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Anm2Ed

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:35:39 -0400

A reimplementation of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’s proprietary animation editor. Manipulates the XML-based “.anm2” format, used for in-game tweened animations.

Download

GitHub

Why I Dislike OCs

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 23:13:19 -0400

People are creative. People express their creativity in any way they like. People make very self-serving art for themselves. All of these things are well and fine.

Concerning the last thing, however, know this: that art is likely going to be enjoyed exclusively by yourself. As said, there’s nothing wrong with that. This is often reflected in the form of “original characters”, or “OCs” for short, where people make their own character designs, and spread them around the world, or particularly on social media.

When you make a business about illustrating other people’s whims (like myself haha), you’re inevitably going to be exposed to this trend of “OCs”.

What is an OC?

Arguably, all characters made are “OCs”, in that somebody originally came up with them and that they are characters, but not all characters are ascribed with the description of “OC”.

So an “OC” describes something narrower than a character. So what describes a “character”?

Think of the great characters of fiction (to avoid being cliche and cringe, I won’t name any examples, because frankly I’m not very cultured on the arts). These characters are often a part of something larger. They’re part of a universe, a narrative, a story.

In many cases, these characters are individuals. They have relationships, they have their own thoughts, they have strengths and weaknesses. Many times, these characters are representatives of larger themes the author wants to touch on, granting them greater purpose. Some characters are static, or purely functional, sure, but they all have a place or a role in their respective contexts. But many develop. Many change. They have a purpose beyond serving the shallow whims of the author.

Many OCs are divorced of this, simply being presented as they are, in a vacuum. So that’s what I would say an OC is: a character without a context.

Show, Don’t Tell

OCs might have little fact sheets attached to them, saying their likes and dislikes, their personality. All you know about them is what is immediately relayed to you, through their design or any little biography next to them on their character sheets.

Because an OC doesn’t have a context to them, all you know about them is what is told to you. And that’s the problem. It’s informational, but not entertaining, not compelling.

If everything is told you about a character, rather than it being discovered through the narrative, what is the intrigue? Why should I care about your character when there’s nothing to speculate upon?

No subtlety, no nuance, no context. That’s the word: context, which is crucial to what a character, and certainly a good character needs.

Unfortunate OC Trends

I’ve explained that an OC, fundamentally, will already have some trouble, because they’re divorced from the aspect that makes a character have purpose. It doesn’t help that many of these OCs also suffer from other weaknesses.

You’re a Random Twitter User, not a Character Designer

Many OC people see other people designing OCs, and then think, “I need one for myself!” Unfortunately, this person doesn’t tend to be an artist. Using their limited artistic ability, they might manage some first draft, and then commission some hapless artist to make their flawed vision a reality.

What comes out is often gaudy, over-nuanced, complex, and unmemorable. Too many colors, too many features, too many clashing motifs. Too many ideas. No refinement. It’s not that it should be tweaked by committee, but, evidently, it has an amateur stink.

“It’s my OC!!”, they might say. Well, yeah. It’s yours, certainly. And, well, it might not have reach beyond you.

Recolors and Accessories Cheapen A Pre-established Character

Recoloring a Sonic template or slapping accessories on a Pokemon shows unoriginality. You’ve taken a beloved character and stapled some arbitrary bit onto it, because, well, “it’s my OC!”

Not really. It’s somebody else’s. Just with a few odd tweaks, which often just take away from the original intent of the design

If people like it, I guarantee it’s not because it’s your artistic ingenuity, but because it’s reminiscent of something more familiar they like, that was originally conceptualized by professional character designers. They’ll like what’s output of it because “it’s that character I like, which is a little different, but it’s mostly like it so it’s okay”.

The Author’s Barely-Disguised Fetish

Not much comment on this, but it should be pretty evident what I’m describing.

Though I will say: isn’t better if a character isn’t already immediately embroiled in your sexual fantasy? Wouldn’t that make it more impactful when they become…corrupted, so to speak?

Well, that sounds like character development, which an OC author might not be attuned to…

Maybe There Are Good OCs

I haven’t seen them. :^)

But, well, this is just my opinion. I’ve certainly seen OCs being drawn by others, totally for free. Perhaps they just tick their buttons in a certain way.

