PetitPrince's recent activity

  1. Comment on Interest in a new Tildes /~group?, ~Electronics or perhaps ~Makers? in ~tildes

    PetitPrince
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    Regardless of where it sits, I'm looking forward seeing more discussion about electronics, 3d printing, maybe even woodworking.

    Regardless of where it sits, I'm looking forward seeing more discussion about electronics, 3d printing, maybe even woodworking.

    3 votes
  2. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    PetitPrince
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    What do you mean, the whimsical feel good and optimist music is unrelated to the whimsical kinda optimist gameplay?

    I can't say for sure that the music really enhances the gameplay since it's pretty unrelated to what's anything that's happening on the screen,

    What do you mean, the whimsical feel good and optimist music is unrelated to the whimsical kinda optimist gameplay?

    1 vote
  3. Comment on If eyes emitted light, could they still see? in ~science

    PetitPrince
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I've done and taught studio photography, here's how I understand this: As you said, the quantity of light you gather in your sensor is critical. Too much and your picture is too bright, too little...
    • Exemplary

    I've done and taught studio photography, here's how I understand this:

    As you said, the quantity of light you gather in your sensor is critical. Too much and your picture is too bright, too little and your picture is all black. One important factor to take into account is the exposure time, which is the time the sensor is exposed to the scene.

    Normally the scene is lit with "ambient" light. It can be the sun or an existing light fixture or whatever. They're continuous source of light. A flash is a punctual source of light. For the purpose of photography, it has no duration. The shape, power and direction of the light is important. You typically want something that looks plausible so that if feel pleasant to the eye (typically a light coming from the floor looks really unnatural). There's also some technical limitations (it's hard and/or expensive to out-compete the sun in term of light produced, but see the spoiler at the bottom for a technical workaround).

    So what's happening when photographing with a flash ?

    Here's a graph:

                                 1    2         3         4    5   
    Shutter                     ----[[[[[---------------]]]]]-----> 
    A. Flash (front curtain)    ----------X-----------------------> 
    B. Flash (rear curtain)     -----------------------x----------> 
    C .Flash (stroboscopic)     ----------x---x---x---x-----------> 
    

    The common sequence of things is as follows:

    1. The sensor is not exposed
    2. The shutter opens [[[[[
    3. The sensor is exposed
    4. The shutter closes ]]]]]
    5. The sensor is no longer exposed

    The sensor will capture ambient light whenever the sensor is exposed, and putting a flash will add additional light on top of it.

    As long as the flash fires when the sensor is exposed, the final image will have this additional light in it.

    A. The default mode of operation is to time the flash is to fire the flash just after the shutter opens (this is called "front curtain", more on that later).

    B. However if you have a relatively long exposure time, you can play with the timing of the flash and time the flash so that if happens just before the shutter closes. You do this to have some tasteful trails, most of the time to put an emphasis on movement. Stuff like this.

    C. You can also do YOLO and fire your flash at regular interval (typically with a very long exposure time) to get a stroboscopic effect (a stroboscope is a mechanical device with a rotating part and a continuous light; most consumer flash can just fire in a quick succession). This is a rather extreme example. Here you put emphasis on movement by having multiple picture in the one.

    It's easier to have such effects when the ambient light is low enough so that the background cannot be captured by the sensor. With long exposure time, any ambient light will make a trail out of any movement, and you want to control that. However with a flash, you kind of freeze a moment in time.

    Outside of the studio, having a slow shutter speed have the risk of having a background that's blurry because of the movement of the camera (as opposed to an out-of-focus blur). In this picture the photographer set an exposure time long enough to have a trail for a rear curtain flash, but you can see that the background is rather smudgy.

    It's always a challenge to balance exposure (how much light you have), blur (intentional or not), and technical limitation (you can have more light gathering power by buying more expensive sensor and/or objectives, but you may not have the budget and/or the will to carry heavier equipment).

    Recent development for photography nerds

    A relatively recent development is the so-called "high speed sync". The mechanics of a shutter make it so that the opening and closing action of a shutter takes a times (notice that in the graph those event are not only 1 symbol), and that with very short exposure time (typically faster than 1/250th of a second), the closing action begins before the opening action has time to finish. See the "rolling shutter" artifact for more info. So if you take have one flash, only a sliver of your picture will receive the light (this happens).

    With high speed sync you effectively put multiple low power flash in one exposure. In diagram form it looks like this

    Shutter (high speed sync) ----[[[////]]]------>
    Flash (high speed sync)   -----x---x---x------>
    

    But this image is more informative than my ASCII diagram.

