From our review of the physical, biological, and ecological consequences
of scaling, we know that creating plausible species is not a trivial
matter. However, it is still possible to look at nature and extrapolate
the adaptations found in real organisms to provide some modest
grounding.
Bone Strength
Cortical bone recieves its strength from the biomineralization of
hydroxyapatite. This sets a limit on the forces a bone can endure, and
therefore on the size of an organism—even whales who benefit from
bouyancy contend with the pressures put upon their spine while swimming.
Indeed, our current understanding of biomechanics suggests that
prehistoric megafauna such as T. Rex moved relatively slowly, as to do
otherwise would have lead to severe injury.
Looking to nature, we see there exist organims that use stronger
materials than hydroxyapatite and keratin: beavers, limpets, abalones,
scaly-foot snails, and probably many more. The best materials of this
selection provide strengths on the order of 10x greater than bone. Since
strength, measured in Pascals, scales with area, we are forced to take
the square root—yeilding bones that can support creatures 3x more
massive.
Looking instead to material science, we can see that there exists
ceramics and nano-engineered carbon allotropes that rise to roughly 100x
greater strength, or 10x larger organisms.
Metabolism
Smaller warm-blooded organisms are more vulnerable to the cold than
larger ones, expending more energy per unit mass to maintain their
temperature. On the other hand, larger organisms retain heat too well
and experience difficulty in dissipating it.
An interesting adaptation in this direction is heterothermy, where the
organism can shift their metabolic rate to match their circumstances.
This allows small, warm blooded animals to resist starvation over the
course of the night.
Vocalisation Pitch
I, personally, do not like the trope of tinies having high-pitched
voices. Although it logically follows from scaling laws, it is tied too
deeply to unseriousness for me to want to utilise it. Furthermore,
higher pitches are arguably maladaptive—higher pitches attenuate more
than lower ones, which reduces the utility of sound for communication.
The Koala is an example of a small organism that has adapted its vocal
tract to produce sound more in line with that of an elephant.
Eye Size
The optics of eyes effectively implies an ideal size, which is why eyes
are proportionally larger on smaller animals and proportionally smaller
on megafauna. I say implies because there does exist one major reason to
increase eye size—light intake. This allows you to justify giants
having human-like eye proportion by arguing their host star is dimmer
than our own. As for tinies, conventional optics can be circumvented by
the use of nanoscale structures to produce a super-lens.
AI Dungeon
AI Dungeon is a non-traditional single and multi-player text adventure
that uses OpenAI’s GPT models to infer game responses. Because the
world and parser model are left to the AI to infer, AI Dungeon is
extremely versatile in what it can do.
Commentary
Despite all the promise of AI-powered text adventures, AI Dungeon
painfully under-delivers when it comes to ESD content. To add further insult to injury, the
companies behind it (Latitude and OpenAI) have gradually reduced the
quality of the product as a consequence of both cost-savings and
misguided "improvements". I would not recommend paying for more than a
month or two, as by that time you’ll have likely grown bored or
frustrated with the limitations.
Note on Privacy
AI Dungeon has significant issues with user privacy. Fundamentally, all
input must be sent as cleartext to OpenAI in order for them to produce
the GPT completion
This is not strictly true;
homomorphic encryption techniques open the possibility of computing over
encrypted data. However, the field has only recently achieved performant
algorithms and their implementations, so the technology is not
widespread as of writing.
. OpenAI is owned by Microsoft
Research, which, as part of the greater Microsoft family, is in
compliance with the U.S.A’s surveilance apparatus
Per Snowden leaks
. Furthermore, subscription requires
payment which requires identifying information.
Latitude has also shown a startling disregard for proper software
engineering and security principles, culminating in the discolsure that
any user could freely access the entire database
AI Dungeon Public Disclosure Vulnerability Report - GraphQL Unpublished Adventure Data Leak
. This does not seem to be
merely accidental, as the strong religious conscience of the developers
has inspired them to implement increasingly invasive measures against
their users such as scanning logs for keywords and reporting them
despite the legality under U.S. law
Content moderation and user privacy, Wikipedia
.
Guide
Don’t Use Negatives (Always Use Positives!)
A limitation of GPT is that it is not very good at understanding logical
negation. A statement such as “there are no cars” counter-intuitively
signals to the AI that the following text has something to do with cars,
and therefore leads to a higher probability of a car appearing than
simply not mentioning them. The only way to prohibit unwanted content,
then, is to ensure the context is one in which the undesired content is
likely to appear. For instance, signalling to the AI that the text
concerns a medieval fantasy world reduces the chance that any modern
technology will appear.
Avoid Tropes
Because GPT is built to produce the expected continuation of an input,
it is prone to falling into "attractors" of extremely common
situations. This leads to everything from unwelcome stereotypes and
confusions when a well-known term is used, to certain stories being
effectively impossible because the AI considers it incredibly unlikely.
For a general list of attractors, see Known Attractors
Examples:
lesbians growing dicks
A simple example of this is how sex scenes involving homosexuals almost
always morphs into heterosexual scenes. Lesbians will grow penises, and
gays vaginas.
couples insertion
Aliens
Even armed with the knowledge of what is possible, we are still
ignorant of what is probable. Part and parcel to this is the problem
of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
The Big Alien Theory
Amusingly, I am not the first to write about the size of aliens in a
serious manner. No, Dr. Fergus Simpson along with his excellent
website is the first. For the
convenience of controlling the narrative, I will recount his theory in
condensed form.
Statistically, it is more likely for you to be a member of a larger
group than a smaller group—that is, one should expect to be amongst
the more populous species. This is essential because it neatly sidesteps
the issue of the Copernican principle—that we should expect ourselves
to be unremarkable.. Now, if we know we’re likely to be more populous
than average, then we can speculate that
A curious corollary of the BAT is that although a randomly selected
alien species is likely to be larger than us, the species we meet at
first contact has the potential to be much smaller. This is because a
populous species has more potential for technological development and
space exploration.
A More Physical Approach
The big alien hypothesis, while general, is exceedingly vague. The
numbers we get for size are driven by assumptions on terrestrial life.
Limits of Planet Size, Gravity
Roughly, we can infer planets with lower gravity will produce larger
organisms and the converse—in line with the BAT. To maintain a
habitable atmosphere, a planet must have an escape velocity roughly 6x
higher than the RMS of the kinetic velocity of the gasses at habital
temperatures. Curiously, the escape velocity and surface gravity are not
linearly related, which allows us to have small planets with thick
atmospheres.
The density of a planet (ignoring the atmosphere) can be no lower than
900kg/m3—the density of water-ice. In practice, planets are usually
going to be denser than 5t/m3 because silicates are likely to make up
the majority of even ligher Earth-like planets. The exception to this
rule is the theoretical ocean world, where the majority of the planet
by mass is water—allowing for densities around 1t/m3.
A digression from this line of thought are moons with subsurface oceans
such as Ganymede. These bodies have the benefit of being able to exist
arbitrarily far from the godilocks zone by virtue of recieving their
heat from the tidal stresses of their orbit. Ganymede has a density of
roughly 2t/m3 due to it being composed in roughly equal parts of water
and silicates.
Planet Frequency
The Red Sky Paradox suggests that most habitable planets would orbit .
We can consider that ocean worlds would insulate their life from stellar
radiation.
Selection Pressures
Cope’s rule states that
lineages tend to increase in body size over time. Lilliput
effect where following
mass extinctions, you see organisms trending smaller.
In hotter climes, endotherms benefit from being smaller while ectotherms
recieve more energy with which they can support larger bodies.
Bergmann’s Rule
states that animals get larger in colder climates, and this has been
observed even in some ectotherms.
A lack of predation encourages species to grow, while a lack of food
encourages them to shrink.
Organisms generally trend larger due to the inherent efficiency that
comes with size. On the other hand, populations shrink accordingly -
exposing the species to greater risk of extinction.
Ocean creatures really do have a tendancy to being larger, and an
interesting example of this is deep-sea
gigantism where it is
not merely bouyancy responsible.
Jarman-Bell
Principle states
that larger animals can get away with lower quality diets, which can be
abused to infer that declining food quality or increasing competition
over highly nutritious foods would lead some species to gigantism to
cope.
Technological Pressures
It is possible to have planets whose escape velocity is too great for
chemical rockets if the radius is 1.5x or the mass 2x greater than that
of Earth’s. On the other hand, habitable moons would greatly encourage
spaceflight due to decreasing the difficulty of escape and having an
abundance of nearby bodies to explore. The only barrier would be the
presence of radiation fields around the parent body.
Aquatic organisms would face hurdles in technological development.
Assuming they secure a source of heat for metalworking, water is more
reactive and thermally conductive than air.
Avoiding Rubber Foreheads
So far I have kept the discussion focussed on size and the factors &
consequences relevant to it. Here, I hope to digress from the topic of
this website to instead focus on all the other aspects of hypothetical
alien species—their shapes, niches, and size-unrelated psychologies.
This is simply because I’m tired of all the exceedingly humanoid aliens
or fantasy races in fiction; we have unlimited potential in the medium,
yet we squander it on what effectively constitutes humans in cosplay.
Alien Bodyplans
The human figure is somewhat unique across all the animal species. While
there are others that rear onto their hindlegs or are exclusively
bipedal, we are the only ones to have a combination of flexible forearms
and running gait. Such a body has its advantages and disadvantages; we
are far more efficient at running than other animals, but our spine is
still relatively unsuited to our posture. It is possible therefore to
imagine there are others that share our form. However, this should not
be confused with a necessity: the use of tools, of language and
intelligence does not appear to be contingent on the human bodyplan.
Therefore, what are the other possibilities? How likely are they?
Here I’ll try to list unusual bodyplans to inspire.
Scorpions.
"Ruberneckers". By this I mean animals like the ostrich or
swan, whose long and flexible neck serves as a manipulating limb in
conjunction with the mouth.
Limpets. We usually associate mollusks with snails and slugs who
spend a lot of their time outside the safety of their shells.
Limpets and barnacles are interesting because they instead seal
themselves against a surface to maximise their defense—looking for
all the world like some coral growth.
Jellyfish & Nautilus. Long, dangling tentacles.
Preying Mantis. Looks much in the way of some insectiod centaur.
Centipedes. Long, segmented bodies that are on historical record
as having been able to scale to several feet in length. They would
have the benefit of their forelegs and/or mandibles being
potentially useful manipulating limbs.
Long Lizards/Legged Snakes. Snakes had a common ancestor with
legs. In an alternate universe, some might have kept their forelegs
as manipulators much in the way of the popular conception of the
naga.
Opabinia. And other Cambrian-era creatures had delightfully
alien forms, some of which with limbs that had the potential to
become manipulators.
Niches
Grazer
Scavenger
Frutivore
Nectarivore
Ambush Predator
Trapper
Persistance Hunter
Forager
Rooter
Grubber
Filter Feeder
Parasite (Leech)
Parasite (Egg-Layer)
Sexes
It’s a bit of a trope for people to suggest aliens with multiple sexes,
but not really have a clear idea of what that might entail. This is
largely because efficiency tends to lie in simplicity, and two sexes
represents the minimum necessary for sexual reproduction. However, there
do exist interesting and reasonable multi-sex systems, which I’ll list
below.
Protozoa. There exists protozoa which during reproduction, split
their macronucleus into one of seven possible "sex-types". In
order for them to sucessfully reproduce, they need to find another
protozoa with a germinal macronucleus of another sex-type.
Immediately, we see that this is no worse than a binary sex division
because the chance of not being compatible with a random partner is
only one in seven—better, in fact, than a binary division if
immediacy of reproduction is important. It is also interesting to
note that the sex-type of the offspring is different from both
parents.
Ambystoma Salamanders. Here, you have a species of salamander
that cheats on having to perform sexual selection by instead relying
on three other species in its genus to do the job for it. All the
female has to do is mate with a male of each of the three
neighboring species to produce viable offspring, guaranteeing
genetic diversity and piggybacking off of their fitness.
Hallmarks of Ameteurish Writing
Ordered from worst to least offensive.
Talking Heads/Pseudo-Script
As an artform descended from stories told by mouth, the rythm and flow
of language is an essential part of bringing it all to life. When the
text is entirely composed of dialogue, it becomes hard to imagine the
scene and consequently immerse oneself in the story. If you struggle to
"fill in" the dialogue-heavy scenes, consider that body language is an
essential part of communication. More than that, the parts of the room
we occupy, the image of the things we look at—it all contributes to
exposing the depth of the characters.
Thesaurus Spagghetti
Good prose (usually) isn’t repetitive; so when you lack words, it feels
necessary to use synonyms to hide the repetition. Unfortunately, this
ends up creating a worse problem in the inevitable misuse of these
unfamiliar synonyms. Instead, one should take a deep breath and forgive
themself of not reading a dictionary cover-to-cover. Most of the time,
repetition is a symptom of telling and not showing; if you were showing,
you wouldn’t need to use the same words anyway. Otherwise, don’t be
afraid to use names and references instead of referring to things
descriptively.
Xette Men
The suffix "-ette" is typically used to refer to women or feminine
entities. However, novice writers frequently use terms like "brunette"
to refer to men, which smacks of ignorance (despite the dictionary
definition allowing for it) especially when the masculine "brunet"
exists where "-et" refers to a smaller part of something else
(possibly metaphysical). This actually stems etymologyically from the
French, where "-ette" and "-et" are feminine and masculine
equivalents.
Pleonasm
Few things are as cringe-worthy as redundant adjectives. "Black
darkness", "burning fire", and "ATM machine". The first two
examples are pleonasms,
Non-Speech Actions as Dialogue Tags
“I’ve got you now,” she smirked. Shorthand, comes across as lazy.
