flâneur

Joey Yap

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on the atlas — 14

highlights — 34

  • “There’s a narcissism that reemerges in the AI dream that we are going to prove that everything we thought was distinctively human can actually be accomplished by machines and accomplished better,” Judith Butler, founding director of the critical-theory program at UC Berkeley, told me, helping parse the ideas at play. “Or that human potential — that’s the fascist idea — human potential is more fully actualized with AI than without it.” The AI dream is “governed by the perfectibility thesis, and that’s where we see a fascist form of the human.” There’s a technological takeover, a fleeing from t…
    ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender
  • Bender defined that dull-sounding word dehumanization as “the cognitive state of failing to perceive another human as fully human … and the experience of being subjected to those acts that express a lack of perception of one’s humanity.” She then spoke at length about the problems of the computational metaphor, one of the most important metaphors in all of science: the idea that the human brain is a computer, and a computer is a human brain. This notion, she said, quoting Alexis T. Baria and Keith Cross’s 2021 paper, affords “the human mind less complexity than is owed, and the computer more w…
    ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender
  • People saying, ‘Well, people are just stochastic parrots,’” she said. “People want to believe so badly that these language models are actually intelligent that they’re willing to take themselves as a point of reference and devalue that to match what the language model can do.”
    ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender
  • How should we process this? Bender offered two options. “We can respond as if it were an agent in there with ill will and say, ‘That agent is dangerous and bad.’ That’s the Terminator fantasy version of this, right?” That is, we can take the bot at face value. Then there’s option two: “We could say, ‘Hey, look, this is technology that really encourages people to interpret it as if there were an agent in there with ideas and thoughts and credibility and stuff like that.’” Why is the tech designed like this? Why try to make users believe the bot has intention, that it’s like us?
    ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender
  • The individual consciousness of historical belonging in what Miyazaki displays as a layered look at how Horikoshi Jiro's passion for flight was captured by capital-flow and militarism" (Asia-Pacific Journal) is subtly counterpointed by this emotional ambivalence towards the position of the intellectuals in times of historical turmoil. A symbolical return to The Grave of the Fireflies (director: Takahata Isao, the double-pack release with My Neighbor Totoro, director: Miyazaki Hayao, from 1988), The Wind Rises is both an appeal to accept war as an unavoidable and to a certain degree necessary e…
    "May the wind be with you!" the beauty of commitment and the inevitability of evil in the wind rises | Romanian Economic and Business Review | Maria Grajdian
  • From this perspective, the anime work The Wind Rises becomes a meditation on life and death on the background of the emerging and gradually unfolding Pacific War, and the circumstances individuals living in that era were facing.
    "May the wind be with you!" the beauty of commitment and the inevitability of evil in the wind rises | Romanian Economic and Business Review | Maria Grajdian
  • Though it paints the reality of the lurking war, the anime movie The Wind Rises is neither an anti-war manifesto nor a pro-war revisionist re-writing of history. I would go as far as to state that it is not even a movie about war, equally as the anime movie The Grave of the Fireflies (director: Takahata Isao) from 1988 wasn't about war, as well. Back then, in 1988, when Takahata Isao's anime movie The Grave of the Fireflies was simultaneously released with Miyazaki Hayao's My Neighbour Totoro in April 1988, it simply depicted the life--and the death--of two war-orphans at the end of the Pacifi…
    "May the wind be with you!" the beauty of commitment and the inevitability of evil in the wind rises | Romanian Economic and Business Review | Maria Grajdian
  • Finishing this game made me rethink what I want from mysteries. If I’m ever writing one, I don’t have to craft some obscure puzzle to amaze my readers. Instead, I should ask what makes a mystery mysterious to me: “What unsettles me? What makes me curious? Why should I care about solving this?” Mysteries, in the end, are exciting stories about shining light on some unknown. Whether the light is from science, magic10, or something else altogether, it should make things be even more riveting. The fetishism of science has made mystery writers forget why readers love to read their stories. We want …
    星影の館殺人事件 (Hoshikage no Yakata Satsujin Jiken): A Curious and Curiouser Free Occult Mystery Game | Minidoshima
  • but my point here is that constructing a larger idea of authorship should be something personal. it should be a way to apply a deeper psychological lens onto a game in order to find your own way into it as a work of art that says something larger about the world. a video game is not a machine that gives you x outputs of fun or y outputs of graphical detail - it's a work of art that a human being made. escaping this language of the market can help redeem the creative value of the entire medium as something both personal and culturally valuable rather than mere commodities and products of a time…
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • and that's the problem when so much of what holds cultural value is left up to shifts in the market. the new normal can very quickly transform into something else, leaving lots of people forever chasing a vanishing zeitgeist. there's always a new situation, always a new context, always a new explanation for how people entering the space are where they are. that's what these massive shifts in the market creates. but without a doubt, the people with the most money and power (i.e. the publishers, platform owners and CEOs) will be the ones who get out and move on just fine. and then a bunch of oth…
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • however there is also an (i'd argue) even bigger danger here: in a landscape where so many niche indie developers are making moves to sell their work, the kind of audience of children and teenagers that flocked to the flash games and free web games that drove the earlier indie boom will not be able to engage with this culture at large anymore because of its price tag. as such, they'll be instead sucked into the ecosystem of free-to-play games and 'UGC' platforms like Roblox owned by very large corporate entities. this could effectively destroy the influence and social power that games like Yum…
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • the way the indie space was prepping itself for primetime meant shaving off its own edges in an increasingly merciless manner in order to achieve correct respectability and palatability to the mainstream. if this sounds really at odds with the often highly personal source of inspiration Blow described games from the indie space as coming from, that's because it was. but it felt that whenever this crowd was hit with anything too weird and freaky for them that took this personal game mantra too seriously, they instantly would launch into "finish your game please" mode and hit people with treatis…
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • the nature of neoliberal capitalism is that any stability or safety net a centralized body might provide is replaced by an unceasing need for creative destruction via 'innovation'. staying afloat and just existing in a space where an increasing social burden is being left to the free market via private platforms with interests that broadly don't align with their users means the default expectation placed on basically everyone is to be (to borrow a phrase i like from David Kanaga from a video presentation we did on neoliberalism) a speedily transmogrifying entrepreneur of the self. of course th…
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • what i'm saying is: how do you know people making some random ass weird art games at little to no cost are always going to be engaging in commercial suicide when compared to the the frankly unsustainable production costs and labor practices behind so many AAA games now?
