Week round-up: May 3
I haven't done one of these in a while! The changes to my work schedule continue to heavily impact the way I use the computer. Anyway, here's some stuff I liked recently:
Last Night at the Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen Roadshow - Mike Horowitz
Mike summarizes some really interesting comments from a live event featuring two highly accomplished children's picture-book creators, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. There's some fascinating stuff in here - why do so many picture books involve people or animals being devoured whole? What do very young children think of the idea of a book having an author? How do kids experience picture book text in a way that is fundamentally different from adults?
Some things to consider when looking for video game translators - Loke
I don't only follow this blog for the posts about videogame localization... but when Loke makes a post about translation, I'm always grateful. This post contains some interesting info about translator rates that I haven't seen covered elsewhere - there's a category of lines called "fuzzies" which often have different rates, and if you accept a pay scale that pays less for these lines, that exploitative pay structure works can sometimes incentivize sub-par work. There's other interesting stuff in here too about loc from the translator's perspective!
Some Words on WigglyPaint - John Earnest
This post is from several months ago, but I only recently got around to reading it fully in my RSS reader. Earnest writes about what happened when their Decker-built drawing tool, Wigglypaint, was copied by a variety of websites which surround the tool with ads, falsely request donations to support "the creators," or offer paid additional features. It sounds like an incredibly frustrating experience to see your work stolen and misused in this way.
The sites are slop; slapdash imitations pieced together with the help of so-called “Large Language Models” (LLMs). The closer you look at them, the stranger they appear, full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and plenty of unattributed (stolen) art. This is what LLMs are best at: quickly fabricating plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary. It is no surprise that the same people who have total contempt for authorship find LLMs useful; every LLM and generative model today is constructed by consuming almost unimaginably massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution, just different enough to hide where it came from (usually). LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, spammers, and everyone who believes that creative expression is worthless. People who extract from the world instead of contributing to it.
It is humiliating and infuriating to see my work stolen by slop enthusiasts, and worse, used to mislead artists into paying scammers for something that ought to be free.
the coolest apology i ever got - Joe Wintergreen
Another post from months ago - this time a story from Joe's childhood about a strange apology he received once as a kid.
GOTO Considered Good, Actually (or: i made a tool for writing casio calculator games using twine) - Adam Le Doux
A post chronicling the creation of a tool for putting twine games on a Casio graphing calculator. If you have one, you can use Adam's tool here to put your twines on it right away! My earliest game dev experiences were hand-programming games for the TI-86 graphing calculator, so I find this very charming. Unfortunately I never had the Casio brand graphing calculator, so I don't have any experience with Casio Basic. Very cool, though!!
The Soft Serve Review - sweetfish
I liked this review of soft serve ice creams in Japan! Lots of cool flavors and killer pictures of extremely tasty-looking soft serve. I love a list!!