Welcome
Hi i'm Dweller, and i'm building this site because like you, I hate the internet now and I decided to become cringe as a response. This page is under construction and not very fleshed out yet.About me:
- I'd gladly blow up the earth without hesitation.
- Computer games are my main passion, particularly older ones for the PC.
- I am currently developing an early 90s style game.
- I collect big box PC games.
- I keep a youtube channel as a journal of game environments.
- I love animals, and I own a cat.
Projects
World-War 2 Sim Game
An early-90s style World-War 2 tank and aircraft sim I'm working on in my spare-time. 40+ playable vehicles, 4 factions, wave-based sandbox style missions. I'll link the page i'm building for it when I can actually settle on a name.D&D Campaign Journal
A journal i'm keeping to chart our party's progress through Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden. Includes maps, logs, art.PC Game Collection
I'll post a new game in my collection here every few days or when I remember. I'll also add a list of games I'm hoping to eventually collect.Collected Games Shelf:
Games I'd like to collect:
- Half-Life.
- Warcraft 2.
- A copy of Diablo that's in better condition.
- Planescape Torment.
- Descent.
Low-Effort Movie Reviews
Doctor Zhivago
I thought the story of a middle-class intellectuals quest to navigate the perils of Russian Revolution in order to cheat on his wife was inspiring. The ultimate bourgeois experience.Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy
Old man power fantasy. A retired Gary Oldman has 6 conversations where his gut is right about things, ends up finding a mole at M16 while a twink does all the legwork. Colin Firth fucks Gary Oldman's wife.The Martian
Ridley Scott, reputed for this preference for visuals over performances, manages to blow the opportunity to make a movie with lots of cool visuals of Mars. Spend 2 hours waiting to see if a redditor makes it home alive. A story so tensionless it could be the front of a unuch's underpants.Low-Effort Game Reviews
SWAT 4
I'm not bullshitting you when I say that this game has more design lineage in its DNA from Thief than it does its contemporaries in tactical shooters. The squad-based police proceedure is the premise, but the crime-scenes and people you interlope and sometimes violently impose that proceedure on; those are what reel you in.I think it's a good example of a game in typically "dry" genre stepping into the "play that's already ended badly" school of storytelling dominated by more "serious" narrative-driven games. It has something to say but it knows when to pull its punches, it doesn't fall into the trap of being sordid for the sake of being sordid. Well worth your time if ambient environments are your thing.
Low-Effort Book Reviews
Dune Messiah
More soon.Web 1.0 Aesthetics
When I decided to escape the walled-garden and have a more minimalist online presence; one that gave me more authorship and capacity for expression, I did research. Neocities is generally top of the list unless you're trying to build a professional page as a business card.The primary audience for this sort of thing are artists using their page as an kind of portfolio piece. There are a lot of videos on youtube urging creative people to turn to sites like Neocities or building and self-hosting a site as a means for self-expression outside of twitter/bluesky or youtube. The irony is of course that they had to go to youtube to say this because that's where the eyeballs actually are.
I think a lot of people are coming here as a means of making joy for themselves or making joy for other people; but in a practical/professional sense, this is something you direct people to, rather than from.
I don't have ANY kind of expectations any more in terms of exposure or professional development or monetary gain in a creative sense. I have tried that once and I want to burn that whole dog and pony show down along with everyone in it.
Nowerdays, I just want to make things that make me happy in my little hovel in the woods, occasionally leaving them by the forest's edge to see if anyone is foolish enough to touch the cursed trinkets I leave there.
I have enjoyed looking at other people's sites for inspriation, and a lot of them are very creative and very humbling in how well constructed they are and how well they use web 1.0 conventions as an artistic medium.
I do have some observations. I think that web 1.0 design is a bit like film noir in the sense that well-known tropes about the style are actually the product of continued parody rather than the historical style itself.
