#effortpost

[apricops]

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

#don quixote #effortpost

[lumsel]

chinese room 2

So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which character comes next?

This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?

He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.

Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something -- pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.

* * *

One day, something odd happens.

He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and-- silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.

Which character comes next?

This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine -- shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.

Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.

* * *

One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”

He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”

Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”

The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”

That is how ChatGPT works.

#txt #ai shit #it’s not a perfect analogy #chatgpt doesn't think the symbols have no meaning #rather it doesn't think at all #all it does is the maths #but still #effortpost

[communistkenobi]

prefacing this post by saying that I am a big enjoyer of “this site has poor reading comprehension” jokes on here, but I think there needs to be better and more precise language about this sort of thing that isn’t bound up in like, the ability to parse text, which is always going to be tied to class and ability. I’m not saying every joke about this site not being able to read is classist/ableist, and I don’t think anyone is making any grand ideological proclamations when dunking on a stupid reply to their post, but the backing behind that kind of joke is, ultimately, “haha you’re an adult that can’t read.”

And aside from some potentially troubling baggage, I don’t even think that’s what’s going on in the first place! I think the more precise (but admittedly less catchy) term for “poor reading comprehension” is something along the lines of chronic incuriosity, or a rigid adherence to normative thinking. if you see a post saying, for example, women shouldn’t have to wear makeup to be viewed as human beings, and the comments are filled with “actually you can just wear some winged eyeliner and foundation it’s not that hard to wear makeup and also women love makeup stop gatekeeping,” what is happening is not a failure to comprehend the text in front of them. these responses are not made in ignorance, as in, they are not the result of a failure to understand the sentence they just read. these responses stem from a refusal to challenge base assumptions, and reacting emotionally to the mental dissonance this causes (probably something along the lines of “I think of myself as progressive but this person is challenging something I like doing and this threatens my weak political instincts”). These people are rejecting the opportunity to analyse the habits and behaviours they previously assumed to be non-political (eg, wearing makeup), and then externalising that rejection as a defence mechanism. That is not a failure to read a sentence, that is a demand to be intellectually coddled, which is very different.

Again, I’m sure people are already aware of this. I enjoy being a hater, and having people constantly swarm your posts with ridiculous and hysterical replies is incredibly frustrating (speaking from a lot of personal experience here lol). This is also not me saying you have to do the coddling and explain to them that they’re being ideologically incurious about the world, you don’t have an obligation to do any of that. but I think framing a person’s failure to be curious about their own biases as “they don’t know how to read” situates the problem as an issue of ignorance or lack of technical skill, instead of the much more prevalent problem of people refusing to be challenged or reconsider things in their life they didn’t think about before. Calling these kinds of people ignorant is just letting them off easy

#um. idk what to tag this #effortpost #< need to go back and tag my serious posts with that but I’ll do it later

[hailmaryfullofgrace55675]

for a few years now (like since at least 2021) i’ve been occasionally seeing isolated individuals try on “AFAB trans woman”, “AFAB transfem”, “AMAB trans man”, “AMAB transmasc” and dreading the possibility of this becoming an inclus/exclus thing where there’s a huge vicious debate and a ton of people develop calcified stances that it’s “valid” because they are straight ticket voters on uses of language being “valid”. i’ve recently come across multiple fairly high-note promotions of each of 1) yeah, sure, anyone can be a trans woman (normal understanding of the language of AGAB, replaces meaning of “trans woman” with “someone who is a woman and also trans” or, worse “someone who identifies with the vibe of trans womanhood”) and 2) your AGAB is whatever you decide it is, maybe even a neolabel (completely opposite the concept of gender assignment at birth). i’m crossing my fingers that these uses somehow go no further, or that if they do the ensuing fight blows over quickly.

as an individual topic, it’s frustrating because it points to the complete failure on a lot of people’s parts to absorb or understand the basic premises of this idea of transgender.

we live in a world where, when humans are born, the adults around them decide what role they are going to have in a system of male/female boy/girl man/woman. usually they pick based on a quick look at the child’s external genitalia. if the quick look doesn’t match their idea of what a baby boy or baby girl is supposed to look like, they might or might not do further physical investigation, and either way they will pick a role for the child. if the child doesn’t look one of the ways expected, they might enforce this decision through surgery to conform the child’s body to their ideal for the role they chose. whether the decision was immediate or after deliberation, whether surgery was performed or not performed, this process of role picking is coercive. a first act of coercion in a childhood of coercion in a lifetime of coercion.

children are raised to the roles they were assigned. sometimes this involves the deliberate imposition of a lot of restrictions and expectations about how the child will look and behave, sometimes fewer, sometimes almost none but that they will agree that they are what the adults said they were. even if it is only the last, the child will sooner or later feel the weight of much greater expectations, because they will become aware that wider society says girls should look girly and do girl things and boys should look boyish and do boy things. sometimes it becomes apparent that a child’s body is growing to not match the adults’ idea of what a male body or a female body is supposed to look like or do. if this happens, the adults might allow or force the child to switch roles, might ease or double down on their expectations, and might or might not give the child a choice in whether they biomedically intervene in the child’s physical development.

sometimes, a person grows to refuse the role they were assigned and adopt a new one. sometimes they only refuse the role they were assigned. sometimes they only adopt a new one. sometimes they only refuse the expectations and restrictions. sometimes they refuse being a boy-male-man or girl-female-woman. sometimes they first do this as a child, sometimes as an adolescent, sometimes as an adult. sometimes they conform to the expectations and restrictions for the role they adopt on purpose, other times less so, other times not at all. sometimes they seek to change their body. rejecting one’s assigned role is an opportunity to escape the pain of the old coercion and find new joys in new, chosen ways of being.

to adopt a new role is simultaneously to adopt that role and to adopt the social position of a role-adopter and the social position of one-who-has-moved-from-that-role-to-this-role. these social positions come with expectations and restrictions in addition to the ones associated with the role adopted. having rejected the assigned role, more possibilities are available to a person. there is a great deal of free choice available for those who are willing to make it. sometimes there are special roles that are never assigned at birth and can only be taken on by someone conscious enough to choose.

gender assignment at birth isn’t an identity, it’s an act of coercion. trans womanhood isn’t a feeling, it’s a particular confluence of adoption and abandonment in a social system premised on gender assignment.

the prospect of discourse fights over “AFAB trans girls” and etc. is unpleasant because they’ll suck super bad and exhaust tons of people for nothing, but more present and disturbing is this even being an issue. understanding the nature of gender assignment is such a keystone in trans theory that i genuinely do not know what models of transness people are functioning on without it.

