Dagoth Cares

Edit by Gay. (Yep that’s the right name, dot included)

Sorry for the quality.

To explore the reality of how people can not control a lot of the traits they have or the circumstances they're in.

To create fun challenges by forcing you to solve problems with a random set of tools.

-new players should *never* be brought into a game without making a character. If they do, then they do not know the mechanics well enough to use them to play the game. This makes running the game much harder.

-This is a TTRPG, why are you not playing a puzzle game?

-This is a TTRPG, why are you not playing a video game?

-This is a TTRPG, why are you not just going outside and engaging with world?

We are talking about TTRPGs. You don't do the character creation, you aren't playing a TTRPG, you are playing an improv game. In which case why did you bother going to the effort to get the materials to lay the game?

advanced dungeons and dragons: ❌ not a ttrpg

traveller: ❌ not a ttrpg

cyberpunk 2020: ❌ not a ttrpg

cubicle 7's doctor who roleplaying game: ❌ not a ttrpg

burning wheel: ❌ not a ttrpg

apocalypse world: ❌ not a ttrpg

warhammer fantasy roleplay: ❌ not a ttrpg

5e campaign starting with lost mines of phandelver: ❌ not a ttrpg

With abuse you can have your abuser "come to jesus" and we can sweep all that nasty abuse stuff under the rug as a side effect of just how big there feelings were and the nuclear family is maintained.

If the abuser doesn't get better you just paint them as the embodiment of absolute evil (you're basically forced to - if you don't noone will understand why you're not trying to fix the relationship instead) and start anew.

Cheating introduces a new character. How are we suppose to explain to the Johnsons or grandma that there's this new girl sortof in the picture but not really. Is the family steve, daisy, and steve's mistress samantha now? Who is mom? Is there gonna be an extended period where all these questions have ambiguos answers?

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

In chapter 299, the main character unleashes a special attack (???), and immediately after, her boobs DEFLATE BACK DOWN TO A REASONABLE SIZE

And then later in the match, she has to use another special move

And now she's completely flat-chested

That is an impressively broad question.

On Tumblr:

@cloakofshadow produces good poetry and good short fiction, which are not easy things to find, here or anywhere.

@materialist-scumbag is an explicitly AI-produced blog, and you can feel about that however you feel about it, but - at the very least, it's a very prolific source for "here is a cool thing that exists in the world and I am going to tell you about it."

@cryptotheism is into All the Right Arcane Shit.

Off Tumblr:

I'll repeat a piece of advice that you've undoubtedly heard too many times already - yes, you should read the classics. If something is famous and has survived the test of time, there's probably some kind of reason for it. At the very least, even if you read a classic and hate it - being familiar with it will put you in a good position to engage with other texts, and with the broader discourse.

(I say "read" because I'm thinking of books, but this is just as true of classic movies, classic video games, etc. The literary canon is much longer and older and more reputable, though.)

I particularly recommend the kind of classics that, in addition to being old and good, are absolutely fucking bonkers. Moby-Dick, the "Four Great Classical Novels" (and any other old Chinese text famous enough that you've heard of it), etc.

If you're interested in theater LARPs - and you should be - you can find some cool ones at Paracelsus Games. You can, at least, find out what the deal with theater LARPing is, to some extent.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On it's own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

(I did ok-ish but not exceptionally on the AI art quiz, probably with a slight bias for misattributing human pieces as AI ones - like many other respondees, I found the Impressionist pieces hardest to distinguish, since they very much play to the AI's strengths.)

There are many different ways you could describe "art" as a human activity, I'm sure there's a post somewhere where I make a list, but a really big one is its communicative function - one purpose of art is to somehow pass on some aspect of our 'inner world' to another person, through a lossy and limited channel.

That a signal can be easily imitated doesn't mean it doesn't carry contextual information. For example, I could ask a yes/no question of enormous emotional importance - "should I take the shot", "has the baby been born", "will you go out with me", "am I a good girl" - and be answered with either "yes" or "no". It would be trivial to generate a machine which randomly substitutes for this communication - that's basically all a magic eight-ball is.

