Articles | The Lament of the Bad Content Creator

When I was forced out of my home and into this crappy apartment I was met with the utter dead-end worst-case scenario I most feared in 2014 when a similar scare occurred. That scenario was that I would be in a shittier recording situation than I already was. Indeed, the horrendous reverb, traffic noise, and upstairs neighbors that practice the fine transnational sport of flinging furniture across their room every hour of the day, clopping like ponies at a steamy smash convention, and knocking on the walls to scare the whites away, the Chinese TV my grandmother blasts at maximum volume in the echo chamber that is the 6x8 space Canadians try to pass off as a livable accomodation (costing more in rent than a Mansion in a first-world country, to boot), and the complete lack of privacy as opposed to large lack of privacy all contribute to an utter nightmare when it comes to making LP’s or voice acting.

The results of which could be seen in my last recordings for CMBW - one of the side characters in the first Terran Tutorial mission, or within the Elden Ring or DKS2 LP’s.

Of course, one can attempt to make some kind of solution to this, given the limitations. In this case, my limitations are extensive, but the two paramount ones are finances and space.

After years (including 2014) of delegation, I ultimately decided my first major expenditure would actually be a change in microphone hardware.

Research across the internet for microphones is always a pain in the ass. Most of what you’ll find are youtubers who think you can grade a microphone through the 128kbps opus slurry that is what Google tries to pass off as an acceptable listening format. Thankfully, there are still some sites out there that hand out actual formats intended for audio, like wav. Ultimately, through a mix of such resources, I ended up with three microphone (that’s three!) choices. These three mics all alleged to have sound isolation and function well in bad acoustic environments.

The Shure SM7b, the Rode Broadcaster, and the Lauten LS-208.

At least, as far as other very questionable tests were concerned, the Shure seemed the lowest quality of the three. This was likely due to being a Dynamic mic. The Rode Broadcaster, however, colored the audio just as much, just in different ways. The Lauten sounded the best out of all of the tests I heard, and fairly consistently.

Hardware puchases of any type in my country are, at the best of times, succintly describable as “a joke”. This is because Canada wants to make it as difficult as possible for Canadians to produce content of their own and would prefer to import their content instead, usually from ESG-approved subsidies. That’s really the only explanation that explains the broad and insane pricing and shipping hurdles you have to overcome and have had to overcome for decades - ESPECIALLY for anything sourced from the States.

Since I already broke my ball bank on the GPU I got a few months ago, a studio microphone purchase wasn’t exactly something I felt great about. However, the two alternatives were as follows -

• Invest in acoustic panels.

• Do nothing and give up on VA forever.

The first option is hysterical. First of all, I cannot find an audio hardware dealer in my entire town, and none adjacent - actually, I struggled to find a credible dealer in the entire country and have yet to. To order acoustic panels online you’re almost always dealing with questionable middlemen whom, of course, hike the price ludicrously high (upwards of $500+ a panel). There’s also the trouble about mounting them - the landlord mentioned M3 hooks, and while somewhat affordable on their own, that’s an additional cost on top of the panels themselves. Cheap, thin foam panels are all riddled with problems. Free-standing panels don’t exist. Homebrew solutions like blankets and PVC pipes are still insanely expensive and impossible to actually find a good resource for. I’m constantly blown away by Americans on youtube saying you can make a large homebrew panel for less than a hundred bucks. Lmao must be nice to live in a first world country! Oh, that’s right. Even if I could afford it I literally don’t even have the space to set up a net of PVC pipes!

So, that came to the microphone debate and here we were.

At the end of the long story and long road we come to the first major subject of this rant.

No One Cares About Quality

When presented with the comparisons of my Rode M2 versus the Lauten, an individual commented you can just “use noise removal” on the Rode. To prove his point he provided a sample that was indeed free of the background traffic noise. Of course, the traffic, sharing frequencies with my voice, meant that just arbitrarily removing the noise removal caused enormous distortion in the voice to the point of absurdity. When presented with this problem, his response eventually came to, “Are you building for audiophiles?”

What the fuck is an ‘Audiophile’?

The closest thing I can think to an audiophile is the two asians I talk to that argue with each other about thousand-dollar cables. Yet they rightly call such hardware snake oil. It’s all tongue in cheek because there’s actually no such thing as an audiophile, just the kind of imbecile who’d spend money on an Apple product or pay monthly for an Adobe subscription, and these kinds of people generally pipe compressed products through their hardware and software, like that which streaming services feed you. Almost no one will even know what you mean when you bring up “limited range” or “chroma subsampling”, even though they just spent ten thousand dollars on a “streaming pc”.

