What I mean is like, what do you think is unironically awesome, even if people now think its cringe or stupid?
Superman
A lot of people dismiss Superman as being “too powerful” or “unrelatable.” They’ll say Batman is more relatable because he doesn’t have superpowers. But seriously, how many of us can actually relate to being a billionaire playboy with unlimited resources? In contrast, Superman grew up in small-town, working-class America. He is as much Clark Kent as he is Superman.
People call him a “boy scout,” as if that’s a flaw. But that misses the point. The fact that he has the power to rule the world and chooses not to, is what makes him extraordinary. He sets an ideal for people to strive for.
Yes, in the hands of a bad writer he can become a walking deus ex machina. But in the hands of a good writer, Superman becomes the core of some of the most powerful and iconic stories in comics. His greatness doesn’t come from what he can do, it comes from the choices he makes.
He’s a power fantasy for those who if they had all the power in the world just want to use it to help
Have you ever read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman%3A_Red_Son ?
I’m not a big fan of Superman stuff, but I found that one to be pretty interesting.
It’s a good one. That one and All-Star Superman are the two I always recommend to people.
I’ve not read All-Star yet, but I keep getting it recommended to me. Thanks!
All-Star is what made me change my mind on Superman. I never really liked him when I was younger, and it was for all the same complaints that people have already listed above. But All-Star was a blast to read, not in spite of it’s (at times) cheesiness, but because of it. All-Star Superman is relatable because he embodies the best traits in all of us; he is incredibly intelligent and kind, leveled and patient. Without going into spoilers, I think what I love most about All-Star is that it shows that even the best among us have our weaknesses, and that it’s not the huge, planet-level threats that define who are and what we do, but the small, innocuous things that can most affect who we are in the moment.
I was gonna ask, thank you!
All star Superman the DC movie is easily the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. Every moment is dumber than the one before it. I laughed so hard I nearly died. Seriously go get messed up and watch it with your friends!
It definitely wasn’t one of DC’s best adaptions. They really tried to squeeze too much in for the run time. They totally could have dropped the whole Atlas and Samson thing and concentrated more on the main story.
Honestly, if they fixed a few things it would just be an extremely mediocre and bad movie so it’s better off that it’s an unbelievable cavalcade of nonsense
Overly Sarcastic Productions has done a number of videos they call detail diatribes that have focused on Superman. The summary of many of them is that Superman is his most interesting when saving people and not when punching villains. Even in larger team fights, he could save everyone or hold off the threat, but he can’t do both so he needs the help of others.
I actually love superman being a normal dude who saves people with a smile. He should be a good person in stories, because his strength isnt the point, his willpower to help everyone is.
Superman has the ability to remove Capitalists from power and chooses not to. That is why I don’t care for Superman.
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They’ll say Batman is more relatable because he doesn’t have superpowers.
Okay, but he’s a billionaire super-scientist who occasionally uses occult magicks. How does none of this qualify?
Superman grew up in small-town, working-class America
Sure, but how many modern day Americans could relate to growing up on a farm? Or getting a job in journalism?
The fact that he has the power to rule the world and chooses not to, is what makes him extraordinary.
I think superheroes are largely defined by their villains. And Lex Luthor - as an individual who regularly does struggle to dominate the world (and periodically succeeds with mixed results) - makes an excellent foil for this exact reason. Superman is, at his heart, just a guy trying to do the right thing. Luthor is an ego-maniacal fascist who cannot conceive of having less than total control.
The best Superman stories are ones that illustrate the practical limits of a seemingly omnipotent individual. It’s Superman’s struggles - his poor choices, his desire for human affection, his naive optimism, his inability to be everywhere at once - that make him relatable. The idea of Superman as a maximal human who still can’t do everything has a way of taking the load of us, comparably weak and vulnerable people, who strive for just as much as a fictional demigod.
Superman probably pays more in taxes than Batman.
That is probably because Batman doesn’t pay taxes, Bruce Wayne does.
And Bruce Wayne is known for spending tons of the Wayne foundation on helping the poor and criminalized. Tons of charities, schools, orphanages, homeless shelters, … are funded by them.
And if Bruce gets tax breaks because of that, it is because that is how the law works, not because he wants them.
Bruce is far from the average Billionaire you get in our dimension.
Bruce Wayne doesn’t exist, it’s merely a disguise Batman sometimes wears.
By your reasoning, is also because Superman probably doesn’t pay taxes, Clark Kent dies
I love Batman (currently replaying the Rocksteady games for the 3rd time) and I grew up with him and cannot really relate to Superman since I am not a farm boy. But it is very easy to see how Batman is in fact a fascist-capitalist fantasy.
A rich man who takes things in his own hands on a whim, infiltrating public order tech, hoarding personal data on virtually everyone in Gotham (at least) if not resorting to real-time surveillance by infiltrating personal devices (in The Dark Knight).
The idea that he “does good” by deciding a subset of all possible activities on which to spend his money and never spends himself on releasing that decision power to the public is exactly what brought the US where they are and what they hate viscerally about the EU (even if the sliding is real here as well).
Furries. As a furry myself I don’t get the hate
Owning a pickup truck is pretty awesome, and I don’t think I’ll ever buy a different type of vehicle again.
Mentioning it online gets hate, but in real life people keep coming up to me, complimenting how nice it looks, asking questions about it, and kids give me thumbs up when I drive by. All of that is just a bonus on top of the fact that I love driving it and the way it looks - and that’s all that really matters.
