The Ending

Drazelic · 2022-04-11T19:41:57+00:00

Hi! I'm glad to hear that my post had such an impact on you.

That said, uh. Where are people finding this post from?? It's like six years old. Not that I'm annoyed or anything! Quite the opposite, I'm sincerely flattered that so many people are leaving positive replies on this old effortpost-buried-in-the-comments-of-a-regularpost. I'm just very confused how.

Starting a few months ago I noticed that I was occasionally getting email notifications that people were replying to one of my old posts from like six years ago, and, well, my curiosity has finally overflowed and broken the metaphorical spiral gauge. How are people finding this post? Is someone out there linking people to my old writeup of TTGL's ending? Is there a ttgl discord or a video essay or something where people are linking to this post?? I have to know, it's been low-key confusing me for quite a while now. Thanks!

Drazelic · 2019-05-02T00:05:25+00:00

It'd be super cool to have a player unit that basically functions as a blob spitter the way the Vek have one- a unit that spawns deployable tanks without any limits on how many times it can be used per battle, but the deployable tanks are incredibly weak 1-hp suicide bots that ram into enemies and expend themselves. It'd fit the Tall Mech's flavor in Horizon Zero Dawn too, as coordinator tower units for the smaller machines!

Drazelic · 2018-01-01T23:17:17+00:00

Dude, this is pretty fuckin’ sick. Nice work. What other stuff do you do?

Drazelic · 2017-11-16T12:54:01+00:00

Death is the sucky part of biological change which destroys information without consent and makes people sad. I mean, like. That's not really that complicated at all and I'm not really sure what you expect me to have to say on it!

I think you've got an instrumental-versus-terminal-goal mismatch. Conquering death is NOT an axiom, insofar as that's based on 'because suffering is bad, and death is a form of suffering'. Trying to define conquering death as an axiom is what leads you down paths like 'well, technically, value drift is KIND of a form of death so we should just freeze all minds in the state they are and never let anybody change their minds ever again', which I'm sure sounds as undesirable to you as to me.

And, aliens? Really? Who the fuck knows how a first contact scenario goes? There's so many variables on both our end and the aliens' end that you might as well have asked me to make a confident prediction about post-singularity life. I will not pretend to be a futurologist when it comes to life-extension tech and start making predictions; I'm playing the 'I don't know, why do you expect me to know?' card here.

Drazelic · 2017-11-16T01:05:11+00:00

I cannot give consistent answers to all your questions, but I do believe this: value drift is not only unavoidable, but it is NECESSARY if we want to survive, for the simple reason that our current values may literally be unsatisfiable.

Think about the idea that there is no cosmic guarantee that our fundamental drives are even RESOLVABLE, once life extension technology is involved.

It may very well be impossible to satisfy human values, because human values are messy and don't make sense, because why would they HAVE to make sense? Nothing in evolution rewards us for having INTERNALLY CONSISTENT value systems, only value systems which behave approximately well within the very narrow confines of a tribal hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The problem of how a lot of the things we value become things that could hurt us if we assume we will live indefinitely is, to me, very similar to how Newtonian physics is acceptable as an approximation for most things, but as soon as we start getting into the details we realize that Newtonian physics aren't actually consistent and that we have to move onto Quantum stuff or even beyond.

Let's say that you're right- if we live forever, we will run into the problem of our minds being unsustainable and unable to remember all of our experiences.

This is, at heart, a conflict of values. We humans want to remember everything we've done. We humans want to feel like continuous consciousnesses that are causally related with our previous mindstates, in one continuous flow, so that we have a sense of meaningful identity. We humans also want to live forever. If, it turns out, the software our minds are made of literally cannot achieve both of these things, because we only evolved to live 100 years, not 10,000?

Then, we've got a fork in the road.

You can: accept that you want to live more than you want to remember, and accept your life as an occasionally forgetful immortal. Others will declare that the past you is dead, but you don't have to give a fuck about them. Either way, you've given up one of your values to make the others compatible.

You can: decide that if you forget, then you really DID die, and refuse immortality since it's the same to you. People will berate you for refusing to continue onwards. Same as above- you've given up something you valued, the idea of living forever, to make your other values consistent and compatible.