If you only knew film noir from references to it, then you'd assume every one features a detective's office, venetian blinds, femme fatales, a monologue voiceover, sunsets in LA, and so on and so forth. In reality, perhaps only a handful of films (Double-Indemnity is generally cited) feature EVERY example of every trope.
Modern examples of web 1.0 design tend to be very maximal in their expression of the style. Lots of animated gifs, a page counter, a guestbook, loud backgrounds, forum badges, music, so on and so forth.
The elephant begging to be addressed here is that the end goal for a lot of these pages isn't to historically emulate how webpages were- they are not museum pieces- but I feel they were intended to be looked at rather than used. They're modern webcore/oldweb/Y2k futurist/fruitiger aero distillations of web 1.0 as a medium for sculpture.
I am curious how much emulated web 1.0 design is intentionally ironic in turning every aspect up to 11, and how many are the product of flanderization. This might have been caused by geocities pages in the mid to late 2000s gradually becoming a more elaborate and maximal pastiche of mid to late 90s web design- with the imitation of that style becoming cemented as 'typical of the 90s and 2000s' during the 2010s and 2020s, when fewer people had first-hand experience of the pre web 2.0 internet.
I have some examples: here and here, of some sites from the late 90s and early 2000s that have been more or less maitained as they were. Like film noir, each of them contains at least one web-design trope from the time, but by and large they're pretty simple (from the user's perspective), functional sites, and don't bombard you visually.
I think there's and something appreciable about less is more; I am inclined to read pages that have a clarity of purpose to them- though I am contiually awed by other people's more-is-more-actually approach too, and it's pretty likely my page will take on some of those trends as I learn over time.
Low-Stakes Fantasy
I recently started playing vanilla Classic World of Warcraft again after trying Classic Burning Crusade for the second time. I have some very fond memories of playing Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King back when they were new; but i've been thoroughly convinced that the vanilla version of the game is the definitive one.Vanilla has, both mechanically and narratively, a strong feeling of disempowerment. You go from feeling very weak to being marginally less weak, to somewhat capable (with help) during your travels. People often say that Burning Crusade "fixed" a lot of problems with class design in vanilla, that made playing some classes unviable in a competitive setting. I think that not only having some classes having some inherent flaws was actually more interesting from a design point of view- but from a thematic one as well. I won't attempt to touch on every mechanical aspect of World of Warcraft's design here because that's a book right there, but i'll talk briefly about how it interweaves thematically.
Vanilla feels a lot closer to what an MMO should be in terms of population. There is no expansion continent where all the characters over level 60 are hanging out. There's a much more even distribution of people throughout the world- even if a lot of those level capped characters are just farming or travelling to or from raids. Otherwise, people are generally taking their time more. 1-60 (for most people) is the eventual, inevitable summit of a winding game-long mountain path. 60-70 by comparison is an unpleasant uphill race to get to endgame dungeons. It's where the game first started to feel like content. In a logistical sense as well, BC tends to move you from one quest hub to another in a much more planned sense of progression. Vanilla has semi-plannedness that does breadcrumb to potential new horizons, but ultimately you're more encouraged to wander and explore the whole world.
It's from this sense of ongoing continual struggle and gradual improvement that makes the original game addictive. Narratively, vanilla deals with much more local problems, that gradually escalate throughout the 1-60 journey into regional ones. You'll start out fighting gnolls, then you'll move to bandits, then to local warlords, and eventually unravelling an Azeroth-wide conspiracy involving dragons; one that ties back into many of the disconnected plotlines you've already been involved in.
Future expansions would tackle global or cosmic catastrophies that would leave little room for this sense of growth. What sets sword and sorcery apart from high fantasy or epic fantasy is not only that the stories tend to be more constrained and personal, but they also tend to be about a person gradually overcoming nature- that nature being either literal, physical nature or some psychological aspect of the human condition. This is what more closely connects sword and sorcery with pulp speculative fiction, rather than its Tolkienian cousins, which, to very broadly generalize; this is a contested topic to say the least, tend to practice more of a historical romanticism.
