Db0 Blog Output

State of the AI Horde – 26/03/2023

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 18:47:25 +0000

Things are progressing very rapidly in this dawn of the AI and likewise for the AI Horde. I thought it would be a good idea to post about all the things that changed and improved in recent days for our service.

More Requests. More statistics.

I’ve deployed endpoints to measure the usage of the AI horde. Now that one month has passed, we can take a look.

Per day, we are averaging 356,378 images (3.7 terapixelsteps) and 45,248 texts (4 megatokens)
In the past month, we produced 11,475,183 images, generating a staggering 127.6 terapixelsteps. Text has also picked up significant speed since merging the hordes with 1,241,895 generated texts for a total of 112.8 megatokens!

Top 10 Stable Diffusion models

The AI Horde offers close to 200 models at the same time. Our statistics allows us to see how the popularity of the various models changes day to day and month to month. The below are just the top 10 models being used.

Deliberate 22.2% (2550591)
stable_diffusion 15.1% (1730426)
Anything Diffusion 11.0% (1257688)
Hentai Diffusion 4.1% (468473)
Realistic Vision 3.0% (338742)
Counterfeit 2.7% (310337)
URPM 2.6% (297853)
Project Unreal Engine 5 2.5% (289006)
waifu_diffusion 1.8% (211572)
Abyss OrangeMix 1.8% (205268)

For the longest time SD 1.5 (stable_diffusion above) was king, but in the past month, Deliberate has confidently taken the lead and has been leading the pack with a staggering 20% of all image requests passing through the AI Horde! This speaks very highly for the popularity of the model

Top 10 Text models

Almost as many text models exist for the AI Horde, but they’re more varied. However last months saw the release of two big milestones, the Pygmalion models for chat-like generation, which happened after the gimping of the Character AI models. The new Llama model was also released, bringing unparalleled miniaturization of the model size, allowing consumer GPUs far more coherence.

PygmalionAI/pygmalion-6b 52.4% (651566)
KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Erebus 14.0% (174393)
KoboldAI/OPT-6.7B-Erebus 6.7% (83249)
KoboldAI/OPT-6.7B-Nerybus-Mix 3.8% (46747)
KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Nerybus-Mix 2.8% (35110)
KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Nerys-v2 2.7% (33667)
Facebook/LLaMA-13b 1.9% (23367)
KoboldAI/OPT-6B-nerys-v2 1.9% (23232)
OPT-6.7B-Nerybus-Mix 1.6% (19268)
KoboldAI/OPT-2.7B-Erebus 1.0% (12464)

We can see Pygmalion has immediately dominated text generation, with Mr.Seeker’s storytelling models mopping up the rest, but the Llama Ascendancy is just beggining!

Ratings, botting and counter-measures

A few months ago we started collecting ratings for the LAION non-profit to help improve the models existing in the commons, as the success of midjourney has a lot to do with them training their models with the best images their previous generation created.

The initial design was very simple to allow integrators to onboard it fast and giving good kudos rewards for those helping us. Unfortunately people almost immediately started abusing this by creating bots to rate randomly, therefore poisoning our collection’s accuracy.

I always knew this was a possibility but I was hoping I wouldn’t be forced to add countermeasures quite so soon. So I spent quite a few days adding a captcha mechanism (along other things) to block at least the low hanging fruit.

It immediately led to a drop in ratings per day which automatically shows just how much damage botted ratings were doing

New Features

We are fortunate enough to have gathered some great collators for the inference aspect of the AI Horde. So I wanted a big shout-out.

ResidentChief has stepped up strongly to help add new features and squash bugs in the nataili library. As a result the AI Horde now supports inpainting on many more models, a lot more post-processors, such as more upscalers and background removers, controlnet improvements, and so many other stuff too numerous to mention. They’re a beast!
Jug has been working on improving the AI Horde worker practically non-stop. Giving us a great terminal control, and improving the webui. Plus a lot of bugfixes and improvements in the bridge part of things
Tazlin who’s been doing a great deal of tech support in the channels as well as helping me detect and figure out malicious ratings. And also sending some code improvements as well!
Aes Sedai who’s been putting a ton of work on improving the moderation capabilities of the AI Horde with a custom frontend.

And of course all the frontend integrators like rockbandit, aqualxx, sgt.chaos and concedo, who’ve been keeping the frontends up to date, with a lot of features smartly using the capabilities of the AI Horde in ways even I had not expected!

CI/CD and pypi

I finally got around to adding CI/CD pipelines for AI Horde Worker and nataili. Now they will be automatically versioned when the right tag is applied to a PR. The Nataili package has also been republished to pypi and will also automatically receive new versions whenever we publish a new release on GitHub.

The notifications also automatically publish a notification on discord, so people can be aware when something new is up.

Alchemists

Using the new post-processing improvements from ResidentChief, I’ve expanded the interrogation worker so that it can now perform post-processing on images, as well as img2text operations. Unfortunately the previous name didn’t fit so well, so now I’ve renamed it to “Alchemist”, to signify it’s capability to convert images to something else.

Likewise, the official names for image worker is now “Dreamer” and text worker is now “Scribe”. Why not Fantasy.ai has gotten into hot water since its inception, which for a company which is based on the Open Source community, is quite impressive feat on its own.

For those who don’t know, basically fantasy.ai goes to various popular model creators and tempts them with promises of monetary reward them for their creative work, if only they agree to sign over some exclusive rights for commercial use of their model, as well as some other priority terms.

It’s a downright Faustian deal and I would argue that this is how a technology that begun using the Open Source ideals to be able to counteract the immense weight of players like OpenAI and Midjourney, begins to be enclosed.

Cory Doctorow penned an excellent new word for the process in which web2.0 companies die – Enshittification.

First they offer an amazing value for the user, which attracts a lot of them and makes the service more valuable to other businesses, like integrating services and advertising agencies.
Then they start making the service worse for their user-base, but more valuable for their business partners, such as via increasing the amount of adverts for the same price, selling user data and metrics, pushing paid content to more users who don’t want to see it, and so on.
Finally once their business partners are also sufficiently reliant on them for income, they tighten their grip and start extracting all the value for themselves and their shareholders, such as by requiring extravagant payment from businesses to let people see the posts they want to see, or the products they want to buy.
Finally, eventually, inexorably, the service experience has become so shitty, so miserable, that it breaches the Trust Thermocline and something disruptive (or sometimes, something simple) triggers a mass exodus of their user base.
Then the service dies, or becomes a zombie, filled with more and more desperate advertisers and an ever increasing flood of spam as the dying service keeps rewarding executives with MBAs rather than their IT personnel.

Because Stable Diffusion is built as open source, we are seeing an explosion of services offering services based on it, crop up practically daily. A lot of those services are trying to discover how to stand out compared to others, so we have a unique opportunity to see how the enshittification can progress in the Open Source Generative AI ecosystem.

We have services at the first stage, like CivitAI which offer an amazing service to their user-base, by tying social media to Stable Diffusion models and fine-tunes, and allowing easy access to share your work. They have not yet figured out their business plan, which is why until now, their service appears completely customer focused.

We have services, like Mage.space which started completely free and uncensored for all and as a result quickly gathered a dedicated following of users without access to GPUs who used them for free AI generations. They are progressing to the second stage of enshittification, by locking NSFW generations behind a paywall, serving adverts and now also making themselves more valuable to model creators as soon as they smelled blood in the water.

We do not have yet Stable Diffusion services at the late stage of enshittification as the environment is still way too fresh.

Fascinatingly, the main mistake of Fantasy.ai is not their speed run through the enshittification process, but rather attempting to bypass the first step. Unfortunately, fantasy.ai entered late in the Generative AI game, as its creator is an NFT-bro who wasn’t smart enough to pivot as early as the Mage.space NFT-bro. So to make up the time, they are flexing their economic muscles, trying to make their service better for their business partners (including the model creators) and choking their business rivals in the process. Smart plan, if only they hadn’t skipped the first step, which is making themselves popular by attracting loyal users.

So now the same user-base which is loyal to other services has turned against fantasy.ai, and a massive flood of negative PR is being directed towards them at every opportunity. The lack of loyalty to fantasy.ai through an amazing customer service is what allowed the community to more clearly see the enshittification signs and turn against them from the start. Maybe fantasy.ai has enough economic muscle to push through the tsunami of bad PR and manage to pull off step 2 before step 1, but I highly doubt it.