I’ve certainly been commissioned to do OC work. But, as expressed, I have major grievances with what I’m often provided.

Some people might accuse me of “oh, you only want to draw stuff from popular IPs”. It’s not that, it’s because those characters are often…characters, and not OCs, as they’ve been defined here!

It doesn’t help that this OC art will only usually truly appeal to one singular person: the commissioner. If you wanted art to be made, surely you’d want to make it so that it would have worth beyond one person, right?

Alright, you asshole!! How do you make a good OC, then?!

Simple: make a character, not an OC. And a character requires context. Make a narrative or some universe that will function to relay meaning beyond trivia.

Art is reflective of our world. Make art that means something to you, but can also mean something to others. Then your OC might just become…a character. Something that can inspire artists to draw them without payment. And, if you’re lucky, a good one.

Frillrun

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:49:43 -0400

My entry for the 2024 WeightGaming Gain Jam.

In a distant patch of wilderness, in a time of abundance, a servant serves its mistress. You’ll have to play and see what happens.

Play in browser on Itch!

Download

Linux

Compiling from source code is recommended, check the README.md.

Credits

Pretty much everything was done by me, with the exception of some sounds and the font sourced from freely licensed resources (freesound.org, etc.). The music was done by FraynVGM.

Yet Another Resprite Mod

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:06:01 -0500

Yet Another Resprite Mod is a mod for The Binding of Isaac: Repentance that changes much of the game’s textures to ones I feel more closely replicate the aesthetic featured in the 2011 original Flash version of the game. It intends to be as comprohensive as possible, with the goal of being a full-on texture replacement.

Download

Steam Workshop

Calamity Cobra in 'A Sweeter Reprise'

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 09:55:59 -0400

My entry for the 2023 WeightGaming Gain Jam.

Following the events of ‘A Sweet Surprise’, Calamity Cobra has spent days wandering through the Dessert Desert, vying to return home. Any of the “damage” she incurred from her last bounty hunt has since shed away. Tired, alone, delirious, Calamity Cobra is at wit’s end - until she stumbles upon a humanoid figure in the distance. Observing more closely, it turns out the feminine creature is made out of the same stuff those bastards who surronded her were! Blasting it away without hesitation, all that’s left of the so-called “Dessert Elemental” is a beating heart covered in caramel. Calamity Cobra pockets it, thinking such an odd organ would have some buyers…but in a flash, the Dessert Elemental reforms, and is furiously hungry! Towering wafers enclose Calamity Cobra in a confectionary colosseum, as foes new and old surrond her. It seems that they’re…out for blood, this time! Calamity Cobra’s task is to appease the Dessert Elemental’s rampaging hunger by battling these dangerous desserts and feeding her their remnants.Forming a symbiotic bond with the stalwart serpent, it seems that the Dessert Elemental can turn these goodies into upgrades, too. Calamity Cobra figures she doesn’t have much time…if she can’t restore the Sweet Heart back inside its proper owner, Calamity Cobra may be swarmed by the sweets…

Download

Linux

Compiling from source code is recommended, check the README.md.

Credits

Programming, Art, Sounds

Me.

Music

Nebby

Quantitative Rating Systems SUCK!

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 20:21:12 -0400

2/10 this article blows chunks

“Quantitative rating systems”? What?

Whatever you’d want to call them. Numeric rating systems. You know, your ten out of ten scores, your five star scores, and your A-F grading scores as well. Well, technically, I’m specfiically referring to rating systems using the ratio scale type, and them being applied to mediums which they are not applicable to.

Scale types?

In measurement, there’s a number of different scales of values that different operations can be performed on. Today, we’ll be discussing the ratio, interval, and ordinal scale types.

We begin at the “ratio” scale type. All manner of operations can be used on it. Essentially, it’s just referring to integers, and the many operations you can perform on them. For example, distance is measured in the absolute scale type; you can have zero distance, you can have positive distance, negative distance; you can multiply distance, divide distance, add distance, substract distance, and you can compare the values distances of to see which quantity is lesser or greater.

