Henshin!

Meri, 27, very gay very fey
any and all pronouns are fine for me
I have a lot of special interests.

1:05 16 May 2023 9653

Picrews I use for online RPG

obi-troll-kenobi

 Got into online roleplaying? Your DM needs a character token and you want something else than google-searching random people’s art that may fit your character’s description? Or are you a DM looking for quick NPC tokens and portraits? Try these picrews!

(This is a completely personal post, my intention is to keep these as in-setting as possible so I’m omiting the overly simplistic styles and anime styles, especially that naime ones rarely have decent dark skin tones. I’m pretty sure there are tons of different amazing makers but I tried to cover those with fantasy options)

Special mention:

HEROFORGE - Free 3D miniature model creator for humanoids and anthros

Humanoid characters:

Baydews avatar maker V. 2.0 - Supports characters in fantasy settings. Supports heterochromia.

Tiefling maker - Great for characters in fantasy settings, not only for Tieflings!

Djarn’s character maker - No clothing choices for fantasy settings, but it’s a very detailed realistic portrait maker.

Bright’s picrew hell - A bit more cartoonish but has a lot of options for humans and fantasy creatures. Supports heterochromia.

Cute D&D character creator - Something more lighthearted if you want to see your OCs as cute chibis.

Murmur Character Creator - Not many fantasy options but it’s good for creating a nice character portrait.

Dragon Age elf/human maker - For fairly realistic fem elves and humans

The Dragon Prince Elf creator - The Dragon Prince style, elves/elvish characters, has horn options too. No clothings.

Hadingley Hill maker - medieval/renaissance portrait maker

Fantasy Icon Maker - For fantasy characters. Supports heterochromia.

Fantasy icon maker - another nice maker with many options

Fantasy girl - elvish/human fem characters

Fantasy Hero Creator - Simple maker bu has some nicely detailed elements

Female human&elf / Male human&elf - a detailed fantasy maker

Muscular female / Muscular male -  a detailed fantasy maker for buff characters

Fairytale duet M/M | F/F | F/M - Humans/elves, realistic skin tones only.

Mystical elf maker - Cute elf fem portrait maker

Elvish character creator - Elf fem. Limited for realistic skintones but nice clothing and background choices

AATAVEITH CHARACTER CREATOR - Human/elf fem. Natural human colors only but many clothing options.

Mermaid Maker - Fem mermaid or humanoid

Witch Doctor - Fem only

Victorian Steampunk Dressup - A detailed steampunk character maker

Elven Fashion - Fem elf only. Realistic skintones and some nice clothing.

Enchanter Maker - Fema elf/human

Deity maker - Lots of creative options for inhuman characters. Base/lineart only

Makowka character maker II - Not many fantasy option but ir’s a cool maker anyway

Nellseto’s maker - cute portrait maker

Black Centered Picrew - Very nice maker with huge variety of black haistyles

Wervty’s Chime Picrew - portrait

Wervty’s Gasp Chara Creator - waist up character

TTRPG Isometric Token - Full fantasy character token.Base/lineart only

TTRPG Portrait Token - Same as above but for character portraits. Base/lineart only

Sci-Fi fantasy portrait maker - Detailed fantasy and scifi/Star wars themed character portraits

portrait maker - masc postrait, very clean and nice artstyle but doesn’t have option for natural dark skintones

sci fi oc - Star Trek focused character maker

KorinMalin’s icon maker - humanoid portrait maker, natural skintones only

BunnyMoss’s OC Maker - Fantasy character maker

heads n shoulders - Fantasy-oriented, supports heterochromia and colored scleras.

fiammazzurra’s avatar maker - Supports heterochromia and colored scleras.

Nonhuman Creator - Fullbody chibi focused on non-human humanoids.

Cybebully Character Maker - Supports fantasy characters and colored scleras

Boy Time - Masc fantasy characters

A basic demon creator - Horned demonic character creator

Create A Cambion - another creator horned demonic species

Kaiju’s Character Maker - A simple fantasy-oriented maker

over the shoulder - portrait maker with tons of options

RPG Husband Generator - Fantasy-oriented muscular masc portrait

cute chubby maker - not many fantasy options but a good choice for fat characters

NuclearVessel’s OC Maker -  Humans/elves, lots of colorful skin tones.

