lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​


i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi


I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory


they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"



Bovigender (click flag for more info!)
bovigender pride flag, by @arina-artemis (click for more info)



xkeeper
@xkeeper

i'm on youtube watching a fascinating video about yars revenge by @rgmechex. it's great, highly recommended.

after looking at the comment from HSW himself (the game's developer), this video in the recommended list catches my eye:

that thumbnail looks kinda familiar! in fact it looks rather suspiciously like our wiki. so i click on the video and, blah blah blah; the first minute is the usual personal anecdotes and introductions. after that minute, it's finally time for the content.

this is a video about super mario world, and i would assume someone would probably open with one of the more interesting aspects of it, like, you know, the cage, or one of the myriad overworld sprites, or the various unused levels. you know, interesting things!

this one... opens with this. (copied from youtube's transcripts with light editing)


for the beginnings let's start with some general stuff ... Super Mario World contains two different translucent level modes with one for horizontal layer 1 background levels and another for horizontal layer 1 and 2 ... both of the modes are fully functional and their positions at the end of the mode list most likely meant that they were shoved into the code somewhat later into the game's development, and the levels that utilize the transparency look like this

look at what happens to be the first non-subpage part of the tcrf article:

✱sigh✱. it turns out that we were responsible for the awkward "why this first?" decision all along.

the worst part is that i was just about done writing this post (because i cannot bear to keep watching this video, it hurts) and i noticed youtube had helpfully added "chapters" to the video.

106,443 views


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @xkeeper's post:

i'm very used to it (this is not the first nor second nor probably tenth person who makes videos basically reading the wiki) and they do link to it in the comments, just. it's weird. it's weird seeing this just being read near verbatim

this is always how it is. the people who actually make shit sit around worrying that we're not trying hard enough, while, the people filling the chum bucket are doing things so brazen you can hardly imagine anyone can sit through it.

the tcrf article reasonably assumes you're coming at this from some nesdev background, and is also a reference rather than an article, so is not meant to be read in order. as a result the video is gibberish; what's a "translucent level mode"? it's never explained, probably because the guy who made the video hadn't parsed any of these words, he just made the sounds with his mouth, pasted in the nearby images and moved on.

you can always detect plagiarism from across the room because the people who do it can't write at all (hence why they're plagiarizing) and thus lack the critical ability to recognize when a chunk of text they've swiped needs to be expanded on to give the audience context. even incredibly dense technical shit like watch for rolling rocks in .5x a presses opens with some attempt to get the audience into the right headspace. this doesn't, because the guy doesn't have the faintest idea what he's talking about, and probably doesn't care.

and of course he'll continue to do it because seemingly, nobody notices the utter apathy. i don't get it. in five seconds i can tell he's reading someone else's words without comprehending them. and yet, 100K views in two weeks and hundreds of accolades - that's how well my stuff performs on a good week. so i guess the value of my entire career, where i release two videos a month at most and spend weeks agonizing over each one to make sure it's as good as I can make it, is on par with "reading wiki pages verbatim even if the result is word salad."

love living in the era of the Entertainment Machine. the crank does not stop turning; the Content Faucet never runs dry.

thats why i stopped, but im sufferin the consequences of not making regular content now. there's a terrible balance somewhere in the middle all of us are looking for but hasn't existed on youtube since like 2013

but also. where else would we post stuff? where else would people see it? how else can one best get eyes on their previous work then by making new work where it rests?

augh. it's such a fuckin trap.

it is, but... the thing we have to remember is that we aren't truly in competition with these people. like. i don't think the fact that people churn out garbage like this to the tune of thousands of videos a minute has affected me at all. if I was producing stuff more frequently I think I'd be well on my way to a half million subscribers. and i'm PRETTY sure a lot of those viewers also watch incredibly shitty, unoriginal sludge, but... that's just not my problem. they still appreciate what i make on its merits, and I can tell from the content of my comments that they're listening and comprehending. it's weird to have to operate in the vicinity of this shit. it's like running a butcher shop next door to the soylent factory, but it's amazing how effective ignoring the smell can be.

