Plan World Optimization Today!

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
shieldfoss
pyr0clast

in any fantasy setting where afterlives of eternal (or even transient but identity-obliterating) suffering exist, it is ethical and correct to achieve immortality through dark magic in order to buy yourself time, accrue sufficient magical power to alter, bend, or break reality itself, neutralize or eliminate any spineless little deities who object, and then personally unfuck the cosmos so that torture isn't baked into the setting mechanics

then retire to a beach somewhere and spend however long you'd like doing whatever, because you've damn well earned it

irradiate-space

I’m currently reading @yudkowsky’s story called, for lack of a better title, “Project Lawful” or “planecrash” or “My 1.8M-word BDSM decision theory D&D fic, which Yann LeCun apparently refuses to read”, and I’m really curious to see whether or not Keltham pulls this off.

endorsed reblog anti deathism pyr0clast shieldfoss project lawful planecrash eliezer yudkowsky glowfic
4thwallbreakersshowdown
4thwallbreakersshowdown

Fourthwall breakers showdown!

Mycroft Canner (Terra Ignota)

Narrator (Hoodwinked)

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Mycroft:

  • Not only does he break the fourth wall, the reader talks back. They have arguments. Reader accuses Mycroft of being an unreliable narrator all the time. We have good fun.

Narrator:

  • He starts the movie by saying he went into voicing over as a job for i don't remember what reason, instead of, you know, narrating the story.
irradiate-space

The only thing short of how Mycroft Canner breaks the fourth wall would be someone changing mediums in a work of art.

terra ignota mycroft canner tournament poll poll meme
ostensible-adult
irradiate-space

in a binary-planet system (Garmillas, Iscandar), where the fuck is L1?

ostensible-adult

It should be at the barycenter, right?

As the mass of the smaller body increases, L1 moves toward the larger body.[citation needed] It’s also intuitively reasonable that if the mass ratio is close to 1:1, you should get approximately the same result when you switch which body is ‘smaller’.

However, when I try to use the equations Wikipedia gives me, things go screwy. L1 gets shoved into the larger body at 4:1, and shoots out to well beyond the larger body at 1:1. So something is wrong.

irradiate-space

Barycentre makes intuitive sense, but I haven’t even bothered to do the math.

astrophysics ostensible-adult reblog
voyaging-too
voyaging-too

I’m still awed (and also scared?) about the whole set-set debate in Terra Ignota. Because on a rhetorical level, accepting set-sets is framed like any other debate about accepting diversity and difference, respecting neuroatypical people, disabled people, trans people, respecting children’s self-determination.

But on a pragmatic level, set-sets are not about children’s self-determination, they are about parents determining their children, about parents exercising unlimited control over their children. Making a set-set is like… what if your strict, demanding helicopter parents who yell at you for less-then-perfect grades and really want you to be a high-earning lawyer could put you in a lawyer-making vat at the age of two, and then have you emerge at the age of ten, not only equipped with brand new lawyerly cognitive capacities, but also filled with a strong desire to do law, and completely disinterested in doing anything else with your life. A lot of people have shitty parents, and even good parents are often wrong about what’s best for their children. Think about what your parents want for you, what your parents expect from you, and imagine it being indelibly printed into your brain, forming the new core of your self, forever.

irradiate-space

That sort of combination indoctrination-and-skills-training is basically what already happens in our present day with regards to competitive gymnasts, equestrians, swimmers, dancers, and beauty-pageant competitors. These are performance fields which require certain shapes from your body and brain, which if you don’t have them by the time you’re old enough to competently make career-planning decisions for yourself, you’re too late to develop them, and you’re mostly locked out of the professional career.

The setting conceit of set-sets merely extends that pattern to mental arts instead of physical.

And so like many things in Terra Ignota, and in speculative fiction, set-sets serve as a mirror by which we see our present-day world, and we are asked: Is this right and acceptable? Where on the sliding scale do we draw the line, and if we draw it there, does the type of line we draw rule out things we don’t want to rule out, like Terra the Moon-Baby?

terra ignota set-sets voyaging-too
unpretty
unpretty

does anyone have an app they're using for collectible tracking in tears of the kingdom? i can never tell which ones are legit and which ones are stealing ign guides and sticking ads on them.

irradiate-space

ZeldaDungeon has an interactive map tied into their wiki, which allows you to mark things as completed and hide them from the map. It’s not all the collectibles, but it’s a big chunk.

unpretty tears of the kingdom
official-kircheis
captainjonnitkessler

Acting like criticizing religion or caring about objective truth is something only white Western atheists do is incredibly eurocentric at best and outright racist at worst.

