rhapsodyxvi

[rhapsodyxvi]

So I started playing Ace Attorney but I accidentally started with the third game, Trials and Tribulations, and played the first case (Turnabout Memories) before realizing my mistake – but I did think, at the time, that it was a brilliant and daring design choice to start you out as Mia Fey, Phoenix’s mentor, in flashback, and play has her against several condescending, infantilizing, or even outright sexist court personnel in a drama that just so happens to feature the cool lawyer guy on the box in the most pathetic and embarrassing state imaginable before you even get to play as him. But then that “first” mission dovetailed into the actual first mission from the first game (The First Turnabout) perfectly, because Turnabout Memories is more or less a fanservice recreation and expansion of that first case, but by playing them in opposite order and immediately in sequence, it comes off instead as seeing right away via timeskip just how well that blubbering idiot you helped can handle himself in a court of law now, thanks to Mia’s tutelage – which is itself a continuation of Grossberg’s, as experienced prior. And every note is there, right down to your mentor getting stressed out to the point of exacerbating a medical condition, and opposing the same loser prosecutor.

And then the second case from the first game (Turnabout Sisters), of course, is about the death of Mia Fey that was foreshadowed at the end of Turnabout Memories, making it the first case where you (the player, mechanically) and Pheonix Wright (the character, narratively) are effectively on your own. You (as Pheonix) finally meet Grossberg again, and his staunch refusal to assist in the case is only made more concerning and significant by your firsthand experience playing as Mia under his wing in Turnabout Memories as the “first’ case, and you wonder immediately about their falling out. Maya’s introduction also keeps Mia in the world (including somewhat literally) by revealing more about the Fey family and Mia’s history, relationships, and legacy, and the thing is that I do have to say that playing Turnabout Memories first and getting that experience as Mia, and seeing her as a flawed and insecure rookie fighting for the win before we see her as the effortlessly cool and confident mentor figure, made for a much more narratively satisfying death of a woman than I think it would have been otherwise. You even get a line from Edgeworth in Turnabout Sisters where he calls Pheonix out for using “Mia’s style” of cross-examination – what he calls cowardly nitpicking of perfectly fine testimonies isn’t just how Pheonix does it narratively, it’s how you (the player) do it as the core mechanic of the game, because it’s how Mia does it, and while she is your guide in The First Turnabout, playing as Mia before you play as Pheonix and doing the same thing shows you firsthand that she’s taught him so well that even the prosecution can see it.

This accidental play-order of Turnabout Memories before The First Turnabout and Turnabout Sisters shows off an invaluable amount of Mia Fey’s character, agency, and development that combine to make her feel like the main character for a perfect and holistic three-act introduction to the series, where it doesn’t feel like Pheonix truly “takes over” until Turnabout Samurai – in which he literally does, in fact, take over the law office with Maya as his assistant. It left such a massive impression on me – much more of an impression, I think, that the intended play-order would, which I don’t think does Mia Fey a total disservice at all, but definitely relegates her to a relatively more one-dimensional mentor figure in Pheonix’s shadow for almost the entirety of her short on-screen lifespan if you don’t have the experience of playing as her in Turnabout Memories first. You as the player develop a much richer relationship to Mia that makes her death in Turnabout Sisters feel so much more personal, and the stakes of cracking the case so much more significant. It just enhances her character, and her role in these two cases, immeasurably.

And I mentioned it earlier, but it can’t be said enough that the player’s relationship to Pheonix benefits from this play-order, too – it’s because of Mia that he goes from the sobbing idiot who ate a bottle of poison on the witness stand for a girl who tried frame him for murder into the hotshot rookie lawyer through which you (the player) get to ask Mia for help during the trial in the first place! And she gives you that help because she has been in this same position herself and understands completely! You (the player) were there! The First Turnabout is also, honestly, kind of an underhand toss after Turnabout Memories (it's literally the first ever case so of course it's easy), but it only benefits the pacing of this play-order to have it as a second act before the much more complicated Turnabout Sisters. And when you, the player, are on your own after Turnabout Sisters and have to start Turnabout Samurai without her help, the only way that I can describe it is that you feel ready to make Mia proud.

[rhapsodyxvi]

We go forward.

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[rhapsodyxvi]

I wanted to show off my process on this D&D character I made with chatGPT, step by step

This took me several hours to make

Ethics notes:

For the fabric swaths I used fabrics off of google. In the future I will use fabric uploaded to sites that are in the public domain.

I also created this with the training data turned off, so any reference images I used were not used to train the AI. Turning off training data locks the chat into the chat alone.

Above is the finished project.

Below the read more, you'll see the majority of the process used to create this image. The full conversation with chat is around 50 pages, so I'll just post the highlights here.

First I started with the basic sketch, simple axolotl person

Next, we made her a mage

Next I gave the AI this fabric to work with for her cloak

And that resulted in this

Next we started working on the color

Next I gave the AI the fabric for the hat

And I gave what I wanted to be in the crystal ball

And I asked the AI to make her a little cuter. I think the word 'cuter' resulted in a complete redo of the art style.

After spending some time getting the art style back, we got the background involved, the story is set in a post apocalypse, I wanted to do a water color background

Next, finishing details, a dagger and a bell and some birds in the crystal ball. The results were a bit awkward.

Finally, I added a bit of glow and made the face cuter, smoothed out the more awkward details and I tattered the robes.

This took me somewhere between 4 and 5 hours to make and something like 50 pages of reading to achieve.

