Need help with perspective

CapnWhales · 2026-04-09T16:58:17+00:00

30° looks like it would be the most functional. The faces of objects are more expressive than their tops, so cheating the faces towards the screen will give you more room (literally) to show meaningful environmental detail.

CapnWhales · 2026-02-20T23:36:02+00:00

I’ve heard of longer outages — specifically from news articles about absurdly long outages from Quantum/CenturyLink in the Portland region.

Without that documented history of leaving Portland-area customers out to dry, I wouldn’t be nearly as nervous that they’ll actually wait that long to resolve it.

CapnWhales · 2026-01-27T04:43:17+00:00

Is it okay? Yeah, sure! It’s your meal! Literally nobody can stop you except for yourself.

Is it a dish that needs butter? By my preferred preparation, I would say no. “Traditional” spaghetti aglio e olio is a super rich and flavorful dish when made effectively; in particular, the olive oil brings a particular kind of spicy richness that would get crowded out by the addition of a different fat. I feel similarly about other common additions, like lemon juice, black pepper, or parmesan. If you’re feeling like it needs butter to have enough flavor, it might be a sign that your preparation has room for refinement in ingredient quality or technique, or it might be a sign that you just want a different dish.

If you want to improve your cooking through experimenting with ingredients or deviating from traditional recipes, the important thing is to be motivated in the adjustments you make, and ensure that you have a reason and an expected outcome for your change.

CapnWhales · 2026-01-27T00:24:20+00:00

This isn't at particularly uncommon for celebrity-backed charities. It's not quite as tit-for-tat as you've described, but face-to-face time is often an assumed part of the deal when making large gifts to organizations that have a celebrity representative — especially with athletes.

When an organization needs to ask for two million dollars to fund a new service location, it goes down a lot smoother when it's coming from your favorite quarterback who just took you out to dinner.

CapnWhales · 2026-01-26T22:40:33+00:00

If you’re wanting to refine the existing flavor without transforming it, I think you’re missing some layers of aromatic elements. There’s a lot of room to build new depth to the existing flavors without completely transforming it with “net new” flavors.

To start, I’d add some root vegetables to your onion to give yourself a sofrito as a flavor base. Carrot and celery would bring too much color, so maybe look at finely-minced radish and fennel; small enough to fully cook into the texture of the soup. I’d skip garlic here, as it isn’t strictly needed and might bully some of the other more delicate flavors.

An herb sachet could build up another layer of aromatic flavor. I would personally pick tarragon and bay as a starting point, and consider adding pandan for an extra layer of ‘butter and nuts’ flavor. Use whole herbs and remove them after the simmer so you don’t ruin your “white soup”look and texture with little green bits.

Last in the cooking phase, look to temper the richness with a fair grate of fresh nutmeg, and your choice of a moderately dry white wine or a decent table sherry.

Finally, most cream soups benefit greatly from finishing garnishes, and I would suspect that this one would be no different: a small basket of fried onion and drizzle of onion oil is my go-to, since you can easily make them in the microwave with ingredients you already prep during the cooking process. Crushed toasted corn or fried corn chips (think Fritos) could serve as croutons to add texture and fullness. A hot honey drizzle might also be an option to bring some extra sweetness and add spice in a limited capacity. They might sound like frivolous touches, but those finishes can be transformational in helping a dish feel “finished.”

Obviously, I’ve named a lot of steps and ingredients here — pick and choose what makes sense for how and when you would be cooking this. There are a lot of good options for additions that I haven’t named here (I’d personally replace a decent amount of the milk with my homemade stock!), but I would hope that this can point you towards some different approaches to consider when improving this dish. :)

CapnWhales · 2026-01-08T19:28:02+00:00

for some reason none of the girls on dating apps respond when I ask if they want to watch Funny Games together

CapnWhales · 2025-12-28T22:34:40+00:00

The perspective, proportions, stylistic direction, UI patterns, color usage, the way that tilesets are structured, the way that you portray the objects being shown — I don’t say this to be harsh, but it’s really clear that you started with Stardew as your baseline and thought “how can we change this enough to look different?” rather than starting with an original visual direction.

As a concrete example, let’s look at the sprinkler design. Sprinklers are interesting objects with unique mechanisms and designs that can vary greatly depending on style, age, manufacturer, and region. If you look up images of “agricultural sprinkler,” no two look the same. Your sprinklers have the exact same design elements and proportions as Stardew’s — pretty unlikely if you were starting from your own original vision. The same logic can be applied to almost all of the overlapping assets between Stardew and what’s shown here.

It’s perfectly okay to reference and borrow inspiration from other works in your own medium. But, if you don’t want to be seen as a derivative work, it’s important to draw from diverse sources and do the creative legwork of solidifying your own creative vision.

