I Know What You Are...

twitter historically sucks but man this is a banger of a tweet

Hi.

Me sell hats. Okay, poke?

Come to old old old haus, poke. Bring coines.

-hat mouse

is it really a successful trip to the pool if you dont inhale a gallon of pool water?

sliding scale of posts about Jesus being a carpenter who was nailed to a cross

alois is kinda a terrible person but i 💖💖💖💖

hes my fav 💖💖💖

Anyone else thinking about how odd the hermitcraft economy is?

in season 9 they had a minor economic recession after the diamond ore war because there were far too many diamonds in circulation making them (hypothetically) worth less than normal and ren stepped in as the king and did what has been done in the midst of a lot of irl economic depressions; he created a government so they could employ the policy of Keynesian economics (basically more gov't intervention to stabilize the economy, it mostly worked in 1930's japan!), he took control of diamonds and even introduced a new currency, royal emeralds (much like Germany after WW1! they had some hyperinflation because of the war reparations they had to pay and the gov't not understanding that printing more money makes the money worth less resulting in the mark [currency] being so worthless they started burning it because they couldn't afford wood for fires. a new gov't came into power and they replaced the mark with rentenmarks which did a lot of fixificating for the economy). Ren's gov't also introduced a lot of gov't funded projects like the quests (the irl equivalent for this would be Roosevelt's New Deal which introduced policies/projects called the Alphabet Agencies (among other things) such as the AAA, CCC, TVA (do you see why they're called the alphabet agencies?) that would adjust the value of grain so farmers could start earning money for produce again and create work that would support a growing economy, projects like building roads and bridges)

so basically, all the policies ren's government introduced were very logically sound and worked in real life to fix the economy (except that irl the Great Depression only fully ended because WW2 started-), the issue is that hermitcraft is not real life and hermits do not behave like real people, they behave like hermits.

lets start with the hermitcraft economy. unlike the real economy, hermits rarely adjust prices according to how many diamonds are "in circulation". i say this despite the fact grian in a recent-ish episode says that "everything costs more this season because diamonds are more common". that can't be true because the caves and cliffs update literally made diamonds more difficult to acquire. I will circle back to this point made by grian later

hermits not adjusting prices by server-wide abundance of diamonds (because they cant really know how much anyone has, much less the total amount of diamonds in circulation, they just know who has a lot and who is broke) means that more diamonds doesn't make them worth less like it did with German marks, it just means hermits have more expendable currency and can spend more money and less time gathering materials for projects. It is also notable that diamonds are constantly being added and taken out of circulation because they're an actual useful currency rather than real life currencies which are symbolic slips of paper. diamonds can be used for armour and tools and it can be acquired by mining. so because of how hermits spend money, taking diamonds out of the economy in s9 did nothing but make them poor and angry at the government. the hermitcraft economy is actually stronger with more diamonds in circulation and is worsened by gov't intervention.

so already the use of real life strategies is utterly useless in hermitcraft economy but there are a few other reasons as well

the hermits tendency to resist government as well as the flawed and greedy government itself are a couple but also the fact that all the hermits are self employed (in real life but also in universe). they own and stock their own shops meaning all profits are more or less direct; its not passed through hands of big corporations so the person producing the product gets mere cents. the hermits are essentially small business owners (which becomes a bit of a problem come season 10 but we're still talking about season 9). The important part is the self employment. the season 9 gov't introduces the quests which mimic and echo real life government funded projects but because they're all employed and the quests gave small amounts of diamonds back, they did very little for the hermits

I'm sure theres more to say but i think its time to move on to the very interesting season 10 economy

if you've missed it you must be living under a rock but hermits are all using permits this season meaning only one shop in the shopping district is selling any given item/material and as a result of this prices have gone sky high. at one point a single stack of mangrove logs cost 7 diamonds when in previous seasons you could get at least 1 stack of wood for 1 diamond if not more

So what is causing this economic depression and hyperinflation?

well, circling back to the point grian made about resources costing more because of abundance of diamonds, I would think it actually costs more because of the permits.

