#imagemap

[joneswebgoods]

Generate Image Maps

If you're working on a website that needs an image map, you can try making one through www.image-map.net. The website offers an easy to use generator where you can upload your picture and add where you want to place the links. After you added your updates it'll then present you with the code that's associated with the same name as the picture you've uploaded.

This is a pretty useful tool, especially for websites that use interactive maps where you can click on the building/area and access more information about it.

[alliseearekingsandthieves]

Happily working on my League of Villains dress-up game and making Shigaraki the tutorial character is very fun because he bitches about not wanting to be the tutorial and then bitches every time you get something wrong. Impossible man.

[cleverwerewolfsalad]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI art has no anti-cooption immune system

TONIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality.

The ugliness of Myspace wasn't just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way (though it was that). Myspace's ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.

In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of "design democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily distinguished between parasitic commercializers.

The immediate predecessors to Myspace's ugliness-as-a-feature were the web, and desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding, the early web was positively bursting with individual personality. The early web balanced in an equilibrium between the plunder-friendliness of "view source" and the topsy-turvy design imperatives of web-based layout, which confounded both print designers (no fixed fonts! RGB colorspaces! dithering!) and even multimedia designers who'd cut their teeth on Hypercard and CD ROMs (no fixed layout!).

Before the web came desktop publishing, the million tractor-feed ransom notes combining Broderbund Print Shop fonts, joystick-edited pixel-art, and a cohort of enthusiasts ranging from punk zinesters to community newsletter publishers. As this work proliferated on coffee-shop counters and telephone poles, it was visibly, obviously distinct from the work produced by "real" designers – that is, designers who'd been a) trained and b) paid by a corporation to employ that training.

All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities – especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and culture would stagnate.

I started thinking about this 25 years ago, the first time I met William Gibson. I'd been assigned by the Globe and Mail to interview him for the launch of All Tomorrow's Parties:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

One of the questions I asked was about his famous aphorism, "The street finds its own use for things." Given how quickly each post-punk tendency had been absorbed by commercial culture, couldn't we say that "Madison Avenue finds its own use for the street"? His answer started me down a quarter-century of thinking and writing about this subject:

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock all represent an incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde – not just normies and squares, but also and especially enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you, and use you to sell stuff to normies and squares.

I think this is what drove a lot of people to 4chan (remember, before 4chan was famous for incubating neofascism, it was the birthplace of Anonymous): its shock culture, combined with a strong cultural norm of anonymity, made for a difficult-to-digest, thoroughly spiky morsel that resisted recommodification (for a while).

All of this brings me to AI art (or AI "art"). In his essay on the "eerieness" of AI art, Henry Farrell quotes Mark Fisher's "The Weird and the Eerie":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

"Eeriness" here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

When we contemplate "authentic" countercultural work – ransom-note DTP, the weird old web, seizure-inducing Myspace GIFs – it is arresting because the personality of the human entity responsible for it shines through. We might be able to recognize where that person ganked their source-viewed HTML or pixel-optimized GIF, but we can also make inferences about the emotional meaning of those choices. To see that work is to connect to a mind. That mind might not necessarily belong to someone you want to be friends with or ever meet in person, but it is unmistakably another person, and you can't help but learn something about yourself from the way that their work makes you feel.

This is why corporate work is so often called "soulless." The point of corporate art is to dress the artificial person of the corporation in the stolen skins of the humans it uses as its substrate. Corporations are potentially immortal, artificial colony organisms. They maintain the pretense of personality, but they have no mind, only action that is the crescendo of an orchestra of improvised instruments played by hundreds or thousands of employees and a handful of executives who are often working directly against one another:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

The corporation is – as Charlie Stross has it – the "slow AI" that is slowly converting our planet to the long-prophesied grey goo (or, more prosaically, wildfire ashes and boiled oceans). The real thing that is signified by CEOs' professed fears of runaway AI is runaway corporations. As Ted Chiang says, the experience of being nominally in charge of a corporation that refuses to do what you tell it to is the kind of thing that will give you nightmares about autonomous AI turning on its masters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

The job of corporate designers is to find the signifiers of authenticity and dress up the corporate entity's robotic imperatives in this stolen flesh. Everything about AI is done in service to this goal: the chatbots that replace customer service reps are meant to both perfectly mimic a real, competent corporate representative while also hewing perfectly to corporate policy, without ever betraying the real human frailties that none of us can escape.