But it’s also interesting to see so many model creators being so easily sucked-in without realizing what exactly they’re signing up for. The money upfront for an aspiring creator might be good (or not, 150$ is way lower than I expected), but if fantasy.ai succeeds in dominating the market, eventually that deal will turn to ball and chain, and the same creators who made fantasy.ai so valuable to the user-base, will now find themselves having to do things like bribe fantasy.ai to simply show their models to the same users who already declared they wish to see them.

It’s a trap and it’s surprising and a bit disheartening to see so many creators sleepwalking into it, when we have ample history to show us this is exactly what will happen. As it has happened in every other instance in the history of the web!

ControlNet on Lucid Creations

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 17:07:51 +0000

I finally got around to adding ControlNet on img2img for Lucid Creations. It’s a pity I haven’t really found anyone to help me keep this client up to date. I’m so busy with other AI Horde stuff, that I just haven’t found the time to show it the attention it deserves.

AI-powered anti-CSAM filter for Stable Diffusion

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:13:11 +0000

One of the big problems we’ve been fighting against since I created the AI Horde was attempts to use it to generate CSAM. While this technology is very new and there’s a lot of question to answer on whether it even is illegal to generate CSAM for personal use, I erred on the safe side and made it a rule from the start, that the one thing that is going against the AI Horde, is such generated content without exceptions.

It’s is not a overstatement to say I’ve spend weeks of work-hours on this problem. From adding capabilities for the workers to set their own comfort level through a blacklist and a censorlist and a bunch of other variables, to blocking VPN access, to the massive horde-regex filter that sits before every request and tries to ascertain from the prompt sent whether it intends to generate CSAM or not.

However the biggest problem is not just pedos, it’s is stupid, but cunning pedos! Stupid because they keep trying to use a free service which is recording all their failed attempts without a VPN. Cunning because they keep looking for ways to bypass our filters.

And that’s where the biggest problem lied until now. The regex filter is based on language which is not only flexible about the same concept, but very frustratingly, the AI is capable of understanding multiple typos of various words and other languages perfectly well. This strains what I can achieve with regex to the breaking point, and led to a cat&mouse game where dedicated pedos kept trying to bypass the filter using typos and translations, and I kept expanding the regex.

But it was inherently a losing game which was wasting an incredible amount of my time, so I needed to find a more robust approach. My new solution was to onboard image interrogation capability to the worker code. The way I go about this is by using image2text, AKA image interrogation. It’s basically AI Model which you feed an image and number of words or sentences and it will tell you how how well each of those words is represented in that image.

So what we’ve started doing is that every AI Horde Worker will now automatically scan every image they generate with clip and look for a number of words. Some of them are looking for underage context, while some of them are looking for lewd context. The trick is detecting one, or the other context is OK. You’re allowed to draw children, and you’re allowed to draw porn. It’s when these two combines that we filter goes into effect and censors the image!

But this is not even the whole plan. While the clip scanning on its own is fairly accurate, I further tweaked my approach by taking into account things like the value of other words interrogated. For example I noticed that when looking for “infant” in the generated image pregnant women would also have a very high rating for it, causing the csam-filter to censor out naked pregnant women consistently. My solution was then to also interrogate for “pregnant” and if the likelihood of that is very high, adjust the threshold to hit infant higher.

The second trick I did was to also utilize the prompt. A lot of pedos were trying to be bypass my filters (which were looking for things like “young”, “child” etc) by not using those words, and instead specifying “old”, “mature” etc in the negative prompt. Effectively going the long route around to make Stable Diffusion draw children without explicitly telling it to. This was downright impossible to block using pure regex without causing a lot of false positives or an incredible amount of regex crafting.

So I implemented a little judo-trick instead. My new CSAM filter now also scans prompt and negative prompt for some words using regex and if they exist, also slightly adjusts the interrogated words based on the author intended. So let’s say the author used “old” in the negative prompt, this will automatically cause the “child” weight to increase bu 0.05. This may not sound by a lot, nut most words tend to variate from 0.13 to 0.22, so it’s actually has a significant chance to push a borderline word (which it would be at a successful CSAM) over the top. This converts the true/false result of a regex query, into a fine-grained approach, where each regex hit reduced the detection threshold only slightly, allowing non-CSAM images to remain unaffected (since the weight of the interrogated word would start low) while making more likely to catch the intended results.

Now the above is not the perfect description of what I’m doing, in the aim of keeping things understandable for the layperson, but if you want to see the exact implementation you can always look at my code directly (and suggest improvements

I honestly have no idea what the appropriate reaction to these news is. Pity? Celebration? Comfort? I got no fucking clue. I wanted to defaulted to advice, but would that be insulting them? In the end I just was honest about it (which by itself requires enough mental fortitude)

It’s this situations that often make it obvious (even to me) how much coping mechanisms I had to create to handle the world smoothly. It’s therefore doubly funny when people who know me don’t even realize I am Neurodivergent. Likewise I see the stress and anguish my 10yo child has, who is high-functioning like me but hasn’t learned coping mechanisms them yet and is constantly tortured by his peeps for not reacting or handling situations “normally”.

Merging of the Hordes. The AI Horde is live!

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 11:24:04 +0000

A while back (gosh, It occurs to me this project is half a year old by now!) I took significant steps to join the two forks I had made of the AI Horde (one for Stable Diffusion and one for Kobold AI) as they diverging code was too difficult to maintain and keep up to parity with features and bug fixes I kept adding.

Then later on, I realized that my code just could not scale anymore, so I undertook a massive refactoring of the code-base to switch to an ORM approach. Due to the time criticality of that refactor (at the time, the stable horde was practically unusable due to the sheer load), I focused on getting the stable horde API up and running and disregarded KoboldAI API, as that was running stable on a different machine and didn’t have nearly as much traffic to be affected.

Once that was deployed a number of other fires had to be constantly be put out and new features on-boarded as Stable Diffusion is growing by leaps and bounds. That meant I never really had a time to onboard the KoboldAI to the ORM as well, especially since the code required refactor to allow two types of workers to exist.

Later on, I added Image Interrogation capabilities as well, which incidentally required that I set up the horde to handle multiple types of workers. This lead me to figuring out how to do ORM class inheritance (which required me figuring out polymorphic tables and other fun stuff) but it also meant that a big part of the groundwork was laid to allow me to add the text workers (which is the kind of thing that does wonder to get my ADHD brain to get over its executive dysfunction).

Since then, it’s been constantly on the back of my mind that I need to finally do the last part and merge the two hordes into a single code base. I had kept the KAI horde into a single lonely branch called KAI_DO_NOT_DELETE (because I deleted the other branch once during branch cleanup :D) and the single-core horde node running. But requests for improvements and bug fixes on the KAI horde kept coming, and the code base was so diverged by now, that it was quite a mess to even remember how to update thing properly.

The final straw is when I noticed the traffic to the KAI Horde had also increased significantly, probably due to the ease of using it through KoboldAI Lite. It was getting closer and closer to the point where the old code base would collapse under its own weight.

So it was time. I blocked my weekend off and started the 4th large refactoring of the AI horde base. The one which would allow me to use the two horde types which were mutually exclusive in the past, at the same time.

This one meant a whole new endpoint, new table polymorphism and going through all my database functions to ensure that all the data is fetched from all types of polymorphic classes.

I also wanted to make my endpoints flexible as well, so it occurred to me it would be better to to have say api/v2/workers?type=text instead of maintaining api/v2/workers/image and api/v2/workers/text independently. This in turn run into caching issues, as my cache did not recognize the query part to store independently (and I am still not sure how to do it), so I had to turn to the redis cache.

That in turn caused by bandwidth to my redis cache to skyrocket, so now I needed to implement a local redis cache on each node server as well, which required rework for my code to handle two caches at the same time. It was a cascading effect of refactoring pg_stat_statements.

That, along with the query to retrieve the most used queries, lead me to find a few areas where I could do some improvements through caching. One was the worker retrieving the models from the DB all the time for example, which I instead made it cache on redis.

Unfortunately none of my tweak seemed to do much difference in the bandwidth. I was starting to lose my mind. Fortunately someone mentioned the amount of rows retrieved so I decided to sort my postgres statements by amount of rows retrieved and that finally got me the thing I was looking for. There was one statement which retrieved a number of rows two whole orders of magnitude more than every other statement!

That statement was an innocent looking query to retrieve all the performance statistics for all workers, which I then created an average for. Given hundreds of workers and 20 rows per worker, and this statement being retrieved once per second per status check on a request, you can imagine the amount of traffic it generated!

