Testing Chat Episode VI: Return of the Chat

[RogueIce]

The one thing that always disappointed me about our SDN STGODs is that they always seemed to be building up towards a "final war" between two alliances of players, but those wars never happened because people were distracted by midterms/finals/family issues/the release of a new video game/etc.

That assumes such a Great War would not devolve into shouting matches over who wins what and so on.

But maybe the STGODs were better than the SDN Worlds in that respect. *shrug*

[adr]

i would settle that with FORESHADOWING

you see i can have fifty death stars at the end because i had the genius to insert a throwaway line from pavel about it back on page 12

[Dooey Jo]

- Die woowoo! You don't belong in this world!
- It was not by my woowoo that I am once again given woowoo. I was brought here by woowoo, who wish to pay me woowoo.
- Woowoo!?! You steal men's woowoo, and make it your woowoo.
- Perhaps the same could be said of all woowoo...
- Your woowoo is as empty as your weewee. Woowoo ill needs a woowoo such as woowoo.
- What is a woowoo! A miserable little pile of woowoo! But enough woowoo... woowoo at you!




remind me to never accidentally visit the randi forums again; it's a fucking owlery

[joviwan]

I am an ignorant rube. Can you give me some context for all that, Dooey?

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

I am just guessing but my impression is that people on the Randi forums have taken to referring to supernatural powers or claims of as 'woowoo'

[joviwan]

Ah, that would make sense. Thanks.

[>:3]

so I just finished reading Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, and all the gods that was amazing. I normally despise detailed magic systems, but here it really worked. The characters were good enough, and the main point of the story is a bunch of magician-thieves attempting to bring about a successful slave rebellion against God.

1. 1. Mistborn
   2. Final Empire
   3. Well of Ascension
   4. Hero of Ages
   5. Alloy of Law
2. Elantris
3. The Emperor's Soul
4. Warbreaker
5. 1. Stormlight Archive
   2. The Way of Kings
   3. Words of Radiance

Keep at it dude, you got a hell of a ride ahead of you.

assuming you haven't read any of the others :ohdear:

[Darksi4190]

My lit professor assigned us two novels today. Looks like i'll be doing reading for school over break instead of finishing up the first and second Soul Drinkers Omnibuses like i'd hoped.

[Straha]

Which novels?

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

1. 1. Mistborn
   2. Final Empire
   3. Well of Ascension
   4. Hero of Ages
   5. Alloy of Law
2. Elantris
3. The Emperor's Soul
4. Warbreaker
5. 1. Stormlight Archive
   2. The Way of Kings
   3. Words of Radiance

While I am not the world's most unbiased source re: Brandon Sanderson frankly the Stormlight Archive is awful. Like the fact it's going to eventually number 10000 pages just blows my mind, because its just all kinds of ploddingly written sub-WoW stuff. At least its weird racism isn't as egregious as it is in the Rithmatist.

[thejester]

While I am not the world's most unbiased source re: Brandon Sanderson frankly the Stormlight Archive is awful. Like the fact it's going to eventually number 10000 pages just blows my mind, because its just all kinds of ploddingly written sub-WoW stuff. At least its weird racism isn't as egregious as it is in the Rithmatist.

Ford I always enjoy your literary analysis so please go on

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Okay so I play a lot of JRPGs and I watch a lot of anime. I think I have a pretty high tolerance for a lot of silly bullshit, and maybe even a predilection. So this is the Gundam with the full psychoframe and this guy is a Star Driver and we've got to get the formula for the blastia so we can defeat the adephagos and resist the dastardly plot of the fal'Cie and so on and so forth. I don't normally blink. It's not necessarily the concepts or whatever, but just the jargon and the strange names.

Branderson really loves this shit. Mistings and rithmatism and whatever. Guy spends a lot of time on that sort of stuff, the cruft of the setting (ie. he is a guy regularly praised for his worldbuilding). It just feels like the Stormlight Archive will be absolutely PACKED with it. Way of Kings was practically overflowing with shardblades and shardplate and voidbringers and highprinces and brightlords and stormlight and highstorms and everstorms and firespren and gloryspren and hatespren and rotspren and every fucking conceivable word smashed together with some other word. The end result just feels like a cheap video game to me. That's just personal feeling though.

The actual main problems with the first book was that it was a) way too long, b) loaded with whole bunch of real nothing characters, like the female lead who seesaws between sassy can do and demurely useless depending on how Branderson feels, or the male lead who just has the most trite and predictable arc and c) incredibly defocused. I have absolutely no idea what this series is supposed to be about, and I don't think anyone else does, either - the wikipedia page for example is just a big list of worldbuilding concepts.

Beyond that I don't think it's particularly well written, and it's got some weird shit like how there's a whole species of docile servants (who are all mottled black and red) and a lot of talk about how maths and reading are traditionally feminine and so not really done by men, but this somehow still just results in the same distribution of genders as every other fantasy brick. Just a real piece of crap all up.

[adr]

so for my book over the last two weeks I wrote a total of like 3 pages

today I've already written 7 and haven't run out of steam yet

mang if I could be in a zone like this every day I could finish the book in week or two

[adr]

naming conventions!

on the d chat room we're talking about text transformations right now, with a lot of folks arguing about proper unicode algorithms... but it seems to me that text transformations are almost always a mistake.


a common thing programs like to do is either axe for "first name" and "last name" or, worse yet, try to figure it out themselves by looking for spaces.

but what about "Worf, son of Mogh"? is "son of Mogh" even his last name? Mogh was the son of Worf (the other worf in star trek 6. i think anyway. regardless that's beside the point)

what about "Kira Nerys"?


or programs that insist on trying to capitalize it (a folly even if it is otherwise correct). what about "bell hooks"?


anyway i've decided what my first born child's name will be: {77fd9741-d6e0-4ffa-bd9f-cc550cba5e18}

and once ze is born i totally expect people to start calling me "abu {77fd9741-d6e0-4ffa-bd9f-cc550cba5e18}"



so my point is just that programs shouldn't make so many assumptions, especially about personal things like names

[adr]

{77fd9741-d6e0-4ffa-bd9f-cc550cba5e18}

PS she is known to her friends as "...tim?"

