#also let's be honest with ourselves. all of the human loop designs out there are VERY pretty. true

[daily-sifloop]

augh i love your human loop design so much.....

Thank you!!

I worked hard on it, I really wanted a middle-ground between "I want them to be pretty (blorbo disease)" and "I think they could wear that", as well as "this looks like something that goes along with the general design theme of isat".

[mandareeboo]

I dont have anything exact for a prompt for dc superhero girls but like... any of them that you want to write abt... simply they are girlfriends ur honor <3

"So," says Babs, conversationally. "Are you a 'one and done' kinda gal, or a 'take it slow, let it go' kind?"

Karen bit her lip. Her fingers were shaking as they dug into the wood of her desk. They'd decided it was best to do this in the Gordon home, seeing how the faintest trace of what was sticking out of her arm could send their friend into serious agony. "Um. Both sound terrible. But I guess I'd rather just be done with the pain."

"Mm-hmm." The redhead adjusted her grip on the shard of kryptonite sticking out of her arm blaster. "Gonna be honest with you, Bee. This went in at an angle. It cut you going in, it's probably gonna cut you coming out. Is there anything I can get you to make this less stressing?"

"A stuffy?" she asked. "Preferably not bat-shaped. Not that bats aren't cool. But you usually stuff explosives into the bat ones."

Babs deems that fair and retrieves what Karen can only assume is the least beloved teddy bear she's ever seen. It's fur is bright brown- or it would be, without the dust. This was clearly an ancient Christmas or birthday present, tossed around but never truly used, with just enough sentimentality to avoid being thrown out or donated. Karen stuffs the teddy into the crook of her elbow and squeezes. Hard.

"Are you going to count to three?" she asked.

Babs shook her head. "You'd tense on three. Flexing the muscles is a bad idea."

"Okay. Then wh-"

She tightened her grip and yanked. Hard. 

Karen let out a yip and buried her face into the bear. She didn't want to imagine the disaster it'd be if the Commissioner heard.

"I got it!" Babs exclaimed, holding the rock up into the fluorescent light. "Man, I wish I could study this stuff. But I don't want to risk Kara getting sick having it close by."

"Yeah," she answered, trying not to get sick herself over the faintest bit of blood. Karen tapped a few buttons on her panel and the limbs popped off one by one, falling to the floor with a clatter. Karen yanked up her sleeve. "Oh, that's not so bad."

Babs, wetting a cotton ball, agreed with her. "Won't even need stitches. This time I'm definitely gonna count, okay?"

"Yes, please."

It doesn't take long to do the medical end of things. It was, all things considered, a surprisingly small gash. That said, getting cut with a rock was a great way to make yourself hate antiseptic. The crisp white bandage was probably a bit too much, but Babs is thorough.

The damage to her armor, however, is pretty damning. Karen felt her stomach squirm as she opened the hull, revealing ripped circuits, damaged data boards, and a couple of melted discs. Not cheap to purchase. She was going to have to run on bubblegum and duct tape for a while. (Not that that was out of the ordinary)

"Back to the drawing board?" Babs hummed, hefting a truly breathtaking toolbox out of thin air. "I'll go to the lair tomorrow and see if I can't scavenge you a few parts from first-drafts bat weapons."

"Thank you." Karen pulled out a wrench, feeling it in her hands. Her grip wasn't too affected. Good. "Back to the drawing board."

There was a clatter on the stairwell, too fast and too heavy to be Commissioner Gordon's, and there was Diana, flinging open the door in her full Wonder Woman garb. "KAREN ARE YOU-" She caught sight of Karen and seemed to lose an entire inch as she sighed with relief. "Oh, thank Zeus."

Babs let out a shriek. "Diana, did you walk to my house dressed in full uniform? What is somebody saw?"

"I did not walk; I ran. I told the your father I was doing a 'costume play'." Diana seemed to struggle to regain her poise at the sight of the bandage on Karen's arm, jaw tightening. "I was told you jumped in front of Supergirl, little Bumblebee."

Karen let out an awkward chuckle, rubbing her arm. "I think that's a bit of a stretch. Y'see, Babs and I have been prepping ourselves for cases like these, and-"

"Cases like these?" Diana echoed. Her voice was flat. "Cases like what, exactly?"

"Kryptonite weapons!" Babs chirped, holding up the stone. She'd had the sense of mind to wipe it off, at least. "Just being near the stuff can weaken Kara. We didn't even want to consider what might happen if she got poked by it. So we've made work-arounds; thicker armor around our limbs, metal designed to avoid skin-contact with sharp objects, etc. The next step is if they find a way to make it into a ray gun or something, but that's mostly if it's somehow too quick for Kara to dodge, and, let's be real, that probably won't-"

"Barbara." The girl stopped instantly. "Leave me and Bumblebee alone for a moment, please. We need to talk."

Karen gulped.

Babs shot her an apologetic look, then gave the Amazonian some finger guns. "Righty-o, boss. I'll go make us some snacks." She paused at the door, looking over her shoulder. "Just gimme a ring when you're ready, alright?"

Diana jerked her head in a nod. She watched with frightening intensity as the knob clicked closed.

"Diana-"

She whirled around. "Why was I not made aware of this? You and Barbara have been plotting to- to collect shards in your limbs like cufflinks! And you never-"

"It's not our first choice!" Karen held up our hands. "It's not even our last choice, Diana. We're also making shields, and inhibiters. It's an extreme emergency, last resort thing. And we've not even fixed the bugs!"

"It was faulty and you did it anyway?" She shrunk down as Diana slammed her hands on the table. "You could have been seriously injured! Or worse!"

"Diana," she said, showing off the bandage. "I'm mortal, not a water balloon. Trust me, I would have never done this if I thought it would be lethal."

Diana, for her part, did look a bit chastised. Her shoulders fell. "I am... sorry, little Bumblebee. I did not mean to doubt your abilities. It's just- I was out of the loop for one mission, and I came home to find my strongest warrior hardly able to move as she told me you were taken elsewhere for serious wounds."

"Kara talked to you?"

"She tried. She was crying."

Karen winced. She knew Kara would hate this idea. That's why they'd been so quiet about it. "I'm sorry I worried you all, but I wasn't in any real danger."

