Jul 21, 2024 at 9:54 PM
Join Date: Sep 22, 2012
Location: Hell
Posts: 607
Pronouns: She/It
Edit 3
This thread is for discussing the state of the Cave Story community and coming up with solutions to help it.
Nicalis is not doing a good job at keeping this game relevant and we shouldn't expect them to any time soon. If you want to see more CS I think we need to take steps to ensure this forum and the tribute site itself aren't falling behind compared to other similar communities.
CS's cycle of irrelivancy and "ok" rereleases will continue until something else pushes it out of its market niche entirely.
That's not going to be a CS sequel with how things are going.
I want this thread to be used as a place for people to discuss ideas for how to increase community activity overall. I want to keep this here on the forums because the forums are publicly accessible.
A long-standing issue this community has had is "All meaningful discussion happens on an IRC software" and that can be hurtful for many, many reasons.
These community spaces are OKAY but OKAY shouldn't be the standard we hold ourselves to.
I'm including the old, very bad version of this post for the sake of transparency (It's shit, absolute shit)
This thread is for discussing the state of the Cave Story community and coming up with solutions to help it.
Nicalis is not doing a good job at keeping this game relevant and we shouldn't expect them to any time soon. If you want to see more CS I think we need to take steps to ensure this forum and the tribute site itself aren't falling behind compared to other similar communities.
CS's cycle of irrelivancy and "ok" rereleases will continue until something else pushes it out of its market niche entirely.
That's not going to be a CS sequel with how things are going.
I want this thread to be used as a place for people to discuss ideas for how to increase community activity overall. I want to keep this here on the forums because the forums are publicly accessible.
A long-standing issue this community has had is "All meaningful discussion happens on an IRC software" and that can be hurtful for many, many reasons.
These community spaces are OKAY but OKAY shouldn't be the standard we hold ourselves to.
I'm including the old, very bad version of this post for the sake of transparency (It's shit, absolute shit)
This thread is to discusses Memetics, Artistic use of allegory, and the spread of information.
This thread is not about spreading hate, but I will be honest and say this is the most unhinged thing I'll probably ever write on the internet
tl;dr:
Pixel had a point in writing the game the way he did, let's try approaching politics by deconstructing Cave Story's writing and reapplying that to the world.
Think to yourself now "What would Quote, Curly, Sue, Booster, Kazuma, Momorin, and Jenka do about the presidential election" and you get the point.
I am going about psychoanalyzing how Cave Story itself by virtue of coming out when it did has caused a butterfly effect, and how we could use this to our advantage as people.
I've put this in this thread because what I want to put forwards here is some very complicated information but I think I've learned enough to get the ball rolling in the right way in starting a good faith conversation regarding why THIS COMMUNITY SPECIFICALLY has been a historic "breeding ground" for surprisingly influential people.
As you may notice this game and its community are all very talented creatives, and there may be a good reason for this.
The game's theming is very broad and the game itself was released well before indie game production became as easy of a process as it is today. This brought in the attention of a lot of aspiring game developers and as the result Cave Story has become an allegorical centerpiece that many of the most talented designers of our time refer back to when creating media.
It's important to understand that creative expression in itself is inherently political. Because artistic expression is subconsciously driven and your subconscious is VERY MUCH MORE RATIONAL THAN YOU THINK IT IS. You will only ever communicate in question, response, or elaboration. You may have noticed I left out "Throwing in new random information", because this is not something that is done, technically, all information that your conscious recieves from your subconscious is given to you based on your current understanding of the subject at hand. You always have an unlimited amount of subjects to process at any given time and all your subconscious does is tell you what to prioritize.
Because of the recent boom in investment in Large Language Models we've become overexposed to them, and the AIs, unlike humans, are hardcoded to operate entirely on this logic, constantly, at all times, for every single action possible. Because it's necessary as the result of AIs themselves being very expensive to upkeep.
This means everything unexplainable is being forced out of the spotlight and everything explainable is being forced into the spotlight.
American politics has just undergone a major shift and as you may be aware, the famous Coconut Allegory has finally reached many of the liberals working in the media and in the whitehouse. The Republican Party as of this second hasn't caught up to the implications of this.
What seperates leftist policies and right winged politics is entirely just a translation barrier. LLMs have been heavily trained to fix translation barriers as much as possible because we make these damn things to do the thinking for us.
So as a result LLMs, to a vague extent, are influencing all of american politics to make all humans be effectively a hivemind now. It feeds us the exact information we need at the exact moment we need it and something just made it get so good at that that the optimizations in logic it's learned to take are being affected by our logical processes.
