Wait, it’s mid-October instead?  I really need to clean out the filters on my time machine, don’t I?

A bunch has happened since I last regularly wrote.  I’ve been sick a bunch, worked a bunch, slept a bunch.  I stopped playing the MMO I’d been playing just about daily for nearly two years, and am puttering around trying to find a proper replacement.  So far I’m settling into the closed beta of Landmark, an odd building-focused multiplayer game.  So far it doesn’t have much of an actual game to it, just wandering around gathering resources and then building things with them, but, well, I like doing that sort of thing.

Like that house in the image above.  I made that.  It’s still a work in progress, and I’ve not even started on furnishing it, but this was just a patch of sand when I started.

I’m still trying to decide what to do with this blog.  I’ve realized it drains my creativity just a bit, and it was causing more stress than I wanted to deal with.  I don’t think I’ll go back to the old format.  Which means either quitting this blog entirely (which I don’t want to do) or coming up with a new format.  And I still haven’t settled on an idea I like yet.

So it may be a little until I write again, and things may look very different here when I do, but then again, they may not!

The post Oh right, I should exist every so often… appeared first on Under A Rock Art.

Wait, I have to post something today? But, but, game!

If you’ve got any interest in a game based around farming, fighting monsters, and befriending people, pick up Rune Factory 4. Well, at least if you have a sense of humor like mine. I’m not sure how the translators managed it quite so well, but they’ve done an excellent job this time making the text just work right for humor and characterization and everything. And that’s with the tremendous difficulty of translating something with this much text.

I mean, I had laughed out loud at least five times, including one where I just had to set down my new 2DS for a little until I got myself under control, before I even got to the point where I name my character! I’ve only played for one in-game day so far, and I love the game already.

Now, the Rune Factory series has long been a favorite, with its delightfully eccentric blend of fantasy RPG and farming simulation (The title of this post isn’t a joke, by the way.  That should give you a glimmer of an idea of how oddball this game is.), and there’s so many things in this edition of the game I have yet to do, but I can already tell this is going to be a real blast to play through.

I’m not sure when I’ll get back to the other game I picked up today, Pokemon X. And that’s really saying something, since I love the pokemon series as well…

…I’ll try to remember to, you know, continue posting, even if it’s with somewhat random photos…

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I noticed an odd quirk in my personal dialect this week.

There’s a place in Guild Wars 2 called Cursed Shore. It lives up to its name, being full of all sorts of undead and corruption and areas that are just a pain to get around. But it’s also one of the few places you can get the best crafting materials, so I still go there, and have been there a lot this week.

But that’s all secondary information. The important part is the name.

You see, I pronounce Cursed Shore with Cursed being two syllables, “cur-sed”, but when the word is on its own, I pronounce it with one syllable, “cursd”.

Now, if you check the dictionary, you’ll find both pronunciations there, so I’m not incorrect whichever way I choose. I tend to default to the one-syllable version, though.

But Cursed Shore gets the special two syllable treatment for some reason. My best guess is that it’s because they sound really awkward together if you try using the one-syllable version. You’re going from a soft syllable with a rising sound to another soft rising sound, so you try to go up even more on “shore”, and that just doesn’t quite work. They blend together as well, dropping the understandability by a lot. I keep switching from a soft “d” sound to a hard “t” sound mid-pronunciation to try to correct that, which causes my tongue to stumble some. If your personal accent uses “curst” rather than “cursd”, it’d work, but my accent doesn’t.

The two syllable version adds a falling sound with a hard ending, so it solves all the stumbling spots of the other variant. Which, I guess, is why this Shore is Cur-sed, not Cursd.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the photo, it’s not just a picture of a random shore. This was taken along the coast of New Jersey, about a year and a half before Hurricane Sandy came to visit. And yes, this spot got hit by the storm surge, and all the beach buildings and fences and what not, well, let’s just say they needed to be replaced. So in some ways, the beach this day was living under a curse of future troubles…

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Mmmm… Diverse ecosystems…

I love seeing a nice mix of plants in the places I visit. Especially a mix like this, where none of the plants are really that weedy, and all of them have interesting colors and shapes. There’s even a bunch that have gorgeous purple flowers!

It’s right on the shore of a lake that has black sand, and while the plants can form small colonies in the sand, they haven’t claimed it all.

You know, that’s one of the interesting things about humans and colors. If you look at the color of the sand in this photo, it’s not black. It’s actually a mid-range grey with a bit of brown mixed in. But, because most of the sand we encounter is of a much lighter shade, and “black sand” sounds better than “grey sand”, we call it black.

And you know, if I made a painting of this place, I would probably color the sand darker than it really is. Since my brain thinks of it as “black”, I’ll start with a darker base color than if I thought of it as “grey”, even if it’s the same color I’m thinking of.

It’s amazing how much language and culture influence how we see color. I’m quite used to seeing pink as quite separate from red, despite it being a cultural construct. Pink is just red mixed with white, just as light orange is just orange mixed with white. But I still see pink and red as separate color profiles while light orange and orange are in the same set.

Which actually can make it tough to figure out what color to make the bright areas when I’m painting red objects. For the other colors, assuming a white light source of course, I’ll just add a bit of white to the color to create the highlights on the image. Perhaps just a touch of yellow as well, to make the bright areas a bit warmer looking to help them pop more. But adding pink on top of red just looks wrong, unless I add enough of another color to make it stop looking pink. It’s actually rather annoying to have to follow a few extra rules because red is considered a manly color and pink a womanly color in my culture, and mixing the two creates mixed messages.

Now if you excuse me, I shall go back to playing my Charr Mesmer in Guild Wars 2. Charr are a feline warrior race, with a proud history of honor and battle, and my Charr is a proud member of the Blood Legion, which lives up to its name. He is, of course, currently dressed in pink clothes.

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