@nitsua60 class poasted?

@Shalvenay no... I was impulsive and got sucked into this bee-thing over in Chat. I have a page of notes on technology integration and diversity that I just need to type up and... ugh. There's a reason I majored in Physics, not Education =\

Gimme ten minutes.

@nitsua60 done?

@Shalvenay trying to make the argument that going Google as a school somehow addresses socioeconomic diversity....

Ah, "building elaborate cantilevered structures so as to reach conclusions more efficiently for prolonged periods."

@BESW you, sir, have just failed my simple writer metric.

Norton Juster don't care.

(Wait, was that Norton Juster? [goes to check sources])

Nope, AJ Hall.

(How'd I get them confused?)

Full quote:

> If they did - well, they wouldn't be so much leaping to conclusions as building elaborate cantilevered structures so as to reach conclusions more efficiently for prolonged periods. (source

@BESW "leaping to conclusions," obviously.

That must be it.

@Shalvenay up to Kahn Academy as a force for equitable access

@nitsua60 alrighty....

@Shalvenay hmm... I suspect that using the legal term of art "suspect class" to describe a minority isn't going to fly very well in an education class....

@nitsua60 probably not.

@Shalvenay done.

@nitsua60 cool. so -- you get what I'm saying about being able to reframe character optimization and competitive metagaming within the game universe, right?

that it's a necessity for you? reconciling the two views/lenses?

yeah

so charop (gamism) has a lens that makes sense in-world.

but narrative concerns are hard for you to "port over" to in-game thinking... that about it?

@nitsua60 exactly

[being unsubtle...] are you a man of faith?

[feel free to push me off this topic]

because it strikes me that many of the concepts/urges that drive faith would also work here.

my heart's...deeply conflicted over that

Backing away from RL faith a bit...

I have a friend who has--for years--been trying to write up his idea of a "spark" in D&D.

It's that thing that separates NPCs from PCs:

a near-omnipotent (or at least transcendent and very differently-powered and wholly alien in thought process) being has taken an interest in the PC.

And now the Universe tends to bend in small ways around them. Especially if they group up.

Gary Saul Morson's Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time might be interestingly relephant.

@BESW how so? (Don't know it.)

A central premise of his thesis is that many/most people in real life act as if they're in a particular kind of story, and have a particular role to play in it.

eg, you make different life choices if you're the protagonist of a romantic tragedy, than if you're the comic relief in a soap opera.

(basically, my religious indoctrination growing up was what one could say is Protestant-leftist, at least for a US definition of "left" -- and that tends to sit orthogonal to the US orthodoxy/expectations for both Christianity and politics, aggravated by further political orthogonalism on my part in the form of a concern for civil liberties)

@BESW Not to trivialize by comparison, but that sounds like some of what I like most about Dexter; someone actually talking through--albeit in inner monologue--all the choices about "what role am I playing?" and "how should I chose to act?"

(See also Dustin Hoffman's character's ideas in Stranger than Fiction.)

but bbiab as dinner's ready

@nitsua60 Yup. Morson's saying that many folks have that monologue, but it might be entirely subconscious--or at the very least, it doesn't occur to the person that they might be wrong about what kind of story they're in..

@Shalvenay I probably should have asked about your theology rather than you're religion, to be fair. Because what I was wondering about is how comfortable you'd be with a character who actually walks around thinking "you know what? I actually am kinda special. Thanks, whoever made this all for me."

@nitsua60 the thing is though,... that to me seemed like part of his psychosis, he was thinking he was a horrible person who could only be a "good guy" by killing other bad guys, and on the side he reinforced it with that internal monologue

not sure I would agree all people actually think that way

(And who, in that world, is pretty reasonable to think that way!)

@Shalvenay enjoy. Hope this was productive or at least interesting.

@trogdor Oh, I don't think he thought that made him good. But he was so utterly preoccupied with passing for good, and that... resonated.

@trogdor Morson's not saying everyone's inner monologue is like Dexter's, just that lots of folks have something in a similar "what is my role in the story?" vein.

