It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. -G.B.S

“WHAT IS THE CORRECT LEVEL OF INJUSTICE AT WHICH TO DECLARE YOURSELF IN REBELLION AGAINST THE POWER METING OUT JUDGMENT IN THE UNIVERSE?”

[jiskblr]

The hammerspace-hammertime continuum

[jiskblr]

I have seen a number of individuals claiming that wint dril is, in fact, the Comte de Saint Germain. Thoughts?

If the most central example of humanity, when given (subjective?) eternity and power, is dril…

I guess that would explain a lot, actually.

[jiskblr]

Wait, in UA 3rd Ed, Le Comte entered the House of Renunciation with The Freak and came out as Old Mother Apocalypse. “I will face God and walk backwards into Hell”, anyone?

[jiskblr]

To the extent I still post on social media that isn't a chatroom, it's this Twitter account as much as anything. It's in-character, sort of, as Yeesha, the 'DM' of Myst: Uru, who is a prophecied messiah of Age-Writing and way too much of an ancient gnomic mystic for how much time has passed since she was born. Guaranteed no bad posts. Guaranteed very few good posts. Very few posts. 4 per year is my max, that was 2025. I'm on pace for as many as 9 this year.

[littlewildmother]

Studies show that engaging in ritualized behavior significantly improves outcomes on measures of grief and feelings of control, even when the person participating in the ritual has little or no belief in the ritual’s power. Just a reminder for no one in particular.

[littlewildmother]

Research has revealed that, while rituals are universal across human cultures, the content and actions of those rituals vary widely even when they have the same intended purpose. This suggests that it is not the actions that matter, but that you are taking any action at all and naming it ritual. It can be an elaborate ritual with dozens of moving parts and participants, or it can be as simple as lighting a candle alone with the intent to remember someone.

The healing is in the doing.

[jiskblr]

Is there research which specifically tried de novo rituals? I would expect those not to work unless made very carefully.

That the content of the ritual doesn't matter, sure. That it's arbitrary, absolutely. That it is established, though, I would expect to matter a lot. You are going through the accepted process of grieving, and it is expected to help, and so it does.

You can call it ritual, if you like, but only in the sense of the joke a dozen colleges tell where "a <college> tradition is anything that's happened twice. A <college> institution is something that's happened three times." It's not literally nothing, separating out a piece of time and space from the rest of your life may help on its own, but I think it's likely to be an indirect social proof effect for the most part.

[fipindustries]

How the fuck did you conceive a magic system that contains physics, cooking, pure mathematics, philosophical idealism, stage magic and Jackie Chan; and it FUCKS

awwww someone's discovered introduction to magic 🤩🥰

there are two fundamental conceits around this setting. one, i tried to make a system that uses all the mechanisms by which fiction makes maguc work, which are not that many. its always writing (symbols, runes, enchantments, formulas), chanting ( singing, spelling, whispering), tools (wands, boxes, balls), movement (dancing, gestures, combat), crafting (potions, cooking, sculture), habdling magical beings (dragons, genies, vampires, phoenix) and pure thought alone. try and come up with a magic system that is not contemplated by that list, youll find it really hard!

the other conceit is that everything is magic, walking, talking, writing, cooking. no matter how simple and mubdane an action is, the only reason it works deeps down is because of magic. and that throwing fireballs and lighting and stuff is just an extrapolation if what happens when you get really good at the mundane stuff, with some added help from "aether/mana/chi/etc".

i put these two ideas in my head and then added a sprinkling of cathegory fuzzyness and real life taxonomical confusion and made everythibg into a bit of a muddled spectrum to ground it and give it verosimilitude and there you go.

you get introduced to magic.

the format itself is based on the little booklets that i had to buy or print during highschool and college for literature and history classes.

[jiskblr]

Stormlight Archive: Vows and breath. No chanting, no writing, some pure thought and magic beings but you don't handle them or bind them, they come looking for you and then you bind yourself and get magic powers, which need you to hold your breath.

Circle of Magic (Tamora Pierce); 'normal' magic uses chanting and things, but none of the people we follow (except Niklaren Goldeye) use it. They use intuitive sense of their element for extremely broad categories of what 'element' can mean, and have to work with the thing. Some of them do this with tools, most of them don't.

Effulgence: Pain. You can get wish magic which basically just works by pure thought (sufficiently well-specified), but in order to produce it (in the form of 'wishcoins'), you need to hurt. Each size of wish takes 10x the pain of the previous one.

Gleamdust: Drugs. There's a magic substance, that if you burn it in fuel makes the flame burn hot and clean, and if you smoke it in a cigar, either makes you very nauseous, or lets you slow down your perception of time, and make small movements a fraction faster to match. (This one's kinda cheating because I wrote it myself, but it was not created for this purpose.)

Literally the first four things that came to mind when I tried to think of a somewhat-unusual magic system. And only Circle of Magic is even arguable.

[centrally-unplanned]

Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow? - American Affairs Journal

In the 1950s, the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian Hiawatha carried passengers from Minneapolis to Chicago in roughly seven hours. Today, Amtrak’s

I saw others (@eightyonekilograms I think?) posting about this article, and I was planning on making my own take on it so I gotta get that moving I guess! This article is a permutation of a point I've seen floating around US train circles every few years; the desultory state of US passenger rail is a result of our very good freight rail system, and those systems trade off inherently. Passenger rail and freight rail use the same tracks, but demand different things from those tracks; build structure, wear-and-tear rates, timetables, etc. Having both of these systems be chugging along full steam ahead (heh) is inherently very difficult; and the US chose freight over passenger because we are geographically spread out in a way that isn't optimal for trains anyway. To quote the conclusion:

The question “why can’t America have trains like Europe?” assumes the comparison is apt—but it isn’t. America has the world’s most productive freight rail network, and the cost is slow passenger trains. The equilibrium we have is neither an accident nor a failure but a choice, one made incrementally over fifty years, which has delivered real value. Whether to unmake it is a decision that we should make with clear understanding of what would be gained, and what would be lost.

