That one sun face
Also: yellow art, junky crosshairs, and Female Dracula.
Hello! This week we’re talking about misshapen cat heads, the fall of a "mouse-accel-legend," and a fully analog man.
Only God knows how many Plants vs. Zombies games exist
A recent comment posted underneath an insane Plants vs. Zombies wojak tableau alerted us to the fact that there are more PvZ games around than we ever imagined. As a refresher: PvZ was a charming but easy tower defense game that came out in 2009. Its publisher Popcap then un-charmingly fired the first game’s creator while making PvZ2, and have since made and recalled the troubled PvZ3, which remains in limbo. PvZ now seems mostly notable as an impressive act of corporate bag-fumbling, a franchise that lost its identity and faded away as competitors like Bloons and Kingdom Rush ascended.
But fans — mostly Chinese fans — have kept breathing life into the franchise even as corpos failed. After the success of official Chinese spinoffs like PvZ: Great Wall Edition (2012) and PvZ: Journey to the West (2013), unofficial developers took up the mantle with fanmade mods like PvZ: Neighborhood Defense, PvZ: Integrated, and the massive Plants vs. Zombies Fusion, whose untranslated menus have not deterred English-speaking fans.
- The still-active community for discontinued mobile game Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes remains still-horny for characters like Solar Flare, a variant of the original game’s Sunflower, who has thousands of entries on R34
- PvZ: Fusion’s hundreds of plant mutations are ridiculous; the game’s Discord has more than 400,000 members
- Here’s a solid six-months-late PvZ Sisyphus meme
CS players still not beating the “weird keybind” allegations
The Counter-Strike series has one of the longest competitive histories out of any current esports title, allowing bizarre configurations to calcify in the intervening years. Its pros continue to boast some of the most unconventional settings and keybinds to ever see competitive play. Some examples:
hallzerk thinks ESL's monitors are too big
by u/Cero_Kurn in GlobalOffensive
- Complexity’s hallzerk uses a 1152 x 864 resolution — a strikingly small window when viewed on a standard monitor — and prefers CS:GO’s default crosshair, a decision so strange that his teammates originally thought he was trolling
- Both Team Vitality’s mezii and Entropiq’s FASHR bind forward movement to the right mouse click, a convention that dates back to old-school FPS games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. FASHR also uses an inverted y-axis on his mouse, a preference he picked up from his father; in this interview, FASHR’s dad explains that the habit came from playing Microsoft Flight Simulator
- For a long time, Eternal Fire’s XANTARES enabled mouse acceleration, a playstyle that requires a staggering amount of muscle memory to use efficiently. He finally relented a few years ago, however, prompting Redditors to pay tribute to the former "Mouse-Accel-Legend"
- Meanwhile, fellow Eternal Fire teammate woxic is notorious for using an astonishingly high DPI setting, resulting in an extremely sensitive mouse
It’s notable that, in most of these cases, the pros have no desire to defend their preferences; most chalk it up to old habits dying hard. Overall, these configs capture the awkward transition from the era of LAN parties to the current landscape of esports — though it seems hardcore gamers haven’t gotten any less stubborn.
New AI art is all yellow
“AI images are soulless because the people prompting them have no souls.” A poster on an AI board somewhere said that this week as the internet weathered an onslaught of mindlessly Ghiblified pictures created by OpenAI’s new autoregressive model, 4o. And it seems broadly true — most people who’ve done creative work (nevermind art) are repelled by AI, leaving it the province of people with bad taste who are thrilled simply to imitate.
Nevertheless! The release of a new model raises an interesting question that both artists and AI hype guys don’t care about: what is the machine’s actual style? Though the big models seem to ingest basically all existing images, in practice they emerge from training with distinctive tastes. FLUX is known for photorealism, but also plastic skin and a tendency to give everyone a cleft chin (“FLUX face”); DALLE-3 showed a level of creativity with lighting and props that made some disparage it as a “random image generator,” but was also so Instagram-brained that getting it to generate an unattractive person was a prompting challenge.
