#altered reality game

[not-in-the-library]

It’s a fake license

[keychanstudios]

Fashion meme-  welcome to fashion, welcome home

[malinaa]

if i think about the hunger games in peeta's perspective i WILL start sobbing

[tempo-tales]

Hey tempo what is your favorite board game

Tempo: Look! I'm even winning again!

[tetrachromate]

not enough people are talking about how anthology of the killer ends with bb and zz achieving (or at least attempting to achieve) gnosis

[elysiaskz]

🍎 (^_^♪)

ty for the ask!! 🫶

(answering for my skz dr)

🍎 : what are three songs that remind you of your dr and why?

I scripted this as one of my solo songs that I wrote about the members (#foundfamilymybeloved) because it reminded me so much of my dr from the very first time I listened to it :)

my Artist of the Month is a dance cover of this song, so every time I hear it I get so excited to film it cause I just KNOW I’m gonna cook 😋

this is another song from my solo discography in my dr, and literally every lyric is so insanely shifting coded so naturally I think of shifting when I listen to it :D

[itsahotminuteinbetween]

I think I saw Vibrant Eyes by CG5 in there? I choose that. As a former DSMPer. I also like cg5. He's one of the top artists I listen to the most if not #1.

don't (tell them what you've done)

'vibrant eyes' by cg5

truman show au playlist

[hrokkall]

> ENTRY #10

[hybbat]

You know a world where your ability to carry something is determined by quantity rather than size or weight is very easy to accept in a video game, because of mechanical convenience, but would probably be so strange in a story in any other medium, and I think a few more books and shows could stand to get a little funkier with the fundamentals of their reality like that.

[felixravinstills]

I know we all want the 4 hour cut of tbosas, but also what I would give to peek into the brain of my best friend and see whatever gestalt funhouse mirror version she has in her head, formulated from her memories of the original trilogy and what I’ve told her of tbosas

[rivilu]

see i'm not even opposed to the concept of canon/trickster Ellu surviving but the thing is in order for it to happen there would need to be a second vulnerable conversation regarding his side of things. where he couldn't lie his way out of it either. So basically he's fucked

[bonyato]

I just realized we didn't get Death Game this season either. i see .. Well that's okay *deflates like a balloon*

[zahai]

As someone who knows nothing about ai: the somnium files: what are your favorite things about ai: the somnium files? (the more you elaborate the better (<-said kicking my feet holding my head in my hands (i love hearing about people's favorire things)))

Oh my goodness me, a chance to ramble about one of my favorite games? How ever will I cope with such a situation??? I suppose... I must... Ramble!

And then I took that very literally and rambled a whole lot. I've put everything under a read more because this is just nonstop stream-of-consciousness and I'm mostly unapologetic. Enjoy!

Firstly, and really I do mean firstly, the ARG that launched with the game announcement! I've had a small interest in ARGs for the last ten or so years. Never anything relevant, weirdly enough (somehow I managed to completely dodge Gravity Falls until well after both its series AND post-series ARG had concluded), but having a new game by one of my favorite directors launch with him introducing us to his new virtual idol who he cared for deeply? Yeah I was hooked. A-Set, Uchikoshi's Virtual Star of the Internet, was a charmer. I found her annoying at first, but her weekly vlogs were a wonderful way to introduce us the players to some of the locations and cast members. There was also a twitter component where A-Set would interact with her in-world self-acclaimed Biggest Fan - Ota Matsushita - and real-world game director - Kotaro Uchikoshi - freely. I didn't and still don't have an account on that website, so I relied mostly on updates fed via discord bot for that.

This ARG was... Fascinating. I honestly highly recommend checking out, at the very least, A-Set's youtube channel. It barely scratches the surface of just how wacky things became (three additional characters eventually began participating in the ARG on twitter - Japanese A-Set, Japanese Ota Matsushita, and Japanese Kotaro Uchikoshi - only one of whom was really relevant in the end but they sure did make things confusing for a bit), but it covers more than enough to be intriguing on its own. And honestly? It made A-Set a more interesting character for me to consider on all of the routes I spent not hanging out with her.

Routes? That's right, this game has different endings! A handful of main endings, a couple of joke endings, a few bad ends scattered here and there. And it's pretty easy to figure out what route you're on because this game is.... A visual novel! Fully voice acted! Yeah I spent all that time up there rambling about an ARG that a majority of players didn't know about, didn't care about, or came too late to participate in, and only now am I actually going to tell you what kind of game Ai: The Somnium Files even is!

AITSF is a fully voice acted visual novel with multiple endings, starring not A-Set because she's too busy being a teenage internet idol, where you play as Horny Idiot Special Agent Kaname Date. The horny is important - trust me. Date's not alone out on the streets of Japan though, he's got a partner with him at all times who goes by the name of Aiba. I would say she's the brains to his foolishness, but we've all begun to realize the failings of AI and oh yeah! I should probably let you in on that little tidbit too, huh? Aiba, short for Ai-Ball, is an artificial intelligence housed inside of Date's left eye socket who has been his false eye and as his partner for the last five years. Sometimes she looks like a gelatinous hamster. I want. To hold her. So badly. So badly... ;-; I will never know the satisfaction of holding my own treasured eye in the palm of my hand, seeing myself reflected through an eye that is and is not my own, I will never feel her tiny little hamster feet trod across the palms of my hands as she lists off all the bugs she saw that day with her little cheers I will never be able to fail resisting the compulsion to put her in my mouth and swallow and thank everything for that because sometimes that gummy bear looks tasty even though she is literally the color of water and I wish I could tell you what it is but the best I can give you is a shrug and maybe a nickel.

