How viable would it be to impose an entitlements tax on (certain forms of) non-cash compensation? Y'know - if you give your employee 5 shares of stock, you have to give 1 share to the Social Security Administration.
Obviously relevant to the same conversations that generate discussion of raising the taxable Social Security wage cap.
I'm confused because stock grants are already taxed? Like when I get 100 shares of XYZ in my quarterly vest, the value of those shares at vest is reported as income on my W-2. And if I'm lucky, my employer automatically sold and remitted ~25 of those shares during the vest to cover my tax obligation.
tech companies appear to be labouring under the delusion that users who click on the wrong program by accident because the button's placement has changed will naturally find themselves using and enjoying whatever feature they moved into the previous location of that program's button
i suspect the number of people in the world who go "ah, what the hell. i've accidentally opened the window for this new feature. i suppose i might as well stop what i'm doing to try this out rather than just figure out where they've hidden the old button and go do the thing i was already doing" is roughly n=2 and that those 2 people are the CEOs of microsoft and google respectively
Perspective from someone who as worked at a big tech company (you've heard of them) that does shit like this:
This isn't so much deliberate, as there's no incentive to notice that you (the button developer) have done it.
Accidental taps on the new button still read as "engagement", make number go up, and no one wants to be the one to rain on the parade. Unless you've built a really strong culture around statistical rigor ("what's a learning effect?") and un-shipping changes (even though the PMs really really want to ship things or they stop existing), it's just so much easier to invent fake wins and keep shipping garbage to justify your continued employment.
"Actually make software people like" is soooooo much harder than "ship garbage that moves the numbers long enough to look like we did something"
Peeling off the broken breastplate of a stoic knight who only fights and never speaks, just to realize there’s nothing in there. Not metaphorically—the armor is literally empty. It doesn’t appear to affect him. If the armor stays mostly in the shape of a knight, he just gets back up to keep fighting. But with the chest plate off he just sits there, equally impervious to curiosity as I reach up into the cavity where his body might’ve gone. Stubbornly, no answers are found anywhere in there.
So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.
He comes back next time with some grievous injury to his nothing, presumably from the massive shredded gash across his thigh plates. He sits and waits. I fix it for him. He is still nothing in there. I decide to add a drawing on the inside, of the type of beast I imagine could rend metal into scraps with a single blow. He puts it back on. He no longer moves as if he is injured.
Over time the interior of the knight becomes decorated with whatever odds and ends I could think to attach to the inside of a guy who’s got room to carry it. What really gets me is that he never removes any of it. Never requests a change. Not even when I installed a curtain rod for a small tapestry, or a bud vase to carry roses for his beloved, or an accordion folder for letters. He didn’t say a word for any of the many, many drawings of mythical beasts that now fight forever inside of his shell.
There are plenty of other forges. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps coming back here anyway. We’re pretty popular, but he could get his armor fixed a lot quicker (and with fewer ridiculous modifications) literally anywhere else. I asked him if I could get a look at his nothing again. He flipped up his visor and nodded his head so I could take a look. It was the same as it had been, filled with drawings and trinkets and weird little fixtures I’d put in there. I asked if he was annoyed by it, or liked it, or felt anything at all, but he literally only ever says nothing, so I’m not sure why I asked.
There’s not much room left in his nothing now. When he comes back for repairs I’ve had to fix my own foolish additions. Some of these pieces are intricate and irritating to repair, but I fix them anyway. It feels wrong to take any of it away from him now, even though I’ve been rudely encroaching on his nothingness to the point where it’s barely even there. How he squeezes his nothing back into a body so full, I’ll never understand. But it’s a game to me now, finding a spot not yet filled and putting something there. A dark part of me wonders if he ever gets filled up completely, if whatever sorcery holds the nothing-knight together may break, and it will all clatter unceremoniously to the floor.
When he hands me his breastplate yet again, it is so shockingly disfigured that I wonder if being made of nothing has somehow kept him alive. No ordinary knight could sustain such injuries. So I fix it. And he waits, unmoving, in a quiet corner of the forge. It’s like he’s watching, even though I know the reading glasses I put inside his helmet were just for fun. I’m careful to put it all back exactly the way it was when he last left. There’s no room to add more this time.