Speaking as a Texan, I associate the worst of truck driving with “being an ass.” It’s not always true, but man, if someone’s gonna cut me off just to be a jerk, it’s usually a lifted abomination.
This though:
This is fine.
No, it’s magnificent.
That looks like a huge truck, there’s nothing small about it.
Its an old Ford Ranger:
The animation does make it look a bit wide.
That small red truck is a truck of a man who truly is masculine. Doesn’t give a shit what other people think, needs it to carry supplies, and didn’t want to waste any money.
Giant lifted trucks are the opposite of masculine. They’re for showing off, desperately trying to get people to notice them, they arely if ever haul anything (if they even can anymore with the lift), and they wasted huge amounts of money.
I dunno, chief. That “small” red truck is big as well. And the stuff in there will still get wet. Much more practical to have a van.
Oh completely agree - but if forced to choose between those two types of trucks I know which one I’d say is more reasonable.
I mean, sure, but I were forced to pick I’d rather bring both to the scrapyard and get a bike instead. Or a van, but yeah. Choosing the lesser evil over time will lead to the actually good options getting eliminated.
If it were a nice person inside and they just liked the ‘lifted’ style though, that’s one thing. I think there’s something to be said for auto personalization culture, like people do with jeeps and the Slate is trying to start up. I actually knew a really short girl who drove a lifted truck and simply thought it was neat, heh.
But usually, I wince in anticipation of what flavor of ‘macho’ is going to step out. Like you said perfectly, it’s usually not Hank Hill.
That’s neat you found a girl like that, but it is not the norm from my experience, as it looks like it’s yours too. I usually see a lot of angry men who are too eager to swerve lanes and show off how cool their truck (and by extension they) are.
Funny that everyone agrees with this take when it comes to trucks, but if you apply it to clothing it is “toxic masculinity”.
I’m not even sure what you mean precisely, but men’s expressiveness through fashion is a bit squelched, yeah.
My point is that the same people who bemoan the lack of expressiveness in men’s clothing are at the same time defining masculine coding as being utilitarian in the context of trucks.
This incongruity is frustrating to me.
Agreed.
I think cars should be more individualistic, which is part of Slate’s pitch. So should men’s fashion expectations.
That being said, a lot of truck lifting is very similar and more “I’m signicaling I’m part of this culture,” than doing it for the sake of being cool. Some people do it as a form of expression, but that’s the exception in my experience.
I actually want to get a pick-up truck for furniture, not like one of these road monsters, but something reasonable, like a 2 seater with lots a bed space. Like an old Chevy or something.
Why not a van? Can typically carry more and keeps it dry.
Not a truck guy, but I’ve had enough vans to know that not having an open top REALLY reduces the potential of what you can put in the back.
Well, that’s clearly bull. They got the same space and on top of that, they provide cover. Opens up a lot more options for stuff that shouldn’t get wet.
And likewise, you can also park easier with them (they have back windows too). Plus, they are safer. If stuff sticks out of the car that’s a transport hazard right there.
Ok, but it’s clearly not. On more than one occasion, I’ve loaded up large appliances or furniture with a van only to learn that it won’t fit through the back hatch, or there are cubbies and curves inside that cut the corners. Even if you have plenty of empty space inside, you have to fit it through a smaller keyhole. I have been stuck with a half empty back and a tied down hatch because the opening wasn’t big enough to get the whole thing in.
With an open bed truck you can just drop the tailgate or drop it in from above.
I can tell you have a real hard on for vans, but just ignoring facts because they don’t fit your stance is ignorant. I’ve never even owned a truck, so I don’t care about defending their honor or any bullshit like that, but you have to give them credit where it’s due, and they haul like nothing else, even vans.
For that furniture there’s a thing called dismantling them and reassembling them, though. And one can also always rent a load carrier for the back, for those few days. Cheaper on the long term.
The number one reason I went with a pickup over a van is that it just looks way better. Vans are boring. But also that my pickup has a 4WD, low-range gear box and a diff lock which vans don’t. It also has a camper shell on it so stuff on the bed stays dry too.
Hah, you took the one part that makes a truck stand out from a van, and put a box over it making it a bad van!
My apologizes for not consulting your opinion when building out my truck.
Get a van instead. Don’t start becoming part of the problem.
I agree. I don’t need the truck part very often, but when I do, it is so nice. I got a BEV truck and it’s also stupid fast, especially for a truck. And it has outlets everywhere, 4x 110V 20A in the back plus a 220v 30A, and more 110V in the cab and the frunk! 130kWh of mobile power.
The suspension is sloppy, the tires are squishy. But I don’t mind that most of the time (I do wish the dampers were a just bit more aggressive).
Pickup trucks in and of themselves as a concept is fine.
The issue I an many others have with them is that they have grown to large, even here in Sweden we have got infected by American pickup trucks that has their bonnet at the same height as my 2021 Seat Leon’s roof.
That is insane.
Get back to the size of 80-90s pickups, and I doubt you’ll get a many complaints
Exactly.
The crew cab with a laughable bedsize, hood as tall as the average person, and clearly unused off road tires is what is unreasonable.
A truck actually being used for work is totally fine.
hood as tall as the average person, and clearly unused off road tires
This is especially silly. Even the ‘F1s’ of offroad racers are lower sprung than that.
And they are very street illegal. But they don’t need to be skyscrapers! Even the Ultra4 rock crawler (the last one) sits lower than lifted pickups.
There’s basically no practical reason to do that, not even an offroading fantasy.