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • but if we do want to make an argument for video games as a serious form of art, or culture, or whatever else... then this conversation still has to be had. particularly when it comes to games made on the margins, which often receive negative attention and very little support, if they receive any at all. especially in the climate of an increasingly intense devaluation of artists and art that is happening across all creative industries lately. video games' proximity to tech, in particular, adds extra intensity to the STEM-addled tech folks who are not exactly literate in art history setting the …
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • and it's at some point after meeting about ten different big industry people who inexplicably seemed to want to talk to me when i realized that, rather than being fundamentally at odds with the hyper-libertarian entrepreneurial side, the communal utopian spirit of indie games was constantly in dialogue with that side. one simply could not function without the other. people needed genuine creativity and communal support, but they also needed to pay the bills and get visibility.
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • but, for me, this underlined the point that these games perhaps weren't, in a sense, actually about what they were about. they were containers signifying the capability of larger meaning that could theoretically exist. they were meaning machines capable of eliciting empathy (a rhetoric that got even more intense later on in the 2010's around VR), but exactly how that empathy manifested itself was a placeholder.
    The California Problem | \\...........//
  • so i think in effect sincerity is really this important relationship between us, language, and the objects we choose to study. it is a gaze, an eye on the things we find most interesting and insightful. when that relationship crumbles do we find ourselves being hostile and stuff. and we can't really demand ourselves and the works to be sincere -- it's not only authoritarian but also impossible. no one can be sincere at will.
    sincerity, a strange word | highimpactsex
  • We are getting further away from the point but I hope it is clear that there is little similarity between the Wild West and modern capitalism, with respect to anything resembling mass production or mass consumption which constitute the latter. Instead, we’re making up fictional evil monopolies to make unsubtle, snide remarks at, as if they were real criticisms made against real historical actors. There is no connection I see, or at least not one where the stated moral concern against one reasonably applies to the other
    Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum | Bones of Contention
  • Kane et al. (2016) recruited and assessed 545 undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG).
    Quantifying streams of thought during cognitive task performance using sequence analysis | Behavioral Research Methods | Anthony Zanesco
  • OM-based sequence analysis might be used to examine the links between ongoing thought and dynamic patterns in time series of categorical brain states identified in time-varying functional magnetic resonance imaging data (i.e., dynamic functional connectivity; Lurie et al., 2020), or to analyze more complex sequences of topographically defined brain electric microstates
    Quantifying streams of thought during cognitive task performance using sequence analysis | Behavioral Research Methods | Anthony Zanesco
  • One limitation of dissimilarity-based sequence analyses and clustering are the many possible choices for quantifying sequence dissimilarity. For dissimilarity based on edit distances, such as optimal matching (OM), there is also the challenge of specifying appropriate indel and substitution costs, which determines how sequences are matched, and can influence sequence dissimilarity by emphasizing certain properties of the data over others
    Quantifying streams of thought during cognitive task performance using sequence analysis | Behavioral Research Methods | Anthony Zanesco
  • It is clear to me that researchers ought to consider not only whether individuals experience spontaneous, deliberate, or task-unrelated thoughts, but also the content and qualities of those thoughts, and the kinds of cognitive states that precede and follow.
