Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Today I got to play out the Anakin side of that four-panel Anakin and Padme meme.

 

I'm tempted to find one of those people who make covers of songs in the style of other artists and suggest "Hurt by Johnny Cash in the style of Nine Inch Nails"

 

If I ever start a really bad restaurant chain I'm calling it Nimby's. It will be extremely tacky and over-commercialized and it will definitely sell low-quality merchandise.

 

Telling new DnD players and/or new biologists that the plural of "lich" is "lichen"

 

The concept of bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense is actually one of the best way to describe the output of LLMs that I've seen so far.

Source: ChatGPT is Bullshit by Hicks, Humphries and Slater

 

I have to say, I am extremely proud of the Kintsugi community and mod team and seebs for putting the site owner on post moderation. Not because it's good to require it, but the fact that the need was recognized and accepted and addressed is amazing.
And like, a lot of us are here because we wanted to talk to seebs, and to hear from seebs, so putting her on post mod should be really weird! And it is! But also ultimately beneficial, I think.

But like, imagine if X's mod team were allowed to screen Musk's posts.

 

Could Hidetaka Miyazaki make a Ghibli movie? Could Hayao Miyazaki make a Soulsborne game?

 

The kind of person who only gets their news from WSJ (Wall Street Journal) vs the kind of person who only gets their news from WSJ (Weekly Shounen Jump)

 

All advertising is false; some advertising is useful.

 

My dad used to ask me about how dangerous AI would be in spreading misinformation. Well, now there's definitely evidence that someone was using ChatGPT to write pro-Trump tweets, mostly due to them fucking up and exposing the error messages.


This makes me more, not less, comfortable, in that this kind of fuck-up would have been less likely were a human the one writing the posts.

 

It turns out that putting chili powder in the smoothie mostly makes my mouth confused. Hot but also cold?
My sinuses feel funny.

 

Spoiler: Not very-well thought-through way to make the end of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth hit harder

If one accepts the premise of the story that Square Enix wants to tell, about multiple timelines and changing fate by manipulating which timeline becomes the alpha timeline (pardon my Homestuck), then I think the ending of FFVII Rebirth has roughly two problems:

1: Being somewhat confusing in a way that distracts from the emotional stakes rather than deepening or complementing them
2: Being a video game in a way that distracts from the emotional stakes rather than deepening or complementing them

Assume we start when the party arrives in the Forgotten Capital. Yeah, there's a bunch of issues with the Forgotten Capital, in that it's kind of introduced out of nowhere and there's no real connective tissue between the events at the Temple, which ended with Cloud and Aerith falling from the root-things that Sephiroth summoned, and the forest.
It might even be the same forest that the Temple was in, but there wasn't any indication or any landing. Cloud just wakes up after the not-date in the offshoot timeline, and then Aerith steps out from behind a tree, takes the white materia from him, and vanishes into the mist, and then the rest of the party arrives.

Okay, but forget all of those issues and just start at the Forgotten Capital. Aerith is praying. Cloud reaches her surrounded and buffeted by Whispers, and Sephiroth tries to make Cloud kill Aerith before trying to stab her himself.

Here's where I'd change things.

Cloud fends him off, there's a flash of multicolored light, and Sephiroth immediately becomes Jenova.
At this point, Cloud and Aerith are still separated from the rest of the party and so we can still have the multi-group fight, although honestly the fight is too long anyway.

And then during the end-of-battle cutscene, while Jenova is dying, Sephiroth emerges, stabs Aerith and bolts when Cloud tries to slice him one last time.
We get a shot of her bow coming undone and the white materia bouncing into the abyss.

Then we get a scene where the rest of the party catches up to Cloud as he's cradling her body. They surround him and realize that she's dead. Then he gets one of those brain flashes and suddenly it's just him and Aerith and she wakes up with her bow intact, and then there's another brain flash and he's back with the party and she's bleeding out on the floor.

And then we go into the ending scenes where Cloud thinks Aerith is alive and everyone else thinks she's dead.

This way we still have Aerith's death but instead of launching right into the fight and making you wait for the emotional impact to hit, you get the long fight out of the way first while wondering if Aerith will survive in this version of the story.
Then you get the dramatic scene and the timeline shenanigans when you have the time for it to process.


I think the other thing that stuck out to me is that Aerith promised to stop the Meteor, which as far as I can tell is the first in-game mention of the meteor. I don't recall anything saying what the black materia actually did other than destroy the world. There was that one timeline where the meteor shows up at the end, but it isn't made clear that that was the result of the black materia rather than just another way for doomed timelines to end.
So I think Aerith should have instead promised to stop Sephiroth from using the black materia instead of mentioning Meteor.

 

Two guards, one who only tells lies for small children, the other only truths not meant for mankind to hear.

There is only one door.

 

I keep forgetting that while my spice tolerance is pretty high, my actual heat (as in temperature) tolerance is pretty low, and that spice makes it worse.
It being summer doesn't help.

 

Someday I will understand how to write metal guitars. Someday.

 

Writing this paper is a lot of "I know this looks like magic, but over the next [many] pages, I will convince you that it is merely sleight-of-hand,"

 

Reverse mirror test: can you understand that the creature you see is not a reflection of you but is actually an interloper that manages to be slightly larger and more threatening than you no matter how much you puff yourself up?

 

The worst part of these political solicitation messages is that I'm not even getting them on my own behalf: they think they're talking to my mom.

 

I'm not usually a big fan of the "public companies are obligated to maximize shareholder wealth", but if I've learned anything from Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter, it's that sometimes the only way to sue a company for doing bad things is not to prove that it did bad things, because demonstrating harm to the direct victim can be hard, but to prove that it did bad things such that the revelation of that bad thing would or did cause the stock price to drop, because demonstrating harm to the shareholders is easy: line goes down.

Hence why securities fraud.

 

TIL that Link/Tetra_(Legend of Zelda) does not resolve to Link/Zelda_(Legend of Zelda) on AO3's tagging system.