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[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

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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/ulyssessword:

I read *Luminosity* and *Radiance* over the last couple weeks, and they were excellent.  

SPOILERS below.

 - [Chelsea](#s "How would you deal with Chelsea?  Would it make sense to try making a pre-commitment to act on your current relationships, even if she destroys them/creates new ones? ")

 - [Nathan](#s "Is Nathan's "perfect timing" power as OP as it seems?  Build a computer with a single button for input, that flips between giving a 1 and a 0 every second.  Create a file labelled "Friendly AI seed" , hover your finger over the input button, and repeatedly think "When is the best time to press the button within the next two seconds?" and build an AI in Assembly language.")

 - [Elspeth](#s "Her info-gathering aspect to her power is extremely powerful and underrated.  Let's say that you know someone ran a race in Track and Field, but didn't know which one.  She can check if the statement "I ran the same race as you" triggers the honesty reaction from Magic, then check "...a shorter race...", "...a longer race...", narrowing it down using a binary search, or something similar.")

 - [Alice](#s "Why did she give Jasper hallucinations?  She should have known that her plan to tell Jasper she's alive wouldn't work because she's a precog, and there are much more effective ways of getting back together.  Irana was able to get through her grief of losing a mate to enact an effective revenge, so why not Alice?")

u/None:

Nathan's ability to do that precisely is why any power that amounts to, "You get empirical information for free" is equivalently broken as "You get negentropy for free" (in fact, on a physical level, *those are the same thing*).

u/None:

[deleted]

u/ulyssessword:

I actually quite liked their reaction, and thought that it was very appropriate in that situation.  [SPOILER](#s "They were acting betrayed because they *were* betrayed.  She was lying to them, putting them in danger, and using their resources in order to try to achieve a goal that does not match *their* values.")

As for it getting better, I thought *Radiance* was head and shoulders above *Luminosity*, but you may want to get a second opinion here, as I didn't think of your objection as something bad.

u/None:

[deleted]

u/ulyssessword:

I watched the first two movies and read half of the first book.  I really couldn't get into it at all.  The characters didn't resonate with me, the writing was moderately scatterbrained, I disagreed with the symbolism/messages, and (worst of all) it wasn't really a genre I enjoyed.

u/None:

[deleted]

u/Kishoto:

Emulating any GBA or N64 game is trivially easy, even on a stock computer. Message me if you want links to a few good sites for Emulating gba, n'es, snes, or n64.

u/LiteralHeadCannon:

Binged Rick And Morty about a week ago, it's pretty great.  Mr. Meeseeks is an interesting approach to utility functions; one that I don't think I've seen before.

u/alexanderwales:

It's my current favorite series on TV. It just got renewed for a third season; I'm hoping that they can keep up the quality that they've reached so far (which *Community* unfortunately did not). The Mr. Meeseeks episode is probably matched only by the Cronenberg episode.

u/TaoGaming:

I agree, although I think this season has been stellar and Auto-Erotic Assimilation is hilarious and brutal, but the season premier may be my favorite. I'll have to rewatch it, it probably has a ton of jokes that are literally impossible to see in real time. 

All of my favorite comedies are now animated, and several of them deal with depression (Bojack and R&M).

u/ulyssessword:

Why do self-insert characters act like telling someone that they're part of a fictional work would be mind-breaking?  

It seems like the writers and characters are skipping over steps in the world's credulity.  The levels of belief that I see are "This person is lying", "This person is crazy/deluded", "This person is honest and of sound mind, but wrong", and "This person is right".  The stories all seem to completely skip over the third possibility.  

What's more likely, that someone gets some weird form of one-shot precog along with their powers/appearance, or else that everything that you know about the universe you live in is a lie?

u/blazinghand:

It's been done, but it's usually pretty boring. Most SI stories rely on the main character not acting optimally, because if he did, well, things would end pretty quickly. 

[A Wizard Named Harry](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8902388) does this well:


>Dumbledore opened his mouth, but I continued rapidly. "Please wait a moment, sir. I've thought long and hard as to how to convince you, and the best I could come up with was eight words."
>
>He simply nodded, and I took a deep breath, and blurted "Tom Marvolo Riddle has eight horcruxes."
>
>That had to have had an effect, but I'll give the old man this much- he had a poker face that would do any card shark proud.
>
>"That was only six words." he pointed out.
>
>....
>
>I nodded sharply. "Well, first and most important, Voldemort... or some weird ghost-bit of him... is here, stuck to Quirrell's head under that stupid turban. He's here looking for the Sorceror's Stone... er, Philosopher's Stone?.. that you've got hidden in the third-floor hallway behind Fluffy- Hagrid's three-headed dog thing- a logic puzzle with potions, a giant game of wizard chess, and maybe some other crap....
>
>....
>
>
>...where, I might add, you are a fictional character, and the boy whose body I've gotten stuffed into is the star of a series of popular childrens' books bearing his name."
>
>"And yes, I've read the series." I said, ignoring Dumbledore's look of blank surprise. "That's how I know about Fluffy and all that stuff, and fun little trivia like the fact that you're going to die of... Hell's bells, something or other, to do with the horcruxes I think... in five-ish years, that Snape is your double-agent because he still has it bad for Lily Potter and that he's going to hate Harry Potter... well, me, I guess... because I represent him never getting her, or that the teaching position for Defense Against the Dark Arts actually is cursed because of old Moldy, or... well, let's just say that it's going to be an entertaining ride."
>
>Dumbledore continued to stare at me for a while, then wordlessly handed me a quill and a piece of parchment.
>
>To this day I don't remember much about that night- just a lot of writing down of absolutely everything I remembered from the series, and then dreamless sleep.

u/None:

[A related microfic](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10069991/1/A-Wizard-Named-Harry-in-505-Words), courtesy of /u/eaglejarl

u/eaglejarl:
```
Thank you.
```

u/ToaKraka:

Do you find [this animation](http://i.imgur.com/Tx597bt.gif) more *cool* or *creepy*?

