Bradley became infamous when her daughter accused her and her husband of sex abuse and molestation. This compounded darkly with Bradley's writing in Mists of Avalon, where sex was a big theme in the story (and not just sex, but incest as well as parental abuse). Prior to the scandal, the themes were light enough to be written off as part of the fantasy.

'Different time, different place, different moral scruples.'

After her daughter's accusations, it becomes hard not to know about the scandal and not see Mists as an expression of Bradley's outlook on sex. And given the accusation that outlook is most politely summed up as 'pretty damn fucked up.'

I think that's confusing the arguments.

Who on earth wants to buy $50,000 of digital 'land' to build a $300,000 digital house on? Nevermind that that isn't even remotely a new idea (hi second life) who actually wants that to be a thing besides the people proposing the idea who stand to make $350,000? Even full something as wicked cool as full-dive VR, you're still going to need an actual damn house and who on Earth is going to pay that much for 1s and 0s?

It's like someone looked at how much money fools have thrown Star Citizens way and wondered how they can get in on that action instead of saying 'this is really really stupid.' $42000 for a video game spaceship? Someone has too much money and no sense.

At least that's the sort of thing I think the article is taking a shot at. Solutions in search of a problem and solutions to problems that not only don't solve the problem but bring in whole new ones. Wild ideas about services that don't actually service anyone or anything but the insiders who are designing them and imagining a need for that service from whole cloth.

Good luck I guess.

Irony is, once this stuff evolves out of single input generation and starts including 'select' and 'crop' the ability to understand basic design principles is just going to surge back into importance while the ability to 'prompt' is going to go back to being not very special.

It's also, hilariously, probably going to end a lot of this debate, since the process of selectively generating multiple pieces into a whole is a very different world.

Prompting is a skill in the same sense that using a search engine is.

There was a time early in the dot com era where people were paid for being able to wrangle search engines. It's not much of a job anymore since its existence mostly owed itself to the machine being unintuitive and a lot of older people being tech unsavvy.

Why would you need to describe a web page layout in one go anyway? If there isn't a generative AI that can take overt successive steps one command at a time already, there will be eventually. You'd never need to sum up the entirety of the page in one go.

You'll own nothing and you'll worship the ground your very stable entrepreneurial genius' overlords walk on, and you'll like it!

What are the odds of 2 humans passing each other in a storm of 100 bots?

4: Assimov's writing has extensive exploration of the three laws being insufficient beyond hypotheticals to assuage the fear of robots in men or to answer any the moral and ethical dilemmas they present.

I feel like at least part of the point of it all was that while the three laws embodied good principals they're too rigid in practice to actually be the basis of any sort of programmed behavior.

One of his stories is about the second and third law contradicting each other and locking the robot in a loop.

Another explores the duality of lying to spare people their feelings/hurting them by not telling the truth.

Others explore the ways the laws could inevitably be turned against people themselves.

Because the point of the Three Laws isn't to provide an answer for people's fear of machines. It was mostly fodder to create interesting and dramatic moral dilemmas. I.E. The three laws are not a serious proposal for how we deal with this problem.

People forget Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None wasn't always called that and went through several title changes well before now. The exact wording of the nursery rhyme has also been rewritten multiple times to go along with the title changes.

Though, if you asked me And Then There Were None is a way more badass title for a book XD

To this day, I do not believe I would understand the subtext of Hills like White Elephants without being told what it was. I'm not sure if it's a changing of the times sort of thing. Maybe.

But god damn is the actual meaning of what's going on buried in there in a way that the whole conversation is very confusing until you know about the part that isn't being said.

Part of the issue is people erroneously equate successful with intelligent. Which is very silly. People fail upward all the time. Some have bad luck.

College isn't really about intelligence or smart. It's about education. These words are not interchangeable but at the same time they're so entangled its almost impossible to separate them down into a single factor, let alone one you can test for in DNA.

Or you're just throwing money away. There's no convincingly strong evidence that genetics is determinitive with intelligence. If they were, you'd think it would be more consistent than being able to directly translate success to where you were born and how much money you had available to you.

More likely what'll happen is a lot of rich aholes with become even aholier, insisting that this matters more than it does and using it as a new means of pulling the leader up from under them because the rich are always looking for a new flimsy justification for why they're better than everyone else.

Now consider that this is a myth invented much later about Spartan society by Romans to try and illustrate how backwards and barbaric the Spartans, and Greek culture, were.

I'll keep bringing it up to illustrate how dumb this correlation is;

You can already do this with your ZIP code.

Susan Wise Baur attempted to do this in a trilogy; The History of the World. It has three volumes, and while it is a world history it's coverage of east Asia, Africa, and the Americas is lacking. It is however, probably the most condensed work to really try and tackle the entire world and tackle it without completely botching the effort.

Understand that many books cover a few hundred years of 1 place.

Covering the entire history of the entire planet is... It's a tall order. You won't find any work that does it excellently. Most of those that do exist suffer in fully accounting for Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas, which aren't helped by the lack of historical records for these places.

Historians unfortunately don't talk to archeologists as often as we should.

