#but i dunno!! it might be because i dont want any skill design to look like they're wearing clothes...?

[volivolition]

designing drama and... hm... maybe going a little too wacky and wild here... like at what point does this go beyond inventive and become Too Weird...?

[horseforeplay]

hi! what do you make of ai art? im conflicted cause i see how its great for disabled people in many ways, but then i look back at the work people put into becoming artists and mastering the craft and feel many things lol i wish i could look at it similarly like i look at producers for example, where you have a vision and tools and you know how to use it well so you dont need the musical training background to be creative, but i cant help but feel like its more complicated with visual art? that theres a whole other side besides having a vision and good understanding of a shortcut tool. im very very torn and also sorry for all that on your succession blog but knowing youre a fantastic artist whos recently been dealing with this sort of impossibility to make art i wonder if you have some insight in this area.

sending love!

i appreciate u wanting to know my opinion on a Hot Topic such as this! i dunno man i have an aversion to any definition of art of any kind that requires effort or skill as essential features that make the art “real”. i think a lot of what is happening with AI discourse is that people are appropriately appalled by the way capitalism mangles creative output and even what kind of relationships artists can have with their work and with the rest of the world. i do not have a problem with a machine that digests and reconfigures information — a machine is just a machine. if one copied the way i make texture with colored pencil and produced an approximation of a new original work by me, i would be fascinated by what reactions i might have to it. would i feel threatened by it? would i be flattered? what might it open up for me, to see my work broken into a particular machine’s data? this is just a dream, though. i see many artists understandably frightened by what the exploiter class may choose to do with their new toys (and what they are already doing to us with them). it just sucks to see that very plain class antagonism passed over with arguments about the “purity” of human-made art, how it is somehow apparent to any observer when a work is truly endowed with a “soul” (if these arguments sound eerily like fascist aesthetic principles, it’s because they are fascistic).

and then to see people cheering for their own doom with this thing of mr. game of thrones & co suing chatGPT, complete with condescending explanations of how it’s not going to hurt fanfic writers because the problem these multimillionaires have is actually with people monetizing their work, and the true humble Fan would ne’er ask a but penny. do people really not see how this is making the divide between the “artist” and the “common person” greater? it is so goddamn expensive to survive right now, and the wealthy are using fear of technology as a tool to prevent you from making money, and yes, making art at all. only those with enough capital to protect their intellectual property with the force of the law are allowed to express themselves through art. yes, i think it should be well within your rights to bind and sell (for money, yes, money) your game of thrones fanfiction. so many of us are living in poverty right now, bombarded by entertainment but prevented from ever chewing it up or spitting it out. ed roth’s rat fink character had it right. fuck mickey mouse. like, we’re actually back to saying “fuck mickey mouse” being really cool. put him in a blender full of data, have it put him into a beach scene with BBW anime versions of lara croft and princess peach. intellectual property is a historically recent phenomenon. it is a tool to make the rich richer and get you well and squarely fucked. theoretically, yeah, it sounds good to have your work and livelihood honored and protected, but just like they’re trying to replace artists and actors and writers with AI, every single tool becomes a weapon in the hands of the rich. the hell people are worried they need more punishing copyright law to fix is already here. the woman who designed care bears & strawberry shortcake never saw a penny from it. AI art is only a threat in the hands of the corporations that happily do these things in the first place.

