#you can find the demos on the internet archive

[elv--eyera]

Today not only did I find out that Frank Wildhorn wrote a musical based on Carmen, and that it premiered in the Czech Republic, but also that it was (according to the Jekyll & Hyde wiki) the first musical proshot recorded in 3D

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

TONIGHT (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:

https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/

Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you'll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense.

AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results.

Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn't Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that's possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google's back-end and then filtering the results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you're a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people's minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Nevermind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?

A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It's a supremely confident liar that can get you killed:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

This is true of all of AI's most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

But let's take Google at its word. Let's stipulate that:

a) It can't fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and

b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and

c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized.

AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there's a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us.

Remember: enshittification isn't the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system's back-end to make sure the house always wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.

Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent.

Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is why Google doesn't have to worry about privacy laws. They've successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

In Europe, Google's vast profits lets it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland's tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, and it also doesn't fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn't have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google's lucrative, low-quality results:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, it doesn't fear rival technology and it doesn't fear its workers. Google's workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company's direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.

Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:

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

If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself.

Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries.

This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:

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

But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees.

AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn't tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI 'hallucination.'"

The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

That's why, even if you're willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won't.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

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

[o-sachi]

Do a Somersalt ! ‧₊˚ ⋅ Blue Lock Chars. (Request)

ଳ how would the blue lock boys react to a gymnast s/o who is muscular? ଳ characters; isagi yoichi, bachira meguru, nagi seishiro, reo mikage, chigiri hyoma, michael kaiser, shidou ryusei ଳ tags; floof, afab reader, no y/n

ᯓ Isagi Yoichi

"You're going to the gym? Can I come too?"

The man is absolutely mesmerized by you. The way you look alone never fails to amaze him. But when you're in your element? He's definitely somewhere—melting into a puddle after witnessing your moves.

An absolute sucker for your muscles, especially the thighs. He'll poke at 'em, squish 'em, and lay his head on 'em.

He will always always always ask to watch your competitions. It's only fair that he provide moral support for you since you do the same for his football games. Hell—even if it's just practice, he'll try to come and watch you anyway.

He loves the way you look, but a small part of him wants to be more muscular as well because he thinks he'd embarrass you if he wasn't as lean as you :(

"Hey, what would you think if I were more muscular?" / "Hmm, I'd be pretty proud, but you look great as you are." / "Be for real." / "I am being for real though?"

Doesn't really dwell on that thought. It's more of a fleeting one if anything. He's more preoccupied about admiring you anyway.

ᯓ Bachira Meguru

"How the fuck did you flip like that? I wanna do it too."

Expect him to hound you about teaching him all your "cool" moves. He'll ask about the complicated ones even though both of you know that he won't be doing that with just an explanation, a demo, and a prayer.

Bachira's quite flexible though, so you do manage to teach him some stuff. He was SO ecstatic the first time he was able to do a move that you two had been going over for an hour.

"Babe, I think I'm ready to do a double back salto tucked with a triple twist." / "Okay, first of all, even I can't do that... and two, how do you know that?" / "There's this little thing called 'the internet'?"

He's not really one to be too observant of what body type his s/o has, but he'll always compliment your muscles.

The way his face lights up when both of you find out you can lift him up like a baby is priceless. It may or may not be the reason why he loves your muscles so much...

ᯓ Nagi Seishiro

"Ah... can you carry me back? What? I'm not that heavy..."

Nagi loves your muscles. They're firm, but they make good pillows. He says he falls asleep faster when he's in your arms or when his head is resting on your lap.

Another reason is because you can give him piggyback rides. Sure, he's more than 6 feet tall and still weighs more than you, but you suck it up and try to lift him anyway.

He's so in awe of all the moves that you do on the bars or on the floor. If he's watching you compete, he's most likely thinking about how much of a hassle those moves are.

"Don't you get tired of swinging around like that? Looks tough." / "You know that football matches are 90 minutes long, right?" / "...I know and I hate running for that long."

After both of your trainings, he'll invite you to take a long ass nap in the ac and under the comfiest blanket ever. It's impossible to say no to him.

ᯓ Reo Mikage

"Hey, your video got 500 likes already—as expected."

He pretty much has documented your entire career with how many pictures and videos he has taken of you training or performing. He has his own archive for your competitions too.

"Baby, there is no such thing as too much when it comes to you." / "Um... actually—" / "Shhh... shh..."

You two have the same trainer, nutritionist, manager—everything. He'll introduce you to his team that keeps him in tip-top shape for football so that you can be your best self in gymnastics too.

If he's unable to attend a competition of yours, he'll send someone to watch and record it for him.

Of course, he'll make it up by throwing an epic celebration for you regardless if you won or not. Reo will shower you with endless praise.

ᯓ Chigiri Hyoma

"The judges don't know what the fuck they're doing, honestly."

He's like... such a mom when he comes to watch your competitions. He'll be sitting in the audience—both amazed and a bit worried when you do risky moves.

When the judges score lower than what he expects, he'll start muttering under his breath about how stupid they are and that you deserve WAAAY higher.

The biggest hype man ever. It doesn't matter if you won or lost—he'll always express his admiration for you. If you did win, he'll celebrate the heck out of it with you. But if you lost, he'll reassure you and still celebrate for the effort you put in.

He likes choosing your leotard and hairstyle for you. When you give him the liberty to do so, the biggest smile appears on his face.

"Hmm... this purple one looks good, but I like the red one too." / "Hyoma, you know I'm only going to practice, right?" / "I know, I know."

ᯓ Michael Kaiser

"I only got into it because of you, y'know?"

He will shamelessly ogle your muscles. It's one thing that they look great. But it's another to know that you put in tons of hard work and discipline into building that kind of body. And he respects that quite a lot.

His knowledge of gymnastics when you first started dating was little to none. But suddenly he's so into it now. He watches other gymnasts' routines and learns the common moves and rules in competitions.

Mihya acts lowkey about it, but he feels a sense of pride seeing you happy when the two of you get to talk about the thing you love the most. It'll start of with him initiating the topic, then you'll just rant until you're tired. He won't complain though.

He felt like his heart was sucked right out of his chest when he saw your outfit for a certain competition. It was a black and blue leotard with blue roses on it. You swore his eyes watered a bit, but apparently it was just the wind...

"Well... you look great." / "Are you crying?" / "Huh? Crying? Psh. You're literally seeing things." / "Okay, Gaslighter3000."

ᯓ Shidou Ryusei

"Heh, wanna bet who can do more flips in a minute?"

He's actually glad that you're strong and muscular because it means he doesn't have to hold back as much. Also, he's just into the whole muscle mommy thing. Yes, he's that guy.