I feel like in the present age of so many plots trying to emphasize their own importance and artistic value, often to over the top and unachievable levels, people have indeed forgotten the joy to be found in a simple well-presented plot.

This is where I recall Gate and So the SDF Fought there.

Or, as I sometimes call it 'Imperial Japan did nothing wrong and Colonialism is just fine as long as you're moral about it.'

This isn't every one of these fics by any measure, but this is a theme I occassionally see in manga, anime, and light novels. Unsurprising. The legacy of Imperial Japan is culturally contentious in Japan today. Inevitably that will find itself reflected in the fiction and media that culture produces. The anime for Gate actually has it better than the manga where it gets harder and harder to ignore the story as it starts justifying Japan's colonizing of a fantasy work and making allusions to Imperial Japan that are thinly veiled at best.

And I could rant for hours about the frequency with which people miss the Nazism analogies in Zeon and the Gundam Unicorn lightnovels were freaking insane on this front, bordering on political diatribes at times.

The anime adaptations have a tendency of toning these elements down.

It has bled over into the LITRPG space somewhat, though in a variant that is more lacking in consideration of its content than anything. These genres borrow a lot from Eastern popular media so the osmosis is to be expected. I wouldn't say the genre is racist or pro-colonial per se. I would say it is at times very unintrospective about its contents and tropes. The writers adopt the motifs of things they like without a hard look at any implications they may carry.

I could make that criticism about most fiction, especially the pulpier popcorn varieties. People are reading them for the power fantasy, and many of them frame themselves as 'young hero fights abusive power structures' kind of stories. This is more a case of unfortunate implication than intent (most of the time, anyway).

As to women and young girls, oh yeah. This is a thing that's way more common in anime and manga than western media and it's bled over in much more unsavory ways. I still remember Reddit from I don't even know how many years ago anymore when Church of Kuro wasn't a banned sub and if you think it's bad now you have no idea. It's still kind of bad.

Though western made stuff generally skips it. Lots of western works in these genres are made and written for people in the early-to-mid 20s and the stories reflect this. The cringy presentation of younger girls and teens or the fetishizing of adolescent bodies isn't nearly as bad as you'll find in translated works originating in Japan, South Korea, or China. And there we have a more blatant case of values dissonance.

Most of the articles are just slideshows and tweets anyway.

What else am I going to do with a toaster but toast things?

Smart appliances are even more dead on arrival than smart houses.

Nothing because the whole thing is kind of meaningless.

I've just seen so many stories about the clock and 'x to midnight' that it basically means nothing, especially when they only ever move it closer and the criteria for moving it is however the people running it happen to feel at the time.

There's no real object-based analysis before this exercise.

Honestly, I'm more annoyed that some day some idiot is going to say 'the doomsday clock was right' and while the nuclear hellfire is enveloping us all my only solace will be 'if all you do in your life is watch paint dry, are you a genius because it finally dried, or a waste of life who spent it watching a blank wall wondering when the paint would dry?'

I'll just take that last word and call it a win, because the last thing anyone should give a shit about in the world is this silly clock exercise and the egos behind it.

The irony of it is Wizards is very clearly afraid of a second Pathfinder scenario, where their fans are pissed at an edition changes/changes and turn to third parties to keep playing the game they like after Wizards stops supporting it.

And all they've done is encourage people to do just that.

And it's baffling. I thought OneDnD was supposed to be 5E+ or something? If the new game is meant to be backwards compatible, then why would anyone turn explicitly to third parties? The game they have should still be viable if they want to keep playing it.

This is the second time in 2 years Wizards has somehow managed to have a message so mixed, it not only creates all their problems but makes them look super scummy because now I guess they were lying about their goals for OneDnD? Or not? IDK. Doesn't seem like they have any idea what they're trying to sell. They sure want to be the only ones selling whatever it is.

Anyone who knows how the internet works looks at a lot of the lofty promises decentralization proposes and says 'that's just the internet we already have with extra steps you want me to pay for so we can pretend we've reinvented something.'

It always goes right back to infrastructure and infrastructure isn't just expensive, it's centralized. Decentralization was an illusion promised by people who either didn't know how things worked, or wanted your money and were willing to bend the truth hard.

It's worth noting this is a fairly common issue facing generals throughout history and not unique to Il-Ghazi.

It's based on the lives of the Warrens, who are real people, but the movies are mostly puff pieces that ignore that they're giant conartists (and Loraine Warren really wants you to know what a chad her husband was). The third movie is especially egregious in this regard because it completely glosses over how the Warrens screwed a man out of a sensible defense because they wanted another fiffteen minutes of fame.

The funniest part about it is that the guy who looked into it built a convincing case that everything Abagnale has ever claimed about himself is bullshit.

Which means the guy conned the entire world into believing he was a great conman, which probably still qualifies him as a great conman XD

If I found it useful I'd use it.

The only time I ever discuss the idea is in reference to Sanderson and how I don't agree with him.

Magic is magic.

Not magic isn't magic.

Semantics doesn't change my opinion on the topic.