am I jumping trains? I ain't turnin' back (part two)

Picking up where we left off.



Here be clockwork spiders. But I couldn't stir myself to care.



And the galling thing is, there are some nifty ideas here. A corrupt mage, trapping an entire town to fulfill his mad scheme to control time itself. The mage parting people out, extending limbs, to turn them into twisted replacement parts for his clockwork creations. Those aren't suffused with mediocrity, at least on the concept level.

No, it's just the entire concept of the haunt is depressingly mediocre.



Could this have been done with existing dark ride scripting? Absolutely. Would it have required time investment on its own? Absolutely. Is the haunt "designer" just effing lazy? Maybe.



Even "fight" scenes could have been done with existing technology. Why, then? Was it just a cash grab? Well, it's not a dark ride that charges. Though it IS listed on at least Firestorm's destination page, if not Second Life's at large. Does that count? Who knows?



And it's not even that it's AI start to finish. It's that ALL of AI is based on one solitary concept: teaching a machine mind to hallucinate. And it's especially obvious in this ride, because everyone has the same six faces, everyone has similarly-detailed clothes, every single set piece looks like every other set piece. It's goddamn derivative as hell.



Case in point, three of the "time portals" opening.



If you haven't tired of the haunt itself, there's a very matchy-matchy maze after, with "gifts". Which are also designed by AI.



And the pic above this one was the last one I took at the haunt site itself. This pic was set up with the gifts I gathered from the maze. I took two images, chose the better one of them, then deleted them from inventory. They're worth the nothing the rest of the haunt is worth.

Here's the thing. Set aside the ecological devastation of multiple data centers drawing enough local water to force droughts, drawing enough power to spike electricity costs for people dozens to hundreds of miles away, causing enough noise from multiple gas-powered turbines to cause hearing damage (similar to families that live too close to airports) in people in those centers' vicinity--those are heavy costs, and those are real, and they matter.

But the bigger cost, for Second Life, at least to me: this required so little personal creativity. I mean, hells, for all I know, this could be a job-lot design from another place entirely, and the dark ride's owner didn't even feed in prompts, they just bought the entire construction. (And again, that just makes it worse, not better.) It's depressing, it's lazy, it's tied to systems that rip our own creativity from us, as individuals, and we're already seeing the effect in essays and research papers, resumes and lesson plans. Hallucination machines do not invent anything; they recombine. And they recombine based on destroyed rare books and stolen art. Why is Second Life encouraging this? Why have a copyright system at all if no one's going to care?

I care. I won't return. Everyone who visits this haunt is now dumber for having listened to it. I award it no points, and I will quietly pray for its extinction from the grid.

I need coffee. This was emotionally draining beyond belief.

am I running away? am I changing tracks? (part one)

It's been forever since I updated, and I want to get back to that. I need to get back to that. But while I'm taking a break from updating holiday information--anyone in the Gearhaven group will see that later--and concurrently taking a break from the most insane haunt I've ever made--and pictures on that are coming, gods help us all--I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about the most depressing dark ride I've ever ridden--in SL, or out of it. Let me introduce you to The Clockmaker's Curse.

And this is probably going to be at least a couple entries.



I think any reader of this blog grasps the issue immediately. Love the details if you will--I did--admire the concept of a steampunk dark ride--I did, too. But it's AI, start to finish. The images, the visual effects, the narrator's voice--all of it. It's all artificial intelligence.



Usually, I ride every dark ride I've gone on in SL twice. More if I really like it, but at least twice: once out of mouselook, for pictures, and the second time as intended--the "correct" time of day, in mouselook, just for the experience.

This one? Popped out of mouselook when I found a reasonable image for this entry, popped back in, because I knew this would be the one and only time I rode it. And my gods, it broke my heart.



I can almost name the engine, too. There's a particular similarity of faces with generative models. Midjourney comes closest--the faces are similar, the particular detailing...the utter lack of everything-is-Pixar-shaped (see PXZ.AI or YouCam). It might not be, it could be another engine I havent run across--and if you scan up to the first two images, that particular style layout, that font, those colors are everywhere in SL right now, and that is also depressing. I've gone to two iterations of the Whispering event, and I'm not going back a third, because...as much as I'm fond of a few creators who've had booths there, the inundation of AI textures, AI text, AI image layouts...it all looks the same, it's all instantly recognizeable, and it's all AI nonsense.



The story wasn't even terrible. Black Hollow was a normal small town, until the Clockmaker arrived. He wanted to preserve time, and he did it with arcane rituals and souls. You have arrived in Black Hollow, years--or decades, or centuries--later, and are advised not to stay after dusk. But...you do. And thus, the ride begins.



I'm not saying the haunt's bad, per se. (Though somehow that makes everything worse.) I am saying it's 100% AI.



I am saying that if I had known about it in advance, I never would have gone.



I am saying if this hadn't been so obviously, so carelessly AI, I might have been far more invested.

On to part two.