RGB Prose

Tumblr is for casual chatting. Main blog, with somewhat more polished pieces, is here.

[toolusingmammalgirl]

The Terra Ignota cast as dril tweets

[nostalgebraist]

The Anonymous: going to start asking “What do you Think?” at the end of each post, to help stimulate discourse and reap the substantial benefits of Social.

Brillists: imgagine if people went through life trying to collect IQ Points in so as much as they try to collect Dollars. verify me. verify my account

Brody DeLupa: i attribute the complete failure of my brand to the actions of detractors, oor my “trolls”, as it were, as well as my own constant fuckups

Bryar Kosala: i regret being tasked the emotional burden of maintaining the final bastion of morality and Nice manners in this endless ocean of human SHIT

Carlyle Foster: “Why should there be only one good friday. Let’s try our best to make all the Fridays good. Thank you” -a quote i invented which made me cry

Casimir Perry: who the fuck is scraeming “LOG OFF” at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off

Cornel MASON: “ah boo hoo hoo i want to post Foul comments to content leaders” Fat Chance, Dimwit. I will annihilate you under bulwark of the Law and God.

Dominic Seneschal: AS J. BOND HOLDS IN HIS POSSESSION THE FAMOUS “LISCSENSE TO KILL,” I MYSELF HAVE LICSENSE TO TOUCH AS MANY GRAPES AS I PLEASE W/O BUYING ANY

Duke Ganymede: 2020: america elects the first Shirtless president

J.E.D.D. Mason: when you do sutuff like… shoot my jaw clean off of my face with a sniper rifle, it mostly reflects poorly on your self

The Mardi Bash’: i warnned you all that bad things would happen if you kept letting your wives wear jeans. AND NOW LOOK! the damn gas prices are up again

The Major: the conflicted supersoldier stares over the horizon as he smokes a cigarette. “war is the most fucked up thing ever.” he takes a sip of beer

Masons: all young men Must be fitted for a good Italian suit, ideally by age 4. i will not fucking apologize or back down from this

Mitsubishi: here are this year’s Vote Multiplers for election day. no, they do not stack

policeman - 10x

army man -12x

verified acct - 15x

Asexual - 18x

Mycroft Canner: am I the most dark & twisted psycho god online?? hm lets see:

- When the dow jones industrial average goes down i say simply the word “Good”

Mycroft Canner (Teenager): the jduge orders me to take off my anonymous v mask & im wearing the joker makeup underneath it. everyone in the courtroom groans at my shit

Ockham Saneer: hwow many favs are worth the equivalent of a human life… id say about 70

Ojiro Cardigan Sniper: i have taken my shirt off over 10000 times

Saladin: “jail isnt real,” i assure myself as i close my eyes and ram the hallmark gift shop with my shitty bronco

Thomas Carlyle: “This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender,” i holler as i overturn my uncle’s barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit

Utopia: committing unforgivable crimes against nautre in my laboratory ,trying to create the next genetically discombobulated meme animal

Vivien Ancelet-Kosala: some times it takes a little bit of Free thinking to be able to look at the bull shit of the world to step back and say “Damn What the hell”

[markovchaingang]

those outgroupers are such cowards lol. they'll happily attack you whenever they please but the second you attack one of them it's all "ow. why are you attacking me? i feel like you're grouping me in with people who've wronged your in the past in order to act out your revenge fantasies". pansies, the lot of 'em

[headspace-hotel]

one of these days i will write a very in-depth post about why the concept of "going back in time and being able to invent modern technology and amaze everyone with modern scientific knowledge" is stupid

[rgbprose]

Ryan North has a (mostly) nonfiction book called "How To Invent Everything" about the basics of all sorts of important technologies. The framing device / gimmick is that it's written as a manual for stranded time travelers who may end up having to do exactly what you're describing. I'm sure there are lots of gaps that would prevent it from actually being usable as such, but as a layperson it was a great read.

