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#unphysical
gup9idttu · 1 year
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w9bvchtphbrru · 1 year
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Hot Thick Nigerian Girl Bouncing Her Big Butt Cum in pussy compilation - 10 amateur shoots Cumshot vibrator threesome phat booty freaks swallow bbc Dutch teen anal creampie Desi cute bhabi with her brother in law hot indian Amiga na siririca O cuzinho mais gostoso que tem, comendo a amiga escondido Prurient babe Rachel Rayye gets her pussy tamed
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thedorfmirrin · 1 year
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LAUGH ATTACK !!!
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betasuppe · 1 year
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*licks ur page* mmm
This is like strawberries, cheese and grapes! BEST JUICY COMBINATION.
That's how good ur blogging is. How good ur posting is.
Ahahaha I'm not sure how I'm managing it to taste juicy & yummy but glad I could be improving your blogging experience in any way 👍👍👍👍👍
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antiauteur · 6 months
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can I just joke about my own story saying I've collected some of the worst incubi and succubi during this whole thing?
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hubr1s69 · 9 months
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nothing soothes my soul as much as flexing in the mirror
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theskeletongames · 1 year
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But imagine dance tale bitties. Sorry not the actual question. I wanted to ask HT Sans's reaction to dancetale Sans. He seemed to like outer, (even if it wasn't mutual) so would he also have a good impression of the casual dancing Sans?
Depends on if Dancetale Sans reveals his unique dance fighting. He'd probably hide it, due to being shy about dancing. So the other Sans might try and figure out what makes him different besides wearing pants, and maybe just call him the pants guy until he reveals the dancing part.
When he reveals the dancing part:
HT Sans probably thinks it's funny, but also looks down on it a little, but also thinks that would be nice compared to what's going on with his world. His outward action would be to laugh and maybe ask something dark about what happens to the looser. Do they die? And how doe they die? What does something like that look like, ya ever seen it happen?
US Sans think's it's cool, and wants to learn some moves.
UF Sans keels over laughing when he finds out. It's the most pathetic thing he's ever seen/heard. He probably laughs/snorts about it every time he looks at DT Sans for a solid couple of days. He looks down on this Sans the most so far, even though being so unphysically fit he can't do much without getting out of breath is equally as pathetic.
UT Sans is just surprised that any variant of him that retains his base persona can do anything physical.
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cosmos-dot-semicolon · 5 months
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Day 23! I'm not doing any better at trying to do simple things, but I think this prompt was definitely worth the time investment. All of the CtM endings are really good to me obligatory disclaimer.
But yeah, Toppat King's my favourite on average. It's partially the fact it has 4/5 of my favourite characters from the series, but also it's just the way it's presented compared to the others. You go from high tensions with Henry's return to every one of the main characters having a standout moment of cool with him in the actual plot. It gives a good sense of what their dynamic is, and it's a surprisingly wholesome turn for you usurping a criminal leader.
Also just the amount of unbelievably stupid, unbelievably unphysical, unbelievably creative awesomeness that goes into every option here is great. Thought I'd pay homage to that by making that old van they stole into a rocket powered helicopter like a mini airship. This was so fulfilling to draw btw you should make these guys do cool stupid things more often
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quiltofstars · 5 months
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NGC 4030 // David Alexander
Fun fact: NGC 4030 is about 65 million light years away from Earth. If someone living in this galaxy had a (unphysically powerful) telescope pointed at Earth, they just saw the dinosaurs get wiped out!
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miscmonstro · 2 years
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The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga
First: You are here
Next: Chapter 2
Fandoms: Danny Phantom, Batman (DC)
Specifically, Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman
Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd
Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust and help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?
👻 {Chapter 1 Below!)
Danny groaned within the confines of his mind, exasperation and irritation and just a bit of fear welling up in his chest. 
His disgruntlement did not go unacknowledged. Danny wasn’t alone, even in his mind, and he hadn’t been for quite some time. Somewhere in Amity Park Tucker sent a wave of comfort in return, and he too was uneasy of the trip Danny’s eccentric parents had forced him to accompany them on. 
Sam, on a plane to Gotham, had her own problems and replied with a simple vague sentiment akin to ‘what can you do’ with less words. Her weariness seeped into it, making it feel quite resigned. It was as though she was awaiting some awful fate she’d long accepted and… no, that's exactly what it was. 
Tucker broke the relative silence across the link with an unrepentant, “At least one of us is going to survive to Christmas.”
Danny responded with the impression of bashing his own head onto a wall and Sam began to seethe. Despite her best efforts, her mind circled back to the annual gala her parents demanded she attend alongside them. It was hosted by a different snob every year, and while the scenery might have been different, the atmosphere was always the same. Without fail it would be simmering with thinly concealed flaunting and heavy with thick lies pasted atop one another.
Sam wished she could tell her parents no. She wished she didn’t have to do this. She would never voice those complaints and misgivings about the Christmas gala ever again, and not just because of Desiree. 
Every year Sam wanted to scream and every year she smiled and let her parents pick her outfits and acted like the perfect daughter. She couldn’t afford to be anything less at the Christmas galas and it made her want to hurl at the plastic cutout she endured becoming for those horrid days. Hurl, or commit a murder.
“I’m doomed. You’ll have to break me out of jail,” Sam muttered in her mind as the second option grew in appeal. “I swear these rich assholes get dumber every year.”
