Hey there,

I kind of always wanted to make a thread about this because it's a game that has been all over my childhood.

Super Mario Bros. X is a Mario fangame.
It combines a solid level and "episode" editor (an episode is a collection of levels through a world map, basically a whole game, full with secret exits and so on), and features from all retro Mario games (SMB1, SMB2, SMB3, SMW) and even some other games (Metroid mostly).

It has support for custom graphics, custom music and even layers and events. And there are plenty of really good episodes and levels by prominent creators that can definitely more than hold a candle to the original Mario games. It's kind of like SMW ROM hacking but with less technical skill required.

And to blow your mind, this was actually the very first project of a little known indie developer called Redigit, who went on to make Terraria!

Nowadays, due to Redigit abandoning the game, there are various different versions and continuations of the game, which kind of split the player base, but also means script support, way more NPCs and blocks, multiplatform and controller support, and much much more.

It has a pretty active forum over here, full of both older and newer players with a very diverse age range and range of personalities and identities, and it's a decently friendly community overall. Over the last years, they also made an effort to purge bigotry from the forums, so you will find a lot of welcoming features and people there.

Clock

I mean, the average streamer on twitch isn't exactly great either lol

Fair, but even Twitch will ban overtly and violently homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist or conspiracy theory people who call for violence against minorities or teach you how to do it.

On other sites that I don't want to name that are commonly recommended as YouTube alternatives, like the one beginning with an O you will get all of these on the front page as recommendations.

On Twitch you will get people having bad opinions or making bad jokes and dogwhistles, but it can get way worse.

As far as I know by the way, Ecosia plants extremely cheap trees in a monoculture, which actually destroys nature more than not. Plus, it's not open source, so you have no way of knowing for sure what they do to your data. No corporation does charity.

Honestly I think the game isn't enjoyable even if you ignore the technical difficulties.

The world feels utterly un-designed, with assets like buildings and NPCs seemingly plopped into the world without context, often clipping through the terrain. There is no real transition between town and nature, civilization just begins somewhere on a platform as if it was user-generated content in a game with a base building side mechanic. The story is as always bland and uninteresting, with the "twists" being obvious from reading the premise and no real interesting characters or plot points. The customization has been almost removed, forcing you into a school uniform. Most of the game world is completely empty, and items and Pokémon are strewn around in a way that I can't imagine has been decided through anything but procedural random placement. The gameplay itself has been nearly unchanged since the first generation, only that we now have a bland and empty open world instead of specifically designed scenic routes. The graphics honestly remind me of licensed Wii games, too; repeating terrain textures, the character models, all of it.

And this is all if you choose to ignore the egregious technical issues: a grand vista that's supposed to show a breathtaking view of a field full of windmills has them spin with two frames a second, NPCs and Pokémon pop in and out a few meters away, people and Pokémon are still T-posing in cutscenes. The game lags unbelievably much and often.

This is something I would criticize even in a student project, let alone the highest grossing media franchise of all time. It was utterly unenjoyable even with goodwill.

Thing is, I don't really think they "grew out of it" but just think it's bad now because modern society tells them it's no longer cool and hip. It's sad how people feel like they need to change to pleased the current state of culture around them.

Some people just change with the zeitgeist though. For example, at some point, parts of the online scene n emo culture became pretty universally uninteresting to people at large, like 'random' jokes (zomg dinosaur rawr), pretending as if no-one else at all on the world understood them or as if they were a super mysterious sociopath (didn't work anymore at some point).

People sometimes just change because they want to, or because society around them that supported their identity changes around and takes them with it.

We also forget that the reason many people got into the things in the first place was society and its whims and trends. Even on this forum and on Neocities, there will be plenty of people who bandwagon on the 'retro web' because they saw it on TikTok or want to have an alt identity away from the rest of society. Nothing wrong with it, of course.

Tick

I'd generally refrain from using proprietary, not even open source streaming platforms. They're going to spy on you, be unsafe, and probably host the kind of "creators" banned elsewhere for good reason.

I'd really use a free software ethical solution like PeerTube or Owncast.

There's a federated self-hostable thing called OwnCast. Or you can find a PeerTube instance that supports streaming.

I use DuckDuckGo regularly. Never wished for anything else.

Yeah, I have had exactly the same problem.
I got diagnosed with ADHD last year and am now on meds. Now it's fine again.

Coffee and vanilla woo :}

My high school actually had us all use Chromebooks, so Google stuff was what we had to use.

That's actually pretty terrible from many standpoints, privacy, freedom of choice, monopolization, Google being a terrible corporation anyway, and the software freedoms of the end user. But mostly school kids being spied on and having their data sold, and being taught by the school system that that's okay and obligatory.

Meanwhile my school switched to GNU/Linux and LibreOffice in 2014.

I still do not get why so much of the conversation is focused on whether it requires skill or not.

Is it not completely irrelevant where the art comes from? Is the end product not worth looking it by itself if it has not met a certain threshold of artist skill? I can imagine looking at algorithmically generated art and enjoying it. Is really anything else required to consider something art?

And even if we assume that artist skill is required for something to be truly art, we are at the very beginning of all this algorithmic art technology. In the future, the simple skillset of phrasing a creative prompt might be expanded by actually fine-tuning all kinds of algorithmic variables, at which point it turns into an actual skill you need to learn. Sure, it's not the same skill-set as a manual artist that uses fine motor motion to sculpt lines on a medium, but it might simply be a newly emerging multi-modal visual-written art form. Who says that something can not be art? If I wrote a poem and used that poem as a prompt for an algorithm, then it's a multimodal art piece consisting of both a visual and a prosaic component. Perhaps they complement each other, or they don't, or they showcase multiple facets of a certain idea. Of course that's art.

I think in a knee-jerk opposition to what people perceive as "tech bros", we lose sight of what art actually means. If something is more art when it requires more manual skill, by that logic using a sequencer is not music because if you take a sequencer away from a chiptune musician, occasionally you will find someone who has never learned to play any instrument at all. I also think this logic is kind of ableist because not everyone has the fine motor control, sense of rhythm or even the required senses to create art, so it can be nice for someone to see the product of their creativity come to life in a visual form who otherwise would never have had the opportunity.

I think it's a very emotionally charged discussion because traditional artists feel like something is taken away from them, while in reality, it's simply one more niche that we can grow into. Traditional art and computer art will co-exist in the same way that sampled music and manual music co-exists right now, like Scratch and C programs co-exist, and like auto-generated news articles and manual news articles co-exist right now.

I think other parts of it are much more dangerous: like ChatGPT being ascribed some sort of communicative intent or "knowledge", when in reality, it is literally just a text generator without any knowledge of the world. The prospect of using ChatGPT and other similar "large language models" for anything but the party trick it is right now is incredibly dangerous. It just puts words behind each other. And of course I don't feel threatened as a programmer or writer by ChatGPT because it might have been trained on my code or writing.

I'm graduated from high school last year, and I was having to explain to my peers how to use Google Docs in more ways than just typing stuff and doing the most basic of formatting. The same peers who had been using Google Docs the same amount of years I had been because we had the same classes that made us use it. It stresses me out.

You would not believe how many young people don't know how to look into the settings of applications.

I wish school took the proper time to actually show kids how to use the electronics in front of them instead of just saying "use this".

Even that is strange, because we actually knew how to use office suites properly with format templates and all. Google Docs itself is kind of a distortion, since you're just working on Google's servers using a flimsy web interface instead of your own computer.