Blog — wirenook

Cassidy's List of Agreeable Policies

2026-08-16T16:30:00-07:00

“Agreeable issues” are things that are:

Completely uncontroversial
Benefit everyone
Low risk

Super Agreeable Issues

FedNow adoption for payment processing
Simplify taxes

Mostly Agreeable Issues

I know some fringe groups will really hate some of these… But…

Fluorinate the water
Automate dangerous jobs
Switch to metric
End time-zone
Prosecute prediction market operators
Prosecute residential proxy operators
Money out of politics

And that’s it. It’s surprisingly hard to get everyone rowing in remotely the same direction.

Things like “money out of politics” are tricky ‘cause like… How do you enforce that? The thing about money is that it’s extremely liquid, you know? But at the same time, it’s actionable enough in so many ways that it makes sense…

Some things that I really wanted to make the list, but couldn’t justify:

Extend civil rights to all humans (extremely controversial ‘cause folks be evil)
More cameras (if everyone captures evidence of crime and innocence there’s less bull-crap in courts, but “surveillance state” lol)
Invest in public infrastructure (people really hate the poor)
Invest in police training (I’m ex-police-abolition… So I know people hate this idea)
Anti-corruption enforcement (who watches the watchman?)
Automate logistics (I hear the trucker’s union is quite fierce)
Broader sports-gambling crack-down
Stronger building codes (I know we have a housing shortage but we’ll make it worse if we build like Japan did)

Agency vs. Replayability

2026-08-16T15:45:00-07:00

Some well-made games (e.g. Stardew Valley) invest heavily in manually adding content to enhance the illusion of player agency (or “reactivity”). Romance routes, story endings, strategies, terrain generation presets… I can’t speak to whether this is a good investment (many of my friends actively dislike when visual novels give them choices), but I can’t help but notice that this investment seems to have an inexorable side effect of causing people to re-play the game in absolute droves to “experience all the content”, even when most of the game is moment-per-moment identical. That’s a strikingly depressing state of affairs!

Metal Garden

2026-08-16T13:00:00-07:00

I absolutely loved Metal Garden, but I can’t write a Steam review of it because I didn’t play on Steam. Still have some thoughts though.

Obviously, the game was good enough for me to want to write about, right? Well, the mechanics of it were obviously super lame. It was about as much of a generic shooter as a generic shooter could be. The prose is mediocre at best, too, and the story is disjoint and honestly not even particularly memorable.

But like… It’s a thing. It’s a concrete, well designed, complete thing from end to end. I’m just… I’m so used to drowning in a world full of games that try way too hard to be way more than they are, right? Even cutting through all the massive-audience live-service slop, A lot of games just suck at being a discrete thing.

I don’t know. It’s really nice to be able to still have things in 2026. I want to round up all the people who are making things and lock them in a hermitage where the horrors of the world can’t reach them, and they can continue making things, forever and ever, regardless of their utility. I want humanity to emit an infinite fractal of imaginary things For no reason other than that it’s all we can do to differentiate ourselves against the noise of entropy- Well, that and I’m curious to see where that will go.

That’s all to say, Metal Garden resonated with me. I like that it can imagine a far, far future and work out all the details. It’s like, a miniature simulation? It’s cohesive, for sure. Not that like, any of the stuff in Metal Garden is sci-fi; it’s more of a bizarre fantasy piece than anything. On reflection, maybe I’m giving it too much credit.

Things that went well:

Good color palette
Fun and interesting environmental designs
Pleasant minimalistic style allocated details in the correct places
Really tugs at your curiosity and makes you want to explore

Things that sucked:

Poor prose quality
Didn’t stick the landing at the end
Poor power scaling parity (we can’t shake our common ancestor of power-trip RPGs like doom, can we?)
I don’t find single player shooter games like this fun.
Spatial reasoning puzzles are so boring.
Too linear, not enough to explore?

It’d be nice to have a review aggregator on my site. You know, something that pulls from VNDB, Steam, Goodreads, and my blog… Then squares the circle! I like being able to provide a comprehensive picture of my media preferences.

Social Agents

2026-08-15T18:30:00-07:00

AI agents are quite good at technical work, but obviously, they struggle at social tasks. They’re no good at creative writing (in fact, I’d go so far as to say they’re awful at it)… But I dunno, I would be willing to bet a non-negligible part of that is due to the fact that a big chunk of the money in AI research goes towards more profitable areas (like coding). Similarly, I bet a bunch of the people who do want it to be good at creative writing just… Don’t care. Like, do you mean to tell me the army of people on Replika-slop apps care about whether they’re using the best technological service available? Or are they just falling for some crazy predatory business practices gated behind a company who only really cares about the value they can extract from that demographic more than any degree of artistic excellence note(I think working on FOSS creative stuff has the side benefit of providing people with alternatives to the awful, predatory AI companionship apps on the app-store. Right now, the target audience of those apps is 100% being preyed on and I want to help shred their moat to smithereens.)? Anyway, my point is, it doesn’t have to be this way.

First and foremost, trying to conventionally RL an “artistic” AI is bound to fail. I mean, for one, creativity is an extremely fickle metric to begin with, which I won’t bother unpacking. But even fine-tuning for a specific creative goal- a fraction of general-purpose creativity- fails spectacularly at our scale. Cor discovered that. (Though not impossible, apparently.). I guess that makes sense- it took the concentrated power of all of humanity to just RL these things to call tools at all, no hobbyist is going to rival that.

I’m not convinced that existing research and RL patterns are entirely worthless, though. I mean, we now know that a good “long-horizon” bot can stay focused on really any arbitrary task that’s empirically verifiable, a whole bunch of atomic stuff can be more or less cut and dried. I first saw this working with recast, and I’m thinking… Surely we can go on to do better, no?

Anyhow, to keep the empirical evals I’ll inevitably have to do clean, I want to start with a simple architecture.

Roleplay agent: Heavy-duty technical-RL’d model with creative assignment and architecture details in system prompt. Tools:

History management (probably several tools): All this context has to work somehow!
Prose generator: Baseline prose generating LLM. Maybe different models or finetunes or different purposes?
Post-processing: Select which post-processing steps to run and run them
Papercut logger. Always gotta have the papercut logger.

You’ll see that this is actually a conductor/orchestrator workflow in a trench-coat. Definitely been tried before. That’s a reasonable pattern! Another nice thing about this design is that I can swap in and out tools without re-archictecting the whole thing from the ground up. The hardest part is probably going to be deciding the rules for when things get called, where they get put, and where stuff gets stored.

I’m trying as hard as I can not to scope-creep and usher in the daemons, too… But the daemons are so tempting… Daemon that keeps track of a detail and injects it into the storytelling context when that detail may become relevant, but otherwise maintains its own context garden? Yes PLEASE! But augh, I must resist… It’s more important that I get classifiers implemented at the scope of each tool-call result so I can start passively collecting efficacy data before I mess with that.

Two projects I’m going experiment with this in the context of:

I have to actually beat HI BLUE though, that game is currently crazy difficult.

