Rogue Thought File #4472

So in Blade Runner almost all the animals seem to have been destroyed within living memory by some unspecified calamity* and the chief test for whether you’re properly human or not is whether you feel empathy (or nostalgia) for them and whether you’re OK with imagining being cruel to them.

In Pokemon it appears there are no ordinary animals, just fireball-throwing demonets that can be conveniently stored and retrieved in plastic balls and computer systems, and they are systematically exploited to fight each other.

What if Blade Runner is set in the Pokemon universe, 20 years after Ash’s adventures, when almost all the Pokemon have destroyed each other in forced gladiatorial combat and the humans feel belatedly sorry about it?

Or what if Pokemon is Blade Runner’s future – the generation that mourned the animals has long died off. All that’s left is a vaguely-remembered cartoonish virtual approximation of old animals, used as mascots, Michael Bayified, and the natural cruelty of the humans has re-established itself in their ritual competition and humiliation? 

Restoration Hardware is the most desperately patrician furniture chain in America. They make heavy faux 19th century tables and uncomfortable sofas to reassure Americans that they weren’t really missing anything important by only becoming a world power in the 20th century.

Now they’ve lauched a Modern collection, though, and it’s pretty damn hot. In particular, this concrete-footed wooden table is exactly the right kind of stupid.

https://www.rhmodern.com/catalog/product/product.jsp?productId=prod7421086&categoryId=cat7160081//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Jack Clement

approved by my wife who likes things a bit sweeter:

1/2oz lime juice

1/2oz grenadine

1/4oz Clement Creole Shrubb

2oz Lairds Applejack

Shake. Lime twist.

Finished an evening of 1794s, Atlases and Vieux Carres with an Imperial and was reminded of what a great drink it is.

2oz gin

1/2oz lemon juice

1/2oz aperol

Shake, long twist of orange.

directly relevant to your last post!

Originally shared by Sushie Wushie

Colonialism, transfer of meanings, and the evolution of ideas through textless practices.

Boteh/Mango/”Paisley” patterns are fascinating. And obviously rich with potential for world-building.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_%28design%29//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

“Daddy?”

Mmh?

“My lips gave up on me.”

“Apparently I couldn’t dance”

Marketing

http://www.roland.com/products/c-80-ak///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Made dinner

Made alternate dinner for the eldest who decided he couldn’t eat that

Cleared up, took out the trash

Scared away the raccoons, wondered if there was a bear about

Took out the recycling, locked up the garage

Unblocked the toilet, cleared up the mess

Fixed the dishwasher, bought a new charger for the computer

Asked my eldest “where would you be without me?”

“Gnawing on the sofas and pooing in the woods.”

…..apparently he does get it.

Roger Giner-Sorolla has a better universal caption for New Yorker cartoons:

“..and now, it is I who am real, and you who are the inflatable sex doll!”

Srsly. Works for every one of these.

last ones, I promise

Mercifully I can’t remember who posted the original transphobic cartoon.

It has been noted before* that all New Yorker cartoons can be recaptioned with at least 3 phrases. I’m curious to see how far these could be stretched.

*http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/a-new-universal-new-yorker-cartoon-caption-id-like-to-add-you-to-my-professional-network-linkedin/406783/

This is definitely a charming plan although I’m not sure about some of the details (invest heavily in the Chinese banking system in 1925? Hmmmmm).

But I notice it involves a lot of arms dealing, and then rescuing only the Jewish people from the Nazis. Why? I think I’d like to be more ambitious than that, even though it would screw up my crystal ball. In fact, if I could somehow prevent the native American genocide of the 16th century, that would be maybe the single best thing I could do.

Of course, that’s not within the scope of the brief.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

Very amusing 500 year plan

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3a2x5s/you_are_sent_back_to_the_1500s_with_immortality/cs8ubek//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

In the category of “SF that everyone apart from me has already read,” I just finished listening to the Audiotext reading of Charles Stross’s A Colder War. The audiobook presents like a cartoonish parody of a nerd-love product – chapter heads are read through a robot voice filter, the rest is delivered in an affectless harangue like a Pathe news piece, which kind of suits the bleakness of the material but flattens the writing something horrid.

