Posts made by bored

@Prototart I’ve never been banned from a game where people play characters who wear their underwear outside their clothes, though.

@renaveleigh I played Thor on UH. I dunno if the logs exist or whatever, but I quit with the giant pile of other people who did, over both the Illyana and Jean stuff.

All the same, I remember how Illyana acted. I remember how Knockout acted. If the Power Girl stuff is wrong, my bad, but again, the player has a pretty consistent MO for both how and what kind of characters she plays, and getting banned multiple times in a genre of game where you pretty much have to go out of your way to get banned.

And no, @Prototart I know you’re big not into dudes or whatever, but the OOC stuff can still be uncomfortable for people even if you’re not attracted to them. You did it, and the power gaming stuff on UH (you’re not suddenly not-Illyana now, right?). You did it on Knockout. If I made a comic game, you’d be pre-banned there for sure as you seem like all drama for no benefit, every place you are (same as Vorpal and Chaucer, for what that’s worth).

Whichever one of you is PG I’m sure will end up getting them tossed off this place too.

From the other thread I get that you’re a squad and I have no interest in litigating shit on those games I had no part in, but the ageless grudge vibe is strong here. She wasn’t banned on UH strictly because they disliked her, people complained about the behavior. She wasn’t banned on HAM strictly because Chaucer didn’t like her, people complained about the behavior. She power-gamed on Maxima and Knockout. She was sexually aggressive in the OOC room, to me and to other people I know. I’m not confused about those games, regardless of whether she’s that other Power Girl too. She’s a player I think many games would pre-ban if they thought about it (as she seems to realize is a possibility).

Coming here and going ‘lol this game hates trans people’ (where I think you’d find most of the players have the opposite opinion) is the same kind of inflammatory behavior that gets her banned everywhere. The game doesn’t hate trans people. The game said no to ‘Porno Futanari Power Girl,’ I think in part because (and I say this admitting my own ignorance as boring cis guy) my understanding is that some trans people consider the dickgirl/futa stuff offensive. I’m sure staff there would be happy to discuss their reasoning in appropriate forums, but framing it the way she’s chosen to is clearly an attempt to get the mob on her side.

@Prototart I was on another where a power-gaming, OOCly sexually inappropriate Power Girl was banned, apologies if it wasn’t you that time. Maybe she attracts the type!

But let’s at least be real: it wasn’t the same people who banned you round two on HAM. You weren’t pre-banned, you were allowed to play on the game, you were playing there just fine and engaged in RP, but you did all the same shit you always do, being sexually inappropriate in the OOC room constantly talking about your huge tits and OOC-playing at people, while also complaining that your god like characters weren’t even more godlike (iirc you were mad they only let you play Knockout as a Kirby-esque space god and not a Morrison-esque universal embodiment of whatever who could auto-win against everyone).

Reminder: I’m literally someone who quit UH in the big exodus, so I don’t not see your side, but can you own up to some of this behavior as maybe being part of the cause of how you’re frequently treated? Maybe don’t do weird flirty shit in OOC if its not invited, maybe don’t constantly talk about how your character can beat up everyone else’s characters, etc?

In b4 @Prototart is banned from their… I’m going to say at least 4th comic game out of those I know.

To give some thoughts, beyond simply dumping logs (sorry 4 formatting!)…

The Chaucer/Shakespeare dichotomy was truly a turd/shit sandwich kind of situation, but the status quo now makes the Chaucer half moot. Shakespeare is what we have left, and she’s basically the anti game-admin, easily one of the least motivated staffers I’ve ever seen. She’s disinterested in her own game to the degree I’m surprised she didn’t just randomly hit @shutdown yet. While she does protect her friends, in an odd way it’s almost not even favoritism, because she won’t take action on anyone for anything. Wade screeching horrific personal attacks is the bar is for catching a ban.

I think its all unsalvageable, and not to encourage Chaucer & co’s GOMO, but I’m absolutely in the place where I’m ready for an alternative game. It just doesn’t seem like there’s another large generalist offering. (I’m aware of Excelsior! but its small roster makes it hard to get a character. Not a criticism, just a reality.)

@renaveleigh re: the Xaviers stuff, this is tricky. I think your frustration is valid but that you’re probably misreading things a little, including the idea that Shakespeare is actively protecting Rogue. My understanding is that they’ve long since fallen out. Shakespeare’s only friends are her ever-shrinking personal RP circle.

