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act-novel · 1 year

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Notes on 3D Game Development in Game Maker Studio 2

Note: Originally published on r/gamemaker. Edited slightly to suit the new context.

Hello, this is Garrett Thompson, sole member of Act-Novel. Reality Layer Zero partially released recently, and so I felt that now was a good opportunity to go into a bit of technical depth on the project. Specifically, I wanted to write about how I made an engine primarily designed for 2D game development (Game Maker Studio 2) more amenable to 3D game development.

Game Maker 3D is sort of a niche topic, but if you're interested in doing some experimentation yourself, consider this a quick top-down look at how your project might end up being organized. I should note that I'm far from the only person doing this, and I may not be the most qualified to speak about it since I'm still learning things all the time, but I can share what I know, at least. First, though, I'd like to address a question that might be on your mind.

Why use Game Maker for this?

Granted, there are tons of engines out there that are much better at doing 3D than GM. You could simply download Unity or Unreal and develop inside of those very fully-featured 3D engines with very little start-up cost. On the other end of the effort spectrum, you could also simply cobble together your own engine from libraries and hotglue.

GM represents a kind of middle-ground between those two approaches, though. A lot of the basic math, graphics, and data structures stuff is handled for you, but you've got to implement the higher-level stuff-- 3D collisions, shaders, lighting, etc-- on your own. In some ways, that's a pain, but I find it also tends to keep your code simple enough that you can reasonably understand every little piece of it, which isn't always a case in a more fully-featured engine. In other words, you get many of the benefits of cobbling together your own 3D engine with fewer of the headaches.

For my project in particular, there's also a lot of 2D heavy lifting to be done-- I swear I spent about half a year just programming menus-- and that's certainly one area where the features offered by Game Maker offer more of a helping hand. The actual "3D" part of the code is, as you'll see later, not too complex, so the engine not having out-of-the-box solutions (to my knowledge) for 3D collisions or physics isn't too big of a set-back. In other words, whether Game Maker is going to act as more of a help or a hindrance is going to mainly depend on the project you're trying to make. That's largely true for both 2D and 3D-- although admittedly Game Maker's help-to-hindrance ratio for 2D games is probably substantially higher on average (versus 3D games).

So, with my obligatory Game Maker apologia out of the way, let's get into the specifics.

How do I even 3D?

The absolute basics of 3D are probably...

- Construct a polygonal primitive.

- Set-up a 3D camera.

There are already a number of tutorials for the camera bit. For learning both at once, I think I used this one. The GM documentation has a lot of good information here, too. Writing another how-to guide for this kind of thing would be, I think, somewhat redundant, so I won't do it!

However, what I will do is offer some insight for how to go from "I have a 3D camera rendering a polygonal plane to my screen" to "I have a way of reasonably making a 3D game."

How do I make a 3D scene?

Unless you want to construct all of your geometry in code (which, I mean, you're free to do if you want to), you'll probably want to use a 3D modeling tool for this (e.g. Blender). However, just modeling the scene won't be enough to get Game Maker to know how to render it. At some point you're going to have to *convert* that model to the internal vertex buffers that it expects. Fortunately, some smart people in the Game Maker community have written scripts to do just that. I believe I'm still using this one, even though more comprehensive solutions exist. I'm sure you can find one that suits your preferences with a quick Google search. You can also write your own, if you're handy with Blender extensions or the equivalent for your 3D modeler of choice.

Something I recommend before you get into modeling, though, is to organize all of the textures that will appear in your scene into one organized texture sheet (of power-of-two size, e.g. 256x256, 1024x1024, 2048x2048). Then, map the UV's of your model to the textures on this sheet. This will make it much simpler to tell GM what textures to put where whenever your model actually shows up in-game. You *can* combine meshes that use different texture sheets at runtime, but it's a bit of a bother, and why solve a problem with code when you can solve it with data?

Note: You can animate basically anything in the game by swapping out its texture at runtime with the next frame in a frame sequence. This is how I'm animating character sprites in 3D-- there's a 3D plane with a texture of one frame, but then that texture gets swapped with the next frame in the sequence, and so on. You can do this with a shader if you want to be, like, super-optimal with it, but it seems to also be mostly fine to just do it with the "separate texture pages" option checked in the sprite editor of the texture you want to use.

On the engine side, you can load the model inside of a game object, throw that game object into a room, and presto! In theory, everything should show up as you expect. In practice, though, sometimes you end up just seeing a black screen. This could be an issue with the camera position, or the scale of the model, or maybe you forgot to submit the vertex buffer in the Draw event, or really a million different other things. Maybe the model you're trying to load doesn't actually have any data in it?

Once you've got pixels drawing, though, you might be struck with a desire to make the scene more interactive. You *could* place game objects individually in the room editor, guessing about where everything should go and manually setting the Z-value of each in the instance creation code... but that sounds just awful, doesn't it?

So, what I ended up doing to make this process more visual and intuitive was to just treat Blender as a level editor in addition to a modeling tool. I duplicated the file I was using for the scene mesh model, combined all of the separate pieces into one "LevelMesh" object, and then started placing other objects (represented by default polygonal primitives-- cubes in this case) with descriptive names like "InteractableZone0", "Signpost8", "NPC2", and so on. The individual names for each unique object will be important later.

There's an intermediate step between setting up the scene in Blender and having it work in GM, which is, again, a data-conversion step. This time, instead of converting the data to a vertex buffer, it's being converted to JSON. If you're not familiar with JSON (how did you get this far in the post?), it's just a simple notation for objects (JavaScript Object Notation) that's remarkably similar to the struct syntax in GM. E.g. a JSON representation of a scene in Blender might look something like this (simplified for explanatory reasons):

"Scene": {

"LevelMesh": {

"baseName": "LevelMesh",

"x": 0.0,

"y": 0.0,

"z": 0.0

"InteractableZone0": {

"baseName": "InteractableZone0",

"x": 20.0,

"y": 40.0,

"z": 1.1111

"NPC0": {

"baseName": "NPC0",

"x": 42.0,

"y: 111.0,

"z": -22.8

}

You should definitely write (or borrow) an extension that converts your scene to JSON "automatically", since you'll probably have to tweak the positions of things and you'll want that process to be reasonably painless. The export script in this tool works splendidly, but the asset it's associated with (MMK) is dreadfully expensive if you're only using it for that purpose, and there's probably a cheaper solution floating around out there if you look for it. It doesn't have to be a special Game Maker JSON format-- just vanilla JSON will work fine.

Once you've got a JSON representation of your scene ready to go, you can load it into GM using the json_decode function. With the resulting ds_map in-hand, you can start generating instances.

In your room's creation code, load the map, step through it in a loop, and then each time you come across a new JSON object, create "some instance" according to the name (probably serialized as a "baseName" field) of the object. You'll probably want to create an engine-side ds_map that contains relationships between baseName strings and GM objects, e.g."InteractableZone0": obj_interactableZone3D, "NPC0": obj_characterController "LevelMesh": obj_exteriorScene

You can instantiate each of these according to the data in the scene JSON-- create them at the position specified, with the scale specified, and with any other encoded data you care about.

After instantiating each instance, you can configure them how you want to directly via their unique instance id, returned from the call to instance_create.

This... isn't exactly how I do things. Instead, I use a top-level "scene config" class to orchestrate the instantiation and configuration of each instance in a manner that's consistent, repeatable, and far less verbose. This might be a little bit too much engineering effort for a prototype, though, so you're free to bypass doing something similar if you wish.

So, with this, you've got a scene loaded, rendering, and with game objects instantiated inside of it, in the positions that you want them to be in, and configured how they ought to be. There's *probably* one major thing for you left to do, which warrants its own section of this post-- how do you get a character walking in here?

Height and Collisions

Movement in 3D is basically just movement in 2D, but with a z-axis. Thus, assuming you already know how to get a character moving around in 2D, doing it in 3D is just that, plus figuring out what your height (or z-value) ought to be.

More RGB than your custom PC.

At a glance: the left image contains height data (blue) of a scene, as well as the camera-restricted zone data (green) to keep the camera from moving out of bounds (this requires custom camera movement code, but it's pretty simple). The right image is the scene's collision map, where the red is "collision" and the black is... actually an "alpha" channel in the real collision map. You can technically put all three together in the same image, but in testing I found it was more efficient to treat the collision map as a separate image and use GM's built-in collision testing code (note: select "precise" on the image's collision settings).

The blue channel of the height-map on the left can be generated in Blender with a little bit of fiddling. The green channel, I added myself in GIMP. I also painted the collision map over the height map in GIMP, but exported it as a separate image.

The basic "high level" idea is that, for the height map, the "100% blue (i.e. a blue value of 255) areas represent the maximum height of the map (where the maximum height is defined "somewhere" in code), and 0% represents the minimum height (also defined "somewhere"). Every value between 0 and 255 is normalized at runtime to between 0 and 100, and then normalized again to somewhere between the minimum and maximum height. This is broadly the process we use to figure out the height (z-coordinate) of the ground at a given x/y coordinate.

You can do this with surface_getpixel, but that's excessively slow, so it's better to use a buffer. Once again, somebody already wrote code to enable this. Every time you need to figure out the height of a certain coordinate (e.g. how high-up the player character ought to be), you can just ask the height map in the buffer. But, wait, how do you know which pixel in the buffer to check?

The height-map and the 3D scene are not necessarily 1:1 scale. Unfortunately, this means that you'll have to "align the height-map" with the 3D scene manually. Personally, I wrote a tool that allows me to do this at runtime, and to then print the alignment information (e.g. height map x/y origin, scale) to the console. This process is a little bit tedious, and can sometimes result in things being ever-so-slightly off, but with enough fine-tuning you can get it "close enough" pretty consistently.

