Maison Bailesu

KIRK: Intelligence different from ours or superior? SPOCK: Probably both, and if you're asking the logical decision to make— KIRK: No, I'm not. The mission of the Enterprise is to seek out and contact alien life.

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KIRK: Those of you who have served for long on this vessel have encountered alien lifeforms. You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there's no such thing as the unknown, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.

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KIRK: There are lives at stake. By our standards, alien life, but lives nevertheless. Captain out.

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"The Corbomite Maneuver" was made at a time when a lot about the show was still being figured out: what kind of political body the Enterprise even answered to, the organization that the ship itself is part of, the divisions the characters belong to (Kirk and new-character Uhura have some Luke-and-Leia-matching-ponchos energy going on with their matching anxiety and command uniforms). Even some core character beats were still being hammered out, especially with Kirk and Spock (much more central protagonists than most later ST series have ever allowed). Many of the people whose visions would play a large part in defining the tone, world building, ethos, characterizations, and quality control of TOS (esp in S1 & S2) weren't involved yet, and you definitely feel the difference in particular once DC (Dorothy) Fontana and Gene L. Coon came onboard to "steer the ship," as it were (beginning with "Charlie X" as I recall).

I have many reasons why I will not use those tools, going from lack of accuracy, lack of ethics, and a higher waste of energy.

But my main reason is this:

I will do things the hard way. I will learn how to do things the hard way.

Because AI is a subscription. And when the world is dependant on AI, they will raise the price of that subscription.

And when the company I work for decides that paying for AI is too expensive for their bottom line, they will remove it.

So yeah, if things had gone the way they planned, they would have waited until people were a lot more dependent on AI than they are to jack up the prices, and their costs would be low enough that they could make a huge profit. But the financials are starting to look pretty dire. It's an open question which companies will even survive long term -- so it might not be a question of "will the AI be too expensive" but "will the AI even be available."

I'm 43. If I started using AI to do all my work, and then I had to stop using it, I would still have my previous experience to fall back on. I'd probably have to relearn some stuff, and it would be annoying, but I could do it.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

Last year I finally had an excuse to illustrate this simple little Tumblr story I've had bookmarked forever for class.

So, there’s a post about how Bertie Wooster’s “what ho!” is a corruption of Beowulf’s “Hwaet!” And @fremedon​ and @oldshrewsburyian​ wrote up some things I decided to voice.

it's all desperation. i do really believe ed zitron's rot economy idea, that the tech sector has been searching for a new internet or iphone or whatever that blows up and changes the world and they get to keep the profits so they'll uplift any garbage (hence nfts and the metaverse) to try and astroturf that. and relatedly, i think nvidia and the cloud compute companies and the ai companies are just passing the same dollar back and forth to create big numbers that paper over how bad the economy really is. it's all an attempt to keep the infinite growth hack going.

The final trailer.

In addition to being a Founding Father, a slaveowner who had eight kids by his dead wife's half-sister (a slave), and one of a handful of people who really did shrink government, he was into what would become known later as paleontology.

In Virginia, by the late 1700s, the bones of mammoths and saber tooth tigers were found. No such creatures were found in VA. But there was a large swathe of the western US and Canada that no white man had ever visited.

So part of the job of the Lewis and Clark expedition to the west was to find these missing creatures. They had to be found *somewhere*.

They did not find them.

And in the early 1800s, the idea of extinction wasn't there yet.

Most humans lived in a world that had no such concept.

But Tolkien was intimately familiar with death to a degree that few current writers are. Tolkien was intimately familiar with despair to a vast degree.

like— think for a second about how mind-bogglingly incredible it is that we know who osiris is? that somebody just made him up one day, and told stories about him to their kids, and literally thousands and thousands of years later we are still able to go “there was a god whose brother cut him into pieces”, it’s so arbitrary, it’s so incredible

that in talking about scheherazade and her husband, you are doing something that someone in every single generation has done since it was written— you are telling stories that have lasted an impossible amount of time 

can you conceive of telling a story, and then traveling into the future and hearing that same story told— with alterations, and through media that you could not possibly conceive of, but your story— in the year 3214?

the fact that we! as a species! have been telling the same damn stories for so long— the fact that we’ve seen homer’s troy and chaucer’s troy and shakespeare’s troy and troy with fucking brad pitt because we never fucking stop telling stories! never ever ever!

we never stop caring about stories, or returning to the same stories, or putting our own spins on stories. we never stop talking about the characters as if they were real, or asking what happened next, or asking to hear it again.