Future City: BLAME! as Postmodern Architecture Hell

Let's talk about the buildings in BLAME!, demons, and postmodernism.

BLAME!: The End of Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is dead. Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! is its bloating corpse. We're just living in it. 

This is very much a Part 1.

The Next Homestuck Will Not Be Made In Flash Part 2: Erases

This is the one where I'm really pessimistic about web art.

Let's Play 17776 Part 2: Point Of Play

If the point of play is to distract us from play being the point, what happens when our games conflict and contradict each other? Pull meaning from the void with me in Part 2 of my readthrough of 17776.

Read more about fun theory, table legs, existentialism, and what scares me most about 17776 and being immortal

Lessons learned from my miserable time with Shotcut

Hungry for more video content of me crying about fictional spacecraft? Check out the extended cut of part 2

Read more about hypercomics history and 17776's forerunners in A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities

Let's Play 17776 Part 1: Is This 'Football'?

In the future, we hang out. Hang out with me as I read Jon Bois's epic sci fi hypercomic 17776 for the first time and discover the power of duration art, the stress of immortality, and the fact that everything continues to basically be Homestuck.

Bonus Patreon Content:

Read more about 17776 and its hypercomics techniques

Go behind the scenes and learn the workflow I used both to create this video and to end my own existence

Hungry for more video content? Can't wait till next week? Check out the extended cut of part 1

Look Inside And You Will Find: Are Glitches Part of the Pokemon Experience?

The fan game Pokemon Uranium has some weird behaviors and some astounding glitches, but are those glitches just flaws, or are they important to make Pokemon Uranium feel like a genuine Pokemon game? And what can it tell us about the hype cycle surrounding canon games Sun and Moon, and spinoffs like Pokemon Go? 

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.

StIT Reviews: Like A Duck in the Rotors of your Flying Car

I anticipated having a bit more of a barrier between this set of reviews and the last one but what can I say? The other articles I'm working on are trickier than I expected for various reasons and I've had to push them back a bit. I'd expect the first one of those to hit next week, depending on which one is giving me less trouble in the intervening time. (If you want some hints as to where those are going, there's some information on my Patreon.)

Since I'm so plagued by the present being deferred into the future indefinitely, it seems fitting that the material I've cobbled together for this set of reviews all pertains in one way or another to the way futuristic science fiction visions keep kinda letting me the fuck down.

"Repent, Feminist!" Said the Wiki Man (Or: Deface Wikipedia Today!)

As I wrote the first draft of this article, a few months ago now (god help me), I took periodic breaks to look at my dashboard on Tumblr. Not because I was really reading any of the content but because I was skimming for instances of people taking advantage to the most recent site update to totally break the website's functionality. If you missed that exciting experience, let me tell you it was at times pretty breathtakingly disorienting, with various icons, text boxes, images, and so on, bouncing all over the screen. While they've caught the major bugs of that update a few more incredible little glitches keep popping up to trash the screen in exciting new ways, months after the fact.

I'm starting here because I think it sheds light, in the usual roundabout sort of way, on the recent clusterfuck over on Wikipedia. If you haven't been following the conflict, the long and short of it is that Gamergate, the violently misogynistic hate group ostensibly dedicated to "ethics in game journalism" but in fact dedicated to hounding women out of the game industry, has been gaming (ahah.) Wikipedia's systems for a while now in order to gain dominance over the article about them. A group dubbed the Five Horsemen has repeatedly opposed their efforts. Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee ("ArbCom") responded by handing down a decision that ousted the Five Horsemen along with a few gamergater burner accounts, patted itself on the back for a job well done, and effectively handed gamergate the keys to the kingdom. You can read about this on the blog of Mark Bernstein (and on his twitter), who broke the story and was banned and denounced in retaliation, or on Wikipedia itself in this editorial by user Protonk... who of course was ALSO banned and denounced in retaliation. Exciting times over on Wikipedia. The story's continued since then but those are the basic facts in the case that I think are worth relaying.

Before getting back to Wikipedia though let's take a moment to talk about the culture of Tumblr and its attitude towards its leaders. Any time Tumblr's staff updates the site there's immediately a race to see who can figure out the best ways to break the new features, or at least do something truly bizarre with the new features. Some of this of course stems from the endless frustration that we all have with a staff that prioritizes trivialities over critically absent core features (a functional blocking system! a functional inbox!) but more broadly speaking I think there's also an attitude on the site that if something CAN be fucked with, it SHOULD be fucked with. It's a creative attitude, and an oppositional one as well, one that resists rather than encourages consensus.