I do think there are a small number of scientific insights that are known to most modern people, simple enough to communicate, and actually useful: germ theory would be a big one. But this would only make a difference if you could make people believe you, which is a big ask, since I don't think there's a quick way to prove germs are real without a microscope.

[vren-diagram]

You'll notice that I only broke one of your legs, but I was well within my rights to break both of your legs. If you forget everything you know about how anything works I think you'll see that this is isomorphic to the situation where both of your legs were broken and I fixed one. I am acting in good faith.

[rgbprose]

This post makes me so mad.

The reason it makes me mad is because I am generally of the opinion that this sort of glibness serves only to score points with people who already agree with the speaker, rather than change any minds or behavior (or in this case, habits of discourse).

But, in fact, I have frequently made arguments of the form that OP is mocking, and this glib analogy actually did make me take a step back and realize that yes, sometimes this kind of argument is really stupid. I will probably use it less from now on.

I don't think this sort of glibness works, but apparently it does some of the time, and I hate being wrong about things like this.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Everytime I see that Ptahhotep 'party girl' translation it hurts my soul. That's a very difficult text, and that passage in particular is of debateable translation. The grammar and vocab are tricky, we're not entirely sure what it's saying, and there's some cultural context we're lacking too.

So seeing it reduced to 'party girl' makes me tinabelchernoise.mp3

[thatlittleegyptologist]

I was reminded of the 'party girl' quote, so here's what the passage actually says (lacunae are filled by other copies of the text).

[isaakbutler]

This sounds far more like "If you found a good woman don't fumble her." Than it does party girl. And I dunno how anyone came to the party girl conclusion.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Yes, that's pretty much the line and would read well in the rest of the context of the Maxims of Ptahhotep. It's a wisdom text, passed down from father to son (Ptahhotep being the father speaking) about how to live a good Egyptian life. Something from the original is always lost in translation, and that goes doubly so for ancient texts. We're missing a lot of context and social norms that would have made this an easy read for someone back then.

So here's the translation I hate:

The first line (from both my image and this one in transliteration reads as follows: ir iri=k Hm.t m Spn.t

'ir' (the first two signs, one reed leaf, one mouth sign) is a conditional clause marker, giving the sentence the meaning of 'if'.

'iri' (the eye) is the verb 'to do/to make/to possess'. This is followed by pronoun =k 'you' (the basket beneath the eye).

Hm.t (the well with water, the semi circle of bread, and the seated woman) is 'woman'.

m (the owl) is a preposition meaning 'in' but...there's grammar stuff here I'm not gonna explain. It's unnecessary for the context.

Spn.t (the oblong pool of water, the seat sign beneath, the water sign beneath that, the semi circle of bread, and a pustule) is a relative form of the verb Spn and means 'one who is voluptuous woman'.

I'm not kidding, this is the dictionary entry for it on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptia.

We know it means that a) because it's used in other contexts to describe voluptuous woman (fatness is a sign of health and wealth in Ancient Egypt) and b) the pustule determinative marks it out as word that has something to do with the body or bodily functions. It's a word that describes the body, not a personality.

Here's a different translation, but for the same passge of the same text:

So, with that said, a translation of 'party girl' is so far removed from the context and meaning of the original text that the translator has simply written what they liked as a meaning. There's really no justification for it. It is quite literally nothing at all like the original text and it infuriates me to see a wisdom text from a civilisation whose culture modern discussion on barely gets out of 'they're obsessed with death and cats, and oh did we mention aliens and curses' reduced to 'party girl'.

If you wanted a better, idiomised translation, I'd go with:

'Find a wife from a wealthy family, one who is liked by all those in the town. Never divorce her! Treat her well! Life will be good for both of you.'

It's simple, it fits the context of a father imparting wisdom to his son, and doesn't wildly extrapolate from the meanings of the words themselves.

