Rynling R&D

This past Saturday, I posted a review of the manga Mushishi on my book review blog. As per my usual schedule, I linked to the review in a Monday-morning promo post on Bluesky (here). I used the hashtag #booksky, which is cringe but sometimes helps these posts connect with people.

My post on Bluesky was quote-tweeted (here) by an #booksky account with 5.5k followers. What this account does, apparently, is quote-tweet posts made on the hashtag with text about the book generated by AI. Is the account making money? No. Is the account promoting anything? Also no.

A friend of a friend recently posted an observation (here) that a lot of people running Gen-AI accounts aren't doing it for any reason other than to watch numbers go up, and that seems to be the case here. But like, why? Why do this?

I suspect that, in the case of this particular #booksky account, there's some sinister underlying purpose involving a study of engagement metrics, which will then be used to train more Gen-AI bot accounts. God I hate this.

I was listening to a podcast whose hosts brought up the topic of “non-political conspiracy theories to discuss with your family at Thanksgiving,” and one of them mentioned mattress stores. Why are there always multiple stores at the same intersection, and how do they make money despite never seeming to have any customers? Oddly enough, I can explain this.

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So mattress stores are a kind of conspiracy, but it’s not the mafia – it’s just capitalism.

Anyway, my own contribution to the topic of “low-stakes conspiracy theories” is that the poet T.S. Eliot put the “S” in his name so that it wouldn’t be “toilet” spelled backwards.

Your Labubu Might Be the Most Honest Indicator of a Global Recession
https://www.milleworld.com/labubu-economic-recession-indicator/

All of this points to the same underlying truth: people are adapting to scarcity by aestheticizing it. When people can’t afford abundance, they turn to objects that feel meaningful, compact, and emotionally loaded. That’s where Labubu enters the chat — not as a toy, but as a talisman.

For real though. I think it's telling that it's not actual teen girls who are into these toys, but grown Millennials who are pushing 40 and still can't afford to buy a house. So on one hand, these stupid little things aren't that deep; but also,

As philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes in The Burnout Society, modern individuals are no longer disciplined by external forces. Instead, they’re coerced internally by a need to perform, optimize, and consume under their own volition. In this framework, buying a Labubu isn’t a childish indulgence, but a full-on coping mechanism as a small act of self-soothing in a system that’s rigged for extraction.

Just for shits and giggles (and also inspired by the brilliant fanwork of a friend), I decided to write a few quick stories about Tenna, the villain (sort of) of the recently released Chapter 3 of Deltarune. I thought the idea of shipping him with Spamton, the villain (definitely) of Chapter 2 was funny for a hot second before actually becoming intrigued by the dynamic. What if they were both awful and made each other worse, that sort of thing.

The problem I had initially was how to write Tenna, who we only ever see speaking to an audience. How would his voice translate to a more intimate situation? To get a sense of fandom tastes, I pulled up fic for the ship on AO3 as sorted by the number of bookmarks, which I hoped would filter out most of the slop.

But alas. There is. A whole lot of slop. Very clearly written by GenAI. And people love it. Apparently.

I don't understand this at all. These stories all follow the same beats and use the same vocabulary, and the characters don't speak in their distinctive voices. There's no attempt to engage with the story or lore of the original game, and there's no specificity at all. Why would so many people bookmark fic like this?

Meanwhile, my university has been aggressively integrating GenAI into its software licenses and digital infrastructure, which has been causing huge problems for everyone. To give an example, many incoming students from East Asia or with East Asian heritage can't upload their photos to their university profiles because the software flags them for using AI-generated images. Because all Asians look fake to the algorithm I guess?? At the same time, the East Asian language teachers have been asking the university to pay for licenses for region-specific GenAI tools that might potentially make huge advances in language learning, but the university (which has more money than God) has been ignoring them. Because why would a university want to use GenAI for actual education and pedagogical innovation amirite.

TLDR: This is dystopian and I hate it.

Join me for this Tiny Teach-In about the USPS!
https://bsky.app/profile/lizdamnit.bsky.social/post/3lmezmbrgcs2c

Maybe I will! The importance and validity of USPS is a hill I will happily die on. 📮

ETA: Nope!! I think I simply need to accept that I am not available for any sort of videoconferencing calls after 6pm. Instead I sat outside with my two dogs in the lovely late spring twilight and played a modded version of Wind Waker on Steam Deck.

2024: An active year of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024-active-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters

According to data gathered and summarized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States witnessed 27 separate environmental disasters that individually resulted in more than a billion dollars of damage during the 2024 calendar year. These incidents, which range from winter storms to wildfires to hurricanes, were all related to climate change.

In other words, in just one year, 27 climate disasters caused a total of almost $183 billion in damages. And that's not counting the other 376 "smaller" climate disasters recorded in 2024. And that’s just in our own country. Fun times.

It might hurt my bottom line, but I’m probably going to stop posting art to Twitter entirely and I suggest you do too. Not only is the site actively putting a “Okay, now remix this” button below art (and elevating them above the OP with a QRT) and it’s false flagging original art as made by AI.

https://bsky.app/profile/milph.mom/post/3lhziydwbg22h

I documented this back in December, but Instagram has started doing this too. Around that time, a few artists I follow started using Cara as an art-specific Twitter clone, but I haven't seen it take off. Meanwhile, despite everything, Tumblr is still going strong.

I'm working on my essay about Crow Country, and I managed to depress the hell out of myself with this paragraph...

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...and I still think it's deeply upsetting how the United States went straight from "save the whales" to "murder the Muslims." This timeline is so fucked.

ETA: Colette Shade's Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything is interesting, by the way. It's marketed as "a quirky and poignant memoir," but that's bullshit. The book is actually a critical media analysis with razor-sharp insight into American popular culture in the 1990s, and I really enjoyed reading it.

Garfield: You are not immune to propaganda!

Propaganda:

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So anyway I'm studying the art style of socialist realism, and it's amazing.

There's a post going around Bluesky...

"If there's anything I hope young creatives take from David Lynch, it's to reject the modern IP-driven impulse to explicitly explain and cleanly categorize the logic behind every single event and decision inside and outside of a story at least some of the time."

...and it's a good post, but it's also frustrating.

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If you really want people to make weird art, then you have to support weird art.