met up upon the rocky cliff face just south of castle rock;it was a risky move for Tommy, in all honesty.

As James handed him the poor excuse of a toy boat, it took Tommy a few seconds to recognise what exactly it was other than a lump of wood. He had the sense to know James wouldn’t gift him a lump of wood. When Tommy realised it was a toy boat all for him, however, he gasped. His mouth agape, he stared at the boat for a few moments before grinning and giggling wildly as he snatched it from James’ hands.

“A proper boat like what Granda was garn get us!!” He exclaimed. Thomas was, admittedly rather impressed with James’ craftsmanship. The poorly crafted work of children was often impressive to other children after all, particularly because they know they wouldn’t be able to do much better. Tommy didn’t have an artistic bone in his body so it was extra impressive.

“Well aye! Probly better than what ya granda was garn get ya, eh.” James stated, grinning at Tommy’s elated reaction.

“Maybe, I ‘spose.” Tommy shrugged, quickly blowing a strand of chestnut brown hair out of his eyes as it fell out of place and over his face.

“Deff.” James asserted.

“Aye but me granda’s quite good wiv making things, eh.” Tommy reasoned, lifting the boat in the air as he carefully observed it and it’s ‘impressive’ craftsmanship.

“Not as good as us.” James snickered proudly, placing a hand upon his painted chest.

“Right…”

Tommy found arguing with an egoist like James pointless.

[andmaybegayer]

This article makes an interesting point about generative AI stuff that I hadn't heard before:

I quietly attended a video conference about possible uses for ChatGPT tech. It was a series of presentations in an open-ended format, little demos of rough drafts and proofs of concept. At random: one to help design a kitchen. It was cool. You could whip up a little kitchen and do a little walkthrough and make changes. Would the kitchen collapse if actually built? Probably not. Did the AI understand the concept of load-bearing walls? Unknown. Did it know what it would be like to actually work in the kitchen it built? 100 percent no. Would somebody trust it? Probably, unless they knew otherwise. Would they pay an expert who had these answers some hundreds of dollars instead of using a nearly-free AI tool? No chance. They might take the AI’s output to an actual expert who could correct things and know the right questions to ask, but the damage has been done, and a whole field begins to suffer, as the demand for entry-level expertise vanishes, gutting the growth of a profession at the root.

I don't know to what extent to expect this, but I can absolutely see that without the need to hire people to design cheap little icons or brief copy text, lots of industries might find themselves with a dearth of trained talent because no one is even trying to do that anymore, resulting in an overall quality decrease because there's less practice going into the art overall.

I wonder if there are comparable occurrences in history, but those are all pretty grounded in like, manufacturing, which seems different in terms of the tradeoffs you're making. There's probably a textiles-related thing here if we want to wrap around on the Luddites.

[gender-trash]

okay i AM going to turn reblogs off for this one --

i think we need to talk more about the collective trauma of being part of an online community that a different online community is directing coordinated, nonstop harassment towards. this is the part of the post i am so close to deleting or leaving in the drafts, because i'm (still!) anticipating anon asks like, how dare YOU, an asexual, compare YOUR experience to that of REAL queer people -- and i have no experience of being a transfeminine person on tumblr but i get the impression it is way way worse than aphobia was at its height. but like -- the experience of having your queer subcommunity harassed sucks! hardcore sucks! and has a variety of shitty knock-on effects on the health of the community! and i wanna commiserate with other people who've had that experience!

(also, i can't stand the sj "how dare you compare bad thing A to bad thing B when B is clearly much worse" rhetorical move. sometimes bad things are bad in similar ways and it's useful to talk about that similarity without necessarily making any claims about relative severity.)

i also think we need better tools and mental models for thinking of harassment as not just a one-to-one relationship, but a many-to-many relationship -- "moderation" as a concept seems to exclusively deal with individual posts or at best individual accounts, when, like. the social graph exists; clustering algorithms exist; i don't trust their reliability enough to want to bring down the website banhammer on anyone in a particular cluster, but i would absolutely fucking love a "block this blog and everyone within three degrees of separation of them" button. or something along those lines -- hey, i'm just spitballing here. a mental model of bad actors on a website as not just individual bad actors, but badly-acting communities with internal dynamics.

