#oneaday Day 184: Deprecated feature

I went into my Amazon wishlist earlier today, as I know it’s the first port of call for several family members when trying to determine what to get me for Christmas, and I was a little perturbed to discover that it is seemingly not possible to change the order of the things on your wishlist any more. Or, to be more accurate, you can rearrange the order of the items in the first three rows in Grid view, but everything else doesn’t respond to clicking and dragging like it used to.

I did a little research online and, indeed, it seems that Amazon deliberately removed this a while back. It’s a “deprecated feature”, apparently.

I always find the idea of “deprecated features” bizarre, because inevitably the features that get “deprecated” are ones that are actually useful, and in many cases they don’t actually get replaced by something with similar functionality. In the case of Amazon wishlists, aside from the Grid view exception I note above (which I suspect is a bug) you can now only sort them in various automated ways, or you can push something to the top of the wishlist by going to its product page and “re-adding” it. You can also move it to another list and then move it back to the original list. Both of these are, I’m sure you’ll agree, inferior to being able to just drag the damn thing to the position you want it — or, indeed, click a “send to top” button, which I’m sure also used to exist.

Modern software — be it stuff you run on your computer or that which powers billion-dollar ecommerce platforms — seems to be full of stuff getting “deprecated” without any real net benefit to the user. The usual interpretation of this is that the creators of said software want to discourage users from doing something in favour of doing something else with a similar function. But in Amazon’s case I’m really struggling to see why I might be discouraged from reordering my wishlist into whatever order I want… particularly as there is no real alternative, aside from the rather clunky options I’ve just outlined.

There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about how tech is genuinely getting worse year on year, and it’s not just people “getting old”. The writer, blogger and tech commentator Ed Zitron does some great work in this field, and I encourage you to check out his blog Where’s Your Ed At and his podcast Better Offline, because while both paint a bleak picture of the tech landscape as it exists in 2024, some of you might find it reassuring that no, it’s not just you, things really are getting worse in terms of usability and overall functionality.

As for me, well, I guess it’s time to go re-add some stuff to my wishlist so it gets pushed to the top!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 179: Your occasional reminder that AI can fuck off

I saw a TV ad for “Apple Intelligence” yesterday. The concept of the ad is that someone is angry someone at their workplace keeps stealing their pudding — hahaha, so hilarious and cosy and relatable — and writes them a furious email. They then click the “Friendly” button on Apple Intelligence and the email is rewritten to be the most milquetoast, handwringy, insincere thing you’ve ever seen. And this is supposed to be a selling point.

Elsewhere, a YouTuber I know had someone in their comments getting pissy about how they pronounced “ZX81”, and, presumably in an attempt to further their argument, the commenter in question then copy-pasted a ChatGPT conversation — without editing out the “ChatGPT says:” bits — that didn’t even particularly help their cause.

I keep seeing YouTube thumbnails made with AI art-stealing machines. Coca-Cola made a Christmas ad with AI. The memorial lunch for beloved broadcaster Steve Wright had an invitation that was made with AI. Entire websites are made of AI slop. And even here in fucking WordPress, I can’t escape the sodding “Generate with AI” button.

I fucking hate it. I want it to go away. I want people who say “but it’s good for summarising things” to drown in the sea. I want people who say “but it’s better than doctors at diagnosing problems!” to be the victims of the worst malpractice the medical industry has ever seen. I wish eternal loneliness and desolation on those who use it to write emails. And I want it out of the pieces of software I use on a daily basis.

We’re even starting to get accounts on BlueSky that pretend to be real people, but simply respond with ChatGPT answers that are tuned to be deliberately argumentative. What is the fucking point of all this shit? How is it benefiting humanity and productivity in any way whatsoever?

It isn’t. All it’s doing is continuing to make tech worse, year on year, while keeping oblivious shareholders — who aren’t interested in anything but seeing “growth” — happy that companies are providing supposed “new innovations” that actually don’t provide any sort of useful functionality whatsoever.

I’m aware I’m ranting incoherently, but honestly right now it feels like it’s pointless to even try and come up with a cogent argument. This shit is infesting everything, and it’s becoming impossible to escape from. And I legitimately do not understand how anyone can possibly think this shit is in any way better than what we had before.

I guess the one upside is that with how much AI is being used pointlessly to provide “summaries” of Google Searches, YouTube videos and other such shite, the planet will burn down all the sooner, so eventually we won’t have to worry about it at all. Then the Great Thinkers of the day — assuming anyone survives — can stroke their chins for two hundred years about “where it all went wrong”.

