#add the tags together—you've still got an essay.

[aeide-thea]

[as long as i’m feeling late-night chatty, i figure i may as well give my tag spiral from earlier its own post, bc i’m realizing it got cut off, and in any case was lengthy enough that it’s probably easier to engage with this way—]

#anyway as i said before i get that we all *feel* more distractible #and i'm inclined to think that's true to some extent—certainly the more i read short-form tumblr posts #instead of longer-form articles or books #the less practice i'm getting at engaging with longer-form narratives #in much the same way that a great deal of close reading has made my eyes physically worse at focusing farther away

#but like—i've always wanted constant stimulus. #when i was growing up i had my nose constantly in a book‚ even when i was walking down the street. #these days i scroll through my phone. it's the same impulse. #if i didn't have internet access i expect i'd shift back to the patterns i grew up with. #maybe those were better; maybe it's value-neutral. #i'm not convinced the golden age of extended attention span was as real as people make out—some of us had adhd before we had internet! #and people have always sought diversion—it used to be that you'd see people on the subway with their noses in newspapers‚ before smartphones were a thing.

#and i think that frankly the panic about attention span gets too general #in the sense that like—if something compelling is in front of me‚ i remain capable of engaging with it. #i can spend hours talking to a friend on the phone‚ or out riding my bike. #so really i think it's a question of like—in what specific areas do we find ourselves dissatisfied with our capacity for attention? #and then what are we doing to address that?

#i do think that specifically my readiness to engage with new long-form writing is less than it was when i was a child #but i think that's a product of (a) having other things to read that take less activation energy #and (b) not being enrolled in e.g. english classes that are asking me to read non-genre fiction #which was‚ if i'm being honest‚ the impetus for a great deal of my more ~literary~ reading growing up. #so like. i could join a book club. i could take a book to a coffee shop and leave my phone at home. #there are specific actions i could take to address this specific issue instead of just engaging in generalized overblown despair. #but like. that isn't a Sexy Unified Theory. that won't sell or go viral.

#but like. clearly i continue to be capable of focusing in on projects—just look at the many words i've assembled in this post and its tags! #so i just think like. we need to define the nature and scope of the issue better—once we get specific‚ solutions start to present themselves. #but we have to believe that we're capable of implementing them. which we're less likely to believe‚ if we're nodding along at disquisitions on How Big Tech Fucked Us Up!

a modest assertion: Big Tech has its agenda; we have our own. we are capable of structuring our lives around our own interests and values‚ rather than the interests and values of corporations. like—not to be constantly le guin-posting, but: any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. but the more we marinate in our own feelings of damagedness—which includes ‘reading thinkpieces that seem to confirm those feelings’—the less alive we become to our own capability, and our own capacity for change. in other words: maybe the real thief of our attention was the johann hari we uncritically lapped up along the way.

[laylabahiti]

HSHQTASK059: FAREWELL SEE YOU LATER!

when did you join ? what made you join ? what do you remember from the plotlines that were current at the time ? where were you in life when you joined and where are you now ?

i joined september 2016 when this was vikrp! i was a junior in college and had been writing indie rp for a minute before that kinda died down, so i took a peek at the tags. vikrp/haisociety/highsociety had the pairs aspect to it back then, so i fulfilled someone's jade thirlwall wc but they went inactive like right after i was accepted asjdfka. i believe the revamp to haisociety happened in december/january, truly a time to be alive. i started as a junior back then and i'm ending as a junior in my second bachelor's degree💀, a homeowner, and within the next couple years, i'll be married and have a kid*. *tbd when we're both done with school and onto other careers

which characters have you written over the years ?

layla, cameron (early days), tobias (early days), katalina, gabriel, mikolas, alaina, dmitri, juliana, ettore, emerson, tamiko, kaira

what is your favourite plotline that you've been part of ?

too many to choose from! tbh the aslan/layla/olivier triangle was fun just because of the silly ic drama it caused. i'm pretty sure it was during haisociety when i messaged e about layla/olivier, because layla has the "he helped me, i love him" mentality and we just went with it askdfa, not really planning anything or knowing what would come of it. also love the egypt plotline and anytime those siblings interacted. and the early days of barbie and layla's friendship, how barbie pretty much took layla under her wing and got her out of her shell.

what about other people's plotlines ?

definitely the chaos of england and the murder mystery event. if i remember any more i'll edit this jaksdf

who is your favourite character from the ones you've played ? why ? what made you love them ? what made them so fun to write ?

no surprise here but layla. in the early days, layla was meek to the point she hardly spoke, took everything literally, and asked too many questions. she developed her voice and learned to be a little selfish in the later years, but she's still a crier.

