Fracturing The Fractal

Who wants to read another post about AI, then? Always a popular subject, I know. But I think we may be past the point where putting our fingers in our our collective ears and singing "La! La! La! not listening!" is going to work.

Did anyone ever actually do that, by the way? It seems like one of those things you grew up knowing other people did, somehow, rather than anything you ever would have done yourself. 

There's a lot like that in the book Mrs Bhagpuss and I are collectively and separately reading Homework by Geoff Dyer. Mrs Bhagpuss got it for Christmas, or maybe it was her birthday, and it's been the bathroom book for a while.

Does everyone have a bathroom book? I first came across the concept back in the 'eighties, when I stayed at a friend's place and saw they had a bookshelf over the cistern. It was all the same book, too. Not literally the same book. Now that would be weird. No, I mean a series of books. I can't remember what the series was except that it was a comic strip. Peanuts maybe?

No, it definitely wasn't Peanuts. I did  have another friend back then... he's dead now, been dead a while... who was, I won't say obsessed with the Peanuts strip but he sure did like it. But then everyone liked Peanuts in those days.

Peanuts is back in fashion now. Did you know that? It goes up and down, somehow. The high point was back in the 'eighties or 'nineties, when there was even a shop in town that sold nothing but Peanuts products. Then it kind of dropped out of the cultural conversation for a while but now it's back. I have no idea why. These things happen.

Oh, that brings me back to what I was saying about the Geoff Dyer book. So, Geoff is exactly the same age as me, give or take a few months, and he grew up within less than an hour's drive of where I grew up. His book is a memoir about that but since he's a... wait, what is he now? 

We were talking about that, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, back when we both started reading the book. I knew his name very well from work but I couldn't exactly put my finger on what he was best known for. With most writers it's easy to go "Oh, him? Yeah, he writes historical crime novels set in the Reformation" or "I know her. She's the woman who writes all those romantasy books with the dragons..."

Authors generally stay in their lanes or they do if they want to have a long-running career. Same as musicians, which is why that Spinal Tap line about "Hope you like our new direction" lands so hard. Nobody ever does.

Some writers, though? Their lane is not being in a lane. The emperor of all of them is Bill Bryson. Bill is real nuisance. People come into the shop all the time and ask "Where are your Bill Brysons?" and the answer is "Depends what he's writing about".  Not the answer anyone wants to hear.

Geoff Dyer is like that, I think. He's a novelist, an essayist, an editor, a critic and I guess he's best described as a cultural commentator. And now he's a memoirist, too.

Except his memories don't exactly tally with mine. Or Mrs Bhagpuss's. She's a couple of years younger and grew up a couple of hundred miles further East but she's still solidly in the same growing-up space as Geoff and me. And both she and I recognize all the experiences Geoff relates but we don't always relate to the experiences. Or not the way he does.

It's a thing about the culture, isn't it? Pop culture, I mean, specifically. I nearly said it's the thing about it. It's fractal. 

Now, see, there's a thing. Another thing. Do I mean fractal? Is it the right word? Do I really know what it means and if I do or if I don't, is it appropriate to the context?

I'm not sure it matters. What does matter is that it's an example of itself. Hey! Recursion again! Recursion is really my jam at the moment. Oh boy, another example.

So, fractal was a moment in the nineties. We sold a lot of books on the back of it and some of us got at least a vague idea what lay behind the pretty pictures and weird optical effects, which led to the word slipping into the language as a vague, hand-wavey metaphor. Kind of but not exactly like I said "jam" there, without really having grown up saying it or having the automatic cultural appreciation of its nuances you get from encountering something while your synapses are still settling in. 

As time goes on, these things get layered in like laminate. It's all surface but add enough surface and you have depth.

Like Peanuts. Peanuts goes back to the 1950s, to a Charles Schulz strip called Li'l Folks. Actually, the 1940s. I just looked it up. It ran from 1947 to 1950. Li'l Folks isn't Peanuts, though. It just looks like it and sounds like it. And was written and drawn by the same person. 

But Li'l Folks is not in the culture in the way Peanuts is. I know it because I've been a comics fan for almost as long as I've been alive. You probably know it too because chances are you came to this blog, directly or indirectly, because it is or at least was a gaming blog and comics is to gaming as jazz is to blues.

Is that fair? I feel like that's an order of magnitude too close. Or maybe the whole analogy doesn't work. This is why editors exist. Cut me a break. I'm wearing a lot of hats, here.

Peanuts is one of those cultural artifacts that transcends both taste and preference. If you lived in a certain place at a certain time you will know who Snoopy is. You may not care but you will know. This is what reading Geoff Dyer's Homework is like. 

