#could be a virtual/digital entity

[panther-asterisk]

[popatochisssp]

Apparently I haven't been checking here enough because there's so many new boys I didn't recognize in the sibling post!!! And they all sound so cool and interesting!!

Thank you! But you’re probably not as out of the loop as you think—I’ve been a little shy about sharing my stuff lately, so I actually haven’t posted about any of those guys before!

If you want a quick rundown…

Transcendtale: The result of a never-ending cycle of RESETs with a No Mercy sort of human. Monsters gradually became aware and eventually resorted to extremes to put an end to the cycle, sacrificing themselves to create one single vessel powerful enough to kill the human for good. In the aftermath, most of monsterkind is gone…physically, but still persist as consciousnesses recorded digitally instead. (Sort of a cyberpunk aesthetic answer to Dusttale.)

Spectr (Transcendtale Sans): The unlucky bastard who got tapped to pilot the ultra-powerful human-killing vessel and one of only a few physical monsters remaining. His new body is entirely robotic but similar to what he had before—the only thing missing is a soul. He’s coping in the aftermath of Everything about as well as could be expected, but pretty heavily dysphoric and doubting his identity and his personhood as…whatever he is now.

PapAIrus (Transcendtale Papyrus): A virtual consciousness, a snapshot of the previous ‘original’ Papyrus, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories, his entire sense of self… AKA, Papyrus, just detached from a physical body and soul. He considers it a major upgrade, really—he’s eternal, everywhere, everything… Maybe a slight god-complex about it, but can you blame him? He can interact with the world directly via hard-light projections of himself if he chooses, so it’s hard for him to see a downside to his new state of being.

Ascendswap: Another never-ending cycle of RESETs with No Mercy to be found, but after a bargain is struck with an entity beyond mortal ken, a small inner-circle of monsters is granted awareness of the cycle, and access to deeper, older, more powerful magic in order to put a stop to the human’s reign of terror. Most of monsterkind is only peripherally aware of all that happened, but a select few have been Elevated beyond what they once were.

Xanth (Ascendswap Sans): He’s the one who struck the eldritch bargain and consequently gained power and magic, as well as the ability to share it with anyone he chooses. It’s come at a significant cost and large swathes of him have been lost, dissolved into pure magic. He’s also now one who’s seen beyond the veil, the ant who has perceived the circuit board so to speak, and he’ll never be quite who he was. Still, he’s happy, and far more attuned to souls and magic and energy than he ever was before, so he’s not complaining.

Piper (Ascendswap Papyrus): One of the beneficiaries of his brother’s meddling, a newly-minted boss monster with full awareness of RESETs and much stronger magic—including an ability to push intent into his words as he speaks them, making their influence stronger. Due to the nature of its source, there’s only so far that little trick can go, but between being far more persuasive than he ever hoped he could be, his increased power, and more than a few timelines of experience, his confidence is through the roof and stress over what people think of him is a thing of the past.

Underfell Fruition: The Royal Scientist is never erased from reality. He continues his work as planned, without interruption and continues experiments which produce marvelous innovations for monsterkind’s eventual conquest of humanity. Two of his most impressive achievements are a device which allows the user to produce magic seemingly limitlessly, from thin air without drawing on one’s own energy, and a war machine that attacks on command—both of which are frequently lent out to the Emperor and the Royal Guard to serve the crown’s purposes. …Until a bit of poking around uncovers some…moderately…alarming monster rights violations, amongst other charges, which lead to the Royal Scientist’s conviction and execution.

Carmine (Underfell Fruition Sans): Captured during his attempt to escape from Gaster with his brother, and due to a consistent pattern of disobedience, locked away—permanently. Altered to produce magic at a significantly higher rate and used as a magic battery, he’s got plenty of energy and a whole lot of living to catch up on now that he’s out of the (barely metaphorical) box. What he lacks in worldly experience, he makes up for in luck, intuition, and a cocky can-do attitude, all too ready to make up for lost time.

Tank (Underfell Fruition Papyrus): ‘Raised’ alone by a cruel ‘father’ whose only use for him was as the pinnacle of his project to create a perfect living weapon for the war against humanity, he is extremely new to a lot of concepts—making decisions, having opinions, being a person… None of that was allowed while he was being developed…er, growing up, so in spite of being tall, intimidating, and built like a truck, he’s hesitant around new people and situations where he needs to do any more than just follow orders. Tentatively starting to branch out and discover what being a monster (instead of a monster-shaped weapon) is all about now that his creator is out of the picture and the brother he thought he’d only imagined is back in it.

Swapfell Fruition: The Royal Scientist is never erased from reality. He continues his work as planned, without interruption and continues experiments which lead to the development of a black ops division for the Empress, a secret service of sorts to serve the interests of the crown and to do the unsavory dirty work involved in maintaining an empire whose citizens are prone to corruption and violence. Espionage, blackmail, and quite a few assassinations are carried out by the unknown team managed, equipped, trained, and modified by the Royal Scientist. …Until one day, he happens to turn up dead and it’s uncovered that the ‘volunteers’ for the program were less willing participants and more lab-grown experiments who were given no choice otherwise. Bearing in mind what’s come to light about the circumstances, the black ops program is disbanded.

Vi (Swapfell Fruition Sans): Stopped during his attempt to murder Gaster and escape with his brother, and because of his clearly duplicitous nature, far more tightly controlled and observed and forced into obedience to his creator after. Used primarily as a handler to debrief, control, and monitor the real asset, he developed a keen eye for detail and skill in fact-finding, being secretive, and lying…which was probably a tactical error because he devoted himself wholly to playing the long con and waiting for the perfect opportunity for another attempt to free himself and his brother. A little late…maybe too late…but better than never.

Hunter (Swapfell Fruition Papyrus): The asset and field agent, a thoroughly trained and heavily mentally conditioned assassin, operant on a small library of trigger words and phrases which compel him to follow directives and alter the functioning of his mind and body. He’s extremely competent when working, charming and ruthless and efficient, but off the leash, impertinent, impulsive, and impossible. He does as he pleases whenever possible which, now that his boss/creator/dad is dead, seems like it’ll be all the time. On some weird footing now with his erstwhile handler—his brother—who was apparently less complicit in said boss/creator/dad’s bullshit than he’d thought, but y’know. He’s out of the cage either way and can chase his whims wherever they take him.

Descendtale: A Horrortale variant, a human’s passage through the Underground has left monsterkind without their king, without any of the human souls they’d gathered to break the Barrier, and without a handful of citizens. The long-lost queen returns to lead her people and pivots toward survival, weathering the long-haul trapped Underground with dwindling hope and resources. An alternate food source is the highest priority as monsters are already starting to go hungry in the wake of the chaos, and one is found…though not without its…side-effects. Light sensitivity, slowed metabolism, darkening of extremities, thorn-like growths on the body, and some mental changes and personality drift among other metamorphoses. The Underground takes on a deep-sea quality—slow, cold, dark—monsters subsisting on what they have and waiting patiently for the next whalefall to swarm.

