Every time I see a fucking "AI Machine learning upscale" mod that aims to make either a 20 year old game with low res textures or gods forbid a game with pixel art "HD" I die a little inside before going a absolutely feral.
I'm eternally fucking infuriated with how the ever growing movement of "graphics = quality/value" chokes the life out of art within the video game landscape. Modern conceptions of art have cheapened certain things to a frankly disgusting degree, so much so that I've genuinely heard someone say "it feels like they couldn't afford real art so they used pixel art" with their real human mouth. The idea that the more high fidelity something is the more value it inherently has both as art and as a project is reductive at best and fucking stupid at worst.
So many of these fucking mods and texture packs and filters and "remaster" projects create vapid facsimiles of whatever they're trying to "improve" or just flat out look like shit. The 20 year old texture you tried to replace with something a shitty AI site you paid for threw up has things like depth and shading built into it to assist with the limitations of its time as well as to match the game's art direction. All you've done is take a fucking butter knife to it and made it a flat confusing mess that barely looks like what it's supposed to anymore.
Look, I'm not against giving beloved old games new coats of paint. Texture packs and overhaul mods have always been a thing. But until recently they were made by people who fucking understood the inherent value of the art they were working with, and either aimed to give a new angle on it or change it all together into something new. And that's good! It's creativity! It's expression! What ISN'T either of those things is smoothing out all the beautifully placed pixels on a sprite from a super Nintendo game and going "ah yes now it looks like real art! So HD! So smooth!"
You cannot reduce the value of such a complex piece of art as a video game down to "well it's got 4K textures and 3D models with tons of polygons" to do so is insulting to the entire medium and the history of technology and skilled developers and artists who created them.
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Hello! I just discovered your blog and I immediately became captivated by your webcomic, but I'm unsure where to read all of it. I know it's on Webtoons, but I can see it hasn't been updated for a while, and you still post about it.
Are your physical novels just prints of the webcomic? Are they a continuation? Is the story complete? Thanks in advance!
Hi there!
Glad you found me and are enjoying my comic!
It's only on webtoons, and the story is not complete yet! We're 2/3 of the way through right now. It's currently on hiatus, and it's scheduled to come back in about 2 months!
I'll explain why it's been so long if you're curious, but also for my followers who might also be wondering about it under the cut. Sorry, it's pretty much just me complaining haha
I took a month off
I took 2 months to get the books printed
I took a month to prepare my next comic
and I took 2 months to write the rest of the series (I knew the character arcs I wanted, but not the time periods or mysteries!!!)
I've been working on actual episodes since then
I had to take some time off because of some pretty extreme burnout due to the sheer amount of work it was to draw over 800 pages and write 6 complete stories in a year and a half... I was getting sick almost weekly due to the overwork, it was really really bad honestly. I was having to work 60+ hours every week just to keep up...
The nature of the comic itself is also difficult... Each of the arcs is a complete, self contained story which can be read (ideally) without context, and my arcs need to be about 10-13 episodes each... And since I have an exact number of episodes to work with, it's even harder.
It takes a ton of planning and a ton of refinement, and working week to week with no breaks I was forced to put out second or even first drafts, so I just wasn't happy with the work I was doing... And to do that for the rest of the series? I wouldn't be proud of the work I did.
Plus... To be entirely honest, webtoon has treated me quite badly IN MY OPINION... They deprioritized me before I launched (I had to beg for more promotion, I'm not exaggerating), they outright denied me the opportunity to even ask for a raise, I don't make any money on fast pass and they pay me less than my partner makes working at trader joes. My first editor left me completely hanging, my second editor (who I loved) was fired... And they told me I wouldn't get a third season before my first season even finished. So it was just repeatedly completely demoralizing.
I'm sorry it has taken so long, it'll have been 10 months by the time I come back. But I realized... I won't get promotion either way. I won't get more episodes either way. I won't get more money either way. So to finish everything, to make it feel good, to make it something I'm proud of, I chose to take longer to make it better.
I am fully aware I will lose a significant amount of my readership for this and it might genuinely affect my career moving forward. But it's what I had to do! So I'm sticking to my guns on it, and I'm confident long term it'll be worth it. It never could have been this good if I didn't take this much time.
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Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is how everyone thought Egon had gone insane. What Happened that made them think that. They've fought a gigantic Stay Puft Marshmellow Man TWICE (counting the 2009 video game because iirc it's canon? Correct me if I'm wrong), fought an interdimensional god, fought a blood thirsty ruler that killed thousands and was hated by all that was trapped in a painting (and managed to get in to beat him by making THE STATUE OF LIBERTY start walking down the street with slime that reacted purely based on vibes), found an underground abandoned transit system full of the moodslime, had a bathtub try to eat Dana and her baby, fought a giant murderous black widow lady, fought the fisherman ghost who turned an entire hotel floor into the bottom of a ocean, and that's not even mentioning them getting trapped on an island that randomly raised up from underwater that had been abandoned for decades created by Ivor Shandor who worshipped Gozer. So what did he do or say that made everyone else think he'd gone insane?? All I can think is maybe he was acting strange / eratic before, but he's always been like that to some degree.
I don't know. It's something that I've been thinking about. The correct answer is 'it's not that deep and they needed a reason that the others weren't together anymore and weren't aware of Egons death or know what was going on,' but also. What Was He Saying that prompted everyone, including Ray, to think he lost his mind when he'd been right almost every time before that.
I'm genuinely so curious as to what he was up to before this. What was he doing. What insane idea was working on prior to this or was he even working on anything at all??
Also want to clarify this post isn't negative 😭 I really love the newer movies and their lore / the newer storyline / characters, I just like thinking about small stupid things like this. Gives me something to think about / speculate about / figure out an answer to.
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