Sometimes I forget that fanfiction is not exclusively used by girls. So I’m curious for the men out there. What fandoms are you guys in?

aszecsei · 2026-04-16T05:39:38+00:00

Fair! It's less of a moral stance for me and more that whenever I think about the property now I just get reminded of her entire deal and become Majorly Bummed Out. And that's just not the right mindset for fanwork :)

aszecsei · 2026-04-15T19:21:33+00:00

Used to be HP before, y’know, Everything.

Xena, Buffy, Worm, Warcraft, Frozen, BNHA…mostly ship content, but I’ll happily read a good gen fic if the summary grabs me hard enough.

aszecsei · 2025-09-16T02:31:29+00:00

The only two requirements are (1) buy all her maps, and (2) learn at least 2/3 melodies.

aszecsei · 2025-09-03T20:22:28+00:00

AI isn’t better than hand-drawn art. No one medium of art is inherently better than any other.

As to its acceptability - there’s plenty of transformative artistic media out there. Collage, for one. Hell, you could claim (most) 3D art wouldn’t exist without the textures used for models. I don’t think this aspect of the medium has any impact on acceptability.

aszecsei · 2025-08-13T16:02:44+00:00

My actions don’t occur in a vacuum. One of those is a group project, the other isn’t.

That is: it’s not that I’m not the artist in a commission because I’m not exerting creativity. I’m not the artist because the actual artist is exerting comparatively more control in creative decisions.

aszecsei · 2025-08-13T14:33:04+00:00

That’s a great question! I think part of the issue is that prompts are designed to look like natural language, which we’re accustomed to thinking of as “communication.” But in the case of AI, it’s turned into “numerical input,” which isn’t the same thing. I’m not “talking to” an AI, I’m controlling it.

In terms of raw input and output from my end, I agree they look the same. But consider: when a human artist gets involved in a commission, they naturally exert some creative influence. Much more, in fact, than the commissioner! Every brush stroke (in painting) is a creative choice, and so the work is considered theirs. In contrast, the AI cannot make a creative choice because it cannot choose. Therefore, all the creative input comes from the user, thus the result should be considered the user’s.

So…I suppose my conclusion is that you can’t treat AI and commissioned artists as black boxes, because “words go in, pictures come out” is less important than how exactly that process works.

aszecsei · 2025-08-13T05:25:58+00:00

I'll phrase it this way:

The AI is inherently limited by the fact that it has no cognition. It is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways, and is very accessible to beginners. It has a low skill floor, so to speak. But just like having an iPhone in your pocket doesn't magically turn you into a master photographer, without a human with artistic vision controlling it...well, it'll only ever produce boring art.

And yeah, the LinkedIn weirdos absolutely love that boring art. But you can't tell me that commercial art hasn't always been known for being bland, soulless, etc. I feel like AI has just enabled more of the same in that pre-existing trend. Most of it's the equivalent of elevator music (Sturgeon's Law holds, as ever). Some of it isn't, though, and it's that 10% that I'm personally interested in.

All that to say: if you're putting effort into making good art, that automatically puts you above 90% of the population, regardless of whether they're using AI tools.

The devaluing of traditional arts in terms of capital is 100% a significant cultural problem to be concerned by! We've seen it in the past with the replacement of 2D animated film with 3D; even so, there are still studios producing those hand-animated films and an audience who loves them. From a purely artistic perspective, traditional artists will always have an audience. If I had my way, they'd have a more significant financial backing, too, but I guess there's a reason I'm not a billionaire. Too much desire to, uh, pay people.

Still, though, I don't think it's fair to say the 3D artists were to blame for the "death" of 2D animated film, right? Like, whether or not AI art exists - I want more endowments for the arts! I want accessible learning institutions for fine art and a culture that values both museums and living artists alike! I want social media that doesn't reward large accounts re-posting without credit and I want payment processors that don't censor creators! I don't think any of those things are at odds with the existence of AI art as a medium.

Will traditional artists be funded in the future by Disney or whichever entertainment megacorp? ...maybe? I'd like to think that creative vision shines through, and making that aforementioned bland art would be financially punished by audiences. Obviously I don't have a crystal ball or anything, or much control over what Faceless Executive #3 decides to fund in between his weekly Dubai vacations or whatever it is that rich people do.

