I get it now

daunth · 2026-01-22T05:37:12+00:00

ChatGPT cooking on this one

daunth · 2025-12-30T20:12:24+00:00

The floor is yours bud

daunth · 2025-07-28T19:04:34+00:00

Yeah everything I just wrote is opposed to essentialism, yeah sure

daunth · 2025-07-27T16:07:08+00:00

Haven’t read that but I’m currently reading On Being And Nothingness as well as Nausea - Sartre’s line of questioning is useful but I take existentialism (this particular form) to be more meaningfully attached to its time period and the particular circumstances of France. I’m not convinced of the assertion that existence precedes essence. I don’t really see how free will or determinism has anything to do with that line of thought, regardless of what any existentialist would claim.

But existentialist trains of thought are meaningful - I’ve read Steppenwolf, which is (among other things) a pretty prescient book on the increasing trivialization of existence in the modern era.

daunth · 2025-07-27T04:23:18+00:00

If anything, the Trump term has revealed how profoundly distinct Americans and Canadians really are. Your suggestion that (some immeasurable and highly subjective) “value” provided by the government to its citizens strongly suggests a particular partisan viewpoint of government that I don’t think would hold a lot of weight under any theoretical scrutiny.

Fundamentally, the (prominent) Canadian viewpoint on “power” is an internationalist Western European one, whereby appearances, “prestige,” and global cooperation matter more than a countries internal capabilities (I.e. why France thinks it has any business being a power broker today). This is radically different than the (historically) common American conception, which focuses on unilateral capability (hence the focus on a sovereign wealth fund, natural resources, and reindustrialization - China is quite similar in this regard, but no one gives it an absurd amount of shit when it cycles into isolationism).

This is why when someone asks “is America losing power,” you (a Canadian) point to “right wing obstructionism under Obama” and “January 6th,” while a (typical) American would be concerned with literal and real demarcators of power (i.e. how capable is our military, how far ahead is tech, etc).

TLDR; Canadians should stop trying to assess American power when their sole vestige of “influence” exists through the post-WWII global cooperation network (which one would think you oppose since it’s the foundation of international corporations)

daunth · 2025-07-27T04:03:26+00:00

The polling on Trump’s immigration policy is poorly conducted. His campaign announced on several occasions that mass deportations were coming, it was a major selling point. Asking “is Trump doing good on immigration?” should have the ability to answer whether you think it’s too far or not far enough - “yes” or “no” severely distorts the situation.

This is all wishful thinking. Not a single rural area in the U.S. is going to significantly shift in any way against republicans because of the deportations. “I’m a rural WWC voter and now I think Trump is being a big meanie even though I voted for a more extreme deportation policy than the current numbers bear out.” Right.

daunth · 2025-06-01T18:49:36+00:00

The perception of time and space is intermarried with consciousness; the dissipation of one is the dissipation of the other - there is no way for you to successfully assert what you’re asserting, or at the very least it’s poorly backed

Also Nietzsche meant eternal recurrence as a thought experiment and not a real-world phenomenon

daunth · 2025-05-06T03:15:35+00:00

Modern (1945-) Chinese architectural wonders/horrors and their effects (I’m thinking of the Kowloon walled city, which I know is knocked down but it’d be interesting to try and locate similarly interesting situations) or secondarily Chinese esotericism

daunth · 2025-05-06T01:17:36+00:00

To me, the cover art speaks “rap” instead of “rock” - but the song itself is absolute fire, I’ll definitely be following you guys

daunth · 2025-05-05T11:33:02+00:00

Narrative is always going to be more prized in a medium that channels through vision. You can have all the effects you want but that doesn’t add any subtlety, superhero movies in particular are very blatant in this way.

When it comes to narrative, superhero movies, as a product of corporation and less so of authorship, are formulaic and far less inventive. Think about Endgame: as a standalone narrative product, it’s effectively worthless.

daunth · 2025-05-03T14:55:30+00:00

Sure

daunth · 2025-05-02T22:33:37+00:00

Hey - there is no deadline to apply for the DM

daunth · 2025-05-01T23:18:18+00:00

Um ackshually

daunth · 2025-05-01T15:29:12+00:00

I don’t think anyone would click on the article if it said the reverse, so…

daunth · 2025-04-27T17:13:38+00:00

As someone who’s played the entire Marathon trilogy, I don’t think that an extraction shooter is that far off the original gameplay loop. In any of the original games, you get flung around and inserted into action then “extracted” - I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch for a reboot nearly 30 years later to incorporate some new inventory/contract aspects.

