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ohwolfling · 1 year ago

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i don’t think ive seen this in any of your analysis posts so i have a question that is commonly used to defend mystra and state that she didn’t groom him

gale admits mystra set clear boundaries to him and he sought to cross them. mystra had reason to set those boundaries, Right? like isnt it fair that she didnt want gale to access magic that had almost killed jer once and he did it in the end anyways?

i personally dont agree with this argument and think its not set up very well but i wanna see how you respond to it

I’m happy to answer this! However, this piece of meta I wrote - Gale, Mystra, and Abuse as Mentorship- is a prerequisite. It does the important work of defining context in their relationship (the power imbalance, the grooming/coercion) as well as defining how “boundaries” work (or rather don’t) in a relationship that is abusive.

IMPORTANT NOTE: if you are not at the conclusion that that relationship is inherently abusive and you are unwilling to process that piece and the rest of this and reconsider, you should go away. I am happy to have discussions but I will not trigger myself or entertain folks who trigger the many people with religious trauma/history of general abuse/neglect to dunk on you or entertain you in any way.

Firstly, let’s look at Gale’s statement, “I sought to cross her boundaries,” in the context in which he says it. Not plucked up and out of it to be chewed up and spit out by someone who has never used the word boundary outside of pop psychology / therapy speak.

If you want the full scene, here is one I found on youtube (I am not going that deep in my harddrive tbqh), but I’m going to share captures of that chunk of convo.

Here are the important pieces that are discarded to support a variety of arguments that Gale crossing Mystra’s boundaries is anything from mutual “mistakes,” Gale is the real abuser and Mystra is absolved, even the implication that Gale SA’d Mystra. I'm going to babystep it as best as I can.

A line by line breakdown/analysis below the cut.

A. He states teacher, muse, lover. Even if you remove her status as his deity and the controller/embodiment of the uncorrupted Weave, the acknowledgement that she was first his teacher is a power imbalance. That being said, don’t feel you can argue that she was teaching him night classes in the adult learning program and so they were equals everywhere else. Like… in any situation where a teacher might end up dating a student and it not be weird and imbalanced, psychosexual religious magic ain’t it.

B. They enjoyed each other’s company- body, mind, and soul. Gale is an unreliable narrator here. Mystra doesn’t have a physical form for him. She is not corporeal when they are together. Whatever “body” they shared did not have the risk for Mystra of physical connection, vulnerability, harm, and Mystra DOES NOT AGE, which becomes important in a moment…

C. “Mystra keeps us in check. There are boundaries she doesn’t let us cross.” This is not about a boundary in sex, which I’ve seen people get… so weird about in implying Gale is some secret deviant. Gale says “he stood on the precipice, gazing into the wonders that lay beyond.” The other time in this game that Gale says he stood on a precipice is after the Act II romance scene and the precipice he refers to is accepting that he has no choice but to kill himself. For Gale, the precipice is literal and metaphorical. The precipice is always about leaving his humanity behind. When he is WITH Mystra, he gazes into her world, the world of his lover who he thinks has given him body, mind, and soul, but will not let him leave the formal living room and enter the den. This is the magical equivalent of being married to someone who has an open relationship but only for them and also they won’t let you stay over. Gale’s drive, anguish, ambition is all stained by feeling he’s not truly Mystra’s equal (he’s right, he’s fucking right, that gnawing feeling is actually correct, y’all).

D. THIS is what “I sought to cross her boundaries” is referring to directly. He isn’t pushing her in regards to sexual acts, he isn’t trying to dominate her, he isn’t trying to control her, he is trying to be equal to a god that handpicked him not only to serve her but to have interplanar psychospiritual magic sex with.

E. Gale admits that he couldn’t let it go. He begs- “pouted” “pleaded” “swore my ambition was only to serve her better”- so Mystra knows this is a great pain for him. Be it an insecurity, a grievance, whatever, MYSTRA KNOWS. She tells Gale to be “contented.” Later, when Gale speaks to her in Act III, she tells him he was already “worthy” but that he lacked “patience.” When Gale is meaner with her, she calls him self-pitying. When Gale explains he researched the Crown of Karsus because he doesn’t want to die, she brushes that off. Mystra knows that Gale is not only mortal, but human, holding one of the shortest life spans in this world. She knows Gale could be trusted to be more equal to her, not in an ascension to Godhood way, but as a partner who could be trusted with the Weave and so herself. Mystra simply DOES NOT CARE. Going back to point B, when I said “which becomes important in a moment…” Gale is aging. Gale is an adult man. His frontal lobe is done. He was an archmage. He had done essentially everything a wizard can do to be a Good WizardTM. He’s at the age where where all of his peers might already be married or otherwise settled. If Gale has a child right now, he might be one of the older dads at school pick up. If Mystra won’t offer him partnership now, the path left to him will soon be… well, Elminster. Becoming old as balls and being endlessly a sexual servant and errand runner for Mystra.

F. He states his motivation plainly - he wanted to do something big enough that Mystra would believe him. That Mystra would choose him not just to be a servant, but would acknowledge his personhood and treat him like a person and a partner. Gale is in that space where you beg your groomer/abuser/generally toxic partner to give you a reason to stay because your body, your mind, are all having a very big response to the feeling that this is a fucking dead end for you.

Now rounding all of this out...

Gale is, of course, a red herring. When he first appears to you, he’s suspicious. He needs to be pulled out of some unstable magic. He’s overly charming and meets anything from general suspicion to a threat to kill him with cheerful acquiescence. He has what looks to be the world’s most suspicious tattoo sending seemingly smoky tendrils from his heart to his eye. He has that slutty little earring. It’s fine narratively to still be a little suspicious of Gale at this moment...

