MWchase @mwchase - Tumblr Blog

John Wick style rampage-of-revenge film about a housecat that got dumped on the side of the highway by a negligent former owner coming back for vengeance. Live action. All practical effects. The cat has no dialogue. This is played 100% straight.

mwchase

I must take pains to emphasize that I am not saying that "this is just" any extant movie that I know of, but I was very strongly reminded of The Shadow of the Cat and The Painted Hills. I guess all I have to say is, there's precedent.

prokopetz

I think it's actually essential to children's moral development to be exposed to short stories moderately beyond their reading level where a bunch of fucked up shit happens and then instead of offering a moral lesson or any sort of emotional or narrative resolution it just ends.

prokopetz

(Ideally these stories should be presented in the form of poorly curated anthologies with the most generic titles imaginable, thereby rendering their contents impossible to identify or find later in life and leaving the affected individual wondering whether they dreamed the whole thing.)

prokopetz

Since we're sharing our personal white whales in the notes, mine is one I read when I was like ten about a boy who travels to a post-apocalyptic future where rising sea levels have caused humanity to evolve into fish-people, has a whirlwind romance with a local girl, then resolves to travel back to his own time and prevent the apocalypse, only to discover that his fish girlfriend has destroyed the time machine while he slept. He has a mental breakdown and the story just ends. Thirty years later and I still have no idea who wrote it or what it's called – not for lack of searching!

mwchase

I'm on the train so I can't focus on reading it to be sure, but could it be https://archive.org/details/extinctionisfore0000loui/page/36/mode/2up ?

prokopetz

Re: Team Fortress 2 hats and crypto, I remember when NFTs rolled out and they were trying to make blockchain/NFT games a thing one of the core points they had was “It’s items you can trade between players that are worth real money”

Which like, I know the mechanics of TF2 hats and NFTs are probably different on some level but as someone with a limited understanding of crypto NFTs literally just looked like TF2 hat economy running on crypto, especially when applied to games

Well, yes – crypto fundamentally doesn't do anything that isn't possible without it. Lots of non-crypto games have real-cash economies. Which isn't a good thing, either, but it's a separate issue from the crypto thing!

Much like the relationship between crypto and banking, the idea behind using NFTs to implement cash economies in games is that, in theory, it would allow the exchange of items to be carried out and validated without involving any central authority. In practice, of course, this falls down even harder than cryptocurrency; at least with cryptocurrencies you're dealing with abstract financial instruments – with real-cash game economies, the game's physical servers need to be owned and operated by somone, and if that someone decides not to recognise the validity of your NFT, what the fuck are you going to do? Authority over virtual environments is inherently centralised by virtue of centralised physical infrastructure dependency, no matter what the magic paperwork says.

(This issue could, in theory, partly be worked around by hosting the game in question on a globally distributed network of servers whose owners and operators have entered into a mutual voluntary agreement to always recognise the same blockchains. However, as far as I'm aware no proponent of NFT-driven game economies has ever put forth a realistic proposal for how to accomplish that; the few NFT advocates who aren't just grifters seem to be under the impression that if you just get the software side right, the physical infrastructure side will sort itself out automatically, which has literally never proven true at any point in history.)

mwchase

re the end of that parenthetical: see also, "vibe-coding a SaaS".

prokopetz

One of my favourite reading comprehension failures I bump into on this blog is when I criticise a game and I get folks coming to me like "well actually [thing] cannot possibly be true of [game] because [game] has one sentence in its introduction that says [other thing]". Like, y'all are aware that it's possible for a text to make claims about itself which are not true, right? Hell, if tabletop RPGs were people, claiming to possess features which they do not in fact possess would be one of their favourite pastimes!

prokopetz

More pertinently to recent discussion, the explicit claims a game's text makes about the roles of the players and the GM need not be in any way consistent with the understanding of those roles articulated by the structure of the mechanics – and I'd argue that inconsistency is more the rule than the exception there.

prokopetz

#writing “have fun!” as my tongue-in-cheek rule zero #then using that to say that anyone who didn't have fun was simply not following the rules properly (via @fjordojustice)

prokopetz

@allfunniesandgames replied:

"If you're not having fun, then you're not playing RAW" is a fantastic deflection.