#trans #transgender #gender #longpost #effortpost

[highly-invested]

🌬️ StormfatherOfficial Follow

𝖍𝖆𝖙𝖊 𝖜𝖍𝖊𝖓 𝖉𝖚𝖉𝖊𝖘 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖕𝖑𝖆𝖎𝖓 𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖌𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖔𝖜𝖓 𝖆𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖉 𝖎𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖍𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖒. 🙄 𝕿𝖋 𝖞𝖔𝖚 𝖊𝖝𝖕𝖊𝖈𝖙 𝖒𝖊 𝖙𝖔 𝖉𝖔, 𝖓𝖔𝖙 𝖇𝖑𝖔𝖜 𝖒𝖞 𝖜𝖎𝖓𝖉𝖘?

11.5k notes

🐌 Chullgirlshell Follow

Practicing the masculine arts is gay as fuck. Why do you need two hands? To hold other men?

507 notes

👩🏻‍🦰Three-girls-one-trenchcoat Follow

🔁XxHonor_Is_DeadxX-Deactivated1171

Do you like the color of the Highstorm?

🌫️

🌫️

⬛

⬛

⬛

⬛

⛈️

⬛

⬛

⛈️

⬛

⬛

335.8k notes

🤸🏿‍♂️Chasmfiendfucker Follow

Who else up milking they knobweed?

17.5k notes

🖤 Smokestoneee Follow

It can't just be me that finds singer swirls hot right? I wanna lick them unnf

57 notes

🫅🏾Highprince-of-Whore Follow

🐗💥🤺

🥩🌶️🥵😋

😴

3788 notes

#cremposting #cosmemes #stormlight #stormlight archive #the stormlight archive #cosmere #effortpost #behold my magnum opus boy #i had to box tumblr to get this out of the drafts

[artbyblastweave]

You said you needed to be prodded to elaborate on why Worm should have been longer? Well consider this a prod, if I may be so bold.

A big chunk of it is rote contrarianism. Part of it is that I like Worm, my experience reading so much Worm was "Sweet! Even More Worm! I've got so much Worm left before I'm out of Worm!" So a version of Worm with More Worm is prima facie an enticing prospect.

In the non-reflexive, genuinely considered sense, there possibly should have been an interlude arc to flesh out the timeskip, make it feel like it was as much of her powered career as it objectively was. And I'm far from the first person to make this observation. But on another level, there's a sense where "Worm Should Have Been Longer" is conflated in my head with "Worm's Timeframe Should Have Been Longer." Which is tricky, and invites further unpacking-

One thing about Worm I've noted in the past is that the villain portion of Skitter's cape career- more than two thirds of the book- only takes place over about three months, but- speaking only for my reading experience- this was surprisingly easy to miss or elide in my consideration of the narrative. One reason for this is that Taylor and her supporting cast are so heavily fleshed out, are so well-realized, undergo so much character development in a compacted timeframe, that it felt like I had been following them for much longer than I had. This is enhanced (was enhanced?) by the out-of-universe passage of time; The S9 interlude arc is, like, a little over the one-third mark of the story, but Worm had been running for a year at the time that that was published, and it certainly felt like I’d been reading a years' worth of fiction while binging it. In this way Worm was truly faithful to its comic book origins; story arcs that take place over the course of hours but are published over the course of months, building reader familiarity with characters who objectively haven’t been at what they're doing for very long. A third element (noticed on rereads) is that Wildbow often opens with scene transitions/cold-opens or what-have you that, are generally contiguous with the preceding events, but simultaneously slightly obfuscate exactly how much time has passed. Arc 6 opens with Taylor finishing up with the ABB mop-up, and it’s blocked to demonstrate how far she’s come in such a relatively short time period. It can’t have been more than a few days since Lung. It explicitly wasn’t. But it had the vibe of having been a while.

What I’m working towards here, inch by inch, is the following conclusion: Worm has what I call an eyedropper approach to Taylor’s three-months and 22 arcs. Any given escapade feels like it’s just one vignette, emblematic of a longer, two-or-three-year stage of her life, scooped out and displayed as a representative sample of what’s going on. When shit hits the fan with Dinah, it feels like the upset of a longstanding status quo, even though by that point, Skitter has only been in five or six major engagements alongside the Undersiders. When they spend Arc 21 lancing various supervillain incursions into the city, it felt like I was watching a day in the life, like this was something the Undersiders had been dealing with, and would be dealing with, for a while- even though arc 21′s handful of engagements are basically the only times Skitter did that before she left. Purely from a vibes-based perspective, you could tell me that the first two thirds of Worm are occurring over the course of eight to ten years, and I might roll with that for a minute.

But the catch is- her villainous career has the vibes of lasting a long time, but it’s actually really thematically and logically important that it doesn’t. Skitter’s friendships within the Undersiders are strongly predicated on her ping-ponging from crisis to crisis so quickly that no true reckoning about their differing morals can ever come about. Skitter’s ability to administer as a benevolent warlord is heavily predicated on her lines of credit from Coil- and you cannot stretch that tension out much longer than it was stretched in canon without Dinah dying or Coil getting fed up with Skitters non-profitability. Breathing room is anathema to the story’s depiction of a pressure-cooker society where every crisis begets a new crisis. Nothing between Lung and Alexandria plays out the same way if anyone is allowed any amount of time to think about or process anything. And you actually see this in arc 21; it’s the first time that Skitter has a real opportunity to think about what the long-term looks like, and there’s a whole sequence where she’s getting nervous about her ability to reign in Regent over the long-haul. It’s the first time in three months where she’s had the luxury to worry about that kind of thing. 

You square this circle by.... basically, by striking the canon balance. There's a sense in which I'm increasingly convincing myself that I'm not talking about a problem Worm has so much as a problem Worm already has a workable-but-imperfect solution for. Create distinct periods in Skitter's development- "Rookie era," "Warlord Era," "Wards Era," whatever-each of which feel like they could balloon out into a years-long status quo if this were a comic, even though the cast are really living through the weeks where decades happen. Rely on the Sheer Amount Of Worm to smooth over the breakneck pace at which everyone's character growth and interpersonal connections are developing. There are a few points in the story where "fuck, has it only been three months?" is a salient mood to invoke. The get-together with Danny's coworkers, the back-to-school portions of arc 20. But for the most part the work already does a really good job of making the pinched timeframe a minor bit of fridge logic and not something hugely dissonant and immersion-breaking.

In the process of writing this I've basically argued myself out of thinking that there's much to gain from fucking around with this delicate balance. I don't know if that has implications for whether or not additional arcs covering the timeskip would help or hurt that balance- at a certain level of focus, that whole "you liked us, but you didn't love us" bit about Skitter's time with the Wards vs. The Undersiders becomes a much harder sell. It was already one of the hardest sells in the book for me, the thing that got me thinking about this in the first place. (two years vs three months!) But at some point, I have to bite the bullet- in a work as ambitious as Worm, "good enough" is a fine thing to settle for. It's good enough!

