Sudanna

to be clear: i wasn't trying to suggest that voting for anything less than my personal ideal is cowardice, i was saying that for me to do what ADoS suggested would be cowardice on my part. vote with your conscience. there is space between good enough and ideal. but that space is an individual determination. whether or not to vote is as much an individual determination as who to vote for, and neither should be compelled.

"everyone that doesn't do what i have decided is best for them to do is a coward and they must be forced to do what i want them to, because it's better." using force to compel people to political action is: bad. refusing to participate in a system that quite deliberately has no place for you is a real and valuable position. refusing to legitimize the functions of a state that has no interest in your priorities is a real and valuable position. refusing to throw in with groups that want you as a manipulable, unquestioning source of power and nothing else is a real and valuable position. refusing to engage with a political system that is bent in every way towards continued domination by the venal and power-hungry is a real and valuable position. there will always be something dreadfully important at stake in some election or other. there will never be a safe time to break ranks. cowardice is clinging to those you know are wrong because you're too afraid of going without and facing the consequences. too afraid to accept systemic failure as a compulsion towards systemic improvement. fear of the opposition, fear of the future, fear of what you'd do without them, and fear of your own weakness are known tools of both ruling parties. to succumb to them is cowardice. if all a candidate ever needs to be is marginally better than someone they are only too happy you help you villianize, then that's all they'll ever be and those are the only leaders you'll ever have. but no, keep feeding the lesser evil. wouldn't you rather be sacrificed to thor than to ba'al ammon? voting is visible. it is undeniably visible: it determines who wins an election. those who need voters -notice- when people don't vote for them, a lot more than they care to notice demonstrations. demonstrations don't cost them power like voting costs them power. starve power at the root.

there are reasons for political abstention beyond childish character flaws that you universally assign those you disagree with childish character flaws indicates a childish character flaw on your part as usual, blaming third parties or insufficiently supportive party members or those not willing to play along with the ideal power schemes of organizations they don't agree with is an excuse for establishmentarians to avoid self-reflection and real revision of their strategies, power structures, and viewpoints. citizens are not obligated to support their rulers. would-be rulers are obligated to entice citizens to support them. if they fail to do so, it is they who have failed, not those they failed to convince. if you keep voting for a party that doesn't adequately represent you, get used to not being adequately represented, cuz they have no reason to change anything.

just a bunchas skinny pale cavepunks fighting the man, living in a cave, bein grumpy, yeah. part of the reason the early avernums are so much more interesting imo

I officiated!

The story is even clumsier than DE:HR about handling its themes. The gameplay is as good or better.

Aren't the Geneforges widely used in G4 just for giving people with no Shaping ability a little bit of seed Shaping ability, though? The G3 protagonist wouldn't need that.

I'll second The Age of Decadence, that game is absolutely fantastic. Other than that, it depends on what exactly you mean by similar. The recent Shadowrun games are real good, but deviate from the SW formula in major ways. They're story-focused isometric turn-based games with great writing, but they're pretty linear.

neb is visiting, so me and bard have connections to neb now. tyran's gonna visit in a couple weeks.

I finished Too Like the Lightning the other day, and while I ended up liking it - liking it significantly, in fact - it came a hair's breadth from losing me about 3/4 in. And I'm not sure I would give it a general recommendation, either. Maybe I'm just overfamiliar with the circles that gave rise to it, maybe I'm too conceited to trust people with complex works, maybe I'm having trouble separating themes of the book from the fixations of its narrator, and maybe my feelings will change when the other half comes out, but it seems too. . . particular a thing for most people. Actual stuff about the book: This is an SF book set in a couple-hundred-years-off future where global transit has become nearly a nonissue. Geographical nation-states have dissolved, replaced by a variety of voluntarily-joined governments and legalities bound by ideology, not territory. And families have been replaced by groups of four-to-twenty friends and colleagues raising children and supporting each other cooperatively. And religion and gender have become -extremely- taboo subjects often prohibited by law from being discussed publicly. And a buuunch of other stuff. It's a neat future, elements and ethics of which may seem familiar to some today. A lot of the book is devoted to displaying and describing that world, which I greatly appreciate. A lot of the book deals with the leaders of the various factions, their power plays, their relationships, the philosophies of the world(as in, actual formal eighteenth-century philosophies), the crises the plot revolves around, and the actual doings of the narrator. And a lot of the book - a looot of the book - is its own slashfic AU where the major characters all frequent the same brothel in the 1700s. And I geeet iiiiit. The author, Ada Palmer, knows what she likes. She's a professor of history focused on the 18th century and philosophy at Chicago University. She has a heart after that of many a nerd. And, as is the perennial failing of our kind, she is way more into her thing than is entirely appropriate to share. For me, it's pagan religions: if you can give me feelings like the feelings I have for Odin, you can legit change my [censored]ing life. For her, it's the eighteenth century and its development of philosophy. She's got a lot of really cool ideas about a lot of things, and also really likes having very attractive people dress up in ridiculous 1700s finery and roleplay - with great accuracy, I'm sure - eighteenth-century gender roles, courting behaviors, and sexual proclivities. And she is way more into that than I am. I mean, it's not done poorly, not by any means. It's very well woven into the plot and there are actual reasons for these things to be happening and actual effects they have on the world. Did you ever want to know what the [censored]ing point of anything the Marquis de Sade wrote was? Well, this book will tell you. By showing. Sometimes the asides into expositing on a great variety of political and philosophical 18th century things get a little cumbersome, but they're usually relevant and interesting. Also this person is dressed up like Louis XIV. Fine, that's what she likes. That was the toughest thing to get over, I think, but it was worth it. It's genuinely a good book with a unique setting, and there's great skill in how the plot turns and how certain things are revealed. Interesting things are done with the narrator and the narrator's conceits. I initially thought the book suffered for its framing device, and some things about it still annoy me - like assigning gendered pronouns essentially arbitrarily - but there are legitimate and interesting reasons for it that become clear only slowly, and in the end I think it works. I don't trust you to properly interpret Too Like the Lightning, but I guess I'm gonna recommend it anyways.

