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sapphiresonstrings · 3 days
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Me:
Wages are a measure of your value to others mediated by your negotiating skills.
You:
So, you agree with me that increasing the value of your work does not *necessarily* increase your wages because wages are not a measure of value.
I would like to continue this conversation after you learn how to read.
I realize that's unnecessarily abrasive, but how did you manage to write such a long post without noticing that you had inverted the meaning of the very post you were reblogging? Did it not occur to you to proofread them back-to-back just in case?
It really seems to me like you're just not bothering to read the posts you're replying to. I'm not repeating your points back to you, you're just selectively failing to read the parts of my sentences that you don't agree with.
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@morlock-holmes Why post it as a reply instead of a reblog?
Can you genuinely not see the difference between these two sentences? They contain some of the same words, that is true.
Think about it again.
Wages are a measure of your value to others mediated by your negotiating skills.
If the price of a good goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about value.
Consider the following two sentences as well.
Michelin stars are a measure of the quality of a restaurant according to Michelin star reviewers.
If the Michelin star rating of a restaurant goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about the quality of the restaurant.
The map is not the territory.
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sapphiresonstrings · 6 days
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@morlock-holmes Why post it as a reply instead of a reblog?
Can you genuinely not see the difference between these two sentences? They contain some of the same words, that is true.
Think about it again.
Wages are a measure of your value to others mediated by your negotiating skills.
If the price of a good goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about value.
Consider the following two sentences as well.
Michelin stars are a measure of the quality of a restaurant according to Michelin star reviewers.
If the Michelin star rating of a restaurant goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about the quality of the restaurant.
The map is not the territory.
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sapphiresonstrings · 7 days
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I think social situations should be mediated by player skill more than character skill anyway, so I let the players call for a check.
I also think that key information is something you should choose to either provide or not. It shouldn't come down to a die roll. I tend to just blatantly signpost key information like which characters are untrustworthy. If there's a system like an Insight check, I let the players use it to get extra information that might be helpful but isn't necessary. For example, maybe the shifty guy keeps glancing at a particular person, or he's in a hurry to make the deal and get out of there.
In practice I avoid giving the players any choices that are straightforwardly wrong or bad, so I tend to use untrustworthy NPCs in a way that makes trusting them a viable option even if you know they're lying. For example, a shifty wizard offers the players cash in exchange for retrieving a rare spell component so the wizard can use it for good - but in actuality the wizard plans to use it for evil. The cash is real though, and an unscrupulous character might choose to take the deal even if they know the truth. The question isn't whether the wizard is sketchy, the question is what to do with that information.
Another aside from reading PTHCE and the Honest Plea Charm (TLDR: roll to prove honesty) is thinking about the difficulty of getting lie detection rolls to work in a game system. Insight, Sense Motive, Judge Intentions, or whatever you call it has some issues.
One issue that the GM calling for a roll leaks information, and a player seeing the result of his Insight dice leaks more.
This can be somewhat suppressed by the GM rolling secretly on behalf of the player characters, but that has other issues with agency, especially if the characters have some optional skill buff that the players should be choosing whether to use. (It's also more stuff for the GM to remember, that the players would usually remember better.) If the skill buff costs a resource to use, secretly spending that resource for them is unfortunate interaction, asking whether they want to spend it leaks info again!
Another approach is that players decide when to express doubt and can roll Insight at any NPC statement, which reduces leakage but now you have the problem of depending on player skill which might fail to roll at what was supposed to be an obvious lie that the more-skilled character should catch.
So ordinary rolling seems to me the least bad of several basic options, and can be mitigated somewhat by the GM calling for insight rolls regarding honest statements to reduce the information content of calling for a roll.
Which brings me to my second issue: how much information should the roll reveal about where you are in a 2x2 grid of possible outcomes? The speaker is lying or honest, and the PC rolled well (enough to detect a lie) or badly on the Insight check.
