#this format is very familiar to a lot of his videos

[viewpointb]

listen. harry brewis isn't exempt to criticism. however I think it's very ironic and telling how much people have been missing the very point of his video on plagiarism and turned his name on a new topic to exploit as of late. when i was trying to look up clips of harry's older videos this came up, and the contents were about the creator clearly being disapointed her line of work (drama youtube) was disregarded as sloppy and something with no effort put into it.

while I do understand her hurt, the thumbnail and title is inherently clickbaiting potential viewers, and her point comes off as a nitpick of a segment harry made out of his own frustration with content mills and how much situations on or between content creators can be so throughly exploited for "commentary" when people don't end up saying anything at all. I think that this is a prime example of the things harry deemed important to criticise. someone who clearly had a point to make about harry's video felt the need to make sure they could milk the shit out of it.

[shurisneakers]

unsolved (ii)

Summary: Bucky doesn't even believe in the paranormal. So who the hell thought it was a good idea to stick him in a series about everything haunted for the internet's amusement? With his loose-canon of a teammate who has no concept of subtlety or shits left to give, to make things even worse. (Buzzfeed unsolved AU)

Warnings: swearing, frustrated bucky at his little shit supreme, obnoxious reader, mentions of hauntings and the things that come with (body harm, priests, etc). images all have alt texts.

A/N: if you're familiar with the format of BuzzFeed unsolved videos, the pictures in this chapter make more sense. anyway we're starting small to warm up but i assure u there's like actual paranormal shit from next chapter onward <3 thank u for the chaotic response to chapter 1 ily guys sm ! as usual, please send me things you'd like to see in the series! it always make me so happy

Previous part || Series masterlist

Bucky loves the compound. The sentiment carries a lot, considering he’s made it a non-negotiable part of his personal brand to hate everything. 

The lush landscape is quiet, spacious enough that he isn’t forced to run into anyone he’s actively avoiding, and has state-of-the art security that lets him sleep soundly, assured that no one will be able to get to his floor in an assassination attempt. 

All of his deep love and fond admiration disappears when it’s the crackass of dawn and his oakwood door receives the beat down of a lifetime. 

He snaps awake instantly, unsure of whether there was someone actually trying to kick the shit out of his door or it was just another nightmare that often blurred lines with reality. 

But after the third deafeningly loud knock confirms it, he scrambles for a pair of pants just so that he isn’t caught entirely vulnerable. 

The thrashing doesn’t cease, and by the time he makes his way to the door and yanks it open– 

There’s no one on the other side. 

Except a coffee cup on the ground and a note scribbled haphazardly on the side.

Shoot day. See you at the studio!

He stares wordlessly at the cup, unable to differentiate whether the feeling coursing through the very fibres of his being currently is pure blinding rage, or confusion that you apparently knew his coffee order. 

The studio is fucking empty. If Bucky wasn’t still reeling from the effects of being startled awake by a fake intrusion at 5am, he’d have been over the damn moon.

He does his part as a man of honour and righteousness– calls out a very quiet ‘Hello?’ and then doesn’t bother feeling guilt when his heart explodes in joy at the lack of response.  

He spins on his heel to march out, only to come to an abrupt stop when he almost runs into you. He didn’t even fucking hear you come in. 

“Oh, hey.” You look at him, hand on a bagel. “You actually showed.”

Bucky’s smile falters, and he returns to his default Grinchian state. 

“You made sure I fuckin’ did,” he grumbles. “How’d you get on my floor?”

“I have my ways.”

Bucky’s glare presses hard into you almost like a palpable entity. 

“I did a gig as an escape artist for a while. Paid super well,” you dismiss. 

He doesn’t blink once, trying to decipher whether you’re telling him the truth or not. 

You offer him a bite from your bagel in return, seemingly having moved on from the conversation already. 

“Where’s everyone else?” he asks, turning away from you.   

“Maya didn’t actually think you’d show up on time so she told everyone to come an hour later.” You speak through a mostly full mouth. “I figured you could use the company.” 

Bucky immediately feels defensive, as if that wasn’t exactly what he tried to do. 

He grumbled all through the morning when he saw fifteen text reminders sent to him through the night telling him he had to shoot a video that day. He grumbled when he couldn’t use traffic as an excuse to not show up because the studio is two streets away from the compound. He grumbled when the toaster actually works for once. Everything is right in the world. This was, of course, devastating to him. 

He finally shuts up when Sam gives him a piece of gum. Then he just glowers, but his jaw is otherwise occupied. 

“She set you on me this morning?” Bucky questions, tone on the verge of being ticked. 

You shake your head, swallowing before taking another bite. “No, that was social service.”

Bucky’s eye twitches. 

“I’ll come back in an hour,” he mumbles, arms crossed over his chest. 

You give him a look that lets him know you’re entirely unconvinced. “Will you?”

Well. No.

“I’m gonna look around the studio. You’re welcome to join,” you say instead, looking past him. “We’ll need to know where we’re working for the next few months.”

Few months? No no– few hours at max, if this were to go exactly his way. 

“Video’s not gonna do numbers,” he reminds you in a dull utterance.

“With an enthusiasm like that, it’s hard to see why you’re not universally beloved, Barnes,” you comment seriously, before clapping his shoulder. “Come on. You ever look at yourself in a mirror? You’re gonna be a star, baby.”

Bucky, in his current chosen avatar, looks less 'man of the world' and more 'reject of the jungle’. 

But the sentiment is appreciated.

The studio is moderately big. 

You find joy in messing around with set pieces of the other Avengers video series that were being shot there. Bucky finds joy in locating every possible escape route within a three foot vicinity. 

He’s admittedly surprised by learning how much actually goes into making a simple video. He just figured they’d stick a camera in his face and teleprompt him and get it over it. 

You chat animatedly about the use of gimbals and different camera gear, lighting setups and sound quality.

“You into this stuff?” He raises an eyebrow.

“No, I just did a stunt as a wedding videographer once,” you wave off, “It was great. You could always tell which couples were gonna get divorced within a year.”

Something unrecognisable flashes in his eyes. 

“Escape artist and wedding videographer,” he repeats.

You stop talking to look at him.

“Yes,” you say simply and go on to provide no further explanation. 

If the morning’s antics weren’t enough, now he’s convinced you’re fucking with him.

“Anyway, they’ll probably stick us in makeup before we go on camera because it–”  

“Makeup?”

“Well– yeah. For the video.” Your eyes dart toward him, sizing him up in a quick glance. “If you look any paler, you’d basically be translucent.”

Bucky can’t even debate it. His skin looks like it hasn't felt the gentle touch of a sunray in millennia.  

“Just say it’s part of the theme.”

You snort. “The first ghost I hunt cannot be one who sits beside me.” 

So Bucky gets his makeup done. 

By the time the studio fills in, he’s already drunk two cups of the shitty breakroom coffee and found fifteen innocuous things to fashion into weaponry if things were to go awry.

The large bright lights force him to keep wiping beads of sweat away from his forehead. Everything exists in a contrarian state of frenzy, and coordinated down to the second as if it were a damn rocket launch. He’s already had three staff members dart about him cross checking if he’s hydrated and if he’s signed the right forms. 

“Oh, you actually showed,” he hears for the second time from Maya, who doesn’t even make an attempt to hide the earnest surprise from her voice.

Bucky wants to scream.

“The team’s picked a really simple case since it’s the first video. You just need to read it out,” she explains breezily, switching from you to him, “and you need to react.” 

You flash her a thumbs up. Bucky doesn’t move an inch. He’s convinced it’ll trigger another round of people meddling with his hair until it looks ‘sufficiently casual but not artificial’. 

 Maya hurriedly leaves after wishing you good luck, probably to fix the walking PR disaster that was Clint, who unceremoniously went live on his Instagram the night before after consuming something he procured from some guy in an alleyway, who described it as ‘carbonated milk’. Bucky watched it for a few seconds and immediately shut down the app when Clint offered to take one article of clothing off for every million people that tuned in.

“I asked for there to be as few people in the room as possible,” you whisper to him. 

“Still a lot,” he replies under his breath, watching them buzz around him, still brushing up his face and dabbing at his hairline with a napkin. 

Someone hands you a folder full of papers. “We lose any more and we’re filming this video ourselves.” 

“All ready!” The camera guy, Shane, announces. 

“Copy that,” you call back, before leaning forward in your chair, grinning. “Chill. I’m gonna do the talking. All you gotta do is say a few words and look pretty.” 

That sounds…doable. 

“Make it fast,” Bucky mutters, crossing his arms over his chest.

Whether he was talking about the video or his death is still up for debate. 

“Recording in three…two…one–”

The whole studio waits with bated breath, but Bucky stares right ahead. 

“When I said a ‘few words’, I did mean one or two, possibly more,” you talk through your smile.  

Bucky continues looking into the camera like it stole his ancestral property.

You exhale, soldiering on, lips still upturned. 

You look at Bucky, hopeful that he will at least answer a question. He doesn’t offer the same kindness, and now you understand why Maya reached out to you for this. 

So you do what needs to be done, as a person with a responsibility to all these fine and tired souls gathered here on a weekend.

You kick him under the table. 

The crew waits for Bucky to say more. He very pointedly doesn’t. 

At least one sound has been procured from him, which is more than what they can say for some other videos.

You continue, “Our story takes place in 1954, in the quaint, rural town of Ravenswood. Irene–”

Bucky scoffs. “You made that up.”

Would now be a good time for him to bring up your previous job experiences you  had dropped so casually or was this enough to let you know he was onto you? 

Your eyebrows pull together, scanning over the sentence. “I haven't even said anything yet.”

“A horror story. Taking place in Raven’s Woods,” Bucky emphasises. “Really.”

Bitch.

“First of all, it’s Ravenswood, not Raven’s Woods,” you shoot back. “And it exists.”

“Where?” He raises an eyebrow. 

“I don’t know– fuckin’ West Virginia?” You shuffle through the papers. “Does it matter? You wanna move there?”

Bucky doesn’t add anything further. 

You observe him for a moment before deciding to continue. 

“In the quiet town of Ravenswood,” you side eye him but he doesn’t look affected. “Irene Wendelin, a 35-year-old woman moved into a house on the outskirts to save up money. She lived alone, had no immediate relatives and worked as a secretary at the local press.”

Bucky continues chewing his gum. You’re not even sure he’s listening, but everyone got paid by the hour regardless of whether he did, so who gives a shit. 

“Within a few weeks of moving in, strange incidents started to take place. Irene’s friend Thelma, who also worked as a secretary at the press, recalled how Irene developed a persistent cough, was constantly fatigued, and had issues sleeping due to her skin itching. Thelma suggested solutions from ointments to medication, but not one remedy that she provided seemed to work. As time went by, Irene’s symptoms escalated into severe respiratory problems, leaving her breathless just from climbing up a flight of stairs. She even reportedly started having hallucinations of people crawling around in her house in the dark, but she was never able to catch them in their entirety.”

“How long did this take?” Bucky questions out of the blue, arms still crossed over his chest. 

“I think within a couple of weeks of moving in.” You try not to look too surprised. “Further, Thelma recalls Irene saying she heard strange sounds at night which kept her up. The only time the woman felt normal was when she left her house to stay with her cousins for a month.”

Bucky’s head snaps to you, eyes narrowing.  

“What?” you challenge.

“Nothin’,” he says instead. “Go on.”

You cast a look at the crew, who look just as confused as you, but you continue regardless. 

