optimistic nihilism @werothegreat - Tumblr Blog

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depsidase

werothegreat

Ms. Kosinski, have you ever heard the term "Watergate"?

happy pride everyone

#bears #pride #lgbt #gay #bdsm #disney #Youtube

s10127470

Since it's Pixar's 40th anniversary (which I didn't even know about until just a few weeks ago), I've been thinking about what it would be like if @werothegreat ever did an analysis series on its films just like what he's doing with the films of the Disney Animated Canon.

Specifically with what titles they would get.

As they usually either relate to the main theme of the film, or an aspect of it.

This is what I came up with.

-Toy Story: What is Friendship?

-A Bug's Life: What is Community?

-Toy Story 2: What is Legacy?

-Monsters, Inc.: Why Should We Use Alternative Means?

-Finding Nemo: What Does It Mean to Be a Parent?

-The Incredibles: What is Identity?

-Cars: Why Should We Make Connections?

-Ratatouille: What is Art?

-Wall-E: What Does It Mean to Live?

-Up: Why Should We Move On?

-Toy Story 3: Should We Let Go?

-Cars 2: How Does One Be A Spy?

-Brave: What are Parental Bonds?

-Monsters University: How Do We Deal with Failure? (or Why Do We Retcon?)

-Inside Out: Why Do Emotions Matter?

-The Good Dinosaur: Why Do We Do Alternate History? (or What is Wasted Potential?)

-Finding Dory: Why Should We Look to Our Past?

-Cars 3: When Should We Pass the Torch?

-Coco: Why Should We Remember Our Family?

-Incredibles 2: What are Gender Roles (or Do We Need Heroes?)

-Toy Story 4: What is One's Purpose?

-Onward: What is Brotherhood?

-Soul: Should We Always Strive for Greatness in Life?

-Luca: Why is Acceptance Important?

-Turning Red: How Do We Deal with Puberty?

-Lightyear: Why Does Andy Have Bad Taste? (or Why Does Pixar Hate Buzz Lightyear of Star Command?)

-Elemental: What is Interracial Love?

-Inside Out 2: How Do We Deal with Adolescence?

-Elio: Where Do We Belong?

-Hoppers: Why Should We Care About Nature?

werothegreat

hoo boy if I ever do Pixar I have Plans for A Bug's Life and The Incredibles

(also I already did "Where Do We Belong" for Tarzan fyi)

what-even-is-thiss

You know the Paul brothers were so controversial around 2016-2017 that I get nostalgic once in a while and decide to see what they’re up to lately. And the answer is almost always that they’re doing some kind of elaborate scam.

what-even-is-thiss

Logan Paul is trying to make like graded mint condition manga a thing I guess. Which is stupid because once it’s encased in the protective plastic it’s just a brick. You can’t read that. Anyone who knows the purpose of books thinks that this is stupid but you just know that some scalper with money and zero brain cells is buying up every worthless shonen jump he can find right now

werothegreat

it's the same deal with cards from TCGs. that is a toy you're supposed to play with. you can't play with that toy if it's in a brick. release it from the brick. play with it. money is a social construct, play with your shiny toy, experience joy for the first time in your adult life

theconcealedweapon

The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.

rostekhorn

Yet another reason this is insanely revisionist is that it pretends the whole reason millennials felt so much pressure to go to college wasn't that conservative politicians had spent the eighties and nineties wrecking the shit out of labor unions to the point that by the time millennials turned eighteen, it was suddenly a lot harder to count on being able to work at a working-class job all your life and still have a good living.

College, all of a sudden, went from "something I'd like to do if I can get in" to "a lifeline in an economy where blue collar jobs are going to shit."