Windswept Maker - Portrait creator with some fantasy options

Fantasy Character Maker 3000 - Detailed fantasy-oriented maker, but requires some manual adjustments.

KZ’s dolls - nice portrait maker with some fantasy options

Plant’s OC Creator - Nice variety of natural skintones and a few fantasy skintones. More modern clothing.

Androgynous picrew! - Fantasy characters with animal friends.

PotatoLord’s Persona Creator - Nice veriaty of options but no eye color customization.

Kavren Character Creator - Another cool picrew, but there aren’t many fantasy clothing options.

Pixel Fantasy Character - fantasy-oriented picrew for pixelart character portraits.

Mega Fantasy Creator - Extremely detailed fantasy-oriented maker with tons of options.

Forest Fairy - Fem fullbody with a nice choice of fantasy clothing

caramael’s character creator - colored scleras and fantasy-oriented clothing choices

longevity’s icon maker - double hair color options

Mad’s Character Creator 2.0 - Many fantasy options

Casual character creator - Includes unnatural skin colors and a nice variety of black hairstyles

character maker - nice character creator but there are no fantasy outfit options

Ultimate friend’s face maker - No elven ears option but lots of option for skin patterns and bicolor hair

Oldmaker Androgynous Picrew 2 - Newer version of androgynous picrew with more customization.

Fantasy OC Maker 4000 - Fantasy-oriented picrew with lots of customization

RPG Character Maker - Fantasy-oriented picrew

Non-humanoid characters:

Dracthyr Maker - For all your dragons and dragonkin

Dragon PNGtuber Base Generator - Dragon base/lineart only

DnD Frog Maker - Frog people

Catfolk Maker - Cat people

Dragonborn - dragon people

Wolf / werewolf designer - Wolf face portrait with many nice options

Werewolf - fantasy werewolf

Anthro character creator - Various animal people

Dragon -  Dragon base/lineart only

Dragon - Dragon portrait

Ruse’s NightWing Creator - fullbody dragon, dark colors only.

Animals:

Wolf&dog - Fluffy friend custimizable with apparel

felidaze’s cool cat creator - Cats with lots of options

Wolf Maker - simple wolf creator

My Froggie - Fantasy frogs

Mouse Warrior - For all you Mouseguard/Mausritter players!

RATS!! - Realistic rat portrait maker

gay rat maker - realistic fullbody rat with apparel

Mouse Guard Maker - Creator for Mouse Guard characters

Dream Horse Maker - Horses

Cat Maker - Cats

Avian Creator - Birds

Fantasy Bird Creator - birds

Realistic Goat maker - realistic goat with lots of options

serval creator - Serval portrait

kittycat maker (wip) - fullbody cat

horse - realistic horse portrait

Pigeon - Fullbody pigeon maker

Rat maker! - fullbody rat

Rats - Fullbody rat

Gecko maker - fullbody gecko

Doberman Maker - fullbody doberman dog

Fighting Cats - two fullbody realistic cats

Horsesona maker - fullbody horse/pony

natural cat maker - fullbody cat

Horsemaker - realistic fullbody horse

cat maker - fullbody cat

Cat - Fullbody cat with gear

Hoof & Antler - Fullbody deer

Kaylink’s Wolf Maker - old good fullbody wolf maker

Kaylink’s Fox Maker -  good old fullbody fox maker

Create a rat - fullbody rat

Create a cat - cat fullbody, portrait and pelt creator all in one


This is a resource for private online gaming between you and your friends, no commercial/advertisement usage!

1:04 16 May 2023 3572
crtter

Other cool aspects of sprite art seen through a CRT monitor: transparency REALLY looked transparent given the fuzz, as seen here on these palm trees from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (also note how much more harmonious the lighting on the palm trees look!)