Which is not to say that the Warcraft games are not Tolkienian, they absolutely are- but vanilla World of Warcraft, in my opinion, comes the closest to the sword and sorcery dungeons and dragons games played by Blizzard developers during their early years, which would go on to inspire so much of their back-catalogue. You are far more of a Conan than an Aragorn when you're playing these games. You travel to Scarlet Monastery to go get a book for a questgiver becasue he's going to pay you, and there might be good loot there, not because you're the lost heir to a fallen kingdom.
Furthermore, this kind of cynicism carries over to the wider story- a lot of the threats hinted at in vanilla, are never fully confronted or eliminated. There are seeds of various narratives sown everywhere, but not every thread is tied up by the game's end. Killing Sauron does not end all evil in the land, instead it sits and waits like a coiled narrative spring waiting for some future adventure to find the dark hole it's hiding in. This brings a great sense of tension as you are never told the complete story or context of your impact on the world. It's not your problem though, it's about your personal journey. You are just one character with tangential involvement in a wider plot.
The "broken" class design in some ways (perhaps unintentionally) gives you a greater sense of your place in context of the world and other players. Traditionally (though this might have changed with a newer playerbase) if you played a druid, it meant you were consigned to a supporting role in endgame raids. Rather than looking at this as a problem, I think actually it makes the game better. Knowing that you are going to be individually weak in some situations not only makes a it a better MMO with a greater need for overlapping roles and synergies- I think also it also narratively, from a roleplaying point of view, keeps you aware of your limitations. It makes overcoming or bypassing those limitations much more rewarding. It shows you a cruel and indifferent world.
And of course, it makes camraderie, and overcoming those weaknesses, feel more satisfying as well; every Conan needs his Subotai (and you will often be the Subotai). You could argue that every dungeons and dragons party is basically the Fellowship of the Ring- and that's certainly what we were all emulating when we were playing the game in 2004 when we were running Blackrock Depths- but again, I think the fleeting friendship, mercenary nature of MMO interactions speaks more to pulp sword and sorcery. These are life-long comrades you've known for all of 20 minutes, and will drift out of your story just as quickly. You'll likely see them again further down the road.
Indie Games
So a few days ago I saw several videos about the challenges of indie game economics in 2026. Then I saw another about the fatigue that audiences are feeling about buying indie games. It made me want to start penning a few belligerently worded paragraphs about it. I have some thoughts on the subject as both a small-time developer and a consumer, and I can see it both sides.A lot of the indie space is people who have made (or commonly not made) games that you've not heard of, giving advice to other people who haven't made games you've not heard of, and then other other people who've made or not made games you've not heard of, commenting on the cottage industry that's sprung up to capitalize on the booming market for talking about not making games. Then consumers pipe up and say that all of this tiring and not worth $20.
Before I lose you: I don't really want to chew on a lot of well-teethed discussions about the value of indie games. I might revisit it in more granular detail later, but I'm very much over game industry discourse, creative discourse, indie game discourse. While I still feel strongly about those things, I chose to sit on those paragraphs a few days and see how I felt later, because my gut told me it was the wrong time. I'd much rather start this little site on a more positive note and leave the bitter parts out.
The thesis of that essay is that fundamentally, too many people are making games now. The real issue with indie games (or games in general) is one of shelf space, not the games, or influencers, or the industry itself per se.
Back in the 80s and 90s, one of the chief concerns among publishers and retailers was that brick-and-mortar shelf space was finite. Publishers, retailers and the games press essentially curated what ended up on shelves, what was marketed, and ultimately what you saw and what you bought.
When we moved to digital storefront, the shelves became virtually infinite. Your attention span though, is not infinite. It stopped being about winning physical space and started being more about winning your eyeballs. We thought this was great in 2010, because it meant the little guy could at least be on the same playing field as a big publisher so long as they could get eyes on what they were making.
