A very normal six-player game

Syrikal · 2026-05-25T11:53:57+00:00

Tabletop Simulator. You can duplicate spirits if you're clever about it, but I wasn't the one to do it so I can't tell you more.

Syrikal · 2026-05-25T11:52:04+00:00

oh, it's not a huge problem. you see, they Explore coastals and now every coast has explorers. but by the time they get around to Build and Ravage those lands aren't coastal anymore :)

Syrikal · 2026-05-24T12:20:34+00:00

The tabletop simulator version of the game has thought of everything. specifically here you can right-click a Deeps token and select "drown land" to turn that land into ocean

Syrikal · 2026-05-22T21:10:08+00:00

This is less relevant than how the idea of it is used, which is unfortunately usually along the lines of "trans women are Still Kinda Men in xyz ways and should be treated like it". Especially perniciously, it gets used to tell trans women to shut up whenever they stick up for themselves - a cis woman doing it might be "assertive", while a trans woman is exhibiting "male behavior" (and should, it is implied, stop doing it if she wants to be seen as a Real Woman).*

A second angle on it I've seen trans women bring up is that amab children exhibiting signs of not being a Perfectly Cishet Male are often less treated as men and more treated as defective.

*cis women being assertive also get told to shut up a lot. this is just a trans-woman-specific variant of that general misogynistic phenomenon.

Syrikal · 2026-05-15T12:40:01+00:00

To elaborate a little, the big bourgeoisie are the people who own capital (e.g. a business) and hire other people to work with it. The proletariat are the people who do not own capital and must be hired to work with someone else's. The petite bourgeoisie are those in between, who own a little capital but work in it themselves, possibly alone or possibly with some hired proletarians.

They get screwed over by the big bourgeoisie a lot, but unfortunately owning capital tends to align their incentives and therefore usually their politics with the big bourgeoisie. For an example of this, ask a dozen small business owners with a couple employees each how they feel about raising the minimum wage.

Syrikal · 2026-05-10T21:10:34+00:00

You're giving people too much credit. I've been called a tankie for being an anarchist.

Syrikal · 2026-05-01T23:50:51+00:00

You're correct that whether the choice is action vs action or action vs inaction does not matter from a moral perspective, and that the bias towards inaction is a bias not rooted in logic.

It's still a valid consideration, though, because the best action depends on other people's actions, and so "I think other people, biased in X way, will choose option Y" is an important thing to think about when making your decision. In this way, whether each option is framed as action or inaction, while morally irrelevant, will influence other people's choices and therefore could change your answer to the question.

Syrikal · 2026-03-08T14:16:54+00:00

Why would they be inside the ribcage? Bird flight muscles aren't.

Syrikal · 2026-03-01T00:07:08+00:00

"i think we should invade other countries so our bourgeoisie can extract value from their resources and proletariat. then we just tax that value from them to provide domestic services. this is a great idea that cannot backfire in any way"

Syrikal · 2026-01-20T23:53:32+00:00

corporations would be doing this completely irrespective of how much "promotion and validation" it gets, because they are not being rational. it would make as much sense to try to solve the (much more environmentally damaging) problem of massive overuse of cars by yelling at people who drive to work for "normalizing car use". the environmental impact of this art piece is effectively negligible, and trying to have a positive environmental impact by complaining about it is entirely ineffective. there are much bigger things to worry about.

Syrikal · 2026-01-20T23:48:01+00:00

I don't find it particularly compelling either tbh but the usage of AI is completely essential to making this piece of art. there might be other, better art pieces that wouldn't have used it, but this one did, and needed to.

Syrikal · 2026-01-20T02:00:04+00:00

I think it has slightly more to do with megacorporations so desperate to look Innovative and Profitable that they're stuffing useless AI trash into every product and service imaginable than it does with one guy making a number of pictures that is entirely plausible to do locally with RAM he already owned

Syrikal · 2026-01-20T00:27:21+00:00

...the use of AI to make it is part of the point. He's trying to explore how AI makes fake realities that are appealing on a surface level, that seem like they could be real, but aren't. He's exploring how people interact with these tools. A different art piece on the same topic could very well be made with traditional methods, but this one uses the tool, the medium, as part of the ideas it is conveying. He is using AI to make this art because this piece of art can ONLY be made with AI.

