Last month, I published an article in The Asexual Agenda about initiation in mixed relationships.

Workplaces Without Borders And Sexual Harassment | Thing of Things – Ozy writes about how sexual harassment laws work best in a stable workplace environment.  In an “borderless” workplace, such as actors who work gig to gig, there’s a lot less protection, and little to prevent quid pro quo.  I think this is a consequence of the weird way that sexual harassment is constructed in US law.  If someone catcalls you in the street, we would colloquially think of that as sexual harassment, but in the eyes of the law it isn’t.  Sexual harassment laws are built upon employment discrimination.  So if it doesn’t affect your job, or if it’s targeted equally at men and women, then it’s legally defensible.

It’s okay to be bad at games | Clayton Purdom – An interview with Bennett Foddy about difficult games.  He talks about the game as a dialogue between the player and designer, rather than the designer just giving players everything they want.  He also says he wants players to admit they like the friction, that failure is a big part of the attraction.  I think that’s true of a lot of games and gamers, although personally I’ve found it useful to recognize that I actually don’t like much friction in games.  That’s why I like walking sims, which have so little friction that they’re often accused of not being games at all (though they totally are).

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First, I’ll plug this month’s Ace Journal Club, which discussed a paper about Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder and the “responsive” sexuality model.

AI Is a Lot of Work | The Verge – This article is about “annotators” or “taskers”, people paid to label data to train machine learning models.  You can think of this as people who are paid to do captcha codes endlessly.  Or imagine Papers Please, but it’s real.  As you might imagine, it does not pay very well.

From the data scientist end, this is a well-known process, although I don’t have direct experience with it.  Typically, you’d go through an intermediary, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and never learn anything about the workers themselves.  Despite workers being paid poorly, it’s an inherently expensive process, and requires a lot of controls.

Games that Don’t Fake the Space | Jacob Geller (video, 31 min) – Video games often use tricks and illusions to make a virtual space seem bigger than it is, but not every game.  Some really are that big.  Now the question I always have about measuring video game spaces is, what’s the measuring stick?  Could we make the world bigger by making the character smaller or slower, or simply lowering the camera closer to the ground?  I feel like virtual spaces should be measured in square minutes instead of square miles.  I have to put a word in for The Longing, which has a big world by virtue of its protagonist walking very very slowly.  You tell the protagonist to walk somewhere, and then you quit and come back later, that’s how slow he is.  It’s not a conventionally “fun” experience, but it’s interesting to see games do big/slow once in a while.

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Some links on AI art – I included some of these shoutouts in my comment section, but might as well include in my link roundup as well.  The reason I was thinking about AI art was because Great American Satan has been writing in its defense.  I also saw a video by Jack Saint (21 min), which was in opposition to AI art, but also concluded that the problem was capitalism.  I thought one of the interesting points Jack Saint made was about the use of AI in animation, which is an art form that arguably takes too much work.  Most people will basically never animate anything, and when people like Jack Saint do solo animation projects, it can take a major toll.  This is why I’m not very convinced by the idea that AI makes things too easy.  Maybe it makes some things too easy, but other things it could make more reasonably easy.

Adastra: The Best Furry Visual Novel Made Me Come Out as Gay and Now You Have to Hear About It | Keith Ballard (video, 3:14 hours) – So, funny story.  I thought I’d watch some Myst Let’s Plays so I could see what I remembered wrong about the series.  And I got sidetracked because the player was obviously a furry and probably gay.  Clearly that’s what Myst was missing–furries.

Anyway, this is the sort of media analysis that includes a summary of the visual novel being discussed–that’s why it’s so long.  Adastra is a political drama where the player character is abducted to an alien society and participates in a contest between two successors to the throne.  It’s also an 18+ romance.  It sounds like this story has a great alignment of text and subtext: the characters are literally gay, but also metaphorically gay in their relation to society.  Despite the common prejudice against furries, some of the smut they write just sounds so sincere and wholesome.

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Although I don’t always plug it here, I run a monthly ace journal club on my other blog.  This month’s article was about asexual experiences coming out.  It might be worth a read if you want an overview of asexual coming out experiences and how they sometimes differ from gay coming out experiences.

Chat GPT is a blurry jpeg of the web | New Yorker – A relatively pessimistic article about Chat GPT that describes it as a copy of the internet, saved with lossy compression.  The author asks, “how much use is a blurry jpeg, when you still have the original?”  I think this a great starting point to understanding the state of the art chatbots.  The chatbots have strictly less knowledge than what you can find on the internet–albeit in more a form that may be easier to process.  Perhaps the megacorps are right, and the best application is search engines.

The Problem With Masterworks | The Plain Bagel (video, 19 min) – If you’ve ever seen sponsored ads on youtube for Masterworks, an art-based investment scheme, you might have thought it sounded scummy.  Sounds scummy, is scummy, this video gives the scoop on that.  Apparently they skirt through regulation loopholes, which gives them a lot of leeway to report returns in a misleading way.  I actually unsubbed to a channel because they accepted a sponsorship from Masterworks.

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Dogmatic Positivity | osteophage – I’m sure most readers are already on board with the idea that negativity can be good, and relentless positivity stifling.  But it’s still fun to see this essay draw together disparate topics, from Christian literature to the Law of Attraction, to NFTs, and space lasers.  All the same, we can also think of contexts where hope seems to be good.  The truth is that hope isn’t good or bad, it’s simply the wrong level of analysis.

How effective altruism let Sam Bankman-Fried happen | Vox – Another good article on Sam Bankman-Fried, and how his actions were related to EA philosophy.  I always say about EA philosophy, it’s basically utilitarianism but they go out of their way to bite every bullet they can find, like imagine a charity movement built by trolleyology enthusiasts–and here Dylan Matthews is saying the same thing!

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