Four paintings from my camera roll:

Through the Digital Looking Glass in the Age of the Social Media Singularity: The Morphology of the Salt Aesthetic

the dump topic is one of the few places in the world that has realized the utopian possibilities of the internet.

hey i have a question. does anyone know how to get ahold of goddess17? i have a couple of simple questions for them: are they still designing and writing? and how did robert yang come to host mastaba snoopy?

i hope all salt worlders and game worlders of past, present, and future have their health and are as happy as can be reasonably expected in our fascist hellscape.

You made this??

wtf awes

I think I agree with denzquix. Just because our heuristic "lies" about reality doesn't mean we don't or can't understand the relationship between the heuristic and what is real, and even if we don't understand indications of what is real, that doesn't negate all of the truth-telling capabilities of our imperfect heuristic.

On the other hand, even though Hoffman's fitness hypothesis is simplified to the point of absurdity, in that it would be trivial to program conditionals whereby an organism capably evaluates its fitness re water, I think the whole point was to create a proof simple enough to demonstrate that "reality" and perfect knowledge don't trump fitness (he never says that reality and perfect knowledge must be a hindrance, though he implies that it can be).

I do think that Hoffman is more multidisciplinary and more knowledgable in the fields he writes about than many Atlantic commenters (et al) give him credit for, and that his publication record will bear this out.

Obli:
Can we call this value argument "obli's razor"? Tbh it probably has a name. I've definitely read some nihilistic-seeming philosophical arguments that later clarify their ethical uses or declare the reasons nihilism doesn't suit their ontology. People are uncomfortable with decentering human subjectivity, even when they do it in the name of "science" and "objectivity," but not every anthropologically decentering ontology is valueless or ethics-less!

The narration is a delight and essential imo. I love the story of when he got so frustrated with the game as a child that he started crying, and his mom threatened to write an angry letter to the developers and he had to talk her out of it, at which time she compromised by throwing the game away. Then he secretly fishes the game out of the trash!

The title screen is very familiar, too: it might be the game's second salty appearance.

That "consciousness all the way down" article should be taken as a psychedelic conceit or as a bit of fun, or at least as a springboard for further reading to figure out in which ways you agree or disagree. It reminds me of super celebrity nerd Jason Rohrer's infinite regression shooter (beyond a star filled sky or something like that?), in the way it posits successive, nested, corporate "consciousnesses" as shaping or being the totality of reality all the way down and all the way up. Btw what happened to super celebrity nerd Jason Rohrer?

I wonder what computers couldn't do without little skinnerian reinforcements. They're basically garbage without reinforcement, but they're capable of a lot of unusual emergent behavior under the guiding hand of a person to direct their goals. I like the idea of unsolvable puzzles and games, and I've always loved the idea of puzzles and games with concealed means and goals, like the towlr games. The cool thing about an unsolvable game is that engaged players would quickly create their own goals, and lots of the best games encourage this behavior anyway.

Hello, saltumnavigators. Did you read this?

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

!

Btw I'm not saying that people shouldn't mourn Prince or should stop feeling things from reading the internet or whatever, but bonzi buddy's post about people being addicted to narratives and psychodramas and tapping into the internet to cry and be outraged/thrilled by suffering Syrian refugees, Trump, "Formation" &c. was really insightful. I, too, am addicted to narrative.
 
p.s. I think I have that particle simulator on my phone?

btw that gnocchi album I posted about steals wholesale from the Rolling Thunder soundtrack without giving credit. Not that I am morally offended.

I love this computer-assisted youtube singularity conversation on the last page or so. I have a theory that instead of there existing alternate worlds and universes with every permutation of every possible thing, we live on a world with enough automata, be they humans or cells or atoms, to create every possible thing cultural or societal or physical. Like how chess is this small, self-contained thing that can produce more game combinations than there are atoms in the universe: the world and its parasitic hairless apes are like that. And maybe it's not everything, but close enough. The way that you know about 1.6382 if you already know 1.6381 and 1.6383, that's the way we know about all the Elsa and Spider-Man permutations.
 
