#they get a larger percentage of the money

[the-fibre-stuff]

The funniest thing about the janky shirt I made for my husband some 4 years ago (he wasn't really in a position to wear a t-shirt to work because he needed to present well in meetings with the higher-ups, and to get the grad students to take him seriously) is that in such a short time not only are more and more people wearing orange shirts, so "oh that's an orange shirt" rather than "that's a t-shirt" would come to mind, but it really feels like everyone is only wearing the ECM shirts (I saw a small handful of other shirts at the walk on campus today + one "Save the Evidence" one, which obviously counts counts as a specific NDTR shirt).

For the record, this years NDTR donation was to Survivors' Secretariat. They are a local group specifically about the Mohawk Institute. They are raising funds to search the grounds, record the names of the children taken to attend there, and create a history archive. They are not a registered charity, so you won't get a tax receipt. However I have downloaded their letter to my MP to object to the lack of funds for grounds search, so maybe they will get some of that tax money that I don't get back.

[olomaya]

Get Pumped!

This started as just a simple solution to allow my Sims to work out without a TV, radio or gym equipment present but I’m a fitness nut so I knew I couldn’t stop there. I love working out and am always trying out new workouts or gyms like people try out food or clothes. It’s one of my favorite hobbies IRL so I was happy to try and make more exercise/fitness things for my athletic Sims.

This is the Exercise Mat I previewed a few weeks (months?) ago and I added a few more features like the ability to teach classes and also free weights (dumbbells and kettlebell).

Credit/Thanks: @aroundthesims for the free weights and kettlebell which are hers. I only recategorized them to Sports/Hobbies. Mats and board are EA. Animations by me, Mixamo and EA!

All the info and download link are after the jump, read through it all before downloading!

Exercise Mat:

Sims can do different floor and body weight exercises on the mat, which are skill gated:

Sit ups, squats: Level 2

Push ups, single-leg squats, bicycle crunches: Level 3

Burpees: Level 4

Sims can also stretch which has benefits if you do it before and/or after exercising. 

Stretching before: the Feeling Limber moodlet will prevent your Sim from getting fatigued so long as it is active

Stretching after: the Feeling Limber moodlet will remove soreness if you have it

If there is an instructor mat on the lot, you can assign the mat to the instructor mat so Sims will use it for classes

Instructor Mat: This mat lets Sims who have Athletic skill 5 or higher teach exercise classes. 

Assign Instructor - sets who the instructor will be for the mat

Schedule Class - self-explanatory; select a time a date to host a class

Start Class - if you don’t want to wait, you can start a class now. Instructors will wait 20 sim minutes (tunable) before starting the class to allow interested Sims to join.

Toggle Stereo - requires IP to work, adds a stereo to the instructor mat so you can play music during class

Free Weights:

You can lift dumbbells or kettlebells. That's pretty much it. These guys look super happy about it.

You only need one dumbbell. The other one is a prop which will be created once your Sim starts lifting.

Gym Board:

Check Scheduled Classes

Sign Up for Class (Note: you can't sign up for classes that have no spots available but you can still show up and try to get a spot if there's a no show)

Cancel Sign Up

Cancel Class

Gym Classes:

Instructors can hold Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced gym classes, the difference in difficulty affects the fat/muscle delta, fatigue level and athletic skill gain. The ability to hold different class levels is skill gated at Levels 5, 6 and 7 respectively.

If you schedule a class, the instructor and any Sims that sign up for the class will be pushed to the lot an hour before the class starts. Sims cannot join a class after it starts but if they leave before the class ends, they still get charged.

The cost per person is based on the class level and the instructor’s athletic skill. If you have NRaas Career and the Instructor is in the Trainer skill-based career, they will also earn extra money and the funds will go towards their career advancement.

If there are no spots available, you can still check what time the class is and get information on the class if you want to show up and see if a spot opens up.

If classes are hosted on a non-park community lot, like a gym, 25% of the class fees will go to the venue (the venue owner will receive this if it’s owned).

You can check and sign up for scheduled classes on the gym board object. Instructors can also cancel classes there.

There are two "rewards" available: Top Trainer and Gym Rat. Top Trainers are Sims that have taught at least 20 classes. After achieving that, their classes are worth more and they also keep a larger percentage of the cost per student. Gym Rats are Sims that have taken at least 10 classes after which they get a discount on any other classes afterwards.

Notes: 

My suggestion is to organize the class room like how I have in my photos with the mats horizontal facing the instructor. I'd also space them out more than I did as some of the exercises involve a lot of jumping/moving around but I have small lots so I have to squeeze in as much as I can! With this plus Twin's spin class and yoga mods, I'm going to need a bigger gym!!

The instructor will face whichever mat is first in the list of assigned mats so I would suggest assigning the front center mat first.

You can have multiple instructors/instructor mats on the same lot but an instructor can only be assigned to one mat.

Sims cannot take a class if they don't have more than $400 in their family funds. You can change this if you like but I don't want my broke inactives spending money on gym classes (we have gym at home!)

If Sims are not autonomously joining classes or using the mat, it’s probably because you have too many advertising objects on your lot that are competing with it. You can up the advertising for the mat but it’s already quite high so you just have to figure out how to balance it. The Join Class interaction does advertise fun and social in addition to the standard Athletic Game Object advertising so I would suggest upping that in order to get more attention from Sims.

The animation of Sims picking up/dropping the free weight is kind of wonky. I may try to fix it later.

There’s a collection file for all the objects but you will find all of them under Entertainment/Sporting Goods. Nothing is more expensive than 150 simoleons.

This is set for YA+ because a) some of the animations will sink for teens and b) they are always trying to do their fucking homework around each other while I'm holding classes and it drove me crazy. You can change the ITUN if you want teens to use it but you've been warned.

Future updates: I'm already thinking about using a similar system to create dance classes. Making an active Dancer career is something I’ve wanted for a while and I have a Sim that would be perfect to test it.

As always, if you run into any issues, let me know!

Download here | Alt: Simblr

What I originally wanted to name this mod 😭😭

[yandere-kokeshi]

Platonic yandere mW2 with a fighter teen reader? If it's ok 🥲

— Yandere Platonic TF-141 with boxer reader

Warnings: yandere behavior, talks about boxing and fighting, and teenager shenanigans.

A/N: since you didn’t specify, I did this poly and boxer reader cuz why not! Hope you enjoy <3!

It’s one way to scare the living shit out of them. 

While they’re happy you found something you are confident and happy with, it also terrifies them of you getting severely hurt; especially if your opponent is larger. No matter how much you reassure them saying you’ve done this since you were a tween, or being trained professionally, they’re immediately babying you and trying to remove you from it. 

Gentle manipulation is what they’ll do — telling you the percentage of injuries, making you afraid of it, or how you’ll end up hurting yourself. 

But as soon as they see you enjoy it, running out of the house despite their strict rules, it tells them you aren’t stopping anytime soon. Finally, they set their foot down and shrug their shoulders; essentially supporting your decision. Just as long as you don’t try to join prizefighting, they’ll allow it; making you promise to take care of yourself, letting them join your rounds at some point, and taking needed breaks. 

Within a few weeks, they migrate into your schedule and like to watch you train and even participate. If you don’t have the equipment, it’s where all their money goes — getting supporting bandages, gloves, punching bags, and possibly a ring. 

Each of them takes turns on training you, which can be fun or a disaster. 

Simon isn’t nice nor easy going against; he tries to go easy, but with his size and stance, he knows how to read your next moves. He lets you get the first jab, or block, but he wants to help you train and be ready whenever, so he’s ruthless. 

Price is the same — but gentler, praising you or telling you something wrong; easily smirking with a, “Atta’ kid!” when you achieve the goals. 

Johnny and Gaz are agile, have much energy and are quite relentless with their dodging. It’s a good fight to go against em, especially since both of them share their liking of joking within the trail. 

