shark vs the universe
Janaina Medeiros
Cosmic Funnies
almost home
Cosimo Galluzzi
#extradirty
Jules of Nature
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
will byers stan first human second
RMH
titsay
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Show & Tell
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Product Placement
$LAYYYTER
Game of Thrones Daily
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Sade Olutola
Love Begins
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@diiq
at this point setting your king arthur adaptation in the gritty real world of 5th century post-roman britain is homophobic. we all know what we're picturing when we say "king arthur"! put them in gothic plate armor, you fucking cowards!!
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Andrey Surnov evening traffic
more art by Andrey Surnov
Vince Locke is a friend of mine; so cool that DC finally allowed this to be finished and released!
"The Alpilles" and "Mont Gaussier", Yoann Crépin
Pierre Bourdieu once argued that the question of whether something is art isn't answered by the artist's intention or even the object itself
This is all good stuff, but I do think it's a little bit disingenuous to equate high fashion with all fashion. and while I agree that it's silly to do marxist critique of just the met gala and not other moments in fashion, a marxist critique of fashion is still fair game! The problem is that the met gala is, often, the only moment of fashion people see. Normal people are not seeing the red carpet at the Oscars, or runway shows, or the exhibition the gala is themed to match. The gala red carpet is their entire annual consumption of high fashion, and so it bears the brunt of all critique, deserved or not. (This is, in part, an "olivine and one or two feldspars" issue.) IMO the organizers could do a much better job making the gala serve not only fundraising but also the museum's mission. Use the attention of the red carpet not only to pull money, but to educate people about fashion, why it's important, where it came from, and how it relates to their lives not only the lives of the rich and famous.
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Give me less "being kind requires zero effort" and more "being kind is worth the effort it takes."
In my personal lexicon, zero-effort kindness is what I classify as "being polite." I only have to make the tiniest detour, or expend a tiny bit of effort, and someone's rails are greased. It's the distance between neutral and positive, and so is literally the smallest kindness. It's the bare minimum, so of course, do at least that much! but the result is merely a lowering of friction. When there's more gas in the tank, also consider the bigger kindnesses, the ones that either take effort to fight from actively negative back into positive, or from neutral to day-/year-/or life-altering.
I don't disagree with the observation that a lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe that game design is real (i.e., in the sense that they believe any GM should be able to achieve any experience of play using any system, and refuse to recognise that rules are opinionated about what sort of games they want to produce), but I feel like putting that at the forefront is confusing the symptom for the disease. A lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe game design is real because they don't believe that games are real.
I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.
The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.
And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.
Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.
(Note that, while I've identified Hasbro's deceptive marketing as the ultimate source of this culture of play, indie RPGs are hardly innocent of perpetuating it. You only need cast a critical eye on the "Rule Zero" sections of many popular indie games to notice that their authors are all in on the idea that games aren't real!)
#ohhhh this is really good analysis #also i think large scale super professional actual play podcasts n shit are a big part of this #cuz imo that was a Lot of peoples main engagement with ttrpgs back in the day (about a decade ago) #and a lot of people thats still their Main TTRPG Experience #and like. those tend to be even less Game Like than the average dnd campaign #like a lot of that shit is in fact. scripted. and made to be more cinematic for the audience etc (via @st4rshiptr00per)
Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.
(The weird part is that I get the impression that some of them don't even know it. Sometimes it seems like Brennan Lee Mulligan genuinely doesn't realise that best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons as a kind of performance art for a paying audience are very different from best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons for your three buddies in the GM's dining room.)
@hayeseveryone replied:
Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players. I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.
Quite so – that's the central paradox of the rules-heavy-versus-rules-light debate: provided that the game the rules want to produce agrees with the game the group wants to play, a rules-heavy game may actually be less demanding to run than a rules-light one. A rigorous framework of play can be a very effective means of distributing the workload of making the game happen; if you play your cards right, the players won't even notice they're taking a load off the GM's shoulders by making their own rulings, because to them it just feels like drawing the obvious conclusions.