Here. Here is where it all went wrong.

#oneaday Day 178: Acceptable mediocrity

My Bold Proclamation of the Day is that I feel like it would probably behoove us, as a society, to be more comfortable with mediocrity than we are.

This evening, Andie and I went out for dinner, because we both just wanted to get out of the house for a bit. We went to a local chain pub that we’ve been to a few times before and always liked, and the food was fine. It was perfectly acceptable. If we were living in a world where star ratings were used properly, I would rate it three out of five stars. It was not the sort of meal that I will remember for the rest of my life (or indeed the rest of the week, probably) but it also wasn’t so terrible that I wanted to throw it in the face of the chef who microwaved it.

Thing is, I don’t feel hard done-by to have a three-out-of-five meal at a place like this. In fact, that’s pretty much what I expect. But I feel like the way we live life today, a three-out-of-five meal would be seen as somehow “unacceptable”, and my commentary on how it was perfectly fine and exactly what you want sometimes, would be ignored completely, with nothing but the star rating being seen as a sort of “inverse recommendation”.

Back when I worked at the Apple Store in the late ’00s, the company introduced a scheme called NetPromoter. Initially I thought this was an Apple initiative, but I have learned in the years that followed that it is quite a common thing in the service and retail sectors generally.

If you’re not familiar with NetPromoter, it goes like this. You engage with a customer and provide them your service or sell them something. Then, after they have departed your premises/website/whatever, they get emailed a short survey in which they are asked to rate their experience out of 10. Higher scores are, of course, good, and are regarded as “Promoters” — people who are actively likely to recommend (or “promote”) your store or service to family, friends and colleagues. Conversely, low scores are, naturally, bad, and are regarded as “Detractors” — people who will recommend against your services.

All sounds reasonable enough, right? What if I told you that only scores of 8 and above were regarded as “Promoters”, and anything below that was considered a “Detractor”? Because that’s how it fucking works. There’s no option for “this was fine, I had no complaints, but it also wasn’t anything particularly special that I feel like shouting about” either. If we assume someone who felt that way believed that was worth a 5 or 6 out of 10, the poor old employee responsible for that perfectly acceptable service would probably find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of disciplinary action. Because yes, of course, systems like NetPromoter are inevitably used to browbeat employees into submission, rather than to actually improve things for the customer.

The same is true of online reviews for pretty much anything. Have you ever noticed how when an app on your phone bugs you to rate it, it’s never “Leave us a review!”, it’s always “Leave us a 5-star review!”? That’s because to most folks online these days, there are only really two ratings: 5-star (good) and everything else (bad). The video game sector has, of course, also been guilty of this for as long as the games press has been a thing; “70%” is seen as a barely average passing grade, and anything below that will almost certainly be ignored or considered “bad” by a significant portion of the games-purchasing public.

I’ve spoken numerous times about how I’ve had the absolute best times with games that, on average, net scores of 65% and below, and it’s often for very similar reasons that I find mediocrity in other areas of life perfectly acceptable: sometimes that’s precisely what you’re in the mood for. This evening, we were in the mood for some average pub food, and by golly, that’s most certainly what we got. When I’m in the mood to play a Neptunia game, I also know exactly what I’m getting and am in the correct mindset to appreciate it, too.

It’s time we embraced perfectly acceptable mediocrity. Perfection is the enemy of good, as the aphorism says, and I absolutely agree with that. If you spend all your time looking for something that is really worth that 5-star rating, you’re never going to be satisfied with anything.

#oneaday Day 174: Why am I still doing this?

Why am I still doing this? Or, perhaps to the point, why did I start doing this again? This article from Aftermath does a good job of explaining why.

Since the rise of social media, I feel like it’s significantly less likely for someone to have a “personal website”, because everyone is concerned about their “reach” and “engagement”, and if you want both of those things, you want to be on a well-established social media site.

But if you’re more concerned with self-expression and having a space to truly call your own, having your own website is hard to beat. And I think as people become more and more disillusioned with social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — I think personal websites are going to become more and more important to a wider range of people.

Times have changed a bit, though. The word “blog” seems to have fallen out of wide usage, to be replaced with “newsletter”, this being a result of the assumption that people will sign up to get your posts delivered to them via email, rather than going out of their way to visit your site. However, most of the “newsletters” out there are actually just blogs: people having a space to call their own, writing whatever they feel like at any given moment.