"This time. What of next time?"

"Now that we know they're onto our weaknesses, there won't be a next time."

"There shouldn't have been a first time!" Diana got down on one knee to hold her arm with great respect. This was one of the few positions she was actually taller than the Amazonian, and it made Karen nervous. She knew how bad it felt to be small. She never wanted other people to feel that way. "Is it bad, αγάπη μου?"

And Karen, smart and strong and absolutely weak to puppy dog eyes, couldn't stop herself. "I was in front of her."

Diana sucked in a breath.

"When it went off. I was in front of Supergirl." Karen forced herself to go on. It felt horrible to say out loud. A betrayal. But she had already betrayed Kara, hadn't she? She needed to own up to it. Reassure them all that she deserved the little scratch on her arm. "I dodged. I dodged out of the way. How horrible is that, Diana?"

"Darling-"

"I dodged," she repeated, voice wobbly with unshed tears. "I knew it could kill her, and I dodged." Fingers dug into her skirt. Her own fingers. The cut burned. "I'm a terrible person."

Diana's fingers cupped her chin, bringing her gaze back to her. "No. Never. You are human, Karen. You were scared."

Karen wished it was that easy. But, to her, it wasn't. She wasn't enough. "Heroes are supposed to take risks."

"Heroes must be alive to take those risks." Diana's fingers tightened their grip- not enough to hurt, but holding her in place. "Please, αγάπη μου. No more secret extreme emergency, last resort things. We are warriors, not blockades to toss in front of each other."

"Promise," she said, and it was the easiest promise she ever made. "...Can we call Babs back in, now? I'm gonna need her help un-soldering some things."

Wonder Woman swooped up for a kiss. Karen was someone who got electrocuted a lot, but nothing so simple had even a bit of life compared to being held and loved by the strongest woman in Metropolis, especially when she smiled like that. "In a moment. Allow me some time with you alone. It’s selfish, but it’s... human.”

[cecilspeaks]

171 - Go to the Mirror?

What makes you, you? Welcome to Night Vale.

[Updated version with most of the backwards speech added - huge thanks to kurofae!]

[particularly scary version of the theme song]

Do you ever stare at yourself for so long in the mirror that you no longer understand what you look like? [Are you losing consciousness?] Is this the same effect as thinking about someone you miss so much that you forget the shape of their face? Why would you do that? Why would you refuse to maintain order? [Why would you refuse to maintain order?] Are you refusing? Or are you a victim of your own mind?

Do brain cells dictate souls? Is thought matter? Does thought matter? Can the person looking back at you from the mirror tell you the answer? Just because you can see a person, does it mean that person exists? Is it you you are looking at? Or is it someone else? [(backwards) Does inscrutability scare you?]

How many hairs do I have? How many did I have yesterday? Are they the same color, the same length? Are these the same hairs I had when I was a child? [(backwards) Their eyes expressing nothing]

Should I be high if I’m going to ask myself these questions? Can you get high by behaving high?

Are you a good person because you do good things? Does a qualitative assessment mandate empirical evidence to support its truth? If I point at something and declare it –good-, will I be cross-examined? And if so, am I to be held in contempt for refusing to answer? Narrative is everything, right? [(backwards) Are you? Are you? Are you?]

Has anyone else been feeling this way, that you don’t recognize yourself? Have you told anyone? Does it help? Is it helping now, hearing me talk about it? Basically, why do I know I am me?

How many times have I seen myself in the mirror? [How many times have I seen myself in the mirror?] Is it bad that the answer is “rarely”? Shouldn’t we all be afraid of mirrors, or is it just me? [(backwards) Strange… and scary] How many times in a fit of disassociation do we see someone else- [Or someone else?] -behind us?

Are you, too, too afraid to turn around? Do you really want to challenge the veracity of your eyes? Do you think disbelief in death will make it disappear?

Are awareness and manifestation one and the same? [(backwards) But isn’t it strange?]

So, what did I see in the mirror today? [(backwards) If you look into the mirror that you just smashed do you see that the creature is gone?] Don’t we all see the same thing, isn’t it a person who looks exactly like ourselves? [(backwards) Mirror] And weren’t they making the same physical gestures and behind that person in the reflection, [(backwards) Are you?] did you not also see just over your shoulder a pair of eyes, the curve of a head, and did you notice how that head was human in shape – but maybe only a third of the size?

And did you make the same mistake as I? Thinking that because the head was so small, it must have been some distance away? [(backwards) Are you? Are you? Are you?] But you stared so long into those tiny eyes, didn’t you? And then you saw it. [And then you saw it.] Right? Did you see little spiny fingers reach up in front of its miniature, this passionate face, and [whispering] touch your shoulders? [(backwards) Are you losing consciousness?]

Did you scream inside, when you understood? Did you really truly understand that it was climbing, right there, on your back? [(backwards) What do you want from me?]

Are you still screaming, like I’m still screaming? How can you know how I feel? What - do you want - from meee?

[long pause, music] Where was I? Who is behind you in the mirror? [(backwards) What do you want from me?] Or what is behind you? Should I speak in present or past tense?

Is there a face there or is the face gone now? Are you no longer at the mirror? Do you feel safer? Why do you assume that because you aren’t looking in the mirror right now, that the tiny face and spiny digits – are not still behind you?

Do you feel it? [(backwards) Is this like when-] Are you, reflexively, touching your shoulder right now? [(backwards) Are you scared?] Or are you too scared? [(backwards) Are you, reflexively, touching your shoulder right now?]

Is this like when the ATM asks if you want to check your balance before withdrawing money and you decline, because you just don’t want to know? It doesn’t change the fact of your bank balance, does it?

Again. You think awareness and manifestation are one and the same, don’t you? Don’t we all?

So what of that little face with its inexpressive eyes and flat, lipless mouth? Didn’t it look like… Didn’t it look oh so familiar? Where have you seen that face before? Is it a ghost, a monster Or your own imagination? Are you starting to forget exactly what it looks like? Do you want to go to the mirror again?

