Did you know that when writing a post, you can rearrange the order of the post’s tags by dragging them?
I just realised this, and it looks very helpful for fixing typos in tag rambles: just write a corrected version of the tag and drag it into place.
(though I might still continue writing my longer tag rambles out in a notepad window and then pasting them in)
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#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #oh look an original post #the first two tags on this post were originally in the opposite order #just because I could #the more you know
#Star Trek #DS9 #it’s so weird to me that Odo never tried to get more information on how his own body works out of the Founders #not even before he knew they were evil #like #to name the most blatant example #if you’ve spent your whole memory-span among beings with lifespans of 1 – 2 centuries or so #and you finally meet a member of your own species #and she greets you with ”oh you’re early we weren’t expecting you for another 300 years” #would you not then *immediately* ask about your life expectancy? #like I get that there’s a zillion questions to ask but #I feel like that would be near the top of my list in general and *especially* after she says that #but he doesn’t ask about his life expectancy at *all* during that visit! #not even off-screen! #(we know this because he *does* ask on-screen *years later*!) #((the answer is live-until-killed by the way)) #tag rambles #death tw
tumblr user slatestarscratchpad: [decides to answer a zillion medical asks all at once in their soothing, dry way]
me, settling in happily, rubbing my hands together: today is a good day
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#I’m glad I’m not the only person who finds Scott’s writing style soothing #like I’ve met plenty of people who *like* Slate Star Codex but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else talking about it as *comfort food*
In this day and age, the convention of giving all of one’s children their father’s name is outdated and oppressive, not to mention limited in the family situations it handles. But the alternatives have their own shortcomings.
My spouse and I decided to keep our own names when we got married, and kick the can down the road for when we actually have children. But we’re going to have to decide how to handle it eventually, so I’ve been thinking about our options.
What’s so important about determinism? It’s not like I’d resent losing a coin toss more than I’d resent just automatically losing every possible coin toss.
Kind of personal preference, I guess? To be honest I don’t like my spouse’s last name, and maybe that’s my real rejection to doing a coin flip. If you’re equally OK with either last name then it could be a good option. Definitely worth considering; it has many good properties.
Personally, I’m fond of the idea of doing hyphenated surnames in which maternal halves are matrilineal and paternal halves are patrilineal: mother X-Y and father A-B have child X-B.
It doesn’t cover everybody, but it seems like pretty much any naming scheme would have coverage problems (except union names, but that’s more of an absence of a scheme, “pick whatever you want”). I think of it as a “sure, you can do whatever you want, but if you *want* a default option, here it is”. (And one can use it as a starting point, adapting it into variants like “lesbian couple who give their kids both maternal halves, and flip a coin to decide the ordering”. (Or “–and pick whichever ordering sounds better”, etc))
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(context: happily born-hyphenated, not planning on having kids but that doesn’t mean I haven’t considered the thought experiment of what their surnames would be)
@argumate the Racist Wizard is back, the same evil wizard from before.
There is a switch in front of you. If you pull it, the next person you date will become Your Soulmate; that is, the perfect partner for you, you’ll fall in love, blah blah. You know the routine. However, this person will ALSO become super racist. Extreme contempt for minorities. BUT. They will never show it. They will never express these viewpoints, not to you, not to anyone, and they will never discriminate based on these; they are, in fact, so good at counteracting their biases that they will not accidentally discriminate more than the average person. Also, your memory will be wiped about the fact that they will be super racist, so you won’t know. (The Wizard will cast a spell to do this because he loves racism.)
If you DON’T pull the switch, then every sexual relationship not involving you will involve lots of a kink that you have no good reason to morally condemn, but that you are personally really squicked out by. You will know, for the rest of your life, that everyone else’s sex lives involve a lot of that thing. Also, the Racist Wizard will occasionally come by to tell you, in graphic detail, about people doing this thing. However, it will make these other people very happy; they will love engaging in this kink and it will enrich their lives meaningfully. (Again, the Wizard will cast a spell that causes this; he likes racism, but he likes dilemmas even more.)
Bonus question: The Racist Wizard is at it again. If you pull the switch, basically every person in society except for you gets significantly More Racist, in the type of Stealth Racism described above. (This lasts forever and affects all future generations, if it matters. You will be the last Non-Racist Person. Or the last Not Particularly Racist Person. Whatever.) If you don’t pull the switch, then in some major European country people will be discriminated against solely because of the color of their skin, with no regard to race, ethnicity, or anything that is not pigmentation. This will last one year, and the discrimination will be widespread and reinforced by the government.
(You THINK you know what the last question entails, but I never said in which direction the discrimination would go; it’s actually done at random, changing every month.)
And yeah, the Racist Wizard is a dick. But hey, at least he’s not tying people to trolley tracks! He just uses a switch because it’s iconic of moral dilemmas at this point.
yer a racist wizard, Harry.
