oligopsony

Tome of Yore

2020-06-13T23:37:43Z

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).)

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the Charnel Sages: Ghouls of Abolished Aeon

2018-12-30T19:13:43Z

Per Lovecraft and the SRD, ghouls are intelligent, vaguely canine featherless bipeds that feast upon the rotting flesh of the dead, absorbing their memories in the process. Although no more inclined to malice than other mortals, ghouls are ritually unclean and cannot participate in naming rituals.

As obligate carnivores, ghouls can (and do) form a minority part of agricultural civilizations, and there are scattered clans of herding and hunting ghouls (most prominently the "Gnoll" nation/movement/tribes,) but no large society consists primarily of ghouls.

(Content notice: racism, cannibalism, various other unpleasant things.)

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"open thread," aka shitpost enablement station

2018-12-29T13:19:46Z

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.

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a quick sketch for a social network

2018-12-29T13:16:20Z

This is just a thought experiment, with no consideration as to e.g. feasibility.

Imagine your usual setup, where you can subscribe to people and tags, and you can post whatever and re share them (dependent on restrictions set by the originator.) You can like things, &c.

The gimmick is that the site updates only once a day.

If you go into Recent View, you'll see everything posted during the last update window in a random order, with multiple reblogs of the same thing treated as one item (unless you've seen that exact version before, in which case you'll skip it; or people are adding modifications/comments, in which case they'll appear together.)

You can also read Archive View. The amount of likes something gets can impact what order you read Archive View of a user or tag, but you can't like from there. I don't know whether you should be able to reblog from there or how posts should be aggregated together - most of the obvious ways of answering that seem to be degenerate in some way - but the goal would be something that doesn't produce perverse incentives or let things compound on themselves.

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Abolished Aeon: the Holy Game

2018-12-24T22:04:44Z

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.

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social melody

2018-12-23T22:40:41Z

The following is a quick attempt to crystallize a concept (which may or may not prove useful.)

Social harmony you are already familiar with. A prospective harmonious society might be deeply hierarchical or flatly egalitarian; it might be communal (as perhaps a certain stereotype suggests) or politically and culturally individualistic (as liberals have often argued that markets create a harmony of interests.) Either way, a harmonious society is marked by the absence of conflict, or at least by the absence of working at cross-purposes.

Some people may value social harmony in itself; others find the idea stultifying, or at least worry (not without reason) that pursuing the appearance of social harmony can harm other values. So social harmony isn't intrinsically good or bad, but its good aspects are easy to see (who wants to see effort wasted on pointless conflicts?), and it probably wouldn't be especially useful too definite it perfectly rigorously, but it has a clear enough meaning that we can communicate with the concept most of the time.

As the name implies, "social melody" is the diachronic equivalent of social harmony. A socially melodious world's history is characterized by generations' efforts being in concert with one another and building upon one another. Within social melody, you try to look at the heroes of the past by treating your own time with the same urge to improve that they took to theirs, and also you try to preserve what they valued (when not based upon error) in the same way that you hope that future generations do to you value yourself (when not based upon error.)

Social melody is easiest to see from what it is not. Year Zero, where you try to begin everything from scratch, is not socially melodious. Blindly following the (object-level) ways of the past, rather than following the spirit of those who instituted new ways when appropriate for their circumstances and current knowledge, is not socially melodious. Remaining within discursive traditions and being part of the continuing conversation is socially melodious: an "atheist Jew" is more socially melodious than an atheist who happens to be ethnically Jewish, a Marxist is more socially melodious than someone who simply happens to accept some materialist premises and egalitarian politics, Catholicism is probably more socially melodious overall than Protestantism, and so on.

Conservatives and left-liberals and radical leftists all have, I think, an appreciation of social melody at the heart of their aesthetic conception of what good politics is and does, but may not appreciate or see it in each others' visions.

Like social harmony, social melody would be difficult to justify as an overriding goal in itself, and there are probably things lost when we pursue it too aggressively. However, it is also easy to see the appeal, and why the appeal is so wide, and I myself would certainly not want to abandon it as one value among many others.

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Abolished Aeon: Monster Manual Metaphysics

2018-12-23T16:05:45Z

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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Christmasism for Halloweenists

2018-12-21T19:17:52Z

discoursedrome suggests that we (or many of us) prefer Halloween to Christmas because (1) Halloween has embraced peasant carnival aspects and (2) the ability to embrace life's darker side:

Over the course of my lifetime Halloween has transmuted very noticeably into a kind of peasant carnival. I think this is because its colonization by commercial forces focused entirely on trick-or-treating, and its religious associations are nonexistent here, so above trick-or-treating age it was left completely to "the folk" to do what they wanted with.

Basically there's two distinct elements to modern Halloween: the first is that it acts out, and thereby creates, a sense of mastery over and comfort amidst the anxieties of life - death, and monsters, and horror, and so forth. These are several steps removed from the actual sources of people's fears, but they represent them. The posture of being at home, amongst family, in the company of death and horror is a way of grappling with the senseless horror of life.

The second aspect is that Halloween flouts the pieties of conventional society, whereas Christmas embodies them. Therefore, Christmas is the anti-Halloween. Since it's America, bland corporate pleasantries and hyperconsumerism are themselves pieties, and as more and more of the population shifts into the service sector, the number of people who experience those things like an imposition from on high increases. The reason everyone starts celebrating Halloween as early as possible, yet dreads when the same thing happens at Christmas, is because Christmas is a "high" holiday that embodies the norms and culture of the upper-middle-class. Halloween is a vulgar party whereas Christmas is a genteel sermon; the commercialization of Christmas only changes the church and God.

