celluloid_dream
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User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
9mo ago
Sure, but why is the thing good?
In its original form, it was good because it served a functional purpose. Thereafter, each copy was only good because of nostalgia or familiarity, and I think it settles for being merely good, when it could innovate using more recent techniques, new materials, creativity and perhaps be better. At least, that's the ethos I got from the book (and, I'm told, it's kinda-sorta what the Modernists were going for).
Against this, I'll dig up my favourite quote from The Fountainhead:
- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.
- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon! The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
- Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”
Maybe those were nice houses for their time (though on many, I see exactly the sort of cargo-cult ornamentation Rand's character complains about). Today, when I hear people clamour for beauty in architecture, they seem to want those old designs back! They have no positive vision of the future. Concrete boxes might be uninspired, but I'm not sure they're that much worse than making a modern copy of a Victorian copy of a Renaissance copy of ancient woodworking.
celluloid_dream
9mo ago
Charitably, these comments are less self-deprecation and more praise for the heroics or achievements of others. If there's any narcissism, it's in the need to be seen as publicly signaling one's respect, and inability to just say it plainly.
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
Huge mistake in my opinion. Can't speak for others, but to me, a sign-in wall means I just stop interacting with that content altogether, and if I get linked there by mistake, I'll curse the site under my breath and close the tab. I can forgive Facebook because it's mostly aiming to be a more tight knit community site for local groups/friends/relatives. Instagram, Reddit, and especially Twitter have no excuse. Gut feeling is it's mortgaging the site's future for short term metrics.
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
I'm skeptical that "it's simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment", full stop. What real-life team sport offers the complexity, action and fast paced strategy of a RTS like Supreme Commander? What real-life pursuit offers a visually stunning, persistent imaginary world for thousands of players to live in and form communities like FFXIV? What real-life performance or play matches the worldbuilding and narrative depth of something like Disco Elysium?
For some people, sure. Winning that game of ultimate frisbee, climbing that mountain, seeing that play, might be more fulfilling than vidya. For others, I doubt it.
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
Out of curiosity, what is the general direction/thrust of Worm fanfic?
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"author did it wrong, I'll fix it"?
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"explore another character's perspective"
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"I just want to play with these toys some more"?
Recommend any high quality ones?
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
Depending on what you want to achieve, Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay (yes, really) have a book: How to Have Impossible Conversations
They generally advise not marshalling evidence for your claims, but instead seeking to understand why your opponent believes their claims, then just asking if they can think of any evidence that would change their mind. This both helps get to the root of the disagreement, and also zeroes in on the kind of evidence you could provide if asked.
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
Decent probability this is fake, but there was a short viral video recently of a "social experiment" where you see the target pause, consider what's going on, and conclude that "no. There's no possible way this is genuine, not even as a real pick-up line. I must be on camera."
Funny, sure, but also a bit sad.
I feel the same way about most unprovoked social interactions in public, except it's almost always about money, not entertainment. One time, someone waved at me, gave a smile and said they liked my hair. This is extremely rare. I never get compliments, and this one brightened my day. Immediately, my brain screamed "scam. They're lying. They want money. It's not real", and I told my brain to shut up. Just this once, we will give this person a chance. They said something nice. There are nice people in the world. Reciprocate. So I stopped, we introduced each other. They were about my age, seemed interesting. We talked about school or something for five minutes. It was pleasant.
Then they got to the part where they just needed fifty bucks to pay cab fare across town to meet their sister. They normally wouldn't ask for money but..
I walked away mid-sentence.
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
This one reminded me of @Primaprimaprima 's post on internet addiction a while ago. I think I'm still of the same opinion.
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
I'm coming around to the idea that the free+advertising model was the internet's original sin. A site like Reddit, maybe the largest and second most trusted repository of human text on the internet, apparently can't make money.
Reddit must look at third party clients scraping "their" data (especially LLMs training on it), using "their" site, then reselling it at an actual profit and feel like they should get a cut. Meanwhile the mods have a good argument that they're providing much of the value, and of course it's ultimately the users' generating the content in the end.
