I have quite a handful of servers currently. One that’s running my OpenSim grid, another that’s basically handling my bot-net, the server that null.mkultra.social lives on, the server where this website lives, the server where my indexed search for Mastodon lives, and then the server for my Wafrn. It’s not that expensive, but to me, since I’m definitely going to keep running Wafrn/Waffles, I felt it a good idea to “move” Mastodon to the Wafrn server! This saves me money, and it rids me of the feeling of needing to choose which thing to post to.

Since my Wafrn has plenty of resources to spare, and Mastodon isn’t that heavy, it can, and is now easily living there. But, I put “move” in quotes because this isn’t a server migration. I wanted to register and use a new domain.

I’ve seen what my detractors and semi-stalkers have said about the “mkultra” domain name, and while I’m definitely going to keep using it for this website, for now, I felt like cmplxdecay.space sounded a lot more awesome.

So! If you’re currently registered on my null.mkultra.social instance and would like to continue using Mastodon, please be sure to migrate your account/followers over to cmplxdecay.space! You can start by requesting an account there, and then by creating an alias. If you have more in-depth questions about this process, feel free to contact me at @valerie@cmplxdecay.space.

But, over the past month, and while OSGrid was suddenly down for nearly that exact amount of time, and completely unannounced, I decided to put up a server and host my own grid.

And there I’ve been building. I created a landing (arrival area), about 28 regions, found some really old archived regions people built back in 2010 and put them up on my grid (among many other things), and now, today, I have registrations open!

Of course, registration is invite-only (in order to keep out spam accounts and people I wouldn’t want here), but if you’re interested in creating an avatar and exploring the hypergrid yourself, all you have to do is ask! So, in order to get a full picture of what it is I’ve built and am still building, you’ll need to join me in-world!

You can read more about what novalandia.online is, what it means to hop the hypergrid, and where to ask for an invite code, here.

Well, they did it again.

And by again, hehe, let’s jsut say, “it” and by “it” I mean, my peani… er, Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

If you’re like me and a billion other people, and you felt like Cyberpunk Edgerunners’ conclusion shot you in the face and farted on your corpse, boy oh boy, does Wuthering Waves have a surprise for you! Without spoiling too much about it: If you wanted closure, you can kind of have a little.

But, like in WuWa style, everything is sad in the end. For some reason. I don’t know, that’s just how they do things.

Did you also want to hear Johnny’s theme one more time, outside of 2077? That’s here too. For reasons.

No, I don’t think it’s hinting at anything.

Although it’d be wild if there was mention of V somewhere. Maybe there was. Maybe I missed it.

Once you get through the whole story though, which lasts, I’d say, around 4 or 5 hours (if you watch all the cinematics and listen to the dialogue) you can beat Adam Smasher’s ass over and over again in order to obtain parts to level up and ascend your completely free Rebecca?

Yup.

They give you Rebecca FOR FREE.

But I feel that’s more of a “Sorry, my dudes” from Studio TRIGGER.

I could write a whole lot more but you should experience it yourself. Consider it an epilogue to season one of Cyberpunk Edgerunners, with probably more crying, but maybe a glint of happiness?

That’s for you to decide, I guess.

No, I don’t think you have to go through the entire game’s normal story to get to it. The event gives you an “early access” button so that you can jump right to the it, but, in order to have Rebecca for free, you have to level up your account to 4 or 5, I think. The union level. So, you might have to play the game a little while longer than the runtime of the event. At least, if you want a free character in your roster.

Which you should. Because these devs are not usually all that generous with your pulls.

At all.

I’ve missed out on at least three that I wanted because the pulls are just that stingy.

Don’t let that deter you, though!

I honestly can’t wait to see what the heck comes next in WuWa, even if I very, very slightly favor Arknights: Endfield a little more, due to it being so much of a, “We liked Death Stranding, so we made it anime” kind of game.

Well, good news, buddy.

This is my shortlist of games that will absolutely blast the crap out of your pants, and immerse you in that world to perfection, short of actually falling into “the hallways” for real, which, for all intents and purposes, can never happen.

Right?

