Chebucto Regional Softball Club

The haters are so mad you got the robot to do some of the things it's for. Anything beyond 'I click the button and it draws a pretty lady! I'm a *artist!*' really fucks with their absolutism. That's a threat to ingroup solidarity for the ones who've made opposition part of their identity.

Text generation is the least you can do. You can still fire up Photoshop and feed in a half-finished image. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. If it does decent scratches on metal, but won't put them exactly where you want, then select them and move them, and the robot will smooth it over. The very first article I read about Stable Diffusion, three years ago, had the author doodling mountains and flipping a spaceship. All the image-to-video stuff *demands* you provide art, as an input. Prompts alone are just a tech demo gone feral.

The industry finally embraces procedural textures, in the dumbest way possible.

Software has won. This was inevitable once ports looked the same and ran the same. Doubling your customer base, without developing the whole game twice? Obvious choice for any third party. First-party developers have taken longer, because their parent companies primarily own them to promote a hardware business. Microsoft's hardware business has become vestigial. It always was, to some extent; the Xbox project was a 1990s scheme to PC-ify the console market. It worked. Consoles don't exist anymore. Do you want the green AMD laptop, or the blue AMD laptop? Even Nintendo rebadged an Android tablet. You can release some crazy new hardware unlike anything else, but the only third-party games will be multiplatform hits that run like garbage. Like on early PS3. The Helldivers 2 PSN fiasco sure looks like Sony found out how profitable they'd be as just another publisher and the answer scared the shit out of them. Without that service, they don't have a *platform,* anymore. They sell a popular model of an IBM compatible. Asterisk on the compatible. Nintendo can get away with that shit forever, because they own Pokemon. I don't know how much longer you can cosplay that sort of first-party importance, on the strength of Horizon and... Death Stranding.

Nobody can "get" exclusives. They don't exist anymore. There's first-party games - there's games the first party funded into existence - and everything runs on *whatever customers have.* Developers want to sell games... to people. Hardware is an obstacle. They don't want to care which color of deliberately incompatible generic computer you bought. Shipping five near-identical versions of the same damn game is a button they push in Unreal 5, and that's why they put up with Unreal 5.

The text also being soft indicates that's a style choice. This is misusing a pejorative to turn specific criticism into general prejudice. Say 'I hate slop' and you'll get near-universal agreement, but people who *mean* 'fuck all uses of AI' are not even the majority. The pattern of retreating from 'I hate how it looks' to 'quality doesn't matter!' is straight-up pretense. It's a low-stakes opportunity to examine how language escalates tension. People in that absolute extreme position are emboldened. People merely tired of shrimp Jesus or whateverthefuck get lumped with them. All nuance is stomped out of this important new term, originally for 'uncurated spam.'

> and that ways lies a poison pill to community engagement. ... mostly due to bias-forming rhetoric like calling any generated image "slop." People had the same kneejerk attitude toward all CGI, long after CGI looked fine. At some point it's the monkey ladder experiment: self-perpetuating behavior through performative distaste. What specifically is wrong with *this* image?

Right, should've stolen a frame from a cartoon. Then the text would be funny.

Advertising shits in your brain.

"Different!" *Better?* "No."

'We bought you, you owe us money' is theft with more steps.