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Lewyn

I am at the center of everything that happens to me

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joined 2022 September 04 22:25:41 UTC
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User ID: 214

Lewyn

I am at the center of everything that happens to me

0 followers   follows 23 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:25:41 UTC

					

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User ID: 214

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More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock?

It seems reductive to call the desire for a space exploration age utopian. It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory. The demographics of people who would sign up for a one-way Mars colonization trip are the same as the people who try to make it big gambling on stocks and crypto. Crypto is a sad excuse for a real frontier for many reasons, but it's the closest thing I can think of in the modern day.

People want more space to spread out and get away from the current social structure. A lot of the most disaffected or persecuted people in Europe were able to do this with the Americas, and right now we lack this kind of physical release valve. I think a lot of social problems would solve themselves if people who were unhappy with things could just go... somewhere else.

It's very possible that space travel looks nothing like that, and will only take highly skilled and educated individuals. Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.

Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

The space race generated/improved countless technologies that vastly improved quality of life back on Earth. A new wave of interest in space would almost certainly result in new material gains here. If asteroid mining is possible in the long term, it could solve a lot of resource problems and lead to an explosion in wealth gains like no other. If by utopia, you mean spiritual transcendence, then yeah this probably wouldn't help with that.

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

My issue with transgenderism is the "point deer, make horse" of social pressure to affirm that someone who is clearly not a woman is a woman, and of pushing dangerous, irreversible medical interventions onto autistic and underage people. Philosophically, I'm not against the concept of changing your body and hormones to be the same as a woman's, were it possible to actually do so. I'm not willing to bet that medicine will ever figure this out 100%, but if it does, that's a good thing.

Sex change isn't your thing, but are you against other forms of bodily modification? Do you have no issues with your health or vanity that you'd be willing to medically fix/improve if it were cheap and easy enough?

I guess ultimately I might have a different definition of transhumanism than you. At its core, it seems like the concept of using technology to overcome failings of the body. We've been doing that since we first picked up a walking stick. If in the future, the cure for blindness is to install vat-grown eyes, I don't see that as much different than LASIK, or even from wearing glasses. In all examples, your genetics or life circumstances led to you having the bad hand of poor eyesight, and you're relying on an unnatural intervention to overcome that.

I admit it looks pretty silly when you look at Yud talking about Cryonics and living forever. I wouldn't recommending holding out for technology to fix everything as an excuse to ignore your physical fitness. I'm not holding my breath for space travel, extreme body modification, etc. But at the same time, if you were to tell a man with poor eyesight from 100 BC that in the future, we could fire lasers into his eye to reshape his cornea, he would probably dismiss that as magical thinking in the same way that you are with some of your examples. These things don't always pan out how we want them to. But sometimes they do.

The movie is primarily aimed at nostalgic millennials, not the young girls the toys are made for. It markets to people who grew up with the toys, but is more interested in using the toy brand to sell a film, not the other way around. Movies made to sell toys look like the ones on this list this list. They are animated, have child-friendly ratings, feature the toys center stage, and have a point of view that is neither critical nor deconstructive of the product featured, unlike the 2023 film.

To say the themes of the movie are only there due to the director just making the motions downplays the intent and artistry of the director, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is known as a feminist director and earned a fair amount of buzz for Ladybird back in 2017. Regardless of how you feel about her work, looking at the three major films that she wrote and directed shows she has a point of view. The themes of her movies are not incidental or accidental, regardless of whether or not they're attached to a Mattel product.

Barbie is especially interesting due to the casting of Ryan Gosling, a masculine icon of problematic young men, as Ken. This has led to the film having a crossover appeal to both women and the incel and sigma subcultures of young men, who are attempting (successfully IMO) to co-opt the film's themes into their own thing with all the Ken memes. There's a lot to see here, and dismissing the movie as a Mattel commercial is reductive. People are not wrong or misguided to analyze a cultural product like this.

My observations from lurking around Art Twitter indicate that most artists, who are often but not always left-aligned, hate hate hate AI art. This may feel like I'm stating the obvious, since it's going to unfortunately invalidate many of their jobs overnight, but it shouldn't be understated.

There are a few strains of this. Some are denying the power of these new programs. Some in the replies indicate this guy is cherrypicking bad results, but even if StableDiffusion can't copy him 100% yet, the time until it's reproducing his art perfectly in seconds is here in less than five years, conservatively. This one is more in the acceptance stage of grief. This is from an art YouTuber that I quite enjoy and to summarize the tweet he essentially says it's here, it's good, it's probably over soon unless you're established.

From my limited perspective, AI Art is/is going to be maligned in online spaces and among journalists in the same way as Crypto and NFTs are. Big companies will adopt it, but they will be dragged for it by the online commentary class. I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad. The tech will be supremely disruptive in a way Crypto and especially NFTs can only gesture at being, but there are a lot of upsides to it, and I get the feeling that many people are dismissing it without giving the implications much thought because of the class of people they perceive as being most excited about it.

Personally, I think it sucks for the artists who get displaced, and they will be displaced, but it's good overall for everyone else who isn't an artist. Others have discussed how many doors it opens to have cheap, instant, bespoke art that you can dictate into a text document… Still, there's something deeply psychologically troubling about some code making something you base your identity on obsolete, so I do genuinely feel for them.

I think voice acting is one that's going to be hit soon as well. I look forward to this for similar reasons - how many games and productions are bottlenecked in quality/money by the high cost of voice acting? The outpouring of art we'll see from people who didn't have the resources beforehand is something that excites me.

