I need to avoid any system where posting is to easy or gives you likes as feedback, so I'm not going back on tumblr, but for the highly dubious benefit of posterity, my posts can be found here. (This is more or less a direct download of the account that tumblr itself offers, minus the images (too big) and messages and some unanswered asks (too personal).)

This is a bit of an experiment: if there are shitposts you want to make but don't feel like DW is normally amenable to them, feel free to post them here.

Like most religious practices common to the entire civilized world, the Holy Game (actually a genre of many games, most developed for exactly one occasion) dates back to the Elder Undyarchy of the northwestern Taddols. In its classic form, it was designed to adjudicate disputes in naming rituals between divine entities - which divinity shall (at least for the upcoming 157-day Short Year) be credited as including the Night, or the Duties of Guarding the Undyarch, or even (if you want to get meta) Sports Gambling. However, as the game has diffused over the ecumene, it has taken on different meanings, including settling disputes between different aspects of a god, initiating 157-day long "marriages" between the gods in question, and determining other important questions. Frequently the teams of the mascot-gods of cities have been pitted against each other as a proxy for war or other negative-sum conflicts. (Some actual wars have been fought as the Holy Game, with huge "teams" and appropriate rules. This is extremely rare when it comes to political entities fighting over existential stakes, but not entirely uncommon for societies with intermittent raiding conflicts.)

Several things are common. The game is always a naming ritual and all players must be ritually clean. (So no ghoul players, although ghouls who have eaten previous champions are often highly sought after as coaches and trainers.) It is almost always a team sport (teams most typically ranging from 3 to 6 players) and almost always asymmetric. If two gods' teams have played in the past, the rules shall be modified to make it harder for the god/team that won last time. Developing the rules for a match, especially a new pairing, is considered one of the most prestigious forms of allegorical art, and also a deadly serious religious affair in the maintenance of naming rituals. Gods are fully expected to intervene in proportion to their power and stakes in the conflict, and players are expected to try to enter ecstatic states to facilitate this. The stakes almost always involve the taking of an idol and breaking and/or moving of it (thus letting it serve the role of a "flag" or "ball," and sometimes the idol is in fact a rune-carved rubber ball, although torches, bowls of alcohol (which can't be spilt), and live animals are probably the most common); although the Holy Game can also be a fight to the death, in which case a player or players are consecrated as the idols. (Since most games are asymmetric, it can also be the case that your goal is to steal their flag and their goal is to kill you.)

A republican state is generally understood as one in which the regularly set stakes are which god is to be the civic god - meaning that their temple administration will function as the government for the following Short Year - and the rules of the game imply some kind of input from the populace, either in terms of formally gathered votes or acclaim or gathered donations.

Since many gods are created to contain and negotiate with hostile forces, and their cults serve to propitiate rather than earnestly advance the interests of their god, entire teams regularly serve as heels, working up the ire of the crowd while fully hoping to lose. But since the rules are adjusted each game to be easier for the loser, such staged matches become more and more vulnerable to the hostile god's sincere intervention. When such a god wins, the next match is of course adjusted very rapidly towards the benefit of the less hostile god. But such matches are always ticking time bombs, watched with sincere trepidation, and sincere relief when good triumphs over evil.

The following is both a set of general suggestions about how to derive the Monster Manual from the Abolished Aeon's metaphysics, a few specific examples, and a preview of some of the intelligent mortal peoples of the Aeon.

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(N.B. - this got some good pushback in the comments, specfically pointing out that the major publishing companies aren't doing much and that the situation may not last for long, depending on who wins what copyright battles)

The complaints about academic publishing are diverse, so I'm only here to speculateYesterday's xkcd inspired a quick thought, which has probably been had before:



Namely: what if academic publishing is fairly effective public goods provision disguised as an dysfunctional market?

The obvious absurdity of the market (at least on the consumption side - I'm going to leave the production side of it alone for now) shows up whenever Elsevier offers you 24-hour access to an article for $29.99.

