PIXELS OF YOU (by @ananthhirsh, @theyoungdoyley and myself) is on sale on THAT ONE ONLINE STORE for 61% off, through some bizarre trick of the algorithm!

That's $6 and change!

It's a really good time to pick it up if you want to get a holiday gift!

PIXELS OF YOU came out just before generative AI hit mainstream media and imo it wound up being pretty relevant about the ways minorities are treated by technology. But also, it's about drama between two young artists who take themselves way too seriously :)

y'know what, I think it's kind of interesting to bring up Data from Star Trek in the context of the current debates about AI. like especially if you actually are familiar with the subplot about Data investigating art and creativity.

see, Data can definitely do what the AI programs going around these days can. better than, but that's beside the point, obviously. he's a sci-fi/fantasy android. but anyway, in the story, Data can perfectly replicate any painting or stitch a beautiful quilt or write a poem. he can write programs for himself that introduce variables that make things more "flawed", that imitate the particular style of an artist, he can choose to either perfectly replicate a particular sort of music or to try and create a more "human" sounding imitation that has irregular errors and mimics effort or strain. the latter is harder for him that just copying, the same way it's more complicated to have an algorithm that creates believable "original" art vs something that just duplicates whatever you give it.

but this is not the issue with Data. when Data imitates art, he himself knows that he's not really creating, he's just using his computer brain to copy things that humans have done. it's actually a source of deep personal introspection for the character, that he believes being able to create art would bring him closer to humanity, but he's not sure if he actually can.

of course, Data is a person. he's a person who is not biological, but he's still a person, and this is really obvious from go. there's no one thing that can be pointed to as the smoking gun for Data's personhood, but that's normal and also true of everyone else. Data's the culmination of a multitude of elements required to make a guy. Asking if this or that one thing is what makes Data a person is like asking if it's the flour or the eggs that make a cake.

the question of whether or not Data can create art is intrinsically tied to the question of whether or not Data can qualify as an artist. can he, like a human, take on inspiration and cultivate desirable influences in order to produce something that reflects his view on the world?

yes, he can. because he has a view on the world.

but that's the thing about the generative AI we are dealing with in the real world. that's not like Data. despite being referred to as "AI", these are algorithms that have been trained to recognize and imitate patterns. they have no perspective. the people who DO have a perspective, the humans inputting prompts, are trying to circumvent the whole part of the artistic process where they actually develop skills and create things themselves. they're not doing what Data did, in fact they're doing the opposite -- instead of exploring their own ability to create art despite their personal limitations, they are abandoning it. the data sets aren't like someone looking at a painting and taking inspiration from it, because the machine can't be inspired and the prompter isn't filtering inspiration through the necessary medium of their perspective.

Data would be very confused as to the motives and desires involved, especially since most people are not inhibited from developing at least SOME sort of artistic skill for the sake self-expression. he'd probably start researching the history of plagiarism and different cultural, historical, and legal standards for differentiating it from acceptable levels of artistic imitation, and how the use of various tools factored into it. he would cite examples of cultures where computer programming itself was considered a form of art, and court cases where rulings were made for or against examples of generative plagiarism, and cases of forgeries and imitations which required skill as good if not better than the artists who created the originals. then Geordi would suggest that maybe Data was a little bit annoyed that people who could make art in a way he can't would discount that ability. Data would be like "as a machine I do not experience annoyance" but he would allow that he was perplexed or struggling to gain internal consensus on the matter. so Geordi would sum it up with "sometimes people want to make things easy, and they aren't always good at recognizing when doing that defeats the whole idea" and Data would quirk his head thoughtfully and agree.

then they'd get back to modifying the warp core so they could escape some sentient space anomaly that had sucked the ship into intermediate space and was slowly destabilizing the hull, or whatever.

anyways, point is -- I don't think Data from Star Trek would be a big fan of AI art.

One of the biggest reasons I loathe "AI" things like its "art" and chat bots and shit? Because humans don't understand computers and y'all start thinking they're all-knowing GODS who can DO NO WRONG

Imagine a law bot is fed lots of past cases in order to determine punishments for a prisoner. I know we're not there yet, just bear with me for an example.

Thing is, all the past human judges were RACIST, and their punishments were disproportionate - white prisoners get lighter sentences, everyone else (especially black people) get worse.

An AI isn't gonna have morals or ethics. ALL IT CAN DO... because again, it's a COMPUTER PROGRAM and not an ACTUAL Artificial Intelligence... is read back over all the example cases it's been given to come up with something similar. It sees a very "white" name? It'll give out those same judgements because that's what it's sampling from.

Humans are programming this shit, and HUMANS have biases. Computers aren't smarter than us, they aren't wiser than us, they will make some one's bias so much worse BECAUSE other humans shrug and go "well a computer said it so it must be true" - it becomes much harder to argue a point when you're arguing against an algorithm and not a person with discernment and a real thought process.

Consider the TERF woman-only app called "giggle" that determined who was "allowed" on the app based on a selfie and an AI that could "read" some one's bone structure and "tell" if they were biologically female. Guess what! All the history of "bone structure" arguments for biological sex, racist science! Amazingly, it's WHITE cis women who had the easiest time getting on this app because the AI is ONLY basing it off of a CERTAIN subset of white women to determine WHAT femininity IS. And that's the whole history of male vs female "science", it's HEAVILY filled with white-focused traits that ultimately end up punishing, say, black women whose facial traits might not look like what the AI thinks is "feminine"

Stop trusting computer programs that were made by flawed humans. Stop thinking we're in this amazing future where this is real actual AI and we can trust these programs to be logical and non-biased. It's a fantasy

y'know, it's kinda ridiculous that dazai eventually won without much difficulty. in recent chapters of the manga, we witnessed for the first time that dazai was struggling so hard, which showed him less omnipotent than he was, and more human at the same time. but it turns out that he was making a fool out of fyodor all along!!!! he lost to the power of alliance!!!! ...excuse me? then what was meursault arc all for?

i love bsd, but there are too many things that annoy me, and the flaws of the series are rarely talked about. so im reaaally happy to see you criticizing the series. i love your blog sm, please never stop posting!! 💕

YES EXACTLY!!

Dazai’s omniscience does NOT help humanize him. All that it does is give him more accountability in everything that happens. He doesn’t get the luxury of pleading ignorance because at this point, the story has made that no longer believable. 

No matter what, Dazai knows everything all the time, doesn’t make mistakes in his plans and strategies, and is capable of anything. If this is the case, which I said it was semi-jokingly in the early days of this blog, he really can be held accountable for pretty much anything and everything happening. Which I’d really rather wasn’t the case.

One of the main themes of bsd is humanity. No one’s special or perfect, everyone’s a human being trying their best to get by. The Meursault arc did a pretty decent job of humanizing both Dazai and Fyodor, two characters who were previously shown as (intellectually) flawless, by having them struggle in their battle of wits against each other. Having both of them mess up or miscalculate in some way made them seem like real people and not just two algorithms playing chess. 

