Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere
So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.
So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.
And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?
"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.
The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?
What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.
This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.
In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".
Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence".
well, no, i was actually thinking about scenarios like navigating a ball/gala type event and exploring the plot through verbal conversation, but i suppose i didn't say that, so fine, egg on my face
i ask this because i've been thinking a lot about why i keep bouncing off games like Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week, both of which like to bill themselves as "rp forward". there's a lot of tools and toys to play with in terms of social encounters for both of those games, to be applied in heist and monster mystery situations, respectively, so i think we can safely say that we're aware of what the rules want to be doing in this instance, and are broadly in agreement with them.
but in practice, i often forget that i even have those tools, or the conversation regularly grinds to a halt while people review their abilities lists, and it's just.... weirdly exhausting. and i keep thinking that surely there must be a better way, but i'm not a game designer, so fuck me if i know what that better way might look like. hence, asking an expert.
i suppose we do need more precise terminology, because yeah "roleplaying" is technically applicable to any aspect of game engagement you can think of. "navigating social situations" is slightly narrower, but maybe just "having a conversation" is what we're after. and maybe part of the problem is that most people are already halfway proficient at having a conversation? in ways that we're not proficient at the aforementioned hitting each other with sticks. so we can just Do It without needing to abstract parts of the process into dice rolls and hit points, because we can just observe what the other guy says and then decide how our character feels about it and how they want to respond.
so is the answer to this just "roleplay is a fake category, and none of it matters"? surely that can't be it. surely someone must know what they're doing here, and can come up with a framework to gamify Having A Conversation in a functional and satisfying way.
You've settled on defining "roleplaying [mechanics]" as "gamifying having a conversation". What does it mean to gamify having a conversation? In what way, and to what purpose? My previously proposed summary of "[having rules for] set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence" is one way of gamifying having a conversation, but you've said that's not what you mean by that; so, what do you mean?
If you're having trouble remembering what the rules for a particular thing are – or even that those rules exist – that's often a good sign that engaging with those rules isn't fostering your desired experience of play; however, it doesn't tell us anything about what that desired experience of play is, other than "not that". (Also, it's worth examining whether this is actually a domain-specific issue; many groups find it necessary to frequently stop and review the rules in many contexts, but this tends to be seen as more tolerable in turn-based frameworks like combat than in contexts that lack such a framework.)
Maybe I'm missing the point, but here's my thing: you're playing a game that is played by talking. Why, then, do you need detailed game mechanics about talking (the thing you're already doing)? Why not just talk, and save the game mechanics for all the stuff that you can't just do for real at the table (e.g. hitting each other with sticks)?
That's definitely a reasonable perspective, though it depends on a very particular notion of What Game Rules Are For.
Suppose, for example, that your tabletop RPG character has occasion to play a game of Texas hold 'em. There are two basic ways this could be played out:
Roll some dice to decide who wins, and based on the outcome of that roll, produce a description of your character having played a game of Texas hold 'em.
Pick up a deck of playing cards and play a round of Texas hold 'em, you in the person of your character and the GM in the person of your NPC opponent, making all relevant decisions in character as your respective roles.
We certainly wouldn't say that the second one less constitutes "roleplaying" than the first. Some in-character activities, however, are less amenable to this sort of step-by-step acting out – at least, not without a lot of special equipment – and one of the functions of detailed frameworks of rules, such as the prototypical "combat system", is to furnish a game-mechanical proxy through which this sort of fine-grained IC decision-making can occur.
(Hell, if you were feeling mischievous, you might even argue that a game with a crunchy combat system is more "RP focused" in this sense than one which simply produces produces a description of your character having had a fight, in the sense that it both obliges and enables you to act out the process of actually making all those nitty-gritty IC choices.)
From this perspective, one might easily conclude that the purpose of RPG rules is to furnish such game-mechanical proxies; by extension, when no proxy is needed because sitting at a table poses no obstacle to acting things out in detail, game mechanics need not enter into it.
That's not the only possible perspective on What Game Rules Are For, though. Take me, for example: from my perspective, game rules are toys. They're made of methods and procedures rather than metal and plastic, but they're toys all the same, and I want to mash their faces together like a kid making their action figures make out. Whether or not a game-mechanical proxy is strictly required in order to play out the activity in question just isn't terribly relevant to me, because that's not why I want the rules to be present in the first place.
This being so, if somebody comes to me asking how best to address or model a particular activity in a framework of rules, I'll assume that they likewise have a reason to want such a framework to be present. I've got nothing against freeform RP, but I'm going to do you the courtesy of assuming that you've already considered and discarded that option and aren't just wasting my time!
