Even though I wanna abolish copyright and am in favor of commons culture and shared-world story-telling and open games, I have an appreciation for when pirated things are “clearly pirated”, when they aren’t being presented as the official thing. Like a shoddily xeroxed version of a game text, or a clearly home-burnt CD or mixtape, or a scanlation/fansub community clearly marking their stuff as “fan made”.
I think pirated stuff is good, but it still rubs me the wrong way when pirated DVDs are presented as if they were official released ones, or when people spread myths about “abandonware” or “No Copyright Intended”.
It’s wrong that Coca-Cola has a schtick of keeping their recipe secret, or even if it were public, keep a monopoly on production through some sorta patent or copyright or whatever (not that there could be a law that would cover beverages from the 19th century). Everyone should be able to brew and sell it. Also it’s kinda gross to drink something that is “secret”.
But.
I conversely don’t think it would right if anyone could sell any brown liquid and call it “Official Coca-Cola™︎︎”.
It’s just like Debian. Everyone can sell Debian. But not everyone can rightfully claim they are speaking for SPI or take donations for SPI.
I really appreciate the scanlation community for (for the most part) keeping it really clear that their releases are not “official” ones.
This is such a weird nuance to have a hang up against, especially since one thing I appreciate even more are games where you don’t have to do that because they truly are a commons resource, like the 5e creative commons SRD or free software video games like Wesnoth, and how I wouldn’t mind it if it became legally recognized that the D&D name has gotten kleenexed. Same goes for Magic cards, how most people think obvious proxies are OK but not counterfeit cards.
It’s hard to put your finger on, but if you think about it this way it becomes obvious: It’s one thing to stand up to Hasbro and Warner and Disney, and quite another to scam your fellow peers.
If it’s such a nuance and such a specific small li’l point it’s weird that I care about it but I do. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, it’s just the smallest of pet peeves, and when I argue for it I can tend to get misread as making a mountain out of this li’l molehill.
I have always super hated the term “magical realism” when-and-only-when it comes along with disparagement of other fantasy genres. Here in Sweden there’s, among literature critics, such unawareness and disparagement of fantasy that it’s mindboggling to me that they then drop their jaws with amazement at something like Gabriel García Márquez or Knut Hamsun.
Sure, I think the argument “once you’re writing in a genre or vein or idiom you’ve compromised your originality” is a reasonable one but fantastic elements like magic, space, super powers or time travel should not be enough to disqualify something on the grounds of being mere “genre”. A relationship drama doesn’t become less interesting because the characters can laminate the stasis or distim the doshes or cast hexes and spells. One li’l ghost shouldn’t send a piece of literature straight to the trash can. Frankly it makes it even more interesting.
One of the big appeals of books to me is to get to think what hasn’t been thunk before and explore modes of being that are beyond.
Nebulos adds:
I think western society has a pathological obsession with “realism”, which is the root cause of this. As soon as you deviate from “reality” we simply can’t consider anything else about your book because it’s not real anymore. Mother fuckers, we’re all just making stuff up, none of this is real lmao.
Alltid när jag pratar om hur mycket jag hatar laptops så kommer nån dragandes med “men jag har extern skärm och tangentbord så den är precis lika bra som en vanlig dator bortsett från att disken är mindre och den är svårare att laga” ja jo men vad tusan har det att göra med att jag hatar laptops formfaktor!
Säger bara det redan nu innan vi ens kommer in på vad problemen är att det svaret kommer jag inte ge två lingon för!
Jag hatar att tangentbordet är längst in så att det blir som ett handledsstöd framför, är jättejobbigt att skriva så. Får ont i handlederna.
Önskar dom såg ut såhär istället:
Är också kasst att tangentborden är så dåliga. Får ont i fingrarna och handlederna.
Hela idén att tangentbordet sitter ihop med skärmen är också dålig. Funkar väl på ett flygplan i värsta fall men inget jag vill ha till vardags hemma. Att man ska sitta och uggla och stirra neråt. Skulle behöva helt andra glasögon.
Jag hatar också trackball, touchpad, mus, IBM-suddgummi och sånt. Tycker om att rita och måla direkt på skärmen. För att göra bilder är laptops helt värdelösa.
Laptops går inte att använda i sängen heller (utan att paja nacken iaf). Jag var sjuk i tre år, enda fönstret mot världen blev tabletter. Ligga & läsa som om jag höll en bok och är det nåt jag behöver svara på som är kort så kan jag göra det med OSK, ska jag skriva längre prosa så kopplar jag in mitt Atreus.
Programmering! Funkar också bäst i sängen. Innan tabletter så brukade jag vara tvungen att skriva ner dom viktigaste problemen och ha ett kollegieblock och blyertspenna och kladda loss tankegångarna liggandes i säng eller soffa. Funkade när det gällde att hitta på egna API och algos (även om min chef fick fråga “lovar du att du jobbar nu?” när jag låg & blundade & klurade i kontorets röda soffa) men inte speciellt bra när det gällde gå igenom andras kod eller lära sig API:er. Pappersböcker hade vi iofs så jag läste dom.
Men med tabletter så kan jag ha hela koden framför mig och jag kan greppa och patcha så hjärtat sjunger. För programmering av andras grejer använder jag sällan Atreus; jag har så många hack i min Emacs att det nästan är lättare med OSK (jag kan trycka fingret direkt i koden och sen på W för att få mer parenteser, gr för att få färre, skrulla genom att dra osv). Kopplade in Atreusen när det var Advent of Code; den är värd när jag ska generera stora textmassor. Brukar inte göra det bara för små buggfixar.
