It’s so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.

Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema

I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we’ve watched for Monsterdon, I’ve been like, “Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they’d have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea…”. Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.

“My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.”

“Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.”

“I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.”

“But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.”

“Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.”

“Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.”

[much later]

“Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”

Some people are into the idea of being so attractive it overpowers others’ self-control. Or, they like to imagine freedom from responsibility—mentally placing themselves in a situation where they cannot be judged for lustfulness. Or both. And hey, no condemnation here.

The idea of a fantasy seems to be too much for Rationalist big brains to handle. I’m sure it can’t be a motivated failure of comprehension, not at all… /s

Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”

Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.

Cishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.

and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.

What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?

It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.

Allegation that Aella herself committed sexual assault

From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA.

OK, that’s more than bad enough. Surely the next sentence will not escalate—

Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast

What the absolute hell? A no is a no and should not need to be “replenished”.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment

Yud’s “I was inspired by Hannibal Lecter but not in a psychopath way” T-shirt is raising many questions

If I had a nickel for each time I’d read something where an HPMoR audio performance was juxtaposed with sexual harassment/assault, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s more nickels than I would ever have wanted to receive for that reason jesus fucking christ just give me the Cenobites’ puzzle box to solve so the chains can pull me out of here already

I wouldn’t trust them to be responsible for minors, first because nothing about them suggests they have the baseline level of responsibility competence to handle the ordinary “hey, watch this!” disasters that are a natural part of being young.

They are also incredibly shady and would be terrible role models, whether or not Lighthaven has a casting couch for influencers.

In other words, there’s a lot we don’t know, and the actual situation is worse by an unknown amount beyond what we can establish, but what we do know is enough reason not to send your offspring to Camp TESCREAL.

There are some leaps in that post which do not seem persuasive to me. E.g., it sure seems pretty well established by now that Bay Area Rationalist society involves trapping people in situations where sexual consent is coerced, because refusal would mean abandoning one’s career/entire social circle/shelter/hope of averting the apocalypse that one fears is coming. But the claim that the “flirt girls” at their weird little confab were actually sex workers? I dunno, that’s a step that seems unsupported by anything leading up to it. Likewise for the claim about CNC events at Lighthaven itself—that feels too close to saying, “Well, they’ve got the venue, where else would they do it?”

The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.

I feel like I’d need to be an actual teenager to invent a remark sufficiently scornful about this.

In which Heartbreaking.jpg and you-do-not-have-to-hand-it-to-ISIS.png war for sovereignty

what

no

what

no

Those poor students.

Reported for promptfondling twerpitude, and I gotta say, I agree.