But the context of the entire rest of the game proves that these are all just coping mechanisms for Gale and that the corrupted orb inside of him is not corrupted because of him but is in fact an echo of another person trying desperately to not be entirely controlled by Mystra, for better or worse. Gale is not doomed to be Karsus. His bad ending is in thinking he could be more than Karsus and that that would empower him. It is a direct narrative echo of Shadowheart and Lae’zel thinking they can serve their leader/god good enough that they will no longer be abused. It is even more directly a parallel pathway to Astarion ascending and losing his humanity, his soul, because of the false idea that claiming your abuser’s power means you are safe, whole, and that you’ve “won” the abuse in some way.

If you don’t engage with Gale, which I imagine Team Twitter Psychology Degree don’t because they decided Gale was an irredeemable sex pest or something, you might miss these things. Gale is unpacking his abuse far better than anyone of the other origin characters throughout the bigger narrative moments of the game. These sentiments can turn to bitterness and corrupted ambition, yes, but for me, they were not.

He sees the parallels, watches as varying degrees of godhood hurt people.

The Big Bad Three are Chosens. They’re an echo of himself, too. What devotion, ambition, wanting to prove yourself worthy can lead you to. Even so, Gale has this strange sort of empathy for Orin.

And throughout the game, Gale is sensitive to these ideas of childhood, as above with Orin, but also in protecting them from manipulative adults. A large part of why it’s “easy” to get Gale’s approval in act one is because so much of act one is about choosing to protect those tiefling kids. Gale’s little fatherhood joke, that he isn’t father material, that he’s not in a place to have kids… to me that is a level of awareness that I see reflected in myself and many of my friends who survived childhoods of neglect, abuse, grooming, etc. Gale resonates with many people who have experienced religious trauma or the trauma of worship in a more generalized sense for a reason.

You have to throw ALL OF THIS AWAY to paint Gale as someone vile and selfish who doesn’t respect his partner’s boundaries. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no way to make it make sense because you can’t pull any evidence because pulling literally any other thing about Gale in the entirety of the narrative immediately destroys that argument.

I could pull more from Gale romance scenes, but as I said, the people holding these ideas about him I sincerely doubt engaged with Gale's story on that level since they took one surface level thing they could twist and ran with it.

I hope this is helpful, re-assuring to anyone who has seen weird takes and felt like maybe they accidentally enjoyed someone sinister (you did not). And if you were on the fence, confused, overwhelmed, etc, hey, I hope it helped you, too! Even if we don't agree 100% on interpretation, I hope it gave you a lot to think about and enriches the game for you.

As always, if you found this valuable, please consider supporting me on ko-fi with a one-off latte or monthly support. The less I'm terrified of losing housing and scavenging for groceries, the more I can write great big meta pieces, god-tier shitposts, and just generally vibe. <3

#this is a long one pls clap #gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #mystra #bg3 mystra #bg3 meta #bg3 #wolfling answers

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swarmishstrangers · 1 year ago

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Your blog, fics and headcanons always cheer me up! Your art is so neat too. Ive been lurking around here for a bit when I feel like I need my crops watered. Question, can I get headcannon of mallek x reader where the reader is an artist? somehow was able to accept commissions while on Alternia? I feel like the vibe of them just silently drawing and him coding in the background is super cute. What do you think?

AUGRHGAA TYYY!!!! I'm glad you like the art, writing, and headcanons! I've also definitely had the thoughts of Mallek being with an s/o who works a lot on computers for digital art stuff, mainly cause it sounds peaceful af.

Okay, so! Artist is a pretty loose term that could apply to a lot of things, but you specify them drawing here, so I'll go over Mallek x reader, both of them being either a traditional artist or a digital artist.

Traditional Artist:

🎨Starting with the traditional artist! Dunno if any of you consider yourselves to be fairly clean but either way if you were to stay over at his hive a lot and for convenience's sake, leave some of your art stuff at his place..it only adds to the chaos that his hive, "damn girl you live like this?" Idk! I just imagine all sorts of physical stuff traditional artist's use. Different types of paint and paintbrushes, charcoal, watercolors, colored pencils, paper, canvases, etc. Your art stuff adds a whole other thing to look at in his hive and honestly? He's here for it. He thinks art is cool. I mean..he can do tattoos, so of course he'd have some appreciation for a s/o who does artsy stuff. He also like those moments where he finds you just covered in your art supplies. Charcoal all over your arms and even smudged on your face for when you couldn't fight a itch and scratched at it, your hands and fingers smudged with paint or oil pastels...he just finds it incredibly charming.

🎨Oh also on the subject of paint uhh. May or may not be something you're comfortable with using considering that paint on Alternia is made from the blood of trolls. Depends whether or not you can get over that and just pretend it isn't to cope lmao. If you can just. Don't ask Amisia and Chahut about how getting the supplies for your paint went!

🎨Mallek would find it incredibly relaxing to listen to while he's fucking around with his husktops and many monitors. Normally he's one to either sit in quiet with nothing to play or maybe he'll have his playlist quietly playing whatever music or other things to listen to while he works on projects or contact people. Not to say it isn't still quiet while you both do your own things, but that's just the thing. It's quiet, not silent. Mallek finds he works the best when he knows that there's life going on around him. The sounds of his hands rapidly typing on his keyboard, the whirring of his husktop, sometimes you can hear him speak to someone that he's calling. You just further add on with your sounds of living, the sound of pencil sketching onto paper or canvas, the louder or softer sounds of you using oil pastels or charcoal, papers being moved, the adjusting of a canvas. It's all very comfortable to you both.