If they can’t personally train you, they find someone trustable to train you. And by chance, they come when you’re still training, they all love to sit down and watch you. Johnny and Gaz love hyping you up, both of them throwing bets that you’ll win each time, and sighing out when you do, because the other one gets to help you. 

Price and Simon watch you closely, cringing when you get hit, but smiling when you get up. They also love supporting you silently with cold water, and helping you with re-bandaging your hand-wrappings. 

—

Masterlist || Reblogs, comments, and likes are very much appreciated!! Stay well!!

© yandere-kokeshi 2023 — Do not copy, modify, edit, repost, or use my works for ASMR readings, tiktoks, or other content.

[writingwithfolklore]

3 Important things about Traditional Publishing

                This post is for people who want to be traditionally published. If you’re down to Indie publish, or are only interested in posting your own fiction online—don’t worry about it!

                First things first, traditional (or trad) publishing is when you go through an editor at a publishing house and they publish your book. They also take a hefty percentage of the profits, but handle the editing, cover design, titling, promotion, etc. for you. Sometimes you may also go through a literary agent who will represent you (send your work and advocate for you) to publishing houses.

                Indie publishing (independent) is when you do it on your own, also known as self publishing. You have more control, but have to build a team behind you to help you edit, design, format, promote, etc. (or do it all yourself). and it can be difficult to get your book in places like book stores and libraries since they usually only do dealings with publishing houses.

                With that out of the way, let’s talk 3 important things I know about trad publishing.

1. Don’t share your work online

If you want to be traditionally published, don’t post any of your work online anywhere. Including little bits and pieces, including excerpts, including characters, including titles. Nothing. Keep it locked down.

                This is because many trad publishing contracts will consider you posting your work online as it being “previously published”, and may reject your work for that reason. To be on the safe side, don’t put any of your work online or submit it to other journals/magazines.

2. Be prepared to let go of some of the decision making.

When you go through lit agents and publishing houses, you give up an amount of creative control to get your work published. They just want to make it as good (and marketable) as possible, so trust that they know what they’re talking about.

                This means they may choose your title, you may not have any control over the cover image, they might even ask you to get rid of a character or change the ending or any other amount of larger edits. You are allowed to reject some ideas, but choose your battles. Taking this feedback and making these edits is what will get your work published, so if that is your goal, be accommodating, trust that they have so much experience and will make your work better.

3. You should NEVER have to pay them

If you’re paying a traditional publisher to publish your work, you are being scammed. The money works this way:

The reader buys the book for say $20.

To make this simple, let’s say $20 then goes to the publishing house.

They take 50%, so $10 goes to your literary agent (if you have one).

They take another 50% so $5 goes to you.

Never, ever should the money be flowing the opposite direction where you are giving money to these businesses to publish your work. I will say it again, if you are paying these people, you are being scammed.

This is really important, because I knew a girl who was working three jobs to get her work published. They were asking for almost 20K. My heart absolutely breaks for her—she just didn’t know that that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Whether it’s 20k, $100, or 3 cents. You don’t pay them.

(Of course, if you’re in indie publishing this is a whole different story. In indie, you pay people to do any of the work you don’t want to do. If you need an indie editor, you pay them, if you want an artist to design your cover, you pay them. This rule only applies to trad publishing!)

Anything else important that I missed?

[twig-tea]

Lately I’ve been feeling like Thai bl is truly all over the place with so many shows airing at once and some of the best ones flying under the radar while discourse is focused on a couple of the big messy ones. I think you’re the only person I know who is actually watching ALL of them and has been here for the whole evolution of the genre, so I’m curious what stands out to you about this current moment. Do the shows feel different to you? Is the way fandom is interacting with them changing? And what are your current favs?

I ended up writing a thesis, sorry friend lol To be fair to me there are 3 questions in there, all of them meaty! I've done my best to give a sense of where I'm at with Thai BL and how it feels like it's changed over time.

Caveating all of this: I am just one fan who I'm sure has had specific experiences that will colour my opinion, also a lot of this is just vibes so I'm open to being told I've forgotten something major or misremembered what it was like! If you are reading this and your opinion or experience is different please share, with stuff like this I'm always interested in hearing about differing opinions because the fandom experience will depend at least partly on where you hang out. For years, my main fandom space for BL was the YouTube comments section (RIP me).

Overall feel

Honestly, things overall don't feel all that different to me in Thai BL in particular, even though I'm about to talk about a lot of changes and ways it actuallyd does feel very different below lol And after reflecting about it, I think it's because these things still feel very much in flux, in a way that they've felt in flux this entire time. Producers are still figuring out the best funding and distribution models and merch models to make money; creators are still calibrating how queer these shows can be and still be popular; actors are still figuring out how to do BGP (business gay performances) without having fans interfere in their private lives off the clock. Writers are still trying to figure out how to write 12-episode arcs that don't drag in the middle or fumble the ending (which is also not new). The tension between established ships, fan expectations, and genre requirements has honestly been there almost the whole time, though the reverberations of missteps is louder now because of the larger fanbase that is (comparatively) more plugged in to live viewing. The core question in BL has always been 'how do we make this marketable', and that unsurprisingly hasn't changed, though the answer to that question has over time, if that makes sense?

Shows

Do the shows feel different? As a whole, I'd say yes. The biggest differences are of course total quantity and overall quality, but the actual distribution of % of shows that have high(er) production values (i.e. quality) feels close to the same--it was close to 50/50 in the late 2010s and now is maybe more like 40/60 with a higher percentage coming from more smaller production companies. But the numbers we're talking about are something like 15 shows in e.g. 2018 and something more like 50 shows in 2023 (being vague because there are shows that people could argue over whether they should count). The quality overall has increased, even the pulps look better, sound better, and tend to feel a little bit more put together than the pulps of even 2020 (please note that these are all relative qualifiers, most of these shows are still not objectively good). 2020 in particular was a watershed moment for high production value BLs; we get colorists and special effects artists, and sometimes decent sound production now!

There has also been an improvement in terms of what is depicted and how certain subject matter is treated very generally, though I think that's still in flux. Things like evil ex girlfriends are less common than they were and the women in BL are more likely (in general, still not always) to be treated as realized characters. We've gotten more and better femme representation in ensemble shows, and the "gay for you" trope is much less common. Consent is now considered sexy and is much more common than it was; non-consent as "sexy" has eroded and is much less common. Things that used to happen in almost every BL now happen in a much lower percentage. I also feel a little bit less worried about some of the actors on pulp sets because there is more general scrutiny about things like minor actors, intimacy coordination, BGP (business gay performance) expectations, and sexual exploitation. Overall, show recommendations these days come with fewer caveats.

The assumption that if you worked with someone on a BL once you would stay with them as an established pairing was surprisingly early in BL; I don't know if it's just because there were a few shows that had side pairings then get main shows, so the actors did work together on a few shows in a row, which made them feel established, or whether it's because the BGP started early to build hype both before and after shows aired, or whether audiences just made homophobic assumptions about how if two actors had chemistry they had to be gay for each other, and otherwise nobody would want to "play gay" more than once, or would want to have to kiss too many other men....in any case, there were huge scandals and blow-ups around this in BL on even the earliest shows, and some early shows were snubbed because of the pairing alone. Similarly, it was established very early in BL (i.e. 2016-17) that an unhappy ending for a pair would result in your show being panned; cheating was also a guaranteed flop in BL circles (though some ensemble shows that had gay relationships in them such as Friend Zone did fine with cheating plots and unhappy endings). Overall it feels like some things were only depicted in early Thai BL and creators have avoided them since due to the audience reception at the time. I will say, generally, that there have now been enough examples of people in a "branded pair" moving on to a new pair or multiple shows, that it feels less like a death knell to a BL career if one of the actors says they no longer wanted to make BLs, or if they switched companies.