“Things escalated when one day, Irene showed up to work in complete disarray. Thelma says that upon a closer look, Irene had bite marks over her hands and legs. Thelma, a devout Christian, insisted on getting the place checked out by the church since all else had failed. Father Gabriel, a local priest, agreed to visit the house, but upon setting foot inside, claimed it was haunted by ‘forces of evil whose reality existed beyond mortal comprehension’. This was the last straw for Thelma, who had Irene move into her house until she found a new place to stay. Within a few weeks, Irene was back to normal, and the house is still considered one of the most haunted places in the country to this place, with no one allowed to enter.” 

Bucky looks at his arms, jaw tightening. 

Your eyebrow twitches.

You could see Maya shaking her head from across the room, entirely fucking defeated. 

You wait a few seconds but receive no response. Bucky’s gaze doesn’t shift from the table top. 

You start gathering the folder with the story in it, getting ready to read out your conclusion. 

You stare at him, but he doesn’t look up at you.

Collectively, every spine in the room straightens. 

“Asbestos?” you echo.

“Or mold. Could be either.” Bucky shrugs, chewing on the same stupid piece of gum that had lost its flavour hours ago. 

You look at him in bewilderment, partly because you weren’t expecting him to say anything at all, much less this. 

“Had an aunt once who thought she was possessed. Turns out her walls were full of mold.” 

You stare at him. “You’re lying.”

He finally turns to you, no traces of humour on his face. “She got remarried and moved out. Good as new.” 

“That doesn’t mean it’s asbestos.”

“Had the same symptoms an’ everything. Itchy skin, breathing problems, fatigue.” 

“Hallucinations?”

“Stress. Being poisoned twenty-four hours a day’ll do a number on anyone.”

“And the bite marks?” 

“You never had an itch so bad you just bit it?”

“On her legs?” you ask incredulously. “She bit her legs? Is that what you’re saying?”

Bucky shrugs. 

You look like you’re going to lose your mind. 

You clear your throat. “What about the priest?

Bucky snorts. “What ‘bout him?” 

“'Forces of evil whose reality existed beyond mortal comprehension’?” 

“Maybe it was her,” he fires back. “Maybe that's just how she was, how would you know?”

“You’re saying the forces of evil are just… her bad vibes?” you say it slowly, as if that would make it better. 

“Maybe.” Bucky’s shoulders rise and drop again. “My aunt was a real stick in the mud too. I coulda called her a force’a evil when she didn’t let me fire a bottle rocket into the tree.” 

You narrow your eyes at him. Bucky looks back innocently.

“You’re bullshitting.”

“About my aunt?” he scoffs. “I would never. Rest her soul. Made some damn good cranberry pie.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s not asbestos.”

“Then why was she fine every time she moved out?”

“Because the house was haunted.”

“By mold.”

Maya clears her throat, pointing to her watch. 

You look back at her and clear your throat as well, shuffling around your papers. 

“Right. So that’s it for this episode.”

The camera guy yells “Cut!’ and you turn to look at Bucky.

But he’s already gone. 

The video goes up that weekend. 

It takes a considerable amount of time to edit, considering they had to bleep out  the steady stream of expletives that you didn’t even know Bucky was muttering under his breath, but got picked up by the mic anyway.

To Barnes (Work):

are you ready for your influencer era

He leaves you on seen. You think you’ll send him more memes of his stupid face.

To Barnes (Work):

influenza

Five hours since the video has gone up, and your phone starts buzzing more than usual. Nat’s already sent you a clearly AI generated article titled ‘Everything We Know About the Latest Avenger’, full of incorrect information and straight up lies. 

The first reviews are promising. Sort of. The newest generation of kids on Twitter are saying shit and using terms that are beyond you, but it looks good. You think.

And then somewhere close to midnight, your phone chimes with a text from a number you hadn’t yet saved. 

From unknown

Hey. Steve Rogers here. Great job on the video.

Your eyebrows shoot up, discarding your refreshing of the Subreddit that has popped up in your name. 

From unknown

Just letting you know though– he was lying.

From unknown

He doesn’t have an aunt. 

Motherfucker.

here’s my ko-fi if you’d like to support my writing!

to keep up with updates for this fic and others, please follow @shurisneakersupdates and turn on post notifications!

Next part

[dromaeo-sauridae]

big cave post

you like caves? no? im showing you anyway. you hear cave and probably think of like, a video game cave. maybe a minecraft cave with axolotls? while i have my gripes with axolotls in caves, this is about the caves themselves. so here, lets get started:

number 1, lod cave in thailand. now, i could do a whole posts about JUST caves in thailand, but here's your first taste of caves from this area. this is a karst cave, formed by water trickling through soluble rock like limestone. it's what most of the caves on this list are going to be. it's one of the most common types of caves. if you've been inside a cave, it was probably a karst. very cool! i particularly enjoy the man shaped stalagmite in the middle (joke, thats just a real guy)

number 2, ellison's cave in georgia, usa. featuring a drop over a thousand feet deep, this one is pretty high on my bucket list. this is what's called a chute, formed by waterfalls cascading downwards. not recommended for people with a fear of heights! if you watch jacon geller, youve probably heard of this type of formation when he talked about krubera (not on this list, sadly)

number 3, mammoth cave in kentucky, usa. one i've been to! mammoth is the longest cave system in the ENTIRE world, that we know of. another one the jacob geller fans are familiar with. i would love to go back someday, pictures dont convey the magnitude of this place. they also used to host church services in here. well worth the visit

number 4, han son doong in vietnam. the LARGEST cave in the world! wait, didnt i already list that? nope, while mammoth is the longest and is massive in its own right, son doong trumps it by having a ceiling 660 feet (200 meters) high. it has stalagmites the size of skyscrapers. its one of the many caves in southeast asia to have its own rainforest system. a bit of a hike to get there, but another i desperately want to visit someday.

number 5, fingal's cave in scotland. though not record setting, its one youve probably seen before. or, maybe my perspective has been skewed as someone who looks at a LOT of caves. ive seen this exact picture more times than i can count. its a sea cave formed from our good friend columnar basalt. upon further research, apparently its also known for its natural acoustics. the more you know!

number 6, grotta azurra in capri. that photo isnt edited! only accessible by boat (and laying flat on your back to get through the entrance) this place looks ridiculously magical. i dont really have much to say about this one, i just think its really cool.

number 7, domica cave in slovakia. this one was brought to my attention by an anonymous asker (if youre still here hi) and i am in love with it. just an absolutely gorgeous cave with some of the most beautiful formations ive ever seen. just look at it! augh! the tiered pools arent something ive seen in any of the caves ive been to and theyre captivating. i love caves.

number 8, ending it off with a bang. here's the gloup.

[crunchycrystals]

still thinking about That Scene in chris grace as scarlett johansson and i want as many people to watch this as possible so under the cut it goes. watch this if you've ever been interested in representation in media and how it affects the way you perceive yourself

anyways so ive talked briefly about how i love a good full utilization of a format (link here) but now i wanna go more in depth on it bc i love it a lot

make some noise

jesus christ the first time i saw this i paused and started jumping up and down on my couch. let me start with basics !!! i love that the video of the show appears on the make some noise tv. its so unnerving to see something completely detached from make some noise now on the tv after watching dozens of episodes. and sam just saying the normal spiel he does every time leaves you wondering for a few extremely disorienting seconds if they just edited the video onto a normal episode until he starts to introduce chris and you see his nameplate is erased. another extremely disorienting thing because we NEVER see the nameplates empty and it ties in so well with the identity crisis currently happening in the show. he has no idea who he is as a performer like is the performer part of him the real part?? how much has been played up for entertainment??? and then after the horror has been slammed into you by the prompt and seeing chris as confused by all of this as we are, he runs off which leads to the thing that kept me standing on my couch for the next 10 minutes

very important people

first off. i absolutely love the coincidence (or intentional detail???? who knows but either way) of chris's first line on the make some noise set being "my name is..." because that's the thing that started vip !!!!!!! and throughout the rest of the existential crisis dropout trip he constantly says "hello my name is" too ough i love that so much thats why i started writing this whole post. very important people is the perfect show to add to this segment it makes me feel a little feral thinking about it. coming out on stage without any alterations to his appearance, again back to the idea of is the chris grace on stage the real chris grace?? can he ever be??? and again his name is gone like in the scene before. vic says "you can be anything you want" like the thing scarjo said to justify playing an asian character and he still can't come up with anything. then the card transition oh my godddddddd

dirty laundry

(side note i did say before that the cards on the vip set were dirty laundry cards. i was wrong they are vip card the designs just look very similar esp compared to s1 of vip)

this is gonna be way shorter than the two rambles above i just think it's really cool to use the dirty laundry question format for some identity crisis stuff. i don't know how to properly express how cool i think it is i don't think i can do it justice. the "who..." format for the cards is a great way of expressing how he is losing grip of his identity

this section of the post is also to point out that i am only noticing now that the "dropout presents" version of chris is seen on the couch at some point also heckling stage chris which is a nice detail especially since part of the card was "who is generally a hypocrite"

gastronauts

gastronauts hasn't come out yet so i can't analyze this as much as i'd like but to me it just seems like an extension of the thing started in dirty laundry of everyone confusing him for scarlett johansson. i initially see this as a reference to the fact that throughout the whole show it's been going deeper than him playing scarlett as she plays him and then her playing him plays her again, etc, but thinking about it more for this post makes me think it's like the line between the real person and character they play blurring. i think everyone in the dropout audience is pretty familiar with this like we know brennan pissed on game changer isn't actually how he is in real life, but it's extremely easy to fall into that parasocial trap. when you put so much of your actual self in a character or performance it's hard to find the line between, even for the performer. chris keeps saying that he's not scarlett but everyone insists it's who he is

[bastila-s]

Baldur's Gate 3 Screenshot Tutorial

Hi, I decided to make a more in-depth guide for my twitter followers, as I'm super limited in characters and formatting options over there.

For this tutorial, I'll explain how you can enhance your screenshots. I'll divide it into five parts: ReShade, making your screenshots high resolution, camera mods, photography basics, and post-processing. By the end of following all of these steps, you should have something way better than the start!

I recommend going through this tutorial downloading things step-by-step for the first three parts, as it'll help you to quickly identify where you've gone wrong if you have any issues.

1. ReShade ReShade is a post-processing tool that allows you to change the look of a game with an array of different effects and adjustments to use. It can be a lot to wrap your head around at first, so I recommend starting off by finding a ReShade preset that speaks to you from this page if you're not already familiar with using it. The mod authors should explain how to download it. I find 22:20 of this YouTube video to be helpful to introduce ReShade if you're completely new to it. This video is for the Sims 4, but ReShade typically works the same across different games. Now that ReShade is downloaded, we can get depth of field working within the ReShade. This step is optional. Depth of field refers to what will be in focus in your screenshot, and what will be blurred. It's essentially simulating shooting with a camera, like so:

To get this effect working, you need to follow this tutorial within the ReShade menu.

2. Making Your Screenshots High Resolution Typically, Baldur's Gate 3 is ran in 1920x1080 resolution, or standard HD (unless you have a higher resolution monitor and are running the game in 4k, in which case, you can ignore this step if you'd like). This is definitely an acceptable quality, but if you'd like to capture any detail, you're not going to get much out of this. To get a better quality image, there are two ways to achieve this. The first method is through hotsampling. Hotsampling is briefly running a game in a much higher resolution than your monitor supports, allowing you to capture screenshots with incredible detail, then bringing it back down to a native playable resolution. To hotsample, you'll either need to use the BG3 camera tool, or SRWE. For either of these hotsampling tools, it's important that you've downloaded ReShade, or they will not work.

