So I was looking through the YouTube Music recommendations and turns out Billy Strings has a new album. I wouldn't call myself a Billy Strings fan, but I do occasionally find myself in a bluegrass mood and he's very good. Anyway, the album wasn't blowing me away, but then I got to a track entitled I Like Train Songs. And you know? I liked this train song.
Then, over on the blueskies, discourse in my feed turned, as it often does, to how highways suck and the 413 is a stupid idea when Esther Wheaton of local bluegrass band Onion Honeychimed in with their track They'll Add Another Lane To the 401, which is actually a (delightful, plaintive) train song.
Thus September 2 became Train Song Day, complete with a Mastodon thread and YouTube Music playlist. (I got a little distracted by work and local hurricanes and a willow tree on my roof, so I didn't quite get this to the level of a Christmas Mixtape, tho I was tempted).
I am happy with how the playlist turned out. The player above will play through it, even though YouTube doesn't do a good job of embedding YouTube Music. It goes to some interesting places, straying quite a ways from bluegrass, but I feel it holds together pretty well. Give it a try.
I'm pretty sure I heard about this from a video talking about its "innovative" drift mechanic. Which, honestly, is just a button that lets Newtonian physics work properly when you hold a button. I rolled my eyes a little. But it's actually pretty fun once you get used to it.
I really like space shooters, but getting the difficulty curve and flying mechanics right for a fun experience and not just incredibly frustrating. Or boring. It seems to be a rare thing.
To its credit, I managed to play though Chorus and have a fun time with it. It's a little buggy, and feels a bit unfinished, like scope was aggressively cut to actually ship the thing. Like I think they meant to have a pretty exhaustive ship customization and upgrade system, but what ended up in the game is, yeah, you can buy a few guns and marginal stat upgrades, but I didn't actually engage with that much. If I got a better gun from a mission, I installed it. Most of what I got just sat in inventory. The money I got from missions went to maxing out my armour and shields and once that was done, I had no use for it.
The story is... I dunno, Star Wars but make it grimdark and vaguely Lovecraftian. But you get to go around helping people by being the awesomest space pilot. I can't complain.
Oh, but I can complain that absolutely none of the environments you're flying around in feel anything like space. I guess navigating an empty void isn't terribly stimulating, but it's all rocks hovering completely stationary with no forces acting on them whatsoever. If it was just this game, I'd maybe give it a pass, but it seems like nobody is willing to let space be space anymore. It has to be all clouds and rocks and lightning and nebulae. It bugs me most in, say, modern Star Trek, which should know better. Space is cool. Let space be space. Does it fundamentally change how space combat works when I'm not constantly trying to avoid bumping into rocks? Yes. Could you still make it fun? I... think so...
Anyway, this was a fun game and I enjoyed it. If you want a single player space shooter, I think it's worth your time, even with all the caveats above.
I was first introduced to Hank Green via The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an utterly delightful artifact of the pre-terrible Internet that I absolutely fell in love with at the time. (I have a bit of a fondness for Pride and Prejudice for reasons that should be obvious if you think about it).
At the time I was definitely not into vloggers or, in general, people talking directly to camera who made up for not being very good at talking to camera with tonnes of quick edits. That changed, tho, as we entered The Quarantine Years and I got a bit more desperate for human connection, however artificial.
(And, of course, as anyone would after doing it every week for almost 20 years, he's a lot better at talking to camera these days).
I was entirely aware that Hank was using LLMs to program those games. I'm sure he said as much. And, I mean, I love making things with code. Part of what I see as the promise of LLMs is they make programming—that is, making the computer do things for you—accessible to non-programmers. That's kind of great. Much as I worry about de-skilling and the de-valuing of my profession, I've tried to teach people how to program. I'm not a great teacher, but programming is an incredibly difficult skill to teach. I think everybody should be able to make their computers do the things they want them to do. My frustration with the computer industry in the last decade or two is that that seems to have no value to people selling—or maybe even buying—computers. And maybe normal people realizing that they can actually write software (or, okay, have software written for them by a machine), will convince them that being able to write software for your own computer ought to be a right, not a privilege granted to them by the gods of Apple or Microsoft.
But I digress.
Anyway, people got mad at Hank because he was using LLMs. Actually the thing that tipped them off, I guess, was an LLM-generated infographic. Which, yeah, wasn't great. And I guess he actually said, out loud, "I appreciate the pushback" in an AHA episode entitled "Does Hank Green Shave His Butt". This is something popular LLMs will say to you if you start arguing with them. (Don't argue with an LLM. There's no point. You're just training it to give you wrong answers).
I'm quite inclined to give Hank grace. I don't want to watch videos generated by LLMs. I don't think Hank's videos are generated by LLMs. But, like he says, he got sucked into LLMs, which I think is a real danger for people.
Hank is a deeply fascinating person, which, I think, is why I keep being attracted to the stuff he makes. But he's not a faultless superhuman or anything. He also doesn't need me defending him or anything. He'll be okay.
And he's been on the Internet for a long time. He knows how this goes. He spent time away from the Internet. He's back a bit now, following his own rules. Right after the whole thing went down I happened to listen to this January episode of Dear Hank and John talking about that time 12 years ago John Green made people on Tumblr angry at him. Here, Hank gives John the advice he's following now. And also talks about his own struggles with this sort of Internet nonsense. And, in other episodes of that podcast, he frequently talks about his struggles with needing to do so much, and his brother chides him for doing too much. And LLMs. But in a kind, supportive way.
I think if you want to take anything from this, it's maybe the value of having a support network to navigate life's turmoils. He'll be okay.
