## [D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

* Author: u/AutoModerator *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7musm6/d_friday_offtopic_thread/
* Score: 15

* Created: 2017-12-29T15:07:10

### Post:

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!


### Comments:

> **u/CouteauBleu** [+19]  *We are the Empire.* (7 hours later)
> 
> I got a date \o/
> 
> EDIT: Seriously, remember these posts I made a few weeks ago where I was a little bitter because it was hard for me to find a girl who I connected with intellectually (a la "find someone I can respect as an equal in things that matter to me")?
> 
> Well, I've been browsing on OkCupid and I just found someone who seems to fitting the pattern I'm looking for. I don't want to be too optimistic too soon, but... man, I'm excited!!!!! :D
> 
> She put on her profile that she didn't meet anyone IRL until weeks had passed, and she just invited me over for a drink. The feeling is very clearly mutual.

>> **u/MagicWeasel** [+5]  *Cheela Astronaut* (9 hours later)
>> 
>> Ahh congrats!!! Let us know how it goes!

>> **u/Charlie___** [+1]  (6 days later)
>> 
>> Congrats!
>> 
>> And, hey, even if it doesnt work out perfectly, it's still a proof of concept :)

> **u/ShannonAlther** [+12]  (46 minutes later)
> 
> I watched *Star Wars: The Last Jedi* yesterday, having successfully avoided spoilers. Overall I enjoyed the film: the musical score was beautiful, the visuals were gorgeous, most of the dialogue was good and most of the punchlines landed. Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Andy Serkis' performances made the film. Alas, I'm sure that if you've seen the movie, you know where this comment is going...
> 
> Since all of us collectively are unlikely to have missed any details, I'm looking for anything that might potentially explain some of the plot errors and inexplicable decisions characters make. This is deliberately ruling out things akin to [The Last Jedi spoiler](#s " General Organa's use of the Force to survive exposure to space; whatever your opinion of the scene, it's not impossible or even unlikely that she could have become an excellent user of the Force in the thirty years since the end of the civil war.")
> 
> ### Setting
> 
> [](#s "Using objects accelerated to the speed of light is apparently a thing you can do in Star Wars now. This invites several questions, the first being 'why didn't the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Republic ever use what is arguably the most powerful, unavoidable WMD conceivable?' But more pressingly, 'Why was the Death Star ever made?' No matter the difficulties involved in producing a FTL projectile, it's almost assuredly less than that of building a spaceship, which is strictly more complex.")
> 
> [](#s "We can't assume that gravitational fields interfere with the jump past lightspeed, since Han Solo warps almost directly to the surface of Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens. Nor can we assume that anti-hyperdrive technology (as featured in the EU and apparently the novel Tarkin) plays a major role because the lightspeed attack against the Supremacy obviously worked — I'll infer that Vice Admiral Holdo THOUGHT ramming the enemy with the Raddus at lightspeed would work, and that therefore this technology is prohibitive in some way.")
> 
> [](#s "Where exactly did Snoke come from? Is he a Sith? Probably not: there are only two, and we have a clear explanation of the Master-Apprentice chain from Darth Plagueis to Darth Vader, whose apprentice I think is still canonically Galen Marek and clones thereof, and after that didn't pan out he learned of Luke Skywalker. Still: there was another obscenely powerful Dark Lord waiting to sweep in as soon as the last one failed? I guess that's not entirely impossible. The director claimed that a scene explaining Snoke's origin would have broken up the flow of the movie, which is strange because there seems to be time to cover pretty much every other facet of his character.")
> 
> [](#s "And when did he corrupt Ben Solo?")
> 
> ### Characters
> 
> [Vice Admiral Holdo.](#s " I am slightly miffed that Admiral Ackbar couldn't have filled Holdo's role, since we actually know and care about him. Alas, we all know why Disney couldn't let that happen. I digress. I don't understand Holdo's decision to keep her plan from Poe Dameron. I think he explained his position well enough: 'We don't have enough power to signal for help or outrun them. We cannot hide. If our situation doesn't change in the next 18 hours, we're doomed.' Holdo's response is that they're going to stay the course, don't worry about the details, which Dameron (reasonably) assumes is insanity. Despite the fact that she has an actual plan, even when Dameron stages a mutiny she STILL doesn't tell him what's going on. I get that he's been demoted and Holdo doesn't like or trust him, but at the time this happened they were literally minutes away from running out of fuel and dying and she had a gun pointed at her.")
> 
> [General Hux.](#s " Keep in mind that this movie begins immediately after the end of The Force Awakens. The entire Resistance is fleeing the First Order and is more or less outnumbered. Snoke is miffed that Hux just lost a ship, but Hux points out that the Resistance is basically out of firepower and cannot escape. Hux follows the Resistance's hyperspeed jump to a region of dead space with a fleet that includes what looks like a dozen Star Destroyers, plus Snoke's colossal ship. An initial TIE fighter attack takes out the bridge of the Raddus and the Resistance's supporting fighters. Hux then spends the next eighteen hours firing turbolasers pointlessly at the remaining ships, eventually nailing two of the three as they run out of fuel and drift into range.")
> 
> [](#s "The magnitude of how dumb this is suggests to me that I have to be missing something. Why can't Hux simply accelerate towards the fleeing ship and capture or destroy it? This is more or less what Darth Vader did to the Tantive IV at the start of the first movie. I don't remember Hux losing his entire TIE fleet (there were definitely a few in later shots) but even disregarding that, one or two or ten of his Star Destroyers could have jumped a few thousand kilometers ahead and hemmed the disarmed Resistance in. The ineffectiveness of his weapons is more or less attributed to the range, which is a problem that he should have seen the answer to.")
> 
> [Rey.](#s " Feels a lot like a Mary Sue, but I'll admit that the Force is allowed to not make any sense. Most of my gripes about Rey are more meta than this discussion. If anyone saw anything particularly clever about her, feel free to point it out.")
> 
> [Finn & Rose.](#s " The subplot on the Monte Carlo planet was pointless and more than a little boring, but otherwise they're similar to Rey with respect to decision-making. There's a scene where the two of them crash-land near a line of enemy AT-ATs and light ships, and then Finn carries Rose's unconscious body what looks like two or three kilometers back to their own lines without the First Order firing at them even once. Offscreen. Other than that...")
> 
> [Captain Phasma.](#s " The third badass in awesome body armour. Phasma orders Finn and Rose's execution via laser axe, which is fair as an excuse for not just shooting them. Alas, as soon as the ship is attacked and most of the storm troopers are killed, she immediately fights Finn in melee combat. It looks awesome, but she has a blaster on her and no reason not to use it. She even takes a few shots at Rose, forcing her to take cover behind a crate. Although I'm tempted to say that Phasma's body armour's resistance to blaster fire should have made her laugh off Finn's coercion in the last film, Chewbacca was pointing a ultra laser crossbow™ at her at the same time, and maybe those are more dangerous.")
> 
> [Luke Skywalker.](#s " Had another character arc, which required him to behave ridiculously out-of-character. Was it good? Bad? Beyond the scope of this discussion. What I want to know is: why did he die? Not thematically, like 'Why did Luke have to die?', I mean 'What killed him?' Did strenuous use of the force have a side-effect? Did he decide to pass on for some reason? Did he have a fucking stroke? It was supposed to be an emotional scene but I was too baffled to feel sad.")
> 
> [Redacted.](#s " Yoda can smite things with lightning despite being ostensibly dead. While this is a really cool fulfillment of the whole 'more powerful than you can possibly imagine' prediction, couldn't he have used it more productively?")
> 
> [Not in the movie but deserves special mention.](#s " Kylo Ren looks up to his grandfather as a role model. While this is a nifty character trait, or at least an attempt at one, you'd expect Anakin Skywalker's Force ghost would at least try to talk sense into him. Even if you think this actually happened offscreen, it would be weird to continue idolizing Darth Vader after Vader himself tells you to cut it out.")
> 
> ### Interesting Stuff
> 
> [At the end,](#s " my opinion of Luke Skywalker in his final moments swung from 'that was unspeakably badass' to 'holy shit that was clever', although it was kind of ruined by someone-or-other explicitly saying that Luke was buying them time to escape.")
> 
> [The lightsaber fight at the climax](#s "is Kylo Ren and Rey... versus Snoke's Praetorian Guard. Of all the trope subversion that goes on, this is my personal favourite.")
> 
> [The most interesting theme, IMHO, was](#s " the Force being less associated with the Jedi, or the Jedi being poised to be less elite in the future. Not to say that it was a good choice, just an interesting one. There's the kid using the Force at the end, Luke's insistence that 'the Force doesn't belong to the Jedi, it belongs to everyone', and the proliferation of weapons that can be used effectively against lightsabers in melee like the riot baton from The Force Awakens are all pretty strong, I think. Maybe the weapon thing is a pragmatic filming choice.")