The core fact above as a story of US rail policy in the 1970's is absolutely true - but the article is overreaching on how much it explains. To start, most high speed rail lines in the world are dedicated passenger lines, and do not carry freight! Japan's Shinkansen doesn't carry freight, Spain's 4000 km of HSR is the large majority freight-free - this stuff has to be for the precise reasons that this article outlines. When people say "US trains are slow", do we really mean the commuter line from Hudson County to NYC? I'm not saying it can't be improved, it can be, but we all know that ain't the sauce - we are complaining about how god damn slow a train from Philly to Boston is. Or San Fransisco to Los Angeles. Or Chicago to anywhere, you are trapped, you can never leave. Other countries built tracks that travel at over twice our "best" passenger trains - and it has almost nothing to do with freight.

The article acknowledges this at the end, but in doing so it just dodges the issue:

Building separate passenger infrastructure avoids this trade-off but introduces another: expense. California’s high-speed rail project, the most ambitious attempt at dedicated passenger track in a generation, has seen costs balloon from $33 billion to over $100 billion, with completion decades away, if it is completed at all. The NEC’s Acela operates on dedicated track only in limited segments; expanding that model nationwide would require investment on a scale American politics has never sustained.

Saying "we could never sustain these investments politically" ignores that California already spent $100 billion on HSR, far more money than the cost of entire train systems in other countries! The money is available if we could build cost effective trains. But we can't, right? California's HSR failure has nothing to do with the "inherent" trade off with freight, it has nothing to do with the ~organic price of HSR; it has everything to do with the government of California failing at its basic function of having state capacity. And this is of course endemic to every aspect of public infrastructure in the US - the cost of building a metro station here compared to Europe frequently costs over five times as much. That obviously has nothing to do with freight, right? If freight was the core issue, the cost problems would circle around the freight lines - but they don't, and actually laying track is something we are probably the least bad at. All of this could be improved without a single trade off vis a vis other infrastructure.

Everything above is the main issue, but there is one other point I wanna make: we shouldn't assume US freight dominance is a product solely of our highly efficient freight lines. We absolutely do use freight rail much more than many other countries! Some of it is because we prioritize its efficiency; other parts are because our geography demands it. But another big part is that, well okay how does Japan ship things? About half of it is via trucks ofc, we do a ton of that too. And the other half is via coastal shipping. Can't do that in Idaho, sure, but couldn't the US do that on the East Coast? Why don't we ship goods from NYC to Boston?

Because it is fucking illegal due of the accursed Jones Act! No ship can sail between US ports that isn't made in the US, and we make ~0% of the world's ships! Japan is ofc a shipping world leader, but also has no equivalent restrictions, and neither does Europe - or any country really. Just us, the lone lunatics. Now obviously if it was a ton more efficient to ship those goods, we would find a way, but there are a lot of margins in the middle there where muddling through is the better path. American freight is very often not the best modality for shipping goods. It is the only modality, and so we have been forced to prioritize it. And that is not a "fundamental tradeoff".

So yeah - the facts are true, but the argument isn't. Freight is a sufficient explanation for why we deprioritized passenger rail in the 1970's. And that + geography & urban design are solid explanations for why we prefer cars in a given suburb. But it does not explain why there is no HSR lines in our major population corridors, or why most of our metro systems were built ~50 years ago. That is because of the reason everyone thinks, the conventional wisdom is true - America just sucks at passenger rail.

[space-wizards]

????????

[centrally-unplanned]

Every day someone learns that the US has the most insane protectionist bullshit in the world around shipping, and I am empowered anew by their sense of affronted rage.

[necarion]

If we were getting an amazing shipbuilding industry out of this, it would still be doing huge harm to the people of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and everywhere else that could benefit from "shipped goods". (Even without it, the US ports are so wildly inefficient and made to benefit longshoremen unions that it wouldn't be an amazing option).

But...the United States is barely a fucking *rounding error* in international shipbuilding.

So, we have thrown protectionism at an industry that effectively does not exist, that has not made any investments in shipbuilding capacity or ship facilities. There are "well, you get what you pay for" situations, and then there is the Jones Act, which is "lol, you thought you were supposed to *get* something?"

[jiskblr]

People will say "your 'free trade' agenda for maintaining a US merchant marine pales in comparison to my strategy of building US ships for all US domestic ports" and then not build US ships

[jiskblr]

Ergaleiion

Greater tools have little tools, with which makers will wright em And little tools have lesser tools, and on ad infinitum

[jiskblr]

Psychrovioi

Little steppes have bigger steppes, full of nomads to ride 'em, And bigger steppes have larger steppes, and on ad infinitum

[jiskblr]

[...]a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them[...] He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. [...] He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. [...] For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: -- Declaration of Independence - excerpts

[jiskblr]

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. [...] He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. [...] For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: [...] He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

-- Declaration of Independence - excerpts

[jiskblr]

Nightmare Telephone and Shortcuts Through Hell

So on the one hand, putting a specific mathematical distribution on how long it takes for an astropath's message or a Warp drive's trip to travel through the Immaterium is sort of antithetical to the core concept that the Warp is Chaos and follows no rules.

