The grouchy leaf-pile druid.

Do weird shit, practice good media literacy, fight the fash and eat leaves. Bi autistic performance bloke from the North. Watch here for more crap.

[gallowglassvt]

Remember how, in the first LittleBigPlanet, the antagonist stole creations from other creators out of jealousy only to have them all tell him he can create things on his own, without the need for stealing?

I'm kinda hoping we hear similar stories about AI bros at some point in the future. Like, they realised the error of their ways and started making real art instead of copyware theft.

[gallowglassvt]

"Built different," but in a heavily interpretive art fashion. Basically, fun to look at, but not very practical for the everyday grind.

[gallowglassvt]

Remember Deadliest Warrior? The show based around the pub conversation of "who would win between a knight and a samurai?" The one where they tested out weapons, but a lot of the "experts" were just actors, and they would get really obnoxious about the whole "rivalry" between the two? Remember when they made the fucking Provisional IRA fight the fucking Taliban?

Yeah, gimme that, but instead of a contest, it's reanactors and martial artists from different cultures comparing their martial traditions. Like, I care less about who would win in a fight than I do about how the two fighters would compare each other’s techniques, outlooks, cultures, weapons, etc from a practical/respectful POV.

[gallowglassvt]

I found out recently that birdwatchers sometimes refer to a bird's vibe as its "gizz" which is pronounced with a soft g or j...

I imagine it gets awkward when they say they like the gizz of tits.

[anarchycatss]

[guardiansofnosgoth]

On Fans, Lore, and Generative AI

A significant amount of new item descriptions were written for Defiance Remastered, in addition to an in-game encyclopedia covering everything from the War of the Ancients to the corruption of the Pillars and beyond. Raina and Aevum (see note in comments) utilized decades of research -- chronicled on the long standing Legacy of Kain fansites, which they also maintain -- and behind the scenes content, including new concept art and lost levels inaccessible until now, to bring this game to life on a level fans never expected.

Reading the encyclopedia for the first time brought me to tears. Here is a rich trove of lore, a labor of love, beautifully written and meticulously fact checked. Think of all the extra time, effort, and budget that was dedicated to making this perfect. Even the item descriptions, written from the point of view of Raziel and Kain respectively, perfectly capture the cadence and personality of these legendary characters. If only Raina could have secured Simon Templeman and Michael Bell to voice them!

Ascendance, the dubiously canonical sixth entry in Kain's legacy, independently developed by BitBot via their studio FreakZone Games, also contains an extra helping of lore adjacent side-content in the form of collectables called codices.

BitBot styles themselves a company by fans, for fans. They may have a track record of fumbling minor details, such as coloring Lt Raziel's cloak brown instead of red in every single panel of TDSR, but surely their undeniable passion for Legacy of Kain will shine just as brightly as Raina's team! Surely BitBot put some effort into Ascendance... right?

Let's talk about chatgpt.

I was reluctant at first to believe BitBot used generative ai in Ascendance. While replacing artists with "automated plagiarism machines" is worthy of condemnation, we must take care not to conduct witch hunts. Human error and sheer inexperience may occasionally produce results that resemble chatgpt. It was trained on human works, after all.

Furthermore, I'd found no evidence of generative images or text in BitBot's The Dead Shall Rise. That comic had a different set of problems.

I like to think I have a good eye for identifying generated images and text. I've spent my entire life writing and drawing. When generative content cast its ugly shadow across the already bot dominated web, I trained myself to identify the tell tale signs of robotic thievery.

Using a so-called "ai detector" is ill-advised. These are also LLMs and prone to error. Your own brain is superior. When it comes to judging writing, there are three major tells that signal you might be dealing with an inorganic:

It's not A, it's B

Excessive use of -- or ;

Lists of three (A, B, and C)

Recall that LLMs are trained on human writing. I've used all of these writing quirks in this very tumblr post to illustrate how diagnosing generative output requires more than identifying a list of symptoms. Additionally, the reader should perform a comprehensive vibe check. Does the text read like something a human being would write? How does sentence length and structure vary? Is the author communicating with the audience or merely talking at them? Are human errors present? Ect.

Armed with this knowledge, let's take a look at a selection of codices from Ascendance.

Not off to a great start, but there's reason for doubt! It's bad form to judge an entire body of work on a single paragraph.

There are human errors in sentence 4. The word "and" is over-used. It would be more correct to write "We have inscribed the lives of twice-dead kings, the annals of bloodless wars and ashless conflagrations." Does this sentence make sense? Yes! The author is simply illustrating that their Order has borne witness to impossible occurrences, events that seem inherently contradictory -- paradoxes! This sounds interesting.