I pay a lot of attention to queerness in BL, and that has changed a little bit too, though not in the way I expected. I had been expecting a more clear and steady trajectory in BL, but we've instead had real swings, and I've realized there will just always be shows that feel more or less actually gay or queer than others, and that's ok. Early Thai shows really spoiled us for good queer content, GayOK Bangkok and Diary of Tootsies are still shows by which i measure what we get now, and both of those are from 2016. I would say that more "mainstream" BL (i.e. by one of the major production companies) hit what turned out to be queer saturation around 2020 and that's where I was most surprised not see a more clear trajectory; rather than things getting more queer from there, I'd say a greater percentage of shows overall feel more queer, but we haven't (and I now suspect won't) reach the queerness we had in Thai tv in 2016. That being said, my secret running list of things I want to see in BL gets shorter every year as entries get crossed off, so I would say the range of queer experience is slowly getting captured as more content continues to be made by a wider range of production houses (PrEP being mentioned in a mainstream show is my white whale).

I know some people assume that shows are higher heat now overall, but I don't think that's true. I do think Thai television producers and directors have overalll gotten better at capturing sensuality, and acting workshops have improved chemistry-building overall too. But from what I can tell the ratio of high head and low heat content is still pretty similar to what it's always been, maybe slightly higher (e.g. at a quick glance I'd guesstimate 30% of shows had a sex scene in 2018 vs 40% in 2023).

Fandom

The main differences in fandom from the really early days and now are the ways we, as international fans, are able to engage with each other, with thai audiences at the same time, and with content creators, and the entitlement that comes with that. In the 2010s we were almost always watching after Thai airing, with either fansubs or, later, official subs, trailing online releases by days or weeks, which themselves may have trailed the Thailand airing date by days or weeks or sometimes even months. That became less true around 2019ish, and especially in 2020 when I think Thai producers were desperate to reach audiences during the start of the pandemic (and when audiences were desperate for something to distract us from what was happening in real life).

As a fan in the mid-late 2010s, watching something was either unofficial via a fansubber, or you were wading through hundreds of Thai comments to find anyone else writing about the shows in English. Now, it's actually rare we don't have immediate international distribution, though it may be paid. If the subs are not up at the same time as the official upload, even on free sites, fans get furious. It's a bit surreal to see people complain about waiting a few hours for subtitles, especially on YouTube, when we sometimes waited months for a series to finish being subbed (not to say people didn't complain back then too, because they sure did! But there were fewer international fans overall, and it wasn't an expectation that there would be subs, so fewer people complained when it happened). This meant that a lot of people only watched shows when they were complete, and people were not watching with any kind of synchronicity.

With international fans moving into simultaneous watching with Thai audiences, we suddenly had the chance to talk about shows as they were airing and affect the conversations about them and even, sometimes, the decisions. Folks seem to have differing opinions about what makes a BL, and what makes a BL good, and they are vocal about when a show doesn't meet their standard. This has always been true, but the strong opinions have more of an effect on the discourse when they're expressed in real-time to the show being aired. Also, when we have literally 3x the number of Thai shows being aired (nevermind other countries which have also increased), it seems so much more egregious to me to complain if a single show doesn't meet your particular taste. Just go watch something else! That was less possible in 2016, but now nobody has any excuse lol Please note here that I'm not saying shows should not be criticized. But when you have one loud faction saying shows should have nothing but innocent kisses if any skinship at all and showing more is distasteful and possibly homophobic, and another faction saying a show should be panned if they don't have at least one sex scene and if there is no good kiss it's homophobic, I don't know where that leaves content creators but I see the tension and how it sometimes results in my least favourite tropes like "blushing maiden" even after a couple has canonically had sex. These factions have always existed in BL fandom, this is not new, they just both seem particularly silly now with so much content to choose from.

The shows that get attention and the shows that get snubbed feel the same too, in all honesty. You can ask yourself the following questions:

Is the show a little slower paced?

Are the story beats less melodramatic?

Do its characters feel more human?

Do they feel more queer?

Is it a comedy?

Is there any risk of an unhappy ending?

Do people not think one of the lead actors is hot?

Do people ship one of the lead actors with someone who isn't his costar?

Do people have to do anything other than go to YouTube to watch it?

If the answer is yes to any of those questions, and especially to the last one, fewer people will be watching, even if the show is good. That's always been true. [Shows I'm thinking about when I say that: Make it Right, He's Coming to Me, My Ride, You're My Sky, Oxygen (though the sides in this one are also at fault), YYY, Something in my Room, Ghost Host Ghost House, Dear Doctor I'm Coming for Soul, Cooking Crush.] All this is to say, there have always been shows that have been ignored, though I agree with you OP that with more shows airing, more are being ignored at any given time.

The other thing is that when a show is good, it doesn't necessarily invite discourse. The messes are often what encourage people to dig in, fill in gaps, linger in the adrenaline. The part that does feel different is also related to the increase in genre BLs; genre stuff in general tends to get more attention in fandom spaces, and the way people are functioning as fans feels different in that they're bringing the way they interact with genre content to BL as BL has started having larger and better funded genre content. I'm thinking about those early genre BLs like He She It, My Dream, Love Poison, Golden Blood, So Much In Love, Why R U....we started getting genre shows in BL in I think 2017 and basically had 1-2 a year until 2020ish and then it increased from there; and the ones that had funding and decent distribution got engagement until they started going off the rails, and then they had even more engagement and then fell off. I don't think it's a coincidence that the shows last year that got people to write meta were La Pluie, Be My Favorite, and I Feel You Linger in the Air. When a show is building a world, there's more to say and interrogate about it, and when a genre show fails, it can fail more spectacularly than a regular romance story. The most popular BL shows used to all be straight-up BL bubble romances, but I think genre shows really started to take over a greater percentage of the popular spots in 2022 and 2023. Again, the main difference here is that there used to be 1-2 stand-out shows per year, and now there are closer to 6+ per year, and as we got more stand-out shows the variety of what type of show stood out as popular has expanded. I do think the overall percentage of shows that are more standard romance plots has reduced, partly because Thai production companies are running out of popular y-novels to adapt. So I'm anticipating we'll continue to get more genre content going forward, and maybe a higher percentage of original works too.

Shows I'm Enjoying Right Now

Right now, the Thai shows airing that I'm watching are:

Cooking Crush

Dead Friend Forever

Cherry Magic Thailand

City of Stars

The Sign

Playboyy

PitBabe

7 Days before Valentine

For Him

Of those, I'd currently most recommend Cooking Crush as a generic BL recommendation. Dead Friend Forever is very good, but is not a romance and is difficult for some to watch (there are a lot of dark themes in addition to the gore and scary bits).

Cooking Crush is doing so many things I love. I've written about the way it's set up its major conflict to be amongst the friend group here, and way the show is depicting communication between the two main characters and how they improve their communication with one another as they get closer here. Two of my biggest BL pet peeves are a conflict for the sake of a dramatic penultimate episode that ignores or retcons a character's growth or the building of trust that a couple has already gone through in the series, so the fact that this show is working so hard to establish strong communication between its leads and then setting up the significant drama to actually about friendship rather than romance is something I cannot overstate my excitement about. To tie this back into what I wrote above, this reminds me of Diary of Tootsies and I mean that in the best possible way.

Dead Friend Foreever is, like I mentioned above, not a romance; it's a slasher horror melodrama with a very well established mystery, an ensemble cast of mostly hateable characters (which I admit isn't usually my thing, but since they're likely all going to die as a result of the genre they're in I'm finding that more tolerable than usual, and there is at least one character I like). DFF did a great job of structuring the story for the ultimate payoff of information reveals. There are a lot of shows that have been messing with non-linear storytelling recently, Cooking Crush being one of the ones that actually does this poorly in my opinion, but Dead Friend Forever effectively uses non-linear storytelling so that we find out important pieces of information about particular characters at a time when that information will have the most emotional impact on what is happening in the "present" of the storyline. Every time there is a reveal, it informs what we've already seen, recontextualizes it, and means we understand some of the character motivations and actions differently from when we saw them the first time. I mentioned above that there are dark themes in this show; one of the things that I really like about this show is that the impact of class is not glossed over, and that the consequences of these events feel very real for the characters; people do terrible things in this show, but these actions are not treated lightly by the show itself.

