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Hey I'm a huge fan of your Card Souls style/series, are you still doing any of that? Feel free to do a squid-pope if you want (PLEase do a Squid-Pope!)(if you feel like it!!)

I don’t take requests but you can bother me about commissions. Card souls is still a wip but between my like five other projects and chum and KRAKOOM!!! And a full time job and working on a masters degree I kind of have to prioritize Funtime projects

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Chum 154: HYPEMAN

My stomach drops when I see the autoinjector. It's sleek and black, like an epipen but dangerous. Something manufactured. Moneyed.

"Don't," I say, but my voice is too quiet, too far away. He doesn't even hear me.

He presses the injector to his neck and clicks it.

Big Hands sees the injector and his smirk twists into something sharper. "Fuck 'em up, Bash," he says, his voice low but carrying like a gunshot.

"Bash," I mutter under my breath, locking the name away in the mental catalog. Yeah. He sure looks like a guy who named himself Bash.

The autoinjector clicks, and Bash doesn't move for a second. Then his body seems to shift, the weight of him settling deeper into the pavement, like the ground itself is straining to hold him up. He rolls his shoulders once, testing his movement, and when he steps forward, I swear the sidewalk cracks under his foot.

Carla doesn't notice at first. She's too busy pulling everything she can find into her orbit. A loose street sign wobbles and tears itself free with a screech, the metal twisting as it hurtles toward him. Bash doesn't even try to dodge. It smashes against his chest, crumpling like foil, and falls to the ground.

Carla freezes, her breathing ragged. Her powers stutter for a moment, the debris in her orbit faltering before snapping back into place. "What the fuck?" she spits, her voice shaking. Another piece of rebar whips toward him, faster this time, but the result's the same. It hits him dead-on, and he doesn't even blink.

"Sam, what's he on?" Maggie whispers. Her voice is tight, laced with panic.

"I don't know," I say, my teeth gritting. "That's not Fly."

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to the tune of "i bet on losing dogs"

i died inside a bog

and if you dig me up you'll be able to rob all my rings

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I had some fun asking ChatGPT about cases from "Counterexamples in Analysis." You get this kind of uncanny valley math, syntactically and stylistically correct but still wildly wrong.

This was a response to "Prove or disprove: there exists a nowhere continuous function whose absolute value is everywhere continuous." It responded in TeX, which I coped into a TeX editor.

Another answer to the same question:

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Vidu and the Quest to Make More Toons

So, a ways back I talked about Minmax, but I've been trying out basically all the video generators looking for the tools I need, and low and behold this week I find out I've been accepted into the Vidu Artists program now, wherein I get credits and access to access their cooler features in in exchange for... talking about the tech and how I use it.

Well twist my arm. I shall endeavor to be objective and informative despite free stuff (a challenge my spirit needs practice withstanding if anyone else wishes to test me)

So let's talk Vidu.

(outside of being converted to gif, no animations in this post have been cut or edited)

Also, everyone say hi to Maureen the Lizard Queen, every hero needs an evil queen that really wants in his pteruges, and she's that for TyrannoMax.

Vidu's got a bit more oomph under the hood than MinMax (no shade to MinMax, they're brand new and very promising) and it's way too early to be picking winners when it comes to video.

Anyhow, basic features that are nice include the options to upload start and end frames, options for a 4 or 8 second duration (more about that later), and a cleanup/upscale. Credits line up more or less with seconds. 4 credits for a 4 second clip, 8 for an 8 second, and again at upscale. It's straightforward in a way a lot of services aren't.

Apetomic Pyle, done on the fast settings. (not to shabby still, and it gave him monkey legs which a lot of systems balk at)

If you're on the $30/mo tier, you can choose to do a double-cost "quality" over "speed" option. Thankfully, the artist program gets me access. Since there's not yet a seed option it's hard to do a direct comparison, but the quality is going to be a must if you're doing anything that looks like cel. Much cleaner, much smoother.

(4 and 8 second quality gens)

One of the nicest features is the character reference feature. Basically it's like Midjourney's --cref, but with a very strict adherence to character details.

The above images used reference shots of Maureen and Dr. Underfang, and it got the stripes on Underfang's tie right in basically every gen. That's a ridiculous level of character model adherence and, for my purposes, all but essential.

It did misinterpret Maureen's undertail coloration for a sort of fin or drape, but the shot I used was oddly cropped, and sometimes stuff like that happens with gen AI. Given my measuring stick for errors is the era of animation I'm emulating, whatever does slip through is only going to make it more authentic.

There is a limitation in that character-reference and text-only prompts default to 16:9 presently with no options to adjust, but some room to pan is always handy and most people are going to be outputting for phone and not outdated CRT televisions, so, it's understandable it'd be a lower priority feature for the devs.

Walk cycles! By Saint Eniac it's a miracle!

On the left we have one prompted with TyrannoMax's control art, and on the right we have one using that art as the starting frame (4 and 8 seconds, respectively).