“And my parents get more insane,” Danny added gloomily. 
There was a hint of something from Tucker that Sam could tell wasn’t thought out and she mentally kicked him before he could put his metaphorical foot in his unphysical mouth. Tucker swatted her in retaliation but understood, switching tracks.
“Uh… yeah. That sucks. But we’re halfway through our junior year and then one more year before we’re free from our parents!” Tucker tried to comfort. Danny’s gloom lightened ever so slightly. 
For a few minutes, Sam looked out the window and imagined that she was going anywhere else to do anything else. There was a growing serene calm shared across the link, the tinges of uncertainty ebbing away. She could hear keys clacking away as Tucker typed and she could feel affection for Jazz from Danny as he texted her. 
And then Mr. Fenton startled Danny and unveiled a new anti-ghost device and Danny’s mood plummeted like a twelve ton rock to the bottom of the ocean. 
Tucker winced and tried to think of any joke that wasn’t a pun to lighten the mood.
Sam sighed. It was going to be a long, long break.
👻 {Boo!)
All too soon the plane landed and Sam zoned out while her parents immediately fought over what she should wear like they hadn’t ordered whatever the clothes were weeks ago. Sam had mentally checked out for self preservation the moment she stepped foot off of the plane. This wasn’t her first rodeo and she had the act down pat. Giggle when she was supposed to as her parents showed her off and stand silently behind them when they weren’t. At the seamstress or at the hotel lobby chatting with other rich people, the script was the same. It wouldn’t change for the gala either.
At least the previous two years hadn’t been as horrible with Danny and Tucker a mere thought away. 
The days dragged like an ant crawling through molasses and then the dreaded day arrived. The first night of the gala. Wayne Manor was old, she noted as their limo drew nearer. She could appreciate the architecture at least, and maybe such an old house had a ghost. At least that would be interesting.
Danny pointed out that she didn’t have a thermos.
She quietly conceded his point and wished for something regardless while she smiled blankly as her parents greeted Bruce, the host of the gala this year. With a polite greeting of her own the Mansons departed from the entrance and swept into the manor.
Straight away her parents engaged in some conversation and Sam stood a step behind them. Allowing herself one sad, longing look towards the quiet corners of the room, Sam bitterly wondered why the Christmas galas made her parents fanatical every year. They let her get away with whatever she wanted within reason the rest of the year, but as soon as Christmas was involved they expected her to be a doll.
With that last break of character she let a calm wash over her, perfected from years of galas, and let her perfect daughter mask snap firmly into place. 
“At least they’re only like this once a year,” Tucker commented, trying to look at the positives. 
Sam agreed. If they were so controlling year round then she was sure she’d have run away from them.  
“And at least the fruitloop is a shut in,” Danny added. The three shuddered at the thought of Vlad at the gala, Sam in particular. She didn’t want to handle him alone. Even between the three of them it was tricky to drive him off sometimes, never mind one on one.  
The clock ticked on at an agonizing pace. Eventually her parents sent her off to dance with the son of some CEO they were chatting with and she used the opportunity to escape after the dance. So long as her parents didn’t see her doing anything “unseemly” then she’d be golden for the rest of the night. She made her way over to a relatively secluded corner and cursed at the dress limiting her movements. Just walking felt like a chore in the wretched thing. Sam might have come from a family with money but she rarely dressed it. 
“Mission accomplished for the night,” she told the boys. “If I have to dance in these heels one more time…”
“You’ve almost made it through,” Danny encouraged her.
“And now you can scope out the room! Are there any cute girls?” Tucker prodded cheekily.
Before Sam could mentally reply a strange sensation washed over her. It felt like a gentle tug at her chest, at her core. Her lips parted and a faint golden-yellow mist emerged. 
“Ghost. There’s a ghost here,” Sam said, head snapping up from her cup of stuff she technically shouldn’t have been drinking as she began scanning the room with a critical eye.
“Ask and you shall receive. You totally jinxed yourself Sam,” Danny said, though his concern belied the light comment.
“You can handle it,” Tucker added at her uneasiness. “You’re-“
“No, this is different. I- I feel something in my core,” Sam said with growing alarm as the feeling didn’t fade. “Guys…”
Now it wasn’t just Sam who felt alarmed but they knew by this point how to prevent a crippling spiral of positive feedback. Dread settled in her gut and Sam couldn’t even tell if it was hers. 
“I think it’s tugging me,” Sam noted after a moment of observation. She stepped toward the crowd, toward the pull, and Tucker recoiled. 
“Um, hello, reason here. Shouldn’t you not be heading toward it?” he said.
“But what if it’s hold on her core gets stronger? She needs to do something,” Danny pointed out. 
“It doesn’t feel malicious so I’m assuming the worst. I might need you guys to pull me out of a mind trap,” Sam relayed as she weaved between the other guests.
There were twin nonverbal agreements from Tucker and Danny. Being connected to two other people usually meant that items and people looking to ensnare the mind needed to nab all three of them for anything to take effect, and for that Sam was grateful. 
Sam paused as the pull led her to a wall. Wherever she was being led was outside of the main room. Glancing around, Sam spied a confectionery table and she ducked behind it. Without a thought she turned herself intangible and invisible and walked through the wall, following the pull. After several rooms, some occupied by guests and some not, Sam came across a balcony.
