But what if someone is actually named Et Al?
Clearly, we must define an escape character for academic citations.
Anonymous asked:
ranma-official answered:
That was a trick question, by the way. The resulting lookup table is all owls.
It’s weird that most people don’t pretend to be the other gender online, honestly.
Eh, there’s still existing gender conformity rules (though more for men than for women) saying not to do it, plus I think a lot more people are vaguely comfortable in their gender roles than they let on.
Not that I don’t recommend it. I have many faces, and I like to let people assume.
If you end up being the person running the @argumate account, I am going to be livid.
We are all running the Argumate account, ShieldFoss. The steady and unrestrained stream of anons assures that the Argumate blog is a democratic and participatory process.
We are all argumate, but none of us know it, because argumate is a Chinese Room whose output is determined by symbols that we pass around to each other without knowing their meaning.
Chinese-Australian room, surely.
If all owl possible owl hoots from all possible worlds in all possible contexts are placed into a lookup table, is the resulting lookup table an owl?
- anonymous, On the Nature of @argumate, 2054
/And if anybody pulls this off, let me know in three years.
Democratic Party Leaders Vow to Impeach Trump, Fight Trump Administration Over Unexplained Decision to Yield American City to Obscure Blogger
[Photo illustration: Obscure blogger “Mitigated Chaos” rides into city of Toledo at head of tank column, wearing “reimagined Union Army uniform”]
Blogger to head new “Metropolitan Planning Authority” as greater Toledo area declared tax-free “Special Development Administrative Zone” by Executive Order 15335
Evil thoughts: Leave the rent conditions terrible in LA, SF, and NY in order to prolong the life of other metro areas.
Anonymous asked:
So you’re here to be entered into the contest? We’ll need you to provide a blood sample so that your eligibility can be verified. Admittedly, I’m not sure if grey spheres can be either Mongolian or Filipino, but I suppose that’s up to the genetics company to determine, right?
> last two races of the year
The last two races of this year are Mongolians and Filipinos!
If you are of Mongolian or Filipino ancestry, please contact the front desk to be entered into our grand prize drawing for your chance to win your very own horde of amphibious steppe marauders.
Every time I see one of those posts about “where are the fantasy stories with even remotely realistic economies and politics!” I glance over to the scattered notes and snippets I’ve made for Exactly That Story and get wracked with those why-aren’t-you-following-your-dreams shivers.
For the third edition of the Exalted rpg, they went to a lot of trouble to cajole the guy who developed the first edition to come back and write some material for the book, and he totally didn’t give a shit since he’d been doing other things for ten years at that point. He’s an economist now, so the biggest contiguous contribution he made was like two pages that just talk about about currency denominations, coinage, and seignorage in the game’s fantasy setting and how those things related to factional politics, and they cut basically the entire section because people do not want to read two pages of that in the core setting chapter of a high fantasy adventure game.
This was the same game line that hired an actual marine historian to write the book about seafaring and thus got a huge amount of material about shipboard chains of command, hull and rigging types, naval watch scheduling, and so on. I loved that book unironically, but you basically can’t use that sort of material because 95% of people will just totally skip your weird Moby Dick style digressions into whale physiology or whatever.
Anyway, regarding your specific story: if the Silmarillion teaches anything, it’s that sufficiently detailed worldbuilding can overcome the need to actually write readable fiction.
Misread this as “whale psychology”.
Anonymous asked:
I’m sorry, Anon-kun.
She’s too genre-savvy for that.