My initial stop was to cache it on redis as well. That just shifted the problem because while there wasn’t a load on the DB, the amount of traffic stayed the same, just on a different VM. So the next step was to try and cache it locally. I initially turned to python cachetools and their TTL function caching. That seemed to work but it was a big mistake. The cachetools are absolutely not thread safe and my code relies on python waitress WSGI server, and that one spawns dozens of threads all over the place.

So one day later, I get reports of random 500 errors and other problems. I look in to find my logs spewing hundreds of logs about missing key errors on the cache. Whoops!

I did make an attempt to see how I can make cachetools thread safe, but that involved adding python locks which would delay everything too much, on ultimately something that is not needed. So instead I just created my own simple cache using global vars and built-in types which are thread-safe by default. That solved the crashing issue.

But then I remembered that I’m stupid and instead of pulling thousands of rows of integers so I can make an average using python, I can just ask PostgreSQL to calculate the average and simply return that final number to me. Duh! This is what happens when my head is not yet tuned into using Databases correctly.

So finally, I wiped my internal cache and switched to that approach. And fortunately that was it! My Mbit/s on my database server dropped from 150 average, to 15! a 10x reduction!

Watch the World Burn

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 12:00:39 +0000

I don’t easily say this, but this song is a masterpiece!

Rap/Power Metal/Death Metal Fusion, seamless transitions and on top a video with incredible production values.

I never really hard to Falling in Reverse until now and this song has been on repeat since it came out. Just mind-blowing!

New Discord Bot for the Stable Horde

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 19:32:14 +0000

For a few months now the Stable Horde has had its own Discord bot, developed by JamDon. One of the most important aspects I wanted for the bot (and the reason for its original creation), was the ability to be able to gift kudos to people via emojis, which would serve as a way to promote good behavior and mutual aid.

In the process, the the bot received more and more features, such as receiving the functionality of being able to generate images from the Stable Horde, or getting information about the linked horde account etc.

Unfortunately development eventually slowed and then 2 months ago or so, ago JamDon informed me that they do not have time anymore to continue development. Further complicating things was the fact that the bot was written in JavaScript which I do not speak, which made it impossible for me to continue its development on my own. So it languished unmaintained, as the horde got more and more features and other things started changing. It was the reason why I couldn’t make the “r2” payload parameter true by default for example.

The final straw was when our own bot got IP banned by the horde because it was a public bot and had been added to a lot of servers, which we do not control. And apparently people there attempted to generate unethical images, which the horde promptly blocked. Unfortunately that meant that the bot image generation also stopped working everywhere every time this happened.

At the same time, another discord regular had not only developed their own discord bot based on the stable horde, but a whole JavaScript SDK! The bot was in fact very well developed and had most of the features of the previous stable horde bot plus a lot of new stuff like image ratings. The only thing really missing which was really important, was the ability to gift images via emojis, which was the original reason to get as discord bot in the first place we deployed the ratings system to gather data for LAION and once the main UIs on-boarded them, they’ve been coming in at an extraordinary pace!

So I thought I’d share some numbers.

Amount of ratings per client

 count  |     client
--------+-----------------
 175060 | ArtBot
    461 | Discord Bot
    159 | Droom
   4124 | Lucid Creations
   2545 | Stable UI
   9430 | Unknown
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

As you can see, the Artbot ratings are crushing everything else, but to also be fair, Artbot was the first to integrate into the ratings system and is also a very popular UI. The Lucid Creations has added post-generation ratings, but not yet generic ratings. Stable UI and Discord Bot only added ratings a couple days ago. Things are about to pick up even more!

Artifacts per client

 count |     client
-------+-----------------
 15308 | ArtBot
     0 | Discord Bot
     0 | Droom
  1073 | Lucid Creations
  2550 | Stable UI
     2 | Unknown
(6 rows)

And we also can see how many artifact ratings each client has done. Artifacts were added only a couple days ago as well. Still ArtBot dominates, but only by a single order of magnitude instead of two Quoth Curtis White:

Through all of this, money remains unmoved. Like Ozymandias, money still says, “submit,” even though its head is rolling around on the ground. It can’t say anything other because it is afraid. Afraid of what happens if we don’t submit. Afraid of what happens when we refuse its work regime and begin to self-organize and self-develop in order to create our own satisfactions—just as we are doing now in many ways. We are beginning to reclaim what Marx called our “rich individuality” in a new way—through local and regional autonomy.

This is pretty much the same thing I was writing in my last post. The lackadaisical way in which the plutocracy is trying to save themselves and the “economy” while disregarding the people who actually live in it, is starting to make more and more people ask them taboo questions.

Capitalism laid bare

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 11:23:21 +0000

The Coronavirus pandemic is making painfully clear to everyone what socialists of all sorts have been pointing out for years: Capitalism doesn’t work!

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the response to the crisis where the “invisible hand of the free market” did absolutely nothing until it was too late and the costs of handling it have become prohibitive. Instead what is actually working is mutual aid. With people springing to the front and volunteering their life, health and even their very lives to help others.

You might see it in all those news about this or that celebrity donating so many millions to the Coronavirus response (we should of course not be praising a billionaire that if effectively giving what amounts to chump change for them, but mass media is gonna propagandize), but it is primarily the thousands of health workers and grocery store employees who are continuing to work with minimal wage and massive health risks because nobody else will. Sure the threat of homelessness is certainly making some people continue to work in life-threatening conditions, but from what I’ve seen, most do it out of a sense of duty. And even if it was the threat of destitution that made doctors and clerks for to their job during a pandemic, it would not exactly be a high praise for the system.

And the free market even now continues to malfunction. Sure a lot of companies are switching only now production to critical provisions, but either they’re doing out of sense of civic duty again (or at least, that’s how they’re portrayed in the media en large), or under pressure from their respective states. Not to mention that the pressures of the capitalist system are putting pressure to non-essential companies to continue operating, putting their workers and the general populace in danger, in order to not collapse.

This situation also makes it blatant on how illusionary money and monetary policy is. When things are going well, it’s all important to save money and “be responsible” and whatnot. But when a crisis comes, money is not important anymore, rather workers are expected to self-sacrifice for the common good, while companies get bailed out and CEOs can just take month-long vacations on their private yachts.

Think about it: For the world, nothing critical has changed. You’re still living in the same house and are getting food and supplies. The people providing supplies are also getting the same things, so they can stay alive and keep working. Now take money out of the equation: Nothing changes.

The only thing that money does in this situation is support the parasitic class of Landlords and Capitalists! We can plainly see that the world will keep turning without them but our ancestors were forced into a fool’s game and people have been running in that wheel out of sheer momentum ever since.

Now that suddenly so many people don’t get any income while their parasites still continue asking their due, people are starting to ask the question: “Wait a minute, why am I even having to give you money?”. And this is why as the bills are coming due, rent strikes and organized action are suddenly becoming widespread. And it’s beautiful!.

And believe me, Capitalists and their bootlickers are shitting their pants right now. The propaganda campaign is going in full-force in places like the /r/coronavirus subreddit whenever posts about rent-strikes rise to the top, but they can’t control it anymore. Governments are dumping trillions (fucking trillions! You can’t even comprehend how big a number that is) into people and companies, hoping to keep the illusion of the monetary system going until thing go back to normal. They literally give money to the workers to pay their landlords so that the workers who don’t have any money left, don’t question why they’re having to pay a landlord in the first place. That’s how desperate they are getting. Last time anything close to as massive happened, they ended up with The New Deal, and they remember!

But this is not going away soon, and the more plutocrats print money to throw at people to pretend the situation is still normal, the more people are going to start to wonder: “If money can just be made out of thin air like that, then what’s the fucking point of pretending it’s necessary?”

Sadly, disaster capitalism can’t let a good crisis go to waste, so we’re already seeing autocratic governments use this opportunity to take as much control as they always wanted. Just take a look at Hungary becoming a full-blown fascist dictatorship, or the Trumpian USA straight-up disemboweling environmental protections as they always wanted (and I fully expect Trump will try to postpone elections indefinitely once things get sufficiently worse, just as well). And on top of that, misinformation is taking advantage of the epidemic news coverage to reinforce denial of climate catastrophe. It’s completely fucked up.

Due to this, if we miraculously manage to contain Coronavirus fast enough, and “save the economy” (i.e. maintain the illusions of the working class) then we’re going to find ourselves in a much worse system. Much more authoritarian and much more dystopian than anything we’ve experienced until now.

