Me on the first date with @thomasthecat.bsky.social

The USS Telev, a second generation Trafalgar-class battlecruiser. Built in 2300s as tensions with the Romulan Star Empire were on the rise #StarTrek #StarTrekOnline @thomasthecat.bsky.social @counselor-sunna.bsky.social @stu1701.bsky.social @flothesnitchy.bsky.social

no one isn’t thinking about or invested in how to help students learn in an age where chatbot LLMs are ubiquitous. but when administrators who couldn’t tell you how RLHF works demand academics write statements of how excited they are to teach students how to use Gemini, yeah, academics will be mad

I think some people are missing the context of how much mandated “shove AI uncritically into all of your pedagogy” academics and educators are getting from administrators who themselves do not know the limitations (and even positive uses!) of this technology

The #StarTrek TOS writer of "Trouble With Tribbles" (and much more) needs some help this #Christmas gofund.me/c29e82796

Zym, son of T'ai, 2269. Zym - State Advisor, Warden of the First City and Treasurer to Chancellors L'Rell, Sturka and Kesh - was the intellectual power behind the Sturkan period of Governance, even if he opposed many of it's most notorious acts.

This is your annual reminder that dilithium crystals don’t power a warp drive in Star Trek! They regulate the massive energy released by a matter-antimatter reaction, created using deuterium harvested during travel. Kyber crystals, in the other hand…

I know it would’ve retconned a lot of EU stuff that was still “in play” at that point, but it would’ve been cool if they had said the shape-changing Zam Wessel was a Bothan.

John Williams also goes way harder on the score than anybody expected for a slapstick holiday movie. Also "Somewhere in My Memory"...

Slapstick aside, the script and plot of HOME ALONE are pretty carefully and thoughtfully constructed!

in light of game industry discourse this week - I am still very much looking for my next concept art/2D artist job! studios, if you care about human-made art and the creativity that fuels the bespoke games you create, then you can find my work here: mattjohnsillustration.com

"Something that I have found difficult for non-artists to understand is that the ‘early messy stuff’ that non-arty folks insist can be ‘fixed by a human artist later’ is where the best work is done." True of every creative field. You can't start building halfway up; the foundation has to be sound.

and tiny tim, who was NOT in the epstein files,

Brothers, sisters, neithers, and in betweens, I beseech thee, join the Moopsy Monotheism! We welcome all with cookies and bones! @counselor-sunna.bsky.social @thomasthecat.bsky.social please pass my gratitude to those who brought us the Moopsy hoodie

I'm an agnostic/atheist. I gave up on organized religion awhile ago because of trauma, etc. I have several close friends who are pastors. My brother is a chaplain. None of us are interested in a "debate" about God because what fucking point would it have.

everyday we drift further from the Iconian light

Just got followed by an account for a band that is clearly top to bottom AI. The music is AI. The videos are AI. The photos of the band members are photorealistic but AI. But you can buy their singles on iTunes!

If I had known the two paragraphs about genAI in my article today would be so controversial, I would have expanded them a bit! Here's a rough transcript of the relevant portion of my interview with Swen Vincke, so everyone has all the context. (Full article here: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...)

Sharing some of my thoughts from the other site but man I'm really pissed off about this shit.

"look we're not using AI in the final product we're just using it to speed up the conceptual stage" is what a lot of dopes affecting an enlightened middle position keep saying. I truly do not get that one. You hate imagining stuff? You don't like thinking and conceptualizing? Get a grip

It's also low-key notable that when pressed to describe how "AI" is useful in concrete terms, Vincke just describes web search circa 2010.

this is a good battle to pick. the CEO mentioned using "AI" and got so much shit for it immediately that he's rattled and backpedaling. easy win there

Ten years ago, I watched The Force Awakens for the first time. <3

Truly, about 3/4s of the things I *want* to do get cut for the sake of project scope, every time. Planning a novel, a game, a mod, a short film, or whatever, usually results in enough ideas to make 3-5 of them, and those get recycled later. I bet you could make a whole game with BG3's leftovers!

Larian: “We commissioned this creepy statue based on our torture orgy trailer because we value craft and human creativity.” Larian’s CEO: “I’m *pretty sure* that the world-class creatives that work for me don’t mind a robot barfing and shitting all over their world-class work.”

