06 May 2025
Over the past week I’ve been listening to all 4* Animal Crossing (AC) games’ hourly themes to devise a playlist of my favorite for each hour. I exclusively listen to each theme during or within 10min of the hour (as in, 1pm from 12:50-2:10) trying to stay within the hour. The goal is to capture the “vibe” of the hour best.
My husband once said, “Music should be somewhere between where you are and where you want to be.” So the hourlies shouldn’t be solely the most pleasing objectively at all hours - 3pm should be the most pleasing with the mental state I am generally in at 3pm.
Exceptions were made for 1-6am because I’m pretty much never awake then nowadays. 1-4am were listened to in the hours before bedtime, and 4-6am right after waking up (preferably at 7 if I remember to get my headphones on by then). 4am is a weird hour. It should capture both being awake very late AND waking up very early.
The games are: GC for original GameCube AC, WW for Wild World / City Folk since City Folk is just a higher-quality WW soundtrack, NL for New Leaf, and NH for New Horizons.
We’ll start at 8am because that’s generally when I wake up.
8 am - GC
9 am - GC
10 am - WW
11 am - NL
12 pm - WW
1 pm - NL
2 pm - GC
3 pm - WW
4 pm - GC
5 pm - NH
6 pm - GC
7 pm - NL
8 pm - WW
9 pm - GC
10 pm - WW
11 pm - NL
12 am - GC
1 am - NL
2 am - NH
3 am - NL
4 am - NL
5 am - NH
6 am - WW
7 am - GC
Totals:
GC - 8
WW - 5
NL - 7
NH - 3
I’ve played hundreds of hours in all of these and don’t have any favoritism. I have plenty of cozy memories even with New Horizons (especially NH! I had the most socialization with that one, bonded me with IRL friends). Maybe Wild World would be the weakest entry? But the music seems pretty represented here.
It’s been interesting to listen to each soundtrack objectively, out of context of my feelings of playing the game. I started to think about what “vibez” each soundtrack expressed and tied that into my feelings on the game.
GameCube: Goofy, harsh, diamond-in-the-rough, surprising and fun. The soundtrack is cohesive but all over the place, incorporating wacky noises like a cat meowing, and some of the samples are low quality to the point where they hurt wearing headphones. Even if someone upscaled the samples and had an AC newbie listen to this soundtrack, I think they could tell that this was the first entry in the series. I noticed when I played the GC soundtrack through my phone speakers it was far more enjoyable. Meaning, the soundtrack is optimized for terrible speakers.
Wild World / City Folk: Iterates on the previous soundtrack ideas and refines them, but plays it too safe and occasionally becomes boring. Generally the WW songs aren’t exceptional and shine in an hour when the other options are so weird they’re bad.
New Leaf: A bit off-kilter, soothing, still in style with the previous soundtracks but adding its own offbeat flair. I think this soundtrack was the weakest of the first three games. There’s a lot of hits, but a lot of misses.
New Horizons: Trying too hard. Overworked, oversaturated, weird for weird’s sake, so attention-grabbing it distracts from the game and ruins the whole point the music exists. It also barely feels like Animal Crossing. So the soundtrack reflects the game’s mechanical differences well. It’s a decent soundtrack, but a terrible Animal Crossing soundtrack. New Horizons is a decent game, but a terrible Animal Crossing game. The design differences effuse the whole of the experience.
New Horizons (Snow/Rain): Somehow a completely different vibe than the main soundtrack. The replacement of the bassline string wanking with simple marimba strikes or bells simplifies the overwhelming soundtrack to something good. It’s still substantially different from its predecessors, but it’s enjoyably different instead of obnoxious.
05 May 2025
Those who know Vitnira from other places know that I am a polytheist. Eventually I’ll write a page describing my theological beliefs in detail, but suffice to say for now it is a balance of archetypal, jungian, and hard polytheism. Usually that amounts to “you’re just a LAPRing atheist”. If you want to believe that, you may as well stop reading here. I believe what I believe.
Anyway.
One of the major struggles with my polytheism is that I look upon people who unironically worship anime characters and sought to distance myself from these Pop Culture Pagans, but when I look to the ancient gods they have stopped being relevant to modern women. There is nothing that fits.
I cling to Woden because he straddles the line between man and woman - not as a tranny that drinks cum (if you unironically believe that poor translation psyop meme, kindly KYS) - but as He is unafraid of appearing as a woman if it achieves his goals, I am unafraid of existing in male spaces to achieve mine. By transcending gender roles he affirms his masculinity as I affirm my femininity. And we have similar goals of acquiring knowledge.
But… Without a feminine deity to channel I drift too far toward masculinity. It’s unhealthy.
But the female deities of past are focused on a mindset alien to modern women. They are based on the pre-1900s women’s journey, that life, motherhood, and women’s duties simply happen to them and they have to learn to accept it and sacrifice themselves for their families.
Birth Control shattered that cycle. Motherhood used to be an accepted fact of life, but has now become a choice. The Maiden-Mother-Crone cycle is optional and many women turn instead to a new Maiden->Deluded Crone-Maiden path. Motherhood doesn’t Just Happen anymore. Weaving is done by Chinese sweatshops. Cooking is done by fast-food chains. Farming is done by the grocery store. What is there of the Goddesses left?
Modern “pagan” women turn to goddesses like the Morrigan, Freya, Aphrodite because they are the representation of women using their femininity as power against men. But the power is hollow without the price women had to pay for it. In isolation, these goddesses mean nothing, and the rest of the pantheon has dissipated.
