u/Xefjord

I am a big language nerd, and I have wanted to learn German for a while for ancestral reasons, but unlike Japanese / Chinese, where I started learning those languages after having a lot of cultural media I already enjoyed and engaged with from those countries, I don't know a whole lot about what kind of German cultural media exists out there.

I know Germany is very big on simulator games (which I already enjoy myself), I also got the Gothic 1 remake, but I am not sure what other video games may be well known in Germany from Germany.

I am also a fan of TV shows, books, comics, etc. I have stuff like Cdrama and Manga for my other two languages I have spent time on, but I am not sure what kind of books, shows, etc are considered popular in Germany. The only things I know about are like "Grimm's Fairy Tales" and "The Neverending Story."

So I would be interested to hear from Germans what they grew up enjoying from Germany on the cultural media side, what is popular nowadays (from Germany), and any and all other recommendations that support German that you feel encapsulate some level of German culture. Danke!

Hi guys, I am an old Master level player that took a long hiatus from Geoguessr and came back after many years. I have been able to build back up to Master level fairly quickly, but the map difference between Master Level and Gold is kind of crazy. I rarely if ever get any signs of civilization and frequently feel like I am playing "SoilGuessr" and "TreeGuessr" more so than actual Geoguessr. Its made doubly worse that I normally play No Move.

Is this the experience for anyone else? Or am I just unlucky? Why is it so important for there to be different maps for different ranks? It feels the maps are trying to promote different skillsets, which I am not really fond of, I just want normal variety.

I remember before I could draw on the picture what parts I wanted the image to regenerate, but now it seems my only option is to leave "Comments" on the picture, but without actually drawing on it. Is the old drawing function depreciated? Or is there conditions I am unaware of that determine which gets used when?

I had a song I liked the sound of, but that I couldn't figure out how to recreate similar sounds to (It had no style prompt either, Studio song). I didn't really intend to make a new cover of it, as I generally try to keep as much of the original in-tact when I do covers, but I couldn't figure out a way to make similar sounds from just prompting alone. So I had the the idea of doing a cover, then using the inspiration feature of those covers to teach Suno how to recreate the genre.

Immediately after doing it, I felt a little icky, because I realized it may copy some melodies (especially if you set the audio reference slider pretty high), and it doesn't seem to give any credit to the original tracks I pulled influence from. Now I am wondering if this was an unintended use case of the inspiration feature, and if using it this way is unethical, even if I try to make the song pretty different from the original in melody and lyrics?

What do you all think?

Was generating a pop song, and randomly one generation was really different and unique compared to all the other ones with the same prompt. I instantly fell in love with it, until I found one single line duplicated erroneously. The rest of the song is great, and I can't get it to generate another song exactly like it, but that one line is now a tremendous headache, because I don't have any tools to actually fix it.

Replace section pretty much always changes the genre and melody quite dramatically, making it utterly jarring to add into the song.
I tried doing an Inspiration but while it keeps the melody it goes back largely to the same kind of generations the prompt was making previously.
I can't just cut that line out, because they used that line to climax the song and it makes it very difficult to resolve.
Remaster won't remove the line.
Covering the song seems to have tremendous amounts of glitches if I go over 50% audio influence, but it changes the song quite a lot if I go below 50%.

I am sad because this song is definitely the best of the generations, but this error is pretty egregious to keep in. But if its not fixable my only option is to just abandon this great song and keep rolling the dice for stuff that sounds totally different. When I have already burned this many credits and put effort into the lyrics I don't want to abandon the song entirely, but I doubt I will be as satisfied with any other generation when I am already attached to how that flawed one turned out.

Anyone else encounter similar situations before?

So to be specific, I am testing a new resource in development for Hong Kong Cantonese, and I noticed that in some instances they teach straight up English words to use in sentences.

I am not talking about Loanwords like 巴士 (baa1 si2), 士多啤梨 (si1 do1 bei1 lei6), or 波 (bo1). Which have a way to be written in Chinese characters.

But rather cases of directly taking English words and throwing them into Cantonese sentences:

我同我friend鍾意食炒飯.

我日日朝早做gym.

To my understanding these are common colloquial terms used by young people, but they both can't really be written in Chinese Characters very well, and there is also native terms readily available for both. My main concern is that they teach these terms exclusively. Like they do not ever teach you a Chinese character way to say 做gym in the resource.

While I think it can be good to know about frequently used English colloquial terms, something just rubs me the wrong way about not having Chinese character vocab alternatives at all. And wonders if the course is veering into "too colloquial." Again teaching both is fine, but if they are only going to teach one, is 做gym the best choice?

I am not a Hong Kong native or Cantonese speaker though, just a learner, so maybe this doesn't bother other people like it does me? What are your guys thoughts?

As someone pro-AI I feel like this ends up being the argument that bothers me most.

