[apricops]

AoE4 got done so dirty. At its core is literally the best RTS game in decades, I could write an essay about how it got around the Starcraft Problem (and probably will knowing me) but that was only after shaking off a buggy release. the ‘variants’ thing was a cool idea: take an existing civ and explore new space in their design. The Ayyubids are like the perfect example of what a variant faction could be: take the “one big pool of landmark bonuses that you choose from each age” from the Abbasids but for a tempo-based faction rather than a late-game one, and there’s some historical continuity so the idea just makes intuitive sense. But it seems clear to me that the higher-ups at Microsoft said “so variants are a way to make new playable factions without having to design as many new assets? Cool, you’re only doing that from now on.’ The newest base civs are still Byzantines and Japanese from the very first expansion back in 2023. They’ve been teasing ‘the Vikings’ for a while now - which, given AoE4’s commitment to more historical accuracy might be ‘the Danes’ or ‘the Scandinavians’ - and I’m crossing my fingers that they’re just releasing what they can in between major expansions because hey, it was a long time from the base game to the Sultans Ascend in 2023, which -

okay, this is my other pet hypothesis about AoE4 development. The initial release was kinda buggy and barebones. A year later we get the ‘free anniversary update’ which includes the Ottomans and Malians. Awesome! Free stuff! Goodwill is won amongst the fans! The Sultans Ascend comes out a year later, and we get:

the Ayyubids. Perfectly on-brand.

the Byzantines and the Order of the Dragon. Fair enough, if you’re going to focus on the west Asian sultanates, you can include their opponents.

Jeanne d’Arc and Zhu Xi? Well, it was their first expansion, they were trying some new stuff

The Japanese? Look I’m not gonna say no to more content but I for one have never heard of the sultanate of Japan.

It’s an odd list, given the title, isn’t it? It almost seems like *this* was where they had originally planned to release the Ottomans and the Malians - you know, the actual historically-Muslim empires that come to mind when I think of sultans ascending - but they had to push stuff out of the door early to get some goodwill back and their schedule has been thrown off ever since. Especially since the next major expansion was Dynasties of the east - you know, the perfect place to debut Japan and Zhu Xi’s Legacy. And that’s why all of the major expansions have felt so weird: it’s all been out of sync due to 1. those early civs being pushed out ahead of schedule for the ‘anniversary update’ and 2. higher-ups using ‘variant civs’ to fill in the gaps more cheaply.

What I hope this means is that later 2026 will be a ‘return to form’ for AoE4 instead of just tinkering, so I’m crossing my fingers.

[apricops]

that is not a dumb question at all because 'starcraft problem' is something I coined in this post and not, like, an established term or anything.

Anyway, in most genres there's been a long, slow process of evolution and refinement: not just people trying out different things within the genre but developers gaining more experience and learning lessons from past releases, technology improving and allowing for more complex mechanics. Y'know, Growth. But for that to happen you need different releases from different publishers competing within the genre. In the late nineties, you had that: you had Warcraft as the standard-setter, Age of Empires as the one with a more complex economy and more 'symmetric' factions with smaller differences, and Command and Conquer as the one that had Evil Soviet Tim Curry shouting "SPAAAACE!"

Then Starcraft came out (or rather, the Brood War expansion) and swallowed up the whole genre like a black hole. Starcraft could not be dethroned. When Age of Empires 3 came out it was a multimillion-selling award-winning game-of-the-year material and it didn't even scratch Starcraft's paint job. When Starcraft 2 finally came out, we learned that even Starcraft couldn't beat Starcraft.

Which is kind of a problem for the genre, not just for the obvious reasons but also because Starcraft is... not the best game to set the template for the RTS genre. Much of its depth comes from late-nineties jank and using minor bugs to your advantage and all sorts of other esoteric things that are hard to learn, and so the RTS genre gained a reputation for having a really high barrier to entry, the whole "don't bother playing if you don't have 400 APM and haven't memorized several novels of Secret Tech" stereotype.

