Forward, Relentlessly

Maï | She/her/hers | 30 Previously windblumesode. Multi-fandom blog, currently obsessed with Genshin Impact and FFXIV. Reblog-heavy. pfp by felaulait

[charl0ttan]

huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while

[charl0ttan]

something earth shattering going on here

[emily84]

this is why one of my favorite all-time paintings is Ship in Stormy Seas by Ivan Aivazovsky... he was really onto something there

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

[is-there-a-boat]

THERE IS A BOAT BY IVAN AIVAZOVSKY!!

[clayandsorcery]

Ivan Aivazovsky could paint glowing water. One of the GOATs for sure.

[bees-of-passage]

@mllekurtz

[evercelle]

SLAY THE DEMON KING, an ORV visual novel, now has a demo available on itch!

STDK is a free joongdok fangame inspired by Slay the Princess by Black Tabby Games.

You can play the first THREE LOOPS right now!

DEMO LINK: available on Itch.io

FEEDBACK: got any comments after playing? Feel free to let us know!

[famouspainterwombat]

[edoro]

In the fan favorite expansion of critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, Shadowbringers, at one point you go to the DMV. Not a regular DMV either. It's a ghost DMV. It's the bittersweet memory of a long dead civilization's DMV crafted from the mind of the only surviving member of that civilization, who is apparently the kind of guy who takes great comfort in meticulously recreating the fucking DMV. And you have to wait in line, despite the fact that you and your companions are the only living beings there and everyone else is a ghost. At the ghost DMV. Because that's what you do at the DMV, obviously.

And the guy's dead wife is there. At the ghost DMV. The dead wife is a ghost and he's the ONLY ghost who knows he's a ghost. In the ghost DMV. You make friends with the guy's dead wife (while waiting in line) (at the ghost DMV) and he tells you that the lunatic immortal wizard who's making you defeat his seven evil bureaucratic processes while you die of magic cancer before you can even fight him directly is really just a silly sentimental fella.

Then in the next expansion you get to live through the dead wife flashbacks yourself. You get to meet the dead wife when he's alive in the past, outside of the DMV. And it turns out he works at the real DMV, in the past. And he has pink hair. And he and the past-self version of the insane immortal wizard (who sent you to the ghost DMV) pull off a sick prank to help you close the timeloop.

Later, you run into the dead wife's real ghost on the moon, which is actually a spaceship full of immortal bunnies.

[plothooksinc]

#and one of the best moments is when the insane immortal wizard in the past#says 'pshaw i will for sure not become an insane immortal wizard. i would never do that'#and then due to Fuckery ends up forgetting all about that until he dies#and then presumably has a beautiful moment of 'oh fuck i DID become an insane immortal wizard'#ffxiv is truly the game that keeps on giving via @kratosaurioned

[unseenphil]

My favorite is when you later meet the past self of a -different- insane immortal wizard and tell him about his future and he's just like "Yeah, that sounds like sort of shit I'd do, actually,"

[mynorthernattitude]

they should make a sleep that feels like you’ve slept

[esmiara]

[greelin]

what i miss most about being a chocolatier (besides the honor of gayest job title imaginable) is we had these massive bars of chocolate for tempering that were 10lbs and we had to break them into smaller chunks. by using a sledgehammer of course. i LIVED for that shit

[greelin]

all the other people in production HATED busting them especially at the end of the shift but i fucking loved it. give me the hammer. i can be trusted with the hammer. And everyone did in fact trust me with the hammer because again they all thought it was tedious and painful. me? i was having the time of my life. even if i had to pick up the slack for other people i would be annoyed for all of five seconds before the euphoria of getting to smash things set in. and the production areas had windows too so customers often just got to watch me beat the shit out of a massive chocolate bar. with a hammer. like a zoo animal. i was getting paid to do that. every day i miss it.

[reglisse-art]

フミ

[josephinecarttanneur]

Happy 10th birthday Yuri on ice

[reglisse-art]

[xcerizex]

[singing-swan]

Third anniversary Fumi lives in my brain rent-free

[singing-swan]

Budding Friendship (Budding Feelings)

[ros-sauce]

[itsclydebitches]

Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

I think this is an incredibly important post for a lot of reasons. You have to write a bad book in order to learn how to do something. You have to suck at playing an instrument before you can improve.

Struggling is part of the process, and I've had a lot of people argue with me that it shouldn't be who fail to see the point. When you replace an composer with an AI music generator, an artist with an AI-generated image, or an author with an AI-generated fanfic, you are missing out on the critical, fundamental experiences humans need to learn and grow. You are robbing yourself of essential skills you need as a person.

AI is not like a calculator, or a synthesizer, or a prompt generator. It's not a tool to aid in your process of understanding or creating something. It is replacing your ability to learn things, and that is going to do so much damage if you let it.

[bourbonciel]

wolgraha for the valentine's day

[casualanimaniac]

I listened to the songs again and well…

…well now you get to see me forget which side of their faces are covered with bangs! For BOTH of them!! It’s gonna keep changing every sketch I swear…