Och nu när jag är friskare (hoppas jag kan få vara det ett tag nu 🤞🏻🙏🏻🤞🏻🙏🏻🧎🏻♀️📿🤲🏻) så kan jag ha Atreusen på bordet som en skrivmaskin och sitta uppe. Varvat med mitt vanliga liggande arbetssätt. Inte för att jag är jättepepp på att hålla på med datagrejer, borde passa på att fixa allt som är trasigt hemma typ taklampan osv nu när jag kan vara uppe.
Dessutom hatar jag namnet “laptop”, det låter som nåt som ens make skamset erkänner att han fick på svensexan.
Jag hatar också gångjärn och gnissel och sedespelarbrickor och allt som kan få smulor och sprickor och gå av. Hatar flipphones och skjutfällbara mobiler också.
Men tabletter går ännu sämre att laga än laptops. Det tillstår jag. Dom har “inbyggt åldrande” också, att säkerhetsuppdateringar slutar komma så man måste köpa nytt nytt nytt. Operativsystemet suger också. Att Apple kan flukta på allt är sjukt. Jag älskar pennan men saknar MyPaint och Krita.
Hade först en desktop i många många år. Sen började jag med laptops. Gud vilket misstag, dom gick sönder hela tiden så jag gick igenom flera stycke innan jag insåg att jag behövde byta tillbaka till desktops.
Jag tycker svenska hemsidor är ännu sämre på GDPR-klickandet.
Amerikanska hemsidor har oftast en popup-labyrint av länkar innan man kan säga “reject all”, ibland måste man gå till “purposes” först osv. Svinjobbigt.
Men på svenska är det ännu pilligare för det står bara typ “hej vi använder kakor kul va” och så finns det en enda knapp “acceptera” och för att säga nej så är det typ värsta inställningssidan man måste hitta och sen klicka ur och sen trycka på “ja jag accepterar”. Vilket alltid känns lite skavigt för tänk om jag missar nåt? En “reject all” eller “minimala cookies” eller åtminstone “save settings” är jag ju van vid. När det bara finns “acceptera” är det rätt kusligt.
Och jag har sagt det förr men för många av dom här hemsidorna känner jag bara varför har dom ens dom här jävla spårkexen från början?
En reklamdriven sida typ Aftonbladet eller Facebook, där kan jag förstå att dom frossar i spårkakor för deras affärsmodell är att sälja din blick, din tid, och rikta det säljandet till annonsörer genom att dom har spårat upp exakt vad vi läsare tänker och vilka vi är.
Men en butik? Jag går in på en webbutik för att jag vill handla hos dom. Att dom då vill spåra mig för att kunna annonsera på andra sidor (“hej vi såg att du var på vippen att köpa en kaffebryggare, kolla på dom igen snälla snälla snälla”) är bara onödig girighet som skapar en skavigare shoppingupplevelse från första början. Ni skulle kunna göra er shoppinghemsida så mycket aptitligare och fräschare om ni inte hade kaksmeten över allt! Skulle inte det vara värt att ge upp lite annonskontroll för?
Och en offentlig verksamhet typ sjukvård osv där är det ännu obegripligare för dom har inte reklam öht.
Our D&D campaign has been on hiatus for two months now but when we last left off, we were 64 sessions deep into Arden Vul (and 254 #boatmode sessions into the Crowded Sea era) after I-lost-count-but-probably-close-to-two-hundred sessions elsewhere in the same world.
My take on Arden Vul is that “the content” itself (the locations, the factions, the items, the creatures) isn’t that good, and there’s some difficult themes (like slave labor). The design is what’s good, great even. Running it has been the best D&D experience of my life.
I’ve played other “big campaigns” before, like a mashup of Veins of the Earth and Ruins of the Grendelroot that could be never ending since there’s so much generative stuff, but what makes Arden Vul different is that it’s so interconnected. It’s not like The Ocarina of Time, subworlds sharply separated. It’s one big sponge where it all hooks up, not just with passages but with actual reasons pulling you across them.
Y’all know about the “three tiers of truth”:
Arden Vul is heavy on the prepped facts which is cumbersome but enables so much interconnectivity. As just one example (out of dozens of such examples per session), someone’s shoe is missing in one room and that shoe then actually is somewhere else in this ginormous dungeon. There are books and rings and… ugh, I shouldn’t’ve mentioned the rings because that’s a problem here. This book puts the awesomest most mindblowing stuff in the hands of the most pushover, easy-to-kill villains. Again, the setup and overall construction and sheer tier-one–ness is what makes this so awesome, not the content itself.
It’s clear that a lot of the stuff is autogenerated or copy-pasted, for example there are pre-rolled hitpoints and stats for monster groups and we see the same stats over and over again.
Here is another review, from Shoggoth Dragged In:
everything is interconnected, and the interesting stuff isn’t gated behind being deep in the dungeon. […] You can find something interesting in Arden Vul and just start working away at it, unlike some dungeons where you can’t really make progress beyond a certain point without being high level.”
This is absolutely true! I didn’t think of that. It gives you interesting stuff throughout the entire thing (the valley that the dungeon is in has hooks also). You’re immediately an acting force upon the world in a level-appropriate way, you’re not just walking through halls of orcs and nothingness. I wrote above that the content is kinda meh but compared to many other megas where the first few levels are beyond meh in their boringness, this is a sparkling gem!
