• “if”
• i’ve already started writing it of course
• but i don’t really feel i’m doing the characters justice
• i guess this is why fanfic is embarrassing
• mini squiggles

something that it would be fun to see a story do is have a cunning yet ignorant underdog challenge‍ ‍‍—‍ not defeat, but challenge‍ ‍‍—‍ a chessmaster type, despite having no idea what she’s doing, simply by reading her far smarter opponent that well

“I don’t understand. I am the greatest strategist in the land! Yet an fool with no training matched me play for play. How can this be? Was it blind luck? Are there spies in my ranks?”

“Oh, but it’s so simple. I had no training‍ ‍‍—‍ at the start. But you were all the teaching I needed. You became the greatest strategist by testing yourself against all the rest. In prediction, you play their moves even better than they could. You prepare for the worst, but that flinch tells me where to look. Where you attack, I defend; where you take countermeasures, I take measures. I could never defeat you, but your fear conjured a far greater threat than I manage alone‍ ‍‍—‍ I should thank you.”

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

SILKSONG REAL!!!

On 2020‍-​12‍-​20, sirobvious posted:

“Appeal to a wider audience” is corporate lingo for “strip more themes from a piece of media so it’s safer and more sanitized for investors”

I struck a nerve in the billionaire fandom with this one

• i’m not sure i have much company in this

there’s been a bit of a push to rehabilitate the image of the hater. i can sympathize with that impulse‍ ‍‍—‍ on both levels

but i don’t think it should be understated that there is something inescapably pathetic about the posture of the hater. criticism, often, can be dignified, but to be moved to hate is akin to being moved to tears‍ ‍‍—‍ overwhelmed, suborned to the whim and rhythm of the media you moan about

hate if you must‍ ‍‍—‍ you clearly can’t help it‍ ‍‍—‍ but i will not respect impotent seething

if i had a nickel for every aromantic fan of mine who i got from a fandom where i’ve near‍-​exclusively written romance, i’d have at least three nickels i know about

which is cool as hell, but i’ve got to wonder whether it’s because of or despite how i write romance

• shamelessly lifting northernlion bits

• ok that’s not true
• i asked if people would be interested elsewhere
• but outside of a niche community no one has context for what i’m on about

• yes the blog post i’m working on is currently 11k words length

no, that’s a bad example‍ ‍‍—‍ i don’t think sentient vs sapient is a useful distinction, actually!

i’ve been having this conversation elsewhere, and a few arguments have come up that i could spend some time laying out‍ ‍‍—‍ i could always give the banal old “descriptivism good prescriptivism bad” take for 23404th time; or i could say using sentient to use sapience is just an instance of metonymy, a valid figurative device; or i could say “sentient” simply sounds better than “sapient” ‍-​ but none of those really convince me, nor do i think should they convince others

i could point out that when it comes to actually picking my words, i nevertheless bite my tongue and use “sapient” even though people would understand me just fine with “sentient”. it seems that for all my protests, in practice i carefully mind this bit of pedantry… but what’s the real reason it bothers me? and i think, after going back and forth with someone else about it, i think figured it out

it’s not a binary!

most people who don’t care about the difference between sentient and sapient are anthropocentric (consciously or not), dismissing out of hand the possibility that animals could be sentient. however, i stand radically in the other direction. i think all animals are sapient, though i’ll admit some uncertainty about parasites and sessile marine animals

i think even plants are sentient! and while i’m not saying single celled organisms or slime molds are sentient, if someone wanted to make an argument, i’m more than ready to hear them out.

what is sentience? “the ability to experience feelings and sensations”? “conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling”?

to me, that’s just describing life. “sentience is when an organism does stuff.” i dislike words that are so broad they specify little. because what i’ve learned from carefully using sentience the way people have advocated is as a result, i don’t use the word sentient ever, because i have little reason to talk about a quality everything possesses.

but no, let’s keep going and complete that meme: “and the more stuff it does, the more sentienter it is. and when it does a real lot of stuff, that’s sapience”

sentience is a spectrum with viruses on one end and humans a little bit farther up

this, incidentally, works as a better defense for the casual usage of “sentience”. it’s not incorrect, it’s just vague. is it wrong for someone to say “a cup of coffee sitting on the table for an hour isn’t hot”? i mean, it still has heat. compared it to some antartic snow, and it’s dramatically hot!

it’s relative. you don’t actually know what temperature range someone means when they say “hot”, though context might give you a hint. “several degrees above room temperature” is a pretty good estimation. similarly, when most people say sentient, what they mean is “sentience close to human”

so, to bring it all back around, i think some people nitpicking the usage of sentient (no, this is not talking about you specically, i have already argued about this before on tumblr, let alone on platforms like discord) are actually incorrecting each other.

i contend saying “sentient means ability to perceive” should be seen akin to saying “hot means possessing heat”.

the usage of sentient i want to promote is as a qualifier. rather than “sentient” you can say something is “more sentient” when its experience and responses are more complicated, and “less sentient” rather than “nonsentient”

sentience is a spectrum, sapience is a threshold. they aren’t sharp boundaries, stop presenting them as such