It's this attitude, more than any other form of resistance, that feels to me like the right strategy for dealing with Wikipedia's increasingly glaring flaws. Wikipedia is an engine for generating consensus, so artistic interventions--more plainly, vandalism, or even more plainly, fucking shit up--are essential for disrupting that engine. If Wikipedia has failed to live up to its ideals, instead becoming mired in the dehumanizing mechanisms of a bureaucracy that only a plutocracy of technocrats can engage with, then it's time to stop thinking about incrementally transforming the system, and start thinking about a way of breaking the system in half.

There's a really obvious pun I could make here but I'll resist.

Breaking the Habit RPG

For a long time now I've been fascinated by the way games suggest certain modes of play, modes of behavior, narratives, and, ultimately, ways of understanding the world. As games as a medium grow in cultural prominence, it's always worth taking a step back and analyzing just what games are teaching, not just from a lit crit kind of perspective often mobilized in these conversations but from a purely play-oriented perspective.

It's especially relevant in the case of a game like Habit RPG, which is explicitly built to help you reorder your existence. The game's premise is simple: it provides a framework whereby you can gamify your existence. You create a customized system of tasks to complete and rewards--in multiple forms--that you receive upon fulfilling them. The interface is simple, with three major task classes--repeated habit-formation classes that have simple plus/minus inputs, daily tasks that are checked off (with rewards for completing streaks of those tasks), and one-off to-do tasks that you simply add once and complete once.

The core of the game, however, is the interaction between these three task classes and an RPG-like system whereby you gain experience and level up for completing tasks, and lose health for failing to complete them. There are other bells and whistles--costume upgrades that can be bought, pets that are randomly dropped by defeated tasks--but that's the core gameplay. You complete tasks to level up. The reward system is hooked right into the same system that has been used by diverse entities such as skinnerboxy Facebook games or the maddeningly addictive click and wait games such as Candy Box, Cookieclicker, or A Dark Room: Humans seem to really like big numbers turning into bigger numbers.

The central logic behind the game is that a habit takes, according to the site at least, 21 days to build or break. Thus, built into the system are rewards for streaks of 21 days. Tasks change color as you complete (or don't complete) them, which allows particular interactions with certain abilities (i.e. spells that when clicking on a different colored task provide a different amount of XP). The game thus offers both instant and long-term rewards for adhering to the tasks you set for yourself, which of course contrasts to the often arbitrary, hard to discern, intangible rewards for good behavior in real life.

It's already been quite useful for me, ensuring, among other things, that I actually bother to eat three times every day, no matter how depressed or lethargic I feel. Oh, and I've got a perfect streak of waking up before ten every day, which is pretty remarkable. Even something as seemingly untamable as sleep habits can be rewired if you're provided with an external reward system. It's pretty great! It's even helping me slowly but surely get over my anxieties about actually replying promptly to people's messages.

All in all, it's a good game, and I see no reason to dig deeper into its workings. See you next week!

Yup just look at my cool pixel avatar and don't read further! Nothing to see here folks!

[S]A6:A6:I1: Homestuck vs Tech Demos, or How To Write Hypercomics Like A Boss

So, for those who haven't heard, Homestuck, Andrew Hussie's mindbending, ultra-dense epic about friendship and tentacle sex (note: the last one may be only in the minds of fans), just came out of the Year Four Megahiatus--a months-long pause in the narrative that Hussie used to prepare for the conclusion of the story and the creation of the video game that fans gave him several million dollars to fund. And, true to form, it came out of the hiatus first with what I can only call a prolonged satire of the worst parts of Homestuck's hatedom and fandom alike, followed by...

Well, here's where things get tricky, actually. I'm not quite sure how to describe [S] Act 6: Act 6: Intermission 1. I've used the term "hypercomic" to describe Homestuck before. That's a bit of a contentious point right there--Alycia Shedd, another hypercomic theorist I'm acquainted with, suggested to me the other day that it's more like an illustrated novel than a comic, and there's maybe some truth to that. Even if we do accept it as a comic, there's definitely some individual elements that jump fully into other media--animation, games of various types, and, at one point, historical romance novels. [S] A6:A6:I1 is one of those points--it's undeniably an animated sequence (images juxtaposed temporally), not a comic.