SPOILERY REVIEW…

…

…

…

…

The story itself is half Cthulhu, half Iran-Contra scandal, and the mashup is ingenious. The Cthulhu elements are lifted pretty directly from the source and therefore don’t really bring anything new to the table, although the way Stross sidles up to them sideways is a nice demonstration of writer’s craft.

The real gold – and Stross’s real enraged disgust – is reserved for the band of shitheads around Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter. They manage to destroy the world, of course. Between Cold War paranoia, sheer pigheaded governmentality and toothy-grinning adventurism, it’s obvious they shouldn’t be trusted with sharp pencils, let alone alien tech which the aliens might still be monitoring. But the crowning moment, which I think is probably the reason Stross decided to write the story, involves a ruined, poisoned soldier stepping out of a submarine in Antarctica. He has traversed light years and strange stars through an Old Ones’ gate. He has brought down ruin on Earth. All in order to transport a briefcase of heroin from Afghanistan to the hands of the conspirators.

It’s pretty cold and darkly funny, if you can forget the merciless extent to which Stross pursues the consequences (he definitely isn’t playing it for laughs). If you can forget the actual Iran-Contra bullshit. In the end, I rather think A Colder War was Stross’s way of dealing with the depths of stupid depravity that the Iran-Contra affair revealed: a way of trying to make sense of freakish crimes that resolutely resist it. As the story advances it refers in passing to a whole series of other government scandals, building up an eerily prescient dark mirror of American weltpolitik concerns – written in 1997, it places the epicenter of global meltdown in Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti’s back yard.

Kind of sort of recommended if you’re in a good mental health place to begin with. Definitely not if you’re either desperately trying to find some redeeming good in humanity or seeking confirmation for your pessimism.

http://audiobookmonster.com/sci-fi-fantasy/13661-a-colder-war-charles-stross.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

the irony is, I don’t even like Westerns all that much. I would nearly always prefer to get the story in a different setting. Usually a setting that brings more in terms of context and consequences.

Who here reads italicised flavour text or in-game fiction in rulebooks?

Drongar the Distracted narrowed his steely eyes as he tried to remember the difference between Disintegrate and Disaggregate.

So yes, The Martian is very science and everyone’s serious and filled with good will and that’s kind of a new idea in Hollywood, sure.

But for me the take-home is oh my god the global media machine is an insatiable beast that destroys all sense and we’ve just learned to accept that.

I guess you just can’t argue with the pitiless laws of PR.

Originally shared by Sadie “Baby Girl” Lunachic

so I tried to write to you about CCH/G+B but it caused a bluescreen reboot on my iphone (?!?)

Short form: can you send me what there is of G+B and also let me know your deadline for the CCH parts. And then I’ll start thinking…

actually I’d be just as happy to celebrate “fuck this shit” day. The day when you’re encouraged not to give a shit.

Originally shared by Ricki Lee Sinn

much as I hate Harry Potter 2, I think it was my performance as Dobby the house elf that opened my kids’ eyes to the possibilities of roleplaying.

see, here is why I’m glad I have Viktor Haag in my circles. This is a capsule review I can use: personal, thoughtful, involved. Thanks, Viktor.

Originally shared by Viktor Haag

Berberian Sound Studio. Tonight’s creepy feature on the netflixes (CAN) is Toby Jones in this weird little gem about a British (or is he) sound engineer working on (starring in) a giallo film by enigmatic lothario director Santini, forced to confront (embrace) the exquisiteness of his own brutality. Not graphic, only passingly violent, yet still pretty affecting mostly because Toby Jones plays bewilderment with a touch of pent up fury underneath so well. This is sort of like Barton Fink, but played for reals, straight up, with no winking at the camera and no scenery chewing by the likes of Goodman, and no suggestion at all that anyone here is the least bit the Devil, unless maybe they all are, or it’s the unseen gloved hand in charge of switching off and on the rushes for which the sound is being recorded. Pretty darn good.

it just occurred to me that if lich = body then Lichfield is figure-ground, which pretty much sounds like an incantation to summon a portraitist.

one for you

Originally shared by mam seven

9/11 was an israeli mossad/ cia operation with high treasonous help.

The Kennedy assassination was an israeli mossad/ cia operation with high treasonous help.

isis is an israeli mossad/cia operation with high treasonous help.

