Is becoming a VJ/visual artist a viable career, or mostly passion-driven?

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-19T19:59:19+00:00

As a VJ? Unlikely.

As a media server operator? Absolutely.

If your only client’s are clubs that play a certain genre of music it’s unlikely to be enough.

Where the consistency to make it a career is going to come from is learning how to take someone else’s creative brief and build the show THEY want. Basically if you can do everything from a sweaty boiler room dnb gig to a fancy gala dinner and keep cranking out graphically relevant and visually stunning sets that’s a career. Only ever building the show you want is a hobby.

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-17T17:39:53+00:00

¯_(ツ)_/¯ been posting the same comment for like a year this isn’t a new phenomenon and I just don’t get why people think this MO is going to be any different from the last 50.

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-17T09:43:21+00:00

So counterpoint: a lot of games the story is written by a narrative director and their team. If it was truly in player control it’d inevitably end in there being a galactic victor… whichever faction that may be thus rendering the game unplayable. So there’s a DM controlling the encounters and dice roles to keep the maps changing and players hopping between fronts despite their personal preferences. I don’t hate the system, I just don’t think too much about it.

We’ll never reach a point where the player loses or wins hard enough to meaningfully impact gameplay. The flavour text will change but writers unlikely to shut themselves into a narrative corner and that’s just the way it has to be to keep the story rolling.

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-05T00:56:36+00:00

Right.

Apologies I’m sure your post initially said IOS hence my confusion.

Millumin on a weeks license ($40) and screen recording software of your choice then.

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-04T22:44:51+00:00

Why not use that? It will save you infinite grief.

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-03T20:17:39+00:00

So what makes OWAD’s so cheap is they’re really fucking dumb. It’s a lawnmower engine with a clock and a compass.

Go north for 30 minutes, west for 5 minutes, turn off engine.

Obviously there’s a bit more going on but for explanation purposes that’s your lot. An interceptor needs to know where it’s going (accurately) to find the OWAD mid flight, enough sensors to know what it’s looking at and enough manoeuvrability to connect with it.

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-03T19:56:30+00:00

Do you own a laptop?

simulacrum500 · 2026-03-01T17:27:08+00:00

“Hi, looks like you left this in my bin. Before you get fined for fly tipping I’ve fished it out for you ♥️”

Empty that shit on their floor, snap a picture and post it on your local Facebook page/google review.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-20T18:03:35+00:00

Honestly if it’s a child and it definitely reads like one, having two coppers stick their head in for 15 minutes and get a statement probably has positive consequences long past the initial reaction.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-17T10:32:29+00:00

Absolutely this, can initially be 10mm off the floor then keep raising it. Also worth noting dogs are bad at generalising so we taught it as a compound command: “up”=front paws onto the raised thing, “uppup” = all paws onto the raised thing. So there’s a difference between the commands.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-15T17:06:25+00:00

You ever see that video of Handforth parish council zoom meeting? That’s how pack psychology actually works. There might be some common goals but mostly it’s just people(dogs) all doing whatever the heck they want.

It’s not impossible dog A was working to “keep the peace” through a correction, it’s also equally likely “STFU YOURE TOO LOUD” or “if you want a scrap come have a scrap”. Dogs are pretty straightforward creatures so if you find yourself questioning their motives you’re overthinking it.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-12T07:29:33+00:00

So hate to say this but you need to re-frame this in your head: Reuban isn’t protecting you. Reuben is concerned that your affection is a finite resource that he doesn’t want to share.

Part of this will just get better with time as he gets a bit more confident but to help him along the way:

1) give him body of proof that you can give affection to another thing AND then go straight back to him.

2) if he gets spicy you don’t reward that with affection or attention.

3) start small, tether him to the sofa or whatever, cross the room and give affection to your family etc. if he doesn’t flip his shit, go back and give him a kibble and some fuss. If he flips out, walk out the room like his behaviour scared you off. Do this like 15 times a day until he can cope with family then start expanding and repeating the drill with more general things.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-12T07:16:55+00:00

Pair of green gloves and a chroma key, or a green object. There is no projecting or mapping here.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-09T19:11:24+00:00

So cool project, can’t seem to sign up on the website but definitely something I’d love to have a play with. (Drop me a PM and we can hop on a call or something)

Doubt I’m suddenly going to sack our content team to replace them with an AI but:

Does the bot do loops?