And yet... there's a number of elements that are more akin to hypercomic technology than anything else I've seen. So, maybe what we're looking at here is a hyperanimation?

This is a big deal because it gives Homestuck yet another You Were Number One achievement badge to sew on its kiddy camper handysash. A hypercomic that's already broken so many other boundaries is, apparently, gleefully breaking new ones with every few updates these days. Hell, this comes shortly after an update that turned Homestuck into a type of hypercomic that up till now was almost purely theoretical. (I'll explain more about that in a moment.)

The most notable part of this, however, is that it again underscores Homestuck's unique qualities--the things that set it apart from other formalist experiments.

[S]A6:A6:I1 isn't powerful because of its formal, experimental elements.

It's powerful because those elements are used to express a powerful, dramatic moment in the story.

I want to try to get at why, which is going to necessitate some discussion of the narrative. For those of you who haven't read any of Homestuck, this surprisingly makes for an ideal element to discuss, as the events are weird enough (and short enough) that by the time you return to this point in the comic it'll be a surprise all over again. (Homestuck's looping narrative actually makes for a great natural spoiler-baffle because it takes so long to read and there's so many twists and turns). I DON'T recommend continuing if you're almost caught up, however--there's just enough visual information that you can piece together some of what's happened in the last few acts. Anyway, the point is that this article should be comprehensible even to those of you who haven't read the comic while not going old information for those of you who have kept up with these recent updates.

I should also warn you that while the first half has lots of juicy textual analysis, the second half is application of the lessons learned to some other stuff, so I'm gonna drift away from Homestuck for a bit. If you're just here for the analysis of [S]A6:A6:I1, you can check out that that point, it's cool, although I'd be most obliged if you stuck around.

Cool?

Cool.

Let's begin.

What Is It Doing

Part of what makes this video so interesting is its relationship to Homestuck as a whole. Before we start analyzing, let's take note of the dimensions of the starting screen. That's the standard layout for Homestuck, the norm from which panels sometimes (or, recently, frequently) deviate from. If you've been following this blog for a while, you might recall that I find such deviations to be particularly interesting, because they often work viscerally on a reader, emphasizing certain emotions, sensations, or narrative elements through their structure. (The only reason I haven't discussed it more is because I'm turning this idea into my grad thesis, so I want to keep it just a little under wraps for now. Well, that, and the actual nitty gritty underlying theory would probably be a huge snoozefest for most anyone that isn't me.)

Keep this idea of norms and deviations in mind as we start watching:

[S] Act 6: Act 6: Intermission 1

Did it take a moment to realize that the comet was breaking the panel border?

The first time, it caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting that transition at all, and it crept up on me, partly because it was so smooth:

I love the way this video begins, actually. It starts with a purely symbolic representation of the universe that the game encompasses--eight planets connected by seven gateways to the central entity known as Skaia, and through that abstract space flies a massive meteor... a meteor which then breaks the panel border.

So, let's start there. What is Hussie trying to show us through that strange breaking of form? Why shatter the established page boundaries here?

Well, first of all, notice how there are four planets to start with, with four more appearing. This is a symbolic representation instantly understandable to fans--it signifies that two universes are finally, after a three year wait in-comic, being merged together. This is an interesting choice, I think. Hussie could have depicted this by actually showing the four new planets materializing in this reality... but instead he simply indicated the titanic shift iconically. This allows him to indicate to the reader what is happening in a way that is still chill-inducing, especially when paired with the ambient cross-speaker pulse of the music, but keeps this event from drawing focus from what he considers the main action to be.

And in fact, the symbols of the planets dissolve into blackness just as the meteor starts growing and breaks the panel borders, and just as the music picks up. This indicates a transition from a symbolic reality to a literal one, and the literal reality of the meteor cannot be contained. There is a very conscious, consistent visual language at work here, actually, that isn't unique to Hussie--the ability to break the restrictions of the panel or page is an indicator, in countless media, of power beyond normal mortals. This is why Rococo angels and putti spill out of heaven onto the molding of churches, why Jack Kirby's gutter-breaking action is so dynamic, why Alphonse Mucha adds borders onto his religious paintings only to have his gods and angels and spirits break those established bounds... heck, it's why Planeswalker cards in Magic the Gathering, which represent beings on the same level as players rather than servile summoned creatures, break out of their art boxes:



Hussie is no stranger to the use of such structural indicators. In fact, there are moments in the comic where the entire layout of the website is reworked to indicate the presence of a being powerful enough to reshape the narrative to its own will and vision.