Do you want to stare and stare at it, until you can comprehend what it is? [(backwards) Do you want to go to the mirror again? Do you want to stare? And stare at it? Until you can comprehend what it is?] Why? What will that accomplish? Are you being honest what yourself? Isn’t the real danger your won face? Could it be inferred that you invented the creature to distract yourself from the real horror? And what if we went to the mirror together? If we don’t feel alone in our feelings, could we conquer our fears? Are we in agreement, you and I?

What are you even looking at? Is your focus drifting to your shoulder? Can you not do that? Can you resist the urge? What will staring directly into your terror accomplish?

You see the face again, don’t you? Are you as scared as before, or have you steeled yourself for this? Is your mind more free to think critically about what it is and what it – wants? Is it attacking, or defending? Is it friend or foe or – indifferent?

Why is it so familiar? Is it something from childhood? [Were you sad?] Or was it a dream you once had? If you think about a memory long enough, doesn’t that mutate the truth? Isn’t every act of remembering another log on the fire of lies? When was the last time you saw your mother?

It’s been since childhood, hasn’t it? Didn’t she warn you – about mirrors? Didn’t she tell you they would be your demise? [(backwards) Didn’t she warn you – about mirrors? Didn’t she tell you they would be your demise?]

Or was that just a popular bedtime story? Do you see a flickering behind the tiny face? Is that sunlight oscillating behind swiftly moving clouds, or is that the creature creating that effect? Is it getting closer? Is the flickering less like a strobe effect and more like a hand-drawn flip book? Now that we’re looking with clearer eyes, is it just me or does the creature look like – a drawing?

Do you suddenly remember a swing set? Why swing set? You were on the swing set, weren’t you? How high did you go? Was it possible to do a full loop? Would you have fallen out at the top of the circle, or did you understand centripetal force without knowing the term? And when you let go at the apex of your arc, did you predict correctly the pain of a broken leg when you landed? Do you still remember the sound of the snap? [backwards) Do you still remember the sound of the snap?] Do you still shudder when ice cracks in warm water, or when someone pops a knuckle?

What did your mother tell you about swing sets? What did she say to you when you yelled to her for help? Did you lean over your sobbing face and ask you: “Why are you crying when you don’t even exist?” Did she tell you again about the mirror?

[Sad.] Do you still see the flickering creature climbing up your back? Is the little hand reaching up again? Do you notice it wears black rings? Are those talons? And what is it opening its mouth to say? Do you see how it rises up behind you, how long is its torso? Is it some kind of snake, but with human skin? Why does it have so many teeth? How long can a tongue be? What is it doing, why is it crying, is it a child? What unholy monster cries like a child, what does it want, Why won’t it stop?!

[music stops, eerie noises]

Is it gone for you too? [whispers] Why did I not look away? [Did I not look away?] Did you? How were you able to do that?

[long pause, music]

Did you figure it out? Could you see past your own mental inventions? [Who out there-]

Who out there looked beyond the long gape-jawed figure and its inexplicable whinesss? Did you see the table? There, in the mirror image- [mirror image of your hou-] -of your house, did you see the table?

You hadn’t noticed the table before, had you? What of the table, of its chipped corners? What of the mismatched wood stain on the tiny drawer at its center? What of its tarnished, yet ornate brass bulb knob? Did you turn around to see if the table was in your home too? Were you sad when you realized it was not? Or were you relieved? Why was the table only in the mirror, why isn’t it real? But isn’t it, though? You didn’t ask for any of this, did you? But what have you ever asked from the universe that you could not get yourself, and when has the universe ever obliged? What’s inside the drawer of the rickety table in the mirror? What other uncanny discoveries await you if you could just break through? Is it as simple as breaking through?

Do you find that the simplest problems require the biggest efforts?

Have you ever decided you wanted a lightweight wool button-up coat, all black? Did you go shopping for it and did you find one? How disappointed were you to learn that this design was not available in any of the five stores you went to? Did you ponder the idea that such a coat was so basic, [angrily] so unassuming, so without frill or feature that no one had ever thought to create it? [angrily, scarily] Do you want to know what’s in the drawer below the table? Shouldn’t it be as easy to obtain as a lightweight wool button-up coat all black? But nothing, nothing easy ever is, is it? How do you get to a table that’s right in front of you but only visible innn a mirror?

Shouldn’t you take a break from this? Wouldn’t some – fresh air – be good for you? What’s the weather like outside?

[“Flower Lane” by Funbearable https://funbearable.bandcamp.com/]

[anxiously] What are you not getting? Besides the creature and the table, what are you not noticing? Do you see yourself? [very fast] What is different about the you you are and the you you see before you? Are you paying close attention to the color of your eyes? Are you watching for any deviation in the movement of your reaction? [(backwards) Now that we’re looking with clearer eyes-] Are you able to ignore the creature over your shoulder? Now that it has revealed itself, do you find it less frightening? [(backwards) -ignore the creature over your shoulder? Now that it has revealed itself do you find it less frightening?] Do-do-does it, does its cry kind of sound now like the high-pitched howl of a Siberian Husky puppy vocalizing its hunger, isn’t it less scary and – more just weird?

Did you see the movie “Signs”? Did you feel less creeped out once the aliens were shown on screen? [(backwards) Are you? Are you?] Isn’t all fear fear of the unknown? Are you concentrating on the table now? And you’re sure it only exists in the mirror? Double checked? Do you want to know what’s inside the drawer of the front of the table? [softly] Are you willing to break something? [Are you-] Are you willing to break the mirror, yes but so much more? [(backwards) Do you feel the pain? -your flesh - is that why you’re screaming?] Are you willing to go- [Are you?] -to a place from which you cannot return? Are you willing to learn things you cannot unlearn? Do you have a hammer? Or if not, can you find something heavy that you can lift? [(backwards) What is different about the you you are?] Will you smash the mirror? Will you do it quickly? Why are you hesitating? Have you let your comfortability lapse into carelessness? Why did you take your eyes off the creature on your neck? Did you see the blood, or feel the pain first? Is it tearing into your flesh, is that why you’re screaming?

Can you still break the mirror? [(backwards) Are you?] Are you losing consciousness? Are you?

[(backwards) Are you willing to break something?] Are you? Are you?