grian thinks the diamond prices are fair because he has middle of the road permits (and is one of the hermits who designed their shopping district, permit and economic system this season so he's biased), there is enough demand to keep him afloat when he's stocked but its nothing people are clamouring for and buying him out. on the other hand, joel made a lot of shops that no one shops at because his objectively weighted permits have not been selling as well as they anticipated when making the permits (also some people like etho and pearl have additional income from their not as fabulous permits because they've made a pay to play game to go with it) and finally there are hermits like mumbo whose gold, iron and item frame shops were constantly getting bought out so he was frustrated with trying to restock despite getting lots of profit

(another interesting dynamic to think about is permits like cleo's book permit which lost value as the season went on because everyone needed books early on but now that they're all playing late game Minecraft, everyone is pretty stocked up and buying from cleo less often)

Basically, grian is satisfied with the pricing because he's middle class and couldn't afford it if they were more expensive but appreciates not being constantly out of stock, joel is unsatisfied because he is lower class and never has enough expendable currency to fund his projects because materials are too expensive and his permits aren't worth enough to sell them for more, and mumbo is unsatisfied because he is higher class and is constantly out of stock because his materials sell out too often and he wants to sell them for more to stay in stock more (classic supply and demand, he doesn't want to stock them as often making the supply lower and the demand proportionally higher making them worth more and therefore more expensive)

the reason i say the permits are to blame for the high prices is because they cause the responsibility of constantly stocking something to fall on one person (in past seasons, if one persons sandstone shop was out of stock you could go check someone else's sandstone shop). the threat of taking the permit away if they arent stocked along with the difficulty of constantly stocking some of these materials raises the cost.

a great example of this is skizzleman because his mangrove and cherry wood shop was one of the first shops to be built in the shopping district, meaning he somewhat set the prices this season. now, mangrove and cherry are both difficult trees to harvest because of their unconventional shapes and the fact that they are more recent additions (and skizz's stubborn desire to design his own farms...) so because of the time required to gather them the prices already were hitched up. add that to the fact that they are trying to constantly be in stock and therefore low prices that allow hermits to completely buy out the shops are unfavourable, and you get sky rocket-ing prices. (it is also difficult because skizz had no prior experience with hermitcraft pricing)

in conclusion... hermitcraft needs a laissez-faire economy (f. a. hayek) to function and not go into economic depression. Between the nature of the diamond currency, hermits' tendency to rebel against governments, the way they use the concept of supply and demand to price their goods, and the restrictions permits put on supplying products, hermits have proven that extensive structure and government intervention have not improved economic wellbeing the way that it does in real life

thus, hermits do not behave like regular humans, they operate on fae laws of its funny so lets do it and therefore must be governed as such (aka not governed), thank you for coming to my ted talk

Me trying to not go insane realizing that it’s 4 pm so soon it will be like 6 pm and I’ll have to start ‘winding down’ for the evening and then it’ll be 8 and then 10 and it’ll be time to do my evening activities and then it’ll be midnight and then it’ll be time for me to go to bed again just so I can wake up and be ever conscious of the passage of time and how meaningless it has become for another day and try to prevent myself from going insane again

happy homestuck day to those who celebrate

love it when I start getting "based on your likes" terf bullshit every few posts and I have to scramble back through my recent likes to figure out what innocuous meme poisoned the well

im pretty sure you've answered smth like this before, but i looked around for a hot second and couldn't find it. so, sorry if this is a repeat question, but how do you get dynamic comic panels? because i've been playing around with my own comic idea for a while but all i can come up with is just,,,,3x3 square panels. and i doubt that's very interesting to look at. is figuring out panels just something that comes with more dynamic posing/environments and whatnot, or is it a skill all on its own? and if so, how can i improve?

(btw i just wanna say thanks for everything you do, i've been watching osp's videos for years and i'm pretty sure yall have shaped part of my personality. so,,,thanks for that.)

Ahh, dynamic comic panels. It's definitely a skill of its own. The way I like to think about it, comic panel layouts are similar to a translation of the camera movement in film and animation. In the same way a movie wouldn't be shot entirely in shot-reverse-shot camera-A-camera-B medium shots, a comic probably won't be entirely framed in equilateral uniform panels.

