Everything got better when I became a green-haired 2D girl. I do fun and unusual things with video games and pinball.

cohost inspired me to do more. Thank you



It's important that I give credit and links to the pinball tables I'm playing.

One of the biggest sources of tension in the VPX community is, there are people who just accumulate piles of VPX tables and sell them as bundles. It makes people not want to put their hard work up for free. An important difference here is I'm not selling them, but when I'm giving viewers VPX tables to play along, I need to do better than the pack sellers with credit. Having just an author name on the screen for a few minutes isn't enough, I've been given the hint.

What's most important is links to the forums, where you can get the tables from the actual authors and give feedback on them.

Here are the VPX tables I'm going to be playing, as we cover the middle of 1995:

The backglass files were all made by Wildman. You can find links to all these tables and more on Virtual Pinball Spreadsheet.




tati
@tati

Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI - The Atlantic


arborelia
@arborelia

Douglas Hofstadter: hey I wrote this unusual, speculative book about math, art, and artificial intelligence! It's got hidden secrets, puns and a smarmy talking tortoise

Reader: oh I get it! reaches for nearest object or metaphysical concept this is intelligence!

Douglas Hofstadter: Reader what the fuck are you talking about


arborelia
@arborelia

It's an amazing book. Even though it's writing about AI from the perspective of what people thought in 1979. Especially because of that, perhaps, because 1979's idea of AI is way more interesting than 2023's idea of AI.

The phenomenon I'm referring to is real and a little frustrating when you try to talk about the book. When someone has just finished reading Godel, Escher, Bach, they are likely to orient themselves by imprinting on the next concept they come across and saying "oh that must be what intelligence is!" I was guilty of it for a while too.

The smarmy tortoise is essential. Hofstadter wrote a follow-up decades later, "I Am A Strange Loop", where he tried to just say what he meant directly instead of in cute dialogues that people could misunderstand. It's pretty dull without Tortoise.

Also -- check the 1999 introduction -- she's trans now. The French translator made Tortoise female, mostly because of the gender essentialism of the French language tbh, and Hofstadter said "wait a minute this is better"



tati
@tati

Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI - The Atlantic


arborelia
@arborelia

Douglas Hofstadter: hey I wrote this unusual, speculative book about math, art, and artificial intelligence! It's got hidden secrets, puns and a smarmy talking tortoise

Reader: oh I get it! reaches for nearest object or metaphysical concept this is intelligence!

Douglas Hofstadter: Reader what the fuck are you talking about



I removed my post about how I gave up on living in a city and going to the corner store and coffee shops and stuff (which I really liked while it was more possible)

because I wrote it as a rebug of @NoelBWrites’s amazing post which really deserves to stand on its own without me kinda changing the topic