Descriptions tend to be long and wordy, and the PDF isn’t hyperlinked, which makes skimming through things at the table a little tricky at times.
Yeah. It’d been OK since I used an app to create hyperlinks (not all thousand pages in advance, just hyperlinking as we went and the nearest areas where we were). I was making bidirectional links between the map and the text, which are in separate files. The problem with that is that if this iPad breaks I’d be out of luck since the app is proprietary and there’s no back-up of cross-file links.
They’ve played 24 sessions, so a little over a third of what we’ve done at 64 in terms of session count.
As far as map coverage goes, we’ve done less than 10% of the whole thing while Shoggoth Dragged In’s group has done, I dunno, a fourth or a fifth of what we’ve explored. Maybe they’re more thorough? We’ve also done a ton of things throughout Burdock Valley (renamed “Dabab Island” in our campaign) and the ruined city and the Broken Head.
We’ve also had a ton more deaths. Maybe they’re more careful, too?
We’ve pretty much exhausted level one, barely touched level two, done around half of level three (kicked out the hobbits and now there are geeba there instead, whom the party has allied with), explored most of level four (and they’ve defeated the Set cult and are now the new rules of the forum, with a lot of employees and mercenaries, having stopped the slave trade).
The players like to travel back to Gosterwick after every big haul to deposit their loot in the bank, level up, and spend a few days resting. They also favour short delves.
This could be it! Our group goes to Gosterwick way more seldom.
He also reveals his tech stack! They have an interesting set up (three monitors?) that seems more thorough than mine. I’ve been running off one iPad with Jitsi and Flexcil. Jitsi can handle XMPP bots so we have a dicebot there.
I used to be a complete luddite at the gaming table, all electronics banned, which got more and more cumbersome as the pile of location books and modules and spell books that were canon in our game grew and grew and grew. When pandemic hit and forced remote play it took me months to finally make the switch. But running this campaign digitally has in some ways been easier than our previous analog game. I get it that #boatmode is an overly ambitious, maximalist game. Looking forward to something simpler next time. Cthulhu Dark or something.
The treasure situation is not good.
Arden Vul is a world where copper pieces preciously do matter because getting them is what so many interactions are designed around, and simultaneously tediously don’t matter because each was stick is like five hundred gems anyway. “You manage to solve six puzzles and spend three days (three days diegetically. That’d be maybe thirty, forty minutes of table time) slogging through a dozen encounters of the exact same 3d2 skeletons type and you manage to find a secrer compartment containing a… copper torque. Worth 1d10 × 10 fels. 0.00002% of a was stick. And you have thirty was sticks. So… 🥳🤔❓”
Date of Expiration was better in that regard with the wire-based loot system.
A listener wrote in to Pauline Kael’s radio show (on KPFA) near the end of 1961 asking why her opinion on movies were inversely correlated to their popularity. She replied:
I try to direct you to films that, if you search them out, will give you something[…]. I try not to waste air time discussing obviously bad movies—popular though they may be; and I don’t discuss unpopular bad movies because you’re not going to see them anyway; and there wouldn’t be much point or sport in hitting people who are already down. I do think it’s important to take time on movies which are inflated by critical acclaim and which some of you might assume to be the film to see.
If a reviewer is a “recommendation helper” that helps me find stuff I like and avoid stuff I don’t like, if that’s the only criteria we’re looking at, the best reviewer of all time is the board game reviewer Tom Vasel. I have super different tastes than him but he is so clear on why he thinks the way he does, compares to other games etc, that I often get a bang-on-target feel for whether or not I would like the game, regardless of his own opinion. I watch other reviewers like SUSD and NPI and many, many more because I am interested in thoughts on games, but looking solely at the “does this review help me know whether or not I’ll love the game” criteria, most other reviewers are not good for me.
In the world of movies, I’ve never found any professional reviewer that’s even remotely helpful with that particular criteria. Like, my favorite film is Seven Times Lucky which was panned by critics and audiences. But it’s not as if my tastes are the complete opposite either, which would almost have been sorta helpful.
The “contrarian” critics like Kael and Ebert are certainly no help either, especially Ebert I found utterly useless when looking only as a “Will I like it” help. I’ve found that there’s just 100% random whether I’ll love a film he hates or the opposite. Just utter and total caprice. And, his reviews were too spoilerific to be read before I see the movie anyway. 🤷🏻♀️
But that’s not why I read them. I read them because what they have to say about the movies is interesting anyway, and how they tie their reviews into the larger cultural context of the era the review was written. Critics are more than just recommendation engines; they are analysis, they’re reflection, they’re society’s dialogue with the movie, our way to talk back and to try to understand what’s there and what’s not there. I’m not trying to elevate them beyond you and me, I’m not saying “them, the legendary critics”, I’m saying critics like us, like all viewers.
Usenet was sorta like Reddit or other threaded forum sites but decentralized.
The word for “sub”, “forum”, “community” on Usenet was called a “newsgroup” or just a “group”.
Each server decided which group it should carry. News servers were mostly ran by ISPs. Back then, ISPs would have email service, you might get a home page on the web, and you’d get Usenet access via one server.
You could only post to groups that your own server carried.