    With HSS you can do picture like this where you can outcompete the sun without resorting to huge and heavy lights. You do that by reducing the firehose that is the sun to a little squirt by having an extremely short exposure time (in this picture, 1/8000 sec.), and then you bring you own light (note that an alternate way to get the same effect would be to bring a reflector and effectively have a secondary continuous source of light, but sometime you want a different quality of light and/or the reflector has no handy source of light to bounce )

    5 votes
  4. Comment on Do you think stressful games are kind of bad for your health? in ~games

    PetitPrince
    (edited )
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    As a long time player of an extreme version Tetris, I can report no ill effect expect a fear of having stuff too organized lest they disappear. Joke aside, I've always like a good challenge in my...

    As a long time player of an extreme version Tetris, I can report no ill effect expect a fear of having stuff too organized lest they disappear.

    Joke aside, I've always like a good challenge in my games and high skill / concentration situation tends to make me enter flow state instead of anxiety. But this happens more in games where the cost of retry is low ; I too am stressed when I cross a field boss and have 2 or 3 levels worth of runes in Elden Ring and no fire camp nearby.

    Is high skill / low barrier to retry is also a big stressor for you? I'm thinking Celeste, Super Meat Boy, rhythm game in hard/expert mode.

    I tend to have an analytical mindset (the above video is a 30 minutes nerd out about Tetris) so for combat it's less "me fighting the immortal archer lord" and more "he's gonna do the 1-2 combo, then I have a small opening to punish, then there's this wide sweep I haven't figured out yet how to avoid". It's not that I cannot immerse myself in a game either ; I loved the vibes of Jusant and that snowcone sidequest in Yakuza 8 left me in tears.

    I don't play multilayer games though (at best, co-op).

    7 votes
  5. Comment on If eyes emitted light, could they still see? in ~science

    PetitPrince
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    Cats and dogs and other animals have a structure called tapetum lucidum in the back of their eyes. They're essentially retroreflector (mirror that sends light back to their source), and for some...

    Cats and dogs and other animals have a structure called tapetum lucidum in the back of their eyes. They're essentially retroreflector (mirror that sends light back to their source), and for some pedant interpretation of your question they are light emitter. That's the reason they are slightly creepy at night.

    They see fine and it's a way to improve the signal when in a low light situation.

    1 vote
  6. Comment on A beskirted trip to Ikea in ~life.men

    PetitPrince
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    Tangentially related : I have two yukatas (for men). Only is like a bathrobe and is used as such, while the other is for outdoor use (bought for a festival in Nara in a touristy shop). They're...

    I (cisman) have actually been wanting to try wearing a women's kimono. There are these modern fusion ones from KIM+ONO in San Francisco that I find beautiful

    Tangentially related : I have two yukatas (for men). Only is like a bathrobe and is used as such, while the other is for outdoor use (bought for a festival in Nara in a touristy shop). They're both super comfy and airy. The sash is a bit fussy to put on though.

    2 votes
  7. Comment on Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued in ~sports.football

    PetitPrince
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    VAR is people checking the video footage of the game to check if some action in game were done within the rules (most notably : was a goal scored with no offside?). I think it's controversial...

    VAR is people checking the video footage of the game to check if some action in game were done within the rules (most notably : was a goal scored with no offside?).

    I think it's controversial cause even smaller clubs in lower division also have to use it, and this things probably cost some pretty penny. Also it's relatively new in football (first high profile use was in the 2018 world Cup). However there's a similar (or even better) system that has been used in like forever in Tennis (Hawk eye).

    4 votes
  8. Comment on A shower thought on cameras in ~talk

    PetitPrince
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    To complement : we are able to have remaster of old movies because they were shot on film. No AI upscaling or whatever, we just need a better scanner. (of course that's a simplification, there's...

    To complement : we are able to have remaster of old movies because they were shot on film. No AI upscaling or whatever, we just need a better scanner. (of course that's a simplification, there's also some restoration and color correction involved).

    6 votes
  9. Comment on A shower thought on cameras in ~talk

    PetitPrince
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Pro: if you scale this principle up you can have volumetric photo and videos. See "Welcome to Light Fields" and this research paper ("Immersive Light Field Video with a Layered Mesh...

    Pro: if you scale this principle up you can have volumetric photo and videos. See "Welcome to Light Fields" and this research paper ("Immersive Light Field Video with a Layered Mesh Representation"). If you have a VR headset and a moderately powerful PC, this is the closest you can have to real VR photo and VR video. Your head is actually able to move in a small bubble and you can see details that are behind objects (from what I read, it's so much more than the "spatial photo" of the Apple Visionl which is just 3D-like-in-a-3d-theater but within a headset). It's insanely cool.

    Cons: for the Lytro, IIRC one of it's main problem is the terrible resolution of the output. From what I've understood you're putting an array of microlens in front of your sensor to capture a lightfield, but then you need to slash your resolution by this a significant number because a given image is not made out of the whole sensor but only a fraction of it.
    Other cons: for the two other demo, you need a half-sphere filled with camera that's as big as the free-movement bubble you're targetting. This automatically exclude casual shooters.

    4 votes
  10. Comment on What is your weirdest kitchen appliance and what do you think of it? in ~food

    PetitPrince
    Link Parent
    Main usecase I found: This dish needs some lemon juice. I have a whole lemon. I don't want to turn my food into edible lemonade, so I cut only what I need. The rest goes into the fridge Our pet...

    Main usecase I found:

    • This dish needs some lemon juice. I have a whole lemon. I don't want to turn my food into edible lemonade, so I cut only what I need. The rest goes into the fridge
    • Our pet rodent doesn't need to eat the whole apple, and we're do not feel like eating half an apple either
    • We don't need to use all of this daikon at once, it's just some garnish for the soup
    • Likewise, this banh mi doesn't need a whole cucumber in it, just some slices
    5 votes
  11. Comment on What is your weirdest kitchen appliance and what do you think of it? in ~food

    PetitPrince
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    Uncommon: cooking chopsticks. They're a whip, tongs/spatula, fork, and rough thermometer all in one. Gadget: food huggers. They're silicon cap for cut fruit and vegetables. Kinda works, but more...

    Uncommon: cooking chopsticks. They're a whip, tongs/spatula, fork, and rough thermometer all in one.

    Gadget: food huggers. They're silicon cap for cut fruit and vegetables. Kinda works, but more often than not I'll use the entire vegetable anyway nowadays.

    3 votes
  12. Comment on What are your favourite let's plays? in ~games

    PetitPrince
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    Lt. Danger textual Let's Play about Neverwinter Nights 2 - Mask of the Betrayer Their analysis of why MotB still resonates and influence how I appreciate and appraise video-game. Some excerpt :

    Lt. Danger textual Let's Play about Neverwinter Nights 2 - Mask of the Betrayer

    Their analysis of why MotB still resonates and influence how I appreciate and appraise video-game.

    Some excerpt :

    I think the answer ultimately boils down to 'brevity.'
    [...]
    Too often in games I find some puzzle, some encounter, that could have come from anywhere; the most egregious example is Bioware's reliance on the Towers of Hanoi puzzle (which thankfully has come to an end). There's too much that has barely anything to do with the premise or purpose of the story (if they bothered to have one at all). In Mask, though, I struggle to find wasted space. I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: there are no irrelevant sidequests. Every quest and every NPC ties back to the core themes in some way.
    [...]
    What I see in Mask that elevates it above Torment and KOTOR2 (in addition to qualities all three games share, like decent writing, good art design, etc.) are brevity and purpose. Torment lacks brevity: the first time through, it was amazing that a developer would spend so much time on an NPC that just sat in a bar and explained the abominable Great Ring to you in massive detail; the second time through, it was utterly tedious. KOTOR2 has too much purpose: so much time is devoted to explaining Kreia's philosophy that the game almost forgets to ask you your opinion as well. In Mask, we will have the option to confirm Obsidian's premise in the choices we make up until the very end of the game... but we can also choose to deny it, or to alter it. The whole mood of the game changes with the player's decisions, and I think that is something special that few other games have accomplished.

  13. Comment on Awesome Games Done Quick 2025, a week-long charity fundraiser featuring speedruns, is live (runs January 5 - January 11) in ~games

    PetitPrince
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    Fun (?) fact: he managed toplay with a broken rotation button the whole goddamn time. TGM uses 3 rotations button - CCW, CW, alt-CCW - and his alt-CCW was dead. It's not essential and he could...

    EricICX in particular had a series of excellent runs.

    Fun (?) fact: he managed toplay with a broken rotation button the whole goddamn time. TGM uses 3 rotations button - CCW, CW, alt-CCW - and his alt-CCW was dead. It's not essential and he could (obviously) still play, but it's quite handy for some specific moves at high speed.

    One of the most impressive thing for me is the live comment while playing done by Mackiegarou.

    3 votes
  14. Comment on Your favorite game OSTs in ~games

    PetitPrince
    (edited )
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    I recently gushed about the soundtrack of the Ace Combat series and Project Wingman in the what are you playing topic and I will do it again here. The final mission / boss music (Megalith, The...

    I recently gushed about the soundtrack of the Ace Combat series and Project Wingman in the what are you playing topic and I will do it again here.

    The final mission / boss music (Megalith, The Unsung War, Zero, The Liberation of Grace Maria, Kings) are all epics in different ways. The base is symphonic music, but some have more electro undertone and other more traditional. Shout out to Zero and it's crazy Spanish guitar. Other rec is Shodown and Redline from Project Wingman (some happy 80-90s anime vibes), Daredevil from Ace Combat 7 (famously commissioned at the very last minute because the mission lacked a good track ; and this delivers) and really the rest of the AC7 soundtrack (Magic Spear is so good).