So when Starcraft finally started to peter out, you had a situation where there was a genre that hadn't seen much innovation in literal decades and had a ton of nostalgic appeal (think of how many people recognize "Wololo" from Age of Empires) but also the genre that everyone looks at and says "no thanks I'm not hardcore enough for that." Which is why the genre left its mark in other ways: RTS influence is obvious in MOBA games like League and DoTA but also in "RTS-lite" games like Thronefall or Diplomacy is Not an Option.

[marypsue]

Night Watch is one of Sir Terry’s most hopeless novels - and, by the same token, because of the same things, one of his most hopeful.

It’s a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because there’s really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. It’s about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives don’t count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.

It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.

In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and there’s no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And it’s all in vain.

Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. It’s something that we tend to bring up when we’re talking about how amazing he is, how much he’s overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because it’s fundamental.

Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keel’s garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.

Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.

Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.

But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he can’t believe it will make any difference. And it doesn’t, in the end.

Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.

And that’s where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.

The Disc turns on the ‘except’. Always has. Always will.

[was-once-somewhere-else]

The hope across the whole arc of Discworld is that things can, if good people try very, very hard, go from extremely awful to only very awful, and that’s worth it.

[marypsue]

Overall, the Discworld series is very hopeful about the grand scheme of things and the effect people, no matter how small, can have on it. But Night Watch is not about that. Night Watch is about what happens when ‘things’ don’t get better. When the grand scheme of things isn’t impacted at all, either way, by the actions of individual people. Night Watch is about what happens when the hope runs out. When the ‘worth it’ runs out. When all that’s left to do is save what little you can, because you can.

That’s why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.

And when that happens, all that matters is what we do.

[saja-star]

a phrase that kinda bothers me when talking about women's historical roles in europe is "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear it so often, those exact words in the same order even. and once you learn a little more you realize that the massive gaping hole in that list is fiberwork. im not an expert and have no hard numbers, but i wouldnt be surprised if fiberwork took up nearly as much time as the other three tasks combined, so it's not a trivial omission.

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

i also think that this just micharacterizes the role of women's work in livelihoods? cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children are all sisyphean tasks that have to be repeated the next day. these are important, but not the whole picture. when we include all kinds of fiberwork—and other things, such as making candles or soap—women's work looks much more like manufacturing, a sphere we now associate more with men's work. i feel like women's connection to making and craftsmanship is often elided.

[queeranarchism]

And part of 'cooking' was brewing, pickling, preserving, fermenting..

Also memory-holed is how incredibly time-consuming laundry was and how much of it relied on physical strength.

[beatrice-otter]

Using a drop spindle to spin fiber into thread (which was the only way to spin thread until the spinning wheel made it to Europe in the 13th Century), and a warp-weighted loom to weave cloth, it takes a long time to turn fiber into finished items. (And even before you start spinning, you have to prepare the fibers, which is additional labor.) For an experienced adult, probably somewhere around 108 hours per square yard of fabric.

A simple dress or robe that covers an adult from shoulders to mid-calf will usually take about two yards of fabric.

Bret Devereaux lays this out if you're interested in looking deeper at the numbers: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivd-spinning-plates/

[apricops]

also - however much effort you thought it took to “cook and clean” back then, it took way more than you thought. “Cleaning” clothes meant mending them by hand before taking them to the river, scrubbing them (with soap you made by hand), and hauling a heavy basket of wet clothes back to your home to wring and beat them dry. “Cooking” meant carrying your grain to the mill, carrying the flour back, sifting it, kneading dough by hand, and baking it, and that was just the bread. Then it’s back to the river (or well or cistern or whatever your water source was) to haul more heavy buckets of water before plucking birds, gutting fish, and harvesting vegetables from the garden, and only now can you actually start doing what we think of as “cooking.” With an open fire that you have to tend while cooking. All of this work had to be done every single day On top of childcare and the massive workload of spinning textiles. And any seasonal work like pickling or preserving fruits and vegetables. And any communal village tasks like rope making or construction. You know those memes that say “a peasant had x many holidays?” A “holiday” just meant that your family didn’t have to do free labor for your lord on top of everything I just mentioned. Medieval women were EXTREMELY busy with tasks that were often physically demanding and juggling multiple tasks at once all day every day.