Let’s say there’s a group about knitting (free.uk.knitting
perhaps) and it’s carried by 40 servers. That means each of those servers would have to copy over every single post every single day. Don’t worry, they didn’t have to poll, it was UUCP which is push based just like Fedi is today, but still! Holy redundancy, Batman!
That collapsed once people were posting binaries, both because they couldn’t handle transfering gigs of binaries across thousands of hosts (already back in 1983 (yes, that’s 83, not 93) there were over 500 servers) and because they didn’t want legal responsibility for those binaries.
Usenet was the anti-BitTorrent. BitTorrent is efficiently letting people share small parts and pieces of binaries and piece them together, it’s the opposite of redundancy. Usenet, on the other hand, was redundancy city. And flaky as all heck redundancy with a lot of posts missing and threads being read out of order and laggily and buggily and it just didn’t work very well. (And the comparison to Reddit unfortunately also extends to the toxicity on a social level.)
A lot of Fedi’s struggles both early on and today come from this idea that every server should carry every post, which just doesn’t work. That’s also why hashtags on Fedi aren’t a good idea.
It doesn’t work technically and it’s inhuman socially. Ebba Grön has a song about it, “Mental Istid” which means “Mental Ice Age”. It’s all about one long algorithmic timeline where you can’t cry, you can’t sob, nothing matters, everything is homogenous, our lives are rapidly flittering past on status updates. That is what Twitter is. That is where the “Usenet-glob” model of Mastodon was heading.
The Fediverse should not try to be like Usenet. It should be like email. FEP-1b12 is more akin to mailing lists (and there can be separate lists on the same topic) whereas hashtags try to be Usenet groups or IRC channels and depend on an UUCP redundancy that just isn’t scalable or healthy.
A mailing list that’s mirrored across a couple of servers to distribute load isn’t a wholly bad thing. I’m not trying to completly write off all of UUCP and NNTP, there were historical reasons why it made sense given the bandwith limitations of the time.
But my main point is that “everyone needs to carry everything” is inherently a broken model. “The whole known network” tab on Mastodon is not your friend.
Jag skrev en kommentar på Simons recension av dom här serierna och jag klistrar in den här också. + fixar till några saker som blev fel (jag kan ju inte redigera där).
Om det skulle visa sig att hon är inne på några antisemitiska yranden (eller antivaxx-yranden) kommer jag ta superavstånd direkt.
Men som en foss-idiot som jag, som inte litar på Facebook, Amazon, Google osv så var Lovely People givande och rolig. Betydligt roligare än vad arc 2 av SSSS vad.
Jag har ofta jättesvårt för att förklara varför dom här apparna är dåliga. Folk fattar bara inte, hur jag än försöker. “Det är ju bara en app.”
Sundberg gör i alla fall ett försök. Ett, för mig som redan omvänd, ganska roligt, lättläst och underhållande försök och hon tecknar ju otroligt bra, även när SSSS arc 2 var som tråkigast. Jag tyckte mycket om Lovely People. Men till syvende om serien inte lyckas övertala en app believer som dig så har den ju inte lyckats 💔
Meandering Line var även den bättre än andra halvan av SSSS (alltså första halvan av SSSS, dvs böckerna du bar, är ju jättebra!). Men jag tyckte inte den var lika bra som Lovely People.
Meandering Line var väldig decompressed och den gör mig mer sugen på ett samtal med Sundberg—det är verkligen “här har vi någon som har funderar i ensamhet, och verkar ha förbisett en del saker som det skulle vara spännande att höra vad hon skulle tycka om”. Ex vis existensialismen—ibland kan Camus eller Sartre vara en lisa för nihilistiska hjärtan. Eller zen. Att leva i världen fullt ut ♥︎ utan att fästa sig vid världens damm. (Jag är ju själv väldigt inne på ett panteistiskt perspektiv, men där har hon ju värmedöden som motargument—för eller senare dör ju allt. Mitt eget motargument mot det är att hon verkar värdesätta framtida tid mer än förfluten tid, men så tänker inte riktigt jag. Det förflutna är precis lika verkligt/overkligt som framtiden, iaf jämfört med nuet.) Eller andra teismer. Hon kanske skulle ha gillat islam, hinduismen, judendomen. Det jag menar är att alternativen blir moderns tro vs den polära motsatsen till moderns tro. Det finns ju andra sätt att tänka 🤷🏻♀️
Att 30000 svenska myndigheter och företag har gått på den här jävla “Kivra” bluffen borde inte förvåna mig. Men det svider ändå. Det här har inget med “post” att göra. Det är en hemsida där folk kan ladda upp grejer. Går att slänga ihop på fem minuter. Snoka på grejerna som folk laddar upp (eller “skickar” som det så bluffmässigt heter) kan dom också göra.
Skicka över normal jävla epost istället för sån här bluffgegga. Det här är det värsta på hela internet. Jag hatar Kivra.🤬 Svenska “internet” är ett pinsamt lol. “Svolternet” ett välförtjänt öknamn på det.