The amount of information that can be contained in an image of a given size and colour depth can also be calculated. For example, the number of fullscreen images that would fill my current monitor at 8 bits per channel would be 2^(3440 × 1440 × 24) ≈ 3 × 10^35788372 - about 15 megabytes uncompressed. It's a number that seems astronomically huge, though effectively the amount of information is much less than you'd calculate since all the likely pixels are correlated. The same goes for other art forms, like novels (encoded as, say, UTF-8 strings or PDFs) or pieces of music (encoded as sound files, MIDI, MuseScore files, etc.). The exact number is complicated, you end up getting into Kolmogorov complexity and shit like that, but the point is that it's finite.

If we want to claim that all the information about a human life that Hofstadter describes (grief, despair etc.) is in there somehow, we're claiming that this finitely many bits is adequate to capture all the nuances of a human life. I don't know that that's true!

This, however, doesn't really seem to align with how we interact with art. Human production and exchange of "art" is a social act - I would describe it as being continuous with "play". When we observe a piece, we are opening a communications channel - at least a one-way channel. The person on the other side sends some information into the channel, and we process it somehow.

Since it is a lossy channel with limited information, we must infer various things about the other mind on the opposite side of it. If I show you an artwork that I made, we might have a conversation about how I did it, why I made the choices I did. If I feel something looking at the work, I might imagine that you felt something similar, and designed the piece to evoke it intentionally (a guess that will often be wrong but sometimes still productive). I might also look at what specific choices you have made, compare them to the choices others have made in the same medium, etc etc.

We form these inferences on the basis of experience - the more you learn about making art, the more you learn to appreciate other peoples' art and vice versa. And we project these experiences, usually plausibly, onto other artists.

(Perhaps I am saying all art is in a sense performance art? Seems like a tasty soundbite, though I'm not fully sure I wanna commit to it.)

I'm not meaning to claim that a computer couldn't simulate this kind of 'how did you make it' interaction too. This line of argument was anticipated by Turing in his original 1950 paper on the 'imitation game' that someone links in the comments above, where he describes a poet undergoing a viva voce test interrogating their word choices, and argues that a computer might be programmed to give convincing answers to such a test. I imagine he's right - for a paper written in 1950 he makes some surprisingly sharp predictions for how future AIs might be made, such as the idea that an AI could be built to be 'educated' like a child. (He also thought the evidence for ESP is 'overwhelming', but hey, can't win 'em all).

A lot of the context around art would be quite easy to forge, had you a mind to. For example, suppose I go to a film screening, and someone is introduced as the director so we can all clap them. Did they really direct it? I don't know! You could totally send an actor. Less conspiratorially, if someone says they made an artistic choice for x or y reason, they could be lying about it, or misremembering, or most likely oversimplifying a complex and inscrutable process down to a simpler story.

At some point you have to take something like that on trust, or else simply accept that being lied to about it is part of the game you're there to play! (c.f. Oshi no Ko.)

Anyway, the sudden arrival of a new process that can produce, at least sometimes, near-indistinguishable output to various types of communication, throws a spanner in the process. If we're feeling uncharitable, we could call it something like a DDOS attack, stuffing the channels with spurious inputs that don't fit our design assumptions. I think that goes too far, though. AI gen doesn't preclude communication, but it does need we need to think differently about what is being communicated.[1]

So to consider that last question, if art is like a game, could you train an AI art to produce art that is meaningful to humans only by 'playing against' itself, like AlphaGo Zero? I don't think this is so likely. The rules of Go are strict and well-defined; the rules of what humans find meaningful are inseparable from the history of interacting with other humans, which is why art constantly evolves. Training an AI on existing human artworks is training it to compress and interpolate/extrapolate that dataset; training it to optimise for "making novel art that expresses something in a form that its interlocutor could understand" requires it to be interacting with someone.

You could imagine a training process with an "artist" AI and a "critic" AI (a sort of more sophisticated GAN, where the adversary is optimising not to distinguish human/AI art but to judge it on aesthetic grounds) - but how would you get the "critic" AI? Whose taste would it express?

Admittedly, the developers of image generators are constantly refining their models in response to users, so they are being optimised to appeal to someone, not just interpolate existing artworks. But I think it would be very hard to remove humans from the equation entirely. And the present means of providing feedback to the AI are very crude.