A racism that is impossible to detect, results in no discrimination ever, and is perfectly counteracted as a bias by every human who possesses it does not count as racism. It’s more like the common intrusive thought about jumping off cliffs.
In fact, the *only* bad outcome here is the yearlong, government-backed pigment discrimination.
If only every Moral Dilemma Genie could be as easy to work with.
I’m amused that this seems to be OP’s attempt at crafting a highly inconvenient philosophical dilemma, but they’ve really just produced a situation where ¾ actions that the omnipotent asshole might take are mildly annoying at worst. The choices in the first dilemma differ only in how *much* net good they produce.
>>It’s more like the common intrusive thought about jumping off cliffs.
In fact, the *only* bad outcome here is the yearlong, government-backed pigment discrimination.<<
…making humanity permanently more prone to intrusive thoughts–including altering every other currently existing person to be such–doesn’t count as a bad outcome?
(the new versions of them are stipulated not to be distressed about being the way they are [link], but there’s still the *current* versions to consider)
I’m not especially confident in my stance, but my first thought is to pull the first switch and not pull the second, on the grounds that those are the options that don’t involve mind-editing the entire planet.
(I considered not pulling the first switch and attempting to convince the wizard that no edits need be made because it’s already true, but while there are many very common kinks I am squicked by, there is no *single* kink that *all* non-me sexual relationships involve, so I don’t think I would win that argument.)
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#racism cw #reply via reblog #discourse cw? #(I don’t like the way my response equivocates between ”human”‚ ”person”‚ and ”Terran”) #(but the other phrasings I tried don’t seem to get across as well how big a deal this would be)
Concept: a dungeon-crawling sci fi game, except instead of wandering space pirates, you play as a crew of legitimate salvage operators retrieving valuable goods from abandoned or evacuated cities on formerly populated planets that have been rendered uninhabitable by various civilisation-ending disasters. The different “dungeon types” would reflect whatever disaster killed that particular planet: plague, increasing solar intensity, nuclear war, continent-shattering meteor, etc. Long-dead worlds have already been picked over by your competitors, of course, so in most cases you’re going in while the world-ending catastrophe is recent – and in some cases still ongoing! – offering plenty of opportunities for potentially fatal misadventures. If you need an overarching plot, maybe you eventually discover that all of these apparently unrelated disasters have some sinister common thread.
A few of the odder fates that might befall a world, as well as salvage operators’ slang terms for such worlds:
Deadworld: A world whose inhabitants have been rendered irretrievably non-sapient by a contagious neurological disease, parasitic fungus, basilisk meme, or other similar vector. Though in many cases their bodies are alive and kicking, they’ve been declared legally brain-dead, leaving the world open for salvage. Describing these unfortunate remnants as “zombies” is considered both unscientific and insensitive, which stops basically no-one. Sometimes an apparent deadworld turns out to actually be a nascent planetary-scale hive mind, which just gets awkward for everybody involved.
Eight-Ball: A world that‘s experienced a hard-takeoff singularity, a sudden asymptotic acceleration of cultural and technological development that certain worlds undergo for reasons which remain unclear. Nobody’s 100% sure what happens to the inhabitants of such worlds; some believe they transform into beings of pure information, transcend to another dimension, or simply die off, their civilisation achieving its zenith, decline and extinction in a matter of hours. Whatever the truth may be, one thing’s for sure: they don’t need any of their stuff anymore. Eight-balls are highly sought after by salvage operators because of all the physics-defying Weird Shit the planet’s former owners tend to leave behind in the wake of their apotheosis, and are among the most dangerous assignments imaginable for the exact same reason.
Locker: One of the oddest fates that can befall a world, a temporally locked civilisation – or “locker”, for short – is literally frozen in a single moment, usually as a result of some damn fool messing around with time travel. With fewer than a dozen known cases in the whole of galactic history, lockers present a unique salvage opportunity: the retrieval not of property, but of people. No means of reversing a temporal lock exists, so the world’s inhabitants must be rescued one at a time, by crews equipped with containment suits that allow them to move about in frozen time – a task frequently contracted out to established salvage operators. Lingering on such worlds is not recommended; though there’s no scientific proof of their existence, rumours persist that temporal locks are known to draw the attention of things that live sideways in time.
(Feel free to add your own!)
Fallout: Seems self explanatory but also includes worlds subject to more creative WMDs like anti-matter and spacial destabilizers.
Coolaids: Linguists and drunk scavengers debate why worlds subject to mass suicides are called this, but its been the term for longer than anyone can remember. Watch out for memetic contagions and “rearguards” assigned to make sure no one gets left behind.
Chocolates: Most times when a planet dies it sends out distress signals or refugees. Most times when a planet doesn’t you can still figure out what happened from orbit. Some times you just have to hope that it isn’t nougat.
