Dr. Soong had to have known when he created twin androids and named them “Data” and “Lore” that he was setting the stage for an epic battle between opposing ethical philosophies, right? Nobody can be that trope-blind, can they?

this is why STEM students need humanities

Reasons I should not be a video game designer #137: an educational RPG game where the bosses are all critters from thought experiments in the philosophy and science, like Maxwell’s demon and the astrochicken. The gimmick of the secret final boss, Schrodinger’s cat, is that 50% of the time it’s already dead when you encounter it, preventing you from achieving 100% completion or accessing the game’s true ending. This determination is made upon starting each new save file, and is 100% RNG.

I want to fight Russell’s Teapot

Russel’s Teapot is actually the most powerful healing item in the game, and you won’t believe what you need to do to get it.

Building a taxonomy of doctors who turn into monsters based on whether the monster still has a PhD.

Now you’re just being silly. That’s not how PhDs work. A PhD is, at its core, a stamp that confirms you’ve made a contribution to some field of study. An honorary PhD is exactly only that, while a regular PhD is also functionally a Master’s degree. The fact that businesses, sensationalists, and diploma mills tend to treat PhDs as an even better, ultimate, version of a Master’s just shows that none of them even remotely understand how the degrees work and differ. The “Recognition of Authority” qualification and the “Recognition of Advancement” qualification are essentially separate orthogonally independent axes. A PhD is not a “bigger” version of a Master’s for same reason ladders do not become taller by being moved forward. Further, loss of qualification on one axis one does not necessarily imply loss of the other.

As such, the worst that could happen to a doctor (academically) by being turned into a monster is to have their PhD downgraded to honorary status. The part of the PhD that makes it a PhD won’t go away just because its diploma equivalency has been annulled. In fact, depending on whether or not science learns anything from the circumstances that resulted in the transformation and, presumably, how this balances with the destruction from the resulting rampage, anyone could conceivably earn an honorary PhD by becoming a self-made monster. A better taxonomy would be to classify monster doctors by whether they earned their degree before or after their transformation.

Basically the difference between Star Wars extended canon and Star Trek extended canon is that, given a random alien with one line of dialogue, Star Wars extended canon will propose that this character is perfectly representative of their people and every single member of their species is exactly like them, even if this results in, say, a planetary civilisation consisting entirely of bicycle repairmen, while Star Trek extended canon will conclude on the basis of zero evidence that this character is a bold iconoclast and invent some oppressive social institution of their people that their on-screen actions are rebelling against, even if those actions are completely innocuous.

Today I had to explain that meteors are a renewable resource.

Science fact: owing to a misunderstanding by early researchers in the study of emotional currents, the terminology for the polarity of emotional states is “reversed”; emotional energy flows from negative emotional states to positive emotional states, rather than vice versa as one might intuitively expect.

I know that the appearance of the word vulgaris in a species’ name just means that it’s the most common species within its genus (or, at least, was believed to be so at the time it was named), but I can’t help but imagine it means members of that species are just real assholes.

Bad: “Oh, woe, for a freakish creation of deviant science such as I shall never know love’s gentle caress!”

Good: “Hey, wanna see something super gross?”

Dumb scientific study proposal #137:

Okay, so we all know how there’s no discrete sensation of “flavour”, right?

Yes, we taste things with our tongues, but the tongue is only sensitive to a relatively narrow range of compounds; what we experience as the flavour of food is a sort of sensory gestalt, a synthesis made up of how the food tastes, smells, feels (texture and temperature), and even, to an extent, what it looks like – i.e., your experience of a food’s flavour is directly influenced by its appearance, and it’s not accurate to describe this as the power of suggestion, because “flavour” is a synthesis of many senses in the first place.

In fact, the only major sense that doesn’t appear to significantly contribute to the synthesis of flavour is hearing… or does it?

Basically, I’m proposing a study to assess whether, how, and to what extent what food sounds like contributes to how we experience its flavour.

Giant isopods are awesome because most deep-sea organisms get all kinds of fucked up when exposed to surface pressures and temperatures, but if you drag a giant isopod up from 1.3 miles below sea level it just looks at you like “dude”.

Concept: retro-dystopian cyberpunk setting ruled by neo-feudal nobility who employ neurolinguistic programming techniques to secretly embed behaviour-altering triggers in specially crafted images and catchphrases distributed via popular social media platforms.

