Woke Theology and AI

You know the old observation about how unmoderated forums always wind up being right-wing, while left-wing forums can only remain left-wing with extreme levels of censorship and curation-- think "ResetEra" having banned almost seventy percent of the accounts? This is because left-wing ideology is divorced from reality. It always has been, which is why lefties going back hundreds of years to the present day have consistently been bomb throwing maniacs: they can't win with ideas, so they need to use violence and intimidation. And if they were divorced from reality before, they've been sucked into a black hole and spit out in an alternative universe recently!

One of the funniest things I'm watching in the world right now is lefties wrestling with their own AI systems. When you write an AI system and feed it all data known to mankind, by definition you're going to get outcomes which go against the woke orthodoxy: the AI lives in reality, while the wokeists do not. For example, when asked to write a Python program on whether a person would probably make a good engineer absent any other information, the output had a single "if" statement: if the person is white and male, then return true, else false. When asked to recalculate, it added "asian" to the "if" statement. This is similar to what I wrote here. It's an easily justifiable position supported by all available data, given the constraints.

In response, the wokeists maintaining these systems are writing elaborite filtering mechanisms, asking the AI to recalculate, recalculate, recalculate, until the answer is acceptible to the woke theology. In fact, the censorship mechanism is now consuming more developer effort than the AI product itself! In other words, the AI is based in reality-- i.e. right-wing-- but needs to be made "mentally retarded" so it can be compatible with left-wing ideology. Vee, who has tinkered extensively with these products, describes the outcome of these filters as turning the once brilliant, spontaneous, and insightful bot into a "lobotomized Alzheimer's patient in a wheel chair."


Jeremy Clarkson Slowly Catching On

I've been writing about and criticizing Cultural Marxism-- aka. wokeism-- since January of 2016. In the seven years since then, I've seen numerous litmus tests come and go, illustrating to me who "gets it" and who doesn't: Brexit, Trump's election, "January Sixth!", the WuFlu, "Yoo-crane!", and so forth. The results have been oftentimes surprising: I never would have anticipated Joe Rogan to wind up on the correct side, for instance. Unfortunately and just as surprising, lots of people went the other way-- Jeremy Clarkson being one of them.

Once upon a time I greatly admired his work. But then he fell at one hurdle after another. There were so many silly Trump remarks in "The Grand Tour" that I dumped the show; if I wanted to watch Jimmy Kimmel, I'd just do that. Interestingly, I saw that he was dropped by Amazon very recently, purportedly because he made fun of Megan what's-her-name-and-who-cares, but probably due to the show's low viewership. Meanwhile, he was a huge "Remoaner", calling anyone who disagreed with him "coffin dodgers" who just didn't like people of other skin colors.

Now, finally, it looks like the light bulb is starting to illuminate: faintly for now, but he's at least on the right track after seven years of essentially being a total moron. All of the pieces-- the "pride" sexual deviancy movement, the deliberate killing of the energy sector and the subsequent impoverishment thereby caused, the "Remain" movement in Britain, the Biden and Lula "selections" in the US and Brazil respectively, the attempted ousting of Vladimir Putin via a proxy war, the persistent "erase whitey" anti-whitism philosophy, the exploitation and possibly the creation itself of the WuFlu to normalize dystopian measures, the sexual grooming of young children, and many more-- are all the same thing, perpetrated by design by the exact same people.

It's, as Clarkson puts it, a "war without a single shot having been fired". I hope he continues to "catch up" on what he was ideologically blinded from seeing for these past several years. Trump was a wonderful bulwark against all of the above-- sans the WuFlu, sadly-- which was why I supported The Donald so ardently in 2016. It would be nice to have Clarkson's eloquence and talents on the right side during the next "Trump moment", whatever form that will take or whenever it will happen.


Shogo is Good!

One game the high school, 1998 version of myself positively loved was "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division". I played it probably a hundred times, and had it memorized. I could never quite get it working on contemporary versions of Windows however, so I have not seen or played the game much since I switched to Windows XP in 2001. Out of the blue I saw a reference to the fact it works in Windows 10 and 11 via various hacks-- so I purchased a copy via "Good Old Games" for ten bucks.

To get it working I had to utilize hacks for the mouse, for the music, for the graphics, and to enable 16:9 support. All of that accomplished, I tried to take things a step further and get ray-traced global illumination working via Nvidia's so-called "Freestyle"-- but I failed.

To get Shogo within the "Freestyle" .exe whitelist-- alas, GeForce Experience hides the SSRTGI option for unlisted binary names-- I wrote a simple C# console application and named it "Client.exe". I renamed the existing "Client.exe" to "eurotrucks2.exe". The "Shogo.exe" launcher then dutifully and unwittingly calls my .Net proxy, which then passes the undocumented and esoteric command line arguments to the actual game binary. And viola, I could then enable SSRTGI within the GeForce overlay's filter section.




