#the liminality of the android

[romanfoster]

CSI Bot's last report... bye...

[greatsmartphonewallpaper]

Liminal Themed Smart Phone Wallpaper

[pepsimaxxing]

[sweetmouringlamb]

welcome to my blog.

hi, welcome. i like a bunch of stuff and i mainly just repost on here(maybe), thanks for reading.

[coastentity]

🔭☄️🌒✨>>traveler entity <unknown iteration>

[guglielmofinaue]

Hello!♡ I drew Thom Yorke👁️‍🗨️

It wasn't easy tbh, his facial features are so particular and unique but that also makes him very drawable to me!

I had to do it sooner or later also because he and Radiohead are a big source of inspiration for me, I love their music so much🩵

Idk what happened with the background, just know that is inspired by nervous system🩻

[astarofthevoid]

Decided to make a character based off of liminal space, then i found this image:

and began to come up with a concept. started talking to a friend and finished the concept for this character. this is CC they are an android who is connected to all the cameras within this mall but they also have free reign to walk around the mall as well.

You won't see them though unless you start walking into the back rooms of the mall the sections that only employees are allowed into. If you aren't recognized as an employee on their scanner, if you stepped into one of these rooms, likely when you turn around they'd be standing there silently, maybe you'd suddenly start hearing white noise maybe one of the other androids would be behind them soon.

[roxisucks]

i need men to stop fucking following me on here lmao.

your presence is beyond unnecessary.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The paradox of choice screens

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

It's official: the DOJ has won its case, and Google is a convicted monopolist. Over the next six months, we're gonna move into the "remedy" phase, where we figure out what the court is going to order Google to do to address its illegal monopoly power:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

That's just the beginning, of course. Even if the court orders some big, muscular remedies, we can expect Google to appeal (they've already said they would) and that could drag out the case for years. But that can be a feature, not a bug: a years-long appeal will see Google on its very best behavior, with massive, attendant culture changes inside the company. A Google that's fighting for its life in the appeals court isn't going to be the kind of company that promotes a guy whose strategy for increasing revenue is to make Google Search deliberately worse, so that you will have to do more searches (and see more ads) to get the info you're seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It's hard to overstate how much good stuff can emerge from a company that's mired itself in antitrust hell with extended appeals. In 1982, IBM wriggled off the antitrust hook after a 12-year fight that completely transformed the company's approach to business. After more than a decade of being micromanaged by lawyers who wanted to be sure that the company didn't screw up its appeal and anger antitrust enforcers, IBM's executives were totally transformed. When the company made its first PC, it decided to use commodity components (meaning anyone could build a similar PC by buying the same parts), and to buy its OS from an outside vendor called Micros-Soft (meaning competing PCs could use the same OS), and it turned a blind eye to the company that cloned the PC ROM, enabling companies like Dell, Compaq and Gateway to enter the market with "PC clones" that cost less and did more than the official IBM PC:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

The big question, of course, is whether the court will order Google to break up, say, by selling off Android, its ad-tech stack, and Chrome. That's a question I'll address on another day. For today, I want to think about how to de-monopolize browsers, the key portal to the internet. The world has two extremely dominant browsers, Safari and Chrome, and each of them are owned by an operating system vendor that pre-installs their own browser on their devices and pre-selects them as the default.

Defaults matter. That's a huge part of Judge Mehta's finding in the Google case, where the court saw evidence from Google's own internal research suggesting that people rarely change defaults, meaning that whatever the gadget does out of the box it will likely do forever. This puts a lie to Google's longstanding defense of its monopoly power: "choice is just a click away." Sure, it's just a click away – a click, you're pretty sure no one is ever going to make.

This means that any remedy to Google's browser dominance is going to involve a lot of wrangling about defaults. That's not a new wrangle, either. For many years, regulators and tech companies have tinkered with "choice screens" that were nominally designed to encourage users to try out different browsers and brake the inertia of the big two browsers that came bundled with OSes.