To answer your prompt on tribe distinctions, this one might fall more on the growth/retreat split that was brought up by Ilforte. Retreat mindset focuses on artists losing their jobs and deepfakes allowing for misinformation. Growth mindset focuses on democratizing access to art and all the new doors opened by AI content.

Criminal justice reform can be somewhat of a snarl phrase because it’s generally used by people who seem to not believe in prison as a concept, or more charitably, are blank statists enough that they believe almost everyone can and should be rehabilitated with enough time and effort.

I’m not really in that camp and think we can and should lock people up for as long as we need if they’re violent menaces to others. That said, prison conditions in the US are appalling and I get extremely uncomfortable when people righteously gloat about how a criminal will be violently raped in prison as retribution for his crimes.

Someone who goes to prison for a minor or nonviolent offense often finds himself joining up with a prison gang just to have protection. Once you’re out, your criminal record hurts your employment chances, but it’s okay because you just networked with a group of hardened criminals… it’s like we designed the system to both maximize suffering and crime.

I’ve seen a few suggestions for reform on here that I really like. One was from a rather controversial user who used to post here named Penpractice, who suggested public corporal punishment instead of jail time for minor offenses. Basically, humiliate and let the criminal resume his life, rather then send him to prison to meet worse criminals.

I like this idea, but since I don’t believe the optics of this could survive for a minute in the US, a better solution came from 2cimirafa, who basically said “keep violent offenders in prison until they’re 60 and give them fast food and video games to keep them humanely fat and sedated.” If that could survive the inevitable Republican swipe of “Democrats want to buy Playstations for every felon in prison” it seems to be a good idea. Keeping violent offenders comfortable and sedated and off the streets should cut down on violence for prison guards, less hardened prisoners they would prey on, and of course the average person.

Obviously, both ideas would take a lot of work from concept to execution, but they seem a lot better than the current system.

Almost everything put out by Hollywood and the big streaming services from the last 5 years is like this to varying degrees, IMO. This (the current, race/gender/sexuality-focused incarnation) began around 2013 but was easy to ignore, ramped up around 2016 when Trump's election broke the minds of many in our creative class, and has become institutionalized (1), (2) in the past few years. I don't expect it to get better, only worse. The average consumer of media has no understanding of semiotics and doesn't pick up on things like racial coding, so they will accept pretty much anything as long as the product is good and the dial is moved slowly enough. Which, fair. Most people understandably just want to experience a good story. But I think most viewers can't really recognize racial animus unless a brown Velma looks directly at the screen and says "I hate white people."

There's a line I've seen here and everywhere in oppositional nerd circles since racial and gender politics started getting injected into things they like. It usually goes something like, "the problem isn't the representation, it's that they focused on it instead of the story." This has always felt like a cope to me. Many progressives are good storytellers. A show can be well-written, compelling, and entertaining AND depict a false history/reality, or cast your demographic group/ideology as all the villains.

People mediate and understand the world through the stories they consume. How many misconceptions about guns or defibrillators does a layman have due to how they are represented in movies? How many people's mental models of who commits violent crimes, what the people of medieval Europe looked like, or what percentage of people are LGBT are primarily derived from what they see in shows and commercials?

In 2022's Batman, there is a scene where a gang of white men attacks an Asian man and tries to pressure a new member into beating him up. The recruit is a young black man, the only nonwhite person in the group, who clearly does not want to do this and resists the temptation of these bad men. This is not an outlier for the movie, as every villain is very deliberately cast as a white man. This scene is especially egregious though because it is deliberately set up to reference to the stories of violence against Asian people in New York and other American cities. If you recall, this violence was also blamed on white supremacy despite the demographics of the majority of the perpetrators.

You, a commenter on an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of a forum dedicated to the noncensorious discussion of idea, may simply roll your eyes at this and file it away as a silly morality play. But what percentage of people are actually aware that it isn't white people randomly attacking Asians on the street? How many people had the opposite impression created by the media and reinforced by the movie? If you look at the comments of the video I linked, they're all talking about how cool the scene was and how much they like Batman. And fair enough, because despite all of this it was still a good movie, because these racial politics are not mutually exclusive with good filmmaking (or the good filmmaking is a vessel for this kind of political message*).

Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" depicts a fictional (within the narrative of the story) country encroaching on and reshaping the real world after a group of people spends generations creating it from whole cloth and presenting it as factually true in encyclopedias and other sources of information. You might understand that the Asian Hate narrative is grossly misleading, but do you think the average person is on the same page as you? When the story is printed as a footnote in the textbooks of future schoolchildren, whose version of reality will it support? One of the United States' biggest exports is its media. What kinds of ideas and narratives are we exporting to the world? Are you comfortable with them?

If you're someone who doesn't really care about this or who can stomach these themes, that's a fair enough position to have. These issues aside, in many ways we're in a golden age of content creation. However, if seeing your identity, ideology, or religion constantly attacked and depicted as evil/ignorant in media does bother you, that's not going to change unless something forces it to. There are many excellent shows saturated in progressive politics, and as long as people are willing to ignore the less savory aspects, they will continue to be made.

Many people mocked the trans lobby's attacks on anyone who played Hogwarts Legacy and declared them a failure. I'm not sure they were. As one commenter here said (I can't find the link unfortunately), they've made it so that if you're a public figure playing the game, you must first disavow Rowling and insist that playing the game does not mean supporting her, which assumes the premise that she did anything wrong in the first place.