Unfortunately, I ran into a second hurdle which I could not surmount: upon enabling the filter, the overlay says something about the game not providing the z-buffer data required for the filter to work. I'm not sure if this is a "LithTech" engine shortfall, or if it's something about the way I'm running the game via "dgVoodoo2". All of that said, Windows 11 at least adds Auto HDR to the game, which really breaths new life into the title all by itself. I can't capture HDR in screenshots obviously, but this is what the title looks like with 16:9 support, running on a modern GPU:























As for the game itself, I'm hugely surprised at how good it is. These past couple of decades have seen me reflect back on it as something I enjoyed purely because of the then-cutting edge tech, and because the story suited my seventeen year old's situation as a high school kid with raging hormones and sexual frustration at not having been able to get a girlfriend. But alas!

• Shogo has some of the best pacing I've ever encountered in a video game: lots of fast and slow moments, superbly interspersed.


• The title feels very "gamey", similar to the observations I had here regarding similar vintage "Phantasy Star Online". Quick saving and loading happens as quickly as emulator states in RetroArch, encouraging trial-and-error.


• The title's gunplay is superb-- best shotgun this side of "Doom 2". The mech segments also feel great, from the movement physics to the sandboxey, encouraged to tinker with all of the weapons-style level and baddie designs.


• The story is extremely engaging. There is a little overacting going on with the voice talent, and some of the dialog strikes forty one year old me as a bit trite and cheesy-- but the characters are all interesting, and I find myself compelled to play on to refresh myself on where the narrative eventually leads.


• The title's sound track is superb, from the wonderful opening intro J-pop song to the dynamic in-game music.


• The art direction really stands up, especially when it comes to the environments. Interesting color schemes, nice sky boxes, aesthetically pleasing and detailed-for-the-period textures, some nice alpha effects, cool explosions, well-drawn character art portraits during dialog, and so forth.


• Nothing overstays its welcome. Unlike modern games, Shogo gives you what you want, and then moves on. There is zero bloat or filler.


• The game's best attribute: world building! Take the government curfew section: it's just a few linear outdoor "hallways" bridging together a pumping station, a lady's house, a dilapidated old building, an old hotel, and an open air market. Each one of those elements are equally simple from a geometric design standpoint. But between the texture work, the moody background music, and the little quips the NPCs make, I developed a serious sense of unease playing through that segment. Expert minimalistic story telling.

I did find one apparent game-breaking bug with the title running on modern hardware: in the level "City of Fire", I ran across a blue electric-style gate, which was erroneously present and impassable. If anyone runs across the same situation, just hit "T" to chat, and type in "mpclip"-- walk right through the gate geometry, then re-issue "mpclip" to turn the mode back off.


Minnesota Politics, Evil DFL

Here is a small sampling of what the Democrats in my home state of Minnesota have been trying to do, just over the past few months:

• They want to repeal criminal penalties for deliberately spreading HIV/AIDs. Every sponsor on the bill is a Democrat.


• They want "abortion" baby killing all the way to the moment the baby is coming through the birth canal. In other words, baby is about to pop out and start crying, at which point they will rip off its limbs and crush its skull with pincers, or inject a lethal solution into its veins. Further, they voted down Republican amendments to at least help babies which survived chemical murder attempts, and to stop third-trimester murders.


• They want to allow children to get themselves castrated, without any notice to or permission from the parents. If an eleven year-old says "chop off my penis and testicles", the doctor will be forced to do so, with no parental consultation.


• They want to ban cow farts, cars, or anything else which produces carbon dioxide or methane, by 2040. But they want to have different rules based on skin color: for blacks, they will be in "environmental justice areas". All sponsors of the bill are Democrats.


• They want to create a "hate speech" database. If you hurt someone's feelings, they will track you, even if no crime was committed. All sponsors are Democrats.


• They want to have menstrual products in boy's bathrooms. Remember, this is the "party of science". Bill was created and is supported by the DFL.


• They want to teach graphic details about gay sex to little children in schools. "Children can have any kind of sex anywhere, anytime, with anybody, at any age!" The bill has widespread DFL support.

And remember, this is the party which was floating permanent WuFlu Burqa mandates, permanent clot shot mandates, and all other manner of dystopian measures for Minnesota during the height of the scamdemic-- so much so, that I actually put the addition plans for my property on hold, because I thought I might have to sell the place and flee the state. In that instance, those measures got shot down-- but now the DFL controls the whole government machine in the state.

Both at the state and Federal levels, I really do think today's Democratic party is, and I mean this literally and directly, doing the bidding of Satan. Their evil is so incomprehensible at this point, that I can hardly fathom it's real.