Purple Unicorn Syndrome
In MLP:FiM the characters are all brightly coloured equines of distinct
races. This works to help distinguish the characters, but as a
consequence, invited many of novice writers to rely on these
distinguishing features in an effort to "show, not tell". Sadly, this
usually results in poor, repetitive prose. Instead, you should not be
afraid to use pronouns or names.
Adjective Salad
"Show, don’t tell," is the usual advice given to creative writing
students, but unfortunately its brevity results in vagueness; too many
students end up thinking that the liberal use of adjectives works to
show rather than tell. It does not. Showing is more fundamental, and
manifests as telling the reader about the consequent phenomena of what
they want to show. Don’t say "the bright moon", talk about how the
clouds form a halo about it and how your eyes need to adjust to the
increased light.
A Borrower’s-Eye View of Construction Techniques
Generally speaking, borrowers are written to live in the unused spaces
of houses where one would realistically expect to find vermin. These are
places such as the crawl space, beneath the floorboards, the gaps inside
the walls, non-convertible attics, and accessory buildings such as
sheds. This may be extended into modernity with dropped ceilings, raised
floors, and decks. In order to better understand these spaces and how
they might be exploited, I’ll proceed to overview each kind, describing
their purpose, location, and exploitation.
Crawl Space
blank
Suspended Timber Floor
It turns out that the ground floor of a building isn’t the only one
with hidden space beneath its floorboards. In Victorian era houses, it
was common to create a suspended floor in order to provide ventilation.
Walls
Within house construction, a prevailing technique is the use of frames
to reduce material costs. In the case of light framing, the walls are
often left hollow—only covered by a thin layer of drywall nailed to
the "ribs" (studs) for support.
Attics
Not all attics are tall enough to be converted into rooms.
Accessory Buildings
This is merely a general term for buildings not intended for habitation.
Sheds, barns, stables, etc. may all serve as spaces for borrowers to
make their homes.
Dropped Ceilings & Raised Floors
Between the accelerating pace of technological advancement, the
unreliability of said technology, and the need to cut costs, the use of
panelled false floors and ceilings for easy access to utility space is
obvious.
Decks
Decks and some accessory buildings are known to be built in a suspended
fashion. The space underneath them is therefore usable to borrowers.
Communities
The following is a list of communities within the ESD sphere of interest
sorted by presence. This list is by no means authoritative; it merely
represents my best efforts to understand the general dynamics of a vast
number of individuals. Generally speaking, a group of people are
considered a distinct community if they maintain dedicated websites
and/or actively produce art that is not incorporated into a community
that does.
This page is far from complete, and anyone looking to contribute is
welcomed to do so. In particular, I am looking for information regarding
the history of these communities, although anything from critique
regarding the page itself to hyperlinks is very much appreciated.
Giantess
Likely the largest community within ESD, the GTS community centers
around fetishistic aspects of not only macro-giantesses, but most size
content concerning smoothies (non-zoomorphic humanoids). It is named due
to the trinity of sites that form the major centers of activity:
*city,
*world, and
*booru.
Outside of the English-speaking world,
gs-uploader serves as a dedicated
hub for Japanese artists to publish their work.
Demographics
This community is primarily composed of heterosexual males from all
across the globe. There do exist a number of females and less common
sexualities, however, and to my knowledge there exists no serious issues
with hostile behaviour.
Micro/Macro
The furry ESD community. While the name is even less authoritative than
GTS, the prevalent use of the component terms by furries distinguishes
it from the former. To my knowledge, the community is not especially
isolated—forming sub-communities within general-purpose furry
websites. However, there are a number of dedicated Micro/Macro
communities worth mentioning.
Giant/Tiny
Unlike the other major communities, the G/T community is remarkable for
having a strong emphasis on non-sexual aspects of ESD. Despite lacking a
popular dedicated website, the community distinguishes itself by its
relative isolation from the GTS community. Art is rarely imported or
exported, perhaps due to the divided stance on sexual content, and the
community gathers itself via small groups and channels under variations
of the name. The consistency with which "Giant/Tiny" is used as makes
it the de-facto title for the community.
Demographics
The G/T community appears to consist largely of heterosexual females,
with a minority of homosexual females and other groups. This shows in
the preponderance of works featuring male giants and female tinies.
Shrunken Women
Giant Male
Culture in Scaling
What customs might exist as a consequence of extreme sizes? The
different physical, biological, ecological, and psychological concerns
opens up a plethora of possibilities. Here, I’ll attempt to outline any
interesting customs, habits, or artefacts that would come about as a
consequence.
Produce Sculpting
While anyone who’s celebrated Halloween would be at least passingly
familiar with pumpkin carving, a civilisation of micros has the
opportunity to take such a practice to new levels. This is because
micros too would benefit from breeding produce to be larger, and the
existance of entire hotels sculpted from ice implies there would be
interest in experimenting in plant matter.
Water Juggling
At a smaller scale, surface tension becomes more significant to the
point where at mouse-size, water droplets behave a lot more like jelly
than what we are familiar with at our own scale. This would give rise to
a tradition of juggling said droplets, with the added entertainment
value being how improper handling would lead to the droplet breaking
apart and soaking the would-be juggler.
Straws over Cups
At a certain scale, the surface tension of water makes filling cups
impractical without making a mess. There is also the concern of how
water is more dangerous at those sizes. Insects deal with this by using
a probocis, and micros could do similar by the use of straws that neatly
puncture the water’s surface.
Mountains as No-Man’s Land
Human territory tends to cover all the land it can, regardless of how
habitable it is—the glaring exception is ocean. This is arguably
because the ocean cannot support long term habitation the same way even
inhospitable climes can. At smaller scales, sensitivity to low
temperatures increases, which might encourage micros to see mountains
and other perpeturally-cold environments the same way we do oceans -
only drawing borders out a little ways in.
Nudity Culture & Outdoor Sleeping
The nudity taboo very likely evolved out of the need for clothes to
protect against exposure to the elements (and also to manage birth
rates). However, past a certain scale, maintaining body temperature is
no longer much of an issue, so it’s plausible that macros would be less
concerned about clothing than we are, and conversely, micros would be
even more conscientious.
Furthermore, the reduced concern over exposure and the implicit
protection against wildlife that size offers means that macros would
also be more likely to casually sleep outdoors.
Strange Flours, Strange Breads
Did you know that you can make flour out of dandelion
roots? From cattails and legumes? Some of these are even
quite tasty. It turns out that flour, generally, can be made
of pretty much anything that’s sufficiently starchy, which
means anything from roots to beans to nuts, seeds, and the
standard grains can be potentially cooked into bread. I
imagine, then, that this would mean baking traditions would
vary with scale. Micros would make use of the tiny seeds in
fruit that we usually discard, while macros might be forced
to grow only the easiest plants to extract from—perhaps
potatos?
Moving on from flour to bread, one might be concerned about
the thickness of the crust given how bread crust is a
surface phenomenon. This, however, might be an overstated
concern; by varying the exact constitution of the dough and
the time for which it’s cooked, it’s possible to achieve a
wide range of thicknesses—perhaps enough to produce the
desired result depending on what scale you’re considering.
Enhancing Depth Perception
Kinetic Depth Effect
Notice how in the absence of any other cues, apparent
motion is enough to give a sense of scale and
depth.
Comparison between edited and original animations.
Wiggle Stereography
One of the better examples, perhaps due to the use of additional
keyframes.
Non-Linear Perspective
One thing that has always bothered me about 3D art is how ultimately
constraining linear perspective is. Traditional artists freely make
subtle and sometimes gross exaggerations in order to better convey how
the scene is percieved. Indeed, I maintain that the job of the
traditional artist isn’t to render the world or worlds of imagination,
but to render them as we ourselves percieve them. A camera can’t do
this because a camera is not prey to the host of mental distortions we
apply to what we see. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s caught on
to this, and there’s been a modest uptick in research on better
conveying space.
FOVO is an attempt at tackling this problem by re-incorporating our
large field-of-view and binocular vision by using a volumetric (read
vertex shader) transformation to the scene to bring forward the middle
and compress the edges. You can see one of their more telling examples
below:
Play around with the slider!
In general, linear perspective is correct for an ideal camera. Correctly
calculated, the image projected onto the near clipping plane is exactly
what you would see if you had a floating window precisely in the same
location. Even the eye can be very accurately approximated using a
curvilinear projection. However, this very literal interpreation of
imagery means that we are limited to the minimum comfortable distance
from the image and therefore restricted in field-of-view. Furthermore,
this model has no accounting for binocular vision unless the entire
light field is captured at the clipping plane.
To rectify this, we observe the mental distortions applied in cyclopean
vision. One of the most obvious is how unlike linear perspective or any
projection thereof, we can see both sides of an object! Don’t believe
me? Pick up a relatively narrow, boxy object like a smartphone and hold
it side-on in front of your face. One eye will see the left side of it,
while the other, the right. The mind fuses these images into a coherent
whole where both sides are simultaneously visible. This effect holds
true even as you move the object away from your eyes—you can still see
a sliver of each side that you wouldn’t with linear perspective.
George Mather has a
collection of optical illusions, along with demos and cited
articles.
ESD Gallery: Anime & Cartoons
Dofus: Kerub’s Bazaar
Synopsis: Retired adventurer Kerubim Crepin wails away in his magical
shop located in the small town of Astrub. Every item for sale within the
bazaar has its own story which Kerubim is eager to share with his
adopted son Joris, dear friends or any potential customers.
Notes: The relevant content is in episode 22: The Giant Ploomers.
Character Name:
Gullivette
Character Scale:
???
Elf Princess Rane
Synopsis: Gou has woved to find the legendary treasure of Salamander.
Searching for it he meets Ren, a fairy, who is looking for the four
treasures of Heart. Gou’s childhood friend Mari is frustrated with Gou
running after treasures, but befriends with another fairy Rin. Gou and
Ren’s treasure hunt messes with a secret project led by Mari’s father.
It turns out Salamander isn’t what Gou thought it was in the first
place…
Notes:
Garzey’s Wing
Synopsis: A young teen gets sent to an ancient land where he has to
fight for his life.
Notes:
Hilda
Synopsis: Hilda follows the adventures of a fearless blue-haired girl as
she travels from her home in a vast magical wilderness full of elves and
giants, to the bustling city of Trolberg, where she meets new friends
and mysterious creatures who are stranger—and more dangerous—than
she ever expected.
Notes:
Leviathan: The Last Defense
Synopsis: The story is set in Aquafall, a fantasy world abound with
water and greenery, and populated by dragons and fairies. Meteorites
suddenly bring forth evil creatures that threaten all living things on
the planet. The fairy Syrup assembles the Aquafall Defense Force, with
three girls of the dragon clans as recruits. The story follows Syrup and
the dragon girls Leviathan, Bahamut, and Jörmungandr as they work
together to battle enemies and grow up.
Notes:
Macross 7 the Movie: The Galaxy’s Calling Me!
Synopsis: While investigating a sound anomaly across the galaxy, Basara
crash-lands on a snowy planet and receives an unfriendly welcome from
the local residents. On the planet, he befriends Pedro, a four-year-old
boy who watches the Galaxy Network and idolizes Fire Bomber. Basara also
discovers that the sound he’s searching for is generated by Emilia, a
lone Meltrandi struggling to make music of her own.
Notes:
MÄR Heaven
Synopsis: Ginta Tiramizu is an average school student but keeps on
having weird dreams about an amazing land. One day, something strange
happens and Ginta appears in his fantasy. Together with Ginta’s friends
on the way, he will be able to fight an evil group call The Chess
Pieces.
Notes:
My Bride is a Mermaid
Synopsis: Nagasumi’s in hot water after a beautiful, young mermaid
named Sun saves him from drowning. The deep-sea sweetheart’s dad is a
merman yakuza prone to executing anyone who learns his family’s scaly
secret! Luckily, there’s a catch—if Nagasumi agrees to marry Sun, he
just might avoid sleeping with the fishes!
Notes:
Ulysses: Jeanne d’Arc and the Alchemist Knight
Synopsis: During the Hundred Years’ War, Montmorency, the son of a
nobleman, immerses himself in the study of alchemy and magic at Paris’
school for knights. However, his everyday life comes to an end when
France loses the Battle of Agincourt and the academy is shuttered.
Fleeing the English army, he eventually comes across a village girl
named Jeanne.
Notes:
ESD Gallery: Comics & Manga
7" Kara
Synopsis: “Lilliputians are the tiny people who occupy the in-between
spaces of our world.” Kara lives with her parents in an old doll house
that’s been hidden away in the back of a neglected shed. Isolated her
entire life, she has few Lilliputian friends her own age, and even less
experience with the outside world. Her life changes drastically when a
human family moves into the house her family lives near. Does this
change signal new opportunities for friendship and adventure, or does it
hail something darker?
Notes:
Aposimz
Synopsis: The 200,000 KM diameter artificial celestial body of APOSIMZ.
Most of its volume is its core space, which is covered by a
superstructural shell. Fifty centuries ago, the people who lost a war
against the core lost their right to reside legitimately in APOSIMZ, and
were left behind on the extremely cold surface. They face the spreading
Frame disease and aggressive automatons which appear frequently on the
ruins level. Yet even so, somehow people survive.
Notes:
Beautiful Darkness
Synopsis: Newly homeless, a group of fairies find themselves trying to
adapt to their new life in the forest. As they dodge dangers from both
without and within, optimistic Aurora steps forward to organize and help
build a new community. Slowly, the world around them becomes more
treacherous, as petty rivalries and factions form.
Notes:
Beth N Cherry
Synopsis: Beth n Cherry is a wlw giant/tiny comic!
Notes:
Chiisako Garden
Synopsis: A collection of stories that revolves around Chiisako and the
humans around them. Garden 1 - A little girl’s unexpected meeting in
the secret garden of their new house. Garden 2 - A romance novelist and
an editor’s mountain trip together. Garden 3 - A withdrawn teenage boy
saves a girl from a crow. Garden 4 - The tipping point of the
relationship between a young wife and her older husband. Garden 5 - An
author’s precious memory involving a prince.