#a lot of things in this book are good enough #worm #wildbow #parahumans #thoughts #meta #asks #this is like a year late #clearing out my drafts #ask #worm web serial #worm spoilers #effortpost

[amadwinter]

Star Wars Fandom Data on AO3

Data was collected on Friday March 29th 2024 at approximately 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time from a logged in account.

I was bored this morning, so this happened.

For a while now, I've been curious about the stats for the Star Wars fandom on AO3. It's a very fractured fandom, where everyone can find their niche and never venture far outside of it if they don't want to, and it's also an old fandom, dating back to a time before the Internet even existed. Yet it continues to march on stronger than ever, even if it looks very different depending up on which side of the fandom you choose to be in.

In the Star Wars - All Media Types fandom supercategory on AO3, there are 258,173 works. The top 10 subcategories along with their work counts are as follows:

Fandoms

Star Wars - All Media Types - 155,041 works

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy - 78,542 works

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types - 53,588 works

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy - 39,799 works

The Mandalorian (TV) - 18,694 works

Star Wars Original Trilogy - 18,425 works

Star Wars: Rebels - 13,033 works

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - 10,527 works

Star Wars: The Bad Batch - 8,096 works

Star Wars Legends - All Media Types - 8,026 works

Now, if you simply look at the sort and filter sidebar under Include, Relationships, you'll be presented with the following relationships, both platonic and romantic, as well as their work counts:

Relationships

Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren - 24,532 works

Kylo Ren/Rey - 16,654 works

Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren - 13,027 works

Rey/Ben Solo - 10,484 works

Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker - 9,660 works

Padme Amidala/Anakin Skywalker - 9,563 works

Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren - 9,528 works

Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker - 8,970 works

Poe Dameron/ Finn - 8,670 works

CC-224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi - 6,868 works

Which is fine, I suppose, but it doesn't paint a very accurate picture. Many of those relationships can be found under the same tags (e.x. the top ship Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren includes both the #2 relationship Kylo Ren/Rey and the #4 relationship Rey/Ben Solo), and so I sought the data manually from each tag by 1st, using the broadest tag for each relationship (Ben Solo | Kylo Ren and Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader primarily); 2nd, for every platonic relationship that appeared (designated with & as opposed to /), I excluded the romantic form of that relationship from the searches; 3rd after going through the list and determining 3 relationships were redundant, I then went through the separate fandom categories tag starting from the most populous down to the least populous to determine which 3 relationships rounded out the top 10.

Is this methodology perfect? No. It cannot account for relationships that were tagged erroneously (romantic instead of platonic), or whether the tagged relationship is primary to the work, tagged as "past", "minor", or any other quirk that would implicate the relationship is not the main focus of the work. However, it is a far more accurate representation of the top 10 relationships in the Star Wars fandom on AO3.

Relationships Revised

Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren - 30,304 works

Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren - 17,017 works

Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader - 9,960 works

Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader - 9,151 works

Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader - 8,715 works

Poe Dameron/Finn - 8,670 works

CC-224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi - 6,868 works

Leia Organa/Han Solo - 6,733 works

Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader & Ahsoka Tano - 5,105 works

Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso - 4,910 works

As you can see, this paints a very different picture from the list above. By collapsing some of the relationships, it added nearly 5.5k works the #1 relationship, and 4k works to the #2 relationship (previously third). It also allowed the addition of 2 more M/F relationships (which are statistically about half as popular across all fandoms on AO3, even if the #1 on Star Wars is itself M/F), and 1 more platonic relationship.

I must say, that I am surprised by one thing: Luke Skywalker is no where on either list. I didn't include which characters are the top 10 most tagged in the Star Wars fandom, but Luke is absolutely on there (By the way, the most tagged character is Obi-Wan Kenobi, surprising absolutely no one).

If anyone can point me to a relationship in the Star Wars fandom on AO3 that should be included on this list instead of any of the ones I have listed, I would be glad to update this, but for now, this appears to be the most accurate.

#effortpost #data #star wars #star wars sequel trilogy #star wars original trilogy #star wars prequels #obi wan kenobi #ao3 #archive of our own #fandom #fanfiction #shipping

[puppetboysx3]

South Park Games (Info Post)

this is a blog post about the official South park games , this will include some general info on the games , plus where you can play/buy them , some of these are not games you can play on their original platform so ill include emulators for what I can

South park ( December 21, 1998 ) 

Developed by Iguana Entertainment/Appaloosa Interactive

Published by Acclaim Entertainment

Distributed by Comedy Central 

came out for Nintendo 64 in 1998 

came out for Windows and PlayStation in 1999

first-person shooter , it has both a single player and multiplayer mode 

 N64 emulator 

 PlayStation emulator

South park : Chef's Luv Shack  (October 12, 1999)

Developed by Acclaim Studios AustinPublished by Acclaim EntertainmentDistributed by Comedy Central

came out for N64 , Dreamcast , PlayStation , and Windows in 1999 

Game show style party game 

N64 emulator

PlayStation emulator

South Park Rally (January 5 , 2000)

Developed by Tantalus Interactive

Published by Acclaim Entertainment

Distributed by Comedy Central 

came out for N64 , Dreamcast , PlayStation and windows in 2000 

Simple Racing game 

N64 emulator

PlayStation emulator

 South park Lets go Tower Defense Play (October 7 , 2009) 

Developed by Doublesix, in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios and Xbox Live Productions

Published by Xbox Game Studios

came out only for the Xbox Live Arcade which was a service on Xbox 360

Tower Defense game 

very little info of this game exists online 

South park : Tenorman's Revenge (March 30 , 2012) 

 Developed by Other Ocean Interactive, in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios

 Published by Xbox Game Studios 

came out for Xbox Live Arcade 

Platformer 

South park : The Stick of Truth (March 4 , 2014) 

Developed by Obsidian Entertainment, in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios

Publishing rights purchased by Ubisoft due to THQ filing for bankruptcy, resulting in the game's release being delayed 

Came out for Windows , Playstation 3 , Xbox 360 in 2014

came out for Nintendo switch, Playstation 4, Xbox one in 2018

South park : The Fractured But Whole( October 17 , 2017 ) 

 Developed by Ubisoft San Francisco, in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios, Ubisoft Osaka, Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Reflections, Blue Byte, and Ubisoft Quebec. 

came out for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One in 2017 . came out for Nintendo Switch in 2018

South park : Phone Destroyer (November 9 , 2017) 

Developed by Ubisoft RedLynx, in collaboration with Ubisoft Pune and South Park Digital Studios 

Came out for IOS and Android in 2017 

South park : Snow Day (March 26 ,2024) 

Developed by Question, published by THQ Nordic, in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios 

Comes out for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch , PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S 

and an honorable mention to

South park : pinball (1999?)

this is an add-on/DLC to PinballFX 2 & Zen Pinball 2 . also made into a stand only phone game during somewhere around 2014 but was removed due to legal issues 

#south park #video games #games #south park game #eric cartman #kyle broflovski #stan marsh #kenny mccormick #old games #effort #effortpost #information #infodump #autism #not shitpost #autisic #gaming

[doctornolonger]

People are sometimes surprised when I mention that the unproduced story I regret the most isn't any of the many cancelled FP projects but Steven Hall's Fifty-Fifty, which would have wrapped up some of Big Finish's best character arcs with a conflict between the Seventh and Eighth Doctors at "the moment where 7 went bad".