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Quadrant 1 (speaker is lying, PC rolled well) should reveal a lie for what it is. What should the GM have in the other quadrants?
The simple option is that all 3 other quadrants are simply "You sense no lies". This seems somewhat uninformative, but I think it sucks the least, and the diagram is going to be a helpful reference for explaining the complexities of why.
Consider this layout of possible comments from the GM.
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Each entry makes intuitive sense on its own as spoken, but the combination results in a situation where the utterance from quadrant 4 is the one that carries a meaning of honesty - you do know, because only when listening to an honest person will you hear "you don't know"! Vice versa, the "definitely a reliable guy" utterance is ambiguous.
(Insert discourse on OOC knowledge and metagaming. Even with goodwill, it's hard to play along with pretending to believe lies and keeping track thereof.)
So having GM utterances mean the opposite sucks. What else can we do?
Well, if a player suspects a lie where there is none, what is the bar for rolling well or badly against an honest statement? Maybe we should just have that column be vague for entries 2 and 4, since the roll was grinding at nothing.
Except... what do we now put in (3)? If it's the same thing, we're back to the original plan. If it's something else, then that something else leaks the fact of an attempted lie.
So having 2+3 match doesn't work, and having 2+4 match doesn't work. They can't all differ, or the roll will be pointless. What about having 3+4 match, and quadrant 2 is something else? Rolling well gives true information about lies or honesty, rolling badly gives you "unclear" regardless of the speaker's intent.
This creates a very odd situation where no amount of skilled lying can ever be mistaken for a definitely honest statement inside the mechanics, because a honest statement has a unique possible outcome in quadrant (2) that lies cannot duplicate.
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And now we're back to the question of what constitutes "rolling well" on Insight checks against an honest statement. What promotes your outcome from quadrant 4 to quadrant 2?
If it's for example DC 15 in D&D-speak, you roll a 16 and get told "you don't know" because the liar rolled 18 to lie, then you do know where you are: Quadrant 3.
Thus my resigned suggestion that only quadrant 1 should be distinguished from the other three, which are identical.
Honest Plea will be a special case to me, "convincing" people that you are really honest in a way which is mechanically more similar to magical mental influence than to detecting truth/lies.
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sapphiresonstrings · 7 days
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I'm curious what you mean when you say that I, specifically, pushed back on this idea. I have no idea what you could possibly mean by that. I would like a quote.
Money is not inherently worth anything. There is no big book of how many dollars and cents every good and service and hour of labour is "really" worth, sent down from on high by God. Money is just a system we use to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.
A loaf of bread can cost half a silver penny or one trillion Zimbabwean dollars depending on the monetary environment, because money is fundamentally arbitrary. What actually matters is the rate of exchange between your labour and the loaf of bread.
Money is just the medium of exchange you use to get the bread despite the fact that the baker has no direct need of your services as a security guard, software engineer, furry porn artist, or whatever.
I often see people talking about how capitalism is great because it's the best way to get people what they need.
But, okay, so like in a Capitalist free market, supply and demand are always going to be somewhat divorced from need for as long as labor itself is subject to supply and demand, right?
I mean, am I crazy here? This seems inevitable to me but a lot of advocates for capitalism act like it isn't true for reasons I can't understand.
Like, I don't make much money, because I do unskilled work. Unskilled work is work where you can train the vast majority of people to be competent at the job within a few days (As opposed to, say, a neurosurgeon, who needs more than 18 hours of training shifts). This means that the supply of labor is high even relative to large demand, which means that in turn the price at which I can sell my labor is low.
What sort of makes me itch is that if I phrase things like that without any political agenda, most evangelists for capitalism will say, "Yeah, broadly you're exactly right."
Okay, but that means that if money is a signal of "need", then I have less ability to signal need than a skilled worker.
Suppose me and Jeff Bezos both get the same kind of cancer, and we both have the same odds of survivability from the same treatment. The treatment costs one million dollars.
