A lot of posts about tragedies are centered around "tragic flaws" and completely avoidable situations created by the character's own actions.

But to my understanding this wasn't really how Greek tragedies originally worked, and I have even read that this idea may come from a wonky later translation of Aristotle which turns the word "hamartia" from "a mistake made in ignorance" to "a sin".

And when you look at characters like Oedipus, you have to remember how heavily the concept of fate ties into their stories. The tragedy is not in the fact that he "got what he deserved" due to some bad character trait, but that fate itself doomed him to a particular outcome no matter how hard he and everyone around him tried to prevent it. The prophecy was always going to come true no matter what. There was no fighting it.

And in the end, isn't that actually much more tragic?

If a character can do everything right but still fail and suffer because the universe does not actually have a sense of justice and pain does not fall exclusively on those who "deserve" it feels not only more tragic to me but also more resonant.

I think tragedy should be tied to a character trait, because "characters' actions should drive the plot" is kind of a baseline requirement for most stories, but it is true that the "tragic flaw" is sometimes a virtue, or would be a virtue in other circumstances. "I refuse to passively accept my terrible fate" is usually a heroic trait, after all.

To look at another Greek play, Antigone is a clash between Cleon's inflexible enforcement of his law, and Antigone's pious desire to bury the dead properly. Sure, Cleon has "sinned" in that desecrating a corpse is a pretty awful thing, but you can see how "in my city we uphold the laws without exception" would normally be a virtue, and he gets to make a pretty good speech about how this is an essential part of Being A King. Fate doesn't enter into it - it's just two characters who have put themselves on an unavoidable collision course because of the virtues they've chosen to uphold.

Or for a more recent example, one I've talked about before, the tragedy in Grave of the Fireflies happens because Seita is a "kid hero" that we want to root for. He's self-reliant, works hard to protect his sister, always has a positive outlook... but he's also proud of this, to the point that he would rather starve to death than go back to his aunt for help. This isn't a sin - Seita is a likeable character, and it's entirely reasonable that he doesn't want to live with his bitchy aunt, but the virtues that make him likeable are exactly the wrong ones for his situation.

I think the prophecy in Oedipus is basically just a literalization of how good tragedies feel inevitable. There isn't a prophecy that literally says "Cleon will kill Antigone," but there might as well be, because the circumstances have aligned perfectly to set them against each other, in such a way that neither will change their mind until it's too late.

YESSS 😭 agree with these placements 😂

Putting this one right in the middle of the chart.

SPRINGFIGHT! (a Simpsons fan comic)

I made this a couple years ago, back before tumblr allowed this many images in one post. May or may not be easier to read on my website.

Reading Weavers, Scribes and Kings at the same time as a long-form analysis of ASOIF really reemphasizing and cementing my contempt for fantasy world building that goes 'and then this specific dynasty ruled this specific kingdom in essential socio-economic stasis for [longer than the entire span of human history]'.

Like, cmon. Shave some zeros off the timeline. Please.

Making this post has motivated me to go back and work out a rough timeline for the 700-year-old empire in the fantasy setting I tinker with, which now has 4 dynasties, a 50-year 'time of troubles', a couple generations where it was basically a theocracy, and a 90-year 'regency' held by someone who was never proven in court to be a devil.

If your fantasy empire doesn't include a bloody-handed coup followed by a fifteen-year interregnum with like four guys all claiming to be the murdered heir within living memory, it's back to the drawing board.

The real fun part is if your timeline includes a great evil that was sealed away a thousand years ago or something. It's not going to be "the ancient hero who founded our kingdom sealed away the evil, and now it's returned," it'll be more like "the ancient hero founded a city state that was conquered, re-conquered, and re-re-conquered until the sealed evil eventually ended up as part of our kingdom. Also, the current royal family doesn't have any connection to the heroes who did it the first time around, they just say they do to legitimize their rule."

Which is really inconvenient for any heroes trying to figure out how they dealt with the sealed evil the first time around!

Senpai says you’re welcome

Reblogging again because I just realized that if I had this advice in high school I would’ve never made a tumblr account.

Also works for most of those news sites like WSJ or NYT that only let you read a little bit, or block adblockers. Also some disable the scroll bar but if you go to the right side of the console after hitting F12 and look for the CSS element “overflow” and change it from “hidden” to “visible” then you can continue scrolling for free. Might have to click around on different parts of the page to find it, but it should work.