Hunched over the railings was someone wearing a tux. Sam couldn’t see anything spectral about him and that put her on guard more than anything. The ones that were strong enough to appear perfectly human were the ones that always brought the most trouble. She stepped into the empty hall and dropped the ghostly aspects from her human form. 
“Are you alright?” she asked. That was usually a good way to start with nonviolent ghosts.
The person stiffened and whirled around. The first thing that Sam noticed was the tuft of white atop his head and the second thing-
A small cry for help. The tug increased and it almost felt like it wanted to yank her core out of her chest. She swallowed thickly and stood her ground. 
He narrowed his eyes at her ever so slightly. 
“Fine,” he replied curtly after a moment.
Sam scowled in return, a spark of temper rising. “Obviously not.” As much as she’d wished for a ghost earlier she didn’t want to deal with one so late at night, especially not one that could do whatever this was to her core-
“Deep breaths Sam,” instructed Tucker.
Sam inhaled deeply.
Danny prodded her and she refocused on the ghost. He hated when their attention was away from potential dangers for too long. 
“Sorry, I’m a bit short after dealing with,” Sam motioned in the direction of the main room, “all that. But seriously, what’s up?”
The ghost man scoffed and eyed her. “I’m not keen on spilling my guts to a stranger,” he said, voice barely above a hostile growl.
“Fair enough,” Sam said, appraising him. She was given the impression that he too found all the rich people business distasteful. Striding forward, she noted how he tensed as though he was ready to bolt at the drop of a hat. Thrusting her hand out in a very ill-bred manner and hoping it would put him at ease, she said, “I’m Manes.”
The man snorted. “Jason,” he said, accepting the handshake. 
Several things became apparent one after another.
Firstly, she could feel his core as it reached for her. This ghost’s core was so weak, so fragile that it wasn’t even really a core. It was a proto-core, meaning that it wasn’t formed from a death, and this ghost shouldn’t even be outside of the Ghost-Zone. He was basically an infant.
Secondly, the hand was warm. Warm as a human hand was, warm like it was alive.
And with how solid the man was and how fragile the proto-core was, there was no way that he was a ghost.
Sam tried not to stare at the very human man who was also a baby ghost. 
Jason raised a brow at her and she yanked her hand back like the contact burned when she realized that she’d been holding his hand for longer than what was polite.
Danny seemed to be coming to some conclusion as he turned the information around in his mind and Tucker was rooting through what they knew about ghost formation from some of his files. 
“Are you sick?” she blurted. It was the only thing she could think of. If Jason was slowly dying and had something he was passionate enough about to become an obsession then it might be possible that a core had started forming.  
Jason huffed out a puff of air that might have been a laugh. “No.” One of his hands made an aborted motion towards his side, like he was going to grab something and thought better of it. “I just got out here. Can’t I get even a moment to myself?” he complained. 
She snorted. She would’ve been more than happy to leave him to his own devices and would have if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a baby ghost. “Guess not,” she replied instead. 
“Is he a halfa?” Danny wondered.
Sam immediately refuted it, but Tucker wasn’t so sure. 
“It’s better to check,” insisted Danny.
“How can we tell? I have no equipment,” Sam reminded them as she shifted her gaze out over the snowy trees surrounding the manor. Aloud to Jason she said, “This is a pretty spot.” 
She was skeptical. They’d been told over and over how rare halfa were. Besides the three of them, Dani-with-an-i, and Vlad-the-supreme-fruitloop there were no others of their species. The common denominator, excluding Dani who had her own circumstances, was Fenton tech. Sam couldn’t fathom how Jason might have been exposed to a portal unless he was a clone. Turning, she looked him over again.
He was well built, likely had an active lifestyle, and had black hair and blue eyes. Sam found her own eyes drawn to the tuft of white on his head, and now that she thought about it, Vlad had a streak of white in both of his forms. Yet, Jason didn’t look like Vlad. 
Tucker added that he could’ve been a test tube baby and you didn’t have to have one person for that. 
“I don’t think he’s a Vlad experiment. Vlad would’ve never let him go, weak core or no,” Sam pondered.
“Unless he escaped,” Danny agreed.
“But then how’d he end up here?” asked Tucker. That was the most damning question, but life was stranger than fiction. However unlikely it was, they couldn’t discount it until they had proof.
There was a mental knock from Tucker and Sam let him in. He was seeing though her eyes, she could tell, and she made sure Tucker could see Jason’s face.
“Wait- that’s Jason Todd!” Tucker exclaimed with disbelief.
“Who?” Sam and Danny chorused.
“One of Bruce Wayne’s adopted sons. He supposedly died before he turned up alive. Or well, maybe he’s not so alive…”
Danny’s presence joined Tuckers in seeing through her eyes.
Sam was going to have to look into more Jason Todd later, but right now she was incredulous. “He might actually be like us?”
“Or maybe that’s just typical of resurrection?” Danny tentatively offered. “It’s not like we know if he really died or not. And we deal with the already dead. Have we ever even met a resurrected person? Can you really resurrect a person?”
“What do you mean, might be like us?” Jason asked. The hard edge to his voice was back.
“I’m going to tell him,” Sam decided. 
Tucker agreed enthusiastically and Danny cautiously. Jason had a core, however faint, and that meant the Anti-Ecto Acts applied to him.
Sam looked around. “There’s no one nearby, right?”
“No, there isn’t,” Jason replied guardedly.