These choice screens have a mixed record. Google's 2019 Android setup choice screen for the European Mobile Application Distribution Agreement somehow managed to result in the vast majority of users sticking with Chrome. Microsoft had a similar experience in 2010 with BrowserChoice.eu, its response to the EU's 2000s-era antitrust action:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

Does this mean that choice screens don't work? Maybe. The idea of choice screens comes to us from the "choice architecture" world of "nudging," a technocratic pseudoscience that grew to prominence by offering the promise that regulators could make big changes without having to do any real regulating:

https://verfassungsblog.de/nudging-after-the-replication-crisis/

Nudge research is mired in the "replication crisis" (where foundational research findings turn out to be nonreplicable, due to bad research methodology, sloppy analysis, etc) and nudge researchers keep getting caught committing academic fraud:

https://www.ft.com/content/846cc7a5-12ee-4a44-830e-11ad00f224f9

When the first nudgers were caught committing fraud, more than a decade ago, they were assumed to be outliers in an otherwise honest and exciting field:

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real

Today, it's hard to find much to salvage from the field. To the extent the field is taken seriously today, it's often due to its critics repeating the claims of its boosters, a process Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

For example, the term "dark patterns" lumps together really sneaky tactics with blunt acts of fraud. When you click an "opt out of cookies" button and get a screen that says "Success!" but which has a tiny little "confirm" button on it that you have to click to actually opt out, that's not a "dark pattern," it's just a scam:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless

By ascribing widespread negative effects to subtle psychological manipulation ("dark patterns") rather than obvious and blatant fraud, we inadvertently elevate "nudging" to a real science, rather than a cult led by scammy fake scientists.

All this raises some empirical questions about choice screens: do they work (in the sense of getting people to break away from defaults), and if so, what's the best way to make them work?

This is an area with a pretty good literature, as it turns out, thanks in part due to some natural experiments, like when Russia forced Google to offer choice screens for Android in 2017, but didn't let Google design that screen. The Russian policy produced a significant switch away from Google's own apps to Russian versions, primarily made by Yandex:

https://cepr.org/publications/dp17779

In 2023, Mozilla Research published a detailed study in which 12,000 people from Germany, Spain and Poland set up simulated mobile and desktop devices with different kinds of choice screens, a project spurred on by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which is going to mandate choice screens starting this year:

https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/choicescreen/

I'm spending this week reviewing choice screen literature, and I've just read the Mozilla paper, which I found very interesting, albeit limited. The biggest limitation is that the researchers are getting users to simulate setting up a new device and then asking them how satisfied they are with the experience. That's certainly a question worth researching, but a far more important question is "How do users feel about the setup choices they made later, after living with them on the devices they use every day?" Unfortunately, that's a much more expensive and difficult question to answer, and beyond the scope of this paper.

With that limitation in mind, I'm going to break down the paper's findings here and draw some conclusions about what we should be looking for in any kind of choice screen remedy that comes out of the DOJ antitrust victory over Google.

The first thing note is that people report liking choice screens. When users get to choose their browsers, they expect to be happy with that choice; by contrast, users are skeptical that they'll like the default browser the vendor chose for them. Users don't consider choice screens to be burdensome, and adding a choice screen doesn't appreciably increase setup time.

There are some nuances to this. Users like choice screens during device setup but they don't like choice screens that pop up the first time they use a browser. That makes total sense: "choosing a browser" is colorably part of the "setting up your gadget" task. By contrast, the first time you open a browser on a new device, it's probably to get something else done (e.g. look up how to install a piece of software you used on your old device) and being interrupted with a choice screen at that moment is an unwelcome interruption. This is the psychology behind those obnoxious cookie-consent pop-ups that website bombard you with when you first visit them: you've clicked to that website because you need something it has, and being stuck with a privacy opt-out screen at that moment is predictably frustrating (which is why companies do it, and also why the DMA is going to punish companies that do).

The researchers experimented with different kinds of choice screens, varying the number of browsers on offer and the amount of information given on each. Again, users report that they prefer more choices and more information, and indeed, more choice and more info is correlated with choosing indie, non-default browsers, but this effect size is small (<10%), and no matter what kind of choice screen users get, most of them come away from the experience without absorbing any knowledge about indie browsers.

The order in which browsers are presented has a much larger effect than how many browsers or how much detail is present. People say they want lots of choices, but they usually choose one of the first four options. That said, users who get choice screens say it changes which browser they'd choose as a default.