Svenska myndigheter är så helvetes satans lättlurade och blåsta så fort det kommer till data. Om dom går på saker som “bank-id” och “Kivra”. Smeta lite skeumorfism på pitchen så hugger dom det direkt. Speciellt när det inte är sant. “Det är som post”, “det är som legitimation”. Nej det är det inte. Kivra har inget med normala brevlådor att göra. Det är mer som om nån skulle i en geggig gammal omkullvält lastbil ute bakom skogen vid tippen inrätta ett “postkontor” och säga “kom hit så ska ni få era räkningar 🤤 ja kom in bara gå ända in i mörkret här heh heh heh det är preciiis som att kolla brevlådan hemma. Kuvert nej nej det behövs ju inte hääär.” Om du köper en crescent och jag en monark så kan vi cykla på samma vägar. Och om jag har en plåtbrevlåda och du en röd plastbrevlåda kan vi skicka brev till varandra. Och om du har gmail och jag har postfix kan vi maila varandra. Med Kivra finns inget sånt. Det enda som finns är en äcklig gegga gjord för att blåsa folk. En scam är vad det är och dom som har gjort det borde sitta i fängelse tillsammans med alla myndigheter och företag som laddar up sina kvitton och fakturor dit och inbillar sig att dom “skickar” nåt.
Kivra är post lika lite som en unges sandkakor i lådan är gormetmat. Fy satan.
Ja, jag gillar inte vanlig post heller och att Kivra-asen försöker använda grönvaskande och klimathotet för att motivera sitt snuskande är helt vidrigt. Använd normal email, ska det vara så svårt?!?!!?!!!!!!!!!!🤬 Satans jävla slabbhemsida.
En anonym läsare skrev in:
Kivra försöker nu få svenska myndigheter att betala för kalaset, motsvarande frimärkeskostnad eller ngt. Har inte de exakta summorna men totalsumman var hög. Använd först, gratis, åhå nej nu måste ni betala nu när alla förväntar att ni erbjuder det
Men det fatt man ju! Vad fan!
Gud om jag bara varit skamlös nog att göra vad Kivra hade mage att göra. Skapa en fucking jävla silotank och kalla det för “post”. Fängelse ska dom ha!
Kivra är en sån där grej som är otroligt svårt att förklara för folk varför det skulle vara så fel. “App som app” tänker dom.
Tydligen är det såhär att i Danmark är det obligatoriskt att vara kund hos nåt av dom här jävla bluff-företagen. Man måste alltså dels ha ström & dator och sen räcker det inte med att köra sin egen postfix/dovecot som en normal mänska utan det är obligatoriskt att dregla ner sig med e-Boks–svett.
Här kan ni läsa mer om vilket helvete dom lever i.
Om dom blåbruna tönejävlarna som kravlat upp på Tidö-tronen här i Svedala skulle få för sig att komma dragandes med nåt liknande krav är det bara att säga men håll käften fixa era certar och skicka till port 587 som en normal människa. Myndigheter, ska det vara så jävla svårt för er att klicka på Eudora-ikonen på era Windows 95-datorer att ni inte ens vet vad en riktig digital brevlåda är och borde förbli snarare än den här nerkletade bluffsmörjan?!
Maybe it’s dumb to try to review a 40-year old book that has already had thousands of other readers & commenters weighing in but here we go! And I’m not talking about the contemporary Robert Anton Wilson classic by the same name that was published at around the same time.
Nope, the book I just read was Jim Sire’s The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog.
He is a Christian theist who lays out his own worldview and then does brief forays into other worldviews for contrast.
I love Christianity but it happens again and again that I get shocked by seeing it expressed as literal theism. You’d think I’d get used to it by now…
From the other worldviews he lays out, I’m into a whole bunch of them. Here are my faves:
That’s fine. He gets some things right and some things wrong. I’ve got to admire someone who starkly looks at all the options as opposed to never leaving the bubble.
The problem is the argument he uses, in a couple of different forms, for why you should choose Christian theism, which boils down to various forms of “he likes it better”, to “wouldn’t it be nice if…”
A sort of reverse Pascal’s wager, if you will. Instead of working based on what you fear might be true, he works off what he wishes was true. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an external, transcendent, personal force that occasionally leaves the Fortress of Solitude?
He also uses kinda flimsy means to declare the other worldviews inconsistent, one by one:
Naturalists, for example, declare the universe to be closed on the one hand, and yet most naturalists affirm that human beings can reorder it on the other hand. If my argument is correct, we have seen that for us to be able to shape or reorder our environment, we must be able to transcend our immediate environment. But since naturalism declares we cannot do this, naturalism is inconsistent and cannot be true, at least as it is normally formulated.
Ah, the good old equivocation fallacy!
The experiential layer on which we have what we colloquially refer to as “free will” is different from the cells-and-atoms layer where we don’t, but he conflates those layers.
Y’all know how I love playing games in the #blorb style you might guess I’d hate something like this, from Stealing Stories for the Devil:
If a PC is good at climbing, crawling, and getting through tight spots, the player might say there’s access to the office suite via the air ducts. But then the GM steps in with a complication: “Yes, but there’s no vent access from the ground level. They connect to the roof.” The players suggest a stairwell, fire escape, or access from a nearby building, and the GM adds in the security cameras, patrols, or other complications. In this way, the players and GM work together until they’ve created a detailed scenario, and an equally detailed plan, all at the same time.
I do and I don’t. Hate it, I mean.
I do in the sense that I’m not very eager to play or run this (also… it’s by MC 😐).
But I don’t because I think it’s good that non-blorby games fully take advantage of not having to be tied to the limitations of blorb. You give up the awesomeness of blorb and in return you hope for things like pick-up, zero prep, character-tailored play.
Tailoring play to character’s abilities is usually a bad idea, but in a heist scenario the upside is that you make all “roles” relevant.