[Scary]

Are you OK? Did you do it? Huh. If you look into the mirror you just smashed, Do you see that the creature is gone? [quietly] Cool, right?

But isn’t it strange that all about you on the floor are shards of the mirror you shattered, yet in front of you, the mirror remains, fully intact? [Scary] Strange. [echoes] Or scary. [swallows, echoes] Wouldn’t you think that the mirror being simultaneously broken- [broken and unbroken is strange while the fact that you have no reflection-] broken and unbroken is strange while the fact that you have no reflection is scary?

Is that true though? Do you have a reflection? Do you see yourself on the floor of the mirror’s world? [Are you losing consciousness? Are you?]

Is your body crumpled on the floor like a wet towel? Is your lower jaw hanging open because you died screaming? Or because of gravity?

Do you have a blanket of some sort? Why don’t you cover that mirror up? Why don’t you cover all the mirrors, in fact? While you are walking about your home, do you notice the antique table by the door with its tarnished, yet ornate brass bulb knob? Was that table always there? Did you – Enter the mirror world?

Or were you always in the mirror world? What else is different around you?

Do you remember why you never opened that door? You do, don’t you? What was it about the book inside that frightened you so? Was it – the handwriting that matched no known language? Was it the drawings of serpents with human faces, but innn-numerable teeth? Was it the disorientation you felt from seeing these faces contorted into a scream, yet their eyes expressing nothing? Does inscrutability scare you?

What was it your mother said before she left home when you were a teenager? Did she tell you she was an oracle? Did she tell you to read the book til you understood its alphabet? Did she make you promise to never tell another soul, and did you keep that promise by burying it so deep, so so deep?

Now what? Will you cover the mirrors and sweep the floor and pretend it never happened? Will this prevent it from happening again?

Are awareness and manifestation one and the same? Who can say? Will you stay tuned next for sound of a muffled… crack! Presented without context or commercial interruption. Could that be an egg, or a twig, or a leg?

Narrative is everything, isn’t it?

Won’t you Have a good night, Night Vale? Won’t you have a good – night?

Today’s proverb: Call me old fashioned, but I believe dance is the only true language.

[myfriendpokey]

GARBAGE DAY!

a bunch of scrappy shorter pieces to clean out my drafts folder for the new year!

***

A videogame will tend towards exhausting every possible variation of a design space whether anyone wants it to or not.

Videogames and duration - if something is good it should continue being good however long you extend it. You don't really encounter the idea that something can be good for a little while and then be evil.

***

Works of art are "in conversation" with their audience, with materials, with history, with each other. The aim of an artwork is to start, or add to, "the conversation". "Conversation" sort of edges out the older tic whereby art "examines" or "explores" something, which always made me think of a big magnifying glass being propped up for the benefit of some eerily calm 1950s scientist. But now that sounds too chilly, and perhaps sort of sketchy in the power dynamics it implies. "Conversation" is much warmer, informal and more fluid - "conversation" is the assurance that any given power dynamic can be dissolved away in the warm glow of basic, mutual humanity. Let's talk it through! My door is always open! Whenever there's a complaint over labour conditions or harassment it's nearly de rigueur to also quote the wounded-sounding HR lackey, upset that people didn't talk to them about it before going public. Why would anybody deny the friendly, outstretched hand of the respected opponent and their entirely in-good-faith quibbling about word meanings, personality and tone? Why don't we have an honest conversation about the "honest conversation", that numbing discourse cloud sprayed out like formic acid to neutralize a threat, to melt any unsettling edges or contraries back into the familiar gloop of the private and the personal.

***

One of the pleasures of videogames is that of an infinitely repeatable, always identical procedure. Pressing the button makes something happen, and by pressing it again it will happen again in the same way. So there's a kind of abundance or excess built into the system - like partaking of a fruit which will never be depleted, and in the process taking on in your own actions something of that same infinity. You can temporarily identify with the self-identical, eternally reproducing action that you are performing. I think one of the difficulties of videogames is that as you get (slightly!) older, that immortal quality becomes more visibly alien, harder to align to your sense of self. That these mechanics act like black holes, able to absorb any amount of your life without ever being satiated, becomes a terrible curse rather than an unexpected gift. That endlessness now seems eerie and artificial, a horrible parody of life rather than the highest version of it. 

The dadification of vgames has gone much remarked. But as well as a demographic shift I think this reflects a certain anxiety about the centrality of these immortal entities, these endless loops, within the culture. As reward for your fealty to the Mario brand you get even more Mario games, which by now you may not have time or energy to actually play. The VG dad (or even the buff, single pseudo-dads of the superhero movies) is eternally exhausted with the genre that he’s trapped in. We hear him groan and complain as he painfully slogs through the motions. The gratuitous loop is redeemed by the finite human suffering of the dad, as he manfully does what it takes to keep these things going forwards to the next generation, so that the next set of children may be able to actually take pleasure in them again. But the attempt to symbolically re-integrate these things into human life by casting them as a family drama never quite works: their ultimate indifference to that life shines through. A blind, eerie deathlessness is both their charm and their authority.

***

That saying that when all you have is a hammer everything else looks like a nail - similarly, when all you have is willpower, everything looks like an obstacle to be pounded into submission by that same willpower. 

Laziness is a good thing in that it means stepping back from this idiot insatiability of the will. If you're lazy you have to pay more attention, because you're more aware of both your own limits and the limits of your material. 

I think there can be value in suspending a formal problem rather than building an exhaustive system to solve it forever. That way it's still something you have to think about, something that still throws off and reroutes the normal workings of your awful private fantasy machine. Dropping text strings into the game as elements to spatially encounter is not ideal technically but does force you to be more responsive and exploratory with how you use that text. Robust systems can be cool, but can also really homogenize everything - now "text" is just the miscellaneous stuff within the all-purpose "textbox" at the bottom of the screen, cementing its role as filler content.

The funny thing about really systemic, open-world type games is that their very robustness tends to suffocate exprience before it happens. We know nothing will happen which will significantly impact this camera POV, this dialogue system.. anything can happen except for anything which would require a fundamental change to the underlying inventory system. But maybe the whole pleasure of the open world game is just being able to hold those experiences in suspense.