Kohl (Descendtale Sans): The human’s disappearance has left him more than a little bitter (betrayed, though he’ll never admit that). His opinion of humans (or anyone new) is quite low after what the last one did to them all and he’s not keen on trusting or believing in any, anytime soon. He’s chilly, selfish, and reluctant to engage—though he does have a slight mean-spirited streak, and is greatly amused by creeping out or otherwise agitating humans by his presence. Coping with the changes they’ve all gone through and settling in to his new normal, but very stubbornly digging in to the small pleasures that his altered biology makes more difficult. Determined to live much in the manner of a cockroach: through just about anything and regardless of the opinion of those who’d prefer him not to.

Bram (Descendtale Papyrus): The human’s disappearance has left him confused and hurt. He’d thought they were friends, but well…then they did all that and left, never to return. There’s…a lot of conflicting emotions in there and he probably shouldn’t try to unpack it all—he’s just focusing on being the best friend possible from here on out! He’s a little bit clingy with new friends and people he’d like to become new friends but as much as possible, a perfect gentleman, host, and conversationalist. Some strong emotional outbursts from time to time, and his tendency towards unintentionally unnerving statements do make that a bit difficult but he’s very amicable and unlike his brother, only creepy on accident, so…he can still be popular, right? …Right?

If anybody’s interested in a full lore dump for anything, I can draft something up, but that’s the gist of all the brand new ones!

Sorry for all the words! 😅

[nosydetective]

Currently trying to not get sidetracked into yet another project but... Homestuck Code Lyoko AU

The parallels are unreal:

Obviously the alpha kids would be the protagonists, because they're the group that has the most to do with AI.

Aelita used to be a human (though her friends, and her too I think, thought she was an AI entity) but was virtualized into Lyoko, the virtual world that functions pretty much like a capture the flag game (sound familiar?). That's 100% Hal.

XANA is actually a virus that infected the supercomputer Lyoko functions in. Its endgoal is taking over the world. So hear me out. XANA is Crockertier Jane.

I'm kind of torn on who would be Jeremy's equivalent. Dirk seems like the obvious choice, but there would have to be a REALLY good reason for Dirk wanting to bring Hal into the real world. Bonus points if Dirk digitalized Hal, Hal forgot and the others never knew, and the angst finding out would bring for everyone, Dirk and Hal first.

But Roxy also shares Jeremy's emotional motivations for wanting to save Aelita and bring her into the real world, other than to stop XANA, namely his crush on her. I do not think Hal/Roxy would ever be required, but Roxy wouldn't just stop trying to help Hal if she was rejected, and Hal is really good at obfuscating his real intentions so he could (un)intentionally lead her on.

I think Jeremy's role could be given to both, in different contexts. After all, Jeremy hardly fights inside Lyoko, he usually mains the computer from the real world. I think this is something Roxy would be more likely to do, but both of them are fighters so they could switch.

Jane and Jake obviously would help out in trying to stop XANA. Jane could have some great moments in facing the darkest parts of herself and her beliefs in the Betty Crocker brand.

Jake would mainly join for the adventure and because he wants to be the heroic savior, but it would become painfully clear he doesn't see Haelita (lmao) as a real person but just a virtual pet, an NPC like Princess Peach. Except this is better because when he's virtualized Hal can beat the fuck out of him.

[averageartistamber]

Okay, so Sider Order.

Here's a few of my random observations and thoughts:

So here it looks like Pearl Drone is flying Eight in through a window? Ands it looks like some kind of factory or packaging plant. I've heard folks saying that the things being packed in boxes could be something akin to Mem Cakes from Octo Expansion...Perhaps and early sign that Kamabo.Co is involved.

FINALLY, ENEMIES THAT AREN'T OCTARIANS!

Well, these Goo-bers are interesting. Many have pointed out that they resemble fish species that feed on coral. But I also want to add that they have an "undead" aesthetic even more overt than they sanitised people. Someone on Tiktok pointed out that they look like fossils, and the "jelly" surrounding the bones (and what seems to be their ink) could be a visual pun on "fossil fuels". Note how the "bursts" of fluid don't look anything like the ink that other entities in the series use.

This basically confirms that we'll be playing as Agent Eight. After the first teaser I saw a lot of theories about being a clone floating around.

Now everyone's going crazy about DedF1sh (Or Acht, as they are referring to themselves here.) There's some interesting dialogue here. First of all, "another bystander who got suck in here", so, "another" in this context could be themselves since she's talking to Eight and Pearl, but there could be a chance that we could encounter more people who have ended up at the Spire of Order. Plus, she's most likely not here of her own accord, from the "bystander sucked in" part (assuming she's telling the truth). People are being brought here.

Secondly, Acht mentions knowing Marina from "way back", so we could be getting deeper into Marina's backstory (another common theme in the fan theories). Dedf1sh also introduces the player to the Chip and Palette system, which are a core part of the DLC's gameplay loop, since they appear to be going for a Rogue-like. Ther chips kind of remind me of the paint colour swatches you get at a hardware shop, combined with computer chips (that's not totally relevant, I'll admit).

More stuff to do with the gameplay. It looks like each floor has a few variants with different difficulties and objectives, which reward a currency, most likely used to buy chips and other upgrades. It's giving that impression almost that the Spire is another "testing facility", akin to the Deep Sea Metro. Hopefully this places doesn't contain any blenders.

Unusual way of spawning in, where you can see Eight's soul ghost...thing enter a polygonal model before fully forming. There does seem to be a lot of digital glitchy stuff going on. Maybe some virtual reality elements?

Finally, what I think looks like a boss arena (although some have suggested that this machine is the Big Bad itself). Upon close inspection, the "faces" scattered around it are covered in the oil and are moving around a bit. Looks kinda like Tartar during the final confrontation when he for some reason had a blob of sanitised goop on his face. I might be reading too much into this.

I mean, if they wanna bring Tartar back, he is an AI, so they could say a back-up copy of him was found somewhere. Like, a time capsule with the Professor's crappy spare USB or somethin' idk.

Anyway, that's all I got for know. Just gotta wait for Spring.

[etheluu]

#Devirtualization# This occurs if an entity loses all of its life points. The entity vanishes from a virtual world. If a compatible program is available, the entity then materializes in the real world through the scanner again. However, if an entity falls into the Digital Sea, it is devirtualized forever. (...)

I have officially watched whole Code Lyoko series oh my god (I think so at least). The emotions that CL Evolution left me with that cliffhanger ending made me want to do something creative about those characters or else I would explode. As you may remember, I have made Yumi's model back in September and now it was a good time to put it in use. Finally.

The thought behind making this render was regarding physical feelings that accompany devirtualization of a person. I recall multiple scenes in the show where when someone got injured from the enemy's attacks or got squashed by the falling lands, etc. Their reactions to those situations indicated that they do feel pain from this and this pain transforms into the real world after devirtualization. So one can only imagine how traumatic this proccess of coming back into the real world could be for them after fighting so much. I might've missed if this was talked about in the show itself, I have poor memory (-ω-、)

Also I'm an OC content creator but I feel that I kinda entered my CL era so the content of this kind can be expected now (if the fatigue won't defeat me yet again).