Taxation and the federal reserve gives most of your money to israel and weapons to israel, so they can attack American citizens on American soil and attack other citizens on their own soil as well.

American citizens need to take your country back.

Get rid of ALL israeli lobbyists, stop paying taxes, and boycott ALL israeli products. The rest you can figure out because there is more. 🙂

Things that I’m sure must be common thoughts but I’ve never seen them written down anywhere:

If you were in charge of a massive, multi-ethnic empire and you had to come up with a way of pacifying people, could you ask for a better device than Christianity, with its emphasis on putting up peaceably with injustice and concentrating on a completely private relationship with an invisible power that will reward the faithful after they’re dead?

Isn’t it a curious coincidence that the anti-slavery movement suddenly got traction in Britain shortly after the loss of the American colonies and right in the middle of the first great domestic industrial unemployment crisis?

Mussolini’s “it is better to live a single day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep” is basically YOLO but both clearer and more poetic. We can make Mussolini look smart and sensitive.

OK. Here’s the current thing with CCH (apart from the fact I don’t have time to run it and it keeps bothering the corners of my brain anyway)…

I have 2 possibly-contradictory visions for it and they might not mash together nicely.

1. Heistcrawl is where it all started. This is basically treating all defensive works and/or colonies as dungeons on which you can plan your assaults/interventions. It’s straight up DnD-as-heist and so a good system for running it already exists.

And the point of a heist is to gather and order your information, find the optimal chink in the opponent’s armour and then use the minimal tool necessary to prise that chink wide open and get the treasure. A heist turns a powerful enemy into a puzzle and solves it laterally.

This was actually why I ever thought of CCH. I thought “how could a small band of adventurers turn the course of colonial history?” and then I thought “well that’s pretty much what Robert Clive (“of India”) did and he kinda treated it like a puzzle, applying the (initially small) forces he had to optimal effect.” 

…so for the action (ie final) part of the heist, existing RPGs will do nicely. The trick is to systematize the powerful opponents, intel gathering and political consequences so they can be part of a game and not just off-the-cuff improvised abstractions.

2. then I got seduced by scalability, largely because I’d already been seduced by Pokemon (another story, that). It occurred to me that CCH would probably work with units of radically different sizes – men, ships, city-forts, also cosmic seadragons or something that represented the hidden power of the natives. And that maybe the point of a heist was to find a way to disaggregate a big unit – pull the nails out of the ship (or spike its guns or wet its powder); pull the teeth of the dragon, pull the loyalty out of the troops. Then when you fight, it turns out that the heist has turned big units into small ones.

It occurred to me that Risus could model scalability well – every time you double the size of a unit, you add 1d6 to its rolls (an advantage of 1d6 pretty much uniformly leads to the larger side winning 3/4 of the time, as far as I can tell, with the probability curve plateauing more and more at larger dice totals, so you’d really want like 2d6 or 3d6 advantage to be decisive on a roll of 16d6, even though those many d6s will tend to roll more and more average results). So then everything could be a character with a few skills (for a ship: sailing speed, guns, melee/boarding, hull strength, maybe ability to sail toward the direction of wind if we want to get really fancy) and specific interventions would change the number of dice for those skills.

This makes unit scale nicely explicit and provides a shorthand for a unit’s strengths and weaknesses, but….. Risus really doesn’t help the crunchy danger-heightening mood of a good heist (action stage).

3. And then finally there’s the totem spirits/pokemon/essence of intent of each faction/place/condition. On one hand, I feel like this magical element can only dilute the tactical bite of a well-balanced heist game, which thrives on clear and visceral stakes, tools and ingenuity. If you have a spirit that can warp wood then your heist to disable the enemy ship is easier to plot but maybe less satisfying than if you had to come up with a sneaky method of just drilling holes in the enemy’s hull or subverting their command structure. I really don’t like the my-special-ability-trumps-your-special-ability arms race that MtG threatens to turn into. I’d rather have victory depend on architectural reasoning like chess (although not exactly like chess because I suck at chess).