anyways. lol. i’m not very technologically minded in my own art practice — i’m not naturally drawn to new technology as a part of my work, and find many of the results i’ve seen from current AI art tech to be kind of aesthetically unpleasant. artwork contains unpleasantness, though. i’m not really interested in arguments over what artwork “should” contain, only what it does. i think the best AI art i’ve seen (ie: the stuff i’ve enjoyed the most) has been from alan resnick:

it is so terrifically disquieting. it leans into what makes AI-generated BBW lara croft kind of difficult to actually jack off to. the overlapping lines of bodies, the nonsense text. but then, if this work has merit, is that because alan resnick is uniquely special, thus proving the point that the technology is only valid in the hands of a “real artist”? can mr. resnick be said to be the “artist” of these images at all, because he trained a program to his own style and input interesting ides? does he deserve lots of money for his work creating iconic adult swim shorts like this house has people in it? well sure

or would this art only have value if somebody put a tremendous amount of labor into it? you know. my mother used to tell me, “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work”. she said she should nail the phrase to my forehead, like martin luther at the church doors. having very recently become disabled & chronically ill, i don’t believe it anymore. i believe we should be able to use technology to make ourselves more free. we should not be so financially insecure that we are threatened by anyone expressing themselves with something we made. the ultra-wealthy are threatened by infringement because they need everybody else to stay poor, and the poor are threatened because they do not want to be poor any longer. it’s got nothing to do with strange scrambled pictures. if i could take pictures of every work of art i’ve ever loved and put it into a machine that mixes it up and turns it into a monster, i would do it just for a bittersweet laugh at it.

[cutekittenlady]

With that skillset you're character is gonna get her ass kicked. No offense.

Oh no, that's legit what I was going for XD

One thing I do have to give Skyrims skill system credit for is that being able to train any skill you want at any time without having to have a stat threshold just to use it DOES make it easier to roleplay character development.

At the moment Rook DOES have weapons. Mainly a wooden club added by the immersive weapons mod, though recently I gave her a mace. Though I'm not sure whether to keep it? Tbh the idea of her using exclusively lightweight weapons kinda fit with her squishy scholar concept while still giving her some weapon experience.

I don't mean this in a sense of her never using a mace, but more that the metal might be too heavy this early on in her adventures in skyrim? Like, she got from Solitude to Whiterun in two days (might look at mods that make the days shorter. If only to make traveling between cities take longer? Might be a bad idea tho), and then spent several days in Whiterun saving up money to hire Jenessa as her bodyguard. Not a lot of time to build the muscle needed to weild a metal mace. If I stick to one handed weapons maybe a dagger if she has to have metal weapons but who knows.

But no, yeah, Rook is a character designed to rely on followers and companions. I gave her skills in things like smithing, enchanting, and speech specifically because I imagine back in Cyrodil she had to get mercenaries and the like on board with escorting her and her coworkers into ruins all the time and being able to offer them a free chance to have their weapons and armor tempered and maybe even enchanted would mean they'd demand less pay for the job.

This aspect of her character may change over time given how rough Skyrim is, and with her eventual discovery that she is Dragonborn, an explicitly warrior-like legendary figure. The change from just generally needing protection from bandits and wildlife and the like to being targeted by literally DRAGONS may also influence her desire to begin training more in weaponry. Though, gameplay wise, her strongest suit in combat is still going to be her Restoration and Alteration magics and later her training in one handed weapons. (I downloaded the Train and Study mod to make this process more organic).

Her relationship with her companions and hired muscle changes too. Before it was just a professional relationship. A matter of gold and an exchange of services, but traveling skyrim and collecting allies, learning their stories, and knowing that any one of them could die on any of their adventures begins to change her from someone who needed to collect bodyguards and more into a genuine leader of a mercenaries, advneturers, and heroes.

Plus the followers and stuff are kinda essential? I'm playing Legacy of the Dragonborn and in order to successfully roleplay that I'm gonna need a number of mods to adjust existing quests, and justifying serving other factions that dont quite compliment her build and character. So, like, I'll want a follower who could plausibly join up with the companions in order to justifying doing that questline, for example.

I've heard of the protentious mod that lets you play multiple characters but I dunno if that's something i really wanna use to mess with my load order.

Beyond ALL that shes not going to be able to avoid getting beat up a bit. I added the wounds mod, so Rook is walking away from a lot of combat encounters with injuries even if she isn't the one doing a ton of damage.

