Maki's Experiment

This is cultural exchange done right

I'm latina I can confirm, hearing the English didn't have that line is wild

like many people have said this better than me but no it IS odd that we've come to think of potatoes as so quintessentially european that their presence in historical fantasy where they're anachronistic doesn't jar. and yes people are trying to have the trappings of post-colonial europe without engaging w the icky colonialism part and yes people are neglecting to imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like.

im fully in favour of 'let people have fun w their fantasy world' but is considering how the potatoes got there in the absence of colonialism not a fun exercise? maybe every year the dragon riders go on a great transatlantic potato pilgrimage

My pseudo European fantasy world has potatoes, black people, a hierarchy in which class is correlated with whiteness, someone who is even whiter than the nobles because his grandmother is a foreigner, and 2 ninjas from fake fantasy Japan that everyone finds interesting because you don't see people like often

It's the same era where people are experiencing drought, but golf courses are lush and green

the natural lifespan of a fandom is unlimited. when well tended a fandom can be functionally immortal. and yet everywhere you look you see newly bred fandoms withering and dying when they’re barely a year old. barely even six months old. fans are looking at their six month old fandoms and saying i think it’s on its last legs, should i euthanise it? when with the proper care that fandom could outlive them for decades. it’s sad. sad state of affairs we’re in.

you have to preface things like this with disclaimers that you are not pro-ai for people incapable of critical thinking but: its so awesome how much people post about AI having no soul and lacking humanity and merely mimicking some sort of innate Humanness while failing to address or contend with the fact that a lot of people are seemingly making work indistinguishable from the statistical average spit up by a computer.

ppl could ABSOLUTELY churn out bland slop that's trying very hard to scan as though it's legit way before AI showed up, and i stopped trying to tell if things were AI generated and started just...thinking more about whatever i was looking at. exploring citations rather than just looking at them, thinking about what's being said and if disparate thoughts connect to each other, trying to engage with the substance of the work. if there was little to no substance, then i could move on, and i'm sure a significant chunk of that was AI, but more importantly, it wasn't worth my time.

i genuinely and unironically hope that this is an unintended but positive outcome in a post-AI world. that people abandon attempts to determine if something is AI or not and are instead forced to think "what is there to like about this and why do i like it?"