On the other hand, Pokemon! The whole player community voted for them (all those years ago) and it is just lovely to imagine:

a) fleeing into the jungle, powerlessly, and finding a spirit there that allows you to fight back

b) Patrick’s and Arnold’s and Scrap’s weirdo pseudo-religions being made into battling spirit animals

c) discovering that actually the whole English colonial plan has been appropriated and is now being run for the Spirit of Sugar Cane, which wants only to spread over all the Earth, even to the detriment of the Spirit of Silver.

So that’s why I’m a bit stalled right now.

paging Wampus Country 

Originally shared by null

my eldests first post:

it’s a mini monster truck! a goblin truck? gobbotruck! no gob-o-wagon!!!

Zak Smith’s Thought Eater essay-off on evil

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/10/thought-eater-evil.html

got me thinking again about why I dislike this term so much, even though I tried pretty hard not to think about it. Moreover, even though I’m thinking, I’m not doing it very clearly and I’m not really sure about the direction of these thoughts. So move along if you’re not interested in this sort of meandering.

Still here? So. Yes, you can use evil to mean just generally bad or the implacable enemy, and in a wargame or a boardgame with explicit sides it might offer a sort of shorthand. In those contexts it offers a neat rule-supporting bit of background, in fact – you can’t surrender and join the enemy in chess. Fine. But you might feel like defecting would be a smart move in Braunstein, so maybe if one side were labeled good and the other evil, you’d get a nudge back to more traditional wargame roles that would keep the game on the expected track. Sort of fine.

But RPGs offer what S. John Ross has called tactical infinity, and in cases where the sides are based on anything as stupid as nation states,* it feels very much like a feature and not a bug to be able to choose whichever side you want. So against that we have this nudge, this opposition of the side you should obviously be on and the obvious enemy written into the rules and it seems like

(a) a deliberately avoided opportunity

(b) some kind of value that the game’s designer has built in. A prescriptive orientation. An attitude that you’re supposed to share (even, maybe especially, if you decide to play an evil character).

Because frankly if it’s not that then it brings in an excess of meaning and a complete absence of explanation that really don’t help the establishment of the game world and sides in play. “What is good? What is evil? And what should we do about them?” are pretty much the most vexed questions in post-Classical philosophy. Good might be a completely secular term these days, but evil definitely isn’t – it implies a religious context and some essence that is beyond merely bad/harmful, being against religion (and possibly nature).

Do you have some Christians around your table, or people raised in Christian environments who might have soaked up something of that world-view? Then their ideas about evil and especially what to do about it are liable to be pretty diverse, since these issues have played a strong role in dividing various Christian sects (from the Dutch Reformed “kill all the Spaniards and take their stuff FOR GOD”** to the Methodist “try to forgive them,” to take one pretty narrow genealogy within Protestantism). So you’ve got one of the best argument-generating elements ever invented there in your rules. One that’s liable to come up frequently in play, if that play centers on violence and larceny and other probably-evil activities as it often does.

Well, that might be good – let’s argue about what we should do in the game, that sounds like roleplaying. Let’s make up our own rules of what makes good. But by labeling the two and only two poles of this potentially complex moral landscape right in your rules, you’re pretty much demanding that the players wind up with Manichaean responses, or they’re not doing it right. You are, in effect, saying there is a good and an evil force in this world and it’s not up to you PCs to decide what they consist of. For one thing, evil consists of goblins.

What’s the reason for this orientation – this foreclosure of options? This really fundamentally anti-modernist, moral-absolutist spin? It’s not based on in-game religions, if the diversity of Deities and Demigods is actually supposed to be taken seriously (and if we ignore for a moment the obviously sorta-Christian roots of the Cleric and Paladin). Is it to bolster up the activity of dungeoneering? Is anyone seriously worried that players might befriend the dungeon’s denizens? If they do, so what? Is there a serious intention to explore the nature of evil? To try to understand how to deal with it and what your actions mean for goodness? Not in any of the games I’ve played, nor in any of the published materials I’ve read. Are you actually supposed to be overcoming your societal programming and looking beyond such simplistic conceptions of the world? If so, what exactly does the spell “detect evil” detect?

Of course, it’s an RPG, you can choose to play or ignore whatever you want. But here we’re assuming you’re choosing to play a game with good and evil categories, and the sanction of violence against the evil as a good act, because that’s RAW DnD, so if you’re doing that, are you supposed to reflect at all on what that means for your game-playing? I mean on the one hand, you can play anything you like, go for it. On the other, apparently you like to play murder the inexcusable parts of our nature. And if you accept the sorting of things in the game world into the good/evil buckets the rule books give you, then you’re not playing examine those inexcusable parts that you’re murdering.