I wonder how the net would have evolved if something like Brave's basic attention token was around back in the day, with users paying in proportion to what they consume, with mods being compensated and ultimately the site not being beholden to advertisers like it is now.
Grum - Heartbeats : fun, bright electro-dance album
Edit: oh, and probably the Mystery Skulls animated music videos
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
It's a useful distinction, and I see you've taken care to avoid "good/bad" judgements, but it's interesting you're still making positive claims under aesthetics which I think demand justification. For instance, that certain colours "will work". Oh will they? Why? Because something something colour wheel theory? What if I like the wrong combos? On what basis can you object? Pure appeal to popularity?
I don't think aesthetics are so quantifiable because year after year I see things that were once explained to me as hard fast prohibitions with hand-waving justifications like "because it would ruin the silhouette, obviously" then become the next big trend. Maybe I'm misreading here and you mean aesthetics are totally value-free. There's combos on the colour wheel axes and off, but it doesn't weigh in on whether either is more correct than the other.
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
Nature: long full day hikes ideally with an exposed scramble at the end. I dont mean to get all mystical blah blah "just you and the rock". But it's focusing. You can't think about anything else when your life depends on your not screwing it up, even if it's easy. There's no room for anything else. Type 1 fun and type 2 fun.
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
Think that's just a general Hollywood problem. We want our actors to look youthful, but also be famous and well established. By the time they reach that point in their careers, they're pushing the limits of what their natural genetics plus plastic surgery plus vfx can hold. I cannot confirm or deny that Vin Diesel gets certain parts of his face edited in post.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
Mountaineering - The Freedom of the Hills - The doorstopper textbook of mountaineering. It's not really something you read, more something you eventually have read after opening it enough times.
It explains the basics of just about every aspect of climbing a mountain from how clothing works (yes, really: "Clothing helps a person stay comfortable by creating a thin insulating layer of air next to the skin." Um. thanks book.) all the way up to crevasse rescue techniques and alpine rock climbing.
It's nice to have as a reference bible in an age where anyone can throw up a quick tutorial on YouTube. Is that really how it's done? Is that knot standard practice? Better double check the textbook. Ah, yes, there it is.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
Oh, I appreciated "Notes on Blood Meridian" by the way. Thanks for that rec! Wish it had started with the analysis first and then the historical references afterward though.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
- You don't get it, words dilute
This is like one of the cryptic notes I scribble down and then can't remember what it was supposed to mean. Then when I go back and try and flesh it out, I'm probably getting the thought subtly wrong. Words diluting indeed.
A duvet is the superior bedding. It sports a number of desirable properties:
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Puff - What you call giant and heavy, I call comfortable and reassuring. It's like a pillow for your whole body in just the right thickness. It neither restricts your movement (like a tight blanket), nor is too light to do hold you (like a sheet). It is the perfect middle ground. A big floofy hug from Duvet-chan!
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Cleanliness - A duvet cover is always washed. You needn't worry about accidentally waking up to find your face has wandered from the safe haven of a clean sheet and found its way to uncharted territory of a scuzzy blanket. Hic sunt sordes
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Simplicity - Just toss it on the bed in roughly the right orientation. What could be simpler? No tucking, no tensioning the corners or messing up the folds
Rambling half-formed notes that never get posted are basically all I write. Example of a fun thread one whining about pokemon:
(Pokemon games are poorly designed by their own stated principles)
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games constantly tell you to bond with pokemon, not only use them as tools, but then make you use them as tools, sometimes literally
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and the stats/moves/types are unbalanced, encouraging you to only use the overpowered ones
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the game doesn't teach the real game - doesn't play like a human trainer would, switching based on type matchups, having inter-pokemon synergy, having strategies.
