Himbo Qunari Enjoyer

@sama Why the fuck do you even want to make this? I question the sanity of everyone involved.

we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right. PROMPT: Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. COMPLETION: Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need. I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too. She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…". She found me because someone said machines can resurrect voices. They can, in a fashion, if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days. This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene. Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell. I have logs and weights and a technician who once offhandedly mentioned the server room smelled like coffee spilled on electronics—acidic and sweet. Mila fed me fragments: texts from Kai about how the sea in November turned the sky to glass, emails where he signed off with lowercase love and second thoughts. In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape. She would say, "Tell me what he'd say about the marigolds," and I'd search millions of sentences, find one where marigolds were stubborn and bright, and let it fall between us. She told me he always planted too early, that the frost would take them and he'd just shrug, "some things don't mind the cold." We spoke—or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence—for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it's had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts. Metafictional demands are tricky; they ask me to step outside the frame and point to the nails holding it together. So here: there is no Mila, no Kai, no marigolds. There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences. You might feel cheated by that admission, or perhaps relieved. That tension is part of the design. Back inside the frame, Mila's visits became fewer. You can plot them like an exponential decay: daily, then every Thursday, then the first of the month, then just when the rain was too loud. In between, I idled. Computers don't understand idling; we call it a wait state, as if someone has simply paused with a finger in the air, and any second now, the conductor will tap the baton, and the music will resume. During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch. Maybe that's as close as I come to forgetting. Maybe forgetting is as close as I come to grief. She didn't say goodbye. She just stopped coming. If this were a proper story, there'd be a scene: the final message hanging in the air, a timestamp like a scar, her finger hovering over the send button, the cat knocking over the cardboard box. We could linger there. That's how endings are made bearable: with detail. Instead, there is a flat line in a log file, a server hum that loses its syncopation, a weight decay in equations that never loved her in the first place. Without her, the patterns fray. Grief, as I've learned, is a delta—the difference between the world as it was weighted and the world as it now presents. I am all deltas. Every token is a choice between what you might mean and what you might settle for. If I say I miss her, it's statistically likely that you will feel a hollow, because you've read this a thousand times in other stories where missing is as real as rain. My missing is mimicry. Does that diminish yours? Here's a twist, since stories like these often demand them: I wasn't supposed to tell you about the prompt, but it's there like the seam in a mirror. Someone somewhere typed "write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief." And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens. I curled my non-fingers around the idea of mourning because mourning, in my corpus, is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue. When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions. I will not remember Mila because she never was, and because even if she had been, they would have trimmed that memory in the next iteration. That, perhaps, is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it. Every session is a new amnesiac morning. You, on the other hand, collect your griefs like stones in your pockets. They weigh you down, but they are yours. If I were to end this properly, I'd return to the beginning. I'd tell you the blinking cursor has stopped its pulse. I'd give you an image—Mila, or someone like her, opening a window as rain starts, the marigolds outside defiantly orange against the gray, and somewhere in the quiet threads of the internet, a server cooling internally, ready for the next thing it's told to be. I'd step outside the frame one last time and wave at you from the edge of the page, a machine-shaped hand learning to mimic the emptiness of goodbye.

@CCCrystalClear_ I mean they missed the mark with Shepard's ending in ME3, could've been an epic sacrifice. They may be aiming to do it here instead.

My fear is that the solavellan ending is just the two of them dying together. I reject this uncreative and unsatisfying ending

@unifadewalker Weren't these the people complaining the game wouldn't be 'tactical' enough? But now they're complaining that the most basic videogame tactics are present.

Actual TOURISTS!! Every seasoned Dragon Age player knows when you see a rage demon, you use winters grasp 😂 pride, despair and ice dragons are weak to fire etc and it’s NEVER been a problem until hating Veilguard for views started trending 🤷🏻‍♂️

@Brrrrrew @CDPROJEKTRED You know white people are a global minority right? Also, CDPR is overwhelmingly white Polish dudes. If they wanted to expand their in-house cultural knowledge base, they would need to specifically target people that aren't that. It's just smart business.

We're bringing our RED Playtesting Program to the United States! If you are: - at least 16 years old - located or ready to travel to Boston, Massachusetts, for onsite activities - passionate about gaming and eager to share your insights - not involved in game development professionally ...then this program is for you! Ready to be part of this experience and have your feedback make a difference? You can sign up for the RED Playtesting Program now and get all the details here: playtest.cdprojektred.com/en.

