Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

[Makemakean]

I sometimes come across software that is so unintuitive that you cannot help but feel it is by design. Like if the programmers felt "I have spent over two years working hard on this. Countless hours have been poured into it. It has been frustrating like hell. It would be an insult to me and my work if anyone were to get to use it without putting into it as much effort as I have done. If you want to use this, then you have to suffer like I did!"

Blender is one of those pieces of software.

 

[Thande]

I sometimes come across software that is so unintuitive that you cannot help but feel it is by design. Like if the programmers felt "I have spent over two years working hard on this. Countless hours have been poured into it. It has been frustrating like hell. It would be an insult to me and my work if anyone were to get to use it without putting into it as much effort as I have done. If you want to use this, then you have to suffer like I did!"

Blender is one of those pieces of software.

Sometimes the motivation is "a company paid me to make this, and I will ensure I have job security for life because nobody else but me knows how to use it properly".

 

[Indicus]

I sometimes come across software that is so unintuitive that you cannot help but feel it is by design. Like if the programmers felt "I have spent over two years working hard on this. Countless hours have been poured into it. It has been frustrating like hell. It would be an insult to me and my work if anyone were to get to use it without putting into it as much effort as I have done. If you want to use this, then you have to suffer like I did!"

Blender is one of those pieces of software.

That’s what it feels like with a lot of open-source software.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Modern software really does veer wildly between "no you can't use this any way but the most simple and why would you need to configure it?" and "so I've worked on this for literally weeks so of course its intuitive what do you mean you don't know how to code? If you just read the fucking timeline"

 

[Makemakean]

Sometimes the motivation is "a company paid me to make this, and I will ensure I have job security for life because nobody else but me knows how to use it properly".

Blender is as @Indicus noted open-source software, and I find it rather frustrating that it took me ages to figure out how to even change the colour of an object, and I have yet to figure out how on Earth to make an object transparent.

When I look for youtube tutorials explaining it, they are insanely intricate, like "Make sure option A is selected, and that you are in mode B, with view setting C, then click on window W, configure X to Y, and go into mode D, where in table K, load channel L, and switch to setting M. As you can now see, the N is now P. We are now almost halfway done-..."

If the people had in mind that this would be software used more or less purely by professionals, then this makes sense. If what they had in mind was casual users who sees it and goes, "Oh, maybe this can help me with this thing I'm working on-..." then they've failed, because the casual user just experimenting around is in 95% of all cases not going to be up for a couple of hours of tutorials before they start using it. They are just going to go, "Whatever", because nobody is going to invest that much time in something that they are not sure that they are going to use in the first place anyway.

 

[Makemakean]

Since Blender was a complete waste of time, I have no choice but to try to figure out what Ernelinde looks like from the front by pure experimentation...



Hrmm... It still leaves a lot to be desired... But it does feel like a step forward.

 

[Alex Richards]

Sometimes the motivation is "a company paid me to make this, and I will ensure I have job security for life because nobody else but me knows how to use it properly".

The leading music-score writing software in professional circles- the aptly named 'Score'- is now dying out because it was written for MSDOS in FORTRAN back in 1987. A beta version for a windows replacement was released in 2008, but was a failure as it was quite buggy and so people stuck to the old one even though support was dropped. The creator- Leland Smith- was extremely controlling about matters and kept on working on the new version until he was killed in a car accident in 2013 and literally nobody else on the planet had a clue how the software architecture worked.

 

[Makemakean]

The leading music-score writing software in professional circles- the aptly named 'Score'- is now dying out because it was written for MSDOS in FORTRAN back in 1987. A beta version for a windows replacement was released in 2008, but was a failure as it was quite buggy and so people stuck to the old one even though support was dropped. The creator- Leland Smith- was extremely controlling about matters and kept on working on the new version until he was killed in a car accident in 2013 and literally nobody else on the planet had a clue how the software architecture worked.

