#gamut mapping

[jockoppressor]

None of them are gonna be physically violent

The Reddit users are going to judge you if you express any religious or “unscientific” sentiment

The Catholics run the gamut from “hardcore pro-lifer” to “Nun who invented communism”

The Protestants have brought lots of food but are going to proselytize the entire time you eat

The crystalists are split 60/40 on whether or not vaccines cause autism, and you don’t know who has the majority until you’ve been there an hour

The Anglophiles have good pastries, but 1/3 of them are in Sherlock cosplay

The girlbosses are all within 10° to the left of the center of the political spectrum and will try very hard to get you to invest in their MLM

The vegans brought food but will turn hostile if you let slip that you’ve used animal products in the last year

The reenactors have booze, but your phone is dead and they’re giving a very pro-America history lecture

The influencers have a pool, a jacuzzi, and lots of drugs, but they have a combined net worth that teaches seven digits and won’t let you forget it

The retirees have great weed but they’re gonna ask you a lot of invasive questions and give you a lot of unsolicited advice.

[thedeviltohisangel]

All The Things I Did (Interlude): Wave Goodbye to the End of the Beginning

a/n: ahhhh it is here! i am so freaking excited to do this little band of brothers crossover with cass. we have all been dreaming of what her friendship with nix would look like and i am happy to report that it is phenomenal. this is most certainly not the last we will see of him because i know for a fact that a night of him and john drinking together can only end in debauchery and we should all be able to experience that for ourselves. side note...what other characters should we explore? part of me wants to write a full cass x ron speirs BoB au? not sure. let me know and i love youuuuuuu

The room was more full of soldiers than she had been used to recently. Thorpe Abotts had been shrinking, slowly but surely, with each and every mission. The hole in her heart growing and growing before it tore to shreds with the loss of her husband. All her days were spent working on ways to get him back. To leverage her capability to get to the camp as a way to get him out of the camp. A man like John was not built to be caged and she would be damned if she let it go on any longer than it already had. 

“Jesus Christ, it had to be you?” Cass smiled as she turned away from the pot of burnt coffee and took in the sight of the one and only Lewis Nixon. 

“I’m just getting a cup of coffee, Nix. Not sure what Jesus has to do with it.” She put the cup down just in time for his hug, the smell of an old friend comforting her in a way she hadn’t known since London.

“Of all the intelligence officers in the entire Army Air Force…it’s good to see you, Coop.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes, he noticed, and she pulled him back in for another hug. This one tighter and almost sadder. Like she was asking him to confirm she was here and she was okay. “We got a lot to catch up on?” Lew could almost tell by the way she was carrying herself that she had experienced the gamut of war over in England. Had already learned what it was like on the frontlines before he had even suited up to jump and join in. 

“More than a lot.” She looked over to the maps that were covered in canvas until the briefing was set to begin. “But I think we’ve got an invasion of the European mainland to learn about first,” she muttered.

“Didn’t ever think we’d see the day.” Nixon drank from a flask and Cass smirked.

“The boys need this. Hope that it will end soon.” Lew noticed the way she was playing with her necklace, it looked like a ring, and had a hauntingly far away look in her eyes with her words. 

“You got someone to bunk with?” He led her towards two empty chairs in the back of the room and sat next to her, arm slung casually over the back of her chair. 

“If I say no, does that mean you are going to offer your company?” Having already known how this was going to go, Cass had a few bottles of Vat 69 in her suitcase. Nix may have been surprised to see her but she had done her research.

“Because we didn’t have a blast in DC a few summers ago? Don’t you remember how hard you laughed while swimming in the reflecting pool? You even let me hold you while we watched the sunrise.” Lewis Nixon had first met Cassandra Cooper at a seminar in Washington, DC for all recent intelligence course graduates. It had served the purpose to prepare them for their transition to the life of espionage before they shipped out. One last weekend of an air of normalcy before everything changed forever. 

“That is the perfect reason as to why I would be apprehensive about sharing a hotel suite with you this weekend, Nix! I can’t afford to get into any more trouble than I’m already in.” The lights dimmed and he had to swallow his question. 

“What kind of trouble?” he whispered. “Can’t be that bad if you’re a Captain now.” Cass looked at him out of the corner of her eye. 

“I’ll tell you when you buy me a nice dinner tonight.” 

“Now we’re making bargains?” Someone coughed a few rows behind them. 

“I’m getting soup and salad and dessert.” Partially, they had bonded over the family legacies that they had run from but knew were still waiting for them at home. For that reason they both knew they could afford whatever kind of luxurious night on the town that they could find.

“You’ll tell me everything that has happened since we last spoke? Not a single detail spared?”

“Just ask if I got laid in England, Nix, it’d be easier.” He laughed out loud and the entire room shushed them. Cass snuggled deeper into her seat with a smirk as the canvas in front of them was finally illuminated and an officer stepped out to brief them. 

“Ladies and gentleman, the ground invasion of Europe is here.” Everyone cheered but Cass wanted to cry. Why couldn’t it have come sooner? Why couldn’t it have come sooner to prevent the need for John to go on that last mission? The map revealed landing points along the coast of Normandy, France. She was already calculating how long it might take them to reach Germany. How long it might take them to reach the POW camps. Every calculation came back that it wasn’t soon enough. That she would have to do this herself if there was any hope of saving John. And she would need to move quickly. The minute American soldiers landed on the shores of Normandy, the SS would take control of the camps.

“Well? You impressed?” Nix asked as he held the door open for her, leading her out onto the streets of the English countryside. 

“Sure. Quite the orchestral undertaking.”

“Dinner?” he asked as he offered her his arm.

“Yes. Dinner.”

----

True to their bargain, Cass spared no expense when ordering. In turn she had answered all of his questions as best he could. What had happened to that fiance that she ran from? Had she gotten to fly in a B-17? Was she really the girl on that mission to Berlin? He stayed away from the ring on her neck. From the circumstances of her promotion and relocation. The last name on the registration paper that wasn't Cooper. 

“Tell me, Coop. What’s it like being in Moscow? Soviets planning to take us out with the Krauts?” She dabbed at her mouth politely as she chewed her bite of steak. 

“It’s busy. They have me doing a lot of internal things. Not a lot of mainland travel but I’m trying to get back there.” Soon.

“You really are fascinating, Coop. Southern belle from so much money it could make the angels weep. Gives it all up to become a spook. Lands in Berlin before the paratroopers and gets a cushy yet high profile gig in Moscow and wants to scoff at it because she prefers the mud.” He made her sound better than she deserved. Her family money wouldn’t get John back. She had to fall back on her intangibles. The skills that she had always had, before OSS school, and that they had just taught her to weaponize. Once this conference was all over she would have the time to practice with them and sharpen them and get ready to wield them at the gates of the Stalag. 

“You want to ask about the ring,” she remarked as her eyes stayed glued to her mashed potatoes. 

“I’m curious. But it’s not on your finger, leads me to believe the man on the other side of it isn’t with you anymore. Yet you have it on a chain around your neck which means you parted amicably, still in love even. There are only two ways that happens. And neither of them are good dinner table conversation.” Cass had to admit she was impressed. His logic and skills of deduction were impressive especially when you considered the sheer amount of whiskey he had consumed since she bumped into him at the coffee table alone. 

“And you told me you learned nothing while you were in Maryland,” she teased as she stabbed a green bean with her fork and pointed it in his direction. “He’s not dead. I’ll take that thought right of your head.” If anyone thought about it then that would give it life. Allow it to fester like an unattended wound. Cass would allow no such thing to happen.

“So the worse option then. Captured.” It was oddly comforting for him to acknowledge that it was the worse option. An odd sense of validation from an old friend blooming in her chest. 

“Yeah. But like you said. Not dinner table talk.” He nodded in agreement and was back to tucking into his dinner. “I don’t have a roommate. But I do have a few bottles of Vat 69.” Life was breathed back into Lewis Nixon in an instant. 

“God, I fucking love you.” They continued to laugh around dinner and she forced her stomach to compensate for the chocolate cake but then guilt started creeping in. Guilt that she was enjoying this time and living this life and it wasn’t with John. They should have been able to live these joyous moments together. “Ready?” Nix was standing and grabbing her blazer from the coat hook.

“Lew, if the tab is too much, just say so. No need for us to dine and dash.” 

“Handed them cash on the way in. It’s taken care of, Coop.” Her cheeks heated as he helped her arms into the jacket. “Someone’s gotta take care of you while the other half of that ring is out of commission.” His arm was around her shoulder and he pulled her in close. 

“He is very protective and very jealous. I’d be careful if I were you,” she cautioned as they walked towards the hotel in sync. 

“Tell me about Mr. Cassandra Cooper.” Cass tugged the hand that was resting on her shoulder tighter around her.

“He’s a pilot from Wisconsin. Joined before Pearl.” Lew hummed in acknowledgement. “Has a mustache,” she added with a smile. 

“Always saw you ending up with a mustached man.” She laughed, working her way through the hotel lobby and towards the elevator. “Sit tight. My bags are with the desk.” While waiting, her hand unconsciously drifted to grab the ring around her neck. If she focused long enough, she would almost feel it burning her palm. On particularly lonely nights she would run it down her cheeks and feel wisps of his fingers. Press it to her lips and feel the way he would whisper how much he loved her. It was exhausting to be without her other half. The piece of him that resided inside of her trying to reach him. Stretching herself thin and wearing down to the bone with the effort it took. 

“How’s Kathy?” she asked when Lew got back. 

“Fine,” he shrugged, “we fight over the dog a lot.” 

“The dog?”

“Why? You and Mr. Mustache a picture of peace and tranquility?” His arm held the elevator doors open as she stepped inside and pressed the button that said eight. 

“Major Mustache to you, Lieutenant.” Pulling her own rank on him would feel ridiculous. “And our play fighting and bantering is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Or…got me out of bed in the morning.” Now the only thing that fueled her was her plot for revenge. She was half tempted to throw a lit match into the camp and see how far that got her. 

“Major. Your mother won’t be upset he isn’t a Colonel? General, even.” Harding flashed across her eyes quickly. 

“She’ll be upset he isn’t a politician or a banker or a lawyer or some other traditionally pleasant profession. And she’ll be even further incensed when she learns I got married in London without her permission.” Just past the open doors, her shoes were kicked off angrily as she stalked towards the crate in the corner. “Bottle or glass?” Nix weighed his options.

“Bottle.” The one in her left hand went to him and the other went to her mouth. “It’s that kind of night?” 

“That kind of year.”

----

They lost track of time as they finished their bottles and decided to share another one. They were on the floor, pillows under their heads as they looked up at the peeling paint of the ceiling. 

“When this is all over, I need to meet this Major of yours. We can meet in Chicago or New York or bumfuck middle of nowhere. We can get drunk just like this and be fucking happy.” Cass smiled and laughed as he fumbled to try and light his cigarette.

