1

A few days ago I started watching "Hirogaru Sky! Precure", after seeing someone post a clip from it and being like "its funny how when they say the word white they instead say hwhite". I looked at the clip and was like yeah they do say "hwhite", after which I thought, "hey isn't this the magical girl anime where they have a magical boy?" I got curious, and after confirming that with some random wiki I found, I went and decided to watch a bit of it.

I pretty quickly learned how the show works, it's extremely formulaic. Each episode is 24 minutes long, but out of those 24 minutes probably at least maybe like 6 minutes, or one quarter, is spent on fully copy pasted scenes which are basically fully the same between episodes. The obvious ones are the intro and outro (which is pretty normal for anime), but there are also minutes long transformation sequences where the heroes transform from ordinary people into magical girl heroes by doing a dance while saying some random fancy words while a lot of flashy effects happen in the background. Each* episode also has a monster, that even has the same name every time even though its a different monster every time. Oh also the villain creating the monster has a copy pasted effect. And each of the main heroes has a spell that has a copy pasted effect when they use their special "move".

None of this is actually very important, I am just trying to say that the creators might be trying to go more for quantity over quality. Which is probably pretty obvious also because they are making literally one episode each week? And I do mean each week, I am looking this up right now and apparently the show has been running from 2004 and there have been 1067 episodes during that time, which according to my vibes based calculations means they missed maybe like 3 weeks on average each year. It might also be obvious from the fact that it's target demographics is basically preschool children.

Anyways what I am trying to say that this is slop right? Its kinda mindless, its the same over and over. Oh, but that first day I did watch 9 episodes of it in a row. From a big part it was because I really wanted to see the magical boy show up. But I also can't deny that I enjoy it. I continued watching it the next day, even after I saw the magical boy show up, after all. I think I saw like 15 episodes now (so no spoilers please, haha), and I want to see more. I've been feeling kind of down, hopeless, and without motivation for quite a long time, and the sort of naive positivity in the show at least sort of makes me a bit optimistic, at least very temporarily. And it also makes me almost (or not almost) cry.

At the same time I feel very guilty of liking it. And I've been thinking really hard about why.

The fact that it's kinda dumb is definitely a part of it, but it can't really bother me that much considering how many hours of my life I have wasted playing videogames mindlessly, or watching/listening to Youtube videos which might be even dumber, as an example I probably watched more than 1000 episodes of Northernlion playing the Binding of Isaac. It's kinda just inevitable that people waste a lot of their time, and there's nothing wrong with that really right. Well, when I was trying to fall asleep but instead kept on pondering my thoughts about this I did decide to go talk with my room-mate, which resulted in us talking about this topic, and life in general until like 2 am, I am really thankful that he's the kind of person who I can do that with. Our discussion didn't really come up with a concrete conclusion, we just kinda were like, "yeah life kinda sucks but it's better to not dwell on that, and oh yeah you probably actually kind of need to consume some lower quality media for the higher quality more thinky media to actually hit more" and then I went to sleep.

The second and I think bigger part is that it's literally made for like 8 year old girls. Uhhh, and there's kind of no way around that I think? Like that just feels embarrassing to watch for me. For context, I am kinda basically a guy even tho I am also probably more feminine than most (maybe it'd be fairer to myself to say that I am nonbinary, but you know, if you are nonbinary in a forest where no one can see you are you really nonbinary? yes? yes. but also I am just perceived as just a guy by most people so lets keep it simple.), it still feels basically illegal to like something like this as an adult guy. When I examine this more I do think it definitely shouldn't feel like that. If someone tells me they like Pokemon I don't really find it weird at all, even though it's theoretically made for preschool boys. Or maybe more similar is what I am guessing is My Little Pony, which I never watched, but which a lot of guys on the internet liked pretty visibly. I even met someone who I really respected who told me that he liked the show. And I did feel a bit iffy about that, but also when actually thinking at least somewhat critically I saw no problem with. I guess the same is for Precure. If I think about it, I just feel it's sort of weird, but also just kinda fine. I thought about how cool it'd be to make a cosplay of Cure Wing (the magical boy in the show), I've been getting into sewing, and I do think it might not be that difficult to make. And then I think how I could like be silly and try do some of those dances from the show in that cosplay. But then I immediately think how it's too much. And how embarrassing is that I am even thinking about that. I just don't really know.