The Complex Expedition

This is a game that I literally cannot finish. It’s too scary. You put on your headphones, the lights are out, and oh my god. In fact, I challenge you to buy this game, and do exactly that, and see how long you last until you just exit the game.

Check out TCE on Steam.

As you begin your trek into the Complex, you start as one of the yellow hazmat suit-wearing scientists, and, very quickly, you’re thrust into the labyrinth all by yourself, and out of contact with the rest of your team.

But something else is in there with you.

I can make it about twenty minutes before I save, quit, and try again another time.

POOLS

This one is actually my all-time fave, but it’s number two on my list, because, while it is Backrooms-themed, it’s not technically specifically Backrooms.

Based on the Pool Rooms level — what the community also calls “sublimity” or “the pool rooms” — this entire game is not much more than a walking simulator, which is fine! There are no monsters, there’s nothing chasing you. But even so, with nothing in pursuit, the silence becomes the enemy.

You simply have to experience it for yourself.

Check out POOLS on Steam.

This specific game I have actually finished, and the most terrifying part isn’t the unknown corners you have to cross, or the murky water, but the massive gaping chasms that go down forever into seemingly nothing at all.

My running theory on the story behind the character in this game is that you play as an abuse victim who visualizes their trauma within this specific splice of the Complex, and while that might not make sense now, it will once you complete the game.

SUBLIMINAL

In this gamified version of the Backrooms, we’re following more of a puzzle-based story, but it’s number three on my list entirely because this is the most Wiki-based Backrooms game you’ll probably find.

I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of the Wiki, because I find Kane’s work much more unsettling and terrifying — it does have its merits, at times.

Check out SUBLIMINAL on Steam.

I haven’t really played this all that much yet, but it shares the same things in common with the other two: It looks amazing, and it’s incredibly immersive.

And that’s it! I know there are actually many Backrooms games, but, in my opinion, these are the only ones you need.

You don’t need Escape the Backrooms or The Classrooms — the latter isn’t multiplayer, but even solo it doesn’t hit like these three — or any number of strange co-op versions of the liminal labyrinth. Do yourself a favor, and experience it the way it’s supposed to be experienced.

Alone.

It started after I returned to my previous job. I didn’t have a good phone, and the car I got was already seeing issues (although, one could say that owning a car is just compounding issues, forever). To top it all off, I was wearing glasses that were nearly two decades old, and my PC had failing hdds.

I needed a quicker solution than saving money for probably a couple of years.

Flash back and then forward to Twitter in 2020, or was it 2022?

It was 2022.

Right before the company was bought out by Elon Musk.

I was drawing these things by hand in Photoshop using a template I created myself, and it was called “Catgirl Pixel Club.”

The first idea, was that I would just draw these things and upload them as NFTs, and maybe someone would decide that, like the monkey images, these were worth a million dollars. Laughable now, but, when you need things, like, the ability to see more clearly with your eyeballs, the limits to what you might do become smaller. And ever-smaller still, when those things you need become more dire.

So I was drawing these things, uploading them onto the Polygon network, for free, and it wasn’t until a bit later that I found out that, nobody wanted to buy any NFTs on the free Polygon network. But that was of no consequence to me, at the time.

I was making stuff! Who cares!

Now, this did come with some knee-jerk consequences. I had some friends on Twitter with whom’st I talked to daily. I think I knew them for … maybe three or four years? Once I changed my name to “cmdr_nova” and started uploading this stuff to my timeline, they turned on a heel and acted like they had no idea who I was. Screamed at me on Discord about how horrible and bad I was for doing all of this, and ghosted me on the spot. Never spoke to me again.

This wasn’t the beginning of my distrust of people online, but it sure was a piece of that stone.

But then, one day on a break at work, something crossed my Twitter timeline.

The official Twitter account wanted to feature some NFTs by creators of different communities, rather than just NFTs created by regular dudes.

I just so happened to fit that bill.

The official Twitter account DMed me.

They asked me to upload some new CPC avatars to the Ethereum network, rather than Polygon.

I obliged and dropped 400 USD out of my own pocket for the privilege to do so.

They bought one.

