Perhaps they’re just airbrushed artwork on top of the armor. It seems like the sort of sardonic thing that character would do.

Matt Ward is such an awful writer that exposure to his prose is an actual psychic damage hazard.

I think it’s something from an old Rogue Trader article? So it may be more a metacommentary from an old writer sort of thing, that Gothic would have been descended from Mandarin with a bunch of English vocabulary mixed in, albeit all unrecognizable after tens of thousands of years of sound changes.

Also the Emperor is from somewhere in what is now Turkey and canonically the most common language the humans speak (“Gothic”) is descended from Mandarin and is just artistically portrayed as being Latin based because “High Gothic” is supposed to scan as archaic in the way that inserting incorrect Latin into English does.

Canonically literally every Space Marine (except for the Blood Angels IIRC) should have dark skin when exposed to sunlight and then (except for the Salamanders) flash to an unnatural pallor when they step inside, because one of the mutations they get is photochromic skin to protect them from getting sunburns while still ensuring they get enough vitamin D. That sounds incredibly stupid and like I just made it up but that is the actual canon from the lore, along with Space Marines eating their enemies brains to gain their knowledge and having acid spit like the xenomorph.

Warhammer 40K is a very silly franchise and the art direction does it a disservice by not leaning into it more.

A lot of people here are missing the funniest thing about this: SAI is floundering, has lost most of its tech talent, and suffered hard to the double punch of SD3 sucking complete shit and Flux showing up like a month later and being everything people had expected SD3 to be but better. SAI has also been pivoting away from the open source release model that got them literally all of the attention they’ve gotten in the first place.

So it looks like James Cameron’s role with this would be trying to use his reputation to grift more investor money to keep the company that now doesn’t have the engineers responsible for all the popular Stable Diffusion models anymore afloat. I wonder if he knows he’s hopping onto a failing grift or if they’ve successfully tricked him into thinking there’s anything of value left in SAI?

The Elder Scrolls series, flaws and all, is generally better about applying magic to its world-building.

For the most part its worldbuilding is like the one thing The Elder Scrolls actually did really well (that and Morrowind’s aesthetic/art direction), at least in terms of the lore. Where it fails is translating that intricate, weird, well-thought-out worldbuilding into gameplay and storytelling.

Everyone I’ve ever known who played The Sims 4 basically just played it because WW is a thing, yeah lmao.

It was weirdly complex and could basically be summed up as “imagine if all the little side mechanics Sims 4 got from DLCs were actually fleshed out into full fledged mechanics with at least some content to them, it actively simulated the entire neighborhood at once which was also bigger and had more stuff in it, and its difficulty was curved a little more towards actually having to try a little like in earlier games.”

It also took forever to load and would actively break without a community patch to regularly fix and clean up invalid background simulation stuff because of compounding errors with said simulation, like background-simulated sims glitching into invalid positions and spamming pathfinding errors - the community patch ran a garbage collection script every in-game day to detect and fix those before they could get out of hand and it worked great. But apart from that it was really good and an iterative improvement over The Sims 2 which had been an iterative improvement over The Sims. It would have been amazing if The Sims 4 had just sort of cleaned it up and kept building on that complexity instead of rebuilding something simpler from the ground up and switching into a minimum-viable-product content churn forever because it’s sitting in a niche where it has no real competition at all.

Not even then, really. Everything in it is just so completely and utterly shallow even compared to comparable things in The Sims 3. It has a huge variety of things that do basically nothing with a core gameplay loop that’s even more of just a “passively win” idle game than the earlier games. I’ve pirated it a few times over the years to see what’s been added and it’s always just sort of disappointing and the new content is less interesting than it sounded like.

It’s really disappointing that they just kind of stripped down 3 and then just treaded water ever since instead of building on any of the mechanics 3 introduced.

“That lobster’s got what it takes to go straight to the top!”

“It is like… they have a CEO too!”

“Nooo, they have an internet funny man! Stop saying it’s a business!”

“The fish are doing market research!”

Huh, I must have either seen it posted somewhere before or it’s just reminding me of a different, similar scene in something else, because I haven’t read that.

What is that from? I feel like I’ve seen that page before but I don’t recognize the characters.

IIRC the book was better in that regard: there the poacher team were just like a pair of random dipshits who wanted to sell a baby T. Rex and get rich quick and the research expedition was some trust fund baby paleontologist’s ill-advised pet project. Like a lot of the same pieces are there, but they actually fit together in a way that makes sense instead of what genuinely seems like a bunch of changes to make even more things to sell as toys.

They did make him way too quaint and charming instead of casting/directing him as a sleezy dipshit, and it’s way too easy to sympathize with him after the whole “I just wanted everyone to see cool dinos and be happy” dialogue.

Honestly I don’t think it did a good job articulating that because it kind of gets lost in the “wow cool dino!” spectacle and in amongst the hi-tech sci-fi stuff. Like I can’t remember the book too clearly but I do remember it kind of lavishing on how cheaply made everything was and how it was falling apart even before the park opened and how shortsighted and naive the park designers were.

The movie kind of just established some of the “doing it wrong” stuff InGen did in building the park as conventions of its worldbuilding, like how they were relying on “cool hi-tech gadgets” that were fragile and needed electricity instead of just hiring a zoo engineer to tell them “yeah just make like a ditch and some concrete earthworks high enough that the large, mundane animal can’t just reach out or something, don’t waste money and power on a fragile little electric fence for no reason.”

I’ve wanted to do something like upload everything I’ve ever drawn and then train an AI to replicate my own technique. But the ethics behind setting a car on fire to save me 30~60 minutes of work isn’t something I’m interested in. Not to mention all the issues with copyright. Immediately my work will be paywalled. I won’t see a dime and the other user will be paying for something I’d give them for free.

What you’d want to do there is pick an open source model like SDXL or Flux and then train a LORA for it, which depending on your hardware you might be able to do locally in a couple of hours. There’s also sites you can pay to do the training for you for a dollar or so, like civitai, and you’d get the safetensor file and then be able to either make it free for download there or keep it private and distribute it however you like instead. With a small enough dataset it’s not that long or energy intensive a process and you would retain control of it yourself.

You would have to tag your images yourself in ways that the machine can process, though, and I don’t know anything about that. Some models want keyword salad and others want natural language descriptions, and I couldn’t tell you what the best practices for either are.

That’s not to actively encourage going and doing that, of course, I’m just saying it’s more accessible and efficient at a hobbyist scale these days than you’d think.

Yeah, like just looking at this in a vacuum the tech as it stands now could probably let a team of animators eschew the need to go and contract out other studios to do a bunch of extra grunt work like hand interpolating between keyframes, etc. In a better system that would be amazing because it would mean that artists could produce things without the need to subordinate so many others to their vision and without needing the sorts of institutional backing necessary to get all those extra hands involved, and that artists wouldn’t get stuck doing thankless grunt work for someone else like they do now.

But instead it’s used as a glorified gacha pull system for the worst people alive just hitting the treat button over and over, and when it does see corporate animation use it’ll be used to cut costs and pad exec salaries and investor profits instead of being used to pay artists better or allow artist-led projects to become more viable and prevalent. And that’s without getting into Hollywood’s interest in using it to make even shittier post production CGI effects for their ever worsening slop.