I end up reading Wikipedia or TVTropes (or everything2, or Reddit threads or Wookiepedia or ancient forums), and then each tab means that I open several more. I have social media posts open that I want to write arguments against later, articles that I might use in writing those arguments…

My phone is usually at the cap of 500. Between Vivaldi and Firefox my computer probably in the thousands.

I tried using “Pocket” to keep track of interesting articles instead, but it didn’t match my flow.

It is hyperlexia and ADHD. I similarly own probably ~1000 or so books.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Nebula is all “bread tubers” and left adjacent.

Google automatically gives me ai search results that are piss poor.

And these results are taken at face value by a shocking number of people. I’ve gotten into niche academic arguments where someone just copy and pasted the AIs completed hallucinated response as “evidence.”

I experimented with using AI to generate basic quizzes for students on concepts like atomic theory or conservation of energy, but maybe 2/20 questions it came up with were any form of accurate/useful. Even when it’s not making shit up entirely, the information is so shallow as to be useless.

Before Skyrim changed Alduin lore, Alduin was Akatosh. The Time Dragon Akatosh ate the world at the end of each era/“kalpa”, with the world being reformed and reshaped. More about the natural cycles of the world and history. (Time is kind of a big thing in the series - the Dragon Breaks at the end of Daggerfall - time breaks in such a way that multiple contradictory things happen simultaneously. It is kinda cool that the most fascinating part of lore is a ass pull to make every ending of Daggerfall canon and not have to pick one)

Skyrim separated Akatosh and Alduin (and there are some in game books justifying this change in theology.) Akatosh is still good god, Alduin is now some sort of independent entity that is just purely evil.

It would have been much more interesting if Alduin was still Akatosh. If the point of the game were you saying - no, I don’t want the world to end even if it is “supposed to” - there could have been some interesting actual plot to break up the dungeon fetch quests. There could have been some tower lore even, that would have been fun.

It reminds me of the flattening of Mehrunes Dagon in Oblivion. Like yeah, he’s part of the House of Troubles and not great but I think he’d actually promise something of value to the Mythic Dawn? Also, maybe not fuck them over for lols? He wasn’t just The Devil with the serial numbers filed off.

Like, Morrowind and Daggerfall’s villains all had motivations that made sense. Dagoth Ur is responding to imperialism by trying to create an ethnostate under his direct rule, Daggerfall doesn’t even really have straight “villains” necessarily. Heck, even in Redguard the main antagonist is a Governor for the empire that is trying to shut down a gang of pirates. Jagar Tharn in Arena is just an evil wizard that wants to impersonate the Emperor.

I hope TES 6 never comes out. Skyrim was a disappointment anyway, I don’t think my heart could take it if they made another story about a big bad wanting to destroy the world for no reason at all.

The Reddit story was very convincing at the time. They later did walk it back, something like they believed the brother when they denied doing it.

I don’t know how conspiratorial we should be, because while the FCC doesn’t play around I think at this point everyone would be more amused and curious if the perpetrator came forward.

Look at how phone phreaking was treated in the 70s, or codes for getting long distance on BBS. The modern justice system would have wanted to make someone like Joybubbles an example.

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I prefer sucking dick for free. When guys pay, they get a bit entitled about it and it’s less fun (can’t take a TMJ break).

It’s asinine to require me to be connected to the internet to use my computer. My work laptop was absolutely useless without the internet. There’s supposed to be a pin/password thing that lets you bypass this, but it would work maybe 30% of the time.

I also don’t get why I have to give Microsoft my name and an email address for my video game machine. (I get steam and proton yada yada, but I’m often playing anything that you can barely get to work on its native system - has anyone actually got EYE : Divine Cybermancy to run for more than ten minutes?)

Windows XP and 7 hit the mark I think. XP let you take it apart in beautiful ways, and had all kinds of wonderful eccentricities - which is also the problem, because XP was insecure af. Windows 7 got right what they figured out by Vista Service Pack 2 as far as security. Less aesthetics, less access to the internals, but also probably “better” for a normie.

The rule is supposedly that every other one is good or something. Maybe 12 will be good?

Is it a “risk” if it’s the desired outcome?

Altman doesn’t seemed to be concerned with consent in general.

By definition a primary source is not “re-written”.

Then you are ruling out most ancient primary sources. I don’t think you understand ancient or medieval concepts of authorship, or document transmission.

What time periods/places are you interested in? I am able to and would be happy to give you a detailed list of primary and secondary sources for a good chunk of concepts.

That’s the big thing - historians tend to focus. Even the university “western history from 1500” or whatever are going to vary a lot by what the professor is interested in and focused on. Behind just focusing on like a whole country or time period, they get super specific and do shit like figure out that whole undocumented kingdoms existed based on numismatic work (coins) or look at things like architectural influences that the crusaders brought back and can be seen in their classes (I had a prof who had a whole feminist interpretation of medieval castle architecture)

Your comment alludes to the history of religion, which is definitely a complicated topic and has its own complexities in historiography (the study of history and techniques). Religion has interactions with so many other spheres, and so you also often have to dive deeply into the culture and history of the specific people who practiced it to understand the why - which is hard, because religious interpretations that are common now tend to get read backwards into the text.

I’d be happy to give you a list of sources for any religion as well. (Do you feel most comfortable with texts for popular audiences, or would you like to explore academic material?)

In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.

It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.

I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.

So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.

The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.

Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.

My idea as a transgender man who struggles with mental illness - if I am safe, than health cis men are also safe.

Maybe it’s not “use people as a buffer” but the start fighting now.

I know I am in danger and there is nothing I can do about it. Many cis men can do things now, that would improve my life and help push up against this rising tide of fascism.

They probably won’t come for you (unless you’re very politically vocal) until after they’re done with immigrants, LGBTQ folks, the mentally ill…

So if you don’t want them to come for you, help make sure they don’t get to wrap up those groups first. Maybe advocate on behalf of some of those folks - your voice has more clout.

Funnily enough, in the 50’s and 60’s - parents were often more concerned with their kiddos “going steady” and preferred them to date around.

Polyamory is definitely dicey without a lot of emotional maturity (tbh I don’t think most adults could handle it), but also teenage dating drama is silly. As long as she’s safe and happy, you should probably just be okay with it.

Which contemporary philosophers demonstrate this supposed shift in thinking?

Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.

I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.

Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)

The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more related to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?