Then I started drawing more, and more, and more. I took custom commissions, I posted in Discords, people on Twitter were sending these things into the stratosphere, and I was receiving congratulations and death threats. I had people jumping in my DMs across multiple social networks telling me things like, “You’re a straight up hustler DAMN!” and, “FUCK YOU!”

Suffice to say, people bought in.

After … I think, three hours? I cashed out.

I siphoned it off little by little until my share in Catgirl Pixel Club was worth nothing, and gradually, the trading stopped. I think other users traded around 30,000 USD worth until they lost interest.

After the dust settled, and miraculously, nobody questioned me about what had happened, I bought all of the stuff I didn’t have, and had needed for over a decade.

Six months later NFTs as a concept began to sharply decline.

Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter.

Everyone forgot about Catgirl Pixel Club.

But I got an iPhone, a Macbook, new glasses, and a new wardrobe, and all it took was a few hours of pretending I really gave a huge shit about NFTs. And, people still send me random NFTs here and there for free on the OpenSea network. Sometimes I drop what’s left in my wallet on weird ones thinking, “This could be worth a million dollars.” But they won’t be.

That’s just the gambler inside of me that will probably never go away, as a side effect of having interacted with the NFT world.

I play gacha games now.

But this is something I detailed in the first post I ever made about OS back in 2025, almost a year ago to the day. Has my experience changed? Have my opinions morphed?

It’s true, OpenSim has AI-generated stuff everywhere. But so does the official Second Life grid. This doesn’t really bother me all that much anymore. It’s also true there are a lot of asset rips all over OS, but if nobody’s profiting from it, does it really matter that much?

No, you shouldn’t run around Second Life with a viewer that rips assets just so you can upload them to OpenSim. In fact, I think you should learn Blender and make stuff to decorate your spaces. But you can’t stop people from doing what they’re going to do. And again, at the end of the day, nobody in OpenSim is making money from any of the things they’ve uploaded.

So there’s that. I think people in OS just want avatars and things to wear, and there aren’t many creators with those skills willing to join the Hypergrid. It’s my thought that… maybe they should? Maybe Maitreya should host an OS region and put her stuff there. If people are going to just take it anyway, they may as well have something that works. This ties more into my views on piracy and copyright, and how maybe, just maybe, there’s more to life and being online than purely making profit.

With the elephant in the room out of the way.

I’ve shut down my city in Second Life. As of Monday, it’s already offline. I decided that, despite having the money to keep it going, I really don’t feel like paying Linden Lab the huge amount they ask just to have a private region. Especially not while I’m hosting a region on the Hypergrid for five dollars. (I mentioned this on the Second Life subreddit in a discussion about region pricing and was promptly banned by the moderators for talking about OpenSim.)

Visit PhyriaL89: hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Neo%20Machina/136/127/22

It has no utility. I’m not selling anything. It is little more than an art piece with some games and a hangout spot. And honestly? That’s the essence of what Second Life used to be.

And that’s what I’ve been wanting all this time. Because I was part of Second Life back in the old days, back when you could log on and just go talk to people, and people would actually talk to you!

Now, I will mention that sometimes on OpenSim I get guys IMing me, probably looking to virtually hook up or something. But (lol) I don’t really care about that. If I’m going to make an emotional connection with someone, well, 1. it’s not going to be a guy, and 2. it’s something that will happen over time.

But it’s there in OpenSim. It may be a small community, but the people talk. They host live events and shows every week and have done so for years.

There are no massive shopping events on a monthly basis. There aren’t thousands of people logging in to endlessly spend money on avatar items in a hyper-capitalist simulation where nearly every social aspect of the world has died.

It’s just… open.

So today, I want to showcase some random places across the vast Hypergrid.

The first place I clicked, I went through the TP interface for about six or seven pages, mainly because there are actually a lot of people online in OpenSim right now, and I wanted to find some places that aren’t super populated that people might miss. So I landed in Bluebay Cafe.

While it appears to be a nightclub at first glance, it also presents itself as a personal art piece, kind of like the way I have my region set up.

Then there’s an upper level in the cafe that showcases users from around the Hypergrid, which is a neat touch. I’ve seen a few of these people in the frequently visited OSGrid Lbsa Plaza.

