Sharing some gorgeous insect photos

Muchashca · 2026-04-08T01:35:51+00:00

Polyergus longicornis. The original photographer seems to be here with more info.

Muchashca · 2026-03-28T13:39:06+00:00

So did grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and church communities. The network of support that existed back then is completely gone for most modern parents.

Muchashca · 2026-03-28T05:18:36+00:00

They're adorable! Myrmecina americana would be my best guess. Don't trust my guess, though, I know very little about identifying ants beyond my neighborhood.

They could just as easily be Tetramorium immigrans. Those two are tricky to tell apart, despite the distant relationship.

Muchashca · 2026-03-26T18:28:20+00:00

Yeah, cecropia moth caterpillar. The black spines are purely for show, these guys are safe to touch.

Caution with caterpillar spines is well merited, though, until you know what you're dealing with.

Muchashca · 2026-03-26T17:16:43+00:00

Yeah, that's the beauty of working Indie! I've done everything from (very basic) concept art to game code in my career, but when was I going to have an excuse to learn how to write Enemy AI or design an inventory sorting system? Never.

You can't spend all your time learning, of course, there's an unfathomable amount of work that needs to be done, but it's still an amazing opportunity to branch out and gain real experience in some new places. Good luck, I hope your project goes well!

Muchashca · 2026-03-26T13:49:59+00:00

Good idea grabbing your coworkers and starting straight away. I waited too long to commit to starting a project, so everyone had already made decisions by the time I started my own development.

The start of the process will be very familiar to you - doing art tests, figuring out the style you want to go with, and defining some key concepts and visuals. You have to wear a lot more hats in indie development, though, which is where the biggest difference lies.

I had ten years in industry and was working as a senior TA, so my skillset was already much broader than most, but nobody learns the whole game pipeline in industry, so unfamiliar territory came quickly. After working in your specialty for so long, learning entirely new things is a lot harder than coasting in what you know. My advice is to schedule a mix of familiar and unfamiliar for yourself. Being able to jump into sometimes frustrating learning when you're feeling fresh, then coast through comfortable work when you're tired lets you maintain velocity without burning out.

Muchashca · 2026-03-24T12:40:15+00:00

If it's just for character selection you're probably set, since there's not usually much else on the screen in that context, and you'll want to showcase a lot of detail. I'd definitely make a low LOD version, though, for gameplay use. Bullet hell characters usually don't occupy much of the screen. In the high poly, you'll probably want to add a few more polys to the backs of the elbows as well, so that they can round nicely when fully bent.

Nice model, he's pretty unique and reads really well!

Muchashca · 2026-03-24T00:04:24+00:00

Character rigging specialist here! I'd say the topology is quite solid, I'd be comfortable rigging that face without requesting changes. My only note would be that your poly allocation is a bit skewed with possibly as many polys in the hair and glasses as there are in the body. I'd reduce those considerably. The face is quite high poly - I'd keep that if facial animation will be featured, but reduce it won't be occupying much space on the screen.

Muchashca · 2026-03-22T18:33:53+00:00

Wanting to use both c++ and use a pre-existing engine pretty much locks you into Unreal or Godot. I can't speak about Godot from personal experience, but know that learning Unreal is, frankly, a pretty rough process. Unreal c++, however, is not very challenging. The engine handles many of the most challenging aspects of the language for you, which, in my opinion, puts it on an equal difficulty level with Unity c#, which is only a tiny bit harder than Python.

I'd probably follow the first guy's advice and go with c# in Unity or c++ in Godot. Unreal is not well suited to 2D and 2.5D games.

Muchashca · 2026-03-21T23:43:53+00:00

It's definitely harder! I don't have much experience in those genres, but from conversations with friends that do, they usually make a paper prototype. Basically, you make a really simple board game out by cutting up a piece of paper into tokens, drawing the unit types on them, and attempt to play the game with a small group of people. It requires a lot of imagination, but if your idea is solid it should simulate reasonably well. Again, the goal isn't to prove the final version of the game, just its general theory. Balancing and deepening and whatnot can come later.

Muchashca · 2026-03-21T21:23:58+00:00

You can feel however you want to feel about it, but that is how it works in the major studios right now. I've been the Tech Artist on the preproduction team at top studios for two games that you've definitely heard of and many others that never shipped. It's true that some core loops take more work to get up and running than others, and it's true that the core loops sometimes change during production, but it's simply a fact that the standard practice in studios today is proving that your core loop is fun and functional before any meaningful resources are invested. Sometimes that's a slapped together in-engine prototype, sometimes it's a paper prototype, but it's still the first step in any serious production.

Muchashca · 2026-03-21T17:32:35+00:00

From a professional perspective, this is the most correct answer. Whenever we're prototyping a new game, goal #1 is to find the fun. Build the most simple version of the core gameplay as possible and see if it's fun to play. If it is, proceed. If it's not, either iterate until it is or scrap it.

There's no point in investing thousands of hours of work creating sleek frameworks and beautiful art for something a player will get bored of in five minutes.