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The natural rounded “warping” of a CRT TV screen also was taken into account to make “trippy” levels in games extra trippy! You can see the optical illusion effect made by the coloring choices in this stage of Life Force no matter if you look at the raw pixels or the screen, but its definitely emphasized on the latter.

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The fuzz and the more washed out coloring also served as what we’d call a “filter” today. It made relatively simple, “sharp” pixel art look much smoother, as if it the colors had been blended, achieving a distinctive faux 3D look seen here in Sonic & Knuckles and Zombies Ate My Neighbors. I personally love how the bricks look in the second one. They truly turn into a gradient!

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This same effect also made darker palettes look lighter! This one is Vagrant Story, for the PS1, for an example of how playing around with the “limitations” of CRT monitors effect was still in vogue even when 3D games became a thing.

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1:03 16 May 2023 69
dragongirltongue

As a dragon, whenever I see a ko6old url it is required that I click on it and see if I should follow. It's just how things work.

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dragongirltongue

The experts weigh in!

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1:01 16 May 2023 6995
ayeforscotland

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This is fucking embarrassing ‘journalism’ from the BBC.

Guy goes to an NHS doctor, flat-out states the nature of his investigation and gets behind the scenes information on assessments.

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Then he hits up three private clinics actively looking for an ADHD diagnosis, has his friends fill out witness forms, and is shocked when he receives a diagnosis.

An utter disgrace.

ayeforscotland

Turns out, if you go and lie about your symptoms, they’ll diagnose you.

Consider me fucking shocked.

headspace-hotel

thank you, random white man, for this insight on the condition known to be underdiagnosed in women and people of color

headspace-hotel

i found the article and it's like, comparing and contrasting private and public clinics I think? It's a little opaque to me (American) what the significance of this is

I'm not sure what the point of this was. Like, the article doesn't really even touch on what his methodology was—it doesn't actually state whether he was filling out the forms honestly, and knowing how an evaluation works and going into the evaluation with the goal of "demonstrating" something about an evaluation infuses inherent bias into everything

this is just yet another thing that serves to create paranoia about people getting prescribed stimulant meds. Something that, in the USA, is difficult to the point that it blocks people from obtaining the care that they need all the time, and i know in many other countries it's even harder

Like, why did he feel the need to do this to begin with. I'm sure that if he went to several different doctors trying to get a diagnosis of chronic constipation, he would get one, because listening to a patient when they bring a concern up to you is Your Job as a doctor

sluttypatrickstar

@headspace-hotel uk person checking in! when you go public for an adhd assessment, waiting lists are YEARS long with often no indication of when you'll finally be seen. thus, many people – who are desperate for care – will pay money (which you don't have to do for public healthcare) to go private.

so basically it's stigmatising people who were so desperate that they were willing to find £1,000 to get help.

headspace-hotel

So this asshole was actively taking precious opportunities and resources away from people who need them?

someonedm

Is your conclusion “he tried to prove that private clinics are bad, something something, less people will be able to go to private clinics for these resources as a result” or “he took 3 diagnoses in private clinics which could have been 3 other people’s diagnoses and resources”?

ayeforscotland

He seems to have bypassed the atrociously long waiting list for the NHS appointment - which he biased anyway by disclosing his investigation to the NHS doctor.

He then fabricated symptoms to three private clinics which require two other people to validate his symptoms - all in a bid to frame them as predatory.

This could have been an investigation into underfunding of the NHS and absurd waiting lines forcing people to use private clinics. Instead the story became ‘ADHD is a fun trend and you can just pay to get a diagnosis’.