You'd think these two shows would have nothing in common, but there are things that they share that put them both in my top category. Generally, in both of these shows, the character arcs are clear and logical; when a character does something, even if I don't like the action itself, I can understand exactly why they that and can see how it matches where they are in their arc at the time. The shows show change in characters as a result of what they experience, and the relationships in this show really matter. When characters start acting in ways that feel out of character or against their own arc because they have to in order to drive the plot forward, I struggle to remain invested; that's not happening with either of these shows. Both of these shows also treat serious topics with seriousness, and consequences for actions are real and felt by the characters in the show (and if someone gets away with something, the show is clear that this is not just). Nothing has happened that hasn't been signalled or implied earlier. Both shows also have clear class consciousness and represent the disparity caused by classism in a critical/harsh light.

Whew! I think I got to everything you asked. Thanks again for the extremely interesting question!

[stickthisbig]

Look it was a really fuckin rough day and internet drama is what is keeping me afloat so here's some bullshit about Watcher

I don't want to talk about creative decisions. Creators deserve to be paid and TV costs a lot of money, and whether you think a TV model makes sense and reflects the brand's appeal is ultimately a matter of taste.

I want to talk about how much this fuckin thing costs.

If you are going to make a venture like this survive, you must aim at the money. I am the money. I'm financially independent and old enough to have kids who watch the show but have no income, I am a long-time BFU/Watcher fan who's splashed out for merch and a live show, and I've subbed to multiple similar services (RIP Alpha). I am the boring adult that you must convince, because I am the one who can pay for this without a second thought. You will not make it through this on the empty promises of children.

The closest comp to Watcher is not Dropout; it's Nebula. And trust me on this- they would prefer you to compare it to Dropout, because of how much better it makes them look. Compared on full prices (because you can almost always get a discount), Nebula costs half of what Watcher does, for a much, much larger catalog. I am a huge fan of Nebula. I've watched hundreds of hours on Nebula, because there is loads of varied content from creators who have expressed exactly the same wishes for creative freedom as the Watcher team.

And honestly, if we are gonna talk about comparisons to Dropout, you're never gonna be able to watch BFU on this service, so it's apples to oranges anyway.

I am certain that they will make more money percentage-wise through this service. It's not on me to care about their yield from youtube vs a dedicated streaming service vs a partnered streaming deal. That's not my job; I'm not their accountant or their dad. It's on me to look at value for money. I am not a charity, and when you put yourself up as a commodity, I'm gonna kick the tires and leave if I don't like the price.

I'm not going to pay $60 for this, or $42, or $6/month, because it's a bad value on my end. It is less content for more money. $30 still would have been too high, but there was a price point where I, the person with the intersection of money and interest, would have said yes. That is the trade-off: you can wait around forever for somebody to spend $60 and end up with $0, or you can get three people who balked in for $20 each and end up with $60.

Look, we're all friends here, we know the Watcher crew is not so damn dumb that they didn't look into joining an existing streaming service. It's not a fuckin grand revelation that there were potentially other options, and obviously they must have thought about this for longer than ten minutes. But when your service is MUCH more expensive than its closest comparison (Nebula) and the same price as the well-established competitor you'd like to be compared to (Dropout), why on god's green earth would you think I would buy it if I was anything short of obsessed? Where is your growth plan? How is this sustainable? The absolute best plan for me is to wait until the next series of Ghost Files is over, pay $6 to watch the whole series, then cancel again.

Also you're fuckin leaving money on the table by not having delayed VOD on youtube but at this point, that's none of my business.

If it's worth $60 to you and you've got the money, you do what's right for you. But I'm out. No hard feelings! But also no $60.

(Also I do think 100% saying that the back catalog will stay on youtube is a walkback and not what he said in the video, so like, watch that)

[t34-mt]

You might have answered it before, I tried to search for it but got no results, do kyhuines and maanuls share a diet? That is, is there anything that one can eat that the other can't digest?

i think i did answer that a while ago, or maybe my memory is failing and I only did it with friends. but even if this is a repeat, i don't mind it!

yes, maanuls and kyhuines can eat each other's food, at least they can eat the majority of it safely. Some products may cause one to be sick, and a few may be lethal. And when it's lethal it's mainly because of the quantity of a toxin found in the food that the other can't process because of their biology.

for example, many bugs, which are a large part of a kyhuines diet, cannot be safely eaten by maanuls because of their toxins. some species can be processed in various ways to remove said toxins and become safer for maanuls to consume.

Things like kelp are things kyhuines can eat safely. And are quite a common dry snack to import inside the mountain alp ring, once trading routes are open between the "inner" continent and the "outside". However, Kyhuines will digest it worse than their larger cousin counterparts. their digestive system does not take as many nutrients from it as maanuls, because maanuls have evolved to process it better since kelp has been used a lot in their cuisine for thousands of years. Kyhuines are better at having a lot of starch in their diet too because of the way their agriculture was and what species they'd cultivate compared to maanuls, and so on with things like this. its quite a fun subject honestly!

in areas such as kaar'kchir and its sister cities, where the population is of mixed species, meaning the area has on average as much kyhuines that there is maanuls around. food stands and other services involving food, will prefer serving food that accommodates both so they can have more clients (kaar'kchir and the sister cities live under different systems that utilize money compared to the majority of the world). But also out of consideration, because establishments and even houses are expected to be able to welcome both species inside. Food stands that only offer food

More recently built infrastructures in kaar'kchir are rather large to let maanuls in, while older still standing builds from before the traverse of the alp and first contact are too small for maanuls. The older ones are usually familial homes that are still living here or have been repurposed for storage. kaar'kchir was a kyhuine colony for info, build before first contact and the traverse of the alp expedition. So old buildings never had maanuls in mind because they didn't even know they existed.

even between the non-gliding kyhuine species and mierthri kyhuines there is food that the other cant consume, many fungal species from the mierthri biome is used by the mierthri kyhuines to ferment food and have it last longer. Their guts are better suited to eat the weird things that grow near the mierthri biome, while non-gliding kyhuines may get extremely sick from it.

on a silly note, because of the size difference between the two (actually 3, since miethri is a different species but in-world they don't categorize it as such. but even then myself ill just say the 2) alcoholic beverage and how fast it affects one is quite silly. the percentage of alcohol in maanul fermented drinks is very high on average even for a human because of their size being larger they can take up more, kyhuines are much smaller than maanuls (kyhuines are smaller than you are for info). So 1 glass of a medium alcoholic drink that is of maanul origin to a kyhuine can be enough to make their head feel warm and funny already. mierthri kyhuines do not drink alcohol made by maanuls. Theyre 120cm (1 ft tall) so if they do they're KO quickly. unless its very light and made with kyhuines in mind, including the gliding kyhuines (mierthri), but then its so light that it defeats the purpose for maanuls. if they care about that to begin with.

i had fun writing ask answer, thank you!

[askagamedev]

What do famous leads get out of becoming freelancers and then continuing to work with their former company? This sounds a glib but it's genuine curiosity. I assume they get a little more control of how they work, but how's that really look in practice?

It's a lot easier to get hired back (as a contractor or not) with a former employer with which you have a good and established relationship. The contractor already knows the dev team, already knows the kind of games they make, already has experience with the franchise, pipeline, tools, and workflow so there's very little ramp-up time. If the cost of contracting the leader's company for the work is reasonable and within the game's budget, there's little to be lost by hiring them on. This also helps establish legitimacy for the lead's contracting company - having a list of established and satisfied clients looks good to other potential clients, which makes it easier for the contracting company to get hired by other companies in the future.

