#i need to stop making so much art of this game

[jadeharleyinc]

you can run free and open source AI art programs on your personal computer, with no internet connection. this doesn't require much more electricity than running a resource-intensive video game on that same computer. does your insistence on consuming less apply to video games too? do you tell Fortnite players to play board games and go to museums instead?

speaking of museums: if you drive 3 miles total to a museum and back home, you have consumed more energy and created more pollution than generating AI images for 24 hours straight (this comes out to roughly 1400 AI images). "being in nature" also involves at least this much driving, usually. i don't think these are more environmentally-conscious alternatives.

obviously, an AI image model costs energy to train in the first place, but take Stable Diffusion v2 as an example: it took 40,000 to 60,000 kWh to train. let's go with the upper bound. if you assume ~125g of CO2 per kWh, that's ~7.5 tons of CO2. to put this into perspective, a single person driving a single car for 12 months emits 4.6 tons of CO2. meanwhile, for example, the creation of a high-budget movie emits 2840 tons of CO2.

is the carbon cost of a single car being driven for 20 month, or 1/378th of a Marvel movie, worth letting anyone with a mid-end computer, anywhere, run free offline software that consumes a gaming session's worth of electricity to produce hundreds of images? i would say yes. in a heartbeat.

even if you see creating AI images as "less soulful" than consuming Marvel/Fortnite content, it's undeniably "more useful" to humanity as a tool. not to mention this usefulness includes reducing the footprint of creating media. AI is more environment-friendly than human labor on digital creative tasks, since it can get a task done with much less computer usage, doesn't commute to work, and doesn't eat.

and speaking of eating, another comparison: if you made an AI image program generate images non-stop for every second of every day for an entire year, you could offset your carbon footprint by… eating 30% less beef and lamb. not pork. not even meat in general. just beef and lamb.

when it comes to the individual impact of AI (this is what OP's post is about, after all), saying "i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources. do you need this? is this making you thrive?" to an individual running an AI program for 45 minutes a day per month is equivalent to questioning whether we're entitled to a single 3 mile car drive once per month or a single meatball's worth of beef once per month. because all of these have the same CO2 footprint.

so yeah. i agree, i think we should drive less, eat less beef, stream less video, consume less. but i don't think we should tell people "stop using AI programs, just watch a TV show, go to a museum, go hiking, etc", for the same reason i wouldn't tell someone "stop playing video games and play board games instead". i don't think this is a productive angle.

(sources and number-crunching under the cut.)

good general resource: GiovanH's article "Is AI eating all the energy?", which highlights the negligible costs of running an AI program, the moderate costs of creating an AI model, and the actual indefensible energy waste coming from specific companies deploying AI irresponsibly.

CO2 emissions from running AI art programs: a) one AI image takes 3 Wh of electricity. b) one AI image takes 1mn in, for example, Midjourney. c) so if you create 1 AI image per minute for 24 hours straight, or for 45 minutes per day for a month, you've consumed 4.3 kWh. d) using the UK electric grid through 2024 as an example, the production of 1 kWh releases 124g of CO2. therefore the production of 4.3 kWh releases 533g (~0.5 kg) of CO2.

CO2 emissions from driving your car: cars in the EU emit 106.4g of CO2 per km. that's 171.19g for 1 mile, or 513g (~0.5 kg) for 3 miles.

costs of training the Stable Diffusion v2 model: quoting GiovanH's article linked in 1. "Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less." at 124g of CO2 per kWh, this comes out to 7440 kg.

CO2 emissions from red meat: a) carbon footprint of eating plenty of red meat, some red meat, only white meat, no meat, and no animal products the difference between a beef/lamb diet and a no-beef-or-lamb diet comes down to 600 kg of CO2 per year. b) Americans consume 42g of beef per day. this doesn't really account for lamb (egads! my math is ruined!) but that's about 1.2 kg per month or 15 kg per year. that single piece of 42g has a 1.65kg CO2 footprint. so our 3 mile drive/4.3 kWh of AI usage have the same carbon footprint as a 12g piece of beef. roughly the size of a meatball [citation needed].