You may or may not agree with the idea that representation in media matters and can significantly influence people's perceptions. I'd argue it does, and that the moderating influence of reality will only wane as information is increasingly filtered through algorithms and generative AI. I think it's fair to assume that the showrunners of TLOU agree with the position and find it important to represent different groups responsibly, given the show's politics. With this in mind, I'd argue that the things Rowling has said about trans people aren't half as egregious as the racial politics of TLOU, its creators, or shows like it. The question then becomes if you're willing to not give these creators your money, attention, and support.

*The posts in this thread from @DaseindustriesLtd are worth reading and were a partial inspiration to start writing this.

You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.

The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.

If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.

Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.

It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.

The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.

So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.

I'm worried about this one. It has bipartisan support between (to my understanding) the pro-censorship wing of the left and the China hawk wing of the right. Both groups hold a lot of power in Washington. The powers the RESTRICT act grants are broad and vague and would extend far past simply banning TikTok were it to be passed.

There are four points generally put forward by proponents of banning the app. I'll try to address these as best as I can. If I'm missing or misrepresenting one, let me know. These points are:

  1. TikTok is should be banned because it harms the attention spans of young people and acts as a bad influence purely as a social media platform, independent of any Chinese interference.

  2. TikTok has the potential as Chinese social media to let the CCP use algorithms to promote harmful viewpoints among American users.

  3. TikTok gives the CCP unprecedented ability to spy on us and collect blackmail on future leaders through user data.

  4. The CCP is our (the USG's) enemy and we should block any gains in cultural, political, or material power they are making and with any means at our disposal.

To the first point. There's no accusation of poisoning our youth, ruining our attention spans, or breaking our minds you can level at TikTok that doesn't also apply to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them promote political extremism and use algorithms of varying complexity to feed users personalized content. TikTok is much better at creating a curated feed, but that's not for lack of trying on the part of its competitors.

An argument to ban TikTok for this reason is an argument to ban all of them. There are plenty of people who would YesChad at this, which is a fair position. I'm not on board with banning these sites for freedom of expression reasons, but they've caused a lot of genuine harm and are likely a net-negative on happiness overall. However, I don't think this is on the table regardless. The 1st Amendment will (rightfully) prevent the government from banning social media apps over this, and the RESTRICT act will only lead to a more regime-controlled version of them. Our lawmakers want to put social media more under government control, not ban it.

Also, if your politics are outside the American overton window, how exactly will you get your message out without social media? Would you believe the things you currently hold to be true if not for the narrative control the Internet has wrested from the government and legacy media? In the 20th century, there were only a few, tightly-controlled media companies that had any messaging power. Your worldview was constrained to what they, and the people around you, found acceptable.

Point two is the psyop potential we are giving the CCP. I'm not sure they have the competency to actually do anything meaningful to us, but it is a fair concern for the future. But what can they do to us that we haven't done to ourselves in the past 8 years, exactly? I believe this point is pushed disingenuously by censorious legislators to pass a law that will give them greater narrative control against their real enemy — domestic opposition, but I will go more into that further down.

Point three is that TikTok gives the CCP huge amounts of user data on Americans. This is a valid concern, and I can see the blackmail potential they would have on future leaders through leaking DMs, nudes, embarrassing old videos, etc. At the very least, I understand why we would want to block TikTok on the phones of anyone who works in the military or in a sensitive government position.

If your position is that no one should get to harvest our personal data, I support you and would like to see that privacy enshrined in law. If your position is that only China shouldn't get to do that… You may disagree with me on this, but as an entity, the CCP's ability to ruin my life seems much more... distant than the USG's. The current regime seems very interested in pointing the state at right-wingers. The linked press release describes the Biden administration's plans for dealing with domestic terrorism, with the outlined targets being white identity extremists and militia people. You may trust the Biden admin to fairly interpret the phrase "domestic terrorist," or trust our 3-letter agencies to not abuse their power or fabricate evidence, but the last few years have destroyed any trust I have in them.

Simply put, if I had to choose one state to get my data, I'd choose the CCP, simply because I'm a world away from them and have no power to break down my door should they desire to. They are not as much of a threat to my freedom or safety as the American government that views many of its citizens as domestic terror threats. I've no illusions about which country I'd actually want to live under, and the USG is not even in the same ballpark of political repression as the CCP, but that doesn't mean I trust my government with our data.

Point 4 is the China Hawk position many Republicans hold. The reasons for this are a combination of China's threat to U.S. hegemony, its desire to spread its politics and influence to client states, the desire to have a "common enemy" to reunite Americans on shared ground, and military-industrial complex-driven greed/warmongering.

This may be the position that gets the most pushback, but I just don't care about China. I don't want to spend more American money and lives on foreign conflicts when there is so much to work on domestically. I don't like the ideology and policies we are exporting to the rest of the world and don't want it to spread completely unopposed. I don't want to die in some "unifying" conflict across the world for a government that pushes domestic policies designed to economically and politically disenfranchise people who look like me. The USG has lost the Mandate of Heaven and it should focus on getting that back, rather than picking more fights abroad.

This is all before we get into what the RESTRICT act gives the government the power to do, which is a lot. It empowers the Secretary of Commerce and the President with the "authority to take any... action as necessary" against information and communications technology products and services that are deemed to be owned or controlled by foreign adversaries and present a national security act.

As I understand it, this would be a process that would require approval by committee, not congress, and lets the President or Secretary bypass 1st Amendment protections to move against any tech or social media company that they deemed to be foreign influenced. This would apply to social media, tech, crypto, etc., and gives these two individuals the power to go after any company they like at will after some procedural outcomes.