So, what we get out of this is that A. the meteor is real, not part of the symbolic world represented by the starting panel, B. it's the subject of this video--the important thing we should be focusing on, and C. this meteor is, in some way, too powerful to be contained by the comic's typical dimensions. This is extremely strong storytelling, because it uses simple elements to convey a LOT of information, much of which flashes past instantly without your brain having to really ponder it. This is why writing articles like this can be tricky--this stuff seems kind of obvious when you spell it out, but most of it is happening on an unconscious level. You're not constantly assailed by a voice spelling all this out like I'm doing, you just "read" it and understand. I suspect some of this is even going to be accessible to people unfamiliar with the astrological symbols invoked here, and unfamiliar with the narrative, because the structure is simply that strong.

As hypermedia, then, this is already a raging success, primarily because it uses hyperelements like the breaking of the previously sacrosanct page--a mark of Infinite Canvas techniques--for a specific informational purpose. The techniques are cool, for sure. Part of the experience comes just from the sheer element of, "woah, I've never seen anything quite like that before!" But that element complements rather than distracts from the actual information--factual and experiential--being conveyed. This is an area where other hypercomics have traditionally struggled, so this page is important from the perspective of pointing toward a way of making use of hypertech. This is what I mean when I describe Homestuck as a successful tech demo: it shows not just what you can do but why the new tech is useful and powerful. It's not just showing off a bunch of disconnected mechanisms, it's showing why we, as creators, might be interested in utilizing similar techniques, and why we, as consumers, should get excited about where the comic is headed.

There's one more thing the first section does well, actually. It leaves us wondering about conclusion C: why is this meteor powerful enough to break page borders?

We keep watching, expecting an answer... and in a moment, we get it:

The meteor is being piloted by a powerful figure. It's not the meteor in and of itself that breaks the boundaries of the comic, it's this dark looking being. (Those of you who have been keeping up with the comic know what's going on, those of you who haven't read any of it should be comfortably baffled and spoiler-immune at this point, and those of you who have read past Act 5 but haven't gotten further now know why I told them not to read this damn article. Too late now, ha ha!)

We have, here, the same techniques that we saw before being used to convey this character's power. Her presence extends beyond the confines of the established page, setting up her later actions as plausible.

And actually, we're starting to see some of the hyperanimation elements that I mentioned earlier. Right now, Hussie is using techniques that couldn't work effectively in a traditional video format, because they depend on the establishment of a small window, followed by the breaking of that window. While it's hard to imagine TV audiences accepting a work that regularly uses just one sixth or so of their viewing screen, such things are perfectly acceptable to computer audiences. What's more, the fact that Hussie is uploading flash constructions himself allows him to do things impossible on sites like YouTube (unless you somehow hack the website and install a bunch of java stuff, which I think Google wouldn't appreciate, the putzes).

What we're seeing here is Hussie utilizing only the parts of the screen he needs, but simultaneously eschewing the arbitrary constraints of single shots, spacial continuity, or set aspect ratios. This is all shit straight out of the Infinite Canvas playbook--when you don't have to worry about paying for blank space on a printed page, you have unlimited freedom of panel size, shape, and spacing. Hussie is using a technique previously reserved for hypercomics and applying it to animation. Thus, hyperanimation. And, like I keep stressing, the techniques are used here for a concrete purpose--here, for A. showing the figure's power and B. establishing a three dimensional spacial relationship between the meteor and the portal above Skaia while also giving us a dramatic closeup on the figure. Hussie is showing us what is possible, but always in the context of the larger purposes of the narrative.

And actually, there's another interesting hypertechnique at work both here and in the next bit:

(For those feeling a bit lost, the meteor just went through a protective portal around Skaia, redirecting it to Earth. What we're seeing here is the meteor leaving that portal and blasting off toward our planet... oh, which is also about to be destroyed by those red things which are tearing the universe apart because a homicidal middle-managing bureaucrat was given omnipotence and decided to take out his anger on the frog that is the universe and DAMMIT THIS EXPLANATION JUST MADE EVERYTHING MORE CONFUSING DIDN'T IT?)