The best blogs… sorry, newsletters… of course have a distinct focus. One of my favourites is Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At?, which is one of the few sites out there continually taking the garbage of the AI industry and other enshittified parts of the Internet to account for their making life worse for everyone.

And, of course, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know about my own MoeGamer, which is my main video game blog. MoeGamer has now outlived all of the professional, commercial sites I have ever written for, which is a nice feeling. Sure, I don’t update it every day or indeed regularly, but there’s a ton of stuff to read on there, and I’ve made sure all of it is hopefully relevant and interesting, regardless of when you come to it. No racing to get “news” out the door; no rushing games to meet embargoes; just in-depth articles about games that, for one reason or another, I have found it worthwhile to spend some time, effort and words talking about.

This site, though, this is mostly for me. This site is my virtual replacement for the personal diaries I used to write as a teenager, only at no point have I become embarrassed enough about something I’ve written to want to throw the whole thing in the outside bin so it would never be found by anyone, except maybe the dustmen, who I hope had a good laugh about how much I fancied Nikki Rose before flinging the book into landfill. This site is my reminder of at least part of my time on this planet which, for sure, has had some hefty ups and downs over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

Does it have many people reading it? No. But I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for myself — and if anyone happens to stumble across this little corner of the Internet and gets something out of something I’ve written, that’s just a happy bonus.

If you’ve never given this sort of thing a try and you find yourself frustrated at social media, I can highly recommend giving it a go. It’s dead easy to get started with a platform like WordPress or its numerous imitators; in many cases, you can get up and running for free, too.

However you choose to do it, I can assure you of one thing: having a space to truly call your own, in which you can express yourself completely freely, is something that I’ve started to find increasingly important with each passing year. It’s a good thing to have an outlet, for both the good feelings and the bad, and banging out 500-1000 words every so often just about whatever’s on your mind is a healthy habit to get into.

That’s why I’m still doing this. Not to be famous, not to make money, not to get engagement and followers. But because it’s just something I want to do, and which I find is of great benefit to my overall wellbeing. Give it a try!

#oneaday Day 170: I really don’t care about drama

I’ve been umming and ahhing about whether or not to post this, but if I can’t speak freely on my own fricking website, I think I’ll explode, so I’m going to say it anyway.

I really, really don’t give a damn about any drama surrounding an individual behind a particular project. I’m not saying you have to feel the same way, but I do want to express that I find it continually tiresome and genuinely upsetting when I want to talk about something that I think is cool, but the first response is always “but [individual] worked on it, so it’s bad (and by extension you are bad for having anything positive to say about it)”.

I’m not going to talk about specific cases here, because even doing that has the potential to attract ire towards me, and that’s not what this post is about. What it is about is the sense of frustration I feel that the real people who worked on a project end up getting punished for the actions or behaviour of one individual — and, by extension, the attacks people who express enthusiasm for that project end up suffering also.

It is an unfortunate fact of capitalist life that in order to claw your way up to the top of the heap, you probably have to be a bit of a shithead. The way capitalism works, the way business works; you need to be a bit of a shithead in order to see success. You need to doggedly pursue the things you want to achieve, and you need to defend your commercial interests. This is true for pretty much all industries, whether it’s groceries, tech, publishing or whatever. I defy you to find any company out there with an executive suite that has never done anything you’re not a particular fan of, all in the name of either pursuing their goals or defending their commercial interests.

Trouble is, when the higher-ups at a company do something that is regarded as “bad” or “indefensible”, the real people who suffer are those who are just doing their job underneath. When one CEO behaves poorly, the people who are actually making the products that CEO’s company is known for end up getting punished for it. They could do an absolutely amazing job on whatever they worked on, but still get punished because their boss once did “A Bad Thing”, often several years ago.

This, unfortunately, spreads outwards. Because “(CEO = Bad) = (Company = Bad)”, anyone who then expresses an interest in or an enthusiasm for the products of Company gets yelled at by people who care more about the CEO than the company or the product. And that leaves people feeling like they simply can’t express their enjoyment of something they like just as a product, because of one thing the CEO did half a decade ago.

CEOs should, ideally, not do shit things. It would be lovely if we lived in a world where CEOs did not feel the need to do shit things, be it in the name of pursuing their goals or defending their interests. But we do not. And frankly, I am, I’m afraid, long past giving a shit.

