Although I Don't Think It's Something From The Game, The Guest Book On The Silvery Tablecloth, Against

I'm the Daijou-Daijin of cringe

infinite potential. We will be able to create at least ten new forms of media each with its own aesthetics and traditions.

Despite the gloomy atmosphere of the 2020s and the 21st century in general, the world of culture is not in danger. It is about to give rise to a new universe.

what is project secret moth?

project secret moth is an LLM-based text adventure with optional visual accompaniment. unlike many other LLM-based text adventures where you can basically do whatever you want and its open ended like a lucid dream, project secret moth has actual game structure built beneath and the LLM simply acts as an interpretative + narrative layer to generate description and cohere the varying game elements. in my schema of game design, things like ai dungeon (with no non-self-imposed win or loss state) or "just open ended chatting with an ai" are "toys", rather than "games". sure, they are fun, and you can make your own fun, but it requires a certain amount of buy-in that always leads me to bounce off of them.

project secret moth does not have that, in the prototype. it is a capital letters Video Game.

project secret moth has the same "win state" as any other yume nikki-like - collect all the effects and leave your bedroom.

the beginning of the game offers two modes - "personal" and "story". personal mode will have the narrative ai ask you psychologically probing questions so that it can customize the dream realms to your psyche. story mode will have it procedurally generate an individual, A Madotsuki, and put you in their shoes.

project secret moth does not have a freeform parser. like the very eldest text adventures, it utilizes verb commands - LOOK AT TORININGEN, USE KNIFE ON UBOA, and so on. there is a certain amount of flexibility - it will try to interpret your actions in a way that a traditional parser never can - but you are not free to do whatever you want. there is no macklankey. you are bound like all living things.

the initial prototype will be text-based only, offering a bedroom, 8 dream worlds (with an indeterminate number of extra layers and sub-areas), minor puzzles, NPCs, and the exciting "environmental cascade" system that allows you to solve area puzzles immersive sim style by manipulating the environment of higher-up layers. order a fan off amazon to make your dream worlds colder.

project secret moth will ship bundled with its own local large language model (the particular one is TBD) and will be built to run on relatively low-spec computers or ones with no GPU available, if possible. no internet connection will be required, and no information you send will be sent to external APIs. when the second prototype (with visual accompaniment system - see the attached images?) launches it will also be bundled with its own fine-tuned image model that, again, will be built to run on low-spec computers.

stay attuned

I don't actually enjoy arguing, but seeing an opinion I really disagree with in text feels sort of overpowering and makes me want to carve out a space against it. Like in a response comment. Maybe it isnt such a good idea

from the wikipedia page of Guarino Guarini. I like how in that era, their culture was about being a polymath and intellectuals were expected to speculate on so many different topics. It would be interesting if it were like that today. Athanasius Kircher must be the ultimate example of this.

Maybe 'living life as art' is a reincarnation of this ideal.

Romanticism (the art movement) is the enemy

The food post reminded me of when I was watching a stream that fredrik knudsen was on and he was talking about the juicero and then went on this rant about how the tech CEOs want to take the humanity out of your life but used making food as an example and how tech CEOs didn't understand the joy of making your own food and how only "tech bros" would enjoy the concept of instant meal pills and it felt like I was listening to a space alien talk. I dunno maybe if you're a youtube essayist who sets your own schedule you take joy in making your own meals but when you're coming home tired from work at 8PM sometimes gas station hot bar food is what you go for rather than making your own meal. Like hell yeah sometimes I would in fact like a pill that could act as every meal. Baffling 'to toil is to be human' moment!

i hate to tell people this but i would love instant meal pills. and i'm a very talented home chef and i love cooking (it's the only thing i will suffer through my arthritis to force myself to do nowadays).

hmm

I wonder

I wonder if 'drug user' was an unnecessarily technical-sounding translation of, like, 'addict' or something. "She had so many drugs, like an addict" is a sentence with good flow

She had so many drugs... like a drug user.

It's the Da He Ding! Chinese ritual bronzes should be contemplated while reading Bataille on sacrifice

I was always amazed by the elaborate surrealism in ancient bronze. The examples are not limited to this famous Square Humanoid Ding (人面銅方鼎). My friend calls it "Shang era TV-set."

Animalistic motifs are common in household items and especially ritual items of the Shang and Zhou eras. However, such Janus-like vessels were rare even in those good old days.

Hunan Provincial Museum (湖南省博物館) collection.

Photo: ©老猪的碎碎念

it feels like we're only beginning to realize how much psychological heterogeny exists among humans

let's forget about the idea of human nature together

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

devil armor