here’s a letter written in {what I assume is ancient Greek?} on papyrus from around 300 BCE. interestingly, the letters are joined. this shows that:

• the concept of cursive (or proto-cursive or whatever this is) existed at the time
• they had the technology to write on paper (or papyrus, anyway. that’s basically paper)

so what I suspect at this point is that the Latin alphabet probably always had two writing systems: cursive for quill-and-paper, and print for wax tablets, stone, clay, etc.

they had to adapt their writing system to two separate uses, which is why cursive was invented (not necessarily by the ancient Romans or Greeks). but then of course we invented much better writing tools like ball-point pens and cursive became pointless because there is no longer any compelling reason to prefer it over print, and it’s demonstrably much less readable. so it’s almost anachronistic at this point

okay yes so:

The origins of the cursive method are associated with the practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils. Steel dip pens followed quills; they were sturdier, but still had some limitations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive#Origin

but now the question is: did the ancient Romans (who, as far as I know, created the Latin script in the first place) write on paper/papyrus/etc. using {something like a quill}? I already found something saying that Romans didn’t write using cursive until the middle ages, but I’m curious if:

• the Romans just didn’t have the technology to write on paper with a quill, so there was no pressure to adapt their writing system to that task
• the Romans did have quills and paper, but chose to write in print anyway. either because they valued clarity that much, or because writing in that was was rare enough that there was no reason for them to invent a whole new writing system for the task

okay wait no I was right! the Latin alphabet started as only uppercase letters and cursive seems to have come much later

I wonder if printing is only possible today because we have ball point pens to write with. I wonder if whatever writing implement (quills?) cursive was originally developed for, makes printing very very impractical or impossible

okay so it occurs to me that I’m not sure whether print came before cursive of vice-versa. I had it in my head that print came first because the Latin alphabet was originally designed for carving into things like stone tablets of soft clay, but now I’m not entirely sure. I’m looking it up but haven’t found any results about the origins of print vs. cursive yet

I find the concept of cursive writing kinda funny. like who looked at print handwriting and thought “I wish this was easier to write but nearly impossible to read”?

GDC 2014: "Lighting Skylanders SWAP Force" by Sean Murphy of Vicarious Visions, Inc. https://gdcvault.com/play/1020341/Lighting-Skylanders-SWAP

I actually thought this was really interesting. This is given by a lighting artist, discussing the switch to physically-based rendering for a cartoony-game like Skylanders.

The first interesting thing was the way they discussed PBR wasn't about performance or BRDFs or the way it's usually discussed among programmers; instead, they said it was entirely for "consistency."

1/6

@Shivaekul omg I was in this exact situation with my own project - although thankfully I didn’t need a database. infrastructure and hardware are honestly just the worst T_T I’d love to hear about your project though if you feel like sharing! but no pressure

@Shivaekul that is such a fucking mood omg. is this for work or something else?

@rowan that’s amazing! did they fix the progression problems where after a certain point you just hit a brick wall?

@rowan ooh what did they add?

I think web browsers should be designed in a way that’s actively hostile to megacorporations

certain browser features should be blacklisted based on how much money the company is worth. over $10 million? no notifications. over $100 million? no modifying the browser’s history. over $1 billion? no modifying the DOM, ever. over $10 billion? no cross-domain requests of any kind. over $100 billion? no javascript

(I’m not very serious about this but I definitely think that all of the fancy stuff that javascript can do is completely squandered on megacorps who just use it to write slow shitty webpages that waste RAM and constantly break)

I would actually really love to watch the new Ghost in the Shell movie. the one that was controversial because Motoko Kusanagi was played by a white women or something. because it just looks really fucking stylish and that’s all I want/need

but then I read the plot summary and it reads like it was created entirely out of tropes that I find triggering. this is true of the vast majority of scifi movies btw

examples:

• the first half of As Above So Below
• the surface-level vibes of the first 2/3rds of We Are The Night, but you have to ignore all of the subtext and foreshadowing and pretend a lot of scenes don’t exist, especially that part (this is one of my favorite movies of all time btw)
• the first 2/3rds of The Dyatlov Pass Incident
• The Thing, except I can’t keep track of who any of the characters are (I couldn’t even tell you how many characters are on the research base) and I mostly just like the vibes of an isolated research base in the snow
• the first 2/3rds of Phoenix Forgotten
• The Martian as long as I deliberately don’t think too much about Mark Watney’s health or comfort

my favorite horror movie is the first 2/3rds of most horror movies - when they’re being atmospheric and spooky and not taking things too far

some of my favorite movies of all time boil down to “if you ignore half of the plot and cut out most of the scenes and ignore the subtext…” I’m basically just 100% there for the surface-level vibes

the bar for being a movie that I like is literally on the floor:

• don’t cause lingering psychological harm when I watch it
• have at least one (1) thing that I think is cool or stylish or clever in some way

and yet…