On 2025‍-​04‍-​24, a user tagged:

• first? I’ve seen plenty of these
• so many poorly made unreal engine games

this post wasn’t about me per se, however my latest advances in pathfinding have made enemies superstitious*

nualie reblogged:

Can you record it? I am now incredibly curious about what that looks like.

i make it sound more interesting than it is, really. the quirk is that i’ve been rewriting pathfinding so that it searches game states, rather than map tiles. (this is necessary because there’s several tiles with fiddly states or interactions that make predicting what moves take you where somewhat complicated).

but crucially, the state the enemies are searching for is “player is dead” not “i’m next to player” or even “i can attack player”

which mostly works fine, but the game state search only simulates physics; it ignores entities other than the enemy whose move is being calculated

which means that if the player will die to something else (i.e., they’re standing next to a bomb with fuse lit) then the enemy will notices that any move results in the player’s death

so essentially, they predict the player blowing up and they’re like “i did that! good job me!” and confidently take whatever the very first move they checked was. (i noticed this because sometimes that move is invalid, e.g. walking face first into a wall)

i’ve still been reading hollow knight fanfic, though i haven’t posted about any since Stasis. i don’t know if anyone following me actually reads the stuff i rec but i just have to mention this one

climb up to paradise by terraces
https://archiveofourown.org/works/45913120

so my latest kick has been white lady/dryya. everybody loves plant mom goddess, but dryya is a really interesting figure and fanfic writers do such great things with her. the queen’s most devoted knight who gave everything and died protecting her. her design also activates the lesbian part of my brain.

it goes without saying that queen x her loyal knight yuri goes as hard as it ever does, but climb up to paradise might be my favorite take on the pairing yet. it’s just pure art. the prose and the way it so perfectly capture’s dryya’s feelings. the dialogue, and the way it’s so effortless mimes the gravitas of hollow knight’s style. the emotion‍ ‍‍—‍ the yearning, the joy, and the weighty tragedy of it all.

what i love most is the psychology of it all‍ ‍‍—‍ if you know me, you know i love a ruthless woman with nothing guided by unflinching dedication to her principles. and you know i love nonhumans characters, and the way white lady is written in this, which so deftly conveys an higher being beyond the concerns of conventional morality…

it’s just so peak man

• you search their character tag and it’s hundreds of fics and you have no idea if they show up for more than a chapter

• funniest shit is locking in against mato and oro and just disrespecting them with parries

• doing nail only no spells no healings challenge to give her a warrior’s defeat

• what is up with the concentration of wife material in hallownest

honestly the conventional notion that it’s great to get the last word in an argument is nonsense, most of the time when the other guy dips it means things petering out without catharsis

feels much better to be the one to flounce away, job done

(i guess ideally you could time the marketplace of ideas and land a zinger right when they’d give up anyway, but it’s hard to land and trying for it compromises other strategies. noob trap imo)

holy shit i found it The Hive and the Spiders by NeverwinterThistle https://archiveofourown.org/works/13523079

One year after the end of the world, the Hive begins to starve.

Collection of Insects Wearing A Fake Human Suit/Collection of Spiders Wearing A Fake Human Suit

the good stuff

watching a video and sitting through the sponsorship segment and i just got hit with a pitch so galling i had to sit up and stare at my screen

I simply must interrupt for a brief moment to introduce you to a tool that has changed the way I make video essays: our returning sponsor Perplexity. […]

Perplexity is revolutionizing how we search. Instead of scrolling through a list of blue hyperlinks, you get instant up‍-​to‍-​date answers with just a question or a quick search. This is enormously helpful for me when I’m doing background for a video essay. I need to start at the very beginning, but I don’t want to read for hours and hours on end. I can get qualitative answers to questions like “when did Katy Perry fall off” instead of trolling through a bunch of often irrelevant articles and blog posts to help me draw my own conclusions.

to be clear, this is a product that intends to “replace” search results with some formatted chatgpt output. and charitably, that last bit might be a misparsed garden path sentence but holy hell, is the selling point that you don’t draw your own conclusions?? imagine discrediting your own process for a buck like this video essays are so cooked man

• and herrah and monomon like me and tell me things will be ok

st‍-​just posted:

So how much more salvageable would tumblrs finances be if it stopped doing video hosting, do we think?

• this is some unexpected hanging paradox shit

entitiy‍-​4 tagged:

• always boss

playing hollow knight randomizer leads to some funny moments

I have a gift, held long for one of your kind. Half of a whole. When united, great power is granted, and on the path ahead, great power it will need.

gives 300 geo

gee… thanks for the allowance, mom?

