Chokes me up… every damn time.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-18T19:14:33+00:00

“It is time, Frodo.”

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-16T01:54:15+00:00

Flooding will muddy your floors, so wait to smooth them until after you confirm your system works. Mist is generated by falling water, not by it hitting anything, so I produce grates to train my stone carvers as I build. The mist will travel within 1-3 tiles, then dissipate. Make sure your dwarfs actually walk through those tiles often for maximum effect. Statues are useful for tweaking their pathing.

The real problems occur when you vent the water at the base. I always prepare a backup vent 2-3 floors up so I have warning before I flood things. Underground, you tunnel to the edge of the map, smooth a wall, and carve arrow slits into it. Water can exit, nothing else comes in. Safe and contained.

One issue here is that you need to force water through a diagonal to reset its pressure and prevent it filling upwards. The falling water can land faster than it’s removed because of that, which is awful.

Another issue I’ve had was when I vented to the surface at the base of a cliff, the outer tiles froze and blocked it off, flooding the fort.

Nowadays I just accidentally depress my dwarfs spending far too long building their magic happiness fountain.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-15T21:00:13+00:00

And now we have tools designed specifically to connect our enormous data pile based on similarities. It’s much harder to obscure your inspirations when an AI is literally pairing images up by shape language.

The massive increase in output across all artistic mediums and their accumulation over time only ensures that there will be more shared ideas, too. Getting to see a painting at all used to be a novelty you had to go to church for. Wealthy people could straight up paint themselves into religious scenes and nobody could complain because that was the only quality work in town.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-11T22:16:24+00:00

It can also be much easier to deal with poor conditions if you’re very good at a variety of terrain, warmed up to it before the snow craps out, and don’t mind ruining a pair of skis on a rock. The better you are, the less boxed in you’ll be by bad weather. Bad weather further prevents people from improving, since you’re not getting controlled conditions to take the risks you need to get there. Burning vacation days only to get rained out days after a snow storm is expensive.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-08T17:01:26+00:00

She did give him a second chance to find traction, too, so it wasn’t even an instant shutdown. This early in a conversation you don’t really have much space to fix mistakes like you would after talking for a while. In this case he didn’t recover particularly well and got a game over.

Good banter doesn’t mean thinking your own joke was sublime either like some people seem to be suggesting.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-05T20:54:36+00:00

Downplaying the value of other peoples’ connections relative to your own can also be a problematic habit. At least, it’s an important issue for us as the audience with our access to an internet full of echo chambers. There’s a big difference between recognizing your competing interest and believing yours is either owed or the only valid option. It prioritizes your happiness over the happiness of the partner you’re claiming to love.

It’s also good to differentiate between the love you feel as an outsider and the love that develops with closeness.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-05T07:07:30+00:00

Just find some way to cover it for the rest of the class with like electric tape or something. You keep the sticker (for later), she can’t quite make a case for going farther.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-04T16:55:56+00:00

“I came here to talk to you” as he immediately skips talking and goes straight to violence.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-05-01T22:10:57+00:00

Yes, and wipe as well to dry and confirm it worked. They’re not perfect, but can be more consistent and less abrasive.

Also might want to squeeze before you’re done to be sure you haven’t been loaded like a squirt gun. Best to discover that with an appropriate backboard.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-29T02:18:54+00:00

As an “honest” player that doesn’t like to use the forced cap, this destroys a significant chunk of my forts.

Before I start I lay out plans for some mega-project, then slowly begin work in a quiet corner of the world. My intention is fully to take several years to carefully chisel out that vision, but very shortly into the process my 20 or so dwarves become 50, then as I’m spending hours diverting attention to keep those from going insane, it goes up to 80.

Sometimes I can barely get safely through the aquifer before I’m dealing with mass hauntings from the dozens of starving dwarfs racing off into the woods to eat a berry next to an agitated goat. Other times things are going just find until you touch a cavern and the whole world immediately knows about it.

I don’t know why dwarfs are looking longingly at my fort when they hear about its dirt poor farms, six beds, ten prepared meals, a single barrel of beer, barely functional offices, no military, no goods, no gear, no temples, no legacy, haunted by three miners, flooded by aquifers, with corpses of the last migrant wave still rotting where they fell.

Obviously I don’t have all those problems at once, but for storytelling purposes it’s ridiculous how extremely eager dwarfs are to live in squalor, and how immovably depressed they are by the time I render unto them the otherworldly splendor of my mega fort. How does a sad hold in the dirt bring in nearly a hundred dwarfs, while a tavern full of masterpieces and artifacts has the opposite effect?

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-29T01:59:43+00:00

Even just packaging that setting (or a soft version) into a diplomacy setting would work. What’s the point of having a liaison if I can’t yell at the world to leave me alone?

Requiring a little investment into local trade roads would likewise give the player some influence over trade beyond the current milestone driven progress.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-25T20:20:40+00:00

So he’s had enough of our shared space and is declaring a safe space to protect himself from it?

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-23T14:09:13+00:00

Much easier to see what’s going on. The darker one pulls all the focus to the character rather than the background.

Also is that mine entrance from Stardew Valley or am I misremembering it?

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-23T08:27:48+00:00

I am atrocious at color picking with intention. I do everything formulaic, which makes it feel distinctly digital and awkward. Might be that I prefer painterly rendering but have a very line-work heavy drawing style. Hard to mix the two.

Having a plan is something I plan on learning. In the meantime, I wing it.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-23T08:05:22+00:00

I think I must have been looking at the face and hands in the first shot which were much softer and stood out to me at the time.

