Gentrified food snacks

I said you could fill a book on this topic and I meant it and I'm not going to, but just to stake a claim on the take: the key reason people use the idiom of contractualism to describe invocation of and negotiation with sublime powers, demons but also fairies and genies and so on, is because vernacular law has supplanted liturgical languages as the language of magisterium, and that's what gets imbued with magical potency in folk culture.

Everyone here loves that Brian Eno quote that goes, like, "whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"; it's that. When the language of magisterium is one that most people don't speak, the phonological features of that language are what we associate with power, and that's where you get pseudolatin incantations as a kind of huckster's business. A less-discussed effect of vernacularization of the language of authority is that it changes its topology of salience, it displaces the "essence" of power, in the mind of the public, onto the features that still stand out even to a fluent speaker.

This is where you get the Anglo-Protestant mysticization of the differences between the KJV's dialect and their own, "thou" as a word of power of a very different kind than was intended. This happens in the secular domain, also, a focus on jargon -- it is to some extent the appeal of the "buzzword" to the managerial caste -- but also on precision and formal and technical structure. Vernacularization has to some extent displaced numen from language to structure, and when we daydream about the true and essential thing of which all these experiences are pale reflections, we think now less of the language God spoke to Adam than of the rules and procedures governing that process. And in the modern era the hucksters with their pseudolatin incantations have become sovereign citizens, cod-proceduralist magi, and we must imagine Odin's songs of power as articles of law. This is why the story of the genie who grants wishes has, like the old "deal with the devil", been reimagined a cautionary tale about drafting imprecise contracts, so thoroughly that people barely remember that these stories were ever anything else.

"Late Night with the Devil" is a horror movie releasing tomorrow about a 70's late night show that has been highly anticipated by the indie film scene.

That is, until reviewers discovered that 3 title cards during the movie were AI generated art. (I couldn't tell myself when I saw the images, but if you look closely enough the telltale signs are there.) Now the same people who were championing it, are boycotting it. I'm not kidding.

These are from the same community that if you ask about a movie by Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, or Harvey Weinstein, talk about "separating the art from the artist." I'm not calling them hypocrites - these are apples to oranges - but the scale of the difference is very funny.

I'm not a fan of AI art, at least in its current incarnation, which promises to replace quality, adequately paid art with industrial slop at a mass scale. I get drawing a line and trying to defend the line.

If anything, it reminds me of tumblr and fan fiction communities. The way the sharpest knives in identity politics aren't out for Republicans and white men and grey tribers - no these days they are wielded against authors who have five intersectional flags but offend against a sixth. Because you can't hurt the mega-establishment, but you can hurt the queer POC author next door.

Which just makes the insular progressive communities hellscapes without proportionality.

No enemies but the in-in-in-in-in-group.

It's always fun when my replies prove for me "some people are absurdly upset about this." You should read them.

To be clear, I consider this "debate" so far beneath discussion that it's just a joke. But it's also my rule of thumb that "the side who avoids mentioning the object level is the one to be skeptical of." Ie., if someone says "it's unbelievable what will get you canceled these days" and an opponent actually quotes the offense, well, there's a good Bayesian prior for who was acting more egregiously.

So here's one of the stills

No, I could not "tell at first glance" that was AI. Now, some people on twitter inform me that when you know what to look for - asymmetry in the eyes, etc - it becomes obvious. But it sure wasn't obvious to me, especially if it was a split second during a movie (caveat, I have yet to see the movie.)

But even as I agree "AI art = bad", this shows how much the anti movement is becoming puritanical and obsessed. They sound just like the TERF's who say it's obvious how an image of any particular transwoman is not a """real""" woman - and both groups are wrong half the time, lumping original art and slightly mannish ciswomen in with the "fake" stuff they hate so much. And then it becomes a sin merely not to see what is "obvious" to the paranoiacs.

Or maybe I am blind and the above image is obvious to anyone, enough to ruin their movie going experience. I guess that makes my ignorance blissful.

It says a lot about me.

Update. I saw the movie and it was good.

I never considered the AI art could be justified as reinforcing the themes of the movie - but it turns out the movie IS about "selling out parts of your integrity bit by bit to evil powers that leads to spirits that surreally interfere with your work."

walrusfairy

Apparently there is tumblr discourse or drama over this absurdist poll question

Unlike the blue pill/red pill discourse, at least this question cuts to a clear ideological difference.

Sherlock Holmes famously put it "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Douglas Adams in his book "Dirk Gently's Holisitic Detective Agency" (you should read it) spends much of the book reversing this aphorism: "Once you eliminate the improbable, whatever remains, no matter how impossible, must be the truth." We, after all, know a lot about human nature and practicality as we must deal with them every day, while we take scientific truths and metaphysics for granted and are actually quite ignorant of their foundation.

The question takes for granted that I even know that fairies don't exist. I don't know this!

"Supernatural" knowledge in the sense of institutional religions and recorded superstitions is falsifiably wrong, as people have put their claims to test and they don't bear out. But this is very different than "there exist things we do not know about." There's a lot we don't know! I doubt creatures resembling our stories of fairies exist, but if one did, it wouldn't upend my view of the entire world.

ok, but i think the existence of a sentient non-human species that lives on Earth should upend your view of the world at least a little bit. what magical abilities do they have? are they even from Earth? does anyone else know about them? why is this particular one at your front door? there are so, so many questions that this should immediately elicit in you, and maybe this is a bit uncharitable, but i think it speaks to a profound lack of curiosity that so many people are just like "huh, ok, i guess there's fairies".