Once you come outside, you find even more: an entire landscape that evokes maybe… Havanan or Cuban vibes.

You can tell whoever built this place put work into it. No incentive for making mass amounts of L$ just passion for creating a social space, a place for people to chill, meet, dance, and talk.

Imagine that. Creating something because you just feel like it.

Visit Bluebay here: hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Paradigme/934/621/23

The next random location I grabbed is the Satori Starport. Another place that doesn’t look like it has a whole lot of visitors. But here’s the neat thing: rather than a destination hosted on OSGrid, this one is over at alternatemetaverse.com. And that’s a main feature of OpenSim and the Hypergrid, you can launch a server, put up a region, and connect to the grid, just like launching a Mastodon instance.

With that in mind, there are many, many regions to find. More than there are in Second Life.

I traveled to Satori and found a neat little space place decorated with rovers, moon landers, a space station launch, and, you guessed it, a dance club!

At Club Nova you can hit the laser-beamed dance floor (although I don’t think I heard any music), or run back outside to the blue-diamond mountains and take a nap in a spacebox (a direct rip of the Neurolabs skybox apartment, but due to 0n0 Zinner being an asshole, I think this is hilarious).

A side story about 0n0 Zinner: Way, way back in… maybe 2016? I started making my own sci-fi themed accessories and objects. In dismay at the huge prices 0n0 was asking for some of his stuff at Neurolabs, I thought, “You know what? I’m learning Blender, why don’t I just make my own!” And he took personal offense to that and banned me from shopping at his store or even visiting it in-world.

If Second Life were the real world, he’d be sued for anti-competitive behavior.

Check out Satori here: hop://alternatemetaverse.com:8002/Satori/524/460/1368

Now, let’s find a place that doesn’t have yet another dance club.

Our next spot is a place called “Abandoned Ghost Town” on the three.hills.grid.outworldz.net grid. Mind you, each place I’ve chosen has been mostly random, going off names alone. And I thought, “What better than a place with zero people in it that is also literally called an abandoned ghost town?”

And that’s not to say OpenSim is abandoned. It’s populated, for sure.

What we have here though is some kind of eerie 1800s western town that is indeed abandoned.

The saloon, while… having a danceball in it, is quite empty.

In fact, the only other partially living thing here is an animated NPC sheriff who grimaces, gun drawn…

…protecting a town where his own face hangs in the distant sky over the mountains.

There’s a deep history here I can’t even begin to fathom. I imagine it might have something to do with this graveyard.

All in all, an interesting place. You can visit it here: hop://three.hills.grid.outworldz.net:8002/Abandoned%20Ghost%20Town/134/79/31

I think that’s all I’m going to visit for this post… for now. I’ll probably do another random hop around the Hypergrid at a later time. But as you can see, this is just three places, and there are thousands to visit. You can see something of an index of places across the Hypergrid here.

If you’re interested in signing up, all you have to do is download the Firestorm viewer that allows OpenSim (because Linden Lab forced the Firestorm devs to make a version that disallows OS), then sign up, maybe over on OSGrid, and input those details under Preferences > OpenSim:

And then add me as a friend and say hi! My username is nova ayashi.

Can you decipher what’s happening in this screenshot?

I’ve given this game my attention kind of on and off since it’s launch, partially due to the fact that it’s so unique, with an extremely polished interface, sometimes really impressive animations, and a slew of features that are also slightly overshadowed by the fact that the game itself also doesn’t feel very polished. Like, the UI is polished, but at the same time, there are elements of the UI that feel janky, like menu selection where selected items stay highlighted after you scroll away from them, or the start button on your controller will stop functioning to open your phone, suddenly.

Update: I forgot to mention that, sometimes, dialogue/story skipping doesn’t work either. I don’t know if this is a result of rushing the game out the door, or if they’ve utilized LLMs to speed up the development process, which is frequently prone to error if you do not review the code.

Also in my previous post, I mentioned how the character movement kind of feels like a tank on ice, and after revisiting Tower of Fantasy (also published by Perfect World Entertainment), I noticed that both games control and feel about the same. And, while some of the animations, especially during cut-scenes, are really great, there’s also the kind of blank expression your own character has while idling around.