While this codex has fewer tells, I find the last two sentences concerning. Chatgpt is known to take on a "corporate" tone. Her unrest is not merely passive sorrow. It is continuing action, reads like a hilariously out of touch post from r/linkedinlunatics. This one fails the vibe check.

No human fan would make the mistake of claiming that the Guardian of States oversees life, death, and all that lies between; this is Mortanius's domain, not that of Anarcrothe.

Since BO1 States has been associated with changing forms (represented by a werewolf where the Pillar's sigil would appear in later games) and states of matter relating to the physical world. Per Silicon Knights: "Anarcrothe the Alchemist is a tinkerer. He fools around with chemicals, alien substances and strange machinery. He concocts, explores, experiments, and dabbles with forces he only partially understands."

Although such brevity is uncharacteristic of chatgpt, we are standing on shaky ground. This codex may have been cut short as the output devolved into utter absurdity.

Now this is long-winded! Sentence length varies from 20 to 30 words. Absorbing a relentless string of winding sentences can strain your eyes and brain, so if you tried to read it you might be feeling a little exhausted.

Draw your attention to the first sentence. Vampires are not born, they are sired. If the intent of this passage is to inform an uninformed reader about the nature of vampires, it has already failed. Merriam-Webster defines "sired" as "beget, especially of domestic animals" or "originate, to bring into being." The former is more common, as "sire" refers to one's biological male parent.

We, the audience, know what "sire" and "siring" mean in regard to vampires because the term has been popularized in vampire media. Diegetically however, the character reading this might conclude that it means to say, Vampires are not born, they are fathered -- which is nonsense.

The authors of the codices are established in universe as the Eyes of Nosgoth. They are presented as a scholarly order of mystics. They presumably wrote the codices with the intent to record and inform, therefore precise language is necessary. Vampires are not born, they are artificially created by other vampires. The elder vampire is called the sire.

This seems pedantic, I know, but a professional writer would take note of these details. A professional writer would not write several protracted, bland sentences in a row to bore their audience.

This is the passage that broke me. Unlike the other codices, I immediately recognized this one as generative with no doubt in my mind.

You see, "it's not A, it's B" is more than mere sentence structure now: it's become a pattern of thought. No, but yes. No, but yes. Repeated. Look how the first sentence sets up an expectation and the next sentence denies that expectation. This goes on. Beat by beat, repeated. Even when it's not saying "B, not A" it still finds a way to say "B, not A." Like an electronic drum, the text is monotonous.

Generative ai is a poison that feeds on laziness and greed. If a writer used it once, you can be sure they've used it multiple times. Still, I hope you learned something new from suffering through my exhaustive case studies.

Does this mean that all of Ascendance was ai generated? I don't believe so, though I am feeling more skeptical. The pixel art ranges from charming to visually striking and the dialogue flows naturally, at least some of the time. When the writing is cheesy it feels cheesy in a human way, as if the writer is trying too hard. LLMs never put in effort. They are incapable.

Now, do I find it extremely telling that BitBot used generative ai specifically to add lore to their collectibles? Well...

It's said that artists in favor of generative ai only use it for the parts of art they find tedious. Don't like shading? Let the ai do it. Don't like editing? Let the ai do it. Don't like writing lore? Let the ai do it.

Legacy of Kain's lore is one of its most vital aspects. Lore has sustained passionate debate and conversation and inspired fan artists and writers for over 20 years while the series languished at the edge of a cliff. The Defiance Remaster is oozing with love and curiosity for the world of Nosgoth, crafted by a small comradery of fans who literally dedicated their lives to preserving Legacy of Kain, first on the web and now in the form of an official remaster. On the other hand, BitBot has presented us with consistently rushed and lazy work that both misunderstands and disrespects what made the series special in the first place.

It's clear who deserves to captain this ship and who should be mopping the deck.

[gallowglassvt]

Does anyone else deliberately use apostrophes at the end of certain words when you wanna let your accent shine through in a message or is it just me?

Like, on occasion, I'll just be like "Evenin'. How are ye doin'?" and I swear, people think I've been possessed by the ghost of an Industrial Revolution era bootsblack.

[gallowglassvt]

At this point, every time YouTube does an update that makes having an ad blocker non-viable, whether that be refusing to load vids or skipping every other vid in a playlist, I'll admit I get annoyed, but I'll be damned if I'm letting another AI GF ad or army recruitment propaganda penetrate my bubble.

You wanna test my limits, YT? Go ahead. Make my day.

[gallowglassvt]

Writing prompt.

There's a bloodline belonging to an ancient hero who once saved the world. When the world needs them again, a search begins. However, because the hero in question lived so long ago, a sizeable portion of the population can be counted as part of the bloodline, meaning that just about ANYONE can be a hero.