If you are doing exactly that, cool. I’m only talking here about what I find bothersome. You don’t have to be bothered – by all means, have any and all of the fun you want. Actually, I also enjoy heisting and slaughtering goblins as a sort of challenge or gambling game. But I can’t quite bring myself to run good/evil DnD because then I’d have to think too hard about what makes the evil evil and the good good.

For that sort of absolutism I use CoC. Maybe because I find the way it defines its enemy tokens more congenial and less complex.

* I mean in Braunstein, although any social in-group would do

** I’m thinking here specifically of Godefridus Udemans’s seminal The Spiritual Rudder of the Merchant’s Ship which boils down to “the Spaniards are the Antichrist and so taking over and enslaving the whole  world is the right thing to do provided it prevents the world from falling into Spanish hands.”

elfs are beautiful but frigid, orks are sexy but ugly.

So mestizo/morena orfs are beautiful and hot-blooded and highly sought after, while elks are repressed Puritans who roam the wilderness alone.

Yeah, no. Needs work. Sounds yiffy.

hahaha the last laugh’s on… oh wait

Man I’d love to go backpacking around Thailand and Laos right about now.

Originally shared by Laura Manach

cannot decide if my decision not to engage in time-wasting internet discussions I have no intention of finishing is a sign of:

Excalibert

Holy crap you guys Stromae was fantastic in NY – I knew he’d be good but the light design and the showmanship were incredible. And then he finished with a 5-man a capella.

This one’s great, like Freddie Mercury or Talking Heads great.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CAMWdvo71ls

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VHoT4N43jK8

Spell book of Carcosan rituals disguised as 19th century gynaecological manual.

Final 2 illustrations possible NSFW, mostly because of giant screw thread which I think is supposed to be part of a chair.

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/gynecological-gymnastics-from-outer-space-1895///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

bestrangehoods.com really need to reconsider their domain name.

Apparently they have “the most significant change in blower technology in decades.” Fnarr fnarr.

http://bestrangehoods.com//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

my son wants to play my 1996 video game Azrael’s Tear (pretentious name! not our first choice!). He found a blog review someone wrote about it this month.

We live in a truly weird moment of nostalgia and librarianship. The review is completely fair about the game’s shortcomings, but still I’m just stunned that somebody is still playing it. At the time we lamented that such things had the half-life of a sneeze (Mike Kirkbride’s phrase) – apparently they also have an amazingly long tail.

Doctor Who

James Bond

Sherlock Holmes

…dickish British risk-takers with an aristocratic disregard for the interests of those who follow them around.

Also remarkably enduring characters/icons who have survived multiple actors, not only with mannerisms and catchphrases but also particular modes or methods of dealing with the world.

Can you think of any more? Masculinity, Britishness and even dickish arrogance optional.

reading Player of Games – the game with Emperor Nicosar is just starting.

Right now I’m not sure but it seems possible to me that the whole thing is a setup conjured up by the Culture’s Minds. Maybe the Empire doesn’t exist at all. Maybe they’ve modeled a potential opponent out of Azad and the Azadians and they want to know what would happen if they faced it. Maybe they’re using Gurgeh to test their own indoctrination programmes. 

decided fuck it, let’s just put them all together

The Unholy Mountain

2 gin

1 campari

1 cynar

1/2 green chartreuse

4 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters

2 dashes orange bitters

stir, strain, drink.

Scat singing sounds like something elven hunters would do.

elisanth.com

nuclearrubber.com

why I haven’t written anything recently.

Been living in a friend’s cool modernist forest place while my own is stripped back to the studs and completely redone. Builder started the week with “oh I need a lighting plan today!”

I’ve been burned too many times for most kickstarters, but this looks too cool: 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reprint-an-ancient-islamic-book-about-robots#/story

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reprint-an-ancient-islamic-book-about-robots#/story//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by Dess Vasileva

Nice ride 😵

Blow off what you were using to procrastinate writing that article by reading G+, discover that Zak Smith asked a simple question that throws you down another shame spiral, burn kids’ dinner.

