“Ouroboros Steak is a DIY meal kit for growing gourmet steaks from of one’s own cells. It comes as a starter kit of tools, ingredients and instructions that enable users to culture their own cells into mini steaks, without causing harm to animals.
“Commissioned for the exhibition Designs for Different Futures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the project is a critical commentary on the lab-grown meat industry and critiques the industry’s claims to sustainability.”
Err, what? Art? Product? Gourmet?!?!?!? What the fuck did I just read???
I… just… What?!? I can’t even decide whether the name is clever or artsy-fartsy pseudo-intellectual crap. Or whether the project might be just a boredom-induced crude joke??? If it were, it would be in highly, EXTREMELY poor taste to not take the health implications of cannibalism into account DURING a pandemic. Unless that’s supposed to be a part of the project???
Just can’t fathom this, in any shape, size, or form!
The 2025 Ropecon—the largest non-commercial RPG convention in Europe organised entirely by volunteers—is over. Thank you, everybody! I’m exhausted and happy. (And sick; con crud got me this year. Bleah.) I do need to get one thing off my chest, however.
I’m going to make an exception and write in Finnish this time, because I’m responding to a post about inclusion at the con by Merli Juustila, the chair for Ropecon ry., the entity running the con, published this June before the Helsinki Pride parade. (FYI: Juustila’s post is Finnish only.)
TL;DR for those who do not want to attempt Finnish: apparently every year for many years now, the organizers get complaints about rainbows at Ropecon and why that should be; it’s a gaming event, after all, or so says the feedback.
My response: Obviously, it’s because it’s a part of people’s identity and part of their lives. By the same logic, you might as well complain about historical dances, cosplay, card games, kids in strollers, or black clothes being visible all over the place during Ropecon.
One of the most prominent topics currently is artificial intelligence. Of course everyone knows—or should know—it’s not real intelligence as we generally understand it. The term seems to have some real staying power, though.
Regardless of what one wants to call the current iterations, machine learning or algorithm-based systems appear to be here to stay. People are starting to figure out what they could be used for in everyday life, not just at the office or lab.
One popular sentiment among creatives goes along the lines of: I want AI to do the dishes for me so I can create, I don’t want AI to create for me so I can do the dishes. I hear you, fellow creatives, and agree! This post talks about what I’d want those systems to do for me. (Eventually. We still must solve several issues, e.g. how to program them without egregious copyright breaches, to mention just one.)
(Please also note: I do realize that computing takes a lot of energy and materials, and that energy production and extraction of minerals aren’t unproblematic processes. Also, the ethics of the current generative models need serious attention; I’m still fuming over Meta’s massive book pirating as revealed by The Atlantic. The point of my post is not to dwell on the problems, however. This is basically just a random, long-winded wish list.)
TL;DR: My preferences boil to complex tasks, specificity instead of generic sludge, and effective analysis of massive amounts of data.
Below is a non-comprehensive list of some specific tasks I want done better, whether by “AI” or not, in no particular order.
“The companies that make AI—which is, to establish our terms right at the outset, large language models that generate text or images in response to natural language queries—have a problem. Their product is dubiously legal, prohibitively expensive […], and it objectively does not work. All of these problems are essentially intractable. […]
“That non-technology industries are falling for this spin [that AI is inevitable] is perhaps unsurprising […] What’s more interesting is that other Silicon Valley companies are doing the same, even though, again, the result is almost always to make their product worse. Google has essentially broken its key product, and Microsoft is threatening to spy on all its users and steal their data, all because a bunch of CEOs have been incepted into the idea that this technology is the future and they cannot afford to be left behind.”
Nussbaum is packing quite a bit into a relatively short post. With regard to the claim that Google’s search engine is broken, she refers to an article in The Verge by Elizabeth Lopatto. Lopatto in turn provides some examples that are truly hair-raising: apart from unusable—or plain wrong—data, Google has offered potentially life-threatening answers to user queries.
