mjollydragon

Latest Posts by mjollydragon

A week or so ago, I was feeling nostalgic for my old Pokémon games, so I pulled out my old copy of Pokémon White, reset the game, and played through the main storyline.

Things I've noticed (spoilers for BW and BW2 follow):

Child!me was really bad at Pokémon. I basically just kept whichever Pokémon happened to be the highest level ones I had in my team, and if that meant randomly putting in a wild 'mon with a terrible moveset, so be it. I basically didn't consider type advantages at all. I'm pretty sure I wiped to Elesa like five times or so before I swapped in a ground type and manage to beat her, and the lesson I took from that was "wow, the Pokémon I added was only one level higher than the one I swapped it out for, amazing how much difference that makes!"

The "good guys'" arguments in the game are ... really bad. Like, I agree that they're correct about the empirical fact "is catching/training/battling Pokémon abusive," but there are a number of conversations that essentially go:

Team Plasma: have you considered that you're making Pokémon suffer, and that's bad? "Good" guy: I think it's important to consider different perspectives and let people make up their own mind on whether Pokémon suffering is bad! not everything is black and white!

Subtext I absolutely did not notice when I initially played through: Alder is really bad at his job! The Elite Four more or less tells you that he's abandoning his actual job duties to wander around Unova being sad that one of his Pokémon died several years ago. When N beats him, he randomly gets really upset about it and starts insulting him. No wonder by the sequels he's been replaced.

One thing I'd remembered as not being explicit until the second game was that outside of N, there are plenty of Team Plasma members who actually genuinely want to help Pokémon and were not abusive. I was remembering wrong -- this is pretty explicit in BW too.

Do you ever think about how, in ATLA, Iroh was still actively leading the siege at Ba Sing Se ~5 years before the show started?

Spotted on campus today.

[Image description: A sign, affixed to an emergency exist door, reading “My friends. I know that sometimes a door will say it has an alarm when it does not really have an alarm, and instead just serves a rebellious and convenient shortcut. [In bold and all caps:] THIS DOOR 100% ACTUALLY HAS AN ALARM. [End bold and caps.] Don’t open it! It’s extremely annoying! [Bold and caps again:] THE ALARM IS REAL AND WILL MAKE A LOUD SOUND. [End bold and caps.] Thanks. [End image description.]]

Watching a movie without subtitles: Gosh. These people sure are saying words. Should I rewind to try and catch that sentence? Nah, I just did that and also I can guess from context what they said.

Watching a movie with subtitles: whY ARE THEY TALKING SO SLOWLY. I’ve finished reading the dialogue? and yet there is not more dialogue? This is ridiculous.

(Am I doing this right?)

“Why are we listening to badger screams?”

“I’m ROLEPLAYING”

im going to start a thread of pokemon drawn to the sizes of the things theyre based on

here, i’ll start 

Hot take: if it starts at 9 PM and ends before 11, it’s not Midnight Soccer.

re: self-inserts

I summon the demon Campbell Mark Swan. I wrote the words along the perimeter of an almost closed circle, drawn on a blank page of a notebook laying on my floor. I knew it wouldn’t actually work, but I still felt an excited anticipation as I closed the circle.

Keep reading

Some spots opened up in [name of professor redacted]’s class and I was able to swap into it!!!

(Also, for the record, if you ever have to choose between killing me or letting literal trillions of people die, you should kill me! Not that people expressing more-or-less this view particularly helped, but.)

I know there’s a very good chance that in Part 2 it’s going to turn out that failing to trade lives was actually the right thing to do, because why would you ever let pulling the lever be the correct solution, but for the time being that hasn’t happened. 

(I won’t be particularly surprised if the message turns out to be ‘actually, you shouldn’t kill one person to save trillions,’ but I’ll be disappointed.)

(I also want an “I Trade Lives” button. The internet is failing me here, although possibly I haven’t looked hard enough. There are buttons that say “We Don’t Trade Lives” but that is the literal opposite of what I want.)

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.

I just saw Infinity War!

Posts containing spoilers (which will probably be posted starting tomorrow) will be tagged with “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Infinity War spoilers,” and “spoilers.” They will also be placed under a cut.

(Probably no one actually cares about spoilers at this point, but I’d rather not risk it.)

Current aesthetic: attending school on Senior Skip Day.