***

Mostly the characters voicing my own opinions in my videogames are explicitly malign and sinister - which is a corny device for me to vent without worrying as much about browbeating people with my opinions. But it's also a way of having those opinions without allowing them to overdetermine the rest of the game, or be fully in control over the more ambivalent and drifting work of "putting together different pieces on a screen to make interesting spaces". So in that sense my own ideas really are the enemies, and any plot role they serve in the game is a dramatisation of the effort to create a space where they lack controlling power.

***

RPG Maker is a collage machine, you get a set of pictures and start placing them around until they start to form some kind of charged and interesting space.

I think the collage aspect is a lot of what I enjoy about making these things, which is why games with more polished or consistent art styles frequently leave me cold. For me the greater the discrepancy between different objects on screen means a greater effect when they're combined. 

How does gameplay etc tie in? For me gameplay can divert the interest but never truly capture it. For decades games have had the problem of effectively being able to train you to do something, but having no idea what that thing should be or why it would matter. They effectively move your attention around without being able to settle it because their inner logic is basically always the same ahistorical, mechanistic void. But this can be a good thing - the permanently restless and unsettled nature of videogame attention can't illuminate itself, but can do so to other things in passing. 

Distraction becomes a way to examine surfaces, rather than being sucked into depths or settled to one fixed meaning. And the drift of unsettled consciousness is ultimately what animates game collages, the spaces that shift and react as attention plays across them, revealing or withholding. And so from this perspective, the answer to why I make videogames is: because I don't trust myself to look after an aquarium.

***

Design is managerial aesthetics - a mode of expertise framed as meta-expertise specifically because it scales up so well to systems of mass organisation and production. It's a universal discipline insofar as the task of removing any obstacles to the frictionless flow of attention and of capital is now also a universal chore. In this context a designer is like the MBA who can be dropped into any business to improve it, without ever having to know just what product they make – because the ultimate goal is always the same, the same tools can always be used. 

The cutesy books about the design of everyday life and so forth exist in the same vein as the ones that tell us there's nothing wrong with marketing because ultimately isn't all human discourse and activity some form of marketing? Isn't everything "design"? The strange top-heaviness with which these things outgrow their host categories parallels the unstoppable expansion of executive salaries within the businesses themselves. The task of managing other people's labour becomes ever more grandoise, ineffable, cosmic and well-paid as that labour in turn is framed as a kind of undifferentiated slop which exists for the sake of being shaped by creatives.

***

tragedy / comedy:

Generalizing hugely I feel like tragedy is about an event or experience so powerful it changes everything - for the characters involved, for the people in that world, for the audience watching - while conversely comedy is the idea that no event or experience can change anything. Oedipus dies and there's a big announcement and everyone has to sit through the awkward two-minute silence before getting back to work, while trying not to fart or itch too noticeably, and the next day somebody's selling Oedipus commemorative pens which run out of ink five minutes after opening, and the pen cap gets lost and the cat starts playing with it. 

In comedy the tragic can still happen, it’s just never strong enough to escape the constraints of the inert material universe which we find ourselves in – all that which remains so stubbornly intractable towards the higher instincts. I can talk about the dignity of man but there's still a risk that my pants will fall down or that someone will hit me with a ladder, causing my head to get stuck inside a bucket of paint, etc. Or my voice might be ridiculous or I might have a stutter (old comedy standbys!), or someone might hear part of my words out of context and assign them a different and unintended meaning. Comedy is consciousness imprisoned within a cumbersome matter which it can't completely do anything with, but also can't exist without. 

Taken as a worldview, this sort of risks congealing into the kneejerk reactionary things-can-never-change, whatever-moment-of-human-history-i-was-reared-in-is-eternal-and-inviolate radio DJ / South Park mindset. And of course somebody's view of what constitutes a tragic, life-changing event depends greatly on whether it's happening to them or someone else. But as exaggeration, in its neurotic overemphasis of the inescapable material, i think this approach still has interest and use. Many of my favourite writers have a kind of comic understanding of consciousness: consciousness becomes a churning material process with its own independent momentum which has to be examined and accounted for as part of any real reckoning with the world. In this light comedy becomes a way to think about opacity and limitation, both in physical matter and in our own selves.

I think many people have made the point that vgames are generally comic, intentionally or unintentionally. The rhetoric around them still tends towards the tragic: make the choice which changes everything! Deal with the consequences, accept your fate! But in practice those moments feel less visible than the clumsy material layer of GUIs, inputs, mechanics and representations that contain and constrain them. The opacity of the black box is one inhibition: was that meant to happen? Was it scripted or a glitch? Maybe I should reload my save and try again. Another is the inertia of the various game systems and loops themselves - [x] character may have died but you still need to collect those chocobo racing feathers if you want the Gold Sword. The numbers in a videogame "want" to keep going up, whatever happens: there's an affordance there which exists independently to any merely human wants and needs, and so tends to act as a gravity well for distracted consciousness as it wanders around. When people talk about tragedy in videogames it's usually with the implicit rider that it's within a game, or set of game conventions, which have become naturalised enough to become invisible. Which also tends to mean the naturalisation of a form, of inputs, of technology, of distribution mechanisms and assumptions, which however arty we can get are still inherently tied to the tech industry. Every art game is to some extent an invitation to spend more time internalising the vocab of your windows computer.

I've mentioned that the materialism of comedy can tend towards unthinking reaction. But the insistence on certain limits inherent to the human body – requirements like clean water and clean air, food and shelter, actual bathroom breaks and not piss jugs and also not having to live six feet beneath a rising sea level - can be helpful at a point when all these things are regarded as negotiable impediments to the pursuit of future profit. Maybe it’s a good thing that some materials can still be so insistent about refusing to be absorbed into the will.

***

I think what I most enjoy about art is the sense of a game with moveable stakes: where you never quite know the value of what you're playing for, which now appears absolutely trivial, and now appears to stand in judgement of the whole world, etc. I think this is also the Adorno idea of the aesthetic as really the extra-aesthetic, that which can step outside or threaten to step outside the limits of the merely aesthetic. It's why "just make a good game / pop song / comic / etc" never quite works, in rhetoric or in practice: the really good pop song is never that which just gives the enjoyable three minutes of listening we might consciously assign to be its remit, it's what overflows or undercuts that category, that which however briefly seems at risk of stepping outside it and into the realm of everyday life.