Tastemakers, are and always have been, a crucial thing. Influencers, particularly streamers and youtubers, are make or break for small developers. Just like indie games itself, influencing is a very crowded market, which is also competing for your time. This is another high-investment barrier the consumer has to overcome. You have to find someone you trust enough to choose to spotlight things that won't waste your time.
Before, just as there were fewer games, so to were there fewer tastemakers. You were pretty much limited to print, not everyone was online, and the attitude of 'old' media like TV towards games was pretty inconsistent. Having fewer ways to find out about games, made making decisions about spending your time and money easier.
So is this a call for more gatekeeping from tastemakers for sake of the customer's comfort? It sounds a lot more dystopian when you put that way, so let's not put it that way. I think it's about finding a healthy compromise between developers needs as a creative industry and consumer's needs (which is also in said developers interest) need for a comprehensible marketplace. I don't think curating the curators is practical or the right answer.
I think the solution might actually be bespoke distribution. The change needs to come at the place people actually buy the games, and how that can be diversified, rather than how you get them there.
The issue I think is that even though the shop is gone, it's still fundamentally an abstract kind of space. That is the place where you actually hand over the money and make your choice. It's where you peruse what they have while you're in there. How that space is presented, who goes there, and how the shelves are sorted is very important.
Visiting steam isn't really like going to a shop, it's like going to a warehouse. Sure, it might have every game you could conceivably play there, but it's an overwhelming, unpleasant pile of mislabeled boxes. We let the customers set the taxonomy and we're surprised the nomenclature is unusable.
Unless you make it your business to pick through it (and I'm sure lots of people do), a lot of people are going to steam to buy something they already heard about and then not hanging about; possibly taking a look at what they've got out the front.
GoG used to be more useful as a storefront because it was reputable like Steam, but it also catered to a specific market and was a little picky about what it displayed on its shelfspace. Discussions about preservationism aside (and boy do I have some opinions on that, more later), GoG's distinctiveness as a space has kind of been diluted over time, as it's sought to bring in more paying demographics (presumably people that will pay to see tits). This is probably just the entropy of running a business. Despite my grievances, GoG fundamentally is one.
The end result though, from my point of view, is I no longer check GoG daily to see if they've added any new games to their library. I know now that most of it is not stuff I'll be interested in, and it's pretty rare now fore them to try to get games I am interested in. What would really comfort me as a consumer would be being able to visit a specific digital space and be presented a comprehensible number of games i'm likely to be interested in. What would comfort me as a developer would be knowing that I could tailor my game to that space, rather than seeing it lost in steam's infinite warehouse.
Visiting physical games stores used to be more like visiting a small bookshop. Because your outside knowledge of what was available was smaller, it used to be more novel to visit them. A lot more effort was put into how games were presented to you at the storefront, and the general experience of buying and installing the game. Those things have fallen by the wayside because ultimately, digital storefronts are more about being a safe and convenient delivery method.
I don't think it's good or viable to try to change the way consumers hear about games, but rather, by establishing your brand as a storefront that caters to a particular kind of customer, and encouraging them to go there specifically for a certain kind of game. Just as every clothing store doesn't sell every kind of clothing- perhaps every game store should not sell every kind of game.
The elephant in the room is, the financial viability of such businesses would be pretty questionable.
Developers, publishers and consumers all like steam because all the eyeballs are there, and eyeballs are good for business. Gamemakers reluctantly hand over that juicy 30% cut for just that reason. Consumers want to go to a storefront they trust, has a good track record of consumer protection, and offers a competitive price. A lot of developers are often (deliberately?) obtuse about why consumers are adverse to EGS, or at least used to be, perhaps we've mellowed on that one now. Brand loyalty matters to both parties and must be acknowledged.