I have officially committed to a college!

Too Like the Lightning is now out free as an ebook for the next three days (ends midnight, March 23rd) through Tor! So if you’re curious what all this is about, (like me) picked up a physical copy but would still like to have an ebook, or for any other reason want a free ebook, check it out!

Edit: link.

I think that a lot of parents prefer their teenagers having cell phones to them not having cell phones, because it makes it easier to coordinate lots of things (pick-up time from events, meeting location, “can you pick up [x] while you’re at the store, etc.). Especially given the number of teenagers who rely on their parents for transportation, teenagers not having cell phones is inconvenient for the parents, not just the teenagers.

I think some adults are bothered by teenagers using their cell phones for social media, and/or during in-person social events? Some of the people complaining about teenagers using cell phones are also older than the parents of current teenagers.

why dont phones have little tiny laser pointers built in

reproductive rights issues:

abortion

birth control

also reproductive rights issues:

doctors performing c sections during births without informed consent

eugenics via sterilization requirements for trans people to change documentation

eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of disabled people

eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of people of color

eugenics via selective abortion of disabled fetuses (fetuses with Down syndrome especially) (these are abortions sought by people who WANT to be pregnant–but only with non-disabled children, when there’s absolutely no guarantee that a non-disabled child won’t become disabled)

if your reproductive rights activism doesn’t incorporate ALL OF THE ABOVE, i want no part of it.

Today in math class:

[Image description: a picture of a blackboard with math written on it. Below the math is the phrase “Pf: I’m too lazy,” followed by a box that signifies the ending of a proof.]

So there’s this community called the rationalist community, which is an outgrowth of the rationalist movement. Common traits of rationalists include watch as all the rationalists I know come yell at me :

Thinking Eliezer Yudowsky is the greatest person ever

Liking this one specific Harry Potter fanfic (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is incidentally very good)

Being very concerned that AIs are going to destroy the world

Thinking/worrying a lot about epistemology

Being preference utilitarians

Not liking religions that believe in a god or gods

Using Bayesian statistics

Being autistic

Doing things that are very cult-like while talking about how much they are Not A Cult

this is a totally unfair characterization but will probably work to a first approximation

(To be clear, I am not saying that specific traits on this list are good or bad.)

Rationalist Tumblr is the rationalist community, but specifically on Tumblr. 

this is a ridiculous question but I wasn’t able to get a clear answer by Googling

…what is rationalist Tumblr? 

I would totally attend a Utopian service.

HUMANISTS:

Expectation- Grow! Strive! Excel!

Reality- Government of, by, and for the most insufferable shitheads you knew in high school

BRILLISTS:

Expectation- Unlock the mysteries of the human psyche!

Reality- Your president is a smug sack of shit who’s also computer-racist

EUROPEANS:

Expectation- Unbreakable bonds of cultural tradition

Reality- “You seized my borderlands, you executed my hero, you conquered me a thousand years ago, and I remember.”

COUSINS:

Expectation- Altruism, community, common good

Reality- Some rando’s crashing on your couch six out of seven nights and it’d be too awkward to say anything at this point

UTOPIANS:

Expectation- Join our constellations and build the future! Also, Fursona-Pokémon are real and you can have one!

Reality- I Fucking Love Science + ENDLESS SCRUPULOSITY HELL

MASONS:

Expectation- Power. Order. Eternal tradition.

Reality- Facebook feed is endless unironic “when did THIS [modern architecture] become hotter than THIS [Byzantine spires]”

MITSUBISHI:

Expectation- Noble stewards of our terrestrial inheritance

Reality- Everyone’s least-favorite rent-seeker, and you don’t even have close to enough property to have a say in anything

WHITELAWS:

Expectation: Morally upright, clean living, stable communities

Reality: Mormonism but without the pretense of spiritual development

GRAYLAWS:

Expectation- Join the one group that isn’t directly run by lunatics

Reality- Somehow even more milquetoast than just becoming a Cousin because your ba'pas are

BLACKLAWS:

Expectation- Proud, honorable libertines, shining example of voluntary self-governance

Reality- The worst possible overlap in the Venn diagram of ancaps and LARPers

Why is this so accurate?

HUMANISTS:

Expectation- Grow! Strive! Excel!