I think it's important to understand that certain portions of the tabletop roleplaying community actually, literally make this argument. Many games contain a "Rule Zero" section which boils down to "if there's ever a conflict between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, no there isn't, because the rules also state that it's the GM's responsibility to modify the rules to revolve the conflict", and some folks sincerely cite such Rule Zeroes to dismiss out of hand any criticism that the game's rules-as-written don't actually do what the text claims they do, on the grounds that the GM's failure to resolve the disconnect proves that Rule Zero was not followed, therefore the game was not being played by the rules-as-written.

mwchase

The rules are fully backwards-compatible.

Dungeon-crawling is universal.

Homebrew is mandatory.

mwchase

Nadella: "Please stop calling it 'slop'."

Me, after several hours of thought and contemplation: "schlop"

mwchase

That said, I can also propose "Statistically Average" (as in, Statistically Average Coder, Writer, Artist, etc) to emphasize the lack of decision-making or judgment, as well as the reliance on existing material, and "square" for when you get the unshakeable feeling that a given image or text is the version of itself most tailored to the gut feelings of a roomful of risk-averse executives.

The latter is also applicable when you're not in the mood to establish for-sure that "AI" was involved. Humans can produce something without a soul; it's just harder for us than it is for generative AI, which is a big part of the basis for selling this stuff to corporations.

#ai #llm

Nadella: "Please stop calling it 'slop'."

Me, after several hours of thought and contemplation: "schlop"

#ai #llm #chatgpt #copilot #carefully pondering all the angles on how to make it sound worse

prokopetz

To fully understand the Bashir/Garak thing in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, you need to understand that Garak first appears in the second episode of the series, very obviously trying to arrange a hookup with Bashir – like, it's just barely subtext – and then the network was like "what the fuck" and ordered to showrunners to knock it off with the gay shit, and as a result, Garak promptly disappears from the show for twenty episodes, next appearing in the fifth episode of season two. Can you imagine what that did to folks who were watching in real time?

prokopetz

For the unacquainted, this is literally Garak's first on-screen appearance:

It's about two minutes long, but watch until the end. Trust me.

mwchase

I'm unsure if I've got a messed up combination of extensions, or if Tumblr's mobile view is just Like This. (It shows up fine everywhere other than the front page of the blog.)

transmascmarypoppins

why is this post completely broken in every way imaginable

cecilsrandomeverything

Broken notes… deactivated account… removed image….

Finally, we have them all.

spacefinch

In addition: OP’s name is just… gone. No “[insert username]-deactivated[insert a bunch of numbers]” as is the standard for deactivated blogs.

Just the world “deactivated.” Look upon their post, ye mighty, and despair.

chatblancofficial

It’ll be almost impossible to find this post unless it wanders across your dash.

huewrite

It wandered across mine. I shall help it travel forward.

highimpactemotions

As will I.

mwchase

When I clicked through to the source, the site passive-aggressively accused me of trying to attack it???

totally-cis-offical

I need a “humans are space orcs” thing where all sentient species are weird like that, but in their own unique ways

And a lot of them are aware of this (like we are when we make these “humans are space orcs” stories)

Maybe one species enjoys getting bit by something equivalent to mosquitoes. Maybe one actively avoids the hospitable places on their planet because it’s boring without a challenge. You get the gist.

I want to see a bunch of aliens (+humans) sitting around a table talking about how their own species is a bunch of freaks

Everyone is space orcs

totally-cis-offical

Best possible addition. This is a top-tier insight

@hotcheetohatred

stephenleasheppard

The thing about "humans are space orcs" is it was originally conceived of as a response to science fiction tropes in which every alien species had its own special thing except humans, whose special thing was either Most Generic, Most Adaptable, or Most Je Ne Sais Quoi. Like, in a lot of science fiction, Klingons are Honorable Warriors, Vulcans are Logical Scientists, Romulans are Cunning Strategists, and humans are all of the above in a way that leaves us slightly less good than any of them at their shtick but better overall and able to triumph because of our lack of specialization and the assumption that we are, somehow, just destined to be the best. See this scene from Enterprise for what I'm talking about. There's a similar scene in Mass Effect where Mordin talks about how humans are more variable and adaptable and less predictable than all the other races in that setting, which is super annoying if you know anything about how much our species is defined by the genetic bottleneck we suffered during the Ice Age -- the generic bottleneck that has left us all so genetically similar to each other that we can do crazy things like donate blood and organs to each other, things other species can't tolerate.