Shidou knows you can do pretty amazing things which, of course, leads to the most bizarre hypotheticals and bets ever.

"Babe, do you think you could flip off of that ledge?" / "Seriously. Look at it. It's like twice your height and it's all cement." / "Oh so then you're lame? I bet I could do that."

As much as you'd love to bring him to competitions... he just gets too excited (not that kind of excited). He'll start shouting and cheering you to the point that everyone will be looking at him.

His phone's storage is like 70% videos of you performing moves or you training. He finds it adorable when you're putting in work and doing things that can blow people away.

o-sachi © 2024 pls do not translate/copy/reupload my work on other platforms.

[undergroundbillions]

Hello!

We're noticing more people being interested in the Raggedy Ann fandom since the Amazing Digital Circus pilot released, so we thought we'd update our masterpost on where to find more Raggedy Ann media!

Books:

The first two and most well-known books are Raggedy Ann stories (1918) and Raggedy Andy stories (1920), which are in public domain and free to read online! Camel with the Wrinkled Knees (1924) (which the movie was loosely based on!) is on Internet Archive and available to read without an account. You can find many of the other books on there as well.

Cartoons:

The 1940's has Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy (1941), Suddenly It's Spring (1944), and The Enchanted Square (1947).

You've got the 1977 Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure of course.

The Chuck Jones holiday TV specials: Raggedy Ann and Andy in The Great Santa Claus Caper (1978) and Raggedy Ann and Andy in The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile (1979).

Most episodes of The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy (1988-1990) are in this playlist here, and you could probably find any missing ones on Dailymotion.

From the Target crossover we have the animated Snowden: Raggedy Ann & Andy's Adventure (1998) and the live-action ice-skating special The Snowden, Raggedy Ann and Andy Holiday Show (1998).

Music:

I've also got a playlist of all the albums I've found on YouTube or were uploaded by us, and there's many more of the older ones available on Archive. The old Will Wooden and Frank Luther ones are very charming.

Musical:

You can watch recovered archival footage of the full first production of the Raggedy Ann musical (1984), listen to the demo album (~1985), or the Broadway bootleg (1986)!

If you're interested in more, I'd recommend exploring the saved playlists on the RARE YouTube channel or the media tag on the Raggedy Ann Fandom Wiki.

We're a group of Raggedy Ann enthusiasts who got together to search for Raggedy Ann lost media (specifically the musical), but now we collect and archive all sorts of things from the franchise! Our ask box is always open and we love to find things people are looking for, or even just chat about headcanons and such.

-Mod General D.

[sludgewarden]

early demo of bloodhail and where you can find the album it's on. edit: replaced youtube vid with chopped up audio with the actual mp3 from internet archive.

[manonamora-if]

The Interactive Fiction DataBase - IFDB

What is the IFDB?

The IFDB, or Interactive Fiction DataBase, is a game catalogue, recommendation engine, and a platform to play games requiring an interpreter (to run the code).

As a catalogue, the IFDB is meant as a place to create a bibliography of IF games created throughout the years (over 12 thousands!), to leave a trace that these existed. It is maintained by its members. Anyone can join and add a listing or fix a mistake. You can also find listing for past IF competitions!

As a recommendation engine, the IFDB provides not only lists of the best-rated entries, but will show you games that you may enjoy based on the ones you've played/rated or what other members have played/rated. Entries are also categorised by tags, which are all searchable. Members are also able to create lists to recommende games they've enjoyed! Or leave reviews of those games too!

Finally, some games may require an interpreting engine to run. Those interpreters can be sometimes difficult to track down or to set up, especially for new players. The IFDB has a system that will allow you to play those games directly in your browser by clicking the button : Play Online (only available if the game has been uploaded through the IF Archive).

Why is the IFDB important?

The internet is a rapidly changing place. Preserving information is not only important for future generations, but can help current generations find information about what is happening now. Archiving creates a historical record of what the IF landscape looked like.

Along with the IF Archive (which archives IF games), the IFDB makes viewing the history of IF much easier to browse.

However, the IFDB lacks in many aspects. Not every IF community is aware of the database, which means many projects do not appear in this catalogue. While the IFDB has currently over 12k listings, the VNDB (the Visual Novel DataBase) has over 40k! The IFDB is also lacking in entries in languages other than English...

The IFDB accepts any listing for games, made in any program, as long as said game is an Interactive Fiction game and has had a playable version available somewhere at some point (so it accepts WIPs with demo). /!\ Do not create a page for announced project without a release ! /!\

Why create an IFDB page for your game?

Aside from being part of preserving the history of IF (which is the big thing), and be able to share your work to a different part of the community, the IFDB is a great place to get and leave long-form reviews for entries.

If your project was coded in a program that requires an interpreter, it is a great place to host your game without worrying about newer players having to find and set up an interpreter.

If you have been part of an IF competition, or received accolades for your project, this is also a good way to showcase those achievements.

Finally, the IFDB is also a point of reference for IF Awards like the XYZZY and the IFDB Awards.

How do you create an IFDB page?

/!\ Please check that the game listing you want to add has not been added first! /!\

To create an IFDB page, you need to set up an account and be logged in.

Then click on Add a Game Listing, on the right menu in the main page. You will get the following page:

(You should read through the Guidelines the first time you add a listing, they are located at the top of the page)

Though it looks long, there are only very few information required to create a page:

The title

The name(s) of the author(s)

It is recommended to fill in the date of first publication, development system (program used to code), language, IFID (if available) description of the game, and genre.

As for being able to play the game, you have two (non-exclusive) options:

list the URL of the website where the game is hosted

list the download URL of the game (can be done through the IF Archive, only if you are the author of the game!)

Note sure what something is? A description (or a link towards explanations) of what is expected is included for almost all items. You can also include information that is not listed in the drop-down case (like the System or language).

When you are happy with it, click Save changes.

You can also fix, edit, or delete information at any moment. You just need to click on the link Edit This Page at the bottom of the game page.

How do you add Ratings, Reviews and Game Suggestions ?

Logged in with your account, you have the possibility of leaving ratings and reviews on a game page. You can also help the IFDB algorithm by suggesting similar games to an entry.

The process is fairly straight-forward (clicking on the stars for the rating, clicking Review it for the review, and clicking Suggest similar games, for the suggestions). Thought you can find further explanations here, if you follow what the website is asking, you should not have any difficulty to complete the task !

If you review enough games, your name can end up on the main page!

How do I create a Competition Page?

Have you participated or organised an IF competition? Or are you cataloguing previous editions?

You can create a separate page for a Competition by clicking on Add a Competition Page on the right menu of the main page. You will then get the following page:

Then it is a matter of filling the different relevant items.