I feel I should also emphasise something that was only lightly touched on above: that this disconnect isn't just an issue on the player side. Many first-time GMs also trip over the whole "D&D is a universal entry-level game, therefore its rules can produce any desired experience of play, therefore you're a Bad GM if this ever appears not to be the case" complex and quite unwittingly end up in a position where they thought they'd be moderating a game, but what they're actually doing is leading a guided improv theatre troupe – and the latter is tremendously more demanding than the former. It's certainly not something that's reasonable to expect a complete novice to navigate as their first experience of play.
There's a reason that first-time GMs burning out so rapidly that their game only lasts two or three sessions and never running one again is a problem that's largely unique to D&D, and this is a big part of it.
If you're doing improv not under the guise of a ttrpg, you're not just gonna be makin' stories, you're also gonna be doing group exercises and rehearsals and analysis. In that sense, improv is a game in the way hockey is a game: there's as much time spent getting better at the game as there is spent playing. A shared, practiced skillset is what enables sharing narrative load. A long-form narrative improv troupe has a director leading that skill-building, but any given performance doesn't have a DM, and yet: the stories still appear! So yes, the big filmed-game DMs are doing a huge amount of work, but that work is done in the confidence their players are gonna catch the narrative gifts being thrown AND their players are gonna throw gifts right back. I have zero doubt that that confidence comes in part from off-screen work on everyone's part.
When taken as written, combat-based TTRPGs like D&D are more like board games than sport games or improv. The bit you can be "good" and "succeed" at is the strategy surrounding the game of chance, and the "playing pretend" parts are just what provides context and emotional stakes. There's an implied "don't worry, the DM will make it work" -- and if the chance-based strategy of encounters is what excites everyone, it won't take a lot to pull the narrative from one encounter to the next. If you want guided improv, that "don't worry, the DM will make it work" has to be set aside, or they will absolutely both burn out from overwork AND be deeply dissatisfied when their narrative presents get accidentally tossed aside, anyway.
the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family
Just saying this is truly one of the best “discourse” posts on this site like……this hits the nail directly on the head re: what is going on with language right now and everyone pushing back in the notes only serves to further prove the point it’s making
There was a big push around 2020/2021 in tech to rename your main git branch (where changes to code are tracked over time) from 'master' to something with fewer etymological connotations of slavery. And I posited even at the time that it was more damaging to fix these subtle, academia-driven language things without first fixing much harder but more impactful shit like hiring practices, sick leave, etc. It only makes people's lives more difficult if we add noise by signaling that we're so advanced we're down to fighting deeply buried subconscious -isms when we're actually just ignoring more important fixes. Doing the big work and being transparent about our progress is pragmatically more useful than vocab tweaks that sound like more progress than they actually represent in practice.
Unfinished cable car station from the 1980s, Ijevan, Vakhtang Lezhava. Picture by Stefano Perego, 2023.
Going through my flat files, I found this task-winning Little Mole God by @meganwhalenturner from CrossingCon 2022 I had set it aside to frame and instead, time passed.
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I remembered recently that the only thing keeping me from living out my wildest pre-teen dreams is decisive action, so I wrote the New York Public Library's video archive, told them I was doing research on a book, and asked to watch their professionally shot archival recording of the original Broadway cast of The Phantom of the Opera.
Today they got in touch and told me that my private viewing room was reserved for Wednesday.
THE WORLD IS YOURS! SEIZE IT!!
jaws music plays
Conclusion: this ruled, and modern theatre has lost the recipes for this show.
(the recipe: staging it as an actual gothic ghost story, anchored by someone middle aged playing the Phantom as a literal Svengali.)
In the archive of Stage on Film there is a recording of Waiting for Godot starring Bill Irwin, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Murray Abraham, and one day I will be in NYC long enough to fabricate an excuse to watch it.
I don't disagree that C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien had very different approaches to fantasy worldbuilding, but not in the way folks often claim. "Lewis put Santa Claus in Narnia because he didn't give a shit" well, no, C S Lewis had a complicated but entirely self-consistent answer for why Santa Claus is in Narnia that somehow manages to involve multiversal time travel and just didn't bother to bring it up until five books later, and it probably wasn't even an ass-pull because his claim to fame before Narnia was as an author of theological science fiction. Lewis didn't annoy the piss out of Tolkien for lack of trying, is what I mean to say.
