malymin | Entries tagged with internet meta

I'm so sick of Discord servers, man.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: local coffee shop
Current Music: sounds of rain and thunder

If you want to develop an art style that is hard for AI to imitate...

You might want to consider pixel art?

It's possible that this weakness will get fixed as the models develop, but for now - image generation seems to be consistently dogshit at pixel art. People ask it to make pixel art and it makes, like... pseudo-pixel art. There's mixels, there's jpeg-like artifacting, it looks bad. Mimicking photography, digital painting, and vector-like flat shaded art all seem to be easier for the models than pixel art - probably because the training data contains more of those things than it does pixel art, but I also wonder if there's something intrinsic to how image synthesis works that makes understanding "pixel art" as something more specific than "theres a bunch of squares and rectangles" difficult.

This also reminds me of the issue of how hosting images is one of social media's sources of bandwidth issues. So much of current fanart culture is focused on posting high-fidelity images with large filesizes, but ultimately every website with unlimited image hosting is going to run into the server and bandwidth costs involved. Was talking about how this bodes badly for the future of conventional social media that doesn't plan on using predatory practices (selling personal data, etc), and how the internet at large might need to pivot back to a text-centric culture if we want more socmed options that are both non-exploitative in their monetization models and financially sustainable (but most people i've mentioned this are afraid this would mean the death of fanart in fandom), they mentioned:

my first thought is getting back into the art of making small-scale pixel art and such, that kind of thing used to be all over the internet and generally the filesizes for them are a lot smaller than large-scale renders and digital paintings and such

I feel like art optimized for small filesizes is something that's become... less of a common skill? I miss tiny-handful-of-KB pixel graphics being all over the place, but also typical social media displays cute little animated gif pixel arts... abysmally, because their imageposting format is designed for photosets. My conversation partner added:

yeah true, display sizes on social media aren't geared towards smaller-scale images i wonder if the "add gif" kind of feature that some sites have could be tuned to account for small pixel and reaction kind of gifs to display them more clearly, i feel like it'd be relatively easy to make that a popular feature considering how much people like using emojis

I think about how decorative pixel graphics used to be very popular on Tumblr back when users were encouraged to customize their page's HTML (remember those Homestuck "pixel families" and the edits of them to represent other fandoms?), but I've noticed that Tumblr has been... not outright removing the ability to make custom HTML pages, but making it harder for new users to even know it's an option, and altering the UI to discourage viewing the site via custom pages and encourage viewing blogs the more standardized pseudo-mobile format.

yeah, customization being removed on a lot of bigger sites definitely seems like a factor in stuff like that declining

I think there's multiple good reasons to shift back towards pixel/sprite art in the wake of fandom artist anxieties over being replaced by AI, the decay and collapse of last decade's Standard Online Experience, etc. But that doesn't mean people are actually going to try, or even think to do it. And I'll never be persuasive enough to start any kind of movement, so.

dvillines26:

The original Pokemon games always felt haunted because the programming was held together on chewing gum, string, duct tape, and prayer. The abundance of glitches, eccentricities, odd design decisions, and unexplained lore that would later be sanded out is vaguely unsettling and intriguing on its own. Like, there are multiple references to real world locations and events in the original games, and 'Kanto' is just based on the Kanto region of Japan, suggesting at least that Red/Green take place in an alternate reality Japan. Gold, Silver and Crystal aggressively retcon, essentially making the Pokemon Universe its own thing, while adding some troubling and unsettling implications of its own, like the silence of Red, Mt. Silver being sealed off, the Cinnabar disaster, the revival of Suicune/Entei/Raikou, the rival being a cruel, petty thief of unknown origin, Eggs, Celebi and the lost GS Ball event, etc.

The thing that makes the Gen III games such a radical break is how much less unsettling they are. This is a function of the GBA inherently being less spooky than the GameBoy/GameBoy Color, but also of design decisions opting for more vivid colors and a lot of more straightforwardly 'cool' Pokemon. Ghost, Dragon, and Dark actually became more standard types with a huge expansion in the available number. The Pokemon series is the series established by Ruby and Sapphire, I would argue. In a sense it's true that Pokemon, as we knew it in GSC, did not continue. It mutated into something with fewer edges, something bright and fun and increasingly lacking in the jank that gives the early games their unique appeal. For Pokemon to survive it had to move beyond that. They never became exceptionally well-programmed, but they weren't janky until Sword/Shield and then Scarlet/Violet, and those are different types of jank. though S/V can be unsettling in their own right especially when you fall through the world or go somewhere you shouldn't be able to. The unclimbable landmass always disturbs me a bit, like I know there's nothing, but it feels like there should be something there.