2

Just a few hours before writing this post I saw a video by Jeffiot called Peak Art, Peak Slop. I'd recommend watching it, it's sort of related to what I wrote about here, but not really. Very, very, oversimplified it tries to somehow explain why something like Twin Peaks might be better than a Mr Beast video. It basically says that all the edges of Mr Beast videos are perfectly sanded off to make it as easy to digest as possible, which they succeed at very well, but it to really enjoy given closer examination, and so when you watch one you don't even really remember what you watched. While something like Twin Peaks breaks a lot of conventions that make things easy to watch, but which also makes it quite memorable. I do take some slight issue with that -- for example, because I can kind of think of what happens in some Mr Beast videos, for example I think in one he recreates Squid Game, though thinking about it I am not really sure if I even actually saw that video. And for example because I did watch all of Twin Peaks, but also can't really remember all that much that happens in it, though again when in the video Jeffiot mentions some of the things I did think to myself yeah I sort of remember that.

I am definitely taking this a bit too literally and sort of just wanted to try be a bit funny here. In reality I think it's just true that something like Twin Peaks makes you think more, and even though it's made in a way that isn't the easiest to watch, thinking about it is really interesting and makes it memorable. There definitely are parts I can think of immediately since they were so so so memorable -- for example episode 8 of season 3 -- even if I don't fully remember the specifics.

Which finally gets me to my point. Precure made me think a lot too. And I sort of remember what's happening in it, and even if I forget the specifics, I don't really think I am ever completely forgetting that I watched it. So I think after all this it might not really be slop, even though it definitely is a bit low quality, and a bit stupid, and made in a way to be easy to watch. It's sort of in a weird way where the context of me not really being the target audience (I think? like maybe I am being unfair here considering they did decide to have a magical boy after making the 900 episodes or whatever before it so maybe they wanted to expand the audience? I have no idea honestly) makes it be more interesting then it otherwise might be? I think? Like while it's definitely made to be easy to watch I did also describe why watching it makes me feel pretty guilty, so that kind of makes it not that easy to watch, right? Or maybe I am just making stuff up to make myself feel better about watching it.

Ok, this is besides the point but I do want to defend Precure (or at least the 15 episodes I watched, I guess I can't vouch for the 1050 others or however many there are) a bit more. I do still think it's better than something like Mr Beast, since it at least has a genuinely positive message and tries to make people be kind and think about what other people feel, which has to be worth at least something right? Meanwhile Mr Beast instead does basically the most parasocial things imaginable, I guess on the very surface he's giving out money, but like he's using the money that to bribe people to embarrass themselves, or even sometimes harm themselves. So I am trying to say that while both are probably slop, some slop is still better than other slop. Shrug.

I am not really sure which group to put this in? Maybe this should be somewhere else instead? Probably ~anime? Or ~tv? ~life? ~lgbt? Feel free to move this elsewhere, I don't really know.

A loss
A problem
A struggle
An emotion
Something difficult
Something perplexing
Something that takes a lot of effort
Something that doesn't fit neatly into an easy description

What are you working through, and how is it going?

Personally, I find RPGs to be at their best when they are reasonably short - somewhere between 5 and 20 hours. Games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound seem to come to mind. For more open-ended experiences like Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim I find that I generally lose interest after somewhere between 30-50 hours regardless of how addictive the gameplay is.

I haven't played tabletop RPGs so I don't have anything to say about them, but please feel free to chime in with them as well.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

So here's a dilemma I'm not sure what to do about. It's really minor, and in the long run who cares, but here's the thing:

Today a link was posted whose link is a URL in Japanese katakana characters. Since DNS only supports ASCII characters, those URLs get encoded as punycode. So, the site's URL gets translated from https://マリウス.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ into https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/.