Sam squinted at him but decided to get on with it. “Alright. Look. You have a core. A weak one, granted, but that’s enough to get you captured and vivisected.”
“What the hell?” Jason asked, rearing back with wide eyes. 
“I have your attention? Good,” Sam said, leaning toward him. “You really died, didn’t you? And when you came back you… well look. Ghosts are real, alright? And you are basically a baby ghost. It… your ghost part is basically screaming for help, that’s how I found you. But!” she said when he opened his mouth, likely to interject, “This means a set of laws called the Anti-Ecto Acts apply to you. By law you are not sentient, never mind other rights. If you get caught you’re toast.”
“Lady you’re insane,” Jason barked, stepping away from her. His core was agitated. 
“I’m trying to keep you after-alive,” she corrected. “The government has these floozies called the Ghost Investigation Ward, but everyone calls them the Guys in White since they wear white. If you see them, run, alright? They’re the ones who will capture and hurt any ghost, even if you’re just minding your own business.”    
Jason shook his head and inched into the hall. “How drunk are you?” he asked.
“Not at all. Listen, just be careful,” Sam sighed.   
Without a backwards glance, Jason left her on the snowy balcony with a snickering Tucker and a pensive Danny.
“Dude, you scared him off,” Tucker chortled.
“I needed to give him the important stuff in case we never meet again,” Sam replied dryly. “Ghosts are hard to accept outside of Amity.”
”I think I’m going to look into how he died and how he might have been brought back,” Tucker announced. Sam could tell he’d already connected with his PDA and was delving into the web for preliminary information, looking for promising leads. 
Danny was nervous but determined. “That’ll help us figure out what he is.”
“It is a new situation,” Sam thought to them as she peered down the hall. 
With a sigh, Danny mentally flopped onto a floor. “I guess I could ask Frostbite about coming back to life and baby ghosts when I get back.”
Sam’s initial, knee jerk reaction was to object and say that they should all go together, but Tucker was already in Amity so Danny wouldn’t be alone.
The two would be fine.
Oh who was she kidding? This was Team Phantom she was thinking about. Something was bound to go awry and she was in no position to help them when the inevitable other shoe dropped.
White, misty condensation swirled in the air as Sam exhaled noisily. She hated this time of year with a passion.
👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)
Next: Chapter 2
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notpoet06 · 9 days
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Proof
Here’s our story:
A story I don’t always know to be
About us
A story I think that might be mine only,
A story you’d never claim.
When we met I saw you as nothing
But I considered you,
Like a new theory,
Like a strange concept.
But it was stupid,
It always was,
Always would be.
And still I tried.
And still I approached you—
And passed, too,
For that girl was prettier,
Like the flowers
I would photograph
As I knew you were talking.
Between the summer heat,
The vibrant flowers,
The buzzing bees,
The lonely breeze,
I thought I’d be alone again.
But night brings something new,
Something so wrong for me,
Something I had prayed for,
And prayed against.
Day arrives and you’re still there,
Day arrives and I consider not just you
I consider this life,
I consider a new happiness.
It doesn’t feel so conspiratorial anymore,
This is not theory,
I might just find proof.
Soon I think I know you.
Scarier still,
I think you know me,
And I let you.
It’s different.
The concept of you
Is so far from what I had
Most don’t leap before stepping, but I dared to,
Like I am on the moon,
But I am just in the pool.
Then — there!
Fireworks!
Sparks!
Electricity!
It’s real!
It surprises me, first.
Then a cold emptiness,
Because you’ve left.
There’s something I have from then,
I still have it.
And I suppose it’s on paper
I keep my hope.
They’re my records.
This is a record, too.
A closeness
Physical, and unphysical
I was hanging on to my proof
I just needed more evidence —
But you,
With the last pieces,
Eluded me.
When you were finally gone,
I knew it.
“I’m so stupid,
I’m so stupid”
No theory like you
Should be considered.
But I couldn’t stop
Trying to prove you,
Not when I’d put so much time
Behind my solution.
And I grew more attached still.
And this, too, is a story that’s not over.
There’s an unsent message,
Somewhere,
Waiting for me to pick up my proof.
Unanswered questions sit in my inbox,
In yours, too.
I’m sending you the final proof
In a couple months.
Or maybe I won’t.
Maybe I’ll finally admit my stupidity.
Maybe I’ll give up.
But I’m sure you’ll get my proof someday.
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canmom · 10 months
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observations of virtual reality: movement and touch and cameras
So. Since I’ve got this job the last few weeks I’ve been getting a very rapid introduction to VR games. I’m coming in after a good few years and several generations of VR games, so by this point, tracking is very good, and new tech like AR passthrough and hand tracking is starting to become more commmon.
Predictably, it’s been absolute fascinating! On the surface VR games should be able to do everything that “flat screen” games can do and more, with the added bonus of head tracking and binocular vision. You are adding, not removing. And in some ways this is true. Moving through a VR space is incredibly intuitive, it’s very much like moving in a real physical space. If you want to get a close look at something, you stick your face up close to it. Compared to controlling an orbiting camera with an analogue stick it’s night and day. You never have to ‘fight’ the camera.
But... there’s many exceptions to that ‘same but more’. The weight of the headset is one. Especially with standalone headsets, where you’re essentially strapping a smartphone to your face. VR games often ask for a lot of physical movement and this is sweaty; the foam pad around the headset always gets very damp when you’re done.