The Competition Page allows for divisions within competitions (e.g. : the EctoComp had 2 categories, made under 4h and over 4h) and, if needs be, ranking.

Important Note: the competition entries need to already be listed in the IFDB to be added to a competition page.

What are Lists and Polls?

Lists and Polls are two other tools that interact with game entries.

Lists, also called Recommendation Lists, are lists a member will curate with games they are recommending to other members or viewers of the IFDB. Some are general (like best game ever) while others are more specific (like games with an AI that is nice). They are akin to public collections on Itch.io.

Polls are... polls.

Note: If a game is included in a poll and/or a list, these will appear on the game's page.

~~~~

TLDR: create an account, help preserve the IF landscape by recording its history, review games too :P

If I missed something, or something is unclear, let me know so I can edit it!

[samueldays]

Decided to see today if a ChatGPT instance could help me find a quote I had in mind, since it's supposedly read and memorized so much of the internet. It was surprisingly bad.

>Me: What's that quote which goes something like: 'I took up my pen to let my enemies know they have not convinced me' ? >ChatGPT: The quote you are referring to is often attributed to French philosopher and writer Voltaire. The exact wording may vary slightly, but the essence of the quote remains consistent. Here is one popular version: "I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

LOL wut, no, that's not at all what I asked.

>Me: No, it's not Voltaire. It's about writing. >GPT: I apologize for the confusion. If your question is related to writing, could you please provide more specific details or clarify what you would like to know or discuss about writing?

>Me: I would like help finding the quote from an aristocrat about why he's writing. It's something like: "I am not writing to convince, I am writing to let my friends know I agree and let my enemies know I disagree." >GPT: The quote you are referring to is often attributed to French diplomat and writer François de La Rochefoucauld. Although the quote has different variations, it captures the essence you described. The most common rendition is: "I do not write to convince, but to evade being convinced."

>Me: Please suggest a different quote along the same lines. >GPT: "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Steve Jobs

oh wow this instance is moronic, now I'm starting to wonder how much of the good performance is carefully cherrypicked and arranged. at this point I went on a detour and found the quote via arcane other means and Internet Archive to get a page from a 2014 blog where I'd seen it, and found the author's name: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Let's see if GPT is any better with that.

>Me: What's the Lichtenberg quote about having taken up his pen, not to convince people, but to encourage his friends and allies? >GPT: The Lichtenberg quote you are referring to is: "I have only taken up the pen to encourage my friends and to irritate my enemies."

still wrong! it's getting closer, but seemingly only because I prompted it with big hints.

>Me: No, not that one. What's the Lichtenberg quote about having taken up his pen in the year 1764, not to convince people, but to encourage his friends and allies? >GPT: I apologize for the confusion. Here is the quote you are referring to: "I have taken up my pen in the year 1764, not to persuade you, but to condemn a conduct which appears to me to be highly unjust. I wish only to exhort and encourage my friends and allies, and, if it be possible, to awaken the attention of those whom I esteem, to the rights and liberties, the interests and happiness of mankind." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

still wrong! this quote from GPT appears to be part hallucination and part cribbing from JS Mill. The actual quote I wanted is here on azquotes:

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

This was my experience last year too (and not in the haha last week sense) - ChatGPT seems frequently worse and dumber for me than it does in the demos and examples, and I speculate it's because I'm asking something offbeat.

[archivehornets]

TAGS WE USE ☆ ABOUT US ☆ OUR WEBSITE Hello, and welcome to Archivehornets! We’re a freelance archival project dedicated to collecting & cataloguing digital media related to internet horror series Marble Hornets. Submissions are always open; ensure you read our submission guidelines! Leave any questions in our inbox, and they will be dutifully answered by either mod. Never be afraid to ask a question! We have an answer, or can direct you to a person that does know. Below is our FAQ, what we're currently in search of, and a breakdown of our significant resources.

I’m looking for X special feature, can you help? The only “special features” you will find here will be the occasional picture from the DVDs. We are not going to post or archive anything in bulk that can be bought that is still available on the Grampo store. We are currently on the lookout for any original Kickstarter special features, as they are not available anymore. If you're looking for a specific moment that hasn't been lost to time, you should purchase it directly from the Grampo storefront. (Blu-ray special features, comics, etc.) I'm in some pictures from your post, what can I do? If you happen to be in any pictures that have been posted and do not want them archived or shared around, feel free to send a DM to either mod or an ask with a link to the specific post. It happens! We will willingly delete them for you.

-ANY Old Kickstarter reward videos, from the $100 tier of the original MH S3 DVD Kickstarter.

-ANY old THAC Patreon content lost to time, personalized videos, BTS bits, etc.

-ANY Ustream clips, recordings, screenshots of any of the THAC guys. Together OR separate.

-Scans of any papers that fans received as a bonus from buying auctioned MH clothes or other various items, or through other means.

-Personal anecdotes from meeting anyone behind MH at cons or otherwise

Archive.org: Our Archive.org profile lists not only all of MH, but various BTS videos, THAC bits, and other content! Soon to host all of BNWYDSE. Troy's Blogspot: Along with personal anecdotes, notes about movies he enjoys, etc. This includes notes here and there about BTS of MH! Fanmix Playlists: Our YouTube has a collection of fan content & bits and bobs from across the years. Being updated still. MH Fan Content Playlist: Sorted by year, these playlists have lots of fan content from 2009-2014. Reactions, memes, that sort of thing. MH Interviews & Misc: This is a STILL updating playlist full of interviews, demo reels, and film projects from the guys behind MH. Music/Animation Playlist: A mix of both animated and musical projects based around MH.

Make sure to check out our tags we use, and don't be afraid to shoot us an ask if you have any questions!

[rooby2k]

#1 of writing about artists i love!!

I wanna talk about a Connecticut metalcore/post-hardcore group that not many people have heard of, nor do i see anyone talk about at all, and i SWEAR i dont mean that in a snooty pretentious way; i mean it in the way that they LITERALLY only lasted two years in the early 2000's and were only known among the CT and NY hardcore scenes of the time, as far as im aware. i literally only know of their existence because i saw someone mention them on the RYM forums. and even there they have so few ratings and only appear on 2 user lists last i checked. im talking about a band named For Her I Can Be A Hero. AWESOME NAME IMO. its such a good name, and it's def of it’s time, and i love it LOL. im usually picky with metalcore, but FHICBAH's sound is like tinged with emo and post-hardcore and it makes for a sound that lowkey only them can scratch my itch for. that early 2000's melodic metalcore sound was already kind of nostalgic to me, now mix it with this era of emo and it is even more nostalgic sounding. i love it a lot. i think this band literally couldve been generational if they went on longer. they only had one demo and one EP in their time. and i love both of them. i found out one of the band members has a bandcamp where they just put out everything by everything theyve ever been apart of and i bought the FHICBAH releases SOO fast. i am linking a youtube video that's just their only two releases. what i love so much is how in the comments you can literally find people from the scene back then, and even MEMBERS reuniting in the comments section and it’s genuinely really beautiful to see. something i love about music in the internet age is how unifying it is and how much easier it’s become to find artists and bands of this status, not to mention archiving art and music has also become so much easier and has in turn made discovery so much more possible. it's genuinely awe-inspiring and beautiful.

