Cynicism

Okay, I think I'm done with ChatGPT and Gemini for good. This time.

This isn't an airport, don't announce your departure.

But I think I started getting way too cynical.

Movies 

•  Theater movies aren't that interesting anymore. But this is due to a few reasons:
• 1. Many of these movies are survivors of the writer's and actor's strike. Many of the "better" movies didn't survive this and will likely come around later.
• 2. The movies you are interested in are PG and PG-13 and I am no longer a kid or a teenager. The R rated movies that do appear I end up not as interested in.
• 3. You got movie cynicism in your head and you think all the movies are bad because people keep rating them 2-3 stars.
• 4. You are literally getting less marketing. You saw 6 instances of Avatar: Fire and Ash before it came out and that's wild because you saw someone wear a Fire and Ash hoodie 2 days before the movie came out. Also SpongeBob 4 came out a week ago and you saw marketing for it and you thought it looked ugly so you probably thought its marketing budget was smaller than it was.
• 5. You just need to see more movies point blank. There's thousands of them but we can only make so many at once. You saw Poor Things while it was out of theaters and you thought it was great.
• 6. The big 3 flooding the theaters: sequels/prequels, remakes, and reboots. Sequels in particular seem to be slowing down.
• I think the only 2025 movies I saw were KPop Demon Hunters and The Electric State; the movie you heard nothing but praise (and a few critiques paired with a "I love this movie" sandwich), and the movie for which in terms of movie reviews, the only good one said "it's a good movie to show the kids and turn your brain off to, and if you worry about the Millie Bobbie Brown Chris Pratt movie not adapting the grim source material properly, cope."
• I heard Sinners and One Battle After Another are good. Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, too. Hundreds of Beavers is the most independent of all these films on this bullet point but people said it was awesome. This, the aforementioned KPop Demon Hunters, and more are proof the movie industry is not all dead inside.

I don't think it's because of disinterest.

AI and "soul"

I am tired and I do not want to explain this as much, but I used AI for three specific reasons, and one of them was to discuss philosophy.

It is common to say "I don't like AI. It's soulless and it's not human." And you're expected to not question that and agree with them.

Sure, the water usage and electricity usage is bad. And a bunch of other things. But why does it matter if AI has a "soul" or not?

I think they called it materialism. To treat everything as physical. The other definition is to value things entirely external, like AI, above spiritual things.

I questioned if the subjective mind is objectively real and if we have things that objectively think about things inside our minds.

I figured the reason about the talk about "souls" and "human essence" was because of humanism, and more so anthropocentrism. I learned about antihumanism. It's not the same as misanthropy. It's anti "humanism", meaning it critiques the philosophy of "humanism" and humans being the center of the universe.

I figured it was hypocritical to be a meat eater and not be a humanist, even though a tenet of humanism is likely also not to eat meat. And probably even more so hypocritical for someone who doesn't like to be sniffed by dogs to be an anti-humanist.

I don't think there's a "natural" thing in this room besides some dead flowers. Not even myself. We've been "human" for so long that if we were ever animalistic, it would be evolutionarily unwise because the only reason many people are as pale as they are is because of migration and, in many cases, racism.

I tried to read Wikipedia summaries about Althusser, I got distracted by the elephant in the room about him. Knowing the crimes philosophers did is like YouTube comments on Mr. Krabs videos saying "Don't let this distract you from the fact that Mr. Krabs sold SpongeBob's soul for 62 cents."

Anyways, soul. Selling soul is a common metaphor. I don't think it's the case for all AI. Penny Parker and the SnapCube team did voice dubs for their AI Dungeon Sonic story where Shadow says "how could a doctor who thrives on death be so afraid to die?" I don't think SnapCube uses AI anymore, and they probably didn't sell their souls for that AI Dungeon thing. But I think I sold mine after I found out ChatGPT uses underpaid workers in Kenya to review chatlogs, and then I kept using AI for 3 years.

I talked to Google Gemini about soul and it said that believing in having a soul, in a world that tries to reduce you to numbers, is actually pretty countercultural. That you refuse to sell yourself because you see yourself as precious, or rather, sacred.

Sure, I could stop believing in souls. It seems... accurate, right? However, believing in at least one subjective, mostly human-constructed thing, like having a soul, is like joining forces with someone who barely aligns with your own but is a stronger fighter than you'll ever be.

Star Detective Pretty Cure

On the day I made my shinkansen and plane Precure titles, the title for the next Precure series was revealed: Star Detective Precure!