Being a peasant sucked. It was really really really bad. Everyone say “thank you industrial revolution”

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

It’s been like a decade since I’ve read Worm fully so maybe I’ve just forgotten it but I don’t think the Number man is ever referred to as an accountant or shown doing accounting

[alkatyn]

tbh I suspect most people online just use "accountant" to mean "boring money numbers guy"

irl accountants are mostly for tax and compliance which I imagine supervillains aren't concerned with

[alkatyn]

And lo they walked away from Omelas and visited the other cities of the great plains. And in them they found not one starving wretched child, but dozens, not buried in a deep dark hole but begging in the streets, crying in slums, or silent in the mortuaries. They asked the people of those cities what great magic they were casting, because surely with the suffering of so many they must have bought wonders even greater than the silver towers of Omelas? Where were their great festivals where millions danced in joy? Their great academies of magic and science? Their wise and judicious rulers dispensing justice and charity throughout the land?

But the people of the cities looked on them with scorn and confusion. This was no act of unnatural blasphemous magic, no craft of men. The poor starved, the sick died, that was the way of the world, the will of the Gods. Who were these strangers from this distant city to question that? They who were complicit in their own evil, which was after all just as great?

And, those who had walked from Omelas, they walked on.

[luminousalicorn]

Inkhaven Retrospective

I have avoided Inkhaven meta so far but now it's the last day and I feel like it.

The first Inkhaven, last fall, I was technically a writing advisor but didn't find many opportunities to show up and hang out, and certainly didn't schedule them in advance such that people could plan around me.  I wound up with my main contribution being remote critique of one specific blogger's work which consisted substantially of begging him to use the Oxford comma.  This time I showed up on campus more and did more things and, in particular, I joined the cohort in publishing a post every day.  Solidarity?  Experimentation?  The desire to go "it's not that hard you guys" if anyone ever asked me, so that I could come off like a smug jerk, in case that ever seemed desirable?  At any rate, my "blog bunnies" file continues to have a bunch of things in it, and the people who follow me for pretty pictures don't seem to have gotten mad that I did all this nonfiction prose and put it on my Tumblr.  Maybe I will continue to occasionally poast.

I like being on the Lighthaven campus a lot qua physical space and free cocoa, as long as no one has released a dog into the environment, and it's not normally open to random drop-ins; Inkhavens are nice for that reason.  But the ostensible point of this exercise wasn't to give me a cool place to loiter and eat complimentary takeout and get away from my kids.  It wasn't even to give me a place to write.  It was to give the Inkhaven cohort a place to write.  How'd they do?

People I Was Already Fully Aware Of:

I am glad to again have a way to stalk the output of an old pal who I first met back in 2010.  He was for a while one of the funnest people on Twitter but like all sane individuals ultimately abandoned it.  I'm not sure the 500 words a day format is great for him - some of the posts smell padded and would have been fine if they weighed in at, like, 275 - but I did particularly enjoy Thought Experiments Should Do One Thing as a nicely linkable pointer to a point, and also his fiction offerings (here's the less meta one) amused me.

I feel like I have followed Katja at least three or four times and she keeps moving.  Hold still!  I'm trying to read your blog posts, dangit, and my RSS reader is not that smart and I rely on it to remember what I'm trying to read!  I like to describe Katja as a friendly and sincerely confused alien, possibly a member of the same extraterrestrial species as Robin Hanson but a less disconcerting example.  I enjoy the defamiliarization she brings to her writing and, hand in hand therewith, the lilting precision of her prose: nothing actually wrong or even awkward in how she chooses and places her words but all of it plainly not how I would do it.

I was also already aware that Sammy existed.  I will probably not follow his blog outright - I have too much of a completionist streak, and I would wind up reading gaming articles that are not really intended for me, a person of limited gaming enthusiasm.  But I will be Vaguely Aware Of It and know how to find it if somebody says something like "oh did you see Sammy's post about this" without having to ask them for a link, and also he gave me a dance lesson and he's invited to my next LARP and I'm on his Discord now.