(And he doesn't express it as an inner monologue, but a sense of one's place in the world.)

@nitsua60 well yeah, there is that

@trogdor not in the "I'll go out and kill some people, 'cause... well, I've been told my whole formative life that I have a need for it" way; but perhaps in the "how many of these decisions/actions/habits have I made out of habit, out of ease, out of playing-a-role, out of 'truly knowing myself' (whatever that means)?"

@BESW ah ok, I was going to say, part of my point was that a constant internal monologue is not necessarily the best sign of mental health, at least in the way our society sees it

Morson's more like "I'm the lead in a romantic tragedy, so I must seek out romance but I already know it's doomed to fail so I'm always going to be expecting it to fall apart."

@nitsua60 I do think his dad kinda jumped the shark there,... the explanation for why he was a serial killer was at the very least a little concerning

@BESW something like "we look for roles to help us as organizing principles, but then we play to those roles in self-fulfilling ways, then we lose rack of the boundary between role and not-role"?

he decided to forgo even trying to get his son any therapy and instead wanted to just get him to kill "bad people",.... parent of the year award for that guy XD

@trogdor "Dexter. What happened to you... you'r just not good. And you never will be." "Thanks, dad."

@nitsua60 yep, pretty much

don't get me wrong, I liked the show, (the last couple seasons weren't so good though, and that stoooooopid ending) but that start of his dad just throwing in the towel on actually parenting him like a normal person was a thing

@nitsua60 Right. But it can also be used to great good, if the organising principle is designed properly.

Morson isn't so big on finding those positive implementations, sadly.

@trogdor I think the Edward James Olmos season was the only one that I didn't care for too much, and even that was saved (for me) by the Dex-Deb dynamic. I looove that... complication.

(His book focuses on how Russian literature and society reflect each other from the Imperial era up into communism.)

@nitsua60 I stopped watching around season 3, and decided that I'd pretend it had only ever been a one-season event instead of a series.

@trogdor Ending didn't bother me nearly as much as... oh... everybody else on the planet? I think it's because I'm not expecting a takeaway message? At the end Dexter had a choice. And he made it. And it pissed lots of people off, both of in-world reasons and for "they screwed the pooch on the narrative!" reasons. But to me it's just his choice.

@BESW Ooh. Them's some of my favorite literature!

I may have to pick this up....

@nitsua60 yeah I can see why you would not like that season, and that dynamic did actually, in fact, have something to it, but the longer the whole show kept going, the more I felt like they were seriously running out of new ideas

@nitsua60 well,.... he makes a choice at the end that he could have made,...... from the start

@nitsua60 back -- and I'm not sure how that'd work -- because I rely on data to answer the "am I special?" question

he literally just confirmed that he had the power to decide something like this from the beginning

Specifically he looks at Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as writing to support competing ideologies of narrative--one embracing narrativism and one rejecting it.

And then he looks at how Russian society was moulded by different forms of narrativism through those tumultuous years.

(ahh... crossing conversation-streams!)

=D

lol

@Shalvenay That's the great thing: if you (Shalvenay) are having trouble because the story's bending around your character, that's your character's proof of specialness!

You're ambichaxtrous, right?

so it leads to "I'm an outlier...now what the heck do I do with it?" vs "I'm special, thanks" -- and furthermore, the bigger problems come when the story's bending around other characters, not my own

@nitsua60 basically, I don't actually mind him getting to make a choice like that,.... but the timing on said choice just left the whole premise of the show and his life completely pointless

and more bending against them in an unnatural way, too

it just confirmed that nothing that happened in that whole show actually mattered, which to be fair was a thing that you could have seen from the start with said bad parenting,.... but,.... it was still not a great idea in my opinion

@nitsua60 oh I am just trying to explain what I actually disliked about it, it isn't something you also have to dislike

@Shalvenay ahh, but if you're all in on it (characters, that is), then you can go hog-wild discovering these new rules of the universe. "How much will the universe bend to us?"

and I still wouldn't like, take back the fact that I had ever watched it,.... they could have just made just about any other ending and it might have in fact been better XD

(Which is the in-game manifestation of at-table chouces.)

