Lithnin

And I think this is true in general but now I'm talking about it in the context of AI.

If you don't enjoy making art and only care about the end piece and how it'll look and how much traction it"lol get online then making art is not something for you, find something you enjoy from start to finish.

Same goes for writing: if you do not enjoy writing and rewriting and then some more and instead want AI to write for you, being a writer is not something you should pursue.

Sure, not every part of creative process is going to be equally enjoyable but you should get satisfaction from solving the problems along the way and you should get a sense of accomplishment on your way of "making the piece yours" and you should have a sense of ownership once you are done.

What I don't like, and indeed most days am not Able to do, is actually sitting down and converting all my well organized ideas and decisions and worldbuilding into tens of thousands of words of prose. I just do not enjoy it at all; I find it tedious and unengaging and it usually feels like pulling teeth. And even if I Did enjoy it, my disabilities make it near impossible to do anything like that most days.

And AI mostly solves that problem for me! Why Wouldn't I want to use it? Why shouldn't I use an awesome new tool that lets me find joy in creating stories I would not otherwise be able to create? Why shouldn't I want to share those stories with people?

I just don't understand tumblr user's immediate and outraged response to someone doing something that they also enjoy, just because they're doing it in a different way. I mean, I know a large part of it is because we like to equate suffering and struggle with value, but like. Cmon guys. Lets stop acting protestant (and ableist) here.

Something being harder to do doesn't make it inherently better! Hard work purely for the sake of hard work is dumb and helps nobody; you shouldn't be railing against people just because they're choosing to take advantage of a tool that allows them to produce art that they otherwise wouldn't. Or even art that they Would have made, but this lets them make it more easily! That's awesome! Being able to create a story or a piece of visual art in a day when it would otherwise take a week is amazing! What's the downside here? More art? More varied art (because now its easier to experiment and try new things)?

Notably absent from OP's post is any explanation or indication as to why one needs to "enjoy every step." It's all pure assertion, a cavalcade of moralizing "should" statements that only carry weight for those who are already convinced that AI developers are a witches' coven. Any particular reason a creator shouldn't focus on the end product? Any explanation as to why solving "the problems along the way" are so strictly required for accomplishment and authorship? No, OP's just dictating how other artists should and shouldn't engage with the creative process, which ironically has the effect of flattening the wonderfully diverse methods of artistic creation into a single orthodox Proper Way To Do Things. Artists, writers, musicians don't owe you a particular artistic process, they can and should use what creative modes and tools they see fit, up to and including LLMs, because choosing what resources to use, and how, is a creative decision too.

Guess what? I like writing, start to finish. For me, it's perhaps the only art form that is true for. I avoid using LLMs for creative-writing tasks because I enjoy having maximal influence over every step of the process. Yet I can recognize that this is not true, or indeed possible, for every writer. My own use case makes LLMs an unpreferable tool to use. That doesn't mean I begrudge the tool itself, or the authors who do choose to make use of that medium. I'm capable of recognizing that different artists have different methods, and that is a beautiful truth that feeds into the variety of works humankind is able to create.

the thing about LLM technology is it's a tool, it's non-sentient, it only does what it is you tell it to do same as any other tool. using generative ai is not a collaboration with another person any more than other artistic uses of tools are collaborations. LLM technology is not comparable to a tattoo artist any more than a paintbrush is comparable to a tattoo artist. comparing tool usage to collaborating with another person is a false equivalent that only makes sense if your are needlessly anthropomorphizing the tool.

tools have always been used in art, and which tools are used have always changed and adapted as society progresses. if someone is an artistic photographer, would you tell them "but YOU didn't make the actual piece, you just fed your ideas into a camera and are claiming the result as your creation"? (this was a genuine argument made at the advent of photography as an artistic medium btw. these reactionary claims are historically circular).

and on the other hand, if someone makes art with a paint set they bought from a store, rather than mixing the paint from scratch themselves, is that not also a Collaboration between themselves and the anonymized workers who crafted their supplies for low wages? why is this not generally considered a collaboration that voids the painter's claims to sole ownership over their piece; but using an LLM (which, again, is not sentient) is a collaboration an account of the LLM "doing the work for you" (which, again, is not really how it works).

It's pretty fun, but would require a lot of work to add any amount of balance, especially when The Vision is that it would be a roguelite part-drafting FTL type of thing.

A few things that occurred to be during the prototyping:

It's fun to have two different modes for construction, "bolt" and "rebuild". When you're out and about, flying from planet to planet, you're using "bolt", attaching parts to your ship as well as you can, jettisoning things you no longer need to make space, trying not to unbalance it. But then you get to some kind of rest point, and you can take the whole ship apart to engineer it into the best version of itself. Like healing in Slay the Spire, but you're getting in the guts of the machine!