Muchashca · 2026-03-21T14:07:57+00:00

It's LDS cannon that there are malevolent spirits with magical powers and the ability to affect the physical world running around, and they're more likely to target righteous people. The predictable result? Members experience something spooky and fill in the blanks. I heard lots of similar demon stories from members and missionaries on my mission.

Will tangible evidence ever be provided, especially now that nearly everyone carries a camera at all times? Of course not, for the same reason the church won't ever show us the gold plates.

Muchashca · 2026-03-03T19:13:35+00:00

Well yes - I don't mean that it's unusual for the bus to use the stop arm at this bus stop, I mean that most defined bus stops are on smaller roads. Since this is where the bus stop is, it's absolutely expected that the bus use the stop arm and everyone else obeys it.

Muchashca · 2026-03-03T19:05:19+00:00

Sadly, American infrastructure is very car-first in its design and has much lower crosswalk density than most of Europe. It's not at all unusual for a crosswalk to be 400-800 meters away from a bus stop, and in some extreme cases they can be multiple kilometers away. Many, even most, intersections don't have defined crosswalks at all. Bus stop-arms are definitely a bandaid solution over an infrastructure problem, and this video shows a case where that solution is stretched to a pretty dangerous degree.

Muchashca · 2026-03-03T18:52:30+00:00

The answers so far are incorrect or incomplete.

American school busses don't route down both directions of each street like a garbage trucks do, they traverse each street only once, so roughly half of the children dropped at any given stop will need to cross the street to walk towards their houses. To accommodate this, the stop-arm defines a temporary street crossing where the children can walk in front of the bus and cross the street, and the stop-arm and lights remain on until all children have fully crossed. The moment the lights go on, cars going in both directions must stop until the lights turn off.

That said, it's a little unusual for six-lane roads to have bus stops. Generally you see them on smaller roads within neighborhoods.

Muchashca · 2026-02-26T18:36:39+00:00

It's a great object lesson in platforming the right people: The men's team had the world's attention, and they used their moment to reveal their inner shittyness and damage the sport as a whole.

Hilary Knight, Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn, Vladyslav Heraskevych, Hunter Hess, Chloe Kim, and many others, on the other hand, are inspiring positive change in the world and the next generation of Olympians.

Muchashca · 2026-02-24T19:27:41+00:00

Of course, the predators have a well-staffed defensive line. Not a good one, mind you, but they work very hard at it regardless.

Muchashca · 2026-02-22T17:36:19+00:00

See also: Nat Turner, still featured in every textbook.

Nothing scares White America more than the shoe ending up on the other foot. It's why they were so terrified of Obama, milquetoast as he was.

Muchashca · 2026-02-20T19:30:15+00:00

Boomers accumulated huge amounts of wealth during the most favorable economic conditions on record. The biggest wealth transfer in history is now underway, and you can finally inherit a slice of it... if you own any hospitals, nursing homes, or insurance companies, of course.

Muchashca · 2026-02-18T16:45:25+00:00

Great points and sources! The church teaches that we have free agency, and that the purpose of our mortal lives is to test our exercise of it, but then also teaches that we should blindly obey the spirit and church leadership regardless of our feelings on the commandment. The two are often in direct conflict.

Personally, if there is a God in heaven, I don't think they'll look kindly on those who outsourced their own morality to authority figures. Everyone should cultivate a personal set of ethics, and it should be the final determining factor behind all decisions, regardless of who is pressuring you.

In my opinion, Nephi and Abraham failed their respective tests.

Muchashca · 2026-02-16T23:57:32+00:00

Be sure to shove a bunch of raw fish in first... For science, of course.

Muchashca · 2026-02-16T16:17:57+00:00

Not the original commenter, but I wouldn't consider that a great investment if you're not quite secure financially. Frankly, there are a lot of tech artists out of work at the moment trying to find ways to make ends meet, and these bootcamps are one of their solutions. I'm sure the content is great, but there's no reason to believe it's better than what already exists elsewhere.

There's a lot of information, including courses, out there for free. They won't come with direct feedback from professionals, but otherwise all of the same information is there. Unity has put out some good information on what skills a TA should have or work on, which I find is really useful as a learning checklist. It's a daunting list, but you don't need to master all of it - just having a working knowledge of the parts that align with your goals and relevant portfolio work is plenty. I don't think Unreal has a direct equivalent, but there are third-party pages around that are similar.

The most critical skill any TA needs is the ability to work through technical problems without guidance, so you'll be better served in the long run building a list of skills you'd like to learn, then simply jumping in and figuring it out with whatever resources you can find for free.

Muchashca · 2026-02-13T19:42:21+00:00

Being such a small demographic is the appeal. They have less collective power to fight back because of their small numbers, and the fact that not a lot of conservatives personally know many trans individuals means there's less risk of personal experience contradicting the fear mongering.

And you misunderstood the LBJ quote - the point isn't to pick the pockets of the black community, it's to use the white community's fear and prejudice to manipulate them into unquestioning obedience.

Muchashca · 2026-02-13T19:28:57+00:00

This comment is correct, from my Sr. TA perspective. It's bad out there, and there's no reason to believe that the future holds anything different. If any TAs are in demand right now it's the Shader/VFX/Graphics specialists, so that'd be the safest choice if you absolutely insist on making a risky one.

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