❣Malice Mizer❣

I haven;t seen the show so I dont have an opinion on the tierlist, but it looks aesthetic doesn't it?

It's a strange spectacle to see how much the community around skeptical inquirer cares about issues of little relevance to culture or power structures

Some people defend this kind of rationalist ideology by talking about, say, anti-superstition activists in India, but those people are admirable for the specific reason that they are undermining hierarchical power structures

A Western skeptic getting angry about Americans venerating ghosts with offerings --- that's not subversive, and it's worthy of contempt!

Ofc Wikipedia is what it is but this line has a really important clue as to why it happened

So this suggests that the Aksumites were identifying themselves with the exonym of the land they conquered.

This claim is cited to the book Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

so "ethiopia" as a term is originally greek, and i'm having a weird amount of trouble telling when the land now called ethiopia started calling itself that. from the discussion here and some wikipedia reading, the 13th century is the first recorded instance, but it's probably older than that. definitely *after* the 4th century, because the axumites and the ethiopians are distinct groups. its weird because ethiopia was originally the exonym, but then abyssinia became the preferred exonym, and at some point ethiopia became the endonym. which is kind of weird, i dont think it's that common that a distant exonym becomes your endonym

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

worst popular statement about art is 'disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed' because that basically means 'art is a weapon to dominate my enemies and help people I like" which is truly evil

the disturbing aspect of art should be something everybody experiences but which turns out to be a good thing as well as a bad thing. Let's all get struck by it like ragdolls!

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

dismantling these unspoken rules and their associated values is the most important task for online artists right now and while I have posted a lot about the AI/IP aspect I think the Constant Self-Improvement aspect is particularly damaging. People are being told they're getting 'better' but really they're just becoming homogenized into realism/specific varieties of illusionism and it's hard to break that mental restraint once you've been indoctrinated with it. The internet should be the place to dismantle these standards not recycle them

at the end of the day i think the online digital artist community has for a very long time operated on a set of like unspoken handshake rules generally enforced by social pressure which (despite being positioned on a moral & pseudolegal plane) have very little overlap with what is legal or illegal (de facto or de jure) but which have Everything to do with figuring The Artist as a universal would-be petit bourgeois auteur, reflected through these rules' emphasis on (1) the moral necessity of The Artist's unwavering & eternal power over their own art (& its reception) as articulated via informal pseudo-IP mechanisms (no reposting, dont tag as me/kin/id, dont use as your pfp, dont draw my oc), (2) the moral mandate toward Constant Self-Improvement (generally meaning adopting more of the conventional signifiers of "Good Art" eg realism) (admonition of "tracing" even for practice, artists who do things that are "not conducive to improvement" being fair game for mockery), & (3) attempting to induce in observers (often through guilt) a social pressure to further the ambitions of such artists ("you need to reblog/share, not just like", "you MUST commission 1 million artists immediately", "it's rude to express anything other than praise for any piece of art")

like these all (in tandem with SEO etc) boil down to attempting to lay the groundwork for an imagined future state of self-employment emanating out of one's (semi-)hobbyist artistry (& to obstruct anything perceived as interfering with that fantasy or its actuation). it's sort of like hiring a team of accountants on the assumption that youre going to win the lottery someday, like if it were in another context we'd effortlessly recognize it for the meritocratic grindset shit that it is. & none of this is even remotely conducive to the production of good art lmao

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

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