Reality- Government of, by, and for the most insufferable shitheads you knew in high school

BRILLISTS:

Expectation- Unlock the mysteries of the human psyche!

Reality- Your president is a smug sack of shit who’s also computer-racist

EUROPEANS:

Expectation- Unbreakable bonds of cultural tradition

Reality- “You seized my borderlands, you executed my hero, you conquered me a thousand years ago, and I remember.”

COUSINS:

Expectation- Altruism, community, common good

Reality- Some rando’s crashing on your couch six out of seven nights and it’d be too awkward to say anything at this point

UTOPIANS:

Expectation- Join our constellations and build the future! Also, Fursona-Pokémon are real and you can have one!

Reality- I Fucking Love Science + ENDLESS SCRUPULOSITY HELL

MASONS:

Expectation- Power. Order. Eternal tradition.

Reality- Facebook feed is endless unironic “when did THIS [modern architecture] become hotter than THIS [Byzantine spires]”

MITSUBISHI:

Expectation- Noble stewards of our terrestrial inheritance

Reality- Everyone’s least-favorite rent-seeker, and you don’t even have close to enough property to have a say in anything

WHITELAWS:

Expectation: Morally upright, clean living, stable communities

Reality: Mormonism but without the pretense of spiritual development

GRAYLAWS:

Expectation- Join the one group that isn’t directly run by lunatics

Reality- Somehow even more milquetoast than just becoming a Cousin because your ba'pas are

BLACKLAWS:

Expectation- Proud, honorable libertines, shining example of voluntary self-governance

Reality- The worst possible overlap in the Venn diagram of ancaps and LARPers

So this is a really funny post and I realize I’m missing the point but Latin didn’t have a “w.” 

tvmblr, 50 bce

friendly reminder that ivlivs caesar is problematic for he attempts to pass legislation in the senate that does not benefit the eqvites and the optimates, vwv

How can I engage with other human beings as full human beings?

If you are a non-Jewish person attempting to be inclusive of Jewish holidays and traditions, but your method of doing so starts from the assumption that Judaism is exactly like Christianity but with less Jesus, and/or that Hanukkah is just like Christmas but eight days long and harder to spell, you are doing it wrong.

(Hanukkah traditions: not actually Christmas traditions with a different color scheme! Including Jewish traditions: not actually talking about Hanukkah exactly like Christmas but with the name of the holiday switched around! Judaism and Christianity are different and their holidays are different. If you actually want to include Jewish people, recognizing these differences is an important step.)

@slatestarscratchpad

My possibly-incorrect understanding of the tax bill is that it doesn’t implement all the deductions at once, which suggests that it wouldn’t add the same amount to the debt this year as it would in, say, 2024. This means that the “x dollars per year” formulation is problematic because it will vary radically depending on which year we look at.

(This seems like it could be solved by “x dollars per year starting in 20whenever, but there might be some reason why that doesn’t work.)

The news I read about the tax plan says it will add $1 trillion to the national debt. Occasionally it ends with “…over the next decade”.

Is there a reason this phrasing is preferable to “will add $100 billion per year to the national debt” or “will add $10 trillion to the national debt over the next century” or “will add $2.50 to the national debt over the next microsecond”?

If not, are headlines like “NEW TAX PLAN WILL ADD $1 TRILLION TO DEBT” completely arbitrary, since they could have made it any number by changing the (unspoken) time course?

@evolution-is-just-a-theorem

I don’t think (f) is necessarily about minds, especially given your interpretation of g. “Sherlock Holmes has a name that starts with S” seems to me to be the equivalent of “Justice has a name that starts with J.” Even though Justice is not a physical thing that exists in the world any more than Sherlock Holmes is, the second statement can still be evaluated as true or false, in the sense that the first letter of the string “Justice” can be determined.

(It is possible that you are using a more narrow definition of the word “name” than I am, which could affect this analysis.)

Bullet of the day: conversations about fictional objects are non-sensical*. One cannot reasonably ask whether or not Sherlock and Watson did the frick-frack.

@lambdaphagy , because you had good comments the last time I talked about a similar topic.

* They can be made sensical without changing the conversation *too* much, but in my experience people don’t even realize they’re doing something strange.

People are either completely shocked or say that everything about me makes so much more sense.

To other autistic people, have other people ever been able to realise you’re autistic without you telling them before?