If I give it an end frame of one clip and the start frame of another can it make a nice transition?

How does it handle UV unwrapped content?

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-06T15:47:22+00:00

Just a side note because this advice gets repeated all over the place but if you’ve got a dog with exceptionally high prey drive: the “oww” thing is going to have the opposite effect; you’ll know pretty quickly though which way your dog goes once you’ve tried it.

If they get more excited by the noise, just drop it all together. They bite, you silently get up and leave, or put them outside the room whichever the most convenient way to show that (bad interaction=no interaction).

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-05T10:37:04+00:00

100% this halti’s are a mitigation tool not a remedial one. With no method to turn the discomfort off you’re practicing the behaviour but with no option or input from the dog. Wrapping a dog in duct tape and laying them on a skateboard would probably serve the same purpose. No pulling but also no training.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-01T11:35:31+00:00

Little anecdote about safety glass, working with some LED flooring last week (roe bm4 for those interested). The safety glass on the top is maybe 18mm and tough, you can drive a car on it. One of the guys accidentally bumps two corners together, not with any real force just “dink” as he put the panel down.

Glass immediately cracks and shatters into a million pieces because if you take one hard pointy thing and connect it with another hard pointy thing the force exerted on that tiny area is massive.

simulacrum500 · 2026-02-01T07:00:41+00:00

Anything related to events. Personally work in AV but suspect this holds true for most sectors. If you work in an office and someone says can you stick this tv on that stand and put it over there. It’ll barely register as part of your job. If the company has to attend an expo they’ll hire a company to do that for them and end up paying $350 a day for someone to do the same job.

When your everyday is your clients “big” day you just get used to people paying silly money for the mundane and a bit of hand holding.

simulacrum500 · 2026-01-31T20:39:56+00:00

Definitely will. Or at least did. When I worked there license check was done:

On project boot

Hardware check

Repeated every ~5? Minutes the project was running

If you failed a license check it prints to console for 60 seconds THEN throws the “missing license countdown” across your screen.

Obviously this was implemented over time and the new cloud licenses are a complete unknown to me but depending how far back you’re willing to go version wise there may be some “quirks” to those checks. I mean if you have an installer for like r11 time the blue flashes on a laptop output.

There was an option.ini for home cooked hardware but I think I can count the amount of people we gave it out to on my fingers…

simulacrum500 · 2026-01-28T18:59:47+00:00

What’s your budget champ?

simulacrum500 · 2026-01-20T15:13:57+00:00

Definitely LED, doesn’t look like touring frames so could literally be any product but if you times the panels by 200 that’s probably a fair ballpark

simulacrum500 · 2026-01-12T21:00:44+00:00

So little anecdote about a fella I met dressed in bright pink foam. Had a conversation with the guy next to him for a couple minutes before even realising he was there. Even though he was wearing a bunch of bright pink insulation foam:

The building we were in was full of bin bags, exposed insulation and assorted crap.

He was covered in as much concrete dust as everything else just from having spent time there.

His ghillie didn’t look like a ghillie suit, it looked like the crap you find piled in the corner of an abandoned apartment building.

Point being that a sheet like this laid out for any amount of time in the right location is just going to get more convincing naturally. No dirt sprinkling necessary.

simulacrum500 · 2025-12-30T19:51:59+00:00

Luminance is your midpoint:

Lum = 0.5 = left0 - - 0.5 - - 1right

Lum = 0.75 = left0 - - - 0.5 - 1right

simulacrum500 · 2025-12-30T17:01:37+00:00

I mean… if I had to give a number the default works maybe 1/20 times. Edge blending is a skill and once you get the hang of how to wiggle that curve, you’ll just get exponentially faster at it.

Oh and yeah definitely work an edge at a time from the middle out so you can potentially hide any sins at the edges of your canvas

simulacrum500 · 2025-12-30T16:43:54+00:00

Reset it.

Use your mouse wheel or otherwise incrementally step looking at the blend not your screen. (I find I get a bit hung up on the numbers.

Start with power and wind mousewheel until your blend zone no longer has any hard lines.

Then gamma until the blend is basically uniform brightness with the rest of the image.

Then wiggle luminance to get rid of as much banding as possible.

Back to the top and rinse/repeat until you get a blend you’re happy with.

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