[finnlongman]

You know, I've seen manuscript abbreviations that looked like text-speak, but hand-drawing emojis to stand in for the word ceann (head) in a passage about Cú Chulainn being beheaded is taking that all to a new level

(The line from another manuscript: "Is ann sin d'éirgedar datha aille iongantacha do cheann Choingculoinn")

Manuscript is RIA 23 H 10, Oidheadh Con Culainn, written in 1808.

[rgbprose]

@allthingslinguistic

[official-kircheis]

the new yorker: not even once

[bnprime]

what are they on about matrix multiplication is wonderful?

[official-kircheis]

it is mathematics more advanced than you learn in grade school so it’s for smelly nerds.

[andmaybegayer]

INSULTING my beautiful friend the eigenvector

[official-kircheis]

slandering my beloved SO(3) and SU(2) by claiming there’s no symmetry to the operation that we use to describe rotations

[rgbprose]

I get the impression that this author thinks "symmetry" means "commutativity", which is kind of a reasonable thing to think if you have no mathematical education. (Of course, if you have no mathematical education, you probably shouldn't be opining about the relative beauty and elegance of mathematical operations.)

On the other hand, even a complete layperson should realize how much of a self-own it is to write "all the elegance of a man hammering a nail into a board". What the hell is inelegant about hammering in nails?

[geyfrog]

I just kind of remain unconvinced that the Media Analysis Critical Thinking people talk about on the Tumblr is strongly correlated with ability to analyze the real world? One of the most common errors people make when Thinking About Politics is narrativising things, seeing signs and symbols and foreshadowing and themes in a world where there are none. This seems to me like exactly the thing that doing a lot of literary analysis of narratives would facilitate. Guy who only reads stories: “getting a lot of story vibes from this”. And in fact it’s a common error I see people make on Tumblr. And everywhere else.

[brazenautomaton]

Man i have complicated feelings about the ending of Hades II

It's really good, but comes completely out of nowhere, but is kind of good because of it?

It draws into sharp contrast what an absolute nothing Melinoe's character is and how much better Zag is, except... I feel like that is kind of the point? This ending wouldn't be as good if Melinoe wasn't such a bad character.

Big spoilz

Mel possesses zero agency in the entire story. She doesn't make, like... a single meaningful decision? Everything she does is a mission she is told to do and told how to do. Zagreus, everything he did was his decision. He was not surrounded by people telling him what to do or telling him to keep trying. Everything was self-directed. The moment when he first steps out onto the surface, and he learns he cannot survive there more than a few mere minutes, and that was why everyone told him it was hopeless... and then he just says "Well, looks like I'm going to reunite with my mother a few minutes at a time." That moment is sublime. Melinoe never does anything like that, she never could. She's too flat and weak as a character. She doesn't have anything she wants that way. Zag's entire story is personal, Melinoe's is about the mission, her story is so much worse and is missing so much...

And then Zag says "This story is bad. This story isn't about people with connections to each other. This is a story about people with no emotional complexity to them. So I'm gonna be the one to fix that."

And he does.

He fucking pulls a Nero.

That absolute legend.

He said "I'm not letting you die." He puts a stop to this familial rivalry. Chronos isn't going to die here, and neither are you. Do you have a problem with that?

They have nothing to care about so he gives them something to care about. He shoves emotional complexity down Chronos's throat. He changes the kind of story this is. Zagreus shows up in an absolute supernova of character agency and saves everything. He rescues the world, he rescues his family, he rescues his grandfather, and he rescues the plot itself. And it wouldn't have worked nearly as well if Melinoe could stand on her own as a character, or if the gameplay wasn't so utterly immaculate to keep you playing, or if you hadn't played Hades 1 (this ending would be an ATROCITY if you hadn't beaten Hades 1).

This is like if Devil May Cry 5 was Rock and Roll Nightmare.

9/10.

[rgbprose]

I agree the ending is conceptually really good, but comes a bit out of nowhere. I'm not sure I agree that it's good because of that suddenness.