But most of all, when you’re designing these things, you’re fighting the devil called ‘motion sickness’. This imposes a hard limit on performance: you cannot afford to drop frames, 72fps is a hard minimum. It also has big implications for game design.
(below: a little tour of design considerations in VR games: movement, interaction and camera mechanics)
One of the most fundamental verbs of videogames is movement. Nearly every genre of 3D game has you moving a character, or at least a camera, through its space. And while motion sickness certainly does affect players, it’s relatively rare, at least among my generation who grew up playing these games. We have, it seems, been able to train ourselves to feel comfortable behind a first or third-person character controller - at least when we’re the ones holding the mouse so the brain can calibrate expectations. (It’s different when watching a stream for many people.) Perhaps, even when you’re not paying attention to it, the presence of a stationary world outside the screen helps anchor the brain’s perception so it doesn’t find a clash between eyes saying ‘movement’ and inner ear saying ‘not movement’.
In VR, though, it’s a puzzle. The most natural way to move through a virtual space would be to physically walk around it, but most players don’t have a play area the size of a typical game level. And very very few people in the world could afford to own an omnidirectional treadmill!
So you have to in some way apply movement that is ‘unphysical’, moving the character without moving the player’s physical body (or equivalently, moving the world around the character). The obvious way to do this would be to use the same analogue sticks as in typical character controller, but in practice this is disfavoured because it’s very, very likely to cause motion sickness.
Instead, game designers have to adapt their own games. The usual solution is to give players a means to teleport. For some reason the brain is a lot more comfortable with instant teleportation. In Superhot for example, the game teleports you through a series of preset positions; Half Life: Alyx has a variety of movement options but the default is a targeted teleport. A whole lot of other games have you standing in one place while objects come towards you; more recently there are AR games which superimpose vritual objects into your space.
What’s strange is there are some odd exceptions to that motion sickness rule. While moving along the ground seems prone to motion sickness, flying often seems to be a lot more comfortable, at least if the flight is relatively smooth and slow. There’s a whole category of flying games available on the store. Perhaps this is because in these circumstances you wouldn’t expect a very strong acceleration signal from the inner ear, so it’s easier to get over the lack of signal.
There’s one game I tried a bit of, called Echo Arena, which is a multiplayer zero-g football-like game where you have to get a disc to a goal. The game includes a variety of movement mechanics: you can thrust in the direction you’re looking, you can use your hands to apply smaller thrusts, and you can push off solid surfaces. Despite the fact that I was standing on a solid floor (my legs got a bit tired!), the zero-g effect was quite compelling; it was easier to suspend disbelief than I thought it might be.
I imagine you could do some incredibly cool movement tech once you got used to it. Compared to other zero-g games I’ve played like Shattered Horizon, it felt a lot more intuitive to actually be immersed in the 3D space. However, it also had some limitations: making small turns was easy, but to make larger turns you either had to physically turn around on the floor (which feels unintuitive when you’re floating around in a zero-g world!) or use the analogue stick to turn in abrupt 12.5-degree increments. This is a lot fiddlier than mouse-look.
I have a pretty robust stomach against motion sickness, so I don’t know if the average player of Echo Arena would find it too much. But I found it surprising how something I thought would be a route to motion sickness - floating around at fairly high speeds - actually didn’t prove problematic at all. I think it’s perhaps that the majority of the time, movement in Echo Arena is purely inertial with no acceleration. You accelerate in brief boosts. By contrast, if you could constantly move with the analogue sticks, your acceleration would be a lot more variable.
I do wonder how it compares to really floating around in a spacesuit in zero-g. There’s probably a single digit number of people who would be able to make the comparison!
Another surprising exception is the game Holoception, made by my new employer a few years before I joined the company. This game’s really cute, it’s like the ultimate form of Newgrounds stick figure fighting games. You control a third-person character, viewing the level from above. Your hands control the character’s hands, so you can swing weapons physically, and you can make them walk around with the analogue stick. As strange as it sounds on the surface (a blend of traditional control schemes and VR), it works startlingly well. I found I got used to controlling the little puppet very quickly; the only problems I had were more to do with occasional physics jank. And, oddly, moving with the analogue stick works just fine and does not cause motion sickness when you’re a floating eye in the sky.
The brain is a weird thing.
Anyway, a disproportionate number of VR players seem to be kids, at least going off the voices of people who talk aloud in VC. I don’t know if that’s just because kids find it easier to acclimate to a new way of relating to 3D space, or if it’s just the demographics of videogame players at large, or just the time of day I was playing when most adults would be at work, or maybe it’s just that kids find it easier to stand up for long periods to play games lmao. [Accessibility for people who can’t stand for long periods is a big problem for the current generation of VR games.] In any case, I wonder if it might be the case that if VR ends up getting popular enough, the next generation might find VR movement as intuitive as I find movement in an FPS. (My dad, by contrast, finds it extremely hard to get used to movement in 3D games. He tried Portal once and found it completely overwhelming.)
For any cyberpunk worldbuilders out there, perhaps one day we’ll get inner ear implants that override the sense of acceleration when in VR. Then maybe we get some Ghost in the Shell type scenario where you can hack someone’s cochlear implant and give them severe motion sickness. Or, perhaps we’ll get as comfortable disregarding our inner ear in VR as we do when playing an FPS...
