KrokanteBamischijf

Fun fact: The Frisian language (and Dutch by extension) has overlapping origin with both Danish and Swedish.

We can usually grasp a lot of conversational Danish and Swedish because a lot of the words are similar.

From a Dutch perspective, there's always 5 new Flemmish words to memorize. You'd think we speak the same language, but we really don't.

In some ways, Flemmish is more Dutch than the language anyone from the Netherlands speaks. Which seems especially true when it comes to loan-words from French, which some of you seem to avoid at all costs.

All of this leads to interesting situations where any conversation with our southern neighbours has a risk of needing a mental double take to make sure we derived the right meaning from your fancy words.

One example of how crazy things can get is the word for roundabout. The Dutch will generally refer such traffic control measures as rotonde, which is a French bastardization. The Flemmish, in turn, sometimes refer to them as rondpunt. ...which the French seem to have adopted when they say rond-point.

The French definition of rotonde is actually from architecture. Where it is used for dome-shaped constructions, and is originally derived from the Latin rotondus, which just means "round". Conclusion: Dutch is a weird language.

As others are sure to point out: welding bad for health.

UV radiation that will give you a near-instant sunburn. Combined with IR radiation that will literally burn your retinas if you don't protect them properly.

Then theres the fact that you're dealing with upwards of 1200°C/2200°F molten steel. And depending on your process you also have argon/CO2 gas leaks to worry about. That or the flux fumes or vaporized oxides and various metals will get you.

But welding is also fun as shit, and surprisingly accessible as long as you're not doing structural stuff without proper training.

I usually associate yoink with playfully stealing something, whereas graaien in this context refers more to behaviour seen in landlords and high level executives. You know, the kinds of people that are so far up their shareholder's butts that they can't see the damage they're causing.

Let's just reserve yoink for stealing each other's hoodies and similar endearing behaviour.

And it leads to a neverending stream of newly invented hype words.

We even have a yearly word of the year tradition, where the organisation behind our most famous dictionary picks one of these newly invented words based on coverage in media.

Last year's word was "graaiflatie", a combination between "graaien" (no direct translation, means to grab, but in a greedy way), and "inflatie" (inflation).

Even at 25% off, a $70 game is still a ripoff.

Which is why you only buy games at 90+% off or through game bundles. Unless the developer proves the game is worth the money through all the positive things the community has to say about it.

Chances are good that your backlog is large enough that you can just wait for newer games to be priced reasonably, even if you're buying games at sensible discounts.

Especially for single player games there is no real reason to play a game on release, other than the hype cycle. You might even be better served waiting a while and not be punished by issues that are patched after release.

Transcoder here, if you're looking to leverage quality/file size benefits of your codec, you don't encode with hardware.

As a rule of fist hardware encoding is better served for streaming purposes where you need to crush a raw 1080p or 1440p stream into something that's actually a sensible bandwith as fast as possible, especially if you're streaming 60fps because your algorithm has a time limit of 16ms per frame.

If file size with preservation of quality is something you care about, you encode as slowly and thouroughly as you can, which is why x264 on your CPU will outperform encoders like NVENC any time.

When it comes to HEVC, software encoding is only really worth it if you have the time to spare, because x265 takes between 3x and 5x as long as encoding the same footage through x264, with a 15-20% smaller file size at best. It is also more intensive to decode, which is why you still see many files with a H.264 codec.

Excellent analysis. Especially this part:

It will be much more productive to try to solve this with the handful of Browser vendors than trying to regulate each and every consent banner.

Early cookie banners were a bad experience but they were manageable. But now thing have transitioned into content-blocking modals, dark patterns, forced individual consent/rejection for each and every one of the 943 partners they're selling your data to, sites that refuse to serve content if you reject tracking and other ways to frustrate the end user.

I'm done with every piece of shit predatory actor inventing their own way of malicious compliance with the GDPR. You either implement the user-friendly consent API or you get no more tracking at all. Paywall your shit for all I care, at least then you'll have a sustainable business model.

Definitely 100% done with the resistance era, and any canon material that comes after it.

Kinda done with the clone wars era stuff, but at least there are still some niche avenues left unexplored.

Also definitely done with anything rule of two. The idea of it has ruined any chances of writing actually interesting dark side characters, because you'll always see the same cycle of student-master power struggle.

It's about time sith ideology was portrayed for what it is actually supposed to be, and not just "bad guys with red lightsabers". Curious what this show will bring, but not quite convinced yet. Only thing that will definitely get that right is a truthful, both-sides, Old Republic era show covering all different factions of interest without presenting any one as morally superior.

Slugs to be you then, I guess. :P

In all seriousness, the graph shows different species as fraction of total uses recorded. Since the paper is mostly about mice, and behavioural differences under different circumstances, it being unfair to the slugs is probably not such a big deal here.

Blender can help with lots of aspects in the game development workflow.

From simple low-poly modeling and texturing, to 3D sculpting highly detailed models, to procedurally generating geometry for massive worlds, animating game characters, baking different texture maps and much more.

If you can handle some python you can even automate pretty much anything the software can do, and build your own plugins.

There are tons of tutorials on youtube on how to make game assets and I would recommend Grant Abitt's stuff when it comes to game development workflows.

Definitely try Blender, you'll find it is probably all you will ever need to make assets for your game.

Nice job! Lighting looks really good!

Some friendly advice for improving the render quality even further: Be mindful of your UV's and seams. Especially wood grain is particularly tricky to do well. This particular render works well when glancing at a distance, but it starts to fall apart when you zoom in on the details.

You did a really good job of faking the wool like material for the seat. I know from experience rendering fuzzy cloth materials that there isn't an easy way to make them from scratch. Especially felt and wool are a bitch to make realistic shaders for. If you want realism for those, you have to simulate the actual material to some degree, which means diving into the rabbit hole that is geometry nodes.

For the floor and the wall materials: Imperfections are your best friend when aiming for realism. Mixing in different texture maps to add subtle stains, dust, rust, scratches and other kinds of damage can really help sell the illusion of real concrete or plaster. And while not really relevant when mimicking a near-perfect photo, adding subtle fingerprints, specks of dust/lint or stains to a reflective surface sometimes makes for a better render.

But most important of all: Remember that rendering things is always more art than science. There are multiple ways to achieve different effects and learning all the tricks by experimenting is going to really up your game. Keep going!