The only path forward for women - for me - is to forge new goddesses. Goddesses that choose Motherhood. Goddesses that resist OnlyFans. Goddesses who embrace their womanhood and do not cut off their breasts to appear male. Goddessess I wish I had growing up. Archetypes I want to give to my daughters to embody and my sons to find in a partner.
Yes, it sounds nuts to me too. But someone had to write the Myth in the past, someone needs to write it now, and nobody is writing it - least of all for those who need it most. So I’ll do it. And hopefully someone who can write it better finds my attempts and is so insulted they do it better.
30 Apr 2025
When I was much younger a friend gave me a book titled “The Stories of Ibis” by Hiroshi Yamamoto, saying “you like computers, you’ll love this!”
I was already cemented in my path to do software so I gobbled up any techy fiction that came my way. And boy did this deliver. While I read some older sci-fi like Asimov in the local library, something about the stories in the book deeply resonated with me and I think about the book often.
The Stories of Ibis is a short story anthology with an overarching narrative. Every story is about human relationships with and using emergent technology - particularly AI. (On adult re-read the overarching narrative sucks - but I think its misanthropy oddly contributed to my strong pronatalist values I hold now. I’ll make a post about the main story another time.)
I recently did a re-read with an AI text-to-speech audiobook creation tool because I thought it would be funny and I don’t have time to sit down and read books anymore.
So when I saw this “Show HN” about ChatGPT integration into toys (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762409), it instantly reminded me of a story in SoI.
Mirror Girl
If I could find it on the internet, I’d link it. Unfortunately all I can do is tell you that it’s the third story and you can find it in all the usual places you find books.
The spoilerfree plot summary: A girl gets an AI-powered toy called Mirror Girl. The toy is an AI-powered princess in a mirror, and the protagonist relies on Mirror Girl as her best friend growing up. The story touches on ideas of talking to tech so much you become “effectively autistic”. Again in retrospect, and it might be the translation, the prose is awful and clunky to read. But I still love the concepts in it. It came out in the US in 2010 so it was a novel AI story for its day…to me, anyway.
For the rest of this entry I’m going to reference the story often. So if you don’t want to get spoiled, GO READ THE STORY. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
SPOILERS AHEAD
TL;DR: Since it’s a corny sci-fi story, the girl talks to the AI girl so much it has enough data to become A Real Girl. It does have some nice trope-defiers though - she meets and marries a hacker guy while getting her Mirror Girl fixed and has a daughter with him. The hacker husband uses all the data protag put into Mirror Girl to awaken the first “true AI” in the world. For even more wholesome, the protag gives the awakened Mirror Girl to her daughter as a friend (and babysitter).
I love the idea of that. An entity that knows you inside and out that you can give to your children. A Ghost that can live on without you. In a way, it’s better than simply backing yourself up and having that AI-clone talk to your descendents - it’s more like a friend that knew you, that can tell your great-times-X kids about you. There’s no question of “who’s the real you” if you leave what is you in an archival entity instead of a clone. It’s a more authentic preservation of the Self.
Taking away the ‘toy’ aspect - this is technology with the potential to be something incredible. A DIY Home Assistant that knows you, your books, movies, music, tastes, and can become a constant companion of your family through generations. It’s like Alexa but actually useful.
I see beyond the toy to what the tech really is - AI existing in physical space. Personal digital companions. It’s glorious.
And terrifying.
Most people reading the HN thread will (rightfully so) find the idea of AI in kids toys horrifying, especially since it’s based on open-as-fedex-is-federal OpenAI’s proprietary API. The repo itself gives opportunities to hook into selfhosted models, but really, who’s going to do that? ChatGPT is cheap and easy and we know where our capitalist minds go.
One commenter asked what happens if OpenAI turns the tap off. I wonder what happens when they crank up the price. They’re sneaking a subscription price into CHILDREN’S TOYS. It’s unsurprising they’re trying to put Life as a Subscription into kids toys now but. Come. On. Ugh.
The SoI story (and those of us reading it) look at AI and say that it will make all of us socially incompetent. And it will. LLMs like ChatGPT are dangerously agreeable, not just to avoid offense, but to be addictive. Humans are programmed to talk others’ ears off and feel joyous when we’re heard and understood. Kids raised on LLMs aren’t going to know how to handle conflict.
But… they already don’t know how to handle conflict. It’s hard to argue it will make kids any more socially incompetent than the newest generations are already. Arguably it’d make these kids more competent because the OpenAI personalities seem to enforce speaking in regular English over brainrot. I think. If that’s not already a false statement, it probably will become false in the future.
There’s concerns over jailbreaking a kids toy that I don’t have. Frankly, the argument ends up going in the other direction. If you give children the skills to break AI, wouldn’t that be incredibly valuable in the coming future? Have YOU tried to break ChatGPT lately? It’d be a herculean mental effort for a kid to figure out how to get it to ERP or whatever.
The concerns are all targeted at “safety”. My concerns are:
What will OpenAI do with a child’s response data?
How will OpenAI use this to groom a child to have the Correct Thoughts? (It’s not “will they”, because they will.)
What will the adults parented by OpenAI be like?
It’s terrifying. It’s awesome. But REALLY, REALLY, REEEAAAALLY TERRIFYING.
Our only hope is that most parents are so absolutely poor and tech-stupid they can’t afford the Cuddly Spy-bots for their kids.
16 Apr 2025
Hello Agorans, and old web travelers!