#structural organization

[voyagerprobe]

good fucking lord we need to demystify minerals. crystals do not have healing or magical powers you guys are just getting scammed

[weaver-z]

This post was made for ex-members of any conservative/fundamentalist religion, not random anti-theist joes on this site. I'm not an anti-theist, I just dislike the fact that people from other countries or smaller communities feel that they can't speak out about their experiences without being accused of generalizing or being culturally Christian on this (very American) site.

[fantastic-nonsense]

thinking about the 'load-bearing event' post and how nearly the entire post-1990s Bat mythos rests on No Man's Land happening, and it getting punted out of canon when the reboot happened irreparably fucked over both the "Batfamily" as a concept and multiple character dynamics until Death Metal/Infinite Frontier re-canonized it last year

[delta-orionis]

thinking about Superstructures tonight folks. love a good Superstructure

[transsextual]

beautiful sunny day today ^-^

[freemonker]

My current emotional support characters, maybe it says something about where I am in life currently, dunno

[hydrasaura]

Super robot monkey team hyperforce go! ~background/scenery appreciation post ~

[docileeffects]

[selkiemaidenfae]

since i’ve gotten back into my hunger games phase and simultaneously back on my everdair rarepair agenda i’ve been thinking a lot about finnick and his backstory and i just realized...

finnick’s only hope of ever getting justice for his abuse in the capitol died with him.

because honestly, he was the only one who could have brought his buyers to justice, especially the earlier ones.

i doubt he told annie anything about what he was doing to keep her alive, so even if she was lucid enough to seek justice for him, i don't think she'd even know how to start.

johanna would have more to go on, but they were only friends for a few years. by the time she was a victor, finnick was of age. and unless snow tried to sell her to the exact same people, she likely wouldn’t know the earlier names.

katniss would want to help, and she’d probably have the most resources, but i imagine she'd hit a lot of dead ends trying to dredge up names. i mean, who'd want to admit that they took advantage of the fallen war hero?

haymitch would have the best chance of everyone, having been around finnick the longest, but it would all depend on how sober he was and what he let himself notice.

finnick would have fought for everyone if he survived the war. every johanna, every cashmere, every morphling the capitol ever took advantage of.

instead finnick died in those sewers, and the people who took advantage of him when he was just a kid effectively got away with it.

i know it's common knowledge that finnick deserved better, but... fuck, dude. he really did.

[kaiasky]

I really truly hate to ask but in your bio when it says map enjoyer the map part is not an acronym. is it??? or u mean the paper maps

ah. a normal map!

source. i think this is very pretty. this is a normal map. The idea is like. Suppose we want to have a 3d model of an old desk like this:

If we just throw that picture on a texture and hit render, we get something like this:

Which doesn't look particularly realistic! Notice how the light is staying in one place and all the highlights on the places where the pencil has dug into the wood don't move to catch the light. Our eyes automatically pick up a lot of detail about the texture of surfaces, and this doesn't look real.

in particular, the angle of the surface determines how much light is reflected at the camera. So we need a way to store the angle of every point on our surface! But it turns out we can use a neat coincidence; we see 3 primary colors and live in 3-dimensional space! To store the orientation of a surface, you can use the normal vector--the arrow perpendicular to the surface. (I like to imagine the object being covered in little tiny spikes sticking straight out at a right angle. We need a way to store those spikes.) Since we have 3 colors and 3 dimensions, we can encode the angle of the normal vector spikes as a color, where the red channel means the left-right angle, the green channel means the up-down angle, and the blue channel means the vertical angle sticking out at the viewer. So to go back to the old image:

The cyan bits to the left (some green, some blue, no red) are spikes pointing to the left. The red/pink bits to the right are spikes pointing to the right. The neutral blue-grey color in the middle is a spike sticking straight up.

There's lots of ways to make a normal map. You can paint them yourself, you can model a really complicated geometry and then calculate a normal map to apply to a much simpler geometry, or you can create it as the "derivative" of a heightmap (a greyscale image where white is high bumps and black is dips). There's even cool neural network things that try to infer the height/normal map from a picture or video!

Here's that normal map I stole applied to a totally flat grey square, with the light moving. Look how convincing the illusion of depth is!

Here's two grey cubes smashing into one another except one has a normal map applied.

So I think this is a really cool technique! But I also think that normal maps, the images themselves, are stunningly beautiful. That's why the background of my avatar is a normal map!

Shoutout to gif.ski for making those gifs. I'm not really sure why its quality is 10x what i get from imagemagick or ffmpeg but it sure as hell is.