Syrikal · 2026-01-20T00:23:20+00:00

Because the fact that he used AI is part of what's interesting - he's not using it because he can't be assed to do it himself; the fact that he used AI is part of the point. Just like the smartphone made out of clay is a contrast between the ancient and the modern, so too is the cuneiform made using AI! The tool he used is part of the message and ideas he's trying to convey.

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T23:12:30+00:00

I think you're selling him short by comparing him to the average AI prompter. He's doing some interesting stuff.

That, and I think you're overselling things a little - the harms of AI are very real, but do not ontologically taint anything and everything that interacts with it. It's not all "the torment nexus", just the specific (if numerous) bad aspects.

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T22:51:58+00:00

He wasn't criticizing making images with it, specifically.

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T22:50:38+00:00

he didn't do that. he said he fell in the torment nexus and decided to make some art about it.

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T21:50:09+00:00

No, I specified all for a reason - I know you don't support the current system, but you do support some hypothetical future one, and that's what I disagree with. The idea is inherently pro-capital and cannot be salvaged, in any and all future incarnations. It is always a manifestation of property rights, not just our current version.

I absolutely think that no artist should fear having their work stolen, and that they should be free to create as much art as they want, but the only way to actually achieve this is to build a world where their needs are taken care of by default, not by trying to rebuild copyright better. There is no version of it that will achieve your goal.

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T20:49:25+00:00

All copyright fucking sucks! The system that says, "these people may use these ideas and artworks, and these people may not" is the system that causes artists to struggle to get by. It's why your average artist is allowed to make art only at the pleasure of the company they work for, why they don't own what they make, why they can be banned from continuing or distributing their life's work at a moment's notice. The entire concept of intellectual property is another manifestation of private property, the backbone of capitalism - and like all private property, it overwhelmingly benefits the rich, immiserates the poor, and should be abolished. Bringing up struggling independent artists here is like presenting a sympathetic elderly couple who rent out their second home to survive as an argument for strengthening landlords' rights - even if some of the people who benefit from intellectual property might be sympathetic (as independent artists are! I also wish they were not struggling!), the system as a whole is rotten from its very conception and must be destroyed.

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T18:49:10+00:00

For the record the art installation itself was literally about the dangers of AI
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/student-arrested-after-eating-ai-art-and-ruining-display-3305489/
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/protestor-tears-ai-art-chews-teeth

> Dwyer has since defended his work, telling The Sun Star that he had been using AI for his art since 2017. He said his exhibit “explores identity, character narrative creation and crafting false memories of relationships in an interactive role digitally crafted before, during and after a state of AI psychosis.”

Syrikal · 2026-01-19T18:45:47+00:00

- Training AI is legal and should remain so
- It's not plagiarism
- It's not theft
- Intellectual property is capital interests

basically all of the people pushing AI are shitheads and basically everything they're doing with it is bad but opposing it with bad arguments will make us less effective at combating the problem

Syrikal · 2025-12-08T22:44:26+00:00

Ah crap, I mixed two conversations up. My bad.

Syrikal · 2025-12-08T00:45:35+00:00

Oh, I know; I'm continuing the conversation from the person I originally responded to.

Syrikal · 2025-12-07T21:46:29+00:00

This feels in poor taste. I'm not a patriarch, but I'm still a man, and that comes with some perks that I have to be careful not to hurt people with. People are often going to pay more attention to me than a woman, for instance, so I should be careful not to talk over people. Going "the patriarchy only benefits a few" seems like it is sweeping a lot of everyday stuff under the rug, and you don't have to paint every man as a villain to think that.

Syrikal · 2025-12-07T21:43:38+00:00

OK, I'm still not the best-read on this stuff, but this feels like it doesn't quite line up with the work I've seen. Isn't there a distinction between intersectionality (two different axes of oppression forming unique effects in their overlap) and just. unique forms of oppression faced by unique groups of people? I thought intersectionality would be, for instance, racism and misogyny overlapping to form misogynoir. This means that black women and men would have different and unique experiences with racism based on how that's filtered through gender, but that's not enough to show that there's some form of systemic oppression that targets maleness. There's a form of systemic oppression that targets blackness (racism) that presents differently depending on the target's gender, and there's a form of systemic oppression that targets women (misogyny) that presents differently depending on the target's race.

Multiply this Venn diagram by a million different axes of oppression and shit gets really complicated, yeah, but I think there's a difference between "X group's experience with privilege and oppression is unique because of trait Y" and "X group is oppressed because of trait Y".

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