One of the things Ian McDevitt and I discussed in the alpha of Understanding Hypercomics (which is woefully out of date but still pretty astute in a LOT of ways of I do say so myself and I do) was that hypercomics could emulate other media more easily than traditional media, because the web is more mutable than, say, the printed page.

This, it seems, extends to other hypermedia. The video here, for example, is emulating comics. This is possible for two reasons. First, Hussie has, as I mentioned above, decided to ignore traditional boundaries and fill the space or leave it blank as the content demands. Second, this hyperanimation comes in the context of a comic. Since we're already primed for comic panel reading (where not everything has to relate spacially) we understand that the meteor is traveling between one close up panel into a much wider shot--not literally, of course, but this transition helps us understand the layout of the event without losing any of the detail. It blends the best elements of comic and animation. It's an animation within a comic emulating a comic.

Homestuck: so meta you'll want to punch something.

This actually brings up another interesting fact about Homestuck: it's constantly doing stuff that we knew was theoretically conceivable, but hadn't been explored in practice.

Want a more tangible example? Ok. Let's take a brief diversion here and talk about Time Variable Hypercomics.

So, one of the things that we realized when writing Understanding Hypercomics was that the editable, reviseable nature of the web meant a comic could stay in one state up to a certain point and then, after it progressed past that point, the previous existing content could change to reflect new information. We came across just one semi-example during our research, and we're still pretty sure the author has no idea of the significance of his experiment. Besides that, and our own tech demo, there was no proof that this could be used as anything other than a gimmick. We had some ideas about using it to show a change in the reader's understanding--like, you could totally do a Fight Club hypercomic where the scenes with Tyler after you read to a certain point would be revised to show just one person fighting with himself, or a 1984 comic where you literally always would have been at war with East Asia... right up until the point where you would always have been at war with Eurasia--but again, we had no concrete implementations.

Or, we didn't, anyway, until John stuck his hand through something weird and suddenly appeared all over the timeline in Homestuck in various panels... and Hussie actually edited those panels to show John's hand materializing inexplicably.

Time. Fucking. Variable.

This blew me away completely, because it was not only an implementation of a previously purely theoretical (and often kind of difficult to explain or understand) class of hypercomics, it also served a strong narrative purpose. As a technique, it both resulted in a humorous circumstance (the slapstick of John's hand showing up in the background of random panels in midair)... and an indication that for the first time ever, the temporal rules of Homestuck were being totally busted. Something that should not have been possible became possible, and the medium itself bent to accommodate. It was a fantastic blending of form and function, made all the more significant by the fact that it was something no one else, to my knowledge, had ever done for a deliberate, in-narrative, not-a-retconny reason.

HUSSIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!

Anyway, that's what I'm talking about when I say that Hussie does stuff in Homestuck that otherwise is purely in the realm of the theoretical. And again, it's always pushing boundaries not at the expense of the narrative but to its benefit.

I don't actually have a lot to say about this next bit, so let's just take a moment to appreciate how cool it is:

I love the dynamism at work here. Stuff is flying all around at this point. Panels transform into stylistic elements (love the way the green of the figure is backed by that thinning red line, for example), we get some more of that cool spacial shifting... nnf. It's just good stuff.

And then, suddenly, everything breaks:

The video that is the comic that is the game Homestuck glitches right the hell out and we're left with an incomplete video. But look how slick that is--the music is written to accommodate that sudden structural break, it glitches in time and in tone in a way that's still intriguing to listen to, before finally breaking apart completely as the video comes to an end. And what's more, the glitching comes as a shock because we've already gotten used to the smooth flowing animation used in the video. Hussie has established a NEW baseline, only to immediately deviate from it once more to indicate...

Well, what's going on here? This might, again, for those of you who aren't caught up, just make things more confusing, but let me try to explain. Homestuck is played on two game disks. We ran out of game disks recently, but there's an expansion pack that continues the narrative, in the form of an old school game cartridge. Only, some asshole decided to fill the game cartridge with sugar and candy corn, like the obnoxious little shit he is. Asshole cherubs. Anyway, currently the narrative itself is glitching because the game has been damaged by the presence of sugary bullshit in its delicate inner workings.