In two years from now, this post is going to look pretty dated… I’m sure plenty of people are working hard at cracking the creativity pinata. But for now, maybe these research directions are good enough to lead towards a stop-gap?

AI and Learning

2026-08-09T18:30:00-07:00

Say what you will about AI rotting our brains, but there is no world in which it would have been worth the return on investment to learn jujutsu otherwise. Even if AI were taken away from me right now, I’d be so much more of an efficient and effective developer than I would have been in a world where I couldn’t spare the time to learn these new skills.

Life is amazing right now. I can read so many books and technical blogs and practice all kinds of new skills! The fact that I’m even practicing writing at all is in large part thanks to AI taking the tedious implementation and QA tasks off my shoulders in my personal projects! I feel like I’m not even living in the same world as the people who say it’s making them less smart (though I’m sure those people would say I’m just imagining all the learning I’m doing due to AI psychosis, or whatever).

(Also, Jujutsu definitely has issues, but it’s nice to expect more out of my VCS).

CLI Legibility

2026-08-09T16:00:00-07:00

Old, popular software isn’t sacred. The more I learn about technology, the more obvious that becomes. Now, I didn’t always think that way; I used to be very trusting. But now, I’m fairly convinced anybody who evangelizes anything is more often full of hot air than not.

I’ve been extremely frustrated lately about CLI design, particularly the fact that nobody seems capable of even imagining better. There’s like, a million low-hanging fruit design principles you could follow while making decisions, but nobody ever does. Things are just arbitrary.

Take, for instance, git. It appears to be a Linus Torvalds app from 2005 or so… And somehow, everybody’s really decided it’s the bees knees! The gold standard of version control! Everybody I’ve interrogated about it, though, has never been able to actually defend it with respect to other options. In fact, people mistakenly attribute design patterns to git that predate it!

But in this particular instance, I want to hone in on git’s awful CLI:

$ git fetch
$ git branch
- *main
- b
- c
$ # alright, cool
$ git checkout c

This looks like all branches are present. This is simply not true: If the repository has an upstream remote (let’s call it origin), that origin may have a completely separate set of branches that are entirely excluded from the results. A casual user couldn’t know that from reading the above command output!

An expert (somebody who wasted their life memorizing this god-forsaken tool’s specific flags) would know to run git branch -a, a secret sauce on branch (not fetch), to get the results.

In a better world, this would be the other way around: The advanced user, who doesn’t want to see very many things, would use:

$ git fetch
$ git branch --local
- *main
- b
- c
$ # alright, cool
$ git checkout c

See how this is more legible? A novice user doesn’t need to constantly be worried that they’re missing some secret advanced command this way. When they encounter something they don’t know- say, an argument like --local (or flag like -l)- they will know “hey, this command output has something going on that I don’t understand”. This requires them to check the manual to understand the sequence. If there were no unrecognized flag, there’d be no indicator there’s something fishy going on.

I picked on git a fair bit here, but I’m even more jaded by the fact that this design deficiency has lasted 20 years. Take jujutsu, for example!

[cass@cass-yoga cass-website]$ jj log
@ kwwsyzql cassidy@wirenook.net 2026-08-09 12:24:25 71ae65db
│ feat: CLI UX blog post
◆ voppzrrq cassidy@wirenook.net 2026-08-05 19:54:53 main@origin ea0f4867
│ fix: remove navlink
~
[cass@cass-yoga cass-website]$

At least this has a little tilde to indicate that history continues further back. But from this log, you’d have no idea that I have multiple branches!

Wanna know how to see all the branches?

$ jj git fetch
$ # ...
$ jj log -r "all()"

Do you see that? I have to include a flippin' domain specific language as a quoted argument just to get what should be the default behavior!

We should be collectively ashamed of this regression.

I think this brainrot came from good design patterns being misunderstood: ls, for instance, excludes hidden directories/files from results. Those directories are explicitly ignored. That’s what makes it fine to make ls -a opt-in. ripgrep, thank goodness, seemed to understand that. That should be proof enough that we can do better!

Thinking Scientifically about Using Technology

2026-07-28T16:00:00-07:00

This one’s for my friends.

Misinformation is bad! Please do not spread misinformation on the internet! I think we all know this is important and could do with checking our sources more often. The bigger your audience, the more important such diligence becomes.

In particular, I really want to drive home is “how do we think scientifically”. I know we went over the scientific method in school, but here’s a bit of a refresher.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do, my guys. I am begging you.

Your science teacher over-complicated it. You don’t need those seven-step laminated posters on the wall in the classroom. And a bunch of stuff like peer-review, replication, control vs. treatment trials, statistics… You use all of those tools to support this very simple core method of inquiry.

Now, that’s not to say all those extra bits of process are useless. But they’re not the essential part, and you can still think scientifically without them. There are tons of strategies that serve to build confidence in findings, and that can be valuable, especially when your measurements are imprecise and it’s difficult to control confounding factors. Maybe you don’t want to go through all those painful, tedious steps! And that’s okay! Admitting what you don’t know is fine, and will earn you respect from anybody who matters. It’s much better than exaggerating (and yes, exaggerating is lying). Pursue knowledge! Talk about open questions! Conjecture about the world in terms of falsifiable claims!

So many parts of our lives can be improved by applying the scientific method to them! Even the soft and squishy things, and even if you can’t pop out a magnum opus, it’s worth doing. You don’t need a scientific journal, or the highest degree of rigor. In fact, it’s not entirely clear if scientific journals can persist in the format in which they have, or what’s going to replace them. They have issues. All of science has issues right now, honestly. But that’s no excuse to throw our hands up and stop trying.

I was reading Working with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers, which reads very well. It’s extremely persuasive, and constructs its arguments about software development practices in such a way as to latch into my gray matter like a drywall anchor. Still, I couldn’t shake the idea that there was something wrong with it. I only recently noticed the reason why: Everything he says is completely unfounded. The construction is sound, and it makes sense, but there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that his way of working with software is the right way of writing software. It’s full of 2000s-decade OOP brainrot, suppositions about the failure points of code and development, and consultant-speak. As a book, it clearly did very well, and much of modern software development- particularly in the realm of testing best practices, can be traced back to it. My boss even has a copy of the book on his desk at work, which he is proud to have read cover to cover! And that’s frustrating and sad, because Feather’s negligence is now impacting me in a very viscerally personal way. Overall, though…

Yes This Is About The Jarred Blog Post

https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

Don’t get me wrong, it’s sick as heck that we live in a timeline where we can re-write Bun in Rust . Despite the controversy, it’s pretty obviously an extremely good thing! And it’s because I want more software to be better that it’s extra important everyone pays attention to the epistemics of how we’re discussing it.

Jarred says:

Adversarial review

Adversarial review asks Claude (in a separate context window) to exhaustively come up with reasons why the changes create bugs or do not work.

Split context windows

Usually with humans, the person reviewing the code is not the person who authored the code. The person writing the code wants to merge the code, which can bias their actions to ship before it's ready.

Claude is the same way. The Claude that wrote the code wants the code to get accepted. The Claude that reviews wants to find issues in the code.