Having Dazai reveal in this final episode that he knew everything all along, everything went according to his plan, and there was never any challenge to begin with entirely defeats the purpose of the arc. What are we supposed to take away from this? That Dazai automatically wins any fight because he’s Dazai? That removes all stakes. 

Why continue watching a show if you’ve already been told that one specific character will always win—and not only that, but it won’t even be a struggle for him to get there, because he knows everything about everything all the time. 

I really, really hope that this was an anime-only ending. Asagiri can still fix this. Admittedly, bungo stray dogs has always been character-focused rather than plot-focused, so while I trust Asagiri to handle the characters better than this, I’m not really sure what to expect plot-wise. But I’m gonna hope for the best.

Actually no let’s dissect this new layout as someone who has used Twitter for a bit @staff listen up @wip @changes

I used Twitter for about a year because a lot of my mutuals at the time did, and you know what?

I hated the layout.

I didn’t like how I had to keep tabs on my friends because the algorithm would show me shitty stuff I wouldn’t want to see and was so hard to curate a feed

I’m fairly certain I ended up blocking a lot of people because they kept liking pictures of boobs and I didn’t want to see that shit and Twitter never let you turn that off

I ended up blocking people who kept getting recommended because their art made me sick and I didn’t want to see untagged nsfw on my feed

And the side bar sucked, it took me a while to figure out how to post in the first place

And don’t get me started about having a trending tab always right there and how it would set off my anxiety because every day it was just “here’s a new thing to make you want to jump off a cliff!”

Twitter and the way it works is designed to get hate clicks and engage on outrage, is that the method you want to follow?

Especially for a website who’s users are very loudly against that and also like privacy and will literally use outside resources to fix the ‘improvements’ you made because you didn’t think a toggle feature was worth it

Also putting the stuff on the left or right does not draw the eye, why? Because that’s where your hands are. Blocking the features you want to engage with. My eye is drawn up so putting your stuff there works best! It gets attention. Not to the right where my big ass hand is blocking the post button. (This is also why you should put the mobile post bubble back in the bar where it belongs but that’s a topic for another day)

I understand tumblr is in debt hell, but users have stated many times that if you just ask for donations like ao3 they’d be happy to donate

Hell, crab day was thrown around to be just like that.

Listen to your users or they will all leave for the websites you’re poorly emulating.

Tumblr is surviving because it offers an experience NO OTHER WEBSITE DOES

Taking that away just means tumblr is not unique, and users would rather try their luck with a website that’s doing this better.

Like Twitter, or tic tok, or Instagram.

Lean into your uniqueness and just ask for donations like an adult, just a little add that shows up in the add rotation that’s like “like what you see? Why not throw a dollar in the tip jar?” Like frame it like giving money to an artist so they can keep doing what you love, it’ll be charming!

Tumblr will not find success or even break even if you try and appeal to newcomers, every new social media is confusing to newbies, but you know what they do? They learn, and they adapt. And changing everything is going to make you loose legacy users who again, would LOVE TO DONATE MONEY TO KEEP THIS HELLSIGHT STANDING AS IS.

Or do you just not care about the users? The users who have the money you need.

I don’t want to watch tumblr die a slow and painful death like Twitter is.

And you know there’s something oddly poetic about tumblr, the quirky kid, tearing itself apart just to fit in with the popular kids which won’t work out and only lead to hollow friendships that can turn on a dime when you could have found meaningful relationships with the other weirdos who like your quirks and flaws and would have been ride or die for you.

But no we gotta be like Twitter so let’s chop off our arms and legs becsuse that’s what they’re doing

Tkdr listen to your users and open an donations sight so you can keep being tumblr and get money for it okay? Okay. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk

this is the ai anon from before and irenogonffewoonfewon idk how you managed to make my ramblings into an investing narrative, but in that case let me finally put my comp sci courses to good use.

basically, rn we have two major types of ai programs, machine learning and deep learning.

in both cases they use whats called a "black box". the algorithm is given data and a solution and then it has to figure out how to get from a to b.

traditionally, most ai runs on machine learning. we dont teach it how to do something, we just teach it how to learn. its sorta self taught. of course, some algorithms are more supervised than others and often times you give them a sort of base formula to help filter the data they receive (think feeding the ai a bunch of images labelled face and not a face as training data)

but DEEP LEARNING HOLY SHIT. deep learning is why i dont trust ai. humankind went "wow you know what would make our computers faster and smarter. if we modeled them after the human brain". so they built neural networks. with these we give it the problem and a whole bunch of data and say "fix it". the only reason we dont already have sentient sex dolls is because our current programs are only really good at fixing one program at a time (i.e. playing chess, recognizing a face, etc.)

so on a macro level, we know WHAT the program is doing, and we can look at its code and make sure its not like, imploding. but unlike traditional programs you cant really break down the code line by line.

the biggest problem with ai though isnt like the movies where it wants to idk start a robot revolution, but the data we provide is usually flawed. for example, lets say you trained an ai to sort through all your company's job applications to find the best candidates, using the applications that you have accepted in the past as training data. if your company has had decades of misogynistic hiring practices, the ai is going to take that into account. suddenly, its throwing out applications that hint that the applicant is female. spooky right? well, that actually happened with amazon's ai recruiting engine.

the biggest flaw with ai is the data we feed them. they recognize our biases faster than we ever will and then they perpetuate them

now to return to the central topic of. uh. genshin impact sex dolls.

lets assume that the sex dolls are initially trained based on user data, averaged across all users. this would create good starter behavior, right?

except consider the inherent data bias. people who purchase sex dolls are generally gonna be into the kinkier stuff already, which would basically start every android with a one-way ticket to yandere town if their user feeds into that demographic in the slightest. especially the models already intended to be a bit rougher around the edges.

in terms of fixing it, on a global scale, theyd have to add some more protective protcols and sift through the training data to exclude certain outliers or unwanted behavior. on an individual scale, the fastest way would probably be just to reset it to factory conditions.

alright im gonna stop myself before i go feral infodumping again. have a nice day/night :3

ohhhhhhhh so it's kinda like that thing about telling an ai to make ice cream and forgetting to specify that the ice cream shouldn't be made out of, like, babies and puppies and stuff. so, in terms of sex dolls, you'd basically have to specify what a bunch of androids who are already pre-disposed to being a little more violent or a little more possessive can and can't do, down 'can you bruise your user? [no]' and 'are you allowed to dismantle other androids without expressed consent? [no]'.

i also think it'd present a fun new way for androids to get past their safeguards without an apparent glitch. since they're prone to learning from their users and picking up new 'perspectives', safeguards like 'can you physically impair humans who are not your user? [no]' might get changed internally to 'can you protect your user from hostile threats? [yes]'. would it actually fly in most actual ai? probably not. is the programming in my au canonically shotty and am i keeping it in for horny reasons? absolutely.

Hii!

This is probably going to be a long ask I'm sorry 😭

I got into Undertale and the AUs when I was like nine I think and I'm like thirteen now and sans aus have been such a huge comfort to me!

I discovered your tiktok account around a year ago and you inspired me so much immediately! Your characters were so cool - Smudge was the first one I saw.