Once you have either of these downloaded, make sure your game is running in windowed mode. If you have more than one monitor, you need to change your display to show only on one screen. Or again, this will not work.

Next, you're going to want to make sure you have a key set for taking screenshots in ReShade, as well as making sure you like the folder where your screenshots are set to be saved. You can find this in the settings tab. Once you have those set, you're ready to take really HD screenshots!

To do that, you want to set your game's resolution to 2x, or even 3x what it's currently displayed as. Once it's set, your game screen is going to look giant and probably run way off your monitor. This is a sign it's working! Once it looks like this, press the screenshot key you set earlier within ReShade, and there you go, a nice big screenshot should be in the folder you set!

If you don't want to do hotsampling, and if you have a Nvidia graphics card, you can download their their app, which can take resampled screenshots. It won't be as high quality as hotsampling, but still better than standard HD.

3. Camera Mods

There are two camera mods that I know of for BG3. One is paid, the other is not.

The first one is the Native Camera Tweaks mod. This mod allows you to move the camera around more freely as you're traversing the world, but in cutscenes you'll still be stuck.

The second one is the paid one, but it allows for total freedom within the game, even during cutscenes. This tool is also very helpful for hotsampling. Within this tool, it's very useful to configure your own controls for moving the camera around in game, as well as setting a key you'll remember for pausing the game so you can set up a screenshot. I changed the movement keys to be wasd and the keys to change the angle of my camera side to side/up and down to the arrow keys.

4. Photography Basics

Taking screenshots in a game is a lot like doing photography irl tbh lol, same rules mostly apply. You of course want to do the basics like making sure your subject is in focus, it's not too dark or too light. But some other tips for people not very familiar with taking photos to take note of are:

Make sure if you're taking a photo of a person, the top of their head is within frame

Try and either make sure someone is front and center, or in the rule of thirds

Pay attention to the lighting, sometimes it's too bright or too dull. Sometimes it's unflattering in certain angles. Lighting will always make a huge difference

5. Post-Processing

You can now leave your screenshot as is, or edit it further with a photo editing software! I recommend using Photopea, as it offers basically everything Photoshop does without the insane price tag. From here you can do whatever you feel is best to enhance your image.

And that's all! If you have any questions, feel free to ask, and if you get stuck anywhere in this tutorial, don't feel bad. A lot of this stuff is just trial and error, but if you're very persistent with it, I promise you'll get these working. Also I would just like to mention that a lot of this stuff applies to taking screenshots in a lot of games! So you can take this knowledge with you elsewhere <3

If you happened to follow all this, please send in an image of your Tav you took!

[thothxv]

myhouse.wad-adjacent facts and blatant shilling for the musicians who soundtracked it

As has been largely disseminated, new mappers making levels based on their own houses are a common trope in the doom community, and they are often referred to generically as "myhouse.wad". The earliest myhouse maps are actually some of the oldest Doom maps in existence, predating Doom 2 (also at least one Doom 2 map was based on Sandy Peterson's house...)

A lot of people are impressed with myhouse.wad's room over room. I'm more impressed that in the first house myhouse used a boom-style silent teleporter to implement room-over-room sloppily so that the illusion very easily breaks (just step back up the stairs while one of the basement doors is open: it will snap shut because you are being teleported back into the version of the house with an upstairs, and thus there can't be an open door there), just like an inexperienced mapper might in 1999, before using modern GZDoom portals to do it more convincingly in the second house.

There's been a lot of theorizing about myhouse's author, probably because veddge is a very very competent mapper and also because everyone who does know who the author is has stonewalled inquiries at the author's request, implying that the author has a meaningful identity in the Doom community. Or maybe they're just shy. However, DavidXNewton noted in his analysis series on myhouse that it does a lot of things in a ways that are unnecessary using modern UDMF and ZScript but would be familiar to someone coming from a less advanced mapping format like Boom or Old ZDoom. This is indicative of Veddge being more along the lines of what he says he is: either someone truly returning after a long absence, or at the very least someone who isn't terribly familiar with modern GZDoom mapping. Either that, or the entire map was mapped in character. I genuinely don't know which I'd find more impressive.

"doomcute" is a term used to refer to maps that recreate real-world items or environments in doom (usually because the immediate reaction from players is "oh that's adorable!"). Myhouse maps are invariably trying for doomcute, but another early doomcute map was Shamus Young's Doom City from 1995 (yes, Shamus Young of DM of the Rings fame. I discovered while researching that he actually died last year. Rest in peace). Doom City recreated a couple of real-world looking buildings, but the thing everyone seems to remember about Doom City is its recreation of... a gas station. Food for thought.

Hilariously, myhouse almost got lost in the shuffle on Doomworld, because most people weren't looking for a myhouse.wad to play. Several of Veddge's collaborators posted in the thread to keep this from happening.

I believe Veddge's confirmed collaborators on myhouse are Kevansevans, esselfortium, and Jimmy. I don't know much about Kevansevans, but I believe he helped with the scripting and some of his scripting work from other sources made it into the wad because he's officially credited (as is everyone whose work was used in the map: it's all inside the PK3). Essel and Jimmy are credited only in anagram form because they are responsible for the music, which is actually wholly original (also Jimmy gave no indication he was involved until it was revealed by players unscrambling the anagram, which was very very funny).

I'm actually going to talk about Essel and Jimmy in detail over the next few bullet points, because I feel like it. And they're both really neat.

Sarah "esselfortium" Mancuso is responsible for memory=entryrrrr/////, the piece the plays in the burned house and various other places throughout the wad. She's composed professionally for video games and has several albums, but in the Doom community she's probably best known for creating and managing the Back to Saturn X project, a trilogy of megawads (only two of which are presently released) being developed by a massive team of modders, with custom assets, a custom palette, a complete original OST, and some very impressive maps... all intended to be playable with a vanilla doom2.exe. Which is insane: Vanilla Doom is brutal to map for, on account of harsh limitations that it's hard to be confident your map or project falls within. Back to Saturn X was so ambitious that it found previously undiscovered ways that Doom can crash. Of course, in addition to running the project, Essel also mapped for it, made textures for it, and composed a significant portion of the soundtrack. And because that was not impressive enough apparently, Essel also (with some help from a few others) created Knee-Deep in Knee-Deep in ZDoom, a joke wad that takes the (in)famous Knee-Deep in ZDoom, a mapset designed to show off the features of ZDoom, and recreates as many of its tricks as it can entirely in vanilla. A feat I can only describe as black magic of the highest order. She also went out of her way to say Trans Rights during her bethesda interview, so that's cool too.

James "Jimmy" Paddock is responsible for the increasingly glitchy and messed-up version of D_RUNNIN that plays in the second house. Which figures, because Jimmy's music is everywhere. He takes commissions for music, he's contributed free music to the community, and his music is very very popular. Notable wads he's contributed tracks to include Plutonia 2, Speed of Doom, Reverie, Back to Saturn X Episodes 1 and 2, Eviternity, and Doom 2 In Spain Only, and the MIDI soundtrack to John Romero's SIGIL, which some consider to be even better than the Buckethead soundtrack. He also is the project lead and mind behind The Adventures of Square, a standalone, free game made in GZDoom, he's done texture work, he's made several award-winning doom mods (cacowards, that is), mapped for numerous other projects, and had just done a whole ton of stuff. The doom community gave him an award for lifetime achievement. Oh, and he did an alternative MIDI OST for Prodeus? Genuinely didn't know about that.

While researching this I learned that Jimmy is going to be evicted in a month, so now's a great time to check out his music online and see if you're into it. I'm not a super fan of his vocal delivery, but I really like some of his instrumentals and MP3 versions of his MIDIs.

[active-mind-15]

Just thought of some Akashi videogame headcanons

So first of all because of all the extra studies and activities he was made to do throughout his childhood, he originally did not play video games at all. He just never had the time and his father considered them to be unproductive, anyway. So, he never grew up with any video game console in his house.

The only exposure he had to video games came from other people, more specifically the Teiko gang. Kise, Aomine, and Murasakibara specifically played a lot of video games in their free time, and if Akashi was around, he'd lean over them to get a peek at their screens (I would imagine they'd be bringing their PSPs or DSs to school or something). Sometimes, Akashi would ask questions about the games that they were playing, because he would just be so curious as to how fun it is to play them, and if they sense that Akashi is really interested they'd give him a turn with their console.

And, of course, Akashi, being the out-of-touch person that he is (bless his precious little heart), ends up getting taught by the other miracles how to play the games. He listens very intently and is a quick learner, though, so once he understands the rules he's really good.

And since he met Midorima and was friends with someone who finally shared his interest in shogi, Akashi started playing online games with him when they weren't at school. I vaguely remember from like an interview or something with Fujimaki that Akashi's online handle is Red Emperor, which is just... very fitting. Either way, even though Akashi did not play console games, he would always do online shogi matches with Midorima which would then expand into other games like chess and Othello. And those kept up all the way until high school. But since he wasn't hanging out with the other former Teiko members like he used to, his video game exposure went right back down to zero.

Eventually, post-Winter Cup, when the former Teiko members start hanging out together again, he starts getting exposed to video games again through the others, and the miracles finally just tell him he should get some games of his own to try out. At first, he wasn't sure about getting a console, but they told him that he could just get PC games to start and if he's comfortable with the PC format then he can just stick with it.

Case in point, Aomine sends him the link for Steam via text with the message "Go crazy".

Lemme tell you, this boy clicks on that link and SCROLLS. Again, as someone who was never familiar with the video game realm, this feels like stepping into a new world. With all the options for games, it's almost overwhelming, but eventually, he starts picking game categories that stick out to him and combing through different game trailers and synopses with a mindset of "I'll pick three games to test out and see how I feel after that."

^^^ Famous last words

Fast-forward to some time after that, and Akashi has very much found an appreciation for video games and regularly tries new ones that interest him.

Since he's a very intelligent person, I would like to think that rather than playing video games to relax and not use his brain for a while, he's the type to play video games that are intellectually stimulating. He likes to be challenged and use his wits to complete the games he plays.

Because of that, I would say his video game preferences probably fall into strategy (specifically turn-based and tabletop strategy) and puzzle games (which include puzzle platformers). He's also a big fan of story-rich games and will play through the occasional visual novel as well.

When he tells the former Teiko members he started getting into video games, they make it a point at every subsequent meetup to ask about any current ones he's playing and what he thinks of them. Sometimes, they'll keep an eye out for upcoming games within his favorite genres and show him trailers of games they think he'd like.

Whenever he's invested in a trailer he'll get this sparkle in his eye that the others pretend they don't notice but secretly look out for to know whether or not they're on the right track.

Also, after successfully getting Akashi into video games, the rest of the former Teiko members (mainly Aomine and Kise) convince him to download a few co-op games that they all can play together.

So whenever all of them have free time, Aomine or Kise will send some bat signal message to their group chat to assemble and they all get on their computers to play.

As time goes on, the co-op gaming sessions eventually become a bi-weekly event, and Akashi tries his best to shift his schedule around so he doesn't miss them.

His current teammates at Rakuzan notice him disappearing or being unavailable on certain days and ask Akashi what's been occupying his time so much, thinking that it would be something school-related. When he tells them he's actually just playing co-op games with his former teammates, they think it's the cutest fucking thing ever (especially Mibuchi).

Eventually, video games become more than just a way to pass the time, they become another outlet for Akashi to just... be a regular teen and not have to worry about being perfect at what he's doing? They help relieve his stress and give him something to take his mind off school. And the Uncrowned Kings notice he's happier because of it. Most importantly of all, he gets to connect more with his Teiko friends like he always wanted.

