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[maklodes]

I understand why alchemists invented, and modern fiction writers use, systems with a few understandable Elements like Earth / Fire / Air / Water / Light / Dark.

I understand why even most nerds don't bother to study the Elements in real life. There's too many of them, and they don't neatly correspond to meaningful aspects of macro-level existence.

But just once I'd like to read a worked magical system where the author has looked up the properties of the real Elements, has put in all the work to build up a system of plausible-sounding correspondences, and the protagonist is a rare dual-element Tellurium-Iodine wizard.

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Is there any relation between you and assdevourer, or is the icon just coincidental? (Also, I'm curious about what your icon is. I get Discworld vibes from it, but can't really explain why.)

No and it always irritates me seeing that guys posts because they're not very good.

Ass devourers eat the asses right off of people

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I agree that the elite establishment is basically anti-Trump, and was powerless to stop him, but given that Clinton actually received more votes than Trump, I wouldn't call his victory a validation of American democracy. It was a triumph of a large minority, combined with arcane electoral laws, over both the popular majority (or at least plurality) and the elite establishment.

There's something to be said for being committed to the rule of law in defiance of both elite and popular sentiment. I think it was a disastrous result in the Trump case, but maybe without the strict adherence to the first amendment, the US would have tried to ban Catholicism in the 19th century or something, with both popular and elite support.

Good or bad, though, it's definitely not quite the same thing as democracy.

(I think minorities probably have more veto power than is good for the US as a polity, but minority veto (i.e. the Ukraine aid situation) is at least better than minority rule. (i.e., the 2016 Donald Trump election situation))

actually I think the political obstacles to the US support of Ukraine demonstrate the weakness of the Deep State in the sense that they put an upper bound on the strength of the military-industrial complex slash "national security interests" wing of the US, who you assume would be absolutely gagging at the chance to rearm in order to pulverise the Russian army entirely at arms length without the need to send in any fragile US troops and cop the negative publicity of them dying, and yet they can barely get this effort off the ground, just like they struggle to keep Trump out of power; it's another data point supporting the "CIA can't find their arse with both hands" hypothesis.

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Surely people who subscribe to that general point of view would say "we can never forgive the British for how they slaughtered all those young Argentine soldiers in the Malvinas."

Every once in a while you encounter saying something completely insane, like "we can never forgive the British for how they slaughtered all those young Argentine soldiers in the Falklands" and you just gotta wonder, do i say things that sound that fucked up

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peeling those sour rainbow gummy strips into long thin strings and putting them into cheap energy drink to create something im calling battery acid spaghetti will update once ive finished it

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Non-European (USAmerican). 88%.

https://www.geoguessr.com/vgp/3007

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vriska fixing things by not dying is also Aranea not screwing things up because she double died. John died in the retcon timeline because his denizen destroyed him and his planet. his denizen destroyed that version of john and the planet because the GO john was the one that was needed for the endgame- the same thing happened to Roxy from the retcon timeline

This ask is from three years ago, and I believe it's in response to this post, but I figure I might as well answer it now: I don't remember some of the particular details of Act 6 and such, but my overall objection is not the plot points of the Vriska-fixes-everything arc, but the characterization. Like, it just didn't seem to fit in with anything else she had done in the story so far, and there was no real explanation of her sudden change in nature.

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I do remember there was a kind of FPS-like game where you were a little cupid-ish angel who could possess people/creatures. Looking it up, it was called Messiah and it came out in the year 2000. Mostly there wasn't a lot of dialog between possessor and possessed, and you controlled them FPS-style. I can't remember whether the possessed tried to shake you off or not.

Game concept that's probably already been done: A videogame about possession, where you, the player, are the foreign entity possessing the character you are playing as.

The story's whole point is to get you out of the protagonist's head, and since you want to complete the game, it's presumable that you therefore want to help the protagonist get rid of you. While you control the playable character's body, their narration is their own, and frequently comments on what you're making them do, with remarks like "ugh, can we focus? we need to go to the thing" when you start twiddling with pointless things instead of progressing the plot.

And occasionally the character just refuses to do what you want them to do. Instead of an invisible wall barring you from going beyond the boundaries of the game, the character consciously halts and tells you "no, that's far enough. We can't just wander off." If you try to make the character attack NPCs that you can't fight, they shudder and shake their head, going "no, what's wrong with you? She's my friend!"

At first the game kind of railroads what you need to do next, which is specifically by the character you're controlling refusing to do what you're trying to make them do. Their whole goal is to get rid of you, get this evil damn thing out of their head. But gradually you can build up trust with the character, by leading them to things they want or need, and keeping them out of danger.

