#and its not even people dedicated to discourse i more often see normal ass people hating other normal ass people. for the crime of notbeing+

[realness-remade]

i think online discourse is genuinely one of the worst things to ever come out of social media

[bitty-bits]

A Jolly SineTrismas

It surely was another year. Let's look back at some stuff, and forward to other stuff, in the final Bitty Bits edition of 2022.

First of all, happy holidays to all who celebrate. Yeah it is a bit late on the "more famous holiday" side of things, but there are still others going on, and... in general it's probably never wrong to be festive during all of December. (It's also not wrong to NOT be festive! Just pointing that out!)

Many things happened in this late half of the year, controversial things, stupid things, all things. Here I will talk about some that mattered to me, to some extent.

(Also, RIP bozo...naro! Good riddance!)

This issue is dedicated to @rick-666, friend and avid newsletter enthusiast who encouraged me to try to fix the broken ass email form thingy that should actually send these posts as newsletter things but just isn't working! I'll have it fixed next year, I promise!!!!

My Work - Where To Next?

So I've made and tried to make many things through the years, but as someone who pretty much does anything all the time, I'm finding myself often doing... nothing at the end of it.

In 2020 I basically started work on Ketchup Dreams by making its first characters, Bitty and Lake, with more to follow the coming years... but still nothing too substantial. Pondered with which medium to present these characters in. Comics? Animation? In the end I'd just continue adding some things here and there to the overall project, but it still doesn't seem like enough. I really want to build a good universe for these guys to live in.

So at the moment I feel kinda directionless. But hopefully that will change. I guess I won't know what sticks until I actually do stuff.

From Bitty also came the entire aesthetic, motif, symbol, meaning AND name for, I guess you can call my "indie" studio/group/label thing... which my future creative works will be released under, and who knows maybe even friends' creations. The "ᑎᐱ" thing was kind of accidental, but I liked it enough that I wanted it to mean something for me. Not to sound corny and dumb, but to me "ᑎᐱ" is kinda like another representation of the polarity we have in life, much like black and white, but in this case it would be something like... smooth and sharp. Yeah I'm not gonna try to give too much meaning to it, it's just for fun, mostly. Bitty's ears initially were meant to just be bunny + kitty ears (hence the incredibly original name) for an asymmetrical design, but that basically spiraled into everything else.

All that said I'm still doing stuff every now and then, I even have been experimenting with tweaking Lake's design slightly, you can even see a little bit of that in the header art here. More on that some other time...

You can check the current "roadmap" for Studio SineTri projects on the pinned tweet.

Why not "TriSine" instead? Because that just... sounds too normal. "Tri" is an existing and common prefix. Also the order matters.

The Tesla In The Room

I don't think I need to talk much about the whole thing with Elon Musk buying Twitter and everything that came with it. Mostly I'm just tired of it all. Billionaires, other than beings that shouldn't exist, are Boring and not even in a funny kind of way (except for Bill Gates, his mere existence is comedic to me probably thanks to early internet culture) I wish I just didn't have to hear about 'em. But I guess we can't.

Anyways this entire situation practically got me back into being on Tumblr daily, after I had left it in favor of Twitter in like 2015, and now... the opposite is happening, that's just how sick I am of Twitter. Not just the website itself but the people in it and the energy that usually comes out of there these days. Musk was simply a final nail in the coffin. The problem is... he just keeps adding more nails. Here's hoping Elon doesn't ruin the very last thing that made Twitter "fun" to me - TweetDeck, but chances it'll survive are slim.

I'm also on Mastodon btw. Juuust in case.

AI Art Discourse - What's Happening?!

"A Still of Klonoa in The Simpsons"

Speaking of Twitter, probably one of the least pleasing topics to witness over there lately will be this.

No doubt, "AI art" as a concept pretty much exploded into popularity in 2022, while it already existed in concept years before, this was pretty much the one year that, 5 years ago, we'd look at machine learning attempting art and say "now just think about how that'll be 5 years from now", and well, that time IS now. Kinda.

There's legitimate worry about whether or not the computer would be able to replace artists, but... personally I don't think it will ever BECAUSE... there will still always be a demand for humanity and human-created content no matter how good any sort of AI gets, and well, currently AI still struggles with "drawing" many things. But it's fine, earlier this year people were mostly memeing with AI generators, being impressed, confused, having a laugh, or everything all at once.

Until computers making drawings suddenly were no longer seen as cool but rather, bad!!! evil!!! problematic!!! etc. even though the reason for that all stems from... misconceptions and misinformation (sometimes on purpose, just because... I dunno. Internet rewards people who get angry at things.) about how the technology works to begin with. No, AI doesn't simply collage a bunch of pictures together, that just isn't how it works, even if it knows what a Mona Lisa looks like almost perfectly. It's hard to put it into words, but this thread I believe explains it a bit better in simpler terms (hopefully), even if you still don't understand, it's... best to not be too ignorant about it.

Of course, I DO think AI ethics is an important conversation that should happen, but not if it's... not gonna be a conversation in the first place. If it sounds too extreme, reactionary, or sounds just about as crazy as anything you'd hear coming from Alex Jones or like, your pro-life uncle™, then it probably isn't the way to go.

This made even people who think photography isn't art come out of their closets, if they even were in one.