He examines the breastplate, and pauses before putting it back on, like he’s looking for something. Is he worried about the fit? But it suits him just as it always did. He calmly points to a little space, about an inch, between a miniature shelf and one of many pockets. There’s nothing there. I ask him what’s wrong, and again he points. It’s the most emotion I’ve ever seen from him, and it’s barely anything at all. I take it to mean he wants something there.
I spend some time engraving a little snail in the gap. He watches, as much as nothing can watch. When I’m finished he holds the breastplate, but he doesn’t put it on right away. I ask him if something’s still wrong. He says nothing, and puts it on. I tell him I can’t add anything else. Even if he could ask, there’s no room left.
Next time he comes back, there’s nothing wrong with his armor—he lets me check to make sure. I ask him what he’s doing here. Out from one of many pockets, he retrieves a tiny rusted knife. It’s in miserable condition, barely worth saving. I tell him I could make him a nice new one, but I’ll fix it if he likes. He puts it away and reaches around to find something else, a needle and thread. Better condition, but I’m not a sewist and I tell him as much. He puts them away. He then retrieves a little twisted piece of wax paper. I open it. It’s candy. I ask if I can eat it. He says nothing. I eat it. It’s flavored with cinnamon. I’m surprised he let me take it.
He keeps bringing me candy now. His armor is the most laborious to repair out of every client my forge serves, but it’s my own fault so I can’t complain. Sometimes he keeps me company while I work. I wonder if he is trying to tell me something when he hands me mints. I wonder again at the lemon lozenges. He stares at me when I eat, as much as nothing can stare.
One day he brings me a little jar of honey. I thank him, I tell him I’ll save it for dinner. He watches me work, he puts his repaired armor back on, and he stays. My shift passes slowly, and when I finally pack up to leave it’s dark outside. He follows me out of the forge. I ask him where he’s going. He points to the jar in my hand. I ask him if he wants to watch me eat it. He says nothing, but the nothing-knight clearly wants something, so I open the lid and dunk my finger in the honey. I try not to get any on my chin. He stands there, inches away, watching me try to consume this jar of honey without a utensil. It tastes like clovers. About half the jar is left when I’ve finally had enough of pretending to be a bear, but he doesn’t move to leave.
I ask if he’s going to follow me home. He says nothing. I tell him he can if he wants to. Again, nothing. I start walking, and he follows at my side. I know he’s not going to say anything ever, so I fill the silence. I tell him I’m grateful for the sweets, I tell him about how his various components are made, I tell him I’ve never met anyone made of nothing before. I tell him it’s a rare opportunity for a smith to work so much on the inside of something. He says nothing. I tell him again how much I like the candy.
It occurs to me that maybe filling me with sugar is as close as he can get to filling someone else’s empty armor with trinkets. I’m not sure if that’s really why he does it. I tell him I don’t have room to be filled with anything on the inside, not like him. I’m not a container for much besides food. He offers me another piece of candy. Maybe he likes containing something, the way I like to feel full. Maybe it’s nothing at all.
—
I didn’t edit this even a little bit. Thanks for reading!
At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes
yeah i like to give my blessing to the most pathetic looking weak little knight at the tournament. she can’t even look me in the eye when i give her my flower and she stutters out that she’ll do her best or something of the like. i think its funny when she has to cry and beg my forgiveness and i get to say “such a shame, i suppose my hand in marriage will have to go to someone else…” and then i get to hear her whimper like a dog. ive done this like 6 times alrea-
Wait, so...Why DID 4E underperform? Or is that outside your expertise here? (No shame if so, you're a game designer, not a market analyst. You can tell by the having a soul).
(With reference to this post here.)
There were a couple of major factors in play there.
First, a big chunk of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition's popularity had come about due to robust third-party support, published under the auspices of Open Game License (OGL). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, however, was not licensed under the OGL, being subject to a much more restrictive license imaginatively titled the Game System License, or GSL. Hasbro reportedly refused to negotiate with existing third-party publishers to get them on board with the GSL, or to offer transition support of any kind; instead, they simply demanded an immediate halt to the publication of all 3E material, and attempted to bludgeon publishers into compliance by threatening to yank their trademark authorisations (i.e., the agreements which allowed them to put the "D&D compatible" logo on the covers of their books).
