The Factory Floor

uh...why do people insist on abusing twitter in a threaded fashion?

@SCPilot Relephant essay: But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense? by NK Jemisin. (contains some harsh language)

Actually the quotes came from the Dragonstar tabletop rulebook.

Read world history, forget conservation of detail. Ha heh.

It's weird that you posted that why does magic have to make sense article since the quotes actually came from a D&D sourcebook. So, in other words, D&D which has a system to make magic make sense has a quote that says magic gives science and technology the middle finger.

1:00 AM

It's meta for the player, Wizards by the Coast playing hardcore.

@BESW interestingly enough -- how much sense your magic needs to make depends on what your setting is being used for

Yep. My thoughts exactly. Although, if you really want to get hardcore, try Tékumel.

if your setting is supporting a single story and then getting thrown out basically, it can basically can just do whatever it needs to to support that story

if your setting is supporting something broader though, you need to make it more systematic, otherwise it becomes a maintainability problem (in the same way a big ball of software mud becomes a maintainability problem)

In the decades of D&D material you can cherry-pick quotes to support nearly any statement. Jemisin's talking about the impact of D&D on popular culture trends, which goes largely unaffected by any particular edge case.

That's true. I mean look at the references of D&D in Ready Player One.

1:07 AM

(The Empire of the Petal Throne setting pre-dates RPGs, was published as an RPG independently of D&D, and is credited as an influential source for D&D at least as much as the other way around.)

When you can go deeper and see the references of The Lord of the Rings in D&D.

Eh, D&D doesn't do a lot with LotR directly. It drew just as much if not more from other material like Three Hearts and Three Lions and Hammer films. A lot of the parallels with LotR come from using other sources which drew inspiration from the same sources that Tolkien drew on.

Hm....I see. I was unaware that the Empire of the Petal Throne pre-dated RPGs. I had figured that it had come about just as D&D was starting out.

It was designed by a college professor.

Tékumel as a setting was originally thought of by that college professor in his teenage years. It dates from the 40s.

@BESW Almost got the meaning of my comment, have to keep going deeper though.

1:12 AM

I see. Interesting. I've read some of it, and it seems to be quite an unique setting, given that it doesn't use Western European characteristics and features. Instead, using Indian, South American (Inca, Mayan, Aztec), and Ancient Persian characteristics.

@FerretCivilization Then I probably didn't understand what your "when" is referring to. If you're interested in the conversation you'll have to put in the effort to clarify the miscommunication rather than simply leave the burden of interpretation as an exercise for others.

@SCPilot yeah, but it also has quite a bit of the infelicity that a setting that tries to fuse multiple S. American cultures together + many, many apprentice marks of the era of its genesis

2

at least, that's my indirect understanding of it

2

I see.

@SCPilot I'm curious about it, but skeptical as to the implementation for reasons Shalv touches on above. It looks like a sincere effort to challenge popular contemporary colonial and stereotypical assumptions in specfic, but it also looks, from a distance, like it may not have been able to divest itself entirely of those assumptions.

Hm....Well, it was something of a science fantasy setting.

And I think it did try to challenge those assumptions.

1:17 AM

@SCPilot Hence "specfic." We don't have a non-awkward phrase yet for works that paper over the vast spectrum between fantasy and scifi.

@BESW It was mostly just a humor thing coming from when Pilot said you can see references of D&D in Ready Player One. If you take a step back you can see references of LoTR in D&D. Keep stepping back and going deeper you can go all the way back to the source material. Though you could also look at what it means going forward, as nothing is unique anymore, it just has unique spins, and one can start looking 'left' or 'right' at other things that come out in a same time period based on 1 thing

Well, in a way, anything modern pop culture has references to something that helped create popular culture.

@SCPilot If you're interested in that sort of thing, I highly recommend Jemisin's "Broken Earth" series, and Leckie's "Imperial Radch" series.

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Hm...I see. Are they good?

One's fantasy, one's scifi, both do a great job of pushing against "traditional" worldbuilding and making something familiar and new. And they're both awesome just on the basis of the story, characters, writing, and setting.

1:22 AM

@BESW actually, can you define what "traditional" worldbuilding is for the purpose of your statement? not sure what pieces-parts of it you're saying they're pushing against

Well, the Dragonstar setting basically has it where there's an intergalatic empire ruled by dragons (chromatic and metallic). Oh boy. Well, now that I think about it, if anyone could effectively and efficiently run a powerful galaxy spanning empire, it would be a dragon......or a Sith Lord.

Jemisin talks here about creating the people in the Broken Earth setting, and beginning with the goal of making them people rather than faceless groups, while keeping them independent of real-world analogies or stereotypes.

And Leckie does some fascinating stuff with challenging common ways that scifi depicts "conquering empires" and cultural assimilation, while also digging into mind/body identity questions using very classical scifi tools of exaggerating a real-world situation to a logical extreme with invented science.

As someone who grew up in the grey area of colonialism, the Imperial Radch felt familiar and real and identifiable in ways that I'd never seen in scifi before.

Tekumel (and to some extent Culture) reminds me of both Jemisin and Leckie in how it strives to discuss real-world problems in speculative fiction through the lens of fictional cultures and distant futures--but Tekumel is... less distant than maybe it needed to be with the cultures it was deriving, without being close enough to the reality it was trying to allegorize.

Compare Okorafor's Lagoon, which doesn't allegorize at all but rather plops a fantastic premise into a fraught contemporary real-world situation and uses its aliens to give the social and conceptual conflicts of Lagos a literal, physical expression.

1:45 AM

I am back.

So, basically......that is the weirdest thing I have ever made.