I love the irony of the writer of "Mastaba Snoopy" writing cultural commentary about this Spider-Man and Elsa inspired symbiosis between landfill human cultural production and landfill computer cultural production, since clearly the end result is huge swathes of art and culture being mindlessly automated by sophisticated yet terrible AI, and this latter situation would not be an unreasonable gloss of "Mastaba Snoopy."

Hamumu's Moon Invaders is perhaps the only tower defense game I like.

His other games have a pre-rendered CG salt aesthetic, but most of them cost money. And they're marketed to 11 year olds. Moon Invaders is free.

Think you guys would like The Gnocchi's "Summer Hard" from Snaker 005. The whole album is good! This particular track gives me Yoshi & baby Mario vibes.

delete post

new nautilus magazine has a pretty good pop-sci overview of current virtual reality research; backgrounds "realism," foregrounds "believability." The issue also has a kind of muddled, ambivalent article about digital reading, pros and cons, and another article about the idea of matter creating space and time, rather than existing in it.
 
I have a friend in his early 70s who, several years ago, visited a comic book/gaming shop with me after dinner one day. Almost as soon as we entered the store, he became enamored with a D&D-style grimoire and bought it on-sight, although he had no interest in gaming. I think it was just the bite-sized esoterica that appealed to him; he had zero concern for the "authenticity" of its information, took it home, perused, put it on his shelf.

Speaking of "authenticity," I wanted to say some words of soft caution about it re our discussion upthread. The moment has passed, so I'll just say that authenticity is a shell game, esp. regarding art and culture. I'm deeply sympathetic to this feeling of there being barbarian hordes on our digital shores, and to any wariness that you all might have towards capitalism and consumerism and towards the commodification of something you love, but I also believe that truly addressing and even fighting these problems means acknowledging and accepting our culpability and complicity, inasmuch as this is the truly ironical and humanitarian pose/attitude. That is, this is really the most salty way of doing things. By extending that salty olive branch to our market forces foes, at least with regard to their aesthetic offspring, we are giving refuge to their abject digital offal the same way we would to dancing skeletons and bootleg CG Mickey Mouse and all the other off-brand animal mascots with rude 'tude. In other words, what's good for the CG goose is good for the Madison Ave gander.
 
On last page, not sure which game might not be an authentic NES game, but the one above is Battle Kid, a homebrew, and the one below is Conquest of the Crystal Palace.
 
I liked obli's post about marketing/corporate spiritualism.
 
And bonzi, you write uncannily like my best friend on the other coast, except he's not super into video games and stuff.

Pop n Run looks like it has its own sketchy Turtles in Time beat-em-up logic. Could've been a fun game.
 
It goes with out saying (hint, E-Z Chips) that I'd play any of y'all's games.
 

also I look forward to the day we could like mind-meld and know the exact specific feelings somebody gets from the period of time they grew up or whatever. 

 
I listen to a lot of old time radio (Quiet Please, Crime Classics, Lights Out, Mind Webs, Pat Novak for Hire, Lives of Harry Lime, WHItehall 1212), and I wonder sometimes about those 500 lonely people who were really into spooky, abject narrative radio art when most people wanted Burns & Allen laffs, two-fisted action, and cheap thrills. I don't wanna be progressivist about it and pretend that people in the 30s, 40s & 50s were less sophisticated than we were, but I also don't think I can pretend that WHItehall 1212 was a big hit with its dead air and unorthodox plotting and its decidedly sardonic fatalism that was so different from the mood of the Black Mask school or Woolrichian noir or post-Chandler soliloquizing; even though all of the above, including WHItehall's author & director, are equally American and relatively equidistant in time (or not?? maybe it's more like the span of the 70s to now).
 
My problem is that although I can't tap into the genius tempus of people growing up in the 1940s, I'm also no more capable of recalling anymore how it feels to be 7 in 1988 or 14 in 1995. My squishy childhood center-of-being has been pushed aside for workaday preoccupations, message boards obsessiveness, cloistered urbanity, &c., &c., &c.

think of it as "the long tail" of outsider cultures

eg burrito galaxy's gonna be on steam. not gonna research it, though, because of current time constraints