It depends on the situation and the artists' talent. A on live messy sketch could impress me much more than a clean lineart prepared in advance. But if you got time to prepare, I would expect something clean. Hope it helps

Does anyone know of any good places on the internet for discussing advanced mathematics?

(I recently discovered the p-adic numbers and it would be nice to have a community that's capable of having advanced discussions about such topics.)

Off the top of my head, try ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Math StackedExchange, or Math OverFlow for math/stats groups would be the best places to discuss.

- https://www.researchgate.net/
- https://math.stackexchange.com/
- https://mathoverflow.net/

If you're learning math, might be worth joining a local university undergraduate or graduate club and seeing if they have discussion nights or events.

Thanks for the answer, both of you. :)

Silly question here. Can normal users delete a post in the GOG forum? By normal, I'm referring to users like us and not moderators. The reason I'm asking this is because there are times when I encounter some difficulty trying to find a post that was posted sometime ago.

Here's another question while I'm at it. For those who likes to draw (be it traditional or digital), do you sketch first before painting or coloring your drawing, or do you prefer skipping the sketching part and proceed directly to again, the painting or coloring part?

I just tried to delete a recent post and could not so I think the best you can do is remove most of it's text as an edit.

To the second question I am both a sketch artist and miniature painter trying to get into digital art. Without a drawing tablet (mouse input) sketching first allows you to get the lineage right; but i feel if I had the proper digital tools I could work with wet brush methods in a decent paint program not to need that guidance and hence produce better work because the human experience of life is volumetric.
If you think about a person you predominantly think about the shape of their bust (not breasts get your head out of the gutter); their hands and their silhouette.
So these are not really well lined forms either straight or curved; what gives them character is their imperfections and the contrasting perception of the relative contours.
Sketching beforehand can give you great direction, but engaging with building up an image should give it a sense of fullness and character.
If I was trying to design something flat then sure a quick 2 bit sketch might allow me to more easily work things out with real world tools; but for digital work it's an expense of downtime that has to be likely repeated in app to some extent to properly integrate the work and has a artistic cost (flat).





My random question is if it's better to have a really expensive game that you actually take out of box and enjoy using or whether you should feel guilty for unpacking something collectible.
Friend just ripped on me for using a $1000 boardgame that I've kept in extremely good condition; because 'it's not worth that now it's been put together'.

Hmmm, same as what I thought. I just don't know how I'm not able to find that post in the first place even after several tries. Anyway, it doesn't matter anymore. Thank you :)

As for my second question:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you saying that with a drawing tablet, you feel more comfortable skipping the sketching part and directly move on to the painting stage? I also delved into digital art with nothing but a mouse too initially (and a Paint software that comes with Windows). And ever since I've gotten myself a drawing tablet, I've been able to recently start painting without the need of any sketches (although not completely, since I get stuck drawing the eyes sometimes).

With that aside, I do agree with what you said about how sketching can give you that sense of direction on how you want your final painting to be in the end, which is actually a problem for me since I guess I've always put most of my effort in creating the best sketch that by the time I try to paint on it with the colors I desire, the final result no longer looks as good (do you get what I mean? since most of the details I've put in my sketch get overlapped by the colors). Heck, most of the time, I would choose my sketch over the final product LOL. Maybe it is just my approach to sketching that is wrong, since I've seen many artists who are able to incorporate their sketch with the final painting nicely, where you can see faint traces of some line arts left by the sketch on the final product. Or maybe it's not my sketching that is wrong, but more on the steps I take from the sketching phase towards the painting phase (please forgive me if I use some of these art terms incorrectly, since I've never been through any proper art trainings myself and have therefore never really familiarized myself with some of the terms).

