aknolan

[aknolan]

i just found out tumblr was storing over three GIGABYTES of cookies on my device without me knowing and that's why it's been running so fucking slow recently... incredible. anyways everyone go clear your fucking cookies. don't let this website run a goddamn video game's worth of disc space in the background for no good reason.

#hang on... I need to check this at my computer

[aknolan]

Hadi Rahnaward: 'Fragile Balance' (2023) rug sculpture created with matches

[aknolan]

[aknolan]

First carriage ride of the year 🐶🌼

For anyone new, Holly Mop is a rescue dog who spent the first few years of her life in a cage. When we first got her she was terrified of being outside and would become ill with stress when we tried to take her on walks. We got her a stroller to see if that would help and it became her favorite thing. Three years later she’s able to walk on leash in quiet spaces, but still loves the elevated view from her carriage.

The flowers are left over from renfaire last year:

[aknolan]

Hi Neil, did you know there's a note on their bench in St James's Park that says not to bother you? (I do understand the irony of asking this)

I did not know that.

[aknolan]

[aknolan]

i think that people should start using “in poor taste” as a descriptor again given it is often the most applicable and clearest phrase when discoursing about media and analysis; sometimes a piece of art isn’t actually THE most problematic thing of all time is is. ​just in poor taste (not JUST in poor taste as a reductive take on potential harm but/and as in regardless of intent the impact is this was an offensive or stupid take/choice)

[aknolan]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[aknolan]

HELLO???? CHILSHI CANON????

[aknolan]

✦ 🗡️

[aknolan]

To understand what's going on here, know these things:

OpenAI is the company that makes ChatGPT

A spider is a kind of bot that autonomously crawls the web and sucks up web pages

robots.txt is a standard text file that most web sites use to inform spiders whether or not they have permission to crawl the site; basically a No Trespassing sign for robots

OpenAI's spider is ignoring robots.txt (very rude!)

the web.sp.am site is a research honeypot created to trap ill-behaved spiders, consisting of billions of nonsense garbage pages that look like real content to a dumb robot

OpenAI is training its newest ChatGPT model using this incredibly lame content, having consumed over 3 million pages and counting...

It's absurd and horrifying at the same time.

[aknolan]

There’s still debate about split attraction on my dash why do you people even care

#every argument I've seen is some version of 'but straight men will think all lesbians can like men then' #and it's just like. the men who won't listen to you when you say you're not interested don't give a shit about bi lesbians #no one who refuses to respect /your/ answer as true for you will suddenly start listening #and it's sad how people blame their fellow queer people for the actions of someone outside the community

[aknolan]

Every contemporary video game RPG wants to give me a party of emotionally dysfunctional weirdos and then bends over backwards to ensure that none of my interpersonal decisions cause any intractable conflicts or have any lasting consequences, which just feels wrong to me – like the latter is actively undermining the former. I want to see an RPG that goes full early 90s dating sim. I want an RPG where organising my party composition is like that logic puzzle about getting a fox and a duck across a river.

#hmm I feel like this idea involves the possibility of sending groups on missions with a somewhat randomised outcome #without your player character needing to be part of the mission #this also reminds me of a criticism of baldur's gate that I came across #in the beginner plays games series razbuten makes on youtube #which is that by giving the player full control over party members... a lot of the personality stops mattering #there was a fight where you could free someone and try to spare the people that captured them #but the person you freed would just start killing the moment you freed them #and so you had to somehow keep them from doing that to do a peaceful solution #if the characters can't decide not to listen to you #are they even characters?

[aknolan]

[aknolan]

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

[aknolan]

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

[aknolan]

There are currently ~2300 works in AO3 tagged with "Created Using Generative AI"

I'll be upfront with my opinion, which mirrors my opinion in regards to my field: using AI will only hasten your own obsolescence. The point of fanfiction is not to crank out fics, but rather to enjoy the hobby and communities of writing and fandom.

#point of nuance AI fic existed before GPT #but before the point of it was to see how funny it would be for it to just be weird and dumb #it was crack fic except even less made sense #those I would read