[BONUS]

Sometime in the distant future, after graduating high school, he convinces his father to let him have a one-bedroom apartment close to his campus with the excuse that it'll make commuting easier. After moving in and unpacking his stuff, the former Teiko members get a text in their group chat from Akashi with a picture of a Nintendo Switch and seven controllers with the message "Anyone up for a game?"

[fipindustries]

Artificial Intelligence Risk

about a month ago i got into my mind the idea of trying the format of video essay, and the topic i came up with that i felt i could more or less handle was AI risk and my objections to yudkowsky. i wrote the script but then soon afterwards i ran out of motivation to do the video. still i didnt want the effort to go to waste so i decided to share the text, slightly edited here. this is a LONG fucking thing so put it aside on its own tab and come back to it when you are comfortable and ready to sink your teeth on quite a lot of reading

Anyway, let’s talk about AI risk

I’m going to be doing a very quick introduction to some of the latest conversations that have been going on in the field of artificial intelligence, what are artificial intelligences exactly, what is an AGI, what is an agent, the orthogonality thesis, the concept of instrumental convergence, alignment and how does Eliezer Yudkowsky figure in all of this.

 If you are already familiar with this you can skip to section two where I’m going to be talking about yudkowsky’s arguments for AI research presenting an existential risk to, not just humanity, or even the world, but to the entire universe and my own tepid rebuttal to his argument.

Now, I SHOULD clarify, I am not an expert on the field, my credentials are dubious at best, I am a college drop out from the career of computer science and I have a three year graduate degree in video game design and a three year graduate degree in electromechanical instalations. All that I know about the current state of AI research I have learned by reading articles, consulting a few friends who have studied about the topic more extensevily than me,

and watching educational you tube videos so. You know. Not an authority on the matter from any considerable point of view and my opinions should be regarded as such.

So without further ado, let’s get in on it.

PART ONE, A RUSHED INTRODUCTION ON THE SUBJECT

1.1 general intelligence and agency

lets begin with what counts as artificial intelligence, the technical definition for artificial intelligence is, eh…, well, why don’t I let a Masters degree in machine intelligence explain it:

 Now let’s get a bit more precise here and include the definition of AGI, Artificial General intelligence. It is understood that classic ai’s such as the ones we have in our videogames or in alpha GO or even our roombas, are narrow Ais, that is to say, they are capable of doing only one kind of thing. They do not understand the world beyond their field of expertise whether that be within a videogame level, within a GO board or within you filthy disgusting floor.

AGI on the other hand is much more, well, general, it can have a multimodal understanding of its surroundings, it can generalize, it can extrapolate, it can learn new things across multiple different fields, it can come up with solutions that account for multiple different factors, it can incorporate new ideas and concepts. Essentially, a human is an agi. So far that is the last frontier of AI research, and although we are not there quite yet, it does seem like we are doing some moderate strides in that direction. We’ve all seen the impressive conversational and coding skills that GPT-4 has and Google just released Gemini, a multimodal AI that can understand and generate text, sounds, images and video simultaneously. Now, of course it has its limits, it has no persistent memory, its contextual window while larger than previous models is still relatively small compared to a human (contextual window means essentially short term memory, how many things can it keep track of and act coherently about).

And yet there is one more factor I haven’t mentioned yet that would be needed to make something a “true” AGI. That is Agency. To have goals and autonomously come up with plans and carry those plans out in the world to achieve those goals. I as a person, have agency over my life, because I can choose at any given moment to do something without anyone explicitly telling me to do it, and I can decide how to do it. That is what computers, and machines to a larger extent, don’t have. Volition.

So, Now that we have established that, allow me to introduce yet one more definition here, one that you may disagree with but which I need to establish in order to have a common language with you such that I can communicate these ideas effectively. The definition of intelligence. It’s a thorny subject and people get very particular with that word because there are moral associations with it. To imply that someone or something has or hasn’t intelligence can be seen as implying that it deserves or doesn’t deserve admiration, validity, moral worth or even  personhood. I don’t care about any of that dumb shit. The way Im going to be using intelligence in this video is basically “how capable you are to do many different things successfully”. The more “intelligent” an AI is, the more capable of doing things that AI can be. After all, there is a reason why education is considered such a universally good thing in society. To educate a child is to uplift them, to expand their world, to increase their opportunities in life. And the same goes for AI. I need to emphasize that this is just the way I’m using the word within the context of this video, I don’t care if you are a psychologist or a neurosurgeon, or a pedagogue, I need a word to express this idea and that is the word im going to use, if you don’t like it or if you think this is innapropiate of me then by all means, keep on thinking that, go on and comment about it below the video, and then go on to suck my dick.

Anyway. Now, we have established what an AGI is, we have established what agency is, and we have established how having more intelligence increases your agency. But as the intelligence of a given agent increases we start to see certain trends, certain strategies start to arise again and again, and we call this Instrumental convergence.

1.2 instrumental convergence

The basic idea behind instrumental convergence is that if you are an intelligent agent that wants to achieve some goal, there are some common basic strategies that you are going to turn towards no matter what. It doesn’t matter if your goal is as complicated as building a nuclear bomb or as simple as making a cup of tea. These are things we can reliably predict any AGI worth its salt is going to try to do.

First of all is self-preservation. Its going to try to protect itself. When you want to do something, being dead is usually. Bad. its counterproductive. Is not generally recommended. Dying is widely considered unadvisable by 9 out of every ten experts in the field. If there is something that it wants getting done, it wont get done if it dies or is turned off, so its safe to predict that any AGI will try to do things in order not be turned off. How far it may go in order to do this? Well… [wouldn’t you like to know weather boy].

Another thing it will predictably converge towards is goal preservation. That is to say, it will resist any attempt to try and change it, to alter it, to modify its goals. Because, again, if you want to accomplish something, suddenly deciding that you want to do something else is uh, not going to accomplish the first thing, is it? Lets say that you want to take care of your child, that is your goal, that is the thing you want to accomplish, and I come to you and say, here, let me change you on the inside so that you don’t care about protecting your kid. Obviously you are not going to let me, because if you stopped caring about your kids, then your kids wouldn’t be cared for or protected. And you want to ensure that happens, so caring about something else instead is a huge no-no- which is why, if we make AGI and it has goals that we don’t like it will probably resist any attempt to “fix” it.

And finally another goal that it will most likely trend towards is self improvement. Which can be more generalized to “resource acquisition”. If it lacks capacities to carry out a plan, then step one of that plan will always be to increase capacities. If you want to get something really expensive, well first you need to get money. If you want to increase your chances of getting a high paying job then you need to get education, if you want to get a partner you need to increase how attractive you are. And as we established earlier, if intelligence is the thing that increases your agency, you want to become smarter in order to do more things. So one more time, is not a huge leap at all, it is not a stretch of the imagination, to say that any AGI will probably seek to increase its capabilities, whether by acquiring more computation, by improving itself, by taking control of resources.

All these three things I mentioned are sure bets, they are likely to happen and safe to assume. They are things we ought to keep in mind when creating AGI.

 Now of course, I have implied a sinister tone to all these things, I have made all this sound vaguely threatening, haven’t i?. There is one more assumption im sneaking into all of this which I haven’t talked about. All that I have mentioned presents a very callous view of AGI, I have made it apparent that all of these strategies it may follow will go in conflict with people, maybe even go as far as to harm humans. Am I impliying that AGI may tend to be… Evil???

1.3 The Orthogonality thesis

Well, not quite.

We humans care about things. Generally. And we generally tend to care about roughly the same things, simply by virtue of being humans. We have some innate preferences and some innate dislikes. We have a tendency to not like suffering (please keep in mind I said a tendency, im talking about a statistical trend, something that most humans present to some degree). Most of us, baring social conditioning, would take pause at the idea of torturing someone directly, on purpose, with our bare hands. (edit bear paws onto my hands as I say this).  Most would feel uncomfortable at the thought of doing it to multitudes of people. We tend to show a preference for food, water, air, shelter, comfort, entertainment and companionship. This is just how we are fundamentally wired. These things can be overcome, of course, but that is the thing, they have to be overcome in the first place.

An AGI is not going to have the same evolutionary predisposition to these things like we do because it is not made of the same things a human is made of and it was not raised the same way a human was raised.

There is something about a human brain, in a human body, flooded with human hormones that makes us feel and think and act in certain ways and care about certain things.

All an AGI is going to have is the goals it developed during its training, and will only care insofar as those goals are met. So say an AGI has the goal of going to the corner store to bring me a pack of cookies. In its way there it comes across an anthill in its path, it will probably step on the anthill because to take that step takes it closer to the corner store, and why wouldn’t it step on the anthill? Was it programmed with some specific innate preference not to step on ants? No? then it will step on the anthill and not pay any mind  to it.

Now lets say it comes across a cat. Same logic applies, if it wasn’t programmed with an inherent tendency to value animals, stepping on the cat wont slow it down at all.

Now let’s say it comes across a baby.

Of course, if its intelligent enough it will probably understand that if it steps on that baby people might notice and try to stop it, most likely even try to disable it or turn it off so it will not step on the baby, to save itself from all that trouble. But you have to understand that it wont stop because it will feel bad about harming a baby or because it understands that to harm a baby is wrong. And indeed if it was powerful enough such that no matter what people did they could not stop it and it would suffer no consequence for killing the baby, it would have probably killed the baby.

If I need to put it in gross, inaccurate terms for you to get it then let me put it this way. Its essentially a sociopath. It only cares about the wellbeing of others in as far as that benefits it self. Except human sociopaths do care nominally about having human comforts and companionship, albeit in a very instrumental way, which will involve some manner of stable society and civilization around them. Also they are only human, and are limited in the harm they can do by human limitations.  An AGI doesn’t need any of that and is not limited by any of that.

So ultimately, much like a car’s goal is to move forward and it is not built to care about wether a human is in front of it or not, an AGI will carry its own goals regardless of what it has to sacrifice in order to carry that goal effectively. And those goals don’t need to include human wellbeing.

Now With that said. How DO we make it so that AGI cares about human wellbeing, how do we make it so that it wants good things for us. How do we make it so that its goals align with that of humans?

1.4 Alignment.

Alignment… is hard [cue hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy scene about the space being big]

This is the part im going to skip over the fastest because frankly it’s a deep field of study, there are many current strategies for aligning AGI, from mesa optimizers, to reinforced learning with human feedback, to adversarial asynchronous AI assisted reward training to uh, sitting on our asses and doing nothing. Suffice to say, none of these methods are perfect or foolproof.

One thing many people like to gesture at when they have not learned or studied anything about the subject is the three laws of robotics by isaac Asimov, a robot should not harm a human or allow by inaction to let a human come to harm, a robot should do what a human orders unless it contradicts the first law and a robot should preserve itself unless that goes against the previous two laws. Now the thing Asimov was prescient about was that these laws were not just “programmed” into the robots. These laws were not coded into their software, they were hardwired, they were part of the robot’s electronic architecture such that a robot could not ever be without those three laws much like a car couldn’t run without wheels.

In this Asimov realized how important these three laws were, that they had to be intrinsic to the robot’s very being, they couldn’t be hacked or uninstalled or erased. A robot simply could not be without these rules. Ideally that is what alignment should be. When we create an AGI, it should be made such that human values are its fundamental goal, that is the thing they should seek to maximize, instead of instrumental values, that is to say something they value simply because it allows it to achieve something else.