I’ve seen too many pointless, unnecessary arguments and too many strained, even broken friendships over this sort of thing, and it just doesn’t matter. We live in a joyless enough world as it is; we should not be attacking one another over the things we choose to have fun with, so long as those things are not actively hurting someone. And in the specific instances I’m thinking about here, no-one is getting hurt except the folks who worked on them, and the people being attacked for daring to say something positive about them.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject. I do not want an argument on this, I do not want anyone in the comments trying to tell me I’m wrong for feeling this way. I’m fed up and I’m annoyed, and I am absolutely not in the mood for someone to tell me I’m wrong for feeling that way. So if you’re gearing up to type a comment like that, zip it. I do not want to hear it.

#oneaday Day 160: The death of Twitter

It seems like Twitter’s day in the sun is finally coming to an end. With the deadline looming for the site to start scraping everyone’s posts to train its AI models, Elon being an absolute fucking maniac (not in a fun way) and Trump being in office, a lot of people — including some well-established figures and brands — have been jumping ship and turning to Bluesky. Hell, even the Clifton Suspension Bridge has decided to ditch Twitter. And no, I’m not making that up.

I haven’t been following the progress of all the “Twitter alternatives” that sprang up a while back too closely, but it seems like a lot of people are favouring Bluesky, which I must confess is one that I’ve been on for a little while now. Threads sounds like an absolute dead end of a social network — tech commentator Ed Zitron describes it as “Twitter made of Instagram comments” — and the less said about shit like Gab, Truth Social and Parler (does that one even still exist?) the better.

I’m interested to see where things will go. The vibe on Bluesky right now is very positive; many folks quite rightly describe it as feeling like Twitter from 10+ years ago, and they’re absolutely right in terms of atmosphere. The users have collectively decided to not allow it to fall into negativity and ragebait like Twitter has become in recent years, and there is a shared understanding that “block early and block often” is the best approach to anyone being a dickhead.

This is helped enormously by Bluesky’s “nuclear block” function, which means that if someone quote-replies a post then blocks the person they quoted, the quote will appear as blocked for everyone. That helps prevent dogpiling and discourages people from going around looking for trouble. Couple this with the “detach quote” function, where if you do find yourself quote-replied and you’re getting grief as a result, you can simply unclip your post from the quote and be left the fuck alone. Much better than Twitter’s woefully ineffective mute and block functions — oh yeah, Twitter made block work so that anyone you blocked can still see your posts, which is… great.

At this point, anyone still on Twitter is in absolute denial. The place is infested with bots, scammers, right-wing fucknuts and Elon sycophants who want nothing more than just a crumb of billionaire dick to suck. And with the impending “AI” shit looming, I’m not surprised people have finally had enough. I’m certainly never going back, and I think my boss and I need to have a serious conversation about whether we start focusing our professional social media efforts on Bluesky instead of Twitter. There are a lot of cool retro game peeps over there, and I think Evercade would fit in well there.

Of course, there’s always the thing to ponder: do people really want “brands” on a social media site? And I guess it depends what they’re doing. If all they’re doing is engagement bait crap, probably not. But this might be a fun opportunity to experiment with doing something a bit different, in a place with an altogether different vibe.

Something to consider next week, certainly — my boss is off this week, otherwise I’d have a chat with him about it tomorrow. In the meantime, Bluesky seems to be a pleasant enough place to hang out from a personal perspective, and a fair few people I know have showed up there. It’s social media how it used to be before all those sites made us want to kill ourselves every day, and I’m sure that won’t last forever. But while it does, we may as well enjoy it.

#oneaday Day 157: A happy ending (not in a sex way)

I’m pleased to report that all of us kicking up a stink over RoseTintedSpectrum’s YouTube channel being wrongfully terminated yesterday has proven successful: our lad managed to finally get through to a human being at YouTube, and his channel has been reinstated, with just an obviously insincere, automated “apology” of sorts from YouTube attached.

This is obviously a good resolution to what was a stressful and upsetting situation for Rosie, and it should bring a few things into sharp focus for everyone. Corporations are not your friends. Corporations can and will take things that you have created away from you at a moment’s notice. Corporations do not care, particularly when they rely on automation and “AI” to do their work for them.

Human beings are your friends. Individuals that you make a personal connection with are how you get by in this increasingly horrible world that we live in. Friendship groups and communities can get things done — the last 24 hours has clearly proven that, with Rosie’s story not only spreading across Twitter and temporarily drowning out at least some of the white supremacy thanks to the few creators with a decent following who are still there, but also making some noise on BlueSky and even getting a writeup on the retro gaming website from the NintendoLife folks, Time Extension.