There are good use cases for AI in art. One of them is allowing disabled individuals to also partake and experiment with visual arts. Yes, technically nothing "stopped" them from "really" doing it, but just look at how much that argument almost slips into ableism territory (and there is a surprising amount of that coming from some anti-AI folks.) Hell, I could've used AI to create a background for the art on my header as I'm mostly... a character illustrator, focused on characters, and just don't really enjoy drawing backgrounds much at all.

Anyways I recommend y'all check out AWAY (Are We Art Yet), a collective of artists and creators alike embracing AI but also fighting for more ethical AI usage (discussion about scraping images from the web, consent for works to be used as training data, etc.), without the reactionarism and sometimes ableism. They're a friendly bunch.

What I’ve Been Playing / Watching

Gravity Falls

Well, does it really?

Hey Kids, Have You Heard Of Gravity Falls? The show's 10th anniversary was this year and, having heard mostly only good things about it since then, AND as someone who had recently been sucked deep into the modern Disney TVA pipeline (DuckTales 2017, Amphibia and Owl House are also great and would also recommend), I made it a goal to watch all of it before the year ends.

At first I thought this, like other very successful shows, would have way too many seasons for me to really get into, so I was surprised when I found out that wasn't the case.

It's definitely a great show, even 10 years later. From what I saw very little of it comes across as dated when it comes to references or jokes, the characters being likable and interesting are about enough to hook you into it I think. Also Matt Chapman is in there a lot and as an avid Homestar Runner fan, you can just Tell not only through his voices, but his humor and vibes entirely in some episodes.

If there's one thing I probably can't get enough of is Disney cartoons made by some of the most... Non-Disney people on Earth.

The Dream I Had On December 25th

Usually I share my dreams on Twitter, but decided it might be neat to feature some of the more interesting ones right here. They are an essential part of one of my creations after all. This year though, for a reason or another, I had less eventful or weird dreams in general. But waking up on Christmas day this is what was on my mind:

For more of my dreams you can check out my dream journal with stuff since at least 2014, here.

I had a dream I can split up in three parts - first I was at an old house of mine but I could hear a new trailer for the Mario movie premiering far outside, a classic game song could be heard in it and things pointed to it being a Daisy reveal.

Second part was a Strong Bad thing, where I possibly interact with him directly and actually cause a change to homestarrunner.com "accidentally". He makes some sort of analog horror parody, and an old main page gets a new "feature" permanently. I felt a sense of realization since "I caused this". I really wish I remembered more cuz it was great

Third part is the one I can recall the most, it was what seemed like a weird Gravity Falls AU type thing, which is slightly mixed up with The Owl House - In what appears to be the first episode, Grunkle Stan is nowhere to be found, with probably Eda taking his place as the twins' "Graunt". The episode begins with Mabel just wandering around the forest, when she comes across several typically good luck signs all at once, things like four leaf clovers and such. Eda knowing better knows it's a trap and tries to protect Mabel, but she is convinced that Eda is a witch (which probably Should be a secret at first in this alternate timeline I guess, Eda Is Not What She Seems™) and EVIL!!! and ignores her, acting hostile towards her, even, so Eda locks her up in a shelter. Perfectly normal. In there she finds… a journal. It doesn't appear to be -the- GF journal but rather a mix of that and Philip's journal from Owl House. At first it looked like the journal could talk by itself but someone just happened to be there in disguise, it was Soos, who happens to know a couple things about the journal but probably not much. For some reason I was "watching" it in Portuguese and they'd give him a completely different name, likely starting with a hard C, but I can't remember now. Some weird magic thing happens too which I don't remember how it's triggered or when exactly in the episode progression it even happens but it would make food and candy "infinitely stretchy", where you could essentially have infinite amounts of something just by stretching them, and it caused children to go insane over it. Eventually Soos and Mabel made it out of the shelter, with the latter no longer feeling suspicious about Eda. That's about what I can recall.

Song of the Issue

I will now feature some cool music (probably just vgm) I like here, just because. Sometimes topical, sometimes not.

But today it might be.

A secret easter egg track, on the older 2008 MIDI version of the Charlie (the Duck) II soundtrack (that probably came into existence together with the 2008 Windows version of the game, as opposed to the original DOS version which much like other Wiering Software games only had sound effects, at most.)

It would only play on Christmas day, and was basically a slight arrangement of the proper theme, but with some classic Christmas tunes thrown into it.

The OGG/streamed version you hear on the Steam release cuts the song a bit shorter.

More Stuff

Audicons Fluent/2.0/Name Pending

Inspired by Microsoft's Fluent Design aesthetics and technicalities, this will be an update to my existing icon pack for audio formats, covering even more obscure formats that only 3 people know about! Just like the old pack, this will be fully compatible with probably any version of foobar2000. Very soon!

Ninjin on Archive.org

Yeah!

juke...box. AI. video.

yeah dude.

(no, seriously, it'll come out when it comes out. that's it.)

Miscellaneous Tumblr Side Things

I dunno, I just felt like... having a couple dedicated side blogs for specific interests, as some people do, cuz I have ideas. One of them will be about brazilian animation in general. Nothing fancy or scheduled, just things that will exist.

Conclusion

The more I write the more self-conscious I get that I might just be shit at writing Anything, but I still appreciate if anyone actually likes reading through!

Stay tuned for the traditional yearly dumb highlights collage pic™ on my main Tumblr (@lu9) and Twitter (if it's not completely broken by then...)

Bitty's Message of the Day

My new year's resolution is to Exist more!