I agree 1000000% with this. Light duty pickups are amazing.
Nissan used to have a light duty pickup everywhere, even the US, called the NP300 Hardbody that slowly morphed into the bloated “Navara” - except for South Africa. Nissan used to have this very Africa-appropriate tiny light duty truck, the Champ. Stellar vehicle. They made the same exact model from 1971 to 2008, and then replaced it with the Nissan NP300 Hardbody. Both are solid metal deathtraps, can be fixed with wire and string, but they’re donkeys as well. Modestly sized and will just go forward (not too fast!) forever. Nissan never stopped making a light duty pickup because the Africa market demands it - something cheap and simple that carries and goes. No frills, not even good for a drive more than 4 hours because the seats are terrible.
And don’t get me started on the way Toyota ruined the Hilux. The only entity in the known universe that could destroy a Hilux was Toyota itself. Damn shame.
Everyone driving these giant monsters wouldn’t know a good economical work vehicle if it drove up to them and dumped a cubic meter of sand on them.
I think those huge American trucks are cool too, but the size is more of an inconvenience than it’s worth, and they stand out and draw too much attention - which is a big reason I didn’t get one. I’m honestly surprised by how much attention even my ’07 mid-size Nissan gets, but luckily it’s all been positive.
What’s cool about an energy slurping vehicle that’s a danger to children and adults alike? It only serves to trick men into thinking their fragile tiny tick gets bigger with that car.
The bigger the car, the smaller the ego, generally. Better to just work on themselves and bicycle. That’s truly good.
Crazy watching you get downvoted for driving a pickup.
Most of the people on these forums live in major cities and don’t do any real work with their lives, so it’s understandable.
I guess I was mistaken for holding them to a higher standard.
Uh, nope. Lived in rural America. Most truck drivers are pavement processes who haul something maybe a handful of times a year. The vast majority.
There was not a shift from 30 years ago everyone driving tiny cars and hatchbacks to now where everyone became blue collar and needed a truck for work suddenly. It’s corporate marketing. Corporations can get around fuel standards by making trucks instead of cars, so they convinced everyone that having a truck was somehow necessary, and the good people of the USA gladly ate it up making the f150 the most popular vehicle on the roads followed by the other truck models.
Also, “most people
on these forumslive in major cities”. Ftfy. It wasn’t until I left my town in Iowa did I realize how many people there are. The entire population of thestate of Iowa lives in my one city.Yeah, you’re clueless.
Pickup trucks are useful for more than just work.
Insulting me doesn’t make it untrue.
Trucks are for hauling things and towing things. Again, the vast majority of truck drivers, and I’m not saying all, but the vast majority of people do not need a truck.
Most truck beds now are only a few feet long. Minivans and old school station wagons can store more in them then most modern trucks can. Why do you think Amazon and UPS use vans instead of pickups? Because they’re more efficient at hauling things.
Then even if you need to haul things and you choose to disregard the whole thing about vans having more cargo space, I ask how often? How often do you actually roll up to the home Depot and grab a while pile of lumber to take home that wouldn’t fit in a van? If it’s not once a week or more that you fill the truck, congrats you’re losing money on your truck. Truck rentals are about 20 bucks and haul my stuff just as easily back to my home, with the added benefit of them I’m not paying for gas and maintenance for this giant thing as my daily driver nor a huge car payment either.
Oh and proof of all of this? Crew cabs. The stupidest invention and absolutely proof it’s just marketing. “Hey we convinced you that you need a truck even though all you really need is a rental truck every once in a while, but oh no you have this family, where do they go? Don’t worry now you have five seats AND a shortened bed!”. They already solved that problem. Vans and station wagons. Can haul minimum 5 people and if you needed to haul shit you just folded down the drats, could fit an entire sheet of plywood in there.
Same goes for towing. If you own a boat I might get it, or again a trailer if you’re towing something regularly, then sure, you need the torque.
I would wager that 95% of truck owners do not actually need a truck.
How am I going to move an ATV in a minivan or station wagon?
Sounds like a job for a trailer
I invite you to read my comment again.
Same goes for towing. If you own a boat I might get it, or again a trailer if you’re towing something regularly, then sure, you need the torque.
Again though, I ask how regularly you do this. If you go out every week? Sure it makes sense, have a truck to carry them out every week. However, an ATV is light enough a cheap trailer attached to any number of vehicles would be able to tow it. If it’s monthly or less, then again, renting a truck is cheaper on the books, or again a cheap trailer is only a couple thousand.
Again, I grew up in rural America surrounded by truck people exactly like you. This is not some new opinion I gained a couple months ago. Do you want to keep trying to trip me up because I guarantee I’ve heard it all before. To date there are only maybe a small reasons I see to own a truck, and most of them involve some level of using it for blue-collar work.
How often do you haul stuff you need a truck for?
I use it for work so pretty much every single day but that’s besides the point. It would be awesome even if I had no need for one.
I was just curious. You mentioned just liking the truck enough that I wondered if it was more fashion or function. Nothing wrong with fashion of course, who wants to drive a vehicle they don’t like the look of? I have feelings about efficiency, but that’s your wallet, not mine.
I want to get a small truck for my wife (she’s always got a project going that would benefit from cargo space) but small trucks are tough to come by these days. I wish Rangers weren’t as big as F150s used to be.
Crucially, that wouldn’t be better carried in a van.
Why does that matter though? A van is just as big and heavy with even worse visibility around you.
You’re aware that mirrors exist, right? And that vans also often have back windows? And that the visibility is actually worse with those big trucks?
