#@determinist

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[pianpianmp3]

Has this game rotted my brain and made me absolutely insane or does Seam’s smile look uncannily similar to the inverted Deltarune???

I hate that I’m even asking this question but they didn’t NEED to have three teeth arranged like THAT and the edges of their smile didn’t need to look that much like WINGS so here we are.

If it were any character OTHER than Seam I would have just accepted that I’m experiencing Deltarune onset hallucinations but unfortunately it is, in fact, Seam.

Has ANYONE else noticed this? Help.

[chubphoe-linkclick]

Knowing that Lu Guang can normally foresee EVERYTHING that could possibly happen in a photograph based on the photographer's limits, not Cheng Xiaoshi's, makes his absolute and utter shock here that much priceless.

He literally couldn't see it coming and it fucking blew him away.

[holdmymetaphor]

i know we all hate tritter but if we think about him as a metaphor instead of a person i think the arc is pretty interesting. especially when we look back at euphoria and note the themes about cops and power there.

the difference between house and a cop (or house and his father or house and god) is that no matter what kind of moralistic view house has (whether it be the deeply flawed one from his dad or his own) house is /always/ up against something taking his agency.

house, especially in the earlier seasons, conflates power with agency. i assume, because that was the case for him growing up: his dad had the power, so he made the decisions about what happens to house's body.

we also see it in the fact society has outcast him, his leg crippled him, his addiction controls him. and perhaps even how his own belief system prevents him from being happy

so when the tritter arc happens and we see this almost comedically evil villain actually able to punish house (unlike the sick cop from euphoria who just like, dies) its not only a representation of the outside forces that conspire against house, but a reflection of the mans own policing system.

a lot of the tritter arc is made for house to confront his own power and how he wields it over others. he outwardly denies any hipocracy or self-destructive behavior, because he believes that his loss of power is loss of agency (because that has been true his whole life). tritter is a bad cop thru and thru but at the end of the day, house does give in, he does apologize to wilson despite having mixed feelings about the whole thing.

in reality we see house reflect a lot of what tritter is saying. in the rehab scene he says nothing matters, that rehab is all fake and cant fix anything. then tritter comes and house gets mad bc tritter wont give him a chance. but tritter says the same thing house does: you cant change, you wont change. house's anger at this could be interpreted as he's pissed hes not getting off, but i think it shows that house really /wishes/ that rehab could work, that people can change. he wishes that his actions to be better made any difference. that he had the power/agency to control his fate

and at the end of court, tritter says the same thing: i hope im wrong about you.

[towers-in-starlight]

I rarely enjoy randomized critical hit systems in games very much.

There are a couple genuinely-useful ways in which they're implemented across a variety of games. They can increase variance, adding the potential for a lucky upset into some encounters which would otherwise insurmountably favor one party over another. Crit-fishing builds can serve as interesting alternatives to more traditional low-variance DPS builds, in games which offer the right sorts of character-building affordances. Perhaps others exist which I have yet to notice. But these implementations, although useful from the game designer's standpoint, are rarely particularly enjoyable for me; when I play most games, I tend to enjoy reproducibility-of-outcomes, minimizing the influence of luck and maximizing the influence of skill on any given encounter.

Recently, however, I encountered a game which, to my surprise, did randomized critical hits in a manner that I found actively fun and one of the core appeals of the gameplay! Namely: Quarta Amethyst, my latest favorite porn game.

Traditional implementations of critical hits have them as a rare thing, perhaps tipping up to low double-digit percent frequencies if one runs a build with an unusually-high crit rate. In Quarta Amethyst, however, the player character Amethyst's baseline stat-line—not dependent on any temporary buffs or suchlike—includes a near-100% crit rate: almost every attack she launches will be a critical hit, and landing a single critical hit is sufficient to defeat most non-boss enemies. Her attacks' non-critical rate, when she's at her baseline capabilities, is about as low as more traditional games' starting player characters' attacks' critical rates.

This sets up a baseline in which Amethyst is extremely overpowered in combat. However, crucially, her maintaining this level of power is dependent on her being fully mentally focused: it doesn't take very much distraction for her to start slipping up. And so, as soon as her enemies manage to wear her down a bit—to land a few lewd attacks increasing her arousal, and perhaps to stack a status effect or two on her for good measure—her critical hit rate starts dropping sharply. Which leaves her harder-pressed to beat her enemies before they can land more attacks on her, which drops her crit rate even further, et cetera; and it doesn't take all that many iterations of this before her crit rate drops to the traditional RPG-protagonist near-0% crit rate.

In Quarta Amethyst, then, instead of being used for their traditional purpose—as a source of variance and/or build-specialization—critical hits function centrally in three roles. First, as a form of characterization and worldbuilding: showing exactly how powerful Amethyst can be when she's in top condition, relative to the enemies she fights, and thus driving home exactly why they lean into the ambush- and debuff-centric tactics they lean into when fighting her. Second, as a way to let unimportant fights pass by quickly: many RPG Maker games have some problems with overly-drawn-out combat, but Quarta Amethyst's crit system ensures that any combat where Amethyst isn't under meaningful threat—where she's at her full strength against ordinary non-notable enemies—will end quickly, thus helping the game's combat's pacing. And, third: as a site for the implementation of a death-spiral mechanic, with reductions in crit rates begetting further reductions in crit rates as one of the first steps in the war of attrition that Amethyst's enemies wage against her.

