… the fact that they’re LLMslop like half the time either. What are they getting out of it? They don’t give a fuck about the game because they’re always riddled with inaccuracies. It can’t be because they actually think it does a better translation than a human, because they’re always promising to do a “another editing pass”. It can’t be accessibility because screen reader translation software and learning basic katakana goes a long way to understanding menus. I don’t think it’ll amount to like any learning experience either since they’re actively not learning how to translate or even how to code necessarily.
I’ve noticed a lot of bitterness in both the people releasing them and especially the 4chan-esque treatlords who seem to get satisfaction from someone being mad about it somewhere. They seem to hate both professional and fan translators. They seem to hate anyone with any moral system. They seem to not even care about the games themselves because they never seem to have heard of the game before the LLMslop release. Very bitter, misanthropic (in the self-loving smug sense) losers, it seems.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qpbuxrel3f3njvjw5rakf532/post/3mqkgb7hbjk2v
It absolutely can be that. If it makes someone feel good, or less scratched, they’ll happily split their reality in half so they can enjoy it working the first time while also frantically trying to make it work - it’s not even a lie, really, since it isn’t a fully coalesced recognition by the conscious layer (though when you’re aware of what you’re doing, and deliberately abdicating thought and control to a bleak impulse of avoidance… that just fucking sucks, really awful times, do not recommend). If you encounter resistance some quick defensive justification rises up, believed just long enough to spit at someone, but not really tethered to your beliefs in a way that risks them.
And since the internet provides both a slippery protective slime and a thick inky cloud, there’s no final collision with reality that can force you to take a coherent position, you can just shrug it off and flash some loud colours with your chromatophores until you feel better. It’s not real, it’s not external.
It is odd though. I’d think it was easier to lose faith in the God Machine than to abase yourself before it, but perhaps supplication to an all-powerful machine allows you to bask in a reflected perfection that you can’t delude yourself into possessing yourself, since you have the fatal flaw of actually existing.
(This went all over the place. The meatiness turned into that cuttlefish thing in the middle, and then corrected back to beep-boop at the end. I should have just stuck with: “the entrails are never wrong, only the Haruspex can be wrong”. )