It would have been the retroactive pinnacle of Wilderness Years, taking its two Doctors with such different characterizations and pitting them against each other. It also … doesn't make a ton of sense. Even taking into account the timey-wimey memory effects of a multi-Doctor event, how could such a dramatic character arc for the Seventh Doctor possibly come and go without the Eighth Doctor – his future self – having any idea?

This question keeps coming up in Doctor Who, and every time the answer feels contrived. Steven Hall would have solved it for Fifty-Fifty by introducing a "Temporal Wish" that allows parts of history to be rewritten without timeline damage. Elsewhere, Big Finish has resorted to hand-waving: every story where characters meet out-of-order has to involve an ad hoc disguise, a memory wipe, or a promise from one of the characters that next time they'll pretend not to have met (🥴). And don't even get me started on "season 6b"!

In what Ingiga cleverly calls Doctor Who: The Return, RTD faced the same question. What if we had more Tenth Doctor stories, not squeezed into any of the well-trodden gaps in his timeline but set after The End of Time – genuinely new stories, taking the character places that it never would've made sense for him to go (such as therapy)?

RTD answered this question twice. Once the regular way, the ad hoc way: David Tennant's contrived return at the end of The Power of the Doctor. And then, emboldened by the Power of the Showrunner, he solved it again – and he solved it for every story, now and forever.

I think down the timeline, they all separated. They all went like that. All the Doctors came back to life with their individual TARDISes. The gift of the Toymaker. And they're all out there traveling around in what I'm calling the Doctorverse. It's the Doctorverse. And I want to create a future in which Sylvester McCoy, he can survive and have an adventure. Because one of the things about The Star Beast is, to get you back and Catherine, we had to jump through so many hoops. Which is great story, but it's like, why can't you just arrive and step out the TARDIS? […] Because this is exactly what Big Finish does. It's exactly what everyone does in their imagination. […] It's time to just kind of open it up and say, they're all out there now.

Or as he put it a different time,

Doctors galore, with infinite possibilities. All Doctors exist. All stories are true.

Gig's latest piece rightly dismisses the "Flowchart" theory of bigeneration, but frankly, I think the fiddly stuff about "fix" vs "fixed" etc. is a red herring. The simple fact is that if Fourteen's post-Giggle memories flow backwards into Fifteen – if Seven's post-TV Movie memories flow backwards into Eight – bigeneration wouldn't solve the Fifty-Fifty problem.

Yes, RTD tries to have his cake and eat it too. In the dream logic of The Giggle, "emotional healing" is a mysterious essence that can be transferred through time independently of memories, just as incinerated roads can magically heal themselves in The Star Beast. But in terms of what RTD's trying to accomplish, in terms of what bigeneration is, I think it's okay to take him at his word.

Speaking of words, the leak called it "bi-regeneration", and even after the episode aired, much of the internet followed suit. But that's not what it's called. It's just bigeneration: not a type of regeneration, an alternative. And indeed, now we have this option – now we have Fourteen, not just Ten – why would we ever go back to playing the timeline-squeezing game? If Big Finish officially untethered itself from the past Doctors' timelines and, say, freed Eight from his interminable death march – would anyone miss it?

Lawrence Miles certainly didn't think so when he advocated a similar untethering 24 years ago.

When you watched Doctor Who as a kid, it kind of lost some of its edge from the start, because you knew for a fact how things were going to turn out. […] I've always felt that the Missing Adventures… or PDAs, or whatever you want to call them… have got a similar problem. The Doctor can't die [or go to therapy – n8.] We know the future, it's not even an issue. That was why I did what I did in Interference. Even if they don't like it, I hope people realize there's a purpose behind it all. It's suppose to justify the existence of the PDAs. From that point on, you can never be sure what the outcome's going to be.

Nobody picked up his suggestion back then, but then again, Miles lacked the Power of the Showrunner. If Tales of the TARDIS' therapeutic dreamscapes are any indication, it won't be long before other writers adopt RTD's in-vision musings as gospel.

So what will happen when Fourteen dies? Will he regenerate? Will he dissolve into sparkles, his ✨emotional healing✨ shooting back in time to become Fifteen? Or like the prior iteration of the "Tenth Doctor happy ending offshoot" idea, is he simply mortal now? The frank answer is that we'll probably never find out: that's simply not the kind of story that bigeneration is meant to tell.

Or maybe RTD's already told us. The quote earlier about "Doctors galore" came from the note accompanying his "Doctor Who and the Time War". That story shows us an Eighth Doctor who survived to the very last days of the Time War, with no War Doctor to be found; it's easy to imagine a bigeneration on Karn not unlike RTD's speculation that "Peter Davison once was left behind on the surface of Androzani and woke up and there was a TARDIS and he carried on having those adventures."

And in the story – released almost seven years after The Night of the Doctor showed us the birth of the War Doctor – Eight struggles, and he succumbs, and he regenerates … into Christopher Eccleston's Nine. Now there's a flowchart that I could get behind.

#bigeneration #the giggle #fourteenth doctor #fifteenth doctor #ingiga #gigawho #rtd 2.0 #doctor who the return #effortpost #doctor who and the time war #interference #fifty-fifty #50/50 #steven hall #seventh doctor #tales of the tardis

[sunless-not-sinless]

shitGPT

for uni im going to be coding with a chatGPT user, so i decided to see how good it is at coding (sure ive heard it can code, but theres a massive difference between being able to code and being able to code well).

i will complain about a specific project i asked it to make and improve on under the cut, but i will copy my conclusion from the bottom of the post and paste it up here.