🎨You're each other's background sounds.

Digital Artist:

🖋️Being a digital artist is also so cool to Mallek, why wouldn't it be? It's tech shit! He can also help you try and traverse the different Alternian art programs. It's pretty new to him too since all he usually uses is the Alternian equivalent to Microsoft paint..and it's not super serious, just doodles, sketches, and shitposts stuff to destress. You got yourself a husktop, Amisia was jumping at the chance to help you look for digital art supplies (such as a tablet and stuff), and Mallek helped you get a hold of art programs for you to try out and decide what you like to use as your primary programs.

🖋️They're pretty much the same as Earth art programs in terms of it's functions. Though of course their interfaces can be different from program to program. Not everything works as it does on Earth? Certain shortcuts or tool locations are moved around or changed but it's pretty easy to figure out if you're experienced in digital art. And if you're stuck or can't figure something out your cool tech savvy matesprit can help you out. Mallek has his moments where he takes a break from what he's working on briefly to watch you draw...he always has to stifle a laugh when he sees you're absolutely struggling over there to do line art, having to undo do your stroke like 50 times before you get it. Like the previous one? He thinks it's cute and charming.

🖋️While you don't add a lot of new things to look at it in his hive, as you're working with more tech, it's still just as nice to listen to in the background he thinks. He can hear your fingers type out messages to friends or clients you're working with, the sound of your pen stroking against the tablet face, your mouse clicking here and then. There may not be as many sounds, but he finds it just as comforting, he likes to listen to the life around him after all.

Commissions:

As for the commission portion, thought it would be fun to get into this separately after talking about the respective art types! Being commissioned as an alien on the planet is certainly. Interesting. Which can be taken positively or otherwise.

Being an alien is your selling point to a lot of trolls online. It's where you got a huge chunk of your followers! Sure, they're very split on genuinely believing you are a real alien and those who think this is some kind of roleplay account or something but follow out of interest. Your commissions gather more interest from those who want a drawing from an alien! Real or not. Lots of odd are fun interactions.

For a traditional artist you could go the route of just, scanning your picture and posting it onto your socials and tag the trolls (or post it to the troll client privately). If you offer a shipement of the physical original drawing Mallek can help you out with getting a drone to drop it off for you so you don't have to go on a wild goose chase to find the troll client in this great wide troll world.

#mallek adalov #mallek adalov x reader #hiveswap #hiveswap friendsim #swarms-asks

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leam1983 · 8 months ago

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Tech - FAQ

Why do magnets still fuck up computers? Aren't plate drives archaic?

Plate drives might be going the way of the dodo as active storage, but magnetism isn't going anywhere. NAND cells use magnetic polarity to shift bits as needed. A control gate handles the programming and the chip's interfacing with the rest of your drive or your system altogether, and a floating gate stores a charge, so that you can theoretically unplug an SSD, leave it lying around for ages, then plug it back in on a whim to find that all your stuff's still there. It's essentially the same tech that's been used since the first few plate drives - and even in things like your old SNES carts. It's why you still have that Megaman X save on your thirty-odd year-old cart - assuming of course that you don't go about sticking a big enough magnet on it.

Fucking magnets - how do they work? I mean, in relation to data?

Alright. Imagine that you're both Jackson Pollock and Magnetism personified. You start out with a row of paint cans and a blank stretch of canvas - a nice, clean and orderly hard drive, more or less. There's magnetic force involved even in the system's proper state - after all, you've got paint in cans. It's just not splashed everywhere, right now.

The thing is, systems want to create neat and orderly drive systems. This is why you'd defragment your drives back when plate drives were super common. The thing is, that pesky user keeps pulling files and shifting them to RAM, which fucks up your neat and orderly arrangement! Unlike raw magnetism, however, a computer fetching files and moving bits around is working as intended. Put a magnet on that drive and, well, you're Pollock splashing paint everywhere, creating beautiful chaos - and an irrecoverable drive.

But if drives are magnetic, then what's the issue?

When an SSD calls up a file, it's doing so in a controlled and expected manner. Magnetism is involved, the NAND chip's configuration changes to match the new state - but nothing's going haywire. Add a magnet to this and you're adding too much of a good thing.

Does any magnet work?

No, thankfully. One of my older PCs ended up with Buckyballs stuck somewhere in the drive cage - I was a dumb teen with way too many desk toys for my own good - and nothing's ever happened. Sticking a fridge magnet or a credit card's strip against a drive won't do much; most PC parts are actually built to tolerate some exposure to open magnetic fields - but leaving that magnet there or going for something bigger might cause issues.

Aren't LCD screens magnetic?

Technically, yes! However, the screen is running off of a controlled and isolated field, and nobody's sticking a computer monitor right next to a running power supply, anyway. You'll need a fairly targeted application of a bigger field to really fuck up your little crystals' polarity - thereby creating the dreaded "dead pixels" video enthusiasts loathe so much.

Let's talk OSes - specifically, dumb shit I'm too scared to try but always wanted to do. What happens if I delete System32 in Windows?

Most modern versions of Windows - we're talking 7 and above - won't let you touch that folder, even with normal elevated system privileges, as a computer's Admin. You can mash Delete for days, the OS just won't let you nuke it. However, a little Terminal wizardry can succeed in telling Windows "shut up, I own you, let me delete the equivalent to your cerebellum, I have Reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to test an insult or run with a shitpost".

