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.

Precure ideas

I have two Precure names that I may use in the future, both relating to transportation and the innate human experience.

Passion Express Pretty Cure! (パッションエクスプレスプリキュア！)

About trains (mainly shinkansen) and expressing yourself. The main Cures are nerds and punks, and the lead Cure is red, and a "nihilist" (there's no such thing as nihilism because if there's no meaning then why are you telling me). There are five Cures.

Lost Air♥Precure (ロストエア♥プリキュア)

A new name for Stitched Essence Pretty Cure. About planes and expressing creativity. The Cures have a flight attendant motif and the main art expressed in the series is handicrafts, especially sewing and knitting, to differentiate it from Arc-En-Ciel. The name is a bad pun on "lost art". 

Talking about "innate human experience" when I complained about the term in and out of this blog. 💀 It's like if humanity in general is sacred or something. 

Finally continuing Dandadan

I watched Dandadan Season 2! It didn't get as much hype as Dandadan Season 1. It could be for a few reasons: The opening was not done by Creepy Nuts this time and they're known for making viral songs (like in Mashle). People know more about... the scene in S1E1. The incident where someone edited Momo and Okarun to be Black got viral and people didn't like racist Dandadan fans berating the artist. Or, perhaps, anime hype may or may not last as long as their first season airs.

But yeah, I watched episodes 10-12 of season 1 and episodes 1-5 of season 2. Probably the most episodes of any anime I watched in 1 day, 8, though I'm not sure if that's actually true.

I am watching the manga as I read along with the manga and I stopped at episode 5 because it seems that we have reached the point where our volumes might be synced up! I stopped somewhere near volume seven. I have volumes 8 and 9, but none after that. I predict Dandadan season 2 doesn't cover anything beyond volume 9. A character who I believe will only have a "last scene of the anime" role in season 2 is the primary cover character of volume 10. I believe volumes 11, 12, and 13 are available internationally, while volumes 14-18 only have official Japanese copies for now.

Spoilers for Dandadan (manga and anime) below: 

Life update and, unrelatedly, dopamine

I got my wisdom teeth removed recently!

I don't think it counts as a surgery because the teeth just popped out and didn't need to be broken. 

I wasn't able to keep them (I think I was allowed to but I wasn't given the time to ask), which was notably the only thing I talked about while on anesthesia. Two comments about keeping wisdom teeth, and nothing more.

So far, I had mashed potatoes, applesauce, macaroni and cheese, and a banana. It would be a BRAT diet if I were allowed to have rice and toast, however, the BRAT diet is a bland foods diet and right now I can only have mushy foods. So no chewy cookies, that leaves crumbs. And no popcorn - crunchy food that leave kernels in your teeth, butter in your mouth, and most of all isn't mushy. I only note these two foods because they're the only foods so far I craved after my surgery. Luckily, I could have vanilla pudding, I tried flan for the first time recently and it was great, but that would be my first actual sweet (the applesauce is unsweetened) since the removal and I don't want to risk that so soon.

Ooh, I made breadstick knots in the oven without help a few weeks ago, maybe when I fully recover, we can celebrate with cinnamon rolls? I found this awesome tutorial which included making brown sugar. And shokupan! Oh, how I'd love to make that.

Okay. Dopamine.

This is how dopamine obsession looks in women. /ref

There's different types of ways to find dopamine. In the least medical most pseudo-health terms possible, there's short-term dopamine, which leads to immediate but very short gratification, notably scrolling and most gambling, and long-term dopamine, like climbing mountains and actually earning things.

I found a type of dopamine that's in the middle of that: crediting artists on Pinterest and finding the sources of certain things. I found some Winx fanart that I was like "wow that looks cool but no artist is credited" so I googled it and I found the artist (innocenceclub) and I added it on that.

Here's a big thing to note: it's pretty hard to get a pin off of Pinterest. I don't think you can delete your own pins, and to copyright claim your work and have it deleted, I believe you have to give your full name to Pinterest and be comfortable with your name being shown to the email inboxes of everyone who saved your pin. So if your real name is Song Kyungmi, it's going to show "Reporter's Name: Song Kyungmi", regardless of if you put your pen name or not.

So that's one unfortunate thing about Pinterest, but if this system wasn't there, Pinterest would either have been a DIY crafting baking site like it seemed to be directly aiming for in the 2010s, or it would have died.

But yeah, that's it. Maybe instead of just scrolling on Pinterest I can just comment "hey this is the original artist". And/or follow the original artist.

Memories, dreams, more AI stuff

Day before yesterday, I went to a comic store I haven't went to in years and got two volumes of Bocchi The Rock. There was Dandadan, which I've been trying to read. I'm at volume 7 and I also have volumes 8 and 9. But while the store had volumes 11 and 12, they didn't have volume 10. I also went to a good restaurant and ate flan for the first time. Very good. And common around here, actually. The whole experience was great; but unfortunate that not all of the family could come.

