mc776 | From the soapbox

And so it is done. Unfortunately this eliminates a much more easily searchably unique abbreviation "LT1" but given all my years of working with "HD" i'm sure i'll live.

Anyway, for posterity's sake here's what i had brainstormed before settling on the new name, with a bit of commentary:

( Read more... )

An attempt to systematically describe the tropes that form this complex of mythmaking that informs a great deal of low-brow pop culture in works like Spawn, Lady Death, Doom and the Jesus versus Satan fight episode of South Park.

I'm sure there's other analyses out there, possibly with a better name, but until I see I think I'll try to regularize this term.

There are three worlds: Heaven, Earth and Hell.

Heaven is the place of Good and Law and Light, often associated with blue and white and gold; Hell is the place of Darkness and Chaos and Evil, often associated with red and black and green. Earth is the place of struggle between these two primal domains.

The struggle is explicit and physical, involving godlike, often shapeshifting beings using actual physical weapons against each other.

Humanity is naturally aligned with the Good, but can align with Evil through extreme moral corruption of some kind. They can also take direct part in the fight in a limited fashion.

Both realms are inherently hierarchical and often roughly symmetrical in their structure. The hierarchy in the realm of Good, however, tends to be much more explicit and unforgiving which is often a driver for entities to defect to Evil even though in actual practice the hierarchy there is no better.

The ultimate masters of both realms are almost always male and the entire cosmos implicitly patriarchal.

It is often repeated that the master of Good is the creator of the universe and the master of Evil lives only at his mercy; however, in the vast bulk of the struggles described in the stories there is almost nothing in the conduct of the parties that supports this over a much more symmetrical, dualist interpretation.

( An attempt. )

There's a kind of thinking where asking someone a question is inherently an act of shaming them.

There's a related kind of thinking where refusing to take action until someone has answered your question is an even bigger act of shaming them.

This is fundamentally in conflict with ways of thinking that respect express consent.

Not all cultures are equal and it is safe to call this kind of thinking toxic.

Wall to wall, racks and racks of vat-grown proto-brains sit in an ever-flowing slurry of nutrient bath.

They are perfect beings of utility: just complex enough to be aware of their own sentience, at least in theory, but hard-wired to constantly feel maximum pleasure all the time.

Eventually they burn out - blissfully, one presumes - and a new one must be grown to take its place.

To be a good person, you can sponsor the project and have a new brain added to the array in your name. You can then go on about your life, knowing that you have helped make the world - objectively - a better place.

The facilities are limited, however, and depending on availability not everyone may be able to afford sponsoring a new brain of their own. Donations to the expansion and maintenance funds are always welcome.

Society is heavily stratified between the progenitors, those who have given life to new brains under their own name, the hopefuls who may have missed this round but may be able to reserve some priority by sufficient contributions to future expansions, and the rabble who must constantly try to make up for their noxious existence by funding the maintenance tier.

Disemoticonoclasticalism: calm

Actually Koko could talk; you just have some hidden ableism – A Response to Soup Emporium’s “Why Koko couldn’t talk (sorry)|The Deep Dive”

A thorough deconstruction of the conventional wisdom of why what Koko et al. demonstrated cannot strictly be speaking be considered "language".

The author does not appear to be trained as a linguist exactly, and plainly has no love for the narrow definition of what constitutes true language. But I think they more than make up for this with their actual specialty: working with people with limited or rudimentary language skills.

Three things I really appreciate about this piece:

the non-negotiable hard, bright line between people and animals
the purposive understanding of language, speech, communication and cognition
the dedication to considering the problem from multiple perspectives, in accordance with the three needful things.

Overall I believe that from a theoretical linguistic perspective this piece is clearly flawed, but in terms of actionable takeaway point it may be less misleading than the temptations the "correct" analysis may open up for some people.

One of the most important clips you include starts at 19:26. It’s one of the few uncut clips provided, and you completely missed the significance of it. When interacting with Mister Rogers (RIP), Koko displays a level of communication that is actually quite advanced and impressive, especially considering that she’s a gorilla.

Mister Rogers had asks “how do you say love?” and from there, you hyper-focus on the fact that she didn’t answer the question without Penny’s prompt.

But watch that clip again and look at Koko. She’s not looking at Penny or even Mister Rogers. She’s touching and looking at his cufflink. From these behaviors, it’s safe to assume that her attention is on the cufflink, not on Mister Rogers’ question of “how do you say ‘love?’”