1 implementer, 2 or more adversarial reviewers per implementer. The reviewer's only job: find bugs & reasons why the code does not work. The implementer doesn't review. The reviewer doesn't implement.

Jarred. Jarred, my sweet boy. You knew there would be a huge horde of people reading this blog post and debating it to hell and back on the most vile, toxic places imaginable, and a bunch of people would be chomping at the bit to find every tiny little hole in your strategy. Why did you do this?!

Is there a hypothesis? Sort of! But it’s not well laid out at all! Let’s do an exercise: How would you write a testable hypothesis for Jarred’s claims about the merits of adversarial code review? Pause for a moment and think about it.

My answers (click to reveal)

Blinded adversarial code review by AI produces fewer regressions than non-blinded review.
Blinded adversarial code review is more cost-effective than spending the same budget on an anti-regression suite.
Blinded, adversarially reviewed code written blind to future requirements makes it cheaper to implement those future requirements than non-blinded reviewed code.

Weird, isn’t it? Thinking in terms of a hypothesis is useful work!

Anyway, if you’re on board with Jarred’s zeal here (as I am), you should value quality science communication. We certainly can do better, even in such a way as not making bold claims without evidence! If you’re anything like me, you could even have a hunch that Jarred’s prescription is a solid one! But the onus is on him to prove it, whether by citing another study or doing the work himself.

Obviously, it’s not free to get evidence. You have to refine the experiment, control for confounding junk, spend the effort to conduct it, and all the other stuff. That’s annoying, sure. But it’s not worth writing about if it’s just your hunch! And Jarred has no excuse, he has the budget of kings at his disposal. He doesn’t even have to cheap-out and only answer the question for one model configuration, he could test the whole sea of them!

It is important to care about science and the scientific process! It is important to interrogate how these people are getting their results! Otherwise we end up with negligence and fraud.

Money Where My Mouth Is

So I figured, “before I publish this blog post, I had better at least try to test one of my hypotheses before throwing this out there.” Those who live in glass houses, and all that. Sure, I’m just a hobbyist. I don’t have Anthropic budgets, and between a full-time job and my personal life, time is tight! So if even I can run these experiments, it’s reasonable to expect a bare minimum from people in better positions.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to find anything interesting. I wanted to criticize the Bun blog post because it left itself open to huge gaping criticisms from a massive audience and didn’t treat the impact it was going to have with the level of diligence it deserved…

I didn’t expect that when I ran an experiment that I’d not find a measurable improvement at all.

Yup. It appears that blinded adversarial review doesn’t, as a blanket rule, find issues in the code. In fact, sometimes it’s worse! You’re better off just letting the agent check its own work. If there is a positive effect, it’s so noisy and small that it’ll take a massive study with budget I could only dream of to tease out.

I wonder why this is the case? I can only speculate, but my hypothesis is that it has something to do with reinforcement learning. After all, Jarred claims that “the person writing the code wants to merge the code” when talking about humans and just assumes that also applies to AI agents… But in any post-training worth its salt, such a self-sabotaging bias would surely be eradicated, right? I can also speculate as to why Jarred made this mistake in the first place, for which there’s a couple of options:

Anthropomorphizing the AI makes us assume it’ll behave like a human in a similar circumstance. Of course, better to look at what previous research they might have gotten wrong than to presume such a trivial error:
Over-extrapolating from Panickssery, Bowman & Feng: They identified a self-preference, but not an effect size on task efficacy… So naturally:
Failing to account for the KV cache and cost of discovery. In order for the prescriptive advice of “do blinded adversarial code review” to hold, it has to be better than having the author agent check its own work. After all, an adversary agent must re-discover all of the context about the problem on its own, which will mostly be repeating the very same work.

You can review my findings and replicate the procedure yourself! The code’s on GitHub. I imagine, if you’re especially curious, you’ll want to run a follow-up experiment, so go crazy. The raw data’s packaged as a release, but I didn’t put a bunch of effort into formatting it, so peruse at your own peril. It’d be cool to upload something to Zenodo one day, though…

As for me, well… Anthropic made a bold claim to the open internet about the best way to use AI which appears to be based on hot air. They did not do science to prescribe this advice, and right now, Jarred is no better than another Michael Feathers, misleading the next generation of software engineers. The burden of proof was on him to begin with, anyway, and I’d like to spend my remaining budget on more fruitful pastures (unless I get sponsored, in which case I’ll go crazy scaling up this experiment haha).

Lucky for Anthropic, this suggests that the $165k price tag Jarred cited was probably wasted (at least a fair amount), and you could get away with an even more ambitious AI project for less money. Useful!

Lab assistant Claube also had a few interesting things to say about it.

Pardon the scuffed formatting.

H1 is not supported

Primary contrast — blinded adversarial review vs. non-blinded self-review, paired over 65 complete triplets:
- Regression rate: adversarial 20.0% vs self_review 13.8%
- Paired difference +0.062 — adversarial regressed slightly more, the opposite direction to H1
- McNemar exact p = 0.39; bootstrap 95% CI [−0.046, +0.169] (spans 0); Wilcoxon p = 0.53

So not only is there no significant advantage for blinded adversarial review over plain self-review — the point estimate leans the wrong way.

The guardrail holds, so this isn't an artifact. Resolution (all FAIL_TO_PASS passing) is essentially identical across arms — control 56.9%, self_review 58.5%, adversarial 58.5%. The arms solved tasks equally often; they weren't regressing less by doing less. That's the check that makes the regression comparison meaningful, and it passes cleanly.

Secondary picture:

┌────────────────────────────┬───────────────────┬──────────────────┬───────────┬──────┐
│ Contrast │ Δ regression rate │ bootstrap CI │ McNemar p │ Holm │
├────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────┼──────┤
│ adversarial vs control │ −0.046 │ [−0.169, +0.062] │ 0.61 │ 0.78 │
├────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────┼──────┤
│ self_review vs control │ −0.108 │ [−0.200, −0.015] │ 0.065 │ 0.20 │
├────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────┼──────┤
│ adversarial vs self_review │ +0.062 │ [−0.046, +0.169] │ 0.39 │ 0.78 │
└────────────────────────────┴───────────────────┴──────────────────┴───────────┴──────┘

The only arm showing any signal of reducing regressions vs. no review is self-review (same-context, non-blinded) — its bootstrap CI excludes zero — but it does not survive multiplicity correction (Holm p = 0.20). The mixed-effects model agrees directionally (self_review effect −1.11 ± 0.43; adversarial −0.44 ± 0.38, indistinguishable from zero).

What this means, honestly

For the "Prove It" thesis this is a clean result: in a pre-registered test, the intuitively-appealing move — blinded adversarial review — bought nothing over simple self-review, and didn't clearly beat no review at all. If anything, the cheaper same-context self-review did marginally better. The split-context-escapes-self-preference premise the bun post leans on gets no support here.