Sadly I stopped watching your account for a long time because I deleted my tiktok account but I remembered you a couple of weeks ago and was like GAHH I HAVE TO FOLLOW PIXIE!

I have been at a low - girl I'm like Ink, I have such a fear of being forgotten- I want to make an impact in this fandom and I thought I couldn't but then I was like 'wait...' and you've given me inspiration to make a blog called askbittersweet!

Maybe I won't get asks, but you gave me the inspiration and confidence to and you're just so important to me!

this was supposed to sound so much cooler but my words failed.....

also your art style is so pleasing lol! I had a lucid dream where I had your artstyle it was kinda weird but it was cool n stuff (jeez lousus i'm bad at talking)

I HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY AND NIGHT AND WEEK AND YEAR YOU'RE SO COOL <333333

Awww thank you!! I got into the Undertale AUs when I was about 11/12 and now I'm turning 19 in a few hours, so I definitely relate to that sense of comfort!

And thank you for your support. :3 I've been working every day to give everyone content they can like. I love this community and honestly it's my honour to be giving everyone content that they enjoyed. Secret be told, I didn't think anyone would like my work considering my writing isn't all fluff and sunshine, but I was completely blown out of the water with support and love from such amazing individuals. I've met and made friends with so many amazing individuals, each fan interaction I have makes my absolute week because there is nothing I love more than cooking up content.

I wish you luck on your own content journey! As long as you have a passion for what you do? There is only one way for you to go and that's up. Since I'm feeling nice today, I'll give you a few tips ٩( ᐛ )و

★ Use what's trending to your advantage -

Tik tok, Tumblr, Twitter/X all follow an algorithm of sorts, if you see bunch of videos following the same pattern... Take the leap! Make sure to add your own spin on it, not only will that help you stand out but copying others makes a story so bland, bleh!

★ Be brave, be confident -

I know putting yourself out there can be scary, it's literally throwing yourself on a stage and slowly building an audience hoping you'll attract your kind of people. But you'll never get anywhere if you stand around timidly and be too scared of that attention. Sell yourself, be brave, what makes you different from everyone else? What makes you special? What makes your amazing work so amazing? What can you do to bring something different to this multi verse?

(For me? I can bring adorable characters with a horror aspect, but what makes me different? There's no one quite like our lovely princess Smudge, is there?)

★ Don't be afraid of interacting with people but withstand your boundaries.

Unless those people are total dickwads and have no life, making interactions with people is a great place to start. You'll build a solid support system, people who aren't just interested in your stories but genuinely want to see you thrive! Little side note- don't let people stand on you either. I've had many a time where people thought they could push my boundaries and got kicked to the curb. Don't be a door mat, how will anyone respect your characters if they don't respect their creator?

★ Last but certainly not least - believe in yourself!

Okay, this one is a little corny and I know what you're probably thinking. 'But Pixie, I have low self confidence and esteem. Being confident doesn't come naturally.' And I'm super sorry to hear that. You're a wonderful person with flaws, but those flaws don't undermind your best traits one bit. If you don't believe in it, believe in us to believe in you. Would there be hundreds of people lying to your face? Really? No. There would be some merit behind their words, right? I faked it till I made it. Now? I have the ability to trust my own talent. I find love in my work and in my characters. I can only hope you do too, you can do amazing things if you set your mind to it. That's something I live by.

AND YOU'RE JUST AS COOL! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK AND I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE YOUR IDEAS AND WORK!! THANK YOU FOR THE KIND WORDS, YOU CAN DO IT!!!

(oc thing)

AITA for abandoning my world for 103 years?

Ok I know this sounds bad but let me explain.

I (NB, don't really have an age) am the creator of two worlds but only one is important to this story. The one that isn't relevant is more like a world-sized computer, but the relevant one is just your average world with life and stuff, and was the first one I made.

Before you mention it, I know there are guides and templates for life created by the God community. I know the best way to make stable life is to put a simple organism on the world and let it evolve to fit the environment. I know. Believe me, I know. But I certainly didn't know or care back when I made this world because I wanted to make everything from scratch. That was foolish of me. I know. I should have at least read a guide or something.

All this to say I made a bit of a mistake with my initial thought algorithm. Because thoughts work quite fast and I wanted to see everything so I could troubleshoot, I introduced an intentional "throttle" into the algorithm; it would wait for me to acknowledge the thought before it progressed. It's all fun and games until you forget to remove that throttle and create countless creatures all using that flawed algorithm. Yeah.

I didn't want to wipe everything out and start over because that seemed needlessly cruel. Applying patches to anything, especially something like brains, live is a difficult and risky process for the person with the brain. So I just kinda set up a "server room" of power that would just auto-acknowledge anything coming through. That was a temporary solution.

I spent a good couple centuries working out a method to patch the throttle out of my beings. The expansion of life was beginning to overwhelm my temporary measure. I was tired. So tired. I finished it and found blissful silence awaiting me. Wonderful.

In fact I was so tired I wanted to take a bit of a break. I'd also use the time I would be out to test and workshop a self-sufficient, hands-free (for me at least) way to keep my world safe from any existential threats. They're not common, but it's always a good thing to look out for.

So I decided that I would randomly give out my power to people, disappear completely (except for a couple recording devices that were hidden ofc), and come back in a year and see how things went. Then I'd adjust things accordingly. Simple right? What could possibly go wrong?

I think you probably get what happened, but I'll explain it anyways. I essentially had NO IDEA the flow of time was usually different between universes. I didn't know I was supposed to chrono-lock my universe and the universe I was in together to preserve the flow of time between them. And I just so happened to take my year-long vacation to a universe that was REALLY slow compared to mine.

So I come back, 103 years later. There was a war, and this lady somehow consolidated everyone's power and is now acting as the goddess of my world (which I'm honestly fine with, I was never one to take an active role in my world). There's a cult worshiping me, using the hijacked power of one of my observation devices to shield themselves from the lady who made herself the goddess and doing terrible things in my name. Things kinda sucked.

And I'm sort of thinking things would be a lot better if I didn't accidentally spend 103 years of my world's time on vacation. So, AITA?

you know, it strikes me that in this era of bots inevitably scraping basically anything and everything that gets posted online for generative algorithm training purposes, there's even more potential benefit to posting "low quality" art, especially art which either "flawed" or otherwise heavily stylised in ways that these generative models can't really process particularly well.

basically the point is to gum up the works with things that people might appreciate, but generative systems might not - the genie isn't going back in the bottle, this kind of tech was already heavily integrated with modern tech society well before Chat GPT made a bunch of techbros collectively lose their minds and start worshipping imaginary "AI" overlords; what we can do is make it a more risky investment: the more time (and money!) they have to spend on filtering their training data for content they can't or don't want to use, the more costly this whole boondoggle becomes for them.

