Acayl's Journals -- Fur Affinity [dot] net

Megaplex

General | Posted 10 years ago

I've never been to a con before, but Megaplex will be close enough to home that it'll make a good first con I think.

Thanks to having been double-hired by my school's tutoring program, I have somewhere in the realm of $1000-$1200 of savings to my name now, scattered across various locations and secret stashes. The better part of that is free for me to use on that con.

I plan on staying for the whole thing.

I haven't reserved a room yet. I'm wondering if there's a group or anyone else interested in going I can share living arrangements with. If it's a group, or someone I already know irl, I'd be happy to share funds with them.

So yeah, throwing that out there just in case.

^.=.^

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Acayl's favorite tracks / influences ^.=.^

General | Posted 10 years ago

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General update

General | Posted 10 years ago

So now I'm all graduated out and moved back to my hometown. I did pretty much all of my unpacking already, so that's done. :)

I'm back with my mom and dad's house for the time being. Next step now is to start looking at job opportunities around town.

Once that happens, what will probably happen next is I'll start looking for my own place. I'm going to want at least two rooms - one for my bedroom and one for a recording studio.

I'm still without any kind of recording studio right now. The house is not very conducive for recording because it's not very big, there isn't a lot of space, and there's a lot of noise due to my dogs, the television, and so forth.

This will be a good opportunity I think to go back to doing ambient practices as a way to get some more experience with FL Studio.

Wish me luck on all this. :)

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There's a problem with the uncanny valley theory.

General | Posted 10 years ago

If you don't know what the "uncanny valley theory" is, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K1Kd9mZL8g

But yeah I'm pretty much just picking nits at the way the chart is usually drawn.

First of all it assumes that the chart is exactly alike for every individual. Though saying that oversimplifies it, I think. I get the point that it's supposed to be a collective average of all of our individual tastes. But if we want to take aesthetics seriously, we can't ignore the individual level. Especially since what we experience individually is more directly part of our world than any collective average. So we have to consider the individual variations of the uncanny valley charts.

When we do that, we realize that different individuals have slightly different charts.

Now usually the uncanny valley is drawn with the photorealism peak higher than the stylized peak. I think the main point is really that the part between the uncanny valley and the photorealistic ideal is very, very steep. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the photorealistic peak is higher than the stylized peak before it. But the way the graph is drawn assumes that, and I think it partly results from the hasty assumption that reality is more ideal than stylization, that the human form is the center of the aesthetic world and that all of our artistic endeavors have depicting the realistic human as the final goal.

That might seem a bit extreme to say at first, except that people in ages like the Renaissance and Classical eras have explicitly stated this. And even today a lot of us still assume that underneath cultural practices like furry is an attempt to realize a "human" kind of expression, as if the concept of human was in every way inseparable from self-expression, objective truth or not.

Some of us, I think, prefer the stylized ideal instead. That means there are some individual charts where the stylized peak is higher than the photorealistic peak. What that means essentially is that some of us find the real world aesthetically tiring, and prefer the stylized world for being aesthetically superior and more life-affirming.

That's the whole point of furry, I think. For some of us, the stylized world (the animals, the caricatures, the cartoons) is aesthetically superior to reality, and is the true paragon of art. We aren't human-centric, or reality-centric. It's not about whether the thing looks human enough, it's more important that it looks expressive enough, and that means quite decidedly rejecting those aspects of the realistic human we find lifeless. Humans aren't the only things in the world with recognizable emotions, and most furries I think understand this intuitively. We don't care about the human world or about reality for aesthetic purposes. The only purpose of the real world for us is practical - eating, paying bills, etc. - while the real end goal is to bring alive the world of stylized art, which for us is the superior world.

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best game ever

General | Posted 10 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxtCIHiceUY

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Music Update :)

General | Posted 10 years ago

I'm making an album. :)

Just now finished the instrumental recordings.

furrymusicians was kind enough to share with me some very helpful tips on improving my vocal quality (since I've only started singing January of this year), and I'm going to go back and try to redo whatever I have the time for.

Problem is, I only have this dorm studio until Thursday, and then I move back to my hometown. So I have to do all my vocals within this span of time (including stuff I have to do for some other people for remixes, collabs, etc.).

After that, I'm thinking of going back to the digital ambient practices for a while. I could use some more practice with FL Studio, I think.

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50 watchers :D

General | Posted 10 years ago

Thanks to everyone for choosing to watch me, whether it be for my music, my character, or because you know me by irl connections. :D

Of course, 50 is a pretty small benchmark on FA, but since being a musician on FA is a lot harder than being an artist, and since I'm not on any other sites yet, I appreciate it quite a bit!

Again thanks to everyone

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What makes the FNAF series so good? (warning tl;dr)

General | Posted 10 years ago

Yeah it might be a bit tl;dr, but I thought it was interesting.