in every community of recreational bullies i've ever closely observed on tumblr (terfs, truscum, aphobes, various flavors of shipping drama), the following dynamics are present:

members of the community socially reward other members for engaging in harassment, and encourage new members to engage in harassment

members of the community screenshot and pass around often-equally-rude responses from the people they're harassing, as "proof" that these people are Incredibly Harmful and therefore the harassment is Morally Good, even Important, and that the harassing community are actually embattled victims valiantly fighting the oppressor

usually an Opposition Community forms, with the mission of harassing the bully community and exactly the same group dynamics, and the "original" bullies + opposition bullies become a self-sustaining feedback loop of harassment, because each group is constantly giving the other one more material to pass around and rile themselves up with

each community forms an incredibly specific and characteristic dialect of shorthand language that updates frequently as the community they're harassing gets wise and starts blacklisting keywords (when i was most recently on a terf blocking spree, "febfem", "TiM", and "moid" were big ones). engaged community members rapidly become unable to interact with anyone who is not Very Online, isolating them so that the community is now their main social circle

eventually the community comes up with some chain of reasoning, no matter how strained, for calling the objects of their hatred pedophiles

occasionally someone in the community will actually Go Too Far and bring down the banhammer on themselves. they remake their blog within days or weeks (due to the profit incentives of running a social media website, users are sucked into becoming hopelessly addicted -- especially users who are in so deep that they can no longer figure out how talk to people who aren't up on the Incredibly Specific Group Vocabulary). they are promptly passed around as a martyr

you'll notice that the main forces that keep the feedback loop going are a feeling of victimization -- if you feel like you're a righteous, oppressed victim, then you can justify little a death threat as a treat against the evil outgroup who is oppressing you, right? -- a community that rewards its members socially both for harassing others and for being harassed, and isolationist tendencies that make it difficult for community members to get social reward anywhere other than within the community.

it seems that, if you want to be able to deal with a group like this, you need to have some strategy for countering those forces -- whereas conventional moderation efforts mostly feed into the victimization mindset. maybe you need to somehow wall off the harassing community and the responding opposition harassers from each other, so that as far as each group is concerned the other one doesn't exist. maybe you need better tools so users with the characteristics that the harassing community targets can block the entire harassing community all at once. i don't actually know! but i doubt we're going to get anywhere without at least a basic understanding of system dynamics!!

[wolfsetfree-if]

Hello! Can you explain the characteristics of delta wolves? :))

Sure! Delta wolves have a sturdier built, both in human and wolf form. It is particularly easy to identify a delta wolf because they have a wider torso and more muscled legs, with big paws and a big head (provided of course with powerful jaws).

I often compare deltas to draft horses, in comparison with say a horse meant for speed. In fact, delta wolves aren't very quick, but they are stable and very strong. Particularly meant for harder labor.

In terms of behaviour, Deltas have this constant, strong pull to provide for the pack. It can manifest in different ways for each individual, for example Raine likes to handmake the house furniture and tools. She also takes care of the heavier works in the house.

Indigo, the other Delta, satisfies his instincts by being the one who cooks for the pack and grows the food. The pack has quite a bit of land they use to grow crops and fruit trees. Plus, Indigo harvests the honey from their bees.

During hunts, Deltas usually stay home to guard the pack house.

[crescencestudio]

Devlog #33 | 07.26.23

Hi everyone!

It's only been a month (per usual) since the last devlog. But it feels like so long ago! Very weird that last devlog I hadn't even released Intertwine yet. But here we are, back with another one!

Before we get into things, I want to extend the biggest thank you to everyone who has played and supported intertwine!

if you havent played yet, here it is. this is me on my knees asking because i am quite proud of it and what our team accomplished in two months!

in the almost month it's been out, we stand at almost 15k total plays and 200+ reviews which is so crazy to me. i never would've expected that kind of reception for our little game and when i say it has been so motivating for alaris!!! u dont even know!!!

thank you again for all the kind words---i know you are all Sick of me talking about it but i don't know how else to express my gratitude <3 it means so much to me ;_;

I wanted to make sure I inserted an official section for it in the Devlog just to really thank you all for the support. But with that, I shall get into the updates!

But not before a quick belated happy birthday to Fenir!

Writing

I posted it earlier this week, but I HAVE!!! THE MOST EXCITING NEWS!!! At least for me.

I FINISHED DRUK'S FIRST DRAFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We all know how long this has been in the making. I've been talking about his route for what feels like an eternity. Evidently, it's Very Normal to experience burnout, struggles with motivation, creative ruts, etc. etc. at this point in development. The initial and final stages of development are easier because your motivation is up. In the beginning, it's like Wow!! This is Fun!! And towards the end, it's like Wow!!! I actually Fckn Made It!!!!

And so the middle part of development, aka the stage I just entered with Druk's route, is the slog.

Now that I've overcome that initial hurdle, while I'm not near the end of development, I do feel like I will have a better handle of progress on the following routes since I have a better set of expectations and tools on how to get through this stage (compared to when I initially started Druk's route, and I was like what are all these Feelings?? Why am I Struggling so much??).

