@discoursedrome / discoursedrome.tumblr.com
the real shibboleth between true online marxist catgirls and delusional larpers is knowing how to correctly pronounce “hoxhaist” without looking it up
I know it because of linguistics. albanian is nothing to me.
i think the thing to me about posts like this that show off some ungodly monstrosity in a shipped game's codebase to prove a point about how doing things the "right" way is less important than getting it done is that it never actually backs up the implicit claim that doing things the right way would have been slower, which is where the actual meat of the claim is. and there are plenty of cases where the simple hack winds up limiting you.
conversely, it's much harder to point at good code and go "this design is so good", so you dont get meme posts about (say) implementing your ability effects as an ADT and how cool this is because it doesn't generate an instinctual reaction
and of course, while most games aren't ongoing projects, anyone who plays hit mmo final fantasy xiv is well aware of the bizarre restrictions in place that are almost definitely due to some ungodly piece of legacy code
Right the subtle detail here is that a lot of things are easier to do right than wrong if you know how to do them right, or at least no harder, but if you don't know how to do them right, the person who just plows ahead is more likely to succeed at making games than the person who views it as an exercise in improving their abilities rather than an exercise in surmounting obstacles, because getting things done at all is harder than getting them done well, conditional on their being done. The point is mainly that people who are fundamentally makers, work fast, and view the code as raw materials in which to render the thing they actually care about tend to beat people who are more concerned with correctness and virtuosity in design, because they get done a lot faster and because in artistic fields where success is random and unpredictable, you're better off doing a lot of different things and seeing what "takes". If you know how to not do it in a giant switch statement you shouldn't, though in the same spirit as the exhortation against premature optimization, you shouldn't really think about architecture too early, either, because that's a real investment, and it's very easy to have a success without good architecture and a good architecture without success.
I actually think there's a persistent issue in software where there isn't really a super clean divide between the contexts where these conditions obtain and the other contexts, medical hardware control systems and secure messaging systems and so forth. But a clientside video game with no financial transactions or internet access is the ultimate paradise of fruitful incompetence in code design, and you too can be more fruitful if you don't sweat that part of it.
Unauthorized 2022 "pop it" style electronic toy where the buttons replace Mario's face. Despite using the Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope branding, the artwork used on the packaging is taken from a variety of older sources.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source
Hey you, with that post-apocalyptic cyberfeudalist setting you've been worldbuilding! Yeah, I'm talking to you. One thing you should put in there is that people put emoji in their screen names as a combination of heraldic crests and nobiliary particles
shitt.pchan
I should really make an effort to get into Taylor Swift while she's the most important celebrity because I do like what little I've heard of her stuff but ugh, there's so much of it and people are so intense about it, it's like trying to start Homestuck in Act 6. If I wait too long there's a risk that she'll be cancelled for something or other and then I'll just completely miss out on knowing what that cultural moment was all about though. the kanye effect
Can you explain this gap in your blog history
I was employed.
Google and I are locked in a perpetual arms race where they try to bury or exclude organic search results in favour of widget boxes that tell you the wrong information or try to sell you things, and I try to block everything but organic search results with CSS, and since they added mandatory infinite scroll a funny side-effect of this is that sometimes they need to do several round trips before I see a single result. It's like they keep serving me a vegetable I don't like and I keep dumping it while their back is turned and they think I must just be really hungry
I literally had to report one of these boxes yesterday for containing incorrect information, and it wasn't even really Google's fault! It sourced the info from Physics Forums, but grabbed the answer from the "summary" of the thread hallucinated by AI, which contradicted the actual body of the thread
Yes, this is increasingly common. Also popular is that it gets almost the right answer, but gets a critical detail wrong, like answering the question for a competitor's product or a different operating system or under some key condition that's not mentioned in its Q&A format. I think it's still sort of Google's fault in the same way as the prevalence of SEO glurge in search results is: the web is getting less reliable and more complex, and they're not just losing the arms race, they took a break to have a picnic.