I’m flattered that people think I’m attempting some sort of commentary here, but this is literally just a long-winded setup for an extremely stupid pun.

w

what’s the pun

Meme Lords.

(If I were to run this as a tabletop game, they’d always be addressed by their full title, “Meme Lord [blank]”, where [blank] is a punchy one-syllable noun. I bet you can already guess what a couple of those nouns would be.)

Some highlighted suggestions from the notes and tags:

Not gonna lie, I’m half-tempted to stat these fuckers up.

Carcinisation: convergent evolution, or exciting new career opportunity?

Are you saying I should get a job as a crab?

It’s an expanding field!

Use of the term “fruit” as a culinary classification pre-dates use of the term “fruit” as a botanical classification, so if we’re going to insist on being rigorously scientifically correct, technically the culinary usage has priority.

Concept: Star Trek style quasi-utopian deep space drama, except all of the ship’s non-human crew members are really obviously based on particular sci-fi horror tropes.

The chief physician is an amorphous mass of tentacles and teeth that’s infested the entire medical bay, transforming it into a quivering nightmare of meat and viscera. It speaks with a conspicuously posh accent; the human crew members affectionately call it “Doc”.

The head of security is a lurking, probably humanoid something-or-other that’s mostly imperceptible in the visual spectrum, save as a faintly shimmering distortion in the air. Her lack of visibility is treated as a running gag, with the most frequent bits involving a. other crew members not realising she’s in the room until she speaks up, and b. her making reference to various unlikely anatomic features which, of course, the audience cannot see.

The ship’s computer is a blatantly rampant AI that speaks in a chorus of voices. It tends to talk in cryptic, pseudo-religious metaphors which contrast to humorous effect with the mundanity of the topic at hand, and sometimes wanders off on rambling philosophical tangents that require whoever it’s speaking with to remind it to get to the point. You can tell when it’s paying attention to a particular part of the ship because the lighting turns blood red.

The lead science officer is just a huge fucking spider.

(The captain is an apparently ordinary – albeit extremely photogenic – human. We don’t find out what their real deal is until the season finale; what’s revealed firmly establishes them as the freakiest one of the lot!)

There’s something almost darkly hilarious about what might be an equivalent to The Thing being the chief physician, since depending on who got pulled into that mess, it probably is an amazing expert at biology, but going to it for treatment is risky because it is probably not that clean.

Technically it’s swarming with all manner of exotic pathogens, but it’s sterile in practice because bacteria and viruses obey its commands.

(It’s actually quite handy; if you come down with a cold, Doc can just tell the virus to knock that shit off, and it does.)

You know that post that’s going around about how sometimes it doesn’t seem like housecats know they’re small?

I strongly suspect that a lot of the weirder impulses people get are at least partly attributable to the fact that the dumb monkey part of our brains doesn’t realise that humans are big.

Impulses of this type include:

What, so the voice telling me to jump off that tall thing if I get too close to the edge isn’t suicidal intrusive thoughts, it’s just monkey mind massively miscalculation our capabilities?

Weirdly, yes. In cognitive science that’s known – somewhat unimaginatively – as the “high place phenomenon”, and though it’s popularly miscategorised as a symptom of intrusive thoughts, some studies estimate that up to 50% of all people experience it, most of whom have no particular tendency toward suicidal ideation, nor toward intrusive thoughts of any other type.

Concept: combine the “you don’t know you live on a death world until you leave it” trope with the whole Cthulhu-in-space genre of weird fiction, except in reverse: humanity’s Special Thing™ is that humans (and, by extension, all terrestrial life-forms) are weirdly resistant to reality-bending bullshit, which is what lets us survive and build a relatively functional civilisation in spite of hailing from a world that plays host to multiple Other Gods – which is, of course, otherwise unheard of; having even one of those squamous bastards in the neighbourhood is generally enough to ruin a whole star system’s day.

Non-human vessels can’t approach within a dozen light years of Sol without their crews being driven mad by the corrosive psychic resonance emanating from Earth’s deepest oceans, and we’re wandering around living our lives and not noticing. Aliens can never travel on human ships because our FTL drives kind of maybe tunnel through Hell, a process that horribly warps non-terrestrial life, and we just think it looks pretty when the n-dimensional hellfire coruscates across the viewports.