New-To-Me Names To Watch:

Aaron Gertler was not previously on my radar at all, but when I - killing time by reading random Inkhaven articles - encountered his absolutely lovely post about yours truly, I was certainly tickled; flattery will get you everywhere.  In this case "everywhere" is my Discord server and also over to my house for dinner and my RSS feed.  (In the course of this process I learned that he's a college friend of one of my housemates, and also a fifth grade friend of another friend, so possibly my encountering him eventually was overdetermined, but in fact I learned he existed via Inkhaven.)

Viv writes really funny posts (for example, her retrospective is funnier than this one) and was also one of the handful of people who would fetch up near me and chat when I appeared on campus.  When asked to write up a profile for myself on the Inkhaven portal website I said among other things that I was probably the only person who'd be on campus and seven months pregnant, but I was wrong, we are the same amount of pregnant and this creates an unbreakable bond forever maybe.  Like our babies have to become blood brothers or something like that.  

I liked some of Natalie Cargill's posts but unfortunately her dog was rude to me and this means we can never truly be friends.  Alas.

I am only once in a while in the mood for history posts but I want Lost Futures to be friends with As Our Days (of Failing To Use The Oxford Comma fame).

Special Mentions:

A handful of people sought me out for feedback on their writing but the only person who did it twice was Nancy, once on a post for her nonfiction Substack and once on fiction.

Thank you to Aaron, conq, and @gazemazeisdead for assaying glowfic with me when I ran an Inkhaven glowfic workshop, even though none of them stuck with it (such is the way of glowfic).

If you were not mentioned:

My median opinion on an unmentioned Inkhaven resident from this cohort is roughly as follows: I read 1-4 of your posts based on which ones had the most accessible and interesting titles, biased away from ones that said they were part of a series or didn't have a preview that showed up properly on the Inkhaven portal because I'm lazy.  I liked one or two of them pretty well but they did not instill in me a strong expectation that reading more semirandomly selected posts of yours would be particularly valuable, especially after I clicked on the one that turned out to be in poor taste (what were you thinking?  no, don't answer that, I know, it was nearly midnight and you were in a hurry).  I might recognize your name if I encounter it later but its impact on the valence of my priors about whatever you're up to at that point will be negligible. But if you want to talk to me, you still can, even if you've now passed up the most obvious opportunity to do so.

[localxenospores]

If you're a longtime Spore enjoyer like myself, I'm sure you've seen these videos or others like them, where invisible limbs (either with vanilla glitches or from the Dark Injection mod) are utilized to make creatures that float above the ground, giving them the illusion that they're flying (or swimming).

But the most well-known, "tried and true" method has always felt a bit...

... janky.

This is achieved by attaching a single invisible limb to the front of the creature, which causes it to walk by hopping on that invisible leg. The single-legged walk cycle gives the appearance that the creature is flapping itself up and down, either flying with its wings or swimming by propelling its tail. The length and angle of the leg changes the stride, and in turn changes the speed of the "flight".

However, I'm not satisfied with my dragon being so floppy. It might work fine for some creatures, but the exaggerated animation is simply too exaggerated for my tastes.

So I've done some experimenting. The method I came up with a couple years ago isn't too different, but it has three feet instead of one.

This smoother motion is definitely an improvement, and it's what I use for most of my floaty creatures. Yet, I still wasn't satisfied with this dragon's flight. The tail still feels a bit too floppy, and it looks like it's leading with its chest rather than flying with its wings, as if it's being dragged along by something.

This design proved to be a winner! The wings look more like they're providing powered flight, and the floppiness level of the rear is more appropriate. The legs are a bit cumbersome, but since they're invisible limbs, they won't render when the creature is encountered in-game.

But as I was composing this post, I thought to myself...

can I make the wings truly flap?

The answer is yes, it can be done!

With another pair of invisible legs attached at the elbow joint of the wings, each with three feet, this dragon has truly taken flight! It certainly isn't perfect, but considering the capabilities and limits of Spore, I'd say it's pretty damn good.

The limb that creates the wing, the one which these new invisible legs are attached to, isn't just cosmetic--it's a fully functional wing limb from the Unshackled mod (check out my review of the mod here!). The wing limb provides the creature with the glide ability, complete with animation. Miraculously, even with these invisible legs attached, the wing limb animates exactly as it should. I really did not expect that.