The headline about 4o is that it’s clearly better at following prompts and keeping characters straight than older models, which makes it more useful for memes, stock photos, presentation filler, etc. It’s state of the art for text and giving pets weirdly shaped heads. But it doesn’t seem to have much range in the lighting and look of its photorealistic output, which seems easy to clock as AI imagery. The output often looks muted, yellow, and “overcooked,” as Stable Diffusion users call images made with SD’s prompt-following setting cranked too high: too crispy, gritty, patchy, etc. Much as 2023 memes led users to compare the drop of DALL-E 3 to an “atomic bomb,” the Ghibli posts and AI evangelists will drown out everything else for a few weeks; then the organic AI communities will get back to grumbling about how old models are better for x or y or that they still have to fix everything in Photoshop.
Ode to an analog man
Over the past couple of decades, boutique guitar pedalmakers have begun to hawk their wares like small-batch IPA breweries. You’ll see it if you skim through a gear reselling platform like Reverb: Fanciful copywriting, colorful packaging, abstract names that barely gesture to the product itself. Yet Analogman — occasionally stylized as aNaLoG.MaN — stands alone against the tide. The company is the brainchild of Mike “Analog Mike” Piera, a veteran pedal builder who started selling handmade pedals online in the early 2000s. Anyone who’s harbored an addiction to gear will recognize the company’s iconic “sun face” graphic.
What really makes them special, however, is their online presence. Their legacy site is still active, preserved as an artifact from a bygone era of HTML — though their current site, which launched in 2007, is still charmingly retro. The product page for the King of Tone, one of the builder’s most famous pedals, is blistered with dark blue hyperlinks that are barely legible against the page’s deep purple background. Scroll further and you’ll find each one of the pedal’s noteworthy owners fondly catalogued in chronological order, punctuated by copy-pasted email testimonials. (Its most recent addition is Hozier, who reportedly got one in 2024.) Hopefully, if this world is a kind one, Analogman’s dissertation-sized product pages will continue to expand for decades to come.
Chum Box
Games
Kid keeps threatening to "improve" indie game via aggressive Discord messages [link]
Newgrounds released a 45-minute DELTARUNE fan animation "collab" this past week [link]
Monster Hunter is the same boy it used to be [link]
“Stair builder situation in Doom is insane” [link]
Weed is finally cool thanks to the co-op Steam hit Schedule 1, a simulator made by a solo dev that reached a peak of more than 300,000 players [link]
Beta Decay is an in-development sci-fi indie game that looks like MGS1 and seems to play like MGS5 [link]
They’ll GeoGuess anything these days — including Hunt: Showdown [link]
Crusader Kings players have found one weird trick to living forever: build a ton of shrines (and feverishly collect books and potions) [link]
Persona 5 Royal claims yet another victim via its cursed gacha game collabs [link]
Turning woke in a Geometry Dash comment section [link]
A dope in-progress RPGMaker rhythm game [link]
The internet
Sinister stew [link]
Analog horror-style sculpture in local park terrifies community [link]
“Sincerely, Female Dracula” [link]
The 3DS camera is undefeated [link]
A great history of the manicule, the little pointer hand [link]
“What are the consequences of being banned for 700 years in Jerma?” [link]
The uwu police [link]
Music
Radiohead watchers have reported pain in joints, changes in wind direction, etc. portending the creation of a new album [link]
Burial is doing the soundtrack for Harmony Korine’s next audience-repelling effort [link]
AI
A Columbia student was heroically suspended for creating an undetectable AI assistant that helps coders ace technical interviews [link]
Connect with EX
- Feedback? Hit reply or email team@exresearch.co
- Follow us on Twitter [link]
- Follow us on Threads [link]
- Follow us on Bluesky [link]
- Write for us [link]
- Support us with a donation by clicking Account
One Last Thing
“your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for"