Personally, for at least a decade if not longer, I haven’t used Google unless I can’t get anything sensible out of other engines, so I’m not the best person to comment on Google specifically. However, I have noticed that pretty much every search engine I’ve tried has gotten worse.
(Please note that my opinion below is based on my experience as an information professional, and on the experiences of my friends and acquaintaces as well; I don’t want to repeat “in my experience“ in every other sentence. Please also note that your experience may differ, and that I am aware of this possibility. And, finally, please note that this is an opinion post, so I will be selective with my point of view and using hyperbole.)
For one large problem, ads are rife among search results. It used to be possible to see a page of results with a couple of ads. Now it’s almost a page of ads with a couple of results sprinkled in for appearance’s sake. I understand the necessity of procuring funding. What I do not understand is destroying customer trust by no longer providing the service you claim to provide.
For another, advanced search is disappearing. (Here Google does seem to work slightly better than its competition, at least in some contexts, at least some of the time.) One example of a basic operation that’s stopped being reliable is excluding a word from your query by typing a minus in front of it; the term almost always if not always shows up in your results anyway. Another example is specifying a phrase by surrounding it with quotation marks. For example, at times I want to check a new-to-me multi-word term, or try to find a phrase I only hazily remember. But that only works if the search works. Even if it does work, an engine might offer other phrases containing your search terms, just in a different order. Obviously that isn’t helpful. A recent example is “price cliff”, for which Google offered the Instagram profile of one “Cliff Price” among the top results. Categorically not what I was looking for!
The results might also be interspersed not just by ads but other irrelevant blocks (“People also ask” or “Related Searches” or such). Granted, related searches do have their use; there are times when it is helpful to see adjacent topics or terminology. They definitely shouldn’t take space from the most relevant results, though, and the suggestions must actually be, you know, related to be relevant.
Further, search engines have stopped displaying the number of results for a query. (Remember when that was a thing?) These days it’s anyone’s guess whether you’re being served with a butt-load or a crap-ton of increasingly poor results.
Finally, at worst your search engine of choice will serve pop-ups in the margins (“See all!” “More from source!”) or push their “mobile experience”. *sigh*
These days, the search engine “experience” (WTH is that even supposed to be?!?) is like going to a restaurant and ordering pasta, but being served paste instead: not at all what was expected, entirely wasteful, and potentially harmful—and if you were to claim that the deliverable is “close” to the request, it is just insulting.
If this is what “smart” business people believe counts as quality output these days, I wouldn’t trust them to think their way out of a pillow case. (Yes, a pillow case, since the poor airbrains would probably hurt themselves with something as sharp as a paper bag.)
According to BBC, a Google spokesperson has defended AI-created overviews saying that “[t]he vast majority […] provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web”. Speaking of vast majorities, most people are just not interested in digging and absolutely will not dig deeper; they want a clear-cut answer and they want it quickly. That means improving the quality of results, and neither the recent, pre-AI iterations nor the curret AI-“improved” engines deliver that.
I can’t think what the heck is up with the encrapification of search engines. Or why does it seem absolutely necessary to keep tweaking a good product what feels like every few months until it’s unrecognizeable.
Is it sunk cost fallacy? A form of mass hysteria spreading from Silicon Valley? Is maintaining a steady level of good service so moth-eaten a concept that it can’t attract resources anymore beyond the barest minimum? Are developers (or developers’ bosses) really that unable to comprehend that a change does not automatically mean an improvement? Is the only thing that matters the ceaseless chase after new features, regardless of whether they will shape up your service or shatter it?
It’s so frustrating, in any case. We, here, are nerds and do at times dig very deep. Sadly, these days search engines often hinder research instead of helping. Lately I’ve noticed that I’m turning more to bookmarks saved in my browser, or pick a specific site I’ve vetted earlier. It’s obviously not a foolproof answer, either, because I need to remember which entity has or might have the information I’m after in order to go and search their pages.
