Frankly Outside The Moral Reasons To Be Pro-shoplifting I'd Rather Folks Just Take Something Instead

So here's my beef with ChatGPT. Even aside from the issues with plagiarism, cheating, people using it to fake the work that they absolutely need to be actually doing, &etc.

With the advent of the internet we've been in a situation where all the knowledge available to humanity could, conceivably, be made available to everyone at all times. We've had enormous public works built towards that purpose -- libraries, Wikipedia, archives, everything. But an increasing problem as the years have gone by has been the problem of sorting out the signal from the noise. Sorting out real, helpful advice from scams and snake-oil. Paths that lead to dead-ends as sources of information go down and don't come back up. Trying to figure out who's a real expert, who's even a real person in a sea of fake generated avatars. Distinguishing wheat from chaff, usable material from trash.

And the makers of ChatGPT -- and every other AI programmer who's now trying to jump on the bandwagon -- is looking at this problem and saying "You know what this situation needs? More noise. More fakes. More chaff. More dead-ends and empty shells. I think we have TOO MUCH useful information and real expertise. I think we should shake things up by adding more utterly contentless garbage to the mix." And they created an automated noise generator.

Just imagine being on the bank of a pond and saying "ah, this is a lovely pond, the fish and plants are so beautiful, I'm just having trouble seeing them through the silt in the water" and the person next to you says "I'm going to build a factory on the bank of this pond that does nothing but pour more dirt into it. All day. Every day. Nonstop." And then everyone else overhears them and says "Oh, what a fantastic idea! I'm going to create my OWN sludge-factory to get in on this action!"

*through gritted teeth* you are not a child taking a test with the purpose of getting the highest score, you are an adult trying new things and finding ways to enjoy your life, make mistakes, be a beginner, be mediocre, be where you need to be, be unlikeable, just. be.

new episode of "revisiting random offputting short films that youtube showed me when i was 11"

in the future, Braiding Sweetgrass will be assigned to all students to read in school, and mostly they will hate it, because it seems to them like poorly structured rambling about nature and vignettes from the author's life. Soooooooo boring!

We will struggle to explain to them: no, no, this book was actually completely revolutionary for its time. When Kimmerer talks about the honorable harvest, learning to listen to the teachings of the plants, understanding nature as animate and alive, and the relationship of reciprocity and mutual dependence between humans and other life forms, these are ideas that were genuinely new and mind-blowing to us when we were young.

It wasn't just those in power that saw nature as "Resources" or some kind of mechanical system that would be better off without human interference—almost no one else knew another way to think. Yes, yes, we knew about symbiosis, but we hardly ever applied it to ourselves. Kimmerer is serious when she says her cultural perspective was almost wiped out; the culture we inherited as children literally didn't have the concepts she is talking about, and that's why the book was so important!

We will tell the students that it would have been weird even among "environmentalists" of the time to think of trees and insects as your family. I mean, well, yes, we knew that everything was related, but we thought Charles Darwin was the first to come up with that. You don't understand, we will say, most of these ideas about living in right relationship with nature would have been thought of as extra-scientific, sentimental or spiritual crap.

"Did you just not know where food and clothes came from?" they will ask, with eyebrows raised. Yes, but back then, food was mostly grown in enormous fields of only one crop where everything else had been killed with chemicals. We didn't really think of agricultural environments as "ecosystems"—"nature" was a separate thing—I mean yeah, we harvested logs from forests, but that was different. No, we basically thought Earth was divided into "human uses" and "nature," and that people shouldn't be in the "nature" parts. No, really!

The students will be fascinated and ask things like "But what about parks?" "Would a hay field be nature or human uses?" "How about pollinator gardens?" "What about the ocean?" and we will try to explain to them that we really just didn't think that hard about it

Messing around with the AI, behold my abomination

Throw back to when I posted this on twitter with a comment about how completely stupid it is that if your boobs are a specific shape they're deemed inappropriate or inherently sexual and I had people telling me how much the message resonated with them and how misogyny sucks, followed by " I couldn't hit like and I'm dming you about it because i have minors following me"

Like, my friend I don't think we're on the same page actually.

Bionicle: Masks of Power - Matoric Conlang Dialogue Files

As you may have seen, it's now been publicly announced that LEGO has asked for the Bionicle: Masks of Power fan game by Team Kanohi to be shut down.

You can read the announcement letter from Team Kanohi here, and also view a walkthrough of the game demo on YouTube, with and without dev commentary. The demo would have been released on 8/10 of this year.

As I've posted about before, the game was slated to feature fully voice-acted lines in the Matoran Language conlang ("Matoric"), and I've been contributing Matoric line translations for this purpose for a few years now. This work amounted to nearly 800 individual lines of Matoric dialogue translated.

Needless to say, this was a very disappointing thing to experience behind the scenes, after the amount of work that Team Kanohi had put into the game, and (in my opinion) it's an extremely poor repayment from LEGO for the enthusiasm that the team has created in the Bionicle fandom over the years, although not unexpected or shocking on LEGO's part.

With that said, there is some solace to be found in the fact that many resources from the game, including 3D models, music, art, and other development materials, have been preserved by the team (for the time being) via Google Drive. This includes all of the individually recorded voice-actor lines in Matoric!

Here is a link to the full Google Drive.

Here is a link to the folder containing the Matoric line recordings.

Here is a link to a spreadsheet containing all of the written Matoric lines and their English translations (along with a few fun easter eggs).

Finally, here are the credits for the audio directors and individual voice actors whose excellent work was represented in the game:

Voice Acting Directors Tasch Ritter Gort (Garrett B)

Voice Acting Lewa ……………….. Dane Braddy Pohatu ……………….. Gianni Matragrano Gali ……………….. Tasch Ritter Onua ……………….. Ashley Quills Kopaka ……………….. Tom Schalk Tahu ……………….. Wes Wiggins Makuta ……………….. Justice Washington Mata Nui ……………….. Justice Washington Matoran 1 ……………….. Ethan Godwin Matoran 2 ……………….. Viator Matoran 3 ……………….. Lou Haroldson Matoran 4 ……………….. Tasch Ritter Matoran 5 ……………….. Mark (Markle) Stefely Matoran 6 ……………….. Anna Maguire Matoran 7 ……………….. SyntheticCharmVa Matoran 8 ……………….. Tabitha Bardall Matoran 9 ……………….. Mark Beischel Matoran 10 ……………….. Jordan (Jocool1231) Willis Matoran 11 ……………….. Quinn Stokan Matoran 12 ……………….. Abigail Adair Matoran 13 ……………….. Cody (MasterGir) Littlefield Matoran 14 ……………….. Zane Schacht Narrator ……………….. Justice Washington Announcer ……………….. David Michael Williamson

I was honored to be able to contribute to this project in a small way, and I hope that the Bionicle community will continue to support the team as it rebrands and moves on to future projects.

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating