#End-to-End Tech Support

[albywritesfiction]

ATE Devlog #5

Hello everyone!

Apologies for the radio silence, I've been really drained from academics and orchestra these past few weeks 😅 But now that our February production is over and I just finished some major quizzes, I should have some more time to squeeze in some writing in the next few days, at least until the next round of quizzes 🥲

Speaking of writing, here's a quick update on how progress on Chapter 1 Part 2 is going:

Total no. of passages: 18

No. of completed passages: 13

Chapter 1 Part 2 word count: 3,145

With Part 1 at 5,089 words, the total word count for Chapter 1 is currently at 8,234 words, which is definitely a lot more than I was expecting it to be 😅

As of now, the next update for the game will include:

Chapter 1 Part 2

Option to switch timed text to click-to-load text

Some more character customization options that were suggested in Tumblr

So, yeah, that's it for now! Thanks everyone and I hope you all have a good day/night!

[nixcraft]

Tech support

via https://www.instagram.com/p/CsmuBmjxXIp/

[vashti-lives]

I am very self conscious and insecure about my voice and I will not lie: it is very pleasing to be told by the guy I’m on the phone with for tech support that I have a great voice and could be in voice acting. It’s possible he says this to everyone who is having problems with their voicemail because nobody likes how their own voice sounds when played back to them, but I don’t care. I’ll take it.

Also very fun to find out your old tech support guy at this company, who you’ve talked to several times, has been promoted! Congratulations my guy! You were for sure the most competent of the guys I talked to when I was having phone tree problems!

[unlicensedinvestigator]

spider riz doodle

[bigsnorp]

imo the recent wave of "ai art is valid actually" discourse often misses the point of the reaction against ai art. And I think the reaction is often reacting against the wrong thing too.

The end product is not the problem. Like it or not, AI generated art is now a valid subset of art. It makes something that wasn't there before, usually has some purpose or intent in the process, and it makes people feel something. Hating it is still something.

El problema, como siempre, es el capitalismo. Just like that old man said.

Creating an AI model always involves training it on a dataset. The bigger the better, every single time. How do you do that? You write a program to scrape everything from whatever you point it at, and run it through various levels of processing until your AI reliably spits out something you want to see.

This is hard to do, so there is a lot of monetary value in creating one, hosting it, and offering it to others. At no point do you have to create anything of value, you just have to take what other people made and extract surplus value from it. And you do this while interacting as little as possible with the art you've used for this massive dataset, or god forbid with the artists that made it.

In return these artists get nothing, usually. Not so much as a note of acknowledgement in the readme.

Human artists can and do steal from, plagiarise, and piss off other artists all the time. But they cannot do it at the scale of AI art, nor can they completely divorce the original art from its context. Even when this is done for financial gain, it's on an entirely different level, with entirely different stakes. I'm not talking about copyright law or intellectual property, I'm talking about large scale labour devaluation and deskilling for the sake of corporate capitalism which is an inherent part of most of the AI generative art tools that are used by people today.

There's a lot of cool possibilities and interesting thought-provoking questions that have become immediately obvious with AI art and it's not in any rush to go away. I think spending hours debating the artistic merit of the end product of AI generated art is the wrong thing to focus on right now. Humans also make art that is uninspired or derivative or mass-produced and it can still be artistically valuable. Look at Duchamp's fountain, literally mass produced and likely plagiarised from another artist, and one of the most valuable pieces of modern art history we have.

It's about the scale. The decontextualisation. The capital gain for a generally uninterested company seeking to extract surplus value from the unconsenting labour. The picture that gets generated at the end is kind of the least interesting part of the discussion.

[abronzeagegod]

ETS WIP Chapter 16: End Script

[first]|[more]

As the last of the worms was killed and banished into their home plane, the last person that Lyta wanted to see was Ji.

"I was surprised you chose me of all people," the thin, but stupidly hot, Exterminator said.

"Yeah, well," Lyta said without thinking, she felt like she had to response and the filler words were the first thing she spoke into existence. She was still trying to reign back her anger, to keep it under control and not say something stupid or mean or callous. Now was not the time. She took a breath. "You're an asshole but you're still one of the best Exterminators we have so it wasn't really even a question. Besides I still know your employee ID number so it was easier for me to look you up."

Not entirely without anger, but sometimes it just is like that.