I’m quite ready to live in the most boring of times, with reliable basic services, please and thank you.
It happens sometimes, especially in today’s social media world: the creator of something you love, be it a book, movie, tv show, comic book, or some other work of art, has a bad take. We’re not talking about your garden-variety difference of opinion. (Despite what the Internet would have you believe, people who like pineapple on their pizza and people who don’t can, in fact, live in peace together.) We’re talking about a serious bad take, one that denies the fundamental humanity of a whole group of people or supports acts of violence in the real world. What do you do then?
The first steps are obvious enough. You can speak out against them, whether online or off. You can affirm your support for the people they targeted, whether publicly to the world at large or privately to the people you care about.
You can watch how the creator responds, whether they learn and grow from the experience or double down on their bad ideas. A lot of us have had to learn to challenge the bad ideas we absorbed from the culture around us, and most of us didn’t do it in public with an audience of millions. It’s fair to say that if someone has reached an age where they are producing art for a mass audience, they should really have gotten past basic prejudices and misjudgments, but if somehow they haven’t, it’s better that they do it now than not at all. Whether you find their actions convincing or sufficient is up to you. You don’t owe anyone your forgiveness, no matter what they may say or do. You’re also not wrong if you choose to give it. You are the only one who gets to decide what is enough for you.
If someone’s bad ideas are egregious enough to merit it, you can stop giving them money. Don’t buy their latest book or a ticket to their new movie. This may get complicated if their work is tangled up with the work of other people whose good work you still want to support, but loss of revenue is one of the biggest pressures you can put on a company or organization to drop a problematic actor or cut ties with a writer who has spewed hate. You can stop giving them attention, too. Unfollow or even block them on social media. Don’t give clicks to articles or posts about them or their latest work.
What about the works you already have? Do you have to clear their books off your shelves or throw away the DVDs? You can, of course, if you feel it’s right for you. If your enjoyment of those pieces of art would forever be tainted by their creator’s asinine or prejudiced comments, then there is no need for you to keep them. Like forgiveness, it’s a personal decision you can only make for yourself.
But what if you want to keep them? What if there are still things you love about those works, despite their creator’s attack of foot-in-mouth disease? How do you continue to enjoy them?
I spend a fair amount of my time reading books that were written by people who were absolutely wrong about a lot of important things ranging from the intellectual capacity of women to the morality of slavery. Much of this I read simply for my work, not for pleasure, but there are ancient texts I enjoy, some I have read over and over again for sheer delight, like the masterfully-told stories of Herodotus, the heroic deeds of the Homeric epics, Sappho’s longing love poetry, Martial’s wickedly funny epigrams, and others. Even without having a social media feed from any of these authors, I am confident that most of them believed in things we would find abhorrent today. How can I continue to enjoy their work?
The art is not the artist. This is the principle known in literary criticism as “the death of the author” (which is less dire than it sounds). What we create exists outside of ourselves. Once an author publishes a novel or a director releases a movie, their creative work is done. It is up to the audience to decide how they will receive and understand the work. Our experiences of art are not dictated wholly by the creator’s intentions but are a complicated interplay of our own thoughts and emotions with the artist’s ideas. Those experiences are personal and unique, and they do not depend on the moral qualities or opinions of the artist.
When I go back to the Iliad, I know that I am reading the product of a culture whose values were sharply different from my own on gender roles, the morality of war, the acceptability of slavery, and many other fundamental questions. It is impossible to read the epic without facing all of those differences. Many of them are so deeply woven into the story that it simply would not be possible to tell the story without them. The Iliad is the story of male warriors fighting over the possession of a beautiful woman; without any of these elements, it would cease to be the Iliad. And yet there are things to enjoy in the epic, without excusing or ignoring the cultural assumptions it is grounded in. Some of the most powerful passages in the work are those in which the humanity of individual characters comes through despite the cultural baggage around them. Helen has moments in the Iliad where we see her fear, her grief, her frustration and anger about the war being fought for her, and we glimpse her as a whole person, just as complex as any of the warrior-heroes around her. The final image of Achilles and Priam weeping together over their lost loved ones is a moving expression of the power of human compassion to overcome hatred. There is beauty and value in these things, and I can enjoy them while still being aware of the context around them.