Are we to say that the fact that I don't have one million dollars indicates that I need cancer treatment less than Jeff Bezos, who would pay without thinking?
That's a completely perverse definition of what it means to need things!
The only way to get out of that would be to advocate for a radical blank slate theory, in which every single person is equally capable of doing a high skilled job, and has consciously chosen not to do so.
This is just, like, obviously not the case. Like, at the very least you have to deal with unmedicated schizophrenics, people with learning disabilities, people getting chemotherapy or other medical treatments that make them too weak to work, and furthermore a lot of people who are the most "rah rah" for capitalism are also somehow the least inclined towards blank slate theory, and are often advocates of fairly rigid views of human potential who are happy to argue that some people are just incapable of doing skilled work.
But like... Because of how labor works Capitalism is going to be not very good at fulfilling the needs of unskilled workers, even if the market is otherwise working in a very idealized and efficient fashion, let alone the world we actually have with things like inherited wealth.
Now, I would argue that capitalism can be bad at fulfilling the needs of low-skill workers even when society is producing enough surplus that it is possible to fulfill their needs.
PS - This doesn't mean that supply and demand are entirely unmoored from human desire either, that's not what I'm arguing.
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sapphiresonstrings · 8 days
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It's really solid intuitive game design, though (the fake game not the real one). It's a game where you can watch someone play for 10 seconds and immediately understand the rules of the game. Not only that, but you can tell at a glance that the person is playing badly and how you could do better.
10/10. I think the guy who makes those videos is a better game designer than the people who make the actual games the fake ads are advertizing.
And the guy who makes those videos where the muscley hero gets knocked back to level 1 by a 20ft tall green woman and/or his dog gets kidnapped by evil birds and/or a mean wizard steals his hair? Better writing than most actual video games. Someone get that guy a job as the lead writer for the next generic strong-guy-kills-bad-guys AAA snoozefest.
i fucking hate those ads for fake mobile games where everything has numbers on it and the player decides to cut his army in half instead of doubling it so you'll go "no, he's so bad, I'll download the game and do it right!"
like not only are the games shit
not only is it hyper shit to advertise your shit game with another game that doesn't exist
the fucking numbers don't even add up right! you made your own fake gameplay trailer where everything had a big helpful number on it to show what damage it took and you couldn't even bother to make it add up!
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sapphiresonstrings · 8 days
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I am not actually angry. I don't know where you're getting that from, but I know your reading comprehension isn't very good so I'm not surprised that you would misunderstand this as well.
The thing the rich husband values in a trophy wife isn't (primarily) "her ability to signal his high status," it's the fact that she's hot and he gets to have sex with her. The children are not paying their mother and are therefore not - and I cannot stress this enough - not the customers. The husband is the customer. Childrearing is only paid for insofar as someone with money is willing to pay for it.
You are paid according to your marginal value to others. You take the money you are paid and spend it on things that you value.
If the price of a good goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about value, because price and value are two different things. If all prices and wages are halved, the only actual change is that all savings have doubled. If all prices and wages double, the only actual change is that all savings have halved.
Neither of these are what happened during the Industrial Revolution, when wages skyrocketed and prices dropped at the same time, dramatically increasing standards of living across the board. I don't know how you get "destruction of value" from that.
You're mixing up value and wealth. In a society where water is extremely scarce and everyone is dying of thirst, water is extremely valuable to the people dying of thirst because without it they will die. It has high value because people value it. That does not make it a wealthy society because wealth and value are not the same thing. A valuable object isn't valuable because it contains the Platonic Essence of Value, it's valuable because people value it.
Value is just a measure of how much people want certain things. Wealth is the state in which people have most of the things they want.
Money is a medium of exchange, not a resource. It's not worth anything, we just use it to track the value of other things. Money is not the same thing as wealth and wealth is not the same thing as value. The map is not the territory.