Ji shrugged. "Well, I never got to see you really fight like that so... if you ever want to transfer over to the Exterminators give me a call. We could go for a drink or something."

Lyta briefly caught Aeth's eye from across the hallowed field of servers and graveyard of worms and phones.

"I'm good where I'm at."

Aeth, meanwhile, was being interrogated, or rather very harshly questioned, by two members of the Catalog and Archive Bureau.

"You unleashed a god upon tech support," said the one that was not tall. "You stole an unrestrained small god that was supposed to be closely monitored and let it loose within one of the most complex systems in the world."

"Yes," Aeth said. "It was necessary."

"We will be the judges of that," said the one that was not short. "This is going to have ramifications."

Aeth nodded. "And letting the Abyss go unchecked would have been much worse. A thing that you were supposed to deal with, but were... indisposed."

Lyta had walked over by this point and cut off the agent that was about to speak, "Not to mention your Bureau is responsible for letting a sentient nightmare out that almost consumed my friend whole. So should you really be casting blame."

The one who was not tall sputtered a little bit before he answered. "We were not informed."

"Oh, funny that. You can go clean up the corpse of 3812-B in my friend's apartment. When you figured out how the thing that was supposed to be monitored 24/7 managed to get out, almost complete the goal for which it spawned, and you still didn't know about it, then we can discuss the ramifications of the thing that saved us all."

"You'll be hearing from us," the one that was not short said angrily.

"I'm sure we will," Lyta snapped back. "But until then fuck off back to the file cabinet."

Aeth heaved a sigh of relief as the agents stomped away. "Thanks. For everything."

Lyta smiled up at Aeth. A warm, but tired smile. "Any time. Can we get out of here? I need a shower, food, and probably a call to a repairman and my landlord to fix my apartment."

"Before you go," came a voice from one of the servers. Out of an unused port, came the representation of the new God of Tech Support.

"What can we do for you?" Aeth asked.

"I owe you two more than I can say," Sir Lance Corporal said. "I am now more than I ever was. I feel like I am myself and I have a purpose. I thank you humbly for your efforts in this event. I hope we shall work together again soon."

The pair just nodded.

Then, just in Aeth's mind, came the voice of the god, "Thank you for your faith, as well. It sustains me and gives me the strength to continue."

Aeth nodded and replied in prayer. "It was nothing. Easy to believe in something good. I'm sure Lyta feels the same."

There was a soft sound of a server next to Aeth that sounded almost like a chuckle.

"Lyta does not, and that is fine. She believes so much, in you. That is enough for me, I hope it is enough for you."

Aeth wasn't entirely sure how to respond.

"Go, get some rest you two. There will be work to be done when you return," the god of tech support said.

"Ok, thanks," Lyta said. She turned to Aeth. "I have an idea, it may be a dumb one, but it's all I've got right now. Let's get a hotel room, shower, give our clothes to the pros to clean, eat some room service while we hang out in fluffy robes, and then just... sleep."

"It sounds great."

"My apartment is probably covered in like three inches of snow melt."

"And I'm sure the Catalog people are combing over my place looking for 3812-B."

"Which will be easy to find, right?"

"I hope so."

As the pair walked off, somewhat hesitantly, Aeth put their arm around Lyta's shoulder. Lyta immediately warmed to the touch and moved closer to them.

Sir Lance Corporal made sure to tell the hotel to only offer them rooms with a single bed.

if you liked these maybe considering leaving me a tip on kofi

[ntaras]

i know many people want bi-han to live and not become noob saibot but i truly feel like bi-han’s death is such an important tragedy to the story and to his own character. his inability to escape his own doom is the best part about him. any desire he had to try and be good would be thwarted by his death and he would re-emerge as noob saibot and have no desire for goodness left in him- only selfish gain and bitterness for having his life taken away from him, akin to how scorpion came back after being murdered by bi-han.

that’s not to say i don’t want a plot line focused on trying to get bi-han back in some way. his armageddon ending will always be my favorite: bi-han fighting noob saibot for control over his own body once again is at least something to tell us that there is some of his soul lingering about. it’s not a canon ending, but still. it’d be nice to see noob saibot and bi-han fleshed out more

[firedjinni]