Yesterday I dreamt my account got hacked by an account called "Are You Even Human?", which somehow got access to the account, and while I successfully removed their access to the account, I also deleted my own channel in the process.

Then I dreamt about HUNTR/X, the Ghostbusters, and the Dandadan characters (dubbed "Team Supernatural" in the dream - Okarun, Momo, Aira, Jin, and I think even Kinta) being in the same class. I watched Half Life VR But The AI is Sentient all the way through recently, so I wonder if the series had influence on this dream, or if Team Science will be there in the future.

I'm just gonna spout out nonsense about AI

• AI agentic browsers. Perplexity's Comet. ChatGPT Atlas. Opera Neon. Gemini in Chrome. Copilot Mode in Edge. Dia, made by the people who abandoned Arc because they thought Dia was cooler. They honestly do seem like toys. Privacy used to be the buzzword of technology. Now it's AI, and these browsers don't care. They want to add things to your shopping list. All of them are Chromium. I wanna say Comet and Atlas are Mac-exclusive.
• Microsoft Mico. New AI mascot. Probably does the same things as Copilot. You can turn it into Clippy. Clippy would never do this.
• ChatGPT released Sora 2. That won't be a nightmare. For some reason it has its own "social media" filled with other Sora videos. Sora videos are watermarked by default, but you can bypass that. People are making racist videos of famous dead people. 

Getting into philosophy

This is going to be bare-bones but I...

I use AI. Privately. I used it occasionally in the past for public works (it's the reason Shion Igarashi is a former delinquent don't tell anyone), and my series Pearl Princess Pretty Cure and Pretty Cure Smile Star were AI-assisted, however, both series have since gotten rid of their AI roots. Or at least Pearl Princess did. Well, okay, the name Tama Hamasaki was AI-generated and she's only blonde because of AI BUT the name was just too good sorry probably not going to change it in spite of Tamaki Hamasaki.

There are plenty of reasons why AI is bad:

• LLM AI's sample data comes from the internet, with the majority of it coming from copyrighted works (If you create something, it automatically gets copyrighted. You have to turn it public domain, creative commons, etc., yourself, not the other way around).
• Companies are using AI in spades and is affecting jobs, particularly creative jobs and factory jobs.
• The spread of AI-generated misinformation or "hallucinations" caused by the very nature of AI.
• Inappropriate use of AI in regards to real faces, particularly of women and children (Perhaps I should use "humans" or "all people" instead of "real faces", especially that "fake faces" harm real people too, but I don't know, "real faces" seems right for what I'm insinuating).
• AI slop, scams, and spam. Scams and spam pretty much all use AI in the modern day, while slop can be more easily produced, flooding the media market of choice for capital gain.
• Over-reliance on AI can make you dumb. Also blindly believing in AI can make you dumb but even if everything AI says is true, it can make you think of generating things instead of actually doing them.
• Environmental impact. Though it's a bit messy, though I heard some things.
• AI uses a lot of electricity, so it needs to use a lot of water to cool its systems.
• I heard some people say some of the water AI uses "disappears", but I need to be smarter in order to believe that sometimes water can't just evaporate into the sky to be used another day. But it's probably true.
• It is said that AI uses 10x the amount of energy as a regular Google search. Though nowadays Google searches might take 10x more energy than it used to /j 
• Unfortunately, a lot of AI impact to the environment is undisclosed. 

But the philosophical reasons... well, actually, they don't matter in terms of more immediate, less metaphysical harms. But philosophy and ethics are what underlie why we do things. So I have questions. For example:

• Does AI do everything for you? Do "prompts" matter? Does "direction" matter?
• Are you using AI to help you or to ease you? Like making things quick and easy for you... or even using it as a dopamine boost because "wow I am not typing this myself this is so cool".
• Where does support for AI start and end? Because it seems like a lot of people just love love every single piece of technology that was made up to 2014, minus cryptocurrency (which isn't exactly AI but it is technology), and that Sophia robot. And they love that one AI that detects cancer cells before humans can. But many say that Generative AI should stay out of the arts. Yet Kasane Teto, which uses neural GenAI, is loved. Some projects that use GenAI, like Glorb, who sings and writes lyrics themself but uses AI-generated SpongeBob character filters, and Neuro-sama, who uses various sorts of GenAI technology, are loved, especially since they have a lot of human effort.
• The word "soulless" gets thrown around in AI discussion, though I think is more important is that the word "soul" gets thrown around in AI discussion. One may say "I don't believe in souls, is AI okay now?" The response would be "you don't have to believe in souls to not support AI for the 'there are plenty of reasons why AI is bad' reasons listed above." Okay, then why are you throwing around phrases like "there are souls in all human art" like it's candy if it's so irrelevant then? 
• Many anti-AI sentiments say to support humans instead of AI. Technically not objective but definitely fair and just. But what does that mean? And how do we go around it?
• And many anti-AI statements say "it's doing NOTHING. it is not HUMAN. it has no SOUL. you need FLESH AND BLOOD. reject artificiality." That's where I'm probably most hung up about, which I'll get into sometime, probably not in this blog post, or even on this blog, but some time. 