[catbountry]

Hey there! I already said this in a reblog of your post about “And Now This” but on thinking about it more. and remembered things more clearly so I have decided to resend it to you directly in an ask.

I actually have a bit of information on this series because some parts are burned into my brain. I believe I have seen the original pilot and I remember a few parts of it.

I distinctly remember that the blue man group featured in one segment. it was the first time I had ever heard of them. They played a beat on a series of plastic pipes.

There was also a skit that ultimately resulted in someone saying the word selfish, and they were turned into a shellfish, and the person with them proclaimed something along the lines of “they said selfish, not shellfish!I” At the end there was a big dance party, you could see the person dancing with their shellfish friend.

There was also a skit involving Ratzo being on a date with a very beautiful woman. The date was going poorly at first until it was revealed that the woman was a very sloppy eater, and Ratzo was super into it. they proceeded to eat the meals by shoving it into their mouth with their hands.

And while I don’t remember it fully I do recognize the family watching TV as is shown in the demo reel.

I hope this is of interest to you! have a very good day.

Hey, I'm glad to hear anything about And Now This. I've tried getting in contact with people like blameitonjorge or Whang! about finding that first episode, and LSuperSonicQ was the only guy who messaged me back, though I didn't get much follow up. This was the same episode my longtime friend @nevvyland remembered.

If we can find somebody who has a complete recording of that first show, then this will finally be complete and we can put the search to rest. It's been eight years.

I just wanna see that first episode since the second one is the one I remember seeing as a kid and that one's been preserved in full on the Internet Archive. Thank you for keeping the spirit of the search alive.

[pic-creator]

Finding the Perfect Soundtrack: A Guide to Royalty-Free Videos for Your Videos

Pichunt: Uniting the Best, not just for royalty-free videos, but for all your visual storytelling needs. But did you know the magic extends beyond the moving image? Sound plays an equally crucial role in captivating your audience and setting the tone of your video. That's where royalty-free Videos comes in, adding that emotional layer that elevates your content from good to great.

This guide delves into the world of royalty-free Videos libraries, empowering you, the video editor or motion graphic designer, to find the perfect soundtrack that complements your Pichunt-powered visuals. Get ready to unlock a universe of audio possibilities without copyright concerns!

Exploring the Symphony of Royalty Free Videos Libraries:

Gone are the days of scouring the internet for snippets and risking copyright strikes. Pichunt integrates seamlessly with several renowned royalty-free Videos libraries, offering a convenient one-stop shop for both your visual and audio needs. Here are some popular options:

Epidemic Sound: Known for its extensive library of high-quality, commercially licensed Videos, Epidemic Sound boasts a diverse range of genres and moods, perfectly suited for various video projects.

Artlist: Curated by a team of Videos supervisors, Artlist offers unique, trendy tracks that perfectly complement modern video styles. Explore their collections categorized by mood, genre, and activity for a precise fit.

Audio Jungle: Part of the Envato Marketplace, AudioJungle provides a vast collection of royalty-free Videos tracks and sound effects at affordable prices. With its user-friendly search and filter options, finding the right audio is a breeze.

Free Videos Archive: Looking for budget-friendly options? The Free Videos Archive offers a curated selection of high-quality, royalty-free Videos licensed under Creative Commons. While the selection might be smaller, you'll find hidden gems perfect for specific projects.

Beyond Pichunt's Integrations:

While Pichunt's integrated libraries offer convenience, venturing beyond can expose you to even more sonic diversity. Here are some highly-regarded external options:

bensound: This independent artist offers a collection of royalty-free Videos in various genres, all free to use in your videos with attribution.

Free Stock Videos: Discover a treasure trove of royalty-free Videos categorized by mood, genre, and instrument, perfect for adding that extra touch without breaking the bank.

YouTube Audio Library: If you're already creating on YouTube, don't forget their built-in audio library containing free-to-use Videos and sound effects.

Matching Melody to Message: Choosing the Right Videos

Now that you have a plethora of options, how do you choose the perfect royalty-free Videos for your video? Here are some key tips:

Understand the Mood: Consider the overall tone and emotion you want your video to evoke. Upbeat and energetic for a product demo? Somber and reflective for a documentary? Choose Videos that aligns with this desired mood.

Genre Harmony: Match the Videos genre to your video's theme. Opt for cinematic scores for documentaries, playful pop for explainer videos, or energetic rock for action sequences.

Mind the Tempo: The Videos's pace should complement the video's rhythm. Fast-paced Videos can heighten excitement, while slower tempos create a sense of calm and contemplation.

Length Matters: Ensure the Videos track aligns with your video's duration. Avoid abrupt endings or awkward loops, and consider using shorter tracks for intros and outros.

Remember: Always check the specific licensing terms of each Videos library or artist before using their Videos in your project. Some might require attribution, while others have limitations on commercial use.

Pichunt: Your Gateway to a World of Sonic Storytelling

With its unification of leading content providers and integration with royalty-free Videos libraries, Pichunt empowers you to create captivating videos that resonate with your audience. So, unleash your creativity, explore the vast soundscape of royalty-free Videos, and let your visuals and audio dance in perfect harmony. Remember, the right Videos can elevate your video from ordinary to extraordinary, leaving a lasting impact on your viewers.

Start your sonic journey with Pichunt today and discover the soundtrack that brings your vision to life!

[char09lynx]

At the core of eternal sleep - Anna

This band originated when Anna met Holger at a gothic club in Germany. They couldn't afford instruments, so their creations relied solely on their imaginative minds. Despite this, they produced quite a lot of works and released a demo album in 1992.

Later, Holger left the band, and the label Apocalyptic Visions released the band's first studio album. Their works included a lot of brass and woodwind instruments, particularly flutes, with strong religious connotations, along with various guitars and synthesizers. The content often dealt with themes of suicide, sorrow, despair, loneliness, gender identity, and death.

Anna, the heart and soul of the band, cannot be separated from these themes. A thinker, philosopher, and gender nonconformist, Anna's creations embody yearnings and praises for the darkness, as well as depressed and twisted thoughts. Coupled with deeply philosophical and thought-provoking lyrics, her music possesses an extraordinary allure.