I grew up on pop culture so I don't have to feel positively towards it. Who am I meant to be defending it from? The handful of surviving WASPs reared on Brahms who get the ostentatiously-fussy-culture-review posts at print newspapers looking to pick up a slightly higher quality of margarine advertisement? The best thing pop culture ever gave me was its own critique: that of containing artists and moments which couldn't be squared with what the rest of it was saying, which seemed  to call the whole enterprise into question and in doing so broadened the sense of what was possible. Pop culture was never quite identified with itself, the value it has is in containing elements which make that self-identification impossible. So it always throws me off to see people celebrating "pop culture", like it's a self-produced totality, when that totality was only ever good for kicking.

Pop culture survives through a negativity it can never properly acknowledge.

[images: Tower of Druaga, Detana!! TwinBee, True Golf Classics: Wicked 18, Microsurgeon, Dark Edge]

[teshknowledgenotes]

PRINCIPLES - RAY DALIO

PRINCIPLES LIST

1) EMBRACE REALITY AND DEAL WITH IT

Learning how reality works, visualizing the things I want to create, and then building them out is incredibly exciting to me. Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilerating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning – just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don't get me wrong, I'm still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks.

Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life

What does a successful life look like? We all have our own deepseated needs, so we have to decide for ourselves what success is. I don't care whether you want to be a master of the universe, a couch potato or anything else – I really don't. Some people want to change the world and others want to operate in simple harmony with it and savor life. Neither is better. Each of us needs to decide what we value most and choose the paths we take to achieve it.

Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes, and improve our understanding of reality as a result. Being radically open-minded enchances the efficiency of those feedback loops, because it makes what you are doing, and why, so clear to yourself and others that there can't be any misunderstandings. The more open-minded you are, the less likely you are to decieve yourself – and the more likely it is that others will give you honest feedback. If they are “believable” people (and it's very important to know who is “believable”), you will learn a lot from them.

Being radically transparent adn radically open-minded accelerates this learning process it can also be difficult because being radically transparent rather than more guarded exposes one to criticism. It's naturaly to fear that. Yet if you don't put yourself out there with your radical transparency you won't learn

Don't let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. You must be willing to do things in the unique ways you think are best – and to open-mindedly reflect on the feedback that comed inevitable as a result of being that way.

Learning to be radically transparent is like learning to speak in public: While it's intially awkward, the more you do it, the more comfortable you will be with it. This has been true for me. For example, I still instinctively find being as radically transparent in the ways that I am in this book uncomfortable because I am exposing personal material to the public that will attract attention and criticism. Yet I am doing it because I've learned that it's best and I wouldn't feel good about myself if I let my fears stand in the way. In other words, I have experienced the positive effects of radical transparency for so long that it's now uncomfortable for me to not be that way.

Look to nature to learn how reality works. All the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn't create these laws, but by understanding them we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals. For example, our ability to fly or to send cell phone signals around the world came from understanding and applying the existing rules of reality – the physical laws or principles that govern the natural world

While I spend most of my time studying the realities that affect me most directly – those that drive economies, the markets, and the people I deal with – I also spend time in nature and can't help reflecting on how it works by observing, reading and speaking with some of the greatest specialists on the subject. I've found it both interesting and valuable to observe which laws we humans have in common with the rest of nature and which differentiate us. Doing that has had a big impact on my approach to life.

First of all, I see how cool it is that the brain's evolution gave us the ability to reflect on how reality works in this way. Man's most distinctive quality is our singular ability to look down on reality from a higher perspective and synthesize an understanding of it. While other species operate by following their instincts, man alone can go above himself and look at himself within his circumstances and within time (including before and after his existence). For example, we can ponder the ways that nature's flying machines, swimming machines, and billions of other machines from the microscopic the the cosmic, interact with one another to make up a working whole that evolves through time. This is because the evolution of the brain gave man a much more developed neocortex, which gives us the power to think abstractly and logically.

While our high-level thinking makes us unique among species, it can also make us uniquely confused. Other species have much simpler and more straightforward lives, without any of man's wrestling with what's good and what's bad. In contrast with animals, most people struggle to reconcile their emotions and their instincts (which come from the animal parts of their brains) with their reasoning (which comes from parts of the brain more developed in humans). This struggle causes people to confuse what they want to be true with what actually is true. Let's look at this dilemma to try to understand how reality works.

To try to figure out the universal  laws of reality and principles for dealing with it, I've found it helpful to try to look at things from nature's perspective. While mankind is very intelligent in relation to other species, we have the intelligence of moss growing on a rock compared to nature as a whole. We are incapable of designing and building a mosquito, let alone all the species and most of the other things in the universe. So I start from the premise that nature is smarter than I am and try to let nature teach me how reality works.

When I went to Africa a number of years ago, I saw a pack of hyenas take down a young wildebeest. My reaction was visceral. I felt empathy for the wildebeest and thought that what I had witnesssed was biased to believe it's horrible when it is actually wonderful? That got me thinking. Would the world be a better or worse place if what I'd seen hadn't occurred? That perspective drove me to consider the second and third-order consequences so that I could see that the world would be worse. I now realize that nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them. What I had seen was the process of nature at work, which is much more effective at furthering the improvement of the whole than any process man has ever invented.

Perfection doesn't exist, it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn't be evolving. Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we're perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them. You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed – or you won't and you will fail.  

Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. Natural selections's trial and error process allows improvement without anyone understanding or guiding it. The same can apply to how we learn . There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one's conscious minds, though it affects our decision making) and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species' adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I've since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation.

Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing – and decide what you want to be. It is a great paradox that individually we are simultaneously everything and nothing. Through our own eyes, we are everything – e.g., when we die, the whole world dissapears. So to most people (and to other species) dying is the worst thing possible, and it is of paramount importance that we have the best life possible. However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. In other words, we are unbelievable tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish our impact will be insignificant. At the same time, we instinctually want to matter and to evolve and we can matter a tiny bit – and it's all those tiny bits that add up to drive the evolution of the universe.