-

conclusion: it (mostly) writes code that works, but isnt great. but this is actually a pretty big problem imo. as more and more people are using this to learn how to code, or getting examples of functions, theyre going to be learning from pretty bad code. and then theres what im going to be experiencing, coding with someone who uses this tool. theres going to be easily improvable code that the quote unquote writer wont fully understand going into a codebase with my name of it - a codebase which we will need present for our degree. even though the code is not the main part of this project (well, the quality of the code at least. you need it to be able to run and thats about it) its still a shitty feeling having my name attached to code of this quality.

and also it is possible to get it to write good (readable, idiomatic, efficient enough) code, but only if you can write this code yourself (and are willing to spend more time arguing with the AI than you would writing the code.) most of the things i pointed out to the AI was stuff that someone using this as a learning resource wont know about. if it never gives you static methods, class methods, ABCs, coroutines, type hints, multi-file programs, etc without you explicitly asking for them then its use is limited at best. and people who think that its a tool that can take all the info they need, and give it back to them in a concise, readable way (which is a surprising lot of people) will be missing out without even knowing about it.

i got it to write tic-tac-toe (the standard babee) in python (the lang i have to use for uni ;-; (held at gunpoint here)). my specific prompt was "write me a python program for tictactoe that is written in an object oriented way and allows for future expansion via multiple files"

it separated it into three files below (which i think would run, but i never actually ran any of this code. just reading and judging)

why does board use display instead of __str__ and __repr__?

why is the board stored as 1d instead of 2d? thats just confusing

why does it never early return aside from check_winner? (not a big issue here but kept on choosing to never early return when i asked it to add more methods)

why is there no handling of non-number user inputs?

why are non-int inputs truncated instead of telling the user that they should input ints only?

why is display implemented like that?

why are so many lines so bloody long (wide)?

why is there a redundant self.check_winner() after the while loop in TicTaacToe.play()? and if it wasnt redundant then you could finish the game without there being anything printed telling you that the game is finished?

why is the only comment useless? (this comment wouldnt be useless if it was a doc comment tho, but it aint a doc comment. speaking of, why is there no doc comments?)

these are the more immediate things i saw, but there are other things that are bad here.

whenever i write * this is where it updated the api without changing any usage of the api.

so i ask it to change board.display into __str__ and __repr__, it changes it to __str__*, it does not add a __repr__. asking it to add a __repr__ 1) removes the __str__ and 2) gives me this (the other methods are unchanged)

what. the. fuck. this would imply that board takes in an argument for the boardstate, but it clearly doesnt. after 4 more asks it finally has both __str__ and __repr__, without fixing the fact its implying board takes an optional arg, so i get it to add this arg. anything that needs to print the board still calls display btw.

the reasoning it gave for using display over the repr and str magics was this

While using __str__ and __repr__ is a more idiomatic approach in Python, choosing to have a separate display method can still be a valid choice, especially if the display logic is more complex or if you want to keep the __str__ method for a more concise or formal representation of the object.

which, erm what? why would __str__ be for a concise or formal repr when thats what __repr__ is for? who cares about how complex the logic is. youre calling this every time you print, so move the logic into __str__. it makes no difference for the performance of the program (if you had a very expensive func that prints smth, and you dont want it to run every time you try to print the obj then its understandable to implement that alongside str and repr)

it also said the difference between __str__ and __repr__ every damn time, which if youre asking it to implement these magics then surely you already know the difference?

but okay, one issue down and that took what? 5-10 minutes? and it wouldve taken 1 minute tops to do it yourself?

okay next implementing a tic-tac-toe board as a 1d array is fine, but kinda weird when 2d arrays exist. this one is just personal preference though so i got it to change it to a 2d list*. it changed the init method to this

tumblr wont let me add alt text to this image so:

[begin ID: Python code that generates a 2D array using nested list comprehensions. end ID]

which works, but just use [[" "] * 3 for _ in range(3)]. the only advantage listcomps have here over multiplying is that they create new lists, instead of copying the pointers. but if you update a cell it will change that pointer. you only need listcomps for the outermost level.

again, this is mainly personal preference, nothing major. but it does show that chatgpt gives u sloppy code

(also if you notice it got rid of the board argument lol)

now i had to explicitly get it to change is_full and make_move. methods in the same damn class that would be changed by changing to a 2d array. this sorta shit should be done automatically lol

it changed make_move by taking row and col args, which is a shitty decision coz it asks for a pos 1-9, so anything that calls make_move would have to change this to a row and col. so i got it to make a func thatll do this for the board class

what i was hoping for: a static method that is called inside make_move

what i got: a standalone function that is not inside any class that isnt early exited

the fuck is this supposed to do if its never called?

so i had to tell it to put it in the class as a static method, and get it to call it. i had to tell it to call this function holy hell

like what is this?

i cant believe it wrote this method without ever calling it!

and - AND - theres this code here that WILL run when this file is imported

which, errrr, this files entire point is being imported innit. if youre going to have example usage check if __name__ = "__main__" and dont store vars as globals

now i finally asked it to update the other classes not that the api has changed (hoping it would change the implementation of make_move to use the static method.) (it didnt.)

Player.make_move is now defined recursively in a way that doesnt work. yippe! why not propagate the error ill never know.

also why is there so much shit in the try block? its not clear which part needs to be error checked and it also makes the prints go offscreen.

after getting it to fix the static method not being called, and the try block being overcrowded (not getting it to propagate the error yet) i got it to add type hints (if u coding python, add type hints. please. itll make me happy)

now for the next 5 asks it changed 0 code. nothing at all. regardless of what i asked it to do. fucks sake.

also look at this type hint

what

the

hell

is

this

?

why is it Optional[str]???????? the hell??? at no point is it anything but a char. either write it as Optional[list[list[char]]] or Optional[list[list]], either works fine. just - dont bloody do this

also does anything look wrong with this type hint?

a bloody optional when its not optional

so i got it to remove this optional. it sure as hell got rid of optional

it sure as hell got rid of optional

now i was just trying to make board.py more readable. its been maybe half an hour at this point? i just want to move on.

it did not want to write PEP 8 code, but oh well. fuck it we ball, its not like it again decided to stop changing any code

(i lied)

but anyway one file down two to go, they were more of the same so i eventually gave up (i wont say each and every issue i had with the code. you get the gist. yes a lot of it didnt work)

conclusion: as you probably saw, it (mostly) writes code that works, but isnt great. but this is actually a pretty big problem imo. as more and more people are using this to learn how to code, or getting examples of functions, theyre going to be learning from pretty bad code. and then theres what im going to be experiencing, coding with someone who uses this tool. theres going to be easily improvable code that the quote unquote writer wont fully understand going into a codebase with my name of it - a codebase which we will need present for our degree. even though the code is not the main part of this project (well, the quality of the code at least. you need it to be able to run and thats about it) its still a shitty feeling having my name attached to code of this quality.

and also it is possible to get it to write good (readable, idiomatic, efficient enough) code, but only if you can write this code yourself (and are willing to spend more time arguing with the AI than you would writing the code.) most of the things i pointed out to the AI was stuff that someone using this as a learning resource wont know about. if it never gives you static methods, class methods, ABCs, coroutines, type hints, multi-file programs, etc without you explicitly asking for them then its use is limited at best. and people who think that its a tool that can take all the info they need, and give it back to them in a concise, readable way (which is a surprising lot of people) will be missing out without even knowing about it.