I often see people talking about how capitalism is great because it's the best way to get people what they need.
But, okay, so like in a Capitalist free market, supply and demand are always going to be somewhat divorced from need for as long as labor itself is subject to supply and demand, right?
I mean, am I crazy here? This seems inevitable to me but a lot of advocates for capitalism act like it isn't true for reasons I can't understand.
Like, I don't make much money, because I do unskilled work. Unskilled work is work where you can train the vast majority of people to be competent at the job within a few days (As opposed to, say, a neurosurgeon, who needs more than 18 hours of training shifts). This means that the supply of labor is high even relative to large demand, which means that in turn the price at which I can sell my labor is low.
What sort of makes me itch is that if I phrase things like that without any political agenda, most evangelists for capitalism will say, "Yeah, broadly you're exactly right."
Okay, but that means that if money is a signal of "need", then I have less ability to signal need than a skilled worker.
Suppose me and Jeff Bezos both get the same kind of cancer, and we both have the same odds of survivability from the same treatment. The treatment costs one million dollars.
Are we to say that the fact that I don't have one million dollars indicates that I need cancer treatment less than Jeff Bezos, who would pay without thinking?
That's a completely perverse definition of what it means to need things!
The only way to get out of that would be to advocate for a radical blank slate theory, in which every single person is equally capable of doing a high skilled job, and has consciously chosen not to do so.
This is just, like, obviously not the case. Like, at the very least you have to deal with unmedicated schizophrenics, people with learning disabilities, people getting chemotherapy or other medical treatments that make them too weak to work, and furthermore a lot of people who are the most "rah rah" for capitalism are also somehow the least inclined towards blank slate theory, and are often advocates of fairly rigid views of human potential who are happy to argue that some people are just incapable of doing skilled work.
But like... Because of how labor works Capitalism is going to be not very good at fulfilling the needs of unskilled workers, even if the market is otherwise working in a very idealized and efficient fashion, let alone the world we actually have with things like inherited wealth.
Now, I would argue that capitalism can be bad at fulfilling the needs of low-skill workers even when society is producing enough surplus that it is possible to fulfill their needs.
PS - This doesn't mean that supply and demand are entirely unmoored from human desire either, that's not what I'm arguing.
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sapphiresonstrings · 8 days
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While stay-at-home mothers aren't literally paid a salary, they do have money anyway. Furthermore, some have more money than others. Depending on the local culture this money could be in the form of anything from an allowance to a joint bank account.
Just like everyone else, how much money they get is determined by their value to their customer as mediated by their negotiation skills. (The customer being the husband, not the children. If you aren't paying then you aren't the customer).
I don't even understand what this analogy is supposed to prove. Obviously the trophy wife of a CEO has, not only more money than most other stay-at-home moms, but more money than most people in the world period. Obviously she gets this money by providing a valuable service to someone willing to pay an extremely large amount of money for that service, as mediated by her own innate abilities and negotiation skills (and also her 'negotiation skills').
I often see people talking about how capitalism is great because it's the best way to get people what they need.
But, okay, so like in a Capitalist free market, supply and demand are always going to be somewhat divorced from need for as long as labor itself is subject to supply and demand, right?
I mean, am I crazy here? This seems inevitable to me but a lot of advocates for capitalism act like it isn't true for reasons I can't understand.
Like, I don't make much money, because I do unskilled work. Unskilled work is work where you can train the vast majority of people to be competent at the job within a few days (As opposed to, say, a neurosurgeon, who needs more than 18 hours of training shifts). This means that the supply of labor is high even relative to large demand, which means that in turn the price at which I can sell my labor is low.
What sort of makes me itch is that if I phrase things like that without any political agenda, most evangelists for capitalism will say, "Yeah, broadly you're exactly right."
Okay, but that means that if money is a signal of "need", then I have less ability to signal need than a skilled worker.
