A bit of everything

Okay this is looking ridiculous

ArenaNet says by the end of the expansion's year-long cycle, around 800 decorations will be available.

It acts as a showcase for your in-game collection of skins and cosmetics. Any alts that you leave in your Homestead—they'll get bonuses for resting in it, including for WvW and sPvP—will still be chilling there when you log in with another character. There's also a stable for your mounts to hang out—great news for anyone who's got a fancy Jackal skin that they rarely have an excuse to see. Even your skiff is docked in a little pier, with some fishing spots available along the river.

With an armour stand, you can make a statue of their character that inherits your current fit—dyes and all. And the weapon stand will let you display any weapon that you've earned.

Fossilised (opalised?) wood Caladbolg design based off @skritt-shinies' AU

It's been determined that these guys are trawling through the GW2 tags specifically, including the racial tags (like #sylvari and #gw2 asura, etc.) for their AI generation data. From the sounds of it, we're talking screencaps and their edits as well as art.

This is a great time to share around the tools we have to combat them again.

Glaze is a defensive tool that helps to protect your work, specifically, from being scraped.

Nightshade is an offensive tool that helps to poison the datasets of these AI generators. It works best when used collectively by multiple artists.

Both of these tools are being developed by the University of Chicago, which recommends using both if you can (but at least using Glaze if Nightshade's effects are too visible on your stuff for your liking). They're also working on integrating the two tools so we can use them together.

Finally, there's this watermark tutorial as an alternative if you need it.

I want to extend proper credit to the people who provided these links again, and who have been informing us about what these clowns are doing, but I don't want to paint unnecessary targets on anyone's backs. Sorry.

Kick GW2 Warp to the curb and make sure you're protecting your stuff, guys. If you didn't think you had to worry about it before, it sure looks like we do now.

Don't let your perceived level of skill, your online presence, etc. make you think you're not a likely target, because other people thinking they didn't have already found their works being stolen for this crap.

Anet changed the contract for the creative partner program.

This change now comes with the caveat that anet has full and total ownership over any GW2 related art created by a partner, including free time work and enacted retroactively.

For those following at home, this is extremely bad for the artists.

So basically if you - say - have a comic that you're working on in your spare time and it uses GW2 as a basis, anet would officially own that under the terms of the new contract and would have free reign to use it however they want.

This is without extra compensation for the creative partners.

Note, I may have some details wrong. The artists in the creative partner program are under NDAs and this is just what I've managed to extrapolate from various artist statements while digging around online. We don't know, for example, what the compensation for the partner program is, though to my knowledge it isn't "live on it" kind of money. It is (iirc) a small kickback from people signing up using their partner referral code and some gems to give out.

Albrecht building the labs: yes hahaha yes

more Peitha!

Gilded rose ✿