#seek wildbow

[blogishdaj]

Seek 0.1.0 spoilers

> guy with full arm tattoos

> thrown blind into a situation where he's in way in over his head

> dark, possibly traumatic, troublesome past

> surprisingly chill in the face of the horrors

> trusted people who betrayed him

> cannot look directly at the enemy

> amnesia and altered/false memories

> handyman-ish skills

> implied to have mad rizz

Close enough, welcome back Blake Thorburn

[estavionpira]

Reading Seek 0.2.b and it's somewhat concerning that A isn't anywhere in the list of people for Basil to listen to. AI that has control over your entire body and only does what you say because it's what your parents want.

[eddathegreat]

Oh this is gonna get fucky

[ewingstan]

Seek seems to have an interesting viewpoint on AI-generated art. It envisions a future where people don't really make art to be viewed and purchased by others, judging by A's conversation with Addy. And it does frame that as sad in some ways: Addy doesn't react with quite the level of joy we'd expect from receiving a drawing from her kid. A's dream of being a famous artist doesn't seem like it fits in this world.

And yet, it isn't just an "oh this is the death of art and human creativity" perspective. The first time we see this real-time made-for-you art, its a familiar instance of childhood play, with the Onboards adding details to a pretend shoot-out. The next, the movie with prompts input by A and Quinn, is an instance of kids collaborating to get a unique story, like kids asking for their parent's bedtime story to include pirates and moonmen. It seems like this world doesn't really respect specific, individual pieces of art as objects to be viewed and interacted with multiple times. There isn't a cultural context for "Great works" or the like. But such a view of art isn't necessarily what art's always been, and Seek doesn't view it as something we should expect to be in the future. Its world's ephemeral, machine-created art isn't framed as soulless; it's an interaction between tools and users for purely creative purposes between friends.

And yes, that itself is given a bit of melancholy. Wildbow seems to be setting up a theme that a post-scarcity, post-want life can start to feel meaningless. Even still, since machine-made art is often bemoaned as the ultimate corruption of art as commodity, its novel to see it positioned instead as unbridled play.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Despite our best efforts, few survived faster than light travel.  None survived the trip back.  So we took a different approach altogether.  We started bringing the universe to us. There’s no point.  We’ve solved it.  Everything humanity needs, it has.  We’ve reached the finish line. There’s no point.  What hasn’t changed in the last four hundred years won’t change in our lifetimes. There’s no point.  Turn off the lights, close your eyes, and cover your ears, nightmares come manifest. Three storylines from three individuals, worlds and eras apart.

-Wildbow introducing Seek

[ronthedunedain]

From twigdice (circa 2019), I guess Winnifred is our starting protagonist.

[radhamspiderexperiment]

friend and I made a seek bingo...

[sincerelynotserious]

An ai(?) called basilisk, surely this will not go awry

[fipindustries]

Here they are, our beloved new protagonists

[theaudientvoid]

Kids WB has done some interesting things with third person limited narration. Like seemingly slipping into omnicient perspective, only to reveal that the actual POV is the sentient cigarette that has been silently observing the scene. But Dai and Katie are the first time that I can recall where the narration has effectively treated two people as a single entity for POV purposes.

[blogishdaj]

I guess Seek is going to force me to learn how to draw mecha now 😩

[estavionpira]

Hey all! Check out my fanart of Winnifred from Seek!

[eddathegreat]

Seek's second chapter honestly blew my mind, and I have gone from hopeful to terribly excited about this story.

It's such a great choice to have a PoV character who is distinctly inhuman yet intrinsically tethered to a human perspective. I love Basil already.

The world also seems fascinating, a genuine utopia with such incredible freedom of experience and pleasure. Instead of depicting it as truly perfect and straining belief, it goes ahead and says yeah crime still exists and corporations hold a lot of sway, but hey this is still such an obvious improvement over real life. Gay rights, trans rights, universal basic income, you only need to work for luxury.

But there's just enough of a terrible undercurrent in the aimlessness and the excess to see plainly how in this paradise people could absolutely lose their minds.

[ewingstan]

My main thoughts on the Seek prologue is that if I’d just pulled it off a bookshelf without knowing anything about the author, I’d put it back on the shelf and look for something more interesting. That said, given what I know about this new story’s pitch, I’m gonna give it a bit more time to see if it grabs me.

The level of disconnect Orion/Pitch has from everything is largely what’s throwing me off, I think. It makes every description of a new weird thing slide off, like he’s just describing the walls of the superstructure. There’s something in the prose style that reminds me of Jeff Vandermeer, especially Strange Bird or Dead Astronauts. There’s a similar flood of descriptions for parts of a very alien setting, and a similar passiveness in the narrators’ descriptions that make it difficult to parse which parts we should care about.

That said, what was very Vandermeer-esque in a good way was the description of the FOX. Would love to see some fanart of that thing.

[thepariahcontinuum]

Thoughts on the first chapter of Seek?