The system will ask you a few more times, as you really shouldn't be doing this - and will then let you proceed ahead. In short order, you'll realize that your current rig is, for all intents and purposes, fucked severe. Even rebooting won't let you fix it, even if you're trying to backtrack to a previous Restore Point. Your only option, at this point, is a complete reformat and reinstall.

Is this why the FORMAT.C command always brings up a warning?

That is exactly why. FORMAT.C, in Terminal or PowerShell, is effectively computer-speak for "I want you to start over, in the most abrupt and uncalled-for way possible. Wipe yourself."

And if what you want is to wipe away a system's very existence, there's more effective, physical and gratifying ways of doing that, anyway. Most of them involve an already-scrapped microwave and a power drill! Awesome!

What is the black magic I need to delete System32? I swear I want to do this to a virtual machine, and not to perpetrate an act of technological malfeasance on someone I happen to loathe.

If you need to ask about the black magic, you're not ready for the black magic. Google is your friend, and I'm not responsible for what you do on your own time.

Linux is so much better, the system trusts me! But, just for funzies, how can I fuck up a distro running off of Ubuntu?

It's the object of the same memes as "delete System32". If the darkness calls to you, thou shall find thine answers upon the myriad pages of Google.

Water's a poor conductor; I remember this from Physics class! Why my PC go broky if I spray it with a garden hose, then?

Because it's not the water that's making the magic smoke happen, believe it or not. If you were a baller and could spray your PC with a tank's worth of pure, ozonized water with absolutely zero particulates in it and no minerals whatsoever, it would probably be totally fine. Hell, there's even entire PC build projects that involve immersing components in purified water. The problem is, tap water isn't exactly pure. There's trace minerals in it, we typically add fluoride as well, and most water tables fall somewhere on the pH and alkalinity scales, and not often in the "objectively pure" margins of them. And even if you could guarantee a basin of 100% pure H2O, then you'd just condemn your PC to suffocation by way of its own building and festering thermal mass. You'd need systems to agitate the water or to re-absorb its heat before diffusing it elsewhere.

This is also why distilled water isn't often used in full-immersion builds, seeing as distilled water is hard to keep in its pure state. You need air to leech off some of its absorbed heat, and exposure to the outside world means a potential exposure to trace minerals, dead skin flakes or other bits of stuff that aren't chemically related to water and that happen to conduct a charge a little bit better, so...

Is this why this never really took off, compared to the liquid-cooling rigs we know of?

Yes. A well-assembled water-cooling loop has water come in contact with a cooling plate, which itself touches the CPU, or occasionally the GPU as well. As it's a closed loop, any traces of organic components - like fungi - could be dangerous over time. It's why most dye kits for water-cooling loops typically generously include a little bottle of sterilizer. The one issue is that with copper being one of the most thermally-effective metals and also fairly rust-prone, a lot of care has to be involved. A lot of cautious water-cooling enthusiasts tend to advise users in that space to drain out and dry out their loop every few years, to check for signs of corrosion.

But fans are so noisy!

I know, but if you're a budget, an air-cooled build is going to be the most effective approach you could take.

What about AIOs?

All-in-One systems are convenient, but you can't typically access the coolant that's circulating in the loop. On the one hand, an airtight system means no buildup of anything. On the other? No maintenance is possible. If it breaks, it breaks. The average AIO has a life expectancy of about five years - about the same lifespan as your typical rig.

Why is everyone bad-mouthing Windows? I'm just an end-user, I don't give a shit about what I put on my computron!

In a few words, Microsoft's pivoted from its former business model, which involved selling legitimate copies of their OS at high prices, to selling their users' data to the highest bidder. It generates far more profits, it's dystopian as shit, and it's a frightfully smart business decision. I don't approve of it one bit - but it's still smart. In the "I don't give a shit about you, now give your browser history, I'm Patrick Bateman with a fancy ISO to give to you" sense of it being smart.

You and I are the product, now. This is why people are moving to Linux - even if I think this is a flawed solution to a problem that has objectively very few serious consequences for the average end-user.

What do you mean? This is terrible!

Yes, it is! However, your collection of cat pics or your snapping stills with a phone because DRM doesn't let you capture frames for a gifset is of zero worth whatsoever to both Microsoft and the advertisers your data is sold to. The more private aspects of your life are safe, for the most part - what they're focused on is what they could sell to you. So - that involves most of your browsing history and potentially your emails, too. Windows Recall, however, could up the ante by giving MS access to those less-marketable aspects of who you are. That's the onus, here.

What's that?

A user-accessible long-term memory of sorts, used to help the user remember previous tasks or recall where certain elements are stored. It seems neat, until you realize this means Microsoft wants to record everything you do at your computer.

And Linux is better?

It doesn't overtly spy on you - at least, not if you stick to most trustworthy distributions, or OS installs. You're paying for an uptick in privacy with a loss in convenience, however. The more tech-savvy you are, the easier you'll get used to Linux. This isn't to say there aren't noob-friendly distros, there's actually several - but if something goes wonky, chances are you could find yourself stuck on your distro's Community forums, trying to divine what this rando means when he's asking you to list what the lspci command returns. Most enthusiasts in the sphere are nice, but several tend to forget that for a lot of end-users, there's no thrill in spending a few days hunting-and-pecking for a fix. Grandma won't grep shit, she just wants her Bluetooth manager to work!

What's grep?