Google and I are locked in a perpetual arms race where they try to bury or exclude organic search results in favour of widget boxes that tell you the wrong information or try to sell you things, and I try to block everything but organic search results with CSS, and since they added mandatory infinite scroll a funny side-effect of this is that sometimes they need to do several round trips before I see a single result. It's like they keep serving me a vegetable I don't like and I keep dumping it while their back is turned and they think I must just be really hungry
this would have got 100k notes as a tumblr post in 2018
"ummm you know the writer only included that because they have a FETISH right?" is always so funny to me as a disparaging comment, because imagine if people spoke that way about nonsexual interests. "the lord of the rings? didnt the author only write that because he was interested in linguistics? thanks, i'll pass" "yeah, i used to love spongebob as a kid, but i can never see it the same after finding out stephen hillenburg is a marine biologist :/"
I said you could fill a book on this topic and I meant it and I'm not going to, but just to stake a claim on the take: the key reason people use the idiom of contractualism to describe invocation of and negotiation with sublime powers, demons but also fairies and genies and so on, is because vernacular law has supplanted liturgical languages as the language of magisterium, and that's what gets imbued with magical potency in folk culture.
Everyone here loves that Brian Eno quote that goes, like, "whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"; it's that. When the language of magisterium is one that most people don't speak, the phonological features of that language are what we associate with power, and that's where you get pseudolatin incantations as a kind of huckster's business. A less-discussed effect of vernacularization of the language of authority is that it changes its topology of salience, it displaces the "essence" of power, in the mind of the public, onto the features that still stand out even to a fluent speaker.
This is where you get the Anglo-Protestant mysticization of the differences between the KJV's dialect and their own, "thou" as a word of power of a very different kind than was intended. This happens in the secular domain, also, a focus on jargon -- it is to some extent the appeal of the "buzzword" to the managerial caste -- but also on precision and formal and technical structure. Vernacularization has to some extent displaced numen from language to structure, and when we daydream about the true and essential thing of which all these experiences are pale reflections, we think now less of the language God spoke to Adam than of the rules and procedures governing that process. And in the modern era the hucksters with their pseudolatin incantations have become sovereign citizens, cod-proceduralist magi, and we must imagine Odin's songs of power as articles of law. This is why the story of the genie who grants wishes has, like the old "deal with the devil", been reimagined a cautionary tale about drafting imprecise contracts, so thoroughly that people barely remember that these stories were ever anything else.
It's very popular, for reasons that could fill a book, to use corporate and legal analogies for Hell, contractually "selling your soul" to the infernal lawyer and so on. But this is only really used for a "ground-level" view, and when it comes back to talking about the rulership and organization of Hell people lapse back into aristocratic language derived from European occultism, princes and dukes of Hell and so on. As a result, it feels like we're overdue to shift to representing the Devil and major demons as being politicians or executives.
There's a bit of this out there, but I see it most often in rapture end times stuff, in the context of an expressly terrestrial Antichrist, which is lame. I want to see an Ars Goetia for the modern day where it's all structured like a social network and you can see which demons have good working relationships with one another and who's burnishing their image the most aggressively.
We could retire this unmeritocratic "duke of Hell" stuff and it'd be more like, you go to Valefar's LinkedIn page and read his puffed-up CV and check his feed for posts congratulating his team for successfully pulling off some infernal scheme, and read his various brand-building thinkfluencer posts about how he worked his way up from doing accounts receivable in the basement to being CFO of the entire American office and that shows the importance of being ambitious and putting in long hours. I want to be like "Hmm Asmodeus removed his current status, should we reach out and see if he's available?" We need to acknowledge that the ruling class doesn't really do majesty nowadays and that the new thing is more smarmy and tacky, and Hell needs to get with the times.
