aspiringwatcher

[aspiringwatcher]

does anybody else remember that reality show where they gaslit a bunch of americans into thinking they were competing to marry prince harry but it was really just some guy

[aspiringwatcher]

What new-world crop are you most glad to have access to?

Potatoes

Peppers

Cacao (chocolate)

Corn/maize

Tomatoes

Common beans (black, pinto, kidney, etc.)

Tobacco

Avocado

Pineapple

Allspice

Another new-world crop

I actually somehow only eat oats and turnips

[aspiringwatcher]

Just discovered the queue, this thing is amazing

[aspiringwatcher]

20 examples of periodic solutions to the three-body problem

[aspiringwatcher]

So this is definitely a case of "we did not expect Harvard to fight back and we forgot they have billions of dollars and the best lawyers"

[aspiringwatcher]

Your regular reminder that trickle-down economics is a cruel joke designed by the wealthy.

[aspiringwatcher]

i like to imagine it’s a little me i gotta protect, take to nice places, be kind to ( @yuukei-yikes )

[aspiringwatcher]

Let’s get to work!

[aspiringwatcher]

[aspiringwatcher]

Did I show u guys my headshot sheet so I remember how I draw everyone

[aspiringwatcher]

if you ever find yourself thinking “wow I scraped the bottom of the barrel with my energy with that and came out okay!” that’s the devil talking. you did not come out okay. you borrowed energy from the future. you will repay it if you don’t rest and replenish the borrowed energy first.

[aspiringwatcher]

If I said "anti-AI arguments that mention souls are instantly really terrible, but I do think there's an element of spiritual rot that I worry about", would anyone understand that?

The "spiritual rot" is metaphorical, not literal, of course. But what I mean is, people talk about accessibility when it comes to AI. When it comes to people who physically cannot hold a pencil with their hands (and stop talking about "draw with your feet" disability porn), there's room to talk there, and a space that I have not fully developed a paradigm on, I guess. But people who *can* hold pencils, who *can* draw, will still say that AI has made art much more accessible. And maybe it has, if you consider "art" to be the product, the image, but not if you consider "art" to be the process.

If you make a pizza from scratch, you are a cook and you made food. If you make a pizza using only store-bought ingredients, you are a cook and you made food. If you threw a frozen pizza in the oven and pulled it out when it was done, you made food, but I don't think you had the space to exercise the "skills of a cook". In that regard, while you did make food, you categorically can't be considered a cook. Similarly, if I ask for a freshly-baked pizza, and you give me a cooked frozen pizza, you have lied to me, as while they might both be pizza, they are different *kinds* of pizza.

(And before you ask, I don't think the store bought ingredients makes the second pizza "worse" or "less of a cook", because you still have to arrange and bake everything, you just didn't go full boar. Though if you prefer fresh pizza from scratch, you can ask for that, and if someone gives you store bought ingredients, that's also a lie.)

Do I think that frozen pizza is degeneracy? No. Do I think it's immoral to not know how to cook? Also no. But I do think there's something negative about *refusing* to learn how to cook, for example, because you can just pre-heat frozen food forever. That's sufficient, but it is stagnant. Similarly, I don't inherently have anything against the idea of "easy modes" in video games, but I do despise the way people talk about them. It's often framed as an "accessibility feature", when it really isn't. Colorblind-friendly palettes, visual cues in audio puzzles, controller remapping, all serve to flatten the disadvantage that disabled gamers have, but they and abled gamers both, at the end of the day, need to engage with the mechanics of the game, and learn how to play it.

Maybe a video game is genuinely tough, and you just want to experience the story, or do "practice mode" so you can try again on a harder difficulty. That's fine. But we talk about mechanics as though they are separate from the story, and putting aside the most obvious instances in which gameplay directly converses with story or vice-versa, it does add to a feeling. Dark Souls isn't very challenging on accident, it adds to the feeling of getting crushed and getting back up again, the only determined actor in a world of decay. It is a part of the Dark Souls *experience*. If you don't enjoy Dark Souls, that's fine. If your skills aren't that great, that's fine. If you say "Dark Souls needs an easy mode", I think you're not attempting to engage with Dark Souls as a work of art that was designed with intent. If you categorically refuse to play on any difficulty except easy, I think that's a bit petulant and you are "less of a gamer" than me, because part of the experience of "playing a game" is engaging with the mechanics, and easy mode requires less engagement in order to make progress.

When people talk about "effort" and the virtue of doing hard work, it often comes back to ideas of "suffering building character", that if it's easy it isn't worth doing, and if you haven't toiled you haven't done anything of worth. This is bad and wrong, obviously. I don't think there's anything inherently positive about struggling. But I do think there is something inherently negative about shying away from difficulty and always taking the easy route. This isn't a pedantic rephrasing of the same idea, but a genuine distinction. "Learned helplessness" and self-infantilization are issues I think about sometimes, and "some hard things are worth doing" is perhaps the politically incorrect way of saying "some people will destroy their lives because they're afraid of struggling". It is, after all, easier to be alone forever than to make friends. Easier to rely on stereotypes than to challenge your biases. Easier to stay the same than to learn a new skill or change something about yourself.

Or to bring it back to the original topic instead of the three-layer deep dish of analogies I was just wallowing in. I do think there is an element of "AI destroying human creative spirit", not in the literal sense that we're all getting dumber (although google sure is looking unusable right now) or that soon the AI Gestapo will shoot anyone holding a pen (although nazis on twitter do talk about that, but AI's popularity among web fascists is a topic for another day). But in that engaging with the process of making art is a positive thing that I think people are robbing themselves of or devaluing. My favorite artists are not the most technically proficient, but the ones with the most distinctive styles, or for whom their art and personality are inextricable. My artwork is, in fact, Not Very Good, and I'm often frustrated by it when it doesn't match my mental image of what I wanted it to look like. But I do get better at bridging that gap, and I'd be a much more frustrated person if I never took an honest stab at it.

I don't think frozen pizza will render the concept of a "cook" inconceivable, and, as they're categorically different things, people will always desire a freshly cooked pizza. My issue isn't that anyone can thaw a meat-and-cheese-disc and have it edible in 30 minutes. It's when people insist that freshly baked and frozen are the same thing, and when people point to the existence of frozen as a reason for why they never have to learn how to cook again, because pizza has now definitively been solved.

[aspiringwatcher]

I swear the received wisdom we're developing about how to clock AI authorship is going to end up doing more harm than good. "Generative language models don't remember what they've written before, so plot holes in fanfic are a red flag that the author is using AI" yeah, and you know who else doesn't remember what they wrote last chapter?

[aspiringwatcher]

PLEASE CYBERBROS DRIVE YOUR TRUCK INTO THE NEAREST LAKE. DONT WORRY ITS A FEATURE

[aspiringwatcher]

in Disco Elysium I was expecting there to be some kind of “addiction mechanic” that would add a long-term downside to taking drugs, and was surprised not only by the absence of any such mechanic but also that the benefits of drugs greatly outweighed the cost. anyways fast forward to the late game and I was downing three bottles of pyrholidon and smoking an entire pack of cigarettes before attempting any check, and it was only then I realized there was in fact an addiction mechanic

[aspiringwatcher]

[aspiringwatcher]