I clicked over to the MSB log linked up top and reading myself talking to Ruby about UH is mind-numbing. So I appreciate frustration in dealing with her. But Jean & her alts and Nathan & his alts are among the tiny few players left on the whole damn game running actual comic book stuff with any kind of regularity or quality, and they’ve both seem like shockingly sane, adult people in every interaction I’ve had. It’s notable you give him a pass while turning on her, even though you admit he fundamentally agreed with them.

So it comes across as personal vendetta & hate directed at Rogue/Ruby, and anyone else who dares be friends with her. In this, I urge you to reconsider your zeal, because it’s easy to pick a side in these these fights, stake your hill to die on, and end up not looking much better than the other guy (I used to do this a lot). For instance, that log involves 1) people talking politics, which they’re not supposed to, 2) Rogue asking them to stop, and 3) you sniping back at her instead of stopping when asked. To be clear, that means Rogue’s the one following the rules in the Shakespeare post you supposedly agree with, and you’re the one violating it, right? So are you toxic? Or would you agree with Jean/Nathan that maybe people just sometimes get emotional.

Not to come down too harshly, and to tie it back, I’m going to reiterate that this is all Shakespeare’s fault. Shakes is 100% checked out, and has been for much of the game’s existence. Without knowing all the grudges, I can imagine that there are many valid and real things that you are upset about, that Jean is upset about, that Warren is upset about, etc., but that all of them have been left to fester because Shakespeare will never take action on anything, ever. That’s really something you have to internalize, especially when taking her ‘side’ in that argument. Understand, that post is a nothingburger, and it’s her usual MO of shifting blame to the players rather than taking any responsibility for staff action.

Somehow I missed that this thread exists (I probably have my notifications, flags and groups etc set wrong). So I thought all this drama had gone under the radar and just assumed no one here played comic places anymore. But no! Drama ensues. Here’s a few other bits from the still-unfolding trainwreck, some deleted posts and other ephemera preceding the Chaucer post.

They’re not really about Chaucer, although they kind of link in to the ongoing underlying dramas of the game, which alternately involve Shakespeare’s ‘faction’ of do-nothing TS cliques for whom bad behavior is overlooked and activity policies ignored, and Chaucer’s group of more pro-active… well, also sex-pests, but with grander scale bad ethics (ie making his own character the chosen of literal monotheistic God) and a tendency to aggressively force his views, opinions, and plot ideas on people. Also, the complaining players themselves kind of seem like assholes. This dumpster fire goes far and wide.

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Message: 2/523                     Posted        Author
Ahem                               Feb 14 2024   Wade Wilson
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Dear Shakespeare. I could have precluded so much of my trouble on your game if I had just agreed to sleep with you repeatedly. Like an online Harvey Weinstein you are this horrible little predator behind your monitor, providing your benefits to the people you enjoy snogging. You are surrounded with two flavors of people. Empty utterly gutless useless pieces of human detritus who are looking to stab you in the back the first chance they get. And ones you have humped. Sometimes these spheres overlap.

I know my behaviour is so horrid. I laugh at you and yours while you sit with your legs up and your blood clotting, your tremendous weight straining under your reinforced office chair as you tap on your keyboard, hypocritically screeching your idiotic social values while working for a fucking oil company. I had the gall to question your horrible decisions with staff, while your idiotic half-man Chaucer repeatedly plots to steal from you, and screeching about how someone is punching down on them while they routinely abuse their position as a staffer to pursue their lovely little bouts of harassment. So cute they imagine if anyone disagrees with them that it's punching down. Probably has to do with their dead end in life at the moment.

I have had most of my trouble on your game... because of getting angry about your corrupt staff. Sapkowski/Waid, lovely chap, loses his mind on me in a public channel. My fault for daring to disagree with your horrible global plot with the dumb ass angels. That guy was lovely. A piece of work. Ask him if he's talked to Silvestri lately? I have! What a waste of oxygen.

Who was the chucklehead that went on his huge political rant on the pub channel? Yeah, then it came to light he was using his position to actually try and get people to harass that one gal who was running SHIELD off the game? Teaching them how to do it with as little accountability as possible. Yah you've had some swell staffers. I've had a lot of trouble with staff. On Here. Elsegame. But the awesome thing about this though, over time it's always come to light how utterly horrible those people have been.