Caveat: I have not played past the main ending where the credits roll, so maybe some of my issues are addressed there.

[HADES II ENDING SPOILERS]

Yes, the contrast between Melinoe and Zagreus is good, but if a character is going to make the decision that resolves the main plot, that character should get significant screen time. The ending would have been much stronger if Zagreus had been a bigger part of the story throughout, in my opinion.

The contrast you talk about between Melinoe and Zagreus is absolutely part of what makes it good, but I don't feel that the out-of-nowhere nature of the ending highlights that contrast more than giving them more conversations would, or more than giving Zagreus one more plot moment where he and Melinoe are at odds would.

(For the record, I don't think Melinoe is a bad character for the story she's in, but as you said she and Zagreus are foils in a lot of ways. I think I described her as "kind of the anti-Zagreus" to another fan at one point, before I knew Zagreus would even show up in Hades II.)

Aside from the question of which character gets the agency, there's also the fact that the final decision comes in the form of a one-off metaphysical trick, whose exact mechanics the audience could not reasonably have guessed. If it had been established that "time travel" works that way in this story, then it would have made me feel more like I could have seen the ending coming. As it was, I kept thinking that Zagreus-in-the-past must surely fail (presumably in a way that surprises Melinoe and Hekate and raises the stakes further), since if he'd succeeded, then the entire game could not have happened. Obviously it's okay for the writers to decide that's not how time magic works in their setting, but you've got to tell the audience that in advance or it feels like cheating.

One thing that makes this so frustrating for me is that the ending is foreshadowed, just in ways that I didn't feel mitigated the problems above. Dionysus, for example, points out how pointless it is for immortals to spend time waging war on each other, and I felt this moment of dissonance like "Wait, that's actually a great point". Turns out the writers agreed with me!

It's also weird that the ending kind of ditches the hints of moral complexity that we'd already gotten, like Chronos's vague Golden Age or the fact that Prometheus seems to think Chronos will be a better ruler for mortals than the Olympians. I wonder if it might not have been possible to tie those threads more elegantly into the ending rather than just abandoning them.

[brazenautomaton]

I honestly mostly agree, the story has massive problems. I am not going to say it's completely heinous worst-thing-ever because I played Bayonetta 3, but it is quite poor quality. (And if you didn't beat Hades 1 I cannot imagine how much this ending would piss you off, like I literally can't, so I can't take it into consideration.) The characters and their relationships are far worse, and there is a very major through-line with a lot of them that simply... never gets followed up on. Melinoe is kind of a terrible person but the game shows us that and then forgets about it and doesn't really do anything with it. And for real, I wonder how much of the plot was laid out before the first early access release, like, did they change it once it was already being played, or was it scripted the whole time? How many of these things are last-second swerves and how many feel like that because I played a lot more of the game before seeing those developments than I "should" have?

I was only talking about the spike in quality for the ending itself.

The ending itself just felt like it validated me in thinking the story was bad in comparison to Hades 1. The ending was a spike in good-ness because it was such a contrast to the game that led up to it. When I controlled Chronos looking for Mel, in a parallel to Hecate playing hide and seek with her, I went "Ohhhhh. The things I hate about this story are the bad timeline Zag is saving us from."

Of course it's really bad storytelling to have the entire plot hinge on a character you never play as doing something that comes almost completely out of nowhere and is only maybe obliquely foreshadowed as the kind of thing one might wish to do in a few scattered lines of nonessential dialogue. The better the game was, the worse this ending would be. But it's H1 saving the world from how bad H2's plot is by making it more like H1!

