The colours captured here and in One Battle After Another (2025), both VistaVision, are so beautifully vivid. For anyone in the know, is it fair to ascribe it to the film stock? My friend and I thought the development might be responsible but it's no different from 35mm?

Finally someone articulating what clearly needed to be said.

Despite your total rejection of free will perhaps making the statement unjust (as much as any punishment or reward), you still have my great thanks for all the wonderful conversations you shepherd. 💜

If only for the benefit that doing some final alterations of SP output is going to happen eventually in Photoshop and one will never suffer having the problem of being too capable in PS.

I love pixl8r myself — I certainly don't want to imply too prescriptive a view. If using SP gives you the results you want or you simply enjoy using it, that's the workflow for you!

I would still recommend just dipping a toe into, as you say, drawing over UVs.

Several! I find its use leads to many games looking too similar at the foundation. I found I didn't become a better digital artist in SP, merely better at using SP contra PS. I feel there's something more tangible and controllable than relying on baked filters or baking in Blender for results.

Some more exotic ammo cases.

Sean Penn reminded everyone that all those Oscars weren't for nothing. I'm stunned. I'm obsessed with Steven J. Lockjaw. He's an absurd character yet all these deeply human universals are expressed so vividly, drawing seemingly every military colonel of the past half-century into a platonic monster.

So many discrete pieces of genius. Like the hydraulic dynamic of the Combine gunship's self-protecting weaponry and turning speed against a laser-guided RPG. It produces something akin to a remote controlled aerial fight with intuitive control and all seamless to the continuity of other action.

Viktor Antonov was a lineal inheritor of the speculative architect Lebbeus Woods. His work and insight are so tangibly and beautifully realised in the shifting, additive, subtractive, angular forms in which a final stasis is denied. Consuming. Overtaking. Combining.

Viktor Antonov was a lineal inheritor of the speculative architect Lebbeus Woods. His work and insight are so tangibly and beautifully realised in the shifting, additive, subtractive, angular forms in which a final stasis is denied. Consuming. Overtaking. Combining.

Recalling the Normandy Landings, there's fight over beachhead emplacements, each with its own curious permutations and escalations to navigate before an Antlion-assisted jailbreak of such incredible empowerment. There could be an entire thread on how skillfully progression is varied area-to-area.

I can't speak positively enough about Black Mesa though I want to emphasize that I utterly adored their expansion of Xen — it felt like receiving a new Valve singleplayer experience after all these years.

One goes from limited ammo physics-based survival horror in Ravenholm to WW2-intensity battles in the apartments of City 17. Airboat chases. Playing catch with a giant robot. The sheer diversity of vignettes wrung from a such simple gameplay grammar is astonishing. The apogee of linear level design.

Thank you so much Joe! That means a lot to me and never fails to motivate me to add alt text.