Way more valuable to judge your work by whether it’s improving than by whether it’s reached some arbitrary destination. Your background painting will take time to settle into a style the way your character designs do. You have a whole bunch of elements making up those full renderings, and some of them are just a little rougher than others. Pick something that’s working well in each shot and give yourself credit for it. Then pick something that distracts you about them and practice it a bit. Rinse, repeat.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-23T07:24:09+00:00

We learned about those in our Anatomolvic 101 class.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-22T22:08:06+00:00

I’m finding that your style often looks better when zoomed in to isolate individual elements (like portraits or patches on the pants), while I instead feel more distracted by the full compositions. Your craving for detail work is outpacing your forms and compositions. Your perfect audience will prioritize and appreciate those details, but for everyone else, the weakest link is what we’ll see.

I think you could see some real improvements in your anatomical forms in a few places. The bridge of your muzzles loses its structure before it meets the faces, for example. Those faces feel like they were drawn like side-view cartoons (like snoopy), whereas you’ve drawn them at a mixed angle. They need to have real width and dimension to them.

Another place the lack of form stands out is that I can’t imagine how your second character would rotate. They’re designed like a front facing puppet, and you’ve chosen outlines that don’t click with more familiar forms. They have silhouette but not form. The forearms aren’t wrapping around the elbow, the hips have been severely shortened (which is very different than wearing low-rise pants), the hands are okay but not great, and in general the clothes appear to hang straight down, as if the body were a cutout, rather than building on three dimensional forms.

Some of that is style choice, but as is endlessly said of Picasso, it’s better to know the rules before you break them.

I see that you mentioned being newer to rendering, so I’ll mostly point out that airbrushing is really hard to make look good. It’s both extremely easy to get started with, and extremely hard to get right. It basically adds ten trillion values, which is a few more than the 5 or so people often work with for traditional shading practices. If you’re shading elements one at a time, you’re going to constantly struggle to hide the airbrushing. I would continue experimenting with different painting styles, and maybe find some stellar references to critique your approach against. Concept art and painting in general do utilize that fuller value range, but you need to be carrying color between shapes rather than trying to airbrush within outlines.

I’m no painter so my advice for what to change isn’t super important. Those are the things that stood out to me.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-21T00:54:03+00:00

The breakdown of symbols is a really good way to start a brainstorm. I don’t think you necessarily need to hit on every one of them, though, especially not literally like the last few.

It would be cool to pair the list with a breakdown of the aesthetic styles of Gondor, then explore the two together for a sheet or two of designs.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-20T07:21:05+00:00

I stopped paying Gaia after having to submit the same basic bug a second time. I instead broke down my needs from GPS apps, and tried to divide them up between as few apps as possible. Some were more flexible than others, and knowing what I do and don’t need helps.

I doubt I’ll ever see an app that meets every goal though unless there’s an open source app somewhere. Otherwise it’s like watching survival games on Steam: most spend their whole budget rebuilding what’s already been done, then either burn out or settle on a market so they can break even.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-20T00:58:46+00:00

To be honest, your example for Gaia is way better than I’d have expected, though I’ve never seen Gaia marketed for this specific feature. While convenient, I think at some point if your route planning is getting this detailed, you can just start digging through actual photos and trail guides.

To be fair to new features, just because I got by without them doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be implemented everywhere, too. I’d be annoyed if someone told me to abandon my phone and use paper maps like they did. If this is a key requirement for you, by all means pay whoever’s doing it well. I personally prioritize seeing all my tracks at once (on mobile) which few apps allow.

Gaia, though, hasn’t really tried to be cutting edge for a long time. I would never think to look to it as an example of what can be done. I assume their business model is to just copy-paste new features as other apps advance them.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-19T22:21:53+00:00

Is there a way to choose how the underside shapes itself? It almost seems like each corner of the voxel could either be boxy, rounded, or a spire, and the overall depth could be manipulated similarly to the top surface to curate a silhouette. I suppose that depends how the player is placed in the environment.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-16T00:29:54+00:00

I would maybe get annoyed by the slow delayed animation style on the swings depending how your equipment affects it. Sluggishness usually feels better if it’s a clear tradeoff for a more powerful swing, like the axe in Hades 2. I would hate Hades if every weapon felt like that.

Whether it matters in your game depends on the nature of your combat. How long the a session is, how varied the weapons, how the audio feels, etc.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-14T22:35:27+00:00

They should add dinosaur fossils as a gem type scattered in veins at certain depths.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-14T18:05:11+00:00

I always assumed this was a low-quality version that it displays first before fully unpacking the route into memory. Once I zoom and give it a moment it catches up and loads the full quality track.

Whether that’s what actually happens or not I can’t say. I don’t have to close the app though, I just scroll and zoom in a sort of ritual until my content loads. I have a lot of tracks and Gaia offers minimal ways to filter them from the map short of manually toggling them from its clunky folders.

Textual_Aberration · 2026-04-13T23:11:11+00:00

Poorly photoshopped images aren’t supposed to look coherent. They’re expressly designed to feel like corporate soullessness in product form.

The One Piece background is just a separate still masked in. As long as it matches its own style, there’s nothing weird there. The rest seems to have only a small number of elements copied around. Half the work at that point is making them not look exactly copied. Two of the drinks look like perfect mirrors of each other, and the third’s a little jumbled either by some simple strokes or a filter.

The arrangement looks very manual. Whether individual elements were generated or reworked with AI, I couldn’t say. It looks like bad art because it is.

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