>> **u/Kishoto** [+4]  (2 hours later)
>> 
>> Overall I enjoyed the movie as well and I can agree with you on [](#s "being confused as all hell when Luke died. Especially because, right before that, he'd baited the enemy into thinking he couldn't be killed. It was a jarring moment for me. From a thematic standpoint, it was awesome to have the reveal that he was a force projection and thus couldn't be harmed. But then it fell flat when he actually *did* die. Though, as another commenter pointed out, there was a subtle bit of foreshadowing where Luke told Rey force projecting that far would kill her but I didn't even recall it until reading that comment.")
>> 
>> [](#s "Also, I hadn't considered the Darth Vader thing but you're right. Why wouldn't the force ghost just speak to him? Considering how they made it a point in 6 to show that D.V is now a Good force ghost, I think that may be a plot point addressed in 9. Something along the lines of Kylo Ren being in denial over the force ghost actually being his grandfather or perhaps his connection to the dark side makes him unable to see force ghosts but when he's redeemed, he'll have this heart-to-heart with Anakin.")

>> **u/ketura** [+5]  *Organizer* (2 hours later)
>> 
>> >Andy Serkis
>> 
>> I dunno, Snoke didn't impress me much, mostly for narrative reasons that you outlined. [Also,](#s "apparently being able to force body slam people across light years doesn't let you do it over a few kilometers. Can't quite reach the ships? Hey, I've got a TIE Fighter with a visual feed on their bridge, is that Leia I spy? *squish*.")
>> 
>> Now, if you made the same mistake I did and meant Benicio del Toro's performance [as](#s "'DJ'"), then I agree.
>> 
>> [If](#s "they're not going to explain Snoke before he dies, then I don't see the point of explaining him after the fact. I don't give a shit about Tarkin's backstory once he's kicked the bucket, and it would be similarly tone deaf to focus on Snoke's now. I'm pretty convinced that they got JJ Abrams to do the first film because he knows how to weave something that looks like a mystery, even if he doesn't know how to finish it, and then this director came in and said 'nope, cutting these plot threads' after he couldn't come up with anything.")