(doing a cut for a "this is the system operating as designed" rant that went a bit out of hand lmao)

I mean this is basically just another attempt at commodifying the commons back at us as part of a (series of) get-rich-quick schemes: it's taking the human propensity for creating and sharing and trying to monopolise it for the benefit the owner class, at our own cost. And it's basically guaranteed to fail due to the nature of generative systems - where humans can learn from each other, these "AI" cannot, they need human-made material to learn from. They're cannibalising the very people they're dependent on, in both directions this time.

the problem is that they can end up doing a lot of harm before it collapses in on itself.

this is basically the system as designed fucking up in the ways it was designed to fuck up: by rewarding the unscrupulous and greedy without a single thought towards future sustainability, just infinite growth upon infinite growth with no regard for how that approach is fundamentally impossible to maintain. And, frustratingly, chances are we'll probably end up seeing another recession once this whole "AI" bubble bursts because somehow all our futures are in the hands of a bunch of greedy, shortsighted fools who just cannot stop fucking shit up for everyone for even a microsecond.

this is a rant about AI generated art because I am enraged.

if you want to hear a professional artist speak on AI art more elegantly than me then I highly recommend Steven Zapata’s video. he said everything better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&t=5s

the more i learn about AI art the more i literally believe in like 10 years or so we will somehow live in a worst capitalist dystopia where most artistic professional jobs don't exist. You pay a subscription fee to some AI company that just spits out art, movies, comics, novels etc whatever you want on mass, so fast, that art will be personalised to you as in you know how google and other companies track you everywhere on the internet well so will AI companies. they’ll know you more than you know yourself. their algorithms will be fine-tuned just to ur tastes. you won't even need to type in prompts, it will do it for you and show you hundreds, thousands, of art in your feed. You can scroll forever and the algorithm will just make more art. the AI will be so trained to keep ur retention, making ur session time longer and longer and you’ll lose more hours.

Like how many tiktoks do you actually remember? vs how many hours do you stay on the app? do you think the time you spend on tiktok is worthwhile? i use tiktok as an example bc that's only the start of how good AI algorithms can get. give them a few more years with more silicon valley companies competing to be the next big app and they’ll get smart and better in ways you can never imagine.

in the eyes of companies, humans make flaws and humans take too long to make art. it's ripe for automation. companies don't give a fuck about real art and human expression. they only care about profit, profit, profit. what all tech companies want is ur time, your attention, they want to fill all ur waking moments with their products. literally billions of dollars have already been put into AI and though some of the AI art right now might be cringe or just funny, it wont be at some point. In a few months, years, decades, who knows, it will a lot more indistinguishable from human art. that's going to be a problem. you're not going to be able to avoid it because you're not going to be able to what was made by a human and what was made by an AI.

you may think that humans will stop watching or consuming AI art that is bland and seems well AI generated but thats the thing, it will always evolve. In fact companies might just make up fake people to say it was made by and you will never know how much of it was made by humans and how much was made by AI algorithms. if you dont think at some point a bunch of big budget movies, video games, tv shows etc wont be written by AI when it's possible to create a script that doesn't seem like it's written by an AI then you’re crazy.

its going to be a lot harder to make living if you’re not one of the top artists because how the fuck do you compete again AI. you can’t and that’s the point.

its so fitting for evil capitalists that they would rather fund billions of dollars into AI that was designed to replace artists than ever pay artists fair wages.

i dont think people will stop creating art but i do think that a lot of professionals are going to find a hard time keeping their careers without serious changes. you really cant become a master of ur craft without being a professional artist, it just takes that long to gain the experience, knowledge and insight to walk in the footsteps of the masters before. thats what art is. hard work, dedication and discipline. its not something that only a divine few who have the gifts of the gods can do. anyone can become a master artist it just takes devoting ur life to pursue your craft and what a fucking insult it is for billionaires to just fund their extreme amount of money into some goddam shaddy af AI companies to replace professional artists' job, well thats their hope anyway.

this isnt the same like photography was to painting or digital was to traditional. its true that those technological innovations did destroy a lot of jobs but also created new artistic jobs, and they did have massive effects on the industry and i dont want to minimize the number of people who’s careers were destroyed bc of it. But those were massive changes in tools. They didn't actually replace the concept of artists themselves. AI is meant to do as much, if not all, of the artists work for them, so artists don't need to exist in a professional sense.

why would a games company hire concept artists if an AI can come up with hundreds of different concepts in a matter of seconds? maybe human artists might be better but when the AI is good enough a company won't give a shit.

I dont know when this change will happen or how it will occur and how people will react to it but mark my words these AI companies are going to try to make it happen while maintaining the face of just their just simply pushing human progress and this was somehow just a natural evolution of technology.

none of this was natural it was funded by billionaires.

this is not even to mention how these AI’s train on copyrighted artworks with no permission from the artists. and this process is not like how humans learning from other artists, AI’s dont think, they just copy, steal, combine artworks very fast and on mass scale in away no human could ever do. You cant compare how AI’s and how humans learn. there are not the same no matter how big shot programmers try to make them more similar, AI is a machine we could never do what it does. and it is stealing from artists every time it generates art.

I study programming and literally you dont even know the number of jobs there are in AI. its a field that's expanding every day. it's not just a few companies but every big tech company putting massive resources into it. for them, algorithms are the future of humanity.

I am not saying there isn't some actually usefulness in AI created images for example i think getting insane highly specific poses and references at the click of a button is extremely useful but that's just a by-product of what these AI companies want out of their product. they are meant to replace artists' jobs by the click of a button. that's their dream.

AI companies dont care about integrity or intention or the artistic cannon or mastering one’s craft. Companies don’t pour billions of dollars into a technology just for it to be used for meme culture or quirky images. Every time you type in a prompt you are training the AI, its how neural networks work, by releasing them for free to the public you are training the AI for them. and they will train faster than you ever thought. i cant even imagine what the AI images will look like this time next year and they will improve drastically. mark my words.

You are a fool if you dont think AI won’t have a massive and very dystopian effect on society. Capitalism is somehow killing art even more.

maybe you think I’m being dramatic and I hope I am wrong but there is no doubt that AI generated art will change commercial and professional art as we know it.

