Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

First time I got rickrolled at a conference

 

The kind of person who says "I like your shoelaces" to Joe Biden.

 

New tumblr strategy: pretend all posts were queued months in advance, including reblogs and answers to asks and reactions to breaking news.

 

On some level, the news should be free to access as a common good. It is (I think? I hope?) better for society for people to have access to news, and requiring payment restricts access. However, journalists do need some sort of compensation for their work.
There are roughly four ways to get money for services these days:

1: Paid for by customers, which by premise is bad
2: Subsidy by the government, which makes the news into propaganda or the equivalent of
3: Charity/donations, which makes the news beholden to whatever the donors want
4: Selling customer data, which is rude

Many things that are common goods can be provided via nationalization because the government can only do so much to fuck with them (ignoring things like the chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay), and similarly for things that are provided by charity. Information, unfortunately, is very malleable.

I do not have a good solution to this. The closest systems I can think of that manage to thread the needle are all via volunteer work by people who have other day jobs, which is probably not really sustainable for something as wide-scale and intensive as news.

Anyway, paywalling news articles sucks.

 

Regarding those rants about how Superman is a story about immigrants and therefore conservatives who like Superman are reading the comic incorrectly, yes, Kal-El is an immigrant. But Superman is an immigrant with a job that he isn't taking from a US-born citizen (until he arrived, Metropolis didn't have an equivalent vigilante). Clark Kent has a number of on-paper qualifications and is polite and passes easily, with a US-born citizen host family.

Kal-El is the type of immigrant that conservatives are usually happy to welcome, because conservatives make a distinction between "good" immigrants and "bad" immigrants, even if the reporting on them doesn't.

 

Is it good or bad that the "shape-rotator" versus "wordcel" stuff died shortly before ChatGPT really took off?

 

I think a good chunk of the AI art discourse would be dealt with if we had a word for generated pictures that wasn't "art". I don't mind "art" being reserved for the human social endeavor, and "artwork" being the material medium of communication for this endeavor. So if AIs, by virtue of not being humans, don't produce "art", so be it. But they do produce something, and it turns out that a lot of people aren't looking for "art", they just want...images? Pictures? Visuals?

You'd think that the generation that grew up on image macros would be a little bit more clear-headed about this, but I guess that might be asking too much. The fact that I keep getting surprised by this kind of thing is a sign that I also don't learn from evidence, and therefore cannot be considered an example of intelligence.

[Edit] The word is "Content"! AI content creation! The discourse already knows about this!

 

Does a woman wearing a dress made out of peacock feathers count as cross-dressing?

 

Occassionally I think about all the times that I was flirted with and totally didn't realize in the moment. But you'd think that "We should get dinner some time" would be blatant enough that I would notice.
Nope.

 

Realizing how weird it would be to see someone write the year with a comma in it. Like, it's the year 2,024.

 

But yeah, I can't imagine giving up or changing away from Exohedron and Layra as my online handles. Like, I can imagine changing my meatspace name more easily than I can my online handles.

 

When you find a new Indian restaurant and have to calibrate to their spice level system.

If I ran a restaurant, I'd have the online ordering system have spice options for everything, including the beverages and deserts, if only to see what people picked. Speaking of, I should actually try out that hot pepper soda.

 

Weird behavior where there was one tumblr blog that would load but after a split second turn completely white. Only one, at least of the blogs that I usually browse. If I turned off my ad blocker I could then view that tumblr, with ad posts.
Now I've turned my ad blocker back on, the ads are gone, and I can see that blog again. Not sure what happened.

 

Having not seen any of the movie and having only a very vague understanding of the plot, I am assuming that Mamma Mia is an attempt to explain the Holy Trinity.

 

When you look at the sky and think to yourself: "Dark Souls weather."

 

I love it when a toy company's lineup is like, fifty muscley, sword-studded, dude-shaped mechs, and one chubby pink child in a bunny costume.

 

But it would be really funny if, having left the EU, Britain goes back to using imperial units instead of metric.

 

Derivative sin

 

Still kind of curious why English culture (food, but also other stuff) was hit so hard by World Wars I and II and the Great Depression, at least according to various people trying to explain modern English culture. France and Germany and so on pride themselves on cultural continuity, however authentic it actually is. In contrast, English food has apparently been reduced to food styles copied from peasants and Indians, and their folk traditions like Morris dancing branded as weird antiquities.

I'm tempted to believe that it's more the decline of the British Empire; at least that separates England from, say, France.

 

Stats for last night's dream:
-At least two POV changes
-At least one change of meta-ness level (higher to lower: original level to character in an anime being watched on original level)