Top-left: The height map, and a sprite representing the player's absolute and relative x/y coordinates. Top-right: The map's current config information and adjustment controls.

The silver lining to this is that you can reuse the height-map configuration for the collision map, assuming the two images are 1:1, so you only need to get the map aligned once.

(Note: There might be better ways to do this. I'd love to hear about them.)

To keep the camera behaving, you're basically checking the same height-map buffer, but checking for green instead of blue, and checking for any value above 0 (since "camera movement" zones are binary-- either it's allowed or it isn't).

One downside of this single-height-map-based approach is that, naively, it doesn't support going under or over things, but there's actually nothing besides memory constraints stopping you from having multiple height maps for multiple different Z-values and just switching between them based on the player's current Z-position. You might be able to do something similar with collision maps to facilitate mechanics like, say, jumping, but I don't know for sure since I haven't tried doing that!

Always More to Do

With all of this done, you can now, potentially, pilot a player character around a 3D scene. Needless to say, that's still far away from what most games probably want to accomplish. You may not even be done fiddling with the lower-level 3D stuff by the time you've done all of this-- I didn't even get into implementing distance fog or lights and shadows (although that, too, can be done in Game Maker). There's also getting all of this to play nicely with however many UI surfaces you want to spin-up, and not to mention optimizing it to run reasonably-well on non-development hardware (hint: use vertex_freeze).

Nevertheless, this should serve as a pretty good foundation for anyone who's curious about GM3D. I'm sure many programmers can see a reasonable path forward from here on pushing this foundation through to actual full-on "game" status.

If I have instead only managed to dissuade you from investigating GM3D, I hope I have at least instilled a newfound sense of respect in you for early-3D game programmers, who doubtlessly had to jump through similar technical hurdles to get their projects up and running all those many years ago. Except they did it in C. And on calculator hardware. Without the internet! Yeesh!

#3D #reality layer zero #game maker studio 2 #gms2 #indiedev #indie games #programming #blender #technical #gamedev

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transienturl · 2 years

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I don't want to edit this at all but I tried to write down the basics of wifi bands/channels. I guess to make a comprehensive tutorial you would have to include, like, "how does wifi compare to wired internet really (and what do the numbers on the box mean" and "how do you get to your router's settings page" and etc, but. eh.

---

Wireless internet kind of comes in two (actually three) types:

2.4GHz: Older; has much less capacity; has the potential for interference from microwaves and some types of wireless transmitters. Has three channels that don't overlap (1, 6, and 11). Not supported by older or inexpensive devices.

5 GHz: Newer and has more channels; exact number depends on your country and hardware (bands are numbered 36 and above). Much less potential for interference and congestion. Slightly less raw range.

6 GHz: As of my writing this, your devices probably don't support this yet; if they do, I'm jealous. Just like 5 GHz, but additional channels that most people won't be using.

Ideally, you want your wifi network to be on a channel that is not used by any of your neighbors, since networks on the same channel interfere with each other. If you live in a populated area, there are often wireless networks on every single band, often more than one, so this turns into "the channel with as few networks as possible."

In an ideal world, usually, we try to put as many wifi networks and devices on the 5 GHz band as possible, since it has a lot more room. However, some devices (the Wii, I think, is an example) only support 2.4GHz networks. This generally results in most wireless routers actually having 2 sets of antennas inside them, and generating one network on 2.4GHz and one network on 5GHz.

There are two options to configure this:

a) You can name your networks the same thing. This will make them appear on your device (phone, computer, etc) as a single network, and your wireless router and device will do their best to choose the ideal one. Sometimes this works great; other times it doesn't.

b) You can name your networks different things, like "Strawberry 2.4" and "Strawberry 5" or whatever. This means you can control which devices are connected to which band yourself. You can then only connect all of your modern devices to the 5 GHz network, and then connect any device where it doesn't show up to the 2.4GHz network. (This is only a hardware thing; they will still be able to connect to each other.)

Regardless of which one of the above you do, you will want to ensure that your router picks a channel with as few other networks as possible. Usually, there is an automatic mode in the router which will attempt to do this for you, and again, sometimes this works great; other times it doesn't.

I like to manually choose the channels my networks are on. To do this, you'll need an app that shows you every network in your area and which channel it's on. Annoyingly, the only ones I know of are for Android smartphones, as most PCs, Macs, and iOS devices seem to have drivers that don't expose this information...? Anyway, you can borrow someone's Android phone and search for "wifi analyzer" in the store.

For 2.4GHz networks, there are technically 11 bands, but generally you only want to use 1, 6, and 11. As you can see from this graph, each network takes up an "area" of wireless spectrum, and if they touch, things get slower. (You can control how "wide" this "area" is in your router's settings, too; definitely leave it on the minimum, which will be 20 MHz.)

Ideally you want to select a free channel. I'm not posting it for privacy reasons, but the 2.4GHz band at my house is literally unreadable with around 30 networks on it, so obviously at that point it really doesn't matter much.

For 5GHz networks, first check your router's settings to see which bands it supports. Mine supports 36, 40, 44, 48, 149, 153, 157, and 161, for example. Often, you'll be able to find one or more of these that are free or only have a weak signal on them.

For 5GHz networks, you can choose to only take up one of these channels (20MHz), two channels (40MHz), or four channels (80MHz). Increasing this won't help if you have spotty wifi, but for a given amount of at-least-decent signal strength it will give you better peak speeds. If you have e.g. gigabit fiber, your internet speed will be limited by wifi, so this will be nice.

Anyway, walk around your house a bit and see which supported channels stay the emptiest, then put your network on those! You can also test out the low range (36-64) vs the high range (100+) since they have slight differences in wall penetration because of physics, if I recall correctly, but I've never noticed a difference.

(If you're lucky enough to be reading this in an era where devices supporting WiFi 6E are common, then maybe you'll set up a third network, too, for your newest devices. I'm not sure whether 6GHz networks will involve manual channel configuration or not.)

Anyway, yeah, that's it. Random other notes about wifi that aren't related to bands and channels:

Not 100% sure on this, but I think it makes the most sense to put external antennas roughly parallel-ish to one another, as opposed to pointed in completely different directions (they work together). also, they make a plane, which I believe is optimally perpendicular to the longest direction you want your wifi to go

Generally the correct security option at present is WPA2 (WPA2 personal, WPA2-PSK) or WPA3+WPA2/transition mode. Do not select the old "WEP" option (if you have a device old enough that it won't connect without this... that is generally not ideal, also you almost certainly don't).

If you have multiple wireless routers generally you put them on different bands (with the same network name) and rely on your devices to connect to the closest one. If you have a mesh wifi solution, ignore this entire post basically.

I haven't used it, but my understanding is that powerline is a quite good solution for many of the sorts of problems that would be solved by "I sure wish I had an ethernet cable that went from here to there." Look into it! (Unless you are really trying to take advantage of a >150 megabit home internet connection, or something.)

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barrowsteeth · 2 years

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I am in love with your last gifset and your meta posts are amazing. Thank you for helping keep the fandom alive during the break!

If you don't mind me asking, how do you make your gifs so sharp and clean looking, if that makes sense? My gifs are always fuzzy or grainy.

You are too kind, anon! I'm glad you're enjoying my posts. 💜

Honestly, it's a huge compliment to hear you think my gifs are sharp and crisp because it's one of the things I'm most envious of when I see other people's gifs! My earlier gifs are not nearly as sharp as what I'm making now, and I have to resist the urge to go back and re-make them all.

I've only been making gifs for a few months so I'm not an expert by any means, but a few key points are (1) starting with HQ video (1080 or better), (2) capturing every frame when you collect your screenshots, and (3) sharpening twice (in most cases, but not always). Coloring -- specifically adding too much brightness -- also hurts the clarity of gifs, imo. There are a lot of tutorials out there for new gif makers, but this one is really comprehensive. I don't use the exact settings as the OP, and I think a lot of it is trial and error, but the linked post was a huge help when I started out. I hope this helps, and thanks again for the kind words.

#anon asks #asked and answered

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a-pop-of-korean · 2 years

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I am kind of floundering with my Korean studies. How do you go from being a beginner to starting to use the language a little? I feel like I'm really struggling with putting everything I've learned into use. I probably don't have enough vocabulary either. I don't know, have you encountered phases when you're stuck and what has helped you through? (I'm learning on my own and using whatever resources I can find, so maybe that impacts my studying as well, because I'm not the most organized and having resources everywhere kind of overwhelms me)

Hmmm that's a good question! I, too, have been a little all over the place since I've also been studying on my own. I think in terms of speaking, the Korean class I started taking at college in the fall has really helped, but ofc not everyone has access to that. There are, however, plenty of other ways to really start putting your skills to use!

I used to write in a diary everyday which can really help with writing! It's a good way to use what you've learned in a real-life context. Take some time when writing in your diary and be consistent with it -- that's how you'll get the most out of it!

I used to be on the app Tandem too, which is great for having natural, everyday conversations with native speakers. In my experience, the people I've spoken with (and by spoken with I mean texted) have been pretty helpful and are willing to correct any mistakes you make. If you have no other opportunity to speak Korean with others, this is the way to go!

If you're looking to improve your listening comprehension, try watching K-dramas and/or Korean YouTube videos. There are plenty of makeup tutorials in Korean which feature some useful vocab, as well as variety show-type channels like Zamster. The K-drama site Viki has some dramas that have something called “learn mode,” which is super helpful because it displays both Korean and English subtitles on the screen! Play around with the subtitles on the YouTube videos too if you have the option. These are good ways to get you more comfortable with the language!

