alisonatwork

TBH I never really got the point of those "video game score played by a real orchestra" things, although to be fair most of them seemed to be for games from the console world so as a PC gamer I didn't have any attachment to the original tunes in the first place.

For me I really felt things turn between Dune 2 and Command & Conquer when Frank Klepacki got to put full-blown lyrics and guitars into the soundtrack. I did listen to a bit of industrial music at the time so I still enjoyed it for what it was, but it never felt as magical as dedicated OPL3 scores like Stéphane Picq's Dune... and when Trent Reznor was pulled in to do the score for Quake I was just like, okay, that's it, game music is over now. I think Epic kept it on life support by still using demoscene composers like Siren (Alexander Brandon) and MCA (Michiel van den Bos) who both went on to do Deus Ex, but since then seems like chip musicians and tracker composers are mostly doing niche indie games.

It's always a blast when you play a AAA these days and hear something that still has a bit of that old vibe - one tune I always remember is Sam Hulick's Uncharted Worlds, which is the galaxy map song from Mass Effect. I think you could probably build it on OPL, SID, even AY chip and have it still sound great.

In 1993 I thought the OPL2 version sounded better and still do now.

But my broader point was that comparing this old game music to "real" guitar music kinda takes away from what it actually was for a lot of people listening to it - something different to and unique from mainstream rock/metal. It always made me a bit sad when these guys did interviews and talked about listening to ordinary rock bands, it kinda broke the spell that games were a special little place for people who were into computer-based art for its own sake.

It's amazing how much better all these sound to me in OPL2.

When CD-ROM soundtracks because the norm it really ruined a lot of game music for me, because all that chip music perhaps inspired by guitar and orchestral music just ended up being replaced with actual guitar and orchestral music, and then games just ended up sounding like movies and it's like what even is the point?

From my side I remember painstakingly transposing Led Zeppelin into an 8 bit tracker when I was a kid and being thrilled at how much more exciting the 3-channel square wave interpration sounded, and pretty much from that point on my guitar just became something to noodle out a riff prior to inputting to the computer.

Fifty Plus One kinda does that now: https://fiftyplusone.news/methodology

You might enjoy some of the projects here, including a presidential approval map: https://projects.gelliottmorris.com

Maps for elections generally don't come out till a few months beforehand because there isn't enough polling data to make a meaningful prediction.

I highly recommend G Elliott Morris' blog Strength in Numbers. He exists more in conversation with political science researchers and commercial polling professionals which makes his reporting feel a lot deeper and more interesting than the back of the envelope hot takes a bunch of other pundits try to sell as data journalism these days.

Strength in Numbers is very US politics centric, but Elliott also works with Mary Radcliffe on Fifty Plus One. That's a new hub for raw polling data (and averages) but they also do some broader polling roundup style stories that have a 538 feel.

David Nir of the Downballot is pretty good too if you are looking for information on the smaller races.

Outside of the SiN extended universe, Marist have a podcast called Poll Hub which is very light and fun and reminiscent of the cuddliest 538 podcasts before they started getting that weird contrarian podcast bro energy.

I've trialed a bunch of other sites since 538 went away and also checked in on the other alumni, but none of it outside of SiN-and-friends or the Marist quite hit for me.

538 had some decent years through its various sellout phases and imo hit its peak after Nate Silver left - he'd long since exposed himself more as a contrarian than a serious analyst and had become a real detriment to the brand.

It was definitely sad to lose 538 how we did, but G Elliott Morris has really stepped up to continue the spirit on his Strength in Numbers blog. It's the best data-driven US politics reporting out there right now imo. He also contributes to Fifty Plus One with Mary Radcliffe, and that's excellent too, reminiscent of the old 538 polling roundup stuff that went beyond just core US politics. Recently he started a podcast with David Nir of The Downballot, which is another solid resource for lower level races.

Thanks for posting this. I feel like for years we've been getting gaslit by the Markdown guys who inexplicably decided that stars should make text go italic instead of bold. I get it wrong every single time and then have to go back and look up a cheat sheet. It really isn't intuitive at all, and it also doesn't codify how we used to write before rich text entry boxes where available everywhere. Markdown reminds me more of all the custom wiki and forum markups that proliferated in the 2000s than any text-based conventions in use prior.

