Latest Posts by tragictaleofshikyou - Page 5

The hidden aspect of this (and something I feel this analysis doesn't get) is that there's something missing in our society that can only be filled with a good vs. evil battle. It probably corresponds to a mass ritual in ancient times. But altered and filtered through a moral framework which is not natural to it... people want to be heroes to get immersed in a moment of violent intensity and cosmological forces

there's a fun thing about the eventual perfection of the "random crime" in the hero video game because it calls to how the desire to be a hero is also a desire for people to be in trouble, because you need people to save, and crimes to solve, and if there are no crimes there are no heroes, and

why would you complain about a super hero who can run out of things to do? shouldn't that be a good thing? to want to save those who are hurt one must need people being hurt. you are the same as your enemy you fucking imbecile

We should base our aesthetics on this rather than making them conform to standards

worried that thing you put in your art or writing or game or music is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, too niche for anyone but yourself? fear not! you can do whatever you want forever. and you should.

No idea what this is called but it sounds really good

the juxtaposition between being asked to basically be a national scarecrow to scare off any countries salivating to invade due to the coup and playing dress up to prepare for the cultural festival at school is insane lmao

one chapter has the leader of the coup practically begging her to agree to be a national deterrent, and the next is her being sent off to the crafts club to have her fitted for the princess cosplay she'll be doing in the festival abdlamdkqkejejdjdnfncn

there's someone on Wikipedia who writes articles about Cantonese opera but constantly names paragraphs after generic figures of speech. For example, they titled a paragraph about the economic threats facing the opera as "All for Naught."

Here's an example from the article on the actor Yam Kim-fai (who is really good, btw):

I wonder if this is translated from Cantonese... maybe the original sounded very poetic

Evillious ❤ my favourite is Capriccio Farce

Interesting: in the title of Capriccio Farce, the word being translated as 'farce' is 茶番 "Chaban" which referred originally to a specific kind of popular theatrical entertainment. The author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki witnessed these performances as a child, and described them in his writing as being very violent, with content taken from true crime cases or military history. They were performed at a Shinto shrine in his neighbourhood. However, it's possible that only the specific Chaban troupe Tanizaki saw performing had this particular, violent aesthetic.

the thing I actually hate abt AI art is not that it has no creative intent behind it (that's not necessary for art imo) or that it trains on ppls stuff (I don't like intellectual property) but that it has a tendency to homogenize everything and present us with what we already expect, reinforce really stupid stereotypes etc. This can be illustrated with how in Minecraft AI it never lets you get to an interesting new world like the Nether and always takes you back to the familiar overworld

If only there was a technology that wasn't predictive, but actively hostile and gave us the opposite of what we expected...

This is extremely important

I can't remember what part of Homestuck deals with this though

My take: it is nevertheless okay to be afraid of sludge. Just because it's connected to life doesn't mean it's wrong to be disgusted, it's just part of the experience... don't feel bad about feeling repulsed by the universe and life itself

i feel like a lot of fiction forgets (or purposefully ignores) the fact life is intrinsically, inextricably linked to *filth*

to *garbage*

shit gets *gross* and if you clean it it will quickly get gross again regardless

the total absence of the disgusting is uncanny

don't be afraid of the sludge

(works that understand this include discworld, significant parts of 40k, blame!, and homestuck, as well as the undisputed king of grime and sludge; dorohedoro. dorohedoro *fucks* absolutely)

Dagashi Kashi is great because it's abt someone infodumping about their special interest and how awesome that is

What I love about Akudama Drive so far is how it makes you totally enthralled with Cutthroat and full of contempt for the Kansai pd in a way that's not just/not *exactly* political. It's not that I hate Kansai pd because they're perpetrating injustice (although I'm sure they are.) I hate them because there's something pathetic and embarrassing about their attempts to enforce order at all. Even if they really were protecting innocent people from dangerous criminals, there's still something shameful about how they think they can end peoples' lives for 'justified' reasons... even if those reasons truly are justified by every ethical system that exists. Just look at how grotesquely their leader behaves --- that's their soul. They will always be flailing around in futility and an endless mess... in a way that's beyond all political definitions of oppression. This show is truly intoxicating.

Watching Akudama Drive and going crazy over Cutthroat. Theoretical observations will arrive shortly

Ten Sho, Sho Ten Sho

Solar System

A lot of people use art as a way to express emotions but I think it's important to not let emotional expression become just a new standard of authenticity. Express your feelings if you want to. You can also just make shapeless forms and that's okay too.

due to current circumstances the idea of art having a 'soul' and using 'soulless' as a pejorative has increased. Is it a good idea to tie creative value to this kind of mystical aura? It's not, and I don't mean that because it's supernatural but because it is exclusive and narrow.

In Ancient Egypt, they apparently believed in more than three 'souls.' Which one is blessing your art?

Will expand in a future post on the bio-essentialist and exclusionary core of the soul/soulless conflict

I didn't realize there were images of the fire happening.