Well, I have to run now. Library is closing for the night. BTW, out of curiosity, does anyone else's library close at 9 PM on Thursdays?

9 PM, damn around where I have lived they close at 5 PM at the latest.

It's only on Thursdays that they're open till 9 PM. The rest of the week closing time is 6 PM, except on Saturdays where they're opened until 2 PM. My library opens at 10 AM. And they're closed of course on Sundays.

@FerretCivilization? Visitors look better yet?

Huh, interesting, you know why it is 9 PM only on Thursdays?

@FutureHistorian And yeah they are looking better, ha.

Q: What is the least "world changing" reason why the government would pay for you to keep a llama during your 44th year of life?

1:53 AM

So far.......weird.

Especially their biological functions and reproductive system + life cycle.

kingledion

2:14 AM

@James I was going to vote to re-open this question, since it seems fine (and funny?) to me.

165

I want to make a short story about an Earth just like ours except it's commonly accepted that at the age of 43, the government allows people to have a llama in their house and the government pays for the llama and the food during that year and that year only. Most people just have a Llama day whe...

Honestly, why did you close it

hey there @kingledion

James

5:59 AM

@kingledion Its off topic like three different ways.

9:08 AM

washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/25/…

It's 2 minutes til midnight

newscientist.com/article/…

Civillisations are predicted to collapse by 2020

I remember the good old days when it was suppose to be 2000

nkjemisin.com/2012/06/…

If that is a good guide, then I definitely have came up the closest thing he will consider as magic when we discussed about the notion of abstract magic, the extreme limit of the true magics

(NB short recap: True magic is something that explicitly violates Clark's 3rd Law, thus it is almost the same idea as what this blogger is whining about)

so far we only have words to describe two classes of them, but there might be more, forever unreachable and uncomprehendable by the human mind

> Eric
June 15, 2012 • 2:31 pm
I appreciate the sentiment, but I can really only meet you halfway. Without limitations, magic can be largely indistinguishable from Deus Ex Machina.

I think people crave understanding, regardless of the genre. Part of what is exceptional about magic is that it solves a great deal of problems, but is in the end a tool in itself. A blast of fire solves the problems of protection and warmth for a spellcaster, but you’ll need to take me on a story to explain how he uses it to catch his dinner or boil water, and -that’s- the interesting part. Stories need conflic…

I think it will be interesting to think about a narrative style where the notion of unknown is a central element of the plot, such that the story still flows sublimely without the reader have to understand what is going on, and just feel it, and said unknown is never fully resolved

that is, a story about the unknown itself

There might be examples already, need to check...

10 hours ago, by SCPilot

“technology lets us harness the laws of nature; magic allows us to break them" Science discovers the rules, technology uses them, and magic breaks them.

@SCPilot The issue of this definition is that we don't know where the boundary is for technology

and we knew that for science, when things break, models were simply updated to include the thing that seemed to be an exception

I don't know how one can envision a phenomenon that the models cannot describe, and no more general model exists for it

If such a phenomenon can exist (what exist means is a matter of complicated philosophy which for simplicity I will just resort to classical logic), then that phenomenon will be magic since there exists no scientific models that can describe it

that is, if some phenomenon A, under classical logic, which satisfies the requirement that given any scientific model M that already described a collection of phenomena S, there exists no extensions or generalisation N such that N describes A, then A is by definition a (true) magical phenomenon

10:02 AM

in The h Bar, 46 secs ago, by Slereah

You can always enlarge a model to accomodate new data

which is why it might be impossible for a human to envision true magic (even mine is only a guess on what it might be look like by basically rambling with half baked philosophy understanding...)

in The h Bar, 26 secs ago, by Slereah

Since we can only produce a finite amount of experimental data and you can always put the results of those experiments as axioms you can just construct a theory for any set of observation

Perhaps we can say, a set of phenomena such that the only model is one which uses the occurence of those phenomena as axioms will be the closest thing to what magic is like that is independent of technology

princeton.edu/~hhalvors/teaching/phi520_f2012/putnam-craig.pdf

see this link shared by Slereah for details. So yes, we might not be able to envision true magic, but we can get something close to it in a practical sense

> Every theory that admits a recursively enumerable set of axioms can be recursively axiomatized

now that puts a whole new level on what infinity magic could possibly mean

Idea: One can potentially envision a magic that scramble experimental outcomes such that no meaningful information can be extracted from the resulting data, or make the computers that do the calculations to not halt or simply break down whenever it tries to do said calculation

A magic that screws with any steps of the scientific method will be practically speaking violating Clark's 3rd law, because it is basically a magic that actively prevent science from peering into it

logically speaking, however it may not because it could be that there really exists technology that can be compatible with it, but the universe conspires in a way such that this can never be shown, hence making Clark's Law vacuously true for such case

10:19 AM

I don't have the time to read through your stuff right now @Secret, but have you ever thought about writing a blog article for Universe Factory? A discussion of your ideas about magic would surely be appreciated as a blog post as there are lots of different topics.

There are worldbuilding How-To's, short stories, analysis of previous posts, ...

Sounds nice, checking out now (did not knew blogs exist in SE since they don't in PSE and MSE). I might have enough material to actually wrote a short essay on what I think magic is and what I (and the chat) knew so far

@Secret It's not an official blog and this month not much is happening (start of the year is a bit slow). There is a dedicated chatroom and there are messages in the chat (this and the linked one) when a post is published. The links are also featured a week on the main site (on the right side) so that you would get some exposure.

That's nice, I wish other SE have similar systems...

SFF has one

10:49 AM

@Secespitus? Did you see the updated Visitor concept art?

11:41 AM

@FutureHistorian No and I currently don't have the time to take a closer look and comment on it.