That being said, WE ARE OVER HALFWAY DONE WITH THE SCRIPT! It currently stands at 200k words including the demo, and with how each of the routes have been shaping up, we have about 150k left to go. Wow!!!!! It is crazy to know I've written that much for Alaris, and this feels like such an exciting milestone to know that I'm over halfway there for the script!

We also have just about wrapped up Fenir's developmental edits, so that makes Kayn and Fenir's foundational versions of their routes done (all that would be left at this point is line tweaking and/or revisions based on beta feedback)!! Overall, this was a really exciting month for writing updates, and I'm so happy to feel back on track with Alaris development <3 I also finished my dissertation proposal in case anyone is keeping track of that HEEHOO

Art

Most of my attention for art was (un?)fortunately on Intertwine this month AGAIN. I really had anticipated being able to dive right into Alaris and irl work this month after Otojam ended. But the reception to Intertwine made it so I needed to dedicate some time to "marketing" artwork aka the artwork I like to make when reaching certain milestones of support (e.g., 1k downloads, etc.). Obviously these aren't necessary, but I like to show my thanks and appreciation in some way, and the artwork is what feels best conveys my gratitude.

Because we hit milestones relatively quickly, I ended up having to make those pieces faster than I anticipated prior to release. So I spent the first half of this month mostly on intertwine "promotional/apprecation" artwork. Near the tail end of this month though, I've prioritized Alaris artwork and have made progress on both the Kickstarter physical rewards and some CG sketches!

sneaky peeky of pretty mermay Aisa

Vui continues to hit it out of the park with the backgrounds. Most of them are spoilers at this point. But I do have one that isn't too bad of a spoiler! And because you all have been so supportive and patient with me, I show hehe

vui and his bg mastery: a preview of the dragon springs

The demo mentions dragon springs (I..... think......... LMAO), and here is a preview of what those dragon springs can look like. Wonder what the context will be in which we visit them, teehee! I'm in love with the way Vui brings the fantasy world of Alaris to life. I am so grateful for him ^^

Market Research

My wrist was feeling ~delicate~ this month due to Otojam crunch and then post-release pieces. So I don't have any actual art pieces to showcase this month for market research. I did play Otojam games and started Cupid Parasite (ryuki and allan my beloveds). But crescence's wrist needs to relax LOL. So no art pieces more than necessary for this month!

I will send some love to my besties over at Ravenstar Games though! If you haven't heard, they have a game currently in development called Lost in Limbo. It looks sick as hell, and the team is unbelievable talented and hardworking. This month to celebrate Barbie, they were able to sneak this promotional piece in, even while working on their Master's ((Do you see...... a familiar group of people..... heh))

Alaris x Lost in Limbo x Barbie the collaboration of the century

That's all from me for now. Thank you again for all the support and love on Intertwine! I've truly cherished all the fanwork, reviews, kind messages, etc.

That being said, while it was a bit of a struggle getting back returning to the Alaris world initially (I was literally like what.... was the plot of this again... LMAOsazodujf), it's been so rewarding to return to my OG gang. The intertwine release and return to Alaris work has also been strangely sentimental since it's reminded me how far I've come in the two years I've been in this dev Thang. As always thank you for your continued support (and for supporting Alaris since it's inception when I was a Wee Dev), and I look forward to bringing you more updates in the future <3

See you all next month, and stay safe!

[sunbeargames]

People get really up in arms about balance in 5e, and whether it even exists. It does, and these are the two primary metrics I use to determine if a feature is balanced. 1. Will this feature reduce meaningful choice?

2. Will this feature create an imbalance in the party?

That's the short version, but allow me to elaborate.

The first metric tells me whether a feature is too good or too bad to be a real option. If a feature is so good that it makes other features less valid options by comparison (for instance, the Agonizing Blast invocation on the warlock), or so bad that it is basically never considered (for instance, the True Strike spell), then it needs to be removed or adjusted.

The second metric tells me whether a feature is going to make one player feel less useful than another. If a feature is very useful in lots of situations and allows one player to bypass issues the other party members struggle with (for instance, Aarakocra having a flying speed of 50 feet), or so bad that a player will feel like they are missing tools compared to the rest of the party (for instance, a very situational feature like the Ranger's Favored Enemy), then that feature needs to be removed or adjusted.

The truth is that splitting hairs over exact damage numbers and resource costs is rarely necessary. Those aspects of a feature can be useful tools, but you usually have a decent amount of leeway to eyeball that kind of thing, at least for a first draft of a feature. What you really want to know when considering whether a feature is balanced is how it might worsen the play experience.

Of course, being able to answer these two questions with any kind of accuracy, especially without seeing the feature in play first, is very difficult and requires a lot of knowledge and experience.