problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
There are tons of great games that already exist sure, there aren't necessarily tons of great games that align with a given person's preferences (and no, you don't have to be really into hentai to feel this way). I say this as someone who is not very interested in a large portion of the much-heralded games out there - there's an extreme deficit of games I would personally want to play. Everything that comes out of the AAA sphere may as well be slop as far as I'm concerned, since the approach that most large studios take when they construct games is basically diametrically opposed to mine. The increased output stemming from the democratisation of game development may well have resulted in an increase in low-effort content and a decrease in the average quality of games released, but the larger amount of content overall and the greater amount of indie games that are a product of one person's idiosyncratic vision has resulted in me finding far more games I enjoy. Arguably 100% of my favourite games only exist because of this process of democratisation, and I can't help but feel the same about the usage of AI tools to speed game production up and democratise it even further. I do not care at all about how the art was made; I only care about its ability to convey the intent of the developer behind it.
I once attempted to make a game on my own due to being unable to find anything I personally thought was interesting - making the art and animation was one of the most time-consuming parts for me since it is not my speciality, and I eventually had to resort to using preexisting photos and assets which I put through a heavy dithering effect and intense colour-grading in order to shorten development time. It would have been so much easier if I had done so in an era where AI tools were available to me. There's a shit ton of games made by inexperienced/time-poor developers with interesting ideas but where the stock assets are very visible; perhaps the existence of generative AI will reduce their incidence and encourage further creation.
I'm not too concerned about being drowned in low quality games; if one would prefer to avoid encountering slop entirely, there are many mechanisms that facilitate content curation and their importance and prominence will only increase as time goes on. It's not as if people are being forced to scroll through every shitty game that's been spewed out by an unknown developer in order to find something they like, that's a caricature that doesn't reflect the reality of how most people discover content; they typically find games through curation mechanisms like forums, review sites or recommendations by friends. Pointing to all the low quality content and wringing one's hands about the unimaginable horrors of All The Slop falls flat to me, since even in an overcrowded environment you can still effectively limit the scope of your search to a subset of media that's most likely to appeal to you.
Sure, and the reason why AI generation in specific is a unique violation of the social ritual is because of an innate, knee-jerk ick people get with AI that they don't with most anything else. It's not down to some evaluation of output quality or even effort invested. There's a distinct reason why the "moat" has been arbitrarily established here and at no other point.
problem_redditor
2d ago
the distinction I'm making is between repurposing existing art (signing a premade card) and outsourcing it to a computer (someone else signs the card for you). I don't think these are directly analagous.
I would agree signing a premade card and someone else signing the card for you is not the same, and that the former is preferable. I don't believe this analogy, however, is appropriate for the situation of repurposing existing art vs outsourcing it to a computer.
In the former case, there is more effort involved in signing the card than there is in getting somebody else to sign it for you, and in addition signing a card yourself is indeed more personalised and you have more control over the output. In the latter case involving AI, it's not clear there is more effort invested when one takes preexisting art as opposed to prompt engineering so a generative model can spit out the correct output, and it's also not clear that the person taking preexisting art has exercised more personal control over the output than the AI-user. If anything, it's the opposite since the AI artist has a more fine-tuned set of controls over the output.
It’s like the difference sending a thoughtful thank you note and signing a card and having someone else sign the card for you.
I don't think that's an adequate comparison - in a context where people often straight-up use preexisting art for album covers, it's more like the difference between copying a stock message from the internet for a thank-you card and having someone else compose the message for you. I don't think it requires autism to believe they're both pretty much equivalent.
Don't have time to write a long post on it now, but interestingly enough there's a lot of legal scholarly analysis on the topic suggesting that generative AI by itself probably would be considered transformative use as per the current state of copyright law.
However, this is a cover for an artist's album, not someone claiming to be a graphic artist, and given that artists often downright steal shit for their album covers - this one painting is the cover to more than 60 different metal bands' albums - it's not the perceived lack of effort involved here that has generated the apoplectic reaction. Furthermore, in music circles where obvious sampling is de facto considered par for the course and a valid form of expression (even when it toes close to outright plagiarism in a way that almost all AI art does not), the usage of AI is still frowned upon hugely.
The idea that generative models might be able to Chinese Room their way into producing artistic output seems to existentially disturb and enrage people, and it's quite clear that people are not evaluating this in a nuanced or remotely objective way by making evaluations that the output has been arrived at through low-effort means. People are run by vibes and this is no exception.