It seems likely that non-human sentient species have existed, like the Cro-Magnons. There are plenty of *almost* sentient animals on this planet already. And humanity spent about 300,000 years being sentient but not civilized. So no, an additional uncivilized but somehow thinking being would not be very shocking to me.

What magic would they have? Dunno. Psychic powers replicate in laboratory conditions.

This emphasizes my thesis that most people don't understand how much little understood, weird stuff is out there. It's not in defiance of science, just outside of it.

Certainly the emphasis on "... and they are at MY door specially interested in ME" makes it more unbelievable. But this just tips the question back into the "improbable" territory. If fairies exist, I find it as improbable that they are interested in me, as that a walrus would come out of the water to greet specifically me. But just judging different practical improbablities, which meh.

"Late Night with the Devil" is a horror movie releasing tomorrow about a 70's late night show that has been highly anticipated by the indie film scene.

That is, until reviewers discovered that 3 title cards during the movie were AI generated art. (I couldn't tell myself when I saw the images, but if you look closely enough the telltale signs are there.) Now the same people who were championing it, are boycotting it. I'm not kidding.

These are from the same community that if you ask about a movie by Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, or Harvey Weinstein, talk about "separating the art from the artist." I'm not calling them hypocrites - these are apples to oranges - but the scale of the difference is very funny.

I'm not a fan of AI art, at least in its current incarnation, which promises to replace quality, adequately paid art with industrial slop at a mass scale. I get drawing a line and trying to defend the line.

If anything, it reminds me of tumblr and fan fiction communities. The way the sharpest knives in identity politics aren't out for Republicans and white men and grey tribers - no these days they are wielded against authors who have five intersectional flags but offend against a sixth. Because you can't hurt the mega-establishment, but you can hurt the queer POC author next door.

Which just makes the insular progressive communities hellscapes without proportionality.

No enemies but the in-in-in-in-in-group.

It's always fun when my replies prove for me "some people are absurdly upset about this." You should read them.

To be clear, I consider this "debate" so far beneath discussion that it's just a joke. But it's also my rule of thumb that "the side who avoids mentioning the object level is the one to be skeptical of." Ie., if someone says "it's unbelievable what will get you canceled these days" and an opponent actually quotes the offense, well, there's a good Bayesian prior for who was acting more egregiously.

So here's one of the stills

No, I could not "tell at first glance" that was AI. Now, some people on twitter inform me that when you know what to look for - asymmetry in the eyes, etc - it becomes obvious. But it sure wasn't obvious to me, especially if it was a split second during a movie (caveat, I have yet to see the movie.)

But even as I agree "AI art = bad", this shows how much the anti movement is becoming puritanical and obsessed. They sound just like the TERF's who say it's obvious how an image of any particular transwoman is not a """real""" woman - and both groups are wrong half the time, lumping original art and slightly mannish ciswomen in with the "fake" stuff they hate so much. And then it becomes a sin merely not to see what is "obvious" to the paranoiacs.

Or maybe I am blind and the above image is obvious to anyone, enough to ruin their movie going experience. I guess that makes my ignorance blissful.

It says a lot about me.

wheelchairs

whatever, man

The funniest thing about D&D wheelchair discourse is that they have existed since the 6th century BCE, and would be present for most settings that D&D journeys are based on. Mostly for old, high ranking and rich people, but not a mystery.

Alright you might not see them much in fieldwork, exploring tombs and evil castles, but then you didn't get many bookish alchemists or ritual priests delving like that either.

But that's not what is interesting to me. What's interesting is the part of the discourse that says "why wouldn't they heal any disabling injury?"

I am always fascinating by healing magic, and the way it works in various settings. (In my arguably most successful work, the villain is the world's only magical healer.)

Oh, biological manipulation magic, growing wings or an extra arm or raising an army of clones from a drop of blood, whatever that's no different from any other power fantasy.

But specifically healing is always about "returning to a state of wholeness." Drink a potion and your wounds all heal, that missing toe comes back, your concussion stops ringing - but that's it. You don't age back to 25, or get your virginity back, or forget the horrors of war, or grow some extra muscles you didn't have before but would be useful.

For "healing" to work as simply as it does in most magical settings, requires there to be an ideal self it can always refer to.

And so the wheelchair-ists implicitly claim that the self without the ability to walk, is the real self they heal to. Not to heap scorn on them, as everyone has pointed out, Professor X lives in a universe with seven thousand different types of healing and robotics, but uses a wheelchair iconicly.

(Fic idea, person who uses a healing potion and heals to a different gender. A whole society dealing with this.)

I forgot to mention, one of the aspects I like is the question of WHO'S vision of the ideal self are we talking about with healing - the recipient's, or the healer's? What if the healer doesn't know about that tattoo, or thought you looked better with long hair, do they heal you back to before that damage? I know Amy from Worm and the Doctor Who episode during the Blitz already engage with this theme, and I like those stories too.