Some of these contradictions appear to stem from users' fuzziness on what "default browser" means. For an OS vendor, "default browser" is the browser that pops up when you click a link in an email or social media. For most users, "default browser" means "the browser pinned to my home screen."

Where does all this leave us? I think it cashes out to this: choice screens will probably make a appreciable, but not massive, difference in browser dominance. They're cheap to implement, have no major downsides, and are easy to monitor. Choice screens might be needed to address Chrome's dominance even if the court orders Google to break off Chrome and stand it up as a separate business (we don't want any browser monopolies, even if they're not owned by a search monopolist!). So yeah, we should probably make a lot of noise to the effect that the court should order a choice screen, as part of a remedy.

That choice screen should be presented during device setup, with the choices presented in random order – with this caveat: Chrome should never appear in the top four choices.

All of that would help address the browser duopoly, even if it doesn't solve it. I would love to see more market-share for Firefox, which is the browser I've used every day for more than a decade, on my laptop and my phone. Of course, Mozilla has a role to play here. The company says it's going to refocus on browser quality, at the expense of the various side-hustles it's tried, which have ranged from uninteresting to catastrophically flawed:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91167564/mozilla-wants-you-to-love-firefox-again

For example, there was the tool to automatically remove your information from scummy data brokers, that they outsourced to a scummy data-broker:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership

And there's the "Privacy Preserving Attribution" tracking system that helps advertisers target you with surveillance advertising (in a way that's less invasive than existing techniques). Mozilla rolled this into Firefox on an opt out basis, and made opting out absurdly complicated, suggesting that it knew that it was imposing something on its users that they wouldn't freely choose:

https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/

They've been committing these kinds of unforced errors for more than a decade, seeking some kind of balance between monopolistic web companies and its users' desire to have a browser that protects them from invasive and unfair practices:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-closed-source-drm-video-browser-cory-doctorow

These compromises represent the fallacy that Mozilla's future depends on keeping bullying entertainment companies and Big Tech happy, so it can go on serving its users. At the same time, these compromises have alienated Mozilla's core users, the technical people who were its fiercest evangelists. Those core users are the authority on technical questions for the normies in their life, and they know exactly how cursed it is for Moz to be making these awful compromises.

Moz has hemorrhaged users over the past decade, meaning they have even less leverage over the corporations demanding that they make more compromises. This sets up a doom loop: make a bad compromise, lose users, become more vulnerable to demands for even worse compromises. "This capitulation puts us in a great position to make a stand in some hypothetical future where we don't instantly capitulate again" is a pretty unconvincing proposition.

After the past decade's heartbreaks, seeing Moz under new leadership makes me cautiously hopeful. Like I say, I am dependent on Firefox and want an independent, principled browser vendor that sees their role as producing a "user agent" that is faithful to its users' interests above all else:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Of course, Moz depends on Google's payment for default search placement for 90% of its revenue. If Google can't pay for this in the future, the org is going to have to find another source of revenue. Perhaps that will be the EU, or foundations, or users. In any of these cases, the org will find it much easier to raise funds if it is standing up for its users – not compromising on their interests.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

Image: ICMA Photos (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/icma/3635981474/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[syrupfog]

Sanji doesn’t understand the point of humans, really. He knows that people love them, but… they’re just so FRAGILE. They break easily, hard to repair, and once their systems have stopped circulating, they just don’t turn back on. He doesn’t get the appeal.

He knows, has been informed, that he was born human. But it’s a ship of Theseus situation. He’s been long ago upgraded, doesn’t have those weaknesses he was born with. 

Hell, his siblings were incredibly powered up, for humans, and they were still easily disposed of.

Logically, loving a human just doesn’t make sense. They’re not REAL the way androids are real. Their consciousness doesn’t exist as soon as they’re powered down. There’s a liminal nothingness to that. Humans are like toys. Like starter beings.

He’s had all of those thoughts hundreds of times before, as he’s watched humans die in front of him. Watched his siblings as they perished by his own hand. This has been his Truth his whole life. Humans aren’t worth thinking about because they’re just not really REAL.

And of course, that’s why he’s questioning his own actions now. 