I felt like time travel came out of nowhere when Mel first laid down on Zag's bed, I was like, for ONE why is this now a time travel story when the Titan of Time doesn't even do that, and for TWO how the fuck does it work like THAT? But I was like, hey, I played this in Early Access a bunch, in my frame of reference this is a lot later in the story than it actually is, I shouldn't think this just came out of nowhere. And Zag's actions in the past affecting the present, that was the entire purpose of the plan, and not knowing what things will be like when they alter the timeline, and thinking maybe it will unmake them, that also was set up. The fact that only Zag and Chronos remember, I don't like as much. It should have been the entire Hades Family, or at least Mel as well. To give her some emotional complexity. Maybe some self-doubt so she could confront and deal with all the characters horribly wronged by the gods, the ones that don't go anywhere.

I'm going to move on to the epilogue, once I stop dying to Scylla and the Sirens feat. Charybdis. Apparently, everyone utterly hates it, even people who liked the story up to that point.

[rgbprose]

I was only talking about the spike in quality for the ending itself.

Oh, then I agree with you. I too spent the whole game thinking "the writing was better in the first game", and when they did the ending I thought "see, this is the kind of thing I wish you'd been doing the whole time". And I hadn't played the game in Early Access.

On the other hand, the writing in the first game was a pretty high bar. As was the gameplay, come to that, which I thought was even better in the sequel (I like Magick and Hexes, and the new Cast feels much less vestigial then the old one).

But since we're talking abandoned plot threads...

... I felt the relationships had a weird lack of closure. I romanced both Eris and Nemesis, and given that they are (a) sisters who (b) hate each other, I was really hoping it would all lead to some kind of messy confrontation. Nope. Not even the first game's "Don't worry about it, gods are all poly" handwave, which was already a cop-out (there are of course myths about Greek gods getting jealous).

[brazenautomaton]

Man i have complicated feelings about the ending of Hades II

It's really good, but comes completely out of nowhere, but is kind of good because of it?

It draws into sharp contrast what an absolute nothing Melinoe's character is and how much better Zag is, except... I feel like that is kind of the point? This ending wouldn't be as good if Melinoe wasn't such a bad character.

Big spoilz

Mel possesses zero agency in the entire story. She doesn't make, like... a single meaningful decision? Everything she does is a mission she is told to do and told how to do. Zagreus, everything he did was his decision. He was not surrounded by people telling him what to do or telling him to keep trying. Everything was self-directed. The moment when he first steps out onto the surface, and he learns he cannot survive there more than a few mere minutes, and that was why everyone told him it was hopeless... and then he just says "Well, looks like I'm going to reunite with my mother a few minutes at a time." That moment is sublime. Melinoe never does anything like that, she never could. She's too flat and weak as a character. She doesn't have anything she wants that way. Zag's entire story is personal, Melinoe's is about the mission, her story is so much worse and is missing so much...

And then Zag says "This story is bad. This story isn't about people with connections to each other. This is a story about people with no emotional complexity to them. So I'm gonna be the one to fix that."

And he does.

He fucking pulls a Nero.

That absolute legend.

He said "I'm not letting you die." He puts a stop to this familial rivalry. Chronos isn't going to die here, and neither are you. Do you have a problem with that?

They have nothing to care about so he gives them something to care about. He shoves emotional complexity down Chronos's throat. He changes the kind of story this is. Zagreus shows up in an absolute supernova of character agency and saves everything. He rescues the world, he rescues his family, he rescues his grandfather, and he rescues the plot itself. And it wouldn't have worked nearly as well if Melinoe could stand on her own as a character, or if the gameplay wasn't so utterly immaculate to keep you playing, or if you hadn't played Hades 1 (this ending would be an ATROCITY if you hadn't beaten Hades 1).

This is like if Devil May Cry 5 was Rock and Roll Nightmare.

9/10.

[rgbprose]

I agree the ending is conceptually really good, but comes a bit out of nowhere. I'm not sure I agree that it's good because of that suddenness.

Caveat: I have not played past the main ending where the credits roll, so maybe some of my issues are addressed there.