I've seen how freely the Russian Interference accusation is baselessly thrown around. It was used by our intelligence agencies to justify shutting down the Hunter Biden story in election time without any supporting evidence. I have no illusions about how this is going to be used, if the act is passed. It will give our government the power to do what it's wanted to for a long time: go after cryptocurrencies and enforce regime control on any platform it wants, free of the pesky constitutional freedoms that prevent it from doing so. It seems like a modern Patriot Act, or an updated Sedition Act of 1918.

I was a bit unclear with the "until they're 60" line I was quoting, but I'm fully for locking that type of offender up for the rest of their natural life with no chance of parole. If I related to the victims, I would probably want blood, but there are other considerations beyond personal satisfaction. Locking him up this way ensures he's never able to harm an innocent citizen again and lowers the likelihood of him person harming the people who have to live with or guard him in prison. In a world where we could 100% verify guilt without bias, I have no issue with the death penalty, but for practical reasons I'm against it.

The others probably shouldn't be jailable offences to begin with.

How should we punish comparatively minor offenses? I think we should come down hard on crimes that don't produce a body like thievery and armed robbery since they lower trust and make people feel unsafe, even if the objective harm they have is minor compared to some white-collar crimes. Just because I don't want those people around doesn't mean I want them to face constant prison violence, though.

Seeing TikToks with likes in the hundreds of thousands lamenting Chris' transition or gleefully noting MrBeast's obvious discomfort with his lifelong friend in their recent video is quite the vibe shift. I'm not sure what's more surprising to me — the reaction itself or it being allowed to exist on a big platform. The censorship of the last 5 years has become so normalized to me that I'm taken aback when I see genuine anti-trans posts break 100,000 impressions without being mopped.

As for the reaction, as others have noted, millions of zoomers have a strong parasocial relationship with this band of male friends. Chris' transition and the awkwardness it injects into their dynamic is palpable. These people may not be anti-trans, but they certainly don't like what transitioning has done to their favorite creator's content. For many people whose exposure to transgenderism has been filtered through sympathetic lenses — popular media or news about transgender oppression — this may be their first genuine glimpse at the uglier side of it.

Chris was a well-adjusted chad who had a wife and infant child, and broke it off to become this. Many 20-something men would literally kill to have half of what Chris had— looks, respect, wife, and child. If throwing those things away to start HRT and live as a woman is what makes Chris happy, then for many it may for the first time really call into question how far their preferences differ from the cultural values that produced this outcome.

I don't really buy into there being a corrective "pendulum" when it comes to most progressive positions, but with the trans stuff it really feels like people are getting sick of it. Recently it feels like every week there is some new story that comes off quite badly for transpeople. The shooter targeting Christian children highlighting the militant anger of many transpeople (no demo fedposts online harder than they do), Dylan Mulvaney going mainstream/being sponsored by an all-American beer brand, and now this.

If you're a normal person growing up in America your default social position is likely live and let live. The tales you grew up reading and watching promote understanding, tolerance, and not jumping to conclusions with regards to unfamiliar cultures or lifestyles. The villains in your childhood tales are the intolerant, traditional, and quick to judge. Many are inclined to apply this rule to transgender people, and it is easy to say at a distance. It's someone else's life, let them live it how they want since it doesn't' affect me.

This isn't a bad rule to live by compared to many others. But it doesn't always play out as well as in the stories and many are beginning to realize that. Many who are fine in theory with transgenderism don't want to see it pushed in their media, for example. Pushing it to children is a bridge too far for many. It wouldn't be so bad if it just meant that your daughter cut her hair like a boy and grew out of it in a few years, but that practice may lead her to being pushed towards a suite of medical interventions that you can't take back. If tolerance means letting activists evangelize irreversible chemical treatment to minors, to your kids, over platforms like discord that you may not fully understand?

At that point, you might be fine becoming the villain. As Huck Finn said:

"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up."

...

That feels like where the post should end, but I said that I was surprised that the "MrBeast 6000" TikToks were allowed to stay up this long. I want to talk more about the platforms, but it feels like it belongs to a different post. Musk buying Twitter feels like a big narrative break. It's the wild west on there once again with accounts being restored and allowed to say things that would have been an instant ban anytime in the last 5 years. The Twitter Files show that much of the online consensus of the last five years was enforced from the top down by federal agents working closely with private institutions.

It makes me wonder what the cultural landscape would look like if not for the top-down smothering of right-wing content. What would Adult Swim look like had they not followed external pressure to cancel MDE's World Peace and Sam Hyde had been given access to that audience for years? Hell, what would Reddit look like if it hadn't nuked the growing far-right subreddit dedicated to the same show, or pulled out all the stops to block /r/theDonald's expansion?

If you look at the Twitch debate scene, it's almost all between varying shades of liberalism and leftism. This isn't necessarily due to these views being more popular, but by who has been allowed to grow their platform without interference. Hasan Piker is allowed to have sponsorships and remain on Twitch despite his views being as radical as Sam Hyde's. The smothering of right-leaning content is artificial and enforced by pulling levers from the top down. But there is a genuine market for it and the people who can articulate conservative thoughts in an interesting way, and it's been suppressed for years. If one side has corporate approval and the other side gets blocked from payment processors, of course there is going to be a disparity in whose ideas are currently more popular. There are many ideas that would sweep through the mainstream if they weren't constantly pulled out by the root.

Activists know this which is why the knives have been out for Musk since the purchase went through. Substack seems to be in the crosshairs as well now. I can't blame the activists for doing this; they understand how power works and are willing to use it to prevent competing power structures from taking hold. Who knows who will come out on top in the end? Smart money may be on Musk being forced to fold, but he seems quite sick of being told what to do by them and may stick to his ideals. If so, I wonder what things will look like 10 years from now.