Yer talkin’ bull, lad.
Are you paid by some truck company? Vans absolutely better carry. They also have cover, so the stuff you carry doesn’t get wet.
Huh? Vans typically get about the same shit gas mileage as trucks.
I like these answers that are actually divisive
The rise in pickups causes everyone’s insurance rates to go up because of the increased fatality of average crash now, they blow through our global carbon budget even faster, they make roads less safe for everyone, they drain your wealth away from your kids inheritance and directly into banks and oil companies. I know you love bankers more than transmitting generational wealth to your kids. Fuck them kids. The bankers need your money more.
Out of curiosity, why did you buy it? It’s so big and seems like a safety hazard for people, wasteful as well.
What would’ve convinced you to switch back to something else? Or what would convince others to do so?
I agree with 95% of FuckCars. Cars should not be the default in our society. Cars are at the root of why our cities suck so bad. We need to do as much as we can towards walkability, bikability, and public transportation. Cars won’t go away completely, but they don’t have to be so prevalent.
The 5% where FuckCars goes wrong is people who don’t know anything about cars talking about cars. Their treatment of trucks vs vans is one of those. Vans are useful for trades, and so are trucks. Let the workers decide which one they prefer for their job.
Those workers usually don’t need an F150 the size of a small house. They don’t even want an F150 the size of a small house. That doesn’t mean a van is necessarily what they want.
Well, I’ve atleast got the two seater with a long bed so it’s barely adequate for what I need it for at work. It’s undeniable that a similar size Vivaro or Transporter would be more practical but I’m willing to trade some of that for a fun truck.
Trucks are fun, 100%. Id love a small truck with a tow package, i don’t need a gigantic Ram child-flattener but having something versatile and tall enough to clear some obstacles is always nice.
Honestly if those Slate (is that right? Im still half asleep) trucks take off I may get one
I love my 99 ram and I can’t imagine having a bigger truck for every day use.
I love my Santa Cruz. I can get 40mpg highway if I drive it right.
Just get a van instead, bro. They’re way more practical.
I literally have one, why does someone have to say that every time. There are reasons to have a truck.
If the reason is a small dick complex, sure. And also a disregard for safety and the energy consumption ending up costing way more for the American worker.
👍
Ohh people are aren’t going to like this
AI coding, “vibe coding”
Yeah, take the enshittification out and +1.
How many corporate man hours are wasted re-inventing the wheel a bajillion times? Wouldn’t it be awesome if people could do less of that, and do more personal stuff like “make this niche program to cuz I want to, and share it,” or “make a game as a passion project” because the bar to entry isn’t an expensive CS education?
How many corporate man hours are wasted re-inventing the wheel a bajillion times? Wouldn’t
Honestly, very little. Unless you’re in a “not designed here” environment. There’s a lot of open source applications/libraries out there that can be added to your project to get what you need.
But I do agree, vibe coding can be great as long as it’s just for one off small projects. Need to do a quick computation or a quick POC and don’t want to spend the time setting everything up? Great!
But if you want to build an application that’s used by 1000 or even millions and receives regular updates? Please follow best practices / design patterns, etc… otherwise you’ll be rewiring the entire codebase every time you want to add a new feature.
I dunno, my experience is teams of people grinding away designing systems that are likely 95% the same as what several other companies already constructed, if not hundreds. It’s great if they use (much less contribute to) some open library for the functionality, so the wheel doesn’t get re-invented, but how often is that the case?
Of course one doesn’t want to distribute slop. I’m talking more theoretical, especially if more formal code verification becomes standard.
Mind you, a lot of this reimplementation is because those 1000 other implementations that came before all haven’t had their source code released to the public. No amount of vibecoding is going to help there because those LLMs were never trained on code that was never publicly released.
They’re trained on plenty that’s similar enough, as long as its Python or something in the dataset.
It’s also been shown that LLMs are good at ‘abstracting’ languages to another, like training on (as an example) Chinese martial arts storytelling and translating that ability to english, despite having not seen a single english character in the finetune. That specific example I’m thinking of is:
https://huggingface.co/TriadParty/Deepsword-34B-Base
Same with code. If you’re, say, working with a language it doesn’t know well, you can finetune it on a relatively small subset, combine with with a framework to verify it, and get good results, like with this:
https://huggingface.co/cognition-ai/Kevin-32B
Someone did this with GDScript too (the Godot Game Engine scripting language, fairly obscure), but I can’t find it atm.
Not that they can be trusted for whole implementations or anything, but for banging out tedious blocks? Oh yeah. Especially if its something local/open one can tailor, and not a corporate API.
Auto-writing boilerplate code doesn’t change the fact that you still have to reimplement the business logic, which is what we’re talking about. If you want to address the “reinventing the wheel” problem, LLMs would have to be able to spit out complete architectures for concrete problems.
Nobody complains about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how do I test a method”, they’re complaining about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how can I refinance loans across multiple countries in the SEPA area while being in accord with all relevant laws”.
Nice an actual controversial take. Im glad more people are getting into coding because of AI honestly. Anyone can code (not just a saying).
Me im impressed sometimes, but its only good for scripting languages. Start getting into compiled or anything beyond templates and it falls on its face.
That was my experience a few months ago as well, but recently I’ve actually been using it almost exclusively with rust, the extra type safety and language safety features have helped a lot with the end code quality.
Claude in particular has been really impressive with compiled languages, it does take a bit more hand holding to get something workable out than with javascript or python though.