Webtoons are another good way to help with reading! A lot of the ones I’ve read are kinda advanced, but there are some more basic ones out there; True Beauty is a personal favorite! There are English versions of webtoons available too, which are helpful, but I also recommend using a dictionary while your reading so you can figure out the meanings yourself. If anyone knows any basic/intermediate webtoons out there, leave a comment!

You all know I love the app Drops, which is great for expanding your vocabulary! There are a ton of different topics and if you use it consistently, you’ll def notice a difference in how much you can understand. There’s a free version of the app, but you can get Drops Premium here!

So those are some things you can do to really start applying your Korean. I think applying it in the real world is really important for strengthening your skills and just getting more comfortable with the language. This might seem like an overwhelming list, but maybe just pick a few things and be consistent with it! I hope you start to notice a difference after a while :) I hope this was helpful! 화이팅!

#apok q&a #korean q&a #korean #korean language #korean langblr

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keenmarvellover · 4 years

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POSTS FOR YOU - 1

Some links to posts with valuable content you want in one place.(BASICALLY EVERYTHING IS THERE)

Suggestions and Recommendations are appreciated and accepted.

Last Updated : 16/10/2020

NOTE: Some of these post are written in a crude and unruly fashion. But they contain valuable tips, guidance and information. If you can't/don't want to read such posts, then don't read.

Mental Health

Do you need a Hug?

Maybe you’re having a stressful day. Maybe you just need a deep breath. Maybe you just didn’t realize how stressed you are. You can get your comfort here.

Some stuff to help you sleep

This is definitely not a google drive full of the sleep stuff from the Headspace app, including sleepcasts, music, and wind down meditation, that normally costs 17.99 a month, no siree and you definitely shouldnt share this with people

Anti-Anxiety Tools

Some tools to help you before, during or after an anxiety attack

100 Reasons NOT To Kill Yourself

READ IT. SHARE IT. REBLOG IT. Save a Life.

HOBBIES MASTERPOST!!!!!!!!

A really excellent way to reduce anxiety is to pick up a new hobby. Find something you’re interested in, learn it, then use it as a healthy and productive way to cope.

Health

Some very Important Lists for Rating PAIN, FATIQUE AND MENTAL HEALTH

It is MUST share

PSA Rregarding Hospital bills

Also how to pay hospital bills when you are broke.

How to differentiate between COVID-19, FLU AND COMMON COLD

Anyway, as we enter cold & flu season in the YEAR of corona, this will come in very handy.

Treatment for HIV

VERY IMPORTANT. Please Read and Share.

What does the Color of your Period mean?

A must read for individuals who get periods.

How to differentiate between Period Cramps and Appendicitis

A MUST READ

From a Person who is Hard of Hearing

Types and levels of deafness

General Tips for Vagina Health

Some stuff they don't teach in sex-ed.

Undo the damage of Sitting

Are you always sitting down? Then these are some exercise you should probably try out for better health.

Guide to Proper Bra Fitting

Guide to Proper Bra Fit and Measuring. Please Read and Share.

Washable, Reusable Menstrual Pads

(Part II)

Reusable menstrual hygiene product, and are an alternative to disposable sanitary napkins or to menstrual cups.

Artists

Art Masterpost

How to draw *insert whatever you want, its there in the list*?

Book Binding

Some video links to different types of DIY Bookbinding

For Artists who Need Photoshop

If youre an artist who cant afford photoshop, definitely DO NOT go to this google drive to pirate the program, that would be so bad!!!

Do’s and Don'ts of Designing for Accessibility

Please consider this when designing for ANYTHING. For BUSINESSES and ARTISTS.

Writers

Color Synonyms

For both ARTISTS and WRITERS

How to make a Masterlist

Simple but efficient instructions to make a masterlist

ULTIMATE NOVEL WRITING RESOURCE MASTERLIST

This is an ultimate masterlist of many resources that could be helpful for writers.

List of AUs and Ship Tropes

For when you run out of ideas.

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Legal sites to get some much needed Info

If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…

Resources for Describing Characters

For writing about physical appearances, character traits, talents,and skills and other related stuff of your characters, here is a comprehensive list.

Resources for Describing Emotions

Having trouble writing jealousy, happiness, motivation. Here you go!!

Some Resources for your Writing

Body Language

Reverse Dictionary

Character Traits

Things to Keep in mind when naming Characters

Valuable advice. Trust me

Words to Use when Writing Smut/Romance

This is for smut/romance writers. Kinda like a thesaurus.

Tips to write Pain

How are you supposed to write about pain you’ve never experienced before?

References for Greek Mythology Characters

Link to an extensive site every single detail of Greek Mythology from Gods to Family Trees.

Tips to write Blind Characters

Some tips that might be invaluable when writing character that are near-blind or blind

Things to Remember when writing a Highly Emotional Scene

Just small things that could make a great difference

How to write with Multiple POVs

Tips on how to write multiple POVs with diverse characters

Synonyms and Antonyms

The person who made this list is a blessing to writers. Just saying.

Good Qualities for Female Characters

Females don't always need to be protected and be weak. Make them more realistic.

Words to Use instead of ‘Said’

Every single situation is listed. Check it out.

Limits of the Human Body

All extremities listed

Readers

Legal Sites to Download Literature

From children’s books to rare books, from philosophy and religion to nonfiction. I guess you can find anything here.

The Rights of the Reader

And some (lots of) bashing of Helicopter Parents.(You want to read only the rights. Here it is)

Wet Book Rescue : Steps to save a Wet Book

Valuable information if some of your prized books were affected by recent flooding. The video even shows you what to do if you can’t dry the book out right away.

Cheatsheet to Navigate AO3

Makes your time on AO3 a little more easier and interesting

How to trick Writers into giving you More Fanfic to read

Works for Comics and Art as well.

Get a Book Suggestion

This book website gives you the first page of a random book without the title or author so that you can read it with no preconceptions

Books written by POC Writers

Only POC authors included in the list.

Students

Basic ASL (American Sign Language) Movements

ASL Hand Movements for beginners.

Tips for studying with ADHD/a>

Made by a person with ADHD themself.

Resources to Learn New Languages

Ten fairly useful general language resources

How to properly take notes

It helps. It really helps.

FREE ONLINE LANGUAGE COURSES

Here is a masterpost of MOOCs (massive open online courses) that are available, archived, or starting soon. I think they will help those that like to learn with a teacher or with videos.

A Thread of Tips

A thread of tips to help High School and College students academically

LEARN THINGS FOR FREE

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Google like a BOSS

Some life hacks which make student's lives easier.

625 words to know in your Target Language

If your learning a new language, these words will help you build a strong foundation.(Some tips and sites are include too)

Miscellaneous/Life Hacks

How to add music to your Blog

How to add your very own, custom homemade playlist to your blog?

How to Walk with Purpose?

Some tips on how to hold yourself in public and why.

Cheatsheet for Laundry Rooms

Saves a lot of money in the Laundry Room

How to Gird up your Loins?

A lesson in how to gird your loins.

How to Disappear Online

Please read and spread for the sake of abuse victims or stalker victims.

What to do during a Nuclear Attack

I hope you never have to use it but here are some guidelines to follow in the event of a nuclear attack

How to pull an All-Nighter.

A to-do list

Write a Thank You letter after your Interview

It leaves a good impression on your interviewer and increase your chances of passing the interview.

Laundry Tags: Meanings

A life hack that you’ll definitely need at some point.

Where to find free Movies and Series Online

Lots of sites. Lots and Lots of sites. I am not Kidding. Now go and chill without netflix. (Part II)

How to get a Refund?

Get your stuff or a refund.

HOW TO DO EVERYTHING FROM SCRATCH

This starts at the most absolute basics of gardening and planting, provides definitions, and hopefully is easily understandable. This is a MUST-READ. (Farming)

Discuss your wages

It’s your right to share your salary, not doing so could be holding you back.

Youtube Tutorials for Basically EVERYTHING

This is a big, giant list of Youtube tutorials that will teach you all the basic life skills you need to know in order to be a functional adult.

Safety

Emergency Evacuation - Items to Gather

A text list of suggested items to acquire in the event of an emergency.

If someone you know is in an abusive relationship

AN ABBREVIATED GUIDE TO ‘Holy shit!!! My friend is in an abusive relationship what do I do’ and what not to do.

Defense Tips for Women

Defense and Safety tips a woman MUST know. (Part II)

An app that informs your Emergency contacts if you are inactive in a set period of time.(Could prevent rape attempts if used correctly)

If a Man gets Physical

How to check if a mirror is one way or two-way

If you are trapped in a smoke-filled apartment: What to Do

How to get out of Hand-binds

How to get out of the bunker of a Car

How to track Anonymous asks.

How to pick a Lock

Traits and Warning signs of an Abuser

What to do if a bigot pulls your Hijab (from behind)

What to do if someone pulls of a Muslim Woman's Hijab? (To do List for both Men and Women)

#safety #health #mental health #writers #readers #micellaneous

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jontheredrc · 2 years

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OMG KIRBY AND THE FORGOTTEN LAND

I beat the main storyline of Kirby and the Forgotten Land over the weekend, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the game! I have a lot of thoughts, but don’t worry. I’m going to gush about the prologue because I think it’s absolutely beautiful, but even then, I tried to “leave room” so that you’ll still get a lot out of it when you experience it for yourself. I’m not going to touch upon the plot much besides that, either, so I’m pretty sure this is spoiler-free!

Kirby is a game series that means a lot to me. Kirby’s Adventure was one of the very first games I ever played as a child. I immediately fell in love with its colorful design, its blend of puzzle solving and combat, and its last-minute plot twist that cut a little deeper than the other platformers of the time. I’ve grown to love the series and the characters in it ever since. I’ve become fascinated by the lore, in which Kirby’s idyllic cartoon world is routinely visited by horrors beyond your comprehension. Kirby himself is a positivity ginjika, and I straight-up aspire for his levels of optimism and friendliness, But out of all of the Kirby games, the last one I played reminds me most of the first one I ever played. Even so, it does a lot that’s new too!