On the other hand, if you want to write a story that doesn't purely move at the speed of plot, such as an RPG game where you want a non-arbitrary answer to 'how long will this take?', it's really convenient to have a mathematical model. You can always say 'this is how it usually works, but it's the Warp and this time it moves at the speed of plot.' If it usually moves at the speed of plot and sometimes according to a model it's much harder to make that call on the spot.

Solution: The Log-Cauchy distribution:

Log-Cauchy distribution - Wikipedia

Parameters: µ sets the center of the distribution. σ sets the spread. You can scale these up as a function of distance; I recommend a power law for both, where µ(d) = ln(d)*A+µ_0 and σ(d) = ln(d)*B+σ_0.

Properties: Median is e^µ. Mean is undefined. Variance is infinite. Values can be any positive number and if you subtract 0.00001s seconds you'll get negative time at least 0.01% of the time even at very slightly above your base unit. (At least under most assumptions. I set the median at half a second across 1 light-second of distance (d_0 = 1ls, t_0 = 0.5s) and sigma at 0.0086*ln(d/d_0), and at 1.50 ls and up it's true.)

And still, you can make a nice neat chart of percentiles. What's the time so that 20% of messages arrive in this time or less? What's the time for 80% of messages? For my particular values, P2 (2% of messages) grows by 50x for every 2000x the distance, about the square root, and P98 by 400x, about with x^(4/5). The median message is about 140x, with x^(5/8). You can send a message across the galaxy and it'll take five years or less half the time - but one time in fifty it'll take three centuries and one time in a hundred, more than twenty millennia - and on the other side, one time in a hundred, less than two weeks, and one time in a thousand it'll be so fast that it's a million times faster than a photon crossing a hydrogen atom.

Still working on a variant for warp travel that takes longer than this at reasonable distances, grows slower so that Segmentum-scale travel is possible in less than a millennium, Subsector-scale travel is reasonably fast, and I have a model for how common lost ships are that's compatible with voidborn dynasties existing. (Currently looks like time will grow pretty slowly but risk grows quickly, so that unless you have a good Navigator you want to travel slow with short hops.)

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

Dating App Idea: The Council

Consensus seems to be that the dating apps are not ok.

Interactions are shallow, atomised, impersonal. People ghost and flake, conversations die. Bots and scams and spam. People put in the minimum possible effort, and when you try to put in effort yourself, people make you wish you hadn't.

Perhaps a better designed app might help. So here's my (sadly extremely heteronormative) idea:

When a man matches with a woman, he can be put into a chat, not with her, but with a Council of 3 to 5 of her most trusted advisors. If he can impress them enough that they vote to let him talk to her, he’s in.

Why is this good for women?

I expect women’s experience of using this app would be much better than with most dating apps.

Much less harassment, for one thing. Most harassing or abusive messages would never be sent in the first place, because why would you send that kind of thing to a group-chat of gatekeepers? And if it does happen, facing it as a group makes it much easier to deal with.

The general standard of one on one conversation you experience on the app would be much higher, because you’re never one-on-one with a random guy, you only talk to people who your Council has voted to send on to you. You don't have to deal with a deluge of losers and time wasters, they’re filtered out for you by your Council. In fact I expect most of them would be filtered out even before then, by being unwilling to use this app in the first place.

So, less hassle in the app, talking to higher quality guys, and thus having better dates.

But also, the dates themselves are probably better, even holding the guy constant, because your Council can ask all the questions you'd want answered early on, but which you'd find awkward to ask. You probably don’t get nearly as much information on a first date as you’d like, because, well, you want to go on a date, not conduct a job interview. But first dates often end up being kind of job-interview-y anyway. If your Council conducts the job interview for you ahead of time though, that part is mostly over with before you're even really involved, the guy has already passed the test, and the first date is free to just be a date.

“But I don’t have 3-5 people who I trust / who know me well enough!”

Honestly I would probably try to fix that before trying to date.

Why is this good for men?

Look, if you want to properly date a woman, you're going to have to win over her friends anyway, so you may as well get that out of the way at the start.

Facing down a group of judgemental gatekeepers can be intimidating, but this is easily dealt with by not being a fucking coward. Did you expect to achieve romantic success without risking social discomfort? Faint heart never won fair lady, get in there and prove yourself!

That said, I expect the experience of using the app would actually be more fun and interesting than the average dating app - certainly more exciting, and probably much less corrosive to the soul:

For one, there’s far less ambiguity and uncertainty. You won’t wait hours for a reply, not knowing if she’s ghosted you - there are like 5 people in this group chat, someone will talk to you. You’ll basically never get kinda-ambiguously-pseudo-rejected by The Council - if they vote you down, 3 to 2 or 4 to 1 or unanimously, you know where you stand.

Plus, you’ll get a lot more feedback! The Council has no reason to be afraid to tell you exactly why you didn’t make the cut. The feedback might be hard to hear, but I’d rather have uncomfortable honesty than a blank featureless wall and no guidance on how to improve.

The Council also keeps you from wasting a lot of time on women you’re not compatible with. If the relationship is going to fail, it should fail fast. And this way, it fails before you have a chance to get attached.

And it’s a two way street. There’s a lot of information you can get about a woman through her Council which would be much harder to infer from her dating app profile. If the Council’s questions are all about kids, that tells you something. If the questions are all about your income, that tells you something. If they’re all about your politics, that tells you something. If a woman is looking for something that I’m not, I want to know that as early as possible.

So being rejected by a Council on those kinds of grounds shouldn’t feel too personal. If it’s super important to a woman that you share her politics, and you really don’t, that’s just saved you both a lot of hassle.

"Jesus, I don't want to run a gauntlet and meet a girl's whole social group, I'm just trying to get laid!"

That's ok! This app is not for you.

Why is it good to be on a Council?

