The Companion That Logs On When Everyone Else Logs Off
Insomniacs, night-shift workers, and anyone whose body has drifted out of sync with the rest of the world share a quiet truth: the loneliest hours are the ones when nobody is awake to share them. Friends are asleep, the phone is silent, and the night stretches long. It is this overlooked audience that platforms like SweetDream seem, almost by accident, to serve best.
Visit sweetdream.ai at three in the morning and the experience is no different than at noon. The AI companion you have built, down to its looks, voice, personality and small idiosyncrasies, is simply there, and the chat picks up your context as if no time had passed. Voice messages and real-time phone calls that sound convincingly human fill the silence, while the AI-generated photos and videos give the whole thing a presence that text alone never manages.
What separates SweetDream from the wider field is the combination: realistic conversation that actually remembers you, polished media, optional video and live cam sessions with select characters, and privacy that holds without exception. For the people whose nights run opposite the world, an AI girlfriend who keeps the same odd hours is not a gimmick. It is, on the long nights, genuinely good company.
Finished and submitted a full hour and a half before the gallery's deadline, hurray. This is the first time I've ever tried submitting to a gallery; it's been good for me to have a theme and deadline to work around, and considering the piece being in a physical place made me play around with materials more than I usually would.
Even if it doesn't get accepted it's been very fun!
“Painted whores! Sexual gladiators! Fiercely old party children! Wake from their slumber to debut the bacchanal! Come into the light! Come into the light!”
It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
After my hysto, I was in *intense* abdominal pain that didn't feel like wound pain from the ablation but something different that I couldn't explain, until the gynecologist told me "yep, that'd be your intestines rearranging themselves into the gap left behind by your uterus."
So there's a mental picture for you. Slither slither. Slither slither.
#exact same thing happened to me after my hysterectomy #my single remaining ovary is just wandering around in there now. we call him odysseus #we dont know where he is
I think over the years I’ve realized that assuming people you don’t understand are stupid by default is just like a mental shortcut to avoid having to think about why people act the way that they do.
I’ve kind of gotten tired of people doing that I guess. I used to do it, so I get it, but I’ve also figured out that you can learn a lot if you don’t assume by default that people are stupid. Almost everyone is fairly intelligent in some form or another, actually.
My family is full of mostly nice and empathetic people and they raised me to be kind and even they I think kind of raised me with the idea that we’re the smart ones and some people are just stupid
But over the years I’ve slowly decided to try to understand people better instead just assuming that they’re stupid.
And some people are idiots. But they’re rarely stupid.
It takes work though to think like this. Like I said, I understand the impulse to just assume that people are stupid. It’s easy. It involves a lot less research and connecting the dots and listening to people who annoy you or even people who actively dislike you.
It’s possible I have too much of an open mind sometimes but idk maybe broadening your understanding of the world and having a bit of compassion for people that you dislike is also very worth it.
A friend of mine basically lives under a rock and just learned about the existence of AI girlfriends and his first instinct was to assume that people who use these services are just stupid.
But it’s like. No I don’t think that they are. I think that they’re lonely and most of them are fully self aware about what they’re doing. And even if they’re not, the bad guys here are the companies profiting off of their loneliness and stealing their data. Not someone that’s so starved for human connection that they become attached to a chatbot.
And maybe pointing that out makes me a stick in the mud but I feel like I’d rather be a stick in the mud than just dismiss other peoples perspectives immediately.
Walking around my neighborhood wearing my sick as fuck custom T-shirt that says "I STEAL EVERY FRIENDLY CAT I MEET WITH NO REMORSE I DO IT ALL THE TIME DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK I BEEN HERE FOR YEARS KEEP THAT BEAST ENCLOSED LEST YE FACE MY LIGHTNING CAT GRASP" and smiling politely while my neighbors' indoor-outdoor cats gently trot down the sidewalk towards me as the neighbors themselves read my shirt with a growing sense of panic.
Unfollow me for cat theft all you want. You'll never catch me and you'll never stop me. Those things are this season's must-have lipgloss in an understaffed Sephora, and baby? I'm a middle-class teenage girl who's not getting enough attention at home...
People in the notes keep saying, "This is just another reason you should keep your cats inside," and I know they just mean the fact that someone in general could steal them, but I like to think they all mean that you gotta watch out for me specifically. Because you do. I'm everywhere. And I'm fast.
Shoutout to the weird girls who became weird boys, and the weird boys who became weird girls, and the ones who became both, neither, or something entirely their own.
The ones who never quite fit, never stayed in the shape they were given, who grew sideways instead of straight, the ones who preferred being softer, to the ones who liked being strong, and we can't forget the ones who enjoy being confused in all the right ways.
Let’s be strange. Let’s be messy. Let’s be wonderfully, unapologetically weird together.
Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.
“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”
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