There is a long, LONG history of non-Western, non-white, non-Christian science, atheism, antitheism, skepticism, and general criticism of various religions. And acting like those people don't exist, or only think that way because of colonialism or "cultural Christianity", or are a minor footnote not worth bothering about because they don't fit the narrative that Christianity is the only Bad religion and everyone else was totally cool and tolerant and properly reverent and respectful of Sacred Things until westerners came in and ruined it all with their science is uhhhhh hugely offensive.

It's very easy to find non-Western people speaking out against religion and theocracy! It is very easy to find non-Western antitheists, many of whom had to flee their home country in order to come out as atheists! And you don't have to agree with them, but you should stop pretending they don't exist or removing their agency because you're more concerned with shitting on atheists and Christians than you are with reckoning with the harm done by religious hegemonies.

cultural christianity religion endorsed captainjonnitkessler reblog
theterrestrialreader
theterrestrialreader

Too Like The Lightning - by Ada Palmer

Terra Ignota is yet another series that intrigued me as soon as I read its concept: that is to say, a story told in an affectedly antiquated language by a morally dubious unreliable narrator, set in an imperfect utopia with its unique take on gender and featuring heaps of philosophical themes. So, let’s talk about its first book, shall we?

Title: Too Like The Lightning

Author: Ada…


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View On WordPress

irradiate-space

So, uh, if you’ve only read the first of this four-book series, you’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg on this series’ gender wierdnesses. And if you think that non-Mycroft plotlines haven’t really started, well, that’s because this is the first book of a series which spends the first two books doing the setup.

gender too like the lightning terra ignota theterrestrialreader
official-kircheis
just-evo-now

I'm not reblogging the post because it made me really really angry but:

Laika was not a noble hero who sacrificed herself so we could reach the stars. She was a dog that was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for essentially no scientific gain.

I assume the reason she is treated as a symbol and a hero and other victims of unbelievably cruel scientific experiments are not is that she was a dog. Interesting how you can ignore how fucking evil an experiment was if the victim is voiceless.

Probably another aspect is something something Space Is Sacred? Everything associated with space gets instantaneously mythologized and no one is ever allowed to pause or criticize because It's Space How Could You Be Against That.

of course if anyone stopped to think about it it would be obvious that Laika was an unwilling participant, she was a dog. But they don't do that, because now Laika is an icon and not, you know, an actual dog they grabbed off the streets of Moscow so they could kill her. Or maybe people think that this was an extremely important experiment and no one could have gone to space otherwise? Bruh even the scientists who worked on it didn't think that.

or maybe you think that Laika was an accidental victim, that something went wrong and that's why she died? no, Sputnik 2 was not designed to even be retrievable. They knew she was going to die, they just needed her to survive long enough for them to get some readings.

the Laika experiment would not even remotely pass a modern ethics review. if you suggested it then not only would you get denied you'd probably be fired, and you'd deserve it.

anyway tldr that Laika was a random dog tortured and murdered by the Soviet government as part of an international dick measuring contest. Celebrating her as a hero or pioneer is a disgusting mockery of her actual story. I realize I'm never going to be able to spread that message very widely but maybe I can at least tell all my mutuals and then ill never have to see this shit again

raginrayguns

animal sacrifice to sacred space travel

irradiate-space

I love the tension between “She was a dog that was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for essentially no scientific gain” and “they just needed her to survive long enough for them to get some readings.” This tension raises an important question: Was there scientific gain from Laika?

Let’s pause our consideration of the Soviet space program for a moment and look at the American space program. You have to keep in mind that, early in the space program, we did not know whether space was compatible with life. Sure, there’s vacuum, but were microgravity and cosmic radiation inimical to life? The US started its tests with fruit flies launched on a V-2 in 1947, which were retrieved alive. They were the first sentient organisms to enter space from Earth. The US launched Albert II, a rhesus monkey, atop a V-2 in 1949. He would’ve survived except the parachute failed. The US launched a lot of monkeys in the ‘50s. They also did some mice. And, because all this was the Cold War, all of the findings were classified. The US wasn’t sharing its research findings with the Soviets.

The Soviets needed to answer the same question: is space compatible with life? As far as Wikipedia knows, the first Soviet animals into space were the dogs Tsygan and Dezik in 1951, who survived their suborbital flight. Laika’s launch in 1957 was the second spacecraft to ever orbit Earth; no one had the tech yet for deorbit burns.

I can’t tell what OP’s desired solution would be to the problem that the Soviets faced. The Soviets were about a decade behind the US on space life sciences, were still at the cutting edge of space science and hadn’t invented deorbit burns. Should the Soviets have waited to launch Laika until they could deorbit? And if they waited, what would the effects of that have been upon the Space Race? How would that have affected the Soviet space program employees’ quality of life? How would the Space Race have played out in this alternate future?

laika space race ussr just-evo-now laika was indeed sacrificed but what were the other options?