Hating the artist, hating the art

(Disclaimer: to the extent that this article was inspired by a specific creator, it’s not a creator you’ve heard of, and not one that I mention anywhere in the article! I mention a few authors as examples, but I was not setting out to specifically comment on any of them.)

When a creator falls into disrepute, there tends to be a public re-evaluation of their work. “Oh, I re-read their book, and it’s aged terribly.” “I’ve always thought their work was bad.”

This is reminiscent the story of sour grapes. In the Aesop’s fable, a fox tries to eat some grapes, but cannot reach them. So the fox says the grapes were sour anyway, and he didn’t want them. So when an artist falls from grace, people can no longer wholly enjoy the art. So they say that the art was never good in the first place, and nothing of value was lost.

But there is a major difference between the fox’s re-evaluation of the grapes and the public’s re-evaluation of the art. The “public” is made up of more than one person. There may be some individuals who first liked the art, and then stopped liking it. But more often, what happens is we first hear from individuals who liked the art, and then later we hear from another set of individuals who did not like the art. Perhaps no individual re-evaluation took place, and it’s just a matter of listening more to the haters.

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Selling out as a game dev

Moon Garden Optimizer is now listed on Steam. You can still play the game in browser for free on Itch.io, but the Steam version will be paid and have expanded content.

Moon Garden Optimizer is a puzzle strategy game about growing a garden while conserving water. It’s the only strategy game I’ve seen that lets you undo as much as you like. Wishlist on Steam!

Moon Garden Optimizer capsule

Ahem.

So I’d like to discuss the decision to put the game on Steam, and also sell it for money. Selling out, as it were.

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What is identity?

I run an annual survey, and we’re always asking about sexual identity.  We include some options that are more obscure than most people are used to.

Something I occasionally hear in feedback, is people saying it takes a long time to answer, because they have to look up identity labels that were unfamiliar with. Or people will say they’re not sure they identify with a term, because they don’t know what it means.

I have to admit, I find this response baffling. If there is a word that you do not recognize, then we can say with 100% certainty that you do not identify with the word. How could you?
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From the drafts: Data science as function fitting

Let’s dig out another article from my drafts bin, something I don’t think I was ever going to finish. This draft was titled “Data Science as function fitting”. It begins:

In the buzzword-ridden age of AI hype, perhaps there’s value in having more unmagical ways of talking about data science. My most unmagical description, is that data science is basically function fitting. It’s like what Excel does when you ask Excel to draw a trendline through a set of data points.

So that’s the thesis statement. But is it a thesis worth arguing? It feels kind of “hot take” quality to me. When you have a large enough audience, you start to be aware that at least a few readers are experts, and will call you out on your bullshit. And so immediately after stating the thesis, I felt it was necessary to add a ton of qualifying statements. You know, like I didn’t really mean it.

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Link Roundup: August 2025

I don’t have many links this time, and all videos.  If you’re one of the readers who doesn’t watch videos, you can skip this one.

The Physics of Dissonance | minutephysics (video, 27 min) – A good introduction to the overtone theory of dissonance.

The one thing I would add, is that it’s useful to distinguish “dissonant” from “unpleasant” from “rough”.  Dissonance is a cultural concept–basically a set of musical tropes used to convey darkness or tension.  For some reason people often define dissonance as an unpleasant sound, but this is obviously untrue–minor chords are considered dissonant and yet people often like them.  In the context of psychoacoustics (as in this video), many authors use “roughness” for the psychoacoustical effect, and “dissonance” for the cultural construct.  Roughness often aligns with dissonance, and is theorized to explain it, but it obviously can’t explain dissonance completely given the cultural and historical variation.

Downton Abbey and the Origin of Capitalism | Unlearning Economics (video, 1:02 hours) – A discussion about the historical origins of capitalism, informed by academic theory and also a TV drama.  There’s the cartoon version of history, where everybody used to barter until somebody invented currency, but that’s definitely not how it actually happened.  According to the argument in this video, capitalism arose specifically in England within the last few centuries.

This argument makes capitalism look pretty good, honestly, but mostly in comparison to the aristocracy-based system it supplanted.  Everyone in this argument is aware that capitalism can still be bad.

Fantasies of Nuremberg | Jacob Geller (video, 49 min) – Jacob Geller describes the actual history of the Nuremberg Trials, and how it was perceived by contemporaries.  When the historical details are examined, it seems to illustrate the futility and dissatisfaction of justice.

“Brain art” sparks controversy

content note: fiction

Recently, brain interfacing technologies have been leveraged to make images and videos straight out of people’s heads. Some people are calling it art, but detractors say it isn’t art at all.

“It lacks any intentionality,” says prompt artist JustAlice. “All they do is lounge around, and the images are just handed to them. They don’t even need to verbalize what they want, or sort through results to choose the best one. And the results look like shit!” She shows me examples of what she considers bad brain art, furiously highlighting all the five-fingered hands. “Is it so hard to just pick up a keyboard?”

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NSFW and defensibility

Earlier I wrote about Itch.io delisting NSFW content. Here’s some followup discussion.

I’ve been impressed by how quickly gamers mobilized around this. There’s an ongoing campaign to flood the call centers of Visa/Mastercard/Paypal. Financial institutions are now ineffectually trying to deflect blame onto each other. I think there’s a chance to win this particular battle.

The issue seems to have united gamers of all types. Progressives can talk about how this hurts LGBTQ games. Other gamers might be confused by the LGBTQ association, but they’re still vehemently anti-censorship. And look, I’m not complaining.

In the long term, Collective Shout and Project 2025 are targeting all porn as well as LGBTQ content. However, Collective Shout will claim that in this case, they were only trying to take down the very worst stuff, i.e. games with sexual abuse, incest, or pedophilia. From what I’ve seen, opinion is divided on these “abusive” games. Opinion is divided… but there is not much disagreement. Gamers recognize that the “abusive” games themselves are not particularly relevant. Whether you’re in favor or against the presence of “abusive” games, it doesn’t actually matter, because the censorship goes way beyond that.

But my instinct is to defend the “abusive” games. I’d like to elaborate on that, and also explain the LGBTQ associations.

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