#our scale for our suspension of disbelief was WELL established you can’t pull something like that like 40 episodes in

[mask-of-anubis]

you know what? I decided don’t care about any another plot hole in this show. Because as far as I’m concerned the only plot hole that matters in this whole show is that goddamn latex hyper-realistic skin mask bullshit they tried to pull in the middle of a random episode of s2

[rockethorse]

HOW TO MAKE SIMLISH LOOK NATURAL (aka. why typography matters, even if you can’t read the language)

We’re living in a golden age of Simlish (or Simlish-esque) fonts. Gone are the days of trying to recycle the same two or three typefaces without feeling like you live in the Twilight Zone! We have handwritten fonts, digital fonts, fancy fonts, formal fonts, cartoony fonts, and blocky fonts. Now making great-looking Maxis Match, Simlish content is as easy as changing the typeface from a drop-down menu in your graphics editor of choice! Right?

The thing is, typography - the art of type - is incredibly important to the overall aesthetic of an image, even if you can’t read it - in fact, probably moreso than if you could, because you have nothing else to distract you from how it looks. The whole point of Simlish is to maintain our immersion, and our suspension of disbelief, but unnaturally-formatted text can break that immersion even if we can’t read it.

The key to nice-looking typography is balance, and two primary factors to that balance are kerning and line spacing. Kerning is the space between two letters, and line spacing is, as you might guess, the space between lines of text. Your program’s default settings are probably not tailored to your needs, or to the specific font you use, and tweaking them can make a big difference.

Here’s a sentence I put down in a graphics editor in both Arial and a well-known Simlish font (Simlish v3 by SIMale) using my program’s default line spacing and kerning.

It’s not awful, but if you compare the two sentences, the Simlish sentence has much greater line spacing than the Arial sentence, and the kerning is a bit tighter (the double “e”s are practically touching). Here’s a chunk of Lorem Ipsum in Simlish (double gibberish!) to show how it looks in a paragraph, maybe for a book or poster retexture:

Again, maybe it doesn’t seem so bad. It definitely does the job of looking like a page of text. But if this were a real book, the line spaces would probably be a bit shorter, and the letters would be spaced just a tiny bit further apart, like this:

It’s still far from perfect, but it’s starting to look a lot more like “real” text. Because this font was one of the first of its kind, and many Simlish font creators are not professional typographists, not all of the characters are going to fit well with each other, but that’s okay - that wasn’t the point. If you’re just filling space with text like this, you probably wouldn’t need to do much more. Your eyes can glaze over this without being distracted by “gaps” caused by awkward line spacing.

Mostly, this is an issue in Simlish logos, signs, book titles, etc. where inappropriate kerning/line spacing really stands out. Back to the first example:

Again, the top text is using my program’s default text formatting. I decreased the overall line spacing and kerning, but because we’re dealing with less text, I was able to also go in and further tweak the spacing between individual characters. I looked for anywhere there was a large gap between letters, such as the gaps between the capital letters and the rest of the word in the first and third words. I also made the last word larger, to balance out the sentence/slogan - play with the sizes of different words and even the sizes of individual letters if certain fonts are scaled unusually.

One great benefit of Simlish is that it’s not a real language, so you don’t have to care about doing things the “normal” way. Imagine how you might write on lined note paper - that invisible “line” in typography is called the base line, and you can adjust where individual characters sit on the base line just as you can adjust individual letters’ kerning. I adjusted the first letter of the last word to sit below the baseline, and also made it larger than the other characters, to be more symmetrical and fit better with the character next to it. In English, that would look like this:

Which makes the S seem a bit odd, because we don’t usually stylise a capital S below the base line. But Simlish is not English, so maybe that’s normal for a Simlish S! You are free to do whatever you like, so long as the end product looks okay!

Most line spacing/kerning mistakes happen by making the spacing too broad, but be careful of making it too tight, too. Tight kerning is called “keming” because that’s exactly what happens - letters get so crowded they look stuck-together, making them difficult or impossible to read, e.g. joining an r and an n together to look like an m.

