I kinda spoiled this on Mastodon, but I decided that the blogroll wasn’t super useful, and I was probably the only person clicking through the newsfeed to read other people’s blogs, so also not useful. I more often use Feedly to keep up to date on the blogosphere.
Combine that with: I was looking at Google Analytics to see what pages most resonated with people (so I could write more like those), and it suggested adding ads to my page. If this blog had a few thousand daily readers, sure, maybe, but I miss that by a couple order of magnitude. But… what if…
What if I combined my love of those deceptive Raid: Shadow Legends ads with my favorite blogs? And made clickbaity little pictures for those?
I used ChatGPT4 to look through those blogs (because it can do this now, with Bing), decide what image would be appropriate, and then generate that image. I had to do some tuning and hinting — it wasn’t as easy as I implied — but it was fun.
As an epilogue, I asked it to generate the HTML to put the thing into the sidebar.
The only problem is that I have more bloggers to add, so I guess I should get to that before they wonder why they were missing…
This was such a great idea! Thanks for including me.
Thanks for writing years of great content!!!
Mine looks just like me!!
I have no idea what you look like 😛 But if you look like that — good job there!
Nah, my conception was a lady who might be saying something like, “come play a game where anything is allowed”, but instead it would go to the blogs of friends, just as deceptive as R:SL thumbnail ads. I think the only one that was actually based on what someone looks like IRL was Belghast’s, since he has various brown bearded avatars all over his blog.
I do know what Scopique and The Friendly Necromancer look like IRL, but I wasn’t trying to put their portraits into my blog.
The one for Scopique looks just like Geena Davis, though.
No, I meant the dragon! 🙂
I love mine! Thanks for the work that went into this – it’s so clever!
Those are fantastic! I love mine – the fur stole and that apothecary shop backdrop are perfect. It does also look weirdly like me, if I was gender-swapped and about 40 years younger.
I was going to use it to replace my ancient and highly inappropriate Gnome avatar on the blog but then I thought, even better, I ought to use your idea and make myself a new avatar, so that’s a project.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with for some other bloggers. (The Belghast one looks bizarrely similar to a manager I once had. He was a bit of a hipster and blindingly incompetent but very affable and friendly. That could easily be him. )