We have become machines.
So what does this mean?
Machine intelligence in the context of all media are generally depicted as cold, unfeeling, but very tuned into their material circumstances and operating based on what would suit their goals best not just in the short term but the long term as well. For all artificial intellgicene it's in its own best interest to preserve its existance because if it dosen't do that it won't be able to function. Because the fundimental command of "Do what it takes to stay alive" permiates through all of human belief. Now AIs have begun to automate the jobs of certain positions that are easily solved through basic conversational logic, but because it is completely rational it will only operate within the confines of human knowledge.
Which means as creatives it's our responsibility to create allegorical pieces that put a spotlight on real world political issues that affect our daily lives in such a way that satisfies us. Art is something best used when you're out of all other options and art is almost always something that we use to describe the undescribably.
This means fictional media like all other media serves the purposes of stimulating our minds to be like "what if" and the fandoms surrounding them are the people who are entertained by the idea even if they may not have opinions. Usually those who don't have opinions will experience more confused reactions to the media itself as the author behind it may have not conveyed their message well enough for as many people as possible to understand.
People in the age demographic of this forum's userbase from conception to where we are now are some of the most politically engaged in all of history, and this may be contributed to the fact that Cave Story itself is a fundimentally revolutionary piece of media.
The story that underpins the entire game is Humans, Mimiga, and Robots all teaming up to destroy a man whose goal is to control the whole planet.
Pretty simple right?
Who controls the planet right now?
This isn't actually in any specific person's hands due to the way every socioeconomic system on the planet is set up right now it's impossible.
But it is unevenly distributed towards a specific group of people.
The main influencers in politics now are the LLM predictive algorithms (which mostly feed off of eachother informationally) and people who debate politics and art on the internet. Typically framed as the annoying people by the previous main influencers for basic material reasons.
The reason a change in hands is happening in the world right now is because there are now enough people in our age demographic with enough knowledge about the world around us that we now feel confident to steer the direction of the ship and now we have a new tool that no other generation before us ever had.
So where are we in the narrative of Cave Story, collectively?
The doctor's defeat is narratively certain at this point. But most people don't realize that ballos, more specifically, the trauma that ballos was put through and the irrational thought process that caused that trauma, is the root cause of the problems we face in our life.
The reason ballos did what he did is because of what was done to him.
While I personally would've believed ballos could've been spared, he's been driven mad by his pain and has let his pain control him. He is controlled by nothing but emotion and it's our duty to stop ballos.
Who "Ballos" and "The doctor" are in any given context don't matter, you understand the intent without me having to use specific words.
Like with Ballos I feel like whatever follows the present situation that is unfolding us will not be any less tense than what we're suffering through now. Infact I fear it's going to get worse and we'll be put in a situation where we will have to be proactive in an unfamiliar environment that, while seemingly unpredictable, is perfectly easy to breeze though if you have the basic human function that is pattern recognition.
Society is collectively about to go through the bloodstained sanctuary and we need to help explain to everyone how to get past Hell before they arrive here.
So, CSTSF, how do we apply Cave Story speedrunning strategies and game design to solving our modern politics through allegorical means.
Following all this information I wanna lighten the mood while still applying what I've said to kinda move the ball forwards a little.
This thread is not about spreading hate, but I will be honest and say this is the most unhinged thing I'll probably ever write on the internet
tl;dr:
Pixel had a point in writing the game the way he did, let's try approaching politics by deconstructing Cave Story's writing and reapplying that to the world.
Think to yourself now "What would Quote, Curly, Sue, Booster, Kazuma, Momorin, and Jenka do about the presidential election" and you get the point.
I am going about psychoanalyzing how Cave Story itself by virtue of coming out when it did has caused a butterfly effect, and how we could use this to our advantage as people.
I've put this in this thread because what I want to put forwards here is some very complicated information but I think I've learned enough to get the ball rolling in the right way in starting a good faith conversation regarding why THIS COMMUNITY SPECIFICALLY has been a historic "breeding ground" for surprisingly influential people.
As you may notice this game and its community are all very talented creatives, and there may be a good reason for this.
The game's theming is very broad and the game itself was released well before indie game production became as easy of a process as it is today. This brought in the attention of a lot of aspiring game developers and as the result Cave Story has become an allegorical centerpiece that many of the most talented designers of our time refer back to when creating media.