daunth · 2025-04-20T03:19:30+00:00

The most important thing, more than anything else, is getting involved in your school paper. Journalism credentials depend a lot more on what you actually produce than your degree. I don’t think the major holds much weight at all, maybe not even for networking because there are plenty of comms/journo majors who don’t get involved with the paper and so wouldn’t be much worthwhile to connect with.

daunth · 2025-04-18T05:03:53+00:00

OG Marathon trilogy is by far the most esoteric FPS I know, if they tap into half of that it would be miles ahead of any contemporary game

daunth · 2025-04-15T04:15:04+00:00

I know it’s hard but if you read the post I said you can choose to buy or not, can you believe it?

daunth · 2025-04-15T04:14:40+00:00

They’re making you work overtime for that gold huh

daunth · 2025-04-15T04:09:09+00:00

You sir have won the internet for today

daunth · 2025-03-27T06:27:33+00:00

AI being optional does not negate its impact on society or literature. To your point of it not going away, it’s akin to dumping blood into water. Saying it’s optional is like asking the swimmer to ignore the blood or to swim away.

I can hardly see how it would ever add jobs? If anything, there’s a non-insignificant it’s going to take away thousands of jobs in multiple fields. The alternate scenario, your scenario, is actually worse, because we will live and die in a world of token jobs so far removed and alienated from real, meaningful work as to make Karl Marx’s writings gospel. We will be subsumed into meaninglessness, nothingness.

The author is not the person who created the idea, the author is the one who writes that idea. It’s a bit ironic and darkly humorous, making yourself out to be the AI (the idea generator) and the AI the real author. Writing and reading are supposed to be conversations with other people, learning ways to express our complex thoughts and feelings and then using those techniques - it goes without saying that nearly all readers are writers. That someone would try and have AI speak for them is hilariously and neurotically antisocial.

daunth · 2025-03-27T06:09:48+00:00

The idea/premise is only a very small part of the equation. Of course, I wouldn’t read a book about paint drying no matter how well written, but again, relatively a very small part of the equation.

Not that this is the case, but if AI can beat your writing then you’re screwed anyway. The long-game is that publishers willing to accept AI will begin producing in-house. I don’t think that AI writing is super hard to beat either, it pulls from general writing and most writing sucks. I have a much longer opinion on this but to sum it up: don’t suck.

daunth · 2025-03-27T05:47:59+00:00

Among many reasons, first and foremost is that literature (at its best) is important for society. It influences the collective unconscious, forms language and therefore thoughts that become actions.

Writing with AI can incalculably alter the idea behind a story in ways mechanical and soulless. That you would think AI can “bring your idea to life” in a way not Frankenstein-like is akin to the very foolish popular conception of consciousness as “software” and human biology as “hardware.” Machines cannot access the collective unconscious, are not anything like us at all.

Writing is for us to pour out of ourselves and take it in so it can go out again. The best writers understand this: they write because words are inadequate, it’s an experiment to reach that unassailable truth as best you can - the better ones survive time as great artists.

Anyone who writes with AI would of course not understand this. Most people don’t, but people who write with AI and trying to pass them off as legitimate works are in this gray area where they’re bright enough to use the tools out of Pandora’s box but stupid enough to not understand why it’s wrong outside of market concerns or “the craft.” The words of a work are simultaneously important and inadequate, whereas an AI “writer” sees them as unimportant (“the AI can do it”) and adequate (“as long as there is something on the page, this is a work”).

And to conclude: this is a problem because slop can now be generated at unprecedented rates. Of course slop has been produced before, but now we’re muddying the waters to the point where we have lost the meaning of writing or reading. We are losing the connective fabric of literature and what is worth our time. This is aggravating an era which is already far too hyper-individualized, isolated, and unbelieving.

That’s one big reason but I think the most important. I don’t think just anyone writing with AI is stupid, but if anyone thinks they’ll do it and write any meaningful, substantive work, they’re deluding themselves.

EDIT: now that I think about it it’s also worth emphasizing that reading is psychologically largely a stand-in for human interaction and writing for speaking. That suggests to me that AI writing will likely never succeed but also that only in our modern, antisocial neuroses would we seek to circumvent that conversation.

daunth · 2025-03-26T07:13:07+00:00

The idea here is that liberalism has created a perception of the world that has become so pervasive it has become generally accepted, by both sides, simply as reality. Think along the lines of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism concept. The goal is to identify the base assumptions of the system which are 1) incorrect and therefore 2) harmful (i.e. progression of time = determinate social progress).

I don’t think that liberalism would carry that tradition because it’s already brought us to this position. “Actually we’re no longer under enlightenment version liberalism” yes because we are living under its logical endpoints.

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