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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

On the one hand: the nature of the power dynamic between the parties involved, which may involve hypothetical parties in the future in the event of needing to punish or reward someone for something.

On the other: the formal analogy of how the particular transaction had been structured.

So many of our seemingly intractable dilemmas in our ethics and seemingly heaven-mandated offenses to all natural sense of propriety and justice and compassion explode, evaporate and dematerialize when we allow ourselves to prioritize the former over the latter.

That our law enshrines the latter is proof of its depravity.

For indeed, when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were troubled on every side. Outside were conflicts, inside were fears.

Nevertheless God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the consolation with which he was comforted in you, when he told us of your earnest desire, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more.

I know I've made comments like this (not all of them on this blog) about a few games already, so to deal with that:

1. the Mass Effect series was far, far more explicit with this. I kinda feel it's almost less effective for it, though it still remains a baseline for me as a videogame that can be read as an allegory for Christ.
   
2. what I'm seeing in LiS completely blows what I've seen in Doom out of the water.
   
3. there are zillions of games out there that go "descend into underworld, defeat its ruler, save the world, emerge victorious" and that without a lot of other Christ-pointing imagery is generally not really worth spending a huge amount of energy over.

For contrast, here are a few games where I don't read this kind of allegory, which I enjoy or could reasonably be expected to enjoy:

• Anything in the Quake series
  
• Half-Life
  
• Diablo, to the point of actively refuting any such reading
  
• Jill of the Jungle, Crystal Caves, classic Duke Nukem, really any of the old golden-age shareware platformers
  
• Cave Story
  
• Final Fantasy 6
  
• LiS: Before The Storm, if I were to understand it as a work on its own independent of LiS, focussing only on Chloe and Rachel's relationship and Max as just a background character
  
• Freedoom
  
• Doom or Freedoom with Hideous Destructor (in retrospect I'm a bit surprised how I'd decided to specifically reject this reading by making a perverted version of it part of the big bad's villain speech)
  
• Any of the new Doom games from 2016 onwards (there is still some to the extent they resemble the original Doom 1 and 2, but all the other stuff tends to water it down greatly)
  
• The Baldur's Gate series (which may have distinctly Christian or post-Christian themes of redemption and sacrifice, but no allegorical reading easily presents itself)
  
• Tell Me Why, at least what little I've seen of it. The twins are too equal and symmetrical in their relationship in a way Max and Chloe are not.

A great deal of "but what about", "but she doesn't", "Harold, they're lesbians" can be answered fairly simply that I'm not even beginning to aim for a perfect 1:1 here.

( the spoilers begin here )
~

While compiling this list someone on Facebook shared a meme attributing to C.S. Lewis: Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good. Anyone who's read how Lewis uses the word "unselfish" in The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters is on alert at this point, especially upon considering the prospect of knowing someone else's highest good.

This is inspiring for me as I write this, but not likely in the way the meme-maker intended. Instead I'm just reminded of all the unselfishness described in those books and why the evil organization in the last Space Trilogy book is called "NICE" and what I wrote here:

The photo is the Ring. That, and not Max's time travel power on its own, is the Ring's true temptation: to make things right again, for everyone, for the world. Even if it means betraying your best friend and consigning her to a miserable death, angry and alone - and worse: turning everything that would have redeemed her soul into something not demonstrably better than "it was all a dream". All to maintain the power structures of the status quo, albeit bringing a few of its chaotic aspects to "justice".

The irony is, of course, that I myself was never able to accept the Christian faith until I gave myself permission to be a little selfish about my own salvation, whereupon everything began to make sense.

I've made snide remarks in the past about what I've described as the worst rationale for sacrificing Arcadia Bay: the insistence that all of my work, what I did as the player, have meaning. I still think it's a bad rationale, and best to downplay in light of so much better; and yet there's the echo of salvation even in that.

(Intro post here)

For reference, here is a list of the photos used for the focuses, in the order taken:
( Cut starts here for obvious spoiler reasons )


Conclusion

An interpretation of the focus jumps as creating independently existing parallel universes results in a great deal of fridge existential horror, a great deal of regular existential horror, immense and exponential cosmic fragmentation and fractal growth, and an ever expanding array of new systems that we would have to suppose to be there for no reason except to provide explanations for the ways in which the alternate timelines behave - or more to the point, are never observed to behave - despite the total lack of empirical support for any such systems existing.

All this, when a model of a single changing timeline can account for all observations with a tiny, elegant subset of the systems the parallel universe theory would have us conjecture.

Fired: There Are Nine Planets

Mired: Pluto Is Not A Planet because we all must stick with this arbitrary definition

Inspired: There Are More Planets In The System, Horatio, Than Are Dreamt Of In Your Philosophies

https://astronomy.com/magazine/2018/05/an-organically-grown-planet-definition

Conversely, scientific definitions are almost never and should never be handed down authoritarian-style from a central voting body, particularly when scientists of different disciplines have different uses for the same word. The artificial authority behind the few voted definitions in existence, such as the IAU’s planet definition, should be viewed with skepticism and even dismissal.

[... i'd be quoting the whole piece if i didn't stop ...]

That definitions arise through professional and common usage are one blow against the legitimacy of the IAU’s definitional vote. Another blow arises from the fact that scientists of one discipline should not presume to define words for another. An illustration stems from considering the word metal. Astronomers use it to describe elements in stars heavier than helium. metallurgists use the word in the more common way, yet astronomers and metallurgists don’t fight over the definition — each user community knows what they mean when they use the word metal. What would happen if the metallurgical community declared an official definition of metal and then publicly scorned astronomers for using a different definition, saying, “I wish they would just get over it”?

Just as different definitions of metal serve different communities, we, as planetary scientists, find it useful to define a planet as a substellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and has enough gravitation to be round due to hydrostatic equilibrium, regardless of its orbital parameters. This is the definition we presented at the 2017 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Indeed, planetary scientists already use and teach such a geophysical definition of planet to promote a useful mental schema about the round and non-round worlds we study: At least 119 peer-reviewed papers in professional, scientific journals implicitly use this definition when they refer to round worlds (including moons) as planets. The publication history for these papers spans decades, hailing from both before and after the 2006 IAU vote. This overwhelming precedent cements the geophysical definition’s legitimacy in professional planetary science.

[...]

This new schema for planet — properly defined by expert planetary scientists — will powerfully work itself out in grade school classrooms. Rather than teaching students the names of all the planets, teachers should emphasize the types and subtypes of planets and how the solar system is naturally organized outward from the Sun, using a handful of planets as examples. This is analogous to learning the organization of the periodic table of the elements without having to memorize all or even most of the 100+ names.

Along with this teaching strategy, scientists, educators, and students should ignore illegitimate scientific definitions that arise via voting, such as the IAU’s planet definition. Instead, they should adopt definitions that arise naturally through usage by experts in the field, which reflect and promote a useful mental schema about the natural world and a more accurate picture of how science operates.