... Though, to be honest, that doesn’t look that bad here, because as we established, Simlish is not English, so we can’t really tell when characters begin and end, especially when your texture is 64x64 pixels. So try out different things that you wouldn’t think to do with a real language and see if you like the results.

Hinting and anti-aliasing are also aspects to consider. Anti-aliasing is probably toggled for you by default, and it’s what makes shapes look smooth instead of jagged/pixelated. Hinting affects the clarity of letters at smaller resolutions. Since many Sims textures are quite small, try toggling hinting on/off to see if the image looks better or more clear.

Hopefully there was something worthwhile here. I’m by no means a typography expert, but as Custom Content is many Simmers’ first experience with graphic design, my only goal is to introduce beginners to these basic concepts, and from there, trial and error is the best way to learn.

Again, Simlish is not English, so the concept of Simlish “legibility” might seem weird, but the ultimate design goal of nonsense-languages like Simlish, alien runes, ancient markings, etc. is to recognise what they represent, not what they say. Your eyes slide over it and you maintain your suspension of disbelief. Awkward typography is a universal language, and it can pull you out of that immersion when that might not be your intention.

Happy Simlishing, nooboos!

[doctorwhonews]

The Early Adventures: The Night Witches (Big Finish)

Latest Review: Written By: Roland Moore Directed By: Helen Goldwyn Cast Anneke Wills (Polly Wright/Narrator), Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon/The Doctor), Elliot Chapman (Ben Jackson), Anjella Mackintosh(Tatiana Kregki), Wanda Opalinska (Nadia Vasney), Kristina Buikaite (Lilya Grankin). Producer David Richardson Script Editor John Dorney Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs Cover: Tom Webster Originally Released: September 2017 Review can be a funny business. If you’re a reviewer working across a large canvas it’s likely you’ll regularly come across things you can’t stand. A newspaper cinema critic who hates horror films still has to review them; a book reviewer may still need to struggle through three volumes of Fifty Shades Made a Lot of Money Didn’t It So Why Not Me? even though they’d rather set fire to their eyelids. But the smaller and more specific your turf the more likely you are to, well, be predisposed to like the material. If you’re working on a Science Fiction magazine it would be odd if your every review began “As someone who loathes SF on principle…” If you’re looking at something even more singular, like a particular TV show, it’s pretty likely it’s a TV show you like. And if reviews of audio plays based on that TV show are being handed out, it’s to be expected if they’re given to people who don’t hate audio as a medium. The Early Adventures, though, exist in a niche within a niche within a niche. And it’s one, I confess, I’m not predisposed towards. When Big Finish decided to evolve their Companion Chronicles range by recasting crucial roles, I was instinctively not a fan of the concept. For me “the Second Doctor”, for instance, was not shorthand for “the Doctor sometime between the events at Snowcap Base and his being put on trial by the Time Lords” but for “the Doctor as portrayed by Patrick Troughton,” actor and performance too bound up in each to be substituted for anything else. I wish I could say that The Night Witches caused the scales to fall from my eyes and for me to be converted into a true believer but unfortunately I have to say doubts about the soundness of the concept still linger. The format of the Early Adventures leads to an odd mish-mash of voices that take a very long time to get used to. We’ve got original Polly Anneke Wills pulling double duty as Narrator and as Polly, Frazer Hines similarly playing both Jamie and the Doctor, while there’s a new Ben in the form of Elliot Chapman. Part of the essential suspension of disbelief with many Big Finish ranges is accepting that the actors sound older than they did at the time, but that’s made harder by pairing them with a Ben who’s genuinely forty years their junior. Hines’ double duty is a particularly strange listening experience as he actually now sounds more like the Doctor than Jamie, even when playing the Scotsman. And while his Doctor is a fair approximation of Troughton’s voice and accent it really misses the sense of the great man’s performance. Troughton was an actor who could seemingly effortlessly spin a line reading on its side half way through to do something unexpected and brilliant. It’s part