Costume Clash is probably going to be back up now. If it isn’t, it at least won’t be my fault.

Following the incident with Larry, the rest of the original team gradually dropped out one by one for various reasons. My plan to revive the game became a Ship of Theseus situation - we were not only going to have to replace the code, but the music, and even the graphics. It stopped being worth fighting for at that point. So with some admin magic from @Tom, I decided to concede project ownership to Larry, remove myself from the team, and let him put the file back if he wanted to. At the end of the day, the two things that matter here are that I’m not associated with his behavior, and that you have something to play. (If he still has a reason to keep it away from you, you’ll have him to confront for problems that were ultimately a result of his behavior. Looking back, I never should’ve had to apologize for him breaking the game on purpose.)

With what I know now, would I have done it differently? Oh, definitely. In fact, I would’ve just put the team together and left them to do their own thing. They would’ve done just fine without a superfluous “director”. But at that time, everything I did was what I thought was the best judgment at the moment. I didn’t want the whole team, especially not me, to be represented by one guy with a condescending streak. Even now, accepting defeat, I do so on my own terms. The record shows, I took the blows, and did it my way.

Thank you, everyone, for putting up with this nonsense.

Defective Dolls and Sinking Ships

Pictured: The current front page banner for Meiker.io, clearly AI-generated.

Considering this is basically the belated wrap-up post for this year’s Costume Jam as a whole, I figure it might be suitable space to share some troubling news from the dress-up community at large. The threat of what some would call enshittification is looming over the sister-sites Doll Divine and Meiker, as their admin Ola Rogula (who I interviewed during the jam) is increasingly relying on AI art generators - which train on data taken from other people’s art - to make graphics for her sites and games. (Examples of the games in question are here and here.) As I remember it from community discussions, Ola has also previously experimented with NFTs for a brief period, though she stopped at least partly because of the community backlash.

I don’t know what to think at this point, but there is some creeping anxiety that I may be standing on a sinking ship. If worse comes to worst, I’d end up having to pull out of the sites and communities in question, but how? We’ll have to see.

In other news…

The Pokémon Mystery Meat Collab, hosted by @whimsical-wife and I, is still accepting entries! Currently I’m working on the beginnings of the code for either an interactive art viewer, or if I can, a full-on game to showcase the artworks. High time I learned how to code my own stuff, right? (I’m aware the thread says the final product will be a collage artwork - that’s my last resort option if nothing else ends up working, and I put it in the thread because it’s the most I can give a 100% promise of.)

Hope everyone’s 2024 is off to a good start! Remember, of course, that compassion for other people usually makes things feel better. If I can pull myself away from Newgrounds, I may be able to go on a proper hiatus like I tried to in November before all this happened. We’ll see.

-Thetageist