Now what ah say WHAT is the big idea?! I toldja ya had no business on a farm an now lookit Watcha done! Don't fly away while I'm talking sister. Now whaddya gon do about that there grass fire, huh?! There's a RED FLAG Warnin' an the Fire Marshalls goin' ta have ya wrapped up so many fines ya could run em down ta da ole dry aquifer an back sev-er-al times over!!

Did I do the current Foghorn Leghorn joke right? Wanted to sketch Foghorn leghorn because I remembered her was my favorite as a kid, but also wanted to sketch @putuksstuff's Wasp for that Wasp Wednesday.

Thanks for this!!

Wasp Wednesday #050

Stunned!!

Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.

There's a particular quality to early-to-mid Homestuck that I really loved when I first read it, but which I tend to forget when thinking about the story retrospectively.

This quality of like . . . taking pre-established elements, and building larger structures out of them. And then repeating this recursively, as these larger structures now become "pre-established elements" unto themselves.

A camera zooming further and further out from the same central point, "Powers of Ten"-style.

----

Homestuck is initially about the process of playing "Sburb," a fictitious base-building computer game.

The vast majority of comic pages in first 4 Acts are either about a character doing something in this game, or (if they are not yet a player) attempting to obtain and install it.

Everything else is secondary, at least formally, to this core activity. The main characters are always playing Sburb (or at least trying to), no matter what else they're doing. Dialogue is presented as a temporary side-stream overlaid onto the game; the characters play in silence unless they need to talk, and when they do talk, it's usually about the game.

This quality appears in the mechanics of Sburb. It's a game about combining things you have to make new ones ("alchemy"); about constructing a building by continually extending it at the edges; about making a tower that gets taller and taller, building on a pre-established foundation, using new components made from earlier ones.

And it appears, less literally, in the mechanics of the story. An element is introduced -- casually, weightlessly, accidentally -- and once introduced, it sticks. It gets brought back again and again, in a series of bigger and weirder riffs.

(John lived in a house, which we spent some time surveying. In the process, we learned about his father, who was his only caretaker. So now everyone has a single caretaker, and everyone lives in a house which we spend some time surveying. But with every iteration, the houses get bigger, the surveys grander, the caretakers more bizarre.)

Whimsical elements introduced very early on, like the "kernelsprite prototyping" mechanic, end up very deeply baked into everything. There's a palpable joy to the way the comic handles these things. A joy in doing something on a whim, and then committing completely to the bit, indefinitely; a joy in making mountains shaped like molehills.

This kind of dims away in the later, more "plot-heavy" portions that loom larger in my memory. There's a similar vibe to the way the plot elaborates upon itself, even much later on, but we lose this dynamic on the micro-level.

Reminds me of this video that analyzes Homestuck's worldbuilding in the context of computer science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07wQAYS3rCk

Homestuck is an example of what I once heard described in a senior seminar as “database-driven” narrative, as opposed to a more traditional linear narrative. Narrative information exists in a database format (i.e., every kid has a guardian, an instrument, a funny fake name, etc.) and much of the narrative is driven by the listing and collation of this information.

for those of you who have not heard of Roger Dean, I am showing you Roger Dean's art now. it's really good, he did a lot of album covers in the 1970s. James Cameron made some famous movie about blue space cat people that lifted pretty heavily from some of Dean's paintings and then was pretty crummy about properly acknowledging it

ART TRADE with @dim-widdy!

I think there's something wrong with this record; it's got this weird buzzing sound to it...

an art trade with the lovely (if evil) @putukdraws!

Wasp Wednesday #048

Watch out below!

exquisite creature chilling under some gumtree bark.

Unknown Cockroach (genus Methana).

Climb time! Feat. @bowelfly's magnificent weevzard, Quercus

Spiders? Hate them but see their use. Mosquitoes? Begrudgingly acknowledge that they like... feed bats. But can anyone explain what the fuck ticks are doing that's helpful??? Because frankly I'm not convinced they're doing anything nice for anyone

ticks are a massive source of protein for the many many creatures that eat them, same as mosquitos. they're integral to the food chain.

also, parasites of all kinds are incredibly important to ecosystems for many reasons: they help keep populations- especially of large herbivores and predators- low and healthy, they help individuals develop immune strength, and they are often integral parts of their food webs.

much of life is parasitic. it's a very successful life-plan and food strategy. dont hold it against them: blood is a really nutritious food and the creatures they target (generally) have a lot of it. it's not their 'fault' they have the capacity to carry even smaller parasites/diseases. that's just how life is

Deer is big creature, has microbe community inside it making it super good at digesting plant, turning plant into easy nutrients.

Small creatures would like nutrients. Deer is too big to eat, hoards all the nutrients. RUDE! Not everybody can be a wolf! Not fair :(

Tick bites deer. Tick takes tiny bit of deer's blood, falls off deer. Tick now contains deer's nutrients

Small creature eats tick. Nutrients in deer go into small creatures.

In this way, deer can become food for spiders, birds, lizards, beetles, ants. It couldn't happen without ticks. They are the portable snack packs of the forest

And not even just when they get eaten by something else, either! The tick also excretes waste and molts an old exoskeleton several times in its life, if it lays eggs then the babies leave thousands of old eggshells behind, and if it evades all possible predators it still eventually dies of old age. One way or another all those deer proteins are recycled by the many ticks, flies, gnats, lice and fleas living and dying for countless generations during the Deer's comparatively tremendous lifespan. It's easy to think of vertebrates like us as just the default neutral citizens of our planet, but the vast majority of life on Earth is microscopic and very short lived. Even a squirrel is on the larger and longer-lived end of our planet's biota, demolishing habitat and hoarding food that would have otherwise been used by millions of tinier lives. So humans might look at a squirrel's parasites and see a bloodthirsty plague torturing a sweet little woodland critter, but in the eyes of nature, they're the ones who evolved to stand up to a gluttonous dragon.

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

Recently I been slowly trying to learn gamedev stuff 'cuz I wanna make a small lil' platformer game.

Following tutorials is rough if you got zero context for any of this stuff so far. If anyone knows a good Godot tutorial, I'd really appreciate it.

I don’t know any specific tutorials, but when learning new game engines what always works for me is just start making a game and see what problems you run into and how to solve them

Ideally make a simple game like snake, flappy bird or pop-the-lock. So you don’t need to worry about game design, and when you do feel confident you can start making the game

I don’t recommend those hour long step by step tutorials for how to make flappy bird, since you just forget a lot of crucial steps so easily, it can be a handy reference, but you (or at least I) aren’t thinking during those tutorials so you don’t learn

So if you’d like to do this too: I recommend you choose a simple game you like, make a list of all the stuff you’d need Godot to do for you in order to make this game playable (display stuff on screen, read inputs, translate inputs to moving), and then start googling them one at a time! I don’t know how much information there is about Godot online, but if you struggle finding some function you’re sure Godot should have then you can also try asking ChatGPT just to get vocabulary needed to find a good tutorial (I do that a lot for Unreal since it assumes you have have read and perfectly memorised all unreal documentation) but don’t use it for code! Then you’re back into the trap of not thinking for yourself! (Plus it sucks at it)

And I think that’s all! I hope you have a good time creating good times for others!

(And if there’s anything else feel free to ask! I’m a game design student so most of my knowledge is on that, but I’m always happy to help!)

I appreciate the feedback! For now I'm gonna follow those step by step tutorials for one simple reason: It gives me context on game engine/programming stuff. Currently, I got none, but by doing, I'll gain insight.

After that, I'll learn more fundamental things about the engine.

And then, I'll see if I can put together a proof-of-concept and see how it goes from there.