Happy Stimming

"Original" Sin is what i've titled this piece. by me. sorry if you don't have "collapse long posts" enabled. I have many thoughts.

Transcript - References

she's right.

even with the subjective element, there are important notes that it will tend to feel wrong when the player doesn't have anything to hit, and unimportant notes that will tend to clutter a chart.

making a given song hit all ranges of charted note density is going to end up with most of them not fitting well with the song.

taking the time to figure out which difficulty is best, per song, is very tedious for the player. better for the developer to save time, only release one chart for each song, and avoid each player having to individually repeat the work.

rhythm game charts shouldnt have multiple difficulties, why do i need to feel out which level will have the chart adequately represent the music without adding shit in or leaving awkward empty space?

There's a lot of stuff that counts as dystopian about modern society, but one of the smaller yet insidious things I've noticed recently is the rise of companies whose entire marketing strategy is to convince you you're a burden to your friends and families.

I'm talking about that one dog watching/walking service that has a whole commercial implying that your family members secretly hate you for asking them to watch your dog to the point it counts as a modern social faux pas.

And there's this moving service commercial that I think someone else referenced in a big tweet that says something along the line of "Real adults don't ask their friends to help them move."

Like fuck that, man. You're supposed to want to watch your friends' pets, and you're supposed to want to help your friends move, and you're supposed to cook for people when they're sick, and you're supposed to show up to check on friends you haven't heard from in awhile, and you're supposed to remember your friend needs a large frying pan when you find one cheap at the thrift store and bring it to them.

One of the reasons the younger generations are so miserable and lonely is because the rise of technology and the concurrent pushing of this rhetoric that all effort is a major inconvenience, and asking someone to put in effort for you therefore makes you an inconvenience has conditioned them not to seek community.

And because they've never experienced it, they don't know that's what's missing. It's a vicious cycle because when you're depressed from lack of community, finding the energy to put in effort for other people is a lot harder than getting quick dopamine hits from scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. Then you encounter the further issue that our media glorifies romantic love to the exclusion of all else, so most of the young people I know who are lonely jump to "Well I just need a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner," and that sets up rough relationships because one person is expected to fill the void of a dozen or more friends and neighbors.

So please believe me: If you're lonely, try volunteering somewhere in the community. Try going to events around your interests. Try talking to local shop owners. Bake something and surprise a friend with it. Search for nearby clubs or intramural sports teams. There are companies literally capitalizing on subtlely encouraging you NOT to do these things. We've reached the point where helping your friend move is an anticapitalist act.

The BIONICLE world has a canonical...hell?

Oh yeah, that's A Thing. I had been toying with that as a Fun Fact, but I kind of assumed we were all like

But I'm happy to hear I can put this back on the slate! So! Today You Learned about Karzanhi!

In BIONICLE, the main inhabitants of the world are these worker fellows called the Matoran, (the people the Toa protect) and they need to keep working for their world to keep functioning (this seems dystopian to me, but the story kind of glosses over that).

The Matoran have this legend that if you're a very good little worker you're sent to Artakha, a divine workshop island kingdom ruled by an entity also known as Artakha. They would work in this ultimate workshop with Artakha to create cooler gadgets and buildings than anywhere else in the world.

But if you're a bad little worker, you're sent to Artakha's brother, Karzanhi. There bad little workers go to his dark kingdom, and are never seen again...

Obviously we have Heaven and Hell parallels here. In the actual story, most of the characters don't believe this is real. In one book, the heroes come across an evil vine creature that's named Karzanhi after the legend.

But then a bit later we find out that Karzanhi is totally real...

Except... he's kind of a doof. See, bad workers weren't sent to his kingdom as punishment, they were sent because Karzanhi's job is to fix them (these are bionic beings, remember?). The idea was Matoran who were bad workers because they needed some kind of repairs were sent to his kingdom for him to repair and send back. But Karzanhi was garbage at his job, so instead of sending them back after "repairing" them, he just sent them away, or kept them in his own kingdom. The reason Matoran never came back was because he was hiding his own shoddy work.

In fact, he also doesn't realize anything exists outside of his own work. When the heroes pass through his kingdom trying to get to the Plot, he doesn't believe that they're saving the world because as far as he knows, the world is just peachy! When he finds out from them how bad things are, he decides to take a hand in world events himself. And predictably, screws things up even worse.

[He also eventually gets a set that looks nothing like his illustration, because mutation shenanigans, but whatever.]

So yeah! BIONICLE Hell! If you ever see me use 'WTK' that stands for "What the Karzanhi?" We in the BIONICLE fandom used it back on BZPower.

I still think that a key function of the way we think of the concepts "adult" and "child" is to separate the human population into "people who deserve autonomy but no protection" and "people who deserve protection but no autonomy" and in the process dehumanize both groups of people. We ignore the fact that all people need both autonomy and protection, and that our society could easily be set up to provide everyone a healthy mix of both.

What, this? Oh, it’s just my Krana. Yeah, I always wear it while I clean the house, it gets me in the zone.

Matoro Mahri

Every now and then I remember that Malbolge exists and I get to spend the better part of an hour cry-laughing at the world’s worst programming language

already starting off strong, but it gets worse

Wow! Sounds easy and intuitive to use! What’s the “crazy operation” you ask? We’ll get to that later. For now let’s see what a program in this language looks like :)

Thanks! I hate it!

it’s so difficult to work with that the first program was written by another brute force search program

mmmmm delicious base-3 arithmetic, what could go wrong? (For reference, that means this program forgoes the usual “0/1″ values of binary code in favor of a much more fun “0/1/2″ set of values)

ah.

Here’s how the language actually figures out what to do. It’s got 8 “simple” commands that can be executed easily by *checks notes* running the code itself through the modulo operation and taking the result.

As a bonus, on top of all that every single character in your code will now alter what every single other character does. So I hope you’re alright with cracking a cipher every time you add a new letter to your program!

oh god oh fuck.

behold, Malbolge’s primary arithmetic operation and what you’ll be using for most of your math while programming with it :)

This looks specifically designed to be the least logical math operation you could make, and knowing what the rest of Malbolge is I’d wager that’s precisely what happened. I never want to ever use this and it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge

Anyways here’s the wiki page if you wanna read through it more deeply, I’m gonna sit here holding in my laughter staring at the hello world program again.

There's this interesting phenomenon where when you're a child, or some other vulnerable minority dependent on a job for shelter, you are actually under duress almost constantly. You can't say "I don't want to work today," you cannot say "I don't want to do the dishes, actually," you cannot choose not to participate. In a lot of cases, the punishment is explicit. Your parents might yell at you. Your boss might fire you. But in other cases, it's implicit. The mood will sour. You lose leeway. People get mad at you. And that creates a really shitty environment where you're constantly being coerced to do things!

And here's the kicker; you're not allowed to acknowledge that. You cannot acknowledge that you are being coerced, you cannot acknowledge that your free will is not being respected, because that's punished too. Your boss insists that you act excited. Your parents punish you for acting surly. You are forced to fake enthusiastic consent, constantly. It's a fucking nightmare. Your hand is being forced, you do not have the option to say "no," and if you ever, for a second, try to acknowledge that, everyone acts like you're the aggressor.

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!