Following his question, Koko says at 19:37 “what’s that? Flower,” and points to his sun-shaped cufflink. That is, she uses the vocabulary she has to demonstrate a very high level of mand: Requesting information. This is a skill you don’t see until around age 2 in humans. Before that, mands are usually for concrete things: mama/dada (caregiver/attention), eat/baba/crackers (food/drink), etc. Following these stages of concrete requests is the infamous “why?” phase that anyone who has spent extended periods of time with young children knows well.

In typing out this list I notice that none of it directly engages the usual atheist objections (proof, problem of evil) at the level in which the objections are typically framed - indeed none of them make any sense except through abandoning or demolishing that frame. But for point 1 [promise of forgiveness and repentance], which included a deep-seated nihilism from my teenage years that I never outgrew, I might not have broken out of it myself.

It's been a little over a year an a half since I was last at a church service in any meaningful way.

I've come to the realization that - or, rather, have had a much harder time ignoring this understanding I've had since 2014 that - these objections were never dealt with at face value and my continued active participation reinforcing the contrary belief was the only thing really holding them at bay.

Which leaves us with 1.

( Personal braindump shit )

But I don't think I could have gotten anywhere with any of that if I hadn't broken down a shitton of limiting beliefs in ways I believe, given the tools available at the time that would not have faced immediate and effective resistance thanks to those limiting beliefs, only this path through Orthodoxy could have done.

And for that I remain grateful.

More or less joyful noise: Helion Prime - The Forbidden Zone

Christine Lemmer-Webber explains what a "blockchain" is - or, perhaps, what she thinks is the sine qua non in the middle of that "roguelike"-like murky cluster of concepts implied by the overall usage of that word. (Which, I suppose is the most we can ever really expect as an answer to any question of "what" "something" "is".)

Blockchains are not magic pixie dust, putting something on a blockchain does not make it work better or more decentralized... indeed, what a blockchain really does is converging (or re-centralizing) a machine from a decentralized set of computers. And it always does so with some cost, some set of overhead... but what those costs and overhead are varies depending on what the configuration decisions are. Those decisions should always stem from some careful thinking about what those trust and integrity needs are... one of the more frustrating things about blockchains being a technology of great hype and low understanding is that such care is much less common than it should be.

I feel like I understood this better before all this cryptocurrency discourse became a thing.

MMOs versus FOSS - tl;dr the entire way an MMO is structured means you can't do any hard anti-cheat and still have your game be FOSS

Adrian's post with discussion

My abridged comment:

the only alternative i can come up with that doesn't require the entire playsim to be server-side-only is to have a decentralized mmo (w/opt-in federation if there's to be any at all) where individual admins are strongly encouraged by both word and UX to actively vet players and run instances in a way that's conductive to ppl identifying with it as part of a community

Which raises the question: what sort of design features would encourage this?

Brainstorming some beneath the cut.

( Read more... )

I am aware that all of this offloads a lot of power and responsibility onto a server admin. Perhaps there's some way to distribute this authority in a communally-controlled server setup, but that is beyond the scope of this brainstorm.

Myth
Investors buy small enterprises and use their money to make those enterprises better at competing against their peers at doing what they do. These improved enterprises make more money by virtue of their superior product.

Reality
Investors use their money to buy up all the small enterprises in a particular area in order to monopolize it. Sometimes in order to do this they are forced to invest some money in improving these enterprises or, more typically, manufacturing whatever impressions of improvement are helpful at the moment in the quest to buy out more enterprises - or destroy whatever cannot be bought out. It is never good to improve anything too much, because that money could have been spent on more buyouts and any delay in the monopolization process is an unbearable risk.

Once the monopoly is secure, the investors are free to revert to pure rent-seeking behaviour. Everything falls apart as the entire industry and everything reliant on it is sucked dry and left to rot.

Myth
A civilization becomes decadent as its people become soft and unmanly. The Good Men violently resist but the temptations of degeneration become irresistible and the civilization eventually crumbles.

Reality
A civilization becomes decadent as its increased resources allow their most brutish, stupid and violent men to indulge in their delusions en masse. Eventually a population of such men gains critical mass and bully and murder their way to power; once on top, they set off a spiral of violent suppression, aggressive mismanagement and diplomatic catastrophe. They double down on their methods and philosophies each time something bad happens, trusting in their continued ability to reclaim the state monopoly on violence as proof that they are doing things right.

The civilization is eventually conquered by people who all but accidentally walk all over them, wondering at what had happened to this fabled mighty warrior-race of old.

Two points, M and F, are placed along the X axis.

