21 KiB
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
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Author: u/AutoModerator *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8gzxzd/d_friday_offtopic_thread/
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Score: 14
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Created: 2018-05-04T15:08:00
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/SimoneNonvelodico [+15] Dai-Gurren Brigade (20 hours later)
Well, not sure if this could really be classed fully as "rational" fiction, so I'll just leave it here. A very short one-shot story that's basically sort of a comedic "How it should have ended" of Avengers: Infinity War. No need to say, but obviously: SPOILERS AHEAD.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Pfffft AHAHAHAHAHAHA. A solution both logical and, more importantly, funny.
u/trekie140 [+10] (7 hours later)
I gave Full Metal Panic three episodes and it didn’t click with me, but then I gave it one more and ended up binging the whole story arc. Dammit, I’m hooked. Now I have to watch more of this bizarre blend of genres that have no reason to be combined.
Half the time it’s Ranma 1/2 meets Chuck, the other half it’s Metal Gear Solid meets Gurren Lagaan....even for anime, wow that’s a weird concept. I’m not even sure if it works, at least half the plot is stupid on purpose, but I still want to see more of it.
u/None [+10] (2 hours later)
Look, all I'm saying is: 14,000,605 is basically just, like, 23.74 bits of entropy or so. So 1/14,000,605 chances at victory with uniform sampling over your own potential actions isn't actually that bad: it mostly just means you need to do roughly 24 coin-flips worth of the Right Thing.
Does this go against the maxim that a good plan has only three steps at most, and really only two because never be as baroque as possible? Possibly. It depends how many bits of optimization power you get out of each step in the plan.
u/None [+5] (4 hours later)
Spoilers for infinity war follow:
Did anyone else find it interesting that Strange could find an outcome where they won despite dying (even if temporarily)? The idea that Strange could view potential futures that accounted for Thanos having the stone is something I find strange. Doesn't that imply that thanos never makes full use of the stone? Else Thanos would be able to see what would happen and then react.
Really though that's minor in comparison to the overpopulation problem that he's supposedly reacting to. The largest plot point in the movie doesn't make sense. I can only conclude that he's an idiot-savant.
u/Covane [+5] Dragon Army (6 hours later)
T truly only wanted his stated goal, in that light it makes sense that he never fully harnesses them because that's not why he got them, they were purely and truly a means to an end
u/sicutumbo [+3] (a day later)
A day late, but whatever:
Thanos barely even uses the power of the stones except for the throwing the moon thing. He doesn't need to, but that's beside the point. Remember in the first Guardians movie when Ronan was going to destroy an entire planet with just one? Thanos has over 2 for most of the movie.
Maybe the gauntlet can only draw on some of the Stone's power? That seems consistent with his actions.
Strange, however, has time to focus on just the one stone, how to use it effectively, and he's drawing upon it directly.
u/Aabcehmu112358 [+3] Utter Fallacy (a day later)
My headcanon is that, while Thanos is Tough, he is not Tough Enough to directly channel the power of six (or even one) infinity stone. The gauntlet, in this case, serves as a complicated metaphysical 'transformer', stepping down the power of the stones and doing a good portion of the mental gymnastics necessary to actually command that power. This would then also be the reason why the gauntlet is wrecked by the Snap, as it'd be blown out by the through-put necessary.
u/AngelaCastir [+8] (8 hours later)
On the off-chance anyone is eagerly expecting the next chapter of Vampire Flower Language today, unfortunately it's only half-edited because one of us has been very busy for most of the month. We're hoping to have it done sometime next week. (And yes, this is why we release on a monthly schedule).
u/DaystarEld [+12] Pokémon Professor (2 hours later)
So I finally finished Twig, and I'm ready to reaffirm on my earlier midway review of it. No spoilers involved.
As I said before, it's the most implicitly rationalist of Wildbow's 3 major stories so far. A lot of the protagonist's inferences lean more toward Holmesian mutant powers (more literally in this case) rather than learnable rationalist techniques, but there's still a lot of insight into how people think, social dynamics, the interactions between power and status, and the light and dark sides of using that knowledge.
It's also definitely the least grimdark of the 3. The world is often nightmarish, and bad things happen, but there is far less of a relentless grind of negative thing after negative thing, of bad to worse. There's a lot more breathing room, a lot more "wins" and positive, even fun, chapters, and there's overall a stronger sense that the protagonist has control of their own destiny.