So, all this sliding and panel breaking and stuff has really just been a red herring. It's a setup to get us excited about what's coming... only to bust up the animation at the last moment as the screen is taken over by broken image files that hint tantalizingly at the content of the rest of the video, but keep any semblance of meaning hidden.

And then, to really drive the point home, on the next page we get this message:

The cool Flash animation is unexpectedly cut short due a critical stardust clog. What a shame. Those exciting new gameplay features were looking real slick, too. You think it was pretty neat how the panels were sliding around like that. Oh well, you probably didn't miss all that much. 

Nevertheless, on a hunch you navigate once again to your trusty bandcamp page, and check the length of the song in question. Your fears are confirmed. It seems you missed four solid minutes of footage. You wonder if you'll ever find out what happened? 

HUSSIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

We've been pranked.

But we could only have been pranked so severely in the context of a masterful use of this medium.

This gag only works because everything that comes before it is so expertly put together. This is the strength of what Hussie is doing: he's making you really and truly want more. As a tech demo, this is perfect because it stirs interest while leaving the audience hanging and wanting satisfaction. It's advertising 101. And to add insult to injury, it's all an unintended, incidental consequence--Hussie isn't trying to market his game engine or anything like that, he's just doing what's best for the narrative.

So, that leaves us to pick up where he left off.

What Can We Do With What It's Doing

This is the bit where Homestuck fans here just for Homestuck stuff can feel free to check out, although of course I'd be glad to have you stick around. I want to talk about what we can take away from the techniques at work here, and how simple exposure to competent experiments can spark other experimentation.

To do that, I want to talk a bit about an idea this sparked in me. To do so, I'm going to have you watch this clip from the show So You Think You Can Dance:

So, this is actually a pretty sweet dance. I don't watch So You Think You Can Dance (I find the premise of reality shows--the idea of artists competing and getting ranked and voted off and told to go do something else--to be really distasteful on a deep kind of gut level) but my girlfriend, who is a dancer, sent this along to me because she knew I'd dig it. It's got the odd kind of off-kilter rhythms and unexpected controlled movements that I like in other media on a more metaphorical or structural level. It's control and release, you know? Just like what I've been ranting about for the last several thousand words or so. My girl knows what I'm into.

But what does this have to do with Homestuck?

Well, as I was watching, it occurred to me, as the camera focused on the judges and their reactions to the dance, that there was absolutely no one in the omniverse at that moment that I gave less of a shit about THAN THE FUCKING JUDGES.

I wanted to see the damn dance, for goodness sake!

And I thought, ok, wait, some people probably do give a shit about those people even though I don't, because some people watch this for the competition rather than the dances alone and they want to see the body language indicators that signify success or failure. Cool, I dig that. But this way we're both getting a fraction of what we want--I'm getting a hamstrung experience and they're missing the flow of body language in response to the other body's movement. To shrink down one screen and split the existing screen would be pretty cumbersome, I think, even with wide screen TVs that not everyone has.

But there's nothing besides the fact that no one has tried it yet to stop a whole other screen from getting added to the mix here. Look at it as a blank border section that you can use, or can leave as empty canvas--just like Homestuck uses the sides and tops of its panels when it needs to. Can you imagine a multiscreen rig that had variable-dimensioned, poseable screens that could be put into use if necessary? I suppose this could be done with a large enough single screen but perhaps not as elegantly or as interestingly. And maybe this is the kind of thing that can only work in specialized spaces with specialized media. That's ok! Shit, we already buy whole gaming systems that run games exclusive to their hardware, and with blu-ray in existence now we've also got multiple hardware types for movies (leaving aside the benighted VHS, which I still use thankyewverymuch). Is it that much of a stretch to say that this has potential?

I don't think so (or at least I didn't a couple of days ago but now it's sounding pretty dumb, actually), but I'd need some sort of demonstration.

And that's where the idea threatens to fall flat on its face.

See, something like this, especially for an idea that arguably could be solved far more easily and economically by hiring some better fucking film editors (seriously, who decided that concerts and dances and comedy performances needed to show the audience's reactions every 12 seconds? I don't care about those unwashed peasants, if I want to see them I'll leave my darksom and odorous room-den), can't stand on its own strength alone. Otherwise it's just glitz. It's just a trained dancing bear and has roughly the same resonant appeal.