If there is a book you love but whose author recently revealed themselves as a bigoted ass, it’s all right for you to still love the book and treasure the memories of how it made you feel when you first read it. Your experience of that book belongs to you, not to the author. Once their words and ideas entered your imagination, they became part of you, as much as any other experience in your past. You don’t have to excuse the author for their bad take, but neither does their bad take have to tarnish your enjoyment of their book.
It’s also okay if you decide that you can’t pick up that book again. You are the only person who knows what is right for you.
I have so many things to say, but I’ll spare your eyeballs because there would be a FUCKING INCONCEIVABLE ABUNDANCE OF EXPLETIVES. But if there’s a pared-down version I want to say to my fellow white folks, especially if you’re a Christian, it’s this:
“You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing; […] you shall not side with the majority so as to pervert justice.”
– Exodus 23:2, after The New Revised Standard Version of The Bible
I was brought up Christian and my grandfather was a policeman, and I cannot fucking fathom how many white people are apparently fucking fine with police essentially executing BIPOC or attacking peaceful demonstrators without any consequences.
If you believe you are a Christian, especially a white one, especially one working as a police officer, there’s only one side in all of this that you can possibly take.
then you are a part of the problem. No ifs or buts.
If you are a police officer and said yes to any of the above, you are, in actual fucking fact, a member of a violent cult and an oathbreaker, and belong in jail.
(No, rioting isn’t okay, but I do understand a little where all the anguish and rage is coming from.)
Comments are closed. This is not a subject that is even supposed to be under discussion.
I turned 40 last year, and I think it’s starting to affect me: I’m beginning to feel the urge to rant about kids these days and how everything was better when I was young. So be warned, there is some curmudgeonliness ahead, but I do have a point here.
I’ve been thinking lately about why I find a lot of contemporary tv so unsatisfying. It’s not that tv shows are bad now. It’s been aptly said that we live in a golden age of television. Freed from the constraints of syndication and network time slots, modern shows have dared to tell bigger, more complicated stories. The proliferation of cable channels and online services producing their own original content has meant a chance for a wider range of productions, from big-budget crowd-winners to oddball side projects. All of this is to the good.
At the same time, we’ve lost something in the modern approach to tv-making: episodes. It used to be that a season of a tv show was one or two dozen short stories, each told over the course of an hour or half hour (or twenty to forty minutes, on commercial television). Nowadays, a season of television is a ten-hour movie with arbitrary breaks for theme music. Stories are not told in an episode but slosh over to the next hour or two before there’s any resolution; meanwhile, another story has started going at the same time and continues to slosh forward on its own. Every tv drama has now become a soap opera.
I miss shows that had actual episodes, each a story unto itself with a beginning, rising action, climax, and denouement all in one sitting. As much as that format could sometimes be limiting, it also had its artistic virtues. It forced the action to move along at a brisk pace. It created a sense of urgency that shaped the storytelling. There was a feeling of satisfaction that came with watching the problem of the episode be resolved. Modern shows tend to wallow in characters’ unresolved feelings, pad their running time with filler, and dive down narrative dead ends, much of which would have been cut short in properly episodic television.
Of course, lack of satisfaction is the point. Now that we can stream any show we want any time we want, the economic pressures have changed. Rather than keep us coming back every week to see more commercials, the business imperative of tv is now to keep us from clicking away to another streaming service. While new content models have freed tv from some artistic constraints, they have imposed new ones that are just as limiting. It is now tv’s job to never give us satisfying endings lest we wander off to do something else.