Sorry, that wasn't really what I was getting at.

The thing I find interesting with orientalism is that it has a mirror in chauvinism from the other direction, both sides reinforcing the idea that there is something special about the cultural norms of people from East Asia in particular. It's almost as if there is a deliberate effort to reify cultural differences in a way that feels counterproductive.

I think these forces are especially noticeable living as a migrant to this part of the world, in that you sometimes find people gushing over you for being able to use what is actually a pretty unremarkable set of utensils or occasionally shitting on you for not knowing an obscure bit of etiquette that locals rarely perform. Either way it's just another form of the "western people like this, Chinese people like that" discourse which at best is vapid and at worst straight-up racist. I don't think it really helps to build a common sense of humanity.

Anyway, I feel like this kind of article is representative of the problem, in that it serves to create anxiety that there is some secret etiquette that must be performed in order to not be seen as an uncultured barbarian. Again, I have no experience with Japan so maybe they really are just That Damn Serious about how they use their chopsticks, but I doubt it. At least for me it was quite reassuring to find that - outside of the folks who really did hold chauvinist and/or racist views - most people in China cared no more about how I ate than how anyone else ate, and that the range of what was socially acceptable eating for all people was wide enough to make it clear that these sorts of articles tend to be either deliberately divisive or out-of-touch.

I feel like a lot of this is culture and class specific. I can't speak for Japan, but in China there are at least as many different levels of chopstick-using skill as anywhere in the west. Kids and elderly who can't pick up a peanut or a cherry tomato, people who find it entirely unproblematic to stab a slippery dumpling, people who think it's stupid to waste time trying to get fried rice into your mouth with chopsticks and just grab a spoon instead, people who dredge their way through the hotpot to find the treat they're looking for...

I often get the sense that foreigners getting stressed about (or feeling pride in) how well they use chopsticks is a weird kind of orientalism. Because, like, who cares if someone shows up in a western restaurant and uses a spoon instead of knife to saw through something, or grabs a big hunk with a fork and takes a bite, leaving the rest on the fork? Maybe you wouldn't do it if you were having dinner with the queen, but any other context nobody cares. I'm sure parents still try to teach their kids to eat polite way, and maybe even feel a bit embarrassed if their kids show themselves to be less well-behaved than the neighbors', but that's a universal thing so, eh.

I have the same issue now. It's especially annoying when it happens while reading a "serious" publication like a newspaper or long form magazine. Whether it was because an AI wrote it or "real" writers have spent so much time reading AI slop they've picked up the same style is kinda by the by. It all reads to me like SEO, which was the slop template that LLMs took their inspiration from, apparently. It just flattens language into the most exhausting version of it, where you need to try to subconsciously blank out all the unnecessary flourishes and weird hype phrases to try figure out what actually is trying to be said. I guess humans who learn to ignore it might to do better in this brave new world, but it's definitely annoying that humans are being forced to adapt to machines instead of the other way around.

How do you do this in the modern era where websites demand a unique phone number for each account? I couldn't even set up one Discord account due to the phone number requirement, which at the time wouldn't accept numbers in the country I was living.

The power grid problems islands have is a really interesting topic. Just the other day I read an interview discussing Taiwan's energy situation[0] and even though I am familiar with the various factions and the surface level debate, it prompted me to think a bit deeper on the unique challenges islands have as marginalized geographic entities. I didn't grow up on an island so I'm not sure if people who do are more conscious of the precarity, but you'd think if they did then they would place even more emphasis on getting energy independence. It's one of those things that would be cool to study if I could go back in time and choose a different specialization...

[0] https://www.volts.wtf/p/taiwans-energy-dilemma

$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.

This kind of thing already existed for a long time, but not as a scam. The people selling these products were selling their ability as "tastemakers". They knew about all the various distributors who could provide "artisanal" products from around the world, they took the time to leaf through all the catalogs and find the best knick-knack that they felt would fit with the theme of their stall and do good business in their local market. And then on the day of the market they would chit-chat with the customers about the process.

The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the vendor didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.

This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene.

Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...

While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.