Predictably, this approach was not well received. The largest of 3E's third-party supporters, Paizo Publishing (now Paizo Inc.), elected to produce their own game which was statblock-compatible with 3E in order to provide a venue for other publishers to continue producing OGL material; many of their peers decided to gamble on Paizo's plan rather than play ball with Hasbro, and this is how we got Pathfinder. Hasbro's behaviour thus caused D&D's third-party support to crater nearly to zero with the publication of 4E and created D&D's largest competitor.
Second, 4E was badly behind the curve on digital availability. Shortly before 4E was scheduled to drop, the digital masters (i.e., the files provided to printers in order to manufacture the books) were leaked on file sharing networks. Hasbro responded by panicking and ordering an immediate and indefinite halt to e-book publication of D&D material (in spite of the fact that the leak had demonstrably originated from their print production arm rather than their e-publishing arm), even going so far as to refuse to honour pre-orders for 4E's now cancelled e-book version.
Combined with a series of mismanagement-induced delays which caused 4E's virtual tabletop tools to miss the game's publication date entirely, and a decision to paywall what few first-party resources did manage to hit their target behind a monthly subscription, this resulted in 4E being available exclusively in print for the first two full years of its lifespan, at a time when D&D's competitors – including the aforementioned Pathfinder – were literally giving their core rules away in digital form for free.
As you say, I'm no market analyst, but I have a strong suspicion that "alienating practically all third-party publishers for a game line which was critically dependent on robust third-party support", "being the first edition of the game ever to face significant direct competition", and "making a game which dropped in the middle of the worst economic recession in thirty years available exclusively as an expensive printed set" resulted in the 4E stepping up to the plate with three strikes already against it. Add to that the almost comical ineptitude of Hasbro's advertising for 4E, and the usual drama of any major edition turnover, and... well.
"But what about the rules" sure, there were some issues with 4E's mechanics, but you need to understand that "4E underperformed because people hated the rules" isn't just a convenient narrative for edition-warring grognards; it's also a fiction which Hasbro itself has tacitly embraced, because the alternative is acknowledging that their publishing department repeatedly shit the bed on 4E's rollout.
this kind of thing sounds like something that would kill d&d as a franchise entirely with how badly hasbro fumbled it, so i'm surprised to see 5e not only still kicking, but also still the primary force to the point that people will say "homebrew 5e" for anything. what's up with that?
"Commercially underperformed" doesn't mean "failed". Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition was still the single best-selling tabletop RPG on the market every year of its lifespan. The idea that nobody bought it at all is another of those edition-warrior myths.
Your therapist asks you "Who in this image do you see yourself as?" and then shows you a drawing of two shirtless skinny anime catboys with a thread of saliva going between their lips
One objection - the study is real but the "overestimated by orders of magnitude" bit isn't, from what I can see.
The specific fact is: cheap gloves shed orders of magnitude more plastics than fancy gloves.
The articles mention "thousands of false positives per square mm" but there's no mention of what a normal amount of true positives is. Maybe it's 10x-ing it, maybe it's just double, maybe it's only inflating estimates by a fraction.
Look forward to this being misquoted and used in environmental science denialism.
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
For Reasons, I've been reading an awful lot of xianxia/cultivation webnovels this year.
Mostly I've been reading three serials in particular (which qualifies as "a lot," given how insanely long these things get). All of them are, I gather, popular and generally considered to be high-quality exemplars of the genre; at least, they were recommended to me on those terms, by knowledgeable parties whose taste I trust.
They're pretty different from one another in terms of tone and focus, especially given how famously formulaic and trope-y the genre is as a whole.
Which makes it kind of remarkable how conspicuously sexually conservative they all are, as texts. It is a unifying feature that I definitely didn't expect.
One of them features a protagonist who is deeply sex-averse for trauma-related reasons, in a way that has caused her to turn away from anything that smacks of romance or intimacy, and it has taken her eight (hefty) volumes to get to the point of even thinking "maybe I should do something about that." One of them features a protagonist who is asexual for reasons of physical malfunction until he levels up enough to fix his body, at which point he transitions seamlessly to an unshakeably-one-target sexuality directed at his beloved life partner. One of them features an isekaied protagonist who quickly gets married to the first woman he meets in the new world (almost literally), and who is as faithful and loyal to her as a golden retriever; he's the POV, so we know what he's thinking, and he never experiences the slightest attraction to anyone else. (His wife is, admittedly, kind of a pervert, but just in a silly way that lets her make #relatable dirty jokes, not in a way that would actually result in anyone ever doing anything.)