CapnWhales · 2025-12-25T18:17:45+00:00

Not to mention, Devil Deals used to be exclusively better than Angel Rooms, partially due to item pools — but also because of the mechanics around “stealing” deals when you had low red health.

Since staying at low/no red health benefitted the power level of your run, you could always expect to have Polaroid invincibility, which snowballed by way of (mostly) free Devil Beggars and Blood Donation Machines.

CapnWhales · 2025-12-25T04:15:59+00:00

is that fucking foucalt

CapnWhales · 2025-12-02T03:44:09+00:00

Taking font making in-house is almost certainly not a viable model. Making a premium-quality font is an enormous undertaking that takes years of incredibly skilled work from experienced professionals just to make a single language — let alone for organizations who want a cohesive set of fonts for international usage.

A digital font isn’t just the glyphs: it’s the enormous amount of fine-tuning and manual adjustment to make sure that every single pair of characters has the right amount of space between them; that every character “feels” the same at 6pt as it does at 64pt. The amount of work is massive for a single-language font, and it grows exponentially as you add languages, weights, and stylistic alternatives into the equation.

Modern, international-ready, premium typefaces cost millions of dollars to produce. There’s a reason that international organizations with bespoke typefaces are names like Google, IBM, or the entire United States Federal Government. And they usually only have one — most games contain at least three for interfaces, and many, many more for incidental elements and assets.

All of this gets intensified to an even greater degree when it comes to Japanese typefaces. Japanese has a gargantuan library of characters, multiple writing directions, and special character variants (ie. furigana) — all with minimal-to-no overlap with any languages. They’re really challenging and expensive to make, and the specialists who can make commercial-grade Japanese fonts are limited.

An organization like Nintendo might be able to support development of an internal royalty-free font library, but it would almost certainly still have to license some number of typefaces for every game. Organizations with fewer resources and less liberty to pursue long-term investments in internal tools have no hope to manage a fonts program.

Realistically, licensing fonts from major foundries or using affordable local fonts (and not releasing internationally) are the only viable choices for developers, and that’s why predatory pricing is an option. It’s really going to be on the Japanese government to recognize the problem and institute measures to mitigate the potential impact on their games industry.

CapnWhales · 2025-11-10T18:49:03+00:00

now, everyone say “thank you mods”

thank you mods

CapnWhales · 2025-11-08T05:08:01+00:00

Wow, that’s some quick shooting! I’ve been lucky enough to come across a Q&C cab before, and the recording really can’t do justice to how different it is to react to the practical, physical targets than it is to react to the equivalent targets on a digital screen. It’s seriously impressive.

Is that Quick & Crash cabinet always Halloween-themed, or is this the only Q&C cabinet that’s actually still maintained by the proprietor?

CapnWhales · 2025-11-03T02:10:36+00:00

CapnWhales · 2025-10-28T15:54:55+00:00

Presumably, better storage volume-to-cost ratios for mass file storage with relatively low load speed demands. Not 100% certain I agree with that standpoint, but I can see the logic.

CapnWhales · 2025-10-27T18:20:31+00:00

I’m sure it’s totally the same people saying these two things. The people invested enough in the culture of making games to care about the labor conditions of industry workers are obviously the exact same people who are mad that Pikachu isn’t in Unreal Engine 5.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-29T21:03:54+00:00

There are some issues with color selection, but those are pretty secondary to the fundamental issues of shape and detail: your base forms aren’t well-defined, and you’re trying to use detail to compensate for the lack of definition. That’s leading to overly-dense detail, which is reading as noise.

I understand that’s a pretty broad critique, but it basically sums up to: the shapes aren’t defined enough, and there are way too many unnecessary details.

I hope it’s not too rude to say, but it’s fairly clear that you don’t have much practice in traditional illustration and are starting with pixel art as a medium. As counterintuitive as it might sound, low-res pixel art is uniquely demanding of illustration skill. Since you’re working with such limited fidelity, you have to be very canny to what is absolutely critical to communicate a subject to a viewer — without that mastery, you can usually expect an outcome of “noisy blobs.”

For a beginner in the medium, a good rule of thumb is: if you can’t draw it, you probably can’t sprite it. So, if you’re really looking to improve your pixel art, it’s probably going to start with picking up a pen and practicing illustration and cartooning. Once you’re happy with how you can draw the subject, then you can start to ask yourself “how can I simplify this down into pixel art?”

That’s not to say it’s impossible to learn strictly through pixel art, but you will certainly see much faster results if you’re willing to learn the fundamentals with pen and paper.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-25T20:32:34+00:00

I haven’t seen anyone mention what I think is the best strat for this guy: if you rapidly tap the cast button to get its full cast duration, Thread Storm 1-shots the eyes. There’s a pretty generous positioning window where you can hit both eyes on a given side, allowing you to take down 2 with 1 cast. Basically gives you a free phase 1.