Aren’t you tired of your awesome friends, who deserve all the romantic success in the world, making bad choices and dating assholes and losers? Don't you wish you could help them find a suitable boy?

Does it not sound fun to have a group chat where you all judge guys who want to date your friends? Be real, do you not already kind of have one? But what if you could grill those guys yourself? And you don't have to be chill and polite, you can ask the hard questions and make sure your friend doesn't get her time wasted.

Talking to randos on dating apps is not fun. Judging randos with a group of your friends is fun as hell.

Ok, but another dating app? Would it even catch on?

The viral potential is high - each woman who signs up needs to get 3-5 other people to be on her Council. That’s extra friction of course, but it also means 3-5 people will make accounts and be using the app regularly. It's natural that some of them might then want to start using the app for themselves, and appoint their own Council, and so on.

I don’t think it will be at all difficult to persuade people to sign up to sit on a friend’s Council. I’ve been led to believe that friends tend to enjoy hearing about, and involving themselves in, one another’s love life decisions.

And a Council Seat is obviously a position of high esteem, a strong signifier of trust and closeness. People will want to be on their friends' Councils simply for the sake of having been deemed worthy of the role. I imagine there will be considerable interpersonal drama about Council Seat appointments. All of this is excellent for the app's mindshare.

Isn’t this whole idea kind of horrible?

In a way yes, but it’s importantly a very different kind of horrible than the existing dating apps.

Plus we can licence that Spice Girls song for the ads.

[jiskblr]

Failure mode: Council members tempted to sabotage in order to get their own shot at desirable men.

Though that goes both ways and can also be an upside if it's a genuinely bad match with the target but a good one with a councilwoman.

[elegiacescapist]

A List of Archons

Since I’m sickly and bored today, here’s my working list of Archons for quick reference; includes titles, a short overview, and an indication (†) if they are confirmed to be deceased. Kyros and the major Archons in the game get a short description because there’s not enough room on this list to do them justice. Again, like the post on locations, please let me know if they are any corrections or additions to be made as this isn’t 100% complete or accurate, and it’s been a while since I made some of these notes. (I am also sick, so there may be typos and mistakes that I didn’t catch).

WARNING: TEXT DUMP & SPOILERS FOR TYRANNY

Keep reading

[jiskblr]

Found your source for Tharavis

“Dear Fatebinder [Name], I must confess to deep disappointment. I beloved that I had accepted the possibility that the Archive had been lost to Kyros' flames, but obviously some hope for its preservation lingered still in my breast. Perhaps you think this scholar possessed a naiveté unbefitting his years, but the Sages were known to be the foremost practitioners of Tharavis' sigil. If they could find a way to protect a prize of such value, they would have. I suppose Terratus will have to endure this tragedy as it has the many that have come before. You are always welcome in our company. - Fatebinder Rhogulas

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

Unbundling Ideologies into Problems and Solutions

There's a type of thing that I'll call an 'ideology' in this post, though this may be a slightly nonstandard usage, as I have no training at all in the relevant fields of study. Perhaps they're better described as 'social movements' or 'philosophies'. Examples of this type of thing include Feminism, Communism, Conservatism, Libertarianism, Modernism, Environmentalism, Rationalism etc.

People will often treat an ideology as an idea, as a relatively monolithic thing that you can agree or disagree with to whatever extent. More sophisticated thinkers often treat an ideology as a bundle of interconnected and related ideas, that can be evaluated individually. I want to talk about an intermediate approach, breaking them down into something smaller than the whole bundle but bigger than individual ideas. I think this approach is particularly useful, and I wish it were more common/accepted:

Ideologies naturally break down into "Problem Identification" and "Solution Proposal"

Many ideologies say "Here is a problem, and here is a solution to it".

I wish it were easier to think and talk about those two parts separately. I want there to be a quick term that's commonly understood to mean "A person who is concerned with the problems that X-ism is trying to tackle", but which doesn't also imply that this person supports any specific X-ist policy proposal.

I want these things separated, because Problem Identification is just a hell of a lot easier than Solution Proposal, and the average quality of Problem Identification in popular ideologies is radically better than the average quality of Solution Proposal.

Problem Identification tends to be relatively decent in popular ideologies, because the quality of their Problem Identification is how ideologies become popular. They gain followers when people hear about the ideology and say "Yes, I also experience that problem, I think it's important, and you've done a good job of characterising it in a way that makes sense to me".

Then, because it seems reasonable enough to assume that the people who can give the best explanation and framing of a problem will also be the best at proposing solutions to the problem, a person who finds an ideology's Problem Identification compelling will often decide to start advocating for that ideology's Solution Proposals.

This is an issue, because most proposed solutions are not much good. Identifying and characterising a problem is very useful for figuring out how to solve it, but is not in itself enough. It's actually really difficult to find something we can do that will result in a problem being solved, without introducing new problems worse than the one we're trying to fix. This is especially true for problems that people have been trying to solve for a long time.

Examples

The example that makes this most clear might be The Unabomber's manifesto. I don't recommend reading it, because murder shouldn't be rewarded with an audience. But before I realised that, in my teenage "read all the edgy literature" phase, I read the Unabomber's manifesto, and I remember the Problem Identification part being surprisingly reasonable. I won't repeat it here for the aforementioned reason, but it did seem to cogently lay out some real problems with how our society does things. Then the Solution Proposal was "blow things up", and it was never clear to me why anyone should expect that to help at all.

In that case, any value in the Problem Identification was overshadowed by the obvious badness of the Solution Proposal, which kept the ideology from becoming popular.