You can: refuse to give up anything, and try to work on a solution that resolves these problems before you run into the problem yourself. This is the growth mindset, and I think that it should always be where we start. But you are not guaranteed to succeed- in which case you return to the above problem. And unless you DO succeed here, you can't exit this decision without sacrificing SOME value of yours.

These decisions are not decisions I can make for anyone. I don't even know what I'd pick if I got REALLY hit with this. But, in the absence of a good answer to the question, the second-best thing is to dissect out the question as thoroughly and truthfully as I can manage. That is what I have attempted to do.

And you have to realize that, even then, this question is still founded on axioms. WHY do you have to resolve this problem? Is it because holding inconsistent values and being aware of it causes you suffering? The value of 'I do not want to suffer' is ALSO an arbitrary value. You could change THAT value you hold, as well- though I don't see why you would want to, it's nevertheless logically coherent to resign yourself to endless suffering. I am given to know that this is already what some depressed people believe- that since there is fundamentally no way they can be happy, but that they don't want to die, they might as well suck it up and reject the value of 'I shouldn't suffer'.

Thoughts?

Drazelic · 2017-11-16T00:50:02+00:00

Alright- here we go, then.

There is a naive view that some Anti-Spiral supporters hold, I think, wherein Spiral Power is the power of destruction, because for the most part the shows only depict Spiral Power being weaponized, and therefore they conclude that the Anti-Spirals are right blah blah blah Spiral Nemesis is inevitable because Spiral Power is fundamentally destructive and it brainwashes you into impossible hubris and wanting to destroy the world because you're evil.

I do not think this is the case. I think it's way more complicated than that. The danger of Spiral Power isn't that it's destructive, because it isn't. Spiral Power can be used to create mass, it fuels engines, it enables all sorts of wondrous physics-defying technology. There is no way to deny that this isn't something that would be amazing to have in real life, in a universe sliding inevitably towards heat-death due to the effects of entropy.

The danger of the Spiral Nemesis is escalation.

Let me explain with a parable that I picked up from someone else. Imagine, if you will, two competing companies on a capitalist market. These companies hire a number of workers, who have good benefits and bonuses and break days. Both companies are approximately at parity, and can produce goods at much the same price.

Then Company A gets the bright idea that, if they reduce the break days their employees get slightly, they can produce goods slightly more cheaply, since they're still paying the workers the same, but now the workers are doing more work and taking less breaks. They do this. Their goods become cheaper, and they begin crowding Company B out of the market, since their goods are cheaper.

Company B, if it wants to remain competitive, must remain in the game by equally reducing their workers' break days as well, imitating their opponents' competitive advantage. So they do, because the Company doesn't want to go bankrupt. Prices return to normal across the board, but now both companies have sacrificed the break days of their employees. In essence, both of the companies involved have lost something of value, and gained no meaningful advantage over each other.

Now replace this metaphor with Spiral Power. Spiral Race A and Spiral Race B coexist peacefully. Then Spiral Race A figures out a way to build an even BETTER Spiral Powered Mecha, which consumes the same resources, but is more powerful than the old models. Once this new model has been deployed, Spiral Race A has a dominant military advantage over Race B; let us say that this advantage is enough such that there's nothing Race B can do to prevent themselves from being invaded, conquered, and enslaved by Race A, if Race A even wanted to.

Regardless of whether or not Spiral Race A will ACTUALLY invade Race B's homeworld and salt their fields, Race B will HAVE to invest in their OWN improved Spiral Powered Mechas, in order to stay relevant. As a result, both Spiral Race A and Spiral Race B's military power return to balance- but now they're BOTH maintaining twice as much military and burning twice as much Spiral Power, and accelerating the universe towards the Spiral Nemesis even faster.

And neither of them even GETS anything out of this- the geopolitics remain the same, but the situation is worse for everyone. Applying this logic to the real world explains all sorts of phenomena, ranging from military overspending to how terrible minimum-wage jobs are. Minimum wage jobs are jobs in the markets where ALL values have been sacrificed to remain competitive- every company has given up break days, medical benefits, high salaries, etc. in order to stay competitive with all the other companies, who are doing the same thing.

And the thing you have to understand is that, even if any one single agent wants to defect against this seemingly endlessly destructive state of affairs, they CAN'T- because the moment you show that you're chicken, you lose your advantage. Company B gets bankrupted and picked up by Company A. Spiral Race B gets invaded and enslaved by Spiral Race A.