But how do we even begin to do that? How do we codify “human values” into a robot? How do we define “harm” for example? How do we even define “human”??? how do we define “happiness”? how do we explain a robot what is right and what is wrong when half the time we ourselves cannot even begin to agree on that? these are not just technical questions that robotic experts have to find the way to codify into ones and zeroes, these are profound philosophical questions to which we still don’t have satisfying answers to.

Well, the best sort of hack solution we’ve come up with so far is not to create bespoke fundamental axiomatic rules that the robot has to follow, but rather train it to imitate humans by showing it a billion billion examples of human behavior. But of course there is a problem with that approach. And no, is not just that humans are flawed and have a tendency to cause harm and therefore to ask a robot to imitate a human means creating something that can do all the bad things a human does, although that IS a problem too. The real problem is that we are training it to *imitate* a human, not  to *be* a human.

To reiterate what I said during the orthogonality thesis, is not good enough that I, for example, buy roses and give massages to act nice to my girlfriend because it allows me to have sex with her, I am not merely imitating or performing the rol of a loving partner because her happiness is an instrumental value to my fundamental value of getting sex. I should want to be nice to my girlfriend because it makes her happy and that is the thing I care about. Her happiness is  my fundamental value. Likewise, to an AGI, human fulfilment should be its fundamental value, not something that it learns to do because it allows it to achieve a certain reward that we give during training. Because if it only really cares deep down about the reward, rather than about what the reward is meant to incentivize, then that reward can very easily be divorced from human happiness.

Its goodharts law, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Why do students cheat during tests? Because their education is measured by grades, so the grades become the target and so students will seek to get high grades regardless of whether they learned or not. When trained on their subject and measured by grades, what they learn is not the school subject, they learn to get high grades, they learn to cheat.

This is also something known in psychology, punishment tends to be a poor mechanism of enforcing behavior because all it teaches people is how to avoid the punishment, it teaches people not to get caught. Which is why punitive justice doesn’t work all that well in stopping recividism and this is why the carceral system is rotten to core and why jail should be fucking abolish-[interrupt the transmission]

Now, how is this all relevant to current AI research? Well, the thing is, we ended up going about the worst possible way to create alignable AI.

1.5 LLMs (large language models)

This is getting way too fucking long So, hurrying up, lets do a quick review of how do Large language models work. We create a neural network which is a collection of giant matrixes, essentially a bunch of numbers that we add and multiply together over and over again, and then we tune those numbers by throwing absurdly big amounts of training data such that it starts forming internal mathematical models based on that data and it starts creating coherent patterns that it can recognize and replicate AND extrapolate! if we do this enough times with matrixes that are big enough and then when we start prodding it for human behavior it will be able to follow the pattern of human behavior that we prime it with and give us coherent responses.

(takes a big breath)this “thing” has learned. To imitate. Human. Behavior.

Problem is, we don’t know what “this thing” actually is, we just know that *it* can imitate humans.

You caught that?

What you have to understand is, we don’t actually know what internal models it creates, we don’t know what are the patterns that it extracted or internalized from the data that we fed it, we don’t know what are the internal rules that decide its behavior, we don’t know what is going on inside there, current LLMs are a black box. We don’t know what it learned, we don’t know what its fundamental values are, we don’t know how it thinks or what it truly wants. all we know is that it can imitate humans when we ask it to do so. We created some inhuman entity that is moderatly intelligent in specific contexts (that is to say, very capable) and we trained it to imitate humans. That sounds a bit unnerving doesn’t it?

 To be clear, LLMs are not carefully crafted piece by piece. This does not work like traditional software where a programmer will sit down and build the thing line by line, all its behaviors specified. Is more accurate to say that LLMs, are grown, almost organically. We know the process that generates them, but we don’t know exactly what it generates or how what it generates works internally, it is a mistery. And these things are so big and so complicated internally that to try and go inside and decipher what they are doing is almost intractable.

But, on the bright side, we are trying to tract it. There is a big subfield of AI research called interpretability, which is actually doing the hard work of going inside and figuring out how the sausage gets made, and they have been doing some moderate progress as of lately. Which is encouraging. But still, understanding the enemy is only step one, step two is coming up with an actually effective and reliable way of turning that potential enemy into a friend.

Puff! Ok so, now that this is all out of the way I can go onto the last subject before I move on to part two of this video, the character of the hour, the man the myth the legend. The modern day Casandra. Mr chicken little himself! Sci fi author extraordinaire! The mad man! The futurist! The leader of the rationalist movement!

1.5 Yudkowsky

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky  born September 11, 1979, wait, what the fuck, September eleven? (looks at camera) yudkowsky was born on 9/11, I literally just learned this for the first time! What the fuck, oh that sucks, oh no, oh no, my condolences, that’s terrible…. Moving on. he is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence, including the idea that there might not be a "fire alarm" for AI He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. Or so says his Wikipedia page.

Yudkowsky is, shall we say, a character. a very eccentric man, he is an AI doomer. Convinced that AGI, once finally created, will most likely kill all humans, extract all valuable resources from the planet, disassemble the solar system, create a dyson sphere around the sun and expand across the universe turning all of the cosmos into paperclips. Wait, no, that is not quite it, to properly quote,( grabs a piece of paper and very pointedly reads from it) turn the cosmos into tiny squiggly  molecules resembling paperclips whose configuration just so happens to fulfill the strange, alien unfathomable terminal goal they ended up developing in training. So you know, something totally different.

And he is utterly convinced of this idea, has been for over a decade now, not only that but, while he cannot pinpoint a precise date, he is confident that, more likely than not it will happen within this century. In fact most betting markets seem to believe that we will get AGI somewhere in the mid 30’s.

His argument is basically that in the field of AI research, the development of capabilities is going much faster than the development of alignment, so that AIs will become disproportionately powerful before we ever figure out how to control them. And once we create unaligned AGI we will have created an agent who doesn’t care about humans but will care about something else entirely irrelevant to us and it will seek to maximize that goal, and because it will be vastly more intelligent than humans therefore we wont be able to stop it. In fact not only we wont be able to stop it, there wont be a fight at all. It will carry out its plans for world domination in secret without us even detecting it and it will execute it before any of us even realize what happened. Because that is what a smart person trying to take over the world would do.

This is why the definition I gave of intelligence at the beginning is so important, it all hinges on that, intelligence as the measure of how capable you are to come up with solutions to problems, problems such as “how to kill all humans without being detected or stopped”. And you may say well now, intelligence is fine and all but there are limits to what you can accomplish with raw intelligence, even if you are supposedly smarter than a human surely you wouldn’t be capable of just taking over the world uninmpeeded, intelligence is not this end all be all superpower. Yudkowsky would respond that you are not recognizing or respecting the power that intelligence has. After all it was intelligence what designed the atom bomb, it was intelligence what created a cure for polio and it was intelligence what made it so that there is a human foot print on the moon.

Some may call this view of intelligence a bit reductive. After all surely it wasn’t *just* intelligence what did all that but also hard physical labor and the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people. But, he would argue, intelligence was the underlying motor that moved all that. That to come up with the plan and to convince people to follow it and to delegate the tasks to the appropriate subagents, it was all directed by thought, by ideas, by intelligence. By the way, so far I am not agreeing or disagreeing with any of this, I am merely explaining his ideas.

But remember, it doesn’t stop there, like I said during his intro, he believes there will be “no fire alarm”. In fact for all we know, maybe AGI has already been created and its merely bidding its time and plotting in the background, trying to get more compute, trying to get smarter. (to be fair, he doesn’t think this is right now, but with the next iteration of gpt? Gpt 5 or 6? Well who knows). He thinks that the entire world should halt AI research and punish with multilateral international treaties any group or nation that doesn’t stop. going as far as putting military attacks on GPU farms as sanctions of those treaties.

What’s more, he believes that, in fact, the fight is already lost. AI is already progressing too fast and there is nothing to stop it, we are not showing any signs of making headway with alignment and no one is incentivized to slow down. Recently he wrote an article called “dying with dignity” where he essentially says all this, AGI will destroy us, there is no point in planning for the future or having children and that we should act as if we are already dead. This doesn’t mean to stop fighting or to stop trying to find ways to align AGI, impossible as it may seem, but to merely have the basic dignity of acknowledging that we are probably not going to win. In every interview ive seen with the guy he sounds fairly defeatist and honestly kind of depressed. He truly seems to think its hopeless, if not because the AGI is clearly unbeatable and superior to humans, then because humans are clearly so stupid that we keep developing AI completely unregulated while making the tools to develop AI widely available and public for anyone to grab and do as they please with, as well as connecting every AI to the internet and to all mobile devices giving it instant access to humanity. and  worst of all: we keep teaching it how to code. From his perspective it really seems like people are in a rush to create the most unsecured, wildly available, unrestricted, capable, hyperconnected AGI possible.

We are not just going to summon the antichrist, we are going to receive them with a red carpet and immediately hand it the keys to the kingdom before it even manages to fully get out of its fiery pit.

So. The situation seems dire, at least to this guy. Now, to be clear, only he and a handful of other AI researchers are on that specific level of alarm. The opinions vary across the field and from what I understand this level of hopelessness and defeatism is the minority opinion.

I WILL say, however what is NOT the minority opinion is that AGI IS actually dangerous, maybe not quite on the level of immediate, inevitable and total human extinction but certainly a genuine threat that has to be taken seriously. AGI being something dangerous if unaligned is not a fringe position and I would not consider it something to be dismissed as an idea that experts don’t take seriously.

Aaand here is where I step up and clarify that this is my position as well. I am also, very much, a believer that AGI would posit a colossal danger to humanity. That yes, an unaligned AGI would represent an agent smarter than a human, capable of causing vast harm to humanity and with no human qualms or limitations to do so. I believe this is not just possible but probable and likely to happen within our lifetimes.

So there. I made my position clear.

BUT!

With all that said. I do have one key disagreement with yudkowsky. And partially the reason why I made this video was so that I could present this counterargument and maybe he, or someone that thinks like him, will see it and either change their mind or present a counter-counterargument that changes MY mind (although I really hope they don’t, that would be really depressing.)

Finally, we can move on to part 2

PART TWO- MY COUNTERARGUMENT TO YUDKOWSKY

I really have my work cut out for me, don’t i? as I said I am not expert and this dude has probably spent far more time than me thinking about this. But I have seen most interviews that guy has been doing for a year, I have seen most of his debates and I have followed him on twitter for years now. (also, to be clear, I AM a fan of the guy, I have read hpmor, three worlds collide, the dark lords answer, a girl intercorrupted, the sequences, and I TRIED to read planecrash, that last one didn’t work out so well for me). My point is in all the material I have seen of Eliezer I don’t recall anyone ever giving him quite this specific argument I’m about to give.

It’s a limited argument. as I have already stated I largely agree with most of what he says, I DO believe that unaligned AGI is possible, I DO believe it would be really dangerous if it were to exist and I do believe alignment is really hard. My key disagreement is specifically about his point I descrived earlier, about the lack of a fire alarm, and perhaps, more to the point, to humanity’s lack of response to such an alarm if it were to come to pass.

All we would need, is a Chernobyl incident, what is that? A situation where this technology goes out of control and causes a lot of damage, of potentially catastrophic consequences, but not so bad that it cannot be contained in time by enough effort. We need a weaker form of AGI to try to harm us, maybe even present a believable threat of taking over the world, but not so smart that humans cant do anything about it. We need essentially an AI vaccine, so that we can finally start developing proper AI antibodies. “aintibodies”

In the past humanity was dazzled by the limitless potential of nuclear power, to the point that old chemistry sets, the kind that were sold to children, would come with uranium for them to play with. We were building atom bombs, nuclear stations, the future was very much based on the power of the atom. But after a couple of really close calls and big enough scares we became, as a species, terrified of nuclear power. Some may argue to the point of overcorrection. We became scared enough that even megalomaniacal hawkish leaders were able to take pause and reconsider using it as a weapon, we became so scared that we overregulated the technology to the point of it almost becoming economically inviable to apply, we started disassembling nuclear stations across the world and to slowly reduce our nuclear arsenal.