Suppose me and Jeff Bezos both get the same kind of cancer, and we both have the same odds of survivability from the same treatment. The treatment costs one million dollars.
Are we to say that the fact that I don't have one million dollars indicates that I need cancer treatment less than Jeff Bezos, who would pay without thinking?
That's a completely perverse definition of what it means to need things!
The only way to get out of that would be to advocate for a radical blank slate theory, in which every single person is equally capable of doing a high skilled job, and has consciously chosen not to do so.
This is just, like, obviously not the case. Like, at the very least you have to deal with unmedicated schizophrenics, people with learning disabilities, people getting chemotherapy or other medical treatments that make them too weak to work, and furthermore a lot of people who are the most "rah rah" for capitalism are also somehow the least inclined towards blank slate theory, and are often advocates of fairly rigid views of human potential who are happy to argue that some people are just incapable of doing skilled work.
But like... Because of how labor works Capitalism is going to be not very good at fulfilling the needs of unskilled workers, even if the market is otherwise working in a very idealized and efficient fashion, let alone the world we actually have with things like inherited wealth.
Now, I would argue that capitalism can be bad at fulfilling the needs of low-skill workers even when society is producing enough surplus that it is possible to fulfill their needs.
PS - This doesn't mean that supply and demand are entirely unmoored from human desire either, that's not what I'm arguing.
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sapphiresonstrings · 9 days
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Let me qualify that for you, then: In a capitalist system, wages are a measure of your value to others as mediated by your negotiation skills.
You may recognize this last sentence as a feature of all systems that involve more than one person, which includes every economic system that ever has existed or ever will exist. Because this feature cannot be removed from the equation without annihilating all life on Earth in nuclear hellfire, we don't feel the need to mention it when discussing the ins and outs of various economic systems.
In a fully communist society, your allocation of resources would be a measure of your need as mediated by your negotiation skills. If you're "too much of a bitch" to ask for a raise in a capitalist system, then you would also be too much of a bitch to ask the commune to allocate more resources to you in a communist system, and too much of a bitch to pursue a high-status marriage in a clan-based system, and too much of a bitch to petition the lord to allow you to receive a plot of land as part of the colonization of Poland in a feudal system, and too much of a bitch to win higher status by boasting of your prowess in war in a tribal system.
Since that part is going to be exactly the same no matter what the system is, it's not really a feature of capitalism. It's a feature of being a human.
Also FYI if you can be easily replaced then by definition you aren't really needed. It doesn't matter how much value your job produces, what matters is how much value you produce relative to whoever would replace you if you weren't there. You didn't create the job, so you don't get credit for its value to society, you only get credit for your value to society. Your value to society is just whatever society would lose if you hadn't been born.
Giving instructions is much, much more difficult (and more valuable to society) than taking instructions. Contra Marx, a factory worker does not get full credit for the things he produces just because he happens to have done the last and least-difficult step of producing the product, after someone else has already done the much harder work of designing it, building the factory, and training the workers.
I often see people talking about how capitalism is great because it's the best way to get people what they need.
But, okay, so like in a Capitalist free market, supply and demand are always going to be somewhat divorced from need for as long as labor itself is subject to supply and demand, right?
I mean, am I crazy here? This seems inevitable to me but a lot of advocates for capitalism act like it isn't true for reasons I can't understand.
Like, I don't make much money, because I do unskilled work. Unskilled work is work where you can train the vast majority of people to be competent at the job within a few days (As opposed to, say, a neurosurgeon, who needs more than 18 hours of training shifts). This means that the supply of labor is high even relative to large demand, which means that in turn the price at which I can sell my labor is low.
What sort of makes me itch is that if I phrase things like that without any political agenda, most evangelists for capitalism will say, "Yeah, broadly you're exactly right."
Okay, but that means that if money is a signal of "need", then I have less ability to signal need than a skilled worker.
Suppose me and Jeff Bezos both get the same kind of cancer, and we both have the same odds of survivability from the same treatment. The treatment costs one million dollars.