I do appreciate tv shows that have continuity and ongoing stories. I wouldn’t want to go back to the days when the end of an episode meant a complete reset back to status quo ante, but continuity can coexist with episodes. Shows of the 1990s like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, X-Files, and Stargate pulled it off. In these shows, episodes mostly told self-contained stories, but they also remembered what had happened in previous episodes. Characters grew and changed, major plot twists had ongoing consequences, and big multi-season arcs played out a piece at a time, and yet when the credits rolled at the end of an episode, you still had the satisfaction of a resolution.
There is one phrase I hate to hear more than any other from authors, scriptwriters, game designers, and other creative people: “At least it made you feel something.” It is a phrase that is sometimes trotted out when audiences voice hurt, anger, or annoyance over how a story that they were emotionally invested in turned out, and it is a load of crap.
We all understand that no story is going to satisfy all audiences. Good stories move us, and sometimes they move us to tears or to rage. Some people want stories to leave them angry or sad, and that’s as legitimate as wanting a story to leave you smiling. But a good story should not leave you hurt or annoyed.
There are good ways for creators to respond to upset audiences (which, I note, is not the same as responding to trolls—that’s a different game altogether). They can say: “I’m sorry, I’ll try to learn from this experience and do a better job in the future.” They can say: “This was the story I wanted to tell, but clearly it wasn’t the story you wanted to hear, so you should find a different story.” They can say: “I think this story matters and I don’t care that you didn’t like it.” All of these are appropriate responses. They are honest and respect the validity of peoples’ feelings, even the ones we don’t share. Even no response at all is perfectly acceptable; no creator owes their audience any engagement they don’t feel like giving.
But if a creator does choose to respond to criticism, “At least it made you feel something” is no kind of response at all. What’s wrong with it?
It sets the bar absurdly low
Good stories make us feel things, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what a story makes us feel as long as it makes us feel something. To put it another way: if I kicked you in the shins, it would definitely make you feel something, but you would be perfectly justified in saying that that wasn’t the feeling you wanted.
It dismisses criticism
Criticism is legitimate. People have a right to have opinions about your story, whether you agree with them or not. Simply dismissing all criticism with “It made you feel something” denies that what your audience feels is just as relevant as how strongly they feel it.
It is self-congratulatory at best, selfish at worst
Reacting to an audience’s complaints with “It made you feel something” is a reach-around self-compliment. Even worse is if you actually take satisfaction in your ability to make others feel bad.
It betrays a lack of belief in the merits of the story
“It made you feel something” is close kin to “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” In a social media world, creators may think that making their audience angry enough post online tirades about their work is the cheapest advertising they can get, but it is also a signal to the audience that the creators don’t care enough about their work or don’t have enough confidence in it to sell it on its own merits.
Stories often make us feel things. That is a huge part of why we read, watch, and play them. To open a book, watch a movie, or play a game is to entrust your feelings to another person for a time, and we have every right to speak up when we feel that our trust has been abused.
If what I feel about your story is hurt that you killed my favorite character, frustrated by the direction of the plot, or annoyed that you railroaded me into playing a villain, you don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to take any account of my feelings at all if you don’t want to. But don’t waste my time with: “At least it made you feel something.”
“Violence is a part of our trade, yes. It is one tool of many. But violence is a tool that, if you use it but once, it begs you to use it again and again. And soon you will find yourself using it against someone undeserving of it.”
– Ashara Komayd, former operative for and prime minister of Saypur in City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett
Yup. I’ve been thinking along similar lines with regard to the racism in the U.S. and the ridiculous, racist non-reasons some racist-ass whites justify their calling of police on people of color, especially blacks. It’s racist, wasteful, racist, reprehensible, racist, entitled, racist, cruel, racist, wrong, and racist. It has to stop.
Bennett, Robert Jackson. City of Miracles. New York: Broadway Books, 2017, p. 177.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Co-Geeking 
You must be logged in to post a comment.