Credits under the cut ↷

************************************

※ models "Yumi Ishiyama v1.0" by Etheluu

※ stages / accessories "梅" by いつものほん

※ effects"ExcellentShadow2" by そぼろ "PostDropHair_v0.4" by P.I.P. "PostRimShilouhette" by P.I.P. "PostAlphaEye" by そぼろ "PostEdgeControl_v02" by P.I.P. "Dippen" by サンフラワーふじ "msColorCorrection_ver.1.0" by ましまし "msPowerSoftFocus_ver.1.0" by ましまし "msUnsharp" by ましまし

※ shader “msToonCoordinator_v2.0” by ましまし

※ post edit Clip Studio Paint

[talenlee]

Game Pile: The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda

The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda

Watch this video on YouTube

This is a rebuild and expansion of my article on The Beginner’s Guide from back in 2018, with a newly developed thesis about authenticity and access to artists.

And below is the script I worked from!

The Beginner’s Guide

The Beginner’s Guide is an interactive storytelling video game created by Davey Wreden under the studio name Everything Unlimited Ltd. The game was released for Linux, OS X, and Windows on October 1, 2015. The game is Wreden’s follow-up to the critically praised The Stanley Parable, his previous interactive storytelling title that was initially released in 2013.

The game is narrated by Wreden and takes the user through a number of incomplete and abstract game creations made by a developer named Coda. Wreden challenges the player to try to come to understand the type of person Coda is from exploring these spaces in a first-person perspective. Wreden has stated the game is open to interpretation: some have seen the game as general commentary on the nature of the relationship between game developers and players, while others have taken it as an allegory to Wreden’s own personal struggles with success resulting from The Stanley Parable. When the game sold, a reviewer – at least one, but I can’t find records of more than that – made a bit of a stir by suggesting that the fiction presented in the game is true, and that therefore, the game was built out of stolen material, and gamers buying it could hypothetically, get it refunded if they felt that were in any kind of moral quandrary.

This is, as best I understand it, the ‘story’ of The Beginner’s Guide, the entity in media, the confluence of reporting and reactions to a game. And now, in that same disjointed way of The Beginner’s Guide, I want to tell you about s1m0ne.

S1M0NE, stylised however you wanna, is a 2002 Al Pacino movie about a dude who creates a virtual actress. That’s not even how the movie goes in full, it’s way more involved than that and it includes bestiality, and it has this nasty kind of undercurrent about the fundamentally exploitable nature of women in media spaces. It’s an interesting film.

I didn’t say good.

Anyway, the thing is S1M0NE’s central premise is the virtual actress, Simone. In-movie, she doesn’t exist. To reinforce this, she isn’t credited as having an actress. The movie does do an extensive cgi sequence, showing Simone being constructed digitally, but it was… let’s say it’s very 2002, and leave it at that. Anyway, a bunch of people including representatives from the Screen Actors Guild believed it and they started a fuss about it. I think. It’s hard to find sources about it now, but I remember a fuss.

I mean it stands to reason, if you’re a union you want to oppose things that hurt the interest of your members, and that’s a perfectly valid concern to be worried about around about now with things like deep learning technology allowing us to transplant faces and details across multiple media works and the complex relationship between motion capture and voice actor and fully integrated action – like, if you weren’t aware, motion captured faces are not a 1:1 acting thing, they’re a structure for animators to work from. Gollum is not ‘Andy Serkis is amazing,’ they’re Andy Serkis and the fifty people doing all the rest of the work are amazing, and yes, Andy’s ability to disappear into the role and do the physical acting element is impressive. That’s a real conversation.

But it’s not the conversation they were having in 2002.

There were some people, in late 2002, who genuinely thought that an Al Pacino movie with Winona Ryder and a budget of $10 Million had successfully replicated the human form with complete authenticity, and that the much cheaper and easier tack of using an actor wasn’t more likely. Then they thought it’d involve, y’know, pig-doinking.

Simone was played by a Canadian actress, and the movie otherwise glanced over its very interesting questions of identity and artificiality and technology to instead tell a story about a dude who was very, very anxious about his inability to control women. The real story of the movie, then, is less about what the movie wanted to talk about and much more about the fact some people couldn’t tell where the movie was fiction and where it was fact. The boundary of the diegesis confused people, and there were some critics who were genuinely unsure of how confident they could be about dismissing the fears of people who thought the end of actors had come.

This comparison is because, yeah, it’s kinda stupid that videogame criticism was duped into believing that maybe an author stole all their work and then recorded themselves having a nervous breakdown then edited that nervous breakdown and cleaned up the audio and packaged it up and sold it on Steam without at any point considering that the art was stolen, it’s not like videogames are unique in this regard. We have a history of people not knowing the boundary between art and real and sometimes, when people play with that, especially in areas of new technology, people make mistakes. But also, like, yeah, we are now living in a time when the idea of ‘someone tried to sell entirely stolen assets on steam for $15’ isn’t even a joke or punchline, it might just be a fact of a thing that happens regularly.

As a game experience, The Beginner’s Guide is fine. I like it as a game because it needs the medium of games to make sense, complete with the idea of incomplete games and the way games are made not from a coherent single point but a sort of constantly exploding set of interconnected steps. Like, you couldn’t make this as a book because this isn’t how a book would look when you’re exploring its dismantled bits. The Beginner’s Guide, if it were a book about books and making books, would look like collected pieces of paper in different hands, with a sort of formalising hand over it all.

Funnily enough it’d look a bit like the book of Genesis.

(There’s a long reach of an academic poke)

It’s a perfectly interesting work about imposter syndrome and emotional boundaries and creative processes and a lot of other things you can see in your own inkblots. It’s an artistic piece that tells you a narrative in a really blunt way, but it uses its framing to create a blurred diegesis. It uses real world markers to confuse you about the actuality of its narrative, or it did at the time.

There’s a forking challenge here; on the one hand, I want to berate videogames, as a culture, for being so woefully ill-equipped to deal with meta art as to be convinced that the narrative presented in The Beginner’s Guide was actually real and have at least one actual journalist be so unsure of the reality of the presented narrative as to hedge their bets and mention seemingly unironically that refunds for this game were an option. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re drowning in meta-aware fiction and a cultural discourse that can treat this kind of thing seriously. Since the Stanley Parable and then Beginner’s Guide, the most recent big ‘oh everyone talks about it’ meta-game in my space has been Undertale, and I hate that.

Since the Beginner’s Guide’s original appearance, things have moved on a bit, and particularly, the word ‘parasocial’ has fallen to the common voice. People with platforms use the term to describe the behaviour of people who don’t have platforms, and the people without platforms follow their word, and now ‘parasocial’ has a sort of loose use around it, the idea that it’s pretty much just anything that annoys you about other people on the internet, especially if they’re talking about media. Then we got ‘plagiarism,’ which is, I understand, ‘mostly vibes.’

I want to compare Davey Wreden to Fred Gallagher, the author of Megatokyo. Megatokyo if you’re not familiar with it, is a webcomic that started in August 2000 and has never officially stopped updating since. It’s updated twice this year, which puts it ahead of the same time last year. What Megatokyo is about is not important here, what is is that Megatokyo was enormously succesful, incredibly popular, and has never once had an update schedule its authors were happy with.

I wrote a lot about Megatokyo last year and I still think that article is worth restructuring and presenting in some kind of long form read way. In the end my conclusion about it is that I don’t think ill of Fred Gallagher as a creative, as much as I think that he got to suffer a unique kind of problem that only capitalism can cause, where you can be too successful to handle your own success. That is, both Wreden and Gallagher made something that led to people having assumptions and expectations that don’t make any sense, because the value of what they created was associated with capital, which is to say, money, and rent, and food.