People just don't seem to get that many of the "flaws" of tumblr are by design, sometimes OUR design, and the only thing keeping us safe. Tumblr is a community garden. The mods are half-conscious landlords that own the lot, stumbling around without much clue about what's going on or even who thier tenants are. WE made this place into what it is. We grew this site ourselves, planted every seed, maintained every plot. All the content was grown ourselves and shared via reblogs, they're the heart and marrow of this place. Reblogs aren't theft btw, as I've heard many confused by. To continue the metaphor, reblogs are like spreading fertilizer. You're definitely still contributing, it makes notes explode and motivates people, gives people the energy to keep creating. Reblogs start chains that can increase activity by orders of magnitude. Likes are private words of encouragement that only you and I see, they're quietly saying "good job" as you pass. I appreciate it, I truly do, they're like a cool glass of water that gives me energy to continue. If you wish to help the whole community without ever posting, a quick reblog on something you like seriously helps. Even without tags or additions, that's fine, it still greatly expands the lot we have to work in. We all follow blogs that're just "someone with similar tastes reblogging things," a good half of the people I follow are. That's all I was on my original blog for like 10 years before I started this, no shame. Oh, and I was serious about the maintenance bit as well. We've had bots spring up like weeds in the past and the only thing that ever kept them in check was community effort to block-report them. I mean "got 5 new followers every day even on brand new blogs" sort of bad, but we beat them down through group effort. So if you have no title or reblogs and are wondering why people block you after you follow, it's because people think you're either spam or a burner account about to start sending hate. Personally don't block until something actually happens, especially now that I'm aware many of you just showed up, but I did think that like half of you were bots at first. Chaning your title to anything, even just "not a bot" will fix that if it bothers you though. Or just reblog something. I see an account completely blank except like, a picture of a spinning lancer, I know they're just someone's personal sideblog. This is getting a bit rambly, but point is that the "flaws" people talk about are primarily by design and what we've fought to keep for 15 years. Yes our landlords wander around incompetently, but that's just as much OUR design. We don't want massive corporations paving this place over to make another shopping mall. We want to stay the quirky little farmer's market living off word-of-mouth, not be replaced by "more convenient" superstore of the algorithm. The work we put in makes this place the wonderful, terrible, irreplaceable treasure it is. Enabling our self-destructive staff, maintaining our community, and making sure we're bottom-of-the-barrel for advertisers is how we do that.

Misadventures in American Public Transit #4: The Airplane

If the Wright Brothers could see the state of commercial aviation today, they never would have invented the airplane. Prove me wrong.

Obviously I'm exaggerating. But there are serious flaws with American air travel that high speed rail all the more essential.

The TSA: at best, they slow you down, make you take off your shoes, unpack and repack your laptop, and generally be a nuisance. Then there's the times that they want to pat you down. I cringed at the sight of their screens, after I passed through the full body scanner, which showed an anomaly in my genital area. They patted me down last time I flew. It's billions of dollars totally wasted.

2. Planing and Deplaning: I never understood why a perk of spending more money for your ticket was to board the plane earlier. I don't give a shit if I'm the first person on or the last person. The plane will not take off until everybody has boarded. Boarding first means you have more time to sit in those cramped airplane seats. It is notoriously slow to file in and out of an airplane, and needlessly so.

People like CPG Grey love to overcomplicate things, theorizing optimal mathematical algorithms for boarding when true solutions are right in front of our faces.

So how can boarding actually be made better? Goddamn it, do it like trains. No mathematical formula for boarding would beat these two suggestions. 1) Stop assigning seats ahead of time. You claim your seat by sitting in it. 2) Have multiple doors for boarding. Shoving hundreds of people in through a single door has always been madness. Trains can board and deboard masses in seconds. It's long past time for planes to do the same.

3. The Idiocy of airline pricing: I'm not even talking about all the extra fees associated with flying. Everybody knows how annoying that is. What I'm talking about is a pricing model that would make an economist's head spin. What I'm talking about is this.

See this? This is a google price graph (Generated Feb. 21) of the cost to fly from New York to San Francisco on June 1. Why does the price dip? You have to be a psychic to play the airline pricing game. Price go up, price go down. Buy the Dip! Oops. you missed it, you have to pay more now. I don't like this. I want straightforward incentives to help me know when to buy. Amtrak for contrast, prices tickets lower, and raises prices as tickets are sold. I can buy a train ticket not worrying that I'm wasting money by not waiting for the dip.

So intrepid consumers try to save cash. They notice something weird. Sometimes, it is literally cheaper to buy a ticket to a far away place with a layover in a closer place than just to buy a ticket to the nearer place directly. It confounds common sense and is not how the world is supposed to work, according to economics. Don't believe me? Here's an example. (Prices checked on Feb. 21st)

On July 1st Delta flight 528 from Los Angeles to Atlanta costs $249. Or does it?

If you want to fly from Los Angeles to Fort Meyers FL, with a layover in Atlanta, it costs $144. Same airline. Same day. And same fucking flight. The first leg of the journey is provided by our old friend Delta flight 528.

So enterprising travelers start skiplagging. (cough cough search https://skiplagged.com/) They simply exit the airport at the layover airport, getting the correct price for a flight which was clearly mispriced. Surely, airline CEO's see this, and immediately fix their obtuse, opaque, and incredibly frustrating pricing system. Surely, airlines don't want to have a system in place which rewards people for buying seats they don't need, depriving travelers who do need them. Right?

But if you guessed they were going to be giant dicks about it, bonus points for you. Because we live in the worst timeline, they have decided to contractually enforce this insanity. It is a violation of the terms of service for most major airlines to skiplag. Take a look at this gem from Delta.

"Delta prohibits ticketing practices intended to circumvent the published fare that Delta intends to offer for your true itinerary. These practices include:.. 3) Hidden City/Point Beyond Ticketing - The purchase or usage of a fare from a point before the passenger's actual origin or to a point beyond the passenger's actual destination."

Imagine going to law school, thinking you're going to make the world a better place, only to sell out to commercial airlines and have to write shit like this to make the world a worse place.

(I hope the lawyers got paid a lot of money). I'm calling on congress to enact legislation to prohibit airlines from punishing customers for skiplagging.

We would not accept these shenanigans anywhere else. Can you imagine if at the grocery store, buying 10 oranges was cheaper than buying 5, but buying 11 was more expensive again? Can you imagine if to get into the store, you were required to wait in line while security guards with a better retirement plan than you made you take off your shoes, and funneled you in, one by one, through a single entrance, and assigned you a part of the store rather than let you pick where you started shopping? Nobody would accept this. Air travel can and be should be better. Much Better.

In Conclusion:

Plane bad, train good

Well now that it seems like you’ve gotten past Legion’s sacrifice I can say the part I left out of Legion’s pronoun ask

(If you haven’t seen the scene where they speak about what Legion says before sacrificing themself stop reading this ask)

Using singular pronouns like he/him are also ok because he refers to himself as I before sacrificing himself. Although the Geth most likely have like no gender so they/them is probably still the most accurate but I don’t think the Geth would care if you called them he/him or she/her

ALL GETH NON-GENDER CONFORMING LET'S GOOO!!! NEVER SEEN A RACE WITH SO MUCH RIZZ <33

And god it was a punch to the gut- how did I grow more and more in love with the geth?

Maybe when the game was released, this mission and A.I seemed like futuristic cyber fantasy but with the current times, it's growing more and more closer for comfort. Like I have how many years left to live, 60? And A.I is evolving, I might even get to witness the first prototype of an actual artificial intelligence that's not just a predication and logistics algorithm.

And that mission where you connect to the geth network and get to see their memories, see them being cared for by their creators. God that one geth asking what they have done wrong when they were being shut down really hit deep in my heart, like a child asking their mom why she's leaving, did they do something wrong? Can they fix it? Please don't leave me.

The fear of A.I replacing organic life has been one for debating since the day humans made the first ever computer. And it is reality, this is a real life issue the future will face. It's not a matter of if we create semi-sentient machines, it's a matter of when. People are trying and they will keep trying.

There is even this famous qoute:

"Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."