if you could relive a plotline, which would it be ?

the greek invasion. it might have been one of the most well-constructed events i have been a part of. i remember traveling during it and writing replies on my phone just so i didn't miss out. every character was affected one way or another, and that event was a turning point in layla's personality.

is there a plotline that you'd edit now if you could ?

i wouldn't necessarily say edit, but it'd be interesting to see how things would've panned out if layla kissed olivier back and still felt guilty enough to tell aslan.

what's a plotline you wish you would have been able to finish before closing or just write more of ?

egypt<3 getting to see amon's coronation and both of them trying to rectify the family's image. life got way too chaotic over the past year, but i love mine and lina's headcanons

what is your favourite ooc memory ?

late 2018, someone kept sending rude/hateful anons to muns and the main, and everyone banded together to keep hshq alive and well. i submitted a whole essay to the main with my comments not thinking the admins would actually post it and they DID, 2018 was an interesting time here. also in the early days when we started listing how all characters were connected and making full circles of connections, simpler times.

where can others find you if they want to get in touch ?

you can always reach me on discord! i'm in the hshq server so feel free to add me or message anytime. i have a few socials if you want those as well - if this is farewell, you've earned my real name ajkdlfj. tbh this is probably my tumblr exit, i don't have much time or mental capacity to write full threads and join something new, but this blog will remain.

what else would you like to say ?

hshq is truly the only reason i've stuck around tumblr this long. almost 8 years of my life has been spent communicating with you all! in some of my worst moments, i was able to turn to hshq and escape reality for a bit. i feel like i'm missing a lot but trying to dig up memories from 8 years ago is difficult lol.

[ballyblee]

ok not to add on to an already long post but i was having a hard time consolidating my thoughts in the tags so here's an essay

tldr; it's the shading (cel vs. soft) i think and also pokemon is the most valuable franchise and has no excuse

i've been staring at these pictures for a while now. just trying to figure out what exactly it is that makes these feel wrong. i think it's finally hit me that it's the shading?

[note: i'm no professional artist, i'm in college and i'm still learning. also i'm going to mostly just reuse the same pictures from before (so i don't have to hunt down new ones and because these are the ones made me realize it)]

here's a quick resource for the difference between cel shading and soft shading! and if you're too lazy to click the link, here's a picture comparing them from the site:

soft shading is generally for paintings, cel shading is generally for cartoons. (obviously this is not the rule, just an observation) (also bonus: for a long time i thought it was cell shading with two Ls because the blobs used to make shadows are cell-shaped. it is actually cel shading with one L because it comes from the material they used to use for animations called celluloid. source)

anyways, pokemon.

i noticed that in the pictures that were definitely pulled from the 3D art, the shading blended together oddly compared to its previous counterparts. you could argue that it's simply an artistic choice, but they didn't carry that across the board. here's fuecoco:

if you look at the shadow lines across the middle section of his belly or on his tongue, you can see that it is pretty crisp. there's no giant gradient blending the shadow in. on the other hand, the highlights on his hands and knee clearly have uneven brush strokes. these still come across as rounded objects. you can compare them to the harsh highlight lines of his toenails. (claws? foot decor? i don't know) this was the first official gen 9 2D art released, so they established a long time ago that they were using cel shading still.

point 1: the orbs

speaking of rounded objects, let's look at lokix's face. it's an orb. funnily enough, we've got plenty of orbs to compare to from previous pokemon. so here's a side-by-side of lokix's face with tentacruel's head orbs. (warning: i will be saying the word orb a lot. it's what the dex entries say and i don't know what else to call them.)

the blending in the dark center of lokix's face is different from tentacruel's orbs. lokix's face is blended into itself in the exact center, while tentacruel's orbs have a sharp-edged circle that is slightly offset. the two small highlight circles on lokix do not sell the "shiny, hard shell" effect, especially when compared to the bright circles on tentacruel. even still, the larger highlight circle is blended into the base color of lokix's face, making it less like a shine and more like a highlight. lokix is supposed to be shiny - he's got an exoskeleton. look at literally any bug ever and the first thing you notice is how hard and shiny and reflective it is.

point 2: the grabbers

oh look, more rounded objects. (hint, this is a really good way to tell imo) here's a comparison of tentacruel's tentacles versus toedscruel's (in this chunk i'm going to call them tenta and toeds because their names are so similar):

maybe you've also noticed. not all highlights are created equal. tenta's has long brush strokes and a harsh line between light and midtone. compare that to poor toeds. he's got a perfectly circular highlight that blends completely into the midtone. it's not nearly as dramatic or aesthetically pleasing as tenta's. also, you can see tenta's start to follow along the length of his tentacle, a thing that doesn't happen on toeds. it makes for not just a less interesting design, but one that has less energy - not a thing people really want in their art.