I think of Wildbow's three stories, Twig might be my favorite? But only because of the characters, which are a huge part of enjoying stories for me. Worm has my favorite plot, had great world building, but only had a few characters I really enjoyed. Pact has my favorite setting, a few great characters, and some solid twists and surprises. But Twig has my favorite characters by far.
I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Worm, but also to those who did not enjoy Worm as much as others because of the characters or grimdarkness of it.
u/tjhance [+8] (3 hours later)
I'm going to say that I completely disagree (although I'll admit I read Twig pretty quickly and probably missed things).
I thought Twig was relentlessly grimdark to the point of exhaustion. The world was bleak, the characters' fates were bleak, and I never really had any hope that things would get better. The protagonist's mental state made it difficult to read as well. I also don't know what "fun, positive" chapters you're talking about.
I also don't see what's rationalist about it. I see you conceded that the protagonist's powers are "Holmesian mutant powers", and that was a big turn-off for me. But I guess I missed all the insight into social dynamics and power.
u/DaystarEld [+8] Pokémon Professor (5 hours later)
Really curious to know what makes you think that, and suspect we just have very different definitions for Grimdark. To me it's some combination of protagonist locus of control, capability to face challenges, win/loss ratio, confidence in themselves, and outcome. Twig wins on like all of these counts compared to Worm and Pact, even while still containing a lot of tragedy and bleakness.
Maybe I'm just calibrated weirdly though, and am curious for your perspective. If you want to use spoiler tags go for it.
u/tjhance [+3] (9 hours later)
ok, sure. At some level it comes down to "I found the darkness in worm a lot more compelling and not as bleak but I can't really explain why" but here goes.
So first of all, I think you're probably right that we have different definitions of grimdark, in that I seem to consider the setting as part of it a lot more than you do. And the atmosphere of Twig is pretty awful. Whenever I picture it in my head, it looks... gray. Whenever we see "ordinary" people they don't seem to be doing so well.
On the other hand, even by your definition, I have a hard time seeing Twig as non-grimdark.
u/tjhance [+1] (9 hours later)
other misc things I didn't like, not necessarily related to grimdarkness
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (17 hours later)
u/tjhance [+1] (a day later)
[spoiler](#s " I feel like we read different Twigs or something, but I remember feeling like Sy was mostly out to look after himself and the lambs, and maybe a handful of others like Emily or Shirley. And his notion of help usually involved a lot of destruction (I seem to remember him blowing up some guy's shop because Jamie/Jessie didn't like the way he treated his stitched. Which was a nice thing, I guess) or torturing people (who were admittedly pretty bad). Another incident that sticks out in my mind was when a mother who had been ravaged was begging him to save her baby, and he lied and said he would, and then later he admitted the baby was definitely going to die of ravage anyway. Another nice thing... but still ultimately really depressing. Like, the only good intention anybody has that doesn't involve killing someone, that I can recall, was Lillian wanting to make a project that would help deliver first aid or something. Oh, I guess there was the orphanage he built. I guess he did make that out of the goodness of his heart, I can't remember a strategic reason behind it, or anything. But when I think about twig what really sticks out in my mind was what a dangerous person Sy was, and even when he was helping others it was usually just... really gruesome. I dunno. It just felt like a story where everybody was out to kill each other and everything was bad and there were no morals. Also, I still can't really remember many "lighter moments" that you claim existed, other than some flirting.")
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (a day later)
[Spoiler](#s "Yeah, he's definitely a darker sort of hero (anti-hero totally fits) that a world as dark as the one he's in would spawn and require. As for the lighter moments, the banter in Twig is pretty top-notch, even during a crisis, and things like getting the orphanage running and acquiring allies were often really enjoyable for me, particularly the arcs where they build the orphanage (though the end of that arc was really sad) and the arc where they recruit their army. Things like that definitely made for lot more chapters that I can only describe as "fun" in Twig compared to Pact or Worm.)
u/tjhance [+1] (a day later)
your spoiler tag doesn't work, it looks like a link (although i can read the contents in the link url)
I don't really have anything more to say though, I think we just have different ideas of what is too light or too dark
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (2 days later)
That happens on mobile, as far as I can tell. And yeah, probably, but I'm still not sure what your darkness metrics are, so that even if you think Twig is too dark, I don't see how Worm or Pact are any lighter.