Contracting at that level also pays a lot more than a salary job working for the studio. A lot of things are open for negotiation when it's company to company, including a percentage of the game's revenues. In many ways, it allows the contracting company to change the risk - reward ratio. The contractor can also take on more risk (e.g. less money paid up front) for more reward (a larger cut of the game revenue once it ships). Masahiro Sakurai of Sora Ltd. does this - he takes no money up front and gets paid entirely based on how well the game he contracted on sells.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[elenorasweet]

What gets to me about mainstream AI enthusiasts is that all of them

all of their talking points

can be boiled down to "I hate artists".

It's all either about replacing the very few art jobs that pay (writer, cover artist, voice actor, actor, 3D renderer, graphic designer, ...) in larger industries...

... or it's about creating "art" (patterns, prints, characters, posters, colouring pages, fabric designs, ...) without needing to actually develop any skills or spend any time, and then selling it on etsy, spoonflower, redbubble, etc, thus taking money and attention away from artists...

... or it's about just being able to claim you made a thing and "showing them up", either by showing that you cando what they do with no effort, or more often, by just not saying it's AI and getting the attention and admiration that they get. Or to get clicks and defraud people who think they're buying a real thing, which still involves creating fake art.

And it's fucking everywhere. As a crafter, I've seen hundreds of crochet, knitting, cross-stitch and quilting patterns that are made by AI, and they NEVER say that in the description when selling them. Literally look up "cross-stitch pattern" on etsy and a large percentage of the first page of results is AI.

My sister collects colouring pages for her library branch, and takes great pride in paying artists for them, because she wants to pay people for their work. She literally has to dig through several pages of AI art to find a single real artist right now. Recently, I've seen several cross-stitch and colouring book artists closing shop because they can't compete with AI and it's not worth the time anymore.

And there are legitimate uses for AI that don't involve these things, like people using it to diagnose cancers and rare illnesses and shit. It could be used to reduce people's workloads immensely. It's barely being used for that, though, because what people seem to really want to FOCUS on is this:

"art is easy", and "I could do that too if I had the time/skill", and "artists are cheating us by charging for their work" and "I hate artists".

[buckybarnesss]

I sucked at history, can you explain the Ulysses Grant propaganda stuff?

essentially after the civil war the former confederacy began to do heavy rewriting of the narrative of the war. they created their own pseudohistory of what is essentially their own mythology of the american civil war that attempts to reframe it. they'll refer to it as the war of northern aggression and insist it was war waged for southern independence. this narrative tries to paint the confederacy as doomed but heroic while softening the role of white supremacy and slavery in their cause. instead they shifted the focus to so-called "states rights" but never truly focusing on what exactly they mean by states rights.

there's a lot more involved in it but in short this revisionist history is known as the lost cause. (for an entertaining debunking of the lost cause myth please watch checkmate, lincolinites)

it's been embedded within american culture. particularly in the former confederate states. largely in part due to the daughter's of the confederacy organizations which helped to teach this narrative in schools. it's also why we have so many goddamn statues of confederate generals and why there's so much named after them.

the lost cause mythos paints robert e. lee as a heroic, paternal, pseudo-religious figure so of course he needs a villain to fight against. enter ulysses s. grant.

grant defeated lee and was arguably the better general but his reputation was slandered by lost causers.

grant became thought of as a drunkard due to no small part due to his bouts of binge drinking. it's hard to diagnose him as an alcoholic but when he was bored, with nothing to do and missing his family he was known to drink to excess and he couldn't hold his liquor. however he was never drunk on the battlefield.

grant during his tenure as general did get painted as a butcher due to the significant causalities that occurred during the overland campaign. it sounds cold but grant simply had larger numbers and was dogged in his determination to finish the confederate army to end the war. we know the numbers and grant lost less of a percentage of his men than lee did. grant wasn't a butcher of his men but the reaction of horror is understandable. it's just that the lost causers use this information to villainize grant.

additionally when grant was president there was rampant corruption in his administration. it's largely agreed upon that grant himself was not corrupt but one of grant's faults was his trusting nature of those around him. here's the wikipedia article on the scandals that occurred during his administration.

these things have been used to diminish and damage ulysses s. grant's reputation despite him being a goddamn american hero and should be remembered as such.

ulysses s. grant was a man of humble origin born in ohio. his father was a tanner and he hated all of that. he didn't even want to be in the military but his father got him a commission to west point to receive an education. he was a middling student.

this man was knocked down by life time and time again. he experienced poverty several times. it's reported that he once sold his gold watch to be able to buy his children christmas gifts and he would sell firewood for money.

he was also swindled a few times and lost money in what's considered one of the first ponzi schemes.

his father in law didn't like him much. grant was raised in abolitionist household and his wife's family were slave holders. his father in law even gave him a slave probably not out of kindness but ulysses later freed the man despite needing the money it could have garnered him.

lets not mince words here though. grant wasn't abolitionist before the war. this act was kind but the bar was and is in hell.

grant had his faults. there was his issuing of general order 11 which expelled all jews from his military district during the vicksburg campaign due to issues with illicit trading and smuggling. let's not make excuses for the anti-semitism this order was rooted in. later in life it seems he did regret it at least on the surface and did go on to hire more than 50 jewish men for federal jobs and attempted to reconcile with the jewish community but it's still quite the stain on his record if you ask me.

the reason he wrote his memoirs was because he was dying from throat cancer and didn't want to leave his family with no money. it was mark twain who published them so that his wife received 70% of the royalties. he died a few days after completing them.

he was a certified horse girl.

as a child was referred to as useless grant by other children.

grant was also a wife guy. he loved his wife julia so goddamn much. julia dent had a condition called strabismus. she was cross eyed. she was reluctant to seek out corrective surgery despite the issues the condition caused her in life.

she wrote in her own memoir:

“I told the General and expressed my regret. He replied ‘What in the world would put such a thought in your head, Julia?’ I said: ‘Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife. I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very plain, Ulys; who knows?’ He drew me to him and said: ‘Did I not see you and fall in love with you with those same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.’ And I never did, my knight, my Lancelot!” [from here]

it was grant that established yellowstone national park when he signed the yellowstone national park protection act in 1872.

it was also grant that signed the civil rights act of 1875 and the enforcement act of 1871 that went after the ku klux klan's activities.

ulysses s grant was as an imperfect person as any of us but the way his contributions to this country have been purposefully slandered and diminished is a crime.

he deserves an oscar bait biopic.

he was also the hottest president. i said what i said.

[edenisme]

Mostly I’m just annoyed the splatfest teams have been so unbalanced. I love Shiver and gg to team money (you guys were fighting hard whenever I saw y’all) but 9% is pretty indicative of the larger problem.

Team Fame had 9.10% and Team Bigfoot had 8.69%. When less than 10% of your player base wants your option (no offense team fame love you guys) then you are not picking good themes/good teams for it.

3/8 splatfests have had one team with more than half the votes:

Ice Cream Splatfest - Team Vanilla: 55.04%

Taste Splatfest - Team Sweet: 56.84%

Deserted Island - Team Gear: 58.28%

That’s 5/8 splatfests with massive popularity disparages. 2 of the remaining 3 were NOT EVEN SPLATOON ORIGINALS—they were the pokemon and Zelda collabs (zeldafest has most even teams to date for those curious). The chocolate splatfest was almost equal to the pokemon percentages, with 24-33-42 and 25-33-40 respectively.

This would be less of a problem if it weren’t for the mirror matches. When more than half your players are stuck in mirror matches (and even more in the case of Fame and Bigfoot skewing the splatfest so badly) the splatfest itself becomes disheartening. While I love getting to play the game regardless, a not insignificant number of players don’t want to be stuck in mirror matches all weekend when they don’t give any clout/points for their team.

This also impacts tricolor, as the mode needs all three teams to have a real match. With less than 10% popularity, both Team Love and Money (+ Nessie and Aliens) get stuck in mirror matches regardless of who is most popular until the minority team can be found. And everyone makes jokes about only seeing these teams once or twice when it happens, so you can see how the average (and casual!) player will suffer if this isn’t addressed.

