Lux and Cor

Since the ai accusations are still being thrown around, here's how i personally like to use these GASP ai telltales. 🦄✨

Em Dashes (—)

To emphasize a shift / action / thought.

They're accusing us—actually accusing us—of using AI.

To add drama.

They dismissed our skills as AI—didn't even think twice, the dimwits—and believed they were onto something.

To insert a sudden thought. Surely they wouldn't do that to us—would they?

To interrupt someone's speech. "Hey, please don't say that. I honed my craft through years of blood and tears—" "Shut up, prompter."

To interrupt someone's thoughts / insert a sudden event.

We're going to get those kudos. We're going to get those reblogs—

A chronically online Steve commented, “it sounds like ai, idk.”

Semi Colons ( ; )

To join two closely related independent sentences / connect ideas.

Not only ChatGPT is capable of correct punctuation; who do you think it learned from in the first place?

Ultimate pro tip: use them whenever the fuck you want. You don't owe anyone your creative process. 🌈

I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die by their social media presence. We can't afford a lot of advertising, if any, and so we rely not only on word-of-mouth advertisement, but also just the good will of our audience. Like another designer @cavegirlpoems put it, we're basically busking, putting our art out for everyone and hoping for voluntary donations, donations which I writing this am reliant on as a disabled designer who can't work a normal job.

If you can't pay, you can still have it for free, and something that can be just as helpful is reblogging the posts of artists like myself. I'll demonstrate with a screenshot from our itch.io page for the open beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

(and on these days, it was only about 6 or 7 people who did the reblogging.)

As you can see, reblogs mean more people see our game, which means more downloads (and sometimes even payments), downloads mean more people play our game and more people see our game in the itch.io algorithm, which means more views, which means more downloads, which means more and so on and so on. But, it all starts with you reblogging our posts, and without that, we're stagnate. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 followers or 10, your reblog means that our posts reach corners of tumblr that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

Look what Meta did with the their metaverse, Horizon Worlds. They wasted $70 billion on something with zero demand.

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

If I was harmless and small, and easy to hold, you would love me. If I was a worm you could put me in the soft earth and I would be helpless in your care. Of course you could love me, but could you love me if I stung you, bit you, pulled against you, hid and didn't understand you but wasn't harmless or helpless at all?

We build wildlife preserves. Often explicitly for the protection of animals and ecosystems that can and have killed humans.

Whenever a whale gets stranded on a beach, CROWDS show up ad risk getting bludgeoned to death trying to get it back into the water.

Every Zoo has a reptile house full of venomous snakes and a team of humans dedicated to giving them the best quality of life possible.

There are volunteer beekeepers who will travel for miles and miles and hours and hours to relocate an entire hive.

There are people who rehabilitate dangerous dogs and horses

There are people who restore structurally unsound houses

There are people who study the way that fire burns so it can rejoin the ecosystem and not be smothered on sight.

Every day, millions of people get up and devote themselves to things that can and will kill them by their nature. Things they can't touch or show kindness to. Things they can't go near. Things that are wholly incapable of loving them back.

And they do it because they love them.

Everything dangerous, everything poisonous, everything 'useless'- absolutely everything has someone, often many thousands of people, who loves them exactly as they are, without expectation that their affection will be returned.