How You Treat AI Says Something About You

The existence and availability of LLMs brings out the weirdest shit in some people.  I personally believe it’s worth it, for the benefits mentioned in my pinned article, but it’s so bizarre to watch.  It really makes me wonder just how messed up most of us are, under the hood.  I’ve already stated for the record that I believe the majority of people are less intellectually and emotionally capable than we expect them to be.  (not ableist because i think this is cause for protecting people, not limiting their freedoms or shaming them.)  Maybe I should take a cue from 2024 me and expect no better, but it still gets me.

A guy linked me to mastodon threads that put me in mind of all this.  (not linking it because i don’t want to give these losers publicity.)  Exhibit A:  Some leftoid activist type says she sees LLMs as automated slaves and use of them as morally corrupt.  I don’t believe she actually believes that.  I think she’s a partisan participating in the AI moral panic for social clout, by saying something wildly inflammatory against people who use AI.  I dismiss her position as asinine BS and move on.

Exhibit B:  A story, possibly apocryphal, of a workplace.  Only one guy has the courage to use the evil sin machine of AI, and his justification?  It’s like having a personal slave, and because they have no feelings, that’s OK and great!  Everybody should have personal slaves!  Why don’t you want one?  While this guy could be fake, I believe that such a guy is possible, and gross.  He is not my ally in the pro-AI position.

Why?  Because that’s a creepy way to think.  I do believe it is absolutely legit that everyone should have labor-saving technology at hand, as much as possible, at all times, because labor fucking blows.  Fuck working any harder than absolutely necessary.  Fitness people are perverts, which hey, is fine, but that’s not an aberration I would ever go in for.  Different kinks for different binks.  But this guy’s phrasing shows that exploitation turns his crank.  That is gross.

To be clear, LLMs don’t have feelings and if you want to be gross to them, that’s perfectly fine, from a moral point of view!  However, the way you treat them does reflect on who you are.  One way of putting this,

“LLMs aren’t conscious but you should still be nice to them.  Kant was right.  Being mean to anything ruins your soul!” – The Kant Car  (misspellings corrected)

You interact with this technology by talking to it with human speech.  Much like how TTRPGs can become an unintentional test of moral character, a consequence-free fake person to interact with can also provide insight into who you are, as the user.  Someone who conceptualizes this relationship as slavery (yay!) is, on some level, a nasty creep, and telling on himself.  Arguably, he should be reported to Human Resources at the company where he works for making his coworkers feel uncomfortable.

Oh yes, the coworkers.  For some reason, they accepted this perv’s framing of LLM usage, and refused to use AI because they saw it as slavery (boo!).  (again, if the story is to be believed.)  This does not say something bad or good about them as people.  It does show that they are shallow thinkers and easily misled, which puts them in good company with the majority of the human species, but aren’t exactly great virtues to possess.

Exhibit A jerk was trying to be cruel to a broad outgroup of labeled enemies – the villainous users of AI – by equating them with slavers, no matter what gentle souls are relying on them for companionship in a shitty fucking world, what gentle or noble purposes they could be applied to.  That says something about her as well.

There is no pro or anti AI person in this article that I respect, save the driver of the Kant Car.  Have a nice day.

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Cootie Catcher

Remember paper fortune tellers?  It’s a basic piece of origami schoolkids have made since who knows when.  You put your hand inside and open it one way and then the other, a much more elaborate way to reach a binary result than flipping a coin.  I dimly recall one being used to see who you’d end up falling in love with, but more clearly I remember a funnier use.

Instead of alternating on some kind of counting system, you alternate with the pincers down on the top of somebody’s head.  One of the results was left blank, the other one had a bunch of weird bugs drawn on it.  If you got the bug result, well, you had cooties, son.  That’s just science.

Hey, that wikipedia article is fun.  Give it a look.

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Where’s the Concentration Camp?

As many people as ICE is abducting right now, where are they being sent?  Because as diverse as Minneapolis is, even a lightning speed deportation can’t happen fast enough to dozens of nations around the world.  Tons of Somalians in the US were born here.  They don’t even have citizenship in Somalia.

If there isn’t a concentration camp, they probably have a dozen or more spread around the city in warehouses and railroad cars and shit.  I have read the white people they arrest are beaten and abused but released in an average of 48 hours to make room for caging those with darker skin tones.

