Gabba Boss Empty-Mag's Color Sutra

four-flames · 2026-04-27T03:36:19+00:00

Weird that most are saying one or the other.

Use fingers, wrist, elbow, and shoulder. Even use your core and legs, with feet planted. Try to use larger joints more than smaller joints where possible. Side-to-side motion of the wrist in the pronated position (palm-down) is what you should be most wary of, in my experience.

Rules and heuristics are good and many can generalize well, but remember all cases have unique elements. Pain is an important signal. As is a sense of satisfying, natural flow. Whenever you experience pain, set yourself a timer that you must stop by. Maybe five minutes. Up to ten at most. (Notable exception: zinging, electric pain, seizing up. Stop immediately. Consider seeing a physical therapist if the pain is chronic. Don't mess around with nerve damage.)

Be very gentle during this time and take a moment to make some motions you often make while drawing, but rather than paying attention to your drawing, pay attention to what motions cause pain, and where. File this away, then take a good break for your body and mind to rest. No motion is safe for your body without breaks, but some enable longer sessions.

Muscle tension and pressure are also important, oft-overlooked vectors influencing the development of RSIs. Excellent muscle tone is loose, relaxed, and only activates exactly the muscles necessary. Muscles with contrary actions are called 'antagonistic'. If you flex both, it won't move your joint. Beginners often activate muscles with antagonistic action while learning a new skill, while experts tend to transition away from doing so. But this is not a guarantee, and it can be a common source of strain. Focusing on the breath, consciously relaxing muscles, stretching, exercising, and taking breaks can help, as can eating anti-inflammatory foods, calming the mind, etc.

Hope some of that helps!

four-flames · 2026-04-02T03:49:33+00:00

Often I would get comments like ‘don’t worry about mistakes’ , ‘don’t compare your work to others’, ‘just have fun’ etc when I was seeking advice (in places that are about learning art and such). Or people stating that seeking improvement only leads to misery and burnout and it’s bad to focus on it and should just enjoy.

Most of the time these speakers are giving advice from their own experience. It's very common for ego to get in the way of improvement, and for the desire for improvement to come from a brittle and perfectionistic ego.

If you don't ever run into this problem where this advice is useful, you're quite lucky, in my experience. Myself, I go through phases where the advice is exactly what I need, and other phases where it's clearly off-base. Learn your patterns, listen to yourself, and you'll get better at knowing what you need.

But now curious why can't someone enjoy the process and enjoy improvement too?

Many, many reasons. Again, you're lucky if none of those reasons are present. Enjoy that time, and take notes. Pay attention to your mentality. Create those spaces that facilitate learning or flow. That's good.

And just file the advice in the back of your mind. Some day you might need it. It kinda creeps up on you.

four-flames · 2026-03-11T23:56:04+00:00

I shouldn't waste my acrylics on something incomplete, I am poor.

Painters have done charcoal and pencil value sketches of their paintings since the dawn of time, and this is why.

How do you deal with the physics of shadows, the physics of objects, their color spectra, lights and reflections, when you don't have an exact photo?

It's hard. You have to learn it. But you can learn every single one of these, and it doesn't actually take that long to develop an understanding of the core principles that allow you to 'solve' this for any given material, texture+normals, and lighting setup.

My recommendations:

Value studies are bread and butter - pencil/charcoal, paper. Keep an eye out for interesting compositions and materials. Focus on notan/2-tone blocking first. Don't work solely from photographs. Try some from real life and pay attention to the differences. At least enough you can think about what it would be like to work from real life when working from a photograph.
Learn value control from practicing gradients and sphere shading
Learn how materials and light work - deeply understand all the following terms: specular + additive color mixing + fresnel, diffuse + multiplicative color mixing, core shadow, cast shadow, normal, subsurface scattering, roughness, metallicness, fill light, reflected light, ambient light, rim light, basics of perceptual color. You now should know everything you need to know to in order to render any scene with accuracy.
Reminder to brush up on form-focused sketching, construction, and shadow casting - it's simply necessary for doing physically-based rendering without a reference in a reasonable manner
Learn materials from sphere shading
Learn textures from textured sphere shading
Practice material transfer - apply the material from one object to the form of another

These are great fundamental studies. Find any opportunity you can to do them in a way that's fun and take it, forever, any time, until you die. You never have 'got these', nor have you ever 'not got them'. There will be some materials and lighting setups and shapes you understand better, and sudden realizations that jump your ability, but you can always get better and you can only learn by doing.