Then, the next rung down is the interval scale type. It’s akin to the “ratio” scale type, but without a concept of zero, or nothing. A good example is temperature, say in celsius (well, “absolute zero” in terms of temperature refers to something else, but that’s another discussion). What is meant by that is that 0°C does not represent a lack of temperature; the particles are still moving, but it’s merely on this scale that zero still represents a quantity rather than nothing. It still has all the same operations, but with that additional caveat.

The following scale type is the ordinal scale type. This one has all the properties of the interval scale type, but with all operations that add or remove quantities gone. All you have left are comparisons; this scale type exists purely in the qualitative realm. For example, let’s say you have a list of all your favorite foods, and you wish to compare them by taste. Taste is not something you can measure by quantity; it is purely by quality. You can say you prefer a canteloupe to a watermelon, but you hate durians even more than watermelons. You cannot numerically add an interval between tastes, you only have this quality to compare the values between.

So what?

I bring this concept up in regards to the use of the ratio scale type to non-quantitative things. A ratio scale type is appropiate for something that can be determined quantitatively. For example, a math test. You have a set amount of questions, and you can either get them right or wrong. You can measurethe amount of question answered correctly through this scale, and measure different values using this ratio scale type to paint an image of which amounts are larger or smaller, or more correct and less correct.

This rating system has also been brought to the world of media. Films, books, video games, music, are all judged and graded as if they were a test, by reviewers and critics…but this misses the point entirely. These are media, not math tests, and their worth cannot be measured quantitatively.

Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire earned a 7.8 for having “too much water”. But I ask, what does that score accurately mean? If I took a game that likewise had the same score, does that mean that they’re exactly, precisely the same quality? What about an 8.8 video game, like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, supposedly? Is Twlight Princess one “point” better than that other game? What does that even mean? How bad must a game be to score 0/10? There are numerous games with a 10/10 rating system. Are they totally perfect, without flaws? What if a 10/10 game is more fun than another 10/10 game? What does any of this mean?!

I now ask this question: why are we using a quantitative rating system to rate something that is purely qualitative?

Applying a ratio scale type score to something that is wholly qualitative is ultimately utterly incomprehensible. You cannot meaningfully rate anything with this. You can’t meaningfully rate anything with these scores.

I can understand the need for something quick and dirty. You want to gauge the quality of something, so you throw out a number, with some vague agreed societal notion that this number reflects a certain quality. But as time passes, as standards change, tightening or loosening, this system only becomes more and more nonsensical overtime.

Whenever I see something like a video game being graded or ranked with a number, I’m just left to think…what does this even mean? It hardly paints a meaningful depiction of that media’s quality, leaving me guessing on what that actually means.

The Right Scale Type to Use

I’ve complained enough about why a ratio scale type is like putting a square peg in a round hole; it’s simply not sufficient for accurately judging something.

Something that should be rated qualitatively should use a scale type that only has comparisons as its only metrics.

And the ordinal scale type is the one to use for these purposes!

So, throw away your five stars, your ten out of tens, your A-F grading scores, and put them firmly in the bin. It’s time to use an ordinal scale system!

“But!” you might be asking, “how am I to use this new ordinal scale type system to determine which American fast food franchise is the most delicious and the most devastating to my body?!”

Well…

Tier Lists

I am so grateful that tier lists have become more popular in recent ages. It’s as if this problem was silently acknowledged by normies and through an odd turn of events, people have actually been embracing a better solution for quite some time now.

Tier lists are an example of this ordinal scale type. The only operation that can be performed on tiers is comparison. A tier, or an item within said tier, is either higher, lower, or equal to its contemporaries. The only way to measure their values are through ordered comparisons.

And due to this, you can actually paint a proper picture of quality now! You are now unbounded by minimums or maximums, and can rank something as high as low as you please to something else. I can now say that Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is not a “10/10” game, but rather, it is better in comparison to Ace Attorney Trials & Tribulations, and Trials & Tribulations is better than Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

Through this, you can now determine something’s quality by determing merely how it is in comparison to something else. And now there’s so much more clarity because of this! No longer do you need to call a bit of media five stars. You can just say it is better or worse than the media around it.