[tumblunni]

HEYO! oh man now my friend helped me get all inspired again for working on my Cathedral Tower Defense game so WOO lets have another long post of miscellaneous ideasies for storyness! may not be very coherant tho cos i am super tired and ill! but happy!! THANKS SUMMON-DAZE FOR BEING MY ULTRA BESTIE

* Okay now I am super sure that I’m gonna let you choose the gender of the protagonist! And I wanna keep it so that their name is Amity either way, cos that’s kinda stuck in my mind. Surname Amity, player gets to decide the first name, but people will still be calling you Amity a lot at first cos you start off all awkward and formal with everybody. You’re a newcomer to this cathedral town and nobody knows whether to trust you, from their perspective you’re this dangerous person theyre forced to accept just because they need you to help protect them, whether you’re good or bad. They’re all worried what price they might have to pay for this, trying to figure out how to minimize the damage if you turn on them... and its not like they’re bad people for being untrustworthy, they’re just scared people huddling in a church and trying to keep their families safe at any cost. So try and prove your worth to them, and help them learn to protect themselves too, and make this ramshackle settlement into a real home! ....anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, gender selection is a good! And it could be relatively easy to impliment too, cos of the situation. Doesnt even necessarily have to be a menu or anything, it could just be like sir amity/lady amity/master amity. Cos you’re this paladin knighto, itd make sense for them to ask for your title. And it could just be like a shot of protagonist’s badass silhouette in the gateway of the cathedral and then you get the dialogue choice to pick your identity, and its all Super Cool~!

* It also actually gives me more of an idea of what i could do for their design, like I dunno maybe they have some sort of face-concealing helm or headdress or something. I was just thinking of them being dressed like a generic nun or princess but maybe emphasize more on the knight aspect instead of the holy part? So like anyway, maybe they have a very all-concealing outfit and that could be the framing of the first scene instead, its like *pulls off the mask and you’re into the character selection screen* Orrrrrr maybe there doesnt need to be any magical setup for a gender selection and it can just be a menu before the first scene starts XD Or maybe you have a cool face-concealing helmet thing anyway, like all three gender options just have a different one, lol

* More random magical names i got via the cool name generator site summon-daze linked to me! Dunno if I’ll actually use any of these but im writing them down here so i dont forget. Berebath, Betnia, Amurziz, Jetre, Miemahl, Semdach, Batxahl, Sidefarch, Botolohn, Vausach, Thammoch, Droibhal, Lekonach, Zeidhal, Tieloch, Rabrohm, Maesur, Smoiroch, Baelbuhr, Axoth, Jige, Chushou, Hukru, Nejeget, Roucu,  Jinah, Aujus, Yekoth, Nugresah, Israfel, Jabriel, Tabris, Douma

* Also I’m remembering Jade Cocoon and how I liked that the different ‘families’ of monsters shared naming traits. Like how all those weird snake/slug cutiepies that i loved best were nushab, rashab, etc etc. And tamatoch and somethingtoch and so on. I think there was at least one where the modifier was a prefix too? I dunno why i’m talking about this, but there you go. I just think if i wanna do full original made up names for demon species then i wanna make em stuff that just... feels like that. I dont actually wanna make like five different elements of each one tho, i wanna have only one per element and then they have like two different higher level finalized forms. Like, the human characters can have two job classes each and the demons can have two specializations within an element. That helps me think about how to limit it down to four or five elements, if we can combine common fantasy elements together! And yeah I was thinking it’d be cool if the demon ‘job classes’ could have their own evolving appearances and new names!