So I don't have a complete business plan here, but something that would be healthy creatively and economically for indie games would be to diversify the way the audiences enjoy the complete holistic experience of finding, purchasing and playing their game- not just how they find out about it. This would help to reduce the growing fatigue among consumers.
Mute Buttons
The "do not recommend this channel" button is one of the greatest inventions in the history of the internet.I've talked a little bit about curation on the internet before, and this time it's specifically about curation of your own mental space. I'm a guy who takes mental hygiene and not having my time wasted very seriously.
If your site comes with some form of "get that shit out of my sight and don't ever let me see it again" button: congratulations; your website is useable in 2026.
Never give second chances, never give second guesses. If the thumbnail has obvious AI in it, hit the button. If the thumbnail has a wojak in it, hit the button. If the thumbnail has a guy with his mouth open pointing at something, that button is getting hit. "but dweller, maybe you should try to sort good things from bad things". Uh how about instead they work a little harder to be good things and until then, I let god sort them out.
The marie kondo approach to the internet is an insanely healthy one. There was this guy, a Japanese game developer, the guy that made Bayonetta; no I don't care, no I'm not looking him up. His approach on twitter was (is?) to block anyone who even breathed at him in a way that didn't bring him joy. Speak to him on English (he only speaks Japanese)? Block. Ask him a question that he doesn't feel like answering? Block. Tell him you liked his game? Block. Anything that causes him even the mildest of displeasure, he just blocks it. And I bet he's super fucking happy with that outlook.
People will attempt to steal your time and energy from you and then feign ignorance when confronted. A lot of time-wasting content dwells within the dark.... uh...crevices of our doubt. What if I mute a creator that might have otherwise good content? What if the thumbnail is just there to get my attention, but the actual video is good? What if a salient point lurks deep within this 2 hour essay that just re-iterates its thesis over and over again? It's those questions that they prey upon. Instead of doubt, just shoot them in the face and move on.
Being on the internet is like standing at the base of the Eiffel tower and letting thousands of trinket salesmen shout in your face. The block button is the pepper spray, it's the only defense you have. It's a vast ocean of content, and you will lose nothing by bailing a few bucketfuls of briney seawater out of your sinking cranial dingy.
I know a few of you are saying "well that's your prerogative, my guy, that was always a choice, you do you, nobody is stopping you, do you want a medal or something". To that I say, one, adopting this attitude in the extreme, like, complete recommendation genocide, is a pretty new to me, and pretty rad. Secondly, it's not a baseline for the whole internet, and we should be demanding it should be.
Sites don't want you to have this ability because their ability to put eyeballs in front of content and then learning what eyeballs go with what content is how they make their money. We kind of get sometimes as a conceit because otherwise, you guessed it, these sites would be fucking unusable and people wouldn't go there.
Don't want any of this dropdown nonsense, I want a big fat one-click button that will turn a field of time-wasting parasite content into a fucking algorithmic parking lot. Being the dictator of your own cerebral banana republic rocks and I will gladly put a trillion gallons of slop against the wall for a microsecond of comprehensible solace.
So I encourage you: always go nuclear, early and often. Words to live by.
Piracy
Something that has come to bother me is that sometimes people treat videogames as if they're unplayable unless they're on steam. Sometimes, people even get excited about games that have been widely avaliable on the internet and in perfect working order on modern systems for decades. Sometimes it's games that've even been on GOG for years.I feel like this kind of speaks to a wider trend of declining 'digital awareness' among a lot of people. There are three sort of conclusions you can draw from this: either that people simply didn't know about the games, didn't care to look for them, or it just wasn't fashionable to be seen playing them before now. I'm not sure if it's a lack of knowlege, a lack of ability or even a lack of inclination to look outside the internet's walled gardens.
Some companies have made a lot of money taking abandonware, making it not abandonware anymore and then charging 15 dollars for it. Don't get me wrong, I definitely don't think there's anything shameful about convenience as a selling point. You're not really paying for the game itself- you're actually paying for someone to go through the hassle of getting something working out of the box for you. I think though it has dulled our collective ability to just troubleshoot or even tolerate friction.