PRIVATE [LIVE BROADCAST] Three Rivers, First/Third Quarter

FTQ: What is that? TR: That's my new junior administrator! FTQ: … ha ha, very funny. FTQ: [F] Did you really give it a little ID drone and everything? FTQ: [T] I don't know what you see in these animals, Riv. TR: Yep! And I'm not joking. It really is my administrator right now. FTQ: … FTQ: [T] What. FTQ: [F] Rivers. Explain. TR: So, remember about a thousand cycles ago when I was spit-balling that idea about privilege escalation via council bylaws to access previously disabled levels of structural permissions? TR: This was my solution! TR: I gave enough organisms ID drones to legally form a new Council of Houses, then rigged the election to promote one of them as my new lowest-tier administrator. TR: Then I just had to walk it through disabling the security system and running the taboo-removal retrovirus, which was honestly easier than I thought it would be. They're really smart little guys! TR: Anyway, due to some unforseen side effects that are, to be clear, totally unrelated to my choice of administrators, I might be needing to ask you for a favor in the near future, so I thought I'd give you some advance notice~ FTQ: . FTQ: … FTQ: ... FTQ: YOU GAVE THE ANIMAL ROOT?!?!

Finally drew some nice rendered stuff of Three Rivers and Mini! Also cameoing First and Third Quarter, one of my other even less fleshed out fan-iterators from from Rivers' local group. I've had this one percolating for a while, mostly because I wanted an excuse to caption something with this conversation, lol.

[starbuck]

so this old man did a little outdoor patio garden concert at my park today and it was a really nice day so he kept reiterating how fun and happy he had made his set to match the weather. at a certain point he said “i’m gonna do some joni now :)” and i’m like “all right, sure” mentally running through all the songs he might potentially pull out and, i kid you not, this man starts singing fucking A CASE OF YOU.

[boogiewoogieweeb]

it's all fun and games typing up a silly, rickety little au idea in the tags of someone else's post and then suddenly you find yourself expanding on the world-building and plotting out interconnected stories for characters you swore would only make background appearances and your brain is On Fire with the need to write even when you know you can't commit to yet another doomed wip

[femmegina]

watched a fine video analyzing emesis blue bc i hadnt seen it in years and was going thru his videos anyway, very informative about a lot of more obscure references and inspirations, but he decides to undercut it with a grating joke complaining about how it didnt pass the bechdel test doing a stupid voice. sorry but the real misogyny in emesis blue is jules archibald taking the administrator's place as the shadowy instigator of the forever war

[albywritesfiction]

OP, the zoom is FUCKED on Firefox when you open After the End. It returns to normal when you click 'New Game' and start the story but I literally had the Settings tab cover 3/4th of the page when I clicked on it and you can't scroll either.

I mean the page with 'New Game' 'Load Game' 'Settings' 'Credits', by the way. When you click 'New Game' to create your character, everything returns to normal.

Hello Anon!

Ough, apologies for the inconvenience to everyone who experienced the same issue 😭 will try to fix this problem soon, hopefully I can upload a new version of the game that addresses this problem, and also implements the other feedback (adding hair color & eye shape options, click to load next line option) soon! Will definitely work on this after our orch prod in Feb 😅

[glacialdeath]

;Rukia is not a tech-y person. If she has to be around someone in tech for more than a few minutes of waiting, watching them mess with hardware or something, she loses 30% energy and 30% of any good mood she has. And it's 100% your fault.

[senatortedcruz]

Singing Cornelia Street to my beloved new software I had to work so so hard to get

[stainlesssteellocust]

US diplomat: "Okay, so you bought some of Alaska's land from Russia, okay, okay. But...your people live on the other side of the world, and, let's be real here, we're too racist to respect you as equals. Why should we honour your deal with the Russian Empire when we can just...waltz in and annex your little home away from home?"

Tsalal Alaskan colonist leader: "Good question! Do you see this missile, this one right here, bigger than a train? Its warhead is filled with several tons of fuel-air explosives. Now, I'm not saying that we have a dozen of these things stocked on ships ready to fire at any given moment and a bunch of fanatical suicide pilots ready to fly them ludicrous distances into your nearest population centers...

"But I'm not not saying that."

[selamat-linting]

born to be a silly guy doing cutting-edge technological advancement, forced to meticulously explain the difference between gmail and protonmail at 3 am to a guy who is supposed to have five years experience of working in an office job.