This is a hacky solution from 20 years ago. It works, but nowadays browsers automatically translate "マリウス" into "xn--gckvb8fzb" transparently, so you never really see the "xn--gckvb8fzb". Unfortunately, Tildes' tag system is one of the parts of the site that only accepts roman characters, so there's no way to tag something with like source.マリウス.

So what do we do here? Tagging something with source.xn_gckvb8fzb is obviously not ideal.

In this case, Japanese in particular has a neat and tidy solution. Romanji. Every katakana character is a syllable, and each syllable has another character or pair or characters using English glyphs. So, マ, リ, ウ, ス is: Ma, Ri, U, Su, or "mariusu", the Japanese pronunciation of the Roman name Marius.

So, if we want to transliterate the word phonetically (ie: in Japanese at least, converting the katakana glyphs directly into their romanji equivalents), we should tag it source.mariusu, or if we want to translate it, it should be source.marius.

A lot of other languages with non-roman letters are not going to be as clean since they don't have a clear transliteration of their character set into ASCII, but in the case of Japanese, I dunno, it seems like it's begging to be converted into romanji. I really just don't know though. It's a dilly of a pickle.

ANYTHING must be better than linking to source.xn_gckvb8fzb since that's literally encoded gibberish not meant to be read by humans. Not quite sure what the alternative should be though.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

This is the twelfth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Our next book will be Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky at the end of April.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself. Also, this month will be slightly different. I have been exceptionally busy and didn't finish the book this time. I am hoping that you all who did read it will come up with interesting questions in addition to your comments/ reviews.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

(I wasn't sure if I should post this in ~talk or ~tech. I went with ~talk because I feel like I'm about to spend a whole lot of this post rambling. Also, be warned: This is a long post.)

A summary of this post: My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.

First of all, hi everyone. I don't post here as often as I maybe would like to. Randomly chiming in with a big ol' post like this a bit daunting. Participating in an online community isn't a muscle I flex very often nowadays, which is actually relevant to what I'm about to talk about.

Lately for a long fucking time now I've just been tired of the direction in which the internet, specifically the "corporate web", has been heading. This all started when I first joined Tildes; around that time was when the big Reddit API fiasco happened, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and it was not long after when AI started to become A Big Thing. If you had asked me why these things had left a bad taste in my mouth back then, I wouldn't have been able to respond with anything articulate, just "big tech bad".

In the three years that have passed, I've developed enough of an opinion and have gone through enough soul searching to give a more concrete answer to why I don't like how things are going:

• Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them
• I am tired of finding figurative AI hairs in my figurative sandwich
• Every company wants infinite growth at the expense of everything that made that company good, if it was ever good
• It's really hard to find a third space on the internet these days
• Almost nobody I know cares about any of this

Among privacy-conscious folks and small internet communities like Tildes, none of the above are particularly novel thoughts. And yet I think about all of this frequently enough that I felt the need to post a topic here for discussion. In this post, I'm going to get on my little soapbox, recount how I got to this mind space, and attempt to explain why I find all of this both endlessly tiring and constantly present in my mind.

Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)

In the past few years I've taken the steps realistic for me in order to protect my online privacy. Why? Well, I hate being advertised to. I hate the idea of surveillance-as-a-service. I'm fortunate enough to be able to just pay for, or configure/self-host, things that do the thing they're supposed to do without knowing that I'm a 512 year old nonbinary alien from like, Nova Arrakis Prime the 2nd, Esq. or something (I am not that old, that is not how I identify, and I'm obviously not from there). I just don't buy the idea that everybody on the internet is a consumer who needs to accept this compromise in order to participate. Again, this might not be novel for a lot of you reading.

For me this has involved switching away from Gmail as an email provider, ditching Windows for Linux everywhere, cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription, deleting Facebook/most Meta stuff, browsing behind a VPN, etc. Some things I'm working on going further on; some things, like deleting Instagram, I don't want to do because that platform is how I connect with a lot of my friends. Essentially I've done what's realistic for me.

All of this has worked out fine for me. My quality of life has not measurably changed as a result, other than maybe the fact that it's slightly inconvenient to open up a new browser session and log in to my otherwise-abandoned Google account just to interact with a random Google Sheet someone sent me.