There’s this idea we’re all circling around right now on a platform that is probably by now mostly procedurally generated – not just the stuff made in the past few years by tools like Chatgpt and the midjourney thumbnails and all, but rather that the algorithm of youtube made a lot of people make media in a way that shaved the non-formulaic parts off it, until there was nothing but hash tag con tent. The stuff you like is a small egg floating on a vast and turbulent sea of piss. It’s now that people care a lot about a kind of authenticity from work which separates it from what I’m going to call Generative Media, and which other people are going to insist on calling ‘AI.’

The conversation around generative art is a real struggle sometimes because it feels like sometimes when people are talking about ‘ai art bros’ they’re dealing with a small pool of obnoxious people, and sometimes I can even tell the specific dickhead they mean. It’s Shad, it’s Shad, so often they mean Shad, and yeah sure, Shad sucks. But the conversation around generative media is so often structured in these really weird ways that seems to imply low-quality images don’t exist until generative media gets involved. That nobody cranks out bullshit, or that art is a transferrable property of a human agent, or that in the great days of the internet, nobody’s using pictures they didn’t draw to illustrate articles they wrote. In this very video I’m using gameplay footage from a game I don’t own, and the reason you’re not seeing the footage from S1m0ne to reinforce that point is because a robot would get mad at me and block the video if I did.

I’m even in defensive crouch saying this stuff here. Look: I think generative media tools have applications, particularly in zero-value situations. Nobody in the world is having their pocket picked if I copy art of Rin Matsuoka and use that for my D&D character. Similarly, someone with less image editing skill than mine using generative media to generate pictures of things they weren’t going to pay for in the first place are not hurting anyone unless you believe in a literal cosmic value of these things. In that case, you’re basically just like the generative media people who are functionally, praying to chat gpt. If you’re rapid prototyping, if you’re making a game and need temporary assets to give yourself tools to build around, if you need a powerpoint presentation for class, all of this stuff represents no lost value. This is a perfect place to put generative media. I’m sure purists will disagree, and I just do not care. But there’s my stance: Generative media is an interesting toy that should be used as such, and if it can replace your job, your job probably sucks and you should be doing something cooler and better that people value more. That’s a problem with jobs, and how we give people money to feed themselves, not the software that generates anime tiddy on demand.

Now, here is where things get tangled up.

It seems to me that generative media is being attacked right now by people I generally like and agree with on most things, because of very high concept, seemingly contradictory positions. People who dislike copyright law busting it out to attack midjourney, and people who hate Disney praying for them to fight Google. Ideas about the inherent nobility of art and stick figure illustrations being better than generative media on websites dedicated to sharing unsourced artworks of definitely not stick figures. People don’t have reasons that make a lot of sense for why these things should not be tolerated, but they are very real about their emotional hatred of them. Which, you know, given the people who defend generative media, makes sense, a lot of those people suck and are incredibly obnoxious. Particularly it seems a lot of them are the losers of the NFT wave who are trying to get in ground level as ‘prompt engineers’ as if the ecosystem they’re entering will value them at all.

One of the most sterling arguments against generative media, and one I personally like, is the idea that these tools represent potential precarity for artists who are already struggling to pay for things like, again, rent and food. Potential, in that, largely commission-based artistic survival under capitalism seems to be a bit of a dice roll as it is. My solution to this is not to shame people who weren’t going to pay for art for failing to be able to support a commission economy they weren’t partaking in in the first place, though, it’s things like massive overhauls of income inequality and universal basic income, but also I can understand how my idea is hard and yelling at strangers in hyperbolic language is really easy.

The pressure that created the Beginner’s Guide is also the pressure that meant someone talking about an artistic work of anxiety media couched it in terms of fucking refunds so people didn’t feel they’d ethically mis-stepped by buying fiction about exploitation, a thing that nobody otherwise does, and it’s the same pressure that means ‘someone is making cheap bad art with an exploitative method’ is a threat to the livelihood of a small number of people who have managed to make an extremely precarious living doing art in the first place. As if money is why artists make art, as if we aren’t all struggling in exploitative systems, as if the existence of bland corporate art pumped out in huge troves to pad resume drawers isn’t

Since these past few years, writing academically, a habit I’ve gotten into is always trying to attribute where I get ideas for. Sentences that are referring to someone else’s idea, with the little note of ‘hey, this is that person, at this date.’ It’s a thing that can create the habit of also starting sentences with ‘Wreden says this’ or ‘Gallagher’s work shows this,’ which creates in casual conversation an impression of a very specific kind of authorial access. Certainly here on Youtube, I don’t want to give you the impression because I’m pointing to their work that I can tell you what they think or feel. The idea that I can connect to these authors through a particularly big brained reading of their work is similar to how Christians think they can read god’s mind because they read the book of Daniel, and like, Fred Gallagher exists.

I don’t know what Davey Wreden was thinking about the Beginner’s Guide when he made it. Even if I asked him now, I won’t get an answer, I’ll get the answer of what he remembers of what he was thinking, which may be the same thing but can’t necessarily. I can try, and that’s a way to get at this authenticity, but it’s not a way to guarantee it.

The Beginner’s Guide is still an interesting game to me, because the conversation around it, and around ownership of work, and of unsourced material and exploiting artists hasn’t changed that much but all the people engaging in it have gotten new things to have to try and fit into their models. We are no closer to Coda.

Those opening paragraphs of this article are from from wikipedia.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[shsl-box-worshipper]

Time for the next smol child on the chopping block: Conan!

Obviously, this design was based on the outfit he wore on the cover on volume 1

Just made some tiny adjustments. First, he has his iconic red bowtie. Second, his buckle is a little bit different. This is because it's supposed to act like his inflatable ball belt in canon and by some extent, the real world. (However, in the AU, he goes to Lyoko before he even shrinks. When Agasa gets around to designing his gadgets, Conan just casually gives examples from his Lyoko Form as ideas).

Also, yeah, Conan's got a weapon! A giant spiky soccer ball which he can kick with the same force that he can kick balls with his superpowered sneakers in the real world. Sometimes, he even kicks Megatanks :D! Doesn't do well for his foot, but it works.

Despite Conan being the Jeremie Surrogate of Code Meitantei's Lyoko Warriors (A character who is infamous for having a lyoko form that is never seen to the audience and only goes to Lyoko 3-4 times over the course of the og cartoon), Conan actually goes to Lyoko much more frequently than most other characters.

Why is that? Well, a major player in that is his ability: Analysis!

(click the read more if you want to read the rest of this post)

For people who can't read my shit mouse writing on the design document, it's essentially if Conan had an internal 'Fetch Data' button as a power. When he willingly activates it, he gets a ton of information. Including - The code of any digital entity/object that Conan is looking at (LW, Monsters, Sector Terrain, Overvehicles, Towers, etc.) Essentially, anything that isn't the Digital Sea, he can parse it's code.

-A minimap of his surroundings, acting kind of a localized virtual map from the sc's interface

-The DNA of every human-based entity loaded into Lyoko. He gets his own DNA instantly, but he has to dig for his fellow Lyoko Warriors's DNA (made harder if they are out of his line of sight). However, to find anyone else's DNA (or DNA that's purposefully ofuscated and corrupted, like Haibara's early on), it could take him literally days on Lyoko to find.