“John will love that. We’ll still be married but you and Kathy…” Nix groaned.

“Kathy.” He handed it to her once he finally managed to capture it in the flame. “Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, Coop.” 

“I don’t like being away from him. I don’t feel like myself when he isn’t with me.” She absent-mindedly played with the ring that was resting against her chest. “I was so close to getting him out of there. He was in my arms…I just couldn’t get him on the damn horse. I wasn’t strong enough to get him out and now they have him caged.” A tear snuck out of the corner of her eye and she wiped it away harshly. 

“Cass,” Nix set the bottle to the side and opened his arms up to her, “your love is going to survive this. Whatever version of you makes it out of here and whatever version of him makes it out of there are going to be so fucking in love I am going to be sick.” She snuggled deeper into his chest. 

“Do you think they’ll fire me if I get myself thrown in a POW camp on purpose?” He’d warn her against it if he thought it would make a difference. 

“Well, walk me through the tradecraft. Do it right, they’ll never know.” When she sat up, she looked more alive than she had in awhile. 

“One of the guards has a very sick mother…”

The rest of the night was spent with her walking him through her plan. The network she had built to get her to the edge of the camp in the first place, the vulnerabilities she had found within the ranks of the guards to get her husband brought to her when required and the web she was weaving to get past the fence and into the barracks. He challenged the motivations of the guards. Challenged the security of her assets along the path. Offered her perspectives on a cover story and made sure she was emphatically aware of the danger she was taking on by enacting this plan. 

“I can’t think of anyone more qualified in recklessness to take this on, Captain,” he said as the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. “He’s one lucky fucking bastard to have a girl willing to do this for him.”

“I’m the lucky one. He’s given me a home. Something to look forward to and a place to feel safe while doing it.” She laughed with no humor behind it. “That future…he’s the only one I want it with. Any other version and it isn’t worth it.” He heard the meaning behind her words. If this was her last mission, she would be going out exactly the way she wanted to. Cass was not meant to live without John. And she didn’t plan on doing so either. 

“As if I needed another reason to want Hitler dead. Now I have to add your love story to the list.” Nix rolled his eyes but there was nothing but love in them. 

“Oh, have you heard the tale of Princess Spook?” 

“Does she have a dashing advisor named Sir Nix?” 

“Not yet but she can.” 

Saying goodbye to him hurt in a way she couldn’t describe. The time spent with him shielding her from the pain and suffering that her reality had to offer her. It had felt good to talk to someone about John and not have to comfort them. Not have to recognize their pain in losing him as well. To share her thoughts and have him listen and provide solutions and not try to dissuade her from the path she was on. It was the first time she had been able to let her guard down in a long while. It would be her last chance to do so for many months.

Cass waved goodbye from the door of her train until it pulled away and Nixon was a speck on the horizon. She stayed there and looked in the same direction until the wind whipped too cold. And as she did everytime the breeze kissed her cheeks, she imagined it was John. And she kissed her fingertips and held them to the wind with a message in the hopes it would return her sentiments in kind.

I love you, John.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

[novantinuum]

Steven Q. Universe is not 145 lbs in Future and I will gladly die on this hill

Aight. I'm tired of the SU fan wiki spreading this too. Here we go. Here are a few reasons why the listing of his weight (and quite honestly, height too) on the wiki are nonsense and need to stop being spread around as fact.

Reason one: Steven's body proportions were completely in flux that entire episode anyways, and there's a good possibility even Priyanka's final "measurements" are inaccurate to his baseline.

Think about it.

We already see evidence of his height fluctuation in the hospital scene as it is.

Connie's mother writes down a measurement...

Notices him sprout just a little taller...

And quickly corrects her measurements.

Not to mention, we've seen evidence of his weight fluctuating just an episode before.

In Together Forever, while ruminating on the thought of Connie moving so far away for college, he turns pink and then sinks really hard into his mattress, as if he actively became heavier while he thought about these literally heavy thoughts.

If his height was fluctuating during the exam, it only makes sense that his weight was, too.

Reason 2: Priyanka has a specific way she writes the number 4

Here is the full, completed clipboard. You can tell the whole thing was filled out by Priyanka, all text is in the same handwriting.

Here is a close-up of her entries on height and weight.

The awkward number correction on the height makes sense. It's hard to tell if what she wrote at first was 5'1" or 5'6" but whatever it was, it seems she ultimately decided to change it to 5'5".

The weight entry is... corrected as well, but in a somewhat nebulous way.

People keep thinking that this entry was corrected to "145," but here's the thing- she doesn't write 4s like that.

She doesn't close her 4s.

I'm more drawn to believe she was correcting a number into a 9 by closing it, but to be fair, I will admit that her her normal, uncorrected 9s aren't as pointy and angular. It's not a 4, though. It doesn't make sense for it to be a 4. Why would you correct a number into a 4 in a different way than you normally write it? Closing a number into a wonky 9 is one thing, 9s have to be closed. But writing an open 4 and then correcting another one by closing it is just... gah. It doesn't make sense to me.

BUT. Here's the thing. Here's why- at the day- Steven's true weight is DEFINITELY not 145.

Reason 3: That is literally not how bodies work.

Folks, please remember that Steven is fat. He is consistently drawn with thick limbs and a tummy, EVEN in Steven Universe Future.

And as someone who has spanned the whole gamut between 195 and 145 lbs at various points of my life... let me tell you from personal experience that Steven absolutely does NOT have a 145 lbs sort of frame.

And like, I'm not gonna pin my money on 195 lbs exactly because of reason number one- Steven being in a complete state of proportional flux that episode anyways- but it's definitely a measurement that is FAR more in the realm of realism than 145.

Once again, in sum:

Steven is not 145 lbs and the measurements taken in this ep need to all be taken with an intense grain of salt anyways because he was literally shrinking and growing all over the map, thank you

[canmom]

canmom's notes on fixing the colours

ok so if you've been following along on this blog for the last week or two i've been banging on about colour calibration. and i feel like it would be good to sum up what i've learned in a poast!

quick rundown on colour spaces

So. When you represent colour on a computer, you just have some numbers. Those numbers are passed to the monitor to tell it to turn some tiny lights up and down. The human visual system is capable of seeing a lot of colours, but your monitor can only display some of them. That's determined by its primaries, basically the exact colour* of its red, green and blue lights.

(*if you're wondering, the primaries are specified in terms of something called the CIELAB colour space, which is a model of all the different colours that humans can possibly see, devised by experiments in the early-mid 20th century where the subjects would turn lights at different frequencies up and down until they appeared visually the same. Through this, we mapped out how eyes respond to light, enabling basically everything that follows. Most human eyes tend to respond in pretty close to identical ways - of course, some people are colourblind, which adds an extra complication!)

Now, the problem we face is that every display is different. In particular, different displays have different primaries. The space in between the primaries is the gamut - the set of all colours that a display can represent. You can learn more about this concept on this excellent interactive page by Bartosz Ciechanowski.

The gamut is combined with other things like a white point and a gamma function to map numbers nonlinearly to amounts of light. All these bits of info in combination declare exactly what colour your computer should display for any given triplet of numbers. We call this a colour space.

There are various standard sets of primaries, the most famous being the ITU-R Rec.709 primaries used in sRGB, first defined in 1993, often just called the sRGB primaries - this is a fairly restricted colour space, intended to be an easy target for monitor manufacturers and to achieve some degree of colour consistency on the web (lol).

Since then, a much wider gamut called Rec.2020 has recently been defined for 'HDR' video. This is a very wide gamut, and no existing displays can actually show it in full. Besides that, there are various other colour spaces such as AdobeRGB and P3, which are used in art and design and video editing.

What you see above is something called a 'chromaticity diagram'. the coordinate system is CIE xyY with fixed Y. The curved upper edge to the shape is the line of monochromatic colours (colours created by a single frequency of light); everything other colour must be created by combining multiple frequencies of light. (Note that the colours inside the shape are not the actual colours of those points in CIE XY, they're mapped into sRGB.)

In this case, the red, green and blue dots are the primaries of my display. Since they are outside the green triangle marked sRGB, it qualifies as a 'wide gamut' display which can display more vivid colours.

Sidebar: you might ask why we didn't define the widest possible gamut we could think of at the start of all this. Well, besides consistency, the problem is that you only have so many bits per channel. For a given bit depth (e.g. 8 bits per channel per pixel), you have a finite number of possible colours you can display. Any colours in between get snapped to the nearest rung of the ladder. The upshot is that if you use a higher gamut, you need to increase the bit depth in order to avoid ugly colour banding, which means your images take up more space and take more time to process. But this is why HDR videos in Rec.2020 should always be using at least 10 bits per colour channel.

in order to display consistent colours between different computers, you need a profile of how your monitor displays colour. Yhis is something that has to be measured empirically, because even two monitors of the same model will be slightly different. You get this information by essentially taking a little gadget which has a lens and a sensitive, factory-calibrated colour meter, and holding it against your screen, then making the screen display various colours to measure what light actually comes out of it. This information is packed into a file called an ICC profile.

(Above is the one I got, the Spyder X2. I didn't put a lot of thought into this, and unfortunately it turns out that the Spyder X2 is not yet supported by programs like DisplayCal. The Spyder software did a pretty good job though.)

Wonderfully, if you have two different ICC profiles, and you want to display the same colour in each space, you can do some maths to map one into the other. So, to make sure that a picture created on one computer looks the same on another computer, you need two things: the colour space (ICC profile) of the image and the colour space (ICC profile) of the screen.

Now different operating systems handle colour differently, but basically for all three major operating systems there is somewhere you can set 'here is the icc profile for this screen'. You might think that's the whole battle: calibrate screen, get ICC profile, you're done! Welcome to the world of consistent colour.

Unfortunately we're not done.

the devil in the details

The problem is the way applications tell the operating system about colour is... spotty, inconsistent, unreliable. Applications can either present their colours in a standard space called sRGB, and let the OS handle the rest - or they can bypass that entirely and just send their numbers straight to the monitor without regard for what space it's in.

Then we have some applications that are 'colour managed', meaning you can tell the application about an ICC profile (or some other colour space representation), and it will handle converting colours into that space. This allows applications to deal with wider colour gamuts than sRGB/Rec.709, which is very restricted, without sacrificing consistency between different screens.

So to sum up, we have three types of program:

programs which only speak sRGB and let the OS correct the colours

programs which aren't colour aware and talk straight to the monitor without any correction (usually games)

programs which do colour correction themselves and talk straight to the monitor.

That last category is the fiddly one. It's a domain that typically includes art programs, video editors and web browsers. Some of them will read your ICC profile from the operating system, some have to be explicitly told which one to use.