I do sometimes think that The Space Trilogy is maybe a required prerequisite for any critique of Narnia based on authorial intention. Tolkien wants his world to hang together sociologically -- people and their speech and their way of thinking are part of a larger tapestry that yes, God is weaving, but at a remove, through the accumulated acts of centuries of people. Lewis wants his world to hang together personally and spiritually, instead; *over and over* he ends stories with a yearning, reaching depiction of heaven that's so obviously metaphorical, so clearly trying to be a finger pointing at the moon, that to insist on strict rationality right up to that moment seems... silly? Frivolous.
i understand why the ‘grizzled loner who slowly melts & improves their outlook on life when forced to take care of a kid’ trope is a male exclusive role, bc the optics of a grizzled loner woman healing by becoming a mother are maybe not so good, but every time i think abt a hypothetical female version of that trope i black out instantly. could we maybe just do it one time and all agree to be cool about it
previous tags and their very valid point:
A character who thinks and acts differently because of the life they've led so far: A+ That character gradually, over the course of a story, coming to have love and comfort and fulfillment: A+++ That character gaining love and comfort &c. by learning to act more "normal": BOOO HISSSS BOOOOOOOO They are interesting because they are different from me but they are still intelligible: what they do is not what I would do, but the story lets me understand why they do it. As long as you keep Austin your character weird and specific, you can give them whatever life you want. The type of weird can change! Their coping mechanisms can go from bad to better, as long as they don't disappear into genericness.
From Thud! Now, English isn't my first language, but I'm pretty sure that this has more than one meaning -
Ha ! Mr Patrician of Ankh-Morpork here thought he could get away with calling Vimes hot if he hid it in the middle of a speech.
(In this paragraph he's listing what other people say about Vimes; he's explaining why Vimes and Vimes' official investigatory opinion holds weight even beyond Ankh-Morpork. Vetinari doesn't think Vimes is hot; Vetinari knows other people think he's hot.)
from this article, which is well worth the read, if only for the fun of seeing zuck get dunked on
My bestie's tags
If the goal is to change people's minds about AI, I suspect that whether the "they don't think" argument is correct or not, it may not be effective as rhetoric. it risks collapsing into Serle's Chinese Room argument, which hasn't managed to convince anyone of anything after decades of debate. We don't really know what "thinking" is, so I can only say an LLM probably isn't doing it.
That an LLM isn't hallucinating or lying is easier to defend, and so is maybe more convincing for people who aren't already suspicious of the current AI boom. LLMs are indifferent to truth and falsehood. Regardless of whether what they do can be counted as thinking, or creativity, or any other word philosophers struggle to pin down, the vast majority of an LLM's training is to produce plausible output; and they largely don't have ways to assess if that output is correct or true. Truth isn't part of the process. LLMs learn in the sense of memorization, and in the sense of getting feedback from an instructor, but they do not learn in the sense of trying things in the world and correcting themselves based on the outcome. Most of their training is offline learning: they don't have access to act in the world or see the outcome when they're learning.
Those limitations are structural rather than based on definitions, so I think they might be more powerful in changing people's opinions, and for discerning sensible applications of LLM AI vs dangerous, costly, and silly ones.
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It's crazy how humanity invented bicycles and decided to try it with one big wheel and one small wheel BEFORE they tried having two wheels the same size
We didn't; the earliest bikes had two wheels of the same size ...but with no chain and sprockets, your speed is directly proportional to the size of the wheel: the same size pedal cranks with a bigger wheel mean more leverage (and a smoother ride). And, if you can put the pedals directly underneath you, you can apply more force; but without a chain, the pedals are on the wheel. The penny farthing was an improvement on the older two-similar-wheels bike, built for speed and comfort. (This is not just bike history pedantry; it's an important lens for thinking about history. People in the past were not stupider; they were just as sensible and silly as we are, but came to different conclusions because of the world they lived in)
Repeatedly read this as "gurl, I have been friends with Online for 20 years" I have been online's friend way longer than you; I think I know what online likes