There's something really pleasing about polyominos, which is that they increase in complexity as you add in more squares. There are two shapes you can make with three squares, seven with four squares, and twelve with five squares.

It would be interesting to have the polyominoes have mechanical identity based on their shape. Storage is O-shaped, power is S-shaped, weapons systems are L-shaped, thrusters are T-shaped ... the problem with this approach is that if part of the gameplay is ship-balancing, we don't want there to be a "standard" ship. So probably three of the shapes are "core" predictable ones, cargo can be any shape, and then the other non-core functions? Mostly I like the idea of going from tertomino T-shape to pentomino T-shape.

Tiny little one-square or two-square shapes are good here as a method of balancing out the ship and making sure that aerodynamics are good? I'm thinking of them like little bonus pieces you're almost always happy to gobble up.

Shipbuilding will depend on tension, and if there's "aerodynamics", mass balancing, center-of-thrust vs. center-of-mass, then there can naturally be archetypes that arise from that, like aerodynamic "missions" or "events" or whatever, which you are either optimized for or not. All this would be for TBD gameplay, but I was working on the bones.

Center-of-mass, center-of-thrust, and aerodynamics are all somewhat unintuitive, particularly if the pieces have different weights to them, so this needs to be very clear in the UI when you're fiddling with ship design, super reactive to the player moving pieces around.

Aerodynamics is handled via rise-over-run along the left and right edges, and I don't know how to calculate that and show that calculation in a way that's instantly legible.

Once the bones are done, there are a lot of neat events you could do, things like adjacency buffs, debuffs that inflate a piece by a square, miniaturization that makes a piece smaller (but might unbalance the ship until reconfiguration), and stuff like that.

The Star Trek title card generator is over here:

The sitemaker (Josh Mayfield at https://bsky.app/profile/bean525.bsky.social) has asked for people to come in and kick its tires so he can work out any bugs they turn up. So do give him a hand, if you feel inclined. :)

(also, deeply amused by this one...)

Context for other users:

On the morning of April 7, 2026, a fire was started at the Kimberly-Clark Distribution Center in Ontario, California. It escalated to a six-alarm fire and took nearly twelve hours to extinguish. The facility was completely destroyed and declared a "total loss". There were no injuries or deaths. An employee who was working in the warehouse is accused of arson.

Authorities stated that the employee had shared videos of himself starting the fire on Facebook, saying "all you had to do was pay us enough to live" and "there goes your inventory" while lighting pallets of toilet paper ablaze.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS PAY US ENOUGH TO LIVE

No injuries. No deaths. This was a protest fire. This is why unions are important, to prevent frustrations like these, to ensure people are paid enough to live.

Then I went to go search Steam to see whether anyone had in fact done this, or made an H.H. Holmes game where you build a death trap, and apparently no one has been that tasteless.

You are a serial killer running a murder hotel (or in the fashion of hotel games, running a series of murder hotels). You have two main goals: murder people and evade detection. The win state for any given hotel is amassing money, and the lose state is bankruptcy and/or being caught by the police.

Every person who works in your hotel, is contracted, or stays there, has a suspicion meter that slowly rises over time when they notice something is wrong. This can either be noticing that the layout is weird, seeing a suspicious stain, or The Smell, which I envision as a major mechanic. If suspicion gets high enough, they'll either start making investigations of the people or the property, or much worse, bring in the (disorganized, incompetent) police. So suspicion management is one of the major things you're doing, either assuaging concerns, raising pay enough for them to forget about it, or firing employees you think might be onto you. Alternately, if someone has high suspicion, you can just kill them.

Separately, everyone has connection, a measure of how much they'll be missed by their friends and families. Ideally, you want to be killing only people with low connection, which is unlikely to attract unwanted attention. Kill someone with too high of connection and you might get a private investigator on you, or less threatening, a loved one snooping around your murder hotel.

You are the Proprietor, a sociopathic but intelligent and charming hotelier. You have a physical avatar that needs to balance 1) lowering suspicion through charm 2) murdering people 3) disposing of bodies. If you have no employees, you fill any role in the hotel, including some basic construction work. Unfortunately, you have The Hunger, a desire to kill, which must be periodically sated. If you don't sate The Hunger, then you'll lose control of the Proprietor, who is liable to kill in his own messy way, which you'll then have to clean up, and is likely suboptimal, especially if he decides to kill a valued employee, or do the kill in a more public place, or while police are visiting. The Hunger imposes a time limit, as it grows over time, requiring more kills, splashier kills, etc.

So the game is one of tensions, trying to manage all the people, delegating tasks that are going to necessarily raise suspicion, cycling through guests and staff, quietly getting away with killing for as long as possible, managing cash flow. To this end, you hire on rotating construction crews to build different parts of the murder hotel: soundproof rooms, airtight rooms with gas lines, secret passages, chutes leading to the basement, vats of acid to dissolve bodies, etc.