FEAST YOUR EYES ON A NEW WORLD

In Kirby and the Forgotten Land, a giant portal suddenly rips open the skies above Planet Popstar, sucking Kirby and many other denizens of Dream Land to a different world. Kirby wakes up by himself on the outskirts of an abandoned city, and the tutorial level sees him hiking around some skyscrapers coated in vegetation. At one point, beset by enemies, he accidentally inhales a rusty old car, and his body stretches out until he’s wrapped around it.

There, all alone in an unfamiliar place, with no way of knowing if he’ll ever see his home or his friends ever again, Kirby finds a still-functional radio among the rubble. It starts playing the game’s upbeat opening theme, “Welcome to the New World”, and Kirby starts to dance along--as best he can with an entire car sticking out of his mouth, anyway.

This isn’t the sort of hostile takeover that started Planet Robobot and Triple Deluxe. This isn’t the kind of ill omens Star Allies and Crystal Shards opened on. Instead, the mood chosen by Kirby here (both the character and the game) is joy.

Even here in times of trouble, no matter how bleak things appear, there is beauty and happiness to be found. Kirby and the Forgotten Land encourages you to seek joy in whatever you can, to make the most of wherever you happen to be. It’s such a wonderful sentiment. and it instantly lays out the vibe the game runs on (and the vibe I want my life to run on, honestly).

Later, among the overgrown skyscrapers, Kirby finds some Waddle Dees, easygoing folk from Dream Land who were also pulled through the portal. Unfortunately, they’re being caught in cages and carried away by little black birds. Joined by his old friend Bandana Waddle Dee and his new friend Elfilin, Kirby sets out to explore this new world and rescue the captured townsfolk. That’s where the tutorial ends, and that’s also the only plot you’re going to get for the next several hours.

You’re not told where the portal came from or who else might have been hurled through it. You’re not told who’s capturing the Waddle Dees, where they are, or why they’re doing it. You’re not even introduced to an antagonist. If you watched the trailer or played the demo, you’re not going to learn anything particularly new until world 4 or so. Sure, you’ll get your answers if you explore the game thoroughly, but even on your mission, the game wants you to be happy and enjoy your journey--and that’s exactly what I did.

A NEW DREAM LAND

This adventure is Kirby’s long-anticipated move to 3D, but it still heavily resembles past games in structure. The game is split up into a series of linear stages, and while the main goal is to simply reach the end of each stage and unlock the next, there’s a lot of secrets and puzzles to find along the way. Indeed, like many of my favorite games of the past, simply getting through the stages is the easy part, but completing some of the optional challenges, like finding all the Waddle Dees, can be surprisingly tough.

Speaking of the Waddle Dees, the adorable little fellas will form a new town in the ruins of the Forgotten Land. The more Waddle Dees you save, the more features you’ll unlock in Waddle Dee Town, including minigames and item shops. Mostly, it’s just things to do for fun, but hey, if you wanted to take a break from your adventure to go fishing or work part-time at the cafe, you can! It’s endearing to watch the town grow bigger and livelier as the game goes on, and it brings a feeling of accomplishment to see the Waddle Dees you’ve helped are truly safe and sound.

You’ll also need to rescue a certain amount of Dees in each area to unlock the boss. Most Dees are dotted through the stages as collectibles, often found in secret areas or behind puzzles (or both). Each stage also has “missions”, extra objectives that each earn you one bonus Waddle Dee. Your first time through the stage, though, the actual mission objectives are hidden, and all you can see is how many Waddle Dees are collectibles in the stage itself. If you beat a stage without completing all the missions, one of the hidden mission objectives will be revealed to you. You’ll have to replay the entire stage to retry any missions you missed.

The missions are one aspect of Forgotten Land that I rarely liked. You’ll achieve some of them automatically, as long as you’re solving puzzles and gathering every collectible you see. Some come across as challenges, such as defeating a boss without taking any damage, and are things I could see a skilled player accomplishing the first time through a stage. A large chunk of the missions, though, struck me as too random. Sometimes you’re asked to use a certain copy ability on a given foe, but you’re presented with multiple options and only one is “correct”. You could theoretically luck your way into that, I guess, but then there’s some like “complete the sign”. I never would have even thought to try some of these things, but when I was shown the objective, it was easy to figure out what to do. Then again, missions only award one Waddle Dee each. If you’re not going for 100%, I’m sure you could ignore the missions and still have enough Dees to unlock every boss and most if not all the functions of the town.

The controls are very tight and very simple, though, and they really heighten the enjoyment. Gone are the four- and five-page move lists from Star Allies or Planet Robobot; instead, each ability can really only do a couple things. The “Mouthful Mode” forms, like the car mouth seen in the prologue, only have one move each! At first, I was unsure how I felt about this, but I ultimately came to appreciate the decision. It’s one of the things that reminds me of Kirby’s Adventure; that was the first game with copy abilities, so most of them only had one move back then. And with the way the game works, the abilities don’t even need that many moves. (Besides, how often did you even use Hat Thrust?)

Before I played the game, I was worried that the Mouthful Modes might kinda step on the copy abilities’ toes. “Why have Car Mouth Kirby,” I thought to myself, “when we could just have Wheel Kirby again?” Well, turns out Car Mouth was kind of a bad example of what Mouthful Mode is for, design-wise. If I were to compare them to something in a past Kirby game...well, it would depend. Car Mouth is more like the Wheel Mode of the Robobot Armor than it is Wheel. Lightbulb Mouth hearkens back to the candle in Return to Dream Land, while a few Mouthfuls start on-rails segments (Pipe Mouth is just like the Friend Circle). Then there’s some like Stairs Mouth that are really only there for solving puzzles. In the end, I felt like Mouthful Mode was used for a lot of things, and I wouldn’t have used copy abilities for any of them.

NO ONE CAN HOLD YOU BACK

There are also optional “Treasure Road” stages scattered about. Most are uncovered by saving Waddle Dees, but a few can be found by searching the world map as well. These are short, timed obstacle courses that test your skill with a particular ability or Mouthful Mode. Think of these like the Challenge Rooms from Return to Dream Land, or maybe even the shrines in Breath of the Wild. Each Treasure Road also has a target time for you to beat. I’ve beaten the target times on all the Treasure Roads I’ve encountered, but so far, no reward has come of it. That’s okay, because I had fun trying to plan my routes and race to the finish. Some of those target times are really tough to beat!

Your main reward for beating Treasure Roads are the Rare Stones. These are a currency you use to evolve Kirby’s copy abilities (once you find the corresponding blueprint in one of the stages). Like the abilities themselves, these upgrades tend to be very simple. A rare few actually do change how the ability controls, but for the most part, they’re straightforward upgrades to things like damage or range or attack speed. I was diligent about unlocking and completing Treasure Roads, so I was able to buy every evolution as soon as I found the blueprints (except for one I got after I beat the game). If you don’t like Treasure Road as much, there’s plenty of easy ones you can blitz through so you can focus on a few favorite abilities to evolve.

RUNNING WILD

If I get into anything else about the game, it’s going to bring me into spoiler territory. Then again, for the vast majority of the game, there’s not much else to say. Kirby and the Forgotten Land throws a series of stages, Treasure Roads, and bosses at you, and all of them are immensely satisfying to overcome. The stages may be linear, but they’re still wondrous and jam-packed with detail. The music is all new, and there are some absolute bops in there (it’s a good thing I really like the Treasure Road music). There’s the usual mind-bending Kirby madness in the finale, but in the meantime, there’s so much to enjoy about this colorful, beautiful world.

Personally, I’m really into the post-apocalyptic setting. Kirby’s search takes him to vibrant places like a derelict shopping mall, a seaside hotel, and an amusement park (where some of the rides still work!). It’s all in ruins, but there’s enough still left here for Kirby to appreciate and enjoy. There’s an underlying sense of mystery (who used to live here? where did they go?), but the game’s not interested in elucidating until the very end. Even the collectible figurines that go into the backstory of the Forgotten Land mostly delve into minute details, like the mascot for the amusement park or a local electric company, rather than answering any burning questions.

But that’s okay. There’s a time for solving mystery, and a time for enjoying yourself. Despite taking place in an abandoned city, Kirby and the Forgotten Land feels like a video game vacation. Aside from some of the missions, the gameplay feels fair and responsive. The devs took great care in ensuring that the transition to 3D went as smoothly as possible. There’s also a hard mode available right off the bat; you don’t seem to get anything special by playing it, so it’s really up to you whether you want the extra challenge. There’s always plenty to do, whether that’s tackling the next stage, detouring into Treasure Roads, or just going fishing. If you’re going for 100% completion, you’ll find yourself surprised by how difficult the game can get sometimes, but if you want to just do the easy stuff, that’ll get you to the end credits too. Like many of my favorite games, including many Kirby games, the difficulty is very malleable to your desires.

All my friends know I’m absolutely hyperfixated on Kirby. To them, it’s probably no surprise to hear me say “the latest Kirby game is a triumph and I enjoyed almost every minute of it”. But Kirby and the Forgotten Land took a lot of risks and tried a lot of new and different things, not the least of which being its foray into 3D gameplay. Frankly, a lot of pre-release information left me with a negative first impression, I wasn’t sure I was going to like the features I saw when I played the game proper.

But let’s face it--it’s a Kirby game, so of course I was going to buy it. I literally gave the game a hug in the parking lot of the store after I bought it. All I wanted was to find joy in Kirby and the Forgotten Land, to eke out some measure of happiness no matter how bleak things may seem.

