Happy Pride Month Maybe I’ll Start Watching Doctor Who Again

The Last Stand by David Ok

Fun fact: the skitarii are so radioactive that every organic lifeform that they "save" will end up dying of terrible cancers sometime later!

I'm still new to Warhammer 40k, and I have gotten attached to two unit types that seem to be very prone to death (kriegers and skitarii), and I'm not sure if it's just coincidence and I have the tastes of a factually inaccurate lemming, or if it is so that everyone in the 40k universe is very prone to dying.

I want a womb tattoo

Uhh exCUse me??

I taught my boyfriend how to play Magic The Gathering and Ive never beaten him :(( I'm not even good at my alternative gratification activity anymore!!!!!!!!

sure, that transfem might not be very good at sex, but she can totally beat your ass at yugioh, and those two activities are practically synonymous for her at this point.

Funeralopolis is a dread-filled apocalyptic body horror game where you discover a strange crack in your kitchen wall!

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows)

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Artwork by Gina Iacob

Today's budget commander sleeper is one that was already featured in our series on Wilds of Eldraine, but I feel like this is the most underrated card in the set for commander, so it gets a standalone post, this card should see play beyond decks that want tapping effects.

In limited, the crown is excellent by virtue of being a tapper. Having something that removes an attacker from combat every turn at instant speed and isn't easy to remove as an artifact is stellar there. You almost never want to cash it in for card draw because it's doing its tapping job.

In commander, this dynamic flips on its head. Tapping one thing is a nice upside on the card, will keep you alive sometimes, but not something you'd use a slot in most decks for. However, the sacrifice ability scales with the number of players, it takes into account the tapped creatures of every opponent. This is really good. For a total of six mana, payable in installments, on the typical board, you should be able to draw reliably what, three to six cards? Given that the tapping is free on your turn, you can even tap an additional creature before cracking it, netting you an extra card, and if you wait before cracking it, you can pay 1 to tap a creature at end step then crack it on your turn for card draw.

Now, is it the best card draw ever? No, but as far as mass card draw effect, this beats almost everything in red and white, and a good bunch of Black's too. And you incidentally get a tapping effect while you wait on your big card draw spell, which is quite an upside.

If you want a mass card draw effect to refuel your hand outside of blue (and green), at mid-power tables that often have a lot of creatures running around, take another look at this card. It's relatively easy to deploy early and cash in later, or in the late game just cast as a mass card draw spell.

Oh, and it's a 3-drop, which means sun titan, Sevinne's Reclamation and Goblin Engineer are all able to grab it back for more card draw if you want to. It's currently under half a dollar, the set has only been out for a month, and I already got three copies that all found homes in decks that wanted one among my collection

I bought a pretty circlet today. My husband says it makes me look like an elf :)) I love it!

I also bought a Jester's cap. It is Black&White and has annoying bells and I will be wearing it to Dungeons & Dragons sessions!

Been reading a book over the last few days called 'How To Think Like A Woman' by Regan Penaluna. I've never been so inspired and also angered by someone else's writing before. I feel so inspired by Penaluna's writing and memoir, as well as the stories of the women she's recounted so far as I've read. What upsets me is how blind I've been to 2000+ years of nearly every major philosopher you've ever heard of being a massively misogynistic prick, and how that's affected civilization as a whole. No matter how much good they may have done for philosophy, politics, etc, what's been hidden from history classes are their vitriol-saturated opinions of women. Despite being hidden from modern eyes in order to keep the good moral image of these philosophers in proper condition, they still had massive impacts on the culture of their day and decades or centuries into their future. For my whole life I had this kind of blasé attitude to Philosphy like it was just a bunch of dudes theorizing about the nature of life, and while it is that (simplified), it is also very dangerous because these philosophers (VERY OFTEN MALE) would hold wide influence over many and their ideas became the basis for communities and civilization moving forward. Their grand plans for humanity and their ideals that humanity should strive for were really only meant to prop up the egos of men, and to keep women subservient.

One of the things that stuck with me and bothered me most was this notion that seemed to be a commonality between many of these "great thinkers", which was - "It is virtuous for a woman to be silent, but not for a man, a man should always speak his mind."

That one kinda killed me a bit. To shared that near carbon-copied sentiment over the course of centuries, misogynist philosopher begeting misogynist philosopher for 2 millenia and some change. It kills me a bit inside. It makes me angry.

What does it mean to become radicalized?

Alright! Let's actually talk about this waterfall thing. It is an amazing showcase of many things that I adore from late 90s graphics. I am replicating this in Blender, through mere observation of the final game, so some things might not be exactly accurate to what the PS1 does.

First off, this is what I started off with, straight from the Noesis exporter into Blender.

"Looks boring!" "What are those weird gradient quads?!" Oh we'll talk about those too, don't worry.

Let's start simple, figuring out the Layers.

We've got the base level geometry, then two layers of water, each with a different texture.

Let's focus on the bottom Water layer first. A waterfall's water falls, and the age old trick to replicate that behaviour is to scroll the texture along the mesh by offsetting the texture coordinates every frame.

Simple enough. Not too convincing yet.

Let's do the same with the other layer.

Look at it goooo!

An often-used trick to enhance the waterfall effect is to increase the distance between vertices (or squash texture coordinates) as the geometry goes down.

This affects the scrolling velocity for the texture in each section, making it look like gravity is accelerating the water.

MGS pulls yet another trick on top of that:

Vertices are subtly animated to oscillate, making the water flow seem more irregular.

It seems to be something similar to what is done to geometry when the camera goes underwater in the docks or vents area.

One opaque layer of water on top of another is no good.

Alpha Blending is an expensive technique and it'd not give the desired effect.

Additive Blending is used instead. The lower layer is rendered first, the second layer is then rendered on top, adding the color values together.

Now we get to talk about those weird quads.

They are darkening gradients! Instead of using Additive Blending, they do the opposite, the color value from the texture is subtracted from the scene that was rendered below, effectively creating shadowed areas.

Who needs HBAO+ anyway?

Lighting pass!

I just threw a few point lights to try and replicate the original vibes of the scene.

MGS, instead, uses lighting information baked into the vertices of the scene to create this mood. And what a mood it is!

Here's an additional example of the same techniques used in the bottom part of the same scene. Although the game seems to be rendering that water mesh as (almost?) completely opaque, there is an actual floor mesh under it.

There, I fixed this post. If you enjoy my posts, shit or not, consider supporting me on Ko-fi, I will appreciate it a lot 💞: https://ko-fi.com/parametricpalta