Tell me honestly: Am I boned?
I've worked in a small Australian tax accounting firm for 1.5 years. Every single time I ask for feedback on my performance people state that my work quality is very good and that I'm responsible; I was recently given one of the most complex jobs in the firm and I had my manager state in my last one-on-one review that she was impressed I was able to complete it with relatively few review points. In spite of this, I always get a score of 3 (meets expectations) when I'm being rated.
In addition, I often blow internal budgeted time on clients. For context I am badly, chronically burned out and have a tendency to collapse after every workday - it was particularly bad in Nov-Dec24 when a family member died, and the excess of writeoffs from this period has resulted in me getting a job review on a specific client to which I booked most of my billable time. I am not looking forward to that review. Lately I also find management being a little colder to me and I'm not sure if that's because we're nearing the busy season or if they actually have an issue but aren't willing to say anything. Everything about this feels so disconcertingly fake and I'd prefer people be direct with me; I would not like to get fired without much prior foreshadowing.
The final aspect that makes me paranoid is that they're introducing a new staff member tomorrow. I've been killing myself with anxiety for the past month or so and I can't really tell if there's something to this, or if I'm just psyching myself out.
I think this is what you're looking for, and no it's not Jonathan Haidt's work. Here's a prior summary I wrote of the findings while TheMotte was still on Reddit: "It used data from voter registration data for faculty members to determine the Democrat to Republican (D:R) ratio of an array of social science fields, namely economics, history, communications, law and psychology. Out of a sample of 7,243 professors, 2,120 were not registered, 1,145 were not affiliated, 3,623 were Democrat, and only 314 were Republican. That's a D:R ratio of 11.5:1. Of the five fields, economics was the most mixed, with a D:R ratio of 4.5:1 (which fits pretty well with my perception of economics). History was by far the most skewed, with a whopping D:R ratio of 33.5:1." Note 60% of history and journalism departments, 45% of psychology departments, and 20% of economics departments have not even a single registered Republican in them. Granted there were a significant portion of people that were not registered as either Democrat or Republican and it's not beyond the realm of possibility there are some hidden conservatives in there, but still a failure to find even one registered Republican professor in such a large percentage of departments is really bad and rather shocking.
There is, however, also a paper Haidt participated in that reviewed a lot of evidence of bias against conservatives in academia (specifically social psychology) though. The rundown of the findings is basically that in social psychology 82% of people identify as leftist, 9% are moderate, and only 6% are conservative. Only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives; 82% admit they would be at least a little bit biased against a conservative candidate. This is only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher.
I've been mooching around Sydney as of late trying to find some lesser-known historic heritage sites in the city that are nonetheless impressive. So, nothing obvious like the Queen Victoria Building, St. Mary's Cathedral and so on. Two of the historic buildings I visited recently surprised me.
1: Yiu Ming Temple. This is a traditional village temple in Alexandria built by settlers from Guangdong circa 1908. It's rather surprising to me that this even exists in Sydney; what makes it even more surreal is that the temple's hidden behind a large brick wall and a row of shops. So it's isolated in a small cranny blocked off from the rest of the city, and stepping past the gate into that weird little back street feels like entering a little pocket of Asia. It even smells exactly like Asia (probably due to all the incense being burned). Highly trippy visit, actually. I've heard there's an even older one that dates back to the 19th century in Glebe, I may pay that temple a visit sometime.
2: The Cathedral of the Annunciation of Our Lady. I visited this one today. It was initially built from 1848-1855 in Redfern as an Anglican place of worship, but was later sold to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and reconsecrated as a Greek Orthodox church. It's really unassuming on the outside and seems like your typical brick church, but the interior is jaw-dropping. Rows of chandeliers hang from the ceiling, the altar is adorned with an insane amount of golden finery and the ceiling is covered in frescoes. It doesn't seem to be well known - it was completely empty when I visited, yet it's probably one of my favourite historic sites I've visited in Sydney and in my estimation it's even comparable to many churches in Europe in its architectural beauty.
Here are photos of each of the sites (I know the resolution isn't always fantastic, my phone is a potato, deal with it).