Flabberghasted, and unwilling to get into the debate, I replied, “Yes”. I then presented my space situation and the conversation quickly ended in silence.

The important thing I took away from this stunning interaction is that the process of wanting good results from post-processing, ergo not wanting to rely on throwing out the baby, the dog and the prostitute with the gamer girl bath water, suddenly makes someone targeting trendy snake oil chasers and "audiophiles”. But, the results were literally plain as day! I didn’t need to explain anything. I gave solid and concrete examples and the counter example given to me literally spoke for itself why it wasn’t viable. Why would someone propose to further degrade quality of an already degraded product rather than solve the problems at the source? What gives?

The insinuation and presentation is largely unbiased, and it repeats a resounding problem we see everywhere: the average user doesn’t give a fuck.

A similar problem encounter I had with another user was a discussion about the hair for the player character in AXX. I explained I don’t use TXAA because the blurring and ghosting is insane. They tried to downplay it. Excuse me? You can’t downplay it. It’s actually insane. That’s why modern games all look out of focus, why everything is shimmering, and why they look to be running at a lower framerate than they really are. “It’s a part of the technology”. Then the technology is bad. Plain and simple. People on websites that try to pride themselves as being out of the mainstream opinion, having an enlightened view on culture and society, nonetheless gobble up media like that for Dragon’s Dogma 2 and say it “looks good” when the insane shimmering, ghosting and blurring of TXAA smears every single frame of any single video and makes the product appear to run at half framerate.

People should be asking for more from their time and money.

The Lauten doesn’t solve my audio problems, but it dramatically reduces background influence. Evidently, the huge hike in price range between the hardware is also quite noticeable. I ended up buying B-stock from their website because holy shit I am not paying $100 before tax to ship a glorified dildo. Of course, Canada sprung a $160 duty bill on me two weeks after I got it, so the mic I ordered ended up being just as expensive anyways.

No, blanket applying noise reduction to further muddy an already muddied signal is not wise. My processing for audio is already too heavy - I need less effects, not more. The fact anyone in the year of our Lord 2024 would even suggest something as destructive as the sample provided is crazy. But I remembered why. “Oh, yeah! Most people use youtube still!” The standards for quality have been pushed so low that most people think cellphone speaker sound is OK, that’s why so many games like Blizzard’s product line since Mists of Pandaria are so insanely heavily compressed, and why they still use 30-40kb/s VBR oggs in their products - they think it’s OK! They’ll never stop because no one asks them to stop. No one ever speaks up. No one cares about quality.

Disgusting.

I care about quality. The lauten helps but I need more than just that. It’s always a perpertual Work In Progress to get results. Results can always be improved. More and more I find myself isolated in the mindset that quality is important, so it’s no surprise I find it harder and harder to find good software, good hardware, and good assets, and above all people I can converse with to improve my understanding of such things. The digital world has crumbled to a hideous ruin and smolders with the last embers of sanity a few diehard hollows still cling to like ghosts in the mist.

So why the fuck are people worked up about AI, anyways?

The Lament of So-Called “Artists”

The “AI” (re: database bruteforcing) revolution is here, and a small handful of vocal “artists” are complaining about how they’ll be rendered irrelevant by it.

Great!

That’s always been my response. It’s fucking fan-tastic that these people are suddenly worried about their livelihood. They never deserved it to begin with. The people who aren’t worried are the people who are actually artists. They’ve seen the joke of AI for what it is, shrugged and moved on with their lives.

I’ve been using AI and psuedo-AI systems for many years. Everything from noise removal in audio to upsampling images for D&D. Now that you can suddenly generate monotone TTS voices like you could since Microsoft Sam, and you can suddenly generate Minions dancing around a burning cross, it’s the end of the world. That’s because these people are extremely rotund, and extremely rotund people have very slowly moving blood and brain signals. It’s taken this long to realize that their crummy mspaint scribbles they’ve been permitted to infest the internet with for decades aren’t heckin valid anymore. Not that they ever were, but websites like Pixiv, Booru, and of course the various furry covens all permit you to upload whatever the fuck without any shred of oversight because “lmao all expression is equal”. That’s what these golems tell themselves through grit teeth and tears.

AI has made them realize that because Joe Sixpack has no quality standards either that he’ll gladly push a prompt to Bing for a cat as a packing peanut rather than pay some greasy American basement dweller three figures to scribble it out in a “Your Character Here”, “Adopt”, or whatever other insane grift they have on their mind to arbitrarily hike already unnecessary prices for. After all, the lunacy of literal mspaint scribbles selling for a hundred+ USD on DeviantArt only exists because equally lunatic Joe Sixpacks are willing to pay for it. The meme that “All furries are rich” is based on the premise that literal morons somehow make enough money to pay for the ludicrously over the top costs associated with any given “niche” commission. And yet, only a handful of commissioners are worthy of being paid at all.