There’s also a Firefox/Chrome extension called Behind The Overlay that does all that with one mouse click. Used it for years; what a time saver.

And if you encounter a true paywall, use Archive.Today to bypass it. Just paste the paywalled url into the blue “search archived snapshots” box near the bottom:

In case you think the writers on strike aren't making good use of their time, think no more!

Only click the read more if you're fully prepared. I'm taking no responsibility past this point.

cult: you must not eat pineapples after 8am you: thats really stupid cult: wow i cant believe you care about eating pineapples after 8am THAT much lol.. mr pineapple over here.. lol you will literally die on this hill? lmoa? is there a name for this type of “attempted insanity transferal”

This is how I feel about the banana discourse.

✨Round 2: Match 31✨

(Yara of Nowhere, the Wandering Bard art by @gwennafran, Dorian Storm art by @agarthanguide)

Yara of Nowhere, the Wandering Bard Propaganda:

Dorian Storm Propaganda:

I don't know much about Dorian Storm, but I don't see how Yara could ever be described as "sparkly." Sparkly in the way that a sharp knife is, perhaps.

— Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal.

kicking the conscious mind out of the way and letting the parallel brain do its thing.

Tentacled Gender...

"My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day."

--Fallen London

Playing through Fallout:New Vegas for the first time in years. And I'm developing a newfound appreciation for the damage done to the intended pacing of the narrative with the addition of the Courier's Stash. I wake up in Goodsprings, and as part of the extended tutorial you have Ghosttown Gunfight, the fairly self-contained faction war between Goodsprings and the Powder Gangers. And the design intent, I think, is that this is probably supposed to be a pain in the ass, with only one or two avenues of support available to you given the low level at which you'll pick this one up. Six Powder Gangers, some in body-armor, would be a serious threat, and committing to fighting against that with your dinky 9mm and a varmint rifle seems like a rough time! An actual uphill battle, doing the right thing instead of the easy thing. Fortunately, Benny inexplicably left my handy 40mm grenade launcher in the grave with me, so I cleaned up.

I'm working my way south, and, you know, in a version of the game where Benny didn't inexplicably leave my handy 40mm grenade launcher in the grave with me, this would have been the knock-on effect of my "good" Karmic choice in defending Goodsprings; the road south is littered with powder gangers who'd have been neutral had I not kicked the hornet's nest. As it stands? Free experience. I hit Primm, and fighting through the cramped hallways of the Bison Steve I encounter an enemy armed with what was clearly supposed to be the first heavy weapon I'd encounter in the world. Tight Corridors. Inexplicable Grenade Launcher. I clean up. South I go to the Mojave outpost, Nipton, that whole thing. And clearly, clearly you aren't meant to take a swing at Vulpes here, right? You're supposed to take it in, get a sense for the legion. In the version of the game that shipped you're supposed to get bodied if you try to kick the beef gate here. There are allowances in the game for if you pull it off, sure, but I did try with just the service rifle, without the glorious first-strike capabilities afforded to me by the 40mm grenade launcher that Benny inexplicably left in the grave with me. It didn't go very well!

So now I'm dogged by Legion hit squads on my way to Novac, which I get the distinct impression was not the point in the game at which this was supposed to start happening to me, because I am gathering up some pretty expensive equipment, all sold for space. I punch through to Vegas, and at this stage, the clear developer intent is that you need to spend some time milling around Freeside or Camp McCarran in order to gain access to the Strip- do odd jobs to scrape up the money, buy the forgery from Mick and Ralphs, gain monorail access, get your science skill high enough to hack the robot. Get the lay of the land, get a feel for the people, send some time stewing in the human cost of House's walled garden before you head in and hear the pitch from the big man himself.

Except I've got 5000 caps from selling off all the legion killteam equipment. In I go!

And the fun thing is, right, the Courier's stash can't be diegetic, but it is having a very direct impact on the world here. A top legion guy just went down to my inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher. Whatever else I'm roleplaying as, I am roleplaying as a guy who woke up in the possession of an inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher, and neither I nor my character can plausibly ignore that fact given its terrible bloodstained utility. I play a man, a man who would be a good man, a man nonetheless bewitched by the terrible resolutory power of the grenade launcher. My best friend, the inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher! My worst enemy, the inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher!