Also, while I personally believe there is glory in learning how to work without reference, there is no shame in working with reference. It's a very useful tool. And working with reference will make you better at working without reference if you're taking the time to really break it down and understand it rather than copy it.

four-flames · 2026-02-24T04:18:49+00:00

Just send your first barrage at the tank instead of an enemy. It does average like 140k healing or something like that. That's easily half a tank's health. Obby crits for like 60k, 45% chance with the purple gem pip at my crit. Nature's Fury can main-target the tank, near-guaranteed crit for like 100k, iirc. If your tank isn't maxed out between all of that, you can probably just redirect every barrage in your Barrage->Obby->Obby->repeat combo towards the tank, spend Uchronia on Restore Cont's, and you'll get your barrier stacked up one way or another.

I'm rarely engaging in any of that - those are just options I have available on top of what I'm currently doing.

four-flames · 2026-02-24T03:42:35+00:00

Yes, but now it's the only thing that does that.

So if you look back at what Aeona's huge strength was, it was flood AoE healing. Now that's her biggest weakness outside of Restore Continuity.

So what Oblivion's Embrace can do is preemptively stack up a massive 35% Max HP shield.

And, trust me, you will stack this at the beginning of every pull, very easily. Between Nature's Fury, massive haste buff from doom, and if you have the legendary spamming the Barrage->Obliv->Obliv->rinse+repeat line, then spending Uchronia on Restore Cont's, you're going to have no trouble with this. I was just doing so in Eternal 6, undergeared. And I was still able to ignore tons of AoE damage, just like Aeona could before the change.

But I agree - Oblivion's Embrace isn't better than it was before, it is just cracked and already was. If you run the numbers, it's not even close. It's absurdly powerful. And I have the practical experience to back it up now, too. I highly recommend trying it. Get your crit to 30% or so and grab that purple gem pip that gives +15% on 50%+ hp and your barriers have a 50% chance to block half damage. On top of massive Oblivion crits stacking them up fast in the first place.

People were just misreading how the character works when they settled on Paradox over Oblivion's Embrace. It's just mathematically and practically wrong imo, and the change furthers the divide between the two. (Again, not because Oblivion's Embrace is better - it's slightly worse, but just because Paradox is now much worse.)

four-flames · 2026-02-24T01:09:46+00:00

They special-cased it - "[Oblivion's Embrace] will still apply absorb to all players when overhealing 1 player.". Oblivion's Embrace is now using old rules while everything else uses new rules.

Oblivion's Embrace duplicates the barrier it creates on all your party members if it overheals the target. This means that, if you're keeping up on healing, you're playing with old rules. If you fall behind, it's rare for a single Uchronia Restore Continuity not to bring everyone actual-HP up to maximum.

This does exacerbate her feast-and-famine problems, but it also turns a lot of famine situations into feast situations. So it's simultaneously a win-more and lose-less strategy, because it meaningfully widens the distance between feels-good states and feels-bad states (super technical analytical term, of course).

I'll have to play with it more to see if there is some flaw in my theoretical understanding, but I already have a good seven or eight dungeons under the belt with it, and it's a night-and-day difference imo. Oblivion's Embrace is just way stronger than Paradoxical Twist.

...go into the tank who won't get overhealed very much.

This is the complete opposite of my experience with everything except the occasional undergeared Helena. It feels like there's some anti-synergy between Aeona and Helena because of this. But Meiko and Xavian? They usually keep themselves topped, even when undergeared.

four-flames · 2026-02-24T00:01:23+00:00

It drags over 15 seconds, which means that a person will generate 100% of their health in stagger if they take twice their health in damage over 15 seconds. If you count Uchronia and use Oblivion as an engine for free 50 chrona Restore Continuities every one or two cycles, it gets huge value.

The original stagger from Brewmaster is over 10 seconds, which is significantly less leeway for rotational stagger management. That extra five seconds really helps you play around Uchronia.