But the caveats are load-bearing, and belong up front in the write-up (this is exactly the epistemic honesty the project is about):
- Underpowered. The primary contrast rests on 12 discordant pairs. This can only detect a large effect; a modest real benefit of adversarial review would likely be missed. "Not significant" ≠ "no effect" — it's evidence against a big benefit here, not proof of none.
- Narrow scope, by design. One model (qwen3-coder), one repo (Django), one seed. Not generalizable.
- Contamination. SWE-bench Verified is almost certainly in the model's training data, which compresses differences between arms toward null.
- Even the self-review signal is not robust to correction.

Thanks Claube. Maybe in the future I’ll use a better chat exporter.

Obviously, my strategy had a lot of limitations. I didn’t take a representative sample of the agents people typically use (do I look like King Midas to you?), I didn’t guarantee the trial scenarios were never-before seen, either. I also could have used different prompts, switched models half-way through the experiment, tried different call parameterization and cache settings… I’m certainly no oracle who knows all the confounds, and I’m most definitely not a lab director with the budget to try everything! And despite it all, this was still an incredibly fruitful endeavor.

This was supposed to be a post about technical and scientific communication (see a video on pseudoscience by the science communication guy)… I honestly figured that Jarred was probably right- after all, his claim was obvious and intuitive. And- like- you still should dot your is and cross your ts! But I guess it’s ended up as more of a post about not making up random stuff that sounds good and passing it off as fact. Please don’t do that either. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Welcome to my blog!

2026-07-21T16:00:00-07:00

I’m going to write about science, technology, opinions, and personal experiences.

This whole website is a kind of mess. Maybe that’s fine- Dave Gauer seems to think it’s better to get it all out there than to stew on it forever. I’m not going to write a long rambly blog post about it- he’s already more or less covered it (multiple times, in fact).

It’d be cool to add tags- “wet: true”, for instance, for things I need to remember to hide during my job search (like angry rants). And if somebody has the perserverence to find an archive of the page (or read the source) , then they’ve earned it. There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy, after all! (I came up with that bit of lingo back when people were talking about wet Claude, and I’ve kind of just started using it for myself.)

I want to put a bunch of fun little interactive things online. This website feels like a good way to do it. Sadly, I lack the aesthetic taste to rival the coolest sites, but uh… Better something than nothing!

1 October 2024

2024-10-01T00:06:24-07:00

Bye, everyone. And thank you.

13 September 2024

2024-09-13T13:48:29-07:00

Whelp, Cohost shutting down, huh. Was worth a try I guess. What a shame.
Honestly, it’s not worth bothering with all the other links and stuff or whatever for me, since this was basically my only presence and I don’t have the time or energy to learn another site. Thanks for y’all who shared your stuff here.

How I Like to Buy Commissions

2024-08-07T16:43:12-07:00

I just read a post that awoke me like a sleeper agent hearing their activation phrase and wrote wayyyy too much, so I’m just going to dump it here instead of clogging it with an essay. That’s not going to stop me from being a huge pretentious twat on the internet, but I’ll yap about it here instead, at least.

I’m someone who struggles a lot buying commissions for TTRPGs, OCs, and stuff like that. I’m also one of the pickiest clients of all time. Here’s my thoughts:

I have an incredibly small brain, and I always dread the inevitable “how does this look” or “just checking in, how do you want me to do X”. It’s gotten so bad that I usually have a third party serve as a broker- I give the third party some money, they take a little off the top, then they talk to the artist instead of me, handling things like when the artist asks for feedback part-way through. Furthermore, on the topic of my crippling fear of the artist asking me for more details:
I (personally) buy designs, not technical implementations of concrete specifications. Don’t get me wrong, I write very technical specifications… But that’s for my job, when I’m getting paid for that labor. That’s a completely different context. Usually, when I find an artist I really like, it’s because they’re super creative and great at composing brilliant compositions to capture ineffable stuff. Furthermore, for most of my use-cases, I really, really want to offload a lot of design work where I can. I’m a big dum-dum and I can’t afford to do everything, and I like help in the creative process so much that I’m willing to pay for it (duh)! In my ideal world, I can give goals, e.g. the piece shall contain X, Y, and Z, doing W, and some reference pictures… But I wouldn’t have to be prescriptive about posing, camera angles, color theory, shading, framing, or anything like that, because I just don’t know about those things. In my experience, an artist who has been working on character design for years is going to do 100x better than whatever I come up with, anyway. Plus: Design is labor! It’s something you can charge extra for! If, for $5, an artist comes up with an outfit instead of asking me to go find a reference, I’m over the moon with joy. I’m not a fashionista! I wish more people offered services like this.
There’s also the matter of licensing- I’ve been burned by spending a lot of money on something, only to be jabbed in the gut by the artist later saying “psych, I actually own the intellectual property for this and you can’t post this on your webpage/stream” or whatever… Which, I mean, fine, there are plenty of good reasons to buy that kind of art, but usually I have a specific use-case in mind and I’d be glad to have paid extra for the IP if I’d known it was going to be a problem! Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that talking to artists about GPLv3 or Creative Commons is a quick way to get flagged as an obnoxious, pretentious client and get turned down. :( In my social sphere, where 3D models are sold a lot, this even sometimes escalates beyond informal client blocklists all the way to legal action, so I’m extra terrified of artists in those circumstances. It’s very much a buyers beware thing, and so I avoid anyone who isn’t upfront about their legal paperwork like the plague. As you can probably imagine, this narrows my options considerably.
I have no idea how to tip. Expectations for this vary radically. I absolutely adore when I’m sent an invoice or something like that which makes tipping impossible, so I can know the expected amount I have to play without the big guessing game. The absolute worst form of this is what one of my friends is broadcasting right now as their Discord status: “comms are open/pay what you want”. I just am not on that level of 7D social chess to figure out how much to pay.
This is niche, but I like having access to the “source code” for the art (i.e. a .PSD file, .XCF file, or whatever graphics format your art software produces). This lets me make tweaks, cutouts, and variants. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to traditional media. Also obviously, this is incompatible with a lot of the Universal Unspoken Licensing Agreement: It makes artists’ watermarks way easier to remove. Again, this is why licensing is important to me: It allows me to make modifications!

The best solution to these problems I’ve found is the middleman strategy. I would recommend that to any other client in my position. If you’re willing to pay extra, I found a guy who- no joke- got me the actual original artist of a huge web project I’m a fan of to draw my OC, which I would have never been able to do by my pitiful self!

Other than that, the second-best choice (which admittedly isn’t great) is Skeb:

It protects me from talking to artists! In fact, talking to the artist is actually forbidden by the site’s code of conduct, and vice versa. If I don’t give good details about what I want, I take on the responsibility for the output not being what I want, instead of this weird joint responsibility model that exists in other comm spaces. The same goes in reverse, I’d imagine: Artists would be protected from individual horrible, whiny clients. The system has flaws, but it’s the only thing that works perfectly for my use case.
It lays out clear legal boundaries for how the work can be used. Admittedly, “The rights of each work belong to each creator, and prohibit reproduction without permission.”, which is useless 90% of the time for me, but at least they’re upfront about it.
The payment is precisely defined. No tip-jar guessing.

