My old workplace used to encourage people to use all caps on their reports because it hid the fact the people they hired didn’t know how to capitalize grammatically.

Already started. Revolt seems like it could be a near 1 to 1 replacement soon.

I didn’t even know about it until I read this comment, but now I’m one of the salty.

Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say ‘They’re doing X. I’ll swap to this character and screw up their plans.’ The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn’t locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.

I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don’t win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?

Man, I miss that game.

Life in the social media age is one in which identity is developed performatively through profilicity. People from the earlier eras created themselves in the face of the Big Other, often as God, or as the crowd of society at large, their families, etc. Younglings of the new age have personified the Big Other as the digital crowd, imagined viewers of their life-as-livestream.

Might sound odd to some, but Overwatch.

Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another ‘left-click on the target’ game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.

The phrase ‘can God do this’ makes me want to see a parody of Genie’s song from Alladin where it’s ‘Can Your God Do This?’ and it’s just a deity dis track by Ganesha, Odinn, or Cthulhu.

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?

…when I use AI generation, I have an idea or specific image in my head and I do my best to come up with a prompt that will produce what I want, or more usually, I use photoshop…

Therein lies the difference. You have an intended target and use tools to create it. The artistry is in the skill and effort put into communicating your internal concept. To my knowledge, people generally aren’t saying AI is useless in a creative process, just that typing in a few words and hitting ‘generate’ until you get something cool, or just running a filter over an image to make it look like a drawing, isn’t artistry.

…there are AI models for specific tasks, say generating human faces, that co trolled experiments have found that people can’t distinguish between the AI content and the real thing.

I failed to communicate my idea clearly enough. I’m not talking about the artefacts that sometimes make images look weird. I’m talking about the deep brain sense that one can develop that can tell the difference between someone acting vs emoting, singing vs lip synching, etc. An ingenuous performance has a different character to it that can be said to fall into the uncanny valley.

There is also plenty of traditional art that hits the uncanny valley or simply doesn’t look right, but that doesn’t make it any less art, does it?

That depends. If hitting the valley is intentional and done using skill, that’s just normal art. If it has intent but not skill, it’s incomplete art. It’s failing to communicate as intended, much like I failed with words above. It’s part of becoming good at something to screw it up, though, so it’s to be expected sometimes. If it has skill but no intent, that’s craftsmanship rather than artistry. Craftsmanship is great but has a subtle difference in how it is experienced.

there’s still a barrier between the type of art miyazaki is fluent in and AI art.

That’s not so good as an analogy. AI imagery isn’t art by itself. Even in your example of your own work, it’s materials, at best. Saying AI image generation is artistry is like saying hiring someone else to paint a picture makes you an artist. Even ‘prompt engineering’ at its finest makes one an artist as much as project management makes one a programmer. So, the general argument comes from the pretense rather than the tool. Bringing your sentence closer to the mark would be something like ‘There is a barrier between art, which Miyazaki is experienced in, and this particular type of tool one can use.’ It’s an apples to oranges comparison, like comparing the field of astronomy to a camera.

Should we take him as an expert on art and view digital art as less than traditional art? Or should we just roll our eyes at the stubborn old man stuck in his ways?

That’s an obvious false binary. People are perfectly capable of being right about one thing and wrong about another. You give his words weight because of his expertise. That doesn’t mean you have to take them as gospel, but ignoring all of an expert’s opinions because you dislike some of them, or some implications of them, is a terrible idea as well.

Actually, yeah, that’s a bad metaphor from me. Comparing benchmarks would be comparing AI models.

He’s not comparing benchmarks. He’s comparing results, so it’s more about maybe error rate than processing speed.

I guess it’s like comparing the result of an approximation versus an explicit computation. GenAI makes an approximation of art. It very quickly spits out something that looks a bit like the intended answer. It even gets you close enough to be totally satisfactory for some purposes, in the same way 3 can be a usable approximation of π for some purposes. However, the picture is not the full purpose of creating art. Art is a form of communication, transmitting something from one mind to another using indirect means because telepathy isn’t available. AI is not trying to communicate anything. It’s just an approximation of something someone could say.

Miyazaki is someone with years of experience in creating art so he understands the ‘language’ of art better than some. He has ‘fluency.’ AI images hit the uncanny valley for artists because they are attuned to the difference between what an art is supposed to look like vs what the imitator approximates. They have the fluency to spot the fake the same way you might be able to spot someone speaking your native language as a mother tongue vs out of a phrasebook. Because he is ‘fluent’ in art, people take his words on art seriously, just as one would generally take a born-and-raised German’s words seriously regarding German grammar.

Almost no one knows how SD works. That’s not the point. He’s not contrasting it against some other GenAI concept to compare training cost. He’s looking at it based on the results. You don’t have to know how to build a CPU to compare benchmarks for ones built by someone else.

The issue with Rowling is more that she started talking out her rear end about something of which she doesn’t have much, if any, understanding. If she gave you advice on writing YA fiction, it’d be worth something. Miyazaki is a visual artist broadly respected for his art, so his opinions on visual art have some weight. If it was about the cultivation of kumquats, I think I’d ask a farmer.

I think you’d have to have a pretty unique style but if you could come up with one, you might be able to trademark it rather than copyright it.

A lot of people care what Miyazaki thinks because he created over a dozen films that are beloved by millions because of their artistry, is well respected in the anime/manga world, and is generally regarded as a master of his artform. People tend to take your words seriously when they have nearly 50 years of experience and success behind them.

Guerilla horticulture.

If the loot boxes affect your ability to win, don’t buy the game. If they are just cosmetic, meh.

But don’t stop there. If it has day one DLC, don’t touch it. If it has DLC to patch game functions that should be in the base game, don’t touch it. If it has any kind of pay to win function, don’t touch it. If it has a subscription, don’t touch it. If it’s a pre-order, don’t touch it. If it’s put out by a conglomerate publisher that eats real developers and shits out imitations of their IP, don’t touch it.

And most of all, teach these things to gamer kids and their parents. Kids are ignorant of the effect their purchases, and parents don’t have the time and energy to go learn for themselves. Spreading awareness helps everyone.

Already transitioning. Been half doing it for ages. This’ll just be the last bit.

Yep

While it’s true that experience is the only way to ‘get used to’ something, having the right settings can minimize the effort of it. It should almost be as effortless as pointing at something with your finger.

You will have to go into the settings and adjust your sensitivity to what matches your personal proprioception. The best way I know to do this is to open up the game and then pick a point to look/aim at (if it’s a first-person/OTS third person) or a point on the screen to put your cursor if it’s something with a static camera. Place your mouse/reticle on that point. Then swing it out for a loop/heart/star shape and try to snap your view right back to the same point based on where it would feel natural. Don’t readjust to get there if it’s not at the spot, just note where you are actually aiming compared to the target. If you go past it, sensitivity or acceleration is too high. If you don’t get there, it’s too low. If you are off to either side on a perpendicular line, (e.g. you come from straight to the side and end up too high or low) that’s you, and that will just have to come with experience. .

I absolutely LOVED Mirror’s Edge. That feeling of hitting flow in game and out of game as you just move smoothly from point to point was just amazing. I played originally on PS2PS3 and almost got the plat trophy. I loved trying not only to find the fastest path but the smoothest, the weirdest, the pacifist, etc. It was great.

Then I tried 2 for like 5 seconds before I dropped it. It immediately felt like a betrayal of the first game. I hated the UI. I hated the color grade. I hated the style. I hated what seemed like a turn toward the violent.