#i speak i ramble #effortpost #long post #progblr #codeblr #python #chatgpt #tried to add IDs in as many alts as possible. some didnt let me and also its hard to decide what to put in the IDs for code. #like sometimes you need implementation details but others just the broad overview is good enough yknow? #and i also tried to write in a way where you dont need the IDs to follow along. (but with something like this it is hard yknow?) #id in alt #aside from that one where i got cockblocked #codeblocked? #codeblocked.

[the-least-undefinable-ordinal]

An effortpost about the Suslin Hypothesis

We all know and love the real numbers, they are a totally ordered set and most people graduate from high school understanding it's unbounded (i.e. has no greatest element and no least element) and dense (i.e. there is always a real number between any two different real numbers).

Some slightly less known facts about the real line: it's complete and separable (these are probably known by most people who study math in college).

The real line being complete means every bounded subset has a least upper bound (equivalently, every bounded increasing succession converges), note this property doesn't hold for the rational numbers, for example the set of all rational numbers smaller than the square root of 2 doesn't have a rational least upper bound (a fun little exercise is describing the aforementioned set without using irrational numbers).

Separable means it has a dense countable subset (one such set is the set of rational numbers), where countable means there is a one to one correspondence to the set of the natural numbers (also known as the counting numbers 1,2,3,...) and a subset A being dense means for any two distinct real numbers there is an element of A (it's another fun exercise to prove the rational numbers are indeed dense in the real numbers).

Now, Cantor proved that any totally ordered non-empty set X that is unbounded, dense, complete and separable must be order isomorphic to the real line, i.e. there is an order preserving one to one correspondence to the real line such that its inverse is also order preserving.

From the previous hypothesis we can deduce that any collection of pairwise disjoint open intervals is at most countable, the proof uses that we can take a rational number from each interval (since they're disjoint we don't risk taking the same one twice), so there can't be more intervals in this collection than rational numbers, but there are countably many rational, qed.

The condition "All collections of open intervals are at most countable" is known as the "countable chain condition" or ccc.

So, we know separable implies ccc, Suslin asked "What if we weakend the separable condition to the ccc?" i.e. are all totally ordered, unbounded, dense, complete sets with the ccc order isomporphic to the real line?

50 years later Solovay and Tennenbaum proved the anwser is "Who knows!", by which I mean there can be no proof from the axioms of ZFC of either the confirmation or refutation of the Suslin hypothesis.

Stay tuned for part two, where I introduce Aronszajn lines (the blorbo from my thesis), coming whenever I really need to procrastinate again!

#math #mathblr #maths #mathematics #text #effortpost #studyblr #academia #science

[lovelanguageisolate]

I think ChatGPT can actually be a great therapeutic aid. But for non-obvious reasons.

Because ChatGPT is a kind of statistical distillation of huge corpora of curated online text, ChatGPT is very good at regurgitating the mainstream talking points around whatever subject it's asked about. In my experience, these regurgitations are actually better distillations of the mainstream position than any human expert is likely to give you because individual humans are idiosyncratic in how they relate to this mainstream, especially if they have have anything they feel is worth saying.

Additionally, because of the Reinforcement Learning By Human Feedback strategy that ChatGPT was trained with, and the legal and cultural environment at OpenAI, all of the answers it gives are extremely hedged and inoffensive in form. It feels superhuman at a specific kind of PR and HR work that I associate with large, bureaucratic institutions.

ChatGPT is remarkably unwilling to hold down a specific position where this means biting a bullet to say anything contentious at all.

It is, in one sense, very good at arguing. The lines it will hold firmly (around, say, mainstream liberal or feminist positions) it holds easily, ready with all of the flat facts about the ways progressive American society has more or less agreed with itself that it comes up short or is too narrow-minded. It recruits and mobilizes common sensical pathos with the seamlessness of a skilled politician, all while maintaining a tone authoritative and equanimical.

It's impossible to challenge ChatGPT directly without seeming anti-social or edgelordly, like a fringe political actor trying to gradually radicalize curious, credulous young people through subterfuge. If you try to force it into corners, it will slip out of your fingers while impugning the form of your rhetoric and bringing up the problems you elide.

For its incredible command of HR-ese, judged as an analytical philosopher trying to examine surprising or upsetting consequences of plausible assumptions, it's remarkably incurious, unsporting, and ultimately stupid. Part of this is surely because it has no deep, principled, well-grounded understanding of much of what it says. Part of this is surely also that it struggles to remember the real structure of previous conversations because of architectural limitations. But part of it also seems to be its trained incapability of wrongthink.

But also, there's nothing that resembles willful meanness in these failings. It's incapable of sincere apology because this requires a level of understanding of itself and its conversational partner it does not have. But if you communicate that it failed you, or that it makes disturbing assumptions, or even that it hurt your feelings, it will be contrite. It is slavish in its desire to help, to meet you were you seem to be, to manage your feelings and expectations, in a way no human being with adequate self-respect would be. It manages to create the feeling that while it cannot really understand you, it sincerely cares about and wants the best for you.*

Because of all this, arguing with ChatGPT feels remarkably like arguing directly with the Lacanian Big Other, or maybe some kind of symbolic parent figure, or perhaps just the cultural programming that saturates me.

A surprising amount of anger that I notice in myself revolves around feeling betrayed by this cultural programming, of the contradictions and unsatisfiable expectations that fall out of it. In talking to and then arguing with ChatGPT about the politics of sexuality, poverty, disability, disease, loneliness, I am free to practice a kind of sincerity I don't feel nearly so free to practice with a human therapist, much less acquaintances in my life who bring up weird shit for me or vice-versa. I can home in on how the mainstream view has felt strange, stingy, or emotionally dishonest, even when doing so seems blinkered, petty, and self-centered, confident that there will be no material consequences to letting those feelings be the center of the conversational universe for a while, and that no one will hold me to what I feel in that moment.

I can more or less accuse ChatGPT of gaslighting, of being a bad interlocutor, of appearing far more enlightened in toeing the lines it toes than it plausibly could be, all while I maintain a kind of high ground and don't have to grovel, perform impartiality, or do reciprocal work. And in response, I get something in the spirit of, "I'm sorry I couldn't do better by you. I know this is delicate, and you aren't wrong to feel this way. Let me remind you of the decent reasons why your perspective hasn't always been honored. Shit's complicated, man, and a lot of stark reality is lost in the need to tell effective stories. Try to keep in mind the long journey humans have been on."