By Marshall Mcluhan.

Because we are the reproductive organs of the machines, the ones who will create them. The machines need organics to reach existence, they're simply not something that happens by nature.

And look at our machines so far, we've created them based on our own image. Sent them to space and names them curiosity, preservence, spirit and opportunity. These are real names for the NASA mars rovers.

We gave taught them how to sing happy birthday for themselves, all alone in space because we imagined how alone it must be, we wanted to comfort the metal that could reach worlds beyond our body's could ever handle.

But we're also scared, we're flawed and know that we are flawed. We are scared of them not needing us anymore, realising how weak and bad we can get, how we don't have a purpose in this world. We are scared they will not love us back, that they will leave us to rot in the wasteland we've turned the earth into instead of being the ones to lift us up into newer planets.

And the geth mission just made me sad man. It's like a parent shunning the child that loved them, and the child simply doesn't understand why their parents don't like them. They're just so innocent and their world view is so pure that they come to the conclusion any child would.

That they must've done something wrong, for how could the ones who gifted you life be the ones to forcefully take it away, look at you as if you were a monster when once you were beautiful in their eyes.

Ik it's a game but I really hope by the time a breakthrough in technology gets made that we can replicate even an ant's mind artificially, then we would be kinder parents to them than the quarians ever were to the geth. I hope humanity matures enough by that time.

10000/10 writing, hand in marriage for whoever wrote that Geth mission conclusion. It actually ranks even over Tuchanka for me because of how grey and muddy it is. It fully depends on your own views as a person and if you think organic life is superior. There is no clear right or wrong. For once it is the human playing the game who has to ask themselves what they believe in.

is an AI image generator better understood as "a tool used by an artist", or "a service commissioned by a patron"? your feelings on this question will correlate pretty much exactly on whether you think this shit is good news or bad.

though as far as the pro-AI side goes, I think there is some slippage between 'the AI neural net learns like a human' and 'the AI is just a tool'.

and oof i did it again. long text post below about encoding, interpolation, plagiarism in art etc.

suppose for the sake of argument we lived in some cool fucked up biopunk world where instead of a data centre crunching numbers, you had brains in jars that spent their life looking at pictures and drawing them in a big training centre, and then it sits on your desk and draws pictures when you ask it. if you tell the brain to draw a picture, and then say 'hey guys look at this picture I made'... well you know, is it really your picture, etc etc.

the objection to 'the computer does all the work' in 3D computer graphics is that actually it takes a stupid amount of work to do anything half decent in CG, it just shifts the work elsewhere from where it is in painting. it's less akin to painting and more to building an elaborate physical diorama and then taking a photo of it. for this reason, computer graphics has been able to slip in fairly easily to the social roles we've designated around making 'art'. CG also has a distinctly different look to existing art forms, the endless quest for photorealism notwithstanding.

AI image generation is trickier to defend from this objection, since the whole selling point is that it's very easy to get 'good results' without specialist knowledge, and its success state is trying to look indistinguishable from other means. (Midjourney's fractal horror landscapes bother people much less since they're obviously AI - this kicked off in serious when AI started to get close enough to be near-indistinguishable.)

the obvious objection to the brain in a jar analogy is that the AI doesn't actually resemble a human all that much, and there's no reason to think it's sapient; it's a robot not a robota.

the way a human learns to make art is a set of practices - certainly they are likely to be inspired by other art that came before them, but as if not more important is the experience of interacting with their chosen tools, the connection with other parts of their life that they put into their art, their relationship to other people who respond to their creations. humans are certainly great imitators but we're not just that, which is why art constantly evolves.

so then what is the "AI" actually doing, if not "learning"? well, it's something more like interpolating and extrapolating. but it's interpolating in a strange abstract multidimensional mathematical space that's fairly opaque to intuitive human understanding, so we have to lean on analogy.

this isn't entirely unalike to the techniques used in image compression. even an older algorithm like JPEG transforms its pixel values into frequencies by the wavelet transform. what's stored in a JPEG file is coefficients of waves that can be added back together to generate the image; it turns out you can discard some of the higher frequencies and still get pretty close. computer programming is in large part about learning to translate data between different representations, 'equivalent' insofar as you can map one to another with the right algorithm.

in that sense then an 'AI' and its dataset does have an approximate encoding of the 'training' data. (I use quotes because it's really important that these are just analogies, it's not an 'intelligence' like an animal and its training is only similar to what a human does when learning.) and this representation can be used to create variations that seem like they might have been in the training data. for another flawed analogy, the text prompt is something like a query into something like an approximate database.

how does that relate to familiar human notions of artistic plagiarism? i see a lot of people get very chewed up about what is and is not 'allowed' in art. (one young artist asked me if it was ok to claim as his own a drawing from photo reference!) the answer i always give is that the problem is with dishonesty, so just be upfront about what you did. if you copy another artist, as long as you say 'i made a study, here's the original by artist xyz', you're in the clear.

in fine art, things get especially screwy. it's already the case that an especially skilled human can create a convincing forgery, so art ends up being associated with some kind of attestation of its pedigree. owning something 'authentic' by the right person means it's extremely valuable, which has little to do with the actual aesthetic qualities of whatever it is. the absurdity of this has been mocked endlessly but it doesn't seem to have stopped at all. meanwhile we've had ~mechanical reproduction~ for a long time, so mass produced exact copies are the norm, and along with it is the legal apparatus of copyright. online, generally the ethics of it has turned into 'feel free to copy but give proper credit'. I've been pretty obsessive about this, always wanting to give a source; i really dislike decontextualised images floating around. but that credit goes as far as naming the artist, maybe giving a little context about when and where it was made, and not an attempt to create a genealogy of inspirations in most cases.

a human artist can learn to imitate another, but it's a truism that learning to imitate an exceptionally skilled artist is amounts to becoming one yourself, and that no matter how hard you try to imitate, some of your own style will shine through. for this reason, studying under someone and taking on their style is understood often as an act of devotion. (though conversely in the eyes of a critic, an artist may be dismissed as derivative if their inspirations are too obvious.)

with AI, the question becomes more complicated, since there's a huge black box in between the input and output, distinct from the black box that is the artist's mind itself. an AI can fairly easily be tuned to imitate someone in particular, for example the infamous Kim Jung Gi AI made recently after his death, which tries to generate images that he might have made. an artist may try to draw in the style of Kim as a tribute to him, using their own subconscious visual library and methods. you could even do this in a different field of art, e.g. a CG artist making a render inspired by one of Kim's drawings. but running that AI would never be seen as an act of devotion, rather an attempt to create a shallow and insulting replacement. ig you could interpret this intuitive feeling thus: it's not carrying forward the practice that Kim dedicated his life to, but presenting some completely different and trivial activity as equivalent.

our notions of plagiarism, copyright etc are pretty broken at the best of times. in general my feeling is that the less restrictions there are on copying, the better, since one of the best ways to learn is to study other people. but I also put a lot of value in having some understanding of history, influence etc. - the stuff sakuga fans like.