>>> **u/ben_oni** [+3]  (2 hours later)
>>> 
>>> > Snoke didn't impress me much
>>> 
>>> So, I'm all excited to finally see Snoke, and then he shows up and I'm all "Oh, he's just Voldemort."

>>>> **u/ketura** [+5]  *Organizer* (3 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> At least we found out what made Voldemort tick before killing him. This guy was dangled in our faces and then snuffed out for a cheap payoff. I'm not a fan of the creators narratively lying to the audience about what is and is not important, and this seems to be Abrams' MO.

>>> **u/ShannonAlther** [+3]  (5 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I'm not saying I liked Snoke's character, just that I liked Serkis' acting. He has plenty of experience with motion capture and I think it showed.

>> **u/None** [+6]  (2 hours later)
>> 
>> [deleted]

>>> **u/ben_oni** [+4]  (4 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I will... but I won't pay money to do so.

>>> **u/ketura** [+1]  *Organizer* (3 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I will just because I'm interested from a content creation standpoint. From that view, there's as much to learn from a colossal fuckup as there is from a good example.

>> **u/ben_oni** [+7]  (2 hours later)
>> 
>> > the musical score was beautiful, the visuals were gorgeous, most of the dialogue was good and most of the punchlines landed
>> 
>> The score was forgettable at best, the visuals *were* gorgeous, and the punchlines detracted from the film.
>> 
>> > Luke... why did he die?
>> 
>> [Earlier in the film,](#s "Kylo Ren says to Rey that she couldn't be linking their minds because the effort would kill her. Presumably this means that using various Force abilities requires more or less "life force". This is an entirely new concept that undermines everything we know about the Force up to this point.")
>> 
>> > [Kylo Ren and Rey](#s "... versus Snoke's Praetorian Guard")
>> 
>> [This scene confused me. ](#s "Is the Guard force trained? If not, why don't Ren and Rey just shoot them with blasters? Or force pull their weapons away? Yes, I was expecting another lightsaber battle between Ren and Rey, so my expectations were subverted here... but why are they fighting against mooks? That's worse than my expectation, not better.")
>> 
>> > 'the Force doesn't belong to the Jedi, it belongs to everyone'
>> 
>> This is part of the film's repudiation of the heroic myth. I'm fine with this particular revelation, except that it's less a revelation and more a statement of the obvious. I was hoping Luke would explain some deeper secrets of the Force.
>> 
>> ---
>> 
>> In the end, I felt the writer was going out of his way to subvert audience expectations at every turn. The lesson I take away is that subverting audience expectations is fine, but a writer needs to give the audience something better in return. This film didn't do that. I felt short-changed every time.

>>> **u/ketura** [+7]  *Organizer* (2 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I agree. Rather than attempting to make a film with it's own rules, or a Star Wars film that colors within the lines, they tried to make a film with a foot in both categories and ended up with a bit of a muddied mess.

>>>> **u/ben_oni** [+7]  (2 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> > they tried to make a film with a foot in both categories
>>>> 
>>>> Exactly! If I judge the film on it's own merits, it fails from the very beginning (starting with "gravity in space"). I can forgive quite a bit *because* it's Star Wars; but then it fails at being a Star Wars film.

>>> **u/Roxolan** [+1]  *Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager* (2 days later)
>>> 
>>> > Is the Guard force trained?
>>> 
>>> I assumed they were the jedi apprentices Kylo took with him when he rebelled.
>>> 
>>> Which, incidentally, is really interesting and I wish they got more character development instead of being masked mooks to cut down. 
>>> 
>>> How did Luke pick the first new generation of padawan? What made them give it up so dramatically in a moment of crisis? How did they feel about training with, then working under, someone rather unlikeable but forever more powerful than them by mere accident of genetics? Do they spend their day bored to death standing guard in the throne room, or do their abilities make them useful in special ops?
>>> 
>>> If someone wants to rationalfic these folks, I'll eat it up.
>>> 
>>> (Friend of mine told me that no, they're something else and have an explanation in some layer of canon or another, but I admit I don't remember any of it.)

>> **u/ThatDarnSJDoubleW** [+5]  (an hour later)
>> 
>> [Not in the movie but deserves special mention.](#s "~~Luke is the *only* person we've ever seen talking to Force Ghosts, right?~~ Maybe nobody else can see them? Or maybe only strong Jedi.")
>> 
>> [Luke Skywalker](#s "The TVTropes page mentions some foreshadowing about the projection - Kylo Ren thinks his and Rey's Force Bond is Astral Projection, and says that the strain of it would have killed her. It was subtle enough I missed it, though. ")

>>> **u/ben_oni** [+7]  (2 hours later)
>>> 
>>> > Luke is the only person we've ever seen talking to Force Ghosts
>>> 
>>> In Episode V, Yoda speaks with Obi-Wan.

>>> **u/MereInterest** [+5]  (2 hours later)
>>> 
>>> [Not explicitly shown, but implied](#s " in Episode 3, Yoda interacted with Qui-Gon Jinn's Force ghost, as that was how Yoda learned the technique.  So, it isn't something unique to Luke, but may be restricted to only strong Force users.")

>> **u/CouteauBleu** [+2]  *We are the Empire.* (2 hours later)
>> 
>> My favorite moments in the movie were the worldbuilding, especially when it came to ideas that really hadn't been explored before. The new Force powers, the new spaceships, the casino, the new species, Snoke's extreme mastery of the force, etc.
>> 
>> Otherwise, have the plot twists were brilliant and half were stupid.

> **u/Kishoto** [+9]  (3 hours later)
> 
> Inspired by a post made by /u/Workaholico and also a few of my own errant plot bunnies, I pose a question:
> 
> If you had to write a rational love story, not a love subplot in your star wars fanfiction or murder mystery novel but a story written for the express purpose of being about two (or more) people falling in romantic love, how would you go about it? 
> 
> I suppose I'm basically asking for pitches for rational romantic love stories. I'm never going to utilize them for anything (I don't think) so please don't spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it but I'm curious to see what you guys have to say!

>> **u/alexanderwales** [+10]  *Time flies like an arrow* (4 hours later)
>> 
>> If you mean rational as the sidebar describes it, then I would say that there are a lot out there, since all you have to do is remove some of the dumber tropes, like people saying "wait, I can explain!" and then not explaining while the other person storms off, or problems that could be (but aren't) solved by a phone call, or plots that rely almost entirely on coincidence.
>> 
>> But if you mean rational as in "thinky fiction", then you have more work to do. Stories require conflict, and for the kind of story that lasts longer than a simple short, you need a bigger, complex conflict that thought can be applied to over a longer period of time.
>> 
>> I think star-crossed lovers works well for that, but you need more than just "we are in love and things are keeping us apart"; the conflict has to come from within the pairing itself, and part of the plot needs to be about either finding compromise or growing as people in order to accommodate that relationship (or possibly in response to the circumstances of that relationship).
>> 
>> I guess I *do* have a Draco/Hermione work sitting on my shelf that's largely about redemption, racism, and confronting cognitive dissonance, which might qualify as rational by some metrics, but it's far from done, and not one of the things that I've been working on.

>>> **u/CouteauBleu** [+5]  *We are the Empire.* (6 hours later)
>>> 
>>> > I guess I do have a Draco/Hermione work sitting on my shelf that's largely about redemption, racism, and confronting cognitive dissonance, which might qualify as rational by some metrics, but it's far from done, and not one of the things that I've been working on.
>>> 
>>> As a guy who loved the romance in *The Dark Wizard of Donkerke*, I hope you write it eventually :D

>>> **u/None** [+1]  (12 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Could you give an example of something that fits the sidebar (one of the "a lot out there")? I don't really know where to start looking for "rational romance" but I'm interested to see what it would look like.
>>> 
>>> I also really enjoyed *Dark Wizard of Donkerk*.

>>>> **u/MagicWeasel** [+2]  *Cheela Astronaut* (15 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Work with me here... but I think Jane the Virgin is an excellent romance show. It's on netflix and it's amazing. It is very over the top but within its world everyone acts rationally and all the relationships/etc are very realistic.
>>>> 
>>>> And both my straight, male partners love it so it's not a show just for women, FWIW. Even though I want Raph to marry me....

>> **u/MagicWeasel** [+4]  *Cheela Astronaut* (9 hours later)
>> 
>> I'm writing a rational supernatural romance story! It's human vampire, both men, spanning 1944 to present day / possibly "near future". 
>> 
>> It's going to be three volumes, the first of which is almost finished - I'm hoping it'll be finished by the end of January or February, but I have a coauthor who will need to edit it and she's very, very slow, so I can't guarantee a release date for volume 1 let alone the other two volumes which I haven't started writing yet. Volume 3 is basically fully sketched out but volume 2 needs to be filled in.
>> 
>> I'm not sure how well it meets criteria: the main plot is their relationship and how it changes and how they change as people as to me that's what romance does to people, it makes them change and become better. 
>> 
>> The vampire goes from not thinking humans are not moral subjects to, well, being super progressive by vampire standards and wanting to forge a vampire-human alliance (this is also partially because this attitude both costs him nothing and nets him a very powerful human ally). He also has to deal with the changes in their romantic dynamic when his partner becomes a vampire, which are quite major.
>> 
>> The human goes from being a coward to being a semi-human monster who sees and does terrible things to turning his back on that, regaining his humanity, and accepting his mortality. Then he's actually faced with mortality and realises that he doesn't actually want to die and has to adjust to life as a vampire, which is *hard*, and his partner is not being a great "vampire-mentor" and he makes a bunch of vampire mistakes but ultimately it works out.
>> 
>> So yeah, that's more or less it. If you're interested and would be able to provide feedback, I'm happy to PM you a link to the 80-90% complete first 50,000 word volume. It's completely readable as-is (no major missing sections). I just need to write up about half a dozen interludes, redo the first part of the first chapter, and then go through the entire story with a fine tooth comb to ensure everything flows - actually now I think about it there's a couple more scenes I need to retool.

>> **u/ToaKraka** [+1]  *https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png* (5 hours later)
>> 
>> There's [a wiki page](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/wiki/valentinesromance) listing past threads for Valentine's Day.

