I sailed a tall ship between Shetland and Norway.
We zig zagged between oil rigs.
I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once.
It was awesome.
The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
111–120 of 151 posts
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very presumptuous for you to be telling me what _I_ admire. I get to make that choice. I admire feats of engineering. I've toured facilities that pump carbon out of the ground, I've toured facilities that capture carbon and pump it into the ground. They're both impressive in their own right, and it's the same skillsets and technologies required to build both.
I didn't pick the analogy here friend. lathe : gun :: _____ : oil drilling platform, you put your own words in there if you want. Regardless I'm within my own rights to tell you that what you admire is bad and your admiration of it is obscene.
I did pick my own words. "Feats of engineering". You are well withing your rights to tell me whatever you want sure, I'm also within mine to tell you what your saying doesn't make sense.
Appreciating the field of engineering isn't "bad" or "obscene" just because some instances of engineering lead to real negative consequences. That's a descent into the exact "society has parts that are bad, yet you participate" logic you were originally clowning on.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't know why you're being downvoted, it's obvious you are right. "AI art" is a style transfer and NLP tool. It doesn't exactly produce visual work with meaning, other than by accident.
It also happens with human artists. Artists are trained in things like perspective, shadows, etc... They often devote a good amount of time drawing people right maybe, study basic principles like mass distribution, but they don't know everything about the underlying principles. For example, I have a painting of a harbor with a few sailboats, it looks great until you realize that sails take the wind from different dir…
It happens with human artists that don't bother understanding the things they draw. What is just a way of saying that yes, human can emulate those NLP¹ AIs, but we can choose not to. (And no, it doesn't take a strong focus on realism. Our world has all kinds of mechanics that most people understand.)
1 - We do need a name for this characteristic, because NPL AI is anything that talks with humans
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could read this as "you can't say anything bad about the industrial complex because you participate in it", though I think that is pretty obviously bad faith. A more charitable interpretation I would take is "whatever misgivings you have about large scale industrial practices, it's important to remember that they also massively benefit society and are in some cases necessary." Pointing out the flaws is great, vil…
I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people. There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been…
The machinery looks the same regardless of the economic system. (I suppose a Soviet oil rig might have looked a little different, but basically the same thing)
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#115I sailed a tall ship between Shetland and Norway. We zig zagged between oil rigs. I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once. It was awesome.
Was that part of some program?
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people. There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been…
Great switch to "for profit" from the general " You do realize that petroleum is not just for fuel but plays a major part in every part of our lives? E.g. fertilizers. This kind of zero-order thinking without thinking of higher-order effects is what lead to this: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la... Real life is not Captain Planet (the cartoon) where everything is as binary as you point out…
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Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?
On an even more fundamentally ridiculous level too. The people being (Alanis Morissette) "ironic" here have absolutely no choice in the matter of literally being born. For those unfamiliar it's this comic that was simplified to the final panel [0]. It's a great send up of a whole arm of bad faith debate tactics that tries to invalidate any criticism of topic X because the person benefits from it. [0] https://i.kym-cd…
Water is very destructive and yet, where would be be without it. Same goes for oil and gas.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#118At a local coffee shop they had paintings for sale of stormy ocean scenes with oil rigs in the mist. I still regret not buying one (it was pretty reasonably priced)
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#119I sailed a tall ship between Shetland and Norway. We zig zagged between oil rigs. I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once. It was awesome.
What a tremendous experience! Which ship?
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#120I agree it is beautiful, but in a strange way. Most construction results in familiar forms. Arbitrary choices are few because the problem has been sufficiently solved. I am floored by the diversity in the forms here. I am not all that thrilled with the aesthetic by itself.
I agree. When I first landed from the link, I thought, "Where's the beauty?" As I scrolled, like you, I found I was becoming impressed with the diversity. (Norway seems to be trying to win some kind of prize that has not been created yet.) More scrolling and I'm thinking, "I would love to 3D model these and resin-print kits so that you can build them, paint them and (?)... display them off the coast of your model rai…
Like the Kowloon city, the form of these objects was evolved out of necessity, step by step. One requirement after another.