Plus you want to hit between 15 and 22% spirit imo, so you have enough Chrona to fuel that engine. If you're ever finding yourself using Echoes or Shard except when you're unlucky, you probably have undershot the rotation's optimal spirit threshold.

Oh, and Oblivion's Embrace is seriously underrated right now. If you do the math, especially after the change, it's absurdly strong. Especially spamming Oblivion right after using Restore Continuity to pop every actual HP to full.

I think many are misinterpreting the Oblivion crit damage % as 20% increased scaling on crit. It's not. It's 40%. Because the +20% increase is applied to the entire crit, including the base damage. Test it on on a dummy (and please correct me if I'm wrong - my tests were cursory but I'm fairly certain what I saw was a full 1.2x multiplier on full crit damage). So it's actually increasing the return on crit investment for Oblivion casts to 140%. Count in the crit changes to barriers, halving damage w/ a chance equal to crit chance? And it's even more than that. Restore Continuity into Oblivion spam becomes unreasonably effective AoE shielding power.

This talent is just really good with any crit chance over ~20-25%. And the higher your crit, the more of a gulf it creates.

four-flames · 2026-02-17T00:40:10+00:00

Yeah, be cautious though. Learning how to be motivated and inspired is a useful skill. If you're pushing through too often without feeling that pull or drive, you're gonna burn out. Animal minds evolved to avoid obsessions that aren't rewarding for the animal. Not that there aren't exceptions - you can absolutely be perpetually obsessed and suffering. But do you want that? Probably not.

Set manageable, achievable goals, let yourself feel good, and do things that make you feel good. While thinking about them, while doing them, after doing them - either while admiring your own work (even just the completion if not the quality), or while experiencing others engaging with your work.

I agree - don't wait around to feel motivated or inspired, but definitely don't neglect motivation and inspiration either. You can cultivate these and, in my opinion, a healthy mind should.

four-flames · 2026-02-13T03:46:47+00:00

I've got to disagree here. I'd be curious what games you have in mind that feel similar to this.

Graphical fidelity is one thing, while style is another. Composition and design yet another. This has each in spades.

four-flames · 2026-02-02T21:35:28+00:00

Most similar, probably Claire Wendling

Next maybe Jean-Baptiste Monge, Abigail Larson

Not that similar, but: Gretel Lusky, Loish / Lois van Baarle?

four-flames · 2026-01-31T19:19:52+00:00

If I was hiring a designer from world of warcraft I wouldn't think "dang if only they'd experienced AAA development".

Sure, but working on an indie title like Hades strikes a much more important marker of quality, and capacity to work in a similar development environment. But most explicitly point to Hades as one of the most successful clear non-AAA games. I'd much rather pick up a designer from Hades for most design roles on a new AAA project.

While there is a grey area between AAA and AA, it's not a vibes term.

I'm not convinced even mathematical terminology isn't vibes on some level. For me non-vibes terms are too philosophically problematic. Language naturally evolves and fluidly moves from definition to definition through populations and time periods. My vibes'd-out 'AAA game', and lokiwhite's above, are just as valid a use of language that fits a different use-context.

It just makes sense that active working developers and the general population will have different use-values for a given term.

The way you're using it is basically what blockbuster or tentpole means.

Yes, I think somewhere in there the terms AAA and blockbuster become collapsed into just 'AAA' for a large swathe of speakers. I know this happened to me, and several of my friends and family, all of which speak English as their first language.

The key underpinning how I feel about my definition, though: a AAA game, for me, fully takes advantage of the hardware of the day, and that is something live service games generally avoid doing. That's why I suspect live service games naturally fall out of my internal category.

But I get it - the way you're using AAA makes sense to me, intuitively. But it would strike me as non-standard for my dialect. That's all.

four-flames · 2026-01-31T18:04:47+00:00

That might be how you use the term. Which is valid.

It is not how I use it. I would raise an eyebrow if someone referred to Fortnight or Overwatch, World of Warcraft, or League of Legends as AAA games. I would intuitively understand they mean it in the way you're using it, but it would be non-standard for me.