In the same way, the shillbots that pretend to be corporate superfans online are supposed to perfectly amplify the corporate message, the slow AI's conception of its own virtues, without injecting their own off-script, potentially cringey enthusiasms.

The Hollywood writers' strike was, at root, about the studio execs' dream that they could convert the "insights" of focus groups and audience research into a perfect script, without having to go through a phalanx of lippy screenwriters who insisted on explaining why they think your idea is stupid. "Hey, nerd, make me another ET, except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars" is exactly how you prompt an AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Corporate design's job is to produce the seeming of intention without any intender. The "personality" we're meant to sense when we encounter corporate design isn't the designer's, nor the art director's, nor even the CEO's. The "personality" is meant to be the slow AI's, but a corporation doesn't have a personality.

In his 2018 short story "Noon in the antilibrary," Karl Schroeder describes an "antilibrary" as an endlessly deep anaerobic lagoon of generative botshit:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/18/104097/noon-in-the-antilibrary/

The antilibrary is a generative AI system that can produce entire librarys’-worth of fake books with fake authors, fake citations by other fake experts with their own fake books and biographies and fake social media accounts, on-demand and instantly. It was speculation in 2018; it’s possible now. Creating an antilibrary is just a matter of investing in a sufficient number of graphics cards and electricity.

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/after-the-internet

Reading Karl's reflections on the antilibrary crystallized something for me that I've been thinking about for a quarter-century, since I interviewed Gibson at the Penguin offices in north Toronto. It snapped something into place that I've trying to fit since encountering Henry's thoughts on the "eeriness" of AI work and the intent without an intender.

It made me realize why I dislike AI art so much, on a deep, aesthetic level. The point of an image generator is to buffer the intention of the prompter (which might be genuinely creative and bursting with personality) in layers of automated decision-making that flense the final product of any hint of the mind that caused its creation.

The most febrile, deeply weird and authentic prompts of the most excluded outsiders produce images that feel the same as the corporate AI illustrations that project the illusion of personality from the immortal, transhuman colony organism that is the limited liability corporation.

AI art is born coopted. Even the 4chan equivalent of AI – the deeply transgressive and immoral nonconsensual pornography – feels no different from the "official" AI porn churned out by "real" pornographers. "Shrimp Jesus" and other SEO-optimized Facebook slop is so uncanny because it is simultaneously "weird" ("that which does not belong") and yet it belongs in the same aesthetic bucket of the most anodyne Corporate Memphis ephemera:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

We call it "generative" but AI art can't generate the kind of turnover that aerates the aesthetic soil. An artform that can't be transgressive is sterile, stillborn, a dead end.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Jake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970s_fanzines_(21224199545).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[arcadekitten]

I'm trying to make a character select screen for a visual novel (similar to the one you have in Here For Sweethearts) and I can't figure out how to display that properly, was there any tutorials or anything you used for that?

Depends on what you wanna do! I used imagemaps for that, there's sure to be some tutorials on how they function!

If you want it to be EXACTLY like Here For Sweethearts (in that it can be updated with new chapters over time), you can check out my post on the lemma soft forums where I first asked for help on how to make the game! [https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?t=61970]

[skaruresonic]

imagemaps

rather than draw backgrounds, I made the backgrounds using SA2 textures

[l-amplights]

i funally got mediawiki to work i can finallybdo that project that required imagemaps

[curlybuttumbl]

Get BOOB-ie trapped

explanation below teehee

so me and a friend made a DIABOLICAL trap on my Minecraft server last night, and dubbed it "the BOOB-ie trap"

It's an imagemap of that one enderwoman from twitter at the bottom of a hole, that you're forced to look at for a few seconds before endermen named "the BOOB-ie trap" spawn in and kill you, so I decided to cook this up at like 3 AM lmfao

[unsettlingcreature]

i was gonna spend today doing some actual coding but instead i'm going to make like sixteen new imagemaps and completely revamp the character creator so. you know. that's how i'm doing.

