Mini-Stacks Collection 1: #SonicSoBlack?

Blerd Anthropology, AI Art, and Shade

I’ve been noticing that lately the flow of ‘stacks has been a bit much, so I have decided to start bundling some of my smaller ‘stacks together into one post. These ‘stacks are less heavy and probably more lax in tone, but still stuff people either recommended I write about or that I felt needed to be addressed.

Blerd Anthropology, Black Sonic Fans, Mario

A while back, I talked on iFunny about how Blerds seem to love Sonic the Hedgehog, while Mario fans were largely White. Yeah, you’ve got your White Sonic fans like Chris Chan and SammyClassicSonicFan, but my experience of there being a lot of Black sonic fans comes from my times in the DeathBattle comments section as a kid.

There are a few reasons I have for this. Firstly, it may have to do with Black people being more likely to have a Sega console later than White people, because their low-income families could not afford the newest Nintendo, Xbox, or Playstation. Black people of recent generations have a bizarre tendency to buy the Nintendo Switch, which is why so many of them like Super Smash Bros., but this is likely explained by the lower cost of the Switch. Secondly, Sonic resonates more with Blerds, who found themselves socially outcompeted by the Tyrones in the Black social heirarchy. Sonic represents someone who is not necessarily very strong, but he is fast and nimble, and unlike Mario he is cool. He is hip, which is how the Blerd views himself in front of his White friends. So Sonic is relatable to the Blerd in both of those ways. Many of you have perhaps noticed in high school that Blerds are always running to class. I don’t know why they do this but they do. This is evidence of their deep connection to Sonic the Hedgehog.

Sonic is also technically racially ambiguous. Black people have a tendency to impose their blackness on characters who aren’t necessarily White. They do this with Piccolo too, and I don’t really understand why. Piccolo is quiet, patient, and also fathers Gohan. Meanwhile Black people are loud, impatient, and don’t even father their own children. It isn’t like he’s voiced by a Black guy either. Sonic, like Piccolo, represents a character that Black people can project their Blackness onto even though he is obviously a White guy.

Knuckles might actually be Black. There is a big push to make Knuckles Black in this day and age, hence being voiced by the Black Heimdall guy in the movie. People don’t like to admit it, but Donkey Kong and the Kongs in general are super black-coded. They sing rap music, they play African drums, they literally get put in jail by King K. Rool… And I’m not even gonna talk about Funky Kong. They’re Black! Donkey Kong is obviously POC-Coded. It might have been an “internalized racismerino”, or just the recognition that Apes come from the same place Black people come from and so to have fictional apes be Black makes sense (in the same way they made the Lion King about black people in the live action) but it might be intentional as well, because a lot of the DK64 staff worked on Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

Meanwhile, Mario is obviously a White guy. NO ITALOPHOBIA IN COMMENTS!!! Okay? Mario is canonically Italian, and he looks stunningly White. A10 blue eyes, auburn hair, fair skin…

I reject all notions that Mario represents Communism, both Game Theory and surprisingly Ryan Faulk from the Alternative Hypothesis have made this claim before. Mario is obviously a representation of the Italian Burgher-Condotierre of the Renaissance. He is a renaissance man. A plumber, a doctor, an artist, and a warrior. His red getup is symbolic of Mars, just as his name might be (Mario’s etymology is disputed. It either means “of Mars” or “of the Sea”). His phenotype is obviously that of a Northern Italian Alpinid. You see many Romans of Alpine type. His brother Luigi had Atlantid features. The red getup is strongly associated with the Medicis and Florentine Poets as well. Bowser’s Koopa Kingdom is obviously representative of the Ottoman Turks, trying to invade the Mushroom Kingdom of kindly toads and steal the European Princess Peach for Bowser’s harem. The idea that Mario is a communist is ridiculous because Mario is the ultimate Petit Bourgeois. He defends the Monarchical institution, he works many trades, and he is independently successful without being a member of the Aristocracy. Wario and Waluigi represent the Barbarians. The Borgias, the French, the Habsburgs, Wario is canonically German (Oh Mein Gott! WAAAH!), while I suspect Waluigi is a Spaniard…

Anyways, you get the point. Mario is obviously a White European and is made to appeal to the standard middle class White family. Sonic is a little bit more edgy and counter-cultural. There was never any Mario game like Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic ‘06, or Sonic Unleashed. Sonic’s enemy, Dr. Eggman, is also how Black people envision the White elite. Stuffy, greedy, oppressive of his people (the animals) for money.

I don’t want to hate too much on Sonic here. I was recently made aware by my good lad Sonichedgehogfuntimefunny on iFunny that some of my beliefs about the subliminal messaging of Sonic OSTs are actually really intentional! Sonic the Hedgehog is Zoroastrian…

Please think about the lyrics of His World… “…Where life is strong…” (just like how in Zoroastrianism life is Ohrmuzd’s strongest weapon against Ahriman)… “Compromise does not exist” (like the battle against evil)… And there are also some Vedic elements perhaps from Bhagawad Gita… “One is all” (Brahman), “Never fear the fall” (like Krishna telling Arjuna that death is only temporary. Yeah, I listen to Sonic OST often because it’s inspirational.

Shade in the ‘Burbs

The Greek Petasos, associated with the god Hermes and other hillbillies.

I was walking with my dog the other day and I noticed how oppressive the heat was. Why was this? Then I realized, there is not any shade. People talk about how access to food, water, shelter are very important to cities, but I think they forget something: access to shade. Here in New York (state, not city), where it doesn’t get that hot that often and it is humid, shade is less important. But in places with drier air, it can make all the difference. When I was in California, shade felt completely different from sunlit heat. Italy was similar but not as noticeable.