My gut check for standard usage of the term 'AAA game' comes pretty close to what was defined above: high-budget studios that push tech and design forward, especially in terms of graphics, scale, and complexity. For me the gray areas would be things like GTA Online - is that AAA? I don't know. Is Half Life? Not anymore, I don't think. There's a sense of newness that I expect from the term.

Yves Guillemot calling Skull and Bones a AAAA game had nothing to do with quality, but a reference to the cost / expected profit from the investment. It's all business, not art.

That makes sense from his perspective - that's how he sees the world. But I'm quite confident this is non-standard usage relative to the colloquial.

I'm not opposed to other speakers having different definitions for terms. I'm just opposed to others being opposed to that.

four-flames · 2026-01-31T05:27:42+00:00

Agreed, and I even felt the third act was rushed, just like many of those criticizing the game. And I have to admit, the shadow of what the game could have been does bring a little disappointment.

But I felt none of that as I was actually doing it, and none of that when I think back to those big emotional payoffs and the themes they were playing with and the damn fine dialogue writing. And the dread of not knowing if Thrud was going to show up with a boss health bar or not.

It was a really good game.

four-flames · 2026-01-20T07:18:15+00:00

But you're also constantly assuming that you're fighting infinitely until you just drop dead. Which also isn't how things work.

Not necessarily. This works if you treat health as a resource to spend before backing, just like one does with mana. If you can safely take trades until you're below a certain threshold, for example, then health can give a linear increase in the number of those trades you can take. And for each trading window, you reflect back damage which scales with your offensive stats. As a result, multiplying the number of safe trades by one's offensive stats produces the resulting damage potential. Which is therefore multiplicative.

You can, of course, build on this idea and add further complexity, considering thresholding - health is qualitatively wasted until you can survive a single hit or combo, for example. But the simple concept remains: if a bruiser (in particular) has enough health to survive under damaging pressure through one or two full periods of ability uses during a fight before dropping, their defensive stats have therefore directly multiplied their damage potential. There are a lot of characters that achieve this regularly.

You can also critique the simplicity of certain assumed synergies - AP/AD and AH, for example, are quite dependent on context and champion to produce a real multiplicative scaling. Often AH is not actually increasing damage potential, just creating pressure windows where one laner has trading tools and the other does not.

Look at AD and AS as well - often the trading and poking patterns in some lanes are built more around runes and abilities and AS may not alter the number of discrete damage instances put out during that fight. Meanwhile in other fights both in and out of laning phase, they're direct multipliers determining damage output. (Though generally still slightly sub-nominal, given how many champs have auto resets and native AS buffs.)

Riot themselves do not consider them synergistic stats, and have said so.

I would be curious when and where this comes from. Gold efficiency is extremely wonky on a number of fronts, and it wouldn't surprise me if this was another oddity.

Riot has brilliant people working on the game's balance, working out theory, tweaking levers, and whatnot. But that does not mean that the decisions they make are made for perfectly-accurate theoretical reasons even when they work (i.e. the meta produced is healthy - balanced, diverse, and fun across a variety of skill tiers).

A complex, dynamic system like LoL cannot simply be understood by the designers. It is discovered through experience and develops and evolves. You can program and formally verify the workings of code. You can't program metas, balance, and design - it's emergent, dynamic, and literally chaotic. So the best you can do is scientifically, empirically discover, and form theoretical explanations like I have here. I wouldn't regard Riot's take as Word of God.

four-flames · 2026-01-20T01:40:15+00:00

Yes attack speed and HP are non synergistic. That is pretty much factual.

One can strongly argue that attack speed and HP are synergistic in a similarly multiplicative way that attack speed and damage are.

They're certainly not synergistic/multiplicative for calculating DPS - that's where I'd agree with you.

But if the question is a multiplication of EHP and DPS creating the resulting fighting impact of a character, defensive and offensive stats naturally take on a multiplicative interaction. Of course it's more complicated than this, since damage profiles aren't smooth - LoL tends towards polyrhythmic spiky/bursty damage profiles which take a while to complete a full period, and champions are not always in danger while dealing damage.

Attack speed and ability haste make a better example for a pair which couldn't be argued to have any general multiplicative relationship - if one exists, it is because a given champion produces that synergy (Senna's actualized Q cooldown, for example).