Are we to say that the fact that I don't have one million dollars indicates that I need cancer treatment less than Jeff Bezos, who would pay without thinking?
That's a completely perverse definition of what it means to need things!
The only way to get out of that would be to advocate for a radical blank slate theory, in which every single person is equally capable of doing a high skilled job, and has consciously chosen not to do so.
This is just, like, obviously not the case. Like, at the very least you have to deal with unmedicated schizophrenics, people with learning disabilities, people getting chemotherapy or other medical treatments that make them too weak to work, and furthermore a lot of people who are the most "rah rah" for capitalism are also somehow the least inclined towards blank slate theory, and are often advocates of fairly rigid views of human potential who are happy to argue that some people are just incapable of doing skilled work.
But like... Because of how labor works Capitalism is going to be not very good at fulfilling the needs of unskilled workers, even if the market is otherwise working in a very idealized and efficient fashion, let alone the world we actually have with things like inherited wealth.
Now, I would argue that capitalism can be bad at fulfilling the needs of low-skill workers even when society is producing enough surplus that it is possible to fulfill their needs.
PS - This doesn't mean that supply and demand are entirely unmoored from human desire either, that's not what I'm arguing.
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sapphiresonstrings · 15 days
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I like both Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin as people. I hate them both as politicians.
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sapphiresonstrings · 15 days
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That one child in Omelas isn't even particularly mistreated, statistically speaking. Beaten and malnourished but still alive? Historically that's an above-average standard of living. Most children who've ever lived have died before the age of 5.
And you're telling me that not only is that one child the worst-off person in Omelas, but every other child lives a life of comfort and happiness? That's solidly above-average performance from a society.
Tbh if Omelas was real I'd walk to there. You're telling me they're only torturing one child to guarantee utopia for everyone else instead of torturing innumerable children and adults for a slightly less bad existence for most others like in real life? Let me in! And yes, I know this explicitly makes me the kind of person that Le Guin was criticising in the story but Omelas is objectively less bad than Living In A Society.
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sapphiresonstrings · 22 days
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the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck
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sapphiresonstrings · 25 days
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For a long time I've had this idea in my head of a grand strategy game where you manage supporters exerting practical influence, rather than having the game endorse a map-painting legal fiction of "X empire owns Y province."
For example, you collect taxes by deploying an administrator, who sends out tax collectors in the area around him. In a mountainous area with no roads the tax collectors move slowly and don't collect much. If bandits run wild in the area, your tax collectors can't go anywhere and you don't get any income at all.
In this game, your main action would be moving your supporters around. Give your general resources so he can build an army, then move him into enemy territory to conquer it.
i guess there's this tension in grand strategy between wanting to have fine-grained player control over richly simulated systems but not wanting to live in arthritis-inducing micromanagement hell esp when u start scaling up ur empire. and the ppl who make video games do try to alleviate this a little bit w small quality of life things like division templates and automatic construction and so on but. why not a full scripting language that hooks into all possible player actions. why can't i run an empire purely through cron jobs. cute little scripts to manage the inputs and outputs of a thousand steelmills spread across a hundred provinces. imagine being kaiser franz joseph waking up at 5am every morning bombarded with a million automated alerts about how the fragile duct-taped data pipeline responsible for the oversight of all austro-hungarian industry has once again torn itself to pieces doesnt that sound like a compelling videogaming experience
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sapphiresonstrings · 25 days
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You know how the word "feline" refers to cats, and "canine" refers to dogs? There are a whole bunch more animal adjectives, and here are some of them:
equine -> horses
bovine -> cows
murine -> mice/rats
porcupine -> porcupines
wolverine -> wolves
marine -> marmosets
saline -> salmonella
cosine -> cosmonauts
citrine -> citrus
combine -> combs
famine -> your fam
bromine -> your bros
palpatine -> your pals
alpine -> alps
christine -> christ
asinine -> asses
machine -> the speed of sound
landmine -> explosions
migraine -> migrants
trampoline -> tramps
dopamine -> dopes
medicine -> the Medici family
praline -> prey
masculine -> mascara
feminine -> femurs
latrine -> latissimus dorsi
fettuccine -> fetuses
poutine -> sadness
turbine -> turbans
engine -> england
supine -> soup
valentine -> valence electrons
Follow for more nature facts!
