#overthinkingit

"Well, it's only a matter of time now."

"Time. Hasn't it always been just a matter of time?", Jacob asked.

She replied, "I awake each morning into another lifetime. Should I not live each day like it's my last?"

Jacob, looking serious, said, "I sometimes think past, present, and future exist all at once. The past affects our now, and now affects the future. Some call it the Block Universe, where time is divided into an infinite number of slices. Like a sausage, but made up of reality."

That made Joni laugh. "You mean like some eternal machine grinding away, slice after slice, and we are caught in between like the filling in some fantastic cosmic sandwich?"

This time Jacob laughed. "Yeah, something like that."

In industries where the final product is going to print, the general rules are:

1— Work in RGB, at at least 300dpi at double the printed size (or 600dpi at double the size) unless otherwise noted. Deliver in RGB. The folks in-house are going to convert to CMYK to their profiles set and synced with whatever printer they’re using, and that can vary wildly. Also, everything that’s print still ends up online to sell on a website or post on social and the colors always look better in RGB.

FYI: if you have someone ask you to deliver in CMYK, or you’re going to send something to a printer yourself, keep it RGB until the very last moment, then group it and convert the group to a smart object. This will preserve the layers, but look like it’s been flattened. You can convert that file to CMYK, but if you double click the Smart Object then all the RGB layers are editable. Magic! Obviously this is in Photoshop, but the other programs have versions of this as well.

2 – You can ask what general color profile they’re using, there’s a ton built into most art programs, and all adobe programs. But honestly, there’s so much color correction done in house before something goes tot he printer that we don’t expect an illustrator to know. You have to set DMAX (Maximum Ink Density) depending on what paper and lamination you’re using. Then you also have to know matte lam makes things tend pink, gloss lam makes things tend towards yellow and more contrast. The grittier the matte coating the less dense the blacks, etc etc. In other words, it’s fine to ask, but the answer is probably going to be “don’t worry about it, work in RGB” because you’d never expect to send something from a freelancer straight in the same file to the printer.

—Agent KillFee

A long, long time ago, I had a regular feature on this blog called Sunday Morning Overthinking-It, where I spent too many words discussing the silly interaction of card theming and mechanics. This was pretty fun, and I wrote generally ignored posts about Sure Gamble, The Future Is Now, Team Sponsorship, Dorm Computer, Quality Time (my favorite), and others.

NISEI just released a bunch of new cards in the generally-interested Midnight Sun half of the Borealis cycle, and I was struck by Ghosttongue. A card that looks like it could be pretty useful to play — essentially, I guess, a kind of Pre-Paid VoicePAD (but more powerful, usable more than once per turn). And with a brain core damage cost and not completely insignificant 2-credit install cost. I like this card a lot, and when I start playing again eventually, I’ll definitely fool around with it.

But, what the living hell is going on here thematically?! It’s a cybernetic card, yes, and the title as well as the great art by Martin de Diego Sádaba clearly depicts what part of the body is being replaced: The tongue. It’s literally a robot tongue. A tongue made of metal. A new tongue. It’s a cybernetic tongue. I can’t get over how weird this is to me.

Forgive my ignorance of cyberpunk fiction, but I can’t recall anything where an artificial tongue gave anyone any demonstrable benefits. Of course, in the fiction of Netrunner, events are “things that happen” that are often the actions and activities that a Runner wants to make happen. Since I don’t really play with NISEI cards, forgive me as I use mainly old, rotated FFG cards for example — Easy Mark is, presumably, finding that poor guy with the backpack and convincing him to part with three credits; Inside Job is, presumably, about the Runner figuring out how to get themselves into that bathroom and hack past one of the Corp’s defenses; Jailbreak is about coordinating an attack on a... jail? That gets you... uh, more things (that were in the jail?), while giving you more resources from your own stash of things (that were also somehow in the jail?).

Okay, so that last one got away from me, but you get the idea. Often, Events have some kind of implicit verbality to them — you can talk your way into getting that money or inside the Corp bathroom. And the flavor of Ghosttongue seems to fit this as well: “Arming the resistance with disarming charm" implies that this cybernetic mouth muscle is going to help you, as the player, get to do what you want to do, but costing you a little less money.

So, let’s think about that for a second — what is the tongue actually doing? Is it a tongue that has a little AI in it and it will, I dunno, analyze the situation for you, moving itself around in your mouth to say the perfect word? Since speech is not just about the tongue moving to the right spot in your mouth, how does the rest of your, uh, head figure out what the Ghosttongue is trying to tell you to say? How does your brain keep up with this so that the Ghosttongue-to-brain lag doesn’t make you come off as more awkward?

Another interpretation might be that just flashing your metal tongue, as in the card art, might just confuse or instill pity in whomever you’re trying to give your money to. So, you go in to the Corp offices to use the bathroom, they say “Nah man, you need to give me two credits to do that,” you flash them your shiny tongue and they say, what, “Oof, sorry, you clearly spent your money on some bad decisions, I’ll let you in for 1 credit now.” Or something like that?