However, as is looking much more likely, the endemic corruption of the capitalist class has become so terminal that it has stymied any effective response they might have taken and Coronavirus is set to last for months, if not years. And for the current system based on the absurd concept of infinite growth, this is fatal. And the more this takes to get under control, the more working class consciousness will grow as direct action for mutual aid will replace the state and market (non-)response. And if it grows fast and strong enough, when the system inevitably collapses from abject stagnation, we might just replace it with something wonderful just soon enough to start the massive global work we’ll have to undertake to stave of climate apocalypse.

Coronavirus has come at the worst time for the global capitalist system but as counter-productive as it sounds, the longer it takes to run its course, the better it might be for the future of humanity as a whole, as it lays the species-ending flaws of capitalism bare for all to see.

The interesting times begin

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 15:08:24 +0000

For Humans, Coronavirus by itself might not be as bad as other diseases like the black plague, but for the global capitalist system it might just end up being terminal.

It started by slowing down the productive capacity of the largest owner of means of production, China. It then progressed to disrupting the routine functions of wage-slavery in densely populated city centers. Soon it’s going to cause immense pain due as the landlords demand their parasitic rewards from people who have not earned any money for a month and have no safety net to fall back onto.

All these effects, are like vital organs in a human patient starting to fail. This, along with some other unexpected “inflammations” (such as the Oil trade war), and the people observing and taking bets on the patient’s recovery start to panic.

Which has now caused an unprecedented stock market crash. Faster than even the Great Depression crash of 1929 where we replicated the same percentile loss in less time. And it’s nowhere near the bottom yet, as the Coronavirus has not even fully taken hold of the US yet.

The cancer of the propaganda channel of Fox News and pretty much the rest of the Murdoch empire has weakened our global immune system enough in the past 3 decades that it managed to create the orange malignant tumor known as Trump, who proceeded to accelerate the dismantling of capitalism’s immune system even further. And now, the first real shock has already sent the global system into cascading failure.

The few million deaths due to healthcare systems becoming overwhelmed during Coronavirus are going not going to be nearly as disruptive as the repercussions of a stalled capitalist system supported by central banks which have no more measures to jump start it anymore and bad acting world leaders.

The situation forming right now will probably end up being the biggest Capitalist crisis the world has ever experienced.

Our Coronavirus reaction is like a test run to the climate catastrophe

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 11:00:30 +0000

It amuses me darkly to see the reaction of the so-called “civilized world” turn from schadenfreude at the plight of the Chinese, to denial and worry, to full-blown panic in the past month, as the Coronavirus spreads unchecked to our own communities now.

However I can’t help but see similarities in these reactions to the ones we have to the climate apocalypse, albeit at something like 3 orders of magnitude faster pace.

Like the climate catastrophe, nations not yet affected have been assuming nothing bad will come out of the Coronavirus and that business as usual should continue. Any steps of preparation were sporadic and isolated, from a few “doomers”, often ridiculed by the smug people who assumed this epidemic would simply fizzle out like the Ebola, or SARS.

They don’t realize, of course, that those diseases might have only fizzled out due to an immediate and good response. But it’s on our nature to label any successful attempt to prevent the worse as an “over-reaction” to something that “wouldn’t have been a big deal”. Frustratingly I see this daily in how many companies perceive investment in their IT departments as an overall loss.

The calls of “climate panic” of climate deniers map very well to the denials and conspiracies created by people when Coronavirus first appeared on the scene. It is for this reason that Europe and US have completely squandered all the time and lesson bought by the Chinese response. And by the time the effects of the pandemic were felt in the western cities, it was way to late to mount an effective response, and the cost of that response is likewise orders of magnitude what it could have been had measures been taken early enough.

Likewise, by the time the real effects of the climate catastrophe start being felt in an undeniable manner, it will be way too late to salvage it. The cost to the existing sociopolitical systems will be prohibitive and thus nothing significant will be effected.

The people in power assume that they will be spared the worst of a catastrophe, but as Coronavirus spreads indiscriminately and the old plutocrats realize their money cannot shield them, so will the collapse of modern civilization from climate catastrophe make their power vanish into thin air as their private security forces realize who has the power in an apocalyptic situation.

The worst thing in my opinion is that we cannot even use this epidemic as an effective wake-up experience because of the timescale of the climate. To mount an solid response to the global warming, we should have started 30 years ago, but like Coronavirus, we simply squandered out rime into business as usual because “it hasn’t happened yet”.

In the scale of climate Catastrophe I speculate we are at the phase Coronavirus was two weeks ago. Some isolated nations have felt the brutal effects, but they were either not significant enough, or those nations themselves could somehow be blamed for it. By the time the climate catastrophe finally manages to panic as many people as Coronavirus has today (5-10 years I expect), it will be too late to do much about it.

My theme kinda died

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 10:08:00 +0000

And I’m not in the mood to fix it anymore. I used a heavily customized HemingwayEx ever since I started this blog, but it’s been unmaintained for the past 7 years and I noticed recently that my homepage is now all wonky. Plus sporadically people had been complaining about readability.

Since I don’t post that much anymore, I think it’s time to go to something more standard, so I just selected one of the wordpress defaults for now. Feeling cute, might change later was still at large. I just found out that he’s been going around unmolested in Europe ever since and there’s a huge thread about that one guy by now in a French forum.

He changes names and nationalities constantly, so any information I provided about him is way obsolete by now, but his face and sob story should remain approximately the same.

On celebration

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 16:43:18 +0000

Ever since I left school I remember I was not big on celebrating my birthday. I don’t say this as any sort of boast, but rather because an event today made me realize something about the concept of celebration and by extension, birthdays.

You see, I just passed an IT certification exam that I felt was fairly difficult. I did the usual and posted about it on Facebook and LinkedIn and whatnot because I was overjoyed I made it. Naturally I wanted people to interact with me about this achievement which is why I broadcasted this online, so I obviously I have the drive to want to share things about my life. However I’m not the kind of person who wants to try and rub it in people’s faces to make them interact with me, so that’s as far as I usually go.

Anyway, at the semi-humorous advice of a colleague on chat, I decided to anyway bring some croissants to work to mark the occasion. What natively happened is that everyone who stopped by to pick one up, also congratulated me about the occasion. and some also asked for more details and ended up having a nice conversation about my experience. Naturally this was very pleasing to me, as I received more positive attention than usual. Certainly more than I would have gotten if I simply came to my desk as any other day.

This is, I expect, normal. People don’t much care about other people achievements and if I went around just announcing it to people unsolicited, it would sound boastful and forced. People might even resent me for thinking I’m trying to rub it in their faces. Typically this is why I tend to not to play up any of my achievements.

In that sense then, me buying a round of croissants for everyone, is sort-of like paying for their attention in a socially-acceptable manner. The croissant is free, but there is an unwritten expectation that you positively interact with the person that brought it!

This has probably been consciously or subconsciously obvious to most of you, but it never really clicked for me until now. I bring snacks now and then, like everyone, but it was more of a guilt-thing. “Everyone is bring stuff on occasion, so I guess I should be doing that as well”. The dynamics of the situation are simply more clear to me now and I felt I had to share.

As I mentioned, this led me to thinking a bit further about birthdays as well, and why I don’t really care to celebrate them. The birth of concept of celebrating birthdays is lost in history, so I’ll guess we’ll never truly know, but It feels to me that birthdays must effectively be tradition that begun when human life was much more easily ended than it is today. Especially since children mortality was sky-high before the advent of modern medicine. Thus surviving for a whole year into your life, especially as a child, is a noteworthy event, and naturally, an occasion on which you might want to reminisce about the past year as well.

Therefore, I think I instinctively stopped caring about my birthdays because they in turn do not feel like an achievement. At this point of my life, it’s not difficult to survive another year, and thus I feel no reason to make it a big deal.

To wrap it into the concept I explained above, I see no reason to “bribe” people to interact with me about something I have nothing to say.

And yes, I realize I sound like a robot learning about human emotions since the last time I posted about it. I now have playable cards, building placement, effect automation, ability to manipulate elements on a hex map and a research pile. All in all, it has taken me approximately 35 hours to reach this stage which feels pretty decent for someone who’s never used Godot or built a video-game from scratch before, but I think a lot has to do with my time building card game plugins in OCTGN.

I even created a Godot demo on how to merge hexagons into tilemaps, which is the question I was asking last time The Godot Engine to finally create The Game I Always Wanted To Play But Nobody Would Make (TM).

Initially I was looking at using pygame since Python is the only language I feel comfortable enough to use for something as complex as that, but my first foray into documentation and examples was a complete disaster. Most the code samples in the pygame repository I tried, led to dead links and the documentation was difficult to get into.

I then left things simmer for a while until I run into Solar Settlers which is surprisingly similar to the concept I have in my head and that kickstarted my drive to continue development as it showed I could do a very minimalist game and still achieve the gameplay I wanted. I checked with the author who pointed me to Unity, which unfortunately does not support python. Howevever I was lucky enough that one of my searches on using python with Unity brought me to Godot and it was “love at first sight”.

You see, Godot is like Unity, but, very importantly, using an Open Source licence (MIT) and its scripting engine, while not python, uses exactly the same syntax and has lot of the same methods. This should theoretically allow me to get a much better running start than having to also learn C# to work with Unity.

So I’ve started doing this on my free time lately, following the great step-by-step tutorials to get me into how Godot handles things, and past few days I’ve started creating a basic setup for me to test and iterate the game rules, without having to use Pen&Paper.

And the speed by which I’m able to do things now has been amazing! I got me a hex map, and a card-drawing mechanism already! It may look like absolute shite, but it’s there Harry Frankfurt (found via this article)

“A liar knows they are lying, which means they know what the truth is, and have a certain respect for it. But a bullshitter either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, and is fundamentally unable to handle being caught. “
Harry Frankfurt – On Bullshit

I was thinking about this when I was seeing the trumpettes valiantly arguing against the world calling Trump a liar for claiming that a living president agreed that The Wall is a good idea.

Trump didn’t lie, he was just trying to bullshit you, as he always does.

Apparently ChristianDatingSites.net wants Antichristians as affiliates.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:23:45 +0000

художник на икониSo, yesterday I received this email: Hi, My name is Cindy and I’m the owner of ChristianDatingSites.net–would you take a look at my site and consider possibly listing it as a resource on your website? ChristianDatingSites.net is the only website exclusively devoted to Christian singles who want reliable information about avoiding the financial [...]

художник на икониSo, yesterday I received this email:

Hi,

My name is Cindy and I’m the owner of ChristianDatingSites.net–would you take a look at my site and consider possibly listing it as a resource on your website?

ChristianDatingSites.net is the only website exclusively devoted to Christian singles who want reliable information about avoiding the financial and physical dangers inherent in using online dating, serving our readers by authoring articles on topics like how to identify dating site scams and how to deal with one if you fall victim.

Please take a look at ChristianDatingSites.net, and if you agree that it’s a valuable resource, perhaps consider adding a link to it from your site?

Thank you in advance for your consideration,

Cindy McDonald
Blogger | Owner

Cindy, my dear, consider your wish granted. We, the devoted antichristians of the net would love to endorse ChristianDatingSites.net wholheartedly. All Antichristians should consider this as their first stop if they ever consider christian dating given the recently converted nature of its owner: Cindy the Antichristian. Welcome to enlightenment my sister.

I know, I know, it might come as something of a shock to the previous audience of ChristianDatingSites.net, but such are the realities when one finally wakes up to the nonsense of the Christian belief system. I’m sure Cindy’s recent deconvertion will not affect her professional conduct in her role as webmaster and that is certainly shown by her rational choice to contact The Antichristian Phenomenon to list her as a valuable resource.

We hear and we acknowledge Cindy! Of course, we do not expect that you link immediately back to the ACP, as that might alienate your readers, but I’m sure you have plans to slowly spread more and more antichristianity and when the time comes, a proper link back to us will be provided. Until then, feel free to copy some of our texts for covert dissemination to your audience. Wink,wink.

For all our christian readers out there, you can now see they the ACP is the top religious blog on the net, when even Christians reach out to us for endorsements.

Tell your friends.

More Antichristianity: FAQ finally up | A small pwnage | Theme update

Your religion breeds this shit

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:49:10 +0000

икониI found this blog the other day through reddit, which is basically daily stories from “escorts” to abortion clinics. That is : People who go to abortion clinics and escort clients towards the door, in order to support them from the onslaught of harassment from the anti-abortion protesting crowds which are forming a gauntlet around [...]

And then I read stories like this

But at one point she turned to face her tormenters -

who were mouthing their usual – “don’t let your baby die – if you need money, we’ll give you money – we love you, we’ll do anything, anything, let someone adopt your baby, please, please, please…”

and she told them her baby was already dead

She told them, through sobs, that she carried one baby til it was born dead and she couldn’t do that again.

Wouldn’t you think they’d have shut up and left her alone? In the face of her pain at having to go through this, wouldn’t you think they’d have backed off?

No.

Instead, they continued to tell her not to kill her already dead baby.

Really.

Fuck. This. Shit!

Fuck it sideways with a jagged screwdriver.

Christians in the so called 1rst world, like to think that they are better than the religious nutters in places like backward Muslim countries. But the only difference is that they’ve replaced physical abuse with emotional abuse at every opportunity. Especially against vulnerable targets, such as women making some of the most difficult choices in their lives.

And to top it off, they are monumental hypocrites to boot.

It’s this kind of thing that reminds me just why exactly I became an Anti-Christian.

More Antichristianity: More of that shit! | The most depressing story about Faith Healing you’ll read | On Respect (Post Β) – The Hunted Knight

How to respond to a "Used-to-be-an-Atheist"

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:45:42 +0000

мека мебелA repost from reddit, in a fail-proof reply to those Theists that love to bring up how they “used to be an atheist when I was young too”. Hebrews 6:4-8 “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who [...]

мека мебелA repost from reddit, in a fail-proof reply to those Theists that love to bring up how they “used to be an atheist when I was young too”.

Hebrews 6:4-8

“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.”

100% of the time, I hear back. “I didn’t know that. Well, I don’t believe that part.” So, of course my response is, “We’re in agreement then; I don’t believe the part that says I’m going to Hell either.”

I’ve never seen someone recover. Enjoy!

Now go forth and pwn.

More Antichristianity: Some answers | Why I don’t want to die!!!!!! …Err, not really | National Day of Groupspeak

Cleaning Up

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:56:18 +0000

Subscriber holocaust

OK, I’ve made registration to the ACP a bit more difficult because a lot of spam accounts were being registered. You now need the invitation code you can find at the “Embrace Enlightenment” page. Hopefully this will deter automated registrations.

I’ve also deleted the 140 subscriber accounts that were on the ACP. People, you are supposed to create an account only if you want to contribute to the blog. And if you want to do that, you’re supposed to email the admins once you register (Again, check the “Embrace Enlightenment” page)

That is all.

More Antichristianity: Welcome to the beta | Member Pages | FAQ finally up

Yahweh or the Highway!

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 10:29:58 +0000

Yahweh was truly a badass.

Just found this little gem in reddit. It’s a comic about the true story of the Christian God, as the church does not want you to see. I can’t accurately express how awesome it is

It’s apparently a comic from Doc Frankensten so this will be a very nice giftmas gift for your antichristian friends

More Antichristianity: How to respond to a "Used-to-be-an-Atheist" | New Year Journal Roundup | Journal Roundup

Bible Multiple Choice

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:11:28 +0000

Do you consider yourself a Christian. Do you think you know the bible? Take this test to prove you're not a sinner!

I just saw this Greek post on making a multiple choice test in the Bible that I thought was brilliant and I couldn’t help but repost the translated version.

The following is basically a little test to see if you still remember the Good Book and all the nice values it has provided to you. Use it in case you need to freshen up your memory, to test if you children are paying attention in School and so on.

Try to figure out which are the correct answers and see how close to inspired perfection you stand. One of the following questions has more than one answer. Can you tell which one?

Good Luck!