Notes:
Demon Tune
Synopsis: In Wizard City, an encounter between a ninja and a fairy
begins a new legend. Bloody fights, demons and fantasy creatures are
just some of the things that await our two protagonists. A new and
fantastic adventure begins!
Notes:
Elf Blood
Synopsis: Science-Fantasy comic about
Notes:
Even If the World Is Over It’s Fun to Live
Notes: Essentially Hakumei & Mikochi, except set in the ruins of
post-apocalyptic future teeming with hostile alien life.
Fairy Dust
Synopsis: While cities provide modern comfort, many fantasy creatures
live their own way on islands and in forests, so no matter where you
are, a wild and strange world is only a few hours’ walk away… when
it doesn’t simply decide to visit you.
Notes: Deleted by the author. A copy is available on the Wayback
Machine.
Fairy Fighting League
Synopsis:
Notes:
Gulliver’s Children
Synopsis: Puberty’s tough. But when it makes you shrink to the size of a
mouse, or tower above the tallest skyscraper in a split second, it just
gets downright traumatic. When Kim Seo-jin is diagnosed with 'Matheson
Syndrome', a rare, size-altering disease, his world is turned upside
down. But when he meets a strangely alluring boy at school, his life
seems to get a whole lot more complicated.
Notes:
Handyman Saitou in Another World
Synopsis: Saitou is an ordinary handyman that gets transported to
another world where his skills are very useful. He starts to really
understand what it means to be needed, as even his mundane tasks and
tools have the most unexpected uses in this new world of fantasy!
Notes:
Hakumei & Mikochi
Synopsis: Nine centimeters (3.5 inches) tall, the tiny girls Hakumei and
Mikochi live in the forest. Living in a tiny house in a tree, riding
insects and birds, and making umbrellas out of leaves, these tiny girls
live a tiny life. Follow their tiny but lovely lives as they live day to
day in a fantastic world of tiny people and gods.
Notes: We never encounter a human in this manga.
Latin
Synopsis: Collection of short stories.
Notes: The relevant content is in Chapter 2: Yuki no Nestore.
Marry Grave
Synopsis: In a world where demons run amok, Riseman Sawyer had managed
to find love and happiness with his wife, Rosalie. But she died, and
Riseman now carries her coffin on his back while searching for the
ingredients to the “Deadman’s Recipe”. The spell is rumored to be able
to bring someone back to life — a rumor that Riseman knows is true,
because Rosalie used it on him, making him an immortal "undead" at the
price of her life. Gathering all the spell’s ingredients won’t be easy,
and the world is still filled with plenty of despair and death. Can hope
and love possibly be resurrected?
Notes:
Mazinger
Synopsis: When we chant the history of our kingdom, we must chant the
tale of the warrior who must never be forgotten. The warrior from
another world who came bearing infinite power. This is the chant of the
mysterious warrior who rescued our kingdom. This is the tale of
MAZINGER.
Notes:
Megapolis
Synopsis: Megapolis is a webcomic focusing on the characters within the
titular city, which is engineered to function and accommodate for
denizens of ordinary, gigantic, or small size.
Notes:
My Little Robinson
Synopsis: My Little Robinson is about a girl named Ichigo who struggles
to balance her job as a successful magazine model with her life as a
normal high school student, and a young man named Tsugumi who is a
member of a race of humans who only grow to be about 15 cm tall.
Notes:
Red Town
Synopsis: This is a webcomic about the fantastic adventure of Jake and
Ferris. Both suddenly find themselves in a world of a completely
different proportions after a mysterious power shrinks them down to very
small little beings. They quickly learn that anything that people
normally do is much more difficult when you’re lacking in size and
strength. Now it is on them to find out how to turn back to normal
again.
Notes:
TINY
Synopsis: What if a mysterious warrior one day appeared on your
breakfast table?
Notes:
Violet Goes to the Beach
Synopsis: Harley meets a tiny woman with no memory of who she was but is
caught off guard when he begins falling in love with her. What will be
uncovered and confessed as the pair dive deeper into themselves and into
each other’s lives during their turbulent voyage of self-discovery?
Notes:
U.F.O.
Synopsis:
Notes: The comic doesn’t seem to be available on the web anymore. I
have a full copy archived, however it would be best for fans to pester
the author, @mopinks, before reuploading
it.
ESD Gallery: Serial & Web Fiction
Gigantic at 5'4
Synopsis: A romantic comedy about a man forced to spend every night six
inches tall and a kind woman willing to help him adapt to the new rules
of his life. Throw in romantic rivals, power hungry biker chicks and an
all powerful reality warping god and you’ve got Gigantic at 5'4.
Notes:
The Gods are Bastards
Synopsis: Evil is rising. The world is rent by strife. The gods have
turned away from us. In times past, heroes of sword and sorcery have
always risen to turn back the tide of darkness… But what will become of
us all, now that swords are obsolete, sorcery is industrialized, and
heroism itself is considered a relic of the past?
Notes:
Jane, Defender of Decura
Synopsis: Ordinary grocery store clerk Jane is thrust into a bizarre
medieval world filled with many different types of dangers. Luckily,
Jane has a HUGE handicap thanks to her greatly increased stature, but
will it be enough to help her protect the people of Decura and find her
way home?
Notes:
The Titan Empire
Synopsis: The Titan Empire series is a collection of works related to
the verse first created byJohnnyScribe in his novel Titan. The series
tracks the interactions between Titans and Humans , who are similar
species save for a massive difference in scale; Titans are on average
about 24 times the height of a Human.
Notes:
ShadESDversity: Fairy Combat Revisited
I’ve been aware that Shadiversity has an episode where Shad speculates
on the weaponry fairies might use in combat for a while now. I’m not
very fond of "YouTubers", so I didn’t watch it until one of my
readers recommended me to. As expected, the video was almost devoid of
citations, structured reasoning, and historical reference. However, it
wasn’t too far off my own inferences, so I’ve decided to write an
article expanding upon it.
To begin with, Shad noted that the speed and agility of a tiny, winged
species would allow them to ruthlessly exploit weak spots such as the
eyes. For this, Shad suggested something akin to a lance—using the
higher proportional strength to justify such a heavy weapon. This is
good, however it leads us to our first problem: tactics.
What happens after the fairy has landed their blow? If they want to keep
their weapon, they would need to spend precious time yanking it out of
their enemy—time they can ill afford given that a single, clumsy blow
would be enough to cripple or kill them outright. Even just landing the
blow represents a problem, as to put all their momentum into the thrust,
the fairy must themself come to a stop. Therefore, a disposable weapon
is more sensible. Historically, this was the javelin.
Aside from piercing weaponry, Shad noted that the absence of the need to
block would allow for the use of very fine-edged blades such as razors.
Perhaps this is my prejudice showing, but at no point did he give the
impression he meant anything other than straight-edged blades. This is a
mistake. Curved blades have been used almost universally for cavalry
because of their effectiveness as slashing weapons. The curve allows the
sword to bite into the opponent for the entire swing and makes excellent
use of the rider’s momentum in doing so. Given that fairies are
essentially flying centaurs in our considerations, there is little
reason why we shouldn’t borrow from historical knowledge concerning
cavalry.
While swords have been favoured by cavalry, reach is still important.
The person with the longer-reaching weapon is predisposed to win the
fight. Therefore, using the proportional strength of fairies, we can
instead suggest polearms. Specifically, the glaive.
The last concern is that these weapons are chosen only for combat
against unprepared humans.
F-List
The foremost ERP website, F-Chat
contains a significant number of users interested in ESD. Despite initially being a
furry website, the flexability and size has lead to a large community of
users who exclusively play humans uninterested in anthropomorphs. For
similar reasons, it has also earned itself a not-insignificant base of
ordinary roleplayers, although they can be fairly rare depending on your
interests.
Following the general trend for "pink" users to be rarer than "blue"
and correspondingly more sought after, users who play giantesses are in
much higher demand than users who play tinies or other categories. This
imbalance appears to caused by the physchological need to "self
insert" into the character that the roleplayer controls, even when the
stories are written in third person.
With regards to fetish, there is a preponderance of size-change
fetishists and a desperate few users who enjoy the more extreme aspects
of hard vore such as cooking.
Getting Partners
Use F-Chat
The vast majority of activity takes place not on the notes system, or
the fora, but in F-Chat. Most users don’t even use the search
functionality when finding partners—they instead look to users and
user ads in the rooms they frequent. Therefore, even just lurking in
relevant rooms will net you more prospective partners than
micro-optimizing your profile and playing around with groups.
Decorate Your Profile
F-List does not want for users. It does, however, want for quality
users. The sheer number of profiles means that someone looking for a
partner is going to take a single glance at your profile before deciding
to move on. Your job is to make that first impression to be one of
quality, and the best way to do this is to invest effort into decorating
your profile. I will now proceed to examine all the ways you can do so,
ordered by the impact it has.
Inlines
These are the biggest sign of quality in a profile due to
the uniformity with which they render, the effort needed to
create them, and the scarcity imposed on them (X per Y).
They also just look good, most of the time.
E-Icons
Like inlines, but smaller in size and less limited in use.
They’re also fun to use in chat. See Goddess for an E-Icon search
engine.
Layout
Prose Quality & Suggestivity
If you’ve gotten them to the point they’re reading, you’ll
want to convince them that you have a decent handle on the
language and an erotic style. Indeed, it is a great idea to
put scenario suggestions, either explicitly or implicitly,
to invite the user to want to RP with you.
Custom Kinks
These are a more concise and arguably more powerful
form of suggestion. Custom kinks shouldn’t be used simply to list what
turns you on, but to illustrate why it’s hot.
Justify Your Text
This seems like a minor nit-pick, but a lot of
people take it as a sign of quality.
Note on Privacy
In general, F-List relies on a trust model. While encryption is used to
protect the user from "man in the middle" attacks, the server has the
potential to monitor all your activity and read all communications -
even on F-Chat. Therefore, you should not do anything on F-List that you
wouldn’t want the moderation tean and those who have power over them
discovering.
However, it should be mentioned that F-List allows the use of Tor. By
registering via Tor (with an email that was also registered on Tor) and
only ever browsing with the protection of tor, you can be mostly
protected from malicious actors. Mostly; there still exist a number of
attacks a motivated actor could leverage to deanonymise you, given all
the knowledge they can build up from monitoring even months of account
activity. If anonymity is important to you, please take care to avoid
posting even the smallest bits of personal information—it can really
add up over time!
Notes & Tips for Tor Users
F-Chat Timeouts
F-Chat detects linkdead users by monitoring websocket timeouts. Since
Tor provides an unstable connection, this can lead to random
disconnects. This usually wouldn’t be a problem on other browsers, but
as of this writing, Tor Browser Bundle does not support the features
necessary to save (as opposed to export) your chat history. Therefore,
timeouts can lead to losing your RP session even if you export
frequently.
The solution is to adjust the timeout value in your "about:config"
page.
Glossary
Extreme Size Difference
ESD
A catch-all term I have coined to refer to matters where extreme differences
in height/scale exist. Extreme is loosely defined to be beyond the range of
human diversity, which using babies as a minimum, gives at least a 10x
difference.
Giant
Tiny
For the benefit of precision and clarity in my writing, I have adopted an
idosyncratic re-definition of these terms such that they refer exclusively to
relative size. That is, a giant is merely an individual that is much larger
than another, regardless of whether they themselves measure far smaller than
humans on an absolute scale. This is useful for scenarios in which the
absolute height does not matter in the discussion—for instance when
examining inter-species dynamics.
Macro(scale)
Micro(scale)
From the ancient greek μακρός (lit. long/large) and μικρός (lit. small),
these terms are used in literature to refer to relatively large and small
subjects. In the furry ESD community, it has been adopted to refer to
characters of the corresponding sizes, usually in an absolute sense. For the
benefit of precision and clarity, I will use the terms to strictly refer to
the absolute case defined by typical human size ranges.
Meso(scale)
In scientific literature, mesoscale (from ancient greek μέσος, lit. middle)
is used to refer to subjects of intermediate size. In ESD discussion, I use
it to refer to species and individuals whose height is commensurate with the
average human’s.
GTS
Giantess.
GT
An abbreviation of “giant”, usually to specify the piece contains male giants
. Not to be confused with G/T.
G/T
Abbreviation of “giant/tiny”, which is the tag that the Giant/Tiny Community
uses to gather themselves.
F/f
F/m
M/f
M/m
FF/f
F/ff
etc.
A shorthand developed to identify the sexes and size roles of characters in a
piece. Generally, the giants are represented by majuscule letters for their
sexes (F for female, M for male) followed by a forward slash and miniscule
letters for the tinies and their sexes.
Genre & Literary Fiction
I will preface this article with the admission that I am not well-read,
at least in the sense of having read literature. Nevertheless, in my
quest for self-expression, I have tried to understand forms that written
fiction takes in order to find the best way to bring these worlds of
extreme size difference to life. A major division of these forms is the
dichotomy of Genre and Literary fiction.
Ungenerously, genre fiction is almost definitionally bad—genre, per
definition, is built upon tropes and plot. The use of tropes in place of
imagination is obviously bad, but why denigrate plot? Simply because
plot has a very fleeting appeal. This is the genesis of my appreciation
of genre fiction—the realisation that plot as a central concern is
very empty. This leads to literary fiction.
Literary fiction is hard to pin down, in part due to the inherent
snobbishness of the concern, but also because it is more subtle.
Wikipedia et al. might define it as fiction that focusses upon theme,
characters, and/or the quality of prose but this is too abstract to
really understand the appeal. A post on Reddit by a professor of ?
explained why: literary fiction is about theme, and characters, and good
prose because these are all beneficial to the creation of meaning.