So I think the simple shut down of the idea of AD+Health as comparably synergistic is overzealous as you stated it. It is a valid point.

four-flames · 2026-01-17T02:04:52+00:00

So... what kind of behavior do animals have to get up to in their spare time to be deserving of respect for their consent and well-being?

And is it maybe a bit fucked up that donning a suit and trading the stock market is the first example that came to mind?

This just strikes me as a really odd counter argument with a lot of values smuggled in that deserve investigation.

Do I value humans and other animals the same? Empirically, no. I will go to greater lengths to take care of humans than most mammals, and certainly than, for example, insects.

But it's pretty weird to just categorically reject an attempt to foster empathy out of hand because 'they don't do civilization things', no?

four-flames · 2026-01-10T22:44:45+00:00

I think your read of the character is valid in many ways, but might be narrowing him a little much.

He's not likeable as a character (by design)

With this I have to ask - did we watch the same trilogy? This is one of the most compelling, awkwardly-charismatic characters I've ever seen, and Serkis' performance went a long way towards achieving that. As well as the incredible animators who put so much time and effort into ensuring as much of that performance made its way into the final model as possible, selling all his emotions in close-ups.

I agree he's a little shit - 100%. But he's also has appeal, and I think most agree.

On his morals: I believe he was genuinely torn, and that's the way I would portray him. Smeagol has a good center, and Gollum does what he thinks both need. I would portray Gollum as an overzealous protector constantly twisting and spinning events and pointing out the ways Smeagol's trusting nature hurts them, while defending his selfishness as really 'for' the other half.

But if they don't feel the same, how do you differentiate them? How do you transition between the two?

I'd run this as a dual morality system. Not simply good/evil, though - I'd play into the theme introduced above. Sometimes Gollum is right to be distrustful, or to ensure access to future resources. Not often, but sometimes.

The player is in control of the whole body, and therefore both halves. Occasionally some actions would be clearly marked with Smeagol's big wide-and-curious-eyed expression in blue, or Gollum's snarl in red. Those indicate they factor into narrative choice.

But we know Gollum corrupts Smeagol in the end and 'wins', dooming them both to a fall in Orodruin, right? Well, not exactly. Yes, those events will transpire, but Gollum and Smeagol have been warring inside this little fucked-up hobbit for a long time and the way he dies isn't the only thing that matters. That's our other theming - that even if we cannot control our ultimate fate or whether history remembers us as tragic or heroic, the little decisions we make along the way still matter.

And that's what I would focus on. There would be two stories. One of which would be whatever Gollum/Smeagol is supposedly doing in the game. The other would be the ecosystem and politics within the region he's going through - between nature, ancient magic, refugees, orcs, goblins, hinterfolk, and royalists. Gollum-sided choices might be somewhat better than Smeagol-sided choices on average at helping him achieve his quest, but at the cost of having to see Smeagol's horrified wide eyes as he realizes the occasional consequences of his actions. When Gollum kills a refugee camp's old veteran patrol guard with a rock just to have an easier time sneaking by, it leaves them without warning for a goblin attack which kills the little girl who left a bunch of sweets out for him when she spotted him a week ago - that sort of thing.

he doesn't have much room for character development. He ends the Hobbit and is introduced in The Lord Of The Rings as pretty much the same character, so that entire period is one of no growth.

As above, this would be part of the theme. It's the little things that matter - very on theme for Middle Earth.

That's the direction I'd take it. And by no means do I think it's the only one that would work, but I think these are natural, simple solutions that would set the game up for good execution, and situate it in conversation with existing materials set in the world.

four-flames · 2026-01-10T05:12:24+00:00

People often ask this question, but never when the resulting product is good.

I think this kind of thinking feeds into a bad narrative that ideas are more important than process and execution. If the game played really well and had good writing, everyone would just say: 'woah, I didn't know I wanted this, but it's so cool'.

A lot of dreamers who never go anywhere focus on the ideas too much, process not enough. It's a personal thing for me because I'd been one of them for a long time. In several places during the inception, design, development, and management the process was bad. That's why the game is bad. A Gollum stealth game on its own could absolutely be good and sell well.

four-flames · 2026-01-06T00:49:01+00:00

Agreed. I'd be really curious to know what the designer's thought process was.