It's Orc-speak for "find shit now." Jokes aside, it means Global Regular Expression Print. It's a command you can input in a Terminal while accessing a file, to have it search for what's inside. So if I open up a folder called "chocolate chip cookie recipe" in Linux and want to check how much flour I need while being too lazy to open the file on my own, I can just head to the terminal and type grep flour chocolatechipcookies.doc Grep tells the computer it'll need to look for something, flour is what it needs to look for in the file, and chocolatechipcookies.doc is what I'm pointing it to. I'm basically saying "Look in the chocolatechipcookies.doc file and find me all instances of the word flour being used."

If your head feels about to burst, I get it. It's a lot, and it's non-obvious - much like Windows' own Terminal or PowerShell languages.

Ah. So some Linux peeps think people are just going to troubleshoot everything themselves?

I know, right? It's almost as if some of these people forgot that for a lot of folks, a PC is just a convenient portal for emails, social networks and the occasional YouTube binge-watch.

So you don't believe we'll ever get the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Nope. Linux is too atomized, too fiddly, too focused on doing things honestly, as opposed to practically. Windows and MacOS aren't in any real danger of losing their market shares, even if the number of Linux users is slowly and steadily increasing. Unless Linux Mint or something close to it becomes so foulproof that your grandma can flat-out not know of the Terminal's existence without it impacting the computer's usage even in the advent of software failure, then we won't get a fully reliable third option.

I don't know what you're talking about, I've changed permissions on my Plex server and I passed my GPU through a VM for containerized Windows gaming on Linux; it's stupid as shi-

You're not the average use-case scenario, Steven. Sit back down. Raise your hand again once you're eighty-six and barely know how to access your NeuraMail or connect with the Galactic Sodality while your hypothetical grandchildren drone on about leaving the prison of the flesh for the purity of silicon wafers and you feel an encroaching sense of Sartrian Contingency rise up in the pit of your stomach upon realizing how incomprehensible this cold and barren new world is for you.

#IT Post #FAQ

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enki2 · 1 year ago

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So, as somebody who was paying close attention to both generative art and generative text years before GANs & LLMs were invented (both the actual tech on the ground and how the media & regular people talked about it), I have a couple things to add. (Also relevant experience: I've written freelance for outlets with varying degrees of clout, self-published, gotten my stuff published in small-press anthologies, gotten paid for non-LLM machine-generated text by a small press who was featuring gen art, commissioned art, and spent a bunch of time talking about GANs with both professional illustrators and people who do art commissions.)

For one thing, text generation that's good enough to generate shitty children's books & nonsense essays has been around for a lot longer. I absolutely do see writers freaking out about LLMs (and the writers I see freaking out about LLMs are exactly the same demographics as the artists I see freaking out about GANs: amateurs doing freelance/commission work), but I think freelance writers have more or less accepted that they've never been able to make a living off this stuff & they also have noticed that their shit pay doesn't seem to get substantially more shitty (or their commissions substantially more rare) even after all the scary articles.

For another, every minor advance in generating art of any kind (including visual and textual art) produces dozens of low-effort sensationalist articles about how robots are gonna take artists' jobs. (It doesn't matter how shitty the output is: look at coverage of that TV screenplay writing program from the 50s.) These articles tend to have a big but short-lived effect on the discourse, and then are completely forgotten -- with the same people freaking out about what is essentially the same article about the same technology several years later. GANs and LLMs have stayed in the news a bit longer because non-technical people were able to play with them through several generations of development -- but this doesn't guarantee that the freakout will "take" (nobody spent too long worrying about botnik's autosuggest-keyboard was going to put comedians out of work, even though a lot of people found it very useful for comedy writing). It may be chance that GAN sensationalism hit a particularly sensitive audience, who now is stuck doubling down on dubious ideas because people post a lot of GAN images & trigger them, rather than amateur illustrators somehow being less capable of critical thinkers than amateur authors.

There's also a much bigger gap between drawing furry porn on commission and being a professional illustrator than there is between writing blog posts and writing a book, in terms of typical workflow. Professional illustrators are used to painting over photobashed models (which is almost exactly the same as painting over a GAN-generated image -- which you'd need to do in order to make it into something of publishable quality) while amateur artists of the kind I'm characterizing here tend to come out of the "do not steal my OC" corners of fandom spaces & idealize originality in a way that's not really compatible with commerce. Meanwhile, both the random Medium publication that wants to republish your shitpost & the New York Times is gonna basically gonna do collaborative editing on google docs & then try to figure out a way to not pay you. So, writers in general are not under the illusion that their work is valued, while digital painters who have not yet interacted with The Industry often are under that illusion.

Another factor is that literacy is more common than visual literacy. Most people can tell that an essay is dogshit because they themselves wrote dogshit essays in high school & got reamed out for it. But most people cannot recognize the illustration equivalent of a C+ essay. What's more, most people can recognize when an essay is poorly structured even when all the words are spelled correctly, while an image with reasonable anatomy but poor composition does not register as an unacceptable image. (I think most people can tell when somebody really knocks it out of the park -- the image equivalent of award-winning poetry has exactly the same kind of impact as award-winning poetry -- but most art, like most writing, is mediocre, and it takes a lot of learned skill to distinguish between two slightly different shades of mediocrity.)

Honestly kind of interesting to compare the relative intensity of response to AI art from visual artists/illustrators and writers - there's plenty of, like, high-minded worry about the potential damage of people using ChatGPT as a search engine/personal assistant or whatever, but basically no one seems to viscerally loath it like people on here do Midjourney.

