Alexander King

In my book I argue that IP fandoms are a crucial part of the economic model of the current media monopoly landscape, as fan campaigns drive down the value of creative labor via harassment and disposability, scare artists from taking risks with IP, and give execs a direct fan base all their own

If you missed this, absolutely go play Mini Mini Golf Golf! It involves, among many other things, an in-universe game design talk show video series which is also a vector for the future communicating with the past (because games are tunnels into the past, the future, and the lives of other people)

I've mentioned this before, but I adore this period in the 1800s when you could just say whatever you wanted about color. No one knows how it works or why, so anything goes. If you've got a wild theory and some illustrated plates, you're good to go!

I frequently see "AI" boosters implying that LLMs are simply an innate and superior part of coding now, inescapable, and that literally all programmers agree with them. And, well. That, too, is a form of propaganda

My 3 year old this morning: "I wish it was Halloween all year!" Me: Oh yeah me too Him, sighing wistfully: "But I know it doesn't work like that"

Ah, hello prince. This is a nice day for rolling, isn't it? We got the idea for rolling up some things. Well, for you to do it. Maybe some fluffy things. Fluffy things with points in their mouths. They make a noise, aw aw? I don't know how it goes. Get a lot of them. Anyway goodbye, I don't love you

microzine #15, oval office odyssey, screenshot, apple II (1986) www.mobygames.com/game/149343/...

I tried to be optimistic! I stand by this bit.

The most recent post on her website being a 3 year old post titled "What Caused Recent Crypto Selloff" is very found audio log energy

I am becoming incredibly exhausted of this pattern: many people: "AI sucks!" Very Smart Person: ah but have you considered (distinct application of ML or statistical modeling that has no real relationship to what the tech industry is marketing as, and people broadly perceive as, "AI")

I think maybe the reason this didn't happen is that promises like the former are quickly verifiable as something it can't actually do, whereas promising to replace all labor *in the future* is a goalpost that's conveniently mobile. (Since, largely, the real customers are VCs etc, not people)

tfw you're working on an ancient world project

Well, guess the time has come that I'm gonna have to sit my kid down and explain gender

What's kind of surprising to me is how boring and small Zuckerberg's vision is, even in a press release where he's just making things up. He could (and does) say it'll do anything, but the only example he can come up with personally is "It tells me how to spend time with my kids"

What I take from this is that every Eurasian civ had "Chicken Nuggets" open on the tech tree from 3000 BCE onwards, but no one pulled the trigger on it for another five millennia, smh

I get the flex from people that have never used AI, believe me. But I think it's equally powerful that I used pretty much all of these tools to learn how they work and see what they do for myself, I stopped using them because they are not very useful and I wouldn't care if they disappeared at all.

So tempted by this. Man I miss the old machines. I always thought they were strangely tacky, the kiddy colors and all caps signage. But then the useless grey new ones came out and I realized, with horror, that all along these were actually stunningly well designed 😢

An aside, but it's funny that all these companies can only imagine collecting middleman rents, throwing a chain across a river. Every tech company's play always boils down to something so boring as "grow so big you can take a cut of all ad spending"

I do love the hilarious court politics at play here, where the consultant can't ask *anything* about AI since it would definitionally require an admission of failure

like, I know people get mad when you say liberals prefer fascists to leftists but they keep saying it

Why not consider in-game ads *literally* during development? As in, in editor ads! If you're not monetizing your programmers, you're falling behind. In this linkedin post I will...

What's fascinating about the second one is that the original author seems to grasp that art has something to do with human labor, that the process and experience of creation are what imbue something as art. Reminds me of the non-art natural object example in John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934)

I've seen some perplexed reactions to these layoffs, like "but firing all this talent is such bad business!", this is the missing part of the puzzle for that. There's an unprecedented wave of unionization in games, and if it means keeping labor cheap and scared, that changes the math for execs.