A Few children were making fun of Prophet Elisha as he was going up a mountain, shouting at him “Get up baldie!”. Elisha…
a) Cut the ears of 42 of them and made them eat them.
b) Cursed them so that a fire broke out around them, burning 42 of the kids.
c) Cursed them so that two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of them.
d) Turned 42 of them into pigs.
What is the 10th Commandment that God gave to Moses to write on two stone plates in the Mount Sina
a) Do not put one ox and one mule in the same field.
b) Do not cook a kid (baby goat) in the milk of it’s mother.
c) Do not sleep with a deaf-mute so that you don’t turn into a deaf-mute yourself.
d) Do not open you house’s door to idol worshippers.
What is the name of God?
a) Whiner.
b) Cheater.
c) Jealous.
d) Naughty.
How should parents kill their son in case he’s drinking and talking back to them?
a) Implate him.
b) Stone him.
c) Burn him alive.
d) Decapitate him.
What happens if you’re not a (female) virgin on the first night of marriage?
a) Your father must pay the husband 100 pail.
b) Your husband whips you and then divorces you.
c) You’re stoned to death.
d) The whole village spits on you.
What is explicitly allowed to be eaten according to the Holy Writ? (All others are explicitly forbidden)
a) Fried Oysters.
b) Rabbit stew.
c) Lemon Pork.
d) Grasshoppers with ketchup.
According to the Holy Writ, God cannot defeat
a) Those who have iron chariots.
b) Those who have iron spears.
c) Those who have iron swords.
d) Those who have iron bows.
When Jephthah came victorious from battle, what did he burn on the alter as an offerring to God?
a) His only son.
b) His only daughter.
c) His two small grandchildren.
d) His wife.
What did David offer to Kind Saul so that he would get his daughter?
a) The heads of 200 Phillistines.
b) The dicks of 200 Phillistines.
c) The testicles of 200 Phillistines.
d) The penis skins of 200 Phillistines.
For what reason did God torture Job?
a) Because God was bored and had nothing to do.
b) Because Satan challenged him to destroy him for no reason.
c) Because Job ate raw meat.
d) Because Job forgot to use incense.
How does God punish pretentious women?
a) He makes them bald, and exposes their cunt.
b) He makes them full of zits, and exposes their tits.
c) He makes them full of sores, and exposes their thighs.
d) He makes the grow a beard, and exposes their arse.
What is the punishment for the lame?
a) Do not approach the holy so that they do not desecrate them.
b) They must pay double the tax as the healthy.
c) The must burn double the amount of animals during sacrifices.
d) They are not allowed to eat bread.
Which Christmas tradition is forbidden by God?
a) Sing Christmas carols for money.
b) Giving gifts.
c) Decorating a tree.
d) Eat turkey.
What did Jesus suggest people do, if they can tolerate it?
a) Self-flaggelate
b) Become a eunuch.
c) Rip out their eyes.
d) Stay unmarried.
Hare, according to the Holy Writ is:
a) Marsupial
b) Reptile
c) Ruminant
d) Predatory
How do we make animals with dots?
a) We make them wear tunics with dots which can get discoloured, and leave them in the rain.
b) We make them look things with dots while they’re drinking water.
c) We throw them on the coals and take them immediately off them again.
d) We make them stand under thinly grown Garlands every noon.
According to the Holy Writ, feeling come from…
a) The intestines
b) The stomach
c) The liver
d) The kidneys
Which from the following creatures appears in the Holy Writ?
a) Unicorn
b) Dragon
c) Basilisk
d) Satyr
When Jesus dies, which from the following miracles happened?
a) A rain of blood fell over Jerusalem.
b) All street of Jerusalem got full of zombies.
c) All sheep in Jerusalem started baying.
d) All wines in Jerusalem turned into vinegar.
Question 20 omitted because I’m too lazy (and obviously sinful) to translate all that text. Maybe later.

How well did you do? Compare your answers to the holy truth:

C (2 Kings 2:23-25)
B (Exodus 24:26-28)
C (Exodus 34:14)
B (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
C (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)
D (Deuteronomy 14:7-8 and Leviticus 11:1-20)
A (Judges 1:19)
B (Judges 11:30-40)
D (1 Samuel 18:27)
B (Job 2:3)
A (Isaiah 3:16-17)
A (Leviticus 21:16-23)
C (Jeremiah 10:2-4)
B (Matthew 19:11)
A (Leviticus 11:6)
B (Genesis 30:37-39)
A (Psalms 7:9, 16:7, 26:2, 73:21, Proverbs 23:16)
All of the above (Isaiah 34:7, Numbers 23:22; 24:8, Deuteronomy 33:17, Deuteronomy 32:33, Psalms 74:13-14, Isaiah 13:21-22, 34:13-14, Proverbs 23:32)
B (Matthew 27:51-53)

More Antichristianity: Morality | Christmas without Christ – Why? | 002: Fodder for Followers

The most depressing story about Faith Healing you’ll read

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:35:29 +0000

A redditor writes his own experiences of attending a Benny Hinn show. The story is, if not disgusting, mildly depressing.

Reddit delivers again, this time from the personal experience of one redditor with the Mega-conman Benny Hinn. The whole story is very cringe-worthy, particularly the way that people are manipulated shamelessly and then blamed for the lack of success. Some choice quotes that made my eyes pop in surprise.

We sat next to a latino family who, by the looks of their clothes, did not have a pot to piss in. Upon the first offertory (and there were 4 offertories that evening), the family father cut a check for $3500 and slipped it into the lock box carried by one of the three dozen visibly armed ushers. Each lock box had a sign on the front reading, Suggested Donation: $1000.00. The family gave additional money each time the lock box went by, but I am not sure how much.

Which is a perfect example why the poor in very religious countries have so much more difficuly rising out of poverty. The fact that the scum that is Benny Hinn can accept such donations for nothing more than a stage show is sickening.

Well, the old lady who fell was crying. Not because she injured herself. But because the men in blue told her (according to one of the Pepsi Center employees who allowed us to stand nearby) that she couldn’t be healed because her faith in God was not 100%. She was told to stand against the wall until she confessed to God that her faith was shaken and be forgiven for it, or confess the sin she was hiding that was preventing God from healing her. A sixtysomething woman, bawling her eyes out (old people crying really gets me).

This is the face of fucking evil folks. This is what you indirectly support as a moderate christian who tolerates faith healing nonsense just because you can’t bring yourself to admit that your God is not omnipotent.

Fuck. This. Shit.

It wouldn’t be as bad if it was simply foolish people losing their money to a professional conman and thus taking themselves out of the social pool in a Darwinian sense (although that’s pretty bad anyway.) It’s the fact that a scum like Benny Hinn achieves so much financial power that he can easily start lobbying politicians for policies that benefit him (even scarier, imagine politicians actually attending and believing his shows…) and he can purchase and control actual capitalist businesses and run them according to his greedy-scummy nature.

More Antichristianity: Child medical neglect on religious grounds | Number of the scout | A bad case of Racism

Last.fm purges large number of anti-religion groups

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:36:26 +0000

Last.fm has decided that all the "hatred" has to go. The ACP managed to weather the storm and reports on the aftermath.

Ever since Last.fm sold out to corporate interests I was expecting the day would come when the many anti-religion groups that existed there were taken down to avoid offending the sensibilities of the increasing pop audience. Well it seems that happened while I was not looking as the first thing I heard about it is this post from Anath in the forum. Apparently the last.fm admins purged many of the existing anti-religion groups with the reasoning that they were promoting “hatred” but fortunately spared the ACP which was seen of keeping things more civil. This message was sent to Anath:

Hi,

As you might have heard, some anti-religion groups have been deleted recently. I have been looking at your group as well, and a few things are beyond what I would normally authorise, but most of the contents are discussion orientated and not just plain bashing and hatred. This is the reason why I am not deleting this group. But I strongly encourage you to keep a strong moderation going, so it does not become mindless hatred.

As an example, “Metal against Islamism group was deleted… BASTARDS!” and “Oh good grief. Stupid bastards, creating a mass of groups for exactly the same thing. That’s just confusing.” are the kind of things I would rather not want to see appearing.

In this thread various opinions were heard, some coming from the Metal against Islamism admins who tried to explain that they had no warning and no chance to fix things before being deleted. The admins of Last.fm also chimed in to explain that they would simply prefer to avoid rampart hatred but have no problem with reasoned arguments. Apparently one of the main reasons why MAI was deleted was their shoutbox was flooded with seething anti-Islam posts, far too many to delete individually. So the whole thing had to be taken down. It reminds of how the Protoss used to clean the Zerg infestations in the popular Starcraft^[I] PC game.

The ironic thing is that the reason the ACP group was spared was the strong moderation we were seen of having which prevented a lot of the most questionable stuff. This moderation, which takes the form of requiring people to join the group before posting in the forum or shoutbox, was implemented in fact to prevent Christian trolling as we would often get fly-by posts and shouts from people who only wanted to disrupt. They would spam the forum with dozens of pro-christian nonsense for example and then leave before being banned, making it impossible to stop them.

