Valentine Kozin
9of9.bsky.social
Valentine Kozin
@9of9.bsky.social
Lead Technical Artist at ☠️Rare☠️ | 🎭 BAFTA Member
Game developer, Houdini user, maker of pretty things.
Pinned
Now this place is teeming with game devs, I should probably pin a post with my actual work. I don't post actual gamedev stuff that much, but the best place to start with is my SIGGRAPH presentation on the Tech Art of Sea of Thieves (second video at the bottom of the page) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Having a hell of a good time with Seance of Blake Manor 😊
We should be so lucky as to have both Blue Prince and Blake Manor come out within the same year.
The Seance of Blake Manor is my Blue Prince
aftermath.site/seance-of-blak...
November 3, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
I've just found out which Babylonian god people prayed to to get up early in the morning - Ninurta!
'To do business at the quay where traffic rushes swiftly by,
You, O unrivalled king of the world, rouse at daybreak him who else would not rise.'
From www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/3/1...
electronic Babylonian Library
The electronic Babylonian Library (eBL) Project brings together ancient Near Eastern specialists and data scientists to revolutionize the way in which the literature of Iraq in the first millennium BC...
www.ebl.lmu.de
October 8, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Too Far Left Off The Visible Spectrum
September 30, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
OPPORTUNITY English writer - Big Word - Remote

Unaffiliated, shares welcome.

www.linkedin.com/posts/bigwor...
‎ | BigWord Game Localization
Remote English Writer – Narrative Specialist !Notification!: We currently have project requirements with an average volume of 35,000 words per writer. Candidates who pass the test will undergo immedi...
www.linkedin.com
September 30, 2025 at 7:07 AM
Strange Horticulture was the cosiest puzzle game that was enormously fun, and Strange Antiquities is the perfect follow-up. Getting close to the end now and thoroughly enjoying it.
September 23, 2025 at 1:43 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
August 7, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Every time there's a cabinet reshuffle, I just really want someone to make a deck builder game based on parliamentary politics where you can literally reshuffle your deck and draw a new cabinet as a mechanic.
September 6, 2025 at 10:18 AM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
This is very good.
Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
September 1, 2025 at 8:10 AM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
the reason I’ve been so vocal about the water use of AI thing is that the most commonly cited stuff saying it’s bad doesn’t add up & I think it’s important to be accurate about the negative impacts of this tech. if 1/3 of your cited issues are wrong, an informed listener may doubt the remaining 2.
The commonly cited AI water usage statistics are based on a methodology where, if your data center buys green energy from a hydroelectric dam (as lots do, including the hyperscalers), then “natural evaporation of the water from the lake behind the dam” is counted as that data center’s water use.
August 30, 2025 at 10:02 PM
One of the scenes that made me stop watching Star Trek Discovery was in S01E02 where the protagonist, confined to the brig, enters an ethical debate with the ship's computer and convinces it to let her go. Little did I know only a few years later it would become the most realistic part of the show 😔
Of the many writers to predict AI, only Douglas Adams got the tone right
August 31, 2025 at 7:44 AM
Thank god for the ability to pixel peep other people's photos to satisfy my FOMO. Not that I could afford it but... yeah, this camera looks pretty, yet it bleeds like any other.
August 26, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
As someone who was introduced to Steve Yedlin's Display Prep demo at a formative time in his career, today's been a very fun day in film emulation.
Some film emulation tests. Can you guess which is film, and which is digital? Part 1, versions A and B.
August 18, 2025 at 10:04 PM
As someone who was introduced to Steve Yedlin's Display Prep demo at a formative time in his career, today's been a very fun day in film emulation.
Some film emulation tests. Can you guess which is film, and which is digital? Part 1, versions A and B.
August 18, 2025 at 10:04 PM
The Immortality Design Works Deluxe Edition box is a beast, I was not prepared for this level of cool. I didn't even realise these were signed, my apologies to your wrist @mrsambarlow.bsky.social!
August 15, 2025 at 2:06 PM
So cool to see some of our Sea of Thieves stylisation work still finding new life! Awesomely cool implementation 😊
On that note, let's also *dive* in another favorite subject of mine:

💧 Water shaders 💧

Here's another behind-the-scenes 🧵 on the tech-art behind our water visuals in HERDLING:
August 14, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
glitter beard
August 12, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
I never before realized how badly I wanted an anime adaptation of Dune

Not the book

The David Lynch movie
Japanese 1984 movie poster by Ryoichi Ikegami for David Lynch’s Dune.
August 10, 2025 at 12:36 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
the UK’s Internet age verification law has led to the effective censorship of all LGBT content on Reddit

what a shocking and unexpected turn of events!
July 25, 2025 at 2:01 AM
Speed running to see how many of these 'age verification' services that the UK now has to put up with, will happily verify my Cyberpunk 2077 character. (Spoiler alert: all of them. Absolute clownshow).
July 25, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
This itch.io NSFW policy change is unfortunately nothing new, the problem isn't the platforms themselves but rather Visa/MC strong-arming these services into revising their NSFW policies.
So if you're eligible I invite you to sign this ACLU petition: action.aclu.org/petition/mas...
Mastercard: Sex Work is Work. End Your Unjust Policy.
Mastercard's new policy unfairly targets the adult content industry, making sex workers more vulnerable, especially Black trans women. It must be stopped.
action.aclu.org
July 24, 2025 at 10:35 AM
For folks in the UK, please take a look at signing petition.parliament.uk/petitions/72... which aims to repeal the Online Safety Act, which is coming into force and restricting large swathes of internet access and pushing online services to curtail their operations in the UK internet.
Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
We want the Government to repeal the Online Safety act.
petition.parliament.uk
July 24, 2025 at 3:37 PM
If you see this, post a vampire.
July 20, 2025 at 6:33 AM
Many thanks to @daggersmctimbers.bsky.social for taking good care of the camera for the group photo! 😀 It came out stellar!
July 12, 2025 at 9:30 PM
Had such a lovely time at my first ever #SoTFest - such a delight to be able to make it finally, and get to meet so many amazing and talented folks!
July 12, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Valentine Kozin
oh my god
If you hold CTRL, it will pause Task Manager so the processes don't move around when you're sorted by resource usage
July 7, 2025 at 11:55 PM