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2 yr. ago

  • Film grain is useful specifically in cases where you're using lighting techniques that have to take a lot of expensive per-pixel samples. If you reduce the number of samples to save on performance, the value doesn't converge and therefore you end up with random noise in your lighting output. Film grain is a compromise that adds random noise everywhere so that the noise in lighting is less noticeable, which looks even worse. Generally it's combined with a sharpening filter that retains hard edges, but if overused it can definitely wash out texture detail.

    Motion blur is useful in cases where you're using temporal effects that gather screen-space data over several frames. These generally look great if the camera stays mostly still, but if the camera is moved a bunch you might end up with "ghosting" as the previous frames' data is used for an incorrect camera position, and motion blur lets that data accumulate before the image is clear enough to spot issues.

    Chromatic aberration is unlike those in that it's not generally covering anything up, it is entirely an artistic effect. I think it can look pretty amazing if used subtly, but much like bloom it can very easily be overused and just get annoying instead. If you're noticing the distinct RGB color banding at the edges it's being used too much. But used right, it can give a lot of flair to bright lights, with a mild bit of hue shift at the edges.

    I don't like motion blur or film grain, I think they're both crutches and look like piss, but to a dev team given limited resources to get a game out the door, they might be the crutch that makes the game shippable. Believe it or not, both of those effects look better than what they're generally covering up. Games are all held together with duct tape and prayers under the hood.

  • There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn't run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.

    That being said, generally I do agree.

  • Yeah as a pretty genderfucky person, people pretty commonly misgender me, and most of the time it's no big deal. It gets pretty easy to tell when it's intentional and when it isn't. As long as people are empathetic and doing their best, it's never a problem personally.

    That being said, many people outside gender norms have sustained a lot of pain over their identity, oftentimes by using pronouns intentionally to out us or otherwise belittle us. The brain maladapts, especially in more serious cases of abuse, and the limbic system takes over to keep us safe - a distinctive characteristic of PTSD. It's taken a long time (still ongoing) for me to heal from that, and lots of queer folks are still too close to active abuse to even begin the process. Any grace that one can lend people in these moments can be monumental in their healing process.

    (editing to say: lmao love me some bugles too)

  • I'm very much the same way. Using everyone's pronouns perfectly, especially among people I don't know well, is a challenge. But all that's been required to get along with queer folks has just been a best effort and willingness to be corrected and move on.

  • Or, y'know, if someone asks me not to call em dude, I just do my best not to. It's a bit simpler

  • Whatever their flaws, as an ex-ruralite I have to disagree that the problem is just stupid rural people being stupid. It's an oversimplification of the problem. Rural communities tend to be more tight-knit, more politically homogenous, and the risks of going against the grain can include ostracization and violence. In places where the church has influence, well-funded youth groups bring kids into a certain view of the world before they even have a chance to see it themselves, and enforce adherence to it through the same ostracization tactics. It's a culture that breeds resistance to change and resentment of the unfamiliar. People caught by this often aren't necessarily stupid, and in fact many, many smart people are victimized by it and then later reinforce it. They've internalized a bunch of ideological poison from a young age, and can't step out of line or support others who step out of line, out of fear of losing their community.

  • Well said. We'd be so much better off if people generally had a better understanding of (c)PTSD. Everyone has a responsibility for how they act, but maladaptation is a hell of a thing and takes lots of time to address, especially when people know these triggers and weaponize them because they want to see you hurt.

  • Yeah, I think that's pretty much all that is generally needed. I've had people assume but ask me first, just asking "she/her?" as a question, I respond yes, we go about our business. If you don't want to assume, you can also pretty much universally use they/them in passing, or if it's someone you interact with more frequently, people really don't tend to mind if you ask.

    I mean I'm trans, I get around quite a bit in queer spaces, I haven't met anyone who would get super mad about initially assuming pronouns rather than just saying "hey I prefer XYZ" and moving on. Generally when people react strongly to being misgendered, it's due to ongoing conflict over their identities, having to deal with people who use pronouns to casually disregard your Identity, familial abandonment, etc. It is often a response to complex trauma from elsewhere. That's not really your responsibility, but I've been there and if you can offer them any grace in those moments, it's extremely helpful.