I worked as a writing consultant in college, a position my college hired English-proficient students for. The job was to be there for appointments other students would schedule to have their essays looked at and the like. This required me to take a semester-long course as training, and the doctrines I was taught there were both extremely bizarre and line up neatly with the CW elements of phonics I've been reading here.

There was a guiding principle for the people who taught this class and who wrote our books that it was wrong to teach a student the "correct" way to speak English. By correct we could instead say hegemonic; the way that educated, well-off people tend to speak and write English in America. Who are you as a (white) educator to tell a (nonwhite) child that the way he learned to speak at home is wrong? It was extremely upsetting for me to learn this was a popular position in the field of English education. But...

It's obviously been a while, but my experience with phonics as a young lad were that they were essentially drills. You have sound-letter association drilled into your brain through constant repetition and reinforcement. It's perhaps not a very Western way to learn on the face of it, as we pride ourselves on being creative learners who don’t rely on rote repetition. But there's a time and place for more rote learning. Like in art, you can't really express yourself in English if don't have the fundamentals down first.

You have to understand that for the type of person who usually gets into English Education, sitting there and beating the sounds of letters into the malleable skull of an underprivileged minority child feels like a form of violence. Your way of speaking is wrong, here is the correct way to talk and write. It is reminiscent of British boarding schools forcing students to copy lines into their books over and over, or of colonial efforts to educate the savages. This may sound like a weakman, but that really is how they seemed to view it.

This conflicts with a more practical understanding of language and the job of an educator. Yes, there is a way that educated people tend to speak. Yes, people go to school so they can fit in with those people and make money. Yes, it is your job as an educator to teach them how to do that. No, it is not your place to decide that this hegemony is unjust and must be overthrown. And finally, how dare you use young students as your pawns in this game to do so.

To the credit of my instructors: they acknowledged that this is, on some level, why people want to get an education. For reasons of practicality, English teachers have to teach English. They made it clear that we should push back against this where we could, and that it was a long-term goal to overthrow this paradigm. To bring it back to the "whole language" model... based on my experience with educators, I know that of the two methods, they would very much like this one to be the one that works. I can see them convincing themselves that it does, especially since it lacks the blunt objectivity of phonics. It makes sense that it took this long before people start raising the alarm on this.

I have some more things to say about English education, but that might be better for another post. I also don't want to lump all teachers into this bucket. I know many of them who just want to educate children and keep their mouths shut about this stuff for the same reason you don't openly push back against your workplace's DEI policies. It is a shame, because mass literacy is a cornerstone of success for a culture, and it seems standards are constantly falling.

I'm not a blank slatist and don't believe that we can equalize outcomes through education. But if we're forcing children to go to school, we should get some form of literacy as a result, and not have the time and money sabotaged by what to me looks like institutionalized white guilt. We could do a lot better by people if we just stopped digging the hole deeper.

A funny aside. As consultants, we weren't supposed to fix the grammar in a student's essay, even if that's what they came in with the intention to do. Just help them with ideas and maybe teach them writing rules they didn't understand. This was... perhaps overselling the importance of the place. Maybe it was to comply with a looser definition of plagiarism the university had (I'm doubtful). However, this was what about half the American students in my appointments wanted me to do, and what almost all of the Chinese students wanted me to do.

This is understandable, especially for the Chinese kids. It seems logical that a writing center for students would be at least in part about an English native fixing your paper so it isn't riddled with basic grammatical and usage errors. English is a difficult language and has a lot of weird rules that make it trivial for a non-native speaker to out themselves as such. After a while I just started doing grammar checks in my consultations, and my consultees tended to be much happier for it.

I've seen this said before but I don't think it's true. Game of Thrones' problem was that the showrunners started writing their own fanfiction well before they ran out of material. This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5, and finally compound to where the average viewer can tell things are very off by the end

By fanfiction I don't necessarily mean fleshing smaller characters out, like Tywin and Margaery — generally this was done well and didn't conflict with anything pre-existing. I'm talking about things like Jaime's storylines after returning to King's Landing being completely different, whatever they did to Euron Greyjoy, and literally everything about the Dorne plot.

An example of cut content is the ignored storyline of Aegon Targaryen landing his armies in Westeros while Daenerys is fucking around in Meereen. He kind of comes out of nowhere in book 5 but it really feels like he should have been there for the endgame in the show. What we had instead is the situation where everyone is against Cersei and the writers have to bend the story in knots to have it be an even fight. A multipolar conflict with Dany, Cersei, Euron, and Aegon all facing off would be much more chaotic and even, assuming this was Martin's intention.

Perhaps the most infamous example of cut content was not including Lady Stoneheart. As I recall, this heavily strained the showrunners' relationship with Martin and led to him distancing himself from the show and depriving it of its most important advisor.

For all the things you can say about the showrunners at least they finished their damn job. I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.

Any Fire Emblem people here? A new mainline game was finally announced this Tuesday, Fire Emblem Engage. It's been over three years since Three Houses released, unless you count the Dynasty Warriors game, which I don't.

There have been comments on the main characters' split color look. Specifically, his/her resemblance to the colors of a specific toothpaste brand. The character design has grown on me, but the clowning is well-deserved. The character designs of many of the side characters are more concerning for me, as many look like generic gacha fantasy art at first blush. I'll have to see them in more detail and how they grow on me. The game looks like it takes many leads from Awakening and Heroes, for better and worse.