    Quantifying streams of thought during cognitive task performance using sequence analysis | Behavioral Research Methods | Anthony Zanesco
  • we often dunk on college students, especially at schools like mit, for abandoning their intellectual interests and selling out to a lucrative industry position. what is often ignored in these discussions is that, in most cases, the person selling out never truly believed they could succeed to begin with, because they never had a chance to properly explore their original field and make real progress. it’s only natural for someone like that to convince themselves they’re unable to accomplish anything in their field of interest and to give up, and that to me is the greatest tragedy of modern univ…
    i wish we’d grown up on the same advice - by vincent huang
  • on one hand, it’s unfair that organizations like 0xparc and hacklodge are so small, that people with genuine interest in the subject aren’t able to do good work because they don’t know the right people or don’t come from the right background. in a previous post i wrote about how an mit.nano class made me feel optimistic about climate change for the first time in my life, and it’s similarly unfair how only 25 people get to take that class each year, how more people can’t get access to that incredible feeling
    i wish we’d grown up on the same advice - by vincent huang
  • It doesn’t matter if your games are good or not. It doesn’t matter if you have good taste or not. Art is bullshit; all this is just a fun distraction while we’re waiting to die.
    How To Make Good Small Games | Far Away Times
  • Nonetheless , committed environmentalists will find the conclusion anticlimatic due to its endorsement of some kind of compromise between the forces of ag gressive growth, the environment, and the spiritual realm. Such compromi se might usher in a mere truce that barely undermines the human putsch, even as it sounds the death knell of the ecosystem and the spiritual unive rse as they had existed. After all, the film concludes with Shishigami, the supreme deity of the innermost natural sanctuary as yet unconquered by human advances, being decapitated by gunfire, an explosive dismemberm ent warn…
    Anime and Historical Inversion in Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke | Japan Studies Review | John Tucker
  • ally omi nous for any real affirmation of environmentalism is Ashitaka’s decision to remain within the Yamato body politic rat her than return to his Emishi village. One might object that Ashitaka had earlier declared himself “dead” to his village, a death encoded ritually via his cutting off his hair. Mutually, the village had deemed him dead, recognizing his self-imposed exile . That notwithstanding Ashitaka’s return to Emishi life, and the close communion with nature it embodied, would have sent a more powerful messag e to viewers than does his decision to become a part of Lady Eboshi’ s vi…
    Anime and Historical Inversion in Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke | Japan Studies Review | John Tucker
  • With Ashitaka, Miyazaki subverts the Yamato-takeru legend by inverting most of the major twists in it so as to glorify the m odel of selfless service to one’s community, humanity, the spirits, and the envi ronment via harmonious life with all. Rather than attempting to dominate or subjugate the Yamato forces or the deities of nature, Ashitaka, an Emishi , works with them assisting in the transformation needed for the eventual re construction of human society
    Anime and Historical Inversion in Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke | Japan Studies Review | John Tucker
  • Princess Mononoke , as a jidaigeki anime, however, reject s “nostalgia” in favor of a per ception of the present as a kind of “science fiction” in which some of the pla yers, specifically those viewing the film, still have a chance to eng age their present in light of a reenvisioned past. Though “lavish images of specific generational pasts” are indeed offered, Princess Mononoke does not encourage evasion of the present for the past so much as activi sm in the present for the future.
    Anime and Historical Inversion in Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke | Japan Studies Review | John Tucker
  • it is still fair to discuss how Mononoke ’s openness – its moral complexity and lack of narrative conclusivity – potentially promotes the audience to actively interpret and act upon the themes of the film. Hall’s discussion of encoding and decoding (and much of cultural studies of media today) draws upon the post-structuralist perspective on the process of signification, forwarded by scholars like R. Barthes (1974) and U. Eco (1989). Then, the lack of empirical engage - ment with media audiences in this study is, at least partially, offset by the acknowledgment that certain textual elements mo…
    Princess Mononoke and beyond: New nature narratives for children | Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture | Benjamin Thevenin
  • this study does not intend to suggest that these ‘ideal’ readings are universal. Without engaging in the type of cultural studies of media audiences pioneered by Hoggart, Hall and others, this study is necessarily limited to a discussion of potential meaning- making processes, facilitated by certain textual elements, with the caveat that audiences (and in this case, young audiences) are influenced by a number and variety of textual and contextual factors in their readings of and responses to any text
    Princess Mononoke and beyond: New nature narratives for children | Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture | Benjamin Thevenin
  • Interestingly, the film’s ending even avoids another typicality of melodrama: heterosexual union as a metaphor for ideo - logical reconciliation. While San and Ashitaka’s growing love for one another is evident, they decide to live apart. In an interview about the film, Miyazaki discussed this lack of resolution, saying ‘I gave up on making a happy ending in the true sense a long time ago. I can go no further than the ending in which the lead character gets over one issue for the time being’
    Princess Mononoke and beyond: New nature narratives for children | Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture | Benjamin Thevenin
  • Finally, the film’s most significant deviation from convention is the ambiguity it allows in its communication of ‘revolutionary moralism’. While Mononoke ’s conclusion offers a hesitant resolution (Ashitaka, San and Eboshi’s lives are spared and the forest is restored), the greater conflict between industry and nature is left unresolved.
    Princess Mononoke and beyond: New nature narratives for children | Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture | Benjamin Thevenin