Anyone can code (not just a saying).
Anyone who is willing to invest the effort in understanding program flow can code.
AI coding, “vibe coding”
We call it ‘slopping’
No we don’t
Not everything AI generates is slop. It is only when used by commercial instances, like businesses and people who want to sell their art.
Let me guess, you frequent the “Fuck AI” sub?
Vibe coding has a niche, which is people who can read, understand, and debug code, but can’t remember the syntax or can’t be arsed to write everything manually. It’s good for blocking in right now, basically, and that’s an entirely valid use of the technology
Yes please.
- I’ve found ai useful as a tool especially when switching context to a different language or framework, as a quicker way to get the syntax and features, to generate a first approximation. It works and saves time
- vibe coding is a horrendous waste of my time doing code reviews. Don’t people look at the slop their tool generates and try to refine it? Why is it ok to waste my time like this?
The parallels with the Dotcom bust continue. Dreamweaver would barf up copious amounts of horrendous HTML that we would get paid decent amounts to clean up. A huge waste, really, but we have forgotten the lesson.
Yeah, vibe coding is fantastic for “I want to give this input {a}, have it do {function}, and return result {z}” types of code.
The issue is that being able to articulate that to an AI already basically requires you to think like a programmer. And many of the people getting into vibe coding don’t have that kind of mindset. They want to just go “give me a program that does {z}” and expect it to work.
Yes! You’ve nailed what I’ve been thinking about. The valuable parts of my work are on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows, not typing code. LLMs are great to use like an interactive reference.
I like listening to some of the shittiest songs ever made mixed in with some of the best songs ever made, on shuffle. About 6400 songs now, extremely different genres. Digbar was my 3rd biggest artist last year lol
You should add MC Hellshit and DJ Carhouse’s “Live” (1996) to your list.
arguing with vegans
with vegans or against vegans?
I consider it to be a mutual activity
It’s mutual something, apparently understanding statistics and calling out the weaknesses of epidemiology is “science illiteracy”.
https://feddit.org/post/18578350
I also like Never Gonna Give You Up, even though that’s generally not my style of music at all.
Hard no on the food, but I’m with you on Never Gonna Give You Up. I sometimes klick obvious rickrolling links just to listen to it.
I also unironically like Wonderwall.
The food looks a little odd, but reasonable. The chocolate is… Someone replied saying chocolate tastes good with savory food, which is true, but IDK about that combo!!
i dunno that meat looks kinda raw
You normally cook salami?
literally just noticed its salami lol
looked just like minced meat to my sleep deprived self.
Salami is basically minced meat sausage.
There was actually someone else in the replies with the same confusion lol You’re not alone
Nooo…I would’ve sworn that was a burger.
That was the most appalling part, for me: I thought they’d just slapped a whole raw patty on top everything.
Salami + chocolate is probably a dud, but fries and chocolate? Give it to me! Or maybe not, I’m trying to lose weight.
Even fries… Well, fries sounds alright, I guess it also depends on the fries.
Good luck on your weight loss!! I lost about 25 kg myself, relatively recently. You can do it!!!
Man, it’s not even that bad, but I’ve been trying to watch my calourie intake for months without success. Losing weight without any outside assistance is fucking hard …
A trick I used was to eat only a certain volume. I had this very reasonably-sized bowl and I’d fill it to the brim (exactly) with food and that would be my lunch for the day. I also always had the same breakfast: a mug of chocolate milk and an apple.
I cut out all snacks and such, and just tried to eat reasonably healthy foods like rice and tuna, and mashed potatoes with veggies, just random stuff that wasn’t chips and gummies.
Yeah, it’s hard, but you can definitely do it! If you need help and don’t have anybody close willing and able to guide you, maybe you could look at getting a nutritionist? Not sure how available that is…
Sonic The Hedgehog
YES 100% Sonic was always cool.
Specifically, Tamers’ “Sonic The Hedgehog Gets Stuck In A Hole Because He’s Fat”
Modern magic. We tricked crystals into thinking by drugging them and zapping them with electricity. Then we used those crystals to trick matricies into hallucinating by forcing them to guess the answer to math questions and smacking them when they get it wrong and kept doing that until they get it right. Ethics and hype aside, it’s pretty fucking wild.
At first I thought you would talk about Magic the Gathering. My confusion increased with every sentence.
What?
Computer silicon and transformer models
transformer models
Surely, more than meets the eye!
They’re talking about computer chips. We dug up rocks, melted them down, and extracted the parts we wanted. Then we engraved arcane and imperceptible runes on and inside of them, using an extremely expensive and delicate process. Then we trapped lightning inside of them, and told them to show us videos of cats.
You missed the bit before engraving them where we grow the rocks into crystals and “drug” (using the OP’s term) them by infusing them with the essence of different rocks, to turn them into slightly different kinds of rocks, which need to be very precisely combined for the engraving to produce the intended result.
Okay, when you put it like that lol
I was an early adopter of No Man’s Sky (long before the shift in public perception), and I fucking loved it back then, and love it now as well. But admitting that in public a few years back was tantamount to saying that stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.
I actually preferred the early days, I don’t like most of the recent updates and I haven’t played in probably a year. I can’t really explain why except now it feels too busy.
Dude, next time use a healthy badger and you’ll only have to deal with blowback from NMS.
stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.
lololololololololol
What is no man’s sky
A space exploration video game. It had a famously bad launch, because the director had over-promised on basically every single feature. It was massively anticipated because the director had hyped it up so much. And when it launched, players quickly discovered that many of the promised features were only half finished, or were missing entirely. The backlash was swift, but the company said they planned to keep working on the game.