There’s just something about this that feels … off.

The jank against the polish out of the way, there are a lot of features to be had. Some of which I haven’t even discovered yet!

But, you can pet cats around the city (I don’t know if you can adopt them), collect random things that I haven’t even discovered any use for, steal or commandeer an NPC’s car, own businesses, play multiplayer Mahjong??? Acquire a vehicle in your personal garage (I don’t have this yet, despite seeing people talk about it constantly), and customize it, acquire an apartment, go on dates with characters? And I’ve only really scratched the surface here, but you can also go to prison for committing crimes, which I have done. I spent seven in-game days in prison and failed an escape attempt.

I’m not sure how much I like the “go to prison” feature, since there’s no way to tell the game, “Hey, actually, I’d rather not do this. Just put me back into the regular game.”

It’s kind of like if Grand Theft Auto had features that people have been asking for, for years.

But it’s anime.

I do wonder, though, what GTA Online would be like if players were forced to spend time in prison (in-game, obviously), without any option for escape, for excessive antisocial behavior.

You’re probably thinking, though, “Okay, the game is like GTA? What’s the driving like?” And … I’d say, the driving is just, okay. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad. You can speed around and turn on a dime with some drift mechanics, but the drifting doesn’t work exactly the way I’d expect it to in order to maintain a slide. At the same time, it doesn’t feel “on-rails” like some racing sims do, but also damaging your vehicle takes a bit more time than it would in GTA. In fact, I don’t even know what happens yet if you damage a vehicle too much.

And, outside of the driving, there are also random paranormal events around the city. Like, one time I was walking along and hit some kind of anomaly, and then the world flipped upside-down and I was fighting monsters in a blackened version of my surroundings and it was like, “What the hell just happened?”

This is a regular thing, and is directly connected to the story, and it’s not like I hate it. I like fighting demons!

Neverness to Everness is a game of chaos, and only having a little bit of experience with it, so far, I can’t really say whether or not the story is all that amazing, yet. I can say that it has one, but whether it’ll have a lasting impression remains to be seen. I could also say the same about Endfield, but Endfield is also much more polished than NTE, and sometimes even Wuthering Waves, in some ways.

All of that said, this game, like every other open-world gacha on the market, suffers partially from a playerbase that judges whether it’s successful or not based on how many players it has. A statistic I’m not sure how you could fully gauge, since a lot of players are on their phones (I’m on PC, plus my iPhone). But, this is an issue across all of gaming, where people watch Steam community numbers and take their opinions from Youtubers. Youtubers, who will say exactly what they need to say in order to make the most amount of engagement, and then money. This is a discussion to be had in a completely different post on the superficiality and gamification of opinions in gaming from influencers whose job it is to gain engagement.

That said, with my experience so far, I’d say NTE is tentatively really cool, and I want to see more polish and content development. And I want to adopt a cat for the apartment my character doesn’t have yet.

That blog post: https://mkultra.monster/gaming/2024/07/19/wuthering-waves-genshin-impact-but-for-adults

Now? Holy god. It’s huge. There are three acts right now? All leading up to a storyline in the region of Lahai-Roi, which … well, it’s story will tear your emotions to shreds, and then pay it off with a grand finale. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I’ll say that Rover has … a family, of sorts. If I had to categorize it alongside a regular triple-a title, I’d almost compare it to the storytelling of Dragon Age Inquisition (without much of the narrative choice), or just a really good anime with emotional tugging (think maybe … the way Darling in the Franxx handled its end).

It really felt like playing up to the end of a game, except it’s not the end! Actually, there’s a freakin’ Cyberpunk Edgerunners event next month.

Also, I appreciate wholly that, at least, during the story, the game kind of evens out your power and makes it so that you can just play right through it. Even going so far as to make you invincible during big important fights.

And yes, there are mechs.

Outside of that storyline, the game sort of remains the same difficulty, requiring you to grind, and grind some more. Because, if you don’t, you’re not going to make it through challenges that bring you to ascension. And if you’re looking for content, it’s everywhere.