@trogdor true on all counts. No question.

@nitsua60 I think this is where the structure of his group is different enough from our experiences that advice starts falling apart.

@trogdor pretty much the way I feel about Lost.

@nitsua60 lol, I am constantly happy I never watched that

soooooooooo many people seem to feel the ending of Lost was so much of a cop out

@trogdor We watched five seasons in three weeks when we moved + my wife was 8mo. pregnant + the cable guy couldn't find our apartment. (Back then streaming options weren't what they are now, and Lost was the only sizable thing we found that held any interest.)

from the impression I get just from people talking about it, it sounds like too much of what happened was way too random and possibly not well planned out enough for there to be a good ending

@trogdor I started a rewatch this year--I'd cooled off enough in the intervening five to come back--and am less annoyed/disappointed now than I thought I'd be.

that being said, it also sounds like they simply didn't TRY to make a good ending XD

It's still not a ringing endorsement, but it was a hell of an experience....

but of course, all of the stuff I just said about Lost is from me hearing several different people talking about it and not having seen it myself XDXDXD

so grains of salt everywhere to be taken

@BESW yeah -- you wind up with not only universe ooze, but no basis to ground conflict resolution in as a result of trying to build atop that universe ooze

in even a rules-light game, there is something to give that universe-ooze structure

@trogdor I will say that you can just watch the pilot and get a pretty good idea of how you'll feel. If you're delighted by the weirdness, you're in for a good ride. If you find the pilot annoying, it's not going to get much better =)

mk

but with neither game rules nor in-universe natural laws/behaviors to form a skeleton, stuff starts falling over in ways that create conflict between players

@nitsua60 I mean, not sure that means I will ever try it, but now at least I think I might easily be able to gauge interest if I ever do decide to

that is always appreciated

@trogdor yeah... you won't hear me saying "oh, just wait until you get to season 2. That's when it grows its beard." So if you find yourself with a partner who can't travel any distance, knowing nobody, in rural areas, with your books delayed in shipment, without cable but with streaming, and have two weeks to kill... I advise giving it a try =)

@Shalvenay I've got to say: I have a hard time wrapping my head around your absolutist statements sometimes.

And I'm not saying you're wrong... anything but.

I think it's probably just that I've had such different experiences.

yeah -- it sounds like all your time in early-stage D&D meant that you pretty much always had a rule-structure to fall back on, instead of having to deal with people who explicitly reject the existing rule structure yet aren't inclined to lay down a new one

I think a major challenge is that his experiences aren't so much focused on a small group of people who know each other. It's more of an MMO-ish context.

@nitsua60 hilariously enough, I have sooooo much backlogged if all I have available to myself is streaming XD

@Shalvenay and the rule-structure was the classic model of "play my way, little brother, or you don't get to play at all." I think there are plenty in my age-category who were "raised" that way =)

(With possible s/brother/cousin allowances.)

@nitsua60 right.

It's not just a lack of rules, it's a softening of interpersonal continuity.

@nitsua60 lol, typically I did not go that route with my brother, usually we agreed on stuff like that implicitly XD

@BESW with which I have exactly zero experience.

IE we already had the same ideas about what the rules were

Ditto.

Anyway, must dash. ttfn

(btw, @nitsua60, I'm still open to talking about faith stuff if you ever come around to that again.)

@BESW that is probably correct as well

@BESW actually, I did want to poke you to ask some very practical questions about visiting the temple in Chicago. That trip's in a week and a half, so I'll grab you soon.

(And after that I'll probably be very keen to ask lots of stupid/n00b questions.)

I'm gonna run, too. Nice night, all.

the lack of interpersonal continuity is a major factor, even -- it puts greater strains on the mechanisms that form implicit rules

@nitsua60 I look forward to it!

(The n00b questions are the ones that get me thinking carefully about things I'd always just glossed over before.)