Seems my midlife crisis has manifested in a desire to beat the original SUPER MARIO BROS without using a warp zone by the time I hit 50. I'm 44 now, so I've got a bit of runway. Other than the "no warping" rule, I'm also - since I'm playing it on my little NES mini (pork chop Nintendo, as I fondly call it) in The Shed and with it, the option of saving and walking away - instituting a single-playthrough rule: once I start, I don't stop until I die or win, just like those long evenings of perpetual failure that ended 20 years later with a (warped) victory and subsequent blackout drunken revelry. So, in that spirit, round one:
Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry’s unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called “generative AI”—despite widespread criticism and the wider public’s distaste for it.
“This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we’re in,” Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. “I’ve been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022."
“Chindogu are inventions that defy concise explanation. They aren't useful. But they aren't completely useless either. Their creator, Kenji Kawakami, describes them as "un-useless." - Chindogu: The Unuseless inventions of Kenji Kawakami