Notably, it doesn't seem to have a route split, which the last two new (original) games did, and also seems to be rolling back some of the focus on the Persona elements of Three Houses. I'm lukewarm on route splits, since it's often obvious after you've played the routes where compromises in design and quality had to be made to support them. I liked the Monastery in Three Houses, but know it's not for everyone.

I'm also interested in how it will be built around permadeath. If you don't know, it is a staple mechanic in Fire Emblem that if a unit hits 0 HP, they die and are not usable for the rest of the campaign, unless you reload the map of course, potentially losing an hour of progress. You're supposed to play to keep your units alive and if someone is going to die, it better be for a damn good reason, because you won't have them for the rest of the run. Early games in the franchise drowned you with tons of recruitable characters with little personality to act as replacements, though you were still incentivized to keep your best alive as the replacements are often worse.

This mechanic has become more and more vestigial as time has gone on and the games add more RPG elements, to the point where it added nothing in Three Houses and actively tanked its storytelling. In a game with a small cast that puts a lot of focus on the story and relationships of each member, it kind of ruins the experience that only 3 of them can ever appear in cutscenes to account for the fact that the player may have lost them. It's... quite terrible, honestly, and I hope the devs re-evaluate the mechanic if they continue to go in that direction. On the other hand, I have nothing against permadeath as long as the game is built around it. I'm expecting Engage to be like Conquest, which in theory has permadeath but does not design around it at all.

I'll recommend the OG Boomer's Gate. What many people enjoy about it is the companion characters you recruit and experiencing their stories while balancing their personalities to keep them happy. I'll admit I've never experienced that; I always make 6 custom characters and play the game with them. For me the enjoyment is purely in the well-written story and the amazing combat system.

It runs off of 2nd Edition AD&D, which is a really cool system and will have some interesting differences for players of modern D&D/CRPGs. Most of the differences are in how spellcasters work. For example, spellcasters use Vancian magic, which means they prepare spells in advance and can only use each spell as many times per day as they prepared that spell. For example, if your wizard knows 5 1st-level spells and 4 2nd-level spells but can only prepare 4 slots of 1st level spells and 2 slots of 2nd level spells, you must allocate a spell to each specific slot. Want to cast sleep more than once per day? Better prepare it multiple times. This is really cool and will satisfy that Batman fantasy. It's a lot for a new RPG player to learn, but an experienced player will really enjoy the system.

The other big difference is how casters scale. They're incredibly weak and fragile early. Most of the time they're slinging terrible darts terribly since they can only cast 2 spells at 1st level. They scale incredibly though - if you play the same wizard from Baldur's Gate 1 to the end of Throne of Bhaal in BG2 you'll watch them go from a weakling who will die to a stiff breeze to a reality-warping demigod. Newer editions try to balance casters to martials at all stages of the game, so playing a game where this is very much not the case is a nice change.

I'd recommend playing Baldur's Gate 1 then importing/remaking your squad in Baldur's Gate 2. Throne of Bhaal is an excellent finale to the series. Play Icewind Dale if you really love the combat system of Baldur's Gate, because there's very little story in that game, just lots of encounters. Ironically I liked the encounters in BG much better, but it's still good content.

Agreed. Mental stats are the unfortunate place where the fantasy of "you can be anyone" runs up against the reality of your real life "mental stats." It's not something you scream from the rooftops, but d&d is a cooperative roleplaying game, and your ability to depict the character you're playing matters. It's easy to abstract away swinging an axe or doing a fearsome war cry to the dice if you can't do those things but your character can. Coming up with a cunning plan or smooth-talking through an encounter... not as much.

The unfortunate result is that someone who freezes up when put on the spot simply cannot roleplay a suave rogue or bard as well as someone who can. Same goes for someone who, like you said, plays a 20 INT Wizard but can't memorize their spells. It's not like you need to be Bond or Einstein to play these characters — you just need to be able to approximate it well enough out of character that the other players can let their imaginations do the rest.

You could abstract things away to rolls like you said, but I find campaigns where that is the norm to be less engaged. If I have a bard as a player, I expect the player to be cracking wise and making rousing speeches instead of saying "I make a joke" or "I make a speech."

I've been playing and thoroughly enjoying Fire Emblem Engage over the past week. The story is bland, with some of the worst hero worship I've ever seen in an RPG, but the gameplay is probably the best it's ever been in the series. Here are my thoughts on it as someone who's played about half the entries in the series. I'm maybe 3/4 through right now, so I suppose my impressions could still change.

The presentation is solid, with better environmental design and seemingly less asset reuse than Three Houses. Many lines are unvoiced though which feels like a step back from Echoes and 3H. The character designs range from trashy gacha game tier to quite good, depending on who you're looking at. The environments are gorgeous and the music is incredible.

The story is pretty generic with fairly obvious plot twists. It's serviceable though, and not actively terrible like Fates. The characters take the unfortunate Awakening route where most of them are one-note gimmicks who just repeat their gimmick(s) in every support conversation. The cast is large enough that despite this, you should find yourself with a full roster of people you like and want to keep alive. I like Alfred, Diamant, and Ivy quite a lot, as well as many of the meme characters that the gameplay makes you grow attached to. I prefer how 3H and Genealogy handled their characters better, with a tightly connected cast of characters whose interactions developed both the characters and the world, but I like the new cast nonetheless.

The big new mechanic of the game is the Engage Rings, which are 12 rings that each contain the soul of a protagonist of the previous entries. Characters can "Engage" them to receive guidance and significant power from the hero stored inside them. The game glosses over the sheer existential horror of being a disembodied spirit bound to a ring for seemingly forever, aware of the world around you but unable to interact or communicate with it until the main character awakens your ring, so... I will too, I suppose. You steadily acquire more of the rings as the story progresses and assign them to your units, who can use them to call on extremely powerful abilities.