That is, literary fiction distinguishes itself from genre fiction by
being a medium in which the readers and writer(s) both collaborate to
produce meaning—the writer by presenting interesting themes,
characters and prose, and the readers by interpreting it through their
own unique lens. Put simply, literary fiction is fiction intended to
make the reader think.
What’s the point of this for ESD? The point is that literary fiction
provides an alternative to the demands of plot, where ESD contributes
little. Instead, the author can focus on where ESD shines—the wealth
of themes and interesting characters that it facilitates.
Method of Translations
This appears to be something of an unwritten technique that is adopted
by writers of xenofiction. One finds when attempting to sincerely write
outside the human perspective that ill-founded assumptions and
stereotypes are quick to step in. Being mindful of this helps, but does
not entirely eliminate the niggling suspicion that the story is still
biased, colored by its writer. To rectify this, one should consider
turning the problem on its head. This is easiest to do in analogy to
non-ESD concepts.
Imagine you wanted to write a story about a centaur, and needed to
examine how a race of equines might percieve them. Obviously, you can
draw from your own feelings regarding their non-human parts and
extrapolate to how they might feel about the human—but this has the
same problem of uncertainty as above. Instead, you invent a
reverse-centaur to be perceived by a race of humanoids, challenging
your prejudices with the upper body of a horse and the lower body of a
human. You could perhaps mentally adjust it so that the image isn’t so
top-heavy and awkward, but nothing will change the instinctive revulsion
at such an image (perhaps I am just xenophobic). This is good, because
that means you are dealing with something that hasn’t been tailored to
suit your sensibilities, but is instead closer to the reality of
encountering something fundamentally alien. This is a translation.
The method of translations is just the generalized, systematic
application of this line of thinking; when in doubt, translate from
something you can be more certain of. In ESD, this means that you should
consider writing from a human perspective and translating as
appropriate.
Modding Morrowind: Marathon 1
So I was thinking about my outlets page, specifically the
RPGs section, and I realised that I’d basically just put down the
latest Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim and Oblivion both have their charms,
but I couldn’t help but feel like I was making myself out to be a
normie. Then it hit me: Morrowind. Morrowind is actually a viable vision
for a fairy combat game because the aged graphics and minimal physics
redirects expectations towards gameplay, where Morrowind stands out with
first-class support for flight. Investigating, it turned out that the
engine indeed supports a "setscale" function and lacks any obvious ESD
mods—perfect for finally getting some technical content for this blog.
Setting Up the Environment
Having misplaced my original Morrowind disk, I decided to use Steam’s
distribution. Bethesda Softworks games usually come with a construction
kit which I was able to acquire for Morrowind off of Nexus[If you are
concerned about the legitimacy of the binary, the uploader "Time???"
is a well-reputed member of the community.].
So far as I could see, there’s no way to change the camera properties
from within the scripting interface. This would therefore require a
MWSE
The MWSE is a community
effort to extend the scripting capabilities of Morrowind. Recently, a
lua interface has been developed that provides access to far more
functionality. Included in all of this is the ability to control the
camera and create custom magic effects.
Items
Final Result
local framework = include("OperatorJack.MagickaExpanded.magickaExpanded")
tes3.claimSpellEffectId("shrink", 7149)
local function adjustCamera()
local mobile = tes3.mobilePlayer
local camera = tes3.worldController.worldCamera.camera
local scale = tes3.player.scale
--First Person View
mobile.cameraHeight = nil --Reset cameraHeight to get default value
mobile.cameraHeight = scale * mobile.cameraHeight
--Third Person View
camera.scale = scale
camera:update()
local o = tes3.player.data.shrink.offset or tes3.get3rdPersonCameraOffset()
if o == nil then print("WTF! o is nil?!") return end --Somehow o still manages to be nil sometimes.
if not scale then print("WTF! scale is nil?!") end
tes3.set3rdPersonCameraOffset{offset=o*scale}
end
event.register("viewChange", adjustCamera)
local function adjustGMSTs()
local scale = tes3.player.scale
local data = scale.data.shrink
tes3.findGMST(tes3.gmst.fSwimHeightScale).value = 0.9*scale
tes3.findGMST(tes3.gmst.fCombatDistance).value = data.flying and math.max(128*scale,64) or 128*scale
tes3.findGMST(tes3.gmst.iMaxActivateDist).value = math.max(192*scale,1)
end
local function lerpScale(previous,target,time)
local rate = 100
local current = math.lerp(previous,target,time*rate)
return math.clamp(current
,math.min(previous,target)
,math.max(previous,target))
end
local function getDistanceToCeiling(reference)
local c = reference.position:copy()
c.z = c.z + reference.mobile.boundSize.z*reference.scale
local d = math.huge
local n = tes3vector3.new(0,0,0)
local function cast(delta)
local res = tes3.rayTest{position = c
,direction = tes3vector3.new(0,0,1) + delta
,returnSmoothNormal=true
,findAll = false
,ignore={reference}}
return res and res.distance or math.huge, res and res.normal or tes3vector3.new(0,0,0)
end
for i = 1,5 do
a,b = cast(tes3vector3.new(math.random(-1,1),math.random(-1,1),1))
d = math.min(d,a)
n = n + b
end
return d or math.huge, n*(1/5)
end
local function alterScale(reference,scale,options)
reference.data.shrink = reference.data.shrink or {}
local data = reference.data.shrink
options = options or {}
data.originalScale = options.originalScale or
data.originalScale or
reference.scale
data.targetScale = scale
data.previousScale = options.previousScale or
reference.scale
data.dateAltered = options.dateAltered or
tes3.getSimulationTimestamp()
tes3.player.data.shrink.unstableEntities:add(reference)
end
local function renderTick(e)
local dt = e.delta
--todo: expand this to work on items
--Needed for smoothest shrinking animation
for _,r in pairs(tes3.player.data.shrink.unstableEntities.dict or {}) do
local data = r.data.shrink
local origin = data.previousScale
local target = data.targetScale
local time = tes3.getSimulationTimestamp()
- data.dateAltered
local current = lerpScale(origin, target, time)
local previous = r.scale
r.scale = current
if r.scale == target then
tes3.player.data.shrink.unstableEntities:remove(r)
end
if target > origin and r.object.objectType == tes3.objectType.npc then
local dist, normal = getDistanceToCeiling(r)
local dh = math.abs(r.mobile.boundSize.z*(current-previous))
local vel = dh/(dist/r.mobile.boundSize.z*current)
if dist < dh*40 then
local e2 = tes3.rayTest{position = r.position
,direction = tes3vector3.new(0,0,-1)
,returnSmoothNormal=true
,findAll = false
,ignore={r}}
local n1 = normal
local n2 = e2.normal:copy(); n2.z = 0
local v = (n1 + n2)*vel
if dist < dh*30 then
r.position = r.position + n2*vel
end
r.position.z = r.position.z + dh
local vel = r.mobile.velocity
r.mobile.velocity = r.mobile.velocity + v/2
end
end
if r == tes3.player then
adjustCamera()
adjustGMSTs()
end
end
end
event.register("damage", function(e)
if e.source == "attack" then
--Damage should scale like muscle area?
e.damage = e.damage * (e.attackerReference.scale/e.reference.scale)^2
end
end)
event.register("keyDown",function(e)
local p = tes3.mobilePlayer
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
data.flying = data.flying or false
if p.height > 20 and (p.isFalling or p.isJumping) then
if data.flying then
data.ascending = true
end
data.flying = not data.flying
end
end,{filter = tes3.scanCode.e})
event.register("keyUp",function(e)
local p = tes3.mobilePlayer
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
data.flying = data.flying or false
if p.height > 20 and (p.isFalling or p.isJumping) then
if data.flying then
data.ascending = false
end
data.flying = not data.flying
end
end,{filter = tes3.scanCode.e})
event.register("simulate",function(e)
local p = tes3.mobilePlayer
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
data.flying = data.flying or 0
if data.flying and (p.isFalling or p.isJumping) then
local vel = (data.ascending and 1000 or 0)*e.delta
p.velocity.z = (p.velocity.z > 0 and p.velocity.z or 3) + vel
end
end)
event.register("itemDropped",function(e)
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
if tes3.isAffectedBy{reference=tes3.player,effect=tes3.effect.shrink} then
alterScale(e.reference
,data.targetScale
,{dateAltered = data.dateAltered
,previousScale = data.previousScale})
data.detachedReferences = data.detachedReferences or {}
data.detachedReferences[e.reference.id] = e.reference
end
end)
local function onReferenceInvalidated(e)
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
if not data then return end
local reference = e.reference or e.object
data.unstableEntities:remove(e.reference)
data.detachedReferences[e.reference.id] = nil
end
event.register("convertReferenceToItem",onReferenceInvalidated)
event.register("objectInvalidated",onReferenceInvalidated)
event.register("itemTileUpdated",function(e)
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
local delta = 0
data.appliedWeight = data.appliedWeight or 0
--Find how much extra mass due to mod
for _, stack in pairs(tes3.player.object.inventory) do
for i,v in pairs(stack.variables or {}) do
if v.data.shrink then
delta = delta + stack.object.weight*(v.data.shrink.scale^3 - 1)
end
end
end
--Apply mass not already accounted for
tes3.modStatistic{reference = tes3.mobilePlayer
,name = "encumbrance"
,current = delta - data.appliedWeight}
--Update applied weight data
data.appliedWeight = delta
end)
event.register("uiObjectTooltip",function(e)
if not e.tooltip then return end
local partmenuID = tes3ui.registerID("PartHelpMenu_main")
local innerBlock = e.tooltip:findChild(partmenuID):findChild(partmenuID):findChild(partmenuID)
local playerScale = tes3.player.scale
for i, element in ipairs(innerBlock.children) do
if string.find(element.text, "Weight:") then
local itemScale = e.itemData.data.shrink and e.itemData.data.shrink.scale or
e.reference and e.reference.scale or 1
local weight = e.object.weight*(itemScale/playerScale)^3
element.text = "Weight: " .. string.format("%.2f",weight):gsub("%.?0+$", "")
end
end
end)
event.register("key",function(e)
local ref = tes3.getPlayerTarget()
ref.data.shrink = ref.data.shrink or {}
ref.data.shrink.scale = 3
ref.scale = ref.data.shrink.scale
end,{filter = tes3.scanCode.h})
local function addShrinkEffect()
framework.effects.alteration.createBasicEffect{
id = tes3.effect.shrink
,name = "Shrink"
,description = "Shrinks the target, weakening them proportionally."
,baseCost = .01
,allowEnchanting = true
,allowSpellmaking = true
,canCastSelf = true
,canCastTarget = false
,canCastTouch = false
,isHarmful = true
,nonRecastable = true
,onTick = function(e)
local source = e.sourceInstance
local effect = e.effectInstance
local target = source.target or source.caster
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
local tdata = target.data.shrink
if e.effectInstance.state == tes3.spellState.beginning then
local ff = framework.functions
effect.magnitude = ff.getCalculatedMagnitudeFromEffect(ff.getEffectFromEffectOnEffectEvent(e, tes3.effect.shrink))
alterScale(target, effect.magnitude^(-1./3.))
if target == tes3.player then
data.offset = tes3.get3rdPersonCameraOffset()
end
elseif e.effectInstance.state == tes3.spellState.ending or
e.effectInstance.state == tes3.spellState.retired then
alterScale(target, tdata.originalScale)
for _,v in pairs(tdata.detachedReferences or {}) do
local tdata = v.data.shrink
alterScale(v, tdata.originalScale)
end
end
if not e:trigger() then
return
end
end
}
end
event.register("magicEffectsResolved", addShrinkEffect)
local function onLoaded()
tes3.player.data.shrink = tes3.player.data.shrink or {}
local data = tes3.player.data.shrink
data.unstableEntities = data.unstableEntities or {dict={}}
data.unstableEntities.count = data.unstableEntities.count or 0
data.unstableEntities.add = function(tbl,target)
tbl.dict[target.id] = target
if tbl.count == 0 then
event.register("simulate", renderTick)
end
tbl.count = tbl.count +1
end
data.unstableEntities.remove = function(tbl,target)
if not tbl.dict[target.id] then return end
tbl.dict[target.id] = nil
tbl.count = tbl.count -1
if tbl.count == 0 then
event.unregister("simulate", renderTick)
end
end
if data.unstableEntities.count > 0 then
event.register("simulate", renderTick)
end
end
event.register("loaded", onLoaded)
Multiple-Size Armament
Pistol Drone
Practically speaking, the biggest problem in arming tinies isn’t
finding something useful, but finding something respectable; a
doll-sized gun will forever be mentally at odds with the ability to
threaten giants. The obvious solution, therefore, is to find ways of
allowing tinies to use giant-sized weapons gracefully. The pistol drone
is one such concept ideally suited to flying tinies.
Imagine a heavy-set laser pistol equipped with an anti-gravity device
that allows it to maneuver freely through space. A tiny-sized replica is
used as a controler, which the drone attempts to match in relative
position as if being held by a scaled-up version of its weilder. Swap it
between hands, and the drone switches side. Since the drone is of
comparable size with the tiny, it can be used as a shield and is
appropriately designed.
Narrative Forms
One of the lingering concerns for ESD fiction is that ESD as a concept
doesn’t particularly lend itself to traditional stories; there is very
little one can explore through it that couldn’t be explored through a
more fundamental theme such as power. Short of finding what few stories
truly benefit from ESD, it is worthwhile to consider other creative
forms it can take.
Before we begin, however, it would be interesting to outline what forms
exist for stories. Going by roughly by seniority, there are epic poems,
epistolaries,
biographies,
Fiction Without Plot
SOL
The following sections are examples of fiction without plot.
False Documents/Fictional Nonfiction
Perhaps the most famous of these is the Voynich
Manuscript, an
indecipherable tome containing illustrations of unknown species among
other things.
Pseudo-Documentaries
Fictional Encyclopediae/Wikis
SCP
Found Footage
Fictional News
Diegetic Websites
Systemspace
Diegetic Paraphernalia
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park
Paradoxographies
While at first consideration this may seem no different than a short
story anthology or a false document, paradoxographies strictly concerns
rumors—something that doesn’t require a plot in the traditional
sense. Therefore, the author is free to explore the scenarios made
possible by ESD without concerning themselves with how to fit a conflict
or deeper theme into it.
Interactive Fiction
CYOAs
Ideas
Insert dounut steel meme.
News website for an ESD setting
This is a particularly interesting idea because
G/T Kama Sutra
Partly inspired by historical “whore dialogues”, this allows for a novel kind of ecchi in the form of encyclopedia of sex acts—something I would want to write anyways. Furthermore, there is plenty of room for worldbuilding and storytelling through the implicit assumptions of the text, much like Dictionary of the Khazars.
Observations on Romance
I will preface by admitting that I am perhaps the worst person to write
about this topic; I have never been in a romantic relationship and my
philosophically materialist view of the world would likely be considered
misogynist, misandrist, and generally misanthropic to most anyone.
Nevertheless, it is hard to live without observing, so I hope what I
share may at least be interesting.
To begin with, it appears long-lasting relationships are the
intersection of a few fundamental concerns. The largest is perhaps the
"economic": what can they bring to the table? Looks, money, security,
healthy children—life needs to be materially better to invest one’s
life in another person. This is also the largest stumbling block for an
ESD relationship, for reasons that I will outline in detail later on.
The next concern is the mental. People need to be comfortable with
eachother, either through familiarity or complementing mindsets, to
coexist. The last is the presence of fetters. Investing in another
person makes it difficult to part with them, the obvious form of this
being children.
The Economic
Extreme differences in size most obviously represents extreme
differences in power, which is a generalisation of material means. This
power can manifest as relative wealth and security for the tiny in the
relationship. But what of the giant? This isn’t just about providing,
but also supporting. If the giant falls ill, how can a tiny hope to
nurse them to health? If they need help with the chores, what can a tiny
meaningfully do? Let’s not even begin with children, if they inherit
the larger partner’s size. I have neglected general breadwinning due to
the existance of "knowledge work" and political careers, which can pay
arbitrarily well. Ultimately, in an ESD relationship, the giant is
liable to becoming the de-facto carer for the tiny partner—placing an
(ironically) enormous burden on them. The only exception I can think of
is perhaps in the case where the giant is somehow permitted to live
amongst the tiny’s people.
The Irrational
People are usually quick to say that love is irrational, but that rarely
seems to be the case—they are just restricting the definition of
rationality to what industrial society values. Sometimes, however, there
do seem to be cases where
On Seriousness
It’s good to always keep things in perspective; becoming absorbed in a
topic, you tend to take for granted all the experience and assumptions
you have built up over time. This is no less true for ESD, which is
patently absurd on the face of it. So when I put on my normie hat, all
of a sudden I can’t take anything seriously. The following is a list of
major aspects and their explanations in the hope that this can be
partially overcome:
Imagery
Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings with the image of the Keebler
elves stuck in mind. Could you take it very seriously? Especially if you
have equally cartoonish ideas of hobbits and dwarves? Imagery is a major
hurdle because
This problem is not solely limited to written fiction, either. In visual
media this is a recurring issue when trying to use technology as a
solution to the power differentials that size presents. If a gun makes
equal a man and a woman, then a particularly powerful gun makes equal
Tom Thumb and Goliath. The issue, of course, is that this is a
ridiculous image—not only is Tom Thumb weilding a gun, but that speck
of a gun felling Goliath. The same is true for even more mundane matters
such as transport—a car appropriate for a tiny will necessarily look
like a toy to a giant.
Thinking deeply, we may recall that laughter is a response to absurdity.
It is necessary, therefore, to shape the audience’s expectations such
that the imagery no longer appears absurd. For instance, pulling a
bait-and-switch by establishing the tiny as human-sized, and then
revealing the true scope of the situation. This works to encourage all
the positive prejudices to root themselves in place before opening the
door to others.
Metaphor
It is inevitable that the reader will attempt to view what they are
reading as a metaphor, regardless of the author’s intent. This is
especially troublesome with male tinies, and the reason why can be
summed up in a single movie: Downsizing. In Downsizing, it’s hard
not to see it as an allegory for a more garden-variety marital trouble
that makes Paul look to be quite pathetic. In the process of Downsizing,
he is essentially emasculated—immediately losing his wife, his career,
and his life’s work simply because he was not strong enough to continue
to compete like a "real man".
This isn’t a stricly male problem, although traditional gender roles
exacerbate the . Women become sexless
Other examples of this particular read-in are posters where women .
Context
Association is a powerful force in the human psyche, and our readiness
to pre-judice media make for an unfortunate combination. In the modern
era, the association is that of comedy: Honey I Shrunk the X.
Intentional or not, the association with cheap special effects, hammy
lines, and unserious concepts is all but cememented in the public
consciousness.
We can also see this problem historically, as views on what subjects
were considered mature has meandered over time.
Significance
It appears there is a natural tendancy for humans to associate
significance with size. This poses a problem, then, when we wish to have
significant characters of tiny size.
Furthermore, the reader is likely to have expectations about how things
"ought" to be. Tinies should swarm their giant opponents just like how
most social predators hunt larger prey. Tinies aren’t expected to live
particularly long.
Even if the protagonist succeeds in their Herculean task, its
significance will always be overshadowed by how easy it would have been
for someone of normal size.
Outlets
This is a directory of pages for interactive applications containing
open-ended ESD content. For
the pragmatism’s sake, the definition has been relaxed to encompass
games that provide human-like races outside of adult human biodiversity,
or two size categories from the average.
MUDs
Aarchon MUD
Aarchon MUD has the
following playable races in the Tiny and Huge size categories for player
creation: Pixie and Golem. For higher remort tiers, Chrysalies (6,
Tiny), Frost Giants (6, Giant), and Titans (8, Giant) are
available.
Waterdeep has the
following playable races in the Tiny, Huge, and
Giant size categories: Pixie, Giant, Titan. There are also the Podrikev
and Draconian races, but for lack of description it is not clear whether
they fit the outlined criteria for this article.
Everquest is currently under a limited F2P model. Although there are no
ESD playable races, there are a number of easily
accessible ways to create ESD scenarios. Beastlords and Shamans get the spell
Shrink at levels 23 and 15 respectively. Additionally, Shamans
get the spell Grow at level 16. Both spells may be stacked, and
are not the only ones of their kind.
After the Depths of Darkhollow expansion, “Spirit Shrouds” were
introduced to allow users to play a number of monsters including “Fairy
Trickster”, “Fairy Wizard”, and “Fairy Cleric”.
Istaria
Istaria includes playable
half-giants and fairies. There
also exists a console command/setscale to set the rendered size
of objects, including players. Istaria currently has a limited F2P offering.
Mabinogi
Mabinogi is a F2P MMO that includes a
playable race of giants.
There are at least two general approaches to scaling: physical and
biological. Physical scaling involves translating the physics of the
situation to an intuitive scale. For instance, determining how rain
might feel when you’re a few inches tall would involve scaling the
momentum and stiffness of a raindrop and then reckoning its impact on
the human body. The biological approach is to consider real examples of
organisms on the relevant scale to approximate the behaviour of an
analogous species of humans.
Despite the naming, the biological approach is more physically
consistent than the physical approach as it does not "mix and match"
different physics. On the other hand, the physical approach is more
flexible—permitting miraculous size-changing devices and scenarios
that the biological approach would prohibit outright. Generally
speaking, analysis via the physical approach produces squishy micros and
invulnerable macros, whereas the biological approach produces
proportionally superhuman micros and pathetic macros.
I will now proceed to treat the first approach, and then go on to list
how physical phenomena behave under different scales to guide intuition
on the latter.
Physical Scaling
In terms of the mathematics involved, the general method for the
physical approach is to insert scaling terms into equations according to
the involved dimensions
Dimensions are physical quantities that units
provide scale for. The SI recognises the following dimensions, although
any other linearly independent basis is equally as valid: Time ,
Length , Mass , Electric Current , Thermodynamic
Temperature , Amount of Substance , Luminous Intensity
).
. Intuition and reasoning over physical laws is used to
guide what the rewrite rules for each unit ought to be. To tackle the
problem most effectively, we will focus on the SI base units and build
up from there.
To start with, we define axiomatically that units with the dimension of
length obey the following rewrite rule
, where is the
scale factor. There isn’t much need to justify this choice of axiom
because the rule is obviously true; if we were to scale a metre ruler by
ten, it would be as long as ten ordinary rulers.
For mass, we can tackle the question by examine the definition of
density
.
Under scaling, we want the density to remain constant. This follows from
our intuition that the amount of "stuff" per volume shouldn’t change
as the volume gets larger. Knowing that
does
not scale, and
scales
according to
, we can
therefore write
where is the
unknown scaling constant associated with
. In order to
balance the equation,
must be equal
to , and
thus
obeys the rule
.
This makes logical sense, as wherever you scale an object linearly,
it’s volume and corresponding mass scales cubically.
General Principles
Square Cube Law
Anyone who’s ever looked into the physics of extreme sizes has probably
heard of the square-cube law. Nevertheless, I will include my own take
on the subject since I have nothing better to do.
The square-cube law stems from a fundamental geometric observation -
that higher-dimensional contents will increase faster than
lower-dimensional contents under a scaling transformation. In the
familiar 3D, this means that a cube will gain a lot more volume than it
will surface area when you increase the length of each side. The name is
derived from the fact that the growths are cubic and quadratic
respectively. Note to self: What does it mean for there to be more of
quantities with disagreeing units?
For size difference, the square-cube law is usually invoked with regards
to heat dissipation. This is because heat is generated as a function of
volume, whereas its dissipation is proportional to the surface area
encapsulating that volume. We see the consequences of this in the
allometry of metabolic rates: smaller endotherms need higher metabolisms
to maintain thermostasis, while larger ones do not.
Fundamentally, the square-cube law is relevant to any phenomenon
involving dissipation and diffusion. For instance, the requirement for
lungs in larger organisms is because the surface area needs to be
artificially increased maintain sufficient gas exchange for respiration.
For our purposes, fractals are interesting because the exhibit
fractional dimensions. In other words, fractals posess properties of
both their highest (ceiling) and second-highest (floor) dimension. We
see this at work in nature where despite being 3D, roots, roads, and
veins all try to maximise their surface area to volume ratio by
approximating infinitely rough surfaces. Indeed, one can say that the
coastline of any landmass is infinite, as increasing the precision of
your measurement increases the measured roughness and therefore the
perimeter.
Notice how the surface area continues to increase as the fractal evolves.
Surface Tension
Drawing the force diagram, it's obvious that the resultant force vector always points back into the bulk of the liquid. Image credit magnetix/Shutterstock.
Surface tension is a rather simple phenomenon masquerading
as a complex one
Actually, this is something of a white lie. Serious work
involving surface tension can be quite complex, but only due
to the fact the forces involved aren’t always simple even if
the principle is.
. Liquids are held together by a common
inter-molecular force
In the case of a mixture of fluids, there is at least some
combination of forces that get them to attract together. If
no such combination existed, they would separate by density.
, weak enough to allow the constituent
molecules to move about unlike solids, but strong enough to
prevent most
The kinetic energies of large collections of interacting
particles (behaving as an ideal gas) usually follow a
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. As particles collide, they trade kinetic
energy and this results in some particles having very little
while others end up building quite a lot—enough,
sometimes, to escape the liquid. This is why liquids,
especially volatile ones like alcohol, feel cool—the
hottest particles (and there are always ones that become hot
enough eventually) are constantly evaporating away to leave
the coldest behind despite the average temperature being
below the boiling point usually associated with evaporation.
from freely moving like a gas. For most
molecules, the attractive forces are coming from all around
them so there’s no particular bias but to flow around in
fluid-y ways. But at the surface, the molecules are only
feeling those attractive forces from the direction of the
bulk, and so their movement is biased in that direction.
This reluctance to move away from the bulk acts like a skin
of elastic that serves to minimize the surface area of a
body. Hence, droplets.
Droplets aren’t the only manifestation of surface tension,
though. Bubbles act on a similar principle—the molecules
of the encapsulating liquid feels a force from its sides,
and in the case of a bubble, there is a curvature that means
each molecule sees its neighbors as being slightly "below"
it and thus a resultant force towards the center of the
bubble emerges. Between the force of the trapped gas trying
to escape and the liquid film trying to collapse, a balance
is struck.
Surface tension tends to become more apparent on smaller scales -
notice how different the giant cheerios look from the real ones on the
right, even with the heroic efforts put into faking it (e.g. the large
bubbles).
All this is to say that surface tension, being a property
related to surface area, scales like area. Therefore, water
droplets, bubbles, etc. gain their properties as a
consequence of their surface forces being commensurate or
greater than their bulk forces. With larger scale,
quadratically-scaling surface effects give way to
cubically-scaling bulk flow, and reciprocally, liquid
behaviour at tiny scales is dictated by these surface
effects. Water to an ant is a lot more like a jelly-filled
balloon than anything we’re familiar with.
Viscocity
Stiffness
Material Failure
Gravity
Under the Newtonian model of gravity, gravitational attraction obeys
Newton’s laws. In particular, falling towards the earth must involve
the earth falling up towards you—if only a little. However, we can
usually get away with approximating the gravity of planets as a
homogenous field for objects on the scale we are used to thinking of. A
consequence of this simplified model is that the gravitational
acceleration is the same for falling objects "regardless" of their
mass. This was famously demonstrated by Galileo when he dropped two
different masses from the leaning tower of Pisa and observed they
arrived at the ground simultaneously.
Altogether, this means that giant objects will noticeably fall slower in
proportion to smaller ones. A giant’s footsteps would fundamentally
have to be slower as the time their foot takes to fall would be
proportionally greater.
Signal Delay
All signals propagate at a finite speed less than or equal to the speed
of light in a vacuum, a value which is more generally considered to be
the speed of information. Because of this, larger entities will
experience disconnects between action and response.
Biological signals are much slower than light. As a consequence, we see
a number of adaptations in larger organisms to concentrate the nervous
system to minimise this delay. It is "the reason" why the eyes are
located
The speed of sound is also finite but much slower than light. As a
consequence, we can percieve a mismatch between seeing an event and the
hearing the sound it produces. The two most striking examples of this in
everyday life are lightning and attempting to talk (yell) to a distant
individual. The latter is particularly interesting because this
phenomenon doesn’t scale—the voice of a giant is no faster than a
human’s. Therefore, sufficiently large giants would experience a
"lag" when talking to eachother unless their perception was
proportionally slower in turn.
Loudness
Acoustic Pitch
Aerodynamics
Generally speaking, for winged craft, lift is proportional to area.
Given that mass is proportional to volume, this means larger aircraft
fundamentally face severe challenges to maintaining lift.
Kinetics
The force of an impact is equivalent to the change in momentum. This is
important because momentum is the product of mass and velocity—for
smaller entities, the force of an impact is less. This is why insects
can survive colliding with things at high relative speed; their mass is
not sufficient to damage themselves.
Another way of thinking about this is that it is your weight that
crushes you when you fall. A minor consequence of this is that the
minimal softness required to consider a surface "soft" would change
with scale, since lighter beings would not feel as much pressure. This
is somewhat paradoxical with the scaling of stiffness.
Relativity
For mega-giants, simply moving would be enough to produce relativistic
phenomena.
Size Cues in Visual Media
In my experience, I’ve found that communicating size difference is
remarkably difficult—chiefly because the mind has strong assumptions
as to the scale of familiar objects and especially that of people.
Rather than believe the subject is a giant, the mind is always ready to
assume they are normal sized even when it implies all sorts of
absurdities elsewhere. It is therefore necessary to apply every possible
trick to overcome this tendancy.
Familiar Objects
The most tried and true technique; portraying objects that are familiar
to the audience allows them to use their own intuitive sense of scale.
This effect can be quite jarring when watching physical modelers step
into view of their miniatures.
A bannana for scale only works until it
doesn't.
Detail
Showing detail that is difficult to percieve or even imperceptible to
the naked eye, helps to establish a sense of scale. It is a particular
pet peeve of mine that many 3D renders use relatively low-resolution
assets in their scene, causing the subject to appear out of place.
Material Stiffness
Materials become proportionally softer as they get larger. This is
especially the case with fabrics, where doll’s clothes are much stiffer
than human clothes, and blanket-sized sheets are proportionally closer
to silk than cotton. Therefore, artists should aspire to ensure that
materials behave correctly with regards to their scale to better
convince the viewer.
Embodiment
An extremely powerful technique used in the right circumstances
A paper
by Van der Hoort et al. showed that "When participants experienced the
tiny body as their own, they perceived objects to be larger and farther
away, and when they experienced the large-body illusion, they perceived
objects to be smaller and nearer. Importantly, despite identical retinal
input, this ‘‘body size effect’’ was greater when the participants
experienced a sense of ownership of the artificial bodies compared to a
control condition in which ownership was disrupted."
, showing
the audience the protagonist’s own body -especially in relation to the
environment- can serve to cement the scale of the scene.
Foreshortening
Foreshortening approximates the manner in which close, large objects
consume our field-of-view. This is very noticeable in how merely
positioning an un-adjusted camera in an appropriate location fails to
convey a sense of scale. By decreasing the focal length and widening the
angle, the scene can be made to appear larger.
Surface Tension
Water forms beads of a very limited range of sizes. Therefore, one can
use their presence to estimate size.
Atmospheric Scattering
Over very long distances, approaching the horizon, we perceive a blue
haze due to. In art, this is called Atmospheric Perspective, that can
therefore be used as a yardstick.
Depth of Field
Depth of field a complicated phenomenon, but one we are able to employ
in gauging scale. Tilt-Shift photography can be used
Such use is known as miniature faking,
and has gained significant popularity on the internet.
to
produce a very shallow depth of field to give the impression the subject
of the photograph is smaller than it actually is.
Comparison between edited and original photographs demonstrating the powerful effect it has. Images credit Janwikifoto & I99pema under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Unfortunately, the converse is not strictly true. Since increases to the
depth of field eventually become unnoticeable, and in ordinary scenes it
is negligable, a larger depth of field does not work well to convery the
smallness of the photographer unless the subject is large enough that
ordinary vision experiences the limitations. Instead,
counter-intuitively, one wants to apply a shallower depth of field to
give the impression that the distances are greater.
Additionally, it should be mentioned that objects cutting across focal
planes can be percieved to be large in relation to the focal length.
Movement Speed
It is remarkable how powerful this effect can be
This effect has been confirmed in a paper by Jia et al.
. To see for yourself, play a space simulator such
as Space Engine and try navigating about small moons at different
speeds. You will see that your perception of its size is entirely tied
to the speed of the camera, since there are no other size cues available
to rely on. It is therefore, unfortunately, hazardous to allow tiny
characters to move quickly, as the audience is quick to assume a
familiar scale and reluctant to deviate from it, even if it implies
other absurdities.
The rate at which objects fall is approximately the same
regardless of its mass. The simple consequence of this is that
large things appear to move slower, according to their proportion, than
small things. Incorporating objects crashing into the ground at
unnatural speeds, especially when close to the camera, can serve as a
powerful indication of size.
Camera Angle
A classic technique in cinematography, the viewer is likely to assume
that if whatever they’re viewing can only be seen from a low angle,
then it must be very large. Jurrassic Park, Star Wars, etc.
Stories
Insert the Dresden Codak comic about different kinds of stories, as well
as the Story Shapes infographic.
Short Stories
Because so much of the "canon" is incomplete or flash.
Maybe move to a "story elements" page? Ontologies are hard—might
need to do a systematic survey.
Pet Store
Hurt/Comfort
Attack of the 50' X
Shrink & Return
Independence Story
Ideas
Wonder of Nature
Themes
Fundamental & Essential Themes
It is easy to think up themes that can be explored with ESD—but
you’ll quickly notice that they share commonalities. What are they?
Knowledge of these funamental themes allows us to more comprehensively
explore the literary potential of ESD by seeing what stories are well
suited to it. I have attempted to distill what I can down into what I
believe are essential themes, but naturally this is a subjective task
that is prone to bias.
These will be ordered by estimated significance.
Power
This is without a doubt the most salient theme in ESD; in almost every
work, size comes with an implicit assumption of raw, physical strength.
Via application or analogy, strength becomes ability, agency, wealth,
status, and every other form of power. In this way, stories about size
implicitly become stories about power.
Relativity of Size & Other Things
In daily life, we tend to have a rather fixed view of what is large and
small, what is valuable and worthless. In ESD contexts, this unavoidably
becomes muddled, which forces the reader to re-examine their
preconceptions.
Extended Themes
While there appears to only be a few fundamental & essential themes, it
is worthwhile to explore the plethora of consequent and related themes
for the benefit of inspiration and precision in thought. I will caution
that those attempting to write something literary should avoid any
"colour-by-numbers" use of writing techniques; attempts to work in
theme are often transparent and not as enjoyable as their subconscious
invocation.
To better explore the themes, I’ll also include sections on different
perspectives of them. By default, the introductory text is written to
show how the ESD elements of the story can be used to explore theme.
Critque: how the theme can be found to be flawed.
Paradox: how the theme is equally valid when inverted.
Utility: how the ESD interpretation of the theme can be used to
serve the story. For example, by making a powerful character giant
to emphasize their power.
Alienation
The same scene of a garden is very different depending on your size
relative to it. What could be an ordinary span of grass to a mesoscale
individual might appear as a jungle to micros, and a mere decoration to
macros. This theme is especially prevalent in fiction that involves size
change, as the individual is made unfamiliar with their enviroment by
their new size.
Female Vulnerability
A common theme, intentional or not, in the Giant/Tiny community
See the page on Communities.
. Framing men as giants
serves to highlight the strength they posess in comparison with women.
Fragility of Life
Humanity is lucky to be in the position where the vast majority of
animal species on this planet is as large as or much smaller than us;
the threat posed by them appears insignificant compared to the threat
posed by scarcity, disease and ourselves. In a way, this gives a sense
of invulnerability that is completely circumstantial. In a world with
giants or an alternate Earth of micro humans, this invulnerability is
stripped to reveal how fragile we really are.
Paradox
While the general implication is that tinies represent the fragility of
life, it is entirely possible to flip the dynamic on its head by showing
how a single adequately prepared tiny can fell a giant many times their
size; a cut to an exposed artery in the middle of the night, a shallow
nick that becomes fetid,—slaying the giant reveals the fragility of
all life.
Goodness & Pettiness
A theme present even in our language. It’s big of you when you do good;
you’re the better person. It’s small of you to do bad. This perhaps
stems from our perception of rodents and venomous animals as an
insidious threat, and tallness a sign of nobility.
Joy of Life, Nature
With the alienation of size comes the opportunity for re-familiarisation
and therefore the child-like wonder of things being new. This applies
equally to the reader as well as the characters.
Marginalisation
National Strength & Unity
Probably the least offensive political cartoon I could find as an
example.
Volksgeist
I’m not actually certain whether this is the correct usage of the term; I’ve
been unable to find a reputable source on what the country-characters in
political cartoons are called.
are a historical example of this trope, wherein the strength
and unity of nations was depicted through their
anthropomorphisation as giants. An interesting example of
this is in the case of Macross, where the alien nation is
shown to be powerful by their sheer size.
Examples:
An inextricable part of Macross, where the conflict with the
Zentraedi is reminiscient of Japan’s conflicts against its powerful
neighbours in the World Wars & before.
In Mistress Masham’s Repose, Lilliput-in-Exile is painted to be
much like a colonized nation after its discovery by Maria, whose
relative enormity represents the overwhelming power of the British
Empire.
Relationship Dynamics
This is less a theme and more of a family of themes—the play of power
in a romantic or working relationship. Traditionally, this is explored
through how the division of labour and ?(desires?) between spouses
results in a give-and-take where the balance of power is made uncertain;
a burly man is easily cowed by their petite wife merely implicating
privation.
Social Stratification
Size can be used to illustrate the magnitude and breadth of consequences
that follows from having extraordinary individuals. The rich can trample
the poor and leave them to eat their scraps all too literally, while the
talented rise beyond the helpless masses merely by accident of birth.
Treatment of Animals
Almost all animals on this planet are significantly different in size
(measured by volume) from humans. As a consequence, the way we interact
with humanoids of different sizes in fiction reflects on the way we
interact with animals in real life. The conditions of a hamster’s cage
appear poor when viewed through the lens of a person subjected to them
and the casual annihilation of insects appears downright monstrous when
viewed from their perspective.
Examples via Anthropomorphism:
Ant Bully
A Bug’s Life
Finding Nemo
Size implies power which implies agency.
Treatment of Possessions
Examples:
Toy Story
Unfairness of Life, Nature
One of the enlightenment ideals that shapes western culture is
egalitarianism. A significant part of that is the belief that with
opportunity and effort, any individual can achieve greatness; that no
one is inherently superior. Unfortunately, the reality is less
favourable; intellectual and physical disabilities for which there is no
cure exist and categorically prevent many millions of people from ever
achieving their otherwise-possible dreams. Depending on context, size
can be viewed as a disability. A tiny individual will never be able to
compete physically with a giant, and a giant may too be doomed from
achieving something possible to tinies.
Value of Small Things
Tropes
Absurdly Silken Cloths
One of the easiest ways to spot green-screen ESD sfx is to note how
fabric bends. At a micro’s scale, fabric should behave closer to a
stiff tarp, yet often we see scenes where it instead easily folds over
itself. Similarly, clothes for macros should show a notable lack of
stiffness, making things like pleated skirts impossible without
structural backing.
Oyayubihime has an especially bad example of this with a cheap
napkin.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman has a scene where this is the case.
Animal Attacks
An almost omnipresent trope in fiction where micros are involved. The
presence of giant insects and animals practically guarantees they will
attack unprovoked, regardless of the likelihood of such action in real
life.
An iconic scene in this trope comes from Richard Matheson’s The
Shrinking Man and its adaptations, where Scott Carey is forced to
defend himself against a giant spider. Before that, he’d been
attacked by the family cat.
Lindsay Gutteridge’s Cold War in a Country Garden frequently
invokes this trope, especially in the first half of the book.
In Studio Ghibli’s The Secret World of Arrietty, the eponymous
protagonist is attacked by a both a crow and a cat.
Big and Dumb
It is a curious phenomena that height can be correlated with
intelligence1
, yet often times they are portrayed ignobly. From scattered
lanklets to hulking brutes, it’s rare
to find an example where a notably virtuous person is significantly
taller than their peers. In contrast, historically the opposite was
mostly true; height was associated with good nutrition, and therefore
the nobility and nobility itself.
Big and Ugly
If beauty can be considered an absence of flaws, then the key to beauty
is being hard to see. A common enough trope in size fiction that
attempts a more serious tone, giants are described as ugly to tinies,
with ever minor flaw impossible to ignore.
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver notes
during his stay in Brobindignag that X, and recalls how his
Lilliputian friend Y.
Captured by Giants
Wherever you have tinies meeting giants, a kidnapping inevitably
follows. Oftentimes the drama is hightened by careless grabbing and the
use of cages meant for small animals.
Shortly after landing in Brobindignag, Lemuel Gulliver is captured
by a farmhand who discovers him hiding amongst the corn stalks in
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
A recurring event in Irwin Allen Production’s Land of the Giants.