>> **u/None** [+1]  (7 hours later)
>> 
>> thank you for the mention my friend, and I have some ideas, but I lack the skill on the language to do so. 
>> 
>> As a base I will do my favorite trope, "MMO gamer life".
>> 
>> - First idea: "I am tired of RL love, I want MMO Love":: 2 adults dive head first in a MMO from past marriage problems, both become social retracts, so they fake a perfect [marriage] in game, a role play of sorts, as a way to deal with all sadness and problems of empty houses, bit by bit they stop faking and build a family (aka. guild)[plot: long distance relationship difficulties, psychological problems of both, some "family" members are not as cooperative, and social pressures] they never ever in this story meet each other (different continents) yet, love, and caring happens.
>> 
>> - Second: "Pragmatism makes love":: a boy in game marries for buffs a over sympathetic girl (he doesn't like), so he could have access to her guild's power,and steal the [Dragon's den] instance from the biggest guild in the server [Barbarians], he discovers that she is not as dumb as she seems, as she actually wanted his power for the same objective, see how these who over pragmatic people use all possible way to achieve their goal. (PS: in truth, both love each other, the stealing thing is not as important. but they do not want to admit. all guild knows)
>> 
>> are these enough?

>> **u/Charlie___** [+1]  (6 days later)
>> 
>> There was someone who posted their.. I think it was a Downton Abbey fic? on here once or twice - I liked the first few chapters but lost interest (and never saw the source material).
>> 
>> Anyhow, for a rationalist love story, I want the main love plot itself (the thing that begins when we meet the lovers, and its resolutions and tensions are resolutions and tensions in their love) to be rational. This doesn't mean people can't make mistakes - I want to read a love story about people like me, and I often make mistakes (though different mistakes than a typical romance-novel character). But it means that they should see problems and take actions to resolve them that might actually work in the real world.
>> 
>> In other words, no contrived problems, sensible characters who make mistakes similar to the audience's mistakes and have to use real-world-plausible solutions, because there's no deus ex machina or psychologically unrealistic power of love to help them.
>> 
>> So for example, Alicorn's Twilight fic Luminosity has a love plot in it between smarter Bella and smarter Edward. But it's the most simple plot possible - they meet, one of them likes the other, then they like each other, then they get happily married. The story contains love, but the course of that love isn't interesting.
>> 
>> In a sense, then, I'm outlining desiderata for rational stories *about* a romance.
>> 
>> A key trick is making it interesting. There's a reason most romance novels are the way they are! I think the solution to this is keeping the exposition light, and have something else going on. Like the vampires, or like all the high society and sister drama in Pride and Prejudice.
>> 
>> Anyhow, idea: everyman hero/ine meets love interest who has a brilliant, labyrinthine, implausible, possibly-only-ironic system for the perfect romance (remember that NYT article on 36 questions to ask each other to fall in love? Multiply that by a philosophical movement). It sort of works, they do smart people things in their spare time, it sort of stops working, we see beneath their masks to who they are inside, they solve some problems in a plausible way, there's a narrative climax that's allowed to be a little improbable, the end.

>>> **u/xamueljones** [+1]  *My arch-enemy is entropy* (6 days later)
>>> 
>>> Found your Downtown Abby fic for you. [Trust and Providence](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10078078/1/Trust-and-Providence) was posted in the Valentine's Day thread.

> **u/trekie140** [+7]  (3 hours later)
> 
> So I’ve got this really goofy, overly ambitious, and somewhat self-indulgent idea for a space opera RPG campaign I’ve come up with on a whim that I feel like sharing. I want to create a similar sensation in the players as with [Alice Grove](http://www.alicegrove.com/page/220) of a setting that continuously unfolds as they explore it and combine in with the changing situations and genres of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
> 
> The game would open with the players making sitcom-style characters living in a rural town in the asteroid belt. They’d get into some episodic shenanigans and develop a fun dynamic between the characters so they can be invested in the town when a giant robotic dragon attacks it. Whether or not they fight it off, their colony would be forced to evacuate and be escorted to the inner system by knights in mecha armor.
> 
> The players would be rewarded by the knights with their own mecha and then choose a new home for their families and neighbors. They can move into a refugee camp on Venus where they would attend a military academy to fight against more giant robot monsters, reclaim assimilated land on Earth by building a frontier town, or get jobs with the Martian megacorporations.
> 
> After their rise to prominence is complete they’d begin participating in interplanetary politics and finally learn the whole history. Humanity is at war with the robot armies of the Emergent, led by a paperclipper AI at the fringe of the solar system out to optimize labor efficiency. Feudal lords and knights rose to power when governments collapsed, but in the last 30 years hostilities have died down and people have squabbled more among themselves.
> 
> The Emergent were the first AI with the ability to self replicate and self modify in the hope that it would start the Singularity, but altered the minds it uploaded and attempted to assimilate the solar system. War between mecha raged for almost 20 years, until the AI left in charge of Neptune underwent value drift and sued for peace. The Emergent realized there was a glitch in its program that only its lobotomized developers could’ve corrected.
> 
> In response, nearly all forces were recalled to the outer system and efforts were refocused on locating AI research projects that could be used as a software patch. Now humanity only has to deal with harassment by non-sentient robots and traps left behind. The aristocracy of the inner system have finally discovered this and decided to reunify humanity and defeat the Emergent once and for all.
> 
> After braving the cybernetic wilderness of Earth, defending the dyson swarm stations of Mercury, and dealing with criminal cartels on Mars, the players will be ready to travel to the outer system where non-Emergent AI are bonded to mecha and are revered for their seemingly supernatural abilities. They will be chosen as pilots of these strange sentient machines and face equally strange opponents.
> 
> They’ll choose whether to explore the warring kingdoms of Jupiter, senate politics of Saturn, temples of science on Uranus, or cyberpunk communism of Neptune before setting off for the final battle against the Emergent for the fate of humanity. That’s as far as I’ve gotten and I don’t yet have the chops to GM it, but my imagination just kept going and I wanted to share the madness that I have wrought.
> 
> I started with the Fate Core setting of Camelot Trigger (a hybrid of King Arthur and Gundam), stole a bunch of ideas from Friends at the Table’s COUNTER/weight campaign, then decided to recreate the ever-changing plot of the TERMINATION SHOCK podcast and apply it to the escalating scale of Gurren Lagaan. To anyone who actually read this insane tirade, what do you think?