And you know what? Mission accomplished. (Now I’m off to try the post-game content!)

#kirby #kirby and the forgotten land

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dramarising-replacement · 3 years

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G1 Hoarder Revamp and the Mountain of Salt

Can we all just acknowledge how much of a total fuck up the new G1 ping system is? I feel bad because they obviously went through so much work and beta testing for this system but it’s absolutely garbage in practice. This isn’t meant as a huge roast (even though I do think the creators could do with getting knocked down a few pegs given how poorly they’ve treated people through this entire process, oops) but I hope they at least see this and see things that they can work on. Obviously, going to them and sharing this stuff in person isn’t possible since L from arcane is notorious for gossiping and overall not super trustworthy, so anon route we go. I’ll give credit where credit is due: they definitely tried to go on the right path and the coding is good in theory. The big issue here is that they tried to fix something that was not great but worked with something that is not great and barely works. Sure there are some good things about the new ping system: if it’s not busy it’s not longer than six or seven minutes to do all of it for a few dragons, which, compared to the previous method? Pretty good timing. Helps automatically tag some colorgroups without having people confused about if their dragon counts or not, and uh... probably something else. The cons far outweigh the pros though: -sheet can only be used one at a time: terrible in theory, terrible in practice, there’s no queue system either so you’re not even guaranteed to go next even if you’ve been waiting ages. This becomes a nightmare around any holiday, as we’ve seen around notn, since everyone flocks to the ping generator and then quickly abandons after seeing the mess there. This should have been something that they found a way to work with from the start, especially since the previous spreadsheet, despite how long it took to sift through if you were actually assed to do all the specifics, could still be used by multiple people. -userface issues: going into the spreadsheet and it may all just be blank, does this mean someone’s using it? Someone isn’t? If you go ahead and assume not you’re going to get warned that you overrode someone since they get the ID to your dragon, if you don’t assume then you end up waiting for ages like an idiot and someone else swoops up the opportunity. The loading bar on the side doesn’t help give that info either since it constantly reloads due to the poorly planned code. Where users have their cells selected also doesn’t help since that isn’t always accurate. There are many times where the loading bar isn’t seen going, there isn’t any visible text on the screen, no comment in the box, but it’s still in use. This isn’t viable for anyone, especially not people who don’t fully understand how the system works. If you’re going to make it for only one person’s use at a time, you need to ensure it’s easier to see what’s going on for everyone. -laggy as all get out: sure, I don’t have to go through 15 pages of different types of pings on the old G1 pinglist and shovel through all the duplicates and specifics list people, but having more than 13 dragons or even doing a bigger lair sale (or even just anything during notn) means you get to wait for the program to chug away for ages (as well as the easy chance for someone to just cut in halfway through a load and have you start all over again or wait) and hope that the three people behind you don’t get impatient or angry as you have to do three separate input sessions rather than massing them all together as you could with the previous spreadsheet. -poorly designed aesthetically: maybe this may sound petty to some, but the design of the system is pretty terrible in terms of layout and color choice. This isn’t to say it’s just ugly though; after speaking about it with people who aren’t neurotypical, have disordered thinking processes, and/or have generalized issues reading things (autism spectrum, dyslexia, semi-visually impaired, etc.) it’s pretty clear that the entire thing is not accessible whatsoever for anyone who can’t immediately decipher what anything is. Black text on bright red is not a good thing for most people beyond old MySpace edgies. If you, as someone without reading or comprehension difficulties, are having a difficult time focusing on it: maybe consider how difficult it’d be for anyone else. The way the rules or tutorial section is laid out also does not help in terms of accessibility! It’s clunky and hard to read, does not flow well, and doesn’t explain as thoroughly as you may think. If you’re someone who uses coded spreadsheets often? Yeah sure, it might be understood. If you’re not? Welp. Good luck kiddo. -very poor user help: this is on the mods or creators more than the spreadsheet itself. If someone has a problem, the first thing you should do is talk with them to find the difficulty and tackle it from there. I’ve seen, multiple times now, where either N (plague) or L (arcane) straight up tell people that they can’t help them and that they should just read the guide on the front page. Like sure, they read them, but something is tricky for them and they’re asking for help. They can read the rules and guide again but without outside help, guess what? Not gonna help them. If you just keep linking them the forum or telling them to read the first page it won’t actually help anyone! One of your jobs as the creators here is to help the community that you made it for, not just parrot that they need to read. Be better. Add that to a system which is not forgiving of any mistakes whatsoever and it becomes a terrible little cocktail. Also does not help that, despite their sugar attitude about having people test it in discord servers, the creators l and r/p (both arcane) don’t actually help people who need help using it. -wait times/queue: this ties in to an earlier point, but there’s no way to organize who goes next. Sure, it might sound strange, but when you have to wait ages to get access despite you being there ahead of anon llama/drama/dingdong/animal because they can all hop in ahead of you, it becomes frustrating. People don’t always type in that itty bitty box to say what they’re doing, and people easily erase it or write over it, or they just outright ignore it. Obviously not everyone is going to do that, but it’s way too easy for people who are greedy/entitled to step over those who are being polite and patient. -no quick ping options this is also kind of minor, but at least with the old spreadsheet you could just click in and say “okay, I just want to ping XXY general for this because I have a quick sale.” Guess what: nah. You have to go through the entire chugging process and queue and everything else just to get that snippet of information on who to ping. What once took maybe five clicks is now five minutes to thirty depending on how many people are using it. Wanna quick check if a dragon with XYZ colours you hatched is one that someone wants specifically? Nah, fuck you. You have to input all the data and wait instead of just doing what was once a super easy quick search. There is so much other shit wrong with this system and I’m honestly surprised N (plague) allowed them to do this. Sure, the old pinglist could have done with some updating, but that should have been done in the form of clearing redundant double pings, maybe a way to sort through specifics like ‘male only’ and mass copy names there. Quality of life things, not this just... total mess. I understand that L and R/P got it into their heads that they needed to fix it and that they wanted to take over the entire system themselves, but they should have kept their pride out of it for once. The sheet to input what dragons you want is also another entire nightmare. It’s frustrating to go through the google poll a dozen times to say exactly what colors/eyes/gender/pasta-shape/siesta-fiesta under the sun you want rather than have a quick way to input it by drop-downs or even just a text based option like the old one had. It’s so easy to forget what you put in or which one you want to put in this time, so easy to end up making mistakes that you don’t see, etc. It’s just not an effective system. It’s great in theory, and sure, it’s all sparkly and new, but it’s like admiring an aluminum trash can. Shiny and sparkly under the sun, still holding a whole lot of hot garbage though. I understand that some people may find it easier, and that’s great! I’ve used it for a few things and yeah, it’s okay, but I wish the old one was back given all the grief and frustration this one has caused. Obviously I’m not in the place to be like DO THIS OR DO THAT since I’m not the one making the sheet here, but I do feel like the people who use it have every right to give commentary and feedback where possible. Even moreso when the creators and team aren’t actually as welcoming as they try to appear to be. As much as it sucks, a lot of L and R/P’s (primarily L) false niceties have kind of come to the surface lately which makes this whole situation just that much more awkward. If people don’t feel like they can approach you because they know you’ll rip into them here or on the anon site immediately, maybe you shouldn’t be a main creator of something for the user base or a mod for a bigger group. Just some side-thought to all this other stuff. Big post, big rambles, I can’t bring myself to organise it though because I’m pretty fed up and tired. Take from this what you may, but basically fix your shit new G1 Hoarder peeps.

#Drama #Rant #Flight Rising #Long post #Shady #User #submission

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browniefox · 3 years

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Waking from the Long Winter

Ace Attorney - 5K Words

Phoenix Wright and a few moments during the ten weeks it takes to receive results from the Bar Exam.

A one-shot written solely for the half-joke I make within the first couple paragraphs lol. Character exploration of Phoenix finding himself again. Hinted narumitsu but just hinted.

oOo

Phoenix is sure there’s a joke here, somewhere.

Something about a lawyer walking into a bar, and then knowing to duck the second time. Or maybe not ducking, but running into it at top speed. Or trying to vault over the bar and getting his feet caught on it and falling on his face instead. There’s something there, he’s sure of it. More than anything, however, Phoenix wishes his brain would focus on the Actual Bar Exam instead of trying to make this stupid joke work.

He took the bar once before, of course. His memory of having done so, however, is shaky at best. Trying to look back at it, it’s nothing more than two days of pure stress. If he tries to pin the experience down to a word, it's just a really long and drawn out scream.

Taking the bar the second time, ten years later, is… different.

Phoenix studied, of course. Apollo had still had his flashcards and big binder full of notes. Slow days in the office were often punctuated with spontaneous quizzing on terms and laws and procedures. He’d spent late nights reading big law books and then falling asleep on top of them like he was in college again. He sat in on a lot of trials, reviewing the roles of the people in the court.

Now that he’s finally actually taking the Bar, it’s like a math test.

Obvious not as far as subject matter went. But it reminds him strongly of what taking a math test back in middle/high school had been like. Going into it scared and then being surprised by how quickly and easily he seemed to go through the questions. Of course, that also always ended with him getting the test back with a million red marks that revealed the test hadn’t been easy, he’d just been dumb.

For the first five minutes, nerves making Phoenix fidgety, the Bar exam had been scary and the words had refused to form comprehensive sentences. He’s pretty sure he almost had a panic attack. But then the five minutes pass, and Phoenix takes a few deep breaths, and when he opens his eyes again, he realizes he actually does know this stuff.

He was a lawyer, once, seven years ago. It feels like that should be more than enough time for him to have forgotten what being one was like, for all of the words to have become greek to him once more. And yet, his previous cases stick out to him on the page. Yes, he remembers using evidence law for the Skye case, he knows this. Ah, yes, he remembers studying this case because it reminds him of the Powers one. There’s even a question about spirit mediums at one point and Phoenix almost laughs out loud.