The 'haunted' energy isn't usually captured by romhacks that use the Gen I/II engine because they're trying too hard, and the people writing them are brain poisoned by creepypasta and 'edgy' media. I think if they want to make something genuinely unsettling, they need to play at least Earthbound, if not also Mother 3, to get some idea of how to generate an 'off' vibe. The best horror is left partially to the imagination. Rather than gore or explicitly fucked up stuff, which usually triggers disgust rather than fear, the point of a 'haunted GameBoy game' should be to give you the increasing sense that something is Just Not Right. It'd be funny to just do a Red/Green mod that 'fixes some of the bugs', and not tell anyone that it's a romhack that gets increasingly weird the deeper you get into it. like, you encounter Pokemon or items in the wrong location, some doors or ladders take you to places they shouldn't, some trainer AI will be extremely odd, things will randomly appear in your inventory that you didn't pick up, and sometimes a text box will pop up, unprompted. You're Running Out of Time. There's never any explanation or pay-off for that message, nor does it correspond to playtime or anything. At the end, instead of silence, Mewtwo talks to you, but what they say doesn't make any sense. But it has Implications. you can't help thinking about what Mewtwo said. however, Mewtwo only speaks the first time you play the romhack, and never again. Also, you can't actually catch Mewtwo. The player character refuses to throw the ball. A message pops up. 'I can't do this anymore.'

Youtube comments are ephemeral things. I wanted to save this one.

a convo w/ rj about tv-signoffs.com

I stumbled upon a website about TV Signoffs, which is "devoted to the memory of a bygone era in American broadcasting", when stations didn't broadcast 24/7. I was delighted by this hyperspecific [and interesting] find, so I showed it to my go-to friend for these discoveries, RJ. This led to a conversation that I thought was worth sharing, so that is exactly what I'm doing :P

You can read RJ and Lindsey's conversation here. I think it's of interest to both the oldschool Dreamwidth crowd and the Cohost expat crowd?

...unfortunately, as of 2024, TV-signoffs.com no longer exists - not in a way that matters. Towards the tail end of 2023, the site simply became a blank page for its hosting service. Going to the link as of 2024 will simply show a camped-out domain with a very modern-looking (derogatory) Wordpress placeholder site.

Here's what the site itself looked like in 2022, when RJ and Lu had their conversation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220523012423/https://tv-signoffs.com/

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: my bed
Current Music: puppies and kitties snoring

im coining a new pinterest aesthetic. im calling it. linkrotcore™️

it's based around clearly broken and redacted images from the rotting of the old web. straight up missing images. images that don't show up because "no hotlinking." empty spaces, watermarks, and placeholders where beauty used to be. frustrating lacunae. move over babes THIS is the new hotness:

made with

nex3's grid generator

(I know hosting images on Discord is a bad idea - in this case the fact the image will definitely rot is part of the post. Conceptually.)

Watch on YouTube

A friend, when I showed her it, told me that:

yeah, a lot of the non-meme vocaloid fanwork I've been seeing has been about this one music video

And I think I understand why? It has some of the kind of qualities that often drew people to make little mini-fandoms for specific Vocaloid song+mvs: catchy song, distinctive designs (that are variants of the vocaloids singing the song), and a vague/implied narrative (bonus for dark qualities) ripe for speculation and iteration on.

The main difference is that I hazily remember a lot of classic Vocaloid mini-fandoms were for things that wore their edgy, dark, or angsty qualities on their sleeve, like Daughter of Evil or Dark Woods Circus; this particular juxtaposition of a cheery exterior with a dark underbelly feels influenced by '10s and onwards web-horror, particularly unfiction (you know, ARGs and stuff) and stylistically adjacent media where the evil hides under a kiddy, utopian, or otherwise friendly/safe aesthetic. Detail like Teto blinking the morse code for SOS, making the American sign language sign for "help," etc. feel very modern compared to the way 00's web-media would convey the "cute thing is actually sinister" premise before the Big Reveal at the end.

Now imagine an old man, puffing a pipe, grumbling that "kids these days don't want hatsune miku dark fantasy Alice-in-Wonderland hanakaki yandere cannibalism guro anymore. All they want is to play bright, colorful videos at .01% speed and collaboratively decode ciphers messages about how the cast of Whimsy's Playhouse is suffering."

The difference between me and that old man is that I'm delighted to be able to witness this stuff. :)

(Also the more classic edge still exists - check out Fallstay's "-ism" series - it's just not what's hip with the kids.)