of the reason why, in his hands, even the clunkiest of rushed scripts could sound compelling and witty when coming out of the Doctor’s mouth. And, as much of a legend as Frazer Hines is, there’s not much sense of that in his reading of the Doctor’s lines here. To an extent, it actually feels like a complete break with the past and a full recast – perhaps even with Hines’ Doctor opposite a ‘new’ Jamie – would work better than this halfway house. By the same token, the format feels held back by being a full cast audio, but with narration. The narration is redundant throughout and doesn’t actually add anything to proceedings. Wills’ Narrator, for example, describes our trio looking down a hillside towards some panzer tanks in the snow below, before we move to the cast’s dialogue establishing how they’re on a hillside looking down at some panzer tanks below. Hopefully future releases will cut that Narrator role as its completely unneeded and simply slows down the drama. Added on top of all this is a doppleganger for Polly, played by a different actor most of the time but sometimes by Wills – meaning that in some scenes Wills is giving voice to three different characters at once. And also that in some scenes the same character is played by two different actors from one line to the next. It’s to the credit of everyone involved that it’s not actually as hard to follow as that makes it sound. I have to admit though that by the end of the two hours, I did get used to the various voices, except possibly for the Doctor himself. Set into this format is a story perhaps best described as ‘Pure Historical Under Siege.’ The TARDIS lands our heroes in the days of WWII and quickly they become tied to the fate of the isolated base of the ‘Night Witches,’ as the steady advance of the Nazis towards Stalingrad draws ever closer to the base. And, typically of a Base Under Siege story, the base commander is deeply sceptical of the new arrivals before beginning to crack under the pressure and becoming as much a threat to her own people as the enemy at the gates. Indeed, we see very little of the Germans themselves in The Night Witches and the Doctor and his companions spend most of the runtime victims of commander Vasney’s attempts to expose them as German spies and, later on, use their deaths to the advantage of a mad propaganda scheme to demoralize the enemy forces. This leaves the play a little short of incident, and much of it is pretty predictable. Each cliffhanger focuses of a dramatic revelation clearly signposted as much as an episode and a half before. Everyone’s gasps of shock and disbelief when they see Polly in the first episode, for instance, makes it no surprise when her doppleganger shows up and the theme music kicks in. And with it established early on that not only is Tatiana a dead ringer for Polly, but a talented impressionist and mimic who was about to begin a stage career before the war who is sick of the fighting and desperate to find a way out, it’s easy to see where the plot will go an hour later. That said, first time contributor to Big Finish Roland Moore delivers a script that has all the right elements in all the right places but, like a piece of Ikea flat pack furniture, there are stress marks where the screwdriver has been applied a little too brutally in the effort to make it all fit together. The real life heroism of the Night Witches, who ran dozens of bombing missions a night in obsolete bi-planes under horrendous conditions is a great period of history to explore and fits nicely with Who’s old fashioned educational remit with lots of detail on the tactics and deployment of the Night Witches. And while there are no genuine Russians among the cast, it’s still lovely to hear some skilled voice work from the Anglo-Polish Wanda Opalinska as Vasney and Lithuanian Kristina Buikaite as Lilya, a young Night Witch smitten with Ben. It lends a nice sense of location to the performances, and of our regular TARDIS team as strangers in a strange land. And it comes wrapped in a cover that, even by Tom Webster's high standards, is a strikingly beautiful composition. A relatively slight story buoyed by sincere and convincing performances by the guest cast and a compellingly tense corner of history, The Night Witches highlights the unique challenges The Early Adventures present to listeners. It’s not to be forgotten, however, that when it comes to recapturing the brilliance of this era of Doctor Who, The Early Adventures are the only game in town. http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2017/11/the_early_adventures_the_night_witches_big_finish.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr