gimblestank-the-goblin

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

This is when Zira discovers she's got a crush

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

I loved when AI art could never be anything but AI art. the dreams of a computer. now it's all boobs and photorealistic women doing bad kink. but I remember you. I miss you. I love you, Secret Horses.

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

shrek 5's teaser animation isnt bad you're just nostalgic for movies made in 2001

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

oh my godddd the people in the notes of that pokemon anti homeless bench are going to kill me. they're so eager to come up with lore explanations or dismissive hand waves instead of looking at it for what it is. anti homeless benches are so unbelievably pervasive that, whether intentional or not, a designer made the benches in a fantasy game mirror the real world in a jarring way. it's an ugly and uncomfortable juxtaposition that really sticks out in a heavily sanitised and safe kids game like pokemon. i don't think this is some grand statement on gamefreak's politics or anything like that, rather a scathing unintentional indictment on the cruelty of a world that intentionally creates public spaces hostile to homeless people leaking into an idyllic fantasy world where humans live in harmony with nature.

maybe the designer is so used to seeing anti homeless benches that they've never thought about it too much, maybe they knew thought it would make it more immersive and get people talking about the inherent cruelty of such a thing, maybe a million other things. the beauty is that we'll never know. the only thing that will remain is the genuinely profound and baffling phrase "lumiose city anti homeless benches" and the dizzying implications that come with it. banksy couldn't eat her shit

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

VHS customs I picked up from Undead Media tonight.

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

"this piece of media is actually really critical of the military/police" and then the underlying repeated message is "individual soldiers/cops know more than civilian government and should be allowed to make decisions autonomously"

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

Using Vidu to Make Character Turnarounds

Disclosure: I am in the Vidu Artist Program.

Having (at the very least) front and back reference greatly improves the quality of character image prompting. And very often, one finds that they were lazy and only got a couple of bits of character reference. Or they have tons of it in the wrong art style.

A character like Wally Manmoth requires some good reference to work right.

Now, it's not that hard to prompt up something that matches close enough and then modifying the stuff manually until it works, such as I did with TriceraBruce and DeinoSteve:

You can tell Steve's the bad boy because he's got a cool rip in the back of his jacket.

But for Wally, I decided to try out Vidu as a means of getting turnaround frames.

So I loaded Wally's front-view pic (above) into the image-to-video feature, and prompted with:

vintage traditional animation scene (1985) humanoid mammoth/furry elephant wearing a red hawaiian shirt and blue shorts, by filmation and sunbow productions, 90s colors, friendly on green background, streamlined black line art with cel shaded vintage cartoon color, official media, character design fullbody shot on green background. The mammoth-anthro starts facing the camera, turning around to face away from the viewer, providing a view of his back.

I gave it two shots at the 720x quality setting (12 points per, total of 24), and got:

Huh. Weird it happened twice, etc.

This demonstrates both that the tech is viable for this use, and the reason you'd want to have that multi-view reference. The robot clearly assumes that a luau shirt would have a large print on the back, whereas wally's is a more basic print. That's ultra easy to fix, though.

I started by exporting the last frame of each (or close to it, picking the one that looks cleanest)

While its image editing features and often touch-and-go, one thing the Midjourney edit feature has going for it is it's utility as an upscaler. You load the image in, make your tweaks (just a little bit of background if you're just upscaling) and then upscale and at the very least you have 2048x2048 worth of resolution.

I used the midjourney edit process, that got those two images to the following state, as a test.

The results are good, but getting the large trees to erase-and-replace out took several attempts, and just doing it in photoshop then using the editor to upscale would have been faster.

This is why we do tests.

I went with the slightly-at-an-angle one for the main reference sheet. I'll be keeping the straight-on-back-shot in case it winds up being useful for specific scenes down the line.

In photoshop, I touched up the shirt print, made sure the colors where consistent, and simplified the hair coloration to something more period-plausible.

No more giant trees on the back! On the other hand, I think the feet sprouting toes on the heel is going to be something I'll be fixing frame-by-frame until there's another revision.

Human characters will induce these issues less often. I just stick with my genre of choice.

Midjourney was not cooperating with TyrannoMax (it really doesn't like giving him the proportions I like, preferring to make him a weird big-head salamander), so I went the same direction, resulting in this stage 1 front/back:

Only Midjourney refused to work with it, at all. Declaring everything that came out of it too lewd for its internal censor. Apparently, this hunky relative of cheesasaurus rex is too sexy for general consumption. Nevermind that it's a cartoon lizard in a shade tangello orange.

The workaround is too dumb for words.

Slam the hue slider until it's off anything that could be perceived as a human skintone.

Then make the modifications. Here I had to rework the leg several times, and do a lot of tweaking to remove-overinking. Then I popped it back out, droped it back into lineart, re-colored it, and and composited it back together:

And voila, a front and back for Max. I shortened his tail, as the longer tails have been causing problems with confusing the image prompting systems. The armor skirt has scallops to accommodate the tail, which looked better more consistently than the flaps folding around the tail.

The results are, thus far, encouraging.

Of course, if the back of your character has any unexpected details, you're going to have to add those in after the fact or include them in the prompting, and you're going to be making a lot of edits regardless (as you should).

Oh, and Max has a sword now.

A blade of amber crystal with a fossilized femur grip and a faceted dino-eye that should be far enough away from the Eye of Thundera for safety. A roleplay-toy friendly trademark weapon, usually a sword, was a must-have for 80s action-adventure lines despite the fact that you'd never see it used on anything that wasn't a robot, living statue, or skeleton.

Thus the sword's gimmick is it cleaves through non-living matter with ease but anything BS&P doesn't want subjected to a stabbin's is encased in amber crystal: locked in place if partially encased, put into suspended animation if fully encased. A nice, nonlethal use for a magic sword.

It's proportioned like a gladius, but is generally interpreted as larger, approaching a broadsword, in keeping with the generally ridiculous blade sizes of kidvid fantasy. They're just more fun when they're stupidly huge.

Is "Sword of Eons" too on the nose?

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

The Odyssey but Penelope has been slowly killing off suitors one by one via poisoning and staged accidents >>>

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

As someone who works with social history for a living, I feel like I’m the aggressive opposite of an anti-vaxxer

I fucking LOVE vaccines, friends. Give me the science stab. I’m so ready. it’s a beautiful day to not die of a Bajillion and one diseases that carried off like half the population before they had even reached age 10, and a significant portion before they made it to old age, 150 years ago

I go to the old cemetery. I see the vast numbers of infant and child and young adult graves. And then I go to my doctor and get injected with Potion of Fuck That Noise. This is beautiful and miraculous and I do not remotely understand how some people can reject it – not just for themselves, but for their children

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

why does this shit have me crying laughing

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

I get a little annoyed at how writings don't give Native North American peoples any agency in agricultural technologies

Domestication takes hundreds or thousands of years to accomplish, so it's weird to me that so many sources claim that food plants native to North America were cultivated into existence after European settlement, from a "wild" ancestor into a highly desirable crop

Take for example, the famous Concord grape. Supposedly it was bred from wild ancestors in a few years by just one guy.

With pecans, the word itself is Algonquin, so it's harder to deny that Native Americans cultivated them, but supposedly "domestication began in the 1800's". and as the source says, "wild-type" pecans are perfectly acceptable for sale in the market

And then there is nonsense like all the sources that will tell you pawpaws are an "evolutionary anachronism" from when they were distributed by giant ground sloths and other megafauna, as though humans don't count.

Are we to believe that indigenous peoples knew nothing of plant breeding? When the Cherokee were given peaches, apples, and watermelon, they adopted the new plants for use in their orchards and soon developed their own breeds.

Don't even get me started on all the plants that were almost lost and largely not used anymore, like Rivercane and the American Chestnut.

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

Of course, it borders on stating the obvious to point out that all the people in the notes of that one txttletale post going "actually no, conservatives ARE incapable of making good art because good art requires empathy/compassion/kindness/understanding other people's perspectives/[insert vaguely good-sounding virtue that conservatives supposedly lack here]" are just mentally doing the whole "every media i like is secretly leftist" thing.

But digging down further and on a less obvious note, I think the reason WHY so many liberals and vibes-based leftists are constantly doing the "every media I like is secretly leftist" thing is because they don't actually fundamentally disagree that much with the basic assumptions about the world that support conservative ideologies, they just dislike when they manifest in the form of explicit bigotry.

So when those assumptions are baked into a piece of art (especially a piece of art that is *good*) in the form of undertones instead of explicit bigotry they just come off as The Way The World Is and completely fail to register as conservative to them.