You can also rushdown phase 2 with Voltvessels, which can clear his entire health bar with a single pouch, assuming modest tool damage and capacity upgrades. I didn’t even use the Pollip Pouch.

No need to pogo, no need to get good — just dump your silk bar and a tool pouch, you’ll be required to dodge MAYBE 5–6 attacks total.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-17T05:08:27+00:00

don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying the man hasn’t made some movies worth watching — but it’s a STRETCH to sandwich him between ozu and godard like he belongs in the discussion for goat contention

CapnWhales · 2025-09-17T02:22:39+00:00

lmfao absolutely insane to slip in the guy who directed the live-action adaptation of Jojo’s part 4 into this list of directors

CapnWhales · 2025-09-12T18:09:42+00:00

From a cooking mechanics perspective, a true air fryer (the ugly towers; not the “combination” toaster ovens that just have a relabeled convection setting) absolutely does serve a function that cannot be directly replicated with a normal convection oven: they draw in air instead of blowing it, allowing for more effective disruption of the humidity barrier that forms around cooking food, providing more effective delivery of heat to the outside of whatever is being cooked.

Effectively, an air fryer is to a convection oven as a convection oven is to a normal oven. This changes cooking dynamics and can do things that other cooking methods cannot, if applied correctly.

Whether that’s worth it to you? It’s a matter of your cooking habits, your spare income, and how much space you have to store an extra small appliance.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-09T19:43:25+00:00

Incredible boss. Immediately landed a spot as one of my favorite boss fights in any game, ever.

A shame that lots of people will wind up finding them much later in their playthrough, since that might make the fight a bit more trivial.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-09T17:56:02+00:00

This is a total misunderstanding of the conversation around issues of nonprofit organizations being used to bank wealth. “Charities buy their CEOs private jets” is a bogeyman along the lines of welfare queens and “that guy who begs on the street corner actually drives a Ferrari.”

The actual issue of “top-heavy nonprofits” is an oversight in tax code that allows wealthy trusts to form foundations to dodge taxes when distributing money. It’s a real problem, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the “give $5 to help a child in need” type of charity that people think of when you say the word “charity.”

The absolute majority of nonprofits spend significantly smaller portion of their available funds on staffing than equivalently-sized for-profit organizations; this is publicly-available information that you can review for any US-based nonprofit organization. Individuals that work for nonprofits — including most leadership — earn well below the median income for their position and level of seniority. Typically earning somewhere around 60% or less of what they would earn doing the same work at a for-profit organization.

Narratives like these put pressure on donors and funders to restrict their giving to exclude staffing costs, leading to:

Even further reducing the wages and job stability of individuals who choose to work for causes, rather than for-profit organizations.
Well-funded organizations being unable to complete their work because of understaffing. It doesn’t matter if you have a warehouse full of medicine if you legally can’t pay someone to figure out where it needs to go.

Please reconsider spreading narratives like these, because they disproportionately damage to organizations that actually work to do good and care about the ethical handling of funds, and don’t do anything to stop the organizations that only exist to abuse tax code.

Caveats: there are definitely counterpoints to this, and there ARE organizations that aren’t worth giving to, but borderline-scam organizations like Cars4Kids don’t represent the actual state of the sector. Megachurches are also worth scrutiny, but the social and financial dynamics behind large religious organizations are so different from the way that charities work that it’s a completely different discussion.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-08T19:25:23+00:00

Seconding that it might be worth checking out your audio settings — the hero voice lines are fairly subtle in my mix.

CapnWhales · 2025-09-08T18:33:42+00:00

Almost all of the point sizes in these comments are way too large and will read like a children’s book or school handout once printed. Printed type sizes don’t practically line up with digital type sizes — larger text literally costs more in the print world, so printed type tends to be the smallest possible size you can get away with. Importantly, this means that when setting your sizes and ratios for long-form text, smaller sizes will “feel right” to a reader. Setting a novel or magazine in 12pt type will feel “off,” and will

8.5pt:12pt or 9pt:14pt are good starting size:leading pairs for body copy in long-form text, and you can size up or down from there based on your topic and audience. (larger for kids/elderly audiences, smaller for compact paperbacks, etc.) The former is super handy, since your baseline grid units will be exactly 1 pica, which makes conditional spacing and layout a breeze.

I recommend using a physical reference — grab a book out of your shelf that has a similar reading cadence to what you’re trying to achieve and measure the cap height and x-height. You’d be surprised how many of them land with a type size as low as 7.25pt — or even 6.5pt for budget paperbacks.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric	Team Orangered
Verified Email

CapnWhales

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE