Perler Projects Again

I'm really excited today; I just finished placing a very large order for more Perler beads. So between that and since lots of people really liked the Lagiacrus from last time, I will show off a few things I've made since then.



This is a small fun piece I made after finding the sprites online. Our house has recently started watching the first season in order and this celebrates that. Mulder is very hard to take serious as a chibi.




Next up is Alice. This piece was requested by my fiance. She has always been a big fan of Cheshire Cat, but I am/was having trouble finding a good sprite that isn't the Disney version. This is the consolation prize. I considered putting some magnets on the back so that it could keep an eye on students from the metal filing cabinet.

This pink haired alien came to earth with her Rickenbacker bass guitar model 4001 and Vespa to rock Naoto's world. Not quite the heroine of the anime FLCL she's pretty integral to the plot and is a catalyst for many of the characters' changes. This was a larger piece that took 3x2 plates. So about 4.3k beads.

Minion wake up and PROTECT ME! Claptrap here was a quick and fun piece. Obviously he's not very big at all, but the only part that matters is how color customizable he is. You could easily swap out the yellow/orange and throw on any number of palettes from the game. 


My most current and second largest piece is Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. He's a triple threat, his game is fantastic, his character is well developed and his style is impeccable. Requiring over 5k beads and having only a few colors utilized this piece was a zen meditation of sorts. Recently my father passed away and this is a piece that I threw myself into so that I could just focus on something else when I needed to. 2 shades in the hair, 3 skin tones, 3 yellows, black, 2 greys. A small palette does not mean bad details.

Perler Beads and Monster hunter

Just around Christmas I was quite bored and needed a creative outlet. Many of my friends are into podcasts, trivia nights, sewing and what have you that I was feeling a little left out since those things have never held too much interest for me. Although my coworkers and I did have lots of fun doing trivia night once a month.

So I got myself some of these:

Then I proceeded to do what every nerd does with perler beads, I made sprite/pixel art.

I started small and worked my way up, but I'm not here to show you the lesser of my works, but my first genuinely large piece. For reference each plate is 29x29 beads. This creation sat on 3x3 planks which means 7,569 possible beads. Now, it didn't take all of that available room, but it was necessary for size overflow.  My working image was about 66x66 pixels or 4,356 beads.
 

So here's an original image of the beast in question. This fancy blue lad likes to swim, eat fish, and electrocute you every time you swat at him with a great sword. He is also really rather large in game, but even so he's just a medium + size monster.


 

I didn't sit down and do it all one go, but rather over a couple of different sittings. I've got all my beads sorted in a container and often use tweezers.

Working on this many tiny beads really cramps my hands up and puts a lot of strain on my back to bend over so long.

 

 

You can see that I like to start at the bottom and my method entails going to the horizontal maximum before working upwards.

I feel like working in this manner helps ensure I've got the piece well centered and provides reference lines so I can tell everything is placed where it is supposed to go.

 

Generally I'll put down my black lines and then do the color in-fills. Again, this helps establish references for me. I also feel like doing sections makes it more rewarding to work on as instead of just all one color placed or squiggles or black you can see a whole piece and know what it looks like.

Now how did I get this down to pixels? Well I took this in-game icon and pixelated it so that I could use it for my reference.

 

Ironing the piece comes last and that melts the edges of the beads together, binding them all and making the piece solid. Generally it is considered the most dangerous part aside from curious cats during construction. 

Ironing is pretty tough to get right and it will turns the circles into more traditional squares if you iron long or hard. Some people like the squared style, but in terms of technique making the beads melt to attachment only shows mastery.

So just how big is my piece? If the water bottle didn't help, then how about this: the whole thing is sitting on my computer desk and here are some other classic sprite characters I've made.

When he gets hungry he'll probably eat Undine first just to show he is the king of the tides.

RPGs: Game Mechanics

The curious logo that doesn't match the premade assets.

Recently I obtained a fully licensed copy of Enterbrain's RPG Maker VX Ace software suite. It's a simplified and all-in-one package for making classic style console role playing games. 

It includes: a collection of pre-made art assets, a completed menu/battle system, database tools, and a fully customizable Ruby engine (a style of coding language). What it does not include is alternate choices or the strength to actually commit to digital data the big dreams inside your head.

The standard party menu.

It should be obvious, but I am no writer of any great talent. Putting together a general story flow is not too difficult but creating dialogue and interesting worlds is not really something I shine at. So I put that on the back burner and began tackling the mechanical systems in place. Stats, numbers, items and registries are all things I got figured out. It was after delving into designing passive skills (perks, talents, etc.) and a class system that I hit a road block and thought "where do I go next?"

In many circles it is said that the story should evolve around the mechanics of a game, that the actual "gameplay" part should come first. This is completely reasonable, after all Call of Duty and Halo need to have tight controls for their run and gun style. Who cares why you're shooting the aliens or terrorists in their faces so long as it feels satisfying and looks great. Building block castles on some procedurally generated world without a single piece of text to be found made Minecraft a huge hit. RPGs though are designed to tell stories and one could argue that their stories are the primary draw and when that is coupled with how much of the RPG universe is ubiquitous between games it rings fairly true.

So I sat down and started thinking about just what sort of mechanics stood out and made RPGs different from each other. Generally I identified two prime sections: in-battle and out-of-battle.

In-battle Examples and Games:

Max Level = Pretty Girl Death Machine

• Power Leveling - Disgaea
• Class Changing - DQ9, FF3/5/X-2
• Positioning - Disgaea, Radiant Historia
• Pet System - Pokemon, Lufia 2, Bahamut Lagoon
• Alternating Party - Lufia 2, FF4, DQ Series
• Pick and Choose Team - Suikoden, FF6
• Create a Party - FF Legends, DQ9
• Transformation - Breath of Fire, FF8/10
• Character Specific Skills - FF6
• Timed Hits - Shadow Hearts / Super Mario RPG
• Team Attacks - Chrono Trigger
• Action Battle - Tales Series, Grandia, Star Ocean
• Free Roam Action Battle - Secret of Mana, Soul Blazer Series
• Strategy/Tile Based - FF Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Front Mission, Fire Emblem, Diagaea
• Diplomacy - Shin Megami Tensei
• Usage Upgrades Skills - FF2, Elder Scrolls
• Customizable Abilities - FF5/6/7, Romancing Series

Now most of these battle systems are functionally the same. Things will almost always boil down to "is it my turn" and "hit" the enemy, but these small twists do a lot to make these games feel different from each other. One of the biggest dichotomies is that of true turn based, I go then you go, or action turn based, where some quality influences how quickly your turns arrive.

Out-of-battle Examples and Games:

True villains don't leave clues.

• Mini-games - FF7, BioShock (hacking), Fallout 3 (lock picking)
• Crafting/Alchemy - Monster Hunter, DQ9, Atelier Alchemist, Star Ocean
• Collecting - Illusion of Gaia
• Skill Trees - WoW, Diablo, FF 10/13
• Alignment - Mass Effect, KotOR
• Puzzles - Lufia 2, Wild Arms
• Alternating Stories - Breath of Fire 4, Secret of the Stars, Romancing Series
• Map Interaction Abilities - Breath of Fire Series, Lufia 2, Romancing Saga, Wild Arms
• The Daily Grind - Elder Scrolls, Mount and Blade

The primary purpose of the out-of-battle aspects is to provide diversions from all that dungeon delving or to enhance the story in regards to how you interact with the world around you. In the case of Monster Hunter collecting pieces of monsters for crafting and the solid game play is all that exists, you kill bigger harder things to obtain newer better stuff with which to kill things. In Star Ocean and the Atelier Series crafting is reflective of the setting, how the characters need to smith out better items in a world because they don't exist yet. Sometimes puzzles serve a similar purpose like in Lufia 2 where almost every dungeon had strange mechanics or hard puzzles because what sort of villain leaves his or her palace unguarded?

Compiling all this information together in one spot really helped me consider the possibilities as well as highlighting what makes all these classic games feel rather different despite the rather similar bone structure. Think about your favorite RPG and how many pieces they mixed and matched from the two lists. Of course there are probably several examples of both that I've forgotten to include, but these really do make a difference when combined.

Porn Nation and Raunch Culture

Sexuality is everywhere in America, but we don't like to talk much about it beyond "He/She is totally hot" or exclaim about how tits on the big screen are unsightly and will warp children's' minds. Yet, we are consuming a staggering amount of pornographic material and generally speaking we have not self-destructed. So what's with this disconnect and why does it matter?

The easiest part to start with is the religious part, some folks feel their religious texts make an argument for the positives of monogamy and that means you should avoid other naked people even if they're only paper or pixels. But in a strange twist parts of the Feminist Culture (not all of it) view pornography in a negative light.

Feminism is an ideal about the equality of women and men, that all people can do all jobs if they so choose. Some Feminists feel that as long as no one is forced into pornography it is a perfectly acceptable field, usually they label themselves as "sex-positive." They can see that a woman choosing to be in pornographic materials could be powerful, the woman controls the men; the virgin-whore complex is turned upside down and the ladies get to go wild without the social consequences. Taken to the extreme you see people who are professional dominatrixes, individuals making good money to sexually abuse a man without actually engaging in sex themselves.

On the flip side however there are Feminists who see pornography as inherently hurtful to the cause and to the image of womanhood and usually they're called "anti-raunch" or simply "anti-pornography." Their position is that no matter how female friendly the material happens to be, it still sexualizes and objectifies the women involved. Of course some women are happy in these roles, so their argument by default extends to a position of even if the people involved are happy it still hurts the group as a whole. Objectification is bad because it commodifies a person and in this case also sexuality; and when something is a commodity it can be bought, sold, or abused because it is no longer regarded with same level of respect as something more intrinsic. There is also blame that body image issues and unrealistic expectations come from pornography as well as fashion magazines. So this group is against what they perceive as the wrongs that this culture perpetrates.

So this brings me around to something on Reddit. There are posts called Ask Me Anything; generally a celebrity or professional in a field does a Q&A. Recently Bill Gates did one, also recently several different porn stars and this started turning the sociological wheels in my head.

Various photographers have already showcased on the internet how they airbrush models for magazines. Film studios have also elaborated on their techniques to make actors/actresses look a certain way for a film or enhance "attractive" features. Apparently some porn studios have begun to do the same thing through "behind the scenes" features about their films.

This is something I find both rather amusing and supremely interesting because it has the potential to offset many of the negative complaints attributed to pornography. Anyone who's seen such a film can tell you that these actors are capable of feats us mere mortals cannot achieve without ropes and a pit crew. A short summary includes: positions are many and varied in complexity, lots of body modifications, erections that last hours, erections that ought to be awarded ribbons for good breeding, curiously romantic backdrops, enough fluids to work a lazy river, etc. There are exceptions of course but this is just a quick a dirty list. But if all the men and women watching these films were told by the participants just what went into all that fucking around, then perhaps the myth would get dispelled.

Those erections didn't last for hours, it was good editing putting scenes together or different angles of the same stuff. She can't just perform on demand and neither should you, she used a bit of lube to get started or used a vibrator. In fact he couldn't either, a whole camera crew watching you get busy is intimidating to anyone not an exhibitionist. He either worked himself up or got some help through modern medicine. They paid to film at that sunny resort or fancy house, none of the crew lives there except maybe a director/producer.


I wonder what will happen next if these behind the scenes features continue. Will transparency lead to a lessening of these supposed social problems? Will blooper reels be far behind?

When the fog of myth is eliminated and we can see how it was all done surely our opinions will change and our neuroses lessen.

 My bias: I disagree with the notion of pornography being a huge social ill.

 Relevant book on this topic:
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy

Divinely Incomplete

So the topic of religion is always something I'm up for discussing, but I'm even more enthusiastic when it is the context of writing. There isn't a point in denying that I am sucker for deep and hidden meanings or turning things around on their heads.

So I was tumbling ideas around in my head weighing different pieces of ideological fluff and came across something I thought was worth sharing.

The short story version narrative in my head goes a bit like this:

When Olivia, age 8, finds herself in heaven she sees that her mother and father, auntie and nana are there and her brother too! Of course she had passed before any of them, but heaven is timeless and so the family is reunited. Except, where is grandpa? Perhaps he swore a little too often and drank too much, or skipped service one to many times; or maybe he never did apologize to the heavens after his brother died in that damn war. To Olivia her heaven is not complete and she turns and runs down the end of the hallway to throw open that big gnarled gate marked "Do Not Open." A roaring gust sweeps up and looks as if it might swing the gate shut once more, but no it pushes through the gap and forces it to widen further. It is then that a gentle voice which comes from every direction says calmly, "Finally."

But ok, my mediocre storytelling skills aside, I hope it illustrates what I am thinking about. Many of our thoughts on the afterlife are incomplete. Heaven isn't heaven unless the sinners are there too. The next logical thought is "they don't deserve it" or "they rejected it," and this is exactly the point that makes me sit and ponder. According to the rules they literally don't deserve it, but according to the rules we also need to show mercy, forgiveness and love.

How can an entire people who are standing beside their deity refuse to look downward? Is it a sense of pride in their accomplishment, a life without sin? Do they feel guilty for making it to safety while others suffer not just a moment, but an eternity? Is acknowledging that their relationship with the divine had less turbulence than those who suffered disease or the loss of a loved one a hard truth to face? How can the outcast find grace when there is only suffering and torture all around and not even his fellow man is willing to send him a drop of water?