This suggests ways that Christmas could possibly be (re-)engineered into something more human-friendly. Indeed, Christmas actually has a very carnivalesque past, and in some ways the parallels between it and Halloween are almost overliteral.

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Lynx, 27 Frimaire CCXXVII

2018-12-18T01:34:47Z

Someone scoops me on something I've wanted to do for a while. But it's more of an outline for a project, so maybe I'm still good.
Most public housing isn't associated with crime, but rather a few projects are typically associated with a lot of it. How to convert physical engineering into social?
Anonymization reduces gender gaps in funding, although I wonder how much of the effect is specific to e.g. subconscious gender stereotypes vs. an overall decrease in the returns to well-connectedness (where male advantage could be due to generational effects or to something more stable like who can invite whom out for drinks after a conference without anxiety.) Seems like good practice either way, though.
Ken Hite's homegame 13th Age setting being adulterated into a 5e product. (Absent some eyerolling about how he'll turn Persia or something into a metaphor for Vladimir Putin or whatever, I expect it to be super neat.)
On strategy and dexterity.
Interactive prehistoric globes!
Replication crisis activism in the long view.

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podcasts I recommend

2018-12-17T15:48:58Z

Podcasts are great! They're one of the few new media forms that I can say have probably made me happier for consuming them, primarily because they make exercise bearable and chores actively pleasurable. This isn't everything I listen to, just the major ones I recommend at a first pass (and could also say something interesting about why I liked them.)

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maybe academic prublishing is... not-broken?

2018-12-15T23:50:30Z

(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.

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Abolished Aeon: Metaphysics 101

2018-12-14T16:42:37Z

This isn't advanced metaphysics - if I understood advanced metaphysics, I'd be a powerful wizard or something. This is just the basics.

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Formerly unnamed worldbuilding project

2018-12-14T01:06:56Z

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.")

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D&D small enough to drown in a bathtub

2018-12-12T17:33:11Z

Trad RPG manuals are notoriously long. But it doesn't have to be that way!

If you don't want to change your system, you can go with an epitome. There are a couple of these for D&D 5e, for instance, Stan Shin's or Ozuro's. These are sometimes conceptualized as "GM's screens," but there's basically no reason not to have every player have one as a handout.

But then there are the hacks/retroclones/whatever that are designed with concision in mind. Knave fits on one double-sided sheet of paper. Into the Depths can be one page side or two double-printed pages. The old Microlite d20 site is full of slightly different small retroclones of both 3e and earlier editions.

It should be easy to add exception-based mechanics of your choice to these, especially if you're dealing with the Slimfast version of a system that already has a lot of mechanical doodads. I've contemplated stitching together something like Microlite d20 + Spheres of Power/Might + E6, for instance. Turning that into a self-contained document that ironed out all the kinks would be a fair amount of work, but just stating the premise gets you 90% of the way there, at least in terms of functionality.

(I've focused on D&D here because its popularity + the uniquely lax copyright of 3e has allowed for an almost infinite variety of experimentation and hacking among trad RPGs, and storygames already often focus on light rules implementation (and aren't really my thing.) But there's no reason to limit the principles here to D&D, of course.)

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some classic conlanging tools

2018-12-11T15:55:14Z

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.

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Chris Wayan's Planetocopia

2018-12-10T21:15:37Z

Please click here if you like worldbuilding or outsider art or planetary science or basically anything that would cause me to associate with you at all, really.

Obviously Middle-Earth was influential in a number of ways, but what drove it for Tolkien? Let's simplify and say you have a hard core of scientific-artistic interest in his area of expertise, languages, around which accretes political leanings (localist conservatism) emotional notes that he finds especially compelling (lacrimae rerum and all that) Catholicism et cetera. The appeal and achievement emerges from all of this as a gestalt.

Planetocopia is like that, except it's anarchocommunist idyll and furry fanart accreting around the hard core of physical geography. A number of the planets are explicit homages/loving corrections to Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin, which shouldn't surprise. If a committee were designing this - if I were designing this - the furry stuff would go right out, there'd be all sorts of political and military conflict, and (of course) it would be worse.

I head back to here every so often and, very rarely, there's an update. It's great!

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currently-unnamed worldbuilding project

2018-12-10T01:51:52Z

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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A silly little character generator thing

2018-12-07T22:32:07Z

Click here to realize your wildest dungeon fantasies!

A while ago I started working on a little widget to generate random first level Pathfinder characters - not fully mechanically elaborated, but with enough to get you started, and with a little biography that’s supposed to both cohere with the character’s stats and with itself. I never completed it, never ironed out the kinks, and you’ll find that there's a lot of repetition and red-text placeholders. Still, I think it has value greater than zero, and in ways that aren’t covered by existing random character generators, and I don’t know when I’ll get around to actually going back and completing it (maybe never? maybe when I get back to wanting to focus on JavaScript? maybe if y’all’re inexplicably enthusiastic?) so I'm posting it here.

If I were to revisit it in a major way, I'd want to expand any of (1) the range of backgrounds and overall sorts of characters it creates, (2) the mechanical depth into which it goes, and/or (3) the options for what kinds of characters it generates (random civilian NPC, PC of class tier X and point budget Y, maybe even choosing a canonical world or two to fit the lore to); since these compound on one another I'd probably be most likely to focus on (1), although (3) is tempting. Anyway, let me know if you have any thoughts, or simply if you find one of these stupid characters amusing. :)

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Hello, Dreamworld

2018-12-07T22:23:53Z

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!

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