postapocalypticcottagecore

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Probably worth more as a collectable today than it ever was as occupation scrip. Whether that qualifies as a good tip I couldn't tell you.

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Bread, as well. You can grow corn and rice, but unless you add a mod you can't grind them into flour and bake bread.

It also mildly bothers me that I needed mods to add coffee, cigarillos and whiskey because it's a space western setting, and they're kind of fundamental to the aesthetic.

(I use the Vegetable Garden Project mod collection, in case anyone was wondering.)

Rimworld should have cheese in it. I know there's probably a billion mods with cheese but I will never get over how the base game has milk but no cheese. The Rule Of Management Sims is that if you got milk you make cheese. Next they'll let you grow cotton but not make you weave it.

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It's not AI-generated fanfic that worries me. It's the prospect of having nothing to read but fanfic, because no major publisher will pay an author five thousand dollars up front and 20% of the cover price thereafter for the rights to one good book when they can pay some start-up fifty a month and have their AI generate a thousand mediocre ones and keep all the money for themselves. And people will end up buying it anyway even if it's barely passable dogshit because it's all there is.

Fanfiction is the reason I'm not as worried about AI (as a writer)

If you've been reading the internet at all in the last few years, you know, according to the CEOs with a vested interest in this being true, that the next Tolstoy is lying in wait in a server farm currently guzzling up so much power it's changing the climate somewhere in Nebraska. AI is going to write books so well that there won't be any need for authors anymore! People will be able to just put in prompts and magically vomit out the stories they have always wanted to their personal standards!

There are not-so-outrageous claims that publishers are flirting with AI-genned and possibly people-guided stories already. And several publishing houses popping up to publish all those amazing AI-generated stories! And I'm not going to pretend that the writer in me didn't feel a twinge of worry.

Are they coming for my stories? Are these server farms going to replace the hours and days and weeks that I put into having an idea, constructing a plot, filling in ALL the words that connect the plot, editing to make the work cohesive all while paying attention to characterization, prose, voice, pacing, world building, realistic dialogue, humor, continuity, theme, and all the infinite little flourishes and details that go into creating a story? Apparently, so say the AI company CEOs who are totally not trying to sell you snake oil!

These insta-stories that people seem to think are a huge market have a really interesting testing ground: fanfiction. Because if there's any place where there is an instant audience voracious for reading stories that often repeat the same themes and tropes and characters, it's here. Look up the two cakes meme if you don't believe me. It's the perfect market for AI slop, providing an endless stream of soulmates fics featuring our favorite blorbos.

But what have we seen in practice? At least in the fandom I'm involved in, the few folks who have tried to make AI slop happen have... had trouble. Not only do the stories get flagged by members of the fandom as being suspicious, but they get very little to no engagement. People aren't interested in these stories. They avoid them. I want to remind everyone that fanfic is free. It's a click and sometime scrolling AO3. The prompts one would need to feed into ChatGPT are really narrow, since you probably already have the tropes you want in mind and the names of the characters. It's exactly where one would expect AI slop to have an audience, and it just doesn't.

If these models have already used the entire internet to train (which they have, even when people have told them to STOP using their content), and the only people who seem to be claiming we're within arm's reach of artificial general intelligence are the CEOs who are trying to keep the venture capital money flowing, then... do I fear that they are going to be able to compete with human creativity? I don't.

Because it can't even get people who've trawled the depths of AO3, of FFN, and even of Media Miner in a desperate search for a bazillion Destiel soulmate ABO fics to turn to the slop that ChatGPT makes.

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The only real issue with this is the non-trivial number of American politicians who would see absolutely no contradiction in fining people for not turning up to vote while still making it pointlessly difficult to actually do so if you're not the sort of person they want participating in their democracy.

And if I'm honest, given how many people only seem to look up the details of what they're voting for after the fact I'm not as enthused about getting as close to a 100% voter turnout as possible as I once was.

I was thinking about how I have grown to value mandatory voting over a system that allows allegedly more freedom. Because in country, mandatory voting means I just have to send in a ballot. It can be empty or filled with the write in ballot "pickle farts" if I want.

If I go to the voting station all I have to do is get my name checked off. I don't have to vote if I don't want to.

But it means it is much more difficult for the government to try and suppress voters. Because voters have a legal obligation to go to the polls, so you can't restrict them or try tactics to dissuade them.