So there you have it: a dragon in Spore that is fully capable of flight, both in animation and ability.

[titleknown]

...I will say, it's deeply fascinating that the Spore community has basically re-created the sort of techniques practical effects folks would use for puppetry with wire removal/green-screen due to the limitations of their medium.

[queenlua]

on participatory art:

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.

In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.

Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.

So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.

But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!

It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)

It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?

Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.

Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.

Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:

“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”

So it goes with these sonatas, too.

[phaeton-flier]

Anyhow that Hogfather quote is dumb, learn what "socially constructed" means and you won't be confused what a lie actually is.

Now, in-universe those lines are being said by the anthropomorphic personification of Death, who regularly moves the souls of humans to the afterlife, so the difference between abstractions and concrete things is a little shakier.

But this isn't just a character saying it, it's Terry Pratchett delivering a moral to the fable, and that's sillier. In the real world while there are no atoms of Justice or whatever there are also no irreducible atoms of Terry Pratchett, just a bunch of protons and neutrons and electrons in certain configuration. Abstractions are perfectly valid to believe in.

[phaeton-flier]

specifically this one:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" MY POINT EXACTLY.”

[tanadrin]

the point of the scene isn't that things which are socially constructed are literally lies; i don't think anybody who reads terry pratchett comes away with the opinion he does not believe in justice or mercy. and of course part of the gag of Death as a character is that he frequently fails to understand humans, despite his sympathy for them; humans are alien to him even as he tries to learn about them--the difference between him and the Auditors is that he tries.

so i think "learn what 'socially constructed' means" misses both the diegetic and extradiegetic significance of this passage, which is not just straightforwardly tacking a moral lesson onto the rest of the novel (something pratchett generally does not do!). it's a character moment about Death, and about Susan (who is contesting the characterization of these concepts as "lies"), and it invites the reader to consider why despite the lack of a truth or justice particle we care about such concepts--in good Shklovskian fashion, the word "lie" arrests our attention and forces us to confront the nature of abstract ideas like this, where simply supplying a piece of standard jargon like "socially constructed" would not.

terry pratchett is not writing Susan Sto Helit and the Methods of Sociological Analysis; he can have his anthropomorphic personification talk about socially constructed concepts in an interesting way (and in a way which betrays said personification's failure to totally understand humans) without directly citing the relevant literature. i think you are being a little overly literal-minded here?

[phaeton-flier]

I think you are ignoring the actual argument in the text, alongside the fact that the actual human character isn't adding any of the complex nuanced details you're suggesting Pratchett is implying.

I think Pratchett the author means this as a moral about needing to believe in the little lies like Santa Claus (The Hogfather), because the whole book was about how important believing in Santa Claus is. There's a bunch of scenes of people getting Hogswatch presents and having hope instead of dying in a ditch. It's very on theme for the rest of the book!

I don't think he's doing some careful read between the lines thing; Pratchett is generally a face-up sort of writer whose themes and meanings are clear in the text, in my experience.

[tanadrin]

I don’t think he’s being mysterious about the themes, I just think your reading is at odds with how most people read that passage—pratchett definitely knows what a social construct is, but he is at bottom a humorist and in that mode operates with a certain wry distance to his subjects. So he’s having a character refer to social constructs as “lies” to provoke the same reaction in the reader as Susan has, to startle and defamiliarize. Like, you don’t seriously think terry pratchett actually believes justice is a lie on par with the existence of Santa Claus, do you? In Thief of Time he has the Auditors disassembling paintings looking for what makes them art, and the whole point is that there are immaterial subjects of value that aren’t reducible to molecules of pigment, and the Auditors look foolish by assuming that they are—quite plainly he is as a writer someone on the side of “immaterial concepts are genuinely important and we neglect them at our peril.” But again, as we see in Hogfather and in other books he appears in, Death doesn’t quite get humans, and is often quite literal-minded. That he would describe a social construct as a “lie” as either a misunderstanding or a provocation of Susan isn’t just in keeping with his character, it’s a reading the text practically demands.