It probably also doesn’t hurt that he’d kept his enemies close during his disbarment, as well as working on MASON.

Kristoph had often asked for Phoenix’s opinion on cases, setting out the evidence and asking for the ex-lawyer’s input and expertise. He wonders if it was supposed to sting, if Kristoph had been trying to rub salt into the wound. If so, he had succeeded, sometimes. Other times, it’d been nice to fall back into those familiar ways of thinking, of trying to piece together a story, of trying to find justice.

Phoenix would never ever thank Kristoph for anything ever, but he did admit there were unexpected rewards for having put up with him for so long.

oOo

Paying for a barber hasn’t exactly been in the budget for years.

Not that there weren’t places you could get a haircut at fairly cheap, but every single dollar and penny counted. Even the months where things looked alright, where there was a comfortable sum left over after rent and taxes and food, most of it was set aside for when the rough times would return. They always did.

“Just a trim?” Trucy asks. She wears the fake mustache she insists on wearing every time he asks her to cut his hair. Her own was just trimmed by him, the floor littered with split ends. There’s layers throughout it, and now that it’s started to dry back out he can see his handiwork and nods to himself. The days of terrible and uneven cuts while trying to watch a video tutorial are well behind both of them, years of practice instead showing through.

The swivel chair from the desk has been moved into the bathroom and Phoenix looks at himself in the mirror, his hair for once not bunched up inside of his beanie. It’s long enough to pull back with a hair tie. Trucy is already gearing up to cut off an inch, the same inch she cuts off every time to keep it from getting too long. For years, that’s been the only reason to cut his hair. He runs his fingers through it. It’s to his shoulders right now and he blinks when he realizes that he hates it.

He hates how the long strands get in his face. He hates how sometimes he pulls his beanie off and his hair is staticy. He hates how if he doesn’t pull it back while cooking, if he has something on his hands, he has to awkwardly flick his head in usually-futile attempts to get the hair out of the way.

He hates it and he’s hated it for a while. But for some reason, every time before now, it’s felt easier and safer to keep it long and annoying.

“Actually,” He says, and then hesitates. He’s had his hair like this for so long now, and shorter hair… He steels himself and straightens a bit, “Actually, Truce, could you go a little shorter this time? Just, you know, a little-”

“Don’t worry, daddy, leave it to me!”

There’s a mischievous little glint in her eyes and Phoenix almost changes his mind, but she’s already spun the chair around and started cutting. Phoenix closes his eyes and waits. Trucy hums as she cuts his hair, and usually she does little tricks with the scissors, but this time she’s just cutting. He tries not to think about how close to his head the scissors sound, how much she must be cutting off. He’d asked her to, and he hates how long it was, and yet now that it’s too late to change his mind he’s nervous.

“Alright!” Trucy chirps and spins him back around to face the mirror. Phoenix opens his eyes.

A young lawyer, full of hope and trust and pure stubbornness, stares back at him.

And then he blinks, and the man has little tired wrinkles around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth and prominently between his eyebrows. He still has the couple-day-old stubble that he had yet to shave. There’s dark shadows under his eyes. He runs a hand through his hair. It spikes up in the back, just like it used to, just like it always has, like how his mom used to hate and try in vain to flatten down.

“Well, what do you think?” Trucy beams at him.

“It’s perfect.” He says.

And it’s true.

oOo

Phoenix has never owned a perfectly tailored suit in his life. He never found an issue with this. Off the rack was just fine, and a lot cheaper, and you didn’t have to worry about anything happening to it.

Apparently Miles thought that this was an issue.

Two weeks after Phoenix took the bar, Miles drags him to get a new suit. Phoenix stresses that his old suit was perfectly fine. He at least assumes it's fine. It is shoved somewhere near the back of his closet and by now is probably made up of as much dust as fabric. But it should still looks like a suit, and he can probably send it to the dry cleaners or something if he ever needs it.

Still, Miles insists on dragging him to get a new suit.

The people there all recognize Miles right of the bat, greeting him as ‘Mr. Edgeworth’, with a lot of ‘So good to see you again’ and ‘Are you here for the usual’ and ‘How is dear Ms. Von Karma doing’. His answers are amicable enough: ‘It’s nice to be back in the country.’ ‘No, not today, I’m here for my friend.’ ‘Franziska is doing well, thank you.’

Phoenix sees how they look at him when they don’t think he can see them. They don’t know that Phoenix is well used to being on guard constantly, no matter the time or place. He cedes that maybe he should’ve worn something today other than his hoodie and beanie and flip flops, especially with how the ‘flip-flop-flip-flop’ is just shy of echoing throughout the large store. He knows they must look an interesting pair, prim and perfect well put together Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth next to disbarred pianist and poker player Phoenix Wright. He doesn’t let it bother him as Miles picks around the room, finding suits that he approves of.

There’s too many shades of blue. Half the time, Miles holds up two and asks which one Phoenix likes more, and they look exactly the same. Still, they eventually end up with a few different ones for Phoenix to try on, and Miles and one of the men - the tailor? Maybe? Or the owner of the store? - walk around Phoenix and critique how it looks on him and then send him back to try on another. It reminds Phoenix how much he hates shopping. The whole process of having to try things on and take them off and then repeat is just a bit too tedious for his sake.

Miles more than Phoenix decides on which suit is best out of the ones he’s picked out, and then Phoenix's measurements are taken so that it can be fixed to fit him just right.

They’re looking at the ties, the last thing to grab before they leave, when Phoenix finally says,

“I haven’t passed the Bar Exam yet.”

Miles pauses for a second, then hangs the white tie back up. He doesn’t turn to face Phoenix but his eyes do glance over.

“You took the test.” He says, and Phoenix can hear the unsaid in there. ‘You took the test, right? You didn’t lie about that? You didn’t purposely sabotage your own test? You haven’t done something incredibly stupid already, have you?’

“I did.” Phoenix nods, and means ‘I really did. I gave it my all. I tried my best, I swear it.’

“Then you’ll need a new suit.” Miles says.

“But I haven’t passed yet.”

“Mm,” Miles hums, grabbing a dark red tie and looking it over, comparing it to the swatch of fabric that matches the color of Phoenix’s new suit, “You’re not going to fail.”

“But-”

“If you fail, then you’ll still have a new suit. There’s more reasons than being an attorney to own a nice suit, you know. If you ever eat somewhere nicer than the Borsch Bowl, for one. Or I have a wide array of incessant events I’m expected to attend throughout the year. They’ll be more manageable if I have someone there with me, but there is usually a dress code. Or perhaps I’ll be in need of a co-council at some point. I could use your eyes, and lord knows they’ll let absolutely anybody co-council, qualifications be damned.”

Miles doesn’t say anything else, and neither does Phoenix. He does, however, pick a wine red tie and add it to the growing stack.

oOo

When he moves the items off of the piano, he’s careful to make sure he remembers where everything goes.

It’s his office, it’s his piano, and while maybe most of the things he takes off aren’t his they also haven’t been touched in weeks, and he doubts that Trucy or Apollo would notice anything different. Still, he feels oddly like a kid sneaking food out of the cupboards while his parents are out. Trucy is setting up for a show and Apollo is out looking at a crime scene. It’s the perfect chance.

He lifts up the covering from the keys of the piano. He sits down on the bench, and a chill rushes over him that isn’t there. He can almost hear the sound of the Borscht Bowl, the clamour of patrons. He’s played this piano so few times, he can count them on one hand. He’d given practice a couple tries when he first got hired, until it became clear that being paid not to play was probably just as lucrative - if not more so - than actually having the skill.

Phoenix rests his hands on the keys, cold ivory under his warm fingers. He’d taken classes, once, years and years ago, when he was small and young. His piano teacher then had been an old and nice woman, but she’d had to stop teaching after a few months due to health problems. He can still find middle C, and that is more or less where his skills end. Usually, when someone requests a song, he plays ‘hot cross buns’ or ‘heart and soul’ or any other classic of the sort.

This time, Phoenix lets himself bang around with wild abandon on the keys, like he had as a kid, caring little for melody or timing or anything at all. The piano is probably out of tune. Not that he can hear that sort of thing, but it's a fair and safe bet to make. The piano hasn’t been played in a long while.

He steps away for a moment and runs a finger over the spines of the books on the shelves until he came across a thin one, so thin that the spine didn’t have any kind of title, just staples holding the pages together. Some hot-shot customer had come into the Borscht Bowl, slapped the ‘Beginner’s Piano Lessons’ book on the top of the piano and declared that Phoenix was going to need it once he was beaten at poker that night.

Of course, Phoenix had won. He got to keep the book anyway. By ‘got to keep’, he meant the customer had punched Phoenix in a fit of rage after losing and had been kicked out, leaving the book behind. Phoenix had kept it.

He isn't any good at reading music, but he has the afternoon to himself. He gets out a pencil, writing the letters above the notes, counting the keys to make sure his fingers land on the right ones. It is slow, and tedious, and not something he has to do. It's something he's doing because he wants to.

oOo

Phoenix has a love-hate relationship with Parent-Teacher Conferences.

He loves to go when the teachers will tell him ‘oh, Trucy is a joy to have in class! Trucy brings such a brightness to the classroom! Trucy is brilliant, what an amazing daughter you have! She’s so talented!’ And then Phoenix gets to beam at Trucy, and Trucy gets to glow under the praise, and then he gets handed her report card that he can place on the fridge so he can look at it every morning and be filled with pride again.

He doesn’t so much like them when the teachers look at him funny.