And you can still use this in the shorthand! You can say a game is an “S tier”, whereas another is a “C tier”, and due to this common rating system, people can perfectly understand what you mean. And you don’t need to limit yourself to those, either; you could say “SS tier” or “Z tier” and people would understand your message just as well. You can have as many arbitrary tiers as you need to rank something’s quality, removing that issue of having multiple “10/10” media.

Another Thing: The Separation of an Experience

I do have one more thing to mention, though.

Let’s say some reviewer plays a game, and chooses to rank its different attributes with different numbers. He’ll rank the game’s sound, its gameplay, its graphics, everything, all with different quantities.

…but what does this even mean?

A game is experienced in the hollistic. You do not listen to its soundtrack, and then indulge in its mechanics, or then be presented with a slideshow of its many textures, models, and shaders. You go through all of this at once. And thus, the experience should be graded as a WHOLE, not in bite-sized pieces.

The Sad Reality

I’ve been a part in some contests or two where rating was a two-hit catastrophe. First, the item being judged is not a math test, it is a qualitative thing whose value cannot have a number attributed to it. And then, second, the judges decided to completely forgo the basic idea of rating the thing as is, and not in nonsensical separations.

Not only that, they don’t even make things simple - they assign some arbitrary amount of points, with arbitrary maximums and minimums, distributing them in god knows which way - and everyone constantly complains about this system not making any sense, and demanding their own changes which do not actually address the fundamental problem of using a ratio scoring scale versus an ordinal one, nor acknowledging the reality of what they’re reviewing.

As proposed earlier, a tier list is a perfect measure for these things. You could even go a step further and order the things within their own tiers for an even clearer picture of quality.

Yes, it may take time to go through all items and compare each of them rather than assigning some arbitrary score. But it’ll be much less headache, I can guarantee you that, and you’ll have made a clearer picture of what each thing’s actual quality is.

Shameless Plagiarism

Much of this article is just reiterating what this video discusses, without all of that YouTuber cruft. I saw this video many years ago and it really just solidified and clarified an issue I’d wanted to verbalize for a very long time.

LambHoot suggests a slightly different ordinal system, assigning an arbitrary “game point” amount for each title he reviewed. The system is nice, but again, I think it still falls into that trap of having arbitrary numbers. It’s more digestible to say a game is “S tier” rather than “this game is worth 500 game points”. You can always make new tiers, or bump things around within their tiers, but let’s say you have a game worth 49 points and a game worth 50 points, and a new game comes around that quality, you’d have to make new numbers and new decimal places to wedge that game within. It’s too much nonsense! A tier list is a better solution, in my eyes.

Takeaway

Stop using “quantitative rating systems” (i.e., ratio scale type scoring systems) for non-quantitative things. Instead of five stars or ten out of ten, use a tier list (or some ordinal scale) to paint a better picture of each item’s quality.

Don’t judge things by their parts, judge them by the hollistic sum of their parts.

Orbit+

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 23:41:43 -0500

A recreation of the 2007 Adobe Flash game by Jacob Grahn (“Jiggmin”).

Don’t let anything touch your white center. Destroy atackers by touching them with their color. Move with your mouse. Spin with WASD/arrow keys. Survive.

An experiment in getting the ropes of OpenGL and implementing an entity component system (ECS).

Download

Linux

Compiling from source code is recommended, check the README.md.

“Ethnica” by NemesisTheory

Credits

Programming/Art

Me.

Concept/SFX

Jacob Grahn (“Jiggmin”)

Play the original

Music

Licensing and You

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:44:50 -0400

If you confide in the liberation the Internet grants you and many billions of users, and you have intentions of contributing anything to it, you should be mindful of licensing anything you put on it. Anything at all.

If you’re authoring something non-trival, that can be seen as valuable for anyone out there and you’re sticking it up on the net, you should be mindful of the restrictions that will automatically be placed upon it if you DON’T license it. Copyright law’s powers are incredibly wide and its breadth continues to expand regularly. If you author ANYTHING, yes, ANYTHING, it will be automatically restricted under copyright. No registration required. Typically, all you would “need” is a simple statement that it is copyrighted to you (e.g., “© 2022 Anonymous”), but even this isn’t necessary. If you publish anything without a word about its use, you will automatically be given the right to restrict any reproduction or redistribution of that work.

