I feel bad because I briefly suspected the comic of having AI faces, despite the rest of the art (especially in the background) being very well drawn and intentional. I checked the website https://goodbearcomics.com/ and ended up reading through a lot of the archive, there are some really good ones in there!
I mean, clicking through to his website shows the branding alternate between Wanderfugl(?) and WanderFull so either it's a sloppy branding mismatch through evolving iterations or ... slop.
Honestly that's a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.
It kills me because I feel like culturally we've really adjusted to this idea of individually patronizing the arts ... if only our whole economy weren't centered around squeezing out every last drop of disposable income from us.
Honestly, the way I learned Linux best after a numerous failed tries over the years was switching to Arch. It gets a lot of crap from the online community, especially regarding its users, but I think it's an excellent distro especially for people at a moderate to advanced level.
First off, the archinstall script makes the actual installation process - notoriously one of the hardest parts of using the distro - much easier. It comes with a barebones set of components installed to get you up and running.
From there, you just start to think of the things you want to do with your system and begin building it out piece by piece. Consult the Arch wiki for a number of application options and then pick one. Usually there's some additional configuration involved, not much, just a config file that needs tweaking or something, but this helps you learn things slowly. It also guarantees that if that particular thing breaks in the future, you have a better idea of what might have gone wrong and where to start looking because you previously set it up (somewhat) manually yourself.
Occasionally you'll stumble across something on your system that's not working the way you thought it would and it's because you needed to manually install some additional component or dependency yourself. So again you consult the wiki and just do that. It's about slowly building the knowledge.
When you're finished you have a highly customized system with only the components you wanted and a better knowledge of it all.
Oh yeah, sorry, was on my phone earlier so didn't really do a write up, but I suppose that wasn't as self evident as I thought.
It's a fan port to the SNES with some polishing on the performance and translations with a few quality of life improvements that leave the vast majority of the game design and gameplay feel intact, it just smooths over some of the rougher edges that can prevent newcomers from really getting into the original NA NES entry.
It's unfortunately a lot more limited than you may expect, it's designed around very limited ideas, but that said it's still incredibly flexible and seeing how people have designed complex games around those limitations is half the fun.
MegaZeux is a fan extension of it (skipping over SuperZZT) that expands it further and breaks a lot of those limitations, but still has certain odd assumptions about gameplay very much from its era.
It's the first game released by the developer on the engine which is intended to show off a bunch of the ideas they had. It has a surprise ending that leads into a very bizarre Zeux 3 (which I haven't beat yet). Zeux 1 was on ZZT but I think was remade for the engine at some point.
Spend an afternoon poking around the site and just trying a few games in your browser, see what it's about! Then check out the help files and look at the scripting. The biggest downside for me is that if/then statements can ONLY EVER lead to jumps. You can't process simple logic without jumping to a label to do so ...
Lesser known, but I cannot recommend enough going back and exploring the worlds of ZZT (and by extension, MegaZeux) as an early, amateur game engine. The projects are raw but endearing and an absolutely wonderful time capsule that still has a niche but dedicated following.
Some day when I have the time, I'd like to make an extended engine similar to this. Something with a simple scripting language, extreme flexibility in character and color sets. Ability to run and host your own game worlds over SSH or something similar. Just like a real spit in the face for triple A and going the complete opposite direction of minimal but super accessible.
Beyond just Tim Sweeney sounding dumb, there's something truly evil and malicious about this framing.
His response was to a tweet that said: Steam and all digital marketplaces need to drop the "Made with AI" label. It doesn't matter anymore. (Emphasis mine)
All well and good for that guy maybe, but why do they need to drop it and why does Tim Sweeney agree? Why is less information for the people that want to have it a necessity. And WHY does he feel compelled to comment on the behavior of his competitors in this way.
Fucking ghouls, the whole lot of them. I hope their AI creations destroy them and they suffer even a single moment of hubris.
I still end up using the Youtube app on my phone sometimes and I'm absolutely floored at the audacity of even making the first video an ad. Total, absolute, utter bullshit.
No. The rebellious spirit is what lights the fire. It may take a few tries to follow through, but I respect the rage >=D
We need to come together as a community and encourage every effort. If you really want to see other people stick to it we need to smash any sense of righteousness or gatekeeping to bits.