I’ve read Walz is not seeking reelection because of nazi death threats.  If I didn’t have a family depending on me, man, I don’t know what the fuck I’d do, but … so easy to imagine making that blood flow.  Death to all nazis now, regardless of what labels they’ve chosen for themselves, what flag they’re flying.  Eat shit and die, motherfuckers, please.

Anyway, on the antidoomerism policy, it does continue to be true that 99.9% of us will not become victims of this political violence, and life under fascism can suck but it can still be a life, with whatever moments of joy that can hold.  Let nobody who is frightened of these fucking monsters allow that fear to harm them in any way.

Long live the fighters in Minneapolis, LA, Chicago, Portland, wherever the jackboot treads.  May your enemies die face down in their own blood and piss.  No justice no peace.

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A Prophecy

“Evil policemen patrol the city;
They look for somebody to kill.
They’ve done a little damage,
They wanna do some more now,
And they probably will.”

“I Wish This Song Was Louder” by Electric Six (2006)

I tease that this was prophetic, but the fact is police work attracts murderers like priest work attracts child molesters, so it’s been true.  But still, it jumps out when you hear it, given the way hair fuhrer’s goon squad is besieging Minneapolis at the moment.  If they keep on like this, we’re going to have a massacre at some point, possibly hundreds of victims.  I’m sure ICE’s secret body count is already well over a hundred “invisible people,” but this is that main street action he was bragging about.  Different.

The casual level of control the fash have over complicit corporate media might prove insufficient at that point.  My guess is they’ll try to seize direct control of media then.  I bet google rolls over for the murderers and restricts youtube for them.  What else might happen?  A good model for how the pigs will react could be the Philippines under Duterte, when they were piling up dead college students and claiming they were all narcoterrorists.

The rest of this song is more silly and irrelevant.  Give you something less dire to look at.

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Dream Scheme

I had a dream that was very sensible.  No illogic or nonsense, just a pretty standard stress plot.  If I wasn’t racing to work, I would have bothered to remember more of it.  However, one element stands out in my memory.  It was not at all the point of the dream, just something within it.

There was a family of people involved in the dream stress.  I don’t remember much about them, except this.  The adult siblings were all involved in an alternate version of astrology that was somewhere between lottery and multi-level marketing scam.  You get these cardstock calendars, to which you would attach tickets that you purchased for each day, which were supposed to be instructive to your life, horoscope style.  Seemed like filling out the calendars was supposed to have a benefit as well, though I don’t remember what that was.

I remember these calendars and tickets though.  The calendars were big because they had to accommodate thirtyish days of tickets, and each of these was about one and a half by three inches.  Scratch ticket vibes in the design, though constellations were involved as well.

The oldest brother was deepest into the sunk cost of this MLMish quasireligion, and tried to guilt his younger brother and sister to stick with it when they were considering skipping a day.  Sister was the most insistent that younger brother just give it up.  After all, they had stress dream shit to do.  No time for comforting rituals.

Maybe I should design these things, work with an antisocial business major to print some up, and make a bank full of money.  Fill out your calendars, see what the future has in store for you!  The very fact I’d joke about this shows some reptile level part of myself would totally do it, shows that the damage I’m suffering from life in this shitty-ass country.

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We Dem Boyz

I made a playlist on yewchoob.  When I say “we dem boyz” I don’t mean to misgender myself.  I was just thinkin’, lotta songs about boys.  I didn’t scratch the surface really, but observe what I got.  I do include just a few non-musical items, including the lead-off track.  Enjoy.

…uuuhhhh content warnings.  some videos might flash a lil light, iggy pop’s song violates my ableism policy, song by the waitresses a lil sexist?, dead milkmen song is about self-destruction and is rude about little people, and just everything about boyz in tha hood…  the rest of the stuff is probably problematic for reasons.  i couldn’t bring myself to include duran duran’s wild boys.

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Juggalo Reprezentation

I feel I should come out of the closet on this, because visibility is important.  Now I don’t routinely bang Insane Clown Posse or Twiztid, but a juggalo once told me that I am a juggalo, and by his decree, so I am.  I, Bébé Mélange, am a juggalo.

