Some people are like "The classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus is Problematic because it features the Torment Nexus"

#Woe betide if it's just called 'The Torment Nexus' and you're supposed to infer 'Don't Creat the Torment Nexus' for yourself

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

That "somebody" is science fiction writer Poul Anderson, fyi.

We read this in one of my German linguistics classes in grad school.

One difference between the Lord of the Rings books and the Peter Jackson films that I find really interesting is what the hobbits find when they return to the Shire.

In the books, they return from the War, only to see that the war has not left their home untouched. Not only has it not left their home unscathed, battle and conflict is still actively ravaging the Shire. They return, weary and battle-scarred, to find a home actively wounded and in need of rescue and healing. All four launch themselves into defending their home and rousting those harming it, and eventually succeed. But their idyllic home has been damaged, and even once healed, is never quite again the Shire they set out to save.

In contrast, in the Jackson films, they return to a Shire shockingly untouched by the horrors of war. The hobbits of the Shire talk, in the Green Dragon in Fellowship of the Ring, about not getting involved with issues "beyond our borders," and it seems those issues have not invaded their sanctuary. After having been bowed to by kings, dwarves, elves, and men alike at the coronation in Gondor, their only acknowledgment upon returning home is a skeptical head shake from an older hobbit.

One of the most poignant scenes to me in Return of the King (and there are a considerable amount) is the scene where Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are sitting in the Green Dragon. The pub patrons bustle around them, talking loudly, clapping excitedly, drinking cheerfully, just as they had in the beginning of the story. But the four hobbits sit silently, watching almost curiously at what was once familiar but is now foreign to them. Their home has not changed. But they have.

Which is the deeper hurt? To come to your home to find it irrevocably changed, despite all you did to keep it untouched and the same? Or to return home but no longer feeling at home, because it is only you that is irrevocably changed?

Spitballing with the fellas on discord and we've come up with a Star Trek character we want to see: A 200-year-old top Vulcan diplomat attending a function and laughing boisterously and slapping backs with everyone and then just relaxing into resting bitch face the moment nobody is watching him. He takes his job deadly seriously and studied parties extensively in the diplomatic academy. Every year he's brushing up on new developments in party theory. He knows every party nuance you could possibly think of, for the sake of intergalactic relations. Peace in the galaxy depends on it. It's weird but you gotta meet people where they're at, he thinks.

Our system is broken.  It is cruel.  It is dehumanizing, degrading, and it’s vile nature is so, so unnecessary.

We need universal healthcare today in America.  We needed it 40 years ago.  It’s cheaper, it’s simpler, it’s more efficient, it’s more effective and it is so, so, so much less cruel than what we have.

Additional sources/references:

Universal Healthcare Cost in America would be cheaper by trillions of dollars

The US has worse life expectancies than socialized healthcare countries

We have worse generalized healthcare results

We have the most expensive care

Our system is so cruel and unique that doctors from other countries literally can’t believe what happens here

I can’t tell you where or how to activate to help solve this.  There are politicians, groups, and activists pushing for this in so many ways.  I can tell you when, though.

Now.

thanks to unity's downright evil new pricing model that charges per-install (including reinstalls), it will now be impossible to sign a deal with a publisher for your unity game because i can guarantee there are zero publishers who are willing to lose money every single time your game gets downloaded and installed.

great news, are you a marginalized game dev? awesome. now 4chan can organize a mass uninstall/reinstall hate campaign and bankrupt you in minutes. unity claims they have fraud protection but i must stress that it's literally not possible for them to determine where an install came from, the intent of the install, what storefront the install came from, or even if the install was from a pirated copy or not.

if a dev gets targeted by revenue bombing it's now on the developer to file a dispute

From what I've seen people saying this sounds like pirated games would also count against the devs unless they also intruded some specific anti-piracy measures to determine if a copy is legit or not before counting it. (And I'm sure people would find ways to cheat that, anyway)

It also would count if somebody installed a game on multiple devices, or if they had to uninstall and reinstall for some reason. Potentially also if you upgraded some of your PC parts because it wouldn't be able to yell the difference between that and being installed on a different device.

This is hopefully going to be contested and forced to be walked back, but... it's pretty bad. Even if they walk this back, they've pretty much ruined any trust many people had in them because if this was considered chill to announce who knows what BS will get pulled in the future even if this change falls through??

The CEO sold A HUGE amount of stock just a few days before this piece of garbage news came out. I think that counts as insider trading.

Also just to jump in here, Unity has no means of producing any actual metrics on installs. No means exists to do that reliably from a developer or publisher stand point, let alone Unity's position as someone who licenses a dev tool. Like yeah you can kinda track installs based on number of sales and info from DRM or other network related things that phone home, but those numbers aren't accurate. You can't know how many times a program has been INSTALLED. you can see purchases sure, but thats only for legal copies. And that's point of sale data, not point of install.

Point of install is a genuinely insane concept to try and tie a monetary fee to. It's unenforceable and unknowable. When pushed by basically everyone in the industry Unity said they would "leverage a proprietary data model" to find out this info which boils down basically to "trust us bro." Like there no way their numbers will be reliable. At worst they'll be like what people have already pointed out, charging for pirated copies or even creating an attack vector where someone could intentionally install a game to try and ruin a developer financially. At best their numbers will be wildly inaccurate in a way that doesn't cost that much. But we have no details on how these numbers are actually collected. They won't tell us what methods they use, if some kind of always online system will be implemented into Unity games by default. They also want this to apply retroactively to every Unity game period. It's insanity.