I find it thrilling to embrace reality, to look down on myself through nature's perspective and to be an infinitesimally small part of the whole. My instinctual and intellectual goal is simply to evolve and contribute to evolution in some tiny way while I'm here and while I am what I am. At the same time, the things I love most – my work and my relationships – are what motivate me. So, I find how reality and nature work, including how I and everything will decompose and recompose, beautiful – though emotionally I find the separation from those I care about difficult to appreciate.

Understand nature's practical lessons. I have found understanding how nature and evolution work helpful in a number of ways. Most importantly, it has helped me deal with my realities more effectively and make difficult choices. When I began to look at reality through the perspective of figuring out how it really works, instead of thinking things should be different, I realized that most everything at at first seemed “bad” to me – like rainy days, weaknesses and even death – was because I held preconceived notions of what I personally wanted. With time, I learned that my initial reaction was because I hadn't put whatever I was reacting to in the context of the fact that reality is built to optimize for the whole rather than for me.

The constant drive toward learning and improvement makes getting better innately enjoyable and getting better fast exhilarating. Though most people think that they are striving to get the things (toys, bigger houses, money, status, etc.) that will make them happy, for most people those things don't supply anywhere near the long-term satisfaction that getting better at something does. Once we get the things we are striving for we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that maters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible i.e., learning rapidly about oneself and one's environment and then changing to improve.

It is natural that it should be this way because of the law of diminishing returns. Consider what acquiring money is like. People who earn so much that they derive little or no marginal gains from it will experience negative consequences, as with other form of excess, like gluttony. If they are intellectually healthy, they will begin seeking something new or seeking new depths in something old – and they will get stronger in the process. As Freud put it, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

The work doesn't necessarily have to be a job, though I believe it's generally better if it is a job. It can be any kind of long-term challenge that leads to personal improvement. As you might have guessed, I believe that the need to have meanignful work is connected to man's innate desire to improve. And relationships are the natural connections to others that make us relevant to each other and to society more broadly.

It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one's limts, which is painful. As Carl Jung put it, “Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health.” Yet most people instinctually avoid pain. This is true wheter we are talking about building the body (e.g. Weight lifting) or the mind (e.g. Frustration, mental struggle, embarrassment, shame) – and especially true when people confront the harsh reality of their own imperfections.

Go to the pain rather than avoid it. If you don't let up on yourself and instad become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a fast pace. That's just the way it is. Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life – you have to opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion. The irony is that if you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure. The pain is the signal! Like switching from not exercising to exercising, developing the habit of embracing the pain and learning from it will “get you to the other side.” By “getting to the other side” I mean that you will become hooked on:

Identifying, accepting, and learning how to deal with your weaknesses,

Preferring that the people around you be honest with you rather than keep their negative thoughts about to themselves and

Being yourself rather than having to pretend to be strong where you are weak.

Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine. One of the hardest things for people to do is to objectively look down on themselves within their circumstances (i.e. Their machine) so that they can act as the machine's designer and manager. Most people remain stuck in the perspective of being a worker within the machine. If you can recognize the differences between those roles and that it is much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it, you will be on the right path. To be successful, the “designer/manager you” has to be objective about what the “worker you” is really like, not believing in him more than he deserves, or putting him in jobs he shouldn't be in. Instead of having this strategic perspective, most people operate emotionaly and in the moment; their lives are a series of undirected emotional experiences, going from one thing to the next. If you want to look back on your life and feel you've achieved what you wanted to, you can't operate that way.

If you are disappointed because you can't be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody an do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team? When he fails to dribble and shoot well, would you think badly of him? Shouldhe feel humiliated? Imagine all the areas in which Einstein was incompetent and imagine how hard he struggled to excel even in the areas in which he was the best in the world.

Watching people struggle and having others watch you struggle can elicit all kinds of ego-driven emotions such as sympathy, pty, embarrassment, anger, or defensiveness. You need to get over all and stop seeing struggling as something negative. Most of life's greatest opportunities come out of moments of struggle, it's up to you to make the most of these tests of creativity and character.

When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices:

1) You can deny them (which is what most people do)

2) You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change).

3) You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them

4) Or, you can change what you are going after.

If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want. So I certainly don't want to dissuade you from going after whatever you want. At the same time, I urge you to reflect on whether what you are going after is consistent with your nature. Whatever your nature is, there are many paths that will suit you, so don't fixate on just one. Should a particular path close, all you ahve to do is find another good one consistent with what you're like.

Most people lack the courage to confront their own weaknesses and make the ahrd choices that the process requires. Ultimately it comes down to the following five decisions:

1) Don't confuse what you wish were true with what is really true

2) Don't worry about looking good – worry instead about achieving your goals

3) Don't overweight first-order consquences relative to second- and third-order ones

4) Don't let pain stand in the way of progress

5) Don't blame bad outcomes on ayone but yourself

[zak-graphicarts]

Richard Williams: The Traditional Walk

In this post, I’m exploring legendary animator Richard Williams’ approach to the traditional walk cycle.

Walking is one of the most important exercises for an animator, but it’s often daunting to the newcomer due to it’s initial intimidating appearance, and seemingly complex mechanics. 

Walking, running, shuffling, skipping and other forms of human and animal movement are rhythmic actions which can be animated using a handful of drawings. Walking is a rather complex repeating pattern of movements, the up and down bobbing of the body and the arcs created by picking up and putting down the feet. 

The Thief and the Cobbler (1993) Test Scenes, a pencil walk cycle from legendary animator Ken Harris

A walk cycle is a looping animation of a walking character - and that’s what I’m attempting to create in this session, by exploring and responding to the teachings of legendary animator Richard Williams on the subject. One thing to note, however, is Williams’ stance against using walk cycles, and thus his guides are for characters walking across the screen. These ideas and concepts that he describes, though, can easily be applied to an actual cycle. 

All walks are different - no two people in the world walk the same way. Actors try to get hold of a character by figuring out how they walk - it’s a good exercise to explore a character’s personality, in any animation process.