Way More details under the fold.

Vidu likes a hefty prompt.

A lot of detail and evocative language helps, and older prompting tricks like mojo-jojoing important concepts are back. For the Max walk cycles above I used:

1986 vintage cel-shaded cartoon character walk cycle. The orange dinosaur-anthro wearing blue gladiator armor walks toward screen right, the camera tracks him, holding him in center-frame. He completes a full, brisk walk cycles from the side view. He walks boldly, back straight, head high, heroic. His tail sways behind him as he moves. The whole clip has the look and feel of vintage 1986 action adventure cel-animated cartoons. The animation quality is high, with flawless motion and anatomy. animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, studio Ghibli, don bluth. BluRay remaster. flat chroma-key green screen background

The potential for use with my Filmation-inspired technique is readily apparent. Both versions are on-model as much as any two shots in a 1980s action-figure shilling cartoon would be, some minor blurring to clean up in post but nothing serious. It should be pretty easy to extract the needed frames for looping and compositing.

Some Extra Points

There are the usual issues with hands, though more often than not it corrects my four-fingered anthros to having a human five-fingered hand. Buzby Spurlock animation was known for those kinds of inconsistencies, though. So an opening credits video is much less far off than it was at the last post.

It's also generally impressive how well it does with my dinosaur characters. Non-humanoid dinosaurs are difficult for most image generators, much less anthrosaurs in a vintage aesthetic. Vidu has yet to override the character art to give Underfang or Max the Jurassic Park style t-rex jaw, which is something both MJ and Dall-E 3 have trouble with.

Human characters like Kitty Concolor here, much more stable.

As always, clips are curated. I didn't choose my absolute best ones (gotta have something for the videos), and I'm working on a fun series of jank reels across all the generators.

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I think almost all of the environmental case against AI is factually incorrect fear mongering, or "misinformation"

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Mutual Aid/Donation Request For Meds

Hi, everyone - it's been a hot minute since I've needed to post one of these. TL;DR my insurance decided to randomly stop paying for one of my many disability-stabilizing medications but did not tell me until I went up to the pharmacy to pick it up. I need to take it tomorrow to keep my medical condition stabilized, but for now I literally just don't have the money to purchase it. Having that money will keep me good for a month while I argue with insurance/my doctors about it.

It is not that much money, but it is still $261.97 USD that I don't have. Between bills, food, and rent, I have maybe 60 bucks to my name right now to last the household until the rest of the month. Anything you could spare so that I can get my meds by tomorrow and keep myself on my regular Friday schedule (and not have to have withdrawal symptoms on Saturday) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a bundle. As always, signal boosts would be appreciated as well.

[reachartwork]

Chum So.1: Haunted

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I think if nft guys just ran that shit back with the internet and called it something other than nfts and went with the intellectual property angle more than the investor angle, they would capture like the majority of artists.

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"a person in a scary looking room with blood on his face"

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turns out the $261.97 is after insurance because my deductible reset with the new year. awesome! i love being disabled.

Mutual Aid/Donation Request For Meds

Hi, everyone - it's been a hot minute since I've needed to post one of these. TL;DR my insurance decided to randomly stop paying for one of my many disability-stabilizing medications but did not tell me until I went up to the pharmacy to pick it up. I need to take it tomorrow to keep my medical condition stabilized, but for now I literally just don't have the money to purchase it. Having that money will keep me good for a month while I argue with insurance/my doctors about it.

It is not that much money, but it is still $261.97 USD that I don't have. Between bills, food, and rent, I have maybe 60 bucks to my name right now to last the household until the rest of the month. Anything you could spare so that I can get my meds by tomorrow and keep myself on my regular Friday schedule (and not have to have withdrawal symptoms on Saturday) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a bundle. As always, signal boosts would be appreciated as well.

[reachartwork]

Mutual Aid/Donation Request For Meds

Hi, everyone - it's been a hot minute since I've needed to post one of these. TL;DR my insurance decided to randomly stop paying for one of my many disability-stabilizing medications but did not tell me until I went up to the pharmacy to pick it up. I need to take it tomorrow to keep my medical condition stabilized, but for now I literally just don't have the money to purchase it. Having that money will keep me good for a month while I argue with insurance/my doctors about it.

It is not that much money, but it is still $261.97 USD that I don't have. Between bills, food, and rent, I have maybe 60 bucks to my name right now to last the household until the rest of the month. Anything you could spare so that I can get my meds by tomorrow and keep myself on my regular Friday schedule (and not have to have withdrawal symptoms on Saturday) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a bundle. As always, signal boosts would be appreciated as well.

[reachartwork]

oh god the david lynch post breached containment

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The vigilante known as "Soot".

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david lynch telling people in 2017 that you should accept trans people or kill yourself. he was so real for this.

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anonymously make an assumption about me and i'll confirm/deny it

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