(for anyone who'd like to reblog this for the data, and doesn't want to put anyone on blast or bore followers with the whole reblog chain, you can find a standalone version of this post here.)

i love how many AI art haters will with no self awareness whatsoever ask "ummm why don't you just underpay and exploit someone (probably in the global south) instead of using the evil words machine :/"

[jadeharleyinc]

the scale of AI's ecological footprint

standalone version of my response to the following:

"you need soulless art? [...] why should you get to use all that computing power and electricity to produce some shitty AI art? i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources." "i think we all deserve nice things. [...] AI art is not a nice thing. it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to us thriving and the cost in terms of energy use [...] is too fucking much. none of us can afford to foot the bill." "go watch some tv show or consume some art that already exists. […] you know what’s more environmentally and economically sustainable […]? museums. galleries. being in nature."

you can run free and open source AI art programs on your personal computer, with no internet connection. this doesn't require much more electricity than running a resource-intensive video game on that same computer. i think it's important to consume less. but if you make these arguments about AI, do you apply them to video games too? do you tell Fortnite players to play board games and go to museums instead?

speaking of museums: if you drive 3 miles total to a museum and back home, you have consumed more energy and created more pollution than generating AI images for 24 hours straight (this comes out to roughly 1400 AI images). "being in nature" also involves at least this much driving, usually. i don't think these are more environmentally-conscious alternatives.

obviously, an AI image model costs energy to train in the first place, but take Stable Diffusion v2 as an example: it took 40,000 to 60,000 kWh to train. let's go with the upper bound. if you assume ~125g of CO2 per kWh, that's ~7.5 tons of CO2. to put this into perspective, a single person driving a single car for 12 months emits 4.6 tons of CO2. meanwhile, for example, the creation of a high-budget movie emits 2840 tons of CO2.

is the carbon cost of a single car being driven for 20 months, or 1/378th of a Marvel movie, worth letting anyone with a mid-end computer, anywhere, run free offline software that consumes a gaming session's worth of electricity to produce hundreds of images? i would say yes. in a heartbeat.

even if you see creating AI images as "less soulful" than consuming Marvel/Fortnite content, it's undeniably "more useful" to humanity as a tool. not to mention this usefulness includes reducing the footprint of creating media. AI is more environment-friendly than human labor on digital creative tasks, since it can get a task done with much less computer usage, doesn't commute to work, and doesn't eat.

and speaking of eating, another comparison: if you made an AI image program generate images non-stop for every second of every day for an entire year, you could offset your carbon footprint by… eating 30% less beef and lamb. not pork. not even meat in general. just beef and lamb.

the tech industry is guilty of plenty of horrendous stuff. but when it comes to the individual impact of AI, saying "i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources. do you need this? is this making you thrive?" to an individual running an AI program for 45 minutes a day per month is equivalent to questioning whether that person is entitled to a single 3 mile car drive once per month or a single meatball's worth of beef once per month. because all of these have the same CO2 footprint.

so yeah. i agree, i think we should drive less, eat less beef, stream less video, consume less. but i don't think we should tell people "stop using AI programs, just watch a TV show, go to a museum, go hiking, etc", for the same reason i wouldn't tell someone "stop playing video games and play board games instead". i don't think this is a productive angle.

(sources and number-crunching under the cut.)

good general resource: GiovanH's article "Is AI eating all the energy?", which highlights the negligible costs of running an AI program, the moderate costs of creating an AI model, and the actual indefensible energy waste coming from specific companies deploying AI irresponsibly.

CO2 emissions from running AI art programs: a) one AI image takes 3 Wh of electricity. b) one AI image takes 1mn in, for example, Midjourney. c) so if you create 1 AI image per minute for 24 hours straight, or for 45 minutes per day for a month, you've consumed 4.3 kWh. d) using the UK electric grid through 2024 as an example, the production of 1 kWh releases 124g of CO2. therefore the production of 4.3 kWh releases 533g (~0.5 kg) of CO2.