That's where so many tech demos fall flat. That's why so much in AAA game design is mindbendingly wrongheaded. You can't tech demo your way to emotion, no matter how many pretty wrinkles you put on the face of your sad old man sprite! Emotion isn't higher resolution, you're not saying anything more profound with those pixels! You say profound things with a marriage of form and content, a blending of experimentation and sound communication techniques.

In other words, you do exactly what Hussie is doing--you write a story, then you bend the tech around that story to accommodate your message.

Wait, I've got one more example:



So. I guess this is impressive? Somehow? Like, it's probably a pretty big deal that it's running real time on the PS3 rather than being prerendered. Alright.

But.

I just.

Don't care?

I just can't work up the will to give a shit about this tech demo or anything it's trying to show me, because the story is a flat, sexist, overdone box-checking exercise. Press [Female In Vulnerable Position] button! Receive protective sympathy lizard brain response! It's rote, it's unimaginative, and it's really kind of gross and male-gazey... I mean, wow, what an explicit power fantasy--only you can protect the naked sexbot! You have the power, insubstantiated male off screen voice implied to be the viewer!

Yuck. Yuck all around.

There's nothing in this video to show why the technology in play here is necessary. Our stupid lizard brains would react regardless of the relative high or low resolution of the figures. This opens no doors, shows us nothing that we haven't seen before, gives me no reason to want to know more.

Basically, this video is everything that [S]A6:A6:I1 is not: dull, closed-ended, and saddled with a narrative ineffectually trying to show of tech, rather than supported by tech designed to effectively show off narrative.

If I wanted naked robots, Bjork already pulled this off in a way that's more compelling, better shot, and way, way sexier.



More like all is full of academic nerd rage!

Anyway, the point I'm driving at here is that as far as Homestuck takes us when it comes to tech, the tech alone can't carry us forward into the future of hypermedia. For that, we need to take the lesson of Homestuck's narrative. We need to see how the tech is used to serve the story, rather than the other way around. And above all else, we need identical lesbian makeo-




NO, no, wait, sorry, got sidetracked there for a moment. Ah, the point is, we're on the verge, culturally, of exploring some really cool stuff. Stuff that busts the boundaries of media wide open. The way forward is to be conscious of how we are putting these ideas out there. We want to see them succeed and grow and change. We want them to inspire people to apply them elsewhere, in surprising new ways.

To accomplish that, we have to move beyond the tech demo. We have to move beyond the tech-driven demo, and create narrative demos. Because ultimately, no matter what the technology looks like, it exists to serve a purpose as old as human thought: telling a tale.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

AI and the Magic Paintbrush

This'll be relevant in a few paragraphs, I swear.

I am discovering that when Elizer Yudkowski, the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and LessWrong1, tells me I should be scared of something, there are actually two levels of terror that I have to access. This is because it's not difficult for me to distance myself from problems of AI--after all, the likelihood that I'm going to be designing a pet friendly artificial intelligence in my basement is pretty slim. So, when he says "I don't talk about this idea, because most people are too frightened by it to react with the proper curiosity and interest," I can easily pick curiosity, because I've got nothing on the line.

I have to get to a state where I can actually be legitimately frightened--where I have chips in the game. Otherwise, all I'm doing is finding a solution that masks the act of fleeing from a problem in the guise of intellectual curiosity. It is very easy for me to say, "Wow, what an interesting problem," then immediately put the problem out of my mind. It would look like I'm reacting appropriately to something scary, but really I'm just disengaging.

This article is a very good example of that, actually. The basic gist is: if we create an AI, it might want to study humans. And the way you study things is frequently to make better and better models of your subject.

So, what happens if the AI accidentally creates models of humans so good that they become sapient?

And then what happens if the AI decides to start deleting old backup copies of these sapient simulations?

It's an intriguing thought that a lot of AI researchers, according to Yudowski, anyway, would handwave out of existence--they would say the problem would take care of itself, because the AI will be smart enough to recognize what was happening and keep it from happening, or that certain limitations would naturally prevent the creation of fully simulated consciousnesses. Of course, there's no way of really knowing that ahead of time, and I'm not sure how an AI would actually recognize that it was creating sentient cyberhumans while it's still in the process of figuring out how sentient humans work. And once it has them, they're there, and both the AI, and humanity, has to figure out what we do with a bunch of simulated beings trapped within the mind of another artificial being.