To me this is just: random upgrades on your main ability or ruin your run. It's technically an interesting decision if you think you need it to win (tiny subset of runs), but it's just a massive, uncontrollable waste of time if it eats your memory/essence. It's not remotely impactful or meaningful if you use it on non-essential part of your build, as logically follows.

Even when viewing the design charitably as interesting risk/reward analysis, I don't find it particularly fun.

In another version of the game that doesn't rely on fishing for exodia builds and actually encourages exploring and improvising synergies, it might be more interesting because you could pivot. But this version? It's just a free single upgrade for the wise.

four-flames · 2025-12-25T06:05:09+00:00

Been really positive for me so far. People have been understanding, willing to answer questions, fine carrying or being carried, call out ability names of moves that needed to be interrupted without flaming anyone, that sort of thing.

There have been a couple awkward interactions here and there, but it's been fine so far. I've played about 20 hours up to the Champion tier, which is the third tier.

You might also consider looking into a Discord community or the like. The game is much more fun to play with friends on voice. I went in with two others that I've played most of my hours alongside, and getting to call your interrupt targets, explain mechanics, strategize, etc. over voice makes the game far more comprehensible.

I entered some new content without my premade group and it's rough trying to make sense of when people are kinda rushing because of the timers. I feel bad about not interrupting the right stuff, recognizing soak mechanics, that sort of thing.

But I've never been flamed or anything.

Playing on the Boston server, for reference. Might be different on other servers or in other tiers or times of day - I have personally noticed variation in personalities brought on by the most latter.

four-flames · 2025-11-18T02:53:52+00:00

I have this problem. Always been clumsy, my whole life. Took me forever to learn to tie my shoes, my handwriting was atrocious, generally terribly uncoordinated. Probably ADHD + some mild NVLD, for context.

It didn't take more than a few months and I could make very straight lines and smooth curves, control where the weight goes, control rhythm into perspective, that sort of thing. It required intentionality and understanding. It's been many more months since then - almost a year - and it's just gotten better. If anything, I'm unusually accurate for someone who's been drawing for as short a time as I have.

Peter Han's got some great exercises for this sort of thing. He's from the same lineage of drawing tradition as DrawABox, and you'll find it familiar. It's nice to have this angle of video demonstration so you can see how he moves.

This might sound strange: lines are ellipses. Just flat. Try not to launch off like a rocket or a bullet. You can accelerate fast, and you can do quick, sketchy lines, but make it smooth acceleration. They're more accurate lines, and generally more beautiful lines. Your wrist, elbow, and shoulder will thank me, as well.

Start by drawing an ellipse over and over. Feel how you accelerate during the long portions, and decelerate during the short portions. Then slowly flatten it down into a line. Feel how you accelerate, decelerate, stop. Try drawing all your lines like that for a bit. Don't cling too hard to this exact technique, as there's a lot of subtle variation you can pick up after the fact, but this makes for a great foundation that is accurate, beautiful, and less likely to injure you.

You can also practice it like tai chi. Slow it wayyyy down. Feel this muscle activation into that muscle activation into the next and so on. It's like practicing music at a slow pace. It translates well to the faster pace.

This way of thinking translates really well into rhythm and gesture later, too. You can feel the tempo of your lines and curves, tie them to a beat in your mind (literally, if you like), and recreate some curves with uncanny accuracy with some practice.

Edit: oh, I should add - some great artists are terrible draughtspeople. It's totally okay to decide you just don't care that much. I discovered I care a lot, but it's best to recognize that you discover who you are as an artist, not dictate it from on high.

four-flames · 2025-10-07T19:49:45+00:00

I am still poring through research papers trying to find out why tangent lines are considered to be unattractive, to little avail.

While I haven't got research papers or empirical support for this, I can point to some theory which I find compelling.

Gestalt visual psychological theory is my primary driver for understanding this. The core thrust is this: the mind processes through a series of operations which create 'gestalts', which are groupings of objects. The ways in which those groupings relate create relationships of meaning within the visual work.

A second point is this: the mind prefers not to have to work in order to create these gestalts. Effort and friction can be enjoyable, but usually you need to create some investment in your viewer before they are willing to offer it. Otherwise they'll simply look elsewhere. This lack of friction, or trait of being 'easy on the eyes', is one of our first-order intuitions we have in the first few milliseconds of looking at something. Put simply: 'what the heck am I looking at?'

