Texture/material creation is fun :3 I’ve got a few tileable procedural material projects I need to finish sometime when I have the time… But seeing it come together is always nice

And yeah, quite a few AAA games have been caught using AI art (multiple times) and had some large backlash too which is comforting

Art is being hit quite hard to be honest… It’ll still exist as a hobby, but as a career it’s getting harder to get into as more and more companies are replacing it with AI.

Look at Nvidia constantly trying to improve their AI to make game-ready 3D assets. It’s not totally there yet, but they’re determined to do so… So not even 3D art is safe. And that just means in the future everyone’s going to be paying same full price for games that visually and coding-wise has been made with AI. Same price, significantly less quality

I just pray they don’t manage to get it 100% replacement, but I’m also not holding my breath anymore…

It does comfort me that there is a lot of backlash to AI art in games for now… I just hope it doesn’t become normalised and more accepted over the years.

I feel the same… 6 years spent on 2 degrees to get into game development, and as soon as I graduate from the last one, the aftermath of COVID and then AI burn the industry and cause it to be nearly impossible to get into for the average junior and layoffs are increasing each year… Then people say we gotta just “deal with it and stop complaining” 🙄

I’m tired of it all

Yep… It should be no surprise to anyone that the US-based far-right Christian group “ADF” has been pumping in £millions into the UK to fund anti-trans and anti-abortion lobbying and court cases (including the Supreme Court ruling on trans rights)… And have also been pumping money into UK law, and recently into the far-right Reform party who have argued against our current abortion rights laws (and Farage also previously having spoken with disdain on gay rights 🙄). Gotta love foreign interference in our politics, and in broad daylight.

The ADF was also the group responsible for the overturning of Roe V Wade and removing women’s constitutional right to abortion in the US… Go figure

More people need to be aware that the same people pushing for more and more restrictive laws on trans people, aren’t even hiding their motive to do the same for women as a whole - in fact they’ve already been doing so.

It’s easier to convince the public to remove a large group of people’s rights, once you’ve already set the precedent that it’s okay to take rights away from a different group. That’s why they first target the smaller more vulnerable group that’s has significantly less, if no voice in politics.

Trans rights are also deeply rooted in rights to Bodily Autonomy as deeply recognised by Women’s rights law organisations

It’s just sad that some women don’t realise they’re attacking the exact people who would be standing by their side when their rights are being threatened…

I’m still going to continue being vocal about women’s rights, especially when they start properly going after abortion rights… I just wish it was mutual :/

Nooo they took the fox’s orange! 😭

The mythical speedrun strats!

Yeah exactly! I’ve always tried to be mindful that not everyone who has possibly transphobic views are necessarily a “transphobe”, and may just be someone that’s misinformed… in an information bubble that’s designed from the start to be against us.

I’ve always been open to talking with people who are a bit “eh” on it, and always try to be respectful… As long as they can do the same. I feel as though a lot of people are willing to listen, and even if they don’t immediately agree with everything, it still helps to introduce a different perspective and new information that they can think on and further look into in the future.

The entire topic is tangled in hatred, suspicion and purposeful dehumanisation of us… It can be hard for the average person to untangle from that if it’s all the info they know, so we have to reconnect on a human level

If everyone is immediately prickly when someone says something misguided, it won’t solve anything, it just drives us all further into our own echo chambers… Though I can understand why some are immediately prickly to transphobic comments… We deal with enough abuse that it can get too much and defensive walls get built to protect ourselves. It’s why we need cis allies to speak out more alongside us because the trans community can’t be the only ones standing up against this billionaire-funded behemoth of a campaign… It just won’t work out. I love stuff like the Not in Our Name collective in the UK for this same reason, it just needs a more attention as most don’t know of it.

Those driving this hate campaign want us to not talk to each other, and look at each other from large deep chasms, because that’s how they drive the wedge further in. So I try to communicate with those at least willing to have a civil conversation even if it may be a bit uncomfortable sometimes.

Of course, if someone is just straight up an a-hole and it’s clear they aren’t willing to be civil and want to just hate and attack, then yeah they are definitely a transphobe and I just stay clear of them lol

Also sorry for the long rambles - I’m prone to it sometimes 😅

Doubt it, at least as the tansphobic right continue trying to restrict rights, and the people who thought they were safe from it suddenly find themselves othered. Such as if a terf athlete suddenly found out she had the SRY, or XY chromosomes (via one of the intersex varieties), and are suddenly banned from the sports she thought she was allowed into… I wouldn’t wish anyone to have to deal with that, despite how many of them are pushing that exact thing… But I doubt they’d be able to just shrug it off if it started to effect them because of the erosion of rights they thought they were safe from.

Sadly some people don’t care about, or at the very least don’t keep up with news on, the erosion of minority rights if they’re secluded from it… Until they suddenly find themselves in the minority

Very true, though I think it would bring a lot more people who are current fence-sitting, or just don’t know anything about trans people/healthcare and prone to fall for conservative lies, into the know on just how silly the transphobic rhetoric is

There will definitely still be a lot who will die on the hill they’ve created, or actively try to make up new lies or even just repeat their old ones with the large billionaire backing they have… Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing, as well as just the deep hatred they hold… But I’d hope it would at least make their bad faith arguments way less acceptable and fallen for by the average person.