[adr]

https://crossway.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=1

OK, I just saw that link on a job list thing. I was going to just skip past it because python and ruby are abysmal languages that I definitely don't want to use but the blurb about jesus in the description made me curious. That's their application. notice two required questions:

Church affiliations __________
Are you a Christian; Biblically know as "saved" or "born again?" ________

wait a minute, are they allowed to even ask that?

tbh I'm tempted to proudly proclaim my Mormonism... get rejected....

then sue for religious discrimination and prey all the way to the bank

[adr]

LOLOL MY LAST POST WAS THE 666'th IN THIS THREAD

[Darth Tedious]

I think the Worf in TUC was TNG Worf's uncle
But I'm not sure

Edit: apparently it's his grandfather
Colonel Worf

[Jung]

I've come to the conclusion that I've developed a really self-sabotaging toxic addictive OCD-ish pattern of thinking when it comes to my art, and if I'm going to get anywhere I'm going to have to stop myself from doing it. I remember RedImperator once saying the reason nerds spend so much effort on worldbuilding is easy to see: it's fun that you can convince yourself is work. The stuff I tend to get hung up on is different and worse though, it's not even that I find it fun, quite the contrary. It hangs me up because I have a paralysing terror of getting something wrong, which I think is tied in with other OCD-ish behaviors I developed and have managed to, if not exactly eliminate get down to a manageable level in the rest of my life by forcing myself to not listen to that awful insidious little voice in my head that keeps saying things like "maybe you forgot to do X" and "go do it one more time and you'll feel better" (that never works; the impulse is never satisfied by any amount of effort or repitition).

I've come to the conclusion the only way I'm going to get anywhere is if I apply the same attitude here, and force myself to stop worrying about the mess I might make and just make art, and that I need to treat myself like a recovering addict and control my behavior so as to minimize the opportunities the little devil on my shoulder has to get me back on the hamster wheel. I need to just break the pattern of anxiety-driven focus on minutia well past the point of diminishing returns (almost always I could have gotten the same result with, like, a tenth the effort, time, and worry), and force myself to just ignore the anxieties that drive that thought pattern. The thing is, when I do that, it works - the insidious thing about this poisonous thought pattern is the way it makes me not want to give it up. Well, starting tomorrow I'm going to make myself do just that.

I posted this here largely so there's a record of my decision here, in a nice public place. Because I worry I'll make this nice resolution and then in a week I'll be right back in the same place - I've told myself "tomorrow it's over" plenty of times before it hasn't worked out that way yet. So I'm putting my commitment to this change in a nice public place, making a little spectacle of it, in the hopes that if I start to backslide the shame of knowing I've failed a public commitment will help me stop myself.

This probably sounds all melodramatic but my art is kind of important to me and I figure we all should get to indulge in a bit of melodramatics over our own petty personal problems every once in a while. If we're not allowed to treat the things we care about as big deals, who is?

[Jung]

From Biscuit's blog:

Doesn’t seem funny? Well, I had to think about it before realizing what struck me as weird about it.

I’ve talked before about how hazy the actual end game of radical feminism’s gender abolition is, but this post made me realize something else:they don’t have much of a start game, either.

Radical feminism isn’t even an Underpants Gnome plan, where there’s a clearly defined start and end but the middle is a mystery. There’s no beginning.

Think about it: radical feminists attack queer politics and liberal feminism for pursuing incremental changes within the system, for trying to evolve the paradigm or create more flexibility and mobility within it. They also claim not to believe in violence.

Well, there are two ways to change a paradigm. There’s the evolutionary approach, where incremental changes add up over time until you wind up with something completely unrecognizable, and there’s the revolutionary approach.

The impression I've gotten from my admittedly very limited exposure to them is radfems have a very Protestant-ish vision of how their revolution would work, where the real strength of the patriarchy is as a system of symbols and the only way to truly fight it is to get women to reject its symbol system inside their own heads, and a successful revolution is what will happen when some critical mass of women do that. They're contemptuous of institutional fixes because they think it's all about symbol manipulation and the ideas in people's heads, and changing institutions without first changing that will never get you a culture that does more than pay lip service to anything but the pre-existing symbol complex.

It strikes me as strongly showing the mark of having come out of a social science/humanities academic space. "I live by studying symbols and ideas, therefore I assume that symbols and ideas are the most powerful and important thing, and the ability to study, understand, and manipulate symbols and ideas is the greatest power."

Would you say there's any truth to this analysis?

[Darth Tedious]

In some cases, the difference might be moot

Take gender pay disparity
It totally symbolises patriarchal oppression and all that
But to remove the symbol, you have to make an institutional change

So it's not really either/or

But this wouldn't hold true in all cases (at least I think it wouldn't)

[Oxymoron]

Hey Biscuit

[Veef]

biscuit doesn't really post here anymore

[Ralin]

I went to a talk by the president of Mongolia once while I was on exchange in Hawai'i as an undergraduate. He mentioned that two-thirds of the judges in Mongolia are women and that they have similarly high rates of representation in other public offices. He explained it by saying that back during the Soviet days boys were the only ones going to school because the boys were all working. He also said this was leading to social problems due to educated Mongolian women not wanting to marry Mongolian farm boys, and concluded by saying that they were worried this was going to lead to the Chinese coming and stealing their women.

[joviwan]

I feel like there's a step or two missing from this chain of logic