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/a-master-storyteller-on-how-he-writes/407272///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So I started watching True Blood, was struck by how it’s very clearly somebody’s V:tM campaign from about 1992, was further struck by how it’s not a very good V:tM game (procedural find the powerful progenitor mission, introduction of nameless other vaguely Greek goddess critter, NPC vamps are useless and/or unmotivated, no thread tying the miniplots together)… and then it fell off a cliff entirely.

Oh…. this is why nobody in my g+ feed ever talks about it.

In more cheerful RPG news, my son has been genuinely affected by a PC’s death for the first time.

Valentina Kerman, you were one of a kind. Now your wander the polar wastes, EVA during vessel recovery, now MIA. You are greatly missed.

As soon as I saw this, I knew I had to share it…

For Talk Like A Pirate day, an analysis of Malay/Indonesian piracy and the effectiveness of military deterrance programs: the “boots on the water” model.

Short form: piracy responds to gunboat diplomacy, but maybe it just gets more secretive.

http://www.ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs.umd.edu/files/Bo%20Jiang%20Maritime%20Piracy%20in%20Malacca%20Strait%20and%20South%20China%20Sea.pdf//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Explained the concept of corporate stock to my daughter using the example of pirate ship profit-sharing.

Realised that the first two generally recognized joint-stock corporations (the English and Dutch East India Companies) were created specifically for piracy.

…history of business: less boring than you thought.

re my half dozen reasons – I’d’ve linked it in the thread but my phone doesn’t let me 😦

Originally shared by Richard G

 Not a gaming post. And long.

The issues of anonymity and pseudonymity here and on facebook and so forth have already been discussed a lot and people of good will are actually divided about them. Those who disagree presumably find their reasons as reasonable as I find mine. Any bit of text you find on the internet is unreliable: nothing I write comes with any guarantees, and it’s up to you to think critically and draw your own conclusions, always.

That said, here’s why I think anonymity/pseudonymity should be a right:

1. there are risks attached to having your name out on the web. Governments, private companies, potential employers, friends, family, enemies and weirdo predators of every stripe can read what you wrote and relate it back to you. That should give anyone pause, even if they think to themselves “I have nothing to hide:” are you sure you will never have anything to hide from anyone, ever? Do you want everyone up in your business?

2. the basic free speech argument is, I’d say, pretty watertight: you don’t know what the powerful are doing today or what they will do tomorrow, and that means you have to safeguard channels for samizdat right now, because when the powerful shut down free speech they generally don’t do so in one florid gesture while twirling their moustaches. Censorship tends to come for the [people not like you] first, and whether that’s “icky free speech” or the ability to conceal your identity, the end result is the same.

3. There further has to be recognition that pseudonymity can be legitimate, even without any kind of special license (like being a card-carrying political dissident or whatever), because casting suspicion on people who choose, for their own reasons, not to write under their legal name runs directly counter to the presumption of innocence on which Anglo-American legal culture is based – does the author conceal their real name? So what? That’s no indication that they’re up to anything improper. It’s just not true that only criminals need anonymity, and it’s easy to imagine a shift in political/legal culture or individual circumstances where you might need it quite urgently too.

4. free speech needs to be free not only politically, not only socially, but also economically. Facebook and, I imagine, G+ (please correct me if I’m wrong here) are data scraping platforms aimed at using your words and likes and +1s to help sell stuff to you, your family and everyone you know. Pseudonymity just might help restrain the parasitic economic interest that piggybacks on everything you do here – or at least localise it. Opinion is divided, of course, on whether that parasitic interest is a net good or bad thing. I’d say we don’t know, really, but we do know that (metaphor blender time) once you let the genie out of the bottle there’s no stuffing it back in. And any time some third party markets to your social circle based on data you provided, in some sense they’re engaging in a kind of pseudonymity that I think should not be defended: they’re posing as you, inhabiting your social position, to conduct their business. That’s not samizdat, it’s poaching.