CO2 emissions from driving your car: cars in the EU emit 106.4g of CO2 per km. that's 171.19g for 1 mile, or 513g (~0.5 kg) for 3 miles.

costs of training the Stable Diffusion v2 model: quoting GiovanH's article linked in 1. "Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less." at 124g of CO2 per kWh, this comes out to 7440 kg.

CO2 emissions from red meat: a) carbon footprint of eating plenty of red meat, some red meat, only white meat, no meat, and no animal products the difference between a beef/lamb diet and a no-beef-or-lamb diet comes down to 600 kg of CO2 per year. b) Americans consume 42g of beef per day. this doesn't really account for lamb (egads! my math is ruined!) but that's about 1.2 kg per month or 15 kg per year. that single piece of 42g has a 1.65kg CO2 footprint. so our 3 mile drive/4.3 kWh of AI usage have the same carbon footprint as a 12g piece of beef. roughly the size of a meatball [citation needed].

[meraki-sunset]

so your crow strider au gave me inspiration for my own au, but i've built up the idea in my brain so much that now im scared to try to put it to paper (oops) did you ever deal with this while making crow strider? (and if you did, how you got over it would be much appreciated thanks fhdjks) also your art is cool :]

Hi, sure, i encountered a few blocks when writing CSAU and other projects. I think my method comes down to a couple rules

You need to know how the story ends from the start, so everything in the story leads to the end. Things can change about the contents of the story as you write it and you change your mind about the events that will transpire in it, but you need an end goal you can build your story towards. Most importantly, this is what allows you to add foreshadowing for said ending and structure the narrative in a clear direction. Otherwise, you might come up with a cool ending too late and regret some choices from past chapters that now don’t help this new ending you want

On that same note (and i’ll proceed to copy and paste from an old post) You need to have a Word document with a rough timeline of the events from start to finish. You need to know how it ends from the beginning and how they get there. It can be really, really vague, but it has to be there. It can go like

. They start the game, the trolls bother them.

.both games go to hell

.scratch

.trip, develop relationships

.new set of kids/teen drama

.old kids they get there

.to hell again

.John retcons everything

.new timeline

.they win

And that's homestuck simplified, Those are your Acts. With them, you will know where you're going and if you need to change something earlier. Everything will be constantly up to change of course, but you will be going from point A to point Z more easily.

From there, you go to every point in that list and create a Word document for all of them. I have them in different folders to have every act separated and in order.

A folder for each Doc for every Act, Numbered, and in each one make more lists like that one telling what happens, for example

WordDoc1 - ACT 1 "They start the game, the trolls bother them"=

.John needs to get his game

.introduce Rose

.introduce the trolls on pester chats

. John gets the game

.introduce Dave

.etc

And those are your chapters. Now you can know the extent of what you want to do and if it makes any sense.

I addition to that, every Folder can contain not only the Word document for the Act but also relevant texts and art that are connected to the Act, so evey folder is all about that specific act and any inspiration for it.

Another piece of advice I can give you is to hint at anything important. That's a rule of comedy; actually, the comedian usually closes the show with something related to the first things they said.

That works for everything, and makes people go, "Oh the thing! The meaningless thing they said earlier, it was a clue all along!"

Interconnect it like a web, and that web will stop the story from falling

Homestuck is so ridiculously interconnected that you lose track of the stuff and objects that repeat that have no way to be where they got to be, songs and people and events that are too similar to not be connected but nobody addresses, things like that make it feel like you're dealing with a universe and not just a line of events.