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reasonoptional · 5 years ago

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Little known fact, but Lorem Ipsum is actually a huge thing in fanfic communities

#python #flask #postgresql #heroku #programming equivalent of a shitpost #@dormarunt

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kata4a · 5 years ago

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as a mere cs student baby, could you explain the post about type systems and languages being turing complete?

gonna err on the side of overexplaining, and try and break things up so that you can just skip the parts that you already know

so,

turing completeness

a “turing machine” is a particular theoretical model of a computer - the details don’t matter too much for this shitpost, but it’s basically a machine that reads and writes symbols to locations an infinite length of tape based on (fixed) state transformation rules. (e.g., one of those rules might be “if you see an ‘X’ at your current position and are in state ‘A’, overwrite the ‘X’ with a ‘Y’ and move left”)

“turing completeness” just means the ability to simulate any turing machine

as it turns out, turing completeness is, (if you ignore execution speed, which we do, because we’re academics) sufficient to compute, well, just about everything that we know how to compute. it’s basically the upper limit on “theoretical computational power” (as long as you don’t care about like, things not being a bitch to program, or programs finishing before your great grandchildren are born)

an aside: something you might have noticed is that turing machines as I described have an infinite tape. actual computers, and, in fact, all other things, do not have an infinite anything. usually we handwave this by pointing to your laptop and just saying “pretend it has infinite ram” because like, ~~~conceptually~~~ it kind of does

we’re academics, etc

halting

(this doesn’t really come up in my shitpost, but it does in @skluug‘s, and is also the only thing people actually care about turing machines)

an extremely deep finding in theoretical computer science is that of the “halting problem.” (you can tell it’s deep because mathblr loves to wank about it)

one of the actions a turing machine can take is to “halt” - basically, to stop and be done running. e.g., a multiplication machine might halts to let the programmer know that it’s finished performing its multiplication. there is no guarantee that a given turing machine ever does halt, though, for example, consider the machine that just always moves left. (remember, our tape is infinite, so it’ll never run out of “left” to move)

so let’s say someone’s just given you an arbitrary turing machine (a popular christmas present among mathematicians). you run it on some input tape, and after a few minutes it’s still running, and you’d really like to know if it’s going to finish before lunch is over

you could inspect the program and try and reason about its logic, but that’s time consuming and effortful. what you’d like to do is formalize your logic into an algorithm (i.e., another turing machine) that you can just run on this machine (and input tape) and have it tell you if it halts

well, sorry, you can’t. there in fact exists no such turing machine (and therefore, as far as we know, no such computer in general) which, given an arbitrary turing machine and input, can always tell if you (in finite time) if it will halt

(exercise: why do we need the “in finite time” constraint in the last sentence)

I’m not going to get in the proof for this, since there is just so much halting problem proof content out there, but as just a start: consider what would happen if you run (variations of) such a turing machine on itself

as it turns out, the fact that the halting problem is unsolvable in this way is essentially equivalent to.....you guessed it! goedel’s incompleteness theorem! fuck math!

non-turing machines

the halting problem, among a bunch of other things, makes programming languages that are turing complete kind of a bitch to reason about (though we will look at some strategies for reasoning about them in a later section)

so if the problems your programming language is trying to solve can be done without using the full power of turing-completeness, then it can be (at least theoretically) useful to do so, as it makes your language much simpler and constrains the different ways programs in it can fail

an example of a non-turing complete theoretical model is a finite state machine (basically a turing machine without the tape). this happens to be sufficient to execute regular expressions (a pattern matching language) (as long as you leave out all the fancy extensions)

I believe SQL might also be non-turing complete? I'm not entirely sure though.

in general, this practice of using highly restricted, easily-reasoned-about languages to solve small problem domains is actually kind of uncommon - people really like add extensions and additional functionality, and if you do that haphazardly and often enough it's very likely that you will just stumble into turing-completeness

(as an example of how easy it is to be extremely minimal and also turing complete, consider the brainfuck "programming language")

however, one domain where it's still very common to have, small, extremely restricted languages solve a single, specific problem is...

type theory

so let’s talk about type systems. a “type system” is just a series of (potentially implied) annotations (”types”) which constrain the set of programs you can write

a typechecker or type unification algorithm then examines these annotations and decides whether the program is "valid"

for example, you might have a capitalize() function (which capitalizes a piece of text) which you declare (or your typechecker infers) operates only on Strings. then if you try and say something like capitalize(5), the typechecker will reject it, as 5 is a Number, a different type from Strings

so this kind of thing, where you have some finite set of types (Number, String) and functions which take arguments (each of a single type) as input and produce an output (of single type) is an example of an extremely simple, minimal type system. absolutely not turing complete

there are better ones (look up "hindley-milner"), but as usual as you increase complexity you approach turing-completeness

dependent types

"dependent types" and "turing complete typechecker" are not exactly equivalent, but they usually go hand in hand. basically this is the level complexity at which your typechecker can enforce basically arbitrary constraints on your programming language

which is great! because, for example, you can even enforce that only programs that can be shown with certainty to halt, (or not) be written, among other things - allowing you both the full computing power of a turing complete language and the ease-of-reasoning afforded by more limited languages

(doesn't this involve solving the halting problem? no, but I'll leave it to you to figure out why - for help, the terms to look up are "enumerable" and "decidable" languages)

...at least, in theory. unfortunately, afaict rn most dependently typed languages are basically useless, at least in part because "proving your program halts" is hard enough when you're trying to prove it to another person (or mathematician), let alone a computer. like, I've never even heard of agda being used outside of academic research or torturing undergrads

anyway yeah that's the joke, hope you this ridiculous explanation was helpful

#I don't want to become a programming blog #is an increasingly dubious category tag

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ieyasu-tacogawa · 7 years ago

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Analysis: MysMes V’s Route is genderbent Phantom of the Opera (the 2004 one)

Some of you may find this analysis to be a shitpost. Honestly it is. But I dare you to listen to all THIRTEEN of these Phantom of the Opera songs, read these analyses and tell me V’s route ain’t the same...