I find it kind of hilarious, tragic and frustrating that there are some folks who took glee in this whole situation. People such as the odious George “FunkySpectrum” Cropper, who has made his entire online life about spreading hatred of people he doesn’t like. And people like one anonymous stroppy twat who goes by “GlamorousAlpaca” in Time Extension’s comments, who just made shit up about Rosie for no apparent reason. But as frustrating as the sad, pathetic existence of these people is, they will never know the joy that Rosie is undoubtedly feeling right now: the understanding that there are people out there who like him, care about him and will fight for him when he has been wronged.

I’m glad that all this has been successfully resolved, but I’m concerned that this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot more of late. The cynic in me blames the rise in the use of “AI” in big corporations like Google; despite these systems being demonstrably fallible and prone to hallucinations, it seems big business is willing to trust its judgement, even going so far as to give it the power to completely remove someone’s hard work from the Internet for a perceived (and, I reiterate, non-existent) infraction. It happened to me with WordPress.com, it happened to Rosie on YouTube and I’m sure we’ll hear about it happening to other people, too.

The Internet continues to enshittify itself, but we can still find havens of sanity amid groups of like-minded, sensible, supportive and caring people. If you have been fortunate enough to find a group like that online, be sure to hold on to them with everything you have. I feel like they will only become more valuable to you as time goes on.

Oh, while you’re here, go pop RoseTintedSpectrum a subscribe if you haven’t already. Watch a few vids and leave a couple of nice comments, too. The lad could do with a smile after the last 24 hours.

#oneaday Day 156: A reminder that automated moderation solutions suck

Hello. Bit of a serious one today. Many of you reading this will likely be familiar with the YouTube channel RoseTintedSpectrum. He has suffered an extremely unfortunate happening today in that YouTube has seen fit to completely obliterate his entire channel. Their reasoning? He supposedly violated their policies about “spam, scams and deceptive practices”. Needless to say, he did not.

For the unfamiliar, RoseTintedSpectrum is someone who’s been doing YouTube for a few years now. As the name of his channel suggests, he started out doing videos about old Spectrum games, and his dry humour and cynical wit won him a small but dedicated following of folks who enjoyed what he put out. Over time, he branched out into a niche that is somewhat underserved: providing commentary on “classic” TV shows, beginning with ITV’s show about video games and computer culture, Bad Influence. Most recently, he has been doing huge retrospectives on the legendary GamesMaster, and these videos caused his channel to have a huge and well-deserved surge in popularity.

Well, they did, anyway. For reasons known only to YouTube’s automated moderation algorithm, his channel has now been banished to the shadow realm, and he is unable to get a human response out of anyone. He attempted to appeal the “decision” and got a negative response back within 5 minutes, suggesting that no human being has been involved at any step in this process. And they have the gall to say on Twitter that “these decisions are made very carefully” and “thoughtfully”. Are they fuck.

If all this sounds a little familiar, it’s very similar to what happened with me and WordPress.com a while back — the reason this blog is now self-hosted rather than hosted with WordPress.com. That was almost the exact same situation: my hard work of many years (nearly 20 in my case!) was accidentally and incorrectly branded as “spam”, and immediately removed from circulation without warning or any attempt to contact me. Thankfully, my repeated badgering and yelling at WordPress.com meant that it was back up and running again the next day, but the whole situation spurred me on to move my blog off-site.

There’s a key difference there, though; while I could do that with my blog, YouTubers do not have that luxury. People who make videos are pretty much locked in to YouTube for life, because self-hosting videos is completely unworkable from both a storage space and bandwidth perspective. There are other video-hosting solutions out there, but they all have issues — no-one gives a shit about Vimeo (particularly now it’s branded itself as “AI-powered”) and Rumble is full of the absolute worst shitheads on the planet. So for most folks, it’s YouTube or nothing.

I want to emphasise this key point: it is completely unacceptable for automated moderation tools to have the power to take a creator’s hard work offline without even attempting to contact them. It is completely unacceptable that this occurs without any human input whatsoever. And it is completely unacceptable for YouTube’s support team, when contacted about this issue, to say there is “nothing more they can do” because the automated appeal response to the automated channel deletion decided within less than five minutes that no mistakes had been made at any point in the automation process.

If a channel is flagged as being in violation of some sort of policy, that should be an immediate signal for an actual human to look at it. It should have taken anyone human less than five minutes to determine that there was nothing on RoseTintedSpectrum’s channel even remotely related to “spam, scams or deceptive practices”, and this whole situation should have never happened in the first place.