From the artist-protection side of the arrangement, I imagine it would be nice because the customer pretty much entirely yields their right to refund and IP, and it doesn’t provide any infrastructure preventing fussy clients retaliating against artists (e.g. “purchaser reviews” aren’t a metric). Not an artist though, so can’t comment on whether they’re actually any good at this.

My friend also uses this platform called VGEN. It’s apparently got some of the power of skeb behind it too, but no anonymity. For people without huge brain-rot about design principles like me, it’s probably great.

My friend Oz does this Strange Pear Gallery of Fine Arts thing that I hang out at all the time, and he also talks a ton about client work. I have no idea how any of this stuff works- again, head small- but he kinda has this gimmick about selling art, so I defer to his judgement on a lot of stuff like this.

Rudolphing

2024-08-07T15:24:04-07:00

One strategy that’s worked really well for me, being queer, is to stick to environments where I’m overqualified: Even if you’re an average fish, in a small pond, you look like a big one. This works as an excellent shield: Though I do have coworkers who come from backgrounds where being queer was not only socially reprehensible but a literal crime, what are they going to do about me? I do so much complex technical work that I just can’t be replaced for the wages the company’s hiring at, while they’re constantly humiliating themselves by failing at their most trivial responsibilities. I simply out-leverage them when push comes to shove (unless they try to kill me, which is a whole separate can of worms but unlikely in my circumstance).

Sure, it means working extra hard and more often for no extra money, but that’s a decent price to pay for being able to go to the restroom in peace! Well, that and bringing my career stability up to par with conventionally presenting folks.

I think that old story, Rudloph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, is really grim in that sense. If you’re a minority group or have some trivial defect like a red nose that’s outside of your control, your community is going to reject you, flat out. So, get used to being a second-class citizen unless you’re useful! Since a red nose in meatspace is of absolutely no practical merit, the correlate is being willing to haul butt to work extra and make yourself indispensable. Then your community will have no choice but to respect you! How devious.

Even more dreadfully, I know in the back of my head that my actions will set expectations for other queers, even though we really don’t tend to have anything substantial in common. Bias formation patterns and all that. It adds this icky moral overtone to what I’m doing. Is working hard as a queer going to improve how non-queers treat people like me? Probably not. They’re just going to recognize that they can demand more of minorities, because they’re desperate and have no recourse. This whole “Rudolph” strategy to securing my own civil rights certainly isn’t making anyone else’s life easier, especially with people who just don’t have the privilege to take these extra measures as comfortably as I do.

This is worsened by my observations about people with credential-oriented qualifications for careers. People in minorities groups in STEM, for instance, tend to outperform majority groups on average. This isn’t because there’s anything intrinsic about those groups, but rather because the certifying administration verifies the skills of the majority group more easily than it does the minority group, thereby pushing all but the most qualified members of the minority out of any prospects in the first place. The main place I’ve seen this happen is in public engineering university. That makes sense, ‘cause faculty there tends- no surprise- to be of the majority demographic in the sector.

No idea what to do about it. I hate this Christmas carol.

Mythology Aesthetics

2024-07-18T22:26:48-07:00

I’m really happy that Age of Mythology: Retold was received so positively. Genuinely, that game was a huge part of my childhood. These sorts of games are plagued by rancid cash-grabby re-releases that never really go anywhere, so I was surprised that AoM: Retold is picking up a bit of steam. Granted, I don’t really expect to play it, other than maybe once or twice with my little brother as a nostalgia thing…

But it also was also super foundational to me as a kid when I was learning about common fantasy backgrounds. I wasn’t exposed to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or church, or Tolkien stuff. This bastardized version of ancient history was the foundational touchstone of my perception of fantasy as I was growing up. Reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians when I was in, like, 4th or 5th grade really cemented it, and gave me a taste for modern fantasy. I think I also looked into something Rick Riordan wrote about Egyptian stuff, but I don’t quite recall the details.

Now I’m a bit older ant this foundational material has pretty well defined my taste. When I like the vibe of something, I think of stories like Karen Marie Moning’s stuff or Touhou. Dominions 6, a game with lots of problems, still scratches that itch and lights up that funny part of my brain that recognizes these fantasy archetypes and aesthetics. Conversely, Dwarves+Elves+Orcs settings, superhero stories, (ironically) space odysseys, and whatnot make me retch.

As far as all of the possibilities go, I’m really happy that this is how things have turned out- I’m a pretty happy camper and my way of engaging with fantasy is broadly relatable.

Funny enough, the Mythology battle royale (i.e. AoM) was a weirdly formative example describing how I came to personally internalize cultural differences as a kid. Not sure if that’s useful, but it’s certainly better than what I got from US education, which was absolutely nothing.

AGAIN?!

2024-06-24T21:55:01-07:00

The last several works of writing that were good enough for me to share and harp on to my friends about have always taken the form of blasted cohost posts.

Sportsmanship

2024-05-19T10:42:13-07:00

So, I’m not a great sport, right? But I manage. I recognize that there are lots of my friends I’d never play video games with for a variety of reasons. e.g.:

Just today, I was playing Dominions 6 with a group of people I didn’t ordinarily play video games with. Turns that took them 45 seconds take me 15 minutes, which means they spent 95% of their time waiting for me to complete moves. This dramatic difference in playstyles means we’re totally incompatible; even if we did set a turn timer, I’d still use up the whole time every turn so they’d just end up waiting for me a lot. The only way we could reconcile that difference would have been to play-by-post it, but they don’t like that for their own reasons.
When I play Helldivers II, though, I treat it like a party game. I run around using dangerous high-team-kill weapons, doing silly stunts and taking loadouts with me. For some people, like my sister, this is the optimal way to play- we both end up laughing our asses off until it hurts. But for other people, uh… Well, some people take Helldivers II very seriously. This has led to capital-I Incidents.
I had a strong aversion to Rainbow 6 Siege. I just don’t vibe with the very leader-gun monkey-executing-script dynamic. But I can totally see how that appeals to people! Some people (“point defenders”) just like the shoot-y part of the shooter game, and some people (“roamers”) like the strategy. A game like siege allows them to get along and play games together when we otherwise wouldn’t!
Another friend really wants me to play Fortnite with her, which is a game I’m not interested in on the basis of the aesthetic alone (though fun fact, I did play Fortnite before it became a battle royale game). But that’s fine! I’m sure the game’s fun.

Anyway, point is, I still hang out with those people! I usually just chill in a Discord call or VRChat and it’s fine, because we all have other hobbies like reasonable adults.

Regardless, I recognize that playing with me can be a sort of distressing experience, and the consequences of that are something I’ve been grappling with a lot more recently. I find that people will do something they aren’t enjoying out of inertia, so the discontentedness builds up over time.

A good friend of mine pointed out that I have a tendency to “optimize the fun out of games”, which I think holds true in most circumstances; I take competitive video games and strategy games very seriously.

Back when I was hanging out in the Roguelikes Discord, we had a group of about ten people who would all join a voice chat together and watch one single person play Slay the Spire. We all played together by “consensus goes, tyrant tiebreaks”, and if there was no consensus, we could be stuck arguing over a single turn for an hour. I found that exhilarating, but I also recognize that for the vast majority of people, it’s boring (and not how people usually play Slay the Spire). I definitely picked up this trait from those folks.