I for one would love to see "No One Lives Forever 2" avaliable commerically again, but let's be real here, if you actually cared about playing that game, you've already found and played it. I don't think more people buying it "preserves" it any better than coming from pirates- I think it's because a lot of people have been conditioned to think that things are only legitimate if they're coming from some places.
People are unwilling to try old games unless they've been modded to remove the rough edges, as opposed to just acclimatising to them. Kinda feels like kids have forgotten how to torrent. I'm sure that's not actually true, but I have noticed that even the pirates evolved into a business model where the game is repackaged as if it were a commerical product.
Now i'm not saying that piracy is the answer to everything. It's very irritating when you're trying to discuss the preservation of games and people pipe up that they'll just pirate it, as if this is the silver bullet to all the layered issues that games-as-a-serice and so on pose. I also don't think that "back in my day, everyone knew how to pirate uphill, in the snow" either. I do think there's a general, potentially self-inflicted psychological war being waged against people's general sense of autonomy on the internet.
Something I have noticed is the number of people that have made a Neocities page and then said they're on "the indie web" now, and it feels a little stolen-valouresque. Yes you have made a little more effort than some people, but hosting your own webpage has always been a thing that's open to you. What Neocities brings is free tools and infrastructure and most importantly- an inherent degree of discoverability. There's a sort of social-media-lite glue that binds the pages together. It's the quit-smoking patch for corporate internet. It's a distored facsimile of a tiny enclave, drawn from memory, of what one part of the internet used to be.
I think stuff like neocities is a good stepping stone to a wider discussion about the re-atomization of the internet, personal expression, existing outside of the corporate internet- but I think the way in which we are our own worst enemies is that it really takes a lot to lure people out of that environment. Telling people that you need to pariah yourself a little to gain back what we had, is a hard sell. You don't make an indie alternative to twitter or youtube or tiktok- you have to be content with the idea of them just not being a thing.
There's been a lot of talk lately of ditching discord for various reasons, chief among them privacy concerns. I've seen people kind of half-heartedly try alternatives and then report back that those alternatives have rougher edges than discord. I think the issue is that our inability to tolate rough edges at all is forcing us like a gasping fish into a smaller and smaller puddle of rapidly evaporating bog water.
Speculative Fiction
In the 1960s and 70s there was a little culture war happening in pulp sci-fi publishing because it was felt that more gentle and palatable stories were seeping into the realm of sci-fi. Many saw the cultural purpose of sci-fi to push boundaries- and was by definition, not "high culture". It was not something that the establisment was meant to internalize and repackage.A lot of this is directed at the influence that fantasy, a genre that had in some ways existed in human civilization as mythology or "fairy stories", but in some ways was a relatively new invention in the early 20th century as a codified literary genre. Sci-fi or speculative fiction was, in the eyes of many of the genre's participants, about looking forward to what humanity could be- while fantasy was inherently reminicent of the past, it is reflective of what humanity is, was and forever shall be.
In my opinion, contemporary science fiction is in something of a crisis of identity. In ways that people actually engage with the genre, the ones that actually matter, push it in predictable ways, but sell themselves under the pretense of transgressiveness. The aforementioned internalizing and repackaging has long since come to pass.
There are really two kinds of science fiction being made. The first are high-concept hard sci-fi novels that are basically just the sci-fi establishment. The other are videogames.
I will put my hand up and say that I don't think that the first kind of sci-fi has any cultural relevance now whatsoever. I think some of them have interesting ideas as concepts, but the time of Azimovian sci-fi somewhat capturing the spiritual and scientific zietgeist of an era as it was emerging (and then suddenly cut short), is over.
I think the most interesting way that young people are connecting with science fiction is through videogames, especially lo-fi indie ones.
