a love letter to arcaea
11/27/2025
arcaea is basically the stereotypical indie vertically scrolling artcore/electronica mobile rhythm game with a story that's likely a metaphor for depression. tldr: moneygrab mobile game changes worldview.
I was first introduced back in 2024 and I remember dismissing it as "projectively transformed piano tiles"?? yeah, I was completely clueless towards rhythm games at all. I think I only started playing it in like may 2025, then I unexpectedly met in the wild two Arcaea players over the summer. I was shown completely terrifying charts where it would suddenly gain two extra lanes and become a six-finger chart, or requiring me to cross hands and arms which completely broke my brain trying to read it
Also they showed me bits and pieces of the story (just eternal core and luminous sky) which immediately captivated me further. massive spoilers:
last warning of spoilers upon clicking of this text.. please read the story for oneself if one has the chance
Hikari is exposed to shards of glass containing positive memories, slowly collecting positive memories of happiness, but this turns out to be an excess. Eventually this leads to her eventual numbness to all feeling and experience. At this point a new partner (hikari zero) is unlocked which sets your HP bar to zero if you miss a single note, representing her loss of her own conscious thought. One is then forced to effectively full-combo a song to unlock the rest of the story. how interesting.
During this time I also started playing sekai and re-fell into my long forgotten love for vocaloid songs after getting over my self-imposed view that they were "chronically online degen" in some sense?? yeah, denying yourself from having fun to appease some nonexistent societal standard is not worth it.
Arcaea was one of the first games where I could actually feel myself improving and by god was it a motivating feeling. Playing this rhythm game in some way rewired my brain to hit notes. The only other rhythm game I played before this was osu!, which is honestly more about physical ability and accuracy than this rewiring of brain, and I never really felt the same effect as quickly as when playing Arcaea, where all the notes were easily physically hittable. Then after this I started actually getting the "rhythm" part of it where playing some songs basically felt like flying with the music. Later I started intentionally spacing out and stop consciously thinking in order to hit notes and patterns "by instinct".
unfounded thought on generative AI and subliminal messaging
09/03/2025
My uncomfortablity with generative AI output is decently correlated with the "dimensionality" of the output type.
i.e. I'm mostly fine with using generative AI for things such as LaTeX generation, html formatting, etc. Using it for text generation is slightly unnerving, and for images much more so.
Am I just very susceptible to the uncanny valley effect? Or maybe is it easier to "completely understand" low-dimensional output?
Or maybe is dimensionality correlated with original thought, and the real reason AI output makes me instinctually uncomfortable is because of its lack of original thought?
As of today, many AI language models have a bias to reach a spiritual attractor state when you refeed its text output back into itself, which is decent evidence of subliminal messaging being possible through text, at least. With image generators, refeeding images is known to gradually exaggerate certain features and become gradually more yellow over time. However, low dimensionality output, there is no real way for messages and influences like this to take hold, as the reader is able to perceive all of it completely.
So maybe the best practice of "mental hygiene" when dealing with AI output is to treat any high-dimensional output as a cognitohazard and try to avoid being exposed to it excessively. Low-dimensional output should likely not have this hypothetical effect, maybe?.
using AI in conversations also ruins the proof of work inherent in human responses
struggles with a 3d printer
07/24/2025
3D printer completely destroyed its extruder by a unattended failed print causing the extruder to extrude a large glob of solid plastic on the nozzle. Even after gentle heating, removing the plastic ended up taking the thermistor out with it, so exasperatedly I decided the best thing to do was just replace the whole hot-end.
After spending a few days tuning leveling and extrusion, the printer was able to print for the first time in months. Currently, I used it to print a part for adapting a 1/4 inch standard camera thread onto a broken tripod I had. Hopefully this will somewhat improve the photos on this website, lol.
stl file for the part, if you want: https://files.catbox.moe/ur2x0e.stl
The printed part for camera attachment