But as is pointed out this seems to be a genuine, outright scam. The CEO, a Grade A shitbag who is also behind a lot of EA's shit baggery from when he was an executive there, has moved a bunch of stocks ahead of this announcment, seemingly trying to short his own stocks. Thats textbook insider trading and pretty goddamn illegal.

What I think he's trying to do is some good old fashion vulture capitalism. He took over Unity with the goal of driving it into the ground and making money off its corpse. This latest policy is an out of touch, genuinely insane attempt at rent seeking that he probably thought would A) drive down stock prices and B) generate some real blood from a stone profits for him to hoover up before he finally let's the husk of the company collapse. However I think this guy is too stupid to realize he's overplayed his hand. Not only did he commit an obvious financial crime, he also instituted a retroactive policy that WILL get him and his company sued. They've said they intend to bill Microsoft for any unity games distributed on Game Pass. Microsoft isn't gonna take that shit. Especially when the pricing per install is absurd. 20 cents an install sounds like chump change but on a game with a few hundred thousand or even several millions installs that quickly becomes a huge sum. Consider how many devs make tiny free to plays with unity. Now they're gonna be in the hole by dent of their game existing. Even if they delist the games from store fronts pirated copies could still cost them. There no way this doesn't end in a legal fire storm and probably the death of unity as a popular dev tool, if not the death of the company and its tool outright.

My takeaway from this is capitalism remains completely at odds with human expression and art. So long as we let profit margins be a deciding factor in anything, it will always end up where we are with this, a greedy man ruining other people's lives and destroying valuable systems and tools, threatening entire forms of expression, to make himself a little bit richer. To generate money that doesn't even mean that much to him. It's absurd and it's disgusting and they can thrust this kind of hollowing out on us whenever they want because our society it built to empower the rich and no one else.

when i say 'i want worse graphics', some ppl assume i mean 'i want stylyzed instead of realistic' then get mad at me for saying it wrong (???) so let me be clear:

i want worse graphics. i want the models topology to be a bit off, i want the rigging to have a few verts mis-weighted, i want the final model to not be accurate to the concept art cuz it would have been too labor intensive to make the scarf that long. i want the shading to do the thing where a real time character shadow is casting on top of another baked in shadow. i want whatever eases the devs workload and prevents crunch so they can go home to their loved ones and actually enjoy their life outside of work

and im not kidding

Today's Adventure is that I, after an unintentional 13-hour power nap,

Update:

Ok, so:

... further details in a bit I think the Vikings are here.

OK so.

I love this story. ^^

Day 29 - Psychosomatic Bullshit

Found the post!

@lesbianneopolitan Found it!

I don’t have children so take this with a grain of salt but I hate when you can tell people like the concept of their children more than their well-being. Parents like the concept of an all-beige nursery that’s photogenic more than they care about the development of their kid’s brain. They like the concept of a cutely dressed kid in designer clothes more than they care about their comfort and personal desires. They like the concept of a child who never eats poorly more than they care about the happiness that can come from a child eating some candy now and then. People need to stop treating their kids like little dolls

Uh, I have kids, and so I've spent a lot of time around kids and around other parents, and you are very much on to something.

Whether they have kids because they felt like they needed to or because they wanted an heir or whatever, they don't actually want to hang out with developing humans. They want the idea of kids. They want the Christmas card and the pictures on the desk and the Instagram picture.

They don't want the baby screaming for 5 hours straight because it's too cold out to walk to the store and get more baby ibuprofen for the ear infection on Friday night and your partner has the car. They don't get that the baby is crying because she's literally never hurt worse than this in her tiny life, and they don't get that their toddler has never been sadder than when her favorite toy broke, and that she really didn't know she would break it if she did the thing she just did. That the 4-year-old is crying because the world is too big and too overwhelming and she has no control over where she goes or what she does most of the time, and that the 14-year-old isn't telling them anything about her life because they told her ten years ago to shut up or they'd give her something worth crying about, so she knows they don't value her real feelings, only the ones she's supposed to have.

And they don't want to get any of it. And it fucking sucks that people who don't actually WANT kids feel like they have to have them, or have them to have something smaller than themselves to bully, or have kids as a status symbol. It all just blows, and mostly because:

Kids are people, and most people are actually pretty fucking rad, if given the opportunity to be.

There are a lot of good parents out there, and then there are the parents who had kids because they thought they had to, or wanted someone to boss around, or whatever. And like... even if you thought you wanted kids, you can quickly find out that it actually blows to be a parent in a nuclear family setup, and get really burned out on being a parent. Kids are much better raised by an extended family. That's how we're wired. And like... we broke it. We broke it, and it breaks parents and it hurts kids.

My mildly unhinged MLP x The Legend of Spyro crossover

“omg ur so quirky for not wearing makeup” people want so bad for not wearing makeup to be just as much of an active, effortful gesture as wearing makeup so they don’t have to acknowledge how much added labor they go through each day because to do so would be implicitly conceding that the act of wearing makeup has a cost. too bad though because, baby, we are genuinely just waking up in the morning and walking out the door without thinking twice about it

#same with shaving body hair #people will act like you're 'doing it' for some specific reason & it's like ..i'm literally not *doing* anything #it is a non-action #I am passively living & hair grows

tags by closet-keys

hope is a skill

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

What is Your Curse?

Take the quiz here!

i think my problem is that i dont have enough little ceramic pomegranates

Refreshing!