You are no different.

Go to hell, you sad little fuck. 

Bye. :)
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Message: 1/168                     Posted        Author
Thor's Player Banned               Feb 14 2024   Stoker
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Thor's player, who also wrote Alexander Aaron, Piotr, and Deadpool, has been permanently banned from the game after sending Staff and other players an extremely inappropriate page/email laden with misogynistic commentary and foul personal insults. This follows a long history of similar comments and insults he has aimed at staff; this time, he broke the pall by launching this tirade after he was denied permission to run a +event with inappropriate ties to RL political issues. We apologize for the disruption to your gameplay. Please Keep Calm, and Carry On.

- Staff
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Context: I don’t have the +event text on hand, but it was something along the lines of ‘Fighting ANTIFOH.’ The scene never got run, although it’s notable some of the tagged players were staff-alts themselves. I think it was aimed at the idea that both Shakespeare and Chaucer like to use language of activism/inclusivity in their communications while not upholding these beliefs in practice (ie, years of enabling sex-pests on UH & HAM alike).

<Public> Tim Drake says, "Phoebe Beacon represents everything that is wrong with MUSHing today. She is a narcissistic, gaslighting, professional victim who sucks energy from others. She, along with her OOC RL friend Doyle/Xander Prescott/ex-Tim Drake have systematically shut me out of RP here by doing things like accuse me of racism and restricting the number of people who can join a scene specifically targeted to Bat Family, all the while allowing people not tagged to come and play. And all of this is has been done to either get me banned from the character or frustrated enough to quit so Doyle can have Tim Drake back.%r%rCongrats, you succeeded, Phoebe. You can continue to be a big fish in a small pond and I'll go spend my time doing something somewhere else with positive people who build up others, not nasty, temperamental, small-minded people with personality disorders.%r%rThe funny thing is, if you had come to me and asked nicely and explained the situation, I would have gladly given the character up and chosen someone else.%r%rTake care. I hope you find some sort of peace and balance."

Context: I have no idea, other than the fact that Doyle did take Tim Drake immediately after this player was banned, and that Phoebe was connected to the ‘angel plot’ where Chaucer got to play the chosen of actual real God. She also quit not long after all of this stuff.

Finally, in the last week there have been a couple posts where prominent/long-running plots were abruptly canceled by their players. Seems like a likely next wave of drama.

@Cobalt said in Royal Paynes:

@ratatat Horse semen.

I think cheese log was someone else. Uh, Artifex on Shang? I can’t remember for sure…

Decius (or something like that) on Metro, too. I believe the cheese log had an actual on-grid appearance there, but I wouldn’t confidently say it was the origin or only such instance.

That was only (looks at the date on a couple of these log files)… holy fuck 20 years ago ok I’m gonna collapse into a pile of dust, now.

@Pavel This is where I admit I’m not smart enough to give you a total answer, but it’s certainly more than just brand of card, because the non-reproducibility can be on the same machine across different sessions.

One of the home installs for Stable Diffusion has a sort of ‘setup test’ where they have you reproduce an image from their text settings: you should get the same picture as in the readme (it happens to be a famous anime girl, because naturally). And then it has some troubleshooting: if she looks wrong in this way, maybe you set this wrong. The images you get are never going to be totally unrelated, they’re similar, but they’re similar along a dimensionality that isn’t the way humans think, it’s similarity in the latent space which is how AI images are represented before they get translated to pixel format. So ‘similar’ might be the same character but in a different pose, or with an extra limb.

That difference feels egregious to a human viewer but might be mathematically quite close. This is why I chose to include that grid picture with my example because it demonstrates what small changes around fixed values can do. The ‘AI art process’ is a lot of this, looking for interesting seeds and then iteratively exploring around them with slight variations. The degree of fault on that xformers thing was generally within this range.

@tributary I’m really not here to argue philosophical things like ‘the value of art’ or what machine intelligence is compared to human intelligence (the ‘it doesn’t understand’ raised frequently in the thread). AI is a terrible term that we’ve just ended up stuck with for legacy reasons, but it tends to send these discussions off on tangents. My point was that many (maybe all) processes are replicable in theory, but the practicality is variable (taken out to the extremes, if we’re doing philosophical wanking, you get ‘does free will exist or are we just executing eons-old chemical reactions writ large?’, etc).