Historically, most monitors besides the very high end were designed to support sRGB colours and not much more. However, recently it's become easier to get your hands on a wide gamut screen. This is theoretically great because it means we can use more vivid colours, but... as always the devil is in the details. What we want is that sRGB colours stay the same, but we have the option to reach for the wider gamut deliberately.

Conversely, when converting between colour spaces, you have to make a decision of what to do with colours that are 'out of gamut' - colours that one space can represent and another space can't. There's no 'correct' way to do this, but there are four standard approaches, which make different tradeoffs of what is preserved and what is sacrificed. So if you look at an image defined in a wide colour space such as Rec.2020, you need to use one of these to put it into your screen's colour space. This is handled automatically in colour managed applications, but it's good to understand what's going on!

(*You may notice a difference in games even if they're not colour managed. This is because one of the things the calibration does is update the 'gamma table' on your graphics card, which maps from numeric colour values to brightness. Since the human eye is more sensitive to differences between dark colours, this uses a nonlinear function - a power law whose exponent is called gamma. That nonlinear function also differs between screens, and your graphics card can be adjusted to compensate and make sure everyone stays on the standard gamma 2.2. Many games offer you a slider to adjust the gamma, as a stopgap measure to deal with the fact that your computer's screen probably isn't calibrated.)

For what follows, any time you need the ICC profile, Windows users should look in C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color. MacOS and Linux users, see this page for places it might be. Some applications can automatically detect the OS's ICC profile, but if not, that's where you should look.

on the web

Theoretically, on the web, colours are supposed to be specified in sRGB if not specified otherwise. But when you put an image on the web, you can include an ICC profile along with it to say exactly what colours to use. Both Firefox and Chrome are colour-managed browsers, and able to read your ICC profile right from the operating system. So an image with a profile should be handled correctly in both (with certain caveats in Chrome).

However, Firefox by default for some reason doesn't do any correction on any colours that don't have a profile, instead passing them through without correction. This can be fixed by changing a setting in about:config: gfx.color_management.mode. If you set this to 1 instead of the default 2, Firefox will assume colours are in sRGB unless it's told otherwise, and correct them.

Here is a great test page to see if your browser is handling colour correctly.

Chrome has fewer options to configure. by default it's almost correctly colour-managed but not quite. So just set the ICC on your OS and you're as good as it's gonna get. The same applies to Electron apps, such as Discord.

To embed a colour profile in an image, hopefully your art program has the ability to do this when saving, but if not, you can use ImageMagick on the command line (see below). Some websites will strip metadata including ICC profile - Tumblr, fortunately, does not.

For the rest of this post I'm going to talk about how to set up colour management in certain programs I use regularly (Krita, Blender, mpv, and games).

in Krita

Krita makes it pretty easy: you go into the settings and give it the ICC profile of your monitor. You can create images in a huge variety of spaces and bit depths and gamma profiles. When copying and pasting between images inside Krita, it will convert it for you.

The tricky thing to consider is pasting into Krita from outside. By default, your copy-paste buffer does not have colour space metadata. Krita gives you the option to interpret it with your monitor's profile, or as sRGB. I believe the correct use is: if you're copying and pasting an image from the web, then sRGB is right; if you're pasting a screenshot, it has already been colour corrected, you should use 'as on monitor' so Krita will convert it back into the image's colour space.

in Blender

Blender does not use ICC profiles, but a more complicated system called OpenColorIO. Blender supports various models of mapping between colour spaces, including Filmic and ACES, to go from its internal scene-referred HDR floating-point working space (basically, a space that measures how much light there is in absolute terms) to other spaces such as sRGB. By default, Blender assumes it can output to sRGB, P3, etc. without any further correction.

So. What we need to do is add another layer after that which takes the sRGB data and corrects it for our screen. This requires something called a Lookup Table (LUT), which is basically just a 3D texture that maps colours to other colours. You can generate a LUT using a program called DisplayCal, which can also be used for display calibration - note that you don't use the main DisplayCal program for this, but instead a tool called 3DLUT Maker that's packaged along with it. see this Stack Overflow thread for details.

Then, you describe in the OpenColorIO file how to use that LUT, defining a colour space.

The procedure described in the thread recommends you set up colour calibration as an additional view transform targeting sRGB. This works, but strictly speaking it's not a correct use of the OpenColorIO model. We should also set up our calibrated screen as an additional display definition, and attach our new colour spaces to that display. Also, if you want to use the 'Filmic' View Transform with corrected colours (or indeed any other), you need to define that in the OpenColorIO file too. Basically, copy whatever transform you want, and insert an extra line with the 3D LUT.

Here's how it looks for me:

in games (using ReShade)

So I mentioned above that games do not generally speaking do any colour correction beyond the option to manually adjust a gamma slider. However, by using a post-processing injection framework such as ReShade, you can correct colours in games.

If you want to get the game looking as close to the original artistic intent as possible, you can use the LUT generator to generate a PNG lookup table, save it in the Reshade textures folder, then you load it into the LUT shader that comes packaged with Reshade. Make sure to set the width, height and number of tiles correctly or you'll get janked up results.

However... that might not be what you want. Especially with older games, there is often a heavy green filter or some other weird choice in the colour design. Or maybe you don't want to follow the 'original artistic intent' and would rather enjoy the full vividness your screen is capable of displaying. (I certainly like FFXIV a lot better with a colour grade applied to it using the full monitor gamut.)

A 3D Lookup Table can actually be used for more than simply calibrating colour to match a monitor - it is in general a very powerful tool for colour correction. A good workflow is to open a screenshot in an image editor along with a base lookup table, adjust the colours in certain ways, and save the edited lookup table as an image texture; you can then use it to apply colour correction throughout the game. This procedure is described here.

Whatever approach you take, when you save screenshots with Reshade, it will not include any colour information. If you want screenshots to look like they do in-game when displayed in a properly colour managed application, you need to attach your monitor's ICC profile to the image. You can do this with an ImageMagick command:

magick convert "{path to screenshot}" -strip -profile "{path to ICC profile}" "{output file name}.webp"

This also works with TIFF and JPEG; for some reason I couldn't get it to work with PNG (you generate a PNG but no colour profile is attached.)

It's possible to write a post-save command in ReShade which could be used to attach this colour space info. If I get round to doing that, I'll edit into this post.

video

In MPV, you can get a colour-corrected video player by setting an appropriate line in mpv.conf, assuming you're using vo=gpu or vo=gpu-next (recommended). icc-profile-auto=yes should automatically load the monitor ICC profile from the operating system, or you can specify a specific one with icc-profile={path to ICC profile}.

For watching online videos, it seems that neither Firefox nor Chrome applies colour correction, even though the rest of the browser is colour-managed. If you don't want to put up with this, you can open Youtube videos in MPV, which internally downloads them using Youtube-DL or yt-dlp. This is inconvenient! Still haven't found a way to make it colour-corrected in-browser.

For other players like VLC or MPC-HC, I'm not so familiar with the procedure, you'll need to research this on your own.

what about HDR?

HDR is a marketing term, and a set of standards for monitor features (the VESA DisplayHDR series), but it does also refer to a new set of protocols around displaying colour, known as Rec. 2100. This defines the use of a 'perceptual quantiser' function in lieu of the old gamma function. HDR screens are able to support extreme ranges of brightness using techniques like local dimming and typically have a wider colour gamut.

If your screen supports it, Windows has a HDR mode which (I believe) switches the output to use Rec.2100. The problem is deciding what to do with SDR content on your screen (which is to say most things) - you have very little control over anything besides brightness, and for some reason Windows screws up the gamma. Turning on HDR introduced truly severe colour banding all over the shop for me.

My colorimeter claims to be able to profile high brightness/hdr screens, but I haven't tested the effect of profiling in HDR mode yet. There is also a Windows HDR calibration tool, but this is only available on the Microsoft store, which makes it a real pain to set up if you've deleted that from your operating system in a fit of pique. (Ameliorated Edition is great until it isn't.)

Anyway, if I get around to profiling my monitor in HDR mode, I will report back. However, for accurate SDR colour, the general recommendation seems to be to simply turn it off. Only turn it on if you want to watch content specifically authored for HDR (some recent games, and HDR videos are available on some platforms like Youtube). It's a pain.

is this all really worth the effort?

Obviously I've really nerded out about all this, and I know the likely feeling you get looking at this wall of text is 'fuck this, I'll just put up with it'. But my monitor's gamma was pretty severely off, and when I was trying to make a video recently I had no idea that my screen was making the red way more saturated and deep than I would see on most monitors.

If you're a digital artist or photographer, I think it's pretty essential to get accurate colour. Of course the pros will spend thousands on a high end screen which may have built in colour correction, but even with a screen at the level I'm looking at (costing a few hundred quid), you can do a lot to improve how it looks 'out of the box'.

So that's the long and short of it. I hope this is useful to someone to have all of this in one place!

I don't know if we'll ever reach a stage where most monitors in use are calibrated, so on some level it's a bit of a fool's errand, but at least with calibration I have some more hope that what I put in is at least on average close to what comes out the other end.

[dragons-clause]

The Dragon's Clause

Sabo x Fem Reader CW: Forced marriage, intrigue, character death, fantasy violence, blood, magic, language, smut, 18+ mdni

Summary: The Nusjuro empire is one of Five Empires in the world, each over seeing the safety and welfare of the Kingdoms that share a continent with them. You're the niece of the King of Lulusia, a small, but rich kingdom whose northern border faces the Wilds, a large swath of land overrun by beasts and monsters.

Unforeseen political issues complicate your life, and you find yourself facing unexpected clauses, causes, and claws!

Chapter 1: A Review

The Empire of Nusjuro was one of five empires across all the realms that had been founded around the same time some eight hundred years prior. Each of the empires had within them several kingdoms. The Empires themselves offered protection to those kingdoms willing, and able, to pay them tribute.

A sign of deference and reverence.

Kingdoms unable or unwilling to pay the tribute often found themselves razed to the ground and struck from the records of history. The empire itself rarely even had to raise a hand, simply allowing other surrounding kingdoms to wipe the offending kingdom from the maps and records through their own greed.

Such actions struck you as foolish, when the lands beyond the borders of any given empire were rife with monsters. It seemed wiser to have more people focused on dealing with the abominations, than wasting resources and lives over foolish things like borders.

The foul beasts were born up from some source none could be sure of. It was agreed that the creatures were hardly natural in their creation, but despite the ferocity and danger of them, their existence was lucrative. Beasts from the wild were soaked in magic, so all parts of them held value, from their hides to the bones. There was a cost in pushing them back, but it was often off-set by the beasts’ own corpses.

Your own country of Lulusia was lucky enough to border lands with particularly useful beasts at its border. Coming out ahead with monsters was a mix of how difficult it was to deal with the beast, and how effective its remains could be processed. Lulusia made decent coin from its monster expeditions, though the neighboring kingdom of Goa struggled to break even on the costs of its own expeditions.