So we have here a situation where heaven is not fully realized because for one reason or another each person has a rational excuse to not open the gate and bring in those cast out. People ought to be mangling their hands trying to wrench open the gate or their lungs exhausted from petitioning the throne. Meanwhile He is just watching and waiting for someone truly brave to do just that.

So keep going with this train of thought. How DO you reconcile the damned with the merciful? The gates are open, but how do we guide towards salvation? The innocent are hopefully many and the damned live amongst them, hopefully learning and turning around.

I wonder then if the gate is open or just how many hands in unison it'd take to budge it.

Layaway

K-Mart has recently been airing a new set of commercials focused not on selection, price, quality or anything relevant to the goods and services, but to bring attention to their layaway plan.

Perhaps you think layaway is benign, that it is no worse than a credit card. However, it indicates an important societal issue and is a very poor way to utilize your money to obtain something.

Layaway virtually disappeared during the 90s and 00s as almost everyone had access to gobs of credit that they did truly need or warrant. The return of layaway and its celebration in commercial form is a clear sign that America is not healthy. We're a nation of bad credit risks who cannot get our economy out of the toilet no matter what the talking heads on television say. It also means that Americans, even without access to credit, are making absolutely terrible decisions with what little money they do have.

Let us skip the long example and I shall state this clearly: there is nothing that layaway can do for you that you cannot do for yourself by simply stashing $25 dollars in a jar or your bank every couple weeks. Layaway is a service and it takes paperwork and time, Kmart and other companies are not doing anything out of the goodness of their hearts. You must put money down on your purchase, pay a fee to establish the layaway, and then make your monthly payments until it is fully paid off at which point you will get the stuff you purchased. Let me reiterate that, you do not get anything until you've paid it off in full.


One more time: there is no advantage to layaway because you do not get the object early AND you pay fees to set it up.

Done.

If you ever need something that badly don't let yourself get bamboozled. Ask family for a short loan or stuff your piggy bank. Do not waste your money on fees that get you nothing.

Insurance - Terminology and a Basic Approach

Insurance in America is a bit of a crapshoot, but it is big business and lots of people are involved in this elaborate system. So today I hope to explain some basic aspects to everyone.

In my own experience many people do not have even the most rudimentary understanding of their insurance and that is a tragedy. Without knowing the basic components then you will be unable to get yourself the best deal and you will be unable to properly budget when you do have a medical situation arise.

So let’s review the basic terminology of insurance:

    * Premium, this is the amount of money you or your business pays per month to keep your policy active.

    * Co-pay, is a flat rate for services. Generally this is used for standard doctor visits, specialist visits or regularly occurring medical services such as rehabilitation.

    * Deductible, this is an amount of money that you must spend BEFORE your insurance begins to provide any financial coverage for medical services.

    * Co-insurance, is a percentage rate of coverage for medical services such as 80/20% coverage where the patient pays 20% of all expenses. This option is usually used instead of a co-pay or in situations where a co-pay is a not financially reasonable solution. At 80/20% the patient will almost certainly pay more than a co-pay, but not significantly more.

    * Out-of-Pocket (Catastrophic Limit) is an upper limit on how much a patient will be required to spend before the insurance covers the patient at 100% of expenses. This can include what you spent on your deductible or in addition to.

    * Benefit Cap/Maximum, is a limit to a particular service per diagnosis, or per year, or per lifetime. This limit can be in the form of a financial limit such as $1500 or by visit limit such as 20 visits to a chiropractor per year. Going beyond this limit means your insurance will no longer provide coverage.

    * Authorization, is a process required by some insurances as a barrier to services to ensure they are necessary. The difficulty of obtaining this varies by insurance, but generally involves submitting paperwork and then waiting for a reply from a centralized office.

    * Referral, similar to authorization this is a barrier to services, but it is generally a straight forward issue of visiting the hierarchy of doctors in order. Going from a GP and being referred to a specialist and then being referred to rehabilitation or other medical service. There is confusion to their word because many people incorrectly call the Rx given by a doctor to a patient as a referral; this is at odds with standard English.

    * Plan Year, is the time period in which one year of coverage is active. Usually from Jan to Dec, but sometimes from month of first active coverage or on school year Sept to Aug. All benefits and payments, unless specified otherwise, should reset at the beginning of each new plan year.

    * Lifetime Maximum, this is the amount your insurance will pay out over the entirety of the life of the policy. Usually stated as in the millions, but yes with a serious ailment it is reachable. After 10 years of chemotherapy your insurance may refuse to pay any more, ever.