* Thoughts for the ol elemental groupings! The only one I really have finalized is grass + poison = same thing. Florin, why u always the character that gets developed faster than everyone else XD And I’m thinking giving them their own made up names would make it easier! Like how in SMT you have spells being stuff like ‘media’ and ‘agi’ instead of cure and fire. But here (hopefully) it’d be easier to memorize cos its just the element names that’re fantasy words, and the attacks themselves would be a little more self explanatory. i just think it’d work cos like... the idea i had of rock and fire being one single demon type, you could just call that magma. But i mean, what can you call plant + poison? Except.. like.. plant. Cos poison is reasonably often a grass type skill anyway. And i mean, game creators dont often worry about making sense, what with how ‘grass’ is the common element name when thats just one plant in a million. I cant stop thinking about that now I’ve noticed it! I legit thought grass was a synonym for plant when i was a kid, i learned to read from pokemon yellow... ANYWAY IM GETTING OFFTOPIC AGAIN The other idea I had for groupings was fire + non-elemental together? I was just thinking like... aura. Non elemental/physical attack as a ‘magic’ could be fighting spirit! And thematically speaking it tends to be shown as fire effects in anime, i guess XD But then i couldnt put fire with rock and that means I’d have to redesign malachi again. his design ended up looking more firey than rocky :P Another idea is maybe darkness + non-elemental together? like, interpret non-elemental as ‘void’. Or light and dark could be together actually, that could be an interesting way to do it, instead of having them opposing. Like maybe the elements could be colours! Grey element, able to specialize into white or black but neither is any sort of ‘good and evil’. And then the rest could be like green or like.. instead of red maybe fire could be bronze and thats why it has rock skills too? or man, maybe rock and metal could be one element and fire could be grouped with something else. And would water and ice be too ordinary and boring? do they already kinda count as one element? should I throw in something else? GAHHHHHHH

* Ideas for the multiple religious groups aligned with each element! I’m thinking I want one of them to interpret the setting’s absent god as two deities. like, every perspective on this deity is a wildly different character, this one is just even more so! they’d see malahat (tentative name) as two people, but kinda more like a shared soul that can manifest as either a male or female form. But there’d be ambiguity and debates in the mythos over whether this is actually a genderfluid god, or if its ‘twins who were cursed to never exist at the same time’, or various other variations on the story. I wanna make it like real life, where even within (for example) catholocism, there’s different sects and different translations of the same text. And where there’s predjudice against minority groups and people like to twist their faith to ‘justify’ it, even when parts of the original tale could easily justify treating those people with kindness too. So there’d be some followers of the twins religion who are very openminded to LGBTQ people, and historically anyone trans was able to hold a unique position as a priest, being treated as someone blessed by god. But like in norse mythology, this wasnt necessarily a sign that society was 100% okay with LGBTQ people. Its kinda depressing to read about how trans women and gay men were considered the only people able to become a specific kind of witches, but also how you kinda HAD to take this one safety net in society to stop people from making you an outcast. It was like ‘make them fear me so they dont fuckin kill me’. You had to become a medicine person and at least claim to believe in these magic powers, you had to be blessed by the gods to prove you were like.. one of the good ones. Otherwise its like youre saying the gods made a mistake when they made you, or youre choosing to be a deviant against nature. i can only imagine how terrifying it must have been if you believed in that religion and had to like.. be forced to go against it and leave society, or be forced to lie about being chosen by a god for a higher purpose, while believing that any moment you might get struck down for lying. And then I read in other history books about how the concept of homosexuality was far different in that old society too, how male-on-male sex was accepted at sea as long as you were the dominant one and you were forcing something unwanted onto a lesser shipmate as punishment. Like ugh, rape being more socially accepted than consensual LGBTQ relationships! I guess the only solace is that we can never be 100% sure how much of historians’s theories are correct and what might have changed in retellings of history, but honestly I can believe the past is this fucked up when the present is already fucked up in different ways. BUT ANYWAY I wanna explore those themes in my story maybe. And I wanna do more research into the subject to make sure I’m doing it justice, even though its a very sad subject that might be quite stressful. Maaaaan, I remember how I used to obsess about researching norse myth as a kid, it was one of my first Special Interests and I really wanted to see all the different reinterpretations of Loki and write my own fanfic/adaptation/vaguely inspired original story about What If He Stayed A Good Guy. Man I had soooo much sympathy for the poor sod. I mean it depends on the retelling whether he was always evil or whether he was like a comedic neutral ally to the gods who just abruptly becomes evil and gets killed off without remorse in the final story. And gahhh he’s like the biggest LGBTQ bastion in the whole mythos, and how can I not feel sympathetic?? When we get all these stories about him being a literal genderfluid shapeshifter and giving birth to half of his children and just like seriously its like The Story Of the One Trans Man In Homophobic Transphobic Valhalla and he was probably meant to seem Bad and Funny and whatever but im gonna sit here and grumpily cling onto the idea that he was deliberately written as trans, or that if these gods actually do exist out there somewhere then Loki would support me. *pout* I just have a lot of good memories of how this was like the first sign of me realizing my own gender, back when I first learned about Loki in school and then devoured every damn history book about the dude. And got in a million internet pissing matches about how innacurate the marvel version was XD Also it sucks that we like to believe that modern times are always 100% more enlightened in every way, yet its modern adaptations that always censor out the bits about him shifting gender identities and getting pregnant once. ... man this has gone offtopic too much, im really tired but seriously its funny how teenage bunni had NO CLUE they were nonbinary, no clue why they got so obsessed researching gender-defying mythological figures and historians who created gender neutral pronouns in the 1800s. i was so supernaturally oblivious, holy shit...