I’m not sure I’m totally convinced that the steps a person takes using AI software are inherently less valuable than the steps someone takes using Photoshop (and again, what if you use BOTH?). That doesn’t mean that I’m against ethical standards for the models, but I’m also not convinced that even the ‘careless’ ones like SD are really egregious ‘theft’ as they exist (finetune models are a different question altogether). They’re certainly no moreso than the work of patreon fan artists who sell work of copyrighted characters (and who are a LARGE part of the force advocating against AI).

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

This ties in with something that I think most folks don’t realize about AI. It’s not ACTUALLY generating something original. Two people on different computers using the same prompt with the same seed value(*) will get the EXACT SAME response - word-for-word, pixel-for-pixel. This is one reason why AI-generated works can’t themselves be copyrighted.

Technical caveat: depending on the settings, this isn’t always true. Some setups or techniques will make outputs non-reproducible (or more accurately, practically non-reproducible unless you can replicate the entire state of the machine at the time of image creation, including hardware). Early xformers library for SD was an example of this. Interestingly, techniques that cause this problem (you want reproducibility because determinism improves your results) are performance-enhancing ones; xformers is an NVIDIA optimization. Performance is always going to be desirable, so it’s not unclear that branches of development might not pursue this kind of technology.

It will be interesting to see how the legal stuff shakes out in the long term, because I don’t see that this division is clear cut. If you replicated an artist’s exact steps, you could also replicate their art pixel-for-pixel. It’s impractical for a painter, sure: we’re bad at fluid dynamics, so this would be akin to knowing the exact hardware state above. But there are plenty of all-digital artists nowadays. Replicating PS work is trivial. In fact, the software is already keeping a record of the steps required to generate the pixels, and you can step back and forth through them with undo-redo. Isn’t that the same thing?

At what point is the # of steps taken by an ‘AI artist’ to generate a unique interesting result sufficient to represent ‘creativity’?

@Rinel Where’s it’s nose? In fact, it doesn’t even have a head, it’s just one big lump. How is this Pikachu in any way other than a distant, vague, 2nd hand understanding of the concept? Percentage wise, its less Pikachu than the AI one.

(And to be clear: No, I cannot draw better. But that isn’t the argument here. I’m just unclear why your failures are less significant than a missing tail.)

But really, I don’t know how to engage with this and I’m going to stop here. You’re just… confidently wrong, here. The AI can make the thing. You said the MS paint doodle would be recognizable as the subject and AI couldn’t produce it at all. But it did. So you switch to critiquing single small elements, even when the subjects are clear, and even when your drawing fails to have 100% of the elements either. If you look through the grid, all the concepts you’re talking about are there. I’m not your employee so I’m not interested in getting you a ‘good enough’ picture, but those concepts are there. AI may not ‘understand’, but the tokens pikachu, jedi, lightsaber, moon, Earth, crown, cape, when passed through CLIP, correspond to vectors in the latent space. That is its equivalent of understanding.

Fnal question: if there was a cheap IP-stealing Chinese mobile game that wanted Jedi Pikachu artwork, which of the two would they pick? Pretty obviously not yours, right?

@Coin said in AI Megathread:

Photoshop already integrated some AI stuff into its latest, IIRC. You can have photoshop essentially “finish” or “expand” art so that it fills out what’s missing past the edges of a picture. Lol. It’s wild.

This is called outpainting in Stable Diffusion (vs inpainting, which is replacing an element inside the image, as I did with Pikachu’s 3rd ear->crown). Photoshop has it’s own ‘Generative Fill’ which is an outpainting process on its own in-house model. It also has plugins for SD and DALL-E integration. These will automate passing selections back and forth to the AI software (which is sensitive to image dimensions, the plugins help with this).

100%, this stuff is going to become a standard part of a professional Photoshop workflow, if it already isn’t. Especially with how fast it can do some tasks that used to be either time consuming or inaccurate under prior algorithmic automation.

Re: AI’s shitposting on forums, Reddit is way ahead of us!