This isn’t always the case. When I read the Communist Manifesto, I remember it spent a lot of time talking about the problems of Capitalism. Those parts of the manifesto were fairly persuasive to me. There certainly are problems with Capitalism, and the manifesto does a good job of explaining some of those problems and making them vivid and compelling. If I had been born too early to see the effects of actual Communist governments, I might have been convinced of the whole bundle. I might not have realised just how important it is to remember that proposing a whole new way to structure society is enormously more difficult than just describing the problems with the current structure.

Now, it's not by any means always the case that the Problem Identification part of an ideology is worthwhile - the Problem Identification of Neonazism is just fucked. But often where there's something of value in an ideology, it's in the Problem Identification rather than the Solution Proposal.

When aspects of an ideology's Problem Identification make sense to me, I wish I could speak more freely about that, without people assuming I endorse the whole ideological bundle.

[jiskblr]

“There are many ways to answer that question,” said the god [of Death and Duality]. “To embrace my own idiom, I think that a faith, a true faith, is a duality of two things: a problem, and a solution. A religion which actually provides for the spiritual needs of people must posit what the core problem of mortal experience is, and then offer a way to solve it. And this has been true since long before the emergence of actual gods, going back to the faiths of the old world from which the Elders came. Humanity had faiths before it had actual deities. Faith speaks to something in the core of what it means to be a person.”

-- The Gods Are Bastards, D.D. Webb, Book 14 (Themselves Contend), Chapter 7

[brazenautomaton]

if Yoshikage Kira was a Magic card he would be monogreen, change my mind

[jiskblr]

I, too, have watched no JoJo, but based on the wiki...

Although he is highly intelligent and possesses many talents, this yearning shows in his dislike of coming in first, and Jotaro theorizes from his many trophies that he even made it a point to never rank better than 3rd in any competition so as not to stand out. Since his youth, Kira has been avoiding standing out, living a healthy life and following a strict regimen. He becomes bothered when someone disrupts his habits and goes to extreme lengths to get them back. As his father pointed out, this will to stay in the background was so bad that if bullied, or denied his favorite toy, Kira would bite his nails until they bled, being the only way he's found to express his frustration.

He doesn't care that his lifestyle involves murder, nor the suffering of his victim's relatives. He only seeks to satisfy his basic instincts. In addition, Kira is determined to preserve his lifestyle, and being set back only increases his determination.

Okay that does sound pretty solidly Green...

[...]his frequent and periodic murderous impulses. Kira targets women, or, more specifically, women with beautiful hands. Kira possesses a hand fetish, which he discovered when he found himself aroused by the Mona Lisa's hands. However, his desire has never extended to the rest of the female person and he otherwise shuns their presence. This results in murdering random women, not caring in the least how they look like or behave, in order to acquire their (severed) hands as "girlfriends", acting as if the severed hands were actually sentient and conversing with them, even offering them various gifts.

Apart from his murders, Kira is particularly violent when someone threatens his way of life or publicly humiliates him. Since Kira doesn't want to be noticed, he will try everything to solve his problems without facing anyone directly. However, if he doesn't have any other choice, he will instantly try to kill whoever discovers his true nature. Kira is quick to drop his polite demeanor, rudely insulting his foes or violently beating them before killing them.

...but not mono. Probably BG but RG would work pretty well too.

Kira believes that he has luck and fate on his side, exposing a superstitious façade, claiming that whenever faced with an obstacle he will be able to make it through with a combination of hard work and opportunity

This is Green but also... White or Blue? And OCD tendencies are typically pretty closely W/U. (Vampire legends of course ascribe them to a Black creature, but I think this is for the same reasons WB vampires work well - they always have had the 'constrained by excessive need for order' thing going on.)

[brazenautomaton]

The wiki does not place the proper emphasis on things.

"Yoshikage Kira wants to live a quiet life" is like his whole thing. He is defined by an absolute lack of ambition. He seeks no knowledge, accolade, or power. He totally accepts his fate, his nature, and his place in the world. His reaction to the heroes is not "how dare you challenge my plans" it's "Why can't you people just leave me alone?" He seeks to change nothing about the world or himself. He really has no need for human interaction aside from their severed hands.

Hermits, recluses, and Thrun the Last Troll are all green. Being at peace with oneself, contentment, accepting who you are, all green. This guy is mega ultra hyper green. If you wanted to really reach you could add colors but like he'd need four green pips and THEN he'd have maybe a hybrid R/G.

[jiskblr]

That sounds like the greenest (sapient) serial killer there's ever been, but still not mono-green because serial killing is unnatural and requires being overwhelmingly motivated to do something severely unnatural. Like BGG or RGG or something. I'd lean toward BG because being enemy colors is typically depicted as being more mentally unstable than allied colors, but knowing more about his ~romantic feelings toward the hands could push that toward Red.

(In theory you could have a species that was obligate cannibals and that was the natural state of them and so they needed to serial kill to live, but I think MtG would still class them as Black even if they weren't undead.)

[brazenautomaton]

By that metric, green characters can't possess agency.

He completely and utterly lacks the aspect that defines black. He is not black at all even a little bit.

[jiskblr]

That's somewhat true. You know the 'Villains Act, Heroes React' trope? Green doesn't act, it reacts. Even when it acts, it typically conceives of itself as reacting. Like NEPA lawyers and Doctor Strange's mentor. Green 'restores the balance' or 'defends its territory,' it doesn't proactively go out and pursue desires that aren't instinctual. Green is opposed to acting. Green has the firm conviction that trying to change the world never improves things.

But the thing that makes him Black or possibly Red is not his personality. It's the part where his personality is bonsaied around having an unnatural desire to kill women and romance/worship/fetishize/whatever their hands.

This is something that true mono-Green recoils at; even things with instincts to do something like that are considered fundamentally suspect. He's a walking anomaly and the pure Green thing to do would be to just not be a hand-fetish serial killer.