The first bit of mental friction stems from discussions I've had with my partner on this topic. She's also privacy-minded, and so isn't against the idea of taking very similar actions. But she's not in a place where she can just do so as easily as I did, either because it's massively inconvenient for her (all of her data is holed up in Google services), would require a very large mindset/workflow shift (She is not technical enough to switch to Linux without a ton of friction, for example), or would damage her relationships (It's completely unrealistic to get everybody she knows to switch to Signal tomorrow - hell, she doesn't even want to do it herself to message me). I want to be very clear that none of this is inherently bad or a stain on her character or whatnot. My point is that privacy looks different for everybody, especially over time.

Extrapolate that friction out to people who aren't as close to me though, and it feels somewhat like dying by a thousand cuts. Not in the sense of mental anguish, just general fatigue. Over 50% of my communication with my good friends takes the form of them sending me memes on Instagram. I react and reply because I'm not just going to ghost them because of muh privacy. But there's that like 1% of my brain that goes "yeah I wish you wouldn't do that". I have not bothered to ask them to stop, because I don't (yet) care to proselytize to them in the name of privacy at the risk of shutting down what is effectively one of their love languages.

The thing is, they either aren't aware of the degree of data collection going on on every major internet platform, or they don't care. I do not believe myself in the slightest to be superior to them because of this. I don't fault them for either, and I, again, don't care to intervene because I don't want to be the person that gatekeeps the entire internet from them in the name of rebelling against big corpo.

So yes, I would say the majority of my friends are not as opinionated on this as I am. Because of this, I sometimes feel I'm a little crazy whenever I propose to my partner the idea of self-hosting our own file storage, or when I happen to say "Yeah, I try not to use Google Maps really. Why? Oh, I just don't want them to know where I've been". But then I talk with those of my friends who share this mindset, or browse online communities which do, and I feel normal again. And then I bounce between these circles, and I feel, I dunno, weird.

Interlude: The AI bubble and my pride as a software engineer

Frankly, I don't know how to feel about AI. This is compounded by the fact that I am a software engineer both by trade and as a hobby.

As a cultural phenomenon, I am pretty sick of it. I cannot stand AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, AI-generated whatever. I also cannot stand ads about AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, or AI-generated whatever. The last time I was spoonfed information about a topic to a remotely comparable degree was back when crypto/NFTs were the monster of the week. This round of industry hype has felt orders of magnitude more prevalent and exhausting.

As a software development tool, it's... fine. I was pretty against AI-assisted coding at first, but after having learned how to properly utilize it (whatever "properly" means), I've found it pretty helpful as of late. I'll usually hand-write the code and patterns I want the LLM to use, tell it "ok, now do this everywhere", approve/reject its output, and it gets a lot right with an acceptable amount of post-fact correction from me. It's also been useful as a learning tool: These past few months I've been working on a project that involves data mining/parsing a proprietary encryption/encoding format for a reasonably popular video game. I was not comfortable working with binary formats to this extent before, but after several back and forths with Claude and an earnest effort to understand just what the fuck it was writing to my codebase, I feel somewhat more knowledgeable now.

The tension I've had to balance given my above stance: I work at an AI startup.

Everyone around me is AI-pilled out the wazoo. This isn't meant to be an insult. They're all great people whom I get along great with, and I like my company/don't hate our vision enough to jump ship (inhales copium). It's just that I constantly have to deal with stuff like:

• Vibecoded PRs, which I have the wherewithal to push back on when appropriate, but in so doing must balance maintainability vs. urgency (and all that other pragmatism crap that comes with being a software engineer)
• AI-flavored communications - I do a mean ChatGPT impression. "That's an excellent observation. The tension you're feeling isn't imagined. It's real. If you want, I can break down the reasons why people tend to pour the cereal before the milk—just say the word."
• Building the meta-inference layer through a combination of carefully curated ground truths, a robust evaluation pipeline, and a multi-step, quantized agent selection algorithm that's resilient to both external disturbances and continuous platform evolution (this is basically a real sentence I had to read in an engineering strategy document someone put out)