Substitute "dudes with swords" for creations if you want. Doesn't have to be a Shaper. And, probably, you could follow the trail all those creations are leaving back to the essence pool. The effectiveness of one Shaper making five creations at a time from safety and winning by attrition is an artifact of the game. I can't imagine that ever being much more than a nuisance to any serious target. The real power of Shapers seems to be their ability to create endless large semi-independent armies with the aid of installations and machinery, creations which can then be given to handlers. Not so much their ability to make five leashed creations at a time which they lead personally. A Shaper making waves of creations with which to harass the surrounding area would be dangerous, sure, but not the kind of thing that razes cities and crushes armies.

The obvious in-world response, which the game AI is obviously not made to take, is to actually go to the essence pool with more than five creations, and overwhelm the Shaper who is only doing five at a time. This is actually how the PCs - and in several scripted sequences, NPCs - respond to things like spawners, which are functionally a limitless creation factory.

The limit on Shapers seems to be how quickly they can get new permanent creations out of vats and how many creations they can control at once without risking them going rogue, not the availability of raw materials.

left to right, actaeon, me, and bard had dinner and little hike. forgive me and bard, we're at a "driving for five/two days, most recently across the utah desert" level of grossness

man, i have a very different opinion of the second book. just finished The Book of the New Sun, which was beautiful and deep and thoughtful and moving. still drifting around in thoughts of it.

The two of us met them separately.

I drove from Ohio to Washington and kidnapped Bard to come live with me. The both of us met Goldengirl and Actaeon on the way back. Goldengirl is very very sweet and Actaeon has the highest charisma score of anyone I've ever met.

Neuromancer can be quite hit and miss, but it treads richer ground than THTK, I think. Combative? Nah, saying what you think about books is what the topic's for. To spoiler, do [spoiler]spoiler text goes here[/spoiler] to get

I liked The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, largely because of Nahadoth - I thought Jemisin did the deity-character-embodying-(vague-and-contradictory)-high-concept thing very very well in that book, especially with Nahadoth, and dealing with those characters makes up a good portion of the book. I sure don't think it was the best debut SF novel ever(Windup Girl? China Mountain Zhang? The Darkness That Comes Before? Neuromancer? like seriously there's a lot of good [censored]in debut novels), but I liked it a decent amount. It comes close to the "you, the author, are just giving me your thinly-disguised political opinions" line but it doesn't cross it and the opinions are inoffensive or agreeable anyways. What did you find jarring about the ending? I suuuuper hate the sequel. It totally fails in every way the first book succeeds. There is none of the well-thought-out characterization, the main conflict is obfuscated or ignored for five-sixths of the book, the sequence of events seems completely arbitrary, the romance is extremely flat with an extremely flat dude, the POV character has way less drive and motivation and understanding of the world, really just a huge disappointment. It actively makes un-special the most special things about the first book. Haven't read the third one yet, have no pressing desire to get around to it.

Well, Lauren and Sylae and Iffy will be moving in with me over the next few months, so that's gonna happen. No meetings yet though.

359. Truffle Nights - Scenario exploring the underworld of the underworld?

341. Break on Through (To the Other Sidhe) - Elf queen of Glastonbury Grove? 342. Mordenkainen's Audible Sigh - Spell for the Truly frustrated 343. Mordenkainen's Inaudible Sidhe - If mythologies collide in the forest, and no one is around... 347. The Wrath of Kant - Critique of Pure Eugenics 352. Seditious Servile - We must take our free! 353. The Fluttering Wimple Round - Mechanism of Merlin's ultimate arboreal fate, as men say

you can run G1-4 in a window, if that would help.

That means a lot, actually, thank you. I might try again or do a post-mortem eventually, but not soon.

Beka might just be a servile from Rising, who escaped to join the Takers,