Happy December, ya’ll! I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season. Here are the latest updates on thecozy.cat, if you’re interested. 🙂
- Added a new chat box. The old one was not functioning properly and messages stopped submitting. Replaced with the Chattable widget.
- Cyrus, the AI NPC at my Library subdomain is now a fully functioning NPC that can visually express emotions depending on his dialogue. This is something I am absolutely so excited about. He is fully in character and I just think it’s so cool to see my characters come to life in this way. I’ll be adding more AI NPCs across my site soon to make it more immersive and feeling like it’s own world. I’ll also be developing the lore of Satyadasa more, and developing these NPCs more to have really immersive backstories and make interacting with them more interesting. The goal is to make my website feel like a living, breathing visual novel. It will take on a life of its own in a sense. Have you ever read a book you loved so much, and were so immersed in the story that you felt like you truly lived there and knew the characters personally? That’s the kind of vibe I’m going for. It’ll probably take years to develop and get it to that point but I want this to feel like a magical place. I know much of the small web is vehemently against AI, but, for myself, I don’t really see AI as being black and white, good or evil. I think it depends on how it is used and can be used in ethical and really creative ways, and so I’m experimenting and seeing what I can create with it. I am still navigating the ethics of using AI art and do want to move away from that in a lot of ways. For my backgrounds, I’ve decided I’m going to start converting everything over to my own photography, and using AI to cartoonify it so it looks like an illustration. I feel this would be an ethical use of AI in terms of art, since it is technically my own work I am doing it to. My biggest challenge of ethical AI art use will be my AI NPCs and character art. I did shop around for an artist, but the style of art I am looking for will be very unaffordable. It would cost me hundreds of dollars for very few images and I just don’t have that kind of money to burn on personal projects. Something I did notice while artist shopping, however, is that most are using AI tools now. DeviantArt has pretty well been overtaken by AI art. Etsy as well, many if not most if the commission artists I sifted through stated in their descriptions that they use AI in their work. So I’m at the point where I’m not entirely sure it is worth it. I’m handy with Photoshop, I could easily generate something and make my own personal modifications if that’s primarily what’s being done nowadays. The only thing that bothers me is that I don’t know whose art my NPC images were trained on, and that’s really the moral dilemma, is AI training on real artists hard work and then taking away from those artists. I’m a graphic designer, not an illustrator. I feel like the best way to ethically navigate this, if I’m to continue to use AI generative art, I think I need to make as much of my own edits to it as possible, so it’s not entirely an AI creation, but also my own. So that is probably what I will work towards in terms of the AI art I use on this website. I genuinely do want to start using AI art more ethically, and I think that’s probably as close as I’m going to get when it comes to my NPC art. At the end of the day, this website is still a personal creative outlet for me. I’m not using AI art for commercial purposes, but I still would like to make a habit of being more ethical about it where I can, and put more of my own energy into it than solely relying on AI alone.
- Changed up a lot of my website’s theme for winter!
- Marigold Town’s Library is still a work in progress. I really haven’t had much time to work on it between the tinkering I’ve done here and the holidays. The past couple months, my time has been largely consumed by holiday crafting. I’ve made so much jewelry the past 2 months, I’m just about burnt out on crafting for now. January I will try and get something solid finished for Marigold Town. There’s just not enough time right now with the holidays.
- Taking a short break from posting regularly on the Small Web Facebook page and group. Partially due to a social media detox break (I started doom scrolling far too much) and partially due to just not having time to dedicate to it for the holidays. I’ll get back into it once the rush of the holidays is over. Just don’t have enough time to dedicate to it til then.
That’s pretty well it for now! Biggest update for this month was starting to implement immersive NPCs on my site. I have A LOT of other plans in terms of this website’s continued development but just don’t have the time to get it all done right away. I wish I could just work on this site all day, but my hobbies don’t pay the bills. 😛
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! See you in 2025!