[trpg-dingusmaster]

NEVERMIND- where the plot was replaced by a chicken

Everything, more or less, that happened in the last adventure in 90lbs FineCoal was retconned. 

I’m not sure why though, I’m pretty sure he wanted these things to happen later and but the parties antics screwed up the time table, but what I do know is that the dm of OfficialEvent was just eating up the utter chaos that ensued. “Now you know what it feels like!” he exclaimed quite joyously at one point.

So, what the event was replaced with was this:

-a town meeting meeting but not mandatory, rather than outlawing this that and the other it was just a royal decree that that a curfew would be put in place starting at the end of the week, giving enough time for everyone to make arrangements to comply with that. 

---what about people who work late? they better call a cab or their employer better have a room set a side for people to crash in until the morning/designated time

---what if you are a cab driver? you’ll have a licence to be out late which will be checked and you better have it.

---what is all of this for? because the party and also their rival gang have blown up A LOT of things, nobody knows it was us for sure but thats probably part of the problem. we’ve had lots of opportunity to have stealth missions but so far have turned all of them into a bloodbath, turns out that has repercussions. and also i guess those feral children that we released from a textile mill we never did go round them up. so who knows what they got up to

after the meeting bruce the cabby came up to the party and asked us to do him a favor: get schematics for a ‘battle wagon’ and bring them to him. He told us where to go- some sort of  wainwright factory? and we were hoping for a smash and grab but the dude we met at the who I’m pretty sure was a templar? I never saw the insignia that the party leader was shown so I only have the reaction she gave when she saw it. but I’m like, 99% sure based on that, and also the fact that they knew a bunch of stuff they had no reason to know.

once the party leader realized that the people we were dealing with were out of our league they tried a different approach.

“we want schematics for a battle wagon, how can we make this happen?”,very civilized and straight forward, novel for us. 

the probably templar gave us these choices: buy it for 400 coppers, buy it for 100 coppers and the deed to some land we stole from another gang, buy it for the deed and manual labor assistance when they build... whatever they are going to build there.

mind you- my character didn’t go to the town meeting and probably didn’t go to this either, Hugo stayed home and worked on gathering supplies and materials for the various things everyone wants to do but cant because I have yet to build the things they need so I probably should have stayed quiet, and mostly I did, but when the party leaders player asked the group for thoughts out of character I chimed in a bit.

mostly nobody wanted to take part of any of it beyond, A- steal it anyway even though BAD IDEA, or B- do other jobs and get the money to pay for it because the deed is probably worth more than this offer for some reason.