It’s malicious journalism that casts doubt in the public’s mind. Some people are now not going to believe other people’s ADHD diagnosis on the back of it.

earhartsease

we also want to challenge his assumption that private clinics apparently taking less time to diagnose obvious adhd is a reflection on their lack of diligence - it's much more a reflection on how much more gatekeepy the nhs is encouraged to be, especially when it's about "invisible" or mental health or neurodivergent conditions (we had 11 hours of meetings before getting diagnosed autistic by the nhs at 55 - a diagnosis six different other autistic people had spotted right away)

you see this with gender care too, nhs gender care (assuming you ever make it to the top of a six year waiting list) is like "yes come and see us for a year before we'll consider hrt for you - but not if you're fat or have mental health conditions because fuck you" while private clinics are like "yes we confirm that you are trans, why on earth would we make you wait?"

ayeforscotland

Yeah, I wonder if the NHS considers the entire time from the start of assessment. Their ‘thorough assessment’ is someone else’s frequent misdiagnosis and the doctor even not believing them at face value.

0:58 16 May 2023 12642
penrosesun

You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.

Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”

Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.

I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones. 

Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.

bemusedlybespectacled

lawyer fun fact! sometimes you need to sue someone before your insurance will pay for your medical bills (because your insurance would rather the other person pay for your medical bills so they don’t have to)! sometimes you need to sue because what you’d get from insurance isn’t enough to pay for all of your medical bills! sometimes you want to change a specific thing, like a dangerous practice or defective part, and that’s not going to happen if you just ask nicely!

most truly ridiculous lawsuits get screened before they’re even filed (because someone goes to an attorney and that attorney is like “yeah you don’t have a case here”) or very shortly after they’re filed (because judges can toss out cases that have zero merit). 99% of the time, if it sounds ridiculous but somehow it went all the way to someone suing and winning in a jury trial, it probably wasn’t actually as absurd as it sounds.

0:56 16 May 2023 704
lesbianboyfriend

do u guys know about butch lesbians. incredible stuff going on there

0:56 16 May 2023 57575
gayestcowboy

non sexual nudity is fantastic and should not be treated like evil incarnate because it’s a basic part of human existence but don’t forget that sexual nudity is also rad as hell

20:14 15 May 2023 376
20:12 15 May 2023 32894
bucksboobs

Yes we need more chaste twee baby gay romances like heartstopper and yes we also need more shows where men fuck raw to express their love for one another like Élite and yes we need more toxic gays having hate sex like Interview with the Vampire and yes we need more incidental gay characters like the dads in cartoons like Owl House.

It's not a competition! It's a hoard and I'm like a gay little Smaug.

cir-c

the normalization of porn in mainstream media is a weird take to have

bucksboobs

Normalization of gay desire and yes, even gay sex, is paramount to gay liberation actually.

apelcini

see, the funny thing about that reply up there is that it assumes that porn is not normalized in mainstream media, when in fact there are many shows advertised on how steamy the hate sex between the male and female leads is, like those ads i keep seeing for “the company you keep”. straight porn in mainstream media IS ridiculously oversaturated, to the point that it’s messing people up. it’s so oversaturated and normalized because it’s not really viewed as inappropriate, it’s seen as just a natural thing two people do to show their love. one of the central tenets of homophobia is that gay desire is seen as shocking, unnatural, inappropriate. so no, we won’t have gay liberation until there’s more gay sex onscreen and it’s treated with the nuance and complexity that straight sex is.

9:35 15 May 2023 3040
nostalgebraist

Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

2:15 15 May 2023 301955
2:10 15 May 2023 33881
supermarketcrush

what's a book you read as a teenager that was so magical and personally profound to you it literally changed your life, doesnt matter if the book was actually well written or not. mine's probably the catcher in the rye

2:06 15 May 2023 4849
towerofglass

if your boss ain't lookin do a little nothin. treat yourself.

1:09 15 May 2023 104327
1:09 15 May 2023 132
onyxedskies

i thought too hard and now i think constance and ashe are foil characters

onyxedskies

but like. constance fell from grace as ashe rose to it. constance went mad trying to find a fix and ashe embraced the beauty of unpredictability and learned to accept whatever cards he was dealt. constance seeks to avenge her parents, while ashe keeps their legacy alive by upholding the ideals they taught him and remembering them through food and other familial/cultural traditions. constance has no one to care for nor to care for her, while ashe dedicates his being to find people to care for/be cared for by. ashe is grounded while constance is not - look at their canon classes, for example, as a sniper and a dark flier.

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