The interesting thing is that all this purging has given a very strong boost in activity to the ACP as it has now become a haven for all those people left groupless in the anti-religion department. Hopefully this will make for a healthier and more active anti-christian community that does not devolve into a circle-jerk of mindless christian bashing.

It also points out the benefits of having an external website complementing your last.fm forum such as the one you’re currently reading. In case the ACP had been taken down, we would still be able to use this area for a staging area until we found a new home, either under a new name or a new forum.

As for Last.fm, unfrtunately it seems to be taking more and more of the corporate route. One can only hope that they won’t go to the extent that Microsoft has for example when they started banning all mention of homosexuality in their allowed usernames. One can only hope that if “hateful” anti-religion groups have been deleted, the same has been done to the hateful religious, fascist and racist groups but I have no knowledge of this either way.

Footnotes

I was thinking of linkin to a wikipedia article of this but then I thought: Seriously, if you don’t know what Starcraft is, you’re probably too old for this site anyway

More Antichristianity: Cleaning Up | Welcome to the beta | Sensitivities

I like her

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:48:00 +0000

That’s all folks. More Antichristianity: Satan pooping on Jesus? Hell yeah! | Fool’s Journal Roundup | Ashamed Christians

That’s all folks.

More Antichristianity: Satan pooping on Jesus? Hell yeah! | Fool’s Journal Roundup | Ashamed Christians

Atheist-bashing now in mainstream video games

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:31:27 +0000

Dragon Age is a mainsteam video game which features a range of character. Unfortunately it seems that the Atheists have a specific role to play...

We’re used to Hollywood portraying Atheists as cynical and bitter personalities who only need the slightest push to see the light as part of their redemption (or alternatively serve as a handy character to kill for being too rational.) Usually we can point out and avoid movies which play on those ridiculous archetypes but sometimes this nonsense comes at you from where you least expect it.

Such was my experience with Dragon Age, which after my recent escapades during its procurement, now gives me another reason to blog in relation to it. You see, this game not only features de-facto atheists as part of your band of “heroes”, not only does it feature them in a profoundly Holywood way but it goes at that extra step to make sure we get the point.

As far as I’ve progressed in the game, I’ve encountered two characters who can be rightly proclaimed as atheists. One of them is the Wild Witch Morrigan which even though is a mage shows a strong disbelief to “The Maker” (A monotheistic deity whose religion is similar to the Christian one) and the other is Shale, a stone Golem which I’ve only had with me for a bit and speaks like an agnostic but already shows strong tendencies towards atheism.

You get the religious views of those two characters mainly by having them in your party at the same time as you have the ultra religious Leliana which then strikes up casual dialogue with either of them on this topic while you’re walking in cities. From those ambient discussions, you quickly realize the beliefs of the two atheists while also getting the classic Holywood trope about atheism. Even though the discussions are quite humorous at times and entertaining in their own right, especially at the parts where Morrigan wonders why she should believe in anything without proof, they quickly turn annoying when instead of showing a person who has a solid basis in their worldview, they paint those characters as insecure and afraid (deep down).

“I’m feel sorry for how isolated and alone you must feel in your life” Leliene says at the end of an exasperating discussion with Morrigan. “Er…I…none of your business.” retorts Morrigan, making obvious to all that she does indeed feel isolated and lonely. I couldn’t help but feel why she couldn’t answer like I would. “You’re mistaken, I’m far from lonely” or even “I like it that way.” In short, any kind of retort that an atheist who is not insecure in his life would give.

But that’s not the worst of it, far from it in fact, if that was all I wouldn’t really mind it. What really annoys me is not simply that those two are cynical, bitter or whatever but that they’re both downright evil! And this is quite the explicit kind of evil mind you, not the vague moral choices that seen from the right perspective might lead to some interesting ethical questions, but the “who cares for suffering, just give me unlimited power no matter the costs” kind of evil that only exist in the cartoonish villains of Hollywood. Morrigan is by far the worse of course, abundantly disproving when I even think of helping the downtrodden and blatantly approving of only the most vile acts (examples: -5 approval for simply convincing a merchant not to exploit the desperate refugees. +7 approval for opting to allow the evil demon to possess a child.)

Shale on the other hand openly admits in disliking humans, consider itself a far superior being, has no issue with wanton violence and is of course, quite hearless about it. This wouldn’t be an issue in itself but when coupled with it openly promoting rationalism and critical thinking, once more one tends to say “Now hold on a goddamn minute!”

Now let me here point out that I have no problem with there being evil Atheists in games. Not at all. However I’d like some basis on this evil which here simply doesn’t exist. Morrigan seems to be wishing the evil options for the sake of being evil. The excuses for the disapproval the character gives are laughable only only serve to point out the shallowness of her worldview which makes the fact that she ignores the obvious result of doing the good thing as benefiting our own mission even more annoying. For example, during a mission where I had to convince a king to help me, I reached his castle only to find that undead were pouring out of it and attacking a nearby village. It made perfect sense to protect the village during the attack and then once the undead were destroyed or lessened, I would go in the castle. Then the obviously thankful King would be more willing to help me out. However for Morrigan helping the village was a big no-no so I got penalized for doing the sensible thing.

So evil atheists are not a problem but when you have only the (blatant) Atheists as goddamn evil bastards while the theists are all little goody-two-shoes angels who approve of all the good stuff (and of course the game doesn’t give any proper moral choices, only caricaturish black&white options) and only care for helping the poor, then one can’t help but make the appropriate assumptions.

While the game could have put a nice perspective into the oppression of organized religion in the form of the templars, we’re rather told that they’re in fact right for being so oppressive since all those people they oppress are kind obviously powerhungry fucks. So again religion + authority + strict rules = good while individualism + atheism + freethought = bad.

For me thus, the problem does not simply simply lie in the fact that some Atheists are portrayed as powerhungry bastards, it lies in the fact that all atheists are such while all the theists are, quite explicitly, good. Would it hurt to have some of the theist heroes be intolerant of, say elves and dwarves (maybe some are, I haven’t seen all of them yet). Would it hurt to have some of them disproving of alternate sexualities? And on the same track, it wouldn’t hurt if some of the atheists weren’t total bastards all the time. It really pokes me in the wrong way where either I have to make total dickish choices with my character (eat babies!) or to lose the only two characters I like since they will disapprove of me so much.

Unfortunately this is a perfect example of the Hollywood-type worldview, on games which enter the same mainstream as movies. When the budgets and risks get into the same range, only the same safe bets in displayed morals and ideas can be played and thus culture might just as well go down the same shallow drain. I’m afraid that as long as profits are on the line, morality will always remain black and white and cuddle the theists who wish to claim the moral high ground. After all, in aggregate, they have the most money don’t they?

More Antichristianity: Crimes of Atheism | Responding to The State: Has the ‘new atheism’ failed? | No, son, there’s no bogeyman in the closet, just an atheist

Find the best blogposts in the Nexus

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:30:00 +0000

I've added the Atheist Nexus full blog RSS to AideRSS. This will allow you to see the best posts that are blogged within the A|N blog system. You can also see at one go the most popular ones.

(Sorry, the blog eats the script so I can't put them here. Visit the link above)

I've already done this a few weeks ago but didn't mention it because the system was failing. It has since been solved (somewhat) so now I'm letting the rest of you know.

You can easily subscribe to either the full feed, or one of less trafficed ones

How does this work, I've blogged about this shortly here but basically AideRSS counts the number of times each post was voted up, commented, seen and discussed and gives it a rating. This is a nice representation of how popular that post is and thus we can filter out the rest in order to save some time.

Cheers!

Love

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:51:21 +0000

Finally I can "love" tracks from my profile page. If there was one thing that really irked me with the previous setup it was that I just could not mark songs as loved unless I was listening to them on the last.fm radio or I wen to my Facebook profile and marked them from there.

It seriously prevented me from marking songs as loved a lot.

In an unrelated note, I would really like an RSS feed of last.fm's recent activity so that I can use it in my lifestream but apparently that's not possible (even though friendfeed can apparently do it somehow. API?)

On an even more unrelated note. While the old forum search sucked, It now seems that there is not search function at all.

Pharyngulean Minions

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:30:00 +0000

They're here and they're flooding the Nexus! :P

Jeebus! 300 members in like what? 4 hours?

I mean, look at this, they've got the newest group and it's already heavily populated.

Help perform a religious coup

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:15:14 +0000

Please help digg up the story and if you have a few moments to spare, vote up the atheist blogs in the "Best Religion Blog" Category.

