Dear readers and customers,
after 14 years existence of this neat little Indie online publishing house, let us introduce you now to our official mascot: the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)!
We chose this animal for several reasons. Here is why:
- it’s agile: no animal on Earth could represent this spirit more. It’s our ultimate goal in anything we do here since our inception
- it’s a cat: everybody loves cats! So do we
- speed: the Internet changed the way we consume, interact with and create media. You need velocity for that. Perfect for our agile approach
- it’s majestic: the cheetah knows exactly what it does. Every movement during the hunt requires perfect coordination of the body. Oh, and if things get hectic, luckily you can catch it with your tail!
- it’s a neat predator: as a company, you sometimes have to be able to negotiate tough. It is an advantage if you look cute here
As positive as this may all sound, to this day, the cheetah is still listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Because of that, we support the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) since many many years with a monthly double digit Euro amount. With our help, we are a godfather for a cheetah (we are currently having our third animal already) and ensure that the animals are able to survive for many years to come in the wild.
You can do this too: as an individual through donations. As well as a company. Any help is highly appreciated not only by us (the big cheetah fans) or the CCF but by the cats themselves. Purr!
What we will do now is insert small cheetahs from time to time here on our website. If you find one, send us the address (URL) of the page where you found one to info@aethyx.eu. At the end of the year you may be one of the lucky ones to win something! It’s a surprise but we are sure you will like it. Chirp Chirp!
Stay tuned and never stop running,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers and customers,
by the end of this month, we are reaching the end of our very first year of AI art generation. Okay, technically it’s not AI but strict machine learning. But nobody gives a damn out there anyways.
So without further ado, let’s celebrate our most popular creations for the first time and tell you some details about them (click to enlarge):
#5 Atlantis
This is really one of the first ones we ever did, end of August 2022 with the open source tool Stable Diffusion on one of our laptops. The command how we generated it can even be seen publicly on the artwork detail page on Deviantart. We are proud we made it and it aquired 6 fans so far. (Buy it as an adoptable for 9$)
#4 8K Space Odyssey
We were experimenting with the built-in generator tool from Deviantart called “DreamUp”. The biggest difference from what we could create last year is the resolution: 1280x1280px instead of 512x512px here. We didn’t see much of a difference in details or quality. We guess “DreamUp” is built around Stable Diffusion itself as it’s freely available as an open source artwork generator tool. This space odyssey attracted 7 fans so far.
#3 Japanese concept cars in a Japanese cherry tree spring setting I
Another one created with “DeviantArt”s own tool. The prompt is there as well, 7 fans so far.
#2 Japanese concept cars in a Japanese cherry tree spring setting II
Except the cherry tree alley, we think this one of the ugliest ones we ever created, haha! Nevertheless, it’s almost our most popular, attracting 9 fans so far. Same as above, from our five most popular AI art creations, three are currently done by “DreamUp”.
#1 a Neuromancer quote
It honours us that the most popular AI art creation was done by us with our local machine! It’s the visualisation of an original Neuromancer quote: “His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines” We and 8 others think this must have been a masterpiece for its prompt. And we won’t complain, as it’s also the only entry here with a comment (Thank you soulcreator789!).
Currently, we are testing out SDXL 1.0 on the exact same machine. Our first experiments look promising, although we want to be honest and admit that a hardware piece from 2019 with 6GB of RAM shows us our current limits very fast. We can’t do hi-res creations, as an example. And one creation with a minimum stepping of 30 iterations takes over 10 minutes for us. So it seems, before we can invest 3,000€-4,000€ to get that 4090 laptop on the market, we have to sell a gazillion of adoptables to really be able to keep up pace with the current industry. Yes, being indie is hard, no doubt about that.
We hope you enjoyed our little artwork excursion today and who knows, if we are still in the AI art creation space next year, we publish another AETHYX MEDIAE artwork ranking entry. 🙂
So long and keep counting those s/it,
your aethyx staff
Dear readers and customers,
here is AETHYX MEDIAE, your friendly and most independent online publishing house from Europe!
Today we want to tell you about a neverending tale of How Google is violating our patience policy as indie publishers!
We’re developing Android apps inhouse since 2013, to be exact. During these times we never got any problems with them regarding any kinds of violations.
This is no wonder as we do our business seriously, and represent open-source to the fullest with all its quirks and hacks and stuff, but never illegally or bad or intentionally wrong, etc.