The other interesting challenge of VR is touching solid surfaces. The amount of haptic feedback on most platforms is: you can make the controller vibrate. That’s it. For a game like Beat Saber, that’s enough: the controller gives a little jolt every time you hit a block, which is enough confirmation.
My employer has a line of games based around hand tracking, in the form of Hand Physics Lab and Surgineer. HPL is a collection of small puzzles designed around hand tracking, and the way it works is quite interesting. Essentially you have a virtual hand that is attached to your real hand by springs. The virtual hand will try to follow the position of your real hand as closely as possible, but it is a physics-simulated object and it will collide with the environment. So, for example, you can grasp an object by closing your hand around it. The springs will pull your virtual fingers onto the object. (There is also a grab assist which will glue an object to your hand when it detects a grab motion).
Your fingers will feel the pressure of closing against your hand, and even though you don’t feel the weight and texture of the virtual object, it works well enough to sell the suspension of disbelief.
It is, inevitably with this hardware, a bit jank and fiddly. The hand tracking has its limits, and sometimes your virtual hand will get caught on something or bent in a funny way. Amusingly, a lot of the minigames are toys we give to babies: it is like we are relearning how to move, just as we did when we were fresh new brains awash with sense-data. But despite that, it works way better than you’d expect it to. You build an intuitive sense of how your ‘ghost hand’ relates to your real hand, and how to get it to do certain things. It doesn’t feel like really interacting with solid objects, but you can interact with objects with a great deal more dexterity than you can in a regular 3D physics-manipulation game (Garry’s Mod or something).
The VR controller is a small and fairly light piece of plastic. The hand tracking is literally an empty hand. In games, it can become all sorts of things. Most often it’s a hand, or else a weapon like a sword or a gun. The player can swing their hand or controller around freely, so how do you communicate a sense of weight? Well, proprioception - your body’s sense of where your limbs are - isn’t actually that precise. If you push against a heavy object, even if your real hands go straight through it, if your virtual hands strain to get it moving then your brain will override the proprioception with what it’s seeing, and it will still feel like you’re pushing something heavy.
Surgineer builds on HPL’s hand tracking concept to have you play the role of a surgeon, picking up tools to cut a patient’s skin and bones. It’s deliberately quite silly - the surgeries you’re performing quickly escalate to things like brain transplants, and you have some pretty magical tools - but it is a game of fairly fine manipulation. I found this one tended to work a lot better with controllers (the controller buttons are used to determine the positions of your fingers, with the trigger and grip button causing your virtual hand to close), and I was able to complete most of the game, if not with very high scores. It’s a funny game, though quite difficult! I think it would be great for streams.
Now, the final level has you manipulating a robot arm with a joystick. This is where it kind of fell apart for me - a real joystick has resistance against being pushed, which the controller, held freely in your hand, doesn’t, so it’s difficult to rotate the virtual joystick without pulling your hand out of position. There were just too many layers of slippage in between me and the robot arm - real hand position to virtual hand position to virtual joystick position to robot arm position - and it was too hard to predict how the robot would move.
But that’s interesting in itself, for showing the limits of these methods. If you attached the controller to a pivot on your desk, it would probably feel a lot easier to manipulate the virtual joystick, since the physics of the real and virtual object would be similar.
Current VR systems track your hands and head, and that’s it. So if the player is playing as a human, the question is what you do with the rest of the body. If the player is visible to others, or you want them to look down and see their own body, you have to simulate it somehow - a combination of an animation system with IK to match the head and hand positions.
And that adds its own design considerations. If it’s a combat game, is their body a target? Most games seem to elect to make the head the only point of vulnerability. For example in Beat Saber, it doesn’t matter if you’re standing in an obstacle as long as your head is clear. I’m not entirely sure if your body can get hit in Superhot. In Echo Arena, you have to hit other players on the head.
I’m not sure if anyone’s made a VR fencing game that’s any good. It seems like a very natural fit - a fencing piste is a limited area, and controllers map to swords very nicely. But also it would have a bunch of problems: if your sword gets parried, it will detach from your hand position, which will get very confusing very quickly. If you’re hit, you won’t feel it. I’ll have to look into that, it must have been done...
Another thing you lose out in VR is the matter of framing. VR films do exist, I watched a few, but they have a big problem: the camera frame is so vitally important to how regular film communicates a story. Think of Sergei Eisenstein and montage theory; the language of film is the cut, the shot length, the angle.
Videogames already have the problem that you can’t rely on the player looking in a particular direction. They solve this with clever level design (e.g. you walk out of a tunnel into a wide open vista) or by seizing control of the camera in a cutscene. But mostly, they define the ways the camera can move. Indeed, many of the genres of game are defined in large part by their camera mechanics - a side-scrolling shmup versus a 2D platformer versus a third person shooter.
So if you think about games that make heavy use of the camera, such as NieR - how would this translate to VR? All the narrative VR games that I’ve played tend to be fully ‘immersive’ in the manner of Half-Life - you never leave the POV of your character. Perhaps a cutscene is possible, but you still have to accept that the player can move their POV around. A VR cutscene is more akin to a moving diorama than a film.
Before I started playing around in VR, I imagined that we’d have to find ways to realistically simulate the sensations of touch, and VR would never really feel ‘real’ without an incredibly fancy haptic feedback suit, omnidirectional treadmill, etc. The reality is in a way more interesting: videogames have always been about approximations and abstractions, and the same is just as true with VR. We are trying to find suitable representations to communicate what is intuitive in 3D space, give the brain enough hooks that it can adapt itself to a new form of interaction with the world. And brains are plastic! Look how well we’ve all adapted to becoming computer touchers.
