Today’s deck is the Pasta Tarot (EYYYYYYYY)
I love its texture, actually.
Today’s reading feels like it’s telling me that I’m close to the end of whatever overwhelming rut I’m stuck in.
As you might guess from the very brief summary, I’m still settling down into a normal pace. So no lesson today either.
I noticed I had a small pimple on my upper lip near my nose and that’s as good a sign as any that the stress “broke”. The spot is interesting though, before I finally got my ears checked (thanks to L may I add) they tended to pop up on the inside of my outer ear and it was HELL.
There isn’t much novelty today, but in the good way where it’s less stress causing an mental gap and more me just taking it easy and tuning the fuck out.
I did have Japanese lesson and I did groceries on the way back, but didn’t do anything special outside of that.
I got a book called Complete Starter Guide to Whittling (the one that showed how to make the chain I tried to make) and one detail I like is how it’s basically designed thinking about someone that only has an old Victorinox multitool and wants to try things out. It describes how to modify a blade to make it fit for woodcarving compared to how it usually comes out of the factory, and more importantly how to achieve that with just some sandpaper.
Oh yeah, the other thing that comes to mind was that I remembered that ages ago (two years ago I wanna say?) I tried one of those AI Art thingies out of curiosity and it was interesting because it felt… Mathematically bland, like, bland in the most “we averaged a bunch of pics into something” way.
Of course there’s extra things at play also, like how unreliable it is for consistency, or how bland the angles it produces are, but it all goes back to how… soulless it is because so much of what makes art appealing is rooted in in imperfection.
Reminds me of Medaka Box, where Medaka was able to play the drums expertly the first time but it was so perfect that it lacked actual artistic punch.
A good example that comes to mind is Ringo Sheena, her style of singing (Tsumi to Batsu always comes to mind obviously) is the sort of thing that even more legitimate forms of synthetized voice like Vocaloid just can’t replicate. It’s going out of tune strategically for effect.
Anyway, I bring this up because for a long ass while I forgot to the fucking AI thingy was a subscription model, so I just had a bunch of the whatever tokens it has and I decided to burn them making some pics.
And it’s amazing how, despite how advanced it’s gotten, it remains so… soulless.
But what does “soul” entail here? Well, let me put an example with a game I like called “毒リンゴの美味しい食べ方-ヲタ女子たちのスケベライフ-“.
The game was released in 2021 and this is one of the event CGs from the base game.
But then in 2022 an update was released and you can just FEEL the improvement in the art.
The same circle released a new game this year called アットアット, and the thing is not just the technical improvement, but the honing of preferences. In the interim between games the circle has released a lot of sets specifically focused on “girls with bangs” for example.
And while we’re at it アットアット actually has a shockingly diverse range of bodies and you can tell that the art style has also been honed SPECIFICALLY to be able to depict those body type variations effectively.
Incidentally, apparently アットアット used AI for some of the background assets… which are blurry as-is so…
Sidenote, it makes me think how the most powerful type of “diversity for diversity’s sake” is the “I wanna fuck those too” kind.
For contrast, here’s a random bunch of pics from The Burning of Tokens.
Yeah, I have a Type, shut up.
I’ll admit that the model has advanced (I remember when I first tried it, the penises were only fed with censored dicks which made the results hilarious), and I’ll even admit that if I saw one of these pics on their own while scrolling I WOULD feel compelled to stop scrolling… but that’s where it ends. It’s discardable by design.
Even if hypothetically you could polish away all the odds and ends, the result still lacks that specific “sicko is being pushed into making things by their unbridled lust” element.
In fact… IN FACT… THIS sicko right here cannot get his kicks properly. The prompt was supposed to be for Loli Kyonyuu for those and there’s zero indication that that’s the case. The second one MAYBE? But there’s not enough going on to properly sell that it’s that and give me my supposed money’s worth. No computer nor amount of tags can replicate the cocktail of perversion that goes into properly producing that sort of thing.
As a contrasting example of what I mean (and after about half an hour trying to pick a single example) here’s one from Kyonyuu Quest Gaiden 2.5 that sells exactly what I mean.
Ironically, the aggressively sanded off element is a telling “style” that AI Art cannot shake off even now.
But let me bring up another contrasting example.
These are assorted CGs from 勇者と邪神のデスティニー.
I’m not going to say that the art is traditionally magnificent, it’s rough and the author was clearly still learning the ropes… and I love it all the more for it.
This person wanted to make this game so hard, so badly, that the drive pushed them to follow the path even if the anatomy looked a bit odd here and there.
Because here’s the thing: The passion (or lust, or whatever other feeling) shines through, the intent overwrites any other inhibition and it seeps through every other aspect of it all.
It’s no surprise that the people that champion AI Art tend to be the type that are like What If You Could Consume More completely oblivious to the fact that the act of making a thing is pleasurable unto itself. The type that insist Togashi should just let someone else finish Hunter x Hunter because they’re more concerned about Consuming their IP rather than the fact that an artist is proud and protective of their own creation.
I’m gonna be honest, I do like to mess around with AI models every so often specifically because it adds fuel to that flame in my heart of “even my chicken scratches are better than this bullshit”.
It’s like that one TikTok comment that’s like “AI accidentally proves the human soul exists by showing what things look like without it”.
…man, I missed having the brainpower to go into insane rants where I use porn as a means to ramble about human connections.
My sleep schedule is slipping more and more into its Inverted Stage and I feel like I should just let it and ride it out.