That’s something a lot of “fudgy judges” out there miss out on by playing “almost blorby” games. You miss out on why blorb is so great but you don’t get anything in in return, just a compromised game, where stakes, integrity, and buy-in have all been ruined by your finger on the scale. Something like this, which seems to take the Dirty Dungeon concept further than other pick-up games like Spirit of the Century or Donjon, gets something in return by not having any aspirations of blorby integrity in the first place.
Now, my own preference if we were to play pick-up is to instead play a GM-less game like Microscope, Fiasco, Svart av kval, vit av lust, or Untold: Adventures Await. The main reason to even have a DM in the first place is to be able to play blorbily, with there being pre-existing, off-screen canon game state that a DM needs to keep secret.
The other day, Meguey wrote:
“All RPGs are descended from wargaming by virtue of D&D” is a trash argument. Full stop.
Seriously, I have a treehouse and some toy dinosaurs who will fight you on this.
Right, and we didn’t need a DM. The idea of a DM came, as far as I know, from games like Kriegspiel and Braunstein, and the reason to have a DM is because there is stuff that is both established as true, but is unknown to some or all of the players.
And to arbitrate rules but even there a DM isn’t necessary or even particularly helpful compared to the players being involved in finding consensus of how play procedures should work. And get on out of here with that “Free Kriegspiel”.
Luke Gearing generously posted some side-by-side comparisons of bullet points vs prose.
Here’s one example. He’s written:
1) Entrance Hall
This wide room, the floor hidden beneath a mouldering bearskin, is dominated by a huge portrait of the late Lord Howard von Deiter. He appears domineering and batrachian, seated in an indeterminate void. Beneath the stairs, hidden behind inconspicuous doors, are five sets of coats with matching shoes. One set is made of much finer material, and cut to the style of the distant cities. Two are child-sized.
- Entrance Hall - dominated by a portrait of the late Lord Howard von Deiter - domineering and batrachian.
- Five sets of various sized boots with matching coats.
- Highlight: one set nonlocal look and material.
There are many more examples on his blog, so go check it out for the full effect.
I was just thinking other day how I should mellow out in my strong preference for bullet points, that a mix is appropriate, i.e. conceding that sometimes prose can be better and that they easily mix (you can easily add longer prose to a bullet or add a bullet list in the middle of prose) so you can, at any point, get whatever’s the best for you.
But these examples push me further back into the bullet point camp. These are meant to illustrate how prose is better, but I’d much rather run the game from the bullet points. He’s like “look how much better the prose is” and I’m like wow, those bullet points are awesome!
Is there a word, phrase, or trope for when something makes the opposite point of what it intended to do?
The prose is great, I’m not slagging the guy as a writer, it’s just that as game material I prefer the bullet points.
Bullet points tend to make me (slightly) less mistake prone than the prose, they make me more eager to pick up and place the module in the game world, they make me wanna run the game, I get stoked! My attention is immediately drawn to the bullet point version of that. I’d make small edits, like “one set nonlocal look and material”—the word “set” is often used as a verb so that sentence becomes clearer with “one set has non-local material and style”, tiny things.
Where I to go read this like a book, over breakfast or in bed, the prose is fine, but bullets work way better for me for something I’d wanna actually run.
It’s great that he did this because we almost never get to see extended examples of how the exact same location would look like with bullets or with prose.
Giffengrabber keep sending me food for thought, it seems.
Most recently, he sent me this quote from user ‘ninkendo’ over on Orange Site:
Back when scarcity was a thing, the act of powering through with media you didn’t initially like was one of the primary ways of maturing your taste and learning to like new things.
Only consuming media which hooks you instantly is a good way to achieve the media equivalent of a sugar-only diet.
I don’t have an answer for this to be honest, it’s just an observation.
I agree that it can often be worthwhile getting into some things that might take a bit of an effort.
For non-fiction, How to Read a Book is still good. Even though it came out in 1972, it’s core message of reading & synthesizing is still relevant, even more relevant, in today’s hypertext world.
That book has a chapter on fiction, too, a good one, but nothing beats Comme un roman for ridding ourselves from the chore parts of fiction and cultivating a breezy love of reading for pleasure.
The part I disagree with ‘ninkendo’ about is the notion that scarcity helped here.
An analogy for an opposing argument would be that curating what media we engage with, from a rich selection, is like selecting fine and healthy ingredients for a meal, whereas in the age of scarcity, we had to eat what was served, even when that was junk, even when it was the intellectual equivalent of being trapped in the candy store.
When I first moved out from home, I was so desperate for information and parasocial company that I turned the TV on even when only shopping channels where on. Shows that were nothing but one long ad. That only lasted a few days, but that was hardly programming that was worthwhile and taste-maturing.
The other argument people often have in favor of how the old information scarcity system worked is shared experience. Everyone talked about the same TV shows, same records, same books to some extent. There’s a value in shared experiences but it’s also from an evolutionary standpoint kind of wack. If we’re all getting the same input we’ll be less likely to come up with cool new things. IDK. I’m not saying it wasn’t nifty, but I usually tuned out from the main TV shows like Fort Boyard or whatever junk they were showing in favor of digging into some comics or books.
We’re heading into an infocalypse where we’re about to drown in the sweet sorrow of fake machine-generated junk. Curating is going to be even more vital and even more difficult, and I agree with the Orange Site poster that choosing based on instant appeal and palatability is not going to be a good selection criteria.