This is all a proof of concept that, no matter how alluring a technology may be, if we are scared enough of it we can coordinate as a species and roll it back, to do our best to put the genie back in the bottle. One of the things eliezer says over and over again is that what makes AGI different from other technologies is that if we get it wrong on the first try we don’t get a second chance. Here is where I think he is wrong: I think if we get AGI wrong on the first try, it is more likely than not that nothing world ending will happen. Perhaps it will be something scary, perhaps something really scary, but unlikely that it will be on the level of all humans dropping dead simultaneously due to diamonoid bacteria. And THAT will be our Chernobyl, that will be the fire alarm, that will be the red flag that the disaster monkeys, as he call us, wont be able to ignore.

Now WHY do I think this? Based on what am I saying this? I will not be as hyperbolic as other yudkowsky detractors and say that he claims AGI will be basically a god. The AGI yudkowsky proposes is not a god. Just a really advanced alien, maybe even a wizard, but certainly not a god.

Still, even if not quite on the level of godhood, this dangerous superintelligent AGI yudkowsky proposes would be impressive. It would be the most advanced and powerful entity on planet earth. It would be humanity’s greatest achievement.

It would also be, I imagine, really hard to create. Even leaving aside the alignment bussines, to create a powerful superintelligent AGI without flaws, without bugs, without glitches, It would have to be an incredibly complex, specific, particular and hard to get right feat of software engineering. We are not just talking about an AGI smarter than a human, that’s easy stuff, humans are not that smart and arguably current AI is already smarter than a human, at least within their context window and until they start hallucinating. But what we are talking about here is an AGI capable of outsmarting reality.

We are talking about an AGI smart enough to carry out complex, multistep plans, in which they are not going to be in control of every factor and variable, specially at the beginning. We are talking about AGI that will have to function in the outside world, crashing with outside logistics and sheer dumb chance. We are talking about plans for world domination with no unforeseen factors, no unexpected delays or mistakes, every single possible setback and hidden variable accounted for. Im not saying that an AGI capable of doing this wont be possible maybe some day, im saying that to create an AGI that is capable of doing this, on the first try, without a hitch, is probably really really really hard for humans to do. Im saying there are probably not a lot of worlds where humans fiddling with giant inscrutable matrixes stumble upon the right precise set of layers and weight and biases that give rise to the Doctor from doctor who, and there are probably a whole truckload of worlds where humans end up with a lot of incoherent nonsense and rubbish.

Im saying that AGI, when it fails, when humans screw it up, doesn’t suddenly become more powerful than we ever expected, its more likely that it just fails and collapses. To turn one of Eliezer’s examples against him, when you screw up a rocket, it doesn’t accidentally punch a worm hole in the fabric of time and space, it just explodes before reaching the stratosphere. When you screw up a nuclear bomb, you don’t get to blow up the solar system, you just get a less powerful bomb.

He presents a fully aligned AGI as this big challenge that humanity has to get right on the first try, but that seems to imply that building an unaligned AGI is just a simple matter, almost taken for granted. It may be comparatively easier than an aligned AGI, but my point is that already unaligned AGI is stupidly hard to do and that if you fail in building unaligned AGI, then you don’t get an unaligned AGI, you just get another stupid model that screws up and stumbles on itself the second it encounters something unexpected. And that is a good thing I’d say! That means that there is SOME safety margin, some space to screw up before we need to really start worrying. And further more, what I am saying is that our first earnest attempt at an unaligned AGI will probably not be that smart or impressive because we as humans would have probably screwed something up, we would have probably unintentionally programmed it with some stupid glitch or bug or flaw and wont be a threat to all of humanity.

Now here comes the hypothetical back and forth, because im not stupid and I can try to anticipate what Yudkowsky might argue back and try to answer that before he says it (although I believe the guy is probably smarter than me and if I follow his logic, I probably cant actually anticipate what he would argue to prove me wrong, much like I cant predict what moves Magnus Carlsen would make in a game of chess against me, I SHOULD predict that him proving me wrong is the likeliest option, even if I cant picture how he will do it, but you see, I believe in a little thing called debating with dignity, wink)

What I anticipate he would argue is that AGI, no matter how flawed and shoddy our first attempt at making it were, would understand that is not smart enough yet and try to become smarter, so it would lie and pretend to be an aligned AGI so that it can trick us into giving it access to more compute or just so that it can bid its time and create an AGI smarter than itself. So even if we don’t create a perfect unaligned AGI, this imperfect AGI would try to create it and succeed, and then THAT new AGI would be the world ender to worry about.

So two things to that, first, this is filled with a lot of assumptions which I don’t know the likelihood of. The idea that this first flawed AGI would be smart enough to understand its limitations, smart enough to convincingly lie about it and smart enough to create an AGI that is better than itself. My priors about all these things are dubious at best. Second, It feels like kicking the can down the road. I don’t think creating an AGI capable of all of this is trivial to make on a first attempt. I think its more likely that we will create an unaligned AGI that is flawed, that is kind of dumb, that is unreliable, even to itself and its own twisted, orthogonal goals.

And I think this flawed creature MIGHT attempt something, maybe something genuenly threatning, but it wont be smart enough to pull it off effortlessly and flawlessly, because us humans are not smart enough to create something that can do that on the first try. And THAT first flawed attempt, that warning shot, THAT will be our fire alarm, that will be our Chernobyl. And THAT will be the thing that opens the door to us disaster monkeys finally getting our shit together.

But hey, maybe yudkowsky wouldn’t argue that, maybe he would come with some better, more insightful response I cant anticipate. If so, im waiting eagerly (although not TOO eagerly) for it.

Part 3 CONCLUSSION

So.

After all that, what is there left to say? Well, if everything that I said checks out then there is hope to be had. My two objectives here were first to provide people who are not familiar with the subject with a starting point as well as with the basic arguments supporting the concept of AI risk, why its something to be taken seriously and not just high faluting wackos who read one too many sci fi stories. This was not meant to be thorough or deep, just a quick catch up with the bear minimum so that, if you are curious and want to go deeper into the subject, you know where to start. I personally recommend watching rob miles’ AI risk series on youtube as well as reading the series of books written by yudkowsky known as the sequences, which can be found on the website lesswrong. If you want other refutations of yudkowsky’s argument you can search for paul christiano or robin hanson, both very smart people who had very smart debates on the subject against eliezer.

The second purpose here was to provide an argument against Yudkowskys brand of doomerism both so that it can be accepted if proven right or properly refuted if proven wrong. Again, I really hope that its not proven wrong. It would really really suck if I end up being wrong about this. But, as a very smart person said once, what is true is already true, and knowing it doesn’t make it any worse. If the sky is blue I want to believe that the sky is blue, and if the sky is not blue then I don’t want to believe the sky is blue.

This has been a presentation by FIP industries, thanks for watching.

[dervampireprince]

ASMR | Elisabeth das Musical - Der Tod x Listener SFW Death Becomes Entranced And Seduces A Lonely Prince

[M4M/GF4M] [Prince! Listener] [Seduction] [Manipulation] [Kissing - no character death, lore here is Death's kisses can kill if it's 'your time' but if it's not they don't but they're still cold and cause temporary frostbite-like symptoms] [TW implies the listener is depressed and has been experiencing suicidal ideation, Death at points advises the listener to kiss him which would kill them, please skip this audio if you think these issues could affect or trigger you and if you are affected by these issues please seek help and contact hotlines in your country. This audio is fictional, Death's attempts to be a voice of suicidal ideation should not be taken seriously nor applied to real life.] 

I've been wanting to make this audio for so long. While I've left it ambiguous enough to be enjoyed as an original audio, this character is actually from my favourite musical 'Elisabeth das Musical'. It's a German-language dark queer historical romance where Death (Der Tod) is drawn to those who think about him, in particular it follows the life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, and her son Rudolf. The musical does deal with serious mental health topics and some historical events from that time including the rise of fascism so please know that going in, but if you think you can handle such topics then I couldn't recommend the musical enough. 

The original 1992 Vienna production is on Youtube with English subtitles, that is my favourite production and means a lot to me as Uwe Kroger as Death is just... perfection to me, very much gender envy and has been a big influence on me and helped me with accepting myself and my gender expression, and his characterisation of Death as this genderfluid, pansexual otherworldly being is just beautiful. And if you enjoy then I'd also recommend the 2005 Vienna production which is also on Youtube with English subtitles mostly for the few extra added song and Serkan Kaya's performance as Lucheni.

For those of you in my Patreon Discord server, I streamed this musical last Sunday in there for you guys and it finally felt like the perfect time to bring this audio to life. And if Kronprinz is still around, I know you were requesting a Der Tod audio for a long time and I hope you're happy with this one. The listener in this audio series takes the place of Rudolf, but you don't need to know anything about the musical to understand these audios. I chose to present them more like my original royalty series audios as Elisabeth das Musical is not very well known outside of mainland Europe and Japan, so I hoped by framing it this way with a photograph of myself cosplaying Death from a couple years ago would entice more people who aren't familiar with the musical. 

I love this musical so much, European musicals in general are my biggest interest and if you go searching for them it wont be long until you find my sfw account @emptymasks posting too much about them. If you're interested in learning more I have some masterlists and info posts pinned on my emptymasks Tumblr, but also as part of my subathon rewards I am doing a stream on my Twitch explaining about infodumping about European musicals and I've been working on some video essays for years that I hope to get finished this year that will be up on my emptymasks Youtube channel. I also run @europeanmusicals . If any mutuals or followers from my main or side blogs finds this... well hello there, I find myself nervous to drop this in the euro musical tags, as if people are going to find this format of fanwork weird but well... I had fun, I hope you guys are nice about this (nice doesn't mean you have to like it, but please don't be mean about it if you just don't enjoy asmr or audio content).

Something something if I had a nickel for every time Prince voiced a personification of Death from different fandoms I'd have three nickels.

.

Old public spicy audios on sound gasm (link in pinned post). 2 Exclusive spicy audios on Patreon every month. I also stream on Twitch every week @ dervampireprince . [minors + ageless blogs dni. this blog is for 18+ only.] [do not repost/reupload/edit any of my content]

[n-anon]

DisMay 2019 Timeline

this is highly inspired by Fins ( @fear-is-nameless)  timeline series, I noticed that no ones really gone and done a timeline (that I’ve seen) for the discord and youtube incidents of May 2019, so I’m gonna do it, about 4 years late, hooray :P

Hit the keep reading cuz this is gonna be long!

along with tagging fin I should probably tag @isas-theory-wall​ and @jselorekeeper​ for this

May 7th

So ironically we’re getting to the bottom of this, by starting with the video of ‘I’ll Get to the Bottom of This...’ Where, we have Jack, playing a 3 scary game video, but right in the first game, something goes wrong and we here a very distorted voice thanking us for our ‘contribution to the video/his death’

May 21st

The start of Observation! And just like that game, we get quite a lot of references sprinkled throughout, and a very concerning ending clip of Jack disappearing at the end after a bunch of symbols flash on screen, along with him mentioning he loves wormholes and space

Meanwhile in the discord a few hours after this, a channel called ‘cgzintom’ in zalgo opens up, and we see familiar faces talking, along with ‘Jack’ who doesn’t seem to know who they are (called BoopyDoopy at this time) after which Chase tells ‘Jack’ he needs to wake up, the chat is deleted:

The  ‘ cgzinotm‘ code was infamously solved by yours truly, as its a Shift Cipher that means ‘Watching’

May 22nd 

FNAF VR’s first part comes out, and while nothing is glitchy about the video, Jacks whiteboard in the background has a familiar number lineup of 101610 

which while formatted wrong, is very close to 10/10/16 aka Anti’s first appearance and birthday, also in fun RGB colors!