In ancient Mesopotamia, cities were oriented heavily around maximizing shade. In areas like that, where it’s hot and dry, shade can provide such a refuge from the sun. It is possible that the entire purpose of building up cities was to protect from the sun. But a lot of suburbs I see these days, they have no protection from sunlight. They have no trees. They aren’t even surrounded by trees. This is especially bad in the South and near the Beach, where suburbs are newer. My suburb actually does have a good amount of foliage, it was just that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I’ve been to ‘burbs in the Carolinas and Delmarva which feel like they a flat pan that is being broiled by the sun.

Those new, immature suburbs have a distinct charm to them though. When I was a kid, I lived in North Carolina, and I remember that my neighborhood was blocked from another neighborhood by only a small wooded area littered with old barbed wire and rocks. I had to cross through this treacherous barrier in order to meet my friends on the other side. I think for some time we were trying to tear a sort of pathway through the pine trees, to make it easier. If you went too far into the forest, chances are you would find yourself in an empty wasteland of branches and reeds and plastic netting. This was land that was being prepared for development, but the building had not started yet. There were natural elements to the woods as well, but it was hard to get lost because of how much development the land was going through. This experience is something very unique. In the city, you don’t truly ever discover anything, and in rural areas, you have to be careful not to discover too much. You just might not find your way back.

Anyways, back to the sun stuff, another thing about shade is that there aren’t any good hats anymore for the shade. Baseball caps are alright, but they only cover one side of your head. Wide-brimmed Fedoras were fairly common when I went to Italy, but they don’t look very good on you if you are wearing more casual clothes. They still don’t deserve the reputation they have acquired in America. Ten-Gallon hats are good but you can only really wear them in places like Texas without looking like a doofus. Straw hats are associated with women mostly these days, or I guess maybe farmers, but if you’re not a farmer people will say that it is a woman’s hat. Bucket hats do a decent job but are inferior to hats with wider and straighter brims.

Hats in general seem to have declined heavily in use. In history there was such a wide variety of hats. Today there is really only bucket hats, baseball hats, and beanie hats.

How I grew to hate AI Art and AI in general

When AI Art first came onto the scene, I liked it. And I noticed that a lot of annoying Twitter artists really hated it, even though it was mostly harmless and fun. It was fun to rub it in their faces because most drawphags are annoying. No hate to any drawphags in the audience btw, I myself have been known on occasion to be a drawphag… In fact, I have been planning for a while to get a drawing tablet. The iPad just can’t cut it. Maybe I’ll ask for that for Christmas. But anyways, soon I started to realize that there was a problem with AI Art. When I would go on google images to find some cool art, I was met with oceans of crappy AI art. Methods of limiting AI art results such as using the “NOT” function in searches, or reducing the date range of results, doesn’t seem to fully work for some reason. Now it is a nightmare trying to find concept art of anything, because AI art actually is not very good. Yes, it’s good for a robot, and it may appear technically good, but it has no intent behind it. It only recognizes patterns. And often times, the data they’re loaded with is shitty as well. Like, you can’t really ask an AI to draw a Roman soldier, because it probably has within its database a bunch of extremely inaccurate costumes and mascots and video game “Roman Soldiers”. I don’t believe training AI more will solve this, it will require an actual Artificial General Intelligence to make AI art good in the way human art is. Because it takes an AI who actually has a sense of direction and creativity and independence in order to make a good work of art. It requires a sort of self-awareness, an actual self-recognition that it is creating art rather than an algorithm that simply meshes a bunch of patterns together. This isn’t just waxing poetically, either. There is good evidence that generative AI may hit a plateau in the future, if you assume that additions to it will mostly revolve around training it on larger and larger datasets.

Another thing about AI Art, is that Indians love it. I don’t know why, but they love it to no end. I can’t be the only one who has noticed this. Every Indian online loves AI art. I remember I started laughing when I saw Shivaji (Vedic) on iFunny posting AI because it gave credence to my suspicions of Indians in particular loving AI art. A lot of the HBD types also love AI art, and it’s just so tasteless. Aporia Magazine, although I like a lot of their articles, is notorious for having AI art as the thumbnail image for most of their articles. Look, I like AI Art for some things. I like being able to generate Donald Trump going super saiyan, or Goku shaking hands with Super Mario, or making weird versions of my own selfies, but do you really need it for every article thumbnail? It gets tiring, especially for a noticer like me who can quickly tell if something is AI or not.

AI in general has become the new big everything for stupid midwits worldwide. In 2020 it was covid and the metaverse. When these 108 IQ “team fulfillment managers” at some tech company have nothing to write about for their next big presentation, they write about AI because it’s the “new big thing” even though they don’t really have any expertise on it. When some scammer is trying to sell his services to you, he will add in fluff about “AI” to make it sound more efficient even if AI is useless in whatever this product or service is. I think AI is still mostly a parlor trick, and I think any Math major would have this bias against LLMs. A lot of people are saying that AGI will be around by 2040, which I doubt, but mostly off of intuition and only slightly because I recall reading something pretty interesting about more reliable predictors or maybe just less biased predictors for other things suggesting later dates. AI might be shocking because it reveals how stupid many people are, and how useless they are at work. The fact that peer review is getting fooled by terribly done AI studies is maybe the icing on the cake. A lot of old people are fooled by AI images, which I guess is more a sign of their oldness than their stupidity, but what I’m shocked by is the number of people who ask ChatGPT questions they could literally just look up. A surprising amount of people seem to not even realize they can look up anything on google, or just go on Wikipedia. It doesn’t even cross their minds.