Now, the underlying point Death is arguing here—that fantasy and childhood fables are a tool that helps us acquire and helps culture convey weightier concepts that are equally immaterial but socially more important—is one you can argue either way IMO, along with a more general argument about the role of imagination in moral development. But if you conclude from this passage “Terry pratchett thought the idea of justice was a lie and was indistinguishable from a belief in Santa Claus,” I feel like you are reading an entirely different writer. That is the opposite of the point he is making, and if it were the point he was making Hogfather would be an unusually cynical book in a series that is generally quite emphatic about the importance of moral idealism.

[aquilacalvitium]

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

[aquilacalvitium]

Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again

[tanadrin]

To previous anon: Baumol's Cost Disease isn't a thing. It's the Laffer Curve for a new generation of contemptible wannabe policy wonk: every application of it is either flatly incorrect (college professor salaries are frequently cited as an example of cost disease, despite average professor salaries either barely matching or shrinking relative to inflation over the last several decades) or better explained by other things. And at least the Laffer Curve had the virtue of being clearly falsifiable! BCD citers assume it's the skeleton key for understanding post-industrial socio-economic woes while ignoring how weak the evidence for it actually is, and handwaving any evidence against it.

These are guys who walk around thinking it's a major economic crisis that schoolteachers and bus drivers are overpaid. Compared to what? A Bay Area programmer who pulls $500K a year making Google's products slightly worse every update? That's what they think the pinnacle of productive labor is? Christ.

Baumol’s core insight seems indisputable to me: there are some areas you just can’t increase efficiency, like how an orchestra can’t play a symphony any faster by adding members. People may overapply the concept, but it seems pretty solid fundamentally?

[jadagul]

To be fair, Laffer's core insight is also absolutely correct. It's just the parameters people throw on it that are crazy.

(The place where you can clearly see actual Laffer dynamics in real life are on vice taxes. We've raised cigarette taxes much higher than the point of optimal revenue—which is fine, because the point was to get people to stop smoking. Similarly, a lot of carbon tax proposals are aiming for a rate higher than the revenue-maximizing rate.)

But to focus on the listed examples briefly, the problem isn't that teachers are "paid too much"; it's that technology hasn't made them (much) more efficient, so we can't get the same amount of "teaching" out of fewer teachers. And part of this is accidental/pragmatic, in that ed tech so far hasn't really worked.

But also part of it is definition, insofar as there's a daycare aspect. If you demand one teacher per thirty students for six hours each day, no technology can enable you to use fewer teachers.

(My favorite comment on this is that the classic example, as you give, is that it still takes the same number of people to play Beethoven's Fifth that it did when he wrote it. And that is true—if you insist on playing it the way they did when he wrote it. Today I can have Beethoven's Fifth played for me, in my apartment, for like five cents.)

[alkatyn]

I think the important insight of the cost-disease framing is that a) cost of labour is really really important for determining how much things cost and that's often invisible to people. And b) The cost of labour is determined in large part by what other things those labourers could be doing, not that specific job

Like, if you live in a developing country and are paid roughly the salary of a median American, you probably have a maid, can get all your meals at restaurants or delivered, etc. that's not because maids, delivery drivers, waiters and cooks are doing something fundamentally different in America but because they could be doing other things that pay more. And that cascades out to the wider shape of your economy and society. You see the inverse when during Biden Americans got upset that fast food was more expensive, because there was a tight labor market and workers could demand higher pay.

[redstonedust]

the way the internet talks about japan is fascinating i never see any other country get equally treated as both a beautiful cultured utopia and an evil imperialist hellhole. you ever just wanna be like hey guys i think japan might be a country. a normal country with good and bad aspects. has anyone thought of this. could be huge.

[alkatyn]

Commentary on China is pretty similar. Very little relationship to the actual experience of living in the country but a kind of fun house mirror for Americans to project their own country's issues onto. Ironically the odd thing about Japan is people know enough about it to make their wild extrapolations by actually relating to some fact about Japan. Rather than saying "America is capitalist that's good/bad. China is Not Capitalist and that's bad/good, and therefore they must have the opposite of America's policies on healthcare/tech/shipping discourse and that's dystopian/utopian".