[brazenautomaton]

Vorinclex.

[jiskblr]

Vorinclex is in the category I drew as Green and not in the one I drew as 'non-Green.' He conceives of himself as reacting. He is not changing the world, he's taking the most predatory competitive elements of it that already exist and having them fight each other to demonstrate who is already the natural superior, and allowing it to propagate as nature always does for the victors. This is bullshit but it's merely an unusually strong variety of the same bullshit normal Green characters tell themselves. And his objection to the other Praetors is that they violate this. (And that they're weak and couldn't survive in the 'natural' competition he encourages.)

[brazenautomaton]

It's natural when Vorinclex does what he wants and kills people with no regard to morality, but it's unnatural when Kira does what he wants and kills people with no regard to morality.

[jiskblr]

Kira does not make any pretense of his murders being in accordance with nature. Vorinclex sees everything he does as part of 'nature, red in tooth and claw,' and it's bullshit, motivated reasoning because he's hopped up on glistening oil, but it's not ludicrous, it's a very intense, somewhat calculating form of things that nature actually does. Kira could not even pretend to his urges being natural. He doesn't describe them as instinct, but as love.* He doesn't excuse himself like a Green character would. Like, say:

"And, finally, when we could be together again…" "…you weren't there. Why weren't you there?" "It's my nature. Would you love me as anything but what I am?" - Tia Dalma and Davy Jones, PotC:AWE

“Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!” “Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.” [...] “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”  “I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

Remember: green doesn't care about morality. White cares about morality. Only White. It's not the immorality that's non-Green, it's the unnatural part.

*Unless you're going to tell me that's wrong and another misconception from the wiki? I'd be pretty surprised.

[brazenautomaton]

if Yoshikage Kira was a Magic card he would be monogreen, change my mind

[jiskblr]

I, too, have watched no JoJo, but based on the wiki...

Although he is highly intelligent and possesses many talents, this yearning shows in his dislike of coming in first, and Jotaro theorizes from his many trophies that he even made it a point to never rank better than 3rd in any competition so as not to stand out. Since his youth, Kira has been avoiding standing out, living a healthy life and following a strict regimen. He becomes bothered when someone disrupts his habits and goes to extreme lengths to get them back. As his father pointed out, this will to stay in the background was so bad that if bullied, or denied his favorite toy, Kira would bite his nails until they bled, being the only way he's found to express his frustration.

He doesn't care that his lifestyle involves murder, nor the suffering of his victim's relatives. He only seeks to satisfy his basic instincts. In addition, Kira is determined to preserve his lifestyle, and being set back only increases his determination.

Okay that does sound pretty solidly Green...

[...]his frequent and periodic murderous impulses. Kira targets women, or, more specifically, women with beautiful hands. Kira possesses a hand fetish, which he discovered when he found himself aroused by the Mona Lisa's hands. However, his desire has never extended to the rest of the female person and he otherwise shuns their presence. This results in murdering random women, not caring in the least how they look like or behave, in order to acquire their (severed) hands as "girlfriends", acting as if the severed hands were actually sentient and conversing with them, even offering them various gifts.

Apart from his murders, Kira is particularly violent when someone threatens his way of life or publicly humiliates him. Since Kira doesn't want to be noticed, he will try everything to solve his problems without facing anyone directly. However, if he doesn't have any other choice, he will instantly try to kill whoever discovers his true nature. Kira is quick to drop his polite demeanor, rudely insulting his foes or violently beating them before killing them.

...but not mono. Probably BG but RG would work pretty well too.

Kira believes that he has luck and fate on his side, exposing a superstitious façade, claiming that whenever faced with an obstacle he will be able to make it through with a combination of hard work and opportunity

This is Green but also... White or Blue? And OCD tendencies are typically pretty closely W/U. (Vampire legends of course ascribe them to a Black creature, but I think this is for the same reasons WB vampires work well - they always have had the 'constrained by excessive need for order' thing going on.)

[brazenautomaton]

The wiki does not place the proper emphasis on things.

"Yoshikage Kira wants to live a quiet life" is like his whole thing. He is defined by an absolute lack of ambition. He seeks no knowledge, accolade, or power. He totally accepts his fate, his nature, and his place in the world. His reaction to the heroes is not "how dare you challenge my plans" it's "Why can't you people just leave me alone?" He seeks to change nothing about the world or himself. He really has no need for human interaction aside from their severed hands.

Hermits, recluses, and Thrun the Last Troll are all green. Being at peace with oneself, contentment, accepting who you are, all green. This guy is mega ultra hyper green. If you wanted to really reach you could add colors but like he'd need four green pips and THEN he'd have maybe a hybrid R/G.

[jiskblr]

That sounds like the greenest (sapient) serial killer there's ever been, but still not mono-green because serial killing is unnatural and requires being overwhelmingly motivated to do something severely unnatural. Like BGG or RGG or something. I'd lean toward BG because being enemy colors is typically depicted as being more mentally unstable than allied colors, but knowing more about his ~romantic feelings toward the hands could push that toward Red.

(In theory you could have a species that was obligate cannibals and that was the natural state of them and so they needed to serial kill to live, but I think MtG would still class them as Black even if they weren't undead.)

[brazenautomaton]

By that metric, green characters can't possess agency.

He completely and utterly lacks the aspect that defines black. He is not black at all even a little bit.

[jiskblr]

That's somewhat true. You know the 'Villains Act, Heroes React' trope? Green doesn't act, it reacts. Even when it acts, it typically conceives of itself as reacting. Like NEPA lawyers and Doctor Strange's mentor. Green 'restores the balance' or 'defends its territory,' it doesn't proactively go out and pursue desires that aren't instinctual. Green is opposed to acting. Green has the firm conviction that trying to change the world never improves things.