Roger (my new boss ^^) compared current VR to the first generation of 3D games, when they were still figuring out what mechanics and control schemes would make sense. (Nowadays nearly every 3D game controls the same; it’s essentially a solved problem.) That’s where VR is, there’s a lot of experiments and some standard patterns but a lot of room for experimentation still. So, even if mostly my role is in visuals at the moment, it’s exciting to be part of a new medium being born.
VR definitely isn’t going to replace flatscreen games. There are many genres of game that simply do not have any reason to be in VR at all outside of a gimmick. While VR motion tracking is now very good, and you can use the controllers as laser pointers (which is how most menus in VR work), they do not have the precision of a mouse. Serving information to the player is another tricky problem; text in VR games tends to be big and has a specific 3D location, it’s hard to match the density of information you can get on a screen, and I’m told that information hovering around your peripheral vision does not feel good in VR.
That means, for example, complicated strategy games are not a good fit. On the other hand, first-person shooting is very good in VR, you’re physically aiming your gun. It’s less accurate than mouse-driven first-person shooting where you’re always perfectly aligned with your sights, but the manipulation of the gun feels more satisfying, it’s good at selling the fantasy. (Though you do lose out on the whole medium of first person gun-interaction animations!)
It’s funny - something like Superhot is in many ways an evolution of the light gun games from the PS2 era. They’re having a moment once again.
So we’re working out a new set of genres for a new medium. In some years, probably design patterns will settle down, we’ll work out what feels good, and games will start to mature as they did on PC and consoles. A lot of VR games now are built around one specific high concept or mechanic, in contrast to games on other consoles where the mechanics are for the most part well-established and it’s more about fleshing them out with a cohesive package of stories and visuals. In a way, the majority of VR games feel a lot more like indie games than AAA games.
Will there be a THRUST//DOLL VR version one day? No promises, and the game will always be flatscreen first, but it’s going to be fun to see if it would work at all.
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What made the brightest cosmic explosion of all time so exceptional? Few cosmic explosions have attracted as much attention from space scientists as the one recorded on October 22 last year and aptly named the Brightest of All Time (BOAT). The event, produced by the collapse of a highly massive star and the subsequent birth of a black hole, was witnessed as an immensely bright flash of gamma rays followed by a slow-fading afterglow of light across frequencies. Since picking up the BOAT signal simultaneously on their giant telescopes, astrophysicists the world over have been scrambling to account for the brightness of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) and the curiously slow fade of its afterglow. Now an international team that includes Dr Hendrik Van Eerten from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath in the UK has formulated an explanation: the initial burst (known as GRB 221009A) was angled directly at Earth and it also dragged along an unusually large amount of stellar material in its wake. The team’s findings are published today in the prestigious journal Science Advances. Dr Brendan O’Connor, a newly graduated doctoral student at the University of Maryland and George Washington University in Washington, DC is the study’s lead author. Dr Van Eerten, who co-led the theoretical analysis of the afterglow, said: “Other researchers working on this puzzle have also come to the conclusion that the jet was pointed directly at us – much like a garden hose angled to spray straight at you – and this definitely goes some way to explain why it was seen so brightly. But what remained a puzzle was that the edges of the jet could not be seen at all. “The slow fade of the afterglow is not characteristic of a narrow jet of gas, and knowing this made us suspect there was an additional reason for the intensity of the explosion, and our mathematical models have borne this out. “Our work clearly shows that the GRB had a unique structure, with observations gradually revealing a narrow jet embedded within a wider gas outflow where an isolated jet would normally be expected.” So what made this GRB wider than normal? The researchers have a theory. As Dr Van Eerten explained: “GRB jets need to go through the collapsing star in which they are formed, and what we think made the difference in this case was the amount of mixing that happened between the stellar material and the jet, such that shock-heated gas kept appearing in our line of sight all the way up to the point that any characteristic jet signature would have been lost in the overall emission from the afterglow.” He added: “Our model helps not just to understand the BOAT, but also previous brightness record holders that had astronomers mystified about their lack of jet signature. These GRBs, like other GRBs, must be directed straight towards us when they happen, as it would be unphysical for that much energy to be expelled in all directions at once. “An exceptional class of events appears to exist that are both extreme and manage to mask the directed nature of their gas flow. Future study into the magnetic fields that launch the jet and into the massive stars that host them should help reveal why these GRBs are so rare.” Dr O’Connor said: “The exceptionally long GRB 221009A is the brightest GRB ever recorded and its afterglow is smashing all records at all wavelengths. Because this burst is so bright and also nearby (cosmically speaking: it occurred at the minor distance of 2.4 billion light years from Earth), we think this is a once-in-a-thousand-year opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions regarding these explosions, from the formation of black holes to tests of dark matter models.” IMAGE...The afterglow of the Brightest of All Time gamma-ray burst, captured by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory’s X-Ray Telescope. Credit: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
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tanadrin · 1 year
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it feels like there are different classes of unphysical nonsense in physics; there’s, like, unphysical stuff which is pretty mathematically tractable but which we have no reason to suppose exists (tachyons), there’s unphysical stuff which is meaningless under current mathematical approaches but which if you worked very hard at you might be able to find a coherent mathematical formalism for (but still probably doesn’t exist) (like ftl), and then there’s stuff that actually just totally incoherent.
and when i see something being described as “impossible” or when i see a statement like “x means that y must be true according to the laws of physics,” it’s not always super clear which kind of thing they’re talking about. because the discovery of tachyons that obeyed the physical properties predicted for them (i.e., particles still couldn’t accelerate across the lightspeed barrier in either direction) would break the laws of physics a lot less than an alien flying by at 1.2 c in a chemical rocket and sending a transmission saying “oh yeah, that whole lorentz transformation thing? totally fake. you can go as fast as you want.”