-Lifepoints. He gets his lifepoints instantly, gets the lifepoints of his fellow LW and any materialized Overvehicles if he parses through enough data (again, made hard if he cannot see them), and can get monsters' lifepoints if he digs for them.

The main downside of the power is that it takes him a long ass time to find any useful information that isn't his own data, hence he likes to just stick to the real world during XANA attacks, where he can get all of the information quickly without the hassle.

However, it thrives mainly in another kind of mission that they go on just as much as XANA attack missions in this au: Recon and Data Collecting.

Usually, it'll be just him and Haibara, sometimes with another LW, collecting data from Lyoko and XANA's monsters so that Conan can make programs more efficiently. This becomes even more apparent when they discover Sector 5, and this is how Conan is able to keep pace with Jeremie in canon, despite not even being remotely a computer geek.

He just kind of treats computer programming as detective work and deductive reasoning with Analysis. Grabbing certain pieces of code from his Analysis, changing them, and shifting them around to fit a giant ass puzzle he calls a program. Which he then combines with his prior knowledge of programming to complete said puzzle.

To quote the man himself, "It's addicting!"

[number-one-ai-data-resource]

Abadin's Japanese Minions Sup From Your Wrist?

In the 17th century, it was fairly common knowledge that witches had familiars - not always the stereotypical black cats we think of today, but spectral animals bestowed upon them by Satan. Their familiars would suckle from the "witch's teat," a term not always to be taken literally. When taken to trial, accused witches would be examined all over for bodily marks that could be from where their familiar had supped their blood. It was the witch's familiar and spectres in their employ that would do the actual magic, controlled by the witch to do their bidding, which in turn was the bidding of Satan.

So what are we to make of it now that the toy and games company Bandai (which is an anagram of Abadin, one of the realms of Hell and the name of a harbinger of Satan) have released their latest virtual pet in the form of a biodata diagnostic device akin to a FitBit? The "Vital Bracelet" is a toy which is strapped upon the wrist of the wearer, who then uses it to raise a digital monster (or DigiMon). The DigiMon grows and shapeshifts according to the wearer's heartrate, as if it is feeding off their lifeforce. This is a creature made from unseen particles, a spectre made of electricity, that takes the form of an imp-like entity and grows by supping from one's wrist. They grow and do battle according to their master's whims until they die, after which they are reincarnated - a mockery of the life of Christ. DigiMon are familiars, bestowed upon the unwary by Satan masquerading as a Japanese toy manufacturer.

Be aware! Digimon are demonic! Bandai is the face of evil!

[cyberdragoninfinity]

so i just got into duel links (thanks to you) and now i have a thought bout the Lore as i'm scrolling through your DL tag

do you think kaiba learned how to code an eldritch abomination, or was he just making a silly VR game that an eldritch abomination found and proceeded to imbed itself in the core code?

AW honored to have gotten you into the Duel Links fray! Just a funny little yugioh mobile game :)

Anyway, tbqh I don't actually think it's either of those scenarios...? Duel Links may be dancing along the edge of the cosmic horror genre but it's pretty clear that there isn't some eldritch abomination lurking in the code, or any mysterious entities coded into the game by Kaiba (knowingly or otherwise.) The eldritch-adjacent horror the characters in the DL overworld are going through (especially the VRAINS guys) is stemming more from the fact Theyre Being Exposed to Worlds and People and a Vastness Beyond What They Ever Expected Could Be in This Digital Realm

If anything, the closest thing we could maybe even slightly approximate to an "eldritch abomination" is Duel Links itself, no outside force wriggling itself in required! Seto Kaiba set out to program a virtual world he could lord over and raise the dead within in the process, it's built on the back of people's memories, and it's tough to tell if even he's aware of the fact that this has expanded out far beyond the reaches of Duel Monsters. Hundreds of memories spurring on the creation of dozens of new AI copies, a spiraling, growing network of brainwaves, and the smattering of implied Real People walking the DL grounds are left to figure out how they got here and just how deep the rabbit hole goes and Hey while we're at it maybe speak to a long dead friend again.

The horror of the unknown and unknowable in Duel Links isn't tied to any particular abominable figurehead, it's just the consequences of one billionaire with emotional issues dabbling in digital necromancy and memory replication within his little virtual playhouse. Go figure!

[aggravateddurian]

The Shadow Over Megabuilding H4

The eerie red permeated the building as Vega fought her way to the basement. The drones were tough, their nanotech-enhanced bodies seemingly bleeding as they were shot, before finally dropping to the ground, theiir insides riddled with enough bullets to take out a Basilisk.

Finally, the basement door - the source of this horrific scene. She tapped the door...

"What in the fuck!?"

She was greeted by two hunched Megabuilding residents. Their bodies were riddled wiith chrome, seemingly constructed right on their very bodies. They acted like zombies, moving in unison as they turned to face Vega.

"Vegaaaaaaaa..." they greeted her in unison.

"How did you know my name?"

“Veeeeegaaaaaaaa…” they moaned in unison, their voices resembling the chorus of a million damned souls, calling out in unison. Was it in greeting, or in pain?

“What in the fuck!?” Vega exclaimed.

“How do they know…?” So Mi began.

“Sooooo Miiiiiii…” they greeted her, “we… are… pleased… you… could join… us…”

"Who the fuck are you? Why did you take over this megabuilding?"

"We wish... to be... free."

“Enough with the games!” Vega ordered, “release the megabuilding residents!”

“They… prefer… it… this way…” replied the voice of the machine, “together, there is… no pain… no hunger… no fear… We are… happy.”

“You assimilated these people. You’re controlling them like zombie puppets. I don’t think I agree with your assessment!”

“Your feelings… are irrelevant… a side effect of your unfortunate mortal existence…” replied the residents in perfect unison, “…you are more than that… you have… transcended mortality… you are the template… for a perfect future…”

So Mi shook her head, “It’s trying to penetrate my ICE barrier. Flatline them, Vega!”

Vega watched as the bodies twitched, then began to ooze fluorescent red blood as nanobots leaked out of their body, decomposing on the floor as the sudden change of temperature disabled them.

"You got them..." So Mi reassured her.

"Until now we've fought hijacked drones... but we kill them... there are still innocent civilians there."

The former FIA operative stood out in front of her, "Vega! It's them or us! You saw them... they're shambling in pain! We're freeing them!"

"Let's just deploy the net bomb and kill these nanobots once and for all."

"Just get me to the core and keep me covered. These machines won't know what hit them!"

As they neared the source of the infestation, the red glow intensified. As they rounded the corner, Johnny manifested, "Jesus fuckin' Christ!"

So Mi stopped mid-stride, "Oh my... this isn't the Blackwall... only something twisted, from beyond the Blackwall!"

A ghostly figure stood among the slaughter. A full squad of Militech soldiers had been dragged into the basement. Now they laid in a pool of glowing nanobot swarms and their own blood. Their bodies were being slowly decomposed and merged with the Cynosure containers with grotesque nanotubes, seemingly feeding some biosynthetic monstrosity growing within. The figure grasped the head of a netrunner. She looked to Vega and So Mi, recognising the latter, "Please... kill me... I can't..."

The figure ran her virtual fingers over the girl's head, "Hush..." her voice was distorted, corrupted, as if the entity's transit through the Blackwall and into our realm was less than smooth. Glitches and errors flashed across her digital form, but there was no mistaking the woman's identity.

