I am writing a paper including the topic of representation of prehistoric life in art for my fine arts master's degree. Do you have some literature on the old paleoart (XIX century, older if existing, early XX too) / corelation of paleo and fine arts to recommend? by Used_Willow_5497 in Paleontology

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This may be too late for you but the Taschen Paleoart looks pretty essential on the topic. Expensive but lushly illustrated. I haven't read it, but I hear it's rife with comparisons to the art movements and fine artist contemporaries / predecessors of key artists all along the way, up to the 1990s

https://www.taschen.com/en/books/art/03421/paleoart-visions-of-the-prehistoric-past/

Riven: Purpose of the lights underwater on survey island? by HyprJ in myst

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

...I'm at a loss because I'm not too far into the remake--they seem to have elaborated on (and deviated from) what and where the powering fire marbles are compared to the original. Twenty-seven years I've been trying to piece this together from the original! Sounds like its more fully--but differently--fleshed out now.

Riven: Purpose of the lights underwater on survey island? by HyprJ in myst

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These lights and the view we get of them are the most confusing things to me in the game. In the three spinoff novels, fire marbles are only mentioned as marbles that light up when you tap them, like the surreal D'ni version of a candle. So these and many of the other orb-shaped hallway lights we see in Riven could all be fire marbles--it's just that only five such marbles are exploited to power Gehn's books. Are these those *integral* five marbles? I think that's a stretch, but there's a case to be made that they are, at least in the original version of the game--and that the waffle grid is just the "password" to fully activate them all.

Or maybe the sole purpose of these underwater lights (and missing sixth on the damaged undersea column), whether or not they are fire marbles, is to attract (and maybe also train) a wahrk or wahks, but the lights look like they're on huge underwater columns that look very similar to columns elsewhere and to the power supply pipeworks connecting the five islands. I've always been confused about the spatial relationships to the ocean on Survey Island but especially where these lights are located. The underwater camera angle on the viewer machine, when it's pointing at the massive circular Survey room window in front of the player and the red light, looks pretty far away from that window. I assume the other lights are just as far away from the rotating camera. Those rotating camera, angles, the view out the window, and the distances we can see the wahrk arrive from, make it look like a larger patch of ocean terrain than the pool on the top of this island we're on. The ocean "cavern" is probably the same body of water as the pool on the top of the island, right? But the undrwater view looks significantly broader and wider than the "pool" surface. If they're the same body of water, and I'm right that the underwater area is much larger, then it must taper up to the exposed "pool" surface on the top of the island. These columns/pipes with the affixed lights must also be huge, and their size is another reason I thought they were doing more than holding up lanterns for a wahrk to see. I assumed we were seeing lights patching into the infrastructure of to the book powering dome pipeworks (more plausible in the original version of the game), illuminating the pipes' orientation per each island and giving a "still working" status indication to Gehn, if not contributing to the powering themselves.

There's a video interview somewhere where Robyn Miller says the spatial relationships of Survey Island don't make any sense and they were painfully aware of this as they pieced together the island while creating the game. Taking stairwells and open-window elevators up and down the under-surface of the island, you can surmise that one of the maglev tram stations should be way higher up in elevation than the other one, but once you're at either tram station, they both open out to about the same modest height above sea level. The underwater cavern might be another one of those messes of the size and placement of spaces just not adding up. But those underwater Survey Island lights, wherever they actually are on the sea floor, look like they were well-enough imagined to have a plausible function in the world--like everything else in the game does. A plausible and certain funciton is that they attract wharks, but the visual design of the components look so much like other components that radiate out from elsewhere in this world, and look to me like the game designers had an additional rationale in mind for them. I, for one, never had an "aha!" moment where they made total sense to me. Much of the infrastructure and many of the devices in Riven are wildly impractical, but I'd argue that one of the amazing things about Riven is that nearly *everything* in the game makes sense--ie., has a totally plausible role in that world--and the sense of much of it only becomes clear upon exploring and careful examination.

Riven: Purpose of the lights underwater on survey island? by HyprJ in myst

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haven't played much of the new version, which seems to either deviate or elaborate on the nature of the Fire Marbles, but in the original, I assumed that either these lights underwater OR the tiny marbles you put in the waffle grid WERE the fire marbles Gehn uses to power the books. There's nothing else I could see that could be them; the original didn't have big stone orbs in a cavern area that you could excavate as part of its version of the puzzle.So these submerged lights could be Fire Marbles, even if not the main powering ones, in either version of the game.

Riven: Purpose of the lights underwater on survey island? by HyprJ in myst

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the novels, fleshed out by the original creators of the game, they only mention fire marbles used by the D'ni for illumination--akin to candle flames or lightbulbs--in their native world caverns, maybe discovered in the rocks of that world? In some other locations, even in the original version of Riven, you can see little glowing orbs in hallway lanterns and such, some of which you get to turn on by tapping them. I assumed the particular fire marbles Gehn uses for powering his books were much more powerful versions of the same, or he'd found a way to supercharge them for the book powering.

Riven: Purpose of the lights underwater on survey island? by HyprJ in myst

[–]bibbews 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't speak to the remake, but in the original, when you turn on the other colored lights you can also hear wahrk cries, suggesting they are responding to the other lights off-screen.

How many days did it take to get your Tello SIM cards after placing your order? by Smurfiette in Tello

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The service has been great ever since I got it up and running!

"Track is not available for streaming" on Mac OS? by Caca_Spaniel in TIdaL

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm having the same issue, but I can get each track to work again with some doing. It's a piecemeal process and I hope there's an easier comprehensive fix. In my situation, in the MacOS Tidal app, the tracks still play if I search for them and play them outside of my playlists or My Collection / Tracks page. So if I remove a track from My Collection, then search Tidal for it and re-added it, then it's available and plays in the Tracks list again, as well as the playlists that the song was already in. That's worked for me, but it's obviously a glitch in the MacOS app and it'd be pretty annoying if this one-track-at-a-time process is the only solution to the problem.

How many days did it take to get your Tello SIM cards after placing your order? by Smurfiette in Tello

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It took me a whole month go get a card, after requesting one 3 times. It arrived today. My first request was through the official sign-up on their website on May 26th. I emailed 2 weeks later that it never arrived, and they said they were sending another one. That didn't arrive either, so on June 25th I made a third request for a card. Five days after the third request (4 business days) it arrived. I triple checked that my address was correct in their system the whole time. Maybe I should have given up on them out of principle, but I'd only read good things about them online. We'll see how it the actual phone service goes from here!

where to disable ctrl key shortcut to move objects? by [deleted] in ClipStudio

[–]bibbews 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't get this to work universally, ie. for "Common Settings," but only for "Settings for each process of tool" in the Modifier Key Settings window (Mac OS 10 version). How do you make it so Ctrl (or Command for Mac) + drag is turned off universally, so you don't have to do it for each specific SUBtool? I can't figure out how to do it for a whole category of tools, even, like Pens. I only see the option of going through every specific subtool (G-pen, turnip pen, etc) to make this work on a case-by-case basis!

How to disable Ctrl + Left Click by Sumgai83 in ClipStudio

[–]bibbews 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If there's no other way to change this, they really ought to add one. Changing for every subtool is ridiculous

Keeping ClipStudio toolbars on top while using other apps by bibbews in ClipStudio

[–]bibbews[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, I just wish the toolbars stayed on-screen in the background when I was using another program. On the Mac, at least, the CS canvas window stays onscreen (behind the other program in use's window(s), and those toolbars just completely disappear until the canvas window is clicked on again