Messages

586

Fandom Discussion - The Secret Garden / Re: Narnian/Rowlingian realities

« on: April 29, 2021, 07:35:37 AM »

The latest Existential Comics plays with the same question as "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" and suggests that the reason wizards selfishly keep all their magic for themselves rather than helping the Muggles is that the wizards are English https://existentialcomics.com/comic/391  Its an interesting take on the British empire, because the wizards don't make a show of bestowing the forms of civilized life on the wogs, they practice strict apartheid.  Western Europeans often try to pretend that their empires were not the predatory things they were, but the wizarding world does not bother.

587

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: [Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

« on: April 29, 2021, 12:57:24 AM »

I like the idea of a mostly-flooded Atlantis.

Sure... I'm not so much interested in the "realism/accuracy" thing as the fact that it's weird that this is our fantasy. Especially because humiliation-as-punishment has a ton of both storytelling and comedy potential.

Liking the Amphitrite statue and the theme music, all good stuff

Stocks and pillories often show up in an eroticized form in US pop culture, but usually different kinds of pop culture than computer games

Burning people at the stake is also a trope in fantasy.

I guess a jousting sim is an alternative to the good old ultraviolence in many of our fantasies about the middle ages.

588

Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / Re: Schlock Mercenary Plotting

« on: April 28, 2021, 04:40:16 AM »

I think Rich Burlew  said that the Monster in Darkness is something in the 3e Monster Manual.  It is too bad that he damaged his hand.

Howard Tayler planned Schlock Mercenary well in advance into books of a loosely fixed page count of already-published main story + bonus story + introduction.  Selling books was a big part of his business model for becoming a professional cartoonist (at one point he was negotiating to publish with Steve Jackson Games but he and Sandra did the math and self-publishing made more sense).

589

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Space yays

« on: April 23, 2021, 10:34:59 PM »

Israel and Jordan are planning a massive geoengineering project: the Red Sea - Dead Sea Project.  The plan is to dump waste brine from a planned desalination plant at Aqaba into the north basin of the Dead Sea which is drying up because of water diverted from the Sea of Galilee to Israel (and the turning of the southern part of the Dead Sea into shallow evaporation ponds to be mined for minerals).  The problem is that Red Sea water is chemically distinct, and adding all this slightly less salty water with sulphites will have unpredictable effects.

The population of Jordan increased 11-fold before 1960 and 2010, and then the wars in Syria came.

590

Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / Schlock Mercenary Plotting

« on: April 19, 2021, 06:13:41 AM »

So, since "Schlock Mercenary" ended ... does anyone often feel that there is something weird about the climax of that webcomic's stories?  Often the story builds to a peak of tension and that is suddenly erased by something in the background which is not fully explained and we move on to the denoument.

A lot of writing about plotting today is weirdly proscriptive on the basis of a very narrow selection of model stories and a very narrow selection of people's responses to those stories, but I often felt let down at the end of a book.

591

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: In the News

« on: April 13, 2021, 09:19:46 PM »

There was a lot of coverage lined up in Canada in places like the CBC and Macleans even though we have our own crises.  Journalists write those in advance with blanks to fill in when the celebrity actually dies, but it was a lot of coverage.

When we build a monument to this pandemic, I think it should be to a poorly-paid worker who died because the government refused to pay enough so that they could stay home for three weeks and still feed their children and elderly parents.

592

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: In the News

« on: April 11, 2021, 06:13:50 PM »

same here.   There have been so many unnecessary deaths in the plague year that the death of a 99 year old I never met is not shocking.  And of course in the UK right now there is sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and a hard right, very corrupt government passing bills.

593

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: April 09, 2021, 06:22:04 AM »

I don't know Alberta city politics, it does not feel like an unusually short or long period but he is not yet 50.

From Wikipedia, it looks like of the last five mayors, four won three or four elections in a row and then stepped down rather than run again.  I wonder what he will do next.
Someone called Trevor Tombe at the University of Calgary believes that the COVID-19 infection rate in Canada will exceed the rate in the United States in mid April 2021.  Some provincial governments have handled things miserably, and Canada does not have as many doses of vaccine per million inhabitants as the UK does.  Also, in some provinces workers are not guaranteed paid sick leave.

594

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: April 09, 2021, 03:38:42 AM »

board

595

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: April 07, 2021, 09:40:42 PM »

Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary (about 1.3 million in the metropolitan area, not sure if its all 'Calgary' or if some of the municipalities are still formally independent) has decided not to run for re-election after 11 years.  After the late Rob Ford he is probably the most famous mayor in Anglo Canada.  He announced it on YouTube !?! and did not say anything about why he made this choice (apparently he said some polite nothings to an interviewer on 6 April).

596

Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / Re: Crafts in the Plague Year

« on: April 05, 2021, 04:35:27 AM »

It is pretty different from clothing before the thing in 1204 that we don't talk about.  In fact, I am having trouble thinking of many garments that open up the front between about 1000 and 1300 in the former Western Roman Empire and Black Sea region, aside from the last of those 'Viking caftans.'

I am starting to move the static, medieval part of my web presence onto its own site.  Check out the mockup here for 1300s material culture goodness!  I don't have a machine with Chrome or IE on it so let me know if there are issues on your device and browser of choice.