@prokopetz proposed that humans ought to get something special of our own that isn't just "We are the bestest and specialist in some generic way that feels like a vague and unsettling metaphor for American superiority and manifest destiny amidst all the other cultures of the world," and settled on space orcs because "Pursuit predators with freakish endurance" was the ecological niche we occupied during our own evolutionary history up until we started doing the civilization thing. The assumption from the start was that every other sci-fi or fantasy species would each be freaks in their own way, and the point of humans are space orcs was to let us be our own sort of freak, too.

People who expanded on the humans are space orcs stories immediately turned it into a reason to write little stories where humans are the biggest freaks or the only freaks and we are, in fact, the specialest most manifest destinyest je ne sais quoi-laden metaphors for the superiority of American culture over all the other cultures of the world. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

Which is to say you've reinvented the point of humans are space orcs from first principles. That's pretty cool.

prokopetz

I think my mistake was failing to appreciate just how readily "humans have exceptionally high cardiovascular endurance due to our real-world evolutionary history as specialised persistence predators" could be twisted around into "humans have superior Will to Power", which is the other problematic special niche humans have historically been assigned in popular science fiction.

mwchase

This doesn't fix the "misunderstanding humans" part, but this got me thinking about what different Weird Things could be.

Like, a civilization of small creatures that evolved on a planet in an extreme horseshoe orbit. The dream of indefinite suspended animation is real, but only for these guys. The waves of their colony ships are interspersed with various catastrophes, meaning that while it's not surprising when they reach a planet first, or show up suddenly one day, it's incredibly hard to predict their culture, language, tech level, and system of government.

An intelligence evolved from something much like eusocial insects. The fundamental aspects of sapience rely so much on the interactions between units, and so little on the unique characteristics of a unit, that, following the development of extremely miniaturized electronics, some colonies ship-of-Theseused themselves into entirely artificial bodies, using them to explore extreme conditions. For economic reasons, it often makes sense to switch back and forth between different chasses, including biological.

A species that has a similar level of transplant compatibility to humans, but has extremely plastic distributed cognition, meaning that amputations and transplants tend to result in the loss or gain of seemingly random memories, skills, or personality traits. Some traditions of ritual surgeries have resulted in individuals that claim to have firsthand memories of events that occurred generations ago, though they do not pretend to be literally the person that experienced those events. Some disturbed individuals believe that they have isolated the seat of personality, and form cults devoted to kidnapping and performing surgery to extend their own conscious experience at the expense of their victims. Any apparent success is generally agreed to actually be a trauma response.

A clade with a similar level of extremophilia to the memetic status of tardigrades. At least one species of them has, for some reason, developed sapience and tool use, and their ability to work in a vacuum makes them an invaluable asset on space journeys, if a bit lackadaisical with the environmental controls. Such arrangements are always temporary, as they eventually grow tired of the stifling routine of consistent temperature, pressure, and humidity.

A species(?) that offloads most of its adaptations to something like plasmids, which can be replicated and spread independently of the cells and bodies. Difficult experiences trigger a kind of tagged retrieval of plasmids between individuals, resulting in sometimes-drastic physiological changes in response to adverse conditions. A curious individual of this species came across a misplaced data-pad from an expedition, and somehow evolved sapience from first principles in its efforts to comprehend it.

Just need to tune the narrative significance of these to be commensurate with "humans consider the galactic standard of hard labor to be equivalent to a leisurely weekend project", or however we want to express humans being Freaks.

prokopetz

Setting up a giant inflatable Shrek in my yard for Christmas, and if anyone asks I act like I genuinely believe that's what the Grinch looks like.

prokopetz

Eventually I allow someone to convince me of my "mistake"; the next day, Shrek has been replaced with a giant inflatable Frankenstein which I insist is Jack Skellington.

mwchase

I wonder how much smooth-shark mileage there'd be in pretending to only know the Grinch from Halloween is Grinch Night.

200-word-rpgs

200 Word RPGs 2025

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2025 event, running from November 1st, 2025 through November 30th, 2025. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

mwchase

Oops, All Chosen Ones

There is one Chosen One. You are all Chosen Ones.