What Lulusia lacked, however, Goa had in spades, and so the two kingdoms had known prosperous trade and peace for some time. Lulusia’s king, your uncle, was good friends with Goa’s king, as the two had attended the academy in the kingdom of Germa back in their youth.

Germa was the academic center for the Nusjuro empire, and almost all nobility, and most assuredly all royalty, attended a year or more at the academy there. Less time was needed for those who had taken up academic studies prior to attendance, and more time was needed for those seeking to specialize in some variety of magic or academia.

Magic in this world was easily categorized into three sections: Basic magic, or cantrips as they were more commonly called, advanced magic, also known as restricted magic, and specialized magic. Cantrips were little more than ways to make one’s life easier, requiring almost no magic to conjure, and very little knowledge to command. Cantrips were useful for things like lighting stoves and campfires, donning and doffing armor used by knights, mending clothes, and helping road-weary travelers stay clean when there was neither an inn nor bath within easy reach.

Advanced magic required more magic, and with few exceptions, formal instruction of some variety. Advanced magic applications covered the gamut from teleportation magics, to destructive rains of fire, to defensive capabilities. Often one either dedicated their time to learning magic or the sword, though there were plenty of people well-practiced in both. Knights capable of wielding advanced magic were either Guardians, or Elemental Swords, depending on their specialization.

Guardians protected themselves and their charges with defensive spells, and Elemental Swords, or simply Swords, were often adept at a single element of magic, and incorporated it into their fighting style.

Your father had been a Sword, and a grandmaster at that. He had three elemental magics he was adept with, and had utilized that flexibility to be the best border knight that Lulusia had known for some generations. His capacity in that regard, and his decision to step down, had kept the small kingdom at peace despite concerns about a war of succession between him and his brother.

“Stay focused lil’ scale, you have a lot to cover during your travels.” You murmur to yourself, turning the page in the book you were currently working through.

Beyond advanced magic was specialized magic. It was difficult to learn specialized magic in a formal setting, and most people who had some sort of specialized magic had either discovered it by happy accident, or been naturally gifted toward it. Specialized magic ran the breadth and width of imagination, allowing the user to transform their own body, or effect the world around them. Some people could seemingly produce materials out of thin air, creating everything from strings to great forests, with minimal magic use and efficiencies far beyond what any known restricted spell could manage.

In some cases the only difference between were-beasts and specialists was the simple fact that specialists had more control over their transformations.

One of the most famous specialists was the Royal Mage of the Dawn Kingdom, who taught at Germa’s academy when his kingdom’s princes had attended. He was known only as The Phoenix, and you weren’t even sure what he looked like, his fiery, feathered form being the most well-known appearance of his.

The Dawn Kingdom had the largest northern border, and as such its military might was impressive compared to its size. Though the current stability within the kingdom was thanks to the adoption of a second prince, who specialized in fire magic to such a degree that people called him the Flame Emperor. A risky moniker, given how touchy the empire is regarding such things, but apparently it fit well enough that there hasn’t been any backlash regarding it.

It was possible, though not plausible, that there wasn’t anything the empire could do about it. Once a name like that caught on, it wouldn’t matter if the Dawn Kingdom attempted to quell it. Things like that had a life of their own.

You shake your head, you’re getting off task again.

The Dawn Kingdom’s problems weren’t yours. Your problem was specific, though maybe “problem” wasn’t so much the word as “predicament” was.

Things between Lulusia and Goa had been slowly deteriorating, and it had been decided between the Kings that a renewal of bonds between their nations was in order. King Seki’s daughter was ill, and he had refused to risk her health, either by land or by teleportation, which itself was a draining process. Seki’s only other child was his eldest son, the crown prince and heir apparent to Lulusia.

That left you.

As the daughter of the king’s brother, you were, by rights, a royal. As such you were afforded certain privileges, such as an education in magic and etiquette, and other more functional academic pursuits. In exchange for those privileges, however, many of your options were decided for you. As the only child of your father, you were forbidden from becoming a border knight, this would have been regardless of your gender, since noble bloodlines fell under the Covenant of the Celestial Dragons, or more commonly referred to as the Divine Clause.

It was a holy document, said to be thousands of years old, that named the bloodlines of the five elders, the twenty saints, and hundred valors. The founding bloodlines for the Empire, the Empire's prominent families, and the hundred kingdoms.

It was more like the sixty-seven kingdoms currently. The number had been in flux for as long as you were alive, and far before you, you were sure. Despite the stability the Empire seemed to promise, there was little more certain in the world than war between kingdoms.

The Divine Clause was one of several such concepts handed down from the Empires and their collective grip on the world. Your father hadn’t been a fan of the system as it was, and you had inherited at least a little of his disdain. You kept it tucked down, as much as you did many parts of yourself.

You’d kept your grades, grace, and martial skills hidden from your uncle, and cousins. You didn’t play the fool, but you’d been prudent to keep yourself below the bar of your kin. Royalty though you were, you weren’t foolish enough to think it would protect you. Your uncle might not have been cruel, but he would’ve burned you at the stake to protect his wealth and his children, of that you had little doubt.

Komane and Maneko had been friendly toward you when you were all children, but once Komane’s illness kept her inside more, and Maneko left for the academy, there had been a sort of neutral business affect to your interactions.

You weren’t surprised things had turned out this way, in all honesty.

With a sigh you return to your studies. You needed to review the interactions of Lulusia and Goa before your arrival. Information was going to be your only weapon until you were able to amass support directly for yourself, and you’d have to do that carefully. Like with your cousins, it wouldn’t be wise to outshine Goa’s crown prince before establishing yourself.

The major kingdoms of concern were your own Lulusia, which required little extra reading, you knew the ins and outs of your own home better than the king. Then Goa, which was your destination, and finally the Dawn Kingdom, which was entwined with Goa.

Lulusia and Dawn had almost no direct interaction with one another, but Goa and Dawn had established robust and lucrative trade routes, met regularly to make sure things were favorable for both kingdoms, and had several things in common.

One of the most notorious things they had in common were that neither kingdom’s crown prince was the biological heir of the current king. In the case of the Dawn Kingdom it had been an event of grandeur and celebration.

In Goa it had been awkward at best. Rumor had been that the King and Queen had intended to cow their son into compliance by adopting an heir apparent. Despite their actions and threats, the biological son hadn’t buckled to whatever demands they required, and they had no choice but to crown the adopted son.

Thus did Goa end up with a Grand Duke.

News regarding him was split down class lines so deeply it was hard to say which was truth. The commoners seemed to exalt and love the Grand Duke. Tasked with keeping the northern border safe, it was rumored that he did so almost single-handedly. The only person with a stronger flame than his was the crowned prince of the Dawn Kingdom.

Nobles, however, painted a far different tale. The Grand Duke was a monster with a soul of ice. Stone hard skin, and a grip of poison. A twisted and scarred man who hungered for the throne, and brought an unnatural chill into every event he attended.

Rumors of his desire for power ran the gamut of hysterical to blood-chillingly believable.

Both sets of rumors pushed the limits of possibility, since no one could guard miles upon miles of border by themselves, and if he was truly so cruel, he would’ve been imprisoned by the Empire on the request of his own kin. So while rumors were all you had, you couldn’t depend on them.

The Duke, however, wasn’t your concern. The crown prince was, and there wasn’t much to be said about him, good or ill. Your Uncle knew only good things concerning him, as his friend, the King of Goa, was not like to speak ill of his heir no matter what.

It was likely that your Uncle was aware of some flaw or failing within Goa’s crown prince and had no intention of handing over his daughter - regardless of the political power that could be gained from it. Otherwise he would’ve sent you with her, as her lady-in-waiting, and had you assure her health and well-being until she was married to the prince.

But, you knew you were effectively a sacrifice from the beginning, and truths among Kingdoms was finicky at best. You’d have to verify things before you could earnestly believe anything, but leaning back and observing were things you were well-practiced in.

[thatsparrow]

watched twister (1996) for the first time (thoughts)

wasn't expecting the opening credits to feel as ominous as they did, very horror-adjacent (when the tornado lands, there's this growling sound effect that feels very monstrous. from what I remember, this is really the only time that happens, which could be a cool, like—given that this is the tornado that killed her dad, to jo, it was a monster)

between toby getting (briefly) locked out of the storm shelter in the beginning and bill paxton having to carry aunt meg's dog out of the house before it collapses, this movie puts animals in danger much more than I anticipated (I guess that one cow didn't have such a good time, either)

still in the opening, but when her dad got yoinked, all those nighttime shots of the lightning and tornado felt very supernatural, ufo-ish (this big transcendent thing in the sky, abducting her father, so large you can only see bits and pieces of it) which does play into the mystery/unknowability aspect

we cut to the present, and there's this jaunty, western-style music playing, which I also didn't expect! I think that was one of my main takeaways—that I thought this movie was more a straight-up natural disaster action movie, when it's really more of an adventure story (and a love story, which bookends the whole thing.) but like, if you think of the tornadoes as some rare treasure, the storm signs (and bill's ability to read them) as the map, chasing against rivals after the same goal, all the beats are there. (not to say it isn't also a natural disaster movie, but it is interesting watching how/when the movie shifts between tornadoes as an object of pursuit, stirring excitement, the majesty of nature, and when they're a threat, a point of fear, dangerous in their unpredictability and impassivity)

we see helen hunt, and my first thought was, "why would he ever divorce helen hunt"

(more under the break)

but also I wasn't actually ever clear on why he was divorcing helen hunt? or more, why they had separated in the first place. the closest I could figure was that conversation when he says something to jo about her not wanting a house, and maybe that it was him wanting to settle down and she wanted a life on the road (see: his current job as a weatherman now that he's with melissa) but also, does he really want to settle down? the whole movie is us seeing how he's clearly happiest and most alive when he's chasing (and with helen hunt), but he can't or won't let himself accept that until melissa ends the relationship for him

didn't expect carey elwes to be here, doing his absolute best effort at a southern accent

i love human barometer bill paxton. "he's better at reading storms than anyone else" "why" "don't worry about it" (genuinely though, it's such a fun detail, and I'm glad they include it in twisters, too)

jo's storm chasing team is bigger than I thought it would be (granted, I had no concept of anyone else being in this movie other than helen hunt, bill paxton, and philip seymour hoffman) and I love that sequence of all the vibes of the different cars as they take off, the music they put on, the interiors—we are running the gamut of personalities here, but they are all equally excited and motivated by storm chasing (then compared to the deeply corporate and uniform energy of jonas's team)