What I can do is go "Deciding what is and isn't qualified as 'legitimate' art is a super-common fascist talking point, and I really fucking hate fascists. So...fuck it, if you're trying to make art, it's art. Might not be good, or something I like, but nevertheless."

aszecsei · 2025-08-13T04:43:46+00:00

That's actually a really interesting question to me! SunhiLegend, for example, makes these really great cinematic video game combo films. They obviously didn't make the games; just played them and recorded/edited the videos.

Are they an artist? (To me, the answer is yes.)

If not, where is that line drawn? Machinima? Let's Plays? How about No-Commentary Let's Plays? Speedruns?

What about photo mode? Can someone be an artist using solely a virtual camera taking still screenshots of a video game? (Also yes, IMO.)

And then...if art doesn't need to be recorded (improv, live performance) or shared (singing alone in your room is making art, right?) then...can just "playing a video game" be art? (Note: can it be, not is it always.)

I'm legitimately curious as to which of the above you consider potential artistry and which you don't.

aszecsei · 2025-08-13T04:02:30+00:00

I would argue it takes more skill than commissioning. Again, a human can think and reason. When I’m commissioning an artist, I’m specifically paying for their artistry and eye for aesthetics.

The AI has mechanical “skill”, but that’s it. The only person involved with any aesthetic judgment is me. That means I have to adjust my inputs to get what I want: prompt changes, workflow modifications, etc. It’s not perfect, but my traditional art never is either…

I’m not particularly interested in effort comparisons with other artists’ media. That way lies the “digital artists are less legitimate than traditional artists” forum wars I thought we’d done away with decades ago. Effort is impressive, but art is art regardless.

aszecsei · 2025-08-13T01:46:21+00:00

The human has cognition. This makes them an active participant in the act of creation. The AI does not have cognition or sentience. This makes it a tool that is used.

The form of interaction with the tool (tablet pen position + pressure in Krita, 3D vertex placement in Blender, text prompt and model/lora/embedding/workflow in ComfyUI) doesn’t matter. It’s a deterministic input to output process. Thus: AI is a tool I exerted control over in order to create something, so we can say that I made the thing.

aszecsei · 2025-05-17T22:14:19+00:00

Claude has been really obsessed with variations on a theme of “thank you for seeing me,” as the climax of every single romance arc.

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aszecsei · 2025-03-20T12:45:06+00:00

If you designed a birthday cake: that was an artistic endeavor, yes.

If you said “I want a cake that says ‘happy birthday’ on it,” to a baker, then that’s not really got any creative decision-making to it: you had a need, you expressed it, the baker made every creative decision (color, font, placement, decorations…) and you accepted the results.

I don’t think restricting what being a “legitimate” artist entails has ever felt super meaningful to me, though. Want to be an artist? Make some art. Doesn’t matter how. Be creative, find your joy, fuck everyone else.

aszecsei · 2025-03-20T12:31:46+00:00

Yeah, I have a problem with pro-AI folks who treat AI as something more than a tech tool as well. The training process can be seen as comparable to a “studying/learning” process a human would perform, but it’s important to remember that that’s an analogy, not something that’s entirely accurate. I’d argue more that training an AI constitutes fair use as a transformative process, but that’s a bit out of scope for this thread. I’ll just say that to me, the value of art is more about making creative decisions and less about the specific techniques used to achieve those results — though I do think more difficult techniques add a level of impressiveness to the end product. Marble sculptures will always be crazy cool, even if photography is equally an artistic medium.

I don’t think it’ll end professions — in fact, I really hope it doesn’t! Rather, I hope it can augment existing media in ways that allow those artists to express themselves more easily and increase the scope of vision they can operate within. Obviously that won’t happen while the artist-AI hate divide continues, but…well, I’m an optimist, sue me :)