And now many years later, the game is actually fairly solid, and basically meets the original promises. But at launch, it definitely didn’t.
I have a lot of respect for the Devs, as shining example of “how to recover from a mistake and make it up to your players”
Many other dev teams would have probably taken their payday and disappeared into the wind after that launch.
Interstellar
Someone said interstellar was bad? Who said that?!!! Hold my beer.
me, I said it
C’mon Tars!
Tenet
I don’t care if it has plot holes. It’s still an awesome movie.
I wish it had better a final act than two almost identical armies fighting in a desert. Reminded me of FPS games the late 2000s.
Yeah but that building going kaboom in both directions of time is super cool.
Not sure what tactical purpose it had.
I haven’t seen it yet, what are the plot holes?
The movie is about things going backwards in time. For example, there is a scene where there are bullet holes in a glass window. In a later action scene, these bullet holes are reverted by a gun going backwards in time. Turns out, these bullet holes were also going backwards in time.
This doesn’t make any sense, because the implication is that this glass window was installed with these bullet holes from the beginning.
There are more examples of similar paradoxes, so the recommendation is to not think about it too hard.
But it’s cool either way.
Honestly I don’t consider them plot holes. ‘Don’t try to understand it’ was not only directed at the protagonist. The premise is pretty much what if we simply accepted this impossible mechanic.
Silent Hill: Homecoming was the first thing to come to mind.
It’s the only one I’ve really played and I thought it was great. I can understand how the Silent Hill community doesn’t like it, but I also believe they’re blowing their criticisms out of proportion to fit in with immature tantrum throwers.
Steven Universe. The online fandom was insane. The actual show was incredible.
Yeah, the fandom is… Not great. It’s basically just an American anime, but the online fans are rabid.
It honestly reminds me of the fandom for Undertale. If you only ever play the game, you’ll have a wonderful time. But if you ever do some online searches to try to dig into it further or find people to discuss it with, you’ll quickly discover that the online fandom is extremely toxic.
I think the fandom is so crappy about it because the show had to cut out most of the redemption arc of the big bads because it was prematurely cancelled. If so that’s pretty silly because it came about after the creator stuck up for a lesbian wedding being included.
My daughter introduced me to that show. I enjoyed watching it with her.
Greg fucking rules.
I’d say the same thing for generation 4 of My Little Pony.
I tried so hard but it just didn’t click with me.
That’s OK. No piece of art or media is gonna be everyone’s Thing.
Rings of Power
While it is not perfect, a lot of criticism of the show is insane or plain dishonest. It became a playing ground for shit stirring and easy rage bait.
Death Stranding
The worst game I ever loved. Yes, the story and dialogue gets weird towards the end. Yes, Kojima keeps over explaining everything almost pathologically. Yes, I only played the Directors Cut, which I have been told reworked most of the game into a better state. And yes, I got PTSD from getting called after every single mission. But if you keep driving vehicles into terrain that obviously isn’t suited to be driven on, or otherwise try to bend the gameplay to your liking instead of accepting how it is supposed to be played, maybe you should play something else.
I love how some people criticize Kojima for beating you over the head with unsubtle themes, but then the other half of people are like “this game made no sense so I deliver packages and then people talk about ropes a lot and why are there hands everywhere”
I agree, Rings of Power is great! As someone who has read and watched LotR, but not the Silmarillion, I found it a nice step into the lore. I found a lot of it matches up decently with the appendices of LotR, even if the timeline isn’t accurate.
It took me a while, but I ended up really enjoying Death Stranding. One of the things that made it click for me was that I watched a video essay on a different game that used the playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-effect as an analytical frame.
My rough understanding of it is that Brecht wanted to break the fourth wall and prevent audiences from identifying too heavily with characters, enabling them to better engage with the themes of the play; for example, if audiences end up identifying with a character who is a relatable asshole, then they might be less inclined to critically understand this character and the systems that facilitate their assholery.
Death Stranding invokes this with its absurd characters and setting. I never stopped finding it jarring when you have such silly character names and plots. This meant that for my first few hours of playing, I felt like I didn’t “get it”, and it seems like this is a fairly common reaction. However, this sense of “I don’t get it” is interesting because of how it primes you to search for something to get — some larger point that Kojima is trying to make with the game. If nothing else, I appreciate games and other media that have something to say, even if I struggle to grasp that message.
If I had to distill things down, I think the most prominent theme I understood was “Play is an essential component of human wellness, and it has tremendous capacity to facilitate building human connection”. I enjoyed how this was explored narratively through Sam’s interactions with various characters, but also through ludic means via the player interacting with other player build structures (I really enjoyed getting so many thumbs up for all the roads I built). Death Stranding sometimes feels pretentious, but I remember thinking “what’s more pretentious: the game that’s trying (and possibly failing, depending on perspective) hard to say something larger, or the player who regards the game with disdain”. Ultimately, I feel that the potential pretentiousness is neutralised by how earnest it is. Yes, it’s a very silly game, but that’s sort of the point.
Regarding Rings of Power, I absolutely hated the show, which sounds like a stronger opinion than what you hold. However, I completely agree that the discourse around the show is a trash fire of bad faith criticism that makes it impossible to express legitimate dislike of the show that’s based in honesty.