[HADES II ENDING SPOILERS]

Yes, the contrast between Melinoe and Zagreus is good, but if a character is going to make the decision that resolves the main plot, that character should get significant screen time. The ending would have been much stronger if Zagreus had been a bigger part of the story throughout, in my opinion.

The contrast you talk about between Melinoe and Zagreus is absolutely part of what makes it good, but I don't feel that the out-of-nowhere nature of the ending highlights that contrast more than giving them more conversations would, or more than giving Zagreus one more plot moment where he and Melinoe are at odds would.

(For the record, I don't think Melinoe is a bad character for the story she's in, but as you said she and Zagreus are foils in a lot of ways. I think I described her as "kind of the anti-Zagreus" to another fan at one point, before I knew Zagreus would even show up in Hades II.)

Aside from the question of which character gets the agency, there's also the fact that the final decision comes in the form of a one-off metaphysical trick, whose exact mechanics the audience could not reasonably have guessed. If it had been established that "time travel" works that way in this story, then it would have made me feel more like I could have seen the ending coming. As it was, I kept thinking that Zagreus-in-the-past must surely fail (presumably in a way that surprises Melinoe and Hekate and raises the stakes further), since if he'd succeeded, then the entire game could not have happened. Obviously it's okay for the writers to decide that's not how time magic works in their setting, but you've got to tell the audience that in advance or it feels like cheating.

One thing that makes this so frustrating for me is that the ending is foreshadowed, just in ways that I didn't feel mitigated the problems above. Dionysus, for example, points out how pointless it is for immortals to spend time waging war on each other, and I felt this moment of dissonance like "Wait, that's actually a great point". Turns out the writers agreed with me!

It's also weird that the ending kind of ditches the hints of moral complexity that we'd already gotten, like Chronos's vague Golden Age or the fact that Prometheus seems to think Chronos will be a better ruler for mortals than the Olympians. I wonder if it might not have been possible to tie those threads more elegantly into the ending rather than just abandoning them.

[alexanderwales]

Ghost of Yōtei is a game about revenge. I really prefer a story about revenge that doesn't feel the need to say, in one way or another "and also, getting revenge is bad, don't let revenge consume you, find something to live for".

This is a stupid message that the vast majority of people don't actually need, and the game makes the very serious misstep of having all the targets of revenge be horrible people who are in the middle of committing atrocities. After my third time seeing these soldiers executing unarmed civilians I said to myself "you know, maybe being the sole person capable of stopping these people is enough of a reason to stop these people".

Everyone gets on the main character's case about being filled with hate, but every character also seems to agree that the revenge targets are scum of the earth and have to be put down. There's this huge dissonance there.

"Your quest to kill Baby-Killer McGee, who killed your baby, is being done out of a deep need for revenge that will ultimately leave you hollow. However, we do need you to kill Baby-Killer McGee, or he's going to keep killing babies."

[rgbprose]

This is a stupid message that the vast majority of people don't actually need

I am generally pretty skeptical about the power of storytelling to Teach Good Morals, but I think that inasfar as it does, this one is a point worth making.

(When competently executed, of course, which it sounds like Ghost of Yōtei is not.)

The issue here is that moral points in fiction, especially popular fiction, are generally exaggerated. Like if you have a story about the power of friendship to overcome adversity (an even more trite lesson that nobody needs to see more of, I admit), then the adversity in question might be a world-conquering demon or tempestuous sea or whatever, but the takeaway will be applicable to smaller kinds of adversity as well, and to friendships that are less fire-forged.

In the same way, most people do not need to be told not to let vengeance for the murder of their babies consume them, because (a) most people don't have murdered babies, and (b) most people who do would leave it to the police. But people do often take the opportunity for vengeance in much more prosaic contexts, so prosaic that we don't call it "vengeance" because that's too grand a term. People will respond to a snide remark with another snide remark instead of a kind one--little things like that. And they pursue this tiny vengeance even when it's counterproductive to the things they consciously want, which is what makes it analogous to the tragic hero who sacrifices the things he actually cares for.

