That bit about the Bioshock designer getting upset tht their character was wearing the wrong type of undergarments that they had to make a style guide, that was hilarious
I'm surprised that people seriously thought that r34 revolutionised anything in 3d anims. I guess they never watched Toy Story or The Incredibles, or they think those films were made with literal magic. The only thing that r34 really did was become super popular, so it made sense for artists to get really good at it and make very high quality videos and other kinds of content. The explosion in r34 quality was easily apparent back in the day, SFM did help popularise it to insane degrees that's for sure - 3d smut used to be really niche before SFM (there were much fewer resources and the general lower quality wasn't as appealing) - but really it was just a case of explosive demand spawning explosive supply (as much as I hate my weird choice of words).
I appreciate videos like this, it feels with platforms being hostile to NSFW art and "cringe culture" being a thing on places like twitter that there's a permanent hostile atmosphere towards it. Even that one BBC article he mentioned annoys me; places like the BBC always seem to have this sneery attitude towards porn. The bit of the article he mentioned might be trying to say the exact opposite by saying "you might think of X when you hear about Y, but..." - but they're frontloading the sentence with the negative stereotype. If you weren't already thinking that, the article makes sure to bring it up before going on.
Another similar tweet that went viral which is similarly but more obviously hyperbolic was one which celebrated the anniversary of Pokemon X/Y as the anniversary of "the most influential NPC of all time" (the Hex Maniac that sells milk).
Kaelan Frey posted:
Speaking as someone who has thought about using my own technical skills to make horny content I think some of the biggest obstacles to rule 34 were the following set of facts
1. most people need a job to make a living
2. most tools used to make high quality horny content require a substantial amount of skill and effort to use (for animations - digital art is a lot easier and that's why that form of rule 34 was popular way earlier)
3. if you have these skills you either have a job and don't have a lot of time and energy to make horny content, or need a job and don't have the time or energy to make something that you can not put on your portfolio/resume
the two things that resulted in a rise of horny content, I think, ended up being
1. ways to profit directly off the horny content like gumroad or, if your horny content is one of those weird kinks that technically isn't sexual, patreon. Prior to these, simple commissions for visual art existed, but these things gave people a place to host stuff like videos besides youtube that can be paywalled and used to generate better revenue
2. tools that are easy enough to use that people who do not have a huge amount of training or skill can make the horny content (SFM was a big part of this)
IMO this was always a matter of tools and platforms, the audience for people who want to both consume and make rule 34 content has never changed.I'm surprised that people seriously thought that r34 revolutionised anything in 3d anims. I guess they never watched Toy Story or The Incredibles, or they think those films were made with literal magic. The only thing that r34 really did was become super popular, so it made sense for artists to get really good at it and make very high quality videos and other kinds of content. The explosion in r34 quality was easily apparent back in the day, SFM did help popularise it to insane degrees that's for sure - 3d smut used to be really niche before SFM (there were much fewer resources and the general lower quality wasn't as appealing) - but really it was just a case of explosive demand spawning explosive supply (as much as I hate my weird choice of words).
I'm 99.9% sure the penetration technology he references later in the video is from our resident kobold gamer (who also recently released another game?)
It's rare that I'm completely captivated by an hour long youtube video, but this had me watching the entire thing with interest.
It's weird thinking about how small that space is that a lot of things being talked about in the video were done by FP heads.
Hell KO too, Lordardvark I think even talked about that meme when I posted it in LMAO pics a year or so back.
Edited:
His comments on the lack of discussion and history preservation in this spaces reminded me a lot of this similar essay on porn games I recently saw:
Wayback Machine
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https://cohost.org/BPGames/post/4131225-porn-games-and-writi
When a thing isn’t talked about - when knowledge of it is either implicitly or explicitly suppressed - it becomes very easy for that thing to be written off as irrelevant. Nobody talks about porn games, thus nobody cares about porn games, thus nobody cares about preserving porn games. Something like this has already happened now that Adobe has discontinued support for Flash - there’s been a lot of admirable work done in preserving Flash games in playable formats, but so many adult Flash games have slipped through the cracks of those archival efforts. Other genres of games might get inducted into dedicated physical archives or library initiatives but porn games really don’t enjoy that kind of status. As things stand right now, the archival framework for porn games is basically a network of pirate and scraper sites held together by dried cum and scotch tape. I worry about a future where porn games don’t exist, where all the games that exist now and the experiences of the people who played them are easily memory-holed by a puritanical monoculture that despises erotic art and sexual exploration. In a way the culture of silent sneering ignorance towards porn games and porn game developers makes it feel like we’re already living in that future. I find this state of affairs repulsive as someone who enjoys porn games, and embarrassing as someone who enjoys critical writing about games. So, finding the body of critical works regarding porn games and porn game culture so thin, we must set out to nourish it.
