I miss the days when everyone used forums! You could join a forum, post on a thread that was two weeks too hold for the mods’ liking and get banned. Whatever happened to those days? We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! And you threw it all away!

Now everyone is on Reddit and X or whatever. There’s a reason you don’t see any social media links on this site. I officially jumped ship from that experiment a while ago. Bluesky is just a complete mess, I don’t even lurk.

Every community is shifting its content to Discord, which is a real shame, because Discord is fucking terrible for long-scale communications. They “tried” “fixing” this a while ago when they added this feature called “threads” and that kinda fixes the problem, but not really.

I understand why they’re all switching, though. Managing accounts is difficult, and servers aren’t particularly cheap. It’s a real shame and there’s no real solution to this.

In my attempts to create a better world, i’ve been working on a forums system written from scratch for the new game that will release very soon. And it isn’t easy, but I feel ideologically inclined to. I have to do my part in creating a better world.

While I’m here, I may as well talk about AI for a little bit. This blog has existed for a little over 5 years now but I’ve never really gotten “real” here. It’s always just been status updates or whatever. And, when I say “AI”, I’m referring specifically to “generative AI” (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Plok, whatever else).

I don’t really care that much, however, when I learn that a really good story that I was reading turned out to actually be written by AI, I can’t help but feel slightly betrayed.

It just doesn’t have the same emotional connection something handwritten would have. I can’t intellectually defend this feeling, but that’s just how it feels to me. And when it comes to art, I feel like this matters more than anything else.

There are some places where AI can be useful; for example when creating concept art or prototype textures or whatever for some artist to ‘clean up’ later, but I’d advise you don’t use it for any public-facing work. Maybe I’m just an out-of-touch boomer or something. I don’t know.

I’ll never forgive it for destroying the em-dash.