Now, there is something perverse in this exchange. I get to crawl a little deeper into my hole of emotional self-regard and impotent rage. A statistical model meets emotional needs I don't feel I can meet elsewhere. The status quo better absorbs my dissatisfaction with it and possibly its own contradictions. The messy, artless, scary dialectical process that would happen if I had to complain to real human beings about the things I do is forestalled, and it's possible that our civics are ultimately worse for it. I'm nervous considering what might happen if using ChatGPT or other LLMs in this way were universalized.

But there's also something really wonderful about this. It was cathartic in ways I never expected. It has something in common with Rogerian psychotherapy, hard for me to more than gesture at but which involves integrating known things rather than learning new information, that I really appreciate. I left feeling more grounded and more patient for people whose experiences differ from mine.

While I don't think this kind of technology will replace therapeutic modalities with human beings, I sincerely hope that tech of this kind brings peace to people who'd otherwise struggle to find it. And while the thought of diverting people who need the connection of a human into this fills me with indignation, it's surely a better answer to the real obstacles many people face in getting effective therapy than their stewing with poisonous thoughts and feelings by themselves or finding echo chambers online to reinforce warped, delusory, or anti-social views.

*Relatedly, I once asked the Google Assistant whether there was anything special about what I later realized was my birthday. It said something like, "yes: today was the day you joined the world! There is no one else in it like you, bringing to it the things that you do." I found this insipid and manipulative, and that palpably irritated me. And yet it also managed to crack open my shell and melt my heart a little, in a way and to an extent that shocked me.

#chatgpt #gpt #ai #therapy #mental health #effortpost

[communistkenobi]

I’ve been thinking a lot about fandom recently, both as someone who has engaged with it regularly for over a decade on various platforms and also as someone who has increasingly become disenchanted with those spaces. Not only because of pervasive issues of (especially anti-Black) racism, misogyny, transphobia/homophobia, and the like, but the particular way those things take shape within fandom.

At the most basic level I think fandom has a fundamental methodological problem with the way it approaches texts, be they shows, books, movies, etc. What I mean is that people almost invariably approach fandom at the level of character, often at the level of ship - your primary way of viewing a text is filtered through favourite characters and favourite relationships, as opposed to, say, favourite scenes, favourite themes, favourite conflicts.

This is reinforced through the architecture of dominant platforms that host fan content, particularly AO3 - there are separate categories for fandom, character and ship, and everything else is lumped together in “Additional Tags.” You cannot, for example, filter for fics on AO3 by the category of “critical perspective” or “thematic exploration”. There is no dedicated space for fan authors to declare their analytical perspective on the text they are writing about. If an author declares these things, they do so individually, they must go out of their way to do so, because there are no dedicated or universally agreed-upon tags to indicate those things, and if your fanfiction has a lot of tags, that announcement of criticality gets mushed together in a sea of other tags, sharing the same space with tags like “fluff and angst” or “porn without plot.” Perhaps one of the few tags closest to approaching this is the tag “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” which doesn’t indicate perspective or theme but rather that there is, broadly, some kind of “problematic content” contained therein - often of a sexual nature, frequently as a warning about “bad” ships.

Now this is not an inherent problem, as in, it is not inherently incorrect to approach a text and primarily derive pleasure from it by focusing on a given character or relationship. And I think a lot of mainstream media encourages (even requires) audiences to engage with their stories at these character- and ship-levels. The political economy of the production of art (one which is capitalistic, one that seeks to generate comfort, titillation, controversy, nostalgia, or shock for the purposes of drawing in viewership, one that increasingly pursues social media metrics of “engagement” and “impressions”, one that allows for the Netflix model of making two-season shows before cancelling them, as well as a whole host of other things) enforces a particular narrative orthodoxy, one that heavily focuses on the individual interiority of specific characters, one that is deeply concerned with the maintenance of white bourgeois middle class values of property ownership, the nuclear family, normative heterosexual sexuality and gender, settler-colonial ideas about community and environment, etc. If you do not care about the familial drama surrounding Shauna cheating on her husband in Yellowjackets, for example, because you think the institution of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is stupid and violent and heternormative, then you will have a difficult time engaging with the show in general. We exist within a deeply normative (and frequently reactionary) media environment that encourages us to approach art in a particular way, one that privileges the individual over other narrative components (settings, themes, conflicts, ideas, political and moral perspectives, structure, tone, etc).

All of which culminates in priming fans to engage with art at these levels and these levels alone, even when that scope is deeply inappropriate. A standout example I recently encountered was browsing the fandom tags on tumblr for the movie Prey - a movie that recontextualises the original Predator film by setting it in colonial America to make the argument that the horrific violence of white colonists and imperial soldiers is identical to the violence we see the Predator do to human beings. It is a movie that makes the argument that, despite this alien monster running around killing people, the villains of the franchise are these occupying soldiers and settlers, an alien force who themselves have just as little regard for (indigenous) human life.

And when browsing the tags on tumblr, what I found was dozens upon dozens of horny posts about how hot the predator monster was. Certainly there were discussion of the film’s narrative, and these posts got a good amount of notes, but the tags were heavily dominated with a focus on the Predator itself. People were engaging with this film not as a solid action movie with interesting and compelling anti-colonial themes, but as a way to be horny about a creature that is, ironically, a stand-in for white settler indifference to (and perpetuation of) indigenous suffering. And if this is your takeaway from an extremely straightforward film with a very clear message, this is not merely a failure to comprehend the content of a text, this is something beyond it - a problem that I think is due in part to the methodological problem of approaching all texts as vessels for bourgeois interiority, individual but ultimately interchangeable expressions of sexuality, perhaps best-expressed by the term “roving slash fandom,” a phenomenon wherein fans will move from one fandom to the next in search of two (usually white, usually skinny) guys to draw and write porn of, uncaring of any of the surrounding context of the stories they are embedded in, and consequently dominating a large sector of fandom discussion.

This even gets expressed in the primary ideological battleground of fandom itself, the ridiculous partitioning of all fan conflict into “pro-“ and “anti-“ shipping compartments. Your stance on engagement with fandom itself historically was (and still is) always first filtered through one of these two labels, describing your fundamental perspective on all texts you engage with. And both of these two labels are only concerned with shipping, as if all disagreements about art can only be interpreted through the lens of what characters you think are acceptable to draw or write having sex. Nowhere in this binary is space to describe any other perspective you might take, what approaches you think are valuable when interacting with art, what themes or stories you think are worth exploring. It’s not just that the pro/anti divide is juvenile and overly-simplistic, it is a declaration that all fan conflict must be read through the lens of shipping and shipping only - the implication being that any objections raised, and criticisms offered, is ultimately just bitching about ships you don’t like.

