.

sometimes the best writing advice is "just let it be bad." revolutionary. terrifying. but it works.

@earsandtailsarefeet !!!

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

I guess the reason all that Backrooms stuff has never really fazed me is because I worked in on-site networking support for a while, and literally every city's downtown district is just Like That once you get off the beaten path. Not just the really big cities, either; the one I'm currently living in has a population of less than 250 000 – metro area included – and a downtown area about six blocks across, and the service corridors still manage to do some House of Leaves shit. At one point I was trying to map the route of a misbehaving network cable, started out in a shopping mall parking garage, and ended up surfacing in the basement of the casino across the street. Totally unsecured – apparently neither the mall's administration nor the casino's managers knew that particular service corridor existed.

Like, I once bumped into a fully stocked and operational Coke machine in an unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level. Its display lighting was the only illumination for a hundred yards in either direction. I don't even know what it was plugged into.

Somewhere below this city there's a room the size of a high school gymnasium filled floor to ceiling with rotting mattresses. I've seen it with my own eyes – and, more importantly, smelled it with my own nose. I can't recommend the experience.

(That last one isn't even mysterious. The room in question is within easy walking distance of the basement of a major hotel, if you know where you're going; I imagine the hotel started stashing their old mattresses there at some point rather than pay to have them hauled away, and over the ensuing decades the situation got out of hand.)

@sunspotpony

🐸

god the line between someone being comically ignorant and obtuse and just a troll is razor thin. probably safer to block either way. coyote post is attracting some... interesting takes.

I like when someone invents a new and disturbing way to Decorate Wrong

Accept that this your legacy

Honestly, as contemptible legacies of my online presence go, "had a prompt filled by the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality guy" probably ranks somewhere below "coined the phrase 'humans are space orcs'" and "convinced people to start shipping Tony the Tiger with the Grinch".

... wait, people ship Tony the Tiger with the Grinch?

@earsandtailsarefeet

i do wish the response to the ai water usage concern debate (umm actually the water and mineral usage is roughly equivalent to all of our other constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction etc etc etc) was less of a "haha checkmate luddites" and more of a "hmm maybe we should reevaluate our usage of constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction" but idk