Sims Having Sex! Plus Joan Didion.
Apr. 23rd, 2023 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraQuite the son et lumiere show last night; thunder and lightning well into the wee hours of the morning. It didn’t keep me awake exactly; instead, it turned my slumber into a kind of lucid dream in which (no shit) I was watching the siege of Sarajevo…
###
Yesterday, I was a paragon of productivity! Completed another Remunerative Project—I really want to get an assembly line going, crank out three Remunerative Projects a week—and then toddled off to the garden where I corralled my strawberries into a single patch.
This was time-consuming.
The sky was glowering by the time I finished, so I judged it prudent not to tromp.
Instead, I repaired home—why is that idiom “to repair?”—and played the Sims, which I haven’t played in a while.
###
The Sims have now evolved to a place where they actually have personalities and emotional memory.
Or I should say the AI that powers them has evolved to manifest personality and emotional memory.
There are also any number of fabulous mods, including a porn mod that allows them to have very graphic sex and a drug mod that allows them to shoot up in their bathrooms if you want them to.
I always want them to.
My game play is always to create a boringly ordinary family—because of my singularly weird upbringing, “boringly ordinary” is actually exotic to me—and then program that boringly ordinary family to self-destruct.
In the hands of the right psychotherapist, the Sims could be a very powerful therapeutic tool.
###
There is a certain degree of autonomy in this latest generation of the Sims. You only control them up to a certain point.
Which is why, I suppose, it is oddly erotic watching Sims have graphic sex.
In the same way that God (assuming God exists) might find it erotic to watch humans having graphic sex. Same proprietary thrill: I created these creatures—and now watch what they’re doing!
Back in the early 90s, one of the mind games we early tech adopters liked to play was, Which new app will become the killer app?
I think one could argue that the Sims is the killer app now that you can model your Sims to look exactly like animated versions of your favorite celebrities and watch them have sex.
Pornography always fuels the rise of killer technologies.
###
Also read a 100 pages more of The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty’s excellent Joan Didion bio.
It’s an exceptionally enlightening bio for those of us who grew up doing deep analytical dives into English literature.
Textual analysis is a high-level demanding discipline. My insane Aunt Jane was an absolute master at it: Oh, the levels of meaning she could wring from a throwaway Dickens passage!
Didion’s unique point of view as a social essayist derives from her ability to apply standard English graduate student skills to the world outside books. It’s a dispassionate approach that finds its connecting dots in allusion rather than narrative.
Very post-modern!
Once you’re shown that’s what she’s doing, it’s very obvious—but I would not have figured it out on my own without Dougherty’s explication.
###
The reason I personally am so drawn to Didion as a writer, though, has very little to do with Didion as what you might call a chronicler of late 20th-century anomie.
No, I like Didion because she’s grammatical. Her language, her syntax, are precise. Even her comma placements are precise! A Didion sentence has exactly one meaning; it is as invariable, implacable, and final as the words carved on a cemetery headstone. It means what it means—no less, no more.
I long to be able to pull something like that off in my own writing.
But I'm just not that kind of a writer.
I’m a storyteller, pure and simple. Narrative is my meat and wine. And there are a thousand ways to tell a story. Often, they all spill out on the page simultaneously!
###
Yesterday, I was a paragon of productivity! Completed another Remunerative Project—I really want to get an assembly line going, crank out three Remunerative Projects a week—and then toddled off to the garden where I corralled my strawberries into a single patch.
This was time-consuming.
The sky was glowering by the time I finished, so I judged it prudent not to tromp.
Instead, I repaired home—why is that idiom “to repair?”—and played the Sims, which I haven’t played in a while.
###
The Sims have now evolved to a place where they actually have personalities and emotional memory.
Or I should say the AI that powers them has evolved to manifest personality and emotional memory.
There are also any number of fabulous mods, including a porn mod that allows them to have very graphic sex and a drug mod that allows them to shoot up in their bathrooms if you want them to.
I always want them to.
My game play is always to create a boringly ordinary family—because of my singularly weird upbringing, “boringly ordinary” is actually exotic to me—and then program that boringly ordinary family to self-destruct.
In the hands of the right psychotherapist, the Sims could be a very powerful therapeutic tool.
###
There is a certain degree of autonomy in this latest generation of the Sims. You only control them up to a certain point.
Which is why, I suppose, it is oddly erotic watching Sims have graphic sex.
In the same way that God (assuming God exists) might find it erotic to watch humans having graphic sex. Same proprietary thrill: I created these creatures—and now watch what they’re doing!
Back in the early 90s, one of the mind games we early tech adopters liked to play was, Which new app will become the killer app?
I think one could argue that the Sims is the killer app now that you can model your Sims to look exactly like animated versions of your favorite celebrities and watch them have sex.
Pornography always fuels the rise of killer technologies.
###
Also read a 100 pages more of The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty’s excellent Joan Didion bio.
It’s an exceptionally enlightening bio for those of us who grew up doing deep analytical dives into English literature.
Textual analysis is a high-level demanding discipline. My insane Aunt Jane was an absolute master at it: Oh, the levels of meaning she could wring from a throwaway Dickens passage!
Didion’s unique point of view as a social essayist derives from her ability to apply standard English graduate student skills to the world outside books. It’s a dispassionate approach that finds its connecting dots in allusion rather than narrative.
Very post-modern!
Once you’re shown that’s what she’s doing, it’s very obvious—but I would not have figured it out on my own without Dougherty’s explication.
###
The reason I personally am so drawn to Didion as a writer, though, has very little to do with Didion as what you might call a chronicler of late 20th-century anomie.
No, I like Didion because she’s grammatical. Her language, her syntax, are precise. Even her comma placements are precise! A Didion sentence has exactly one meaning; it is as invariable, implacable, and final as the words carved on a cemetery headstone. It means what it means—no less, no more.
I long to be able to pull something like that off in my own writing.
But I'm just not that kind of a writer.
I’m a storyteller, pure and simple. Narrative is my meat and wine. And there are a thousand ways to tell a story. Often, they all spill out on the page simultaneously!
