Shattered Junk

A 2ch thread from 2007 (!) translated from… definitely probably Japanese. It’s all very simple, really. Also, everything is spelled and typed exactly right. (as it should be).

The main difference is of course, I’m Chinese and you’re not Japanese. When I photoshop a chinese character to “look more chinese” it’s to create an image to look more like my own, using myself and my friends as reference, where as when you do it you’re photoshopping a character to what you think is a certain race’s features. Sometimes this can be done right, but more often then not it will come off as wrong, especially if the changes aren’t actually very common facial features. (You tried to make his eye sockets less deep, but you didn’t actually move them forward, and instead of widening and making the nose bridge more shallow you narrowed it and deepened it)

I’m sorry, but there’s no place for somebody in the game industry (or any industry, really) who’s only qualification is that he really wants to be there. I don’t know you well enough to know what you’re good at, but I do know that you need to have some sort of skill beyond enthusiasm that makes you useful to us. I understand that it isn’t easy out there figuring out what it is you want to do, especially if you’re still in school and haven’t had a lot of success yet, but you have to consider it from other perspectives (because a good developer must be able to consider things from the player’s perspective). We don’t hire people just because they want a job. We hire people because we have work that needs doing, and we need people who can do the work.

Imagine you’re head of a development studio. Everyone working at this studio has a job to do - some of us are engineers, artists, designers, QA, producers, some of us run the facilities, some do HR, and so on and so forth. Everybody at the studio is (generally) good enough at their job to deserve being paid for it. People who aren’t don’t work for us very long. This means that whenever you look to hire somebody new, it’s because you have a job that needs doing. When we interview for new positions, it’s because we look for somebody who can do a job, whether that’s optimizing the graphics, designing multiplayer game modes, or keeping the art team on schedule and tasked out. Once we know what sort of job that needs doing, we look for people who know how to do it and we hire the best person from that pool that we can find.

If you want to work in the game industry, you’ve got to be good at doing something that is useful to us. That way, when we need someone to do the thing that you’re good at doing, we can pay you to do it for us. So what I want to tell you is that, if you want to work in the game industry, you need to figure out what it is that you want to be good at. Just “working in the industry” isn’t specific enough. “Being the idea person” isn’t an option. Maybe you are interested in programming - making the rules for the game, or creating a new way to handle lights, or building content tools for designers. Maybe you are interested in creating content - scripting conversations, setting up battles, placing enemies in the world, building maps. Maybe you just want to do QA, and your passion is finding problems and reporting them. Maybe you want to come up with better ways of testing than just trying stuff and writing reports - you could write tools to help automatically test systems for stability, for example. But whatever it is you want to do, you need to figure it out and then get good at it first - good enough that you can do the tasks that we need done. If you can demonstrate to us that you can do the work, you can probably get a job doing the work. We need people who can do the work but, until you can show us that you can do it, we will never consider hiring you.

Further Reading:

[AAGD’s Game Career FAQ (Part 1)]

So this morning I woke up to a message from someone telling me they saw my art on the site www.rageon.com. Below are screenshots of the pieces I saw. One is deliberate theft of my art and the other is an attempt to copy the same piece. 

While the copy is amusing, the stolen piece is not. I’ve already made an attempt to contact someone through the site explaining the situation and to see if I can at least get the stolen piece taken down. Please know that the only stuff I put up for sale are on my Society6 account or from me personally. I haven’t placed anything else online for sale. 

BALMAIN

Fall/Winter 2016 collection

FEUDAL STAR WARS 

There is absolutely nothing interesting about a portfolio that is filled with page after page of the same poses, the same body type, the same concept, the same degrading view of women, the same skin-tight catsuits and exaggerated contra-posta-while-looking-into-the-camera-smirking, the same lovingly rendered and weirdly shiny breasts, the same five haircuts, the same style and ideas of wardrobe, over and over and over again. You know what that shows? You’re boring. You got no ideas. All you can do is draw the same sexy lady in a scant handful of poses with an incredibly limited concept of fashion, or just naked because you think it makes your portfolio look serious and professional, but really you’ve just already drawn all 6 outfits you can think of and clothes are damn hard when you know nothing about them because doing research might damage your fragile sense of masculinity, huh buddy? It shows you don’t bother to try anything new or interesting. It shows you don’t research, you don’t look into fashion of any sort, you have an incredibly narrow grasp of interesting characterization, you don’t have any inspirations beyond what other men-who-draw-sexy-ladies have drawn before you. Go look at lesbian artists, please. I beg you. And not to masturbate to it. There’s so much to learn from looking at what women find attractive and interesting about women that you’ve probably never attempted to think about before. And I don’t just mean physically attractive or interesting! You realize that women are, uh, dynamic and varied people with complex lives, histories, emotions, preferences, and aesthetics, right?

Popular male artists love to go on and on about broadening your horizons and going outside your comfort bubble, but the notion of attempting to leave the comfort of their warped collective sex fantasy filled with idealized pinup girls is apparently too much to ask. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Ya guys get so defensive when people point it out, too. It kinda stopped being cute forever ago, just FYI. We know you have a “type”, and I ain’t here to kinkshame, buddy, but come on, your stagnant imagination is depressing as fuck and it might do you some good to blow the dust off the old creative muscles and like, do something different for a change? 

Men, you also gotta stop with the excuse of “I draw what I like! What’s wrong with drawing what makes me happy?” or “What have you got against confident women?” when all you ever draw is the same shit men just like you have been jacking off to for decades. It’s not about the women you draw, it’s about how you draw them and why, and why the fuck y’all are so damn boring. Predictable hacks, the lot of you. Come back when you got something other than blonde bombshells in form-fitting chain mail corsets riding dragons in the snow. Trust me, we’ve all seen a thousand of those. There’s nothing interesting you can do there because there’s nothing interesting you will ever attempt to do there. You are never gonna be the next Frazetta, get over yourself.