"have you lost your nerve?" "tighten your seatbelt" we all know their chemistry is good, but their chemistry is SO good ("let's get you wired" LET'S GO)

melissa is interesting, like — she's the audience surrogate, she's the excuse to explain things about storm chasing and tornadoes that everyone else would already know (but the audience likely doesn't), she's insightful and compassionate when she's talking to her clients (are we meant to take the reproductive therapy or something as a joke job?), and she does clearly love bill, and he loves her, too. but she's so out of her element, she complements this entirely different side of him, and now that he's in this place where he's most himself, she's completely at sea. she's understandably afraid and overwhelmed. she's watching her fiance fall back in love (or, realize he was always still in love) with his ex, who's accomplished and capable in all the ways she isn't. and there's some friction between them, like melissa telling jo not to try to win bill back, and some jockeying from jo at the diner counter, but then you also have jo checking on melissa after the first tornado hits. I like that her story ends with her deciding to leave bill, but then adding the line about not being that sad about it, her recognizing that they weren't really what the other needed (it is weird though that she's suddenly gone from the group and no one remarks on it)

very into bill starting the movie all buttoned-up, then gradually shedding those layers, getting less kempt, his shiny new truck converted into their chase vehicle (later when the other chasers refer to bill as "the extreme," the push-pull between who he is in his life before the movie starts, and who he clearly is at heart)

it is wild that a divorce is the undercurrent of this whole thing (but wild in a fun way! like it's fun how much this is a love story that also has tornadoes. bill paxton is here to get the divorce papers signed. the movie ends with them kissing. rebuilding relationships via natural disasters)

that shot of the flying cow happens so much earlier than I expected

just between us, it took me way too long to realize jo was the little girl from the beginning ("how long?" don't worry about it)

jo as ahab, her trying to look into the tornado and bill turning her away, the obsessive need to understand, pushing forward beyond what's reasonable

the cars! cars as their primary instruments, reflective of their personalities, this is a western and their cars are their horses, but also cars won't protect them when a tornado hits, and in fact add to the danger, they're at the drive-in when the surprise tornado comes, they hide out in the floor of the garage, cars as homes, cars getting trashed, I've lost the point but you see it

there's something about the disconnect between the threat messages, both "they had no warning" when a tornado hits unexpectedly, vs. an f-5 that you can see and follow the trail of, but it's still going to destroy whatever is in its path (also after wakita gets hit and jo's aunt meg tells her that jo needs to stop it—like the data they collect is vital, but also them getting dorothy to fly won't have any immediate consequences on the tornado itself)

I do love all the "bill's back" "I'm not back" from the beginning, him saying he's only going to stay a day, and then he's immediately so back

spoilers but I did not expect carey elwes and his driver to die. this movie has a pretty low onscreen body count, and that one was a surprise

that near-kiss in the cornfield! so good!!

the whole sequence of them sprinting from the tornado toward the barn, the fence posts getting pulled up just behind them, the horses running—so, so good

but also what's the deal with the murder barn? like they run into the barn and it looks like a murder barn and then they run out because everything in the murder barn would murder them when the tornado hits, and then we never address it again. was this just to keep them running from the tornado a little longer?

they're a battle couple but for storm chasers, and it slaps

the movie ends with them kissing! this is their love story!!

all in all, I had a hell of a time, a blast from start to finish

[splendsay]

COD FF // Callsign: Sunshine // Ch. 37: Light and Dark

..................................................................

Callsign: Sunshine // Chapter 37: Light and Dark

Rating: 18+ !!MDNI!! Chapters: 37/? WC: 96,103 Pairing(s): TF141 x F!Reader (You) Chapter Warnings: Explicit language, canon-typical violence Chapter Excerpt:

You look like a fairy. A fairy princess, dancing about her garden kingdom -- carefree and wistful and altogether full of magic. 

You did something to your eyes. Darkened them. And your hair, you magnified it somehow.  Mussed it up in that perfectly imperfect way of yours. You look...alive. Alluring. Wild and unruly. Sultry, even. He never would've thought it possible -- for you to be any more beautiful.

But here you are. A rainbow come to life. A flower in bloom. Ruffling your skirts and throwing your head back, laughing as Soap twirls you by the hand in circle after circle. 

Ghost isn't a dancer. Neither is Soap, but he has the spirit -- the shamelessness that Ghost lacks. 

You, though. You are magnetic. Joy incarnate. A tornado that breathes life instead of taking it away. 

He shouldn't be surprised. Not anymore. But you always manage. You always surprise him. 

You'd dutifully begged him to join you on the dance floor when the reception had begun, Farah and Alex leading the way with a loud, flashy number. But he'd politely declined, horrified at the thought of you or anyone else seeing him move in such a way. No, he's more than happy to watch you from the sidelines. Taking in every detail. Committing every spin, every shimmy, every grin to memory. You keep checking in, though. After every song, you check in. 

Pink in the face, eyes gleaming, you stumble over to him. 

"You're sure you don't want to dance?"

"I'm sure, baby."

You pout each time, pushing your lower lip out. And each time, he kisses it away.

"Go on."

Rudy's been playing the gamut -- all the wedding classics. Ghost would be lying if he said this wasn't the liveliest party he's been to in years. Including quite a few pre-Rift years. And it's all thanks to you. This welcome respite. 

It's been a hellish week and a half -- an endless back and forth of logistics and maps and group assignments. Not to mention, the hours upon hours apart from you, despite sleeping under the same roof. 

But he's managed to keep an eye on you, watching you pull together something impossible and wonderful and momentous. He knew you'd outdo yourself. Expected nothing less. But he never would've been able to anticipate this. 

You've transformed a scraggly overgrown eyesore into something truly bewitching -- with a little help from Soap and Gaz and the others, sure. But you -- you have a way of doing this -- livening things. A crackling fire in the heart of winter. A single, bright star on a cloudy night. Ink on a blank sheet of paper. 

The whole atmosphere is very Farah -- and Alex too. Vivid swirls of violet and emerald and cream. A subtle, beguiling garden fantasy. You've captured their romance well with what limited resources available to you. But it's also got your name written all over it. Lovingly and tenderly. Seamlessly intertwined. 

He's more than a little glad the candles he set out before the ceremony seemed to please you. To add to what you created. He'd found hundreds of them stored in the kitchens one day while talking to Gaz about hunting plans, and had decided then to plan a little surprise of his own. 

He'd been waiting for you to come down the stairs tonight, nearly bouncing on his toes, eager to see your reaction. Watching your eyes light up as you took them all in -- it'd been painstaking work, laying each one out by hand, melting them enough to adhere to the surface of whatever he'd set them on, and then coming back around and lighting them. He'd burned through half a box of matches. 

But it'd been worth it to see those eyes. That smile. Worth every second. Every singed fingertip. 

"It's good to see her laughin'," Cap says softly from Ghost's left, glass of whisky in-hand. 

Ghost glances down at him, heart sinking a little. The Captain looks worn. Exhausted. Everyone does to a certain degree -- but Cap more than anyone else. He's worried about Laswell. Worried about managing the estate without her resources. Worried about you and the supposed cure. Worried about all of it. He's told Ghost as much over many a bottle in the past week.

Ghost swallows the lump in his throat, a grim feeling of discomfort settling in his bones. At his Captain's stress. The sudden proximity -- and the unspoken question now hanging in the air. He's been waiting for it, but he still doesn't quite feel ready. 

"Aye," he agrees. "It is."

Cap just wordlessly swallows a gulp of amber. The question looms heavy. Unwieldy. Precarious. 

He hasn't made an effort to hide it -- his feelings for you. Or the progression of your relationship. But he hasn't outright said anything about it. Hasn't openly admitted it or discussed it with anyone, except for those few shared moments with Soap -- and even then, it'd still felt like a secret. 

When he does admit it aloud, it'll make it real. And if it's real to the others -- suddenly it feels like... like it's at risk. To say nothing of the fact that it's...well...it's forbidden. If you're a member of the task force, a relationship with you is forbidden. Ghost has a few complicated feelings about that. A desire to protect you. An unwillingness to let you come to harm or to hurt. But an acceptance that you won't stand for a life on the sidelines. If it means he can't have you, though...he's not sure he's that selfless. 

"I don't intend to pry, Ghost," Cap starts, keeping his voice low. "Or impose any rules on ya. I think we're well beyond the point of any of that mattering. But....be careful -- for both your sakes."

Surprise trickles through him. This isn't the lecture he was expecting. 

..................................................................... Links to: Spotify Playlist Full Fic

[solarishashernoseinabook]

Solaris reviews To Shape a Dragon's Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose (2023)

*happy stimming*

Summary: Anequs of Masquapaug finds a dragon egg one day, the first her people have found for generations. When the egg hatches, the dragon chooses Anequs to be her companion. Anequs and the dragon, named Kasaqua, are then forced to attend a coloniser-run dragon school, facing prejudice and setbacks as they try to navigate a society that views Anequs as inherently lesser and dragons as merely a tool. Despite these problems, Anequs must do well - for the sake of her people, and the life of her dragon

Content: It was really good! Strong characters, strong worldbuilding, good lore - there's a lot to recommend in this book. Anequs is an active, determined protagonist, calling out racism, condescension, and revisionist history at every turn, and Kasaqua - a baby dragon throughout the course of the book - was a delight to read

Who I think would like it: Anyone interested in dragons, or looking for a good coming of age story

Things it does well: -copy/pastes the entire text of this 500 page book into a tumblr post- Okay, but seriously, this book handles prejudice and conflict with nuance and care, showing plainly how blatant I-hate-you-because-of-your-skin prejudice is merely one part of a larger problem. It has a canonically autistic character, portrayed with more care, accuracy, and attention to detail than I've ever seen in published fiction. The chapter titles were delightful - each was a short phrase describing the content of the chapter that, if you happened to read them all together, would give you a short summary of the novel. The book has a map, periodic table, and pronunciation guide right at the beginning, all of which were easy to follow

Things that could be improved: I had a bit of trouble following the chemistry in the book - the elements are given fantasy names, which fits the worldbuilding, but meant I had a bit of trouble following what was what. I've only got a high school understanding of chemistry, though, so I'm putting this down as a me problem instead of a problem with Blackgoose's writing

My review: This book was a breath of fresh air, especially compared to the last dragon book I reviewed. This was a book with emotional highs and lows, hard-earned happy endings, and a world that seems to leap off the page with how real it is. Definitely give it a try if dragon stories are your thing. Written by Seaconke Wampanoag author Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon's Breath is a masterfully-written dragonrider fantasy

Does this book have…: ✅= yes ❓= not sure ⭕= possibly/mixed ❌= no Romance? ✅ Anequs develops crushes, and her classmate Marta spends a lot of time discussing the importance of marriage to Anglish society and the need to make a good match Sex? ⭕ References are made to sex - mainly from a particular, rather bigoted character - but they're confined to a handful of scenes Racism? ✅ As mentioned above, Anequs must deal with a lot of racism from the colonisers, and it runs the gamut from outright, vile racism (openly calling her people savage or barely human) to ignorant condescension (charitably saying that Anequs's people are not terrible, they can be civilised if only they work at it!) Sexism? ✅ Anglish society is also highly sexist, another thing Anequs struggles to deal with. None of it is worse than you'd get in any other historical fantasy, though LGBTQIA-phobia? ✅ Anglish society is also homophobic, though it's more referenced rather than any characters actually facing violence for it Ableism? ✅ Sander, our autistic character, faces some ableism from his mother (forcing him to speak instead of letting him write, demanding he stop stimming, etc.), though this is countered by Anequs and Sander's sister fully supporting him Swearing? ❓ ⭕ I don't remember any, so if there was it was pretty minor Drug/Alcohol references? ✅ Characters drink and get mildly intoxicated a few times - mainly when celebrating holidays References to or actual violence or suicide? ✅ Yep. There's many references to war, genocide, brawling, executions, and so on. References to or actual animal death or cruelty? ✅ As per Anglish law, dragons who bind themselves to people considered "unsuitable" are put down. The fear of this happening to Kasaqua is one reason Anequs is so motivated to prove herself to the Anglish and succeed at school

Recommended: Yes

[sirfrogsworth]

I was worried the TV would be too big, but it honestly feels like watching a big movie screen at the theater and it is so immersive. Like you are *in* the frickin movie.