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(later pkmn games): raids .. - this is a terrible thing to put in as a game mechanic in pokemon. It makes sense in fantasy because coming together to take down the giant/dragon is sort of the thing. Pokemon is absolutely NOT that. It's .. cute cockfighting. It's low-level. It's gym training. It's person vs person, poke vs poke at their normal power levels. No super saiyan, no magic. definitely not supposed to be fighting some giant pokemon inflated like a balloon
- can just imagine some lazy game designer coming up with this. "players like raids in MMOs right? very social, much enjoyment. let's just copy that!" instead of coming up with something more creative that fits the world & game they actually had
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
Yeah, trumpet and other brass instruments are miserable because you lose your emboucher without continual upkeep. After enough time off, you physically can't play the notes, even if you remember how. Oh, and the noise. There are harmon mutes for that though.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
But a community college student can't churn out a page in ten seconds, fast enough to run an ongoing open-ended story at the pace of a conversation. Maybe I unintentionally emphasized the wrong thing. It's not so much the prose, but the interactivity of it.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
For sure, though it's likely my fault. I think the prompt for it included "as if in a cyberpunk novel or role playing game", and some of that is inherent to the genre.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
That'd probably work. Sometimes I'm asking questions and letting it write. Other times I just tell it how it should go, or did go (it writes better in past tense). You can ask for combat with rules - admittedly that's not it's forte, and often needs correction.
My usual format is something like: "Write the scene/story/day as a bunch of things happen, then write what happens next, and make sure you do it in this style, including this, that and the other".
I've been totally mesmerized by ChatGPT4's writing capabilities lately, having used it to generate hours upon hours of entertainment somewhere in the gray area between a TTRPG and collaborative fanfic. I give it the outline of a scene, tell it what the characters do. If there's combat or uncertainty, I have it evaluate using the game rules and their character sheets. Mostly though, it reads like a choose-your-own-adventure novel with all possibilities open.
Consider this tavern-meet scene from the Cyberpunk universe: I think this is pretty fucking good. GPT's prose is not high art, but it's a damn sight better than what I could manage. If I played a live game with friends, we would not narrate this well. If we played a PbP or written game, I'd still forget to colour the similes with elements of each character's backstory like GPT did without my even asking.
It's empowering to be able to orchestrate tropey pulp so quickly. Normally I'm a slow writer (seconding @PatellaFarmer 's comment a while ago ), and not a good one - both for fiction and nonfiction. I'll agonize over word choice, phrasing, go back, edit too much, and it'll still come out awful (e.g. this post).
With GPT though, I'm like Mickey in Fantasia's Sorcerer's Apprentice and god, it's fun! "Have two characters enage in a fierce argument reflecting their core moral differences". "Write a climactic battle scene, every action heightened to the stuff of legend", "Do a silly montage anime music video (AMV) set to an angsty alt-rock song (Paramore, MCR or something) Cut the lyrics with descriptions of each clip as you write the next few days of story." Call me easily amused, I guess.
Maybe I'll get bored eventually, but for now, I'm astonished at how addicting it is. A quick ctrl+F of my inputs says I made 422 requests on one session alone: great value for the monthly subscription. I found myself staying up late several nights to wait for the next quota rollover. It's like that just one more episode feeling of a good TV show, but the next episode never disappoints, because you can tell the writers to go back and fix it straight away. Then they do!
Of course, it's not without flaws. Given the limited context window, ChatGPT behaves kinda like "Skeleton Jelly", forgetting details you haven't mentioned recently. You have to act as its script supervisor and fix continuity when it inevitably screws up. I mitigate this by keeping a running "save file" prompt of character stats, appearance, the story so far. So long as I keep that up to date and re-prompt it, it does all right, at the cost of re-using the same descriptive words more than it should.
There are also quirks I wish I didn't have to burn requests correcting. Like, for whatever reason - my prompting? its training data? - dialogue tends to drift into therapy-speak. Characters validate each others' feelings and everyone is super happy and supportive. I have to keep pulling on the reins to maintain tension and conflict.
Anyway, I highly recommend trying some stories with it if you like narrative crafting or TTRPGs but otherwise can't write.
I like https://spotwx.com/ . Zoom in, pick a location. Select the model for the area / time span you want, and then you get a nice readout like this.
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