The anecdotes aren’t necessarily something you should rely on, and it’s a mistake to draw your conclusions on that basis alone. Men are harassed more across the board, but the methods through which one would seek to piss off the sexes differ. Women aren’t usually targeted just for being women, but bringing up their femaleness is a sure-fire way to set women off (especially in gaming where they are fairly uncommon), and so it gets used sometimes as a vector of attack when the target is female. But you can’t conflate that with “women are targeted for being women”. Who woulda thunk it, being touchy about your identity group also means it can be used by people to attack you for any reason.
I've found that the belief that “women are targeted for being women” is usually not soluble to any kind of argument, evidence or really anything at all. It's a Truth that supersedes reasoning, acquired almost entirely from a mix of personal biases + social osmosis (which is a self-reinforcing collective phenomenon arising from many examples of individual bias). Look how the discourse around street violence has proceeded with the presumption of women-as-most-at-risk when nothing could be further from the truth. Women are always justified in their endless self-victimisation, even when they are not, and for some reason no one ever sees anything wrong when they insert themselves into majority male spaces and demand the entire culture change to fit them because it makes them feel unsafe. This is the kind of thing that makes me firmly in favour of enforced male spaces, ideally with strict "no girls allowed" policies or alternatively severe gatekeeping based on unambiguously masculine standards of behaviour - every space that attracts a significant amount of women always gets hectored and lectured and eventually adapts to cater to their level of comfort.
It's also my observation that women don’t get more abuse than anyone else when they play games. They don’t get more harassed than men on the internet in general either (if anything it is the opposite), and this finding has been replicated when looking across the board, even in samples which are most likely to attract online criticism like politicians and journalists too. And men don't just experience relatively harmless acts - serious online abuse is also more likely to be directed at men by the way. But people are much more sensitive to harsh comments and threats directed at women than they are when directed at men, who are generally expected to be able to take it and/or dish back; we have no such expectation that women do so.
"Online harassment" in general is one of these very many areas wherein women actually receive preferential treatment but the popular consensus somehow seems to believe it's the opposite based on what people find emotionally salient. Women really dislike being in male spaces wherein they will sometimes be treated like men (bullying and threats will be slightly adapted based on gender to optimise for mental damage regardless of who they are insulting, but the phenomenon isn't distinct), and many men take offence on behalf of female dignity when women are treated like men too. And as soon as any large number of women enter a space, the norms quickly adapt to cater to feminine sensibilities. I've seen these attempts at social enforcement in real-time, too - I was once in a close-knit private server populated almost entirely by men, and the only woman in there was a girlfriend of one of the men who would routinely storm out of calls in response to any off-colour joke (as an aside they later broke up and she started dating one of his friends in the server immediately after, which spelled the end of the whole thing).
EDIT: added an extra sentence. I will also leave this very angry, drunk-narrated two part video here. Part 1, and part 2. Bit vitriolic, but I agree with it.
As I understand it, in the West that practice is primarily concentrated in the American South, isn’t it? The general concept exists in multiple places, but my impression is that in many of these areas it’s not exactly accepted across the board - many people think it’s weird, and it’s certainly not entrenched enough for fruit vendors to serve a packet of salt, let alone shichimi, alongside it (maybe in Japan they do). There’s a real difference in acceptability and uptake.
@srf0638, @self_made_human, point taken on Mexico and India; I’ve never travelled to either of these countries so I don’t have much context for their culinary preferences (though I am considering visiting the latter someday; Kailasa Temple alone would justify the entire trip).
Thanks, really enjoyed your trip reports on China as well. There's gonna be many more of these in the future as I travel.
I didn't take any notes as I went, I wrote the entire thing after the fact. It was just rather memorable. Going from swimming under a subterranean waterfall to having cookies and tea with the grandson of a feudal mandarin within the span of a few days was insane and felt like a weird fever dream.
problem_redditor
1mo ago
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Agreed, buying it for yourself as a 40-year-old adult is infinitely more based.
problem_redditor
1mo ago
I definitely wouldn't say they deserve to be constantly browbeaten and driven into self-hatred, and it's true they have issued official apologies over the years. I'm not the largest fan of inherited guilt myself, and wouldn't want to subject the Japanese to that. But it would kind of help their perceptions of sincerity if they didn't enshrine the Martyrs of Showa in Yasukuni Shrine, and if multiple heads of state and government officials didn't ceremonially visit it (granted, visitation is spotty, certain Japanese PMs have made efforts to distance themselves from it).