I could also be just being hopelessly optimistic of an alternate timeline that won’t happen anyways… Who knows I guess

Goddd yes I wasn’t “straight As” but still passed majority of my school subject grades and did get full marks on my uni degrees, but I had kinda just… Floated through the entire segment of my life? “Disassociated” definitely works here. It was only after I had finished education entirely, finally got medicated to solve the constant ADHD noise, that the burnout kicked in. Still going through it tbh. But it also gave way for me to properly learn to accept myself and everything I had suppressed. Started playing with my appearance more, stopped worrying about what others think (well… sort of… I’m working on it still) and ultimately am happier with myself for it. I look at past photos of me, and my ID and see how miserable I looked and know that I need to get it updated and it would look so much less… empty in the eyes.

Positive praise and such I do love - but I’ve found I can’t properly express it outwardly in the moment? I think that’s to do with past stuff and still unravelling the emotional web that I used to suppress myself, and it’s roots… but we’re making progress slowly :3

100% this. I think this is why I’m always feeling a bit icky about the phrase “Not all men, but always a man” (and my feelings on the phrase isn’t a judgement on anyone that’s used it)…

I can see where it came from, as a counter to the “Not all men” folk shouting over the abused, but the "always a man" part, “always” being the issue, I fear may accidentally give a smokescreen for other abusers from other groups to hide behind, and I’d rather they also be pointed at and shamed regardless of the group they belong to (hell, just throw “mostly” infront of “always” and it solves the issue for me). I’ve been inappropriately touched by a woman (thankfully only happened once) as well another time with a dude customer who groped me in full display while I was cleaning a table while I was at work only, for the woman in his group to tell me to stop overreacting and “he’s just being nice” (of course, he was the physical abuser, but I still see her as actively complicit). It just kinda worries me when someone accidentally gives a blanket defense to non-men abusers with the phrase…

That being said, just so there’s no confusion for others, it’s still obviously correct to highlight that the majority of abuse does usually come from cis straight men and I’m not against pointing that out in the slightest ❤️ I still feel way more wary around men I don’t know than anyone else, which is unfortunate but due to past experiences… It’s just that one word in the phrase because of it possibly obscuring the bad actors in any other group. If anyone reading has suffered abuse (be you man, woman, enby etc), I’ll wholeheartedly stand with regardless of who it was that did the abuse.

I agree - and that’s not even a speculative possibility either, they’ve already started out in the open for everyone to see…

Look at the Olympics, they used to (without any issues) only require trans women to show 2 years on HRT in medical records, and a recent blood test showing hormone levels within average cis women ranges… Then after Trump and co, now that was scrapped. Now, they test for the SRY gene (a test that is widely condemned as disproportionate). This means anyone who has the SRY gene (which as far as I’m aware only activates once in the womb, and is what causes the development of male genitals) is immediately disqualified from taking part in women’s sports

This obviously targets trans women regardless of hormones and medical history, but also targets any cis woman who is found to have the SRY gene. It’s rarer, sure, and terfs would argue that can’t happen with their basic biology they learnt at 6yrs old… But it is possible for the SRY gene to translocate from the Y chromosome onto an X chromosome in the womb… Causing a cis woman who grew up her entire life as a woman with no difference in sex characteristics, with XX Chromosomes, to be found with the SRY gene even if it never activated during development… And the Olympics even recognised this, and just shrugged their shoulders. So in the eyes of the Olympic rules, they don’t even consider cis women who may have the gene (and be unknowingly intersex) to be eligible women. All for the sake of “fairness”

Honestly, I feel as though if we just mandated that everyone should have to get a chromosome test, there’ll be so many cis people who find out that they’re intersex that the whole culture war aimed at trans people falls apart because they no longer can stand on the pedestal of “the majority” and become so much more aware that sex and chromosomes aren’t as black and white (or bio-essentialist) as some may think…

Damn, obviously I’d pick the perfect transition… But knowing someone would inevitably pick the other, would I be able to get myself, friends and family out? :Pc

Or is this some weird monkey paw where I immediately transition perfectly only to seconds later find myself sinking to the bottom of the ocean? Hmm

Yeah I know that feeling, being the most motivated only by severe pressure of the quickly approaching deadline 😅 How I managed through uni with a good grade is beyond me sometimes lol. Meds helped a bit with that for me though

Yeah unfortunately 😭 just gotta stock up on the jokes for the real ones - or until the topic climate hopefully eases up in the future. Have a good library of gold at the ready!

I think it was just how you worded it originally that got people mistaken on what you meant haha. I at first assumed you meant the “don’t stop working” kind too… Unfortunately some people do have that way of thinking

But yeah skill development can be fun when we find the right ones for us. I’m an artist and do that in my day-to-day but I’ve always dipped into programming on and off through my life… I wanna soon put some proper effort into learning more than just the basics of a language (and without relying on vibe-coding).

It’s nice to have personal goals

Yep exactly! I used to feel guilty when I ever had a day where I did nothing other than eat, shower and game. Now, I look forward to it.

We all need our breaks to recover and recharge for the week ahead and society kinda tries to push us to feel bad about that.

Sometimes I’m working on a project or my job… Sometimes I’m working on/for myself. Still work, just the latter is paid in a different way ✨

Thanks for the censor, it still jumpscared me but it was easier to recover ❤️

Unfortunately, there’re a lot more UK rags owned by Murdoch than just that one :( and many others owned by other rightwing billionaires. It’s insane we have got to this point where our majority sources of our local news is mostly all foreign billionaire + politically captured

Lmao that was a good one

How I wish the average person would realise that they can still make jokes about trans people as you can about any group of people, just make jokes (like this) where it’s laughing with us, not at us. Where there’s no maliciousness and we’re all involved and laughing rather than being the butt of it.

Maybe someday we’ll properly get to that point. Thanks for the giggle :3

I can call you a dom but stop leaning on the switch, you’re turning the lights off :p