the-world-annealing

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#oh my god i knew it was going to be funny but not this funny #disco elysium

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I have one of those robot vacuums but there's a mirror in the house low enough to the ground that the lidar scanner can see a nonexistent room in the reflection so on the navigation map it's generated I have a room that doesn't exist that I have to forbid the vacuum from entering.

#technocosmology

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A fun fact about andorra is that the 1278 charter that forms the basis of its modern constitution stipulated it was to be under the dominion of two co-princes: the bishop of urgell (a catalonian roman catholic diocese) and the count of foix. The latter title was eventually absorbed into the french crown upon the ascension of henry iv (then count of foix) to the french throne, meaning that the 1278 charter now effectively gave andorra over to the joint leadership of the urgell bishop and the french king. This title ofc eventually became an awkward question once several revolutions rendered the title of the king of france basically politically obsolete, leaving us with the current state of the andorran constitution under which Emmanuel macron is a co-monarch democratically elected by the citizens of a foreign country

#thank u OP that was indeed a fun fact #politics

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New short story. Fantasy, < 7,800 words.

#ohh this is good #fantasy #religion

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“Carve” by Woshibai

#this is what von neumann probes actually believe #art

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"the scene was designed to be an eerie night by moonlight"

#ai art

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Mr. President, they've slain the second spire

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Follow for more pokemon posts

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🐣 Washington 2: Anyone up for helping me figure out why I’m experiencing tip-of-the-toungueism?

﷽ rude 413: !healthbot;

🤖 Actually a Bot: If you believe you are experiencing a physical problem, please contact your warranty supplier.

🐣 Washington 2: Nono it’s not that; I think it’s software

🐣 Washington 2: I’m trying to recall a memory, and the pointers are there for the memory, but the memory isn’t.

An AI’s memories are intermittently going missing, and so they turn to a chatroom for advice. ~2500 words.

#oh i like this #fiction

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Is there a pithy one-word term for the chauvinism of literate/urban/agrarian elites toward nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers? Like as far as bigotries go it's pretty much literally as old as civilization (that is, since those elites have existed to record/feel their chauvinism), but I can't think of a specific term for it.

#pffff

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i dreamt of a house with too many rooms, which sounds lyrical and all except most of them were just full of different kinds of couch

#piranesi #whoooh piranesi #loved that book

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v interesting blog post on "invasive species":

many of the white suburbanites i do work for -- some of whom have years of experience in plant based work -- describe any plant that grows well enough or spreads quick enough as "invasive," even plants like poke and monarda and virginia creeper that are not only native to the region but usually regarded as ecologically important species. the message is clear: nativity is fragile, broken, in need of paternalist protection. if a plant is doing well or adapting to new situations under the conditions of capitalism, that means it is a threat to the truly native plants and ecosystems, which are always vulnerable and never able to fend for themselves. anything flourishing must be a threat to the naturalized order of things; nature itself must be produced in relation to its own (definitely real and not made up) established, prior, and stable order.

#sociobotany

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#a lot of books suffer from being written by writers

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Only tangentially related, but I was going to reblog this anyway so I might as well add it:

In 3rd edition D&D, the obscure Ghostwalk setting had a spell called 'Door to Great Evil'. It's available to paladins of level 14 and up, can be cast on any willing paladin, and it teleports the target to a nearby evil creature that 'they are justified to fight by the rules of their faith'. It seems very reminiscent of this, in that it takes the wandering knight archetype and streamlines it via magic.

A post of mine from several months ago about the Perlesvaus self-rearranging forest just wandered across my dash again and made me think about it some more, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

Perlesvaus, for those who don’t know, is a 13th-century French Arthurian romance. It’s intended to be a continuation of Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, but it’s mostly known for being completely batshit when it’s known at all. (There’s an old book on Arthurian texts that dedicates a chapter to Perlesvaus and repeatedly speculates that the anonymous author had Something Wrong With Him. This is the longest scholarly treatment of Perlesvaus I’ve been able to find & read.)

Anyway, there’s an odd worldbuilding detail in the text. See, it’s a Thing in chivalric romances that the questing knights happen upon castles & lords & damsels & such that are unfamiliar to them and have to be explained. You know, “this is the Castle of Such-and-Such, where the local custom is as follows. It’s ruled by Lady So-and-So, whose character I shall now describe to you.”

This is a genre convention that largely goes unquestioned, but it’s a bit odd if you think about it. All these knights are at least minor nobility. They don’t know the other nobles in their region? They don’t know what castles are where? Don’t they have, like, diplomatic relations with these people or at least attend the same tournaments? Even if they’re all fully committed to the knight-errant lifestyle and don’t really engage in courtly diplomacy, you’d think they would share information with each other and get the lay of the land. But instead, to use TTRPG terminology, it’s like they’re all on a hexcrawl that was randomly generated just for them to have these adventures.

The author of Perlesvaus decides to address this. In what’s kind of a throwaway paragraph late in the text, he explains that God moves things around so knights always have new quests to do (and, presumably, is also making sure they always arrive at the right narratively-significant moment). So the reason they’re always encountering people & places they have no knowledge of is because those people & places really weren’t there yesterday. They didn’t know about the Castle of Such-and-Such because it’s normally a thousand miles away and the forest path they followed to get there used to lead somewhere else.

And I think that would be a really interesting thing to stick into a novel or a TTRPG or something. When a knight rides into the forest with the intent of Going On A Quest, at some point they go around a bend in the path, cross an invisible barrier, and wind up in the Forest of Narrative. This is a vast forest with no set geography, filled with winding paths and populated almost entirely with questing knights, damsels in search of questing knights, friendly hermits, strange creatures, and allegorical set-pieces. Then, at the narratively-appropriate time, they cross back over the invisible barrier back into the regular world, and find themselves wherever the Narrative has decided they need to be. This could be a different country, a different continent, or a different world entirely.

Whether anyone involved is actually aware that this is how it works is… optional, really. Though if it’s not a Known Phenomenon, the people whose jobs it is to handle trade & diplomacy & god forbid, maps, are going to end up tearing their hair out in frustration.

#d&d #worldbuilding

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KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS 

#*nodding* kill six billion demons

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The Terraformers, right? I like to joke how that book only had two real flaws: it insisted on calling things that clearly were planes 'flying trains', and it didn't show us (or acknowledge) humans and moose having sex.

Then we rant about why so many people are obsessed with psychoanalyzing villains, and are flocking to stories that reveal the innermost traumas of bad guys. Why do we keep humanizing awful people? It's a problem.

jesus christ this podcast has won a Hugo

#or more abstractly #it very clearly tries to appeal to an audience of queer urbanite online americans #both by shoehorning in said audience's pet issues #and by actively betraying its stated morals when the audience would take offense #and unfortunately that has the effect of making the book feel less like a far-future spectacle and more like a 2020 twitter thread #also didn't know about that podcast quote but good lord #the terraformers

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(Source)

#philosophy