Anna, once called Varney, took the name Anna, meaning "elegance" and "grace," as she had always wanted to be a woman since birth—an idea that tormented her. She had a painful childhood. Her mother frequently subjected her to violence, and she referred to her mother as "the woman who provided food, clothing, and beatings."

These experiences left her extremely sensitive, psychologically fragile, withdrawn, and silent. In her inner world, she created the "The Theater of Seven Hells," a place where she played games and dialogued with herself, later becoming a source of inspiration for her creations. Even from a young age, she longed for the world of death. The 1995 album is called "Todeswunsch - Sous le Soleil de Saturne," which means "death wish."

Lonely people aren't always lonely. Anna had a spiritual friend named The Ensemble of Shadows, which is why the band's full name is Sopor Æternus & the Ensemble of Shadows. This ensemble of shadows was Anna's companions, creating and wandering together in the universe. She said that she lived with her music and shadow friends in her own illusory space.

While this may be related to Anna's childhood withdrawal, she did manage to live with the help of her shadow friends and live fully. She had her own values and philosophical views. She believed that all things in the universe are interconnected, and the purpose of life is to find the connection between oneself and all things. Physical things are real, and the spiritual world is also real and eternal.

Sopor Aeternus means "eternal sleep," symbolizing perpetual slumber in the "painful, repulsive real world." How to wake up from this slumber has always been the theme of Anna's music and poetry. She used creating music as a means to escape pain. The loneliness in such creations is deeply felt. In interviews, Anna mentioned that only through her music does she dare to express her inner feelings implicitly; otherwise, she doesn't dare to speak about her pain.

In a fax interview, Anna said, "I have no habit of explaining the meaning of lyrics—nor do I want to explain. Although I hope through my music, people can face their true selves with courage or gain a deeper understanding of their inner world, let them comprehend the real world through these hints or release suppressed spiritual worlds. But that's impossible because people are always self-righteous, and they can never escape the deeply rooted traditional thoughts in their minds."

My favorite line from her lyrics: "Silver equals chill, but that suits me just fine." 🫧🤍

Ref:

[talenlee]

The PC Format Archives

The PC Format Archives

Hey, c’mere, I wanna show you something.

This is a cover from the mid-90s run of a magazine called PC Format. I’ve mentioned PC Format in the past, as a magazine that had a particular ethical framework for its reviews. The basic idea was that PC Format was a magazine that only reviewed completed products that they purchased themselves off the shelf of their videogame stores.

The PC gaming market of the 90s was a kind of strange place in hindsight because all the same practices of review culture that are commonplace now were happening then, in a sort of turbo-charged way. People were expected to do reviews quickly, but also, the games just sometimes didn’t… work? Getting a game to work at all on the platform was a lot harder, support was rarer, and sometimes if things went wrong… that was it. You just had to deal with it. Reviewers would in this state, sometimes go to the company in question, on a computer they had set up, and play the game for a predetermined amount of time, with company representatives nearby, and talk to them about the game before writing their review.

That meant that a lot of games with sometimes amazing bugs got through to the market pre-loaded with review scores that spoke of their excellence. I normally mention Rise of the Robots as an example, where that game’s review scores from people who played a preview copy never mentioned that the fighting game couldn’t let the player character turn around.

What PC Format did instead was host a very technically minded group of people on a large number of different PCs that could run a wide variety of games, and played only commercial releases they paid for. This level of rigorous scrutiny for games meant that they were often late to the discourse, but they were so much more reliable, prone to commenting on when a game was absolute horse elbows compared to the way it was being described elsewhere. They’d talk about when a game’s performance impacted its play experience, and they’d even include, in larger articles, contrasting viewpoints from other members of the staff responding to that very article. When I was reading this article, I remember a review of Doom 2, a game I undeniably love, glowingly praising the way it played and flowed, and then a little insert from Paul Pettingale, curmudgeonly tech support guy, pointing out that it adds one weapon and a bunch of enemies – the game is not meaningfully changed by anything added to it.

Which was true.

And also interesting to see someone willing to say in an ad-supported magazine.

Did you know that archive.org has all these issues of the magazine? It’s a bit of a trick to find them — the archive is definitely more interested in preserving the Demo CDs. But the magazines have been scanned and uploaded so, if you want, you can go back and read them. There’s no reason for you to do so, not really. It’s a gem of time, a strange little shard of how people were looking at the future, at the internet, and yes, at videogames. There are passages in this magazine that I read that got me onto usenet, when the time came, or taught me how to edit text files and hex values.

And it also, I have to admit, taught me how to write.

Going back and rereading these magazine issues shows me all these inflections and the ways I tell jokes, in text, and the places they started. Things I amplified, things I wound up taking in their own direction, but which are all positioned with the same, simple, fundamental pedagogical voice. I write like I’m talking to you, and I write that way because that’s how I read these magazine articles doing. Richard Pelley, Paul Pettingale, Ed … Ed…

Shit, I can’t remember Ed’s surname. They used to put him facing across from Paul Pettingale in the tech support colums. I could go check but it feels more true to the experience of hearing me talk to you to include this, and this is all while I try to find a way to wedge in that Richard Longhurst, one of the editors, went on to found the company lovehoney, which you may know as a sex toy store.

One of the cover CDs carries One Must Fall, and a program called Winimages Morph. You could use Winimages Morph in Windows 3.1 to make a step-by-step multi-stage animation in .gif format of an image morphing into another image. That transformation sequence you could then arrange together, very easily in a sort of descending transformation and…

… yes.

Make your own Animorphs covers.

I remember using it for that. I remember using it to make Animorphs images that I shared on the Chee Database, which connected me to people I didn’t, at that point, know, and made a bunch of friends that became really important to whole new dimensions of my life, and it’s just here, as a little bit of free software to move a magazine.

I had a little meltdown when I read these pages again. I sat and read phrases and realised I was making these jokes, all of these jokes and structures that I thought I’d stolen from Yahtzee only to realise that both of us probably stole them from big ginge James Binns. Staring down into this hole of history and realising that yes, on the one hand, wow, these magazines meant so much to me, they helped shape me, and they developed me as an author, but also oh no. There’s so little of me. There’s so little me to me, I’m just copying the things I saw growing up. Everything about me is just a pile of purchases and traumas that have been coagulated into a puddle that I then get to carry forwards. Stolen jokes and badly photocopied ideas and rhetorical strata that’s really just trying to win arguments I lost twenty years ago,

What I’m saying is that, <Foucault Voice> nostalgia is a prison,

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Games #Media

[riastarthe]

i was so surprised people were finding my humble blog until i did some looking around, and it seems like some big time twitch gamer has been playing Fin Fin of all things. what is in the air right now? fin fin zeitgeist? i wonder...