Excellent video, but I absolutely pointed at the screen like DiCaprio when Danbooru was mentioned, and more specifically, that it "went up on May 17th 2005". Traditionally, May 24th is given as Danbooru's birthday, because that's the day the first post on the site went up, but thanks to an effort back in 2021 to try and make a Danbooru history page (technically ongoing but inactive), I ended up rediscovering that Danbooru actually went up on May 17th, but had undergone a one-time database reset, which is why there isn't any earlier posts (and this info was forgotten because albert's OG blog isn't online anymore).
Since I'm on the subject, I have to point out that 2chan was not interested in preserving stuff. 2channel, because it is text-based, has archives spanning back decades, but 2chan's image-based nature would cause havoc on server space, so posts would just get deleted on there after time, and they wear that fact as a badge of pride. The attitude of 2chan users has seen them abandon homemade memes because "they got preserved" and went viral off-site. It's why, in contrast to 4chan, there are immensely few 2chan archival websites, and those that I have seen only archive stuff for an extra bit longer before wiping too, as if continuing tradition, or being very selective on what is archived. And, given the litigious nature of Japanese companies, having the porn fade into the aether was probably practical too.
Danbooru actually shares its origins with 4chan, in that it emerged out of Raspberry Heaven, Something Awful's anime forum IRC chat. Prior to being a website, it was just an IRC bot that posted random images albert saved off JP artists' blogs, before making the website for, among other reasons, resume padding, building it off the donmai.us domain where he was hosting his blog, in which he recommended pages with art and reviewed ero anime (my warning to anyone wanting to check out his blog on the Wayback Machine). So Danbooru at its earliest was just a dumping ground for anime art for albert (who is just called Albert Yi in real life), moot, and others who hung out there, and eventually caught on as a massive dumping ground for 4chan users and anime fans elsewhere on the Internet, getting easier access to art that previously was only on artists' personal blogs, 2channel/2chan, other Japanese forums, official websites, etc, years before sites like Pixiv and mass Japanese SNS consumption were a thing.
When Danbooru went down briefly, Gelbooru went up, and to my memory, Gelbooru's creator Lozer T. User may have offered to host the images in the interim for accessibility purposes. Though code-wise Gelbooru has diverged significantly, it still regularly scrapes Danbooru's uploads, and then in turn both Danbooru and Gelbooru get scraped by boorus such as Safebooru, the rule34 boorus, and Sankaku Channel (and Sankaku doesn't permit scraping back), which you can note because scraped uploads credit the site as its 'uploader' - if a general image booru seems to have specific niche upload focuses, it's probably because the more popular stuff gets uploaded upstream on Danbooru, giving them the opportunity to specialize in other things. Danbooru and Gelbooru are generally in close contact, with the latter viewed as a back-up for the former, and staff on both sites intermingling on the former's Discord server and on-site forum; if a big change happens on Danbooru, Gelbooru sometimes follows, or may even be the cause of it.
Gelbooru would spin-off its code base for public use, and Gelbooru's code alongside Shimmie, another derivative of Danbooru, are what most booru websites are based on today (rule34.pahael.us being based on Shimmie, and rule34.xxx being based on Gelbooru, to name the most relevant examples for this topic). So while a lot of folks might associate boorus with creator-focused boorus where people dump fanart (ala Vinebooru), where the uploaders are the creators of the art, old school general boorus are by their nature image reposting websites. and self-uploads are tagged as such, because the default assumption is that the uploader did not create the art.
Hilariously though, despite Danbooru and similar being viewed as porn/rule34 sites, the vast majority of stuff uploaded to general boorus is non-pornographic rating-wise, though whether it's actually safe for work is another question entirely (one that ended up causing Danbooru to make a whole new rating just for safe-for-work stuff, because it got lumped in with non-pornographic ecchi).
Damian0358 posted:
Man that site is such dog shit. Seriously make sure you load down your ad blocker and script blocker because that site is a fucking warzone of ads, popups, and general obstructive garbage. And searching it is awful because you have an extremely limited ability to filter before you're cut off on a search, and then you increasingly have to sift through the AI trash they have been pushing more and more (alongside crypto), like the "ai companion" shit that now has an unremovable window always present in every page of the site. And that's before getting in to how the "News" side is like 50% or more bigoted, alt-right garbage and the rest is like an even split on random news from Japan or else talking about some ai porn that got posted. Like it has probably the largest variety of content, but good fucking luck surviving to see most of it.Sankaku Channel (and Sankaku doesn't permit scraping back),
Coldmute posted:
Yeah, no matter how much it may have been good as an alternative in the past (since you still have a lot of folks who profess Sankaku to be better than not just Gelbooru, but Danbooru too), the last decade has just seen the booru just decline completely. At bare minimum, from everything I've heard, the owner of Sankaku is a massive asshole who does everything he can to prevent folks from scraping images from the website despite much of its booru consisting of stuff scraped from other boorus, pushes a $10 monthly subscription for features you can get on Danbooru with either a one-time $20 donation for server costs or for free if you put in the effort and contribute, has tried to pull a Fakku via Sankaku Plus, and the users of the booru are constantly at war with the owner over broken features and changes, with the recent Sankaku beta being the last straw for many folks. I've even seen a Sankaku mod on the Danbooru Discord server complain about how they can't even contact the owner anymore, and how moderation tools are broken, so an enormous amount of images are stuck in permanent 'to be approved' mode.