Look, Phoenix is an adult, he can admit that his appearance took a pretty sharp decline after he was disbarred. But some days it was all he could do to put on the hoodie and beanie, and he had learned pretty early in how to rationalize it all away as ‘putting on an act’, as trying to get Kristoph to underestimate him. However, an adult man who adopted a daughter, and thus had had someone declare him fit to raise a kid, looking like he was one trip to McDonalds away from being completely broke wasn’t always the best way to present one’s self to other adults, especially ones on high alert make sure their students were in a stable living condition.

One time, Trucy had even had to warn him to clean up a bit. She’d picked up on the worried questions her teacher had been asking her, about how often she ate and what her dad did for a living. Phoenix had put on actual shoes and a button up for that PTC. The teacher had still looked at him suspiciously, but he’d done his best to exude confidence and ‘I’m perfectly capable of raising a child on my own’. He couldn’t risk losing Trucy. If he lost Trucy…

He can’t lose Trucy.

Of course, the days of those sorts of PTC’s are behind them. Now that Trucy’s in high school and has eight different teachers, PTC’s consist of going between the school’s cafeteria and library to find Trucy’s teachers, get told if she’s a good student or a distraction or doing well or doing poorly, and then heading right to the next teacher. Some teachers they just outright skip, like Trucy’s gym teachers.

“C’mon Daddy, you have to dress up too!”

Trucy spins around in her magician outfit. The straplessness of the dress made it against the school’s dress code, so she never got to wear it to classes. She’d been talking about showing it off during the PTC, when school wasn’t technically in session, and Phoenix knew that she was probably going to take the chance to dazzle her teachers with some of her smaller tricks as well.

Put that in the list of reasons why he did like PTC: getting to see people be amazed with Trucy’s close-up magic tricks.

“Trucy,” Phoenix sighs.

“No, please? I always get dressed up, and you never do.” She pouts, crossing her arms.

“That’s because you’re the star of the show tonight.”

“But you’re my assistant! Please, just this once? I know you don’t like getting dressed up, but...” And then Trucy hesitates, which is so unlike her it catches Phoenix’s attention right away, “But I’d like it.” She finishes. For a moment, the room is plunged into darkness that only Phoenix can see as chains shoot out of nowhere and a single psych-lock places itself in front of Trucy.

Phoenix sighs one more time. He’s not going to pry, not unless it becomes a big deal.

“Sure, can’t have you performing with a sub-par partner.” He relents and Trucy claps her hand excitedly.

He goes back into his room, reaching for a button down. Something simple, he figures. Just something a little nicer than usual.

And he sees the suit Miles had bought him.

It’s in a big black bag to keep it safe from dust or whatever. Almost without thinking to, he takes the hanger off the rack and sets it on his bed, unzipping the bag and looking at the suit. It’s so much like to his old one. He runs a hand over it and then almost puts it back. But if he can’t wear it to a PTC, how can he wear it to any of the myriad of events Miles had listed off? He used to wear a suit everywhere. It had been border-line mandatory.

“Hurry up, Daddy, or we’ll be late!”

Phoenix jumps at the banging on his door.

“Just a minute, sweetie!” He shouts back.

It feels… different. He blames that on the light blue waistcoat that Edgeworth had insisted on. That, and the fact that it was a suit that was made to fit him exactly. His old suit had been second-hand, all that he’d been able to afford at the time. The blue, what many people seemed to remember about him, had been due to lack of options rather than real choice.

He looks at himself in the mirror, running a wet hand through his hair to try and get it into some semblance of presentable. He still has his stubble. He hadn’t shaved this morning. It’s not too late to tear off the jacket and vest and go with his original plan of just a button up.

“Daddy!” Trucy calls again.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” He shouts back, and with one last look at himself, one last effort to convince himself he looks fine, leaves his apartment looking more like the Turnabout Terror than he has in years.

oOo

More of Miles’ things seem to come weekly.

Apparently Franziska is doing a deep and thorough cleaning of the Von Karma estate. She keeps finding more things, and so boxes and boxes turn up on Miles’ doorstep.

Phoenix finds himself spending a lot of his time in Miles’ office, and it means he ends up spending a lot of time helping Miles unpack boxes. Some of them are things that really shouldn’t have surprised Phoenix, like Steel Samurai manga and dvds that Franziska has unearthed from hidden corners of the estate. Miles had admitted he’d kept them anywhere he thought Manfred wouldn’t look. Other little things like that showed up - small mementos or notes, most of which seem innocuous, but that Miles insists would’ve been disapproved of.

There are also other things, like pens or books or pictures. Some of these do belong to Miles while others of them are items Franziska 'didn’t wish to hold on to any longer’. While that seemed to be the case with some, it only took looking at Miles face to confirm for Phoenix that a lot of them had secret sentimental value.

He never understood their relationship. He’d been an only child, and while there were people he was close to, he’d never grown up in the same building with them, nor under the harsh condition Miles and Franziska had. He's glad he doesn't have to jump through the weird hoops and unsaid rules that Miles and Franziska do when navigating anything to do with the other.

“Okay, you can’t tell me these are important.” Phoenix holds up a pair of scissors. They’re cold and pure metal, no plastic handle like the three pairs Phoenix himself owns. All three of them always go missing at the same time too, which completley defeatst he point of having so many pairs.

Miles sighs and rolls his eyes. He’s sitting on the ground in front of the bookshelf. With the most recent influx of books, alphabetizing them means that the previous books need to be pushed to the next shelf, and it has created a chain of necessary rearrangement to every subsequent shelf as well. Phoenix has seen Miles force the work onto some younger prosecutors or even unlucky detectives, but with Phoenix here he does it himself.

“Open them up.” He says and Phoenix does just that. There are initials welded into the metal, M.E.V.K. Phoenix raises his eyebrows.

“Miles Edgeworth… Von Karma?” He says, just to be sure, and Miles nods.

“Mm, yes. Those are my shears. Franziska insisted on the initials so that if I ruined my pair, she’d be able to tell they were mine right away, and I wouldn’t be able to try and steal hers. She took them to get initialed herself.”

He speaks of the event with the calm and cool that is so Edgeworth, but Phoenix has learned to read between lines. He runs a finger over the four initials. Von Karma. The household Edgeworth had lived in and belonged to in all but the official name change. The name that he was able to carry on these shears.

“I’ll put them in your desk.” Phoenix says instead of the millions of other responses running through his head. He’s standing in front of it anyway. He pulls open the first drawer as Miles says,

“No, I’ll be taking them home. They’re fabric scissors, Phoenix. Using them on paper will ruin them.”

Phoenix’s response to that completely leaves his head when he sees the small golden pin in the drawer.

“What’s this?” He says, more to himself than Miles. He knows what it is, and yet he asks anyway. It’s a defense attorney pin. He can see the petals, the image of scales in the center. It’s not as if he hasn’t seen one recently, he has defense attorneys working for him, after all. But it’s so out of place to see one in Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth’s office that it takes him completely by surprise. He picks it up, turning it this way and that.

“Is this... your dad’s?” He asks, the first answer that comes to mind.

“Is what- oh. No. It isn’t.” Miles is looking over now, and there’s something in his voice that makes Phoenix’s brow furrow. He sounds… hesitant? Scared? Nervous? None of those seemed quite right, but Miles didn’t seem completely at ease. Phoenix returned his focus to the pin.

There are teeth marks in it, like someone had bit into it at one point. The edges of it are worn slightly, softened with time. It’s nostalgic to look at.

It’s even more nostalgic to turn over and see the number 26381.

“Wait, this is…!” Phoenix stares at the number, the number that is burned into his memory. He’d memorized it soon after receiving the pin. It was his number, the number that meant he was really a lawyer, that he had done it.

“... yes. It is.” Phoenix looks back up. Miles is still looking at him, the odd expression still there. Not hesitance, not nervousness, not fear.

Anticipation. Miles is sitting there, watching in anticipation, as Phoenix finds his old defense attorney’s badge in Miles’ desk.

“You have my badge.” Phoenix says. He turns it back around to stare at the face. Yes, that bite mark… that was from Ema, wasn’t it?

“I do.” Miles confirms.

“Why?” Phoenix says. He weighs the small pin in his hand and then tosses it, catching it easily enough. It’s so light and small.

Miles considers both Phoenix and the pin, eyes tracking the movement of the pin as it goes up in the air again and then returns to Phoenix’s palm.

“I didn’t want anyone else to have it.” He says. He’s still anticipating something.

“I see,” Phoenix says. And… he thinks he does, “You never told me. Would’ve been a lot easier to have given it to you personally instead of having to take it off and give it to the board.” He gives Miles a half grin.

“They wouldn’t have accepted that. They’d be upset with you.”

“What would they do? Disbar me?” Phoenix jokes. Miles looks like he’s trying not to crack a smile at the joke. It’s a joke at Phoenix’s expense, but the pain of the event has been numbed by time, and the joke is made to Miles.

“I suppose there wasn’t much they could do at that point, no,” Miles agrees, “It would’ve been easier to have gotten it from you personally. I had to pull some strings to get it.”

“And you didn’t tell me.” Phoenix brings up again.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I thought you’d want it back.” Miles answers honestly.

Phoenix looks back down at the pin, his pin. He can see himself, six or five or even three years ago, finding out that Miles had his pin and begging the man to give it back to him. It had meant so much to him. Its absence had meant even more. It wasn’t as if he would’ve been able to do anything more with it than Miles had been doing; he’d have stuck it in a drawer, and on his worse days he would’ve pulled it out and cried over the small piece of metal.

Maybe if he’d found out a few years earlier, he would’ve been upset at Miles for not telling him, for keeping this from him. It was his badge, after all.

