If AI was this wonderful, amazing thing, that is so much better than artists and developers and voice actors, that results in a better product, then surely we'd see organic demand for it? Surely there'd be comments everywhere from players demanding AI generated elements from game developers, right?

Tim Swindle cryarsing about AI disclosure being a scarlet letter lets slip something significant here, because if AI was all that slop jockeys claim it was, then surely such a disclosure would be a mark of pride, even a selling point! Surely people would be clamouring for AI games. But they're not.

Remember this? @aickmanwill.bsky.social and I are making a neat-looking comic, first issue now available digital and physical 😎 I'm exploring ways of having it more accessible; like next digital issues with reduced prices, and possibly as free webcomic in the future. Would you be into that?

Apart from anything else, AI is not a tool for creativity: in art, in writing, its function is to prevent you from exercising your creativity. It is, itself, a barrier to entry, nudging you away from participating in culture and towards prompting an algorithm to participate for you.

Creating is the best part of doing stuff. 99% of those who use AI are bypassing the fun part, it means they never cared about creation, so when they say "it unlocks creativity" it just means "it allows me to roleplay as a creative person"

I was lucky enough to get an original copy of Burzok's back when it was first on sale and have thought about it once a week or so ever since. Don't let this unexpected second bite at the apple pass you by!

Departing for Thrax.

There's an interesting discussion about the latest addition to the GOG preservation program (Thief), as people are realizing that all GOG does is add a few fan patches and mods to games that already work fine. They are not interested in preserving anything that would require *actual* effort.

So you want to pay artists less (or not at all), while offloading creativity to the big AI machine huh? What a flex.

Down North, the rebels may have acquired an old Imperial weapon. The 'Double-Edged-Sword' is a powerful but delicate relic, for one in ten shots may result in the user and arm's own combustion... And there are not many left. Find out soon, in the second issue!

Fuck you old man, it's all of us or none of us

ENTROPY is our child of love, and it's getting so much of our passion and ideas poured into it that I REALLY hope you will give our demo a chance, so it could possibly speak to you and your tastes -- both in gameplay and storytelling! steamcommunity.com/app/3940340/...

ICYM!

They're telling me you can grab a copy of me and @aickmanwill.bsky.social's new comic's first issue! Also Book of Fuligin and some other goodies. Now at DCAF, via @strangers.bsky.social!

Do I just repost this every time someone brings up Mieville or…

Just saw a thread recommending "great modern adventure games" where 80% of the listed titles released a decade ago or longer. One came out in 2003.

I hear it’s a day to celebrate science fantasy with hokey old religions and blasters and swords and giant space monsters and maudlin androids

My favorite character design micro-genre? Science fiction Debbie Harry

"Who ben alle þese folke? Whider gon þey? Abydeþ ye, seist þou me þat lady is to washtubbe y-wedded? O, if ich hadde ned to witen alle þis he scholde it han put in booke"--Guy who skipped Chaucer's general prologue to get to the real story

Trans people deserve compassion, comradeship and now fierce advocacy. Transphobia is a social illness; societally embarrassing, unscientific, antisocial, failing to improve human happiness. Oppose it where you find it, either in yourself or others.

I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED

Help me out with a quick comics poll. Repost this If you prefer physical comics. Like this if you prefer digital comics. Rely to this if you love both..

Started reading a novella by a multi-award-winning author put out last year by a major publisher and already came across "you're" for "your" and "enervated" for "invigorated." So that's going back to the library.

wow that's the best your graphics cards can do?

lots of work to make difficult traversal feel natural, fraught and fun. the player controls which direction emmer faces, so you have to rotate her to walk across narrow stretches.

Mervyn Peake. His Gormenghast trilogy had a huge impact upon me as a teenager. I was lost in his gothic labyrinth for many years.

Oh, my heart. Once in a while at least the best things *do* happen

sorry this is so bleak. such a bizarre & unjust situation for so many ppl to be stuck in www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

Fuck this shit

BREAKING — 51 Iranian children are dead after a strike hits Minab girls elementary school in Iran.

My review of Daymare Town, the latest first-person point-and-click phantasmagoria by Mateusz Skutnik. A gorgeously weird and captivating sojourn through a creepy pen-and-ink fugue state, full of uniquely odd creatures and surreal settings. adventuregamehotspot.com/review/5634/...

Sorry to get radical but I don’t think it’s my job or yours to embrace, accept, understand - and certainly not to use - the thing being sold to us as AI. I don’t like any part of it, so I won’t. I’m missing out? Good, that’s what I want. You’re worried about me missing out? That’s fuckin weird, man.

When I read a piece of contemporary SFF, and it feels like something is wrong with it, it's more often than not that feels like the wrong length. Sometimes a novel feels too stretched and spread out, but I've also often had that sense that a novella was a novel overly stripped down.

If I don't follow an account but have seen their stuff reposted enough times that I've learned who they are I mute em on principle. Can't trust somebody with that kind of mass appeal

Finally got around to watching The Turin Horse. Captivating, like all Tarr's work, but little real connection to the supposed source material. Hardly anything ties the horse of the title to the story in question, and what's more, Glaurung never even shows up.

Grocery store was out of platybelodon meat again

"But I can't afford to hire a human artist for my business!" Then you can't afford a business.

If you're looking to support preservation (and want free games) you'd do much better to look at organizations like the VGHF. Or hey I also do preservation and I hate AI. Any lil support is always appreciated https://ko-fi.com/thegenesistemple

Their handling of the Devotion fiasco soured me on GOG a long time ago, but I always kinda hoped they'd turn it around. Seems unlikely at this point!

steerpike

So #GOG is lying to you about their use AI. They've now been caught using AI images at least twice recently, with a possible 3rd coming in their patron cancellation survey. 'WIP' that was never removed? How about the last use of AI? Was that WIP too? Let's dig...

I've been baffled by many weird choices by GOG over the last few months, but this one takes the cake. AI art for a sale banner??

ICE has now carried out two summary executions of innocent people in the streets of an American city. If you work for ICE, there's no denying that's the mission you're supporting now. You don't get to claim in one year or ten or twenty that you didn't know what ICE was doing. You're complicit.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station, the adventure game my team and I've been crafting for the past 4 years, is OUT NOW!! And look, I even got you a weekend so you can play it. store.steampowered.com/app/2088810/...

Just struck me that Tolkien might have intended the name "Wormtongue" to carry a somewhat different connotation in a milieu where dragons are established as uncannily dangerous and cunning speakers.

In solidarity with today's ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA blackout, MinnMax is donating $1 to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota for every share of this Bluesky post for the next hour.

I reviewed Perfect Tides: Station to Station, developed by @meredithgran.com, a brilliant and heartbreaking exploration of youth, time, and the process of growing into oneself, and a game of the year frontrunner in January. Don't dare miss it.