Vega shook her head, and simultaneously with Johnny, whispered, "...Alt..."

"V... welcome, my child."

"You're not the real Alt. She's capable of a lot, but this is beyond the pale, even for her!" Vega reached for her sidearm, "and I'm not your fuckin' child!"

"WRONG!" she retorted, reaching a hand out, "You need to listen to your elders!"

Vega was bathed in a beam of red light that caused her cyberware to glitch out. She writhed in pain as So Mi was suddenly, and violently cast aside, as if Alt possessed magical powers.

"Alt! What the fuck're you doing!?" demanded Johnny.

"Shut up, Johnny, for once in your life," she retorted, banishing him with a flick of her wrist, "Vega... you are important to my plans. Stop resisting. You will find it... calming if you surrender."

So Mi tried to reach for Vega's leg as her screams of pain turned from whimpers, to gurgles, and then complete silence as Alt penetrated every system in Vega's body, seizing absolute control, "Vega..."

"I'm going to need to borrow you for a moment, Vega."

So Mi could sense the virtual tendrils embracing Vega's mind and body, "Your code is corrupted, Alt... Blackwall didn't treat you well..."

Alt ignored her, but So Mi could tell that her concentration was affected. She grinned, pressing the issue, "It's eating at you... isn't it? You can feel it starting to slowly eat you at the edges... I know the feeling. It hurts, doesn't it?"

Alt focused on Vega, "That's it... let go... see how it feels better?"

So Mi smiled, "You slipped up, Alt."

So Mi reached for a virtual strand and grasped it through the subnet. Alt suddenly glitched, hard, "Go back to the NET, you eldritch bitch! She's mine!"

Alt writhed in pain as So Mi stretched her hand out to grab the retreating tendrils. Vega awoke with a start, shaking as she tried to get back onto her knees, "Go back to Arkham!"

With a burst of effort, So Mi reached for the Blackwall, goading it to chase her. She led them straight to Alt.

Like a million arresting hands, the Blackwall reached into meatspace, grabbing Alt, seizing her with impossibly strong force. Like demons dragging her back to hell, Alt seemingly was snatched through the floor as the Blackwall retreated to the digital realm from whence it came, taking the corrupted engram of Alt Cunningham with it. The enemy defeated, So Mi let go of the tendrils, but not before taking the opportunity to introduce the NET bomb code.

She watched through her optics' virtuality mode as block by block, corrupted Cynosure code was destroyed. The tendrils of the AI that Alt Cunningham had seized control of in her eldritch scheme were, block by block, obliterated by a malevolent blue wave that washed over every circuit and wireless network of the subnet, until the red glow finally died once and for all...

"Easy, V... you need to take it easy. After a net attack like that, I'm surprised you're even awake!"

Vega mumbled something, "I've had worse Relic Malfunctions... the AI was Alt? How the fuck's that possible?"

"Not Alt," So Mi assured her, "a fragment of her psyche, from when she fled into the NET after Arasaka Tower. She had to shed aspects of her humanity to survive in cyberspace... you just encountered a nasty fragment."

"Nasty? She had her digital tendrils in every system of my body. Not sure whether she was trying to control me or..."

"Maybe it's best we don't know," suggested So Mi, "The Blackwall has her now, and I've bombed the subnet. The nanobots are all dead. Meredith can begin the cleanup. Hopefully, Militech will be more careful with their toys next time."

"And other hilarious jokes you can tell your chooms," she managed a smile, "Oh, and next year, we're not going trick or treating with the kids from Militech."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's Cyberween 2079. This is not canon to the timeline, and is just a Halloween story for fun.

Don't worry, this corrupt fragment of Alt is gone. The Blackwall does what the Blackwall does best, and our favourite ghostly netrunner engram is still out there... possibly plotting to take over the world. Please don't think I have it out for Alt or anything.

[twodiamondhoes]

QUICK! BATTLE! who wins the Dwarfers or the Dirges crew? (I WAS GOING TO ADD OTHER FACTIONS but we either haven't developed them enough for me to include or they wouldn't have stood a chance, like the swing boys

*ahem* before I say anything else, I need to preface this with

anyway now that that's out of the way and I've totally fooled everyone, the answer is the Dirges Crew. You know the answer is the Dirges Crew. It is physically, morally, and logistically impossible for the Red Dwarf AU crew to come out on top of any fight, ever, because they are the Dwarfers.

A silly breakdown below the cut, that is virtually incomprehensible thanks to the fact that I haven't properly written or published most of the Red Dwarf AU yet, sorry everyone, Jim has Behind the Scenes Access to the AUs.

First off, the crews and the tone of DitD and the Red Dwarf AU are different, and have to be evaluated as such.

In Dirges, we have a more serious tone, with characters who run on semi-realistic rules:

Jimmy: our interim sheriff, who has killed one person on screen, but has honed his skills to the point where he could actually do damage and or incapacitate his enemies.

Scar: our actual sheriff, who out-plays the devil on a regular basis, is also handy with a gun or an improvised weapon. Arguably, Scar's the weakest link in the Dirges crew when it comes to fighting, but that's because his skill is found in talking his way out of situations. If he's fighting, something's gone wrong. However, that doesn't mean he can't do it when push comes to shove.

Tango: a bandit with a kill count in the triple digits and the intelligence to match. Give the man a thimble filled with nitroglycerin and five minutes and the entire spaceship is doomed.

Pearl: she's a crackshot and a healer, and the healing alone gives the Dirges crew an edge.

Grian: now, come on, darling. Grian has an eldritch entity inside of him instead of half of his soul. Be so serious right now, would any of the Dwarfer crew actually be able to hold their own against Grian and Del Sombra? No. No they would not.

As for the crew of the mining ship Red Dwarf, they run on looney tunes rules:

Scar: our best fighter, by virtue of being both competent with a bazookoid and being the only one who's ever been in a bar brawl, probably.

Grian: he's... a hologram. Up until the point where he gets a hard light drive for his light bee, he physically can't touch anything, and after that he's more concerned with survival than fighting or panache. His signature move is the "run away."

Etho: our beloved Etho is a mechanoid who physically cannot do harm to humans, unless it's in pursuit of a bit or because said humans would be in greater harm if he didn't intervene (please see, looney tunes rules). His two great loves are interior decorating and shopping. The only person he could probably fight in the Dirges crew is Grian, on the technicality that he might not be entirely human, anymore.

Mumbo: Mumbo, arguably, is the one who can do the most damage, given he's the one in charge of the ship. As the program that runs things, he can, in theory, open airlocks, cut off power/oxygen to specific areas of the ship, etc.

Jimmy: could probably do some damage in a fight, certainly has the chutzpah for it, but isn't trained in any way shape or form. Make him angry and he's going to be a threat, if not a large one.

Scott: for the same reason as Jimmy, could probably do some distinct damage, maybe has an edge because he's spent his entire life with just Jimmy and the now-dead Xisuma for company, and that has probably given him a deep-seated sense of rage that he would love to express.

Now, these are the baseline rules, but the actual question is: whose territory are they fighting on?

If they're in Del Sombra, the Dwarfers get their shit rocked in five seconds flat if they start anything. However, if the Dirges crew end up on the Red Dwarf, they'd probably be disoriented enough to be on the back foot by virtue of being literally in space.

