Notices by Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social), page 2

Today you will learn: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/eat-4
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #animals

@mattmcirvin Oh yeah, definitely. I think farce has to have stupid shallow characters who never evolve.

I think one of the keys with Wodehouse is that his characters are much more like punch cards than people. Like, for a given character their personality, motives, and the state of their relationships to the other characters could be listed with complete thoroughness on a postcard. They are uncomplex. What scenes do is they alter a number of states on each character, e.g. who they're in love with, are they in a good mood, etc.

I think what was likely going on is that for plot purposes he needed Bertie's mood to change. In most authors' hands, and even Wodehouse's in most cases, the move here is to rejigger prior plots to arrive at the correct mental state. But because Wodehouse is so funny and clever, he's able to essentially just assert the mood change, and you don't even notice. In fact, you'd like to read more.

So, for a project I'm reading a lot of Wodehouse. I'd read a lot of it before, but this time more analytically. An interesting thing is just how much he gets away with by being slow and funny. There's a scene in one of his books where Bertie is grumpy, then finds a rubber duckie. There's a whole paragraph by Bertie describing how to operate the duck. Seems like a complete throwaway gag, and an excellent one, BUT the real trick is he did a bit-flip on Bertie, who goes from sad to happy.

Anyway this all relates to a project that'll probably appear... Winter 2025ish? Assuming AI has let us survive.

And so the game is just a rich and surprising set of flips in state, over and over and over, with greater urgency and seemingly less chance of happy resolution, until by some scheme everything is saved at the last second. The reason he gets away with such a complex abstracted notion of plot is that the scenes themselves can be quite slow, e.g. a person will pause to explain everything so far, or a piece of dialog will be ultra-repetitive, or a person will sit and play with a duck for no reason.

So Toys R Us is running an AI generated video: https://www.toysrus.com/pages/studios

It looks... bad? But I can't tell if that's just because I'm interested in AI so I can see all the cheats and problems. Presumably most people don't even realize it's AI?

Bonus panel here if you touch me on the red button: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/control

#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #ai

So we keep seeing this cycle where some cool new AI doodad - instant music, instant images etc. - makes the Internet lose its mind and then... people stop caring.

I think there's a long-standing myth that what makes humans happy is beauty. I think of for example, Bellamy's book "Looking Backward" where he imagines in the year 2000 you'll have 4 radio stations you can listen to any time playing music as the height of human joy.

@jcutting @ramuuns Is she angry or reciprocating?

Man, dudes are out here all day long sending dick pix nobody wants when they should've been doing boudoir shots of their knuckles

I wonder if we'll start to see a bunch of these new data centers going to low-population places where wind power is cheap, e.g. Nebraska? Like I assume for a lot of this stuff distance from population isn't a huge deal?

One of the secrets of the book-writing business is how few people read books. This is especially true of literary books. Like, if the NYT bestseller list were stripped of celeb books, self-help books, and "beach reads," I bet you could get on with fewer than 500 sales per week. Maybe fewer than 300. It's astonishing to read what publishing was like about 100 years ago before mass media, when regular people would buy the Saturday Evening Post for original short stories.

Attention
Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/health-3
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #adhd

One big mystery to me is why YouTube, which is run by demonstrable rent-seeker Google, nevertheless gives creators close to 50% of ad rev by their stuff. The result? The most vibrant online creation scene. Not to say it doesn't have loads of issues and bullshit, but you really get high production value stuff, creating a virtuous cycle.

But most sites don't do this, so in addition to harming good things like arts and journalism, they're harming their own food source.

So, one lens on the weird direction of the modern Internet is that entities created to route you to cool stuff, e.g. search, social media, have especially in the last 5-10 years been taking an ever larger part of the pie via having giant networks. Google can now control whether a news site lives or dies. Meta can take 99.5% of all ad revenue displayed next to an artist's work and they have no power.

Long-term effect? Damage to the creative class.

My wife is now sharing the worst facts

https://www.instagram.com/p/C7JslqvOZZM/?hl=en

The rant nobody asked for.

Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/myth-2

#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #superhero #myth

10-year-old told me today that chanting things, e.g. "eat the worm!" or whatever was a distinctly boy activity.

What are weird some things your kids have perceived as gendered?