That doesn’t sound very cool and neat and liberating as the Internet should be, yeah? You’d want your friends or anyone who could benefit off of your work to be able to use it with less restrictions, yes? Well, tough luck, because if you don’t specify those privileges, legally, they simply can’t. If you state what privileges you’d want your work to have, and if you don’t do so in an all-encompassing manner, you can open yourself up to legal loopholes which could screw you over in the future. Hence why there’s a proliferation of legally sound licenses out there that offer to help you with these sorts of things.

Many people ignore or disregard licenses, and in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to think about this and all. Unfortunately, copyright is a persistent and insidious threat, and its power continues to grow. While the chance is often slight in smaller communities for it to burn you, there’s really no harm in just slapping on a license that ensures there is no legal confusion over a work’s use.

The question is then, what licenses should you be using? Let’s talk about licenses, their distinctions, and what sorts of works merit what licenses.

Software

If you’re not familiar with “free software”, or software that is free. In the context of software, “free” implies that the software possesses the four freedoms, which are:

you can run the software in any way you wish;
you can modify the software in any way you wish, with source code being a prerequisite;
you can share the software with others;
you can share software you’ve modified with others.

Unlike other creative works, there is an imperative for software to be freed. Software is in a unique boat concerning copyright law because it is not just a “creative” work (i.e., its source code being a form of literature in some way), but it can be used in a practical or mechanical way to do things.

You might’ve heard about a man named Theodore Kasczynski. He wrote this great book called “Industrial Society and its Future” which, among MANY other things, its key point is that technology can be used to impact your freedom. If you live in a rock you might believe this, but many other people are starting to wake up to the ways in which technology can negatively impact you, whether it be outright malware or subtly chip away at your privacy. I’ve heard a few tales from family members and even strangers that they left their phone hanging somewhere, and upon having a conversation, words from that conversation were used to send them targeted advertisements. That doesn’t sound very liberating, does it?

Software should serve the users, not the developers. If it servers the developers first and foremost, oftentimes, it can and will be used to exploit you. It’s not just targeted advertising, of course - it’s data collection, subtle psychologically techniques that spur addiction, microtransactions, locking down your system, preventing unauthorized copying, and more. Thus, there is an imperative for software to be free. Software that is not free, or proprietary, should be used with great consideration. Proprietary software may not directly affect your freedom; there may be harmless proprietary programs, but if not, they are certainly harmful in principle, in the context of their presence in society.

I’m not going to hate you if you write some software that you poured you heart into and make it proprietary (i.e., a lot of commercial video games), and sure, it may be harmless, but ultimately I will bemoan the fact that it just won’t respect me or my freedom. Concerning video games, you can make “fake” solutions to this problem (i.e., a modding API) to meet half-way, but unless you just make your software fully free I still will feel restricted and uncomfortable using it.

If you’re a a current or future software developer and agree with these statements, what license SHOULD you use then to be free?

Copyleft vs. Cuck Licenses

A license can be free in the strict sense (i.e., it meets those four freedoms as listed above), but what “free” truly means is in up to debate, and this debate materializes in the form of two camps of software licenses; copyleft licenses, and non-copyleft licenses (or so called “cuck” licenses, more on that later).

A copyleft license is one that says any derivative work must maintain the same license. If a bit of software is under copyleft, then any work which uses code from that software must be redistributed under the same conditions, thus guaranteeing the freedoms of that original work is maintained. An example of a free, copyleft license is the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3.

What if the license does not have this copyleft clause? Thus it is a cuck license. A cuck licensed program may be free, but it is vulnerable to being used in a proprietary program, which may jeopardize the freedoms of the ussers. A cuckold is someone who willingly lets their sexual partner be used by another; a cuck licenser is someone who willings lets their free software be abused by another. I’ll let Luke Smith explain it better for you.

What to use?

I recommend the use of the GNU General Public License v3 (GNU GPLv3) for any non-trivial software you release. It is a free, copyleft license that concisely eliminates any potential injustices users of your software may face, and ensures that it will maintain their freedom.