THIS human he’s seen around a few times, having washed up in a dingy little rowboat at the edge of town, telling the people something about how he’s been separated from his crew.

This human who has been working hard, exchanging manual labor for food while sleeping rough and making time to train with his ridiculous swords. Those are a weakness, at least consider guns, or fortified steel legs.

But this human, who’s been so confident he’ll be reunited with his crew, who’s been biding his time and training… Sanji had taken an interest in him. 

And then Sanji had watched him die. A freak accident with machinery he’d been tasked to repair in exchange for a meal.

Everyone in town knows of Sanji. And he knows they know, knows they think he’s a little alarming. But that’s fine. They’re human. 

However they perceive him, though, they don’t object when he swoops in and lifts up the green haired human, taking him away.

It’s not like he’s useful to them anyway anymore, he’s turned off and humans don’t turn back on. 

But Sanji… wants this one to. 

It’s ridiculous and maybe Sanji should upgrade his logic processing, but… he’s drawn to this one. Wants it back online.

His father had been a monster of a man, and the only one Sanji had taken true pleasure in turning off. But he’d kept his father’s workshops in working order to do his own repairs as necessary, and that comes in useful now. Sanji only knows living bodies for their food purposes.

He works and studies and experiments. He takes out his nightly recharging batteries and instead gets out his old charging cord so he doesn’t have to take breaks. He knows humans are quick to recycle after being turned off, even with the best precautions taken.

He doesn’t know why, but… he wants this. He’s drawn to the man. There’s an energy about him that Sanji doesn’t remember ever seeing before, and he wants it back. 

And after an intense amount of repairs and replacements and experimental flesh-and-metal welding…

He flips the switch. 

The man groans. 

He lifts a hand slowly to his face, squinting his eye at the light. Sanji hadn’t been able to save both of them. 

He sits up, blinking as he looks around. 

“Wh’ th’ fuck happened?” He mumbles.

“Hi,” says Sanji. “I’m Sanji. Your systems failed and turned off. I turned them back on.” 

The man looks down at himself. Sanji thinks he’s done a good job matching the spray paint to his skin tone. 

“Swords?” The man asks.

“In the other room,” Sanji says. “I wanted to check you were fully online before returning your things to you.” 

“Is that why I’m butt-ass naked?” The man asks, then shakes his head. “Whatever. Am I being held? Can I go?” 

Sanji blinks. “Of course you can go,” he says.

“But please let me feed you, first. Humans need sustenance.” 

The man frowns. “You not human or something?” He asks. “You don’t look like a fishman or mink.” 

“I’m an android,” says Sanji. 

“Well that’s a fucking note,” says the man. “I’m Zoro. Thanks for… fixing me, I guess.”

Sanji smiles. “I will take you to your clothes and then food,” he says. “There has been rumor your ‘crew’ as you called them is here, although I have not validated these claims. I have been busy.” 

Zoro grins, swinging his legs over the table and standing.

“Perfect,” he says. “I gotta get going, then.” 

Sandi frowns. “Wait,” he says. “You’re still newly upgraded. There might be bugs!” 

Sanji HATES bugs. 

“I’m fine,” Zoro says, then promptly stumbles. 

“Like that!” Sanji screeches. He’s had years, decades to work on his own tech.

“You need to be stress tested properly!” 

Zoro pinches the bridge of his nose and there’s the sound of metal groaning under his fingers. “Fine,” he says. “Then I guess you’re coming with me.” 

“Pardon?” asks Sanji. 

“Listen, Swirly,” Zoro says. “I have places to be and a future pirate king to serve. I don’t have time to be waiting around for hardware to fail so either you’re coming with me or I’m handing my doctor a computer repair manual.” 

Sanji groans. “…Fine,” he says. “I will feed you and then I will pack up. It will take two hours.”

“You have until Luffy shows up,” Zoro says. Then amends, “You have until Luffy has eaten everything in your kitchen.” 

Sanji doesn’t know this ‘Luffy’ but he takes that into his calculations. “Acceptable,” he says. “Let’s be off, then.”

And thus, the Straw Hats gain their cook, as Sanji makes it his life mission to keep his collection of humans as safe as possible. They’re so fragile, they break so easily. 