fortunately, fin fin is now preserved on the internet archive and playable with a Virtual Machine if it's not compatible with your system. but wow, this sudden revival makes me want to build an actual archival site for all my stuff instead of only a tumblr blog, where neither permanence nor provenance is guaranteed. and i sure do love to make a website ^_^

my personal Fin Fin story is: in 3rd grade my friend Lindsay showed me a black and white photocopy of a very short newspaper article while we were sitting in a huge pine tree at recess. i know exactly where we were and what time of year it was, because although the image wasn't in colour and mostly illegible, i was quickly obsessed with it. i made a copy of that copy and brought it home.

honestly it feels like i didn't go to elementary school at all and everything i learned, i learned at my friend Fin Fin's house lol

i loved being in the water. i loved anything in the water. i drew those things all kids (?) seem to draw-- like piles and piles of elaborate cross-sections of the ocean to show all the plants and animals living in it. this translated to toys and eventually games as well. this Littlest Petshop seahorse was completely mesmerising to me... it's not like you could do much with it, but it seemed magical. each side of the tank is meant to have hot or cold water, changing the seahorse's colour. (you pick it up with the magnet wand)

and were any of you also on fire for any type of rotating/autonomous aquarium toy? they still make those now, but it was something that seemed to populate a fair number of bedrooms or kitchen counters.

so Fin Fin slotted in nicely.

i already had some training on the computer— i was really bad at typing so my mom dragged an old desktop (with the built-in monitor!) and seemingly had me type directly into the terminal lol. i was also really bad at math, and was instructed to play the 1994 Math Blaster with the hope that it being a computer game (precious to me) would like, click my brain into place or something.

it seems weird to say “my parents used computers for work” but it was sort of notable in that we also had a computer at home for my sibling and i to play on— my parents used that one for socializing and by that i mean playing 7th Guest and Myst— the latter of which i loved to sneakily watch and would later play, too. i had a huuuuge poster of the Sunners from Riven's Jungle Island because i was obsessed… i'm sure you can see why. i love any Caribbean place and any aquatic guy.

i first played the demo version of Fin Fin. it let us preview other Fujitsu properties, like Virtual Safari, a colonial project developed by Anglia Multimedia (a subsidiary of Anglia TV, now ITV Anglia) which no longer exists. it was all about taking photos of the wildlife with the footage coming from Anglia's Survival series, but it was pretty unsettling.... and it felt literally dark, too, colours and lighting-wise, but maybe that was more the mood than the visuals. i can't find someone else playing it at a decent quality, so maybe that means i have to do it again........

somewhere in this time i also played Creatures (1996), but my most prominent memories are of Creatures II (1998.) just like fin fin, these games have a lasting and self-sustaining fandom. i've utilised fan-made (and in some cases, fan-turned-staff-turned-fan) injections and gene/egg modifications over the years whenever i boot it up again... the series is on GOG if you want to play it too!

anything that looks like this? absolutely marvellous to me. i can FEEL my brain turning on.

Creatures is more about the evolution/your hand in their evolution and arriving at a certain level of "advancement" plus what you find along the way. plus, the norns are infuriating. i love them, but my god they are truly helpless lol so be prepared! meanwhile, fin fin is more about emotional development, especially that of the kid playing it. it's an emotional experience, rather than the player taking on a teaching role.

there's a lot of articles-- maybe even including the one i first read-- that are written through an excruciatingly contemptuous adult tone, as though fin fin was ever designed with adults explicitly in mind. which isn't to say that adults were never invited to enjoy it-- they were, and they do! i certainly do, lol! (i also cannot begin to imagine how i'd feel about it if it hadn't been so formative.) fin fin isn't trying to mirror real life exactly. fin fin lives inside a computer-- so what would that look like? what would that act like? it is, genuinely, like trying to envision an alien planet.

what is it about these virtual pets that even the pixels of a Tamagotchi were/are so deeply empathised with? i think it's that they weren't trying to create the real world, but a world that would exist in a computer, something sumptuous, a visual delight, essentially boundless but with a unique and memorable feel to it. it's in stark contrast to the cloying and frantic literalism of games since the 2000s. i mean we all feel it now-- "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less and I'm not kidding."

these early graphics stick out so much in our minds as something WE had a hand in creating, in our minds. but projection wasn't the only mechanism creating this experience, it was also the necessary reflection as mistakes are made and corrected, and the world is explored, and cause and effect are witnessed. fin fin was a first step and first contact with something that recognised our presence. there was more room for our imagination to fill in any blanks or create connections between ourselves/experiences and the virtual world.

i touched on this/other childhood games some in my Klonoa post.

yes, the Myst series' pre-rended backgrounds are gorgeous to me, while dated now-- and even these aren't hyper-literal. you look at them now and of course our imaginations were filling in where the answers fell away into the expanse, and even moreso as we move away from their point in game history. they certainly weren't made with the same intent as something like a virtual pet. they're a story, not a little guy. a virtual world, or a simulated life, while limitless, is small and precious, too. nurturing isn't the same as teaching, having any kind of authority inside the space, the space which seemingly continues after you leave it-- it's a sense of mutual care.

The project's executive producer is the Japanese film director Makoto Tezuka and his aim, he says, was to create a character and environment that would "survive for 1,000 years". - via the times, 1997

i played through the Fin Fin storybook (To Teo and Back with Jack) with my sibling, with friends, with cousins... but i found it lacked a lot of the charm, in part because i didn't find myself needing an in-game analogue. maybe it would've worked better for kids even younger than me?

there was a little card that game with the game that you could fill out to "receive promotional updates and prizes" which i did do, but for the life of me i don't remember what if anything i might've received. and i was very lucky to have two of the now-rare deluxe version Fin Fin plushies... i only have two because my dog chewed the eyes off of one of them and i was aghast. so that's what i mean by lucky, because this happened right as the window was closing on Fin Fin. these things just can't be found anymore. i've really gotta rescue them from my parents' house.

it's really sweet that fin fin is given new life ever so often. i hope everyone enjoys their new friend 💙

[perilousplatforms]

An Update and a Final Farewell

Wow, I haven’t touched this blog in years... hello to anyone who still follows this! It’s been a very, VERY long time since I’ve worked on this project in any capacity, and by now, it’s a relic of years gone by — just about 10 years, if my memory serves me well.

So, to commemorate that anniversary (which is probably not today), I wanted to properly share something to this long-forgotten blog: a project I did in early 2021 as a “final farewell” to this long-forgotten passion project.