For example, on YouTube I’ve blocked the “recommended videos” that appear in the sidebar and after the video. That was a stream of noise, garbage, and false balance. I need to find other, higher-quality ways to challenge my echo chamber.
This 80s Italian duck geneology isn’t canon according to me.
It’s neither OK that Elvira and Scrooge are siblings nor that they are Donald’s parents (kind of contradicts Scrooges early appearances in Barks). It’s even less OK that they are both those things. That book came out in Swedish in 86 (two years after its original Italian publication), I saw it and always wanted to read it, but when I did get a chance to a few years later, in the later eighties, I was super weirded out and not happy. (The Swedish book also contained two Lockman/Strobl stories and they were pretty good.)
The second Rosa tree, on the other hand, might be my canon.
Weirdest part there is that Gladstone isn’t more directly related to Scrooge, given how he’s often presented as a rival heir to Donald or at least someone Scrooge considers to be close family. According to this tree, Gladstone is Scrooge’s sister’s husband’s sister’s son. But OK. You love the ones you’re with, and Scrooge interacts with Gladstone more often than some of his other family members like Della.
I first saw the original version of this in the early nineties and was a lot happier with it than with the Rota version. Rosa always wanted to add Ludwig, but was disallowed to, which is why I prefer this second version. Ludwig is a great character. Him as Matilda’s husband is fine. Some trees put him as instead as a relative of Daisy, and I like that, as long as they are not otherwise related to the duck clan.
Daisy as a sister to Huey, Dewey and Louie’s dad, as per some European editorial office’s family trees, is definitely not OK. Remember, they killed their biological father (Holy Oedipus Quack, Batman! It wasn’t murder one; they pranked him with a firecracker that sent him to the hospital and he later died) before Donald adopted them. So either Daisy would resent them for that or she’d get over it and help Donald take care of them but she does neither, she’s just cool with them. I just don’t want her related to Gladstone or Donald, even as an in-law.
Rosa also didn’t wanna add Fethry but I’m glad he did. A hit and miss character but at least he’s part of the canon.
I’ve been seeing the Matrix bridge to IRC networks like Libera as an overall good thing. IRC has been dying and this bridge is, in some sense of the word, an IRC client, and it’s an IRC client that people can get behind. Don’t ask me why they’re so into it because I don’t like using it, but that’s the point of clients and protocols: you use a client you like, I use a client I like, it’s all kumbaya and good.
However, IRC is set up so that you can join channels / rooms about
topics and talk about topics there. It’s not set up so you can just go
in and take your pick of users all across the network and start a
convo with a rando. I know that /names
with channel and server
omitted is supposed to list all names, but that’s disabled on Libera.
Of course, there is /query
and /msg
, and that’s been great for
talking to friends.
But lately I’ve been getting a ton of creepy queries from complete rando strangers who seem to believe they’re on Tinder or something and I’ve been wondering what channel they find me in. They don’t seem to know who I am or to be familiar with this web page.
They never say who they are, just a bunch of hello. And if I ask questions, like how the heck they found me or who they are, it’s “Can’t we get to know each other first dear”. I don’t think so.
Today I found out where they are all coming from and why there’s no connection to a particular room, channel, or topic.
Turns out on Matrix has a user directory and people search for Sandra (not sure why they do that if they don’t know me) and they find my Libera account.
Now, it’s not like it’d be a rock solid situation if Matrix didn’t
exist. There’s no stopping someone from just going on Libera and
/whois
some random names, including mine. And I get plenty of
creepers on email already.
But it’s a bit weird that I try to stay off the main networks, I try to stick to smolnet, but because of bridges the larger networks are right at my own door anyway.
I don’t want to discourage readers of this homepage from writing in (I get so many good corrections, clarifications, suggestions, questions from y’all), and this @sandra:libera.chat Matrix address is one legitimate way to do that (although I prefer email even though I’m also on Libera, Tilde, OFTC, XMPP, and Fedi).
Update: The Libera bridge is down. @_oftc_sandra:matrix.org
still works.
Using that Matrix address isn’t gonna break anything on my end. It shows up like any other query in my Soju. I might not see it right away, because I’m not hanging out on IRC all day.
If any of the Matrix email bridges gets dusted off and end up working well, maybe even with encryption (I have TLS for the wire, and WKD and Autocrypt and an exported key for e2ee), that’d be even better since email is better than IRC.
In the end, Matrix is just a client, and I don’t wanna prevent people from using whatever client they’re comfy with.
Matrix users are often nervous on IRC, “is my client being annoying”—no, I’ve never had a problem. I wish your clients could read/parse our escape codes (like bold or italic) but it’s such a minor issue that I don’t even notice. I want IRC and e-mail to live, and if Matrix is one way for that to happen then that’s a good thing.
Like, I use Emacs to connect to IRC, e-mail, and XMPP. Is someone preferring to use Matrix to connect to IRC, e-mail, and XMPP really that much weirder?
Of course, the fear is that Matrix will embrace & extend those protocols and eventually drop support for them once everyone is on Matrix.
So to summarize: I’m not complaining about readers writing in. If you’re reading this we’re most likely good.
What I’m complaining about is scrubs who are just like “🤤🤤🤤 I wanna search for random girl names in this text box and chat them up”.
It’s half a year later, autumn of 2023.