Christine = V

The Phantom = Rika

Raoul = MC

Carlotta = Ray

(Check out these sick MS Paint skillz ooh yeah. Pretend the Phantom is Rika)

Analysis and dissection of the songs below (WARNING: SPOILERS FOR MYSTIC MESSENGER V’S ROUTE AND THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA I GUESS. Also THIS IS REALLY LONG SORRY).

HANNIBAL

Ray takes MC to Mint Eye

“This trophy from our saviors, from our saviors, from the enslaving force of Rome!”

“We greet the victorious throng, returned to bring salvation!”

THINK OF ME

V’s idealistic views on Rika and romance at the beginning of the route.

“We never said our love was evergreen, or as unchanging as the sea. But if you can still remember, stop and think of me.”

I could quote half the song tbh.

ANGEL OF MUSIC

V and Jumin (Madame Giry’s daughter lmao) speak about V’s talent, Rika, etc.

V: “[Mother] once spoke of [unconditional love], I used to dream [someone I could love like Rika would] appear. Now as I [waste my time with photography] I can sense [her]. And I know [she’s] here.”

The final exchange: V: “[She’s] with me even now.” Jumin: “Your hands are cold” V: “All around me.” Jumin: “Your face, Jihyun, it’s white.” V: “I’m frightened.” Jumin: “Don’t be frightened.” (in Jumin terms, “approach the situation and assume the worst outcome blah blah”)

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

V and Rika climbing into her dark dark lair.

Rika: “Sing once again with me, our strange duet.” Rika constantly tries to prove throughout the story that V has some sort of devil inside of him too, since to her that’s the only way V could understand her.

“My power over you grows stronger yet. And though you turn from me to glance behind. The phantom of the opera is there, inside your mind.” Rika’s darkness is darker than yours! And yet despite her devils, despite her atrocious crimes, despite V’s hesitations and regrets, it is his “unconditional“ love for Rika that stops him from acting at the beginning.

V: “Those who have seen your face, draw back in fear. I am the mask you wear.” Rika tells us quite plainly that she uses fear as a manipulative tactic on the believers. V masks all these crimes from the RFA.

Rika: “Sing for me!” Equivalent to how Rika is constantly demanding V’s unconditional love.

MUSIC OF THE NIGHT (lmao)

This song is Rika af...

“Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation. Darkness wakes and stirs imagination.” blah blah blah. Basically the sensuality of this song is just as enticing and persuasive as Rika is. In addition, the theme of this song is to romanticize darkness, and we all know Rika loves that shit.

“Open up your mind, let your fantasies unwind, in this darkness which you know you cannot fight.”

"You alone can make my song take flight...” A final line to Rika’s dependence on V’s unconditional love.

I REMEMBER/STRANGER THAN YOU DREAMT IT

V accepts loving Rika but sees more and more of Rika’s darkness. She lashes out.

Rika: “Damn you! You little prying pandora!” etc. Plenty examples of Rika’s verbal abuse.

“Stranger than you dreamt it, can you even dare to look or bear to think of me? This loathsome gargoyle who burns in hell but secretly, secretly...” Rika’s devil yadda yadda.

“Fear can turn to love, you’ll learn to see...”

PRIMA DONNA

Me: “Your public needs you.”

Also me: “We need you too!”

Ray: “Wouldn’t you rather have that precious little mint hair man?”

Me: “Saeran, no. The world, wants, you...”

POOR FOOL

Ray: “Poor fool he makes me laugh, hahahahaha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ho...”

“TIme I tried to get a better, better half.” OUCH OUCH.

“Poor fool he doesn’t know... If he knew the truth, he’d never, ever go.”

WHY HAVE YOU BROUGHT ME HERE?

MC: “Why have you brought me here [to the RFA]?”

V: “We can’t go back there... [She’ll] kill you. [Her] eyes will find us there [at Mint Eye]... If [she] has to kill a thousand men... [Rika] will kill and kill again.”

“My god who is this [woman]?” MC: “My god who [the fuck] is this [crazy ex of yours]?” V: “Who hunts to kill? I can’t escape from [her]. I never will.”

“[MC] I’ve been there, to [her] world of unending night. To a world where the daylight dissolves into darkness.”

V: “Yet [my ideals on loving this dark person] filled my spirit with a strange, sweet sound. In that night there was [painting I guess] in my mind. And through [that white canvas painting with love metaphor junk] my soul begain, to soar! I [loved] as I never [loved] before.”

MC: “What you [loved] was a dream and nothing more.”

ALL I ASK OF YOU

MC: “No more talk of darkness, forget these wide eyed fears. I’m here. No one can harm you. My words [that the game programmed for us] will warm and calm you... I’m here, with you, beside you. To guard you and to guide you.”

V: “All I want is freedom. A world with no more night, and you. Always beside me. To hold me and to hide me.”

MC: “Then say you’ll share with me one love one lifetime.” (meh...)

Both: “Love me, that’s all I ask of you.” (I think this one is a stretch given the timeline of V’s emotional development, but oh well, I think maybe the feelings were growing even if the words of love and declarations weren’t?)