But now, seeing it placed in the top drawer of Miles’ desk where he could quickly open it and look at it whenever he’d wanted to, it fills Phoenix with something warm. This whole time, it hadn’t been locked away somewhere, or handed off to some rookie, or tossed away. It had been with Miles, watched over, polished, kept safe.

“Thank you.” Phoenix puts it back into the shelf, closing the drawer. The anticipation finally leaves Miles to be replaced with relief.

“It was my pleasure.” Miles smiles, and Phoenix returns it.

oOo

A lawyer doesn’t cry until it’s over.

For seven long and painful years, through even terrible twist and turn in the road, Phoenix hadn’t cried. Oh, he’d come close several times. Times where everything had started to get to him, when his chest had shaken with the sobs he so desperately wanted to let out, when he was reminded that he wasn’t a lawyer anymore, that the rule wasn’t his rule anymore. And yet the tears never came. His face stayed dry. And he’d rise again to carry on.

The packet comes in the mail ten months after the test.

It’s thick and heavy. He’s home alone, Trucy at school and Apollo doing some last-minute preparation for a trial. Sometimes it seems like the kid has better luck getting clients than Phoenix ever did.

He knows what the packet is the moment he sees it in the mail slot. He feels numb as he carries it to his apartment. He considers waiting to open it, but that seems like putting himself through unnecessary cruelty.

There’s a knife in the kitchen and he grabs it so he can cleanly slice open the top. It feels wrong to rip into it like an animal.

His shoulders shake as he slips the knife under the flap, his eyesight becomes blurry as he cleanly cuts across the top.

Win or lose, pass or fail, Phoenix thinks he knows how Godot felt at that trial. He imagines that if someone was watching him with the magatama, they’d see a final psyche-lock, placed firmly there when Phoenix had first started to close himself off for the war against Gavin, break apart.

Alone, in his apartment, for the first time in seven years, Phoenix cries.

It finally feels like it’s over.

#ace attorney #phoenix wright #fanfiction #fanfic #browniefox writes #i shall post fic here #as a treat to myself

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neojeno · 4 years

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I really wouldn't mind you aiding me with some tutorials love

giffing tutorial/resources

hi anon! sorry it took me so long to answer. i figured this might be helpful for others out there who have asked me similar questions, so i’ve compiled a pretty comprehensive list of tutorials/resources. idk about others but when i was new to giffing, it took me a lot of painful effort to go around and look for resources, so i’m putting it all here to make it a little easier!

i download videos using 4k video downloader. it will download very good quality 1080p videos in .mp4 format. if you’re downloading a 4k video, make sure to change the setting option to .mkv so that you get 4k and not 1080p—for obvious reasons since you want the highest quality.

i rely on kpopexciting to get .ts files — which are basically raw, very high quality video files for live performances. they are much less grainy than .mp4 versions of live performances—which are the ones you’ll see uploaded to youtube. i’ve found that 4k videos (in .mkv) are just as good quality as .ts, but obviously you will rarely see live performances in 4k, so get .ts when you can!! you can also try to find .ts files on twitter, but you may have to do a lot of digging. i wish i could recommend you twitter accounts, but the ones i used to go to have been very inactive/taken down all their drives :( but this website is really nice and updated frequently so i would recommend it!

vapoursynth links + download. the reason you would use vapoursynth is to resize your gif, while maintaining the optimal quality of the gif. if you gif without vapoursynth (.ie only using photoshop), it will still be fine, but the image quality may be grainier. also, you will definitely need vapoursynth to gif .ts files —more will be explained in the tutorial i’ve linked below. i would recommend that you have a high processing/lots of ram/newer desktop or laptop to use vapoursynth so that 1, your computer isn’t fried and 2, your vapoursynth process will go a lot faster. i am using a 2017 macbook pro for all my work, and it runs pretty well, but my laptop still gets pretty hot so just make sure you’re not running a million things in the background while using adobe products and vapoursynth lol. i used a pretty old and beat up 2011 model macbook air back then, and i will say that yes vapoursynth worked and ran on it, but it took much longer, and basically fried the laptop’s battery (aka i had to get the battery changed twice and the laptop would die randomly) but issok it was a school borrowed laptop so i didn’t feel too bad lol. im just saying this as a precaution, to preserve the health of your electronic devices!! but don’t be afraid to use vapoursynth! you should still try it at least once.

thank you to @realstraykids for this super detailed, really nice tutorial! it includes how and where to download videos, how to gif using vapoursynth, using photoshop, comparisons, coloring, and pretty much all you need to know. 10/10 would recommend

thank you to @dreamcolouring for this lifesaver!!! the best and easiest way to blur out unwanted captions/objects in your gifs. i recommend doing this step after converting your frames to video timeline and before you do sharpening and coloring. another tip i’ll add is to feather the selection you’ve made right before you click on “add vector mask” —this will make sense once you’ve read through the tutorial. feathering it will make the blurred spot less noticeable and more subtle.

i use this generator to create gradient colored captions! copy and paste your text, then select the colors you want. generate the code, and copy it. change the settings of the text editor on your post to HTML. paste the code, preview, and voila! add elements <blockquote>,<b>,<i>, etc as needed. see more on colored captions in this tutorial by @kylos --i believe op mentioned a different and better color generator but for some reason it won’t work for me :( hopefully it works for u! basically same idea as the previous generator i mentioned.

my own mini tutorial/workflow process of making gifs. this includes working with a .ts file, vapoursynth, photoshop, coloring, watermarking, etc. and a few of my own tips below:

if you are working with an .mp4, you do not have to make any changes to the preprocessor/denoise filters/sharpening in the resizing part of vapoursynth—it doesn’t make that big of a difference if you do. but if you are working with a .ts file, definitely do make those changes,, that’s the whole reason you have vapoursynth. with an .mp4, i like to use vapoursynth to just resize, but i don’t add any additional settings. i use smart sharpen in photoshop to sharpen it, which is pretty good on it’s own (at least in photoshop 2020!).

my rule of thumb is to do add .02 seconds when i am setting frame delay. so if when you first import the frames, they are at 0.04 seconds, i usually change them to 0.06. of course, this is my personal taste—you can make all your gifs faster or slower depending on how you want em to look.

if you are on a mac, you can screen record by pressing Command+Shift+5 (it’s a shortcut to quicktime screen recording). I only screen record for things like the beyond live concert or other live streamed events. the image quality of the screen recording, in my experience, is actually pretty good. when you gif the screen recording however, you may notice that it adds extra frames that you don’t need. by that i mean duplicate frames. you could keep the duplicate frames but that just means the size of your gif is going to be much bigger (keep in mind the limit is 8mb). in order to remove those duplicates, my only solution has been to remove them manually (by holding Command while selecting), or when you are importing the video to frames, select the option to “limit to every 2 frames”—but this method will be less precise and still not as good as manually removing frames. if you remove the duplicate frames, this means you will need to set the frame delay even slower, to make up for lost frames. in my experience, fps(frames per second) and frame delay work in conjunction. so for example, if i delete every other frame because they are duplicates, but the starting frame delay is 0.02, i am now going to change it to something like 0.05 (so i added 0.03 seconds rather than my usual 0.02). if the duration length and the image dimensions of the gif are short/small, feel free to keep the duplicate frames in—i only delete duplicate frames in order to keep my gif under the 8mb limit. then, if you keep the duplicate frames in, continue with your standard frame delay preferences. now that i’m writing this im realizing this might not make a lot of sense lol.. but don’t worry about it for now and if you run into trouble w screen recorded gifs then you can come back to this for reference. again, this is only my experience recording on a mac—it may be a lot different if you use a screen recording program or are on a pc.

i don’t really use .psd templates because i like to give every gif/gifset it’s own unique coloring—so i remake the coloring every time, but if you get into a rhythm it’s pretty easy. there are a lot of nice coloring tutorials out there, too! my personal coloring adjustments in order: levels, exposure, color balance, selective color (if needed), vibrance, photo filter (if needed), color lookup (i use 2strip most often and i put it on ‘color’ blending mode). don’t forget to adjust the opacities and fills of the ‘color lookup’ adjustment layer in case it’s too strong. go back to correct each adjustment layer as needed. then, when you’re done and satisfied, group all those layers, copy the group (you can do an easy command+c), and paste it onto the next gif you’re working on for easy workflow.

if for some reason you can’t see the frames when you import your layers/video, it’s likely because your ‘timeline’ window isn’t showing up. just go to the window menu on photoshop, go to the bottom and you’ll see ‘timeline.’ make sure it has a check next to it.

i recommend watermarking your gifs because a lot of people like to repost tings these days 😠 - so make sure u got your brand on it! i keep my watermark saved to my ‘libraries’ in photoshop so it’s ready when i need it. i use the blending mode ‘overlay’ and adjust the opacity, but if you don’t want to do that you can also add a stroke/shadow to your watermark/do all sorts.

tag #nctinc for your nct creations and #jenonet for your jeno creations!!

here’s my own mini tutorial (well not much of a tutorial ig more like a work process vid?): took about ten minutes including the time to search and download the video (but i didn’t record that part i trust yall know how to do that), vapoursynth, and exporting. i hope this helps somewhat! feel free to ask more questions whenever :)

youtube

keep in mind that giffing takes a lot of patience, energy, and experience—so don’t worry if it takes you a bit to figure things out or if your gifs don’t turn out the way you want them to the first time around. we all start at the same place and all run into problems. i know giffing can sound intimidating and seem like a lot of work, but i promise, once you get into a routine, giffing is going to happen in minutes—and you’ll get beautiful gifs. have fun! 😊

#anon #answered #tut #tuts #giffing tutorial #should i make a tut/resources post on gfx? not rly sure if gfx can be taught.. it's like a lottt about personal style imo lol #hope this helps!#not just for anon but for anyone

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