MGS2 parody on LLMs, and a tangent on media archival
Someone made a MGS2 codec parody that’s… actually on point. I like to think this is what Kojima would have written himself in the current climate. The tinfoil hat seems more reasonable every single day.
Also, life imitates art:
Tangentially related, I’m trying to get into the habit of archiving every bit of online media that I like, because there are 2 things I’ve learned in the past year:
You can’t just assume that Someone Else (tm) has archived something you like anymore.
It’s never been a sound strategy, but I feel that pieces of media get lost more easily these last few years. Cases in point: any Vietnamese-speaking online person would likely have heard about the infamous hot-sauce-on-cơm-tấm ad, or the ridiculously sloppy AI-generated propaganda music video, both of which got deleted promptly after their respective online backlashes, and to this day I haven’t managed to find their original videos anywhere. All that’s left is heaps of content-vulture articles featuring lazily censored screenshots, or heavily edited TikTok-style clips - lame! If you’re somehow in possession of these clips, please do the Vietnamese internet community a favor and set them free.
Update: I did some digging and turns out Mực Tím, of all places, still proudly hosts the original Kiếp sau MV in all of its 1080p glory lmao. Tuoitre remains one of the increasing few outlets that still do actual journalism sometimes. I’ve mirrored it here just in case:
Apparently, you can Remove Something From The Internet
… if you have the right connections. I followed the #DropKiwiFarms saga closely in the last few years, not because I’m a supporter of either side, but because it’s a fascinating real life case study: Assuming you’re a universally hated website but still operating within the confines of the law (according to kiwifarms’ owner anyway), can a sufficiently pissed off party kick you off the internet? So far the answer seems to be No, but not without lots of effort. Nevertheless, an interesting side effect came about: the dropkiwifarms folks managed to convince Archive.org to wipe kiwifarms off their archives. I used to consider Archive.org a somewhat reliable historian, but this whole spat set a clear precedent: they can, and have, deleted data from their archive, no matter what they advertise otherwise.
So again:
You cannot rely on someone else to archive internet content for you. Period.
Archive.org, archive.is, whatever, doesn’t matter, they’re all Other People’s Computers, where Other People (read: Not You) can decide to delete, or worse, alter, whatever, whenever. If you see something on the internet and want to get back to it in the future, archive it yourself.
Boy was that a tangent!