Frog @fastplasticfrog - Tumblr Blog

just a happy shadai-kai enjoying the sun

#dnd character #dnd #oc art #oc #artists on tumblr #art #illustration #may I never have to render grass ever again

just your average sketches of a shadar-kai chilling in the sun

#oc #oc art #dnd character #artists on tumblr #blanche

God it really PAINS ME to unfollow talented creators on simblr, but if you're using AI – even if you say it's "just for fun" –, you're simply repeatedly telling me, an artist, that you don't care about me. Because at this point everyone knows what AI is, it IS stealing. You're on tumblr, you've seen artists complain about being stolen by jealous tech bros who didn't care to watch one single youtube video to learn how to draw so they made an entire genre of nightmare technology to imitate us. You are on tumblr, you've seen what has been going on with OpenAI and Automattic for the past couple of hours. You've seen your mutuals screaming "OPT OUT" and teaching you how to turn this thing off your profile. Yet, you still play around with this uncanny valley made real. So yes i will unfollow and sometimes even block people who are using AI, and i encourage you to do the same.

whitepeopletwitter

birble-bobble

Yeah so the Big Think is literally owned by big oil. They’re making shit up so people feel too exhausted to fight for any change. Ignore this kind of environmental nihilism, all it does it help the rich avoid change.

midnight-spectrum-again

The fuck

astridfromthenorth-deactivated2

24ozsteak

thinking about that WoW epidemic

24ozsteak

swampgallows

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

wheel-skellington

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

the-jellyfish-galaxy

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

fitzreiley

The ‘higher level’ thing hits me like a ton of bricks. Wow….just fucking wow.

sundaysstrawberrykombucha

I hate this, I don’t want to reblog this, because this is a very bleak look on the whole situation. I don’t like how accurate it is, I don’t like anything about this… But I feel the need to reblog it anyway. So… Let’s maybe inject some hope, though…

So… Life isn’t a video game. Well, in a lot of senses it is, but let’s not think about that. We can’t just “revert the servers.” This, I think, is where we’ll find hope. The corrupted blood incident lasted a few weeks. September 13 to October 8 before Blizzard went “okay, we’re doing a reset.”

Think about that, will ya? Not even a month, and Blizzard, to save face and save their game, fixed it by doing a hard reset. Though we don’t have that luxury, we also didn’t get full data. What would have happened if it lasted, say… Three months? Six? A year? Would something have been figured out? While some good data was given, there wasn’t any for a long-term epidemic.

So here we are, going on 8 months now, and we’re still working to beat our plague, we may not have the ability to reset the server back a year, but god damn are we stubborn sons-of-bitches. And the longer it goes on, the closer we get to some solution. At least, that’s what I have to hope on.