Eh, Aphex fans and IDM more broadly has always been pretentious AF. I think there's a kayfabe effect going on where both the artists and the fans lean so far into the earnestness of it all that it surely has to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I suspect that's part of the appeal for some folks, the delight in being obtuse.

It doesn't bother me too much. Many indie scenes have this sort of self-consciously avant garde sub-movement - theater, dance, fashion, games...

While I find 99% of braindance to be aggressively unlistenable and/or thoroughly tedious, the 1% that isn't tends to be truly great. Imo the best thing that ever happened to this genre was digital record stores, because casual fans can skip over all the limited edition vinyls and albums full of abstract noodling and just pick up the bangers.

From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.

Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.

I can't speak for this one, but I've stayed in a bunch of these over the years and they're exactly as quoted in the article - better than a hostel, worse than a hotel. Because the rate is higher than a hostel, it prices out the bottom rung crowd, and because the architecture explicitly prioritizes privacy over socialization, the visitors tend to be more respectful of one another. As such, it's quiet and clean enough, although obviously if you are sleeping next to a bunch of other people you may hear some snoring, farts, sleeptalking etc.

Some of these are better sound-proofed than others. Some even have little TVs or radios inside, but I've never found that worse than traffic or construction noise if you're anyway in the city. There's always earplugs.

Shared bathrooms suck, especially if you need to be out during "rush hour" when everyone else also needs to be out, but for a saving of $100+ per night there's plenty of people who would gladly accept holding their pee for a few minutes and/or getting into an already-steamed-up and damp shower cubicle. Most people gotta work 4 hours to make that kind of money back.

What platform are you on? I use Ungoogled Chromium on desktop (uBlock Origin still works if you install it from GitHub) and Cromite on mobile (some AdBlock built-in), mainly because both of these just give you a clean and compatible browser without any frills. I noped out of Firefox back whenever it was that they started prompting me to make an account to sync every time I opened it, but I still use LibreWolf at work to test compatibility.

I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.

I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.

There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.

There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.

I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.

The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.

I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.

So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.

I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.

Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.

I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.

AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.

I wonder if it depends what country you are in. I only notice it occasionally when the video won't play in FreeTube or PipePipe (which always has the pause at the start since the last few months) and I'm forced to open an incognito browser tab to watch, and then I realize just how many ads other people are being subjected to before they can even watch the video.

This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.

Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.

I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.

But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.

I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.

The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to watch the video they actually wanted to watch while interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen. This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.

I see it as a neat way for nerds to nerd out about nerd stuff in an experiential way. Like, this is not going to headline a big time rave or festival or anything, but in a community of people who like math or programming or science, sure, why not introduce this kind of performance as another little celebration of their hobby?

Years ago I went to a sci-fi convention for the first time, because I had moved to a new town and didn't know anyone, and I like sci-fi. I realized when I was there that despite me growing up reading Hugo and Nebula award winners, despite watching pretty much every sci-fi show on TV, despite being a full-time computer nerd, the folks who go to sci-fi conventions are a whole nother subculture again. They have their own heroes, their own in-jokes, their own jargon... and even their own form of music! It's made by people in the community for the community and it misses the point to judge it by "objective" standards from the outside, because it's not about trying to make "interesting music" or write the best song of all time. The music made in that context is not being made as an end in itself, or even as the focus of the event, it's just a mechanism to enable a quirky subculture to hang out and bond in a way that's fun for them. I see this kind of live coded music as fulfilling a similar role in a different subculture. Maybe it's not for you, but that's fine.

Basically, this. My first tech job was IT support at the time and ordinary people using their computers for actual work liked them too. I remember the dog/puppy being particular popular. At worst the assistants were seen as charmingly naff, not actively hostile. They were simple for power users to disable and this weird retroactive hatred for them feels more like some kind of nerd bitterness over the fact that normies ever started using computers in the first place. There was plenty of reason to be critical of Microsoft in those days that wasn't their office assistant.

This comment is so divorced from reality on the ground in Taiwan that it's hard to respond to. Certainly, someone can look at cherry-picked pieces of legislature or historical documents and imagine that they represent some kind of intrinsic truth, but in reality it is simply not the case that Taiwanese people understand themselves as locked in some kind of ongoing civil war with the CCP. The culture has long since moved on from 1940s era politics that even at the time were imported by a minority group from the mainland.