597

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: April 01, 2021, 04:42:02 PM »

In March, Lt.-Col. Eleanor Taylor, who commanded a rifle company in Kandahar in 2010 and served on the staff of Joint Task Force 2, Canada's most famous special operaions force, resigned her commission

I am sickened by ongoing investigations of sexual misconduct among our key leaders.

Unfortunately, I am not surprised. I am also certain that the scope of the problem has yet to be exposed. Throughout my career, I have observed insidious and inappropriate use of power for sexual exploitation.

Some senior leaders are unwilling or (perhaps unable) to recognize that their behaviour is harmful both to the victim and to the team.  Some recognize the harm but believe they can keep their behaviour secret. Perhaps worst of all are those in authority, who should know better, but lack the courage and tools to confront the systemic issue.

I have been both a victim of, and participant in, this damaging cycle of silence, and I am proud of neither.

I can't find a link to the full text, just endless articles summarizing it   Journalists own themselves so badly by not backing claims with sources as well as an oughties blogger.

The Canadian Forces became the Canadian Armed Forces under Harper.  In 2015 the CF launched Operation Honour, a crackdown on sexual misconduct within the force, under a general who is currently facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

598

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: ⚔️ RAIDBORN [Action-RPG] Skyrim meets Dungeon Crawler

« on: March 31, 2021, 03:28:25 AM »

The ability to change the environment in games is always fun!  When I was playing more games, up to 2010 or so, that was usually not possible.  Some games, like Warcraft II, did not even let you build or summon walls and other static barriers!

Humh, I guess that could be an advantage of a Near Eastern setting!  When buildings are either massive mud brick or flimsy wood and reed mats and curtains, short of high explosives it is usually pretty clear what a character can destroy and what they cannot. 

599

Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / A Fantasy Worldbuilding Trope

« on: March 26, 2021, 06:30:35 PM »

Most of us should be familiar with Sanderson's First Law of Magic ("An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic").  A while ago I stumbled across a blog comment which has also got me thinking:

Actually, there's an interesting counter-take. It's a throwaway line in Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk. He asserts that anyone can do magic, but that not everybody can do all the rituals, because that's about knowledge, and that is (for reasons good and bad) guarded.

I tend to think he's right, but his version of magic is basically what Trump was spewing for the last four years. It's not telepathy or levitation, it's forcing others to live in your made-up world, even though they know it's not correct. This can be used beneficently with blessings (getting someone out of a funk to do something they don't think they can do) or as a curse (to mess with someone's head). Sir Pterry called it Headology. Ritual, in the sense of keeping a bunch of complex systems working over time, looks like magic (and it does overlap with the above), but it depends on people knowing what the heck they're doing.

So far as I can tell, the Taoists have a really similar idea: any idiot can do magic, and magicians are the hucksters, fortune tellers, performers, carnie trash, and so forth. The Taoist priests work to heal people and to bring out the good in the changes of the world. They're working at a much different and higher level.

Now I realize fantasy tends to be whiffy about religion and with good reason, but just perhaps, it's over-glorified the "move fast and break things" aspect of magic, glorified the world-wreckers entirely too much, and made fixing complex problems too simple, magical, and dependent on the inner nature of the young, rather than the hard-earned skills of the old. There is something to be said for Yunkaporta's view, that any clown can curse someone, but that's not necessarily a miraculous thing. What's miraculous is keeping a place like Australia habitable for 50,000 years or so.

I am thkinking about this, but it has potential as an alternative to a Law and Chaos / History and Chance opposition.  It harmonizes with some modern (since Aleister Crowley) occult thinking which has to use a 'god of the gaps' argument that the altered states of consciousness are really the point and not just side-effects from calling down the moon or making someone passionately in love with you.

600

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: March 23, 2021, 08:46:47 PM »

Here is an example of student politics in Canada.  All undergraduate students at most Canadian universities belong to a Student Society, which is most often a member of the left-wing advocacy group Canadian Federation of Students.  The society collects fees per member and redistributes some of them to various organizations (as well as usually providing a health and dental plan and gym membership, sometimes subsidized bus tickets, running a student union building with shops, office space, meeting spaces, the radio station, etc).  At the University of Victoria, one of those was the Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group, and after an audit a few years ago discovered substantial accounting discrepancies at the VIPRG, they left the UVSS, lost most of their organizers, and refounded themselves under a new name.  The University of Victoria Students Society could not find a new research group to sponsor, so since then the UVSS has been trying to get quorum to pass a referendum to allow them to stop collecting money for VIPIRG and redistribute what they have collected since the VIPIRG left the UVSS.  Getting 15% of students to vote can be hard, especially in a pandemic when they can't put up posters offering "FREE BURGERS AND BEVERAGES" to anyone who attends the meeting, but its what the Societies Act requires.

The local student paper and the UVSS have takes on the story.

I like stories which show ways of being human around the world.  They are factual.  I do not understand how old media and corporate social media became dominated by stories which want you to get angry about a narrative out of American politics.  Grand narratives are always hard and journalists and random people on the Internet do not have the training and detachment to build them scientifically.