So Date and his eye, Aiba, now that we finally have main characters for this game, are introduced to Problems almost faster than we are introduced to the characters themselves in-game. We've got a corpse on our hands (okay well actually it's in the saddle of a busted-down merry-go-round horse) and it's missing a left eye, and our Boss is looking none-too-pleased to be tromping around in the mud in her heels. From there, I'm sure you can imagine what Date's role is for the rest of this game. Find out who killed this woman, and figure out why everyone's so cagey about that case six years ago that this one is apparently so similar to.

We've got a job now, yay! How do we do it though, other than clicking on every single thing you can see on screen until every character runs out of dialogue, then panning the camera over six inches and repeating the process? There's also the generic "drive to X location" travel option, but neither dialogue decisions or travel choices impact how the story unfolds. That depends entirely on how you handle certain gameplay sections called Psyncs.

I hesitate on what to call psyncs other than what they are. It's not an interrogation, not in a traditional sense. Special Agent Kaname Date is a member of the Advanced Brain Investigation Squad of the Metropolitan Police Department. Members of ABIS use the psync machine to peer into the dreaming minds of people they're investigating in order to advance their investigations. Not great, but honestly probably one of the more ethical settings Uchikoshi has made up. I'm going to level with you - the insanely unethical bullshit that SHOULD NOT fly is most of the reason I come to Uchi games. They're fucking bizarre and there's NO way people signed off on it, and yet somehow????

During normal world investigation and interaction, Date takes the lead. He's got the bigger body of the Date-Aiba duo, and also the advantage of not being Some Annoying Blond Guy's Eye. Aiba will chime in whenever Date is too pervy, too annoying, or A BUG!!!! appears, and will also scatter in commentary to Date while he talks or looks about. During a Psync, this flips completely. Aiba's got herself a snazzy little Human Look, and everyone immediately dubbed her A Shrimp. A Shrimp Wife Who Has My Heart. I would die for her in any form. I love my hamster shrimp wife with glowing hair and a wig that I want to make some day I love her silly puns I lvoe her stupid faces I love how she teases I think it's so funny that she's decided to fuck with Date as part of her job I love how much she cares I lovve her I lvoe her so much she's everything and I would blow myself up for her no questions asked

sorry

anyways. Psyncing. Unethical, but fun! Aiba gets to explore and Date hangs back and plays the chatterbox role this time. For the most part. Aiba has six minutes to run around in whoever's brain, except not actually! Thanks to ABIS's tech guy, Pewter, time only passes normally while you're moving around. As long as you're standing still, time passes at a much, much slower rate. Psyncs are a dive into someone's dreams and psyche, so a wonderful way for a player to look at what makes a character tick. The choices you make in them decide how the story unwinds, and oh my goodness can it unwind. Before the game launched, back when all we had was the ARG's version of Ota (which actually is no different from how he is in game just so you know), I didn't like him. I didn't like him for my first several hours. I full-on sobbed at his ending because of just how HARD it went. And then I went to my next path thinking that surely this one wouldn't make me cry nearly as hard now that I'd gotten it all out early on the worst character, right?

I don't remember how many times I cried over this game and its characters. I'm tearing up now, just thinking of one of my favorite psyncs, one of my favorite somniums. and Now I'm realizing I never chained that final dot. Oops. You're Psynching into their Somnium. That's all. Sorry I forgot, I really didn't mean to. Anyways. The somniums get more and more complex the further in you get, and there were some that I replayed five or six times before I finally cracked them. They still feel good to go back and replay, actually! The complexity is just deep enough between wandering around investigating things, and figuring out how to wander around and investigate them again, but DIFFERENTLY. Because the choices you make set what path the investigation takes, with different paths revealing different clues.

Wonder what that's about.

I think I've just gone and summed up everything but the OST at this point instead of telling you what parts are my favorite. Truth be told? I love it all. Even the music. There's a lot of that, but I'm going to force myself to wrap this post up before the two hour mark even if it kills me and quite honestly there are a few tracks in there that have me tearing up just thinking about them. I'm also tireed of tearing up when I don't even have the game on.

I. I love the game's story. Not all of them, I don't really love any of the endings where Date winds up shot, but I love the big stories and the small. I love the depth and complexity to each individual ending, the way each one can hit differently once you've spent enough time turning them over, and the amount of care the charactters express through the game. They care about each other. Yes in found family no in found family say what you will but the connections between all the individual characters is just chef's kiss perfection. Every time I go back and replay aitsf I go down certain paths first because I care about their stories most. And I still cry.

If you read all this - holy shit. Thakls. I didn't make my deadline ): that's okay though, because I had fun. I'm gonna replay my game. I can't wait

BTW it's got a free demo and is available on pc, switch, ps4, and xboxone(I think? Idk how microsoft does their. naming)~

[perdidit-vulpes]

SITS UP

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en