#narfsrandomthoughts

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norfair food web (unreadable)

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fuck it. nightmare metroid fanfiction

EDIT: Added alt text

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it's like this basically

Society at large: Robots are basically people and should be treated as people, but if you have to choose between the will of a robot and the will of a person, then the will of the person should always win out. It's reasonable to design robots specifically to fulfill exactly one niche to the point of physically designing their body to do that job and designing their personality to like doing that job because a happy slave is a good worker. If a robot must be destroyed to protect a human, so be it, we can always build another one to fill that role.

Dr. Light's perspective: My hope is that eventually intelligent robots will just be seen as people with different capabilities that society creates when we need to deal with situations that need to be solved but would be far too unsafe for humans to handle. They should be seen as just like humans, because it is clear that the situations we require them for are situations that need human-level intelligence, though many issues can be handled by simpler ones.

Dr. Wily's perspective: There's no point to treating robots like humans and any attempt to make them more like people is ridiculous because of fundamental differences in how they work and how they're born. It's just completely impractical. If you need a hammer, you don't create a hammer that can arbitrarily decide it doesn't like hammering nails, you just make a hammer. There are some situations in the world where the most practical way to solve the problem is to create a particularly intelligent artificial organism whose purpose is to fulfill a task, but you shouldn't treat it like a human, because humans are impossible to control and any amount of freedom you give them will eventually be used to foment rebellion.

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in high school one of my english teachers saw the mechanically separated chicken copypasta, the original one, and had us do a whole unit on the evils of fast food from one of those pop books. and it kinda pissed me off b/c the mechanically separated chicken copypasta somewhat describes all meat…

so it was always interesting to me to see people have a strong revulsion reaction to this phrasing specifically but not the idea itself lol

"b/c it's crawling with bacteria it will be washed" like all meat has to be prepared yeah "it will be reflavored artificially" what spices are for yes. "then, because it's weirdly pink" Oh, yeah, famously not a color meat is. i dunno i think a lot about these things after in hs agriculture sciences class we watched a video explaining the full slaughterhouse process. it's part of why i really dislike ppl who prefer excuses to acceptance lol

like as i've harped on over and over cnsrtvs are fixated on excusing what they feel and not on looking at the truth itself. and so you have really annoying "validate my disgust reaction but don't you dare make me think about how it's an arbitrary difference from what i like" moments constantly

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"multiple emanations of one cosmic being" is a very old and classic concept in fiction but i have to say, one of the metaphors for it that made the most impression on me still comes from battle for zendikar's story articles... i remember this one sometimes and it makes me happy

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we stand now at the end of a nonsensical american concept, the idea that one could be "socially progressive and economically conservative". this is why the democrats are useless, that description means "person who says being bigoted is bad but will do nothing to change the fundamental elements of society that keep those out of power from being exploited"

every day now i spend pondering how we phrase bigotry as though it's an inbuilt personal element of evil individuals that tarnish a perfect system, rather than a tendency to constant reassert the status quo through the machinery it current provides and protects. we economically privilege a certain idea of marriage and treat children as parents' property. a system that keeps everyone in a state of perpetual precarity where if you lose your source of income you lose everything means that those given the role of controlling income can control who they want

the concept of people accepting that nobles are inherently superior seems insane to us, wouldn't everyone stand up against it? but it's literally the same tendencies as people have now, "noblesse oblige", the idea that nobility followed certain requirements to deserve their position. and so, in turn, if a noble was cruel to those under them, could it not be said that the noble was simply a bad apple in a system that otherwise functioned acceptably? people reinforce whatever world they're in, they accept it, they rationalize it, they defend it as obvious and inarguable

if you do nothing to alter the economic and legal conditions that create power disparities, then all you do is reinforce them. that is how bigotry truly becomes manifest, when people are given power over another's life and death. seek not to alter this and you are only virtue signalling

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i had a sort of strange dream where fantasy towers and floating islands were giant magical creatures that wanted to induce humans to enter them (maybe to live in them?) so they could eat them on an occasional basis.

the towers were kinda like, green solid plates connected by grey connective tissue that could seal up or expand a bit. the one i saw had a bunch of fake "flowers" they would grow near them that would routinely bob their head towards the body and had various colorful patterns on them. they would like. change though. like holographic pokemon cards or a cuttlefish's skin or something. it was like the tower kind of knew what a flower and what a sign and what an usher was but didn't really get that something in the middle was just kind of strange

my family were researching and had investigated a floating island for a while. i thought they couldn't possibly eat enough to sustain themselves but reasoned they would only eat very occasionally and mostly used smth else. kinda like a mix of a bromeliad and a pitcher plant? they generally supported an environment of various inhabitants inside them but like a carnivorous plant they really needed a small amount of a trace vitamin they only got by eating occasionally. i think that for some reason they needed at least some "intelligent" prey or their magic wouldn't work

i think ultimately it was usually not a bad deal to live in one once a map of it was established, but it was good form to let it eat all the corpses b/c otherwise it'd start trying to eat people at random every so often.

floating islands were weirder, i think they were very closely related but they didn't have a stalk. they got wider at the bottom like a round mountain and spent more of their time with plates locked together, whereas towers would often expand and contract based on the day and temp. they would land on a regular basis and then spend time traveling. people would want to take control of them bc they were powerful for movement control. having to feed it people was an acceptable downside for air power

not sure how smart they all were. i got the impression that at the very least they didn't talk, even magically. but i think they had more than instinct. we were pretty sure this tower grew "flowers" b/c it... personally heard... "women like flowers?" from somewhere??? they would just kind of do things like they were trying to keep one step ahead of changing behaviors even in their own lifetimes. so i think they were probably intelligent but they would take a long time to form thoughts and you couldn't really "commune" with one in a systematized way, even if you were a sorcerer. that said if people could control the movement of the islands they probably had some means of manipulating them

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It's hard to say why, but despite similar domains, earlier YGO monster designs do feel as though they're drawing on a different stylistic basis than early MTG ones. I don't want to just say "cultural differences", but maybe YGO's monsters are a bit more... cartoony? And hence feel RPG-y

early magic fixated heavily on paintings and sketches but also is clearly kinda dnd to me. it really really wanted you to feel like you were living in that western 20th century fantasy world that adorned covers and stuff lol. ygo was more digital and rarely had backgrounds or scenes