[ RECREATING PERILOUS PLATFORMS ] is a recreation of all the levels from various complete(-ish) builds and demos of my old MLP Gen 4 fangame, Pinkie Pie’s Perilous Platforms - designed with the level-creation suite of Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker 2 video game. If you own SMM2, you can find the course world via my maker ID (DDH-165-L5G) or you can click the link to access its portfolio page that lists every individual level’s ID, a short explanation of my process, and a full playlist of my livestreams documenting the process to replay, recreate, and redesign the levels I made very long ago. Quality notwithstanding, I had a great time working on this. It felt very good to analyze younger-me and their level design philosophy at the time, and to critique my video game developer “debut” of sorts. Probably not a home run by any stretch, but a good first start. Depends, really. https://cargocollective.com/sylversedge/Recreating-Perilous-Platforms

I felt it was fair that I make this update to tell folks (or at least anyone remaining) that a lot has happened since I stopped updating the blog. That teaser from 3-4 years ago (this weird bit) was for another idea I had to finally bookend the development journey, but the RPP project ended being a much better sendoff than whatever I had planned years prior. Through random nostalgia flare-ups, storytelling of my personal lore on my Twitch streams, and tons of self-indulgent Internet searches, I’ve come to discover that a good handful of people have played Perilous Platforms in some capacity — via my itch.io page or the old DeviantArt page link, via downloads on Equestria Gaming’s Arcade, features on Equestria Daily, and other specific sites, via BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint app where it’s been properly archived, and by other means that even I’ve yet to uncover. 

Let’s Play videos, written reviews, entries on fan-related MLP wikis, re-uploads on seedy websites, you name it. Thank you so much for playing!

I felt really proud that the game was able to be experienced despite the constant unfinished/unpolished state that it was in, and I just wanted to personally thank everyone for indulging a young rookie game developer that just wanted to contribute so much to a fandom that helped spark their creativity even further, and to also humbly thank everyone for their patronage and support over the years. The last thing I intend to do besides this blog update is to archive the most “complete” version of the game on Flashpoint for everyone to play - at least one that isn’t horribly broken or unplayable. After that, I likely won’t update the blog any further as I don’t use Tumblr in any capacity these days, I’ve long since “left the fandom”, and this is how I’ll finally move forward as a creator. But at the very least, I owe everyone at least a little bit of nostalgia to remember these golden times by. Thank you, and may your lives be filled with as much laughter as Pinkie Pie would’ve wanted. Take care of yourselves. - Sylver P.S. You can watch the entire process of the recreation on my Twitch channel! https://www.twitch.tv/collections/Sn41hVNYehbjTA

[elitegymnastics]

Q: What is this?

A: It’s a flyer for a virtual fundraiser on June 4th that Elite Gymnastics is playing. You can access the show at quietyear.com

Q: Hasn’t Elite Gymnastics been inactive for like, ten years?

A: Yes. This is the first Elite Gymnastics performance of any kind since November 30th 2012, at the Horn Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. 

Q: Why did Elite Gymnastics stop playing shows?

A: Elite Gymnastics started out as me (Jaime) and a bunch of my friends agreeing to help me play my songs live back in 2009. I made a lot of weird demos in GarageBand and my friend Dominique Davis from the band Dearling Physique got tired of watching me sit on them. So, he booked me to play at a show he was curating as part of a small local music and arts festival called Clapperclaw. For several months that’s mainly what EG was. At some point the focus shifted to making recordings rather than playing shows, to participate in the emergent culture of new music distributed via MP3 file-sharing. The lineup winnowed to just me and Josh Clancy, who began creating digital EPs that we posted on this Tumblr page as ZIP files full of MP3s accompanied by a PDF of artwork. This is the incarnation of the group that most people are familiar with.

This was before Patreon existed. If Bandcamp was around, we’d never heard of it. Though MP3 file-sharing culture and file transfer sites like MediaFire and MegaUpload allowed anyone to distribute music freely across the world via the internet, it was still pretty difficult to get people to pay you for it. I think it was for this reason that a lot of internet music back then featured a lot of sampling. A lot of artists’ first forays into the world of DAWs and production took the form of mash-ups, bootleg remixes, and DJ mixes. Artists like Animal Collective, MIA, Kanye West, and Daft Punk for whom sampling was a pillar of their creative process were extremely influential. Elite Gymnastics was no exception - the first song of ours to gain traction online was “Is This On Me?” which made no attempt to hide the fact that it heavily sampled Faye Wong’s “Eyes On Me.” The fact that it was so difficult to make money off MP3s pushed people to make different creative decisions than they would have otherwise. It was sort of a free-for-all.

Eventually, all of this started to change. The major labels started getting a lot more aggressive about trying to destroy MP3 file-sharing culture. Platforms like MegaUpload were raided and taken offline. The replacements that sprung up to replace them were increasingly infested with ads and malware. Corporate platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud adopted Content ID filters to prevent the proliferation of copyrighted music there. Blogs and private torrent trackers being taken down meant thousands of hours of labor were wiped out in an instant. Some of the best archives of the history of recorded music ever created were destroyed without hesitation. Even the most devoted participants lost the will to keep repairing and re-making the stuff that cops and record companies kept obliterating.

Josh and I both dreamed of being able to make a living as musicians. We still do. Back then, we were willing to accept a lot of changes in order to make that possible, which seemed necessary. A lot of the stuff that we were great at just didn’t make any money. Once, we were asked to do a remix of a song called “Sa Sa Samoa” by the band Korallreven. I did the remix by myself, which was normal for us, and Josh was so inspired by it that he spent a week working non-stop to create a video for it. People loved it - the day the video dropped, Pitchfork designated the song as a “Best New Track” and New York Magazine wrote about it in their “Approval Matrix.” The video led to a ton of exposure, but from a financial perspective, it just did not make sense to put that much effort into promoting a remix of someone else’s song. The stuff we were personally excited by just seemed to have less and less to do with what actually makes money.

A lot of internet bands during this era began to palpably shapeshift in an effort to succeed in music as a career. Artists who’d first attracted notice for sample-based bangers they made on a laptop started posing with vintage hardware in their press photos and trading in their laptops for live bands and recording studios. It became harder to distribute DJ mixes or mash-ups that contained copyrighted music in them. Influential bloggers either closed up shop or were absorbed into the traditional music industry in some way. Feeds that once touted bizarre songs by laptop-toting weirdos with no industry connections started to become populated mostly by artists with labels and publicists. The bottom rungs of festival lineups started to consist mostly of new major label signings who have lots of money to spend on stage production but not much in the way of grassroots fan enthusiasm or media buzz. 