The wheel's turned long enough that now college students are being treated the way union workers and union-adjacent workers were treated in the eighties and nineties, so now college grads are the ones that it's fashionable to shit on, and the new fix-all solution is supposed to be "go into the trades!" Which means that by the 2050s at the latest, we'll be coming up with some new lie to blame people in the trades for the fact that now they're in trouble. And we'll have some new job that everyone should have been doing instead.

werothegreat

i think we might need to eat the rich

libraford

Religious opposition to Pride betrays the truth of how that person approaches religion.

werothegreat

or it betrays the truth that religion is hostile to queerness and maybe you should find something else to do with your Sundays

#this is mostly aimed at christianity #but it applies to most other religions

prokopetz

A thing about the lack of institutional continuity in indie video game development is that everybody is figuring everything out from first principles every single time, and if you've been around the block enough times you start to recognise common technical fuckups on sight. "Oh, this game's scrolling is all juddery because they anchored the camera directly to a physics object with no smoothing and their physics frame rate doesn't divide evenly into their screen frame rate – classic rookie mistake" sounds like it ought to be an unhinged thought to have, and yet.

werothegreat

so what you're saying is we need video game design apprenticeships

depsidase

sioltach

I love being an animal I love that everything I am can only be because I am a recycled material sculpture sourced from the random but beautiful bullshit of planet earth

sioltach

How it feels when it's my turn with the oxygen, carbon and hydrogen + other trace elements (arranged in such a way to be a terrestrial mammal)

werothegreat

you are made of dinosaur pee and poo

prokopetz

you've spoken at length about problems with D&D5e re: the disconnect between the game hasbro says that it is vs the game that it actually is, and have made it clear that such discussions aren't about the weaknesses of D&D5e itself as a game. I do suspect that you have some thoughts on that though, and I'd be interested to hear them. there are plenty of thinkpieces from others already, but I'd like to hear yours specifically, if you're interested.

A big part of the reason I don't talk a lot about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a system is because it's been my experience that, as indie RPG designers, there's a constant temptation to treat a game's culture of play as something which emerges purely from its published text. It'd be super convenient if that were the case: if the ultimate source of the problem is bad game design, then it can be fixed with better game design. In practice, this framing leads people to prattle on about how playing trad RPGs causes brain damage while overlooking the rather more obvious economic incentives for why D&D's culture of play is the way it is.

All that in mind, I tend to look at it the other way 'round: the main problems with D&D5E as a system stem from a shared set of circumstances with its culture of play. Hasbro wants to market 5E as a universal entry-level game, and to that end, they've given Wizards of the Coast a mandate to produce an "evergreen" D&D which appeals equally to fans of all past iterations of the game. This goal is of course both impossible and absurd, and the result is a game whose rules are put together based mostly on vibes, with greater weight given to whether any particular feature is deemed to reinforce D&D's brand identity than to how it actually operates in play, or to how it interacts with other features that have been included in the same fashion.

In the most extreme cases, this leads to a text which pretends to have features it does not in fact possess. For example, 5E wants to have the vibe of a game which cares deeply about logistical play, in order to attract players who like that sort of thing; however, it's also terrified of imposing entry barriers that might interfere with maximising the number of people playing D&D, so you end up with stuff like lengthy stats tables of functionally identical weapons, an economy that denominates prices of adventuring supplies to the hundredth of a gold piece and stops being relevant by level three if you're running the gameplay loop as written, and subsystems for carrying capacity and consumable resource tracking which ask you to do a lot of math for a mechanical impact so insubstantial that it doesn't materially affect said gameplay loop at all if you simply leave it out entirely.

Basically, it's a text that puts forth tremendous effort to obfuscate its own baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played, because it might hypothetically alienate someone who would otherwise have given Hasbro money if it ever expressed an opinion. I've talked in the past about how a lot of RPGs don't seem to understand how to engage in transparency about their own design goals, but Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is one of the very few games I've encountered that demonstrates it perfectly understands how to engage in design goal transparency by consciously doing the exact opposite.

werothegreat

gotta love the "vibe" of logistical play which is then utterly undermined by the spells Goodberry and Create Food and Water. who cares about rations, we gotta get to the next encounter, we're supposed to be getting in five a day so the Warlock feels like they matter

LLMs do not "believe" anything. they do not have sentience. they are algorithms. they are beefed-up auto-complete.

when you give a prompt to an LLM, whether that's a question, or an admonition, or a declaration of love, it spits out an answer based on the weights inside its neural network. it is producing an answer that gets it the most positive feedback. it cannot learn facts and integrate them into a knowledge base, it can only "learn" which answers give it negative or positive feedback and adjust the weights in its neural network.

LLMs do not "know" anything. stop anthropomorphizing these unconscious programs.

#ai #fuck ai