however some of us reasoned that if they really wanted that deed they would get it and maybe we shouldnt make an enemy of these guys just yet. 

the leader reasoned we should take the third offer- help build the thing the templars want to build and pay nothing, because were poor and need money to survive. 

the one handed girls player complained about the disussion because none of it mattered, that faction was getting the deed no matter what so why bother discusing? this interaction was meaningless and served only to fix something the dm did wrong. I think he was just being a weenie because his character wasnt getting any spotlight and he and the dm had gotten into an argument earlier that day or something. He didn’t really have a preference to which offer we took just was salty in general about everything and seemed to really want everyone to know he wasn’t into any of this.

I agreed with the party leader: we should take the third offer, but for different reasons, if we help build the thing we’ll know more about it. well have seen the blue prints have walked the rooms and hallways and that should give us a pretty good idea about what its for and how to get in and out later. the gnome/new guy agreed.

the one handed girl player, argued? but wasnt really arguing? they were just restating what I said but really passive aggressively? as if what I said was wrong and different from what they were saying? but it was the same thing? I dunno, dude was just being a weenie I think because he didn’t think of that first? but also kept saying how this whole thing was pointless and dumb? but party leader is a face character they pretty much were built for healing and talking, they can fight but thats not what theyre good at so... come on let them have some action.

I dunno if the party leader or anyone else heard any of this exchange but either way, thats what the offer we took. it was descided that the two characters whos players dont show up because they dont like these rules loose games will be doing the construction mostly. the rubble from that property would be delivered to the cabin within the week because they dont want it anyway and we were going gather it off screen ourselves anyway to build shit with.

after, the gnome and... jamie? went to sneak into a casino to rob the place, but it didn’t really go down like that. gnome got on jamies shoulders and I gave them one of hugos long coats so they looked like one normal sized but terribly proportioned person and they went off. which begs the question, what IS jamie? we just don’t know.

they learned the layout of the first (slots and roulette), second (cards ad dice) and seventh floors of the casino and discovered that floor seven had dog fighting.... which lead to the gnome- who had his ears cut much like elves do- arranging an agreement for a child to fight the dog champion Mama Fluffy, win or loose payment would be given to jamie to bring back to the party (there was concern that gnome might die either from the dog or from the casino security) because “holy shit this gnomes gotta fight that dog and win thats my goal”, said the new guy. 

the contract was signed and he and jamie revealed their selves, gnome successfully passed himself off as a child, and the fight commenced, mostly naked gnome vs angry hungry dog. it went pretty well but he lost the fight he did get a whole gold piece for the effort though. as a joke the dm mentioned that if they had stopped on the fifth or sixth floor  (I forget) there would have been a chicken fight. so the gnome player10000x more excited about this encounter payed to get himself healed and signed up to fight a “monstrous chicken”. which may have been more like a cassowary but with coloration like a chicken? the party leader ooc commented that a chicken matching the description the dm gave wasnt a thing and was probably not possible  so what is it doing in this setting? just comic relief? why was this happening? his only explanation was a that look dms give, “hush pls I know what I’m doing, just go with it in time you may understand” and just carrying on with the encounter. we suspect comic relief but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some sort of mad science-ing. we may or may not find out.

the gnome tamed the chicken, during the course of the glorious battle and rode it home, he didn’t pick up his winnings though he just left right way and they may have been forfeited because of that. it has taken over our kitchen table. if his character dies the chicken is to be willed to Hugo because I agreed to build it its own house.

the dm had actual plot for after the deed was signed over but we never got to it.

the one handed girl went to the library all day to learn about black smithing? instead of trying to apprentice at a black smith? where actual interactions and things could happen? or trying to find ways to take advantage of the skills he already has for his character? and the player left the table but stayed at the shop when gnome and jamie went to the casino figuring I guess his character wasnt getting any screen time this adventure? i dunno. he sure did miss a pretty great series of events.