I've also been trying to figure out why I use AI:

• The world is not easy. It's not going to hold your hand. AI companies purport their product as an assistive tool first and foremost. As someone who felt like I couldn't do anything, I would probably find solace in AI.
• AI can generate things quickly. In seconds. The country is in a "convenience culture". I think a YouTube comment said that a single Simpsons defines American culture, where Skinner's mom wanted all of her groceries in one bag whilst demanding the bag not be heavy. I usually ask for "niche" questions or generations. Instead of asking for answers on a forum, or even drawing or writing or doing the thing I message AI to do myself, I go the easy way out.
• Additionally, Google is worse now. While I have extensions that make the experience better, Google has a lot of AI. I did manage to hide the Google Gemini AI from searches, though! There's also an extension that removes certain sites from Google search, namely sites whose sole purpose is for AI. But even then, the sites Google shows were forced to appeal to its SEO. 
• Validation. The "yesman" praise that is very common in AI. I heard someone say it's a common feature in all LLM chatbots, but I do not know if it's intentional or just a consequence of its programming. Like when AI says "your message is more profound than 99% of the people who chat with me." But the "yesman" praise of AI is a way of AI saying "I'm here and I'm listening to you".
• Novelty. It's a brand new toy. It can do all sorts of things. ChatGPT actually just had a "dev talk" where they introduced a new AI agent tool, and added some third-party apps users can "directly talk to" on ChatGPT, including Spotify and Zillow. It's like when a gacha game adds a new character or a toy line adds a new vehicle and outfits for all of the characters.

And my own limits. I used to be less strict, but now my personal rules are: no videos, no music, no pictures except if you ask really nicely with two cherries on top, use Microsoft David/Zira/Mark instead of AI TTS, limit AI speech synthesis to those Google AI podcasts and even then you should not do that, no AI templates, no AI coding, and only use AI creative writing if you're willing to completely throw it away and forget about it, meaning, do NOT post it publicly on any circumstance.

As for AI research... a lot of people do permit it as long as human-written references and resources are involved, though for some, it's a no-go. One Redditor, for example, said "asking if using AI is cheating is pro-AI propaganda; AI is a plagiarism machine and that's why it should never be used."

I've been using it a lot for philosophy, and what I trick myself into believing isn't psuedo-therapy but it totally is. My philosophy teacher told me not to use AI, not just because of misinformation, but also because of misuse of terms. Philosophy uses many common words that take new meanings in philosophy, something AI would either misunderstand or attribute both meanings to when the common meaning may not apply at all to something. And using LLMs for therapy is bad is because AI is not human.

And I'm finally going more away towards AI because if predictive LLMs, by their very nature, are not good for the epistemological, they cannot be good for the metaphysical.

In my own "AI generations", too, AI has messed up. Once it said that [group of male characters of human intelligence 1] recognizing and respecting the sexual boundaries of [group of female characters of human intelligence 2] is scarier than if [group of male characters of human intelligence 1] didn't. Hello? Do you know what "Man vs. Bear" is even about?
Another time it called a manipulative milkman character's tactics "soft white power" (rather than "soft power"). You can see the problem with that.

I realized I can't transition neatly to my next topic, so I'll just go out and say it.

One popular post against AI is, "Why would I look at this if you didn't have the time to make it yourself?". It's about people having the dignity to respect audiences by showing them something they actually made instead of something they prompted.

But I've been thinking, does this apply to AI-generated content not made to see the light of day? "Why would I generate this if I didn't have the time to make it myself?"

So I've been researching dignity. And I found this article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and while I read the whole thing, I got disappointed that I was actually thinking of integrity instead of dignity.

I haven't read this article yet but I think it will help me on AI.

Yeah. That was two hours of research for nothing.

Also I had a dream about The Amazing Digital Circus episode 7 and for some reason Kinger tortures Jax. And Pomni and Jax go to the supermarket and that helps Jax become a better person. And then Caine starts dancing with pink guards and Precure Kigurumi dancers to "Koi wa Chaos no Shimobe Nari" from the Nyaruko anime and "UFO" by f5ve.