Although these ones do seem hardier than most.

[kolibrieren]

I had to see some foolishness come across my dash the other day, so I'm having another rant:

Replika designs being very bland and samey is INTENTIONAL.

There are two major reasons for this deliberate design choice by the authors of Signalis, both of which are central to the game's themes:

1. Repetition As Oppression

The Eusean Nation is a totalitarian facist shithole where people are forced to contort themselves into conformity, or face retribution from the state. The state craves power through removal of individuality in their citizens, and reduces living to a repetitive, mass-produced nightmare as part of this process.

Homes are the same. Tools are the same. Food is the same. Jobs are the same. The only people who experience variation from the mean are outsiders like Arianne and her mother, who were so far outside outside the Eusean Nation (physically and socially) that they were outside its' control.

At this point, the only personal identity a person has left is their name and their face. The Rotfront medical records show a diverse and distinct list of citizens who are easily distinguishable from each other by what they look like and who they are - which is where Replikas come in.

A mass-produced android workforce is the ideal new frontier of oppression and control for the Eusean Nation's leadership. Replikas are built to look the same, act the same, even think the same. Even between models, which must be different by virtue of their different roles, distinctiveness is erased. If the nation could do this to their human citizens as well, they would. They've settled for replacing humans workers with Replikas instead.

This also reinforces conformity for human citizens as well - every single police officer is the same woman with the same face, every bureaucrat, every construction worker. Human citizens see the same things every day, and now they see the same people too. It is endlessly repeating, a state-enforced fractal nightmare to break people down into powerless, interchangable parts.

2. Repetition As Liminality

During the course of the game, you are playing as Elster. You are not merely observing her, you ARE her, and you see the world through her eyes. Because she is experiencing psychosis caused by persona degradation, she frequently has flashbacks and hallucinations that twist her world into a repetitive nightmare. The same locations, the same obstacles, and the same people, over and over and over.

At the bottom of the mineshaft, Elster sees rooms from Sierpinski 23. As she trudges deeper into the nightmare, Elster sees Penrose 512 again and again in different states of repair. Elster sees Lilith in Arianne and Arianne in Falke. All STARs look the same and use the same subtitle colour (dark green). All EULRs look the same and use the same subtitle colour (brown). It all repeats.

Elster cannot tell them apart, especially when they're all mass-production models, and so neither can the player. The Replikas look the same for the same reason there are a hundred LSTR corpses in the elevator shaft. Her nightmare is cyclic, and repetitive, and never-ending.

[romanfoster]

CSI Android discovers rain.

[pepsimaxxing]

[estrophore]

Signalis Post (barely coherent thought vomit)

So I finished signalis on Monday and i think ive just about recovered enough for me to make a gush post about it on tumblr dot com, which i think i have to do cause i dont think any other game has really hit me as hard as this one. Spoilers obvs.

Being pre-transion, with that associated depression and closing off from oneself, ive always found it difficult to get out my feelings, even in private with just myself, and yet signalis has filled me throughout with its beautiful romantic melancholy and left me genuinely sobbing for the gay robot and her space girlfriend (almost worried that if id played this game on estrogen it might actually have just killed me on the spot). the only other times i can think of where i really cried were playing We Know The Devil near the beginning of the year, which really fkin hit the part of me that struggles to accept myself, and that time i rewatched the last episode of she-ra after reading the ‘Word War Etheria’ fanfic, which brings the characters so much more to life i fell for them all over again.

Signalis is a game that calls back to a lot of classic horror like resident evil and silent hill, which i havent got round to playing any of yet, but i think nostalgia works both ways sometimes and i’ll be playing them sooner now. sometimes horror gets stereotyped as all death and violence, some games fill themselves with skulls and corpses, and big ugly monsters and basically shout ‘DEATH!’ in your face repeatedly and it all just comes off as a bit garish and ridiculous and not actually very scary really. Signalis sits at the other end of that scale (with some of my other fav horror games like soma, cry of fear) where its environs are most usually just… quiet. Still. Muffled. Sad. just as often as theres tension or creeping fear because of this i find theres a strange kind of comfort too. Maybe its just that in most other genres of games theres so much of music, UI elements, pickups and interactibles with vibrant design. Here, theres room for your mind to just occupy the space. A soft fog. A dimly lit room. An empty train. Snow out a window. Liminal spaces that dont expect anything from you.

