Bay 12 Games Forum

Ugh, yeah. And setting aside the risk of people in a crisis being incarcerated in a psych facility against their will, let alone the risk of people getting shot by a cop when someone calls a hotline for help with it... the carceral state is looking for any excuse to lock people up in for-profit prisons. And it's not above targeting people at their lowest lows, or those around them.

Emergencies are emergencies, so seek help wherever it's available... but try to point friends in a crisis toward a trusted local Peer Support Hotline first. And if it's an option, work out who among your social circle is able to offer you support in emergencies like that, before involving a crisis line. Community-driven care is probably more important now than ever.

I've got a pretty common and androgynous name, so you can probably all fly under the radar if you aren't seen together. But you'll need to coordinate sharing a single Industry Pass, or help each other sneak past the gate. Which is very in character for me, so it's a good start!

Oh, and fun fact I forgot to mention; the film was funded as part of the *cough* Brexit Festival, so we had to comply with their UK-History-Wanking demands to use archival footage of Britain's Glorious Past... but we still managed to work within the letter of the law (using footage of pride marches and riots, insightful interviews with trans folks, Thatcher et al. being indefensible fashy homophobes, etc), to criticize the absolutely dogshit state of trans rights in the UK. So like, even if I can't go to the festival, it feels nice to have gotten that out there, and taken the British government's money to do it, haha.

I'm interested though, how does VR films work? Are you like a fly on the wall in the room, able to move around inside scenes and stuff?

Some people differentiate "VR Film" from "VR Experience", to describe the level of audience agency involved... but the line can be blurry in either case! Some are just animated shorts that can be explored and interacted with, or respond to where your head is looking. Others (like ours was) are meant to be experienced more like a traditional movie; you're placed into a 3D environment you feel present in, and you might get moved around a bit, or have to turn your head to follow things, but generally it's a linear film you're in the middle of.

There was another one a date took me to a few years back called "Terrain", where it was set in sort of a shattered underground parking lot, with busted, glitched out cement bits exploding into a dark space. If you followed the glitchy debris into the void, you'd see these giant bubbles in the distance; you could step into them, and each one was a short video; a pivotal moment from a handful of people's lives, projected on the inside of the bubble. As you explored, you could get a sense for the lives of these people, how their paths crossed and affected one another for better or worse, and all that. So it was a sort of... series of short non-linear films that tell a larger story together, framed within a surreal environment you could explore? And props to my date for picking it, because it's really stuck with me!

If you have access to a VR headset (or can make one out of a smartphone), it's *allegedly* possible to find La Biennale di Venezia's worlds on VR Chat still, or perhaps elsewhere online? If so, there's some really cool, experimental stuff there. I don't know if they'll be doing it again this fall, since everyone's pretending the Plague Times are over, but if they do, there's some very cool stuff there!

I mean, my career has been in freelance tech art and 3D dev for a while now, but this is was my first VR gig, yeah.

A close friend referred me to them to rescue their project after some bad hiring calls, and my clients want me back later this summer, so I for sure have SOME recurring VR work. And I could see myself enjoying working on more films and interactive VR, especially under less crunchy conditions?

But my clients can't pay for any expenses beyond the 400 euro I'd need just to get into the dang festival. And it's currently miserably hot, expensive, super crowded, and exposed to Much Disease... so like, quintessential Venetian experience if you're into that, but Guhhhhhh...

You can't make me.

I am going to sit at home, and make an elegant and efficient triplanar shader instead. >:I

I've tried sugaring before like Vec mentioned, and it works, but making sugaring wax basically involves candy-making chemistry, and requires specialized thermometers and such (plus it's easy to over or undercook it and fuck it up).

I have used a few epiliators for day to day face-hair maintenance sometimes (coarse dark hair runs in the fam), but it hurts to epiliate where the hair is dense, or the follicles are thick and well-established. I'm usually like, sweating and teary and sore by the time I'm done, and my pain tolerance isn't too bad.

My usual solution is to get a pair of tweezers, queue up an audiobook or something, and spending a few hours carefully tweezing all the hairs out of my face. I'm usually good for weeks after, the pain is less than epiliating, and maintenance after that is easier too since the hairs come in finer for a while.

NOTE: I still get the odd ingrown hair doing this, so it's not a perfect solution. They just happen! :I

P.S. Edit: I use a Braun Silk-Epil, and it's done well by me. Also has a nice little trimmer head you can swap out that works well for shaving my legs after a long winter of wearing long pants and Not Being Able To Be Arsed To Shave, or cleaning up the back of my neck.

Would probably advise against working for clients for free. But in the context of building a portfolio, it'd probably be good to write for a personal blog, get together with like-minded friends to write pieces to some end, etc. Stuff to demonstrate your voice, and to prove you can do what you want to be paid to do.

But as someone who's done freelance, I wouldn't suggest working *for* people who won't pay you, even to get started. Most people who are going to be good references down the line will respect your time and work enough to compensate you.

As a recent Maine import, I was expecting to miss the variety of autumn colors we used to get in Michigan. Went out for a hike, though, and it turns out the leaves are still good here.

(Pardon the blurry photos. Phone's old, and it seems the camera forgot how to focus.)

I love frogs, hats, and scarves, so  this is a very fun combo. Really cute, especially the little froggy balaclava with the mouth hole! If they talk from their throat, I suppose they wouldn't even need a hole for the mouth, except for eating and such... so I could see the head-sack being better in some situations. Nice!

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Some recent bits from Redlander. Currently working on mechanics and animations for Core, my small box-robot child.


They can grab walls and scamper around on them!


They can also extend their legs to become a sentient moving platform.