Williams’ opens the chapter by defining a walk, which is a process of falling over and catching yourself just in time. If we don’t put our foot down, we’ll fall flat on our face - we’re going through a series of controlled falls. We lean forward with our upper bodies and throw out a leg just in time to catch ourselves. Step, catch. Repeat.

There are two main poses for a walk cycle - the contact and passing poses. In order to let the other leg take a step, we just need to repeat these two poses and reverse them. From these four drawings, the audience knows that the character is walking. In this example from animator Alan Becker, he shows this limited motion, which still creates the illusion of a walk. 

Although this is quite flat and lifeless, I’m going to be exploring more economical, restricted approaches to animation through retro 16-bit video game animations - so I’ll be applying these simple mechanics in order to create a walk. 

In reality, we lift our feet off the ground for just the bare minimum - thus if we rotoscope the animation, the sequence will be quite muted and lifeless as a result. 

There’s a massive amount of information in a walk, and we read it instantly. Animator Art Babbitt taught Williams to look at someone walking in the street from the back view, and then ask these questions, and attempt to answer them based on the walk alone:

Richard discusses how women mostly walk with their legs close together, resulting in not much up and down head and body action on each stride, with skirts also restricting movement. A macho character, however, has his legs wide apart so there’s lots of up and down head and body action on each stride. It’s the up and down postion of a character’s mass that creates the illusion of weight.

He continues, establishing what happens in a ‘normal’ walk. Through primary research, I’ve identified these key poses myself. Before we can break the rules, we need to know them - so Williams’ establishes these key poses. Instead of using William’s examples, I’ll be using my own to explain these key ideas.

First comes the two contact positions, and then the passing position. As the leg is straight up on this passing position, the pelvis, body and head is lifted slighlty higher. 

Then we add the down position, where the bent leg takes the weight. It’s this pose that the arms swing at their widest on the down position.

Adding the up position, as our character pushes off. The foot pushing off lifts the pelvis, body and head up to it’s highest position and then the leg is thrown out to catch us on the contact position - so we don’t fall over. 

In a normal, realistic walk, the weight goes down just after the contact pose and the weight goes up just after the passing position.

‘In trying out walks, it’s best to keep the figure simple.’ It’s quick to do and easy to fix - easy to make changes. Having looked at Williams’ break down of a so-called ‘normal’ walk, I wanted to create my own example using the same simple stick figure character - and compare it to my own rotoscoped example, looking at the differences and why these add value.

As an experiment, I wanted to create a quick example walk cycle using post it notes, to explore analogue animation rather than just digitally-drawn. Following Williams’ guide, I produced both a post it note and digital rendering. Whilst the first five poses were rather straight-forward, the walk cycles presented in the book are only ‘half cycles’.

A half cycle means the arms and legs seat sides at the end of each repetition - only half of an actual walk cycle. 

My main problem to solve with this task was completing the cycle, adding more frames in order for it to loop properly. This wasn’t exactly a difficult task, I just followed the established rules for a walk cycle, and swapped the legs over.

The point of this task was to establish a clear understanding of a ’normal’ walk cycle, as suggested by legendary animator Richard Williams. Through my own primary research, I’ve been able to identify the key poses and positions, and here I’ll briefly discuss the differences between the two animations.

My rotoscoped example almost floats - there’s no real sense of weight to the animation. In terms of movement, it’s quite muted - realistic. This is obviously because I’m directly drawing from life. Compared to my Richard Williams’ example, there is an exaggerated bounce to the walk, as the up and down poses are accentuated to create a feeling of weight. There’s a grace to my rotoscoped animation, and a liveliness to the post-it note example. In the past, I’ve explored the use of rotoscope for both delicate and quite fast actions - swimming, or a head turn - and I feel like it’s a technique best used for these extreme sides of the coin. When we take something as middling as a walk, rotoscope isn’t the answer. This is something that I found when trying to rotoscope a breathing animation, which simply didn’t work.

‘We’re not copying life - we’re making a comment on it’                           - Richard Williams

When we jump to pencil and a post it note, there’s a hand-created, lo-fi quality to the animation - a purposeful imperfection that embraces the roots of the medium in a way that perhaps digital animation cannot. It’s a very chattery animation, with the head growing in one frame - but there’s a pleasing, naive quality to that, I think. With the post-it numbers flying across too, the audience is shown exactly how the animation made - and there’s quite an honest quality to that.

The actual walk is successful, and we can see that signature Williams’ bounce I was talking about earlier on. My digital rendering attempts to capture that sketchy, hand-drawn aesthetic with clear mark making and a loose approach to drawing.

I think this is the main difference between my own reference and Williams’ guide to a walk cycle - his is exaggerated, inherently animated. I was drawing from reference, directly from life - and so my poses are much more subtle and muted in comparison to his. Both approaches have value, but I’m glad my initial understanding of the basic mechanics of a walk cycle was from my own primary research, allowing me to learn and develop upon now, looking at Richard Williams’ teachings in more depth. 

I won’t be copying these reference guides exactly, it’s more like a blue print for the drawings I’ll need to create a successful walk cycle. As we can see from my own reference, these poses form the basic mechanics of all walks.

Moving forward, I will be exploring Williams’ approach to adding personality to the walks. No two people walk the same way, and now I’ve learnt the rules - it’s time to break them. In the next independent session, I’ll be exploring how changing a single position can completely change a walk and how we can communicate a character’s personality through a walk cycle.

I will be developing my own characters and exploring character design principles, but for these animation tests, I’ll be keeping the figure simple. This is the best approach to take, as it’s quick to do, easy to fix and easy to make changes. Keeping with a simple character design also allows me to explore emotion purely through movement, how to communicate their mood or personality through the way they hold themselves in a walk.

Actions

Explore how to convey personality through altering the traditional walk cycle, further exploring animator Richard Williams’ examples.

New References

Living Lines Library: Ken Harris - Pencil Tests. 2018. Living Lines Library: Ken Harris - Pencil Tests. [ONLINE] Available at: http://livlily.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/ken-harris.html. [Accessed: 9 May 2018].

AlanBeckerTutorials. (2018). ALAN BECKER - Animating Walk Cycles. [Online Video]. 8 April 2015. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y6aVz0Acx0. [Accessed: 9 May 2018].