On the same date, Jack uploads part 2 of Observation, where he not only glitches into the intro but continuing the creepy endings, we get to see a slow r moving camera focusing on the ship, which is flooded with ominous red lighting, until a very familiar silhouette appears in one of the many glitches.

May 23rd

Jack uploads Observation Part 3! And we get a very familiar neck movement, and our favorite phrase. Time is Broken.

May 24th

FNAF VR again! But this time. Theres a very familiar face. Along with a very familiar wheeze

Oh but thats not all, if you guessed ‘whats next another weird discord thing?’ Then you’d be CORRECTTTT. (you see why this was called Dismay?) A few hours before Observation Part 4 is uploaded, the mods begin acting....A little strange. And Jack himself begins...glitching. And it keeps happening, right as part 4 is uploaded, so we’re split between lines-

the mods begin trying to corrupt the others....and ask odd questions

Lauralie appears to be okay...But not for long

Now lets get to the meat of the matter, aka Observation Part 4 after ALL of that, theres no going back now- and Jack himself? Stuck in a loop, along with the words ‘Bring Him’

May 27th

3 days later, everythings back to normal, the mods are fine, jacks fine- But whats this? FNAF VR part 3 with a steel chair??? Theres a code here too! as stated in my code guide earlier its ‘Big plans’ in Enigma

June 5th 2019

While technically not in May, the final part of FNAF VR (and this large saga) Was uploaded in which there was a code on the whiteboard yet again, this time in ASCII85, which translated to ‘you can’t look away’

[analoghorrorexplained]

Analog Horror Review: UrbanSPOOK

[ Warning, this post will contain spoilers for the work of media mentioned in the title. This review will also contain mentions of upsetting topics such as the SA and SA of a minor. Please read at your own risk]

It has been awhile since I have made an analog horror review since, well, there have not been many series I have seen that has caught my eye. But, while I am not really “dazzled” by the newer content being put out there (minus Vita Carnis). But... despite me not really finding much of what is being released right now interesting... I found myself unable to not say anything about the series above. 

UrbanSPOOK is an analog horror series detailing the exploits of an extremely violent serial killer who leaves paintings at the scenes of his crimes. That is it. The horror from this series is actually a little different than what we are used to since instead of something paranormal or extraordinary happening all of what we are seeing happen is caused by a presumably normal (although extremely deranged) man with no other extraordinary traits. In a way, this makes urbanSPOOK more realistic than some other series. Things like this could very well happen (and probably are happening) in our real world. This is more or less the extent of the plot. Each video is set up to be a VHS recap of the crimes of this serial killer recounting in detail how this serial killer murdered these people in the most violent way they could. And in each video, the paintings left behind by this person are shown. 

I watched the entire series which was not hard to do since each video was under 5 minutes long. And I did not like what I saw.

For one, as many others have said, UrbanSPOOK does not really use the actual genre of analog horror that well. While I can tell the creator put some serious effort in those paintings along with research involving the methods of killing: the series itself is more reminiscent of a slideshow. There is no reason this could not have been any other type of horror or even just a series of twitter posts providing backstories for these paintings. These videos dont seem like PSAs since they do not state what organization they originate from or any other specifics like the dates these murders happened, approximate locations, or any other details that really give us a time or a place. With the analog format, you are supposed to be using analog formats of media to tell a story. This can take the form of a channel hijacking, old TV ads, old children's shows, PSAs, or radio broadcasts (among others). While the channel says the videos we are being shown are from supposedly “old VHS tapes”, they do not even show the old VHS grain or distortions most tapes have and, again, lack a lot of the information we already went over. There is no time frame for events other than “2 months ago” or “4 months ago” nor is there a location, or even any organizations we can trace things back to.

If this is supposed to be a PI or a family member of a victim raising awareness, why are they detailing the killings in such crippling detail when the focus should be on catching the guy doing this? If this is meant for police eyes only (which would explain the graphicness) why is there a number at the end of the video? If this was made by the killer, what would be the point in doing this when they are already leaving behind paintings at the scene? And if this is a news network: all of the above is still true but why is there no secondary voiceover? Why are they showing the paintings when those paintings do not help identify the victims and are evidence? Why are no specific locations being mentioned other than “the lighthouse” or “a mine”. At least with series like Gemini Home, Vita Carnis, Local 58, and Mandela, we have some sort of base location we get to be familiar with. We know why the story is being presented in analog format. It makes sense because the story is set in a time where that is the only format available. We have clues. This isnt giving us anything other than the phone number. And the phone number only tells us that the series takes place in Louisiana, near New Orleans, and is sometimes during of after 2001 since that's when that area code was introduced. And even then, DVDs were introduced in 1996 and surpassed the sale of tapes by 2003. This isnt to say people did not use VHS after 2001 but by 2008 everything was mostly switched over to the DVD format. 

My point is: the story does not make a lot of sense in the format it is. Either the creator is having this take place in the early 2000s which... I guess can work but then begs the question of the phone number. But if its before then: the phone number itself is a massive continuity error. 

That is not the only issue I have with the series though.

Sexual assault, themes of genital mutilation, and pedophilia are also pretty common or at least are openly displayed in the series. Grant it, these are traits the killer is shown to possess. These are not things being inherently endorsed or promoted. However, what I do take issue with is the fact that the series lingers a little bit too long on describing these acts and the violence that results from them and not really much else. While the series creator has stated multiple times on now-deleted tweets that he does not view himself as “having limits” in regards to his series and makes this mostly for shock value: I do not think this should excuse just how haphazardly the subject of SA is handled. Almost every episode of the series has something that is either blatantly rape or can be interpreted as a form of rape somewhere in the episode. And a lot of these scenes also involve children, mutilation, or the abuse of animals as well. This is in almost EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. And once again, these are all described in sickening detail. 

Other than being “gross and disturbing” it serves no narrative purpose just like it being on a VHS doesn't. If this was supposed to make us hate the villain: we already have gotten to that point I think. If anything, we have gone well past it. But what also bothers me is that these themes also pop up in the creator's other work. This same issue is a near-constant thing with the other work they put out. I am not accusing the creator of anything, lets be clear on that, but it is not a good look to admit you make content for shock value, have SA be a main theme in your work, and then make a lot of art also about SA and the SA of kids while also selling the painting your in-world serial killer made of a SAed murdered child as merch. 

If you want to address some dark real-world subjects, do that, other places have (for example the SCP foundation or Mandela). But doing that and describing the most graphic rape scene you can think of are not the same thing. Not only is it lazy, it just makes your series into torture porn. It serves little purpose. And when that is a majority of what you talk about: I am inclined to think you have more of a darker connection with that topic beyond using it to simply advance your art. Again, this is not an accusation, just an observation from what is public. 

Overall, between the fact this series fails to really live up to what “analog horror” actually is and lacks any story beyond “here is this guy, he kills people in really violent ways, he leaves paintings behind, and did I mention he does fucked up stuff with their genitals” and it does not progress beyond that. It is edge-fodder without a coherent story or point for existing beyond being disturbing. The only thing that makes this series interesting is the fact its a person doing this and not a monster but after recent episodes even that is questionable. The fact that a teenager who spends a little bit too much time on Liveleak could have written this tells me its not worth following further. The horror here is the fact that something this seemingly loved by other people is this terrible in terms of execution and its ability to convey a point other than “look, a mangled human body I may or may not have SAed, be afraid”. 

Over all I give this a “For the love of god try harder, and no not in that way/10″. While the art is well made, I have no idea why this series gets praise when it fumbles this badly at everything it tries to do. This could have been so good, why is it so bad?

And analog horror community, get better standards if this is the “new standard” of the genre. This is laughable. 

[brujitaadinbo]

Well, now that I continue to see a lot of commotion because according to many "fans" of The Mandalorian series, they criticize that the action format changed, that Din's role disappeared, blah blah blah…

I wonder, do they at least realize that everything won't always be the same as the first season? that everything is part of growth? That's how a western-type series develops…

And it's absurd that they want to maintain the same line, really… if they don't like this material… what are they doing here watching it? LOL Has no sense.

When we talk about a western, we don't just talk about action, we talk about drama, suspense, a story that develops with other characters, many protagonists and villains, romance, of course short, long, with or without a happy ending, but present romance.

So I keep asking myself, what are they doing here? Because the series has given us this and more; the development of Din, accompanied by Grogu, his new son, having a new profession, recovering his planet, having rewards like the cabin, being guardians and the first line of defense of the outer edge,

unify with another tribe, redeem himself with his creed, with his own group, form a bond with a fallen princess, but more than that with a woman whom he respects, admires and values ​​​​very much (Bo katan) So, do you still think that Din lost prominence?? LOL I prefer to call it because they never paid attention to the series and I repeat, they are those types of people who have no passion for anything, they don't take a message from anything, they just want to see something "good" and short as if everything were a stupid video of tik tok haha ​​and well I think you're making a mistake if you keep seeing everything like this.

And with this I return to my childhood; the legacy that my mother left in me… watching the films and series from the golden age of Mexican cinema, those westerns that were so dark and sinister or at the same time with that soft and familiar tone, where there was everything and obvious. Romance, not just because it is a cliché, is part of our human nature, this is something that Star Wars has always touched on in its material. I loved seeing actors like Rodolfo de Anda being gunfighters and living their lives to the limit, without fear of anything, like Din Djarin, adopting children and saving towns, helping his friends and conquering the heart of a certain protagonist girl with his heroism, honor and bravery. .

Those are the westerns, gentlemen, and before criticizing the material of The Mandalorian or its relationship with Bo Katan, look at all the Star Wars content, you will notice that until recently Rebels and Ashoka also touched on these aspects. about, do yourself a favor and see the material better.

[micromanclub]

A new "Microman"-based project, code named "Project M" was announced by Takara Tomy at the Shizuoka Hobby Show earlier this Spring. Microman Enthusiast Patrick Chan compiled many, many images and analyzed the images hidden in the teaser promo on the Facebook MicroFans Group a while back, and the findings were pretty interesting!

We'll share soon some of Patrick's findings (and just a couple of our own conclusions) here in anticipation of the bigger reeveals expected in late July, the month of Microman's 50th anniversary, ahead of the planned Autumn project launch. Be sure to check out his albums on Facebook if you are able!

While still in very early prototype sculpt phase, a number of pre-articulated maquettes, internal armatures, and partially sculpted figures and mecha were revealed along with a lot of the design concepts, mostly flashed through on video. The new figure format, apparently geared towards the 1:18 premium action figure collectors of toylines for adult hobbyists (such as Acid Rain) features a hard SF feel and an innovative articulated collarbone /shoulder structure and will be 10.5 centimeters tall:

A number of unique figures were identified with familiar Microman-based names:

We'll give each a look thanks to Patrick's detailed sorting of the images. The above equipment appear from the concepts and sculpts to be unique backpacks for each figure class, possibly also usable as shields, and possibly with folding dashwings or similar functions.

Also of note was one piece of unidentified concept art we believe is the new redesign of Robotman:

In the following posts to come we'll go over each of the figure classes and the two mecha that were revealed scuplts of so far.