3. Yet another thing, it's something I'm still trying to assimilate, and is that less is more, sometimes things don't need to be said, specialy not bluntly, and an expression, a gesture, a flinch can summarize them. Backgrounds can be reduced, and ideas can be conveyed.

one example is, In homestuck, it's never said that Dave was raised with lack of food. He never sais it, but it's shown in how happy he was to find a warm bottle of juice in his closet, how there is only weapons on the kitchen and no sign of food, how he later sais he never learned what the purpose of a fridge was until he saw it on tv. If someone is lacking something, don't have them say, "i grew up without X thing" show what filled that space in the absence of X thing.

Instead of some character saying, "My dad was never there for christmas" have them say how they thrited for presents at the local goodwill, payed with their lawn mowing money and put the presents under the tree themselves for their siblings and mom.

4. Something that I always have in mind when writing the dialogs and sketching the scenes, is

"I have an idea; what's the easiest way for someone to get the idea, to get the feelings i want to transmit from the idea?" I made the art something I could handle drawing hundreds of times, simplified the coloring, the aspect symbols, the way I draw backgrounds, the way I write dialogs, etc.

That will save you time and work and could prevent you from getting stuck with a project too big to handle

5. This is the most important one: The first draft’s only purpose is to exist.

Writing is like playing darts sometimes; you only get closer to hitting the center by missing it and learning what not to do. That’s an actual rule on animation and a motto on the Disney office. “Get it wrong as quick as you can,” because when you learn what you’re doing wrong is when you start learnign what doing it right means.

If it helps, title your first draft “the dumb version,” because that’s what it is—the version to get the idea out of your head, and then you built over it.

On the same note, once you write "the dumb version" don’t correct it. Rewrite it. It’s annoying, I know, i know, but fixing and fixing a text only carries the mistakes from the first draft, and everything looks kind of disconnected, because it ends up being a Frankenstein text of all the versions of the story mixed together.

This also applies to art; that’s how I handle both writing and drawing; if it’s not working, hold onto the core idea, new page, restart.

Rewriting it puts it in perspective; it feels like a text of its own, with a clear intent in mind.

I think that’s all I have. Making a story is mostly about managing your strengths and weaknesses, organizing and not being scared of it not being perfect.

Hope this helps.

[kexyyxx]

Hello!! I appreciate your art and your headcanons of Movie amy and her relationship with Sonic! If it’s not a bother, I’m very curious of more hc’s about movie Sonamy! Thanks in advance🩷

Hiiiii, it's not a bother, and of course!

At first I wanted to draw many things for this, but I realised that it would be too much, maybe in the future :,)

Anyway, Movie SonAmy Headcanons, here they are! :D

HC#1: Tbh I think it would be cool if Movie Amy came from a tribe, just like Knuckles. She would know different fighting techniques, the tribe would have taught her different magic spells (Amy has a sh*t-ton of magic powers in the games too, like turning invisible, it's awesome🥹) and other stuff.

When she came to Earth and saw Sonic, she was like : "Erm.... human-kind freak lol" so she would try to teach him the hedgehog tribe's ways C;

HC#2: There is a "Hedgehogian" language which Amy can speak, due to coming from the tribe. It would be a mixture of puffing and hissing sounds with real words (which isn't anything like any other languages' words).

Whenever Amy gets mad or feels a bit overwhelmed, she starts speaking in that language; but because she couldn't really teach Sonic the language yet, Sonic would be like: "What the... what are you even saying😪" while panicking lol

HC#3: Whenever Sonic and Amy are together, and spend time together in any way, they often listen to music.

If one of Amy's fave songs come up, Sonic would immediately stand up and dance for her/with her to try to impress her a bit😊❤️

HC#4: Sonic absolutely FREAKS OUUUUUUUT whenever Amy is in pain; therefore, when Amy has woman-problems, Sonic is all over the place xD

He'd be like: "DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?!?!?" "YOU AREN'T GONNA DIE, RIGHT?!!?!?!??" "IS THIS THE END?!?!??!" I DON'T WANT TO LOSE YOUUUUU😭"

And Amy would be like: "Dude stop, I'm already in pain, no need to make it worse with a headache😩"

HC#5: Although I love to portray Movie Ames as a typical tough girl, in reality, she is sweet as honey🥰 (Honey the Cat reference????🤭)

She was the one to first give smooches and hugs to Sonic, and she LOVES to cuddle with him. Sometimes she also just goes over to his house randomly, without any notifications, and if she is not a bother, she drags him into his room, tosses him onto his bed and cuddle time begins.