• i’m in the middle of trying to edit something
• keep getting distracted and every time i tab back to my editor
• i get jumpscared by the paragraph on‍-​screen being uzi getting flustered and thinking “ugh how do i recover aura

the “quality ratchet” is a concept i’ve come up with, and i wanted to reference it in an upcoming post, but apparently i’ve never talked about it on tumblr?^note[my old idea of scope creep or how i only lock in when i’m not trying to lock in[The Fallacy of Intention] are related, but i think i’ve refined it to something even more precise.]

but i digress

i’ve talked about how every longform fiction i’ve written, without exception, has been an unserious experiment that snowballed into something far more involved than intended

i fuck around, then i lock in, and then you can hear the death knell ringing. but i have a new analogy for the mechanism.

the quality ratchet operates simply: it’s far more acceptable to overdeliver than to underdeliver.

new chapter turning out better than the the last? man i’m on a roll, i outdid myself, great job. new chapter turning out worse than the last? what the fuck i can’t publish this, gotta go back to the drawing board

if you suppose that the quality a writer is capable of outputting is distribution which they sample from whenever they write, then just by statistics they’ll usually start out near the median

if subsequent updates have to hit that same target or higher, then it’ll be pretty easy to raise the waterline so long as you’re still in the fat middle of the distribution. (and if they’re just fucking around like me, then that means they’re starting closer to the bottom, giving them an even longer run way)

of course, the closer you get to the top, the more times you need to roll the dice to sample a point that’s several deviations above your average output. it becomes unsustainable, you burn out

what’s interesting about this framing, though, is that it’s possible to get ratcheted before you even write a word

another observation i’ve often made about my writing is that for as much as i love outlining and have written several, the stories i’ve actually written are the improvised ones, and there’s but a single (meaningful) intersection of what i’ve outlined and what i’ve actually written

writers like wildbow often dismiss outlines, citing that knowing what happens detracts from their motivation to write it. i’ve personally found this silly, but i realize something effectively similar actually does apply to me

the problem with outlines mixed with a mindset like mine is that the outline creates yet another standard to hold against anything you write. now it’s not just “is this as good as what came before”, it’s “is this as good as what i had planned? does this advance the plan at all?”

so in short it’s not knowing what happens that’s my problem, it’s having expectations

today is a day of some significance, and long time fans might remember why

exactly one year ago today, i posted An Opaque Heart, a first draft of a murder drones fanfic that began humbly as an attempt to explain a (gasp, N/Uzi) idea i had to a friend. i locked in and wrote 35k words in under a week.

in many places, especially near the beginning, it shows, recounted with all the casual and unliterary verve of explaining a story to someone, rather than actually telling the story.

still by some metric it stands as my longest complete story. (i consider Even in Debt‍ ‍‍—‍ Dreams properly complete, and Aurora Moonrise is over twice as long as AOH and has a conclusion, but it’s even less coherently edited in its present state)

no one noticed, i imagine, but a bit over two weeks ago, i took AOH down; the link to my site is broken, and the tumblr post is private. i had a plan for the one year anniversary: i was going to edit the story into something more proudly presentable, and finally post it on ao3.

so i opened up the doc and started hacking away. i made some good progress on the first chapter, adding hundreds of words, doubling its length before i’d even gotten halfway through

and therein lies the trouble. it’s the quality ratchet. in the original draft of AOH, it starts out mid and just gets better and better. the rewrite of the start is promising, but that just makes it all the more jarring where the edits and stop and you’re thrown back into the old draft again

so i have a dilemma on my hands. my tumblr has a fraction of the audience of my ao3, and the overlap is pretty narrow even then. there’s several stories (two one‍-​shots, plus An Opaque Heart, and Like Shadows Chasing the Balance, and arguably Corrupt Combustion) which were only posted to my site and tumblr and never deemed worth posting on ao3.

if i were smart enough to realize i’ve my ability to edit things after the fact has totally atrophied, i think i would have preferred to post them at the time they were written. posting them now, though? people who follow me would get a notification, but rather than the triumphant return after months of inactivity, it’s a dead cat bounce, dumping the literal dregs of my oeuvre.

i guess i’ll probably just keep doing nothing

why is it to so hard to remember that rice requires a 1:2 ratio to water while making oatmeal requires a 1:2 ratio

literally every time i’m like “is this is the one that’s 1:2 or the one that’s 1:2”

why are pathfinding bugs the funniest. when an entity is destroyed in my game, i set its xy field to null. to save some cycles, i’m currently rewriting enemy ai to check to see if the player’s position is on an precomputed set of reachable tiles

…which means that if the player is dead, the enemy observes (arguably correctly!) that if it kills itself, it will reach the same tile as the player

• even in death i will find you

was explaining description to a friend. everyone knows show don’t tell, and in particular everyone knows that chekhov quote. so this isn’t a new insight at all, but lacking a better name for it, i decided to call it the rule of one

to make something vivid, pick one. for an object, find one little detail. for a group, find one individual. for a process, find one step, and describe that. leave the rest to imagination.

don’t take a careful inventory of the moonlit night, just look for a sealed mansion’s outward‍-​shattered glass.

cut your sword exactly once, then sheath it

• normally i go on at length in writing advice posts
• but it’s fitting to keep this one short i think