Voting polls are open long hours with access to food and water being a fairly standard staple. You don't need any form of ID, you have to be given time to go vote in work hours without penalty if you cannot do it after work hours.

Every now and then a politician tries some small way of voter suppression but it isn't as easy. And so I have learned to appreciate it.

But when I googled, out of curiosity, if the USA had ever had anything like that I was met with a barrage of websites talking about freedom and justice and the absolute liberty of Americans. I thought an eagle was going to bust out of the screen.

Going through some of these I noticed they were think tanks connected to billionaires, one of them was funded and created by the Koch brothers.

Gotta love how often the American "freedom" is actually used as a way to further deny actual freedoms, both linguistically and politically.

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OpenTTD. Could be worse, I guess?

The only way to log out is to beat the game. And if you die in the game you die for real.

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I guess some people have just made a conscious decision not to find out about this stuff unless they have to.

And maybe we shouldn't judge them too harshly for it, because they might just come through the other side of all this with fewer scars.

i am legitimately so frustrated by the stupid unfunny destiel confession news thing u losers r still doing. destiel “the us has bombed iran” do u ppl not understand how obnoxious this is? the bit has run its course and been unfunny for years now but doing this shit is so fucking offensive and irreverent

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I could swear you could buy actual widescreen VHS tapes for a while. Not that we ever did, I think we bought a DVD player before we got our first widescreen TV, but there would have been a slight market for such things if they were real.

so this is a VHS rip of a video made in 1998 so WHY IS IT IN WIDESCREEN?!

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I don't know much about either band, but I have a very hard time picturing them performing in the Northampton I know today...

What a show this must have been.

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On the plus side, if these yahoos siphon off the voters who mostly agree with the GOP but find Trump's behaviour a bit gauche then maybe it'll be what passes for the centre-left who get to exploit the infighting for once.

I found a self described radical centrist publication

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As someone who is just old enough to remember when "Where are all the toilets?" was a minor meme in the Doom fandom, the previous version of this post-chain had me very confused indeed.

Who wants to hear my very unpopular interior design opinion.

[postapocalypticcottagecore]

All I can say is that I hope Lewis had the decency to be embarrassed if Tolkien caught on, and said sorry at some point.

This was on @whatareyoureallyafraidof's post where they put up this:

And I responded with this image:

and promised in the tags to elaborate if asked. And, @frodo-the-weeb, I will. But it's going to get long and I'm going to have to split it up into several reblogs.

First of all, since not everybody in the world is a Silmarillion enthusiast, let me explain what we're referring to.

One of the stories in the Silmarillion, and possibly the one Tolkien cared about the most, is the tale of Lúthien and Beren; a highly condensed version of a narrative poem called the Lay of Leithian, which Tolkien began writing in the 1930s and tried to get his publisher interested in after the success of The Hobbit.

(Their readers said no, and they tactfully asked him to focus on his Hobbit sequel instead. "The result," in Tolkien's own words, "was The Lord of the Rings.")

The skeleton of The Lay of Leithian is as follows; I'm intentionally leaving out a bunch of information that weaves it into the overarching story of the Silmarillion but isn't relevant to the thesis I'm advancing here.

Lúthien, an Elven princess and enchantress, falls in love with a mortal man, a ranger called Beren. Her father, the Elven King Thingol, disapproves and sends him Beren off to fetch one of the jewels from the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. Lúthien tries to join Beren but her father imprisons her in a tower to stop her, only it's actually a treehouse because they're forest elves. Lúthien magically grows her hair long and uses it to escape. By the time she catches up with Beren he is chained in the dungeons of Morgoth's second-in-command, Thû (whom Tolkien later renamed Sauron). She rescues him with the help only of a dog, who defeats Thû himself in single combat. They then live in the forest together for quite some time, but Beren feels bad about being the reason she can't go home to her family, and still intends to finish his mission and get the jewel. He leaves one morning while she's still asleep, so as not to put her in danger, and then when he's on the threshold of Morgoth's underground fortress in the far North of Middle-Earth she catches up with him again and he accepts that she's not going to be put off. Together they enter Morgoth's fortress and make their way to his throne room. They are in disguise but Morgoth is not fooled and uncovers Lúthien in front of everyone, declaring his intention to make her one of his many slaves. Lúthien offers to sing and dance for him, which is the way she works her magic. She puts everyone in the throne room to sleep, including both Beren and eventually Morgoth. She wakes Beren and he takes the jewel and they flee, but as they get to the outer door they are stopped by Morgoth's guard-wolf, who bites off Beren's hand holding the jewel.