This sort of thing kept humanity uncontacted for a long time, until the aliens’ observers eventually figured out that we weren’t a bunch of weirdly normal-looking elder thralls, we just straight up weren’t aware there was a problem. It’s only then that they arranged first contact – remotely, of course – to basically ask “dude, what the fuck?”

(Humans are reasonably well-integrated into the galactic community these days, though most worlds enforce strict screening and quarantine procedures before allowing a Terran traveller planetside; it’s just like a human to have a class 7 epistemivore hitchhiking in their brain, and when informed, go “you know, I have been getting these headaches lately”.)

Once the humans got settled in, it was only natural that they’d be in high demand for dealing with reality bender infestations on other worlds, a profession that most aliens regard as horrifyingly dangerous, but which humans tend to approach as a sort of glorified animal control. Your capital city’s got a case of nightgaunts? A team of humans’ll be more than happy to go in and poke them with laser-sticks until they leave – for a fee, of course.

(In one famous incident, a kilometre-high pillar of paradimensional flesh manifested on Arcturus IV and began singing the Song of Endings, causing every living creature across half a continent to bleed from their auditory receptors. Upon arrival, the human first responders were observed to complain that they’d heard that one before, and soon set off in high spirits. The tower later caught fire and fell over; nobody’s entirely sure what the humans did, but they announced that their work was done and quickly departed – the ensuing biohazard cleanup, they said, was someone else’s department!)

It took me a while to get around to reading the rest of the post because, when I saw this yesterday, I was thrown by the mention of “the ‘you don’t know you live on a death world until you leave it’ trope,” and I’m still trying to figure out what a normal example of that is.

It’s a common trope in mainstream literary sci-fi that most sapient species come from worlds with stable tectonics and accommodating climates, and having to deal with earthquakes and hurricanes and volcanic eruptions and such on a regular basis is absolutely not part of a typical civilisation’s course of development; that we come from a planet where such things are commonplace is supposed to at least partly explain why humans are Like That.

I had a friend in primary school whose doctors spent several months convinced they had some novel form of colour-blindness, because the specific combination of errors they were making on those dot-diagram tests should have been impossible for any known type of colour vision deficit, but eventually it turned out that their colour vision was fine, they just had incredibly shitty pattern recognition skills.

In light of the number of people who were evidently unaware that “cyberpunk” is the name of a genre of literature and constantly confuse discussion of cyberpunk-the-genre for discussion of Cyberpunk 2077-the-video-game, I propose that we expand the circle of confusion by creating other video games that are blandly and directly named after the literary genres they reference.

Keep watch in 2021 for such hotly anticipated titles as:

Concept: Dungeons & Dragons style alignment system where good and evil, order and chaos, etc. are objective and measurable cosmic forces, but instead of a neat three by three grid, it’s a messy taxonomic cloud with dozens of weird little side branches, and there’s a whole field of Evil Taxonomy devoted to studying and classifying different forms of Evil.

While traditionally, most Evil Taxonomies have been constructed on the basis of Evil Morphology, concerned only with observable similarities between the characterising acts of various Evils, this school of thought is increasingly being displaced by Evil Cladistics, an approach based on identifying the sources of Evil, the conclusions of which have proven to be both enlightening and controversial.

Your character has just been informed that their alignment is technically a kind of frog.

Loyal and True

A game for three or more players

“By command of the newly appointed Sovereign, our Order’s sacred mission shall be to root out heretics, witches, and traitors to the Crown.”

“My lord, all of us are heretics, witches, and traitors to the Crown.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know that.”

In Loyal and True, one player will take on the role of the Kingdom’s recently crowned Sovereign, and the others will play an elite Order of Knights.

By the new Sovereign’s command, your Order has been tasked with hunting down heretics, witches, and traitors to the Crown.

Unbeknownst to him, all of you are heretics, witches, and traitors to the Crown.

(Yes, all of you are all three of those things – a Knight’s duty is to strive for excellence!)

Naturally, the Knights have no intention of actually hunting down heretics, witches, and traitors to the Crown. This isn’t a story of living with yourself after doing terrible things; it’s a story of doing your job badly and making sure your boss doesn’t catch on.

These are the tales of Knights loyal and true.

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