Tabitha King’s Small World involves multiple cases of such
kidnapping.
Cannibalism
Apparently being different sizes is reason enough to eat people.
Falling is Deadly (for tinies)
As megafauna, humans are close to the upper limit for terrestrial
organisms and this shows in how our bodies are unable to cope with the
stress of impact with the ground at terminal velocity. For the vast
majority of organisms, this is not an issue as their weight is
insufficient to damage themselves. A (morbid) thought experiment along
these lines2
The gendankenexperiment was originally popularised by J. B. S. Haldane in
his essay On Being the Right Size.
is to imagine the difference between throwing an ant, a mouse, a human
and a horse down a well. The ant will be entirely unaffected, the mouse
will come out unharmed, the human broken, and the horse a bloodly stain.
We can infer this to be the case in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, as the Lilliputians are described to be risking injury
when performing their customary tightrope dance/challenge, and also
when the Lilliputian horse injures itself after tearing a hole in
Lemuel’s hankerchief.
Curiously averted in T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose,
where a young Lilliputian-in-exile falls from a toy plane at great
relative height merely to break a leg.
Ground Tremors
Intuitively, we expect the movement of immense creatures to produce
ground tremors. Commonly used in films involving megafauna and giant
monsters, it applies equally to many ESD works—even where it is not
particularly appropriate. This is something between a Coconut
Effect
and a tactical use of exaggeration to sell the scene.
If You’re Brave Enough
Giantesses seem to have no qualms putting all manner of things inside
themselves. Buildings, really? Even the male giants seem careless about
how shattered glass and jagged metal might feel.
Immodest Giants
Modesty is a multifaceted cultural phenomenon. It not only encompasses
the nudity taboo established both philosophically by Abrahamic religions
(among others?), and pratically by our lack of fur, but also the
aversion to voiding in public, the consideration of sexual activity as
private, etc. It is my belief that modesty fundamentally stems from fear
of vulnerability. Naked people are vulnerable, as are people in the
process of voiding or sexual intercourse. It follows, then, that if
there is no possibility of danger, modesty is disregarded—exactly as
in the case of a giant accompanied by a tiny.
This trope is invoked multiple times in Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, perhaps being responsible for its
establishment.
François Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel has
far too much of this to be considered part of the literary cannon.
Ketchup Packet Tinies
And the inverse. Often, shrunken individuals are portrayed as being
particularly fragile, and giants conversely durable. This is a
consequence of a physical approach to scaling.
Mobile-Suit Human
If pride is not an obstactle, tinies can make use of relatively
enourmous mecha to fight giants on even terms. See also the TVTropes
page.
On the Shoulders of Giants
Perching on the head, shoulder, or other convenient locations.
In Studio Ghibli’s The Secret World of Arrietty, Sho gives
Arrietty a ride on his shoulder.
An unusual example, Obsi’s To be a Breezie finds Twilight’s ears
being used in this fashion.
Pocket Travellers
Pockets are for keeping small things, and what more is a tiny than one
such small thing? Sometimes other parts of clothes serve as pockets, but
that is usually for more erotic stories.
In Mary Dublin and Anne Kendsley’s Shot in the Dark, Sylvia
frequently finds herself having to hide in pockets.
Ponderous Giants, Agile Tinies
Psychopathy
Humans are prone to treating the "other" poorly, and size is a
powerful alienator. ESD fiction often takes this to extremes, where
tinies are regularly treated worse than slaves were historically. This
applies to a lesser extent with tinies oppressing giants, but often such
oppression falls within historical norms.
Reaching In
An easy way to drill home the size difference is to have the giant
reaching into a regular building as if it were a dollhouse. An arm,
barely fitting through a window while a table-sized hand wriggles around
like an enormous spider is incredibly alienating for an otherwise
unremarkable situation.
In Tabitha King’s book Small World, Dorothy regularly reaches
into the dollhouse while X is occupying it, leading to her
describing
Riding Rodent
The need for transportation is universal, and for primitive society,
animals serve as efficient vehicles. With the smallest horse-like
animals (X) measuring only (Y), it is common for writers to grant tinies
other species for this purpose. Oftentimes these are rodents such as
rats, mice, and rabits. Less common are dogs and fowl, despite how the
former is considered the traditional mount of fairies3
This actually may be a modern myth; I’ve been unable to find an authoritative citation to
back it up. Perhaps The Mythology of Dogs: Canine Legend by Gerald and
Loretta Hausman might suffice, but I do not have a copy of the book
available to verify.
. Caution must be taken with this trope as,
elucidated in the article on mounts, the structure of spine
and mode of locomotion required for efficient riding is very specific,
and not found in dogs and rats.
The Lilliputians-in-Exile were not able to bring any Lilliputian
horses to England, and so used rats as mounts in T. H. White’s
Mistress Masham’s Repose.
In Blue Sky Studio’s epic, the Leafmen ride birds among other
small animals.
The Bigger They Are, The Faster They Fall
How long would it take for you to fall five feet? How about fifty? As
stated in the article on the physics of scaling,
giants must appear to walk and fall slower, given that the time it takes
for their feet to fall to the ground is proportionally longer. Usually,
this observation is ignored in favour of having giants move
proportionally at the same speed.
Implied to be the case in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
as the Lilliputians are not said to appear scuttling, and the
brobindignags ponderous.
The Dollhouse
What else would be more appropriate to house doll-sized people than a
house for dolls?
Used to great effect in Tabitha King’s Small World.
In The Secret World of Arrietty, a dollhouse was originally built
for the use of the borrowers but sat almost unused until Sho
transports the kitchen into the Clock’s home.
The Joyride
When the tiny’s just the right size to make use of an RC toy vehicle,
you inevitably have a montage.
Stuart Little
Oyayubihime
The Rampage
The only sensible reaction to becoming 50' tall is to cause as much
property damage as you possibly can. This classic trope started with the
infamous Attack of the 50' Woman and the associated monster-movie
culture, becoming
Attack of the 50' Woman
Tinies are Squeaky, Giants are Rumbly
Intuitively we know that small things are usually
associated with higher frequencies—and for voice, the
kinds of pitches we’d expect are percieved to be "squeaky"
or "rumbly" depending on who’s talking. Physically, this
isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but in ESD fiction, it is
surprisingly common.
Like many tropes regarding size, it was likely established by
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, as Swift describes the
voice of the Lilliputians to be X, and that of the Brobindignags
as Y.
Tinies in Food
Inevitably, tinies seem to find themselves surrounded by a giant’s
food, even if they are not supposed to be a part of it.
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver finds
himself at least twice in the food of the Brobindignag court. Once
he is dunked in ?milk?, and another time stuffed in the cavity of a
bone.
Oyayubihime has a cruel and unusual take on this trope, where
Saeko puts X on the pan she used for making pancakes, forcing her to
"dance" on the burning-hot surface.
Unawareness
A curious thing about awareness/perceptiveness is that any
attempt to guage it for yourself suffers from survivorship
bias. We only notice that we noticed the
things we noticed, so the true extent of what we haven’t
noticed is left out of our internal estimation. For most of
us, this isn’t a big deal. Small things are usually
negligable, after all—and those are the most likely to be
overlooked. But when said small things are people and their
effects, the importance of awareness cannot be overstated.
In fiction, it’s common to work on the assumption that we’re
actually quite bad at being aware of smaller things, so a
constant, implicit threat from giants is simply what they
can do by accident. Less extreme is the associated
difficulty with getting noticed, or desire to sneak past
unwitting giants. Altogether, this is something of an
omnipresent trope despite how exaggeratedly it is often
portrayed.
Averted in Mistress Masham’s Repose, where Maria takes extra
caution not to accidentally trample the Lilliputians.
Discussed in Hilda, where the first episode establishes a theme of
giants stepping on houses/villages without noticing.
About
Extreme Size Difference is a catch-all term to encompass humanity’s
long-held fascination with giants and smallfolk, with shrink rays and
Eat Me’s. This website is intended to become a comprehensive resource
for all things size difference: documenting, cataloguing, and
contributing where possible in a balanced and informative manner to the
widest audience. That is, despite the sexualisation of the topic, this
is not intended to be an niche or NSFW website; I hope to provide something for everyone from
creators and consumers of ESD content to scientists and curious laypeople.
About Myself
I am a privacy-conscious macrophile with a background in the sciences.
Because of the impossibility of my desires and a similar level of
failure in my other persuits, I generally struggle for motivation.
Please accept my apologies if you encounter an unfinished or sub-par
page; I find it helps to publish what I’ve written rather than ruminate
over what I haven’t.
Although it’s not directly related to this website, I
frequent Lainchan to discuss subjects such as
programming, cryptography, and political theory. The people
there are pretty cool, and the project to revive
webrings for small, personal sites inspires me. So,
here’s my copy of the webring:
Live
This is the bulk of the webring, sorted into tiers by how
interesting I personally find each website, and then
alphabetically within each tier. For me, this usually means
those websites with plenty of meaty articles, eccentricies,
and unusual designs rank highly. It is by no means an
attempt at an objective ranking (I disfavour music, for
instance, because I am not particularly musical) and
definitely not any serious endorsement of the content
(honestly, there is too much variety for this list to
represent a coherent character beyond “I use tech”).
Darknet
This is a special section to highlight websites available on
mixnets and other anonymizing overlay networks.
Inaccessible
These are websites that are either inaccesible to me, an
English speaker and Tor user, or are no longer online.
Or, a new year’s resolution. Previously I had written the
HTML and CSS code for this website by hand, and it showed.
At the time, I was literally editing the website in
neocities’ online editor, saving each change and observing
the effect in a new tab. One. Tiny. Change. At. A. Time. It
was laborious, slow, and yielded an inconsistent,
poorly-written website.
I’d known beforehand of Static Site Generators, but the
effort involved in setting one up kept me away from them.
Lately, I’ve started feeling better. More confident,
energetic, and capable of tackling larger problems. I think
I owe it to my resolution to make decisions, even bad ones,
in the name of overcoming things that depress me. It isn’t
easy, but it is necessary if I want to achieve anything
in this life. I must make mistakes, even if I know they
could have been avoided in some hypothetical ideal
situation.
So I dumped the website contents (thanks neocities!) into a
folder, split it into files, and used HTML→Markdown
converters. Then, I tidied up the generated code and ran it
back through Kramdown to recover an
approximation of the original website. Success! But this was
a long way from a proper static site. I needed more than
just a concatenation of pages, if only to correct some of
the undesirable output from Kramdown.
Usually, static site generators are built around templates.
Indeed, it’s almost unspoken the assumption that static
websites are supposed to be built through templating. This
struck me as strange, because HTML is itself structured data
that can be parsed and manipulated in a well-defined
manner—my mental model is of a tree, just like any other.
Templating feels clumsy and awkward. So I looked around and
found only one rebel: Soupault. Not the French
writer Philippe Soupault, but the software named
after him. The developer hit upon the core of my concern:
HTML is structured data, so a static website generator
should work as a series of programmable transformations over
it. This was fantastic! Unfortunately, Soupault,
intentionally or not, is rather opinionated. So far as I
could see, there is no way to generate a SPA like what I
want, and furthermore, it assumes a very linear, pipeline
model for data transformation that strikes me as wholly
unnecessary.
Dissatisfied, I decided I would just cobble together my own
tool, damn the consequences. Soupault, really, is a thin
layer over a good HTML parsing library, so it
struck me that I could build my own Soupault with
blackjack and hookers with another library. It turns
out that python has just the thing: Beautiful Soup 4.
Not only does this library parse HTML, but it also provides
tools for editing and printing it back out. Inspired by
Soupault’s design, I created a folder of simple scripts that
Did One Thing and Did It Well, written as filters, which I eventually turned into modules that
could be dynamically loaded at runtime by a handy tool.
Apparently, it’s something of a meme for programmers to
write their own static site generator rather than learn
someone else’s. I can relate to this sentiment.
I usually try to avoid writing my own stuff when I can use
someone else’s. Avoid seems too light a word, really. I will
spend hours, days, sometimes weeks searching for an
implementation by someone else. It comes from a lack of
confidence in myself—both in my power to commit, and my
ability to succeed. In extreme cases, I have patiently
waited years for someone to write software I know is beyond
my current ability (but not necessarily beyond my
potential). Perhaps in seeing the code samples for my
"project" you can agree, but perhaps I am overly
self-critical.
First htmltool.py parses input data into a pipeline, each
long switch declaring a new operation, with all following
items the arguments to it.
pipeline = []
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
if arg[0:2] == "--":
pipeline.append([arg[2:]])
else:
pipeline[-1].append(arg)
Probably not the most elegant code, but it suffices. Next I
passed it to a routine that would just loop through the
list, piping the output of one function into the input of
the next, given a standard form fn(input,*args).
with sys.stdin as stdin:
res = BeautifulSoup(stdin, 'html.parser')
for invocation in pipeline:
cmd = invocation[0]
cmd = importlib.import_module(f"modules.{cmd}").fn
res = cmd(res,*invocation[1:])
And that’s it. As simple as possible, but not any simpler.
To see an example of how it works, here’s
script-replace-attr.py:
from subprocess import run, PIPE
def fn(document,selector,attr,script):
for tag in document.select(selector):
tag[attr] = run(script, shell=True\
,stdout = PIPE\
,text = True\
,input = tag[attr]).stdout
return document
And here is how I use it to transform
In case anyone’s curious, the sed 's/.*?//' is there
because this is actually part of the caching step where the
image links generated by --math are made into local files.
scary arbitrary LaTeX
like $$e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0\text{; rm -rf --no-preserve-root /#}$$
into something I can safely
That didn’t stop me from making a full system backup
before compiling, though.
manipulate:
--script-replace-attr "img.equation" src\
"sed 's/.*?//' | base64 | sed 's|^|./math/|;s/$$/.gif/'"
The combination of CSS selectors (including the non-spec
selectors like :has()Documented here.