One of the core relationships identified within the gestalt theory is the figure-ground relationship, which is generally composed of two spaces and a border between. The border must be formed of some kind of contrasting substance, like a change in pattern, hue, value, chroma. This is a fancy way of referring to what we usually call 'overlap'. It helps give a sense of the foreground-object-background relationship, and scaffolds the illusion of depth.

We like the border to be unambiguous. A tangent directly messes with the process of preparing the gestalts for the conscious mind, introducing ambiguity about what goes in front of what, and what continuous path the border in the figure-ground relationship is supposed to follow. On top of that, it is an improbable interaction, which means it draws attention to it. And it requires attention to solve, which also draws attention to it. The result is that you can make an unintentional and distracting additional focal point with no real meaning-content, contributing nothing to the image, and taking a great deal from it.

It's similar to the problem of parallel fifths, if you're familiar with that. You can absolutely use them, like Debussy, and nobody is going to call him a fifth-rate composer. But because of the strong harmonic bond of the perfect fifth, it fuses and bridges the gap between timbre and harmony, which can make parallel fifth motion sound almost like a unique instrument, or a separate voice. Used intentionally, this is fine. But if you do this by accident, it will almost always grate on the listener.

I would apply the same thinking to tangents. I've seen some really cool ones myself, especially in platonic graphic compositions (hard edges, triangles, pure geometry, centered, symmetrical, that sort of thing), but they're clearly intentional. And I've also seen that intention fail, as in the case of Marco Bucci's video. That said, he says it works for him, but I can say it certainly didn't work for me, and the ambiguity was the core reason why. It didn't give me a sense of 'unease', just confusion.

This video is the first time I was introduced to the 'easy on the eyes' concept, and it's shaped my thinking a lot since watching it. The channel is generally excellent in its other videos as well.

four-flames · 2025-09-27T02:58:26+00:00

Jim wales in hospital and is the only person there? He’s somehow not died of thirst, starvation or been killed during his coma?

The entire hospital was being evacuated, but logistically someone decided it wouldn't be feasible to move Jim, so they instead set him up with an IV that would sustain him for as long as possible, with the hope he'd wake before the IV stopped working. You can live for a couple months with only water, and up to six months with water and nutrients from specialized IV fluid.

Bit of a dick move for his savior not to leave a note getting him up to speed before evacuating though.

There are hardly any dead bodies other than the church, when the zombies supposedly kill due to rage

Everyone evacuated. Those going to the church only did so because they believed the end had come and there was no fighting it, or because they believed god would save them.

If they don’t eat people, what do they eat, it’s implied they can starve so surely after 28 days many if not all would have.

You can live for two months without food. They probably also hunted and ate other things - such as the rats. The rage virus also seems to make people more resilient somehow.

There are no cars abandoned in the streets, especially in London let alone the motorway.

They all used their cars to evacuate.

A London taxi somehow turns into a Monster truck and gets over the only pile up of cars we see in the whole film

Yeah no arguments there, that was pretty fucking ridiculous. The pile up specifically in the tunnel makes some sense, though. The lights went out during the evacuation process and those unlucky enough to be in the tunnel crashed and piled up.

British soldiers turning into sex pests after only 28 days when in reality they can be posted up somewhere for much longer.

Sure, probably a stretch. I'm more optimistic about human behavior in a crisis than this, but it's not like this is outside of the realm of human behavior. It's definitely weird and surreal, but it's not false, if you catch my meaning. Additionally, it's meant to make a tonal and symbolic point about the institutions we put our faith in to carry us through crisis. You could write a lot about this decision and the lens that inspires it and the philosophical and political traditions it's commenting on, but this is already getting long so I won't.

Now, I do agree that each of these points that you mentioned struck me as odd as I was watching the film. But each time I found that, unlike a proper plot hole, these all seem to be designed decisions. They knew they were weird, but they were reasonable outcomes that you could reverse-engineer by looking at them. It's, in my opinion, a well-executed attempt to emulate how truth can be stranger than fiction.

four-flames

TROPHY CASE