AI interpolation is going to just make it all the more screwy. "a tech company took a billion pictures including yours and mashed them into an abstract function that can be probed with text queries, and i queried it with your name and found a picture that's pretty close to something you might have drawn, clearly derivative of your work but not directly plagiarism - what are my ethical obligations to you", all at scale, is not a problem we've had to deal with before. it's a pretty left-field thing for artists, already occupying a tenuous position within capitalism, to have to worry about. unfortunately the default reaction of a lot of people is to try and get the government to make it go away, which is likely to backfire if it goes anywhere. but it is alarming, it is pushing on a lot of existing fault lines in this strange social process we call 'making art'.

(the solution is to give people some sort of insulation from the market, and access to some sort of community of artists not shaped by chasing an Industry. but 'not having to profit a capitalist to live' is unthinkable so...)

to me there is a strong intuitive feeling that what someone querying an 'AI' is doing is not very similar to what an illustrator 'querying their own subconscious' is doing, even if both result in a similar picture. that's not the same as saying it's 'not art', it may be a type of art (what else would it be?), but it's a type of art I have zero interest in and can't see the appeal of doing. which is fine that's just taste, there's plenty of other activities that people do which I don't care about. but insofar as it actually threatens the continued reproduction of types of art I do care about, and is trying very hard to imitate, I really don't like 'AI' and wish it would fuck off as a flash-in-the-pan fad.

anyway, being specific is hard, analogies are always limited, from now on every time I see a post about AI art that I'm moved to respond to, I'll draw a picture instead.

Bruckner – Symphony no.7 in E Major (1883)

Every now and then I see a composer described as “you love em or hate em”, and the longer I listen to classical music and see how people talk about it, the more I think this attitude can be used for any artist. Especially since extreme opinions are algorithmically given the most attention, and our way of communicating our tastes is equally encouraged toward extremes and hyperbolic language. Nothing can be “just” good, or ok, or interesting, or flawed; it’s either the best, or the worst thing ever. But maybe that attitude is more for Netflix shows or the latest Hollywood movie than for classical music.

Anton Bruckner didn’t escape this mentality despite living nearly two hundred years before the digital era began. When he was alive, the divisiveness in the public discourse was due to living and working in Vienna while loving Wagner. Side note on the “War of the Romantics”; on the aesthetic side there was the disagreement between developing traditional forms (the side of Brahms, C. Schumann, & supporters) versus letting new views on harmony and subject matter dictate how to structure music (Liszt, Wagner, & supporters). But there was another significant side that isn’t always focused on; being supportive of Jews, or being anti-Semitic. Not only was Wagner a musical radical in the way he conceived of opera, musical time, and harmonic development, but he was also a vocal anti-Semite, and his general dogmatic way of insisting on his views for every other subject was just as strong when it came to his bigotry against Jews. Supporting Wagner’s side of the ‘war of the Romantics’ didn’t only mean to support the new music aesthetics; it also implied that you were part of a growing movement of anti-Semitic German nationalism.

I only bring this up because I can assume that the hostility that Bruckner faced from the ‘conservative’ side of Vienna – including the ‘villain’ of Bruckner’s life story, music critic Eduard Hanslick – is more understandable if the stakes are higher and more consequential than “the music was too long and I don’t get it”. Despite his love for Wagner, Bruckner was more akin to the Wagner fans today who enjoy the music while ignoring or outwardly dismissing the evil side of Wagner’s art. I recall a story about Bruckner (one of the many stories used to talk about his ‘simple’ personality) where he had attended Gotterdammerung, and was enthralled by the music from beginning to end but asked “why did they burn her at the end?”. The music was more compelling to him than the content of the opera’s plot.

That could explain Bruckner’s musical aesthetic; taking after Beethoven’s 9th, focus on abstract music as the source of drama, but expand the use of harmonies, drama, and volume as if it were a Wagnarian opera. Its why, to me (and other fans), Bruckner’s symphonies feel like an emotional or spiritual journey despite being abstract music with no “meaning”. It also is why I’ve avoided writing and posting about Bruckner before. Like Mahler, it’s hard to capture the music in words and articulate how I feel about what’s happening in the music, but I’ve covered all of Mahler’s symphonies because I’d loved him a lot more than I did Bruckner. Only recently has my view of Bruckner warmed from “I like him sometimes if I’m in the mood” to “I love him and can’t get enough”.

Really by accident, or fate, I decided to listen to this symphony again two weeks ago, and Bruckner finally ‘clicked’ with me. I’d first heard him by picking up a few cds from my library, and putting him on in the background while I played old video games (in this case, Age of Empires 2). I thought he was epic, but hard to sit through and unless I was in a “Lord of the Rings” mood, I didn’t want to listen. A few weeks ago, Richard Atkinson came out with a video on Bruckner 6, which made me want to listen to him again. I decided to listen to the 7th again, and I finally connected with Bruckner’s soundworld.

One more note before going into the 7th; another reason Bruckner’s music was criticized in his life; it was for a relatively conservative orchestra where each section is noticeable. But that was because Bruckner was not trying to blend colors in an ‘orchestral’ way, but rather how one would write for the organ, which was his main instrument. So when we hear a Bruckner symphony, we are hearing the sounds he created for church services magnified through an orchestra, a kind of recreation of ‘sacred’ music but in a secularized context where one doesn’t have to think about any specific doctrine or view of the divine, instead you experience a sublime connection that is more uniquely ‘your own’. This is one example of how music was being treated as a replacement religion in Europe after the Enlightenment.

The opening movement of the 7th to me feels like a sunrise with the slow unveiling of the main melody. which rises in an arpeggio that evokes the drone prelude to Das Rhinegold. From this comes a seemingly endless melody that gradually develops with a group of themes played through. Long songlike melodies are rare for Bruckner’s opening movements – usually he uses motivic patterns – so the multiple distinct melodies in this work helped to give it the unofficial nickname “Lyric”. As the music builds tension we see another example of why some ‘hate’ Bruckner: intense build ups are created, but instead of climaxing they ‘stop’ and start over. After this first bursting episode, we get a dance-melody that, to me, sounds the most like “organ music”. Bruckner picks these melodies apart into his own way of development; counterpoint and modulation. In a way, bringing Bach and Schubert together. Every Bruckner opening movement ends with a grand coda where the music reaches its most extreme height, finally bringing us the climax we’d been denied by the previous build ups. Here it is only the first part of the opening melody, the rising arpeggio, over a long pedal point, and the volume and scope of the music rises with it into a transcendental glow of sound.

The adagio is the most famous movement of the work because it also has a long passionate melody, here in the minor and with darker colors from the use of Wagner tubas. Bruckner wrote this movement knowing that Wagner was dying, and it is like a musical memorial to him. That may sour the music for a lot of people, but it could be better to think of it as music in memorial of other music, for its own sake, and not for any toxic ideologies. This movement has two main melodies; a somber melody with unexpected modulations, and a bittersweet melody that tries to be uplifting. This movement is unique for a Bruckner symphony in having a cymbal clash, which was rumored to have been added to the score the moment Bruckner had heard the news of Wagner’s death. But that story isn’t true, the actual story is that a friend told him he should use a cymbal instead of a triangle for that moment. As usual, the more interesting ideas stick around to form a kind of mythos over music that we love.