Roll or decide as a group how this happened:

Divided essence

Counterfactual timelines

Temporally displaced

Imperfect clones

Ambiguous prophecies

Reroll until there are two different non-6 results

Decide as a group what Baseline traits of a character in the setting are (example: "regular human"), what traits you specifically have in Common, and what is Unique about each of you.

Assign each character starting Difference of 3. Difference ranges between 0 and 6.

When attempting a task, it either calls on Baseline traits, Common traits, or Unique traits. Calling on Baseline traits always succeeds. Otherwise, determine whether it calls on a Common trait, or a Unique trait. When Difference is 0, outcome is Common. When Difference is 6, outcome is Unique. Otherwise, roll d6: if result is greater than your Difference, outcome is Common; otherwise, outcome is Unique.

If the outcome is Common, increment Difference to represent seeking greater self-determination in response. If the outcome is Unique, decrement Difference to represent drawing away from the unfamiliar. If the outcome matches the chosen trait, narrate the results; otherwise the rest of the group decides what happens.

prokopetz

Narrative RPG which proofs its true ending against data mining by arranging itself so that all player-facing decisions have either two, four, or eight potential options, thus yielding 1, 2, or 3 bits of binary data. These decisions are in turn arranged so that no matter what path the player takes, their choices will yield exactly 128 bits worth of data. At the end of the game, the decisions are concatenated in some pre-defined order into a 128-bit integer, which is then used to attempt to decrypt an AES-encrypted archive containing the cutscene script for the true ending. If decryption succeeds, the true ending is received.

(That this would involve a main story path in which roughly seventy player-facing decisions – assuming an average of just under four options per decision – must be made without a single deviation in order to receive the true ending is, of course, an acceptable price to pay.)

mwchase

Data mining would simply be somewhat more percussive than usual.

prokopetz

I know some would consider this an unreasonable expectation, but I feel like when I pick up an officially licensed tabletop RPG adaptation of some piece of media, it shouldn't be a coin toss whether or not there will be any mechanism for playing as the sorts of characters that the game's ostensible source material is actually about.

prokopetz

The source material: Cold opens with Spacewizard Lasergirl blowing up a small moon.

The tabletop RPG: Zero to hero advancement, a page-long table of melee weapons in spite of the fact that the source material depicts no hand to hand combat, and a condescending sidebar explaining why playing as Spacewizard Lasergirl would be "unbalanced".

prokopetz

You need to understand that there is both an officially licensed Avatar: The Last Airbender RPG where nobody is allowed to be the Avatar and an officially licensed Doctor Who RPG where nobody is allowed to be the Doctor. The situation is dire.

prokopetz

If your reaction to the preceding post was "wait, those actually make sense because it's bad to have a group of tabletop RPG characters where one character is more powerful than the other characters", you are very much part of the problem.

mwchase

Currently working on a 200 word RPG to deliberately fail at addressing this. Somehow, my initial draft is extremely short, so I'm trying for figure out whether to spend my generous word budget on improving the mechanics, or on translating it out of insane headlinese.

prokopetz

I feel like "mech pilot in an inadequately negotiated D/s relationship with their own robot" is fertile ground for mechsploitation porn, but I can't decide whether it's optimally a post-Evangelion "we cloned Cthulhu and put it in your robot" scenario, or whether it works better if the mech is basically just GLaDOS.

mwchase

The mech has both, and is two-thirds of a deeply-dysfunctional polycule?

prokopetz

I have to confess a certain affection for D&D clones where all of the most straightforward and effective classes are in the core book, then all the sourcebook classes are goofy mutants that require twice as much system mastery to be half as effective. You literally made your game pay-to-lose.

mwchase

They just need to figure out how to implement achievements in a tabletop game, and then it's a challenge mode DLC.

prokopetz

I really hope all the folks who've signed up for WTFjam in the last couple of hours have been working on their submissions all month and just got around to registering now, and aren't thinking to themselves "yes, I can produce an acceptable entry to a month-long game jam in approximately five hours".

mwchase

A hubris on par with my original thought of "I'll knock out this Fiasco playset quick, then get to work on a robot-gladiatorial-tournament hack of Nobilis".

After I finished the Fiasco playset, I did not work on a robot-gladiatorial-tournament hack of Nobilis. I got high and barely spoke for several days, and now here we are.

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MWchase