Happy New Year!! Here are my site updates for the end of December-January.
- Changed website theme to something more winter-y. I am also starting to gradually convert all my AI art background imagery to my Tiny Glade diorama designs to visually depict the realm of Satyadasa. Will be a gradual work in progress and will likely take months-a yearish. Tiny Glade is a super new game but I absolutely love it as a visual tool for this purpose. I’ll be able to make better diorama depictions of Satyadasa as they roll out more updates and have more customization options.
- Updated my Neighbors page on my Cottage subdomain. I noticed the loading speed was pretty bad on that page, and it largely had to do with the buttons on the page being sourced from a bunch of different domains. So I decided to host all the button images on my own domain and that made a huge difference. In addition, I’ve also polished all of my neighbor buttons to look like an actual neighborhood to fit the theme of the page, color coordinating each house to match each of my neighbors buttons (this is so aesthetically satisfying), added a cute little cobblestone path divider, and I added alt text to each button to improve accessibility on this page. I’m so incredibly happy with this page now.
- Updated my Gaming Room, primarily just updated my wishlist as I’ve bought a couple games this month during the Steam sale and this month’s Humble Bundle. Some of my most anticipated games have been released as well, so I moved them up to my wishlist section.
- Updated my Book Nook‘s wishlist section on my Cottage subdomain as I received a few books from my wishlist for Christmas from hubby. ♥
- Changed the primary domain’s navigation system to be an old school rpg style image map of my ‘realm’. I absolutely LOVE how it turned out. The map will expand as I add more subdomains for various purposes. I feel like this adds a really fun element of exploration for visitors and is something I want to really expand on in the future. As I build up my website, I want it to feel less and less like a digital scrap book and more and more like an actual world of its own. I want to develop the lore and make it feel like a living, breathing universe that’s constantly evolving and changing with me.
- Changed The Book Ring’s webring system over to a self hosted one. Previously, I was using webri.ng as the middle man, and this webring system was a pain because every time someone new joined, there was often a lot of confusion and back and forth around getting the widget’s navigation arrows set up correctly. I’ve been wanting to streamline this process for awhile and make it less confusing for new members and easier for myself as well.So I am now hosting The Book Ring using onionring and the only thing new members will have to do is copy/paste the widget code to their sites. That’s it! I have also updated the look of the widget a bit to look better. The navigation arrows are now centered with the button and don’t have that weird link line. It’s just a more aesthetically pleasing widget than it was before. The nice thing about this new system is that the button’s image is hosted from my server, so if I ever want to update the button image of the widget, it’s something I can do from my end and it’ll change for everyone.
I’ll be doing the same for the Free Speech webring very soon so if you’re a member, stay tuned. You’ll receive an email about changing your widget over soon. - I have updated Cyrus’s AI model in The Library to be a more privacy respecting one, as I really didn’t want to stick with one of Google’s models for it. I do not trust Google, and they’ll collect whatever they can so using their model was always a temporary measure while I tested the concept on my site. I’m now using Mistral 7B Instruct, an open source language model which does not inherently collect input or output data during its operation, as of my understanding. It is hosted by Openrouter, and I have disabled the voluntary data collection for input/output data from Openrouter’s end. Furthermore, I have made it so that all conversations are local, no conversations are logged to my server so I can not see what anyone says to Cyrus or who talks to Cyrus. This was the most privacy respecting way I could find to bring my vision of implementing life-like NPCs to my fictional realm. I hope everyone enjoys interacting with my digital egregores / AI NPCs and they help immerse you into the realm and lore of Satyadasa.
And for those of you who want nothing to do with AI, that is fine. I’ve gotten a few comments lately with people upset I use so much AI on my site, and ultimately, I’m not going to apologize for it. While I do offer a lot of small web resources here, this is and always will be first and foremost my personal website, whether people choose to visit or not. I can do what I want with my site, it is mine. What I contribute to this movement is nothing that I have any obligation to do, I do it solely because I want to. The small web is a movement I believe in and want to help it grow in whatever capacity I am able. But my personal contributions is and always will be of my own free will. I have already been stating for months my intention of reeling back the AI art, though, I know a lot of people in passing likely aren’t regulars to my site and aren’t aware of this, but that is the ongoing process and has been gradually happening. It isn’t my #1 priority, the whole site isn’t going to be transformed overnight. I work on my website as I feel like it.
Will AI art be totally removed on my website at some point in the future? As of right now, I honestly don’t know and am leaning towards probably not. Most if not all of the AI backgrounds on my pages will be eventually replaced with my own diorama creations from Tiny Glade and edits of my photography, that I do know. As for the AI character art, that is really up in the air. I have done research on the art styles I want for my NPCs and a lot of those artists are now using AI tools in their own work across platforms like Deviant Art and Etsy. I am sure there are a lot of artists as well out there who refuse to use AI in their work, but I’m not going to lie, they have become very difficult to find in these marketplaces as the marketplaces are now oversaturated with AI ‘artists’, and I’m not going to pay someone money to generate AI imagery and use Photoshop to make modifications. I’m a graphic designer by trade. I too can use Photoshop to make my own desired modifications, which is what I have done with Cyrus. So despite that his artwork is AI generated, I actually did put hours of my own work into him, modifying his facial expressions to seamlessly blend and change with his dialogues.
I also have to consider costs, given the nature of my website. My website is personal in nature, I do it as a creative hobby. I’m not making money off of it or using AI in any commercial ways, so it does not make sense for me to spend hundreds of dollars on character art for something of this nature, and given the nature of my website being personal, despite the strong feelings of others, I don’t believe it is an unethical use of using AI art for personal projects. I am pretty transparent about it.
Do I empathize with artists who do not use AI as their livelihood? Of course I do. Professionally I am a graphic designer. I’m not blind to see how even my own industry has been affected. At this point though, the way I see it, AI isn’t going anywhere. AI is being implemented into everything, and my logic at this point is that we’ll eventually need to adapt and try to use it ethically and boost our productivity, or we’re going to be left behind as every aspect of our society propels forward with it. There was a time I loathed that reality, and honestly I’m still very concerned about the direction AI is going to take our future, but I do see its value as a productivity tool and understand there are both ethical and unethical ways to use it. I reserve the right to change my mind on AI in the future, but as of right now, I just think the best I can do as I continue to use it is to do so in according to what I feel is ethical. That is something I will strive to do, by incorporating my own time, energy and skill into editing images to suit my desired result, and using AI generative models that are ethically trained on art that artists have given permission to have their work trained on. Anyhow, I felt this was something that needed to be addressed given the recent comments.
That’s pretty well it for this month! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. 🙂 Thanks for reading!