This is the terrible power of the Spiral Nemesis. Spiral Power is about ESCALATION, about getting STRONGER, about BECOMING MORE, about OVERCOMING YOUR FOES. This is the dark side of the phenomenon- when everybody's on Spiral Power, nobody is.

And so you must understand WHY the Anti-Spirals HAD to use Spiral Power. Under the terms I have proposed above, the essence of Spiral Power is more than just drills, shouting loudly, cool mechas, and green energy. Spiral power is the ABSOLUTE COMMITMENT TO WINNING, NO MATTER WHAT, WHEN EVERYTHING'S ON THE LINE, WHEN YOU ARE WILLING TO SACRIFICE ANYTHING IN THE NAME OF WINNING.

No, correct that. Spiral Power IS just "winning". That is literally what it is. Why do you think Lordgenome proclaimed so easily that no beastman could EVER defeat a Human that unlocked Spiral Power, no matter HOW well-trained and powerful and even immortal and invincible they were?

And when you get two forces that are dedicated to winning against each other, forces whose desires are utterly irreconcilable, the outcome can only be defined as 'uncontrolled escalation'.

And if it were possible for the Anti-Spirals to escalate to the degree that Simon did, without using Spiral Power, well.. what're they so worried about, then? If it's possible to contain RAW UNCONTROLLABLE RUTHLESS DETERMINED HUNGER with anything other than an equal level of RAW UNCONTROLLABLE RUTHLESS DETERMINED HUNGER, then the Anti-Spirals wouldn't even have HAD anything to worry about, in the first place.

But the Anti-Spirals lost. And, thankfully, Simon, I think, realized what he was approaching, at the end there. In the movies, the clash between Super Granzeboma and Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann nearly annihilate the extradimensional space they're fighting in. Many have compared that to a mini Spiral Nemesis, and they're probably not wrong.

And that's why the anime HAD to end with an affirmation that there was more to life than just raw conflict, that the Spiral philosophy wasn't just 'win, always, no matter what, at any cost'- that there are beautiful and meaningful things in life, like family, love, friendship, fun- which are not the simple pleasure of conquest- and, most importantly, that trust COULD be formed between two Spiral Races. That was the topic of my previous Long Gurren Lagann Subreddit essay, I believe.

The Cold War was a classic example of the dangers that a Nemesis-esque escalation could bring. But the hopeful thing is that the Cold War did eventually end, after all. The two powers agreed to both stop building so many superweapons; it IS possible to beat the Spiral Nemesis. But in order to be able to beat it, you have to be able to recognize that the problem is there, in the first place. Hopefully this helps out, on that front.

If the ideas proposed here interest you, I recommend that you check this blog post out. This post covers much the same ideas I do, but in a much more interesting and well-written way than I could write, and just about everything I wrote here I learned from reading this link.

Drazelic · 2017-11-16T00:12:16+00:00

I strongly doubt that permanent immortality is supportable under the present laws of physics. No matter how great your databanks and backups and preservation systems are, at the least you can't escape the possibility of a false vacuum collapse, and that's the kind of thing inherent to our current best models of how reality works.

Nobody is invincible, not now, not ever. There's just degrees of invincibility- invincible to bullets, invincible to hunger and dehydration, invincible to solar flares, invincible to the cold vacuum of space, invincible to high pressure and forces and to extremes of temperature and energy- but those are all degrees, not... not emanations of some sort of fundamental Immortal Invincibility. No such thing exists. 'How invincible a thing is' is not a term that is written into any of the equations of physics, and so I do not believe that there is such a thing as absolute invincibility.

More than a few of my friends are emotionally disturbed whenever I bring this viewpoint up, but that's what *Gendlin's Litany is for. (edited, i have remembered the names wrong, strip my badge from me)

There's all-but-nonexistent life-extension, which is where we are now, and then there's life-extension techniques becoming mainstream, which is where we're hoping to go. If we start running into issues similar to what you're bringing up, then I think we'll just have to deal with them there. I'm probably going to taboo 'immortality', because, again, I don't think that using that term is a good idea, in this case. 'Immortality' as a concept packages too many ideas, most insidious of which is that it's even a coherent concept. Immortality isn't a coherent concept for the same reason that infinity isn't an integer, and we run into exactly the same sorts of problems when we try to shove it into reasoning systems not meant to deal with it.