Get some Satisfaction

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:35:46 +0000

So after discussions with Brother Richard and general mucking around, we've finally setup the official support channel for the Atheist Nexus. This is going to be dealt over at Get Satisfaction(GSFN) and we're already working on making it more integrated into the site.

You might have noticed the new "Member-Powered Support" widget on the left. I won't explain again the benefits but needless to say it will make support and suggestions so much easier.

So if you have something to propose, a question to ask, a problem to solve or just want to open a general discussion and you hate the forums here, head over there and post. I guarantee fast responses :)

Visualized Last.fm

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:15:51 +0000

Yay, thanks to C26000 I now have my own personal stats visualization thingy ;)

I am guessing that the colours are calculated based on the tags the song has, so the more different the tags, the more different the colours.

In my case, it seems to be separated into three distinct periods.

1. When I started using last.fm (audioscrobbler back then) you can see that I was listening to mainly the same kind of music and thus the whole things is basically one colour. That didn't really change much until I moved to the UK and phase 2 began

2. In phase 2, I pretty much stopped scrobbling most of my music due to lack of computer time and later due to lack of cumputer. I did listen to a lot of Mago de Oz for a period though ;)
Eventually I stopped tottaly for 2 months which created that "pinched" effect you see in the middle. Then phase 3 strarted after I moved to Deutschland

3. Here my taste started to vary a bit. You can see where a friend introduced me to Ska-P and later on I found Freak Kitchen and all the German Medieval bands which started squeezing all the metal away. However the red core remains ;)

Audiosurf

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:05:01 +0000

So I've recently discovered this little game that seems very interesting. I've downloaded the public beta and played with it a while and I must say that releasing it to the public like that must have been the best thing they did for promotion.

The game plays very interestingly and has various levels of difficulty to keep you occupied. I personally didn't try the very difficult levels but stayed in the medium and even then didn't manage to catch the max. Still with just one hour of play I didn't expect much

It uses some algorithm to calculate your level setup before you start by analyzing the song and thus give you an appropriate ride. Unfortunately, as with most of these kinds of algorithms, it's not really tuned to work well with metal songs as it expects electronic music. Hmmmm, now that I think about it, perhaps I should have been playing some Machinae Supremacy instead of Saltatio Mortis :-/

An annoying thing is that it does not currently read tags but rather just looks at the filename. Since my filenames include artist, album, track nr and name,this made it impossible to select some songs from some albums as the select window is non expandable and the font is huge. So before you use it, I suggest you create an extra folder and copy your songs to it so that you can just play one after the other.

It's a pity it doesn't run under linux however as I would totally buy it. Currently I am not certain if I will as it's quite a hindrance to dual boot just to play it and I'd rather work on Wesnoth

I've also scraped my old playlist in order to make a new one that will probably, hopefully be good with it. Let's see. If you however have some songs (you think I would like) to propose, be my guests.

UPDATE: You should use a tag to mark good songs to ride. I personally use audiosurf

Why the recording industry is so out of touch

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:27:45 +0000

Basically, the stink comes from the head...as always

Just read this article..

Wow, just wow (and I don't mean Blizzard's)

Manowar Resurgence

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:16:09 +0000

Fri 6 Jul – Magic Circle Music Festival

I wrote a blogpost here about it.

_{Manowar|Gamma Ray|Majesty|Stormwarrior|Holy Hell}

Ambush Awakening

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:20:22 +0000

I've just recently discovered this great project called NEU World Order that manages to marry music and sociopolitical messages in a wonderful package of information.

It is true that most people are too bored to try and listen, read or see anything outside their very limited interests and that is why they let themselves be stepped on. They will only go and see something controversial because it's popular (or in another sense, ad-forced on them) like Michael Moore's films; try to have a discussion with them about such a subject and they will immediately get defensive, bored or both.

It is a curse of our time that people spend so much time at work that when they return they do not want to bother themselves with learning. They are happy to watch TV or play video games, which is exactly what the powers that be would like you to do.

That is why this project seems so promising imho, the music is quite relaxed and smoothing but what you hear, even when you're not paying attention, is really powerful. You don't have to waste you active time but you can listen to it while working, reading or playing.

That is why I propose people start aggressively tagging this artist. That way when people play it on the last.fm gloval tag radio, it will pop up. My initial idea is to tag it as chill out but if you have another opinion I'd love to hear it.
I truly believe that everyone should listen to these songs, at least once. But even if you do not, take the few seconds required to tag it for the greater good.

Maybe this way, some people may discover it when they do not expect it. Perhaps the message contained within will strike a chord at a few more "sleepers".

Headbanging

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 21:29:13 +0000

I always felt that Machinae Supremacy's Rogue World Asylum would be excellent in a night club and I was not wrong. last week I brought a CD to the Final Destination that contained this song and the DJ, who is fast becoming my favorite, among others played the song.

I knew I was going the be headbanging to it, but I didn't expect a few other people to do so as well. 'Twas nice and at the heavy riff point it was better :)

Among others, the DJ played my favorite epic song, Ase Katw to Dikanno Giagia but I didn't have time to listen to Ρεμπέτης Μεταλλάς but the time will come soon :).

Why not to sign up with a major label

Thu, 24 May 2007 08:37:41 +0000

Now this is a very interesting article on why signing up with a major label is a very bad choice for fledging musicians.

Along with articles like this and this, it actually makes me wonder why people still help the recording industry cartel who's main actions lately seem to be stuff like killing the online radio, lie and sue into submission.

R@W: Machinae Supremacy - Webography

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:49:26 +0000

Wow, it's been almost a year after my last R@W , I've finally settled to my new City (and country) and I was itching to write a new one for a while now.

This time I have decided to take over a still pretty obscure band, Machinae Supremacy.To make it even more interesting, I decided not to review any of their albums but rather the songs they released freely on the web before that, excluding Jets'N'Guns OST which is a normal album as well.

The musical style of Machinae is what immediately draws attention.Not only because they use the Sidstation but the general melodies give them a truly unique feel.
A blend of melody and metal with a healthy sprinkle of Geekiness is what most of their early work is about. They truly deserve the term progressive as well. Some times you might feel the song is going to move into electronic territory but the Electric Guitar is a constant reminder that their roots are fimly into rocks.

Their lyrics as is to be expected, are not about love. The main issues they take up are either rebelious (such as Follower
or Legion of Stoopid), game-related (Arcade) or just plain weird. It's not always quite easy to get the general meaning of their songs as their lyrics are not always easy to understand.

My personal preference is to their instrumental songs over their normal ones but this mostly has to do with the fact that I can't get used to the voice of the singer. It just doesn't give the passion that is needed. I've yet to listen to their later works such as Redeemer, however so this aspect may have improved.

One such amazing Instumental song that immediately drew my attention is Cryosleep. The whole melody behind it transfers a very melancholic feeling to the listener.
This should of course be chased by Winterstorm which is on a similar vein but with lyrics this time ;)

Hero has become one of my favorites as well as it starts powerfully with an interesting riff and even includes a nice solo near the end in the classic spirit of rock.

For those nostalgic of those 8bit times long past, you'll be happily surprised by Steve's Quest whose happy sid-music is certain to brings back memories

Machinae seem to like doing strange covers for songs and for a rocker, any such covers are always an improvement. Starting with the charming phrase "Support your local terrorists" Sidstyler is on of those where you get the nice melody of Freestyler with a good dose of Metal and Sid. ;)

Of course thir review would not be complete unless I mentioned the Sidology trilogy. Three instrumental songs, the second of which goes on for 12 minutes, and the last one is just a trip into memory lane with covers of songs like the Arcanoid and Bubble Bobble theme songs...in metal! Fun!

Machinae Supremacy are now one of the newer bands I follow. I tend to listen to them frequently just because of the inherent geekiness of a band like that. The fact that they mix Rock/Metal into this makes them that much better.
I heartily propose any Geek with metal tendencies to check them out asap and anyone interested in interesting progressive bands should not miss them either. With the songs of this review available for free on their webpage, you have no excuse not to check them out.

The end of Last.fm Radio?

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:06:57 +0000

This is greatly disturbing.

If this passes it means a radio station would have to pay exorbant fees just to keep broadcasting. I don't think last.fm would be able to afford this even if every registered user was a subscriber.

Now I know some of you will say that last.fm is based in London, UK, but EU countries are usually quick to copy US based regulations.

Fight to get this greedy policy stopped before it destroys everyone's experience.

EDIT: Here's a good analysis on Techdirt