The New Vegas GOTY edition gives you four different starting DLCs all at once, so I started the game with like, an entire wheelbarrow full of guns. Which made it pretty obvious that this wasn't the intended starting experience, so I left everything but the canteen at home. Seems like it was a wise decision.

The dark souls games arnt hard and their difficulty qas deeply over egged by journalists

Not just journalists (they were hugely relevant in this, though, the most relevant, in fact), but also high profile players that incentivized a “just don’t get hit” play style with players that weren’t as experienced or as good as them, which then sort of became the “way” the game was played, so no one was leveling HP just to maximize damage (already a bad investment anyways since most of your damage until the late-ish midgame comes from upgrades, not stats*), and then they were getting one shot by every attack because they had no HP. This led to the completely wrong belief that Dark Souls was a game in which everything killed you in one hit, which is ironic, because Dark Souls 1 specifically lets you become so insanely tanky that you can take 2-3 grab attacks from bosses, back up a little, and use one of your nigh-instant 20 Estus to go back to 90% HP again.

The thing is, Dark Souls doesn't tell you any of that stuff. It expects you to read the description of what each stat does yourself (nobody does this, especially not a reviewer in a hurry), and even then the brief one-line explanations won't tell you some important facts, like "most of your damage until the late-ish midgame comes from upgrades, not stats." Or "leveling HP will improve your survivability more than Resistance will." Or my personal favorite (from DS2) - "Adaptability is the stat that controls how many i-frames your rolls have."

(I didn't even know that dodge rolls had i-frames until partway through the first game, which made the early bosses much harder than they should have been.)

The problem isn't just that players don't look for solutions because they assumed the game was supposed to be hard, the problem was that the game doesn't do anything to lead players to those solutions. Some of this stuff might seem obvious if you've internalized the game's systems, but it's not obvious to a new player, who's going to just die a whole bunch until they give up and read the wiki.

Or in other words:

[Wrex voice]: Shepard wants to f-ck you so bad it makes her look stupid

Part 2

Comic Masterpost

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

I've been working on this project for a while and I think it's time to show them off. These are propaganda/health and safety reminder posters for the Office for the Preservation of Normalcy, an organization that deals with the supernatural in a canon I'm working on. I have some lore I'm working on, but these posters will be the main thing that exists for now. The "sample" watermark is because I would like to sell higher-quality printouts and files in the future.

At this stage I'm looking for feedback. How do they look visually? Could a tagline be punchier? Please please let me know what you think.

Unsong interlude chapter

That isn't even Hebrew in the picture. Wtf is going on?

One implication from The Infinite and The Divine’s strong worldbuilding that I keep coming back to is that, time being so meaningless to necrons, mortal species must be extremely annoying for them to deal with. So annoying, in fact, that it must border on being terrifying. 

Half a dozen generations of Tau can change during the time it takes Orikan the Diviner to have a proper meditation. And sure, it’s all “pathetic mortals” until you realize that, without the trademark imperial stagnancy, that is a lot of time to do something.

When Trazyn met Cawl on Cadia, the latter seemingly knew next to nothing about necron technology, and probably even necrons in general. But not much more than 20 years later - barely a discrete amount of time for immortals - we see Cawl hacking and manipulating necron tech on Pharos and slamming it with a C’tan shard.

Imagine going away for the weekend, and when you are back, the crows outside your house have learned to drive a fucking car. Probably yours. And will continue in that vein if you don’t do something about it very quickly and constantly. Because what for you is a distraction of a menial task, for them could be the purpose of their whole existence, at which they will come again, and again and again, never stopping, always dragging you down to their level of chaotic short-term existence.

I guess what I am saying is that it must be very hard to enjoy being untethered from the flow of time, while someone very tethered to it is out there trying to steal your whole shit.

Idk my first response to a lot of degrowth "x is impossible without exploitation" stuff is like... well, have you tried? Because most of the time this seems less like a reasoned empirical statement about reality and more like a thing you could say if you wanted to be edgy and also make your political philosophy maximally unpopular

Yeah.

So I'm sympathetic to at least certain versions of degrowth. Labor is basically the biggest expense or one of the biggest expenses in the production of just about everything, so if you make working conditions better and working hours shorter and so on you'll make labor more expensive which will make everything more expensive. And this means that you're basically looking at a tradeoff between the interests of labor and the degree to which large amounts of stuff can be produced for cheap. And I think in terms of QOL it would be worth it to make this trade-off way more in favor of labor than society currently does, especially on a global scale. People's lives would improve on net if they had more time and more autonomy at the cost of having less stuff. And that's basically one of the positions that gets called degrowth. So like, yeah, I'm basically in favor of that.