Storywise, the rings are pure fanservice, and often feel like a missed opportunity. Many of these characters are already very similar to eachother coming into it — at least half are infantry lords with similar personalities who use swords in their own stories — and Engage flattens their personalities even further into basically a single, happy, supportive blob with one personality between the 12 of them. It might be more interesting to have the rings be the spirits of characters and heroes or villains from the game's own worldbuilding, with distinct personalities and histories that vary between the spirits, but I get why they went the way they did. I've played the games about 2/3 of the included characters and it is fun to see them here, even if it does feel like the I clapped when I saw it meme.

Going by gameplay the rings are awesome. They give varied, interesting abilities that can play to a unit's strengths or shore up their weaknesses, and each one has a flashy, single-use move you can use each time you Engage it. Many characters have unique mechanics that echo the mechanics from their own games (Lucina's abilities are based on pair-up attacks, Corrin has terrain-altering moves, Leif cheats and uses whatever weapon is most advantageous when attacked, just like the enemies in his game.) that make the unit you attach them to play radically differently. The rings are definitely overpowered, but the game throws so much of its own nonsense at you that they actually feel somewhat balanced, though your experience may vary based on difficulty and how much you grind.

The game itself is a blast, minus some tedious minigames like the fishing. The map design is strong, units have varied niches, fights are challenging and feel cinematic, skill inheritance and ring placement give you lots of unit building options, and I can go on. Engage is easily shaping up to be one of my favorite entries in the series. Strong recommend if you enjoy RPGs, strategy games, or Fire Emblem.

I've been asking it to generate some new monsters and other content for D&D. I've been adding new enemies to Roll20 and wanted to generate new variants of existing monsters, so I'd say something like "generate a kobold, but it has these attributes and does X, Y, and Z." I'm also working on a growing system as a player downtime option, so I asked it to "generate a list of fantasy plants. Give each one a growing time in weeks, flavor text, and if it responds to X, Y, or Z type of cultivation." I was fairly impressed at what it could consistently give me, though it obviously has a ways to go. It was a great way to fish for inspiration and mechanics before refining them into something usable.

Right now, it's best used as a way to rapidly generate ideas/content before someone who knows what he's doing polishes and fixes it. I haven't seen it output anything that was passable out of the box. This is how I feel about AI image generators too; in the hands of an artist, they have insane potential.

The real strength of the software is its working memory of context. You can issue corrections, prompt it with more information, tell it to adjust something, and it'll do it. That's what impressed me more than the generation itself, I think. The main limitation right now is it doesn't remember anything outside of a session, and it has trouble going past half a dozen revisions or so. This is to be expected since it's a free service at the moment, so I only see this improving.

So really, is the only sin of “transpeople” being early?

I wonder this myself sometimes. For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them. And you can lose your job if you don’t. If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.

Of course, none of this applies to children transitioning. The number of people doing irreversible damage to their bodies without knowing the true risks based on social pressure has exploded, and I don’t want to get too into it because others already have done it much better here. I don’t think it’s a good thing nor do I want it to continue.

And then the natural question is, does tolerating the first thing lead to the second? It seems like it to me. In its current state trans ideology seems to allow for no opinion besides a maximalist one. And despite their small numbers, as an influence group they are incredibly influential in tech and online discourse due to the demographics of most people who transition to women tending to be people who are very online and in tech. See the deplatformings of the Kiwi Farms spearheaded by several trans activists for a recent example.

So futurist medical procedures would sidestep a big issue of mine with transgenderism, but it is far from the only one.

Quick edit: I forgot to mention the people that will want to be considered their chosen gender without doing the work to physically pass, which is a thing now and will most likely still be even in this hypothetical future. The question of how we respond to those people is important. Is it, yes you are your chosen gender? Or will we say l: I’ll call you a woman once you don’t have to tell me you’re one. I’d be okay with the latter option, not the former, but I can’t see it going that way culturally.

This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right?

The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:

I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.

The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.

The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.

Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.

Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.

You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.

Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.

The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.

While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.

I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?

This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.

I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.

I'll say their search system is impressively bad lately. Every search gives you maybe three results for what you're actually searching before recommending you things you've already seen that are completely unrelated. The only explanation I can think of comes from my experience in a completely different field. My boss will often have me make adjustments to our site or ad network that, without getting too into it, essentially trade a little bit of the system's health or user experience for a short-term bump in impressions/clicks.

With the search problem I described, it's possible that a PM had a bonus or other incentive to increase the clickthroughs on the "recommended" tab. Not being able to make this increase through genuine growth, they tell the engineers to cannibalize the search feature to also promote recommended videos to the user. The engineers ask "are you sure about this?" before just doing their job. And then another part of the user experience is shortsightedly consumed.

Any other ideas/explanations as to why this happens?

Agree and I'd possibly like to see a second upvote/downvote button that people could use to indicate "well-argued" or something like that. Even if I disagree with their points I hate seeing our resident lefties get downvoted to 0 and dogpiled every time they make a post. I would like to think that would help, but there's also the future where it becomes an I disagree even more button...

You're underselling the effect of these things because they're normal now, but we used to live in a world where on-demand entertainment meant picking one of 3 channels on TV whose content was made by very similar people. Hell, there was a world where to even own a copy of a book was a huge status symbol, because we didn't have a way of quickly copying them. The democratization brought by computers, the Internet, new tools, etc. has created a golden age of creativity.