In short, then, despite its superficial resemblance to traditional execution of randomized critical hits—attacks having some probability of doing substantially more damage than their ordinary baseline—Quarta Amethyst's critical hit system serves entirely different functions in the game's overall design and flow, compared with most games with critical hit systems, and said functions are ones that I find much more interesting and enjoyable.

For the most part, the lessons I learned from playing Quarta Amethyst were writing-centric; it's a good example of a well-written porn game, relative to my kinks. But its critical hit system is a substantial inspiration to me on the game-mechanics-design front as well, which I expected much less when first going into playing it; and I hope to see more games follow in its footsteps, either directly using critical hit systems to similar effect or more abstractly running similar experiments in use of critical hit systems for nonstandard game-design purposes. Because I find its crit system to be a lot more fun to play with, and a lot better-integrated into its broader narrative and thematic purposes, than that of any other game I recall encountering to date! And it would be nice to see that quality spread more broadly, both within and beyond the porn-game sphere.

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

been thinking about god and free will. their hand-in-hand existences. godswill like spacetime. distance as time. been reading about iterative bifurcation. things split in two over and over to fit pseudo-infinite distance into finite spaces. we have 48.000 miles of capillaries in our bodies. this takes up 3% of our body volume. tardis voice: so much bigger on the inside. the doctor was adam and the master was eve, but the master was the older (greater) so he was cain and the doctor was abel. who came first, god or time?

[sparklyjojos]

Regarding Disco Wednesdayyy's last part, I feel like discussions regarding it cannot be divorced from JDC, which features a similar concept of humanity's bleak future, and a frankly terrifying degree of universal determinism is involved. It really feels like Maijo read Carnival Day and decided to iterate on it while also including his own version of the still unwritten last JDC book, Twin Disappearance Case.

Explaining the details again here would take stupidly long (the final explanations of JDC are like 100 pages of Seiryoin going absolutely off his rocker) so I'll just toss a link to the last part of my recaps of Carnival Day if you really wanna get through All That (MASSIVE SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY. Might be incomprehensible).

[podcast-hemocytoblast]

I keep thinking about the futility of Jon and Daisy’s efforts to resist their patrons and it makes me wonder….How terrifying must it be to be courted by the Web, especially if you’re aware of the fact that it’s happening? What do you do when the force of nature which seemingly controls everything in the entire world begins to draw you in? Does it even feel worth it to fight against what you are becoming when faced with the reality that the Mother of Puppets—who wants you—always gets what she wants?

[agnesandhilda]

not every story needs to be about generational trauma

[fitzrove]

Underused in fanwork: Rudolf experiencing inner conflict re: his deep beliefs in scientific rationality and lack of faith in metaphysics vs. his [redacted] [redacted] bdsm imaginary friend existing, seemingly on a semi-physical level

[xeed-null]

Imagine a computer simulation that perfectly replicated our universe's laws of physics.

Would the people in said simulation be conscious? if yes, continue.

imagine some immortal (and infallible) mathematician, if given enough time they could do all the calculations the computer simulation. This is, in essence, no different from the computer simulation, and any person inside the equation would be conscious (given an answer of yes for the first question).

if a person in this equation is conscious, then the person is implicitly conscious even if it is not represented by the mathematician mentioned.

extending this idea, any person in any possible 'universe' (IE, a system of rules, that applies onto groups of objects), is conscious even if said universe doesn't materially exist.

[knotty-et-al]

Knotty's art of today [2023/08/07]

[literallys-illiteracy]

Expect something about moral implications of the Index and the implications behind predeterminism in the city and Yan Vismok in the next episode of “Literally doesn’t know what a healthy sleep schedule is”

im sure ill be just as surprised about what i end up writing as you are when/if im less delirious

[raps-hellion]

i love it when demigods' names/surnames somewhat reflect their godly parentage.

aphrodite - silena beauregard (beauregard: "beautiful gaze")

apollo - lee fletcher (fletcher: "maker of arrows"), michael yew (yew: an evergreen tree with red berries, once used to make archery bows), will solace (solace: "comfort", sol: "sun")

ares/mars - frank zhang (zhang: "archer/drawing a bow"), sherman yang (sherman: after general william sherman [son of ares], or the m4 sherman tank)

demeter - katie gardner (gardner: "keeper of the garden"), miranda gardiner (gardiner: "garden/gardener")

hades - nico di angelo (di angelo: "angel/of the angels")

hephaestus - jake mason (mason: "one who works with stone")

nike - holly & laurel victor (victor: "conqueror/winner")

[dykesantos]

the mercy of a friend who once loved me

[onetimemacaroni]

I kinda wrote lyrics to a Laplace's Angel cover that turns the song into a trans metaphor

I might do this for other WW songs idk