I don't want to say that no one has ever been rich, clueless, and also genuinely scientifically curious enough to pay for one of these. A close friend of mine has published a lot of articles in a scientific field and learned about SciHub only recently (though even she wasn't paying for articles, just going the long way of actually logging in through her uni/workplace and personally emailing researchers when that didn't work.) Rather, academic libraries and I guess institutions like pharmaceutical companies are paying for what must be close to 100% of Elsevier's income. Then Elsevier uses this to produce public goods, by sponsoring the production of journal articles that they nominally charge $29.99 for but that are also immediately uploaded to their actual distribution mechanism, arXiv/SciHub/Book4You.

Presumably universities could defect from this equilibrium by just not bothering with the part where they pretend to pay for the library coverage. Partially of course that could land them in trouble (I know of professors who have gotten disciplined or fired for being overly honest about how to actually access textbooks and other materials, which is tragic,) even when no one is getting punished for pirating academic materials as a private individual (leaving aside other tragic cases that weren't really as "private individuals," like Aaron Schwarz.) But also probably having a subscription to the right suite of journals is just the kind of prestige purchase that major universities like to make (or even are required for credentialing, which would make the public goods provisioning aspect even more explicit. "You want to be in the Elks Club, you better pay your maintenance fees.") In this sense, if Elsevier's shareholders are skimming off the top of this process that could maybe be provided more efficiently (relying on lots of volunteer labor driven by intra-guild prestige considerations, etc) then that's possibly just another instance of administrative bloat. If pharma companies are paying for subscriptions, then that's likewise just another instance of them contributing to what they should be paying for anyway.

I am less informed on these topics than I should be, however - especially as someone who will soon be shopping a book around to academic publishers. (No investigation, no right to speak, but I'm speaking anyway.) So I welcome corrections to my likely numerous errors.

is now "Abolished Aeon" (or "Abolished Æon," if you want to be æsthetic.) The secret history of our world, until fell time magics meant that it wasn't!

(Also following, of course, the naming convention that brought you "Forgotten Realms" or "Lost Lands.")

It's not unlikely that you've heard of Mark Rosenfelder's language construction kit. (I have the print version, currently lent out to an acquaintance, but not yet the sequels.)

The site also has some cool tools on it! These are, I suspect, especially useful if you're lazy enough that you don't want to create an actual conlang, but are unlazy enough that you want something that scans right, in terms of having a grammatical structure and set of consistent sounds and that changes over time in consistent ways, and are willing to work with somewhat clunky tools to do so. These include a vocabulary generator (help page), sound change applier (help), and then a number of generators based around creating grammatical sentences.

discoursedrome mentions that Pathfinder is problematic. Setting aside many other ways in which it could be problematic, like many open-source projects, Pathfinder is pointlessly complex, but also has a lot of fun bits once you realize what fun is to be had in delving through them. There's a certain kind of fun that, I think, can come from the combination of (1) "limitng" yourself to the extremely large palette of races, classes, magic systems, &c. that the edition has and (2) running with the assumption that rules are an approximation of in-game logic, rather than anything as plebian as an aid to play games.

So anyway, here are some goals going forward:

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In 2010 I joined an improbably infamous epistemology forum founded by an apocalypse cult. The community built around this fled from about five or six platforms, and I am joining Dreamwidth so that I can stay in touch with the fork that has the least number of Nazis in it, if the current platform stops existing or functioning (or even if it doesn't, depending on how much I like this platform and who joins it.)

Historically I have posted about politics (more than I would like on reflection), meaningless RPG stuff (less than I would like on reflection), and whatever other, smarter people near me have been talking about (about as much as I would like on reflection.) If I do post here in any meaningful way, it is likely that I will continue to do so.

From the little experience I have of this platform, it seems much more Web 1.5 than where we were previously - not coincidentally, since it is a Livejournal clone. This seems encouraging to me - if I were designing a social network from scratch I would probably make it text-only (as paradoxical as that seems, given what prompted the likelihood of a Tumblr exodus.) But we shall see!