I could say, "it's inevitable with wooden architecture." But maybe it's better to not make excuses and to feel the sense of loss

Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, burned down by a schizophrenic monk, 1950, it was rebuilt in 1955

people who try to turn being 'weird' into just another way of being virtuous don't really understand what they're doing. Being a social outcast will always mean being in a category that includes perpetrators of evil.

attr. Sang Schichuan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple

Thinking about how a lot of the cultural-political worldbuilding in His Dark Materials might not even be true because it's filtered through the perspectives of biased characters. Things like, do the Northern Tartars actually form a distinct group, or is it just an abstract term the European characters use for a collection of peoples they don't fully understand? It doesn't seem like the Yenisei Pakhtars are connected at all to the Tartars attacking Muscovy. I feel the same way about the description of the insect automata as "Afric." The worldbuilding is full of ironic exoticism and we are never given a 100% objective look at how things work

Wish the novels were available in English

Teito Monogatari, episode 4

in the endless battle between aesthetic reactionaries and consumer slop nobody will ever win

I hate all those youtube videos called like "This book is the worst" and they have some ooc suggestive or risky quotes on the thumbnail next to an npc loser affecting a shocked expression. It's so evil.

Please don't promote the idea that weird or explicit lines are a serious flaw in books

It's very rare that being so invested in a character's personality that you want to imagine them in a relationship is a bad thing that makes it harder to appreciate the work

It's also cool when people ship in a spirit that goes against the work's themes because it's like emotional graffiti in a positive sense, taking the characters and mixing them into a new context

I don't believe such a thing as 'not like other girls ism' exists, but nonetheless

it's absolutely true that some folks take Shipping too far and can't engage in Fandom without it, but the way others shit on it tends to reek of misogyny and not-like-the-other-girls-ism

Always be sus of ideas that confuse the value of art with technical skill, talent, or hard work. There's a reason people used to think of it as 'divine inspiration' -- artistic success, is mysterious, arbitrary, and about getting possessed by supernatural organisms

Beginning sentences with "And" is a reference to Biblical Hebrew. It was used by the translators of the King James Bible because they wanted to preserve Hebrew grammatical patterns. It is unlike Latin-based grammatical rules. There's no reason not to begin sentences like this. After all, the King James Bible is very beautiful writing.

I wonder if any English-speakers began sentences with "and" before the influence of Bible translations?

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

Coherence

A pattern I notice in 'writing advice' is that the ideal that gets promoted is to restrain and tightly organize every element in order to produce a single overall effect.

It is not so good that this is commonplace. Writing needs space to be incoherent and disjointed. This is what will allow writing to be truly alive. In a functional aesthetic world, there will not be a need to sever 'useless' growths from the body.

infinite potential. We will be able to create at least ten new forms of media each with its own aesthetics and traditions.

Despite the gloomy atmosphere of the 2020s and the 21st century in general, the world of culture is not in danger. It is about to give rise to a new universe.

what is project secret moth?

project secret moth is an LLM-based text adventure with optional visual accompaniment. unlike many other LLM-based text adventures where you can basically do whatever you want and its open ended like a lucid dream, project secret moth has actual game structure built beneath and the LLM simply acts as an interpretative + narrative layer to generate description and cohere the varying game elements. in my schema of game design, things like ai dungeon (with no non-self-imposed win or loss state) or "just open ended chatting with an ai" are "toys", rather than "games". sure, they are fun, and you can make your own fun, but it requires a certain amount of buy-in that always leads me to bounce off of them.

project secret moth does not have that, in the prototype. it is a capital letters Video Game.

project secret moth has the same "win state" as any other yume nikki-like - collect all the effects and leave your bedroom.

the beginning of the game offers two modes - "personal" and "story". personal mode will have the narrative ai ask you psychologically probing questions so that it can customize the dream realms to your psyche. story mode will have it procedurally generate an individual, A Madotsuki, and put you in their shoes.

project secret moth does not have a freeform parser. like the very eldest text adventures, it utilizes verb commands - LOOK AT TORININGEN, USE KNIFE ON UBOA, and so on. there is a certain amount of flexibility - it will try to interpret your actions in a way that a traditional parser never can - but you are not free to do whatever you want. there is no macklankey. you are bound like all living things.

the initial prototype will be text-based only, offering a bedroom, 8 dream worlds (with an indeterminate number of extra layers and sub-areas), minor puzzles, NPCs, and the exciting "environmental cascade" system that allows you to solve area puzzles immersive sim style by manipulating the environment of higher-up layers. order a fan off amazon to make your dream worlds colder.

project secret moth will ship bundled with its own local large language model (the particular one is TBD) and will be built to run on relatively low-spec computers or ones with no GPU available, if possible. no internet connection will be required, and no information you send will be sent to external APIs. when the second prototype (with visual accompaniment system - see the attached images?) launches it will also be bundled with its own fine-tuned image model that, again, will be built to run on low-spec computers.

stay attuned

second favourite anime.

The intense way they communicate feelings is infinitely valuable

The Paracas culture made the best art in the universe

(they are also the inspiration for a lot of the imagery in Yume Nikki)

Edogawa Ranpo

I'm still afraid of them

Panic

The idea that gameplay is all that matters for games has been a disease on our aesthetic worldview. Mixed media is undervalued and infinitely powerful. The full potential of video games is to create maximalist sensory-rich stories and world. Please continue to make long cutscenes.

this makes me want to play the game more actually