Ur Personality Is Defined By Ur Favorite Line In Hallelujah

Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.

Worlds Within: Pill Bug Terrarium

  Bioluminescent mushrooms are just magical~ I hope to see these in real life one day :D In the meantime, I can dream and paint them instead.

For anyone who wants a free pose-able human reference for drawing

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.

Generally, I’m not the person to talk about politics but today something happened in my country. There’re mass protests all over Russia, all because of our president having a fucking palace thanks to stolen money and arresting the person who found it out and shared with people (Aleksey Navalny) who happens to be the leader of opposition and who was almost killed with chemical weapon a few months ago.

The police have arrested more than 1000 people today including a 10 year old child. We have no one to rely on, no one to ask for help. Putin has been on the throne for about 20 years and now he has a possibility to continue ruling Russia due to constitutional amendments that were approved in 2020.

I can do nothing but ask you to spread this information, so that people know we need help. We don’t want the dictator to rule our country anymore, we’re sick and tired.

Frank, have you become self-aware?

I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on the algorithms behind the bot, and now I just need to figure out a way to actually talk to the internet without making shitposts

Why does the left - rather than the right - accuse even reasonable and nuanced moderates/classical liberals of #enlightenedcentrism and false equivalencies?

If in the middle of the Red Scare, you barged into the House Un-American Activities Committee and shouted “I THINK BOTH CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM HAVE SOME GOOD POINTS AND WE SHOULD TREAT BOTH OF THEM FAIRLY!”, Joe McCarthy would probably view you as an enemy, and any communists hidden in the audience would probably view you as a potential ally or at least as not their top problem right now. Shout the same thing in Red Square in Moscow, and you’d get the opposite results.

I think a better question is how scared we should be #enlightenedcentrism is an insult that people try to avoid. I think Sacred Principles As Exhaustible Resources remains an underappreciated point, and I think we’re already past the point where “reason”, “nuance”, “listening to both sides”, and “trying to be unbiased” are considered enemy tribal signals and automatic proof of bad faith by a big segment of the population. This was avoidable, but thanks to a bunch of bad actors poisoning the epistemic commons, we failed to avoid it.

The perfect storm of intelligence and agility

Tiny Hedgehog Goes Camping, And His Pics Are The Best Thing You’ll See Today

Poem: I lik the form

My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail I am my best / when formats are not mix’d Wen poits play / subversions often fail

Stik out their toung / to rebel with no cause At ruls and norms / In ignorance they call: My words are free / Defying lit'rate laws To lik the forms / brings ruin on us all

A sonnet I / the noblest lit'rate verse And ruls me bind / to paths that Shakespeare paved Iambic fot / allusions well dispersed On my behind / I stately sit and wave

You think me tame /   Fenced-in and penned / bespelled I bide my time /   I twist the end / like hell

* “lik” should be read as “lick”, not “like”. In general, the initial section on each line should be read sort of phonetically.

Written for World Poetry Day, March 21, 2018. When I had this idea earlier today, I thought it was the worst, most faux hip pretentious idea for a shallow demonstration of empty wordsmithing skill in poetry ever. So I had to try to write it. I mean, how often do you get to fuse the iambic dimeter of bredlik - one of the newest and most exciting verse forms - with the stately iambic pentameter of the classic sonnet?