Tl;dr Splatfest teams have large popularity disparages and this causes excess mirror matching/unbalanced splatfests. Splatoon devs need to start doing polls ahead of time or something it’s really bugging me.

[berrypass-de-murdler]

91. They Bill You Double for Dying

When I feel uncertain and anxious and then I see that people saw my stuff I feel much better immediately <3 <3

Because VALIDATION, my life force/jk

I'm happy to inform that ALL OF THE BOOK 1 CHARACTERS ARE DESIGNED

That's 68 characters total, from my very first Murdle drawing of Aureolin back in May to the Crystal Goddess, who was just finished yesterday.

On another note the Crystal Goddess is now my least favorite design and I find her worse than Sir Rulean. Fletch colored her but I drew this monstrosity and uh you have been warned.

Nuh

Why is she another fish woman

Why are there so many of those

My original idea in my head actually was a lot less horrifying but Fletch insisted that she needed these creepy lips and NSJFSDCKSDN I hate her :'D KAY AT LEAST SHE'S NOT IN THIS EPISODE MOVING ON

DON'T READ THE EPISODES UNTIL YOU'VE FINISHED THE FIRST BOOK!!

Logico needs to do something he does not want to do.

He has to drive.

LOGICO: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOT ANOTHER CAR!!! [mature sobbing]

He has to go to a new law firm, because he HAS to get out of this stupid contract. No more fucking around in Hollywood with his stupid boss and his stupid film crew - he’s not even PARTICIPATING in the movie. When he gets there (and kicks his rental car like a man), he sees the lobby, which is the size of an entire grocery store. That’s just the LOBBY!

LOGICO: Hahahaha, I can’t afford this. ???: LOOK MURDER! LOGICO: Fuck

Blaxton and Argyle followed him to the place!

LOGICO: WHAT DO YOU WANT?? BLAXTON: We knew you knew things, and we wanted them!! ARGYLE: Ay we want yer money.

Blackstone and Pine are also there.

PINE: [snort] Haven’t seen YOU in a while. BLAXTON: AND I JUST WANT TO FUCKING SIGN MY LIFE AWAY!!! LOGICO: All RIGHT, you already spoke.

BLAXTON: Get out of my life, I’m going to go drink coffee with that hot girl!!! I mean drink hot coffee, with the room-temperature girl - YOU UNDERSTAND!!!

Logi, fed up with the puppet man, gets statements.

PINE: Judicially, whoever had the antique- LOGICO: NO! Stop. Retry, but WITHOUT the character-relevant prefix. BLACKSTONE: I-I’ll give you my statement now and my bill later. LOGICO: Ohoho I am not paying you. BLACKSTONE: I’M SORRY MAN!! I’m just… I’m freaking out! Something just doesn’t feel right. I need… money??  LOGICO: Relax. It’s probably because this building is larger than is physically possible on the land surface available. 

Logi gets a really blunt email from Irratino and blushes anyway, because even his most basic words float like whipped cream.

LOGICO: [weird giggling]

But he figures out the truth!

LOGICO: AGENT ARGYLE! You weren’t following me, I was following you! You were here before I was, and you killed that random person! ARGYLE: HISSSSS!!! It wan’t a ‘RANDOM PERSON’! It was a LAWYER! I wanted another percentage point of a mutual client’s revenue. He disagreed. We negotiated, and long story short, he died. Is THAT A CRIME, YOU LITTLE BUSHHUGGER? PINE: [at a computer] You know what is a crime? I just sold your house on Zillow. ARGYLE: WHAT?!? PINE: Serves you right. You just got JUDGED!!! BLAXTON: WHAT JUDGED?? WHAT’S HAPPENING?!?!? BLACKSTONE: STOP… SCREAMING, YOU LITTLE PUPPET MAN!!

Blackstone tackles the puppet and fights with it stupidly. 

ARGYLE: I didn’t think my empty heart could feel depression, until I saw THAT.

The marshmallow man finally manages to rip the little blue guy from his roots. The ‘real’ Hack Blaxton appears to be… a clone of Blackstone? Wait a minute!

LOGICO: He murdered you! BLACKSTONE: I murdered you! How… how??? BLAXTON: I… I… 

The red-tied doppelganger picks himself off the ground.

BLAXTON: I didn’t really die. You were so controlling, so demanding, all the time… the only way I could get away from you was to pretend that you killed me. I just didn’t want to see you again. BLACKSTONE: Hacker… you… really felt like that? I… I don’t want you to think of me like that, I really thought… we were a good team… BLAXTON: I work here now, in Hollywood. I write movies. It’s… what I really want to do. BLACKSTONE: …It’s okay, man. I’m sorry I ever scared you off. I just… I can’t believe you’re alive. I…

They hug and cry. Pine clutches her heart. Logico does a long, withering sigh of confusion. 

LOGICO: I hate this contract… I want to die… why can’t lawyers… why can’t anyone… [LE GASP!!] WAIT! I know who can get me out of ANYTHING! 

He giggles and runs away like a penguin, with an idea in his circular head.

The end!

Yeah Hack Blaxton actually looks exactly like his twin bro, just shorter, with slightly different hair, and a red tie.

Some of the dumbest 'new lore' to come out of the cartoon! ...As if the puppet wasn't already problematic

But with all the designs finished, that means I can start book 2 as soon as the final episodes are published <3

The power of Goat Lord compels you!

See you next time murdlers!

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Tears for Fears and AI

Back to posting about AI. Stick around and maybe you'll learn some basic copyright law and Graphic design principles about why the cover sucks. AKA why you spend the money to pay for a graphic designer at least if not a photographer/designer.

Background: So Tears for Fears released an album cover which was made by someone who "professionally uses AI"

I should note that some of the content of this post, though not copied by words, was said under the Tears for Fears post. The notes I made about composition failing and Typography, the sky, and color notes are mine. I have done my best to give credit, but I missed a few and thus have pointed out when it wasn't my own idea. 'cause stealing other people's observations would defeat the purpose of this post.

Then they have the audacity after looking at that man's Photoshop layers to call that a collage. Even though the image itself is terrible and has a lot of basic issues.

If you can't see the Photoshop layers, it's basically. Gen AI, Gen AI, Gen AI Black layer, and text layer. Gen AI background. They are calling this a collage. Oh, Masking. Oh, look, set out the guidelines for the print bleed and then botched the composition lines without a ruler.

A collage is done in fair use category in such a way that the arrangement of elements is 1. unique, 2. makes a new statement and 3. uses less than 10 percent of the total image and/or is used as a parody.

A collage actually uses design principles and juxtaposition to boost the core message of the piece being produced, not overall harms it.

This image is far from that.

BUT BUT THE CONCEPT IS ORIGINAL...

BTW, the horizon line on the helmet is correct on this one, not that AI would ever understand that. It's called perspective.

Yeah, no.

Look, most AI prompters haven't developed or challenged their creativity that much so they don't know what the hell they are doing.

And besides, look at the other Album covers. They are better composed. The AI generated one needs to be composted.

But AI was only "one of the elements used."

99%, the other percentage is the text.

OK, let's get past the point that the idea isn't new which is terrible marketing, BTW. And all of the basic ethical concerns about AI.

But the composition is decent...

Honestly, the composition makes me want to cry.

First off the horizon line should follow the rule of thirds.

Either 2/3rds sky to 1/3 middle ground. Or 2/3rds middle ground to 1/3 sky. This is almost dead center, which sets my graphic designer and photographer senses on edge. I want to swear so much. DO NOT SPLIT your composition in half unless you have a really good reason for it. And he has no reason for it. There is no "choice" between two things, your eyes doesn't need to switch, he's got absolutely no clue how to do any basic composition.

Barring that, the horizon line cuts straight through the middle of the head which looks awkward. The horizon line reflected is odd compared to the picture. See the genuine plagiarized from picture has a different horizon line? Yes, because reflections are like this.

This is purely my note.

Second the guy botched The golden mean.