It's filled with anecdotes and stories that reference all the same things both I and Mrs Bhagpuss grew up with but the importance Geoff places on them and the conclusions he draws from his experiences with them frequently don't tally with ours. And ours don't always tally with each other, either, although they do come closer more often, which I suppose goes some way towards explaining why we've been able to stand each other for over thirty years.

And understand each other, too. Sharing a cultural identity does lead to a degree of understanding even if it's often as confusing as it is comforting. All experiences are unique as the cliche goes, if I didn't just make that up.

So, yes, pop culture is fractal. I was right all along! Maybe.

AI, though.. 

Ah! Look! We're back to AI. Lulled you into thinking I'd forgotten, did I? Well, I said at the top that was where this was going, although I'd almost forgotten, myself.

Here's what I was thinking. You know the AI bubble that was going to burst? Is it, though? It seems to be taking it's time to pop, doesn't it? And meanwhile new AI stories keep cropping up. Gaming stories, I mean. (Here's the famous writer, staying in his lane.)

Like Roblox (Ptuiii!) and its "agentic AI  tools" or the $50m fund to "invest in AI-driven games". AI is going to "save the games industry." Or at least the part that isn't swearing on a stack of Bibles that it's never going to use AI at all...

I don't have any links to the people saying that. They tend not to be very interesting. People fervently advocating for the maintenance of the status quo rarely are.

A lot more interesting are the people willing to engage not just with the future but the immanent present, even if I'm not sure Infinity Nikki is the best example of the ineluctable importance of the human soul.

I'd be happy to engage if someone would hand me the controls. Here's what I'd like AI to do for my gaming. I'd like it to let me prompt for a game featuring my characters, the same ones I've spent the last year recovering from the dead spaces of the past and turning into songs. I'd like to see them walking around, interacting with each other and with me. And no-one else.

I wouldn't want to share them. They wouldn't become part of the shifting, drifting cultural backdrop, not even to the degree this post you're reading has. And congratulations if you are still reading. You have some stamina!

AI has the potential to create hyper-local cultural bubbles. It's nothing new. The Brontes were doing it on a family scale with Glass Town two centuries ago. Li'l Folks was doing it, an order of magnitude larger, for the people of  St. Paul just after the war. (You probably need to be the same age as Geoff Dyer and me not to need to add a qualifier to "the war" there...)

My wished-for bubble would be the smallest of them all. I'd be the only one in it. Me and my imaginary friends.

I've always had a thing for imaginary friends but they're had to sustain without psychosis or psychedelics once you get past seven or so. Paper and pen has been the best way for me but it is, frankly, a lot of work. Uplifting, elevating, wonderful work but work all the same.

Wouldn't you like to have a faithful amanuensis to turn all that creativity into a playground designed and built just for you? I imagine I would but maybe that's just my imagination. The reality might not taste as sweet.

If it did or if it didn't, though, I'd be the only one tasting it. 

And where does the culture go, if everyone's creating their own?  

 

AI used in this post

The three images. Obviously. Although none of them is what you'd call original AI. I fucked around with all of them in paint.net. I think messing up AI images with filters and effects is both fun and aesthetically pleasing. Artistically valid is another question.

The thing is (I do say that a lot, don't I? It's like a nervous tic.) it's quite hard to get useable images out of non-visual prompts. Go figure! And I tend mostly to use AI for illustrations only when I don't have obvious visuals to work with. Otherwise I'd use a screenshot or take a photograph.

For this post, I did the old "pull out a sentence and see what the AI comes up with" routine. I think it did a very good job with the one I used for the header image. That was with the very catchily-named Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. Who's in charge of these naming conventions? Clearly not the Marketing Department. The prompt was the entire third paragraph of the post, which I'm not going to repeat here. Just scroll up if you're that interested. I added the style instruction "1950s comic strip. Sunday color page."As for the settings, honestly these days I'm past caring. I don't even look at them so whatever the default was.

The next image is by Qwen Image SD from the prompt "fractal was a moment in the nineties. We sold a lot of books on the back of it and some of us got at least a vague idea what lay behind the pretty pictures and weird optical effects". No style instruction.

The final picture is a hybrid created by both the previous models. I had Qwen Image SD make something from the prompt "So, yes, pop culture is fractal. I was right all along! Maybe." with no style instruction and then I used that image a starter for Flux blah blah blah, only using the cut-down prompt "pop culture is fractal" and the style instruction "line drawing, ink wash, color."

Then, as I said, I really messed them all up. If you think they look ugly now, you should have seen them before!

Also, is it really obvious I enjoy doing these "AI used..." postscripts as much as or maybe more than doing the posts themselves? I can see why all those actors and directors love doing the commentaries on the special editions of the DVDs...