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sapphiresonstrings · 26 days
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There is no difference, but both are bad stories. These are both examples of stories in which nothing changes. The protagonist is moving in a particular direction when the story starts. The protagonist continues in that direction, with no surprises, until the story ends.
I'm going to bring in the example story I wrote on my other post for comparison:
"Have you considered writing a story about a guy who angsts about wanting to be a superhero for 1 chapter, then gets what he wants, only to discover that it's harder than it looks? And then maybe he faces adversity and considers giving up, but finds his inner strength at the beginning of Act 3 and defeats the bad guy? And he ends the story having learned a valuable lesson?"
Note the three deeply generic plot beats I sketched out. 1: Undertake your task, discover it's harder than it looks. 2: Face adversity, but find inner strength. 3: End the story having learned a valuable lesson.
These are all corny. You've probably seen them dozens of times before, in everything from Rocky to Mulan. The reason you've seen them all before is that they work. If you remove them then you have to replace them with another element that does the same thing.
A less corny example is Pixar's classic story structure:
The character wants something.
They get what they want, but in the process they lose something they need.
They change their priorities to get what they need, possibly at the cost of what they originally wanted.
The key here is that the character must change direction during the course of the story. Kurt Vonnegut said that your story should conceal nothing from the reader, so that if the last page were missing the reader could write it themselves. That may be so. However, if the reader can predict the ending of your story from the first page, then you have a problem. There have to be changes of direction in the middle of the story or else the middle of the story has no informational content.
The pain of realizing you are not actually a temporarily embarrassed winner/genius never ends. It's been years since I discovered the ultimate proof of my stupidity and it still hurts to wake up every day and know I'm stupid. And it should hurt. It's good that it hurts and I would not want it to stop because stupid people deserve it.
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sapphiresonstrings · 27 days
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at least with Stable-Diffusion you can't really go, "Give me four different pictures of a kid on a bike, but make sure that two are girls and two are boys, and make sure they're different nationalities in each picture."
Yes you can. You can't literally type the words "make sure that two are girls and two are boys, and make sure they're different nationalities in each picture" into the prompt and expect it to understand you, because that's not how prompts work - but you can write:
(Chinese|French|Nigerian|Lebanese) (boy|girl) riding a bike
As for making that happen automatically, it is not clear to me why anyone would want the AI to automatically fuck with their prompts under the hood. Generally when I generate a batch of images I'm doing it because I have a specific outcome in mind. I don't want them to all come out different, I want them to all come out the same with tiny variations so I can pick the best one.
Gemini seems optimized as a toy that you play with for five minutes and then forget about, rather than as a tool that you can actually use to do things with.
So apparently a Google image generator made some black Nazis or something.
The fact that people care about this, that they think there is some skin color that a fake Nazi, or a fake founding father, or whatever, *ought* to have in the absence of explicit user prompting is strong evidence that large portions of society have gone insane.
I can't even begin to tell you how infuriating it is to me that people care about this. It's a batshit set of priorities.
The correct race for a character in an image generator output is whatever the user asks for, period.
PS - This is a big reason I don't like the closed source generators, they feel that anything they generate reflects on the company so they're constantly working to make sure you don't have enough input into the image to do naughty things.
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sapphiresonstrings · 1 month
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I know I just wrote a massive reblog, but here's another one because I have a different angle that didn't fit in the other reblog. This is more specific writing technique stuff.