[jaedoesart]

CodeDead is (almost) fully functional! I actually managed to get the investigation sequences to work (mostly) the way I want them to; the only thing left to do is make it so that when you're sent back to the imagemap after looking at something, it retains the position you were at when you left it. I have an idea of how to make this work, by setting a variable for your position every time you interact with an object, and having the xinitial of the imagemap linked to that variable. Is there an easier way to do this? Oh most certainly. But I'm too stupid to figure it out so I'm gonna try this first and hope it works the way I think it will. Wish me luck!

[futureworkplace]

Progress Update #4

What's Been Happening

To put it simply, I've just been working constantly on my game. I recently put in a couple of imagemaps for a few sections of the game, albeit in a drafty stage, and added more code for specific action and story direction. I've added more to my story tree as well, but I think there still needs to be more done.

What's Next?

More work. Not much more past that and not much less, I basically need to go into turbo mode and turn on all my creative fountains to get things done in time.

More story tree additions, more art, and more programming. Just more of everything at this point.

Hiccups, Hurdles and AHA! Moments

A hiccup I had was a power outage yesterday, hindering a lot of my progress and pushing my update back a day. I recovered mostly from it though.

A hurdle I came across, and may not be able to get around, is how to implement a "buff/debuff" system for the player. After toying around with the code, I have led myself to believe that there is no way to do it properly and it'd take either

A) A stronger, more versatile engine

B) A lot more complex coding

And I'm not sure I can do either of those options. In the end, I decided to remove the system and will be continuing development without it.

My biggest AHA! moment was figuring out how to program moving around the living space a player would be in and what it would look like. I created a floor plan for the area and made some pretty alright first drafts for the areas. I'll be linking a video that shows this.

Where I am on my Timeline

Definitely still very far behind. I haven't gotten ANY playtesting done, outside of my own personal playtesting to make sure code is functioning. As for the player experience, I have yet to find out if players would enjoy this game and the mechanics I have laid out. I'm planning on working hard enough that I will have something presentable at least within the week. If I don't, I think I'm going to have to downscale this deliverable once again to meet deadlines/what I want done, and I don't really want to do that.

Some Visual Documentation

Here's some BTS of me doing speed art for a single interactable background for the game. I can't upload more than one video, so here's what I've got

I haven't done the kitchen yet lol

[futuresoon]

coding is terrible. i spent an hour trying to make three buttons and i still don't have it. don't talk to me about imagemaps

[townofcrosshollow]

If anybody knows how to actually get responsive imagemaps working in Twine hmu

[randomthefox]

Thanks for playing my game :P I'm working on the full version now and I appreciate you taking the time to check it out!

Some bits and bobs:

>>I've set up variables on the imagemap so that you only need to look at a certain number of objects a certain number of times in order to trigger progression. You don't strictly need to see everything, but I'd like people to cuz I worked hard on those scenes lol. This technically means a player could examine the same flagged object multiple times and move on without having examined everything. Which, while not the "intended" way of playing, is an option I do want to keep available out of consideration for folks who just want to advance to the next segment. Eventually I will try to open up backtracking, so that folks will be able to see any dialogue they missed on any map.

>>Saving often is highly recommended. Thank God for RenPy's automatic saves.

>> Michael's last name is the same as the surname you enter for your doctor during the survey at the beginning of the game. Recall that the researcher claims his son was just playing there when you examine the toys on the lab floor.

(Also, the reason you always jump to the survey after starting the game is because the game will crash unless you define those variables.)

>>Examining the keyboard pulls up Maria, Michael, and Shadow's progress reports.

>>Examining the poster above the class schedule pulls up one of Shadow's failed assignments.

>>The reason you kept getting a B rank whenever you clicked on the GUN flyer in the classroom was because I accidentally left a hotspot open intended for battle testing, where you would automatically jump into a battle. I was using it to test the rank calculator. My bad lol.

>>If you select "I have Maria.", Shadow will recount a funny anecdote about not speaking to anyone for a week as a form of "meditation" and threaten to stuff Omochao back into his cardboard box.

>>If you wait before Shadow catches Omochao, you'll see Omochao slow down and fall.

>>Omochao has unique lines if you try to flee his battle.