And war? Without getting into the grim realities of a present conflict, I instead refer to a classic ‘Simpsons did it’: https://youtu.be/qEvTlARQJAY?t=203

@Rinel Lol, OK. So obviously we’re into extreme bad faith territory here.

That took me maybe 10 minutes to do. And most of that was the usual multitasking of change settings->look at something else while images generate->look at results , change settings, repeat. The 36 image grid took ~5 minutes, so I left the computer. That’s the point. You want to bang on ‘oh my god, it added an ear, it didn’t have a tail, it doesn’t understaaaaand’. I fixed the ear instantly (again, no photoshop - I just put a blob over the ear and told it ‘crown instead, plz’). I could obviously add a fucking tail. I’m not going to do more because it’s pretty clear I could give you the Picasso of Pikachu vs. Darth Maulard and you’d complain about a single pixel.

Even though your goalpost was ‘MS paint doodle.’ Lets see your doodle so we can critique it.

There’s a lot of casual dismissal of the tech here, which is fine I guess, you’re entitled to your opinions. They won’t change the people who are going to be (or already are) out of jobs for this stuff. It’s not going to completely erase humans (that’s a straw man no one is suggesting), but when a human using these tools is as productive as a dozen without it, then you don’t have to pay 11 humans. And that’s tangentially what you saw in the D&D case: someone who found it useful, due to their workload and time constraints, to use the tool to finish a project for a deadline. They got caught, but the lesson won’t be ‘don’t use AI’ it will be ‘let’s make sure we use better looking AI.’

@Rinel said in AI Megathread:

You cannot make Midjourney (or Stable Diffusion, or any other model currently available to the public) generate an image of Pikachu, wearing a crown and royal cape, in a lightsaber duel on the moon with an angry duck. I can draw that in MS Paint, and people will know what is happening in the image, even though I cannot draw.

Spoiler

I think that’s a few steps up from MS paint doodle?

That’s a pure text prompt. Obviously it has some issues, that are pretty easy to fix, also still in stable diffusion (although arguably some of this would be faster/better in Photoshop - I could generate a couple hundred images to get the lightsabers right, but with photoshop you’d just make some slight hand adjustments):

Spoiler

Bonus! What it looks like in the early stages, iterating through minor variations. Sometimes there’s a human! Or a giant bird monster! It was giving me occasional anime waifus with feathers as well until I negative prompted for it.

Spoiler

Maybe you can’t do it in Midjourney. I don’t know. That’s a bot meant to feed people very specific output that will look a certain way so they’ll pay for it. But if you’re willing to get into the tech, it can do a lot. And the advanced tools just take it further. For instance, you could use ControlNet to actually ‘pose’ these, if you wanted.

@Faraday Yeah, I saw. They also had a previous book called out (for weird 3D porn looking art) and they… made a statement and apologized and went on to do this. So we’ll see!

@Rinel They don’t have to steal data. They can just… get people to consent to scans (which will be far more exhaustive and better for training than random scraping). Maybe even pay them a pittance!

The point was that they have the resources to do it, and are simultaneously one of the major movers behind the technology. The idea that the data necessary to generate convincing people is hard to acquire is just… it’s not The movie industry ‘scan extras’ thing was being done for other reasons, not because it’s hard to find humans. I would assume they probably already have it available; Google’s AI models are not based on the broad, wild-west scraping that Stable Diffusion is.

@SpaceKhomeini Yes. If people are reading this as… pro big business, I have no idea how.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@bored said in AI Megathread:

Are we fans of the DMCA now?

There’s certainly room to improve copyright laws, but am I a fan of the broad principles behind it? Of protecting creators’ work? Absolutely.

Principles are great. But what actually happens when the government intervenes to protect stakeholders from technology? At no point is the answer ‘the little guy profits.’ (See, for instance, DMCAs against youtubers).

I don’t just mean they’re dumb on principle, I mean they’re dumb logically and artistically. They’re parrots who don’t understand the world they’re parroting. They don’t understand jack about the human experience.

Be that as it may, artists are clearly threatened by them. And I can see why.

Working with a home install on consumer-grade gaming hardware, I can with a bit of learning and small amount of effort and generate images that are arguably more aesthetically pleasing than most amateur humans, in what is probably a hundredth of the time, with much closer control than I’d get trying to communicate needs to an artist and going through a revision process. For me, this is just fun to play around with, yet I see how that could be immensely valuable to a lot of people. AI can’t replace top 20% human creative talent, maybe, but I think it will obliterate vast midrange of it. I started this tangent with the largest company in our hobby selling a 60 dollar hardcover book with AI art. That’s where we’re at. I thought it was interesting, anyway.