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: You's Tube
Current Music: "Mesmerizer" by Satsuki-P

I'm not sure what to do with all of my Princess Tutu sidepage material. It feels weird and spammy to just dump several month's of posts onto a new account, you know? The community is most active on Tumblr, so really I should just put it on Tumblr.. but agh, I hate Tumblr. Every person I have fun talking to on that site says they're exhausted with Tumblr, too, there's just... nowhere else they know of to find other fans.

I really, really do need to get around to making a website. I think a website will be the best way to store my observations in the long term, as long as I always make sure to keep a hard-drive copy of the site's contents on hand. I just... need to remind myself that as much as I think many of my interests need a big, comprehensive fansite (your Serebii, your Starman.net, your Rumik World and Empty Movement)... I am not in the position to make something of that scope from scratch. All of those websites had humble beginnings; they weren't made in a day.

I kind of... wish, I had participated in Petz' website-making culture, instead of just lurking. Because the websites Petz fans make are so beautiful, but they're beautiful because many Petz fans have like... 15 or more years experience working with HTML and CSS. There's an experience gap between me and them, because I was a timid child afraid to do things, often watching other children play on the web. I need to remember that in terms of experience, where I am now is where they were 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago; I need to let my first website be the website of a child, even though I'm over 30, and grow as I learn

When I worry over getting things perfect on the first try, I never getting anything made.

Current Location: Between places

To be honest... I'm not sure how to prioritize preserving my Cohost material.

I was on Cohost for less than a year, but it was... it felt better than Tumblr.

Tumblr feels increasingly hostile to the kind of posting I want to do. Good faith, nuanced discussions that don't get reduced down to memes or soundbites. Cohost's culture was by no means perfect, of course. No sites' is. I definitely remember seeing how the userbases' unexamined racism reared its head, and how the staff was far too slow to address it. But there was a sort of... tolerance, for being earnestly weird. In many cases, an open embrace and celebration of it.

Tumblr is filled with people who are viciously hostile to anything they deem cringe, where anything from reading certain books that happen to be popular online (House of Leaves...) to speaking too enthusiastically or clinically is taken as something worthy of disgust and disdain. Whatever meme, imagery, or media people freely enjoy one month becomes a punchline for a bad and stupid person within less than a year.

It's fucking stifling. I want to be earnest. I want to engage in my natural tendency to use analysis as a form of play, a thing I've enjoyed since I was little, without being mocked for being "like a Redditor." I've seen good friends get harassed off of Tumblr because of its culture. And yet nearly every more mainstream website is ...worse. I already knew, back when Livejournal was enshittifying around 2009, that I didn't want to migrate to Twitter; its format immediately struck me as hostile to how I naturally enjoy the internet. That initial instinct has been validated, and I do not want to go to anything modeling itself after Twitter. Reddit is uncanny - in some ways like forums, like Livejournal "communities", but... not quite right. Something about the design makes it not function the same way, but I don't understand enough about how website design impacts function to articulate why. And Pinterest, Instagram, Tiktok? Don't make me laugh. I do draw, from time to time, but my primary mode of online expression has always been text.

It's interesting that several Cohost users are jumping to Dreamwidth. To me, Cohost itself already felt like a hybrid of 2011 Tumblr and Livejournal in its prime; nothing trying to be modern in how it approaches the concept of "social media" is going to fufill the approach to textposting that Cohost had.

If there's one thing I can suggest - the "community" feature was one of my favorite parts of LiveJournal, and I want to see how cohost-jumpees take advantage of it on Dreamwidth. Being able to post content in a moderated community solves issues that the tag-as-watering-hole approach of Tumblr and Cohost had: you can set aside, for example, a moderated community for intersex issues that disallow fantasy-genital porn; contrast with the futility of trying to individually correct the behavior of every user who mistags fantasy genital porn as #intersex in a website's tag feed. In Livejournal's prime, there were often multiple communities for different facets of a topic or interest: nsfw vs sfw topic communities, different aspects of of a hobby or subculture, etc. I imagine there's many dead, abandoned communities on Dreamwidth, but there do seem to be a few living ones, too.

One that just posted today is

baihe_media , a community dedicated to Chinese-language media in the same genre as what's called yuri in Japanese. Neat!

Another feature of Dreamwidth that originates from Livejournal is having multiple icons, avatars, pfps - whatever you want to call them - per account. You can kind of use them to abstractly convey the mood, tone, and topic of individual posts, and even individual comments. You should be able to find premade options here. You can also make and upload your own icons. If you just wanted to fill all your slots with different drawings of your fursona's face to act as visual tone indicators... you can do that! I always thought it was a neat feature, and was sad no 2010's social media copied the idea off of LiveJournal.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: The drifting expanses of the web
Current Music: Goodbye to a World - Porter Robinson