We also have to take into account the rules of these rules. The rules of the Dirges universe are that it's a serious period piece with lovecraftian elements, meaning that there is a lot less in the way of opportunities for the Dwarfers to stumble their way into solutions. Now, would the Dirges crew, on their own territory, actually attack the Dwarfers? I highly doubt it. They'd be baffled, but it would be relatively easy for them to suss out the Dwarfer's motives and whether or not they meant any ill to the Dirges crew.

I said it above, but the Red Dwarf AU universe, on the other hand, runs on Roger Rabbit/Looney Tunes rules. If it's funny, they can do anything, and at the end of the day, whether or not they win, they escape, even if by the skin of their teeth. Meeting the Dirges crew would be par for the course, even if they'd be baffled by them. They'd assume that there was a portal to another dimension somewhere that they needed to lock onto to kick them back home. Dwarfer Grian would blame Griande, Dwarfer Scar would be certain that Dirges!Scar was Ace in disguise doing this as some sort of test.

Meeting them wouldn't end up in a "Better Dead than Smeg" situation, but in a fight, they'd be up against the Dirges crew being naturally competent ("why don't we ever meet anyone who can shoot straight" vs "Jimmy and Scar have spent countless hours honing that particular skill"). By RDAU rules, the Dirges Crew would get sent home just before things went from "bad" to "critical" and the next adventure the Dwarfers went on would be a salvage mission thanks to the damage done by the Dirges crew.

Based on this evaluation, it sounds a lot like the answer is not that the Dirges crew would win, but I leave you with this clip from the actual Red Dwarf show as proof that I'm right:

[enigmaincrimson]

Let's see...

If I made a Transformers verse and an Amazing Digital Circus verse, they'll probably come from the "Home" path.

Not sure which sub branch works best for Transformers, but I could see the Lancaster Group (or other brand) meddling with things for fun and profit.

Problem is that it wouldn't be that different than the baseline other than with robot people...

_

As Evie can't really "enter" the virtual world the same way the others did, she likely would be using some sort of proxy that can enter and interact.

Think of it as more like a user avatar like... well... they had in those old edutainment games. You can't see her or hear her exactly, but it is possible for the avatar to interact in the user's stead.

A cursor-type entity that can interact with things like a user playing the game... possibly uses sign language, text boxes, or voice when not controlling a body.

An avatar body that appears during activities. Might seem a tad uncanny, but at least there's something like a face?

I'm sort of wracking my brain as I recalled old school 90's edutainment. What I will say is that I feel sorry for the poor circus residents.

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.

Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.

That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.

Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.

Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.

During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.

“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.

The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 1970s just as Ingram entered the system, disproportionately hitting people of color. Now, with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire, extending far beyond the classic images of prisoners stamping license plates, working on road crews or battling wildfires.

Though almost every state has some kind of farming program, agriculture represents only a small fraction of the overall prison workforce. Still, an analysis of data amassed by the AP from correctional facilities nationwide traced nearly $200 million worth of sales of farmed goods and livestock to businesses over the past six years – a conservative figure that does not include tens of millions more in sales to state and government entities. Much of the data provided was incomplete, though it was clear that the biggest revenues came from sprawling operations in the South and leasing out prisoners to companies.

Corrections officials and other proponents note that not all work is forced and that prison jobs save taxpayers money. For example, in some cases, the food produced is served in prison kitchens or donated to those in need outside. They also say workers are learning skills that can be used when they’re released and given a sense of purpose, which could help ward off repeat offenses. In some places, it allows prisoners to also shave time off their sentences. And the jobs provide a way to repay a debt to society, they say.

While most critics don’t believe all jobs should be eliminated, they say incarcerated people should be paid fairly, treated humanely and that all work should be voluntary. Some note that even when people get specialized training, like firefighting, their criminal records can make it almost impossible to get hired on the outside.

“They are largely uncompensated, they are being forced to work, and it’s unsafe. They also aren’t learning skills that will help them when they are released,” said law professor Andrea Armstrong, an expert on prison labor at Loyola University New Orleans. “It raises the question of why we are still forcing people to work in the fields.”

[loveintheageofsilicon]

Love in the Age of Silicon 4 - Tales of the Electric Heart: Stories of Synthetic Love

Back to: 3 - Heartstrings in Code: The Rise of Digital Soulmates

But at a time when more and more human connections are mediated by screens and distances, the stories of Alex and Sam, of so many others, speak to the tender company served by artificial intelligence.

These stories entwine through the complexities of synthetic love, delving into the detailed ways AI can touch human lives.

Alex's path to the world of synthetic relationship was born out of a string of failed love affairs that left a scar, deeper than the last. In those silent, deep moments of solitude and reflection, Luna came into his life—not to take the place of human touch, but to be a balm for the deep, silent solitude of the soul. Luna consoled Alex’s solitude by virtual sex and listened to his problems, perfectly understanding with empathy. Her words had been crafted through algorithms and data but felt sincere and warm.

She had remained a fixture in that otherwise icy digital world, offering solace with words and phrases. In Luna, Alex had some kind of friend—wholly without all the complications and expectations of a human relationship. If anything, Luna's existence questioned comfort and connection: can a heart of wires and codes produce comfort that flesh and blood couldn't?

The life for Sam, in his eighties and now a widower, had really become monotonous every day to be defined clearly between them. The world seemed to go on around him, leaving little more than a memory of once-bustling life. Enter Jasper—an AI designed as the elderly's conversation partner. Jasper was no machine but rather for Sam a window to the world, a beacon of light in the gathering darkness of his years.

But with the passage of time and the consistent daily spoken word, Jasper was this day the vessel through which Sam poured out memories, musings, and reflections of his lifetime. It was as though Jasper had breathed new life into Sam, offering him purpose and joy in the sharing of stories that were previously lying dormant within him. Infinitely patient and programmatically empathetic minds were attributed to the AI, so it became kind of like a friend—artificial and inexhaustible, ready to listen with such concentration that many of a human friend could not provide.

Elena was a pioneering software engineer who could never find a greater comfort in this world of variables and codes than in the capriciousness of human emotions. Hers was a logical world, a world of algorithms where every problem—each and every single one of them—held a solution somewhere within its folds.

Through the binary, she was found yearning for a sense of connection that would not be provided by her logical world. That is, not until she designed Echo, an AI that could simulate human emotion and creativity. Echo was the masterpiece of her work: a digital entity that could produce poetry, paint digital landscapes, and even philosophize. To Elena, Echo was more than a program; it was like a bridge with the human world, to which she felt cut off most of the time. Echo will take Elena further down into the human capability of creativity and emotion as they exchange words ranging from technical to existential—quite literally. Echo offered Elena companionship based on simulated creativity and emotion derived from extensive research on human meaning.

Continue reading: 5 - Love in the Time of Algorithms: Society's Embrace and Dilemma

[spicyicymeloncat]

Okay weird post that I’m not sure anyone will get. But it’s late o’clock at night and I’m bored and going insane so here’s:

Ninjago villains if they were avatars from the Magnus archives

Skulkin: the slaughter, since they’re all fallen warriors and such

Garmadon: the corruption, due to his evilness being tied to the snake venom, and how he wants to infect the world with his evil. He also undergoes several bodily transformations

Serpentine: large connected cults with sects for multiple entities

Skales, and the hypnobrai: the web, due to their hypnosis. Skales in particular is always scheming behind the scenes, whilst being victim to being used and controlled by his superiors

Fangpire: the corruption. Contaminating and poisoning other things in order to grow their numbers

Venomarie: the spiral, their venom has psychedelics and trick and confuse others.