There is a debate concerning something like the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3), which ensures that software served by a server must also have published source code. Unless you are running software over a server, this isn’t really necessary, but it may ensure additional freedom. Your mileage may vary.

Creative Works

Let’s discuss licensing for…everything else, Software is an important exception to my licensing recommendation, concerning its practical applications. Unlike software, however, art can’t be used to directly exploit people (at least, as far as I know of), so there is a different rationale for it.

For art, I recommend the Creative Commons Zero (CC0)) license; a license that effectively renders your work as public domain and ensures your work is as unencumbered as possible, and with a very permissive license as backup in case your country does not recogize public domain dedications.

Why not something else?

As your resident schizophrenic, I’ve held imaginary debates in my head concerning people challenging my choice of license; why I’ve chosen the one that ensures that it my works licensed under it have as little restrictions as possible. There are benefits to copyright, after all; that’s why it exists, as selfish as it can be!

The Creative Commons organization maintains a wide list of licenses; some free, some not free, with modular clauses, simplifying the process for licensing, as each license is basically one with these clauses added or subtracted:

The “Attribution” (BY) clause; clarifies that the work cannot be reproduced without the author’s name (or pseudonym);
The “Share Alike” (SA) clause; clarifies that the works making use of this work must be shared under the same restrictions (i.e., copyleft)
The “Non-Commercial” (NC) clause; clarifies that your work cannot be used by others for profit, in a rather vaguely-defined manner;
The “No Derivatives” (ND) clause; clarifies that your work cannot be modified or changed.

Just like free software, other creative works can also be free, meeting the same four freedoms (though without the “source code” caveat). Creative Commons hosts three free licenses, those being the CC0, CC-BY, the CC BY-SA, The NC and ND clauses both would make your work non-free, as they would restrict commercial users and users that modify the work respectively. Attributing the author and maintaing the licenses are trivial requirements, and they don’t take away any freedom whatsoever from anybody.

I’m perfectly content with anyone who chooses to license their works under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA; they’re both free licenses and I have no qualms with them. However, I prefer my works to be unencumbered as possible.

Attribution is a pleasant thing to have; it keeps your mind at ease, knowing that for anybody who’s used your work that they can trace its origins back. In this digital era, however, it being a requirement is rather trivial; if your work is notable enough, you can probably easily be found by others on the digital landscape. Trying to misattribute something is a nigh impossibility when there’s such a saturation of information on the internet. If your work really is that personal and notable, your name will be attached to it by default without the need of some attribution clause.

Share-alike is the copyleft clause for any free license. Keeping things free is respectable, but there’s really not a huge imperative for artistic works that merit being licensed under the Creative Commons license versus its nigh necessity for software. Having the license be consistent for the broader work the SA-claused work is attached to just often causes headaches. I’d rather just be grateful for any reuse of my work, not just ones meeting the same license criteria.

Takeaway

For software, I use GPLv3. There is a moral imperative for software to be free and to remain that way; a copyleft license such as the GPLv3 ensures as such. I’d also recommend the AGPLv3 as well.

For any artistic works, there is less reason for it to restrict its use in any way, as it can’t be used to cause grievance, and in accordance with that I recommend the Creative Commons Zero license. I employ this license as a sort of protest against copyright, and I believe artistic works should be wholly unencumbered from its shackles. Copyright is anti-social and counter to human nature and functions incredibly poorly in “spurring creativity”, as it’s been touted to do. By employing the license, I continue that tradition of the spread of culture, and hey, if any of this resonates with you, I hope you do so, too.

Calamity Cobra in 'A Sweet Surprise'

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:35:27 -0400

My entry for the 2022 WeightGaming Gain Jam.

A rugged sharpshooter of the West, Calamity Cobra the snake girl has got the best aim around. However, she’s been presented with a new bounty: an odd sort of creatures that look like…sweets? Entering the Dessert Desert, Calamity Cobra finds herself surrounded by hoards of fiendish treats! She’s got a trick up her sleeve to counter the threat: her patened Snekgun, which fires living snake companions. In this semi-endless wave-based arcade shooter, will Calamity Cobra survive the situation she finds herself in, or succumb to living temptations swarming around her?

Download

Linux

Compiling from source code is recommended, check the README.md.