AI art (and AI in general). The amount of misinformed and outright wrong bullshit that gets levelled at me when I defend AI or point out something false is ludicrous. Almost every single argument against it was levelled at photography a century ago, much of that was levelled at pre-mixed paints before that, and what’s left is either flat out wrong, or levelled at the wrong place
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People are kinda dumb, but the level of wilful ignorance displayed by the anti-ai crowd is equalled only by trump cultists
The fact you think all art is predicated on what came before is absolutely stupid.
If thats true, there would never have been anything new created. Ai slop generators CANT make anything new because they are limited on their (massively) illegally scraped input.
Also thinking that originality and human experience are capitalist myths is quite humorous, that is a new take.
Uh… all art is influenced by what came before. All of it, except maybe the very first cave paintings. And claiming that ai can’t make anything new is as as clear an indicator that you don’t know what you’re talking about as is calling it “slop”
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Agreed. Obviously mega corporations suck, but AI as a technology does not NEED to be unethical. It sucks that because people want to hate on mega corps (rightfully so) they feel justified in tacking on any flawed argument they want to against AI.
People have issues separating out complex bundles of issues into their separate threads and dealing with them individually. It’s much easier to keep it all jumbled together and pass judgement on the whole lot. It’s lazy thinking, which is ironically contrary to the virtues so frequently espoused in these arguments.
Furthermore, like you said, many people have strong opinions on the issue despite not really having any understanding of the philosophy of art, history of art, or the technology itself. It boils down to the same sort of layperson’s gibberish that gives us other bad takes like “abstract art isn’t art, my dog could paint that!” or “this performance art is just a tax evasion scheme!”. It reveals the tastelessness of the accuser. It’s extremely frustrating that these people always present themselves as true art enjoyers, when in fact they are not.
It reminds me of a time I was at the symphony, and the opening piece was a very avant garde one. It displayed wonderful chromaticism, really emotional chaotic passages, clever balancing of orchestral timbres…I study and compose classical music, I know music theory quite deeply, and for me it was a lovely piece. When it was over, this old lady next to me, all dressed up, complained that “that was just noise, not even music”, and got all indignant about the bastardization of art. I’m sure she would have said the same thing at the debut of Rite of Spring, which she now undoubtedly “admires” and upholds as a masterwork. I would be surprised if she could name the notes of the key of C major. Yet it is precisely her lack of knowledge which gives her such a narrow view of the art she imagines herself to be a connoisseur of.
Same exact phenomenon as I’ve complained about before on Reddit, with its endless art-boner for any realistic “impressive” pencil sketch, over something that is equally technically impressive and more emotional, but in a way they are too unknowledgeable to appreciate.
It’s just the way of art, I suppose.
Yeah, spot on. Also The Rite Of Spring is one of my favourite pieces of music ever
Wait but why would someone defend ai art…
Like the only reason I can think of is it maybe makes someone who is lazy feel good about themselves because they make a computer generated picture with zero effort (while stealing from real artists and feeding the megacorp machine) ?
Sorry, this is on the same level of saying “well they denied electricity at first and this is just like that!” Braindead take.
Carry on. (Yes im reinforcing your comment by even replying here, ha!!)
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Lookout guys, its a prompt “engineer”!
My 5 year old niece is a prompt “engineer” too.
If you want art to have absolutely zero humanity in it, gobble up all the slop you want.
You are correct about the end stage capitalism component. But if youre truly a “prompt engineer” you should know running a local model doesnt at all unlink you from massive data sucking corps, because who do you think trained that model?
For the record I will also say that painting a picture DOES take more invested skill than a photograph, and I will respect the person who painted a scene vs took a picture of it WAY more. Now, both can be enjoyed by anyone, and thats fine.
I’ll have absolutely 0 respect for any image made using ai. Its a toy, and a tool for corporations to further cut costs where they want to the most (take out the pesky humans and gross empathy, ick!)
The skill that it takes to produce something is a horrible, horrible metric for what makes something good art or not. There are artworks that took tons of skill but are boring, bland, generic, emotionless - all the things you don’t like about AI art. There are artworks that took next to no skill but stand out as powerful, great works that resonate with everyone.
Skill is a proxy used to judge art in place of having developed taste. The purpose of art is not to show off, to flex your skill, or demonstrate technical superiority to others. This is a very sad, utilitarian, economic view of art that I beg you to reconsider.
Its a good point. However id argue that many things did require great skill and time commitments OR the people who created them were so above normal people with their gifts that it didn’t take them as much effort as someone else.
Example, do you think Bach wrote all his best work in a day with no effort ?
Do you think a 3 minute song made of GarageBand loops by a 13 year old is on the same level of art ? No, its not. However, someone may enjoy the 3 minute looped song over a Bach piece. Thats fine. But if we have to ask which is higher art and which is timeless, its going to be the Bach piece.
I agree though to a point, metal for example. Just because dream theater puts out an insanely complex 20 minute song that only they can play proficiently doesn’t mean its “better” than enter sandman. The areas get very gray at that point.
While I agree with your conclusion about the garageband loops vs the Bach, I think that the skill was coincidental, not essential, in the superiority of the Bach piece. It’s not the fact that Bach was more skilled that makes his piece better. It’s simply the case that his skill made it easier for him to discover a better piece. It’s something useful for him, but as people who experience his art, it’s not what the art is about. If a toddler happened to accidentally mash out the same piece on the piano at home (yes this is unfathomably unlikely), it would still be an equally amazing and timeless piece - despite the fact that no skill whatsoever went into it. All that the artwork is, is contained in the artwork. Everything else is extraneous context that we may derive some other additional value from, but it is not essential to the art in itself.