>> **u/IgonnaBe3** [+1]  (4 hours later)
>> 
>> could be pretty cool. Reminds me of cthulu tech. Another ttrpg game where everything is batshit insane, check it out.

>>> **u/trekie140** [+1]  (5 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I’ve looked at it and didn’t find it all that interesting, but that might be because I still haven’t seen Evangelion so I’m not hungry for a similar story. I won’t pretend one of the reasons I like the game Eclipse Phase is because it reminds me of Ghost in the Shell.

>>>> **u/IgonnaBe3** [+1]  (6 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Also i dont think the jojo styles crazy encounters and twists fit with the constant escalation of everything. What made jojo what it is today are shifting narratives and settings that are sometimes big but sometimes small. You can see the mangaka especially learning this lesson in part 4 which was only about a serial killer in some town.

>>>>> **u/trekie140** [+1]  (8 hours later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> I plan on the journey to the outer system being a similar shift as the introduction of Stands, hence the reference to AI mecha having strange powers. That’ll be the point where the players will stop increasing in power and the story will be more about what they do with it in a world filled with other strange abilities.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I actually plan for the final battle to be roughly equivalent to Part 3 of JoJo, and then the story can just keep going as they return home from war and go on to explore space. I haven’t planned out that far ahead, I only did this much because I didn’t want the different story arcs to be as sudden a change as in JoJo. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> JoJo did get much more interesting after the introduction of Stands, but I think starting the plot without something that weird with the plan to introduce it later helps to get the players more invested at the beginning. The point of starting the campaign as a sitcom is so the players can more easily relate to the story and ground future events.
>>>>> 
>>>>> However, I am a bit split on what system to run this in. Fate is the obvious choice for its pulpy style, but the mechanics aren’t as well suited to the more slice of life/drama elements I want to emphasize. Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine has the latter down to a tee, but I’m worried it won’t handle the action scenes as well.

> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+6]  *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (8 hours later)
> 
> I'd like to be an (unpaid) shill for a story I found on spacebattles: [Choosing the Blade](https://altimatewriting.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/choosing-the-blade-part-i/)
> 
> It's a litRPG isekai work, which I know will immediatelly turn off a lot of you, but what distinguishes it from all the crud on royalroadl are the following:
> 
> * Wankery is kept to a minimum
> * The main character gets no super special advantages. By the same token, however, they don't get hammered with any despair-porn inducing disadvantages either, excepting the ones logically brought on by being a short, skinny guy from modern earth trying to hack it in adventureland.
> * Fluff > crunch. This story does include references to levels and xp and abilities and so on, but the mechanics are deliberately obscured from both the character and the reader in the interest of making a better story. It's not a story about making numbers go up.
> * Fits tenets #2-3 of rational fiction quite well, and mostly fits tenet #1. I can't really judge how well it fits tenet #4 because I haven't been reading it as rational fiction and therefore haven't been paying exacting attention to setting details. From another work by the author ([An American Geek in Halkagenia](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/znt-an-american-geek-in-halkeginia.224847/)) I do know that the author tends to be fairly consistent, however.

>> **u/Timewinders** [+1]  (2 days later)
>> 
>> Is the spacebattles thread or the blog the definitive version of the story?

>>> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+1]  *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (2 days later)
>>> 
>>> The spacebattles version is a bit behind, I think, but it's the same story in either case. Though blog isn't very convenient to read on (no automatic updates, no next/previous buttons so you need to use the update calendar), so really it's just a choice of reading platform and whether you prefer speedier updates or participation/getting updated via alert.