A third point, G, is arbitrarily placed. The resulting triangle almost never has a right or obtuse angle, except in rare cases the corner occupied by G itself.

This setup is filtered through a representation that only shows points along the X axis, discarding all other data.

For any unequal length of GM and GF, given any non-zero value for G.y:

GM will be longer than the distance from G.x to M.x.
GF will be longer than the distance from G.x to F.x.
The proportion between GM and GF will be closer to 1 than will the proportion of the distance from G.x to M.x versus G.x to F.x.

Example:( Read more... )

One consequence is that, for any given G, the relative difference between GM and GF is always going to be exaggerated when viewed through the flattened representation. Where G.y is much greater than MF, GM and GF may be different by a rounding error while the flat representation shows an enormous bias one way or the other.

There's actually a bunch of stuff (mostly in 2013 and some creative writing things) I'm okay with republicizing but it's easier to just do those on demand.

Fired: Ghibli Narnia movie

Wired: Ghibli Midworld movie

Inspired:

( Imagine 50 Shades. Now imagine having taken Twilight's core concepts and run in exactly the opposite direction. )

The Iron Prison (also Black Iron Prison, Cold Iron Prison) is a self-perpetuating complex of institutions, sentiments and associations that constantly ensnares our minds and preserves them in a state of unending fear, anger and violence.

It is the duty of every person to do what is in their power to tear down the bars of their own Iron Prison and, whenever they become aware that they may be doing so, to stop acting as a warden of that Prison to others. This duty may override utilitarian concerns, especially if those utilitarian concerns themselves constitute a call to feed the Prison.

Any institution or doctrine, however originally good or well-intended, can be incorporated into the Iron Prison. It may sometimes be necessary to cut oneself off from an institution, no matter how good its works or its origins, when it has been inextricably absorbed into the Iron Prison's works such that the institution's agendas cannot be furthered without also furthering that of the Prison; anything of value and uncorrupted may and ought to be carefully salvaged.

While the Prison itself seeks to force and flatten all personality into fungible lifeless copies of its own image, its actual effect on people - or rather its circumstantial ability to affect people - is unique to every person. One person may be forced, on pain of becoming one with the Prison, to abandon an entire institution that another can work within and adequately resist the corruption of all their life.

Destruction is never the Prison's goal, even if it is a necessary and obvious everyday consequence. It always seeks to preserve, to protect, to put everything into its right place under its control. To conserve.

There is no possibility of an ich/du relationship within the parameters of the Iron Prison. In its ideal form all exchanges must either be forced, or transactional and backed by force.

The Iron Prison is fundamentally an institutional reality. If every person were to disappear from the earth, the Iron Prison would have no existence whatsoever, no matter how dire the material consequences it leaves behind. The material world and the persons formed in it are fundamentally good.

The Prison can thrive wherever there are people and rural traditional life provides no inherent protection (and indeed the isolation of such life can greatly exacerbate it). It is, however, far more difficult to break free of the Prison when more of your supply chains depend on it.

A paradox: the easiest way to let the Prison consume you is to be dependent on its products; the second easiest way to let the Prison consume you is to be consumed by your zeal not to be dependent on anyone else in order to protect yourself from the Prison.

[Decided to get a few thoughts down about certain key elements of my moral outlook. Figured no more would be more fitting than the diegetic anniversary of a work dear to my heart where someone is tempted with the offer to save many people's lives in exchange for directly enabling the Iron Prison at the cost of everything she believes in and loves.]

More or less joyful noise: Koethe Koethe - Obstacles

This thread got me thinking about that whole ~"men writing women"~ thing again, and in particular what sorts of things I would inevitably miss if I were to naïvely just write ~whoever~ and then append a feminine gender as an afterthought.

This was going to be a response to that thread but a quick look at the notes suggests that interacting would be a Bad Idea.

So the biggest problems that I can identify seem to be:

( Read more... )

Obviously I'm missing a lot here, and I'm intentionally ignoring any of that awful male-gaze "she breasted up the stairs boobily" sort of nonsense - my focus on this post is primarily on the specifics I'm most likely to miss with a "just write a character and remember to use she/her pronouns to refer to them" approach.

(As for women writing men, the only times I've ever felt that a woman author's rendition of a man character seemed a bit off has been in MLM slashfics where I simply cannot parse how two guys go from this kind of interaction to that kind, but it turns out that's just because I, personally, have no concept of enemies-to-lovers shipping without prior crying heartfelt repentance and I get this reaction regardless of gender (cf. a lot of mainstream media heterosexual interactions that do this and leave me baffled in more or less the same way).)