And even in the 2 years since I got my other TV, the picture quality has improved quite a bit. All of the issues I had with my other TV are pretty much resolved. The only thing it can’t do perfectly is deep inky blacks like an OLED screen. But it comes really close and it gets much much brighter than any OLED, so lasers and lightsabers just look soooo cool. Like they could melt your face off.

I am also finally able to notice a difference between 1080p and 4K. Though it is still subtle and I wish people wouldn't think 4K is the ultimate measure of clarity and quality. Resolution has become one of the least important aspects of picture quality.

I mean, our phones can film in 4K. An Arri Alexa cinema camera can also film in 4K. Do you really believe a $1000 smartphone and an $80000 motion picture camera have equivalent quality?

The goal of higher resolutions is to resolve more detail to provide a sharper image. So imagine a tiny tree in the background where the leaves are all mushed together in a blur in a low detail image and the individual leaves can be seen in a high detail image.

What allows you to get that high level of detail?

Teamwork!

You need a really good sensor with a lot of photosites or pixels. And you need a really good lens with a great design and perfect glass. Bigger is better in both cases.

There is this concept called "perceptual megapixels." This is a measurement of how much detail a camera lens can resolve. So if you have a 50 megapixel sensor but a lens that can only resolve 20 megapixels worth of detail... then you are getting a 20 megapixel image.

The dirty secret of smartphone advertising is that while their sensors might *technically* be 4K or 8K or 100+ megapixels, none of those tiny lenses have the resolving power to support those resolutions. That's why a Samsung with a 100 megapixel sensor does not look significantly sharper than an iPhone with a 12 megapixel sensor. And that's why if you took an old DSLR with a 12 megapixel sensor and slapped a Zeiss Otus lens on the front, the image detail would trounce any smartphone.

But honestly, detail and sharpness really only come into play when you are pixel peeping and zooming way into images. At normal viewing distances, pretty much any modern camera or lens is sharp enough to give you an acceptably detailed image.

If you are looking for a quality TV picture, ignore the Ks and look for things like brightness (nits) and black levels (contrast ratio) and color gamut (number of colors) and HDR interpretation (tone mapping). A great site that breaks all this down is rtings.com. They have the most detailed reviews of anyone and they test various aspects of picture quality. You can decide which aspects are important to you and choose a great television accordingly.

[theresattrpgforthat]

I find myself really enjoying OSR/NSR systems like Cairn, or Durf, i like that their rules-lite, and have a lot of freedom for player/gm alike but find myself wanting classes with possible class abilities, or similar mechanics, I'm curious if you have any recommendations of that

THEME: Rules-lite Systems with Classes.

Some things to keep in mind: OSR games are stripped down to bare bones because character ingenuity (rather than brute force) is meant to take the forefront. This is why characters don’t usually have class abilities. 

What I’m hearing you ask for is something that keeps light rules, in the same way OSR systems do, but still provides a way to differentiate characters from each-other. I don’t know if all of these suggested games can be classed as OSR or NSR, but they require the same amount of creativity to push the game forward.

24XX Tides Will Rise, by Tubatic. 

A STORM IS COMING!

The crew finds themselves at a settlement preparing for a huge seasonal storm.  Using mechs like in that one movie with the aliens, or whatever you choose, help prepare the settlement to survive The Storm.  

24XX Tides Will Rise is a microgame  / oneshot designed in the style of Jason Tocci's 2400, created for submission to the 24XX Jam. 

24XX games are a distillation of OSR games, usually only about two pages or so, with dice that scale up or down in size depending on your character’s situation and aptitude. Your character will usually get a special ability related to their class, career, background, or in this version, Pilot Skill. There’s also a simplified money and gear system that gets you one or two pieces of useful items that are destined to break at some point, in order to reduce whatever harm you take. Tides Will Rise is about preparing your local settlement for an extreme weather event using giant mechs, but 24XX games could happen in nearly any setting, and are almost always deadly for your characters. If you want a quick game that you can learn and get up and running in less than 30 minutes, this is the game for you!

Hexfall, by titanomachyRPG.

You are a hyperpowered being who came into larger-than-life abilities because of a profound cataclysm. Heartbreak. Grief. The depths. Physical, emotional, multidimensional–something unlocked incredible power in you. People like you have many names across Stratus Cay, but the most common is “Diver,” a nickname derived from their affinity for falling through the Rift, either on dangerous jobs or just for fun. 

Divers’ abilities run the gamut of even the wildest imaginations, and their extreme power and durability makes many of them reckless thrillseekers. The pay is too good and the thrills too extraordinary to turn down the opportunity to go on a dive.

What will you do, falling soul?

Hexfall uses Caltrop Core, a rules-lite system that requires 3d4 and that’s it. Like many OSR games, it uses a hex map that your characters will navigate as they fall through an inter dimensional space called the Rift, their movements and obstacles determined by the roll of the dice. The characters gain tokens as they fall, which act as player currency that can affect narrative beats or navigation rolls as you play. Finally, there are 12 playbooks that you can choose to represent your character: will you be a resilient Giantborn? A liberating MotherThawed? A masterful Myconaut? Each character playbook comes with special moves that only you can do.

High Magic Lowlives, by Gem Room Games.

High Magic Lowlives is a Post-Dungeon Fantasy Tabletop RPG about wizard school dropouts who get into trouble with the Immortal Aristocracy to make coin and build their #brand. Like old school RPGs this is a game about a crew of weirdos finding subterranean vaults filled with treasure, kicking down doors, beating up guards, setting off traps, and taking home as much coin as you can carry. Like new school RPGs the mechanics are simple, drive the story forward, and don't rely on a ton of preparation in advance.

Unlike any RPG you've ever played before you can get paid for livestreaming your fight against the jack-o-lantern queen of zabraxas. Your companions would probably prefer you help them survive the fight, but they'll forgive you when you capture their critical hit for all to see.

High Magic Lowlives uses a ruleset that is a combination of Powered by the Apocalypse, Forged in the Dark, and the Black Hack. Your lowlife has 6 attributes, which could range from 0 to 3. Each character also selects a General Deal, which grants you a special ability, such as access the local library, sweet-talk computers, or gather food in unlikely places. Similar to OSR games, there are tables and tables of items that you can use for conventional and non-conventional uses, and, in step with PbtA mechanics, there are graded levels of success when it comes to hitting things with a weapon. You also have Risk Dice, which deteriorate as you use them, lending the feeling of dwindling resources as you play. If you want a game of high risk, high reward, I recommend High Magic Lowlives!

Aetherway, by Jason Tocci.

Hit the road between worlds with a black cat, a clockwork assassin, a fallen star, and a pilgrim who huffs the ashes of a dead saint. Deliver lumber to communist skeletons living on the back of a gargantuan crab. Ride a comet to a party in the skull of a cosmic god that was converted to condos.

Aetherway is a quirky, planet-hopping RPG zine, compatible with both Tunnel Goons and Troika! Use it to improvise your own adventures, as set of extra Troika! backgrounds, as a conversion guide between Troika! and Tunnel Goons rules, or a bunch of random generators for any other game of planeswalking hijinks. 

This is mostly another chance for me to talk about Troika again, because it’s a) a really funky setting, and b) a game that borrows a lot of elements from OSR-style games. You have random roll tables, backgrounds that give your characters skills and abilities, and an initiative order that leaves everything up to chance. However, you can also use Aetherway to play Tunnel Goons, which is a rules-lite game that contains much of the hallmarks of OSR. 

Planet Dungeon, by Nathan Lathroum.

Ever since birth, the dungeon is all you’ve ever known. All you’ve ever seen. All you were ever meant to see. Who built the dungeon? Is there anything beyond it? How long has the world been trapped here? You can almost smell the fresh outside air. You can almost feel the heat of the sun. You can almost taste victory. But your journey is not over yet.

Ten floors of the dungeon remain. This is all that stands between you and the mythical surface of the Aboveworld. Does it truly exist, or is it merely legend? Is there still a world beyond these walls?

Planet Dungeon is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) designed for 3 to 5 players. This book contains all of the rules, systems, and mechanics you will need to play. Additionally, Planet Dungeon requires two regular dice for each player and a singular deck of playing cards. Be warned: Planet Dungeon is not easy, and is intended for players willing to lose.

This game uses 2d6 and a deck of playing cards. As a table, you will create the planet you live on, and select backgrounds for your characters. Each background carries with it a pre-determined set of stats and a unique ability - including the Wretched, which starts woefully bereft of any ability, but has the chance to level up dramatically the first time you reach a boss in any given session. The rooms of each dungeon are determined by a card pulled from the deck, with the suit determining the type of the room. Cards also describe your death, should it happen, as well as what the end of the story looks like, once you escape. If you like simple rules and overwhelming odds, this might be worth checking out.

Lost Eons, by David Blandy.

LOST EONS is solarpunk sci-fantasy. In Lost Eons you will emerge from the darkness into a new light, one dominated by inscrutable and terrible forces you must seek to understand. Using this guide create a post-human character, ready to face the mysteries and dangers of a far future Earth.

LOST EONS is a fast but deep toolkit. Play instant no-prep one-shots and sustained campaigns. Discover beautiful and horrifying new adventures through evocative prompts and procedural generation. This game is no-maths and instantly playable. Mashing together 24XX and Blades in the Dark, gameplay is streamlined, flexible, fast and potentially brutal. Level-up through mutation, your body changing as you evolve. Character Playbooks let you create a character in seconds, yet have limitless customisation through play.