Lately I've been in a Markiplier mood and blazed though some old videos of his, and I also revisited some of his old videos of Five Nights at Freddy's 1 and 2. I couldn't help but think there's something really uniquely cool about the basic idea of the game, and it got me thinking.

I might have a working theory. A game theory, hehe, except instead of looking at the lore, it looks into what makes the "feel" of the games click so well for so many of us.

I call it the Backstage Effect. It starts out with bright colors and friendly faces, but after a while you can peek through the cracks and notice the scary machines behind it all. The eerie machines and darkness back there don't belong. But it's behind all the bright colors and friendly faces and driving them. That tends to give off an unsettling sense of, "it's all just superficial, and what's driving them on the inside is in fact something very different, hiding from us." A good example of that I think is the industrial employee tunnels you find beneath Disney World.

Horror uses the Backstage Effect a lot. Pretty much everything that uses children's themes does it, like demonic teddy bears, demonic little girls, demonic clowns, etc. They give an outside appearance of something nice, friendly, and following the laws of physics, but later reveal a core beneath that's hostile, violent, and violating physics as we know it. The contrast between the friendly outside and the sinister inside, the feeling that the inside "doesn't belong" and yet is the essence controlling the outside, is what makes it work so well in horror. It's all about *contrast*.

Sometimes physics is all you need. SCP-173 is a statue. Statues are supposed to stay in one place. But when you blink or look away, it moves to a different place. Even without its homocidal tendencies, that's enough to make it creepy. SCP-173 appears to be one thing, but turns out to have a completely different inner essence. That's the Backstage Effect.

What makes Five Nights at Freddy's stand out as a horror franchise, I think, is that it employs the Backstage Effect not just once, but on multiple levels at the same time:

1. You're an employee working literally *behind the scenes* of the kids' restaurant. Already you're being exposed to the bowels of the restaurant where the kids don't belong, with industrial doors and phone guy's "I'm working" tone of voice not really fitting in with the spirit of being kid friendly. And yet that's the core that drives the restaurant. The cheapness, the "hollowness," of the restaurant gives it the Backstage Effect, kind of like seeing the industrial employee tunnels underneath Disney World. Seeing the restaurant from an employee's point of view makes it a little creepy, even without any of the monsters you see later.

2. At first, the movements of the animatronics seem to be just the way phone guy described them. Ok yeah, they're programmed to move around at night, and yeah they're programmed to act as if I were an endoskeleton without a suit, so yeah I should just be careful they don't accidentally see me. But later, when you see them staring at you and focusing so intensely on you, that's when you start to think, "Maybe it's not so accidental, but they're *deliberately* trying to get to me. Maybe it's not just lifeless programming. Maybe the animatronics actually *know* I'm here and *want* me dead..."

Also if you think about it, the two levels are kind of inverses of each other when it comes to *living* vs. *dead*:

On the 1st level, the restaurant *appears* to be full of life and colorful friendly animals, but *turn out* to be all run by lifeless machines.

On the 2nd level, the animatronics *appear* to be lifeless machines, but *turn out* to have living spirits on the inside.

In a way, the demonic supernatural side of the restaurant in FNAF almost serves to correct the cheapness of the restaurant itself. It's all kind of one big closure that way. It's almost as if the souls of the dead children were taking revenge for being lied to by the restaurant, and forcing that lie to become the truth by bringing Freddy and his friends to life.

Further, without all the scary monsters and the supernatural, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza seems to be a very cliche concept for a kid's restaurant. The cliche of it makes it feel dead. If you were a kid and you went there, you wouldn't really notice that except maybe as a vague, unsetting notion. What better way to put that unsettling notion to rest than to do the work of bringing Freddy and his friends to life by yourself. To *be* Freddy, and Foxy, and so forth.

Even further, I wonder if that's what furry means to a lot of us? Filling a void. Bringing life to something that needs life but feels dead. Closure. We grew up with things very similar to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, like Disney characters, Pokemon, etc., and these things are where a lot of our inspiration as furries come from. By themselves, they feel dead, cheap, cliche, the products of soul-deadening commercialism. By doing the work of bringing them to life ourselves, by distorting them into our own visions of them, we're doing a good, we're making right.

So yeah, theories. But I like it when the theories not only try to explain the lore and the plot, but also try to explain the *feel* of the game as well.

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Megaplex

Acayl's favorite tracks / influences ^.=.^

General update

There's a problem with the uncanny valley theory.

best game ever

Music Update :)

50 watchers :D

What makes the FNAF series so good? (warning tl;dr)

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Megaplex

Acayl's favorite tracks / influences ^.=.^

General update

There's a problem with the uncanny valley theory.

best game ever

Music Update :)

50 watchers :D

What makes the FNAF series so good? (warning tl;dr)

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