In an academic setting, I have come across software that was being used to model certain things, and which had grown organically since about 1980. Basically, all of it had been written by a single guy which meant that there was some overarching idea of the architecture and everything, but he had notoriously not been documenting his code, and he had forgotten how many subroutines worked. Some he had forgotten what they even did, or why they worked the way they worked. You would write emails to him asking questions, and he would just reply along the lines of "I'm afraid I have no idea, I hope you figure it out! P.S. If you do figure it out, please write me back!"

I briefly was part of a project to update the code to be able to do some new things, and to allow it to do certain things with parallel computing. In the end, though, after I had left the project, the people at the top decided that it would simply be less time-consuming to literally re-write the whole thing from scratch in a more logical manner.

 

[Makemakean]

Hrm... If I make the eyes slightly smaller, and rotate them by a few degrees...



Much better...!

 

[Makemakean]

"Max, what are you doing...?"

"Alternate history!"

"Really...? Because it looks like you're drawing princesses... You know... Like a little girl..."

"I'm trying to figure out what Ernelinde, youngest daughter of the sovereigns of the Nordic Empire looks like! It's important!"

"Right... Right... Err... Isn't this supposed to be steampunk? Because, you know... That thing reeks of rococo."

"It's symbolic! As the favourite child of the Emperor and the Empress, they have been shielding her from the outside world, allowing her to grow up in a fairy tale reality where princes and princesses are like in the old stories! It serves as contrast regarding the state of how affairs really are! Hence why her dresses and hairstyles are very rococo-ish!"

"Right-... Err-... You sure you didn't pick the era because Victorian dresses generally were much more, err-... modest with regards to the-..."

"The PoD is in 1770! I can do whatever I want!"

 

[Makemakean]

Continuing on, one cannot help but be amazed by the stuff you can do with photoshop! I should have forked over those $250 that it costs for a year's subscription ages ago!

 

[Thande]

I suppose it's just because they're character concept sheets, but these remind me of the behind-the-scenes on how they designed the new character sprites for Streets of Rage 4.

Which now makes me picture a Kickstarter for a steampunk-themed side-scrolling beat 'em-up, someone should get on that.

 

[Makemakean]

character concept sheets

As a person whose very foray into creative writing of any sort came about through me having grand plans of drawing epic comic series, character design has always been intimately connected in my mind with character conceptualization and figuring out their personalities and everything. Even when I do not draw a character, I need to have some sort of mental image of what they look like to even be able to say anything about who they are.

The fact that most people apparently do not need this crutch to stand on continues to baffle me. I remember when I drew my idea of what Pablo Sanchez looked like (it included him having a massive Karl Marx/Mikhail Bakunin-style beard), and you had a look at it and your comment was one of "Huh! I actually don't know if he has a beard or not. I suppose that depends on what fashion is like in the 19th century in Look to the West..."

If you've said "in my head, he's clean-shaven", that I would have totally understood. The fact that you have this character who has been in the background, constantly referred to, in an on-going story for now well over a decade and you've somehow managed to just avoid ever getting an idea of stuff like that is just beyond me.

 

[Ares96]

It's weird with me, because I tend to have a rough idea of what most of the side characters I write look like, but not the protagonists.

 

[Alex Richards]

I just have an incredibly poor ability to mentally picture people in general.

Now fictional cities/landscapes I can get an idea for.

 

[Makemakean]

Sorry for the onslaught of updates, but working in Photoshop is surprisingly fun, and I'm keen to share my progress.

Though doing that embroidery (hell, coming up with embroidery!) is very tedious work.

 

[Thande]

As a person whose very foray into creative writing of any sort came about through me having grand plans of drawing epic comic series, character design has always been intimately connected in my mind with character conceptualization and figuring out their personalities and everything. Even when I do not draw a character, I need to have some sort of mental image of what they look like to even be able to say anything about who they are.

The fact that most people apparently do not need this crutch to stand on continues to baffle me. I remember when I drew my idea of what Pablo Sanchez looked like (it included him having a massive Karl Marx/Mikhail Bakunin-style beard), and you had a look at it and your comment was one of "Huh! I actually don't know if he has a beard or not. I suppose that depends on what fashion is like in the 19th century in Look to the West..."