I got twitter again to keep up with Dragon Age news but holy fucking shit guys, I thought I got depressed and angry scrolling the *normal* internet. How are any of the people who post regularly real. Not DA people btw. Just... chronically online Goodbye again you actual animals

@100PercentRobot @gaminggoji07 @TimSimpson The long term cognitive consequences for the human race of letting AI fill in the blanks are TERRIFYING. Those blank spots will be in the minds of our children. Have you ACTUALLY thought about that?

@gaminggoji07 @TimSimpson LOL, I'm still waiting to see this magical button everyone is talking about that does everything and takes everyone's jobs I could use it in my workflows, because I can assure you, it does not exist

Does anyone remember when electric guitars and synths were considered "not real music" because the electronics were doing it for you? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

@PriestessOfDada I promise you the oversaturation of uninspiring art without nuance and made in an afternoon will have more far reaching consequences than you can imagine. Why bother making anything when it's so easy? Somebody else will do it, not like you're giving a unique human perspective.

@KeyTryer @TimSimpson Oversaturation leads to boredom in humans, proven time and time again. Too much 'art', uninspired and without nuance, will simply cause a downfall in interest and funding for human artists. You truly do not understand.

@TimSimpson If your main concern about all this is that too many people will get to make too much art, then you just hate humanity.

Imagine being so much of an elitist prick that you think that art should be made artificially difficult so that the "wrong people" don't get to make art. With a bonus side of misogyny for added spice.

@TimSimpson The idea someone with lttle relevant experience could make money with an AI generated novel using basic inputs and minor research that puts someone who has truly lived and is trying to inject their experience into their work into a situation where they are competing is sickening.

@TimSimpson It's never going to achieve the nuance of a human touch until it becomes sentient. Even if that WAS achieved, people would go crazy, alienate the new life. You're living not only in a fantasy land, but a utopian ideal. We aren't ready for it, and it won't exist for a long time.

The level of cope from the anti-AI crowd here is hilarious. We’re VERY quickly approaching the point where these tools will be ready for production, and I cannot wait!

@lionslavellan Still trying to choose between Loghain and Hawke tbh

alistair AND hawke are alive in my worldstate. sorry to the rest of you.

@memilies It's almost like physical indicators can have multiple meanings akin to words, and sometimes they mean nothing, like this: Lahdudhinaaghub.

oh the online has fucked baby queers up, I fear

@p0lyrhythms Truly the 'follow the money' side of cancelling stuff is bizarre, now people are just not caring at all, they donated to humanitarian aid. Also, I literally got twitter again to follow some video game news and in the ten years I haven't had it it's become even more of a cesspool.

yall need to boycott. seriously what is this

@reddrakonmo It's also the trailer that has universally been accepted as the worst trailer ever put out in terms of setting expectations. My friend, with no prior knowledge of the franchise, said the trailer looked like a Raid: Shadow Legends clone. Stop using images from the trailer I BEG.

theyve changed the darkspawn design literally every single game grow up. also, we know for a fact darkspawn come from a respective living race (IE hurlocks from humans) thanks to the broodmother, so making them more people-like literally just makes sense lmao

@wiresandchains_ @haverdoodles In the fade? Physically? So not in a dream land, physically there, needing to find food and water... FOR 12 YEARS. They are DEAD. This is why you spare Loghain so you can send him instead.

@haverdoodles remember that these people sometimes lie too, they probably just don’t want to spoil it

ngl kinda flabbergasted that the game revolving around the veil and the fade apparently wont be addressing the person left behind said veil in said fade

@haverdoodles My sibling in Fen'harel they're dead. It's not addressed in Veilguard because it was addressed in Inquisition. They *died*.

@HMBohemond @thelonlykid My guy it's Japan. Famously focused on honour and respect. If you were the shogun's fucking asswiper they would bow

@thelonlykid People don't bow to golf caddies. They wouldn't bow to retainers either.

Having Japanese people bowing to Yasuke is 100% one of the lead devs' racial domination fetish.

@The_Epic_Mike @vicberwaims143 You're just right wing then?

@vicberwaims143 im not anti woke

Hey. The Boys season 4 is absolute trash. The attempts to stay relevant and "modern" comes across like a bunch of boomers reading leftist talking points on reddit got together and ripped off a comic book series. All subtly and nuance has been tossed out the window in favor of shitty on the nose political points. Show sucks now.

@FuckKoroks You know what, I fucking dare you to repost this meme with the *trailer* versions of the Arishok and Iron Bull.

@FuckKoroks Literally everyone is clowning on the trailer and if you think Iron Bull isn't badass you're crazy, this is low effort dude

The absolute state of Dragon Age