The disgrace of the state of the internet was made very clear to me early into my pursuits for D&D content. There is no website not chock full of utter refuse. Even when you try to mask out cruft with blacklists you’ll quickly realize 99% of sites don’t offer the ability to blacklist low-quality content. That’s because there was never a pursuit for quality to begin with. Only through the expression of the very few individuals, whom I often find myself able to recognize across the sea of rubbish regardless of context or source, do I even believe there exists humans out there who possess the capacity much less the will to learn and master a craft.

Foster Craftsmen, Not Grifters

Someone who puts time into a craft becomes a craftsman. A craftsman’s identity is his craft. He becomes reknowned through the merit of his craft. People pursue his craft by extent of the examples given by it. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But the internet is so ridiculously overflowing with noise and garbage that it has become impossible to both discover and measure merit, and those whom peruse the internet are so accustomed to the taste of shit they’ve fooled themselves into thinking they like the taste of shit.

This is precisely why the trash tenders are so scared of AI image generation. It sets a bar of expected quality. Why would I hire XX_Sw33tAngel_XX for horse futa watersports at the premium price of $400 USD, wait for a year while they groom kids on Discord (because why else would anyone associate discord with their products?) before finally getting a “watercolor” that amounts to blast processing a ceramic cutout of a mobility scooter with organic trumpets after a weekend of drinking absinthe nonstop when you can just send a three-word prompt to any given image generator and get better results in the time it takes for you to find your zipper?

“AI can’t into anatomy”. Well, guess what! Across my near-decade of searching for art at least 5-10 hours a week, I can tell you with exceptional confidence that the extreme majority, I’d say at least 90%, of people who post “art” on the internet also don’t know anatomy. In fact, I would bet good money - not Canadian funnymoney, but actual real people money - that next to nobody who (proudly) owns a DeviantArt account has actually seen a person before, not even themselves in a mirror. After all, in our Current Year x 41 we have fostered the growth of a cancerous polycule that is terrified of mirrors to begin with.

AI can’t into fingers. Well, guess what! The above also applies.

AI can’t into lighting. Have you seen what modern games try to pass off as lighting, much less so-called artists? Haven’t you noticed that more and more 2d and 3d images are plastered with chromatic aberration these days? Perish the thought!

AI can’ into X. Yes, AI is a joke and it produces utter abominations, the hardware requirement is massive, the time commitment is insane.

If you have the knowhow and the drive, you’ll commission an actual artist who can make you the Shrek X Shadow panorama of your dreams. You’ll coach them and work with them to flesh out every individual vein and toenail. That’s what being a craftsman and a person pursuing their craft is all about.

What about people like me who just need content to make their fucking D&D game?

I say, bring on the AI, big boy.

You should not be permitted to post “art” on the internet unless it is of a high quality. I’ve yet to find a freelance voice actor or actress touting a cheeky website that warrants payment, yet their prices are more than that a professional contract would cost. The prices asked for most 3d assets are well beyond unreasable regardless of the terms of use. The moment the AI becomes competent enough to make acceptable voices and not just an extra avenue for scammers to spam your answering machine is the moment all of these shitty youtube-sourced “actors” get thrown out of business and I could not be a happier person for it. That day is a very long ways away, make no mistake, but if I live to see it I will jump with joy.

I’m a developer. I want to develop high-quality content. Anything that pushes the bar of quality for resources I have access to higher is great. I don’t give two fucks if it’s a malnourished artist or a toaster that gives me my assets. I care about quality. There’s a cost in terms of time, energy, and often money into quality content. Whether it’s electricity or the very finite hours of my mortal life, I will get better results out of the toaster than I will out of 99% of the self-proclaimed “artists” on the world. Why else would companies be ditching shitty western localization and overpaid street urchins for AI text generators? The results may as well be the same, likely better, and much cheaper and faster. That’s on the fault of the employees/contractees being replaced. Work harder, do a better job, and stop asking for unrealistic payment. Else, be replaced. That’s what merit is supposed to be about.

For the time being, HKS recently set me up with a very finnicky ROCm supported stable diffusion generator, and my first experiments have been unexpectedly successful. Especially when it comes to anthro characters. I dare say I may never need to invest more than a cursory glance at my favored monster mashers in the future. The simple fact is, is that if you want anthro characters in a game you’re suddenly a furry and furries have utterly no standards whatsoever when it comes to art, visual or otherwise, and trying to find the very rare decent non-abominable sketch or concept art that isn’t riddled in enormous cocks, deformaties, inflation and scat for fuck’s sake is a trial. It’s not that any of these things are just objectional - I could appreciate a man’s love for dressing as a horse to fuck his bodypillow that is also suspiciously horse shaped, if only they put some goddamn effort into it. How much of a fetish can these people really have if they put absolutely no effort into ther time with it?