(And of course when acting as a group against other groups, people are often willing to pursue the grander kind of revenge, the kind that repays literal death with more literal death. But that's a separate point that I'm sure you're already aware of.)

[probablybadrpgideas]

Lesser Known Elemental Planes

Elemental Plane of Testicular Tortion.

Elemental Plane of Poorly Thought-Out Plot Points (it's lesser known, but you've likely played a campaign set here!)

Elemental Plane of Elemental Planes.

Elemental Plane of Fire. No, not that one. The other one. We also have fire! It's not unique to that one place!

The Elemental Plane of AI Slop (people keep building portals here for some reason?)

Elemental Plane of Elemental Planes of Elemental Planes

Elemental Plane of Oganesson (get there quickly if you want to see it!)

Elemental Plane of Tumblr Sexymen

Elemental Plane of Scheduling Errors

Elemental Plane of Things That Are Blue, Made Of Glass, 2-4 Inches Tall, Contain Exactly Three Cracks, Are Less Then 3 Years And More Than One Year Old, Are Currently In Direct Sunlight And Have Moved Exactly 32m In Total In Their Existence.

Elemental Plane of Elemental Planes of Elemental Planes of Elemental Planes.

Elemental Plane of Me

(Hello!)

[brazenautomaton]

Elemental plane of things drawn with a fine camel hair brush

Elemental plane of things owned by the emperor

Elemental plane of things contained within that elemental plane

[rgbprose]

Elemental plane of things not contained within that elemental plane

[brazenautomaton]

phantom is a really good boss except for the times she just decides not to travel to her pin or cancel her recovery animation to do the jump attack

I can recognize that some level of positive engagement with a challenge must be happening inside of me, but I can't experience it

it's probably not normal to be involuntarily saying things like "Kill yourself kill myself I hate being alive I don't want to be alive I hate being alive I don't want to be alive" on each boss run as the shame-spike hits me

the upped dosage of the new medication isn't working

which is even more depressing because it confirms again nope, the meds aren't dulling all your emotions. "experience positive emotions" was never an option on the table. it's just what % you can numb the negative ones too.

how the fuck is this personality disorder an adaptive response to any sort of environment, in what sense is "do not ever experience positive emotions" a thing that is beneficial

[brazenautomaton]

beat her and said "GET FUCKED" and internally felt nothing

keep saying "I hate being alive I don't want to be alive" at random intervals

this is not an unprecedented thing, it is just usually not this often

[rgbprose]

I feel like I don't have a good mental model of how this feature of your mind shapes your experience of media.

Like in this example, you say you cannot experience the positive engagement with the challenge of the game - then why are you playing it? Is it just that it distracts from the negative emotions, or is the part of you where the positive engagement is happening involved in decision-making, even though you can't experience it?

Or, to pick a different example, a little while ago you were recommending Hundreds Of Beavers in no uncertain terms. That's a comedy - did it make you feel amused? If not, why did you recommend it?

I appreciate this is an extremely personal line of inquiry and you have no obligation at all to answer it. I only ask because posts like this make me think you're comfortable telling strangers about it and, well, I'm curious.

(And for what it's worth, I like your blog, so your existence is good for me even if not for you. I hope that can be a tiny solace.)

[brazenautomaton]

do people still write "machine of death" stories

I think I got a pretty good premise

guy stops by the machine on his way home from work, gets the readout that ironically describes how you will die, and it says "NOTHING. CONGRATULATIONS! YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE FOREVER."

dude is elated! confidently walks down the street, spring in his step, until he gets run over by a drunk driver. his last thoughts are "The machine was wrong! I didn't live forever! I got hit by a car!"

smash cut! the moment the guy gets the readout, and it says "HIT BY A CAR" this time. he looks around, nervous, and steps back away from the street. oh shit, a drunk driver rode up onto the curb, that could have killed him! he'll need to be careful, he can't stay around cars! he lives his life in paranoia for years before deciding he's going to go somewhere that he doesn't have to live in fear. so he moves to an island in the Phillipines where the jungle is too dense to make roads. and you know what? he's very happy there. he marries a woman and they have several children, he becomes an author. he lives to be eighty-three, his wife dead, his children moved out, and one day he falls and breaks his hip, he can't call for any help, and a large snake slithers in from the jungle. his last thoughts before being crushed are "The machine was wrong. I didn't end up getting hit by a car, I got killed by a python."