Comic panels have one weakness and one strength in contrast with camera shots: the weakness is that comics are static and can't actually move the camera to follow the action, but the strength is that comics are not bound to a specific aspect ratio like cameras are. If a camera wants a close-in shot on a character's reaction, it'll by necessity have a decent chunk of empty space on either side. If a camera wants an establishing shot of something really tall or big, it'll need to pan across it rather than capturing the whole thing in one shot. In comics, in contrast, we can do a close-in shot on a character's reaction that's narrow enough that they're basically the only thing in frame, and if we want to show a really tall thing we can just put it in a really tall panel.

Of course, the baseline mechanical consideration for panel construction is that panels of different sizes can frame things differently. If you want a wide, establishing shot of a location, you probably don't want to try and squeeze that into the same kind of half-width panel you'd use for basic dialogue.

Smaller panels can put focus on smaller details, while larger panels imply a pulling-back of focus. Every panel basically implies a single beat of time passing - the size, shape, and arrangement of that panel helps indicate exactly how much time and what rhythm it carries in the story overall. In this one, three short stacked panels imply a miniature montage of "what we're doing to get ready to go into the spooky cave."

Panels used for character conversation can be relatively small, only large enough to accommodate the speech bubbles and the relevant character's expression, but that can be played with too. If a character's saying a lot at once, you might want to put all that in a wide panel rather than having to space the dialogue across panels unnecessarily.

Wide panels are also good for showing more motion, or highlighting a character's position relative to their environment. Its visual equivalent in film would be a medium-shot, but it can fill a similar role as a film wide-shot, situating a character in their environment and allowing for more close-in shots later.

Wide panels that show a character in their environment are also good for showing how other characters are reacting to that character, so I often use them to follow smaller panels of close-shot dialogue - like cutting to a medium-shot to show the characters moving after a conversation.

I personally tend to be a lot more willing to play with panel width than panel height - tall panels are usually restricted to establishing shots or narrow reaction-shot inserts. This is because tall panels really eat into how much you can fit on any given page. In my early chapters, like the sentinel fight, I used a lot of very tall panels, and that meant the fight felt a lot slower.

I don't hate how it looks, but I could've arranged it more efficiently.

More funky panel arrangements can be used to split the difference - smaller insert panels over larger backgrounds can let you sort of get the best of both worlds, producing a large panel with the impact of a splash page while also allowing you to insert more standard character reactions and dialogue.

Tall panels are good for adding depth and a sense of scale, but wide panels flow more readily with the way we naturally read comics - in general, we read horizontally, not vertically.

You also can play around with panel arrangements to imply things about the mindset or state of a character. In this one, I used the narrowing panels and the reduced skew of the border to highlight a character falling unconscious.

And in this one, I used a rare case of identically-shaped panels to indicate a character slowly waking up. Since he wasn't yet aware of what his situation was, using identically-shaped panels helped communicate that he's feeling about the same across all three panels, despite the change in status quo.

Fight scenes make things more complicated, of course. A lot more is happening, which means I usually make the panels on average somewhat bigger to avoid losing detail. I often board dialogue-heavy pages with four lines of panels, but for fight scenes I almost always use three to allow for more verticality in each individual panel. I also tend to skew the top and bottom panel borders more, and might skew the side borders to more extreme angles, because this (a) produces an unbalancing effect that makes the scene feel more hectic, and (b) can draw the eye in helpful directions to follow the movement. In this scene, the top and bottom borders are skewed to narrow as they move to the right, which, combined with the middle border also skewing down and to the right, draws the eye to naturally follow that movement - we slide down from the first panel to the second, and then across to the third panel of the taller, wider reaction shot.

In this case, I skew the panels one way on the first line during the gradual push-in from a wide shot to a close-up, and then on the second line I skew the panel border the opposite way, because the vibe of the fight has very suddenly changed. It also draws the eye up and to the right to see the character’s initial moment of realization before we cut wider for their more dramatic reaction shot.

I don’t really have this down to a science or anything. I can explain in hindsight why I did a lot of these things, but during the storyboarding process when I’m laying it out I really mostly make these decisions based on ✨vibes✨. My general suggestion for getting a feel for it is, as always, play around with it and read a fuckton of comic books.