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Posts authored by 3/2

Chaos Is Honestly A Cooler Name For Spring

Chaos Is Honestly A Cooler Name For Spring published on No Comments on Chaos Is Honestly A Cooler Name For Spring

It seems like the weather is finally trending warmer, but still likes to randomly throw us a freeze advisory curveball and otherwise wobble up and down by 30 degrees over the course of the day and make my sinus cavities writhe in pain. Thank you, industrialists who bravely accelerate the climate crisis in the name of pleasing stockholders.

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my ACL tear! I choose to celebrate it because I’ve ended up in the ER one way or another each spring for the past 3 years and I’ve vowed to watch my back until Summer officially begins this time. Observing the date involved shitposting, as do most standard dates.

The actual point of this post is that I’m getting really sick of hearing about AI features being rolled out and promoted on art platforms despite being massively unpopular with actual artists. I already wasn’t wild about it being pretty constant background radiation in art spaces lately, and I kind of snapped when TGL fan page runner Arseniy randomly commented on one of my sketches, that I could make something “actually cool” if I fed my sketches into an AI generator as if I was incapable of finishing a piece or making something appealing on my own. Between the phrasing and the fact that my TGL fan art is like the only thing I make that is regularly stolen and reposted it really rubbed me the wrong way, even if he didn’t mean anything by it. Plenty of people see AI as a tool, or a way to optimize work flow, but the stuff just inherently doesn’t work without ingesting mass sample data and it’s been shown time and time again that the people developing the shit don’t bother asking permission and are including ways to specifically copy the styles of specific artists. It would bug the heck out of me if I had a tool that would take care of inking for me but needed to trawl someone’s portfolio for just the perfect hair stroke.

It really fucking sucks that it’s difficult to build reach online without making use of social media. I understand wholeheartedly that most people don’t go out of their way to look at things, hell, most of the time I don’t bother loading up my deviantart (which ALSO rolled out AI generation tools, which is one of the dickest moves since ‘move forward and back a lot’) and only visit pixiv when Discord friends post porn from it. Discord *itself* is now force feeding people its new Clyde AI which will be peeping in on your conversations and presumably funneling it to fuel something else that sucks.

So, I’m really, seriously going to make an effort to use my site more. I don’t intend to run ads or anything. I may even revert to a static HTML template again out of spite since nobody is commenting anyway and it’s easier to make things look how I want than trying to sweet talk WordPress into doing things like “show archives of this category in a nice way” or “incorporate a webcomic navigation bar in a way that doesn’t require an unsupported plugin.” Hell that kind of goes back to the initial point, because I think most people are either using Webtoon or some other hosting site instead of their own.

In all honesty, I have thought of just letting my domain and hosting account lapse due to inactivity, but I like having MY space that I can control how I like. Last year, I made a grand total of like $50 on artwork due to Paypal shenanigans and one of my friends being busy on the road and not paying up as yet. I thought there was more, but when I pulled up my receipts from last year most of the incoming funds were when I was injured so I could order delivery. So, I run my stuff at a loss because I like creating, and I like helping my friends more than opening requests to everyone just because I like helping my friends. That’s why I’m weird about commissions. This also reminded me my friends rock. Thanks a bunch, guys!

I hope that you check back often, I’m still working on some game ideas and will probably keep the minutiae here or in my Discord’s skunk works channel so the ideas don’t just rot in my head forever.

Anyway, here’s some sketches I did since last posting; I actually invested in a Good PC finally but I’m adjusting everything how I like it.

Updates on This and That

Updates on This and That published on No Comments on Updates on This and That

You may have noticed progress has been uber slow on my game(s) and my art grind progress has been a bit erratic, and both are kind of related. I had this kind of “eureka!” moment last week to change focus from a tabletop lite strategy game a la Heroscape to a card dueling game then when I sat to print out and test things I realized, “oh shit- I have no idea where to begin making this actually function.”

See, my goal with CH and Irrgarten before it was to keep things quick and easy to set up and play without making it so simple as to be boring or the same every match. So, the concept of the duel system was going to be danmaku, basically. Shmup stuff broken down in such a way it could be played with cards but still have the “vibe” of carefully taking shots while avoiding massed fire. The idea was each player gets a Battleship style board, but can move around between turns while trading fire via pattern cards. So, main issues:

  1. would require a large number of markers/tokens
  2. on a 5×5 grid, there’s a *lot* of possible bullet patterns

So, it was kind of starting to lose the vision I had in mind and all the compromises I could think of either were too board gamey or inadvertently ripping off something else (which I confirmed by going through my copies of Bullet?? and Pocket Paragons.) So, all that paired with the odds of anyone wanting to help test it have me a little crestfallen. I’m not quite ready to give up or anything, but I think I’m better off focusing on art for a while and/or learning how to make a digital version of the game for easier access and distribution.

Finally shaking off the funk so I hope to have more real content soon. Until then… take it easy folks.

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