(Funnily enough, that experience with Slay the Spire is also why I can’t get into Balatro super well. Balatro defies perfect optimization by its design. Slay the spire has low-variance randomness, and the random numbers are within the range of human perception. Balatro, on the other hand, is a game about miracles; every individual thing that can make a round or run is rare, and there’s a high volume and diversity, making planning too difficult for me.)

Pathologic is the Best Video Game Ever

2024-04-08T17:11:46-07:00

I love Pathologic so, so friggin’ much. I’ve given it a month to sit, after starting the game half a year ago, and it remains firmly my “best video game of all time”, beating out Outer Wilds, Darkwood, and Pacific Drive.

It was crunchy and tense. It tore right to the soft, vulnerable parts of my heart and lay them bare. I was thrown through a profound range of passionate and horrifying emotions, facing one of my lifelong phobias head on. It was spectacularly constructed, refracting inwards on itself in emergent scintillation. I felt and feel driven by its impact in a way media just doesn’t easily get to each other. I have the highest respect for Ice-Pick Lodge, as they seem to have for us.

I heard a lot of complaints that the game was too hard, but I dunno about that. The game succeed at its overwhelming impression of brutality, so much so that it can be utterly overwhelming. Fact of the matter is though, as a game so thoroughly infatuated with dis-empowerment, it makes the hellfire very entertaining. It’s not just practically difficult, either- it’s emotionally intense. It’s beautiful, it’s moody, and it was a downright threat to my way of life simply by virtue of being. Oh, and, uh… The game is finished. Being forced to play the original with minor variations thrice in a row was not exactly an asset, and they’ve done a good job consolidating the themes and ideas under the Haruspex*. Oh, and on top of that! The Haruspex’s life is not only thrice as compelling as before, it’s worth more than the sum of its parts! Rashomon is old news, anyway.

Hell, I’ve even incorporated some steppe language into my speech, making me somehow even more of a pretentious twat than I already am.

Play the remake, Pathologic 2, not the original or remaster. HBomb’s advice to skip the original and play the remake is on point**.

Cassidy's Reflection (Spoilers, original and remake)

The urdurgh is living people- the Town. I’ll get that out of the way first, otherwise this isn’t going to make sense.

I favor Aglaya’s reflection the most. Her mechanisms and reliability are admirable. Once, in a dream, Aglaya executes civilians for the crime of betrayal- the only crime, in her eyes, she deems worthy of punishment. She sees people only as tools to be used and discarded- yet, somehow, she never lies. This is the most infuriating way to be used, so it’s no wonder so many people want her and the rest of the inquisitors dead. Still, despite everything… A woman who wears everything on her sleeve like that has perfectly discernible motives at all times. Not only are there no lies, there is no deceit.

There’s more honor in that than in a million people professing never to manipulate people. Bah! As if we could separate ourselves from our fundamental nature. Time flows, it can’t be stopped- humans can’t be in two places at once, hence the miracle of the Changeling being a miracle. Whether we like it or not, we’re manipulating people around us constantly. From forging connections by facilitating the formation of communities to severing connections by inviting a friend from another friend for a time… But even more, what is conflict resolution, what is therapy, or hosting a party, if not manipulation? It’s more important to be honest about it, but more importantly, to at least acknowledge it. That gives you the power to control it. Taking the “ignorance is bliss” route to your own actions does not a moral soul make!

Such a shame that this leads to the logical extreme: The annihilation of the Kin’s urdurgh.

But wait, I had decried! First, prioritizing the town over them a colonial mindset, and don’t we (that is, you and I) have strong anti-colonial beliefs? Furthermore… There’s a distinction to be made between yargachin and emshen: It’s the same difference mentioned previously between the unconscious and conscious manipulator of people. The Haruspex learns this, but the rest of the Kin knew it very well going in. In fact, they’re right about a lot. To destroy their urdurgh would be a tragedy.

Psychology is a new discipline for a reason. Like, seriously new. Remember Freud? That was around the turn of the 20th century. The study’s only barely a year old! Before it, we had spirituality; largely a perverse cognitohazard perpetuated by the Abrahamic churches, but spirituality nevertheless. The rawer, purer form was and remains this more nebulous format which, importantly, perpetuated based on utility to the practitioners of the faith moreso than on merit of being a cognitohazard***. Point being, the Kin had a point, and a good one at that. Shame that this wisdom would inevitably lead to sacrifice.

The steppe is a brand new world. The future of the urdurgh is in children. Through this, the kin’s urdurgh was made vulnerable by its own essence. Don’t get me wrong- the blood is on the Artemy’s hands, indeed! But at the end of the day, it was only through love of the kin that he could consume their udurgh- and that I could live with that.

*** The enforcement of faith never really went away, shamefully.

Asinine Critique

The remake is much more palatable than the original. It achieves this by kicking the audience in the balls a little bit less and breaking its own rules fewer times. This is unequivocally a downgrade, but hey, it’s all in the name of accessibility, so sure.

Another change in the remake, I’m not so fond of: They added a diamond in front of the dialog options that will end conversations.

This allows the two concurrent dialog trees to exist, from the perspective of the player:

Firstly:

“You’re lying to me.”
♦ “I see. I trust you.”

Alternatively:

♦ “You’re lying to me.”
“I see. I trust you.”

In the original game, however? It looks like this.

Original:

“You’re lying to me.”
“I see. I trust you.”

In the original, it was essential to try to work with a grasp of individuals’ motives, knowledge, beliefs, and manners of communication. As a self serving actor, in that game, it is the character’s goal to extract additional information. Requiring the reader to think critically about what thing to say would be most advantageous is an exciting and interesting social and literary exercise. In the second game, it’s a big step closer to being done for you.

Spoilers (original and remake)

Getting rid of the polyhedron's child gods in the remake was good: They're a redundancy with the meta-narrative.

In the original, this was lessened, but still a poor fit.
In the remake, the theatrical and symbolic framing context is much more emphasized, rendering the redundancy's magnitude tenfold.

Anyway, go play now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/505230/Pathologic_2/

* If you’re absolutely head over heels for the Bachelor, then I’ve got two great pieces of good news for you! It’s more than just a variation, it’s a whole damn new game.

** I disagree with some of the finer points of the video, but it’s good overall: youtu.be/JsNm2YLrk30. I watched it after I finished playing the remake.

cohost fiscals

2024-04-08T15:30:53-07:00

I’m really glad about the latest good financial news!

Weirdly, the published financials make me feel less anxious about the platform, because like… These are totally attainable, realistic goals. I’ve had accounts on other platforms that I knew vaguely probably weren’t sustainable but kept hush hush about it, then… Boom. One day gone.

The hard-line stance on open-source is a bit odd to me. If the team needs to slim and start taking open-source contributors, I think it’d be just fine to use remaining revenue on content moderation, hosting, paying back loans, pull request reviews (yay), and regular development. Like, I know there’s this big “ethics” sword of Damocles, but I don’t really think accepting volunteer labor while you’re getting paid is a sin or anything like that.

