whenever im looking through god tier title tags on tumblr i come across people’s self-insert sburb ocs (no hate here, why do you think im in the tags in the first place?) and im like…your guys’ strife specibus ought to be knifekind, unless you can give a plausible reason for gunkind, tbh.
like, pick an actual goddamn weapon for your strife specibus! i dont care what rose or vriska did, use an actual fucking weapon!! and how many of us actually had swords and spears and guns easily available for kids in our childhood homes? very few of us im willing to bet. meanwhile in literally everyones kitchens are some bigass butcher knives that are halfway to being swords themselves to a small teenager.
anyway, the moral of the story is: if we all played sburb, we would all be knifekind users, except for the USians who lived in the country, who would be shotgunkind.
I willpost this on AO3 after I manage to finish all of Cornstalk Fiddle, but…..I wrote a draft of sexy follow-up and hate all of it. So rather than let it go to waste, here is the absolutely useless 4.8k of johnny/devil, which I refuse to acknowledge past this point
So there’s this game Umineko, right? Or “When The Seagulls Cry”, but no one calls it that. It is… probably my new favorite work of fiction, full stop.
It’s an episodic murder mystery visual novel in eight parts, each of which takes the same initial setup in a different direction. The incidents that play out in each episode are confusing, obfuscated, and not entirely solvable on their own- it’s as you play through more of them that you notice suspicious commonalities and pick up on key facts that put previous episodes into context. It’s all masterfully arranged and clever as hell, with twists that turn things upside down over and over again. All that plus killer music+sound design and some really fun meta stuff makes it an incredibly fun challenge to tackle, despite not technically being at all interactive.
Now- if that’s enough of a recommendation for you, here’s the Steam page, here’s an LP if you don’t want to spend money, go nuts. But… I want to go into a little more detail on why it’s so unique and worth playing, and that requires going a little bit into spoiler territory. Not major stuff, but… the main hook gets established halfway through episode 2, and it’s hard to talk about Umineko without talking about that hook. So, a readmore, if you’d rather go in blind, which I reccommend:
This is the first time I’ve seen a coherent explanation of what Umineko actually IS, and I’m kind of into it. It sounds a bit Phoenix-Wright-esque.
Brb putting it on my Steam wishlist.
The Ace Attorney influence is very explicit- one of Battler’s sprite poses is the Phoenix Wright Finger Point. It’s a bit cw: everything, though, especially gore and detailed and intense depictions of child abuse, so fair warning.
this looks really neat, but i’m very confused because there seem to be at least three games, one base and then “question arcs” and “answer arcs” and i have no idea which are which or which you’re talking about or whether they’re related or ???.
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
And Godot would know!
What do you Godot’s not an AI?
It’s also worth pointing out that algorithms cannot help but to end up replicating the inherent biases of the system it is ‘learning’ from.
I get why ppl are leaving tumblr but ive never deleted an account for anything in my life and if tumblr wants me to leave theyre going to have to kill me themselves
just moving along like everyone else 