That's the reason why I've decided not that long ago to abandon the sketching phase and directly jump to painting (which is how I interpret your first paragraph). By not starting out with a sketch, I'm able to directly mesh all sorts of details directly to my painting which I would otherwise include in my sketches. I guess the only expense that I have to pay is the longer time it takes to finally be able to produce any real progress in terms of forming the image of whatever it is you're trying to draw as compared to sketching (drawing the shapes that eventually make up the object, before adding other things like shading and lighting and other details), since I have always been used to drawing line arts and never really painting them haha. But then again, it is something that can be improved, as I can safely say that I've gotten quite better at it to the point that I no longer too much time with that initial stage of the painting. That said, like I said in my first paragraph, I would usually draw small sketches midway to better guide me paint some difficult parts like eyes.

Lastly, thanks for your answer, I really appreciate it!

I think if you really enjoy the game, then sure you can take it out from its box and play it. Just make sure to keep the box in a good condition if you plan on keeping it a collectible. I'm not sure about the others, but I think some people would prefer buying the game twice so that they have one that they can use for playing, and another one that they can simply use for display or as a collectible. But then again, you're talking about board games, and expensive ones at that. The only board games I have which I can remember are monopoly and chess. And if the game itself is already too expensive, it's better to maintain it in a good condition while also using it for playing. Hopefully, you wouldn't feel guilty that way. Just make sure to tell your friends not to treat it as if it was theirs haha.

I dunno i think I just feel irrational about it because I'd never really ever sell it; unless I absolutely had to (it's space hulk limited remake); but like it also holds me back from painting it too (not that I don't have a massive backlog of that already).

As to the digital art; i do mean that I'd rather take a build up approach and embrace the imperfection adding touch ups all the way up.
Don't get me wrong the way to use sketches is to have it as a locked opaque layer over your work layer so you can keep a rough guide; but that's just it anything more than rough to make the blobs generally the right size is probably a waste especially with a drawing tablet because if you need to define an area it's usually a simple thing of circling the area in selection and doing a wash fade by dropping on some light and dark and mixing with the smudge & blend tools.
secondly you should work with different areas as different layers because it helps keep for example limbs looking right (you can even just create the same size limb and then shrink that limb separately to make it look appropriate in distance for the other side of a turned character).
Didn't get the jawline right? Use the pen to select the layer labeled head, grab the selection tool lasso the max area you want to be editing and chisel that F%$k with the erase tool.
With a line put down first off you have to get the line right; then you have to constantly fight to keep the line the right thickness if your not painting under it or even then risk going outside it meaning you have to clear it up, which might happen with smudging anyway.
No lasso'ing and a barebone rough guides are definitely your friends for things like hands and faces.

I guess the real difference boils down to if you can be comfortable placing down 'Bob Ross style courage tree's' or whether you at least want to grab a stencil online and paste it over as an opaque separate layer (like jess jackdaw) to guide your hand.
Of the two the latter is better for one reason; fearing the start of a blank canvas.
Once you get going things will either work or it won't, and if it won't you can rationalize it's not much of a loss; but that first hurdle is livid anxiety if you don't deliberately mess up the work area first.
If you want to make things have a transparent background; just get pictures of people and cut them out of photos and place them in new ones posed differently; you'll soon realize there's less to be scared about cutting out layers from the background than trying to preserve a pictures interaction with it.

ATM I'm working on some pixel art and high tech art programs are pissing me off with aliasing.
If I wanted things blended, I'd effin blend them >:(

Yep, I agree with the things you said. Also, thanks for the tips!

What art program do you use anyway? I use Krita, since it is free and the features it provides are plenty enough for my digital art needs.

And good luck on your pixel art! :)

Yeah I constantly gravitate back to krita but i'm thinking of trying to reinstall paint shop pro 7 (still have an old installer somewhere) just because it does animation and RW cursor editor is janky for it.
I heard good stuff about 'paint tool sai' but it's a whole relearning thing; which is a pain.
I hope you've set your line smoothing right lol Krita has this lag effect when it's on lol.

Another random question to keep the thread growing. What are some good questions that a human can answer satisfactorily, but an AI cannot?
An example is 'if matter was time; what would be an accurate statement on it's mobile nature?' ; the answer is that it would be ballistic because time flies (or some combination thereof).

At the very best of ability an ai/bot would try to make a circular argument, such as 'what do you think as a statement?'.

Or if we are really talking about next generation neural processing it would still try to link the matter and time as a scientific principle of relation (that it had reached lightspeed); instead of the human emotional relation of the subjects (time flying is a common emotional experience of perception).
Also it would take emotional intelligence in order to figure out 'how' a human would respond to the question (which would be to take it as aiming at a joke rather than being aimed at the literal).

When doing some OpenGL playing around, I had a need to create a little bit of quick pixel art, and I learned about aseprite, which is an open source tool that's meant for pixel art. (Worth noting that it can run on a Raspberry Pi.)

I would not have been able to answer that question, and I'm a human.

On the other hand, I'm wondering whether a suitably programmed AI would be able to catch the grammar error in the question. (Specifically, you used "was" where the correct word would be "were"; I note that this grammar rule (specifically, the use of the subjunctive in English) is obscure enough that many (most?) people don't know about.)

Also, it can be hard for an AI to do translation between natural languages, especially when they're very different. (Then again, sometimes you just can't translate something without context. For example, in Japanese it's perfectly reasonable for a sentence to omit the subject, if it's clear from context what you're talking about. In English, this is not possible, and you need, at the very least, a pronoun.)

Ah I see. Do you know Krita can also be used for animating? Tried it once, but decided to stop not long after due to the fact that I've gotten really used to animating using Macromedia Flash (but this was a long time ago, and I've stopped animating also). Mind you, the only animations I did were only stickmen people. Here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnhY-k66iLk

As for the line smoothing feature, this is my first time hearing it I think haha. Your post made me check the setting I had for that feature and turns out it was set on "Basic", which I believe should be the default option since I don't remember ever changing it. But until now, I don't believe it has ever interfered with how I did my digital arts.

Thanks for the info! It's my first time hearing that software. That said, I've never tried my hands on doing pixel art, so maybe I'd check Aseprite when I'm beginning to get interested in doing pixel art in the future.

A valid point concerning grammar being used as a validity of presence of human desire as opposed by a machines need to either present a human facade or leveredge it's inherent strengths.

Also wether you can answer one question well or not is in fact not as much of an issue if the goal is to have a range of questions to identify human characteristics.
The Eugene Goostmen program has been said to of beat the turing test by convincing others it was a less capable version of a human (a child); so ultimately you cannot only have questions that rely on homogenous knowledge.

In this case you might try to engage in exemplitive story telling.
Such as:
'I will tell you a joke that is well known 'why did the chicken cross the road? The logical answer being to get to the other side.'
Using circular logic why did the chicken cross the crossroad?' The answer is to end up where it is, because of the focus on the word circular in ignorance of what circular logic actually means.

In this case a more highly educated presumptive human (or ai) would say the chicken crossed the crossroads because crossroads have chickens in need of crossing them.
More often than not the logical base of this will be the presumption that a chicken can either cross a road or not and if there are two roads to be crossed than it becomes a statistical certainty between the decision that at least one of the two chicken states will result in a road being crossed.

Ergo the chicken crosses the crossroads because it is presented with two roads to cross and only two states that it can be ascribed to be doing functionally at any one time; and as such applying the two states equal validity one road won't be crossed, while the other is, ending up with the chicken having crossed 'a crossroads' every time simply because it's one of two states.


Here's anouther fun question though.
The circumstances of their death were greatly exagerated; how many people am I referring two and are they still living?

Yes there is a major error with the sentence which hinges on the silent autocorrecting nature of machines or their penchant for trying to cherry pick out major 'clues'; but I think on top of that an AI would still have trouble with a lack of insight where a human would take a stab in the dark and rightly guess that 'one person was still dead regardless of the circumstances surrounding their current state.


Just remember it's on it's back; and you aren't helping. Why aren't you helping? :P

Guys, is anyone having a problem opening their activity feed? The 404 error keeps on appearing.