) and UNIX text manipulation
facilities makes this simple function ridiculously powerful.
Another sterling example would be set-attrs.py which I use
to make external links safer and images lazy load.
def fn(document,selector,attr,valu):
for tag in document.select(selector):
tag[attr] = valu
return document
But this doesn’t really show off the power of HTML as
structured data, does it? Here’s details-summary.py which
parses a shorthand I developed where some markdown like:
which was very convenient given how many collapsibles I have
on this website! The code is simply:
def fn(document):
for summary in document("ds"):
content = summary.find_next_siblings()
summary.name = "summary"
details = document.new_tag("details")
summary.wrap(details)
details.extend(content)
return document
That’s it. I am honestly shocked this way of doing things
isn’t more popular—it seems so obvious and simple. That
said, it’s pretty slow and stupid since each sub-command
represents at least one full scan of the document. Before I
figured out how to get make to play nicely with caching
progress, it would take a good number of minutes to compile
the whole project.
I do intend to open source the rest of the project
eventually since I figure if nothing else, there needs to be
a tool for editing HTML like jqHomepage
is for viewing JSON.
First, however, I must learn git properly if I don’t want to
publish my embarassing edit histories for all the world to
see. There is also an aspect of privacy, as I’m sure there’s
a stylometric attack lurking in the style, frequency, and
constitution of one’s commits.
In general, you may notice that the site looks prettier and
feels more natural on the screen. I’ve rewritten the CSS
pretty much from scratch (though it could definitely use
another pass or two), combing over the declarations and
testing their relevance to the whole with firebug/firefox
dev tools. To a somewhat significant extent, I feel I have
improved over the original john-doe template by removing
some hardcoded assumptions that limit its responsiveness. It
should now work on all of your Skinner boxes! If not, please
leave me a comment so I can try my hand at fixing it.
Let’s start with the header. The original header was an
after-thought. I’d wanted to emphasize the book nature of
illuminated manuscripts by making the header look like the
cover of a book laid flat. Unfortunately, stitching
together segments of a detailed texture was never going to
look natural, especially with how hard I had to compress it
to make the file size reasonably small. Honestly, it looked
more like some hellish roast-beef sandwich than a book.
Coupled with the headings simply inheriting the style of
regular text links, it looked like a particularly sad
sandwich that had been abandoned at the beach.
This time I decided to try a fixed-width header so I could
get everything to agree. Furthermore, I’d use CSS to
decorate since I recalled seeing a wonderfully simple
stitching effect achieved with border
In the end, I abused outline to save on the
number of pseudo-elements I was using.
. Through this, I’d
also been working with a subconscious bias towards
skeuomorphism, and so wanted the book cover to pop out of the
screen. Again, CSS has a surprisingly simple trick for it:
box-shadow gives enough of a visual cue to imply depth
where there is none.
The heading text was unexpectedly difficult. I wanted to
emulate the look of a leather-bound book, but like with the
paper effect, the details in the background diminished the
legibility of the text. However, unlike the paper, I
couldn’t take advantage of a simple background blur—the
color contrast was also too poor! Be it gold or black, the
visual noise was too significant and it made the header
unusable. Frustrated, I looked towards references (like I
should have done in the first place) to guide my art.
Surprisingly, I found that real leather-bound books actually
get away with a very weak color contrast. The first trick is
that the leather they use is very fine, lacking in texture
unlike the alligator-skin belt leather I had been using up
'till now. The second is that the letters are actually
slightly depressed, allowing the play of light to illuminate
the contours and guide the eye with subtle cues that are
almost unnoticeable. One texture-swap later and some
carefully applied box-shadows, I had this surprisingly
legible header. My only lingering concern is that the text
now appears too small even though it remains unchanged in
size. Scaling up the text cramps it together, since I wanted
the header to align with the body which itself is very
narrow. Perhaps some time to reflect will reveal a solution.
I’ve changed the background text blur to just a solid color.
I noticed how you could hardly see the color variation
implicit in using the background image, so it seemed like a
waste of valuable pseudo-elements. Furthermore, it bothered
me how computationally expensive that feature was. Why
doesn’t CSS have background-image-blur yet? Or better yet,
why hasn’t backdrop-filter been accepted into the spec?
One wonders why CSS doesn’t embrace programmable shaders,
given how convoluted the whole thing must be to implement at
this point.
One of the major improvements has been moving everything to
be served locally. I was perhaps pre-mature in offloading my
images to a third party host, even if the thumbnail service
was rather convenient, and as perfect as codecogs is, it is
still another burden on the performance and privacy of this
site’s users. Even the favicons, fetched by DuckDuckGo,
force the user to interact with a third party they may not
wish to in order to view this website properly.
Having a tool to manipulate HTML as data, I found I was
writing a lot of clumsy code to make up for the deficiencies
in my markdown dialect. Converting fragment-based footnotes
to inlines, adding new digraphs and pseudo-elements. I have
half a mind to write my own markdown that’s more modular,
assuming I can’t find one already implemented. It seems
obvious that any sensible markdown compiler should be
written as a series of modular rules that the user can
effortlessly append to. I know that I could edit or
interface with the actual ruby library doing the generation
(particular to Kramdown), but I have always preferred to
operate on the level of commands. A script, usually, has
bugs a-plenty and requires effectively rewriting the code
that already goes into the commandline interface. For
behaviour that is purely extensional, it seems unnecessary.
One of the things I noticed early on was how poorly indexed
the site was. I added a manual sitemap.xml when I noticed,
but it struck me this could be automated.
More generally, I hope to improve this blog by changing my
attitude to writing. Usually, I am very judicious of
anything I produce, so I tend to constantly edit posts
instead of actually write them. Furthermore, I tend towards
being formal, but do so poorly and so come across as
immature or pretentious (or some combination of both). To
this end, I’ve resolved myself to write first and ask
questions later. To write conversationally and easily, with
the understanding my audience will appreciate it better,
modern as they are. It also helps that now I don’t have to
bother with manually, tediously, editing in the HTML and
trying to read around it.
Only time will tell whether dealing with the overhead
involved in this system is superior to monkeying around in
the raw HTML. I am never really satisfied, or at least, not
for long. I can always imagine how much better something
could be, and thus find it too-easy to see everything in the
light of their perfect selves. For making this website, I
know I will be dissatisfied with the amount of mental
overhead involved with making edits to the makefile and
pipeline of HTML transformations. The makefile is a
monstrosity of tortured make, twisted into understanding
when exactly to pull resources from the 'net and bloated
with page-long invocations that would usually be hidden away
in $(CFLAGS) or similar. Does anyone know the proper way
to extract make dependencies from targets? Is there a
proper way? Images, equations, favicons, etc., to be
published are inferred from the contents of the HTML, which
itself is generated from the markdown. What is the order of
operations if I did use a shell command as a dependency?
make is a surprisingly complex program for having such an
ostensibly simple job.
Regardless, I hope you enjoy the new and improved website,
and the additional articles to come.
Colour at last!
When I first announced this blog, one of the first criticisms was the
lack of color. I’m a pretty boring person, so I’ve never been prone to
putting color and graphics in my documents unless prompted by colleagues
and superiors. However, there’s no denying that color helps grab and
maintain interest, so I decided upon the parchment theme that I used in
my banner. Trying to apply it to the blog wasn’t as easy; the visual
noise from the texture made the text difficult to read, while the cool
stacked paper effects I was interested in didn’t appear to work with
the trick I use to make it a (mostly) single page website. So I threw my
hands up and just made do with beautiful simplicity.
Months later, I’ve been wondering how to make this blog stand out on
the neocities listing and decided to see if I might have better luck on
the second try. First, to overcome the noise problem, I used a strong
background blur to help reduce the visual noise directly under the
text while still preserving the interesting details around it. As you
can see, it works surprisingly well. In the research towards it, I
became inspired to evolve the general parchment look into that of
an illuminated manuscript. Gold text doesn’t go well on pale yellow
paper, so to get the illuminated text to read well, I’ve tried a very
subtle outline ("stroke", according to the tutorial) in a darker
gold color. For the hyperlinks you see, it’s not so bad.
The top/navigation bar was looking pretty bare, so I decided on trying
to hybridize the idea of a book cover with it. Searching flickr, I came
across this image which almost perfectly matched the feel of what I
had in mind under a permissive license. Unfortunately, the lighting is
uneven in the original picture, which caused very jarring transitions
when tiled. To fix this, I used this rather clever tutorial on
equalising brightness in GIMP. I had to apply the trick twice, fiddle with the
curves, do some rotations and croppings to get it to be somewhat
homogenous, but combined with re-using some of the ideas from the blur
technique, I managed to get it to be half-decent. If you’re wondering
how I got the edges of the .JPEGs to be transparent, the truth is that I didn’t—I just manually composited in the background texture.
Altogether, it’s turned out alright. There’s still some work to do to
make it properly look like an illuminated manuscript, but for now this
suffices.
Rant
My life has predictable elements in it. Like an addict, when my thoughts
turn to ESD, I desperately
seek out content to sate my longing. This week was AO3, and to my (mis)fortune, I found something
captivating: an SG-1 fanfiction where the author clearly has shown a
love of the franchise, history, and a general thoughtfulness that puts
them above the rest. I consumed all ~100k words of it over the course of
about eight or ten nearly-consecutive hours. The issue with addictions
is that satiation is an illusion—what follows it is an even greater
longing. I know this, but my life sometimes feels empty enough that even
the most base expressions of dukkha are a preferable distraction to the
existential emptiness my view of the world invites. Edgy, but I suppose
that’s appropriate—given how edginess follows from immaturity, of
which purposelessness is a sure sign of. I digress. What is likely
interesting to you, the reader, isn’t how pathetic I am, but what
insights my sour thoughts may provide.
In this case, when my mind grows numb from the barrage of offensive tags
and vacuous words (as if my own are not!), I retreat to the fantasy of
writing something better. Only—what is better? What differentiates a
story worth reading from one that should never have been written, let
alone published? A good story isn’t the absence of odious writing, that
much is obvious, but the surpluss of something enjoyable. Perhaps
misguidedly, I am quick to associate that enjoyableness with the plot. A
good plot is a novel plot, or an old one well executed. In both cases I
ask myself: what can ESD
contribute? Are there interesting plots that can only exist with ESD? Does introducing ESD to well-storied plots make
them worth reading yet again? I am not sure. In my pessimism, I argue
no; ESD is readily seen as
a metaphor for power, and stories about power have been done to death.
Yet I naïvely want to say yes; that ESD provides a new perspective, no different than
exploring how some more obviously alien species might colour the story.
Without anything definite to persuade my rational mind one way or the
other, I think elsewhere.
Perhaps the goodness of the story doesn’t lie in its plot, but its
ability to captivate. Evocative prose, inventive imagery, some naked
piece of the author’s Unique. I consider this, and I write
appropriately. But a writer is their own worst critic, and what made
something like the SG-1 fanfiction enjoyable to me falls flat when I try
my own hand at it. The horrible thing about depression and low
self-esteem is that it devours encouragement with little to show for it,
leaving you begging a frustrated peergroup for ever-more attention.
Insecurity is a bad look, and one people are tired of. Therefore, I
become paralysed. It is a small grace that I think so lowly of blogs
that I can fearlessly spew my verbal diarrhea for others to suffer
through. I am sorry.
ADDENDUM:
In the process of writing, I had forgotten one of the original points I
wished to make; everything worth saying has already been said, and
nothing is new under the sun. Part of growing up for the vast majority
of people is recognising your own mediocrity. Confronting it. Does the
world need another mediocre expression from a forgettable individual who
has lived an uninteresting life? Probably not. Yet I need to create, to
breathe life through my fantasies by realizing them in some small
fashion—dragging myself out of the comfort of simple ideas to approach
the complexity of life and imitate it.
Dragon Maid
I finally got around to watching Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, and
the relationship between Tohru and Kobayashi
Funnily enough, we never learn her given name.
intrigued me from an ESD perspective; Tohru deeply adores Kobayashi
despite their disparity. Physically, Kobayashi is weaker, poorer, less
capable, and much shorter lived than Tohru. In that sense, Kobayashi has
nothing to offer Tohru—the usual stumbling
block for ESD relationships in my mind. Nevertheless, the
infatuation seems believable to me because what Kobayashi offers is
something wholly immaterial but infinitely useful: a cool head.
Kobayashi is Tohru’s emotional rock, her voice of reason, and guiding
light to something better than the empty life of a dragon. I think such
a foundation would make for a touching ESD story.
Hello World!
So, I’ve had this idea for a while, now. A website where I could
publish all my overthinking in the hopes that someone else might benefit
from it. After a bit of soul searching, I decided to bite the bullet and
spin up a neocities website. I figure: it doesn’t matter if it isn’t
professional, or if it isn’t properly cited, or even complete. What
matters is that I’m building up a base of accomplishments that I can
look back on when I’m feeling down. So here it is! A bunch of
incomplete articles on the one of the most bizarre choices of topic.
,
Length 
, Mass 
, Electric Current 
, Thermodynamic
Temperature 
, Amount of Substance 
, Luminous Intensity
).
. Intuition and reasoning over physical laws is used to
guide what the rewrite rules for each unit ought to be. To tackle the
problem most effectively, we will focus on the SI base units and build
up from there.
, where 
is the
scale factor. There isn’t much need to justify this choice of axiom
because the rule is obviously true; if we were to scale a metre ruler by
ten, it would be as long as ten ordinary rulers.
.
Under scaling, we want the density to remain constant. This follows from
our intuition that the amount of "stuff" per volume shouldn’t change
as the volume gets larger. Knowing that
does
not scale, and
scales
according to
, we can
therefore write
where 
is the
unknown scaling constant associated with
. In order to
balance the equation,
.
This makes logical sense, as wherever you scale an object linearly,
it’s volume and corresponding mass scales cubically.
