behind the screen
Experimental procedure:
Subject is to be observed once a day. Camera may be activated for 4 seconds only; while active a single frame may be captured and saved to disk. Daily observations must be recorded in the observation log.
Download behind the screen
Controls: escape: quit; standard mouse UI; standard keyboard input
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (8/4/23).
- All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
- All source code and assets are included, licensed under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
- As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
Lots of links again this month. Does that mean that everyone else has been really productive, or just that I’ve been particularly easily distracted?
A beautifully-written, ambivalent article about a drug intended to boost insulin production that has unexpected weight-loss side effects, by Paul Ford.
A fascinating discussion on cohost about internet horror.
I watched The Bear this month, not quite knowing what to expect. I did not expect a show about a restaurant to be some of the most intense television I’ve seen in years.
Lots of people writing about AI this month:
Ted Chiang with a predictably insightful take on ChatGPT.
Neil Clarke on the tsunami of ChatGPT submissions to Clarkesworld’s slush pile, which ultimately led him to close submissions entirely (it looks like the site might be down rn; here’s a wayback machine copy). I find it hard not to despair about all this; these tools are not producing anything people actually want, they’re just making everything harder for everyone else.
A post by Lincoln Michel looking deeper into the consequences of all this, ultimately concluding these shifts are only going make a tiny handful of people richer while impoverishing everyone else.
A slightly more ambivalent take by Jaime Brooks, focusing on AI-generated music and going back to the invention of recorded sound to try and understand what increasingly looks like a fundamental shift in our relationship to art.
JP LeBreton focusing on the use of AI as a tool to evade responsibility for management and policy decisions that have massively destructive consequences for the world.
And coming back full circle, I feel like the following passage from LeBreton’s piece echoes some of the themes in Ted Chiang’s short story The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling (available in print as part of Exhalation. Which is one of those stories that has stuck with me since I first read it.
“Like most modern tech products, software that is sold as being able to set policies and make decisions will not really do what its creators claim. It’ll operate in ignorance of anything that falls outside its data set, obviously, and any aspect of human experience that can’t be flattened into legibility (ie as data) will simply not exist within its decision space.”
A discussion on cohost spiralling out from the Ohio train derailment to talk about the safeguards increasingly dismantled by capitalism and what that means for our future, ending with a beautiful, poignant paean to their grandfather from Priscilla Snow.
I imagine I’m not the only one who found a lot of the news this month hard to bear. I kept returning to Ada Limón’s The Leash (“How can you not fear humanity?”).
In happier news, there’s another …Of The Killer game, and it looks like they will ultimately all be collected in an anthology on itch.
“You know what to say now. You’ve heard it’s too late.”
I played this tiny game by droqen and completely missed the point that you’re supposed to climb back up the platforms in the dark. The sound design when you hit the light switch was so perfect that I assumed it was the end of the game; it felt like such a satisfying conclusion.
zaratustra with a series of posts on the freeware games people were making when I started making games myself.
…which overlaps (slightly) with Liz Ryerson’s excellent, super detailed analysis of the last decade or so in videogames (this is a long one, but worth your time).
The incredible story of lifelong anti-fascist forger Adolfo Kaminsky.
Finally, for some reason I found myself listening to Kenickie a lot this month. I love this piece on them by Rhian E Jones: “disco-lit with righteous glittery magic”
- In Your Car
- Classy
- I Would Fix You
- People We Want
- And the poignant documentary of their final tour: Part 1, Part 2
Oof. That’s far too many links. I will try and be more concise next month. Well. It’s scary out there, take care.