The problem is that most of these are really just a mystery box narrative which dares their audience to look inside. You tentatively ask "is the surpise just body horror or implied sexual assault". The author smiles "haha, no they're good games sir". You shrug and open the box. It's body horror.
A lot of these games are sophomoric. Pseudo-political or pseudo-theological commentary wrapped up in a veneer of transgressiveness as bait for younger people who are actively searching for transgressive media that will tickle them. People who are looking to be challenged- the thing is that edginess isn't the same as challenging; but both audience and author haven't really matured yet.
The problem is that most of this transgression isn't transgressive in new or interesting ways- it's sort of safely edgy in a way that will get 15-35 years olds to play it like taking a little hit of being challenged for the day before nodding off on the sofa. It's only actually challenging if you've not been exposed to more of the genre or just life in general. It's "AKIRA-in-the-shell-runner-again-core".
If were to look at the equivalent in AAA games, at something like 2077 for instance, it's more similar than you think. It would be interesting if it were literally the first science fiction narrative you'd ever experienced, but its dystopian hyper-capitalist setting is decidedly toothless. It has literally nothing to say that hasn't been said- it is ALL style. The AAA and indie-scenes are more similar than we are comfortable to admit. It's really more about wanting to be in a pantheon with your influences than it is to make something truly novel.
So, the questiom is, "ok numbnuts, if you're so fucking smart, why don't you write some science fiction that pushes the envelope in a way that will satisfy your pretentious ass". To that I say, "yeah touche"; but I don't think we need new flavours of science fiction. I think we've iterated away its usefulness as a civilizational telescope. What I think we actually need is to invent a whole new form of media altogether.
We live in decidedly dystopian times and we make decidedly dystopian art to reflect that. A lot of people are trying to pivot towards more "earnest" fiction, because irony cannot satirize our current reality anymore. I think we have been overtaken by reminicent forms of science fiction for this reason, we're not really optimistic enough about the future to think about it anymore- because the future came and it disappointed us.
Now that videogames have kind of been eaten and absorbed by old media, I think whatever comes next will be spurred by technological or societal change, and whatever *that* is, will be picking up the torch of relevance going forward. I think something important to remember is that literary genres aren't constants. Literary genres, like all thoughts, are naturally selected just as genes are. In the same way that oral tradition still exists in human civilization but it is no longer the primary means that ideas are carried forward, I think that some of our 20th century literary genres and media will die and be replaced.
What makes a good burger
Dweller's edicts on good burger design:- Burgers are more about texture than flavour.
- It's an American lasagne: you want several thin layers of ingredients.
- Big burgers look impressive but actually aren't fun to eat. If I have to unhinge my jaw like a snake, it's a shit burger.
- Bun toasting is essential, see first point.
- Keep it simple and balanced: meat, cheese, optional vegetable, garnish, sauce. See second point.
- Cheap, thin, frozen patties will beat more expensive, thicker, fresh ones. You want a crispy patty that's going to interact with the other ingredients in the burger- not a fucking meatloaf.
- Don't drown it in sauce. Resturants and cafes use a lot of strong sauce to disguise the fact that the burger it flavourless and textureless.
I'm depressed about AI
I'm not going to discuss any of the wider issues with AI at length, because there are smarter people than me to do that and i'm pretty sure if they're genuinely smart they'll admit they also don't really know what's going on, or they're sitting with a bottle of gin in one hand and a barrel of a shotgun between their teeth like me. I'll tell you who isn't worried about AI though: stupid people.Indeed it's not the bellend-fuckhead-hammer that worries me, but the bellend-fuckhead-hand that wields it. The technology itself is far less dangerous than the cretinous troglodytes that it emboldens. It's not that the technology puts stupid people on the same playing field as people of normal cranial enrichedness but- but the belief that it does is an unpredictable and destructive kind of courage. AI is a row of glimmering miraculously-awarded medals for bravey pinned to a dictator's chest.