And I think once you commit fully to this, you can double back to the human-level diabolism and it's more fun, too. Like:
I know lots of respectable people who are into it with an innocent joyfulness that I envy, so I don't want to adopt a disproportionately grinchlike posture, but I absolutely cannot bring myself to care at all about solar eclipses. I was mildly interested in the first solar eclipse that ever happened, when I was a kid and we made pinhole cameras at school, but ever since then it has just seemed like this baffling non-event that everyone gets excited about.
like yes. okay. it's very dramatic! I'll concede. but the two big features of solar eclipses are that they're unpredictable portentous events, and that if you watch them unfold it's a rare and extraordinary sight. and nowadays we can predict the timing and visibility perfectly at any point on the planet, and the whole thing is that you can't look at them, you need to use some oblique viewing method. and it's like, oh, you mean like video? You mean like the million videos of the eclipse that appear on Youtube every time one happens, or the nature shows that film it with specialized high-quality equipment? I don't see what the added benefit of personalized eclipse-viewing stuff is if it's no less indirect than that; it's not like the sun is in the same room. It's as if the emperor's new clothes really were just invisible clothes. In some sense that's impressive, but I'm not going to go to the party.
Various people had rebuttals to this which I am afraid I did not find enormously persuasive (except "it's good for birders because it tricks nocturnal birds into coming out and acting weird", which, you know what, that's fair). However, I want you to know that in honour of you guys I got up from my work to look out the window when it got dark, along with the rest of the office. It was okay? There was a certain camaraderie to the experience which was aided by the shared knowledge that we were supposed to be working, serving as a reminder that celestial omens can be substituted for class consciousness in precipitating a work stoppage. Nonetheless, I feel obliged to note that I have also had this experience a few times when there was a stray dog in the yard and everyone stopped working to watch the dog, and while that is more common than a total eclipse of the sun it is also in some sense more exciting, because you can look directly at the dog and the scientists haven't yet learned how to predict it.
Were you in totality? Being inside totality is much darker and you can look at the now covered sun with your naked eyes for a few minutes.
And it’s way better than videos. The light goes all wrong and alien and it’s like no other type of light.
I'm wise to you, you're one of those doxxers trying to identify my coordinates! The first principle of online safety is to never tell anyone your terrestrial position with respect to the ecliptic.
I know lots of respectable people who are into it with an innocent joyfulness that I envy, so I don't want to adopt a disproportionately grinchlike posture, but I absolutely cannot bring myself to care at all about solar eclipses. I was mildly interested in the first solar eclipse that ever happened, when I was a kid and we made pinhole cameras at school, but ever since then it has just seemed like this baffling non-event that everyone gets excited about.
like yes. okay. it's very dramatic! I'll concede. but the two big features of solar eclipses are that they're unpredictable portentous events, and that if you watch them unfold it's a rare and extraordinary sight. and nowadays we can predict the timing and visibility perfectly at any point on the planet, and the whole thing is that you can't look at them, you need to use some oblique viewing method. and it's like, oh, you mean like video? You mean like the million videos of the eclipse that appear on Youtube every time one happens, or the nature shows that film it with specialized high-quality equipment? I don't see what the added benefit of personalized eclipse-viewing stuff is if it's no less indirect than that; it's not like the sun is in the same room. It's as if the emperor's new clothes really were just invisible clothes. In some sense that's impressive, but I'm not going to go to the party.
Various people had rebuttals to this which I am afraid I did not find enormously persuasive (except "it's good for birders because it tricks nocturnal birds into coming out and acting weird", which, you know what, that's fair). However, I want you to know that in honour of you guys I got up from my work to look out the window when it got dark, along with the rest of the office. It was okay? There was a certain camaraderie to the experience which was aided by the shared knowledge that we were supposed to be working, serving as a reminder that celestial omens can be substituted for class consciousness in precipitating a work stoppage. Nonetheless, I feel obliged to note that I have also had this experience a few times when there was a stray dog in the yard and everyone stopped working to watch the dog, and while that is more common than a total eclipse of the sun it is also in some sense more exciting, because you can look directly at the dog and the scientists haven't yet learned how to predict it.