But the thing that makes him Black or possibly Red is not his personality. It's the part where his personality is bonsaied around having an unnatural desire to kill women and romance/worship/fetishize/whatever their hands.

This is something that true mono-Green recoils at; even things with instincts to do something like that are considered fundamentally suspect. He's a walking anomaly and the pure Green thing to do would be to just not be a hand-fetish serial killer.

[brazenautomaton]

Vorinclex.

[jiskblr]

Vorinclex is in the category I drew as Green and not in the one I drew as 'non-Green.' He conceives of himself as reacting. He is not changing the world, he's taking the most predatory competitive elements of it that already exist and having them fight each other to demonstrate who is already the natural superior, and allowing it to propagate as nature always does for the victors. This is bullshit but it's merely an unusually strong variety of the same bullshit normal Green characters tell themselves. And his objection to the other Praetors is that they violate this. (And that they're weak and couldn't survive in the 'natural' competition he encourages.)

[brazenautomaton]

if Yoshikage Kira was a Magic card he would be monogreen, change my mind

[jiskblr]

I, too, have watched no JoJo, but based on the wiki...

Although he is highly intelligent and possesses many talents, this yearning shows in his dislike of coming in first, and Jotaro theorizes from his many trophies that he even made it a point to never rank better than 3rd in any competition so as not to stand out. Since his youth, Kira has been avoiding standing out, living a healthy life and following a strict regimen. He becomes bothered when someone disrupts his habits and goes to extreme lengths to get them back. As his father pointed out, this will to stay in the background was so bad that if bullied, or denied his favorite toy, Kira would bite his nails until they bled, being the only way he's found to express his frustration.

He doesn't care that his lifestyle involves murder, nor the suffering of his victim's relatives. He only seeks to satisfy his basic instincts. In addition, Kira is determined to preserve his lifestyle, and being set back only increases his determination.

Okay that does sound pretty solidly Green...

[...]his frequent and periodic murderous impulses. Kira targets women, or, more specifically, women with beautiful hands. Kira possesses a hand fetish, which he discovered when he found himself aroused by the Mona Lisa's hands. However, his desire has never extended to the rest of the female person and he otherwise shuns their presence. This results in murdering random women, not caring in the least how they look like or behave, in order to acquire their (severed) hands as "girlfriends", acting as if the severed hands were actually sentient and conversing with them, even offering them various gifts.

Apart from his murders, Kira is particularly violent when someone threatens his way of life or publicly humiliates him. Since Kira doesn't want to be noticed, he will try everything to solve his problems without facing anyone directly. However, if he doesn't have any other choice, he will instantly try to kill whoever discovers his true nature. Kira is quick to drop his polite demeanor, rudely insulting his foes or violently beating them before killing them.

...but not mono. Probably BG but RG would work pretty well too.

Kira believes that he has luck and fate on his side, exposing a superstitious façade, claiming that whenever faced with an obstacle he will be able to make it through with a combination of hard work and opportunity

This is Green but also... White or Blue? And OCD tendencies are typically pretty closely W/U. (Vampire legends of course ascribe them to a Black creature, but I think this is for the same reasons WB vampires work well - they always have had the 'constrained by excessive need for order' thing going on.)

[brazenautomaton]

The wiki does not place the proper emphasis on things.

"Yoshikage Kira wants to live a quiet life" is like his whole thing. He is defined by an absolute lack of ambition. He seeks no knowledge, accolade, or power. He totally accepts his fate, his nature, and his place in the world. His reaction to the heroes is not "how dare you challenge my plans" it's "Why can't you people just leave me alone?" He seeks to change nothing about the world or himself. He really has no need for human interaction aside from their severed hands.

Hermits, recluses, and Thrun the Last Troll are all green. Being at peace with oneself, contentment, accepting who you are, all green. This guy is mega ultra hyper green. If you wanted to really reach you could add colors but like he'd need four green pips and THEN he'd have maybe a hybrid R/G.

[jiskblr]

That sounds like the greenest (sapient) serial killer there's ever been, but still not mono-green because serial killing is unnatural and requires being overwhelmingly motivated to do something severely unnatural. Like BGG or RGG or something. I'd lean toward BG because being enemy colors is typically depicted as being more mentally unstable than allied colors, but knowing more about his ~romantic feelings toward the hands could push that toward Red.

(In theory you could have a species that was obligate cannibals and that was the natural state of them and so they needed to serial kill to live, but I think MtG would still class them as Black even if they weren't undead.)

[brazenautomaton]

By that metric, green characters can't possess agency.

He completely and utterly lacks the aspect that defines black. He is not black at all even a little bit.

[jiskblr]

That's somewhat true. You know the 'Villains Act, Heroes React' trope? Green doesn't act, it reacts. Even when it acts, it typically conceives of itself as reacting. Like NEPA lawyers and Doctor Strange's mentor. Green 'restores the balance' or 'defends its territory,' it doesn't proactively go out and pursue desires that aren't instinctual. Green is opposed to acting. Green has the firm conviction that trying to change the world never improves things.

But the thing that makes him Black or possibly Red is not his personality. It's the part where his personality is bonsaied around having an unnatural desire to kill women and romance/worship/fetishize/whatever their hands.

This is something that true mono-Green recoils at; even things with instincts to do something like that are considered fundamentally suspect. He's a walking anomaly and the pure Green thing to do would be to just not be a hand-fetish serial killer.

[brazenautomaton]

if Yoshikage Kira was a Magic card he would be monogreen, change my mind

[jiskblr]

I, too, have watched no JoJo, but based on the wiki...