I read through some of your work again, and your fundamental flaw seem to be that your stories don't go anywhere. Nothing ever builds on anything else. Nothing interesting ever happens. There are no twists and no turns, not even a change in direction. At most they go in one direction, monotonously, then arrive there. A single emotion spread across an entire work of fiction.
In other words, they're pure vibes
I think that when you talk about improving your writing skills, what you're actually doing is trying to improve the quality of those vibes. That's not bad. Vibes are important. But they aren't the most important thing, and they're also not the only thing.
You need to work on having something interesting to write about, and doing justice to that interesting idea. Coming up with good ideas is its own thing, but fortunately you don't have to do that! All you have to do is steal someone else's good idea. Coming up with an original plot will become much easier once you have a feel for what a good plot looks like, and it's way easier to do that by looking at the existing plots that rose to the top than by coming up with new ones from scratch.
Grab a copy of Harry Potter and start copying its structure chapter-by-chapter. Ask yourself what the purpose of each scene is. Ask yourself what each character's role in the story is. If you change anything, make sure you replace each load-bearing element with another element that's capable of doing the same thing.
This ties back into what I said in the other post: Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Beginner painters learn technique by copying paintings or photographs. Beginner writers learn technique by copying plot structures.
The pain of realizing you are not actually a temporarily embarrassed winner/genius never ends. It's been years since I discovered the ultimate proof of my stupidity and it still hurts to wake up every day and know I'm stupid. And it should hurt. It's good that it hurts and I would not want it to stop because stupid people deserve it.
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sapphiresonstrings · 1 month
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It sounds like you're willing to try anything, so long as there's no danger that it might actually work.
Self-sabotage is an interesting phenomenon. Studies show that people who are insecure about their abilities will prefer to take on impossible or unfair tasks over possible or fair ones. The protects one's self-esteem. If you undertake a task that you believe you're capable of and fail, it damages your self-perception. If you fail at an impossible or unfair task on the other hand, well, there's no shame in that.
You measure your success by reader engagement, but you avoid writing anything that has a chance of engaging readers. You've invented a genre that focuses exclusively on sad people who spend all their time wallowing in misery ("Bojack Horseman without the comedy" as you put it). Everything you write, you write in this invented genre. The fact that no popular examples of this genre exist does not seem to phase you. You intend to invent and popularize this new genre entirely on the basis of your writing skills.
This is your impossible task, and you're using it to sabotage yourself. The reason you're not making progress is that you haven't actually started yet. You're loitering at the starting gate doing warm-up exercises.
When you're ready to start, here's step 1: Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Copy something that's already popular. Write a story that's X meets Y, or Z with a twist, where X, Y, and Z are popular stories. Pick a popular genre with an established structure and follow that structure.
You've written a story about a guy who angsts about wanting to be a superhero for 7 chapters, gets in one fight, and then goes to jail.
Have you considered writing a story about a guy who angsts about wanting to be a superhero for 1 chapter, then gets what he wants, only to discover that it's harder than it looks? And then maybe he faces adversity and considers giving up, but finds his inner strength at the beginning of Act 3 and defeats the bad guy? And he ends the story having learned a valuable lesson?
It seems to me like you're so dead-set on making everything you write unique that you've rejected all the tried-and-true tools - but those tools have stuck around so long for a reason. You should learn to use them before you move on to inventing your own.
You've talked about your writing skills, but skills are just techniques for achieving certain ends, such as creating a product. There is no mystical light of genius that emanates from Great Artists and suffuses everything they touch. There is just art, and an audience that wants to consume that art for entertainment. You cannot become a popular author by ignoring what people actually like.
In order to genuinely improve you need to look outside yourself.
The pain of realizing you are not actually a temporarily embarrassed winner/genius never ends. It's been years since I discovered the ultimate proof of my stupidity and it still hurts to wake up every day and know I'm stupid. And it should hurt. It's good that it hurts and I would not want it to stop because stupid people deserve it.
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