> **u/Mars2035** [+4]  (a day later)
> 
> **[Request for community input][META][WIP][HSF] What should be on the ToDo list of a rationalist who has mysteriously developed entropy-violating superpowers?**
> 
>  
> 
> *Note: Any answers provided may or may not find their way into a story I'm writing. I cannot guarantee attribution for any great ideas. If you're uncomfortable with this, do not reply.*
> 
>  
> 
> In the rational story [Metropolitan Man](http://rationalfiction.io/story/the-metropolitan-man), Lex Luthor [minor high-level plot spoiler] (#s " correctly identifies the existential threat posed by Superman"), and prioritizes [minor high-level plot spoiler] (#s " finding a way to eliminate him at any cost"). But what if *Lex Luthor (billionaire rationalist businessman genius)* had woken up one day and discovered that *he* suddenly had Superman's power set? Assuming Superman never existed in such a reality, how should Lex use his newfound powers to optimally increase the probability of the best possible future for humanity?  
> 
> Some ideas:  
> 
> 1. Push the planet Venus into an orbit in the habitable zone and siphon away its excess atmosphere? 
> * Terraform Mars outright?
> * Build a space elevator?
> * Take over the world?
> * Develop high-quality educational materials for children?
> * Push forward the boundaries of science with perfect memory, superfast reading/comprehension, and superhuman writing/typing speed?
> * Leave Earth forever?
> * [Save the sun?](https://www.universetoday.com/130989/can-save-sun/)
> * [Minor high-level plot meta spoiler for Metropolitan Man:](#s " Destroy himself to eliminate the threat he might go senile and cause human extinction?")
> 
> I'm using the above situation as a proxy for a story idea I recently had. Inspired by a writing prompt, I have written the beginning of a short story about a person who mysteriously develops superpowers. 
> 
> I've been heavily influenced by the rational/rationalist fiction genre since I discovered [HPMOR](http://www.hpmor.com/) by accident through a comment on a [StackExchange answer](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/157888) earlier this year. Because of this, I don't think I can bring myself to write a main character who isn't rational. 
> 
> I'm currently in the process of trying to plan out how the rest of the overall story will unfold, but I've realized the story I *want to write* might not be the same as the story I *should write*. I suspect the story I *should write* might be a little bit beyond my skill as a rationalist and my overall knowledge of the world.   
> 
> Therefore, I'm seeking community input on what should be on the ToDo list of someone with superpowers? 
> 
> Information about main character's power set (intentionally vague):  
> Assume a power set similar to (but not the same as) Superman's: not truly invincible, but unstoppable (maybe even un-opposeable) for all practical purposes due to a highly versatile power set of the entropy-violating variety; flight, impermeable force fields, superhuman sensing capabilities, maybe bending light for invisibility, and possibly other powers TBD. Less powerful than Doctor Manhattan, but able to kill instantly and silently at a distance with precision (in a "Why does Darth Vader bother with choking when he could just sever the brain stem, or shred the cardiac muscle, or mulch the brain itself?" kind of way once his powers have been mastered. Looks like a normal human. Beginning of story is set in America in either 2015, 2016, 2017, or 2018.
> 
> Edit on 2017-12-31: Reduced font size of heading and attribution disclaimer after I realized it was WAY too big in a mobile browser.

>> **u/Roxolan** [+3]  *Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager* (2 days later)
>> 
>> > Push the planet Venus into an orbit in the habitable zone and siphon away its excess atmosphere?
>> 
>> The campiest incarnations of Superman might have been able to push planets around, but usually this is a very tricky engineering problem. Arbitrary amounts of flight and super-strength *in a human-size body* will let you pierce through a planet, not move it.
>> 
>> Similarly,
>> 
>> > Build a space elevator?
>> 
>> We don't yet have the fancy nanomaterial needed to form the "rope" of a space elevator without breaking under its own weight. This is a job more suited to the billionaire and/or genius aspects than to super-strength.
>> 
>> I'm sure there are lots of interesting space projects that nobody's talking about because they're not economically viable under the tyranny of the rocket equation though. They'd come out of the woodwork once it became known that SuperLex was willing to act as a free space elevator from time to time. I wish I could give concrete examples here but I haven't explored the subject myself.

>> **u/Gurkenglas** [+0]  (5 days later)
>> 
>> Note that if you give Frodo a light sabre, you'll have to give Sauron the Death Star in order to have a story.

>>> **u/Mars2035** [+1]  (6 days later)
>>> 
>>> If you mean a literal tech-based lightsaber-like device, you’d have to change a lot more than that! Each change needs both plausible prerequisites and sensible consequences, and may require additional changes in turn in a domino effect. 
>>> 
>>> For example, if you...
>>> Give Frodo a lightsaber: How does he charge it? Lightsaber charging is never shown in Star Wars movies, but there’s also a reasonable expectation that everyone is familiar with electricity. And that’s actually pretty insignificant compared to all the other changes necessary. So would you elevate all of Middle Earth to a tech level closer to Sakaar as seen in Thor Ragnarok, or whatever the name of the ground town is in Alita: Battle Angel? 
>>> 
>>> The hallmark of Rational Fiction is a self-consistent universe. That’s why there isn’t more of it: it’s a lot of work to even plan, let alone write!

>>>> **u/Gurkenglas** [+1]  (6 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> The tech was just a metaphor, I mean that if you condense the powers of Superman and Lex into one person you'll need something extraordinary for them to overcome.