    * Replacement Policy, is an insurance policy that takes the place of your Medicare policy. In essence, you may opt out of your Medicare plan and deliver those dollars to a privately held insurance company for the benefits they offer you.

    * Supplemental Policy, is an insurance policy that you pay for that covers what your original policy does not cover or to extend coverage to new services. Generally this is used by Medicare patients to cover the 20% expense that Medicare does not and to cover their prescription drugs and visual/dental care.

Now that we’ve reviewed the basic terminology let me try and explain how they fit together to form a policy.

Generally speaking the more you pay (Premium) for your insurance the better coverage it has. Better coverage is defined as lower co-payments, more favorable co-insurance rates (80/20 to 90/10 to 100%), easier or no authorizations, higher benefit maximums, lower deductibles and lower out-of-pockets. Better coverage also means coverage for more types of services such as for name brand drugs rather than generics only.

Bad insurance is of course the exact opposite of everything I just listed. Higher co-pays, higher deductibles, higher out-of-pockets, lower co-insurance rates (60/40 or 50/50), more authorizations required, lower benefit maximums and less services covered.

Two examples of policies:
 

Policy 1 Montly Premium $258 Doctor Visit co-pay of  $25 Specialist Visit co-pay of $40 Laboratory testing 90/10% Rx Drugs        Name Brands $18        Generic $7 Physcial/Occupation/Speech Therapy co-pay $25 Deductible does not apply Out-of-pocket does not apply Maximum as Medically Necessary (MN)

Policy 2 Montly Premium $118 Doctor Visit co-pay of  $45 Specialist Visit co-pay of $50 Laboratory testing 70/30% Rx Drugs        Name Brands Not covered        Generic $9 Physcial/Occupation/Speech Therapy 80/20% Deductible of $1500 Out-of-pocket of $3500 includes Maximum of $5500

At first glance the policies are rather similar, but the 2nd one has lower premiums and slightly higher co-pays. The true wealth is in the details. Some people do not respond well to generic drugs and name brand drugs can sometimes be superiorly engineered to alternatives.

Policy 1 has no limits on how much service a person can receive, which is a good thing, however policy 1 makes you pay for that privilege at the door with the higher premium and during treatment because there is no personal spending limit (out-of-pocket).

On policy 2 the deductible will only apply to things covered at a percentage rate so for physical therapy the patient must pay $1500 of their own money before insurance starts paying 80%, then while the patient pays 20% if they spend an additional $2000 for a total of $3500 then the insurance will cover all things at 100% from there after.

So despite the barrier to service of policy 2’s deductible, once that patient pays $3500 they are set while policy 1 will pay indefinitely. This is most notable in accident cases and other emergencies.

So one policy is superior to the other on everyday usage and that’s not unexpected. Depending on how you look at it though the 2nd policy is actively worse because you might not even get anything out of it due to the deductible.

However, so called “bad” insurance has its place and should not be immediately dismissed. Your needs will determine what sort of insurance you should look for.

There are essentially three categories of people in terms of health: healthy people who expect to stay healthy, healthy people who expect to be ill (such as parents) and people who are already ill (yes, age counts as illness).

If you’re healthy and expect to stay that way aside from a minor cold or a completely unexpected accident you might forgo insurance or get the bare minimum possible. Lapsing coverage is bad because if you have or develop a serious condition you will have trouble resuming coverage later, so minimum coverage is preferred. This is the true purpose of “bad” insurance; it keeps you from lapsing coverage and can provide for you in extreme medical emergencies.

When you’re an otherwise healthy individual but you interact with sickly people or children or are involved in hazardous work, then it is important to carry solid coverage. Without good insurance coverage a minor illness might grow, a cut might turn into a staph infection, and a knee needing replacement might be delayed until you’re on disability. In short, good coverage will keep you able bodied enough to continue working or to get you up to speed as quickly as possible.

If you’re elderly or sickly or have a serious chronic ailment then it behooves you to get the best insurance coverage you can get your hands on to cover all your liabilities. If a single monthly shot for osteoarthritis is without insurance is $1500 and your premium is $567 with the shot now only $150, you’re coming out ahead assuming you can afford the expense of the premium.

Despite the amount of money involved in medical insurance far too few people are paying attention to what they’re getting for their money. Even if you do have an idea finding the right insurance for you is an elaborate guessing game, paying for too much coverage is waste and paying for too little can destroy your finances in the event of a major problem. This information should allow you to better weigh those choices and find that right balance for your own life and circumstances.