[phaeton-flier]

In most Sci Fi, or whatever, you start with the normal universe and then see the alternate one—what if everyone was gender swapped and it was Wilma Shakespeare and Henrietta the 8th. Or what if being Gay was normal and Straight was a despised minority.

But there's always the idea that our universe is the default, you know. It's never "Yeah. I met my alternate self and she was a squid, almost all other universes are squid people, were the weird primate universe."

Better, then, to look around at our own universe and ask: what's different, what seems like it would be odd from a cosmic perspective?

[random-thought-depository]

The big thing that comes to my mind as an observed feature of our universe that seems odd from a cosmic perspective is the Fermi Paradox.

A "we're the odd ones" scenario for that might be that if we could look at a bunch of parallel universe versions of the Milky Way galaxy we'd find that in most of them the Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox. In most of them the galaxy was peopled by the first generation of sapient species to evolve six billion years ago. Compared to both our parallel universe contemporaries (who live in a six billion year old super-civilization that would be very obvious to us by now if it was around us; we'd see the Dyson spheres and artificially managed giant stars and so on), and our parallel universe equivalents (who lived six billion years ago and whose alien life discourse is more like "given plausible assumptions about cosmic heavy element accumulation, terrestrial planet formation, evolution, etc., we are living about when we'd expect the first technological civilizations to develop in our galaxy"), we're having this very strange and eerie experience of being in an old but apparently inexplicably empty galaxy. And it would be more than a little ominous to know that our experience is an outlier this way; that suggests that the apparent emptiness of our galaxy isn't a consequence of some natural default feature of the universe, that it's contingent on some low-probability historical event, and one obvious possibility for how our galaxy can be empty in a way that's contingent on some low-probability historical event is that something with first mover advantage has spent the last six billion years destroying new technological civilizations as they develop.

Well, on the plus side, it's likely that this thing that keeps the stars silent is quite feeble compared to the six billion year old parallel universe galactic super-civilizations we'd have contact with in this scenario! Perhaps a minor police action will make quick work of this terror more ancient than our sun! But then perhaps this is an inter-universal ansible scenario in which parallel universe civilizations can talk to each other but cannot send macroscopic objects or significant amounts of energy to each other, so their ability to help us will be limited... There might be a pretty interesting sci fi novel or three in that premise!

[alkatyn]

Earth having a moon that's roughly the same size in the sky as the sun, enough that eclipses are a thing and we can have the idea of noon and sun duality, rather than the sun just being the most obviously dominant thing in the sky, is a weird thing statistically and probably only true of a fairly narrow slice of Earth's history. We're like if someone from a more normal planet was like "hey what if you had a planet with such a big and close moon it could block out the sun?" And then yes-and-ed a whole bunch of cultural symbolism around it. Like when our scifi writers come up with planets with weird eccentric orbits and seasons

[tossawary]

Chatting with someone about recent Pixar films compared to "golden age"(?) Pixar films... I don't really have coherent examples of this, but I feel like some of their weakest films (and weak speculative fiction generally) get too caught up in... the metaphor? The allegory? The underlying theme?

Like, I think "Finding Nemo" is a great film. And people will say, "It's not JUST a film about cartoon fish! It's also about parent-child relationships and suffocating overprotectiveness and learning to let your child be independent!" Which is true. I think that's a very true statement. That IS the emotional core of the movie.

But I also think "Finding Nemo" is great and works as a film because it also respects and explores the setting in a straightforward way. It's also a movie about how genuinely scary it would be to be a small fish in a big, wonderous, terrifying ocean. It's asking, "What would it be like to be a fish going through this experience?"

The original world of "Toy Story" is compelling and delightfully disturbing, because it's asking, "What would it be like to be a toy?" And "A Bug's Life" is similarly asking, "What might it be like to be a bug?" And "Monsters Inc." is asking, "Why might monsters scare children at night?" All of these movies have strong emotional cores and allegories and all that jazz, but they're also engaging with these speculative prompts in a forthright way.