the tcrf article reasonably assumes you're coming at this from some nesdev background, and is also a reference rather than an article, so is not meant to be read in order. as a result the video is gibberish; what's a "translucent level mode"? it's never explained, probably because the guy who made the video hadn't parsed any of these words, he just made the sounds with his mouth, pasted in the nearby images and moved on.

i did not realize this until you mentioned it; that there is zero context for these statements, especially as an opener. to me it doesn't stand out because, as someone who's gotten up to my eyeballs in lunar magic, i know what all those words mean. i've actually made levels using those level modes.

but then thinking about it, a few days ago i was streaming super mario advance 2, the super mario world port. and i had talked about that during one of the game's water levels, that i really wish they'd used the transparent level modes more, and how there were some that used unusual movement patterns for the game's layer 2 segments (during one of the yellow-rock segments that sink into lava)

i didn't really think about this until now. wild

man i really wanna start writing my own videos. i've done one or two already, i just need to fuckin do em. new years resolution

edit: you can see i noticed it was strange, but for a different reason! i figured they would have gone for something exciting but i completely missed that the concept of level modes is just dropped on the viewer with zero explanation or context

Honestly, this is a reason I'm sad that the Hbomberguy video has turned into people bashing this one specific guy. Because this kind of sloppy video that's just plagiarizing other content and sourcing it poorly or not at all is... everywhere? And it doesn't seem like any of the backlash is falling on those people.

i'll be real, until i watched that video i didn't even really think of it as wrong, per se. like, that's just how everything is. that's the norm. and if "reading off a website and crediting it in the description" is normal, who am i to judge?

it took someone saying it to really realize that, no, it is not fine

the thing that throws me completely for a loop is how can anyone not tell this is happening? like. tell me if i'm off base here, but even if you hadn't known specifically where this text was from, didn't the guy's tone and diction instantly tell you "he is reading someone else's words without comprehending them"? am i the weird one, does everyone else not have this sense?

I first realized this is a thing that happens all the god damn time when I was watching Cybershell made like his third video about cut content from the Sonic games and went "If you all really want to watch a video of me reading TCRF who am I to complain"

At least he hangs a lampshade on it.

i reckon half of all cut content videos on youtube are just some jackoff reading tcrf into the mic. frankly even when they are super upfront about getting all their info from tcrf its... still... a waste of my time?? i know about websites. i know where to get them. do they not think that i know that

the thing that's fucked about this is just that there's a completely valid and reasonable cases for doing this openly and deliberately and in good faith, and a video version of someone else's article can be of value. people are dyslexic, people are better auditory than visual learners, people don't know much about programming and could use a visual, animated explanation - all valid reasons to do this! and it happens, but it never looks anything like this because it's incredibly hard for anyone who can write at all to just read someone else's words without changing anything. there is inevitably that itch to add something of your own, some kind of editorial value, which negates the value of stealing the verbatim text to begin with!

it's why you have a big bright line between plagiarism and original content: if you're a writer, then the writing isn't the hard part, it's the conceptualizing. there's no point stealing someone else's words because you were inevitably going to spend more time and effort figuring out what you have to say on the subject than in actually turning it into words anyway.

yeah. on the bright side, telling apart a schmuck who is reading off a script they didnt write like its a school project, and a pannenkoek type of guy who did all the research himself, is usually pretty easy.

(oh wow i just scrolled up and you literally said the same thing in another comment even using pannen as an example LMFAO. sorry to psychically plagiarize you to you)

(also, honestly, as much as i enjoy when i DO come across a charming narrated video on wikipedia, the only wiki that ever has those, i think that baked video is a terrible format for wiki information. this static thing on the page is going to be out of date and uneditable quickly. there would need to be some kind of like, flash or hypercard type thing embedded that could turn editable markup into a presentation... but this is all beside the point, lol)