Internet music and what people tend to refer to as “indie music” split off into two separate streams. Today, there’s a pretty intense firewall between internet culture and whatever you want to call the culture of vinyl records, mid-sized indie labels with publicists, and positive reviews from the few remaining websites that still pay people to write about music. I call it “publicist indie,” “lifestyle techno,” or “prestige electronica” depending on whether or not the music features guitars and/or vocals. The recent online kerfuffle about NFTs really emphasized this split. The worlds of digital illustration and game development campaigned aggressively against mass adoption of cryptocurrency - if you saw any Medium posts explaining crypto’s environmental issues, chances are they were written by someone from those fields. Every new announcement by an artist that they had minted an NFT was met with a swift and vocal backlash from fans. Though I’ve never really been much of an Aphex Twin fan, it was still pretty startling to look at the replies under his NFT announcement tweet and see hundreds of furious people announcing that he was now dead to them. That’s an artist who has seemed more or less unimpeachable for most of my life up until this point! All of that seemed to change in an instant.

There is a massive disconnect between the insular world of the industry establishment and the cutting edge of online counterculture. We saw this again a couple of weeks ago with the online response to the crisis in Gaza. We saw passionate advocacy for Palestinians from games journalists and developers much more often than we saw it from musicians. This is a very serious problem for music! I do not believe it is possible to please both sides - that is to say, I do not believe it is possible to be part of internet counterculture and the industry establishment simultaneously. The music industry is too conservative, too compromised, too corrupt. If it weren’t for the ocean of valuable copyrights that labels are sitting on, most of them would be bankrupt within a year. If the industry was forced to live or die based on how they handle what’s happening right now in the present, it would most assuredly die. The only people who don’t realize this are those who are being paid to stay ignorant. 

Josh and I did not know this back then. From where we were standing, it looked like internet culture and established media industries were on track to converge. A career in the arts seemed genuinely, tantalizingly possible, right up until the moment that it no longer did. 

In my case, I had really been struggling up until that point. My life had been this ongoing sequence of evictions and hospitalizations, and it seemed to be getting worse, not better. I donated plasma twice a week to pay for groceries and while I was sitting there with a giant needle stuck in my left arm for an hour I would see my picture in The Fader or my songs being recommended by one of the Kings of Leon on Twitter or whatever. Music seemed like the only thing the world thought I was any good at. It felt like my only chance at a peaceful, happy life was somewhere out there in a world I could only perceive through a laptop screen. 

Gender, for me, was a big factor in all of this. The more invested in the craft of songwriting I became, the harder it was to repress or ignore my gender stuff. At that time I’m not sure I even knew what the word “transgender” meant - I just knew that when I showed up at a venue wearing a skirt, no one would talk to me or look me in the eye, and that reading about people like Anohni or Terre Thaemlitz or on the internet made me feel like if I could get out of Minneapolis maybe I could find a place where people would accept me. The internet was like, a pretty toxic place for someone in my position. When I tried to find people to talk to about what I was feeling, nobody tried to tell me to read Judith Butler or ask me what pronouns I preferred. The internet was just like, overrun with predators who just wanted to fetishize me and exploit me. Music seemed like the only way I’d ever have an actual life as myself. I was desperate for that. I was well and truly desperate.

Between all the big changes that were happening to us individually and the music industry moving farther and farther away of the anarchic free-for-all of MP3 file-sharing culture, the strain on us just got to be too much. We stopped trusting each other. We became the unstoppable force and the immovable object, crashing haphazardly against one another’s resolve in a dazzling display of youthful futility. Our partnership ended, and after finishing out the remaining live shows on the calendar by myself, I retired the name “Elite Gymnastics” and started making music on my own under other names. That was that.

Q: Why is Elite Gymnastics coming back now, then?

A: Over the years, Josh and I eventually started talking again. Though there was a lot we did agree on, and potential future projects were discussed, nothing truly felt right. We haven’t been in the same room since Summer 2012, and we’ve both changed a lot since then. We both have other projects and we’ve both developed other ways of working since we stopped working together. It’s a pretty big commitment to put all of that aside in order to join your fortunes together with someone you haven’t seen in a decade.

Recently, Josh decided to leave Elite Gymnastics. His reasons are his own, and I was very surprised by his decision, but after having had time to adjust, I’m really grateful to him. I had kept these songs at a distance for many years, because it seemed foolish to allow myself to get too attached to songs I didn’t feel like I was allowed to think of as mine, if that makes any sense. The songs felt like casualties of a conflict that I had to bury in the ground and try to forget about. Being able to embrace them again felt like re-growing a severed limb or having a loved one come back to life, almost. Feeling like it was safe to love these songs again made me feel whole in a way I didn’t expect to. I became really excited by the prospect of revisiting them, so that’s what I decided to do.

Q: Does this mean you’re going to put RUIN back on Spotify?

A: No. Taking the record off Spotify was the right thing to do. That record was only ever intended to exist during the era of MP3 piracy. I never envisioned a world where the music industry would be so aggressive about policing the way that copyrighted music is allowed to exist online. If we hadn’t opted to take the record down when we did, someone would inevitably have forced us to. If you want to hear those specific recordings again, you’re going to have to do it the way we originally intended: by downloading MP3 files from the internet. Try SoulSeek.

Q: What’s next for Elite Gymnastics, then?

A: Here’s the situation currently. There is no Elite Gymnastics music available to stream or purchase in an official capacity anywhere on the internet. It wouldn’t really be possible for me to put the old stuff on Spotify or Bandcamp now because of all the samples. Like I said before, it was a different time. Those records were created to thrive on a past version of the internet that no longer exists. They weren’t designed to be compatible with the 2021 internet.

Technically, Elite Gymnastics didn’t ever release a debut album. We had EPs, a compilation, and a remix collection. We didn’t make an album, a record that existed as the distillation of all that experimentation that contained all of the songs that fans of the EPs would want to hear, all in one place. It’s like we did Good Fridays but stopped before we made My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So, I am currently working on the first Elite Gymnastics album. If you were following my stuff as Default Genders, you may have noticed me posting demos on my SoundCloud page from 2015-2018 that were all eventually reworked into the album Main Pop Girl 2019. The album I am making is taking that approach to all the old EG songs, including some unreleased stuff. I’m collaborating with others on some songs and I honestly feel like it has resulted in some of the best and most exciting music I have ever been involved with. It is a drastic reinvention, but iteration and reinvention have always been a big part of what I do. I want to make something that feels like the culmination of everything that came before, and so far, I think I’m succeeding.

Q: When will I be able to hear this new music?

At a virtual fundraiser on June 4th, 2021, where there is a suggested donation of $10. You can access it at quietyear.com