point 3: the lines?

in the kindest way possible. what are these lines. you can really see them in the grayscale image. there's just. lines of light. that cut across baxcalibur's body. there's no dimension to them to make it seem like he's round. they just. are these streaky lines. i don't even know what to say about this because it's genuinely just so confusing to me. they show up in some of the other 3D-to-2D pieces, too - i.e. scroll back up to the full body lokix.

ok, the art's weird. so what?

everyone makes mistakes, nobody's perfect, etc. sometimes art is just weird. maybe the company ran out of time to hand draw all of the pokemons' official art and this is simply a faster alternative that gets the job done. who cares?

pokemon is the most valuable franchise in the entire world. it's got a chokehold on just about every single person who was a child anywhere from 1996 to now. it has legs in video games, trading card games, tv shows, kids toys, even like. the travel industry. pokemon makes money.

so why couldn't they hire an artist to draw these?

why couldn't they have postponed the release of the game/art until everything was completed?

they would have lost... not enough money to make that much of an impact. however, they knew that this would be enough for them to get by. they knew that this was acceptable, and acceptable still sells as long as it's got the pokemon logo on it.

we as a whole are okay with settling with less. the more we become okay with poor quality, the less pokemon as a company will try. the more quality goes down, the more quantity goes up. the more quantity goes up, the more quality is lowered in every aspect, not just the 2D art. that's why SV feels so cheaply made at times. because it was.

maybe you're okay with the quality being bad and the games being fun for you. but the people who are creating this game - and i mean actually creating, not the people who sit and delegate tasks all day but the people who are writing and drawing and sculpting and coding and everything else - they are going to be so incredibly overworked. (and we all know they definitely aren't getting paid enough) you can already see the bits and pieces of people wanting to care in SV - clearly this story is so well thought out and these characters bring a depth and personality to everything they are a part of. however, it is undeniably faulty because these creators were clearly pushed to get this game out before christmas. even now, these 2D artists ended up having to copy 3D sprites so they could meet the deadline.

personally, i'd rather have a game that people care about and are allowed to take the time to care about it than a game every 6 months. i say this as someone who has cared about pokemon for more than half of their life.

I’ll be bringing this up in my coming review of Spidops but some of the official artwork looks directly traced (or even auto-generated, with a few touch-ups) from the in-game models and it damn near hurts my soul. The artwork is the “real face” of a Pokemon and typically has more personality than the 3d graphics, because the drawings and the models exist for different purposes. The models are made to function in a 3d animated game. The drawings are made to look good and represent the character. THIS DOES NOT LOOK GOOD, and it’s glaringly cheap for something that over a hundred artists on my dash every day could have done better. As I’ll also be repeating in the Spidops review, its tcg card shows how much personality its design is capable of conveying:

[neuxue]

I was looking back at the TEotW live blog entries and I noticed the distinct shift in authorial quality from then to now, which made me curious as to what goes into creating a chapter of the live blog at this stage? You've evidently solidified your style over the years, and it would be nice to know how much effort goes into something we enjoy. Thank you for your work, and I promise Sanderson gets better at writing Mat.

Ha, yeah, I’m a little afraid to ever look at the early posts again because I’ll probably want to crawl under a rock and die of shame, but hopefully they’re at least entertaining…and hopefully the quality shift is in the right direction ;)

Short answer: nowadays, a liveblog chapter usually takes 4-8 hours to write, depending on the chapter’s length and content and how much I care, how I’m feeling that day, etc. To put this in context, when I first started the liveblog I made 2-3 posts per day, of 2-5 chapters each, and a post took me 1-2 hours.

The biggest challenge is therefore finding several hours during which I know I can sit down and do a full chapter. It’s easy enough to find an hour or two, but it’s a lot harder to find 6, and I hate having to split a chapter across several days because I never feel like I can get into it as well. This is mainly because I write while reading, so it feels disjointed if I can’t do it all in one sitting.

To answer your question more thoroughly…as you say, it’s been a case of writing my way into a style that works for me (YMMV, of course). I can’t recall specifically deciding to change anything; as far as I can tell it’s been a mostly gradual change (which adds up to quite a large change when looking at the endpoints). There are a few main contributing factors, which might give a better answer to the question of what goes into a liveblog post now, as opposed to just an amount of time.