Which, yeah, I can see how that would be a problem, but not for me personally, right? I'm not an AI researcher. I'm pretty sure that for us artists and writers there's not a lot to worry about. After all, we don't have to deal with the hard realities of AI, we can comfortably speculate and fantasize about the intriguing future that awaits us without worrying too much about solving the problems ourselves. We're never going to get so exact a fictional simulation that our own creations start thinking for themselves! And besides, artists are smart, we'll know if that's what's happening and stop ourselves before we go to far. There are just fundamental limitations to our simulations that would prevent the creation of an actual secondary consciousness in our own minds.

Huh.

Why does that sound familiar?

There's a story I remember reading as a child (which Google tells me was probably "Liang and the Magic Paintbrush"), a picture book about a boy who can paint pictures so real they spring to life, and so he deliberately paints flaws in his form. The Emperor hears tell of the boy's strange powers and commissions the artist to paint a great dragon. The boy does, but leaves one eye unfinished, blank.

The emperor doesn't like this.

You can probably imagine what kind of ending the story has. It's not a happy ending.

I didn't really understand this story as a child, and I'm not sure I quite grasp the intended metaphor now, but boy, I can think of a pretty intriguing new reading.

Think about it like this:

As artists (used here to include writers, dancers, &c.--creators of aesthetic works) we often simulate characters, audiences, Ideal Readers, even semi-abstracted emotional ideas as part of our works. I think this is true even of abstract artists--expressionists, poets, dancers, maybe even chefs--albeit to a lesser extent than to realists. There's still a mental model of audience and experience that you're trying to convey--a simulation that attempts to accurately map behavior.

In the most extreme cases of this modeling, we have writers discussing their characters in self-determining terms. The character does, in essence, what it wants and the writer is along for the ride. Which isn't to say the simulation has free will. Think of it in terms of the classic philosophical problem of omniscience: because we are an omniscient observer, we know what the characters would do based on our modeling of their personality, and so while the characters aren't literally walking around making decisions, we see the path that they would weave through a fictional narrative.

Basically, although ultimately I (or more accurately, my mental simulation) am winding the characters up and noting what paths they naturally wobble along due to the particular physics of their setting and personality, they still feel quite real. So intense is this experience that I personally have a lot of trouble subjecting characters to pain, because I feel to much empathy for these simulations, despite the fact that they don't have subjective experiences.

At least, they don't yet.

There's going to be a point in possibly the very near future when we start actually augmenting our intelligence. How long do you think before we start simulating simple people--actual subjectively aware life forms--within our own swelled heads?

If you are an artist, you should be feeling sheer terror right now. Imagine what it will be like to write stories or draw portraits when you might accidentally create a real being just by thinking too hard about your subject.

You will essentially have become mentally pregnant with a fully grown adult that cannot escape the confines of your mind.

Oh, but it gets worse!

See, there's nothing currently that says a sociopath can't be an artist, and that a sociopathic artist can't get the same kind of brain augmentation that the rest of us can.

Ever wanted to just... blow up the world? Well in the future, you might be able to blow up fully realized simulated worlds with sentient beings--genocide as stress relief.

It's enough to make you give up art forever... or give up augmentation.

But that's a path I don't really find interesting or productive. The benefits of upgrading everyone's brains are just too damn weighty to be counterbalanced by this totally hypothetical, fictional, and possibly straight up idiotic media theorist's fears. Remember, this isn't my field. I could be totally off base here--dreaming up nightmares that could never manifest in real life.

No, this isn't a problem we can run from, as alarming as it is. Maybe the solution is to put hard limits in our own brains along the lines that Yudowski suggests for sentient AI--something that can recognize when a being might be created and stop it from being created. We need to leave flaws in our form so that the dragon doesn't spring to life. That seems like, at the very least, a useful metaphor for describing the problem. And really, one of the lessons of that magic paintbrush tale is that art can and perhaps even should accept flaws. Remember, artists are liars, and art derives the greater part of its power from lies--sometimes lies as simple as the careful manipulation of a shadow, or a single unfinished eye.

How do we set up those limits? Hell if I know. But it's something we're going to have to worry about in the future, I think. And in the mean time I'll be thinking very carefully before killing off any fictional characters.

After all, for all I know I may already have blood on my hands.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

1 I can never quite figure out whether LessWrong is an identity, a collective, or just a website full of articles. It might be all three, and it seems to be used differently in different situations. Fucking transhumanists.