LOST EONS uses all of the basic dice types to tackle obstacles, depending on what you’re doing and what piece of equipment you use to help you. Like Blades in the Dark, this game uses clocks to track consequences, health and adventures, while similar to the grit of dungeon-delving games, the characters find their inventory slowly dwindling the longer they adventure. Survival is difficult in this post-human future. At character creation, you choose one of six different archetypes that will give you a set of skills and a unique talent. If you’re looking for new approaches to play while holding on to some of the tone of OSR games, LOST EONS may be a good fit for you.

[stierhai]

Thoughts on: The One Within the Villainess

Manga: The One Within the Villainess

Amount read: Up to chapter 12

Impression: Middling positive.

On genre:

I'm not an Isekai person. I don't find wish fulfillment to be compelling in media. I don't care about game mechanics. I don't like characters going into the narrative with all the answers already and just needing to wait to put them into effect. Isekai may run the gamut of tones, with there being as much seinen edgelord bullshit as there is cute reincarnator sidesteps the plot of the in-fiction original work, so I won't say there's never conflict in isekai but... none of that does anything for me. With rare exceptions, the conflict almost always feels extremely shallow to me even when the stakes are high.

This is because they don't typically feel like they're about the characters, so much as they feel like lore infodumps and following a road map. Then top that off with a main character that has either a narratively convenient power that typically is powerful enough to overcome all conflict by default whilst requiring a lot of info-dumping— or the power is skipped in favor of short-cutting straight to the power being a lore and plot dump... they feel less like stories in and of themselves and more like reading a tabletop corebook. Lore is, in my mind, meant to be the stage upon which we tell stories, not the story itself— and I just don't think the stage can stand all its own and pretend to be a competent story.

And that is even assuming the stage was competent to begin with. A lot of Isekai also are very tropey and reference not just the broad strokes of other fantasy settings writ large but other isekai.

And there is no place this is more exemplary than the Villainess subgenre of isekai works.

They've all got this same basic framework: girl dies somehow and wakes up in an otome game she either played or knew about in her old life! However, she isn't the protagonist of the otome game, she's the villainess: an odious character who existed just to obstruct the heroine's chosen route in the game!

But here's the thing. I play otome games. I'm maybe not an expert, but I do have a casual acquaintanceship with the genre. The villainess rival plot that's endemic to this whole-ass genre? It stems from one of the earliest otome games ever, Angelique. However: it's not a trope that actually stuck around in otome games. To the point that Angelique's own sequels and spin-offs also didn't have the villainess rival. Similarly, the idea of the grindy items or whatever-- most modern otome games are not "dating sims", they're visual novels. You can think of them as choose your own adventure books, way more than a grindy dating sim where you have to raise stats, repeatedly talk to the dating options in certain areas on certain days, or give them items. The last set of actual popular otome games that had those elements is probably the [Heart/Spade/Diamond/etc] no Kuni no Alice series, I'm pretty sure? Someone can correct me if I'm wrong. But either way, I can say pretty confidently that Persona 5 is more of a dating sim than most otome games.

The fact is, these manga and light novels are all cribbing notes off each other, not otome games. So I have a grudge against them for that, first and foremost. It's like, okay you're talking shit about the problems and how terrible it is for the villainess to have to suffer just because she also liked the guy and her life is ALSO BAD and it's like. This is just not a thing. These works exist as critiques of a phenomenon that just isn't widespread and barely exists at all. You are all still just mad at Angelique-- or rather, because they don't know their "source material" at all, they're just empty shells of someone else's subversion of an extremely old game. And the subversion of ACTUALLY THE VILLAINESS IS FINE is also eroded even further by the fact a lot of them just decide to have the plot be actually the heroine is the real bad guy. Look at that hussy, chatting up these dudes above her station and stealing someone else's fiance. The issue isn't that the original plot of the game set up these girls as having their own happiness achievable only as mutually exclusive, implying women are all enemies competing for men, the real issue with the initial story is... genki girl bad, elegant girl good. I'm hating on a few specific manga here, but I'm sure there's more than that out there that have pulled that particular twist.

They have nothing to say. But when the framework of the story is we're going to fix the shit that went wrong in the original... it reads like they're trying to be commentary on the original genre. Which just falls so, so flat. Thanks for the commentary on a thing that isn't even a problem with the genre and also your commentary sucked.

So, enough generalities. Onto The One Within the Villainess.

The Plot:

The basic rundown: The villainess, Remilia, was replaced out as a child by Emi, a Japanese girl who was familar with the game Remilia is from. Emi did all the usual villainess isekai protagonist things-- rescued the male love interests from problems in their lives and came to occupy the same space as the protagnist did within the original game's story. Remilia, from within Emi, watched this and was satisfied because she had lived a loveless life with terrible parents but with Emi's memories of her own family in Japan and the second-hand experience of Emi's new life, she was able to finally experience happiness and became protective of Emi.

However, a fellow isekai'd girl has taken over the role of the game's protagonist. Pissed off that the villainess has changed the plot, she plots Remilia/Emi's downfall. Emi suffers the same fate as the villainess in the game, and retreats within herself. Remilia, back in control of her own body, swears vengeance and to make herself happy to fulfill Emi's wishes for her. To these ends, she does some bog-standard villainess things. She takes control of the land she's exiled to, begins doing damage control to her reputation, saves some poor people who were neglected by fate in the "original" timeline, teams up with a demon lord, and kills god.

I won't say the plot is anything special. A lot of the plot points I have read beat for beat in other manga. It also has the issue of not being very familiar with otome games— aside from my usual otome games almost never have a villainess issue, the whole subplot about the shop shows that the writer is thinking of the mechanics of a mobile game. And granted, I've never played a mobile game otoge, maybe they really are like that. But with the genre as a whole taking cues from a very old otome game, it is weird to see the very modern cash shop mechanics thrown in there. It feels like indiscriminate cribbing off the notes of other isekai that just accidentally took something from the wrong source material-- that any one isekai is as good as any other to crib from, overlooking the thing that's supposed to make the subgenre distinct. Which makes sense-- if you don't play otoge, you wouldn't know what the mechanics were like so you probably wouldn't see an issue with a cash shop existing as a plot point and as a major part of a subplot.

Thus far, this review has mostly been negative. But that's because I've focused on what it has in common with most other villainess isekai— a genre I started with saying I don't like. So, next: what sets it apart and what it does well within its trappings.

The Art:

The art fucks /pos.

Manga is a visual medium, and having good art isn't a must persay, but it does a lot to influence audience perception of characters, setting a mood, and just the overall enjoyment of a series. Characters in this manga make great fucking faces. The otoge heroine just runs around making the shittiest faces, the clearest faux-cutesy but complete scumbag expressions ever. They're great. Emi and Remilia technically have the same face but they're very well distinguished by light shines and make-up, sure, but also the kind of expressions they make— Remilia playing at Emi is also distinguishable from what we saw of Emi. Things are telegraphed really well-- you can see the people around Emi being affected by the heroine because they also begin making shitty smug faces (though not to the same degree).

Also, about selling a mood: killing God isn't an exceptional plot point in a JP fantasy series. It's every JRPG I played growing up, it's my beloved Angel Sanctuary, etc. So how do you sell the audience on the gravity of killing this God that was only recently introduced? Radical art style shift from villainess isekai to surreal high contrast Madoka witch labyrinth was the answer this manga landed upon and damn if I can't say it doesn't work. That sequence was great. Excellent choice by the artist.

The character designs are also pretty good. Remilia and Pino Blanchet definitely pass for the villainess and heroine isekai tropes. The demon shopkeep also looks like a minor NPC that for some reason has been taken out of a minor role and been given a more major one, whilst also making sense with the larger world set-up as we get that. The demon king looks like a boy you might romance on an otome route. The gods have weird inhuman forms. The dwarf girls both look like dwarves, in a western fantasy sense whilst still fitting into an otome game! I'm not sure any of them really stand out to me as like damn good job, but I think as a whole they do help get across the setting-- both as a fantasy in its own right outside the "game's plot", and as an isekai into an "otome game".

Emi and Remilia:

Okay. Listen. Listen. I grew up in YGO fandom, alright? Bodyshare romance is peak. And I've got a thing for unrequited love, tragic loves, dead girl haunts the narrative she can no longer directly touch but everyone around her is still impacted by the hole she left. And, to clarify, that isn't what this manga is— I do not think this was written with the intention of being read as hot girl doppleganger ghost romance— but it's got the vibes. That even if that is not the intended reading of the text, it has an appeal that people into that could appreciate.

So, Emi is not textually dead, aside from the whole reincarnation thing. But she is functionally a ghost in the story. After she fell into despair, she retreated within herself and Remilia retook control. In-character, Remilia believes that Emi is as she was— alive, and now merely watching from behind the scenes. With this belief, she seeks to make Emi's ideal world so she can emerge and live happily again, just as she did before. There is no sign of Emi stirring, but Remilia is motivated by her memories and ideals, by what she gave her and honoring her memory. The Remilia the audience knows is a person changed, but not by someone who is in the story any longer. In this way, Emi "reads" as a ghost, haunting the narrative through her effect on Remilia. Dead girlfriend vibes, is what I'm saying.

There's also something to be said for the dynamic necessitated by the bodyshare where despite being deeply invested in the other's happiness, they do and do not have any personal relationship at all. They both know intimately and have never met the other person— we see Emi playing Remilia's game and crying over her; we see Remilia watching Emi living her life on a flat-screen television window in their mindscape. Without direct interaction, they nontheless are invested in each other, their highs and lows, their success and happiness. They're the other's biggest fan, but not in the sense that we usually think of in the modern era when someone says Parasocial. They are aware of each other, and both is individually important to the other. Whilst the situation is fantastical, it comes out feeling like an early internet friendship with both girls lurking on the other's blog, more than it feels like the relationship between stan and oshi.

On Female Characters:

So, this manga is guilty of the whole villainess isekai trend of actually the game heroine is the bad one! twist.

I forgive it.

The most important relationship in the manga, the fulcrum upon which the whole manga's storyline sits, is the one between Emi and Remilia. They're both full characters in their own rights, even though Emi exists only in flashback. Meanwhile, of the major side characters the ratio of male to female characters actually favors women. There's two men, whilst all the other major side-characters with personalities are women. So, Pino being shitty is just like, oh okay she's just a shitty person, not that this author has kind of an unfortunate attitude about women. Also, Pino's character flaws of being incredibly selfish and focused on romantic feelings without caring about the target of her affections as a person-- it rather neatly echoes the evil god featured in the manga as well. The two of them echo each other, so considering we see the exact same flaws in evil incel god and the main female antagonist... Yeah, I don't see the way Pino is written as a problem here.

