>I'm getting overwhelmed with AI being injected everywhere. >Time to touch grass. >Literally go across the world to Shanghai, China. >AI is here too. >There is no escape.

Test post from China

Hey y'all. I'm leaving to Shanghai, China. Won't have Internet access, so I'm not ignoring any commissions DMs.

October Update Progress has been slow. Just admitting it outright. Work has been whipping me and eating lots of my time, same with my familial commitments. Unfortunate, but it is what it is. I have been working with Monogatari, but have hit a snag - performance issues. I wasn't expecting to hit this snag so soon, I was just moving around animated sprites and found it to be chuggy. Hrmm. That's not good. And then when I started to automatically start audio playback, it doesn't - and requires the user to click a button that says "Click to enable audio playback". Which completely defeats the point that I was trying to use the built-in WebView control rather than bundling CEF in an electron application. Bah! What I'm going to do is try and recreate what I've got right now in Godot engine, using Dialogix, and see if it presents the same issues. If it does, then it's my fault for moving big textures around. If it doesn't, then I'll proceed with using Godot over Monogatari. If it's any consolation, it's possible that using Godot may result in just a better experience for desktop and mobile users anyway. Godot is actually quite the nice engine, and it'll be what I'm going with for other things, so I might as well give it a serious spin for this. I initially tried out doing animated portraits through Live2D, and while that does have a lot of potential, I'm not entirely sure I'll continue using them. It's quite a lot of effort to make a Live2D scene (basically a vtuber model if we're being honest) that's able to express a complete set of emotions and expressions that one would expect from the equivalent complete set of visual novel portraits, and it would look a bit weird to only have the main cast animated so, even as they talk with an interact with side characters. Oh well. Still, this is a proof-of-concept that I might use elsewhere, animate CGs or similar with Live2D and import those either in-engine or rendered as video to be played as a cutscene. I'm heading to Shanghai, China to immerse myself a little bit more with the culture and scenery, hoping to take lots of photos of the landscape while I'm there visiting extended family. I hope to make updates more often. ;-; In the meantime, have a looksie at the test animated portrait, animated by parcival_vt

Doing some Godot shader tests. Goal is to cut a hole through the wall when the wall obscures the player and things nearby in third-person camera mode. It's okay. Shout out to @KenneyNL for their amazing Modular Dungeon Asset pack. It's good!

Call-out post for Brainless Phoebes. I commissioned and paid for artwork that you never delivered on, and never got back to me no matter how many times I messaged you, including when I emailed you too. ..... Hey, if you're reading this, no hard feelings. I hope you're okay. Stay safe. I hope you're safe.

People don't really trust Twitter/X as a platform. I can tell, because in quite a few of my DMs with artists for commissions, they direct me off-site, to continue the conversation there. Usually on Discord, Telegram, etc. Well. When I see people getting banned left, right, and center, without rhyme or reason ... When I see the response from support being "X reserves the right to ban accounts for any or no reason whatsoever." ... Who in their right mind would trust this platform?

I remember when I started making this I thought to myself: "Pssh, it's just a door - how complicated could it possibly be?" Well. Fudge. The player can finally open the door. None of the NPCs can yet. Doors are hard!

I was halfway through negotiating a commission with an artist who seemed nice Suddenly "This user is suspended from using X Chat" THEY GOT SUSPENDED MID CHAT WITH ME No! No! My peak! Their peak! No!

Question for artists, composers, and content creators alike that take commissions: Do you want people who commission you for work to be publicly posting "I commissioned this person (at them)" or would you instead prefer to be more quietly listed in the credits?

Amazing things can happen when one touches grass. I should do that more often.

My time has come, apparently. I was commenting and replying too much. Too terminally online. I need to touch grass more.

Ah, Godot. You and your random errors. In which scene? Who knows. Which node? Who knows. Which script? Who knows. Will I fix it? Who knows.

AI has been an absolute catastrophe for searching for inspiration/references. The slop is everywhere, thrown about like litter. It clogs the waterways, it stagnates ecosystems. Awful. Just awful.

I like how if you bookmark a post and put it in a folder and then the account is suspended, you get a "the account is suspended" entry, without the ability to unbookmark that post. It's stuck there. Like a tombstone. This would be fine except now it's clogging my bookmarks.

Looks like the bug in Twitter chat has been resolved, so now I can get back to the artists who were wondering about updates from me - thanks for your patience if that's you.

Info: There's a bug in the Twitter chats, so nothing's showing for me~! If a chat is encrypted (and almost all of them are!) they are not visible - so if I'm not replying, it's not because I'm ghosting you! Hopefully they'll fix this soon (what a pain!)

Still working on my TCOAAL fangame, I am hoping it'll be okay with the IP guidelines yet to come out. So far, I have the following disclaimer: This is a collaborative fanwork, designed to pay respects to the game known as The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is published by Kit9 Studio and is unaffiliated with this project. All visual assets herein are created from the community\'s artists and are original works. Music you may hear is hosted on Youtube, played through the Youtube IFrame API. This fanwork does not seek to compete with nor replace its inspiring title. As a fanwork, this is distinctly non-canon. Please view this as an interactive fanfiction. Which hopefully, will be okay with Kit9 and team. I'm about halfway through development of the first day of chapter one. Sadly, I've lost my background artist, so I might just have to crack out Blender and quickly sketch something up as an alternative. #tcoaal

Ah, looks like the background artist I was working with has left the Internet for real - their account just reads "[NULL]" now. A shame. I had even paid them, but they never finished even a single piece for me. It wasn't meant to be, I guess.

Man, I don't get why people reply to me, rebuking me and telling me that I'm wrong then blocking me before I can get a chance to ask for more information or evidence It gives the wrong impression that I'm not interested in the conversation and no-one can see that they blocked me