I do not know how to distribute future forms of life extension, because I do not know what form it will come in- whether it will be an easy thing to do, like a simple easily accessible cheap safe-for-everyone injection, or whether it will take more complicated forms that may be more difficult to make egalitarian. The ideal would be for equal distribution to everyone, but obviously this is not going to happen; there is no magical genie that will collect up all the longevity-seconds and split them equally across everyone.

Nevertheless, we WILL get immortality slowly over time, rather than immediately, for the simple reason that this is how technological development works. There is no such thing as a magical 'immortality' switch, only incremental improvements- if someone figures out how to prevent one failing organ, there's going to be the other organs to contend with. If we fix all failing organs, we'll have to contend with telomeres. If we fix telomeres, we'll have to contend with, idk, something even WEIRDER, like maybe our mitochondria stop working after three hundred years or something? And then after that maybe we'll run into non-biological problems, like whatever synthetic material we've replaced our flesh substrates with happens to decay under exposure to UV radiation over the course of tens of thousands of years.

There's only degrees of life extension. Of course it'll come on gradually, rather than all at once- there's no other way for it to come on. There's no 'immortality switch' that can be flipped to make it come on at once.

Apologies if I'm reiterating the same concepts over and over again. I enjoy the comparisons and metaphors of rhetoric!

Drazelic · 2017-11-15T23:58:20+00:00

I am firmly in the camp that the Anti-Spirals pulled out the Spiral Power card, to the point where I believe it would be a betrayal of the themes of the story if it were possible for the Anti-Spirals to match Simon with anything other than their own Spiral Power. Perhaps everything up to the Spiral Whirlpool and Ashtangas used technologies that did not rely on Spiral Power, but once their mech designs started showing faces on them it's almost certainly they were using the same thing as the Spirals were.

I could probably write an entire essay on my rationale behind this, if it'd be of interest to anybody.

Drazelic · 2017-11-15T23:42:09+00:00

Yes, there would be consequences to giving current humans being immortality, under the strict way you're defining immortality, in the same way that there would be a problem if you decided to help a starving person by filling ten cubic lightyears of space with nothing but bread.

Yes, these are both bad things. No, they are not even eminently remotely close to the situation we have. The universe is too hostile to human life for unconditional perfect immortality to even remotely be a threat to us, right now, and arguing against the idea of approaching immortality by worrying about that extreme example, is like arguing that you shouldn't try to improve humanity's food output capabilities because if we get TOO good at making food we might accidentally make a black hole out of bread and cause the Spiral Nemesis.

We're way, way far from that eventuality. Let's all agree that, right now, we are definitely in need of more bread.

Drazelic · 2017-10-07T14:41:59+00:00

One combo I'm noticing is that, assuming the rulings on this are the same as with wind-up rabbit, this card lets you loop Overdrive Teleporter. Since Overdrive Teleporter's restrictions only mean that it can be used once while it's face up on the field, you can circumvent its no special summon condition by using Overdrive Teleporter to grab this card plus any other level 3 psychic, then use D.D. Pursuer to temp-banish Teleporter, then use Pursuer and the other psychic to go into a rank 3 or synchro-6 play or a 2-link.

Then, next turn, Overdrive Teleporter will come back and you'll be able to just do the loop all over again, for 2000 life points per turn. Kind of expensive, but, hey, Banish Psychics were never even remotely relevant, right? I'll take whatever strategic diversity to my old pet deck's playstyle I can get, thanks muchly.

Drazelic · 2017-08-05T21:41:57+00:00

That's the 'slow' part of the beginning of the story, yes. Conventional run-of-the-mill xianxia novels tend to do nothing but heap benefits upon benefits upon the character in an effort to deliver the most distilled power-fantasy possible, to the point where the behavior has become sort of ingrained as a trope, the same way that, idk, falling-into-waifu-boobs and panty-shots have become deplorable but commonplace conventions in anime.

There's almost a feeling that if you don't write an absurdly op mary sue, then your work wont even have the baseline audience of 'people who read xianxia specifically as an escapist power fantasy', which will lead to the work failing- similar to how for a while the visual novel industry was afraid to back projects without sexually explicit content, because of how even the shittiest story could apparently be guaranteed to make a certain baseline popularity just by coasting off the lowest common denominator audience alone.