...and it's not like it's weird to have a happy stable monogamous couple, or a protagonist who isn't interested in sex or romance. It's not even very weird to have three instances of those things. The weirdness, such as it is, comes from the awareness - discernibly shared by all three texts - that this is a literary choice, and it is not the default choice. Which is obviously true, because xianxia/cultivation is a genre full of harems and sexiness. All three texts comment explicitly on how the protagonist isn't pursuing a life of boundless sexual opportunity, and there's an implicit sense in all of them that you should find this fact noteworthy and meaningful.
The reasons for this, I'm sure, are varied and complicated. In at least one case, the novel is a cleaned-up version of an audience-participation "quest" text (like Andrew Hussie's early work), and so the protagonist's choices reflect nothing so much as the unpredictable decisions made by a group of forum denizens.
But I can't shake the feeling that this is being used by all of them, at least to some extent, as a quality marker. "Look, I know that I'm writing in a genre full of self-indulgent wish-fulfillment trash, but I promise that this isn't trash! See? No harems anywhere! No chance of that at all!"
And, having seen it in the xianxia webnovels, I find myself seeing a very similar dynamic in a lot of other places...
I should start by pointing out that these are all works of extremely serialized fiction, with everything that entails. All of them are stupendously long, like "at least five thick novels long right now." None of them is anywhere close to being finished. All of them read like stories designed to keep a smallish fanbase engaged for many years on end, as opposed to stories designed to be consumed in their entirety and then contemplated. If you don't want that, this is not the genre for you.
That said -
The best of them, by a lot, is Sky Pride by Warby Picus. This is the one that I can, with a clean conscience, recommend to people who aren't already super into the genre. It's got a real grounding in Neidan internal-alchemy theory, and engages with both ethics and personal emotions in a not-entirely-shallow way, while still having all the magic kung fu power-up extravaganza nonsense. The main character is legitimately adorable and admirable. It is also the one of these that feels the least heavily padded, although that's not saying much.
(...I do regret to inform you that Sky Pride has, um, an isekai element. It's a minor element, and it's well-handled - our protagonist is guided by some kind of extraplanar ghost who clearly knows the system and is trying to game it hard, and this ghost is a genuinely charming presence - but, even so, ::facepalm::.)
Forge of Destiny (which later becomes Threads of Destiny) (and possibly becomes something else further on?), by Yrsillar, is very standard-issue decent-quality xianxia. There sure is a Chinese-flavored fantasy world (which becomes less-Chinese flavored around the edges), there sure is a complicated magic system with power-ups, etc. It rambles massively even compared to the other things on this list; characters are often introduced and then not-particularly-followed-up-on, or dropped and picked up again in weird arbitrary ways, in a fashion that feels true-to-life but also narratively frustrating. The first three (?) volumes are, uh, kung-fu-flavored magic school adventures. The hilarious thing about this one is that the novels are adapted from a forum quest, so chapters have a tendency to end on Extremely Explicit Decision Points (like "...and then Ling Qi had to pick two of the following five prizes that were offered to her").
Beware of Chicken, by Casualfarmer, is...uh. It is a very silly genre parody about a guy who gets isekaied into xianxia land, immediately nopes out of cultivating in order to go be a farmer, but gets drawn back into Kung Fu Shenanigans anyway (in large part because his farm animals are pretty determined to become great cultivators). It is, as a story, pure chirpy treacly slice-of-life-y pap. There's a lot of cuteness and not a lot of suspense or depth. (Our hero is a Canadian, and ends up making his fortune by selling qi-infused maple syrup...) If you're interested in reading Ridiculous Jokes About Xianxia for the length of a full-blown actual xianxia serial, it's pretty good.
I have read (some of) Beware of Chicken! Recommended it to my never-heard-of-Xianxia wife even. I think it's fun if you're not into Xianxa/Cultivation, and if you are it's a nice change of pace and very silly/cute.
I got into Xianxia like some ~8 years ago (or more?) I think with "Warlock in the Magus World" which I wouldn't necessarily recommend and did not realize what I was biting off at the time. It's been really neat to see the genre expand and get adopted by western writers (Hello Will Wight).