If you are a juggalo and feel the need to talk about it with someone, let my comment section be a safe space for you.  Also, if you just want to ask a juggalo a question, you can put it to me.  Just be kind, you know, ask in good faith. Thank you…

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…ok, apologies to real jugheads; this was obviously a bit facetious.  no offense intended, do consider me an ally at least?  i’ll pour a faygo out for you in contrition.  i really was granted juggalo status by one of that tribe, but it’s more of an honorary title.  rezpekt.

There’s not much to that story.  I went to a diploma mill type commercial art school, which lured in radical bros by saying “you could make animays or vidya games.”  This wasn’t me; I was lured by lies about how much money I could make with the job skills.  But this juggalo, he was a radical son of a bitch, as they say.  He had a ball bearing necklace and his life drawings looked like lofi dragon ballz.

We rode the same bus south from Seattle into poor people lands, where he was the kind of guy to drop acid and shoot fireballs in his back yard, and I was the kind of binch to work in fast food and come up with house rules for ttrpgs I’d never get to use.  One night he told me that I met his criteria for being considered a juggalo.  Fantastic.  I’ll accept that.

I hope he’s having a juggalish good time out there somewhere, perhaps with a juggalette and two point five juggajuniors.  He was a handsome lad, but life has many traps.

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More Bad Ideas

Maybe because life has been rather hard lately in some respects, I’m just full of escapist compulsions.  Being a creative type, these tend toward the creative – write this, write that.  Sometimes I even have an urge to draw and I am sooo out of practice on that shit.  What I need to be doing is keep that new year resolution to sort out our shit and empty the storage unit.  If Florida is going to start having bouts of underwaterness within fifteen years, my condo is as well.  If I get that shit squared away, it will be much easier to move.  Just to live in general.

Let me interrupt the explanation of my bad ideas to talk about a good idea that isn’t getting discussion.  Any place that could salvage real estate with a system of dikes needs to get on that shit right fuckin’ now.  If Washington state does that with this river valley I live in, some pretty useful land can be kept.  And maybe we won’t have to throw all the work we did here in the trash.  All the suffering we went through just to get this far in life.  Ho hum.  File that next to Marcus Ranum’s big proposal for humanity to unfuck itself.

Anyway, thinkin’ about ttrpg fun times I’ve had in the past got me yearning to fuck around with that in the present.  Run a Vampire: The Masquerade game with myself just to see where the random rolls lead me.  But if I’m going to waste time writing, it should be writing something at least quasi-original.  One approach people like to take, to get the creative juice of a rpg while still having a possibility of selling it as their own writing, is filing the serial numbers off – like the Fifty Shades lady done with her fanfic.  I’m not in that state of creative desperation.

Then again, why focus on original content?  The notion I should make any of my writing legal to sell?  That’s laughable.  But then, making art that uses other people’s content just seems kind of pathetic.  I’ve made no secret of my disdain for fanfic.  Writing a story in somebody else’s world is a close cousin to that.  Why think of the content of a game as writing?  It’s really hard for me to not do that, for reasons.

Other random wild hares – Read all the books you’re supposed to read, to be an intellectual.  Finish Josefina y Blasfemia.  Serialize a completely unrelated novel on here, like I did with Centennial Hills.  Get back into drawing by way of doing a comic strip.  Get back into drawing by way of doing all of the exercises in the How to Draw Manga book series.  Start a book club.  Start practicing singing.  Make music.  Make concept albums.

I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years…

Those dudes from U2 ripped this song off pretty hard for “Goldeneye,” I think.  Whatever.

Anything is anything.

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Typeset Your Transphobia

I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves.  Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables.  Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered).  Let’s take a trip back in time…

Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz.  He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written.  He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games.  The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself.  Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it.  I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.

I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press.  Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house.  Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process.  The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife?  These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.

One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same.  The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press.  I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is.  Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.

So.  Random insanity tables.  These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character.  They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll.  And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia.  I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight.  The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else.  Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.

I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D.  Weird times.  I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.

The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh.  This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin!  Genuinely.  I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool.  Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions.  Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities.  But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever.  Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester?  Hmmm, Kevin?  KEVIN?

If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with.  Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this.  Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh.  Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit.  Game on.

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