@Faraday

I agree large rightsholders pushing is the only way those legal chances happen. I am extremely dubious that this somehow yields an ‘ethical’ outcome. Are we fans of the DMCA now?

If generative AI becomes subject to proof of ownership of your training data, then it will just become de facto the exclusive tool of large tech and media companies that already own that data (or who can encourage you to sign away your rights to it as a part of their services, or just purchase it). Subsequently, everyone who wants to use it will be paying for their services. Google and Meta and Disney win, not John StockModel or Jane FanArtist. At best, they’ll be given the option to sign over their work forever, for very small payouts.

And it’s fundamentally worse than any of the analogy cases because once you have your model, you genuinely never need those models or artists again. That’s why the tech is worth it. It’s pointless if you owe royalties. Even if it wins a court case, Getty will lose (or realistically, sell the data while it’s still worth anything): Google scanned the planet, it can generate new training data if it has to. The actors strike will settle, they’ll give up their Bond villain position as a negotiating point and just generate novel fake humans instead of buying someone’s face. The tech is so transformative that anyone who thinks they can fight it is just going to get run over.

@Faraday There will be a legal shake-out, for sure. I’m not optimistic that starving artists (a group not traditionally known for their ability to afford expensive lobbyists) are going to win, though. While Midjourney is a bit of a black box (given their for-profit model), the idea of figuring out valid royalties for Stable Diffusion’s training data is getting into counting grains of sand on the beach territory. Given the open-source nature and proliferation of descendant models… what can you do? The only answer is to ban the technology completely outside of… approved, licensed models, which would almost certainly just be MORE of a corporate coup as ownership of those big data sets will become prized.

I brought this one up because I think the Hasbro stuff is an interesting case of it being mainstreamed and placed into the professional space (And its RPGs. Exactly what we discuss here.) Notably, the book has artist credits! These are a bunch of regular WotC contributors, and the art is in familiar styles (although also, the artist whose work it most looks like is not in the credits). Something got arranged here. Some people got paid. But maybe not all the people. WoTC presumably owns the rights to every bit of D&D and (vastly more) MTG art. That is a big enough set to train on. They’re probably not paying most of those people.

There will be laws for all this stuff eventually, but the idea that the creative industries come out on top seems very slim. Copywriting is already essentially being annihilated as a profession. I don’t see how it goes any other way.

As not to pollute the other thread, in regards to MUs becoming heavily reliant on AI:

The official RPGs are doing it, so why shouldn’t you?! Hasbro has announced AI DMs as an upcoming feature for D&D Beyond, and they were just caught using AI generated art in their newest upcoming/just releasing book, with some pretty blatantly poor looking results.

That’s to say nothing of the major film industry strikes right now being triggered by studios wanting to replace writers with AI and digitally catalogue extras so they can deepfake them for eternity.

Thrash and struggle as we may, but this is the world we live in now.

You can definitely improve your work by providing GPT with the text you have written, which will serve as the input for the editing process. (Requisite ‘I had ChatGPT edit my post for me’ joke. In this case, I let it fix absurdly bad grammar. Input: “Edit this into better language please: you can for sure get GPT to make some good edit on your work if you give it them things you did wrote first as what goes inside!”)

While the ChatGPT interface is designed for chatbot-style exchange, the underlying model (GPT-3/4) still involves feeding inputs through functions with parameters to generate a given output. You can give it anything for a prompt and ask for any length of output (or let it decide how much to give you), and you can control, in numerical terms, how much the input and output are correlated. If you set it to discard all but the most likely probabilities, you can get something that will resemble your initial text very closely (or exactly). Thus, while it isn’t going word by word or sentence by sentence and fixing things, it is instead creating a ‘novel’ text that may be 99% similar to the original.

This is easier to demonstrate with image generating AI, as they can operate with a text prompt or with another image. So you can ask for a dog, or you can give it a dog and ask it for a 95% similar dog. This is useful in photo editing as a blend pass on what would have previously been ‘obvious shops.’ But the idea is pretty much the same.