So far, none of the Cures seem to have leaked. The closest one was a keychain that had the line width of the other keychains wrong and almost the exact same head accessory as Cure Friendy.

Unfortunately, this was also the first year an AI image was spread as a leak. I think NanoBanana Pro just released when it was made. It even retained the Gemini logo even though that was easy to remove. Luckily, no AI leaks since that one arose. Leakers knew we wouldn't fall for that twice...

...actually, there's a second one that doesn't look like AI on the surface but might be. Had a yellow Cure named Cure Watson who had two different forms with two completely different faces... whatever "completely different" means for an anime style. They also had three of the four Cures share first names with real Cures, Madoka, Arisu, and Akane, which had never happened before. One of the Cures had a hiragana surname even though that doesn't seem right (it's usually kanji, or katakana if they aren't Japanese). And one of the Cures, whose theme color was brown, had a smoking pipe! I couldn't tell you if it's true but I think the image is AI.

Edit:

Designs leaked, likely either on the 16th or 17th. I believe they were all leaked on designs of surprise cards you get when you buy Pretty Cure gummies. The Cures were:

• A purple Cure, purple hair and blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair in civilian form.
• Cheerful, probably a bright-eyed dreamer. While her Cure form is purple, her civilian form looked more... pink? I am not a fan of the lilac color for her, but that's probably only because it's so ubiquitous in Pretty Cure, and it's actually quite rare for hair colors. Most likely the lead Cure, as she is the sole Cure on the boxart of the transformation item.
• A pink Cure, pink hair and purple eyes, purple hair in civilian form.
• Tsurime eyes, rare for pink Cures. You got Melody, Miracle, Butterfly, and Black and Summer if you count them as pink Cures. Her civilian outfit seems to be mostly red. She reminds me of Tomoyo Daidouji for some reason. Or Arale Norimaki. Or maybe there's someone she actually looks like a lot more and I'll be like "OH! That's who she looks like!" She's the only other Cure who appears in merchandising, so it can be assumed that the team starts as a duo, in spite of there being more Cures leaked.
• A green Cure, or perhaps blue.
• She kind of looks like a peacock to me. Very elegant. She is the only Cure in the leak to not have her civilian art, which is weird because there's an image of the rest of the Cures in their civilian forms and she's not there.
• A black Cure.
• The third black Cure since Cure Black, following Cure Joker (a novel-exclusive Cure) and Cure Kiss. She has blonde hair and... amber eyes? She is absolutely a standout compared to the 87 (now 91) Cures we have now, let alone the Star Detective cast. Dirty blonde hair in civilian form, which is quite rare as well. I actually have the least to say about her because of how mysterious she is.
•  A male (or at least masc) supporting character.
• He has yellow hair and goggles, a lab coat, and is overall represented by the color yellow. Most likely not the same as the civilian form-less green Cure. He also has a animal for, a yellow creature with the same goggles.
• Three other fairies.
• A pink koala/bear, a purple fox, and... another fox but green? The koala was also featured in boxart.

Merchandise listings showed that the four Cures' names are Cure Answer, Cure Mystic, Cure Arcana Shadow (shown in some listings as Cure Arcana), and Cure Eclair!

 

The Cure designs are less detective-y than expected, so people guessed all the detective Cure names in the book not knowing how much the team will stray away from the theme (previous series in the past few years went all in, naming Cures after onomatopoeiae). Cure Answer is the most likely name to get right out of the four (mine were Cure Case, Cure Mystery, Cure Glass, and Cure Mark). Though nobody probably expected Cure Arcana Shadow. One of the few Cures to have three words in her name. On the top of my head, I can only think of Cure Southern Cross (which, fun fact, is a longer name than Cure Arcana Shadow in letter count but not syllable count) and Cure La Mer, and even with her, the "La" part is an article determiner. Arcana Shadow is two separate nouns!

 

Mascot names have also been listed in merchandise listings, those being Pochitan, Mashutan, and Shushutan. I predict Pochi is pink, Mashu is purple, Shushu is green. Nice to have these guys because for three seasons in a row the Cures fully transformed as a group didn't have animal sidekicks to yell at them thinks sigmas wouldn't think twice about like "not giving up" and "looking to your left". Baby sh*t.

 

No comments on the transformation items, nice the kiddos are getting watches again. I think Delicious Party is the only other series with magical watches.

 

I won't lie and say I'm not impatient for the release of the official website. Those feel like breaths of fresh air to finally find out about Aikawa Niina and Yuzuki Mikan and Cosmos and Aurora. Lol, sorry, those are my PreCure OCs. I know, I have hundreds of them.