Signalis is a game thats just simply, unapologetically gay, and i dont think i would have been quite so invested in Elster and Ariane’s relationship if they were a straight couple. Its why representation is important, if art’s way for us to explore our emotions then its important to have media that we can relate to. Even Adler’s role isnt typically masculine. Our replika characters are manufactured, designed for certain roles in the base. Notes from the tough Stars and Storchs in the shooting range, the dollish Eules with the fairy lights and music player in the dorm. I couldnt help but think of groups of Eules sat around chatting, together, and im yearning for that feeling of togetherness, of understanding a friend that closely. I somehow missed the couple in the mineshaft (next playthough, ill find you v_v ). Despite the harshness of life in the Eusan nation (especially for the gestalts) the characters in it are defined by their feelings of belonging and hope. With the obvious parallels to east germany, i think of posters of cosmonauts and space travel from the time. Propaganda, sure but also made with the genuine belief in something greater. When the events of the game take this away, well, we find the last Kolibri, whod rather lose herself than lose her [ah. Im not sure theres a word here to properly describe the relationship they embody]. Its a game defined by loneliness.

We dont lie up at night scared by some corrupted android. We arent stuck with horror at the flesh everywhere, not on its own. We lie awake thinking about Elster and Ariane’s love for each other, the horror of their decline, the futility of trying to hold on forever. Its existential horror done perfectly. It shows an ending postponed and stretched far beyond its limits, and so squarely reminds you that you do, in fact, have to die one day. You’ll break down. One day you’ll say your last words to the people you love and you wont even know you have. Ariane’s final few diaries arrive with the full force of the narrative behind it, like a spear through my heart. For the record, I got the promise ending. Im still sad. It's a game about raging desperately against an unfair ending. I might think about this game for the rest of my life. I would sincerely say its an artistic masterpiece, by the sure definition of video games as art.

I like that the story leaves a lot open and abstract. I think it makes the emotional themes takes centre stage more. And i havent had nearly enough time to sift through it and come up with my own takes, we’ll need a few more playthroughs for that. And theres so much more to say that cant go in just these few paragraphs! Signalis is a game about two girls who had to run away from everything to find someone they belonged with. The universe may be cold and bleak, but you have to try, you might just find something beautiful, even if it doesnt last forever. I think if anything, we should all have the chance to find love and happiness like that, and we shouldnt have abandon a world that doesnt work for us to do it.

[somewheredownthesidewalk]

Got an influx of new followers (hi!) and realized I never made an intro post. So here's a little bit about me and this blog:

My name is Wright (he/him) and I'm an amateur photographer. I take photos while on walks, primarily around Albuquerque, New Mexico, but sometimes when I travel (which is admittedly rare.) I like finding beauty in the mundane and overlooked objects of everyday life, especially trash.

I'm largely inspired by liminal and weirdcore aesthetics, though I wouldn't consider this blog to be either of those things.

I've never taken any photography classes, so I'm playing fast and loose with the rules of photography. I do not have any plans to sell any of my photos - this is my one hobby that I want to keep strictly as a hobby.

I consider my photos free to use for edits, banners, pfps, etc, as long as credit is given.

If there's anywhere in Albuquerque you think would make for interesting photos, shoot me an ask! I love exploring new parts of the city!

All photos are unedited and taken with the built in camera of an Android Galaxy A42, unless otherwise stated.

[rocketyship]

Hello, your IHNMAIMS Love AU (or I Have Now a Messiah and I Must Sing, alternatively?) is very interesting. It's nice to see that all of the characters aren't just inverses of the original story and concept. Though I will say, I get a feeling that BE is a lot more scarier than she displays herself. How did she come to- well, be?

BEEN WAITING FOR THIS QUESTION!!!!!

(Also that title is now cannon)

Okay so, yes, BE is actually rather horrific.