Consider if Germany had maintained an official shrine in which Nazi war-criminals were worshipped, and if large groups of members of the Bundestag had visited that shrine over the years. Would people have believed the original official apology to have been sincere under those circumstances? I'm aware the PM has no say in who the shrine venerates due to the separation of church and state in Japan, but when they're torn between their sense of nationalism vs. wanting to distance themselves from their actions in WW2, they're likely to select the former.
I dunno, I actually have a very high regard for Koreans and their mindset. This is just an anecdote but I did visit South Korea a while back and left with a very positive opinion of the people there - in fact they're the loveliest people I've ever met in any country, the hospitality they showed us travellers was just overwhelming. So many of the locals there actually went out of their way to help us and make our experience better, I wasn't expecting it at all. They weren't too hung up on social propriety like the Japanese sometimes are and they didn't help in a way where they were just politely showing service to foreigners, they did so as if they actually wanted to make sure we were safe and comfortable. It may well be my fondest travel experience, and part of the reason why is that it just felt so genuinely welcoming.
Regarding the Japanese and their "belief in Japan", I'm not exactly sure this is a positive - I get the sense they do so by ignoring all the warts and all in their own country out of a sense of nationalism, somewhat similar to how Chinese nationalists do so. This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany. Koreans seem to be more self-critical and this is reflected in their media, but I think in some ways this is a good thing.
The key difference being that a lot of these #girlboss movies include lines like that essentially as fanservice for the audience and the creators don't really mean it
Not entirely sure that's the case, really. In general, I think the percentage of ideologues in Hollywood is higher than people think it is, and that these pieces of "fanservice" for the audience are actually the stated beliefs of many of those involved (see: the clip of the Disney executive producer effectively stating she had a not-so secret gay agenda which she inserted into films wherever she could). The ratio of true believers to cynical grifters is probably much higher than is usually acknowledged, especially once taking into account the fact that truly believing something is a great way to gain the corresponding benefits of that belief system without bearing the costs of deception. Even when they conduct fanservice, they are basing it on what they would personally want to see.
Whereas The Room is such a painfully honest, unvarnished expression of its creator's worldview and wish-fulfilment fantasy - it seems reasonable to conclude that the worldview the movie espouses is literally that of its creator.
That's odd because I view The Room as a bit of a nonsensical Rorschach test of a film where you could pick out any number of statements to prove any number of things. There are a number of scenes which try to model differing worldviews, I think, and there are even some hackneyed attempts to try and deepen Lisa's character a bit (e.g. introducing her mother Claudette, who pressures Lisa to stay in a relationship for money against her stated wishes, causing the affair in the first place). Wiseau is not very good at trying to represent these other perspectives, but the point he wanted to convey is also incoherent enough that it's difficult to tease out exactly what it is. Pretty much the only larger-scale point I can glean from the entire thing is that Tommy Wiseau is amazing and he should never have been betrayed, and if he had killed himself that would have truly shown Lisa/the actual real-life girlfriend she represents.
It feels a little voyeuristic, honestly. Like watching someone have a low-level mental breakdown over the deterioration of their relationship.
With regards to The Room itself: Lisa is such a uniquely selfish, manipulative and conniving character with no redeeming traits to speak of, who is pointlessly cruel and vicious to everyone around her just for her own amusement.
In general this is true of the majority of badly written films with badly written antagonists. I'm less convinced Lisa in specific is meant to be a stand-in for women and more an aggressive subtweet of an ex-girlfriend. "According to Sestero, the character of Lisa is based on a former lover of Wiseau's to whom he intended to propose marriage with a US$1,500 diamond engagement ring, but because she "betray[ed] him multiple times", their relationship ended in a break-up."
Coupled with Tommy Wiseau's self-insert character laughing uproariously when his friend tells him a story about an unfaithful woman he knew who got beaten up by her boyfriend so badly that she was hospitalised
See above; this is not surprising given the context of who Lisa is meant to represent. Yes, the movie is self-pitying and half-autobiographical, but I'm not so sure it's supposed to be an expression of hatred for all women.