I believe that this is brushing right up against (and partially overlapping) the Rules Elide blogpost-and-subsequent-years-long-conversation, which I was chewing on again recently after hearing about the GUNFUCKERS tweet (deleted, reproduced)
I don't think I agree that "rules elide" is universally true, but I do agree that a system can have hard rules; rules that are (theoretically) quick to resolve, aren't particularly interesting to consider, and leave no room for creativity or negotiation. Stuff that you could hand over to a computer to resolve without skipping over any decision points.
Example: Boot Hill. Also relevant: [the blog post about using boot hill for a political intrigue game.](https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=5773)
My new experimental stance: hard rules are a short-circuit, a strict A->B; they move cognitive load off themselves and onto the decision points (or conversations) around them, because they present fixed points to let people think about whether to use those hard rules or not. In effect, hard rules will be located right next to (or may be within) whatever your system is "actually about" but themselves will not be it.
There's also the whole issue that you can have 6 people at the same table all playing different games - you could have one player trying to keep their team fiscally solvent, another trying to finish quests, a third playing a dating simulator, the next trying to tame every monster, etc. But a ruleset (and the system that it "wants" to be) still has qualities of its own; the ultra-subjective framework doesn't seem to be giving me any interesting tools to work with.
Perhaps it can be examined by what the players are thinking about between sessions or how they'd summarise the last session they were in?
Within that lens, PF1 is actually about character-building and showing off what it can do...
I'm familiar with the thought exercise, and I've never found it terribly interesting because it's an obvious rhetorical sleight of hand. Neither Dragons & Damsels nor Gunfuckers are "about" convincing dragons to free princesses in any meaningful way. The former is so uninterested in convincing dragons to free princesses that it abstracts it all the way down to a single essentially non-interactive roll of the dice, while the latter simply has no opinion on the matter. There's nothing about Gunfuckers in particular that produced the described outcome; any premise or framing device which took the possibility of fighting the dragon off the table would have sufficed, and claiming otherwise is, at best, giving an essentially unrelated text credit for your GM's labour. It's falling prey to the same mentality that insists that Dungeons & Dragons is "about" all sorts of things on which its text is silent because you saw a podcast where the GM made something up.
(In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a hypothetical tabletop RPG which consists of absurdly hyper-lethal combat rules and nothing else is an objectively badly designed game, because the only thing its text has opinions on is what the game isn't about. I can get experiences of play that aren't about things anywhere!)
"[x story type] but what if-" short story. come on man you should know that if your story is easily blurbed down to "interesting thing happens" that is not going to sustain a reader for 400-600 pages. a book is where you write an actual narrative, not a cool idea that came to you in the shower last night.
there's nothing wrong with writing a short story! there are lots of good short stories that revolve around Interesting Ideas. What if I was my own mother. What if fish people were real and also (evil) living in massachusetts. What if you were your own worst enemy, literally. lots of good short stories there, all at just the right length for a cool idea. no one is going to go see the feature-length adaptation of William Wilson though, because that's it. unless you add in a tragic backstory and a love interest and so on and unfortunately there are a lot of novels and movies running around out there that clearly were meant to be a short story before someone took them and stretched them to a silly length.
your short story doesn't even have to be short! herman melville wrote over 100 pages of a guy who hated his job so much he died of being a hater the end. good show, herman. thank you
novellas exist. you can write one. please. it's necessary for the land to survive
i love you lab grown diamonds i love you slavery-free chocolate i love you community gardens i love you fact that the insulin patent was sold for $1 i love you locally produced meat and milk i love you streets turned into walkable parks i love you little reminders that Things Do Not Have To Be This Way and there are people working to build a better world!!
i love you smog tests for cars i love you clean air regulations i love you HEPA filters i love you dam removal i love you planting native gardens i love you monarch butterflies (up 64% in 2026!) i love you working for decades to bring the condors back from zero to 300+ in the wild i love you inventing little machines to pick up the plastic fishing nets and other trash in the sea i love you occupational health and safety regulations i love you environmental protection agencies i love you unions i love you social aid programs i love you food not bombs i love you sea shepherds i love you most countries stopping industrial whaling and more humpback whales now than ever before i love you saving the forests i love you little libraries i love you take what you need cupboards/fridges i love you secular food pantries i love you public bathrooms i love you all-ages playgrounds i love you museums i love you aquariums + zoos i love you restoring peregrine falcons to nyc i love you letting beavers fix the river i love you releasing wolves into the wild i love you bison recovery efforts i love you landback i love you reducing light pollution i love you freeway sound baffle walls i love you advertising bans i love you public outreach and education i love you maria montessori i love you queer clinics i love you people working really hard and succeeding at fixing the world and making it safer for all living beings!
just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out
if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.
if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to
PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply
figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list
I believe it's only auto-enabled if you were already sharing your likes. If you had like sharing turned off, reply sharing should (should) also be turned off.
the ideal media diet for a child is books and music from at least fifty years ago so they are always out of touch with the references and allusions of their peer group