[definitelynotshouting]

Been a while since i updated yall on my minecraft world, so heres the greenhouse i designed last night that im planning on building to house my bamboo and the allay i nabbed last week or so :] the smaller section is for an attached bee farm

This design is actually 100% mine!!! This is the first time i havent used a tutorial as the base of a build, and while it still needs a few tweaks and extra decorations, for a first pass im pretty damn happy with it. I did use a site to help me with the dome shape, it's called plotz and it was extremely helpful especially while using the 2D model :]

Also please look at my diamonds rn, holy fuck

[strawglicks]

cathal is a rlly fun character to dive into when it comes to his mental state and general view on life. they seek too much for a "meaning" to the things they do, and if they dont see a meaning or a point to it, it demotivates them from engaging in it at all. it causes them to slack off so much in their work bc they dont see an end goal to it, considering they find the toons vs cogs war pointless. if the cycle's just gonna repeat whats the point of trying? whats the point of doing any of his work?

and while this is frustrating to an outside perspective aka their coworkers, its clear that cathal is. depressed. their constant exhaustion, lack of motivation, and general apathy and carelessness points to this. these aren't just things any ordinary lazy person does.

HOWEVER i think its worth mentioning that, due to their environment, cathal has BECOME lazy, which might make the underlying issue (depression) less obvious . what i mean is, his job is directly harming his mental state bc it basically encourages his apathy and carelessness. they have everything handed to them without trying, so whats the point. when they get in trouble, their dad makes sure they keep their job, so whats the point of following the rules. they dont even need to do any real work bc, again, no matter what, they wont lose their job. so whats the point?

this will definitely steer someone in a more lazy direction even tho the root problem is something more serious . cathal is now unwilling to do even the smallest of tasks and would rather have his coworkers do them instead, as shown in that one comic from a few months back (i dont feel like grabbing it ill just assume you know what im talking abt LMAO)

this has also given them a bit of an ego! which is very bad. they actively take pride in their ability to waste time and how they dont have to try. which isnt something one should be proud of or strive for. its very unhealthy

i hope this gets built on and cathal doesnt get boiled down to "lol look how lazy this character is all they do is eat and sleep!!!" bc i think the laziness drives from a deeper issue . and their job rlly isnt helping

[miyuecakes-moved]

"no politics" rule is shorthand for "this space is not safe for POC"

[wordsnstuff]

Hello! I see you’ve answered questions on outlining chapters for stories/novels, how to begin chapters, and chapter length, but my question is, when should your fan fiction be a one shot or a multi-chapter work and if you make it a multi-chapter work, how do you decide where to split everything up into the chapters? If you’d like, I can PM you a sample of my current WIP so you can see what I mean. Thank you!

Selecting the placement of chapter breaks...

There are several factors you should consider when strategizing the chapter structure of your story, and the ending is by far one of the most critical. The way you manipulate the breaks in the narrative is imperative to holding your reader's attention and maintaining the addictive quality of the story. This concept is easily extended to fanfiction, and fanfiction is one of the best places to examine how people organically utilize this device, as it is episodic in nature and often updated over lengths of time, mimicking the experience of media like television.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to focus on how one would approach this in a traditional novel format but please remember that these principles can be applied to multiple formats including fanfiction and even television scripts.

When approaching the end of a chapter, your goal is to build tension and anticipation in the reader. Essentially, you need to make whatever might happen next seem too intriguing to walk away from. You want to leave a question (old or new) unanswered but make it clear that their curiosity will be satisfying if only they stick around a few more pages.

You can also elicit this feeling by resolving something within the narrative that creates a moment of satisfaction, and this feeling will leave them in search for more. Like giving them a taste and promising that on the other side of the next chapter header, there is more of that feeling to indulge in. It is simply good practice to consistently weave these satisfying chapter endings throughout the story, otherwise the reader may become frustrated with a lack of perceived payoff to the build-up.

Overall, a chapter should serve as somewhat of a container. Identify what your chapters are designed contain, and then correspond the chapter breaks to that design. For example, if the chapter is primarily about progress in a character's arc or a major new event in the conflict, centralize the chapter on that factor. As you approach the ending, create some kind of resolution to the central factor while leaving a loose string that the reader will definitely notice and desire to pull on in the next chapter.

I hope this helps, and of course if you have any further questions my ask box is always open.

x Kate

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Masterlist

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[swaps55]

Not sure what it says about me that I am more alarmed people don't know how to download files from Google Docs than I am about Google's policies.

[caesarsaladinn]

I got tired of autocorrect’s bullshit, so I decided to just own it. behold: the aromatic flag.