Hedgehog's harem

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

December 4 is a great day for French retro game revivals on Switch ⊟

It’s a weird, amazing coincidence, but after years (in one case, nine years) of roller-coaster development, two French teams are launching their vintage-inspired games on Switch on the same day, December 4.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom began as a Wonder Boy-inspired Flying Hamster game by The Game Atelier… then the Flying Hamster series connection was excised, the original Wonder Boy creator came on board, all the graphics and animation were redone, and now it’s a proper Wonder Boy sequel in everything but name.

The hand-drawn 2D remake of Toki was announced in 2009 as a WiiWare/XBLA game (with a PS3 version possible as well)… and has only now resurfaced, three Nintendo platforms later. And now, surprise! It’s just one of like a million Switch games coming out. I’m excited to see both of these!

Delbin is a blessing! Thank u Nicholas Kole for the new Spyro designs !

Mario’s in-game texture from this distance is a lot less detailed, so the pupils ended up less visible. You can also see that the emblem on his hat is a lot blurrier.

(And, really, if you’ll allow me to be blunt for a second, if there’s one kind of post I really don’t like at Supper Mario Broth, it’s the misguided attempts at technical explanations. Other gamer™ places like “Digital Foundry” often get that wrong too or just thoughtlessly regurgitate marketing talk.)

Games don’t “switch” to lower quality textures in the distance (mipmapping) to save processing power, they do it to avoid aliasing*. That’s mipmapping.

Aliasing isn’t just a thing that can happen to geometry edges, it can also happen from shader effects (such as tight specularity on normal maps); this is why temporal screen-space AA is a strong solution, because it helps address issues that traditional AA (MSAA, etc.) does nothing against.

(*The one exception to this is when games have lots of very high res textures that they have to juggle between; that’s “texture streaming” and aims to keep the highest mip levels for stuff near you in video memory, and lower mip levels for far away stuff)

Broadly speaking, texture aliasing happens when you have more texels (texture pixels) than you can display in a single screen pixel. Ideally, you want the ratio of texel-to-pixel to be as close as possible to 1:1. So if we display less texels far away (where there are less screen pixels to display things), our textures won’t create aliasing.

You might remember some weird texture crawling/shimmering in PS2 games (like Shadow of the Colossus, IIRC). This is because some textures back then didn’t have mipmapping present. Why? Because mipmapping costs you about 35% more video memory. On top of the texture itself, you also have to store a quarter of your texture, then a quarter of a quarter, then a quarter of a quarter of a quarter, and so on. In percentages, this would be about 100% + 25% + 6.25% + 1.56%… and so on.

The PS2 had limited memory so sometimes they had to do that tradeoff.

Left: no mipmapping, a crawly aliased mess.

Right: mipmapping present, no crawling, no aliasing, but some blurriness.

Mipmapping is also what makes “texture quality” settings work on PC. Don’t have enough video memory to fit everything at once? Just tell the game to load most textures one mip level down. Suddenly they’re 25% the size in memory.

Now there are two big things of relevance here.

1. HOW MIPMAPS ARE GENERATED

Mipmaps are almost always pre-generated when the texture file is created. There are lots of debates on what’s the best approach to generate them, in fact. How can you try to represent the most amount of perceptually visible frequency/energy when you are doing it with a quarter of the pixels each step down? (half the resolution = ¼ the pixels)

You can read more about it here:

http://number-none.com/product/Mipmapping,%20Part%202/index.html

Naive approaches will create mipmaps that may be overly blurry and lose their visual energy in the wrong ways. For Mario’s eyes up here, it may be that the surrounding white of his eyes will start encroaching too much on the blue, like in the first “17″  up here.

2. HOW MIPMAPS ARE DISPLAYED

It’s one thing to have your textures and their mipmaps, but you still gotta know how to display them. The naive approach: bilinear filtering. This usually refers to interpolating texels when the texels are bigger than each screen pixel. Before bilinear filtering we only had what we now refer to as “nearest neighbor” or “point sampling”. It means “just display whatever texel is the nearest neighbor of the pixel on screen, no fanciness here”.

That’s nearest neighbor vs. bilinear.

The next step up is trilinear, then anisotropic filtering.

Anisotropic filtering will sample more texels for each screen pixel, thereby reducing the blurriness of mipmapping while still not causing texture aliasing.

IIRC Mario Odyssey uses trilinear. I don’t remember seeing a Nintendo game ever using anisotropic. I do remember a funky case with Super Mario 3D Land using trilinear for everything but normal map / spec mip transitions were bilinear. (weird!)

OKAY BUT WHAT ABOUT MARIO’S EYES

How does all this pertain to the Mario Odyssey thing?

SMO has dynamic resolution scaling. While docked, the game will switch anywhere between 1280x720 and 1600x900 to maximize resolution while prioritizing 60 frames per second first and foremost. In portable mode, it does something even crazier: it halves the horizontal resolution, creating an anamorphic 640x720 image, and odd/even vertical columns alternate each frame; the horizontal axis is effectively interleaved, which is a very cool trick. You can see that things will be more aliased in motion that way but the technique is practically invisible for static images.

ANYWAY, when you enter the camera mode, Super Mario Odyssey will drop the framerate to 30 and maximize resolution. I think it also toggles 2xMSAA on but I can’t remember.

Because we suddenly have more screen pixels, it means that, well, we have more screen pixels to represent the same amount of texels. Therefore, all mipmap levels get pushed back a bit. Here’s an example with Half-Life 2 (set to bilinear filtering). Each band of color represents a different mipmap level.

Therefore Mario’s eyes are most likely going one mip level back up. You can see the same thing on his hat.

Fun fact: I did the above GIF when “Digital Foundry” grossly misinformed people about texture filtering. They claimed that Breath of the Wild had better “texture filtering” on Switch than Wii, because the mipmap transitions started further away. Nope, that’s just because Zelda BOTW runs at 900p on Switch and 720p on Wii U.

I think it’s great that people are interested about the technical side of games and I will always encourage curiosity of everything around yourself, whether it’s games or how bread is made. But please be careful and mindful when you do that. Joe Wintergreen explains it better than me:

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If Article 13 is approved, European People might be basically banned from uploading any fan content. 

You won’t get new fanfics from people in Europe.

You won’t get new gifs from people in Europe.

You won’t get new fanart from people in Europe.

Because they’ll be automatically filtered and blocked!

We might leave Tumblr and other fandom pages.

And if we’re getting all our content blocked? 

You might lose some of your favourite followers/mutuals.

You might not get to read the rest of that fic you’re dying to read - simply because the writer lives in the wrong country.

So do whatever you can to help us stop this.

Reblog this.

Me now: Wow okay yeah these broke disasters drowning in debt and picking up part-time gigs to supplement the meager pay from their crap job working for an evil boss are ONE THOUSAND PERCENT in their twenties, huh.