This game is free, too! I’ve still hardly gone through everything and I must’ve spent at least thirty or forty hours doing things in it, by now.

My only gripe, and this is a gripe with most of these gacha games, is that some of them are stingy with actually giving you characters when you pull for them. WuWa is, sadly, moderately to kind of severely stingy. On most pulls, I get weapons or weapon parts? I read somewhere that this is due, possibly, to the type of currency I’m using, and I should be using the actual baubles or whatever they’re called (I’m not in-game right now, so I don’t remember).

This also comes along with a pretty big gripe: The one character in the Lahai-Roi section that I wanted (Aemeath) is currently not attainable. Because I missed the window of her limited release. That doesn’t mean she won’t be attainable during other windows, but … Come on! Just let me spend my 15 bucks on some currency and take a shot!

My obsession with this game has also brought some other games to my attention, because you can’t just play one of these anime gachas. You gotta collect them all.

I’m also dabbling in Arknights Endfield, which is very cool, very polished, and it has a factory/base building mechanic! And you can kind of go to space? My gripe with this game is that … uhm, a lot of sections I’m trying to get to right now are blocked off by this red scourge virus thing, and I don’t know how to get around some of it.

But the base building, the ability to connect electrical points, seemingly, across the entire map so that you can power up the world? The exploration and gathering, plus the ship you can go to and customize, plus upgrade? All very neat. In fact, I feel kind of like I’m cheating on someone when I’m in WuWa rather than Endfield.

The other game I’m currently looking at, which just released, is a game published by Perfect World Entertainment (PWE), that calls itself Neverness to Everness. Instead of base building, this game swaps in … Grand Theft Auto features?! You can customize a car? You can own businesses and race people online?!

Yup.

But, and I have a lot more to say about this game right now, I will say that, despite some of the animation being really impressive, there is also a lot of it that is kind of unpolished feeling. Especially the running animations. When I’m moving, sometimes I feel like a tank on ice.

Also, you can go to jail for committing crimes, and this game put me in prison for seven whole in-game days.

Because I stole a car.

Regardless, I want to write about both of these aforementioned games later, and I’m eagerly anticipating updates to all three of them, especially the Cyberpunk event in WuWa, holy hell! And I’m so obsessed with these little cross-progression anime gacha adventure games that, and I don’t know yet if I want to admit this, but I feel like my days of playing games like World of Warcraft might be over.

Going into an MMO of yester-year kind of feels like the actual past now.

I can’t unlock my phone and make some progress on my character in WoW? You want me to continually pay for expansions while also paying a subscription fee, and you have an item shop with microtransactions?

Seems like a lot, and I’ve purchased every single piece of expansion content for The Sims 4.

But, I don’t know, we’ll see. I think there’s still some value left in games you have to sit in front of your PC for that you also can’t take anywhere … maybe?

In discussions about LLM training, to many, it’s either theft, or it’s learning. Learning, in the way that a person might learn if they take art classes, or study art, or what-have-you. Wherein they learn about other artists, they learn from their works. Some people even adapt styles from others in order to incorporate said styles into their eventual own works. And, in some cases, you can compare this to how LLMs are trained.

Human beings learn by studying the art of others, on a very small scale, a little bit at a time. You could of course, exist in a vacuum your entire life, and be handed a pencil and a piece of paper, but I believe even in that environment, you would take cues from things around you. Even if those things are sparse, and almost nothing exists.

An LLM learns by being shown the work of others, at an extremely large scale, as if you’re taking the work of thousands of people and shoving it into your brain.

Either way, you could say that these are similar ways of learning, unless you’re of the assumption that an LLM cannot create anything new, which is arguable. It’s very arguable, if you’re making these statements, and you’ve never actually interacted with an LLM or generative media.

It’s also arguable that a person cannot create anything new, because every idea has already been done, and everything currently being done is just something being done in a different style, or a different theme, looked at from another angle, with different purpose, and that everything can be traced back to an origin, a source.

Take the Backrooms for example. An idea that originated from a 4chan forum thread? Or a concept that was born on Tumblr from someone who was talking about dead gas stations in the middle of the night on the side of a highway? Or, the 1990 David Lynch series, Twin Peaks?