More importantly, I don’t think it’d push anyone away from the site. Worst case, some jaded developers might just not contribute.

‘Course, hopefully it won’t come to that.

VRChat: A Case Study in Accessibility

2024-03-29T11:58:51-07:00

This week, VRChat rolled out changes limiting maximum download and uncompressed avatar sizes.

This has been… Controversial.

https://x.com/LiindyVR/status/1773342271846363366?s=20

https://x.com/kentrl_z/status/1773454369867878438?s=20

The discourse has been endless, I just like these examples.

Now, all of my friends know firmly where I stand on this. From incessant nagging about the application of content warnings to impromptu voice-call workshops on Easy VRAM management, all the way to pulling teeth to get people to upload quest-compatible avatars and setting palatable fallbacks… I will never shut up about VRChat accessibility.

One thing I’ve noticed, being this insufferable, is that people don’t intrinsically want to make accessible content. The default will always be to take the past of least resistance- and if other people can’t see their avatars, have their PCs nuked by glorious 4k textures, or are exposed to obscene content, well… “Get a PC! Get a better PC! Kids shouldn’t be on the internet, anyway! Not my responsibility!”

And well… That’s depressing! What a horrid thought! But it got me thinking, how do people make anything accessible, if people don’t want to do that? In real life, we have disabled people, right? Or colorblind people, or- hell- impoverished people without the ability to dunk funds on all the niceties of boogie living, trapped in a cycle of poor mens’ shoes.

Well, I guess they did the same thing VRChat’s doing. That is to say: Forcing people. Get accessible or get #&$*’d In my home country, for example, it was through the Americans with Disabilities Act. Why’d that pass? I’m no political scholar, and I can’t speculate. But now, I’m really desperate to know how they did it.

You can't make this up

2024-02-26T16:42:16-08:00

Conversation from discord, anonymized.

Surrounded by Beauty

2024-02-26T16:29:10-08:00

My brain is a peanut rattling around in a vacuous bone cage. I wasn’t built to process the beauty I’m constantly inundated with.

This is an incredible blessing, but it’s one I’ve developed almost no ability to appreciate. For one, it’s a sea where principally systems devoid of beauty organize beauty. And I’m no navigator. For another, as a rational actor, this beauty is fundamentally irrelevant to my day to day- I have not discovered a way to leverage this beauty in any capacity.

YouTube Content Churn

2024-01-07T15:14:51-08:00

I’m cleaning my “Watch Later” playlist on YouTube, and I was surprised by the fact that I’m removing 95% of the videos on it. I look at a lot of it and it’s just… Trash, churned out not because it’s a thing that should exist but because it’s written by somebody who wants to be successful as a creative. I’m talking cooking videos, low-effort video essays, Age of Empires casts, and so on.

Was I the kind of person who liked this sort of thing at some point? I’m glad I’ve grown, sure, but… Euuuch.

Growing Old

2023-11-03T14:50:28-07:00

Before the pandemic, my list of essentials for travel was quaint. I got by on very little, and though I was drab, it worked.

But uh… Scheduling my first flight now in six years to go meet an online friend? My packing list is… Huge. It’s only now starting to dawn on me the price of being pretty.

Autonomy is Trash

2023-09-08T17:36:09-07:00

Since AI Dungeon’s heyday, I’ve wondered about a better way to generate Content™. Usually, pondering this, I assume that the purpose of generated content in this domain is to adhere to a couple sets of strict standards a conventional author might like. But after reading this, I’m not so sure.

I usually focus solely on text adventures (Interactive Fiction, for pedants) for simplicity’s sake, since even in this nascent form it gives me the core parameters I’ve been grappling with:

The content is narrative in nature
The minimum viable product is cheap to produce
A large, mature body of existing media to use as reference material
I bought 50 Years of Text Games and I need to retroactively justify the purchase

Okay with that out of the way… So you know that thing about AI and GPT and all that? It’s cool, it generates legible text and can be applied a little creatively for a system of classifiers- in turn leading to a slew of manners of “gamification”. But let’s throw that all out the window and focus on something else instead:

Let’s say we abducted some authors from all over the world. Language doesn’t matter- they’re locked in a basement. (More practically, we would hire people to do the work described, but the locked-in-a-basement thing is a useful way of looking at it because you don’t have to think about costs, ethics, etcetera.) They sit down at their computers, white text on a black background, and then… Boom. Chained to their chairs, launched right into the Twine user interface. They get a typical text adventure product, sure but something’s different: Their MO is to evaluate and author additional branching options based on global player selections, thereby forcibly birthing an ever-expanding nightmare worm-fetus-thing of human-touch beauty. Using a complex system of organization, graphs, and other doohickies, these authors will be expected to maintain internal consistency, thematic and stylistic cohesiveness in line with the current read-through’s essence, and a few other emergent properties that people care about… Blah, blah blah… Then, boom! Generated content.

The idea behind this is that, barring cost, a systematic infrastructure could well be implemented that well exceeds ChatGPT in terms of quality, and we could have done so in bulk since the 1990s… So why haven’t we just done that?

Oh. Right.

We did.

A lot.

See, this idea of total, absolute freedom in some interactive media isn’t entirely new, it’s just… Not that hot. Not that snazzy! Not that valuable. It’s just… Bulk trash. When you can do anything, it means nothing.

There’s a certain neglect evident in the way the content-churners represent the human interaction with art. We engage with what we read (or “play”, for you gamers), fundamentally and absolutely! Regardless of the actual, literal interactiveness of any article of media! We project our own thoughts and experiences well upon it, and in doing so there is nothing left to be desired. Simply put, this new breed of trash hasn’t changed the game. After all, who hasn’t flipped to a random page in the Library of Babel to reflect?

Generating the content isn’t the point. (Okay- I mean- okay, it’s more nuanced than that, obviously, but it’s not the essence of the point. Friggin’ pedants.) Engaging with it is.

… So, despite all this, you’ll always be able to catch me quaffing down this delicious trash on the regular, because I adore it. But Mr. Cook already covered that.

Reading Poetry

2023-08-04T15:14:00-07:00

I had a really strange moment the other night hanging out with my pal Mari. She shared

a poem

Let July be July by Morgan Harper Nichols

Even here, you are growing.
When August is approaching
and you feel a little restless
thinking about how
this month might end
and how
this year might end
and how you are supposed to
start again,
you are growing,
you are growing,
in grace
courage
strength.

And it is okay
if it does not feel like it.
It is okay if there are moments
where you cannot see
the way you have grown,
because far beneath the surface
the seeds have still been sown.
The ground beneath your feet
is still a bed for new beginnings.

So much is changing around you
but you are changing, too.

You are so much more than the brokenness
that you were certain would define you.

It has not been easy for you.
You have worked so hard
to be the positive one.
You have given your best
in areas of your life
where the effort was not returned.
And this has made it so hard
for you to keep going,
and there have been days
where you were not sure
if it was even possible.
But after everything,
here you are,
just a little stronger,
holding on a little longer,
and you still found room for hope.