It’s mid August now and we already had to eat five takedowns since January. All because of the same fake bulls**t reason:
This is a snapshot from the automatically generated Email you get when your app is taken down but with no further information what the problem was exactly.
In the past we didn’t ask them what the problem was. We just provided them a new APK, let them check it, and were good for the next couple of months.
This time we tried a different approach and asked them for a more detailed answer.
This is the answer followed by a graphic which, according to Google, violated their policy:
“During review, we found that your app violates the Payments policy. You can read through the Payments policy page for more details.
For example, your app provides methods for users to donate without using Google Play’s payment system in app and in the store listing. Please refer to the attached screenshot for further information.
Donations may only be collected within an app under certain conditions:
Donations are only permitted for validated non-profit charitable organizations (for example, a validated 501(c)(3) charitable organization or the local equivalent).
Donations must be facilitated via a web browser, and any collection must be made through a secure payment system.You can learn more about in-app billing in the Android Developers Help Center. Note that all of these conditions need to be fulfilled for us to reinstate your app.”
This is the same nonsense they send you automatically when your app is taken down. It simply means we aren’t allowed to use donation(!) buttons we designed ourselves(!) on our own(!) apps and websites.
Don’t believe us? Then here’s the graphic with the “violation” in red:
For historical reasons we didn’t change the naming of the file, we just resized it to get down to the violation from us according to Google.
As if this wouldn’t be enough, “Big G” knocked us down another time.
This time, same(!) EMail, we would violate a “YouTube autoplay policy”:
“Additionally, during review, we also found that your app violates the Device and Network Abuse policy by enabling background play of YouTube videos.
One example to illustrate background play is YouTube video continues to play even after the screen is locked. Please refer to the attached screenshot (1) for further information.Please update your app to fix these issues. You’ll need to disable background play functionality of YouTube videos in your app before submitting it for another review. You may also want to double check that your app complies with all other policies listed in the Developer Policy Center as additional enforcement could occur if there are further policy violations.”
They sent us a snapshot here too:
We think there is no more concrete way to tell you in one Email “we don’t like you, and we don’t support what you do, either”. DAMN.
If we wouldn’t have asked for a more detailed description about the first “violation”, we wouldn’t have received the second one about YouTube autoplay. Oh my…
Well, we’re the underdogs here, we can’t do anything about rules made by Google. Their Play Store still is the #1 reason why developers publish Android apps and this never changed and it will never change in the future.
So, what we’ll do, we can only nod our sad head and comply with them. As always.
As we’re already on our way out from tainted and non-GDPR-complying advertising schemes (as promised by us in an article back in March this year), we’re thinking about bringing back Google Adsense at least for those projects which offer Android app functionality. We never used Google Payments and don’t know what this is, and as far as we’re concerned we just won’t use it in the future for the reasons found herein, obviously.
For the time being, we can’t provide a working Android app for the aforementioned project. Let’s hope for the best!
Good luck to all the Android indie developers out there.
Take care,
the aethyx staff
Hello dear readers & customers,
today, we want to introduce to you our one and only “social media expert” Rae McCoy:
Rae is so far our only expert for anything Q&A related for our deluxe premium adult toy store, 53x.toys.
If there is anything open about our toys there, you want to get a Nornenrad tarot sent to your Email mailbox (75€), or just want to chat for a while, don’t hesitate to contact her!
She’s to this day still unmarried, doesn’t want kids, is bisexual and Scorpio too.
Have fun & respect her, please, she has a very tough job on Facebook & Twitter.
Have a nice day and happy masturbating,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers and customers,
in 2014 we build up our first adult toy store, 53x.toys.
We are selling quality premium adult toys online since this year, primarly for females. But toys are available for males, too.
We rejected selling DVDs and magazines from the beginning.
What we try to provide here is celebrating masturbation for anyone on planet Earth. We don’t need more humans, we need more sex.
Time to train, girls & boys. 😉
We did other online sex toy stores too. It’s up to you find out how much we did since 2014 and which these are. Happy Easter! 😀
Right now we are providing omnichannel support via one female secretary only, Mrs. Rae McCoy. She’s available 24/7 via Facebook & Twitter.
All of our online adult toy stores pertain the ability to connect via “Social Networks” for customer support reasons. We think that’s the only channel we need in the 21. century for customer support.
Have fun checking our stores and happy buying! <3
Celebrate the end of 2018 with one or two new vibrators,
celebrate humanity,
celebrate satisfaction.
Only the bestest,
the aethyx staff