I'm reminded of a joke post that I saw about "The Hobbit" in which Bilbo says, "Ohhh, I get it! The dragon is a metaphor for greed!" And Thorin replies, "Bilbo, it's a real dragon and it's in my house." Like, there IS a lot about Smaug that's neat thematically, for sure, but also... for the fantasy setting to work, you do have to keep in mind the dangerous, logistical realities of a big, fire-breathing, man-eating lizard, which Tolkien obviously very much does.

Like, I saw "Elemental" and I kind of thought... the movie was maybe too caught up in being a metaphor for interracial relationships, possibly at the expense of the speculative worldbuilding. I don't think the movie engaged enough with the fact that marginalized fire-person Ember lives in a city full of water features that could apparently injure or even kill her. I think that the movie pulled a lot of its punches in regards to structural racism.

I thought that "Onward" was particularly disinterested in its own setting and the logic of it. Most of the fantasy elements were gags. It's a "normal" generic modern setting with speculative elements pasted on top, rather than a new world with the speculative elements integrated in unique ways that changed the way that people did things, you know? A society disregarding clearly very powerful magic (and all magical history) in favour of mildly more convenient lightbulbs doesn't actually make sense in-universe. It's, idk, the story forcibly simplifying itself just to call modern society lazy and incurious, which isn't an interesting statement.

I don't remember "Luca" and "Soul" very well, so I won't really comment on them here. I liked "Turning Red" well enough and I think its specific Chinese-Canadian setting worked fine for it. And I think "Inside Out" generally works as well, because it's specifically about how messy it inwardly feels to be even a "normal" preteen / teenage girl; a lot is smoothed over by it all being inside Riley's head. "Lightyear" was... I don't know how to get started on that mess, so I will not start.

Anyway, my point is: I think that with speculative fiction, it IS good and important to keep your themes and messages and emotional cores in mind! I just think you do have to also engage with the reality of the world you have going on, so that the story actually feels logical and well-grounded and unique. Sometimes, a dragon has also got to be a literal dragon, you know?

[captainlordauditor]

@animatedamerican said once, and it's a thing that has stuck in my brain since: "Moby Dick doesn't work as anything unless he works as a whale".

[horror-aesthete]

The Twilight Zone, 1963, dir. David Lowell Rich

SE04E14 Of Late I Think of Cliffordville

[shortfictionary]

This has to be one of, if not, the most unique way of both showcasing the trope/narrative concept of "selling your soul" as well as the insidious nature of evil and the power of corruption and all the ill gains it nets you in a fine selection of stills from an episode of a show that is 60 years old!

fantastic work

[everything-narrative]

“So soon, boy? It isn’t a month,” Lord Iron said as Olaf sat on the cool stone rail. The moon high above the city seemed also to dance in the water, lighting Lord Iron’s face from below and above at once. “There was no need,” Olaf said. “I have your answer. But I will have to make something clear before I deliver it. If you will permit me?” Lord Iron opened his hand in motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat. “Wealth,” he said, “is not a measure of money. It is a measure of well-being. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated.” “I believe I can follow you so far,” Lord Iron said. “Certainly I can agree that a fat wallet is no guarantor of contentment.” “Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is no good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not.” Lord Iron coughed out something akin to a laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt. “You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already.” “He does,” Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance. “And so I saw,” Olaf said. “You aren’t seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one.”

The Cabrist and Lord Iron by Daniel Abraham

[alkatyn]

The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics - Lightspeed Magazine

For as many years as anyone in the city could remember, Olaf Neddelsohn had been the cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority. Every mo

[dateamonster]

tbh im not entirely immune to a villain with a tragic backstory but i do think villain origins are a lot more interesting when the focus is less "here is the original sin, the first big bad thing that happened to them that made them who they are" and more "here is the first time a person who maybe otherwise felt powerless in their life realized that they could hurt someone and get away with it"

[kvothbloodless]

[caitlynslashai]

the most dangerous man alive sat across from an orphaned girl and offered her a knife.

[todays-xkcd]

today i learnt that, as a natural outcome of having "citation needed" as a joke, explainxkcd necessarily has "actual citation needed" for when an assertion needs citations.