Although he is highly intelligent and possesses many talents, this yearning shows in his dislike of coming in first, and Jotaro theorizes from his many trophies that he even made it a point to never rank better than 3rd in any competition so as not to stand out. Since his youth, Kira has been avoiding standing out, living a healthy life and following a strict regimen. He becomes bothered when someone disrupts his habits and goes to extreme lengths to get them back. As his father pointed out, this will to stay in the background was so bad that if bullied, or denied his favorite toy, Kira would bite his nails until they bled, being the only way he's found to express his frustration.

He doesn't care that his lifestyle involves murder, nor the suffering of his victim's relatives. He only seeks to satisfy his basic instincts. In addition, Kira is determined to preserve his lifestyle, and being set back only increases his determination.

Okay that does sound pretty solidly Green...

[...]his frequent and periodic murderous impulses. Kira targets women, or, more specifically, women with beautiful hands. Kira possesses a hand fetish, which he discovered when he found himself aroused by the Mona Lisa's hands. However, his desire has never extended to the rest of the female person and he otherwise shuns their presence. This results in murdering random women, not caring in the least how they look like or behave, in order to acquire their (severed) hands as "girlfriends", acting as if the severed hands were actually sentient and conversing with them, even offering them various gifts.

Apart from his murders, Kira is particularly violent when someone threatens his way of life or publicly humiliates him. Since Kira doesn't want to be noticed, he will try everything to solve his problems without facing anyone directly. However, if he doesn't have any other choice, he will instantly try to kill whoever discovers his true nature. Kira is quick to drop his polite demeanor, rudely insulting his foes or violently beating them before killing them.

...but not mono. Probably BG but RG would work pretty well too.

Kira believes that he has luck and fate on his side, exposing a superstitious façade, claiming that whenever faced with an obstacle he will be able to make it through with a combination of hard work and opportunity

This is Green but also... White or Blue? And OCD tendencies are typically pretty closely W/U. (Vampire legends of course ascribe them to a Black creature, but I think this is for the same reasons WB vampires work well - they always have had the 'constrained by excessive need for order' thing going on.)

[brazenautomaton]

The wiki does not place the proper emphasis on things.

"Yoshikage Kira wants to live a quiet life" is like his whole thing. He is defined by an absolute lack of ambition. He seeks no knowledge, accolade, or power. He totally accepts his fate, his nature, and his place in the world. His reaction to the heroes is not "how dare you challenge my plans" it's "Why can't you people just leave me alone?" He seeks to change nothing about the world or himself. He really has no need for human interaction aside from their severed hands.

Hermits, recluses, and Thrun the Last Troll are all green. Being at peace with oneself, contentment, accepting who you are, all green. This guy is mega ultra hyper green. If you wanted to really reach you could add colors but like he'd need four green pips and THEN he'd have maybe a hybrid R/G.

[jiskblr]

That sounds like the greenest (sapient) serial killer there's ever been, but still not mono-green because serial killing is unnatural and requires being overwhelmingly motivated to do something severely unnatural. Like BGG or RGG or something. I'd lean toward BG because being enemy colors is typically depicted as being more mentally unstable than allied colors, but knowing more about his ~romantic feelings toward the hands could push that toward Red.

(In theory you could have a species that was obligate cannibals and that was the natural state of them and so they needed to serial kill to live, but I think MtG would still class them as Black even if they weren't undead.)

[brazenautomaton]

if Yoshikage Kira was a Magic card he would be monogreen, change my mind

[jiskblr]

I, too, have watched no JoJo, but based on the wiki...

Although he is highly intelligent and possesses many talents, this yearning shows in his dislike of coming in first, and Jotaro theorizes from his many trophies that he even made it a point to never rank better than 3rd in any competition so as not to stand out. Since his youth, Kira has been avoiding standing out, living a healthy life and following a strict regimen. He becomes bothered when someone disrupts his habits and goes to extreme lengths to get them back. As his father pointed out, this will to stay in the background was so bad that if bullied, or denied his favorite toy, Kira would bite his nails until they bled, being the only way he's found to express his frustration.

He doesn't care that his lifestyle involves murder, nor the suffering of his victim's relatives. He only seeks to satisfy his basic instincts. In addition, Kira is determined to preserve his lifestyle, and being set back only increases his determination.

Okay that does sound pretty solidly Green...

[...]his frequent and periodic murderous impulses. Kira targets women, or, more specifically, women with beautiful hands. Kira possesses a hand fetish, which he discovered when he found himself aroused by the Mona Lisa's hands. However, his desire has never extended to the rest of the female person and he otherwise shuns their presence. This results in murdering random women, not caring in the least how they look like or behave, in order to acquire their (severed) hands as "girlfriends", acting as if the severed hands were actually sentient and conversing with them, even offering them various gifts.

Apart from his murders, Kira is particularly violent when someone threatens his way of life or publicly humiliates him. Since Kira doesn't want to be noticed, he will try everything to solve his problems without facing anyone directly. However, if he doesn't have any other choice, he will instantly try to kill whoever discovers his true nature. Kira is quick to drop his polite demeanor, rudely insulting his foes or violently beating them before killing them.

...but not mono. Probably BG but RG would work pretty well too.

Kira believes that he has luck and fate on his side, exposing a superstitious façade, claiming that whenever faced with an obstacle he will be able to make it through with a combination of hard work and opportunity

This is Green but also... White or Blue? And OCD tendencies are typically pretty closely W/U. (Vampire legends of course ascribe them to a Black creature, but I think this is for the same reasons WB vampires work well - they always have had the 'constrained by excessive need for order' thing going on.)