So there's the old controversy about AO3 floating around Tumblr and I don't feel like replying to any of those threads, so I'll put down my thoughts here.

The problem: OTW (the organization that runs AO3) is, for some good (or at least earnest, well-intentioned, good-in-principle) reasons that go to the very reasons for its founding, highly allergic to any moralistic censorship of any kind whatsoever.

Unfortunately, ( CW: references to (fictional) child sexual abuse, and other less severe but still nasty and misogynistic porn tropes. )

Anyway, yes I'm aware much better thinkers than me have spent a lot more time on this. But I'd still like to do this as a reminder to myself how AO3 (which I fully intend to continue using for the time being) got to this point in the first place.

Based on what I've written out, though, I think they can do better. And I think the times are changing in a way that eventually they will.

( probably of general application too. )

...and edited every OP in your blog to excise it.

I'll never be able to recover the OpenID credentials so that will have to stay unless I went back to delete every such comment. Which I don't hate that name quite enough to do just yet.

Deleted all the auto-generated Livejournal memes I found, plus a few posts that were just Too. Fucking. Cringe. even for "let's look back at how much worse a person I used to be" purposes.

Damn, we were so young and naïve about metadata and social network analysis back in the early oughts... when it was a nerdy toy instead of the mass mind control weapon it is now.

There's probably a lot more stuff in here that's at least as much worth deleting, but I'll do it when/if I see it.

Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money by Cory Doctorow

The actual historical reality, supported by history, archaeology and anthropology, is that governments created money by creating tax. The first "money" was the Babylonian ledgers that recorded how much of their crops farmers owed to the state and their creditors.

Money took a leap forward with imperial conquest: emperors solved the logistical problem of feeding and billeting their occupying soldiers by charging the occupied a tax that had to be paid for in coins stamped with the emperor's head.

They paid the soldiers in these coins, and demanded that their conquered populations somehow get the coins in order to pay their tax, with violent consequences if the tax wasn't paid. So the people sold food and other necessities to soldiers to get the coins.

Money, in other words, is how states provision themselves, and it derives its value from the fact that you have to pay your taxes in it. Governments spend money into existence by buying labor and goods from the public, and then tax it out of existence once a year. ...

When You Know by Tim Bray

OK, let me add one additional argument for why Bitcoin is not and can never be “real” money. You know what real money is? Money you can use to pay your taxes. The USA, in 2018, had about 140 million taxpayers. Suppose 10% of them wanted to use Bitcoin to pay their taxes. Let’s say the global Bitcoin network can process ten transactions per second (it can’t, it’s slower than that). By my arithmetic, at 10/second it would take the whole network, running flat out, not doing anything else, over five months to process those payments and refunds. This is just Federal Income Tax.

I should keep this in mind for any further worldbuilding stuff. Sure beats uncritically rehashing barter mechanics and GP...

I know this

If life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

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Freedoom fork rebranding project
American post-Christian heroic dualism
The notwithstanding clause is actually a good idea in principle; it just needs one little safeguard
(no subject)
The utility machine
In the beginning was the word.
Nave[l] gazing, i guess
Blockchains
Thinking about FOSS-in-spirit MMO design
The standard narrative of capitalism
The standard narrative of the decline of civilization
This is a post about gender
All public entries from before 2014 have been locked.
More ideas that will never happen: Ghibli adaptation of Twilight
The Iron Prison
Writing women characters without having ever been a woman
Hypothetical AO3 CP ban spitballing
Quick tip guide for surviving the final boss fight in Life Is Strange
No, YOU just went and string-searched for an old username...
On why money is tax.

Page generated May 19th, 2025 14:18

Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

From the soapbox

Freedoom fork rebranding project

American post-Christian heroic dualism

The notwithstanding clause is actually a good idea in principle; it just needs one little safeguard

(no subject)

The utility machine

In the beginning was the word.

Nave[l] gazing, i guess

Blockchains

Thinking about FOSS-in-spirit MMO design

The standard narrative of capitalism

The standard narrative of the decline of civilization

This is a post about gender

All public entries from before 2014 have been locked.

More ideas that will never happen: Ghibli adaptation of Twilight

The Iron Prison

Writing women characters without having ever been a woman

Hypothetical AO3 CP ban spitballing

Quick tip guide for surviving the final boss fight in Life Is Strange

No, YOU just went and string-searched for an old username...

On why money is tax.