But no. Because big corpos like Google are all-in on AI and automation, they trust the clearly and demonstrably fallible machines to handle it all themselves — including any attempts to appeal the decisions. And the result is situations like we have now, where a dedicated and hard-working creative type is left with absolutely nothing to show for years of hard graft.

RoseTintedSpectrum puts an unbelievable amount of effort into each and every video he has ever made, and that should be abundantly clear to any human being looking at his channel.

But sadly, because no human being at YouTube has looked at his channel, we’re left with the situation we’re in now. Which is completely unacceptable.

If you’re still clinging on to your Twitter account in the vain hope that the last week or so has all been a bad dream, I urge you to contact @TeamYouTube and @YouTubeLiaison over there to let them know they have made a huge mistake — RoseTintedSpectrum’s YouTube account, if you want to copy that in, also, is @SpectrumTinted. With any luck, this will all be resolved sooner rather than later.

And if you’re reading this and happen to be in any sort of position to make big decisions at your place of work: automated moderation solutions are fucking bad and should always have human oversight. So don’t fucking delete people’s hard work before you even attempt to contact them.

Sort it out, YouTube.

#oneaday Day 154: If you can’t create without AI, you shouldn’t be creating

YouTube recommended me a video earlier. I’m not going to share it because it’s shit. But I will tell you about it. It was a video supposedly “reimagining” the video game series Streets of Rage as a “movie”. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last year or so, you already know what’s coming: yes, it’s entirely AI-generated drivel, and the complete content of the “movie” consists of nothing but people staring moodily at the camera while there’s a slight pan around them, and people walking towards the camera in slow motion.

The video has a quarter of a million views, and a comments section full of people gushing effusive praise over the “creator”. This is not the first video that this channel has put out like this; to date, over the last year they have spaffed out 215 videos that are all like this. And not only that, their About section on their channel is very transparently written by ChatGPT.

I hope you don’t think it controversial of me to say that if you can’t create without using AI, you shouldn’t be creating at all. I will, under extreme duress, concede that there are certain uses of AI tools which might be useful as part of the creative process. AI music tools, for example, can be quite effective if you feed them some lyrics you’ve written yourself. (Getting AI to write lyrics results in extreme garbage.)

But if all you do is put shit into an AI video generator and then spaff it out on YouTube — and you can’t even be arsed to write your own bio — you are not a creative person.

The standard argument that insufferable AI types like to trot out at this point is that generative AI “democratises” creativity by allowing anyone to “create”. Except it doesn’t, because the output is not your own work; you haven’t created anything. The result is a pile of plagiarised crap that is immediately identifiable as the product of generative AI.

And anyway, creativity is already democratised. There is tons of free software out there that anyone can download and use, for computers, phones and tablets. YouTube is full of video tutorials on how to get started, improve your techniques and take on some advanced challenges. There are several decades’ worth of text tutorials archived across various websites from over the years.

There is no excuse for taking the lazy option and just feeding a prompt into the lake-boiling plagiarism machine. If you want to be creative, be creative. But know that it takes work. And that work is worthwhile, because people will be able to tell when you have put that work in. Those who follow you will see your work improve, adapt and change over time. You’ll find your own unique “voice”. And there really is nothing quite like being able to express yourself in your own distinctive way; being able to sit back and look at something you made and think, with a slight smile on your lips, “I made that”.

With generative AI, there is none of that. You get derivative, immediately identifiable slop that all looks the same and all contains the same basic errors. You never have the experience of refining and improving your own work, because you haven’t done any work. You never find your own unique voice, because you are beholden to the algorithms and training data that the LLM you’re using has stolen from all over the Internet. And you never, really, truly, express yourself.

In the meantime, until you come to the realisation that all you’re doing is spaffing out hollow, soulless pieces of crap that look like creative works but are actually anything but, you are poisoning the entire Internet with your garbage… and, judging by the comments section on the video in question, poisoning the minds of people who aren’t familiar with just how fucking easy it is to tell the magic art-stealing machine to steal some art to your specifications.

The planet is doomed. And no-one gives a shit. Sleep well!

#oneaday Day 148: Stream Success

I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:

As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I’ve been playing recently.

I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It’s really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.

There’s also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a “rank” which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.

There’s also a really great “rapid battle” system, where if you know what you’re doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.

Anyway, it’s half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!