Not going to explain it. But the placement of the astronaut in the larger composition is incorrect. If the helmet is the focal point, he messed it up severely. Notice that the other compositions of the same theme do not mess it up.

This is also purely my note.

The typography is horrid.

What is with the same value for the album title and the name of the band? My typography prof would have my head for that choice alone. Then you have the fact that you can't see the title at all. Remember, large contrast with small text on large space is readable. This does not do that.

I didn't realize there was a title or the name of the band on it until someone pointed it out, and then when I looked at the typography I about lost it.

The font choice is strange. The color is wrong and the margin spacing makes me cry in the print bleed.

And the tracking? What are you doing? There is a huge space between the words for "Songs for" then "a" then "Nervous Planet."

What is that? That's not a good choice.

Did you get AI to do your crappy typography too? Typography also communicates and works with, not against the image.

Uhhhghhh I could spend so much type ranting against the typography, but there are other errors to get into.

lol This is purely me, though I didn't see the type at first until it was pointed out.

The details of the space suit are wrong.

An Astronaut suit doesn't look like that.

What are you doing?

Would be faster to use a NASA Suit and then Photoshop in the reflection. You'd have to get permission, but that's not difficult.

This is purely my note. ^^;; I drew an astronaut by hand in a pixel program, so I roughly knew the one used was wrong.

The sunflowers are wrong

You know why sunflowers are called sunflowers? Oh, because they are famous for pointing every which way the sun is not? What? What?! So they will point at the ground, they will point east and west in the same photo. You know, that's why they are called effing sunflowers. What? What do you mean that makes no sense?

The AI genned photo versus the genuine one he copied and plagiarized from, see the difference? Oh My! The sunflowers are lined up in the same direction, as if they are pointed towards the what? The sun! Maybe that's why they are called effing sunflowers.

See, a human out in the world can experience sunflowers and see them throughout the day to know they are going to what? Always point towards the sun.

This was pointed out by someone else on the posts. But damned brilliant. The words are mine.

The clouds are wrong

I learned this in geography class, but there are cloud types for different levels of the atmosphere. Cumulus clouds are more likely to hang lower. Do you see the problem yet?

Also the clouds look too similar and the same.

Compare the images of the AI genned and the one he plagiarized from.

See, there is actual ranking to the clouds which also gives it depth. (Plus the earth in the background is pretty cool since it ranks the background int a secondary background. Did you learn about perspective? No?)

This is purely me.

The green nurple?

AI made a mistake with the sunflowers trying to twist the nipples of the suit? What?

If the guy could paint, it's an easy fix, but he can't paint so he leaves that mess there?

This was pointed out by someone else. Finding the origin of this turned out to be difficult since it was copy-pasted by different people.

The color scheme isn't my favorite.

My personal thing, but the colors feel off to me as if the guy has never met a color wheel before. I would wholly be tempted to force primary triadic especially since he wants to make the type red, though the shades of blue and yellow feel "off" to me compared to the genuinely made ones. I want more depth to the color ranges.

To show what I mean, the basics of color are usually saturation, hue, and brightness.

Ideally you want three shades of the same color for what are called highlights, midtones, and darks.

See, this, feels rich in color even though it's only bichromatic.

This is a genuine cumulus cloud formation.

The reason for the feeling of DEPTH is simply because there is a midtone blue, a dark saturated blue and then a different, but similar lighter, less saturated blue on the opposite end, but not on the direct diagonal. AND it comes to a logical horizon.

Does the AI genned image understand that and how light reacts? No, it does not.

This makes the image feel lifeless and flat, without purpose to do so. It doesn't add to the words "Planet" or "Nervous"

When a golden mean diagram has better understanding of gradients than your AI genned horizon which totally does not understand how a horizon line works, that's when you know you've been scammed.

Look at the horizon line on the genuine sky? !@#$. Do you see the issue yet compared to the genned AI image. Yes, yes. I know you see it.

!@#$.

When you remove say the midtones, it's an artistic choice, but in doing so, you have to really make it carefully or you eff the whole piece. The choices we make as graphic designers are purposeful, thought out and composed and then pushed into the art piece. Why? We have some semblance of how people think because we are humans.

This is purely me. I really hate the color scheme here. It's off. This is purely graphic design training on my part.

Ethical Concerns

"Songs for a nervous planet"

Sounds environmental until you know that gen ai machines eat a TON of electricity, thus power, thus pollute the planet, and create more heat and also contribute to global warming. They also drain the power grid as well and don't use the amount of sustainable energy as they say they do.

I suppose Boomers no longer care about the planet?

Been floating around for a while. I didn't originally find it, but you can see MIT here.

Plagiarism

The concept isn't new. The art is all stolen, but not done correctly anyway. The basis of gen AI is stolen. (Credited already).

Why are we here anyway? Oh yeah, some tech bros who knew nothing about art decided to collectively steal everyone's work without their permission and then try to undercut the artists until the artist put up protections against them, and now the tech bros are crying, but we need to force you to give up your material without an opt out option so we can feed our AI machine to undercut you with degenerate and substandard creations that don't understand the fundamentals of what it is like to be a human being because their AI is a simulacrum of humanness rather than an experience or a collective experience of humanness.

Clearly I side with Althusser on this one.

Anyway, the law from what I know (not a lawyer) says that art is fair use if it only uses 10% or is public domain. the majority of NASA images are public domain, it wasn't that hard to find a picture of an astronaut, make sure it was fair domain. What is hard for this prompter--not artist is that they clearly, clearly do not know the basics of life and graphic design if they think the final image is "good".

The problem here is that AI is based 100% on stolen art and 0% on personal life experiences. And the last part is what it makes it art and I would argue copyrightable.

Conclusion

What graphic design artists and artists do, etc is give you that feeling of the more you stare at it, the more satisfied you feel about the emotions it's trying to give you because those little details start to stick out at you, such as the energy or precision of the brush strokes, even in digital art. Or the amount of time you have to know that person spent

on something minute such as the tick on where the clock hand should go, or how the 6 is just a tiny bit off compared to the perspective on this piece.

This painting rewards you the more you stare at it. The closer you are to it since I've seen it in real life and would keep spotting more and more every time. That little rock behind what looks like a dead tree or branch, the hollowness of the tree, the indefinite shoreline of water, the water itself alluding to memory and of the mind. The way the horizon isn't quite precise, but that's a purposeful suggestion to suck you in. Each precision speaks to you until an emotion washes over you and then the next little detail sticks out at you and keeps pulling you ever in.

Gen AI makes you recoil every time you look at the details. You're left with asking about intention and then you have none. AI does not care about the details. It has not breathed or lived a full life.

Art not only delivers a point of view to the viewer, but graphic design also delivers a type of psychology that cannot be replicated by someone whose never lived and breathed, needed to eat, go to the bathroom, never experienced a field of flowers brushing past your hands, never seen a beach, never laughed when they saw someone botch taking photography of a beach, never cried over loss or extreme happiness and never dreamed. These are points of view. This is what art allows us to tap into fundamentally and this is why AI ultimately is flat. There is no surface to delve into. The surface is flat. And the details make you hate the art, rather than make you think or feel, and who wants art like that?

!@#$ I tested AI once and it couldn't figure out how to get out of the subway station. What makes you think it can make one effectively?

For those artists out there, don't use AI. Who wants to eat chocolate chip cookies that are ooey gooey inside, hot from the oven only to find out that there are egg shells inside, lumps of salt, not well sifted sugar, lumps of baking soda, and find out that the chocolate chips are melting plastic. To me, that is in essence AI. Looks good until you try to consume it and then you try not to cry for the next 20 minutes, not from overwhelming emotion of something great or something that made you happy, but that you're not rewarded but rather disappointed by the reality of the situation. Where is the final kick of detail that connects you to your audience and the understanding of what it really means to be a human being with a perspective on life? And that's why AI can't do art.

[not-poignant]

Hi hi :D Hope you are having a good day!