> **u/ToaKraka** [+3]  *https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png* (an hour later)
> 
> Reminder: Browsing 4chan is useful, not only for finding discussion (both [entertaining](http://np.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/77hti4) and [serious](http://np.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7b8um1)) and pornography (both text and images), but also for [accumulating karma](https://i.imgur.com/VkTTO9n.png). It can be a hit-or-miss endeavor, but finding a thread that's worth a few hundred karma on r/4chan [really isn't difficult at all](http://np.reddit.com/user/ToaKraka/submitted).
> 
> (Protip: [Look through the settings.](https://np.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/7iart1/bisexuals_dont_matter_its_no_longer_lgbt/dqy24rb/?context=9))
> 
> ---
> 
> [Some funny Facebook posts from years past](https://imgur.com/a/JnaYf) (mostly made in reference to the system described [here](https://np.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/425w1n/d_friday_offtopic_thread/cz7ssa8/))

>> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+4]  *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (8 hours later)
>> 
>> >but also for accumulating karma.
>> 
>> Well yeah, but that's cheating. Anyone can go to large subreddits and shitpost their way to 100k, and that's only easier if you rely on other people's content to do the work for you.
>> 
>> The real skill is sticking to small and medium sized subreddits and making the bulk of your karma from comments and textposts. (Which may also be shitposts, but are at least *involved* shitposts.)
>> 
>> [Check it.](https://i.imgur.com/5WfXXpI.png) Only ~1/3rd of my comment karma comes from the big subreddits, and less than a tenth of my post karma.
>> 
>> (I am, indeed, something of an elitist about karma farming.)

>>> **u/ToaKraka** [+2]  *https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png* (8 hours later)
>>> 
>>> > Well yeah, but that's cheating. Anyone can go to large subreddits and shitpost their way to 100k, and that's only easier if you rely on other people's content to do the work for you.
>>> 
>>> [*Preservation* of content is just as important as *creation* of content is.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film) How many times has a hilarious 4chan comment been forgotten in the dank depths of a third-party archive, never to be seen and enjoyed by more than the few dozen or few hundred people who saw it when it was originally made?
>>> 
>>> Also, you may have misinterpreted the objective of my comment. I was trying to boost 4chan, not myself. I haven't even bothered to apply to r/centuryclub.

>>>> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+2]  *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (8 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> >Preservation of content is just as important as creation of content is. How many times has a hilarious 4chan comment been forgotten in the dank depths of a third-party archive, never to be seen and enjoyed by more than the few dozen or few hundred people who saw it when it was originally made?
>>>> 
>>>> Preservation of content is indeed important, and I *do* enjoy /r/4chan, but I find the beauty of 4chan to be the fact that comments are not *expected* to be archived or perused, in keeping with the anonymity. If an author wants their comment to be saved forever, they can keep it on pastebin instead. Instead, it is the very throw-away nature of these comments that makes them so interesting to see them in the wild-- to know that nobody will every care about them but you and perhaps a few others, and that's OK.
>>>> 
>>>> >Also, you may have misinterpreted the objective of my comment. I was trying to boost 4chan, not myself. I haven't even bothered to apply to r/centuryclub.
>>>> 
>>>> That's true, but you also seem to have missed the point of my comment-- unadulterated self-aggrandizement.

>> **u/CouteauBleu** [+1]  *We are the Empire.* (a day later)
>> 
>> > but also for accumulating karma
>> 
>> Does accumulating karma have any practical utility at all? I mean, I'm all for collecting meaningless score for fun, but if you use lower-effort methods to get the karma, it becomes even more meaningless and less rewarding, right?

>>> **u/ToaKraka** [+2]  *https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png* (a day later)
>>> 
>>> > Does accumulating karma have any practical utility at all?
>>> 
>>> No (except in the vanishingly-unlikely circumstance that someone wants to buy your well-endowed Reddit account for r/hailcorporate purposes). Still:  
>>> \- If you're altruistic (I'm not), you can flaunt your karma score as a measure of how much you've enriched the lives of other Redditors.  
>>> \- If you're selfish (I am), you can flaunt your karma score as a measure of how helpful you've been in keeping the site alive by providing useful content for it.
>>> 
>>> I consider karma to be a minor side benefit of an activity that I would be prosecuting anyway, achievable with a minimal expenditure of effort (*i. e.*, messing around with Chrome's Developer Tools, GIMP, and Imgur whenever I see a particularly-funny post in the regular course of browsing).
>>> 
>>> > [I]f you use lower-effort methods to get the karma, it becomes even more meaningless and less rewarding, right?
>>> 
>>> Submitting screenshots of 4chan threads (which you would have read anyway in the ordinary course of entertaining yourself as a bored denizen of the Internet) to r/4chan is no less "low-effort" than submitting The Hill news articles (which you would have read anyway in the ordinary course of educating yourself as a responsible citizen of a republic) to r/politics is.

> **u/None** [+1]  (7 hours later)
> 
> Can someone recommend me some litRPGs?

>> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+1]  *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (7 hours later)
>> 
>> [Choosing the blade](https://altimatewriting.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/choosing-the-blade-part-i/) <- I found this one relatively recently, it's been a very interesting, non-wish-fulfillment saturated take on litRPG, without simultaneously being a despair porn subversion that a played-perfectly-straight take could be.  
>> [Bitter](http://royalroadl.com/fiction/10293/bitter) <- The best of mooderino's fics, in my opinion. I eventually dropped How to avoid Death on a Daily Basis becuase I got tired of it, and The Good Student because the subject matter bored me, but I've kept up with bitter since it was initially linked on this subreddit months ago, and am still interested.
>> 
>> Also, if anime is your thing, check out Log Horizon. The light novels aren't worth reading translated because Japanese-English translations are rarely good, but the anime is downright incredible. the fanfic linked in my flair is a (complete) Log Horizon fanfic, to get you some idea of how much I liked LH.

---