[writing-prompt-s]

You were a god of textiles; respected, but generally considered a minor deity. But everything changed when mortals started regularly describing spacetime and reality as a 'fabric'.

[gallowglassvt]

The Norns upon realising that their quilt business is now tied to the fate of mortals and gods alike: Uh, girls... we might have to up production.

[gallowglassvt]

One thing I wish would make a comeback is games about what I'm calling Weird Little Guys (WLGs for short). Think Oddworld, or at least the Abe and Munch game(s), think Voodoo Vince, think of all the off-kilter mascot based games that seemed to pop up in the bargain bins of your second hand gamestores back in the day. Nostalgic? Perhaps, but unlike a lot of nostalgia, it feels like we could have easily struck gold there, but didn't because the industry became what it is now. Even so, I genuinely think that WLG games hold a lot of promise even now for developers to let loose their creativity.

[gallowglassvt]

You know the generally agreed upon precedent that dragons have six limbs while wyvern have four? Well, here's the thing...

On top of the fact that the term 'dragon' is a pretty nebulous one that gets chucked at everything vaguely reptilian across numerous mythologies, even in medieval Europe, the modern definition didn't fit. You find dragons with six limbs, but also eight limbs or no limbs at all. In fact, dragons and giant snakes are often cognate in Germanic cultures (English wyrm and Norse ormr, for instance). The only real difference in European mythology between dragons and wyverns is that wyverns were very rarely, if ever, were depicted breathing fire.

With that in mind, where does that leave us modern-day dragon connoisseurs? Well, the short answer is that they're both fantastical creatures, and you can do whatever you want unless you're going down the spec evo route. In the latter case, you're limited by real-world biology. However, since I have your attention, here's how I do it in both my fantasy setting and my spec evo concept.

In the spec evo idea, wyverns and dragons evolve from separate reptile lineages with wyverns being related to archosaurs like crocodilians, while dragons are related to squamates. Both independently develop the same means to attain powered flight, but while wyvern wings are one set of their four limbs as with birds, bats, and pterosaurs, dragon wings are in fact derived pseudolimbs that were derived from sails meant to help regulate body heat.

As for the fantasy setting, they're both part of the same family, but from different branches. Also, while both can breathe fire, wyverns can only manage it in short bursts like fireballs.

Anyway, feel free to say how you approach the matter!

[gallowglassvt]

So, masking is something a good chunk of the ND community does, and in a broader sense, NT folk seem to do it on instinct, but what happens when the mask subsumes the face? When an NT is so committed to the performance that all that remains is the mask?

We've all met these people at least once. In fact, you could argue they make up a sizeable portion of humanity. They're the definition of the word conformity, they're often the worst kind of bullies and will be the first to sit in judgement of anyone who steps outside the norm.

I call them obligate neurotypicals or O-NTs.

[gallowglassvt]

Concept: a group of naturalists are summoned to a fantasy world and spend their time researching, categorising, helping, conserving etc the local flora and fauna.

You gonna look me square in the eye and tell me you don't want a Steve Irwin type character jumping on a fire drake shouting "CRIKEY, LOOK AT THIS BEAUTY!"?

[fadel-dani]

Israel is gradually and rapidly advancing the yellow line from all sides of the Gaza Strip towards the center, reducing the area of ​​the Gaza Strip to less than half its current size, and Israeli government officials are planning to build a settlements in the northern Gaza Strip.

[gallowglassvt]

I'm probably not gonna blow anyone's minds with this, but...

You know how every apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic usually ends up pulling a "humanity are the real monsters?" Well, here's the thing. From what we've seen in cases where ordinary people have been forced to survive outside of urban society, they tend not to degenerate a la Lord of the Flies. In fact, it's usually the opposite, as was the case for a real life case of it: a group of school boys who were marooned on an island in Tonga, but decided early on not to fight or waste resources. If anything, it seems that, on the whole, these situations bring out the best in ordinary people.

The key word here, though, is ORDINARY. As with monsters in the modern world, they tend not to be ordinary individuals, but rather psychopaths and narcissists. In which case, in such extreme situations, it would make sense that they would seek power in an attempt to preserve the systems that pervert the natural human tendency towards cooperation and empathy.

Anyway, I just saw a video essay on The Bone Temple, and this popped into my head.

[gallowglassvt]

Per my last post about a magical girl show where the girls in question are just done with it all. Here are some more deconstructed anime ideas:

An isekai hero who's been there a while and is done with it all.

An isekai hero who leads a slave revolt rather than just going "When in Rome..."

A harem protagonist who's aware of their situation and actively works against it.

A stereotypical tsundere getting dealt with as they would likely be dealt with IRL (IE, unless their romantic target is a masochist, they're probably gonna get sick of their shit pretty quickly).