Libera Chat shut down the bridge and writes:
We likewise continuously forwarded reports of spam originating from the Matrix network to varying success and also requested Matrix developers find a solution to avoid IRC users being listed in the Matrix network’s expansive user directory, which was causing some people to receive unwanted attention and problematic spam in private messages.
Me: “Skill challenges should die in a fire”
Me, three seconds later: “Hold on, Starforged is amazing!”
This game is so great. It’s basically the never-ending version of something like those old choose-your-own-adventure books like Citadel of Chaos.
The strength of skill challenges are the low-prep / pickup nature of them; create a textured description purely generatively. They’re the ultimate extension of the “wallpaper salience” #blorb principle.
The problem is that it’s at the expense of agency. It reduces the joy of exploring to a drab one-dimensional bingo. And the math is broken, too (that goes for 5e’s group checks also). It’s one of the reasons why Diaspora wasn’t that fun after a while.
Starforged mitigates the drawbacks (by weaving together several different “vows” (its name for skill challenges) at the same time, pulling in different directions across that starlit canvas), and leverages its strength (with a mythic / location crafter style generative world).
I love blorb so of course I miss all the tier one truths of a blorbier game (like Arden Vul which is the blorbiest and best game experience of all time). But I’m also loving Starforged. It reminds me of… well, the aforementioned Citadel of Chaos, sure, but also Caves of Qud with its mix of generative / oracular gameplay. Or something like Untold: Adventures Await (which I’d say is maybe a good intro game to try before jumping in to Starforged?). It also reminds me a li’l bit of Disco Elysium but with the safety valves I wish that game had. Although my Starforged game has already become snafubar. My imagination is problematic 🤦🏻♀️
So I had played like three seconds of Popeye on a home computer (guessing the C64) at a distant relative’s house and had two Game & Watches (Life Boat and a non-Nintendo space shooter, both of which I loved), but the first real video game I really played was Duck Tales.
Loved it, amazing game, kind of sad to start with one of the best games of all time since it was all downhill from there, but point of the story is that I play a couple of levels, get to Transylvania, start talking to Webby, and… I have no idea how to move forward. I was stuck on the same screen for an hour.
Because I didn’t know to press A to continue the dialogue.
I must’ve accidentally hit A without realizing it because I was stuck again the next time, a li’l bit shorter since that time I did figure it out.
That was winter of 90/91. Today, 32 years later I was playing OlliOlli World and first it took me a while to realize that once I’m done with making my character, I need to back out all the way using the B button (the actual making of the character was a li’l bit tricky, too; it says that A “selects” which I at first thought meant confirms that choice. “I don’t wanna confirm this dorky beanie, aren’t there any hijabs?”—and then, some select screens with sub-areas (like selecting your start runs for example) needed one more A to start selecting than the highlighting seemed to indicate, and throughout, “B” for backing out also means confirm).
Then after the first level the visual cues seem to indicate that A would restart the same boring push-five-times tutorial but nope. This time it’s A that’s moving forward. I remember that the original OlliOlli game, which I completed, also had misclick-prone UI with some unintuitive menu flows.
Conclusion: UX does matter in game dev. We want the game part to be challenging but we also want the systems around the game to lead us into that fun part of game.
Link’s Awakening DX was released on Switch (the version with depressing color scheme and the can’t-skip-dialog–bug for Pieces of Power and Guardian Acorns, and some other de-charm tweaks like how dialog changes and stone tablets are now that annoying owl) but comparing DX to the remake on the same device, it’s remarkable how much better all of the DX audio is (instrumentation is crisp and clear, compared to the more muddled sound on the Switch Remake, with “the dropping a toyshop down six flights of stairs” instrumentation of Animal Village a nadir of the latter) and how much faster and more fluid the DX controls are. And also shorter—albeit non-zero—loading times on DX.
The remake only lets you use stick to move, the DX version you can play with either stick or D-pad.
Ironically using the DX version with stick feels much nicer than the remake with a stick. The remake fixes the sqrt(2) issue where in the original, moving diagonally let’s you move 41% fasterthan normal. There’s also no diagonal animation. So small movements and adjustment feel fast and nice on DX whereas on the remake you’re a freight train that needs to get oriented and then get going.
That is primarily a visual illusion since, looking at your core box, it’s not that slow on the remake, it’s just that the visual jitter makes it feel like an ordeal.
Low numbers are bad, high are good.
It’s not bounded and can go negative (so far things have stayed between -20 to +20).
0 is spending the equivalent amount of time looking at a mono-colored (non-papered or -patterned) wall.
10 is perfect. An example 10 is the 1977 version of Star Wars.
So my 1 through 10 should match up pretty well with other reviewers who use 1–10, is the idea. But some things are just off the charts. For example, I’d rate Birth of a Nation in the negatives because it’s worse than nothingness.
Love in a Time of Low Expectations by Sahara Hotnights is my fave record of the last five years, when Hiss Spun by Chelsea Wolfe came out, although that album lives and dies by its best track, “Twin Fawn”, whereas Love in a Time of Low Expectations is all killer.
Sahara Hotnights have made quite a journey, it seems like, starting out in the nineties with the most perfect seventies raw rock, veering into a retro 50s dansband sound, and now here they are with a polished, soft, smooth post-punk sound, sort of like a rounder and cleaner Joy Division or Warpaint.
It sounds like nothing they’ve ever done before. I love it♥︎