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (17 hours later)
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (an hour later)
Every so often, I swat a housefly or some other insect that's buzzing around me and I think "Man, the Animorphs must hate my guts".
u/xamueljones [+9] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)
Of course they do! You killed their mosquito nothlit several years ago, forcing the rest of them who were visiting their friend in morph and thought-speak, to spend far too long looking for their friend and became mosquito nothlits as well. Now all they can do is buzz impotently at you to fight the Yeerks on their behalf while hating you for their friend's death.
Wow...that came out darker than I intended...
Just don't go mad with power, and you should do fine!
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (11 hours later)
Yeah, that's roughly what I think every time I crush a bug :/
u/Yama951 [+7] (13 hours later)
I'm trying to find the website where they mundanely explain Lovecraft's mythos sort of in-universe.
The gist of what I remember was that Lovecraft's racism made him build up a false interpretation of the personal philosophy of a devout Muslim scholar with strange but not heretical ideas on the divine.
u/trekie140 [+3] (a day later)
[Is this what you're looking for?](http://www.digital-brilliance.com/necron/necron.htm) This how TV Tropes describes it:
> This website deconstructs the Cthulhu Mythos, specifically the Necronomicon. In essence it asks "what if it was a real book?" and builds from there, by looking for parallels between Judeo-Christian tradition and the Cthulhu Mythos (The Old Ones = The Giants from Genesis), it creates the content of the book, it then asks "what kind of person would write about such things in 730 AD?" Thus Abdul Alhazred is what the Koran calls a "Sabian" and what Western biblical scholars call a "Gnostic" — a person with religious views related to, but radically different from, mainstream Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It then builds a comprehensive history of how it got from the Middle East and into the hands of Western Occultists, and finally makes the assumption that while yes, Lovecraft wrote about it, he got only the name and the author correct, having never read the book itself.
u/blazinghand [+3] Chaos Undivided (5 hours later)
I'm taking part in a fanfiction writing fest to try writing some new stuff with prompts outside of what I'd normally think of. Unlike most of these events, it's not related to any particular ship, and in fact is a non-shipping-fics-only kind of deal. Check it out, submit prompts, and/or sign up if this interests you. Hopefully this can give me some inspiration to write more.
Prompts submission: https://festforall-genfic.tumblr.com/post/172709296528/submit-your-prompts
u/Fresh_C [+1] (10 hours later)
When are the prompts going to be available?
I don't really want to sign up unless I've already seen a prompt I'd like to write for, but I understand if it's not that kind of event (meaning the prompts aren't supposed to be known before signing up for some reason).
u/blazinghand [+2] Chaos Undivided (10 hours later)
Hmm, I'm not sure what the schedule but I think it goes something like this, from what they wrote earlier:
May 2, 2018: sign-ups start
May 14, 2018: prompting closes
May 21, 2018: prompts posted
May 31, 2018: sign-ups end
And then shortly thereafter you can claim a prompt and start writing, I think it's a 6-week or 4-week window or something.
u/blazinghand [+2] Chaos Undivided (18 days later)
Prompts are live: https://festforall-genfic.tumblr.com/post/174116399445/prompts-masterpost
Signup form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRZQ7A8kdl6tty0_kbg4RYXZ7lQsgAkVrFOPxZTxv6Ip2w-g/viewform
u/None [+3] (10 hours later)
[deleted]
u/ObiWan-K [+1] (10 hours later)
Yep this is one of the the finest card games that I have played
u/Kizadek [+1] (13 hours later)
I think Gog had some sort of giveaway for that fame this week.
u/None [+4] (an hour later)
Just got 5k+ karma for a lazy crosspost...
And I think I didn't deserve that. But now I know that crossposts don't give the upvotes to the op -.-
u/Fresh_C [+3] (11 hours later)
Yeah, it'd be nice if cross-posting shared the points between you and the OP. That way people would still have incentive to share content among different threads and you wouldn't feel like you were stealing the OP's opportunity to get that karma themselves.
u/None [+2] (20 hours later)
I don't understand the Karma system at all, maybe it does that.
I have at the moment 7.436 Karma, 819 Comment, 6617 Post Karma (Before that I had ~478-508 Karma)
And the post has 18.0k upvotes atm...
If you use crosspost, you can see the original post, at least on mozilla firefox.
u/gbear605 [+2] history’s greatest story (a day later)
Reddit admins have talked before about how the karma increase that you get from a post is only a fraction of the post's karma, because something-something-balancing.