“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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Origami: Passiflora Ornata with Spirals

Passiflora Ornata with Spirals

Passiflora Ornata with Spirals, designed by Ekaterina Lukasheva

Looking through my old photos, here’s one from 2014.  It’s a variant on the Passiflora Ornata, of which I have an example here.  The long points, instead of being used to make flower pettles, are twisted into spirals.  I believe the spiral design is quite similar to Tomoko Fuse’s Origami Spiral Star, so if you’d like to try a simple version you can look into that.

Waking up, past tense

Do you like waking up? Yeah, me neither. I prefer that all my waking be done strictly in the past tense, i.e. to be woke.

I’m looking at my drafts bin and I have a lot of stuff here that I never finished and never will finish. I thought I’d turn some of these ideas into a more casual blogging. How do you like this format? How do I like this format?

I have a draft dated to 2023, whose premise is “a linguistic analysis of ‘woke’”. Basically, I would use google trends and time-constrained google searches to identify the historical trajectory of the word and its meaning. I’ve done this a few times before, e.g. tracing the history of “No homo”.

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The NSFW game purge

Recently, Steam purged a bunch of NSFW games from its storefront. This occurred as the result of efforts from Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout who applied pressure through payment processors. Collective Shout is a “””feminist””” group, although nobody with a passing glance would recognize them as legitimately feminist. Its founder is anti-abortion, what does that tell you? Collective Shout has previously fought to ban GTAV, Detroit: Become Human, as well as rappers Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Tyler, the Creator.

The games that were banned on Steam primarily contain non-consensual and incest erotic content. I was curious what specific games were banned, and found a website dedicated to tracking it (warning: link contains thumbnails for NSFW games).

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Critical thinking as community value

Last month, I explored the idea that empiricism and critical thinking are (or should be) core values in social justice.

On the other hand… how good of an idea is that really? While we may agree that critical thinking is a good thing, just because a community values critical thinking does not mean they are good at it. In fact, communities that value critical thinking are often bad at it.

This is an easy observation to make, here, because I don’t need to argue for it, I just need to gesture at what we already know. In short, we are a community that’s been burned. The skeptical, atheist, and Rationalist communities all valued critical thinking in slightly different ways, and each has had its problems. All the praise of critical thinking did not save us.

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Link Roundup: July 2025

This month, the Ace Journal Club discussed birth order effects–often cited as evidence of the biological origins of sexual orientation.  I came away thinking the evidence is shakier than I realized.

The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures | verilybitchie (video, 31 min) – Why does sci-fi use feminine men to signify decadence in the ruling class?  Well, sexism, obviously.  But the video also traces historical and literary precedent, to help us understand the intersection of sexism and fashion.

“Portfolios of the Poor” (book review) | Tell me why the world is weird – How do the global poor live on $2 a day?  It’s perhaps misleading to say they earn $2 a day, because their income tends to be volatile.  There’s a lot of discussion of how they borrow, lend, and save money to smooth out the volatility.

I was thinking about this in relation to my post about loans, and how loans function as a shitty welfare system.  The value of lending is smoothing volatility, and that’s something that poor people need more than anyone else.  But lending and other financial tools have an overhead cost–a cost that falls, unfairly, on the poor.  And when we’re talking about $2 a day, it’s hard to imagine anything resembling the US financial system operating on those margins.

Kanye West and The Daily Wire | Big Joel (video, 43 min) – As an example of how ultra-wealthy people become unmoored from reality, Kanye West openly praises Hitler in song.  In comes Ben Shapiro to say “Hitler is bad actually”, a banal observation turned desperate plea.  Joel explores a fracture in the right wing between anti-semitism and zionism.

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