Bonus if you have sympathy for Rika: the All I Ask of You reprise. Rika: “I gave you [the blank canvas you wanted]. Made your [art] take wing. And now, how you’ve repaid me. Denied me and betrayed me... You will curse the day you did not do! All that [Rika] asked of you!”

MASQUERADE

RFA member: “Dear, MC what a splendid party!” lmao

Everyone: “Masquerade! Paper faces on parade! Masquerade. Hide your face so the world will never find you...” This song is about how festive and happy things seem on the outside, but carry or ignore evils underneath.

WISHING YOU WERE SOMEHOW HERE AGAIN

V’s feelings about his mother...

“Wishing I could hear your voice again, knowing that I never would. Dreaming of you, won’t help me to do, all that you dreamed I could.” V’s dreams of painting are unrealized until the good ending (idk about that musician business).

“Too many years, fighting back tears, why can’t the past just die!?”

“Wishing you were somehow here again, knowing I must say goodbye. Try to forgive, teach me to live, give me the strength to try!” V’s rejection of his artistic urges, his mother’s suggestions and encouragement to let him explore art.

PAST THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Rika: “You have come here, in pursuit of your deepest urge, in pursuit of that wish which til now has been silent...”

V: “Past the point of no return, no going back now, our passion play has now at last begun.”

“When will the blood begin to race? The sleeping bud burst into bloom? When will the flames at last, consume us?”

Both: “The bridge has crossed, so stand and watch it burn. We’ve past the point of no return...” sobs loudly for Saeran.

Rika sings her All I Ask of You reprise and pleads her love to V once last time.

V and scooby gang unmask Rika and her crimes AND THE RFA IS DONE WITH HER GG.

#mystic messenger #phantom of the opera #analysis #low key shit post #mm v #mm rika #mm ray

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blog-anish · 7 years ago

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Hillel's Brainfuck Interpreter, explained

It took me some fiddling to get Hillel Wayne’s original vim-macros-only Brainfuck interpreter running, so I figured I’d share an asciinema, in the spirit of reproducible shitposting!

Any mistakes are mine; The interpreter itself is based on Hillel’s.

Why was it so hard?

The tricky part was the [ operator: I figured his 'clF0`b needed to do something other than move. Looking at the brainfuck spec, [ behaves like jz end_of_loop. `bh%mbmb clearly moves the mark `b (that is, the program counter) to the matching ], so 'clF0 has to crash the macro if the mark 'c (that is, the position of the head on the tape) is on a 0. That’s super clever; I wouldn’t have thought to use the fact that vim stops running your macro if you make an impossible move.

Alright, so how do we do that? Well, l just moves us one left, and F0 tries to go back to the previous 0 on this line. Okay, so it normally fails immediately, since there’s nowhere left to go after the numbers on each line. The first thing I tried to do is add a space after each number, but the C-a/C-x increment/decrement operator deletes the trailing whitespace. The solution is to use one of my favorite vim options virtualedit (invaluable for asciiart! see the modeline at the top). Now, we can go left all we like, but F0 still fails if there’s no 0 to our left!

Huh? Sorry, I don’t speak linenoise…

Let’s break it down:

What’s Brainfuck?

Brainfuck is a small, Turing-complete, notoriously impenetrable, language. Here’s the semantics denoted into C, according to wikipedia:

Brainfuck command C equivalent ------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- (Program Start) char array[INFINITELY_LARGE_SIZE] = {0}; char *ptr=array; > ++ptr; < --ptr; + ++*ptr; - --*ptr; [ while (*ptr) { ] )

That is, we have a pointer into an infinitely long tape, and we can move back and forth along the tape with < and >, increment and decrement the memory cell on the tape that we’re currently looking at with + and -, and finally, we can loop until our pointer ends on a 0, using [ and ].

How?

You’ll notice that the commands from the above table mirror the block of text at mark `a on lines 8-14. That’s no coincidence: this is where we keep a lookup table of commands to execute. Mark `b is our program counter, and mark `c is the location of our pointer in memory/the tape. So at every step, we want to read the symbol at the program counter, look up the meaning of that symbol in our table of meanings, and then run that meaning/command on our tape. We’ll come back to that macro at the end, but let’s start with the easier ones and move up:

+ just needs to increment the tape cell by 1, and since we’re already on it, we just use vim’s built in command to increment the next number in the line, ^A

- similarly just decrements the number on the current line using ^X, the opposite of ^A

> moves to the next tape cell. Since we have one cell per line with the current position marked by `c, we just move down a line (j) and update `c (mc)

<, similarly moves to the previous cell, so we just move up a line (k) and update `c (mc)

] is finally a little more complex. It ends a looping construct, so it needs to change the program counter. It goes to the location of the program counter (`b), jumps to the matching [ delimiter (%), and then decrements the program counter (hmbmb), so that the next instruction is the start of the loop. Note that we need to run mb twice to change the mark b to a different character on the same line. The first mb deletes the mark instead of moving it, since this same line was the old location of the mark.

[ is the companion to ] that’s a little more complex and trick since it needs to actually check a conditional. See the first section of this post for an explanation of how it works.

Our macro on line 3 does exactly that every time we call it, so each call to that macro is one step on the machine. This works by moving to mark `b (`b), yanking the character into register "a ("ayl), jumping to mark `a (`a), starting a search (/), and then pasting in register "a (^R^Ra^M)^[note that ^R means “hold down control and hit R”], going to the next word (W), yanking into register "a the rest of the line ("ay$) which contains the macro to run, then moves to the tape 'c, runs the relevant command @a, and then moves mark `b one character to the right (`blmbmb). Remember, if you couldn’t follow any of that, vim’s :h is very good!

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