Downvoters don’t know what “fair use” means. Or do, but would rather work backwards from kneejerk opposition to an outcome.
A robot read every book in the library. That’s what libraries are for. If it can’t reproduce any book more closely than a Wikipedia summary, and serves a different purpose - that’s a protected work.
Training is transformative use.
A gigabyte of linear algebra that can rap about the Silmarillion is plainly not just copying. It’s not even large enough to contain a meaningful fragment of every book that shaped it.
“I came to rob your house and you fought me so I shot your dog. What did you gain from this?”
Protecting fair use is more important than any hate-boner toward chatbots.
Oh fuck off.
A site cannot send someone a video and then be mad that they still have it.
My perspective’s always skewed when people say ‘you just hate new stuff,’ because I hated plenty of the old stuff at the time. We can say pop is generic, and I mean, as opposed to when?
Relying on the radio for music just plain suuucks. There’s a cycle of alternating decades where the most popular stuff tends to be worth keeping, versus the big hits being unfortunate relics, but even the highest highs are rarely experimental or subversive. The idea of a cultural phenomenon being countercultural feels self-contradictory.
So yes, The Beatles were a big fucking deal for a variety of reasons, but their early career was all teeny-bopper relationship fluff. As late as Revolver they were writing two-minute AM-friendly hits like “And Your Bird Can Sing.” Meanwhile the Silver Apples were using homemade synths to sound years ahead of their time. If you went by radio play you’d think very little was happening.
Conversely, Depeche Mode blew everybody’s dicks off with Violator, but it’s just stripping back all the spacey industrial shit they’d been doing for a decade. “Personal Jesus” is a minimalist and twangy version of Martin Gore being horny on main. Their raucous live album 101 came out right before that and to my ears is the better experience. Was any of that on the Billboard 100? Was it fuck. Women crooning about love outsold them ten to one. (Okay, shout out to Phil Collins getting “Another Day In Paradise” to #7, because talk about atypical confrontational subject matter.)
Some of my favorite albums are from around 2000. Stuff from Kingston Wall, Meshuggah, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dragonforce, Blind Guardian, Slayer - was that what I listened to, most days, at the time? Nope. I was subjected to “Last Kiss” for the thousandth time, having hated it since the first. I heard so much country that I developed opinions about it. At the lowest point, I could tell boy bands apart. Admittedly: this deluge of crud was sprinkled with Third Eye Blind’s love letter to meth, Filter tricking people into buying Title Of Record, Chumbwamba making anarchist agitprop dancy as a complicated joke, and quite a lot of genuinely good pop. But sometimes you’d spin the dial for a solid minute and prefer to leave it on static. When I finally found out how to pirate shit, I just grabbed stuff they’d already played, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Nowadays - is there a mainstream? I only heard “Your New Love” when I was in a dentist’s office. I found “Good Luck, Babe” on Youtube after some screenshots of tweeted jokes. For two decades, it has been dead easy to filter and cultivate your own tastes. You don’t have to hear about a band, visit a store, and plunk down negotiable currency to receive a physical album, unheard. You can go from “Who?” to an informed opinion in like twenty minutes. Elsewhere in this thread someone linked Igorrr, so there must be some newly-minted industrial polka fans, and you can readily say ‘don’t miss Gogol Bordello.’
Maybe he mutters it in Sindarin and Legolas struggles to keep a straight face.
Gandalf comes up with a snarky comment, but reads the room, and pockets it until they barge into Meduseld.
I’m not sure this is ordered in any sensible way, if Bored Of The Rings is that deep down.
That really ignores the subgenres so bizarre they were considered jokes. Nightcore, dubstep, vaporwave, witch house, et cetera. All of those influenced popular culture and popular music. In terms of mainstream experimentation - Radiohead alone, come on. The Flaming Lips careened through popularity and back into weird shit like a hyperbolic comet. A Deftones fan in the 90s would listen to “Spell Of Mathematics” and ask if it sounds like that on purpose. Chappel Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” would not have been made the same, a decade prior; what she’d be guide toward is more like Adele’s “Your New Love.”
Rick Rubin is still alive and working. Artists give him their latest tracks for a vibe check and he consistently steers them toward success. And he tells says, he doesn’t give a shit what’s popular, because people have no idea what they want next.
musical categories hardened
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like “alternative.” ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you’d think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there’s people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
Presumably a PPSh-41? First result for an obvious search, looks the business.
(via Jack Bernhardt @jackbern.bsky.social)
From: Jeffrey Epstein
To: Cain From The Bible
Date: March 7th, 3000BC
Subject: Re: Thinking of killing my brother? 👀👀
go for it it wouljld be extremlry sexy to invenf thr cornvept of murder snd yherefore curse mankind fur eternkity ;) ;)
Instructions unclear, drank my buddy.
“All observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.”
Austin Powers: “You know what’s remarkable, is how much England looks in no way like Southern California.”
An ancient 4chan demotivator summarized FFTA as “your life sucks shit and I’m dragging you back to it.” You’d think it was fundamentally impossible to have a good story where the message is, escapism is bad, mmkay? But it would be so easy to say Ivalice only exists as a shared hallucination, with the locals they’ve befriended gradually revealed as shallow imitations of people. Or: say it’s a real place which these kids can visit any time… y’know… like players do. Put some ludonarrative assonance on the idea there’s a crapsack reality you do need to take care of, to continue enjoying this fantasy.
On the other hand, as an actual game, Penny Arcade gave it the “Oh shit, is it 3AM?” award.
An isekai where the MC is Snuffkin.
Having erased the game everybody loved for a janked-up and shamelessly greedy do-over, they’re now trying to erase even its memory.
Like how specifying “Halo CE” requires further disambiguation.
If - if - they release another Xbox, they’re gonna name the fucker “The Original Xbox.”