I have been engaging with AI art tools for a year or so now, and just got into AI music very recently. I don't commercialize anything, I just do it for my own personal creative projects that I make for myself or friends. In the process I have encountered a few friends (and plenty of people on the internet) that are of course staunchly against any AI "art." The most powerful arguments I have seen are the ones of theft, and while I disagree with the arguments about "art" needs to be made through struggle and honed skills, I do at least understand them.

But I have in many instances encountered people using these phrases about AI being soulless and totally devoid of any human creativity. In some instances it seems like a final emotional fallback if other logical arguments don't work. But everything about this argument seems very ignorant of the process of making things with AI, if not outright maliciously prejudiced.

To me, human creativity is having something in your mind, and wanting to express your unique experience or vision through some form of art. I do think there is something to be said about the power of friction in art, the difference between what you want to make, and what you can make, that forces you to either learn how to better your craft, or figure out creative solutions to bridge the gap. To me this is part of the essence of thinking artistically.

Most importantly, I think many good artists will always feel like more could be done to their work. And it's very difficult to feel satisfied that a work is truly done until we just practically have to tell ourselves that it's good enough and any further work is just being done in circles or beyond your current capability.

For people that have a creative vision, AI is just as much a tool as a camera is. It's an easier tool than drawing by hand, and I definitely have way more awe and admiration for people that are really good at manual works of art. But true artists will frequently encounter that friction listed above, if they are legitimately trying to use a tool creatively to make something unique.

But every time I see my super anti AI friends half heartedly make something with AI, from the get go, they have zero desire to actually try to make something unique with AI, much less something uniquely from their vision. They just ask it to make something technically difficult with a very simple prompt, then are either amazed with the ease it makes something technically difficult, or are aghast at all the artistic mistakes and genericness of their one sentence prompt and label it "soulless." But at no point did they ever actually try to engage with AI art "creatively" and it's no surprise that if they never try to engage with AI tools creatively, they will both never encounter that friction that engaging in Art creates, nor will they get any results that feel artistically fulfilling.

But they simply don't care, whether they don't want the AI to steal their unique style and thus don't want to input anything creatively real, or they just want to convince themselves that all AI is bad so they purposefully tarnish their own efforts to make anything good to reaffirm AI can only make slop.

Yet for the people that I see use AI in my social circle, that finally have an outlet for art they never had before, the stuff I see them make is incredibly creative, normally takes a lot of effort and iterations from their side, and is almost always uniquely identifiable as having something tied to their experiences or history. I can tell that their abilities are limited because they know little about art, but they are rarely satisfied with the first piece generated and are constantly working with and against the AI to get closer to the vision in their head.

And especially in my case, it has pushed me to learn more about actual art and actually draw more or learn more about music. I try to generate something and no matter how I word it, it just doesn't understand me, so I eventually get frustrated enough to open MS paint and sketch the whole thing myself to use as reference. Or a line in a song never gets sung with the notes I want, and just spinning the slot machine is burning credits and wasting time to fix a single line, so then I end up opening a piano app to try to find the note progression that does what I want.

I think so many anti AI folks are convinced that it's impossible to have any meaningful human input for AI generated stuff, but it feels like they just never try to do anything creative with it or try to understand the experience and vision behind why people may use it. Nothing AI would exist without a human desiring to express something with it. The main difference is just is it being used to make low effort products, or is it being used by a human trying to share a creative vision. That distinction is meaningful, but lost when we just throw all AI into the soulless anti-human creativity camp.

We all know the argument that AI is a threat to replacing artists. But as someone that dabbles with AI and that cares a lot about trying to create specific details. It often feels like I am handicapped as a normie with little knowledge of art, in ways that the AI can't really fix.

I have a hypothesis, although none of my artist friends like AI enough to even consider it, but it essentially goes like this:

Take an artist's already created work, show it both to the original artist and to a non-artist normie. Without using any reference images, ask both parties to create the most detailed prompt they can to accurately recreate that original image.

I am willing to bet that the original artist is going to get exceptionally close, whereas the normie non artist will greatly struggle. Especially for more unique, dynamic, or detailed works.

Reference images have made it pretty easy for normies to copy styles and make up for gaps in their knowledge and creativity, but when people try to make original styles or works with AI, unless they have the vocabulary, knowledge, and experience to do so with normal art. It seems it would be very difficult to put a precise vision to paper. You can get something that looks nicer than a MS paint drawing sure, but the level of human intention does show and make the difference between something looking uncanny valley / obviously AI, vs something looking actually human made.

I personally like AI, but as someone that appreciates expression and art, it's difficult to actually express myself fully and properly with my limited art knowledge and vocabulary, and I think that actual artists will always be in the best place to actually make something decent with AI instead of just being totally replaced by non-artists.