That's as far as Tolkien ever got with the poem, but we have the synopsis in the prose Silmarillion to tell us the rest of the story; again cutting it down to the quick, Thingol accepts Beren as his son-in-law, Morgoth's guard-wolf attacks Doriath, Beren goes and hunts it but is mortally wounded, his spirit goes to the Halls of Waiting in the Undying Lands where the dead in Middle-Earth go, Lúthien also goes there and, again through her magical song, persuades Mandos the god of the dead to let him come back. Mandos offers her a choice: live on immortally as an Elf without Beren, or return to Middle-Earth with Beren but both of them will grow old and die. She chooses the latter.

Tolkien created Lúthien as a portrait of his wife Edith, which makes Beren a picture of himself. We know this for a fact because he had LUTHIEN written on her grave when she died, and when he joined her in it two years later the name BEREN was written for him:

Now on the lower right side of my response image you'll see Pauline Baynes' illustration of the Lady in the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories. A quick synopsis of the Lady of the Green Kirtle's part in the story:

The Lady is a witch who rules a gloomy kingdom underneath Narnia, accessible through a fissure in the earth in an old ruined city far to the North. Before the story opens she has enspelled and kidnapped King Caspian's son Prince Rilian, whom she intends to send leading an army to conquer Narnia in her name. For twenty-three hours a day he is her willing slave and lap-dog; to maintain the spell, he must be bound to the titular silver chair for the remaining hour, during which he is sane and aware of his imprisonment. The protagonists, Eustace and Jill and their guide Puddleglum, meet her and Rilian unawares on their journey to the North; she sends them astray and almost succeeds in getting them eaten by giants. Eventually they rescue Rilian from the chair, but she sings a magical song which very nearly puts them all to sleep but for Puddleglum's intervention. Foiled, she transforms into a serpent, attacks them, and they kill her.

It is my contention that the Lady in the Green Kirtle is Lewis's caricature of Lúthien, with the enslaved and befuddled Prince Rilian representing Beren; and further, that Lewis knew or recognised that Lúthien and Beren were a literary portrait of the Tolkiens, so that The Silver Chair is ultimately a nasty commentary on their marriage.

In forthcoming reblogs I will lay out my evidence for this thesis.

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We are now a very short chain of oversights and poor decisions from Microsoft finding themselve training the new incarnation of That Bastard Paperclip on confidential medical information and state secrets.

But they've probably got the EFF and the CIA on the same page about something for once, and I have to kind of respect that.

Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

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I remember the statement that Scott Cawthorn put out when this came to light, and I honestly felt a little bit sorry for him because he clearly wasn't being malicious. He was just... Well, I'm pretty sure he'd never spoken to a single person who wasn't white, cishet, financially stable and at least nominally Christian in his entire life. I didn't think that was still physically possible, even in the Midwest!

fnaf is such, a fascinating cultural object.

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I don't think we can blame this one on the Russians. I don't have a good source for this to hand, but I distinctly recall hearing that Trump's held a grudge against the asbestos ban ever since he was forced to comply with it in all his buildings, and got it into his head that the health risks were a hoax dreamed up by the Mafia and/or the Jews because they could make money off removing the stuff and trucking it away.

Another Kremlin policy to kill Americans put in place by MAGA traitors.

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You know what? They probably would. But who cares? It's not like they're a large enough demographic that any mainstream party would take them particularly seriously.

And if they end up starting their own political party instead, and that political party looks like it might have a chance of winning a non-trivial fraction of the vote? Well, at that point we've got considerably bigger problems anyway.

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Much as I want to pick the Linux supremacy option, when I started experimenting with it about fifteen years ago it still had a fair way to go before it was something I'd recommend to someone who isn't very good with computers.

And while 7 was not a bad OS overall, it earned a permanent place on my shitlist for forcing me to actively fight its constantly trying to sneak a Bing desktop shortcut onto my computer every time I updated. The constant pop-ups about how any update setting besides "Download and update immediately" (a process that took a good half an hour on the elderly Optiplex I was using at the time) was a security hazard and just because it was an option in the settings didn't mean MS wanted to let me wait until I was done using my PC and shut it down didn't overly impress me either.