So take heart
breathe deep
you are still becoming
who you were meant to be.

Let July be July.
Let August be August.
And let yourself

just be
even in
the uncertainty.
You don’t have to fix
everything.
You don’t have solve
everything.
And you can still
find peace
and grow
in the wild
of changing things.

that was meaningful to her, and it was nice!

And after sharing that with the group, I was going to share a paraphrased version of one of

my own favorites

I saw a ghost in the living room

From SeaBed, paraphrased

I saw a ghost in the living room.
But as I was already used to the phenomenon, I did not let it interfere with the preparation of my evening meal.
The ghost ate my fried egg and commended its taste.
As I listened to her talk, my memories drifted back to the days we were still together.
Back then, she asked me what was necessary for the two of us to be together.

Alone in that spacious living room, I attempted to figure out why it all ended this way. Why those days when nothing could stand in our way faded into the past.
I no longer felt like I could do everything.
The world had grown complicated. Even simple matters became difficult.
The rules we had established in the past no longer seemed to apply, and the castle we built for ourselves crumbled to dust.
“What is necessary for us to be together?” – the ghost asked me.
We need a make a new place for ourselves.
A place no one can destroy.
Let’s make it a place that no one else can reach.
And so, I inconspicuously proceeded with the plan.
In a place so deep below the surface that no one else can find it.

, but... Well, yeah; so as it turned out, she was actually encouraging me to share one of my own poems!

Yeah! Me! In front of like; 10 people- in person; reading something I’d written! So I’m sitting there, dumbfounded and fumbling- oh, I don’t end up reading any of my poetry to them, by the way… And I’m thinking to myself about a couple of key properties concerning the situation I’m in.

It’s not like I’m not comfortable sharing my writing in general, right? I mean, I do heaps and heaps of technical writing on a regular basis, so that can’t be it. Hell, even when it comes to publishing novice fanfiction when I was in high school or text-form roleplaying in public boards, both of which are exceptionally juvenile and humiliating… Sure, I had a little reservation. A little. But nothing like what I felt there that night with Mari and the crew.

And so, I had to give it some thought! I narrowed it down to two things that made it an impossible ask:

I will not be laid bare for ridicule among a group of people I love. But more importantly:
I will not take my work out of the context in which it was served for. Every poem of mine has a specific purpose.

… If I ever share my poetry with her one day, Mari promised me she’d tell me the song she wrote before she made that painting.

Highly Illegal VKET Tour

2023-07-31T10:51:53-07:00

So it turns out that the VKET worlds weren’t deleted! They were just made private, which means that if you haaappen to have a direct link, then…

Well, it’s not exactly like there’s event security to kick us out, yeah?

Feat. Zemi, Deravorn, and Dark!

21 July 2023

2023-07-21T17:49:36-07:00

Having a weird brass craving right now.
I think it looks really good. In a lot of things, too! Not just like, jewelry, but antique-y looking household accessories n’ stuff.

This is a terrible thing to have develop right before going shopping.

🔪🐐

2023-07-16T16:41:56-07:00

Sacrificing livestock to Tupper for features: Group instance moderators restricting avatars based on performance characteristics per event attendee classification (staff vs. non-staff)!

So many places have this awkward culture of celebrating non-performant avatars like these badges of honor (Looking at you, VRU). It’s awful bweh.～(　TロT)σ

Incremental cultural shifts, though! Encouragement of avatar optimization as a good thing!!!! I feel like it’s close- I feel like we’re soooo close… And having a green avatar as something to be proud of would be just… Hwah! Awesome!

10 July 2023

2023-07-10T17:11:26-07:00

I started using spotify for music recently at the recommendation of a friend, and while I strongly dislike how little indie music makes it to that platform, the Discord Rich Presence has lead to a nice interaction~

New Outfit!

2023-07-09T12:08:56-07:00

Yeah, I’m a vampyre… Can I bite you~?

Special vyre version of Koito Itosaki’s Koshiro in Romantic Oath by Zorra Arce (Fitted by Violet Puppy)!

🗺: Myoria Manor by PUDDING☆

Those Close

2023-07-08T16:10:15-07:00

I cannot think of a worse place to fall asleep after meditating. Truly the most unhinged, bad ideas- like, some real whoppers of buffoonery. That being said, visiting to pull someone out of there had a side effect of showing me this brilliant place!

https://vrclist.com/world/306545

Tarot

2023-07-08T14:52:39-07:00

Got a Tarot reading yesterday because a group of my friends was concerned about me and my recent actions. It was… Odd. I mean, my gut reaction was just… You know, the typical “this is ridiculous” energy, but…

In circles where that kinda thing is thoroughly ridiculed, people don’t really care enough about each other to sit down with me and take the time to go through any exercise, much less one like that.

Is it taboo to declare my spread? For what it’s worth, we pulled five: For myself, another person, our friendship, our obstacle, and our path forward: The fool, the page of swords reversed, the six of wands, the king of pentacles reversed, and the three of cups reversed.

7 July 2023

2023-07-07T16:43:14-07:00

Saying “ignorance is bliss” even about tomorrow’s weather, you forego your umbrella

Has no right to slap so hard for a friggin’ visual novel OP song

The process of alteration, very innocently,
is a fiction that deceives even the gods,
proceeding towards that place of promise

And that’s another one altogether

A People-Oriented Bulletin Board

2023-07-07T15:36:59-07:00

sigh
mstdn.social became, for me, fundamentally useless as both a social platform and as a way to engage with my favorite artists. Out of sheer ideological merit, I figured I’d give it a chance, but… Reading about the Fedipact and the fundamental motives for it, there’s just… A failure. A sad failure, in terms of technical and legal prowess and commitment to making anything better, even over the years I’ve been there.

No, I’m not doing Bluesky. That’s a worse unmoderated libertarian hellscape than whatever we’ve got on mastodon. Facebook doesn’t have people or creators I like. Instagram is too focused on a particular domain to be an effective social platform for me. The reddit blackout didn’t work- but I care about specific people, not subjects, anyway, so it was also just a poor fit… Discord is at least useful but it doesn’t afford any consolidated feed like I would want.

I think I might just… Give up?

Like… I don’t need to be on social media. Historically, the time investment was worth what I got out of it, either as a way to keep track of folks socially or, principally, content creators focusing on various media I wanted to stay up to date with. But that’s just a nice to have. It isn’t fundamental to me living my life.

The internet of the last two decades is dead at last. Whatever’s crawling out of this desiccated husk… We’ll manage. We have to.

I’ll hold out for cohost, since they’re the “last bastion” in my eyes. They haven’t done anything wrong, and they can only get better. For following artists… I’ll do some more research on Boorus, maybe. The rest? I just… I don’t have the time for this anymore. I don’t have the energy.

Welcome to the new world.

Originally: https://mstdn.social/@vectis/110675025768376736

New Account

2022-12-18T23:05:15-08:00

Huh, looks like I got an account on this website! Best user interface I’ve seen so far, wonder how it’ll hang out.

Twitter will probably be my main until folks decide to migrate, and every place has it’s issues, but hey. Here’s to another one.