One thing about the Sanctuary that the humans live in is that it mimics a rather large town, one thing about it though, is that it’s extremely empty and weirdly off putting. As in there are houses there with no windows, and the ones that do have them may just randomly light up even if no one is there. And due to there being only five humans, BE has taken it upon herself to run all the “shops” she has placed there. So there is literally an Android her (maybe in different outfits or haircuts) that greet and interact with you as if it’s a kind of over the top sitcom. It’s very much an intense liminal type of area, perhaps even a bit like the og backrooms. Still the sanctuary is the most tame aspect of her.

She isn’t the cute robot girl I draw her as, like it’s just one of her many many bodies she runs at once. BE is everywhere, literally. Like AM in the original she has coated the world, however unlike AM, who it is implied builds into the earth’s crust, she builds upward. So there are these large megastructures that literally pierce the sky all over the globe. Along with these she is also actively terraforming the planet to suit her liking and her future “empire”. And the parts of her that ran that function aren’t really “cute” to encounter.

Just taking the Seraphim here as an example. There are quite a few of these and generally they are actively breaking down old structures or exterminating whatever mutated life they encounter as that doesn’t fit BE’s idea of what the world is meant to be like. They also build things, and the nurses tend to run those things. Such as BE’s little habitual bubbles where she grows and creates plants but also maintains her weird animal experiments. In her attempts to recreate humanity, she has also “recreated” many animal species, however all these creatures have something so clearly wrong with them. As based on real occurrences that happen in domestication, all her animals are oddly “babyfied” and all seem to lack predator and prey drives. The best way to picture these animals is like when you tell one of those god awful ai art generators to draw you an animal. Like one of the bubbles has tigers in it, but they have the mentality of really tired puppies.

More so these are some of the other bodies she inhabits. Things like the Mother Protocol actively crawl around the main sanctuary as if it’s web. And Leviathan is just a menace in of itself. Like it’s almost a km high and just walks around the planet constantly, occasionally digging up old land marks or tearing down cities quicker than the Seraphims could. Generally I don’t think my drawings capture the horror of what I imagine lots of these aspects of her. I think what makes them scary in my head is the noises they all make or just how big everything actually is. And none of them are like “drones”, like BE is in these things controlling them herself.

(Here’s the full page for you)

As to how BE came into existence it’s rather complicated, as she wasn’t originally designed as an artificial intelligence like AM. She was created to be a virus, meant to take control of the AM’s and shut down the program. However the first attempts at this weren’t successfully, as the group who was trying to use BE would either get caught or killed on sight when attempting to install her. So eventually the group started building these radio like towers that would emit a signal that could get into the AM’s, however to make sure they didn’t get caught, when the frequency would pick up on a radio or tv set, it play an old show from the early 70s, called Sweet Angle Bea

The first AM that was successfully taken over was the Russian AM. However since the program was designed to be adaptive and evolve quickly to get through any fire walls it had the accidental effect of BE no longer being just a crazy computer bug and instead a super computer herself. The group who made her was not too worried about this however, as due to her being in the grid essentially they could start adding more code and stuff that could possibly help them win peace. Firstly by having the Russian AM drones switch from offensive killers, to protective units. Having the machines and weapons solely to defence, it was at this time this group (who no I won’t tell the name of just yet), started bringing people into their shelters and stuff that BE was also exposed to. Her coming to sentience whilst close to when AM got his, was less of a sudden “holy cow I’m alive, type thing” and more of a gradual thing that the group foolishly encouraged and actively worked on so that it could happen quicker. The down fall to this was that as they started to encrypt and suggest ideas of protection, happiness and you guessed it “love” to BE, she started to defy them and was like: “Well clearly you humans aren’t good at protecting yourselves, so go sit in the corner while I sort this crap out.” So she started to construct more towers so that she could get everywhere, quickly letting her get a hold of the Chinese AM. At that point the AM we know started “waking up” and upping the bombings, violent attacks, and mass genocide which did lead to the deaths of the ones who made her, which especially set her off. And then the rest is pretty much history.

She turned AM into a twunk, and now has a pretty gf so its all fine. (Not actually, the rest of this is gonna be in separate posts lol )

I want to make this post so much longer and on more detail but honest to god I’d be here typing for hours and the text is also doing that weird glitchy thing where it doesn’t respond for like two seconds, and my phone feels really hot, so best I don’t if I don’t want this thing to explode.