For an AI to learn from interacting with other AI (and the world), I feel like you'd need a whole new process that isn't about minimising loss against input-output pairs. Romantically, I imagine it would be closer to how humans learn from life, but I don't really know what will 'work' in the end.

below: some other remarks that were excised from the main post.

Anyway, I wanted to expand a bit more on what I had in mind about a computer rediscovering Impressionism.

Actually this is inspired by a quote I read (I unfortunately can't locate it now) by some Chinese calligrapher, who had a kind of deflationary view of a past master. Something like, while the work had previously been said to "reveal the soul" of the characters, he said that they were made by exaggerating the variations to make the thin parts even thinner and the thick parts thicker. I think this analysis makes the calligraphy seem more "shallow". The effect can be obtained through operations directly on the pixels, without an understanding of the deep meaning of the writing

Maybe this is obvious because characters don't have any souls in the first place. So let's instead consider people. There's a classic paper from 1985, where somebody made a program to generate caricature drawings by comparing the facial landmarks to an average face, and then increasing the distance:

(Indeed, this is similar to what caricature tutorials say you should do, so I think it may be a realistic model of what's going on.)

But this could be worrisome! When we look at a caricature of JFK, we might feel that the artist really captured his soul. We look into his eyes and feel his wit, intelligence and arrogance shine through, which tells that the artist well those passions read. But if we did think that, then this computer program reveals that we were deceiving ourself, because caricature can be done by just computing a basis for a vector space of images of faces without any understanding of the passions at all.

Now what about Impressionism? It too might involve deep understanding: "people must first of all learn to look at nature, and only then may they see and understand what we are trying to do" —Monet.

Or, it may mostly be a matter of changing the color palette (get rid of black, add mauve) and using coarser brush work ("try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow"—also Monet). In the latter case, maybe you could take a random photo, project it down to a basis of limited brush strokes, and achieve the same results that won the Impressionists fame without learning to look at nature at all, without even having a semantic notion of house, tree, or field?

DO YOU KNOW WHAT REAL STEPPE NOMADS FUCKING WORE???

HERE'S THE FUCKING REFERENCES I CREATED FOR A XIONGNU-INSPIRED DND CHARACTER COMMISSION. AND THAT WAS SOMEHOW MORE RESEARCH THAN GRR MARTIN AND HBO COULD BE PISSED DOING.

vs

LOOK AT THE FUCKING ARTESTY. THE CRAFTSMANSHIP. THE EMBROIDERY.

One thing I don't see discussed enough about game of thrones is the blatant orientialism. hey quick question, why are the real cultures you were "inspired by" portrayed as basically human-orcs? 1) why are nomadic societies automatically portrayed as being incapable of valuing or producing sophisticated clothes, and why is that costuming directly linked to their "bloodthirsty" and "warlike" natures? did you know their IRL counterparts the xiongnu/jurchens/mongols/hu people LOVED the fancy silks produced by the han chinese. not only was this a key part of diplomacy between the two nations. (surprise! they were not constantly at war, because steppe nomads were not bloodthristy monsters who loved death, but real people engaged in resource competition and territory control). it was also part of the internal politics of steppe culture, e.g., who was favoured by the leader and how valuable gifts were distributed among the nobility. but noooo that would mean thinking of them as real people motivated by complicated things like politics, status and culture within their tribes! and who would watch a show about people doing that? -_- 2) why do their societies revolve around killing and conquest, and have no love for intellectual or artistic pursuits? historically, genghis khan, kublai khan, ect, valued scholars and did everything they could to patronise/kidnap/poach huge numbers of them, and this was key to their tactical success! han chinese engineers were captured, and used to build siege engines to take down the great wall! that portrait of kublai khan you see up there was drawn by the nepalese artist araniko, a child prodigy who was part of the khan's court. does khal drogo have a flock of artists following him around, propagandising his greatness to the world, so everyone knows that he is a man of culture and his rule has legitimacy? no, he burns down villages for fun? cool. cool cool.

