rampaging-poet

the oranges holy shit

My problem with the term "hubris" in literary analysis is that folks like to toss it around in contexts in which it just plain doesn't apply. The notion of hubris inherently presumes that humans have assigned stations beyond which it's morally – and, often, metaphysically – wrong to reach. Most modern fictional milieux simply lack such an implicit hierarchy. That character isn't guilty of hubris; they're guilty of negligent risk management.

Folks will analyse a fictional character who accidentally blew up half a city and act like the resulting seven-digit body count is purely ancillary to the real crime of aspiring to exceed one's God-given place in the Great Chain of Being.

one of my biggest problems with "i transmigrated into medieval fantasy and started the industrial revolution" stories is that they always act like it's possible for one guy to do that just by Knowing Things Intelligently With Their Big Brain, meanwhile i'm always screaming about "the material conditions!!!!" internally. knowing things intelligently won't help you if you don't have the necessary infrastructure, or access to enough raw materials.

I Transmigrated Into A Medieval Fantasy World With No Accessible Coal Deposits So My Plan To Kickstart The Industrial Revolution Fizzled Out Immediately?!?!?!

This depends on where you time travel to but I think the strategy isn't to directly kickstart the industrial revolution it's to get people to listen to you in general. Get in touch with a glass grinder and invent the telescope. Get in touch with some mathematicians and tell them about the Cartesian plane. Get some chemists to do gunpowder. The compass, if you're far enough back. Come up with a few undeniably useful things that nobody in that society would've figured out any time soon, use that trust to write books selling intellectuals on the idea of further material progress with as much detail as you can muster. Without neglecting the material and social preconditions of course. Start a movement of craftsmen allied with independent researchers who can build on your work at a much more rapid clip than would otherwise be possible. You gotta be a Francis Bacon more than a turbo Edison. You won't live to see the fruits of it but that's okay history needs its Moseses.

"write books"? did you mean invent the printing press??

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but "all weird indie tabletop RPGs are designed as a kink thing" is reductive. There is also "designing tabletop RPGs as a pretext to publish your original setting's worldbuilding bible", "designing tabletop RPGs because you came up with a neat dice trick", "designing tabletop RPGs to win an argument", and "designing tabletop RPGs as an act of self harm".

Bluesky went offline the exact moment I attempted to crosspost this, which I am choosing to interpret as a positive sign.

No one could stop me

No one could stop you from what exactly?

No one could stop me

Oh yeah, no, when I said "how do the characters advance if there's no levels" I was kind of hearkening back to the original gleeblor, where you said "how will they win if you don't design encounters," sort of throwing in a second assumption that's predicated on the first. In real life, I am aware that there are even games with no character advancement at all!

Ooooh right, gotcha! :D Sorry, that just went completely past me.

Gleeblor affects us all.

9 out of 10 times I see people on here celebrating a new "landmark piece of anti-AI legislation" the legislation in question is inevitably some variation of "we propose making IP laws more restrictive but presented through the language of opposing AI". But that one from germany about holding google liable for the words of its AI overview feature is legitimately good I think. If they actively choose to shove that thing in everyone's face as the first thing they're going to see when they make a google search then they shouldn't be able to dodge accountability for the information it provides with a little "gemini AI can be inaccurate, please remember to double-check information teeheehee" disclaimer.

the germany ruling is good because it's targeting something that's bad to do whether it's done by an AI or a human