The Demon King:

So, speaking of side-characters. The Demon King Angel is supposed to have been a secret route from within the game. And while I think this manga gets a lot of shit wrong about otome games I will say this for it: Angel absolutely feels like a true/secret route character. Gorgeous character design, genuinely tragic backstory with a good reason for him to have been an absolute bastard within the story. . . nailed it. Good job. A++. More than anyone else here, I actually buy him as an otoge character.

It's a little bit unfortunate for him that Remilia is only interested in Emi and making Emi's ideals a reality! That just makes him feel like he's properly executed even moreso though, and really drives home that this manga is about the relationship between Emi and Remilia more than any thing else though.

post also available on dreamwidth

[mistakenot4892]

Nebula devblog March '24

This is a crosspost from cohost.

Nebdevblob time! Fair bit of neat stuff to talk about this time, though it's a bit delayed due to work.

Nebula SS13 is an open source project based on the Baystation 12 version of Space Station 13. SS13 is a topdown multiplayer simulation game where you play the crew of a ship, station, colony, etc. depending on your fork and map, with the Nebula and Bay forks having a focus on roleplaying and simulation interactions.

Notable changes

We have finally managed to kill /turf/simulated. This sounds a bit arcane probably, but it represents a project I've been plugging away at off and on for a couple of years. Basically the previous system used a specific kind of tile to represent parts of the map that could participate in the atmospheric simulation - if you weren't on /turf/simulated, things like depressurization, poison gas, etc. ceased to matter. This was a problem for modelling large areas like the surface of planets, because if we made them /turf/simulated it would cause horrendous performance impacts when the zones had to be rebuilt (as Polaris experiences whenever someone leaves the Cynosure front door open). Our workaround in the past was a whole new turf type, /turf/exterior, that did some hacky workarounds. Now all our turfs are unified as /turf/floor and /turf/wall and we can go forward with some cool plans that weren't possible in the past, like material-based turfs.

Similarly, we're closing in on killing /mob/living/carbon. This is a very outdated middle-man type harking back to the days when monkeys and xenomorphs were their own mob type. Killing this has no real impact other than making a lot of previously human-only behavior like breathing and metabolism available to mob types outside the human type tree.

There's been a bit of a fey mood resulting in a fantasy-themed planet map called Shaded Hills with a focus around more low-tech crafting like carpentry and pottery, as well as survivalist mechanics like cutting down trees for wood, making campfires, and harvesting wild plants. It's a lot of fun, and provides a very different experience to the standard space station style of play. I wasn't intending for it to be a 'main' map, but with Penny and I working on it in tandem, it's starting to shape up into something that might actually be playable at some point.

Outstanding bugs of note

No big or funny bugs to talk about this time, just the usual gamut of smaller ones.

r5 staging has begun, so we should find some fun ones over the next couple of weeks. We're shooting for an April deadline, so it should be nice to hear the whooshing sound as it flies past.

Current priorities

Testing r5 is the other big ticket issue. We'll probably organize some test rounds between now and April so we can do some shakedowns.

Getting my fire source rework in is important as it means I can get pottery and metalworking into a state where we can playtest and potentially merge them.

We're so close to removing /carbon and /exterior entirely I can taste it. I'm going to be working on that as/when my current PRs are merged.

The skeleton of a fishing minigame is done, but there's no fun UI stuff or skill testing yet. Perhaps...

[redstringraven]

purple hyacinth, begonias, red dahlia, orange lilies, marigolds, wolfsbanea bouquet of regret and sorrow, pleas for forgiveness; foreshadowed betrayal

this month's server challenge was to draw your OCs in flower crowns that matched their personality! we'd had a question in the qna section about bouquets representing our characters last year, so i used that as a base for the challenge. i also tried using a limited palette with this one, so i only pulled colors from a specific gamut map! it was a fun experiment. c:

[pynkhues]

Hey Sophie, I'm going to be in Melbourne soon! Do you have any tips for what to do, see, or eat?

Hey! Ah! How exciting! Melbourne's a really fun city to visit, and I feel really does have something for everyone.

Hmmm, tip wise, I think I'd say:

grab a Myki card for public transport. You can buy these at any news agent, train station or petrol station. Melbourne has a free inner-city tramzone, which is great for getting around the CBD, but you should also take advantage of Melbourne's incredibly good train network which'll open up the broader city to you. A Myki card works on all forms of public transport - buses, trams (for trams outside of the free tram zone) and trains - so they're pretty straight forward.

On that note, the PTV app is pretty useless for public transport (you're better off using Google maps tbh), but it does let you top up your Myki instantly via your phone, which makes it useful. The TramTracker app is very good for trams though, especially because you can type in the number of the tram you're on and know exactly which stops you're heading towards. The logos look like this: (trust the doggo)

Don't drive in the city - it's a layer of hell.

Have a little bit of cash on you. Most places take cards or smart watches, but you'll need gold coins for certain things too, particularly accessing certain gardens or markets.

Pack for all weather. Melbourne's known for having four seasons in a day, and having lived here for almost five years now, it's not an exaggeration. Layering is your friend, and always have an umbrella!

Hook turns are a real thing here, and whether you're driving or just crossing the road, they're worth being aware of.

Places to visit

Melbourne's famous for its street art, and while you can just wander around and observe yourself, doing a tour is particularly fun (and makes sure you see the best stuff!)

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is one of my favourite places to show out-of-towners (although that's probably partly just because it's me, haha). It's a museum of film, tv and games, and explores the moving image as both a form of commercial entertainment and as a form of art. Their cinema is often playing really interesting films too.

National Gallery Victoria is always worth checking out.

Chapel Street is known for it's little galleries, restaurants and indie shops, and makes for a fun day out.

Queen Vic Market and South Melbourne Market are both iconic and for good reason. They've been operational since the mid-1800s, and you can often feel that when you're in them. They can get packed though, so just a heads up.

I love love love heritage buildings and exploring history through place, so will always recommend checking out the National Trust's historic sites in Melbourne. Rippon Lea Estate is a personal fave and only about 20 minutes out of the CBD on the train. They shot parts of Miss Fisher there, and even if you don't get to tour the house (although I recommend you do!) even just exploring the gardens are beautiful.

Abbotsford Convent & Collingwood Children's Farm are right next door to each other and a pretty amazing day out.

If you fancy seeing a movie, my all time fave cinemas are The Classic and The Lido, which are owned by the same family. Either spot is worth checking out.

If you're looking to see a show or performance, you can look for the big ones at any of the big theatres, but for smaller, exciting indie stuff, I'd check out the programs at Malthouse, La Mama, Art House, Meat Market, and Footscray Community Arts Centre,

What to eat

Wellllll, this ultimately depends on your budget, haha, since Melbourne restaurants can run the gamut. Some of my favourite restaurants that are a bit more on the expensive side but great for a special occasion:

Maha's probably my favourite restaurant in Melbourne? It's modern Middle Eastern cuisine and their seafood in particular is divine. It's a set menu, and like I said, a little exy, haha.

Mabu Mabu is modern Australian First Nations (Torres Strait Islander) cuisine and is very good! They sell some of their own sauces too, and I highly recommend snagging their pineapple hot sauce! It's also very easy to get to, as it's located in Fed Square right next to the Koori Heritage Trust which often has Indigenous exhibitions on (and a great gift store if you're looking for anything to take home)

Chin Chin's - delicious South East Asian fusion cuisine. Again, a little exy.

Transformer - incredible vegetarian restaurant. They do both ala carte and a fixed menu. Highly recommend their fixed menu! They're also very good with dietary requirements, particularly if you're gluten free or if you have annoying allergies for a vegetarian restaurant like me, haha (tomato and eggplant).

Cheaper eats that are also delicious:

A little out in the South Side 'burbs, but Saigon Mamma is my favourite Vietnamese restaurant in Melbourne.

Rice Paper Scissors is good too, as is Chocolate Buddha, Green Man's Arms, and oh! Studley Park Boathouse is a fave. It's beautiful location-wise with pretty standard (but good) pub eats, and they've got a lot of water birds you can feed and boats you can hire pretty cheap ($30 for a kayak, $40 for a row boat) to row along the Yarra River. It's also really close to the Convent + Children's Farm if you fancy making a day of it.

If you're willing to travel a little further out of inner Melbourne, I'd also suggest:

Healesville Sanctuary - the bird show is i n c r e d i b l e. I took my nephews last year and the older one still talks about it, haha.

Mornington Penninsula Hot Springs - Mornington Penninsula is a great day trip from Melbourne. It's only just over an hour drive, and it's pretty stunning. Full of wineries and beachy walks. The hot springs are so relaxing though, and really centring if you need it.

Mount Macedon - home of the Hanging Rock of Picnic at Hanging Rock fame! Plus it's just a beautiful area.

Cranborne Gardens - the Royal Botanical Gardens in the city are beautiful too, but I'm particularly partial to these ones.

Hope this gets you started, and just let me know if you have any other questions!

[canmom]

Have you seen some of the new HDR stuff on KDE plasma 6? Still early days, but very exciting!

https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2023/12/18/update-on-hdr-and-colormanagement-in-plasma.html

oh that is interesting! sounds very promising.

“SDR Color Intensity” is inspired by the color slider on the Steam Deck. For sRGB applications it scales the color gamut up to (at 100%) rec.2020, or more simply put, it makes the colors of non-HDR apps more intense, to counteract the bad gamut mapping many HDR displays do and make colors of SDR apps look more like when HDR is disabled

I guess this goes some way to answering why colour accuracy for SDR content was so dodge when I turned on HDR on windows (which lacks such a slider, just a brightness slider). "the bad gamut mapping many HDR displays do" is big oof but also explains a lot. the mathematics for colour space transformation is pretty well-defined, so if hardware is implementing them incorrectly, that's really frustrating. older screens are working with standards that predate the idea of colour management, but now we're bringing in all these new display signalling standards (PQ and all that), it seems like a golden opportunity to do things properly this time... so of course we don't lmao.

the colorimeter I got has an option for high brightness/HDR screens, but I haven't really tested it yet. 'measure your screen colorimetrically and compensate in software' works decently well in SDR land, but I'm not sure what happens in HDR. I haven't played any HDR-enabled games since I got this colour accuracy bug, so I haven't had cause to try and figure out the ins and outs of it yet.

it seems like KDE intend to be a lot less black-box about it than Microsoft, which is very welcome.

[sarahowritesostucky]

I've just reread like everything on your masterlist and honestly it's incredible I love love love ur fics. I was wondering when another chapter of temporary custody was coming out <3

Aww! Thank you (I feel like that's such a great compliment b/c I'll be the first to admit my library ... runs the gamut of genres, from smut to smut, ya know? Lol.)

I have the next chapter of Temporary Custody mapped out, but it's probably going to be another week or two before I can get it written. I just got back from a trip and all my regular job orders are flooding in 😅. Sorry about that, but thank you so much for taking the time to ask and comment: I love that!