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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

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@rationalfears

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Dan Hays Colorado Snow Effect 4 (with detail) 2007, oil on canvas
another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!
(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.
actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)
a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.
deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.
the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.
and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.
however.
you do have to know which one you're doing.
the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).
and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.
the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.
the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.
point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.
the sims will never not be one of the funniest games on the planet
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

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unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!
(warning: loud chirping throughout)
source: hellgate osprey cam
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
Since I just searched it for myself: TED Talk link and link to the actual study article for anyone interested in further details
Sherlock Holmes having a universal ace experience -- expressing disinterest and immediately getting called an inhuman robot.
#images#sherlock holmes#sorry i don't turn rabid and marry the prettiest girl in sight at the push of a button my dear watson
Watson is like "of course I proposed marriage to a girl I met two days ago, I'm normal and make rational decisions"
#I read this part just the other day#He literally proposes within two days it’s crazy
Every Sherlock Holmes remake that tries to make Watson the straight man does him a great injustice. Mfer is a total madlad. Everyone's like "oh he's not addicted to hard drugs and doesn't do chemistry experiments in his bedroom for fun" there are subtler ways to be completely unhinged.
The thing is, Watson may or may not instigate the Situations & Shenanigans, but he voluntarily spends most of his Sherlock Holmes, who DOES!
““Normal”“ people do not do that.
Watson will show up at Holmes' place and be like "are you doing any investigations of super weird shit today" and Holmes will be like "yes I am cornering this dangerous mass murderer, you should come and bring your gun in case anyone tries to shoot us" and Watson will do it without question, thinking "I'm so glad he's got something wholesome to distract himself with so he doesn't take more cocaine".
You said something in “Smith” which I hope I grasped, and there was a feeling almost of recognition. An odd feeling of grief overcame me when I read it. I cannot explain my feelings any clearer. It was like hearing a piece of music from way back, except that it was nearer poetry by Graves’ definition. Thank you very much for writing it.
Terry Pratchett, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, 22 November 1967
Thank you very much for your letter. The first one that I have received with regard to Smith of Wootton Major. You evidently feel about the story very much as I do myself. I can hardly say more.
J. R. R. Tolkien, in reply to Pratchett’s letter, 24 November 1967
This is the first I've ever seen this and it makes me wonder if it's why Pratchett was always so conscientious about responding to letters from kids.
If you were wondering: in November 1967, Terry Pratchett was 19 years old.
And he did in fact say on at least one occasion that it was this that pushed him to always engage with his own fans in the same kind and conscientious manner.
I'm not a prayin' man, but the night I found out my at-the-time-fiancé had been sending sex horny nasty horny sex asks to my friend on THIS VERY WEBSITE, I sat in the car in the parking lot of an abandoned church and watched a family of deer play in the snow, and it didn't quite feel like a sign because that part of Pennsylvania was mostly deer and abandoned buildings and snow, but it felt nice, and once the tears stopped, I looked down at my phone and my other friend had sent me a text that said, "HE'S TRYING TO CHEAT ON YOU ON THE ONE DIRECTION IMAGINES WEBSITE?" and I realized that life is all about your curated experience. A real choose-your-own-adventure deal. I have never seen someone post about One Direction on here in my life.

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(USAmerican trying to imagine a societal environment) Okay, so picture a highway,
inability to correctly perceive 3d objects is in fact far more dangerous when someone is driving a car next to you then when they're like, sending emails to you.
can we focus on the gnome for a second
wait sorry i was not wearing my glasses. that is a cat
“bits to use in everyday conversations”
this panel really is so much to me
I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.
Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A
https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)
Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un
Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though
That should be enough
While I appreciate the enthusiasm for citation, none of these are primary sources.
Here is the study (no paywall).
Some questions I had that were answered:
How are gloves made of organic materials contaminating an inorganic sample?
In the manufacturing process, stearate salts are used to remove gloves from molds, these salts have an almost identical size and shape to microplastics.
Does this mean all the old studies are null?
No. Like many scientific studies, this one was conducted in a way that simulates an extreme situation. They tested how much residue was left behind if a researcher were to have pinched a slide between their fingers. However, a professional in a lab should not be doing that. You are supposed to pick up slides by the sides for this exact reason. Some studies may need to be redone, but in general reexamining results is the recommended response.
So are microplastics actually an issue?
Yes. While previous studies MAY have been contaminated, they also may not have been. And even if they were, it’s unlikely results were skewed to the level of ignoring the impact of microplastics altogether. Keep using natural materials, please.
Open to the public starting Friday. And more importantly they are honoring the victims. Too bad congress is spineless and toothless

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the world's smallest carnivore is called the "least weasel" 😭😭 i'm dying but like if it's the smallest carnivore then it sure is the least amount of weasel you can have 😭😭😭
Look at him: this is absolutely the least amount of weasel you can have
To really put it in perspective
Immediately I love him
some tardigrades are carnivores though so uhh what are you talking about
the idea that women are "more allowed" to express emotions than men under patriarchy honestly seems like a lie that serves patriarchy itself.
women are constantly pressured to dissociate from the way our circumstances negatively impact us, and we are straight up not permitted more emotional expression in any meaningful way that is received well in patriarchal relations. in reality, we are marked as "more emotional" and therefore taken less seriously than men.
nobody under patriarchy is allowed a healthy and full expression of their emotions, but framing emotional expression as an advantage that women have is bizarre.
Women are only allowed to express emotions that fit the role of servitude - love, care, nurturing, admiration, submission, and some concern or sadness when appropriate.
Men are only allowed to express emotions that fit the role of oppressor - lust, assertiveness, domination, anger, rage, violence.
These emotions are divided to sustain a hierarchy that places women below men. Anyone who violates this division - an angry woman, a nurturing man - is punished.
And women who perform only the correct emotions at the correct moment are still punished with the accusation that those emotions make them inferior to men, whose manly feelings are re-imagined as rational drivers of their actions.
By the way: if you understand this, then you should be able to understand that "the patriarchy harms men too" & "men benefit from the patriarchy" can both be true.
A system can both give a privileged demographic increased access to power and money, and at the same time force the members of that demographic into performing the rigid and emotionally stunting role of oppressor. It's not that complicated.