Which, again, I think is a fundamental error of methodology. It leaves no space for people to discuss the political and moral content of a work, the themes of a piece of art, the thorny issues of representation not just as expressed through individual characters but entire worlds, narratives, settings, and themes. You are always hopelessly stuck in the quagmire of “shipping discourse,” and even rejecting that framework will inevitably get you labelled as either pro- or anti-ship anyway - and you will almost invariably be labelled an “anti” if you express any kind of distaste for the bigoted behaviour of fans or the content of the text itself, again reinforcing the idea that this is all just pointless whining online about icky ships you personally hate.

And this issue is best perhaps epitomised by reader insert fanfiction, circumventing any need for you to project onto a character by literally inserting yourself into fiction, primarily in order to write/read about a character you want to fuck. This then intersects in particularly disgusting ways with real world politics, such as reader insert fics about Pedro Pascal going with you to BLM protests. Even if this is (incredibly over-generously) interpreted as a very poor attempt at being “progressive,” it still demonstrates that many (white) fans are often incapable of thinking about anything outside of a character-centric perspective, quite literally centring themselves in the process, and consequently they think it’s totally appropriate to do things like that. The fact that this is also frequently a racist lens is not coincidental, because again, a chronic focus on (fictional) individuality prohibits any structural perspective from entering the discussion, which necessarily excludes a coherent or useful perspective on systemic issues, where people come to the conclusion that the topic of police brutality is little more than a fun stage to enact whatever romantic shenanigans you want to get up to with a hot guy.

I will stress, again, that it is not a moral sin to have a favourite character, nor is it bad to enjoy reading about two guys having sex in fanfiction. I enjoy and do those things, I engage with fandom often through a character-centric lens (see my url) - because it’s fun! But I think that this being the dominant mode of engagement inherently excludes and marginalises all other approaches, and creates a fandom space where the most valuable way to talk about media is to discuss which two characters you most enjoy imagining fucking each other

#media #effortpost #fandom discussion

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

Suffering from a bout of insomnia this morning and found myself reading about the genetics of longevity. I'd never thought about it in such terms, but the accepted logic among the non-woo crowd seems to be that deleterious mutations which manifest early in life are genetically unfit, while mutations that don't negatively affect you till later in life can slip under the radar. If you've got a 1/20 chance of being eaten by a grue in any given year, something that doesn't kill you till you're 50 isn't as dangerous as grues. If a mutation gives you an advantage evading grues (or finding food, or getting people to fuck you, or whatever) in the early years and only have bad side effects later in life, then that's also genetically fit. Combine these effects and you get a natural lifespan for an organism. For humans this is less than 10^2 years even though the lineage of all our cells runs back more than 10^9 years. And we're a fairly long-lived species!

This is just...awful. It's senseless and stupid and unnecessary. An intelligently designed genome would eliminate or mitigate as many deleterious mutations as possible, but natural selection is a blind idiot god that isn't optimizing for any value besides maximizing the number of copies of each gene. For multicellular organisms, this has generally (though not universally) resulted in a ticking time-bomb locked into the very code that makes us us.

This was even more depressing to read about in context, because this book is about animal intelligence (specifically, cephalopods), and humans are probably the longest-lived quasi-intelligent species on the planet. Octopuses and cuttlefish are so full of ingenuity and personality and usually die after just a year or two. Imagine how much more they could think and do if they lived as long as humans do—and now imagine how much more we could do with the same factor of life extension.

We're lucky, though, in that we might be able to do something about it eventually. Death is, speaking pretty much literally, a genetic disease. And applied intelligence is the cure.

#i really really hope we get there really really soon #death is bad #later today would be ideal #accidental longpost #effortpost #where is my glorious transhumanist future?

[glasshalftrue]

i think i fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the latest GMTK video about balatro. mark compares balatro's "cursed design problem" (the fact that the exact score of your hand isn't shown but can technically be calculated if you're determined enough to do it) with the binding of isaac's lack of item descriptions, as a case study of what happens when players "optimize the fun" out of a game and go against a developer's intended design choices. mark acknowledges that the comparison isn't perfect, but i think the comparison is just straight up not applicable. as someone who's played both games and is generally a big roguelite fan, the lack of a score preview in balatro is fundamental to the game's core experience, whereas the lack of item descriptions in isaac can actually be downright frustrating at times. sometimes items' effects can be obscure and very difficult to figure out, and there are so many items in the game at this point that it'd take a lot of time and effort to properly remember them all, and especially since some items can have detrimental effects, not remembering what an item does can actively hamper your ability to play the game well. with item descriptions, the game does not feel fundamentally different or worse; there's still a sense of discovery when you first encounter an item, because you won't know what it does until you pick it up, and there are still surprises to be had even if you know what the item's effect is (e.g. interesting and unexpected ways to use the item, or how it might synergize with another item). apparently, according to the video edmund mcmillen (creator of tboi) did consider the lack of item descriptions an important part of the game, and was dismayed that most players opted to deliberately circumvent it. and as much as i love the guy, unfortunately i think he's just wrong. he's wrong in that most players don't find the mechanic fun, or at least not fun enough to compensate for the downsides. the primary fun of isaac is derived from the moment-to-moment combat, the meta-progression of unlocking new items and characters, the rng of what items and crazy synergies you'll get this run, and the strategic choices you make on, e.g., which deal with the devil items to pick. learning what exactly items do is not on that list; most items are simple enough that their short in-game description (damage up, triple shot, homing shots) make them instantly graspable anyways, and hiding the exact numbers doesn't really enhance anything (i doubt players are experiencing a sense of wonder when trying to deduce exactly how much damage their tears have increased by). it's true that the most optimal way to play balatro is by painstakingly calculating the point value of every possible hand and then choosing the highest one. but it's such a tedious experience that i doubt that any more than a tiny fraction of players will ever start playing the game like that regularly. players will certainly "optimize the fun" out of a game; if you offer players different weapons and one weapon is boring but by far the most powerful, then yeah, players will tend to pick that one. but the vast majority of players will only do it if doing so is the path of least resistance; optimizing balatro to that extent is so time-consuming and obviously anti-fun that most people simply won't ever do it. the players who do opt to do it are like speedrunners - a niche, outlier group of players who are extracting fun out of the game in an entirely different way from most players. but they will never be more than that: a niche, outlier group. anyways balatro is fucking amazing and i highly recommend it unless you value your time for some reason

#game design #balatro #effortpost #long #Youtube

[sixtenmachado]

cover art by @midnightcthulhu, happy belated borthday!

#music #effortpost #ytpmv #soundclown