@pentapod
Game designer in Edmonton, formerly EverQuest2 “Domino”, formerly BioWare, now Spry Fox. Mostly I share cat photos, Edmonton stuff, food, pottery, covid info, & other nerdy randomness including reading, SciFi, mycology. Also found at @pentapod@mstdn.ca.
I've been running gdcparties.com for a few years now. Some shitty company BlueberryAI decided they'd just take all the source code for the work I've done and reskin it, advertising it as their own. Jokes on them...it was still linked to my events spreadsheet, and now their website looks like this 😉
Steam community requesting additional body types for added immersion.
A large block of sentient tofu
Steam community: “Can we play as a male character?”
Me (indie dev in this economy):
“Best I can do is sentient tofu.”
Do it plz store.steampowered.com/app/2321960/...
hi!! do you make gameplay video content? are you interested in flying alpacas, tiny bears, dancing spirits, grizzled yet kindly wilderness men and beautiful women in tea shops with knives?? and if all of that were in cozy multiplayer game, would you think "dang I'd sure love to make videos of that"?
requiem for vanished birdsong
I aspire to exude as much confidence as this little Kinesin protein strutting along a microtubule while hauling intracellular cargo.
Look at that little guy go! 🔬🧪
Hi Bluesky friends, I’m ShouXin (手訫). I love drawing cats with simple lines.
This is my first post here, and I’m sharing four of my classic pieces.
I hope they bring you a little joy, and I hope you enjoy them.
#art #sketch #catart #cats #shouxinsketch #ShouXinArt
It’s yours if you want it! (Can drop it off within Edmonton, or can mail it if you cover postage.) It was fun to try but I have no earthly use for it 😅
Ta da! @kristadb1.bsky.social One approximation at a neolithic pig mug. Some minor liberties taken. It ain’t perfect but it was fun to try. #pottery
Did you know that Spry Fox has a presence in Alberta?
You can listen to the incredibly talented @pentapod.bsky.social talk about her early career here: www.podbean.com/media/share/... including her time on EverQuest II, working around the globe and ending up at BioWare before joining Spry Fox.
Corona UV signals observed under a thunderstorm on 27 June 2024. (a) Approximate location of all 859 corona UV signals observed during the ∼1.5-hr observation period on a sweetgum tree. Each corona UV signal is colored by the number of total isotropic UV photons between 255 and 273 nm emitted by the corona discharge, as estimated from the illuminated pixels observed in that frame. The boxes depict the Corona Observing Telescope System (COTS) UV camera field of view, and the colors indicate the observation time for the branch within each box. Panel (b) as in (a), but for all 93 corona UV signals observed during the ∼20-min observation period on a loblolly pine tree. Locations of boxes and corona UV signals are only approximate because the wind blew the branches in and out of the COTS field of view. Note a corona UV signal is defined as a contiguous bundle of several illuminated pixels.
Coronae glow on the tips of spruce needles, induced by charged metal plates in a laboratory. These weak electric discharges subtly singe the tips of leaves and needles, and new observations indicate they may occur ubiquitously across treetops under thunderstorms. Credit: William Brune
During thunderstorms, electric discharges in the air cause trees to glow with an ultraviolet aura. You can't see it with your eyes, but researchers have finally managed to measure it & recreate it in the lab. 🧪🔭
news.agu.org/press-releas...
A brush painting dark brown glaze into the interior of a terracotta pig-shaped mug which stands on a scuffed banding wheel on a grey table.
I glazed the interior of the pig with Mayco black walnut glaze, but left the exterior unglazed. It’s now waiting for its second firing. 🤞🏼 #pottery
The larger pig seems fine though! I did take liberties with the tail - tried turning it into more of a handle. I’m a little worried it’s a bit thin to support too much weight, but too much bigger wouldn’t look tail-like. #pottery
Photo of the underside of a terracotta pig sculpture being held by a light skinned hand. Two very thin vertical cracks are visible on each side between the peg legs.
The pigs are now bisque fired but alas! Tragedy struck the smaller one - I had tried making this one a little thinner but it resulted in some cracks opening in the bottom. This will never be safe for use as a mug.
If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.
It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...
It does occur to me that with both lent (Feb 18-Apr 2) and Ramadan (Feb 17-Mar 19) happening concurrently this year, there's a period of about a month where 2 major religions should not be eating ANY pancakes (or other sinful stuff) during daylight hours. I SEE AN OPPORTUNITY 🍴🍴🍴😂
100%, I might consider worshipping the pancake god however. 🤔
one more reason I’m happily not Christian, I can eat pancakes and anything else I want at any time! 😊But we had Dutch Baby pancakes for dinner on pancake Tuesday anyway because good excuse 😄 www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-...
The start of a new series where I talk about game production and misc industry junk while showing off our game Spirit Crossing!
What do you want to know about video game production? 😀 www.tiktok.com/t/ZThXn91KC/
Bookmarking this video for the next time someone claims that science communication can’t be engaging unless it’s about an inherently exciting topic or made personally relevant to people’s lives
Game industry pickup lines
Are you a Perforce file? Because I keep trying to check you out but it looks like you're exclusive with someone else.
This is the only correct take. (In fact, didn’t even need to include the “in LOTRO” part of the headline.) 😝
How about all of those and a nice week away to some all inclusive place where you don’t have to cook or clean or worry about anything and can read trashy novels or draw or whatever relaxes you well out of contact from work? 😊
Well, in the process of making anyway, it can still all go wrong 😅
Two pot-bellied pig shaped mugs standing on a banding wheel, surfaces slightly shining.
Now the clay is leather hard, burnished it smooth.
Frequently wrong about themselves Sure, there are complex psychological issues at play, but surely people can at least be trusted to tell you about themselves, right? Unfortunately not. A particular AAA developer I know of once sent surveys to 1000 players asking them which game they had played the most, then compared it with the data of what they had actually played. Not a single one answered correctly. Zero out of one thousand players could remember their own habits enough to tell which game they’d played the most. Player answers were so consistently wildly wrong that the team involved thought that their data must have been corrupted. Upon validating that it was in fact accurate, they went back to the players and told them what their actual most played games were, and every single one said something along the lines of “OH! Right. Well, that makes sense”. When people tell you things they’re really telling you the stories they tell themselves about themselves, and those stories may not have anything at all to do with reality.
there u go, bless
This is literally the best article on this topic I've ever read. It is something that many game devs can tell you straight to your face, and something SO many people simply don't believe.
And after reglazing. Got a much better drippy effect at the bottom of the glaze, much happier about that.
Two terracotta clay mugs, still damp, shaped like round-bellied bowls with a pig-like eyes and snout and four small peg legs. They are sitting on a grey work table with smears of clay and various related tools and supplies in the background.
Just for fun, experiment in progress. It is surprisingly hard to capture the expression of a pig in clay! 🤔 #pottery
The wonderful folks at @augursociety.bsky.social published my story "Welcome to Spruceway" last year.
You can read it here: augursociety.org/welcome-to-s...