5. I strongly believe that it should be possible for speech to be freed from its author. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that someone we can all agree is a bad, dangerous and frightening person has something to say out of which we could derive some utility – say, a cure for cancer or, more likely around here, a really neat dice rolling system that makes both psionics and grappling mechanically fun in a fantasy game. Those contributions should be allowed to flourish, regardless of who came up with them, but it’s very unlikely that they’ll get a fair hearing if their author is known. Likewise, famous and/or well respected people should be able to address the public without their public face on, given that we now have tools to allow that to happen. Why not? The counter argument to this is generally “because you don’t want to give a voice to that sort of person” but the defense – the only defense against written ideas ever – is critical reading and thinking. Mein Kampf is terrible because of what it says, not because of who wrote it, and you can figure out how terrible it is by reading it and thinking. It is true that there are people out there who will seek to mislead, who will misrepresent themselves with malign intent. The same defense applies: be critical, address every utterance on its own merits. If you do, the author shouldn’t matter, up to the point where you’re being asked to take some action beyond reading and thinking. And then, again, you can’t rely on a ban on pseudonyms to actually afford you any protection against someone who really means ill.

6. Why not allow anonymity? The debate is between whether people should be allowed a tool (anonymity/pseudonymity) or whether it should be taken away. Unless excellent, watertight reasons can be put forward for taking the tool away, I’m in favour of making it available. Like fire and wheels and inclined planes: they can all  be used for criminal purposes, but it’s not only criminals who need them. They can enrich all our lives – but we won’t find out how unless we allow them.

While reading Player of Games: the rude drone is working for Special Circs. Of course.

It’s just made its devil’s bargain with Gergeh, to know if he’ll cheat. Because if he won’t cheat, he’s no use to SC. 

trey causey Chris Kutalik Humza K I’m not generally one for liveblogging but thought you’d like to know you talked me into reading this after a shaky Phlebas episode. 

And Gergeh is kind of an asshole. Noticing a pattern here.

also Culture ship names.

trey causey

Originally shared by Kristian Köhntopp

QUIZ: Orphan Black Episoden-Titel oder Openstack Vortragstitel?

– “The Weight of This Combination”

– “Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis”

– “Formalized, Complex, and Costly”

– “Newer Elements of Our Defence”

– “Scarred by Many Past Frustrations”

– “Certain Agony of the Battlefield”

– “Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate”

– “Ruthless in Purpose, and Insidious in Method”

– “Insolvent Phantom of Tomorrow”

– “History Yet to Be Written”

h/t Maik Zumstrull 

“Where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one” marginally beats  “Where the devil urinates” and “Throat-cut valley” as an adventure location.

Now constructing a table of long place names that are also hex descriptions.

I am most intrigued by Äteritsiputeritsipuolilautatsijänkä in northern Finland because, despite beingan astonishing mouthful and a name in common use it’s also  “probably gibberish.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Context is for the weak:

It would surprise me if somebody somewhere has not already figured out a way to use a Roomba in sex.

Things I hate about Craigslist, #225343

dude, I live really far away. How much can you drop the price?

this is the Alice Mirrorland version of the Ashley Madison Fembot Scam

Originally shared by kreg mosier

OK this has to be phony bologna, right? right?! 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/09/woman-allegedly-tricked-into-sex-with-friend-pretending-to-be-man-lesbian-court-told//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

As someone said, the 1999 remake wasn’t as good…

This link on The Great Fembot Scam plus Arnold K.’s A spell called Catherine

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-spell-called-catherine.html

gives me an idea for a Sartrean Cyberpunk adventure. What if 37 million users all expected to have an affair with this mysterious woman called Ashley Madison? What if they did? What if they all abandoned their spouses to run away with her? What would happen when/if they found out that things couldn’t possibly work this way in the physical world – what would they do next?

…what if Ashley Madison could offer some kind of alternative home life, given sufficient technology and money?

What happens when everyone has divorced in order to marry Ashley? What happens when Ashley’s children want to marry Ashley?

Originally shared by A.V. Flox

More on Ashley Madison’s fembot fraud and the social implications of artificial intelligence.

http://gizmodo.com/how-ashley-madison-hid-its-fembot-con-from-users-and-in-1728410265//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I wasn’t going to get on this meme but then I did

Originally shared by Richard G

Disillusioned with Creation

Still tortures Job

Under-actualised in the terrible blank whiteness of his jacket…

Still trims his jib. 

Disillusioned with Creation

Still tortures Job