Rynling R&D

Fam, be careful with your time online.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected

If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.

I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.

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My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.

Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.

I'll probably get a Switch 2 eventually, but I'm not in any rush. It doesn't mean much to me.

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TLDR: Fuck Nintendo, but Happy "Silksong Real" to all who celebrate. <3

I'm currently working on a zine called In Praise of Moss: An Argument for Sustainable Disability Positivity. I'm feeling good about the opening section, so I thought I'd share the first draft here.

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As an aside, one half-letter page accommodates 250 words, so I need to cap each section of the essay at 500 words maximum. I'm not the sort of person who can snap my fingers and watch the words flow, but there's still an element of skill involved in being able to communicate a fully-formed idea in such a restricted space. I wish I had the skill to concentrate ideas like this into a tweet, but alas. I am very bad at social media. Still, as I argue above... that's fine.

Quillbot AI Detector
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector

I've found that AI detectors tend to be hit or miss, but this one seems to work well. What I especially appreciate about the way it works is that it's able to detect text that was generated by AI and then altered, either by hand or by another AI program.

I learned about this through discourse in the Dragon Age fandom, by the way. Apparently, you can now enter a short prompt into Gemini with the name of a character or ship, and the AI can match this keyword not only with the fandom, but also with its specific writing tropes.

If you're curious about the wank, people have been arguing about whether it's possible to write a 400k-word novel in a month. What this ridiculous argument underlines is the fact that there is a substantial (and passionate) audience for novels written by AI. This is dystopian, and I hate it.

Disco Elysium
https://archive.org/details/disco-elysium-ultra-compressed.-7z

and also, the artbook:

Disco Elysium Digital Artbook
https://archive.org/details/discoelysiumartbook

Women Write About Comics (WWAC) is going on hiatus
https://www.comicsbeat.com/women-write-about-comics-wwac-is-going-on-hiatus/

WWAC was an essential site, presenting strong writing and opinions by women and other marginalized genders. Despite being exactly what every loudmouth on social media platforms said they wanted – viewpoints long missing in comics discourse, insightful reviews, and occasional fearless reporting – WWAC struggled to reach its Patreon goals. This disconnect (to put it kindly) or hypocrisy (to put it bluntly) always distressed me. If there was any site that deserved support from every level of the industry, it was WWAC. Unfortunately it’s a particularly stark example of the low value of writing about comics.

Yeah. That's the gist of it.

An unfortunate truth about comics writing is that it's a very tough market. I hate to say this, but it's definitely the sort of environment where most people won't respond to your pitch emails if your name reads as female. It truly was something special to have a website where the editors were always open to new perspectives. And now it's... hopefully not gone, but not doing great at the moment. It's a shame, but uncompensated labor is fun until it isn't.

Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.

This is a long article, but it's fascinating to read. Be warned, though - it's also extremely depressing.

Why exactly do you dislike generative art so much?
https://were--ralph.tumblr.com/post/737973707149017088/why-exactly-do-you-dislike-generative-art-so-much

There is genuinely not one upside to ai art. at all. it’s theft, it’s harming peoples lives, its harming the environment, its cutting jobs back and hurting the economy, it’s invading peoples privacy, its making pedophilia accessible, and more. it’s a plague and there’s no vaccine for it. And all because people don’t want to take a year to learn anatomy.

I finally found this post again. It's good, and I especially appreciate the examples. If you're not already familiar with Were-Ralph on Tumblr dot com, you're in for a treat. I am unironically in love with this man.

This morning I was reading (here) about how the Grand Canyon is losing its river. That's depressing; so, as a palette cleanser, I got caught up on the news about the Dec 4 assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

I usually have a policy of not reading comments, but this is an exception. It brings joy to my heart that, on this particular matter, people with usernames like HitlerWasRight88 and LiveLaughFanfic are in complete agreement and shaking hands across the aisle. Kumbaya motherfuckers.

Now for a wholesome meme:

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For me, spoilers are really important, especially when it comes to video games. If I'm going to spend 50+ hours with a piece of media, I need to know that it's worth my time. I also like knowing what the final destination is so that I can take my time getting there.

To give an example, I enjoyed Tears of the Kingdom precisely because I didn't have to worry about the story. It was good to go into the game knowing that there's no narrative payoff. I was upset about the story to begin with, and I can't even begin to imagine how I would have felt if I'd put more emotional investment into the game while rushing to finish it.

Thankfully, I'm getting completely different vibes from the Shadow of the Erdtree spoilers I've been able to find. This is a good story, I think. The (main) final boss is heartbreaking, as is the short cutscene that plays afterward, and it's going to be an interesting journey to figure out what's happening there. Even with spoilers, it's probably going to be months (or even years) before lore experts manage to put everything together.

Idk, I just think the anxiety over spoilers and the fear of missing out is manufactured by corporations to keep the consumption cycle moving as quickly as possible. Consumers are pressured to preorder everything and play/watch/read it as soon as it comes out, which in turn primes them to be ready to move on to the next thing immediately. I totally understand the thrill and joy of discovery, but it seems there's no longer any middle ground between "no spoilers at all" and "having complete access to a full wiki." That can't be healthy.