For the D&D nerds, her name is Ayula. She's a triton celestial warlock and her patron is a servant of Celestian the Sky Wanderer. Her game took place east of the sword coast on an island called Alaron. I'm thrilled I could bring her to life.

[rhapsodyxvi]

do you need to at minimum be friends with someone to start to date them?

[rhapsodyxvi]

be careful what you wish for

[rhapsodyxvi]

When you find yourself somewhere new, roll+sharp. On a hit, you can ask the MC questions. Whenever you act on one of the MC’s answers, take +1. On a 10+, ask 3. On a 7–9, ask 1: • How do I work this? • Where is that large automobile? • What is that beautiful house? • Where does that highway go to? • Am I right? Am I wrong? • My God! What have I done? On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but the water holds you down.

[rhapsodyxvi]

reverse suicide note where everyone you write on it dies

[rhapsodyxvi]

One thing I’ve noticed about AI users is that they are completely repulsed by the notion of feeling bad or frustrated for even the slightest moment

[rhapsodyxvi]

putting in my two cents to say as well that

a) yes, getting better at something does inevitably include some amount of discomfort and frustration, but also

b) i do not think that avoiding discomfort is something to be looked down on.

i've spent over 15 years doing manual art. my grasp on anatomy is still not where i want it to be. no matter what i do, i can't understand it. i've tried tutorial after tutorial, i've waited, i've gotten advice, it's never worked. i cannot do it by myself. i cannot force myself to understand, to be able to execute it in a way that makes me happy.

i do not like that feeling. i do not look forward to that feeling, to being frustrated and feeling incompetent because of my inability to get to where i want to be, knowing that even after all this time, i'm still struggling. again, i've been at this for 15 years! i've experienced the growing pains, over and over! it's hurt plenty of times before, and honestly, i'm tired of banging my head against a wall! and for my own mental health, i have to accept that i will not get to where i want to be. not without hurting myself.

but because art is too important for me to simply give up and move onto another hobby, i deal with that by using tools that understand anatomy for me. and that is not a bad thing. using a tool to help assuage that self-loathing, that discomfort, is not a bad thing. my hobbies shouldn't hurt me!

and i'm kind of tired of people putting their own suffering on a pedestal in order to say that they should. i am not a thing that hurts so other people can look at what my pain made and clap. i do not need to be in pain to create. i shouldn't have to be. i've done my time.

One thing I’ve noticed about AI users is that they are completely repulsed by the notion of feeling bad or frustrated for even the slightest moment

[rhapsodyxvi]

People put a lot of stock on tumblrs lack of algorithm as one of the features that makes it superior to other social networks. The whole idea that you get your dash with perfectly chronological post as they are being posted exclusively from the people you follow. With no curation or suggestion or input from the website itself (unless you include the for you tab but who even uses that)

But i think there also something to be said about the varied diet that tumblr offers in terms of posts. You will get paragraph long effort posts and videos and fanart and comic pages and short shitpost and screencaps and many other different formats side by side in a ways that i genuenly think no other website achieves with the same level of unpredictable variance.

[rhapsodyxvi]

still thinking about that r/hypotheticalsituation post where someone was like "what if a potato chip spawned somewhere randomly in the world. and every hour the number of potato chips at that location would double. and the only way to get rid of them for good would be to eat all of the potato chips before they doubled again." and someone calculated that it would only take like, 48 hours of people ignoring a weird pile of potato chips before an absolutely irreconcilable number of potato chips was blanketing a city.

and then people were like "no wait if it spawns randomly in the world, it's highly likely it would be in an ocean" and then people were debating whether there were enough small fish swimming at the surface in the open ocean that would be able to eat a potato chip and thus save humanity from the potato chip apocalypse.

[rhapsodyxvi]

you get to cut one basic need out of your life. you can still CHOOSE to partake in them and they will feel as good and refreshing as normal, but going without will no longer affect you negatively.

[rhapsodyxvi]

My newest song collaboration with Itoki Hana has been released.

Please watch the video. It was created by Bani-chan (who created UNDERTALE fan animations a long time ago) entirely by herself over a period of two years. I’m extremely proud of this.

(Warning: Contains graphic imagery.)

[rhapsodyxvi]

as someone who does both AI and manual art, i've noticed that there's a sort of bell curve going on that looks like this:

which is to say, with manual art, being a beginner is generally going to look "worse" than being a beginner with ai or synth art, where everything fits what the cultural idea of "perfection" is. when it comes to manual art, you're learning how to make things look better, make more sense, and eventually, look more unique. you want to carve out your own space and find out what elements appeal to you.

when it comes to being serious about AI art, the interesting thing is that some of these factors are reversed. much of my experience with AI art has been learning to make things look worse, to pull out of that perfection.

here's a comparison shot of various AI and manual works i've done:

and you can see what i'm trying to achieve here, right? there's surely tons of mistakes in any one of these, things that don't look right, but i like those parts of it. in fact, here's some of my earlier forays into ai art:

(can you believe how ecstatic i was to learn that novelai could do sketches? i remember showing some of these to my partner and going "look! it can do textured, messy lines!")

you might say "but rhapsody, a lot of people who are really skilled at prompting and inpainting still want to make really technically perfect stuff." and you're right, and that's fair! so do a lot of people who do manual art primarily!

but i think there's also a shell to be broken there for a lot of people, because once you spend enough time reveling in how you can make something beautiful and perfect, eventually, you're going to want to make it yours. as AI art becomes more accessible and the backlash dies down, i hope to see a lot more unique art. :)

[rhapsodyxvi]

[rhapsodyxvi]

[rhapsodyxvi]

"the painting shows a person sitting in a room with a sword"