In previous eras, if you wanted to be an artist, you needed a wealthy person to sponsor you. Now, open a Twitter or ArtStation account and get to work. If you are a writer with ideas too weird for publishers, you can get a following on Twitter and outsell most published authors. Musician? No need to sign a deal with a label anymore, just make good music and network. Interested in video? There's YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, etc. Take your pick of media — books, games, short videos, fanfiction — it has either been improved by or invented as a result of new technologies. If your media is too samey, then that might be due to a lack of looking on your part.

My fear is we will turn us into mindless consumers, incapable of creating anything beautiful anymore, or even understanding the world around us.

Why is this? From my point of view new tech that democratizes creation is the best solution to those that would like to gatekeep and limit the range of acceptable thought. If people seem dumber now because of things like Twitter, I'd counter that the average person isn't much of a thinker anyway and you're just able to see them more clearly now.

I'm running the fourth session in my online D&D campaign today. So far it's gone well, though I've had to onboard a few new players to replace ones who proved to not be able to commit. Right now I have 5 great players and have brought on 2 more that I'll have to test out, and would like to have 8 total. It's a West Marches style game, so 4 players from the wider group do a session at a time (I hate running for/playing with 5+ players). Each player is allowed to have 2 characters and it's given the campaign a really cool sense of scale and continuity having a large circle of players and characters that rotate in and out of missions.

Since we're all living in different locations and have different work schedules, this is just about the only way we could have gotten a group together, but I've been dying to try the format for years. It's a lot of work for me, but very fun.

I spent ages developing systems to give 5e actual exploration and interaction mechanics. I created an in-depth system for downtime that lets players use their character skills to gain different kinds of resources. Each IRL week they can choose what activity they do, though often a player will do a few weeks at a time because of scheduling. There are different downtime activities that use different skills and a lot of goals they can pursue. They can do downtime for both characters they run, so they've had fun trying to optimize the system towards their ends.

I'm very pressed for time, since the session is at 7 and I still have a lot to get ready... along with the rest of the workday. Running a game online lets me make the production values very slick, but requires more input time to do so. It's worth it in my book, but taking the time to write this up may not have been, given the situation...

I'm having so much fun with NovelAI. It's basically StableDiffusion but trained on danbooru, which is an anime art booru. The AI has some limitations - you can only really do one character at a time, it has some issues with anatomy, and my god does it struggle with the hands. That said, if you work the prompts and iterate on the generations you like, it generates some really good stuff. It's also remarkably consistent at depicting the same character once you have the prompts figured out, at which point it's a matter of generating until you get something that looks good and doesn't have the typical AI shortcomings. I've shown some of the fanart of characters I've generated to friends and then dropped that an AI made it to near-universal shock.

I'm also using StableDiffusion to generate assets like scenery and enemies for my online 5e campaign, which it has done very well. I'm on the browser model for that since my graphics card is AMD and I haven't had the time to jump through the hoops to get everything working yet.

I'm sympathetic to the issues this will cause for artists, but at the same time these tools are incredible. I dislike the "soulless" description I've seen thrown at the tech. My main creative strength has been with words and fiction. I've tried my hand at digital art and made stuff I'm proud of before, but I've always considered it a massive bottleneck in terms of time, talent, and resources. What I can't depict by hand vastly outstrips what I can depict, so being able to convert words into illustrations is both delightful and mindblowing to me. This isn't soulless AI vomiting images to drown out human intent, this is AI allowing human intent to manifest more easily for many more people.

In short, AI art is very cool, try out StableDiffusion, or NovelAI if you're a weeb.

The reason you ask for the player to roleplay his speech but not to describe his sword swing technique is because D&D is a game that exists in our heads. It is a real as the group believes it to be. That is to say, it can be very real, but this requires collective suspension of disbelief, engagement, buy-in, and yes — roleplaying. You aren't taken out of the collective fantasy by your fighter's player not knowing how to swing a sword, but you are by the player who is supposedly the high Charisma party face clamming up whenever an NPC speaks to him.

I don't have an issue with such players being at my table, and in my experience they tend to avoid those kinds of characters anyway. You don't need a silver tongue to be able to play a charismatic character, but you need to have some degree of wit and charm. If a player wants to give a speech, I'm not exactly expecting St. Crispin's Day, but he should have something to say.

I have a buddy who was/is(?) still into the GME and AMC stuff. He tried to convince me that the mother of all short squeezes you mentioned would happen in about June of last year. I just told him to not invest what he couldn’t lose, etc. but it was troubling to see him constantly latching on to that and other cope excuses for why his meme stocks were not working out.

He isn’t well off and has a lot of issues in his life, most of them genuinely not his fault. It’s easy to scoff at what he’s doing, but I think the degenerate betting you see in the crypto/meme stock space is more rational than I first gave it credit for. If you’re a young man with little assets, no education, no girl, and no status, what do you have to lose if you make a terrible options play and go bankrupt, really? And what do you gain? Possibly a life free of working a shit job until your body gives out.

You might run the numbers and find that the odds are so low that it is not worth the risk. I’d tend to agree, but If you’re the type to run those numbers I’d bet you’re more likely to have something resembling a degree, stable job, and financial assets.

There are issues with those online communities you described but at their core they’re a place for young men who aren’t doing as well as they’d like to shoot the shit and find some camaraderie. We used to have wars, robust priesthoods, and high risk high reward jobs like whaling (we still have some jobs like this, not as many though) to deal with excess men. What pressure valve is there for excess men today?

I don’t think we should bring those things back, because most of those things are terrible. But men are disposable and for many the risk/reward of hustling crypto/NFTs/stocks does seem to make sense.