Multicore Headspace

Looks like I didn't notice this ask for several weeks. Anyway, better late than never.

As far as communication goes, it's almost entirely verbal, with some nonverbal stuff for emphasis or whatever. However, our brain is just pretty verbally oriented in general.

The extent to which we share memories, emotions, and personality traits is "a lot". Emphasizing differences between system members seems to be something you need to work on, and we've really done the opposite by taking in the same social media feeds, working at the same job, and doing the same hobbies.

The differences are more pronounced when we're talking internally than the difference in how we act in real life, since in that context we're focusing more on what the contrast is "supposed to be". But we don't actually talk internally all that much anymore - mostly just in quiet times like the shower or late night walks.

As part of the rebranding, @multicore-processor will only be using I/me/myself pronouns, to make it less awkward to interact outside of plural communities. Anything tulpa/plurality related will probably go here at @multicore-headspace .

Think the famous Yu-gi-oh scene where the smirking antagonist tells the kid to draw his last pathetic card, and the kid reveals that he’s assembled Exodia, and the antagonist is completely shocked. Realistically, expert players of any game are going to know most of the pieces, and while some instant-kill combos are surprising and counterintuitive (try to figure out APM Priest without reading the guide), Exodia is so obvious that everyone would know about it. You might be surprised that a particular opponent had it, but not about its existence.

What’s interesting in following competitive games is players trying to predict what the opponent will do next and stay one step ahead, to weigh the effectiveness of an option against the opponent’s possible response. (”If I play this, Duskbreaker can’t clear my board. Mass Hysteria would have a pretty good chance of clearing, but I’d be willing to spend these resources to bait it out.”)

The only “outsider comes in and breaks a game” story I know of that actually incorporates this sort of reasoning is nonfictional - Deepmind’s recent unveiling of Alphastar.

It’s perhaps understandable that you can’t get to that level of meta with a system that the author had to make up and that the audience had no familarity with. And it’s understandable that an author with no real game design experience can’t make a system as balanced as one made by a world-class company. But you can at least do your characters the favor of letting them understand the system they’re supposedly familiar with.

This post was inspired by a scene in Log Horizon where a big hulky tank guy uses a skill that makes him invulnerable for ten seconds, even shouts out the skill’s name as he’s doing it. But his opponents, supposedly high level players, continue to attack him and even waste some of their big long-cooldown burst damage skills, as if they didn’t even know what the skill did.

Log Horizon also seems to imply that the crux of its world’s combat are field control skills - pulls, stuns, buffs, debuffs, and so forth. But the enemy players in these scenes seem to prefer just charging in and swinging swords around. Like, why? Did they never go to the forums and look up guides? Did they never get their asses kicked by someone using the field control skills effectively before?

It has this really family-friendly aesthetic, with cartoony graphics, calming music, and the really condescending box that pops up if you fail too many times in a row and offers to show you an example of someone beating the run.

But the game is so hard that I keep thinking that going back to Dark Souls III would be calming and relaxing. Mario is surprisingly hard to control because he has a lot of inertia - you have to build up speed for long jumps, and you can’t always turn on a dime. While the many tricky parts generally aren’t quite as tricky as in games like Electronic Super Joy or They Bleed Pixels, you only get one checkpoint per level instead of a zillion, so you have to do much longer stretches without screwing up.

It’s a single-syllable English word, albeit not one in common use in most contexts, but everyone who reads it confuses it with a different more common last name, and everyone who hears it confuses it with another more common last name.

And they included one of the best diagrams I’ve ever seen.

(x-post from reddit)

As you probably heard last week, there's a new book out about tulpamancy, Creating Consciousness: The Psychology and Art of Tulpamancy. Since many of you are likely reluctant to put down fifteen dollars for an unknown quantity, I figured I'd be the first to put up a review.

It’s important to be clear about what this book is and isn't. What it is is a manual for new tulpamancers and an overview of most of the concepts surrounding the phenomenon. It doesn’t contain much narrative content or description of the history and state of the tulpa community. It's not a particularly deep dive on anything, and if you've been around here a while, there's not much new information. I consider this a feature rather than a bug, since it means new people will get the consensus rather than speculation.

It's also not particularly long. It's about a hundred pages, and many of those are not filled with words. I read it in about two hours. I don't think it particularly needed to be any longer than that, but maybe that's not worth the price of admission for you.

The author, Nicholas Guillette, has had a tulpa since 2017, so he has himself used at least most of the techniques he describes. Aside from an introduction from his tulpa at the start, though, the book’s style is very impersonal. This suits the “manual” intent, but I would have found it helpful if he showed his power levels a bit more. He describes techniques for imposition and switching, but doesn't make it clear if he's speaking from experience or merely drawing from other people's descriptions.

Importantly, Guillette also has a psychology degree, and the book’s gimmick is incorporating concepts from psychology to explain and give context to tulpamancy concepts. From my limited knowledge the applications seem mostly good, though I don’t think Jung is so popular these days. I'd heard of a lot of it before, though one new thing mentioned offhand was the Tellegen absorption scale, invoked in reference to wonderlands. The added scientific background doesn't usually change the recommended techniques, but it can help the reader understand why they would be useful.

One slightly unorthodox technique covered was the use of symbolic objects associated with a tulpa, including a decorated “tulpa box”. Most everything else is probably covered to some extent by most of the guides you’ve read.

The book also has sections structured like a therapy workbook, inviting you to reflect on some concept or fill in some detail about your tulpa. Though I'm loathe to write in books, it's a good way of guiding people through the thought process.

The book's content is reasonably well organized, proceeding from underlying concepts and considerations to creation techniques to “what's next?” type ideas, but the formatting of the text leaves much to be desired. There are lots of pages partially or entirely blank, and there are a few diagrams that look amateurish at best and add very little to the text. Also, for some reason the title on the cover is different from the title on the top of the interior pages. These and a couple other things don't ruin the experience, but they make the product feel less polished.