It takes skill to eat literal shit without gagging
Doesn’t change anything about how good it is.
Skill has nothing to do with art.
People said the same about electronic music. Calling it “skill-less” music, since you only have to “press a couple of buttons” instead of learning an entire instrument.
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Yes GD and ML are entirely different. I agree with you. I just dont understand why you would support llm based art.
That’s because you are as wilfully ignorant as trump cultist and refuse to understand how this new tool works. You’ve been told it’s bad by luddite youtube influencers and that’s good enough for you.
Wait but why would someone defend ai art…
For the same reason that we defended computer-aided art back in the day after people had the exact same reaction to it.
And photography before that, and pre-mixed paints before that (the media dragged J. M. W Turner of all people for it!). I imagine many of the same arguments were used against pencils and brushes when they were first invented too!
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Lol at a luddite calling someone braindead.
Yeah that’s a damn fine example of a really stupid take. Thank you.
Lets start with the amount of effort it takes not being related to artistic value, otherwise your pictures would be worth more than Picasso’s doodles, wh9ich is clearly bullshit. Plus the fact that’s ableist as fuck - I recently suffered nerve damage and so can’t actually control a pencil properly, and trying get painful, soi are you really saying disabled people can’t and shouldn’t create art?
Now theft - it; not theft. No artist is denied their work, no copies are made, and it can’t reproduce their work. It can mimic a style but most of the people who complain about that are the most derivative anime-style furry porn artists (no offence to furry porn, but what they create is no high art!)
Oh, and I agree that the best ai, like most software, is run locally and is open source. Disliking megacorps is not a criticism of ai
So yeah, thanks again for illustrating my point
AI art requires “zero effort” in much the same way that creating art using digital cameras requires “zero effort.”
Here’s my reason for it. Let’s suppose that I have set a xylophone up outside near a rocky cliff face, and one day, some rocks fall loose from the top of the cliff and strike the xylophone in such a way as to coincidentally produce the melody of Bach’s Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Is this melody any less beautiful, less artistic, because it was not produced by a human? Does it really matter whether the xylophone event happened before or after Bach’s writing of the Prelude? If the xylophone event happened first, would we say Bach’s authoring of the melody was superfluous?
Consider this: there are 8 notes to a major scale, and so this means that there are only 32,768 possible 5-note sequences within one octave to make a melody out of (more if you count the timing of the notes, but the point remains). The possibility space of melodies is already implicitly formed by the medium. When Bach writes a 5 note melody, we say that he has created a melody - but we could just as well say that he discovered one of the pre-existing 32,768 melodies of 5 notes.
This paradigm is true in visual arts as well. We can start with a small example: imagine a community of pixel artists making black and white pixel art images on a canvas of 32x32 pixels. Or you could imagine them as weavers of rugs with up to 32 weaves in and out in both directions, if you’d rather a low-tech example. There are a HUGE number of possible ways to choose to color in these pixels even just black and white. But the number is still finite. Now let me ask you this. Have you ever made visual art before? If you have, you probably know how the blank canvas full of possibilities quickly narrows down to constraints as your composition comes along. “If my figure is posed like this, I can’t show both the elbow and wrist, unless I use a strange perspective…”, “if I give them black hair, it darkens the composition too much and doesn’t look as good, but maybe if I add more light it could work…” Etc. What is it that you’re doing as an artist? You’re narrowing down the possibilities, from the HUGE possibility space of the blank canvas, to narrower and narrower “acceptable” configurations according to the criteria of the goal you have in mind.
Now suppose instead that I was doing really constrained pixel art - black or white only on a 3x3 grid. In that case there are only 512 possible artworks to be made. In that case, we COULD lay out all 512 of them, and just pick the one we like best. But if we were not very smart people, maybe we couldn’t figure out this trick, and we’d have to use our artistry to explore the 512 possible canvases one by one. We can imagine an artist eventually choosing configuration #371 as their artwork. They probably won’t think of as though they’ve chosen configuration #371, they probably will think of it like “I have come up with this new arrangement of pixels on the 3x3 canvas” - but in reality all they did was discover a possibility that has already existed since the beginning of time. Either way, I hope you and I agree that this person’s pixel art, despite being small and likely pretty boring, is still ART. It’s a work of art, although maybe not a great one. Now if I have a computer do the same process - explore this latent possibility space according to some criteria, finally selecting one possible configuration - and let’s say the computer also selects #371. Are we going to say this is not art? But this would be paradoxical! It’s the same image the artist made! Anyone who is familiar with the notion of “the death of the author” will see this is quite the same sort of principle. And if the computer happened to select #371 before any human did, would we then accuse the human of having “copied” the computer? Clearly not. This line of thinking, to me, is a strong one to defend AI images as possibly being legitimate and original art.
As an artist, you cannot create a new possibility within the medium. You can only actualize a possibility that has always latently been implied by the constraints of that medium. This is why many musicians and artists often talk about “finding” a melody or “finding” a vision. They find it because they are searching. They are searching their own unique path through that massive possibility space. The possibility space is too large for us to just simply look at every possibility and pick the one we like best - so we have to explore it, choosing at every moment which direction is best to step towards next, based on what we’ve got so far, and what we think we’ve learned about the shape of this possibility landscape over our experiences as artists.
Yes yes, “electronic calculators will steal jobs”. “Electronic calculators will make us dumber.” People have been crying wolf about technology for decades.