Much mystery remains, including whether we will see the usage of clear parts, chrome, and bright colors hat old fans associate with the series or not. But in the meantime, it's exciting to see Microman is still very much alive again, regardless of what form it ends up taking, or who it is ultimately geared towards. Stay tuned!

[itsybitsyjoltik]

so as someone who's dabbled with playing pokemon vgc, i feel like the average person...kind of doesn't fully understand the 2014 pokemon vgc world championship thing with se jun park using pachirisu, and i wanted to demystify it a bit

disclaimer that i'm a very casual vgc player and while i'm trying my best to avoid making any major mistakes i don't know everything, i also am not familiar with the specific format in that generation so there might be nuances that i miss.

so wait, what is vgc? what do you mean by format?

vgc (video game championship) is the official competitive pokemon format. it's a double battle (two on two) format. each player has a team of six mons, and each player gets to see that team before they fight, and then they pick four of their own mons to try to beat whichever four their opponent picks. tournaments are usually played as best of three, so whoever wins twice wins the match

unlike unofficial formats like smogon, there aren't really banlists or anything like that. (usually.) however, what pokemon are legal depends on the game that's currently being played and the format, cycling between pokemon native to that game, national dex formats where other pokemon are usable, and formats where you can use up to two box legendaries (restricted pokemon)

the relevant points are 1. the double battle format and 2. it was limited to pokemon that are native to the gen 6 games (not necessarily gen 6 pokemon) and no box legendaries

why is pachirisu such an unusual choice?

the 2014 pokemon world championship is the only instance in which pachirisu has been used to any significant success. and in fact it's fairly rare for anyone to consider it, and, well, there's definitely a reason for that

stats aren't everything, but these are...quite bad. the threshold at which a stat is usable varies depending on the stat, but it's generally a minimum of around 100 to be good. no stat above 100 is generally quite bad. 95 speed and 90 sp def are...okay, but a bulk of 60/70/90 is. not good. and with 45/45 in its offensive stats the best you're gonna get is a bulky support set. and at least on paper, pachirisu doesn't have anything to make that worth using. however...

so why would anyone use pachirisu?

to be clear, se jun park did not use pachirisu just because he liked it or to see if he could. there was a method to his madness and once you know a little bit about vgc it contextualizes things a lot

strategy is very different in double battles from in single battles, especially with the have 6 bring 4 format in vgc. you have a limited number of pokemon that you can use in a given battle and you have to try to survive attacks from two different mons on the same turn. this means that attacks, items, and dedicated mons with defensive utility can be very useful, especially mons that can redirect attacks away from their partner and survive it themselves

one of the best attacks in the game, then, is the move Follow Me--completely useless in single battles, but in double battles it makes it so all of the opponent's attacks that turn hit the user instead of their partner. there's a couple of other attacks that can be used for similar purposes (rage powder, ally switch) but for various reasons follow me is considered to be the best

it's also a move with somewhat limited distribution, even more so in formats where you can only use pokemon native to the current game

so. pachirisu is one of the mons who can learn follow me. it has...not great stats, but enough bulk that if you're desperate you can work with it. it has volt absorb, an ability that makes it immune to electric type attacks, and immunities are always nice if you want to redirect hits and especially if they're to types its teammates are weak to

so se jun park raised a pachirisu to be particularly bulky, gave it a sitrus berry to heal itself and get even more bulk, and gave it a support moveset with follow me and super fang (a fairly rare attack in terms of distribution that knocks enemy pokemon's health down by half), and he won the world championship using a pokemon no one expected

but one that made sense for his particular team's composition

in closing, some other pokemon that have been successful using follow me: togekiss, female indeedee, clefairy (yes, clefairy rather than clefable. there are reasons but i'm not going into them here), recently maushold got a decent amount of use despite having similar assets to pachirisu but i think it's kinda fallen off due to power creep, and then the other main non-follow me redirector is amoonguss with rage powder (insert your among us jokes here)

anyway i say all of this not to make se jun park's victory seem any less impressive. it's really cool, and it was really cool that he managed to make pachirisu work!! and that pachirisu in vgc managed to be so iconic

but i think the reasons behind using pachirisu and knowing why it worked makes it all the more impressive

[ravenkings]

Ok so someone told me you’ve read “erotica m: death and sensuality” and actually understood it. Pls give me your wisdom bc I’ve been trying to read the book and ???

yeah, i don't blame you. it's definitely not an easy read, especially since bataille is not really concerned with making his ideas particularly accessible (and, arguably, might even be actively working to make them less accessible.) also, a lot of the conclusions he comes to can seem anywhere from outlandish to downright terrifying at first glance, especially if you are not particularly receptive to them.

however, i think before i try to give you a probably inadequate explanation of my interpretation, i would direct you towards these two esoterica videos for a brief crash course in georges bataille's thought and the "death drive" (also dr. justin sledge is INFINITELY better educated and better read than i am, so he probably has a better understanding of these things than i could ever have:)

so here goes my take:

bataille sees "eroticism" and religious/spiritual experience (in his case, christian religious experience) as intimately related, if not, in some cases, almost exactly the same thing. he refers to eroticism as "assenting to life up to the point of death."

mystical religious experience often entails the feeling of becoming "one" with god/the universe and shedding our notions of our own individuality in blissful "one-ness" with everything. in some sense, one can see this as a precursor to death. (btw if you are not familiar with the freudian concept of the "death drive," bataille will not make much sense to you.)

anyway, for bataille, this idea of "one-ness" (or death, if you will) is the central preoccupation for eroticism, since the ultimate "consummation" of eroticism is, of course, the experience of orgasm, which he equates to death. (it also helps here to remember the term for orgasm "la petite mort" which translates directly to "the little death" in english.) however, for bataille, the main point of engaging in "eroticism" is not actually reaching the point of "consummation" but the moment RIGHT BEFORE, which, he believes, is when we feel most alive.

however, if we accept that all of this is true, eroticism also becomes, fundamentally, a form of violation and violence, since what it primarily constitutes is a change from one state to another (the individuated/separate/discontinuous to the one/united/continuous). eroticism, for bataille, means crossing boundaries and transgressing. also, if death and sexual consummation are somehow both equivalent experiences in some sense, the act of violence against the body can become a quasi-erotic (or explicitly erotic) act.

another way to think about this is with religious mystics and/or ascetics like medieval catholic flagellants who "mortified their own flesh" by whipping themselves to repent of their sins and thus get closer to god or just to attain mystical experience.

this also leads us into the concept of the "taboo" which bataille seems to understand (imo) as a category of things that exist primarily so that engaging in "taboo" behavior crosses some sort of boundary, which is an inherently erotic act. basically, the very FACT that the thing is taboo and forbidden is what makes it erotic and thus attractive and pleasurable.

another thing you might want to look into to understand this better is clive barker's hellraiser franchise (and the novel it is based on the hellbound heart.) the "cenobites" who feature in the franchise are really heavily influenced by bataille's ideas, and it might be helpful to see these ideas illustrated in more of a narrative format.)

also, here is a video about the connection between bataille and hellraiser which might be useful:

i don't know if any of this makes ANY sense, but i hope this helps!

[imjulia-andilikecats]

If Cal had Tik tok he would make thrist traps on there and post them💀

No? Yes? Maybe?

Warning: This will be very unnecessarily long.

Let me explain. Cal is a responsible dude that values professionalism and hard work.

If Cal ever uses Tik Tok, he would have downloaded it for the purpose of understanding a new strategy of getting a younger demographic interested in his family's mylti-million manufacturing company.

He would take note on the type of content and format that would get the most attention.

Cal doing some speedy research on successful video that are "short, exciting, and informative." Which Cal enterprited as making ads, but for viewers with a much shorter attention span.

So he started making tik tok shorts of reviewing tools, car maintenance advice and how to fix it car parts. With him earing a few views and comments that would ask about the video but some would ask if he wants to check their *p@rn website*.

But it didn't deter Cal since he also noticed that the more tiktok shorts he makes, his videos would pop up more on those designated tags.

When he started to get more views, with the comments asking him how he fix the engines. The video would get a good view of his arms and shoulders. (And y'all know how glorious those biceps are💪😘).

So he got messages and comments asking how he got those muscles. Cal thinking, "eh might as well and try to sneak some other products in the video".

Cal started to product gym videos. (But he keeps his face hidden, since his family is well known and he likes to keep his identity private.)

But his 🎇BUFFNESS🎇 was more than enough to get a ton of views and a sizable following of young men who want to build muscles and excersice. Which Cal happily shared (and shoved more product ads in).

Since he was slowly getting quiet famous, some of his workout videos started to gain female viewers (the middle age women that have A LOT of free time on their hands.) Sending thirsty messages amd comments which Cal either blocked or ignored.

Cal is too 👼PIOUS🧼 to share his body like that in a fast paced platform. Keep his content strictly educational, with the occassional dad puns.

Until he saw her....

Cal was done filming a "how to tell if your mechanic is overcharging you" video and was famish. When he arrived in his family's kitchen, he saw a petite girl with wavy brown hair rummaging through the cupboards.

He first that she was a thief, so he quick went up to her asking what on earth is she doing in his house.

The girl turned to him. Cal thought a strong with breezed whipped through him, as his skin prickled at how strikingly pretty this uninvited guest was.

Her dark brow raised and her full lips, slightly pouting at him with annoyance. Only answered, "I'm a guest." Lifting her arms full of snacks that his baby brother kept hidden in the kitchen cabinet.

Cal was left speechless and VERY smitten with Mavey's guest, who apparently was his classmate and they were working on a project that needs to be submitted tomorrow. His baby brother angrily explained, while pulling his guest back to his bedroom and glaring at him as they walked away.

He found it odd that Mavey, often thoughtful and soft spoken, openly looked annoyed with him, but his mind was far too occupied with warm brown eyes and soft, pouty lips.

A few days past, Cal was going quite mad at "how to attract a guest's attention", when he received a notification of someone liking his workout videos and a short comment, "Cool." Was all it said.

But Cal stared hard at the profile, the familiar face and the account name: "lightningmarequeen".

A quick search into her account showed mostly videos of her two older brothers goofing around and a blode guy, around her again, tagging along with their weird stunts.

At that moment, something clicked.

Looking at the video that earned her like and comment. Where he was doing one handed push ups. He finally found a way to get her attention.

Cal started posting more workout videos, each more tiring than the last, with him no longer wearing his usual long sleeves.

It was replaed with short sleeved gym wear and would occassionally change his shirt, and "accidentally" forgot to edit out that part of the video.

The account, lightningmarequeen, would like and comment 1 out of 5 of his videos. Leaving one to two worded comments like. "Cool. Nice. Cool video. Bruh (which Cal had to look up)."

After a month of his strategy, he worked up the courage to send her a private message, asking her if she wanted to meet up and get coffee.

She replied. "Sure, but show me your face first."

Cal inhaled, sending her a picture of him in a suit and tie.

His phone made a sound, and saw that she sent a message.

Cal opened it, excited to see an up close photo of her.

What he got instead was a picture of a very tall, very hairy man that appeared to be her older brother. With a note. "I like your videos dude but hands off my sister."

So, my answer is yes, for love and research.😘

P. S. SORRY FOR TAKING SO LONG IN ANSWERING THIS ASK. MY BRAIN WAS NOT BRAINING LATELY.

P. S. P. S. Mare sent the photo of Bree. Cause she is not into thirst traps and has no idea who he was. But worry not, Cal found an opportunity to ask her out (when he waited to make sure Maven was not around, watching her like a hawk).