realdadaph - Tumblr blog

[realdadaph]

No to AI generated images, no to AI generated text, no to AI generated music, no to AI generated voices, no to AI generated games, no to AI generated videos, no to AI generated slop in all its forms. NO TO AI FUCKING SCRAPING I do not and will never consent to have my work used to train your fucking stealing plagiarism machines.

[realdadaph]

Corpo bullshit post if I ever saw one. If this is so fucking important for you, how about opt-in being the default. Or even better, help protecting users against scummy AI companies scraping and stealing our art? Fuck you!

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

[realdadaph]

My gf helped me make my character. Time to spend hundreds of hours in Baldur's Gate!

[realdadaph]

Replaying Heroes of Might and Magic 2

So I got the flu a couple of weeks back, and as I sit there trying to fill my days with Youtube, I stumble across this one talking about fheroes2, an open source recreation of Heroes of Might and Magic 2:

Heroes 2 is a game I got for Christmas of 1996. I was 14 and had just gotten a new PC and internet 10 days prior. Heroes 2 was a game that meant so much for me the next couple of years. On its own it was a great strategy game, but it also helped me bond with my friends over a game of Hot Seat. Me and my best friend were playing this game for thousands of hours the next years, until Heroes 3 came out. I also joined with the Heroes community on IRC (Undernet) as the first English speaking internet community I ever was a part of. I don't have contact with any of those people anymore, but it was some good times. I also remember spending half a year finishing the campaigns of the original game, and never beating the campaigns of the expansion pack, Price of Loyalty. Well, I decided to give the campaigns a try.

First I did the Evil campaign, which was surprisingly easy. I still remembered how to cheese the final map by carrying over an army from the previous mission, though Roland went a bit heavy on summoning elementals, so it was still a tight battle.

Good campaign next. Nothing too hard, but final map turned out to be an even bigger puzzle, as Archibald had too big of an army for me to beat when I got there. I ended up having to recruit a hero with navigation skills to get me there quicker, which was just enough for me to be able to capture the castle without taking the map the long tired way.

Price of Loyalty expansion pack next, I started with the titular campaign, which turned out to be easier than anticipated. At least until the very final map, which now, thanks to an improved AI who have learned to combine troops and use Dimension Door, kept taking all my cities with 800 bone dragons after just two weeks. Unwinnable? Seemingly... so I unfortunately gave up, and went on to the next one...

Voyage Home was a much quicker and dare I say easy campaign, with only 4 maps (final one being two alternate versions of the same, and you can only play one). I went the evil path and managed to win quick and easy. This one was alot of fun, possibly my favorite one!

Descendants next, another long campaign, and while certainly not as easy as Voyage Home, it wasn't too much of a challenge either. The final map had a lot of hide-and-seek gameplay with tough heroes, but the thing with Heroes is, once the snowball rolls in either direction, it's very hard to stop, so if you play aggressive from the start, winning is just a matter of time.

Now, the next campaign was called Wizard's Isle, the second of the Mini Campaigns, and this was so much fun! I can't even remember anything from the first couple of maps. They were fine and cool, but the final one was an adventure on a different level! I even had to restart it because I got wiped after 3 weeks on my first try, by a teleporting hero with a stack of doom. Familiar? Turns out, on my second go, that never happened, because it seems like the spells the enemy starts with, is randomized. Dimension Door just lets you teleport all over, and its perhaps the most broken spell in the game - at least in the early game. Had I just been unlucky on the previous campaign Price of Loyalty? I had to give it another go!

Turns out I had been somewhat unlucky, though at the very end of the map here, the bad guy still had Dimension Door, he just never left his home turf! And with a stack of almost 2000 Bone Dragons against my 100 Titans, I never had a chance. He would just catch up with me and murder me. I town portaled away and was just about to give up, when he escaped his homelands in a boat, and went straight towards my main city. I panicked, knew I had one shot at this. So I sent my main guy back there, avoiding his hero. Landed, took his towns. And as he was about to return, I put a guy on the teleporter, blocking him off. The strip of land is just far enough away for Dimension Door to not work, so he went back into the ship to head towards my main town. But as I moved the guy from the teleporter, he disembarked again. The AI was stuck in a loop! I kept moving the guy into the teleporter, then back, a couple of turns, until finally, I won!

Can I recommend Heroes 2? Absolutely! The fheroes2 recreation requires the original game(which is available on GoG if you don't have the CDs), it has smooth HD graphcis and some QoL improvements, like creature managements and quick combat. The game has aged gracefully, and in my opinion looks better than Heroes 3 does, thanks to the hand drawn colorful 2D graphics. Its a timeless and fun strategy game that triggers that "one more turn" feel, and while the expansion pack suffers from some balancing issues (like the final campaign map being much more difficult than intended), the base game is still a solid experience!

It kept me entertained during 3 weeks of the flu!

[realdadaph]

Oh, I made it to the best episode of Avatar!

[realdadaph]

Chun-Li (SF6 version)

Chun-Li was always my favorite character to play since SF2, so I just wanted to draw her in her new SF6 outfit.

[realdadaph]

D&D characer: KANK!

KANK! was a character I played in D&D5e for about a year. Unfortunately, our group disbanded due to covid, and I miss him dearly.

My Kenku Barbarian was a fun, but challenging character to play. Raised in a clan of thieves, young Kank was always too impatient to learn how to open treasures the proper way. He'd prefer an axe or a crowbar over a lockpick, thus gaining him the name KANK for the sound he made.

He raged so badly over a locked chest one day, the head of the tribe decided to kick him out, telling him to become like SHHH, his grandfather and legendary master burglar, but he'd have to find his way on his own.

Those who don't know about Kenkus: the race of crow people got a curse on them. They can't speak. They can't fly. And they can't think creatively. They're amazing copycats, though. I became the group's record player.

[realdadaph]

EverQuest memories

I played EQ from 2000 to around 2002 or so(Kunark-Planes of Power, Dadaph on the Luclin server), and I still occasionally pop into both p1999 green and the latest tlp server Yelinak for some casual lvling.

I love the game, story and atmosphere and memories.

So I wanted to explore that in a piece of fanart. This shows the game's mascot and boxart babe, Firiona Vie, standing in front of the East Commonlands tunnel, which is the main hub of the game, at least until the Luclin expansion hit. Also felt like adding some typical OOC dialogue you'd probably hear in that zone.

[realdadaph]

This one got WEIRD.

Background story: earlier this year, someone claimed to have found a secret door in the game Nier Automata (which is one of my all time favorite videogames).

A video would show a door in an area of the game that seemed to be built of paper, and the big mystery was of course, what was behind that door?

I tried to answer that with this sketchup...

[realdadaph]

Female Link escorting Prince Zeldo

Another one in my series of artwork with a female Link. Here I decided to go for a male Zelda. This picture is inspired by some artwork in the Link to the Past instruction manual, but completely redone.

[realdadaph]

Tower of Frozen Shadow

I don't care what anyone says. For a 22 year old game(EverQuest Scars of Velious, December 2000), this still looks amazing. Screenshot from the Yelinak server, though I also occasionally play p1999.

[realdadaph]

Testing

Just a test as I'm trying to figure out this platform... Here's a city I drafted for one of my D&D games a few years ago.