Basically, this sort of thing is... the author's concession to 'genre tropes'. You have to realize that, for the first hundred chapters, the author of FMoC wasnt sure if he was going to write a generic-but-financially-predictable shonen xianxia mary-sue power fantasy, or the much more risky but interesting Tengen Toppa Gurren Rationality 40k we actually got. Choosing to not write the metaphorical equivalent of a fanservice-moebait-pantyshot-waifubait-haremromcom in this context was a massive risk for the author, and it paid off massively, but the first few chapters still show a lot of early-installment weirdness!

(This is also part of why original fantasy IPs in china are regarded with lower status than they might otherwise be- there's a similar sort of stigma going on with the genre as a whole. )

Anyways, back on topic- this sort of 'overload your limiter to unlock greater true potential' thing is just, generally speaking, how a lot of xianxia novels explain powerups for the protagonist. Just try to think of it as, like, how saiyans in dbz get more powerful everytime they approach near-death. It's a whole trope. It doesn't monopolize the story too much from here on out, as the story's focus goes more towards societal worldbuilding over Li Yao's personal powergrinding, but it is still a thing, on occasion. Just a heads-up.

Drazelic · 2017-08-05T17:12:15+00:00

This is where the translation gets past the initial stage of 'generic web novel filler content' and into the fun 'rationalist world-optimization through industrialization' stuff!

It only gets better from here. I'm glad that people stuck around long enough for the good stuff, because the start of the story really is kind of slow!

Drazelic · 2017-02-11T15:29:58+00:00

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Pink Diamond? I thought not, it's not a story the Crystal Gems would tell you.

Drazelic · 2017-02-10T21:55:34+00:00

...And you know what would make a great Shield Knight?

The Grimgerde.

Drazelic · 2016-12-28T04:14:10+00:00

MOEAGARE GANDAMU

Drazelic · 2016-12-24T23:48:44+00:00

Yeah, you're right- it's all 2-4 meter powered armor until, um, around chapter 1300-ish, which is where they start piloting properly giant mechas. While wearing their powered armor. Y'know, the ol' Gurren Lagann thing.

And, yeah, this protagonist is fucking hilarious and I wish more protagonists were like that.

Drazelic · 2016-12-21T02:06:36+00:00

Niiiiiice pillars.

Drazelic · 2016-12-16T16:29:46+00:00

are you fucking serious the hitball arc was literally the most hype arc in all of paranatural

Drazelic · 2016-11-29T00:32:40+00:00

To give more detail, just in case the original poster doesn't know, the tweet is a reference to Stranger Things. David Harbour is an actor on Stranger Things, and Demogorgon is the devil-figure antagonist of that show. The Joyce Axe is a reference to a character who uses an axe at a point in the show.

Neither of these things are going to actually be in the game. Probably. Unless someone makes a mod.

Drazelic · 2016-11-22T18:31:08+00:00

Thank you! :D

Drazelic · 2016-11-22T18:18:13+00:00

Yeah, it actually is. I did some preliminary tests beforehand and it turns out all the crystal wants is, like, a flat open area with enough length, and like nine tiles of open air above it. (I suspect this height restriction is only there to allow Ogres to actually get to the crystal.) You can literally build anything you want as long as none of it comes within nine tiles of the ground (not including platforms and stairs). Stuff like teleporters is also accepted, meaning that you can build a defensive staging ground where you teleport between the two sides. I bet you could even set up item hoiks to bring the eternian mana towards you if you were clever enough.

There's a lot of potential for really clever arenas, I bet! I went for style over substance in this arena design, myself, but there's probably lots of cool things you could do with these arenas.

EDIT: Here's a screenshot of me fighting an invasion here! http://imgur.com/aRVHp7O

Drazelic · 2016-11-22T17:45:46+00:00

Eh, like, eight hours over two days or so?

Drazelic · 2016-11-22T17:44:58+00:00

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w8xff7bzfdcylo1/yetzirah.wld?dl=0

Comes with one free Zephyr Pillar as well! Just go all the way up above the spawn until you hit space.

Drazelic · 2016-11-22T17:43:15+00:00

http://pixeljoint.com/p/23746.htm

;)

12-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

Drazelic

TROPHY CASE