Then there’s the fact that anyone who is degenerate enough to actually post about or interact with anthro stuff on the internet is usually a complete lunatic. It’s like a co-symptom for complete mental atrophy. I just want to have beast characters in a D&D game because I think I can make the concept work and I don’t give a shit about what other people do with the idea… but the barrage of disgusting shit I have to wade through is simply not healthy for the human mind no matter how desensitized you have become to it. Nudity doesn’t even bother me. Whatever. I can edit images and censor them if I need to. There’s way worse out there than you might imagine, and it often is at the very forefront. Pride flags, scat, inflation, crude sexualized gore (probably the same people who fuck roadkill) to zoophilia, the moment you try to step into the innocent world of looking for art to use in a virtual tabletop game is the moment you are lamblasted with some of the most foul things our species can conjure. Even if the sites in question support blacklisting and you spend the days writing out filters necessary to make the results not stir your gut you’re still stuck with the profoundly baffling realization there is no quality filter seemingly anywhere.

No, upvote systems don’t solve this issue, they only compound it. That’s another problem I’ve noticed. Never once has an upvote system objectively improved any website I’ve ever seen it deployed in. The most functionally useful system I’ve used so far is pixiv’s “related” searches, once you run an addon and a healthy dose of ublock to prune the site. Related searchess by pass the paywalled popular search parameters and can consistently net you higher-quality results, although often unrelated. For explorative searching it can very helpful, but now that pixiv is heavily flooded with low-quality AI results the usefulness is much lower than it was a year ago. Even so, the low-quality AI results look better than the scribbles I commonly would see otherwise. It’s just no one is putting in time to fix artifacting. It’s a small improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

Honestly, I think every single person in the entire circulation of content distribution is either a troll or a clown. It is just way too goddamn difficult to find people who put in the effort. There’s individuals who’ve had daily uploads for years and never once has their art actually shown any tangible signs of improvement. Most people don’t have learning disabilities like I do, and even I will improve over such a vast period of time in a pursuit, if only slightly. So what is their excuse? There isn’t an excuse. They just don’t care.

The baffling conundrum of why commercial content in particular is so bad in the last 20 years has become a truly incomprehensible rat’s nest. Games are completely in the shitter and the content that goes into them is in no small part to blame. Yet an unskilled craftsman can still put love into his craft and make up for his shortcomings through commitment and discipline. Without fail the highest quality content will be found from individuals whom do not stand to gain monetarily for it. There is no money in quality, after all.

The dudebros making these AI samples are out there to get around the fact there’s no artists. They have adopted a new technology and much like how Canadian ISPs whine about the death of cable tevision the leeches whining about AI image generators never deserved their imaginary spotlight to begin with. They have been forced to wake up to the reality that there is now competition. What an amazing concept. If you can’t make visual content better than an AI generator you really have no business posting it on the internet to begin with. If even 10% of the cruft I am forced to wade through in my searches disappears or ascends to the heights of AI then it will be a tremendous improvement. Unfortunately most people using AI generators seem hellbent to just make more abominations with it, so it will be a long process for sure. Of course, nothing AI related is worth money, and you should never be paying for it. That’s just insanity I am very glad is not catching on very much, except for the Unreal Marketplace, of course, where it seems like every second or third upload is a five-minute prompt collection from people who are very much aware of the inevitable collapse and disappearance of AI asset marketability and just desparately need that one bong hit before the cows come home.

The fact that AI content is not worth money is also a good thing. It means there’s a bar forming between what is worth monetary value and what isn’t, objectively speaking. This is another thing that grifters are terrified of. Seeing them sweat is great. There’s people putting legitimate effort into picking up art skills I am loosely following and they’ll go far if they keep at it. AI will never threaten their job security. After all, even sketches can sometimes make great fodder for Img2Img generation.

I’m actually having fun with this. Sure, making something specific is very difficult. But it’s a tool that I can apply my existing skills to. I can fix the things like busted fingers and eyes. All I need to do is give myself something to work with. Maybe I can even generate token assets from it.

As much of a joke AI is, I hope it continues to improve, and I long for the day it can handle decent quality PBR organic assets. Maybe then we’ll stop seeing Chinese firms and gumroad goobers uploading Unreal 2 technology assets at $50 USD or more a piece.

Nah. Digital industry is fucked and we’re all fucked with it.