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twovests wrote

Woah, I appreciate this.

I recognize the constituent elements of that gif with Blaze the Cat -- it appears to be a 3D noise texture, animated in the Z and Y axes, used two times in the same place: With a gradient map for the pink lightning, and with a gradient map for the alpha masks for the Blaze art.

I'm putting all these details out there to ask the question: How was that made? Is it...

  1. Picmix provides the tools to do noise textures, gradient maps, alpha masks, and to animate things; and you made that by hand?

  2. You made that background by hand, but not in Picmix?

  3. Picmix provided that pink-fiery texture thing, and everything I said was gibberish? Or

  4. The background art came with that pink fiery texture thing baked in.

I ask just from curiosity :3

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voxpoplar OP wrote

Lightning background is from Sonic Rush. Ring of fire is from Picmix with the colours adjusted. It really is just a pile of GIFs layered on top of each other.

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twovests wrote

Oh rad :D I love that. Thank you for sharing.

I was surprised learn that the person who made the ring of fire is 60 years old. I really associated these gifs with the youngest of internet youth, so I kind of went down a rabbit hole.

Chris-26, born in 1957, has a PicMix of the new pope which is admittedly quite endearing. That's only ~68, so not so old this is surprising.

Clicking around recent, it seems older people dominate the site, albeit one user being 111 years old makes me wonder how true these ages are.

But peoples profiles are full of comments like this:

💙Hi!💙 Beautiful image💙 Thanks for visiting and appreciating!💙 💙Kisses!💙

This whole feed feels painfully nostalgic-- like I'm looking back into what Facebook was ~15 years ago.

About a year ago I made a really dismissive post about how there was "no great AI art"... But it feels hard to say this isn't an earnest piece of art incorporating AI. Like, I wouldn't call this "great", but I can at least recognize that was a really satisfying thing for that person to make.

There is a whole and fascinating culture here. Prior to this, I would have categorized "AI art" as either (1) bad porn or (2) communities making AI art for the sake of AI. But this seems wholly earnest.

I don't know what to say except that I am fascinated. This feels like a holdout from some of the last vestiges of the old internet. And most importantly, these aren't .webms or .gifvs or .mp4s-- these are honest-to-soft-g-god .gifs Thank you for sharing

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