The other quote you linked seems to be a... not abnormal thing to think after being screwed over during dating and relationships, so I'm not surprised one would put it in a script. In a similar vein many films have "I'm done with men, they're rapacious bastards"-style quotes by female characters who you are supposed to sympathise with, so I suppose I can say that if you contextualise those as making the films inherently anti-male, I suppose you're consistent.
those elements were just the icing on the cake of its nonsensical plot, illogical characters, bizarre dialogue and its creator's misogynistic, narcissistic worldview
I see this crop up every now and then in discussions about the film, and this evaluation of The Room isn't particularly coherent unless you consider virtually all movies that depict women behaving badly and doing things like "lying to hurt people" as misogynistic. Yes, Lisa is obviously the antagonist and is portrayed in a bad light, having an irredeemable female villain isn't enough to declare a film as advocating hatred of women. Is Gone Girl misogynistic? In addition, many films involve a female protagonist taking revenge on the man/men who victimised her (The Invisible Man, I Spit On Your Grave, etc, to name a few); people seem to have zero problems with those despite these films having far more negative portrayals of men than any kind of "problematic" female portrayal.
It's a terrible film, but its "misogyny" is not one of the reasons why.
What are your favourite art hoaxes?
Pierre Brassau was the pseudonym of a chimpanzee called "Peter" whose art was exhibited and shown to critics, as an experiment by the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson to see whether critics could tell the difference between avant-garde modern art and the scrawling of a chimpanzee. He convinced Peter's caretaker to let him play with oil paints and a brush, and included the paintings he considered the most worthy in an exhibition. The reviews were extremely positive - one went so far as to state "Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." Here is one of Peter's paintings, and here is a painting from the Bacchus series by Cy Twombly. I have to say, I, too, prefer the chimpanzee.
Then there's Disumbrationism. It was an entire fictionalised art movement created by one man - Paul Jordan Smith. Annoyed with the fact that his wife's realistic still-life paintings were panned by critics as being "of the old style" when she showed them in a local exhibition, he decided to make parody art under the pseudonym Pavel Jerdanowitch, and despite never having any art training or even having picked up a paintbrush in his life he "took up a defective canvas and in a few minutes splashed out the crude outlines of an asymmetrical savage holding up what was intended to be a star fish, but turned out a banana." The painting was initially called Yes We Have No Bananas, but he eventually entered it to an art exhibition under a new name Exaltation.
He ended up receiving a letter from an art journal praising the art and asking him for more information about himself, as well as an interpretation of the painting. So he invented a whole fucking backstory for Pavel Jerdanowitch (which culminated in him inventing the art style he called "Disumbrationism"), stated the painting was about "breaking the shackles of womanhood", and his name slowly became known. He was asked to exhibit the next year, and he painted another masterpiece: Aspiration. This was reproduced in the January 26, 1926 issue of Chicago's Art World, and art critics described it as a "delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality." Later he painted Adoration and Illumination, which were also highly praised. He wrote on the latter painting "It is midnight and the drunken man stumbles home, anticipating a storm from his indignant wife; he sees her eyes and the lightning of her wrath. It is conscience at work."
Eventually he broke the hoax to a news source, and the ruse became widely known.
The Gift by Ishmael Ensemble is a tune I've been enjoying lately. It almost sounds Thom Yorke-esque, like it could've been a track on the album In Rainbows.
Also I've been looking into East Asian classical music lately and some of it sounds incredibly alien and bizarre. Here are two examples: Korean ritual music and Vietnamese court music.
I'm not going to disagree with you. Thing is, labels such as "progressivism" and "social conservatism" are constantly-shifting categories that get defined in relation to the norm, and the agreed-on societal starting point for debate has shifted left to the point that the social conservatives of today are liberals driving the speed limit and the social conservatives of yore are just horrible alt-righter fascists. The conservatism that many espouse over here is no longer inside the Overton Window.
In most cases I definitely would not have enjoyed them as much, no. Even I would say it would likely have taken away from the product - I do agree with you that AI art for the most part isn't inspiring to me, and there's a lot of noticeable artifacting in AI generations. Used as is, it's very immersion-breaking.
However, I'm not so sure it's likely to stay that way, and even in its current incarnation I can see very many use-cases for it. As an example there are many highly pixelated/low fidelity/dithered indie games which rely on the style precisely because of its simplicity, and it's not that difficult to selectively crop and edit AI image outputs in such a way where it's not recognisable as AI. You're still going to need to do a lot of work to make it look good and fit within the game's intended aesthetic, for sure, but it cuts down on time significantly when you're comparing against doing it by hand. Producing novel textures for 3d models are yet another possible situation where it could be quite helpful, I imagine. Its output usually isn't good enough to just use verbatim, but it can help speed up the process of game development and that's where I think its true utility lies at the moment.
More options
Context Copy link