(Bonus: They also often invite Tails and Knuckles, and they make a cuddle pile🥺 and Ozzie also likes to join them🥰)

There's more, but for 'Part 1', this is enough xD

[sukibon]

jassault art

[pixellangel]

finally made some more up-to-date art of the mc of my rpgmaker game, magical girl: grim reaper!! her name is yurei, and she's a magical girl who continues serving sparkly justice after she dies by becoming the grim reaper :3

[makeriia]

Fantober day 31!! A free day again.

Recently gotten into HADES, and I think about them a normal amount (lie)

[angiestown]

I finished that dressup game I said I was working on !! would very appreciate people giving it a go because I spent literally a week on this. like 7 days off work doing nothing but drawing clothes lmao

in order to make the different body types work without ballooning up the file size way more than it already is, I had to make it so you choose your skin tone twice. in meiker you can't arrange the order elements appear in, but I recommend starting with these two options to pick out your body type and skin tone first, since some options look better on certain bodies imo

also !! meiker !! I don't hear people talk about it much, but it's really cool I like it a lot! it's like picrew, but instead of uploading a bunch of pngs, you arrange and label your layers in folders and upload a single psd file. personally I liked the process a lot more than picrew because I'd rather work with one big file than a million tiny image files, but that's just me. plus you can make the images bigger than you can on picrew too

also posting this again since I can attach it to a post with the game, but I made a tutorial on how to create a bunch of colour options super fast if you want to make your own dressup game. there's no way I'd have nearly as many options if I didn't know how to do this. once you understand the actions feature you can do so much stuff so much more efficiently it's insane it's like my favourite photoshop feature

[joshuamj]

Linktober Day 8. Tunic

[hauntingsunshine14]

summer olympics 2028 in a universe with no exy we have:

star gymnast neil josten

heavyweight champion andrew minyard

tennis pro kevin day

rugby goddess allison reynolds

d pole laxer matt boyd

marathon swimmer renee walker

volleyball libero aaron minyard

hockey forward dan wilds

synchronized diver nicky hemmick

[ganondoodle]

I am sorry to hear that the depression has stolen your spark.

I want you to know that you are the sole reason I gave Skyward Sword a chance. Your art was so beautiful and compelling that I just had to know about the media it came from.

Your art introduced me to an incredible community that years later, I am still benefitting from. Your art was the gateway, and I've always been thankful to you for that.

I hope your spark realights, and I hope you can kick depression right in its ass.

i- i did that????? qoq

yes im reviving old reaction pictures

i hope im not ruining the mood bc .. this legitimately made me tear up and i kept thinking of this ever since receiving the ask-

but bc i cant keep my mouth shut (i apologize if you are already well aware of all this i just .. like to talk i guess), i ... idk i have said this before but i feel incredibly conflicted about demise (am i allowed to like him??? do i even like him when i changed him so much??? am i a fraud fan????) and the game he comes from, i .. dont actually like skyward sword that much, or, not as much as it may seem like (my favorite is windwaker, second is botw), every now and then i even feel guilty for demise being my blorbo tm- as much as i love him im under no illusion what his introduction to the series did, the games lore is not .. great, it seems to have kickstarted the decline of the series writing and completely torpedoed any sort of fandom discussion by making zelda a literal reincarnation of the good tm gods of love and light and peace and everything good tm uwu and pit her against an evil demonnnnn that just crawled out the earth one day (??) and was only evil and bad and dark and hate incarnate an hated the good tm gods bc hes jsut so eviiiil, it gave rise to the utter dissmissal of any sort of ganondorf related discussions (funny how it only seems to apply to ganondorf, and none of the other villains hmmmmmmmmmmmm) bc, while not confirmed confirmed (though the fandom likes to pretend that), hes now widely seen as a reincarnation of demise and thus, doesnt need nuance or be given any grace or thought bc apparently when you say someone is a demon (or its reincarnation, which i dont believe ganondorf is, to be clear) that means its fine to not give them any thought bc demons are just evil tm and thats ok and good writing actually (wat????)