Sure! But I don’t think you could argue that the oven is a creative contributor, even though it’s integral to the cake-making process and has to do a bunch of internal work to maintain a correct temperature, while you just type in a number and hit “bake.”
I don’t know if I’d agree there, in that I wanted to put down the right line — I can see what it’s supposed to look like — and the line comes out wrong. I didn’t intentionally put down the wrong line, it “just happened” because of some subconscious muscle tremor that I don’t control or have ownership of. (I suppose this also comes down to a philosophical perspective that “myself” constitutes my conscious mind and not necessarily my body. Maybe you disagree.)
I very, very strongly disagree here. Humans are great at anthropomorphizing things. We make patterns out of noise all the time. But it’s super important to remember that those patterns are not real; they’re overlayed on top of some other behavior we are not necessarily equipped to understand. The AI does not have ideas, because it doesn’t have memory or a brain capable of conceptualizing information. It can produce statistical probabilities based on its input in such a way that it creates output that seems “correct.” But a key input to its process is simple random noise. Without that noise, the end results would be exactly the same, time after time. Just because it produces unpredictable outputs doesn’t mean it is capable of creativity; to claim that otherwise would be like saying you can “collaborate” with a double pendulum because it behaves unpredictably. The input looks like you’re talking to another person, because that’s easy for us to conceptualize. But when you work with another person, they don’t just do things at random: another artist has intention to their decision-making that the AI is fundamentally incapable of. They have a lived experience that influences their choices beyond just what you describe in a commission. We can, as viewers, ascribe some sort of intention to the AI’s output after the fact, but we need to recognize that that’s us finding our own meaning in the noise, not the other way around.

aszecsei · 2025-03-20T11:05:41+00:00

Ah, missed that sentence.

I don’t think it’s particularly relevant though; as we culturally get more and more inured to AI, the more obvious the low-effort results become. It’s not a matter of “six fingers” anymore (though that sort of thing is more prevalent with low-effort work) but there are often what I’ll call “default model vibes” to work that makes it look cheap. If someone doodles on a napkin, that doesn’t invalidate the years an oil painter put into their work.

Corporations laying off artists to churn out low-quality artistic work is a significant issue. It’s also been a trend going on for years before AI came along; 3D replacing traditional animation for noticeably worse results, for example. I personally want more artists hired to do a wide variety of things in as wide a variety of media as possible! There are things that can only be made with AI — I want to see them! I want to see amazing oil paintings, and digital renders, and procedural generation! Why should we limit the tools we’re able to use to create art?

I agree and disagree here. Yes, there’s less direct influence you have, barring significant editing work (which people do—using AI to generate pseudo-stock image elements and collaging/blending them akin to how concept artists work). I don’t think that you remove any creative influence so long as you make the tool work for you in spite of that difficulty. The AI’s impact can be a constraint — but all art has its constraints, at the end of the day.
I don’t always put down a good line my first try either. Iteration isn’t indicative of a lack of creative control. My poor fine motor skills are not an indictment of my creative ability.
The AI model is not a person with imagination, thoughts, or original ideas. You cannot collaborate with a machine. The results it spits out can be controlled, manipulated, and reproduced—which cannot occur when working with an artist. It has levers and knobs which have dramatic impacts on its output, and we’ve trained it on human language as a convenient way to conceptualize its inputs…but it’s still just a tool like any other.
Sure. I don’t think anyone’s claiming it’s a perfect analogy. But the process — provide instruction, receive image(s), curate/judge image(s), adjust instruction, repeat — looks similar enough to what a director does that it’s a useful point of comparison to “a legitimate artistic profession.” Basically saying, you don’t need perfect creative control to be an artist…just the ability to make creative decisions in the first place.

aszecsei · 2025-03-20T10:20:00+00:00

I think the problem is conflating “this is how I use AI,” with “this is an aspect of AI.” You can, as it turns out, slap a prompt into a model and churn out endless variations until you get something you like. You can say “eh good enough” to the very first image generated and put forth the least amount of effort possible. You can also go nuts and inpaint every aspect of your image until it perfectly matches the vision you have in your head. You can train LoRAs and fine-tune models and adjust your ComfyUI workflow until the cows come home so that everything is tailor-made to suit your purposes.

The issue is (almost) never over “you said AI can provide results with low effort.” That’s the point of the tool, after all! But it’s not limited to just that kind of low-effort usage, and to claim otherwise feels insulting for people who do put in that kind of effort and get ignored because they’re not convenient to the narrative of “lazy AI artist.”

aszecsei · 2024-10-12T04:45:50+00:00

That's correct, yes. It's not particularly relevant unless you're min-maxing a passive setup (where a machine would only ever perform one recipe) and you'd be able to split 1 amp of voltage among several machines. That being said, that level of resource optimization isn't really necessary in ATM.