3) why are the dothraki portrayed as lawless brigands who are incapable of governing their captured territory, when the mongol-led yuan dynasty managed to conquer and rule over china, and genghis khan was responsible for expanding the silk road, and enforcing such effective law and order over it that it resulted in the pax mongolica, and increased trade between the east and west? is it because they "don't wanna?"' why? are they a monolith? why would they throw away the advantages of all that trade control? are they just "intrinsically incapable of it?" would you care to expand on that?

picture references:

clothing of a Xiongnu chief, 2nd century BCE-1st century CE. Reconstruction by archaeologist A.N. Podushkin, in the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan.[77][78]

Noin-Ula carpet, animal style. 1st century CE.[236]

Xiongnu Leather Robe, Han period, Henan Provincial Museum, Zhengzhou

Belt buckle with animal combat scene, 2nd-1st century BCE, made in North China for the Xiongnu.[267][157]

The parallels are pretty stark. Political lesbians adopted Marxism and applied it to biological sex and human sexuality, determined that there could be no ethical sex under patriarchy the same as there could be no ethical consumption under capitalism, so all binary sexed sexual relations were tantamount to exploitation- thus, no sex with a man could be anything but rape.

Eggers take a similar extremist view, but for gender. They deny the biological underpinnings as any social constructionist does and primary and secondary sexual characteristics to them are just aesthetics to change for the arbitrary uniform of gender. Eggers believe, much like the political lesbians did, that you could be “convinced” to become trans (in the case of political lesbians, will yourself to be gay.)

The political lesbians soon realized, no, you can’t force yourself to be gay. There are hard wired neurological mechanisms behind sexuality, gay or straight. At best you could hurt yourself until you’re better able to tolerate sex, and maybe perform that way for some sort of degredation thrill, but it’s not the same thing as actually being sexually attracted to what you’re having sex with. A lot of drug abusers experience the same thing, a lot of sex workers too. It’s not the same thing as sexual orientation when you just burn out your ability to process feelings in order to perform sex like it’s an act on stage.

And similarly with ‘egg’ discourse among transgendered people. ‘Eggs’, like political lesbians, believe transgenderedness is cultural and can be imposed on someone. That you can just adopt or choose to become that way. They treat, “queerness” like a religion or a hobby. And define that as being trans. It’s actally a very transphobic view of how it works, because it’s like adopting the idea to be trans is to be a pervert, therefore all perverts are trans and that’s normal.

I, a bloke with cock & balls, actually identified as a girl in adolescence in the '90s (being aware of the previous Renee Richards/Wendy Carlos Williams '70s Transgender Moment).

I eventually stopped, which I explained (to myself, others if asked) in terms that going through a gender transition (in like 1998) wouldn't bring me anything like the experiences of my female classmates, or even a particularly good life at all.

If there had been anything like the environment of even the early 2010s, maybe I wouldn't have. (When people said people transitioning were getting another chance at adolescence, I think they were underweighting the "you find an online community around your one subculture and it becomes your whole world" angle.)

So I'd say "egg cracked, it's a cock".

Oh, also, I wanted to be bisexual, tried "bihacking" myself, but discovered I was in fact Kinsey 0 pure heterosexual. Because I experimented with boys, and the results were "no".

So forward to my late 30s, Covid happens, I caught it before vaccines existed, it goes "Long" in my brain and gives me a totally new personality. That is bisexual. (Which is probably the weirdest single part but well below 50% of the total weirdness)

And what that is, is "boy" has been added alongside "girl" on the list of "genders I can see value in". Which doesn't just matter for sexual stuff, it means I am just psyched to be a boy, in what I am pretty sure is "gender euphoria". Earlier today I picked up a load of topsoil in my pickup truck and spread it in my yard by straining (and building!) the muscles of my shirtless, powerful male body and it was glorious in ways that have nothing to do with progression towards orgasm.

- strange use of idioms or expressions (e.g. “your question has a large blast radius”)

- overly verbose, lots of filler words and too many transitional, connective-type phrases

- overly-acquiescent, just begging to be useful to a degree that’s pathetic and terrified of coming across as rude even when it’s necessary

- circumlocution, too many abstract concepts or talking “around” something instead of addressing the topic directly

- em-dashes, unfortunately