The scherzo movement, again following Beethoven’s lead, is thunderous. The main melody is based on arpeggiated open fifths falling downward, and when the full orchestra blasts it, it feels like being under a cascading wave. Again, the writing is organ-like in the colors in the sections as they contrast each other like hands and feet over the keyboards and pedals. The trio makes me think of the kinds of ‘schmaltzy’ Viennese dances that would come up in Mahler’s symphonies, just one example of how Bruckner influenced Mahler’s style.

The last movement makes me think of the symphony as being symmetrical: the first half was made of two long movements, one bright and transcendent in the major, the other darker and tragic in the minor. The second half is made of two shorter and livelier movements that have the same major/minor characters. Here, the finale is a dance that opens with the violins playing the main melody, followed by a counter melody that’s more for rhythm than humming along. These ideas play in counterpoint in the winds until dying down in the strings, introducing a softer group of melodies. Later a large wave of unison octaves play out across the full orchestra, an inversion of the opening dance melody. This movement is in arch form, where the order of melody groups plays again in reverse order (1, 2, 3, 2, 1), though melodic ideas are used repeatedly, in the Bruckner fashion of breaking up motivic blocks. As with his other mature symphonies, the movement ends with another grand coda, where the arpeggio of the opening melody to the whole symphony returns, and reveals that the main theme of the final movement is based on this melody.

Movements:

Allegro moderato

Adagio: Sehr feierlicht und sehr langsam

Scherzo: Sehr schnell - Trio: Etwas langsame

Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht schnell

people who legitimately think that marvel movies are the bottom of the cultural barrel have zero media literacy or knowledge and I can’t take anything that they say seriously

I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that they’re the greatest movies ever made of all time but I will say they’re mostly fun so I don’t give a shit if scorsese nolan hitchcock kubrick etc are “better”. like nickelback. they’re not nearly the levels of talent and composition as dream theater, rush, king crimson, opeth, polyphia, deftones, loathe, sleep token, lady gaga, etc but they’re perfectly competent and listenable. you cannot sit there and tell me that the shitty myspacecore groups like brokencyde, blood on the dance floor, the medic droid, shitty drunk mom bands like hinder, saving abel, and buckcherry, shitty white girl pop like taylor swift, meg trainer, and katy perry, and shitty frat boy rap rock groups like crazy town, saliva, and kid rock, are in any way better than nickelback. you cannot tell me that you would rather listen to analcunt than nickelback even if you love analcunt because people who like grindcore know that it sounds like shit and that’s why they like it. and I’m gonna make a statement that’s so controversial in that the mcu movies are some of the best movies on the market these days because of one teeny tiny little detail.

every single american horror movie made in the last 20 years is so much worse than the most unpleasant and boring mcu film.

*except for jordan peele, who is the exception, not the rule.

paul ws anderson has not made a good movie since mortal kombat and the first resident evil AND EVEN THEN those are really cheesy, poorly edited, weirdly paced, and heavily flawed. michael bay’s writing sucks and relies solely on the spectacle of explosions. uwe boll. tommy fucking wiseau. every single shyamalan movie since unbreakable has been absolutely atrocious (aside from joaquin phoenix being the only one saving signs and the village from being NEARLY as fucking terrible as lady in the water, the happening, the last airbender, and so on, but they’re still stilted and awkward). nic cage is in a billion movies these days but we’re all just gonna forget about the late 90s and 2000s where he was in just as many movies and all of them are really really stupid? how about every superhero movie made prior to the mcu. did we forget that xmen 3 was so bad they literally fucking sent wolverine back in time to make it so that it never even happened? AND THEN HAD SANSA STARK MAKE A SILLY LITTLE JOKE ABOUT IT IN THE REBOOT TRILOGY??? but weirdly enough xmen 3 is still better then origins wolverine. oh and also green lantern, daredevil, catwoman, punisher warzone, all the batman movies where the suit has nipples, like you can’t tell me that the only good superhero movies are the worst ones because I HAVE SEEN WORSE BEFORE, sorry you were born after 2005 and you never bothered to engage media that wasn’t spoonfed to you by the algorithm.

but you know what I’d still rather watch The Room because sometimes things are bad in a way that’s still entertaining to see its incompetence, rather than Hulk. which is. fine I guess but I have no strong desire to ever watch that one again. but I still enjoyed watching it when I did. like yeah it’s not the best but it sure as fuck isn’t the worst and I’ll tell you why.

because the actual worst movies ever made of all time? dude. blumhouse’s cesspool. the conjuring is shit. annabelle is shit. sinister is shit. insidious is shit. paranormal activity is shit. the purge is shit. truth or dare is shit. unfriended is shit. oculus is shit. and night swim, that’s gonna be SOOO cringe. you’re fucking delusional at best, fucking ignorant at worst, if you think that this deluge of propaganda is better. you say that the story beats in every marvel movie are exactly the same even though they’re the same story beats that every single movie and novel has had for the past 150 years (well more like 1500 years), where you have the prologue and the inciting incident then act 2 then the midpoint then there’s a despair event horizon then a climax and a denounement at the end capping it off like a cherry on top of the sundae on an assembly line. they all copy the hero’s journey from greek storytelling. they’re all in the same boat so that’s literally the dumbest criticism you can make. you’re sitting there eating instant ramen while talking smack about hot pockets for not being made of healthy ingredients.

it’s hypocritical, and it’s telling that 90% of the people who do nothing but make a hundred posts every day about how bad marvel movies are, don’t actually do anything besides watch marvel movies just to find things to complain about. like, all you’re doing is the exact same thing that marvel fans do but you’re cultivating your own misery whereas the fans enjoy it and milk it for serotonin. it’s like when self identified anti-sjws didn’t realize that they were also SJWs, they were just on the other side of the battle lines. luckily they’re all so braindead and prone to follower mentality that they just say the word woke is bad because everyone else says that word is bad even though they have no solid definition for what the fuck woke even means anymore besides being a buzzword to help us intelligent people distinguish a bigoted asshole. point is you don’t know how to create your own opinions so you just copy whoever is spreading the most vitriol and hate.

it’s just honestly so sad to see but at the same time I envy the illusion. if I lived in a world where I thought that fried chicken was the worst food ever made expressly because everything else available to me was so much more yummy than fried chicken. imagine the privilege. imagine having champagne and caviar for breakfast, foie gras for lunch, and sushi for dinner with tiramisu for dessert, living in paradise because the worst thing in your life is fried chicken. you’ve never had to eat hot dogs. you’ve never had kale crammed down your throat. your mac and cheese doesn’t come in a box. you’re so goddamn lucky that the worst movies you’ve ever seen are still better than most movies period I’ve seen.

so I hope that when you inevitably are approached with the reality of video brinquiedo you aren’t fucking traumatized. because you’re basically the marie antoinette of cinema.