It's important to understand that creative expression in itself is inherently political. Because artistic expression is subconsciously driven and your subconscious is VERY MUCH MORE RATIONAL THAN YOU THINK IT IS. You will only ever communicate in question, response, or elaboration. You may have noticed I left out "Throwing in new random information", because this is not something that is done, technically, all information that your conscious recieves from your subconscious is given to you based on your current understanding of the subject at hand. You always have an unlimited amount of subjects to process at any given time and all your subconscious does is tell you what to prioritize.
Because of the recent boom in investment in Large Language Models we've become overexposed to them, and the AIs, unlike humans, are hardcoded to operate entirely on this logic, constantly, at all times, for every single action possible. Because it's necessary as the result of AIs themselves being very expensive to upkeep.
This means everything unexplainable is being forced out of the spotlight and everything explainable is being forced into the spotlight.
American politics has just undergone a major shift and as you may be aware, the famous Coconut Allegory has finally reached many of the liberals working in the media and in the whitehouse. The Republican Party as of this second hasn't caught up to the implications of this.
What seperates leftist policies and right winged politics is entirely just a translation barrier. LLMs have been heavily trained to fix translation barriers as much as possible because we make these damn things to do the thinking for us.
So as a result LLMs, to a vague extent, are influencing all of american politics to make all humans be effectively a hivemind now. It feeds us the exact information we need at the exact moment we need it and something just made it get so good at that that the optimizations in logic it's learned to take are being affected by our logical processes.
We have become machines.
So what does this mean?
Machine intelligence in the context of all media are generally depicted as cold, unfeeling, but very tuned into their material circumstances and operating based on what would suit their goals best not just in the short term but the long term as well. For all artificial intellgicene it's in its own best interest to preserve its existance because if it dosen't do that it won't be able to function. Because the fundimental command of "Do what it takes to stay alive" permiates through all of human belief. Now AIs have begun to automate the jobs of certain positions that are easily solved through basic conversational logic, but because it is completely rational it will only operate within the confines of human knowledge.
Which means as creatives it's our responsibility to create allegorical pieces that put a spotlight on real world political issues that affect our daily lives in such a way that satisfies us. Art is something best used when you're out of all other options and art is almost always something that we use to describe the undescribably.
This means fictional media like all other media serves the purposes of stimulating our minds to be like "what if" and the fandoms surrounding them are the people who are entertained by the idea even if they may not have opinions. Usually those who don't have opinions will experience more confused reactions to the media itself as the author behind it may have not conveyed their message well enough for as many people as possible to understand.
People in the age demographic of this forum's userbase from conception to where we are now are some of the most politically engaged in all of history, and this may be contributed to the fact that Cave Story itself is a fundimentally revolutionary piece of media.
The story that underpins the entire game is Humans, Mimiga, and Robots all teaming up to destroy a man whose goal is to control the whole planet.
Pretty simple right?
Who controls the planet right now?
This isn't actually in any specific person's hands due to the way every socioeconomic system on the planet is set up right now it's impossible.
But it is unevenly distributed towards a specific group of people.
The main influencers in politics now are the LLM predictive algorithms (which mostly feed off of eachother informationally) and people who debate politics and art on the internet. Typically framed as the annoying people by the previous main influencers for basic material reasons.
The reason a change in hands is happening in the world right now is because there are now enough people in our age demographic with enough knowledge about the world around us that we now feel confident to steer the direction of the ship and now we have a new tool that no other generation before us ever had.
So where are we in the narrative of Cave Story, collectively?
The doctor's defeat is narratively certain at this point. But most people don't realize that ballos, more specifically, the trauma that ballos was put through and the irrational thought process that caused that trauma, is the root cause of the problems we face in our life.
The reason ballos did what he did is because of what was done to him.
While I personally would've believed ballos could've been spared, he's been driven mad by his pain and has let his pain control him. He is controlled by nothing but emotion and it's our duty to stop ballos.
Who "Ballos" and "The doctor" are in any given context don't matter, you understand the intent without me having to use specific words.
Like with Ballos I feel like whatever follows the present situation that is unfolding us will not be any less tense than what we're suffering through now. Infact I fear it's going to get worse and we'll be put in a situation where we will have to be proactive in an unfamiliar environment that, while seemingly unpredictable, is perfectly easy to breeze though if you have the basic human function that is pattern recognition.
Society is collectively about to go through the bloodstained sanctuary and we need to help explain to everyone how to get past Hell before they arrive here.
So, CSTSF, how do we apply Cave Story speedrunning strategies and game design to solving our modern politics through allegorical means.
Following all this information I wanna lighten the mood while still applying what I've said to kinda move the ball forwards a little.
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