And so on and so forth, you get the idea.

It’s the idea of training and learning being theft that brings me to the point of this blog post today. Wherein, the belief that training an LLM on the works of creatives around the world, has suddenly catapulted people into this idea that, if you’re a person reading or consuming art and media without a license, you’re stealing, and that’s bad.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but copyright is not good. The only people who benefit from copyright, are the rich, the billionaires. And in this example of Lars Ulrich, we had/have one of the wealthiest bands in the world, who went on a campaign in the early 2000s in order to rally against Napster, because people were downloading their music. This essentially killed Napster, and controversially is the tipping point that brought us to where we are today, where the mainstream way to consume music is to stream it.

When was the last time you saw a store that exclusively just sells CDs?

But, it’s due to the aforementioned thinking, that if someone downloads your album, that’s a lost sale.

But here’s the thing: If someone is pirating music, or art, or a game, they weren’t potential customers. In some cases, they might become customers, but it’s never an additional lost sale. Most people pirate because they can’t afford to buy, and I definitely wouldn’t see many issues with that today, when games are reaching 70 USD and more, and most don’t even own the music they listen to, anymore.

With this in mind, you can take this concept and apply it to generative media. If someone generates an image of an anime girl, I don’t know, punching someone, that’s not a lost commission that some artist isn’t making. That person who generated that image was never going to pay anyone a commission for art, whether AI exists or not.

Furthermore, AI isn’t stopping anyone from continuing to draw, to create, to compose, and to write.

Whether people like it or not, and how valid or invalid it is, the main point not being spoken about here, is competition. People perceive AI as competition, even if it isn’t. Even if piracy isn’t losing anyone any customers, or gen-AI losing anyone any commissions. And to rally around the concept of copyright, to the point where you’d say something like this:

I do see it differently. Looking at something or reading something isn't stealing unless you don't have the license to look at it or read it. Buying a book and reading it, and then being inspired by the content is actually good.

— Girl Lich 🏳️‍⚧️⚢💀 (@girllich.bsky.social) April 28, 2026 at 1:14 PM

… is probably one of the largest faux pas happening in online leftist spaces right now.

“You can’t look at my work unless you’ve paid for it.”

Look, sweaty, I know we’re all hurting for money and this economy is crushing us, and something must be done about it before it destroys the entire world, but seriously? You’re just going to say that? No irony at all?

How are we allowing ourselves to arrive at these dystopian mindsets, just because of AI/LLMs?

Maybe these are ideas that people have always held, and generative media is only bringing it to light, now, because it’s suddenly more acceptable to sound like a lawyer.

Anyway, on a side note, I’ve been speaking about the nuances of AI a bit more lately, and recently, as of a few days ago, someone who came to my defense during a bunch of harassment on the Fediverse (which I am still eternally grateful for, since nobody usually speaks up for me when these things happen), decided to then, and now, stab me in the back. Because anything but complete angry and vicious rejection of anything AI at all, is evil and bad. That because I’d even entertain these ideas, every single thing I do and post must also be AI generated, which is insulting for multiple reasons, even if there are things I do that have AI influence, or are generated by AI. For reference, I write all of my blog posts, and I pass them through an AI to generate tags and summaries for the metadata. You know, some of the simple monotonous stuff I just don’t feel like doing (see: Groq, not to be confused with the Elon Musk machine).

Yes, I am aware that I am essentially training some LLMs with the things I write. I also don’t care. As we’ve all seen before, having access to AI doesn’t mean you can produce good things, or, having access to AI doesn’t suddenly make you intelligent, or magically give you an imagination.

But I shouldn’t have to explain myself. What I do is my business, and one of the things I’ve learned over the past two decades, is that, generally, almost nobody online has any effect on my actual life. There are very few people who do influence me, and who care about my existence online, and to those people, I’m grateful they exist.

But, while I continue to deal with the superficiality of so-called good people in online spaces, maybe there’s something for more reasonable people to take away from this post.