And so, similar to the privacy dilemma I spoke about earlier, I find myself constantly doing mental gymnastics while working here. I am one of a few cynics in a room full of zealots (Again, I'm not trying to paint myself as some pariah here - I'm in this situation by choice, I'm just trying to note the juxtaposition). It would be easier if I just flat out hated the idea of AI to its core - I could just leave and choose not to engage with AI anything - but no, I use it, and I find it useful. In fact I enjoy applying software engineering principles to AI, because it's an interesting set of problems to wrangle.

Again, death by a thousand cuts. Firstly, I hate the prevalence of AI in mainstream culture, and I hate how it's being pushed as a panacea in my industry. Secondly, I don't hate AI as a tool. Thirdly, I'm surrounded by the first thing. Fourth: I have to explain my job to my friends and family. Doing so usually results in them asking me surface-level questions about AI (which I don't mind entertaining), them relaying how AI is god/the devil because it made them look like a Disney character (which I am tired of dealing with), or them asking me what my opinion on AI is (if I were to give them the whole story, it would be this entire post, so I just go "eh, it's fine").

My point with this section: I feel I am constantly doing mental gymnastics to justify the attitude I have towards AI. My stance is somewhat neutral. I read a blog post absolutely glazing it, I roll my eyes. I read a blog post absolutely trashing it, I roll my eyes. I think about AI, I roll my eyes. It's all just so tiring.

And also, as is evident by now, I have an Opinion about all of this. Am I crazy? Wouldn't it be a lot easier if I could just roll over and accept AI for what it is?

Turbo capitalism has fucked up how I navigate internet communities (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)

The most recent development that's caused me to think about the topics presented in this post is Discord's recent rollout of its identity verification system. There has been plenty of discourse on this topic as of late, so I won't go on about too long about it here.

I view this motion by Discord as the next step in the enshittification of that platform. Given my views I've shared on surveillance capitalism as well as AI's effects on the industry and the garbage shoveled into the world by its most annoying proponents, you won't be surprised that my reaction to this news is negative, and I am currently deciding on whether or not to divest myself from Discord completely.

This decision is a small dilemma for me. On the one hand, muh privacy. On the other hand, I am part of a server centered around that one video game for which I'm working on that side project, and leaving the platform means severely reducing my participation in that community, because there's no way in hell they're moving that server off Discord. I don't know which way I'm going to go. This is also the same dilemma that occurred when I decided to partially divest myself from Meta and the like: Do I care about my relationships with my friends/family more than I care about muh privacy? (Yes).

(I feel like I'm finally getting to the point of my own post here...)

I'm very tired of the fact that these small dilemmas and points of contention have been popping up for me fairly consistently over the past few years. If we all just held hands and prayed I'd have it my way, I wouldn't have to choose between being an outsider in X community and *~\muh privacy~*, and I'd be 6'3" and jacked. But the way the corporate web is developing towards the endless rat race of turbo enshittification, I feel the rate at which I'm going to have to make these kinds of choices is going to be as consistent as it is now, or it's going to go up. Probably until I die.

Epilogue: The side project I was working on

I mentioned I was working on a video game side project. I feel it encapsulates the gripes I describe within this post pretty well, because it contains the following elements:

• Parsing binary data of a proprietary encoding/encryption format (I previously didn't know shit about how to do this, so I used AI to help me do it/learn more about the topic)
• A website which acts as a game database/search tool for in-game entities (I wanted to contribute to a community I'm currently deciding whether or not to somewhat isolate myself from)
• A Discord bot as an alternative method of interacting with the application/a way to submit drop table information, all of which must be crowd-sourced (Discord Bad. I figured I'd just stand up an authenticated REST API and let others do a Discord integration if they want, but still, I wish I wasn't about to force myself to cut this out of my roadmap.)

If you managed to read through all of that, thanks. I've been writing for like an hour, and I feel my ramblings have become more nonsensical than usual.

A summary of this post (copied from the beginning): My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.

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