An argument I see a lot is that resistance to this technology is almost a kind of counter-revolutionary discrimnation against the terminally stupid classes. Finally, flat heads need not dwell beneath the jackboot of people that can do and think things.
You could say AI is in some ways the most emancipating and least emancipating technology of our time. It at least gives the impression that we live in a now post-competence society. Credentialism is dead. Rise up idiots of the world, you have nothing to lose but the weighty chains of skill, talent, taste, technical knowlege, literacy, cause and effect, health and safety, pattern recognition and critical thinking. Good luck finding a job, idiot.
What really tipped me over today was seeing it invade the realm of recreational creativity in real life, in flesh space, in a way I've not had to experience yet, but many others have. I play tabletop roleplaying games, I really enjoy it. It's a hobby in which imagination and improvisation are a core pillar- and I like imaginging things and I have discovered, even as a weird, peevish misanthrope, that I'm apparently a theatre-kid on the quiet.
So I'm shocked at how rapidly creative parts of tabletop have been willingly outsourced- when the creativity is the whole point. Why even bother having a dungeon master, just let GPT run the game. Why bother creating our characters or making interesting choices, just let GPT do it. Why bother trying to do anything to immerse ourselves in the campaign, just let GPT make all the materials. It totally robs the joy and thus purpose from the whole enterpise.
The thing is, these people aren't new, they were already inside the house; they've been in the walls the whole time. AI just gave them the green-light to start organizing into a quasi political demographic within society as a whole- but in this case, within hobbies or fandoms. It's a dog-whistle for a secret society of philistines who once had to meet after dark to concoct their nefarious imbecile plans- now free to conduct their feeble-minded business while the sun is up.
AI proliferation in public spaces isn't actually about AI use as so much as it is about trying to stack the deck with culturally-likeminded people- which is to say, fucking morons. It's a way of getting smarter people to leave the room so that you can have the room. We'll just have the robot do ... whatever it is those eggheads did. The kind of person who genuinely wants to be free of being capable is a malleable person.
People that use AI are relentless in trying to wear down other people into using it because they feel guilty about what they're doing and they know they should feel guilty. Everyone ever has felt insecurity about the limits of their own ability. God knows I do. The drive to resolve that conflict is what pushes us. Getting more people to use AI dulls that push. If we're all equally reliant on the everything machine, there's less guilt about the need to improve.
Perhaps maybe they've never known the joy of making something with their own hands, and feeling responsible for it? Why bother to do this by hand when an AI could draw something better(?) far more quickly. I've seen people seem genuinely confused by the idea that you might just do something creative for its own sake. It's a real microplastics in the water moment. I'm being put into the postion where i'm having to defend making things myself.
In terms of how AI is going to shape things economically and thus socially: If AI is truly the new cotton-gin then it would be pretty foolish to think that constant vigilance in favour of bespoke basket-weaving would spare us from the future. However. I think people fixate on art in particular when it comes to the consequences of AI because expression is, frankly, the thing that hasn't been taken outsourced yet.
The AI stuff is like government; it won't leave you alone to be a private citizen. I've certainly had angry moments about AI in the last few years. The people who've spoken to me most enthusiastically have been the least computer literate people I know. It's like covid all over again; if you were paying attention before that happened, you knew covid was coming. There was a lot of people who didn't believe it was coming. Then it did. Overnight programming change. Suddenly people were subject matter experts. The whole skepticsm, healthy-concern-for-authority script flipped.
It's terrifying to spend a life being immersed in technology and still not feeling competent about it- and then being informed by people who can barely dress themselves that they're the new overclass because they're a bit more willing to toe the line. We're monstrously fucked.
I think I felt so affected by this thing in particular because, at least at one point, you could have told yourself that there would be bread and circuses- but the circuses are now generated by a prompt and, the bread contains tiny plastic beads that will turn up in your balls.