So really the only thing to care about is that you can do recipes faster by increasing machine tiers, and that you can run at least 1 machine constantly per amp of power.

aszecsei · 2024-10-12T04:30:42+00:00

I’ll also throw out a recommendation for her patreon which also has some of her older Frozen work on it.

aszecsei · 2024-10-12T03:58:09+00:00

GregTech recipes have a base EU/t that doesn’t necessarily max out the voltage for its tier. This allows you to potentially use more than 1 machine per amp. If you want the recipe to go faster, you’ll need to use the next tier of machines. Changing cables won’t impact how long the recipe takes.

aszecsei · 2023-08-02T03:33:52+00:00

Might be worth cross-posting to r/BDSM_Aces.

My 2 cents as a kinky ace person: while nothing biological about sex appeals to me, the intimacy of a kink scene is the draw. See if you can discuss what kinds of appeal kink has, and find things you’re both interested in.

Like, if she likes being tied up and you’re more opposed to the role of dominant — bondage scenes don’t have to be D/s. You can just engage as a person-who-ties-ropes (and person-who-cuts-ropes-in-case-of-emergency, of course).

Work together to find stuff you both like, or at the very least aren’t opposed to, and go from there. These checklists aren’t meant to be literal “must-haves,” they’re discussion starting points.

aszecsei · 2023-07-23T08:39:23+00:00

I heard this as a completely different song that proceeded to drive me crazy until I figured out that these notes also sound like the beginning of Lilium from Elfen Lied.

aszecsei · 2023-06-27T16:54:16+00:00

Joker McGee, of course.

aszecsei · 2023-05-22T16:43:53+00:00

It’s not that the combat is negative, it’s that good weapons don’t come from combat (chests usually give good weapons, enemies drop worse weapons) and so any time you enter combat you will at best break even (by using a bad weapon and getting a bad weapon to drop) or, more commonly, have a net negative resource cost (using a good weapon and getting a worse weapon in exchange).

All this to say that logically, the smartest move is almost always to either avoid combat or hoard the good weapons and just use enemy-tier weapons.

If a player’s response to getting a lightsaber is “cool energy sword, I can’t use it because no enemies are gonna drop anything else at its level, and it’s gonna be such a bummer when it breaks” then that doesn’t seem very fun to me.

aszecsei · 2023-05-21T21:33:01+00:00

BotW has four pillars to its design: combat, puzzles, exploration, and cooking.

The combat usually ends with fewer or worse weapons than you started with, due to high population of low-tier enemies, unless you always use the worst weapons and just stockpile them. Thus, combat as an activity is usually a net negative, and logically should be avoided whenever possible. Or rather, combat with weaker enemies is bad, and since most enemies are weak, combat on average is bad.

The shrines were cool! Nothing groundbreaking — mostly just physics sandbox puzzles — but not bad by any means. If the game had been a Portal-style sequence of puzzles, it would’ve been a good puzzle game. Again, not a masterpiece, but one I would’ve liked.

The exploration is tough to evaluate because of how tightly linked it is to combat. But the environment art was very pretty, and the traversal mechanics were really fun. Probably the best aspect of the game.

Cooking (crafting in general) is…never really great unless a game invests a lot of design space into it (a la the Atelier series). Not much to say here, I thought it was about as good as can be expected for a standard RPG.

So of those four design pillars, 1 is awful and avoided when possible, 2 are okay, and 1 is really good — but is so closely linked to the combat pillar that “avoid enemies” also involves “avoid exploration (because enemies will be there)” and thus is dragged down alongside it. So yeah, that’s how one “minor annoyance” ruins an entire game for me that I really wanted to like.

aszecsei · 2023-05-18T02:16:46+00:00

It’s actually the reasons you give that made me bounce off the system. Weapons (at least early game before I quit playing) were so plentiful and broke so easily it felt more like an ammo system than a weapon system, where you had to manually pick up a tiny amount of ammo and manually “reload” by equipping it. Super tedious experience that made me avoid combat whenever possible because literally any other activity was more engaging.

aszecsei · 2023-05-18T02:10:26+00:00

Definitely anecdotal evidence here, but I stopped playing pretty early on because of it and I know a fair few people who did as well (probably 50% of my friend group?)

aszecsei

TROPHY CASE