>>I was already kind of frustrated with the 50% flee success rate, so I agree with your point about increasing it. I'm also considering increasing the enemy encounter probability on items to 2/3. Right now, they're all different.

>>You also, uh... kinda button-mashed through the tutorial section explaining that you shouldn't button-mash, or else the game will jump to the return label. It's not that big of a deal tbh, but I did try to include it as a warning. RenPy says you should anticipate people speedrunning your game, so that one is pretty much on me lol.

The way the battle loop is set up is so that RenPy doesn't skip over battles when you're inside the loop; it only ends when either you or the enemy die. But since the game doesn't remember your last action, you can't really roll back on a turn. I think if I implement some kind of way of disabling rollback within the battle loop, though, it'll fix the issue.

This is also why I took away auto and skip. Because again, clicking on unclickable parts of the map will jump you to the label that returns you to the title screen.

>>The reason the enemies outside of scripted encounters don't have animations yet is because there are 24 enemy configurations, meaning I'd have to write animations for each and copy-paste that stuff 24 times. I'll go back and do it eventually, just not right now lol. I was more focused on hammering out the details of the Flying Dog fight.

>>Antigravity is a wildcard effect that has a 1/3 chance of restoring you to full health, one-shot KO-ing the enemy, or resulting in a Game Over... during regular battle. It's not meant to be used in boss battles.

Because I didn't want folks to one-shot KO Flying Dog, I set up a variable where using Antigravity here will always result in a Game Over. But I haven't thoroughly tested the effects of Antigravity (because a lot of shit is happening on the screen), and so the Game Over effect sort of just looks like you jumped straight back to the title screen. In actuality, you hopped for a split second from Flying Dog to the Game Over screen, then to the title screen. Now I'm thinking Game Over could benefit from a disabled rollback too.

Plus, before you make your choice, Omochao warns you that using Antigravity could be dangerous.

>>What else? ...I'm planning on implementing an extra Chaos move, a shield ability that absorbs damage (AKA the enemy depletes 0 of your HP on their turn). This will probably come in handy later when bosses start hitting harder. Like Chaos Heal, it'll take two Chaos Drives.

>>I'm also planning on making an unlockable special boss as a reward for collecting 10 or more A ranks throughout the game (to get an A rank, you need to end battle with 90 HP or above). Hopefully this will incentivize regular battles and using Antigravity.

>You also, uh... kinda button-mashed through the tutorial section explaining that you shouldn't button-mash

I didn't intend to bug test the game, this is just naturally the way I interact with video games. And technology in general. By pushing the limits until it breaks lol.

Yeah I figure most of the ways the game kinda broke out was due to trying to get Renpy to function as a turn based RPG. Still very impressive for what you've managed to do with it so far, my meddling aside!

[arcadekitten]

You totally don't have to answer this if you don't want to- but I have a coding question for renpy! When it comes to your image buttons when choosing routes how did you position them? Even official renpy servers can't seem to help me haha

I don't use imagebuttons for that stuff, I use imagemaps!

I'll use the HFSH screens as an example

These are both completely flat images in the game. The first is the "ground" and the second is the "hover". There's tutorials about imagemaps that explain it better, but basically the "hover" areas will only appear on top of the "ground" image when hovered over!!

[skaruresonic]

Happy birthday ^^ may the birthday present be tons of inspiration and energy to work on your VN and gift us with the blorbos :D

Thanks ^^ The first draft is technically done, but the art and coding need tending to (slowly wading through it lol). Over the past few days, I've been considering simply releasing maybe a third of what was already a demo, since it's otherwise two hours long. o.o

Yesterday I did a stupid amount of coding to get Arthur's sprite to "breathe" in a realistic manner, on top of some other cool effects, by making a choice screen composed of moving images. I don't even wanna say how much time was spent on this one thing, because in the end the solution to the bugs turned out to be idiotically obvious, but still. xP

Only Random might get this since he's my playtester, but the choice of "left eye-right eye" has been changed from a text-based choice to an image-based one. Namely, if you hover your mouse over one of Arthur's eyes, it will play an animation of the knife tip encircling that eye. While he's breathing. no, I do not understand imagemaps, why do you ask