“More or less Ok” reads to me as “I won’t complain about it to my superiors otherwise I might lose my job”

Totally. "The use of generative AI has led to some pushback at Larian, “but I think at this point everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we’re using it,” More or less OK with it? I guarantee People are *resigned* to it because they see no way to actually entirely oust its use.

I do not know how CEOs cannot see that they are basically pushing people's faces into cake and then saying "haha but they love it"

everyone in the whole world except me hates uv unwrapping but i think it's fun it's like if tetris was evil

I think it's really important to keep imagining a better world. And that doesn't just mean wishing on a star aww how sweet, that means remembering that the way everything is shit right now is not written into immovable law. That means checking self and not believing so hard in the now as the always

There's the "I want shorter games worse graphics not kidding etc etc" phrase, how about "I want artists to be able to make mistakes and make weird unappealing shit sometimes and not starve"

Seeing people in the comments saying that To a T was unfun and essentially that he deserves this if he can't make a good game. Gamers, I don't know how else to say this, artists are not supposed to be punished with financial ruin for making imperfect art. That's such a fucked up idea you have

The #battletech Atlas.. when nothing less than utter stompy death will suffice! #atlas #mecha #giantrobot #mechwarrior #digitalpainting @battletechcomms.bsky.social

As art evolves, things change! I believe S4S6 was cut from the final edit - with just one shot of Klingon K't'ingas in formation. One detail I had to make sure I included was the arrowhead on Klingon disruptor fire, seen in Star Trek III. It ended up less clean than I'd've liked, though.

I'm glad we could honor both Bill Krause and Howie Day and show off the Shangri-La in this manner. Shoutout to Howie as well - I used a lot of his work as reference for look development as pre-production of the trailer was going on :)

I loved the use of the "loot critter" objects as mines in the start of this final scene.

Originally designed by Virtuos Games based on the Shepard-Class from Star Trek: Discovery (by John Eaves), the Kerala was a joint effort between myself, @scorpiondesign.bsky.social and Thomas to bring it to the final state it is in-game! Virtuos did an amazing job to start with, and we pushed it

Recently - in my personal time - I re-rendered all of these scenes with the new contemporary Daetra-Class Warbird by @scorpiondesign.bsky.social - a TMP-era Romulan Warbird exclusive to the new Legendary Last Stand Bundle. I dunno if it'll ever see the light of day though, haha - but have a tease.

Each scene in the trailer had a slightly different backdrop. We started with Earth, then deep space, now an asteroid field, and later a vaguely red nebula. The background of this scene took the most iteration. Asteroids were a simple-enough system, but Thomas wanted some dusty fog/haze

For the Ark Royal's fighter launch sequence, I modelled the shuttlebay interior which was also made available to captains of the Ark Royal in-game! The scatterpack shuttle scene was one of the most difficult for me - it took a lot of iteration to get the explosion to look right...

The Aurora-Class remaster was the very first ship I worked on for STO - designed and modelled by EC Henry, it allowed me to tackle the starship art pipeline with great haste. It was fun blowing it up, with SkyForge Films's wonderful explosion effects!

The wonderful TMP drydock model was made by Tobias Richter for this trailer. A late addition in the final trailer that I wanted and Thomas went with was the inclusion of the bundle-exclusive Theseus Prototype - designed by @scorpiondesign.bsky.social based on @idwpublishing.com 's work!

It's been almost a year since I worked on the trailer for the 15th Anniversary Classic Film Bundle for Star Trek Online, and it was extremely fun to do! I started my foray into official STO work with the tie-in series Ex Astris for STO and Spacedock, and this felt like myself coming full circle.

Still a fuckin' banger if I do say so myself. I wrote, directed, and edited it and @pundus.art did an incredible job animating it all with Blender. www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4GG...

An art trade with @theawkwardartist13.bsky.social ft her Star Trek OC Twelve with EMH. I'm having a whale of a time doing this piece

Doodles for fun. Essex Mk III-class Calypso concept.

AI has actively made life worse for literally everyone - tech is now more expensive - you cannot trust most media of reality anymore - programs barely function - energy prices - literal psychosis - your voice can be literally stolen for evil - more spyware but hey, you can avoid paying an artist.

Just me... Standing in front of a bunch of games I worked on, holding my Peabody award. NBD.

Ol' Pen & Ink from the archives. (1985)