This is kind of irrelevant to the argument, but if I were to provide you with a mix of AI and organically produced music, would you be able to pick them out every time?
I'd like to think much more often than not, yes. People talk about it being able to replicate low level pop and ... fine. But that's not really the kind of stuff I listen to. Maybe there's a statement to be made there about how far down pop has fallen that it can be mistaken with formulaic AI slop ...
It’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s “Brillo box” art installation. Is it just a Brillo box he got at the store? Or did he make it himself, thereby creating “art”? Could you know the difference? Would you?
Which I guess is what your point here is. What is art and who is the arbiter of that?
Kind of different circumstances as I see it, though. Andy Warhol still performed the art of the Brillo box. He took something basic and skillfully crafted it into art to prod the artistic community into considering what we think of as art and why. It was in no way a trick but a very deliberate and intentional statement, or question even.
AI on the other hand often feels like a trick. There is little to no intention, no human craft, and an effort to pass it off as a higher form of art than it really is. It's not asking questions or making statements but an effort to deliver "content" to fill some need. The need for more content.
I was looking for videogame remixes one day and found a channel doing Little Nemo from the NES. I used to love that game and thought it was an odd pick for remixes, one you don't see too often so I clicked on it and ... it was incredibly underwhelming. I listened for a few minutes and something was kind of off but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It was AI of course.
I'm not much of a music person, I've been listening to it daily for my entire life but I don't know much about theory. Still, when it comes to remixes, you can usually tell why someone remixed a song. They like that particular song, or there's a motif that really struck them. They'll pick out certain sounds or elements and build on them, single them out and rearrange them. It's very intentional and you can tell.
AI-generated remixes lack this intentionality. It was like someone had twisted a dial that just said "complexity" and that was it. There were more intricate layers of beats and instrumentation on top, but it wasn't doing anything. I sat there and listened for 15 minutes and it was like I heard nothing. Nothing new stuck in my head, there was no riff or little melody that made go, "Aw fuck yeah! This is what it's about!"
That's how you can tell AI generated music.
Sadly, a lot of slower and minimalist genres have been decimated by it though. Vaporwave, chillcore, dungeonsynth. A lot of these had large bodies of work to train on and it's a lot harder to tell due to their subtler nature, but you'll usually notice the artist has a new hour-long upload every day. If you click through it at random, you'll begin to notice that while the tones shift, the overall pattern of the entire hour-long mix is still kind of the same?
Oh! Amazing guilty pleasure of mine, but Code Vein! Anime vampire Dark Souls!
Everything about the game is a little rough and lackluster, but somehow it still comes together enough to be an entertaining play if you're willing to give it enough grace to meet it where it's actually at. I'd recommend getting it on sale for <$20USD or less if you can.
But also check out the amazing Monster Factory episode for it. If that doesn't sell you on the character creator I don't know what will.
I'm on Arch and even the wiki just recommends using the Flatpak. It's pretty obvious once you get the hang of it, each Bottle is just it's own little, specific Windows configuration. Try running through the example on that site and installing Notepad++ (or something else of your choice) and you'll probably have an a-ha! moment.
The arguments of preference and convenience are falling by the wayside as megacorporations take more and more control over not just your hardware but your behavioral patterns by dictating what you can install and how it functions. They suck up all your personal, private data for AI training without your consent.
I get it, shit sucks. It really does, but we have to remember who is to blame here and it's not each other. There has to be some urgency here because this is a battle and we, the consumers, the ordinary people, are surely losing. It's not about being holier than thou, it's about lifting each other up.
This 20 minute video is worth the watch. On paper, N64 had more power but there were a lot of weird limitations in how it could be utilized that affected the overall visual quality. Something I definitely noticed even when I was younger was how it seemed to rely on larger polygons with stretched textures and a smeared anti-aliasing a lot. Also just severely limited by cartridge space.
In all honesty, I've been in the fandom for years. External opinions fluctuate with the times, but if there's one thing furries know how to do it's build community with tech, adamantly support human rights, and be vehemently anti-establishment (EDIT: and apparently not count, I got distracted mid-sentence). A++, love being a stupid animal.
I feel bad because I briefly suspected the comic of having AI faces, despite the rest of the art (especially in the background) being very well drawn and intentional. I checked the website https://goodbearcomics.com/ and ended up reading through a lot of the archive, there are some really good ones in there!