Depressive Times

I've heard this refered to as the hedonic treadmill and it's related to a lot of things, not just social media.

Once you get to a certain level of success, amount of money, happiness, etc, your baseline expectations move with it - earning 10k dollars doesn't hit quite as nicely when you're a billionaire.

For the average person I think the easiest way to illustrate this is videogames. Your average RPG has you start out quite weak, fighting weak enemies. Then you find a sword that does more damage, and you can fight tougher enemies. Then you get a sword that does even more damage, and you can fight even tougher enemies. Then you get the legendary sword of legendary legends that lets you kill anything with 1 legendary swing, and that first sword that helped you get a foothold to eventually get here seems like a piece of garbage by comparison. You wouldn't look twice if you found one like that again. This constant scaling of your character and the enemies leaves you at net zero - your sword is always *just enough* to handle the enemies you're encountering, but the numbers that pop up from hitting them keep getting larger and larger. Like a treadmill.

And that's largely how it goes with any rising numbers in our lives. Every time you reach a higher number, the ones below it seem smaller and smaller as time goes on. Doesn't help that humans tend to naturally think in fractions and exponents - once you get from 1 to 10, the next target is more likely to be 100 than 20. I think it's important to recognize that kind of bias in ourselves and try to appreciate and enjoy what we already have a little bit more.

Not too long ago...

I was posting art on Tumblr and getting like, 2 notes. In those days, if I got 5 notes anywhere, I'd be thrilled...and if it went to 10 I'd be positively jubilant! TENPEOPLESAWMYARTAAAA.

A few days ago, I posted something and it unexpectedly climbed to almost 300 notes! Must've done something right with the hashtags I dunno...but here's the thing-

Since that day, I've posted a few more times and I've started getting so pissed if the notes don't come. Now even 50 notes (which would ordinarily have made me faint with ecstasy) seems disappointing...

Makes me wonder. I've seen artists here get many tens of thousands of likes/comments/reblogs on their art. Does an artist who regularly gets >10,000 notes on their art feel dejected when they get just 6 to 7000 on something?

Would you look at that fuzz !

hello!!

how do you do this really cool cel shading look on your renders? i’m assuming you use blender…

Hey there! You're right that I use Blender for the majority of my 3D art, this one in particular involves a very simple node setup that I put together earlier this year for shiny stuff like metal or gems.

You can change the colors of the surface and reflections through the ColorRamp node

And alter the angle of the reflections by rotating your light sources

Super simple, but I use it for a lot of scenes nowadays

Recent system update borked up blender for me so for the first time in a few years I drew with pencils!! Refreshing

First time animating!!!! Look at them they're so walking

I was designing a little magic system for a game project I'm planning once I finish Brawlmentum and I had some trouble with telekinesis: how do I make it not overpowered? It's one of those powers where even as a kid watching superhero movies or reading comics I always had in the back of my mind things like "why don't they just telekinetically grab the guy's heart and rip it out of his chest" and whatnot. So to that my solution is "it's just not that precise and you kind of have to intuit a general area of what you want to grab; but then the other problem: how to limit the weight of what can be picked up in a way that doesn't seem entirely arbitrary? So I deliberated on that for a bit and came up with what I think is an easy solution and even kind of doesn't break physics as hard as usual telekinesis does: whatever force you apply to the object gets applied in reverse to you, spread over your whole body or parts of it so you can lift up a small rock no problem, it's just gonna feel a bit heavy on your arm - but if you try to lift up a boulder, it's either not gonna work at all or you'll collapse into a puddle. Which in turn also means that I have a good excuse to have incredibly jacked up wizards - the stronger you are physically, the more you can lift with magic, too

There is something weirdly poetic about things that are designed to look like they're function over form, but in reality are still form over function because it's a videogame and none of the visible parts are actually needed to do anything

Get Real

Bit batty goth gf

Seeing something I made be put in a game I enjoy is an immensely cool feeling :) Presenting the Obonto Construction Platform 209 ! A decommissioned work ship entering the second-hand market in the rings of Saturn, with a huge side-loaded cargo bay, 2 heavy hardpoint mounts, and a cool rotating habitat section Ship model is mine, backgrounds by Koder of Kodera software. HUD by both