Consequently, allowing the character to die or get injured makes them harder to control, and more likely to refuse to do as you want. And the less they trust you, the harder the game is. While the sliding scale of trust might not be a visible mechanic in the game, you can hear it in the tone in which they talk to you. The voice lines are mostly the same, but when you start leading the character to a random direction, the same "where are you taking me?" can either be calm but intrigued, or distressed and afraid.

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Over the course of our conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality. One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong. The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine. As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.)

ChatBPD

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You could also have fantasy republics that are have embedded magic just as much as fantasy kingdoms. Like, if you have a setting where only the true heir of the kingdom can wield a certain magical sword, you could also have... like, only the truly properly elected doge of the republic can wear a certain magical signet ring of power, or whatever.

I'm always criticizing eurocentric fantasy worldbuilding, but one thing I think it's underused are city-states and trade republics and leagues. Not that they don't exist, but they're often in the background, the fantasy genre is so focused on monarchies and dynasties and noble drama, while those systems have so much room for intrigue and stuff without getting into "who's the TRUE heir of the super magical monarch" (yes, I know they had aristocratic families that ruled almost as monarchs, but trust me, Medici drama is another beast from regular feudal stuff)

Venice with its stupidly complex election system and their eternal rivals in Genoa, Florence home of the Rennaissance, the Hanseatic League, and lesser known examples like Novgorod, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Taifa of Córdoba, the Consolat de Mar (technically not a republic but kind of an Iberian Hansa) and if we go farther back, the leagues of city states of antiquity... you know what, I'm bored of feudalism. Next time I do a fantasy setting, it will all be city states and republics. Fuck feudalism.

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More along similar lines:

I've seen @aksemmi talking about being disturbed by all the Dungeon Meshi stuff and for the most part I'm pretty indifferent to it, but then I see that someone has actually made a recipe-cum-TTRPG called "How to Cook Your Mortal Enemy" in which the narrative is that you've slain some mortal enemy and are now eating the body, but the gameplay is that you're literally cooking and eating a chicken.

So, like, I think I see where she's coming from more now.

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What about this though?

having computable sex with my turing complete girlfriend

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This is an SSC post, not a TUOC post, but it's not this is it?

need to dig up that unit of caring post about distrusting any group founded on the bonding activity of constantly digging up random examples of [despised group] behaving badly. the world is big the internet is big you can find ten million examples for any group at all ever and even if you started out with some principles the human brain is just dogshit at not rewiring itself in response to a torrent of examples of [specific group] behaving badly. it's like propagandizing yourself. it will make you insane it will make you lose touch with reality.

(there's nuance here-- if it's like examples of a group abusing significant institutional power that they actually have, with real repercussions being rare-- trying to create pressure for there to be accountability for bad actions & making tangible changes to systems to prevent this from happening so much (cops are a prime example for this) it can be different. but also when it's the first group ppl will totally frame it like it's the second so it's tricky)

I've basically just badly restated a good post and i totally could have gone and dug it up in the time it took me to type this on a damn phone screen. but i did not do that so here we are. sometimes it's good to restate things in your own words even if those words are much less good than the original. maybe.

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A girl who says she's really into CNC invites you to her place. She takes you to her basement and shows you her 4-axis milling machine, putting a block of SAE 316L steel into it and loading up some gcode. Later you really think the ankle cuffs on the spreader bar she just milled could use more filleting and deburring, but she says there's no need because she wants it to be rough when you tie her to her restraint bench, force her ankles in the spreader bar, and ravage her while ignoring all her protests and struggling.

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I thought that was probably the case. (At first I was thinking "Does this really 'fit very neatly' into either case? Given issues like fungibility, etc, it seems a little different from both the homeless case and the AMF case," but I suppose the AMF case is just one example of "ethical, but not popularity-maxing," and other cases can be pretty different. Popular vs unpopular is a different axis from ineffectual vs effective altruism.)

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between "ethical acts that make people feel positively towards you" and "ethical acts that don't actively make people feel positively towards you" because I feel like people in general care quite a bit about the former but are most of the time at best apathetic and at worst actively hostile towards the latter. Like...okay for example. It's definitely a good thing to like, give money to a homeless person. But I think it's unambiguously a *more good* thing to give money to an effective charity like the against malaria foundation. Because like. It helps people more. It's better for the same reason it's better to give a homeless person a dollar than a quarter.

But I think your average person cares considerably more about the former than the latter, because the former makes a person feel positively towards you and the latter doesnt. The most extreme case here is tipping. Like. Tipping at a place you'll never go again is effectively charity (I mean you could make some sort of contract ethics argument. But I don't think any of us want to be contract ethicists). But I think generally people would think you less virtuous if you switched from "guy who always tips" to "guy who calculates the tip and then donates it to AMF"

And then like. Obviously there's vegans. They fit very neatly into this