Dustborn and Concord are rather notable cautionary examples of what happens when you build for what is either a nonexistent audience or one which is unwilling to commit to actually supporting your endeavours.
If you build it, they won’t come.
Mozilla sells out their users again
Mozilla with Firefox positions itself as a user privacy focused company but it looks like this is changing, having recently acquired an advertising tech company itself.
And following that acquisition it has sneaked in an opt-out piece of tracking into the latest Firefox version.
Under “Privacy & Security” in settings you will find a “Web Site Advertising Preferences” section with the option enabled by default.
Clearly the next step you need to be doing if you are a user of Firefox is to disable this option.
Further details and analysis of this can be found at the privacyguides.org site.
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
AI Art Wallpapers
One of the things I like about AI Art is the surreal images it can generate which make for great wallpapers and general backgrounds.
Here’s a selection of fantasy themed images I’ve used for wallpapers or visual aids for use in roleplaying games.
AI for RPG Art
AI Art is such a godsend when it comes to generating images/art for role-playing game sessions. I’m using it constantly now to generate pictures for player characters and tokens.
The results are getting exponentially better as time goes on.
Here are a few I did a while back using Midjourney while not free, does have the edge out of the box over Stable Diffusion. That said Stable Diffusion is more than capable of generating useable images and tokens, added to which it is free.
Lord of the Rings – Dogs and Cats
Here’s a re-imagining of the principle characters from Lord of the Rings as Dogs and Cats.
Generating RPG Character Assets
I’ve recently been on a AI image generation role, primarily using MidJourney to create landscapes, but there is a cost to that service (It’s a processing expensive task, so I’m OK with that).
But for the job of creating character portraits, I’ve taken to using Stable Diffusion which is an open sourced implementation which can be run locally. It’s pretty heavy on the hardware requirements, needing a GPU with 6+gb of ram, but if you can meet that the results are pretty good.
The following are some character portraits I’ve used it to create:
Spam as Gaeilge.
Well this is a new one for me.
Spam as Gaeilge !
Good to see they’re taking the effort to know their audience.
Return to MidJourney
Here’s some more images generated using the image generating AI MidJourney.
There’s a sort of otherworldly feeling about what it generates.
For some reasons eyes remain a problem in the images which have been generated.
With that in mind I thought I would try some landscapes to see how the AI would handle those.
MidJourney – AI Drawings
I’ve recently taken to playing with MidJourney to create AI generated drawings. They’re certainly impressive if not a little unworldly.
Here’s a few created on a theme of the games we have been playing, namely 1920s Lovecraft mythos related.
This time I tried to get one for Rock and Agatha using “1920s male and female investigate haunted house”
Adding Brave Search To Firefox
Adding Brave Search to Firefox so that it is available in the default search options isn’t immediately obvious, since it’s not listed under the search providers under Settings->Search
And while there are a number of add-ons which provide it available, none are provided by Brave themselves.
That said the solution is surprisingly simple:
- Start by going to https://search.brave.com
- Then right-click the address bar
- On the menu displayed, select “Add Brave Search”
- Now open “Setting”, select “Search” and choose “Brave Search” under “Default Search Engine”