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inverse-problem · 8 months
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okay now I’m wondering how much hotter the sun has to be down in greed to heat the sand to temperatures hot enough to damage metal
tbh the answer is probably just “hell is unphysical and you’re overthinking for no reason” but still I wonder
edit: ending this train of thought because I decided I don't feel like reminding myself how radiative transfer works, actually. but also because maybe v1 just has a low heat tolerance because it is full of blood, so it can only tolerate human-tolerable temperatures and if it stands on very hot sand too long its blood starts boiling. or something lol
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the-stonekeeper · 17 days
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Pelipper mail for Ikol! A nightmare.
You are a human.
Standard. Ordinary. Boring. They all are. You all are. There is no such thing as magic.
There are no stones, no mother. No loopholes through the cold, uncaring physics of a universe that expands ceaselessly, diluting itself with nothingness, spreading out what little it already contains until one day, even kinematics itself will cease to exist, as every rigid object will have decayed into neutrons, and photons, and those ghostly neutrinos that pass through the most solid of substances without brushing up against a single atom.
You know the physics. You studied it for years, you built an intuition. You know precisely how things will play out.
And yet, knowing gives you nothing. You have no control, not the smallest shred of power to actually change it. You can know, and you can speak, but even speaking does nothing when the world will not listen.
You are employed. You are one of the lucky ones, who toils away, selling your life for meager, less than adequate pennies that you are forced immediately to give up again, just to tend to the frail human body that binds your mind within. So many others have even less. So many would kill for the opportunity to have their life stolen from them the way yours is.
You go to work. You labor. You return.
You go to work. You labor. You return.
You go to work again.
The labor you do requires none of the knowledge you possess. It is mind-numbing, repetitive, more fit for a machine than a living being, but it is work. It provides you those pennies that let you scrape by. But it is isolating, selling your so limited existence for such a fraction of its worth, and you lose the energy to connect with the humans around you. They are tired too, and do not reach out to you first.
Eventually, you realize that you are alone.
You are a human, a living mind, and one so capable! But you are bound by things so unphysical, mere abstractions that wield the power of starvation or hypothermia or preventable disease. You are bound by the corporate mandate to produce and to steal and above all, to waste.
You are a human, a singular member of a social species, but you are alone.
And you can see how it all plays out! The physics, the mathematics, the constraints and conditions upon the edges of the universe and how they ripple inward into laws that even the all-powerful corporate masters must obey, yet still they play as if to flaunt reality itself.
You see how they take exponential aim at the solid ceiling of Earth's limits. You know how it will end, and how all the pain will be passed on to you and so many like you. You see even beyond, into the realms comprehensible only through the abstractions of thermodynamics. You see how every action only hastens the demise of everything, and how the waste your meaningless toil produces hastens it faster than most.
It is all the kinematics of particles, in the end. How they collide, and either bounce or shatter. How the great roll through and flatten the small. How the great, too, will someday shatter, but only too late. It is all the same interactions, so similar, so easy for your mind to follow and predict, whether at the level of people and companies or the level of galaxies and stars.
It will all end in dispersion, eventually. Every person, every particle, alone in its own private universe, unable to reach out to any other.
But until then, there is so much beauty! So much life!
...But you are a human. And you are bound by bodily needs, enslaved to the grind of selling your very being to survive. You cannot see that beauty, cannot live that life.
And you are alone.
[A video is attached. There you see the human, the cog in the machine, working working working day and night and day again. This time, a dazed Pelipper is beside Ikol.
"Is this meant to intimidate me? Or to make me pity?"
The Pelipper lets out a feeble warble.
"Oh, I will let you leave. But just look at what you've put Emily through." He laughs, soft and low. "This is how it's like? Without the dangers of magic and the sins of its abusers? I almost feel sorry. But then again, it is all the more reason..."
It's difficult to tell whether the human is Emily or someone wholly unremarkable.
"They make you ill," he murmurs as he travels down to the human toiling away. "And you want to save them?"
"Ikol--"
Emily shuts her eyes and breaks away from the nightmare. "What is this?"
"Pelipper mail-- A nightmare," Ikol responds simply, as the power of the mailed nightmare traps Emily again and the blank expression returns to her face. "Poor little slug, dragging the gears of the factory in the dirt behind you like a whipped steed. You had so much potential. If only something like the Stone could have saved you..."
A startled squawk sounds behind the camera, and it whips around. "Ah. Not yet. See what kinds of pain you bring around, first. Do you relish it? Do you fear it?"
The Pelipper stares, quivering.
Ikol sighs. “You could be something so much better, too. Instead of playing messenger boy for people who just want to inflict suffering for no good reason. Don’t you want it?”
The Pelipper snorts.
“Suit yourself.” The Pelipper disappears from the Void in a flash, and the video ends.]
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