  • Personally, it's nbd when people slip up - especially people who've known me for a very long time pre-transition. Oftentimes they correct themselves, and I usually feel worse that they feel bad about it. It's pretty easy to tell when it's intentional or not, and I reserve my ire for people who clearly mean disrespect.

    Though, I should say, that's now - early on in transition, it was certainly a bit harder to take. It reminded me of very fresh family abandonment and abuse over my identity. That's not on the people who accidentally called me by the wrong pronoun, but it certainly could put me in a pretty bad place and I'm sure I wasn't the friendliest in those moments. The more that trans folks are supported by their friends and family, the more secure they feel and the less likely they are to react strongly to being accidentally misgendered, imo.

  • I love how divergent those two popular interpretations of AI are, too. One is all Skynet and scary and all-powerful and the other is being refactored for the umpteenth time because navmeshes broke and all the enemies are T-pose floating 10cm in the air.

  • For the person being executed, firing squads are among the most "humane" methods. It's fast, reliable, and simple. It's not common because the brutality of painting someone's brains on the wall is too clear for onlookers.

  • RedLetterMedia on YouTube. They're great! I recommend starting with one of their Wheel of the Worst episodes, those are always fun

  • If you haven't already heard it, I highly recommend Pyre's OST! I'm a little biased, it's one of my favorite games of all time, but I feel the OST especially improves on elements of Bastion/Transistor's soundtracks but with a style all its own.

    also yasssss frozen synapse rules

  • the singular use is so old, when it was first introduced, "they" was still spelled with a fucking thorn!

  • My GF loves One Piece, she started me at just one episode quite a ways in - the one with Bink's Sake - basically just to say "hey look, this story is actually going somewhere". Then we started at like episode 60 or so and kept watching from there - it's definitely a lot rougher, but I'm hooked enough now to watch it with her!

  • You start out in 2005 by saying "t----- t----- t-----." By 2023, you can't say t----. That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, parents' rights, bathrooms, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about nicknames, and all these things you're talking about are totally superficial things and a byproduct of them is, queer folks get hurt more than cishets... "We want to know about kids' nicknames" is much more abstract than even the parents' rights thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "t------ t------ t-------."

  • Sticks and stones may break my bones, and single words here and there won't hurt me, but en masse they normalize an attitude of supremacy and derision toward folks that super don't need any more. No snowflake thinks they caused the avalanche, but lots of us have to live with the consequences of this in daily life regardless. Shock value slurs are also just... tired and played out at this point. Whatever humor they had at one point doesn't really land in the same way anymore.

  • me n the trans catgirl polycule reading lambda calculus whitepapers like :3

  • No True Scotsman doesn't really make sense without an effort to define what a Scotsman is in the first place. What feminism are we talking about? Are we so caught up on labeling people as feminists and misandrists that we've stopped talking about underlying ideas or caring about the internal conflicts within that camp?

    As someone who's queer as hell, I've seen this play out time and time again - someone who's queer does something terrible, (because we're just people, a mix of good and bad) the media plays up that incident and re-stokes the debate over whether or not we get to exist, then people in my life suddenly look to me as somehow responsible or associated with or benefiting from that person's actions, simply due to the labeled association. Truth is, I only have direct insight into people I'm close to, queer or no. And so when I express my lack of political or personal connection with that person, it's perceived as No True Scotsman, even though the original perceived connection was shaky at best.

    As with all groups of people, take feminists as a mixed bag of people with varying ideas, who aren't all responsible for what everyone else thinks. We're all better off expressing ideas one-on-one rather than playing to these tribal labels. I think you are absolutely correct in that some rhetoric employed in service of feminism has alienated a sector of young men, but we can't forget how media paints persecution narratives out of single tweets and snappy hot takes and holds everyone who labels themselves a feminist responsible.