I consider it rather creepy, myself--you can just hear the Technicolor amebas scream in terror as, despite their wild pulsations, they're slowly engulfed by their neighbors...

u/dalr3th1n:

I found it more "cool" until the black space was filled up, at which point it became, I wouldn't say "creepy," but a bit disconcerting.  At first it was easy to admire the interesting aspect of the animation, these diamonds competing with each other.

One the black space was gone, however, it began to feel claustrophobic.  There was no space left to gain except by taking it from another color.

u/alexanderwales:

I think it's the heartbeat-like pulsing that makes it creepy. Assuming it's procedurally generated, I think the underlying rules probably have an emergent property that's similar to something organic in how it ends up developing, which is one of the things I think procedural generation is really good at.

u/Transfuturist:

After the negative space is filled it looks a lot like twitching meat.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld:

Ugh, their growth pattern is such that they always move just when I'm not looking at them. It's disconcerting. Then it starts to pulsate, but in a pattern that's just far enough away from normal to be unpleasant.

u/None:

I think it's pretty cool, but I totally feel for the creepy crowd. As another commenter said, it became much creepier when all those crisp lines disappeared with the black background, and all the remaining borders were those weird, rough edges. I'd like to know how those were calculated.

With a less cheerful color scheme (eg, black vs blood red and grey etc), I think it would be 10x creepier.

Also, shapes besides diamonds?

u/ToaKraka:

> I'd like to know how those were calculated.

It's pretty simple: On each tick, a random blob is chosen, and that blob attempts to expand into every tile that borders it. If a tile is already occupied, the chance of a blob's winning the battle over that tile is directly proportional to that blob's size--if a 100-tile blob fights a 200-tile blob in a tile, the 100-tile blob's chance of winning the tile is 1 in 3.

> Also, shapes besides diamonds?

But a hexagonal grid is just *such* a pain to code...

u/IomKg:

if i absolutely had to pick one it'd probably be "creepy", but mostly because i could imagine this about the squeres dying, whereas i can't see how would this be cool..

but really, death is all around you, it doesn't make sense to be creeped by a few squeres dying..

u/alexanderwales:

I just started watching *Fate/Stay Night: Infinite Blade Works*, mostly because my wife is away for the week at a dance competition and I needed something to watch that she wouldn't have enjoyed. The fight scenes are well-animated and interesting, which by itself probably would have been enough for me.

It always surprises me how much exposition anime/manga have, and I don't really know what accounts for why it's so different from Western media, or if this is just some sort of selection bias of the sorts of anime/manga I've been exposed to.

u/blazinghand:

I liked that anime, but if you haven't seen the prequel *Fate/Zero*, you should almost certainly watch that first. Same studio, but a different writer. *Fate/Zero* is basically authorized fanfic about the events before *Fate/Stay Night* and is written exquisitely well.

u/alexanderwales:

I haven't really gotten any responses on this, but are there any thoughts on variant Weekly Challenge like the one that's running this week? Right now I'm thinking that in the future we'll have some distribution "canon challenge", "trope challenge", image prompts, genre prompts, and things of that nature. Any canon (preferably a broad one that most people would have some familiarity with) which you think would make a good future prompt?

u/ulyssessword:

I'd say the obvious one is the DC and Marvel universes.  They're both well known and decent targets for fanfiction.

u/None:
```
[deleted]
```

u/avret:

I've noticed a weird phenomenon over the past few weeks, and I'm curious if anybody can explain it:  During the summer months, reader participation in fanfic drops drastically--reviews, PMs, and so on.  However, average readership stays around the same.  Why?

u/alexanderwales:

Assuming that this is a real phenomenon, not something caused by selection bias, variance, etc.?

Summer months mean school's out for most of Europe and North America. I have to imagine that students make up a large portion of the fanfic reading community (which I don't think you can deny skews young). So why would they be participating less?

At a guess, it has to do with how people are satisfying their social impulses. Reading is mostly for entertainment, while reviews and PMs are mostly social. So there's some difference between how social impulses are satisfied during "school time" and "not school time". (I would naively assume the opposite effect, but I don't know.) Or it might be a matter of available energy; reviews take more effort than reading does.

But we'd need raw data in order to tell that the phenomenon is real and to gather data on where the differences are coming from (whether it's *actually* students as I predict).

u/gvsmirnov:

What do you think of the Jean Le Flambeur series? If you have not read it yet, here are some keywords for you: "hard science fiction", "dilemma prison", "entangled quantum society", "planet-sized brains", "protocol wars", "walking cities", "simulations within simulations within simulations", "mind upload copyclans", "preserve every thought ever thought" etc.

u/Transfuturist:

> "preserve every thought ever"

Smacks of pointless ideology.

u/None:

That sounds like he's trying to throw every science-flavored idea he can think of into a blender without a coherent theme to tie it together.

u/None:
```
[deleted]
```

u/_brightwing:

How do you guys deal with really big to-read lists?

There's been so many interesting things I'd love to get around to reading, non fiction specifically.

I never seem to be able to make time nowadays though. And it just keeps getting more and more obese as newly discovered books start to pile up. This has been the case ever since I started my classes. 

And now when I do find the time, I don't even know where to begin.. Prospect of finishing them all seem so daunting, I end up reading something else - ongoing webserials, or shorts.

I've tried making reading tracking notes, choice picked a few from the lot - got audiobooks. Nothing seems to help.

15 KiB Raw Blame History

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

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15 KiB

Raw Blame History