(if you take skysw as canonically how it all went down bc my interpretation makes it all be a fabricated lie so the gods can play their little games, there is no godess reincarnation, that was a lie to make way for an opressive kingdom belivieing itself to be irrevocably good no matter what they do etc)

it also cheapens any of the past entries, all of them have been flattened by this, why disscuss ganondorfs motivation lol, he just be a demon/demons puppet, zelda could never be wrong or do bad things bc she literal incarnation of goodness uwu etc- (and then totk, only the second game after skysw, retreads its points and makes it even worse while ALSO trampeling over that game imo)

i dont like saying it, but i do feel a little alienated even from ganondorf fans (i love him too!!!!!) bc they hate demise, and rightfully so, it feels weird having your main blorbo be the reason your second fav is constantly done dirty, why you cant even talk about anything critically bc 'iTs jUst a sIMpLe fAiRytALe' now and part of the reason the lore in general has gone to shit, and i dont know how much i can talk about that before i become an obnoxious 'well ACTUALLY my blorbo, who is the reason for all this, is ALSO done dirty and im gonna explain away the bad stuff via my completely noncanon reinterpretation-' guy, or if i already am what im doing with destiny is like .. my way of trying to fix it and make it interesting again? though at this point i guess im falling into the category of people who change their blorbo so much that there really isnt anythign left of the og, which worries me alot, though i wonder if thats even possible given how little there is to him in the first place, i so often see viral posts that make me feel guilty or conflicted for the way i work with media, "actually my blorbo did all those crimes and thats good you all who need to explain away the bad things are weak and annoying!!" "people who change their favs until they barely resemble the character anymore should just make an oc instead!!"-

i dont know if i take these types of posts too literally, i dont know when or how they apply, but it always circles around in my head, i know not everyone can like what you do, but i want to work with the material i have in an interesting way, not a puritanical way (or however you call that), its not in my mind every second, but it nevertheless makes me doubt what i do with my fanworks anytime i talk about them-

... this wasnt really the point of the message was it ... apologies, i hope not every ask will devolve into a sort of mini rant ;__; i dont mean to invalidate what you said, (and im not saying skyward sword is all bad, its full of charm, from characters to designs, just the lore is .. damaging) it is incredibly touching bc me or my art having a positive impact on people blindsides me every single time like "WHAT??? IMPOSSIBLE you MUST be thinking of someone else, no way i could do that", when something gets brought up my thoughts just kinda start pouring out, i thought about deleting everything i wrote, but then felt like that wouldnt be as genuine anymore (i am not normal tm after all and im long past a point pretending otherwise) and have wasted another hour for nothing, so im gonne leave it in and hope, pray even, it comes across correctly

q-q

[jalo-parker]

I love making self indulgent art..

I am going to draw them together more it is inevitable

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[mbat]

red flag: someone says that copper in minecraft is useless

[okthatsgreat]

QUICK UPDATED REFERENCES!!! some ocs from the 50th danganronpa season >:)

[lesbiansanemi]

I’ve been trying not to think about it and get my hopes too high up but I realized that it’s been over a week since I’ve like, felt that “the world is caving in on itself” hurt, anxiety, and sadness. Tbh I’ve felt more…. Stable? Steady? Don’t feel like I’m wildly swinging between extreme moods every couple hours to couple minutes and I’ve been like huh that’s cool but also waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to come back but then I realized this started a bit after all my med dosages got doubled and now I’m like. Holy god….. are they working???? Do meds actually fucking work???????