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When I was talking to Mork yesterday about Instagram, it became apparent that describing the web accurately makes you sound unwell. You can leave one service because it has enthroned a cyber-tyrant who is training an AI on all your data, and then go to another service where only a few months later they will start training an AI on your data. You might open up an account for your art on an independent service, where your enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of others strikes their infrastructure so hard that it generated a hundred thousand dollars in overage fees after a few hours. How do you orient yourself toward such an environment? These aren't natural phenomena.

Meta is going to train their AI on all the artwork posted on Instagram. I have not deleted my entire Instagram account yet but I have already removed all my art. I realize that there is really no place on the internet where you can possibly hope to be safe from these monsters but I don’t have to literally put my head in their mouth. I heard that it’s possible to mail them and request that they not use your work to build their artist killing AI. How about fuck you instead? I’m not going to beg the creature devouring me to be more gentle, I'm just going to leave.

I messed with Wayfinder a bit in its original MMO form, and I have now messed with it a bit more in its new incarnation as a co-op action RPG. One of my fixations is imagining all the games that could be made with a specific set of assets; I often fantasize about that sort of thing when I'm about done with a game, just trying to think of all the possible creatures it could become or could have been. I've been in the soup of gamedev alongside different designers enough to know that there are points where the game's state - in the sense of material states - is a liquid. Seeing what the same mechanics and the same gameplay arc mean in the absence of a monetization scheme that (functionally) constitutes a genre unto itself is fascinating and I don't know that there are that many precedents for what's happened here. It's gonna be a heavy fucking lift - but I can't look away.

Famously, I don't own a Playstation - at least not a working one. My PS4 Pro is so angry at me that it won't turn on. My Xbox One X is also goof troop.  So I don't really have a dog in any kind of State of Play fight, except to say that as this website's resident PC stalwart it doesn't look like I'm gonna need a Playstation.