I was born in the capitol of Pennsylvania, and I briefly lived in Miami, Florida as a toddler. From there, my family, who moved around a lot until about 1996 or 1997 (it’s foggy now), moved over to Little Silver, New Jersey. I spent most of the late eighties in this location, and another in NJ. My memories are brief and only flashes, but I remember: Horse-race tracks, a large wooden tube-television, my NES, Super Mario Bros (the game, and the eventual live-action in 1993), an Italian family we spent a lot of time with, their kids and their gas-powered dirt bike they drove around their backyard, The Goonies, our next-door neighbor who was a kid that I remember as the perfect personification of what you would image an eighties kid to be.

I remember playing pretend as if I was a Ninja Turtle, running down the driveway, into the street, and then someone else’s driveway, where I slammed my forehead into a side-view mirror and passed out. That was the first time I had stitches. The second time was when I fell flat on the gravel and cut open my hand to the point part of the muscle was sticking out. This was terrifying for me at the time!

I think we had a pet bird at some point, too, and with the aforementioned family, we also took road trips in a big blue van with wood on the side that you could use as a place to sleep. I don’t remember where we used to take those road trips to.

But then, after, I wanna say maybe three or four years, we moved back to Pennsylvania. Back to PA, to some kind of ferry town (Millersburg), where I remember the main attractions were, of course, the ferry, and a large Ames complex that was a precursor to the Walmart I believe is there now. This was about 1990 or 1991, and is exactly where my memories begin to be clearer.

Which is good. Because these blog posts are going to be about the nineties.

It was here that my Dad brought home the first computer we ever had. A thing that predates the 386 by quite a few years, if I recall. It was a tan box that only did DOS. A primitive version of DOS with green text and menus that looked like something customized specifically for that machine. It definitely wasn’t Windows 3.1, or Windows at all. But I do remember watching the very first installation of Windows 3.1, and the informational videos that would play during the install process.

Which took hours.

But he had the big eight inch floppy discs we slapped into the “B” drive, and he borrowed quite a few from the neighbor in the cul de sac, some of which I remember not working. Either because the neighbor had a different kind of PC, or a Mac. Computers were much more complicated back then, because they all needed different drivers, and you had to manually select IRQ numbers for soundcards and so on and so forth.

My Dad used it to communicate with people over BBS that he’d dial into, and I used it to play, I believe, a text adventure Twilight Zone DOS game that I can’t remember the name of. But it did have graphics of some sort to represent each “room” you navigated.

Then, after the Windows install, there was Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, Doom, and Whacky Wheels.

I remember clearly that I’d be rushing home from school, just to play Wolfenstein 3D.

I also remember sitting up late at night with the glow of my night light in the room, as I hallucinated the demon skulls from Doom entering my room. That was … horrifying.

I remember when Jurrasic Park was brand new, and this kid at school would hum the theme tune from the opening credits, and the girl who, after I asked if she’d be my 3rd or 4th grade girlfriend, told me I wasn’t her type!

Being a coke-bottled glasses kid, I wasn’t really what people considered anything other than a nerd. People hated nerds in the nineties.

This section of memories leaves off living in that same house, and the very first 3D chat software ever released, Worlds Chat, and the one time my Dad let me use it.

I think Worlds is why I’m so intrigued by Second Life, today, in modern society.

But, I chose my avatar, I recall that clearly as some kind of boy with a Hawaiian shirt, and I navigated the rooms available to users to see (which, I think, still look the same today, if you download the app). It was like Doom or Ken’s Labyrinth type graphics, except the sprites moving around in front of you were other people, and they were chatting in a little box.

The reason I was only ever allowed to “play” it once, is because, while I was exploring, with my Dad sitting behind me watching, an adult user, a man who must have figured out that I was just a little kid, followed me around, and when I was alone he turned to me and asked me if I liked men, along with some lewd questions I don’t remember all-too-clearly anymore. I was very young at the time, so I didn’t really understand what was going on, or why this guy was asking me these questions. Especially because my Dad ripped the keyboard out of my hands and typed a flurry of messages I don’t think I ever saw. But that was the last time I was ever allowed to log onto Worlds Chat, and it would be something that I would remember, forever. Both as me, being able to experience the first 3D online software that allowed user communication, and my first experience with an online predator.