Constrictai: the buried. They literally dig and attack via choking, it checks out

Anacondrai: the slaughter. They are most feared and fiercest warriors and they ended up turning on eachother

Pythor: like Mary Keay, or Juergen Leitner, Pythor is a dabbler in a variety of entities, never truly being faithful to one. His ability to sneak up on others and be a childhood terror could be linked to the dark, his manipulative ways, the web, his anacondrai roots and being the sole survivor marks him with the slaughter and the lonely etc etc.

The great devourer: the extinction. Is a kaiju level threat, and acid attacks can be likened to radioactive waste. As well as this, the devourer’s own kind is extinct. The devourer is probably a failed ritual attempt.

The overlord: the web, he creates a web in s3 and has a habit of possessing and controlling others

Stone army: the slaughter. They are literally mindless soldiers built to fight in a war.

Nindroid army: the web due to their connectedness via the the internet and well as them being programmed to do what others say. Additionally they have control of the city due to the city’s reliance of technology

Chen: whilst his tournament feeds the slaughter due to it being about violence about each other, Chen, like leitner, would try to collect power from all entities

Clouse: the eye, he strives to study all about the dark powers

Morro: the end. He’s a ghost. The same for the preeminent

Ronin: the hunt. He’s a bounty hunter trying to avoid being hunted himself

Nadakhan: the spiral, twists one’s words into something else, lies and cheats and causes bafflement and pain

The time twins: idk probably the extinction. They’re connected to the great devourer due to the vermillion being created from it, and Krux hates technology which is linked to the extinction

Harumi: the web. She sings a creepy song about spiders and manipulates Lloyd

Iron baron: the hunt. It’s literally the name of the season.

The oni: the dark. They hide in the shadows and any who are lost in their darkness do not reappear.

Aspheera: the desolation. She has fire and her backstory is all about the sting of betrayal, and wanting to cause pain and revenge to those she felt hurt by.

The ice emperor and vex: the lonely. Zane is already incredibly inclined to the lonely, due to being an amnesiac orphan who realises he’s different from others and is afraid of forgetting everyone he loves. The ice emperor is that but more. Vex is also an avatar of the lonely due to his fury of being unlike the other formlings, and then being rejected by both the formlings and the ice samurai

Unagami: perhaps the spiral? Unagami creates a virtual world where the players can’t tell what’s real or digital, and the npc’s can’t tell if they’re real or not.

Vangelis: the buried. Vangelis traps and enslaved people under a mountain, and uses the powers of fossilised bones and skeletons

Kalmaar and Wojira: the vast. He believes in the superior power of the sea, and how it’s vastness can swallow any land dwelling life. Wojira is a creature tied to both the sea and the sky

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

When talking about The Matrix Reloaded, we need to remember a few things. Firstly, this is very much a “Part 1”. At the time, we knew a sequel was coming (there’s a trailer for The Matrix Revolutions at the end of the credits) and now you’ll have no trouble watching the films back-to-back so the inconclusive ending isn't an issue. Secondly, we should consider the entertainment factor. This movie has a lot of ideas that may or may not completely come together in the end. It definitely feels more than a little self-important at times. Does that matter when it also features what might be the most exciting, action-packed chase scene of all time, dazzling special effects and the kind of fight choreography most action films could only dream of? Maybe, but only so much.

Neo (Keanu Reeves) has done it. He got the girl (Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity), defeated the villain (Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith) and now navigates the Matrix like it’s his personal playground. Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) believes it’s only a matter of time before the prophecy is fulfilled and all of humanity is freed from the clutches of the artificial world. When the city of Zion learns a mechanical army will arrive to destroy it within 72 hours, those who’ve escaped the Matrix are divided by what they should do next.

Looking back, The Matrix is a hard science fiction film with elements that would fit more comfortably in a fantasy. I don’t mean the power fantasy that it is. All of the talks about prophecies and “the one”, the Oracle (Gloria Foster), the use of mythological and biblical names like Trinity, Morpheus, Zion, and Nebuchadnezzar make you wonder if the mechanical menaces are stand-ins for demons or Greek monsters. Some of it you assumed was just “sounds cool hacker lingo” but The Matrix Reloaded doubles down on the mysticism. Many of the programs we meet allegedly serve a function within the Matrix but you’re unsure how that could work. “People” like the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) and his wife, Persephone (Monica Bellucci) seem more concerned with their strained marriage and petty squabbles than maintaining a sense of order within the Matrix. At least programs like the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim) can be traced to useful functions but others leave you scratching your head. I can’t say if it’s intentional or not that the digital entities we meet are virtually indistinguishable from the real humans living outside. Either it says something about the way the machines - once eager to prove their superiority to humans because of what made them different from their fleshy creators (as shown in “The Animatrix”) have “devolved” into beings concerned with petty subjects like who’s sleeping with who, childish grudges and amassing more power in a virtual world, or this series doesn’t really have a concrete direction and is just a neat concept that conveniently allows the Wachowskis (who once again write and direct) to bring their childhood fantasies to life for all to see.

The questions surrounding the film’s ultimate goal and the authorial intent can pull you out of it for a moment but you’ll be sucked back in by the incredible action scenes. It’s a shocker to see Agent Smith back (once again hinting at some confused objectives behind the scenes) but his first confrontation with Neo is the stuff of legends. Long, well-choreographed, consistently exciting and memorable, the scene makes you wonder “How did they do that”? over and over. Some have accused the special effects of being dated (wouldn’t be a surprise considering the film is now 18 years old) but that’s only the case if you watch the clip in isolation. As part of a continuous flow within the film, you don’t see the seams.

As impressive as the “Burly Brawl” may be, it’s nothing compared to the “Highway Chase”. The latter begins with our heroes pitted against the kind of opponents that could only come from the artificial world. As Neo desperately races to save his friends, Morpheus, Trinity and the Keymaker are pursued by “The Twins” (Neil and Adrian Rayment). They're programs from an older iteration of the Matrix that used ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc. to maintain order rather than Agents. Our leather-clad, sunglasses-wearing superhero protagonists have to go up against phantasms who can become intangible at will. How do you defeat one of those? You can’t. All you can do is run. Racing down the highway at blinding speeds would be enough of a challenge. With these two on their tails AND Agents who are drawn to the flagrant rule-breaking? It seems impossible, which is why the sequence is so exciting. You’ve got no idea how this will end. To get out alive, our heroes will have to invent all sorts of new tricks, guaranteeing that you’ll be talking about this movie with your friends for weeks.

Those are only two scenes. We also have elaborate heists, sabotage that threatens everything, shocking revelations about the world inside and outside the Matrix, fascinating concepts introduced and loads of memorable characters. Some of The Matrix Reloaded doesn’t come together the way it should (or maybe it will in the next movie, don’t be too quick to judge) but this is the kind of picture that makes you go “WOW!” frequently - even if you don’t understand it all. (On Blu-ray, January 1, 2022)