I was rereading UtB and I got to chap 24 and there was this part:

"‘Jesus,’ Dr Gary said."

And at first I was like 'huuuhuuhu I wonder if Jesus is an omega, beta, or alspha in the Underline-verse'

But then I was like 'gaaaasp, what if he was a peak alpha!' And I started thinking about the influence of peak alphas on things like religion, as religious figures. I know they're very rare, but I also remember Augus saying that it should be illegal for Ash to be a lawyer as a peak alpha. So then I started thinking about how would peak alphas would impact religion. Or cults! Or royalty! Or politics! Or just the course of history in general! Maybe they would stay the fuck away from it, or maybe they would crave having that control? I spent a very enjoyable hour daydreaming about it, which felt a bit like splashing around in the paddling pool of someone elses worldbuilding, which was maybe a bit rude lol, sorry if it was. And maybe Gary saying 'jesus' was just a throwaway expletive, and you didn't even mean much by it, but I was wondering about your thoughts! <<33

Hi anon!

This is something I've thought of. It's hilarious to me to low-key imagine Jesus in this world as an omega, though I haven't invested too much thought into it because I don't really care much for religion in general.

But generally speaking I liked the conflict of omegas being treated as second-class citizens and how that gets justified against Jesus being an omega etc. And then I was like 'I don't care about this enough to keep thinking about it, it's just amusing to me.' And that's about where I'm at. Enough to be sacrilegious and not enough to have fleshed it out further because I'm very idc about that stuff.

So then I started thinking about how would peak alphas would impact religion. Or cults! Or royalty! Or politics! Or just the course of history in general! Maybe they would stay the fuck away from it, or maybe they would crave having that control?

Oh no they totally crave that control. A tiny percentage of the world's population is peak alphas but they're overwhelmingly likely to be found in positions of power.

Tbh this is... intentional. I was trying to think of how to account for the absolute fucking monsters that end up as all-powerful billionaires in the world. Utter twats like Elon Musk, who you just know are too pathological to have hold of that much money, and yet no one on the planet is holding him (or the Zuck etc.) accountable.

And to me it gave me some comfort in my omegaverse, to imagine these asshats as being peak alphas. People who attain their power not because the governments have no regulations to stop them (which they should), but because they just have too much ardolphogen influence / power for anyone to stop them from getting this powerful.

And just like it's a huge issue in our world, it's a huge issue in this world too. The millionaires but especially the billionaires in this world are likely to be peak alphas. Generally speaking it's frowned upon for them to become Presidents and Prime Ministers, but they are found in other levels of court and parliament, as royalty, etc. They're less likely to make cults and more likely to go into business where they can control a lot of people at once.

It is a huge, huge issue. And it was planned for as part of the dystopia in advance.

Peak alphas crave controlling communities, not individuals. With the exception of Augus, the peak alphas we meet all have significant control over large amounts of people, whether it's Crielle and Fenwy Laboratories, or Temsen and Gary and Hillview, etc.

They don't need intimate relationships or love, because they form a bond to a much larger group. Historically that would have worked for small micro-communities - one person drawn to controlling and looking after the community while alphas were drawn to omegas. But in a globalised society and runaway exploitation re: billionaires, it's just become completely dystopian and it's partly how you end up with a world that favours alphas so much in the first place.

[umflowers]

if you're able-bodied and ever think you have a grasp on how demoralizing and dehumanizing it is to be disabled, don't. i just played another round of phone tag trying to get a wheelchair bc i can't stand for more than 3 minutes on a really good day without having to sit bc my back is in agonizing pain. i won't end up getting coverage bc you have to be able to not navigate your home without it, plus the wheelchair is 32" wide and our doors are narrower than that, which is another thing they use to not have to spend money on you for the insurance you pay for. i may not even get coverage for a rollator, though that remains to be seen. oh, and i'll be applying for ssi soon. they want about 50 different documents showing every facet of your life including when you got married, if applicable, for god knows what reason. and despite everyone including my doctor telling me your spouse's income doesn't factor into to ssi (rather than ssdi), it apparently can and does if they have savings. and even if i do somehow end up getting it, i won't on the first try bc it's literally routine that they find any excuse they can to deny your first attempt, and then there's an entire cottage industry of "disability lawyers" who fight your case in court against the social security administration and if you win they take a giant chunk of your first (larger than the rest, to get you started) check. so the government essentially defrauds you out of a well-into-double-digits percentage of your first check by handing it to lawyers bc they always deny the first try. oh, and i'm doing all this while so fatigued i have a migraine settling in and physically can't hold my head upright.

[fishrpg]

2024-10-26: Area 26 (Golden Paradise Casino)

Located in the heart of the Indian Acre is the Golden Paradise Casino. It's not open 24 hours a day (closing at 3AM and opening just before lunch), but it is open 7 days a week, much to the chagrin of the Methodists who travel from Linkville solely to espouse the evils of vice for an afternoon before returning to their more godly hometown the following day. The Golden Paradise (AKA Pair-o-dice and no gold for those with recently-thinned wallets) is a single story building with high ceilings and a fancy chandelier. There's also a restricted loft area that goes around the whole casino where 1d4 guards patrol and look for cheating and threats to public safety.

With respect to games, the casino has several popular activities: faro, 5-card stud poker (though straights flushes as a hand haven't made it this far west yet), keno (basically bingo), craps, blackjack (though called Vingt-et-un here), roulette, and hazard (a zero-skill dice game where it's pretty easy for the house to cheat). Each dealer pays up-front to rent a table from the casino for the night, and then receives a percentage of the table's earnings. It's a strategy that is designed to naturally weed out the generous/unsuccessful dealers while motivating renters to choose games that are popular and profitable. Unfortunately, this arrangement does little to discourage crooked dealers from applying.

There are also two billiards tables that can be rented for games when people don't want to play against the house. In addition to the games, there is also a bar that sells sandwiches of questionable health value, cheap liquor that is adulterated but not advertised as such, and unadulterated middle shelf liquor that is sold at top shelf prices.

Harrison Lyons is the longest-serving dealer at the Golden Paradise, and although he isn't the casino's most profitable dealer, he's one of the most popular ones because he doesn't cheat. Harrison sticks mostly to running poker games because of the skill threshold, though he runs blackjack and faro periodically when demand for the game is high. Although he doesn't cheat in card games, he does often wear the colored glasses that are commonly used by crooked card dealers to read the hidden designs on the backs of marked "advantage decks." This is so he can tell if other folks are cheating and remove them from the table. For Harrison, the ultimate goal of a game is about the skill of play is to see the skill in action by itself, not artificially inflate its effects through cheating.

Anyone Harrison notices is using marked cards will be asked to "buy a nice drink and a sandwich" to repay some of the money the house would have lost to cheating. If they don't leave the table (or if they come back and keep cheating), Harrison calls the guards down to deal with the cheater by a particularly impressive fake sneeze.

There is also another popular fixture in the casino, but this one is on the other side of the table. Maude "Moneybags" Sanders is a young woman who traveled westward (though from where is unclear, as it seems to change each telling) after she discovered a knack for making money from gambling. She wears her hair in thick black ringlets, and dresses only the slightest bit provocatively (especially compared to the ladies of the evening in the Acre). Like Harrison, she is interested in games of skill and refuses to actively cheat, but she will do everything up to that line if it will give her an advantage.

Maude's primary game is blackjack because the games are quick and give relatively predictable payouts for her. Over her young life, she has developed an intuitive sense of the game, effectively relying on a large series of small bets to produce average returns. Maude gets her nickname from two things: the first is that she keeps the paper money she wins in her bra and successful evenings see her leave the casino with noticeably larger bust. The second is that if anyone attempts to engage in any hanky-panky with her, she will beat the assailant with her coin purse (a reinforced canvas bag that looks like a doctor's bag) that is more than capable of breaking bones even when only partially filled.

Additional Reading

"Gambling in the Old West" by R.K. DeArment