Smash cut! the moment the guy gets the readout, and it says "KILLED BY A PYTHON" this time. confused, he thinks it over for a bit. a drunk driver veers on up to the curb half a block away, and he's startled, but realizes -- hey, that can't be what kills him, he gets killed by a snake! he needs to worry less. he should be able to handle this just fine. he walks on down to a corner store to get some clebratory booze, only to find it being robbed. pfft, he's fine, he knows this isn' how he goes out. he tells the robber "can you just fuck off, buddy, some of us are in a hurry." as the robber turns the gun to him, he sees that it's a revolver -- a .357 Colt Python.

his last thoughts are "I was doomed anyway. The machine is never wrong."

[rgbprose]

I really like the model of time travel (or in this case, time-information-transfer) where things iterate until they reach a steady state. There's two problems that need to be solved to make it tight, though: (a) a non-arbitrary starting point, and (b) what if there is no steady-state.

In this case (a) is "Nothing", which seems natural enough. (b) is more of a problem, though--we can easily imagine some guy who happens to be wired such that "BURNING" consistently leads him to drown and "DROWNING" consistently leads him to burn, resulting in an infinite loop.

Given the context of Machine of Death specifically, we can fix this by imagining that the iteration system keeps track of what predictions it's tried already and never gives the same one twice--if you end up dying in the same way twice, it will describe it differently, hopefully sending you on a different path. Since there are an infinite number of possible messages, and even an infinite number of ways of describing any given death, the machine can keep trying until it finds a steady-state. Given that predictions can be very vague, I think it's reasonable to say it will eventually find one--in extremis, it can always just print "SOMEHOW" (a pretty good prompt for a MoD story in itself, in my opinion).

In other time-travel stories, it's not so obvious that any steady-state prediction exists. To deal with this and several other problems I tend to have with fictional time travel, I once wrote up a model for oracles which are nondeterministic in the same fundamental way that radioactive decay is nondeterministic, with the probabilities of its responses being those from the steady-state distribution. The nice thing about this system in our context is that this distribution can be proven to exist without any assumptions about the person reacting to the machine's predictions. The big disadvantage is that nondeterministic oracles aren't nearly as impressive to read about.

[rgbprose]

I think I see more value in the existence of IP law than a lot of people on here, so I wish to state for the record that Nintendo's recently-recognized patent on summoning characters who fight each other is, if I've understood it correctly, complete horseshit that shows nobody at the patent office has any understanding at all of the videogames they are required to regulate.

[official-kircheis]

I have a scheme for choosing passwords where I can’t use a password manager (logging into computers, encrypted drives etc) and I think it’s very clever but of course I can’t tell anyone why because that would compromise the scheme

[rgbprose]

Sounds like you're relying on security through obscurity! A truly secure password scheme would remain so even if the attacker knew it.

That's why everyone should post their password schemes on Tumblr so that they can be rigorously reviewed and any flaws pointed out as fast as possible. Otherwise, how can you know if they're secure?

[official-kircheis]

one very fascinating aspect of some autocomplete systems is you type the first three letters of the thing you’re looking for, say alu for aluminium, and it brings that up as the top suggestion, and then you type the fourth letter, but alum gives the top suggestion alumn. and because there is lag in these systems that means you select alumn when you wanted aluminium. anyway if your system is not monotonic in this sense that the top suggestion is preserved if you enter more letters matching it you should get fucked. fuck you.