And then for posts themselves, image links are temporary, so if you fuck up your linking, it'll break and just give you their logo as a redirect. And more egregiously, with the recent beta, they literally made it so that it doesn't show you the source of the art anymore (though a lot of non-scraped stuff was already unsourced, but now stuff taken from Danbooru, Gelbooru, etc. have been desourced). I could probably go on and on regarding how shit Sankaku Channel is, and why I'm a tiny Cato in the Danbooru Discord server, calling for 'Sankaku delenda est' and for ways of circumventing Sankaku to preserve anything unique it has on Dan/Gel so that it can be burnt down.
Man that site is such dog shit. Seriously make sure you load down your ad blocker and script blocker because that site is a fucking warzone of ads, popups, and general obstructive garbage. And searching it is awful because you have an extremely limited ability to filter before you're cut off on a search, and then you increasingly have to sift through the AI trash they have been pushing more and more (alongside crypto), like the "ai companion" shit that now has an unremovable window always present in every page of the site.
Coldmute posted:
I suspect the only reason why Sankaku has survived this long is because of its 'News' section, Sankaku Complex, since it served niche anime news for many years (though always being seen as tabloid level, and only getting worse since), and the corresponding booru gave an avenue to concentrate site supporters. Also, Sankaku has one of the few rare English-language instances of idol/gravure boorus, with pics of real people, which is probably another thing that draws folks to them.And that's before getting in to how the "News" side is like 50% or more bigoted, alt-right garbage and the rest is like an even split on random news from Japan or else talking about some ai porn that got posted. Like it has probably the largest variety of content, but good fucking luck surviving to see most of it.
ShepPeppers posted:
You're gonna have to Paheal these nuts off your chin. Huehuehuehuehue.Yeah why is it called Paheal
Coldmute posted:
Sankaku is the biggest example of "enshittification" I've seen. Even worse than Twitter.
Ads on ads, popups, popups on ads, banners for premium and their AI shit everywhere, the AI chat bot, removal of source links...Man that site is such dog shit. Seriously make sure you load down your ad blocker and script blocker because that site is a fucking warzone of ads, popups, and general obstructive garbage. And searching it is awful because you have an extremely limited ability to filter before you're cut off on a search, and then you increasingly have to sift through the AI trash they have been pushing more and more (alongside crypto), like the "ai companion" shit that now has an unremovable window always present in every page of the site. And that's before getting in to how the "News" side is like 50% or more bigoted, alt-right garbage and the rest is like an even split on random news from Japan or else talking about some ai porn that got posted. Like it has probably the largest variety of content, but good fucking luck surviving to see most of it.
Shifting back to talking about the tweet that inspired the video, I suspect the main thing going on, aside from giving too much credit, is memory conflation. No matter how little of an impact BioShock Infinite and Elizabeth may have had, I think the numerous reactions Ken Levine made publicly to the porn of the game is why people give that game's 3D porn scene so much credit, and then conflate that with Overwatch, its early SFM porn scene that eventually gave way to the modern Blender porn scene, and Blizzard's reaction to said porn. That's the only way I could imagine "BioShock Infinite porn" and "Blender" ending up in the same set of tweets. So it's more accurate to say that BioShock Infinite's lasting legacy is, in fact, Ken Levine's reactions to its porn.
The legacy people are imprinting on BioShock and Elizabeth is actually the legacy of Overwatch and Tracer - if that doesn't show what little legacy BioShock Infinite has had since its release, in the memory of mainstream gaming culture, I don't know what does.
The thumbnail annoys me because Raven is the only character among those girls who isn't originally from a video game. Someoooone was biased.
I feel sad about the situation with Ken Levine. I feel like if the creator doesn't like it you shouldn't keep creating it out of respect for them. Like there's so many other characters out there for you to make porn of anyway. Even worse is if you make even more porn of a character out of spite, like in MLP when a dying child requested to be a character in the show, and the creators did it, and said on tw*tter to please not make any porn of that character.
ShepPeppers posted:
Your example aside which is kind of another thing entirely (character that depicts or represents a real person), If I were a popular creator, i'd be honored to know that a character of mine is so popular it's getting porn drawings, it means that i've managed to make people care about this character, or at the very least I gave it a striking design.I feel sad about the situation with Ken Levine. I feel like if the creator doesn't like it you shouldn't keep creating it out of respect for them. Like there's so many other characters out there for you to make porn of anyway. Even worse is if you make even more porn of a character out of spite, like in MLP when a dying child requested to be a character in the show, and the creators did it, and said on tw*tter to please not make any porn of that character.