If you've said "in my head, he's clean-shaven", that I would have totally understood. The fact that you have this character who has been in the background, constantly referred to, in an on-going story for now well over a decade and you've somehow managed to just avoid ever getting an idea of stuff like that is just beyond me.

That is partly due to the nature of LTTW and its largely non-narrative history book style, however - one can read history books (especially about the period covered in LTTW) without having a clear idea in your head of what French prime minister #45 of the Third Republic looks like. Sanchez is explicitly someone who feels like a 'long-dead backstory referred to' character even when talking about his actual lifetime.

I do have much more solid mental pictures of characters I write about in narrative works, like Well Met By Starlight for instance, and the same is true of those bits of LTTW written in a narrative style with recurring characters, as with Charles Grey and Amy Cheung for instance.

 

[Makemakean]

That is partly due to the nature of LTTW and its largely non-narrative history book style, however - one can read history books (especially about the period covered in LTTW) without having a clear idea in your head of what French prime minister #45 of the Third Republic looks like. Sanchez is explicitly someone who feels like a 'long-dead backstory referred to' character even when talking about his actual lifetime.

I do have much more solid mental pictures of characters I write about in narrative works, like Well Met By Starlight for instance, and the same is true of those bits of LTTW written in a narrative style with recurring characters, as with Charles Grey and Amy Cheung for instance.

Makes it more understandable, but still very far away from how things work in my head. If French Prime Minister #45 only shows up at one part in a work I'm reading, be it fictional or historical, like, "...though fundamentally an isolationist by inclination, President Coolidge could appreciate the need for stability in Europe, if not for that it benefited American business interest, then at the very least because it would reduce the chance of the United States being entangled in further European conflicts. To that end, in August of 1925, he dispatched Vice President Dawes to Paris to negotiate with Prime Minister Paul Painlevé regarding extending the time table for German reparations in exchange for more favourable conditions regarding American loans to the French Third Republic..."

Then Paul Painlevé is just, in some sense, an abstract entity, my mind is happy to just let him be very literally faceless.

If the work then goes on to detail that actually, the negotiations were a success, it helped Paul Painlevé keep his government from falling apart, he went on to win re-election, he goes to America for a state visit, etc., etc. Soon enough, even if no picture is ever presented, my mind will start to conjure up an idea of what Paul Painlevé looks like, and what the scene looks like when he is interacting with Coolidge, even though no description of him is ever given. As a consequence, I often end up having very different ideas of what various people from history "look like" that are fundamentally very different from what they actually looked like.

 

[Makemakean]

Also, err-... I made a mistake. Paul Painlevé was the 35th Prime Minister of the Third Republic (provided that you do not count Louis-Jules Trochu's tenure as head of the provisional government 1870-71, that is, wherein he held the title and office of Président du gouvernement de la Défense nationale, while all subsequent French heads of government up to Pétain held the title and office of Président du Conseil des ministres français). The 45th was a fellow by the name of Joseph Paul-Boncour, who served for little over a month around the New Year 1932/1933.

And that is if you follow the French style of only counting the first time a fellow became Prime Minister (by which style, Grover Cleveland was only the 22nd President of the United States, Obama was the 43rd, Trump the 44th, and Biden the 45th). If you follow the official style of numbering for American Presidents, then the 45th Prime Minister was Aristide Briand (specifically, his second ministry, which lasted for two months and one day in the spring of 1913).

Come to think of it, when you look at how often French changed premiers during the Third Republic, and consider that back then, France had a parliamentary, not a semi-presidential, form of government, you cannot help but wonder if Adolph Thiers put a curse on the office somehow.

 

[Makemakean]

Fixed the eyes (seemed fitting that they should have some colour), and gave Ernelinde some moles:



Was surprised to learn that back in the day, there was actually a whole system for classifying facial moles:



Also finished the sketch for the embroidery:



I literally just took random things I found on the internet.