Investment, engagement, and progress in the story. I simply didn’t have as much to say when I first started. I didn’t know anything about the world or the characters or the story yet, so while there was a lot to learn and begin piecing together early on, I wasn’t nearly as invested in it as I am now. I also didn’t have as much to draw from; if I were to reread TEotW now, I’m sure I would have far more to say, because a lot of the richness is a product of the story as a larger whole. The more context you have, the more important each individual piece will start to seem.And I care a lot more about the story and the characters now than I did when they were first introduced, so I want to look more closely and go deeper and challenge myself more.  

What I get out of it / what I want to get out of it. This whole thing started as a fun method of procrastination when I was at university. Since then, it has evolved into more of…is it pretentious to say ‘an intellectual exercise’? Being Funny On The Internet is really not my strong point, whereas I actually like writing longer freeform ‘essays’ and getting into detailed analysis. I like having the freedom that a first-time close-read provides to dig into whatever takes my interest, whether that means line-by-line (over)analysis of a particular sequence, or drawing parallels between events or characters, or writing essays on the use of POV as a tool for exploring identity, or whatever else. Because I’m a massive nerd who loves this kind of thing, and this format lets me do whatever I want with it.I’ve actually learned quite a lot about myself as a reader during this whole absurd project, especially about what I want from a story, what kinds of things I like to think about, and what things I could not give less of a fuck about. I want a book that makes me think, and I want to be challenged in some way. When I say the liveblog is primarily for me, I’m really not kidding. I’d be thinking about these things anyway, and this just gives me more structure and ability to do so, because I have to follow my thoughts through and frame them more clearly.Of course, there’s something of a flipside, which brings me to…

Expectations, both my own and other people’s, real or perceived. Probably not surprisingly, I tend to expect quite a lot (too much) of myself. Part of the reason I chose to do the liveblog in a stream-of-consciousness as-I-read format was to give myself as much freedom as possible from those expectations. When I first started, it didn’t matter if one post felt sloppy, or if I skipped over an interesting line, or even if I missed bigger ideas. But as time and wordcount went on, and I got more invested, it felt more and more important to pick up on everything, and to make every post good. (Spoiler alert: I did not make every post good).Maybe it shouldn’t matter to me how many people are reading this and what they think, but I’m human and I have flaws and also an ego. When I first started, I wasn’t thinking of it as work that I was putting on display, or something that would be read and judged as an example of my capability or intelligence or whatever. But as it started to change in style/content, and as more and more people were reading it and responding to it, there was more of a sense of…pressure (an illusion of my own perception, just to clarify, not anyone’s fault). Like I had to exhibit my best work every time, because I suppose I care more what people think of my analytical ability than what they think of my bad one-liners.It’s positive in that it pushes me to produce better work, and encourages me to spend more time on things I find interesting because it turns out there are people who like reading what I come up with. Which is awesome! But as (perceived) expectation increases, it gets harder to produce content quickly. When it didn’t matter, I could spit out several posts a day. Now, I have to spend more time – I want to spend more time; if I’m going to do this I’m going to do it well. But the longer it takes, the better I want each piece to be so that the only post in a month isn’t a shitty one, so then each post takes more time, so then…you get the idea.(To illustrate: every time I think about the Rhuidean sequence there’s a part of me that throws up an absurd amount of self-criticism for not ‘doing those chapters justice’. Because they’re some of the best chapters of the series, but at the time I hadn’t progressed enough in the series or my style to spend as much time on those chapters or analyse them as well as I might now. Also, at the time I felt like I was already doing way more than I had before, and I worried even then that it was too much somehow. Check my tags on that one; I laugh at them now, and it’s clearly a Turning Point in the style of the liveblog, but I was actually quite insecure about it at the time).

The general passage of time. The Wheel of Time turns…when I started this, I was a 22-year-old university student. Now I’m (masquerading as) a Real Adult. 3 years isn’t that long, but people change over time. There are things I’ve formed or changed or relinquished opinions on, and things I care more or less about. My priorities and goals, both day-to-day and longer term, have shifted, some in small ways and some in larger ones. Most of that isn’t going to directly impact a tumblr liveblog of an epic fantasy series, but there’s definitely an indirect impact.  The other thing to consider in terms of ‘time’ is the approach to a short-term project vs a long-term one. I initially saw this as light short-term fun, meaning I could go all-in, use all my spare time on it, and put aside other projects and hobbies for a while. When it became clear that it was not going to be a matter of 2-3 months, that had to change. I wish I could still spend nearly all my free time on this, just as I wish I could get paid to travel wherever I want while reading whatever I fancy. Unfortunately, real life seems to disagree, so the liveblog has had to slow down. 

All that said, I am still enjoying this – it’s been a surprisingly and incredibly fun, fascinating, and rewarding project, and I am still absolutely committed to seeing it through.