Worth noting as an aside, because labor is cheapest in poor countries, making this trade-off would mean benefiting the global poor at the cost of the global rich (you and I and your average American). I mean I'm sure you know this I'm just adding it in for the peanut gallery. And I'm not turned off by this fact, because all questions of labor-vs-production trade-offs aside, a transfer of wealth from the global rich to the global poor is obviously, obviously the right thing to do if you care about humanity as a whole. But it goes against the interests of every major government on earth almost by definition, so. Ya know.

Anyway the thing I don't like about degrowth is how often this trade-off gets framed as not actually a trade-off; how often it is argued that a reduction in the availability of cheap goods is not merely an unfortunate consequence of prioritizing labor more than we currently do, but is in fact desirable in-and-of-itself. People frame it as something that will like, heal some kind of sickness in the human soul borne of modernity. And I think that's goofy. I think there are lots of ways that we can aim to offset the effects of that trade-off, the most obvious being automation, and it's unambiguously good to pursue these things vigorously. Cheap mass-produced goods are awesome! More people having access to more stuff is great! It's good for human wellbeing and it's good for human autonomy. And the relative fungibility of mass-produced goods is good for autonomy. This doesn't mean that other production styles don't have their humanistic benefits—I think that they do—but I don't think accessing these benefits needs to come at the cost of mass production. That's sort of veering into another topic though.

Well anyway, a lot of different people talk about degrowth and mean a lot of different things by it, but I don't like the ascetic philosophy that comes packaged with so much of it.

I'm very much in agreement with your overall thoughts, but I would like to address the assertion:

with this hastily edited meme:

Because, like, "things will become more expensive when the forced-labour required to produce those things becomes more expensive" isn't some immutable law of the universe or anything. It's purely an outcome of our current dehumanising enslavement to the unrelenting dogma of Numbers Must Go Up.

No, it is basically a law of the universe. Stuff takes time and energy to make. If people work less and are not pushed to work so hard, you're reducing the time and energy investment and less stuff will get made. There are narrow contexts in which this is not true—exhausted workers are less efficient with their time, so giving them some amount of rest will increase production—but in the broad strokes, the less human hours you spend on something the less of it you can make.

This is the fundamental fact that motivates anyone to talk about degrowth in the first place. If it weren't for this, the whole discussion would be moot.

If less stuff gets made, people will not have access to as much stuff as easily. Framing this as monetary expense is a product of our current economic system, yes, but the underlying trade-off is not. The underlying trade-off is a product of the reality of goods production, and will be just as true in any economic system. The only way around it is to use something like automation to reduce the amount of human time and labor that is actually required to make stuff in the first place. But this is principally a technological issue and not a social one. Capitalists want to automate labor just as much as I do, although for different reasons (and they want profits to go to owners and not society as a whole), but they haven't completely figured it out yet either! The difficulty of automation is mainly technological and not principally social. We cannot remove the trade-off between reduction of labor time and overall availability of goods through purely social change because the trade-off is not a social construct to begin with.

Asimov was openly uninterested in this kind of story, preferring more of a “logic puzzle” approach to robots. Then he wrote one anyway and said “I can do one if I want to!”

Asimov described his "Laws of Robotics" as simply an extension of the laws that govern any tool:

In other words, these laws aren't moral absolutes - they're a design philosophy. Robots are designed to follow these laws for the same reason that a toaster oven is - because nobody wants a tool that injures the user, doesn't work, and breaks easily. Skynet is not a profitable business model.

I, Robot has a lot of robots that go awry for various reasons, but the reaction is never "oh no, the machines have found a loophole!" (And the robots don't react that way either - they're usually driven insane because their brain can't handle whatever moral dilemma they ran into.) The reaction is more like an industrial accident - a seemingly reliable machine has broken down in dramatic fashion. How do you fix it before someone else gets hurt? Hence the logic-puzzle nature of the stories.

(If I, Robot as a whole is about anything, I'd say it's about superiority, not slavery - if robots are smarter, stronger and more benevolent than us, what's left for humans to do?)

seen a lot of these with your favorites, but reblog with the CURRENT book you are reading, show you are streaming, the last movie you watched, and any game/puzzle/crafts you’re working on