    Classic Heroes of Might and Magic (I to IV) have a consistently great ambient soundtrack thanks Paul Romero.


    Trials of Mana OST is burned into my mind. Incredible how solid those composition are (and how little they changed for the remake).


    SpaceChem has this relentless rhythm that's ideal for work.

    3 votes
  15. Comment on Your favorite game OSTs in ~games

    PetitPrince
    Link Parent
    Yay another fan! Do you know about Kirite (also by Mitsuda) ? I find that it's quite close to Creid (same new agey feelings) There's also Genso Suikoden2 Orrizonte Music Collection by Miki...

    Yay another fan!

    Do you know about Kirite (also by Mitsuda) ? I find that it's quite close to Creid (same new agey feelings)

    There's also Genso Suikoden2 Orrizonte Music Collection by Miki Higashino that quite close to Creid.

    And that Xenogears 20th anniversary concert is really nice.

    1 vote
  16. Comment on Your favorite game OSTs in ~games

    PetitPrince
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    To this day Xenogears Creid (an arrangement album with more celtic vibes, made by Mitsuda himself) is still one of my benchmark album I listen to whenever I get new audio equipment. I love it so much.

    Yasunori Mitsuda

    To this day Xenogears Creid (an arrangement album with more celtic vibes, made by Mitsuda himself) is still one of my benchmark album I listen to whenever I get new audio equipment. I love it so much.

    3 votes
  17. Comment on CES 2025 in ~tech

    PetitPrince
    Link Parent
    On the top of my head : Ideapad : consumer Legion : gamer Thinkpad: business Then for the Thinkpads T: workhorse (the multipurpose ones) P: workstation (the discrete GPU ones) X: ultrabook (the...

    Easy peasy. Contrast that to Lenovo, who offer T, X & P series, X1 series, "Idea"-branded garbage

    On the top of my head :

    Ideapad : consumer
    Legion : gamer
    Thinkpad: business

    Then for the Thinkpads
    T: workhorse (the multipurpose ones)
    P: workstation (the discrete GPU ones)
    X: ultrabook (the thin ones)

    3 votes
  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    PetitPrince
    Link Parent
    Another Ace Combat and Project Wingman fan here ! One thing to add is that the soundtrack for both games (and the whole series really) have absolute bangers. It's mostly orchestral music, and...

    Another Ace Combat and Project Wingman fan here !

    One thing to add is that the soundtrack for both games (and the whole series really) have absolute bangers. It's mostly orchestral music, and quite often bombastic, but unlike other modern military fictions it's more... joyful for the lack of a better term. It's as /u/Flashfall and the linked documentary said: it's a simulation of not reality, but of the feeling of a pilot. And, I might say, the pilot is 13 years old and runs on rules of cool. And thus the act of killing someone you know is not gritty and messy, but rather a joust between two knights of the sky. And in that regard, the soundtrack for this moment is not an emotional piece full of strings and brass, but rather an orchestral flamenco piece. Rule of cool indeed.

    I suspect /u/Flashfall had a grin has wide as me when he realized what mission 4 ("Express Lane") was about,

    because... it's a that's nearly entirely about a tunnel sequence, and that is a staple of the series because it's *plain cool*.
    1 vote
  19. Comment on Awesome Games Done Quick 2025, a week-long charity fundraiser featuring speedruns, is live (runs January 5 - January 11) in ~games

    PetitPrince
    Link
    The first run on Friday is a Tetris the Grand Master showcase, now with less setup time because TGM1 and TGM2 were released on Switch and PS4. The players presenting the game are some of the top...

    The first run on Friday is a Tetris the Grand Master showcase, now with less setup time because TGM1 and TGM2 were released on Switch and PS4.

    The players presenting the game are some of the top players in our little community; only mackir seems to be a newcomer (I don't know them). Otherwise they are all TGM3 Gms (which is insanely hard to do). Spc is currently at the top of our leaderboard, and you may know EricICX for being an elite NES Tetris player and CTCW champion.

    That's certainly a good way to hype the series while waiting for TGM4 that was recently announced!

    4 votes
  20. Comment on Steam Winter Sale 2024: Hidden gems in ~games

    PetitPrince
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    Buried treasure : TETRACHROMA (108 reviews). It's one of the most interesting Tetris-like release in the last few years, and that's coming from a Tetris the Grand Master player. So it's Tetris...

    Buried treasure : TETRACHROMA (108 reviews).

    It's one of the most interesting Tetris-like release in the last few years, and that's coming from a Tetris the Grand Master player.

    So it's Tetris with a gimmick, and the gimmick is very simple (as it should be) : each pieces have a color and you can only clear a line if the whole line have the same color. Each piece you place change color of the adjacent pieces in a line (think Reversi).

    It's an elegant addition and really messes with your brain (in a good way).

    1 vote